David Huckabee’s mug shot after his April, 2007 weapons arrest in Little Rock
UPDATE: January 2015 – Testing the waters for another presidential run, Mike Huckabee — whose son tortured and killed a dog — has sought attention by criticizing the Obamas’ parenting skills.Click here…
Original article from 2007
The White House has boarded its share of unsavory family members of occupants. During Pres. George H.W. Bush’s term, no doubt coke was snorted in the hallowed halls by his sons and their friends. Everyone still remembers what it was like when Billy Bob Carter came to town. And the daughters of today’s Pres. Bush could not be considered boring.
But if Mike Huckabee makes it to Pennsylvania Avenue, should we expect Michael Vick to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom?
David Huckabee “admitted to catching a stray dog during their summer session at Camp Pioneer in Hatfield, AR, and hanging the dog by his neck, slitting his throat and stoning him to death”
Huckabee’s eldest and tubbiest son, David, would have made Vick proud when he was 18 and fired from his Boy Scout counseling job for torturing and killing a stray dog. David most recently made headlines when he was arrested for forgetting about the Glock pistol in his bag at the Little Rock airport.
But a few years earlier, when his dad was still governor, Big Boy was in a different kind of trouble. Corrente has been all over this story but the site is down now, probably due to excessive hits. This is from the Crooks & Liars quote from Corrente:
Here’s the barebones story of how 18-year-old Mike Huckabee’s son, David, and 17-year-old Clayton Frady killed a dog when they were Boy Scouts, and got fired for it. From the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 1998 (as quoted in DogBlog):
[David Huckabee,] the younger son of Gov. Mike Huckabee and another teen were fired last month from jobs at a Boy Scout camp after the killing of a stray dog.[..]
So, how and why did David Huckabee (and Clayton Frady) kill the dog?
Best wishes to the House’s newest newlyweds, Florida Rep. Connie Mack IV (R-Naples), and California Rep. Mary Bono (R-Palm Springs). The two are moderate GOPers, if you define moderate as referring to themselves by their first names on their official websites. They were married in Asheville, N.C. over the weekend.
Actually both have shown signs of independence from the Bush White House and Republican leadership. Connie, as we are invited to call him, is the latest of the dynasty that began with his great-grandfather the baseball guy. Last month, Connie rebuked Bushite Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, for saying Americans no longer expect privacy. In a press release titled, “Mack Blasts Administration for Waving White Flag on Freedom,” Connie went all Democrat on his ass.
“Dr. Kerr’s comments suggest that he believes government ought to be entrusted to protect the private data of 300 million Americans. That’s absurd.
“Safeguarding our nation’s security is paramount. But so too is preserving our freedom. To bolster the first by disintegrating the latter runs counter to every democratic principle known to man.
“The American people have expectations of privacy and constitutional protections from government intrusion. Sadly, it seems that Dr. Kerr and his colleagues need a refresher course in Civics 101.â€
Mary, as she is familiarly known, has also demonstrated skipping whole days of Kool-aid drinking. In October, she voted to override Bush’s veto of the Children’s Health Insurance Reauthorization Act, and expressed her frustration with those who would use children as political pawns.
“During the past few months, I have been dismayed by the political gamesmanship on this issue that has replaced compromise and bipartisanship,” said Bono. “While I am disappointed that we were unable to override the President’s veto, I believe that we must now take this opportunity to craft a viable compromise that will serve the needs of America’s children.”
This is a second marriage for both. Mary, of course, is the widow of Sonny Bono, who died in a skiing accident in 1998. Connie divorced his wife, Ann, mother of his children Addison and — you guessed it — Connie V at some hard to determine point in his relationship with Mary.
How they will continue to represent their districts remains to be seen. Both are maintaining residences back home, while living in their shared household in the northern Virginia ‘burbs.
Rudolph Giuliani’s campaign is in free fall. Mitt Romney’s support is essentially static — while “values” voters are giving Fred Thompson a pass and coalescing around Mike Huckabee.This is especially so in Florida:
Mitt Romney’s strategy for winning the Republican nomination was to win the early states and build momentum. Rudy Giuliani’s plan was to accept defeats in the early states and come back strong on January 29 in Florida and in many large states on February 5.
The latest Rasmussen Reports polling in the state of Florida suggests that Giuliani might need to work on a “Plan B.’ Mike Huckabee now leads in the Sunshine State Primary with 27 percent of the vote. He is trailed closely by Romney at 23 percent and Giuliani at 19 percent. Fred Thompson is at 9 percent in the poll, John McCain at 6 percent, and Ron Paul at 4 percent. Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter each attract 1 percent and 8 percent are undecided.
In June, Dick Cheney made the shocking claim that because he was an official of the Legislative Branch in his capacity as president of the Senate, the office of the vice presidential (OVP) in the Executive Branch is exempt from oversight to ensure that he and his staff are properly handling classified documents.
Rep. Rahm Emanuel threatened to take Cheney at his word that the OVP is not part of the Executive Branch and remove its $4.8 million operating budget. Within a few days after Emanuel’s threat, Cheney agreed to the oversight. Or so we thought.
Because Cheney has a record of betraying government secrets — it was he who directed his minions, including Scooter Libby and Karl Rove, to forfeit a secret CIA program that tracked the blackmarket for terror weapons in 2003 — without oversight, how can we be sure that Cheney and his staffers are not handing over secret documents to enemies of the United States such as al Qaeda and Iran?
Last summer, soon after Cheney announced that he was exempt from security oversight, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) threatened to take Cheney at his word that the OVP is not part of the Executive Branch and de-fund its $4.8 million operating budget. Very quickly after the threat, Cheney agreed to the oversight.
The Office of the Vice President is not an “agency” for purposes of the executive order on classification and therefore its classification and declassification activity no longer need be reported to the Information Security Oversight Office, the Justice Department finally informed ISOO Director Bill Leonard in a newly disclosed letter.
In a January 9, 2007 letter to the Attorney General, Director Leonard had questioned the OVP’s refusal since 2003 to submit to normal oversight. He was following up on a complaint filed with ISOO by the Federation of American Scientists, which was also forwarded to the Attorney General.
The OVP’s position is not consistent with a “plain text reading” of the executve order, Mr. Leonard wrote to the Attorney General at that time.
Be that as it may, the President’s intention is that the Office of Vice President should not be considered an “agency” for purposes of oversight, Steven G. Bradbury of the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel wrote to Mr. Leonard on July 20, 2007 on behalf of the Attorney General. He cited another letter to that effect from White House counsel Fred Fielding…
On Monday, the Senate will debate giving immunity to giant telecom corporations who illegally spied on American citizens at the behest of the Bush administration. At least one Democratic presidential candidate is outraged:
Now the campaign of Senator Chris Dodd, who has promised to put a hold on and filibuster the bill, has just sent out an email to supporters containing a challenge for the other Dem Senators running for President: Will you stick by your promise to publicly support my filibuster of the bill?
Back when Dodd first announced his planned filibuster of the measure in October, the Dem Senators running for President came under heavy pressure to say they’d publicly support it. Senators Clinton, Obama and Biden all said they would.
No word from the campaigns as of Saturday morning.
Italia Federici, who once headed a GOP anti-environmentalism front group, Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA), and who was used as a conduit between disgraced and imprison Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Interior deputy secretary Stephen Griles, a high official in the Interior Department who was her lover, was sentenced on Friday to 60 days in a halfway house, four years of probation and a fine of $77,000 in restitution.
“Judge: You didn’t understand there was any quid pro quo going on?” Federici: “It did strike me as odd.”
Federici admitted that she knowingly failed to pay income taxes on $187,000 in salary she drew over three years from the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA) and that she “minimized the extent of information I had” when she testified in 2005 about Abramoff and … Griles before openly skeptical members of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.
Federici, 38, was a go-between for Griles, with whom she was linked romantically, and Abramoff, who had his tribal clients donate $500,000 to her group…
[The judge] asked Federici why anyone would “believe for a minute” that Abramoff’s client contributions were unconnected to her role as an intermediary: “You didn’t understand there was any quid pro quo going on?”
“It did strike me as odd,” Federici said. But, she added, “at the time I viewed Mr. Abramoff as what we in the nonprofit community call an angel,” explaining that she saw him as “a truly ideologically aligned Republican.”
CREA, which used its resources to oppose the environmental movement, was as cynical an enterprise as any the Republican Party has come up with yet, was founded by Gale Norton, George Bush’s first anti-environmental secretary of the interior, and Grover Norquist, an anti-United States government crusader.
Yesterday, I suggested that Democrats should pray that Mike Huckabee wins the GOP nomination because his record is riven with bad judgment and questionable ethics that would make it a perfect target for attack ads.
The GOP establishment is not worried about Huckabee. Look at the numbers. Huckabee’s just don’t add up.
Several commenters, including my colleague Trish, disagreed, suggesting that Huckabee would be a formidable candidate in the general election. If Huckabee were to become the GOP nominee, I still believe he would be the easiest of the top four to beat, but mainly I just can’t see how he makes it past South Carolina next month.
That’s because Huckabee’s biggest obstacle isn’t Democrats, it’s the corporatist Republican establishment that has been in control of the government for the past seven years. Life has been grand for these fatcats under the Bush regime. There is no way they’re going to quietly cede power to a yahoo Christian nationalist populist like Huckabee.
The Club for Growth is (along with Karl Rove’s BFF Grover Norquist and his anti-tax gang) one of the leading shills for the corporatist wing of the Republican Party. If you have any doubt that they hate Huckabee, don’t take the word of an old leftist like yours truly — just click “play” on the video of the Club for Growth’s anti-Huckabee ad above to see what they have to say about “Tax Hike Mike.”
But the GOP establishment is not worried about Huckabee. Look at the numbers. Huckabee’s just don’t add up.
Money:
After New Hampshire, in order to make it to Super-Duper Tuesday on Feb. 5, Huckabee needs to have banked a minimum of $20 million for TV ads to run against Giuliani and Romney (and possibly McCain). First, he must deploy ads in states that vote in January — Michigan, Nevada, S.C. and Florida. Almost simultaneously, he needs to go up in as many of the “red” states as possible among the states that vote on Feb. 5: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah.
In reality, Huckabee will likely come in fourth in New Hampshire, after Romney, Giuliani and McCain. If so, it’s pretty much all over for him. But if he comes in second or third, and gets momentum into South Carolina, the Giuliani and Romney campaigns will turn all their guns on him, with “Willie Horton”-type ads suggesting he’s soft on crime and “Tax Hike Mike” ads like the one above.
Without $20 million or so to counter the barrage of negative ads, Huckabee has no chance. At the moment, he does not have $20 million and is not likely to raise it in time.
In the third quarter, Huckabee raised a little over $1 million (roughly the same as Dennis Kucinich), which is half of what he’s raised total from day one of the campaign — and he’s already spent over $1.5 million. By comparison, Romney raised $18 million and Giuliani raised $11 million in the last quarter. (Clinton raised $27 million and Obama raised $21 million.)
Huckabee will probably have a better fourth quarter now that his polling has improved but it’s hard to imagine that he will have raised more than $5 million before Dec. 31. He could easily blow that in the next few weeks advertising in S.C., Nevada and especially Michigan, which has an audience that might be receptive to his populist message but where advertising is expensive — leaving him nothing to spend in red states that vote on Feb. 5.
He has to win Arkansas on Feb. and that might be no problem — unless Giuliani or Romney were to flood Arkansas with negative ads forcing him to drain what’s left of his coffers in order to counter.
Even if Huckabee survives past Feb. 5 somehow, he’ll enter the downhill slope in second or third place — and broke.
Votes:
If Huckabee gets the vote of every white evangelical and even every African-American registered Republican (which I believe is less than 1 percent) between now and Feb. 6, that’s still only 15 to 20 percent of the Republican vote.
It’s hard to see how he wins in any of the GOP’s other main interest groups. The corporatist anti-tax Republicans, who have all the money, will go for either Romney or Giuliani. (Huckabee will get 0 percent from this group.) The country clubbers, including the Bushies and their ilk, appear to be favoring their East Coast preppie homeboy, Romney. (Huckabee can also count on 0 percent from this sector.)
Most importantly, Huckabee’s lack of foreign policy experience is not resonating with the largest GOP voting bloc: Terror-addicted paranoids. These brain-addled fear-addicts, who might make up as much as 50 percent of the GOP, will vote for Rudolph (“9/11”) Giuliani or possibly John (“Bomb Iran”) McCain.
Mexican-haters will split between Rep. Ron Paul, Rep. Duncan Hunter and Rep. Tom Trancredo. Huckabee, who has flip-flopped on this issue, will get no votes from this statistically tiny group either.
Bottom line: If by some miracle (literally), Huckabee can raise $20 million for advertising in the next two weeks (which includes both the Christmas and New Year’s holidays), and survives through the primaries, in the rosiest, most optimistic scenario, Huckabee gets 20 percent of the delegates — an honor that will buy him an early evening slot at the podium to address the GOP convention in Minneapolis, well before the winners take the stage.
Trump and the Iranians seem to be in different realities,
Though they share a callousness toward the war’s casualties.
Is Trump insane
Or just insanely vain?
And how can we extract ourselves from his “Quagmire of the Vanities?”
“If any politician wants to get mothers on their side, they should adopt this issue. It’s such an obvious electoral winner. And what I’ve learned is there is no force in the universe stronger than mothers trying to protect their kids.”
— Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, quoted by Politico, on the threats posed by social media and artificial intelligence.
“There are a lot of Ukrainian drones in the air. It would be dangerous.”
— Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, quoted by the Associated Press, when President Trump asked him if he would accept Moscow as a venue for peace talks.
“Years before Natalie Harp became a key White House aide to President Donald Trump, she flooded her Twitter feed with posts demonstrating extraordinary devotion to him on January 6, 2021,” CNN reports. “Harp posted more than 150 tweets that day, urging Republicans to ‘FIGHT FOR TRUMP’ as he began his speech near the White House. She echoed the president’s talking points that the election was stolen, and amplified rhetoric of his allies, who also sought to undermine the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election win. Harp’s X account appears suspended. It’s unclear when her account was taken down, and whether she or the platform removed her posts.”
“The number of U.S. service members wounded since the start of the Iran war has passed 750, according to the Defense Department’s war casualty database,” CNN reports.
“The U.S. State Department announced on Monday that it has revoked more than 175,000 visas during President Donald Trump’s administration so far,” Fox News reports.
President Donald Trump is asking for $1,500,000 million for the military for next year. That’s close to $600 billion (adjusted for inflation) more than we were spending on the military in fiscal year 2025, before Trump took office, Alternet reports. This increase is huge by any measure. It comes to around $4,600 per household. It is around 8% of the total budget.
A new Emerson College survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53% to 42%. President Trump holds a 39% job approval rating, consistent with the past two months, whereas his disapproval increased another point, to 57%.
Photo from the 
