Category Archives: elections

The Leopard Hasn’t Changed His Spots

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CNN has gotten some undeserved criticism for holding a town hall meeting with Republican likely voters and Donald Trump in New Hampshire last week.

Kaitlin Collins knew that she was going to have to try to lasso a tornado.  She knew that Trump would show no respect for anyone except himself and maybe such admirable figures as Putin and Xi and that he would try to steamroller her.

She did such a good job that Trump called her a “nasty person.”  He didn’t like it that she kept correcting him and challenging his lies, even if it was like trying to take a sip from Niagara Falls.

If I were her, I’d wear that comment with a certain degree of professional pride.

Some Democrats were critical afterwards, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for one: “CNN should be ashamed of themselves.  They have lost control of this ‘town hall’ to again be manipulated into performing election disinformation, defense of Jan 6th, and a public attack on a sexual abuse victim. The audience is cheering him on and laughing at the host.”

From the Republican side of the aisle came this from Erin Perrine, the spokesman for the Never Back Down super PAC backing Ron DeSantis: “The CNN town hall was, as expected, over an hour of nonsense that proved Trump is stuck in the past. After 76 years, Trump still doesn’t know where he stands on important conservative issues like supporting life and the 2nd amendment. How does that make America Great Again?”

Niall Stanage, writing for The Hill, said “Trump did not so much win the event as CNN lost it—catastrophically.” Stanage didn’t like the audience whooping and hollering and applauding Trump, even when he attacked Collins and E. Jean Carroll, the woman who earlier in the week won a five-million dollar damage suit against Trump for sexual battery and defamation.

Rival network commentator Joy Reid on MSNBC referred to the show as “blatant fascism meets the Jerry Springer Show.”  We think that’s a little over the top because no fist fight broke out over somebody’s claim that Trump fathered her child, although the program aired just a day after a civil court jury found Trump liable in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case.

And what did Trump think?  With his typical modesty, he called the show a “very smart thing” that got “Sky High Ratings that they haven’t seen in a very long time…Many minds were changed on Wednesday night by listening to Common Sense, and sheer ‘Brilliance.’”

Well, of course. Would you expect anything less from a “stable genius?”

While the soundtrack certainly sounded like the audience ate it up, audience cutaways during the broadcast showed plenty of audience members were silent and non-demonstrative.  Republican consultant Matthew Bartlett told correspondent Tara Palmeri of Puck News, a digital media company covering politics, finance, technology, and entertainment news, that many in the audience were “quietly disgusted or bewildered.. In a TV setting you hear the applause but you don’t see the disgust, “ he said.

He was critical of Collins for sparring with Trump instead of taking more audience questions because some disgusted audience members “were ready to confront him” if they had been given the chance.

Here’s why the CNN town hall was not a train wreck:

1.The first such gathering in the campaign cycle showed what our democracy is up against. And it showed the GOP frontrunner for what he (still) is.  And what he is, is what he has been.  He has not learned from his 2020 defeat or from the Carroll lawsuit for from the House January 6 Committee hearings or even from many of his former supporters and enablers who have told him his loud whining about losing the election and doing nothing wrong in trying to intimidate elections officials, the media, prosecutors, and opponents is not doing him any good. He is not a surprise anymore. Republicans can complain about the event, but the energy spent complaining is wasted. Better it be channelled it into keeping his minority segment of the party from keeping the entire party down to his level.

  1. The program provided plenty of evidence for supporters who are thinking about moving past Trump that they should waste no time doing it. For those who are finding him tiresome and his bluster wearing thin, this program gave them an early opportunity to look for a grownup who can life the party out of Swamp Trumpy.
  2. The program showed that he has a core group of supporters that for reasons normal people cannot understand still buy into his egotistical irrationality no matter what.
  3. Clearly, other Republicans know they need to find a way to unify during the primaries to deny him enough delegates for an assured convention nomination (as was the case in 2016).
  4. Trump’s performance might have shown why some believe his firm grip on the party is eroding. Mainline party members can figure out how to put him in the rearview mirror. It’s the old saying, “The enemy you know is better than the enemy you don’t know.”   Trump delivered an opportunity to his party. Several Republicans are making noises about running.  Before they form a circular firing squad, they need to eliminate the outsider who has more bullets than each of them have individually.
  5. If Democrats haven’t cut that broadcast into hundreds of segments they can campaign against, they’re asleep at the switch.
  6. AOC is wrong. Trump might have taken control of the program but he didn’t run over Collins. At the end of the show she was standing almost nose to nose with him, showing control many people would have lost long before, and not backing down to his windstorm, always reminding viewers and listeners that the words “Trump” and “truth” are only remotely related.

He thought she was “nasty.”  This observer thought she was quietly tough enough that he called her a name. I hope somebody creates a bumper sticker to pin to her office bulletin board.

In months to come, there will be other town halls involving both parties.  The cumulative impact of those other town halls should weigh heavily against Trump.  But it would be a mistake if those other town halls focus too much on attacking Trump instead of offering clear, positive, honest alternatives to him.

In fact, he probably hopes they do spend too much time attacking him instead of offering their party and the general public something better.  People like Trump enjoy being attacked by better people because it makes him look bigger and makes them look smaller.

It’s better to have the worst possibility first.  After that things can only get better.  God knows this program succeeded in showing us all why he deserved to lose in 2020 and why he deserves to lose in 2024.

Then again, as we’ve said a few times, Mr. Trump needs to be less worried about whether he’ll get four more years and more worried about whether he’ll get ten to fifteen.

Bob and George, Part II 

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I’ve already admitted that I appear to be woke and unapologetically so.  Now I have revealed that I once was involved with George Soros.

I have some strongly conservative friends but so far none have made the sign of the cross and waved garlic branches to protect themselves as I have drawn near them.  I swear, however, based on some letters to the editor, that there are people who each night pull their Murphy Beds down from the storage space in their bedroom wall and then look under it to see that George isn’t there.

Here’s how George and I got together.

One of the hinge-points in world history occurred on November 9, 1989 when the gates of the Berlin Wall were opened and the destruction of the wall began.  The fall of the Berlin Wall was the symbolic end of the Cold War, confirmed at a summing meeting on December 2-3 ith George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev during which both declared the Cole War was officially, in their opionons at least, finished. German reunification took place the next October.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republicans quickly fell apart.  When Czechslovak President Gustav Husak resigned on December 10, the only hard line Communist government remaining from the Warsaw Pact was in Nicolai Ceaucesecu’s Romania and he was about done.

(He pronounced his last name Chow-CHESS-koo.)

About the time Berlin was celebrating the fall of the wall, the Romanian Communist Party’s Fifteenth Congress  was electing Ceausescu to another five-year term. His speech that day denounced the Peaceful Revolution, as it was called, that was underway throughout Eastern Europe. Violent demonstrations broke out in the Romanian Capital of Bucharest and in Timisoara, considered the cultural and social center of the western part of the country.

Ceausescu held a mass meeting on University Square in Bucharest four days before Christmas that year in which he blamed the riots in Timisoara on “fascist agitators who want to destroy socialism” but the crowd was having none of it. He was booed and heckled and took cover inside the building.  By the next day the revolution was nationwide and the military turned against him. He fled in a helicopter than had landed on the roof of the building, just ahead of demonstrators who had surged inside. The chopper was ordered to land by the army which soon took custody of the president and his wife.

They were tried on Christmas day by a court established by the provisional government, convicted and sentenced to death. It was reported that hundreds of soldiers volunteered to be their firing squad. A firing squad described as “a gathering of soldiers” began shooting as soon as the two were in front of a wall. Their execution was videotaped and shown on Romanian television.

In the months after those events, Marvin Stone, a former deputy director of the United States Information Agency, with support from Secretary of State James Baker, founded the International Media Fund to “help establish non-governmental media across the former Communist bloc.”

In August and September, 1991, I was one of three men sent to Romania and Poland to conduct seminars under the auspices of the International Media Fund and the National Association of Broadcasters. While there we worked with The Soros Foundation for an Open Society, which organized the seminars we conducted.  The foundation told us it was formed “to promote the values of freedom and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe.”

In order to build an open society, one needs education, free communications and the free flow of ideas, and the development of independent, critical thinking at all levels in society. An open society is characterized by a plurality of opinions. There is never only one truth, such dogmatic thinking is the characteristic of closed societies. In an open system ideas, ideals and opinions are constantly challenged, and they enter into competition with each other.  This free, unhindered competition of ideas yields a better system for all.

I was joined by two other men, Bayard “Bud” Walters of Nashville, the owner of several radio stations who would discuss sales—a novel concept in a country that had nothing approaching a capitalist society or a capitalist mindset—and Julian Breen, a former programmer from WABC in New York who had built WABC to having the largest listening audience in America.

Julian died at the age of 63 in 2005. Bud, who is my age, still runs his Cromwell Media expire from Nashville.  When he was asked a couple of years ago about his career highlights, the first one he cited was being “part of a three-person media team that taught how to have a Free Press in Romania and Poland.”  It was eye-opening and rewarding.”

We spent a week in each country and all three of us were impressed by the enthusiasm the young people of Romania and Poland had for free expression.  I talked about the mechanics of covering the news, of who news sources would be—or should be, of the things people needed to know about in a free society (heavy emphasis on telling people what their government was doing for, to, and with them, a unique thing to those folks).  I talked of ethics, a particular interest of our audience.  I talked about the courage it takes to be a reporter, a quality necessary in building free media in a society still mentally adjusted to totalitarianism.

When we came home, we hoped we had planted some seeds of freedom in countries that still had few free radio stations, countries where many people—especially older ones who were accustomed to cradle-to-grave government regulation of their lives—were not sure what this freedom thing was all about and whether it was a good thing.

But the young people knew it was.  One of them told me there was a great irony in the advent of freedom in Romania.  In 1966, Ceausescu made abortion illegal. It was an effort to increase the country’s population. Decree 770 provided benefits to mothers of five or more children and those with ten or more children were declared “heroine mothers” by the state. The government all but prohibited divorces.

The ”decree-ites,” our friend told me, the children born because of the ban on abortions, constituted the generation of Romanians that revolted and killed Ceaucescu.  And were learning lessons about a free society from us.

A decade later, I was judging an annual contest for excellence in news reporting for the Radio-Television News Directors Association—an international organizationthat made me the first person to lead it twice—when one of my board members announced that we had our first truly international winner.

A young woman from Romania.

I think she was too young to have been in those seminars in ’91.  But knowing that a seed we had sown in Romania had, indeed, flowered, was a strongly emotional moment.

We were sent there by the IMF and the Media Fund.  The seminars at which we spoke were financed by George Soros.

For those who speak his name because of their ignorance of his belief in an open society, I want you to know that I am proud of my association with him even though it was decades ago.  To those who think we as a nation should be ignorant of our history of prejudice, discrimination, and coercion,  and blindly follow those who demean and insult our intelligence in their efforts to get and maintain self-serving power over us, I want to remind you of the goal of George Soros’ Open Society foundation:

In order to build an open society, one needs education, free communications and the free flow of ideas, and the development of independent, critical thinking at all levels in society. An open society is characterized by a plurality of opinions. There is never only one truth, such dogmatic thinking is the characteristic of closed societies. In an open system ideas, ideals and opinions are constantly challenged, and they enter into competition with each other.  This free, unhindered competition of ideas yields a better system for all.

When it comes to freedom, I’d rather have George Soros on my side.  Because I have seen the other side. Unlike so many of those who have turned his name into an empty-headed epithet, I have been within his circle. And I do not fear him.

Despots should.  And I know why.

Showing His Stripes

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Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft wants to be the second son of a former Missouri Governor to also achieve that office.*  Ashcroft seems to have been aloof from the three-ring show at the Attorney General’s office that has involved lawsuits against China, meddling in the elections of other states and, now, joining an abortion lawsuit in Texas—all of which by some twisted logic seem to involve protecting or advocating MISSOURI’s laws.

But with the passing of the 2022 elections, Ashcroft has left his moderate self at home and has started to show his stripes.

His declaration a few months ago that he alone can withhold state aid to public libraries unless they agree with his personal standards on what’s fit for your children and my children to read is scary.  He seems to be most worried about the corruptive influences of anything other than stories about married heterosexual adults sleeping in separate beds (the Rob and Laura Petrie model of marital bliss).  His proposed policy is worrisome enough on its own but in pondering the example it sets for his successors, we are gravely concerned.  Suppose our next Secretary of State denies the existence of the holocaust, regardless of the reader’s age.  Suppose our next Secretary of State is one who thinks the history of black people is not material to our well-being.  Suppose our next Secretary of State reveals himself to be fond of Karl Marx and will take money away from libraries that have any capitalist literature.

His announcement of his availability to lead our state is aggressive, antagonistic, and—as it turns out—ill-timed.  He says Missouri is at a “crossroads,” which is certainly true.  We are known as the Center State, with as many states to the north of us as to the south and as many states to the east as to the west.  But he’s not talking geography here. He’s talking about his own party’s failure to make Missouri a one-party state.

And it would not be surprising if some of his fellow Republicans didn’t feel like he’d gut-punched them when he said, “Red states like Florida, Texas, Tennessee, even Indiana and Arkansas have become examples of conservative leadership while Missouri Republicans, who control every statewide office and have supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature have failed to deliver.”

As we recall, Ashcroft wasn’t satisfied last year that Missouri still has two Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives and wanted new congressional district maps redrawn to reduce that to one by eliminating a district in Kansas City served by Missouri’s current longest-serving African-American congressman.

As for the legislative supermajorities failing to deliver, legislators of the red school might rightfully take umbrage.  They’ve delivered a lot although some of what they’ve delivered has been ruled unconstitutional by courts.

He complains about career politicians who “talk a lot but don’t do a lot.”

The career politician is a frequent target of fervent successor wannabes who have not given us a definition.  Perhaps he’s referring to a career politician such as:

State auditor 1973-1975

State Attorney General 1977-1985

Govenror 1985-1993

  1. S. Senator 1995-2001
  2. S. Attorney General 2001-2005

Yep, Jay Ashcroft knows all about the dangerous career politicians.

He’s also critical of “politicians and lobbyists in Jefferson City [who] slap each other on the back while they give our tax dollars to global corporations, sell out farmland to China, and raise gas taxes on hardworking Missourians.”

Right. Before the recent ten-cent hike (spread over several years) in the gas tax, the latest “big” gas tax hike was a six-center spread through four years (a 55% increase in the then-11-cent per gallon tax) that was proclaimed as “the great economic development tool of the decade” by the then-governor, the career politician described above.

Wonder what dad thinks of the swipe in his son’s candidacy comment.

Give our tax dollars to global corporations?  Several years ago the state cut a big tax deal with a company called Ford to keep it building trucks here. Ford’s pretty global. There are no doubt other examples that don’t jump immediately to mind of such irresponsible use of our tax dollars.

Selling our farmland to China? How about leasing it?  Bad idea, too?

Don’t be too critical with your mouth full. Smithfield Foods, owned by a company in Hong Kong—that’s in China, you know—owns eleven of Missouri’s biggest concentrated animal feeding operations and hires hundreds of Missourians to work those operations or process the meat they produce.

His announcement reiterates a commonly-heard GOP claim that, “It is the very rare occasion if ever, that the state spends its money better than families that it’s taken that money from.”  There’s a lot of validity in that claim if you think social services, criminal justice, education, and our infrastructure can be financed with car washes and cookie sales while taxpayers keep their money and buy a new big-screen teevee.

His comment that Missouri Republicans have failed to make Missouri more like red states of Florida, Texas, TENNESSEE, Indiana, and Arkansas could not have been more poorly timed, coming about the same time the Republicans in the Tennessee legislature expelled two black Democrats who had joined a protest that interrupted a house session, while keeping a white representative (by one vote) who was part of the protest, too.

If Florida is going to be an example, does this mean Jay Ashcroft will take over Worlds of Fun if it disagrees with his political philosophy?

This critical examination of the words used in announcing his political intentions leaves this observer of the passing scene uncomfortable after reading his idealistic words reported by Missouri Independent in its story on his announcement:

“It helps that I was raised with the understanding that people being involved in politics is normal, that elected officials aren’t special. I was raised to understand that it’s about public service, that it’s everyday human beings that are willing to give up their life to serve other people and to make a difference in the lives of current generations and future generations.”

That is an honorable statement. I’ve heard his career politician father say the same sort of thing. But I am left wondering how to reconcile this kind of idealism with his angry, aggressive, antagonistic, and unsettling statement of candidacy.

Which is the real Jay Ashcroft? Which one should I believe in?

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*John Sappington Marmaduke (1885-died in office 1887) was the son of Meredith Miles Marmaduke, who served the last ninet months of Thomas Reynolds’ term after he committed suicide February 9, 1844.

If You Think Congress Is A Mess Now—-

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You’d better hope some Republicans in the U.S. House fail in their efforts to take away your rights to make it better.

Several of these birds are trying to whip up support for a change in the United States Constitution to limit the number of times you and I can vote to send someone to represent us.

They say they want to confront the “corruption” of career politicians.

House Joint Resolution 11 would limit House members to six years and Senators to twelve years.

That’s worse than Missouri’s term limits and Missouri’s term limits, take the word of one who has watched the impact from the front row, are a disaster.

Congressman Ralph Norman of South Carolina finished Congressman Mick Mulvaney’s term with a special election win in 2017. He has since been elected in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

Do you sense a whiff of hypocrisy here?

Do you suppose he will voluntarily step aside after this term?

His bill has 44 cosponsors.

His term limits idea would work the same way our term limit amendment worked when it was adopted 31 years ago.  The clock would be reset so a member could only run for three MORE terms after the amendment would go into effect.  Past terms would not count.

So let’s assume his idea is passed by the Congress (fat chance, at least in this term) and then is ratified before the 2024 election. He could still run in ’24, ’26 and ’28. So, the sponsor of this three-term limit could serve six terms and part of a seventh.

And if voters in his state react the same way Missourians reacted, he would.

His argument is the same debunked argument we heard in 1992. He told Fox News Digital last week, “It’s inappropriate for our elected leaders to make long-term careers off the backs of the American taxpayers. We’ve seen the corruption it can led to. While there is value in experience, it’s easy to become disconnected from those you serve after too many years in Washington. Most American support term limits, but the problem is convincing politicians they ought to serve for a period of time and then go home and live under the laws they enacted.”

Only one of the 44 co-sponsors is a Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine. He says the House of Representatives was “never intended at its inception to be a place where someone served for 30 years.”

His argument harkens to the Articles of Confederation, which set limits for members of Congress at six years.  But when the Constitution was written after delegates learned the Articles just didn’t work, the delegates opted for a system of checks and balances, the bittest check and balance being the voters.

James Madison, considered the Father of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist Paper 53 that “[A] few of the members of Congress will possess superior talents; will by frequent re-elections, become members of long standing; will be thoroughly masters of the public business, and perhaps not unwilling to avail themselves of those advantages. The greater the proportion of new members of Congress, and the less the information of the bulk of the members, the more apt they be to fall into the snares that may be laid before them.”

Madison’s allies felt the better check on corruption was regular elections than short turnovers in office.

They placed their confidence in the citizens, in the voters. Not so for this bunch.

Golden is serving his third term right now.  Let’s see if he files for re-election next year.

Among those fervently in support are Matt Gaetz of Florida, a prime example of the kind of person who would bring dignity to the office. He is serving his fourth term. Want to bet he will voluntarily decide he has been around more than long enough next year?

Another bandwagon rider is James Comer of Kentucky, also a four-termer.

Representative Don Bacon, another four-termer, thinks this idea is just ducky, too.

Gaetz thinks term limits would help lead to a “more effective legislature.”

If one calls the process by which Speaker McCarthy was elected earlier this year “effective,” I guess he has a point.  Drawing a name out of a hat would have been more effective.

Comer says his constituents are “excited” about the idea. Does that mean they would be “excited” to see him leave after this term?  They can prove how excited they are about term limits by kicking him to the galleries in 2024.

Bacon, who doubts this thing will fly in the U.S. Senate, thinks it’s a “good thing.”  We’ll see just how “good” he really thinks it is at filing time next year.

The tragic thing about this kind of gut-thinking rhetoric is that those who spout it aren’t honest about the “corruption” they claim they want to fight.

We wonder what a close look at their campaign finance reports will show.  Who has their hooks in them?  What is their voting record on issue their big-money donors are interested in?

What do the budget hawks among them think should be slashed or eliminated?  Things on which average folks rely?  Or might it be things the wealthy use to get wealthier—you know, all those things that the big-money folks receive with the questionable contention that the benefits will trickle down to the little people such as you and me or those below us on the economic scale?

Let’s put it this way:

If you are not scared out of your shoes that this entire notion, from its national security and national defense implications and that the national economy would be left in the hands of Matt Gaetz (four terms), Marjorie Taylor-Greene (second term), or Lorena Boebert (second term)—or even relatively responsible people—who would have only four years experience heading into their last terms forever, you should be.

And let’s not even think about talking about George Santos and whether his colleagues from the majority party should have term limited him after three DAYS.

Consider our current House of Representative members:

Cori Bush  second term

Ann Wagner  tenth term

Blaine Leutkemeyer  eighth term

Mark Alford  first term

Emanuel Cleaver  tenth term

Sam Graves  twelfth term

Eric Burlison first term

Jason Smith sixth term

If you favor term limits in Congress and if you voted for five of these people in the last election, you’re an undeniable hypocrite. Bush, Alford, and Burlison are still using training wheels.

But the other five are, in the eyes of Norman and his deluded disciples, corrupt, serving “on the backs of taxpayers,” “disconnected,” and—God help us—career politicians.

Forget that the voters decide every two years if their careers should end. .

The Hell with the voters.  They don’t know what they’re doing when they send their representatives and their senators back for another term. The crew behind House Resolution 11 is clearly the moral superiors of the voters and they know that you and I have no business making the decision more than three times on who will represent us although your critical observer has no trouble suggesting there are some people who should be limited to one term—and even that is too long in a few cases.

The responsibility for the good or bad in our government remains with the voters. There are problems with manipulative media and the influence of secret and unlimited money. Perhaps if Norman and his friends focused their considerable intellectual efforts on those issues, they would do more good than they will by limiting the choices you and I can make on election day.

But that’s too hard.  Helping to educate a public with an increasingly short attention span when it comes to politics takes far more effort than telling them, “We’ve fixed it so you only have to endure these crooks for six years. And then you can elect another one.”  Encouraging citizen irresponsibility is easier.  And it sounds better.  And it might get them elected to a fourth term.  Or more.

Term limits is an unending train wreck.

I’m not buying a ticket on that train and I sure hope you don’t either.

 

 

The News is Broken

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Brooke Baldwin was a reporter and an anchor for CNN for thirteen years but left the network in 2021.  But she is still a journalist and she still cares about the news industry.

Earlier this week, she took to her Instagram page to express some concerns about the cable news business and the recently-revealed disclosures that indicate FOX News might be a bigger Trump mouthpiece than suspected.

In her frank video she not only expresses concern with what the broadcast news business has become (cable, over-the-air radio and television, etc.) but what the public has become. One fees the other, and she fears that is now healthy for democracy.

We’re publishing her posting that comes after she says, “I’ve thought so much about this and realize I really feel it’s my duty to say something.”  Her conclusion is a pretty strong statement about the news media AND about the public’s responsibility to itself and to our country.

I also realize I’m in this sort of rare position having spent more than a decade in the cable news machine and I will own it. It’s sometimes being part of the problem. But now I am out and I am a viewer just like you.

And I cannot stop thinking today…about this Peter Baker reporting in the New York Times, specifically the piece about FOX news and election night 2020. And so if you have not read the piece…the quick skinny is this:

So it’s election night 2020. It’s Biden versus Trump for the presidency.  FOX news was first. FOX News was right by the way something you really want to be as any news network in calling a state for one of these people running for president.

You know, they had their fancy multi-million dollar updated election projection system up and running.  They called the battleground state of Arizona for Joe Biden. And they did it before anyone.  And they were accurate in calling it.

But they had a problem because Team Trump was furious and also by calling it early, it sounds like they lost out on even more monster ratings by not stringing out the results by not telling the truth when they knew it. And they were mighty upset about that.

And what’s crazy is how do we know about this?  Because the New York Times in this Peter Baker piece, they got ahold of one of these post-election FOX Zoom calls where it included some of these news anchors like Martha McCallum and Brett Baier, folks that I admired over the years, who were upset at the hateful reactions they were getting not only from their own viewers but from the Trump Campaign and so there was a quote in the piece that I’m going to read it for you. This is from one of the FOX executives and this is what she said. “Listen, it’s one of the sad realities, if we hadn’t called Arizona, those three or four days following election day our ratings would have been bigger.  The mystery still would have been hanging out there.”

In addition to that, Tucker Carlson’s texts revealed that he was instructing others to sort of reel in the truth in favor of Trumpism because of FOX’s share price was tanking.

A clear choice of propagandist economics over truth. And Peter Baker, this New York Times reporter doing what any good journalist does also reached out to CNN to say, “Hey, CNN, Did you prolong your election night, any of the calls for ratings?” And their response from this PR person was, “No.”

Full disclosure, I wasn’t in any of those rooms among CNN brass on election night 2020 making those calls but there was zero evidence of CNN doing so.

There’s so much more to this piece. I encourage you to check it out. But my takeaway is this: that FOX wanted the ratings instead of the truth. In fact they tripped over themselves to choose ratings over truth. Honestly, they look like clowns. Not even like clowns masquerading as journalists, just clowns.

And this is all so freaking important because the race to 2024 is already underway and we the viewer deserve to know if we’re being strung along or given the truth about one of the biggest decisions that happens every few years in this country.

This is our democracy at stake and this is also personal for me. I love journalism…When I was growing up as a little girl my mom always told me I was fair and trustworthy. She was, like, “Brooke, you should go be a judge.” I said, “No, I’m going to be something very similar. I want to be a journalist.” I’ve agreed with the pioneers of CNN who once said, “The news should be the star.”

That said, the last couple of years I was hosting my show, how we covered news fundamentally changed. And part of that was because of the then newly-elected president in 2016 and his sudden complete disregard for civility and process and truth.

And part of it was the way we covered the last president.

Yes, how we covered the last president. It felt like a personal feud was playing out every day on our air, devouring what I thought was a disproportionate amount of airtime at the expense of other news.

And if you started pushing back, you got sidelined.

As for all the opinions and opinion overload, I was part of it. My colleagues at night especially were part of it and people who turned on CNN, you know, you come for the news but you perhaps stayed for the opinion. Same with any of the other cable news networks. You just go and flip the channel until you find the host who you most agree with and then you stay there in hopes of leanring about a scoop or further detail on any given story. But really, if you are not changing the channel to hear the counter view, then cable news has become a confirmation bias echo chamber.

Full stop.

Again, perspective that was then.  CNN is under new leadership now. I’m fully rooting for them. I really am. But I’m out so I can’t speak to the editorial decisions being made internally but my bottom line, why I’m sitting here today:

I am worried. On top of getting informed about the state of our democracy I’ve been reading about all these studies that are showing how we are all suffering mentally, physically, just from watching news.

And I’m going to share something I have yet to share publicly—my closest friends know this.  And by the way, I am so proud of my 20-year broadcast journalism career and so proud of these incredible warriors I got to work with through the years.

But today, unless there is a MAJOR breaking news story, I don’t turn on the TV anymore. How do I get my news?  People ask me this all the time.

I read. I read morning newsletters. I read a variety of newspapers, magazines. You know, we are craving the truth and we need it. But between now and next election we will become victims and perpetrators of an all-out information war.

There are some incredible organizations out there trying to do something about all of this and…we all need to do something about it because right now the truth is –

The news is broken.

She’s right.  I have said to several groups and to several individuals that the problem with radio, television, and cable information sources is there’s too much talking and not enough reporting, too much analyzing/speculating/manipulating by people who have become or think they are becoming media stars.

She also makes a valid point when she says, “If you are not changing the channel to hear the counter view, then cable news has become a confirmation bias echo chamber.”

We have a responsibility to ourselves and to our American system to be open to different ideas, opposing ideas, challenging ideas. We have to view different channels, read newspapers and magazines—-and even listen respectfully to other’s ideas.

If we become nothing more than cable-enabled idiots, we do ourselves and our country no good. We need a personal Declaration of Independence from unthinking opinion.

And it’s time we quit making stars out of people whose thoughts are no greater than  yours or mine just because they have a microphone and a camera.  Because, after all—

The news is the star.

 

Presidents Day

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On this Presidents Day, we pause to think of Missouri’s Presidents.  There are two, only one of whom is a native. And there might be a third.

And then there are a lot of folks who once entertained thoughts of high political grandeur but who fell by the wayside.  We spent some time back in a Missourinet studio last week talking for today’s edition of “Showme Today” about our presidents and some of our presidential wannabes.

In the old railroad depot in Atchison, Kansas is the smallest presidential library in the country. It’s considered an unofficial one because of the peculiar circumstances of David Rice Atchison’s perhaps-presidency.  His grave stone in Plattsburg tells a story:

Missouri’s northwesternmost county is named for him, way up in the corner. For years, Missouri and Nebraska feuded over 5,000 acres known as McKissick’s Island that was left on the Missouri side of the river after a flood in 1867 changed the river channel. The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1904 that McKissick Island was still Nebraska territory. It took 95 more years for the two states to agree on an interstate compact approved by Congress that created the legal boundary. But the only way Nebraskans can get to it is by driving through part of Iowa and into Atchison County, Missouri.

Atchison, Kansas is 24 miles southwest of St. Joseph. David Rice Atchison was from Liberty but in the days of “Bleeding Kansas” when the state was deciding if it would be slave or free, Atchison led one of the groups of “border ruffians” who went to Kansas and voted to elect a pro-slavery legislature.

He served two terms in the U. S. Senate. He was so popular that he was elected president pro tempore thirteen times. In those days, the vice-president presided over the Senate and the pro tem was elected and presided only on those rare times when the vice-president wasn’t there.

Vice-President George M. Dallas left the Senate for the rest of the session on March 2, 1849 and the senate picked Atchison to preside in his place.

Presidents were inaugurated later back there—March 4th (the 25th Amendment adopted in 1933 moved the date to January).  The date fell on a Sunday in 1849. Pesident James Polk signed his last bill early in the moring of March 4 because the Senate had been in session all night. In fact, it didn’t adjourn until 7 a.m.

Incoming President Zachary Taylor did not want to be sworn in on the Sabbath and did not take the oath of office until noon, Monday, March 8.

Some argue that Atchison, as president pro tem, was in line to be president of the country under the succession act of 1792.  But Congress had adjourned its session that Sunday morning, meaning Atchison no longer held a Congressional office and therefore there was no line of succession.

He never claimed he was president, “never for a moment” as he wrote in 1880. The truth seems to be that there was no president and no congress for almost a day. In those days of slow national and international communication, there was no crisis.

That’s why the Atchison presidential library, those two display cases in the railroad depot, is “unofficial.”

Incidentally—there was a corresponding controversy in 1877 when Rutheford B. Hays, apparently seeking to avoid another Atchison affair, took took the oath of office in a private ceremony on Saturday, March 3.  But President Grant’s term did not end officially until March 4th. Some think that meant we had TWO presidents for a day.

Speaking of Grant—

Missouri claims him although he was not a native.  He married Julia Dent, the daughter of a wealthy St. Louis County farmer and took up farming in the area.  Grant was Ohio-born and his real name Hiram Ulysses Grant.  He didn’t like his first name and preferred to be known byhis mddleone. He became known as Ulysses S. Grant because Congressman Thomas Hamer nominated him for appointment to West Point apparently not realizing his first name was Hiram and addig a “S” as a middle initial—Grant’s mother’s maiden name was Simpson.

There is at least one letter from Grant during his West Point years in which he signed, “U. H. Grant.”  In time he came to accept the Ulysses S(for Simpson) Grant.  His tactics during the Civil War led to his nickname of “Unconditional Surrender.

Grant’s father-in-law gave the young couple some of his land for their own farm. But the venture was unsuccessful. He also was unsuccessful in other business ventures.

He rejoined the Army at the start of the war and was a Colonel based in Mexico Missouri when he read in a newspaper that he had been appointe Brigadier General.  He commended the unit at Jefferson City for a few days before being dispatched to southeast Missouri where he began building his fame.

Missourian Mark Twain became his close frend in his last days when the family was living in very poor conditions—there was no presidential pension then—and Grant was slowly dying of throat cancer.  Twain arranged to have Grant’s two-volume autobiography published after his death. Sales gave the family some financial security.

In 1903 the Busch family bought the land, now known as Grant’s Farm. Today his farm, his cabin, and the mansion of the Dent Family are part of the Busch family estate.

And that brings us to our native-borne president, Harry Truman, who also has an “S” that means nothing. He was born in Lamar, in southwest Missouri, a town where famous Wyatt Earp had his first law enforcement job.  He also has an S between his first and last names but, unlike Grant, it’s not a mistake.  Formally, there’s no period after the letter because it doesn’t stand for any specific name although he often put a period there.  The “S” honors his two grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young.

His extensive story is a familiar one to Missourians but there’s a special angle that links Jefferson City to the Man from Independence.   In the 1930s while he was the Presiding Judge of the Jackson County administratie court, President Roosevelt appointed him to head the administrations jobs program.  Three days a week, he drove to Jefferson City where he did business out of a fourth-floor room at the Capitol.  It was during that time that the Pendergast political machine in Kansas City called him to a meeting in Sedalia to tell him he was going to challenge incumbent U.S. Senator Roscoe Patterson in the 1934 election.  There are those who think the Pendergasts wanted him to lose so they could put their own man in the presiding judge’s chair and get Truman out of Jackson County politics. Truman, however, beat Patterson, beginning a career in Washington that led him in 1944 to the vice-presidential nomination and ultimately his historic years in the White House.

We’ve had some others who sought the presidency or thought they might seek it.

Governor Benjamin Gratz Brownan Unconditional Unionist in the Civil War and a founder of he Republican Party in Missouri.  He tried to get Abraham Lincoln replaced as the Republican nominee in 1864, strongly opposed President Johnson’s Reconstruction policies, was defeated in the 1872 convention by New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley—and they ultimately were crushed by former Missouri failed farmer U.S. Grant.

Congressman Richard Parks Bland was the leader going into the 1896 Democratic National Convention.  But his marriage to a Catholic woman generated opposition within the party and he lost to William Jennings Bryan on the fifth ballot.

Champ Clark, the only Missourian to serve as Speaker of the House, was the leading candidate at the 1912 Democratic Convention. Although he was favored by a majority of delegates he never could get to the required two-thirds.  It took 46 ballots for the convention to choose Woodrow Wilson over him.

Young Christopher Bond was seen as a rising star in the Republican Party when the convention met in 1976 in Kansas City and was on a short-list of potential running mades for Gerald Ford. His 12,000 vote upset loss to Joseph Teasdale in November crashed dreams of the White House. But he beat Teasdale in a 1980 rematch and went on to a distinguished career as a United States Senator.

Thomas Eagleton sought the vice-presidency under George McGovern’s campaign. But reports that he had undergone some electro-shock treatments for depression ended is VP run a few weeks after the convention.

Congressman Jerry Litton was a charismatic candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1976 who died with his wife and two children and two other people when their airplane crashed on takeoff from the Chillicothe Airport on their way to a victory party in Kansas City.  Litton was known to think he was presidential material. Jimmy Carter, who was elected President that day, thought that Litton would be President some day.  The Senatorship went to John Danforth.  His top aide told me sometime afterwards that Danforth wasn’t sure he could have beaten Litton.  The what-if game can ponder whether we might have seen a Reagan-Litton contest or a Litton-Bush 41.

We haven’t had a serious contestant since, although there are rumors that Josh Hawley would like to be the running mate of Donald Trump in 2024.

Some presidents bring honor to the office. Others bring dishonor and all of them fall somewhere in between.  Today we honor those who served and the office they held.

It is one of the Monday holidays decreed by Congress in 1968. Although we call it Presidents Day, Congress has never changed its original designation:  Washington’s birthday.

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Notes from a Quiet Street (post-January celebration)

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We saw something a few days ago at the Capitol that I don’t think we’ve ever seen—generally bipartisan reaction to a governor’s State of the State message. Applause from both sides of the aisle and complimentary assessments from the minority party that exceeded such positive comments we’ve seen in the past regardless of who the governor has been.

We’ll watch in the next four months to see if the good feelings last.

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Our State Representative has filed a sports wagering bill that gives the legislature a choice for the first time in the five years the gambling industry has tried to push the legislature into passing what the industry is demanding.  The new bill also allows sports wagering, but says it will be done on the state’s terms, not the indutry’s terms.  Our lawmakers now have a choice of whether the people are at home are more important than the people in the hallways of the Capitol.

We’ll probably revisit that topic later.

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Both political parties are looking for viable national candidates or tickets for 2024.  We have one for the GOP that will be hard to beat.

Kinsinger and Cheney.

Or

Cheney and Kinsinger

The party is unlikely to nominate either one, let alone both.  But it would seem that both would be attractive to non-Trumpist GOPers and to independents alike and likely would even draw some interest from Democrats, especially if the Democrats nominate a ticket that has weaknesses—and as we write this, there are plenty of questions within the Democratic Party about whether a renomination of Joseph Biden would be the most solid choice, particularly if somebody not named Trump runs on the other side.

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The Hill recently published a list of eight Republicans who could challenge Donald Trump in 2024.  You know Yogi’s old saying about deju vu.  One of the ways The Donald got the nomination in 2016 was because several candidates split the 65% of the primary vote he didn’t get primary after primary, enabling him to get all of the delegates at one-third the price.

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Some think he won’t be a factor by then—that his concern about a new four-year term should be replaced by concern about a 10-15 year term.

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Joe Biden will turn 82 a few weeks after the 2024 election.  Donald Trump will be that old when he finishes a second term, if——

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We are only about 17 or 18 months away from national conventions, a year away from the first primaries.  That’s a long time in politics.  Plenty of time for something good to happen.

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And Lord knows we need something good to happen in our politics.

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We are grateful it is February.  We have weathered the worst month of the year. Cold and snow do not seem so permanent after we have left January.  February is a short month and by the end of it men are playing baseball again and racing engines are running hot. And it stays daylight longer.  And soon there will be a little green haze in the trees.

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Update:  As of this writing, the Mediacom cable that the company laid across our street instead of re-burying it at the end of last September has been ripped out only twice by the snowplow. It quit working a third time, perhaps because regular traffic dislodged it from its attachment post in our neighbor’s yard. But a technician hustled right out and got it hooked back up.

But it’s only February. Plenty of time for snowplows to roam the streets again.

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Super Bowl is next weekend.  That will end the NFL Season and set the stage for the new XFL season that will carry us until the Canadian Football League starts, filling the gap until the next NFL season.

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And speaking of the NFL—It has found a way to make an irrelevant football game even more irrelevant.  The All-Star game was flag football. Made-for-TV entertainment.

Watch next year for one-hand below the waist games.

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An article in the local paper about this year’s efforts to get sports wagering approved mentioned Rep. Dave Griffith’s bill but missed an important point.  It’s the first time the legislature has been given a clear altenrative to the casino industry’s demands.  This is the first time the lawmakers will have a chance to decide if sports wagering should be done on the casino industry’s terms….or in the best interests of the people who sent those lawmakers here.

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Do you know how to tell—

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—if a politician is lying?

His lips are moving.

This old and cynical joke that cavalierly diminishes all of those who seek to serve honorably has found new circulation thanks to a New York congressional candidate who told lie after lie during his campaign, got elected, has grudgingly admitted to some of his lies, but is unrepentant and as of the writing of this entry plans to take the oath of office.

George Santos is a Republican and (so far) the leadership of his party has been pretty silent about his admissions and the additional lies uncovered by reporters. About the only thing that seems to be true about him is that he’s a Republican. For now, anyway.  If his clay feet, which have crumbled at least ankle-high, continue to crumble, he might be most appropriationly listed as (P-NY), for “Pariah” from New York.

“I am not a criminal,” he told The New York Post. “This will not deter me from having good legislative success. I will be effective. I will be good.”

Whether he is not a criminal is open to some question. Did his claims constitute fraud?  Did he lie to obtain campaign donations, thus defrauding donors?  Did his lies result in financial gain?  Did he lie on his campaign financial disclosure forms, a potential criminal act? And those are starter questions..

He claimed to be the grandchild of Ukrainian natives who escaped the holocaust by going to Belgium and then to Brazil. Investigators say he is not.  He’s a native Brazilian and there are shadows over his life there.

He claimed to be Jewish. He released a position paper during his campaign saying he was “a proud American Jew.”  That was then. Now he says he never claimed to be a Jew and that he’s Catholic who is “Jew-ish,” a comment that the word “outlandish” is inadequate to describe. He says his grandmother told him stories about being Jewish before she converted to Catholicism. His grandparents were born in Brazil.  The Democrat he beat in November says Santos’ lies about his Jewish background are more than offensive—“It’s sick and obscene,” he says.

In the campaign he claimed that he had been openly gay for more than a decade and is married to another man.  But another news organization has learned he was married to a woman that he divorced in 2019 and has found no record of his marriage to the man Santos says is his husband.

He claimed to have worked with two of the biggest names in the financial industry—Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, neither of which says his name ever appeared on their employee rolls. He says he probably could have used “a better choice of words” in making that claim.

He claimed to have attended New York University and to have graduated from Baruch College. Now he confesses, “I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning.” He says he is “embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my resume.” But he excused himself by commenting, “A lot of people overstate in their resumes or twist a little bit.”

Embellished his resume?  And it’s okay because “a lot of people” do it “a little bit?”

What he has done is more than “a little bit.”  He lied and now he’s lying about lying. In fact, he has created a waterfall of lies including how much property he does or does now own, and how many dogs his nonprofit dog rescue group rescued.

The silence of his party’s leadership, particularly his future colleagues in the United States House of Representatives is tragic in this time when distrust of those who seek public service or those who win positions of public service is so strong.  Santos tars all of them with his irresponsible campaign and his petulant responses to those who have exposed him for what he is—a man who was incapable of truth during his campaign and seems incapable of admitting the depth of his lies after his election.

Unfortunately, the public doesn’t see him as the exception to the rule. Unfortunately, the public has come to believe his kind IS the rule.

But I know from years of front-row coverage of politics and politicians that people of his kind are the rotten apple that spoils the barrel.

The Santoses of the political world damn the saints of the political world. It is up to those who will take office for the first time in 2023 to be the kind of people who eventually leave public life having uplifted public opinion about those who go from being “one of us” on election day to being “one of them.”  It will be a heavy lift.  Honor is a great weight.

Failure of his party, particularly those who will be leaders of his party colleagues in Washington, to censure—even expel—him will deepen mistrust in all of those in either party, further damaging our republic and furthering the aims of those who seek to capitalize on distrust in it to strengthen their hopes for control.

“Disgrace” is spelled S-A-N-T-O-S.

The People, Yes

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Carl Sandburg was a great American poet from my home state of Illinois.  His multi-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln remains one of the great works about the Sixteenth President.

In 1936, Sandburg published his epic poem, The People, Yes. It’s a powerful work that captures the American people in their contradictory, dynamic nature.  It’s a great read.  Sometimes when I’m explaining the Benton mural at the Capitol, I quote it when I emphasize to students and—a few days ago—to newly-elected legislators that politicians come and go but the people are forever and the greatness of a state rests with the people and their hopes and efforts and thoughts:

The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it…

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for
keeps, the people march:
“Where to? what next?”

Sandburg also wrote in the poem about Lincoln.  What he wrote about Lincoln has some resonance today:

Lincoln?

He was a mystery in smoke and flags

Saying yes to the smoke, yes to the flags,

Yes to the paradoxes of democracy,

Yes to the hopes of government

Of the people by the people for the people,

No to debauchery of the public mind,

No to personal malice nursed and fed,

Yes to the Constitution when a help,

No to the Constitution when a hindrance

Yes to man as a struggler amid illusions,

Each man fated to answer for himself:

Which of the faiths and illusions of mankind

Must I choose for my own sustaining light

To bring me beyond the present wilderness?

Lincoln? Was he a poet?

And did he write verses?

“I have not willingly planted a thorn

in any man’s bosom.”

I shall do nothing through malice: what

I deal with is too vast for malice.”

What will we look for in the elections of 2024—candidates of malice or candidates who think, “What I deal with is too vast for malice?”

Let us not be so cynical as to believe there are no candidates in the latter category. We might need to persuade some to jump into the arena where they ae badly needed.  We must not tolerate an atmosphere so toxic that those to whom malice is beneath them will lack the support to lead a people who still dare ask, “Where to, what next?”

 

Thirty years ago—–

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I remember a young Attorney General who could envision an almost limitless political future for himself.  The governorship was within his grasp. And after that, there would be Washington, the U.S. Senate.  And from there?   I don’t know how much he dreamed of things beyond the Senate but he had followers who did.

He had won a bruising primary election for governor, outrunning the Secretary of State and the State Treasurer.

But then he lost the general election for governor.  And a few months after that, he lost a lot more.

Bill Webster, son of a state senator once considered one of the most powerful men—some thought he was THE most powerful man—in state government had withstood months of intense news coverage and weeks of campaign commercials linking him to major political scandal.

In June, 1993, Bill Webster, facing two federal felony charges of conspiracy and embezzlement pleaded guilty to one charge of using his office staff, equipment and supplies for his campaign.   He was sentenced to two years in prison.

Webster lost his political future and his law license. The last we heard, however, he has done well as a Vice-President of Bartlett and Company, a major agri-marketing firm in Kansas City.

We started thinking about Bill Webster when we learned of a court ruling involving another now-former attorney general who has visions of greatness.   Last week, Jefferson City Circuit Judge Tom Beetem ruled that Josh Hawley’s taxpayer-financed office staff used private email accounts and equipment to “knowingly and purposefully” conceal public records of communications with political consultants involved in Hawley’s campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Josh Hancock, writing last week for Missouri Independent, reported, “The emails, text messages and other documents at the center of the lawsuit show that early in his tenure as attorney general, Hawley’s campaign consultants gave direct guidance and tasks to his taxpayer-funded staff and led meetings during work hours in the state Supreme Court building, where the attorney general’s official office is located.”

A spokesman for Hawley’s campaign, Kyle Plotkin, has maintained that investigations have found no wrongdoing. One such investigation, he claimed, was done by “a Democratic state auditor.”

He apparently has not read a state auditor’s report suggesting that Hawley and his staff might have misused state resources but their use of private email and text messaging made a definite determination impossible.

Webster went to prison for misuse of state resources.  Hawley has gone to Washington