PrairiePundit

  Epoch Times: Arkansas Bill Creates Antibody Exemption for Biden Vaccine Mandates There is evidence that people who recovered from Covid have the antibodies that resist reinfection that may be more effective than the vaccine .  An Israeli study found that to be the case. The Biden administration tends to ignore these scientific findings.

Washington Free Beacon: The Democratic Party of Arkansas announced Monday that it was ending its push to get a candidate for U.S. Senate on the ballot in 2020 for Republican senator Tom Cotton's first reelection bid. Party leaders spent the past two weeks scrambling to find a way to replace Joshua Mahony, who announced that he was ending his campaign just two hours after the official filing deadline to run for office. Mahony cited a "family health concern" in his surprise announcement, leaving party officials flatfooted. In a Monday press conference, party chairman Michael John Gray said Mahony was a no-show for a meeting he had scheduled with the party to explain his situation, and that a legal representative for Mahony refused to elaborate beyond his initial statement on quitting the race. Without cooperation from Mahony, Gray said the party had no way to get a candidate on the ballot, according to video of the press conference posted by a local news website . ... ...

NY Times: Loss of a Democratic Power Leaves Arkansas in Doub t A.J. Chavar Democrats face tough challenges in a state that is drifting right. Their popular governor must leave office because of term limits, and outside interests loom larger in a race that may determine control of the Senate. What is becoming harder for Democrats in Arkansas is to hide the inherent liberalism of their party from conservative voters.  Arkansas is a little behind some of the other southern states which have already cast off the evils of liberalism.  Voters are not blind to the failure of the blue state model.  They don't like Obama's policies and they don't want to vote for someone who is supporting him and Harry Reid.

NY Times: A Little Clarity in Arkansas as Tom Cotton Opens a Lead Arkansas could be the first state where the G.O.P. turns a big opportunity into a big lead in the polls. Arkansas appears to be making its transition to a red state.   Pryor's backing of Obama liberal policies has been hard to defend.

It is a tough ad, that ties Pryor to a lot of things conservatives dislike.

Fred Barnes: "Tom Cotton voted against preparing America for pandemics like Ebola,” a TV ad in Arkansas declared last week. The ad came from Democrat Mark Pryor, who is running for reelection to the Senate. Cotton, a House member, is his Republican opponent in the November 4 election. The ad failed to mention that after voting against an early version of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Reauthorization Act, Cotton voted for the bill once a provision he objected to was removed. Last spring, Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s PAC said in an ad: “Before Congress, Cotton got paid handsomely working for insurance companies.” The claim was untrue, as was the ad’s insistence that Cotton “wants to end Medicare’s guarantee, giving billions in profits to insurance companies.” The Washington Post’s fact checker gave the ad “four Pinocchios,” calling it “as phony as a three-dollar bill.” In June, a 30-second ad by the Arkansas Democratic party said Cotton opposes disaster reli...

Leon Wolf: Mark Pryor (D-AR) Accuses Tom Cotton of Being Pro-Ebola Pryor engages in what is called fraud by omission.  He knows Cotton did not vote for Ebola, but objected to a portion of a bill because it attempted to give power to a bureaucracy that the courts said they could not.  This is pretty low even by political standards and it shows the desperation of the Democrats.

This is a good ad that will hammer Democrats as much on border security as they have also been hammered on Obamacare.  They can't blame this on the Koch brothers.

Ron Fournier: For five decades of Saturdays, Jerry's Barber Shop has been a center of Arkansas politics, servicing receding hairlines for governors, legislators and judges alongside the voters who elect and reject them. "I know how to make a politician tell the truth," owner Jerry Hood says, "put a razor to his neck." That joke never fails. On this Saturday morning, Hood's audience consists of two fellow barbers and four customers, including me – and the crowd guffaws while I blindly scribble quotes in a notepad beneath my barber's smock. I've ordered a Number 1 buzz cut. "People are sick and tired of the path we're taking. They're sick and tired of Obama and Obamacare," Hood says. His customers are mostly progressives from the shop's affluent Heights neighborhood. "A lot of people coming in here talking about voting against every Democrat. They're pissed off at Obamacare …" "How small businesses are...

Tom Cotton makes the case against the Democrats.  He is running for the Senate in Arkansas against a Democrat incumbent.

I don't know what the Democrats were thinking with these attacks but they are certainly self destructive.

Fuel Fix: The Fayetteville Shale in Arkansas will be one of the nation’s most prolific regions for natural gas production, with reserves that can be economically extracted through 2050, according to a study released this week. The Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin analyzed the basin’s production history as well as areas that have not yet been drilled. The assessment showed that the Fayetteville has 38 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas reserves. Of that, 18 trillion cubic feet will be feasible to extract at natural gas prices around $4 per million British thermal units, the researchers said.. ... The field is compared to the Haynesville shale formation and the Barnett shale in Texas.  It does give you an idea of just how much natural gas energy is stored beneath the surface of the US if we are only willing to take advantage of it.

Politico: Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor trails his Republican challenger, Rep. Tom Cotton, by seven points among likely voters in Arkansas, 48 percent to 41 percent, according to a new poll from a conservative group that says his support of the health care reform law is costing him. The survey, shared exclusively with POLITICO , was conducted Friday and Saturday for the Citizens United Political Victory Fund by Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway of the polling company, Inc./WomanTrend. Cotton is ahead among independents by 21 points and among women by 4 points. The last published numbers from this marquee match-up came in the midst of October’s government shutdown and before the national focus turned to the disastrous rollout of Obamacare, which Pryor voted for. Four polls taken that month showed the race within the margin of error. In this latest survey, 62 percent of those polled have an unfavorable view of the health care law — 56 percent strongly so. ... Democrats have taken them...

National Journal: Is This 36-Year-Old Veteran the Future of the GOP? Two Ivy League degrees. Two tours of duty. Can Tom Cotton win the Senate for the GOP? It is a story about people looking to find fault with him without success.  He is a sharp guy.  The story is worth reading.

I think Tom cotton deserves to win this race.  He has shown a willingness to serve and has the conservative values to fight against the liberal agenda.

Harry Enten, Guardian: Tom Cotton Puts Mark Pryor on Defensive   He gives five reasons why Cotton is a strong contender in this race and they all make sense.  Cotton is a smart guy from southern Arkansas who grew up on a farm and went off to Harvard for undergraduate and law degrees before becoming an Army officer who served in combat assignments.  Arkansas has already been trending Republican and Cotton will only accelerate that trend.

Townhall: If the GOP has any prayer of winning back the Senate next year -- they need to net six seats -- they must take advantage of Obamacare as a winning issue. It's been clear for years that the American people loathe the law . Will Republicans ( again ) persuade voters to punish Democratic incumbents who enabled its passage, this time as the law rolls out? Because Harry Reid needed every last vote from his caucus to jam the "Affordable" Care Act through, any single Senator in that coalition can be accurately described as the "deciding vote." David Freddoso flags a solid attack ad that merges several potent anti-Obamacare narratives. Its target? Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor: "Deciding vote," Pelosi/Obama, job losses. Good morning, good afternoon, good night. Unable to dispute the devastating contents of the ad, Pryor is assailing the small businessman who stars in it.... ... I think Pryor is vulnerable.  Arkansas has finally swung to the...

Michael Barone: Liberal commentators like to spotlight rifts in the Republican party and self-destructive fights among various flavors of conservatives. In this they often have legitimate raw material to work with. But I haven’t seen so much introspection in those quarters when liberals do similar things. Case in point: Arkansas, where New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/05/28/are-dems-killing-off-sen-mark-pryor/ Mayors Against Illegal Guns is running ads against Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor, who voted against the Manchin-Toomey gun control proposal. These ads could hurt Pryor and, as Time’s Michael Scherer points out http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/28/bloombergs-gamble-risking-the-democratic-senate-majority-for-gun-control/, reduce Democrats’ chances of holding onto a Senate majority in the 2014 election. The chance of Bloomberg’s ads producing an Arkansas senator willing to vote for gun control measures is close to zero. This is...

Washington Post: Arkansas is not a battleground in the presidential race, being solidly in Mitt Romney’s camp. It doesn’t have a U.S. Senate contest or gubernatorial election this year. Even its four House races are not considered competitive. But Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a conservative group backed by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, has pledged to spend nearly $1 million here. The prize lies farther down the ballot: Both houses of the Arkansas legislature are in play this November, with every seat up for reelection for the first time in a decade. Republicans need to flip just a handful of those spots to turn the chambers red for the first time since the end of the Civil War. If they succeed, it will be another death knell for Southern Democrats and perhaps the beginning of a new Solid South — of the 11 states that made up the Confederacy, only Arkansas still has a Democratic chamber. Using a bus tour across the state, AFP is making its case for smaller governmen...

Politico: President Barack Obama continued to have trouble on Tuesday performing in Democratic primaries in traditionally conservative states, barely eking out wins in Kentucky and Arkansas.   The president didn’t even have an opponent in Kentucky, but with 99 percent of the vote counted, Obama took just 57.9 percent of the vote, with the remaining more than 42 percent of ballots cast for “uncommitted.” In Arkansas, with 70 percent of the vote tallied, Obama nabbed just 59 percent of the vote. His opponent there, John Wolfe, was able to take 41 percent of the vote at that point, according to The Associated Press.  Wolfe, an attorney from Tennessee whose platform includes repealing Obamacare, was able to win several counties.  Mitt Romney fared better in the two primaries, but even the presumptive GOP nominee, who has had trouble exciting the conservative wing of his base, didn’t turn in a stellar performance.  While they are both Kentucky ...