The next time someone wants to sell you on the whole “red state/blue state” thing, point them to this AP piece:

LITTLE ROCK — In a bid for more national exposure, the Arkansas owners of the Miss Gay America Pageant have sold the franchise to a Mississippi company.

The annual pageant has had its headquarters in Little Rock for more than three decades. Organizers describe it as the largest and most prestigious female impersonator competition in the nation.

Former owner Norman Jones sold the pageant, its copyright and a smaller circuit of competitions on Feb. 4 to L&T Entertainment, a firm in Nesbit, Miss., about 20 miles south of Memphis.

Another entry in our ongoing series, “cut the legislature’s pay and send them home”: the nitwits in the House have managed to make it harder to buy cold medicine than it is to vote in this state.

Buying cold medicine could require showing photo ID, signing your name and talking to the pharmacist under House bills passed Thursday.

The next time any Democrats in the legislature start whining about requiring voter ID, someone ought to remind them they voted for this idiotic bill.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plan to end redistricting as we know it in California may be hitting a snag; James Joyner notes that opposition has emerged among California’s Republican members of Congress who were gerrymandered into safe seats in the 2000 election and might have problems winning competitive elections due to the national GOP‘s position far to the right of the median California voter.

More details in today’s Los Angeles Times; meanwhile, Robert Tagorda looks at the redistricting politics on both sides of the aisle, while Kevin Drum denies he’s a hack but senses an opportune time to switch sides and support the Schwarzenegger plan nonetheless. At least Greg Wythe has been on the bandwagon all along ☺.

Incidentally, is anyone up for collecting nearly 110,000 signatures (12% of the number of votes cast in the 2003 gubernatorial race) in twelve months to qualify an initiative to do the same thing in Mississippi?

More evidence that Mississippi has too many lawmakers and, apparently, too long a legislative session:

A practice of some teenage girls — getting birth control from neighborhood health clinics without their parents’ consent — would end under a bill pending in the Mississippi Senate.

Public Health and Welfare Chairman Alan Nunnelee, R-Tupelo, said he’s filed the bill for about eight years without the legislation ever getting out of committee. Nunnelee’s chairmanship guarantees that the bill will at least get a Senate vote this year.

A particular highlight of the piece is Nunnelee’s apparent belief that sexually active teenagers are “little girls.” And, since the AP can’t be bothered to include the bill number in the article (a pet peeve of mine), here’s a link to all the information.

Today’s New York Times has a somewhat lengthy piece on efforts in various states to reform their redistricting processes. As far as I know, aside from various efforts to create majority-minority Supreme Court districts, there are no serious efforts to fix redistricting in Mississippi—an oversight that surely ought to be corrected.

And, Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters says plans for a redistricting initiative in California may potentially be hijacked by partisan interests, although Walters doesn’t do a very good job of explaining how—he just alleges that requiring the redistricting commission to create competitive districts might somehow favor Republicans. (þ: Rick Hasen).

Update: More on this theme from John Fund at OpinionJournal.com.

Steven Taylor links a New York Times piece detailing plans by President Bush to ask Congress to cut farm subsidies, pitting Bush against many in Congress, including Mississippi senator Thad Cochran, the new Senate appropriations committee chairman (and former agriculture committee chairman). Those with longer memories—apparently not including the Times’ reporter—would recall that in the mid-90s, U.S. agricultural subsidies were reduced and the rules reformed but the 2002 farm bill rolled back many of those achievements.

Steven favors a gradual phase-out of farm subsidies, a position I wholeheartedly agree with, and starting with caps on the payments to the large conglomerates would be a great plan. Plus, this is an area where the U.S. could do a lot of good globally: both the United States and European Union have already committed to reducing farm subsidies as part of the WTO’s Doha round, but the devil (as always) is in the details.

You know, I don’t think referring to the state’s leading football prospects as the state’s “Ten Most Wanted” is really projecting the image wanted by Ole Miss, State, and Southern.

Steven Taylor notes that the Austin American-Statesman has started a weblog just covering the Texas state legislature. It seems to me that the Clarion-Ledger could easily do the same thing for the Mississippi Legislature and provide a much more useful service to its readers than its typical output of 2–3 articles a day during the session.

Glenn Reynolds in the course of rightly criticizing the neo-Confederate movement makes this rather incongrous statement:

As a political force, neo-Confederate sentiment is pretty trivial at the moment, even compared to the decaying remnants of Marxism.

Apparently Glenn didn’t get the memo about these schmucks who apparently have a substantial chunk of the Mississippi legislature doing their bidding. At least the Marxists around here are in relatively harmless professions (or serving on the Jackson City Council, which amounts to basically the same thing).

Interesting piece in today’s New York Times about plans to build another nuclear reactor next to Entergy’s existing nuclear plant about 60 miles southwest of Jackson. (þ: Tom Maguire and a student)

It’s always nice to see our state legislators up to business as usual:

Some Mississippi lawmakers are scheduled to speak Thursday to the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “a patently white supremacist group.”

Well, isn’t that special. Even better, AP reporter Emily Wagster Pettus manages to track down one of the nitwits expected to attend this speaking engagement; unintentional hilarity ensues:

State Rep. John Moore, R-Brandon, said he’s scheduled to speak at the CCC gathering Thursday. He said he’ll talk about issues to be considered during the current legislative session.

Moore said he didn’t know anything about the group’s position on race.

“If I find out for certain they are a racist organization, I am going to confront them,” he said.

“You hear that the NAACP is racist, but that wouldn’t keep me from talking to them,” Moore said.

One is forced to conclude that Moore’s invites to the Rankin County NAACP chapter meetings must have gotten lost in the mail. But it gets better.

He said he had never looked at the CCC‘s Web site, but he sat with an AP reporter and scrolled through it. After looking at the question-and-answer section on race, Moore said: “I didn’t get any indication from this that they were racist.”

You know, there’s a joke just begging to be made here about the reading comprehension of Mississippi State graduates, but it’s not even funny in this context. The people of Brandon ought to be embarrassed to have this guy allegedly representing them in the legislature. (þ: memeorandum)

This is almost becoming a recurring joke:

Route: I-55

Impact: medium

On I-55 north 2.5 miles north of Pearl Street, the left lane will be closed to replace posts from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. today. The ramp leaving Woodrow Wilson to go north on I-55 will be closed.

This marks the third time in four months that MDOT has replaced these stupid things, which are intended to stop traffic coming from eastbound Woodrow Wilson Drive cutting across three lanes of traffic to exit at eastbound Lakeland Drive (Hwy 25). I applaud the sentiment, but it’s increasingly clear to me (although apparently not our esteemed Department of Transportation) that something more substantial than plastic posts are needed here.

After a brief haitus, the Jackson-George Regional Library Board voted 5–2 yesterday to reverse its earlier decision and return Jon Stewart’s America: The Book to the shelves.

Fellow Jacksonian Shawn Lea is compiling a directory of Mississippi bloggers and blogs about Mississippi.

As promised, here’s the exit poll report, hot off the presses. There are not enough pretty graphs yet, but you get the idea.

Today’s Clarion-Ledger possibly engages in a bit of agenda setting by suggesting the state flag issue will return from the dead during the 2005 regular session. While I have to say I’m not particularly enamored of the existing state flag, and was one of those who voted to change it back in 2001 (even though the alternative wasn’t exactly the best state flag ever designed either), if anyone seriously thinks a change will stick they’re going to have to make a lot more of an effort than they did during the previous referendum campaign, which was generally spearheaded by a group of has-beens and never-wases.

The more I read about the state legislature’s shenanigans, the more I am compelled to conclude that referring to extraordinary sessions of that body as “special” seems oddly appropriate.

I think it’s safe to say that if you’re a New York Giants fan in Mississippi you can cancel NFL Sunday Ticket for the forseeable future.

In Thursday’s Clarion-Ledger, former U.S. representative David Bowen distills some advice for the national Democrats that’s been floating around the punditocracy over the past week:

The Democratic Party could once again become America’s majority party if it chose a more conservative path on social issues while remaining liberal on economic and governmental issues. That combination is sometimes called populism, an unbeatable combination.

It is not necessary for Democratic nominees to abandon a pro-choice or stem-cell-research position. Just abandon partial birth and late-term abortion. Respect and defend gay Americans, but abandon gay marriage. Don’t abandon your consistent support for African-Americans, but modify race-based discrimination. Don’t think you have to speak in tongues or teach Sunday school to get the evangelical vote, but do show respect and understanding for all people of faith and demonstrate some faith of your own.

I’m not entirely sure populism is “unbeatable” (ask Ronnie Musgrove, the highlights of whose unsuccessful reelection campaign were joining Haley Barbour in pathetically pandering by offering to take on Roy Moore’s Ten Commandments monument and running away from the unpopular state flag referendum he helped engineer), and referring to affirmative action as “race-based discrimination” probably won’t play well with the left-wing set, but nonetheless Bowen may have a point.

Today’s Clarion-Ledger has an interesting story based on an interview with Judge Neal Biggers, Jr., who presided over the Ayers desegregation case. Interestingly, a shutdown of both MVSU and MUW was on the table in the mid-1990s, but Biggers rejected that as part of the solution because he doubted the College Board’s sincerity in planning to shut them down. He also echos a point that I’ve made repeatedly over the years (and which has been a major roadblock to finalizing the settlement):

“The remedy for the situation was not to enhance segregated facilities, but to desegregate the facilities. Some of the plaintiffs, it seemed, wanted equal, segregated facilities,’’ [Biggers] said.

I echo BigJim’s magnanimity on the occasion of A&M’s win over Florida… but, if all you Bulldog fans think this means you’re not still due for your annual whoopin’ in the Egg Bowl, you’re sorely mistaken.

In other news, the Millsaps Majors just got pummelled 38–7 by DePauw at Homecoming; somehow, the unseasonal 80+ degree heat didn’t even seem to bother the visitors from Indiana. Nonetheless, a good time was had by all, and one of my con law students was crowned Homecoming Queen, so that was cool too.

No doubt to the infinite shock of all attentive observers, the president of Belarus has won a referendum removing the country’s two-term limit for presidential service, which essentially is a precursor for him to be elected dictator-for-life; in a separate ballot for the national legislature, no opposition candidates won election to the body. Unsurprisingly, observers from the OSCE found numerous irregularities in the vote.

In not-entirely-unrelated news, today’s Clarion-Ledger carries a column on preparations for the November 2nd ballot here in Mississippi, and I’ve spent most of the past weekend working putting together an exit poll—somehow I managed to cram 46* legible questions on both sides of a sheet of letter paper.

Now, the heavy lifting begins after the final end of the Ayers lawsuit. Personally, I was never very clear on what the plaintiffs actually wanted (I suspect they would have been content with a segregated, “separate but truly equal” system), but in the end it ended up as more of a desegregation case than an equal financing case.

I tend to think that this state needs to focus its limited resources on K-12 education and community colleges, providing scholarships for the truly needy to attend four-year institutions while making the middle and upper class pay something close to “retail” for university educations, and shutting down or privatizing the non-doctoral institutions (Alcorn State, Delta State, Mississippi Valley State, and Mississippi University for Women). Unfortunately I think Ayers is a hindrance, not a help, toward those goals.

Breaking news from the Clarion-Ledger:

A Clinton-based airline pilot accused of hosting parties where teens were provided drugs and alcohol and where some were videotaped in sexual situations today was sentenced to two years in jail for contributing to the delinquency of minors.

Just in case our former president didn’t have enough bad publicity regarding young women, sex, drugs, and alcohol associated with his name.

Somehow, the Rebels have avoided making ESPN.com’s Bottom 10; Sylvester Croom’s squad, however, failed to dodge that bullet—losing to Vandy will lead to things like that.