• HUCKABUCK: His pitch today ties into the National Day of Prayer.

I joked yesterday about how Mike Huckabee ties a commercial pitch to just about every breaking news event, often soliciting Huck PAC contributions tailored to the latest Fox slant on President Obama. Earlier this week, he begged for contributions to his PAC to counter the evil of Nancy Pelosi. Another e-mail reached out to the "pro-marriage" and pro-gun crowd. I jokingly speculated the Huckster might soon have something in the fund-raising line tied to his celebrity eulogist role at country singer George Jones' funeral.

Nothing on the George Jones front yet, but ....

Today is the National Day of Prayer, and naturally, the Bro. Gov. has an idea for you to show him some money. His lead-in:

Why America Needs God More Than Ever

Please accept this special gift on this National Day of Prayer—a Free DVD for the children in your life called One Nation Under God.

Yes, a video from the Huckster's cartoon history series for kiddies, absolutely FREE.*

* There is a low, low charge of $4.95 for shipping and handling. And if you squint down at the fine print, you'll also learn that "about once a month, we will send you an email letting you know when the next DVID in the series is scheduled to ship. If you want it, there's nothing for you to do. [In other words, you must explicitly opt out or you get it.] You'll receive a new Learn Our History DVD for the same low price of $11.95 plus $4.95 S&H billed conveniently to your credit card.

Imagine the marketing Huck could do with a Pennsylvania Avenue return address.

• Gage Skidmore
• Huckabee via Wikimedia Commons

"This is a very different president than our first one. George Washington was so adamant that we would not have a king and I thought, 'Well, gosh, we've done pretty well until 2008 and now I thnk we may have ended up with one.' Am I too far off in saying that there's probably never been a greater contrast than George Washington than Barack Obama?"

Media Matters nails Mike Huckabee for a familiar happenstance — noting a speck in an opponent's eye while ignoring the log in his own. (Matthew 7:5.)

Fox News host Mike Huckabee is irked at President Obama for converting his campaign apparatus into a tax-exempt non-profit advocacy group. Appearing on Fox & Friends Saturday, the former Arkansas governor admonished the president by saying: "Fine, go ahead and have your organization. Pay taxes on it like the rest of us have to when we get out and speak in our businesses and personal lives."

This is nonsense. Huckabee has his own tax-exempt political action committee, Huck PAC, that he has hyped up on Fox News and uses to "promote conservative principles and help elect conservative candidates at every level of government." Indeed, Huckabee has made ample use of tax-exempt groups throughout his political career and actually has a sketchy history with non-profits.

Back when he was lieutenant governor of Arkansas, Huckabee and his allies formed a non-profit group that had just two functions: to pay for Mike Huckabee to travel across the country bashing health care reform, and to pay Mike Huckabee.

Mike Huckabee knows a winner when he sees one. He sold a previous book, after all, on the backs of dead kids in Jonesboro. The outcry over his outrageous comments linking the Connecticut school disaster to an absence of God in the schools has only encouraged him.

Now it's "abortion pills," not to mention other immorality — meaning homosexuality — that leads to these slaughters. Really, he said that.

Huckabee has cover blurbs from James Robison, Josh Turner, Joan Lunden, Bob Barker, Neil Sedaka, and Robert Duvall.

Current book tour stops don't include Arkansas. Book lists at $24.95, but Amazon has it for $13.66.

The publication includes more stories from Huckabee's Lava soap-rough childhood in Hope, Ark. From Amazon:

'Dear Chandler, Dear Scarlett' touches on the time­less topics of faith, love, family, overcoming adversity, and staying true to your values in the face of failure and temptation. For instance, Huckabee tells how being forced to pick up pecans from the trees in his yard taught him the value of hard work. (“We were told that if we wanted to eat that night and sleep in a bed instead of in the yard, we’d pick up the pecans.”)

• 'IT'S A BATTLE': Mike Huckabee on weight loss.

On weight:

In regards to his very public battle to lose weight, Huckabee said he has had mixed success. He initially lost a lot of weight, but has put some back on since then.

“It’s been a battle all my life, I’ve put 30 pounds back on,” said Governor Huckabee. “I messed up my knee running the New York Marathon and I’ve never quite gotten over that.”

He said that it’s hard to keep the weight off especially in today’s society that encourages you to eat.

“It’s a battle…but ultimately, it’s my responsibility,” he said.

A return to politics?

“Good question…I don’t rule anything out,” he said. “If someone asked me four years ago I’d be doing television and radio, I would have said ‘gee no, I’d rather be in the White House.”

• The Cable
• HUCK DOES JAPAN: Photo appears to show Mike Huckabee with a former Japanese prime minister and a more shadowy figure.

Interesting, nonetheless, even if you don't want to assume too much simply because Huckabee had his picture taken with someone characterized as a "Japanese gangster" or that he was once in talks to be a cruise ship lecturer with another dubious figure, according to The Cable blog at foreignpolicy.com.

This encounter is not Huckabee's only bizarre connection with Japanese politics. In 2009, The Cable reported that Huckabee was to be the featured lecturer for a cruise with a controversial Japanese general who is known for defending Japan's World War II atrocities.

Huckabee was in discussions to interview the organizer of that cruise, Toshio Tamogami, the former Japanese Air Force chief of staff who was fired in 2009 after creating an international incident by writing in an essay that Japan was "not an aggressor nation" in WWII. Huckabee's participation in the event was scuttled after The Cable's report came out.

"There seems to be an unholy alliance between Japan's ultra-right and the American right," said Mindy Kotler, the founder of Asia Policy Point, a non-profit organization that does research on Japan. "They agree on an aggressive anti-China defense policy, but little else. If the two compared values they would frighten each other."

Closer to home was the article's mention of Sylvester Smith as Huckabee's communications spokesman. Is that the same former Huckabee administration minority affairs staffer and lobbyist? If so, I saw him just the other day and I thought he said he was still state director for the National Federation of Independent Business, another Republican corporate front group. But wait...Google turns up Smith's name as a contact on The Huckster's enterprise to sell animated cartoon history lessons (appropriately slanted, of course) for kids. If Repubs take over the legislature, no heavy lifting will be required for Smith as a lobbyist. NFIB votes will be automatic, unless the Kochs or ALEC disapprove for some reason. So time for a little moonlighting, I guess.

Janet Huckabee, wife of Florida tax fugitive Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, has been enlisted to lead the charge of a series of "Women Standing with Todd Akin" events to overcome the Republican senatorial candidate's deservedly low state for ignorant remarks about rape.

Janet Huckabee is a lot like Akin, often wrong but rarely in doubt.

Now, Huckabee has managed to lay out a fibulance so big it might wind up being the King Whopper of all lies spun for the faithful at the Republican National Convention in Tampa: that Barack Obama is kinda okay with murder.

From Huckabee's speech:

Let me clear the air about whether guys like me would support an evangelical. Of the four people on the two tickets, the only self-professed evangelical is Barack Obama, and he supports changing the definition of marriage, believes that human life is disposable and expendable at any time in the womb or even beyond the womb, and tells people of faith that they must bow their knees to the god of government and violate their faith and conscience in order to comply with what he calls health care...

Somebody hunt up grandma's hat and shawl. It's time for her appointment at The Death Panel.

• Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com
• Mike Huckabee

Following his comment in a TV interview that Missouri victims of "forcible rape" rarely become pregnant, Rep. Todd Akin's apology tour yesterday detoured around a scheduled appearance on CNN's "Piers Morgan Tonight." Better to stick with friendly media. Like Mike Huckabee, who's never afraid to double-down on a political gaffe.

In a radio interview with Akin yesterday, the L.A. Times reports that Huckabee tried to help out the disgraced U.S. Senate candidate by pointing to several cases where rapes, "though horrible tragedies," had produced great human beings.

“Ethel Waters, for example, was the result of a forcible rape,” Huckabee said of the late American gospel singer. One-time presidential candidate Huckabee added: “I used to work for James Robison back in the 1970s, he leads a large Christian organization. He, himself, was the result of a forcible rape. And so I know it happens, and yet even from those horrible, horrible tragedies of rape, which are inexcusable and indefensible, life has come and sometimes, you know, those people are able to do extraordinary things.”

Akin, wisely, didn't respond directly to Huckabee's premise, according to the L.A. Times.

• EAT MORE CHICKEN: So says the Huckster. No knife and fork needed with chicken nuggets.

Huckabee's support for a fried food purveyor, naturally, was too much for some commentators to resist. Such as Dana Milbank of Washington Post.

When he ran for president in 2008, Mike Huckabee spoke about the good eating habits that led to his 105-pound weight loss, and he often touted his book “Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork.”

Now Huckabee has found some of those pounds he lost, and he has a new message: He wants Americans to eat more fast food.

Milbank's point is more sweeping than Huckabee's found weight. He thinks Huckabee has done the chain no favors in making it a standard bearer for discrimination against gay people. Even the company has tried since its president's radio and published remarks to distance itself from any antipathy toward gay people in hiring and, particularly, to whom it sells fried food. Gay people's dollars are green, too.

I asked T.J. Parker, the owner of the Chick-fil-A franchise in Silver Spring, what he thought about Huckabee. He looked stricken, as he should: He operates in a blue part of a blue state, across the street from Ben & Jerry’s and down the block from Whole Foods. “For any comments involving anything, you have to contact public relations,” he pleaded.

If only Cathy, and Huckabee, had shown such restraint. They didn’t, and now Chick-fil-A seems destined to climb to the top of the left’s boycott list, already crowded by, among others, Wal-Mart, Target, Bayer, Exxon Mobil, Koch Industries, Peabody Energy and United Parcel Service. Conservatives “buy-cott” such enterprises to counteract the boycotts, while observing their own long boycott list, including: AOL, Planet Hollywood, Nike, Southwest Airlines, General Mills, JCPenney, Starwood and Whole Foods.

• Brian Chilson
• OF DOUGHNUTS AND MEDIA DOMINANCE: Talk of Mike Huckabee leads us, inevitably, to Little Rock's new Dunkin' Donuts.

• NY Times
• Q&A: Mike Huckabee got featured one-page interview in last Sunday's New York Times.

Well, Governor Huckabee has now been on the air for three months. It would seem fair to ask the obvious questions:

Where has all the Huckabee-challenging-Rush buzz gone?

The writer chooses not to count as buzz last Sunday's New York Times magazine interview with Huckabee. As he notes, it was mostly about Huckabee's support for Mitt Romney, his bitter rival in 2008, and had only a glancing reference to the Limbaugh competition. But it did have this winning passage between Andrew Goldman and Huckabee:

Could it possibly be true that you have never, ever tried alcohol in your life?

That’s true, other than communion wine in Europe. But I’ve never, ever tasted beer.

You’ve never cracked open the hotel minibar and thought to yourself, Well, I’m out of town, what the heck?

No. It’s really not a religious reason. When I was younger, someone said, “Here, try this,” and handed me beer, and I smelled it, and I thought, Gee, that smells horrible. And they said, “Well, you have to develop a taste for it.” When they said that, I said, “All of my senses tell me to reject it, but you’re telling me that I have to keep doing it over and over till I get to the point that I’m convincing myself that I enjoy it?” Now, have I ever been tempted to break into a Krispy Kreme doughnut store in the middle of the night? Oh, yeah. God help us if I had a minibar stocked with cheesecake and chicken-fried steak. Dangerous.

Which reminds me of Brian Chilson's spread of photos on Facebook of the new Dunkin' Donuts on Cantrell Road. I'm still a Shipley's man. This may be another issue on which the guv and I can't find common ground, but I think we could discuss the topic amiably with some mutual enthusiasm. I guess we can't do it over a pitcher of PBR draft, however.

• Mediaite
• SLOW START: For Huckabee's radio show.

The Radio Equalizer blog is pretty rough:

With mainstream media expectations so high, Mike Huckabee's new radio talk show was probably bound to disappoint. But newly-available hard data reveals a gaping donut hole where the audience should be.

...But the strategy behind Huckabee's new positioning has been flawed from the start: though "civil", his delivery is generally regarded as stiff and dry. Weak performance has opened him up to ridicule from both left and right, including libtalker Randi Rhodes ...

The blog samples audience ratings around the country and finds them anemic, overall and particularly against Limbaugh.

Moreover, in most of these metro regions, the trend is actually moving further against Huckabee.

We could only find one place where the former GOP presidential candidate fared relatively well: in Nashville, from noon-1pm at WWTN-FM, resulting in 12th place and a respectable 4.1 overall share. Perhaps he could become a local host there.

The bottom line: we know why the establishment media loves Huck, but we can't figure out why Cumulus would willingly undermine itself with this truly doomed effort, unless they're looking for a giant tax write-off.

Radio execs cannot force listeners to tune into a bad program, no matter how hard they try. It's a lesson they NEVER, ever seem to learn.

Well, Rome — and that big house on Florida beach — weren't built in a day.