Best and Worst of 2003 (From the Ark. Times)

[ChoralScholar]

From this week's Arkansas Times
http://www.arktimes.com/031226coverstorya.html

I'm sure not all of you will care about these, but some are at least good for a chuckle, or a sigh. Nonetheless here are a few from "Best and Worst of 2003). I've included the link in case you want to read the rest.

Worst commemoration

The state legislature designated Feb. 4 as Ronald Reagan Day in Arkansas, crediting the former president with having won the Cold War, among other mythic feats. Reagan himself had no comment.

(Moron Alert) Worst p

The state legislature enacted a bill making it illegal for Arkansas residents to sell or give away their urine. State representatives made "pssss" sounds into their microphones as they whizzed it through to enactment in January.

(Moron Alert) Worst snip

The legislature in March considered a bill to make it illegal for hair stylists to work topless.

Worst third

Statistics published in November showed that Little Rock had the third highest crime rate in the nation in cities with more than 100,000 people, behind only St. Louis and Atlanta.

Worst unemployment

(The jobless rate in Arkansas zoomed up to 6.1 percent in September, higher than at any time since November 1992, before Bill Clinton became president. This bad economic news came the same month that the Census Bureau reported that Arkansas had become the nation's poorest state, with 19 percent of its population (more than half a million people) living below the poverty line.

Best presidential candidate ever to come out of Paron

Wesley Clark of Paron, former NATO commander and Democrat, announced his candidacy in September.

Worst omen for education reform

Gov. Huckabee's first announced appointment in 2003 was an 80-year-old Hot Springs Village woman to the state Board of Education. Her most recent experience in the public-education field was attending high school during World War II. She eventually declined the appointment, saying those who had raised questions about her qualifications were just prejudiced against old people. (NOTE:for those who don't know, the Arkansas Supreme Court has mandated that the state reform its education system to make it "fair and equitable" by....well.....tomorrow 1/1/2004)

Best time to be rich

Tradition has it that the rich get richer when the Republicans are in office, and sure enough, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans grew by 10 percent this year - to nearly a trillion dollars. Five members of the Wal-Mart Walton family of Arkansas took 4th through 8th place on the annual rich list, with a mere $20.5 billion apiece. Lt. Gov. Winthrop P. Rockefeller checked in at 195th with a measly $1.2 bil.

Best high school

Mills University Studies High School in Little Rock was named by Newsweek magazine in May as one of the 20 best high schools in the United States.


(Moron Alert) Best shelving

School officials at Cedarville (Crawford County) returned the Harry Potter series of children's books to the school library shelves in April, but only after a federal judge ordered them to. They had earlier exiled the books to a back room, where they were kept under lock and key, to humor fundamentalist parents who complained that the books weren't sufficiently condemnatory of the witchcraft portrayed in them.

(Moron Alert) Worst school system

The preceding item would have made Cedarville a contender, even without the embarrassing and transparently racist efforts of the school's administration to nullify the election in May of a black youngster as middle-school student council president.

Worst first

The first Arkansas serviceman killed in the Iraq War in March was Navy corpsman Michael Vann Johnson Jr. of Little Rock.

(Moron Alert) Worst snack

Police followed a trail of lollipop wrappers in Marked Tree to catch a bank robber, who went on trial in January. The bank kept the lollipops on hand for customers' children, and the robber included a big sack of them in his loot, and ate them during his getaway, discarding the wrappers en route back to the house trailer where he lived.

(Moron Alert) Worst gay-bashing

When a 14-year-old Jacksonville boy uncloseted early in the year, his fellow students took the matter in stride but teachers and administrators at Jacksonville Junior High School gave him such trouble, including an assistant principal requiring the lad to read aloud Biblical passages condemning homosexuality, that the American Civil Liberties Union intervened to force them to desist.

It's not all bad here in the Natural State, but hopefully 2004 will be a good year. Happy New Year Everyone!

[ChoralScholar]

1. awww come on.....

at least the first one is good :)