American offshore oil is a spit in the bucket compared to Iraq’s oil reserve.Someone needs to point out the irony here. We’ve occupied a nation for five years. That nation owns a massive oil reserve. By any objective measure – size, quality, ease and relative cheapness of drilling to it and moving it from the [...]

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Arkansas Republicans will get a reminder next month that there’s a race they can win.GOP presidential nominee-apparent Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is coming to Northwest Arkansas on Aug. 8, the state Republican Party announced Friday. The most recent polls show him leading this state by large margins.There’s been a lot of speculation about why McCain [...]

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Arkansas Republicans will get a reminder next month that there’s a race they can win.GOP presidential nominee-apparent Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is coming to Northwest Arkansas on Aug. 8, the state Republican Party announced Friday. The most recent polls show him leading this state by large margins.There’s been a lot of speculation about why McCain [...]

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The prospect of forced consolidation of the Greenland and Decatur school districts is the biggest news in Benton and Washington counties right now. No pundit worth his space in the paper can ignore it.Unfortunately, there’s not much to say, at least not as far as Greenland’s concerned. The district’s board and administration had five years [...]

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The state constitution should be changed to allow full tax increment financing for roads.People pay $4 a gallon for gas and close to that for milk. They try to squeeze through on roads that just aren’t adequate anymore, wasting a lot of that $4 gas. The roads should be widened. Here’s the problem: How do [...]

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Tim Summers won a Republican primary against Vickey Boozman. That would have surprised me a month ago.Back then, I was droning on about all the challenges Summers faced in his bid for a state House seat, talking to somebody with more sense than me. That somebody pointed out that the presidential primary was over. All [...]

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High fuel prices was the first thing I thought of when reading that Arkansas and West Virginia had the lowest percentage of people with college degrees.You get some strange notions in my job.This particular notion goes back to Lu Hardin. He served as head of the state Department of Higher Education a few years ago. [...]

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Steve Clark’s ego got him in serious trouble 19 years ago.He was the fair-haired state attorney general who was next in line for governor. He used his taxpayer-provided credit card for personal benefit and was convicted for it.He could have let that history sleep. Instead, he recently announced for Fayetteville mayor. This brought his old [...]

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All four U.S. House of Representatives members from Arkansas got a pass from major party opposition this year. This includes 3rd District Rep. John Boozman of Rogers, the sole Republican.The Green Party will have a candidate in the 3rd, but Democrats won’t. This lack of a party challenger to Boozman aggravates many Democrats in Northwest [...]

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Give Gov. Mike Beebe a lot of credit for increasing the severance tax. Just don’t give him all of it.The governor struck a deal that natural gas drillers didn’t fight during this week’s special legislative session. That deal raises tax revenues by $57 million. That’s expected to grow to about $100 million a year. Nobody [...]

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