Reaction so far to the Top 10 legislator list: Not bad, people say, but Sen. Bryan King shouldn’t have been there, and instead, at 10th, I should have put either Rep. Darrin Williams of Little Rock, who helped kill bad bills, or Sen. Johnny Key of Mountain Home, an often-overlooked reasonable Republican.

Probably so. I was determined to pry King in there for reasons I am having trouble remembering

I think I just wanted to irk people. But I do that naturally enough.

Some legislators are mentioning the idea of polling themselves to see how they would select a Top 10. I wish they would do that. It would be interesting to compare.

I will not do a Bottom 10 because, after you list Jason Rapert, Bob Ballinger and the two Meekses, you get into a kind of mundane general badness.

Worst delegation: Conway. No contest.

Here are some related awards just for kicks:

Best lobbyists — The Mullenexes.

Best on-line reporter — David Ramsey.

Best multi-platform reporter — Roby Brock.

Best bureaucrat — Andy Allison.

Allow me to explain why Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would take the assault-weapon ban out of the gun control measure.

It’s because of you.

Not you solely or specifically, of course. I refer to you in a general way as an Arkansas voter, thus an element of a gun-crazed electoral subset.

I refer to our pervasive identity in the Natural State as irrationally devoted to the self-enriching propaganda of the National Rifle Association.

You know the nonsense to which I refer: Any restriction of any kind of any weapon violates your constitutional right to defend yourself against an evil president who is coming for your gun,

You know the self-enrichment to which I refer: The more that the NRA can make you afraid, the more money the NRA receives.

So Arkansas paranoia rules the country. Arkansas paranoia helps keep it possible to shoot faster to kill more children in a shorter time.

What I am saying is that Reid’s action is largely about preventing U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor from losing too many of your votes in the next election.

It matters to the country whether the Democrats hold control of the Senate. It matters to Democrats in holding that control whether Pryor keeps his seat. It matters to Pryor’s keeping that seat whether you will vote for him.

So put yourself at the center of gravity on gun issues in America.

Reid is a practical politician who enjoys a Democratic majority and would like to preserve it, indeed build on it toward filibuster-proofing. He certainly does not want to imperil it for the next election cycle.

He has four Democratic senators from red states who face re-election in 2014, one of them Pryor. The others are Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, Mark Begich in Alaska and Kay Hagan in North Carolina.

Please understand that the Tea Party-infested U.S. House of Representatives will never approve an assault-weapon ban. So the Senate exercise of pursuing such a ban, led by California’s Diane Feinstein, is academic, pointless as policy.

So what Reid has done is pare the assault-weapon ban from the main gun control measure. He’s told Feinstein she can propose it only as an amendment.

Leaving it in the main bill would cause Republican senators to filibuster, blocking any gun legislation at all.

It would force Pryor and those three others either to vote to end a filibuster and thus for the ban, and thereby likely commit political suicide, or vote against any gun legislation and so outrage their bases that their re-elections would be severely weakened by a loss of supporter enthusiasm.

And it would be for no good reason since the House is not going to approve an assault-weapon ban anyway.

So Reid wants to give Pryor and the three others something moderate on guns to support, though it’s not certain they’ll do even that as long as there is an unsettled dispute about whether universal background checks would create a national gun owner database, which the gun lobby fears for some paranoid reason.

Then it would be up to these red-state senators to finesse with their liberal bases their separate votes against Feinstein’s amendment for the assault-weapon ban.

Pryor has spent his political life in those very kinds of finesses, first watching his dad do them and now performing them himself. He knows how they’re done.

Or used to be done.

He undoubtedly will say something privately to his base along these lines: “I opposed the assault-weapon ban because Republicans were going to filibuster it in the Senate and defeat it in the House. Faced with that reality, I voted the best way I could to make sure we would get at least some improvement in our gun laws.”

Translation: Do you prefer me on this tightrope or Tom Cotton and the Tea Party?

It used to be that a Democrat like Pryor could deflect the gun issue by publishing photographs of himself as a sportsman hunting fowl.

That’s what Pryor did in 2002. People leaving a big pre-election NRA rally in Springdale found photos like that on flyers that had been placed under their windshields while they worshipped inside with Wayne LaPierre.

But the right-wing has so devolved that the issue is no longer about hunting.

The contemporary gun zealot doesn’t care how much camouflage a politician lathers on his body or how many dead birds he carries out of a duck blind for a waiting photographer.

The contemporary gun zealot wants to carry any firearm of his choosing on his person at all times, regardless of what game is in season.

That’s because it’s always in season to be manipulated by the NRA and prepared for marauding Kenyan Muslim socialists coming to take your Constitution and your arsenal.

So House members and Senate members played a basketball game last night at the Stephens Center at UALR, this to raise money for Big Brothers.

A crowd of a few hundred assembled. That’s a few hundred more than the Trojans regularly draw.

The House won by eight or nine points, as everyone knew would happen because one of their members, Green Party-ist Fred Smith — well, he once was a Globetrotter and he is young enough that he can still dunk.

Game over.

Well, the House also had the better ex-Hog celebrity, sharp-shooter Pat Bradley, who can still do it in this context despite having added a mid-adult layer of flesh.

It was unclear who the Senate’s ex-Razorback ringer was. Some said Blake Eddins.

The Senate’s best player was Jeremy Hutchinson, the bald fireplug, who looks like a veteran YMCA-level combatant and whose pugnacious intensity on the court  — risking the health of himself, others and infrastructure — reminded me of the way Rep. John Burris legislates.

Burris did not play. He was spotted standing in an aisle enjoying a cup of what may have been an adult beverage.

Hutchinson was ripe for “gator” jokes. He had an unfortunate incident with a semi-estranged girlfriend in which she reportedly conked him with a gator head. So there was some gator-chop motioning going on. And there may have been a sign. And I may have tweeted that he looked like he’d played before, maybe for Florida.

A few random observations:

1. Full-court basketball is a serious physical test and I am most impressed with the near-50 senators, Jim Hendren and Paul Bookout, who played a lot of minutes — Hendren getting in the low post for several rebounds and layups. I complimented him as he departed with an ice pack on his knee.

2. The game started almost as if on a script. House Speaker Davy Carter, a runner who looks mildly athletic, was left open for a three and he drained it softly. Then he was not heard from again.

3. Republicans are better athletes than Democrats. Just a sad fact. Well, Bill Bradley was OK. But watching Sens. Robert Thompson and David Johnson try to negotiate a basketball court gave me a good sense of the tragedy that has happened to Democrats in Arkansas.

I’m just going to tell you what happened and you can make of it what you will.

I was in a conference room high in a downtown Little Rock office tower on Sunday afternoon letting Bill Halter, the candidate for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, explain to me his proposed “Arkansas Promise.”

That is his idea to give Arkansas a fighting chance in this rapidly changing economy by guaranteeing every Arkansas school kid with a 2.5 grade-point average a tuition-paid college education in the state. He would use his lottery scholarships as the foundation, then plug in grants, donations and, he thinks, no more than $50 million to $75 million a year in general revenue.

A $50,000 investment in a youngster’s higher education could produce, studies show, an additional million dollars in lifetime income. Halter thinks that’s a pretty good deal.

He says if we don’t move aggressively to catch up and gain ground, then we will go backward in a world that now moves this fast: One of our biggest companies, Google, didn’t exist when today’s 10th graders were born. Another, Facebook, is not yet 10 years old.

The next billion-dollar phenomenon that will have changed the world in 10 years probably hasn’t been thought of yet, he said. And you have to be educated to hope to be a part of it, he said.

So, anyway, what happened: Halter was telling me of his distress that Arkansas has always been 48th or 49th in every meaningful ranking. He was telling me that the typical Arkansas tragedy is that, somewhere along the way, low-paid Arkansas parents accept the reality that they can’t afford to send their kids to college, and the kids get that signal, and dreams vanish. And he was telling me that the great equalizer in our society is the maternity ward, where everybody shares the same concern — that the baby will be fine — and everyone shares the same dream, that the kid soon to enter the world will get a college education. And then it doesn’t happen for many of those parents and those kids.

He became emotional. His eyes dampened and he had to pause.

So is this the robotic, overly opportunistic, cynically ambitious, personally remote Bill Halter whom I and others have described?

Or have we found a real and noble passion within?

It’ll be a long governor’s race in 2014. Maybe we can answer that along the way.

Halter seems to be banking on the notion that this governor’s race could be about something different from the state’s mad rush to right-wing extremism and different as well from a columnist’s personality-driven, poll-driven commentary.

Here’s a little sidebar to my online-only column this morning:

I’m fine with the Arkansas Republican idea to buy poor people’s private health insurance with federal deficit  dollars rather than use that money to cover poor people directly on Medicaid.

But let’s tell the truth: It’s borrow-and-spend at the federal level, coupled with the premium tax on private health insurance policies in Arkansas that amounts to tax-and-spend.

It’s borrowing and spending to subsidize private sector rather than pay for poor people’s health care directly.

And it’s potentially more costly.

It’s fascinating how Republicans don’t really oppose government spending. They just want to funnel it to the private sector kinda semi-socialistically.

They worship private enterprise by citing its independence and risk even as they belie that independence and risk by subsidizing the private sector with tax money.

How much risk would I have if I started a newspaper and the federal government paid for my subscribers?

Oh, next up: State taxpayer debt to send $125 million to a prospective steel mill.

I’d been halfway expecting it, and now we have it.

A little mention has been made to me from a good left-of-center Democratic source that at least Associate Justice Courtney Goodson disclosed everything and is a good jurist.

And that the drumbeat against her is being fed cynically by the state business community to advance bad tort reform law.

And that a progressive columnist such as myself shouldn’t let himself get used like that.

All right, then. Let me get right on these issues:

1. Tort reform that would cap punitive damages is useless, never makes any difference in malpractice insurance rates and is destructively distrusting to the jury system we ought instead to treasure.

2. Even more aggressive tort reform as proposed at the Legislature to let the legislative branch basically run the court system is an outrage.

3. Neither No. 1 nor No. 2 has anything to do with, nor should either be given impetus by, the fact that national news sources have alleged that Goodson’s husband, Texarkana lawyer Johnny Goodson, has made his vast fortune operating in a “class-action hellhole” in Miller County where rich interstate defendants allegedly are nagged open-endedly into settling for often-lucrative attorneys’ fees.

4. Neither No. 1 nor No. 2 has anything to do with a Supreme Court judge who sullies her and her court’s vital perception of independence by not having the basic good judgment  to make sure she doesn’t accept a gift valued at $50,000 from an attorney associate of her embattled husband in one of those class-action matters, all of this extending to use of a yacht owned by a prominent Arkansas businessman whose interests sometimes intersect with legal matters.

To summarize: We don’t need tort reform. We don’t need a class-action hellhole. We do need a Supreme Court fully committed to appearances of integrity and propriety and independence.

Glad to get straight on all that.

So let’s follow up on my column this morning about the governor’s race of 2014.

In furtherance of my assertion that Asa Hutchinson has locked up preemptively the Republican nomination, Lt. Gov. Mark Darr comes forward to take himself out of the race he never was in and to endorse Asa.

Darr might run for the U.S. Senate, but Tom Cotton is the Weekly Standard’s nominee for that, and Fox’s, and Darr probably ought to try to stay where he is, which won’t be easy. He was a Tea Party fad of 2010. That’s all.

As for the Democrats, I get ever-reliable information that Mike Ross has moved to 90 percent likelihood to run and is buoyed by Democratic establishment encouragement and the promise of quick money — this based on the fact that people in the Democratic Party cannot stand Bill Halter.

Ross still hasn’t called me back, which is unusual for him.

A young politico highly thought-of on the Democratic side as a Beebe-type — Chris Thomason of Hope, a 39-year-old community college chancellor who formerly was a prosecutor and state representative — will likely go for attorney general if Ross goes for governor, I am advised.

I met Thomason yesterday. Don’t recall ever meeting him before. Found him to be about 6-2 and pleasant and with sparking shined shoes.

Speaking of sparkling shined shoes, I’m told that Thomason comes from humble beginnings and got accepted to West Point and was quite a football prospect, but tore up his knee before classes ever started and came back home. That probably doesn’t have anything to do with what kind of attorney general he would be.

UPDATE: I should throw in that Talk Business talks to Sheffield Nelson and he is saying people begging him to run as Republican or independent. Get creamed  by Asa Republican side; elect Democrat if an independent by taking Asa votes.

Medical marijuana is coming back, better than ever, more passable than before.

A lawyer for the movement in Arkansas submitted a draft of an initiated act on Friday to the attorney general’s office to begin the process by which the matter would appear on the general election ballot in November 2014.

Most importantly:

The authority for people to grow their own marijuana is not contained in the new version.

Secondly:

A provision for a designated caregiver to grow plants for up to five patients is not contained in the new version.

There are other improvements, such as clarity about annual physician certification of authority to use medicinal marijuana and restrictions by which authorized dispensaries’ plants would have to be grown indoors.

The attorney general’s office will now edit around on this thing for a while, and, in time, petitions would get circulated and we could vote again.

The reasons I opposed it last time are gone. I think I’m going to have to endorse, unless the proponents would prefer I not.

Here is a little blog post offered as a companion to my column this morning and drawn from a discussion yesterday afternoon with Jason Rapert.

He tells me that the national media posts accusing him of racism in his country pulpit jive session at that Tea Party rally caused him to receive what the State Police told him were “credible” threats on his and his family’s life.

I have no reason to disbelieve him, and, indeed, understand that a nation al  posting of a video that, taken without context, seems to indicate blatant racial bigotry could indeed spur some evil reaction of that kind.

It is important to get these kinds of issues right. Rapert’s bigotry was not racial, but religious. His outrage was to call for a theocracy. His offense was to pander as a demagogue. Race is not any part of it.

Now, Rapert denied to me any religious bigotry by telling me a long dramatic story, as is his wont, about his Holy Ghost MInistries missionary work in Muslim land. I told him his story was nice, but that it had nothing to do with the issue.

He acknowledged only one thing — he gets too preacher-like in his political communication, but is better about that. He stressed that the offending video was from nearly two years ago, when he was a state Senate rookie.

He also claims that the pro-choice crowd is reacting so vigorously because it knows his bill is constitutional.

That is simply nonsense. It reacts so vigorously because the bill is such a flagrantly unconstitutional affront to the rights and respect of women.

Oh, and he said he was talking about President Obama’s blowing off a National Prayer Day, not blowing off the National Prayer Breakfast.

Yeah, Ok. He said National Prayer Breakfast. But it’s quite possible he misstated because, after all, his whole  country pulpit jive was fabricated nonsense.

So I went out to the Capitol to see the big steel plant announcement for Osceola, and, in the course thereof, picked up a little item about Democratic senators being irked at Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe.

Understandably irked. Appropriately irked. Righteously irked.

Actually, all reasonable people in the state ought to irked.

Senate Democrats are beleaguered anyway, since there are only 14 of them in the 35-member Senate. But at least they have, or had, the governor on their side.

A few days ago some of them were approached by state Sen. Jason Rapert of Conway, the leading showboat demagogue of the Republican caucus, who handed them a copy of the governor’s centerpiece legislation — a bill to complete the governor’s proposed and popular drawdown of the sales tax on groceries as budget developments allow — and said he would be sponsoring the bill for the governor.

I have been advised as to several Democratic senatorial responses, most of them profane. “Are you [bleeping] kidding me?” was one. “Jason [bleeping] Rapert? Jason [bleeping] Rapert?” was another.

There are two issues here, in ascending order of significance:

1. Democratic senators were at least due the courtesy of a heads-up, which they didn’t get.

2. Jason [bleeping) Rapert?

Bipartisanship is one thing, and a good thing. But Rapert is singularly the most grandstanding right-wing blowhard in the Republican caucus.

But, more than that, a moderate Democratic governor with near-70 percent approval has just handed a marginalized, extremist, out-of-the-mainstream Republican new bonafides of credibility by letting him handle as lead sponsor the governor’s most popular measure.

More even than that, Beebe has placed his imprimatur on the Republican senator who is the lead sponsor of that bill — unconstitutional — to force women seeking legal abortions to endure a vaginal probing by a doctor for signs of a fetus heartbeat, in which case she couldn’t get the legal abortion without the doctor going to prison.

The sponsor of this atrocity to women is now the governor’s bosom buddy on getting rid of the sales tax groceries.

Beeebe told me Rapert was the first to ask and that he seeks bipartisanship.

Bipartisanship is one thing. Intergalactic alliances and betrayal are other things.

I asked Morril Harriman, Beebe’s right hand and chief of staff, if Beebe at least extracted a vote from Rapert for something. Harriman said Beebe doesn’t work that way, though there was some discussion between the two men about pending issues.

Beebe should have extracted nothing less than Rapert’s vote for Medicaid expansion.

Of course the last I heard from Rapert on Medicaid expansion was this little gem: If Arkansas expanded Medicaid and our adjoining states didn’t, all the poor people from those other states would flood us.

Like Democratic senators, I don’t get it.

All the ever-savvy Beebe would have had to say was that he welcomed Rapert’s support for the grocery tax repeal, but had already asked a couple of senators to handle the bill and that he needed to speak with them first.

Then he could have gone out and found somebody. I know three or four who would have been thrilled to handle the bill.