A session more special than the rest

I can think of no finer way to drop $110,000 of public money than to convene a special session of the Alabama Legislature.

It can be productive. It offers loads of largely unintentional entertainment. And it's a second chance to go gavel-to-gavel without marijuana-related drama, or flooding of epic proportions, or editorials with epically bad legislative flood puns.

The arguments for a special session may seem obvious, but like most things, they look more compelling in a bulleted list:

• Jefferson County -- which, as the county where more Alabamians live than anywhere else, is kind of a big deal -- faces the budgetary equivalent of a massive heart attack in the middle of a debilitating stroke. And swine flu. Swine flu that mutated into Ebola.
  
• The state's prepaid college tuition program is in danger of being eaten by bears. Stock market bears, not literal ones. Not yet, anyway.
• Your child's school would like to invite you to a proration party! And then another one in October! BYOB! (Bring your own books, that is. There's not much money for new ones.)
• More Alabamians are losing their jobs every single month, prompting the state to borrow money for its unemployment fund. But at least we didn't take federal stimulus money for the unemployment fund. Because that would have required submission to outrageous liberal tyrannies like giving an unemployment check to a woman who had to leave her job to escape an abusive husband, or counting applicants' most recent work to determine their eligibility for benefits. Oh, and a hypothetical tax increase years down the road. As opposed to the certain one next year.
• Insert reference to the broken and unfair nature of our state constitution and tax system here.
• We're going on four months since the Legislature weighed in on an opposite-marriage dispute between a beauty pageant contestant and an entertainment blogger, both of whom live thousands of miles away. And it's been years since we double-banned gay marriage. If it weren't for our ongoing efforts to rid ourselves of the scourge of wine labels featuring classical artwork of nude women, outsiders might start getting the wrong idea.
  

Whatever happens, we should make sure it occurs during the most stifling, unbearable stretch of August. The one that proves that a bunch of liberal liberals and lazy polar bears and the Hawaiian birth certificate industry have orchestrated an international conspiracy to invent so-called "global warming."

And the one that's least likely to bring flood waters back.