OPINION
Dope, dice, death
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nless the Arkansas Supreme Court decides otherwise, voters will have six constitutional amendments and one initiated act to consider in the Nov. 8 election. The three from the legislature range from minor cleanup (allowing the governor to remain governor when out of state) to egregious — pledging state tax money to private business bond issues and giving tax money to big business lobbying organizations. In between is an amendment aimed mainly at giving sheriffs four-year terms. The big battles come from petition drives. DOPE: There’s the initiated act to allow nonprofit dispensation of marijuana for medical purposes and the amendment to allow for-profit dispensation. As I said last week, I’m for any step toward decriminalization of marijuana. Governor Hutchinson assembled a bunch of doctors in lab coats Monday to reiterate his opposition. The group took the “reasonable” approach, solemnly
proclaiming that an FDA study process was the best course and claiming — despite avid disagreement from MAX tens of thousands BRANTLEY of satisfied users — maxbrantley@arktimes.com that prescription drugs exist that are better alternatives. They were either ignorant or lying when they suggested that marijuana could only be smoked. They signaled coming demagoguery by suggesting there was a particular horror in using pot tax revenue to provide palliative marijuana to poor people. Poor people are low on Asa’s totem pole. The half of America that has already legalized is wrong. So, too, are the 75 percent of doctors who support medical marijuana, which has never killed anyone, unlike, say, alcohol or opioids. You had to laugh when Hutchinson’s crew tried to compare Big Marijuana to Big Tobacco, as if private enterprise
Privacy hurts
H
illary Clinton’s decision to keep severely incapaciher mild case of pneumonia se- tated Franklin D. cret from all but a few of her Roosevelt is only staff and family may be only a momentary the most famous. campaign distraction, but it raises the A historian sifting question: Will she ever get it? through President ERNEST That is, after so many stumbles, will John F. Kennedy’s DUMAS she ever realize that her unrelenting papers in 2002 disinsistence on a “zone of privacy,” a citi- covered the breadth of the president’s zen’s right honored in the Bill of Rights, suffering from Addison’s disease and is a dead weight in the political world? addiction to painkillers and anxiety medIt is all that has stood between her and icine even as he took the country to the the presidency. brink of nuclear war over Russian missiles in Cuba in October 1962 (my drill John Brummett in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette imagined Clinton’s sergeant’s scolding that day is still fresh: response to the doctor’s prescription “Train hard, men, you’ll be shooting Rusof a few days’ rest. It probably comes sians in a few days”). Warren G. Harding close to a literal transcription. Since rest was treated for heart trouble, depresmight seem to be an affirmation of Don- sion and mental illness long before anyald Trump’s charges that her fall and one had a clue about how to treat them. concussion in 2012 left her physically Americans never knew that strokes left unfit for the presidency, she must keep Woodrow Wilson half-blind and parthe pneumonia secret and drive herself tially paralyzed. The rail-thin Andrew harder. Jackson suffered headaches, bleeding “Hillary is sick” may be Trump’s least lungs, gum disease, near blindness and effective stratagem. There is never an pain from two bullets he took in duels. occasion when she is not more alert and William Taft, a 300-pounder, endured more responsive than he, nor is anyone hypertension, sleep apnea and double likely to be swayed by the charge unless vision. The senior President Bush had they hate her anyway. bleeding ulcers, arthritis, atrial fibrilMany presidents had big health prob- lation and Graves’ disease. The signs of lems that they diminished or hid entirely, the dementia that killed Ronald Reagan often with the media’s complicity. The showed up fairly early in his presidency.
was a boogeyman. Hutchinson’s PAC, by which he helps elect like-minded legislators, takes money from Big Tobacco. His former chief of staff, Michael Lamoureux, took it by the bucketful while sitting in the state Senate. Cheech and Chong couldn’t have scripted it. DICE: A number of legislators and Bible beaters turned out for a campaign event against the amendment to allow two Missouri speculators to have sole rights to three casinos in Arkansas. It IS a bad idea. But, again, laughs were in order when the group moaned about the possibility that some guys from Missouri would get a monopoly for themselves written into the state Constitution. The folks at Oaklawn Park got a monopoly on parimutuel wagering on horses written into the state Constitution more than a halfcentury ago. And, wait for it ... the owners of that horse racing monopoly are from Missouri. With a little judicial and legislative sleight of hand, the Missouri horse race monopolists were joined by dog race monopolists in West Memphis in adding casino gambling to their lineup under the euphemism “electronic games of skill.” DEATH: Nothing less than fair com-
pensation for a horrifying death is at issue in the effort led by the nursing home industry to pass an amendment that says a human life is worth as little as $250,000, no matter how much abuse, negligence or malpractice brought that life to an end. What’s more, they want to cap attorney fees to further discourage lawyers from lawsuits over such neglect. The organized bar will fight the proposal if it makes the ballot. I’m guessing it will. Five of the seven Supreme Court justices who will decide whether it should be ballot eligible received big nursing home campaign contributions, most from nursing home magnate Michael Morton of Fort Smith. He has a good nose for judicial temperament when it comes to nursing homes. One justice, Rhonda Wood, got the majority of her money from nursing homes. She has been asked to get off an unrelated nursing home class action for that reason. As yet, no response. It also appears she participated in the court’s orders last week setting briefing schedules in the amendment cases and naming special masters to review compliance in the signature gathering process. Do I sound cynical? I mean to.
President Eisenhower endured a heart attack, stroke and Crohn’s disease. It is not her pneumonia that is troubling, but her decision, again, to hunker down and protect her privacy for fear that the plain facts might give somebody the impression that she is not the perfect moral, ethical and physical exemplar she wants to be. It has been so since she came on the political scene in Arkansas in 1974 to surreptitiously help her boyfriend Clinton in his first political race. Friends or aides always learn that their advice to just let everything hang out is unavailing. In politics, nowadays if not so much in the past, shielding harmless or even highminded deeds from public scrutiny leads to the opposite result — in her case, the widely polled view that she is untrustworthy and Trump’s lustily cheered libel that she is “crooked.” It would be pointless to rehash all the privacy stalls but for the two most famous, her refusal in 1993 to share with a newspaper or a congressional committee her law firm’s trivial work in the 1980s for a tiny Little Rock thrift, which led to eight years of investigation by the scourge Kenneth Starr, and now her State Department emails. Memoirs by White House aides recall her dogged refusal, in spite of pleas by advisers and her husband, to surrender a few pages of her firm’s billings. Eventually, the independent Whitewater counsels found nothing wrong in the billings,
her toil for the little thrift or in any of the other “scandals” that arose in its wake: the travel office firings, FBI files, Vince Foster’s suicide, the claims of an Arkansas political enemy that the governor had asked him to make an illegal SBA loan, and on and on. Nothing came of it all but revelations of Bill Clinton’s unchecked libido. But it produced the narrative, still recited by such reluctant Hillary supporters as David Brooks, that the Clintons were “scandal-ridden.” Once The New York Times reported her private email server during her State Department years, she might have acknowledged that, like her predecessor Colin Powell and others in the George W. Bush presidency, she did it to avoid the press or anyone else accessing her thoughts and deliberations through the FOI or subpoena. She said it was just convenience. She could have mentioned that the Bush White House switched to email servers at the Republican headquarters and destroyed 22 million emails, including the deliberations leading to the Iraq war. That surfaced in 2007 when Congress investigated the White House firing of Arkansas’s Bud Cummins and seven other federal prosecutors, but the press never made much of it. Unequal treatment? Sure, but that is the world she works in. You don’t feed it. arktimes.com
SEPTEMBER 15, 2016
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