« January 2007 | Main | March 2007 »
Mike Beebe just announced the appointment of John Tyson to the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees. Football should not be the first thing that comes to mind, but it is. Tyson reportedly hasn't any use for the football coach at the UA. Tyson is issuing a written statement saying he looks forward to helping the Fayetteville campus achieve the upper echelon in both academics and athletics and to "make whatever changes are necessary." Hmmm.
That the minority Otherhood in the Senate will coalesce and vote against all surplus spending appropriations on capital projects until those projects are prioritized, thus preventing the necessary three-fourths vote for approval — why, it's spectacularly good policy and ought to be, and could be, yet another step toward what could be an extraordinarily good session. The problem will be if the Senate Brotherhood and House members rear up in defense of pet projects or petty turf, in which case one scenario would be that the legislature would adjourn without appropriating any general improvement money at all. That would be all right, actually, except for school facilities, and that would keep the Lake View case alive. The best scenario is that, as Otherhood leader Jim Argue suggests, the bill compiling projects would be approved before individual appropriations are. That's simply sound fiscal behavior — to sort your projects and prioritize them before you start passing a bunch of individual stuff. It is not "sad," as Sen. Gilbert Baker says, and it is not personal, as Sen. Shawn Womack charges. Too much of this business in the Senate is adolescence about how someone was treated or perceived himself to be treated years ago. Bob Johnson needs to be generous here. He's the Brotherhood glue and he has won the battle for control of the Senate. He'll be the next president pro tem. He has reformed his thinking, or at least his rhetoric, about general improvement projects. He needs to work with Argue and the others. What could possibly be the harm in prioritizing spending? It'll be up to Benny Petrus to maintain sanity in the House, where they're still living in the past, filing individual little bills for their individual little local projects.
Everybody — well, the Memphis Commercial Appeal a half-hour ago and a Japanese paper, both picked up widely — reports that Toyota has picked not Marion, not Chattanooga, but Tupelo, Miss., for the big SUV plant. Tupelo and Mississippi apparently came with an end run after having reportedly been eliminated. It may turn out that one reason Mike Beebe stayed in Washington Sunday was to meet with somebody in a last-ditch pitch against what would be a very deep disappointment and sad loss for the Arkansas Delta. A Tennessee TV station says the governor there has been informed; we can assume Beebe has been as well. Officials everywhere are saying they'll talk tomorrow — the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce calling a news conference at 10 a.m.
Until this morning, my plan for Tuesday's column was to say that Mike Beebe had made his first mistake. Some of his people back home had been blown away and he'd stayed in Washington for the National Governors Association conference and to attend a state dinner with George W. at the White House. Bad imagery. Bad reality. But now I'm given to understand he has cut short his NGA attendance by nearly two days and is, at this typing, on his way back to Little Rock, then, this afternoon, to Dumas by 2 p.m. I suppose it makes sense to get an assessment before barreling back, plus it may be that these NGA sessions are good for something, though I can't specify anything off hand. By the way, Beebe took the State Police plane, not yet quite grounded by FAA guidelines for routine required maintenance, to Washington. Beebe's people asserted during the transition that the State Police craft had always been intended for official gubernatorial use when logistical and cost issues justify. In this case, it might have well-served Beebe's official gubernatorial purpose to have his own craft in snowstormed Washington than to be dependent on commercial schedules. I'm still checking and pondering that.
For a couple of days. But not column. A little newsiness and lot of commentating comin' in that traditional genre. Check out nwaonline.net/opinion or arkansasnews.com on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
A Fort Smith blog-reader invites me to get down off my Central Arkansas, Alltel Arena-loving high horse (see preceding item/diatribe) and understand that this new U. S. Marshal's Museum in Fort Smith will be a good thing and deserves state aid. Well, I deny I'm pro-LR. I live in LR, yes, but my readership base anymore is Fort Smith and due north up the mountain along Prosperity Corridor. I like Fort Smith; get over there all the time. The way the wind whips out of Oklahoma messes up my tennis, but I have no complaint otherwise. This federal museum is more than a local project; it's a legitimate target of General Improvement money. My point about Alltel was that it got state money after a local tax, and that, as a general rule, state funds for capital projects ought to be spent in partnership with the locals. My other point was that it's a rather hollow victory to beat out other cities for this museum, then get no federal money. "The prize is the opportunity," my Fort Smith correspondent said. Anyway, he said, Boozman, Lincoln and Pryor are working on it.
The snorting at the trough for the $843 million surplus is getting louder. They're coming up on the deadline for filing appropriatons bills. So legislators want to know what they kinds of bills they can file for the General Improvement Fund and meet constitutional muster, meaning for capital projects of statewide, not solely local, purpose. Meantime, uncertainty abounds over this commission the Brotherhood wants to create to launder — I mean funnel — local projects. It'll probably come up in the Senate this afternoon, and we'll see if the Brotherhood wants to pass it without changing it, though the attorney general advises changing it. If they want to get it and their volunteer fire departments thrown out by the court, that's up to them. This morning they chewed on a little of all this at the Joint Budget Committee meeting. Rep. Betty Pickett wanted someone to provide a list of project categories suitably legal for their own separate GIF bills. Co-chairman Chris Thyer said no one outside the Supreme Court could do that and that there was a part of him that couldn't see the difference between money for the Alltel Arena and money for Bigelow streets. Well, Alltel is a big thing that serves people coming from all around, and the local taxpayers anted up a tax increase for a generous match, and a local company chipped in some funds for naming rights. There are three differences right there. Someone asked if maybe the boys from Finance and Administration would provide some advice. Richard Weiss said oh, no, I'm not gonna touch it. Fort Smith people have asked for $25 million for this new U. S. marshal's museum that was supposed to be a good thing when Fort Smith won it from the federal government. You have your unfunded mandates. Now you have your unfunded federal tourist stops. I'm told the Fort Smith people would settle for $10 million. Fort Smith people tell me the whole thing was sold as not costing taxpayer money. The state surplus is taxpayer money. A local hotel and restaurant tax, which Fort Smith probably ought to do before it seeks state largesse, would be taxpayer money.
Speaker Benny Petrus has in mind his own ethics bill, something more far-reaching than Sen. Robert Thompson's now-amended bill that, in the House version, simply bars all current and future legislators from becoming lobbyists for a year after their service. Petrus is fine with Thompson's amended bill, and wants it to come out of the Rules Committee and get passed on the House floor. But he is amenable as well to a two-year ban, which he might propose in his still-formulating measure. He'll probably be joined in this legislation by his best legislative pal, Rep. Chris Thyer of Jonesboro. So far they've mostly compiled drafts and encountered complication. What they probably will wind up proposing is a "hard cap" on the $100 gift limit, meaning no gift above that for a state public official from anyone other than a family member. Over time, this gift cap has come to mean you can take more than a hundred bucks so long as no one can prove it's a direct bribe for a direct action. Beebe has endorsed the hard-cap. Petrus and Thyer also may wind up proposing full disclosure of lobbyists' expenditures on legislators, down to a cup of coffee. This is the "do what you want, up to a hundred bucks, just tell everything" philosophy. Its premise is that disclosure is better than prohibition.
Just made a few state Capitol calls and this is what I found: A wild rush for chunks of this $843 million surplus. This new federally approved U. S. marshal's museum at Fort Smith needs many millions. There's an aging center in Jonesboro lining up at the trough. Colleges and universities are the most aggressive. There's even a meeting in a couple of days in which the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame, a collection of old Razorbacks who have a cocktail party once a year, and which serves no public government purpose and is not remotely a government responsibility or operation, will seek more money. It got a hundred grand a few years ago, about which I'm still seething. I'm telling you — we should get an equal share for an Arkansas Newspaper Hall of Fame. We can throw cocktail parties with the best of 'em.
A piece in New York magazine, not New Yorker, says the future of journalism may well be newspapers using their Web video portals to wrest the role of TV news, which is oxymoronic anymore, and fill a void, the one for "smart people." The piece reminded me of that Arkansas Times blog video of their guy interviewing Mike Beebe while walking backwards and video-recording the governor with a little digiital camcorder. This is going to require more dexterity than I've normally seen in newspaper people.
Look, if the Brotherhood wants to take a small and not wholly unreasonable slice of the surplus to fund not unworthy local projects like volunteer rural fire departments and community centers and senior citizens centers — oh, let's say $35 million — and if it would prefer to survive court challenge to the constitutionality, here's what it should do: It should set up a Community Assistance Commission with appointments to staggered terms made the governor, and it should fund this agency operationally with three or four young CPAs fresh out of college who would conduct pre-audits and post-audits of grant applications and grant dispositions, and it should provide that this commission engage in open, transparent assessment of these grant applications, and it should place no timetable on the work. I hereby so propose only in the interest of good government. You're welcome.
Actually, there's something in the attorney general's opinion on this Brotherhood pork barrel commission (preceding item) that raises a potential sticking point. The opinion observes that the legislation calls for the speaker and president pro tem to appoint this commisson right away and get grants awarded by the end of the legislative session. (That's a mighty big hurry.) The opinion says this does not on its face represent unconstitutional legislative encroachment on executive authority. But it says this falls into an area of case law that is a vastly uncertain. The opinion says the attorney general has "separation of powers concerns." Clearly, this commission is mere window dressing. Rather than write their own pork bills directly, since the Supreme Court frowns on that, the Senate Brotherhood, with House Speaker Petrus sadly in tow, proposes to appoint a friendly and quickie commission through which to run its projects for rubber-stamping. And to make sure everything gets done the way they want, they provide in the law that decisions must be made by April 10, while they're probably still in session or at least in recess awaiting formal adjournment. This would all take place before any objective or substantive review of projects could be undertaken, not that it would. The Brotherhood can do it that way, get sued and maybe lose, or, it can let the governor appoint commissioners and the commission do its work in peace and with greater appearance of independence, at least, after the Legislature goes home. They'll still get sued. But at least they'd have a more defensible position.
Attorney General Dustin McDaniel says — well, his independent-operating opinions section says — that it's not necessarily unconstitutional for the Legislature, as it intends, to create a commission appointed by its two leaders to parcel out General Improvement money, thus eluding the Supreme Court injunction against directly funding locally specified projects. This is the "cheesecloth" Bob Johnson told me about weeks ago. McDaniels' lawyers found that it's conceivable this commission could be independent and that the Legislature was not necessarily delegating its authority unlawfully. OK, then. The next question is whether the Otherhood — the minority comprising mostly if not exclusively good guys in the Senate — will use its size of 14 to block GIF appropriatons requiring three-fourths majorities, until, at least, the makeup of this commission is changed, maybe to add gubernatorial appointments. The motive of some would be to add detached credibility to the disbursements. The motive of others would be to try to get somebody on the commission who'd free up money to someone other than Brotherhooders. The best thing that could happen would be for the whole surplus to get used up otherwise, including capital-project turnback for cities and counties and a road program with money for local governments. That, as I have endeavored to explain, is how the state ought to assist localities. A relatively well-run session still might blow up over this.
By the way, I've been remiss this day in not extending congratulations to the Arkansas Times and its lively blog. The scoop that Frank Broyles was on his way out was about the biggest you could get in Arkansas. To get it as a little liberal weekly 180 miles away from hogaholism headquarters with a new-media Internet outlet and no sportswriter on staff — well, very impressive, Max. Conversely, the Little Rock daily's treatment — a little left-hand-side article on the sports front saying the UA president was saying Frank wouldn't be fired — was quite odd. Of course, Wally Hall had a column at the bottom of the page, but nobody reads that.
CNN was just showing Nancy Pelosi arguing on the floor of the House for the resolution opposing Bush's escalation of the war in Iraq. Then CNN cut away for the breaking news of a woman in Florida reporting on the release of Anna Nicole Smith's will, the one that makes Howard Stern executor. That' all I'm going to say about that. It reminded me of the other day. I was listening to one or the other of the Little Rock radio stations. They played one of the better bluesy Led Zeppelin numbers, the one where Robert Plant moans about how he's got a woman who stays drunk all the time and won't be true and likes to, well, mess around all day. And the station followed the song instantly with a promotional spot about how you won't be hearing any dirty song lyrics on that station. Unless it's old white guys doing that rockin' and rollin', that is.
I just taped a little stint with Roby Brock for Sunday night's local Fox airing of the best locally produced public affairs program in Arkansas — Roby's "Talk Business." The theme of his questions seemed to be that I predicted for years that Beebe would be a great governor, and well, how did I feel about being right? Just fine. But I did allow as to how it's hard not to be successful when circumstances permit you to cut taxes and raise spending at the same time. I told Roby that even he or I could do it.
No, the headline doesn't refer to Vic Snyder's ill-advised appearance on the Colbert Report last evening. I'm talking about all this hogaholic business. Perhaps you are aware that I use our debilitating cultural Razorback obsession merely for personal amusement purposes, and that I tend to get amused more by irony than anything else. So Frank's big sin over 30 years has been egomaniacal, arrogant, control-freak meddling with famously successful coaches, like Sutton, Holtz, Hatfield, Richardson. So now he has his two worst coaches ever, Nutt and Heath, and there's no indication he's feuding with either of them or plotting their removal. And now is when the UA decides to force him out. Odd. Is there some theory that getting rid of Frank will make Nutt and Heath competent. Or are they the next to go? I don't know. I only trust that, whatever happens, I will remain amused.
Maybe you read my column of Tuesday poking fun at Wally and Houston and calling Arkansas a Jerry Springer episode masquerading as a state. I thought I'd go ahead and blog the note received this morning from Wally. He said, "Your column was well written, clever and a good read. You got duped though. The version of the radio interview you heard was edited. I just got that copy and more than a minute has been removed, including me saying, 'I stand by what I wrote,' while Houston was on the air.
Wally ... p.s. I'm going to pray for more hair too." Well, OK, I stand corrected. But I'll need to hear that excised portion to know whether Wally was mousy and shaky-voiced when he said it. As you may have read, I compared Wally's toughness until directly confronted to my dog Scooter, who's been growling at me ever since. No word from Houston.
I've been knocking around trying to learn more about hard-drive crushing, the protocol and industry-wide practices and such. At this point, I'll say this: State government guidelines, drawn from industry-wide ones, say the disposition of hard drives is the decision of the "customer" and that among the appropriate options is crushing/destruction. This crushing of Huckabee's office computer hard drives was one of the biggest; most of the others are the occasional computer hard drives containing such things as sensitive crime information. Periodically, the state makes tapes of all state government servers and stores the tapes in a building down by the river. But there's no need FOI-ing those backup tapes from Huckabee's closed network, because they gave all that to Brenda Turner, Huckabee's chief of staff.
Around 8:30 a.m., ran into Beebe. He was leaving the Capitol to pick up a suit at Bauman's as I was going in. Forgive me for not even thinking to ask who was paying for the suit and assuming, as I do, that, like Bumpers but not Huckabee, this governor outfits himself. I said, hey, let's talk about your thinking on this emergence, on top of everything else, of a highway program. "It's a leak," he cackled, amused by himself. But, seriously, I said. How about I give him my thinking and see what he had to say? Awright, he said. So, right there in front of the gift shop as the State Police security people tapped their feet, I said he had been intending to do no highway program this session but pace and focus otherwise, and do highways next time, but that it turned out that the truckers are so worried about toll roads that they are willing to pay five cents more in diesel right now to head off that dire prospect, and that we happen to have an available hundred million in surplus funds that we won't have in a couple of years because his budgets will be more taut, and a highway bond program would have to be approved by the voters anyhow, so, --- why not now? He said, "You said that, I didn't," and headed off to go get him something new to wear. UPDATE: He paid for his own suit, pays for all his suits.
Vic Snyder's office says the appearance on the Colbert Report has been moved from 10:30 p.m. Wednesday to 10:30 p.m. Thursday.
Mike Huckabee was very good on "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos. He is at his best in this stage of first impression, since glibness and a kind of unconventional, expansive conservatism are his strong suits. His shortcomings on ethics, petulance, thin-skinness and hyperbole can only be learned via observation and experience over time. Yes, Stephanopoulos asked about critics, but only from the conservative side among those who don't like Huckabee's big-government record in Arkansas. Those actually play to Huckabee's appealing unconventional side, making him appear a fresh difference. He can far better answer them than the more personal criticism back home in Arkansas about gift-receiving and hard drive-crushing and petty huffiness. Anyway, I have to say I had this moment of premonition that we were watching a Republican vice presidential nominee. I saw Huckabee talking circles around Hillary's running mate, who looked kind of like a morphing of Evan Bayh and Bill Richardson, in a veep debate. One other thing: Stephanopoulos mentioned only fleetingly that he'd seen polls showing Hillary beating Huckabee in Arkansas. "On any given day," Huckabee replied, adding he thought he would beat her. Ernie Oakleaf's poll showing her up on him in Arkansas, 49-36, last August shows a maximum lead reflecting generic Democratic advantages, subject to erosion through negative attacks casting the Democrat as a cultural liberal unacceptable to white rural Arkansas. That's the essence of Arkansas politics right there.
Sen. Robert Thompson of Paragould has this bill saying that after a state legislator's term ends, he can't be a registered lobbyist for a year. That means a term-limited state legislator would have to wait for the second-year's special session to become a registered and formally remunerated corporate agent. Better than nothing, literally. This counts as progress in a state where, a few years ago, a state senator could handle a corporation's bill, then hire out as that corporation's lobbyist even before he had the good grace actually to resign from the Senate. Anyway, Thompson's little bill passed the Senate 26-to-2 and went to the House, where Speaker Benny Petrus sent it to Rules. There has been speculation that Petrus sent it there to kill it, since Rules is by tradition a speaker's personal fiefdom and, for some reason, some people always seem to think Benny's up to no good. I guess its the car dealer stereotype. All this will be known soon enough, but I'm hereby predicting that Petrus sent it there to make sure not that it would die, but that it would get a do-pass.
As you know, Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report on Comedy Central rounds up congressmen for spoof interviews that air from time to time. So, on Jan. 19, Colbert sat down with the 2nd District's Vic Snyder. They taped for about 90 minutes and the interview — to air at 10:30 p.m. Arkansas time next Wednesday, Valentine's Day — will get about five minutes actual play. Snyder is said to be curious if not trepidatious about which five minutes will make the cut, but is also said to have been impressed with Colbert's knowledge and generally pleased with the conversation. Apparently, since Snyder is a doctor, Colbert suggested that they "play operation," and remove Arkansas, since Arkansas is like your appendix, serving no purpose and not missed if gone.
I'm not sure Denny Altes' bill to set up a system by which the Health Department would keep records of many of our prescription drugs is as dead as reported. Senate president pro tem Jack Critcher was telling me yesterday it's a good bill. The Health Department wouldn't mind the federal money. And, frankly, usually reasonable people have not responded with the uniform outrage I might have expected over a Big Brother invasion of medical privacy. A dinner companion was saying the other night that if the state thinks it can better combat doctor shopping, drug dealing and drug abuse by keeping a record of what she takes -- then it's all right with her. Just now I taught my weekly retirees' class, and I brought up the subject. I expected more vocal outrage than I got. After class, one of the more informed and thoughtful attendees came up to say doctor shopping is a real problem, and, well, she needed to think more about why I was so aghast at this particular legislation. I have long contended that Americans are not altogether comfortable with these constitutional rights the founders extended them. When those rights are pitted against fighting crime, people go wobbly and don't even realize they're doing it. And sometimes they choose practice over principle. If they have nothing to hide in their prescriptions, maybe they don't get so worked up that the principle of individual liberty and privacy is generally at issue.
Bill Goodman was a leading and trusted staff official around the state Capitol for four decades. Most predominantly, he was chief of the legislative budget staff. For the last few years, he'd been Senate chief of staff. But these Brotherhood characters who now run the Senate didn't like him because of some nonsense or other, all falling under an umbrella complaint — which was that his hiring preceded Brotherhood control. So, under pressure from a secret Efficiency Committee confab dominated by Brotherhooders, Goodman chose to resign, take accumulated leave and depart immediately. That was Monday a week ago. Around 7 p.m. the next day, he and his daughter and son-in-law showed up with boxes at the Capitol, signed in at the security station and proceeded to his former office to retrieve personal things. As they were packing, a State Capitol Police officer walked in and asked Goodman if he had the cell number of Jack Critcher, the president pro tem and Brotherhood front man who was chief among those wanting Goodman out. Goodman gave the number to the officer. Moments later, the officer returned with a second officer, saying that they would need to stand by and observe Goodman as he and his family packed up. Goodman asked if the officers wished to see the files he was taking. They said no; that they wouldn't know what they were looking at, anyway. About that time, his e-mail access was cut off. I find all this outrageous. The State Capitol Police security chief tells me this is standard operating procedure for any Capitol employee terminated or resigning. Critcher tells me he had merely asked State Capitol police to keep an eye on Goodman's vacated office. He says he didn't order the police supervision of Goodman's packing; that he got buzzed during a meeting, but didn't return the officer's call immediately, and that, by the time he returned the call, was merely informed after the fact that Goodman had been in and that two officers had observed. He said he would not have directed the officers to stand by had he been asked. Critcher says, "If he was there with his family, and subjected to that, and thought I had something to do with it — I'm sorry."
The legislative report: The House passed Keven Anderson's $75-per-dependent tax credit as an expression of preference and support for Speaker Petrus. But that's all it was. Petrus and Beebe are close to separate agreement as outlined previously: Giving the governor his halving of the grocery tax and giving Petrus, and poor folks, a raised floor for application of the personal income tax as well as a larger manufacturer's sales tax reduction on utilities than Beebe has proposed. The holdup is for Beebe to figure out where to take a few million from his budget.
Meantime, Denny Altes' bill to report your drug prescriptions to the state Health Department set off a vigorous debate in the Senate this afternoon, and Altes pulled it down. It was sent back to the Senate Public Health Committee.
At the uncivilized time of 7 a.m., just moments ago, I did a half-hour on C-Span's Washington Journal on the subject of Mike Huckabee. It was interesting, to me, anyway. The second caller was a woman from El Dorado who wanted me to make sure I told the nation how thin-skinned and ethically suspect Huckabee was, and to explain his office-departing actions on that emergency fund and those computer hard drives. So, I did, as best I could. Later, a man calling from Virginia said Huckabee ought to be brought up on criminal charges for crushing those hard drives. A woman from California followed up to say much the same thing. A guy from Albuquerque called to say it was important for conservatives to hear what I was saying about Huckabee's growing state government over a decade. This Huckabee is no conservative, the man said. A guy from New York said we don't need another religious "cultist" as president. I found myself trying to temper these intense criticisms. After all, I promised Huckabee I'd be careful in what I said about him. Perhaps we shouldn't read too much into things said by persons calling C-SPAN at 7 a.m. And that's Central time.
The morning Little Rock paper has a front-page piece with House Speaker Benny Petrus saying essentially one of the things that my Sunday column will predict — that we'll end up with Gov. Beebe's grocery tax halving along with two watered-down versions of Petrus' counterproposals. Those would be income tax relief for the very poorest state income taxpayers and a higher reduction in the manufacturers' utility sales tax than Beebe has recommended. For Petrus to admit this even before his and Keven Anderson's $75-per-dependent tax credit gets voted on and surely passed in the House, and apparenty suggest not even voting on that bill but coming up with a fresh bill to raise the minimum income tax level insead — well, there's straight-shooting in that, and an eschewing of any game-playing. Beebe always said that Benny wasn't hard-headed. Beebe will have to agree and find a few million to cut in his budget. Surely there's something in that 7.5 percent increased spending the governor has recommended. Higher education, due for 10 percent raises, is probably covering up.
Speaker Petrus' alternative to Gov. Beebe's grocery tax halving — a $75 per dependent tax credit now amended to extend to individuals under $25,000 in annual income and families under $50,000 — sailed out of the House Revenue and Tax Committee. Of course. Its sponsor, Republican Keven Anderson of Rogers, is committee chairman. It'll be passed on the House floor by Monday, if not the weekend. The House usually works on Fridays, and procedural rules can always be suspended by a two-thirds vote — if the speaker wants to flex even more muscle. That'll mean the Senate will have passed Beebe's and sent it to the House, and that the House will have pased Petrus' and sent it to the Senate. Everybody is just going to sit tight like that for a while. I'd tell you how I think it'll turn out, but I wouldn't want to scoop my Sunday column, already written and to be plopped down this afternoon on at least one paper's advance-printed Sunday editorial section. By the way, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families is not so enamored of the Petrus-Anderson income tax credit. They'd wanted a real earned income tax credit like the federal government's, meaning one refundable in cash if credits exceeded tax liability. So, they're kind of sitting out there moderately pleased, if not ecstatic, that poor families will get some help one way or the other.