Category: News

Maybe I am reading too much into unrelated events, but these two things could indicate the beginning of an escalating arms race and tensions between two non-governmental entities.

1: Dam plans jeopardize Amazon, experts say.

2: Private Texas spaceport launches test rocket:

A remote West Texas spaceport being built and bankrolled by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos launched a test rocket Monday for the first time.

So you have a dam threatening Amazon, and Amazon’s founder bankrolling a rocket program. Only a fool would miss the obvious.

Tobacco tax defeat smacks hospitals:

Missouri’s hospitals weren’t running for office last week, but they ended up among the losers.

Voters rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have increased cigarette taxes by 80 cents a pack.

Most of the money raised — about $289 million of the forecast $350 million — would have gone to Missouri’s hospitals to help pay for the care of the state’s lowest-income patients.

The Missouri Hospital Association, the major supporter of the failed amendment, says it’s not giving up.

That’s the spirit, Missouri Hospital Association, you continue finding ways to have the taxpayers chip in to bolster your and your members’ bottom lines. Don’t give up.

Oh, I know, you’re saying, “There goes MfBJN, attacking the poor again,” but note, fellows, that any wide-ranging industry serves the poor. Just because it’s health care doesn’t mean it’s exempt from my free market-loving scorn.

I mean, how many poor people could be served with the money spent in the Missouri Hospital Association’s budget? Plenty, I would guess, but no doubt that capital is doing more good paying salaries and expenses for lobbyists who are self-selected to do the work for the poor.

Well, why aren’t the climate experts making that claim? Because the bad storms are happening on Saturn:

NASA says its Cassini spacecraft has found a hurricane-like storm at Saturn’s South Pole, nearly 5,000 miles across — or two-thirds Earth’s diameter.

“It looks like a hurricane, but it doesn’t behave like a hurricane,” said Andrew Ingersoll, a member of Cassini’s imaging team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. “Whatever it is, we’re going to focus on the eye of this storm and find out why it’s there.”

Maybe it’s an ozone hole or something on account of all the CFCs.

In a startling turn of events, when the price of something goes up, consumers buy less of it. This holds true of labor, where the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has performed some hard-hitting post-election journalism to discover that businesses will hire fewer employees at minimum wage now that the state’s citizens have ordered businesses to do so:

26 percent increase in Missouri’s minimum wage to $6.50 an hour will hit urban and rural workers hardest because some may lose their jobs or not be hired as businesses adjust to hold down costs, some business owners and analysts say.

So Missourians have elected to lessen customer service to themselves and to promote the use of illegal immigrants whereever possible (it’s not that they do jobs Americans don’t want, but they do take pay that Americans cannot).

Meanwhile, in Illinois, the re-elected Governor Rod Blagojevich cannot wait to impose an additional hiring freeze in his state:

Two days after his re-election, Gov. Rod Blagojevich wasted no time spending some political capital on what had been one of his biggest campaign promises: raising the minimum wage, again.

Such a campaign pledge had helped Blagojevich win his first term in 2002 and it became a pledge he made good on when he signed a $1.35-an-hour hike above the federal level in the summer of 2003.

On Thursday, he called his proposed $1 hike, which would raise the minimum wage to $7.50 an hour, his “first order of business” as the legislature returns for its fall session next week.

Meanwhile, in the bowels of the Power-to-the-People headquarters in Missouri, the master tacticians have begun their planning for agitation for the next attempt to raise the minimum wage in Missouri or select parts thereof to a “living wage” because the electoral victory on Tuesday was only the latest victory in a struggle to make the job market equal. In which half the people make a living wage of some sort or another, and the other half are unemployed.

I voted. Now, I am going to drink a little wine and read a bit of classical literature.

Because, gentle reader, this Republic will go on beyond tonight, beyond the tallies, beyond tomorrow.

Regardless of what the panting pamphleteers of pixels say tonight.

Greenland ice sheet shrinking fast: NASA:

The vast sheet of ice that covers Greenland is shrinking fast, but still not as fast as previous research indicated, NASA scientists said on Thursday.

Greenland’s low coastal regions lost 155 gigatons (41 cubic miles) of ice each year between 2003 and 2005 from excess melting and icebergs, the scientists said in a statement.

Well, it’s about time it lived up to its name.

Long live the Greenland banana plantations!

Laclede asks to reduce rate:

Overwhelmed by higher prices to heat their homes and fill their gas tanks over the last few years, some area residents may get a reprieve.

Laclede Gas Co., which serves St. Louis and surrounding Missouri counties, has filed for a 13 percent reduction in fuel costs, reflecting lower wholesale prices for natural gas, which is used to heat most homes. Gas rates for Ameren Corp. customers in Missouri and Illinois already have been cut.

Who will be the first to blame the failed economic policies of the President? Hah, trick question, no one, because this is a transparent ploy on the part of Big Rotten Dinosaur to influence the election!

Also, it’s funny to note the following misprinting that’s probably due to a failure in the filling in of the Mad Libs template for utility stories:

Bills for Laclede residential customers would fall an average of almost $14 a month under the filings last week with the Missouri Public Service Commission. The increase is based on monthly usage of about 93 therms and “normal” temperatures, according to St. Louis-based Laclede.

Sticking it to the poor and using cheap prices to make them dependent on the heat. Or something.

I bet this made some troops’ days:

Corporals John W. Wright and Lazaro A. Castillo, intelligence specialists with Headquarters Company, 1st Marine Logistics Group (Forward), and Cpl. Romel M. Estremadura, a member of the 1st MLG Personal Security Detachment, earned these bragging rights and their present rank during a special promotion ceremony here Nov. 2.

Gen. Robert Magnus, Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps, along with action stars Marshall Teague and Chuck Norris, joined a military formation of 20 service members to promote the three Marines.

How cool would that be? I mean, I’m just a QA guy, and I guess the equivalent would be for Loki to tell me, “Nice job.”

(Link seen on Ace of Spades HQ.)

Not that you were asking, but this is no relation of mine:

A man from Illinois is accused of killing a man from Bland this week. The Phelps County Sheriff’s Department says Michael Noggle of Cahokia is charged with first-degree murder after the body of James Gaylord was found under a bridge northwest of Rolla Wednesday.

At least, I don’t think so.

Well, not exactly, but “backers” want to give police more excuses to stop people in cars: Missouri wants what Illinois has: a tougher seat belt law:

Backers of a tougher seat belt law in Missouri are holding a pep rally next week to get psyched up for the upcoming legislative battle in Jefferson City. They’re about to take another crack at a primary seat belt law.

Police in Missouri can write a ticket for not wearing a seat belt only if the motorist was pulled over for another violation. A primary seat belt law, which has failed in the legislature every year since 2000, gives police authority to pull people over solely for not buckling up.

As a former young man who rode in motor vehicles, I understand this really isn’t about giving police a pretext to stop you and check your story, since they’ll do that for license plate light infractions that aren’t, wow, look at that, infractious. This will, however, give them a reason to stop people and part them from some of their money.

To save a projected 90 lives a year. But that’s projected, whereas the loss of freedom and the loss of citizens’ money, will be real.

At least, I think that’s the point he meanders to in his column today:

Medical care is already expensive. Without health insurance, the most expensive treatments are beyond the reach of even an affluent citizen. Consider bone marrow transplants. This is the most common adult stem cell therapy, and technology-wise, it’s horse-and-buggy stuff compared with what might be coming in the not-distant future. And what does this horse-and-buggy stuff cost? Approximately $100,000.

So what would we do? If the insurance companies have to foot the bill for the new technology, rates would have to rise, and maybe rise steeply.

This would compound the problem we already can barely ignore about health insurance. Millions of Americans don’t have any. We’re able to ignore this only because most middle-class people have at least some semblance of health insurance, but if rates go up, what then? Could we become a society in which some people — the most affluent — are able to get new organs while many go without even basic treatment?

More likely, we will have to make some very difficult decisions. Who will get the cutting-edge treatment and be allowed to cheat death? I think about a spiritual man in his mid-60s, a man who used to dress as a horse for Shakespeare in the Park. Would he make the cut?

Never mind how the free market would eventually balance this out by finding more cost-effective solutions so health care providers could make money by applying the cures to new people with smaller budgets. Nah, let’s just grab that precise moment of maximum suck, where it’s no longer impossible but remains prohibitively expensive, and extrapolate to indict…. I don’t know who McClellan’s trying to indict here. Health care? Researchers? Opponents of Amendment 2? All of the above?

The evidence is clear; the Dow Jones average, widely reported in the media as a snapshot financial harbinger or at least simple box score of the nation, is trending downward the week before the election, from a high of almost 12,150 on Monday to about 12,020 at the close of business yesterday. This can mean only one thing:

Billionaire George Soros is manipulating the stock market to affect the election!

Because I understand that these days all portents and augury has something to do with stolen or rigged elections. I thought I would read some guts, too.

The problem: Overfishing and pollution are going to end seafood as we know it:

Clambakes, crabcakes, swordfish steaks and even humble fish sticks could be little more than a fond memory in a few decades. If current trends of overfishing and pollution continue, the populations of just about all seafood face collapse by 2048, a team of ecologists and economists warns in a report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

The MfBJN solution: Raise the earth’s temperature a few degrees! The rising temperatures will melt the ice caps, providing more ocean to dilute the pollution and will submerge coastal areas, providing rich new habitats for our tasty waterbound friends.

Now, to get a government grant to turn this pithy blog post into a couple years’ worth of easy living and a couple hundred pages of obscure, hesitant prose.

Apparently, it’s getting easier to denounce things. At least in headlines: Voters denounce handling of page scandal by Shimkus, Hastert. Denounced on soapboxes, in rousing speeches, in vehement letters to the editor, or in protests? Not quite.

When asked whether they approve of how Republican leaders in general — and Hastert in particular — handled the issue, two-thirds of the poll respondents said they disapproved.

When questioned specifically about Shimkus’ decision to privately tell Foley to stop e-mailing pages without taking further action, more than three-quarters of respondents said that wasn’t the correct response.

Denounced, expressed disappointment through canned answers to a survey, same difference (if you’re disapproving of Republicans).

When do you not have to comply with the law? When you are the law:

Attorney General Lisa Madigan ordered Gov. Blagojevich’s administration Thursday to release copies of all subpoenas issued by federal investigators probing corruption under the governor.

But Blagojevich’s office late Thursday indicated it would not abide by Madigan’s order, setting up a possible constitutional showdown between two of the state’s top Democratic officeholders.

“We didn’t request an opinion on this topic, but we appreciate the attorney general office’s advisory input,” Blagojevich spokeswoman Abby Ottenhoff said.

Well, at least they were polite about continuing in their coverup of potential wrongdoing.