Category Archives: events

And Down the Stretch They Come

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It’s like the Kentucky Derby this past weekend.  The big group of horses rounds the last turn, accelerating, bumping, jostling, looking for an opening, straining for the finishing line.

And then, it’s over.  Suddenly.  Done.  In the record books. The exhausted competitors head back to their barns.

The last week of this year’s regular legislative session begins today.  All of the work, the hopes, the politicking, the lobbying, the deals and compromises, the conflicts and the consensus-building comes to a merciful end at 6 p.m. Friday.

The public has no concept of what their elected representatives go through on their behalf—or at the behest of those with power to force decisions—between early January and mid-May, especially in the weeks after Easter break when the clock begins to tick more loudly and the calendar pages fall more quickly.

The greatest responsibility the legislature has each year is passage of a state budget.  This year it is $51 billion, huge, the largest budget in state history.  The state is flush with money and sometimes there’s more fighting about state spending when there’s a lot than there is when there’s a little.  With the little, lawmakers have to cover the basic services. With a lot, there are more pet projects, more promises to be fulfilled, more conflicts about what constitutes responsible fiscal policy.

Time of plenty tend to breed unnecessary discussions of policies that ultimately will make times of little even worse.  It becomes harder to defend a system that allows consistent fiscal responsibility in good times as well as bad.

This is the week when bills become Christmas Trees, as they’re called in legislative circles—bills that begin as simple measures suddenly exploding in size as lawmakers who see their bills doomed for failure find bills with better prospects on which they can hang their issues.

Sometimes it works.  Sometimes the bills finish up violating a constitutional standard that a bill can contain only one subject. Sometimes an effort to piggyback a controversial issue onto a relatively non-controversial bill kills both.

Perhaps the biggest issue involving the above scenario involves sports wagering.  Hallway talk is that gambling interests will make one last push to finally get sports wagering by tacking the bill onto a Senate-passed tax bill during House debate and sending it back to the Senate for approval with no time for negotiations. The Senate must take sports wagering, which would face certain death on its own, if it wants to finally approve a more general bill that it has already passed.

If you have trouble following that description, you are not alone.  Bills can become sacrificial lambs as well as becoming Christmas trees.  Believe it or not, the process as a certain fascination the more you watch it.  We will not try to influence your judgment about how moral or ethical that process is.

Sports wagering has at least one strong opponent in the Senate who is prepared to filibuster if the issue returns in some form from the House—and filibustering means there won’t be time for several other bills to be considered as the clock winds down.

So will the sports wagering advocates, desperate to get the issue approved after five years of previous failures, cause the death of other issues because they cannot take “no” for an answer? Again?

This is a nervous time for majority leadership in both chambers because they know every deck contains 52 wild cards at this time of year.   To their credit, they’ve run the place pretty well in 2023, particularly compared the debacle of 2022. But they know their leadership legacy might rest on what happens by 6 p.m. Friday.

Everybody is excited to be coming to Jefferson City each January.  But speed limits will become  just roadside advisories for a lot of people after the gavel falls Friday evening.

The journalist

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The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was last weekend.  They’re filled with jokes and jabs between those who cover and those who are covered.  And along the way, the people who are covered get to say some good things about journalists. Sometimes, the covered make some pointed comments about journalists.

We pause today to pay our tribute to the fellow ink-stained wretches who daily do their best to tell us about our city, our state, our nation, and our world. There are those who will dismiss this contribution as silly because they already know that reporters are biased against their viewpoint, whatever it might be.  Some of those who dismiss these remarks might, in fact, claim that they know the “media” is biased because their favorite radio or television talk show host or political leader says it is, missing the irony in that position. We hope they will excuse us as we plunge ahead, using words of another written a long time ago when the press was newspapers and reporters really could be called ink-stained wretches—a title many were proud to wear.  The phrase, incidentally, is of uncertain origin but has been used for decades.

In 1922, New York American writer Gene Fowler, one of the great journalists of the first third of the Twentieth Century, asked Arthur Brisbane to write about the one-thousand members of the Newspaper Club of New York. Brisbane was the editor of William Randolph Hearst’s tabloid New York Mirror. When he died in 1936, Brisbane was called “the greatest journalist in his day” by Hearst.  And Damon Runyon, certainly no slouch as a 1920s writer, said, “Journalism has lost its all-time No. 1 genius.” What he wrote then about newspaper reporters rings true today among those who toil not only in newspapers but in the changing world of electronic journalism, often without pay increases for years, to responsibly report about the factors that shape our lives. We found a reprint of Brisbane’s editorial on page nineteen in the October 14, 1922 edition of The Fourth Estate, which billed itself as “a newspaper for the makers of newspapers.”

A thousand newspaper men represent, among other things, disappointment in life. Newspaper work is hard, and it does not get better as you grow older, unless you are among the few very fortunate.

Men in other professions, as they work through the years, build up a firm name professionally or in business they build up a business name. And at the end of years they have created something that goes on earning for them when they are old.

Not so with the newspaper man.

He must do every day the work by which he lives, and do it all over again.

Each day he must create his reputation anew.

His greatest asset is enthusiasm, real interest in what he sees and what he tells.

And the years are the enemies of enthusiasm.

A thousand newspapermen, however, represent something more important than several hundred kinds of disappointment. They are to our civilization what the bulb in the electric lamp is to the big factory grinding out electricity down by the waterfront. The light in the bulb tells what the factory is doing. The reporter in the newspaper tells what civilization is doing, as it works, builds, tears down, cheats, lies, deceives and slowly goes ahead.

“The electric bulb burns out, so does the newspaperman. He at least has made it possible for humanity to see more clearly and to advance with knowledge. That means satisfaction.

Newspaper work brings disillusion. After a few years a man starting out full of enthusiasm knows too much about human beings. He must begin with a great supply of hope and optimism, and a good deal of knowledge of the past and of progress in the past to avoid pessimism and gloom.

Young reporters learn that the words of great men is often unreliable. One of the best known statesmen and heroes of this country always had two reporters sent to see him by the Associated Press, that one might corroborate the other and discourage denial of what the hero had actually said.

Reporters in the very beginning learn the pitiful craving for notoriety, eagerness for publicity that obsesses their fellow citizens and that diminishes their opinion of them.

Reporters learn quite young that politics and the government of this nation are managed to a great extent by the intellectual dregs of the population. They discover that the first step toward public approval is a step down, and that discourages them,

However, newspaper work is an education. It enlightens reporter as the reporter enlightens his fellow citizens. If he can stay out of the rut, which is extremely difficult and unusual, or if he can stay in long enough to get the information he wants, then get out and try something else, the reporter usually can thank his newspaper experience.

If he stays too long and is not exceptionally fortunate, time and the current of news running through him burn him out, as the electric current burns out the bulb, and like that bulb he goes into the scrap heap.

This is written after thirty-nine years of reporting and other newspaper work, and therefore with some slight authority.

Without the work of good reporters our government, our grafters, our hypocrites, big and little, our crooks in politics, and our politics in crime would be a thousand times worse than they are. Let that repay the 1,000 newspaper men.

We often have said that being a reporter is the most exciting thing to do because reporters do something that scientists say is impossible and they do it every day.  Each day reporters walk into their newsrooms not knowing what events will challenge their skills and their principles during the day.  At the end of that day—and passionate reporters know a “day” for them is not measured in a fixed number of hours—they have created something out of nothing, a product known as “news.”  It happens every day in newspaper, radio, and television newsrooms throughout America.  Critics blast television for the “if it bleeds, it leads” attitude, or bemoan the shrinking commitment to solid local news reporting on radio, and mourn the passing of competition in local newspaper markets.  But in hundreds of newsrooms of those organizations are those who consciously work to tell the story straight.  But even if you believe the “media” are biased, believe Brisbane’s last paragraph:

Without the work of good reporters our government, our grafters, our hypocrites, big and little, our crooks in politics, and our politics in crime would be a thousand times worse than they are

Brisbane also wrote something else—advice that is good for reporters and non-reporters alike—that we’ll pass along in another entry.

SPORTS:  Look for a Long, Hot, Depressing Summer, Baseball Fans; Maybe You Should Go to a Race

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(BASEBALL)—We are left to recall a man who lived and died baseball, who passed up a potential Heisman Trophy college career to play the game of baseball, and who gave us some memorable thoughts and calls during fifty years in the broadcast booth as Jack Buck’s sidekick and later as the number one play-by-play guy with the Missourinet’s first sports director, John Rooney.

Mike Shannon is gone. He was 83. He was a multi-star athlete in high school who went to the University of Missouri on a football scholarship. In the days when freshmen could not play varsity football, Shannon so impressed Missouri coach Frank Broyles that Broyles thought he could have won the Heisman Trophy if he had stayed with football.

Instead, Shannon got a $50,000 signing bonus from the Cardinals and played baseball.

He gave us a lot of things on the field and in the booth. His Shannon-isms might be rivalled in all of baseball history (at least in our experience) only by the colorful phrasing of another native Missourian, Casey Stengel:

“It’s Mothers Day, so a big happy birthday to all you mothers out there.”

“Back in the day when I played, a pitcher had three pitches: a fastball, a curveball, a slider, a changeup and a good sinker pitch.”

(During a game in New York): “I wish you folks back in St. Louis could see this moon.”

“Ol’ Abner has done it again.”  (a late-game observation when the game is tight going into the last innings.)

“He’s faster than a chicken being chased by Ronald McDonald.”

“Our next home stand follows this road trip.”

“The wind has switched 360 degrees.”

“The crowd (is) on their feet for the Canadian Star Spangled Banner.”

And there were many more. Mike Shannon was Mike Shannon. Nice guy.  Good ball player. One of those guys who made a baseball broadcast booth much more than calling balls and strikes.  They don’t come along often and their enthusiasm for the game can’t be faked or scripted.

And we really need him these days.   His beloved Cardinals are in the pits. There’s no sugar-coating it.

They haven’t won a series since April 10-12 and were 10-19 after their weekend series against the Dodgers, wrapping up a road trip in which they went 2-8. They haven’t been this far under .500 in at least 16 years, 2007, the last time the cardinals finished below .500.  They have to go 80-53 if they’re going to win 90 games and compete for a wild card slot.

The Cardinals had never finished the first month of the season in last place in the National League Central—-and it was formed in 1994.

This weeks’ USA TODAY power rankings put the Cardinals 23rd out of the 30 teams.  The team started the year with fairly low expectations from the newspaper. They were ranked 11th.

And they’re expecting a 41-year old pitcher who has had a mediocre rehab assignments in Springfield and Memphis to lead a turnaround?   Wainwright had an ERA of 6.14 in Springfield and 6.35 at Memphis, 13 strikeouts in 12.2 innings in which he gave up 18 hits and nine runs.

Doesn’t me he can come up to the big club and do better—-rehab assignments aren’t necessarily about winning and losing.

But still…..

The Cardinals could be worse.  They could be the Kansas City Royals and ranked 29th by USA TODAY.  Only Oakland (soon to be Las Vegas, perhaps) is below them.

Where’s Mike Matheny when the Cardinals need him?

He’s in Kansas City where he is 172-242 in his three-plus seasons after going 591-474 in seven seasons in St. Louis and never having a losing record. The Royals went 7-22 in the first month of the season.

(MIZ-WHO?)—We confess that we’ve lost track of what the Missouri basketball team has won or lost since the season ended.  I think we’re suffering from portal fatigue.  They still lack a horse in the middle, a big one.

We’ll root for whatever Dennis Gates puts on the floor next year. But the era of carpet bagger-players the NCAA has ushered in with the portal and the NIL business has been a huge mess we prefer not to try to follow.

Pretty much the same for the football team.  We hope coach Drinkwitz is able to put together an outstanding team.  But by and large it’s going to be a bunch of strangers on Faurot field next fall.

It’s tempting to say that the NCAA has really screwed up collegiate sports.

(RACING)—All three major series were on track during the weekend—although the weekend stretched to an extra day for one of them.

(INDYCAR)—Close, but no cigar—again—for Romain Grosjean who led 57 of the first 66 laps before Scott McLaughlin fought his way past on lap 71 and held on to beat Grosjean to the line by about 1.8 seconds at Barber Motorsports Park at Birmingham, Alabama.

Grosjean, who started the race on the pole,  admits that he’s headed to Indianapolis for the two races in May—on the road course on May 14 and the Indianapolis 500 on the 28th.

McLaughlin’s win, his fourth in the INDYCAR series, was the product of race strategy.  His team planned on three pit stops. Grosjean’s team hoped to win the race on two stops.  But the three-stop strategy eliminated any fuel concerns for McLaughlin, who called it a “happy driver strategy.”

McLaughlin is the fourth driver to win in the four races run this year in INDYCAR.

Two-time series champion Will Power challenged Grosjean in the final laps but couldn’t get close enough to make a pass attempt.  Pato O’Ward and Alex Palou made up the rest of the top five.

(NASCAR)—The long dry spell for Martin Truex Jr., has come to an end after 54 races and 597 days.  Truex, opting for two tires on his last pit stop, held off Ross Chastain, who went with four, for the final fourteen laps.  Truex crossed the stripe a half-second ahead of Chastain.

The race was run yesterday (Monday) because it was rained out on Sunday. The win made the long weekend a family affair. His younger brother, Ryan, won the Xfinity race on Saturday.

Ryan Blaney, William Byron, and Denny Hamlin completed the top five. Byron led almost half of the 400 laps (193 of them) but couldn’t keep up with the top three in the closing laps.

Chastain’s run has put him on top of the points standings.

Chase Elliott, in his third race after returning from a broken leg was 11th and is now within the top thirty in points.  NASCAR rules say a driver must be in the top thirty in points and must have at least one victory if they’re not 16th or better in points at the start of playoffs.  Elliott is still looking for his first win of the year.

Josh Berry, who filled in for Elliott while he was recovering, was driving Alex Bowman’s car at Dover because Bowman suffered some compression back fractures in a sprint car wreck last week. He’s out indefinitely.  Berry finished 11th.

(FORMULA 1)—Sergio Perez is the first driver to win twice at the Grand Prix of Azerbain.

He beat teammate Max Verstappen, the defending f1 champion, by 2.1 seconds. Ferrari’s Charles LeClerc claimed the other podium spot.

Perez’s victory moves him to within six points of Verstappen in the standings. Both drivers have won twice this year. Two-time F1 champion Fernando Alonso, who seems to have found a new life in his career driving for Aston Martin, is third.

(Photo Credits; MLB Tonight (Rooney and Shannon) and Bob Priddy)

 

 

SPORTS: Fluttering Cardinals, Tarnished Royals, Battling Hawks and Dirty Racing.

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by Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(BASEBALL)—Both of our Major League baseball teams have staggered out of the gate in this young season.  While only modest success had been expected of the new-look Kansas City Royals, the Cardinals are far from meeting early-season expectations. A rookie leads the team in hitting and a crippled veteran’s rendition of the National Anthem is near the top of this year’s highlight reel through the first ten games.

The Royals are three-and-a-half games back after ten, with three wins. They are not the worst team in the league, though.  Oakland and Detroit are 2-7.

The Cardinals are last in the National League Central with as many wins as the Royals and one fewer loss.  Philadelphia has the sme record (3-6). Washington is the only team with a worse start, at 3-7.

Cardinals rookie Jordan Walker had one of the Redbirds’ five hits Sunday, setting a new team record for longest hitting streak to start his career—nine games. Another Jordan, Montgomery, was impressive as a starting pitcher during the weekend—nine strikeouts in six scoreless innings against the Brewers. Nolan Arenado got his 300th home career home run during the weekend. But pitchers are giving up almost five earned runs a game (4.87) while scoring only 36 runs (4.0 per game).

The Royals, on the other hand, have scored only 27 runs in their first ten games. But when your pitching staff has a team ERA of 3.74—

If the Cardinals were to play the Royals today, who—if anybody—do you think would win?

(RECORDS)—Baseball might be the most esoteric of all sports and Jordan Walker is a living example.  By getting a hit in his first nine games, he has tied Magneuris Sierra for the team record for longest hitting streak at the start of his career.  (Sierra, once a hotshot prospect for the Cardinals, flamed out, was part of the trade with Atlanta for Marcell Ozuna at the end of his first year in St. Louis. He took his .228 career batting average onto the free agent market during the offseason and signed a minor league deal with Atlanta.)

But an even more obscure record is that Walker has tied the great Ted Williams for second-longest hitting streak by a player twenty years old or younger to start a career. The all-time record is 12 games set by Eddie Murphy of the Philadelphia Athletics in 1912.  Murphy lasted 15 years in the majors and was known as “Honest Eddie” because he was not one of the eight members of the Chicago “Black” Sox involved in the 1919 World Series scandal.

(BATTLEHAWKS)—Some people thought it was funny.  But those who did not will certainly be excused for their reactions.

Pro Football Talk reports that the St. Louis Battlehawks, a little more than a week ago posted this notice:

“Following a vote from XFL owners, the Battlehawks have been officially approved to relocate to the greater Los Angeles area and will do so for the 2024 season.

“St. Louis is a city known for its incredibly hard-working, passionate and proud people. Bringing the XFL back to St. Louis in 2023 will go down as one of the proudest moments in our league’s history. This move isn’t about whether we love St. Louis or its fans, but rather about what is in the best interest of the Battlehawks organization.

“We would like to thank the XFL, its owners, and all of Battlehawk Nation for their diligence and dedication, and we look forward to building a world-class franchise in Inglewood.”

There likely were several folks who failed to note that the notice was posted on April 1 as a joke. Much of the statement sounds like the condescending news release of the Rams when they skedaddled out of town. Rest assured fans, it was just an April Fool’s intended knee-slapper.

In the real world, the Battlehawks battled back in the closing minutes against the Las Vegas Vipers for an overtime 21-17 win.  Down 17-8 with backup quarterback replacing A. J. Mccarron, the Battlehawks scored with 4:49 left when punter Sterling Hofrighter threw a pass to Gary Jennings that turned into a 64-yard touchdown. A three-point points after failed. But the ‘Hawks defense stopped the Vipers and Donny Hagemann kicked a tying field goal with eleven seconds left.

XFL overtime is played as three alternative two-point plays from the five yard line.  St. Louis scored on its first two possessions, a pass from backup QB Nick Tiano to Hakeem Butler and a run by Brian Hill.

St. Louis is 6-2. Las Vegas drops to 2-6.

(SMITH)—Former Missouri Tiger Aldon Smith, whose potentially outstanding pro career fell apart in a flurry of drunk driving, domestic violence, and weapons charges, has been sentenced to a year in jail and five years probation after pleading guilty a felony drunk driving charge growing out of a traffic crash that injured the other driver.

Smith started his pro career by setting a record for sacks as a rookie (14.5). He was an All-Pro the next year with nineteen of them. But his career started spiraling down in 2013.

(RACING)—NASCAR ran its only Cup race on dirt this weekend, at Bristol, Sunday night. Christopher Bell, one of the young guys who grew up racing on dirt tracks, held off another young gun, Tyler Reddick.  The race had been dominated by another young dirt-track veteran, Kyle Larson, until he was involved in a crash just past the halfway point.

Bristol is one of NASCAR’s shortest tracks. Fourteen cautions lowered the winning speed to just 47 mph.

Another short track, Martinsville, is on tap for next weekend.

(OTHER RACING)—INDYCAR and Formula 1 both took Easter weekend off.

We Don’t Want Big Government

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—except we do want it.

I was listening to some debate in the state senate a few days ago during which one senator went off on the idea that government is too big and needs to be shrunk.  This issue has been debate fodder for decades.

Despite many cutbacks—I recall when governors proudly pointed in their State of the State Addresses how many jobs they had eliminated in the past year.

But do we REALLY want smaller government?

The appropriate answer is a familiar one:  Yes, for the other guy.   But don’t touch my programs or my benefits.

There’s an organization called NORC at the University of Chicago.  Although the outfit says, NORC is not an acronym, it is our name,” the letters stand for The National Opinion Research Center, founded in 1941. But it does businesses as NORC, the pronunciation of which always reminds us of a hilarious 1977 outtake from the Carol Burnett show in which Tim Conway, as he often did, ad-libs a story that broke up the cast, including guest star Dick Van Dyke.  Tim Conway elephant story – YouTube.

Well, anyway, The Associated Press and NORC have done a new survey.  Sixty percent of Americans think the federal government spends too much money. But 65% want more spending for education (12% want less).  Health care?  More, says 63% of the respondents; 16% want less. Only 7% of those surveyed want less in Social Security.  Sixty-two percent want less. Medicare? 59% more. Ten percent less. Increased border security spending is favored by 53% with 29% favoring less.  Military spending is pretty even—35% want more and 29% want less.

It’s interesting to see how these numbers matter in the partisan deadlock over raising the debt ceiling and/or cutting government spending. Heather Cox Richardson, whose blog is called “Letters from an American,” says Republicans are harping on Biden policies and want to slash the budget, ignoring the fact that spending in the Trump administration increased the national debt by one-fourth.  The GOPers in Congress want a balanced budget in ten years but don’t want to raise taxes or cut defense, Medicare, Social Security, or veterans benefits.  She says that would “require slashing everything else by an impossible 85%, at least (some estimates say even 100% cuts wouldn’t do it.”

She cites David Firestone, a New York Times editorial board member, who has written, “Cutting spending…might sound attractive to many voters until you explain what you’re actually cutting and what effect it would have.” Firestone asserts that Republicans cut taxes and then complain about deficits “but don’t want to discuss how many veterans won’t get care or whose damaged homes won’t get rebuilt or which dangerous products won’t get recalled.”

He opines that difference of opinion and philosophy is why Republicans in the U.S. House haven’t come up with a budget.  He says, “its easier to just issue a fiery news release” instead of dealing with the unpopularity of austerity.

What makes things harder for our people in Washington is that we want things.  And we expect them to get those things for us.  That’s why we’ve never heard a member of Congress come home and tell constituents, “I didn’t introduce the bill that would have built a new post office,” or “I didn’t work for a federal grant for the local hospital,” because the congress person didn’t want to increase the national debt.

And here’s another recent example:

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who made a lot of political hay in her campaign by saying Arkansawyers should not allow the feds to become involved in state and local issues and who tweeted earlier this year that “As long as I am your governor, the meddling hand of big government creeping down from Washington, DC will be stopped cold at the Mississippi River,” has toured the areas of death and destruction from the tornados this week. Afterwards she said, “The federal government is currently paying 75% of all costs incurred during our recovery process, but that arrangement must go further to help Akansans in need…I am asking the federal government to cover 100% of all our recovery expenses during the first 30 days after the storm.”

She seems to be asking, “Where is big government when we want it?”

The other person is always the greedy one who wants the government to do everything for him or her until WE are that other person.

And that’s why we don’t trust politicians.  They give us what we want.  Then they argue about who is responsible for the debt.

At the basic level, folks, it’s not them. It’s us. We’re responsible for this situation.  They can’t argue with us so they argue with each other.

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The End of an Upsetting Tournament; Cardinals and Royals Start Slowly; and Racing

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(NCAA)—(Ladies first): Nobody saw this one coming.  Oh, we knew the LSU-Iowa matchup for the women’s NCAA basketball championship probably would be special.  But 187 points was not seen as a likely thing for most folks, and 102 points by LSU was equally unexpected and it overpowered Iowa by 17 points. .

But LSU gets the big trophy and Iowa gets the experience of playing in a championship game.  And Iowa’s Caitlin Clark has a year of eligibility left if she wants it after scoring a record 191 points in Iowa’s six games.  That is a record for boh men and women; Glen Rice scored 184 for Michigan in 1989 and Cheryl Swoops had 177 for Texas Tech in 1993.

(Men): San Diego State University met the same fate that Iowa did in the men’s championship game—also a 17-point loss.  Number four seed Connecticut beat the number five seeded Aztecs 76-59.

It’s the fifth championship for UConn, tying them with Duke and Indiana for the fourth-most NCAA championships. UCLA has 11. Kentucky has won it eight times. North Carolina has six titles.

(BASEBALL)—The St. Louis Cardinals have split their first four games with shaky starting pitching a lowlight so far.  Jack Flaherty’s five hitless innings against the Blue Jays has been the only solid performance in the early going. The other starters, Miles Mikolas (13.50 ERA in 3.1 innings), Jordan Hicks (13.50, also in five innings) and Jake Woodford (12.46 in 4.1 innings) have given the hitters plenty of work to do just to stay even. The Cardinals have scored 26 runs in their first four games nd are batting .329 as a team in their break-even start.

One piece of solid news is rookie Jordan Walker who has gone five for 16 has struck out only once.

The Kansas City Royals have only 22 hits as a team in their first four games, which helps explain why they’re off to a 1-3 start.  Ten of those hits came last night in a 9-5 win against the Blue Jays in Toronto’s home opener.  Royals pitching has been solid except for Dylan Coleman who lasted only gave up four runs in his 3.1 innings to start the season.

(INDYCAR)—INDYCAR driver David Malukas might have described the weekend race at the Texas Motor Speedway best: “beautiful chaos.”

Eight drivers, 482 passes for position, 26 lead changes, with Josef Newgarden slipping past Pato O’Ward just before a final caution flag came out on the last lap, freezing the running order to the end made for one of the most exciting open-wheel racing in recent memory and started some observers suggesting the race made a strong case for more oval races on the INDYCAR schedule.

Seven of the 28 starters finished on the lead lap in a race that saw O’Ward rip off the fast lap of the day, just over 221 mph.  Twenty-two of the starters were still competing when the checkered flag fell.

“There were parts when we were good, parts when we were weaker,” Newgarden said after the race. “But when we needed to be good, the car was there at the end.”  He and O’Ward dueled inches apart for more than ten laps before Newgarden inched ahead just before Romain Grosjean’s late crash brought out the final yellow.  “Pato gave me all the respect in the world when he was racing next to me. It was really hard to fight those guys,” said Newgarden. “There are just no gimmies. It was packed up today, very difficult to get away.”

O’Ward’s second-place finish, puts him in the points lead after two races ahead of Marcus Ericsson, the winner of last year’s Indianapolis 500, and Scott Dixon.  Ericsson finished eighth and Dixon was fifth in the race.

O’Ward has finished second in both of the races in the series this year. “That’s a great start to the championship year,” he said, “and that’s what we need.”

(NASCAR)—Kyle Larson’s mediocre season so far—only two top ten finishes in the first six races—took a turn for the brighter at Richmond during the weekend.  Larson beat teammate Josh Berry to the line by a second-and-a=half after leading the last 25 laps.  Berry is filling in for defending Cup champion Chase Elliott, who is expected to be out of the car for several more weeks after surgery on his broken leg.

Larson took advantage of a late caution and pit stop to move in front for the last 25 laps on the three-quarter mile track.  Ross Chastain chased the two Hendrick Motorsports drivers to the flag with Christoher Bell and Kecin Harvick fillingo out the top five.

NASCAR runs its only dirt track race next weekend at Bristol. The track is a little more than a half-mile long but has sharply banked turns. It is this country’s fourth-largest sports venue and the tenth largest sports venue in the entire world with seating for as many as 153,000 people.

(FORMULA 1)—Carnage and confusion marred the Grand Prix of Australia although the usual winner these days won again.

Only twelve of the twenty starters finished with Max Verstappen taking his third win in three races this year.  The race was red-flagged three times and the safety car hit the track two other times.  Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso claimed the other two podium slots, both finishing withing one second of Verstappen.

Disintegration

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We’ve heard it several times in recent days and heard it again this past weekend when a talking head on one of the talking head shows said we are watching “the disintegration of the Republican Party” with the indictment of ex-president Trump and the early support he’s getting from his ardent supporters including two former Missouri Attorneys General.

Senator Josh Hawley calls the charge “an assault on our democracy, pure and simple,” interesting words coming from a man who encouraged that huge crowd of “tourists” to “tour” the U. S. Capitol in a memorable way two years ago.

His successor, Eric Schmitt, calls it “a purely partisan case.”  Schmitt is remembered because he decided to meddle in the 2020 election in four states in what surely was a non-partisan defense of popular democracy. Schmitt, as we recall, was 0-for-4.

And newly-minted Congressman Mark Alford from Raymore, who thinks prosecutor Alvin Bragg  “will clearly dig up old parking tickets if that means Donald Trump cannot run for President,” and says the charges are “nothing short of political persecution.”  Alford was one of Trump’s endorsement successes in the elections last year.

Politico reports, by the way, that Trump went 10-11 in his congressional endorsements last year, eight of those victories coming in districts that already leaned Republican, including Alford’s district.

It is important to remember that Trump is by far not the first federal public official to be indicted. Kentucky Congressman Matthew Lyon was found guilty of violating the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. He was re-elected while he spent four months in jail.

Until now, the highest federal official indicted was Vice-President Spiro agenew, who pleaded no contest to income tax evasion in 1973.

Much is made of Donald Trump being the first PRESIDENT indicted.  It’s worth noting historically but it has no meaning otherwise.  Lyon was the first member of the House to be indicted. Joseph R. Burton, in 1904, was the first sitting senator to be indicted—by a federal grand jury in St. Louis. He was convicted of taking a bribe, fined $2,500 and ordered to serve six months in jail in Ironton, Missouri. He resigned after losing two appeals to the Supreme Court.

The point is: Somebody has to be first.  Trump is the first ex-president to be indicted.

Point noted. He joins a firsts list of  Lyon, Burton, and Agnew.

Now, get on with it.

The headlines have gone to those who have thundered their support of Trump.  Slight notice has been paid to those who have been more judicious in their comments, if they have commented at all.

The silent ones will be the ones who count when it comes to a post-Trump GOP.

It seems obvious that inter-party support for Trump is declining and the ratcheting-up of the noise on his behalf is a strident indication that the remaining Trumpists know their grasp on the short hairs is weakening.

The Republican Party is not “disintegrating” as those who speak more broadly than discretion should suggest are suggesting.  Indictment by indictment, more and more Republicans will be willing to do unto Trump what he has done unto so many others—throw him under the bus (The phrase, by the way, is believed to have started in British politics in the late 1970s).

Here’s the difference between the Trump era of the Republican Party and the post-Trump era—it is the difference between a fish and a tree.

An old political saying, from an unknown origin is, “A fish rots from the head down.”  It generally means that when the leader of a movement dies, the movement will, through time, die too.

But a political party is not a fish.  A political party is more like a tree, which grows from its roots.  Its tip might die but when the dead part if lopped off, the lower part regrows.

So it will be for the Republican Party.  The focus today is on a diseased top branch.  When removed, whether by a windstorm of justice or by intentional cutting and pruning by those who are tired of dealing with it, the roots and the trunk will remain and they will sprout new branches and new, clean leaves.

The focus today is on an element of the national party.  But the roots and the trunk of the party are at the state level and they will remain, and not just in Missouri. The windstorm or the cutting and pruning might make the tree less attractive for a while or reduce its output of political fruit, but it will survive.

Many years ago, our last family vacation before children left for college and ultimately for the real world, we went to Yellowstone National Park.  It was the year after the great fires had blackened so much of the land.  But already we were seeing small green leaves emerge amidst the charred stumps and scorched grass.

The Republican Party will not disintegrate despite gloomy forecasts from talking heads, although the rotten top branch might be transformed in the political fireplace into an “ash heap of history” a phrase attributed to Ronald Reagan, whose party Trump usurped.

Us vs. It—part XIII, Empathetic edition 

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We began this series in the early days of the pandemic. It’s been a long time since the twelfth chapter that likened what we have been going through, or went through, and yesterday.

An odd thing sometimes happens to the historical researcher.  Names and addresses become more than words and numbers on a printed page.  Something empathetic happens sometimes.  I like to say that ghosts live in those boxes of letters and journals or in the stories on the pages of microfilmed newspapers that make yesterday immediate.

Maybe it’s because the address is a place the researcher has driven past many times without a thought.  But now, knowing something that happened at that address produces a peculiar personal tie to the place. These are some of the Jefferson City Sites of Sadness during the great Spanish Flu expidemic of 1918.

1022 West McCarty

1029 West Main

1303 Monroe Street

708 East Miller Street

804 Broadway

Particularly, in this case, is this note in the newspaper from December 10, 1918:

Mrs. Fred Landwehr died at her home east of the city.

The house was east of the city in 1918. It’s well within the city in 2022.  I used to drive past this house almost every time I went to my home on Landwehr Hills Road where we lived for twenty years.  Mrs. Landwehr was one of the victims of the Spanish Influenza pandemic.  One of her descendants is a former Mayor of my town.

In most instances, the people who now live at the addresses above where part of that terrible history happened in 1918-19 have no knowledge of the small but enormously tragic event that enveloped their home so many years ago. They don’t know that the living room of their home might have held the coffin of a loved one who died in that pandemic—funerals often were held in homes in those pre-funeral home days.

We don’t know if such information would be particularly meaningful to the way the current inhabitants live their lives.  But these houses remain memorials to the citizens whose name mean little or nothing to most of us but who were part of the fear and the sadness that was there in that awful historic time.

And in the past three-plus years some modern addresses have been added that were the homes of victims of the worst pandemic since the Spanish Flu of 1918-19.

History is more immediate and more valuable than you might think if you know you are in a place where life and death happened or if you know as you drive past what circumstance of life was played out behind those windows.

Sports—Baseball final tune-ups; A Pepto-Bismol NCAA Tournament; A hot hand for the Battlehawks QB; And a little racin’ at the end

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(Royals)—Kansas City Royals starter Zack Greinke looked ready to go in his last Cactus League start before he becomes the oldest pitcher to make an opening-day start in Royals history.

He’ll be on the mound Thursday afternoon when the Royals open at home against the Twins.  Minnesota will go with Pablo Lopez who joined the Twins in the offseason from the Marlins.

Greinke needs two more wins to get to 225 and 118 strikeouts to become the 20th pitcher to throw 3,000.  Only Justin Verlander (3,198) and former Missouri Tiger Max Sherzer (3,193) are ahead of him as active pitchers.

It will be Greinke’s seventh opening day start.  The game will be the first opening day as manager for the Royals’ Matt Quataro.

The Royals finish spring training this afternoon before opening at home against the Twins on Thursday. Last night the two teams played to a 4-4 tie.  The Royals opened a 3-0 lead on a two-run homer in the fourth inning but Texas scored twice in each of the last two innings for the tie.

(Cardinals)—It’s the time when hopeful young guys get the word on whether they’ve made “the show” or whether they’re going to ride minor league buses again.

Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol called Jordan Walker into his office Saturday, gave him a candid evaluation of his spring training work and then told him, “You deserve every bit of being with us on opening day.”

He’s 20. He’s six feet-five, a third baseman becoming a left fielder, who played his way onto the opening day roster by hitting .284 in the Grapefruit League with three homes, nine RBIs, and 19 runs scored in 65 at-bats.  Last year at Springfield he hit .308 with 22 stolen bases to go with his 19 homers.

He will be the youngest Cardinals player to make his major league debut since 1999. That was Rick Ankiel’s year to get the great news.

Jack Flaherty, scheduled to pitch the second game of the regular season Saturday, had an ugly wrap-up in Florida, as the Cardinals lost to the Astros 24-1, getting outhit 20-9. Flaherty got just 11 outs, gave up six hearned runs on four hits and three walks. He struck out one batter and only 39 of his 69 pitches were strikes. He finishes spring training with an ERA of 6.41. Opposing batters hit .329 against him.

Miles Mikolas will be the opening day pitcher.

The Redbirds wrapped up their spring training schedule with an 8-2 win over the Orioles. Jordan Montgomery had a solid five innings with one run, three hits, four strikeouts and a walk on 72 pitches.

The Cardinals open against the Blue Jays, in St. Louis, Thursday.

 (BATTLEHAWKS)—Quarterback A. J. McCarron hit 19 passes in a row Saturday night against the Las Vegas Vipers. He finished 23 for 29, three touchdowns and 236 yards.  The Battlehawks are now 4-2, tied with the Seattle Sea Dragons for second place behind D. C. Defenders, who are undefeated.

The XFL season is starting to run down for the ‘Hawks. They’re on the road for the last time next Sunday against the Houston Roughnecks. They finish up with three straight home games against the Vipers, the Sea Dragons, and then play the Orlando Guardians.

(NCAA TOURNAMENT)—A historic final four has been set after a couple of weeks of bracket carnage.  For the first time since the NCAA started seeding teams in 1979, no number ones made it to the great eight.

The whole tournament has been one of great upset.  One-third of the games played to narrow the field to the Final Four have seen a lower ranked team prevail over a higher seed. That means no #1 will be in the final four for only the fourth time. It happed previously in 1980, when there were only 48 teams in the tournament, 2006 and 2011 after the expansion to 64 teams.

The final four features one team seeded as high as fourth—University of Connecticut.  Two number fives (San Diego State and Miami of Florida) and a sixth seed, Creighton.

Next weekend San Diego State (5) plays Creighton (6) and UConn (4) plays Miami of Florida (5) will decide who will play for the big trophy.

Now the racin’

(NASCAR)—Tyler Reddick withstood three furious overtime restarts to win his first race of the year and post the first Toyota victory of 2023 at the Circuit of the Americas in Texas.  It’s his first win with his new team, 23XI racing.  He’s driving the car Kurt Busch would have been driving if he was healthy enough to be in a race car this year.

Instead, Busch was in the television broadcasting booth and admitted he was choked up as he watched “his” car win by 1.4 seconds over Kyle Busch, Alex Bowman, Ross Chastain, and pole-sitter William Byron.

Reddick and Byron had fought for the lead during most of the, eventually, 75-lap race. They led 69 of the laps, 41 by Reddick.

The race had an international flavor with four “ringers” who were brought in because of their road-racing experience.  Kimi Raikkonen, the 2007 Formula One champion, was as high as fourth before finishing 29th.  Jenson Button, the F1 champion in 2009, was 18th.  Jordan Taylor, the reigning champion in the IMSA Series, filled in for the injured Chase Elliott and came home 24th after reaching the top ten briefly.  INDYCAR driver Conor Daley was 36th, dropping out early with a bad transmission.

(INDYCAR)—The high banks of the Texas Motor Speedway will see INDYCAR’s second race of the season next weekend.

(F1)—Formula One is in Melbourne, Australia next weekend for the Australian Grand Prix.

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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