Monthly Archives: January 2023

Angry People Who Will Not Be Slaves Again

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Our friends Hugh and Lisa Waggoner took us with them recently to the Fox Theatre production of Les Miz.  Midway through the play I was struck with the thought that we were sitting in our comfortable mezzanine chairs listening to incredible voices sing of fighting for freedom while 5,300 miles to our east thousands of people were huddled in cold and dark shattered buildings while thousands of others were dying, fighting for freedom—for real.

And that’s when the lyrics of the songs began to ring differently in my mind. And the words of two contemporary men began a point-counterpoint.

I had a dream in days gone by                                                                                 So different from this hell I’m living,
So different now from what it seemed…
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed…

Vladimir Putin, February 23, 2022: “We have been left no other option to protect Russia and our people, but for the one that we will be forced to use today. The situation requires us to take decisive and immediate action…Its goal is to protect people who have been subjected to abuse and genocide by the regime in Kyiv for eight years. And for this we will pursue the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine, as well as bringing to justice those who committed numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including citizens of the Russian Federation.

Sit yourself down
And meet the best                                                                                                    Innkeeper in town
As for the rest,
All of ’em crooks
Rooking their guests
And cooking the books.
Seldom do you see
Honest men like me
A gent of good intent
Who’s content to be
Master of the house
Doling out the charm
Ready with a handshake
And an open palm…
But nothing gets you nothing
Everything has got a little price!

Volodymyr Zelensky, February 23, 2022: The people of Ukraine and the government of Ukraine want peace. But if we come under attack, if we face an attempt to take away our country, our freedom, our lives and lives of our children, we will defend ourselves. When you attack us, you will see our faces, not our backs.”

Here upon theses stones we will build our barricade
In the heart of the city we claim as our own
Each man to his duty and don’t be afraid

Putin: “What is happening today does not come out of a desire to infringe on the interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. It is related to the protection of Russia itself from those who took Ukraine hostage and are trying to use it against our country and its people.”

(Later): what is happening today is unpleasant, to put it mildly, but we would have got the same thing a little later, only in worse conditions for us, that’s that. So, we are acting correctly and in a timely manner.”

We’ll be ready for these
Schoolboys

Zelensky, December 21, 2022, to the American Congress:  The battle continues, and we have to defeat the Kremlin on the battlefield, yes. This battle is not only for the territory, for this or another part of Europe. The battle is not only for life, freedom and security of Ukrainians or any other nation which Russia attempts to conquer. This struggle will define in what world our children and grandchildren will live, and then their children and grandchildren.

And little people know
When little people fight
We may look easy pickings
But we’ve got some bite
So never kick a dog
Because he’s just a pup
We’ll fight like twenty armies
And we won’t give up
So you’d better run for cover
When the pup grows up! Last Update

 Zelensky, to the American Congress: Dear Americans, in all states, cities and communities, all those who value freedom and justice, who cherish it as strongly as we Ukrainians in our cities, in each and every family, I hope my words of respect and gratitude resonate in each American heart.

Freedom is mine. The earth is still.
I feel the wind. I breathe again.
And the sky clears
The world is waking.
Drink from the pool. How clean the taste.
Never forget the years, the waste.
Nor forgive them
For what they’ve done.
They are the guilty – everyone.
The day begins…
And now lets see
What this new world
Will do for me!

Zelensky: It will define whether it will be a democracy of Ukrainians and for Americans — for all. This battle cannot be frozen or postponed. It cannot be ignored, hoping that the ocean or something else will provide a protection. From the United States to China, from Europe to Latin America, and from Africa to Australia, the world is too interconnected and interdependent to allow someone to stay aside and at the same time to feel safe when such a battle continues.

They were schoolboys
Never held a gun…
Fighting for a new world
That would rise up like the sun.

Zelensky: Our two nations are allies in this battle. And next year will be a turning point, I know it, the point when Ukrainian courage and American resolve must guarantee the future of our common freedom, the freedom of people who stand for their values.

It is time for us all
To decide who we are
Do we fight for the right
To a night at the opera now?

Have you asked of yourselves
What’s the price you might pay?
Is it simply a game
For rich young boys to play?
The color of the world
Is changing day by day…

Red – the blood of angry men!
Black – the dark of ages past!
Red – a world about to dawn!
Black – the night that ends at last!

Zelensky: I know that everything depends on us, on Ukrainian armed forces, yet so much depends on the world. So much in the world depends on you.

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see?
Do you hear the people sing?
Say, do you hear the distant drums?
It is the future that they bring when tomorrow comes!

December 25, 2022:

Putin: “I believe that we are acting in the right direction, we are defending our national interests, the interests of our citizens, our people. And we have no other choice but to protect our citizens.”

Zelensky: ““It’s terror, it’s killing for the sake of intimidation and pleasure. The world must see what absolute evil we are fighting against.”

Oh my friends, my friends forgive me
That I live and you are gone.
There’s a grief that can’t be spoken.
There’s a pain goes on and on.

Phantom faces at the window.
Phantom shadows on the floor.
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will meet no more.

We gave the players before us a standing ovation, our hearts lifted by the ultimate triumph that had been played out before us.  In cold Ukraine, grim and courageous heroes were standing against great odds, hanging on and praying for help that will keep them free.

Freedom is mine. The earth is still.
I feel the wind. I breathe again.
And the sky clears
The world is waking.
Drink from the pool. How clean the taste.
Never forget the years, the waste.
Nor forgive them
For what they’ve done.
They are the guilty – everyone.

It is a long way from the auditorium in St. Louis to the desperate battlefield that is Ukraine where soon would come another dawn.

Tomorrow we’ll discover
What our God in Heaven has in store!
One more dawn
One more day
One day more! 

Freedom is not won or defended on a fabulous theatre stage. It is defended and won on the world stage one day at a time.

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

We must make sure there always is a tomorrow for Ukraine.

(Les Misėrables is a musical based on the novel by Victor Hugo with music by Claude-Michel Schongberg and lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer.)

The Ring-Tailed Painter Puts a Governor in his Place 

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One of the great untapped resources for great stories from Missouri’s earliest days is the county histories that were compiled in the 1870s and ‘80s.

A few days ago, our indefatigable researcher was prowling through one of those old histories to make sure a footnote in the next Capitol book is correct and I came across the story of how Wakenda County became Carroll County.  That led to digging out the 1881 history of Carroll County where I met a fascinating character.  The account concluded with his departure for Texas and that led to an exploration of the early history of Texas. And there was the same guy, with a different name, who was part of the discontented Missourians that lit the fuse for the Texas Revolution.

I’ve written him up for an episode of Across Our Wide Missouri that I’ll record some day for The Missourinet.  The story will be shortened for time constraints.  But I want you to meet one of the many fascinating people whose often-colorful ghosts live in those old books.

The first settler of Carroll County “combined the characters of trapper, Indian skirmisher, and politician….a singular man, eccentric in his habits, and fond of secluding himself in the wilderness beyond the haunts of civilization. He was rough in his manners, but brave, hospitable and daring…He was uneducated, unpolished, profane and pugilistic.”  An 1881 county history says Martin Palmer, at social gatherings “would invariably get half drunk and invariably have a rough and tumble fight.”

He called himself the Ring-Tailed Panther, or as he pronounced it, “the Ring-Tailed Painter” and said he fed his children “on rattlesnake hearts fried in painter’s grease.”  A county in Texas is named for this “half horse and half alligator” of a man.

Martin Palmer was the first state representative from Carroll County in a state legislature that was a mixture of the genteel gentlemen from the city and rough-cut members of the outstate settlements.  During the first legislative session, held in St. Charles, some of the members got into a free-for-all and when Governor Alexander McNair tried to break up what Palmer called “the prettiest kind of fight,” Palmer landed a punch that knocked our first governor to the ground.   He told McNair, as he put it, “upon this principle of democratic liberty and equality,” that “A governor is no more in a fight than any other man.”

Wetmore’s Gazette, published in 1837, recorded that Palmer and his son loaded a small keel boat with salt as they headed for the second legislative session in St. Charles, planning to sell the much-valued mineral when they got there.  But the boat capsized in the dangerous Missouri River. The salt was lost and Palmer and his son survived by climbing on the upside-down boat and riding it until they landed at the now-gone town of Franklin. He remarked, “The river…is no respecter of persons; for, notwithstanding I am the people’s representative, I was cast away with as little ceremony as a stray dog would be turned out of a city church. “

He became a state senator in the third legislative session but left for Texas shortly after, in 1825, as one of the early Missouri residents to move to then-Mexican Texas.

A short time later he was accused of killing a man in an argument. He went to Louisiana and raised a force of men, returned and arrested all of the local Mexican government officials and took control of the area around Nacogdoches. He pronounced himself commander-in-chief of the local government in what became known as the Fredonian Rebellion and ordered all Americans to bear arms. He held “courts martial” for the local officials, convicted them, and sentenced them to death, then commuted the sentences on condition they leave Texas and never return.

Fellow Missourian Stephen F. Austin opposed the rebellion and wrote it was being led by “infatuated madmen.” It ended a month later when the Mexican Army arrived and Palmer went back to Louisiana. But some historians believe it became seed of the later Texas War for Independence.  Palmer later returned to become a key figure in the Texas Revolution.

He was elected a delegate to a convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos. When Sam Houston moved for adoption of the Texas Declaration of Independence, Palmer seconded the motion. He chaired the committee that wrote the Texas Constitution. But he knew it meant war with Mexico. He wrote his wife, “The declaration of our freedom, unless it is sealed with blood, is of no force.”

By now he had changed his last name from Palmer to Parmer. One contemporary observed, “He had a stubborn and determined will and showed impatience of delays…Hewas a unique character but with all he was a man with the best of impulses—honest, brave and heroic.” A fellow delegate called him “a wonderfully fascinating talker…a man absolutely without fear (who) held the Mexicans in contempt.”

After independence was won, Parmer served in the Texas congress and later was appointed Chief Justice of Jasper County, Texas.  He died there at the age of 71. He is buried thirty feet from the grave of Stephen F. Austin, “The Father of Texas,” in the Texas State Cemetery.

In 1876, the Texas Legislature honored a Parmer, “an eccentric Texan of the olden times,” by naming a panhandle county for him.

Missouri’s “Ring-tailed painter,” and fighting Texas pioneer Martin Parmer, born as Martin Palmer died, appropriately, on Texas Independence Day, March 2, 1850.

It’s Not the Silliest Thing I’ve Ever Heard 

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But it’s among ’em.

I’m sure there must have been things that were sillier.  But the push by some members of Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s caucus to expunge Donald Trump’s impeachments is moves the needle on our Outlandish Scale.

They want to say officially that the impeachments never happened.

The House and Senate never debated his impeachments—two of them—no matter what hundreds of pages of the Congressional Record show.  Or newspaper stories.  Or archived video and audio of hours of proceedings.  Or personal memories.

Major issues foreign and domestic loom over the Congress but there are people who think one of the most important things to do is say the House did not impeach Donald Trump.

If the House didn’t impeach him, what were those trials in the Senate all about then?

Here we fall back on some trite observations familiar to all of us:

You can’t un-ring a bell.

You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.

Other perceptions come to mind:

You can close the barn door, but the horse is already gone.

You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

What are they going to do if they pass their expungement resolution?  Come around to my door and tell me “Fuggedaboudit?”  What will they do if I don’t?

Donald Trump is the only president to be impeached twice. Period.

Whether he likes it or not, he’s past history. And the number of people who care what he likes is diminishing.

Don’t waste time on Trump when there’s Joe and Hunter Biden to maul.  Trump is outdated liverwurst. The Bidens are fresh meat.

And in your spare time, address the debt limit and the budget.  And clean up the daily accumulating mess represented by New York’s third district congresman.

But as far as erasing impeachment? Move on. Get over it.

Support your local bureaucrat

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Governor Parson last week recommended a pretty healthy pay increase for state employees.  It’s a much-needed step for a much-underappreciated group of people.

Bureaucrats.   You know, those shiftless people who wrap everything in red tape when they’re not standing outside the front door of a state building, smoking.

Truth be told:  I’m married to a former bureaucrat.  She doesn’t smoke. She never took a state paycheck while frustrating taxpayers with poor service.  She never had anything to do with red tape. She was one of thousands of people who spent their days in cubicles performing everything from mundane tasks to examining situations that would be dangerous to public health and well-being.  She shuffled a lot of paper.  She created a lot of paperwork.  She was a necessary small cog in a very big wheel of a system designed to serve a public too easily bamboozled by opportunistic power-seekers who believe their best road to importance is attacking people such as her.

She left her cubicle behind several years ago to manage a bigger but far less lucrative project: Me.

We hope the legislature acts quickly on the governor’s recommendation of an 8.7 percent cost of living increase.  But his generous gesture constitutes a problem for some in our political world who cavalierly rattle on about shrinking government.  It also presents a problem for those who are eager to cut taxes so they have something to brag about in their 2024 campaigns.

The estimated cost of these salary increases is $151.2 million and that’s only the start.  The number will grow as time passes and more people find state salaries attractive enough to replenish a diminished state workforce—particularly in fields such as prison guards and mental health workers and social services workers, three fields—among many—that require courage and compassion many would find difficult to summon in those professional circumstances. The number also will grow as other increases are approved.

As welcome and as necessary as this expenditure is, it also should temper the enthusiasm of some to reduce the state’s ability to finance it today and properly to augment it tomorrow, lest it lead to layoffs in poorer economic times that will lessen or cancel the progress they create.

These proposed raises fly in the face of those who base their popularity on the time-worn concept of “shrinking government.”  Doing nothing has produced pretty good results for them, although it might be difficult to explain when constituents want to know why they can’t get services government should be providing but can’t get because of too many empty cubicles.

The Missouri Budget Project says the lack of more decent pay has resulted in the decline of state government jobs by 13.2 percent between February 2020 and June 2022. Governor Parson says there are 7,000 unfilled positions in state government and employee turnover is unacceptably high.

Those are numbers of which the “shrinkers” might take pride.  And now, here comes their conservative state leader trying to undo much of the hard-won results of their successful efforts to starve the beast. His common-sense proposal is a challenge to those who think effective and efficient government is possible only if fewer people run it and they’re content with being under-rewarded.  They’re just bureaucrats, you know.  Twenty-first century Bob Cratchits.

One of the goals of the suggested pay increases is to improve recruitment and retention of workers. Oh, Lord, that must mean he supports Big Government!!!

No, he doesn’t. He’s pushing for effective government and we can’t have effective government if we don’t have enough people to do the jobs that effective government requires.  And we can’t get—and keep—enough people if we (us taxpayers) aren’t responsible enough through our representatives and senators to pay them a more-worthy salary.

So, legislators, support your local bureaucrats.  And don’t follow up with something rash that will later set back whatever progress is attained through the governor’s recommendations

When the children’s poet roamed the Capitol

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Of all of the reporters who have covered the State Capitol, only one rose to such significance that a portrait of him is part of the great art in the building. One of the four famous Missourians whose portraits decorate the governor’s office is Eugene Field.  A plaque on the side of a building about three blocks away marks the place where he had his office as a correspondent for the St. Louis Journal.

If you are not familiar with the name, you undoubtedly at some point in your childhood heard the poem beginning:

“Wynken, Blyken, and Nod one night                                                                                            Sailed off in a wooden shoe….”

Or maybe:

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat…”

Or perhaps:

“I ain’t afraid uv snakes or toads, or bugs or worms or mice,                                                       An’ things ‘at girls are skeered uf I think are awful nice!”

One of these days we’ll go to the State Historical Society in Columbia and dig out the articles he wrote from Jefferson City but for now we’ll share with you a recollection by one of his contemporaries, Chicago newspaperman Slason Thompson, who write a book about Field in 1901:

Although Eugene Field made his first essay in journalism as a reporter, there is not the shadow of tradition that he made any more progress along the line of news-gathering and descriptive writing than he did as a student at Williams.  He had too many grotesque fancies dancing through his whimsical brain to make account or “copy” of the plain ordinary facts that for the most part make up the sum of the news of the average reporter’s day.  What he wrote for the St. Louis Journal or Times-Journal, therefore, had little relation to the happening he was sent out to report, but from the outset it possessed the quality that attracted readers.  The peculiarities and not the conventions of life appealed to him and he devoted himself to them with an assiduity that lasted while he lived.  Thus when he was sent by the Journal to Jefferson City to report the proceedings of the Missouri state Legislature, what his paper got was not an edifying summary of that unending grist of mostly irrelevant and immaterial legislation through the General Assembly hopper, but a running fire of pungent comment on the idiosyncrasies of its officers and members.  He would attach himself to the legislators whose personal qualities afforded most profitable ammunition for sport in print.  He shunned the sessions of Senate and House and held all night sessions of story and song with the choice spirits to be found on the floors and in the lobbies of every western legislature.  I wonder why I wrote “western” when the species is as ubiquitous in Maine as in Colorado?  From such sources Field gleaned the infinite fund of anecdote and of character-study which eventually made him the most sought-for boon companion that ever crossed the lobby of a legislature or of a state capital hotel in Missouri, Colorado, or Illinois. He was a looker-on in the legislative halls and right merrily he lampooned everything he saw. Nothing was too trivial for his notice, nothing so serious as to escape his ridicule or satire. 

Sounds as if Eugene Field would have loved some of the things we have today—blogs, Twitter, Facebook—-all of the social media stuff.  But Thompson says that at the time Field was part of the capitol press corps, “There was little about his work…that gave promise of anything beyond the spicy facility of a quick-witted, light-hearted western paragrapher.”

Thompson told of Field’s merry spirit when Fields was assigned the job of (as Thompson put it) “misreporting Carl Schurz when that peripatetic statesman stumped Missouri in 1874 as a candidate for re-election to the United States Senate.”

Field in later years paid unstinted tribute to the logic, eloquence, and patriotic force of Mr. Schurz’s futile appeals to rural voters of Missouri.  But during the trip his reports were in no wise conducive to the success of the Republican an Independent candidate.  Mr. Schurz’s only remonstrances were, “Field, why will you lie so outrageously?”  It was only by the exercise of careful watchfulness that Mr. Schurz’s party was saved from serious compromise through the practical jokes and snares which Field laid for the grave, but not revered Senator.  On one occasion when a party of German serenaders appeared at the hotel where the party was stopping, before Mr. Schurz had completed a necessary change of toilet. Field stepped out on the veranda, and waving the vociferous cornet and trombone to silence, proceeded to address the crowd in broken English.  As he went on the cheering soon subsided into amazed silence at the heterodox doctrines he uttered, until the bogus candidate was pushed unceremoniously aside by the real one.  Mr. Schurz had great difficulty in saving Field from the just wrath of the crowd, which had resented his broken English more than his political heresies.

On another occasion when there was a momentary delay on the part of the gentleman who was to introduce Mr. Schurz, Field stepped to the front and with a strong German accent addressed the gathering as follows:

“Ladies and Shentlemen:  I haf such a pad colt dot et vas not bossible for me to make you a speedg tonight, but I have die bleasure to introduce you to my prilliant chournalistic friend Euchene Fielt, who will spoke to you in my blace.” 

It was all done so quickly and so seriously that the joke was complete before Mr. Schurz could push himself into the centre of the stage. Annoyance and mirth mingled in the explanation that followed.  A love of music was the only thing that made Field tolerable to his serious-minded elder.

A July 3, 1924 story in the Jefferson City Daily Capital News gives us more stories about Fields’ days as a member of the Capitol press corps.  E. W. Stephens, the chairman of the State Capitol Commission that oversaw construction of the building, related:

“When Field was acting as a reporter in Jefferson City he sometimes tied his young son to a post while he went into the Capitol to get a story.  I remember that he organized a band of serenaders here that was known as the Van Amburgh Show. One man impersonated a monkey, one a lion, another a monkey, and so on.  It was a real circus especially when the lion roared.  Field took the men and drilled them and then serenaded the governor and other dignitaries. 

“Field was very fond of singing and one of his most popular songs was ‘I am captain of the Armyee.’  It goes like this:

I am Captain Jinks of the Horse marines,                                                                I feed my horse on corn and beans,                                                                        I court young ladies in their teen                                                                              I am a captain of the armyee.

“Another song he was fond of singing was, ‘If I was as young as I used to be.’  I remember one evening when Field was attending a party at the home of Judge Warren Woodson.  The evening was warm, and couples strolled to a nearby well occasionally, after water.  Someone came in and reported that a certain young man had been seen at the well kissing a young woman.  Field immediately paraphrased a song which he was in the habit of singing and when the couple returned sang the following version of ‘The Old Man.’

When I was young and in my prime,                                                                      I was drinking cold water most of my time.                                                                If any girl here will go to the well with me,                                                                I’ll show her I’m as young as I used to be.”

We have come across a letter Field wrote from Jefferson City to his wife, Julia, whom he had married in October, 1873, about two months before her seventeenth birthday.  She had remained in St. Joseph.  Most of the letter is the kind of usual chit-chat but toward the end, we learn a little about how bored he was in Jefferson City.  It was sent on January 12, 1874.

My dear wife.  I was delayed somewhat in making up my report tonight and am therefore compelled to sit up and wait for the down train so as to mail my letter to the Journal.  I have been feeling much better today and am more in condition to work.  Edgar’s letter received this morning. You will be very much disappointed about the wedding, will you now, Julia?  I am indeed sorry that I am so situated as to be unable to go.  Mr. Selby wants me to ask you whether you think it safe to let me stay in Jefferson this winter, without your presence to keep me within the proper limits. I tell him that it is your choice to be in St. Joseph and I want you to stay there as long as you feel that you want to.  This has been a cold, raw day and yet I have been on the go most of the time.  The session has not got fairly to running.  When it does, I expect we shall have very lively times.  I went to call on Miss Ella Woodson night before last.  She is looking about as usual, perhaps not quite so delicate.  I will write often to you, darling. Don’t forget that I love you dearly.  I send many kisses. Yours ever, Field.  

Eugene Field must have been one of those people who left his more conventional colleagues in the capitol press corps with a combination of amusement and embarrassment and maybe a little envy. But most of his fellow reporters then as well as his reportorial descendants now could or can identify with an observation he wrote in the Journal on August 3, 1878:

“A great many newspaper men lie awake night after night mentally debating whether they will leave their property to some charitable institution or spend it the next day for something with a little lemon in it.”

We’ve Seen This Before 

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It’s called the tyranny of the minority.

Watching Congressman Kevin McCarthy trying to appease an unwilling minority in his party so he could realize his dream of becoming Speaker of the House was agonizing last week.  But for those of us who follow Missouri politics it as not an unfamiliar experience.

Remember the 2021 legislative session when an ultra-conservative segment of Senate Republicans held the entire chamber hostage when they couldn’t get their way on a congressional redistricting map?  Day after day they refused to let any other business be done until they could get their way. On a few occasions the remaining Republicans got some support from minority Democrats to move something—a relationship that really steamed the tyrannical minority.

In Washington last week we watched Kevin McCarthy come about as close to making the Speakership a figurehead position in his effort to get enough of his hard right party members to let him have the job.

As the process wore on, we wondered if it occurred to McCarthy that he had to protect the Speakership, not just his own personal ambitions. Neutering the Speakership sews the seeds of anarchy in the House.

We saw in the Missouri Senate last year the dangers of deadlock caused by those who replaced public service with political power.  To see the same scenario played out on a national scale is disastrous for those who have some faith in our system.

McCarthy was finally picked on the 15th ballot when Congressman Matt Gaetz, who had proclaimed himself a never-Kevin vote switched to “present.”

So now the House of Representative can get down to business.  But the narrowness of the Republican majority and the divisions within the party are likely to prove hazardous to McCarthy’s House leadership.

And don’t forget that a favorite punching bag of the Republicans, President Biden, holds a veto pen and there appears to be zero chance that the House can get a two-thirds vote to override a presidential veto, assuming it can get its legislation through the Senate and to the president’s desk..

The spectacle has not ended with McCarthy’s selection as Speaker.

Politics is an imperfect science but we never have seen such a time as when good will seems so unachievable.  Did any of us elect any of them to think that there is nothing more important than who sits in what office in one building in Washington, D.C.?

Today we mourn the (temporary, we hope) passing of the ideal of majority rule. A tyrannical minority can be put in its place if the two major factions would recognize they must create the majority—and in the creation of a bipartisan majority, return sanity to our system.

We still have the hope that somebody will be unafraid to scale the wall separating the parties and produce enough unity to overcome the tail that thinks it can wag the congressional dog.

The Speakership is more important than any individual that aspires for it. If protecting the office and its responsibility and its power means reaching across the partisan wall, let the reaching begin.  We need to know that the tyrannical minority is not in charge.

But frankly, we’re not sure it won’t be.

Do you know how to tell—

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—if a politician is lying?

His lips are moving.

This old and cynical joke that cavalierly diminishes all of those who seek to serve honorably has found new circulation thanks to a New York congressional candidate who told lie after lie during his campaign, got elected, has grudgingly admitted to some of his lies, but is unrepentant and as of the writing of this entry plans to take the oath of office.

George Santos is a Republican and (so far) the leadership of his party has been pretty silent about his admissions and the additional lies uncovered by reporters. About the only thing that seems to be true about him is that he’s a Republican. For now, anyway.  If his clay feet, which have crumbled at least ankle-high, continue to crumble, he might be most appropriationly listed as (P-NY), for “Pariah” from New York.

“I am not a criminal,” he told The New York Post. “This will not deter me from having good legislative success. I will be effective. I will be good.”

Whether he is not a criminal is open to some question. Did his claims constitute fraud?  Did he lie to obtain campaign donations, thus defrauding donors?  Did his lies result in financial gain?  Did he lie on his campaign financial disclosure forms, a potential criminal act? And those are starter questions..

He claimed to be the grandchild of Ukrainian natives who escaped the holocaust by going to Belgium and then to Brazil. Investigators say he is not.  He’s a native Brazilian and there are shadows over his life there.

He claimed to be Jewish. He released a position paper during his campaign saying he was “a proud American Jew.”  That was then. Now he says he never claimed to be a Jew and that he’s Catholic who is “Jew-ish,” a comment that the word “outlandish” is inadequate to describe. He says his grandmother told him stories about being Jewish before she converted to Catholicism. His grandparents were born in Brazil.  The Democrat he beat in November says Santos’ lies about his Jewish background are more than offensive—“It’s sick and obscene,” he says.

In the campaign he claimed that he had been openly gay for more than a decade and is married to another man.  But another news organization has learned he was married to a woman that he divorced in 2019 and has found no record of his marriage to the man Santos says is his husband.

He claimed to have worked with two of the biggest names in the financial industry—Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, neither of which says his name ever appeared on their employee rolls. He says he probably could have used “a better choice of words” in making that claim.

He claimed to have attended New York University and to have graduated from Baruch College. Now he confesses, “I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning.” He says he is “embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my resume.” But he excused himself by commenting, “A lot of people overstate in their resumes or twist a little bit.”

Embellished his resume?  And it’s okay because “a lot of people” do it “a little bit?”

What he has done is more than “a little bit.”  He lied and now he’s lying about lying. In fact, he has created a waterfall of lies including how much property he does or does now own, and how many dogs his nonprofit dog rescue group rescued.

The silence of his party’s leadership, particularly his future colleagues in the United States House of Representatives is tragic in this time when distrust of those who seek public service or those who win positions of public service is so strong.  Santos tars all of them with his irresponsible campaign and his petulant responses to those who have exposed him for what he is—a man who was incapable of truth during his campaign and seems incapable of admitting the depth of his lies after his election.

Unfortunately, the public doesn’t see him as the exception to the rule. Unfortunately, the public has come to believe his kind IS the rule.

But I know from years of front-row coverage of politics and politicians that people of his kind are the rotten apple that spoils the barrel.

The Santoses of the political world damn the saints of the political world. It is up to those who will take office for the first time in 2023 to be the kind of people who eventually leave public life having uplifted public opinion about those who go from being “one of us” on election day to being “one of them.”  It will be a heavy lift.  Honor is a great weight.

Failure of his party, particularly those who will be leaders of his party colleagues in Washington, to censure—even expel—him will deepen mistrust in all of those in either party, further damaging our republic and furthering the aims of those who seek to capitalize on distrust in it to strengthen their hopes for control.

“Disgrace” is spelled S-A-N-T-O-S.

Notes from a quiet  street  (Happy New Year edition) 

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For the rare and cherished few who expect to find something new on this site a couple of times a week, we must explain that it is not because we had run out of pithiness. It is because a company that calls us a “valued customer” apparently doesn’t value our customership very much at all.

On September 29, Mediacom laid a cable on top of our street to restore our internet service after the Socket folks ripped up the buried line while digging to install their fiber optic cable.  A couple of weeks later I suggested to the folks at the local Mediacom office that it would be good to bury that cable before the first big snow brought out a snowplow that would collect it—and who knows how many above-ground connector boxes and private mail boxes that the cable pulls down as the snowplow proceeds down the street.

That line was still lying on the street until the afternoon of December 22.  It snowed and as I had told the foretold in the Mediacom office and the first snowplow did yank out the.  I saw several feet of orange cable in the yard of a neighbor up the street. On the 20th, I had visited the local office for a second time and a friendly lady behind the desk said repairs are usually made within 24 hours. I told a nice Mediacom lady from Iowa who answered the company trouble line that I expected this problem to be solved regardless of the temperature (which was below zero, you might remember) within 24 hours. The company sent us a notice that it would be a week before anything was done, that repairs would be made on the 28th and required us to be at home between 10 a.m. and noon.

On the afternoon of the 27th, Mediacom—without ever calling us or ringing our doorbell—stretched a new line across the top of the street. The line was only partly covered so vehicles going over it did not damage it. The next day, the Mediacom tech person who was supposed to respond rang our door bell. We had a nice discussion in which he told me, among other things, that we would lose our internet service as many times as the snowplows came out this winter.  Too bad. But that’s Mediacom Life.

I sent a letter to the editor of the News-Tribune, who published it yesterday. Several folks at church or at the noontime restaurants we checked out told me they agreed with it. They’re apparently valued customers, too.

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I made a big mistake the week before Christmas.

I bought a new computer because my old hard drive was dying.

For the price I paid for the computer, I could have bought about eight of Donald Trump’s superhero cards.

Buyer’s remorse has not yet set in, though.

If you bought any of them, would you let me know if any of them show him as a Capitol policeman on January 6, 2021 or as a Ukrainian freedom fighter?

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There’s this old and somewhat indelicate saying, “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s too late to drain the swamp.”  The release of the January 6 Committee report has called that observation to mind in reference to someone who once promised to drain a certain swamp.

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One of the fun things about researching history is prowling through the millions of pages of old newspapers at the State Historical Society.  And reading the old advertisements is often fun.  I made a copy of a headline for one and it’s magneted to our refrigerator.

It says “Ice Cream is Real Food.”

Now that’s real truth in advertising.

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State Conservation Department Director Sara Pauley Parker wrote in her Missouri Conservationist  “Up Front” column in December of 2021 that she’s a dog person. She wrote, “I especially appreciate dogs that will look you in the eye, know their role in life, and want to serve honorably.”

I’m hoping the Missouri House and the Missouri Senate will be kennels, starting Wednesday.

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It’s hard to beat honey by itself and honey-butter on a hot roll is an unacknowledged delicacy.  A old newspaper ad I came across recently urges people to “Get that quick relief that brings back the normal ‘pep’ and energy. Don’t suffer a minute longer than you actually have to.” The cure?  Dr. Bell’s Pine Tar Honey for Coughs and Colds.

If Dr. Bell’s cure isn’t tasty enough, you might try a spoonful of a variation made by the Certified Hospital Products Company: Pine Tar Honey and Eucalyptus (Mentholated).

Menthol.  That will do the trick.

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Retired Missouri football coach Gary Pinkel has been inducted into the National Football Foundation College Football Hall of Fame, something he could not have imagined after his teams had gone 10-14 in his first two years in Columbia.  In fact, he admits he started wondering if he’d made a mistake going to Missouri and if he would last much longer.

In his first four years the Tigers were 22-25.   But Missouri kept him.

The Tigers played their 34th bowl game a few days before Christmas. (Their 35th bowl game was Covided out a couple of years ago).  Their fourth bowl loss in a row left Eliah Drinkwitz’s record at 17-19.

The fourth year will be a critical one for him, as it was for his predecessor, Barry Odom.  Odom was sacked when his Tigers were 25-25.  But Gary Pinkel was only 22-25 after four years and Missouri kept him.

How have other Mizzou coaches done after four years? Larry Smith was 18-27.  Bob Stull was 12-31-1 before he left the field and became an athletic director at another school.  Woody Widenhofer was 12-31-1 and Al Onofrio was 22-24.

Incidentally, Don Faurot, whose name is on the field on which Drinkwitz’s players perform, was 0-4 in bowl games.

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