MissouriGreen

For those outside of St. Louis, we suffered a tragic shooting this week that left one young fireman dead, and two police officers seriously wounded. The event took place in Maplewood, which is just across I44 from where I live.

The fireman was Ryan Hummert, a 22 year old rookie and son of the former mayor of Maplewood, who just started work with the fire department last August. He and others were responding to a reported car fire when the owner of the car started shooting at the fire and police personnel who answered the call for help.

The owner of the house, Mark Knobbe, was a recluse cut off from friends and family, but had never given any indication that he would do an act such as this. After shooting at the police and firefighters, Knobbe set his own home on fire and then killed himself.

Tomorrow, the road outside of the complex where we have our town home will be closed for the funeral procession. I'll be standing on the side of the road, taking some photos and paying my respects. I'll post a follow up story tomorrow.

In the meantime, for those in the St. Louis area, the Missouri Fire Service Funeral Assistance Team has a page with information on visitation and the funeral procession. In addition, donations in Ryan Hummert's name can be made to The Backstoppers an organization dedicated to the support of families of fallen police and fire fighting personnel.

Procession route:

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The lawyer for Lori Drew has filed a response in California, to the charges that Drew violated MySpace's rules and terms of service. If you don't remember who Lori Drew is, she was the woman accused of "hounding" the 13 year old Megan Meier to death. I used the word "hounded" facetiously, as there's much more to this story than a tale of a lost little girl done wrong by a Big Bad Woman. The event happened here in Missouri, and has been a very major story, as well as source of contention.

These charges are absurd, as well as being potentially devastating to any and all online web usage. From the filing, and quoted in the St. Louis Today report:

“If violating user agreements is a crime, millions of Americans are probably committing crimes on a daily basis and don’t know it,” the filings says.

Steward also says that laws have to make clear what is prohibited, and the one being used against Drew doesn't. The terms “access” and “unauthorized” aren't defined in the law. The law fails to warn the public of what is prohibited and establish standards that would prevent it from being enforced in an arbitrary and capricious manner, he wrote.

“A reasonable person could never know whether their conduct violates the statute,” the filings say, and the law is “ripe for discriminatory enforcement.”

Steward also writes that it is unconstitutional to delegate governmental powers to private parties. Prosecutors' interpretation of the law would allow Web site owners unlimited authority to decide what was unauthorized.

“Almost any computer owner can set up whatever arbitrary and unique rules they want, and a violation of those rules can lead to a. . . prosecution,” Steward wrote

In other words, you could not only lose access to a web service by not following the "rules" of the service, you could thrown in prison for not following the rules. How absolutely insane is that?

More from Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. In addition, copies of the filings: Failure to State Offence, delegation of authority, and vagueness.

St. Louis Today, the online site for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has put together a clever page for Missouri voters: side-by-side videos on the issues by the single Democratic and two Republican contenders for governor.

I won't hide the fact that I'm a big supporter of Jay Nixon. It was with relief, though, that I saw the videos because, frankly, Nixon blew the doors of of Steelman and Hulshof.

Nixon had specific plans in mind about how to deal with the individual issues. He didn't equivocate on his beliefs; nothing he proposed was left deliberately vague or over generalized. You know where he stands on issues, and you know what he'll do as governor. He'll follow through, too. He's been a phenomenal Attorney General for the state of Missouri.

As for the Republican candidates, as much as I support women in politics, I thought Steelman was terrible. One platitude after another, with vague Party Line waving ideas of how she would fix problems. I don't think she had one original thought.

Nixon talks about increasing Medicare for the uninsured, and getting those Federal dollars we lost thanks to our current governor's poor decisions. Nixon also talks about a pool for those who work but can't afford private sector insurance—a plan many other states are adopting. Both Republican candidates had awful ideas on the growing health care crises. Steelman thinks we just need more private sector involvement. Yeah. Right. After all, health insurance organizations aren't interested in raking as profit as they can from the people they insure. And Hulshof thinks all we need is tort reform. Yup, that will solve the problem of the millions of under-insured Missourians: tort reform.

How to create more jobs? Steelman wants to bring in an oil refinery. An oil refinery. And Steelman and Holshof both focused on the business end in their proposals. I found it interesting that Nixon focused on both business and the people. He's also the only one interested in actively recruiting the bioscience business, which could potentially turn this state around. The voters of this state also support the bioscience business, while Steelman and Holshof want things like...oil refineries.

The folks of St. Louis are still talking about the massive freeway crash that occurred Tuesday afternoon during rush hour. Three people have now died, and several are still in the hospital.

For those not from our area, the interchange between our Highway 40 (Interstate 64) and southbound I270 is incredibly busy in the afternoon rush hour. Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for people to be forced to slow or even stop in the rightmost lane. Tuesday afternoon, a semi-truck hauling scrap aluminum hit, and literally ran over ten cars. Two people died immediately, and a third died today. Two of the three who died were Amish, traveling in a hired van heading to a funeral.

All the facts aren't in and the police haven't issued a report yet, but one thing is known: the truck driver was not paying attention before he hit the cars. A person driving besides the truck, who ended up getting hit by one of the cars knocked over the truck, estimated it was going 75 MPH when it hit the cars, and with no slowing down.

No charges have been filed yet. The driver has a clean record, and is emotionally wrecked, as you can imagine.

Tonight, one of the local news stations reported that the driver was distracted by a cellphone call just before the accident. I don't think any of us are surprised.

The biggest cause of accidents, in this area and most likely elsewhere, is people not paying attention. They talk on the phone, they eat, try to read the newspaper while waiting at lights, check their email, and probably send Twitter updates. We travel in vehicles weighing thousands of pounds, traveling at high speeds, surrounded by other big, fast moving vehicles, and seem to think it's perfectly acceptable to have a phone conversation with Joe, or quickly check that email from Jane—not to mention drinking hot coffee, smoking cigarettes that drop hot ash, or fiddling with the in-dash GPS, iPod, or radio.

Needless to say, the accident has awakened the call to make cellphone use while driving illegal. We shouldn't need a law, though. We have something between our ears called a brain.

It is difficult to be sympathetic to people in Iowa and Missouri when you read some webloggers who gloat about how "well" their state did compared to how well the people did in New Orleans after Katrina. I think it's time to take a closer look at events; to get some perspective on both events.

Early estimates put the number of damaged or lost homes in Iowa at about 8,000 to 10,000 homes, based on the number of displaced people. I estimate from the numbers I've heard in the last few weeks that Missouri will end up with about 500 to 1000 damaged or destroyed homes.

The number of homes destroyed by Katrina varies widely, but I've seen estimates from 275,000 to over 850,000 homes, many of them in New Orleans. In fact, 80% of the city was impacted, and only 45% of the New Orleans population has been able to return to New Orleans, years after the storm.

I couldn't find numbers of people killed in the recent floods here in the midwest, but from an old estimate, we lost about 30 people. Over 1836 people died from Katrina, and the long term impact of the flood could result in thousands more dying.

Though we like to think floods along the Mississippi are sudden, this one was not. We had all the indications of a bad flood building up along the Mississippi beginning in April. The people impacted by New Orleans had three days, four tops, to prepare.

The people in Missouri and Iowa were not cut off and isolated. Most had neighbors and friends who helped. The people in New Orleans were shoved into a coliseum or left marooned on damaged bridges, as the surrounding communities would not let them leave the city. Why? Because rumors talked about roving bands of thugs shooting everything in sight; rumors proven to be untrue, but still persisting in places like Wikipedia—an article I nominate for being the worst edited, most inaccurate, and outdated article in Wikipedia. These people were left without water and food, in intense heat for days. No comfortable Red Cross shelters for them.

River floods like the recent flooding in the Midwest impact across class lines, especially after the federal buy outs resulting from the the 1993 flood. The flood in New Orleans impacted on some of the poorest people in this country. People who were then bused as far away as Salt Lake City, and cut adrift.

This recent flooding is terrible, and I don't want to downplay the awfulness of the event, or the extent of the damage and the help that will be needed to rebuild in Iowa and Missouri. At the same time, it angers me to see those pontificating in how "better" we handled the flood than the folks handled Katrina in New Orleans and the rest of the south. Especially when the purpose for such comparisons is politically, and even racially, motivated.

Additional

• Despite Framing, Iowa Flood no Katrina
• Think Progress on Limbaugh's despicable comments
• Iowa's Floods: A Midwestern Katrina?
• Hurricane Katrina fact sheet.