I see the people of Mulvane are doing whatever it takes to get a casino built at their exit on the Kansas turnpike.

Here’s how the Eagle reports it:

[Mulvane’s] City Council will meet tonight to consider a public relations campaign aimed at convincing lawmakers and lottery officials that its exit on the Kansas Turnpike is the best location for the county's casino.

"We're getting down kind of to the nitty-gritty now and we think it's time to step it up a notch and let Topeka know just what the feelings are down here," said council member Joe Johnson.

Everybody wants a casino in their town, I guess. And why not? It’s how the governor and the Legislature said the state would pay for those hundreds of millions of dollars awarded to “education” by the state Supreme Court. This could point to a new way of looking at local-option financing: you build a new school—and then you put a casino in the cafeteria to pay for it. Lunch money spends just like the real thing, you know.

But why stop with casinos? Why not let every county build its own coal-fired power plant? Because that would be unhealthy, according to Dr. Rod Bremby, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ health secretary. Okay, he’s not actually a doctor, but he plays one for Kansas. As his official state bio puts it, he “ oversees the regulation of health and environmental entities in Kansas including child care centers, food service businesses, hospitals, laboratories, feedlots, landfills, and various other industries with environmental impacts.”

Wow. Just think of all the industries that have environmental impacts….hey, wait a minute! That's everything! If that’s a light-bulb moment for you too, thank Rod Bremby, because he’s also in charge of deciding who gets power plants and who doesn’t, and who gets cheap electricity and who doesn’t.

As it happens, “Secretary Bremby served 10 years as the assistant city manager in Lawrence, Kan., where he was responsible for overseeing the budgeting process, police, fire and medical, public works, water, sewer, finance, information systems, and parks and recreation departments.” Just coincidentally, Lawrence gets its power from an old-fashioned coal plant. The thing pollutes the way sailors cuss and horses pee, but Sec. Bremby’s not banning that plant, because, heck, Lawrence is home.

Holcomb isn’t. In fact, Holcomb is so far from Lawrence that, according to Truman Capote, even people in Kansas locate Holcomb by saying it’s “out there” and pointing at Denver. Holcomb wants cheap power the way Mulvane wants a gambling casino—and for the same reasons, mostly: money, jobs, development, bigger city trucks, and, of course, even bigger schools! (Holcomb would probably like its own casino, too, but one thing at a time.)

But Secretary Bremby said no. He took a break from regulating those aromatic feedlots to proclaim a ban on new, "clean" coal-fired power plants in Holcomb because, he said, the carbon-dioxide emissions from the plant would be unhealthy for Kansans. Unfortunately, that’s kind of a guess, since not only are there no standards for acceptable carbon-dioxide levels, there are also no tests or studies or anything else that suggests people in Kansas would be poisoned by a coal plant in Holcomb. In fact, there's only one research-based assertion that suggests a link between carbon dioxide emissions and risk of death, and it's predicated on a computer ("state of the art") simulation by a guy at Stanford.

There are however a lot of environmental groups that have no interest in casinos, but think that coal-fired plants, which is how most Americans get their electricity, are the first big step on the road to environmental degradation.

Some people say casinos are kind of toxic, too. I see that researchers at places like the University of Illinois, the University of Nevada and Oklahoma State, and at peer-reviewed journals like the Journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, among many other places, have conducted studies that seem to prove that gambling’s bad for your town—and bad for you, if you’re broke or prone to gambling addictions.

Now, I’m no doctor, either, and I’m sure there must be other studies (including at least one funded by the American Gaming Association) that show gambling’s a fine thing. I believe that completely. I’m a potential lottery millionaire myself.

But it does raise a question or two. If there are at least some scientific studies that show gambling’s bad for you, and none that show that carbon dioxide’s bad for you, why is the governor of Kansas hugging casinos and banning power plants?

And why, according to this Kansas Liberty report, is her attorney general helping to make sure that gambling in Kansas can’t be regulated, like, say, feedlots?

I mean, even in New Jersey they regulate gambling. Of course, in New Jersey the state doesn’t own the casinos, the way Kansas does. Well, the governor of Kansas says she’s looking for a compromise on the coal deal. My hunch is she’d like coal as much as casinos if the state owned all the power plants.

“Monday Monday” columnist Denis Boyles is the author of more than a dozen books, including, most recently,  Superior, Nebraska, a book mostly about Kansas named by the New York publisher after a nice town in Nebraska because, “you know, Kansas, Nebraska—they’re all the same.”