COMMENTARY: One Old Boy’s Early Ballot

LITTLE ROCK — As always, these come to you not as formal endorsements or recommendations.

I dare not behave so presumptuously as that.

They come to you merely in the spirit of free and open writerreader dialogue.

So, for your mere information and consideration and perhaps amusement, these are the votes your humble opinion columnist cast early the other day:

U. S. Senate - For Green Party candidate John Gray, because he is a free thinker and truth teller and Oklahoma does not need or deserve the third senator that John Boozman would provide.

Blanche Lincoln, meantime, always managed to push me back out just when it seemed she might reel me back in. The final straw: That defeatist and self-pitying closing television commercial and her telling a local reporter for National Public Radio that it is Bill Halter’s fault, basically, that she is not more popular than she is. But she was the one who falsely attacked Halter.

So she’s mad at the unions?

Well, then, she should not have been for card check before she was against it.

Congress in the Second District - For state Sen. Joyce Elliott, of course, because she has been a brave, compassionate, competent and responsible state legislator and Tim Griffin has been a weaselly political operative who finagled his way into an unconfirmed and undeserved stint as U.S. attorney and then whined, even cried, that the pain of the criticism was not worth it.

That he will beat her will represent one of the great voter misjudgments in thestate’s history.

Governor - For Mike Beebe, of course. I told you for years that he would be a very good governor, and now you know that I was telling you the truth.

Arkansas Supreme Court - For Tim Fox over Karen Baker because he has issued a couple of good high-profile circuit court rulings and she strikes me as a right-wing panderer.

I do not much care whether Fox and a law clerk might have taken an extra-marital shine to each other. I am led to believe that he, if an extra-marital indulger, would not be the first of that transgression to wear the robe of our state Supreme Court.

Amendment 1 - Against, of course, because we already have a wholly unthreatened right to hunt and fish and it is always ill-advised to clutter our state constitution with unnecessary powers.

You put something in the state constitution and the next thing you know you have a couple of rich guys on the Game and Fish Commission saying they do not have to abide by everyone else’s law.

Constitutions should be minimalist. Check the Bill of Rights in the federal one - short, sweet, simple, clear, addressing basic human freedoms. That ishow you should do it.

The right to water-ski will be next.

Amendment 2 - Alas, forget briefly what I just said about minimalism. Apparently we need to address interest rates in the constitution to protect people from usurious abuse. But that necessarily will get complicated in a volatile economy.

This one may get thrown out later because it actually encompasses three constitutional changes in one amendment and is under litigation that will extend past the election. But, at its defining core, it says that we should unlink our interest rates limits - from what consumers are charged to what governments can pay on bonds to generate cash - from the now uncommonly low federal discount rate. I see the need for that.

Amendment 3 - I said a most reluctant “yes” on this one that lets the Legislature pledge future general revenue to bonds to try to match other states in the bribery/ blackmail nonsense by which economic development projects have been lured by states.

We already approve this concept, but only for large, socalled “super projects.” This would let us do it on smaller ones or on packages of smaller ones. I cast my vote with the hope that we never actually do this.

P.S. - These were wholly without enthusiasm and warrant no comment: Pat O’Brien for secretary of state and Shane Broadway for lieutenant governor.

JOHN BRUMMETT IS A COLUMNIST FOR THE ARKANSAS NEWS BUREAU IN LITTLE ROCK.