Author Archives: bpriddy

If It Ain’t Broke—the other view

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As we noted in last Wednesday’s entry, there is a “comments” box at the end of each one that for those who agree or differ with what is said. This is the first time we have published comments as a stand-alone entry.  But the issue of elections and voting is so central to our system of government that when the sponsor of the bill we questioned called last week with concerns about some of the things we had written, we decided that the comment, or response, should get more than space in the “comment” box that, having been entered after the original piece was published, would not get the attention the issue deserves to have.

Representative Peggy McGaugh’s background on election issues is considerable. She worked for 32 years in the Carroll County Clerk’s office, almost 24 of those years (six four-year terms) as the County Clerk.  She is a past-president of the Missouri Association of Counties and a former member of the Secretary of State’s Voter Integrity Task Force.

In response to your “If it ain’t broke” blog, find below a few answers from my view as one of the sponsors of the consolidated election bill going through the General Assembly this year.

This bill is a culmination of bills passed out of the House Elections committee with the involvement of the Mo Secretary of State’s office and the Missouri Association of County Clerk’s/ Election Authorities (MACCEA)  who do Resolutions each year for proposed changes to improve the law and better the process for Missourians.

*limiting changes to six months before an election would prevent nefarious or bad actors from pushing a specific narrative to change the outcome of an election.

 

*the ability to select election judges and poll watchers from outside of the boundaries of a jurisdiction was a request from MACCEA who have difficulty filling the positions in areas where one party dominates another when following Chapter 115 of equal representation of parties at the precinct.

 

*the direct recording electronic devices (DREs) are the electronic equipment being phased out in the bill.  The three counties that currently use them will move to a system that will include some type of paper ballot hand marked by the voter and counted by an electronic tabulator as you described.

 

*absentee voting by mail or in person will still occur six weeks out from any election using the same excuses as in the past.  This bill allows a registered voter to appear in the election authority’s office three weeks out from any election, apply for and receive their ballot without using an excuse and then thread the ballot through tabulator. This assures them that their ballot was received and counted without having to fib to get the convenience. 

 

*ballots will be considered cast when received in the election authority office if postmarked on or before election day and the drop boxes will be swept and gathered for counting up until the close of the polls on election day.

Thank you for bringing the merits of this election bill to your readers.

Keeping Missouri as a model of free, fair and transparent elections is our goal in the General Assembly.

I look forward to answering any other questions you might have.

Representative Peggy McGaugh

Proudly representing Ray, Carroll and Chariton Counties   

    

We appreciate Rep. McGaugh’s thoughts. Her page on the House of Representatives website contains contact information should anyone want to send her an email.  If you do, please follow the same guidelines you follow them when writing to us—be kind, be courteous, be respectful.

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I respectfully beg to differ

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(We live in a time when disagreements seem unresolvable, when disputing forces seem more interested in fighting than serving, when disagreeing is, to use a term we wish had never come up, weaponized. Dr. Crane reminds us that disagreement can be a positive part of our existence, if respect is part of it, as he asks—-)

ARE YOU ON OPPOSITE SIDES?

Doubtless each of us knows someone in his circle of acquaintances who is intellectually contrary. Such as one delights on every occasion to take the opposite side.

If he is within a religious community he will take his stand firmly for atheism.  If he is one of the scoffers, he will argue just as valiantly for the church. He is a standing minority report. He is a crooked stick that will not lie in the woodpile. Like Goethe’s Devil he is the spirit who constantly denies.

This type of person is the steady, normal crop in the field of humanity. We would not get along without them. They keep the kettle of thing stirred, which otherwise would settle and spoil. These are they that keep the course of social life pure as a running stream and prevent it from becoming like a green stagnant pool.

They supply ginger for political campaigns. They are the party out of power. They are the watchdogs of progress. Without them religion would harden into a cruel tyranny of superstition, falsehoods would be crystallized into power, and ancient fraud live forever.

They harass mankind into being honest.

A Trojan Horse and a Forked Tongue

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We have grown tired of the arguing, year after year, campaign after campaign, administration after administration about rebuilding or improving our infrastructure.

While all of this talking and proposing and blaming and balking has been going on, I have replaced the front struts on my car—not a cheap thing to do—perhaps because I hit a few too many serious potholes in the seven years I’ve owned the car (it’s a great car, so great that I see no reason to replace it—and I’ve driven its 2021 replacement).

They talk. I pay to replace my struts.

President Biden this week announced a $2.25 Trillion infrastructure plan.  He wants to offset its further expansion of the federal debt by increasing the tax on corporations and people who are a lot richer than almost everybody who reads these entries.

Immediate opposition has come from the usual sources—the people on the other side of the aisle.  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has branded Biden’s plan a “Trojan Horse,” saying, “It’s called infrastructure, but inside the Trojan Horse is going to be more borrowed money and massive tax increases.”

By “massive tax increases” he appears to mean a rollback of part of the “massive tax cuts” the Republican Congress approved under the Trump administration in 2017, cuts that were supposed to help the simple folk who work for the people and companies that got the tax increases.  Many of the folks who find the tax increase odious are the same people who have complained about the increasing the national debt for infrastructure building/rebuilding.

From time to time we hear political leaders from both sides bemoaning, on one hand, the cynicism of the public toward the political process while on the other hand they take advantage of that cynicism by appealing to it to get votes and campaign money.

While they play their games, my car’s struts keep taking beatings.

The Biden plan spreads the fiscal pain through several years.  It has several elements, some of which are more urgent to address than others.  There’s plenty of room for compromise—we’ll pass this but you’ll have to ditch that for now—if anybody wants to compromise.  But why compromise when you can just fight?

We’re tired of hearing our politicians say they’ll “fight” for us.   To Hell with fighting.  DO something for us!

For starters, here is an alternative plan that Republicans might consider supporting because it comes from one of theirs:

This infrastructure plan would be smaller and narrower.  It would involve spending up to one-trillion dollars financed by government bonds that average citizens as well as big-money investors could buy.

It’s kind of like the War Bonds that were issued during WWII to finance the fight against the Axis. Yes, the national debt would be increased but the payout would be gradual and spread through a number of years and, as some politicians and economic theoreticians like to say from time to time, the economic benefits would produce the increased revenues to pay off the debt.

This idea was proposed in 2016 by candidate Donald J. Trump—and his party has demonstrated he could do no wrong. It never gained any traction during his administration, perhaps because he suggested it to counter a smaller proposal by opponent Hillary Clinton and then, once in office, abandoned it because it was no longer needed for political points when there were more self-beneficial things to talk about.

The Clinton campaign rejected the Trump proposal, by the way, saying “Donald Trump’s only actual infrastructure proposal is the build a giant wall on the Mexican border and have Mexico pay for it.”  In retrospect there seems to be an element of truth in that observation. We’re still waiting to hear the Treasury Department announce the arrival of the first payment from Mexico, by the way.

Conservative critics of the Trump plan might have used the word “Trojan Horse” to describe it because, as New York Times reporter Alan Rappaport related, they believed, it was similar to a stimulus plan set forth in 2009 by President Obama and would worsen the national debt.

Any plan put forth by Obama had to be blocked because it was from Obama.  Any plan from Trump had to be blocked because it came from Trump. Today, if it comes from Biden, it must be automatically opposed by those who offer nothing but attacks.

So while our politicians in Washington continue to speak with forked tongues, the potholes keep getting deeper, the bridges keep getting weaker, old lead sewer and water pipes become more dangerous, and a public that absorbs all of this (aided and abetted by powerful undermining  voices on the air and in print) continues to incrementally lose faith in the democratic form of government.

Those in public office who prefer to stoke the fires of public dissatisfaction with the processes of government are the ones who are building a Trojan Horse. We saw on January 6 what is inside it—anarchy and totalitarianism, which do not seek nor want what is best for the nation.

And in Washington, it appears, the only thing that matters is an argument not over how the gate can be made more secure, but over whose hand most weakly holds it closed.

 

 

If it ain’t broke—

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Break it.

We have a place at the end of each of these musings for you, dear reader, to straighten out the author on points in which his thoughts obviously and erroneously vary from the truth.  In your opinion.

Feel free to utilize that space, especially with this entry because your worthy author seems to be missing badly the whole point of the legislative effort to rewrite some of our election laws.  Those doing the rewriting say our election system is flawed and need to be made better. Others  think the re-writers are limiting rather than enhancing voting rights and opportunities.

We must be missing something.  Big.

—because Missouri’s Secretary of State has offered zero complaints, as far as we know, about last year’s elections. We have heard zero complaints of voter fraud here.  No federal lawsuits were filed in Missouri contesting the outcome(s).  In fact, our Attorney General, who was so vigilant at spotting fraud and shortcomings in several other states’ elections, has offered not one legal peep about things here.  The two-third majorities were maintained in both chambers of the General Assembly, so it appears there was no nefarious plot to undermine the lawmaking structure of our state.

More than three-million people voted, the first time that many people took part in a November election. It beat the 2.9-million who voted in the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. The raw number might have been a record but the percentage of eligible voters fell short of projections and short of the 78% vote when Bill Clinton was elected over George H. W. Bush, who had the worst performance for a Republican since Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Bush was hurt because Ross Perot had the best performance for a third party candidate here since John Bell Williams, also in 1860.

So what was broken last year?

Why is there a provision saying no change in voting laws can be made within six months of a presidential election?  Just last year the legislature made a change in response to a pandemic that was making many people nervous about going to polling places.  Mail-in ballots were allowed but they are outlawed in this bill. We have not heard any loud yelling, seen any frantic arm-waving, and heard of any lawsuit filed complaining this system generated anything but greater opportunity for citizens to exercise one of our most cherished rights, especially during one of our greatest health crises in history.

The good thing is that this is just a statute.  And this ban on changing laws within six months of an election can be repealed, just as the bill repeals mail-in ballots.  And we wouldn’t be surprised to see a repeal of the repeal if the party makeup of the legislature ever happens.

Present law allows the election authority—the county clerk or the metropolitan election authority—to appoint two judges from each major party to serve at each polling place. The proposed law says the political parties will recommend potential judges but says they don’t have to live within the jurisdiction of the election authority.  So the election authority, which is given the power to throw out people it deems unqualified to be judges, instead of going back to the parties can instead appoint somebody from outside the voting area—namely the county or the city?  Could the election authority, for example, dismiss local election judge candidates (we see nothing in the bill allowing an appeal of that action) and install, let’s say, a perceived looney advocate for a national candidate instead?

Please tell us we have just hatched a conspiracy theory.  We hate conspiracy theories and have no desire to be associated with one.

Another section allows the chairman of each county political party committee to designate a watcher for each place where votes are counted (that’s present law).  But the new language says the poll watcher does not have to live within that jurisdiction.  See the above question.

Are we reading another section of the proposed election law changes to say that we are doing away with electronic voting machines?  And going back to paper ballots?  We must have missed all of the complaints about how voting machines corrupted the elections in Missouri in 2020.

As we understand it, (from section 115.237—please pardon the technical language) the bill refers to “direct-recording” machines but not to electronic COUNTING machines. When I voted last November, I used a pencil to filling a little oval on a voting card and then fed the card into an electronic tabulating machine.  That’s okay but anything of a higher technology is not to be allowed.  Correct?

Absentee ballots can’t be cast until three weeks before the election and can only be cast at a designated location—seemingly a further limitation on mail-in voting—and require a photo identification (Did I miss anything about absentee voting by the military far overseas?).  BUT the bill does eliminate lying about the reason for voting absentee.  Last year Nancy and I voted absentee, citing our age which made us especially susceptible to the virus. Had we been required to say we were going to be out of town that day, we would have sworn that we would be and would have driven outside the city limits, turned around, and come back, thus being honest.

Should we be bothered by a provision that absentee ballots that do not arrive by the time polls close on election day will not be counted?  They “shall be deemed cast when received prior to the time fixed by law for closing the polls on election day.”  This applies to absentees mailed from halfway around the world as well as absentees left in a drop box.  This is kind of an awkward issue, isn’t it? We have heard for years discussions about the timing of sending out absentee ballots to our military in time for them to be voted and returned within proper time limits to be counted and we don’t know that there has ever been a system that guarantees every vote case before election day is counted whenever it arrives home. Given the mess our postal system is in today (we are never sure when we’ll get our mail anymore), maybe it makes sense to be a little more flexible than the bill allows.  As for drop boxes—-what is to keep an election authority from waiting for two hours past poll-closing to empty drop boxes in areas inclined to vote against the election authority’s wishes?   Doesn’t sound as if those votes will be counted even if they went into the box the day before election day.

In the days when we were in the chambers listening to debates or in the hearing rooms when bills were considered and justified or attacked by sponsors and critics, we might understand better the motivations behind this bill.  But we’re just another old guy on a quiet street—who is a voter—and we don’t have that kind of access.

So we wonder what all the fuss is about in making these changes after three million of our 4,338,133 registered voters found a way—-with the bipartisan help of the 2019 legislature—to cast ballots in a 2020 election that produced absolutely none of the bombast, accusations, and conspiracies that were generated in other states, usually by people who don’t live in those states.

Let us know.  This obviously isn’t Twitter. You can use as many helpful words as you wish.

 

 

Correcting a Short, Pithy Statement

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(We hear them all the time. We say them all the time—verbal shorthand that eliminates the need to explore the nuances of what we say or even the truth of what we say.  They’re called “maxims,” and sometimes we need to question their truth.  Dr. Frank Crane suggests the real truth about one of our often-used maxims is just the opposite of what is said.)

REAL SORROW SEEKS SOLITUDE

One of the maxims that is not true is, “Misery loves company.” The fact is, it is happiness that loves company, while sorrow seeks solitude. We close the door to weep, and draw the blinds. We go to the theatre and crowded restaurants to laugh.

Misfortune isolates. Pensiveness is unsociable.

These lines are written on shipboard; we have been six days at sea and all the passengers have become acquainted; for an ocean liner a few days out resembles a country village; everybody knows everybody and everybody’s business.  Convention rules the decks and gossip guards the cozy corners as thoroughly as in a New England town.

Only one man keeps apart.  His wife is in a coffin in the hold. A month ago they went to Italy for a long lark; she died in Naples. This man speaks to no one. He keeps to his room. He may be seen of nights looking over the rail into the boiling dark of the sea, alone.

When an animal is wounded, he flees the pack and in some cave or under some bush, solitary, he licks the bleeding paw or torn shoulder. So when the human heart breaks, its cry is for solitude; it shuns light; fellowship is pain; lonesomeness becomes a luxury.

Joy is the centripetal; sorrow the centrifugal force of the world. Joy makes cities; disappointment makes emigration.

Honoring Those Left Behind

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A group of us has been working on building a special monument in Jefferson City. We’re working with a national foundation led by a World War II Medal of Honor winner (The Herschel Woody Williams Medal of Honor Foundation) to put up a memorial honoring Gold Star families. I have had a small role; others have done the real work. But it is an privilege to be part of their effort. I am not a veteran although, as I reminded the group at my first meeting with them, “I have fought many valiant skirmishes at Marine Corps League trivia contests.”

One thing that kind of surprised us is how few people know what a Gold Star Family is.  In some ways that is not surprising. Unfortunate, but not surprising.

We don’t see them often these days. During our World Wars and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, they were more visible.  Families with members in the military during times of conflict could display a flag in the window of their home with a blue star for each family member in the service.  If a family member died or was killed during honorable service to their country during those times, the family would cover a blue star with a gold one, leaving the blue outline around the gold star.  Anyone going past a home with a flag in the window knew that somebody from that home was doing something special for the nation—or had died doing it.

In these times of limited conflicts with no massive calls to service, these symbols are seldom seen and a broad general public seldom touched by the human costs of defending our freedoms is not familiar with these flags.

But for each soldier killed in those prior wars or who dies in today’s long-ongoing conflcts, there are many broken hearts at home. Our memorial will honor those left behind to carry on in the spirit of their lost loved one.

You might have seen some of the numerous Blue Star Memorial Highway markers that have been erected since 1945 by state or local garden clubs that honor the military generally. This one is at the National Cemetery in Jefferson City.

There also is a small Gold Star Memorial sign at the west end of the Capitol, a tribute to “all Gold Star families.”

Our new monument to Gold Star Families will be built on city property adjacent to the Veterans Memorial at the Capitol, near the entrance to the Bicentennial Bridge being built to Adrian’s Island.

This is a computer simulation of our proposed monument against a different background than you’ll see when we dedicate it, hopefully in August.  The Capitol will be behind it then.

We want Gold Star Families throughout the state to know about the effort to put this memorial at the State Capitol. Although there has been a lot of publicity about the effort, most of it has been local.

If you are part of a group—veterans, civic, fraternal, church, or other—we would appreciate it if you would spread the word, and perhaps in doing so, learn of the special people in your neighborhood or among you friends who deserve to know there soon will be a monument at the Missouri Capitol honoring their sacrifice and their continued work in carrying on the spirit of those they lost.

(Photo credits: JC Parks, Missouri Capitol Commission, Gold Star Memorial Monument Committee)

How to identify political corruption

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I lost a good friend a year ago (March 12) when Tracy Wood stopped living with cancer. She was 76.  The Los Angeles Times called her “a hard-charging reporter who broke through the male-dominated press corps to cover the Vietnam War and later helped The Times win a Pulitzer [Prize] for its coverage of the L.A. Riots.”

Tracy, a United Press International correspondent in Vietnam, became the only woman to serve as president of the Association of Foreign Correspondents in Vietnam.  She worked in the UPI bureau at the California Capitol and let Nancy and me go with her to a Ronald Reagan news conference on the day we dropped in on her. She was a founding member of the editorial staff of the Voice of OC, a non-profit digital news operation founded when Orange County’s newspaper went away in the Los Angeles area. She thrived on investigating corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.

The photo is from a book about Tracy and the few other women correspondents who covered the Vietnam War,  War Torn. Among other things, she covered the release by the North Vietnamese of American POWs, including the release of John McCain.

I remember her because she was a New Jersey girl who came to the University of Missouri intending to go to the School of Journalism.  She left school before she got her degree but she taught me how to play bridge (badly) and a friend of ours, Richard Montgomery, and I taught her how to sop gravy with pieces of bread, a Midwestern practice totally unknown, apparently, in New Jersey.  I consider the experience a valuable cultural exchange.

She wrote an article once headlined “The Ingredients of Corrupt Governments.” It’s good to keep what she wrote in mind.

Corruption doesn’t happen by accident. Here’s a rundown of tools used worldwide by corrupt leaders.

  • Patronage and its siblings, nepotism and cronyism. Government leaders appoint loyalists and relatives to posts without requiring them to have the experience and qualifications needed to perform the job competently. Patronage employees also often work on government time or resources to ensure their patron or patroness gets re-elected. The result is bureaucracies that exist solely to stay in power, not serve the public good.
  • Secrecy, one of the most valuable tools of a corrupt government. In the U.S., in spite of decades-old state and federal laws that mandate government openness, corrupt officials still try to hide their meetings and communications with lobbyists and others who influence their decisions. Lack of transparency is the canary in the coal mine signaling government corruption.
  • Attacking and even shutting down a free press. The No. 1 enemy of a corrupt ruler is a free and unfettered press. That is why you’ll see authoritarian rulers in places like China, North Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East and Russia — go to great lengths to stop journalists from doing their work. For example, China this month sentenced a 71-year-old reporter to seven years in prison, according to the Los Angeles Times,because she obtained an internal Communist Party document and leaked it to a U.S. based news organization. The document she got, the Times said, “urged tighter ideological control over Chinese society and warned against promoting judicial independence, media freedom and civil society.”
  • Cash, gifts or assets handed or promised to a government official in exchange for an official favor, like a vote, or for using his or her influence to benefit the briber.
  • Contracting/procurement. It’s a universal practice of corrupt government officials. Make sure government contracts or other payments go to supporters, even if others are more qualified to do the work.
  • Financial accountability. Corrupt governments fear exposure and one way to prevent it is to falsify, minimize or simply not allow strong financial audits.
  • Election fraud. Rigged elections, which unfortunately are commonplace throughout the world, undermine the foundation of democracy. Orange County has acted to combat its own election abuses. For example, then-GOP Assemblyman Curt Pringle and the Republican Party paid a $400,000 federal court settlement after they stationed guards at 20 Santa Ana polling places in 1988 in what those who filed suit alleged was an attempt to intimidate Hispanic voters.Eight years later, former Pringle aide and current county executive Mark Denny was one of three GOP workers convicted of election fraud as part of a scheme to manipulate an Assembly election by illegally circulating nominating petitions for a decoy candidate.
  • One-sided justice. Corrupt officials everywhere use law enforcement to go after political foes but protect—or simply don’t prosecute—their supporters or those who are friends of their allies. In some cases, they avoid enforcing the law against their backers by simply not equipping their offices with professionals who are good enough at their jobs to prosecute political crimes. In that case, even if they are forced to bring charges against a supporter, there is little likelihood of a conviction.
  • Keeping voters at a distance. The rise of professional political consultants over the past half-century has made it easier for corrupt politicians to get elected and re-elected because direct mail and other campaign tools allow them to avoid personal contact with voters. Officials truly interested in representing their constituents, meet face-to-face and listen to small groups representing a range of views. Sarah Chayes, in “Thieves of State, Why Corruption Threatens Global Security,”emphasizes the importance of all government leaders holding such small group meetings. Among other things, it reduces the ability of unethical aides to filter information that reaches the top leaders. And it gives leaders accurate information about public concerns.
  • Deliberately running yes-men—and now women—for office. Behind-the-scenes power brokers keep control by seeking out and running women and men who will take orders. Even better, finding candidates who will do what they believe their benefactors want without being told. That includes elected women and men who bully those around them or only think of government as a way to make themselves important, as well as financially better off.

Resources for government corruption information:

In another article in 2015 in which she recalled the corruption of the South Vietnamese government, Tracy warned, “…All governments, not just those at war, suffer when corruption takes hold.  The corrosive effects of government corruption can be seen wherever the symptoms appear, like political patronage, attempts to stifle the free press, government secrecy—and where complacency takes hold of the electorate.”

Tracy was not one for conspiracy theories, not one to think all people in politics are corrupt (because almost all of them aren’t). She recognized corruption and went after it, though, as all good reporters do.

She also knew corruption will take root when the complacent public ignores its responsibility to pay attention, to think for itself, to ignore those who try to make them think they are victims rather than partners in government, and to support and elect the best people.

Every couple of years we have a chance to recognize that responsibility.

 

The Perpetual Best-Seller

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(I’ve told people from time to time that I never fear an editor, that nobody has ever written a perfect book—-which explains why there are so many different versions of the Bible on the bookstore shelves. We offer these thoughts from Dr. Frank Crane, who wrote them in 1912, although we admit not being sure about their political correctness.  But we think his thoughts are worth consideration because they suggest the Bible comes from a culture and a time different from ours and its teachings might be perceived as being presented differently from the way we understand teachings. Perhaps, he suggests, we can understand those teachings better if we consider—-)

HOW TO READ THE BIBLE

I have no particular creed I want you to swallow, and no particular church I want you to join. I have no intention to convert you, and even aim to “do you good.”

Still a friendly hint on how to read the Bible may interest you.

You may read the Bible from moral motives, or merely as literature. In the one case, you may find it a very puzzling book, and in the other, very antique, unless you remember one thing.

The one thing is that the Bible is an oriental book.

Unless you keep that in mind you’re pretty sure to miss its meaning.

Some of the most absurd vagaries have arisen by forgetting it, and by treating the Bible as a western book.

The oriental mind differs from ours chiefly in this, that it is essentially poetic. Eastern peoples have always thought, spoken, and written poetry…

Poetry does not speak plainly. It hints, symbolizes; touches facts not with a rough, firm grasp but evasively; loves riddles, dark sayings and apparent contradictions.

It functions in parables and paradoxes.

The western mind is prosaic. It plods, builds, and reasons.

To get to the top of the mountain, the occidental cuts logical steps in the rocks, the oriental flies.

In moral subjects and religious the eastern mind is the more skillful, as such matters are better divined that argued.

Forget not, therefore, that there is hardly a line of your Bible that is not poetry.  The nearest to prose is in Paul’s writings; yet they also abound in highly poetical passages.

No one had this poetical turn than the chief figure of the Bible, Jesus.

His parables are pure poetry; his maxims are full of paradox.

It is very unfortunate that our western bent for logic and bald facts led us to use the glowing images of the Great Master’s poetry as bricks and squared stones wherewith to build up our “systems for truth.”

For it is doubtful that truth is a system at all; it is more likely a vision.

Take one illustration: Jesus would teach his disciples the value of humility. Instead of analyzing this virtue, dissecting and explaining it, as a modern professor might do, He removes his coat, girds himself with a towel and washes His pupils’ feet, saying finished:

“If I, your Master, wash your feet, so ought ye to wash one another’s feet.”

The advantage of this method of teaching is that it is striking, easily remembered, visual, and interesting.

Common sense prevented His disciples from taking his command literally. They were forced to seek the idea, the sentiment behind it.

Literalism is not Truth. It is the foe of Truth. “The letter killeth.”

You cannot literally obey a poet; you should spiritually obey him; that is, try to appreciate him, to get his point of view, his atmosphere and feeling.

Logic chopping is fatal to all poetry.

 

A Western Paul Revere

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While looking for something else a few days ago I came across a story in a 1912 edition of the Keokuk Daily Gate City that explained how Union forces won the northernmost battle of the Civil War west of the Mississippi River. The story involves a mad ride through the countryside to warn of impending attack and a small town’s action against a stronger enemy. Unlike the story that turned Paul Revere’s truncated ride into an epic apocryphal poem, this story is a first-hand account of a wild adventure that changed history west of the Mississippi River.

Athens, Missouri (It’s pronounced AY-thens there) was a town of about fifty about the time of the Civil War, backed up against the Des Moines River that forms the notch in our border in the far northeast corner of the state.  It’s pretty much a ghost town now, with a state historic site nearby commemorating the Battle of Athens. Athens doesn’t even show up on the maps anymore (the one above is from Google). Go up to the northeast corner of the notch, just east of Highway 81 about seven miles (as the crow flies) southeast of Farmington, Iowa, where the DesMoines River forms the state boundary and imagine a dot there and you’ll pretty much know where Athens was.

About 2,000 Confederates under Colonel Martin Green tried to capture Athens from the Home Guard Troops under Col. David Moore who occupied the town. Normally he would have had 500 men but he was down to about 330 because some of his troops had been allowed to go to their homes in the area. Green surrounded the town on three sides and attacked on August 5, 1861.

But Moore’s men turned out to be better armed, with rifled muskets and bayonets while Green’s force was poorly equipped and was mostly untrained recruits. When the Confederate attack wavered in the face of better-than-expected defenses, Moore led a bayonet counter-attack that forced the Rebels to flee, never again to threaten an invasion Iowa.

A key part of the story is how the Union forces came to be better armed. And that is where the seldom-related (for many years, apparently) story of General Cyrus Bussey, then a cavalry Lieutenant-Colonel of the Iowa Home Guard begins.  He told it to Phillip Dolan of the New York World and it was reprinted in the Keokuk newspaper on January 1, 1912.

Listen my friends and you shall hear of the daring ride of Cyrus Bussey, and how it changed Civil War history in northeast Missouri and in Iowa.

“Because I was a Democratic member of the Iowa State Senate and supported the measure to appropriate $800,000 to raise troops in Iowa for the preservation of the Union, Governor Kirkwood named me his aide-de-camp on his staff, with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel of Cavalry. That was May, 1861. I was twenty-eight years old with no military education or training.

“I lived in Bloomfield, twelve miles from the Missouri border. My messenger reported to me that the Confederal Gen. Martin Green was organizing a brigade on the border to invade Iowa. I applied to Governor Kirkwood for arms but he had none.  The Battle of Bull Run had given the southerners big encouragement and there was great enlistment in northern Missouri for the Confederate army.

“I went to General Fremont in St. Louis and asked for arms. He had none.  I said, ‘Give me 100,000 rounds of ammunition.

“What will you do with ammunition without guns?”

“I replied ‘I don’t know but I’ll feel better if I have ammunition.’

“He gave me 50,000 rounds and right away it was loaded on a steamboat and sent up the Mississippi River to Keokuk, Iowa.

“The next night about midnight my messenger came to my house in Bloomfield and reported that Gen. Green was shoeing his horses and would start the invasion of Iowa within thirty-six hours with 1,500 cavalry.

“I went at once to a livery stable and asked for a horse and buggy. At 4 o’clock in the morning they brought to my house a rig —a two-wheeled sulky—and in the shafts was a mustang and three men were holding him, for he was really a wild horse just taken from the herd. It was the only horse they could give me.

“I got up in the seat, took the reins, the men let go and the mustang plunged off.  Away I went behind that wild horse toward Keokuk, forty miles to the eastward. For fourteen miles he tore over the road, over the hills, up and down and through streams with never a let up; a hundred escapes from imminent wreck we had.

“We approached the home of Mr. Bloom, a friend of mine. Here the road led down to a ravine and Mr. Bloom’s cattle filled the road, lying down. Straight down the road, galloped the horse, straight at the herd of cattle. One wheel struck a cow, the shock took the horse clean off his feet, threw him into the air and down he landed on his back in a ditch with the sulky on top of him. I was flung twenty feet.

“But good fortune was with me. The sulky was not broken, and better still, the horse was still full of life and his legs uninjured. Swiftly, Mr. Bloom and his hired man helped me to hitch up again, and away we went, the horse wilder than ever. At the Pittsburgh ford he plunged through the Des Moines River, half a mile wide, and a mile and a half further, came to the town of Keosauqua. Here I tried to stop him but he would not stop. I guided him around the square in the center of the town. Round and round he raced three times, and then a crowd of the town’s people stopped him and I got out. I left him there for good. I took the train for Keokuk and reached that place.

“I notified the authorities of Keokuk to barricade their streets against the coming of Martin Green. One of the railroad officials came to me with a bill of lading showing 1,000 guns in transit, shipped by the war department to Col. Grenville M. Dodge at Council Bluffs, for the regiment he was raising there and these guns had just arrived in Keokuk and were about to go out on the west bound train. I felt that Providence was with me. I seized the guns and the train.

“I found the ammunition which General Fremont had sent, and by more wonderful good fortune, the cartridges were exactly right for the caliber of the guns.

“Immediately I gave 100 of the guns to Gen. Belknap, afterwards secretary of war, and 100 to H. J. Sample. I got on the train with 800 guns. At Athens, Mo., Col. David Moore was in camp with 300 loyal Missourians armed with a few shotguns. I gave him 200 rifles. A few miles further up, I left 100 guns with Capt. O. H. P. Scott.  At Keosauqua I left 200 guns. The other 300 guns I took to Ottumwa, hired a wagon, and hauled them to Bloomfield, my home, where three companies were promptly raised, and I immediately started back to Keokuk.

“On the way, I received a message from Col. Moore telling me Green’s forces were advancing on him and a battle was momentarily expected. A special train brought a detachment to his aid.

“Moore had barricaded the streets of Athens. Green attacked him but the resistance was so strong that Green retired. For two days my Home Guard continued to arrive at Athens. Then Col. Moore, in command, followed the rebels into Missouri. They never came back to Iowa.

“Having seized the guns without warrant—ordinarily a great offense—I started to get my action legalized. Gen. Fremont said to me, ‘You have rendered a very important service. You have shown fitness for command. Next day he appointed me Colonel and authorized me to raise a regiment of cavalry. In ten days I had 1,100 men in camp, mustered in as the Third Iowa Cavalry.

“But I have never ceased to wonder what would have happened if that wild mustang had not landed on his back in the soft ditch and thus saved his legs to carry me on.”

And that’s how Moore’s men at Athens became better armed than the  much larger force of Confederates and how a little battle in a now-gone northeast Missouri town stopped a Confederate invasion of Iowa.

The battle was the beginning of a distinguished military and civilian life for Bussey. He was Grant’s chief of cavalry at Vicksburg and commanded Sherman’s advance guard at Jackson Mississippi.  He became a wartime Major-General in 1865. For a short time after the war he was a commission merchant in St. Louis and New Orleans before becoming a lawyer. During the Harrison administration (1889-1893) he was Assistant Secretary of the Interior.  At the time of the interview he was described as “a spare, medium-size man, showing few marks of his long life of great activity, he is mentally keen and keeps the dry humor of an Iowa pioneer.”

He died in 1915 at the age of 81.  He and his wife are buried in Arlington National Cemetery under an imposing monument.

The Paul Revere of the west, he was—except that, unlike Revere, he was propelled by a wild mustang and he completed his mission.  And he changed the history of the Civil War west of the Mississippi.

(The picture is from History of Iowa from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (1903)

Finally—

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Somebody has come up with a way for the legislature to improve financing of our roads and bridges while also anticipating the growth of electric vehicles and their impact on future transportation infrastructure funding. The idea is halfway through the legislative process but some observers think the road ahead is uphill. And the hill is the House of Representatives.

Your loyal observer observed the last part of Missouri Senate debate on the bill sponsored by Senate President Pro Tem Dave Schatz of Sullivan last Thursday morning, shortly before the Senate adjourned for spring break. Schatz, who thinks returning to gravel roads is not much of a solution to our present road upkeep problems, has gotten his gas tax increase bill through the Senate but he had to work for it.

Passage of the bill was reminiscent of some of the bi-partisan collegiality and compromise in which the Senate takes pride but which has too often in many recent years been missing.

Earlier in the week, Schatz’s plan for a 15-cent per-gallon fuel tax increase ran into a roadblock thrown up by the conservative caucus, a group of senators that seemingly opposes any kind of a tax increase any time (the present tax rate of 17 cents a gallon ranks Missouri 49th in the country in fuel tax level).  Our last gas tax was a phased-in tax that peaked in 1996.

MODOT doesn’t buy much asphalt, cement, or winter salt and the equipment to spread it for 1996 prices these days.  But it sure could use the estimated $460 million a year the increased tax will produce when it’s fully effective.

The compromise bill phases in a 12.5 cent increase through five years.  For those who think roads and bridges can be built and maintained for free, there’s a provision that lets people save all of their receipts printed at the pump and then claim a full rebate of the new taxes.  It’s a nice touch to mollify some no-tax folks, many of whom won’t keep track of all of those receipts to claim 2.5 cents per gallon at the end of the year.

We calculate that somebody traveling 12,000 miles a year in a vehicle that gets 20 miles per gallon would get back $15, not much money for the hassle of saving all those receipts.

We’ve observed previously in some of these conversations the growing number of vehicles that do not contribute to the cost of maintaining our road and highway system, which is why we are gratified to see a provision in this bill that increases present EV fees by twenty percent during the next five years.

As we understand present law, the owners of Alternative Fuel Vehicles have to buy a decal from the state. For cars that are not powered by electricity, that decal is $75. AFVs weighing 18 tons or more have to have a $1,000 decal in the window.  For plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, the decal costs half of the fee for vehicles that powered by fossil fuels.

But is that half-off fee proper for EVs fair to the road system?  That’s where another welcome part of Schatz’s bill kicks in. It establishes the “Electric Vehicle Task Force” within the Revenue Department to recommend future legislation on ways EVs can appropriately contribute to the infrastructure they use.

There is never an ideal time for a tax increase as far as the public and some members of the legislature are concerned.  But two or three pennies a gallon will mean that the state can afford do more than to apply cold patches to potholes and keep fingers crossed that rusty bolts on bridges will hold on a little bit longer.

I’d rather pay a little more at the pump than read about school buses winding up in a rural creek on the wsay to school.

There’s no guarantee the House will accept Schatz’s plan or recognize the compromise work that got it passed (every Senate Democrat joined with some of the members of Schatz’s party to pass the bill).  From our lofty position, however, it seems to be a prudent, responsible approach to dealing with a major problem today while laying the groundwork for dealing with our electric-powered future.