What they're saying…

Here are excerpts from recent editorials in Missouri newspapers:

Sept. 24

St. Joseph News-Press, on Insure Missouri:

Gov. Matt Blunt unveiled recently Insure Missouri, his new plan for extending health insurance to as many as 200,000 uninsured Missourians.

Working parents and caregivers with children who live at or below the poverty level ($20,650 for a family of four) will be able to take advantage of the new program starting early next year. The next phase of the program will bring in working adults who are not Medicare-eligible starting next summer.

Finally, the program will become available to small-business owners and employees after that.

Insure America is projected to gradually extend health care coverage to 189,787 people at an ultimate annual cost of $952 million over the next five years. ...

Democrats are unhappy, predictably. And the farther left you go, that happiness turns into the almost inevitable call for some form of government-driven universal health care.

Given those options, we are more than happy to give the governor's plan a chance to work. ...

As importantly, we understand that the very term ''uninsured American'' triggers sincere emotions that a nation this rich should be able to do better -- and it can.

But this is also a nation built on a freedom of choice that means some Americans earning plenty of money skip buying insurance as part of a calculated risk because a costly health crisis is less threatening than the appeal of buying a fancy car or flat-screen TV.

The governor's plan sets a credible path toward moving more Missourians toward insurance while acknowledging the danger of government trying to become all things for all people.

Sept. 23

The Southeast Missourian, on Missouri Ethics Commission:

The Missouri Ethics Commission bowed to public pressure last week and agreed that its recent secret meetings regarding campaign contributions were improper and decided to hold public meetings on the issue.

Gov. Matt Blunt and his staff, however, stubbornly refuse to discuss whether or not their e-mails are public records and need to be preserved along with all other official correspondence.

And the state's Appellate Judicial Nominating Commission, also under fire for failure to provide notice of its secret meetings, claims it operates under rules set by the Missouri Supreme Court, not the Missouri Sunshine Law.

There are three of the most recent examples of why the public lacks trust in its government.

The ethics commission deserves some credit for recognizing that it -- of all state boards, commissions, agencies and departments -- has an obligation to adhere to the purest interpretations of the state law on open meetings and open records.

The governor and his staff likewise should be setting an example for transparency in state government. ...

Every public official -- and every voter and taxpayer as well -- needs to again read the pening of the Sunshine Law. ...

Public officials who look for ways to sidestep that admonition are not ''public'' servants. They are merely preserving their ''private'' interests while pretending to obey the law.

Sept. 22

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, on new science building:

The new Edward A. Doisy Research Center, which opens next month, represents a $67 million vote of confidence in St. Louis University as a place for scientific discovery.

The vote came mainly from private donors who financed most of the construction costs and two endowed chairs in medical science.

Chief among them: a $30 million gift from the family of Edward A. Doisy, a former SLU scientist who won the Nobel Prize in 1943 for discovering the chemical nature of Vitamin K. The vitamin is essential for blood clotting.

The labs in the 10-story building will be one-quarter vacant when it opens -- by design. The National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of basic research in the nation, paid $4 million toward the research center and insisted that there be room to expand.

To a degree, the world of academic research operates on the Field of Dreams Theory: If you build it.

Put modern laboratories and support structures in place, and good researchers and grants will come. ...

Missouri's reputation as a place for scientific inquiry has suffered from the constant and wrongheaded efforts by some legislators to ban embryonic stem cell research.

That's not an issue at SLU, a Catholic university that already prohibits such work.

Washington University remains our local scientific powerhouse, with $546 million in sponsored research last year. Just this week, the National Institutes of Health awarded $50 million to a consortium headed by the university to improve clinical research and translate the results into medical treatments.

SLU, Washington University and a host of private businesses keep St. Louis a player in biotechnology, a field with vast growth potential. Building on the intellectual wealth of scientific talent at their institutions, our area universities -- with help from generous private donors are advancing medical knowledge and enhancing the economic future of our region.

Sept. 21

Springfield News-Leader, on Blunt and Nixon politics:

On the same day, in the same city, Missouri's two most bitter political rivals made headlines with their race for governor in mind.

Gov. Matt Blunt, a Republican, announced his latest plan to change the face of Missouri's health care system, Insure Missouri. The proposal is designed to reduce the number of uninsured adults in the state.

Attorney General Jay Nixon, a Democrat, announced his intention to support legislation that would reign in Missouri's out-of-control payday loan industry.

The announcements were designed with politics in mind. Blunt, still stinging from criticism of his 2005 Medicaid cuts, is slowly undoing some of the damage his administration wreaked by cutting the needy off health care.

Nixon is building on the theme that Blunt and his like-minded legislators have been a disaster when it comes to helping those in poverty.

But as hard as it is for the two bitter rivals and their supporters to ignore a good opportunity to slam their opponents' perceived weaknesses, we have a challenge for the lawmakers who will eventually be entrusted with the responsibility of passing the legislation that will allow either proposal to become law.

Difficult though it might be, examine each proposal on its own merits and ignore the names -- Nixon and Blunt -- attached to either of them. We're confident you'll find what we think common sense Missourians will discover: Both ideas have merit. ...

In the Show Me State, good ideas should win, regardless of which party, or which candidate, is offering them up.

That's our state's history, and our plea to lawmakers and the constituents who elected them is this: Let's not allow the mere mention of the names Nixon and Blunt get in the way of good proposals that will make this state a better place to live.