Arkansas: Irs

Arkansas writer Gene Lyons has a terrific piece in Salon on the mainstream media's knee-jerk defense of Fox. After the White House said it was a "fiction" that Fox News was a traditional news organization, columnists gasped in horror.

... neither the Times nor most "mainstream" pundits evaluated the claim on its merits. Most pretended not to grasp the White House's point, and then went straight to the aiding and abetting. Many invoked the ghost of Richard Nixon. Why, to criticize Fox, claimed the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus and Charles Krauthammer, was downright "Nixonian."

NPR's Ken Rudin recalled "what Nixon and Agnew did with their enemies list." So did CNN's Anderson Cooper. Rudin subsequently apologized for the "boneheaded" comparison; Cooper didn't.

Excuse me, but Nixon's enemies list was secret. Journalists and others got subjected to illegal FBI wiretaps, "black bag" break-ins and IRS audits. White House officials even discussed murdering columnist Jack Anderson.

Thanks to Cato for pointing me to a website of a scholar devoted to cataloguing Mike Huckabee's extremism. It's not light work to keep up with Huckawhoppers. Much of it's familiar: His approval of discrimination against gay people; his calls for the U.S. to leave the UN and abolish the IRS. I'd missed this one, about the threat of a nuclear device using electromagnetic impulses to knock out power and communications in the U.S. for maybe years:

On September 10, Governor Huckabee the keynote speaker on day two of the EMPACT America conference on the threat from electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks. At the event

Catching up on odds and ends:

* D-G reports 15 proposals responding to State Fair's search for a new site (or improving the existing LR location). Lacking: Any idea where money would come from for buildings, roads, etc., much less purchase of the land offered for sale. I include in that omission the Little Rock proposal which would only seem to require $45 million for a freeway interchange through wetlands, acquisition of more property, condemnation of neighborhood homes, relocation of a housing project, millions for building improvements. Talk is, indeed, cheap.

* Speaking of tall talk: George Hopkins' noble effort to make the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System follow the law (something honored only sporadically under the previous leadership) has run into political realities.

I just got a letter from my former colleague, Warwick Sabin, whose current duties include being publisher of the Oxford American, the Southern lit magazine based at UCA.

The letter describes the magazine's shaky future on the account of the IRS' insistence for prompt payment in full of a tax debt, among the wreckage left by a former bookkeeper's alleged embezzlement. On the jump, Warwick lays out the case. Sure he mentions that the IRS is now overseen by a former tax cheat who you might say got a little forbearance from the government. It might be if the Faulkner County prosecutor would get off the dime and prosecute the embezzler, a restitution plan could be worked out to help ease the OA's problems.