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John Brummett

John Brummett

Arkansas Online

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OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: How the sausage is made

Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" to run up the deficit and debt by trillions and kick millions off Medicaid and food stamps passed in the Senate...

yesterday 3

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: Caught in a tiresome cycle

Democrat-Gazette onlineThe U.S. Senate meets all night and through the next day and does nothing except argue and preen amid Democratic procedural...

previous day 6

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: The end of presumption?

Let us not lose sight of the issue.

wednesday 4

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Catching up with Chris

Catching up with Chris

I sent a text to Chris Jones, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in 2022, saying I hoped we could talk about my hearing of his possibly running...

30.06.2025 3

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Dropping f-bombs

Dropping f-bombs

First, let's talk a little about the "f-bomb," which isn't what it used to be.

27.06.2025 5

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

The method of madness

The method of madness

Democrat-Gazette onlineIs Donald Trump megalomaniacally mad, or does he pretend to be that on television and thereby apply tactical madness as his...

26.06.2025 10

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Ineptitude on parade

Ineptitude on parade

The national political condition is such that Democrats could be rendered incapable of winning the presidency or the U.S.

25.06.2025 5

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Arrows aloft again

Readers still say they like the arrows.

23.06.2025 10

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: A letter of relevance

I'd like to say that the letter to the editor was the best thing on the Voices page Sunday except for my column.

20.06.2025 4

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Another excuse for partisan smears

In American politics as currently diseased, cold-blooded murder can be less a cause for human grieving than a cause for partisan blame games.In

19.06.2025 10

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

The opposite of news

Seventeen years ago, I fell into--or perhaps I started--a public dust-up with a young woman reporter for a Little Rock television station.She

18.06.2025 4

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Still fanning the flames

Still fanning the flames

Sarah Sanders went on Fox News on Tuesday and did her thing for Donald Trump. She's no Karoline Leavitt, but she still has skills. Sanders'...

16.06.2025 3

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

2025 is not 1957

Everything is totally different about federalized troops activated in Los Angeles without a governor's request in 2025 and federalized troops...

13.06.2025 20

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

A surprise from the Supremes

The credibility of media reporting on politics plummets hourly.

12.06.2025 5

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Megalomaniacal infantility

Let us use as a guide The New York Times' piece over the weekend describing the anatomy of the burst of outsized infantility in Donald Trump and Elon...

11.06.2025 10

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

The Democrats’ problem

An intellectual, atheist, neuroscientist and meditation advocate--that's all one person--was speaking on his podcast last week with a 37-year-old...

09.06.2025 3

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Prison plans roll on anyway

At the behest or command of Gov. Sarah Sanders, the Arkansas Board of Corrections is making final preparations to hire an architectural engineering...

06.06.2025 4

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Walz struts his [expletive deleted]

Tim Walz was all over the political news last weekend.

05.06.2025 2

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Turn of the screw

A fellow from out in the country who drank a bit applied without invitation many years ago to be the editorial cartoonist for the old Arkansas...

04.06.2025 3

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Garden-variety Trumpism

Two fine conservative fellows forwarded me copies of President Donald Trump's pardon of former state Sen.

02.06.2025 4

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Democrats in disarray

We need to stay up to date on the death spiral of the Democratic Party in presidential politics lest we wind up like students sleeping in algebra...

30.05.2025 3

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: Separation of law and politics

We must stop treating political issues and legal issues the same.

29.05.2025 2

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Woo hoo, more debt!

House Republicans in Washington were hugging and otherwise celebrating early Thursday morning.

28.05.2025 10

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Bubba ready for the day

"Thank goodness you called," Bubba McCoy said. "Otherwise, I wouldn't have any Memorial Day tradition left.

26.05.2025 2

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Monosyllabic impediment

A coalition of direct-democracy advocates filed a proposed constitutional amendment Monday that would remove the Legislature's intentionally...

23.05.2025 10

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: A lesson for Democrats

Democrat-Gazette onlineThe wise and venerable Democrat spoke with careful deliberation to younger admirers gathered around him at lunch.

22.05.2025 3

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

The singer and the president

The rock singer is a serious person. The president of the United States isn't.

21.05.2025 3

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Inhumanity by euphemism

It was great news for Arkansas and all other places where working poor people live.

19.05.2025 2

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

As the arrows fly

Let's get right to the arrows. You know the drill.

16.05.2025 4

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: When in doubt, just don’t

One time, in an indoor pickleball contest, an opponent overhit the pickleball, similar to a wiffle ball, so badly that it came like a missile directly...

15.05.2025 10

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: Not old political claptrap

I recall the last time I wrote favorably in this space about a culturally connected and genuinely rural Arkansas woman with an interesting history...

14.05.2025 3

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: The danger of certitude

There will be other commentaries this weekend on the pope, but those probably will be about the real one, the new one--Robert Prevost out of the north...

12.05.2025 2

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Books focus on Joe’s decline

Joe Biden did an interview with the BBC on Tuesday.

09.05.2025 7

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

‘60 Minutes’ not cowed by Trump

Democrat-Gazette onlineAll hail the journalists working on "60 Minutes."

08.05.2025 2

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Menace to quality dialogue

What we have for certain is a wildly reckless, say-anything president.

07.05.2025 3

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

A legislative post-mortem

The legislative session will be formally adjourned Monday after a mid-April recess to await the governor's vetoes and the discovery of any technical...

05.05.2025 2

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Right to know over profit

Mainstream-media newsroom people with whom I've happily spent much of my life always struck me--generally speaking, of course--as impractical and kind...

02.05.2025 2

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: How low can they go?

Democrat-Gazette onlineThere apparently is not a catastrophic poll plummet for Donald Trump that Democrats can't manage to limbo under.

01.05.2025 3

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Advice for Democrats

Good Democrats were gathered to watch presidential election returns in 2016, when, you'll recall, Hillary Clinton was going to win.

30.04.2025 2

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

On church and state

This being Sunday, let's blend religion and government.

28.04.2025 2

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

First Amendment’s essence

As a responding reader put it so well the other day, Donald Trump surely uses the courts a lot for someone so contemptuous of them.

25.04.2025 2

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: Making a prison from bits and bobs

You could put four state legislators in a sedan oozing around a parking lot, and you'd be lucky to get two of the three passengers to agree that...

24.04.2025 2

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

So. Much. Whining.

Disagreeing with a court decision is not the issue.

23.04.2025 3

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Better by comparison

The just-completed legislative session seemed workmanlike and tame after the last few biennial exercises in extreme right-wing meanness and absurdity.

21.04.2025 2

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

On cynical fraudulence

"Bill Maher got played," declared the headline on an opinion column in The Washington Post.

18.04.2025 2

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Barking at the wall

Democrat-Gazette onlineI called Bubba McCoy because he has an ego like everyone else, and I thought he would appreciate what I had to relay to him.

17.04.2025 3

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Reviving the Dean strategy

In 2006, the consummate Southern Blue Dog Democratic congressman with moderate to center-right leanings, the late Marion Berry representing the 1st...

16.04.2025 2

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Cynicism on full blast

I was going to write about the legislative session, but it's entirely too frantic and fluid in the last few days of that spectacle to take a chance...

14.04.2025 2

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

The most important thing

Louis Brandeis was one of the great justices of the U.S.

11.04.2025 3

Arkansas Online

John Brummett

Thus it is commanded

Democrat-Gazette onlineIt's all about sticking their supposed conservative godliness in the face of those they perceive as heathens, which some might...

10.04.2025 4

Arkansas Online

John Brummett