Missouri

It’s certainly no coincidence that a Will Smith shoot-em-up, blow-em-up movie opens Fourth of July week. After all, the actor’s previous efforts with early July debuts – "Independence Day” and the "Men in Black” – brought in more than a billion dollars.

Oops, forgot about "Wild Wild West.” No problem, everybody else has, too.

Unfortunately, this one tilts more toward the "West.” You can’t beat the timing, tough, using the country’s most patriotic holiday to launch a character named John Hancock – you know, like the Founding Father whose signature dominates the Declaration of Independence.

In "Hancock,” Smith is a drunken, abrasive superhero with worse PR than NFL bad boy Adam "Pacman” Jones.

(Read the full post about ‘Smith can’t save ‘Hancock’ from Hollywood ending’…)

I was thinking about the recent history of the Missouri Governorship, and going back to at least Warren Hearnes, those elected as Governor had a previous political job that is another statewide elected office.  The only exception is Joe Teasdale, who was the Circuit Attorney for Jackson County before he was Governor.

Congressmen don’t seem to have very good luck in this stead; the last to try in MO before Kenny Hulshof was Jim Talent in 2000.  I think the reason is that Congressmen have their nose to the D.C.

(Read the full post about ‘Why Kenny Hulshof Won’t Be Governor’…)

Minneapolis Star-Tribune :

Prior Lake High to disallow hats

Schools say they want to be sure students can be identified on security cameras and want teachers to be able to watch their eyes during tests.

(snip)

Miller said some students wear hats to speak to their identity, such as Twins or Red Sox hats to signify where they’re from, or different colors, such as white, to help show which clique they’re in.

Red Sox hats in Minnesota, another AL city?  Now that’s identifying one’s self as a bandwagonner.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Chief Illiniwek’s Victory

Heading to Rome to be the Vatican equivalent of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Has the St. Stan issue had its day at Apostolic Signatura yet?  If it hasn’t, wouldn’t it be ironic if it got there and they saw RB as Chief Justice, so to speak?

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• First American named to head Vatican high court
• A promotion in St. Louis
• This is bullsh*t. Of course they can.
• Two “It” Bags Duke it Out in Court

Bob Norman:  Palm Beach Post To Cut 300 Jobs

The Palm Beach Post will have to reprint the New York Times every day with 300 fewer hands on deck.

AP:  Utah Republican [Chris Cannon] says he’s happy he lost primary

I wish we could make a lot of other RINOs happy.

Take Two:  AP:   Utah Republican [Chris Cannon] says he’s happy he lost primary

He could have been happy months earlier and save Jason Chaffetz the trouble at the same time.

KSDK:  Bourisaw: Final Thoughts on St.

(Read the full post about ‘Fun With Happy Losers’…)

Those words, and many other similar words in an improptu video filmed in NYC, is why Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio wants Shaq’s badges.

Good thing for Shaq that he didn’t do anything naughty anywhere near Phoenix, or else he’d be wearing giant pink underwear and habitating inside a tent right about now.  Otherwise, the county’s illegal aliens can rest a little easier, because they won’t see a 7-foot-1 325-pound frame coming to deport them anytime soon.

Now Shaq’s only law enforcement career option for his post-NBA years will be the FBI.  They’re the only agency left with low enough standards.  At least Joe Arpaio has some.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Repercussions
• Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio Understands Illegal Immigration
• Good-bye Shaq
• Shaq’s rap video costs him Arizona deputy badge

This is just what we needed after the Brewery.  All of the south (minivan) plant and half of the north (truck) plant at Chrysler’s St. Louis operations will be cut by the end of the year.  If you’re keeping score at home, that amounts to some 2,400 jobs that average in the $50Gs.  By one estimate, that’s 80% of the Chrysler unionized hourly wage workers in St.

(Read the full post about ‘Will the Last Person to Leave St. Louis Turn Out the Lights?’…)

Hopefully, this incident will be for the Swedes what the late Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” was for me, and that is the final egalitarian and universalist straw on the camel’s back.

AP:

Swedish school confiscates boy’s party invitations

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - A school has confiscated an 8-year-old boy’s birthday party invitations after they were handed out during class because it said it had a duty to ensure against discrimination.

The boy handed out invitations to classmates at his school in Lund, southern Sweden, but did not invite two boys because they were not his friends, the Sydsvenskan newspaper reported earlier this week.

The school, 360 miles south of Stockholm, confiscated all the invitations, saying it objected because it had a duty to ensure against discrimination.

The report on Friday did not name the boy or his family.

(Read the full post about ‘Reductio ad Swedium’…)

This is just rich.  The Post-Dispatch is complaining that a number of newly-minted East St. Louis cops have enough run-ins with the law that would have disqualified them from being hired by Departments that actually have standards.  Remember this the next time the P-D has an op-ed complaining about the lack of diversity in police departments.

You figure, the very few adult men in East St. Louis that haven’t been touched in any way by the Long Arm probably don’t want to be ESL cops, because they’re smart enough to know that it’s an impossible, thankless job.  Therefore, any given recruit has only those transgressions detailed in the article are the best that ESL can find.  Compared to the population they’ll be patrolling, half of the adult men are convicted felons, many of them with a violent felony, and a good percentage have done stints in state prison.  Therefore, these new cops truly are East St.

(Read the full post about ‘East St. Louis’s “Finest”’…)

AP:

South African TB patients rampage

Authorities increased security Friday at a tuberculosis hospital where patients with drug-resistant forms of the disease went on a rampage to protest prison-like conditions.

(snip)

The Jose Pearson hospital, near the coastal city of Port Elizabeth, treats about 300 patients. Many have multidrug-resistant TB and the even more dangerous extensively drug-resistant TB, which is very difficult and expensive to treat.

(Read the full post about ‘Club TB’…)