The Tolbert Report

 Arkansas is on the front page of Fox News today for some controversial artwork in Eureka Spring.  According to their report, there are two controversial pieces.  Here is how Fox News describes them. 

Exhibit A is a painting of Alice in Wonderland, by Beth Post of Fayetteville, Ark. Titled “The Temptation of Alice,” it is a rendering of the iconic children’s book character alongside the “Drag-Queen of Hearts,” a man wearing women’s lingerie. The two of them are surrounded by rabbits that are, ahem, busy making more rabbits.

Exhibit B is a painting of the Virgin Mary, by Michelle Levy of Eureka Springs, Ark. Titled “The Divine Mother,” it depicts a bare-breasted Mary nursing the baby Jesus, with text above the Madonna that asks, “Does this halo make my face look fat?”

Apparently the Eureka Spring city council is taking steps to take control and remove the art, which is leading to some to cry foul.  If you will recall, Eureka Springs was recently at the center of controversy over recognizing same sex domestic partnerships.

For more on this, see the Arkansas Democrat Gazette report from last week.

I am trying to limit my blog to no more than one post on Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s forever shifting position on card check but the story just keeps on going.  It seems now Sen. Lincoln is allowing information to leak that she is going to vote no on card check … probably.  I wonder if she will have to explain to the people in this picture why she is now opposing a bill she once co-sponsored.

Arkansas News Bureau opinion writer John Brummett opined this week in his column, “Lincoln will be against ‘card check’ if circumstances require an actual position, or so I confidently expect.”  This was just days after he bragged on his twitter account that Lincoln’s campaign manager called to take him out to lunch.  Of course, maybe he did not mean to tell the world about this, after all he has been begging me to show him how to use his twitter account.  Regardless, it seems those in the news who are in the good graces of the Lincoln camp are hearing the chatter of her card check shift.  I must not be in that category as apparently Brummett got a personal invitation to attend her fundraiser while (in spite of my request) mine must have gotten lost in the mail.  Shocking, I know!

Anyway, it will be interesting to see if she actually takes a position in Little Rock this weekend in front of the business community that has doled out the big bucks to try and influence her stance or if she continues to insist that she has more important things to worry about than this.

John Brummett writes about a familiar topic on his blog today, the troubled news industry and its relationship to bloggers. Brummett, continuing the parasitic cycle by quoting from Salon, says “if newspapers die, the coverage of news dies because the Internet is basically parasitic.” He goes on to write, “you have all these bloggers who boast of their greater relevance than newspapers even as 90 percent of what they presume to know comes straight out of a newspaper.”

In a sense, he is right. Although I am not sure if I would go as high as 90 percent, most of what I know comes from the research and shoe leather of beat reporters who work at the state capital for eight to twelve hours everyday of the week. Without the Rob Moritz’s and the Andrew DeMillo’s of the world, I would know very little about what is going on with our legislature. Sure, I do make a trip or two a week for hour or so to the state capital and pick up a couple interviews and tips of what is going on. I correspond by email and occasionally a phone call with our elected officials to get some direct information on a issue I am following. But for the most part, I let the pros do the leg work.

What the news industry needs to understand is that bloggers are not their competition. If anything my blog drives traffic to their online content. Many times my posts are more of a commercial for their actual story than anything else. The news companies that survive will be the ones that figure out that their business is the delivery of news information and then adapt their business model to deliver this information in the manner that consumers are demanding, whether that is in print, online, via twitter, or whatever the next big thing is. Brummett should be pleased to know that ArkansasNews.com is a good example of this. With their improved website, I now read most all of Brummett’s blog posts and columns.

Speculating on what Republicans may run for office a year from now is usually a task reserved for crazy right wing bloggers like Kinkade and myself. But for some reason the left leaning blogging crowd has entered the mix. Brantley, commenting on state Sen. Gilbert Baker’s vote against the tobacco tax increase on Thursday said, “He is still thinking about a challenge to U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln in 2010.”

Brummett read this and did the unthinkable for a blogger; he called him – and on the phone no less! No checking his twitter account, no reviewing the scheduled speakers at the Central Arkansas Young Republicans luncheon. Brummett is so old school. Anyway, Baker tells him that National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee has approached him about running but that he is really focusing on his work in the legislature right now. Brummett paraphrases Baker to say “Unlikely, but not absolutely not.”

So let’s review. So far Republicans (in no particular order) Tim Griffin, Tom Cotton, Rick Calhoun, French Hill, and Gilbert Baker are all rumored to be thinking of mounting a challenge to Sen. Lincoln. Of course, all of them have been approached by other people begging and pleading for them to run but none of them have been talked into actually doing it…yet!

But Republicans are not the only ones thinking a making a run against Blanche. Whispers around the capital are saying that the Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter (photo from Lance Turner) might be catching the Senate fever as well. Word is that the Union Bosses are keeping an eye on Lincoln’s vote on card check legislation. If she votes against them, they will put their support (and money) behind Halter for a primary challenge. Of course, all this could just be state legislators expressing their admiration for the job that they think Halter is doing and their desire to see him leave the state capital building for bigger and better things.

Either way, 2010 should be a fun year for Arkansas politics!