Missouri Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro is to be applauded for getting out in front with guidelines for student transfers from unaccredited districts. The Missouri legislature could have resolved the ambiguities in its transfer statute years ago, but chose to let the courts and state bureaucrats hash it out.
Good for Jennifer Kerr. The Jackson County mom has won a huge verdict from a jury that was properly outraged by Kerr’s story of being deceived by the promises and practices of a for-profit college.
This is how preventable tragedies occur. What should be automatic doesn’t get done. In the dark, quiet hours of the morning, an unsuspecting, fun-loving young man comes into contact with a live power line and is killed by electrocution.
Early and consistent treatment would do wonders, but Missouri has shown a callous disregard for its mentally ill citizens. Penny-wise and pound-foolish, as Judge John Torrence said. And utterly soulless, as well.
You’d better believe that the same people who are agitating to “shrink government” and promote free enterprise are working hand-in-hand with those who stand to profit mightily from government outsourcing.
At a time when too many college graduates struggle to find good jobs, convincing low-income middle- and-high-school girls that the future is theirs for the taking is a tough chore. But there is some evidence to show that good schools and intensive career counseling does reduce the incidence of teen pregnancies among girls from poor families. Until then, at least we’ve got Plan B.
National intellegence director James Clapper and future prosecutors may see it differently, but there are key distinctions between Edward Snowden’s disclosure of the U.S. government’s sweeping data-mining programs to news reporters and Bradley Manning’s alleged dump of hundreds of thousands of classified military documents on the Wikileaks site.
Should Prism, the federal government’s data collection program, be shut down? I’m not in that camp at the moment. But we need to know a lot more about what it is and how it is used.
By the time Missouri Republicans get a chance to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of their income-tax bill in September, it should be clear to Missourians that Nixon is the one sticking up for their interests.
One can envision the hearings. The outraged congressmen and the pompous senators grilling the secretary, with no answer likely to satisfy. The TV lights and live coverage on Fox. A new revelation (or non-revelation) popping up every couple of days. Is it any wonder good people are reluctant to go into public service these days?
We still raise corn and cotton in Missouri, and cockleburs pop up as weeds. But we aren’t producing a bumper crop of Democrats these days. And, sadly, our state politicians are no longer immune to the frothy eloquence of charlatans who sell the false logic of income tax cuts and anti-worker laws and other brands of snake oil.
It now appears that the wrong candidate was declared winner of the 2010 Democratic primary in Missouri’s 19th District. That would be the contentious race between John Rizzo and Will Royster.
Truly, what were those folks in Cincinnati thinking? Did they not know that their targeting would result in a conservative firestorm? Singling out groups with keywords in their names was absolutely wrong.
Keeping documents on file hurts no one. Curiously, many of the documents that Missouri Republicans want kept under lock and key are the same ones they want people to produce in order to register to vote.
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has called the bluff of the Republican-controlled state legislature. Good for him. Setting a new standard in bad behavior, the legislature’s budget writers made next year’s fiscal plan a tool in an ongoing power struggle they’re having with the governor.
You’ll find the same apparel at any number of stores in any number of cities worldwide — cheap clothes made by workers who labor for low pay and often in deadly conditions to enable recreational shopping in wealthier nations.
The notion that expanding Medicaid might improve people’s health never proved a compelling argument to opponents of expansion. But you can be sure that opponents are all over a study which shows that access to Medicaid didn’t significantly improve the health of recipients in certain indicators over a two-year period.
Republicans won’t vote for sensible gun safety legislation because they can’t give Obama a political victory. Then they turn around and accuse him of being ineffective. Moreover, their insensitivity to victims and survivors of gun violence is stunning.
The thinking of Gov. Sam Brownback is mysterious. But we can say with some certainty that a pathogen lab is more attractive to him as an economic stimulus than an expansion of health care to low-income Kansans.
Obamacare haters first looked to the U.S. Supreme Court to kill health care reform. When that didn’t work, they fixed their hopes on Mitt Romney’s election and a Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate. Foiled again. As it has from the beginning, the crippling of Obamacare relies on omission and distortion.
To have lost the young Chinese student Lu Lingzi in Boston so suddenly and brutally seems like an abject failure.
After hopes of even winning a rational debate in the U.S. Senate on gun safety fell apart on Thursday, a woman leaving the gallery said of the senators, “Who do they think they represent?” Good question. Not the 80 to 90 percent of Americans who support modest measures such as background checks at gun shows and for Internet gun sales, that’s for sure.
Gun owners matter. But so do the families of the slain children in Newtown, Conn., and the survivors and families left bereaved by shootings in movie theaters, on college campuses, in shopping malls and on the streets of cities all over America.
For a program that helps the poor, the earned income tax credit is remarkably uncontroversial. Thoughtful observers see that it works exactly as Milton Friedman envisioned: Given a lump sum, people generally use it to improve their circumstances.
The hugs for same-sex couples and handshakes for immigrants are great developments. But our baser instincts will always demand a group to marginalize. And as a certain pilgrim said in Biblical times: The poor we will always have with us.
