The St. Louis Post Dispatch is not a very good newspaper, even as newspapers go, unless you like your leftism served up smug and unthinking. And the columnists there are generally pretty awful, at least since they fired Elaine Viets for reasons not apparent to her readers. Yes, that includes the sports page, although I’m partial to Jeff Gordon who is a nice guy, at least he was to my wife when she worked briefly as a bank teller. 

But in the interest of fairness and giving credit where credit is due, I’d like to point out that there are two spots you can read good columns – the business section and the outdoor section at the back of the sports page — and I don’t even hunt or fish. The Talk Tech guy is pretty good, as this column on iPods and PDAs shows. But Dave Nicklaus is far and away the best they’ve got — he’d be worth mentioning even at a good newspaper. Try this column on the minimum wage and see what I mean – balanced, factual, thoughtful. Something you rarely get in the rest of the daily fishwrap — any daily fishwrap. What’s funny is reading one of his columns, and then not much later get the editorial page’s take on a subject. Nicklaus writes about how college prices are driven up by third party pay and their ability to engage in “perfect pricing” through the financial disclosures involved in financial aid – the editorialists complain that the Bush administration isn’t providing enough public money to reduce the cost of private tuition. When Nicklaus writes about soaring healthcare costs (here for example) you get a thoughtful look at competing factors with no villains, and the editorialists counter with how big companies and rich doctors work a “patchwork quilt of payers” to drive prices up — mainly because they unswervingly advocate a single payer, namely all of us paying taxes. Actually, I should be happy that the rest of the columnists don’t seem to read Mr. Nicklaus, or he might just disappear from the paper.