Jackson Free Press

Due to lack of water pressure, the city of Jackson has issued what they are calling a "precautionary" boil-water notice Friday, Sept. 28 for the following areas:

Lucedale Street, Canton Club Court, Canton Park Drive, Riviera Drive, Kinder Drive, N Canton Club Circle, Barkwood Court, Beechcrest Street, Beechcrest Drive, Sedgwick Drive, E Sedgwick Ct, W Sedgwick Ct, Dover Place, Pickford Lane, Vista Court, Chelsea Court, River Road, Foxboro Drive, Deer Trail, Cypress Trail, River Glen Street and River Cove

The notice does not mean that the water is unclean, but that the city is urging citizens in the affected areas to boil all water for at least 1 minute before drinking or cooking with it.

RESIDENTS WILL BE NOTIFIED IMMEDIATELY WHEN THE ADVISORY IS LIFTED. For more information, call 601-960-2723 during business hours or 601-960-1778 or 601-960-1875 after 3:00PM and on weekends.

Vickie Stanford called me today. Her 15-year-old son Brennan needs a kidney, and there are no signs of match anywhere in sight.

The JFP featured Brennan as a Person of the Day in April. You can read the story here: POD: Brennan Stanford

Vickie said today that the Tulane University pediatric kidney transplant program shut down recently. Brennan, whose blood type is O positive, is now on the waiting lists for a kidney at University of Mississippi Medical Center, which just recently reopened its pediatric transplant unit, and at Ochsner Hospital in New Orleans.

There is no nationwide, or even statewide, kidney donation program. Each hospital that does transplants has its own waiting list and its own donor supplies. Vickie said that UMMC told her that they may receive one kidney a year that is a match for Brennan, who can only accept a kidney from someone with Type O blood.

Vickie hopes to get Brennan on the list at the University of Alabama-Birmingham soon.

Brennan is currently in good health, and doctors have told Vickie that now is the best time to give him a transplant, if she can find a donor. He currently takes 9 hours of dialysis every night, and Vickie said he cannot do that forever.

Brennan, whose father donated a kidney to him before his second birthday, has no other family with his O positive blood type. If Brennan is going to receive the kidney he needs to survive, he will most likely need a volunteer donor.

Further information about donating a kidney can be found in the JFP's Person of the Day story on Brennan. Brennan's health insurance will pay for all medical expenses related to a donation.

For more information on donating or to find out if you are a match, please call Silvia at UMMC at 601-984-5065, or Becky Guillera at Ochsner Hospital at 504-842-3925.

http://jacksonfreepress.com/users/photos/2012/sep/28/8655/

The NFL announced Thursday that the referee lockout that never should have happened in the first place is over. And only three weeks too late.

The final play from scrimmage in Monday night's game between Seattle and Green Bay has been replayed, reviewed and evaluated by every media outlet in America at least four dozen times in the last 60 hours. That clearly was the straw that broke the owners' backs.

We all saw it coming. With the NFL, who answers to the individual team owners, and the referees nowhere near an agreement, it became clear that this lockout would not end pretty. As replacement refs made mistakes and showed their lack of ability to keep up with the professional game's speed and complexity, we all knew the fatal mistake was coming.

It came the only way it could. For the NFL and the referees to come to an agreement, it would take a game-changing call. A call that took a rightfully earned digit out of one team's win column and placed it in the opponent's. Thankfully, it didn't take until the playoffs for it to happen.

There is certainly an argument for the call Monday night. Under NFL rules, it two players have simultaneous possession, the tie goes to the offensive player. The play Monday was close. So close, I am not certain that the real NFL referees would not have called it the same way. Unfortunately for the replacement refs, and fortunately for all the rest of us, it looked like the Green Bay defender had the ball first, and had the superior control of the ball, but didn't get the credit.

That was all the fuel the media needed to create a 48-hour news storm that a Buddhist monk living in a cave on a deserted island couldn't ignore. Thankfully, neither could the NFL. It decided the league couldn't take another debacle like Monday night.

No longer could the owners pretend the replacement refs were a worthy option. No longer could they act like the men who have done such a fantastic job of almost never being in the spotlight were not a vital part of what makes the NFL the smoothest-running show in American sports. No longer could the owners deny the real referees what they have clearly earned.

So the NFL and owners did what they should have done a month ago, and settled with the referees. Thankfully, we can all go back to the NFL we love, starting tonight. The NFL where we watch the greatest football players in the world play the game as it was meant to be played: with referees enforcing the rules, interpreting them correctly and staying the hell out of the spotlight.

Thanks to the economic downturn, it's a buyer's market for a lot of products: houses are cheap, food is relatively inexpensive (although experts are predicting a bacon shortage of apocalyptic proportions) and now, at Jackson-area Walmart stores, you can even get a pretty good deal on a weapon that shoots bullets faster than I can gobble down bacon, which is pretty damn fast.

Over the weekend, Walmart ran an ad in the Clarion-Ledger advertising deals on shotguns, rifles and MSRs. It's possible that the world's largest corporation understands that global chaos could ensue when bacon reserves dry up.

Anarchy is generally good for the gun business.

According to the ad, one might procure one of these MSRs -- modern sporting rifle more commonly known as an assault rifle -- for as little as $597 and as much $1,097 for a .223-caliber Colt M4 Rifle. If you're smart, you don't go cheap because when the bacon-takers come -- and, believe me, they will come -- you want a reliable weapon to protect your family's salted meats.

At the same time, you don't want to spend too much just to be sure you can afford to stock up on enough ammo to fend off the imminent roving hoards of pork-looters. To that end, there's a mid-level machine gun, a Sig Sauer M400 SRP with Prismatic Scope can be had for just $897 and, according to the ad, is available only at Walmart.

Only at Walmart indeed.

http://jacksonfreepress.com/users/photos/2012/sep/26/8601/

Update: I deferred to the expertise of the firearmphiles and removed a reference to automatic weapons. Again, the gun people win.

The website Remapping Debate has posted a story titled "Brother, Can you Spare $829 Billion?" On it, your can see just how much the top public corporations are hoarding ... er, holding.

So how much pump-priming could America’s largest corporations achieve if they were to dig into their cash and cash equivalents as well as their short-term investments? Remapping Debate examined the relevant quarterly Securities and Exchange Commission filings of the 100 largest corporations by revenue as ranked by the Fortune 500 in 2012 (looking only at publicly-held corporations, and excluding those in the financial sector). We looked at filing data for the period closest to June 30th in 2012, 2006, and 2000.

...each of three numbers calculated as a percentage of total assets for each of the three years: cash and cash equivalents (CCE) separately, short-term investments separately, and CCE and short-term investments combined (for 10 companies in 2000, comparable data were not available).

It turns out that more than 70 percent of the corporations listed in both 2012 and 2000 showed an increase over time in CCE and short-term investments combined as a percentage of total assets, including 15 corporations where the percentage point increase was 10 points or more.

Kind of makes me wonder how much faster the economy could recover if some of those companies would put some of their resources into hiring -- and creating additional consumers for their goods. Hmmm... What do you think?

Nobody tweets like Ward 4 Councilman Frank Bluntson

Fifty years ago today, Gov. Ross R. Barnett blocked African-American student James Meredith from enrolling at the University of Mississippi.

Meredith's appearance on the Oxford campus sparked violent protests and prompted President John F. Kennedy to dispatch federal troops to Mississippi.

Barnett was fined and, later, a body of water was named after him. Meredith got a statue erected in his honor, about which he told the Jackson Free Press in 2008:

Like all the other major schools in the country, they were put under heavy pressure to do a "Black Thing." The night before statue dedication, they did their "Black Thing," and asked me to come early and attend it. I've been trying for 20, 25 years to figure out how to bury James Meredith and go back to who God put me here to be. And I chose that night. And I told them in my presentation to them ... that for the last 10 or 15 years I've been fighting hard with the university to cut out the "black this, black that" thing. That is the worst thing in American education today, the "black this" and "black that."

http://jacksonfreepress.com/users/photos/2012/sep/20/8555/

I swear: The last decade feels like a blur. It's been such a ride here at the Jackson Free Press. As we've been putting together the birthday issue that hit the streets today, we went through 10 years of issues. I also re-read our old business plan, mission, cause statement: even found rough drafts and old possible names for the paper. (We even considered "Jackson Weekly" early on; thank goodness we didn't go with THAT!? I mean, we're a daily now online and on mobile, so that would have problematic.)

One thing I found was this draft "mission statement" and this list of goals we set up in 2002 for the paper. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy now to know how many of these high-falutin' goal we managed to conquer. See for yourself:

September 2002: The JFP's Mission What: "Our mission is to provide straightforward, in-depth, well-reasoned and insightful reporting about news, politics and cultural events in Jackson."

1. We will entertain and challenge readers with knowledgeable and critical coverage of Jackson’s cultural strengths.

2. We will present a news voice that appeals to the under-served people of the community.

3. We will encourage civic participation and voting.

4. We will promote diversity through hiring, reportage and viewpoints, distribution and active solicitation of non-white businesses in our advertising pages, calendar, classifieds and one-to-one pages.

5. We will recruit and train journalists and other staffers and contributors from under-served communities.

6. We will promote locally owned businesses over corporate and big-box outlets and provide a marketplace for entrepreneurship and enterprise that improves Jackson and its neighborhoods.

7. We will encourage and watchdog intelligent redevelopment of downtown Jackson.

8. We will cheer on an artistic, creative, inclusive approach to quality-of-life improvements.

9. We will work to encourage health and wellness in the community every way possible.

10. We will play an active role in building a diverse and cohesive progressive community that will attract positive economic development and Mississippi’s best, brightest and most creative people."