Category Archives: elections

We The People

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Many years ago during a meeting in Washington D.C., a friend of mine from Maine insisted I go along with him to the Birchmere Music Hall across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia to listen to a folk music trio from his state, Maine.   Schooner Faire’s harmonies on music focusing on northeastern culture has stayed with me to this day.  One is especially appropriate for our times.

One of the three men I watched that night has died but the other two, brothers Steve and Chuck Romanoff continue to perform. The third member, Tom Rowe, died in 2004. .

One of the songs they sang is one of their most popular. It’s called “We the People,” and although they’ve been singing it for decades it seems appropriate today.

If you want to follow along, or join in the signing, here are the lyrics by Steve Romanoff

We the people, hand in hand
We, the people, understand
That there’s an answer, there’s a way
We, the people, have to say
So, send the orders to prepare
We, the people, do declare
Send the good news, send the word
We, the people, will be heard
We, the people, everywhere

There’s a message in the air
And it’s a’movin’ across the land
If you listen you can hear it well, my friend
We know the time has come
To take our heads out of the sand
‘Cause if we don’t the chance might never come again
The future is in reason
Not in building ways of war
And the time has come for reason to be heard
The purpose of the people
Is what this declaration’s for
And it’s why our fathers told us word for word…

We the people, hand in hand
We, the people, understand
That there’s an answer, there’s a way
We, the people, have to say
So, send the orders to prepare
We, the people, do declare
Send the good news, send the word
We, the people, will be heard
We, the people, everywhere

We won’t accept excuses
And we won’t accept the lies
Of those who’d lead our nations into hell
It’s time to call their bluff
To say to them, enough’s enough
It’s time we all could hear the tolling of the bell

It’s time to feed the hungry
And it’s time to heal the pain
And it’s time to beat our weapons into plows

It’s time to hear the voices that have risen once again
It’s the wisdom of the people clear and loud
Singing proud…

We the people, hand in hand
We, the people, understand
That there’s an answer, there’s a way
We, the people, have to say
So, send the orders to prepare
We, the people, do declare
Send the good news, send the word
We, the people, will be heard
We, the people, everywhere

We the people, hand in hand
We, the people, understand
That there’s an answer, there’s a way
We, the people, have to say

So, send the orders to prepare
(That) We, the people, do declare
Send the good news, send the word
We, the people, will be heard
We, the people (Oooh)
We, the people (Oooh)
We, the people (Oh, Yes Oooh)
We, the people (Oooh)
We the people everywhere

Schooner Fare still performs after more than fifty years of concerts although you have to go to Maine at this time of year to hear them.

(The song can be heard on an album with the song’s title. Find it on Amazon at: https://music.amazon.com/albums/B00IIVZUGM?do=play&trackAsin=B00IIVZUOO&ts=1787150255&ref=dm_sh_zsaULICOxXOjIqQEaRmXCxqAz

There also are several Schooner Faire songs on YouTube and a complete 1992 concert from the Chocolate Church Arts Center in Bath, Maine. The song starts about 98 minutes in the concert if you would like to sing along with them:  youtube.com/watch?v=oJXtbDLHMl0&t=6234s.youtube.com/watch?v=oJXtbDLHMl0&t=6234s)

When you go to the polling place in November, perhaps this song will be in your mind along with Edmund Burke’s comment, “Governments who ignore the natural wisdom of the eople willd o so at their own peril.”

(photo credit: YouTube)

Just for the Record

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There have been few times Missourians have so revolted against legislative proposals for new constitutional amendments as they did Tuesday.

Worst losses:

1912 Am 6  Authorizes land inheritance and utility taxes, excepts personal property, abolishes poll and occupational taxes, removes tax limits.  86,647-508,137    85.43% no

2026 Am 5  Phase out of Income Tax  233,309-1,165,085   83.31% no

1914  Am 14  Fifty million dollar bond issue  build and maintain state highways, authorizes a tax levy to pay off bonds (10 cents a gallon of gas)  76,542=378,530   83.17%  no

1918 Am 8  Restructures state tax system to derive public revenue form improved value of land 80,725-373,220   82.21% no

1914  Am 15 Allow petitions to authorize bond issue for road construction and maintenance. 80,935-373,202  82.18% no

2026 Am 4  Constitutional Amendments proposed by petition must be approved by votes in all congressional districts   275,040-1,122,748  80.32% no

1910 Am 8  Increase per diem for legislators  95,045-385,765    80.23% no

1914  Am 4  Establishes annual salary of $1,000 for member of legislature  89,629-355,326  79.85% no (rounded up to 80%)

November is a whole lot more interesting now—-and one question will be whether the Republicans can retain their two-thirds membership in the House and in the Senate.

And then there is 2028.——The offices of Governor, Lt. Governor, Secretary of Sate, Attorney General, and State Treasurer—all are held by Republicans—and all are up for decisions by voters.

 

Massive Repudiation

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(This post has been updated to correct an error.  Amendment five failed in every county, not in all but one. We relied on erroneous information for the original post.)

It was not just a historic election—

It was an epic defeat for two constitutional amendments proposed by a legislature that is two-thirds Republican.

Missouri voters rejected amendments four and five by rates unseen in more than a century. The results for the income tax elimination amendment failed in every county and according to the New York Times just before midnight last night failed in one county, Shannon, 92-8 percent and failed in Maries County 90-10.

Here’s a simple explanation for the failure of Amendment 5—the income tax destruction amendment—and some observations about a flawed state fiscal policy:

The people who can’t afford more sales taxes defeated the people who don’t want to pay income taxes.

For folks to whom an income tax cut would be of relatively minor value while increased sales taxes would be a major blow, the defeat of the effort to excuse those to whom sales taxes are a minor thing from paying income taxes is a major victory, a crushing rejection of the legislature’s proposals.

We hope our lawmakers and/or the candidates to become lawmakers understand a sorry message:

The people at large do not trust them, at least not in matters of tax policy.

How will it play out in candidate elections in November? Incumbent Republicans might face intense demands to explain why they supported both of these amendment, especially Amendment 5.

Here’s a different approach that supporters of Amendment 5 might think about next:

Eliminate the sales tax.  Restructure the income tax so it spreads the fiscal responsibility for state finances more equitably across income levels but gives the folks on the margins some breathing room.

Governor Kehoe said one reason Amendment 5 was justified was because, “We don’t have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem.”

No.

We have both. And we’ve had them for a long time. And the thinking of the legislative majority has been for two decades that the state needs to lower its capabilities to raise money for programs and services for the people who put them in power.

Our spending problem will only increase by reducing our revenues. It would be the equivalent of solving a breathing problem through strangulation.  Fortunately, Missourians didn’t buy that irresponsible cure.

Our politics are filled with cliches, two of which are:

Government needs to be operated like a business.

You can’t cut your way to prosperity.

The Managing Editor of the Illinois Business Journal, Alan J. Ortbals observed in 2015:

Many people advocate government living within its means. Government needs to operate like a business, they say. Those who say that, however, apparently don’t know much about business…

Cost cutting alone creates a downward spiral — cuts diminish your product which reduces your sales which lead to more cuts that diminish your product and further reduce sales until you hang the “Going Out of Business” sign in the window.

Good government — like good business — requires stable revenue. Grover Norquist’s “No New Taxes” pledge is a mindless way to operate…Imagine running your business on a “No New Revenues” pledge. 

Ortbals called for a “balanced approach to government funding with a combination of revenue and cuts. You can’t do it all one way.”

He concluded, “Yes, government does need to operate like a business, which means working on both sides of the ledger to build a stable organization that can grow and prosper.”

Here is a question voters need to ask their candidates in November:  How are you going to build a stable state financial plan that encourages the state to grow and prosper?  What is your plan?

Jeremy Corbyn, a member of the House of Commons in England, put it most simply: “You grow your way to prosperity; you don’t cut your way to it.” It’s probably not an original statement because so many others have said it.

Shannon Power, a member of the Forbes Finance Council wrote in 2024, “The harsh reality is that you can’t cost-cut your way to sustainable growth.”

“The key to growth lies…in the strategic allocation of resources to areas that promise a return on investment. This requires a thorough analysis of where the company can generate growth. A go-to-market analysis of which industries are projected to grow in the coming years and/or which customers or potential customers are projected to increase spending next year is a good place to start.”

She was talking about business growth but in this case, running a government like a business has some applicability:

“The temptation to resort to short-term cost-cutting measures during uncertain times is commonplace. However, companies must recognize that sustainable growth requires strategic investments in areas that drive revenue…The key lies not in cutting costs—but in investing wisely for a prosperous future.”

Gut-touching political slogans won’t do the job. Simplistic steps that do not lift both ends of the boat are not steps toward greatness.  Only by broadening our views, and recognizing that growth begats growth can we lift Missouri from being a state ranked in the 30s and 40s to one other states can point to.

Let us hope that someday the kind of leadership emerges that makes us want to be such a state

Let’s Talk Tennessee Some More

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Maybe this will help you decide how to vote tomorrow, if you haven’t visited the county clerk’s office already.  There’s a lot that backers of Amendment 5 have kept from you as they hold up Tennessee as a utopian land of no income tax.

Although we’ve been told we won’t be paying sales taxes on all kinds of things, here is what your Tennessee friends and relatives pay extra for.  We thank Madras Accountancy for this information.

The basic state sales tax rate is 7 percent. Our state rate now is 4.225.  Local sales taxes are allowed for another 2.75%.  Citing the Tax Foundation, Madras says the rate applies to clothing, furniture, electronics, restaurant meals or other prepared foods, some digital products, motor vehicle purchase—familiar to us.  However:

A sales tax also is applied to gasoline and fuel products. We don’t do that unless you buy a can of oil, for example.

Groceries are taxed, although at four percent—including the rotisserie chicken, deli meals, candy and sugary snacks, soft and energy drinks, dietary supplements.

If you download or stream things, you’re likely to be charged a sales tax in Tennessee for such things as e-books and digital text books, downloadable music and movies, streaming subscriptions if the provider had an office in the state; computer software downloads and licenses, cloud-based software and SaaS platforms.

What’s exempt in Tennessee—

Prescription drugs and insulin, medical devices and durable medical equipment—such things as oxygen tanks and wheelchairs, farm equipment and agricultural supplies, some textbooks, machinery used in manufacturing or processing, and things you’re going to resell.

Services charge sales taxes.  Car repairs and replacement parts, appliance servicing, extended warranties and service contracts, pre-written software (including cloud-based tools), internet and telecommunications services, lodging and short-term rentals, as well as parking services and storage units.

We have a lot of special district taxes or specific taxes for such things as conservation, soil conservation efforts, state parks, police and fire safety, etc., that will continue because they’re part of the state constitution.  All of those will add to the basic state tax.

Supporters also talk of lowering property taxes—-which are the life blood of our schools, local roads and bridges, and city and county governments (do you know that two cents of your property taxes are earmarked for the state blind pension fund?).

No income tax and lowered property taxes sound good but we could be setting ourselves up for some difficult financial times if we buy the simplistic campaign arguments of supporters of Amendment 5.

As mentioned earlier—-we shouldn’t want to be Tennessee, nice as it is to visit.  We should expect our leaders to show us how we can be something better than 34th or lower.

Do We Really Want To Be Like Tennessee?

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Advocated for Amendment 5, the income tax elimination, like to point to Tennessee as a state that flourishes without an income tax.

As usual, campaigns—whether personal or policy in nature—cherry-pick simple issues and dislike honest discussion of the complexity of our way of life.

The Pro-Five campaign has been long on deception.  Equaling Tennessee is not big deal. In most cases our lives will be no better if we decide to move from being 30-something in sales taxes to Tennessee’s 7th highest in the nation.

I don’t want to be like Tennessee. I want to be Missouri—the best Missouri

Let’s look below the deception and see if the things that really matter in how we live are worth voting for 5.

The newest ranking of states by U.S. News says it would not be much of an improvement.  Among the fifty states, Tennessee ranks 24th.  Missouri is 31st.

Ending the income tax might please Missouri’s rich folks but it will not appreciably benefit Missourians as a whole.  U.S. News ranked the states in eight categories and in 22 subcategories.  Here is how we match up with Tennessee, the sweetheart of the Pro-Five set: The numbers on the left are Missouri. Tennessee is on the right.,

44  Crime and Corrections 40

22  Economy  13

32  Education  31

17  Fiscal Stability 5

43 Healthcare  39

35  Infrastructure  39

17 Natural Resources 34

8  Opportunity  22

The survey breaks down the categories this way:

CRIME AND CORRECTIONS

35 Corrections Outcomes  8

40 Public Safety  46

ECONOMY

9 Business Environment 17

28 Employment 15

34 Growth 11

EDUCATION

30  Higher Education 37

27 Pre-K-12 20

FISCAL STABILITY

18 Long-term stability 1

18 Short-term stability 22

HEALTHCARE

40 Healthcare Access  37

39 Healthcare Quality 21

39 Public Health  48

INFRASTRUCTURE

22 Energy 31

33 Internet Access 13

36 Transportation 14

NATURAL RESOURCES

23 Air and Water Quality 16

20 Pollution  39

OPPORTUNITY

12 Affordability 17

34 Economic Opportunity 39

14 Equality 26

You can go to the U. S. News website to get some breakdowns of these categories.

Here is the main point:  Missouri’s goal is not to be as good as Tennessee but to be BETTER THAN TENNESSEE.  That is going to take some really deep and non-partisan (if there’s any chance of that) policy-making that sees our state holistically and encourages Missourians to see beyond themselves.

Abraham Lincoln told Congress in 1861 that circumstances had forced a break from the status quo: “As our case is new, we must think and act anew.”

We the people, and those we elect must not be afraid of thinking and acting anew if we want a better state.  A simplistic step being offered Tuesday that favors some and disadvantages many others is the wrong direction to go.

Notes From a Not-Quiet Hill

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I’m typing this between phone calls to check on my Medicare program, my burial plans, the unclaimed property that might be waiting for me, an accident claim with my name attached to it and who knows what else because I’m not answering and the people who are spending hours calling me aren’t leaving messages so I can call them back. How rude.

I am disappointed, however, that no candidates have called.  You’d think that with the emphasis President Trump placed on redrawing my Congressional District that he would be calling about his preference.  Maybe he’s saving his energy for the general election.

We could discuss whether he can take away my citizenship after about seven generations or so (I honestly do not know if my earliest ancestors were legal immigrants.  We are learning that it’s never too late for ICE to execute justice on those who think they are legal.

Back to the phone calls—

There are so many I can’t recall all of them.  Yesterday our phone started ringing with robo calls at 9:15.  Our last call came at about 6:15.  There were so many that our caller ID stopped at 14 and our landline stopped counting at 50 sometime yesterday afternoon.

If a candidate for Congress or for the U.S. Senate wants to curry my favor, hey will announce the introduction of legislation enacting penalties on companies that show up on my caller ID as someone, some place, or some thing that they are not.

I swear, the entire city of Mokane called but never left a message.  It WAS kind of entertaining for a while listening to the Lady of the Phone pronounce the names of the Missouri places calling us.

Political junk in the mailbox.  Insurance junk on the telephone.  Billboard junk on our highways (well, on I-70 anyway).  Talk junk in the White House.  If there was any more junk, I’d be living in a landfill.

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Speaking of I-70—I drove back Sunday night from the race in Indianapolis and rather quickly realized I had made a mistake of coming back on 70.  At night.  Especially at Kingdom City where I thank Heaven I was the only car on the road at the time as I sought the exit lane and then navigated the new traffic circle.  The entrance to the circle seems designed for truckers who sit up high and can see over the end of the bridge railing to see if there are vehicles coming around.  But my car is small and I had to pull into the circle to see peek around that end.

It probably will be very nice when it is finished.  But Sunday night I didn’t feel particularly safe getting into the circle. I am becoming more friendly with Highway 50.

Now, back to our main theme—

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One of our candidates is shown on the teevee carrying a rifle and telling us he’s going to stop the Chinese from buying our farmland. Pete Hegseth should be proud of this testosterone-loaded commercial.

I don’t vote for testosterone. And I’ve seen enough of people who pledge to “fight” for our rights by showing us a gun instead of an original idea. Eric Greitens wore that theme down to the nubbins. He was able to blow up some targets and he couldn’t blow things up when He became one.

What this present candidate hasn’t mentioned is what he’ll do to the Chinese who already own some of our farmland—-in this case, the properties that used to be Smithfield Foods, which sold its holdings in north Missouri to Chinese interests a few years ago. Will he go into the embassy in Washington, point his gun at the ambassador and demand the Smithfield land be given back?

Charleton Heston is dead.  He was not buried with a gun in his cold dead hands. It was impossible.  He was cremated.

-0—0-

And please spare me all of cow cakes about ending waste, fraud, and abuse. Anybody who makes a big deal of that in a campaign is long on slogans and short on facets and is greatly unoriginal.  PLUS, they’re insulting the hundred or thousands of people who got into public office making the same promise by implying they were liars because it’s still going on. I have yet to hear from any of those candidates who promised to root out those terrible things, stretching back for several decades, who showed me at the next election time what they had accomplished anything. PLUS PLUS, I hope these candidates are not using the Trump playbook for eliminating WFA.

Wouldn’t it be nice to find a candidate that didn’t waste my time, use a fraudulent telephone number, and abuse my intelligence, or volunteer to shoot the bogey man of the day?

The problem with too many political campaigns is that they insult the voters by treating them as idiots.

Enough of this howling in the wind.  I need to grab my Red Ryder Daisy BB Gun and chase off a Chinese land-grabber somewhere.

And don’t try to take it away me. I’m going to consult with one of those callers who wants to talk about my final expenses and tell them I want to be buried with my BB gun in my cold dead hands so that I can the security force at St. Peter’s gate.  He must be getting some real doozies of  souls knock, knock, knocking on Heaven’s Door.

Notes From a Quiet Hill (Worst Campaign Commercials, Best movie scenes, Cavernous Man-Made Potholes edition)

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We’re hoping to have enough time between automated Medicare phone calls to put these thoughts together. We did get a real person once a few days ago. He wound up apologizing.

Moving on to the pithy observations:

I can understand naturally-occurring potholes.  But I’m having trouble dealing with some man-made potholes in Jefferson City. A couple of years ago I had an expensive encounter with a pothole on I-70. We don’t have anything such as that in town but we do have some that give pretty big jolts.

The resurfacing of some of our streets has left some manhole covers below the street surface. Readers in Jefferson City might be intimately familiar with a real suspension banger for cars turning right from Jefferson Street onto East Capitol Avenue. For example.

It has taken me too long to decide on an alternate way to church.  That’s not the only man-made pothole in our street system but it’s the worst I’ve encountered so far.

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Nancy and I are college graduates.  I even went to graduate school until I discovered her, at which point I got a real job so we could get married (This is only partly true but I’m not sure which part).  We, as educated people, have trouble accepting how awful the commercials are for the income tax elimination proposal on the August ballot.  In the case I’m about to cite, they are so intellectually silly that the point they want to make is lost, assuming they make a point.

Here’s the script for one that is a total turn-off in our household;

Some uninvited guests have been eating at your table for years. Property taxes and income taxes, helping themselves to money that belongs to your family. Amendment 5 shows them the door: it cuts property taxes, phases out the income tax, and shifts the burden to the big corporations that have been getting a free meal. This is your table. It’s time you had room at it. Vote YES on Amendment 5. August 4.

The shifting of the tax burden to big corporations is exactly the opposite of what we have understood the proposal to be about and the ad’s targeting of them is pretty bewildering.  As we understand the rational explanations of Amendment 5, the shift of the tax burden would be from the wealthy and the big corporations to the little guy.

Further, aren’t “big corporations” supposed to flock to Missouri because we’re cutting the taxes?  Not according to this awful commercial that says we need to “show them the door,” presumably the door out, not in.

000

The famous archaeologist Dr. Alan Grant died a few days ago.  We will always remember him for one of the most magical sequences in movie history—the day Dr. Grant saw his first living dinosaur—and when we saw it with him—and then the first dinosaur herd.

We know Dr. Grant, of course, by his real name—Sam Neill

Remember, he and the rest of the cast were not seeing what we saw on the screen, which made the acting that carried the impact of the scene so extraordinary. We were as emotionally awed as Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) were.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=sam%20neill%20sees%20a%20dinosaur&view=detail&mid=883E4913FA95A4A0FD448

Everything about the Jurassic Park movie franchise seemed formulaic after this.  But these first few moments are pure magic—and we saw them with the eyes of Alan and Ellie.

Off the top of our head we can think of few other movie scenes with the visual scope and emotional impact of those few minutes.

Perhaps our first view of the slowly revolving space station in 2001 (with perfectly chosen music making it even better). Maybe the great pull-back scene in Gone With the Wind that showed all of the casualties of the Battle of Atlanta.  Maybe the intensity of Pickett’s Charge in Ted Turner’s “Gettysburg” series.

You might have comparable scenes in your memory. Share them, if you like, in the box below.

(picture credits: Instagram)

Heather

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It is not uncommon in our household for one of us (usually Nancy), to ask the other, “Have you read Heather’s column today?—Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston University history professor who gives us great understanding of the historical roots of contemporary events, calls her column, “Letters from an American.”  It’s one of the top columns on Substack.

Her column a day after President Trump’s fact-free speech Thursday night lifts the veil to expose his handlers (string-pullers?) and the frightening future they are planning for our country. It is a lesson we better learn from our past. As any good academic person would do, she footnotes her comments.

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Yesterday President Donald J. Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller all threw the weight of the U.S. government behind a far-right conspiracy theory that says Trump and his loyalists are defending the United States of America against a communist takeover.

As Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich recalled today, two years ago, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec and co-author Joshua Lisec wrote a bestselling book called Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). Trump ally and media guru Stephen Bannon wrote the introduction. Donald Trump Jr. blurbed the book, saying that it provided a playbook to deploy “immediately to save the West.” Then–Ohio senator J.D. Vance also blurbed the book, saying: “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”

Posobiec is a loyalist who worked to keep Trump in office after voters elected Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. He is known for courting controversy by promoting what Maya Oppenheim of the The Independent in 2018 called “wholly erroneous and debunked conspiracy theories,” including the infamous 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that Democrats were operating a child sex ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.

In Unhumans, Posobiec and Lisec argue that the United States is under siege by “the left,” which in their view means anyone from communists to “progressives.” “For the purposes of this book, we will call them the unhumans,” the authors write, because they “oppose everything that makes up humanity. As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”

Lisec explained to Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs that the reason they called the book “Unhumans” “is because it’s a verb, to unhuman someone…. To ‘unhuman’ someone means to deprive someone of their rights to life, liberty and property.” The authors insisted that “communists” were trying to “unhuman” those they consider good Americans, and that “we can’t tolerate an ideology like that” and so must do it to them first.

Ignoring the fascist revolutions that gave rise to World War II, the authors tie together left-wing revolutions from the late Roman Republic to the French Revolution of 1789 to the Russian and Chinese revolutions to the present and claim that all political positions designed to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, or protect civil rights reflect that same left-wing radicalism. In their telling, Spain’s fascist dictator Francisco Franco, who said, “Wherever I am, there will be no communism,” is a hero.

Franco ordered illegal detentions, torture, and mass killings in the name of social cleansing. As Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times noted in 2024, the right wing has often championed Franco, but “it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.”

The embrace of authoritarianism in Unhumans reflects the modern version of an ideology shaped after World War II by those determined to get rid of the modern state. Although the great majority of both Republicans and Democrats embraced such a government, right-wing reactionaries insisted it was a slippery slope to socialism. Defending business regulation, social welfare, infrastructure investment, and civil rights cost tax dollars and so, they said, redistributed wealth.

Over the years, reactionaries insisted that Americans who believed in such a system were un-American takers sucking dry the country’s makers. Increasingly, they demonized Black Americans or people of color and women as lazy and looking for government handouts, breaking laws with impunity, corrupting the country with their godless ways, and winning elections only by cheating.

And yet voters continued to elect lawmakers who supported the modern government. This infuriated the far right, but even establishment Republicans recognized that voters liked Social Security and cancer research, clean air and reproductive rights. While they turned out voters by railing against the “Liberals” who supported regulations and the welfare state, they made sure not to cut into those programs deeply enough to cause a backlash.

Trump has unmasked that facade. He has put the far right in power, where they are destroying the modern American state. Right-wing officials have undermined the world trade system that underpins American prosperity, empowered economic monopolists by slashing regulations and public lands, decimated reproductive rights and healthcare, cut social safety programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, slashed medical and scientific research, and dismantled the post–World War II rules-based international order that has maintained global stability for seventy-five years.

But the right-wing push to get rid of the modern state is deeply unpopular. And so Trump and his loyalists are embracing the idea that his opponents are in league with a historic throughline of left-wing revolutionaries.

Trump’s speech last night began with a completely fantastical vision of current conditions in the U.S. that has been widely debunked, point by point, by fact-checkers. But his portrait of a nation “doing really well” was a setup for his warning that the prosperity and success he touts are under direct threat by “leftists” both abroad and at home.

Trump claimed to present evidence that beginning with the 2020 election cycle, China “carried out what was believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history.” He referred to “China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files” and called this an “unprecedented election security nightmare.” In fact, as Louis Jacobson and Amy Sherman of PolitiFact report, documents the White House itself posted show that such information is publicly available for purchase, and such purchases are common.

Trump also said documents showed that “members of the deep state” worked “to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling.” But, in fact, the intelligence community told Trump about foreign interference in 2021, and Biden released its report when he took office. The report said China did not make an effort to change the outcome of the 2020 election.

Actually, one of the documents Trump released yesterday shows that Russia tried to influence the 2020 election to defeat Biden. Its operatives worked “with US officials and other prominent persons” to “spread claims about former Vice President Biden as well as Ukrainian politicians and alleged Ukrainian influence in the 2016 US elections.” Trump has denied Russian interference in U.S. elections.

Trump tied American journalists to this alleged plot, claiming the Chinese government was paying journalists to write negatively about him. He then attacked the media for being “part of a plot…to continue this [election] fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left.” He called for the government to revoke their broadcast licenses.

“The findings are stunning,” Trump said, and indeed if they were true, we should expect dramatic diplomatic rifts and lawsuits. But does Trump actually believe any of this? The White House today said plans for a lavish state visit of Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Washington, D.C., in two months have not changed.

Trump’s warning of a communist threat against U.S. elections was a setup for his insistence that future elections could be rigged and that the country must do as he says to stop that danger.

He said he had ordered the Department of Homeland Security “to notify every state about noncitizens on their rolls and direct them to be deemed ineligible.” And he demanded Congress pass the SAVE America voter suppression act, saying “the only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get elected in any other way.”

“These reforms are urgently needed to stop the vulnerabilities that I have mentioned,” he said, and he told Americans to call lawmakers to demand they pass the SAVE America act.

Today Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin demanded states run voter rolls through a federal digital tool designed to identify noncitizens who are ineligible for certain government programs. Federal judges have blocked federal demands for those rolls sixteen times and prohibited the use of the federal tool, noting it was not designed to scan citizens’ information and often flags recently naturalized citizens as noncitizens. Blocked by the courts, Mullin threatened state officials with criminal prosecution if they don’t comply with Trump’s demands.

Yesterday Secretary of State Rubio expounded on the administration’s opposition to “Radical Left terrorism.” A meeting at the State Department was billed as an examination of the “transnational” nature of far-left terrorism, but Shannon K. Kingston of ABC News noted that Rubio and other officials from the Trump administration spoke primarily about what they call “antifa” and conditions in the United States, including the assassination attempts against Trump.

Kingston noted that a 2025 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) showed that left-wing political violence in the U.S. “remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.”

Nonetheless, the White House said, “Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

There is a point to all this. Bannon argued in Tuesday’s War Room podcast that the idea of “communists” threatening to take over the United States through corrupt elections is “a predicate for immediate action.” That immediate action, he said, would be for Trump to declare “a national security emergency executive order…that took all of SAVE America plus plus plus plus.” And then, we can be sure, the Republicans will win the 2026 elections and, as Trump keeps saying, all the elections for the next 100 years. They would do so by default as the administration purged so-called communists from public life.

The parallels between Unhumans and the administration’s current rhetoric showed yesterday in Miller’s speech at the State Department. Bannon’s introduction to Unhumans begins with an epigram that reads: “Communism is when ugly deformed freaks make it illegal to be normal then rob and/or kill all successful people out of petty resentment and cruelty. The ideology is all just window dressing.”

Miller told the State Department attendees: “It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations, you see any photograph of those who are assembled, to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person, not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism. Why is that?… You look at two photographs, and you see, you know, a normal American street, you see an antifa protest. Why did the people that are violently demonstrating, why is there not one normal looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways, to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.”

In response to Trump’s address last night, the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, Cisco Aguilar of Nevada, released a statement saying: “That was some bullsh*t.”

—

Notes:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-jack-posobiec-pizzagate-rape-melania-sign-twitter-conspiracy-theory-far-right-a8159661.html

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/trumpworlds-favorite-writer-says-the-right-must-emulate-dictators-in-battling-leftist-unhumans

https://www.thenerdreich.com/why-trump-keeps-talking-about-communism-the-unhumans-playbook/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/07/trump-administration-unleashes-global-campaign-to-crush-radical-left-terrorism/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/opinion/jd-vance-fascism-unhumans.html

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/17/politics/china-election-trump-xi-state-visit

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/homeland-security-secretary-markwayne-mullin-threatens-states-election-rcna588002

https://abcnews.com/Politics/rubio-urges-international-counterterrorism-crackdown-left/story?id=134820036

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jd-vance-jack-posobiec_n_66a2755fe4b04c3a302465e7

https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/steve-bannon-says-trumps-thursday-night-speech-must-be-predicate

usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2026-07-17/trump-says-these-documents-prove-his-false-claims-of-election-fraud-heres-what-they-really-say

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-trumps-address-on-china-the-2020-election-and-what-documents-show

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/that-was-some-bull-state-election-chiefs-condemn-trumps-long-debunked-election-lies/

Facebook:

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Amendment 1 

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(We intended to post this last Friday but it didn’t make it (we don’t think it did anyway)

Missouri is one of eight states without state park admission fees. Amendment 1 maintains that distinction.

We might think Amendment One would be a no-brainer.  It extends a popular, small, sales tax for ten more years.  But those disposed to vote “No” on everything next month might add a touch of uncertainty to this issue.

Voting “no” on everything is irresponsible.  So is voting “yes.”  Government, even something so small as one-tenth of a cent, requires responsible thought.

This one-tenth of a cent sales tax is earmarked for financing state parks and programs retarding soil erosion. When it was initially approved, Missourians weren’t so sure it was a good idea.  It was a 50.1-49.9 approval, about 1700 votes..  But it was renewed with a 69% favorable vote in 1988,  renewed again eight years later with two-thirds of the vote, with a 71% majority in 2006 and most recently almost 80% in 2016.  It has won with an average of about 71.5%.

Renewal should easy. But in 1984 it was on the ballot with  a Kansas City proposal to let the city issue bonds without voter approval if two-thirds of the property owners in a special benefit district wanted them. Fifty-nine percent of the voters said “no” on that one.

The third issue seemed benign—renaming the Department of Consumer Affairs, Regulation, and Licensing (CARL) the Department of Economic Development. It passed 61-39 percent, so we know voters were discriminating in casting their ballots.

DNR observes, “Since 1984, Missouri farmers have implemented more than 295,000 structural and management conservation practices on cropland, hayland, pastureland and woodlands. Through these conservation efforts, Missouri has stopped more than 194 million tons of soil from eroding, enough to fill the lanes of I-70 from St. Louis to Kansas City over 52 feet high. These practices were supported by over $975 million from the Parks, Soils and Water Sales Tax since 1984.

And what do our state parks get?  “Free admission to all state parks and historic sites,” and these other bullet points—

  • Enriches visitor experiences with improvements, such as the new Spirit Trail and playground at Knob Noster State Park, a new visitor center at Deutscheim State Historic Site and upgraded playgrounds at Bothwell Lodge, and Bennett Spring state parks.
  • Offers a variety of overnight accommodations from walk-in campsites to full service cabins and modern lodges.
  • Enhances campground amenities such as upgraded electric, showerhouses and restrooms.
  • Improves accessibility, including track chairs, 360-degree virtual tours and tram tours for senior citizens.
  • Provides ongoing maintenance and repair of more than 2,000 structures, 3,000 campsites and 1,000 miles of trail.

We are proud of our state parks.  We like not to see soil erosion providing a problem for our streams.  It’s only a tenth of one percent. We’ve gotten our money’s worth from this little tax and we should keep getting it.

-0-

Amendment 1 

Posted on by
Reply

Missouri is one of eight states without state park admission fees. Amendment 1 maintains that distinction.

We might think Amendment One would be a no-brainer.  It extends a popular, small, sales tax for ten more years.  But those disposed to vote “No” on everything in August might add a touch of uncertainty to this issue.

Voting “no” on everything is irresponsible.  So is voting “yes.”  Government, even something so small as one-tenth of a cent, requires responsible thought.

This one-tenth of a cent sales tax is earmarked for financing state parks and programs retarding soil erosion. When it was initially approved, Missourians weren’t so sure it was a good idea.  It was a 50.1-49.9 approval, about 1700 votes..  But it was renewed with a 69% favorable vote in 1988,  renewed again eight years later with two-thirds of the vote, with a 71% majority in 2006 and most recently almost 80% in 2016.  It has won with an average of about 71.5%.

Renewal should easy. But in 1984 it was on the ballot with  a Kansas City proposal to let the city issue bonds without voter approval if two-thirds of the property owners in a special benefit district wanted them. Fifty-nine percent of the voters said “no” on that one.

The third issue seemed benign—renaming the Department of Consumer Affairs, Regulation, and Licensing (CARL) the Department of Economic Development. It passed 61-39 percent, so we know voters were discriminating in casting their ballots.

DNR observes, “Since 1984, Missouri farmers have implemented more than 295,000 structural and management conservation practices on cropland, hayland, pastureland and woodlands. Through these conservation efforts, Missouri has stopped more than 194 million tons of soil from eroding, enough to fill the lanes of I-70 from St. Louis to Kansas City over 52 feet high. These practices were supported by over $975 million from the Parks, Soils and Water Sales Tax since 1984.

And what do our state parks get?  “Free admission to all state parks and historic sites,” and these other bullet points—

  • Enriches visitor experiences with improvements, such as the new Spirit Trail and playground at Knob Noster State Park, a new visitor center at Deutscheim State Historic Site and upgraded playgrounds at Bothwell Lodge, and Bennett Spring state parks.
  • Offers a variety of overnight accommodations from walk-in campsites to full service cabins and modern lodges.
  • Enhances campground amenities such as upgraded electric, showerhouses and restrooms.
  • Improves accessibility, including track chairs, 360-degree virtual tours and tram tours for senior citizens.
  • Provides ongoing maintenance and repair of more than 2,000 structures, 3,000 campsites and 1,000 miles of trail.

We are proud of our state parks.  We like not to see soil erosion providing a problem for our streams.  It’s only a tenth of one percent. We’ve gotten our money’s worth from this little tax and we should keep getting it.