A few more days of torture are left, but it’s not too soon to declare winners and losers in this year’s legislative session. Ernest Dumas does so in his column for us this week, posted early, on the jump.

The same winner as every session: Corporate Arkansas. Did they lose a single round?

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A perfect coda today was a weirdly misfocused AP story on the battle over the SWEPCO power plant down in Hempstead County. It’s a colorfully written little piece that suggests this is little more than a battle between hunting club elites and honest sons of toil scraping for jobs in tough times. It all but ignores the unproven need for the plant, the plant’s rejection by Texas and Louisiana, the ominous effects of greenhouse gases, the lax regulatory process, the inadequate environmental review, the near-universal turn against coal-fired power plants and the current legislature’s usurpation of legal due process. A giant national power company, aided by the 800-pound local utility gorilla, the Arkansas Electric Coop, runs roughshod and a reporter sees it as a handful of “elites” versus good ol’ boy temporary construction workers? All truly may be lost.

Read on for Ernie’s summary:

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