It's possible the "South American Liberator" was murdered, and did not die of the tubercule bacterioso.

It's possible Hugo will in fact not rest until all of the resources of Venezuela (including their submarine fleet) are brought to bear on this mystery.

It is far more likely he'll have a chicken sandwich and a nap tomorrow.

Posted by: Dave In Texas at 08:26 PM | Comments (10)
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One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, "Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!" But the other rebuked him, saying, "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong." And he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." And he said to him, "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise." - Luke 23:39-43

When I read stories about the generous clemencies of Mike Huckabee, I think of the two criminals crucified with Jesus. Although one of them came to repentance, he was not given a reprieve from his secular punishment. He died at the hands of the state for his crime. He accepted that judgment at the hands of men.

While governor of Arkansas, Huckabee granted 1,023 commutations and pardons in 10 years, twice as many as his three predecessors combined. Arkansas prosecutors have said that if a pastor was involved, Huckabee was likely to grant clemency.

Huckabee's clemency/pardon record is troubling, if only because it shows an inability to separate his faith from his responsibilities as governor of Arkansas. Romans 13 makes it clear that government "does not bear the sword in vain," and that Christians should be "subject to the governing authorities." Huckabee may have been the governor of his state, but his actions showed a fundamental disrespect for the judgment of citizens who served on juries. He put his judgment above those citizens, and in doing so granted mercy where none was deserved.

There is a difference between spiritual redemption and secular justice. People may be forgiven by God for their sins, but that doesn't mean society should overlook their crimes. Huckabee's seeming inability to differentiate between the two is troubling.

Update - A few commenters bring up a fair point. I was in error to write "disrespect for citizens who served on juries." What I should have said is that Huckabee's actions show a fundamental disrespect for the overall judicial system and the families affected by the criminals he pardoned with such frequency.

Prosecutors in that state asked Huckabee time and time again to take more care in his use of the pardon/commutation power and he did not, and even threatened to make it harder for them to make plea agreements with defendants. His actions and his response to criticism showed that he put his own value system above his responsibilities as governor to use his executive power with discretion and take the opinions of those in the judicial system under appropriate consideration.

Oh...And for those who doubt that Huckabee's faith was his rationale for the number of clemencies...

LITTLE ROCK - Gov. Mike Huckabee said Wednesday that his religious background and belief in redemption played a key role in the high number of state prisoners he has pardoned or turned loose early.

"I would not deny that my sense of the reality of redemption is a factor," the former Baptist pastor said in a radio interview with KUAR in Little Rock. "And I don't know that I can apologize for that because I would hate to think of the kind of human I would be if I thought people were beyond forgiveness and beyond reformation and beyond some sense of improvement."

Posted by: Slublog at 08:06 PM | Comments (110)
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Bloodcurdling tales of the Fat Man and the Elvish Horror.

Erich Zann and Mannheim Steamroller playing in the background.

thanks to the Man of Substance, who is way weirder than I thought he was.

Is it just me, or is it weird that "weird" totally violates that whole "i before e" rule?

Posted by: Dave In Texas at 05:24 PM | Comments (13)
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South Carolina, the first turn against the Huckster? Both are now tied at 23%.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney are tied for the lead in South CarolinaÂ’s Republican Presidential Primary. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows both Huckabee and Romney with 23% of the vote followed by John McCain at 12%, Fred Thompson at 12%, and Rudy Giuliani at 11%. Ron Paul is supported by 5%, Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter by 1% each, and 12% are undecided.

Nationally, it's Rudy 27, Huckabee 16, Romney 14, Fred 14, McCain 14.

This is weird. I don't know about you but I can't remember any elections where so many candidates got so much traction, and yet not nearly enough to actually win the thing.

Posted by: Ace at 03:58 PM | Comments (25)
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I don't know what we're paying these people, but it's not enough. Just what we needed: giant mutant super-rats.

"The giant rat is about five times the size of a typical city rat," said Kristofer Helgen, a scientist with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. "With no fear of humans, it apparently came into the camp several times during the trip."

Posted by: Ace at 01:32 PM | Comments (68)
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And it gets worse.

Robert Novak writes:

Nearly the entire federal government would be funded by an omnibus appropriations bill to be unveiled today after covert negotiations. In subsequent parliamentary maneuvering likely to extend all through this week, Democrats will pare the spending level to the maximum demanded by President George W. Bush in order to avoid a veto. Republicans will declare victory. In fact, they are in retreat.

As the minority party in Congress, the GOP will have less than 24 hours to read the massive bill before it comes up for a House vote on Tuesday. While at least coming close to the Bush limit, the bill will be passed over Republican opposition because it contains no Iraq war funding. It then will go the Senate on Wednesday, where Republicans will use their filibuster threat to insert money for Iraq. Overall spending will be reduced to the Bush standard in the Senate by means of an across-the-board cut.

The bill then will be passed into law by the House, though Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she personally will vote against this solution that, in effect, finances the war at the expense of domestic programs.

This solution is designed to win bipartisan support because it will contain the earmarks for pork barrel spending back home dearly desired on both sides of the aisle. It became clear a week ago that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell was in negotiation with Majority Leader Harry Reid for a bill to finance multiple new earmarks by means of across-the-board reduction in government programs. What's more, a little rules chicanery will hide an estimated 12,000 new earmarks, including pork that previously had not been passed by any chamber and is "airdropped" into the bill. The wily legislators have found a way to get around new ethics rules that require disclosure of all such spending.

Republicans seem to be bowing to this because many of them (such as Cochran and Stevens) actually lead the Congress in earmarking, and because others of them are afraid of being blamed for a government shutdown.

This new blog is digging up the earmarks. Included in the new bill: Hillary Clinton's "Hippie Museum" earmark, again. Oh, this time it doesn't exactly earmark money for the museum of free love. Instead it seems to permit agencies to fund it, which is pretty much telling them "Fund it if you wish to keep my favor."

Senator Coburn has made the PDF of all the earmarks available. But make sure your computer has free space available before you open it -- there are six hundred and ninety six pages of earmarks alone.

Posted by: Ace at 01:22 PM | Comments (18)
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If you didn't know a Republican (nominally) was making this speech, wouldn't you have guessed it was Obama or Edwards?

Someone wrote by email that Huckbee's claim that "Sun Tzu's ancient wisdom" -- "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer" -- is a misattribution and that the quote is actually from The Godfather. Or Part II. However, just in case this is getting traction, it should be noted he seems to have gotten this one right. Sun Tzu is credited with the aphorism.

Posted by: Ace at 12:21 PM | Comments (8)
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I heard on the radio this morning that Fred Thompson's getting the endorsement of Congressman Steve King. King's a Republican from Western Iowa, which is Iowa's most reliably conservative region. In my earlier Fred post, some of the Moron Nation living in SW and NW Iowa wanted to know why Fred hasn't worked that part of the state as hard as Huckabee or Romney yet. Hopefully, that's because they knew this endorsement was coming down the pike.

King's an immigration hawk, and a close ally of Tancredo in the Republican caucus, so this endorsement will shore up Fred's conservative mojo among Iowa Republicans. There aren't many bright lights among Iowa's Republican politicians, so getting the Grand PooBah of Iowa's elected Republicans to endorse your candidacy is big news.

I'll let you know how this shakes out in the next couple of days.

In other news, my wife and I went in for an ultrasound this morning (I had already broken the good news to the "Splitters" site a few weeks ago, but this is the official AoSHQ unveiling of "Baby from Winterset"), and I've got a question for other recent parents. When they show you the ultrasound (we're talking about 22 weeks or so here), can you REALLY tell what you're seeing, or do you just trust the technician? I could see the really obvious stuff, like hands, feet & the spinal column, but the kidneys & heart just looked like bad TV reception during a lightning storm.

I tried to count fingers & toes, but she was going way too fast for me to be sure. I'm almost positive that we're going to get at LEAST five on each limb, but I'm not so sure that maybe I didn't see six toes on one foot. An extra toe isn't a big deal, is it? In my moron opinion, extra digits are like getting an extra donut or two in your box from the bakery. They're a bonus. If you don't want to use them, fine; but it's easier to get rid of an extra one than to try to deal with one that's missing, right?

Or not. It could've been just a shadow, on the screen, right?

Posted by: Russ from Winterset at 12:16 PM | Comments (24)
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The Sun reported earlier:

An alleged physical attack on a Princeton University student who is leading a movement to instill conservative moral values among undergraduates is rattling the campus here.

A politics major from Texas who is a junior, Francisco Nava, said he was physically attacked Friday, beaten, and rendered unconscious by two black-clad men about two miles from campus, he told the student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, in an interview.

The rare incidence of violence within the Ivy League prompted an outcry from conservative students and faculty who said they felt singled out by the Princeton administration and the majority of the student body, who remained silent in the face of what looked to many like a politically charged attack.

But the disclosure today that Mr. Nava fabricated a death threat against himself and his roommate when he was a high school student at the Groton School, has some students questioning his account of the last week's attack as well as the series of death threats he said he received this semester after airing his morally conservative views.

In high school, Mr. Nava wrote a death threat using an anti-homosexual slur, the Web site Firstthings.com reported this morning. Mr. Nava's roommate at Groton was a founder of the Gay-Straight Alliance, according to the Web site.

"Evidently he did it once when he was a student at the Groton School," a professor of jurisprudence, Robert George, confirmed to The New York Sun. Several students at Princeton said yesterday that they did not want to pass any judgment on the situation without more information.

"Those of us who saw him at the emergency room find it difficult to believe he could have done this himself. The physical manifestations were too evident, too severe," Mr. George said. Mr. Nava earlier had told Mr. George about the incident at Groton, but denied that he sent the death threats at Princeton, or that he fabricated the attack, Mr. George said.

Well, here you go:

Francisco Nava '09 has admitted to fabricating an alleged assault on him that he said occurred Friday evening and also to sending threatening emails to himself, other members of the Anscombe Society and prominent conservative politics professor Robert George, Princeton Township Police said today.

"He fabricated the story," Det. Sgt. Ernie Silagyi said.

I expect he'll be punished severely, possibly expelled, as he ought to be.

A pity universities don't deliver such punishments against lefties who concoct fake hate crimes against themselves.

Posted by: Ace at 11:23 AM | Comments (6)
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Pretty amazing stuff.

The greatly reduced number of casualties and deaths are well-publicized... at least in the alternative media. Here's a stat that's less well known.

That's not just violence settling down, passively -- that's citizens informing to Coalition Forces, and Coalition Forces breaking up cells and finding the bad guys.

And violence is, by the way, now at its lowest level since 2004.

Posted by: Ace at 10:19 AM | Comments (8)
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