• Sen. Mark Pryor announced his opposition to changing U.S. Senate filibuster rules.
• Green Party candidate Bobby Tullis launched his campaign for state Treasurer.
• Jason Tolbert notes Rick Crawford’s response to news of his bankruptcy years ago.
• Blue Hog Report examines Mr. Crawford’s donor rolls and finds a connection to Karl Rove.
• Max Brantley of Arkansas Times wonders when Democrats in Arkansas will get moving to fill big job vacancies for U.S. Attorney, etc.?
• John Brummett of Stephens Media thinks the timing of Jim Keet’s assault on state cars is good.
• Suzi Parker reports that Chelsea Clinton’s pending nuptials are driving up attendance at former President Bill Clinton’s residence in Fayetteville, Ark. where he and Hillary Rodham were married.
• And in national news . . . Shirley Sherrod is suing Andrew Breitbart; Snookie-gate, really?’; What happens if we leave Afghanistan?; Gary Shteyngart on how to find time to read in the age of Facebook; Sarah Palin’s new book; Movie watch: Miral, Thor, Get Low; RIP: Maury Chaykin; Dan Shaughnessy is sky-high about the Sox; John B. Taylor of Stanford University responds to the Blinder-Zandi paper; and Red Sox are OFF (GB: 7).

Thanks for reading.

Arkansas

The Pryors: Sen. Mark Pryor (D) is the son of former Sen. David Pryor (D).

Hard to quarrel with it.

Mr. Crawford’s campaign rhetoric has been very harsh on the issue of spending. For example, on his campaign website he writes,

If businesses in America spent money the way the federal government does, they would be in bankruptcy.  If people ran their personal finances the way Congress does, they would be in jail.When is this reckless spending going to stop?  It will stop when we unite to send citizen legislators to Congress who will not cave to the Washington-loving professional politicians.

Rhetorically, I have to ask: Does Mr. Crawford have any credibility on this issue?

The Arkansas Times’ own Arkansas Blog takes the top honors. I’m joined by Jason Tolbert’s The Tolbert Report, who I spar with regularly on Twitter and co-author (along with Roby Brock of Talk Business) The Arkansas Election Line, and Kat Robinson’s Tie Dye Travels, which has some of the best food writing around, in the runner-up spot.

As always, thanks for reading.

. . . we estimate that, without the government’s response, GDP in 2010 would be about 6½% lower, payroll employment would be less by some 8½ million jobs, and the nation would now be experiencing deflation.

Ezra Klein of The Washington Post spoke to Mr. Zandi today. In that interview, Mr. Zandi continued,

Any individual aspect could’ve been a failure, or not very effective. But the totality was successful. It ended the recession much sooner than otherwise would’ve been the case and it forestalled a much larger decline in our output. And at the end of the day, it saved taxpayers money. it would’ve cost us a lot more if we had not responded.

As I’ve written before, Arkansas Republicans refuse to engage in a dialogue about the impact of TARP and the stimulus. To them, it’s the impact of this spending – and particularly the stimulus – that has placed increased the deficit. What they have refused to consider is the position the American economy would be in without it.

This should give new fuel to Sen. Blanche Lincoln to engage in a more honest dialogue about the virtue of the federal stimulus. If the American economy would have been substantially worse resulting in, among other things, 8.5 million more people to be out of work, why are Republicans right to oppose it?

The DCCC is broadening its list of Democratic-held seats it plans to spend to protect, including party-held open seats Arkansas’s 1st and 2nd districts, Indiana’s 8th District, Massachusetts’s 10th District, Michigan’s 1st District, New Hampshire’s 2nd District, Pennsylvania’s 7th District, Tennessee’s 8th District, Washington’s 3rd District, and Wisconsin’s 7th District.

For context, this chart from The New York Times notes the comparative grant funding to fight obesity compared to the funding used to fight smoking. If the numbers are suggestive of anything it’s that obesity is our great public health challenge.

In Arkansas, this should matter to voters. In the context of health care, obesity related medical costs may be as high as $147 billion a year nationawide (from 1998-2000 obesity accounted for $663 million in health care costs in Arkansas).  Between 1998 and 2006 the prevalence of obesity increased by 37 percent. This increase resulted in an additional $40 billion dollars in health care costs. A lot of the impact is felt on Medicare. For example, Medicare prescription drug payments for an obese recipient are about $600 more annually than for a non-obese recipient. Overall, obesity accounts for 8.5 per cet of Medicare expenditure, 11.8 per cent of Medicaid expenditure, and 12.9 per cent of private insurance expenditure.

Yet, obesity seems to be lost in the grander debate about health care spending and the future of entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Sen. Blanche Lincoln has introduced a bill that aims to enhance childhood wellness and nutrition with a particular emphasis on fighting childhood obesity. The thinking there, of course, is that an obese child is far more likely to come an obese adult bringing with the substantially more medical concerns and costs. But she doesn’t seem to be getting much traction on the issue.

Arkansas (Move from Toss Up to Lean Republican): Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D) deserves credit for her nothing-short-of-miraculous runoff victory over Lt. Gov. Bill Halter (D). But, now she faces Rep. John Boozman (R) in a state that has trended strongly toward Republicans.

I’m not about the last sentence, particularly when you consider that all Democrats in the state constitutional offices are in a good position to win in November. Still, Jason Tolbert of The Tolbert Report notes that new numbers from Gallup suggest that more people in Arkansas now identify with the Republican Party than with the Democratic Party.

• GOP gubernatorial candidate Jim Keet calls for selling the state plane.
• Max Brantley of Arkansas Times notes that former Gov. Mike Huckabee is struggling to build a political base in Florida. 2012 presidential polls show him running a distant fourth in the Sunshine State.
• White supremacy in the Arkansas TEA Party? Blue Arkansas Blog reports.
• John Brummett of Stephens Media scores the Democrats (2) and Republicans (1) on the battle over unemployment benefits.
• Blue Hog Report observes, rightly, that there’s a lot to like about Rep. Mike Ross . . . if you’re a conservative.
• Would you rather have a lead in the polls or more cash-on-hand? Jason Tolbert of The Tolbert Report offers his analysis through the prism of Lincoln v. Halter.
• Roby Brock of Talk Business catches up with Arkansas financial leaders (some often rumored as political candidates) who believe the Wall Street reform bill will cost them money.
• And in national news . . . James Franco is still cooler than you (and me); Add “WikiLeaks” to your lexicon; Andrew Sullivan: Is Afghanistan an unwinnable war?Meghan McArdle on why we should tax estates over inheritance; Frank Rich reviews “The Promise”; Children who don’t read grow up bad; Breitbart, Sherrod and the shame of the fourth estate; and Red Sox v. Angels in Anaheim (GB: 7).

Thanks for reading.

This argument is intellectual and political, although the conversations I have with Republicans put no emphasis on the former. Arkansas Republicans, it seems, won’t entertain a conversation about it. As I noted 07.22, to them all spending is bad.

Consider what Ezra Klein of The Washington Post writes today,

. . . we knew it was too small then, and the recession it was designed to fight turned out to be larger than we’d predicted. In the end, we took a soapbox racer to a go-kart track and then realized we were racing against actual cars.This was a mistake, of course. But the mistake may not just have been the size of the stimulus package. I wonder if it wasn’t fed by a belief that there’d be other chances. If all we needed was the $700 billion package, then great. But if unemployment remained high and the recovery had trouble taking hold, surely there would be the votes for further stimulus and relief spending. No one in the political system could possibly look at 10 percent unemployment and walk away from it, right?

Wrong. Ten percent unemployment and a terrible recession ended up discrediting the people trying to do more for the economy, as their previous intervention was deemed a failure. That, in turn, empowered the people attempting to do less for the economy. So rather than a modestly sized stimulus offering room leaving the door open for more stimulus if needed, its modest size was used to discredit the idea of more stimulus when it became needed.

Democrats and Republicans aren’t the only political parties in Arkansas meeting these last two weeks. The Green Party of Arkansas selected its nominees for office at its Saturday convention.

The Green Party selected the following candidates for statewide and federal offices:

Mayor John Gray – U.S. Senate
Ken Adler – U.S. Congress, Dist. 1
Lewis Kennedy – U.S. Congress, Dist. 2
Joshua Drake – U.S. Congress, Dist. 4

Jim Lendall – Governor of Arkansas
Rebekah Kennedy – Attorney General
David Orr – Secretary of State
Bobby Tullis – State Treasurer
Mary Willis – State Auditor

Funny thing: As I was reading the press release from the Rankin campaign I thought about Mr. Morrison, who as adopted a view that global warming is a “hoax,” among many other strange positions. Today, Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, writes,

Rising temperatures won’t “destroy” the planet, as fearmongers and celebrities like to say. But the evidence that carbon emissions are altering the planet’s ecology is too convincing to ignore. Conservatives who dismiss climate change as a hoax are making a spectacle of their ignorance.

A thoughtful discussion about climate change should be welcomed in Arkansas. Unfortunately, it’s too easy for Mr. Morrison (and others) to get away with making sweeping declarations that are hailed as a pillars of conservative values. At some point, voters are going to have to realize that problems cannot be solved with soundbites, particularly unintelligent ones.

Season 4 of “Mad Men” debuts tonight on AMC. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy plays a pivotal role. I’ll leave it to you. Thanks for reading.

Democratic leaders, including Mr. Obama, say they are intent on letting the tax cuts for the wealthy expire as scheduled at the end of this year. But they have pledged to continue the lower tax rates for individuals earning less than $200,000 and families earning less than $250,000 — what Democrats call the middle class.

Mr. Geither reaffirmed this committment to keeping tax cuts in place for the middle class and small business owners, describing them “as the people that it the most.”

This will be an interesting issue in Arkansas. Sen. Blanche Lincoln supported the first Bush tax cut. How will she approach the matter now? It is certain to be addressed by the Senate Finance Committee of which she is a member. Rep. John Boozman, a Republican, is assumed to be in favor of extending the tax cuts for everyone. In the weekly Republican radio address, GOP Rep. Mike Pence said, ““House Republicans will oppose this tax increase with everything we’ve got.”

Re: the rhetoric that cutting a tax rebate is the equivalent to a tax increase: When asked on “This Week” whether that was the case in New Jersey where GOP Gov. Chris Christie has done away with certain tax rebates, Mr. Christie said, “No.”

Earlier, I posted this chart which shows the impact that the Bush tax cuts had on the American economy. Draw your own conclusions.

Heilemann: Refernced Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s race as an example of Mr. Clinton’s effectiveness. “The White House likes the idea,” he said. Noted that Mr. Clinton is a better campaigner in vulnerable districts.

Walter: “What do you sell? . .  That’s going be tough.”

Tucker: “Bill Clinton is more tempermentally suited for the ideologial warfare.”

Fineman: “There is going to be a slight reluctance to embrace the Clintons. It’s going to be interesting to watch.”

• Sen. Blanche Lincoln hit the KARN airwaves today to talk about poll numbers and the TEA party.
• Sen. Mark Pryor is making some headway on his economic development agenda.
• Lt. Gov. Bill Halter stopped by Netroots Nation. Blue Arkansas is in Vegas to the event too.
• Max Brantley of Arkansas Times notes that the Angry White Man is the Republican’s key demographic this November.
• John Brummett of Stephens Media on the folly of polling.
• Roby Brock checks in from the campaign trail.
• Michael Tilley of The City Wire checks in with Gov. Mike Beebe about his second term strategy.
• GOP gubernatorial nominee Jim Keet is “closing the gap” according to a new web video with music from Brooks & Dunn.
• Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics listed U.S. House, Dist. 2 GOP candidate Tim Griffin as one of its 2010 Crooked Candidates.
• The race for Arkansas State House, Dist. 92 just got interesting.
• On the shelf: Hitch 22, The Pregnant Widow
• In the Queue: Winter’s Bone
• And in national news . . . Cheerleading is a not a sport for the purposes of Title IX; Ross Douthat notes the Republicans lack an agenda; RIP Daniel Schorr; Mad Men TV Club; Megan McArdle deconstructs the benefit of tenure; Jake Tapper signs off “This Week” after a four month run; Daniel Foster of National Review worries about an active lame duck session; The Rehabilitation of George W. Bush has begun; Movie watch: Machete, Tron: Legacy, Stone, The Company Men; Joseph Gordon Levitt as The Riddler?; and Red Sox v. Mariners in Seattle (GB: 7)

Enjoy the weekend. Thanks for reading.