Lip from Arkinsaw

Greetings from The Bear State, The Wonder State, The Natural State, The Land of Opportunity, The Land of Bad Government.

For 150 years the Arkansas legislature has been dominated by the Democratic Party and we have moved from 50th to 49th in just about every measurable category. This giant leap forward is a definite reason to keep doing what we are doing in my opinion. No need to change the horse in midstream!

Arkansas, the land of contradiction, home of the greatest retailing monolith in the history of the world yet too broke to fix its highways. The land that votes Republican for President and Democrat for everything else. The land that has to have a special income tax exemption for Texarkana to keep people on its side of the border but can't understand why the rest of the state (that doesn't have the exemption) keeps losing business deals to Texas.

Arkansas, my beloved home, land of the inferiority complex. Where our biggest sports rivalry is against a team that doesn't know we exist and where the catch-phrase is "Thank God for Mississippi".

Our great poet laureate, and only real poet of note, John Gould Fletcher summed it all up perfectly when he wrote about his home state's role in the Civil War..."It was the people of the State who had to make this war, abandoned and betrayed and alone. And they fought with a grin of pain on their faces, as if to say to all beholders: 'We know we are nothing but backwoods trash, inferior to everybody, It does not matter to anyone. We will still fight on.'"

That's the people of Arkansas even today. We don't care who loves us, we don't care who understands us, and we don't even care if we are internally inconsistent. We will still fight on.