Poor Balance Checkbook on Backs of Missouri Phone Customers

The short item in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch today, bearing the innocuous-sounding title “Additional fee on phones starts Sunday“, but it tells a story of the creeping socialism of modern life:

Beginning Sunday, Missouri telephone customers will pay an additional universal service fee to help subsidize telephone service for the poor and disabled.

Not that I am entirely without heart, but when did schnucking telephone service become a right necessitating public subsidy?

Let’s take bets….what’s the next thing that the government will subsidize or force us to subsidize through service fees?

  • Cable television?
  • Cellular phone service?
  • Cellular phone service for The Children?
  • Internet connections in every home?
  • Trips to the doctor and free prescriptions every time you get a sniffle?
  • Professional landscaping services?

Yes, number 5 is very popular, but watch for the others to sneak in while we’re fighting against free health care.

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Spot the Spurious Assertion

Gentle reader, I present to you this review of Ntozake Shange’s novel Betsey Brown and ask you to spot the spurious assertion within.

Here’s a hint:

But even if they had shared temporal as well as physical space, the Smiths wouldn’t have invited the middle-class, African-American Browns for a stroll in Forest Park.

Because whites, dear friends, are inherently racist, and if you’re presented with a white character from America before 1960 (and beyond, if the white character votes Republican or Libertarian or anything to the right of the middle of the Democrat party, to the present day), you can certainly assume that off-page characterization would include racism.

Perhaps I am speaking out of school, friends, as I have neither seen the movie version of nor have I read the book Meet Me In St. Louis (because, as you long time readers know, I am not a St. Louis partisan who would invite someone to meet me in this metro area; I am more of the We’re In St. Louis, Now What? camp). So perhaps the DVD’s deleted scenes have the Smith family’s participation in the Klan’s rites, or maybe the book presents a stark view of how the normal white family in the early 20th century hated and oppressed black people or wouldn’t be seen publicly walking with them, for crying out loud.

Or one could assume, as I do, that the author of this piece wants to inject that little poison into the common thought, that all white Americans have always been embarrassed or oppressive of their black fellow citizens. Because once this truth is accepted, we white Americans must guiltily attone until Sisyphus perches his rock.

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St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Senseable Spending Could Drive Missouri Further into Mediocrity

STATE SPENDING LIMITS: Trashing our future:

THE HOUSE BUDGET COMMITTEE approved a bill this month that is guaranteed to sink Missouri further into miserly mediocrity, while the rest of the country passes us by.

It would enshrine in the Missouri Constitution the shortchanging of our public schools, the decline of our state universities and the neglect of the poor and sick, abused children and the mentally ill.

Over the long haul, it would undercut the state’s economy, kill jobs and make Missouri a poorer, meaner place to live. It might increase crime, too.

The committee approved a proposed constitutional amendment that would limit increases in state general spending to the rise in state population, plus the rise in consumer prices and medical inflation. It would require a vote of the people to spend more than a smidgen over that limit. The effect would be to freeze spending at about today’s shriveled levels.

I cannot begin to comment coherently upon this editorial. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch encourages unbridled growth the of state government apparatus and, undoubtedly, of the wealth transfer from everyone who is not dependent on government for basic luxuries to those who are (that is, the “needy” or “state employees”).

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