Today at 3:41 a.m.

by John Brummett

Government transparency is good except when it reveals the Arkansas Supreme Court. Our current predicament of petty pedestrianism at the highest level of so-called justice needs to be kept in the state government attic with food and drink pushed through a tiny sliding door.

Last week the court had its annual administrative conference to deal with in-house detail. In an ideal world, such things would bore egg-headed and preoccupied justices tasked with the final say on interpretation of the just rule of law in the state.

The annual administrative conference is different from the necessarily closed-door periodic conferences to decide cases, which the Supreme Court doesn't much do anymore. It doesn't take a lot of cases because that would interfere with the justices' huffy referring of each other to professional disciplinary review by committees existing under the aegis of the Supreme Court, or at least factions thereof.

To invoke again what would be ideal: The justices would plow through intense dislike for each other and work all that out in deference to the job and the institution, giving and taking, so they could get back to the real work of thinking, reading briefs and editing their clerks'........

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