Editorial Roundup: Recent editorials in Arkansas newspapers

Here are excerpts from recent editorials in Arkansas newspapers:

Southwest Times Record. Jan. 7, 2018.

Those of us in Fort Smith have a unique opportunity, one that residents in many other cities across America will never have: We get to celebrate a milestone birthday for our city. And the celebration isn’t just one day, it’s all year long. We encourage all residents, whether you’re new in town or have lived here all your life, to participate in the celebration. There will be many opportunities to do so, and we’d hate to see residents missing out on such a special opportunity.

Christmas Day marked the 200th anniversary of the founding of Fort Smith, when Army troops landed here along the Arkansas River. That event was re-enacted on Christmas Day 2017 in an event that kicked off Fort Smith’s yearlong Bicentennial celebration.

Fort Smith’s Bicentennial even reached Washington, D.C., when Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., a Fort Smith native and Northside High School graduate, acknowledged the occasion on the Senate floor.

“As home to a growing university, new medical school and vibrant new industries, I know Fort Smith is starting the 21st century on a solid foundation. We have much to celebrate from the past, but even more to look forward to for the future,” Boozman said.

“Fort Smith is a city with an incredible story to tell in its faith communities, its schools, its industries and its arts and culture,” the senator went on to say.

What’s exciting is the celebration continues throughout 2018. Not many cities can say they have done anything like this. Indeed, a yearlong celebration of this type seems quite special. We’re fortunate Fort Smith has so many stories to tell, and we look forward to seeing what the four quarters of the celebration (Arts & Culture, Western Heritage, Homecoming and Future Fort Smith) have to offer.

So if you missed the kickoff, there are still plenty of events and activities in which to take part, whether it’s attending a concert, viewing an art exhibit or taking part in an attempt (or two) at a Guinness World Record.

Even if you think you already know everything there is to know about Fort Smith, we’re pretty sure you don’t. And even if you do, we believe this year offers such a special opportunity to celebrate and enjoy Fort Smith’s uniqueness. We think you’ll discover that Fort Smith is more than just an “Old West” town, although certainly there are plenty of exciting stories from that part of its history.

The Bicentennial will be about more than history, though. The fourth quarter of 2018 (October-December) will focus on Fort Smith’s future. Whether you’re young or just young at heart, that will prove to be an exciting three-month celebration and will no doubt offer a look at opportunities that await Fort Smith’s youngest residents.

And you don’t want to regret missing out on things like an attempt to break the world record for a lip dub video during the Old Fort Days Rodeo Parade on Memorial Day, or the attempt to create a glass bottle mosaic in the shape of the six-pointed U.S. Marshal star in September.

All in all, the Bicentennial is about celebrating a special occasion together as a city. Each and every event may not be your thing, so to speak, but we’re confident there will be something for you to attend and enjoy with other members of your community. And if you’re a former resident of Fort Smith, 2018 is the perfect opportunity to return and remember all the things that make the city special.

If you ever wanted to know more about Fort Smith, now is the opportunity. We owe it to the city to take part in the events that are planned throughout the year. Planning for the Bicentennial began long ago, and the folks in charge deserve a lot of credit for making it happen. Most of us won’t be around for the city’s 300th birthday, so don’t let the 200th slip by you. This opportunity comes just once in a lifetime.

“We are forever grateful to the men and women who have encouraged the community’s progress and implemented their ideas to shape the city for the next generation,” Boozman said this month in Washington.

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Texarkana Gazette. Jan. 9, 2018.

Many of our more seasoned subscribers will remember back in the day when soft drink bottles came with a deposit.

The drinks were sold in glass bottles and buyers paid a small sum - a couple of pennies in the early 1960s - to take the drink home. No deposit required if you gulped it down at the store.

Then you took the bottle back to the store to get your money back. For some young folks collecting Coca-Cola and other soft drink bottles, it became almost like a part-time job - the money financing more soft drinks, candy or even a Saturday morning trip to the movies.

The deposit was a way for franchisees to ensure they got their bottles back for reuse. Since the arrival of cans and plastic containers, those days are long gone around these parts. But elsewhere in the country you might have to pay a deposit as part of an anti-litter campaign.

But now in Seattle, anyone who wants to enjoy a sweetened drink will be paying a lot more. And a lot of folks aren’t happy about it.

As of the first of the year, Seattle consumers must cough up a 1.75-cent-per-ounce tax on drinks such as soda pop, sports and energy drinks and the like that contain added caloric sweeteners. Diet drinks are excluded as are some drinks that include milk as the first ingredient, such a chocolate milk and egg nog and even some fancy coffee drinks, even though the sugar count might be much higher than in regular soft drinks. Alcohol is also excluded.

An example? Costco advertised a 35-pack of Gatorade for $15.99. With the new tax of $10.34 the total price shot up to $26.33. A 36-can carton of Dr Pepper advertised for $9.99 became $17.55 when the $7.56 tax was added.

The idea is to steer folks away from unhealthy beverages. But the money is attractive, too. The city says the tax will bring in $15 million this year alone. Maybe so. But as Costco’s signs reminds customers, all it takes is a trip outside the city limits to avoid the tax. And more and more residents might just opt to spend money on gas to make the journey rather than give it to the city. That’s fine for a big retailer like Costco. We wonder how the tax will affect smaller operations?

Let’s just hope all we ever have around here is our memories of tiny deposits on glass bottles. Leave the pricey social engineering elsewhere.

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Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Jan. 9, 2018.

Some of us can think of far worse accusations to make against a president of the United States than what Donald Trump is now being accused of by his oh-so-reflexive critics. Namely, that he changes his mind - and his policies - when they no longer seem to be working. But this isn’t inconsistency so much as common sense. Why go on doing the same thing over and over again in the vain hope that this time it will work?

To quote the president’s press secretary, whose name, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, will have a familiar ring here in Arkansas: “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission (in charge of investigating voter fraud), and he has asked the Department of Homeland Security to review its initial findings and determine next courses of action.”

In short: Stop, look and listen when the sound of an approaching political train threatens to drown out everything else. This bipartisan committee, aka the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, was chaired by Vice President Mike Pence and led by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. The administration isn’t giving up its interest in tracking allegations of fraudulent voting, it’s just taking another tack when faced by the opposition’s determination to derail the whole train.

The leader of the Democratic minority in the U.S. Senate, Chuck Schumer of New York, was busy painting the administration’s tactical retreat as a great victory for his party. “The commission,” he claimed, “never had anything to do with election integrity. It was instead a front to suppress the vote, perpetrate dangerous and baseless claims, and was ridiculed from one end of the country to the other. This shows that ill-founded proposals that just appeal to a narrow group of people won’t work, and we hope they’ll learn this lesson elsewhere.”

Seldom in the history of political infighting has so much been claimed by so few on so little basis. The upshot of all this commotion is that the country no longer has one more bureaucracy cluttering up the federal government. Which may be the best result an overburdened public could have hoped for.

The moral of the story: Give us a happy ending every time, even if it takes a while and an awful lot of rhetoric to get there. Something tells us this whole raucous episode will prove only a blip on history’s radar screen as the Republic goes forward - in this case by going backward.