Monthly Archives: July 2025

Sports: MLB teams muddle along as trading deadline nears: and a special win in NASCAR)

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(CARDINALS)—The Cardinals post all-star game drive to the playoff has been an unsteady one with a terrible turn in Colorado, where the worst team in major league baseball this year took two out of three—and wrapped up the series by holding the Redbirds scoreless, 6-0.  It’s the first time in 220 games that Denver has shut out an opponent. The win left Denver 26-76.

The Cardinals, thus, helped set a major league record by ending the Rockies record run of no shutouts.  The shutout is only the third time St. Louis has been shut out in the 32-year history of the Rockies. It was the second straight series loss since the break and dropped them to just one game over .500 after losing five of their first six games on the road trip and being outscored 20-1 in the first three innings.

The only win in those first six games was the middle game in the Denver series when Michael McGreevy, just up from Memphis picked up the victory.  His performance was solid enough that the team decided it’s time for one of its younger pitchers to become a starter. But that meant that a veteran had to go. In this case, it was Erick  Fedde, who has been a bust for St. Louis this year. He’s 3-10 with a 5.22 ERA. In his last 17 2/3 innings he gave up 26 earned runs. He’s 33-52 in eight major league seasons. The Braves have decided to pick him up. They’ll give the Cardinals some cash or a player later.  Fedde will be a free agent at the end of the season.

We start the week still waiting for the Cardinals to make the blockbuster trade that various sorts experts have been predicting.

(ROYALS)—The Royals  have continued to muddle along but they have gone to the free agent market to pick up former Cardinals outfielder Randall Grichuk from the Diamondbacks in exchange for pitcher Andrew Hoffman.  Grichuk, who is expected to immediately improve the outfield offensively and defensively, went one-for-four in his first game with the new team.  For now, he takes the roster place of rookie outfielder Jac Caglianone, who has gone on the 10-day DL with a strained left hamstring. Caglianone has struggled at the plate in his first season.  Grichuk was hitting .240 with 175 AB this year. He’s a lifetime .252 hitter  with five teams in a 12-year career.

Also going on the DL is starting pitcher Kris Bubic, our for 15 days with a rotator cuff strain.

The Royals did make a major commitment to the pitching staff, signing Seth Lugo to a two-year, $46 million guaranteed contract extension.

Last night, the Royals lost 10-7 to the Braves.  The game is memorable because Royals pitchers tied a club record with fourteen walks.  Six of those walks were dealt by Rich Hill, the 45-year old journeyman pitcher making his second start with his record-tying 14th team. He also gave up four runs and gave up two homers.

Now, the story of a man named Darrell and his record-setting day

(NASCAR)—

This is William Darrell Wallce, who goes by his middle name and more often is known as Bubba.  He’s a NASCAR driver who had gone three years, 100 races, since his last victory. When he broke that string this past weekend, he made significant auto racing history.

Bubba Wallace became the first Black driver to win a major race in the 116 year history of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He and Wendell Scott are the only black drivers to win a NASCAR race. Scott won one race in 1963. Wallace now has three NASCAR Cup winner’s trophies.

He only the third black driver to compete in one of the major races at the Speedway and the first since George Mack in 2002. The first was Willy T. Ribbs in 1991 and 1993

Wallace took the lead with less than twenty laps to go and held a three second lead over defending race champion Kyle Larson when a crash brought out the caution flag and bunched up the field for a restart. But he got the jump—twice—on Larson on two overtime restarts and took the checkered flag two tenths of a second ahead of Larson.

The win makes him the thirteenth entrant in the 16-driver playoff field with four races to go before that field is set.  Three non-winners are in the top ten in points and could be eliminated from the championship run if three other drivers win one of those four races.

Two other drives merit special attention:

Denny Hamlin, who was on a pole-setting run, wrecked on his second qualifying lap and started dead last, 39th. He and his pit crew got him to fifth for the last restart (that’s his 11 in the picture) and he picked up two more positions third place at the end.

And the only woman racing in NASCAR, Kathryn Legge (she pronounces the first three letters of her last name) drew praise for finishing 17th, far better than her average finish this year. She was on the leader’s lap on the last restart and held her position during the wild two-lap green-white-checker flag scramble to the end.

 

(INDYCAR)—Alex Palou puts more points distance between himself and challenger Pato O’Ward with a win at Laguna Seca, near Monterey, California. It’s his eighth win of the year. It has been eighteen years since anybody won eight races on the INDYCAR schedule.

Sebastian Bourdais did it in 2007.

The record for most wins in a season has been set and equaled at 10. A. J. Foyt in 1964 and Al Unser Senion in 1970 are the only ones to hit that mark.

Now he has eight of those. The record is 10 by A.J. Foyt in 1964 and Al Unser in 1970.

Two wins in the last three races of the year would let Palou tie the record.

(Photo credits: Wallace speaking and winning, restart and Legge—Bob Priddy; Wallace car—Rick Gevers)

Two-faced

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Our Missouri Republican delegates in Washington, House members and Senators, have supported the Trump administration’s major legislative effort to control the information Americans—and, in particular, their constituents—can receive.

In the case of Congressman Mark Alford, whose district stretches from Kansas City and the western border to Columbia and almost to Springfield, his support of the crippling recission of funds from public broadcasting might not be as hypocritical as you can get but it’s close.

On March 20, Alford and two other members of the House formed the Broadcasters Caucus. He said THEN, “As a longtime TV news reporter, including anchoring Kansas City’s top morning news show for nearly twenty-five years, I’m proud to help lead the Broadcaster’s Caucus this Congress. Our time in the media gave us a front row seat to the stories that impact our constituents’ lives, as well as insight into how misguided public policy can harm the local radio and TV stations Missourians rely on. I look forward to working with Co-chairs Flood, Soto, and Boyle to educate our colleagues, bridge the partisan divide, and solve the issues that matter to the broadcasting community.”

“Broadcast journalism is the cornerstone of how Middle America receives its news,” said Congressman Flood (NE-01). “The significance of local radio and television stations cannot be overstated—they help connect communities to the news that shapes our way of life. As someone who grew up in the broadcasting world before coming to Congress, I know firsthand how critical this kind of advocacy is for broadcasters. I’m pleased to be joined by Congressmen Alford, Boyle, and Soto as co-chairs as we continue the caucus’ mission in the 119th Congress.”

“I helped start the Broadcasters Caucus five years ago to support the important work of our local radio and television stations, and I’m excited to continue the Caucus’ bipartisan mission in the 119th Congress. Both as a student broadcaster and as the Representative for the people of Pennsylvania’s 2nd district, I have seen firsthand how many Americans rely on our local broadcasters for the news they need about our communities and the world. I look forward to working alongside Congressmen Alford, Flood, and Soto to support the vital work of our local broadcasters,” said Congressman Brendan Boyle (PA-02).

Congressman Darren Soto chimed in, “Helping lead the Broadcaster’s Caucus this Congress has been a privilege, especially as we work to amplify the voices of Central Florida. Our region’s diverse communities and dynamic growth demand that we stand together to ensure fair representation, and I’m proud to be part of this effort to strengthen the future of broadcasting for all.”

(I added the bold face emphasis)

Noble words then. The National Association of Broadcasters was thrilled. Association CEO Curtis LeGeyt commended this  bunch for recognizing “the vital role local TV and radio stations play in every community across the country.”  He pledged the NAB would help these four “advance bipartisan policies that allow local stations to continue serving their audiences with the trusted news, sports, weather and emergency updates they depend on every day.”

But a few days ago, Alford was singing the Trump song about the media that seems to be strikingly different from what he said in March: “NPR and PBS have gotten funding from the taxpayers and they’ve gone way too far to the Left. The taxpayer dollar should not be funding propaganda.”

No, it’s best to only circulate Trump propaganda. And it’s easy to throw around a vague accusation without showing that TV shows on quilting and painting and teaching kids how to respect each other and their elders are somehow dangerously socialistic or woke.

Columbia television station KMIZ (Columbia has two publicly supported radio stations including NPR affiliate KBIA that operates satellite transmitters in Mexico and Kirksville) got a statement from Alford praising the cuts.

Alford continued, “With the proliferation of free, high-quality education content across the internet, NPR and PBS have outlived their usefulness. In addition, these outlets — especially at the national level — routinely show a clear left-wing bias, which should not be subsidized by taxpayers. For more than 25 years as a television news anchor, I competed against these taxpayer-subsidized entities. NPR and PBS should compete in the marketplace for advertising dollars just like ABC 17. It’s time for Big Bird to leave the nest.”

The Big Bird nest thing has been around for a long time. Surely he could have found a more original way to demonstrate he really didn’t mean all the good things he was saying about broadcasters, no exceptions, in March.

In truth, Alford probably didn’t compete much against PBS and NPR because PBS and NPR focus on national and international news and he was more locally-focused.  Plus, it’s hard to believe that the underwriters of public broadcasting would be significant sponsors on his commercial station.

And just where does he think Big Bird will find a home in today’s commercial TV world—because that is what the cut off in public funding will force the welcome world of commercial-free information, entertainment, and creative educational programming to go. And if public broadcasting has to start doing the kinds of advertising we hear on commercial stations, wont that increase competition for the already-limited advertising dollars that support traditional commercial media?

Big Bird is a big problem to the Trumpers.  Sesame Street has been teaching children about tolerance and respect for others as well as counting and learning the alphabet for decades. Big Bird never cultivates fear or disrespect of other creatures, all of which are concepts Trump and his toadies love to promote on commercial stations.

KBIA’s general manager told KMIZ, “As publicly funded organizations, NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service are legally required to follow principles of fairness, balance and objectivity in their programming, according to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. The use of these guidelines by public and private news media has come under question during both Trump terms with the President coining the phrase ‘fake news.’”

I’ve got news, real news, for these members of Congress and their presidential bed partner. Alford’s comment that, “With the proliferation of free, high-quality education content across the internet, NPR and PBS have outlived their usefulness,” is a pretty blatant reversal from his comments about broadcasters in March.

Listenership and viewership of NPR and PBS programming give lie to his claim that the internet has made both of them no longer useful. If they are no longer useful, then his commercial broadcasters are just passengers in the other end of the boat. His real problem, and Trump’s real problem, is that the PBS Newshour is not the evening news on the One America Network and that NPR’s Morning Edition is not Newsmax’s “Wake Up America.”

Big corporations own commercial radio stations these days and few of them want to invest in much local programming, if any at all. Spending money on people reporting on city councils, school boards, county commissions, local weather (they don’t even have their own announcer giving weather forecasts) doesn’t help dividends to stockholders. In the Jefferson City/Fulton/Columbia market, it’s hard to find a radio news person who actually covers local news in person or a station that sets aside time for reporting it.  A search of their webpages for “local news” turn up nothing or next to nothing—except KBIA.

Radio might be a dying medium and if it is, it is a self-inflicted wound because corporations give listeners no reason to listen and Alford and his companions, despite their March words, are doing nothing to change that system.Without local voices talking about local issues, why should people listen, especially if the program schedule is more focused on influencing public opinion rather than informing it and the same programs or kinds of programs can be found all up and down the dial.

The story is similar throughout the United States including a tragic development in Missouri.  Recently, the stations founded by radio pioneer Jerrell Shepherd of Moberly in the late 40s and early 50s have been sold to a company that told staff members showing up for work one day earlier this year that were fired at the end of their shifts.  And these were stations widely known for “owning” their markets because of their local news coverage.

The decline in local news coverage is infecting some television markets, too. One major TV conglomerate owner has replaced most local reporting with its own reporters in Washington and other places. Some time is allotted to local weather and local sports (very little to sports) but viewers don’t get much local or regional information anymore.

And newspapers. The internet has sucked huge amounts of revenue from newspapers. Look at the classified ad pages of today’s newspapers and recall when there used to be several. Look for grocery advertisers or car dealer ads; you won’t find them.  Real estate sections are long gone.

Too many small-market weekly newspapers have been cornered by a limited number of larger companies that see them only as a profit center, not part of a community. One person with a camera and a computer is the editor/reporter and the newspaper is filled with material from other towns under the same company ownership. It’s happening in a lot of larger markets, too.

If newspapers and commercial radio stations struggle to find revenues to continue fulfilling their vitally important traditional roles in our communities, then we—as responsible citizens—need NPR and PBS.  And if we have a country that believes in an educated, intelligent citizenry, then our country owes it to all of us to make sure public radio and television can flourish independent of government dictation or censorship, an independence President Trump and his loyalists do not want to exist.

At a time when it is critical to have more eyes on government, the number is shrinking badly. Local news deserts are increasing all across the country thanks to corporations that find it cheaper to bring in talk shows from outside, forget about offering anything that actually serves local audiences with information about local agencies and organizations are doing. Automate everything and dump news staffs.

Public radio stations not only are, in too many places, the only places on the dial where you will hear local voices, where you will hear local news AND where you will hear a variety of programs that are well above politics.  Intelligent discussions of issues are running counter to the desire of some elements to have only one view on the air.

I have watched and listened to public broadcasting for decades. Our household has memberships at KBIA and at the PBS Station in Warrensburg, KMOS-TV.  We are enriched because we get a variety of information programs that apparently are objectionable because they do not advocate the line of the party in power, particularly the leader of such a party who wants to control the narrative American people are allowed to hear. If it’s not some lie from his mouth, it’s fake news.

To that point (and I’ve said this before): I have never indulged in reporting fake news but I have done news about fakes.  If I were still an active reporter and on the national level, I would be swimming in the latter pool.

And I’d be asking some pretty severe questions about those such as Alford who mouthed about support of a caucus that provides insight into how misguided public policy can harm the local radio and TV stations Missourians rely on but who then turn around and get in bed with a president who prefers nobody offer any such insight, and who is quick to punish those who question his statements, his policies, and his morals.

This entry has gone on long enough. I dare not get into the CBS sellout except this note:

I dearly hope that Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal do not wilt in the face of a big revenge lawsuit filed by President Trump against them for reporting on a cartoon he reportedly sent to his close buddy, Jeffrey Epstein. He has put himself in the crosshairs of a more comprehensive investigation by filing this suit. Who knows what will crawl out from under the rocks that are lifted in the discovery process.

All the Wall Street Journal has to do is put that drawing on the internet and the heat will greatly increase under the cooking goose.

The Disaster 

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We pause today to pay tribute to the humble and often-maligned FEMA trailer, the refuge for those who have watched all that they have wash away, be blown away, burned away in a natural disaster.  The Federal Emergency Management Agency has given hundreds of thousand of victims of fires, floods, earthquakes, and windstorms places to live while they begin to reassemble their lives.

FEMA Trailers often are criticized for their condition or their environmental problems. But they also are symbols of a nation that believes all of us must help some of us in times of disaster.

That concept is strange to the people in charge in Washington, led by a person who has never known and has no sympathy for those socially and mentally beneath him.  And that is why the trailers and the federal agency that provides these crucial shelters are endangered.

The administration in Washington is reacting poorly to reports that the emergency management system locally and federally was broken when more than 150 people lost their lives in the July 6 Texas flash flood.

The New York Times has described some of the dimensions of the disaster that the administration has inflicted on the nation’s disaster agency:

“On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.

“The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.”

Unbelievably, a statement from FEMA claimed, “When a natural disaster strikes, phone calls surge, and wait times can subsequently increase. Despite this expected influx, FEMA’s disaster call center responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently, ensuring no one was left without assistance.”

And what one person appears to be behind that totally untrue statement, delivered to the newspaper through an unsigned email?

On that very day, July 5, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem failed to renew or extend the agreements with the contract operators of those call centers leading to layoffs of thousands of employees. She has to approve any expenses of more than $100,000 and she didn’t do it for five days.

Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee also say Noem did not authorize deployment of search and rescue teams until three days after the flooding began.

Earlier this year, President Trump called for elimination of the entire agency and in June, FEMA stopped going door to door in disaster areas to find those needing help.

The Times identified the acting administrator of FEMA as David Richardson, “who has no background in emergency management.” He took the position May 8 and a week later, according to The Wall Street Journal, admitted privately that he did not have a plan for the spring Atlantic hurricane season. Reuters reported on June 2 that he had told the staff he didn’t know there was such a thing—a comment the agency claimed later was a joke. CNN has reported he went to Kerrville, Texas on July 12 but refused to answer any questions from reporters.

The President has said often he wants to transfer much of the responsibility for disaster response to the states that already are facing struggles because of large cuts in federal funds going to them for various programs.

If you are old enough to recall the great 103-day1993 flood, you are likely to remember the thousands of FEMA trailers brought to Missouri from numerous other states to be temporary homes for our people.  Imagine the state having to find—and pay for—those trailers while also dealing with the costs of fixing destroyed roads, bridges, and public buildings and paying for the massive extra personnel costs of first responders, National Guard sandbaggers, and healthcare givers among thousands of other expenses.  The Weather Service estimated the damages totaled twelve to sixteen billion 1993 dollars.

Or more recently:

Sure, the state of Missouri can handle something like this. Easily. The amateurs and idealogues in Washington know it can. Without doing any research.

These things are permanent parts of our lives. There were 27 disasters causing at least one billion dollars damage reported last year alone.

The Times has reported FEMA grants totaling $3.6 billion dollars already have been revoked. The money was earmarked for protection of communities from wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters.  One in five agency staff members are likely to be gone by the end of the year.

Trump wants to shut down ten NOAA laboratories in the next fiscal year that research changes in weather patterns. The studies are based on global warming, something the President doesn’t believe in. One of the targeted labs is the one that sends hurricane hunter airplanes into storms to collect important forecasting data and other information.

Another cut that’s important to us in Missouri would cut programs that use river gauges to forecast floods. Those gauges check river levels every fifteen seconds and are used to issue flood alerts.  They showed the sudden rise of the river in Texas July 5th.  They measured the weeks of Missouri and Mississippi River floodwaters in 1993. Trum wants to eliminate more than twenty percent of the budget of that program.

Times reporters say the Weather service did issue appropriate warnings for the area flooded in Texas but staff cutbacks had left the San Antonio office without a warning coordination meteorologist.  That’s the person that works with local emergency managers to warn people of floods and helps them get to safe ground.

From gutting the national weather service to hamstringing the call centers and other response entities and reducing abilities to forecast hurricanes and floods and to crippling disaster responses, the administration is once again acknowledging that the word “humane” is not in its dictionary.

The real disaster is not wind, fire, and water.

(Photo credits: Trailers–Magnolia Reporter; Joplin Tornado–National Standards for Technology; Flood–USGS)

Sports: Lows and highs at Mizzou; Chiefs Lock In Two, Third Escapes Lockup;  Bad Baseball, And More.

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(MIZBB)—It might be the dawn of Tiger football season but the big Mizzou sports story of the week is with the roundballers. And it is a really big deal.

Guard Jason Crowe Junior also had been courted by UCLA, USC, and Kentucky. It’s a verbal commitment. Signing day isn’t until November so he could bolt.

247 sports ranks him as the sixth best player in the class of 2026. He’s from Inglewood, Califoornia, 6-3 with arms of a player two inches taller. He’s considered so good that some see him going to the NBA after one season at Missouri.

He’s the second-best recruit in Tiger basketball history. Number one is Michael Porter Jr., whose career didn’t turn out too well because of injuries.

(MIZFB1)—When former Tiger wide receiver Luther Burden I11 unexpectedly dropped off the list of first round NFL draft picks, he said, “That’s staying with me forever. Everybody who passed up on me gotta pay.”

But first, the team that took him as the 39th overall pick is GOING to pay.  The Chicago Bears have signed Burden to a guaranteed eleven million dollar contract. He is the first 39th pick in the NFL draft to sign a guaranteed deal.

(MIZFB2)—Once again, the Southeastern Conference media have picked Missouri to be in the lower tier of the football standings this year.

Twelfth, to be exact.

The Tigers play eight conference games, five against teams ranked higher: Alabama is third; South Carolina is ranked fifth. Texas A&M ranks number 8 with Oklahoma tenth. Auburn is forecast to finish one slot above Missouri. Below Missouri are Vanderbilt (13th), Arkansas (14), and Mississippi State, picked for last, at 16th.

The sportswriters think left guard Cayden Green is a first-team all-conference player. Wide receiver Kevin Coleman has been picked for the third team.

Here’s how the fulltime sports writers think the conference will look at the end (first place votes in parenthesis:

  1. Texas (96)
  2. Georgia (44)
  3. Alabama (29)
  4. LSU (20)
  5. South Carolina (5)
  6. Florida (2)
  7. Ole Miss (1)
  8. Texas A&M
  9. Tennessee (1)
  10. Oklahoma (3)
  11.  Auburn (1)
  12. Missouri
  13. Vanderbilt (2)
  14. Arkansas
  15. Kentucky
  16. Mississippi State

Vanderbilt got TWO first-place votes???

Missouri starts its fall practices one week from today.

(CHIEFS)—The Kansas City Chiefs start their pre-season camp today in St. Joseph. They’ll have wide receiver Rashee Rice on hand but they don’t yet know how much of the season he will miss. Rice has avoided a serious prison sentence with a plea bargain growing out of his big traffic crash in Dallas in 2024 that will put him on probation for five years and let him serve thirty days in jail at his convenience. He also has paid the medical bills of those he hurt, about $115,000 worth.

The NFL has not yet announced what IT plans to do about him, but a multi-game suspension appears to be looming—the Chiefs think he’ll be gone for two to five games. The Chiefs, however, are not totally without speedy wide receivers. This year’s fourth-round pick, Jalen Royals is on the depth chart behind Rice,  Xavier Worthy, and Marquise Brown.

A few days ago the Chiefs made sure two key players on the line would be around for several more years—offensive lineman Trey Smith and defensive end George Karlaftis.

Smith, originally a sixth-round draft pick, is the highest-paid player in his position in the whole NFL—$94 million for four years, with $70 million guaranteed.

 

 

 

George Karlaftis, a number one draft pick in 2022 and an immediate impact player at defensive end also is locked up for four more years. He gets $92 million with $62 million guaranteed.

 

 

(BASEBALL)—This wasn’t the post-All Star Game start that either of our MLB teams wanted. They went 1-5, the Cardinals being swept by the Diamondbacks and the Royals salvaging a win in the third game against the Marlins.

The Royals, behind a couple of Salvador Perez home runs, clubbed the cubs last night 12-4. Joe Caglianone and John Rave also joined the power show.

The Royals have the oldest player in the major leagues on the mound tonight—Rich Hill, who is 45, has been called up from Omaha. He was drafted by the Cubs in 1999 and made his major league debut in 2005. The Royals will be his fourteenth major league team. That ties him with Edwin Jackson as the player who has been part of the most major league teams in their careers. Jackson did it by the time he was 35, a decade younger than Hill.

Hill has made nine starts for Omaha this year and has lasted 42 innings. He has struck out 61 batters but has an ERA of 5.36. He’s 90-74 in his big league career.

The Cardinals opened a series last night against the Rockies who are headed for the worst season in modern MLB history. They’s won only 24 of their first 100 games after losing to the Cardinals 6-2.  The Cardinals racked Colorado pitching for fifteen hits, to get back to three games over .500 at 52-49.  Michael McGreevy went seven solid innings in his latest callup from Memphis.

If the Rockies can improve to win eighteen of their next 44 games, they will avoid breaking last year’s modern baseball loss record, 121 games, set by the White Sox.

The Cardinals have a chance to pour it on tonight as they face Colorado’s Bradley Blalock who has lost both of his decisions this year and has a 9.97 ERA. But that means the disappointing Erick Fedde will have to avoid losing his tenth game of the year (he has three wins) and should lower his 4.83 ERA.

Now, the More:

(INDYCAR)—It’s starting to develop into the Palou and Pato show in Indycar with Pato O’Ward’s win at Toronto

Monterey, CA – during the Firestone Grand Prix of Monterey in Monterey, California. (Photo by Joe Skibinski | IMS Photo)

O’Ward’s win cuts  Alex Palou’s championship points lead by thirty. It’s his second win in eight days; he and Palou split visits to victory lane in the to races at Iowa the weekend before.

The Toronto race course winds its way for 1.786 curvy (11 curves) miles through downtown Toronto.  The race produced the most on-track passes (226) since the 2014 event and the most passes for position (201) for position since the 2019 race.

Palou finished twelfth at Toronto. O’Ward was joined on the podium by two guys not familiar with the ceremony—Rinus Veekay, who hasn’t had a top-three finish since 2022, and Kyffin Simpson, who’s never been there in his two years in the series.

Palou still leads by 99 points, though, a  challenging figure for O’Ward to overcome in the four races remaining on the INDYCAR schedule.

The miserable season of INDYCAR’s most prestigious team added another chapter at Toronto. Scott McLaughlin went into the wall when a left rear lug nut came off  on the second turn after a pit stop. He finished 26th. Josef Newgarden was caught up in a crash that found the car of Jacob Abel on top of his, relegating him to 23rd.  Once again, the best finish for the Penske team was by Will Power, who finished 11th after brushing a wall.

Santino Ferrucci finished 27th, and last, although he did not start the race. He crashed in practice, damaging his car and injuring his right hand.

INDYCAR heads west to race at Laguna Seca next weekend.

(NASCAR)—THIS, I have to see to believe:

Your reporter is off to Indianapolis this coming weekend for the Brickyard 400, an annual trek we make.  He’s gone to a lot of automobile races in his long life, but this one……

Last weekend, in a more normal setting, the CUP series was at Dover, where Denny Hamlin edged teammate Chase Briscoe for the win in a two-lap overtime shootout.  The win is his fourth of the  year, the best of all drivers in the series. It’s his 58th career Cup win. Only Kyle Busch, with 63, has more victories among full-time drivers in the series. He needs two more to tie Kevin Harvick for tenth on the all-time winners list.

Hamlin was in charge late in the race until a rainstorm stopped the race with fewer than twenty laps to go. He got good jumps on the first two restarts after the track was dried, and got ahead of Brisco for the green-white-checker laps.

Chase Elliott, who led 238 of the 407 laps, couldn’t match Hamlin’s late run and dropped back to sixth at the end. But that was good enough to take the regular season points lead away from teammate William Byron.

The fight for the sixteenth playoff spot remains tight. Bubba Wallace is sixteen points ahead of Ryan Preece and 39 up on Kyle Busch with five races to go before the sixteen driver playoff field is set.

(Photo credits: Smith and Karlaftis—KC Chiefs; O’Ward—Indianapolis Motor Speedway; Hamlin—Rick Gevers; Cookie Monster—NASCAR)

Inspiration

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We need a break from the heavy and depressing things we have been addressing lately. We need some inspiration.  Unconventional inspiration.

Journalists sometimes seem to have a warped sense of humor. It’s a contrariness that good reporters have to have because we must deal with so much righteousness, often self-righteousness (especially when we deal with politics).  We also have to deal with some things that are so incredibly serious that, as Abraham Lincoln once remarked, “Gentlemen, why do you not laugh? With the fearful strain that is upon me day and night, if I did not laugh, I should die.”

None of us often has a “fearful strain” upon us, although our times present great opportunities for it.  But all of us at some time have broken a dark scenario with a joke.

Think of the last memorial service or celebration of life you attended. The ones I have attended have been more light-hearted than mournful.

Your faithful correspondent has never been impressed by companies that post beautiful pictures on walls or in offices, the pictures accompanied by some drivel that is supposed to be uplifting.  That is why he had a series of counter-uplifting posters at his desk that did a different kind of uplifting.

This one is from a company called Despair Incorporated. Its website informs visitors:

“No industry has inflicted more suffering than the Motivational Industry. Motivational books, speakers and posters have made billions of dollars selling shortcuts to success and tools for unleashing our unlimited potential. At Despair, we know such products only raise hopes to dash them. That’s why our products go straight to the dashing.”

For many years, I secretly harbored but never carried out the ambition to steal into my company headquarters under the cover of darkness and replace motivational posters with Demotivational posters from the folks at Despair—such as this one which goes to the very heart of the issue:

One of the founders of this company is E. L Kirsten, who has a Ph.D., (which might stand for perverse humor director) and once was a professor of organizational communication. He got his degree from Southern Cal,

He has a book:

The book, like the company products, satirizes the motivational poster industry. A promotion for it says:

Motivation. The Futile Quest.

Motivation has become a multi-billion dollar industry, courtesy of the patronage of corporations and the noble intentions of Executives who lead them. At the heart of this colossal confederation of inspirational speakers, platitudinous posters, parable-filled management books, and increasingly complicated incentive programs lies an alluring promise: that with enough encouragement, empowerment, and esteem, employees will become productive and loyal, to the benefit of both their employers and themselves.

Yet, in spite of the staggering expenditures on packaged esteem, polls show that worker morale has reached critical lows, with a majority of employees even claiming to hate their jobs. How is this possible? And more importantly, what can Executives do about this crisis of employee dissatisfaction?

In this revolutionary new management book, Despair, Inc.® founder Dr. E. L. Kersten plumbs the depths of employee discontent to find its root cause. Though most live lackluster lives filled with wasted opportunities and trivial accomplishments, employees grow ever more certain of their enormous worth and glorious destinies. Why is this so? Because most are the products of a narcissistic age, the spiritual casualties of a grand social experiment gone terribly awry.

Ironically, managers attempting to motivate employees by increasing their self-esteem only compound the very problem they seek to solve. Reinforcing employee delusions of grandeur only increases their irrational sense of entitlement to the wealth, stature and privilege that justice dictates be reserved for the truly accomplished and inarguably worthy: namely, Executives.

With The Art of Demotivation former professor and current executive Kersten offers not only a comprehensive analysis of the problem but a prescriptive solution; one grounded not in the fantasies of infinite human potential so often advanced by the motivation industry, but in the grim realities of a broken world. Managers who seek a productive, loyal workforce must first liberate employees from the prison cells of their narcissism by forcing them to confront that which they expend enormous energy to avoid:
their true selves.

There are three editions of the book. One, the Chairman edition, goes for almost $1200—actually at the bargain price of $1,195, a price fully in keeping with the company, uh, philosophy.

We mention all of this NOT to be giving this company a lot of free advertising. We’re just doing it to keep from being hit with a copyright violation.

But we do think these posters perform a valuable service to some places that take themselves far too seriously. These are some of those days when, as a friend of mine once observed, “The people in Washington have it backwards.  They take themselves seriously but not their jobs.” These posters would make great billboards there.

It’s sold out.  Why are we not surprised?

And for those who like the Disney theme song—-the first three notes of which are a big part of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind:”

I love these things.

Let’s wrap this up with a couple of others that I don’t recall seeing among the Despair products. There are other internet sites that have their own offerings. They lack the sophistication of Despair but that doesn’t mean they can’t provoke a smile or a snort or even a laugh.

I think we have arrived there today.

The Pious Silence

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“With gratitude and humility, we pray for President Trump. You assigned him, you appointed him, you anointed him for such a time as this. We ask You to cover him with the blood of Jesus, empowering him to advance an agenda of righteousness and justice, truth and love.

Protect him from all evil as he undergirds our nation with the firewall of our Judeo-Christian value system. Fulfill Your purpose in his life.”

—Prayer given in the oval office, March 23, 2025, by Rev. Samuel Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, one of several evangelical pastors who laid hands on President Trump, a repeat of a ceremony at the start of his first term. The President appeared to be earnestly participating.

Shortly after, podcaster Todd Starnes attacked those who question Trump’s Christianity and the motives of those who regard him as a national savior: “The ‘Christians’ complaining about Christians praying over President Trump in the Oval Office are not Christians.”

Last year, just before the Iowa caucuses, a television add proclaimed: “And on 14 June 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump,

“God said I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state. So God made Trump,”

When the similar group of Christian Nationalist preachers held a laying-on of hands ceremony in 2017, the Reverend Robert Jeffress, a Texas Southern Baptist preacher, told Trump, “Mr. President, we’re going to be your most loyal friends.”

Among all the voices protesting Medicaid Cuts, using government agencies to punish opponents, indiscriminate roundups of immigrants, the dismantling of government agencies and programs helping the poor with food and medicines, and—most recently—the burning of hundreds of thousands of pounds of food that could have kept thousands of African children alive, where are these preachers?

The silence of these pious ministers is thunderous.

Is THIS a President whose words and actions show he wants “to advance an agenda of righteousness and justice, truth and love?”

Is this President—who has jerked everybody around on the Epstein matter, who has deported people to nations far away from their own, who reportedly is jamming people into Florida cages, and who has cut Medicaid payments—undergirding the nation “with the firewall of our Judeo-Christian value system?”

Is he fulfilling God’s purpose?

Let’s hear it, preachers.  Tell us, God, that what we are seeing and getting—of which we have only scratched the surface in the lists above—fulfilling your purpose?

Tell us, most loyal friends, why you aren’t saying anything about all of this?  Do you believe a loving God is rooting for Trump to do all of the mean, cruel, unfeeling, un-loving things to others?

Can you watch what has happened since you prayed for him and still believe God “assigned him…appointed him (and) anointed him for such a time as this?”

Do you really believe his acts and statements truly represent our Judeo-Christian value system? Was Jesus a lying bully?

Is not Donald Trump exposing the falseness of the proclamations of pious faith leaders such as yourselves?

And what is it you have faith in?

Who’s not a Christian, Mr. Starnes—those who seek to serve others or those who seek power to serve themselves?

A lot of us are praying these days but not for Trump; for our country.

I lost a good friend this week, a gentle man who celebrated sixty years in the ministry just a few weeks ago with what became his last sermon. The Reverend John Bennett dedicated his life to social justice and told an interviewer a few years ago, “My guideposts as I move forward in my life and ministry are Micah, Chapter 6, verse 8.  ‘Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God,’ which is to walk in solidarity with all who hurt.”

And how did he hope others would remember him?

“He was a gentle and passionate man, on fire for social justice, rooted in his deep faith.”

I will take one John Bennett for 500 of those who would lay hands on Donald Trump.

(photo credit–Facebook)

A Follow-up on “They’re Disappearing…”

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We recently condemned, without using the word, the actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons who hauled four people out of the nearby town of Holts Summit and took them somewhere for some reason, apparently without warrants and taking special care not to identify themselves, somehow scaring the county sheriff enough that he didn’t want to know anything about what they were doing with these people.

We got some pretty strong positive feedback (thank you) and some negative feedback that basically boiled down to, “But they were criminals when they came across the border to begin with.”

There’s no disagreement that they broke the law by crossing illegally.  But that hardly justifies what Trump’s goons are doing to large swaths of people.  And there are numbers that prove that our president has turned this agency into a bunch of thugs.

An example of that attitude came to light during the weekend, a story about a youth baseball coach who confronted ICE agents armed with guns and tasers who approached some high school kids at a youth baseball camp practice in New York City and started asking them about their nation of origin and other issues. Coach Houman Wilder, who has a master’s degree in law and who has coached the Harlem Baseball Academy for years, stepped in, told his players to go to a nearby batting cage, and told the agents their actions were inappropriate. He told a The West Side Rag, an online news site covering the Upper West Side of Manhattan, “They started to talk about cuffing me, and that if the kids were here legally, what do they have to lose by answering. I told them that they still have their fifth and fourth amendment rights, and that they don’t have to speak to you or help with any investigation.”

He told MSNBC an agent told him, “I don’t care what the law says,” and called him a “YouTube lawyer” before leaving.

Wilder says the ball players are all American-born although their parents are from Africa, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic and many don’t come to practice now because their parents are scared.

You can watch the interview at Bing Videos

Associated Press reporter Melissa Goldin’s recent story reiterated Trump’s pledge to deport “the worst of the worst”—rapists, murderers, and child predators. (As we recall, he referred to them during his campaign as “animals.”)

He promised the largest deportation program in history. He’s determined to be remembered for that. And he will be. We believe he would not like how he will be remembered, but he won’t be around to write inflammatory overnight internet ravings of protest.

He says he wants to protect law-abiding citizens from these terrible people.

The problem is that most of these people ARE law-abiding, other than with the way they came here.

In kind of a strange way, perhaps, we should be complimented that people would be so desperate to seek opportunities and freedoms they don’t have elsewhere that they will break our laws by coming to this country illegally.  Most of us cannot fathom what we have meant to so many people from throughout the world.

The growing question of concern is who is going to protect us from Trump’s protectors.

Reporter Goldin has seen “nonpublic data” collected by one of the world’s leading libertarian think tanks, The Cato Institute, that shows almost two-thirds of the people picked up by ICE in the first eight months of this fiscal year had NO CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS. Of those with convictions, fewer than seven percent did violent crimes.

A little more than half, 53%, had immigration, traffic, or vice crimes.

(One of the founders of the Cato Institute, by the way, was Charles Koch, one of the Koch brothers who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars, at least, into Republican campaigns. Charles Koch remains as Chairman of the Board of Koch Industries. His brother, David, died six years ago. The Kochs have been strong supporters of conservative Republicans but they want nothing to do with Donald Trump.)

In the first five months of the fiscal year, ICE was arresting about 650 people a day. Then, at the end of the May, the power behind the throne—Stephen Miller—demanded 3,000 arrests a day. And the agents appear to be doing their best to do his bidding.

The AP story quotes the Transactional Records Clearinghouse as calculating ICE arrests jumped by thirty percent in May, compared to April, and another 28 percent in June and that that Cato Institute figures for the fourth months from February to May, show that ICE fed 421-454 “non criminals” a day into the system. But in the last two weeks of May and the first half of June, the numbers were 678 for the first two weeks and 927 for the second two weeks.

The AP also reported the Bureau of Economic Review put out a working paper two years ago showing that for the last century and a half, the incarceration rate for immigrants has been lower than for people born in this country and the gap has widened in the last six decades with immigrants SIXTY PERCENT LESS LIKELY to be incarcerated than American-born people.

Trump and his crowd like to dehumanize all immigrants by citing specific killings or rapes done by illegal immigrants, never mentioning how much greater, by far, are incidents of lifelong legal citizens committing those same crimes.

So let’s be clear about our view from this quiet hill:  Demagogues and dictators rise to power and try to stay in power by turning a segment of a nation’s population into dangers to society. They achieve dominance by making us afraid of our neighbors and the strangers we pass on the streets, or those who live in lesser neighborhoods or ethnic communities.

We always have to hate somebody, to fear somebody when the people we most must fear are those who paint others with the broad brush of dehumanization.

Should we turn a blind eye to those who are here illegally?  No.

Should we not care about immigrants who do deal drugs and who do commit terrible personal crimes?  No. We should arrest them and hold them as we would hold regular Americans. But our government does not round up the few who are dangerous. It is rounding up thousands of us in random raids and carting people off to undisclosed locations.

Just as we were posting this entry, a truly unnecessary tragedy was reported that is off-topic but is not surprising for this heartless administration. We must include it because it cries out for the telling of a story that is our conclusion.

The Atlantic reported that today (Wednesday), the Trump administration is going to incinerate 500 tons of USAID food for children living in war and disaster zones. It is part of the destruction of the agency that for years has carried a message of American kindness around the world. The magazine says that’s enough food to feed 1.5 million children a week and that it’s enough to feed every starving child in Gaza. It’s part of the sixty-thousand tons of food originally targeted for Sudan, which is battling a famine.  But The Atlantic reports that food cannot be delivered because the USAID has been gutted and its logistics experts have been fired.

These are not immigrants we are told we must fear and hate. These are children who will die because of one man.

Let’s look back to the 1950s when we were supposed to be fearful that our federal government was filled with Communists.

On a day in early June, seventy-one years ago, Senator Joseph McCarthy in one of his sensational hearings accused young Boston lawyer Frederick G. Fisher of being a member of a group he considered “a legal arm of the Communist Party.” Fisher worked with Joseph Welch’s firm, Hale and Dore. Welch was the lawyer for the Army in those hearings and had recognized that Fisher’s association with a left-leaning student group while in law school could be a problem. So he replaced him during the hearings.

But that didn’t keep McCarthy from attacking him.

McCarthy’s reckless accusation was stunning. For some reason, I was watching those events on our 13-inch Admiral black and white television set that day. I had no understanding of what the hearings was all about but what happened in a few minutes created in me a strong memory as I watched as a seething Joseph Welch, his voice shaking with emotion, barely controlling his composure, look McCarthy in the eye and say:

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us.… Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentle man but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.”

When McCarthy appeared to pay no attention to Welch’s remarks and began another rambling insinuation, Welch cut him off:

“Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild.… Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency??”

There they are.  Three words for our time.

Reckless.  Cruel.

Children will starve because this administration has eliminated the people who could deliver it and the solution is to burn it.

Joseph Welch’s third word echoes from his  last sentence. It must be repeated and repeated and repeated today.

“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Decency is a word I have not heard lately, to our country’s shame. Nor, it seems, is it a word that is in any way familiar to our chief executive. He will shed no tears but all of us should.

(If you want to watch that dramatic moment that many believe turned the Senate against McCarthy, here it is from PBS:  Bing Videos)

Sports:  All-Star Break; MLB Draft; and Speedy stuff

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(BASEBALL)—We hit the all-star break and take a look at where our teams are and who they have picked to shape their futures.

(CARDINALS)—The Cardinals  are five games above .500, third in the division, but 4½ games behind the Mariners in the fight for a playoff spot. Nobody on the team is dominating the squad. Sonny Gray and Steven Matz are a combined 14-5. Ryan Helsley has 19 saves in 33 appearances. Offensively, Wilson Contreras and Lars Nootbar each have a dozen home runs. Contreras is hitting .253 but Noot is only hitting .235.  Victor Scott II has 23 stolen bases but would have a whole lot more if he was hitting better than .235.  Jordan Walker is in at only .210.

(ROYALS)— The Kansas City Royals are three games under .500 at 47-50 with one of last year’s star pitchers dealing with a rotator cuff problem.  Cole Ragans is on the IL with a 2-3 record and a 5.18 ERA after having 21 quality starts last year and going 11-9.

An emerging star is rookie Noah Cameron who struck out eight in six and two-thirds innings Sunday to lower his ERA to 2.31. But he’s only 2-3, a record that underline how much the Royals struggle to score. He’s carving a place in the Royals record book, though.  He has tied Steve Busby’s record of five quality starts to begin a career—five. He and LA’s Fernando Valenzuela are the only pitchers in the history of the major leagues to pitch at least six innings and allow one or fewer runs in their first five starts.

Michael Wacha, after a solid year in ’24, is 4-9 despite a presentable 3.94 ERA and All-Star Kris Bubic is only 7-6 despite a 2.48 ERA. Seth Lugo is only 6-5 while giving up only 2.67 earned runs per nine innings.

Power is coming from three guys—Vinnie Pasquantino with 15 homers; Bobby Witt with 14, and Salvador Perez with 13. Rookie Joe Caglianone, brought up in hopes he’d add some offensive lightning, is hitting only .140 although he’s hit some tape-measure home runs.

(FUTURE)—In three or four or five years, we might be hearing some of these names in the starting lineups for our major league teams.

The Cardinals first draft pick was Tennessee’s lefty Liam Doyle who helped his team defend its college championship and led Division 1 in strikeouts for a lot of the season. He’s a fastballer (95-97 mph) who can get it as fast as 99-100. He averaged 15.4 strikeouts per nine innings.

The Cardinals reached down to a high school for their second choice, shortstop Ryan Mitchell from Houston, Texas. There are questions about his hitting style and it’s not clear whether he’s better at short or second.

The Redbirds returned to Tennessee for their third pick, right hander Tanner Franklin, who has a fast ball that can touch 102. He also has a low 90s cutter. Franklin is seen as a reliever.

Jack Gurevitch from the University of San Diego is a first baseman with a lot of raw power but scouts say he needs to improve his discipline at the plate.

One player from Missouri was picked by the Cardinals, catcher Chase Heath from the University of Central Missouri. He was picked in the 20th round, the 600th pick.

(ROYALS—The Royals had five picks on the first day, with outfielder Sean Gamble of  IMG Academy as their number one. He’s a Des Moines native, left handed contact hitter. Their second choice was infielder Josh Hammond, also in high school—at Wesleyan Christian Academy in North Carolina. He’s been drafted as a shortstop although he pitched for USA Baseball’s U18 team. His bat is what drew interest—.471, six homers and 29 RBIs in 19 game.s

The second round pick was Tulane relief pitcher Michael Lombardi who had 73 Ks in 42 innings.

Although Texas A&M lefty Justin Lamkin was 5-7 this year in 15 starts, the Royals liked his control and his three-pitch repertoire. He had 98 strikeouts and just 19 walks in 84.1 innings.

The last draftee for KC is righty Cameron Millar, a high schooler from Martinez, California. He’s 6-2, fastball-changeup guy.  He has signed to play college ball at Arizona.

(MIZ—DRAFT)—Two Missouri Tigers were taken in late rounds of the baseball draft. Infielder Jason Lovich was picked in the 14th round by the Yankees and Sam Horn—once considered a leading candidate as a football quarterback at Mizzou—went in the 16th round to the Dodgers. Horn is a redshirt sophomore at MU.

Lovich, in three years at Mizzou, hit .311 in 108 games and ranked sixth in the SEC with a .357 average this year.

Horn, who came to Missouri as a two-sport athlete, only played five games for the Tigers this year after missing all of 2024 after Tommy John surgery. This year he struck out 14 batters in 10.2 innings.

If he stays at Mizzou, he will be one of four competitors for quarterback. Drew Pyne, who filled in for a couple of games last year, is back. Beau Pribula has been brought in at a good price to be the leading contender. Freshman Matt Zellers also is listed in the depth chart.

Moving along—very fast

(INDYCAR)—Pato O’Ward and Alex Palou picked up wins at the Iowa Speedway last weekend and Penske Racing saw a weekend of promise turn to ashes.

In Saturday’s race, Penske’s Josef Newgarden started from pole and led the first 232 of the race’s 275 laps only to see O’Ward seize the lead because of a pit stop bobble by Newgarden’s crew and hold on for the win.

But the race was the best of the year for the Penske team as its driver finished 2-3-4.Will Power joined Newgarden on the podium and Scott McLaughlin, who started 27th after wrecking in qualifying, worked his way to fourth.  Points leader Alex Palou came home fifth.

O’Ward, who has three second place finishes this year,  became the sixth driver in Indycar history to win in his 100th career race. The last driver to do that in the series was Patrick Carpenter in 2002. The first four are Indycar Legends—Rodger Ward, A. J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, and Bobby Unser.  O’Ward also won his 50th start.

His win is the first for a Chevrolet-powered car this year.

Things fell apart early for Penske cars on Sunday.  McLaughlin was knocked out on the fifth lap in a tangle with Devlin  DeFrancesco and finished 26th. Power left with mechanical issues and finished 24th.  Newgarden led some laps but could only make it to 10th.

The Sunday race produced a seventh winner’s trophy for the year for Alex Palou, who saw his points lead build.  Palou had a dominant day, running in front for 192 laps and finished just ahead of Scott Dixon. Marcus Armstrong tied his best career finish by crossing the line third.

Saturday’s winner, Pato O’Ward, could only muster a fifth-place finish.

Palou has a 129-point lead on O’Ward as the Indycar season heads into the last third of its schedule.  Kyle Kirkwood, who has three wins this year, and went into the weekend in second place, had disappointing results and dropped to fourth in the points behind Dixon.

The series moves to the streets of Toronto next weekend.

(NASCAR)—-Another road course. Another dominating win for Shane von Gisbergen. His win at Sonoma is his third of the year and puts him as the number four seed for the playoffs. Denny Hamlin, Kyle Larson, and Christopher Bell won their third races earlier.

Van Ginsbergen started from the pole and established solid leads throughout in a record-setting or tying performance, leading a record 97 of the 110 laps around the 1.99-mile course and finishing more than 1.1 seconds ahead of Chase Briscoe.

It is his third straight win from the pole on a road course, equaling Jeff Gordon’s string stretching over the 1998 and 1999 seasons. The win in his 34th start is the fourth of his Cup career, the fastest a driver has won four to start his career since Parnelli Jones did it in  1967 in start number 31. He broke Jeff Gordon’s record of 92 laps led set in 2004.

Nobody else led more than four laps.

Only six races are left before the 16-driver playoffs. Competition for the 16th spot is fierce after twenty races. A. J. Allmendinger has it but five drivers are within twenty points, three within ten.

Next up for NASCAR is the short track at Dover.

(photo credits: O’Ward and Palou—Bob Priddy; von Ginsbergen—NASCAR (Meg Oliphant/Getty Images)

 

 

6:30 a.m., Longmont, Colorado, July 5, 2025

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It was a beautiful, clear morning in this city of 120,000 just a half hour from Rocky Mountain National Park when I took my morning walk.

Sixty degrees headed for the mid-eighties, the morning after Nancy and I watched our granddaughters celebrate Independence Day with fireworks in the driveway and in the Cul de sac of the subdivision where our son and his family live.

I started the day reflecting on July 4 in Longmont deeply worried about the nation into which those girls will grow up. I was out and about quite a bit on Independence Day in this city where one in four people is Latino, beginning the long walk through his and the adjoining neighborhood, much of it along a shady sidewalk on a street called Mountain View.

Later I did a brief prowl in the business district, checked on a bookstore I like, visited a big strip mall, got a hot dog at Sam’s Club and lunched on a bowl of chili at Wendy’s.

Not once did any of the Latino people I mingled with, did business with, or bought food from offer to sell me any Fentanyl.  I saw no tattoos signifying gang membership. None of them appeared to be former mental patients, killers, rapists or other criminals supposedly released from jails so they could “invade” our country and practice their hobbies on us.

All I saw were ordinary people, and I wondered how they feel in today’s American political climate that indiscriminately lumps them in with the few criminals who cross the border. Could I have been mistaken?  Shouldn’t I realize that people such as them are lesser people in the eyes of the country’s leader who is advocating a form of ethnic cleansing?

I started wondering about those who subscribe to the idea that citizenship is arbitrary and can be taken away at the whim of a leader who acknowledges no limits on his authority, typified by obsessively targeting one man jailed and tortured in a strange land by mistake—his tortures described in contemporary news accounts—who, having finally been returned to this country is targeted again on suspicious charges that only now will involve due process denied him earlier and still denied to many others caught up in a cruel system.

It has become a country where its leader speaks with pride of a detention camp called “Alligator Alcatraz,” where five thousand people of Latin origin can be imprisoned without due process.

He thinks it is funny to say, “We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator, OK? If they escape prison, how to run away. Don’t run in a straight line…And you know what? Your chances go up about 1%.”

His press secretary amplified the tragic absurdity of the whole idea, saying,  “When you have illegal murderers and rapists and heinous criminals in a detention facility surrounded by alligators, yes, I do think that’s a deterrent for them to try to escape.” Neither of them wants to address how they know all of these people are “illegal murderers and rapists and heinous criminals.”  (Illegal murderers?)

The Republican Party in Florida adds an additional flair to “appalling” by selling Alligator Alcatraz merchandise.  Imagine seeing a baby in an Alligator Alcatraz onesie. The Florida GOP will sell you one. They come in several colors and only cost twenty-five dollars.

Hilarious.

The President has caused some serious whiplash by calling for expulsion of migrant farm workers (without indicating how his zealous ICE agents will differentiate the legal ones from the illegal ones when they swoop down on agriculture facilities) then saying he’ll give them a pass, then his Secretary of Agriculture say there will “no amnesty” for those workers—-

—-and then Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins brushed aside industry concerns that mass deportations would have severe consequences on American farming by making the completely bonkers suggestion that 34-million able-bodied people on Medicaid could replace those migrant workers “quickly” because of the work requirements for Medicaid recipients in the Big Ugly Bill.

He also recently said he’s looking into taking over Washington, D. C. and New York. And his obsession with punishing Harvard University because it has resisted his intimidating demand to shape education in his image further confirms his limited toleration of “freedom.”

The idea that Trump would want to “take a look” at denaturalizing Elon Musk because Musk dared criticize his proposed big policy legislation, or that he would consider denaturalizing the legally-elected Democratic candidate for Mayor of New York on specious, if not spurious, reasons is an indication that this president is even more dangerous to all of us in one way or another.

Today’s children and grandchildren are going to inherit from this generation that which it refuses to reject. It will not be a good legacy that we give them.

I felt pretty good when I started that walk.  By the end of the day, after watching innocent youngsters celebrate the founding of this now deeply-troubled country, I feared for them.

And I remembered that on that morning stroll, that I walked past a young brown girl sitting on a shady curb and talking to a friend, in Spanish, on her cell phone. A block later, I passed a house with a July 4th yard decoration.

God, Guns, and Trump.

A lady saw me take the picture and shouted out her window, “Happy July 4th.”  I wished her the same as I continued the walk.  And I wondered if she would have said the same thing to the brown girl I had seen a block away if she walked past that sign.

Independence Day isn’t as much fun as it should be anymore.

(photo credits:  onesie—markayshop.com; Lake and Mountains—shutterstock; Mountain View and the yard decoration: Bob Priddy.)

Sports: Missouri-Illinois Gridiron Reduction; Blues Notes;

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(It is always interesting when one has been away for a while, even for a week or so, that things haven’t changed—they’ve only occurred—during the absence. We’ll try to catch up on sports today).

(BASEBALL)—This is the last week before the All-Star game Monday night in Atlanta. Brendan Donovan of the Cardinals will be a National League reserve. Bobby Witt Jr., will be a reserve shortstop for the American League. Kris Bubic has made the AL pitching roster.

Neither team has a player in the home run derby.

The Royals are going to take a look at 2015 Cy Young Award winner Dallas Keuchel, now 37, and under a minor league contract. He was cut by the Brewers a year ago and hasn’t thrown a major league pitch since. He finished last year in Japan with the Chiba Lotte Pirates where he pitched 40 innings and had a 3.60 ERA.

Since his big year with the Astros, Keuchel has bounced around with the Braves, White Sox, Diamondbacks, Rangers, and the Twins. He’s 103-92 in his career with a 4.04 ERA. He’ll begin his attempted return in Omaha and could make two-million dollars if he climbs back to the major league roster.

The Cardinals roster is standing pat for now but there’s all kinds of speculation about what will happen between now and the trade deadline.  Noland Arenado says his shoulder is feeling better and he hopes he can come off the IL this week. He’s still the talk of the speculators when it comes to being trade bait.

The Royals continue to muddle along with a sub-.500 record. The Cardinals continue to be the surprise team of the year despite some embarrassing performances in the last week or so—three straight shutouts at the hands of the Pirates, and Miles Mikolas’s tendency to throw home run balls (21 so far), becoming the first Cardinals pitcher to give up six in a single game (among the ten hits and eight earned runs the Cubs got in the first six  innings of their blowout of the ‘Birds., six of the homers came in the first three innings, a Chicago record, off Mikolas).  MLB.com’s John Denton calculated the home runs totaled 2,441 feet, almost a half-mile.

(RIVALRY)—-Missouri and Illinois in this case, and in football.  The Tigers and the Fighting Illini had agreed to an eight-game series stretched though ten years.  But Illinois AD Josh Whitman has announced that series has been cut to six games.

The games will be played in Columbia and in Champaign-Urbana, not on a neutral St. Louis field. The first one will be in 2027, seventeen years after the most recent of their 24 games. Missouri has won seventeen of them including the 2010 game,  23-13. Missouri has won the last six games against Illinois.

(UF/NFL)—-Another former Missouri Tiger has performed well enough in the recently-concluded United Football League season to be given a shot at playing in the NFL. In this case its Yasir Durant, a former tackle for the Tigers, who has signed with the New England Patriots.

He was a starting offensive lineman for the DC Defenders, the UFL champions.

He’s joining Marcus Bryant, who was picked by the Patriots in the seventh rough of this year’s draft. Bryant played his final year at MU.  Both will try to make the team at left tackle.

Durant played 34 games for the Tigers from 2017-2019 and has been in and out of the NFL several times since. He made the Kansas City Chiefs roster in 2020 as an undrafted free agent and played in eleven games, mostly on special teams. He was traded to the Patriots and played seven games for them in ’21 before he was waived. He also made the rosters of the Broncos and the Saints but only saw action in two of their games.

Durant has made brief stops at the Denver Broncos and New Orleans Saints since then, but only played two NFL snaps between those two teams. In the UFL, he played every offensive line position except center for the Defenders. The center was another ex-Tiger, Michael Maietti.

Durant is the second former Tiger who played in the UFL this year to get an invite to move up. Place kicker Harrison Mevis, who played for the Birmingham Stallions this year, has been signed by the New York Jets.

(BLUES)–The St. Louis Blues will look similar, but not the same, next season as they did in the one just finished.  They’ll be sporting new duds, easily recognizable but more modern, or as Marketing Officer Steve Chapman put it, “We want to honor everything that has taken place to get us to where we are today. But we want to focus on what we’re doing next.”

The new blue home jersey looks something like the jersey worn for the 2017 Winter Classic that was held at Busch Stadium.

 

The white jersey for road games is reminiscent of the jersey worn for the 2022 Winter Classic in Minnesota.

The change in four years in the making. It started in 2021 when the Blues hired Mississippi-based Rare Design to come up with the new schemes:

You’ll have to wait until September.  You could have bought one a lot sooner but the National Hockey League was busy ending its contract with Adidas and signing on with Fanatics.

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(PORTER)—Michael Porter Jr., who was never healthy enough to recognize his potential at Mizzou, has been traded from the Denver Nuggets to the Brooklyn Nets. Denver gets Cam Johnson and a gives up a first-round draft pick in 2032. Denver also frees up some salary space because Porter’s $179.3 million contract signed in 2021 pays him $79 million in the next two seasons while Johnson will get only $44 million.

Porter was highly-regarded in Denver as one of the key players in the Nuggets’ NBA title year in 2023. This year he averaged 18.2 points, seven rebounds and two assists per game. He was a 50% shooter from the field, almost 40% from three.

(BOOKER)—Another big NBA contract involves  Devin Booker, who did not play for Missouri but his father, Melvin, did in the Norm Stewart Era.  The Phoenix Sun have decided to built the team around him and will pay dearly for it. Reports say Melvin’s kid has agreed to a two-year, $150 million contract extension that will keep him with the team until he’s 33. In the next five years, he’ll make $321 million.

Booker averaged 25.6 ppg, seven assists and four rebounds a game last season.  He’s a four-time all-star and holds the team’s scoring record.

Dad Melvin played pro basketball for fifteen years but only a couple of years in the NBA, 32 games with the Houston Rockets, Denver Nuggets and the Golden State Warriors on callups from the development league before going abroad with teams in Asia and Europe.

Catching up to the speedsters:

(INDYCAR)—Alex Palou beat the heat at Road America to race into the Indycar history books, taking his sixth win in the first nine races of the year, equaling A. J. Foyt’s start of the 1975 season.

Palou took the lead when Scott Dixon had to pit for a splash-and-go with three laps left and finished ahead of Felix Rosenqvist and Santino Ferrucci, who continues to elevate A. J. Foyt’s team in the series. David Malukis, who spun into the gravel on the first lap, rallied back to finish seventh in the other Foyt Car.  Dixon dropped to ninth because of his late fuel stop.

Louis Foster, had had his first pole start of his Indycar career, wound up 11th.

The air temperature of 96 degrees and a track temperature of 131 degrees challenged the field and left some drivers getting water bottles thrown over the fence to them at the end of the race.

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At Mid-Ohio last weekend, Dixon proved once again he’s a master at stretching a gallon, held off Palou by about four-tenths of a second to pick up his first win of the year, extending his streak to 21 years with at least one win.

Dixon had help from Palou, who appeared to be on the way to his seventh win when he made a mistake with just over five laps to go that let Dixon slip past.  The win is number 59 for Dixon, who now trails  only A. J. Foyt, who had 67 Indycar wins.

Especially significant, however, is that he has won a race in 23 seasons and is still a contender as he nears his 45th birthday for a seventh series title, which would tie Foyt’s record.

The win is the tenth of the year for Honda. The only other engine manufacturer in Indycar, Chevrolet, has yet to put a car in victory lane. However, it does provide the Corvette pace cars, who it runs ahead of the field for a while.

The race was another major disappointment for the sport’s leading team—Penske Racing. Josef  Newgarden’s rear wheels locked up just after the start that caused a spin that also took out Graham Rahal. Will Power’s car caught fire on pit road early in the race, putting him in 26th place at the end, one spot better than Newgarden. The best that Scott McLaughlin could do was a 23rd.

The team known for its dominance of the sport has started P1 in only two of the ten races, has only eight top five finishes combined, and a dozen top tens. The three Penske cars have led only 133 laps this  year (only one by Power and 27 by Newgarden).

Missourians wanting to catch an Indycar race have another good opportunity next weekend when Palou, et al, run at Iowa.

(NASCAR)—Georgia native Chase Elliott’s 44-race non-winning streak ended at Atlanta with a last lap pass of Brad Keselowski.  It’s his 20th career win in a race red-flagged for fifteen minutes because of rain in the first stage and stopped again for nine minutes after a crash that involved more than half of the cars.

The win locks Elliott into the ten-race run for the NASCAR Cup and moves him to fifth in the points standings. He’s the 11th driver to claim a playoff spot in the field of 16. Atlanta was the 18th race of the year. The playoff field will be set after 26 races.  Non-winners filling out the field will be determined by points. Bubba Wallace has the 16th spot after Atlanta, but he has a little cushion over Ryan Preece, who is 23 points behind him. Others hoping they can rally to get in are Erik Jones (49 points back), A. J. Almendinger (minus 59), and Carson Hocevar, 62 points out.

Chicago belonged the SVG—Shane van Gisbergen, the Australian race driver who made his NASCAR Cup debut two years ago by winning a race on the streets of downtown  Chicago in a drenching rain picked up his second win in the last three races by running off at the end of this year’s event, also run under increasingly threatening skies.  In fact, he swept both the Cup race but the Xfinity race the day before. He started on the pole in both.  He had a two second lead on the last lap when the caution came out and froze the field because a broken brake rotor sent Cody Ware’s car head-on into the tire barrier at more than 90 mph.

Ware radioed his crew that he “needs help,” but it took more than 30 seconds for NASCAR to thrown the yellow flag and for a rescue crew to get to his car.   He was able to climb out and was released from the track medical center after a checkup.

NASCAR says there was no television camera that captured the severe impact of the crash, which led to the delay in showing the caution flag.

Van Gisbergen’s win makes him the 12th driver in the playoffs. The race also saw a tightening of the points race for the sixteen playoff positions.  Bubba Wallace’s 28th place finish and Ryan Preece’s run the seventh put Preece just two points behind Wallace for the 16th playoff slot.

(Photo credits:  Blues jerseys–Steve Roberts-Imagn Images; Dixon—Bob Priddy; Penske Logo—team Penske; All Star Game logo—sportslogos.net)