Arkansas finally sells a scratch-off

They've waited longer than four of their neighbors, voted on it and argued over how it will be administered. But at 12:01 a.m. Monday at the Murphy USA gas station in West Little Rock, the first scratch-off ticket was purchased a ceremony to begin the Arkansas lottery.

Arkansas gamblers won't get Powerball until Oct. 31, but as of today they will be able to purchase instant games at 1,500 locations around the state. Arkansas is playing catch-up with four of its neighboring states, but lottery director Ernie Passailaigue -- a former South Carolina state senator who ran that state's lottery before being hired away by Arkansas -- has predicted the state will raise $400,000 million a year for college scholarships.

-- The strange story of Kenneth Trentadue, a convicted bank robber whose brother claims was beaten to death by guards who mistook him for a suspect in the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing, hasn't received a lot of national attention. But it took an interesting turn Sunday when Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City attorney, that security videotapes of the building appear to have been edited and are blank moments before the bombing. The tapes were obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request.

-- After Hurricane Katrina, the Mobile Press-Register did an exhaustive study of the maps used to determine eligibility under the National Flood Insurance Program and determined that many areas were subject to flooding a lot more frequently than the feds estimated. In the wake of last week's flooding, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution undertook a similar survey, and found the same thing: Your chances of being flooded out in a 100-year flood plain are a lot worse than once-a-century.

-- She's North Carolina's first woman governor, but Bev Perdue's failure to put more women in leadership positions has some Democratic women in her state grumbling. So far, Perdue has appointed fewer women to cabinet posts than any governor in a generation.

-- Last week, a federal judge denied a request by former US Rep. William Jefferson, partly because they were not allowed to bring up the relationship of a key witness, Lori Mody and an undercover FBI agent who worked with her on the case. But documents unsealed last week showed the FBI and its Office of Professional Reponsibility knew about the agent's intimate relationship with the witness and failed to pass the information along to federal attorneys or the lead agent on the case. Source www.southernpoliticalreport.com/