Gee, why does this ring hollow? Couldn’t be because Arkansas Republicans cry wolf so much is it?
Little Rock, Ark. – The state Republican Party filed a complaint with the Arkansas Ethics Commission Tuesday against State Representative Barry Hyde, D-North Little Rock, for alleged improper use of campaign carryover funds and failure to correctly disclose expenditures relating to his State Senate campaign.
Hyde says website and consulting expenses were for the 2010 race, not the Senate race. He said he hasn’t been billed yet for website and consulting work for the 2012 race, though some work has been done. But he said he “might have a problem” on the newspaper ads and has been talking to the Ethics Commission about it. His explanation is that he makes an annual purchase of newspaper ads of a public service nature, which would be allowable with his carryover up to an amount equal to his salary. But those ads were converted to Senate campaign ads without being charged as Senate expenses. And the money for those ads, though perhaps devoted in part to community service advertising, clearly came from money in excess of his pay. It “gets confusing,” dealing with all the deadlines and reports and exceptions, Hyde said. If an error was made, he said, it was an “honest one.” He said he’d never had a complaint about his reporting before and that he takes the responsibility seriously. “We’ll explain ourselves to the Ethics Commission. .. We’re going to do the best we can and when we make an error we’re going to do what it takes to make them right.”
I doubt this gets any traction or has any real substance to it. Most likely it will turn out like the Republican complaints about the state cars or the complaint they filed against Hudson Hallum and will go nowhere. Why do I say that? Because Republicans have pulled this shit so much that they don’t have an ounce of credibility on filing these ethics complaints. Doyle Webb must have been the little kid that always went running to Mommy or the the teacher with a made up story to get the other kids in trouble, because that’s how the Arkansas GOP behaves under his leadership. Personally, my time is too valuable to be wasted by twerps like this.
Odd, considering that the Left never had a problem with ethics complaints when they were filing them one right after the other against Republicans such as Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. Frivolous ones, at that.
I suspect this post was nothing more than the boilerplate liberal tactic of projection. Correct, no?