Arkansas Politics

No, This Is Not That Arkansas Project

We have never met this man.

In a recent editorial by the Portland Press Herald, their editors attempt a critique of a previous op-ed by Maine House Minority Leader Ken Fredette, R-Newport, which congratulated Maine Republicans for blocking Medicaid expansion in Maine. In the course of the Press Herald’s accusations of others getting basic facts wrong, the PH unfortunately gets basic facts wrong.
There’s a lot to quibble with in the editorial regarding its supposed debunking of the claim that the Arkansas “private option” version of Medicaid expansion is experiencing cost overruns, but I’ll limit this article to the paragraph in which The Arkansas Project makes an appearance.
In his column, Fredette cited a Forbes article by Josh Archambault, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Government Accountability, which cited work written here at The Arkansas Project. In their response to Fredette, the PH editors had this to say about The Arkansas Project:

Among his sources, Archambault cites The Arkansas Project, a right-wing news website funded by anti-Bill Clinton billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. During the 1990s, Scaife paid for efforts to invent scandals about the president and his family, including the failed 1970s Whitewater land sale, an alleged drug-dealing operation and the supposed murder of White House counsel Vince Foster, who, according to all reliable sources, committed suicide.

Unfortunately, the Portland Press Herald seems to be confusing the American Spectator’s Arkansas Project of the 1990s with our humble, unassuming blog, The Arkansas Project.
One could ignore this mistake if it only happened once from a newspaper in Maine whose editors probably couldn’t place Arkansas on a map, but it also occurred when former American Spectator journalist turned left-wing Media Matters for America founder, David Brock, came to Little Rock in March to speak about the “right wing’s 20-year obsession with the Clintons that continues today,” according to Politico.
During the speech, Brock apparently mentioned the Arkansas Project from the 1990s — and a KATV reporter apparently thought he was referring to this blog.
After the speech, KATV was nice enough to call Advance Arkansas Institute president, Dan Greenberg, for comment:

Awful behavior is really bi-partisan, and that’s just a fact of life that there are awful people that pervade politics, and I don’t think it’s really confined to one party or another.

Quite a tame comment for someone who is presumably being bankrolled by Scaife, according to the Portland Press Herald.
Also, I did a The Arkansas Project archives search for the name “Hillary Clinton” and it came back with two articles written in the last year, both of which were about state-level policy discussions. If Scaife was actually bankrolling us, he should probably ask for his money back.
So just to be clear: that Arkansas Project (which began and ended in the mid-1990s) and which was funded by Scaife is not The Arkansas Project which we all have come to know and love — namely, a conservative blog dedicated to covering politics and policy in Arkansas.

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The Arkansas Project