Fragile connections
My thanks to Mike Masterson for sharing his personal story about his dad Rue. His ability to visualize the final days and moments of life through his dad's perspective was very thought-provoking and a reminder to us all of the sometimes fragile connections we make while we take this short journey. Happy Father's Day to all.
JERRY McINTYRE
Little Rock
Reflects poorly on her
With each passing day, it becomes clearer that Donald J. Trump's ego and lust for power would not let him accept the reality that he lost the 2020 presidential election fairly and squarely. He even went so far as to entertain the notion that his own vice president should be hanged.
As shocking as all these new revelations are, they shouldn't surprise anyone who knows anything about Trump's well-established history of lies, deceit, treachery and general absence of a moral compass.
For years, Sarah Huckabee Sanders worked closely with Trump as his press secretary. Did she not know the caliber of person her boss was? If she didn't, shame on her for being so ignorant. If she did, even more shame on her for enabling this grave threat to our democracy.
(And let us not forget that, during the Mueller probe, she admitted making intentionally false statements to the public during her tenure at the White House. Not my opinion. Fact.)
So ... she's either a horrendously poor judge of character, or is uniquely implicit in enabling Trump to drag America to the brink of destruction.
Either way, and especially considering her utter lack of qualifications for the position, she does not deserve to govern our great state of Arkansas.
DREW JANSEN
Little Rock
Will make us great
After listening Thursday to close to 2½ hours of revealing and heartbreaking testimony from people who made great personal sacrifice to come forward, and whose political ideologies are radically different from mine, I am hopeful that we can come together and transcend the game of politics where the conscience of those in power to do what is right and unequivocally loyal to truth will prevail.
Then, and only then, will we be able to make America great again. Truly great.
WILSON STILES
Little Rock
Her plan won't work
Sarah Huckabee Sanders states in her political advertisements that she wants to save us from the radical left, defend our right to be free of socialism and tyranny, help solve the inflation problem, have great schools, create high-paying jobs, educate our children not indoctrinate them, have less government dependence, eliminate the state income tax and not allow her children to view CNN.
High-paying jobs require a good education, a good education requires great schools, and great schools require money. Arkansas has several problems already in the area of education. According to the U.S. Census Bureau in 2016, just 22.4 percent of the citizens of Arkansas had a four-year college degree, compared with 31.3 percent of all Americans, putting Arkansas in 49th place.
State income taxes fund over a third of the education budget in Arkansas. What funding source will replace them? Huckabee Sanders' plan just does not add up. Under it, Arkansans would become more uneducated. Democracy does not work with an uneducated population. Is that what Huckabee Sanders and the Republican Party really want? An uneducated populace that is much easier to manipulate by tyrants?
Inflation is caused by the massive overprinting of money by the Federal Reserve. Jerome Powell, the current chairman of the Fed, was appointed by Donald Trump. I believe another inflation cause is the Trump tariffs. Huckabee Sanders must not have paid attention in her economics 101 class. I do not recall Huckabee Sanders objecting to Powell's appointment or the tariffs.
Huckabee Sanders' career has been dominated by government employment and dependence. She rallies against government dependence yet she has fed primarily at the public trough.
Arkansas does not need Huckabee Sanders.
JOHN ROLLANS
Little Rock
They deserve shame
Former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is generally credited with the well-known saying that "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics." Your recent correspondent from Horseshoe Bend offers cherry-picked statistics from the 2020 presidential election results in key battleground states as proof that the results were bogus. This attempt to take a known fact and from it derive an unrelated conclusion is known as a fallacy.
The total voter turnout in 2020 was the largest in U.S. history. Joe Biden's margin of victory over Donald Trump was over 7 million votes. Women in suburban areas in key battleground states turned out heavily for Biden over Trump. The numbers prove a simple fact: Biden handily defeated Trump in a free and fair election. No evidence of widespread voter fraud was ever upheld in the dozens of lawsuits and spurious challenges raised by a rabid cohort of Trump loyalists.
2020 was a race like no other. Our national health was literally at stake. The choice was stark. An impeached, divisive, ill-prepared, untruthful narcissist who had fooled the voters into electing him in 2016, but who had quickly proven to be unfit for office, was running against an exceptionally experienced, decent man who promised to try and reunite the American people and help heal the racial divide that Trump was fostering.
Instead of accepting the results of this free and fair election, the sitting president launched a disgraceful and unprecedented campaign to overturn them and thwart the will of the American people. That campaign continues with the help of Republican bootlicks and sycophants who shamefully seek Trump's endorsement to curry favor with his followers.
Congressman Rick Crawford is exceptionally guilty for voting against certifying the election results on Jan. 6, 2021, but every other Republican candidate for a major political office in Arkansas claimed fealty to the disgraced former president in their political ads. They all share the shame and deserve the harsh judgment that history will surely impose.
DAVID ELI COCKCROFT
Little Rock
Show with our votes
If you are as sick and tired of gun violence that kills our children and family members, then join me in voting for anybody but a Republican in the coming election. I know this seems extreme, but it will send a message to our lawmakers that we the people want action on gun reform.
LARRY LARSON
Little Rock