Your state government at work

State-appointed attorneys for indigent defendants in all but one of Alabama's counties haven't gotten payments for overhead costs since February, when Attorney General Troy King issued an opinion saying that state law bars such payments. The lawyers, upset about losing roughly a third of the already comparatively small amount they received to represent the poor, have sued seeking to get the payments restored.

King, for his part, says he's all well and good with overhead pay and blames the Legislature, which recently passed a resolution that said it didn't mean for the law to say what King said it said. Correcting the law itself during the recent special session was out of the question, of course, especially after the state Christian Coalition for some reason saw fit to oppose the restoration.

Somewhere, on a parallel world far, far away, this makes sense.