Shame on us. The Ledge just put one over on us ... again!
Reader alert: Before you go any further--I have my dandruff up over this one. My little screed here today will probably be fraught with froth and flakes.
As reported several times in the past weeks, the results of Issue No. 3 from last November's ballot are official and we are all fixin' to be ... well, let's just say it rhymes with "dude."
The dudes who designed our collective duping are Rep. Warwick Sabin and Sen. Jon "never trust a man who drops a letter from his first name" Woods. If you are not sitting down, you may want to pour yourself a stiff one and get real comfortable for this. They apparently stuffed their greasy palms (politicians' palms get that way at campaign time) deep into the state treasury's cookie jar and pulled out a 150 percent pay raise for themselves. You read that right--150 percent!
Let's just take a little aside here and put this shameful act into perspective. It has recently been reported that the average American worker (and by average American worker I mean folks like you and Joanne), over the past seven years, after allowing for taxes and inflation, has been rewarded with a net wage increase of zero. Nada. Nuttin', honey. By the time that most of us achieve the same 150 percent wage increase as Woods and Sabin et al., the world will be well into its next glaciation.
If you have ever been lost in the woods, you probably know that one critical survival technique is to cover your trail so the lions, tigers, and snakes (oh no!) can't track you down and eat you up. Well, it seems the dudes did just that. They covered their trail. Or so we are led to believe.
They wrote into their little laughable list that an independent (wink wink) commission would ride herd over the implementation of Issue No. 3. Turns out this independent (wink wink) commission is about as auto-nomous as a Vladimir Putin-appointed commission on human rights. These independent (wink wink) commissioners are nothing more than patronage-driven money-grubbers who would have made "Boss Tweed" and his Tammany Hall thugs (who created the nearly perfect triangulation of the mayor's office, the Democratic party, and the social club organization) look like a troop of Girl Scouts. They constitute an even more perfect ménage à trois that is appointed by the same folks who will be the recipients of their self-created windfall: state House and Senate leaders, judges, and even old "never trust a man whose first name is a palindrome" Asa Hutchinson.
Now, I don't know about you, but to me that's like cutting a bunch of 5-year-olds loose in a candy store. (I wanted to write something more appropriate like cutting a bunch of rednecks loose in a porn shop--but the paper wouldn't let me.)
So you are probably asking yourself, "Bill, how the heck did Issue No. 3 ever get this far?" Turns out the answer is pretty simple. Woods and Sabin simply exercised their right to invoke Rule No. 7 that is listed in the appendix of the ever-popular handbook that is required reading for all freshmen lawmakers: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Arkansas Politics But Were Afraid To Ask. It simply states: "When in doubt, be criminally ambiguous."
Trust me, you don't even want to know the other nine rules on the list, but one of them deals with the proper pronunciation and wistful inflection when using the term, "Aw, shucks" when explaining yourself to the media or constituents.
Have you ever watched one of those commercials on television where the announcer, who has just been jacked-up with 12 cups of Folgers dark roast in an IV, reads the light-speed disclaimer that even your teenager can't understand? Well, that is effectively what they did to us when they wrote this "ethics" bill.
When I went to vote last fall, I lingered in the voting booth and read Issue No. 3 four times. It made about as much sense as the fine print of a used-car sales contract, so I settled in for another read when some big woman with a big button on her blouse that read Voting Booth Congestion Control pulled me out and vehemently sprayed these spittle-riddled words into my face: "Time's up, buddy ... move along."
Exasperated and ready to abandon all hope, you're probably asking yourself, "Bill, what the heck can we do now?" Well, I'll tell you what we can do. Thankfully we live in a state that still guarantees our constitutional right to a democratic process (unlike Texas where their governor just tells them what to do). We can start what is called an "initiative."
The first seven of you who email me will get your names on an independent (wink wink) commission that I'm organizing. Together, we will author a measure whereby all 2,915,918 Arkansans will be eligible for tax refunds that equal 150 percent of the taxes that they will pay for the next five years. We will call ourselves the "150 Percenters."
Now, as we all know a measure like that is ludicrous and just plain outrageous. But what concern is that of ours? Apparently Jon and Warwick didn't care.
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Bill Rausch is a freelance humor writer from Little Rock. Email him at williamrausch25@yahoo.com.
Editorial on 02/28/2015