Andanh.com

The Arkansas Senate voted 19-12 today to affirm a committee's recommendation not to overturn the results of Sen. Jack Crumbly's 2006 election. Arnell Willis had challenged the outcome.

The committee had voted 4-3 to recommend that Crumbly, of Widener, keep his seat despite allegations of fraud. Senate debate was vigorous. In the end, it was not a Brotherhood-v.-Otherhood decision. Patterns: Black members of the Senate voted not to oust Crumbly, who is black, as is his opponent Willis. All but one of the Senate Republicans present, the exception being Gilbert Baker, voted to overturn the results. Point worth noting: It is not clear whether the irregularities noted in this election arose strictly from the Senate race. A number of other important local contests were on the ballot then.

For (19): Argue, Baker, Bookout, Broadway, Brown, Bryles, Critcher, Faris, Horn, Jimmy Jeffress, Johnson, Laverty, Luker, Madison, Malone, Smith, Steele, Wilkins, Wilkinson.

Against (12): Bisbee, Capps, Glover, Hendren, Miller, Pritchard, Salmon, Taylor, Thompson, Trusty, Whitaker, Womack.

Abstained (1): Crumbly.

Absent (3): Altes, Hill, Gene Jeffress.

I've mentioned this previously, but there's surely still time to get a ticket:

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford will be in LR Friday evening to speak to the Republican Party of Arkansas's "Hi, I'm Frank White" awards dinner. Ask him if he'd like to be vice president.

Bob Dylan will play the Riverfest Amphitheatre at 8 p.m. Aug. 26.

Tickets go on sale July 21. $39.50 to $59.50.

Carville suggests Al Gore. What about John Kerry? He's not ruling it out. But you can forget Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland. He categorically says no.

I saw Kerry eat McCain's lunch on Iraq last night on MSNBC. There was a time when McCain wouldn't Swiftboat Kerry, but now that he's the nominee ....  

Now that they've beaten the bitch ....

David Broder is making nice about Hillary and women....Nick Kristof is making nice about women...this blog notes others (Howard Dean, Slate, Obama, etc.) making nice about women....John McCain (and Obama again) making nice about women.

Brummett notes the announcement by an Oklahoma Democratic congressman that he won't endorse Barack Obama and says it illustrates the candidate's problem in Arkansas and the region. In short, though the Arkansas legislature has been post-partisan since Obama was a pup, the state is not yet post-racial or post-liberal.

ALSO: The guy in Oklahoma isn't the only centrist Democrat reluctant to join the Obama party.

Your turn.

Tomatoes, football, drugstores, sex, cross burning, airborne Airstreams, presidential politics, an insect-bedeviled TV reporter, Perry County intrigue, slumping home sales, immigration. A typical day on the Arkansas Blog has just about wore me out.

There's an old-fashioned filling station in the Heights where they'll still pump your gas, check your oil and wash your windshield, but you pay a  handsome premium for the service.

Today's report: 13.6 high-test gallons for $72 -- $5.29 per gallon.

I told the complainer he could at least start pumping his own gas.

UPDATE: My original whiner thinks maybe he misread the pump. Maybe he pumped more gallons and the gas was ONLY $4.40 or so a gallon. Oh, OK then.

Junior Freddie Fairchild has been booted from the UA football team. He'd been suspended earlier. The Petrino era is already looking different.

Thanks to the blog of the AFSCME local at the UA for news that Bill Clinton cancelled a commencement speech at UCLA rather than cross a picket line of university workers in a wage dispute.

Is there an Arkansas politician who wouldn't cross an AFSCME picket line at Walton University? In Arkansas, as the song reminds, is there a power greater than their hoarded gold?

The committee voted only after the developers said no to an offer to put off a decision until they could tweak the design to address committee members' concerns, according to Randy Jeffery, the CZDC's director.

 
Springfield Holdings, a Little Rock real estate development company, wants to build the Walgreens on the corner where the Box restaurant now stands, across the street from a Harvest Foods store. The CZD has fairly strict rules on buildings, meant to protect the area's historic integrity (the Harvest Foods was grandfathered in). For Walgreens, that meant putting the parking lot in the back and building out to the sidewalk, among other major changes.

Neighborhood activists have been wary, with the general feeling seeming to be that a Walgreens store is officially welcome, as long as it doesn't look like a Walgreens.
The proposed design had the rear parking and sidewalk build-out, but not the full-length storefront windows CZD regulations specify. It also included an LED scroll sign, strictly prohibited in the district, and several other design elements that would require variances that the design review committee apparently wasn't inclined to approve.

The CZD staff has also weighed in on the proposal: It's recommending approval of the project only if the developers agree to make some changes to the design, including many of the changes the design review committee wanted, Jeffery said.

 
Neither recommendation is binding -- the Capital Zoning District Commission makes the final decision. Its next meeting is June 26.

Tom Coughlin's special handling by a federal court in Fort Smith sent a message that there's a special brand of justice for rich folks.

Now federal Judge Harry Barnes has sent a message that there's a special brand of justice for thugs who commit a hate crime by burning a cross in a black person's yard in Fouke. If you were drunk and in a partying spirit and have a lot of friends who vouch for you, Barnes is just not inclined to impose much of a sentence, no matter what the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals says.

Is anyone else a bit tired of the American media, the American president and his American wife tut-tutting about the Chinese and Myanmar regimes' slowness in responding to the typhoon and earthquake damage inflicted on their country a month ago?

This finger-pointing is coming from the same goons who have long been silent on the destruction of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast and our own government's smirking non-response to that particular disaster.

Laura Bush tut-tuts from her Airborne Airstream about the Myanmar dictators' actions but sat like a stone monument while her husband and Dicked Cheney let the people along the Gulf Coast essentially shift for themselves for three years after Katrina devastated the area.

(Thanks to Hugh Mann for this supporting link; Myanmar got nothing on the Bushies when it comes to insensitivity.)