Arkansas Blog: There are none so brilliant ...

... as those who quote us.

Such as The Leader, Garrick Feldman's spunky paper up in North Pulaski, where editorials by our friend Ernest Dumas this week include:

The similarities between Mike Huckabee and Mike Beebe, despite Huckabee's obligatory support of the champion of watering down Huckabee's school standards, Asa Hutchinson.

The immigration raid on the Men's Grill at the Country Club of Little Rock, which has crammed the inadequate County Jail, badly in need of room for real criminals, with dangerous waiters and lawn mowers. Moral:

Last year, the arrest of 199 illegal immigrant workers at the Petit Jean poultry plant at Arkadelphia, separating 30 children from their parents, gave people in that community a new perspective on the immigration issue. Gov. Huckabee denounced the raid. Unless our knowledge of the locker room and the men’s grill at the LRCC is badly amiss, there have been many maledictions there about illegal aliens soaking up their taxes.

In a way, the LRCC raid is a microcosm of this burning issue. It is the business class that has reaped the rewards of the vast influx of hard-working people who have poured across our borders looking for low-wage jobs. It may take a few more bucks now to get the tables bused and the fairways manicured at the CC.

Huckabee monuments, and Huckabee's willingness to have his political appointees name things -- two nature centers, a building at the blind school and a lake -- for him and family. It's unprecendented in-office veneration among Arkansas governors. Even Faubus claimed only a paltry single edifice.

Good manners and good taste change, we guess, but we liked it when statesmen exercised modesty and diffidence and let the judgment of history pass on their worthiness for memorials and monuments.

Comments

Now I might be wrong and time will tell the tale, but I'm betting a whole lot of these Huckabee monuments will be renamed for someone else before the end of this decade.

I got my eye on this little run down school near my house. I'm wondering what it would take to get it renamed DeathbyInches Elementary? The old guy it was named for has been dead for years.

Call their little football team the DBI Ghosts...something like that...something to scare the little kids in the other schools. Could call them the DBI FEMAs.....that scares me!

Posted by: Deathbyinches | August 30, 2006 10:38 PM

I've always wanted to have a landfill named after me...or, wait a minute...that's Marky GOP 73s legacy...

Posted by: rosso | August 30, 2006 10:53 PM

"Dale Bumpers presided over a massive construction program at state institutions but he allowed none of the buildings, schools or parks to be named for him."

Hey, it's not fair to compare apples to oranges. Senator Bumpers was a man of class, not a cheap, small-town ego.
Even Rwingnut David Saunders today had to pay homage to Sen Bumpers. I doubt ten years from now Huckabee will get much more than passing interest as he becomes (maybe) dean of Quachita Baptist.

Posted by: Lwood | August 31, 2006 01:03 AM

The Leader, where have you been all my life? Great editorial!

Until corporate America divorces illegal immigration, we'll have gut-wrenching stories like these.

I don't think stuff should be named after a person until that person is dead. Smells too much like a$$ ki$$ing.

I'd be proud for my kid to attend DBI Elementary.

Posted by: hugh mann | August 31, 2006 01:27 AM

I thought this title was for a feature on the death of a truly American Great - Glenn Ford.

Not able to sleep, I turned to the BBC and saw this sad bit of news.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/1037210.stm

Ford was a great actor and we will all be better for having witnessed his work. He is one of the last of the "GREATS" that Hollywood produced.

I rank Ford with John Wayne, Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant, and other greats of that era.

The BBC Article quotes Ford as having said once, "I don't look back. I only think about the next day, the next dinner and the next film."

We should all recognize and take that wisdom to heart!

Posted by: The Roaming Gnome | August 31, 2006 03:32 AM

And I hear that if the employees of these Nature Centers don't answer the phone with "Governor Mike Huckabee Delta Rivers Nature Cente or Janet Huckabee Arkansas River Valley Nature Center" that they will be officially reprimanded.

Posted by: ARKDEMOCRAT | August 31, 2006 07:23 AM

How arrogant and un-Jesus like. I'd say he'll never be able to inflict his arrogant self on the nation but...after monkeyboy anything is possible. I don't know if we can go any lower than the incompetent idiot we now have in the White House.

I detest the use of taxpayer money to memorialize taxpayer's employees. Universities/public schools are the worst. A casual glance around most school districts and you'd think the superintendents (or board members) personally funded and built most of em. I know there are exceptions, but in general government employees are unique in their propensity to forget that raising/allocating money for projects is their job...and a paycheck, not a memorial, is the appropriate compensation.

Posted by: zelda | August 31, 2006 08:04 AM

If the guv wants to be remembered by naming taxpayer property closely associated with him, then I propose that we put his name on the state airplane, which we can lovingly call the "Preacher's plane" forevermore

Posted by: downtowner | September 1, 2006 08:05 AM

Arkansas Blog

There are none so brilliant ...

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