Y’all, I have such an abundance of charming news from Mississippi, that I’ve designated today Hell, Yes, It’s Mississippi Day.

First, we have this for the people who just can’t let go.

A Mississippi lawmaker is proposing two state flags.

Republican House Speaker Pro Tempore Greg Snowden is proposing that the state have two flags: one with the Confederate emblem, which currently represents Mississippi, and another flag without the emblem.

You know, like we used to have separate drinking fountains.

If you want to know how a guy can be so tone deaf, it might have something to do with education in Mississippi.  Mississippi is all that stands between Texas being the worse state in the nation for education.  And they proudly uphold that standard.

A principal served four years and two months in prison for attempted murder. Another pleaded guilty to embezzling $73,033 in electronics from his school. One teacher struck a student, and several others were accused of misconduct involving students.

All of these individuals surrendered or lost their teaching license, and each of them was later reinstated by Mississippi’s commission responsible for disciplining educators.

And there is even a possible explanation for that.  As I was looking around to find more bad teachers in Mississippi, I stumbled across this:

Highway patrol spokesman Eric Henry said the incident began when a vehicle slowed down in front of an 18 wheeler carrying a load of Budweiser beer. In order to avoid hitting the back of the vehicle, the truck driver steered into the median, and the truck overturned.

In the oncoming lane, the driver of a Toyota Tacoma saw the accident happen, and slowed his vehicle, at which point he was rear-ended by another 18 wheeler. That pushed the Tacoma into the back of a third 18 wheeler.

Henry said there are no injuries, but authorities will be on scene for a few hours clearing the spilled beer from the median.

You would be hard-pressed to prove those were not empty cans leaving Mississippi.  I bet it was the best attended highway clean-up in the state.

Thanks to AlanInAustin for the original heads up.

Way back on August 1st of last year, Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen and I told you about how Ted Cruz’s SuperPAC gave Carly Fiorina’s SuperPAC half a million dollars.  We both wondered why he would do that. The best we could figure is that Ted thought Carly could effectively attack Hillary Clinton better than a man could.

When it turned out that Fiorina was a 15 minute wonder – she made the grown-up debate one time and only because Donald Trump said she is ugly – we wondered why Ted didn’t ask for a refund.

Well, come to find out, maybe it’s because he has a crush on her.

Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is vetting Carly Fiorina as a potential running mate, THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned.

According to a spokeswoman for Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO and one-time presidential candidate is being vetted by Cruz’s campaign.

Hey, at least give Ted this – when you are the most soulless man on the planet, it is difficult to find someone equally as soulless.

Why does the head of a group called Liberty Counsel, Anita Staver, hate Target?  Because, oddly enough, Target likes Liberty.

Anita Staver, the president of the radical anti-LGBT group Liberty Counsel, tweeted last week that people should boycott Target for its new policy preventing discrimination against transgender customers, adding that she plans to take her pistol into the restroom from now on.

Y’all, really?

I’m putting a picture of her right here because if she’s in the restroom she’s gonna wanna see your gender identifying thingies. You need to turn and run away faster than a bullet with legs, ‘cuz this woman is not only nasty, she’s armed.

You know how sometimes you finish your bathroom business just in time to discover that your stall is outta toilet paper and you nicely ask the woman next stall if she’ll hand you some under the divider?  Don’t do that to her.  She’ll shoot your damn hand off.

Here’s the deal I want to say to Anita – Let people be. Just let them be. It ain’t none of your concern.  Or, in the alternative, when you’re going to Target, pee before you leave home. This ain’t complicated. Target has family bathrooms and there’s a reason for that – nobody wants their kids around Anita Staver.

What is it with these people and bathrooms?  I remember back in the 1970’s, there was a state representative out of Houston named Walter Mengden.  Walter was opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment because it would mean that we’d have to have unisex bathrooms.  He was horrified by the thought. Ole Walter is 89 years old now and I do believe that he’s still constipated.

Thanks to everybody for the heads up.

The Washington State Dems have yet to get their entire act together – they have county conventions coming up on May 1 – and so Bernie Sanders has not seen all the delegate fruits of victory there since his March 26 precinct caucus victory, and won’t see final totals until May 21. Only 34 of their 101 pledged delegates have been allocated.  I estimate that when the rest are, Bernie will pick up enough to narrow Hillary Clinton’s lead by 35 more delegates.

It won’t be near enough. Even with that assumption baked in, after her resounding New York win, Clinton maintains a 240-delegate lead, with a little over 1400 delegates left in play. After his Michigan surprise seven weeks ago, Sanders needed 55% of the remaining delegates to overtake her pledged delegate lead.  Two weeks ago, that was up to 57%. Now it’s up to 59% of every delegate pool up for grabs from now on, including in the 5 Northeastern states voting tomorrow.

On yet another, super, Tuesday, there are nearly 400 Democratic  delegates up for grabs, half in Pennsylvania. Unless something weird has happened that I can’t fathom yet, Hillary should come out of those contests with a net gain of around 60 more delegates.  Between that and New York, she will have wiped out all of Bernie’s gains during his Revolution’s Long March through Western Caucasia.

This means that, by about 11 PM tomorrow, Sanders will need two thirds of the remaining delegates, just to catch up in the pledged delegate column. That’s not going to happen, and he will not catch up in the popular vote, either, where Clinton’s lead will be north of 3 million votes.

These numbers could change if Bernie overperforms tomorrow, a la Michigan, especially if he can steal a march in Pennsylvannia. But even that would not be enough to change the narrative, this time.  And the Sanders team recognizes this, which is why they’ve been making noise about asking the superdelegates to overturn themselves, and forsake Hillary, for Party and Country.

Let’s see what they say after tomorrow night.

High Street runs right down the middle of Columbus. It has a trendily renaissanced arts district.  It runs past The Ohio State University.  It is the center of a vibrant gay community.  It has some rough stretches.  It has some homey stretches.  It has some “suburb-within-the-city-limits” places.  It’s my favorite street in town, and also out of town.  As US-23, it can take me north to Toledo, and to Ann Arbor where resides that “Team Up North” that as a Buckeye fan and a former Notre Dame student I abhor with double fervor.  It goes up to Flint, even, then hugs Lake Huron before ending at the Mackinac Bridge.  But I use it most to head south, to play the slots at Scioto Downs, or to just take a nice drive down to Portsmouth, on the mighty Ohio, and beyond into Kentucky.  I could take it, eventually, to Jacksonville, FL.

But before you reach Portsmouth, you pass through Piketon, an hour south of where I sit, named for the same Pike as Pike’s Peak. It’s a depressed rural town like 10,000 others in America, with one major advantage: it’s poised for growth thanks to the very latest in uranium enrichment technology and the successful gas centrifuge proof-of-concept plant that is supposed to expand its operations.  That will help, because about 1/3 of Piketon is below the poverty line.

Last week, Piketon became infamous as the site of the murders of 8 members of the Rhoden family across 4 different homesteads. The family members were killed methodically, some in their beds, possibly asleep, even, while 3 infants and toddlers were spared, by a person or persons still unknown.

I don’t know what this is yet. Nobody seems to know.  Today a few marijuana grow sites were linked to the homes, but whether that was some sort of motive, no one can yet say.

What I do know is this: in 1959, the Clutter family was murdered in Holcomb, Kansas under similarly mysterious circumstances. America was shocked, and then was not allowed to forget, as author Truman Capote, by virtue of his glorious writing and his larger-than-life persona turned it into a macabre form of entertainment.

The Rhodens of Piketon are the 21^st Century Clutters, ramped up to 8 killings over 4 sites due to inflation.  The inflation of guns.  The inflation of coldness.  The inflation of a country pathologically loving and hating itself to death.  On the same day this broke, there was another mass shooting in Georgia.  In the last week, since last Monday, 23 people have been killed in mass shootings.  Nearly double that – 44 – have been injured in the same shootings.

Forget “Right to Life.” They’re getting rich selling “Right to Death.”

The Piketon murders are the monster grown from the demon child that Capote midwifed on that Kansas prairie. Why are we arming this ravenous beast?

Y’all, I do not know what is wrong with Paul LePage but, seriously, somebody needs to check him for a brain tumor.

His latest?  We should not raise the minimum wage because … (deep breath) people from Bulgaria and India are hard to  understand.

Maine’s Republican governor says it’s hard to understand workers “from Bulgaria” and workers from India are “the worst ones.”

The governor said Saturday that foreign workers are being used in restaurants after he criticized a referendum proposal to raise Maine’s minimum wage to $12. He says he’s disappointed his alternative proposal to hike the wage to $10 didn’t get traction.

Look, I don’t like being mean so I’ll call this a helpful suggestion:  LePage, the damn last thing you need is to be understood by a waiter in a restaurant.

But, hey, I kinda appreciate what he’s saying.  It’s really hard for me to understand LePage.  I mean, I know he’s talking English and I get that.  I understand all the words he’s saying.  I just don’t think he does.

Thelma has a theory.  “Just look at a map,” she explains. “Maine is way the hell up there.  I mean, the air has gotta be thinner than here, right?”

Maybe.  At least it’s the best explanation I’ve heard.