In the Stack
Queen Sarah's cabal, China in Arkansas universities, starving Amendment 7, AI depression, cursive writing, and more
The weekend’s ice and snow has slowed most of us down. But the Governor (“Queen Sarah”) and her old guard crony cabal certainly didn’t slow down in their power play to take over the Arkansas Board of Corrections, which had (rightly!) opposed the Queen’s Franklin County prison boondoggle project from the very start.
After Sanders appointed four of the 7-member Board about a month ago, those insiders moved swiftly last Friday to take over the Board at its first meeting of 2026, electing the Queen’s former Chief of Staff (and former state Rep. Sonia Barker’s son) Jamie Barker as Chair, the Secretary of State’s former legal counsel Nathan Lee as vice-Chair, and Medicaid fraud investigator from AG Griffin’s office Boyce Hamlet as Board secretary / Chair of the Post-Prison Transfer Board.
With two hours of his election by a 4-3 vote, Barker reconvened the Board into a special meeting to rescind “the llegal hiring” of attorney Abtin Megdizadegan, who has guided the former Corrections Board in what turned into a couple of lawsuits as the Board (again correctly!) resisted the Queen’s attempts to use the Legislature to pass laws and obtain Court rulings to gain control.
Board member Lee Watson, a lawsuit defendant, objected to removing Megdizadegan, saying that would leave the Board defendants unrepresented in court.
This woman continues to do anything, and do it right in our faces, to get this 3,000-bed prison in Franklin County! WHY!? Remember, this all started when area residents, including the County Judge and local elected officials, learned in October, 2024 that Arkansas had already purchased 815 acres in Franklin County for $2.95 million without notice and without their input.
As Arkansas Advocate reports:
A Pulaski County judge ruled in favor of the board in its lawsuit against Sanders last year. The board sued over state laws passed that shifted oversight of the Department of Corrections’ secretary from the board to the governor, arguing they were an unconstitutional power-grab. Sanders and Griffin have appealed the ruling. The case filed by Griffin (against the former Board under our FOI) is still ongoing….
Local
Slow progress: Well, the weather… The Game and Fish Commission set a public meeting for tonight (January 27) at 7pm at Mayflower High School Cafeteria to report on the Lake Conway renovation project, which they say has reached its half-way point. So far, no updates on a cancellation or a new date.
New “poles” everywhere: What are those tall, black poles popping up around Conway roadways in the last several months? First it was those 5G towers. Now what’s that along Salem Road near UCA?
Arkansas
It’s gonna cost ‘em: MAGA Republicans are still being strong-armed by the Republican Party of Arkansas and last year the Craighead County GOP reverted to old guard GOP control. But what’s that ethics complaint all about? What’s the ongoing war against conservative MAGA voters gonna cost the Republican Party of Arkansas?
Lonoke Circuit Judge is a sneak: Just because Lonoke County Circuit Judge Barbara Elmore came to an agreement and paid for the damage she caused when she sideswiped a fellow employee’s car in the Courthouse parking lot does not excuse the fact that she sneaked off when it happened and would not have owned up to her despicable lack of character except for a police report from another County employee who saw what she did that day. Hey Lonoke County voters, is this the kind of person you want to preside over your circuit courtroom?
The long war: The State of Arkansas is waging war on Amendment 7 but instead of killing it…they’re starving it. “The people’s right to initiate laws is not a favor granted by the General Assembly—it is a right reserved against it.”
Follow-upon China in our state schools: Arkansas still does not know whether UCA’s immediate replacement for its now-shuttered Confucius Institute (CI) will close because Act 937, passed in April 2025, bans state-supported institutions from hosting entities affiliated with the Chinese government. When CIs closed a handful of years ago, almost all American colleges and universities immediately re-branded through a newer organization, the Chinese Students & Scholars Association that’s now on campus at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville. A recent study shows that even though most CIs have been rebranded, almost all these programs, under new names, are still maintaining “a relationship with Chinese affiliate(s)” — and all those “Chinese student programs” are administered through the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
National
USPS update: The USPS has “clarified its postmarking policy, explaining that mail is postmarked on the day it is processed by the Postal Service, not when it’s dropped off at a post office.” Fourteen states accept ballots postmarked on or before election day, so this change could hurt folks who wait until the day or two before the election to drop their ballots in the mail — USPS processing delays could delay that postmark date.
It’s not going away: Joe Oltmann has filed paperwork to become Colorado Governor, joining the field of 18 preliminary Republican candidates already announced. A former Colorado GOP leader says “only a half-dozen or so” candidates are “credible” — an adjective he used “very, very loosely” — and Oltmann is one of them.
Slowly coming around: Justice is slow. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court that had stopped the Trump administration from detaining or deporting former Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, the Hamas-supporting Palestinian activist at the center of Columbia University’s 2025 campus protests. The Trump Administration now says he’ll be deported to Algeria.
Non-vaxed blood bank? An Oklahoma state Representative has submitted legislation for his state to run its own blood bank to “provide people with unvaccinated blood products, especially in emergencies,” an idea that many say is not only impossible to achieve but that would “essentially shut down all blood banks because there’s no way they could comply.”
Tech
Can you read/write it? Our schools left it behind. Students cannot read our founding documents - they’re written in cursive! Now, students are exploring “for fun” the “special sauce” of cursive writing, which has been proven to strengthen not just spelling but reading and comprehension skills.
It’s not healthy! No surprise, when people trade real interactions with human beings for talking all day/night long to a computer.
Adults who use generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools every day — especially for personal, non-work reasons — show significantly higher rates of depression than those who use them less often or not at all, according to a new national survey of more than 20,000 people….
Daily users had about 30 percent higher odds of meeting the threshold of moderate depression — a level where doctors often start to think about treatment or referral.
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