It was a good week for …
DARREN MCFADDEN. The former running back was drafted fourth in the NFL draft, by Oakland. He’ll be signing a multimillion-dollar contract. Running mate Felix Jones was also a first-round pick, by Dallas, at No. 22.
HILLARY CLINTON. She still faces long odds, but polls indicated she was closing ground on Democratic presidential nomination rival Barack Obama.
ACCOUNTABILITY. The state Higher Education Coordinating Board approved a rule that will tie a tenth of college funding to the number of students who stay enrolled.
RABBLE-ROUSING. Businessman Gene Pfeifer created a website to spur the Clinton Presidential Foundation to make good on a promise to convert an abandoned railroad bridge to a pedestrian/bike path over the Arkansas River. He got a quick reassurance from the foundation that it planned to follow through.
It was a bad week for …
POLITICAL DEMONSTRATIONS I. Micah Qualls, a waitress at Central Flying Service, was fired for leaving work briefly to greet an arriving John McCain with a Hillary Clinton campaign sign. (See Max Brantley’s column.)
POLITICAL DEMONSTRATIONS II. Out of all the causes in all the world that college students could be fired up about, a group at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville decided the most important was to get the law changed to allow students to pack weapons on campus. Phi Beta Kappa material these bozos are not.
MAGNOLIA. Police arrested Donna Sanders, a former Magnolia teacher, for supplying alcohol to teens and taking girls aged 12 and 13 to El Dorado motels to have sex with men.
TIM WILLIAMSON. The prosecutor from Mena finally reported on his long reinvestigation of the 1989 death of a Searcy County girl, Janie Ward, whose cause has received great attention primarily because of obsessive, conspiracy-laced coverage by Democrat-Gazette columnist Mike Masterson. It wasn’t a homicide, Williamson said. This won’t satisfy Masterson or the girl’s family, of course.