Vote for tax, despite doubts
We wish in vain for the perfect tax proposal, one that addresses a need that everyone concurs is unavoidable with a remedy that everyone considers wise.
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Slumping incomes
Another day, another depressing economic report. Now it is the U.S. Census Bureau reporting on its 2005 household survey, which showed median family incomes slumping swince the turn of the century, in Arkansas a whopping 7.2 percent over the five years.
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Huck frees another one
Another killer has been paroled, and questions have been raised about Gov. Huckabee's involvement.
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Where was the president?
There was a time — up to about a year ago, in fact — when a presidential visit was a big event in rural vineyards like Arkansas. When President Reagan swooped into Little Rock for an eleventh-hour campaign visit to plug Arkansas Republican candidates for federal office, every moment of his sojourn was public from his deplaning to the emplaning.
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Brothers or enemies
The Arkansas Times blog raised an intriguing question this week. How long can Gov. Huckabee hold out before he endorses Democrat Mike Beebe over Asa Hutchinson in the governor’s race?
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Raid unmasks country club
Someone in the federal establishment has a perfect sense of the sublime. He or she caused the U. S. Immigration and Customs services to raid the Little Rock Country Club last week and arrest 11 immigrant employees, illegal aliens almost certainly, because they did not have good citizenship papers.
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Huckabee monuments
You have an invitation to attend the grand opening and dedication of the Janet Huckabee Nature Center on the Arkansas River at Fort Smith on Thursday. We understand that it is quite an impressive place.
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More choices for voters
Jim Lendall, the copiously bearded former state representative, is not going to be the next governor of Arkansas, and he doesn’t expect to be.
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Judge sees the light
It does not speak especially well for judicial reflection, but Pulaski Circuit Judge Jay Moody reversed himself yesterday afternoon and ruled that the Bryant School District could close the little Paron High School immediately and educate the youngsters in schools that can offer them more education for much less of the taxpayers’ money.
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Beebe wants it both ways
Attorney General Mike Beebe, doing his best Bill Clinton imitation, tried to have it both ways when the state newspaper asked him about intelligent design, the theory that a supreme being created the universe.
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Inheritance for superrich
Sen. Mark Pryor’s vote against the omnibus bill that tied an increase in the minimum wage to the virtual repeal of the estate tax did not strike us as a politically dangerous act, but it apparently worried him.
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Candidates pandering
Voters know by now not to invest much confidence in what a candidate for governor says about taxes during a heated campaign. The budget realities a year from now will determine what he does about taxes.
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College bonds: They're baack!
Gov. Huckabee signed a proclamation last Thursday putting $250 million of college construction debt on the ballot again, less than a year after its defeat at a special election.
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‘Good,’ ‘bad’ governors
Economic statistics can prove to be so perverse, but rarely to such an extreme as the report card that the Arkansas Policy Foundation issued the past week on the job-creating performance of Arkansas governors since World War II.
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The Fed does nothing
After 17 straight periods in which it raised benchmark interest rates, the Federal Reserve yesterday lay doggo. Equity exchanges, bond markets, traders and economists everywhere waited for that news and then, their prayers answered, didn’t know what to make of it. The indexes fluctuated wildly and then finished, very oddly, lower across the board.
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Casinos Royale
By winter, Arkansas will have casinos at Hot Springs and West Memphis, the first since Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller shut down the illegal ones at Hot Springs in 1968.
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Adios, Paron
Should anyone by now have any doubts, the seven justices of the Arkansas Supreme Court let it be known this week that they are serious about finally requiring the state to follow the state Constitution’s 130-year-old mandate that it provide a good education to every child, equally and efficiently.
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Huckabee in Frisco
Gov. Huckabee pops up nowadays in the most unusual venues, newspaper offices, as he plies his unofficial campaign for president.
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Special election is ill adviced
Pulaski County, which is too broke to afford to house hardly any new prisoners, is about to get $100,000 deeper in debt and be out of jail options because of the quorum court’s ill-advised decision to hold a special election.
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Internet disputes
Every-thing’s up to date in Arkansas this week, with a pair of high-tech news items grabbing our attention.
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We'll pay piper twice
Did you catch the numbing remark in the state newspaper this week about the land value of the rugged slopes south of Lake Maumelle that the water utility for central Arkansas is trying to buy to keep your water safe?
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