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Holiday weekend arrows Saturday, Jul 5, 2008 By John Brummett You know the holiday weekend drill. We fire arrows to reflect the supposed conventional wisdom.  Gov. Mike Beebe - He cut the grocery tax, nailed down Hewlett-Packard and ended the fiscal year June 30 with a surplus of $176 million. Now he has state agencies on conservative budgets for this new fiscal year so that he can save some slack to keep his promise to cut the grocery tax a little more next year. The pressure to ease those budget constraints will come mostly from the State Police, which needs gasoline to fight crime and chase speeders. Lu Hardin - UCA is simply doing great and he gets most of the credit. But to try to hide a $300,000 bonus was just nuts, and that is now what defines him publicly. He may need to get off TV; it's that serious. What would I have had him do? One of two things: Not take any big bonus at a time the faculty was getting nothing and students were getting hit for tuition increases, or take the money and be a stand-up guy about it. Bobby Petrino - We thought it was Houston Nutt's loose ship that had all those players getting afoul of law enforcement. But now the no-nonsense Bobby P. may not have any linebackers left, thanks to criminal misbehavior. And he may not win any more than four or five games the first year. If he loses to Nutt and Gus Malzahn, well, I don't even want to think about it. Vic Snyder - He's 60 and he and his 47-year-old preacher wife are about to have triplets, which would give them four kids in three years. Why, it's positively Duggeresque. It may begin to get through out there in the Second District's right-wing exurbs that Vic's not gay. George W. Bush - He gnarls traffic in Little Rock to raise big money at a beer distributor's house. This is after a similar fund-raiser in Jackson, Miss., the only other town considered backwater enough to put up with him. At least it distracted him a few hours from plans to attack Iran between November and January. But, trouble is, Dick Cheney's probably doing most of that planning, with Rummy consulting. Barack Obama - If we voted today, he becomes president. But we're not voting today. The National Rifle Association still has $40 million to spend against him in rural Virginia and Ohio, two states he needs. John McCain - He has no command of the economy and is wrong on Iraq. His best thing is whatever the smears do to Obama between now and November. Conway - Everyone in town except Lu is doing great. Bill Halter - We're going to get that lottery and it's going to be to his credit. Dustin McDaniel - The young attorney general, master of the televised public service announcement, will beat Halter, anyway, for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination after Beebe' two terms. Mike Huckabee - He's making a lot of money. He called me back last week. I don't know why he'd still bother with me unless he was keeping his options open in Arkansas to oppose Blanche Lincoln's re-election in 2010. Blanche Lincoln - That preceding item may have ruined her breakfast.------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
