Dear Sheriff Dunn:

(From the Jasper County Commission )

Dated April 27,2011

Thank you for expressing your concerns about inmate rights and jail safety in our meeting yesterday. Although you said these concerns were not new, you never mentioned them in your budget request for this year, nor any other year. If you had requested, funds certainly could have been allocated for them within your annual $6.5 million Sheriff’s budget. Nothing was requested, therefore nothing was budgeted.

At our meeting you announced that because of your concerns about inmate crowding you were going to transfer 79 county inmates to other counties at a cost of $40 to $50 a day, generating a monthly bill of $100,000 for Jasper County taxpayers. These are the same citizens who taxed themselves so you could do your job, literally doubling the Sheriff’s office budget.

We will not condone nor pay for a taxpayer-funded inmate room and board plan. Any contract for services must be reviewed by the auditor who must then certify that the funds are available to pay the County obligation under that contract.

The Auditor will not certify that funds are available to pay these bills, and therefore the County will not be bound by any agreement you make with other entities for boarding prisoners. Be advised that Missouri law indicates that if you proceed with this initiative it is quite possible that you personally may be responsible for the cost.

Simply demanding that the citizens build a new jail for you is not a solution. We urge you to sit down and talk with us cooperatively so that we may resolve these challenges that confront so many counties today.

John Bartosh

Presiding Commissioner

Jim Honey

Eastern District Commissioner

Darius Adams

Western District Commissioner

NASCAR THIS WEEK

By Monte Dutton

Nice Guys Finish ... Fourth

TALLADEGA, Ala. -- Know the cartoon where the sheep dog and the wolf -- they’re named Ralph E. Wolf and Sam Sheepdog if you’re keeping a scorecard at home -- fight all day and then exchange pleasantries as they punch their time cards at the end of each day?

A bit of that dynamic comes into play at Talladega Superspeedway these days, only in reverse. Instead of parting on good terms, Restrictor Plate Racing 7.0 is a program in which everyone plays nice -- or at least attempts to do so -- until the very end.

But the seeming rivals do work together. Some NASCAR fans yearn for the days of rugged individualists and cold-blooded decisions. They want their favorite driver to look out for No. 1. Or, perhaps, No. 88.

In the latest case, many Dale Earnhardt Jr. fans -- we’re talking tens of thousands -- tramped to the parking lots and motored home from Talladega Superspeedway grumbling about what a good dude their hero was.

Earnhardt Jr. didn’t win the Aaron’s 499, but he was instrumental in Jimmie Johnson’s victory. Earnhardt concluded long before the finish that the drafting partnership -- races at Talladega and Daytona have become almost an entirely new genre in which drivers race in tandem -- with Johnson worked better with the winner of the past five championships riding in front.

The trouble, from the perspective of Earnhardt’s fans, is that riding behind Johnson makes it impossible for Earnhardt to win. Not that Johnson wasn’t a sympathetic figure, mind you. It had been a whole 15 races since the perennial champion’s most recent victory.

And Earnhardt has been prospering. Why, he won ... 101 races ago. George W. Bush, no relation to Kyle and Kurt (Busch), was president.

The four drivers at Hendrick Motorsports might as well be ... musketeers. There were four of them, you know: Athos, Portos and Aramis were eventually joined by d’Artagnan. They acted with esprit de corps, morale and several other terms derived from French.

All for one. One for all. Just like Johnson, Earnhardt, Jeff Gordon and Mark Martin.

Earnhardt explained it all matter-of-factly in the style of the swell guy he is.

"Well, I was more comfortable pushing Jimmie [Johnson], and I think we were the faster combination pushing that way," he said.

If only there had been a fife and bugle corps performing in the background, Earnhardt’s words would have rung even more wholesome.

"If I couldn’t win the race," he said, "I wanted Jimmie to win the race because I had worked with him all day, and he’s my teammate and I’m proud to be driving for Hendrick Motorsports, and this was a great finish and a great weekend for us to be able to qualify like we did, race like we did, and we have awesome engines and we build great cars and we all finished very well today, and that is a tribute to the craftsmanship we have back in Charlotte."

I see the IBM computer won the chess competition against some tough players.

The computer is supposed ta be able ta make a zillion computations and make the best move.

Some see the game as a challenge to human intelligence, but I tend ta believe it doesn’t amount ta much.

In the first place, us humans are much too unpredictable to be plugged into some calculation. The thought that one single action could put in motion a chain of precise events that would lead to a desired conclusion just ain’t reality.

If anything close to that could occur we’d be drivin Edsels, drinkin’ "new" Coke, and eatin’ those MacAdult sandwiches. The fact that all these ideas and the millions spent promotin’ ‘em failed is plenty of reassurance that you can’t predict human nature.

This is some fact, but mostly,

Just Jake Talkin’.

---

Weekly Column

CLICK and CLACK

TALK CARS

Dear Tom and Ray:

Here’s my challenge, for which I’d welcome help and/or suggestions. Our theater company soon will open its latest production. Almost all of the play takes place in one of two cars, which the actors are sitting in, standing by, etc. The only way into the theater is down steps and through a not-much-larger-than-?regular doorway. I thus have to disassemble, then reassemble the front ends of these cars, along with the front doors, on the stage. I also have to remove them and rebuild them every week for five weeks, as there is another show running at the same time. I’d like to do so in less than two hours each time. So, how would you go about this task? Feel like coming out to Colorado to tackle the task firsthand? -- Darren

TOM: To answer your last question first, Darren: No. But thanks for asking.

RAY: I think the easiest thing to do is widen the theater’s doorway, Darren. I think that’s an easier job. Cars are not made to be assembled or disassembled so easily.

TOM: If you can’t actually drive or push the cars onto the stage, I guess you’ve got two options. The better option is cardboard cutouts. I’m sure you’ve seen cardboard cutouts -- where you can stand next to someone really famous, like Sleepy LaBeef, and have your picture taken, even though Sleepy’s too busy to actually stand next to you.

RAY: Well, you could have photographs taken and cutouts made for the parts of the front ends of two cars. That’s about as easy and safe as it gets in terms of moving, assembly and disassembly.

TOM: It would cost you some money to have them made. But they’d probably look pretty good, or at least good enough for a theater that doesn’t have a loading bay.