Category: St. Louis Post-Dispatch

From this recent column by Sylvester Brown, Jr., for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, we get the following stunning insight:

His comment reminded me of a call I received from Erin Earley, 46, who had attended the recent Rib America Festival downtown.

“I’ve been going for eight years and have really enjoyed it. But this year, it took a real turn,” Earley, who described herself as Irish, told me.

“There were few people of color, no blues or R&B acts, just bad rock ‘n’ roll bands. They also charged a $3 cover for some unknown reason. I wondered if a white people’s ‘Da Vinci Code’ had been put in place,” Earley said, suggesting that event planners had sent subtle messages to keep the homeless and people of color away.

A priori assumptions:

• Rib America is somehow less authentic without homeless people.
• The same signals work on homeless people as on people of color.

Well, if that statement, with its set of a priori assumptions, doesn’t express what’s wrong with race relations today, I don’t know what does.

The St. Louis daily paper chortles over the city of St. Louis driving out one company, but it’s not yet satisfied:

If you are breathing a sigh of relief because Praxair is moving from a site adjacent to Lafayette Square to an industrial area of Cahokia, think again.

At least two companies remain in St. Louis that repackage and distribute the same kinds of flammable gases, such as acetylene and propylene, that Praxair did at its site on Chouteau Avenue, and both are dangerously close to homes, highways and pedestrians.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch WILL NOT REST until everyone in the city of St. Louis is safely employed flipping burgers and dishing out fries….until it discovers the perils of hot grease.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, today, exclaims Blue-collar workers are paid well here:

In St. Louis, it’s good to wear a blue collar.

Despite a wide wage gap in most parts of the country, local blue-collar workers barely trailed their more educated white-collar peers in pay last year.

Last week, in an article by the very same writer, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch lamented Retail overtakes manufacturing:

After decades of industrial layoffs, the St. Louis area has hit an unsettling milestone: More residents now work in retail stores than in manufacturing plants.

The news isn’t surprising. Manufacturing employment has slipped below retailing in selected months in recent years. But last year was the first time it was true year-round.

And never the twain shall meet.

In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, former television critic Eric Mink takes a stand on the violence erupting over editorial cartoons elsewhere in the world and, not surprisingly, finds a nuanced view where everyone is wrong but him:

Having made the obvious points, I can’t decide who’s dumber: those who believe that beating people and torching buildings honor Mohammed and his teachings or those who believe there’s something honorable about insulting someone else’s religion simply to prove that they can.

Atta boy, Eric.

Perhaps editorial page apologists, by saying that editorial cartoons and their commonplace commentary are equivalent to violence, burning, mayhem, and bloodshed aren’t so much trying to diminish the immorality of the latter but rather to inflate the importance and potence of their own meager scratchings on the stage of world events. Because deep down, it’s probably very gratifying to see one’s drivel have a visceral reaction and change the world. For better or for worse.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s headline identifies whose side it comes down on: Casino’s parking is hijacked:

How much is too much to pay to park a car in downtown St. Louis?

At the very least, it’s a bit less than $25, according to the President Casino on the Admiral.

In an apparent power play over control of the much-disputed “Cherrick” parking lot, its owner has jacked up more than tenfold the price the President pays for customers to use the lot.

So it’s the owner hijacking its own property. Well, sort of. As I read the article, the owner wants to squeeze the government-subsidized entertainment venue (the President Casino) into buying the parking garage before the new government-subsidized entertainment venue (the new casino and go-kart track) seizes the property for a “fair” price. Somewhere in there I got confused about the blighted area infighting for the same profitable resource and stopped paying attention.

Which is probably just what they wanted. All the better to rule me.

Kudos to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and its investigative journalists for finding the Jews in the woodpile:

One of the hottest musical offerings of this holiday season may be a catchy radio jingle for a New Jersey-based vehicle donation program:

“1-877-KARS4KIDS. . . K-A-R-S, cars for kids . . . 1-877-KARS4KIDS. . . Donate your car today.”

The advertising spots, which have been airing on KMOX since before Thanksgiving, offer few details on the vehicle donation program. They tell listeners the program is a “recognized charity” and donors will receive a “maximum deduction” from the Internal Revenue Service for their vehicles. The ad also says donors will receive a “free vacation voucher” good for a three-day, two-night stay.

What is left unsaid, and what also is conspicuously absent from the charity’s Web site, is that almost all money raised through the Kars4Kids charity goes to a Lakewood, N. J.-based program set up to pay for private schooling and other educational programs. It aims to bring Jewish schoolchildren and adults closer to their heritage.

Curse those Hebes and their desire to teach Jewish children about Jewish culture!

How very investigatory of the Post-Dispatch to wade through a world full of Muslim charities collecting money to blow up innocents, Irish charities collecting money to fund the IRA, and Chinese Taoist charities collecting American defense secrets to sniff out the Zionists.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

Speaking of Christine, St. Louis has suffered its own spate and spite of demonic vehicles with minds of their own killing and mayhemming:

• Fleeing SUV crashes, killing passenger
• Car police say was stolen crashes in St. Charles
• Car chased by police crashes; killing one, injuring others

Demonic possession….or demonic passive voice?

Interesting narrative that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch would seem to offer with a headline like this:

Eminent domain faces roadblock in Creve Coeur

Except that the poor roadblocked practice is the mechanism by which a local government seizes property from the little guy for things like the entertainment complexes about which the Post-Dispatch routinely crows.

Because face it, citizen, you don’t buy ad pages like the casinos, sports venues, or go-cart tracks do.

Well, not the working rich, who barely cross the thresholds with their moderately expensive houses and luxury cars that take them to the office every day. No, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch favors tax cuts and give aways, as usual, for the idle rich who have hundreds of millions of dollars for buying sports teams or developing properites and lavishing giveaways, commissions, and dinners on poor working journalists.

For example, how else can you explain this mention in a story about a group looking to buying the St. Louis Blues:

It is possible the exclusive negotiating window could be extended past one month, and it’s also possible the deal could fall through altogether. Checketts could be using the window to feel out the city about its amusement tax.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch insitutionally has harped on the city of St. Louis for not providing an exemption to the St. Louis Blues hockey club, by which of course they mean the well-funded corporations and partnerships and legal fictions that control the beloved on-ice team. The other publicly-subsidized sports teams in the area, or at least the ones the Post-Dispatch thinks are glamourous enough, have exemptions to the tax.

Note what the St. Louis Post-Dispatch does not:

• It does not favor abolishing the tax
• It does not favor giving tax breaks to mere citizens who pay income taxes, sales taxes, and other innumerable fees for the privilege of living in a city where the only paper is a government-licking pup and whose government is a corporation-licking toy dog that makes up for its lack of infrastructure with sports and entertainment venues funded publicly.

So it’s obvious what the Post-Dispatch does favor. Tax exemptions and government giveaways to its friends. The Post-Dispatch is a corporation, after all, and its unwritten mission statement certainly identifies its goal to coddle other power brokers and corporate monstrosities.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch points out the obvious: Katrina dwarfs our Flood of ’93:

Water was the enemy in both disasters, but observers say the Midwest’s Great Flood of 1993 pales in comparison to what is unfolding now along the Gulf Coast.

It also pales in comparison to the disappointment I experienced when my lunch at the downtown Thai place was listed as two iconic flames’ worth of hot on the menu, but wasn’t very hot at all.

But I see how some local observers could mistake the scale of some upper middle class West County St. Louis being forced from their homes with the destruction of an entire city and devestation of parts of three states. Still, I’m sure the end result will be the same: hubristic and federally-funded reconstruction and further overdevelopment in disaster-susceptible areas.

Instant messaging: A threat to you and your kids?

It’s hard to imagine anything online as “old-fashioned” just yet. Nevertheless, that’s how young teens today apparently view the concept of e-mail.

Recent research shows most teenagers between ages 12 and 17 prefer “instant messaging,” or IM, to e-mail in getting their message across. They cite IM’s immediacy and its constant connection, especially to friends, as the reasons they prefer it to e-mail.

Unfortunately, the same things that make IM appealing to teens also draw another crowd: malicious programmers, spam merchants and online predators. These sinister characters don’t use IM to keep in touch with each other; they use it to keep in touch with your kids.

Scarier still, most parents don’t know it.

Which “parents” are those? Oh, yeah, the ones who get their “news” from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (which could also be known as the Pre-Contemporary,-Ubiquitous-Technological-Advance).

Headline in St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Some want unwed dads to pick up Medicaid’s birth costs:

Some Republican legislators want to charge unwed fathers thousands of dollars for hospital birth costs incurred by low-income mothers on Medicaid.

The twin goals: making fathers shoulder more responsibility and reducing taxpayers’ costs.

“I don’t intend for anything to be punitive at all for mom and baby,” Senate Majority Leader Charlie Shields said at a recent meeting of the Missouri Medicaid Reform Commission, which he co-chairs.

“But the last time I checked, it takes two people to make a baby. And there is some responsibility, not just for child support, but for the cost of bringing that child successfully into the world,” said Shields, R-St. Joseph.

A capital idea, I say. But the Post-Dispatch can find some to say otherwise:

Critics say mother and baby would suffer under Shields’ proposal because some women would give up Medicaid and forgo prenatal care rather than cooperate in efforts to bill the father for hospital costs.

Some women would give up Medicaid because they didn’t want to give up the father. The Post-Dispatch summons forth an anecdote about an unwed couple begatting their third child. Father’s working sixty hours a week to support the family and thumps his chest in the article about taking on responsibility.

But his “responsibility” includes not paying for the actual babies prenatal care and by not marrying the mother because it would reduce her Medicaid eligibility. Also, his responsibility includes having a large family in his early twenties that he cannot support with a retail career.

I’d grade his responsibility at “incomplete” at best.

But I came not to judge this fellow; instead, I came to judge those critics who say that any state-based assumption of personal responsibility–personal fiscal responsibility–must be exposed as ill-advised and cold-hearted.

A murder victim and DNA evidence on the scene, but the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports on a lack of progress with unintentional irony:

But investigators have a growing list of people who did not kill Angela Lee.

That list has been compiled with the help of DNA evidence, found at the scene, that has been compared with voluntary DNA submissions from “people of interest,” said Mike Sheeley, a master sergeant with the Illinois State Police.

About 30 people have been cleared after giving DNA samples at the request of authorities, he said.

It’s one example of how the science of DNA is helping to solve crimes that aren’t easily solved – including crimes in a village surrounded by corn fields.

No, dear Post-Dispatch reporter, this is not an example of how DNA is solving crimes. As a matter of fact, it illustrates the opposite, perhaps: DNA evidence alone will not solve a crime.

Now, 30 “persons of interest”–that is, suspects without the presumption of innocence–have now logged their most personal essence permanently within the law enforcement machine for nothing but for the right to be not suspected of a crime they didn’t commit. And the killer remains at large.

Perhaps if we had a nationwide database of all DNA, excised from birth. But we’d also have the same, or better, crime closure rate if the state merely implanted us with chips at birth. Somewhere where we can’t pull them out before committing crimes, like in the brain.

A matter of degree, not kind, my friends. And we’re giving up the kind rather easily.

Sylvester Brown digs shallowly into his knowledge of Bush supporters to explain why we’re delusional in his column today, “Isn’t it time we accepted the truth about Bush?“:

BACK IN THE EARLY 1980s, comedian Richard Pryor used to tell a story about a woman, so in love with her man, she tolerates his obvious indiscretions. Once, after catching her beloved in bed with another woman, Pryor told how the man persuaded the woman he did nothing wrong.

“Who you gonna believe — me or your lying eyes?” the man asked.

While listening to the comedy routine recently, I finally figured out why President George W. Bush has managed to deflect scrutiny and backlash for his actions. Most Americans, it seems, look upon Bush like starry-eyed lovers. No matter what he’s done or what’s happened on his watch, most refuse to see their “man’s” reckless behavior for what it is.

Who are you going to believe, me or this lying mistaken columnist, who faults Bush for:

• Forget the flimflam, sleight-of-hand, word manipulation Bush used to justify invading Iraq — a country he claimed possessed a cache of nuclear and chemical weapons. It wasn’t about WMDs, he later told us with a straight face. We’re fighting for more democratic, nobler causes.

  Wow, Sylvester Brown got dinged for making that very same claim before. See also Instapundit posts here and here. Perhaps like me, Mr. Brown just wants the attention from Instapundit and the readership he brings.

• And what about those “secret memos” that were all the buzz in Europe?

  That’s the discredited Downing Street Memo.

• A news story about a politician who vengefully jeopardized the life of a government agent — now that’s juicy stuff. Surely such a story, even if remotely true, would signal the end of any political career.

  Gunning for Rove with BBs. Yawn.

So that’s what our lying eyes–the media–would tell us are important. Not elections in Syria, Afghanistan, or Iraq. Not the recovery of the economy. Not the nomination of judges who are not voted on in the Senate. No, believe what columnists like Brown tell you, America, or you’re a fool in love.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

Here’s what some are saying and how that’s headline material for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

• Both sides fear “stealth” nominee, observers say

  One wonders what observers these are. International appointment observers? Professional observers? I know it doesn’t include me, because the Post-Dispatch never asked. But then, citizens are not engaged observers and independent thinkers. They’re children to whom the press must explain things like they really are, not how they are portrayed on Fox News.

• Ranchers don’t always report cattle diseases, some say

  Some ranchers? Some cattle diseases? No, wait, the “some” does refer to ranchers. Some ranchers say the other ranchers do illegal things. Why would businessmen say ill things about their competitors? Who cares, it’s news!

• Man kills himself after standoff, police say

  Of course, the Post-Dispatch wants you to know that what follows is only the police story; actually, it’s entirely possible that the police shot him dead with his own gun or that a Republican strangled the man and staged the whole crime to cover it up and used illegal capitalist profit to buy off the police. So of course the police would say it was attempted murder-successful suicide.

• Iran’s president-elect wasn’t hostage taker, ex-secret agent says

  Of course, that’s Saeed Hajjarian, a top adviser to outgoing President Mohammad Khatami, so we have an Iranian ex-secret agent defending the newly-minted (and not elected) Iranian president. But the Post-Dispatch has conveyed as much gravitas as it can on the report by noting that
  it’s a secret agent and someone who would know. Theirs, ours, it’s all the same to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

• Vote fraud verdict won’t change results of Nov. 2 election, officials say

  Of course not, as a Democrat was elected. However, the story only seems to quote one official, and he says “I think it would be really difficult for a losing candidate to get a judge to overrule the election code,” which is a far sight from won’t. Perhaps the other officials said won’t. Perhaps it was just the headline writer.

So does the St. Louis Post-Dispatch include or alter the “x says” portion of its headlines to flavor the following story? Eh, who knows. All I know is that they waste an awful lot of words on he-said, she-said, they-said.