Ya'll Come To a Party!

Kim Chandler and Charles Dean are reporting in today's Birmingham News that AG Troy King attended a party by the developers of Country Crossing three months before he issued an opinion that the development would quality for a BINGO permit once it was 70% complete. It was an opinion the developers had sought. King's name was on the invitation, along with two country music stars. The biggest surprise here isn't that the News has the anti-King story or that King attended the party. It's that King himself wasn't asked to perform. Remember he sent about two-dozen friends a CD of himself performing a post-mortem duet with Johnny Cash of the song "My Elusive Dreams". The producer of that song was Billy Sherrill, who met King at a birthday party for George Jones in 2007. Soon thereafter, King recorded new lyrics with a chorus and Sherrill mixed the AG in to make it sound like a Cash/King duet. Oh, and the story in this morning's News reports that George Jones was one of the other country stars on the invitation to the Country Crossings party. I'm not a fan of those talkradioesque comments newspapers encourage after their stories these days, mostly because, like talk radio, comments are anonymous. But read the lengthy one by the supposed member of the Alabama GOP executive committee. Too bad the writer is too afraid to say what he thinks under his own name, instead of hiding behind the anonymity of the new-media web. [Note: I wanted to post the 30 second clip of the song that was circulating on the net a year ago, but it was pulled from YouTube after the Johnny Cash estate complained. Their complaint was a legal one, but it might just as well have been based on the quality of the performance, which was truly miserable.] [UPDATE: See comments.]