OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: On civility and the media
It's been a convulsive few days in Arkansas in matters of media and civility, or incivility. Let's run through it.
It's been a convulsive few days in Arkansas in matters of media and civility, or incivility. Let's run through it.
Asa Hutchinson hasn't lost the sense of humor I never really knew he had.
The Washington Post came out Sunday with a headline essentially saying it didn't believe its own poll that was conducted in partnership with ABC.
Arkansas politics has always been about rural working-class distrust and resistance of government that seemed tone-deaf and full of itself.
It's partly about whether you instinctively want to throw people off Medicaid because you think they ought to get up and go to work. I get that.
The moderate movement in America, an oxymoronic if not laughable phrase, reached its height in a single photograph taken in the early afternoon of June 24, 202…
Maybe you'd simply call it "An Amendment to the State Constitution to Guarantee Freedom of Information."
What a week it was. First Arkansas Republicans turned against their vaunted leader, Gov. Sarah Sanders. Then some of the several still-existent Democrats took …
It's huge for royalty to get rebuffed by a legislative body of commoners. And make no mistake. Queen Sarah lost.
The queen got the non-royal treatment.
An editorial in this newspaper Sunday considered disapprovingly Gov. Sarah Sanders' announcement of her intended evisceration of the state's Freedom of Informa…
We know old age isn't for sissies, but the issue now raging is whether it's suitable for political office and public service.
It looks like you're going to get your top state income-tax rate dropped a tad next week. You might thank the Blue Hog blogger and his Blue Hog Report.
Jimmy Buffett was a Redneck Riviera vacation walking. That's what made him especially popular in Arkansas.
The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution may be the best after the First.
With a long holiday weekend ahead requiring an additional column by week's end to free Monday for celebration of the union man, I placed the traditional call t…
A reader suggested I watch a recording of last week's "Arkansas Week" program on Arkansas PBS to get the proper perspective on Asa Hutchinson's campaign.
What's interesting about the lopsided race for the Republican presidential nomination is that democracy may be at stake in it.
A group calling itself Braver Angels and dedicated to civility in politics had me as a guest last week for a recorded podcast that will be available at some po…
A lot of people probably want their dollar back. They paid to put Asa Hutchinson on the debate stage for the opportunity to break through.
It's like this. You get in your car and prepare to start it and a police officer pulls in behind you and blocks your driveway. He walks up to the driver's side…
Arkansas Supreme Court Associate Justice Shawn Womack, a combative partisan Republican as a young state legislator decades ago and now the wannabe Antonin Scal…
"I'm going down to sing in Texas where anybody can carry a gun. But we will all be so much safer there, the biggest lie under the sun. Go ahead and shoot me if…
Donald Trump was indicted Monday night in Georgia. The next day, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton was issuing a derisive statement that the indictment represented just ano…
Let's begin with the definition of a key word: indoctrination.
We now have four indictments of Donald Trump, which ought to be about it unless he did something else while I was typing.
It reminded me of 1986 when I wrote that Asa Hutchinson would lose the U.S. Senate race to Dale Bumpers but would always be able to say that he had out-debated…
Last week's voting in red-state Ohio, coming after public-initiative votes in red-state Kansas and red-state Kentucky, provides strong evidence that there is a…
The United States is always a great country, but not always a good country.
Asa Hutchinson isn't yet qualified for the Republican presidential debate stage, but there he was Sunday morning zoomed in for a remote interview by Talk Busin…
Public-school defenders might be learning not to get their hopes up in this season of John Birch's revenge.
I hear from the irrational right, to use a phrase becoming redundant in American politics.
Much hinges, as always, on how you ask the question. But some Arkansas Democrats say they're encouraged that the Republican Legislature's attack on libraries m…
There it was, an encounter with conscience and democracy, on the drive back from the veterinary clinic with the beagle Roscoe and his bottle of antibiotics on …
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is defending his state's new school standards and curriculum guidelines. Those call for instructing children that slave…
This weekend provides the perfect occasion to say a kind word for the loyal opposition, which represents a vital cog in our system by raising resistance to pow…
It is an opportune time for a special edition of arrows devoted to the revving-up race for the Republican presidential nomination.
Donald Trump has expanded his national polling lead in the Republican presidential race to 44 points. He seems fueled by the strong prospect of another indictm…
National media reports indicate that Sarah Huckabee Sanders is among the causes of former President Donald Trump's irritation these days.
You need to be careful writing any kind of ode to the way state government once handled budget surpluses.
Let's do some arrows of conventional wisdom's fickle fortune. It's a good way to sum up the politics and beat the heat.
Which would be worse, having Donald Trump back as president or having only Trump and Joe Biden as the choices?
Asa Hutchinson walked into a religious-right "values summit" with big plans for explaining his old-time conservative Christian bona fides.
Much has been written about a legal challenge to the LEARNS Act and the job insecurity of Don Bobbitt as president of the University of Arkansas system in ligh…
Just slow down a bit to check the cracks to see if any children have fallen through.
It may be that I've lived too long in the same place. Or it might be that living long in the same place can make one's history richer. And there is the possibi…
The lawsuit over the LEARNS Act has always been about time, which is about up.
Arkansas state government closed the fiscal year June 30 having taken in $1.16 billion more than it had budgeted to spend over the preceding 12 months.
Colleges and universities may prove able to work around, to an extent, last week's ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court against affirmative action admissions progr…
I've seen states of flux before, and the LEARNS Act is sure enough momentarily in one, not that our Trumpy governor admits it.