Arkansas Encyclopedia of Arkansas History - Encyclopedia Arkapedia

The American Spectator

The American Spectator is a conservative U.S. monthly magazine, edited by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. and published by the non-profit American Spectator Foundation. Today the magazine is best known for its attacks in the 1990s on Bill Clinton and its "Arkansas Project" to discredit the president, funded by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and the Bradley Foundation.

The publication gained prominence in the 1990s by reporting on political scandals. The March 1992 issue contained David Brock's expose on Clarence Thomas accuser Anita Hill, famously calling Hill "a bit nutty and a bit slutty". Brock and his colleague Daniel Wattenberg soon moved on to a target of somewhat longer-lasting relevance: Hillary and Bill Clinton. A January 1994 article about then-President Bill Clinton's sex life contained the first reference in print to Clinton accuser Paula Jones, although the article focused on allegations that Clinton used Arkansas state troopers to facilitate his extramarital sexual activities.

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Arkansas' gross domestic product for 2005 was $87 billion. Its per capita household median income (in current dollars) for 2004 was $35,295, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The state's agriculture outputs are poultry and eggs, soybeans, sorghum, cattle, cotton, rice, hogs, and milk. Its industrial outputs are food processing, electric equipment, fabricated metal products, machinery, paper products, bromine, and vanadium.

Several global companies are headquartered in the northwest corner of Arkansas, including Wal-Mart (the world's largest public corporation by revenue in 2007), J.B. Hunt and Tyson Foods. This area of the state has experienced an economic boom since the 1970s as a result.

In recent years, automobile parts manufacturers have opened factories in eastern Arkansas to support auto plants in other states. Additionally, the city of Conway is the site of a school bus factory.

Tourism is also very important to the Arkansas economy; the official state nickname "The Natural State" was originally created (as "Arkansas Is A Natural") for state tourism advertising in the 1970s, and is still regularly used to this day.

The Arkansas Project is the general name of a series of investigations (mostly funded by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife) that were designed to damage and end the presidency of Bill Clinton. Scaife gave $1.8 million dollars "to unearth damaging information about President Clinton." Some reports and investigations connected to this project focused on questions about the suicide of Vincent Foster, the Clintons' investment in Whitewater, and Troopergate.

Richard Mellon Scaife (born July 3, 1932 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is an American billionaire and newspaper publisher.

Scaife owns and publishes the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. With $1.2 billion, Scaife, a principal heir to the Mellon banking, oil, and aluminum fortune, is No. 283 on the 2005 Forbes 400.

Scaife is particularly well known for his financial support of conservative public policy organizations over the past two decades. Scaife has provided support for conservative and libertarian causes in the U.S., mostly through the private, nonprofit foundations he controls: the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Carthage Foundation, and Allegheny Foundation, and until 2001 the Scaife Family Foundation, now controlled by his daughter Jennie and son David. Scaife also helped fund the Arkansas Project, which ultimately led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

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since statehood.