A pair of dark horse Republican presidential candidates are in the dog house after separate news stories discussing a number of different possible ethics violations.

The Denver Post reported Thursday that Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, “published the same news release on his U.S. House and campaign websites, despite ethics rules prohibiting ‘campaign or political activity from taking place in a congressional office.’”

At issue are two identical news releases dated Oct. 23 entitled “Tancredo Introduces ‘No- Match’ Letter Legislation.” Posted on the immigration reformer’s campaign website and his taxpayer-funded U.S. House website, they decry a federal court decision blocking the Department of Homeland Security from sending letters to employers seeking to verify workers’ immigration status.

These were not the first identical postings Tancredo has used for his congressional work and presidential campaign. On Oct. 11, the same news release lambasting officials in El Paso for opposing a border fence also appeared on both websites.

The House rule book on campaign activity says members’ campaigns must wait a few days after a news release is issued before reproducing its contents. [SUSAN GREENE - Denver Post]

And perhaps more damaging is a story that ran on the American Spectator Wednesday that delved beneath the skin of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to discover, “a guy with a thin skin, a nasty vindictive streak, and a long history of imbroglios about questionable ethics.”

Once, Gov. Huckabee even had the gall to file suit against the state ethics commission. He lost.

Fourteen times, the ethics commission — a respected body, not a partisan witch-hunt group — investigated claims against Huckabee. Five of those times, it officially reprimanded him. And, as only MSNBC among the big national media has reported at any real length, there were lots of other mini-scandals and embarrassments along the way.

He used public money for family restaurant meals, boat expenses, and other personal uses. He tried to claim as his own some $70,000 of furniture donated to the governor's mansion. He repeatedly, and obstinately, against the pleadings even from conservative columnists and editorials, refused to divulge the names of donors to a “charitable” organization he set up while lieutenant governor — an outfit whose main charitable purpose seemed to be to pay Huckabee to make speeches. Then, as a kicker, he misreported the income itself from the suspicious “charity.”

Huckabee has been criticized, reasonably so, for misusing the state airplane for personal reasons. And he and his wife, Janet, actually set up a “wedding gift registry” (they had already been married for years) to which people could donate as the Huckabees left the governorship, in order to furnish their new $525,000 home.

According to the Arkansas News Bureau (Feb. 1, 2003), “Huckabee's personal lawyer, Kevin Crass of Little Rock, has said Huckabee believes there should be no limit on gifts short of a bribe.” After all, said Janet Huckabee, public officials like her husband should be automatically trusted: “Until you absolutely positively know that the man has outright lied to you, it should be enough that the man's word is that everything was done appropriately, legally, to the best of his knowledge to the letter of the law.”

Of course, her reasoning refutes itself: If one is precluded from even questioning “the man's word,” how can one possibly find out in the first place whether the official “has outright lied to you”?

It must be said that a fair-minded journalist ought to tread lightly in scrutinizing a candidate's spouse; but in Janet Huckabee's case, she is a politician in her own right, having run unsuccessfully for Arkansas Secretary of State. Voters overwhelmingly rejected her, perhaps because they remembered her propensity for other outrageous statements — such as the time when she defended secrecy about the donors to her husband's “charity” by saying that a donor's name “wouldn't be enough. [Then] you'd want to know who he was married to, and then his wife would be German descent, and you'd have Mike, you'd have him responsible for 600,000 killings of Jews.”

Huh?

Of course, nobody accused Huckabee of genocide. But his skin is so thin that when various underlings in his administration, even for bureaus as small as the state film office, crossed ethical lines (some of them, admittedly, rather minor), the governor consistently and angrily attacked the media for reporting the transgressions rather than demanding that the transgressors make things right.

Finally, Gov. Huckabee had a propensity to be almost as prodigal with pardons as was his famous predecessor by the name of Clinton. Indeed, Hillary Clinton's campaign team is probably licking their chops at the prospect of Huck as the nominee, because one of his pardons, in particular, was so outlandish as to make Willie Horton's case in Massachusetts seem almost child's play by comparison. After Huckabee helped secure the release of already-well-known rapist Wayne Dumond, the released convict sexually assaulted and murdered a woman in Missouri.[QUIN HILLYER - American Spectator]