Still more from the Little Shop of Horrors, otherwise known as the bill-filing room at the Arkansas Capitol:
* ALLOW GUNS OR I’LL SUE YOU: Amid a lot of gun nuttery, this may be the winner. Rep. Richard Womack proposes that you be able to sue someone who doesn’t allow guns on their property — including a private residence — should you be suffer “unlawful physical injury” on that property. If you’d been packing, you wouldn’t have been hurt, see?
* AND SPEAKING OF GUN NUTTERY: Sen. Linda Collins-Smith adds another to a stack of gun expansion bills with one to allow concealed carry permit holders to take their guns into the Capitol, Justice Building and courthouses and courtrooms all over Arkansas.
* HYPOCRISY AT WORK: Repubs hate regulations except when it f***s poor people. Here’s another bureaucracy creating bill, by Rep. Penzo, to prohibit food stamp recipients from using benefits to buy “luxury” foods. Define that, if you will. Will require a federal waiver. Etc.
* AND FOR SHEER PETTINESS: It’s hard to beat the shell bill filed by Sen. Bart Hester and Rep. Jim Dotson. It “concerns the replacement of the two (2) current Arkansas statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the United States Capitol.”
They are lawyer Uriah Rose, namesake of the Rose Law Firm, and James Paul Clarke, a former U.S. senator and governor, who, yes, like most people of the era didn’t do well on the race issue.
To understand this you need to know the background: The idea of replacing this statuary arose with Stacy Hurst, the state Heritage director. It arose specifically from her desire to remove Clarke’s statue from the Capitol. You might remember that she was defeated in a House race by Clarke Tucker, a descendant of James Clarke (great-great-grandfather, I think.) Her spitefulness knows no limits, I can testify from personal experience and that of others she has summarily cashiered in her reign of error and terror at the department.
Other states have substituted statues on occasion, however. And, correct, you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who could answer the question of who stands for Arkansas in D.C. So let’s freshen it up.
Let’s go diversity. No old white men. Let’s get outside that old box. How about Allen Sims and Charlotte Moorman. And not in those formal poses. Let’s have them engaged in activities for which they are best remembered — cooking ribs and playing the cello topless, respectively.