Red Wing Daily: January 18, 2025

"the more you know..."

State

• Come celebrate with like-minded patriots: Arkansas 1st sponsors an inaugural party on the night of January 20 at 6:30 at the Always & Forever Wedding Barn at 2401 Snow Lane in Alexander 72002. We’ll be walking the red carpet to Trump rally music, creating a time capsule, and enjoying a photo booth along with a potluck buffet of “red” food. Wear your red and come celebrate President Trump’s inauguration with Arkansas 1st!

• Shaping state government: Governor Sanders appointed Sydney McKenzie, wife of state Rep. Brit McKenzie, to the Arkansas State Library Board to serve until 2031. Sanders also named former state Rep. Grant Hodges to the Board of Corrections — her third appointment to that 7-member board.

• Is she shaping state government with the World Economic Forum? Just three days after President Trump’s inauguration, his former press secretary — our Governor — is set to speak at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland on a panel called “Conversations with US Governors” with Democrat Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who had been rumored as a Kamala Harris running mate last year. To attend Davos, you must first buy a WEF membership at between $62,000 and $620,000 annually, and then you can purchase a Davos event ticket for a reported $29,000. However, “government employees and those associated with non-profits and media outlets generally aren't required to pay to attend Davos.” So, who’s paying? And, how much?

• Workforce training aims at higher salaries: Arkansas has spent $75 million over the last two months on workforce development / training grants to various state colleges and universities from a pool of $88 million generated from Arkansas Workforce Initiative grant funding and federal funds. Designed to help workers earn higher wages, the grants are driven by employer need and reporting from the Governor’s Workforce Cabinet she created two years ago when she took office. Governor Sanders says the grants

  “will make Arkansas more competitive in industries such as steel manufacturing, aerospace and defense, lithium, and cybersecurity”

• Sheesh! What a great place to work: Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) Director Marty Sullivan told Chief Justice Karen Baker to stay away from his office and have no contact or communication with his Supreme Court employees as a result of “an investigation of her conduct in December by the office’s personnel department,” but the “harassment” investigation was apparently not covered in the AOC Employee Handbook. So, Sullivan, on January 9 with no notice, apparently added a new section to the handbook that changed the handbook’s instructions on “sexual harrassment complaints” to “harassment complaints.”

• Did you know? Since 2014, Arkansas lawmakers have spent more than $600 million to legislative consulting firms in London; San Francisco; Philadelphia; Washington D.C.; Boca Raton, Florida; and New York for studies on issues such as making state government more efficient, prison overcrowding, the natural gas severance tax, and one of our faves, Medicaid expansion. Is Arkansas better for it? It’s Arkansas Legislature time again. Watch state Senator Bryan King, who’s working on a different way to deal with the Franklin County prison situation.

• “Energy efficiency” will raise housing prices; Arkansas sues: The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), along with 15 states including Arkansas, has sued the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Department of Agriculture (USDA) over the adoption of the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) and 2019 energy efficiency benchmarks set by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). The proposed rules apply only to certain types of new residences such as single-family and multiple units and are estimated to add an extra $31,000 in builders’ operational expenses, raising the average new home price by more than $22,000.

• Does your pharmacist get paid enough? Drug middlemen pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) continue to be a hot spot with the Arkansas Legislature, after the Legislative Council’s Rules Subcommittee voted against PBMs on Thursday after hours and hours of testimony and the full Legislative Council immediately reversed to pass a continuation of Rule 128 on Friday. The controversial Rule says PBMs must pay pharmacies a dispensing fee set by the Arkansas Insurance Commissioner to ensure that pharmacies are receiving “fair” reimbursement payments. The Insurance Department says they’ve gotten about 3,000 complaints in 2024 where pharmacies say PBMs are illegally and unfairly paying less than mandated by law and so they are going out of business. The three largest PBMs in the country, CVS Caremark, OptumRX and Express Scripts, “are owned by much larger corporations that each also own a top-10 health insurer” and together control about 80% of the prescription market. Legislative opponents say that Rule 128 doesn’t address the underlying problems, and will only raise consumer drug costs and, additionally, is unconstitutional because the Insurance Commissioner is tasked with setting a what some call a “tax.” Watch for more PBM action during the 95th General Assembly.

• No cryptomining near military facilities in Arkansas: State Senator Ricky Hill and House Speaker Brian Evans have submitted Senate Bill 60 that amends the 2023 Data Centers Act to “ban the construction of cryptomines within a 30-mile radius of military facilities in the state and ban the operation of cryptomines within that radius unless they were in operation before 2025.” Opponents say the bill “unfairly targets the industry as a whole, not just cryptominers deemed bad actors and under investigation by the state for potential ties to foreign adversaries.”

National

• On the way to healing: Anticipating President Trump’s immediate J6 pardons, the J6 Freedom’s Ambassador Project will greet released JS prisoners at the prison gates, and will provide private jet aircraft on loan, “effective Monday, to be available to fly these people home.” Gary Heavin, CEO of Curves fitness/weight loss franchise, told American Family Radio he plans to help “those individuals – who are currently held in 75 different prisons in 35 different states … [to be] repatriated safely, comfortably, and efficiently.” The Project’s GiveSendGo page for donations has raised over $45,000 (at time of posting) with a $100,000 goal. Heavin, a good human, earlier coordinated a group of about 20 helicopters that delivered “much-needed supplies to stranded communities in the far eastern mountains of North Carolina.”

• Cabinet approvals can’t happen soon enough: “As is customary, all current political appointees will step down as of noon EST on Inauguration Day, leaving hundreds of key defense posts open, including dozens that require Senate confirmation. In addition to the top job {at the Pentagon] and all three [miliary] service secretaries, all of their deputies and senior policy staff will leave.” So, who will be in charge?

• You won’t stop paper ballots: Louisiana’s Republican State Central Committee (RSCC), the governing body of the Louisiana Republican Party, has recommended an auditable paper back-up voting system for Louisiana in a close 79-77 vote.

• Partial win for unconstitutional DACA: The 5th Circuit federal Court of Appeals has ruled to uphold a lower court “that found the Biden administration’s attempt to codify DACA violated U.S. immigration law.” However, the 5th Circuit ruling — narrowed to apply only in “Texas, the state spearheading the Republican-led lawsuit against the program” — keeps “DACA alive for current recipients and closed to new applicants, as the program has been operating for the past few years,” pending another ruling by the 5th Circuit or the Supreme Court on current DACA beneficiaries.

• You bet it’s an enemies list: President Trump says he won’t hire anyone who has worked with or endorsed by Americans for Prosperity and specific deep state Republicans and critics, namely former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Rep. Liz Cheney, former Senator Mitt Romney, former House Speaker Paul Ryan, former Vice President Mike Pence, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, former national security adviser John Bolton, former Defense Secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark Esper, and retired General Mark Milley (former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff).

  

Tech

• Here we go again: The Federal Trade Commission alleges that GM “collected, used, and sold drivers’ precise geolocation data and driving behavior information from millions of vehicles—data that can be used to set insurance rates—without adequately notifying consumers and obtaining their affirmative consent” to participate in the OnStar program. Under a proposed settlement, “GM and OnStar are banned from disclosing geolocation and driver-behavior data to consumer reporting agencies for a period of five years.”

• Do not open or click on unsolicited emails! “One of the first things everyone predicted when artificial intelligence (AI) became more commonplace was that it would assist cybercriminals in making their phishing campaigns more effective.” New research proves that concern is well-founded. A November 2024 study “used AI agents based on GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to search the web for available information on a target and use this for highly personalized phishing messages” and got an astoundingly high 54% click-through rate. “The control group received arbitrary phishing emails and achieved a CTR of 12% (roughly 1 in 8 people clicked the link).” Read more at Malwarebytes Labs. (While we highly recommend and use their products, Red Wing Post is not a paid sponsor of Malwarebytes.)

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