Jerry Clower, the great Mississippi comedian, used to tell the story of a coon hunter who didn’t believe in treeing a coon and shooting the animal off the limb. One day John, Jerry, and some friends treed a coon and John climbed up to poke it off the branch it was on. Except it wasn’t a coon. It was a lynx. “We call ’em souped-up wildcats,” Jerry used to say.
Well, John and this lynx got into a horrible battle way up in that great big tree.
As Jerry used to tell it:
“WAAAAHHHH! This thing’s killin’ me!” The whole top of the tree was shakin’. And John knew that Mr. Barron toted a pistol in his belt to shoot snakes with. And he kept hollerin, “WHAWWWWW, SHOOT THIS THING!! HAVE MERCY, THIS THING’S KILLIN’ ME!! SHOOT THIS THING!!”
And Mr. Barron said, “John, I cain’t shoot up in there. I might hit you.”
“WELL JUST SHOOT UP HERE AMONGST US. ONE OF US HAS GOT TO HAVE SOME RELIEF!!”
This is the last day of the special legislative session. Unless it’s not.
You now know as much as we do.
The MOSIRA bill is still breathing. It’s in the House. The Senate has passed it. But some people who are afraid it will lead to cloning want to put some language into it that might or might not be constitutional and the Speaker of the House will give them a chance to do it. That would mean the bill would have to go back to a senate that has been getting increasingly testy about this whole special session and still wants the House to pass an economic development bill that a House committee cannot agree on enough to even take a vote on. Legislative leaders have vowed that this is the last day. Unless they decide to try to keep negotiating on the economic development bill, which they might or might not because both sides want things the other side doesn’t.
Those of us who have been covering state government for a few decades have done something the legislature hasn’t been able to do. We have reached a consensus.
We agree that we’ve never seen a special legislative session that is such a mess as this one. There already has been a bunch of finger pointing about who’s to blame. There is no shortage of suspects.
But thank heavens this is the last day.
Unless it isn’t.
Where is Mr. Barron and his pistol when we need him?
When elections are held in third world countries where most of the populace can’t read, candidates are represented on the ballots by their party’s symbols. Examples are such things as set of Scales, a Plow, a Cow, or a Hammer. That would work great for our electoral system! The symbols that come to my mind are: an Outhouse, a Large Screw, a Clown, a Snake, and a Dollar Bill with Wings. – paraphrased from P. J. O’Rourke