John Brummett: Dustin, Halter and your money

Dustin McDaniel and Bill Halter want to be governor after Mike Beebe. This is costing you thousands of dollars.

At a time of economic distress, these presumptuous wannabes waste our state taxpayer money to exaggerate their importance in the public eye. They puff themselves up on your overly stressed buck.

Lieutenant governor is a pointless office with no responsibility whatever other than to be there if Beebe goes nuts and runs off to Argentina. Nonetheless, Halter spent about $9,000 of our money to send out thousands of copies of a full-color mailer splashing a dozen pictures of himself over six pages presumably to report on vital goings-on at the Capitol.

It was one part campaign document and one part personal photo album, but no part worthwhile.

Now we learn that, over the last few weeks, Halter has spent another $25,000 of your money to place mass calls to groups totaling an estimated 369,000 of you about a tenth of whom actually answered the phone and stayed on the line to chat with you about the lottery.

Halter apparently is afraid there are a few who don't yet fully appreciate that he, having nothing else to do in a pointless office, got the lottery on the ballot and is the "father" of it.

Halter's office points out that U.S. Rep. Mike Ross and U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor have availed themselves of this technology to make these kinds of group calls at public expense. But Ross and Pryor are full-time elected representatives. There's at least an arguable context to their using public money to be in touch with the people they are elected to represent.

Quite on the other hand, Halter has no official day-to-day responsibility and does nothing other than that which he chooses to invent for himself for self-promotion, meaning the lottery.

Then there's Emperor McDaniel, up in that prison plane or down on the highway in a brand new hybrid SUV or dispatching his new personal police force.

Attorneys general actually do important things. Well, that's not true. Their staffs of lawyers do important things, such as represent state agencies, handle appeals, prepare briefs and hand out formal opinions on what the law might mean.

As we've established in this space previously, the actual elected attorneys general in Arkansas Clark, Clinton, Bryant, Tucker, Beebe and now Emperor McDaniel mostly parlay the significance of the work these hired lawyers do into an exaggerated sense of personal importance that they deploy to run as hard as they can for higher office.

McDaniel likes to use the faux importance of his office to go around the state making personally promotional speeches. But he does not like to drive or ride in a land-bound vehicle even in that great long black SUV we provide him if the public appearance is in an outlying area of the state.

So, you see, he has been calling down to the prison and saying he'd like to use the plane that the prison got from the State Police, meaning the taxpayers, in exchange for giving the State Police rent on some prison real estate, which the prisons might otherwise have leased or sold for actual money in behalf of the taxpayers.

Then, as it turned out, the prison was neglecting to send McDaniel's office any bill for these plane trips, apparently because it's been too busy watching inmates wallow in their own feces to handle the requisite bookkeeping.

Now here's the latest: After all these decades of having an attorney general without criminal investigative authority, that being superfluous to what prosecuting attorneys do, McDaniel got the pliable Legislature to give him wholly superfluous criminal investigative authority in capital murder cases, on the tenuous basis that his office must handle the appeals.

He also has moved some public money around to hire four former cops as his own police force. Meantime, he's moved your money around to unload the big black SUV that he wouldn't deign to ride in for long distances so that he could get himself a new hybrid SUV.

File this column. Refer to it in 2014 when, in an epic Democratic gubernatorial primary, these guys come around to tell you what fiscal conservatives they are.

John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699