You Can't Dig A Grave Without A Shovel Ready
Plus: Still Stuck on Huck!

As Maximus said, "Are you not stimulated?"

This news item is easily overlooked, and revealing: "Highway-construction companies around the country, having completed the mostly small projects paid for by the federal economic-stimulus package, are starting to see their business run aground, an ominous sign for the nation's weak employment picture."

The month the stimulus passed, February of this year, 6,593,000 Americans were employed in construction; in the most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 5,966,000 Americans were employed in that field. In other words, while all of this stimulus-based construction was going on, the profession lost 627,000 jobs.

Not only did the stimulus fail to create a significant number of jobs in the overall economy, it had little or no impact in the one area that provided that much-hyped slogan: “shovel ready.”

Since I just stole Geraghty's whole post, let me link this takedown of Huck. And quote, um, merely most of it.

Joe Carter, probably the best part of Huckabee's presidential campaign, notes that the candidate really saw this issue differently from almost everyone else in the political world, for better or worse: "The governor seemed genuinely surprised that he was held responsible for the criminal acts committed by those whose sentences he had commuted as governor. It was as if he believed that simply having noble intentions and a willingness to make tough decisions would provide political cover."

...

Huckabee's initial statement, declaring, "should he be found to be responsible for this horrible tragedy, it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington State" seemed to be deflecting his share of the blame. The criminal justice system in Arkansas, for example, was going to keep Clemmons behind bars until the year 2098 until Huckabee stepped in.

Today Huckabee went on Joe Scarborough's radio show, and finally used strong language - not to criticize his earlier decision, but to denounce critics of the decision as "disgusting" and lamenting "how sick our society has become that people are more concerned about a campaign three years from now than those grieving families in Washington."

It takes a particular bravado for a man in Huckabee's circumstances to contend that his critics are the ones who should hang their heads in shame; some people might find letting violent criminals go free early out of a misguided sense that they've changed their ways a clearer reflection of a sick society.

Okay, well, I ripped off that whole post pretty much too.

How about I link his posts on "Bloody Afghanistan" and Bush's "abandonment" of that war?

Update on Huckabee: Huckabee (in Allah's update) accepts partial responsibility for Clemmons while ripping the prosecutors who let him go (since Huckabee let him go), and states unequivocally that in this case religion played no part.

Well, we'll see.

As I conceded, Huckabee does have a point here: 108 years is a long spell for a series of felonies that don't include murder or rape. Still: Part of the decision is about whether this guy had shaped up, and clearly, he had not. Huckabee could have reduced 108 years to 30 years, rather than 11, and this guy would still be in the Slamma like MC Hamma, as Jane Lynch says in Role Models.*

* Possibly erroneously, as the film notes.

Spare Parts: Since I'm apparently just sticking into this post anything and everything that occurs to me, I want to note the witticism of "dr. kill" (I think): He called Michael Mann "Piltdown Mann."

Hee, hee.

He also said scientists were really angry and spitting venom about this sham and that a whitewash wasn't as in-the-bag as I was thinking.

Correction: I had the chronology wrong. SarahW (and other posters) inform me...

Ace, FWIW, Hbee commuted the sentence to 47 years. There is no record of prosecutors objecting in any official or unofficial way.

It's the parole board what sprung him after 11 years. They didn't have to.

Okay, so Huck reduces the sentence to a certain point, then the parole board springs him. But that had to be anticipated. Surely it wasn't a shock to Huck.

posted by Ace at 05:22 PM

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