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Huck picks our pockets
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Candidate
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| Contributor | DFWDem |
| Last Edited | DFWDem Jan 26, 2007 10:59am |
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| Category | Editorial |
| News Date | Monday, January 22, 2007 04:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Mike Huckabee’s unstylish leavetaking from the Capitol, in which he almost literally took everything with him, seems almost calculated to make him unmissed by the body politic. On the other hand, there’s a loud claque that wants to form a posse and go bring him back.
The Arkansas Democrat Gazette’s Capitol reporters Friday expounded on still another siege of outrages by the ex-governor in his last days in office. Huckabee completely emptied the state fund for emergencies by distributing its $500,000 among a bunch of pet projects, not one an emergency, leaving the new governor shorn of any way to help in a real emergency the next months.
To keep prying eyes from his official activities as governor, Huckabee paid (from the same emergency fund) to have the hard drives of 83 state computers yanked out and hammered into pieces, then spent $335,000 from his successor’s office budget to replace a few of the computers. He dismantled lights, sound equipment and some furniture from the governor’s offices and conference room and took them with him, or somewhere.
The week before he left office to go promote sales of his book and to campaign for president, you will remember, Huckabee directed his fiscal agency to illegally transfer money appropriated to University of Arkansas campuses to a couple of pet projects at the medical sciences campus, including a richly endowed chair for the doctor who told him that he needed to diet and exercise to avoid an early death. When his own state fiscal employees and the universities demurred, Huckabee rescinded his orders and gave money instead to his friend, the president of the University of Central Arkansas, which did have legal authority to spend any money that it got.
Huckabee did not want his successor, Mike Beebe, to take office with anything to spend if he could help it — not from the governor’s emergency fund, not from his office budget and not from the General Improvement Fund that was allocated to the go |
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