Arkansas Blog

I hope Miss Sue will also propose the reinstatement of the Sunday blue laws. Remember those quaint old days when we Arkies could buy a flashlight but no batteries on Sunday? And while she's at it, Miss Sue might as well propose closing down the casino in Jazzyville. And, the horse racing, too. Not only is Oaklawn a sinful place, but it's also a place where the sainted spouse has been losing way too much green.

"... particularly since Madison isn't a legislative power broker." Lol, you have a flair for the understatement, Max.

I'm sure the woman needs a shrink now more than ever. It could just be some heavy astro afflictions, alignment with bad stars, but likely her problems have been mounting for some time.

Ask Senator Sue about killing the extension of Sam's Wholesale Club in Springdale. It cost Springdale schools about $750, 000 per year. Yet, when Sam's applied for the same treatment in Fayetteville, Senator Sue's hometown, she didn't make a sound.

Next came her luny tunes about Macadoodles moving into Springdale. Senator Sue claimed they had drawn bidness from Ark into Missouri thus robbing Arkies of tax revenue. Believe me, Sue, in Springdale we know how you feel about losing tax revenue to adjoining jurisdictions. See above paragraph. And Senator Sue was right on.

However, Senator Sue failed to mention that Arkies flowing to Macadoodles were from mostly a DRY, next door Arkie County and others from Springdale were looking for lottery tickets and competitive pricing. So kill the Ark lottery and we once again can venture back to Missouri for better prices and lotto tickets. Smart girl that Senator Sue.

If any of you are NOT enjoying those huge concrete utility poles placed on Dickson Street and some adjoin the historic neighborhoods in Fayetteville then THANK SENATOR SUE for them. She gave the deciding vote from her committee a few years ago.

In reality the bottom line is that Senator Sue has gone far enough off the deep end to qualify for
Division R of the Corporate Party of Ark.
.

Ask anybody in Springdale how they fell about the fair Ms. Madison.
Or, just ask me. I'm afraid to volunteer the information, using my real name, for fear of a slander or libel suit. But...an opinion......let's just say, not favorable.

Sue, you can get rid of the lottery after I win a coupla million dollars or at least a scratch off once or twice.

It looks to me like Sue paid for that glamor shot and distributed it to the press. Whee doggies. Looks like a mug shot for the nervous hospital. What has happened to the woman's mind?

I think that Max and those who share his insulting, paternalistic attitude toward the poor should do something about it. Instead of whining about it on the blog, once the lottery begins, go stand in convenience stores and explain to those who appear poor or belong to a racial minority and seek to buy lottery tickets that you know better than they do how they should be spending the money they earn.

ARK. BLOG: Fair enough. I've written about this before and generally come down on the side of consumer deteriminism. Spend your money the way you want. Lord knows there are precious few things to provide hope on the lower end of the economic spectrum.

But the question is how far should the state intervene to enable people to make bad decisions, particularly ones with no upside for those doing the spending.

Here, the bigger problem isn't spending by the poor but where the money will go. The record has generally been that lottery scholarship money has tended to most help people who were headed to college anyway. See Georgia. There was a lot of talk and some action in working on the Arkansas lottery to direct that money in other directions, inclouding to community colleges. Perhaps that will happen. I hope so. But, simply put, I'd feel a whole lot different about the lottery if its profits supported indigent health care. You think it would have passed then?

"The record has generally been that lottery scholarship money has tended to most help people who were headed to college anyway." --- ARK.BLOG

Does the record show the total student loan debts of those "who were headed to college anyway"? Lottery scholarships could greatly reduce such burdens.

Ewood,

"Ask Senator Sue about killing the extension of Sam's Wholesale Club in Springdale. It cost Springdale schools about $750, 000 per year. Yet, when Sam's applied for the same treatment in Fayetteville, Senator Sue's hometown, she didn't make a sound."

I'm no fan of Sue but if memory serves me well, it was your city council refusing to allow Sam's to sell liquor that prompted the move of Sam's to Fayetteville.

I would have voted for it, certainly.

I'd love to see an overhaul of the college system that kept technical and remedial courses in two-year schools and funded them appropriately. I'd love to see us remove the stigma that is currently associated with community colleges in some people's minds, and instead see them as performing a separate function, rather than a lesser function. The amendment certainly included funding for two-year schools.

I'd also love to see a public education system that worked harder to seek equal footing for poor and racial minority students at the very early years of their education. This is a whole thesis, but it's the reason that so much of my studies have focused on essentialist education theory and education policy, and the reason I worked as a second grade teacher in a 100% Hispanic school that served a zone that included mostly government housing.

All that said, I don't know if any of that is something the lottery can do, and I don't believe that failures that already exist in the system can be blamed on the lottery. If all it does is help families pay for the education of students who would have gone to college anyway, isn't that a good thing, nonetheless?

I suspect the Senator is reflecting public opinion. If an election was held today on the lottery do you think it would pass? I doubt it very seriously. Ernie done fouled his nest big time. I voted for the lottery but given the stupidity that has surrounded it since the election - Ernie, the legislators involved ,and Brother Thornton - I'd probably vote the other way now since foolishness seems to be running things. Way to screw things up, boys.

Students might have to take out loans, but at least she is keeping their textbook prices under control (sure!). Another damn micromanaging, puritanical legislator. Much like our host, who wants to protect the poor from themselves. A step away from eugenics? If, "those people" are not responsible enough to decide where to spend their money, are they responsible enough to have children?

A Dead Heat on a Merry Go Round?

How will the public vote, if such an effort did make the ballot?

Can the "flake of Fayetteville," as our Ernie "Pass-Me-the-Money" fans, have characterized her, get the issue on the ballot?

Are the daily letters to the editors and the ire at being in effect called "dumb arkies," who can't understand the intellectual depths of lottery set-up and operations, by Ernie "Pass-Me- the- Money" enough to push the majority the opposite way and repeal the lottery? Will the "flake of Fayetteville" 's draft become the stimulus that crystallizes a renewed anti-lottery and anti-gaming movement in the state by the religious and non-religious who voted against the lottery?

Where will Halter and the legislature stand, if the bill does get on the ballot, after Thornton, the Lottery Commision and Ernie "Pass-Me-the-Money" have so magnificently paved the way with their public relations gaffes/triumphes?

There are many positives and many negatives to a lottery and not just because of personal religious beliefs and frighteningly for the lottery fans a larger part of the general public may now realize some of the other indirect negatives from the Lottobery Follies we have experienced the last couple of months.

>>I'm no fan of Sue but if memory serves me well, it was your city council refusing to allow Sam's to sell liquor that prompted the move of Sam's to Fayetteville.<<

Your memory does not serve you well. In fact the city fathers took a trip to L.R. when Sam's Club-Springdale-was denied the permit. They knew what it would mean. The City Council could have done more but they did not stand in the way. This time around with Macadoodles the city council got behind it in a BIG way.

I would still like for some investigative journalism to discover IF Jesus Jim Holt has any ties to
the Springdale liquor monopoly.
.

Another damn micromanaging, puritanical legislator. Much like our host, who wants to protect the poor from themselves. A step away from eugenics? If, "those people" are not responsible enough to decide where to spend their money, are they responsible enough to have children?

And it follows from this, are they responsible /bright enought to have the vote?

.............speaking of Oaklawn, I hung out in my fave shop, this aft, where I'm prone to get
in trouble sitting on my old lady stool behind the counter. A middle age woman walked up and
smiled at me and said, *I've seen you before in Little Rock on election night.* My jaw dropped,
my mind raced, this was not a blogger I met that night,,,,,no she was sitting at the bar with
her boyfriend who's ashes she had just dumped in/on Oaklawn 'cause he loved the races so
much.....for once I had no tart comeback but did think of Cato....oh, she said she had
permission.............but, be careful where you step, might be the poor man's rib.

Wow. Citing astrology to claim someone else is nuts. Pot, kettle, black.

and here we are. and we cann't even get a lottery right. had to hire some folks from where...south carolina? when did they start exporting rocket scientest? oh. only to arkansas. i get it. do you think that the other states that have lotteries went to south carolina and hired their "lottery speciallist" away from them? i haven't heard of that happening. have you? just lucky for us that we had uncle ray. we'd be lost asses if not for him. show me the ping pong balls, ray.

Those danged poor people are always holding us back.

Please excuse my post. Early tomorrow I will be heading into dry counties so I stocked up and it seems I might have dabbled a bit tonight.

Normally I attempt to stay above catty apearance based comments but that woman looks like a an old crazy aunt that my crazy family let out of the attic a couple times a week for Sunday church. Wednesday church bingo, and a run to Liberty Liquor on Asher Avenue.

Classic dingy gray robe and hairdo is a patdown with a spittyhand.

In the pot smoking late teens the aunt was sort of accepted into my afternoon TV in the back room group. During our Jeopardy competitions she would blurt out absolutely absurd answers half the time yet be dead on correct the other half.

we had her convinced a bong was treatment for asthma like old lady Stager next door. We told her not to tell my parents becasue my toughman dad would disown any kid that needed an kind of medical treatment.

Anyway I am beginning to feel guilty about judging a book by its... you know. I think I'll go check to see if my load headed North is still alright before I get too catty.

I guess I'm missing something here. Why exactly should a state senator elected to represent Fayetteville be sorry for getting a nice tax base item like Sam's Club moved from Springdale to Fayetteville? Seems to me Springdale's quarrel is with Jim Holt. He's the man elected to represent them who screwed the Springdale school system out of that money, an act entirely consistent with his political philosophy.

So much for keeping the lottery business out of the hands of the politicians. E.P. was right, you can't trust this business to the dumb asses that grow so well around these parts. Let us pray to the ghost of David O. Dodd that this Yankee influence will pass. (Oh, wait a minute. South Carolina, Fort Sumter, and the stupidest shot heard 'round the world.)

Looking at the picture, I've got to ask, is that an Adam' s apple?

It is impolite to comment on another's appearance. It is even MORE impolite to FORCE others to do so. As in your case, Sen. SueMad.

Professional appearance IS important. Hence, a tip or two.

Genetics can't be helped. You weren't blessed with what's called a "full frontal" face. A professional photographer would gently coax an up-tilted three-quarter slightly-over-one-shoulder shot to disguise eyes uncomfortably close together and foreshorten a nose that suggests a landing strip for model planes.

Those "glamour" tricks aren't posted inside the mall's photo-booth. Spring for a pro-pho and a gay makeup artist.

But that's really the least of it, SueMad.

If you insist on wearing a choir robe without a dickey for your professional portrait, try something that livens up your skin tones rather than replicates the EXACT shade of crematory ash.

A woman's hair is her crowning glory, SueMad.

If, indeed, you had to put down your beloved lhasa apso at 24 because she was in terminal pain, then repurposed her pelt as an all-weather hairpiece, we totally understand owner-pet devotion. Wearing Muffy's pelt on your head, however, is going a tad far.

If, in fact, this is YOUR hair and you think hair this dark makes age this advanced look "younger" and natural, there are professional colorists available for counsel.

Either way, SueMad - could you at least COMB IT? Before taking your professional portrait? CARE about us who gaze upon you if not yourself?

Our professional appearance and grooming, as I hope you're aware, Sen. SueMad, reflect our mental qualities and self image.

Careless, Frazzled and Dead is NOT, in the long haul, a successful demographic pool with which to connect for votes.

Unless somebody somewhere we don't know about is remaking "The Wizard of Oz" and this is the head shot your agent submitted for the role of Miss Gulch.

In which case you're the next Meryl Streep. Disregard the above and keep marching to your own drummer, girlfriend.

Clearly this is an unstable human. I think Norma hit all the suggestions I was going to make, but obviously when Ms Madison ran for office her picture wasn't displayed on the yard signs. Are we sure votes are counted in Arkansas? Or is there some kind of election lottery that flings lucky names at a sticky Velcro board or something.

As I cast a sideways glance into the mirror next to my desk I realize looks aren't everything, but they are something and if you elect someone who looks like they Delta Dawn 25 years after the song came out...I'd say consensus in our legislature is out the door. I'll have none of what Ms Madison is serving, thank you very much. But now that I've looked upon her....I fully understand why she comes up with such nutty bills. Which begs the question...are the voters of Fayetteville high? They were in my day up there...but still?

This is either the most amazing or the most distressing thread I've ever seen here. Maybe both.

Why are the folks running the lottery getting such outrageous salaries. C'mon, the money is supposed to help Arkansas college students, not fatten the pocket of some wannabe politicians.

I concur, John A. But just to keep the pot stirred (ITYS).

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