I'm in a bit of a somber mood today. The reason I support

[Art_from_Ark]

7. It doesn't matter who I vote for in the GE

Arkansas in all likelihood will vote for the Republican. The state has NEVER voted for a Democratic ticket that didn't include at least one Southerner since the 1940s. My vote has never, ever come close to mattering in presidential elections. Even in 1968, the closest Arkansas presidential vote in my lifetime, but when I was too young to vote, the state went for George Freakin' Wallace by a wide margin, with Nixon coming in second.

I lived in Arkansas when Hillary was First Lady. My Democratic mentor when I was a teenager, my history teacher, was supremely pissed that Hillary started to meddle in the state's educational system. Between that time and now, the state has gone from true blue to deep red.

While a corporate lawyer at the Rose Law Firm, Hillary helped to overturn a ballot initiative by Little Rock voters that would have given them a break on their utility rates at a time when inflation was eating away the wages of working people.
If the ballot initiative had succeeded, my family would have likely been able to eventually benefit from it, since it likely would have spread statewide.

As a University of Arkansas student, I also worked on a temporary basis at a Walmart warehouse in its home office town when Hillary sat on the board. I commuted the 40-mile round trip from Fayetteville to Bentonville for a measly $18 gross a night, on an on-call basis. It was obvious by reading the notices in the break room that labor was having a lot of difficulties with management. That situation did not change during the time I was there.

Meanwhile, a lot of my liberal professors at the University of Arkansas were remarking that Hillary serving on the board of Wal-Mart was "the best of both worlds"--that is, "Hillary gets to rub shoulders with America's Richest Man, while Sam Walton has a nearly direct connection to the Governor". And although it has been said that Hillary worked to raise the salaries of women at Wal-Mart, a woman I knew who was working full-time in an intellectual capacity at corporate shortly after Hillary left was only puling in a lousy $15,000 a year.

Hillary also got donations from Arkansas' richest Republicans (Sam Walton, Jackson Stephens, Don Tyson, et al) to help finance her husband's 1992 presidential campaign, and has been cozy with Alice Walton ever since.

When she and Bill came back to Arkansas for a visit in August 1993, and I and about 75 other locals went to the Springdale airport to greet them, Bill dived into the crowd and started shaking everybody's hand, while Hillary was aloof.

And things that Hillary has done after leaving Arkansas, including plugging NAFTA and TPP as SoS and the President's wife, shilling for Bush's war against a defenseless Iraq asSenator from New York, and laughing about the death of a nation's leader as SoS, have really rubbed me the wrong way. And another straw on the proverbial camel's back was when Bill Clinton came back to Arkansas in 2010 to campaign for Blanche Lincoln versus a more liberal candidate in the Democratic Senate primary. Lincoln won the primary in a dubious run-off election, then went on to get her ass handed to her in the general election-- the first time an incumbent Democratic Senator from Arkansas had lost an election since Reconstruction.

So please, tell me why Hillary is such a great candidate.