Weekly Wrap: Rural Broadband Access, Health Care Lies, and More

Good:  Gov. Jay Nixon unveiled an ambitious initiative Wednesday to deliver high-speed Internet access to rural Missourians.

• Nixon announced a public-private partnership with Sho-Me Power to get $142.3 million in federal stimulus money to lay 2,500 miles of fiber- optic cable and build 200 new towers to improve rural broadband Internet connections.
• Twenty percent of Missourians live in areas not served by broadband.
• The state's $25.2 million in matching funds would help purchase the equipment to connect the new fiber across the state. While the equipment would serve the needs of both the state and Sho-Me Technologies, the state would actually own the equipment.
• "We support the state’s efforts to secure a portion of the federal stimulus funds for a legitimate project that has the potential to not only create immediate construction and engineering jobs, but also position the state for growth in the future," wrote The News-Press.

Bad: Roy Blunt lied to scare constituents and voters about health care reform proposals -- but was called to task by the Post-Dispatch and News-Leader.

• "Some of what he knows just isn’t true," wrote the Post-Dispatch.
• "I'm 59. In either Canada or Great Britain, if I broke my hip, I couldn’t get it replaced," he told the paper.
• Blunt made the same faulty claim to the News-Leader.
• Blunt's ridiculous statements about being unable to get a new hip earned him a "Pants On Fire" Award from PolitiFact.com

Ugly: Conservative leaders in Missouri continued their outrageous euthanasia and "death panel" fearmongering.

• Roy Blunt, Michael Steele, Blaine Luetkemeyer, Ed Martin, Cynthia Davis, the Missouri Family Policy Council's Joe Ortwerth helped feed the fire.
• Accordingly, 53% of Republicans believe that “the government will require the elderly to make decisions about how and when they will die.”
• It's all part of a "campaign of misinformation and distortion against health care reform."

Other Notes:

• A near capacity crowd in Charleston paid respects to former Gov. Warren Hearnes on Thursday.
• Hearnes' state funeral was Wednesday.
• Tom Delay sounds a lot like Roy Blunt when talking about Obama's birth certificate.
• Thirty-nine percent of Americans want government to ‘stay out of Medicare.’
• The State Fair Ham Breakfast was Thursday.
• The Cubs are seven games behind the Cardinals.
• Usain Bolt is like, the bomb.