Talk:Mike Huckabee/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Complaint on Sourcing

SNSAnchor, I have two complaints on your last edit. ontheissues.org is a nice compilation of sources. However, best practices is to use primary sources rather than secondary sources. Could you find the primary source? My other complaint is that the McCain-Kennedy bill came up once in 2006 and twice in 2007. It is not at all clear which time you mean that Huckabee opposed the bill. I have encountered no source which suggests he opposed the bill in 2006. Jmegill 00:55, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

"Best practices is [sic] to use primary sources rather than secondary sources." Really? That is the first time I have ever heard of that "best practice". In fact, one of our core policies explicitly says that "Wikipedia articles should rely on reliable, published primary and secondary sources." --ElKevbo 02:01, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Okay, ontheissues.org isn't reliable. The probably with ontheissues.org is that it gets some of its information from wikipedia. Run google search wikipedia site:ontheissues.org and you see why avoiding ontheissues.org is a good idea if one want to avoid circular references. Jmegill 04:14, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Three sample pages which reference wikipedia http://www.ontheissues.org/2008/Mike_Gravel_Drugs.htm http://www.ontheissues.org/2008/Mike_Gravel_Education.htm http://www.ontheissues.org/2008/Rudy_Giuliani_Immigration.htm For example, I wrote the actual passage that ontheissues.org quotes: "Giuliani has been criticized for embracing illegal immigration. Giuliani continued a policy of preventing city employees from contacting INS about immigration violations. He ordered city attorneys to defend this policy in federal court. Giuliani has also expressed doubt that the federal government can stop illegal immigration. In April 2006, Giuliani went on the record as favoring the US Senate's comprehensive immigration plan which includes a path to citizenship and a guest worker plan" Source: wikipedia.org Nov 7, 2006 So...do you think that I am a reliable source? Jmegill 04:20, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Presidential campaign summary needs to be condensed

The campaign section needs to be a short summary, not a list of everything that's happened in the campaign, since there is now a separate article for that.--Gloriamarie 22:40, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Fiscal record

This section reads like a National Review article, assuming that the interest of the reader is in discovering if he adhered to a tax cutting political line. Indeed it only cites anti-tax foundations and arch conservative political rags. I myself am more interested in his fiscal policies--that is, on whom did he raise taxes, on whom did he lower them, and what are his proposals as president, than I am in what the National Review of some other equivalent source thinks about whether he lived up to their standards.190.10.54.145 (talk) 06:20, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Reading through this section I noted that it did not include information that I've heard regarding the 65.3 figure. I remember someone saying (perhaps Huckabee) that almost all this was Federal programs that he had no control over and that his figure was closer to 2% or something. Trying to find where I read/heard it but thought I would post here. Morphh ^(talk) 13:14, 09 September 2007 (UTC)

Huckabee has claimed in the past that discretionary spending was 10% of the budget and the other 90% was education, Medicare, and something else. I don't have the source right here. Perhaps the Charlie Rose interview. this was in the context of what spending was under his control. It is a bit disingenious, though, for Huckabee to pass legislation to increase Medicare (including ARKids) eligibility and then claim that he had no control over budget increases in medical spending. btw, the 65.3 figure is low because it excludes the last two years of governance. It also should be viewed in context of inflation. Jmegill 03:56, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

It appears to me that in light of Huckabee's stance on the FairTax, a lot of your points are moot. Brian Pearson 03:10, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Political position on Drug War?

This is a very important issue. What's his position on it? Please includemain article w/ references. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.249.64.128 (talk) 16:25, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

re political positions

Huckabee is a very strong advocate of the Fair Tax. I think it should be mentioned under political positions. Brian Pearson 00:27, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

 Done – Morphh ^(talk) 1:17, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Morphh! You are very busy but still manage to stay on top of things. Brian Pearson 01:23, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Huckabee does not believe the theory of evolution (which, I suppose, refers to the modern synthesis), and he is on record in the 3rd source on the detailed issues page and in a Bill Maher Youtube mini-interview for taking the position that science teachers should determine the curriculum of science courses. This is quite far from "expressed support for allowing creationism and intelligent design in school science classes along with evolution" since there are very few science teachers who take creationism and ID seriously. Is there a source for the latter statement, or is this just a mis-characterization? Mistercupcake 04:29, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Mistercupcake, you may have not read a paragraph under "second full term" which dealt with the subject. Here is what Huckabee said on a TV show in 2004: Student: Many schools in Arkansas are failing to teach students about evolution according to the educational standards of our state. Since it is against these standards to teach creationism, how would you go about helping our state educate students more sufficiently for this?

Huckabee: Are you saying some students are not getting exposure to the various theories of creation?

Student (stunned): No, of evol … well, of evolution specifically. It’s a biological study that should be educated [taught], but is generally not.

Moderator: Schools are dodging Darwinism? Is that what you … ?

Student: Yes.

Huckabee: I’m not familiar that they’re dodging it. Maybe they are. But I think schools also ought to be fair to all views. Because, frankly, Darwinism is not an established scientific fact. It is a theory of evolution, that’s why it’s called the theory of evolution. And I think that what I’d be concerned with is that it should be taught as one of the views that’s held by people. But it’s not the only view that’s held. And any time you teach one thing as that it’s the only thing, then I think that has a real problem to it. source: http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/rncse_content/vol25/8118_is_evolution_arkansas39s_h_12_30_1899.asp

From the same TV show in 2003

Student: Goal 2.04 of the Biology Benchmark Goals published by the Arkansas Department of Education in May of 2002 indicates that students should examine the development of the theory of biological evolution. Yet many students in Arkansas that I have met … have not been exposed to this idea. What do you believe is the appropriate role of the state in mandating the curriculum of a given course?

Huckabee: I think that the state ought to give students exposure to all points of view. And I would hope that that would be all points of view and not only evolution. I think that they also should be given exposure to the theories not only of evolution but to the basis of those who believe in creationism … source: http://www.arktimes.com/Articles/print.aspx?ArticleID=e7a0f0e1-ecfd-4fc8-bca4-b9997c912a91

So, Mistercupcake, the previous statement about Huckabee is accurate. Jmegill 05:23, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Mistercupcake, I object to saying that Huckabee is "taking the position that science teachers should determine the curriculum of science courses". It is not supported by your sources. Huckabee's position is that a belief in evolution does not matter for being President. In the Saint Anselm Debate, Huckabee said, "I don't think knowing that [if evolution is true] would make me a better or a worse president." I went and looked up the transcript for the Bill Maher interview that you mentioned. source is here http://www.billmaher.com/?page_id=200 Huckabee takes the position that asking questions about evolution does not matter for president. Here is what they say about evolution MAHER: Now, in one of the debates, the question was asked of the ten Republicans on the stage, “How many of you do not believe in evolution?” And three candidates raised their hand. You were one of them.

HUCKABEE: Mm-hmm. [affirmative]

MAHER: So…[laughter]…you don’t really believe in evolution?

HUCKABEE: Bill, I believe God created the heavens and the earth. Now, how He did it, I don’t know. I thought the question was utterly silly to be asked in a presidential debate. None of us are running in order to be an eighth grade science teacher. We’re running to be president. It’s really not, to me, a proper yes-or-no question. But if he meant by that, do I believe that it is all about just random selection and that it just happened without any design – designer and anybody who was behind it – no, I don’t believe that. I think there was a God behind it. And that was what I was trying to say. And I still believe that.

MAHER: But evolution is about, like, we came from the monkeys.

HUCKABEE: Yes.

MAHER: You don’t agree with that?

HUCKABEE: I don’t know. I mean, if God six days—

MAHER: [overlapping] Come on, have you ever seen a monkey? [laughter]

HUCKABEE: [overlapping]—or if he took six million years – sure, I have, you know. And, in fact, if evolution—

MAHER: [overlapping] How can you look in a monkey’s eye and want to start a monkey fight like Michael Vick? No.

HUCKABEE: No, I don’t think so. You know, the point is that the whole process of these debates were more like a game show than it was a serious discourse of political discussion. And the yes-and-no, raise-your-hands, that’s nonsense. If you want to have an honest political discussion, we ought to have it. But the questions sometimes were posed, were a little silly.

MAHER: [overlapping] But, why shouldn’t it be part of a political discussion? If someone believes that the earth is 6,000 years old when every scientist in the world tells us it’s billions of years old, why shouldn’t I take that into account when I’m assessing the rationality of someone I’m going to put into the highest office in the land? [applause] [cheers]

HUCKABEE: Well, I think the point, though, Bill, is that we really don’t know. And that’s my whole point. I don’t believe that it matters how long it took. It may have been six billion years. That’s how God may have done it. I just want to make sure that if I’m put on the spot, do I believe that it’s a basically just sort of an accident that all of this happened, this wonderful creation of ours, or do I believe there was a creator behind it – look, I’m going to go on the side that there’s a creator behind it.

MAHER: Okay. Speaking of creators—

HUCKABEE: Yes.

MAHER: [overlapping]—I know you’ve said that Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton – you’ve commented on their marriage and said, you know, a lot of people in my party have a lot of these values and judgments they make, but they, despite their marital difficulties, kept their marriage together, and that that was a good thing.

HUCKABEE: That’s right. [scattered applause]

Mistercupcake, I think the original sentence better described Huckabee's views on the subject. Unfortunately, it was not supported by references to his views. To be fair, Huckabee's argument is that evolution is not relevant to being President. Thus, I will undo your edits, add in references and also add "Huckabee's position is that belief in evolution is not relevant to being President." referenced on the Bill Maher show transcript. Jmegill 05:59, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

I have to chuckle here a little bit because I can't help but feel a little bit like I'm defending a candidate who I disagree with... but in any case I agree with you 90%, the only change I would make is deleting the word "science" from the current version since he has not suggested that creationism be taught in science class specifically; since he is in favor of school prayer, one could argue that he is suggesting that creationism be taught in a UK-style "social beliefs" class. I know very little about these classes except that they involve religious education and that students in some locales have choice as to whether to attend a "Christian world view" version or a "Scientific world view version." Overall I think the candidate has done a bad job of explaining his views on the subject and on science curricula, so I think the version with "science" is close enough if you disagree. Mistercupcake 11:30, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

The first exchange in 2004 makes reference to "biological study" and the second exchange in 2003 makes reference to "Goal 2.04 of the Biology Benchmark Goals published by the Arkansas Department of Education in May of 2002". So this is biology class. Jmegill 13:48, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

The student and Maher make these references, resp. but we can't assume that Huckabee is answering the question put to him (he is a politician), so just because the exchanges reference these statements, we can't infer that Huckabee's stated position refers to science/biology classes. Mistercupcake 18:27, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

JRG39402: http://www.mikehuckabee.com/?FuseAction=Newsroom.PressRelease&ID=406 needs to be taken into consideration on the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility issue. Currently the page is either inaccurate or very lacking in his description on this issue. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.0.164.35 (talk) 17:40, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Huckabee Wins Republican Poll

I saw this and thought someone might want to include some points. http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=57708 Morphh ^(talk) 2:37, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Huckabee Comments before the NRA/Religious Beliefs of Mike Huckabee

On Tuesday September 25, Jon Stewart made fun of Huckabee's (and also Giuliani and Thompson) comments before the NRA.. Huckabee said, "I'm pretty sure that they will be duck hunting in heaven" and "Somehow the angels took that bullet and went right to the antelope and my hunt was over in a wonderful way" Clip Here: http://rackjite.com/archives/640-Jon-Stewart-Does-the-NRA-and-Looneytoon-Mike-Huckabee.html Several anonymous editors have attempted to alter the page to reflect Huckabee's comments. I was not aware that Huckabee had actually made the comments and thought it was some kind of joke. I wonder if the comments merit a mention either on the Huckabee page or the campaign page. The larger issue is Stewart is calling attention to the way Huckabee approaches religion. While Stewart and Comedy Central are apathetic or hostile to Christianity (and gun rights), Huckabee's comments infuse religious beliefs in everyday life in a manner uncommon in many circles. Huckabee's rejection of evolution, support for Creationism/ID, support for ArKids and opposition to Jim Holt's immigration bill appear to be related to Huckabee's religious views. What information is out there that describes Huckabee's religious views? Jmegill 01:00, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

The clips were cut so it is unknown what the context was to the statements or the reaction of the audience (ie. laughter). In any sense, it sounds like something someone would say in a jesting manner to get a little laugh. It is certainly not anything that merits WP:WEIGHT unless this was sufficiently publicized. Some offhand jesting comment is not something to include in an encyclopedia unless it became part of Huckabee's notability (see WP:BLP). Morphh ^(talk) 1:23, 07 October 2007 (UTC)

Move to separate page

Where should Mike Huckabees nicknames go such as Tax Hike Mike,. Also where should the mention that Gov. Huckabee was number 6 on Judicial Watch's "Top 10 most wanted corrupt politicians" go.

This article is starting to look out of whack. The criticism section (many of them very minor criticisms) is getting to big to be on the main Mike Huckabee page ( I mean when its as long as his bio, its going a little over the top). Like other presidential candidates pages have done, I think it is time to make it into a subpage in titled, Criticism of Mike Huckabee. Right now it looks like a negative ad by another campaign :). --Gnnnews2 01:53, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

I did move the football comments. I don't know the background story to it, but Huckabee acknowledged a huge interest in where Univ. of Arkansas plays its football games. It is not really criticism (people just want the football team to play near where they live), so thus the move to the first full term. The article needs to be fleshed out more to really describe Huckabee. I don't see removing the criticism section as a way to do that as it would make for a sterile article. Adding more information to produce a more rounded picture is the way to go. I am having some difficulty in finding Huckabee's press releases and speeches from his governorship. (if anyone knows where the official archive is, let me know). One of the things I got from reading some press releases is that Huckabee talks about the importance of education, maintaining good health, and attracting business investment repeatedly. This is not something that the article really shows well. I also think the article is lacking in details about Huckabee before he entered politics. I would like to see more information about Huckabee pre-1993. What churches he was pastor at, what tv station did he work at, press accounts from his election at boys state. siblings, if any and what they do. What sermons Huckabee has given when he was pastor. Favorite hobbies or past times. I haven't any of his books and I assume that such information would be included in there. Jmegill 19:10, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Formating

Something to work on... the paragraphs in this article need a bit of work. Some are one or two sentences that might combined well with others and some look like 20 sentences that need to be split up (like illegal immigration). Morphh ^(talk) 13:21, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the illegal immigration section should be split into two paragraphs. Jmegill 18:22, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Comment on recent revertions. I object to deletion of material about football games. The material may not seem relevant to some, but I think it provides some commentary on how people respond to politics and their interest in such. I think it is a little surprising that a simple question: where to have football games attracts more interest than any other political topic. If there is a case for deleting the section, then that case should be made on the talk pages first. As for deletion of the igloo section, it probably isn't that relevant, but it shows that Huckabee is a good sport. Huckabee has a winning personality and doesn't get upset when the joke is on him. Contrast this with James Oddo who throw a Norwegian prankster out of his office using profanity. Here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1iNH7W9SC8 As for the other edits, the word "claims" has be to used to describe material which comes from Huckabee's campaign. Likewise, material that comes from critics is not repeated as fact. The sentence "During his tenure, the number of state government workers in Arkansas increased over 20 percent, and the state’s general obligation debt shot up by almost $1 billion" is written by Jennifer Rubin at NRO. Club for Growth repeats those claims and sources them to (Arkansas Leader 04/15/06) and Americans for Tax Reform respectively. To be fair, I don't think Jennifer Rubin is the source of those claims and the sentence should be structured, "According to __ , the number of state government workers in Arkansas increased over 20 percent, and the state’s general obligation debt shot up by almost $1 billion."Jmegill 18:22, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

I dug up the reference to the Arkansas Leader http://www.arkansasleader.com/2006/04/saturday-editorial-huckabees-no.html Jmegill 18:37, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Clemency

Material on clemency concerns. I am not sure how to best summarize these concerns. I am also not sure how to work it in, because Wayne Dumond would be a special case of clemency concerns. http://www.petitiononline.com/792004/petition.html and http://www.arkansasleader.com/frontstories/st_07_14_04/clemency.html and http://web.archive.org/web/20060815191208/http://mikehuckabee.com/recent_news.htm#Governor%20gave%20clemency%20to%20man%20who%20made%20him%20Governor and http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2004/03/11/News/143271.html and http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2004/02/26/News/131977.html and http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2004/04/14/News/180347.html and http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2004/02/20/News/127410.html and http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2004/04/21/News/185658.html and http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2004/01/23/News/109327.html and http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2004/01/08/JohnBrummett/104159.html and http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2004/01/24/News/109466.html http://www.arkansasleader.com/frontstories/st_07_07_04/huckabee3.html http://www.arkansasleader.com/frontstories/st_06_23_04/huckabee.html http://www.arkansasleader.com/frontstories/st_06_30_04/huckabee2.html http://www.arkansasleader.com/frontstories/st_07_14_04/huckabee4.html http://www.kfsm.com/Global/story.asp?S=2019803 http://web.archive.org/web/20041210185701/www.bentoncourier.com/articles/2004/07/17/news/43onews.txt http://web.archive.org/web/20041210185124/www.bentoncourier.com/articles/2004/07/17/news/43hnews.txt http://www.todaysthv.com/news/news.aspx?storyid=10496 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jmegill (talk • contribs) 05:51, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Brock vs Huckabee

Material on the Brock vs Huckabee lawsuit. http://www.rcfp.org/news/2003/0717brockv.html http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=11712 http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=16126 http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=16106 http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=16132 http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=16313 http://web.archive.org/web/20020802061334/www.arkansasnews.com/275422933732023.bsp http://web.archive.org/web/20020802153110/todaysthv.com/news/news.asp?storyid=3875 http://web.archive.org/web/20020609063946/www.arktimes.com/max/050302brantley.html http://web.archive.org/web/20031008160334/www.swtimes.com/archive/2002/April/24/news/huckabee_aide.html http://web.archive.org/web/20030802041832/www.arktimes.com/dumas/050302dumas.html Jmegill 02:08, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Lawsuit over Wikipedia edits

The only reason this section is on the page is because it is weirdly self-referential. It is not criticism of Mike Huckabee. It may have nothing to do with Mike Huckabee except that Huckabee's page was the object of the actions. I think that the section should be removed. Jmegill 02:21, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree, this is a biography and the criticism in it should be directed at Mike Huckabee. Morphh ^(talk) 2:52, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

In fact, I think the entire criticism section needs major rework. There shouldn't even really be a criticism section unless the criticism is why he is notable (see WP:BLP). The article structure regarding criticism violates NPOV Article structure and undue weight. While there should be criticism if it is part of his notability and verifiable via secondary sources, we should attempt to integrate it into the text if possible or put into a section that doesn't bias the content. Morphh ^(talk) 3:33, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

The views of critics should be represented if they are relevant to the subject's notability and can be sourced to reliable secondary sources, and so long as the material is written in a manner that does not overwhelm the article or appear to side with the critics; rather, it needs to be presented responsibly, conservatively, and in a neutral, encyclopedic tone. Be careful not to give a disproportionate amount of space to critics, to avoid the effect of representing a minority view as if it were the majority one. If the criticism represents the views of a tiny minority, it has no place in the article. Content should be sourced to reliable sources and should be about the subject of the article specifically. Beware of claims that rely on guilt by association. Editors should also be on the lookout for biased or malicious content about living persons. If someone appears to be pushing an agenda or a biased point of view, insist on reliable third-party published sources and a clear demonstration of relevance to the person's notability. — BLP Criticism

Huckabee was Governor for 10.5 years. It is impossible to hold any political job that long and avoid criticism. The reason why the criticism section is proportionally big is because it contains not only criticism of Huckabee, but also Huckabee's response to such criticism. The only subsection of the criticism section which does not contain a Huckabee response is the Janet Huckabee 2002 Secretary of State Run. Not surprisingly, that subsection is also the shortest subsection. Huckabee does get to defend himself in the criticism section. The article structure does not violate NPOV. That said, if you want to remove material from the criticism section, the place to start is with "Controversial comments". I do not think that these comments have much weight. In my opinion, the comments are failed jokes. I have been doing my part to add material to other parts of the Huckabee article to round it out. I have also held back on adding material to the criticism section. See Brock vs. Huckabee and Clemency above in the discussion. Jmegill 04:34, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm not saying that criticism should not be included of Huckabee, it should but within the guidelines of BLP. Is this criticism part of his notability, in some cases yes, in others no (as you expressed). You are correct in that criticism should contain Huckabee's response for NPOV, but we have to look at the size of the content given with regard to weight. This article is probably 1/3 or almost 1/2 about criticism (either directly or in rebuttal). This needs to be greatly summarized to address the points without giving undue weight to the topic. No criticism should have its own header unless it is a major part of Huckabee's notability. Here is what NPOV article structure states - "Examples that may warrant attention include: Segregation of text or other content into different regions or subsections, based solely on the apparent POV of the content itself; Arrangements of formatting, headers, footnotes or other elements that appear to unduly favor a particular "side" of an issue; or Other structural or stylistic aspects that make it difficult for a neutral reader to fairly and equally assess the credibility of all relevant and related viewpoints." These points are exactly what this article does. Look at the Table of Contents, where criticism takes up half the structure, which biases the article. If there is a topic of politics like "illegal immigration" that is notable enough, put it under politics - describe it as a political position that has taken criticism and include such. Perhaps a controversy section for other points that may not integrate but deserve mention. We have to keep in mind that this is a biography and his life should not be broken down into criticisms. We need to be careful about structuring the article. This is an encyclopedia and we're telling the story of a man's life. Morphh ^(talk) 13:10, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Elected officials get criticized for decisions made. That's part and parcel of the gig. As such, it's as notable as the decisions themselves, which are the heart of why the person's notable. If the criticism goes, the decisions alone get undue weight, and if they go, then we get left with nothing. Criticism sections like this are well within BLP and UW. The criticisms section for Huckabee, however, has had a long, LONG history of whitewashing. Every stupid statement he's ever made has been disallowed repeatedly, laws he signed into action were deleted, he attitudes towards the criminal justice system in a couple trials was dropped, and so on. It's pretty unfixable. ThuranX 15:15, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't mind whether it is called "Criticisms" or "Controversy". The guy is notable for getting people to like him and elect him. There will always be detractors - and the reason why these people object is important for understanding the person. I reject arguments that the structure of the article violates NPOV. The structure follows from why he is notable.Jmegill 15:56, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

I object to the deletion of "Janet Huckabee 2002 Run for Secretary of State" subsection. It almost cost Huckabee the 2002 race for Governor, thus it is notable. Jmegill 16:04, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Ok, It just didn't seem like direct criticism of Huckabee but just the fact that both were running. Not sure why that in itself is criticism of Hackabee directly but you're probably a better judge. Morphh ^(talk) 16:22, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

The existence of a criticism somewhere is not as notable as the decisions made by public officials, especially since, as you yourself admit, their mere existence is a given. They must be notable on their own merits. A.J.A. 18:23, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Evidence in favor of the notability of the items in the controversy section (formerly criticism section) is that they are or have been campaign issues. As I have said before, there is a lot more that can go in there. See Clemency and Brock vs. Huckabee. Jmegill 19:15, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

I never said the section shouldn't exist. All I'm saying is that it shouldn't be a massive collection of anything bad anyone ever said. ThuranX has a history of violating BLP on this article. A.J.A. 21:44, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

that's a direct and clear violation of WP:NPA. You can retract that, or I can take it to WP:AN/I. You spent months removing each, every, and all criticism of Huckabee, and I had to keep reverting your rampant blanking. You were told to stop, not I. Any attempt to find consensus with you was met with 'It's not sourced/notable enough'. You're a well known POV editor on this topic, and a review of the archives will support that. Retract your attack immediately. ThuranX 23:32, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Cool it. Both of you. Jmegill 23:36, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Check AJA's block log. he's got one for 3RR on here to get 'his way', which is an 'anti-huckabee'free article. It's quite simple, AJA's contributions to this article need to be scrutinized carefully, every time. ThuranX 00:38, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

You said, "You spent months removing each, every, and all criticism of Huckabee". That's a lie. You also say I was told to stop, knowing full well the mediator (who actually bothered to read the discussion, unlike the incompetant admin you're citing) said the content wasn't sufficiently sourced and it was ultimately left out. That's two lies.

You know what? Go ahead. Post an AN/I. I dare you. Link them right here and then complain that I called that a violation of BLP. A.J.A. 02:05, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

You lost that then, why dredge it up again now? You don't get it, do you? You can't force yoru POV on this article. Apologize for your personal attack, immediately. ThuranX 02:18, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Apologize for lying. A.J.A. 04:02, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

haven't lied, nothign to apologize for. I'm waiting for your apology for you personal attack. ThuranX 04:06, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

I pointed out two of them. Apologize.. A.J.A. 04:17, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

No. Nothing to apologize for. YOu used a personal attack, you still haven't done anything about it. I'm done here, we all know what kind of bias you've got. ThuranX 04:37, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Extended Quote from the Scott Parks 1997 article

This is an excerpt from the Scott Parks 1997 article: "During his presidency from 1989 to 1991, Southern Baptists were feuding at the state and national level. The conservative wing believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible. Moderates believed some Bible stories were simply metaphors and parables. Mr. Huckabee counted himself in the conservative camp, a believer in Biblical inerrancy. "If you can accept the resurrection, that is the ultimate miracle," he said. "If you can buy that one, the others are easy: turning water into wine and such."" Jmegill 19:15, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure what point you're making. BTW, that's a really poor summary of the issues involved. A.J.A. 21:46, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Take it up with Scott Parks. That was how it was reported in the article. I added the section to show that my addition on the main article was not taken out of context. Jmegill 23:35, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't like how this is phrased. It makes it sound like a fact and not the statement of being referenced. I'm not even sure if it is accurate or important to state Scott Park's opinion. If you listen to Huckabee's statements on Bill Maher regarding evolution, he is not talking Biblical inerrancy. Morphh ^(talk) 19:39, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I am more than happy to send you the text of the article if you provide an email address. This is not Scott Park's opinion. Scott Park is reporting what Huckabee told him he believes. Jmegill (talk) 20:25, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, but it is not quoting Huckabee saying he believes in Biblical inerrancy. It is Park's interpretation of what Huckabee believes.. at least from the excerp above. I'm seeing a conflict on what Huckabee said on Bill Maher and what is implied by the statement of Biblical inerrancy. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the meaning or misunderstanding his views.. anyway - something to look at. Morphh ^(talk) 20:40, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I removed the quotation marks to remove confusion over whose words they are. I don't doubt that Huckabee believe in Biblical inerrancy. A second source on Huckabe's Biblical inerrancy is an Arkansas Democrat-gazette article, "Old denominations seek new members" printed on September, 01 1991. Excerpt: "Even though Southern Baptists overwhelmingly outnumber other denominations in state membership, Huckabee said the churches won't stand by and wait for members to walk in the door." Our purpose is not fulfilled unless there is outreach. Stagnant Christianity would be unthinkable to us," he said, noting that denominational loyalty has declined with today's church-goers." People are shopping around. The day of denominationalism is dead, and going to a church just because that's what your parents have always done is over. " Growing pains But Huckabee conceded that the rapid growth experienced by his church hasn't been without growing pains. In recent years, the 15 million-member denomination has been troubled with internal disagreements between conservative and moderate members. Part of the cause for those disagreements, Farthing said, may be that the conservative teachings are so simplistic that they don't address "the uncertainties of everyday life. " He and Huckabee agreed that the simple, literal use of the Bible was attractive, but they didn't agree on whether that was good. " Those in the mainstream churches who look wistfully at the growth patterns of those such as the Southern Baptists had better think twice," Farthing said." Most of the mainstreamers and this is to their credit have avoided the simplistic message. The down side is that Methodists may have been wishy-washy and evasive (NOTE: Some of the sentence fragments are article subheading. Lexis-Nexis just provides the text and the formatting is a little messed up.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jmegill (talk • contribs) 21:12, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

A third source is the Arkansas Democrat Gazette article printed on 7/28/1990 by James Scudder titled "A moderate view of inerrancy". Scudder is interviewing a bunch of pastors. Excerpt: "GAZETTE: For our purposes here, let's just say a so-called "liberal" in a Southern Baptist church would be a pastor or lay person who did not believe in the inerrancy of the Scripture Jesus literally walking on water, literally turning water into wine, being born of a virgin, and so on. With that in mind, Mike Huckabee, the current president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, has recently said that if all the Baptist liberals in Arkansas got together, they could meet in a Waffle House booth with room left over. Is that true? SNEED: Yes. By the definition you just laid down, there is not a Southern Baptist in Arkansas that would be a liberal, and there would be very few if you stretched it to the Southern Baptist Convention." Here, Huckabee is referenced as saying that very, very few Southern Baptists doubt the Scripture. And which is confirmed by Dr. Sneed in the interviewJmegill (talk) 21:34, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Fair enough... Morphh ^(talk) 2:18, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

References and links

Are there are links to give credibility to references 10 and 11 in "The Commercial Appeal"? I'm still looking but can't find them.....thanksStrunke 22:38, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

The material is copyrighted and I paid for access to the archive per article. You can do likewise or Send me an email to {myusername} @ hotmail.com with Huckabee article in the subject and I will send you a copy. Jmegill 23:33, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Should Gift Registry and Comments be subsections under the Controversy section?

Anonymous editor 75.37.206.111 returned redacted material to the article. My position on "Comments" is that they are failed jokes or just Huckabee's style of speaking. They lack notability. I question whether they merit an extended mention under Controversy. I liked how Morphh summarized with a single sentence with many footnotes. I imagine that that going forward there will be many more statements that attract attention. Similar comments already include Huckabee's remarks to the NRA which Jon Stewart commented on and Huckabee's calling Arkansas a "banana republic" on a New York radio station. It will be easy just to add footnote references to Morphh's summary sentence, rather than giving each one its own mention. (Which would make the Controversy section proportionally big) Just two days ago, Huckabee spoke of the "Holocaust of abortion". As for the other section, Gift Registry, the reference links were also included in the summary sentence provided by Morphh. I am neutral on whether Gift Registry should have its own subsection. But I would like to see 75.37.206.111 justify why both subsections merit an extended mention. I am content with the other four subsections. Jmegill 03:08, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

I really never found the 'gift registry' to be that big a deal. they used the site as it was more-or-less meant to be used, within the website's limitations, and I'd wager money they're not the only people to use the registry for a non-marital gift list purpose. Big deal, big schmeal to me. However, if there's enough supporting citation, I wouldn't fight keeping it either. Count me as on the fence leaning to dropping it on that one; it seems like a lot of nothing.

The comments section, however, makes more sense to keep. Had it been the one tasteless Holocaust joke, I'd write it off as pandering to his christian base by mocking liberals and Hollywood Jews and so on. However, Huckabee seems to have a penchant for letting bad comments fly, and he's repeatedly been criticized for it. As such, I think it belongs in, because it represents multiple citable incidents, which singularly might be argued as non-notable, but as a whole matter more. As some articles seem to reference his other 'gaffs', the perception of pattern is estab lished, and the comments should stay. ThuranX 04:05, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

The first sentence of the controversy section is: "During Huckabee's time as Governor, he has been criticized for some of his positions, actions,[47][48] and statements.[49][50][51][52]" Where each of the numbers is a reference to some odd comment that Huckabee made. I am not saying not to keep track of comments. I just think that each one by itself is not notable. The idea is just to add references to the end of the first sentence each time Huckabee makes an odd comment. The alternative is write out each comment made -- which would clog up the controvery section. Personally, I feel that it is somewhat unfair to criticize politicians on their verbal gaffes because humans make mistakes --especially if they are in front of the camera frequently. Instead, the criticism should be on their conscious and deliberate actions.Jmegill 04:41, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

I added the references for the statements as a compromise for those that would like to keep the content. So we're not completely removing the criticism, we're just giving it the weight of a sentence or two with footnotes (which is probably as you said more than it deserves). I'd even go for ThuranX wording that states something like Huckabee has made repeated comments, which he has been criticized for. ref ref ref The point is that we don't need to spell each one out, and then provide Huckabee's reply. In these cases, where notability is minimal, if included at all, state the basic charge and supply references for the charge. If Huckabee has defended himself, append the statement that Huckabee denied the charges... ref That's it.. no need to quote this and that, give dates, where it was said, etc. - it provides too much weight to an insignificant point in Huckabee's biography. Consider reading this article 100 years from now. Today's brief headline about a joke or gift registry mean little in the life of Huckabee and deserve such due weight in the article, not a defining section as provided here. A header or section title means that this region is an important part of Huckabee's notability, they are the sections to which we break down his life for the reader. Put this into perspective... Morphh ^(talk) 11:57, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

that's actually not what I said, though. I didn't say 'distill it down to one line with refs. What I meant was, making a small coherent paragraph that gets the fact that a pattern of particularly unsavory comments have fallen from Huckabee's lips across to the reader, is a good thing. He has said a number of stupid things. I'm not talking about the natural spoonerisms and such that come with public speaking, not even freudian slip sort of things. I'm talking about things like Holocaust democrats, and Suicide jokes. These aren't minor oopses, like ... was it obama who said 10 when he meant 10,000, or vice-versa? Getting number and statistics wrong by an order of magnitude is a natural mistake, and I wouldn't expect one or two such slips in anyone's article. I would expect, however, that if a candidate had a history of misquoting statistics and numbers, and was criticized for it in editorials, that such would be included. But Huckabee's comments were rebuked for their actual favor and substance, which is different than any 'news commentators' who grab any flubbed numbers. In these cases, he was specifically chastized for the intent and nature of his comments; that is, he meant something deliberate by them, and got 'caught' for it. that's different than getting the city you're in wrong, catching yourself, and later releasing an 'oops, lots of campaign stops, forgot a few' statement later. I see a big gulf of difference between things like that. ThuranX 20:51, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

There are a lot of things that are news worthy but not encyclopedic. The question is if they are relevant to the subject's notability and what weight to give it in his biography (WP:BLP). I don't mind including a statement or two that says Huckabee's comments have gotten him into trouble, perhaps even with a very brief statement that describes the type of comments (holocaust and suicide). They just don't warrent two paragraphs and its own section. A section header identifies important areas of the subjects notability. This is barely relevant enough for inclusion, never mind its own section and header. Morphh ^(talk) 21:26, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

ThuranX, I agree that Huckabee does say some dumb stuff. I suspect that it is a pattern. But given all the other material there is about Huckabee and given that few people know about Huckabee and far fewer people have picked up on the pattern, I don't think it merits an extended mention. If Huckabee becomes President, then I could see the need for an article about Huckabee similar to Bushisms. But Huckabee and his comments have to become far more notable for that to happen. I argue for deletion of the 'comments' subsection. Jmegill 23:18, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

I oppose such removal. The section is VERY well substantiated, and the comments DO matter. he's managed to offend two serious social groups outside of politics. he claims he shot at democrats and republicans, but he hit Jews and suicide victims, attempted suicide victims, and the families thereof. He was duly chastised publicly for the actions in the media. This is notable, and as with so much else on a candidate page, attempts to remove all criticism are whitewashes, and POV. I want to avoid any such problems. Further, you assert Huckabee is known by few, whereas I just today heard NPR report that he's rapidly rising despite low fundraising, and his recent debate performances were also critiqued. He's been referenced regularly by Limbaugh, Colbert and Stewart, and political blogs regularly discuss him. Anyone who's aware of the primaries and the candidates is aware of him. He might be relatively unknown outside the US, but as this is EN.wiki, it's well worth giving him a wider assumption of notability. Further, to dip into a bit more OR/SPEC on the matter, with Brownback out now, Huckabee's well positioned to be percieved and covered as teh 'christian colation/social conservative' candidate, and will likely be MORE notable in the coming months than less. Morphh offers a compromise wherein his pattern of drawing serious criticism can be reduced to a 'very brief statement'. I'm open to working on a (no sarcasm) fair and balanced reporting of such here, but Firmly Oppose removal. ThuranX 02:21, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Part of my concern is that there is more substantial material which is not covered in depth enough. Keeping "comments" will eventually lead to Controversy talking over the whole Huckabee page. There are just too many oddball comments. "thank god for mississippi", for example. Huckabee frequently talked about Arkansas was ranked 49th in education or some other field. Thank God Mississippi is worse. Or Huckabee started a major speech, "Someone gave me a scripture verse for today, said this would be a wonderful verse for you. I was kind of surprised. It was a person who has never been so much my friend. And I looked it up. It was Psalm 109, verse 8. It says 'May his days be few and may another take his place.' " What I am saying is that there is other material which could go in controversy. For example, in the Brock Lawsuit, Huckabee testified that he denied knowing that his staff lobbied for a television program to be pulled from the air and then later settled for 15k in damages and 16k in attorneys fees. The school consolidation issue is not covered enough. Part of it, I haven't done enough reading on. Arkansas is weird in that their constitution mandates public education. This generates all kinds of lawsuits. In 1996, Huckabee lobbied against school consolidation, then in 2004 lobbied for it. This was Huckabee's solution to a Arkansas Supreme Court ruling that the State of Arkansas needed to be more equitable in funding. Why is this relevant? Federalism, that's why. Local people having local control. I argue that there is better material available.Jmegill 03:32, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Mississippi's a foolish joke. The Scripture thing's an anecdote he opened with. No one here seems to be arguing for, nor have I seen muc hediting to add, those topics. As for the reversal oon school issues, and the lawsuit, Those both should probably be included in his history as governor as they happened then, and reflect his policies and governing style. as for shots against Federalism, you're about a century late for that. That 'other stuff exists' isn't a particular reason for eliminating this stuff. IF all of that other stuff were in here( schools and lawsuit, not the anecdote and the mississippi line)and there were serious length concerns, further reductions could be made. However, as it stands, things not included in his governorship are only a strawman to what's in his criticisms. I simply haven't seen anything particularly strong arguing against their inclusion, beyond 'they make him look stupid/bad/foolish', which, frankly, is on him for saying them, not us for repeating them. ThuranX 04:04, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I think we can reach a compromise here. My main issues are that it should not get a header and it needs to be summarized. Put it directly under controversy as a statement of criticism. ThuranX, to your point on that you "simply haven't seen anything particularly strong arguing against their inclusion" - just so we're on the same page, BLP states the burden of evidence for any edit on Wikipedia, but especially for edits about living persons, rests firmly on the shoulders of the person who adds or restores the material. So we must see something particularly strong arguing for their inclusion, which I haven't really seen. I agree that Huckabee is becoming well known but the question is how much of the material in discussion here is the reason for him becoming well known or being known. Is the material part of his notability and to what degree? This is different than the material being notable or news worthy. Not only is it currently presented as being part of his notability, it is listed as an "important" part of his notability by giving it a header and two paragraphs, which to me is just absurd. We might also have issues with NPOV weight as such criticism from a particular suicide or jewish group may fall under this policy: "If a viewpoint is held by an extremely small (or vastly limited) minority, it does not belong in Wikipedia (except perhaps in some ancillary article) regardless of whether it is true or not; and regardless of whether you can prove it or not." So we have several considerations here regarding the contents weight and if or how much it contributes to Huckabee's notability. Personally, I don't think they merit the weight or notability requirements, but a compromise as discussed above would be sufficent to address my main concerns. Morphh ^(talk) 14:07, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I am concerned by the parts of your comment above which seem to imply that ou think notability is cumulative, and somehow only grows when greater notability is added to a person. I've never percieved that to be the case. When notable people do things which are notable, those things are fair game for inclusion, providing they can be sourced. As for BLP, These comments have been here for a long time. I haven't restored them, and they have not been deleted to need restoration. You COULD force the issue by deleting them, then putting the burden on that editor to do all the work, but given that I've just explained it, I'd see it as a WP:POINT violations and consult an admin. Luckily, I know you're not that sort of person, and anyone else who does it would be being a disruptive editor, and we would restore as vandalism, and continue debating back here. I haven't contested that it' a large section which could be refined, reduced, and made more sedate. I have a suggested solution below, in response to a VERY important comment by Huckabee, which seems to acknowledge that he makes these mistakes and they get him in trouble. He was asked in a notable journalistic endeavor about this phenomenon (for lack of a better word), and acknowledged it and addressed it. That hte candidate knows it makes it much easier to argue it's notable. He took the time to actually assume responsibility for it. he didn't brush it off with a 'oh, you know how it is, you're on stage 3 times a day, you try to mix it up a bit, and things slip out when i speak extemporaneously. (I think that's the right word, it's been a long long day.) Anyways, two final notes. One, a shorter solution below. Two, you and Jmegill have both been paragons of a proper discussion here, and I'm actually enjoying this discussion a lot more than many I have on here about policy, content and so on, so I thank you both. Pleaes respond to all below after reading my proposal, so we can keep this thread linear, not branching. Best, ThuranX 01:16, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Dig up a topical quote. He had been quoted earlier comparing reporters whom he disagreed with in Arkansas to the disgraced Janet Cooke and Jayson Blair. Now, asked about this comparison, Huckabee says it illustrates his greatest fault: "You'll see it--one of the things that gets me in trouble is my love of metaphors. I use hyperbole in the course of trying to paint a word picture. I pay a dear price for it." source: The bearable lightness of Mike Huckabee by D.T. Max in The New Republic Issue date 10.08.07 Jmegill 15:09, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I think you mean 'dug up...'. here's a possible solution, with ROUGH wording, but my clear intent, i hope:

Title: Public Comments (these are given when publicly speaking, and should reflect that these are open quotes made in public, and thus not some secretive back door slurring of groups and people)

Huckabee has made a number of public statements that have drawn criticism, including comparing his weight loss to the experience of a concentration camp, for which the Nat'l Jewish Demo Committee chastised Huckabee, and his use of suicide as a joke about fundraising efforts by himself and his opponents in the republican primaries, for which he was criticized by various suicide awareness groups. In both cases, Huckabee and his campaign publicly responded with clear apologies. Huckabee has discussed his tendency to publicly misspeak. Commenting on a third incident paralleling Arkansas journalists critical of his policies to dsigraced reporters Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke "You'll see it--one of the things that gets me in trouble is my love of metaphors. I use hyperbole in the course of trying to paint a word picture. I pay a dear price for it." source: The bearable lightness of Mike Huckabee by D.T. Max in The New Republic Issue date 10.08.07

Some of that might be a bit too close to the original, and thus constitute Plagarism, but as I intend it only for a compromise back here to be polished before publishing in article, and as a rough drat at that, I think i'm ok.

Anyways, I think that that would meet everyone's needs here, so long as all the extant citations are injected at the right places. It takes two lengthy paragraphs to one much shorter paragraph which includes the BIO subject's own addressing of the issue. To be clear, I don't like Huckabee's policies, but he doesn't strike me as a jerk, sleaze, or thief particularly (that is, no more than most other politicians, and frankly, less than a lt of his own party.) I really LIKE having his response in there, it helps avoid WP:UW, because instead of simply listing the bad, we show why it happens, and frankly, that really does neutralize the weight issues, while simultaneously demonstrating the notability. He KNOWS he mis-speaks. He talked about it. I really hope this suggested compromise meets all approval, or at least moves us forward. ThuranX 01:27, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

A link to the TNR story is here http://vote-smart.org/speech_detail.php?sc_id=322527&keyword=&phrase=&contain= Jmegill 03:41, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't think a phrase is needed in there and should be dropped because it borrowed from TNR. Huckabee's quote should be used. Jmegill 03:52, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Thus 'Public Comments' Huckabee has made a number of public statements that have drawn criticism, including comparing his weight loss to the experience of a concentration camp, for which the Nat'l Jewish Demo Committee chastised Huckabee, and his use of suicide as a joke about fundraising efforts by himself and his opponents in the republican primaries, for which he was criticized by various suicide awareness groups. In both cases, Huckabee and his campaign publicly responded with clear apologies. Huckabee has discussed his tendency to publicly misspeak. He commented, "You'll see it--one of the things that gets me in trouble is my love of metaphors. I use hyperbole in the course of trying to paint a word picture. I pay a dear price for it." Jmegill 03:52, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Don't understand why you've removed the context of his quote, which offers a third reported on comment, and whih he used to indirectly address the general problem. please explain why we don't need it? ThuranX 04:47, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

You can add back in the reporters commentary if you want. I feel that the context wasn't necessary because the full passage from the text shows that it is generalized. The full passage is this, "It's February and we are at the Sperling breakfast, a Washington rite of passage sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor, where presidential candidates get an early introduction to the national political press. Huckabee has passed up the bacon for coffee, but he's getting a pretty good grilling anyway. He had been quoted earlier comparing reporters whom he disagreed with in Arkansas to the disgraced Janet Cooke and Jayson Blair. Now, asked about this comparison, Huckabee says it illustrates his greatest fault: "You'll see it--one of the things that gets me in trouble is my love of metaphors. I use hyperbole in the course of trying to paint a word picture. I pay a dear price for it." " Jmegill 05:22, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

I removed the Jon Stewart item. Jon Stewart ma go after everyone to some extent, but I'm not sure that his jokes about Huckabee's line carries the same level of authoritative dissenting outcry as we see in things like the suicide crack and the suicide group or the holocaust and the ADL. You'd pretty much need a christian theologian saying somethign about the nature of heaven not having ducks or hunting, or angels not really having time to guide bullets, or that attributing every thing that happens to higher powers isn't reasonable. You'll never find it. Huckabee's religious views might get legit criticism when he talks about creationism, but this isn't of the same magnitude. ThuranX 11:37, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

New Editor on a mission.

Please be aware of the following: User_talk:Shogun108#Mike_Huckabee. Shogun108 feels that any 'controversies' section is inherently evil, and should be folded into the political positions section. Although I tried to explain that some controversies would be orphaned and lost, he responded with policy wonking about NPOV. He's not interested in actually explaining, beyond citing NPOV, and has stated an intent to go ahead and make it his way. IN the face of requests to talk things out, such actions would not be BOLD. I invite others to simliarly appeal to him to use talk instead of make radical changes to the article. ThuranX 04:50, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

I simply believe that the article be reworked. Do not remove any of the "controversies." According to Wikipedia's guidelines:

"The neutral point of view is a means of dealing with conflicting verifiable perspectives on a topic as evidenced by reliable sources. The policy requires that where multiple or conflicting perspectives exist within a topic each should be presented fairly. None of the views should be given undue weight or asserted as being judged as "the truth", in order that the various significant published viewpoints are made accessible to the reader, not just the most popular one. It should also not be asserted that the most popular view, or some sort of intermediate view among the different views, is the correct one to the extent that other views are mentioned only pejoratively. Readers should be allowed to form their own opinions."

Readers simply cannot do this with the current state of the article. I also ask that your own bias does not affect NPOV of an article. Details of how it will be edited will be provided in a few days once I figure out a way to best incorporate both points of view. But please judge this article within a NPOV. It distresses me when bias can leak onto an advertised unbiased site. I do not want to delete his criticism I simply would like to have the chance of cleaning up redundant information in that section and either combining it with his "Political Positions," Which I think NEEDs to be expanded, or presenting two views in a manner without bias. I know who does this stuff to Huckabee and I'm not sure they would like it if their candidate was slandered on his own page no I'd imagine not. So why does their view take precedence over pro-Huckabee supporters? Sorry I'm rambling Expect me to chime in later with a proposed fix to this problem. Shogun108 04:56, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Uh, this isn't how Wikipedia operates. You're accusing the editors here of all having a bias, and you of being the only voice of reason. That's a highly uncooperative view to take, and one unlikely to get you much support. There's a LOT of effort here to get this page into a good form. Coming in and telling us we're all doing it 'wrong' while claiming to be new to wikipedia is also confusing. If you're really new, perhaps taking the time to learn how we work would suit you, before you demand we lose the criticism and move it to Positions. To cap it all with the 'I'll be back when I figure out how to do it' is even worse. You've just told a pge full of editors 'you're all wrong, and I know what right is, but I can't tell you'. Arguments from Secret Knowledge are fallacious arguments, invalid on their face. Take the time to learn it first. ThuranX 05:06, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

To Shogun, Many issues have already been discussed concerning the article. I recommend that you read the entire discussion page to get a feel for what the issues are and what the reasons are for the appearance of the page. Jmegill 05:29, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

NOTE: I posted this to ThuranX I guess he hasn't seen it jet or he wouldn't have opened me up to scrutiny. You need Specifics eh? Well I have to get to sleep soon so don't discount me in my sleep... Here is a sample of Non-Neutral Rhetoric.

Huckabee claims to have cut taxes while governor, saving Arkansas' citizens close to $380 million.

Look at the word "Claims" What is it doing there? It is discrediting the statement Huckabee made. Use of words in this manner is a promotion of bias. Another:

Huckabee has denied influencing the parole board in any way, but acknowledges some responsibility for signing Dumond's parole.[citation needed] His full disclosure of the incident is described in his book From Hope to Higher Ground.

But his view is never explained in the article at all! It is said that it exists, but it is not given. Illegal immigration This entire section is not a controversy come to think of it the only true controversies he was involved in was the Dunlop Case and His wife's political race and maybe the wedding gifts. Anyway most of the info on his immigration points is old and it concludes without even addressing Huckabee's current beliefs etc. That shows no balance. When you look at the section about his public comments it does not address his response to the outcries.

Let me put this in simple terms. Eveidence is proposed for only one side of the case and rhetoric clearly leans to one side of the argument. Two sections in "Controversies" are not controversies

A contentious speech act; a dispute where there is strong disagreement.

WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.

Even though some of his positions may not have been agreeable with everyone does that make them controversies? No they do not Disagreement must be universal to be a legitimate controversy. You see the Taxes and Immigration points can be transfered into his "Political Positions" while the others need to be balanced in reference and rhetoric. All in all the article needs work and there are loads more points I could make about it, but I really must be going. Shogun108 05:24, 24 October 2007 (UTC)REMEMBER this was posted elsewhere first. Shogun108 06:19, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Your comments about the public comments section alone show that your efforts are in bad faith. We've spent days, literally, back here on talk working out the 'comments' section. We've gone around in circles till we found a way to balance the criticism with his responses, and his apologies. Instead, you dismissed it all out of hand. Huckabee did CLAIM to make that savings. If you can find a neutral source for proof that his tax cuts had that actual savings, use it. And good luck - finding neutral proof on such thigns is difficult. perhaps Arkansas has a state level equivalent of the GAO or CBO.

Your dismissal of all the sections in controversies under a single definition is disingenuous. here' for examppe, is 'controversial' - # S: (adj) controversial (marked by or capable of arousing controversy) "the issue of the death penalty is highly controversial"; "Rushdie's controversial book"; "a controversial decision on affirmative action". Note that controversial refers to issues, public topics, and discussion of events, all of whihc are then 'controversies'. In other words, his actions brought about public strong disagreement, thus controversy. I'm afraid that you'd have to explain why those things in the controversy section are not notable, and should be removed, or how you'd suggest moving them into his political positions. Fianlly, you are a big fan of the word 'rhetoric'. Suggesting that we're sitting around filling the article with our biased rhetoric when there's a clear refutation of one point in the section immediately preceding this, and others on the talk page, is fairly rude and insulting. There are multiple editors here working to find compromises and consensus to improve the article. You're approaching this article in an absolutist manner. I suggest you get yourself prepared for a long discussion, and lots of compromises that find consensus, if you expect to actually change the article. There's a lot of consensus now to keep the controversies section. ThuranX 11:31, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Jmegill: Although the question of moving the controversy section was under question in this discussion page, a course of action was never agreed upon. Therefore this current discussion is justified. The article, as it is, is way out of balanced. The section on Huckabee's tenure as governor is as long as the "Controversy" section! Also in the controversy section, there is no need to have his Fiscal Policy and Immigrations Stance as a controversy. Huckabee fiscal policy is a matter dealing with policy not a controversy regarding him, there totally different.

In order to make this article balanced, we should:

1. Create a separate page for the Controversy regarding Huckabee
2. Place the fiscal and immigration policy controversy into a controversy section on Huckabee’s “Political positions” page.

--SNSAnchor 14:13, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

SNSAnchor, the deletion of "claims" in the fiscal record subsection is not supported by the reference. Here the reference, Forbes magazine, uses, "He claims that those cuts saved his citizens a total of $380 million while still securing a substantial budget surplus." Forbes magazine uses the word 'claims'. They are not reporting the information as fact, but rather as a claim. Thus the reversion to the original wording. Originally, the Forbes article did not use the word 'claims', but I emailed them and asked for an independent source. Since they had none, they had to change the wording of their article. That is why the language should stay as it is. Jmegill 14:46, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

To answer your other concerns, there is an ongoing discussion about that section of the article. My position is that the controversy section should not be moved to another page. The fiscal policy subsection shows an evolution in Huckabee's thinking. Huckabee's political positions are not static and the fiscal policy subsection shows how Huckabee has shifted in reaction to criticism. The illegal immigration subsection is marvelous because it shows Huckabee's personality in conflict. He called his opponent, who is also a minister, "un-Christian". These parts are about more than political issues, they describe Huckabee's personality and ambitions. Lastly, my response to structural arguments about the article is that the complainer should put some enough into filling out the other sections. How many siblings does Huckabee have? How many kids does Huckabee have? Did you know that Huckabee's son married a former Miss Arkansas? Jmegill 14:46, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Here if you will not believe me then look at this article a bit:

As well, each individual who reports or writes the news has to work hard to guard against his or her own opinions. These opinions can become media bias simply through word choice or inflections and tone of voice when delivering news.

This is from [1] I also you look into "bias in Word Choice." A subtle change can create glaring bias. If worst comes to worst I suggest that you remove bias sources if you refuse to create unbiased articles besides news articles do not have to be quoted in their rhetoric. Citation means you got the information from that site. It does not mean that you should mirror the article you cited. That is part of the problem. It is very unprofessional to do such things... Shogun108 21:21, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

I am unaware of a wikipedia guideline which cites wisegeek DOT com. Jmegill 22:58, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Lastly, the deletion of Huckabee's radio address on Marriage from the talk page was not cool. I am really proud of having dug that up. It shows the best aspects of Huckabee and is extremely relevant to any discussion of why Huckabee is different from other candidates. Jmegill 14:50, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

I disagree with creating a separate page for Controversy as it may be considered a POV fork and I don't think we have enough content to justify such a split. I'm also not sure about moving fiscal and immigration - I'll have to look at that further. We should not remove content that is part of Hackabee's notability. While a political position, if it is an important part of his biography, we should include it here. However, it does not have to be under an article structure that identifies it as a "negative" (although I think we've decreased this by using the term controversy instead of criticism). I'm open to integrating the controversy into the article, in fact, I'd probably prefer it per WP:CRITICISM and WP:NPOV#Article structure. We should try to integrate criticism into the topic of discussion providing both points of view and not break things down into criticism when possible. I'm going to WP:AGF and hold my comments on Shogun108's suggestions until I see more. Morphh ^(talk) 15:00, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your objective take on my position. I have no intention of silencing any of the "controversies" I think though that the information under it should be fair and balanced. I know "claims" was used in the original article, but this rhetoric shows obvious bias. If it were put to say Huckabee "stated" or "asserts" then it would be Neutral. Also like I said lack of evidence or Huckabee's own rebuttals to these controversies shows hindsight and must be dealt with. I'd also like to say that "Immigration" and "Fiscal Policy" is not a conroversy. Let's limit "controversies" to events and not "Political Positions." Because if someone happens to disagree with someone's political position does that mean it is a controversy? No not at all someone agrees right? I sense a slant in direction from the anti war and radical conservatives. So as a hole this should be cleaned up to expand on his Positions and move those things which are not controversies into their appropriate place... I guess before anything is done We need to expand his Position section. After that we can move things around. I'll give it a try... Also again I'm not trying to make this a whitewashed article. I want it to be neutral and I will work on it until it achieves its neutrality. I will not silence the opposition. Shogun108 15:51, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

You say that "controversies" should be limited to events. Okay. The Fiscal Record subsection covers the following events 1. The 1997 omnibus tax reform 2. budgetary increases in the state of Arkansas 3. Tax increases in 1999, 2001, 2002 4. Watchdog groups critiquing Huckabee's performance 5. Criticism by Grover Norquist 6. Praise by Grover Norquist 7. Huckabee's rejection of signing a no tax increase pledge 8. Huckabee's signing of a no tax increase pledge. 9. Huckabee's announcement of a Fair Tax The last part, number 9, is the only item with can be really said to go under Political Positions. It was added by a pro-Huckabee supporter who argued that by adding it, it makes the rest of Huckabee's history irrelevant. The Fiscal Record does not cover that Club for Growth ran negative ads in Iowa nor does it link to them. Oddly, it covers the campaigns response to the negative ads. To be fair, Fiscal Record should have a link to the negative ads that were run against Huckabee. The Illegal Immigration section covers the following events 1 a caller to Huckabee's radio program complains to him about illegal immigration 2 a second caller complains to him 3. Huckabee says in the 2005 State of the State address the illegal aliens should be eligible to Arkansas scholarships 4. Huckabee speaks out against an immigration enforcement raid 5. Huckabee labels a fellow minister as "un-Christian" 6. Huckabee says illegal immigrants are not a fiscal drain 7. Huckabee gives earmarked money to Little Rock for them to give to the Mexican consulate 8. Huckabee says deportation is unrealistic 9. Huckabee denies that illegal immigrants take jobs from Americans 10. Huckabee defends his position on educating illegal immigrant children 11. Huckabee goes before a hispanic organization and says that he supports them. So, it seems to me that the Controversy section does have lots of events. Since this is your own criteria for inclusion, everything in the Controversy section should stay. Jmegill 17:19, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

This does not come to any conclusion what is your point? Oh yeah to discredit me. Okay look at that what you posted. It outlines multiple events so how is that a "controversy?" it is not. So again with equivocation. It is getting old. Shogun108 00:47, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Regarding new editors

It has been brought to my attention that this page is the focus of an organized effort to slant the article pro-huckabee.[1] These editors claim they are making edits for NPOV, but in reality they are just trying to cover up all bad things of the candidate they support. [1] Byates5637 13:23, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the post - we'll judge each edit on its merits and discuss as needed. Such efforts are usually short lived and more talk than action. Morphh ^(talk) 14:04, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

I assure you this is an honest attempt to neutralize the article. Look at what I propose in the section above. Also I WILL take action! Shogun108 15:53, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Shogun108, you are poster millerkevd on the Huckabee message board. You wrote, "Oh by the way I'm looking for a more positive Huckabee article, but I need to rewrite the "Controversies" part so of course the paulites will hate me..." Another poster on the message board wrote, "We need to hide all of those controversies." Jmegill 16:46, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

To be fair to Shogun108 (if he is millerkevd), he responded to the "hide all those controversies" poster with "Hide No! Fix the bias yes!". In the context of the Huckabee message board, such a discussion should not be suprising and we should not instantly use it to assume bad faith. Usually editors have a position or interest in the topics to which they edit. We each have some form of bias but it is by working together within the guidelines of Wikipedia that we're able to move toward a neutral and exceptional article. Wikipedia has ways to deal with dispute resolution and cabal mediation to assist the minority, if policy is being subverted by a POV pushing majority. I think we're all working toward the same goal - to produce an unbias, well written, factually accurate, sufficently detailed article. Morphh ^(talk) 18:43, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

I have submitted a WP:COI/N report, it might be bounced to WP:BIO/N, dunno. ThuranX 20:33, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes Morphh that is what I want. I do not want to destroy a certain point of view to promote my bias. No I want to neutralize the bias inherent in the article. Shogun108 21:07, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

The report has been taken to WP:BIO/N. Further, the off wiki group is now resorting to off-site personal attacks, and here, they're attempting to extort services to leave certain areas of this article alone. I'm going to give it a little time more at WP:BIO, then take this mess to AN/I for blocks and protections. ThuranX 22:14, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Today's edits show clearly that more SPA editors are coming here from Hucksarmy to whitewash the article. I will again go to BIO/N, but they're incredibly slow there. ThuranX 23:39, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

inclusion of campaign logos

from the text i submitted when requesting temporary unprotection of Fred Thompson:

having reviewed the articles for the 2008 presidential candidates, i realized that the majority of the articles did not have campaign logos inserted in them. a minority of articles do have them. a campaign logo/poster/image, by definition, is intended to promote the candidate. promotion implies POV. the inclusion of these images is inherently POV. i've removed these images from a handful of articles, and would like to have the image removed from this article - in that way, all candidate articles will be represented equally, in service to NPOV.

with the re-inclusion of huckabee's campaign logo, his is now the only presidential candidate biography that has such a logo. i assert that either all candidate bio's have such logos, or none. the latter is better, per the justification above. Anastrophe 18:02, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Clinton's image was readded before this one - I copied part of the summary from that revert. Images don't have to be "neutral". If they illustrate the content of the topic under discussion, that is sufficient for inclusion. I'm sure many articles would like to pull pictures because they present the topic in a positive or negative light, but the purpose of the image is to illustrate the content. The content is what falls under NPOV policy and even then the NPOV rule simply does not prohibit the use of biased sources, biased images, or biased material, as odd as that may sound. The NPOV rule instead means that Wikipedia itself does not take a position within the article that "this source is correct" or "that source is wrong". NPOV relates to how the material is presented. Your removal of the image is inappropriate and uniformity across candidates is not a justification for such a removal. Each article grows at its own pace and there is no rule on uniformity for you to assert such. Morphh ^(talk) 18:56, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

i would dispute only the assertion that there is 'no rule on uniformity for you to assert anything'. true, there are no rules, but there are guidelines for uniformity that are routinely in use on such articles - the inclusion and format of the info box, the structure of the lede, etc.. the whole reason this issue came up for me was when i saw that the mitt romney logo had been increased in size by an editor. that's when i 'realized' the ability to use the logo for promotion - it was a deft 'trick' to push the candidate's visibility in the article without actually saying anything. as i stated elsewhere, i'm not going to revert on this issue any further. i wanted to get it out there, and this discussion is what that's for. i have no partisanship in this matter - none of the candidates interest me. i'm interested in even-handed presentation, only. Anastrophe 19:08, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

That would be the manual of style for articles in general, which is not a rule but a guideline. We don't say every biography must have an infobox or no one will. We're also not talking about general style, you were asserting uniformity with specific articles having pictures or not having pictures on a particular subject (campaign logos). Now you may be able to argue manual of style or NPOV for the size of the image, but that is a another discussion. What is the proper size for such an image, if increasing the image is POV than perhaps decreasing it is equally POV. You have to come to some compromise on the appropriate size for the formating of the article (does it look oversized). Does the size of the image fit with the content with regard to weight given to the topic area? I don't know that such a dispute has taken place here but it appears you need to have it on the Romney article. Morphh ^(talk) 19:18, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

As I write this, Hillary's entry has a campaign logo on it too. She also has an awards and honors page. Do all the other candidates have the same? --Mactographer 19:02, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

if by that rhetorical question you are suggesting that absence of same from other articles is a matter of contention, it isn't for me. not every candidate has won a bunch of awards and honors. so you can't exactly include what may not exist. Anastrophe 19:10, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't care either way on the issue of campaign logos. Jmegill 20:35, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

I concur with Anastrophe, and I find WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS a poor rationale for returnign it to the article. ThuranX 20:54, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

If that is the case, then why do you use the same argument here when you claim, and I quote: "Editor leaves it on some candidates and not others?" --Mactographer 09:35, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Then delete the other crap too. --24.6.29.122 21:04, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Someone didn't read the essay, did they? And most of the other stuff has been. there are editors working hard for neutrality here against editors who come from off wiki to promote and protect their candidates... hrmm... woonder where I read that recently? ThuranX 21:14, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

ThuranX, Anastrophe's argument makes no sense and is not at issue with policy - See my comments above. While I did not base my argument on the rationale you describe, his rationale for the image removal is being overturned on every article that he's made this change to that I can tell. Morphh ^(talk) 21:19, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

"Anastrophe's argument makes no sense". please, WP:CIVIL. my argument is not nonsensical; but apparently you are stating that as a term of belittlement. please reread my argument. nowhere did i claim it was an issue of policy - please don't put words in my mouth. Anastrophe 21:23, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

I apologize, I did not mean to belittle you. I only meant that your argument was for POV, which to me meant that it was a violation of NPOV. You also asserted that they should be uniform in the service of NPOV. Perhaps you did not mean to claim policy but that is what it sounded like to me. So I was saying your argument did not make sense in regard to what NPOV policy states and the reason you removed the images, which is what I argued above. I hope this clarifies it. Morphh ^(talk) 21:37, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

fair enough, thank you. you're right, arguing NPOV is arguing policy. my intent has been more on the spirit of NPOV rather than as an issue of enforcement, if that makes sense (in this case, i grant i might not be making sense! ;^). i hope to have articles avoid even the appearance of POV, particularly with topics that are so deeply prone to POV as 'who best to run the country'. anyway, nuff said. Anastrophe 21:40, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Whoops, so sorry. Morphh, you seem to think my 'no one read the essay' was a response to you. It was to the Rude IP citing Othercrap, not to you. YOu're smoothly arguing a point with other editors. You're not agenda warring. In a section above, I talked about how some editors here are dsicussing things at length rather than fighting, and I see that again here in the main, excepting only those from Huck'sArmy, the website calling for a meatpuppet attack on the page. ThuranX 21:51, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm qutie troubled by two things in this discussion: ALL OR NONE, which sounds like an ultimatum, not an editing argument when left unsupported as it was, and 'othercrapexists', which I've seen used twice now, the second time COMPLETELY incorrectly, in fact. I agree that Logos are likely to be a biasing image. IF there are to be such images, their inclusion should probably be determined by an appropriate wiki-project... is there a 2008 US elections project? as US politics project? if not, go right to RfC and let's get this settled. Inclusion AFTER the election is encyclopedic, I'd scan in some older 'truman for president' buttons lying around the house for that, it's historic at that point. the question becomes, is a single image enough to constitute endoresement or biasing? I think that since many of those trying to include such are SPAs and Meat Puppets, as per the Huck'sArmy message baord seeking inclusion as part of its' agenda, that's enough to show me that bias exists in such an image, an we should disallow all of them. ThuranX 21:30, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Please try to judge each edit on its merits and not who is supporting or against it. If you check the other articles, there are also discussions there. I hope that I'm not included in the "SPA" / "Meat Puppet" crowd, he's not my pick for prez. Perhaps you should take a step back - you seem to getting "us against them", which creates a more difficult atmosphere. Good arguments and policy should prevail. Morphh ^(talk) 21:51, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Morphh, did you miss my clarification above? i specifically singled you out as NOT an SPA, agenda warrior, or meatpuppet. I complimented your ability to discuss this rationally. If you still think I said anythign bad about you, bring it to my talk page, keep this section focused on the issue at hand. I thought I was clear though, especially in another reply where I called for opening an RfC about this, thus creating a guideline for the entire WP project, not just a page here and/or there. ThuranX 22:06, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Ah, sorry.. missed the "many of" and since I was the main disputer of the justification for removal.. I must have assumed. I did read the other comment and thank you. I didn't quite understand the RFC thought as I didn't see the argument. I was just a little worried that you were so focused on the huck-army cabal that the merits of the edits were glossed over. I apologize if that was not the case, it was just my observation. However, now perhaps we need an RFC as all the AIN cabal are joining in battling the huck cabal. All huck cabal edits are POV, particularly this graphic which has no justification for removal under the POV policy being stated by the AIN cabal. What a mess....

Morphh ^(talk) 2:15, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

While I don't concur that campaign logos are necessarily POV, in fact, I think they are a part of the history of the individual or campaign. Nonetheless, I will personally abide by by all the current candidates of all the various parties having them included or all of them being removed ... but not some of either. ThuranX, I noticed you removed Hillary's campaign logo, so I won't return Mike's if it says that way. --Mactographer 21:48, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Uh, what? I'm not that article's babysitter. Further, Ultimatums are specifically discouraged on Wikipedia. In the best light, it's another WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS argument, at worst, it's an admission that unless you get your ay, you're going to disrupt pages, which is in itself disruptive. I suggest you strike out the comment above, and refraim from such extortionist tactics in the future. ThuranX 22:04, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Try to play fair, and get called an extortionist. s'why I don't bother much with this site anymore. --24.6.29.122 23:46, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Though I am new to this article I did see the posting about it at the Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard. I support ThuranX's position in the above discussion. I'd remind the other editors that there is tremendous support within Wikipedia for neutral coverage of political candidates. It is not rocket science to determine whether an article is neutral, and whether the arguments on a Talk page sound like they are in good faith. If we perceive that there is a group trying to game the situation, or issue ultimatums, on a particular article, there is a very good system of notification within Wikipedia to draw attention to the problem and take any needed countermeasures. EdJohnston 22:41, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

As another total outsider who came here from AIN can I just point out that there is something that doesn't appear to have been hit on yet. Campaign logos are copyrighted, as such they need to be uploaded to WP with a fair use rationale. So far the Huckabee logo doesn't yet have one and will more than likely be deleted at some point. The other thing to remember is that copyrighted images under a FUR can only be used in specific places and for specific reasons. They can't be used willy nilly and just as decoration. As it stands the logo is not a requirement for this article, it isn't specifically mentioned in the article and it doesn't serve (or exist) to clarify anything in the article, therefore it doesn't meet FUR usage. Just thought I'd throw that in the mix. ---- WebHamster 01:09, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Now that is an argument for removal that I can support. On the other points, I am a bit disturbed by the above discussion. I'm not even sure what EdJohnston is supporting. The image has been there for quite awhile, and was removed today by an editor that is not any of the described in the AIN (not that it should matter), nor a normal contributor to this article. Justification for removal has been disputed at every candidate article where removal was done and was not valid use of the policy specified for removal. So why is the new editor getting jumped on? They have not presented a force that would "game the system" and they haven't issued any "ultimatums". I have yet to see them do anything that wouldn't be considered normal editor behavior. I was the main one disputing the image - debate the merits. Lets not make this about some cabal. Give the editors a chance here. Most articles have biased editors, this is nothing new... at least you know where they stand. It seems we're ignoring the merits of their edits based on the assumption of bad faith. Morphh ^(talk) 1:57, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

That's a great policy reason. As to the above discussion, and your concerns... Have you read the BLP/N report, also at WP:AN/I? Multiple editors are conspiring off-site to push their agenda, discussing editors on wiki, and using extortion techniques on talk pages to enforce their goals? Mactographer's goal was 'all or none', and he chose to attempt enforcement with this:"ThuranX, I noticed you removed Hillary's campaign logo, so I won't return Mike's if it says that way." That's do A, or ELSE, he'll do B. that's extortion. I've reported this all to AN/I, and to BLP/N. They refer to editors here who don't agree with their views as 'liberal elitists out to make them feel like trailer trash', 'POV warriors', 'bias' (not 'biased'). At least three editors have agreed to pursue this, and possibly the original poster as well. ThuranX 02:32, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Anastrophe was the one that asserted "that either all candidate bio's have such logos, or none. the latter is better, per the justification above." When I read Mactograph's statement, I read that he would abide by what everyone else was doing but he would not go for removing it from here if others articles had it added, which is understandable... the policy used for justification should apply broadly, not just to this article. It was not extortion, he was saying that if the use is applied globally he would respect it, if it is not, he would reapply it here as the justification for removal was deemed invalid. Where is the extortion? I think your making a war out of nothing. Morphh ^(talk) 2:44, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

'ThuranX, keep Hillary Clinton's page the way I want it, or I'll do something on this page'. See, that's extortion. especially since it's an absurd demand to make. It's all threats, which are breaks with WP:CIVIL, if not some other policy I'm not familiar with. Off wiki actions like this are violations of WP:CANVAS, WP:POV, and possibly other policies. It's really taht simple. Violations of Policy can, and often are, enough in themselves to justify resisting such edits. Had the thread on that site been ' I've been working the Wiki page, and need help finding a citation for Event A or Statement ABC' There would be nothig there. getting help with research from people who know a subject is fine. Getting help in changing an article to the way your group want is very different. I don't understand why you think such behaviors are so innocuous. I never went after Anastrophe, as he had a good idea, if not the right policy to cite. Since not all candidates have logos, its' both POV, and WP:UW, to include them. As WebHamster poinsts out, there's an even better policy, FUR, for it. it seems there's consensus that the policy is right in this application, so I don't think there's much to worry about on the topic of this thread. As to the conduct of this off-wiki message board, it's still objectionable, and still on AN/I. ThuranX 03:01, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Where did he say that he wanted Hillary's page a certain way? He just wanted them the same way based on the justification. He was just saying that it was not right for one to be one way and Huckabee to be another, based on the justification used - I completely agree. It was an invalid justification and if deemed valid should have been applicable to all. I agree - Am I extorting you? Normal revert policies apply. I see no threats... dispute in justification for the change. Is every revert a threat and extortion... this is insane. People can talk outside of Wikipedia and I don't see anything overtly worrisome in the blog. They have a right to be concerned about what they perceive to be bias in an article and discuss correcting it. It was not POV for some articles to have a logo and others not... so lets remove all the logos... come on. IMO you're stretching policy here to mean something other than what it says. If we get a sufficiently free logo, I'll argue to have it added back. Morphh ^(talk) 3:15, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

We should either include campaign logos on all campaigns or on none due to the POV issues. Since the logos are generally coprighted, we must make a fair use argument for them. As far as I can tell they add little to the articles since the campaign logos are almost all variants on the same thing: the candidate's name with some combination of red, white and blue. Given that, all the campaign logos should be removed. JoshuaZ 03:24, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure what part of POV policy your using there for justification but I agree on the Fair Use. Perhaps we should just get rid of all pictures as they present some POV in one way or another. It's unfair to all those articles that don't have pictures and presents a POV in each article. Of course, this has no relation to what the NPOV policy actually states. Morphh ^(talk) 3:32, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Including some campaigns logos and not others is arguably POV since it could be seen as supporting those campaigns more than others(Actually, the more I think about this the more it seems like a really weak argument). The fair use issue is serious however- we aren't adding almost anything with these pictures. WP:FAIR is pretty clear about this sort of thing and even if FAIR were substantially weakened these still wouldn't fall within it. JoshuaZ 03:43, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Changing the Order of the Article

Shogun108, you should discuss why you are changing the order of the article. You should make the case why one order of the article is better than another order of the article. If not, then I may just change it back to how it was before. Jmegill 17:17, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I had hoped to bring up and make the same change Shogun made. his political positions are the rule, the controversies teh exception, to split a metaphor. His positions go directly to his daily style of governing his state, and to his notability as a candidate by standing out on certain issues or blending into the GOP crowd on others. Further, it's a logical order or us as writers, to set out the ground-work for why things became controversial, by establishing Huckabee's baseline attitudes. HYPOTHETICAL example: 'Candidate Q gives a speech about the evils of gun control, and the benefits of the second amendment, a school shooting occurs with a gun made with a straw purchase or other comtroversial method, huckabee gives same speech again a week later. Gun control groups, parents of injured students, and so on are outraged and rebuke him in the media to a large amount of coverage.' end example. Now, his position isn't controversial in and of itself, beyond that of the general gun control debate, but his unyielding view in the face of counterexamples would be. Knowing already that he's against gun legislation, we as editors can go right to the heart of the controversy, that he was criticized for not re-examining his positions. Again, this is a hypothetical. I concur with Shogun108 on this move, had considered it, but suddenly had to watch for the invasion of Huck's Army of POV warriors. ThuranX 20:15, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

All right I guess I could have started a talk about this, but the edit was minor. I changed nothing. I have another idea as to what to do with the page to make it better I'll start a talk for that one because it is larger. Anyway Thuran is right here. It creates logical flow to the article and fixes a small POV problem with reading the "controversies" before you know his position. I don't think anyone should be against that.Shogun108 20:23, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I have no objections. Morphh ^(talk) 20:35, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

that final statement, SHogun, is exactly why it should've been done, and bringing up things using arguments like that to support your edits is how to achieve consensus, or at least, premise your ideas, here in talk. Keep that up, please. That's how Wikipedia gets stuff done best. ThuranX 20:52, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your words of advice. Maybe you noticed I am new to how Wikipedia works internally, but I'll learn and maybe I'll contribute to other pages later... So I'll put that to note thanks again. Shogun108 21:44, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

My position is that no information should be left out in the editing process. On the Dumas quote, I believe it is relevant and should be included. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jmegill (talk • contribs) 17:09, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Question on Arkids/Medicaid Huckabee vs. Clinton Administration

In 1999-2000, Huckabee was in conflict with the Clinton Administration over whether kids who qualified for Arkids A (then called Medicaid) should be funneled into Arkids A rather than Arkids B.(then called Arkids First). Huckabee stated that some people refused to enroll in Medicaid out of pride, but would enroll in Arkids First because it wasn't called Medicaid. Arkids A had no co-pay, while Arkids B did have co-pays and higher income levels for eligibility. Are there other reasons WHY Huckabee challenged the Clinton Administration over this? Jmegill 22:53, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Dumond edit

I object Bryan Derksen's edit to the Dumond subsection. He changed "Dumond had been attacked and castrated prior to his trial for the rape" to "Dumond was castrated prior to his trial; he claimed that he was attacked by two men in his home (though district prosecutor Gene Raff suggested it was a case of self-mutilation and a urologist who'd studied the topic told the Forrest City Times-Herald that self-mutilation isn't that rare among psychologically disturbed sex offenders)." Comments on how and why Dumond was castrated are tangential to an article about Mike Huckabee. The level of detail is not necessary to understanding the controversy.Jmegill 01:37, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry Jmegill, but facts are facts, take a look at this article.[2] Derksen's edits are totally legitimate. --SNSAnchor 03:20, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Jmegill isn't contesting he facts, but the level of detail. I support the older version as well. It's simple and direct. Others who wish to read up on the case can go look it up. What's relevant to Huckabee is the sentencing reduction and resultant recidivism, not disparaging Dumond's assertions; that should go into a Dumond case article. Huckabee wasn't criticized for doing the chop work, jsut for opening the door early. ThuranX 03:57, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

The Dumond section states that full disclosure from Huckabee can be found in his book. According to a new article citing evidence provided by a former Huckabee aide and published by the Huffington Post, however, that notion simply is not true. In fact, the former governor received written letters from former Dumond rape victims pleading for his continued imprisonment and warning of his likelihood to not only rape again, but to kill the victims. Apparently, Huckabee chose politics over the private words of rape victims, and two more heinous crimes were commited as a direct result. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.142.186.115 (talk) 06:00, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

"Full disclosure"? How is that neutral? As the previous post states, it is a lie. I'm not going to direct you to other sources since I'm tired of Wikifascists would appoint themselves the guardians of the articles. Walter E. Kurtz, USA (Retd.) (talk) 09:33, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia has rules for discussing living persons WP:BLP. Jmegill (talk) 14:50, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Edit to Fiscal Record

I object to the last two edits by SNSAnchor. The addition of the phrase "The same year, Huckabee was named “Friend of a Taxpayer” by American for Tax Reform (ATR) for his cut in statewide spending." should be put with Fiscal Record subsection, not under the first term subsection. This is because it more logically goes with a discussion of his fiscal record. The second to last edit has a couple of problems. The way it was edited the structure of the edit reads 1.) Huckabee's campaign talking points 2.) Fiscal Criticism 3. Repeats Huckabee's campaign talking points. Thus, the edit carries redundant sentences. The first sentence "Huckabee cut taxes over ninety times while governor,..." is redundant with "Huckabee's campaign has countered these arguments by saying that Huckabee cut taxes 94 times including signing the first broad-based tax cut in the history of the state". Jmegill 04:25, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't see why "Tax Me More Fund" is relevant to discussing Huckabee's fiscal record. It ended up collecting a laughable amount of funds. I would just as soon eliminate it. Jmegill 05:03, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

It was made in response to criticism for his record in the area of fiscal matters. It also drew opposition for being a campaign trick. In any case I also edited the fiscal record part I think I only removed one article, but I was shifting and making the article flow better so that it seemed more like an encyclopedia entry explaining the details as they happened. The order provides for a much more stable read. You may add anything as long as it does not detract from the flow. It took me forever to create an article which presented this issue as being a controversy with two sides to the argument. I was trying and I think I did all right I all ready asked a few people and they said it didn't weigh to heavily on either side. The information allows the reader to choose a side and from what is provided it is easy to support either side without feeling like you where convinced to change your opinion. I hope this works out for everyone, because I think this is how an encyclopedia should be written when writing about criticism or controversy.Shogun108 13:36, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

There is one issue I have though is the "Arkansas Democratic Gazette a credible source for fiscal issues? I noticed that the "It was reported" was this paper so I added the name of the source into the article. Do you think it should still be used? Shogun108 13:36, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

The Arkansas Democratic Gazette is reporting its numbers from what the Department of Finance and Administration gave it. Jmegill 13:49, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Shogun108, exactly WHO did you ask about the balance of the article? Certainly no one here on Wikipedia, per your contribs list. Please do not claim consensus based on Off-wiki discussions over at Huck's Army, or your family, or anywhere else but here. There's no way to verify that you've got such consensus. ThuranX 14:02, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

There were some deletions and some additions. I object to the deletion of "According to a National Review writer, during his tenure the number of state government workers in Arkansas increased over 20 percent, and the state’s general obligation debt shot up by almost $1 billion". Jmegill 14:16, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

If it was cited, put it back in. Also, Stop wit thhe 'I object' talk. it's really confrontational, and it is not helping build consensus. It pushes people away. Wikipedia isn't a court of law, and we can afford to be more civil and less formal. How about this: Shogun, since The Nat'l Review segment was cited, why did you remove it? ThuranX 14:23, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

I've reverted some edits because they fail to represent both sides of the controversy and thus violate the neutral point of view policy. The "Tax Me More Fund" is very relevant to this topic it was created in response to Huckabee not raising taxes.--SNSAnchor 14:30, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

I just read through both versions and I don't see where it violates NPOV. What part of the controversy is not represented, and if there is something missing, why not add it instead of reverting the entire thing. Shogun's changes, I thought, made it flow much better. Instead of back and forth, back and forth, he said she said... it does a much better job keeping the arguments together. It discusses much of the criticism for his history in the first paragraph, discusses much of the rebuttal in the second paragraph, and then goes into comments on the presidential election in the third. This has much better flow and is easier to understand. I think it makes each section stronger. I'm not an expert on it, so perhaps I missed on small piece of criticism that may have been left out, to which there should be discussed here as to inclusion. The "Tax Me More Fund" was included in the version that I read... not sure what the issue is. Morphh ^(talk) 15:12, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, after reading though it again, I do believe now that it is fine as it is. Thanks Morphh for the feedback. ----SNSAnchor 15:45, 28 October 2007 (UTC) 15:44, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm going to revert to my version, but I will add "According to a National Review writer, during his tenure the number of state government workers in Arkansas increased over 20 percent, and the state’s general obligation debt shot up by almost $1 billion. I didn't notice that I'd deleted that which is why I asked for you guys to look it over so I'll do as Morphh recommends and before we have editing wars make sure your ideas have met a general consensus. I confess I did ask my parents and that the review was off wiki, but I cannot prove their bias except by saying they do not follow my own. Of course that has no backing. I just wanted you guys to know I put an honest effort into maintaining the integrity of the article and of the issue REMEBER: The section is called controversy not criticism so it must reflect both sides equally, but not give preference to any. In witch case a person who reads it will not feel obliged to change sides given their view. There is no persuasive prose in it I made sure of it. All sources are cited so. I will say it again I am reverting to my version and adding the citation I accidentally left out. Thanks for the feedback! Shogun108 16:45, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Just to be clear, I don't think every change should go through some talk page consensus process. This would likely greatly interfere with getting things done and the WP:BOLD idea. However, if it is something large, something disputed, you're removing something, or adding something significant, then it is best to start a discussion. If there is disagreement in the discussion, we should work to compromise to gain a consensus. Morphh ^(talk) 22:31, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Although I usually share your sentiments, I don't particularly mind the extra tact and review, as a result of the influx of editors from hucksarmy. That said, Most of the contested material's coming here fast anyways, so let's not discourage talk page use. too much is ALWAYS preferable to too little, because too little leads to 3RR and edit wars. SHogun108's mostly coming around to wiki-style editing, and Jmegill is also generally working within guidelines. I do worry about the SPA nature of both, but so long as they continue to work together, and with others, I'm not going to make any more deal about that. ThuranX 01:50, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

An editor attempted to add aditional information on Grover Norquist, but Huckabee's relationship to him is irrelevent. His comments were though. I cited the date. If you have ANY problems tell ME. I WILL fix them. Edit wars is not the answer so I'd prefer if you told me what you thought was wrong and we discuss it. Shogun108 17:02, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

The Dumas characterization should remain the section. Huckabee does have a history with Norquist. In 2001, ATR (Norquist organization) praised Huckabee calling him friend of the taxpayer. In 2006, Norquist dismissed Huckabee calling him a serial tax increaser. In 2007, Huckabee signs ATR's pledge. Jmegill 17:14, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Before changing it let's wait for a third fourth or even fifth opinion. I don't think it adds or detracts anything from the passage and as such seems irrelevant. So I guess I'll consider it, but not too much because we are talking about Huckabee not Norquist Shogun108 17:56, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

More Comments on Edits

The edit on Huckabee's first term is not supported by the source. The bond issue vote happened on June 15, 1999. The vote passed 80-20. Huckabee signed the bill two months earlier on April 1, 1999. Taxes went up immediately upon signing the bill. Now, logically, how can 80% of the state support a tax increase two months before they voted on it? The source clearly states that the bond vote does not affect the tax increases. The bond vote is only on whether Arkansas issues bonds to speed up road repair or uses the tax increase to finance road repair on a pay as you go basis. The source is copyrighted material which I paid for from a newspaper archive, but I am more than willing to email anybody who asks for the full article in question if they have any doubts about it. I emailed the full article in question on September 3 to the editor in question. The second edit "because of previous years of mismanagement" is POV and will be removed. The Jim Cooper quote should be place in the fiscal record subsection since it is dated Oct. 13, 2007 and is designed to counter criticism. Jmegill 20:13, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

All I ask is that editors read the relevant documents before making edits. This is the bond issue act signed on April 1, 1999. http://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/1999/scripts/ablr/bills/bills.asp?billno=HB1500 and this is the gasoline and diesel tax increase also signed on April 1, 1999 http://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/1999/scripts/ablr/bills/bills.asp?billno=HB1548 Jmegill 21:29, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Spanish??

Why isn't there an Español link in the "In other languages" box?? I found an article at es.wikipedia.org, so does someone know how to get it linked here?? 67.149.116.181 —Preceding comment was added at 15:58, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

 Done Morphh ^(talk) 16:02, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Stated,Asserted

Information from the campaign or candidate should be sourced as coming from the campaign or candidate. Information which comes from a reliable third party source can be stated as fact. This is my reasoning for the last revert. Jmegill 15:43, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

All of my recent changes have been to preserve information about Janet Huckabee, maintain what has already been put in the fiscal record section and to accomodate useful edits. Jmegill 23:21, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Forums

I am not sure that Huckabee has an official campaign forum. The candidate would want to control the message and allowing others to post in the forum would interfere with that. I have been unable to find a link to an official forum on Huckabee's campaign website. There are links to http://www.forum.hucksarmy.com/ but they are only found in the comments section of the blog. This does not suggest endorsement of the site. Reading the "About Us" section of Hucksarmy, they do not claim to be an official forum either. Whois for Hucksarmy returms Bill Goins, whose name appears nowhere on MikeHuckabee.com. Where is the evidence that Hucksarmy or MikeHuckabeeforums.com is an official forum? Jmegill 23:31, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Amendment One of 1996

Does anyone know where I can find the text of the actual Amendment one that was on the ballot in 1996? The Amendment established a minimum property tax of 25 mils (Arkansas property is assessed on 20% of the value). Supposedly, only 6 out of 311 school districts were below 25 mils. The Amendment received support from David Pryor, Mike Beebe, Ron Russell of the Ark Chamber of Commerce (and other business leaders) and was Jim Guy Tucker's idea. Huckabee didn't have to support it and the issue was contentious for Tucker. I am unclear over how redistributionist the formula was and whether this represented a significant change in terms of tax burden and also school expenditures. One source says, " All money raised by school taxes in 319 individual districts would have to come to Little Rock and be dispersed statewide. That way, the same amount of money would be spent on every child in public schools regardless of how rich or poor the child's district" and "a measure to redistribute local property tax money to equalize school funding statewide.". Also, "At its heart is a provision to remove constitutional restrictions on distributing local property tax proceeds statewide to even out big differences in education funding available to rich school districts and poor ones." Also, "The amendment requires that districts that bring in more money per student than specified in the funding formula send the extra money to the state for redistribution" Also, "It would require that all school districts earmark for the state an amount of money equal to the revenue generated by a 25-mill tax; the state would ensure that the money is distributed among the districts. The amendment would not force a tax increase in most school districts, and each district would keep any revenue it generates in excess of the state minimum. " A letter writer complains, "Amendment 1 means the end of local control. If it passes, Arkansas, like several other reform states, will begin an impossible fight to regain local control of their schools, lost when a state mandates "equalizing funding.""

The Alternatives mentioned to Amendment 1 were tax increases or a school consolidation program. (school consolidation did later end up happening, but Huckabee later ended up endorsing a plan of consolidation) The previous year, some persons had to pay a 10% income surcharge. I would appreciate any insight on this issue. Jmegill 03:46, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Janet Huckabee: "controversy"?

Although the section about Mr. Huckabee and his wife running on the same ticket may be an interesting piece of trivia, it hardly merits listing under the "controversy" section. Is it controversial for Mrs. Clinton to run for the same office her husband once held? Please.

I suggest the section either be removed or relocated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.135.30.198 (talk) 21:21, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

It is significant. The Times article mentioned that the run almost cost Mike Huckabee the Governor's race in 2002. It was a major campaign issue and the Republican party in Arkansas was more than a little angry at the Huckabee. Maybe putting in my context like Janet Huckabee's offensive comments towards Jews or use of a state airplane would help the reader see why the voters abandoned Janet on this race, but I don't care to go in too much detail here. Jmegill 02:15, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

I suggest you and the rest of HucksArmy move on. You've got half a dozen editors assaulting this page to whitewash the article. This was discussed by reputable editors of Wikipedia dedicated to the process, and it was felt that the criticism of consolidation of power within one family and particularly under Mike Huckabee's guidance was notable. ThuranX 02:17, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Considering RFC

I wanted to mention this on the talk page before I do this as perhaps a short discussion will make it unnecessary but I have discussed it in the past and the article continues to concern me. If we do submit this for request for comment, please don't take it as anything against the editors working to improve the article. Sometimes things just need a little more discussion from external sources to get us on the proper path (if any issue is found). Due to the sensitivity of BLP with regard to a U.S. presidential candidate, we need to be very cautious and make sure we're presenting the material in the most neutral way. My concerns are with the controversy section and issues with WP:BLP particularly regarding BLP criticism, NPOV article structure, and NPOV undue weight. When looking at the table of contents, the controversy overwhelms the article and gives undue weight to headers that do not reflect important areas to the subject's notability in comparison with the rest of the article structure. Take a look at the John Stossel article before and after, which underwent a similar process of BLP / article structure and undue weight changes. All the important content and criticism is still there but it is presented in a way that does not bias the article and puts it in context for the overall biography. I'm not sure how best to address it but I thought perhaps an RFC would get some opinions of other editors that are not as vested as our longtime editors and HucksArmy. The consensus my be no changes, and I can accept that, but I think we need to have more discussion for this high profile biography. Morphh ^(talk) 15:14, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

My comment on the latest edit (tdl1060) is that this particular criticism is better on the Presidential campaign page and/or where it was. I think I am going to revert it because it deletes some of the Huckabee's team response to criticism on fiscal matters and takes an absolutist anti-Huckabee stance with regards to the fuel tax. In general, I would like to see material move from the Controversy section to other parts of the article rather than the other way around. I would like not to see sub-subsections in the controversies part because that makes structural POV allegations easier to lodge. The way the article is now is two parts: his life told chronologically and then his life told thematically. Early life, early political career, and Governor of Arkansas is a chronology. Poltical position, Controversy, Presidential ambitions, Health advocacy are themes. It appears to me that the Stossel article was mainly changed by eliminating subcategories of Criticisms. A couple sentences of the health care and pesticide criticism were dropped as well as the section on school choice/education. The article has a similar format: chronological and then thematically. Let me ask you: should the Controvery section be renamed "Awards, Praise and Controversy" like it is on the Stossel article? One could make a case that that would mitigate structural POV allegations. My thinking on the question is politicians, by their very nature of being politicians, attract criticism or controversy. Being overly concerned about NPOV when dealing with politicians sanitizes the articles. I think the criticism should stand as well as the politicians response to such criticism. That is one reason why I am against the deletion of Rudy Giuliani's controversy page. Here: http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Controversies_of_Rudy_Giuliani I've repeated this before: school consolidation/Lake View lawsuit is big issue with regards to the Huckabee, yet I don't fully understand this issue and the sourcing on it (such as Jim Holt's proposed legal end run around the court) is incomplete. This also has a tie-in to national standards testing in Arkansas and educational spending. I am thinking that a catchall "Education" section might useful to describe this issue thematically. Jmegill 21:36, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm not targeting deleting any criticism - I'll leave that up to the normal discussion/editing, although some might benefit from a little summarization in a restructure or might be better placed in other Huckabee articles as you describe. I would like to see some of the sections integrated where possible as described in WP:CRITICISM. I also see the change in structure from chronological to themes that you describe. The larger theme subheadings, such as Political positions, Controversy, and Presidential ambitions seem to be appropriate but many of the smaller "issue" headings should be looked at. I don't care for the "Books" or "Health advocacy" being main sections either. Books should be integrated into a life or profession section either titled "Author" or just a paragraph without a header. Health advocacy should also be integrated or subsectioned under some area of his life. Sections under Controversy, which could be renamed to include praise, should be integrated to other areas where appropriate or combined into broader section titles that do not reflect a list criticisms. This also helps remove areas for trolling. Perhaps the entire structure should be considered. Maybe we should do larger themes over the chronological by breaking it down into sections in "Early life & education" and "Personal life". Then a main section on his Professional career. Then perhaps a section on controversy and praise. Morphh ^(talk) 1:38, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Seems the RFC has done nothing and this is only getting worse. I've made a post to the BLP noticeboard to try and get this moving. This is getting too close to the primaries to not do something quickly. Morphh ^(talk) 21:39, 03 December 2007 (UTC)

Really? Wikipedia has time constraints? To what end? to hype the candidate? Absurd. Articles move at the pace they move at, no faster nor slower. That this article moves slowly in some aspects is due to the obvious and clear agitation of HucksArmy, who've been discussing this page on their forum for weeks. We have to evaluate every single edit more closely, revert more, and so on. NO agenda pushing here. 'hurrying' to reach some rather arbitrary content or viewpoint benchmark in time for primaries is against our core policies. ThuranX 01:08, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Huckabee is a douchebag though, you have to remember that. Sammiejoiluvbuts (talk) 23:04, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

ThuranX, my thoughts on urgency are related to the effects regarding BLP and the harm that could be caused due to non-neutral presentation. BLP certainly has time constraints depending on the content such as the statement "removed immediately and without discussion". Wikipedia is obviously a source of information for some considering candidates.. be it Giuliani, Huckabee, Clinton... If we have an article on one of the candidates during the period of time for which most people are looking to gain information and Wikipedia is presenting Huckabee in a way that biases the article (as I described above) - I think that is of great concern and should be delt with quickly. Wikipedia could do "harm" by not following the policies of BLP and thus effect his chances at election because of our presentation. It may not matter in three months - the harm will already be done. Doesn't matter to me what candidate you're for, we should all have the goal of presenting the material neutrally here. Morphh ^(talk) 14:48, 04 December 2007 (UTC)

I'll take Morph's suggestion and Make "Controversy" into "Awards, Praise and Controversy". Huckabee's weight loss can be included in there as well as his promotion of marriage. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jmegill (talk • contribs) 02:15, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Context?

Link [3] Brian Pearson 01:12, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

The context was back in August when there were arguments over whether to describe Huckabee as a fiscal moderate, a fiscal liberal or a economic populist. Ultimately, it was dropped from the introduction.Jmegill 06:27, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

I think the man can be described without the labels. Brian Pearson (talk) 01:23, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Expunging of Data Upon Leaving Governor's Office

I removed this from the main article for some discussion. The only thing here that makes this anything to consider is the last statement, which links to a self described liberal blog. I don't see that the statement that "some political commentators to cry foul" is supported in the article. This is not a reliable source and the accusation could be very close to libelous. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a tabloid; it is not our job to be sensationalist, or to be the primary vehicle for the spread of titillating claims about people's lives. Morphh ^(talk) 15:53, 04 December 2007 (UTC)

Shortly before announcing his candidacy for the President of the United States, Huckabee ordered that the drives of 83 personal computers and 4 servers be destroyed during his transition phase in leaving office. According to Claire Bailey, director of the Arkansas Department of Information Systems, the governor’s office chose a combination of writing over the data and destroying the hard drives. This controversial move has led some political commentators to cry foul, as the measures he took seem excessive unless he had something to hide.

Jloc1210 (talk) 15:50, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

The expunging of the data is not sourced and does not provide Huckabee's reply, which has to do with safeguarding personal information. With regards to issues which are more important, Huckabee's record on schools and education, as well as his attempts to promote marriage are most important. Jmegill 17:19, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Secondly, I think that the Author section should go at the bottom of the page. The Presidential ambitions section can be slimmed down and the information therein transferred to the presidential race page. Jmegill 17:19, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

It doesn't matter too much but why do you think that Author or Books should go at the bottom? Being an author (one of his professions) and discussing his books seems like something that would go before the theme based praise/criticism. I won't consider this as a references section or further reader. The bullets should be removed and the section should be expanded to discuss the books a little more. Morphh ^(talk) 18:13, 04 December 2007 (UTC)

I hate to say because that's how I've seen it done on other pages, but that's how I've seen it done on other pages. It's not a terribly good reason. As a list it should go at the bottom with the references, but if the section goes into detail, then it could warrant a higher placement on the page. I have only read "Character is the Issue" of the five books. The book is important in describing Huckabee's beliefs and outlook. Perhaps under Awards, Praise, Theme, and Controversy, there can be a section describing how Huckabee views the world Jmegill 19:50, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Also, one of Huckabee's professions was public speaker. He did some professional speaking for side income when he was lt. gov. Jmegill 19:50, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

A passage from "Character is the Issue" reads, "Here's the bottom line not just for Arkansas and America, but for the world: one worldview will prevail. Either by numbers or persuasion, one side of this polarized culture will defeat the other in setting public policy. When two irreconcilable views emerge, one is going to dominate. Ours will either be a worldview with humans at the center or with God at the center. Standards of right and wrong are either what we establish as human beings (standards which can be changed to suit us), or they are what God has set in motion since the creation of the world and cannot be moved." page 137. I put this out there to show what I meant in the previous comment. Jmegill 19:56, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Awards, praise, themes and controversy

This is not a useful heading - I see exactly one award in there, and almost no praise. I'm not even sure what "themes" means - another version of "political positions", perhaps? And I think controversies are best handled when integrated into the appropriate section of the article, as has been done for Hillary Rodham Clinton and others. The section's focus is not at all clear and has no analogues that I can think of in other biographies - seems to be a catch-all section. So I would break it up and move the parts as follows: create a "personal image" section or some name like that (health advocacy, gift registry, public comments and any other things about his personal image); appropriate governorship term (fiscal record, Wayne Dumond, Janet Huckabee/Secy of State}; political positions - which would be much better rendered not as a list (illegal immigration). I'm willing to do the work, but wanted to raise it here rather than waste my time. But I think this section has to change. Tvoz |talk 22:12, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Morph (I think) earlier pointed to the John Stossel page which had an Awards, Praise and Controversy section. I used that formula, but I also added "Themes" because I didn't know how to deal with material concerning his religious beliefs which seem to touch many aspects of Huckabee's life. Perhaps there could be a full section devoted to Huckabee's Personality and Beliefs. Like you suggested, Personal Image. I could see integrating the Janet Huckabee part into the first governor term because it fits there chronologically. But other controversies such as fiscal matters or Dumond play out over time. The Dumond case was an issue in 1996/1997 and then again in 2002 when it was brought up in the 2002 Governor's race. The Dumond case also ties into concerns over clemency. So where would it fit in chronologically? On fiscal matters, should there be a summary for a 10 1/2 year record or should each tax cut and tax hike be dealt with separately? In general, I believe that there should be controversy sections, especially for politicians who frequent have to take stances on divisive issues. In fact, the only way a politician can avoid controversy is to not get elected. That said, I can see that having a separate controversies page would lead to a POV fork. (Although in Giuliani's case, there were so many controversies that to exclude them would be biased towards Giuliani). In this page's section which includes controversy, there is balance because Huckabee's responses to criticism have been included. That is one of the reasons why the section is as large as it is. It is ironic that it can be argued that this section has undue weight because of its length when the length is due to balance. Jmegill (talk) 00:12, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, I stopped following Stossel some months ago because of the high level of contentious editing going on, so I didn't remember that section (or it may not have been there when I was editing there) - nor am I sure I'd recommend that article as a model in general, but I think the problem here is that in any case that model doesn't really work on this article. If I'm not mistaken there is only one award here, and not exactly a major one - it should certainly be included, but elevating it to a section head seems off to me. I would go for the "personal" section to include religion beliefs. I see what you're saying about the chronology problem - I'm not really looking for strict chronology, as you're right that sometimes an event happens and its repercussions happen much later - so I suppose I'd place Dumond in whichever gubernatorial term it happened in, and say there that it became an issue later on as well. Fiscal matters perhaps would be better in political positions - not sure about that. I haven't tried to actually re-write this, so I realize that my suggestion per se may not quite work, but I want to raise the question of that catch-all section and see what we can do about it. Tvoz |talk 00:27, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, the Janet Huckabee section can go in the first full term. And the gift registry can go to the second term. As for awards, there is a paragraph in the first full term which lists some of them. I'll leave it there for now. The other sections fiscal record, illegal immigration, and now Dumond deal with things which were much discussed when they happened in Arkansas and also have been discussed in the national media. I would like to keep as much detail as possible on the topics. Jmegill (talk) 01:13, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I like Tvoz's ideas here. Also, I've moved it a couple of times but Jeremy221 keeps moving it back - I think the Presidential ambitions section should go above the theme based praise, controversies and such. Since several of these can be integrated into the governership sections, perhaps this will reduce the conflict but I think the presidential section should follow the Governor of Arkansas section. Morphh ^(talk) 18:28, 07 December 2007 (UTC)

Neutrality

After reading the entire page, I'm left with the feeling that I just read a campaign brochure for Huckabee. This is a highly-biased entry with barely a mention of Huckabee's many scandals while governor or of his borderline legal/illegal acceptance of "gifts" similar to those received from this Baptist congregations.

I had hoped to read a balanced article displaying both his successes and failures but mostly read a litany of great accomplishments. Gee, he's closer to being godlike than I knew. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.178.38.95 (talk) 06:32, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

What sourced information do you think should be included? Jmegill (talk) 06:48, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

How about this? (Includes primary sources) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/12/05/exclusive-the-complete-h_n_75373.html Brian, 12/7/07 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.67.236.132 (talk) 17:05, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Sure. This is Waas' followup story. The previous Waas story was released on 12/4 and a link added and phrases added to the Dumond section to reflect the information Waas reported.Jmegill (talk) 18:18, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

As Governor of Arkansas Huckabee had many controversial articles written about him. They are documented in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Arkansas Times. I am wondering why many of those are not covered in this bio as they would give a more balanced view of his time in office. One in particular occurred early in his career, "Huckabee tapped mansion account for himself," by Arkansas Times [4]. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Arkansastexas (talk • contribs) 02:18, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Done. Jmegill (talk) 04:24, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't know about the article itself, but what was wrong with the original photo? The full-body shot in front of the flag makes him look like a rock star or something. Narco (talk) 03:25, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. I'd hoped someone else would nuke it from orbit, but since they didn't I have. that was absurdly propaganda, and it's gone now. ThuranX (talk) 04:48, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Copyright issues on that image are more of a concern; however the current image is kind of crappy, compositionally speaking and unprofessional for an encyclopedia. Given that we're dealing with a fairly prominent U.S. figure, there should be a public domain image of him somewhere without a microphone. Borisblue (talk) 05:45, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

I know it's not the best, but it IS the most recent previous image. We did, at one point, have a nice, legit ,good image of him, i think from an official portrait, but that went away, and I'm not digging through thousands of diffs to find it, because as I recall, it was there during another spate of image edit warring. Maybe you can find a good one? ThuranX (talk) 14:26, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Copyright issues are not a concern for that image, they were originally addressed in the original upload of the image. It as an original work and was released for Public Domain. The previous photo was outdated and the image is simply of his head, while most other candidates profiles feature more body images and there were none of Huckabee. He is running for President of the United States of America, what is wrong with having him with a picture of a flag? He is a politician.

The Image does not violate any Wikipedia rules and should have never been removed.Rtr10 —Preceding comment was added at 21:26, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't doubt that the flag image is legal, and doesn't violate any Wikipedia rules. Neither does the one that shows him speaking in his official duties as Governor of Arkansas. This is not a page for his presidential campaign.Paisan30 (talk) 22:06, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Paisan's reversion today of the fan image. It's a highly biased photograph, it's fan-made, not authentic, and it's definitely NOT encyclopedic, unless he's willing to create images which equally indicate that level of patriotism for all candidates and political figures. As I'm sure he's not, and is only willing to do this for Huckabee, I think it has to be kept out. ThuranX (talk) 22:48, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Also, the Superman (flag) image is already being used on the "Presidential Campaign of Mike Huckabee" page. I don't agree with having a photo created by a supporter there either, but I'm willing to leave that alone. I think leaving a normal, real photo of him on this page is appropriate. Paisan30 (talk) 00:19, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

actually, thanks for the heads up, it should not be there either. No part of Wikipedia is adspace for any candidate or platform. ThuranX (talk) 01:12, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Sorry for any trouble and I see your point about having it on Mike Huckabee's official profile picture on his Wikipedia Biography. I will not attempt to replace the profile picture. I have inserted the small thumbnail of the image in his President campaign section. There is no reason however that it should have been taken down from the Wikipedia page of the Presidential campaign. It is in no way bias or at least none more than on the pages of other candidates. That image should not be removed and I think it is a good compromise to leave it on the campaign Wikipedia page and leave it off of his official Bio Wikipedia. Rtr10 (talk) 02:07, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Applying policy in one place and not another isn't a good compromise. You made the image to support your candidate (yes, at this point, I'm going to flat out state, you're a clear Huckabee supporter), and we've said no. Repeatedly. You keep adding it. Consider that when multiple people object, and one keeps going, it's a matter of consensus is against it, and we have policy on our side. There's no compromise needed, the image is out. ThuranX (talk) 08:52, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

The image does not violate any Wikipedia policies or rules. This is your person opinion and that is it, you have nothing on "your side" (which I didn't know we were supposed to take sides) this is simply a matter of what is right and what is wrong. You removing something simply because you don't like it personally is wrong. You have right as not being an administrator to continually undermine other Wikipedia users based on person opinion. I have contributed to other campaign sites. I have stated my case and have admitted that it was a mistake to post the image on the Mike Huckabee Wikipedia page, but there is no reason that image should be removed from the campaign page and you still have not cited such policy. Making up something such as "bias" and "unencyclopedic" just to cover for your person opinion has no bearing on whether the image should be on the campaign site or not. It makes little sense why a comic expert would have such an interest in the Mike Huckabee campaign page other than political bias. You need to get over your person hissy fit and get on with your life. Rtr10 (talk) 03:03, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Maybe a comic book fan would have a problem with it because it makes Huckabee look like Captain America (I think that applies more than Superman). The image is not illegal and may not explicitly violate any rules. However, it is BETTER and more encyclopedic to use a real photograph, rather than superimposing Huckabee in front of an American flag backdrop.Paisan30 (talk) 20:59, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Under "Political Positions" article states "Huckabee supports murder and is a hunter" while the reference used shows that Mike Huckabee is a hunter (as stated), supports 2nd amendment along the lines of NRA, and supports a law similar to the Florida "castle law" which "states that any person has the right to 'stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm.'" To call this 'murder' shows obvious bias against the position. Should be changed to state simply that he supports law similar to Florida "castle law" with brief summary of what that entails. Griff199 (talk) 13:30, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

metric

it may be a US article but not every one reading it is in the united states. User:Silverhorse —Preceding comment was added at 02:20, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

That's true. Thank you for pointing that out. I added the {{convert}} thingy to display both systems. Because it is a US article, the US system is used first and metric is given parenthetically, per WP:MOS#Which system to use. --Elliskev 14:26, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Time to move controversy section

The controversy section has grown big enough to move to a separate page. If it is not Wikipedia would have a bias argument against it. Check out the status of all the other top tier Republican candidates:

Mike Huckabee: large controversy section on main article Rudy Giuliani: No controversy section Fred Thompson: Same size as Huckabee, but on its own page Mitt Romney: No controversy section John McCain: No controversy section

What do you think?--SNSAnchor (talk) 03:02, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Agree. I'll give it a shot, leaving a little info on the main page.Paisan30 (talk) 03:10, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Merger proposal

The following is a closed discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was Merge the controversies article back into the primary biography article.
-- Yellowdesk (talk) 23:18, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

---

I support merging Mike Huckabee and Mike Huckabee controversies to avoid POV fork. Jmegill (talk) 09:20, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

I think it is better formatted the way it is. Maybe a little more highlight of the controversies in the main page, but it seems if the campaign and political positions are going to be separated, it seems only fair to separate the controversies as well. Not to mention it seems to be the same format used for other candidates and I do not see a particular reason as to why this page should be any different. If the pages were to be merged, it would seem fitting to do the same for every single candidate. Are you suggesting this for every single candidate or just Mike Huckabee?Rtr10 (talk) 09:20, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

The controversies page for Al Gore, Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, etc. have all been deleted or merge with the main article.Jmegill (talk) 09:37, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

I just saw a minute ago that Fred Thompson still has one and it is formated the same way, as is Mitt Romney's page. I don't have a problem with it IF it is done to every Presidential candidates page, if not it seems as if there is an political motive behind the change. Not accusing you of any such thing, but that is how it would come off in my personal opinion. Let's just try and stay "fair and balanced!" ;-) Rtr10 (talk 10:04, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Support per BLP and WEIGHT concerns, and because of established precedent in previous cases. It needs to be done. Lawrence Cohen 09:48, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree with the merge. Superm401 - Talk 10:33, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Merge as guidelines WP:Criticism says "Don't make articles entirely devoted to criticism of a topic that has or should have its own Wikipedia article". Robneild (talk) 11:26, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Merge into the section on the governorship, as these all relate to that period in office...and then take the entire the governor section of the Huckabee biography, and split it out, as it is large enough to stand on its own, and overwhelming the biography article. You can see the parallel in the Governorship_of_Mitt_Romney, which is where a controversies section, in brief form resides, referrring to the single term in office as governor of Massachusetts.
  -- Yellowdesk (talk) 14:56, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• • Added the Wayne Dumond section into the appropriate time frame in his tenure as governor. If anyone can think of a better way to merge the rest of the Controversy section into the rest of the article, feel free. Paisan30 (talk) 14:58, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
• Merge per Wikipedia:Content forking. Fireplace (talk) 15:19, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Merge. Shouldn't have been split out, one other article isn't much precedent. Leave it all here until a real consensus can be formed for a solution, and perhaps crosspost to the Election Wikiproject, as they may have already come up with a uniform system. This is a ridiculously fast moving set of efforts to mave his criticisms, in one form or another, to a second article. Al lot of it seems to be being done by people of the same mindset as the rest of HucksArmy. This has got to stop, Wikipedia has standards, as well as consensus, and the constant attacking of this page by a growing number of HA zealots is dragging page quality down. ThuranX (talk) 15:20, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Dont Merge, but seperate. The candidates articles should be consistent. Fred Thompson controversy section is 1,300 words long, Huckabee's is 1,700, yet Thompson has a separate page on his controversy. That is clearly bias and in violation of the NPOV. If the pages are not separated, then Thompson's page must change or I'll take action with another wiki-board. --SNSAnchor (talk) 18:25, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

No one cares what you will do, and that doesn't change the fact that controversies of is being deprecated across the board. Controversies of has been merged now in both Gore, and Rudy's articles. Good luck making a stand on that argument. EvanCarroll (talk) 18:28, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

---

 Done Fireplace (talk) 15:57, 9 December 2007 (UTC) Merge Re Controversies articles-- Philosophically, I am in favor of such articles. I don;t necessarily see a POV fork. People opposing the edits should just give their reasons for opposition. However, since the Hillary and Rudy ones have been taken down, I'd have to say, for consistency that this one on Huckabee could not endure. Dogru144 (talk) 21:22, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

---

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Proposal: Split governorship section into an article.

The following is a closed discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was to not split the governorship section into a stand-alone article as of December 12, 2007. Subject to revisiting as the article expands.
-- Yellowdesk (talk) 03:55, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

---

Wikipedia:Summary Style is now appropriate for this biography article, which is overwhelmed by the section on the period as Governor, and which I promise will grow now that Huckabee is a contender. For an example, see this navigional template Mitt Romney's several articles: {{Mitt Romney}}
-- Yellowdesk (talk) 15:18, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
See:

• Mike_Huckabee#Governor_of_Arkansas

Proposal: following the structure of another leading candidate article who was governor, using Wikipedia:Summary Style for the Biography, create an article named:

• Governorship of Mike Huckabee

Comments

• Oppose at this time. I am not convinced that the length of the Huckabee article warrants it yet. Although the wikipedia guidelines say 30k, some of the other candidates have extremely long articles. Right Huckabee is at 70k. Romney's governorship article is 87k and his bio at 53k; thus these two articles not split out were double the length of Huckabee. Hillary Clinton is at 134k and Rudy Giuliani at 104k. After 30-40k more material on Huckabee, I would consider splitting the material out. The downside of splitting articles is it separates material which helps form a whole picture. Jmegill (talk) 17:34, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose, period. Stop with the end runs to remove chunks about Huckabee's prior actions. this is getting ridiculous, and bordering on POV tendentious behavior. You can't remove the controversies, so now you want to remove the gorvernorship, so that controversies can be removed. This is absurdist Agenda Warrior behavior, and I'm tired of seeing it all over the election articles. Huckabee's article is fine, stop making up excuses to hide his faults. ALL the regular editors are now aware of the HucksArmy agenda here, and I have little doubt that those HA folks have taken this to other message boards, and into private communication to coordinate their attacks on the page's neutrality. It needs to stop. ThuranX (talk) 18:40, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

I care not about removing the controversies, as you can see the above section's comments, I have said they should be combined. I'm merely saying, based on my experience with the Mitt Romney biography article, that the gubernatorial history of Huckabee will grow and unbalance the biography. -- Yellowdesk (talk) 23:10, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose. Agree with ThuranX again. I'm a little new at the whole page-creation thing, so I wasn't clear on the policy about "controversy"-type pages. After looking at other candidates' pages (Clinton and Giuliani in particular), the Controversy pages have been merged into the main articles. Fred Thompson still has a separate Controversy page, but I think that should probably be merged as well. It doesn't seem encyclopedic to have an entire article devoted to criticism and controversies surrounding a person who already has a biography. Having an article devoted to Huckabee's governorship just doesn't make sense on any level. His presidential campaign is arguably an entity of its own, so that should have its own page. Regardless, THIS is the article about Mike Huckabee. Ideally, the "governorship" sections should include everything relating to his years as governor... including controversies. I started that with the Dumond case, and will try to do more of it later. Still not sure whether there should be a full Controversy section in this article, but I'm not sure how else to incorporate some of the topics (immigration, AIDS, etc.) which need to be addressed.Paisan30 (talk) 19:06, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose. Huckabee's tenure has Governor is over a fifth of his life (over 10 years) and being a Biography common sense would tell you not to remove something from his biography that took up nearly a fifth of his life. The amount of information is not overwhelming and definitely does not warrant creating a separate article for his Governorship. Rtr10 (talk) 21:50, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Did you actually take a look at the leading example?
It's not that big a deal, and there are summary paragraphs to lead into that particular period in that leading example, Mitt Romney
-- Yellowdesk (talk) 23:32, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose The aspects of Govenor are the most important aspects to Huckabee's Biography at this point. I don't know that it would make any sense to split it. The article only has 36K of readable prose.. this is not ready for a split based on WP:LENGTH. If it does grow, we can reconsider at that point. Morphh ^(talk) 0:36, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

---

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

formatting of references for editing

Many of the Mike Huckabee references are in need of attention. There are many references that are blind and do not state the author, source, or date of retrieval, and this prevents the article from being even considered a good article, let alone a featured article .
I reformated how the <ref> and </ref> tags related to the text so that they can be found with greater ease in the editing screen.
Here is what I suggest when people add a reference. The good result of this is that you can locate the end of any reference easily, since the closing </ref> is on the first column of an editing screeen. This should make it easier to add or edit the text of the article while noticing where the end and start of each reference is. And when there's more than one ref per paragraph, then on one line you'll see together on the same line, alone, </ref><ref> tags, showing more than one reference relates to that particular text of the article. Comments invited. -- Yellowdesk (talk) 02:21, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

How the formatting was implemented:

some text at the end of the sentence.NOSPACE<ref>SPACE-NEWLINE
body of reference material hereSPACE-NEWLINE
</ref>SPACE-NEWLINE
Start of next sentence...

The result looks like this while editing:

some text at the end of the sentence.<ref>
body of reference material here
</ref>
Start of next sentence.

---

HIV/ AIDS

Moved this from the article. Another example of undue weight.. Come on.. AIDS statements? This is part of Huckabee's notability? This is part of the problem I have with "criticism" sections. We're going to get every little piece of criticism that anyone can form two sentences around. Also seems like a bit of original research structured in there. Morphh ^(talk) 3:02, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

In a 1992 statement he provided to the Associated Press, Huckabee advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general population.

In 2007, Huckabee no longer advocates a quarantine, but he defended his earlier view, saying that in 1992 "there was still a great deal of, I think, uncertainty about just how widespread AIDS was, how it could be transmitted. So we know more now than we did in 1992, all of us do -- hopefully." However, by 1992 it was well known that HIV/AIDS could not be spread by casual contact.

In the same statement, Huckabee also opposed increasing federal funding for HIV/AIDS research and suggested that Hollywood celebrities should provide additional funds instead. He said that "homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk."

Huckabee now supports additional funding for HIV/AIDS research, but his view that homosexuality is sinful and not normal has not changed.

This ties in with his socially conservative views. It don't know how many examples are needed throughout the article to really drive it home. For example, covenant marriage, abortion, and now this.....A full explanation of this belongs on the political positions page. That is, both 1992 position and 2007 positions. Jmegill (talk) 04:03, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I read some stuff about this very issue just earlier this weekend, I see nothing undue with reporting how the man views, and viewed, HIV nad homosexuality. ThuranX (talk) 05:16, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I also support inclusion (as the editor who originally added it). It's an extremely controversial view and it received wide coverage in the AP, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all the major TV networks. Fireplace (talk) 08:23, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I think Morphh is misinterpreting the WP:BLP standard of inclusion. As I read it, the standard for public figures isn't whether the content contributes to the subject's notability (that would be an extremely difficult standard to apply, as the public figure is already notable for other reasons) -- the standard is that "if an allegation or incident is notable, relevant, and well-documented by reliable published sources, it belongs in the article — even if it's negative and the subject dislikes all mention of it" (WP:BLP#Well_known_public_figures). Fireplace (talk) 08:41, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. Huckabee's past statements about HIV/AIDS have attracted a lot of recent attention. The statements will continue to be relevant to an assessment of the man. (Aside: I don't see the OR that Morphh appears to have seen.) I came close to reinserting the information, but decided to wait a bit until a few other editors have had their say.--HughGRex (talk) 12:00, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

As far as misinterpreting BLP - "The views of critics should be represented if they are relevant to the subject's notability and can be sourced to reliable secondary sources, and so long as the material is written in a manner that does not overwhelm the article or appear to side with the critics; rather, it needs to be presented responsibly, conservatively, and in a neutral, encyclopedic tone. Be careful not to give a disproportionate amount of space to critics, to avoid the effect of representing a minority view as if it were the majority one. If the criticism represents the views of a tiny minority, it has no place in the article. Care must be taken with article structure to ensure the overall presentation is broadly neutral, in particular, header structure for regions or subsections should reflect important areas to the subject's notability." (bold added by me) However, I also see the area described above, so there seems to be a conflict in policy. At the time, I had not seen the recent "news" regarding AIDS comments and I wonder if this would be better served on Wikinews. We could probably fill up this article with the latest news and criticism of the day. However, this biography (the main one) should cover his life in general and not every little statement or criticism of Huckabee, even if it is the latest news story (Wikipedia is not the News). I'm not saying that it shouldn't have some mention under some aspect of his biography and perhaps in a more detail in a sub-article but to have it's own header (making it "important to notability") is way to much WP:WEIGHT for this story. The statements also need more balance - "Huckabee no longer advocates a quarantine" when Huckabee denies saying quarantine. It also does not include Huckabee's reply to "it was well known that HIV/AIDS". My point is not to make it longer with he said / she said. It should be summarized and integrated somewhere. Morphh ^(talk) 16:10, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

(1) I think the policy you quote above is the standard for inclusion of "the views of critics", not the standard of inclusion for controversial incidents. So, for instance, that standard would be more relevant if we were including how editorials have responded to the incident, not merely the incident itself. (2) You're right that Huckabee yesterday drew a distinction between "quarantine" and "isolate from the general population." Without commenting on the plausibility of that distinction, I agree that we should use "isolate" rather than "quarantine", because "isolate" is the word he used in 1992. Fireplace (talk) 17:16, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Discussion seems to have died down. I'm going to attempt a compromise solution by restoring the material under the "Political positions" heading, which seems to more clearly fall outside the "critical views" standard that Morphh is concerned about. Fireplace (talk) 15:11, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

"said homosexuality could "pose a dangerous public health risk.""

Associated Press http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071208/ap_po/huckabee_aids --Leladax (talk) 12:48, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

This is mentioned on Political positions of Mike Huckabee.Paisan30 (talk) 13:00, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Attitude to Women

Besides being a poorly worded section title, I don't think this belongs here. This is the problem with a Controversy section. Should we have every newspaper article (in a British paper, no less) in which every candidate is criticized? No. The other topics (immigration, fiscal record) seem to have received pretty widespread coverage as compared to one article in the Guardian.Paisan30 (talk) 15:20, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree. Undue weight given to an opinion piece. --Elliskev 15:25, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

In what way is 'Attitude to women' poorly worded? Should it be 'towards'? If reference to the article shouldn't be included, which is fair enough, I think his denial of an abortion to a disabled 15 year old should definitely be included somewhere in the 'political positions' section. Tom —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tomcarding (talk • contribs) 19:06, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, "toward". I think that "to" suggests that Mr. Huckabee is somehow rude to women or something. :) I will take a look at the article and possibly put it under Abortion on the Political Positions page. Paisan30 (talk) 21:49, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

---

Dual Citizenship

There should be adequate mention of his promises to discourage and prevent dual-citizenship and to restrict the ability of US Citizens from voting in foreign elections. This could be a decisive factor for many potential voters. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ewindisch (talk • contribs) 21:56, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I am curious. Is this a new political position for Mike Huckabee, that is, being opposed to dual citizenship? Do you have a reference prior to December 2007 where he says that he opposes dual citizenship? Also, what exactly will Huckabee do to prevent the exercise of dual citizenship? Jmegill (talk) 00:01, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Links for reference:

* http://www.mikehuckabee.com/?FuseAction=Issues.View&Issue_id=26

* http://www.nysun.com/article/67734

* Discussion on the Huckabee blog:

- http://www.mikehuckabee.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=Blogs.View&Blog_id=851 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ewindisch (talk • contribs) 21:41, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

I looked at the links. The NY Sun reporter noted, "...Mr. Huckabee's plan is short on details..." and "Spokeswomen for Mr. Huckabee's campaign did not respond to telephone calls and e-mail messages yesterday seeking more information on the proposal.". I don't think this merits a mention on the main page. It could merit a mention on the political positions page, but I question its weight. The proposal on dual citizenship is not well defined and vague. A Volokh conspiracy blogger notes that current US law already prohibits the exercise of dual citizenship and Huckabee's proposal only extends current law to cover travel on foreign passports. Here: http://volokh.com/posts/1197356514.shtml Jmegill (talk) 23:05, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Homeschooling record

I ran across this link on a blog. Considering that Huckabee has a lot of support from homeschoolers, it begs the question what his record is on the question http://www.hslda.org/courtreport/v15n3/V15N3AR.asp?PrinterFriendly=True Any additional material out there? Jmegill (talk) 04:46, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Wayne DuMond

From reading Huckabee's transcripts on Fox, I felt there was a disconnect from what is presentend in the article from the side of Huckabee. Could someone familar with the case and Huckabee's responce, fill in the gaps? Remember that we're not to take sides. Statements like "In fact, ..." and "Even before taking office, ..." have the perception of bias. Also, do we really need to know about his castration in this article - How is this relavant to Huckabee's handling? Morphh ^(talk) 17:00, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Morphh, the castration is important and my own personal thoughts on it is that Huckabee made a mistake by not focusing on the castration. His apology should have been more along the lines of, "the guy was castrated. Normally, people without testicles are a whole lot less aggressive and not likely to commit further violent crimes. Thus I thought it was safe to release him after 12 years of prison." But that is my opinion only. As for the phrasing, the "in fact" should be an "although" and the "even before taking office" should be "before taking office". That said, the section could use some of Huckabee's recent comments in response to the media's current focus on the case. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jmegill (talk • contribs) 18:44, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

The castration is important, because it shows there was public ill will towards Dumond and it has been noted many times that Dumond came close to being killed in prison and many people did not want him to be killed in prison. It would probably be a good idea to start to refer more of the Wayne Dumond situation to the Wayne Dumond page on Wikipedia and remain focused on what pertained to Huckabee in the situation and role in everything. Rtr10 (talk) 20:09, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

The Dumond case should be a separate subsection - it's now included with fiscal management, and the story should be expanded. It would be helpful to show what he said before Dumond was released and his recent statements. The Four Deuces (talk) 00:21, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean -- it IS a separate subsection, included under his First Term as governor. I think there is ample information on this page about Huckabee's involvement, as DuMond has a separate page with more details.Paisan30 (talk) 00:45, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Sorry. It was not a separate subsection when I read the article, and I see that the subsection was created Dec. 9th. Don't know why I missed it. --The Four Deuces (talk) 23:28, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Freeper Connection

The following sourced and previously-published-on-wiki copy was deleted without good reason:

==Freeper Associations==

In January of 2001, the controversial conservative internet group Free Republic organized a "Free Republic Inaugural Gala and Count the Silverware Ball, with orchestral entertainment provided by the sitting governor of Arkansas (Gov. Mike Huckabee) and his band." Among the attendees were James Golden (a.k.a., Bo Snerdly from The Rush Limbaugh Show, an early investor in Free Republic), and the Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson of B.O.N.D.

In January 2005, Free Republic organized an unofficial Inaugural Ball at the Washington Plaza Hotel to celebrate the reelection of President Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney and to honor the men and women serving in the United States Armed Forces. The event was promoted to feature then Arkansas Republican Governor Mike Huckabee and his rock and roll band called Capitol Offense.

The fact that he has a band is important enough to make the lead paragraph. If that band only played for the ACLU or the KKK, wouldn't that be significant? Here he is playing for a politically active right-wing website not once but twice. They're not some juke joint or the Knights of Columbus or Little Rock First Night Balls.

It's relevant, its sourced, its been on the Free Republic website for months verbatim without challenge. It should not have been deleted.Eschoir (talk) 05:24, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't think the deletion was proper. At the same time, I don't think that it warrants that much of a mention. Maybe a sentence or two about when and where Capitol Offense has played. For example, a single sentence saying: "Capitol Offense was played place A, place B, place C...etc. Jmegill (talk) 06:15, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

How about

Capitol Offense

Huckabee's band has played for political events and parties, including entertaining at unofficial inaugural balls in Washington DC in 2001 and 2005, organized and promoted by controversial conservative website Free Republic. The band is polished enough to have opened for Willie Nelson, Percy Sledge, .38 Special and Grand Funk Railroad.

Eschoir (talk) 07:30, 12 December 2007 (UTC) Eschoir (talk) 07:40, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

well, I took at "controversial" because that is a weasel word and just added the first sentence plus a link for the band. Jmegill (talk) 18:05, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Seminary School

I am removing the following from the article and putting it up for discussion here:

There is some confusion in the public record regarding Huckabee's educational record at the seminary. Some public sources report that he received a master's degree from Southwestern in 1980. Other accounts report that he dropped out after attending the seminary for a year, and imply he never returned.

Sources: http://pewforum.org/religion08/profile.php?CandidateID=10 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/magazine/16huckabee.html?pagewanted=6&_r=1&hp&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1197480423-iFOvWJ3XMBCToJGeeKt2hg

The oldest source I have on Huckabee's bio is from 1989. This says that he attended Southwestern Baptist, but did not say he received a degree. I would prefer not to have three sentences in the article speculating about it because the speculation should be on the Talk Page. "Huckabee was born in Hope and is a 1975 graduate of Ouachita Baptist University. He attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. " source: Publication: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Original Date: 06/24/1989

My thinking is that the oldest source is more accurate that any later source. It says that he attended Southwestern. If Huckabee received a degree, the source would have surely mentioned that Huckabee received an MA degree even if it happened a few years later. I think the information that he received a MA degree in 1980 is inaccurate. I would change my view if someone pointed to a source over two years old which mentioned the MA degree. Jmegill (talk) 19:30, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Another old source I have is from 1997 which makes no mention of a 1980 MA.

"At Hope High School, Mr. Huckabee was an honor student and president of the student body in 1973, his senior year. His girlfriend, Janet McCain, was on the girl's basketball team. He was the play-by-play announcer on local radio. They went off to college together at Ouachita Baptist University and married before they were 20. He graduated magna cum laude in "just more than two years," according to his resume. The Huckabees moved to Fort Worth after college. He entered Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and went to work for mercurial television evangelist James Robison, an early advocate of conservative Christian involvement in politics."

Huckabee's not preaching to choir;Arkansas governor leads largely Democratic state The Dallas Morning News, February, 09 1997 by Scott Parks Jmegill (talk) 19:38, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Jmegill, thanks for your input. Your notion that the older sources are most accurate is persuasive to me. Huckabee's repeated comments at debates that he's the only candidate with a theology degree brought me to Wikipedia, because I was curious about this point, and the reference to his attendance at Southwestern in this article seemed indefinitive to me. That led me to do a more thorough search, and I found many online biographies attributing an M.A. degree in 1980, including Brittanica Online. (Here's a list: http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=%22Mike+Huckabee%22+%22master%27s+degree%22&btnG=Google+Search)

The Brittanica Online site is undated, but I wonder if its existence changes your view that the information shouldn't be included on this page? http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9439074/Mike-Huckabee

I've asked the Pew Forum webmaster if Pew could source the 1980 degree, but don't yet have a response. Because the "theology degree" is a persistent part of Huckabee's campaign, I wonder if it's inappropriate to raise the confusion here at Wikipedia until someone can provide an authoritative source?

I'm not trying to cause trouble, but am genuinely interested in Huckabee's qualifications for office and think this is not a trivial point.

Thanks again. Jeff Nobles (talk) 20:23, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

My opinion on the matter is that there is bad information going around. It would be POV to speculate how that occurred. That said, here is link which explicitly mentions Huckabee and Southwestern. http://www.sbcbaptistpress.org/bpnews.asp?ID=17080

that website mentions that Huckabee is an alumnus, but it does not say that he received a degree from there. This was issued in 2003. The google news has some paid archives, but one can make out some information from the summaries http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22Mike+Huckabee%22+%22Southwestern+Baptist+Theological+Seminary%22+&hl=en&um=1&sa=N&start=20 That is, search "Mike Huckabee" "Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary" Sources from 2006 and 2007 say that he "graduated" from there. Prior sources say that he "attended" or "entered" there. You try to figure out what this means. Jmegill (talk) 21:05, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Bad information, definitely, but I can't figure out what it means; maybe only Huckabee could explain it. Had hopes that I could find an answer here, or at least note that the question exists. Today's long piece in the New York Times says that Huckabee's bachelor's degree was in speech and communications, so I'm curious about Huckabee's theology degree, which he has used to set himself apart from the other candidates at the GOP debates. Is it better for this entry not to note the confusion that exists in the public record, including Brittanica Online? There might be a chance that someone with knowledge will read this entry and clarify the confusion. Jeff Nobles (talk) 21:55, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

The information on higher education on the wikipedia page is sourced to Mike Huckabee's campaign website. The link now no longer mentions any higher educational institution that Huckabee attended. http://www.mikehuckabee.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=About.Home Yet Janet Huckabee's page mentions that she attended Ouachita and later in life received a graduate degree. http://www.mikehuckabee.com/?FuseAction=About.MeetJanet The removal of Mike's information from his own website is unusual and without explanation.Jmegill (talk) 22:10, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree; that is unusual. Weird stuff. 22:16, 12 December 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jeff Nobles (talk • contribs)

Found another source: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/mike_huckabee/

Education: B.A., Religion, Ouachita Baptist University, 1976; Postgrad., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (Fort Worth, Tex.), 1977; L.H.D., John Brown Univ, 1991; LL.D., Ouachita Baptist University, 1992.

I assume LHD and LLD are some sort of divinity degrees. Jmegill (talk) 22:30, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Those are honorary degrees. I think the LL.D. is an honorary law degree. I don't know what an L.H.D. is. Jeff Nobles (talk) 22:52, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia says the L.H.D. is an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters: "The degree of Doctor of Humane Letters (Latin: Litterarum humanarum doctor; D.H.L.; or L.H.D.) is always conferred as an honorary degree, usually to those who have distinguished themselves in areas other than science (these normally receive the Doctor of Science), government (these often receive a Doctor of Laws degree), religion (these often receive a Doctor of Divinity degree) or literature (these often receive a Doctor of Letters degree)." Jeff Nobles (talk) 22:54, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Here [5] "He graduated magna cum laude from Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas in 1975, completing a four year degree program in just over two years. He attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas in 1976 and 1977. He holds an Honorary Doctor of Humanities from John Brown University and an Honorary Doctor of Laws from Ouachita Baptist University." —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jmegill (talk • contribs) 23:02, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I added a sentence to reflect the honorary degrees. On the question of Southwestern, the weight of the evidence seems to indicate that Huckabee did not receive a degree from there. 23:23, 12 December 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jmegill (talk • contribs)

Although Brittanica Online and other sources are saying that he received a master's degree in 1980, and I've heard the candidate himself refer to his theology degree. I hope to see the confusion in the public record cleared up soon, either by the Huckabee campaign or a good journalist. Thanks for looking into it with me. Jeff Nobles (talk) 23:32, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Ah, here's the answer to my question. It's online tonight, from Joe Carter, the Mike Huckabee campaign's research director:

"Governor Huckabee doesn’t have a theology degree. He only spent a year in seminary."

http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTdmMWE3MjhjZTgyM2RhYzFmMWRiMzY2MThjZTMxZWY=

Joe Carter goes on to explain that the candidate may be referring to his bachelor's degree in Biblical Studies. This explanation still conflicts with the articles, as in today's New York Times, that say his undergrad degree was in Speech and Communications. But it's now clear that the candidate doesn't have a graduate degree in theology, which was unclear to me before now. Jeff Nobles (talk) 04:53, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

I can't remember what, but something else happened recently which caused me to feel that I could not trust Joe Carter as a source. Carter issued a statement in response to something and then changed his statement by the next day. Carter should waited to check with his boss and get it right. If Huckabee has an honorary doctorate in theology degree, (from John Brown University), then Huckabee can say stuff like "I have a theology degree". Joe Carter may be unaware of the honorary degrees. I, myself, did not know about them until the question was raised....and I still have figure what the subject of the John Brown degree was. I ASSUME that it was in theology because Huckabee was then head of the Arkansas State Baptist Convention.Jmegill (talk) 05:12, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

What a tangled web we weave when we try to clean up our resume to run for high office. I hope to find out why Huckabee refers to his theology degree. I think the best development for him would come if he were able to show that he studied theology in a substantial way as an undergrad and obtained a degree in religious studies and not speech and communications. To claim his honorary degree as a qualification for talking about other Islam and Mormons wouldn't hold water with me. Jeff Nobles (talk) 05:28, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Look on the bright side, there is no source that claims that Huckabee minored in a subject. Jmegill (talk) 05:41, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

HA! I appreciate the humor. Take care. Jeff Nobles (talk) 05:45, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Here's the explanation Huckabee gave today when asked about this, and he DOES lay claim to a college minor!

"I have a bachelor of arts in religion and a minor in communications in my undergraduate work. And then I have 46 hours on a master's degree at Southwestern Theology Seminary. So, my degree as a theological degree is at the college level and then 46 hours toward a masters -- three years of study of New Testament Greek, and then the rest of it, all in Seminary was theological studies, but my degree was actually in religion."

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/12/14/518108.aspx

Jeff Nobles (talk) 21:57, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. Still confused why the NYTimes reported he was a speech and communications major. Let me know if there is anymore information. Jmegill (talk) 23:23, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Of course it's difficult to tell the academic state of affairs at the time Huckabee attended college based on the college's current website, but the school does NOT currently have a major in either "religion" or "biblical studies" but does appear to have one in "Christian Studies." This topic is relevant to the campaign because Huckabee has on several occasions touted his theology degree—giving him unique insight into the nature of Islam—which might have been covered in a religion major, although probably not at small liberal-arts Baptist college at the time he attended. Honorary degrees are by their nature not subject-specific, thus there's really no way they could logically be construed as "theology degrees." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.194.8.90 (talk) 17:15, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

The main article cites the "Official biography", http://www.mikehuckabee.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=About.Home, as one of the references for the information about Huckabee's college education. I looked up the "Official biography" today, Dec 17, 2007, and there is no information there about his college education at all. Am I missing something of did the "biography" page changed recently? In any event, it is probably not appropriate now to cite the "biography" page as the source of info about his college degree(s). On the other hand, it the "official biography" still seems to be a useful site to reference; maybe it should be cited somewhere else in the article or perhaps moved to the "external links".... Regards, Nsk92 (talk) 15:52, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

The information for higher education comes from the MSNBC article. Previously, the source was the official biography. I imagine that the campaign biography page at one time held information about Huckabee's higher education, but I can not confirm that through the use of archive.org. You may be right in that it is not appropriate to reference the page if the content of the page has changed. Yet, it leaves a mystery: why was the content of the page changed? The NYTimes Chafets' article says something a little different: that Huckabee's undergraduate degree was in speech and communications. The way that it is now reflects Huckabee's words and not what Chafets reported. Jmegill (talk) 18:53, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Discussion on Introduction

I removed the following from the introduction and putting them up for discussion. My thinking is that the introduction should have a neutral POV. This requires an introduction which is either balanced in its POV or strictly biographical facts without any mention of popularity or awards.

He was the third Republican governor of the state since Reconstruction and was the most popular political figure in Arkansas for some periods of his tenure.

In 2005, Huckabee was praised by TIME Magazine as one of the five best governors in America and Governing Magazine who named him among the Public Officials of the Year. He also received the AARP Impact Award in 2006..

Jmegill (talk) 02:32, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Agree. The intro should be a summary of the most important points about Huckabee. Unless it is something major, such as Time's Person of the Year or a Nobel prize, I don't think it should be there. Those things can be mentioned elsewhere in the article.Paisan30 (talk) 03:00, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Suggestions for improvement

ThuranX, it seems like your remarks in reply to my first comment violated Wikipedia's "Good faith" policy. You stated without basis that I'm part of some vast plan by "Hucks Army" to whitewash this article, which is, by the way, completely false. I'm definitely a Huckabee supporter, but that does not mean that I'm not part of Huck's Army or that I want to "whitewash the article."

With that said, I read through the article again and think it has greatly improved, but I'd like to submit these items for consideration:

Why is Huckabee's position on Biblical innerancy significant? I don't care whether or not it's mentioned in the article, but the in its current context it looks very out of place (why does it matter, and why doesn't the article elaborate on Hucakbee's other doctrinal positions as well?)

"borrowing," under the "First full term" section, is a bad word choice. Something like "Huckabee paterned his K-12 public education program after..."

References to the band in the "First full term" section should also be reworded. It sounds like Huckabee "owns a band" like the President owns a band, when in reality he just plays in one. Perhaps "Hucakbee played in his band, Capital Offence, for several political events and parties..." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.135.30.198 (talk) 23:26, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Biblical inerrancy matters because religion is a major theme in Huckabee's life. The doctrine is significant in SBC's politics and also in Huckabee's ascent to state head of the Arkansas Baptists. If you read his book, Character is the Issue, Huckabee talks about religion as being a major driver for his entry into politics. And as a politician, Huckabee has brought up religion repeatedly. Thus it is significant and should be addressed. It looks like the education program sentence has been changed. On the sentence for Capitol Offense, Huckabee doesn't just play in a band. That is understating it. The reason why the band has played at RNC, Bush Inaugural I & II, and other places is precisely because a member was a higher ranking Republican politician. Huckabee was the boss of three of the four original band members. Using the possessive doesn't imply ownership, but the band would not exist without Huckabee's involvement.Jmegill (talk) 02:20, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, religion is a major part of Huckabee's life, but why is Biblical innerancy per se so important that it should be included in the article? Why doesn't the article mention Huckabee's position on other doctrinal matters as well? Once again, I'm not against having the sentence in the article. But in its current context, it doesn't fit.

I understand your point about the band. Thanks for the explanation! Ajax128 (talk) 14:31, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Biblical Inerrancy is THE central political issue within the Southern Baptist Convention. Since the conservatives took over the SBC in the late 1970s, they have held that all who hold positions within the SBC must adhere to the belief of Biblical Inerrancy. Huckabee was not the conservatives' choice to lead the Arkansas State Baptist Convention (which is a rather interesting story), but he won them over by affirming their beliefs. Huckabee would have been unacceptable if he rejected that belief. Biblical Inerrancy is what sets apart Southern Baptists from other denominations. The archives of the New York Times and Time Magazine are free and open if you want to search for "Biblican Inerrancy" and "Southern Baptist" in order to gain some background on the issue. As for other doctrinal issues, such as a belief in moral absolutes, opposition to homosexuality and abortion, they are mentioned. Jmegill (talk) 20:13, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Two mistakes here: First, Biblical inerrancy was the central "political" issue in the SBC, but one side has almost entirely left the Convention. Second, inerrancy is not what sets the SBC apart. There are plenty of other denominations and non-denominational churches that also teach inerrancy, and the SBC had a long history before the Resurgence. A.J.A. (talk) 04:26, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Eugene Fields

Eugene Field merits 2-3 sentences, maybe. This case is different from DuMond in that nobody died, nor did large numbers of politicians object, nor did it become a campaign issue like Dumond did in 2002. Jmegill (talk) 02:41, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Agreed... I fixed the major problems and was going to pare it down later. Feel free to do so first if you like! Paisan30 (talk) 02:46, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

coverup of son's dog torture

I have to think this is worth a mention right?

http://www.newsweek.com/id/78241

http://utopiarescue.com/oldsite/stop_animal_torture.htm

Zilcho (talk) 15:35, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

My thinking is that the issue is not warranted by WP:WEIGHT. David Huckabee's actions reflect badly on his father, but the allegations in NewsWeek are the only ones I've seen which suggest that Mike Huckabee acted inappropriately. Yet, I find this quote is troublesome, "The elder Huckabee said then that politics was behind the dog-killing accusation." from here http://www.nwaonline.net/articles/2007/04/27/news/042707arhucksonarrest.txt I could change my mind if other material comes to light which suggests that Huckabee relatives enjoy protection from consequences as result of Mike Huckabee's political power. On this, I question the material's significance. Jmegill (talk) 19:16, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

No. If this becomes a major story, maybe it will warrant a spot in Huckabee's biography. It's going to be a long campaign, and I don't think we want to start adding every controversy for every candidate. Paisan30 (talk) 04:31, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

I've created David his own article=. He surely has enough secondary sources to permit it. EvanCarroll (talk) 07:19, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately, David's page is a reiteration of two news items, rather than a legitimate biography page. Paisan30 (talk) 07:34, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Agree and agree. It's undue weight here until it starts seeing widespread coverage, and then should be explained here as a potential abuse of power, focusing on Huckabee's leveraging the police, not the son's crime, which has inherent emotional weight to it. And the new page should probably get AfD'd. I'd vote delete on it. ThuranX (talk) 14:08, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Please remove the Criticisms section

There are people that want me banned for saying this: and they will most likely delete this, but nothing they can do will hide what is already widely known, that Wikipedia suffers an increasingly bad reputation for being biased. Barak Obama does not have a criticisms section. Therefore this one shouldn't either. If you want reasons why this article should have its criticisms section removed, go here: http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Talk:Barack_Obama#No_Criticism_Section.3F.21. if you are a guardian of the democratic candidates and are not NPOV, you will delete my comment. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.63.188 (talk) 05:58, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. The stylistic decisions made at one article do not always carry forward to other articles, and to an extend, whether to have a Criticism section or whether to put the criticism items in the main flow of the article is a choice of article style. —C.Fred (talk) 06:04, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

this is a false argument to what I am saying and does not apply. The Obama article claims objective standards for not having a criticisms section. Objective standards therefore apply to ALL articles. Either you are wrong Fred, or the Obama editors are wrong. You cannot both be right. See: Law of non-contradiction. The criticisms section for Huckabee, and one that is lacking on the democratic frontrunners (save Hillary), demonstrates an obvious bias on Wikipedia.

But it's not policy that must be applied to all articles. Just a good idea. A.J.A. (talk) 19:46, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

what is a good idea? That criticism sections should be removed from all political candidates, or that just the ones that Wiki authors are biased against have it included and then pose the article off as NPOV? Its not my opinion that Wiki has a reputation for being biased, its widespread. For the sake of the public perception of this website, remove the criticism section of Huckabee. What is more important....your bias against huckabee, or the public perception of Wiki? You are the ones hurting the reputation of wiki, not me. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.108.5 (talk) 20:58, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Then why not just create a criticism section for Barack Obama, or for that matter all of the candidates? WAVY 10 Fan (talk) 23:11, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

You mean why not remove them from all the candidates. I dare you to create a criticism section for obama, and watch how leftist wiki's throw the ole "3 revert" warning on you and ban you. will NEVER happen. But you already knew that Wavy.

Make yourself useful and suggest topics for inclusion. Jmegill (talk) 00:53, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

This site would be useful if editors did not use "criticisms" sections as a bashing playground, doing so in the name of NPOV. Ive suggested that you remove the criticism section, as per

http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Talk:Barack_Obama#No_Criticism_Section.3F.21 Now you could do the right thing and help make WIki's reputation more fair, but its too compelling to be biased on this site, so I highly doubt any editor here will do it, regardless of how bad wiki's reputation suffers. Knol can't get here soon enough! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.108.5 (talk) 01:28, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Kids?

How many kids does he have? "He and his wife, Janet, have three grown children: David John Mark, and Sarah." The comma is missing somewhere since I see three boys and one girl.-Babylon pride (talk) 18:56, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Kids who Kill

Somebody added a section about his book Kids who Kill. The person says it's a children's book. I really don't think that's correct.

JBFrenchhorn (talk) 13:57, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

It wasn;t correct... thanks for pointing that out.--Dr who1975 (talk) 14:31, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

It's not appropriate to add every single nagative anyone ever said about him. A.J.A. (talk) 18:53, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

In essence, I just cited information from the book.--Dr who1975 (talk) 15:13, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Comments on Edits

I strongly disagree with breaking out items from Huckabee's Governorship and putting them in the criticisms section. Material should be dealt with as it comes up chronologically - and if the same theme comes up again in the Governorship, the material should all go in the first spot chronologically. Thus a discussion of Dumond would start in fall of 1996 and all the Dumond themed material would be together even though some of it came up in 2001, 2002. While I appreciate Jeremy's attempts to make the article better, adding content to the criticisms section will bring back POV structure complaints. Secondly, I think this article is not long enough yet to justify breaking into pieces. The first attempt which was to break out the criticism/controversies section in a separate page ended with merging the page back into the main article. The second attempt, which was a proposal for a Governorship section, ended with votes for oppose. However, if someone wants to make that argument, then the first thing which should be done is to put David Huckabee paragraph on the David Huckabee page and the second thing is to put the investments criticism on the presidential page. Jmegill (talk) 05:17, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

The text of the article (excluding references and other markup language) is only 42 kB which does not warrant splitting the article yet. http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia:LENGTH#A_rule_of_thumb Jmegill (talk) 05:21, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

More than half of the article is now Criticisms and Controversies. What was wrong with it before? Paisan30 (talk) 05:31, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

From my talk page "I completely see the rationale to integrate the controversies to their time but its just EXTREMELY painful to read. Its simply too long. I read the whole article for the first time and I wanted to just read his legislative record and I was forced to read about his personality, controversies, personal life and opinions all together in one. I definitely think it will be better if we split it all up so people can find exactly what they are looking for. I also dont think there should be any edit wars. The bottom line is the article needs some type of improvement and I am just making an attempt. If my change causes edit wars we can revert it back." by Jeremy221 Jmegill (talk) 05:34, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I concur with the removal of the following from the main page. It is not notabile. "Huckabee is criticized by the Biblically Responsible Investing Institute for investing in companies it disapproves of. BRII says Huckabee owns stock, either directly or through mutual funds, in firms the institute says “aggressively promote a homosexual lifestyle” through same-sex partner benefits or by giving money to gay rights groups. The organization also complained about investments in casinos and companies that give to Planned Parenthood. Jmegill (talk) 06:19, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Jmegill with disagreement in breaking out the material and putting it into the criticism section (which I don't even think we should have in the first place). Two sentence paragraphs (Other Pardons and Investments) do not deserve they're own section and does not meet BLP/NPOV article structure requirements . Please integrate into another section where appropriate, if it even merits that. The section title of criticism is also an issue and should be retitled if at all possible. Morphh ^(talk) 4:23, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

I'd say the section itself should be broken up and incorporated into the governorship, campaign, or positions sections. A.J.A. (talk) 06:11, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Investments Section

We are not going to create a new "Criticism" subsection every time a fringe interest group criticizes a candidate. The "Biblically Responsible Investing Institute" criticized Huckabee (along with Romney, McCain and Thompson) for investing in companies that are not up to their "standards". This includes Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, General Electric and Berkshire-Hathaway. Anyone investing in those companies-- directly OR THROUGH MUTUAL FUNDS -- is guilty in the eyes of th e BRI. By this group's standards, almost any investor in America would be criticized. I couldn't find many news stories about BRI, but here is one. http://www.worldnewspaperpublishing.com/news/FullStory.asp?loc=TCW&id=1572 Paisan30 (talk) 04:52, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

BRII is well known and their interests are compatible with Huckabee. Since when does Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway promote conservative causes? Bill Gates invested in gay rights groups and Warren Buffet is campaigning for Obama. The article you cited says the BRII approves of three of the ten top companies in America. The top companies are more likely to be disapproved as they are huge conglomerates and pressured to have a good public image. We need to present the information and let the reader draw their own conclusion. They post legitimate reasons why they do not approve of each company and these reasons are against what Huckabee claims to stand for. Regardless if you classify BRII as "fringe" it doesn't change the fact Huckabee is investing in companies that support socially liberal causes and this was picked up by the mainstream media.

Jeremy221 (talk) 07:06, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

It was a blurb in the Kansas City Star. Hardly notable. If anything, it would belong on his presidential campaign page-- not as part of his biography. Paisan30 (talk) 07:45, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Undue weight, doubt it would qualify for the campaign page. R. Baley (talk) 08:58, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Not everything that is news is notable for a biography. To quote NPOV undue weight - "If a viewpoint is held by an extremely small (or vastly limited) minority, it does not belong in Wikipedia (except perhaps in some ancillary article) regardless of whether it is true or not; and regardless of whether you can prove it or not." Morphh ^(talk) 13:15, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Proposal for New, Related article

I was thinking of starting an article which lists people who have a connection with Mike Huckabee (and their relationship to Huckabee) would be good for tying together loose information. List of major donors, long time staff members, campaign workers, people who are on the same committees, etc. What do you think? Jmegill (talk) 08:44, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

If you do end up doing something like that, I would suggest writing it as a Wikipedia:Lists and not a normal article. Morphh ^(talk) 13:26, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Sentences on Personality

I added the following to describe Huckabee's personality

"Huckabee's personality has been described in positive terms as "gentle and warm"[170], "charming"[171],"friendly, teddy-bear"[172],and "engaging, warm, relaxed, and persuasive".[173]. Huckabee's personality has been described in negative terms as "petty, thin-skinned, self-righteous"[174], and "somewhat vindictive"[175]. Mixed descriptions include "best of leaders and the worst of thin-skinned pols"[176] and "charming and aloof"[177]"

I think Huckabee can not be understood without knowing about his personality - good and bad. comments welcome. Jmegill (talk) 18:29, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Last controversies section standing

For what it's worth, of the articles for the 15 major Dem and GOP candidates still running for president, this is the last one that still has a "Controversies" or "Criticisms" section or subarticle. All the others have dismantled, with their contents disbursed and integrated into appropriate sections of the main article or other subarticles. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject United States presidential elections#Status of "controversies" pages for the full list, and a record of the discussions and dismantlings. Wasted Time R (talk) 13:55, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks - I've been arguing for this for quite some time. I'm also thinking the section "Organizations" should be integrated into another section. Morphh ^(talk) 14:17, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Get rid of it! If people start removing it, we will eventually overtake any hawk who starts a revert war. THe controversey section MUST be removed if Wikipedia wants to save face from its vast perception of bias. But you know there are haws here that looovvveeee that good ole' controversey section...it is their bashing playground....and they love slapping down those warning tags on anyone who dare purge their articles of bias. Take away the section, get reverted, and get a warning slap. Thats how biased hawks on Wiki operate. But if you get your numbers up, you can demand the bias of this article be purged. The only way this article can be NPOV is to have that section expugned. Until then, its a biased piece of POV. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.108.5 (talk • contribs)

Appreciate the support but this does not help things. Please be civil and do not attack good faith editors. This is not about us / them - good editing and consensus is achieved through discussion, not force of numbers. Since the other articles have taken this step and a good argument can be made for doing so, the most productive discussion is how best to move forward with integration. We may want to look at how some of these other articles went about the process. Morphh ^(talk) 16:19, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I will move the Wayne DuMond case back to the Governorship section, where it was and where I think it belongs. The other two are a little more ambiguous. Maybe they belong on the Political Positions page? Not sure. Paisan30 (talk) 17:22, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

For something like the 'Illegal immigration' section, it depends upon the context. That which describes Huckabee's actions while Governor (the first paragraph and the LULAC conference, I think) belongs in the appropriate Governor section of the main article. That which describes Huckabee's philosophy and general approach to immigration (much of the second paragraph) belongs in the Political positions subarticle. That which describes the effect of Huckabee's immigration stance on his presidential campaign, belongs in the presidential campaign article (the third paragraph probably). Wasted Time R (talk) 18:25, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Done. A.J.A. (talk) 20:11, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Lead

What happened to the lead? It should be two-three paragraphs according to WP:LEAD and to meet standards of a GA/FA article. I had expanded the lead to two paragraphs but now it is back to one paragraph. Morphh ^(talk) 23:00, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Jewish criticism section...

I think it should be deleted. Its note noteworthy.

Jeremy221 (talk) 22:30, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

It is most certainly noteworthy- candidates for the Presidency making concentration camp references is a big deal for sure. Monsieurdl ^{mon talk-mon contribs} 15:18, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

I believe this is already referenced in the public comments section. No need for it to be repeated and it doesn't deserve its own section, though I don't see that one has been added. Perhaps I'm missing something or coming to this late. Morphh ^(talk) 16:52, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Possible vandalism

>Huckabee supports the death penalty.[132] Blaise (talk) 14:02, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

He does, read the citation. He calls it necessary, but apparently is personally uncomfortable with it. ThuranX (talk) 14:18, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Oh, boy, does he support it. That's not hard to find a lot of sources to back it up. Doczilla (talk) 20:49, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Currency

Is there any logical reason to mark currencies in this article as US$? I think that it's reasonably assumed that currencies referred to in an article would be the native currency, unless otherwise marked. If anyone can point me to a policy on this or give some amazing logical reasons, I'll leave it. Otherwise, this should be corrected. Huckabee's not budgeting with the twoonie. ThuranX (talk) 14:15, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

"Supports murder"?

"Huckabee supports murder and is a hunter." What does support murder mean? BCapp 14:35, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Dunno, it was removed. ThuranX (talk) 19:06, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Looks like someone put it back in there. Definitely needs to be removed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.196.47.247 (talk) 19:23, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, he's a hunter, but what does that have to do with anything? Doczilla (talk) 20:50, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Being a hunter and supporting murder do not belong in the same sentence; it is sythesis and attempts to lead the reader to a conclusion with facts not in evidence. --Storm Rider ^(talk) 22:14, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

I would add that "support murder" doesn't belong in any sentence. Using a sythesis rationale is being too generous, it's much closer to vandalism (or at the very least, it's simply POV commentary). Anyway, it's been removed again. --Loonymonkey (talk) 23:04, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Religious career/affiliation

I am curious why there is not more information on his religious career? How long did he serve as a minister? Where was his church located? Did he work with youth; was he the senior pastor, etc. This seems like a rather large gap in his history. Does someone have this information to flesh out the article? Given the size of the Southern Baptists in the United States, this is a significant issue in the political arena. --Storm Rider ^(talk) 10:20, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

In looking at the article, it seems a lot of the information is found in the "Early life" section. I think it would be better served by putting it in a separate section. Thoughts? --Storm Rider ^(talk) 10:22, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Information about Huckabee's time before political office is not available. The Huckabee archives are embargoed at Ouachita University. The campaign has refused to release the text of any of his sermons. There are a few newspaper articles from 1990 and 1991 which mention Huckabee's election to converntion leader and the general state of the SBC then. So, due to lack of other source material, Huckabee's early books are the best place to look for information about his earlier years. Jmegill (talk) 14:54, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree there should be a separate section. The first section should be called "Early life and education", which is what a lot of similar articles use, and the second "Ministerial career" or "Pastoral career" or something like that. Wasted Time R (talk) 15:11, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

I am not the best equipped to write this new section; do one of you feel more comfortable? I think it would be interesting to readers. --Storm Rider ^(talk) 18:52, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Interwiki

Please add [[pt:Mike Huckabee]]. Thanks. Dantadd (talk) 18:29, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Photograph

Is there a better picture out there than the one with Huckabee and the microphone? There are some, like [6] and [7], that are on flickr without the right CC license. Maybe someone could go out there and take a picture or otherwise find a better pic of Huckabee without the microphone at the bottom. Calwatch (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 07:49, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Trip to India and Association with K. A. Paul

K.A. Paul with Gov Huckabee, Mrs. Huckabee and members of India's Parliament

K.A. Paul with Governor and Mrs. Huckabee with Indian orphans from Paul's Charity City

Mike Huckabee is many things, including a good and decent guy. That is where his association with Dr. K.A. Paul comes to play, trying to do what is right and helping the needy. KA Paul is a Christian evangelist who promotes peace and end to poverty, and has "counseled" third world dictators like Charles Taylor, Sadaam Hussein, Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi and others in the category. Huckabee has endorsed Paul and his work[8], They traveled with Paul from February, 26 through March, 4 2002 on KA Paul's 747sp "Global Peace One", and then Gov. Huckabee hosted a State dinner on July, 11 2005 for Paul and his organization. The fact that Huckabee has invested time and trust into Paul is noteworthy for a guy who wants to be our president. Whether or not K.A. Paul's activities are positive in certain circles or not is a matter for public consumption along with Huckabee's time and attention to this individual. I would't put it on the article page at the moment, but want to hear from others on the matter first.- Juda S. Engelmayer (talk) 18:10, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Are there any third-party accounts? Did the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette or another newspaper publish anything with KA Paul and Huckabee's name together? Jmegill (talk) 23:37, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

After a quick Google search, all I see are Blog post on the subject of Huckabee and Paul which strikes me kind of strange. If this is inserted into the Wikipedia biography it certainly needs to have a more credible source than a blog and some pictures. Rtr10 (talk) 00:18, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

The Washington Times has a story on July 20, 2005 which mentions both Huckabee and KA Paul. However, the mention of KA Paul causes me to be concerned about KA Paul's judgment. Apparently, KA Paul's group took orphans from India to the US without making necessary and proper arrangements. Jmegill (talk) 00:53, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

The Houston Press, a Texas Weekly publication that also has an online presence, ran an article on June 8, 2006[9] by Craig Malisow that talks of Huckabee's connection. In it he quotes Huckabee as distancing himself from Paul. There was a press release by GPI [10] and Mother Jones ran a piece that spoke of Huckabee's connection as well [11] and the Washington Times piece "Holyfield pleads case of sick Indian orphan; Girl's caregiver denied visa to come to U.S.", on July 20, 2005 by Sharon Behn [12]. The Hindu Times, an Indian Daily, ran this piece [13] too. Additionally, this was printed on no fewer that 45 blogs, and while we don't take blogs as news, the info came from somewhere. Also, Huckabee himself doesn't deny it, he just distances himself from it. While many mainstream pubs did not feel KA Paul was a story, we cannot assume that it did not happen. KA Paul has suffered from not being taken seriously by media and that perhaps is his cross to bear, but that fact that it isn’t found interesting enough doesn't make it less true. In a letter to the editor to the NY Times, Liberia's Charles Taylor said he stepped down because KA Paul told him to do so, but the Times, which had the letter a day after he resigned and confirmed its authenticity with Taylor via telephone, did not feel it was important enough to include in their coverage. So I don't always place credibility in what Wiki refers to as reputable sources - Juda S. Engelmayer (talk) 04:35, 10 January 2008 (UTC)