Monthly Archives: May 2022

Sports Page—Racing: Punting in Auto Racing

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(NASCAR)—Finishes of NASCAR races of late have had something of an NBA quality to them of late with last-laps events that determine winners.

Case in point: Darlington, Joey Logano—pardon us for mixing our sports terms here—punted race leader William Byron into the wall on the last restart to end a 40-race winless streak.

Logano becomes the tenth winner in the season’s first dozen races. He now has at least one win in the last eleven seasons.

Logano, who started on the outside of the first row on the last restart, complained Byron went up the track and pinched him against the wall. With two laps to go, Logano got his revenge, bumping Byron in the third turn, sending him into the wall and Logano into the lead. He got the checkered flag about three-quarters of a second in front of Tyler Reddick.

“If someone’s going to be willing to do that to you, then the gloves are off,” Logano said after the race. “There’s something to be said for an angry race car driver.”

Byron brought his damaged car home 13th and he did have something to say: “He slammed me so hard, it knocked all the right side off the car and sent me into the corner. He’s just a moron. He can’t win a race, so he does it that way.”

Also having behavioral problems was to-time series champion Kyle Busch who had nowhere to go when another wreck took out former NASCAR champion, Brad Keselowski. He took his car to the pits but instead of driving it into the garage area, he climbed out and abandoned it. That forced NASCAR to close the pits to other drivers until Busch’s car could be hauled away.

Only 23 of the 36 starting cars were still on the track at the end.  The 13 DNFs equaled the season high established at Talladega last month.

The show moves to the Kansas Speedway, just west of Kansas City last weekend.

(FORMULA 1)—The first Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix has gone to Max Verstappen, who is charging back through the points standings after a dismal start to the season.  Verstappen started from the second row with Ferrari duo Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz, bolted around Sainz on the first turn then hunted down Leclerc on lap nine to take a lead he never surrendered.

Verstappen now has three wins and has cut Leclerc’s points lead to 19. Just two races ago he was 46 points behind.

The drivers are calling for improvements in the course. Some suggested the pavement need to be fixed, complaining driving in some areas was like driving on a wet track. The situation made passing difficult and led to some straight-line racing.

Grand Prix managing partner Tom Garfinkel promised organizers will take “a really hard look” at the situation “and make the track as good as we can.”

(INDCAR)—Three drivers are locked in a tight three-way points chase as INDYCAR heads to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for next weekend’s May race on the road course.  Although Josef Newgarden has won twice, he’s only third in the points behind runnerup and Penske team member Scott McLaughlin and winless points leader Alex Palou. The three are separated by only nine points with the road course race next weekend and the Indianapolis 500 on the 29th.

(Photo credit: Bob Priddy)

A Reading List

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This is the last week of the legislative session.  Time is even more precious now and the risk that some worthwhile things will be talked to death is greatest.

This session already will be remembered as the year the Missouri Senate became a reading club.  A lousy one.

Not only were the choices of reading material poor, the reading of the material was fingernails-on-the-blackboard irritating.

Not only was their choice of material and their delivery of it lifeless, spiritless, colorless, arid, tedious (we could go on—we found a listing of 50 synonyms for “boring”), it set a low bar for being educational.

If unrecoverable hours of members’ lives will be taken from them, they at least should have the opportunity to turn the torturous time into a learning experience.

To solve this problem, we suggest that the Senate set aside funds to hire temporary personnel who have professional reading skills and employ them as part-time reading clerks—overnight reading hours would demand heftier salaries but it would be a small price to pay for making the Senate a more enlightened chamber.  Accompanying this recommendation is a suggested rule change that any group fomenting a filibuster must commit to staying in the chamber for the duration of the readings, thus guaranteeing that SOMEBODY will learn something.

Herewith, then, we offer a reading list for filibusters in hopes that consumption of those hours will provide participants and listeners alike some value.  We regret that we cannot guarantee that the readers can do a better job than they did this year.

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. While most of us have read the Declaration or have heard it read, this book is a highly-informative explanation of the care that went into each paragraph and sometimes each word of our nation’s foundational document and how the elements of the Declaration fit together and constitute the legal framework that led to the writing of the United States Constitution.

America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By, by Akil Reed Amar, who teaches Constitutional Law at Yale College and Yale Law School. Amar is considered “one of America’s pre-eminent legal scholars” who explains why the Constitution does not set forth all of the rights, principles, and procedures that govern our nation. He maintains that the Constitution cannot be understood in textual isolation from a changing world and the laws that change with it.

The End of White Christian America by Robert P. Jones, a former psychology professor at Missouri State University who now leads the Public Religion Research Institute, that examines what is happening because our nation is no longer an evangelical majority white Christian nation and the political and cultural effects of that change. The book explores that change, its implications for the future, and why those who fear the future should instead understand how the positive values of white Christian America will survive.

New World, Inc., by John Butman and Simon Targett. The authors explain that it was commerce, not religious freedom, that was the motivating factor for the earliest explorations and settlements of our nation.

The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell. Ms. Vowell is greatly entertaining in explaining who the Puritans on which so much of our standard history is based really were as human beings—and they were pips and not necessarily pure..

Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin, by Joseph Kelly, takes us to the dangerous, desperate times overlooked in our usual histories. We do not often consider that those who came to this side of the Atlantic placed themselves in a hostile world for which most were unsuited to settle with no guarantees that new supplies to sustain them would arrive later  It also explores the papal-approved concept that if a land was not populated by Christians, it was proper—a duty, in fact—for Christians to take that land regardless of the cost to those who inhabited it.

El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America, by Carrie Gibson.  Long before the Pilgrims and the Puritans arrived on this side of the pond, the Spanish were here as conquerors, settlers, enslavers, missionaries, and adventurers.  But most of our history is based on, as poet Walt Whitman put it, the idea that this nation was founded as a second England.

There are several others that could broaden understanding of who laid the foundation for our country and the opportunities and the missed opportunities to recognize them that shape our attitudes today, and not always in a positive way.

If the Senate, or a small part of it, wants to kill time and possibly beneficial legislation (for somebody) in the process, it should at least contribute to improving the general knowledge of our nation, at least for the Senator who should fill his mind while killing everybody else’s time, and for those who might stick around if there’s something worthwhile to listen to.  And with these books, there is.

We offer these suggestions with no hope that they will amount to anything.

But that doesn’t keep individual members of the legislature—and the public—from becoming better citizens by broadening their understanding of our nation’s roots.

 

 

The Light

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—is starting to grow larger at the end of the tunnel.

The last week and a half of the legislative session is here.  It’s time for legislators wanting another two or four years in Jefferson City to get the heck out of town and start telling the folks why they deserve another term, or a term of some other kind that lets them remain at the public trough.

The biggest budget in state history, bloated with federal pandemic relief funds, must be resolved by Friday—and it probably will be.  But the session is likely to be recalled for its divisions in the Senate and the lost first half of the session to filibusters that went beyond making a point, whatever it was.

It won’t be much to go home and brag about in this campaign year.  And for those who will be spending their last days as decision-makers for the state, this year won’t be much of a legacy to be mentioned in the last newspaper article written about them.

It could be worse.

We remember when sessions went until June 15 in non-election years with a midnight adjournment.  Given what we’ve seen this year, we are intensely grateful that custom was ended some time ago when reason was more present in the General Assembly.

New Winners

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Two drivers pick up their first wins of the year—-although one has to wait an extra day.

INDYCAR)—INDYCAR has finished the part of the season preceding the traditional month of May at the track that gives the series its name.

Pato O’Ward has ended Team Penske domination of the early part of the INDYCAR season with a focused victory at Barber Motorsports Park, his first win since one of the June races at Belle Isle in Detroit last year.  The win moves O’Ward from ninth to fifth in the points. Palou’s runnerup finish moved him top the top of the points list. McLaughlin remains second with previous points leader Josef Newgarden dropping to third with a 14th place finish.

It’s O’Ward’s third career win in INDYCAR and it tightens the standings after the first four races of the year.

The race boiled down to tire strategy and a fight between O’Ward, Alex Palou, and Rinus VeeKay.

VeeKay had a two-second lead on O’Ward just before the two, plus Scott McLaughlin, pitted on the 62nd of 90 laps. VeeKay led coming out of the pits but O’Ward got past him on the course’s fifth turn to take the lead for good.  Palou’s quick pit stop two laps later put him between O’Ward and VeeKay but O’Ward held the lead at almost one second for the remainder of the race.

The next action for INDYCAR will be at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The drivers will run on the infield road course on May 14th before re-tuning their cars for the famous squared oval and the 106th Indianapolis 600 on May 29th.

(NASCAR)—Everybody was chasing Chase at the end of the two-day NASCAR Cup race at Dover—Chase Elliott, becoming the last of the four Hendick Motorsports drivers to snag a win this year.

Elliott took the lead from Ross Chastain with 52 laps left on the one-mile concrete oval and led Ricky Stenhouse Jr., across the finish line under the thirteenth caution flag of the race.  Chastain finished third but not without ruffling the feathers of Martin Truex Jr., who tried to pass him on the outside on the final lap but lost control of his car when Chastain moved up the track.  Truex spun and hit the inside wall.  He kept his car running and salvaged 12th.

Elliott, the 2020 season champion had gone 26 races since his last win last July at Road America.

The race was moved to Monday after rain interrupted Sunday’s race after 78 laps. Denny Hamlin’s disappointing season got worse when his car lost a wheel. Under NASCAR rules, the teams’ crew chief, tire changer and Jackman will be suspended for four races.

Elliott is the ninth winner in the first eleven races of the year.  The 16-car playoff field won’t be set until 15 more races are run.

NASCAR heads to Darlington next weekend.

(FORMULA 1)—Formula 1 is back on track in Miami next Sunday.

(Photo credits: Bob Priddy)

 

Premonition

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Your faithful chronicler was invited to speak to a group of freshman, sophomore, and junior State Representatives last week. It turned out they all were Republicans, including some Republican candidates for the House.

If Democrats want to hear the nonpartisan speech, I’d be glad to do it for them.

In fact, the words of a Democrat had a prominent role in the early part of the speech.  I had recited some facts about being raised in a Republican family. But I came of age in the Camelot era, a pedigree that I hope is somewhat behind my efforts as a reporter to harass both parties equally.

As I was researching some of the material for the speech, I came across the speech President Kennedy would have delivered at the Texas Trade Mart. As history records, the world ended for him ten minutes or so before he was to arrive there. The conclusion of the speech reaches across the generations since that day in Dallas.  Here’s the part of that speech that made it into part of my remarks last week:

“In this time of division and hostility, of narrowness and demagoguery often fueled by fear of the different instead of the opportunities presented by the things we have in common, it might be good to reflect on some of President Kennedy’s words again.  The other day I came across some words he would have spoken at the Dallas Trade Mart on November 22, 1963, a day I remember vividly as a young reporter.

Ignorance and misinformation can handicap the progress of a city or a company, but they can, if allowed to prevail in foreign policy, handicap this country’s security. In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.

There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable.

But today other voices are heard in the land – voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality,…doctrines which apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory and that peace is a sign of weakness…

We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will “talk sense to the American people.” But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense…

We in this country, in this generation, are – by destiny rather than choice – the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: “except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”

It has been too long since we heard that kind of uplifting challenge. And it’s time for leaders with courage to speak that way again.”

The crowd provided a standing ovation at the end of the talk, which was nice. I hope that means they didn’t think they were listening to nonsense.  And that they won’t go out and deliver it.