Blaine Luetkemeyer is trying to make lemonade out of being mocked by the P-D editorial Thursday for his dingbat notions on climate change. He sent a fundraising letter to constituents:

Will you help me by contributing to our campaign and show the liberal St. Louis Post Dispatch they are WRONG?

I don’t know how much cash that may have netted him, but it definitely earned him a rejoinder from the Post, which, after citing Blaine’s complaint about “a liberal agenda of taxing businesses and forcing us to ride bicycles to work,” concluded the posting:

We are of two minds about this. Contributions might better be spent to provide Mr. Luetkemeyer an education in science. But if he’s defeated by someone with critical thinking skills, what will we do for fun after we ride our bicycles to work?

The posting is worth a look, if only for the picture.

I’d recommend that the congressman keep in mind Mark Twain’s advice that he should: “Never pick a fight with someone who buys his ink by the barrel.”

Kudos to the Post-Dispatch for its Thursday editorial about “Just Blaine Wrong on climate change” Luetkemeyer. The representative from the ninth district, an embarrassment to the state of Missouri in the U.S. Congress, claims that the Nobel prize winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produces “junk science”. The editorial writers accuse Luetkemeyer of “trumpet[ing] his ignorance” in a press release that said: “We are undergoing a period of worldwide cooling.”

The Post had a good deal to say about that assertion, but the graph below pretty much sums it up:

Matson’s accompanying editorial cartoon depicts a beanie-wearing airhead with a button that says: “The brain in Blaine is mainly on the wane.”

The graph is from Wikipedia Commons.

Term limits do more harm than good, but they are not without virtue. For example: Rod Jetton is history.

The Sunday Post-Dispatch has a double-wide editorial about “The Sad Legacy of the Jetton Era,” as good a summary of his depradations as you’ll find. It gets five stars.

Here’s the conclusion:

Perhaps the greatest irony of Mr. Jetton’s last days in the Legislature was that work on voter ID, as well as work on such causes as abortion restrictions and illegal immigration, was held up by a Jetton sweetheart deal that even his GOP colleagues hated.

A year ago, Mr. Jetton had engineered a stealth amendment to an economic development bill that benefited developer Robert W. Plaster of Lebanon, a major campaign contributor and hunting buddy of the speaker’s. The amendment allowed a single person – in this case, Mr. Plaster – to incorporate land near Table Rock Lake as a “village,” thus bypassing local officials in Stone County.

Other developers began trying to take advantage of the “village law,” causing local officials around the state to complain to their legislators. Their effort to repeal the village law caused a logjam and filibusters during the last week of the legislative session. Mr. Jetton finally relented at 4 o’clock Friday morning, but only after cutting a deal that gives Mr. Plaster more time to set up his village.

By then, even some of his fellow Republicans were sick of him. Still, by dragging his feet Rod Jetton may inadvertently have saved the people of Missouri from several other lousy laws. It’s not much of a legacy for the star of the Class of 2000, but it’s all there is.