This blog is on a temporary hiatus. Posting will resume in the near future.

Re-launching soon.

• Claire McCaskill won’t be supporting the Waxman-Markely cap & trade bill that recently passed the House, and she doesn’t think very many other senate Democrats will, either. [Huffington Post]
• Don’t mince words, Kit Bond, tell us how you really feel. Jeez. Somebody’s not terribly concerned about political expediency anymore now that they’re not running for reelection. We wonder if Bond will no-call-no-show during his last week in the Senate, like we do with all our jobs. [The Hill]
• Ike Skelton may have survived the 1994 GOP whiteout, but could he really be in trouble in 2010? Roll Call looks at a group of Democratic representatives from districts in which John McCain won a plurality of the 2008 vote. [Roll Call]
• State Senator and brave bowl-cut holdover Chuck Purgason (R-Caulfield) is thinking about wasting some time and money in a primary fight with Roy Blunt for the 2010 GOP U.S. Senate nomination. [Political Fix]
• If Sarah Palin wants to salvage the tattered remnants of her political career, she should imitate… Missouri congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson? [The Hill]

Just when you thought his neutered ghost had finally disappeared into the ether once and for all, John Ashcroft, noted hater of free speech, civil rights, women’s rights—really any rights, anywhere—turns up again like a doddering old bad penny, singing out his general shittiness to the world  in obnoxious baritone vibrato.

Ashcroft’s consulting firm, The Ashcroft Group, recipient of a friendly-bordering-on-coital $52 million no-bid contract from then-New Jersey U.S. attorney, now gubernatorial candidate, Chris Christie (R), is suddenly the hot button issue in the NJ governor’s race.

Incumbent Governor John Corzine (D) had been very busy the past three months, using the tears of unemployed Jersey-ites and dirty Goldman-Sachs money to paper mache some new wallpaper in one of the quarter-square-mile bathrooms of his money fortress, but it seems that he must’ve looked down long enough to notice his reelection hopes swirling down the toilet. Though the questionable 2008 contract had been just lying there for months, waiting for someone be shitty about it and use it, Corzine’s people have only now jumped on it, making it the centerpiece of this new ad.

Ashcroft’s no-bid deal an issue in N.J. governor’s race [Political Fix]

THANKS FOR ALL THE PRETTY TWISTED-UP METAL. CAN I HAVE A JOB, INSTEAD?: The fallow husk of what once was St. Louis just opened its new 2.9 acre Citygarden sculpture park. All it takes to restore a once-proud midwestern business hub to its former glory is an acre of two modern industrial art. Who knew?

Sculpture to Invigorate a Shrinking City [NY Times]

• The National Resources Defense Council says Missouri is a potential wind power development haven. [St. Joseph News-Press]
• Claire McCaskill won’t support a second stimulus package. [KY3]
• Gov. Nixon will apply for federal dollars to create a statewide broadband internet network by 2014. [MissouriNet]
• David Bradley and Wayne Goode are your two newest members of the MU Board of Curators. Not exactly a political appointment, but not exactly not one, either. [Columbia Missourian]
• With the economy remaining stuck in a quagmire of slow/no growth, Missouri will start to feel the pinch even more during the upcoming fiscal year. [Springfield News-Leader]

NATTY NEWS: President Obama’s stimulus package might not have been as successful as was hoped, but America’s unadulterated  Grapes-of-Wrath economic desperation has become a stimulus package for the stimulus package.

Boost in Food-Stamp Funding Percolates Through Economy [Wall Street Journal]

Missouri State representative and part-time right wing radio talk jock Jim Guest (R-5) is taking the kind of bold stand against secret electronic and microwave monitoring devices that… uh, some people, somewhere, have been, kind of, at least, clamoring for. Congressman Guest recently provided a letter—on official congressional letterhead—to a Kansas man seeking an order of protection against a former business partner whom he claimed had been stalking him using secret spaceage microwave monitoring devices. Obviously, the man’s story struck a personal chord with Rep. Guest, whose office mostly functions as a bully pulpit in a crusade against science fiction villians. Guest’s one man parade of delusion was even documented in a 2008 New York Times article on quack mind control:

“I’ve had enough calls, some from credible people — professors — being targeted by nonlethal weapons,” Mr. Guest said in a telephone interview, adding that nothing came of his request for a legislative investigation. “They become psychologically affected by it. They have trouble sleeping at night.”

He added: “I believe there are people who have been targeted by this. With this equipment, you have to test it on somebody to see if it works.”

Professors!

We were unable to reach Rep. Guest through his website for follow-up comments, and would have kept trying, but our own mild ambivalence, quickly followed by complete indifference, made that impossible.

The Congressman’s most recent legislative bon mot, a bill introduced this past legislative session seeking to bar employers from engaging in “involuntary microchipping” of employees, died mercifully in committee while the rest of the legislature was busy dealing with little things like the state budget, corresponding with their own, actual Missouri constituents, and helping to relieve the state’s financial burdens by encouraging Missourians to kill themselves with motorcycles.

Lawmakers on the Frontier of Science [Post-Dispatch]

• I just guessed your social security number. [Washington Post]
• Tom Schweich is all set to announce his candidacy for State Auditor. [Post-Dispatch]
• Jay Nixon’s signing tour landed in Rolla yesterday, where the Governor signed two completely meaningless bills establishing a statewide cheerleading squad for math and science. [Rolla Daily News]
• In a case that could have implications for power-grabbing governors of the future, the courts will decide whether or not current Gov. Jay Nixon has the authority to dismiss three administrative law judges, as had been planned. [Springfield News-Leader]
• Senate doorkeeper and capitol fixture Don Rackers has died. He was 76 years old. [MissouriNet]
• Roy Blunt, the GOP’s congressional point man on health care reform, lays out his plan to do nothing much, really, because health care is “about competition”, in that if two men suffer massive head hounds in a car accident and then engage in a foot race to the hospital, it doesn’t matter who wins because neither of them have insurance.  [KC Star]

Sarah Palin is a quitter. Michelle Bachmann’s own party keeps telling her to shut up. The last six people on earth who didn’t already believe Joe the Plumber is a moron seem to have finally come around. Even reliably batty old standbys like Pat Robertson and James Dobson are keeping a lower profile these days. Where O’ Where is a church-obsessed shut-in with less than two career sexual partners to turn to for salient political discourse these days?

Of course, that’s the easiest question in politics. The answer: MISSOURI STATE LEGISLATIVE SUPER-DUPER-STAR CYNTHIA DAVIS!

Not one to get all exhausted trying to outdo her previous work (it’ll take a while for her to figure out how to top this, anyway), Cynthia Davis (R-19) is pacing herself, rationing out little nuggets of bugshit insanity here and there so as not to go the way of Palin or the Plumber prematurely. Instead, Davis is careful to focus on only one or two outlandishly false, stupid, and/or senile(?) things per talk show appearance. The congresswoman’s Chernobyl-like inner core of unqualified stupidity is far too volatile to release in one area alone. A leopard like this can’t help but reveal a few of its spots once a while, though. The fact that she makes Alex Jones look even mildly reasonable in this clip—in which Davis explains a state sovereignty resolution she introduced in the Missouri statehouse and drops some knowledge on the Civil War—is a testament to the expansive power of what lies beneath the pasty, rosacea-ridden dough concealing Davis’ own Three Mile Island of unbridled lunacy.

Words really aren’t gonna enhance this. We’ll wait quietly while you pick your mind up off the floor.

More From Missouri Rep. Cynthia Davis on the Civil War [Ryan Witt- Examiner.com]

Olfactory challenged news hounds unite!

Not content to rest upon their laurels as the most misleadingly named entry in the MOPolitics blog sweepstakes, Missouri Political News Service is taking KY3 political reporter and blogger Dave Cantanese to task for…  a thing. That he did. Or didn’t do. In typical Objective News Hound fashion, the conservative MOPNS hits Cantanese for not conservatively hitting Jay Nixon hard enough on a conservative point of conservative political minutiae that conservatively proves (proves!) some contrived conservative argument of theirs specifically and conservatively.

Your authors are still a little new to the MOPolitics blogging game and haven’t fully flushed out the motivations of our contemporaries, but we didn’t just fall off the truck, either (OK, we did, but only after several drinks). Cantanese’s coverage strikes us as the work of an innocuous but relatively competent local news ham-and-egger,  but Missouri Political News Service is fast gaining a reputation around here as the place to go for easy laughs. Laughing-at-you-not-with-you kind of laughs.

While we fully admit to and embrace our proud liberalness, we’re not as keen on Nixon’s performance thus far as Cantanese seems to be, nor as we as (apparently) unexplainably disappointed as MOPNS. From our standpoint, Nixon appears to be relatively adept at playing the state political game, but he hasn’t proven much else to us beyond that. Nevertheless, labeling our blog a “news” service while using it as a platform for silly, made-up conservative vs. liberal chicanery isn’t what we’re about. Our high and mighty moral standard is evidenced by the fact that we’ve labeled our blog a “gossip” service and are instead using it as a platform for injecting ourselves into already-existing conservative vs. liberal chicanery without making any of it up on our own. So put that on your toast.

Jiminy Cricket Dave! [Missouri Political "News" Service]