Category Archives: elections

Notes From a Quiet Hill (data intensive version)

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(“Notes” is a series of irregularly published miscellaneous comments that didn’t quite reach the level of full blogitude*.)

Drove past a yard sign the other day saying “Garage Sale.”   Not for the first time, I thought, “There’s only one letter difference between “garage” and “garbage.”

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One of the great artists of the American West, and a favorite of mine, was St. Louis-born Charles M. Russell. We give much praise to the discoveries of Lewis and Clark on their trip to the Pacific but Russell offered a different perspective on them and their discoveries.

You see, the Native Americans already knew all the things Lewis and Clark “discovered.”  The big thing for Native Americans was the discovery of Lewis and Clark—the title of Russell’s painting.

And that brings us back to a frequently contested idea that this country was founded as a Christian Nation. It already was a nation of numerous religions or interpretations of creation and principles for living in harmony. Christianity was only an addition to the spiritual traditions that existed here already.

As in Russell’s painting, the First Nations people discovered the Christians, who became just added another spiritual tradition here. Christianity is just another interpretation of universal truths that have existed far longer than the New Testament.

Here in Missouri, some missionaries opened Harmony Mission in the western part of the state, an effort to “civilize” the savages.  It closed after several years with nary a convert.  The story is told of one of the missionaries telling the natives the story of Jonah and the Whale, after which one of the leaders of the group wrapped himself in his blanket, told the minister, “We know the White Man lies, but that is the biggest lie we have ever heard,” and stalked away.

Followers of our Euro-Christian traditions, as those who followed after Lewis and Clark, might consider toning down their conceit and remember they were not founders but instead were late-comers to nation of religious traditions, some many years older than theirs.

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Anybody care to guess how much Ashli Babbit’s family could have gotten from the Trump slush fund that was going to pay the peaceful tourists of January 6?  Ten figures?  More?

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We don’t know what to think about data centers.  But there’s so many things these days that we don’t know what to think about. Data centers are one of the biggest topics now and their use of water seems to be a big issue.  I guess they process so much data that they have to water-cool their computers.

This sounds like a great diversification opportunity for Ameren, our electric company. It runs the state’s only commercial nuclear power plant, in Callaway County.  Maybe Ameren should add data centers to their properties, even buy more land if needed.  Ameren uses a lot of Missouri River water in its cooling tower.  Why not recycle that water through some nearby data centers before dumping it back into the river as it does now?

This is an example of knowing what we think but not thinking we know anything about an issue, which probably makes us a typical citizen in these confusing times.

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If the Democrats seize control of both houses of Congress in November, when will they have time to work on a budget and other issues because they likely will be too busy doing house-cleaning impeachments?

They probably will be emboldened because the House Speaker will be a D, and the Speaker is third in the line of succession. For reference, The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 lists: Vice President, Speaker of the House, President pro tempore of the Senate, Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Defense, Attorney General, Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Labor, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Secretary of Education, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Secretary of Homeland Security—all of whom probably would be gone quickly if the D’s decide the top two in line need to hit the road.

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The President’s plan to turn the nation’s 250th birthday into a celebration of himself has become a struggle for him. We frankly prefer that he show as much interest in being part of the event as he showed about attending his son’s wedding.

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*”blogitude” is a phrase not found in any dictionary known to man except in this writer’s personal lexicon.

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CBS

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President Trump and his toadies have turned CBS into broadcasting’s Gaza.

CBS News Radio is dead. The CBS Evening News has been abandoned by thousands of viewers. Sixty Minutes has become an ideological battleground that has left the program severely, if not mortally, wounded. Reports that Editor-in Chief Bari Weiss has ordered some stories rewritten to be more favorable to President Trump presaged last week’s blow up that led to the immediate firing of longtime correspondent Scott Pelley because he dared speak truth to power by accusing Editor in Chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” Sixty Minutes.

North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, a conservative nationalist and flaming bigot who served thirty years in the U. S. Senate, once wished he could own what he called “The Communist Broadcasting System” so he could “be Dan Rather’s boss.” Wherever he is now (he died in 2008), he must be rubbing his hands with glee at what Donald Trump and his allies/enablers have done to CBS.

Helms would be right at home in today’s Washington.. Helms was an unalterable opponent of civil rights of all stripes, the National Endowment for the Arts, affirmative action, feminism, and abortion access. Some strongly loved him. Some strongly hated him.

Donald Trump is everything Jesse Helms wishes he could have been.  But Helms was just a Senator while Trump is the President and has salted the ground of government with allies that can carry out the dreams of Helms magnified by Trump.

President Trump and his buddies have succeeded in killing CBS News and they’d like to do it with all other media companies that speak out against their abuses.  Thankfully, so far, Disney/ABC has resisted after mistakenly thinking appeasement would work with Trump. Although Jimmy Fallon has been targeted in the overnight rave-fest from the White House, NBC seems to be a smaller target.

Trump set a new record in May with 861 posts on his social media site, which continues to lose tens of millions of dollars each month.  White House spokesperson Olivia Wales thinks Trump’s overnight behavior is just wonderful, telling the Daily Beast, “Trump offers his unfiltered and direct thoughts to the American people, without the biased media taking him out of context. The American people have never had a president as transparent as President Trump, who shares his thoughts with them in real time.”

It’s hard to argue with that.  The problem is that Wales and her like seem to think that calling all of his lies and biases is bias.

The threat to our republic is that his is the only voice he wants to allow and he’s taking steps to make it so. The firehose of lies that he gushes every night—and throughout the day—cannot go unchallenged in a free country. It is the responsibility of the press in all of its iterations to  challenge, to expose, even if he is provoked into greater personal outrage.

In my long career that included years of leadership with a national organization for broadcast journalists, I met a lot of CBS news people, including the founders of Sixty Minutes Don Hewitt, Morley Safer, Andy Rooney, Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, Lesley Stahl, Harry Reasoner, Dan Rather, not to mention Walter Cronkite and others. Scott Pelley spoke at one our conventions several years ago.  It was a good speech.

I met them. I talked to them. Don’t think any of them would know me if we had met on the street. They wouldn’t.  But I knew them as fellow professionals and I can tell you that they all had more integrity in their little finger than Donald Trump has in his entire administration and cadre of sycophants.

Edward R. Murrow is the patron saint of broadcast journalism.  No, I didn’t meet him (but I did meet his widow).  In 1958 Murrow spoke to our convention—long before I was involved with the group.

In his concluding remarks, he warned against networks that considered still-young television only as mindless entertainment medium. He wanted them to be more, and more responsible.

“This nation is now in competition with malignant forces of evil who are using every instrument at their command to empty the minds of their subjects and fill those minds with slogans, determination, and faith in the future. If we go on as we are, we are protecting the mind of the American public from any real contact with the menacing world that squeezes in upon us. We’re engaged in a great experiment to discover whether a free public opinion can devise and direct methods of managing the affairs of the nation.”

Murrow was speaking of the external threat to this country of Communism.” Today, he might be speaking of the internal threat from our own leaders.

The signature words of the speech: “This instrument can teach; it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance, and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.” Today, Donald Trump wants television to be useful in keeping the American public ignorant, intolerant, and indifferent to his actions.

Murrow concluded, “Stonewall Jackson, who is generally believed to have known something about weapons, is reported to have said, ‘When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.’ The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.”  That was 1958. In 2026, Trump prefers that outlets such as CBS and Sixty Minutes throw away the sword and carry the rusty scabbard.

That becomes more obvious with every day, with every collision between Trump lackeys and people such as Scott Pelley and many others who used to be part of a once highly-respected program and its network.

Trump must not be allowed to win.  Ignorance, Intolerance, and indifference must not survive. Jesse Helms must stay buried. Unfortunately, his ideas remain too much alive and in much more powerful hands.

Elections are nearing. We hope voters take their figurative swords to their polling places.

The Income Tax Cut

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It’s going to take some pretty strong lobbying to convince me that the governor’s plan to eliminate the state income tax and make up for the lost state revenue by increasing the sales tax is a good idea.

We already have seen a major investment in promoting passage from an anonymous source—almost two million dollars so far.  Our campaign finance laws allow big money special interests or individuals to hide behind a legal campaign money laundering system that has been abused by both side of the aisle.

If I contribute $100 dollars to someone’s campaign (which never have been done or will be done), my name becomes a public record. If I were wealthy enough to buy part of the Missouri Constitution, I could hide my attempted purchase.

Getting back to the topic:

Here is an issue that could have a chilling effect on our public services and public protections that hasn’t been discussed as far as I have heard:

The local sales tax has been used throughout Missouri to improve local infrastructure—streets, sewer systems, parks, and improved public safety.

This last point has been highlighted in the last couple of weeks by requests from sheriffs in Boone and Cole County for temporary sales tax increases to fund jails and jail expansions.  The Boone County Commission is putting a 3/8 cent sales tax increase on the November ballot with proceeds building a new jail.

The Cole County sheriff has just asked his county commission for a temporary sales tax to improve and expand current jail—which was built with proceeds from a temporary sales tax increase.

Temporary local sales taxes need voter agreement.  It seems that if voters are given a specific amount to be raised and significant enough purpose for the increase, they are likely to support it as a matter of community self interest. We make this observation without having seen any professionally-done studies on the subject; it just seems to work this way. The system gives citizens an opportunity to evaluate the benefits they will receive versus the cost of obtaining them.

But if the income tax is cut and the state imposes new sales taxes on a myriad of products and services, the local voter has no say in how that money will benefit their communities. And the higher the state-imposed sales tax is (the legislature can determine what the rate will be), might it become harder for voters to approve temporary increases at the local level?

The income tax/sales tax proposal headed for the statewide ballot in August might be nice for those who have a lot of money and don’t want to share it but a lower income tax won’t much help our lower income residents—and a higher statewide sales tax not only will increase financial problems for the paycheck-to-paycheck families, it could weaken voter support for a temporary tool used by local governments  to increase public services and public safety.

I might find a temporary sales tax for a new jail or improvements to an existing one—or other public improvements and programs— more than my billfold can bear if the state taxes my purchases to make up for the loss of revenue that seems to benefit people higher up the fiscal food chain than I am.

Until we are better persuaded, the proposed income tax cut appears from our hilltop view to be a benefit I can’t afford and that my city and county can’t afford either.

I’m always open to efforts to make me think otherwise.  But for now, a billionaire’s money is unlikely to buy my vote.

Laws for the Presidency

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CNN polling discussed last weekend shows the overwhelming number of Americans are tired of President Trump lionizing himself, especially by sticking his name on  buildings while he remains in office. The data was called “clear as glass” by CNN’s Chief Data Analyst, Harry Enten.

The Surve found one in five Americans think it’s okay to name buildings after Trump—but only after has left office (and, we add, after time and more open evaluation of his behavior is possible).

Only NINE PERCENT say it’s okay for him to stick his name on government buildings while he’s still in office.

How strong is that feeling.  Enten looked at some other ridiculous ideas for comparison.  Nine percent is even lower than the 12 percent of Americans who think the moon landing was a fake.

It is even one point lower than the number of Americans who think the Earth if flat—ten percent.

Enten said, “On this issue, the rock core, that core Republican base that Trump has relied upon, that stick with him through thick and thin, even on this issue, though, just 17 percent, just 17 percent of Republicans say that, yes, it is. Three percent, not really so surprising, of Democrats say the same thing. So, you get rare bipartisan unity on this issue.

But is he fixated on himself, as if we need to ask? He plans to the celebration of our nation’s 250th birthday in Washington into a celebration of himself, which should remove any doubt, underlining the sentiment of only 29% of Americans in the CNN survey who think he is focused enough on issues that really matter.  More than two-thirds (68 percent) say he is not.

As we have noted in a previous blog, the polarization of America this man is causing is staggering in its scope.  In this issue—focus—only THREE PERCENT of respondents seemed to have no opinion.

Because our current occupant of the White House has so clearly violated or ignored all previous written and unwritten standards for the office, it is time for Congress put serious limits on the presidency, written standards with severe penalties for their violations. Some of these standards must be applied also to those who enact them.

These proposals are based on the proposition that the higher people rise in our political system, the more they must reveal of themselves as a matter public honesty with those who elevate them to those positions.

In short, the higher you rise, the less private your life becomes and the more you “belong” to the public because you are entrusted by that public with increasing levels of power that must be exercised with responsibility beyond personal interest.

To begin with the current example, these laws of the powerful should require:

—The name of no President shall be affixed to any government building, park, military equipment or other federal holding while in office. Such naming shall remain the province of the Congress and its usual process for such designations which shall not be made until the president has been out of office for one election cycle.

—No image, signature or other representation of a sitting or living former President shall appear on any United States currency or coinage used in general public circulation.

—Within two weeks of an individual achieving a nomination for President, or achieving the office through succession, the Internal Revenue Service shall make public the tax returns of the individual for the previous five years and shall release them for each year the individual is in office.

—The same standards shall apply to appointees to the United States Supreme Court, to cabinet positions, and to members of Congress upon their elections. .

—The President and incoming Vice-President, not later than two weeks  prior to inauguration, shall transfer all assets, including but not limited to personal financial holdings and property to an independent blind trust established by the Congress to manage those assets during the time they are in office. No transfer of assets within the families of the President and the Vice-President during the two years before the inauguration date shall be recognized as legal and such assets shall be seized and placed into the trust if so made.

—Failure to place assets into such a trust will delay the inauguration until such time as the obligation is met.  The sitting president shall serve as a President Pro Tempore until such requirements are met.  If the sitting president is incapable of serving under provisions of the 25th amendment or chooses not to continue service, the sitting president shall be replaced according to the line of succession established in the Constitution and that person will continue serving until all trust requirements are met. Impeachment shall be mandatory if it is determined later that these standards have not been met intentionally.

—Within two weeks of all annual physical examinations, the detailed results including (for lack of a better term) “beyond basic” tests of cognition, shall be released.

—No President shall order the unprovoked attack of or invasion of another independent nation without the approval of Congress.

—No President can claim, annex, or purchase any independent nation or territory of an independent nation without approval by Congress and a proven willingness by the inhabitants of such lands to become part of the United States..  “Proven willingness” shall mean a positive vote by the general population of the area proposed.

—No President unilaterally can withdraw this country from international bodies dedicated to the health, safety, welfare, financial stability, and peaceful coexistence with others without approval by Congress.

—No President may interfere with the orderly elections of the states nor with the standards of institutional of higher learning within those states.

—All revenue outside of campaign donations that would personally benefit a sitting President shall be applied against the national debt (ending the pay for play philosophy that seems so prominent in today’s presidential dealings).

—All campaign donations to presidential and congressional candidates shall be listed according to the name of the individuals making them.  Organizations aggregating campaign funds must identify the individuals contributing to such aggregated donations.

—No president shall establish independent political action committees to influence elections at the state level during the term of the presidency.

Nothing in these suggestions prohibits a president from making recommendations nor do any of them limit the president’s constitutionally protected freedoms of speech and expression nor his ability to associate with others who might advocate a cause on his behalf. But they will go far to prevent future presidents from taking the powers of the people from them.

Expecting Congress to enact any of these protections for the nation’s general welfare seems to be quite a reach. But we should know by now that failure to do so only invites something worse, if it is possible to envision something worse, than the inattentive but self-absorbed figure we have now.

Recall that on September 18, 1787, the last day of the Constitutional Convention. Elizabeth Willing Powell, a Philadelphia social leader we today would call “an influencer,” asked delegate Benjamin Franklin as he emerged from the final meeting, “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”  Franklin’s answer is well known: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

These recommendations are designed to keep our republic and have been created to respond to the excesses of the current holder of the presidency.  You might have modifications to these ideas or additional limits that Congress could and should impose.  Feel free to share them in the “comments’ section at the end of this posting. No snark please. This is too important for that.

In this campaign year, those seeking federal office should be asked by the media and the voters if they would support limits such as these on the most powerful single person in our government and for those seeking high federal positions. If yes, why?  If not, why not?

We citizens have obligations to ourselves and to our families as well as to our neighbors—known and unknown—to protect ourselves and to protect our nation.  Some might argue that the Constitution already protects us enough.  Your correspondent does not believe that it does, and we have seen demonstration after demonstration of that inadequacy, especially with President Trump.

These issues need to be part of the national dialogue in this election year. If you would like to begin this discussion with others by distributing these ideas, feel free to do so. If you have a chance to speak of these things with your congressional candidates, do not miss it.

A republic is a terrible thing to be wasted.

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The People Will Not Be Defeated 

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I walked out of the Missouri Supreme Court building last Tuesday and saw large crowd across the street chanting:

“The People,

United

Will Not Be Defeated.”

It was a “People Not Politicians” demonstration urging the court to throw out the new congressional district map enacted by the legislature  to protect President Trump from a new Congress that would hold him more responsible for his acts than his timid GOP Solons are doing now.

Later the group crossed the street and paraded in front of the court building.

—-and about four hours later, the court ruled against People Not Politicians on all three cases it had heard that morning.

Please do not take this to suggest people should not gather for this purpose, but protest demonstrations and marches in these situations are of limited utility.

Rallies to get and to keep people involved in public policy-setting are important. But in terms of forcing a change in direction by government far more is required.

Every year during a legislative session, thousands of people representing one cause or another, or one profession or another, organize “Day at the Capitol” events when they bus in dozens of people, many of whom have no experience in Capitol politics, to go to legislative offices to make their cases. For many, perhaps most, of these people, this is the only time they relate to their lawmaker, who usually is in the chamber working on legislative business.  So they drop off some brochures or information packets and then check their lists to see whose office they will visit next.

Days at the Capitol join demonstrations and marches, in general, with having little lasting impact.

Here are some things that do work:

Money.

Sayings such as “Money greases the wheels of politics,” or “Money is the lifeblood of politics” are, unfortunately, part of our system of government. This is not to say that those we elect can be bought, at least not directly.  But money buys lobbyists. Money for campaigns speaks loudly.

It is often said that money doesn’t buy politicians; it just buys access to politicians. However, the more access you can have, the more influence you might be able to exercise. That is the world they live in. It is wrong, however, to assume that all who live in this world are corrupt. In all my forty-some years of covering Missouri government, probably no more than twenty legislators and state officers were sent to prison or removed from their jobs, less than two percent of all of the people I covered in the pressure cooker of Missouri politics.

When your legislators drive across the bridge or under the viaducts to enter Jefferson City, they are entering a bubble that has a tendency to be all-absorbing of their attention.  It is a special world where the focus of those working in it is entirely on the issues in front of them. Home can become a long ways away.  The pressure is enormous and it grows even greater as the pages are peeled off of the calendar.

On Tuesday, the day the Supreme Court heard the redistricting cases, the House and the Senate met for the 68th time this year.

The session ended after 71 working days. Here’s what the lawmakers were facing: 1,002 Senate bills and resolutions introduced this year and 2,101 bills and resolutions introduced in the House—by our count. That’s 3,103 proposals, many of them duplicates or more.

The legislative process becomes a highly-selective and highly subjective matter. What goes on in the Capitol is an intense winnowing that will produce, in a good year, 100-125 agreements on legislation. This year, the total was about 90, a big improvement over recent years when a few members of the Senate decided that if they could not get their way, the large majority wouldn’t get anything done.

About twenty of those bills each year detail the way the state will spend money on programs and services that people want or need.  Even the most skilled lobbyist for even the wealthiest interest group realizes that legislative sessions resemble a crap shoot. Few things are guaranteed from the outset. Not even the governor is guaranteed approval of his issues.

It is easier to get some things approved when one party occupies two-thirds of both seats in the House and Senate—such as the protect-the-President redistricting plan upheld by the Supreme Court last Tuesday. Many of the protestors likely would have asserted that some words carved into a Missouri Senate wall were clearly ignored: “Nothing is politically right that is morally wrong.”

Noble words carved into Capitol stone are easier said than honored at times, in a system that is shaped by humans.

None of this should be considered excuses. It’s just the real world.

While all of this might sound as if there is no hope for principled protestors such as the People Not Politics demonstrators Tuesday, there is hope.

The congressional districts are drawn presumably to change our 6-2 Republican delegation in the United States House to 7-1. Even some Republicans have admitted publicly that the new maps should not be considered a predetermined result. They know a lot of public opinion can be swayed between now and November.

If that is going to be the case, Tuesday’s marchers will have to be more effective at home than they have been in Jefferson City. One day at the Capitol cannot replace many well-organized days on the streets at home. Their cause is more persuasive among the voters than among the lawmakers and judges. No Republican candidate should feel comfortable in their re-election campaigns this year, especially since the court has upheld that map. Donald Trump can be his party’s own worst enemy regardless of congressional district lines. The PNP demonstrators can become a formidable force if they organize at home and advocate against those who support President Trump in spite of all of his sins—especially those who passed the redistricting bill that manipulates our political system.

The battleground is not in front of the Supreme Court building. It is in the cities and counties of each congressional district and each legislative district. Redistricting can become a major issue against the party that did it, whether it’s the legislators who drew the lines or the congressional candidates who want to take advantage of them.

The Republicans have gotten what they wished for. But you know the old saying about being careful that what you wish for because what you got can become an issue of voter retribution.

This is not a suggestion that all of the rascals should be turned out.  It is, instead, an observation of how those opposed to the redistricting scheme can turn it against the scheme’s advocates and a warning to those advocates to be prepared in their own defense.

In 2016, Senator Ted Cruz told ABC’s Face the Nation, ““If we’re given the White House and both houses of Congress and we don’t deliver, I think there will be pitchforks and torches in the streets. And I think quite rightly,” a metaphorical reference to England’s Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 against a perceived unjust government.

Will the Supreme Court marchers from last Tuesday go home and become the organizers and the activists—the pitchfork and torch carriers—whose biggest and most effective protest will be at the ballot box?

Will they create a united people who will not be defeated?

We’ll all see an answer in a little more than five months.

Don Jr., Sends Me an Email

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I’m going through my phone messages Saturday afternoon and I come across one from 571-470-0894.

The message says, “Hi, it’s Don Jr. My father an….”

I don’t know any Don Juniors who would have my phone number. And the message doesn’t tell me why I should care about his father.  He’s only an “an.”

An what?

An engineer?

An astronaut?

An animal lover who wants me to donate 19 dollars a month so I can get an adorable plush toy?

An alien?

And why would a Don Jr., address me, someone he’s never met (because I don’t think I ever met him) is so casual a way?

I’ve known several people named Don although I don’t know any Don Juniors, or I don’t think I do.

So I go on the internet and check several sites that will look up phone numbers and after each one of them takes several minutes of my time they want me to pay thirty dollars or something to find out who belongs to this number.

By now I’m thinking this must be a burner phone and we know burner phones are used by blackmailers and the like.  But I know all of my family is safe so this must be a fake blackmailer—maybe one of those calls from someone who says, ”Grandpa, I’m down here in Alabama and I’ve been arrested and I need you to send me $500 to get out of jail.”  I got one of those once and my “grandson” didn’t seem to know his first name so I began to think this was a con.  So I hung up.

Well, I decided to open the message to see if Don Junior had a last name.

The rest of the sentence added a “d” to the “an.” And it told none other than Donald Trump Junior was concerned about my voting status.   “My father and I (he didn’t mention his name so I wondered if there’s some reason he’s embarrassed to do so) need you to do one thing: update your voter verification record. Robert, go to—(hmmmm, I thought, this is strange. The only time anyone calls me “Robert” is when I have an appointment with someone on my increasingly long list of doctors that have accumulated with each passing year and a nurse says it’s my turn for whatever ceremony I’m about to undergo.).

Well, it gave me an email address to open but I didn’t at first because opening those unsolicited things means a raft of future emails that I move to the Spam folder without looking. But I gambled because Don’s dad must be a pretty important guy to want this kind of information from me.

So I took a gamble and clicked on it. It’s labeled “The Official 2025 Voter Verification Questionnaire,” and we all know that when the word “Official” is on something, it is not something to be ignored.

The message invited me to tap on a website—

And when I did, there popped up a picture of a very serious—in fact he looked pretty pitiful, like a lost soul who needed a shave—badly—Don Jr. (Remember Emmett Kelly, the famous circus clown known as “Weary Willie?”  Well, he looked kind of like that although Don Jr. was dressed better.

Weary Willie always carried a head of lettuce that he gave a leaf from  to people in the audience, symbolizing his good heart because all he could afford to give people was a lettuce leaf. I had my suspicion that Willie’s lettuce wasn’t the kind of lettuce we’d eventually get around to discussing in this “survey.”

His father—-again, his name was not mentioned so I wondered why he was hiding his father’s name—“needs every Republican reading this message to update their official voting record.”  Then red ink—as in a dramatically increased federal deficit—the message said, “”With enough feed back nothing can stop us from making America great again.”  I was asked to fill out a form that asked it I agreed that only American Citizens should be allowed to vote.  I had only a yes-no choice but I would like have asked, “Who decides who is good enough to be an American citizen,” but Don apparently hoped I would fill out this form without thinking and I have some friends who think that would make me a regular MAGA person which I am not and besides it’s unfair to stereotype many otherwise intelligent people that way. Shame on my friend Don for wanting me to treat so many of my friends like that. I know them better than he does, apparently.

“Are you an American citizen?” was the next question.   If I’m not why did you contact me? If I say “yes” are you going to have the Department of Homeland Security see if I lied?

“Could you prove your American citizenship?”  Can you?  Why should I trust someone who looks at me like a circus clown?

Please confirm my zip code.  You have my area code and that ‘s enough. I expect to get a lot of phone calls at meal times from you and I don’t want to get mail.

Did I vote in the 2024 Presidential election?  That’s supposed to be a secret, or have you bothered to read election laws?  It’s none of your business.

If so, who did I vote for?  President Trump, Kamala Harris (wait a minute. If Trump can carry a title for this election, shouldn’t my other choice be VICE PRESIDENT HARRIS just to put things on a courteous and equal footing.)   I also thought that if I said I voted for “other,”  there would be a following question asking if that person was a transexual, gay, brown or black or a question accusing me of perjury if I had indicated I really was a Republican (which I am not; I am a radical independent although using the word “radical” might be dangerous in this context.).

He wanted to know what state I voted in, if I voted.  Well, he knows my area code so he must know where I voted, or where I likely voted, if a voted, so why ask?

Did I cast my vote by mail, in person, or did I not vote. You already know whether I voted so the last alternative is silly.  Actually, I voted absentee because I might be out of town on election day (and I was.  Just to make sure I was within the law, I drove outside the city limits, turned around and came home so I could say I was out of town—-although I think that qualification ended during the Pandemic.).

Do I want free and fair elections?  I certainly do, which is why I find attempts to redraw congressional district just to benefit one old man who is scared that he might have to face some consequences if he doesn’t do all he can to do something he has falsely accused others of doing odious.

Do I think voters should have to show photo ID before voting? Ehhh.  I have a driver’s license and I registered in person and the election folks at my precinct know me by name but, okay, if you insist, I’ll make sure I have a government issued ID card. My driver license will do it although I’ve lost some weight since the picture was taken.

Do I identify as a Republican?  What’s a Republican these days?  For that matter, what’s a Democrat?  Why should I identify with either?

Do I support Free Speech?  Of course I do.  But your dad—I assume that’s who you’re asking all of this information for—apparently does not.  So sue me. I’d be honored.

Do I believe big tech is censoring Republicans. Define big tech. Do Elon Musk and DOGE constitute big tech?  Do I believe Republicans want to censor anybody who doesn’t worship a certain creator of monuments to himself?  Ask the head of the FCC.

Do I believe our country is better off under President Biden and Kamala Harris? Have you noticed that they are not in charge of things anymore?

Which issue facing our country concerns you the most moving forward?  Well, I think moving forward is a big issue.

And then we get down to the real reason that I should  verify my voter record.  “Can we count on you to give $10 to ensure Senate Republicans can fight back against extremist Democrats in the Senate?”   No. In fact you should send me ten dollars for the time I spent filling out your fake “update.”

Plus, you said at the start your father wanted me to do only one thing. I would have filled in a lot of blanks, which is more than one thing. And then making a donation is another.

Don Junior, I am starting to think you weren’t honest with me from the start. But be assured that my opinion of you has not changed.

I was given a chance to contribute more.  Let me calculate my hourly rate and I’ll let you know how much YOU owe ME for considering  your, uh, survey.

At the bottom in little print is the notice that I had been given 25 minutes to ensure my response was recorded. However, ”the timer has expired, but you can still donate below!”  And I was given several choices ranging from $35 to$1,000 or “other.”

And in little print I was told my contribution “will benefit the NRSC.”

“Nurse?” I muttered.  What does this have to do with nursing?   And why are nurses interested in my voting record?

Then this “survey” really goes off the rails because it warns me that those dirty Democrats are “ALWAYS fund raising.  ALWAYS organizing. ALWAYS plotting their comeback.”  Think of Snidely Whiplash, who surely must be a Democrat in the eyes of Willie—or, I mean Don Jr.

“The only answer is consistent monthly support from patriots who refuse to blink.”

I’m sorry, but this patriot is presently tied up supporting NPR and Public Broadcasting. When they raise funds, they don’t try to hide behind FAKE surveys.

Then there’s a FLASH POLL that doesn’t quite meet the standards most legitimate polls use to formulate questions. “Should Congress DEFUND every radical left-wing organization trying to destroy our democracy? Vote YES and pledge another gift…to help us win!”

Does “every radical left-wing organization mean I should not give money to the Democratic Party?  Our two parties are in such disarray that I think I will make my donation to the Whigs.

Then we were told “Campaign Finance Law requires us to collect your employment information.”  Which campaign law is that?   And does it also require me to give you the phone number you asked for?

I’d prefer you not have it.  I get enough calls about Medicaid while I’m trying to each breakfast, lunch, or dinner.  I don’t need to be getting calls about nurses.

(Photo Credits: Emmett Kelly—State Historical Society of Missouri; Snidely—ClipArtMax.com; Don Junior—Don Junior, I guess)

-0-

Putting Politics Back Into Our Highest Courts

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Most Missouri judges are elected, but years ago the state and its people decided the highest courts should be as isolated from partisan politics as possible. That nationally-recognized plan is under attack in the Missouri Legislature this year—and the process that created that insulated system also is under attack.

The decision was made after the collapse of the Pendergast political machine that so dominated Democratic politics in Missouri in the first forty years of the Twentieth Century that it could field a substitute for a gubernatorial candidate who died three weeks before the election and push previously obscure Platte County Judge Guy B. Park to a win by the third largest margin in state history up to that time, 61 percent of the vote against the incumbent Lieutenant Governor, Edward H. Winter.         (That winning percentage had been exceeded only twice before—Thomas Fletcher with 70.3 percent in 1864 and by John Miller, who had no opposition in1828) or after, by Warren Hearnes’ 62% in 1964 and John Ashcroft’s election in 1988 with 64.2%)

Members of Missouri’s appeals courts—which includes the Supreme Court—had been elected throughout state history until citizens had had enough of Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast’s grip on state politics. A citizen-led initiative led to voter approval of “The Missouri Plan” in 1940.  The legislature tried to overturn it but voters rejected the effort. The plan was made part of the Missouri Constitution when the present document was adopted in 1945.

The plan applied to the Supreme Court and the appeals court as well as lower courts in a few counties. The changes were put in our Constitution in 1976.

Missouri rarely has been a leader in political thinking but this is a case where the state should be proud—because about forty states have adopted a version of The Missouri Plan which established a non-partisan Appellate Judicial Commission that takes applications for open judgeships handle appeals from local courts. The commission reviews applications for appellate judgeships and forwards three names to the governor who appoints one of them. The Senate does not confirm the appointment, another step to limit political influence in the makeup of our highest courts.

The commission is made up of three members of the Missouri Bar and three private citizens appointed by the Governor. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court chairs the commission.

The Missouri House Committee on General Laws has voted 8-6 to recommend the full House pass a bill junking the nonpartisan court plan and giving appointment power to the Governor with confirmation by the Senate.

If you think the similar system used to let a President pick U. S. Supreme Court Justices and federal district judges is the best way to have a non-partisan court system un-influenced by partisan factors, this bill is right up your alley. If the spectacle we see every time a new Supreme Court Justice is nominated approaches or exceeds your unbearable level, this bill is toxic.

When you have a President and a Senate under one party’s control, or a Governor and a state senate under one party’s control, there is room for discomfort about the fairness of the judicial system and whether money influences those who must confirm nominations.

Missouri no longer has political bosses such as Tom Pendergast, but it has something as bad—big-money political donors who have tried to buy state laws through the legislature or to buy sections of the state constitution (think of $43 million spent to get sports betting passed in 2024).

Moneyed political influence in shaping the laws mixed with political influence in determining the laws’ constitutionality is a dangerous combination.

There is a second dangerous move afoot in the two-thirds Republican General Assembly.  It’s the proposal saying no petition issue can be approved by voters unless it gets majorities in every one of our eight congressional districts. That means one district in which an issue fails by one vote can render positive votes in the other seven districts meaningless. Call it what it is—tyranny by the minority.

On one hand, our politically-independent upper judiciary is being threatened. On the other hand is a new threat—to the concept of majority rule, replaced with a one-eighth majority tyranny. Those backing this scheme certainly would not hold that no one could be elected to the legislature who did not carry every precinct in their district. Nor would they support the idea that no one could be elected to state office without carrying every legislative district. Or that no one could be sent to Congress without carrying every county in their district.

But they will silence the voice of the people when it comes to taking their grievances against government  to the ballot  box.

It’s a one-two punch to our democracy. The last time legislative Republicans tried to weaken the plan was 2012. Voters went 76 percent against it.

Fourteen years later they’re trying again. Let’s hope voters aren’t duped this time either.

A Congressman Steps Down; Thousands Protest 

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It would be nice if the headline reflected reality.  But in the case of Congressman Sam Graves, a native of Tarkio in the far northwest corner of Missouri, it’s not his retirement that has triggered the protests.  We’re going to offer some quick, surface, observations about these two separate events and how Missouri’s chaotic 2026 elections just got more interesting.

I remember Sam Graves mostly because he caused me some sleepless nights. More on that later.

Sam is now 62. He has served 26 of those years in Congress. He might just be hitting his prime and he’s leaving. The website legistorm.com calculates the average age of members of the U.S. House is 58 (for all of Congress it’s 61.5). However, he has served twice as long as the average length of service for U.S. Representatives. In fact, Graves is 32nd in seniority among the 435 members of the House (the Dean of the House is Kentucky Congressman Harold Rogers who is 88 and in his 45th year, his 23rd term and he will seek a 24th.).

The longest-serving Congressman from Missouri was Clarence Cannon, from Elsberry, in northeast Missouri. He died in office after 41 years 69 days and planning for more before a fatal heart attack in 1964. He ranks 29th as the longest-serving member of the U.S. House, 49th  on a list that also includes Senators.

In 1963, the year Graves was born, country music star Jim Reeves put out a song by fellow singer and songwriter Bill Anderson called “I’ve Enjoyed About as Much of This as I Can Stand.”  We don’t know if he has heard the song but in joining 35 other Republicans who are leaving, we wouldn’t be surprised if several of them felt that way (there are 21 Democrats who have decided there’s more to life, too).

Already, several fellow Republicans and at least three Democrats have filed or expressed an interest in filing for his seat and it would be no surprise if the numbers did not increase on both sides.

The Sixth Congressional District is a rural one that covers the entire sparsely-settled rural north Missouri—36 of our 114 counties. It has been solidly conservative for a long, long time.

But the political climate nationwide seems to be changing. Last weekend there were at least 33 “No Kings” rallies in Missouri, nine in the Kansas City area, eight in the St. Louis area, thirteen outstate and three more in northwest Missouri.

Here is something to ponder for the sixth district.  A “No Kings” rally in Quincy, Illinois—not listed among 33—probably had some attraction for some northeast Missourians in the sixth district. TEN of the scheduled rallies on the Missouri side of the Mississippi were in Graves’ present district.  Ten of them. Excelsior Springs, Harrisonville, Kearney, Liberty, Platte City, Madison, Moberly, Maryville, Chillicothe, and St. Joseph.

The “No Kings” movement has survived the winter and the Trump administration’s headline activities from Minnesota to Iran.  The sixth district will not have an incumbent with all of the vote-getting power that goes with incumbency.

The sixth district—in whatever form it winds up being after legislative action and courts reviews—might be more in play than it has been for two decades. And both parties know it full well.

Getting back to Sam—pardon the unfamiliarity but he was “Senator” when I covered him in the legislature and the last time I saw him I called him, “Sam,” an uncharacteristic familiarity that I almost never allow myself with present or past political figures.

There he is from the Missouri Official Manual (the Blue Book by more familiar name) for his first term in the Senate. He was in the Senate for the last years of Democrat-domination of state government.  I recall that he was collegial with good relationships on the other side of the aisle.

But the main thing about him that I recall is that he kept me up all night on at least two occasions.  Sam was not afraid of a filibuster but he rarely took a leading role and didn’t do it so often as to be tiring—as some have done more recently. And he was entertaining, something most filibuster participants never approach.

There were some senators after him who were so boring that I gave one of them a list of books to read that would at least educate those who had to endure them.  Sadly, the list went unused.

He talked about being a poor farm boy whose only pet, a three-legged dog named “Tripod,” was the star of some of his stories. The best performance, however, was the night he threatened to read the names of every high school student in his district who was graduating that year. Every time he was interrupted, he started over. As I recall, he finally forced a compromise on the issue under discussion—which is what filibusters should be for if participants respect them.

The only better filibuster story-teller than Sam Graves was Senator Danny Staples of Eminence.  I made sure I turned on my recorder whenever he asked another member, “Senator, did you know…..” because I knew what was coming.  The State Historical Society has several hours of Staples’ recordings. There are hundreds of other cassettes in the oral history collection that I have to listen to and label one of these days and there has to be some Sam Graves stories on them.  Or on the memory chips we used in later recorders.

He was a work horse not a show horse in his political career, as we observed him up close and from a distance. He’s young enough to have a long and prosperous K-Street career in Washington. K-Street is a street known for its offices of the special interest groups.

The folks in the sixth district would be well-served to seek out another work horse in November.

-o-

George 

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I’ve written about George Will before in these entries, a conservative columnist I admired for his thinking in a time when many on both sides don’t, for his eloquence at a time when many merely shout and curse, his insight when many prefer not looking below an ugly surface. Earlier this week, he used something odd from FOX News as the springboard for a powerful essay about an obviously deteriorating, clearly fearful, increasingly worried about how he will be remembered and his efforts to erase history, particularly history of black people. George Will turns 85 on May 4 and unlike our President, he is very much still all there.

If you are a dyed in the wool Trump fan, you won’t make it to the end. If you are a Republican who still believes in service to the country rather than a country serving a President, you might find yourself surprised by how much you agree. If you are a Democrat, you’ll think George nailed it.

From our hilltop, we will not argue with him.  Even when we have disagreed with him, we would not want to debate him. Here’s George with our Friday bonus: (1800) 1 Minute Ago: Trump Falls Apart Staff Handling Him Legacy Panic & Black History Erasure |George Will – YouTube

(We just checked a few minutes ago and saw that the video has been taken down. However, Cockatoo has provided a transcript.  The video ran about 23 minutes.  We’ve adjusted some of the time cues in the interest of complete sentences.)

Something very unusual happened this week. Donald Trump held a cabinet meeting, the kind of organized event where he sits at a very long table, surrounded by people who just agree with everything he says. But this time, things went differently. In the middle of his unclear remarks about trade deals and made up economic wins, Fox News did something they almost never do. They stopped showing it. They just cut away, went to a commercial break, and came back talking about something else entirely.

0:38

When your own supportive news channel, the one that spent years defending everything you said, explaining away every mistake and cleaning up every power grab, decides they can no longer show you to their viewers. That tells you everything you need to know. This wasn’t Fox News protecting Trump. This was Fox News protecting their audience from Trump.

1:02

Because what they saw in that cabinet room was a man clearly falling apart mentally and physically. Even they knew there was no way to put a positive spin on what everyone could plainly see. Let’s look at what actually happened in that meeting, because the clips that got out are truly disturbing. Trump tried to explain recent economic numbers, and I say tried very generously. What he really did was throw out random figures, confuse countries with companies, and at one point completely forgot what he was saying in the middle of a sentence. He said, and these are his exact words, we’re bringing back $400 billion, maybe $500 billion, some say $600 billion from China, from Canada, from the European Union, which is basically Germany if you think about it. And nobody has ever seen numbers like this, the biggest numbers in history.

1:59

None of that means anything. Those aren’t policy ideas. That’s not even a twisted version of the truth. That’s a man reaching for numbers he thinks sound impressive while having no clue what he’s actually talking about. But it’s not just what he said. Look at how he looked physically. The way he gripped the table. The way he leaned forward like he needed the furniture to hold himself up, the way his staff, Carolyn Levitt, Stephen Miller, whoever was there, watched him, the way nurses watch a patient ready to jump in if something went wrong. And afterward, he didn’t take any questions. He didn’t walk over to the reporters. His team rushed him out of there as fast as his weakening body could go. Because they know. Every single one of them knows. Here’s what has become completely obvious.

2:58

Donald Trump’s staff isn’t serving him anymore. They’re handling him. There’s a big difference. Compare how much he appears in public now to his first term. Back then, whether you liked him or not, the man was everywhere. Daily press briefings, hour-long unplanned rants. He would stand in front of his helicopter and just talk.

3:22

It was stream of consciousness, sure, but he was alert and present. Now he barely shows up. When he does, everything is carefully planned. He uses a teleprompter for remarks that he would have made off the top of his head in 2017. Only pre-approved questions are allowed. Media access is limited. And the moment anything goes off script, they pull him away.

3:50

Why? Because the people around him, Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, JD Vance, are no longer working to advance Donald Trump’s goals. They’re pushing their own. While he falls apart in front of everyone.

4:06

There were recent reports that Miller runs a separate private communication line with Trump, feeding him information all day long, basically creating an unofficial power structure that goes around the official White House chain of command. That’s not loyal staff work. That’s a power grab. That’s someone making themselves the real decision-maker, while the president, in name only, gets worse and worse. Elon Musk has openly disagreed with Trump’s own policy statements.

4:44

J.D. Vance is already doing his own interviews, presenting himself as the calm, reliable leader of the administration. These people aren’t serving Trump. They’re using him. They’re getting rich, pushing their own plans, playing the stock market with inside information, and just waiting for the unavoidable moment when he’s too far gone to stop them. Donald Trump has become a figurehead in his own White House, and everyone around him knows it. But here’s where it gets really telling. Here’s where Trump’s mental state becomes impossible to look away from.

5:20 You may have heard about this already. Donald Trump is currently holding up federal infrastructure money, specifically funding for the Gateway Project, which is vital transportation infrastructure for the Northeast, unless he gets his name put on Dallas Airport and Penn Station in New York. Read that one more time. The President of the United States is using blackmail against a sitting senator, Chuck Schumer, to get public buildings renamed after himself. On the surface, this is just sad. It’s the behavior of a deeply insecure narcissist who never got enough attention growing up.

5:43

But it goes deeper than that. Because when you look at the pattern of what Trump has been doing over the past few months, a clear picture forms. And that picture is of a man in total panic about how he’ll be remembered. He renamed the Kennedy Center to include his own name, making it the John F. Kennedy and Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts. He couldn’t even let JFK have that one thing to himself. He’s ordered the construction of a huge arch in Washington DC, a literal monument to himself that historians have compared to the kind of ego-driven projects built by Saddam Hussein and Stalin in their final years. He’s trying to rename military bases, government buildings, any structure that has federal money attached to it. Why?

Why this sudden obsession with monuments? Because history shows us that when dictators sense the end is near, whether that’s political, physical, or both, they speed up their monument building. Saddam Hussein’s palace construction went into overdrive in the late 1990s when international sanctions had him isolated. Stalin’s worship of his own image grew stronger as his paranoia and health got worse in his last years. It’s a pattern. When authoritarian leaders know their time is running out, they try to lock themselves into stone because they understand something basic.

They’ve lost control of their own story. And Trump knows he’s lost control. You can see it in his social media posts. You can hear it in the way he’s been talking lately. He started this week, and I’m not making this up, talking about whether he’s going to get into heaven. He just posted it out of nowhere. He wrote something like, the nasty fake news keeps reporting that I said I’m not going to heaven. It was a joke, but they reported seriously because they’re terrible people who want to make me look bad. First of all, nobody was reporting that. He brought it up on his own. He’s the one who can’t stop thinking about it.

8:13

Second, Donald Trump, a man who never talked about God except to win over religious voters, who couldn’t name a single Bible verse when asked, who famously said he’s never asked God for forgiveness, is now fixated on whether God will judge him. That’s not politics. That’s psychology. That’s a man facing the reality of his own death and realizing that no amount of spin can change what’s coming. There are reports from inside Mar-a-Lago that he’s been having conversations about his funeral, about how people will remember him, about what will be said about him after he’s gone. He’s trying to negotiate with history in real time, and he’s losing that negotiation.

You want to know the most perfect symbol of Trump’s panic about his legacy? The Kennedy Center situation. After Trump forced his name onto the building, after he held a big renaming ceremony, after he stood there smiling like he’d done something meaningful, the Kennedy Center shut down. Just closed, with no set date to reopen.

Officially, they said it was for renovations and reorganization. But let’s be honest about what really happened. Donald Trump couldn’t stand the idea that his name would be next to the legacy of a real president. A president remembered for his vision, his way with words, and his sacrifice. So rather than let that comparison exist, rather than risk the building not getting the worship he demanded, he just closed it. He took his ball and went home. And here’s my prediction. Write it down and come back to it.

In 10 years, every monument Trump is building right now will be a source of embarrassment. Hotels will remove the Trump name to avoid being boycotted and some already have. Buildings will be given new names. The arch will be torn down or turned into something else. His own children will try to distance themselves from the brand and some already are. The monuments he’s so desperately trying to build won’t protect his legacy.

10:27

They’ll become places people visit to laugh. People will go see Trump’s folly, the way they visit Confederate monuments, not to honor them, but to remember what we got past. Donald Trump senses this. He knows this, and it’s destroying him inside.

10:46

But here’s the thing. This isn’t just about one aging man’s vanity. This obsession with monuments, this panic about his legacy, it’s connected to something much more dangerous. It’s connected to what his administration is trying to cover up. Because at the exact same time Trump is trying to build monuments to himself, his administration is systematically wiping out other people’s history, specifically black history.

11:17

It started right away, from day one of this administration. The rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. The removal of materials from the Smithsonian. The changes to school curriculum, forcing schools to take out discussions of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and the civil rights movement from American history classes. Remember the Enola Gay situation? They ran a computer search for the word gay in federal museum records and just started deleting things. They removed an entire exhibit about the plane that dropped the atomic bomb because the word gay appeared in its name. That’s the level of foolishness we’re dealing with. But it’s foolishness in service of a very specific goal, which is erasing history.

12:11

Now a lot of people rightly said, of course Trump wants to erase black history. He’s a racist. His administration is full of white supremacists. They don’t want those stories to be told. That’s true. But it’s not the whole truth. Because the reason they’re erasing black history isn’t just hatred.

12:32

It’s a deliberate strategy. Fascism needs people to forget history. Authoritarian rule cannot survive if people remember how it works, what it looks like, who it targets, and how it has been fought before. There was a podcast conversation recently between Andrew Schultz and Charlemagne the God that captured this perfectly. Schultz, who, let’s remember, defended Trump, made excuses for Trump, told people they were overreacting about Trump, was now expressing shock at what he was seeing. I never thought I’d see this in America, he said. People being shot in the streets by federal agents, families being ripped apart, armed thugs with badges hunting people down for no reason. And Charlemagne said something so simple, so obvious, and so powerful in response. He said, you never thought it would happen to white people. Because here’s the reality. This is American history. This has always been American history. Where do you think policing in America came from? Slave patrols. That’s it.

13:46

That’s the origin. Armed men given power by the government to hunt down black people, return them to slavery, and terrorize communities into obedience. That’s where American policing started.

14:01

The ICE raids happening right now—agents breaking into homes without warrants, tearing families apart, making people disappear into detention centers. That’s not new. That’s a copy of the Fugitive Slave Laws, where federal agents were given the power to hunt human beings across state lines and drag them back into bondage. The heavily armed police beating protesters in the streets, the government surveillance tracking activists, The criminalization of people helping each other. Black Americans have been living through this for 400 years. Indigenous Americans wrote the book on it with their own blood. What’s happening now isn’t Trump inventing American authoritarianism.

14:48

It’s American authoritarianism finally reaching everyone. And that’s exactly why they need to erase black history. Because if Americans knew that history, if they truly understood it, they would immediately recognize what’s happening right now. If we knew Frederick Douglass, we would know how to speak truth to power. If we knew Harriet Tubman, we would know how to build secret networks of resistance. If we knew Ida B. Wells, we would know how to document terrible acts and force the country to face them. If we knew Fannie Lou Hamer, we would know how to document terrible acts and force the country to face them. If we knew Fannie Lou Hamer, we would know how to organize at the local level and fight corrupt systems. If we knew about the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program, we would know how to build community support networks that make us less dependent on a government that wants us helpless.

15:44

If we knew about the labor movements led by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, we would know how to shut down the economy when those in power refuse to listen. They’re not erasing history because they hate the past. They’re erasing it because they’re afraid of a well-informed future. They’re terrified that if you knew how black Americans resisted slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration, you would know exactly how to resist them. That’s why Trump’s monument-building and history-erasing are two sides of the same authoritarian coin. Build monuments to the regime. Erase monuments to resistance. Control the past. Control the future. Except it’s not going to work. Because here’s what Donald Trump can’t seem to grasp. His legacy is already written. It’s done. It’s finished. No amount of marble or fancy stone or renamed airports is going to change it.

16:56

January 6th will be studies for centuries, not as a patriotic uprising, not as a protest that got out of hand, but as a fascist attempt to overthrow the government by a president who refused to accept that he lost an election. His face will be next to the word insurrection in history textbooks forever. His COVID response, telling people to inject bleach, holding packed rallies while hundreds of thousands of people died, tearing apart pandemic preparedness systems because Obama built them. That’s his legacy. His family separation policy, children locked in cages, toddlers forced to represent themselves in immigration court, thousands of families permanently broken apart. That’s his legacy.

17:46

His two impeachments, his 34 felony convictions, his being found liable for sexual assault, his fraud convictions, his theft of classified documents. That’s his legacy. Future generations aren’t going to ask, was Trump a great president? They’re going to ask, how on earth did Americans fall for this twice? His name isn’t going to stand for greatness.

18:14

It’s going to stand for American decline, the weakening of democracy, and the conman who nearly destroyed the republic. Every monument he builds is one more thing to tear down. Every name he puts on a building is one more name to scrub off. Every arch he orders is one more structure future generations will demolish. That’s his real legacy, and he can’t change it. But you wanna know what the real monument to this era will be? It’s not going to be his arch. It’s not going to be his renamed airport. It’s going to be the resistance. The millions of women who marched the day after his inauguration and kept marching. The sanctuary cities that refused to become part of his deportation machine, the election workers who protected democracy while he sent a mob after them, the journalists he called enemies of the people who kept reporting the truth anyway, the lawyers who filed lawsuit after lawsuit to block his worst actions, the mutual aid networks that fed people when his government shut down. The young people organizing climate protests while he gutted environmental protections.

19:35

The families torn apart by ice who are fighting to be brought back together. The trans kids he tried to erase who refused to disappear. That’s the monument. That’s what will be taught. Not his buildings, not his speeches, but the fact that millions of Americans looked at his authoritarianism and said, no, not here, not us, not ever. The monument to this era is every person who resisted.

20:06

And that monument is being built right now, in real time, by all of us. Which brings me back to Chuck Schumer and that airport naming deal. Senator Schumer, you have one job right now, one very simple job. Do not negotiate with someone using threats. Do not build monuments to tyrants. Do not give this man one more piece of legacy preservation while he’s actively tearing apart American democracy. The answer to Trump’s blackmail should be simple. No. Build the Gateway Project because it’s critical infrastructure and name it after the workers who built it, not the would-be dictator who held it hostage.

20:55

This is a test not just for Schumer, but for every Democrat who claims to be part of the opposition. Are you actually going to push back? Or are you going to make deals with fascism because it’s the easier path?

21:11

But more than that, this is a test for all of us, because Trump’s team is counting on us being worn out. They’re counting on us forgetting. They’re counting on us not remembering how we got here and who showed us the way out. So here’s what we do.

21:27

We write down everything. Every abuse, every lie, every crime. We create the record they’re trying to destroy. We learn the history they’re trying to hide. Read Frederick Douglass, read James Baldwin, read Ida B. Wells, read the scholars they’re removing from universities.

21:48

Learn the strategies of resistance they don’t want you to know about. And we build the other side of the story right now while they’re still in power, so that when this era ends, and it will end, the history that gets taught is the true one. Not Trump’s fantasy, not his monuments, but the real story of what happened and how we made it through. They want us to forget. Our job is to remember everything. If you’ve read this far, you’re part of the resistance. You’re part of that counter-monument we’re building, and I hope you’ll keep building it with me.

Chuck Schumer, do the right thing. No airports, no monuments, no deals with autocrats. And to everyone else, keep fighting. Keep writing things down. Keep learning the history they’re trying to erase. Keep learning the history they’re trying to erase. They’re counting on your silence. Don’t give it to them.

 

The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear (of Ourselves)  

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It was a cool-ish morning, a few degrees above chilly and several degrees above cold, the early sun making the warmth inside my car welcoming a few hours after results of this week’s elections had been announced.

As I had fast-walked my mile around the track at the Knowles YMCA in Jefferson City a few minutes earlier, two moments in history came to me as I thought about the first elections since Donald Trump began his second term.  Two phrases from those events  seemed appropriate:

“The people are coming, armed with pitchforks”  and “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

And I thought the Tuesday results amounted to the people armed with political pitchforks, a story springing from the French Revolution of 1789. And my mind added a phrase: “and the grooves in the guillotine are being greased.”

It was October 5, 1789 when 7,000 angry women, armed not only with pitchforks but with pikes and muskets, marched six miles in the rain from Paris to the palace at Versailles to confront Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette about the people in Paris who were starving while the Royal First Family of France ate well in their palace. There had been significant events preceding the march including the famous Storming of the Bastille, the infamous Paris fortress and a prison for Parisians charged with various offenses against the crown, and the circulation of “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

Four days before the march, a banquet was thrown at the palace, welcoming the troops that had arrived to protect the royal family. There were toasts and expressions of loyalty to the throne, a lavish banquet that outraged the hungry people in Paris when the newspapers publicized it.

Now, on October 5, those 7,000 rain-dampened working women were at the palace chanting “Bread, Bread,” to the rhythm of a beating drum, a moment captured two centuries later in the Broadway musical Les Miserables:

When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

The twenty-thousand French National Guardsmen were unable to keep the women from breaching the gates and demanding Marie face them alone, which she did from a balcony. The mob by now recognized the strength of its position and demanded that she and the King accompany them back to Paris to witness the misery of the people from whom bread had been withheld.

They had no choice. The next day, they became prisoners of the revolution and two years later went to the guillotine.

The dropping of the blade on the neck of Louis XVI meant the future of France would involve no kings.

We will learn more a year from now how much the story of the No Kings movement in France almost 250 years ago will be played out in our streets against President Trump, who held a sumptuous Great Gatsby Party at Mar-a-Lago hours before the Food Stamp Program expired, leaving millions of his citizens wondering how they could afford bread and other necessities of life as he and his friends dined on fine food.

Tuesday’s election results from coast to coast showed an undeniable revolt against Donald Trump.  It is easy and perhaps simplistic to draw parallels with his party and the banquet at Versailles in 1789, when a ruler and his supporters ate very well at a time when many Americans wondered if they could afford bread—and other necessities.

Trump’s reaction to the results illustrates his tone-deaf self-centeredness, his attitude that he is above the mob: “Trump wasn’t on the ballot, and shutdown, were two reasons that Republicans lost elections tonight, according to pollsters,” he wrote in all capital letters on his social media page.  As usual, he did not cite any pollsters supporting his attitude.

The fact is, Trump WAS on the ballot Tuesday.  And his party loyalists who have tried to blame the shutdown entirely on minority Democrats clearly have not convinced a lot of voters they are speaking the truth.

Trump never campaigned for any of his party’s candidates in this election cycle. In the New York Mayor’s race, he didn’t even endorse his party’s candidate and his name-calling against the eventual winner failed bigly.

Our two political parties face important decisions in the aftermath..  Democrats need to keep the public pot boiling for 2026, perhaps not a huge problem as long as Donald Trump keeps doing and saying Donald Trump things.

Is it already too late for Republicans to keep control?  A year is a long time in politics. Candidates and parties historically have found ways to get off the mat.  The Democrats did it Tuesday. But Republicans surely must be questioning how much continued slavish loyalty to Donald Trump will be a major liability for them as individuals and as a party in 2026.

How relevant will Donald Trump be to what the party needs to do in the next year to avoid being irrelevant to voters?  The party surely must confront the reality of the danger Donald Trump embodies to its continued power.  How will the party move beyond him for its self-preservation?

Mayor-elect Zahron Mamdani of New York told well-wishers Tuesday night, “We can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.  After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him.”

On March 4, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt opened his first inaugural address this way:

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today.

This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.

Republicans surely understand that they have been warned, that the No Kings rallies are now emboldened, the pitchforks are out, and the pikes are ready for Republican heads next year. The beating of the drum and the beating of the national heart will intensify.

After Tuesday’s elections, it appears the only thing the Republican Party has to fear is itself.