The senseless and savage slaying of 4 police officers in Lakewood, Washington has raised many questions as to why the alleged murderer was even on the streets. My name has figured prominently in many of the stories because I commuted his 108 year sentence to a term of 47 years back in 2000. I take full responsibility for my decision then. Unfortunately, many of my fellow conservatives don’t seem to want to take responsibility for the facts surrounding the case.

The Maurice Clemmons presented in a commutation request in the year 2000 was much different than the one who is being sought for the killings of the police officers.

The case before me was of a 16 year old who received a disproportionate sentence of 108 years for burglary and robbery charges. He had already served 11 years in Arkansas prison by that time, which is more time actually served than most similar cases would have netted in sentencing alone. Under Arkansas law, governors don’t parole anyone. The Post Prison Transfer Board does. That board can recommend clemency, and in this case recommended by a 5-0 vote that his sentence be reduced. This was one of 1000-1200 cases I reviewed each of the 10 ½ years as Governor. 92% of the time, any request for clemency was denied. Most of the ones granted were for clearing a person’s record for a minor offense from 20 years previous. The trial judge in the case supported the commutation. During the legally required 30 day public comment period before action on the case was complete, there were no objections registered by my office by any authorities, despite claims of the local prosecutor that he “was afraid something like this would happen.” Interestingly, if he was so afraid, then he has failed to explain why in 2004 when Clemmons was back in prison for a parole violation, his office failed to pursue charges and in fact DROPPED them, allowing Clemmons to go free, move to Washington, and for reasons beyond me, continue to avoid extradition back to Arkansas or be kept by Washington authorities as he displayed signs of psychotic behavior. I am responsible for the commutation in 2000. I would not have commuted his sentence in 2004 after the re-arrest or in any of the years following. I can explain my decision in 2000. I cannot explain the decision of the very vocal prosecutor in Little Rock who seems to avoid answering the questions as to why he didn’t keep Clemmons in prison in 2004 or get him brought back to Arkansas for his repeated parole violations.

There are some glaring facts that some conservative talkers seem to miss:

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As the dust is still settling on the Washington State police killings and the connection to Mike Huckabee, I’m reminded of this article by Ron Fournier written shortly before the Iowa Caucus. It got a lot of play in national media circles, but not in Iowa itself.

Back in 2008, a lot of people tried to paint Mike Huckabee as soft on crime. But, the guy is extremely likable and he makes sure you know he is a former preacher. So people tend to forgive him for his forgiving criminals their crimes.

Despite several attempts to drum up a Willie Horton for Huckabee in 2008, nothing happened. People glossed over the numbers.

With the Washington State police killings, people will probably pay attention in a different way now.

As Fournier noted at the time, while Mike Huckabee was Governor of Arkansas, he granted “1,033 pardons and commutations, including for 12 convicted murderers.”

To quote a different preacher, those chickens are now coming home to roost in inconvenient ways.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) I don’t know if Mediaite deliberately omitted the reason for former President Bill Clinton’s refusal to attend a Keith Olbermann-boosted ‘free clinic event.’  It’s entirely possible that the actual reason (warning: FDL link) - that Clinton thinks that the event in question is a thinly-veiled primary campaign event against Senator Blanche Lincoln (D, AR) and for Democratic Senate hopeful Bill Halter - was simply uninteresting to Mediaite, which is of course that site’s privilege.

That being said, this kind of allegation is newsworthy.  A former President accusing a more-or-less prominent Leftist television commentator of playing internal Democratic party politics with people’s health care coverage?  This should have been front and center on the site.  Heck, it should be above the fold on the New York Times.

‘Should,’ not ‘will.’

Moe Lane

PS: Does MSNBC… approve of this?

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Some points of interest, for various campaigns:

• AR-01: Rick Crawford - who is running against Marion Berry, AKA The Guy Who Can’t Remember That He’s Not Supposed to Be Taken Farm Subsidies - has a revamped website.  It’s a definite improvement over the old version, and should allow for more and better networking.  AR-01 is a R+8 district, and long overdue for a Congressman not as ready to ‘forget’ about his income (both agricultural and residential) as Berry is.  Check Rick out.

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As Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas navigates the political minefield of health care reform, the two-term Democrat may be hewing a more conservative course in the wake of a new poll by Public Policy Polling which found her in a dead heat with three potential Republican challengers despite scant name recognition.

PPP, whose sampling of voters skewed Democratic, found that only 36% of respondents approve of Lincoln’s job performance, while 44% say they disprove. In March of this year, the same outfit found that Lincoln maintained an approval rating with a 5-point positive spread.

The three would-be GOP challengers polled included state Senator Gilbert Baker, Huckabee fundraiser Curtis Coleman and Harvard-educated lawyer and U.S. Army veteran Tom Cotton. Among them, Baker performed the best; however a majority of Arkansans—ranging from 78% to 83%—were unsure of their opinions on the three men.

“You couldn’t get a clearer indication that the national momentum is with Republicans right now than a poll showing some guys with single digit name recognition running even with an incumbent Senator,” said PPP’s Dean Debnam.

With Obama’s health care proposal fairing worse in the polls than former President Clinton’s defeated reforms of 1994, Lincoln must take into consideration the consequences of supporting the President’s contentious legislation in a state whose voters ten months ago gave Republican John McCain 59% of the vote.

What’s more, the hemorrhaging of Democratic support to wavering public opinion raises a serious dilemma for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and poses an acute challenge to the President’s legislative agenda, as Democrats today lost their filibuster-proof majority with the death of Senator Ted Kennedy.

Reid must accept the political reality that Lincoln, who previously bucked party leadership on the cap-and-trade legislation designed to reduce carbon emissions and the reauthorization of banking infusion, may be the next casualty in the polarized health care debate.

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I guess Marion Berry (D-AR) does not like being ambushed with easy questions. He has decided to disappear for the month of August and only talk to select groups.

Here is an email from a RedState Gathering attendee:

Marion Berry is hiding from his constituents. I called his office to see when his town hall meetings were going to be, and Emily, the scheduler, said he doesn’t have any meetings planned—when I feigned amazement (I’m not really at all surprised), she said that he was having a few meetings with certain groups.

I guess you guys in Marion Berry’s District are going to have to go to his office to find him.

You’ll find his office at 108 E Huntington, Jonesboro, AR 72401.

The phone number there is (870) 972-4600. Try real hard to get in touch with him as he does not want to touch you.

It’s sad when a sitting US Congressman loses his ability to remember the basic details of the shenanigans he went through to bring in the cash. Via Boot Berry, this classic moment of what we call a Kinsley gaffe:

To those without video: it’s of Berry first confidently denying that he personally gets farm subsidies (in 2007), then (yesterday) momentarily forgetting that he denies personally getting farm subsidies, cheerfully admitting that he personally gets farm subsidies, then visibly stopping and going to himself Wait a second. I’m supposed to pretend that I don’t personally get farm subsidies. It’s the stop-and-wait-and-visible-oops moment that makes this video: by all means, watch it.

And then check out his opponent Rick Crawford. Because if Berry can’t even keep up on this, him returning to private life seems best for all concerned.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Rep Marion Berry (AR-01) is playing financial disclosure games again:

Rep. Marion Berry (D-Ark.) appears to have understated by hundreds of thousands of dollars the value of his Capitol Hill rowhouse on his annual financial disclosure forms.

In May, Berry filed a financial disclosure form reporting the value of the house at between $250,000 and $500,000, the same value that he has listed on his disclosure forms each year.

But according to District of Columbia tax records, the current assessed value of the house is $947,080, and the proposed 2010 assessment value is $864,970, reflecting the drop in Capitol Hill property values.

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The heinous act of Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, 24, formerly Carlos Leon Bledsoe, a prison convert to Islam, is a perfect example of why terrorism cannot be fought using police procedures and is more effectively fought under military auspices. The fact that Muhammad was under FBI surveillance and already under suspicion of possible terrorist activities but got away with murdering one soldier and seriously injuring another is a lesson of how police procedures are prone to failure in stopping terrorism.

Many on the left in America lambasted President Bush for utilizing military tribunals and for his contention that the capture of foreign terrorists was a military matter. They said that these terrorist’s “civil rights” were being violated by the quick military actions and they abhorred the limited availability to legal council such procedures offered to suspects. The solution the left commonly offers is for the full American justice system to be placed at the disposal of foreign terror suspects. The left claims that doing so makes our own actions “consistent” with our traditions of justice.

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It is apparently inconvenient for the media and left to talk about this.

A Muslim convert “with political and religious motives” shot two uniformed soldiers outside an Arkansas military recruiting center Monday, killing one and wounding the other, authorities said.

Police arrested Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, 23, on a nearby interstate shortly after the bloodshed at the Army-Navy Career Center in a shopping center in west Little Rock. Three guns were found in his SUV, they said.

They would rather focus on the nut who killed George Tiller than the nut who killed two soldiers. Look at the front page of Google News as of this writing and there are multiple stories on the former and none on the latter.

Why?

Well, one was allegedly a pro-life militant and the other was a peace activist. Which one do you think fits the media narrative better?

Also — President Obama rushed out pretty forthrightly after the death of Dr. Tiller to tell the pro-life community that violence is not the answer. Will he do the same to the peace movement?

Starting with the background: AR-01 is one of those districts that is… interesting. It is currently rated as R +8 in the Cook Political Report, but is held by a soi-disant ‘Blue Dog Democrat’: in this case, Marion Berry. Berry has been in that seat since 1997: he won the 2006 election with 69% of the vote; and he was unopposed in 2008.

However, he will not be unopposed this term. Rick Crawford is going to be challenging him; it’s reported that the NRCC is looking at him as part of their planned campaign against selected ‘Blue Dogs’ that did not get challenged in the last election cycle. Rick is a business owner (AG Watch, a radio agricultural network) and military veteran (Army, bomb disposal) with strong roots in the area; he’s pro-life, pro-Tea Party, ready to run on an agricultural platform and is just as exceptionally happy to see the back of Arlen Specter as most of the people reading this, particularly after what Specter did to Kemp’s memory.

The NRCC is taking a challenge to this district seriously, and it’s no surprise why: while Barry has been comfortably winning elections lately - and didn’t have a challenger last cycle - the district itself has shifted on the national level (Gore in ‘00, Bush in ‘04, McCain in ‘08). Plus there’s the entire agricultural subsidy thing, which Berry is notorious for (and, apparently, has set up an arrangement to allow himself to continue to benefit from personally). Then there’s the ongoing neutering of the Blue Dogs in general; as this NRCC radio ad (H/T: ARRA News Service) points out, Barry’s voting for what Pelosi’s proposing.

As noted above, Rick’s website is here, this is his current donation link, and here’s his Facebook page. We will no doubt see more campaign-related items as time goes on.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

See this line?

That’d be one hell of an army of activists ready and willing to help in run for Senator from Arkansas next year.

Maybe he’ll do it. He should.

To answer the headline: NO.

According to the historically illiterate Democrats in the Arkansas legislature, the USA was “founded by slaveowners,” and so they said in a resolution celebrating the election of Barack Obama. Not surprisingly, a few Arkansas Republicans objected to this stilted and historically misleading language and voted against the thing and those few Republicans deserve a pat on the back.

The resolution congratulating President Obama was killed in the Arkansas House Committee on State Agencies and Governmental Affairs this week when Republicans raised objections over the language in the document that claimed the United States as a nation was “founded by slaveowners” as if every founder was a slave owner or slave owning was a chief reason for creating the nation.

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