If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to dive into this week’s Times, and not only for Warwick’s cover story on the race for governor.
The Insider has word of the first effort — by big restaurants — to water down the brand-new minimum wage law. Plus other nuggets of news.
My column reveals that Gov. Mike Huckabee has shut down his CLAPAC, a six-year-old vehicle ostensibly established to promote conservative Arkansas candidates. It did a little of that, but there’s a strong suggestion in the spending pattern — almost 60 percent of $340,000 raised went to overhead, not candidates — that this was yet another Huckabee slush fund. His maneuvering was cramped after I and, later, the Democrat-Gazette shone a light on his spending on travel, a personal political consultant, etc.
Warwick’s column considers the tight race for lieutenant governor and reports some outreach by Bill Halter to a Democratic legislative establishment that hasn’t exactly embraced him warmly.
Be sure, too, to check out Assmunch, AKA Bob Lancaster, who nails the Democrat-Gazette for a bit of editorial hypocrisy when it scolded Little Rock for historical revisionism in adopting The Rock as a nickname — “est. 1722.” Do we need history lessons from a newspaper that has backdated its founding to the starting date of a newspaper it had shut down and that now claims the defunct paper’s Pulitzer Prizes as its own?
Find the links to these and more on the left rail of this page.