Speak Out 5/3/16

Stop for school bus

I am a Cape Girardeau school bus driver. Every day at my Jefferson and Sprigg stop, going north, I turn on my warning yellow lights well in advance, I have stopped with the red lights on and the stop signs out, I am laying on my horn, and the people going south don’t stop or even slow down. Sometimes they will throw up their arms like they didn’t know that they had to stop. I guess what it’s going to take is for one of our local children to be killed by someone going through the stop signs on a bus. I have seen drivers to go around the bus when it’s stopped. Also parents picking up their children at Blanchard Elementary School in the afternoon go into the bus lane and will get out of their cars and block the lane so the buses can’t get through so we can pick up the kids and take them home. Please be considerate and let us get through so we can do our job.

Zero sum

I sure hope my theory is incorrect. The closure of Ryan’s followed by that of Bob Evans may reflect that the renaissance of downtown Cape Girardeau may mean that east side, west side ups and downs will result in little more than a zero sum game.

Not one teleprompter

Let me make this very clear. Donald Trump did not use a single teleprompter during his much panned and disastrous foreign policy address. He used two.

No ring

Ted Cruz: I did some research to try to help you and your supporters, hoping that the word you used, ring, was an acceptable synonym for a basketball hoop but had no luck. Sorry.

Opioid overdoses

Many states have enacted legislation to allow for more immediate intervention in case of an opioid overdose. Missouri is not one of them.

Voters, delegate rule

Honestly, David Limbaugh, do you really believe the 1,237 delegate rule, which you seem to deify, is going to carry any weight with the average American voter if Donald Trump gets more primary votes than Ted Cruz? It may indeed end up leading to the nomination in the process but it will be a Pyrrhic victory as the Republican Party as we’ve known it and the Christian conservative wing of it are forever marginalized if not destroyed.

Zika scare

As we learn more about the catastrophic consequence of a Zika virus outbreak, it becomes ever more outrageous that members of Congress are playing politics and refusing to act on President Obama’s request for an emergency appropriation to fight this threat.