I have received dozens of requests for information about setting up booths or tables, selling merchandise, and helping out at the 9-12 Tea Party in St. Louis.  Here’s some forms.  Please fill these out to get involved.

Speakers and Performers:

If you’d like to recommend a speaker or performer, fill this out.

Volunteers:

We need lots of volunteers, before and during the 9-12 Weekend.  Please consider signing up here.

Vendors, Groups, and Candidates:

If you’d like a table or booth to promote your organization, sell merchandise or food, etc., please fill out this form. Retail and organization space will be on the East side of Leonor K. Sullivan Blvd., just like Fair St. Louis.

3rd Sponsor Yourself on the Permit:

Very generous people are sponsoring this event, but they (and we) want to have gas in the tank to keep on rolling right through 2012 elections (and beyond).  One way to make that happen is to sponsor yourself or yourself and others through this nifty form.

If you can’t make it to the Tea Party and you can’t find someone to come in your place, consider sponsoring someone. It’s a great way to support the organizations that are putting this on.

And, of course, we’re going to ask you to:

• Sign up on the Facebook event page
• Join our Facebook Page
• Register for our daily update and special alerts
• Follow @stlteaparty on Twitter
• And REGISTER yourself and everyone in your house to vote.

You have less than a month and a half (October 2) to register to vote.  Don’t miss your chance to protect America.

…if you control for all of the important variables that contribute to wage differentials (age, marital status, having children, etc.), i.e. impose ceteris paribus conditions, there is no evidence of gender discrimination, and either there is no statistically significant wage gap, or now there’s a wage gap in favor of women.

I think Alexander Hamilton would be pleased with this. In his Report on Manufactures, he recognized the importance of expanding the labor force:

III. As to the additional employment of classes of the community not ordinarily engaged in the particular business.

This is not among the least valuable of the means by which manufacturing institutions contribute to augment the general stock of industry and production. In places where those institutions prevail, besides the persons regularly engaged in them, they afford occasional and extra employment to industrious individuals and families who are willing to devote the leisure resulting from the intermissions of their ordinary pursuits to collateral labors as a resource of multiplying their acquisitions or enjoyments. The husbandman himself experiences a new source of profit and support from the encreased industry of his wife and daughters, invited and stimulated by the demands of the neighboring manufactories.

Besides this advantage of occasional employment to classes having different occupations, there is another of a nature allied to it and of a similar tendency. This is—the employment of persons who would otherwise be idle (and in many cases a burthen on the community), either from the bias of temper, habit, infirmity or body, or some other cause, indisposing or disqualifying them for the toils of the country. It is worthy of particular remark that, in general, women and children are rendered more useful, and the latter more early useful, by manufacturing establishments than they would otherwise be. Of the number of persons employed in the cotton manufactories of Great Britain, it is computed that 4/7 nearly are women and children, of whom the greatest proportion are children and many of them of a very tender age.

And thus it appears to be one of the attributes of manufactures, and one of no small consequence, to give occasion to the exertion of a greater quantity of industry, even by the same number of persons, where they happen to prevail, than would exist if there were no such establishments.

POLITICO – A Confusing TARP Maze in Mo. Races http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/41595.html

Springfield News-Leader/AP – Real Estate Tax to Be on Missouri Ballot http://www.news-leader.com/article/20100901/NEWS01/9010419/1007/Real-estate-tax-to-be-on-Missouri-ballot

KC Star Disingenuous Editorial –  Group seeking to abolish KC’s earnings tax takes a disingenuous approach  http://www.kansascity.com/2010/08/31/2191091/group-seeking-to-abolish-kcs-earnings.html

You can contact the hosts by emailing missouriminute@unitedformissouri.org or by sending us a message on twitter @United4MOor@Senator32 or by visiting http://www.cozadcompany.com/

Photo by Grunge Textures

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Projects generating power and heat using renewable energy sources are on hold awaiting a final ruling on emissions standards from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA started a firestorm this spring when it classified wood used in energy generation, often called woody biomass, the same as it classified coal. According to the pending EPA rule, EPA will count biomass carbon dioxide emissions the same as fossil fuel emissions in permitting programs under the Clean Air Act.

Please visit our main news site, www.monewshorion.org, to read the complete article or listen to our audio story.

…if you look at a Marxist Utopia — say, Cuba — what you’ll see is basically a plantation. At the top, you’ve got the Massa and his family — Fidel, Raul, et al. — followed by various layers of overseers — the Communist Party apparat, the secret police — and House Negroes — e.g., the state-controlled media — all living off the surplus labor of the Field Negroes, whose produce is disposed of not according to their own desires (that would be capitalism!) but according to their betters’. This, we’re told, is for the best, since they aren’t smart enough to make their own decisions anyway, and the Massa looks after them with food, housing, and health care. Slaveholders even defended their system as more humane and less exploitative than atomistic capitalism, conveniently ignoring the role of the lash, just as apologists for Marxism conveniently ignore the role of the gulag.

A marketing suggestion for our leftie friends: Communism: it’s the new slavery!

Photo by John Muk

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — After more than 11 years, the state of Missouri and Premium Standard Farms have come to a final agreement over penalties and remedies for violations of various state and federal environmental laws.

The settlement announced Wednesday by Attorney General Chris Koster ends legal wrangling that began in 1999 when then-attorney general Jay Nixon filed a lawsuit against Premium Standard alleging violations of various laws involving wastewater spills and discharges at several of the company’s confined animal feeding operations in five northern Missouri counties.

Please visit our main news site, www.monewshorizon.org, to read the full article.

Photo by Malinkrop

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – An appellate judge rejected the request for temporary relief that Missouri’s adult industry sought from a new law tightening restrictions on their business practices.

The Missouri Court of Appeals Western District on Wednesday denied industry attorneys’ request for a temporary restraining order, refusing to overturn the original ruling issued Friday by Cole County Circuit Court Judge Jon Bettem.

Please visit our main news site, www.monewshound.org, to read the full article.

Some decisions in Jefferson City are made by the trappings of the offices, not the officeholders, I guess.

A judge on Tuesday ordered a real estate tax initiative to appear on
Missouri's November ballot, concluding the measure's supporters
submitted enough valid signatures from voters.

Earlier
this month the Missouri secretary of state's office concluded that too
few signatures were submitted for the initiative to appear. Cole County
Circuit Judge Paul Wilson effectively overruled that and ordered
election officials to place the measure on the ballot.

The article does not mention the name of the current Secretary of State.  Her name is Robin Carnahan, and she is currently running for United States Senate.  Maybe the Associated Press didn't want to explicitly tie Secretary of State Robin Carnahan to an attempt to block a citizen ballot initiative to limit taxes in an election year.

I don't mind doing it at all.  And I don't mind reminding you of other ballot initiatives being thrown out on technicalities when they don't adhere to the Democratic Party platform.

According to a WSJ article by Robert Bryce, wind is one of the more reliable renewable sources for energy companies being hit with mandates to use certain amounts of renewable sources, but it won’t have the intended effect of reducing carbon emissions.

Wind—not solar or geothermal sources—must provide most of this electricity. It’s the only renewable source that can rapidly scale up to meet the requirements of the mandates. This means billions more in taxpayer subsidies for the wind industry and higher electricity costs for consumers.

Bentek found that thanks to the cycling of Colorado’s coal-fired plants in 2009, at least 94,000 more pounds of carbon dioxide were generated because of the repeated cycling. In Texas, Bentek estimated that the cycling of power plants due to increased use of wind energy resulted in a slight savings of carbon dioxide (about 600 tons) in 2008 and a slight increase (of about 1,000 tons) in 2009.

Missouri passed a mandate a few years ago that requires electric utilities to become 15% dependent on wind or solar energy by 2021.  On the state and federal level, these new laws will dramatically increase costs for utilities, which will almost certainly raise rates in response.  But the reasons why these particular types of subsidization were necessary now look like they could be blown over by a strong gust of wind.

If I were an environmentalist right now I’d be weeping, dissolving my biodegradable shoes.  It seems like you just can’t win: you buy cloth diapers, only to find out that the energy it takes to wash them (not to mention the ew factor) is far “worse” for the environment, according to the people keeping that list.  Or, consider that the Hybrid is coming under fire for doing more harm to the environment than the long-beleaguered Hummer.  There is a long line of products that purport to be atmospherically advantageous, but turn out to have nastier consequences then their run-of-the-mill competitors.

At the end of the day, I can change my behavior, if I want to, based on new information.  I can decide what businesses I want to support with the money I earn.  Regulation, well, not so much.  That’s what bothers me about so many environmental regulations of late: not only is government deciding what business activity is better than another, they could easily be subsidizing (i.e. using my money to prop up) activity that moves the needle in the opposite direction.  Bottom line: even for the environmentally conscious, subsidizing renewable energy is heading down the wrong path.