mike huckabee

A law-and-order Republican governor, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, has given full pardons or clemency to 208 inmates, including 14 convicted murderers, setting off a political uproar over the limits of executive power in the traditionally patriarchal South.

Mr. Barbour, a popular two-term governor who was term-limited from serving more, signed the pardons before leaving office on Tuesday. The surprise spree caught both Republicans and Democrats off stride, and it suggested that Barbour, who had flirted with running for the White House last year, may be leaving politics for good.

It has become so bad that a judge had to step up and actually block the pardons:

A Mississippi judge Wednesday evening issued a temporary injunction forbidding the release of any more prisoners pardoned or given clemency by outgoing Gov. Haley Barbour, whose actions created an uproar.

The pardons include four convicted murderers and a convicted armed robber who were released Sunday. The five now must contact prison officials on a daily basis as their fate is adjudicated.

The pardons are "a slap in the face to everyone in law enforcement and Gov. Barbour should be ashamed," said state Attorney General Jim Hood.

Remember the story of Maurice Clemmons? He was a man that executed four Washington State police. Clemmons was essentially serving a life sentence in Louisiana for a series of burglaries, rape and a bunch of other nasty crimes. Well he was until then-governor, Mike Huckabee, decided to commute the sentence of Clemmons. After that he went to Washington and gunned down four police officers.

There's a reason for this trip down memory lane. Tomorrow morning former Minnesota Governor, Tim Pawlenty, is going to announce his run for the White House in 2012. Pawlenty, like his fellow Republican former governor Mike Huckabee, also has a problem with not taking crimes seriously (h/t Kos):

​Jeremy Giefer served time in jail in 1994 for having sex with a 14-year-old girl. But you wouldn't know it to look at the record of the man now charged with sexually molesting his daughter more than 250 times over the last eight years.

That's because two years ago, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Attorney General Lori Swanson, and then-Chief Justice Eric Magnuson unanimously voted to wipe Giefer's record clean, granting him a pardon extraordinary.

One reason Giefer wanted his record cleared? His wife wanted to open a childcare center in the house where they live--the same house where Giefer allegedly molested his young daughter throughout the six years prior.

So what happened with Giefer? Well:

Mother Jones:

Send a public records request seeking documents from his 12-year stint as Arkansas governor, as Mother Jones did recently, and an eyebrow-raising reply will come back: The records are unavailable, and the computer hard drives that once contained them were erased and physically destroyed by the Huckabee administration as the governor prepared to leave office and launch a presidential bid.

What’s Mike Huckabee trying to hide? We already know how he likes to let hardened criminals out of jail, like Maurice Clemmons, who went on to kill four police officers. Is there something even worse hiding in Huckabee’s tenure?

I love it. Every time some new big outrage rips through the nation, politicians take to the airwaves to whip it out and see who has the biggest. Take Mike Huckabee for example:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee says execution is the appropriate punishment for the leaker who provided thousands of State Department documents to the website WikiLeaks.

“Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason, and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty,” Huckabee, a likely presidential candidate, told reporters Monday during a stop at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library to sign copies of his new children’s book, “Can’t Wait Till Christmas!

BooYah! Let’s talk about killing people while signing the children’s Christmas book we just authored. Mike Huckabee is so full of Christiany-goodness that it just hurts.

But I can’t let this end here. Instead I have an urge to jump into the mix and come up with my own punishment for the leaker. Maybe execution is to good for this guy? How about something with a little more creative and a lot more devious. Perhaps an appropriate punishment would be to place the leaker as the tail end of the Human Centipede?

Joe Conason has a very enlightening piece up about Mike Huckabee and his addiction to letting criminals walk free. In the article Conason points out something very interesting, yet missed in this debate:

Huckabee has proudly declared on many occasions that he disdains the separation of church and state, insisting that his strict Baptist piety should serve as the bedrock of public policy. Nowhere in his record as governor was the influence of religious zeal felt more heavily than in the distribution of pardons and commutations, as his own explanations have indicated.

Religion clouded Huckabee’s judgment, which resulted in the release of a record number of prisoners, including Maurice Clemmons. This is the very reason why we should chose leaders based upon their performance, instead of how many times they pray. Would Jesus let someone like Clemmons walk free to constantly repeat the violent crimes he had done all his life? I highly doubt it.

The next time someone says they will use their religious views to lead our nation, we now only have to point to the actions of Huckabee to argue against them.

While going on about Tiger Woods again this morning, Joe Scarborough started defending Woods from the onslaught of media coverage and said it reminded him of balloon boy. What’s interesting is that this is happening on the very morning when Scarborough could only take 10 seconds to talk about the slaying of the Washington police officers by a man released from prison by Mike Huckabee. Instead of talking about this big story, Scarborough has decided to talk about the White House party crashers and Tiger Woods.

Exit question – How much longer before MSNBC cuts their losses with the major ratings bomb that is Morning Joe? All they cover is fluff pieces.

I’ve decided that I’m going to point out tweets from prominent politicians today like this one:

Over 2,200 veterans died last year because of a lack of healthcare. Will Mike Huckabee support a robust public option that would provide care to not only to the millions of uninsured citizens, but also our veterans?

  The party of old white Christian men does it again:

RNC candidate Chip Saltsman’s Christmas greeting to committee members includes a music CD with lyrics from a song called “Barack the Magic Negro,” first played on Rush Limbaugh’s popular radio show.

Saltsman, a personal friend of conservative satirist Paul Shanklin, sent a 41-track CD along with a note to national committee members.

“I look forward to working together in the New Year,” Saltsman wrote. “Please enjoy the enclosed CD by my friend Paul Shanklin of the Rush Limbaugh Show.”

The CD, called “We Hate the USA,” lampoons liberals with such songs as “John Edwards’ Poverty Tour,” “Wright place, wrong pastor,” “Love Client #9,” “Ivory and Ebony” and “The Star Spanglish banner.”

Several of the track titles, including “Barack the Magic Negro,” are written in bold font.

Saltsman, the former campaign manager for Mike Huckabee, has even been endorsed by his former boss and Bill Frist. Maybe someone in the media should ask the pastor or doctor how they feel about this.

There is one guarantee if Saltsman becomes the new RNC chair – they will remain in the minority for years to come. This kind of idiotic, hate-filled divisiveness is what has been destroying the GOP.