The Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio
Brian Gongol

Today's snowfall set a daily record for February 17th here in Des Moines, with 5.7" of the white stuff. That's turned a lot of Iowa road conditions into trouble, especially in the eastern two-thirds of the state. Cedar Rapids looks like it got more than 7" of snow in this storm.

Sometimes people lean on us as though we're the non-Internet version of Wikipedia. To wit: Someone called tonight to ask Brian Dean who sang "Sunglasses at Night." (Answer: Corey Hart. My first guess was Thomas Dolby. He has a weblog, for what it's worth. Take that, Cyndi Lauper.)

Michael Bloomberg -- billionaire mayor of New York City -- agrees with me that the economic-stimulus package is a bad idea.

199 years after Abraham Lincoln was born, an estimated 12.3 million people are still held in slavery around the world today. That's more than four times the population of the state of Iowa. And yet Congress is wasting time grandstanding about steroids in baseball. I'm not saying that legal action shouldn't be taken if people have been using illegal drugs. But I think Congress has about 10,000 better things to be doing at taxpayer expense. I came up with a list of ten issues of vastly greater importance in about 60 seconds the other day.

Ted Turner swears he's not trying to corner the market on water in the Great Plains. He says he's buying up millions of acres of grazing land out West so that he can raise buffalo for his restaurants. But the fact that people are concerned that a person might try to corner the market on water rights and then sell it (like oil) should be a sign that we've ignored the real value of water for a long, long time.

The state auditor has red-flagged the state's budget, saying the Legislature and Governor are spending money we don't have and borrowing too much to do it. Thank goodness there are some adults in the room. Unfortunately, State Auditor David Vaudt might be the only one.

A knee-brace power generator might not sound like a revolutionary idea, but just imagine: We now have a way to allow people who rely on insulin pumps to generate their own electricity, no matter where they go -- or to let hikers have access to a cell-phone recharge even if they're miles from an outlet. Many lives will be made better by an invention like this, and the only motivation required is the desire to make a buck.

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