Open letter to AG Leslie Rutledge

This letter is in response to your decision to join Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and nine other state legal officials in calling for President Trump to cancel the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Undocumented children have not committed any crime. The fact that I have to say this in 2017 when this battle was fought over five years ago is astonishing to me. These are people who are following the rules and actively trying to work in America and become citizens. You have consistently used your office to oppress and fight against the rights of Arkansas residents. The attorney general’s office is meant to protect and serve the interests of ALL residents of the state. Your actions constitute a dereliction of duty.

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Your previous efforts to prevent DACA recipients from obtaining Arkansas driver’s licenses show how malicious and mean-spirited your use of the attorney general’s office has been. Undocumented people contribute to Arkansas’s economy. They work in agriculture, at Tyson, at Walmart. They came to this country to seek a better life for themselves and their children. As the Cato Institute has pointed out, immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the general population of native-born citizens, and designating more people as “criminals” who have not committed any other offense increases government spending in detention infrastructure. You are actively opposing the cause of justice and hurting the local economy of your state by making these actions a priority.

I grew up in Arkansas and was educated in the Little Rock School District. We were taught the civil rights history of our state. We learned about the Little Rock Nine and Daisy Bates. This is the civil rights issue of our time. You are choosing to side with the legacy of Orval Faubus, with the white families who spit on integrating students. History will be a harsh judge of your actions today.

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Connor Thompson

Long Beach, Calif.

From the web

In reaction to Arkansas Blog posts on the July 1 shootings at the Power Ultra Lounge concert downtown that injured 28 people, the poster advertising the concert that featured a gun, and the city’s response:

Didn’t our Arkansas Legislature recently permit guns into places where alcohol is served? What could possibly go wrong?

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MysteryShopper

So, Finesse 2TYMES is a rapper out of Memphis. Quite a few lesser-known rappers make their way through Little Rock on tour. Little Rock is getting a serious rep for being where the “real s**t” goes down. We are almost back to early 1990 levels of infamy. Oh, and your sensibilities are disturbed by that concert poster. … Why don’t you waltz over and Google “NRA Convention in Houston” and you will see much the same there, only with white faces.

Artificial Inteligence

Beginning with the “concert” advertising poster, what could have gone wrong? At 2:30 a.m. 16-year-olds in a bar where clearly no one under the age of 21 was permitted to consume adult beverages, what could have gone wrong? Then the excuse-makers surface blaming the NRA, making excuses for the black face on the poster when the NRA had a white face on their poster (like a white face on this poster would have sold tickets), and of course the obligatory cheap shot at the attorney general. Is this a great country or what?

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Razorblade

I’m so confused. The article has an ad for the club that shows your typical white preppie Little Rockers enjoying themselves. The club brings in a rapper act and the ad shows him holding a gun. Guess what kind of people are going to show up at this venue? Rule of thumb: If an event is not going to be covered in Little Rock Soiree, don’t go! I mean, come on … . This crap never happens at Tabriz.

jasonrob870

Would a police force made up of LR residents have more skin in the game to stop this kinda shit? Just askin’.

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Slithey Tove

Mayor Stodola’s inept and impotent leadership in Little Rock concerning the continued violence in this city is just sad. There will be some shutdown of a few nightclubs, meetings and panel discussions on mentoring programs and “stop the violence,” and the city’s continued focused on West Little Rock. I would suggest the mayor drive through communities in Central Little Rock and witness the decay, sense of hopelessness and lack of city resources (except police) and economic development in urban areas, then he would understand why such events occur. #FireMarkStodola.

ProfessorEmeritus

Don’t worry about whether the guns are legal or illegal. That’s pretty much irrelevant when gun manufacturers have been pumping out the number of weapons that they’ve been doing for decades. Water seeks its own level and that avalanche of weaponry will find its ownership.

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The more guns that are manufactured, the more guns that are bought legally and illegally, the more guns that are stolen and distributed on the black market.

Who’s the main beneficiary of all this mayhem and death? It’s the gun manufacturers, and they don’t care where their product ends up. They’re rolling in money, and most definitely not responsible or even responsive to the needs of society. 

Their weapons aren’t primarily used for hunting anymore — unless you include human hunting. The money is in semiautomatic handguns and military-style rifles and they keep getting deadlier and deadlier, more and more efficient.  Translation: more and more profit for the gunmakers, who are protected by their lobby in Washington, the NRA. They’re like the man whom they got elected as president. They can do what they want. They’re stars. It’s the supply side that really needs to be curtailed. Fat cats. Fat chance.

Olphart

In response to reporting on the Arkansas Blog that the Ten Commandments monument on the state Capitol grounds had been destroyed:

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Well, THAT didn’t take long. Given the legalized chicanery, shameless self-dealing, outright bribery, hypocritical assertions of piety and hatred of the poor by our so-called elected representatives at the Capitol, it’s quite possible that a message from “on high” is being sent.

tsallenarng

In response to the University of Arkansas System’s legal counsel saying that federal law does not require a gun-free zone to protect eStem charter High School on the University of Arkansas at Little Rock campus:

So bullets that penetrate through home walls and hit innocent children who are asleep will magically stop at a charter school wall, window or door. More NRA magic? [State Rep.] Charlie Collins and his ilk won’t be the ones who are shot when this “magic” is shown to be more NRA BS!

couldn’t be better

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