If this blog were a goldfish, it would have died from neglect days ago. That’s poor hustle on my part. But enough about that — let’s pretend like we haven’t missed a beat and go straight to the odds and ends.
Off the Radarr. Imagine you are Lt. Gov. Mark Darr.[foot]The easiest way to do this is to get a job for which you aren’t qualified, then show up to that job about once every two weeks while still collecting a full-time paycheck.[/foot] You have been sued recently for alleged violations of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, but you are sure that you’ve done nothing wrong. You’ve even managed to convince a few other people[foot]Read: morons[/foot] that you haven’t done anything wrong, mainly by encouraging a selective reading of an irrelevant email.
Nevertheless, considering your office won’t have to pay for an attorney to defend you, if you honestly believe that you haven’t done anything wrong, why would you avoid actually being served with the lawsuit and summons?
Under Ark. Rule of Civil Procedure 4(d)(8), the attorney for the plaintiff in a lawsuit[foot]Full disclosure, for the handful of people who don’t already know: I am both the plaintiff and the plaintiff’s attorney in this instance.[/foot] can serve the summons and complaint on a defendant by sending both certified mail, return-receipt requested, which is exactly what I did on October 30. Delivery was attempted, and notice was left (because apparently no one was working in that office at 1:50pm on a Friday) on Halloween. Yet, as of this writing, neither Darr nor anyone from his office has picked up the summons and complaint from the Post Office.
Not to worry, however; I’ve amended the Complaint to add Amber Pool, as custodian of records, as a defendant as well. This way, we can be sure that someone is served, and we can see if Lt. Gov. Darr is so sure that he’s done nothing wrong that he’ll continue to duck service even when it leaves a loyal employee in the lurch.
Carpetbagging, Madison Avenue Style. Apparently, 4th District Congressional Candidate Tommy Moll — who sources assure me really does exist — was endorsed today by noted loon Erick Erickson.[foot]You should totally click on that last link. That’s an amazing amount of crazy in a few words, and it shows why Erickson is a rising star within the nuttier-than-squirrel-turds Republican echo chamber.[/foot] Thankfully, I can’t even pretend to actually care about that endorsement.
What I can care about, however, is the fact that Tommy Moll is apparently aware that he is a carpetbagger in the mold of Tom Cotton, sans the military resume that made Cotton relevant. But he’s trying to change that image . . . mainly by trying to scrub reality from the internet. Case in point, Tommy Moll was a member of the 2012 class of the New York Leaders of the Foreign Policy Initiative. Yet, were a person to go to the current page of the FPI’s 2012 class, Moll’s name is nowhere to be seen. So how do I know he was a part of the class? Because, as I’ve mentioned, the internet has a long memory.
I’m not saying that Moll’s name was deleted from the FPI website just to make it easier for him to pretend like he and his wife haven’t been full-time NYC residents for years — effectively, letting Moll pretend like he’s had anything resembling a presence in Arkansas over that time period — but . . . actually, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.
Endemic Crazy in Podunk, AR. In an equitable world, a story about the abrupt resignation of a politician from West Fork would have featured Mark Martin[foot]Who you can probably find in West Fork right now, since he comes to Little Rock only slightly more often than Mark Darr.[/foot] or at least Justin “Hypocrisy Is The New Black” Harris.
Instead, we get West Fork mayor Frances Hime, who apparently informed West Fork that she was resigning effectively RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND, they could mail her last paycheck to her home address, and they could just keep whatever furniture she left behind in her office because, apparently, she had no intention of ever returning to City Hall. Ever. Even the former residents of Pyramiden think this is an abrupt departure.
Sometimes I Feel Like…. Steve Rockwell has apparently defeated Radius Baker by fewer than 25 votes and John Cooper has defeated Dan Sullivan by fewer than 75 in the runoff election for SD21. Assuming that margin holds for both, Rockwell now faces the unenviable task of overcoming a [Edit: 500ish] vote deficit in the general election at a time when Arkansas State students won’t even be back on campus from Winter Break.
Can it be done? Maybe, if Rockwell can outraise Cooper by an absurd margin and run a deadly efficient campaign. Short of that, I wouldn’t advise holding one’s breath.
Texan Like Me. So a conservative wingnut gets himself elected to the Houston Community College board by pretending to be black? Somehow, that seems preferable to pretending to be a NASCAR driver.