Whoever gets elected mayor in Tuesday’s runoff, please keep Fayetteville out of any more real estate deals.Let’s learn from the Mountain Inn gravesite and SouthPass.My check into the SouthPass issue reached an early conclusion that nothing else shook: The city council’s resolution to let the mayor make this deal was vague enough to authorize just [...]

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I’ll cuss Eric Harris every time I drive to Little Rock. I told him. He laughed and promised me a picture of his grinning mug. I can put it on my dashboard and grind my thumb into it every trip, he said.Harris is a state House member from Springdale. He and his accomplice, Sen. Bill [...]

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Northwest Arkansas isn’t a belle of the White House ball any longer.George W. Bush knew he was going to win in 2000 when he flew in to Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport. Strings of car headlights filled the highways to the place.The new president’s never been here. He doesn’t owe us a thing, vote totals show.I [...]

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Only Dave Bisbee would make a public announcement in favor of governing in secret.The remarkably outspoken Senator Bisbee is running against Bill Williams for Benton County judge. Both are forthright men. That’s one reason Bisbee, a state senator, has enjoyed good press most of his career. That candor is also one reason I like Bisbee [...]

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“Daddy, is it true that most people won’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black?” my youngest asked me Saturday.“No, son. That’s not true. Who said that?”“A lady on TV.”“No, son. Every poll there is shows that most people will vote for him. A lot of people won’t vote for him, but they have different [...]

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John McCain’s presidential prospects collapsed this week, flattened by the Panic of ‘08 like a Wall Street investment bank.Pollster.com overlays state-by-state poll results with a map of the Electoral College. Republican nominee McCain was within 20 electoral votes of Democrat Barack Obama as recently as the week before last. That gap was 87 electoral votes [...]

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I don’t know if the Bella Vista bypass will get built in my lifetime.Only one road could get a big dollop of federal taxpayer money anytime soon. That’s Wall Street.There’s an election and a regular legislative session coming up. It’s time to take a hard look at our new circumstances. We’re either going to have [...]

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Any chance Barack Obama would carry Arkansas dried up Friday.Neither Obama nor his running mate, Joe Biden, could come to Arkansas without Bill or Hillary and draw much more than a polite crowd. New GOP vice presidential pick Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska could. She’d have to go to the Embassy Suites in Rogers, the [...]

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According to news accounts, this surprises and disappoints the school board.Why?I wasn’t surprised, and my history of real estate wheeling and dealing consists of buying three houses and selling two.How long did the board expect anybody to leave $50 million on the table?Yeah, a little warning or a deadline from the university would have been [...]

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Bill Gwatney would tell you the truth to your face whether you were his best friend or his worst enemy. He was also smart enough to know what the truth was.He had a talent for skewering the pompous. He was also so cocky he regularly skewered himself. Nobody took more of Gwatney’s stingingly clever gibes [...]

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