Arkansas Lottery Looks to Hire $89K Public Relations Aide

Arkansas Lottery

According to a story in today’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Arkansas Lottery Commission’s Personnel Committee has approved a proposal to hire a public relations and legislative liaison for $88,957 a year. The full commission will vote on the proposal later this month.

To be fair, the position is not a new one; Lottery Commissioner Julie Baldridge held the job before retiring in April of 2013, and it has been vacant ever since. But the Arkansas Lottery seems to have gotten along just fine without a PR person. Yes, ticket sales have continued to drop at the Arkansas Lottery, and scholarship projections have been cut time and time again, but you can’t blame that on poor public relations–although it might be the kind of thing a public relations aide could help gloss over.

In the face of lagging revenue, the Arkansas Lottery seems to be bent on using the same, tired strategy of rolling out more gambling, spending extra on advertising, and, now, hiring an $89,000 PR aide–presumably to boost the lottery’s image.

So far, those tactics haven’t delivered the “world class” lottery we were all promised back in 2009. Is there really any reason to think that strategy will work this time?

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Keno and Powerball: What’s the Difference?

Arkansas Lottery,

The Arkansas Lottery has decided to bring “monitor games” to the state later this summer despite objections from lawmakers. One of the first monitor games they apparently plan to roll out is, for lack of a better term, keno.

We’ve heard a few people describe the monitor games as “keno-like” or “similar to Powerball.” Many people do not know what keno is, and they assume it’s just another lottery game. Here’s a very brief breakdown of keno and a few ways it differs from your typical lottery (Note: For the sake of example, we are comparing Keno to Powerball, as Powerball is fairly standard lottery).

How Keno and Powerball Are Similar

Both are, essentially, “draw games.” In a “draw game,” players try to guess which numbers will be drawn from a pool of numbers. For instance, if I ask you to guess a number between 1 and 10, you could call that a “draw game.” I thought of (drew) one number out of ten possible numbers, and I asked you to guess which number I drew. This would be called a 1-from-10 lottery (one number chosen from ten possible numbers).

How Keno and Powerball are Different

  1. Keno draws more numbers from a bigger pool of potential numbers than Powerball.
  2. Keno’s odds are much worse than Powerball’s.
  3. Keno is traditionally played in casinos.

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VA Med Center: Pay No Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain

Religious Freedom,

The Oscar G. Johnson VA Medical Center in Iron Mountain, Michigan, has a dedicated chapel open to the public 24 hours a day, but the med center has placed a curtain around the altar, cross, and statue of Jesus at the front of the room.

The center wrote on its Facebook page that the VA’s federal policy is to maintain “the chapel as religiously neutral only when chapel services are not being conducted or being used by a specific faith group.” So when a Christian group wants to use the chapel for services, the curtain can be drawn back; otherwise, the curtain must stay in place.

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