Category Archives: crime

Simile When You Say That, Pardner

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One of my favorite satellite radio channels Radio Classics, maybe because I’m so old that I remember when radio was filled with diverse entertainments instead of the steady diet of super-inflated egos who pour division and distrust into democracy’s gears.

One thing television has taken away from radio is the detective show in which the main character is the narrator who explains in often-colorful phrases the world in which he or she lives.  Many of these shows were created in era of hard-boiled detective novels and magazines, thus leading to a lot of similes that left vivid images in the listeners’ minds.

Let’s face it, television and movies cannot come close to showing what we see in our minds and they did it with similies.

The king of the detective simile was Pat Novak, played by pre-Dragnet Jack Webb on “Pat Novak for Hire.”  The other day Radio Classics played an episode called “Agnes Bolton.”

To refresh your memory of high school freshman English, a simile is a figure of speech in which something is compared to something different.

Pat Novak was a tough private eye living on the financial edge with a boat rental business in San Francisco. Webb’s narration throughout the program described his situations and those he met, including a friend who tells him during the show, “You’re never on the right side of things. You’ll always be in trouble because you’re a bad citizen. You’re a shabby half-step in the march of human progress. You don’t know the difference between good and evil. For you, all of human endeavor is a vague blur in high heels…You might as well try to recapture melancholy or ventilate a swamp. Ya haven’t a chance. You’ll never be any good.”

The writers for the show were Richard Breen and Gil Doud.  It must have been fun writing Webb’s narration as Pat Novak.  Even those who were raised after the dawn of television can probably hear in their own minds Jack Webb’s clipped, blunt, reading:

Around here a set of morals won’t cause any more stir than Mothers Day at an orphanage.

It doesn’t do any good to sing the blues because down here you’re just another guy in the chorus.

About as likely he would show up as a second pat of butter on a 50-cent lunch.

A smile as smooth as a pound of liver in a bucket of glycerin.

His eyes swept the room like a $10 broom.

She was at least 50 because you can’t get that ugly without years of practice.

(Her complexion) was red and scratchy as if she used a bag of sand for cold cream.

Her hair hung down like dead branches of a tree.

The way she fit (into a telephone booth), a sardine ought to be happy.

He was making noises in his throat as if he was eating a pound of cellophane.

(I couldn’t get anybody to talk to me.) I might as well have been selling tip sheets in a monastery.

If you keep your foot on a bar rail, you’ll find it’ll do more good for your arches than for your brain.

I better have a drink first; there’s an ugly taste in my mouth. I think it’s saliva.

It wasn’t raining hard anymore…It sounded quiet, almost private, like the sound a woman makes when she runs her fingernail up and down her stocking. It got on your nerves at first and then you learn to enjoy it.

Her main talent is more dimensional than dramatic.

(She was) stretched out as dead as a deer on a fender.

Her skin reminded you of a piece of felt that was almost worn out. But the rest was all right.

Riding with (him) is just about as safe as eating an arsenic sandwich.

The rain was hitting the windshield and it was like trying to see through a mint julep.

—All of those are from that single show.  If a person loves descriptive writing or wants to learn something about it, I suggest they listen to some of these great old detective shows.

Various people have proclaimed, “Theatre is life; film is art; television is furniture; but radio is imagination.”  Have you ever seen on television anything that has shown you someone “as dead as a deer on a fender?”  Or seen anything on television as sensuous as “the sound a woman makes when she runs her fingernail up and down her stocking?”  What we see with our eyes is often so inadequate when compared to what we see in our minds.

This is a good opportunity to pay tribute to those two writers. Their names are unfamiliar. In fact, we don’t pay much attention as the credits roll at the end of our movies or TV shows and name of the writer(s) show up.

Richard Breen started as a freelance radio writer who moved to movies. He won an Oscar as the screenwriter for 1953’s Titanic.  He was nominated for writing A Foreign Affair in 1948 and for Captain Newman, M.D., in 1963.

Gil Doud also wrote for the Sam Spade radio series.  He wrote one episode of the radio Gunsmoke and adapted five of John Meston’s Gunsmoke radio scripts for the early television versions of the show. He didn’t match Green’s screenwriting credentials but he did write Thunder Bay starring James Stewart in 1953, Saskatchewan with Alan Ladd the next year, and Audie Murphy’s To Hell and Back in 1955.  He also wrote episodes for the radio shows Suspense and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.

These guys were writing for radio in the era when people such as Mickey Spillane were beginning their tough murder mysteries with (from Spillane’s The Big Kill):

“It was one of those nights when the sky came down and wrapped itself around the world.  The rain clawed at the windows of the bar like an angry cat and tried to sneak in every time some drunk lurched in the door. The place reeked of stale beer and soggy men and enough cheap perfume thrown in to make you sick.”

Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels and the radio shows written by people such as Breen and Doud create images no television program or movie could ever show.  It’s the power of the written word.  And the spoken word.

Let’s conclude this colorful reminiscence with part of the script from the opening of the tenth Pat Novak show, “Go Away Dixie Gilliam.”  It’s from https://www.genericradio.com/show/07d5af03664522b5:

Ladies and Gentlemen, the American Broadcasting Company brings transcribed to its entire network, one of radio’s most unusual programs:

MUSIC: BRIEF, DRAMATIC INTRO, THEN SOFTEN FOR NEXT LINE

ANNOUNCER: Pat Novak, For Hire.

MUSIC: UP AGAIN BRIEFLY AND FADE OUT

SOUND: HARBOR AMBIANCE DURING NOVAK’S INTRO LINES

SOUND:FOOTSTEPS OUT OF THE FOG

 

NOVAK: Sure, I’m Pat Novak, For Hire.

SOUND:HARBOR OUT

MUSIC: CUP AS HARBOR FADES. PLAY BRIEFLY AND THEN SOFTEN AS NOVAK CONTINUES.

NOVAK:

That’s what the sign out in front of my office says: Pat Novak, For Hire. Down on the waterfront in San Francisco you always bite off more than you can chew. It’s tough on your wind pipe, but you don’t go hungry. And down here a lot of people figure its better to be a fat guy in a graveyard than a thin guy in a stew. That way he can be sure of a tight fit. (Pause) Oh, I rent boats and do anything else which makes a sound like money–

MUSIC: OUT

NOVAK:

–It works out alright, if your mother doesn’t mind you coming home for Easter in a box. I found that out on Wednesday night at about 9 o’clock. I closed the shop early and I came home to read. It wasn’t a bad book, if you ever wanted to start a forest fire. It was one of those historical things and the girl in it wandered around like a meat grinder in ribbons. Ah, I was moving along alright. She was just getting her second wind before going for the world’s record when the door to my apartment opened and the place began to get kinda crowded. From where I sat, the crowd looked good.

SOUND: SOFT FOOTSTEPS APPROACH UNTIL LEIGH’S FIRST LINE

NOVAK:

She sauntered in, moving slowly from side to side like a hundred and eighteen pounds of warm smoke. Her voice was alright, too. It reminded you of a furnace full of marshmallows.

 

My God!  “Like a hundred and eighteen pounds of warm smoke….”  Let NCSI or Law & Order try to match that.

Some of our women readers might consider this language blatantly sexist.  It’s hard not to agree.  Perhaps in our comment box below, some might want to suggest some similar similes describing men. Just remember, this is a family blog, rated no higher than PG.

This concludes our refresher course on SIMILIES.

And how much better our minds were when radio brought them to us

I beg your pardon

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Ming the Merciless came to mind the other day.  The villain in countless Flash Gordon comics, movie serials, motion pictures, television shows and series programs, Ming presided over the Kingdom of Mongo and Flash was his nemesis.

Ming and Mike Parson have nothing in common. But word association kicked in when I noticed the latest word that Governor Parson issued 36 more pardons to imprisoned Missourians a few days ago.  By our count, that raises his total to 105 pardons in the last six months along with four reductions in sentences—commutations.  And I thought, “Mike the Merciful.”  And that led to the next thought, Ming. Odd how the mind works sometimes.

We haven’t combed the records of all of our previous governors but we suspect Governor Parson might already have set a record for pardons. Certainly he will have a chance to set one if he has not set it by now.

But it is unlikely that any previous governor has had the chance Mike Parson has had to take these actions.  It seems that his predecessors, we don’t know how many, did not act on about 3,700 clemency petitions.  His office says he has made a slight dent in that total by dispensing with about 500 of them.  Obviously, he’s not in the mood to rubber-stamp anything.

These circumstances might surprise some people.  He’s a conservative for one thing and conservatives are sometimes stereotyped as “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” people.  He sure isn’t a liberal who stereotypically would open prison doors to release all kinds of bad folks.

He’s a former sheriff and we’ve heard some law enforcement people complain that they work hard to put people away only to see some stereotypically soft-hearted judge let them go.

And here we have conservative Mike Parson, former sheriff, letting more than 100 people (so far) out of prison early.

If we were still an active reporter at the Capitol, we’d want to interview him about this issue. It’s one of the things we miss about not being an active reporter anymore—access to explore issues such as this with people such as Governor Parson.  So we’ve suggested to some colleagues they do it.

Just think of it as an old fire horse who thinks he hears the fire bell ringing again every now and then.

Without trying to read the governor’s mind, might we suggest a couple of things?

First, because he’s a former sheriff, maybe he understands that the justice system isn’t always fair to the people law enforcement officers spend a lot of time arresting.  Mandatory sentencing isn’t particularly fair all the time.  And not all of those going to prison are by nature bad people who deserve the stiff penalties they’re given whether under mandatory standards or otherwise.

Second, people change.  They earn a second chance and no good results from denying it to them.

Third, the accumulation of clemency requests not acted upon by predecessors is just plain wrong.  Justice delayed is Justice denied, we’re told.  Justice can be served in a lot of ways, and continuing to hold a redeemed soul behind bars isn’t justice. Or, at least, it hasn’t been for more than 100 people in the last six months.

From what we’ve seen, the bar is pretty high to merit a Parson pardon or a commutation. The folks to whom he’s giving clemency have not earned it by just doing time; they’ve earned it by what they have done with their time.

Last December, when he announced his first batch of pardons, he said he chose those who have “demonstrated a changed lifestyle and desire to move on from past behaviors.”

“If we are to be a society that believes in forgiveness and second chances, then it is the next chapter in these individuals’ lives that will matter the most. We are encouraged and hopeful these individuals will take full advantage of this opportunity.” 

He has told his legal team—less than a handful of people if we read the latest Blue Book staff list correctly—-to keep reviewing the files.  That’s a lot of reading and follow-up questioning for that small number of people to do. But they’re chipping away at it.

He said in December that he wants it clearly known that he’s not “soft” on lawbreakers. “There must be serious consequences for criminal behavior,” he said. “But when individuals demonstrate a changed lifestyle and a commitment to abandoning the ways of their past, they should be able to redeem themselves in the eyes of the law.”

It’s a clear message—-Lock ‘em up.

But remember where the key is.

And WHAT it is.   And what it is, is the inmate.

 

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Those in the Middle

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Abraham Lincoln was born 212 years ago today.  He was the second Republican to run for President and the first to win. A lot can happen to a political party, and has, in the 160 years since he entered the White House.

The party made a critical decision about its future when it nominated him, a moderate in a time of rising radicalism, to run for President of the United States. Today’s Republicans might be facing a decision about their party’s future that is no less serious than the party’s decision in 1860. There is concern, however, about who are the people who will make that decision or who will take it in its future direction.

Sarah Longwell runs a conservative website, The Bulwark, and does a conservative podcast.

She made an interesting point this week about some people who have, by and large, escaped the spotlight that is shining on our ex-president and on the insurrectionists he is accused of spending months motivating to take actions that will put many of them in prison.

“Hold Them All Accountable,” says the headline on her website entry last Tuesday.  She asks, “What of the elected officials whose months of lies agitated and radicalized the crowd, even before it was incited to insurrection?”

And who are these people she thinks are running under the radar?

“Finding 17 Republican senators to convict Trump is a Herculean task, not least because many of them joined him in feeding the lie that brought these people to the Capitol in the first place. In this regard, this trial is unique for having members of the jury who are not just not impartial, but are both witnesses and accomplices to the crime.”

Longwell reminds us to remember that more than one-fourth of Republicans in the Senate were on-record objecting to certifying the Electoral College results. She calls their demands for investigations into Trump-claimed extensive voter fraud “nothing less than hype-man interjections meant to bolster Trump’s claims that he ‘won in a landslide’ and that the election was being stolen.”

She especially targets our own Josh Hawley along with colleagues Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, and Lindsey Graham who “were happy to jump in front of every available television camera to discuss the unprecedented allegations of voter fraud no matter how discredited those allegations were.”

She also scorns some house members: Louis Gohmert who suggested “violence in the streets” was the only thing left after a federal court refused to order Vice President Mike Pence to reverse the results; Madison Cawthorn, who suggested people call their congressmen and “lightly threaten” them if they didn’t reverse the results; Mo Brooks, who said just before the insurrection, “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.”

She recalls 126 House Republicans joined the Texas Attorney General’s lawsuit questioning the results in four swing states.

“So now, while those arrested for the Capitol attack are—rightly—facing hard time, the Republicans and members of Conservatism Inc., who filled these thugs’ heads with poison and pointed them toward the Capitol are ‘moving on,’ their campaign fund flush with the millions they raised claiming they were going to ‘stop the steal.’”

She quotes former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s observation that, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by their president and other powerful people.”

Longwell says that means that ‘the elected officials who fed these people lies should be held accountable in some way, too.”

Sarah Longwell finishes, “Call witnesses. Prosecute the case. And never forget who the enemies of democracy were.”

She was interviewed on NPR”s Morning Edition earlier this week and host Sacha Pfeifer asked her how penalties could be exacted against those in Congress who supported The Big Lie. She answered, “Unfortunately, the electoral process is going to take a long time to play out…So it has to be the rest of our culture. It has to be with the process of shame.  You need the business community to stand up and say we draw a bright line for people who objected to this election, that that is disqualifying to hold public office for people whotold lies to voters. Fifty million people believing that the election was stolen is an existential threat to our democracy.”  More specifically for the business community, “Withholding their donations, saying we are not going to donate to politicians who objected to a free and fair election.”

She thinks newspapers have a role with “editorial boards calling relentlessly for the resignations…We’ve got billboards up through our Republican Accountability Project calling for a lot of these foficials to resign. There is—needs to be a relentless public pressure that says what they did was wrong and be very clear about that becuae it was wrong.”

Longwell thinks it will be difficult for government to have a Biblical “physician, heal thyself” attitude because “so many Republicans participated in this problem that they’re not really going to hold each other accountable…Democrats essentially have to do it (but) then it looks entirely political, which is why the rest of the culture sort of has to step in here.”

She urged “as many Republican senators as possible (to) stand up and do the right thing now because it’s really going to matter, showing people that there is come accountability even within your own party.”

The entire article is at: https://thebulwark.com/hold-them-all-accountable/

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Sarah Longwell might not set well with the Trump true believers.  She has a background as a Republican strategist and is a former Senior Vice-President and Communications Director for noted GOP lobbyist Richard Berman.  She now runs her own communications company in DC. She was the first woman to sit on the board of Log Cabin Republicans, a Republican organization that refused to endorse Donald Trump in 2016.  She resigned as chairman of the board when the organization endorsed him in 2019.  Now a Never-Trumper, she leads a group called Republicans for the Rule of Law, an organization she founded with noted conservative writer Bill Kristol.  The organization advocated for Trump’s impeachment and removal two years ago.

Impeachment Rides Again

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The second Senate trial of Donald Trump begins today with Trump’s same threatening shadow over those who might personally and intellectually believe he deserves no sympathy but who are unable to resist his politically-threatening presence. .

If it is improper to impeach and convict someone whose behavior in office so strongly breaches all bounds of propriety after he or she vacates the office, how then can that person be held accountable for his direct or indirect actions?  How is justice to be exacted on behalf of the Republic?

Is Lady Justice to be stripped of her scales by the calendar or does she carry them into his or her political afterlife ?

The Senate voted 56-44 yesterday afternoon that Lady Justice is mobile.

We encourage you to watch these events on C-SPAN as much as you can. Stay away from partisan sources.  Watch, listen, be informed by an organization that lets you watch, form your own opinions, and decide if justice is done.

There is considerable doubt that enough Republicans will join with Democrats to reach the two-thirds majority needed to convict Trump. Based on the vote that the proceeding is constitutional, Democrats need to pick up eleven Republican votes to convict.

In truth, conviction would appear to be more likely if these proceedings were done in secret as we observe the strong secret caucus vote of confidence for Representative Lynne Cheney who was facing party punishment for voting to impeach.  But the public vote to take away committee appointments from Marjorie Taylor Greene for her outlandish advocacy of numerous debunked conspiracies found few Republicans willing to step up.  It is easy to be courageous if those who seek to intimidate you do not know who you are. But courage in public despite a penalty that might be threatened or imposed is rare no matter how much it is justified.

Honor is achieved in the light, not in the darkness.

Should the Senate fail to generate the needed two-thirds vote to convict, the former president might once again proclaim victory.  It is a mistake for others to respect that proclamation.

Even if the final vote is 51-50, with the Vice President breaking a tie, the Senate will achieve a majority that Trump never achieved in either of his presidential elections.  In 2016 he achieved only 46.1%.  In 2020, he achieved only 46.9%.

Forget all of the pap about getting 74-million votes.  He lost. By millions of votes. Chris Kobach, whose investigation failed to turn up all the fraudulent votes Trump claimed were against him in 20-16 won’t be able to find fraudulent votes in 2020 either.  God knows Rudi Giuliani tried even harder last year than Kobach did in ’16, tried so hard he’s being sued for billions by the companies that made the voting machines.

Let all of the senators regardless of whose side they are on (willingly or fearfully) and all of us listen to and see the evidence from both sides.  Our Senators and 98 of their colleagues eventually will vote and we hope they will vote their conscience, not their fear of retribution.

And as we noted in observing Trump’s first trial, a verdict of “not guilty” is not the same as finding him “innocent.”   By whatever gauge anyone might use to consider Trump’s behavior, the word “innocent’ cannot be used with validity.

A lot of people who are in jail or are out on bond facing tough charges and hard time will not connect “innocent” to him.

(Incidentally, has anyone heard of Trump calling the families of those who are facing those charges, or calling the families of any of those who were hurt or who have died because of the onsurrection to offer any comfort or, in the case of police officers injured in protecting the building and the people who work in it, any sympathy?)

We shall wait for honor and courage to be displayed by those who sit in judgment of Donald J. Trump.

Theodore Roosevelt  and fake news

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Please pardon us for some introductory observations that recall our very recent past, but—

Our most current former president got pretty prickly when somebody had the temerity to suggest he was wrong (which has led to one observer in our social circle suggesting the official White House pet should have been a porcupine).

No matter how much he complained about “fake news,” there’s nothing fake about his exit from the biggest pulpit he will ever have.  He came along several decades late because—

This country once had a law against using “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about our government or the flag or the armed forces or making comments that led others to hold the government in contempt during wartime. There are some today who think that’s a dandy idea, particularly as the longest war in our history appears to have seized back the headlines and complaints about “fake news” and a new war—against a virus—has ignited even more hostility toward those who tell us this war won’t just go away.

And a lot of people apparently side with the President who labels anything in the press that runs counter to his remarks or ideas to be “fake news” published by “enemies of the people.”  But the president has done a pretty good job, himself, of violating the century-old law against speaking poorly of the government. And his most recent tirade, mostly “fake facts” of the kind of which he has thrived, and its consequences are unforgiveable.

The Sedition Act of 1918 was an extension of the Espionage Act of 1917, both products of World War One.  People could go to prison for twenty years for expressing an opinion somebody found un-American.

Kansas City Star editor William Rockhill Nelson had a good friend named Teddy Roosevelt who was concerned about the nation’s readiness for war.  Nelson convinced Roosevelt he should put his ideas in print with the Star, which would then circulate the editorials throughout the country.  Roosevelt promptly called himself the newest “cub reporter” on the Star staff.  He typed his first column in the Star newsroom while he was in town for a visit in September, 1917.  His column published the next May 7 made the case for people to say bad things about a President if they thought he deserved it. His column resonates today (we have emphasized the part about free speech and the press and underlined a particularly important word):

The legislation now being enacted by Congress should deal drastically with sedition. It should also guarantee the right of the press and people to speak the truth freely of all their public servants, including the President, and to criticize them in the severest terms of truth whenever they come short in their public duty. Finally, Congress should grant the Executive the amplest powers to act as an executive and should hold him to stern accountability for failure so to act, but it should itself do the actual lawmaking and should clearly define the lines and limits of action and should retain and use the fullest powers of investigation into and supervision over such action. Sedition is a form of treason. It is an offense against the country, not against the President. At this time to oppose the draft or sending our armies to Europe, to uphold Germany, to attack our allies, to oppose raising the money necessary to carry on the war are at least forms of sedition, while to act as a German spy or to encourage German spies to use money or intrigue in the corrupt service of Germany, to tamper with our war manufactures and to encourage our soldiers to desert or to fail in their duty, and all similar actions are forms of undoubtedly illegal sedition. For some of these offenses death should be summarily inflicted. For all the punishment should be severe.

The Administration has been gravely remiss in dealing with such acts.

Free speech, exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where the people are themselves free. Our Government is the servant of the people, whereas in Germany it is the master of the people. This is because the American people are free and the German are not free. The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.

During the last year the Administration has shown itself anxious to punish the newspapers which uphold the war, but which told the truth about the Administration’s failure to conduct the war efficiently, whereas it has failed to proceed against various powerful newspapers which opposed the war or attacked our allies or directly or indirectly aided Germany against this country, as these papers upheld the Administration and defended the inefficiency. Therefore, no additional power should be given the Administration to deal with papers for criticizing the Administration. And, moreover, Congress should closely scrutinize the way the Postmaster-General and Attorney-General have already exercised discrimination between the papers they prosecuted and the papers they failed to prosecute.

Congress should give the President full power for efficient executive action. It should not abrogate its own power. It should define how he is to reorganize the Administration. It should say how large an army we are to have and not leave the decision to the amiable Secretary of War, who has for two years shown such inefficiency. It should declare for an army of five million men and inform the Secretary that it would give him more the minute he asks for more.

All of this is from a man who, as President, filed a libel suit against Joseph Pulitzer after Pulitzer’s New York World disclosed that a syndicate involving friends of Roosevelt and his favored successor, William Howard Taft, made a lot of money from the United States’ purchase of land from France for the Panama Canal.  The Indianapolis News also was sued.

When an Indiana judge threw out the suit against the News, Roosevelt called him “a crook and a jackass.”  Sounds pretty contemporary to us.

Roosevelt dictated his last column for the Kansas City newspaper on January 3, 1919. Three days later he died.

It has to be FRAUD, I tell you!

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I’ve been studying the Missouri results of the November 3 election and I believe we need some judges to declare there were fraudulent votes cast.  Thousands of them.

One need only look at the winning percentages of statewide Republican candidates to see evidence of illegal activity.

Missouri abolished straight-ticket voting in 2006.  But look at the winning percentages of top-of-the-ticket Republicans:

Trump 58.26%

Parson  57.17%

Kehoe  58.5%

Secretary of State 60.6%

Treasurer 59.2%

Attorney General 59.5%

Clearly, there’s something fishy here.  It’s impossible to have percentages this uniform unless there wasn’t illegal straight-ticket voting going on.  I’m not sure how it was done but it’s time to hire a lawyer, file a lawsuit, and accuse voters and local election authorities of plotting to assure a Republican sweep.

These votes should not have been counted because the percentages show there was clear tampering going on at the ballot box.  Chances are that a check of thousands of ballots will show remarkable similarities in the way the little ovals next to candidates’ names were filled in by reputed voters.

Furthermore, poll watchers were kept so far away from the tabulations that they could not closely examine the way the ballots were marked, thus being unable to challenge each ballot before it was processed.

All of the votes cast in the election of 2020 in Missouri should be voided because the uniformity of markings clearly shows extensive violation of the state election law against straight-ticket voting.

An investigation must be launched at the highest level to find the actual ballots that were removed so these fake ballots could be substituted and elections officials throughout Missouri should be jailed for their parts in this massive voter fraud that resulted in obvious straight-ticket voting ban.

Maybe the Democratic Attorney General of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, and nine other Democratic Attorneys General who have no business sticking their noses into a Missouri election should file a petition asking the United States Supreme Court to throw out all of the ballots showing near-uniform voting for President Trump and the five Republican statewide officers.

Note to Nicole Galloway:  This election is not over!

The whole election was a record-breaking fraud, I say.  FRAUD!!!  FRAUD!!!

Dr. Crane on lying

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(In a time when accusations of lying are common, we turn to a column by Dr. Frank Crane published about 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and the publication of the diaries of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy had died in 1910. Although nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature five consecutive years and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times, he never won. Dr. Crane uses Tolstoy’s diary to talk about—-)

LYING TO YOURSELF

The private diary of Leo Tolstoy was recently published in Paris by his daughter, the Countess Alexandria Ivovna. One of his views therein expressed is:

“Lying to others is much less serious than lying to yourself.”

To know this is the beginning of wisdom.

Self-deception is the starting-point of moral decay.

Lying to others may be but a harmless amusement, but lying to yourself is sure to mean inward deformity, the germ-laden fleck that spreads disease throughout your whole character.

Yet it is the commonest, easiest, most subtle of sins.

If you talk with the inmates of the penitentiary, with the crime-wrecked and drug-soaked of the slums, you will find that every one of them is living like a spider in a web of delusions he has woven out of his own substance.

The profligate has told himself that “the world owes him a living” until he believes it.

The criminal lays his downfall at the door of society.

The prostitute can glibly prove that she is not to blame, she is the victim of injustice.

Every down-and-outer labors to justify himself and trace his misfortune to others.

As a matter of fact, no person since the world began was ever compelled to do wrong.

No rotten stone or cracked beam was ever laid in the edifice of any man’s character that he did not put there with his own hands.

When I say that another made me do an evil thing I lie to myself.

Others may have threatened, cajoled, tempted, pushed, or bribed me, but the fatal final step was never taken except by the consent of my own will.

You may offer me a habit-forming thing, you may argue with me that it will do me good, you may urge me by ridicule, and lead me on by example; and my appetite may second your efforts. I may crave the glass, my nerves may clamor for it, and my imagination may lure me to it; BUT I DO NOT HAVE TO DRINK.

Whatever excuses I may give, there is one thing I do not have to do, and I do only because I will do it, and that is to swallow the stuff.

And that is true of every injurious deed. If I do an act of fraud, or uncleanness, or cruelty, there is just one person guilty—it is myself.

The world is full of blubbering whiners, whimperers, and weaklings. Overfull.

That we do wrong is not so disgusting. We are all human, and perhaps all a little perverted. But having erred, let us be down-right and manly and honest about it. Let us acknowledge our guilt, admit that our lusts and greeds and selfishness, which other people or circumstances may have deftly played upon, are no valid excuse, and that the responsibility for our evil rests absolutely upon ourselves. We may be sinners; but at least we can play the man.

Don’t lie to yourself. Don’t wallow in self-pity. Don’t hunt extenuating circumstances. Don’t justify yourself by comparing your own with others’ wrongdoings.

The wickedness of others may bring pain or loss to you through no fault of yours. Each of us must  bear a portion of the vicarious burden of the world’s evil. But mark this; you never did wrong for any other reason than that you chose to do it.

Not to have committed the wrong deed may have meant suffering to y9ou or to those you love, may have meant humiliation, or calamity, or even death. BUT YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO DO IT. You could have died.

You may have to suffer, to be humiliated, to endure tragedy, to die; nor you,  nor any human being, ever had to do wrong.

So don’t lie to yourself.

Honesty toward yourself is the key that will open to you the New Life.

Invasion

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Our president has decided cities with Democratic mayors are so hopelessly overridden by violent crime that the only solution is an invasion by federal forces who presumably will get rid of the crime problem.

Your observer isn’t sure criminals in those cities should start “shaking in their boots” because of his rhetoric, but he sure scares the hell out of me.

His insertion of 114 federal law enforcement agents into Portland a couple of weeks ago ostensibly to protect the federal courthouse from “anarchists” (a nice phrase borrowed from the late 19th and early 20th centuries) has shown to many of his critics that he is a man with a can.

Not a man with a PLAN.  A man with a can

—of gasoline.

The behavior of those agents, captured on cell phones and in stories of some of those hauled into vans and spirited away to lockups, does not indicate that this strategy is providing any significant increase in the protection of the general population, nor is it showing any concern for stopping violent crime—unless you consider all protestors to be in the same league with murderers, rapists, armed robbers, arsonists, and others of that ilk.

Based on reports we have read and seen, the presence of these forces has intensified the protests in Portland.

A few days ago Portland’s mayor was among those gassed by federal agents. Our president found that gleeful. “They knocked the hell out of him,” he declared.

How he wants to “help the cities” is something few of us could ever have imagined and few of us want to contemplate. “We’ll go into all of the cities, any of the cities. We’ll put in fifty-thousand, sixty-thousand people that really know what they’re doing. They’re strong. They’re tough. And we can solve these problems so fast,” he told a FOX interviewer last week, adding, “but as you know, we have to be invited in.”

He says it but he doesn’t believe it—the part about being invited in, that is.

So far he has sent or threatened to send agents to Kansas City and Portland, Chicago and Albuquerque.

Let’s do some invasion math—-because what he’s proposing isn’t assistance. It’s invasion.

Number of mayors asking for hundreds (and ultimately thousands perhaps) of agents to come in to fight violent crime: 0

Number of governors who have asked for such actions by the Trump administration: 0

Number of congressional delegations who have sought this “help” in their states: 0

One of the first surges of federal agents was the insertion of 225 of them into Kansas City to help catch and prosecute violent criminals. The administration says it is sending more.

Number of violent crime charges the administration claims have been filed in Kansas City since Operation Legend began: 200

Number of charges really filed by federal prosecutors: 1

Attorney General William Barr last week, speaking of Operation Legend, said, “Just to give you an idea of what’s possible, the FBI went in very strong into Kansas City and within two weeks we’ve had 200 arrests,”

That was news to the U. S. Attorney who told inquisitive reporters for The Kansas City Star that his office has filed ONE charge and it was against a guy with a drug conviction on his record who had a gun. Convicted felons cannot have guns under the law.

Last weekend, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said on FOX News Sunday he welcomed the federal agents in his town, but for a “pinpointed and targeted focus on solving murders.”  But he was frustrated by our president’s rhetoric about the George Floyd Protests and the Black Lives Matter movement because “that’s not the case in Kansas City.”

“What we don’t need is more fuel on the fire from federal agents to make, I think, an exciting political issue.”

He told NBC’s Chuck Todd our president’s talk about Black Lives Matter protests causing murders is “asinine” as well as “inaccurate and unfair” and does nothing to address the real issue—national gun trafficking that make guns readily available on cities’ streets.

There are many people, whether they are supporters of our president or supporters of someone else, who argue the cause of states’ rights. These actions should provide fertile ground for spirited arguments on both sides of whether the federal government has a right to invade cities at the whim of a president, a person who thinks he can order fifty or sixty thousand people “who really know what they’re doing” into a city for whatever purpose he might have—including looking good to his political base by creating “an exciting political issue.” Forget about any invitation.

States rights advocates, in our observations, generally seem to fall on the right side of the political spectrum.  But we haven’t heard or seen any of those folks questioning the administration’s uninvited invasion of cities as a violation of states rights. We might have missed it, but the issue deserves louder discussions than we have heard. There is no doubt that discussion will take place. Among judges.

The administration’s choice of locations for these invasions also is curious. The most recent FBI final non-preliminary data (whatever that means) that we’ve seen for cities with the highest violent crime rate lists none of these cities among the top 20 cities for violent crime. Kansas City is 23rd.

It is interesting that our president was not as concerned about mobilizing federal forces to fight a pandemic as he has been in fighting mostly-legal protests (destroying public buildings is hardly legal). You might recall that early in the pandemic, states were pleading with the administration to help them find the equipment needed to fight the virus, particularly the protective equipment needed to protect those on the front lines.  But the states were told to fend for themselves, that federal help was a “last resort,” at a time when many states were seeing the federal government in precisely that way and our president said he felt no responsibility for the spread of the virus.

The administration’s handling of the pandemic has undermined our president’s re-election hopes.  He hopes to regain that ground by his “tough on crime” approach.  A key question for the public to consider is whether his approach has been appropriate in either case.

He relied on the Tenth Amendment for his defense that fighting the virus was a state responsibility. States and cities see Tenth Amendment as their defense on the local issue of crime.  This crime-fighting strategy already is headed to the courts. It appears the pandemic defense is headed to the ballot box.

The polls indicate most potential voters consider his response (or non-response, depending on the way the question was answered) in the spring produced tragic results. We can only hope the crime fighting strategy of the summer does not also turn tragic before the courts define the bounds of presidential power exercised or suggested by the man with a can.

(For those who lean right who see this entry as an attack on them, we plan our next entry to question the left, with the rights of states at the center of that argument, too.)

Dr. Crane on Chaos and Confusion

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(After an awful weekend of disorder and disaster in a tragic time of worldwide sickness and death, we are absorbed in our own uncertainties. What can go wrong next? Where are we headed, personally, politiclaly, and nationally? Some of us watched Saturday for a few brief minutes a small rising symbol of hope and future adventure with the launch of the Dragon space capsule. But with night came more consuming gloom and despair that continued yesterday. The Young Men’s Christian Association national magazine, Association Men, in its October, 1923 issue published Dr. Frank Crane’s reflection on rising above despair, reflecting on a post-World War I world with words that fit our times.

He advised us to—-)

CAST YOUR ANCHOR and WAIT for DAYLIGHT

AFTER some fourteen days of violent driving to and fro before the wind, the ship upon which St. Paul was a passenger was found, by soundings, to be approaching an unknown shore. Then upon the advice of Paul the sailors cast anchor and waited for day.

The world today seems to be in a confusion resembling the case of the ship which held the apostle. Conditions are swirling. There is chaos in politics and confusion in men’s minds. Nature adds its touch of tragedy in the Japanese earthquake, one of the greatest natural disasters in history.

During the war America and the World in spite of the horrors of the time were elevated by a great moral purpose. The very seriousness of the threatened disaster aroused the idealism of the people. When the war was over America and the world had a great slump. Since then we have been wallowing in pessimism and petulance. The effort to make rational arrangement which would avert another such cataclysm by means of the League of Nations was defeated by partisanship. Since that time the forces of reaction have been strong and continuous.

France in the Ruhr and Italy with Greece look very much as though they were adopting the tactics of old Germany.

Rather universally the song of the birds has been succeeded by the croaking of frogs. The only way to get and maintain our poise is by grasping clearly the fundamentals of religious faith.

The very purpose of religion is to steady and sustain life. What the world needs is an intelligent faith. Let us think a bit about what this implies.

An intelligent faith is not a silly optimism. It does not consist of absurd denial of evil and pain. Any faith which ignores facts can hardly be called intelligent. An optimism that says all is good is false. The only true optimism is that which recognizes evil and at same time recognizes the responsibility for correcting evil. The right kind of optimist is one who tries to find the will of God and cooperate with it and who believes that that will is pure and perfect. And the law of God is growth. And there can be no growth that does not pass through imperfection to perfection. We are yet in the transition stage. We are co-workers with God with the great task before us of bringing order out of chaos. Optimism consists in believing we shall succeed and not in deluding ourselves that we have succeeded.

An intelligent faith faces the deeper facts. Pessimism sees only the superficial facts. There are many who say that faith is a delusion because they see evil rampant, but the man of faith looks deeper than this, knowing that the great facts of life and destiny are not upon the surface but hidden. That is why those who merely see the apparent facts are often discouraged and swept away into despair. But the mind of him who has faith in God is like the still deeps of the ocean, while the mind of the godless is like its storm-tossed surface.

Intelligent faith rests upon the great cosmic laws. These are the laws of righteousness and justice and of the fixed benevolent will of God. These are eternal. Vice, and violence, evil and despair flourish for a time but they are as the falling leaves. Goodness is the tree trunk that time nor seasons nor the defections of men cause to decay.

An intelligent faith is no blind belief in totems. It is not superstition. It has nothing to do with mysterious hocus pocus of any sort. It is based upon a knowledge of history, a knowledge of the human heart, and a knowledge of the great unfolding law of evolution in the world.

An intelligent faith is not a seed of fanaticism. It is courage. It makes a man keep on fighting when the battle goes against him. It is the strong conviction that no matter how dark the night the sun will rise in due season. It is the implicit belief in the truth that it always stops raining. It lends to a man something of the fixity of Nature herself because it is a belief in Nature’s law and in Nature’s god.

An intelligent faith does the constructive work of the world. It builds, it plants, it creates. It is the source of the best functions of human energy. It is the backbone of the mind. It not only keeps the mind strong but it keeps the body healthy, the eye clear and the soul undisturbed.

An intelligent faith begins with faith in oneself. That he is a child of God, that he has been put into this world for a purpose and cannot be removed from it until that purpose is fulfilled. It is a faith in one’s potential goodness because it is a faith in one’s sonship toward the Eternal.

An intelligent faith is a belief in men, in one’s neighbors in the world. Almost all the troubles that have arisen from human contact have been caused by the failure of faith. If men would only believe in each other, that all men are fair and all women good, the world might lift itself into the millennium. This would be no lifting of oneself by the boot straps, it would rather be lifting of oneself by allowing the greatest force in the universe to operate through him.

An intelligent faith is also one of the instincts. It is from the instincts a human being derives all his force. Faith is one of the latest products of evolution, an instinct developed by the long struggles of the race, the finest flower in God’s garden of Souls.

An intelligent faith is faith in God. That does not mean in some mysterious charm to avoid disaster, nor in some medieval monarch sitting on the throne of heaven, nor in some fantastic heathenish deity to be propitiated by sacrifice and incense, but it means faith in the Mighty Father who broods ever upon his world of men, bringing order out of confusion, goodness out of evil, and love and holiness out of mankind, even as He brings the white lily out of the muck, even as he conducts His own universe upon the vast dim voyage from chaos to the stars.

Let us cast our anchor of an intelligent faith in God and wait for day.

Dr. Crane on fearful times

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(Several years before President Franklin Roosevelt told Depression America, “The only thing we have to fear….is Fear itself,” Dr. Frank Crane had the same message in his nationally-syndicated newspaper column. In these fearful times of 2020, his message is renewed).

THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST FEAR

The campaign against Fear is the greatest movement of the race. Fear is not bred of ignorance. It is the child of half-knowledge. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” What we don’t know at all we are not afraid of; as a sheep is happy, ignorant of the slaughter-house.

What we half-know scares us. Men used to be afraid of electricity, seeing it only in lightning; now they know it, and the motor-man whistles as he regulates the power of ten thunderstorms.

All along, humanity has been walking up to bugaboos and finding out they were absurd.

Stranger! Men have thought fear helped morality. They tortured, imprisoned, killed, to cure criminals. They beat children. They burned heretics. Gradually they saw their folly. They are learning that crime is essentially fear, the fear of the consequences of doing right, and that you cannot put out fire with kerosene; that is, you cannot cure the fear of doing right by the fear of punishment.

The Romans build a temple to Fear. Fear has played a malign part in the history of religion. The most amazing creation of the human imagination is hell.

There are still those who are afraid to walk under a ladder, to carry a spade through the house, and to start on a journey on a Friday.

Business once was based on fear. Men thought the only way to get work done was by slaves, and by keeping them frightened. The capitalist and the laborer still appeal to fear. But little by little, the futility of it all is appearing.

Employers and employed are learning to appeal to the free co-operation of beach other.

When men half-know gods they trembled at them. Timor fecit deos—fear made the gods. The race today fears and dreads God less because we are nearer Him than in the past.