IT'S UP TO THE MISSOURI SUPREME COURT TO PUT AN END TO BIG FEES FOR FAVORED POLITICAL CRONIES

Our Missouri attorney general, and all future AGs, are today free to flip through their Rolodexes searching for campaign contributors to reward by designating them as special assistant AGs for such cases as the tobacco litigation.

Moreover, these favored lawyer-contributors stand to be enriched by appointments made in the sole and unfettered discretion of the attorney general, who may line their pockets with hundreds of millions of dollars at rates equivalent to thousands of dollars per hour for whatever work is done. No other official in your state government can do anything about it.

Thus have spoken your state courts in the case of Kinder vs. Nixon, specifically the Western District Missouri Court of Appeals in Kansas City.

The latest opinion is a dozen pages of pedestrian claptrap posing as legalese and purporting to bless this outrageous new means of rewarding favored political contributors. That the opinion was written by a Carnahan appointee known to be aligned with the trial lawyers of the plaintiffs' bar will come as no surprise to close observers of today's corrupted, and increasingly corrupting, legal arena.

The state of play, then, is this: Attorney General Jay Nixon and his favored political contributors in the trial bar are one court away from getting away with the biggest rip-off in 180 years of statehood.

All eyes are on the Missouri Supreme Court and a pending appeal.