(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done, and it’s too hot to sleep and time is runnin’ away.

We begin in Mississippi, where various grifters and rounders have found themselves shipwrecked on a volleyball court. Someone keeps spiking the ball on influential Mississippians. From Mississippi Today:

The scheme in question involves $24 million in misspent federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funding that the state allegedly plowed into a number of projects having nothing to do with needy families, including a new volleyball arena at the University of Southern Mississippi, allegedly at the request of noted USM alumnus Brett Favre. There is now a sprawling lawsuit brought by the Mississippi Department of Human Services aimed at clawing back as much of that $24 million as it can from the people to whom it was misappropriated. Earlier this week, the MDHS fired the private attorney handling the case because the attorney had dropped paper on USM on his own initiative.

Pigott said that Gov. Tate Reeves had intervened to keep the USM piece out of the MDHS lawsuit. Nevertheless, it is the money plowed into the volleyball facility that seems to reach the highest in the state’s political and social elite — which, being Mississippi, includes Brett Favre.

I would like to state, for the record, that if this scandal causes Favre to muse publicly about another comeback, I am filing an amicus brief to argue that Mississippi must drop the case in the interest of public boredom.

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We move along to Alabama, specifically to a Hyundai subsidiary’s factory in Luverne, where yet another issue our grandparents thought was settled turns out to be very much not. From Reuters:

In March of 1912, a 14-year-old girl named Camella Teoli summoned up all of her courage and testified before Congress. Camella worked in a mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and when that state passed a child labor law to limit the number of hours children like Camella had to work, the milliners simply speeded up the machinery. The children walked out. The local police attacked them. Congress launched an investigation and that was how Camella Teoli came to Congress.

This, from the official history from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is what she told them:

Her testimony helped pass the Keating-Owen Act, the first anti-child labor law enacted by the federal government. Two years later, the Supreme Court ruled it to be unconstitutional, and that’s about as far as I care to pursue historical parallels these days, thanks.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Frontier tummler Friedman of the Plains brings us the continuing efforts of that state to kill as many people as possible. From ProPublica:

And he’s not alone.

And Henry Ford is introduced to the death chamber. This does not seem to me like progress.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.