In its entirety, a news release from a Pulaski County School Board member this afternoon. You can see the holes:

"The board of education of the Pulaski County School District is pleased to report that Acting Superintendent Rob McGill has been cleared of allegations that he made racially motivated statements several weeks ago. The investigation, requested by Mr. McGill, was conducted by an outside agency, a private attorney’s office hired by the board with no connection to the school district. We look forward to putting this situation behind us and moving forward as we work to make our District the best it can be."

Charlie Wood
(Tim Clark, president of the PCSSD School District, is out of town through this weekend)

This is, of course, the Wood-Clark faction taking control of the de facto selection of McGill as next superintendent. Some other Board members aren't so enamored of the idea. Here's one story with a hint of the district's strife relative to McGill and racial  tensions.

I believe it's safe to predict the future doesn't hold a united School Board. But, what's new?

Ho-hum.

That seems the universal takeaway on the first "fiscal session" of the legislature.

Stephens. Andrew DeMillo. D-G (sub. reqd.)

I do know that -- in a shuffle to move gas revenue to road work -- the administration overlooked also moving some money to beef up the state's woeful environmental regulation of that industry. I'm also running down a tip on a significant chunk of money quietly moved into an energy project that some might find dubious.

It's true that the annual session took away built-in pay raises for elected officials set out in 2009 that would have automatically been taken off the top absent this year's required new appropriations and the attendant pay freeze that was imposed.

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That rally at Barton Coliseum yesterday to defend the Second Amendment (is somebody trying to repeal it?) seems to have had an underwhelming turnout.

The U.S. Supreme Court's legislating of unlimited campaign spending by corporations is even worse than most people already realize. This explains how the unlimited money can pour anonymously into the political arena without disclosure. The idea that there might be some transparency in contributions has been the fig-leaf offered by the handful of defenders of this right-wing court legislation.

Corporations can funnel the money through nonprofits that aren't required to disclose contributors. Can Democrats pass legislation to close this loophole? What do you think the No Party will say about that? Their record of favoring corporations over human beings is clear.

Frank Rich comments on the reaction to the terrorist attack on the IRS building in Austin, Texas.

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.

Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, even rationalized Stack’s crime. “It’s sad the incident in Texas happened,” he said, “but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the I.R.S., it’s going to be a happy day for America.” No one in King’s caucus condemned these remarks. Then again, what King euphemized as “the incident” took out just 1 of the 200 workers in the Austin building: Vernon Hunter, a 68-year-old Vietnam veteran nearing his I.R.S. retirement. Had Stack the devastating weaponry and timing to match the death toll of 168 inflicted by Timothy McVeigh on a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995, maybe a few of the congressman’s peers would have cried foul.

It is not glib or inaccurate to invoke Oklahoma City in this context, because the acrid stench of 1995 is back in the air. Two days before Stack’s suicide mission, The Times published David Barstow’s chilling, months-long investigation of the Tea Party movement. Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history. The Patriot movement. “The New World Order,” with its shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias.

On this topic: A feature on an early leader of the Tea Party movement.

John Brummett examines all the reasons Lt. Gov. Bill Halter should or should not bypass a certain re-election and run for U.S. Senate of 2nd District Congress.

He concludes he should stay put.

The evidence in the last week pointed to a race for Senate. But those hints might all be attention-getting show biz. If he does seek higher office, Democrats best hope he does it early in the filing period, so that another party member is on deck with a filing fee to seek his No. 2 spot. But this would presume Halter cares deeply about what other Democratic politicians think about him.

No, a cold winter and the wackjobs haven't deterred him.

What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.

I'd say this is a good takeoff for tonight's open line:

Survey says 

Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds.

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

John Brummett talks to the new Republican candidate for governor, Jim Keet, and he reiterates he'll run a positive campaign with an emphasis on changes in state tax policy.

Brummett figures he's certainly good for the 3 percent necessary to keep the Republican Party an automatic ballot qualifier.

How screwed up is the Pulaski County Special School District? I leave it to you and the federal court to decide.

But to help you along, here's a news release from School Board President Tim Clark announcing what appears to be the fait accompli of ascension of his buddy, Rob McGill, the acting superintendent, to bossdom of the troubled district.