(Part One of this discussion, which you can read here, took place yesterday.  Part Two will be shorter, I promise)

So yesterday we had a too lengthy, too windy and too pedantic discussion of income statistics in Arkansas, sparked by a dispute between GOP Rep. Charlie Collins of Fayetteville and the Democratic Party of Arkansas (DPA).

Are you up to speed on the difference between per capita income and median income? Do you care? Of course you don’t, because you are a normal human being with healthy interests, and the only income stats you really care about are your own. I’m not sure I care that much, either. But if we’re going to discuss it, we should at least be clear on what we’re talking about, and don’t go about clouding up the issue, as the DPA did in their shoddy attack on Collins.

Anyway, Collins got the essential facts right:

• Arkansas ranks low in income statistics, whether measured in per capita or median terms;
• Household income in the state is stagnant (and has declined since 2007); and
• A reasonable discussion of why that is, and how it might be changed, should occur.

He gets credit for raising the issue, and doing so in a measured and civil manner, which is more than we can say for DPA mouthpiece Candace Martin.

I don’t intend to make a habit of close readings of party news releases, because whether they come from Republicans or Democrats they all tend to be overwrought and hysterical and shot through with fallacious reasoning and are more or less immediately forgettable. I only focused in on this piece from the DPA because it was so terrible on so many levels.

And also because it reveals a tactic that we’re seeing more frequently from the defenders of the status quo in Arkansas, as well as one that you should be on watch for in the heated campaigny months that lie before us:

1) Defenders of the status quo in Arkansas politics and government will glom on to any ranking or study that ostensibly reflects well on the state, without taking a critical look at just what that ranking means. We saw it with the “income growth” measure; Gov. Mike Beebe’s office reported the ranking as a “historic high,” which is true, except the “historic high” is still pretty low, and median incomes in the state remain stagnant.

We saw it last month with education policy, when Beebe breathlessly trumpeted the state’s #5 ranking in “education policy” from Education Week, and ignored a (probably more accurate) study that ranked the state’s education system #45 in the nation.

A cynical type might think that all they’re trying to do is get you to remember the top line numbers (“Didn’t I see something about Arkansas being fifth in education?”) to obscure any lack of progress that has occurred under their long command (with a few brief interregna in the governor’s mansion) of the state’s government. Some might even call that “misleading.”

2) Arkansas Democrats are also keen to portray anyone who points out the facts about the state’s lack of progress as “out of touch” or “talking down” the state. Look back at Martin’s release attacking Collins from last week: She accuses Collins of “badmouthing” Arkansas and “deriding the state.” Goodness!

Then, boy howdy, she really works up a head of steam: “It is bad enough when people from other states talk down about Arkansas, but for an elected official to do so, and falsely, is inexcusable,” Martin writes. Say, isn’t Collins from another state? Expect more of this.

Martin believes that it’s “badmouthing” the state or “talking down” about Arkansas when someone points out verifiable facts about the state, as Collins did. That’s a nice appeal to sentimentality, but it doesn’t do much to advance the discussion of what will move the state forward.

By this light, it’s better to tell “useful lies” rather than “harmful truths” (see quote at top of post; you were just wondering how that would tie in!). The lies are more pleasant, whether they are about income stats or education or whatever, and they allow the usual suspects to maintain their positions of power and privilege, instead of taking careful stock of where we stand and figuring out how we might do better.

Nice little racket they got there. And one wonders why the state continues to lag in so many indices. But not really.

Why are Arkansas Democrats exaggerating the Natural State’s progress on income growth? Or more to the point, just how damn stupid do they think we are?

I was thumbing through the Wall Street Journal this morning, in the manner of all good plutocrats everywhere, when I came across this story about declines in household income over the last few years.

Citing a study by a Maryland-based consultancy group, the WSJ reports that 38 states saw a decline in median household income from 2007-2010, according to an analysis of Census data. Arkansas was one of those 38—in the Natural State, median household incomes dropped 2.9 percent. (Meanwhile, Washington D.C. led the nation with an 8.1 percent income INCREASE, “in large part because of federal government employment.” If you need me, I’ll be sharpening my pitchfork.)

That got me thinking: Wasn’t there a to-do just a few days ago in which the Democratic Party of Arkansas (DPA) took a Republican state legislator to task on this very question? Why, it turns out there was!

Rep. Charlie Collins

Here’s the deal: Some weeks ago, GOP Rep. Charlie Collins of Fayetteville published a letter to the editor in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s northwest edition arguing that the state needs income tax reform to create jobs. Collins cited the slow growth rate in the state’s median income to suggest that Arkansas could be doing better. (For our discussion purposes, I’m pasting the text of Collins’ original letter below).

Last week, the DPA issued a news release charging Collins with “misleading” voters….

Actually, no, that’s not right. Let’s carefully read the lead of the DPA news release: it says that Collins’ letter “leaves voters to wonder if he was being intentionally misleading about Arkansas’s economy and deriding the state, or even worse, was he ignorant of the facts?”

Got that? They’re not actually suggesting Collins did all that bad stuff they just said; they’re not leveling a charge. It just “leaves voters to wonder” if there’s a charge to be made, by someone, maybe. Oh, my, this is an unprepossessing start.

Let’s read on. Here’s DPA spokeslady Candace Martin:

“What is worse, if Charlie Collins was intentionally misleading people and badmouthing Arkansas’s progress or if he was just ignorant of the facts? He owes the people of Northwest Arkansas an explanation,” Democratic Party of Arkansas Spokesman Candace Martin challenged. “Politicians shouldn’t use these lean economic times as an excuse to falsify facts or mislead Arkansans. Rep. Charlie Collins condemned Arkansas for making no economic progress when in reality USA Today ranked our state 11^th in the nation for personal income growth. It is bad enough when people from other states talk down about Arkansas, but for an elected official to do so, and falsely, is inexcusable.”

OK, here’s where it starts to get thornier. Martin invokes a USA Today ranking that says Arkansas is “11 in the nation for personal income growth.” But note the shift here: Collins in his letter writes about median incomes, not “personal income growth.” Moreover, if we follow the link to the Bureau of Economic Analysis data on which USA Today based its ranking, we see the data used is per capita personal income. So they’ve subtly changed the subject.

And here’s the thing: Per capita income and median income are not the same thing. Median numbers tend to be a more reliable measure because they aren’t swayed by extremely high or low extremes, and they’re more useful for comparing numbers over time.

If you look at per capita income, Arkansas does a shade better; moreover, if you look at the rate of growth in per capita income, you’re talking about something else entirely. So they’ve moved the discussion away completely from what Collins was talking about, and then they charge him with being “misleading.”

Candace Martin and the DPA seem confused on these issues (that’s the charitable interpretation). In paragraph 3 of the news release, they state that “Arkansas steadily moved up three rankings in the national average for median income at a time when other states were falling” (emphasis added).

Except that’s not quite right, based upon a reading of the data that they themselves provide. The news release points us to the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of New Mexico, which reports that Arkansas moved up a few slots on per capita income, not median income, from 2007-2010 (from 47th to 44th).

Now, if you just go Google “state rankings median income,” you’ll get a number of results that show Arkansas languishing around 48th or 49th, which is in line with what Collins discussed in his letter. Like this. Or this. Go ahead, roll your own. Collins wasn’t “misleading” anyone.

I think Charlie Collins does know the difference between per capita and median incomes, since he’s careful in his letter to always refer to “median income,” and doesn’t sloppily swap the terms around.

Look back at that DPA news release, in which all the accusations against Collins are leveled as rhetorical questions, rather than actually flat-out making a charge that he was being “misleading.” It seems clear the Dems recognized they were on shaky ground, or they didn’t really care, because all they wanted to do was muddy the waters of the discussion, so the facts didn’t much matter.

Or we might put it this way: What is worse, if Arkansas Democrats were intentionally misleading people and exaggerating Arkansas’s progress on income levels, or if they were just ignorant of the facts?

You know, it really leaves voters to wonder.

WHAT YOU ARE PROBABLY THINKING: “Thank you, David, for that not at all fascinating discussion of  a dispute over per capita and median income in a stupid party news release, which sounds like something Greenberg would write, because, ugh, Greenberg.”

But bear with me! There is, indeed, a point to all this! No really, there is! I think! But you’ll have to wait for the explanation as to why this matters in the EXCITING PART DEUX OF THIS POST (forthcoming!)

Collins letter follows.

Letter to the Editor, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

January 5, 2012

State at disadvantage

Thanks for your editorial calling out the disadvantage our income tax places on Arkansas workers compared with workers in nearby states. Why is there outrage when China creates a disadvantage for our workers through tax and currency policy, but not when we do it to ourselves? We’re regularly ranked near the bottom of all states for median income. We haven’t made substantial progress in decades. It wasn’t always this way. From about 1940 to the early 1970s, Arkansas improved from about 44 percent of national median income to about 75 percent.

Then we raised our income-tax rates in 1971 (with the top rate up 40 percent from 5 percent to 7 percent) and relative income-growth progress stopped. Today, Arkansas median income remains around 75 percent of national income almost four decades after the higher income-tax rates took effect. If we had left tax rates alone in 1971 and remained on the pre-tax-rise trend, the Arkansas Policy Foundation found that Arkansas median incomes would be at or above the national average by now.

The editorial highlighted two income-tax ideas to create jobs: A special deal for new residents only, and bigger exemptions for capital. How about this instead? Let’s simplify the code and give all our workers a fair playing field by eliminating the 2.5 percent and 7 percent rates. This approach lowers the rate by 60 percent on low-income workers and 14 percent on workers making more than $33,000. We won’t need to say “Thank God for Mississippi” anymore.

CHARLIE COLLINS, Fayetteville

Click for more

Hey, how was your National School Choice Week? Why, mine was lovely, thanks so much for asking!

We round out the week with a look at the latest Report Card on American Education from the good folks at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), ranking these 50 states for their performance on a variety of measures related to K-12 education.

OK, let’s take a look here (turns pages, turns pages, jesus this thing is long). Hmmm, Arkansas lands at number 45…But wait! Weren’t Gov. Mike Beebe and the Arkansas Dept. of Education just trumpeting news two weeks ago that Arkansas was fifth in the nation in education? I think they were! What gives, huh?

The study Beebe et al. were wetting their pants over was the Education Week Quality Counts 2011 survey, which ranked Arkansas #5 based on education policies.

But notably, the Quality Counts study gave the state “low marks in two areas two areas where the state has long struggled to advance: Student achievement and the chance for a successful career with an Arkansas education,” according to the Arkansas News Bureau’s John Lyon. Gosh, those kind of seem like areas where you’d want to get the high marks!

(In addition, here’s a good explanation of the shortfalls of the Quality Counts survey from a couple years back by all-around smart guy Stuart Buck from the University of Arkansas Dept. of Education Reform).

The ALEC study aims to provide a more comprehensive look at how state education performs based on student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). By their figuring, Arkansas lands at 45th in the nation. The ALEC study even gives letter grades for education policy, scoring Arkansas with a gentleman’s C.

The ALEC researchers are also heavy into various school reform measures, with high praise for different education reform programs in disparate states like Massachusetts, Florida and Indiana. To hear them tell it:

The past two years however have been crucial, however, in demonstrating that reform is not only necessary but in fact achievable. In the past, governors gave lip service to education reform but tended to simply increase spending and kick the can down the road. The 2010–2011 period witnessed something entirely different: lawmakers taking on the reactionary education establishment directly, and defeating them repeatedly.

States having passed reforms must move vigorously to implementation, given the huge difference between changing law and changing policy and opportunities for subversion. Reformers in other states should carefully study the comprehensive approaches of Florida and Indiana lawmakers. Dramatic improvement results from broad, rather than incremental, reform.

On a related note, you should go back and read Dan Greenberg’s Arkansas Project submission from last summer, Confessions of an ALEC Conspirator, which pooh-poohs all the paranoid liberal handwringing about the organization with a calm look at the facts about the role ALEC plays in policymaking. Facts! Is there anything they CAN’T do?

UPDATE: The gang at the UA Office of Education Policy put together a dynamite policy brief that explains both the strengths and weaknesses of the Education Week Quality Counts survey. Go read it, if that’s your thing.

Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress and Reform (American Legislative Exchange Council)

We have established before how much I like the Tax Foundation’s studies and maps as a tool for exploring tax policy. In fact, when it comes right down to it, the Tax Foundation should probably be paying me for how frequently I pimp their work around here.

As Arkansas lawmakers gear up for a legislative session devoted strictly to budget matters, they should read this humdinger of a new study ranking all 50 states by the Tax Foundation “Business Tax Climate Index.”

The index is a magic alchemical stew of corporate, income, sales, property and unemployment insurance taxes used to determine how “which states’ tax systems are the most hospitable to business and economic growth.” That is of course a gross oversimplification of how the rankings were arrived at, but if you want to learn more then go read the study yourself, Mr. Technical Methodology.

Man, I’ll bet Arkansas comes out looking like a real peach, huh? Eh, not so much—your beloved Natural State checks in at #31. If there’s good news, it’s that Arkansas has climbed one slot since last year’s report, when we ranked #32. Why, should we keep up at this blistering pace, this state will be a veritable economic powerhouse by, uh, let’s see… 2044. Huzzah!

“But, but, but taxes aren’t the only thing that drive business decisions!” is what some of you might be sputtering right about now. Well, shut up, because economist Mark Robyn, who authored the study, covers that issue:

The modern market is characterized by mobile capital and labor, with all types of business, small and large, tending to locate where they have the greatest competitive advantage. The evidence shows that states with the best tax systems will be the most competitive in attracting new businesses and most effective at generating economic and employment growth.

It is true that taxes are but one factor in business decision-making. Other concerns, such as raw materials or infrastructure or a skilled labor pool, matter, but a simple, sensible tax system can positively or negatively impact business operations with regard to these very resources.

Furthermore, unlike changes to a state’s health care, transportation, or education system—which can take decades to implement—changes to the tax code can quickly improve a state’s business climate.

Oh, but read on, because there’s even more good stuff about the dangers of tax incentives and subsidies targeting specific businesses:

State lawmakers are always mindful of their states’ business tax climates but they are often tempted to lure business with lucrative tax incentives and subsidies instead of broad-based tax reform. This can be a dangerous proposition….

Lawmakers create these deals under the banner of job creation and economic development, but the truth is that if a state needs to offer such packages, it is most likely covering for a woeful business tax climate. A far more effective approach is to systematically improve the business tax climate for the long term so as to improve the state’s competitiveness.

Robyn also includes a nicely comprehensive review of the economic debate over just how much taxes matter (pages 5-9) that you should totally check out. Print and read! Or what, you’d rather read yet another goddamn article about the Republican presidential primary or mindlessly scan the pointless ephemera in Twitter feed? Ugh, you disgust me. I don’t know how you live with yourself. Read this instead.

UPDATE: Ha ha ha ha ha! Michael Cook, a lockstep Democratic blogger who has never been troubled by an interesting or intelligent idea, sees everyone talking about the Tax Foundation study on Twitter, and leaps into action with this dandy:

Good work, Michael Cook! You have indeed Googled a report suggesting that two counties of the state boast a relatively strong economy. Case closed! Of course, and I can’t believe I have to point this out, this doesn’t exactly contravene the findings from the Tax Foundation, for a number of reasons, including that two counties are not the same thing as a whole state.

Moreover, if we just want to wave around competing studies, here’s one from the Brookings Institution (PDF) ranking the Little Rock area as one of the 20 weakest performing metro areas over the course of the economic recovery. Your move, Michael Cook! 

Oh, man, can you imagine what it must be like to be Michael Cook? I can’t help but to think that I’d just literally die from the sheer existential humiliation.

2012 State Business Tax Climate Index (Tax Foundation)

Will medical device tax drive production overseas and stifle innovation?

We wrote here previously about the medical device tax tucked deep inside 2010 health care bill (Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, pick your poison). That’s a 2.3 percent levy on sales of all kinds of medical devices used in diagnosis and treatment (excluding items sold directly to consumers over the counter, like Band-Aids and such), expected to generate $20 billion over 10 years.

After my earlier post, I heard from some folks at Cook Medical, a medical device manufacturer located in Bloomington, Indiana, who wanted to talk more about the issue. Cook Medical makes and distributes thousands of products, including stents and catheters, for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. I asked if they would talk on the record to give a fuller perspective on how the tax would affect their industry, and they agreed.

An industry leader’s perspective

In a phone conversation with Steve Ferguson, Cook’s chairman of the board, and John Eckberg, the company’s media relations director, I asked how this tax came to be—what policy discussions led to its being included as a funding mechanism for the president’s signature legislation? Ferguson’s answer offered a depressing, but not at all surprising, insight into how the health care reform bill developed.

“It wasn’t a policy discussion at all,” Ferguson said. “When you tried to have a policy discussion with [Congressional committee members and staff], their attitude was that ‘We just don’t care; we need the money’.”

Ferguson praised members from Indiana, like Sen. Evan Bayh and Rep. Baron Hill, both Democrats who have since left Congress, for leading opposition to the tax. They had some success, he said, cutting the tax in half from $40 billion to $20 billion over the next 10 years—but got no further.

The problem, Ferguson said, was that the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress insisted that the health care reform bill would create a “windfall” for device manufacturers—the reasoning being that, with millions of additional Americans being brought into the health care system, there would inevitably be greater demand for their products.

Ferguson dismissed that line of reasoning. Most of the newly covered beneficiaries under Obamacare, he said, would be younger people, who typically have less need for medical devices. He also noted that based upon results from Massachusetts—where former Republican Gov. Mitt Romney established a state health insurance program in 2006 similar to the federal effort—there would be no “windfall”: The demand for medical devices in Massachusetts, he said, tracks with overall national trends.

“I think that’s a fallacious argument,” Ferguson concluded.

Another common argument is that manufacturers can simply absorb the tax by passing the cost on to their customers—say, tacking on 2.3 percent to the cost of a stent or catheter. But Ferguson said that wasn’t likely, because device manufacturers are competing with other manufacturers from around the world who export and sell products in the U.S. To remain competitive, his company and other domestic manufacturers are limited in how much they can “pass on” increased costs.

He also noted that the device tax isn’t the only higher cost that Cook Medical faces—they’re also paying more for energy, utilities, employee health care, unemployment insurance and other items.

“If you add all of those together, are they gonna say I can pass everything on?” Ferguson said. “Someone who tells you that has never run a business.”

The regulatory burden

And of course, taxes are only one factor in industry decision-making. Ferguson explained how a lengthy, complex and slow approval process for new devices by federal regulators in the Food and Drug Administration slows his company’s ability to bring new products to market. Higher taxes and a burdensome regulatory regime can only serve to stifle innovation in the industry—with a direct effect on patient care.

At least on the domestic front. If companies can get approvals for new products in Europe or China, they’ll open new operations in those countries. The overall effect, Ferguson said, is that the U.S. government is appearing almost hostile toward the medical technology industry, based upon the regulatory and tax regimes.

Note also that the device tax is based on a company’s total revenues, not profits—so a smaller start-up that’s operating on narrower margins, or at a loss, could be crippled by the tax. Moreover, many other nations are approving new medical products for clinical use more quickly, which creates an additional incentive to move operations outside the United States.

“If you put all those things together and you wanted to drive an industry out of this country, you couldn’t have decided it any better,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of factors in there, but this was kind of the final blow for companies. You put all those factors together and everyone’s saying, let’s just move out of the country.”

Ferguson warned of a “mass exodus from the United States” on the part of device manufacturers. That might sound like standard corporate doom-mongering, until you note that Boston Scientific, one company Ferguson mentioned as an example, is laying off U.S. employees and investing in China, India and Brazil. (Aside from facilities in several U.S. states, Cook Medical boasts operations in Ireland, Denmark, Australia).

Meanwhile, other nations—Eckberg pointed to Ireland—are aggressively courting investment from U.S. companies.

Is repeal an option?

I wrote in my earlier post about an effort in the U.S. House of Representatives to repeal the medical device tax, which boasts 225 co-sponsors. The tax doesn’t take effect until January 2013, which means there is time to get it off the books. (And lest we forget, due to the shoddy design of Obamacare, several pieces of it have already been repealed or shut down as unworkable).

Ferguson said that while Cook and other companies are pushing hard for repeal, he’s concerned it won’t happen fast enough. Most device manufacturers, he said, are making long range plans that assume the 2.3 percent tax bite will remain in effect.

“In fact, it’s moving so rapidly, I’m afraid that it’s becoming rapidly too late,” Ferguson said. “Once people start planning and making provisions for it…it’s hard to turn it back.”

All hail school choice! All hail education reform! Our pals over at Americans for Prosperity are sponsoring National School Choice Week (January 22-28), a week-long nationwide event aimed at “shining a spotlight on effective education options for every child.” There look to be a few events taking place around Arkansas in the days to come—check out the events page on this website to track one down.

We’ve checked in on the school choice debate in recent months. Here, here are some links to a few of the Arkansas Project’s favorite pieces on school choice issues from the last year. Go read!:

October 2011: My report from an education reform panel debate at Philander Smith College in Little Rock that turned out to be feistier and more combative than anyone imagined.

August 2011: Christian Olson of the Advance Arkansas Institute supplies notes from a school choice symposium in Little Rock hosted by the Heritage Foundation.

June 2011: Our interview with University of Arkansas education reform honcho Jay Greene on the publication of his e-book, Why America Needs School Choice.

Meanwhile, over at the Arkansas Times blog, perennially outraged liberal Max Brantley, who stands bravely athwart any and all changes to the status quo in public education, notes the week’s events with a six graf post in which he name-checks his favorite bogeymen, the Koch Brothers, eight times. Bonus: It includes a darkly conspiratorial and hilariously over-the-top anti-Koch video. Do you get the feeling that Max just really isn’t even trying anymore? Yeah, me, too.

Boozman posted on his Facebook page that he is having his name removed from the list of co-sponsors and would vote against the bill “in its current form.”

Full Boozman statement as follows:

However, I did install that obnoxious pop-up window you might have seen when you clicked over here. Fear not, it’s just for one day. But I am doing my part to raise awareness, which I recommend as a way to feel good about yourself without actually having to do all that much of anything.

And if you live in Arkansas, then I regret to inform you that two of your Congressional officials—U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin and Sen. John Boozman, both Republicans—are sponsors of the bills in their respective chambers. So now would be a good time to drop them a note and give ‘em what for.

So, anyway, these bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), have everyone up in arms for the power they’ll give the government and corporate media cronies to shut down websites in the name of “fighting piracy,” and represent not only an assault on the open nature of the Internet, but also on free speech. SOPA is on hold in the House, but not dead; PIPA is slated for a vote in the Senate on Tuesday, January 24.

If you’re late to the game and would like to learn more, here’s a previously posted video from Fight For the Future that lays out the issues with clarity and verve:

PROTECT IP/SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo. More:

Tell Congress not to censor the internet NOW! – http://www.fightforthefuture.org/pipa

PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting “creativity”. The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites– they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, or what sites like Youtube and Twitter do, would be considered illegal behavior according to this bill.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill would cost us $47 million tax dollars a year — that’s for a fix that won’t work, disrupts the internet, stifles innovation, shuts out diverse voices, and censors the internet. This bill is bad for creativity and does not protect your rights.

Wikipedia Blackout, SOPA and PIPA Explained (ABC News)

The Hopefuls: Cotton, Rankin & Richmond

If you’re looking to check in on what the candidates in the Arkansas Fourth Congressional District Republican primary have to say on the issues, then you do not want to miss the Twitter debate to be hosted tomorrow (Wednesday, January 18), by the Arkansas College Republicans.

And by “do not want to miss,” I of course mean that you absolutely want to miss this, because a Twitter debate is just a terrible idea. Who needs this? This, this Twitter debate, I do not think anybody needs.

Here, to make things simpler for you, I have developed a short checklist to let you know if you should, uh, watch the Twitter debate. (watch? view? read? endure?):

• You are a masochist.
• You like to read boilerplate political statements in incoherent, decontextualized, non-sequential 140 character bursts.
• You are Jason Tolbert.

If you suffer from one or more of the above conditions, please tune in to Twitter on Wednesday for the Arkansas Fourth Congressional District at 2 p.m. CST. The rest of you, please, for the love of god, just go about your business as previously planned.

I’m not 100 percent sure how it will work—presumably you’ll have to follow the @ARkCR feed and all the participants, if you’re not already? The College Republicans’ news release says that the two confirmed participants are Tom Cotton and Marcus Richmond, which I guess means Beth Ann Rankin won’t be participating, which I guess means we have a winner. Congratulations, Beth Ann, on your sound judgment and your decisive Twitter debate victory! 

In conclusion: Terrible.

College Republicans Plan Twitter Debate for Fourth District (Talk Business)

Ranger Mike sez, "Give a hoot, don't pollute your balance sheet by illegally commingling state and federal funds, or at least don't get caught doing that!" Catchy slogan, Ranger Mike!

It’s Friday the 13th, which is bad news for you if you planned on spending the night at Camp Crystal Lake, or if you are one of the 36 employees of the Arkansas Forestry Commission losing your job today due to the agency’s epic mismanagement.

Oh, guys, this Forestry Commission story, with all its bumbling and bungling, can we talk about this a minute? Never did we dream when the story broke in early December that it would still be boiling along six weeks later, but here we are.

The agency is $4 million in the hole, hence the layoffs of three dozen workers, and in hock to the feds for some $1.2 million for misusing federal grant funds. Gov. Mike Beebe, eager to deflect any blame for the mess, is itching to show he’s in command of the situation by issuing a supreme edict for a legislative audit of the troubled agency. And he means business, boys, so get cracking!

One obnoxious theme in this story that continues to rear its head is the notion that the dispute is simply a function of partisan politics, with those dastardly Republican lawmakers trying to get the better of good ole reliable Mike with their Washington D.C.-style tactics. Boo! Hiss!

But really, decrying the “partisanship” in this dynamic rather misses the point.

OK, fine, Arkansas Republicans are seeking to exploit some political advantage here—because, you know, people in political arenas tend to have incentives to do that. But the more important fact is that without the relentless pressure from minority lawmakers like Rep. Bryan King, Rep. Kim Hammer and Sen. Missy Irvin to keep the story alive, it’s not likely that the facts of the Forestry Commission’s dysfunction and mismanagement would have come to light.

Or perhaps you would prefer the approach of those who would just chalk it up to “partisanship” and move on from all this unpleasantness, like one lawmaker who talked to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Mike Wickline (subscription required):

Sen. Jimmy Jeffress, a Democrat from Crossett, wonders whether [Forestry Commission head John] Shannon will survive this controversy.

“I don’t want to put the governor on the spot, but it just depends on whether or not he is willing to sacrifice [Shannon] as a sacrificial lamb and get on with business or not,” he said. “I think if that should happen, some people think that that will get us over the hump. But then I think that, well, [the Republicans] will have the first bloodletting and will they look around for something else?”

I guess you could say that Sen. Jimmy Jeffress, Democrat from Crossett, can’t see the forest for the trees (“Good one, Dave!”—All Arkansas Project Readers).

Or maybe Jeffress is right: maybe the last thing we need in state government is for these legislators to go poking around “for something else” and turning up more examples of millions of dollars in mismanaged funds and dysfunctional management. That is something we simply do not want. Who knows what they might find? 

Who knows indeed.

Lawmakers To Eye Forestry Commission Shortfall During Budget Hearings (Arkansas News Bureau)

Beebe Asks Legislative Audit to Review Forestry Commission (Talk Business)