For those of you who don’t see the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: It carried a great story today by Seth Blomeley and Michael Wickline elaborating on the great computer hard drive smash up by outgoing Gov. Mike Huckabee that we alluded to yesterday. It was full of details — of the cost to taxpayers, of petulant complaints from Huckabee about loss of electronic services, about a big bill he stuck the incoming governor with, about accounting funny business that seems likely to have been intended to make the governor’s budget look smaller than it was, about the lack of an explanation of how furniture, lights and sound equipment in the governor’s office were Huckabee’s to take. (The Republican Party said it didn’t supply the money for the disappeared property as far as Director Clint Reed knew; in any case, nobody has said the GOP has the stuff. If Huckabee has it, he should explain how he acquired it and what legal theory allows him to personally keep it.)

Do you see, again, the familiar pattern? Huckabee has always loved stuff and has grabbed whatever he could, from his coming in (when he tapped campaign funds in his very first race for personal payments) to his going out — on orgy of gift registries, free china and crystal, a furniture haul, dispensation of favors to pals, etc. I suspect there is much more to learn.

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Sen. Percy Malone, long a target of Huckabee ire, intends to get to the bottom, too, of Huckabee’s last-minute spending spree with his “emergency” fund. It didn’t go for emergencies, but to pet projects. We happen to like the idea of  his program to provide musicial instruments to poor kids. But 1) it’s not an emergency and 2) when Huckabee says some of the $100,000 spent there needs to go to “operational costs,” our immediate question is whether Mike Huckabee has a friend or relative standing in line to be paid with that “operational money.” Speaking of which: Wasn’t it nice he gave the Red Cross, which recently employed his wife as a “liaison,” $15,000? You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours (my scratching will be with taxpayer money, of course, not my own.)

In gutting computers and his emergency fund, as the D-G headline put it so graphically, we note the governor took care to wipe out computer memory at the State Police airplane hangar. Surprise. Wouldn’t want anyone to come up with a complete analysis of the activities of Air Huckabee.

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Here’s a link to copy and paste for the excellent report:

http://www.nwanews.com/story.php?paper=adg&section=News&storyid=179261

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Or this one is easier to copy and paste:

tinyurl.com/yrchl2

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