Last dance for provocative plate

At least her name isn’t Mary Jane. Nevada resident Stacy Moore could lose the license plates she’s had for 20 years, since she was a 21-year-old driving a Camaro, because another driver complained her “XSTACY” tags referred to drugs. Moore, who says she never did drugs and who now drives a Trailblazer, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal she chose the plates because “I was in college and cute and XSTACY was a play on my name. … I wanted some attention.” 

If it wasn’t enough that Texas schoolkids have to memorize two pledges of allegiance – one oath to the U.S. flag and one to Texas, now they’ll have to recite a longer Texas pledge. The Lone Star State, one of six with its own pledge, just added “one state, under God,” to its 13-word pledge, The Houston Chronicle reports. The paper notes that Mississippi and Alabama mention God in their pledges, too, and Kentucky’s says the state is “blessed from on high.”

Is a Delegate cheaper to buy than a Senator? West Virginia lawmakers pondered what a “Delegate” hamburger would taste like last week, after a member of the lower chamber complained that the Charleston minor-league baseball park sold Senator burgers but no Delegates, The Charleston Gazette writes. One delegate’s suggestion: a burger made with 70 percent beef and 30 percent pork. That could grease some deals.

At a recent casino tour, Missouri state Sen. Jeff Smith (D) learned an important rule of gambling: You have to know when to walk away, or even run. The problem was Smith returned to gamble with some fellow lawmakers and was busted for presenting false identification, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. Smith said a casino employee gave him someone else’s entrance card, after he realized he forgot his driver’s license.

This little piggy is not amused. In a case that reached all the way to the Washington state Supreme Court, a dental assistant sued her former boss for dressing her up in pig parts – fake boar tusks, to be exact – while she was sedated for oral surgery, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports. The high court was invoked to determine whether the dentist’s insurance company should defend him over the prank; in a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that it should.

So much for the Big Tent. The defection-prone Kansas Republican Party wants to punish party leaders who endorse Democrats, the Topeka bureau of The Associated Press reports. The proponent of the measure notes that 15 other state GOP organizations have ways to remove wayward Republicans from party posts. But Bob Beatty, a political scientist, slammed the idea. “It smacks most of the Communist Party. … That’s the kind of public irony that most parties try to avoid – the party of freedom telling people they have no freedom.”