Daily Archives: May 9, 2022

Everything you need to know about the biggest political races in Arkansas for the May 2022 primaries.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. Voters across Arkansas will choose on May 24 who will advance in several key races for the 2022 elections. Among those races is whether Sarah Huckabee Sanders will become the Republican nominee for the gubernatorial race and which Democratic challenger she will face in November.

Incumbent U.S. Senator John Boozman is facing tough competition from Jake Bequette and Jan Morgan for one of two Senate seats in the state. And six Republicans are facing off for the lieutenant governor ticket.

Statewide election dates

Governor

Because current Governor Asa Hutchinson has reached his term limits, the state will hold a general election on November 8 to determine the next governor.

On May 24, Republican frontrunner Sarah Huckabee Sanders will go up against Doc Martin as the Republican nominee for governor. Sanders expected to win that race.

Democrat candidates include Dr. Chris Jones, who is leading the party's candidates in a recent poll by Talk Business & Politics, will face off against Supha Xayprasith-Mays, Jay Martin, Anthony Bland, and James Russell.

Ricky Dale Harrington Jr. is the Libertarian candidate for Arkansas governor.

On Nov. 8, the winners of the Republican and Democrat primaries will go up against Harrington in the race.

Lt. Governor

A total of six Republicans are facing off in the race; Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, state Senator Jason Rapert, Doyle Webb, Joseph Wood, Chris Bequette, and Greg Bledsoe.

The winner of that race will face Democratic candidate Kelly Krout and Libertarian Frank Gilbert.

Attorney General

The race will be against Democratic candidate Jesse Gibson, independent Gerhard Langguth, and the winner of the Republican primary.

Current Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin is facing off against Leon Jones Jr. for the Republican ticket.

Secretary of State

Incumbent John Thurston will face Eddie Joe Williams in the Republican primary race.

And Joshua Price will go up against Anna Beth Gorman in the Democratic ticket.

U.S. Senate

Incumbent Senator John Boozman, who has been in the seat since 2011, will be contested by Jake Bequette, Heath Loftis, and Jan Morgan in the Republican primary on May 24, 2022.

The Democratic candidates for Boozman's seat are Natalie James, Jack Foster, and Dan Whitfield.

Kenneth Cates is the Libertarian candidate for the US Senate seat.

U.S. House

For local measures, issues, and other races either visit your county's election page or the Secretary of State's website.

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Arkansas May 2022 primaries: What you need to know - THV11.com KTHV

Everything in our politics and society today seems stuck, hanging, thrusting forward in a foreboding moment of transition in which essentially nothing seems good but just where its all going isnt at all clear. One of the big transitions is the shift of the tech world from its general indifference to politics in the first decade of the century, to a generally D-aligned engagement, to one that is increasingly but by no means universally aligned with the right and the hard right. In general many of us are accustomed to think of the tech high flyers as reflexively laissez-faire on economics while being cosmopolitan/libertarian on social issues. That latter stance isnt liberalism, though its fairly close in the context of U.S. politics. This is changing rapidly, however, and I want to note some particulars about a development you may have heard about.

Blake Masters is a Trumpite candidate for Senate from Arizona. Hes not the frontrunner but hes definitely in the mix. He wants states to again be able to outlaw contraception, though he says he has no personal opposition to contraception and would not support laws banning it. But he posted on his website that if he is elected he will only vote to confirm judges who understand thatRoeandGriswold andCaseywere wrongly decided, and that there is no constitutional right to abortion.

Well, Masters is another of Peter Thiels favored candidates, like JD Vance. Indeed, hes the President of Thiels foundation and coauthored a book with him. Hes a VC himself. As near as I can tell his entire career from law school has been tied to Thiel.

I generally dont think of even the far right folks from the tech world being terribly hung up about banning contraception. And Masters isnt necessarily representative of tech or VCs in this sense. But hes no exception or outlier either. I assume Masters must just be a conservative in ways that predate his involvement with Thiel and even with the tech and VC world. But this is still the direction of things. Anti-democratic thinking, authoritarianism and embrace of rightist revanchism are building rapidly in this milieu which controls enough capital to have a thundering voice in our politics going forward. What seemed like outliers almost a decade ago, the acolytes around Curtis Yarvins blog and the like, now seem like theyre moving to the center of the action.

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Thiel, Tech and the Hard Right Turn - TPM Talking Points Memo - TPM

By Rep. David Meuse, D- Portsmouth

One of the saddest developments in recent times is the expert use of the tools of democracy by those seeking to destroy the institutions democracy makes possible.

A recent example occured in March in the tiny town of Croydon, New Hampshire. A combination of bad weather, indifference, and busy lives kept the vast majority of the towns 801 residents from attending the annual school district meeting. The key item? A vote on the local school budget.

Undeterred by bad weather and with a specific mission in mind, a member of a libertarian-leaning group whose mission includes eliminating public education across New Hampshire introduced a motion to cut the school budget in half. A majority of the 34 people present, who included other members of the Free State Project and their allies, voted to support the motion.

All of a sudden, a largely forgotten school board had the full attention of a previously sleepy community. The reaction at first was shock. Then shock turned to anger. How could something like this happen in a town so proud of its K-4 school and so committed to going the extra mile to educate its children?

The answer was obvious. It happened because people skeptical ofand even hostile topublic education showed up and voted. Meanwhile, the vast majority of residents who value public education and whose children depend on it stayed home.

Fortunately, Croydon residents had one more card to playthe possibility of unwinding the vote if more than half the towns voters showed up for a special meeting. In the end, members of a chastened but wiser community voted 377-2 to restore the school budget to its original level.

While Croydons victory is worth celebrating, it also presents a cautionary tale of what can happen when civic engagement lags and distracted voters fail to understand that not all of their fellow residentsor elected officialsshare their values or their commitment to community.

This year in New Hampshire weve seen elected officials use redistricting laws as an opportunity to tighten the grip of a single political party. Weve witnessed other laws passed to make absentee voting harder and to quash the ability of members of the public to fully participate remotely in public meetings. At the local level, weve seen vocal groups crowd into public meetings to make demands that often dont reflect the will of a majority of other members of the communityand get the changes they demanded.

While we may not like the results, these outcomes all represent democracy in action. To win, you must show up and play. When you dont, you run the risk of ceding control over the issues that matter to you to a vocal minority adept at using the tools of democracy to unravel things you care deeply about.

Increasingly, many of us wonder if democracy is working or not working. But the truth is democracies dont take action or solve problemspeople do. For democracies to work, voters need to take interest, show up, make their voices heard, and most importantlyvote.

Life rarely gives us the opportunity for a do-over. Our democracy offers multiple chances. But only if were willing to do our part.

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Op-Ed: Using and Abusing the Tools of Democracy - InDepthNH.org

The following is a lightly edited transcript of remarks made by Nick Gillespie during a Newsweek episode of The Debate about COVID-19. You can listen to the podcast here:

Vaccines were a game changer because they allowed people to set their own personal risk level and get on with their business. People who want to wear masks and remove themselves from society can do so, but [vaccines] also allow you to be essentially free from bad outcomes. If you're vaccinated, you're not going to die or be hospitalized, with very rare exception. COVID in that sense is over, it should be over, and we should be working to get back to what life was like before the pandemic.

I'm a libertarian, not an anarchist, so I believe that there are certain public health moments where it will make sense for the government to impose mandates for some limited period of time. But other than speeding up production and distribution of vaccines, the federal government made terrible decisions. Between the FDA asserting monopoly control over testing, the conflicting information coming from the CDC and Dr. Fauci about mask wearing that was misinformation. I also don't like the idea of state and local governments deciding what is an essential business and what is a non-essential business. All of this is in the rear-view-mirror for the most part, because people can internalize their cost-benefit analysis of how to move forward.

Dr. Nick Gillespie is editor-at-large for Reason Magazine and host of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.

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COVID-19 Is Over for the Vaccinated | Opinion - Newsweek

If the Ohio primary tells us anything, its that Trump is still dominant in the Republican Party. All of his endorsed candidates won their races. If that holds here in North Carolina, well have Ted Budd as the GOP Senate nominee, Madison Cawthorn in the 11thCongressional district, and Bo Hines in whatever district he finally chose. If I were a Republican, I would be embarrassed, but if weve learned anything from the Trump years, we learned Republicans have no shame.

Trumps dominance in the party lays bare the fact that the so-called Conservative Movement based on principles of liberty, small government, and free-markets wasnt really a movement at all. It was what so many of us believed all alonga cover for reactionary populism of Jim Crow and was fueled by White nationalism and theocratic evangelicalism. Ronald Reagan may have been the face of party, but the Moral Majority was the engine.

Sure, there were true believers among the free-marketeers, but they didnt have the numbers to get elected on their own merit. They were always dependent on resentment politics to get a enough support to reach a majority. And those movement conservatives always denied the racism in their midst because they believed, falsely, that the bigots were a minority in their party. In fact, the opposite was true.

Whats most surprising, though, is how many of the movement conservatives have abandoned their beliefs for tribalism, making excuses for MAGA and supporting the blatantly White nationalist GOP. North Carolina has always been an epicenter of the balance and its now one of the clearest examples of the reactionaries dominating the ideologues and the ideologues surrendering their principles. The NC GOP is MAGA through and through.

The John Locke Foundation and Civitas were begun by Art Pope as free-market think tanks with a libertarian bent. They built a fierce campaign arm that funded the GOP transformation from a minority to a majority party. Their influence peaked in 2010 and 2012 when they underwrote the elections that captured the legislature and Governors Mansion. By 2016, they were on the decline, backing the failed governorship of Pat McCrory and initially opposing Donald Trump.

Six years later, Civitas and JLF are in control of MAGA tribalists defending everything from the homophobia of Mark Robinson to the anti-vaxxers with a death wish. The new leadership is loath to criticize Trump or take on the Big Lie. They might criticize Madison Cawthorn now that hes made a clown of himself, but they wont criticize Dan Bishop who votes exactly like Cawthorn, siding with Russia over Ukraine, praising the crazy Lauren Boebert, and supporting an America First agenda. Theyve evolved from organizations dedicated to promoting liberty and the free-market to campaign operations focused on maintaining power at any cost.

The primary season is revealing Trumps continued grip on the GOP and the reality that the party is grounded in nationalism and evangelicalism, not a commitment to liberty or free-markets. His candidates dominated Ohio, including nominee JD Vance who was an anti-Trumper until he read the writing on the wall. In North Carolina, well see next week whether Trumps control over our GOP is as complete. I suspect it is.

Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >

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The primary season shows Trump's continued dominance of the GOP - PoliticsNC

This morning I appeared on C-SPAN Washington Journal to talk aboutDobbs. I was asked to explain how the Supreme Court could overrule precedent, and extinguish a judicially-created constitutional right.

This question has been used to criticize the stare decisis analysis in the draftDobbs opinion. Sure, the Supreme Court has overruled precedents, but has (almost) always done so to expand liberty. Brown v. Board of Education, for example, (partially) overruledPlessy, but did so in the service of expanding the equal protection under the law.

This argument presumes that liberty is defined by removing the state's power to restrict individuals.ConsiderAdkins v. Children's Hospital andWest Coast Hotel v. Parrish. The former case protected a right of individuals to contract. The latter case protected the right of the people to govern themselves, and mandate a minimum wage. Both cases involved rights of different sorts. To say that West Coast Hotel did not promote liberty is to adopt a classically libertarian understanding of liberty. But there is more than one conception of liberty.

Chief Justice Roberts explored this concept in hisObergefell dissent:

Those who founded our country would not recognize the majority's conception of the judicial role. They after all risked their lives and fortunes for the precious right to govern themselves. They would never have imagined yielding that right on a question of social policy to unaccountable and unelected judges.

Justice Scalia made this point more forcefully in hisObergefell dissent:

Today's decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in factand the furthest extension one can even imagineof the Court's claimed power to create "liberties" that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.

Justice Alito's draft opinion explains that there are many conceptions of liberty, quoting Lincoln and Berlin:

Historical inquiries of this nature are essential whenever we are asked to recognize a new component of the "liberty" protected by the Due Process Clause because the term "liberty" alone provides little guidance. "Liberty" is a capacious term. As Lincoln once said: "We all declare for Liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing." In a well-known essay, Isaiah Berlin reported that "[h]istorians of ideas" had catalogued more than 200 different senses in which the terms had been used.

It is a mistake to argue that Dobbs extinguishes a right, without also acknowledging that the decision would restore another right. OverrulingRoe would extinguish a judicially-created right to abortion, but it would restore a very different right: the right of the people to govern themselves.

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Overruling Roe Would Extinguish A Judicially Created Right, But Would Restore The People's "Precious Right To Govern Themselves" - Reason

As the COVID-19 pandemic rattled global supply chains, each of the two most recent presidential administrations stressed the importance of limiting America's supposed reliance on imported goods and boosting domestic supply chains. Now, a national shortage of baby formula is testing that theoryand the results don't look good for the "Made in America" crowd.

The shortage is a serious one. According to CBS News, about 40 percent of the top-selling brands are currently out of stock. And as news of the shortage spreads, fears of panic-buying that could further deplete supply lines are causing some stores and pharmacies to limit how many units consumers can buy, The New York Timesreports.

Much of the current shortage is rooted in a February recall of formula after a suspected bacterial outbreak at an Abbott Nutrition plant in Michigan. The recall affected three major brands of powdered baby formula, and the plant was subsequently closed as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspected it. On Saturday, a spokesperson for Abbott told CNN that the company is working with the FDA to restore full operations.

With the Abbott plant out of commission for the time being, America's demand for baby formula has outpaced domestic supply. It's exactly the type of situation where imports would help alleviate the domestic supply crunch and make American markets more resilient.

Unfortunately, American trade policy is doing exactly the opposite right now. Tariffs and quotassome that predate the Trump and Biden administrations, but others that were worsened in recent yearsmake it burdensome and costly to import the supplies that are now desperately needed. Sometimes those imports aren't allowed at all, for reasons that have nothing to do with health and safety.

"Surely, protectionism isn't the only reason for the current formula crisis," Scott Lincicome, director of general economics and trade for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, tells Reason, "but it's just-as-surely making things worse."

As Lincicome has noted on Twitter, imports of infant formula are subject to tariff-rate quotas of 17.5 percent after certain thresholds are met. As the name suggests, tariff-rate quotas are meant to be set high enough that they effectively block additional imports by making it unprofitable to pay the tariff. In a year like this one, when domestic supplies are flagging and more formula is needed, that creates a serious impediment for suppliers.

But even if importers and consumers were willing to swallow those higher costs right now, they might be prohibited from having that choice. Last year, for example, the FDA forced a recall of approximately 76,000 units of infant formula manufactured in Germany and imported into the United States. The formula wasn't a health or safety risk to babies but merely failed to meet the FDA's labeling standards. In this case, the products were banned for not informing parents that they contained less than 1 milligram of iron per 100 calories.

In a separate incident last year, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) bragged in a press release about seizing 588 cases of baby formula that violated other FDA regulations. The seized formulas were made by HiPP and Holle brands, which are based in Germany and the Netherlands, respectively. Both are widely and legally sold in Europe and around the rest of the world.

Even when there isn't a shortage of formula in the market, consumers should be given the choice to buy perfectly safe products that are approved by regulators in Europe even if they fail to meet the FDA's standards. Now, especially, many parents would probably prefer to feed their infants formula imported from Europe instead of not having access to any formula at all. Economic protectionism and unnecessary regulation are the reasons why that's not a viable solution right now.

But rather than moving toward allowing greater trade, the U.S. has recently adopted policies making it more difficult to import infant formula. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) championed by the Trump administration, set new limits on how much baby formula Canada could exportnot just to the United States, but anywhere else in the world too.

As the CBC reported in 2018, that provision was likely a way for the Trump administration to snipe at China, after a Chinese-based company had invested $225 million in a formula manufacturing facility in Canada. The deal was also a win for American dairy farmers and the Trump administration, the CBC reported, after a political spat between the dairy special interests on both sides of the border.

But the new "export fees" included in the USMCA likely make it more costly and difficult for America to import extra supplies of formula from its northern neighbor. Chalk it up to another self-inflicted wound of the trade war with China.

While each of these specific trade and regulatory policies has contributed to the infant formula shortage in small ways, the bigger picture should raise some difficult questions for the economic nationalists who believe that foreign trade is a vulnerability for America's economy. Sen. Josh Hawley (RMo.), for example, has suggested tightening the "Made in America" rules that already govern federal procurement to include "the entire commercial market." Using the power of the federal government to exclude even more foreign-made products, he argued in aNew York Times op-ed last year, is "critical for our national security."

But, as the situation with Abbott Nutrition demonstrates, supply shocks can originate close to home too. Thanks to strict FDA regulations and oppressive tariffs, America is already largely dependent on only domestic suppliers for infant formula: America exports far more than it imports every year.

That's exactly the situation the economic nationalist want in all industriesand we're now seeing exactly how that can go wrong. Cutting off foreign trade and protecting domestic suppliers can make a country more vulnerable to unexpected supply problems, not more resilient.

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America's Trade and Regulatory Policies Have Contributed to the Baby Formula Shortage - Reason