Category Archives: government

Disgrace

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Friends: This entry was programmed to go up on the website at 1:01 Wednesday morning. For some reason, the computer failed to post it.

We normally would just try to re-post it without comment.  But an event today surprised (and to be honest, gratified) your loyal observer. The House elected Representative Jon Patterson the new Speaker of the House.  He is starting his fourth and final term in the House, which means he was part of the freshman class of 2018.  He told House members, “It is the people that we serve; it is the areas that we represent that supersede us, long after we’re gone and we’re but pictures on a wall,.”

You will learn why this statement was especially meaningful to this observer when you read what we wrote last weekend and posted on Monday for release early this morning—that didn’t go out on time.

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The 2025 legislative session begins this week.  There are more than fifty new members of the House of Representatives. The Senate will gain ten new people, only two of whom have not been in the House. The Senate will have a President who has had no elective office experience.

For a long time, I have been asked to speak to the incoming class of new state representatives. Whether it has been a briefing on the history of the Capitol or an hour explaining the Thomas Hart Benton Mural in the House Lounge, I always try to work in some points that, I have been told, takes some of the air of importance out of their balloon.

I tell them that one of the messages of the mural is that the greatness of a state depends on the greatness of its people and less on what 197 of them do each year. You are just temporary, I say, but the people are forever.

I tell them that if they ever start feeling self-important, they should go out in the halls and look at the composite photographs of members of past sessions, and look at one from as recently as ten or twelve years back and see how many of the names and faces they recognize and whether they know of anything those people said or did.  “With luck, eight years from now you will only be pictures on the wall,” I tell them, “and someday someone will point to your picture and say, ‘there’s great grandma or grandpa; he served in the House of Representatives,’ and the child will look at the picture for a couple of seconds and then want to go downstairs to see the stagecoach again.”

I also tell them, “Do not do anything here that would be an embarrassment to your family at home, that will lead to your children or grandchildren being asked at school, ’Why are people saying those things about your dad or mom, or grandpa or grandma?’  You can be as crooked as you want but you never want to face a day when a reporter walks into your office and starts asking questions you don’t want to answer.”

But there’s always at least one that doesn’t get the message.

The newbies will find their personal values and ethics challenged from the beginning; some might already have been contacted by people with political action committees and big checking accounts.  And they’ll have to decide who they listen to the most—the people in the hallways or the people in the coffee shops at home.

But they need to understand this; no lobbyist can give them as much money as the people of Missouri do—about $37,500 a year, guaranteed for two years.

They will leave their normal lives each Monday and walk into a bubble that is a completely different culture from what they have at home.  How will they handle it?  How will they keep up  because things move awfully fast—although the general public thinks it doesn’t move at all.

It’s a pressure cooker few of them have experienced in normal life. It might be hard for them to realize, but it is easy to be a different person in the bubble than they are at home.  The challenge each will face is how much different they will be.

Citizens have a responsibility in this game of politics. They have to understand that what a district wants is not necessarily the best thing for the state as a whole and their people in the House and Senate might be represent District X, but their title is STATE Representative and STATE Senator.

Watch how they deal with those pressures, those scenarios, those responsibilities. Care enough about your state and your community that  you don’t just read their press releases and newspaper columns—check on their voting records, especially on bills that are important to more than you.

Of course, citizens can adopt the position that it doesn’t really matter; they’ll be gone in eight years because of term limits anyway—that’s why voters saddled Missouri government with them.

That’s exactly the wrong way to go about being a citizen.

What’s the correct way to serve in the legislature? Read the top half of this entry.  The people will outlast those who represent them in Jefferson City.  The important people in shaping the greatness of a state, or limiting the greatness of a state, are—in the long run—the people who are on the wall of the House Lounge in the Benton mural, the hard-working, struggling people.

A lot of pictures have been hung in the Capitol hallways since Benton painted people who have always been there when all of those in the pictures have come and gone.

So for those who will take or re-take their oaths of office this week—don’t think you are more important than your neighbors at home just because you have been given a temporary title.

And for he folks back home:

You are the ones who have to hold those who will be here temporarily to account—and to make their terms are limited to less than eight years, if necessary. Voters still have the power to limit their representatives to two, three, or four years. Voters still have the power to limit their senator to four years.  After that, the law—unfortunately approved by the voters—takes away the citizen right to determine who their legislators will be.

We hope those beginning their service, whether for the first term or for an additional term heed the advice. And we hope those who sent them here meet their responsibilities.

Rep. Patterson’s remarks are at:

Jon Patterson becomes Missouri House speaker

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Fifty 

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It was 5:55 a.m.  Fifty years ago today, I turned on the microphone, pushed a button on the cart machine to play the theme, and said to people throughout Missouri, “This is news on the Missourinet….” for the first time.

We’re going to tell you the story of how it all started and some of the things that it turned into. This will be a long entry.  But half a century is a long time and no, it does not seem like only yesterday.

This entry runs to about 15-16 printed pages, so you will be forgiven if you decide it’s not worth finishing if you start.  But the company isn’t doing anything to celebrate this anniversary, so I’ve decided to put some things on the record. Voluminous things and I apologize for being voluminous. But The Missourinet and the people who made it deserve a historical accounting.

All we did was revolutionize the way Missourians learned about their state government, their candidates, their office-holders as well as the daily flow of events throughout the state.  We lived by the second hand and by the events, some scheduled and some random, and a few were tragedies that put us to tests and challenged our capabilities to respond. But respond we did.

The Missourinet was a dream of my former assistant news director at KLIK in Jefferson City, a station that has since become just one more format in a building full of formats in Columbia, one of the hundreds of stations owned by one of the larger radio station groups in the country.  Clyde Lear was the first Plan B graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, a program that let people do a special project instead of writing a thesis.  I probably would have a master’s degree today if that option had been available in my time at the Journalism School.  But as time went by, I found that doing radio was more interesting than writing a big paper about some arcane issue in the business.  Clyde’s project was how to do a statewide radio news network.

A report Clyde did for KOMU-TV while he was a student shows some of the roots of the company that he, Derry, and others founded.  The creation of a broadcast center on the first floor of the Capitol was a significant development, as you will see.

Bing Videos

Clyde, who earned enough money in the summers selling religious books to finance much of his college education, recalled on his own blog many years later:

My first “run” at starting a radio network failed. It happened in the fall of 1968 between my final book summer and starting at KLIK. My idea was a simple one. I’d charge each station an average of $10.00 per week for feeding them personalized stories from Missouri’s capital city. Bigger stations would pay more; smaller markets less. All I needed was 20 of the some 70 markets to earn $200 per week; pretty good pay in those days. So, I started selling; driving east on I-70 toward St. Louis. KWRE, Warrenton signed on; then St. Louis’ powerhouse rocker, KXOK; then Farmington; then another along I-55 and then Cape Girardeau. At Sikeston in the southeast corner of the state I hit a snag. The owner was a board member of the Missouri Broadcaster’s Association and he reported that he thought the MBA was going to start its own news network. He suggested I chat with the President of the MBA over in Joplin — on the other side of southern Missouri. I remember clearly driving all night for an early morning meeting with this guy who confirmed that most certainly the MBA was getting into the radio network business and there wasn’t a chance I’d succeed. So, I drove home. Five hours. A failure. And dejected. The next day I applied for and got my $85/week job at KLIK. The rest of the story is that the MBA never moved on its scheme. But I’d had a taste; learned tons; and four years later was much wiser.

Just down the hall from us in that century-plus old building at 410 East Capitol Avenue in Jefferson City, was the office of farm Director Derry Brownfield, who had dreams of doing some kind of agricultural marketing program throughout the state.

When I met Derry, I thought he had the perfect name for a farm broadcaster.

Clyde was a terrific reporter and as a Jefferson City native, he had a background in the city I did not have. We made a great team. Both of us were committed journalists, aggressive, creative—and newlyweds.  Clyde left us after a couple of years (to sell driveway sealer for a local lumber dealer—-which might help you understand how paltry his salary was) but he stayed in touch with Derry and with me.

He and Derry got some financial backing to put a farm network on the air on January 2, 1973. They called it Missouri Network, Inc.  Derry did the broadcasting. Clyde was the engineer, manager, salesman and whatever else needed be done. They started with just six affilaites, but  before too long they had a lot of stations and when they started picking up affiliates outside Missouri, they had to change the name.

And that’s where the Brownfield Network began. Today it is known as Brownfield Ag News and bills itself as “the largest, and most listened-to ag radio network in the country with more than 600 affiliate radio stations across Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and the Delta region.”

“The Delta Region” originally was The Delta Net, a specialty network for Missouri’s bootheel and farming areas around it where the crops are a little different—cotton for example—that went on the air a year after Derry’s first broadcast.

By early 1974, Clyde and Derry’s project was strong enough for them to move toward creation of a news network.  The Missourinet, they decided to call it.  Clyde asked me to be his news director.  I put him off because the CBS Regional Vice President and KMOX General Manager Robert Hyland had told me that the station in St. Louis wanted to “bring you in” when there was a news department vacancy. I believed it and so did then-news director Bob Hardy but as the months went by and Hardy moved more to the programming side, and a new news director took over, it became apparent I had been misled.

So I agreed to work for Clyde.

(An early ad from Missouri Life, which the company owned until it cost too much to keep. It flourishes today under another generation or two of owners.)

The only thing close to a statewide radio network that existed before that was something that was haybaled together once every four years for a gubernatorial inauguration.  The Missouri Broadcasters Association arranged all the necessary phone lines for stations throughout Missouri to pick up the KLIK broadcasts of the parade and the ceremonies at the Capitol.

But a full-time network focusing on state government and politics that also picked up stories from affiliates throughout Missouri—a state version of the national networks—was revolutionary in Missouri broadcasting.

Clyde and Derry had built so much confidence in the industry that The Missourinet started with something like 36 affiliates.

I was the seventh employee of the company, the sixth on the staff  at the time because one of the early ones had stayed only briefly and was gone when I arrived. I thought it would be great, at least for a while, to work from 8-5 getting things set up and hiring two other reporters.

Not so fast, Bob—Derry had gone to Rome to cover the World Food Conference.  So my first day started before 6 a.m. and I had to drive to Brownfield’s farm off of Route 179 just past Marion where a studio had been set up in a house originally intended to be a residence.  My first broadcasts were farm news.  Thankfully our other farm broadcaster, Don Osborne, did the markets.  I knew how to do news but I didn’t know a pork belly from a tenderloin, so that worked out well.

When Derry got back, I went to work on the state network side.  The first thing we had to do was think of a new name for a history show I had done on KLIK called “Missouri in Retrospect.”  The station still had the original scripts but I had copies retyped by the station secretary and it was always our plan to do a network version of the show. We kicked around several ideas before slightly paraphrasing the title of Bernard DeVoto’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Across The Wide Missouri. I suggested substituting “our” for “the,” and the rest is, well, history.

It took a lawsuit to allow us to run the program. The manager of KLIK maintained I had done the program as part of my employment there and thus the station owned all the rights to it—although the program began as a voluntary effort on my part to commemorate Missouri’s sesquicentennial in 197I and I had kept doing it voluntarily until I left with the station never telling me I had to keep doing it.  So we had a little lawsuit that let us run the show on the network while the station had someone else reading my scripts.  We finally got it settled without a hearing.

One day, when Clyde was working at KLIK, he looked across the table that separated our desks and said, “You should put this in a book.”  Eventually, there were three.

One day we went to St. Louis to meet a fellow with a synthesizer to create the opening and closing themes for our newscasts.  We settled on a jazzed-up version of the first five notes of The Missouri Waltz, the state song. In 1976 I heard someone comment that it’s a lousy state song, languid and reeking of the old South and having nothing to do with Missouri except being a song about a song that someone learned while sitting on their mammy’s knee, “way down in Missouri where I heard this melodeeeeeee.”  I immediately agreed but not until relatively recently have I heard something immeasurably better—The Missouri Anthem sung by Neal E. Boyd, the young man who won the America’s Got Talent contest.  Neal died in 2018 at the age of 42. There’s a video of him made when he was running for a legislative seat—he ran twice and lost both times—in which he sings the anthem: Neal E. Boyd and Brandon K. Guttenfelder – MISSOURI ANTHEM

After that we had to find a studio, furnish it, hire the other two reporters, and let the world know about us.

The original Carnegie library in Jefferson City was about to move into its new building and had furniture to sell.  The U-shaped circulation desk struck me as the ideal studio piece. We also bought a big two-sided library shelf.  A few days before we went on the air the three members of the news staff exhausted themselves trying to get that big U-shaped desk up a flight of stairs, around a corner to the left and then through a door on the right.  It took all day and we finally took the thing apart enough to get it in.

We didn’t have regular soundproofing materials for the studio so we put carpet on the floor and on all the walls; the orange and red shag design looked okay in the 70s but by the time we left 216 East McCarty Street to move into an attic of an old house across the street, that carpet looked sooooooo 70s.

(The original cast in what is now a Missouri Bar office that once was our newsroom—-with a piece of the “soundproofing.”)

Down on the first floor of what had once been a funeral home was affiliate KWOS. The station break room had a drain in the floor.  It was next to the hand-operated elevator that brought caskets from the display room, down the hall from the Missourinet office, to be used by those who had been prepared in the later KWOS break room.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that we got a group picture taken of the three of us who were the Missourinet that first day.

The first reporter we hired for the Missourinet was Jeff Smith, who had worked with us at KLIK for a while before going to Illinois to find more profitable employment.  And we also hired a young reporter from KRKE in Albuquerque named Charles Morris.  Jeff much later retired as a VP with Northwest Airlines and Chuck went on to a long career in religious broadcasting, recently retiring as the voice of Haven Ministries.  Our get-together a few years ago was the first time we’d been back together in the better part of four decades. That’s Charles on the left, Jeff, me, and Clyde on the right. Frankly, I think we look pretty good, fifty years along.

I don’t think it ever occurred to any of us that this thing might not make it.  I like to say we materialized Clyde’s dream.

We went on the air on January 2, 1975. We had spent the week before that doing interviews and gathering actualities for our first newscasts.  We spent a day “dead-rolling” our programs—newscasts at :55 with repeats at five minutes past the hour (the 7 a.m. newscast was stretched an additional five minutes in those days when stations did longer newscasts, in case anybody wanted to stick with us for the extra time) and again on the half-hour—-except during the noon our when the third feed went out at 12:29 because the farm network had a show that was fed from the Centertown office at 12:35.  Our second newscast on the first day featured Governor Bond welcoming us to the Missouri airwaves and saying a nice thing or two about us.

We were everywhere.  We sent people with the Missouri delegations to the national conventions. When a tornado hit Neosho not long after we went on the air, we sent Chuck to Neosho to give us live reports.  We were in the House and the Senate every day and often would be at the Capitol for night committee hearings when the common folks got to tell their stories about potential legislation and we were recording, recording, recording so listeners could hear the voices of those shaping their public policy.

At the time, the Capitol Press Corps was made up of guys who’d been around for years with two wire services, two newspapers from St. Louis and two more from Kansas City with other newspaper reporters from Cape Girardeau, Springfield, Joplin and St. Joseph. There was some
“who are these guys” questions and there was some skepticism that we would last.  We were a completely new animal and sometimes—because we hadn’t been around very long—we asked some impertinent questions.

People throughout the state heard their legislators arguing about bills. They heard the governor’s voice talking about issues.  They heard the state epidemiologist talking about the Swine Flu, the Revenue Director updating the number of income tax returns being filed (with the assistance of United Press International Bureau Chief Steve Forsythe, we embarrassed one Director of Revenue by having the department mail somebody’s tax return to a stranger).  And our affiliates provided stories from all corners of the state.

Some members of the House didn’t like it when they heard that their voices in debate were being broadcast on the radio but we quickly overcame that.  Once, the chairman of a Senate Committee—William Baxter Waters—demanded that I remove a microphone from a witness table at a hearing. He and I worked that out right afterward and we never had another problem with recording hearings.

There were few hearing rooms at the Capitol when we set up operations, which meant a lot of committees met at night because there was no place to hold hearings in the daytime. The House sometimes had hearings in the Capitol restaurant in the basement because it could hold a pretty good number of people.  It worked out well—until the refrigerators and freezers motors kicked in and unless you were face to face with the committee, you couldn’t hear anything.

Sometimes we had hearings in the legislative library, a wide-open room with the witness table facing the windows and the audience sitting behind them It’s a beautiful place (more beautiful now that it’s been restored to its original colors) but the acoustics were horrible.  Those of us sitting behind the witness struggled to hear what was being said. I had headphones plugged into my SONY 110B cassette recorder, so I was better off.

House Appropriations Committee meetings were in the House Lounge with the large committee seated at a c-shaped section made up of several tables to the left of the entrance. The witness sat at a table across from the entrance and others, including me, sat behind them, to the right. When things got boring, which was most of the time, I would find myself looking at part of the Benton mural and a few minutes later I would realize I was looking at another segment. Several years later when I wrote a book about the mural, I discovered Benton designed the painting to draw the viewer’s eyes through it.

There also were hearings in the Highway Department hearing room a block away, in the rotunda, and at least once, in the House chamber.

One hearing in the Senate Lounge—on the Equal Rights Amendment—was packed and undoubtedly was far beyond fire safety standards.  The Senate committee was around a couple of tables on a platform on the left side from the entrance and I spent the hearing account halfway under the committee table, right in front of the table that witnesses who struggled through the crowd would stand at to testify.

We were doing primary election returns in 1976 when Congressmen Jim Symington and Jerry Litton and former Governor Warren Hearnes were competing for the Democratic nomination to succeed the retiring Stuart Symington, Jim’s dad.  It appeared Litton, a cattle farmer from Chillicothe, had pulled off an upset when we got a telephone call. There had been a plane crash at the Chillicothe airport. We immediately suspected the worst because we knew Litton was staying at home until the numbers came in and then planned to fly to Kansas City for a victory party.  We worked the phones and wound up talking to the driver of the ambulance that had gone to the scene. He confirmed there were no survivors.  Litton and his family all died along the pilot and the pilot’s son.

A few days later we arranged to broadcast the Litton funeral.

Twenty-four years later, Nancy and I were at her sister’s house in Albuquerque, decompressing after a week in the back country of Colorado mapping ancient pueblos and rock art sites, when the KOB-TV newscaster announced that the plane carrying Missouri Senate candidate Mel Carnahan was missing.  We switched over to CNN and it was reporting the plane had crashed. I called the newsroom and everybody was there—including Clyde.  I told Brent Martin, my managing editor, to find Lt. Governor Roger Wilson and stick with him because he was going to be sworn in as governor that night if worst came to worst.  Brent gave Clyde a recorder and sent him to the Capitol.  Roger didn’t want to say much but Clyde, the old fire horse of a journalist got a brief interview from him anyway.

Nancy and I got a little sleep and then drove 996 miles from Albuquerque to Jefferson City the next day. Brent told me later that when he went on the air at 5:55 that morning for our first newscast, he had to stop and remind himself that thousands of Missourians would be hearing for the first time that their governor was dead.

Our Chief Engineer, Charlie Peters, spent the next day getting phone lines installed the capitol for the big funeral that was expected.  By then the word was out that President Clinton and Vice President Gore would be attending the funeral, along with a large number of those I referred to as “the stars of C-SPAN.”  Workers at the Capitol had worked hard to get aluminum stands set up for photographers and TV cameras and facilities for radio and other media.  One of the Carnahan aides complained that the  Secret Service had gotten involved and, “It was secret and not very much service.” We had a little set-to with them when they said we couldn’t broadcast from our planned location. I think the Carnahan folks intervened because the media stayed put.

The funeral was on a beautiful day three weeks before the election and it was outdoors on the south lawn. Clinton, Gore, and members of the U. S. Senate and the House of Representatives walked right past our broadcast position. The AP took a picture of the procession and I’m standing right at the fence, broadcasting what I was seeing.

Two events. Two plane crashes.  I believe they changed the course of Missouri politics.  People have asked me what were the biggest stories the Missourinet covered.  The flood of 1993 was a huge and long=running story.  But the most important stories of the first half-centuries of The Missourinet were the most important ones we covered.

It was a difficult event to broadcast because I had allowed myself to get closer to the Carnahans than I did to anyone else I ever covered. Jean kept me up to date on the book she was writing about First Ladies and I gave a couple of speeches at special events there.  The governor’s coffin was in the mansion’s main hallway and I, as the radio pool reporter, was in the library to the left of the hallway as you enter the front door.  Jean came down to welcome the governor’s office staff and when she came in, she saw me in the library and came over and hugged me and said, “We’re so glad we got to know your son.”

Our son, Rob, was a flight instructor at the time (now a Southwest Airlines Captain) and one evening during the campaign, when Governor Carnahan showed up to fly a light plane to Hermann—he hadn’t had his pilot’s license very long, I don’t think—where was going to meet Jean and their Highway Patrol security officer and go on to a fundraiser in St. Louis. Somebody had to fly the plane back to Columbia.  But when they got to Hermann on that hot summer night, the plane’s engine wouldn’t refire.  The Governor invited Rob to go into town with them and have dinner together. And Jean remembered that when she saw me in the library on a day that she had the heaviest of hearts.

There have been other funerals at the capitol, only a few, and none had a greater influence on What Missouri—and maybe the nation—would become.

Carnahan had gone to St. Louis three weeks before the election for a fund-raiser and then was headed to southeast Missouri for another one when the plane went down.  Many years later, I met the man who hosted the fundraiser in St. Louis and he told me that Carnahan announced during the meeting that he had, for the first time, pulled ahead of John Ashcroft in the race for Senate.

The crash was a huge problem for Ashcroft. He did the honorable thing by pulling all of campaign commercials and not campaigning for the last three weeks.  It was too late to put somebody else’s name on the ballot and on election night, I was anchoring our coverage when, along about midnight the last big slug of votes came in just before we went on with that hour’s report. I remember thinking, “My God, he’s done it.”

We covered a lot of important stories in the first 50 years of The Missourinet. Those were probably the most consequential stories.

Telephone lines were the lifelines of our operation when we started. But as the Brownfield Network expanded into other states, we had to look at an alternate distribution system because the phone bills were getting financially difficult.  Satellite technology was just catching on and Clyde and the other company officials decided we had to distribute our services by the bird.  Our first satellite dish was set up behind the office at 216. The Missourinet and Brownfield Net became the first broadcast networks, including the national ones, to be distributed entirely by satellite.

A bigger uplink dish was installed at the farm office.  In 1989, as we consolidated the farm and news divisions in the one building at 505 Hobbs Road, the company hired a big-lift helicopter company to airlift the big dish from the farm to the new office site.  I think there still is a video on Youtube that shows what happened—-that shortly after the helicopter lifted the dish off and headed toward town, one of he retaining bolts snapped and the added eight was more than the others could hold so the whole thing fell a few hundred feet into a farm field with a disastrous “crunch” and our dish became material for recycling.  Fortunately, the incident happened early so the dish didn’t fall on top of road, a home, or even a shopping mall.  We used a portable uplink until we got all of the insurance stuff settled and built a whole new one at 505.

One day we got job application filled out in pencil from a kid working our affiliate in Lexington. When we were far enough along to hire a sports director, we brought him in.  His name was (and still is) John Rooney.  Each morning, after I had finished the major newscast and John had finished his 7:20 sports report, he and I would make a fast trip to the Yum-Yum Tree up on High Street to pick up a version of a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit and a diet cola drink called TAB.  We’d be back in plenty of time to do the 7:55 newscast.

John later teamed with another up and coming young sports broadcaster for some of our early Missouri Tiger basketball broadcasts.  Both John and Bob Costas went on to long careers in major sports broadcasting. John, of course, has been in the St. Louis Cardinals broadcasting booth for a long time.

After a few years at 216, we moved across the street into a house at 217 E. McCarty. The news department was in the attic. Our studios were one floor down. It was dark up there so Clyde installed a skylight, which was fine until summer arrived and that old attic, as attics do, got hot, really hot. There were times when I’d send some members of the news staff to the kitchen to cool off. We finally got up on a ladder and scotch-taped some wire-service fanfold paper to the ceiling to deflect some of the sun’s rays and heat.

We moved to 505 Hobbs Road, the present headquarters of the two networks, in 1988-89.  That place became the nerve center of a major broadcasting corporation that was moving to become one of the nation’s dominant entities in collegiate sports radio and is today THE largest.

As time went by and as technology changed, my House reporter—Travis Ford—convinced the Speaker to let us run live floor debate on our web page. I did the same with Senate leader Jim Mathewson.  A few years later, we convinced the Missouri Supreme Court, which only recently had agreed to let people record and film its hearings, let us stream arguments before it. I’m not sure if we were on the internet for the trial of impeached Secretary of State Judith Moriarty, but I do know we recorded the whole thing. The recordings are in the oral history archives of the State Historical Society in Columbia.

When the state re-instituted the death penalty with legal drug injections as the means, we knew we had to cover executions because we believed the state should not inflict its most severe penalty without statewide news media present, and by then UPI had faded away, leaving us and the Associated Press as the only statewide media organizations. The Missourinet’s Dan McPherson covered the first one—which was done in the gas chamber at the old penitentiary (they couldn’t use gas because the seal around the door to the chamber had rotted away and witnesses as well as the honored guest would all be executed so a lethal cocktail of three drigs ws used for George “Tiny” Mercer, who was about as bad as they come.  Dan was one of the pool reporters that covered the event and reported to the large number of other media folks what had happened—and there was a large crowd for the first execution in more than a decade. Dan is one of three of our former reporters who had to learn  new way of writing and thinking when they went to law school. He’s been an assistant attorney general for a long time.

In 2009, I covered the execution of Dennis Skillicorn, one of 22 executions I covered, first in Potosi and then in the newer prison at Bonne Terre.  Executions were done at midnight then (now they’re scheduled for 6 p.m.) and reporters then, and now, cannot use cell phones during the event itself—or other recording or photographic devices.  I kept notes of the times various events occurred that night and afterwards, in my motel room, I sent out a series of tweets doing a chronological recounting of events.  I think I might have been the first reporter in the world to tweet an execution.

And it goes on through the pronouncement of death, interviews (if there were any) of survivors of his victims and eventually with me leaving the prison.

It got a lot of reaction. Some thought it was gruesome. Some thought it was a revelation. Some were critical, including some anti-death penalty people in Europe—as I recall.  I only did this once, not because of any bad reaction but because when executions were finished and I was back in my motel room, I had to write my stories and feed them back to Jefferson City for the morning newscasts. By then it would be about 4 a.m., and my only thought was getting to bed.

After the 1986 elections, we compared the two wire services reporting of the numbers and found a lot of inconsistencies. I met with Secretary of State Roy Blunt to see how we could develop a centralized, reliable election reporting system, and the Missouri Elections Consortium was born, giving the media that paid the consortium fees that were used to pay Blunt’s staff who had to run the feeds.  Secretary of State Bekki Cook took the consortium system and made it available to the public at large.

We believed in pushing the envelope.  One year, we had an intern whose expertise on the internet was so much a benefit that we almost started doing video feeds of the legislature. We were wired for let people watch the state senate’s last day but backed away at the request of the President Pro Tem who worried the senators would misbehave on the last day if they knew they were being televised. By the time the next session began we had lost our intern and some internal company management changes ended our experimentations.

One election, we went on the internet live at 7 p. m. and stayed live until we wrapped up our coverage after midnight.  During the feed we paused to do reports on the network.  We had a small audience of people watching us do radio in the August Primary that included reports from reporters or stringers at various campaign headquarters. Our audience tripled for November.  The next time, we tried to use Google Groups so we could have videos. Our success was spotty but we were looking forward to taking the next step but it never happened.

Clyde let me have a summer off one year to work with the Missouri Cable Television Association to establish a Missourinet cable channel that would be kind of a hybrid between ESPN, CNN, and PBS.  We put together a terrific programming package that we could deliver to the cable operators throughout the state for a price per customer per month that was about as much as a large bag of M&Ms with peanuts.  When I pitched it to the local operators, they looked at me as if I was a telephone post.

Today the House, Senate, and the Supreme Court do their own streaming.  House floor sessions are televised and so are some hearings. Inaugurations are televised, streamed, and broadcast.

One reason we were able do the things we did, or try the things we tried, was that the owner of the company was a journalist at heart.  As we have seen radio change in these last fifty years, and too often not for the good of the communities in which they operate, we realize how important Clyde was to the things we were free to do.  I think Missourians are better off because we didn’t just do newscasts but because we were motivated to push that envelope.

Because Clyde was a journalist at heart, he let me do a lot of things—especially getting involved with the Radio-Television News Directors Association, the equivalent in our business to the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association. The company paid for my travels to meetings in Washington and convention cities. I was the first person elected to lead the organization twice and my active participation in it led me to lecture programs on college campuses and even conducting seminars on creating free newsrooms in Romania and Poland after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Clyde never voiced any concerns about the costs of those activities. And I always had great news staffs that kept up our levels of reporting while I was gone.

I walked out the door for the last time as news director on December 1, 2014. As they say in sports, “I left it all on the field.”

The Missourinet is still where I left it but not the same as I left it.  It has changed as the radio industry has changed.  But it still fills its role as the statewide news organization that keeps an eye on our government and our politics.

Clyde retired before I did and I see fewer faces that I recognize whenever I visit to record some new episodes of Across Our Wide Missouri (I have a new batch on a shelf next to me) or drop in for some other reason.

A lot of people worked for The Missourinet in those years and good people work for it now.  It’s different but the industry is different.

Fifty years ago today we went on the air.  We started something good.  We had faith in each other that we could do it.

We started with Royal manual typewriters (our first newsletters were called “Notes from a Battered Royal—which all these years later has morphed into “Notes from a Quiet Street.”), cart machines in the studio, one reel-to-reel tape recorder that we used for telephone interviews (everything else was one-to-one in person interviews) and one UPI wire machine.

And we had no idea what the network or the company would be fifty years later.

It’s only a tiny part of a billion-dollar corporation with headquarters in Plano, Texas now, but it keeps churning out meaningful products and profits.  Learfield Communications helped inaugurate the big-money collegiate sports marketing deal to the country when we bid six million dollars to broadcast Missouri Tiger basketball and football games for five years.  Today, Learfield says, “From tailgates to t-shirts, courtside seats to NIL activations, on game day and every day, Learfield is your connection to college sports and live events. We engage 150M+ loyal and passionate fans across the US with unrivaled leadership across sponsorship, ticketing, licensing, and more. Our playbook is powered by media, technology, and data, unlocking value for university partners and venues while connecting brands to fans.”

The 50th anniversary of the Missourinet will pass quietly today. The corporation decided there would be no celebration. But that’s okay because The Missourinet will do what it did on January 2, 1975—cover the news for the people of Missouri, with good people who will do it responsibly and do it well.

Four of the founders of various parts of what became Learfield Communications (a combination of Lear and Brownfield)  are in the Missouri Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame—Clyde, Derry, Rooney, and me. It’s quite an honor but more important, it’s a validation that Clyde had a dream and we make it come true far beyond what any of us could conceive.

So there’s some of the story of The Missourinet, just for a historical record.  It began fifty years ago today, on this date, January 2, 1975.

It seems like it was only—

Fifty years ago.

Notes from a Quiet Street

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(Comments on affairs of our world that do not reach the umbrage level necessary to result in a full blog).

This is sooooo bureaucratic—from someone who wants to reduce the bureaucracy.

President Trump has set up a Department of Government Efficiency.  DOGE to those who speak Bureaucratic.

Think about that for a minute.  Trump’s first step in making major cuts to the federal bureaucracy is to establish a new bureaucracy.  We’ll be watching to see how many employees it takes to be efficient.

It’s not really a “department” that is part of the cabinet. So far it’s just two rich guys who’ve never been inside government, hired by a third billionaire.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are the two guys.

We will watch to see if adjusting the tax code for themselves is as important as axing programs for those farther down the economic ladder.

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Many of us are surprised to learn that Canada is such an evil country, right up there with Mexico.  One of the reasons the incoming president has given for big tariffs being put on products from those two countries is that they facilitate the entrance of Fentanyl into this country.

It’s always easy to do tariffs.  Let’s see what the administration’s plan is to reduce consumption of the drug in this country. Money follows the consumption of a product, whether it’s fentanyl, superhero trading cards, gold tennis shoes, allegedly fancy watches, or even red caps.  Right?

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And, of course, making Canada our 51st state—-hear that, Texas and Alaska, who will be dwarfed by this new state—will solve all that problem.

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How about making Panama our 52nd state?

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And maybe we can revive talks about trading Puerto Rico for Greenland, or just buying Greenland, too, and keeping Puerto Rico!!

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How much will the Billionaire Boys have to cut out of the budget to pay for that little shopping spree by someone who is unlikely to have ever bought a ten-dollar shirt at Sam’s club?

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Lt. Governor-elect Dave Wasinger has hired Katie Ashcroft as his Chief of Staff.  She needed the job as she looks toward being the sole breadwinner for the family when her spouse gets laid off   in January.

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Wasinger is the first person who to preside over the Missouri Senate as the Senate President (one of the roles of the Lt. Governor) with no experience in elective office at any level since Kansas City lawyer and Democratic Party activist Hillary Busch, who served from 1961-65 under Governor John Dalton.

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It is such a relief to open our mail at this time of year and hearing from people who have a personal relationship with us to donate more than $19 a month—or to dispense with parts of my children’s inheritance.

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But then again, we’re not getting automated phone calls from people wanting to counsel us about Medicare enrollment.

In the space of 24 hours our caller-ID told us we had gotten calls from Elgin, Missouri; Laddonia, Benton, Lewistown, and Jefferson City. Most left no messages but a few times when we answered and a human was on the other end, we asked, “Where are you located?”  One person would only say, ”I’m calling from a remote location.”

I thought we were on the Attorney General’s no-call list.  I would call him to ask, but he’s too busy working on national issues, probably, to talk about why it doesn’t seem to work very well.

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One day last year, our caller ID said the call was coming from our number.

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It oughta be illegal.

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It’s been so nice not wrapping a bunch of presents and not digging out all of the Christmas decorations and planning a big meal for the extended family.  Instead of wrapping things, we’re packing things.  We’ve given ourselves a great big present—a new mailing address.

But the blog is not moving.  It’s going to stay right here.

(image credit: Executioner—Reddit)

 

Let the Ethnic Cleansing Begin—Part Two

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We painted a rather pessimistic view in our last entry of our retread President’s plans for the largest deportation effort in our history. We looked at a Mother Jones article from a few months back that tried to gauge what the difficulties would be if he carries through with his plan.

The article displayed concerns about grave economic consequences of deporting 11-million people. Most of the adults in the group would be forced to leave their jobs behind, producing a crisis in the chicken plucking, roofing, and agricultural industries.

Here’s how to deal with this:

During his campaign, the incoming President asserted that these brown people from the south and the (probably) predominantly white people form the north—all of those thieves, killers, rapists, robbers, insane people, and major drug carriers, you know—were taking jobs away from Americans. Late in the campaign, speaking to a special group, he emphasized that these jobs were “Black jobs.”

You might remember from his June debate: “They’re taking Black jobs, and they’re taking Hispanic jobs, and you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history.”

Hispanics taking Hispanic jobs?   We’ll let him try to make that logical some other time, which might be one of the few times he has done that.  But what about “Black jobs?”

If I were an African-American, I might take great offense at his assumption that there are certain jobs set aside for Black people. I thought our civilized America had pretty well gotten beyond that, but maybe he was too busy bankrupting his latest business venture to notice.

Incidentally, did he ever check the citizenship status of the cleaning staff at his hotels, clubs, and other properties? And what color were those jobs?

Well, not to get toooooo snarky—

The Hispanic people that he seems to have a hate/love relationship with do the farming, roofing, hotel cleaning, and healthcare jobs that include, as one source put it in our last entry, “emptying bedpans.” But if we export the Hispanics despite them having “Hispanic jobs,” then Black people seem to be the correct substitute, especially since those folks took black jobs to begin with.

But before we jettison all of these brown rapists, drug smugglers, etc., we can make them build the wall on our southern border that Mexico was supposed to pay us for building. We’re still waiting to hear that the check has cleared.

NBC had a story this summer reporting that Black workers often are overrepresented in government and health care work. There are eight Fortune 500 companies already headed by black executives, and Black people cause a problem for this scheme elsewhere. Under the first Trump administration, black unemployment dropped to 5.3%–in September 2019.  Under Joe Biden, it dropped to 4.8% in April 2023.

But that’s good news because the Army and the National Guard won’t have to round up a real big bunch of people to fill vacancies in Black people’s Black jobs. That’s good news because he won’t have enough federal military or state national guard units to round up all of the Black people who will be told to fill in for the rounded-up Hispanics.  Federal law tends to oppose that sort of thing anyway—-although the Trump Supreme Court might refine that provision.

Oh, wait! We DO have enough troops to do all of this. We just bring home soldiers helping protect our NATO allies and our sailors whose ships are protecting Israel from Iranian rocket attacks, and sailors from the ships protecting Taiwan, and troops keeping peace or holding enemies at bay in other places.  He doesn’t seem to think many of them belong out there anyway, so that’s not an employment gap he needs to worry about filling.

But then, who will replace all the Black people who are going to replace the Brown people thrown out of the country?

The solution is too easy.

Round up all the homeless people and make them fill in for all the Black folks who will regain all the jobs the brown people took away from the black people who will get their jobs back when we get rid of the Hispanic people who risked everything to come to this country to get jobs, many of whom sent some of their earnings back to other people in their home countries .

Now, all of those people who sent money home from America will be no longer sending money back home that helps their national economies. Instead, they will become a burden to those counties that we consider our allies.

Getting back to the homeless—

There are studies that show many of the homeless have mental problems but they can’t be treated because Ronald Reagan killed President Carter’s Mental Health Systems Act that continued funding federal community mental health centers. In a matter of weeks after he took office, Reagan changed things to give states block grants which haven’t made up for the loss of the Carter program. So we have a lot of mentally-ill homeless people among us and it’s easier to complain about them than do something about their problems.

But if we can take these folks, even those with mental health issues, round them up, get them off the streets and then distribute them out for mental health care duties now handled by Hispanic and Black people, everything’s fine.

Elon Musk wants to slash government spending by billions of dollars so don’t look for any mental health help for the homeless folks that will be rounded up to complete this restructuring of our economy.  The buck has to stop somewhere.

But who is going to help those who have taken the remaining job openings that have trickled down after the Hispanic deportations?

Simple.

Our retread President tells all those countries for which he wants to inflict tariffs that if the armies in those other countries round up enough of their people and make them emigrate to the United States, we won’t have a problem.  Unfortunately, our immigration people might be so busy getting people out of the country that they won’t have time to check the legality of those coming in.

But there it is.  All the bases are covered.  America will be great again.

No charge.  No awards expected.

A lingering issue remains, though.  Will the Army and the National Guard be committed equally to rounding up Canadians, Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, and Swedes—among others—who probably are in this country illegally, too?

And then once we’ve got all of immigrants out of the country, who’s going to protect the rest of us from the Wampanoags, whose lands were taken by the Pilgrims who came here seeking religious liberty for themselves but not for Baptists and other unacceptable people who they considered the equivalents of our rapists, drug smugglers, criminals and crazy people, when the Wampanoags and other nations demand the interlopers get out of places such as Mar-a-Lago?

The Majority Rules, Chapter Two

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A rare race for Speaker of the Missouri House has shaped up after 51.6% of the voters of Missouri approved Amendment 3, the abortion amendment.

For several years, Missouri House Republicans have picked a Speaker-designate during the September veto session who would succeed the outgoing Speaker in January. They have a two-thirds majority, so the decision in September is tantamount to the actual election.

But the November election has injected some uncertainty into the proceedings.

Republicans chose Dr. Jon Patterson of Lee’s Summit as the presumptive successor to Dean Plocher, a St. Louis County Representative who is term limited.

But the election, particularly the approval of Amendment 3, has produced a challenger—Justin Sparks of Wildwood.

Patterson has said the legislature should “respect the law.”  But Sparks says that Patterson’s comment “is not what the leader of the Republican Caucus should be saying.”

Sparks is a member of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus.  His background is in law enforcement as a 15-year veteran of the St. Louis County Police Department and a Deputy U.S. Marshall. He has told St. Louis television station KMOV, “It is clear that many people that voted for Amendment 3 did so under information that was false.” And he asked, “Should three cities determine what everybody lives under for the entire state? I say no.”

Sparks also criticizes Patterson on other issues, especially as a St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial put it, “Patterson’s vote against legislation to prohibit transgender treatments for minors. Patterson, a surgeon, has said he believes there should be exceptions to that prohibition based on case-by-case details — a medically reasonable standard that most in Patterson’s party today reject. As House majority leader, Patterson nonetheless allowed debate on the legislation, which passed.”

The November election tally from the Secretary of State’s office shows Amendment 3 passed 1,527,096-1,432,084., a 95,000 vote margin.  But it passed in only seven of Missouri’s 116 voting areas (114 counties plus the cities of St. Louis and Kansas City).  Voters in the two cities, Jackson and St. Louis Counties were joined by Boone, Clay, and Buchanan Counties with 72.6% of the votes in those areas.  In the rest of the state, Amendment 3 was outvoted 728,042-1,050,088. Boone County was the only county outside the metro areas to vote “yes.”

Patterson and Sparks, both Republicans, won in areas that went heavily in favor of Amendment 3. St. Louis County, where Sparks lives, went for it 335,082-162,311 with St. Louis City going 95,039-19,673. Jackson County was in favor 112,822-78,712 with Kansas City adding a tally of 99,120-23,985.

Two Republicans will face off for one of the most important jobs in state government in January, both from metro areas that provided the margin in the statewide victory for Amendment 3.  One says the will of the whole people of Missouri as well as the will of voters in his home area, should be honored. The other says both should be ignored because that’s not what Republicans are about, in effect saying that they should be a party that does not accept the will of all of the public.

One says all of the voters should make the decision. The other says only one party’s voters count.

Let’s see what kind of Republican Party we have in the Missouri House, come January.

The Rules Don’t Apply to Me

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Four years later, the Leopard still has his spots.

Donald Trump has wasted no time proclaiming in word and deed that rules and laws do not apply to him. After all, his victory “was the greatest political movement of all time.”

He said during his campaign he wanted to be a dictator on day one. He’s not even waiting that long. He’s already ignoring the law and in a dangerous way.

New York Times reporter Ken Bensinger reported earlier this week that Trump “has not submitted a required ethics plan stating he will avoid conflicts of interest.”

The Trump transition team was hired in August “but has refused to participate in the normal handoff process, which typically begins months before the election.” Because of that, the Trump team is barred from national security briefings. The committee also has been denied access to federal agencies. The team reportedly has “an intent” to sign the agreements. But nobody has.

Concerns about Trump’s ethical lapses (to substantially understate the point) in his first term led Congress in 2019 to require candidates to post an ethics plan before the election and how the person would address conflict of issues accusations during their presidential terms, regardless of how far they get in the process.  Trump announced then that he would not divest his assets or put them in a blind trust, as office-holders usually do to separate themselves from making decisions that would benefit them while in office. Bensinger says the watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has identified 3,400-plus Trumpian conflicts in his first four years as President.

Both President Biden and Vice-President Harris  had no trouble signing the agreements during the recently-concluded campaign. But signing them apparently was too inconvenient on the other side. Doing so apparently would distract from cooking up cat-eating conspiracies and fake reports of Venezuelan gangs taking over Colorado apartments.

Frequent Trump critic, Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, charges Trump is “thumbing his nose” at the requirements. Raskin says refusal to sign the documents keeps the Trump transition team from getting $7.2 million in transition money.  The program puts $5,000 limits on individual donations to the transition effort.  But since Trump refuses to sign the ethics code, he can raise money hand over fist and now have to report who gave it to him.

There’s an even bigger issue that would be trouble for people who think they are not above the law:  Refusal to sign the ethics documents means none of the transition team can get security clearances that will give them access to 438 federal agencies’ records.

But who needs that?  After all, we’re dealing with someone who thinks he knows everything already. Nobody knows the political system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” had modestly observed in his first campaign.

Even more recently, Trump demanded that the next leader of the U. S. Senate not stand in the way of his appointments to key positions by letting him make what are called recess appointments.

And those seeking power in the Senate are saying, in effect, “Yes Sir. Whatever you want, sir.”

Recess appointments are intended to respond to emergencies. They can stay in place for a couple of years without seeking advice and consent form the Senate. He has openly said he wants to avoid opposition to his choices. He said on his personal social media site, “Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments…without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner.”

Senate confirmation of appointments has been one of the great checks and balances in the American system of government. They demand, on behalf of the American people, accountability from the nominees as well as from the President making the nominations.

Sadly, the three front-runners as Mitch McConnell’s replacement have quickly drunk from the Trump Kool-Aid pitcher on this. Trump favors Florida Senator Rick Scott for the job. His election will tell us a lot about whether the Senate will maintain any independence from the White House.

So far, however, thee’s no guarantee that every other Senator will go along with Trump’s dictates.  Some of those who survived January 6th aren’t happy with plans to pardon many of the peaceful tourists who convinced members of Congress they weren’t interested in tourism. Some also think his tariff plans are impractical. Those who resist will be threatened with well-funded primary opponents in their re-election bids, a visceral threat. Loyalty to him is the only thing that matters with Trump.

Trump also wants all judicial appointments by President Biden halted until Republicans take control of the Senate.  Damn the process! Forget about checks and balances. The only judges fit to sit on the federal bench are those that must prove their loyalty is beyond (or is beneath?) the law alone. That appears to be a no-brainer for the bunch that refused to even let Merritt Garland have a hearing months before the end of the Obama presidency so Trump could get a head start on loading the court.

Last night, the Wall Street Journal reported the Trump transition team is creating an executive order that would establish a so-called “warrior board” of retired general and noncoms to recommend dismissals of generals that Trump considers disloyal, were involved in the Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021 or have suggested policies that are considered too liberal. The report says the generals could be kicked out of the service for “lacking in requisite leadership qualities,” a vague phrase that so far has not been explained by the transition team.

A military loyal to Trump more than it is loyal to the nation and its Constitution is something he promised during his campaign to do.

Well, this is the bed made by those who don’t like his mouth but think his policies are okay.  Forget ethics and laws and constitutional limits on presidential power. Within a week after his election, Donald Trump has blatantly asserted that the rules and the laws do not apply to him.

And he is more than two months away from taking office.

I am terribly scared of this man.

The Choice

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We will decide the future of our state and nation tomorrow.

Some argue we will decide the FATE of our nation tomorrow.

We harken back to the story of an English stable owner in the 16th and 17th Centuries who had forty horses, leading customers to think they could choose one from among the forty.  But the stable owner allowed only the horse in the first stall to be rented, believing that he was keeping the best horses from always being chosen.

Customers believing they had many choices actually had only one. Take it or leave it, even if neither was desirable.

The stable owner was named Thomas Hobson, whose name is preserved in the phrase “Hobson’s Choice,” meaning only one thing is really offered while it appears there are other choices and it isn’t particularly desirable.

Many believe that is what we are facing tomorrow, a Hobson’s Choice.

We’ve all survived the weeks of rhetoric, weeks of misstatements and lies, or misinformation from insiders and outsiders on our social media, weeks of efforts to denigrate competing candidates and competing issues.

We have listened to the two sides paint the picture of the other side. And after listening to all of that noise we have concluded that we have these choices at the top of the ticket:

—A candidate who claims to be middle-class child of immigrants whose party has been branded as Marxist and Socialist and a threat to our democracy by the other party.

—A felon, a congenital liar and narcissist whose party is backing him despite complaints that he wants to emulate Hitler and other dictators and is a threat to our democracy.

Thomas Hobson would be greatly entertained.  Take it or leave it when neither choice seems to be desirable.

The political process seems to have given us horses in the first of two stalls in a stable full of better mounts that we can’t have.

This might not be any help to you at all, but let’s skim the surface of the two possibilities.

Both Karl Marx and Adolph Hitler wrote books: Marx’s Das Kapital, and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Marx is described as “a German-born philosopher, political theorist, economist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist.”  The description is from Wikipedia, which serious researchers caution should not be considered original research. It is an amalgam of the evaluations done by others presumably well-acquainted with a subject.  So, We are going to rely on one of Wikipedia’s sources, English historian Gareth Stedman Jones, whose work focuses on working class history and Marxist theory and who wrote in 2017 in the journal Nature:

“What is extraordinary about Das Kapital is that it offers a still-unrivalled picture of the dynamism of capitalism and its transformation of societies on a global scale. It firmly embedded concepts such as commodity and capital in the lexicon. And it highlights some of the vulnerabilities of capitalism, including its unsettling disruption of states and political systems… it [connects] critical analysis of the economy of his time with its historical roots. In doing so, he inaugurated a debate about how best to reform or transform politics and social relations, which has gone on ever since.”

The same resource describes Hitler as “an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator” of Germany under the Nazi Party that “controlled the country, transforming it into a totalitarian dictatorship.”  He wrote his book in prison while serving four years for treason after a failed coup in 1923. The book outlined his plans for Germany’s future, the main thesis being that Germany was in danger from “the Jewish peril,” a conspiracy of Jews to gain world control. It is considered a book on political theory. “For example, Hitler announces his hatred of what he believed to be the world’s two evils: communism and Judaism…Hitler blamed Germany’s chief woes on the parliament…Jews, and Social Democrats, as well as Marxists, though he believed that Marxists, Social Democrats, and the parliament were all working for Jewish interests. He announced that he wanted to destroy the parliamentary system, believing it to be corrupt in principle…”

So there you have it. A choice between an economic theorist whose theories challenge our capitalistic society and a political theorist who used every means necessary to be an all-powerful manipulator of a political system, including mass incarceration and murder of undesirables.

You might have a different evaluation for these two whose partisans have stereotyped each other throughout this campaign.

We had a coworker who once observed, “Stereotypes are so useful because they save a lot of time.”

In American politics, stereotyping saves the voters a lot of thinking.

And that’s too bad.

From our lofty position, we offer this thought;

Economic theories are abstract offerings that do not imprison or murder those who differ from them.  Political theories can create tangible results that, taken to extremes, can produce (in order) division, disrespect, control through, if necessary, mass incarceration and—-at the very worst—murder.

We have two politicians to think about tomorrow.  It’s too bad none of the others in the stable are available.  It’s take it or leave it time.

Which Hobson’s Choice are you going to make?

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Then They Came For Me…..

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Our almost final pre-election meditation today focuses on a former president, a comedian/social commentator/political satirist, a German leader, a Christian movement that might sound familiar, and a Lutheran minister.

We are focusing on Donald Trump’s promotion of “the enemy within” and the failure of people today to recognize the dangers of that philosophy in the past as a warning for us now.

There are several versions of a famous quotation although scholars have found no indication that he was the one who distilled his words into the poetic version in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The one we will use here comes from the British Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and is slightly longer.

The Lutheran minister is Martin Niemoëller, an anti-Communist supporter of Adolph Hitler during his rise to power. But he became a leader of German religious leaders opposing Hitler when Hitler announced he supported the German Christians movement that sought to remove the “Jewish element” from Christianity, including portraying Jesus as Aryan, rejecting the Old Testament and trying to rewrite the New Testament. Niemoëller was a leader in the opposition to Hitler and the German Christians.

He was arrested in 1937 and imprisoned at Dachau and Sachsenhausen until American troops liberated the camps in 1945.  The next year, he began a series of speeches apologizing for those who remained silent about Hitler’s crackdowns. Among his comments we find, “The people who were put in camps then were Communists. Who cared about them?…They got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables [who] just cost the state money; they are a burden to themselves and others….”

His apologies came to mind as I watched a recent edition of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show.  Stewart is a liberal comedian and social commentator who has a large following, especially among young people, and is an intellectual critic of American politics and the contradictions within the practice of them.  In this case, we refer to his comments after Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden event.

We have omitted the audience applause and Stewart’s pauses and facial expressions that are part of his schtick.  He inserted several video excerpts of events as part of his program:

Trump at his Madison Square Garden rally; On day one I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out.

Stewart: Day one? Have a snack. Meet the staff.  Day one is typically—we just read the syllabus. There’s no—there’s generally no homework. OK, day one, mass deportation.  How is that going to happen?

Trump: I will invoke the Alien enemies act of 1798.

Stewart: …From the man himself, that is his priority.  From day one, I’m going to round up all the so-called illegal immigrants. It’s a tough policy but I guess it’s gotta be done. And it’s not like anyone else, i.e. legal immigrants or who are American citizens going to be caught up in that dragnet. I’m sure that Trump has a very detailed and precise plan.  How many people are we talking about?

Niemoëller: First they came for the Communists but I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.  

Trump (montage of previous statements at rallies and in interviews); Millions of illegal immigrants.  They think it’s two million; it’s probably five times that amount. You hear 15, 16 million, sometimes you hear 17. We have 21 million, at least 21 million; I think it’s much more than 21.

Stewart: So we are going to be rounding up and deporting between two and 21, or more, million people. But listen, they’re all bad. And they’ve all committed terrible crimes. And we have cataloged—without due process—the terrible things they have done, yes?

Trump (from debate with Kamala Harris): In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.

Stewart: So, between 2 and 21 million people—and while they weren’t actually doing that, still, chase them with guns. Because at the very least they are here illegally. Yes, they are illegal.

John Berman, CNN, during broadcast: Donald Trump threatening to deport thousands of migrants in the country legally…

Stewart: So that one’s tricky. But I’m confident that on day one, Trump does his mass deportation of anywhere from two to 100 million people, it won’t be you. It’ll be them because of how precise Trump is, especially when it comes to people of color.

Niemoëller: They came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist.

Trump: I know Willie Brown very well. In fact I went down in a helicopter with him.

(Part of News Nation’s The Hill Sunday excerpt, with Chris Stirewalt): The African-American politician in question was not Willie Brown but rather this man, Nate Holden.

Reporter: Holden says, quote, “Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco. I’m a tall black guy living in Los Angeles. I guess we all look alike.”

Stewart: I guess there’s some confusion there. But he’s not deporting California politicians day one. And that story makes him racist. It’s not the point. He really can’t tell white people apart either.

Trump (video from grand jury deposition in the E. Jean Carroll case): Roberta Kaplan asks, “You say Marla’s in this photo?”  Trump: “That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife.”  Kaplan: “Which woman are you pointing to?” Trump: (points) “Here.” Kaplan: “That’s Tara. The person you just pointed to is E. Jean Carroll.”  Trump: “Oh, I see. Who is that? (points to another woman in the picture). Kaplan: “And the person, the woman on  your right is your then wife, Ivana?” Trump: “I don’t know.  This was the picture.”

Stewart: You know what I just realized? Donald Trump doesn’t have affairs—just thinks everyone is his wife. So clearly an attempt to deport between thirty and 500 million people is gonna be complicated. So it’s gonna be important to know how carefully the former president would execute this plan.

(Portion of interview on Full Measure, the weekly television news show hosted by Sharryl Attkisson):

Niemoëller: Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Attkisson: “A lot of the millions of people have had children here who are American citizens. So, yes to mass deportation of women and children—”  Trump: So we’re going to look at it very closely. They way that you phrase it is exactly right. You put one wrong person on a bus or on an airplane and your radical-left lunatics will try and make it sound like the worst thing that’s ever happened.”

Stewart;  Because it’s the worst thing that ever happened to THEM, the American citizens, the American citizens you mistakenly deport. Yet Trump is like (imitating Trump), “That makes me look like the bad guy.” And why is my wife interviewing me? (a takeoff on his inability to identify people in the photo, shown earlier and a reference to Attkisson) You are my wife, right? Marla? Ivana? Ivanka? I don’t know. This sounds awful. But as everyone knows, you can never listen to what Trump’s saying and hear it.

(Montage of Republicans responding: Unidentified member of Congress: “I think you’re taking everything a little bit too literally.”  New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sunnunu: “Look, Trump speaks in hyperbole. This is nothing new.” KellyeAnn Conway, at the time of the interview the incoming White House counselor: “He’s telling you what was in his heart. You always want to go with what comes out of his mouth rather than what’s in his heart.”

Stewart: You’re right Why hold former presidents to what they say they’re going to do from their mouth holes?… Look. You know what? Sure, maybe Trump’s just talk. But on day one when the deportation of between two and eleventy billion people begins, what will be the guiding principle? Perhaps we should ask the dead-eyed architect of these plans, Stephen Miller.

Miller (at Madison Square Garden rally): America is for Americans and Americans only.

Niemoëller: Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Stewart:  Oh, that makes sense. We’re only deporting people who’ve come here illegally, or people who have come here legally but sneaky legally. Or people who have children who actually are citizens, or some people who look like they may have come here illegally, or people who have protested the war in Gaza, or a special prosecutor that Trump doesn’t like, like Jack Smith, which, by the way, name a more American name than Jack (bleeped) Smith. Where are you going to report him to, Faneuil Hall in Boston? Or maybe we just going to be deporting the people that always bring wretchedness and want.

Oh, I’m sorry. That’s how we describe the Irish in 1832 (with image of portrait of New York Mayor Phillip Hone who said, “They will always bring wretchedness and want.”)

Or maybe we’re just going to deport people whose race inherently has a certain kind of criminality.  Oh, I’m sorry, That was the Italians in 1911.

The point is, every one of these groups was at a place and a time on the wrong side of not being American enough. And right now you think you’re safe. Because the group Trump’s people are talking about—It’s not you, as if…Donald Trump can tell the (bleep) difference or even cares that day one implementation of the 1798 law that was last used to intern Japanese and German citizens in World War II, will be a fine-toothed comb.

It just makes me very sad, it—the whole thing—it

(Interrupted by the show’s former senior correspondent, Jessica Williams) Jon, Jon, Jon…Don’t be sad.  Jon, everything’s going to be okay—for you, a white guy, a rich old white guy.

Stewart: You think my rich old white guy privilege will save me?

V: Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Williams; Maybe…It doesn’t matter. Because for non old white people, for people of color, and women, and queer people it’s gonna be a completely different story, all right?

Let me give you some advice.  I know you’re exhausted. Hell, I’m exhausted. Everybody’s exhausted. Anger and disappointment in our political discourse is exhausting. But it’s easy to throw up our hands and be like fine…I’m tired.  Go ahead and take people’s rights…

—–

In one of his 1946 speeches, Niemoëller  wondered what would have happened if thousands of clergy in Germany would have spoken out against Hitler and his German Christians and the disaster and the tragedy they brought to the world.

Niemoëller: … I believe, we Confessing-Church-Christians have every reason to say: mea culpa, mea culpa! We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out.

We preferred to keep silent. We are certainly not without guilt/fault, and I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934—there must have been a possibility—14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die. I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 30–40,000 million [sic] people, because that is what it is costing us now.

Williams: Focus, okay? I just want to be clear, all right? Do not let them exhaust you. Don’t let the constant draining bull— wear you out. Do not turn away. Look it right down that barrel and say, not today, apathy… And no matter what happens, we have to throw our arms around the people who need us the most, and hang…on. All right?

If you want to watch the entire routine, it’s at (15) Jon Stewart on Trump’s Xenophobic MSG Rally & Mass Deportation Plan | The Daily Show – YouTube.

(Photo Credits: Amazon, The Daily Show, Holocaust Museum)

Beyond Hope

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He’s not deranged.

He’s not unhinged.

Both words have been used frequently to describe him.

He is just plain sick.

Try to imagine that you are one of the children of Arnold Palmer.  Try to imagine being a resident of Springfield, Ohio.

Would you tolerate unmitigated sewage of this kind about your family or your town at your dinner table?

He thinks he’s being funny when he talks about genitalia, whether it’s describing it in admiring (or is it envious?) terms or whether it’s in claiming he can have his way with some people if he grabs theirs.

He thinks it’s a good thing to libel an entire town and the people who live and work there, to make citizens whose culture is not native to the community afraid?

—to tell a lie because it gets you publicity and the bigger the lie the more you can overwhelm those who won’t wade through the treatment plant with you.

How furious would you be—perhaps after you’ve gotten over the embarrassment of hearing your father described as Trump described Arnold Palmer?

Pam Palmer Wears, a daughter of the great golfer, called Trump’s commentary about her father “inappropriate,” one of the biggest understatements of our recent political history. And she said it was a waste of voter’s time. Palmer described himself as a political conservative but Wears told ABC news that her father would “cringe” at the thought of Trump. In fact, she recalls, he did..

She called Trump’s commentary “a waste of the voters’ time.”

“”The people coming to these rallies deserve substance about plans Trump has as a candidate, if he could elucidate on some of the threats he’s made to people. I mean, these are important issues that should be discussed for people when they’re getting ready to vote, and using my dad to cover the important things just seems unacceptable to me.”

She said her father “was very modest,” continuing, “We’ve lost our sense of outrage in this country over just about everything, and I’m not sure that’s okay.  There are other things about my dad that would be better to focus on.”

And she recalled her father, talking shortly before his death, about his strong dislike of Trump:

“My dad didn’t like people who act like they’re better than other people. He didn’t like it when people were nasty and rude. He didn’t like it when someone was disrespectful to someone else. My dad had no patience for people who demean other people in public. He had no patience for people who are dishonest and cheat. My dad was disciplined. He wanted to be a good role model. He was appalled by Trump’s lack of civility and what he began to see as Trump’s lack of character.”

I’m not sure I would be that restrained if someone were to stand in front of a large audience and make that kind of personal comments, regardless of their truth, about someone in my family.

When I take my ballot for the November election in a few days, I’m likely to vote against this sick bully and I will be hard-pressed to vote for anyone who has become aligned with him.

John Dean, who became famous fifty years ago with his damaging testimony against President Nixon in a Watergate hearing, told Nixon one day in the oval office, “I think that there’s no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’ve got. We have a cancer within—close to the presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding. It grows geometrically now, “

We know who would fit that description today.

—a man with no morals. No regard for anyone else.

Donald Trump is the RINO he accuses others of being.  It would not be disloyal to the party—in fact, it might be a great sign of loyalty—to vote for every other Republican but not for hm.

The nation’s history is dotted with times that people have chosen the better of two evils.

It should not be that hard in 2024—unless you believe that the face of our country should be someone who think that a person’s genitalia is a proper topic of conversation.

It’s not.  It’s sick.

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Cold Cases 

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We usually talk about big-deal issues and people in these entries but there are times when an issue overlooked in the rush of great thoughts about great issues catches the eye.  Such is the case with Ethan Colbert’s piece in the September 17 Post-Dispatch about the exhumation in Jefferson County of an unidentified man found in the Mississippi River thirty years ago.

On one hand, it’s about how DNA technology not available then will help identify him now. He was naked except for a pair of socks, with no tattoos or other easily-identifiable features or injuries.  On the other hand, it’s a story of how government works, or can work, on behalf of the people, especially the least of us. And you don’t get much more “least’ than this man.

Colbert reported Missouri cemeteries hold the remains of more than 115 unidentified men, women, and children, “such as the female toddler found inside a suitcase in 1968 along the riverbank in West Alton in St. Charles County, date back decades.Others are far more recent, including an infant who was found in July 2019 inside a freezer inside an abandoned St. Louis city residence. The boy, wrapped in a blanket, was wearing a diaper and a ‘Winnie the Pooh’ onesie.”

Authorities and the news media did all they could do thirty years ago to identify the man pulled from the river.  They combed missing person reports, published and broadcast information about a 160-pound man, 5-10, with a three-day beard. His fingerprints didn’t match any records at the state or federal levels. Nobody called the sheriff’s office to say the man’s description resembled someone they knew.

Some of these nameless people might be those whose families long ago filed missing person reports. Some might be victims of a crime whose perpetrator has been eliminated by the passage of time. They deserve to be known, as do all of us.

Colbert relates how State Representative Tricia Byrnes of Wentzville met with some families of missing people and then got $1.5 million put into the state budget requiring the state to pay the costs of exhuming and of identifying those John and Jane Does.

Highway Patrol Sergeant Eric Brown, speaking for the Patrol, told Colbert private labs that specialize in this kind of cold cases will have to be hired because none of the state labors has the equipment needed.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department spent $1,700 of its own money to exhume the body of the unidentified man and it still hasn’t found a laboratory to do the DNA work, which is expected to cost another $2,300.  Once a lab is found, it could take as much as six months to finish its inquiry.

But few would doubt the value of spending $4,000 to resolve a family’s questions or of giving someone a name for a proper stone that marks their existence.

Sometimes the effort succeeds. Colbert recalled a 2022 case in St. Louis County when investigators learned a man had been missing since 1994 from Moline Illinois.  His family released a statement saying the discovery would provide “comfort to us and his friends.”

DNA technology has vastly improved in thirty years and the amount of DNA in various systems has partnered with that technology to solve lot of mysteries.  Private DNA repositories such as those available through Ancestry.com and other commercial ancestry companies have been used to identify victims of crime and their perpetrators as well as missing persons.

It is time consuming work, not much like the stuff we see on television where it seems DNA evidence can be processed within an hour-long program.

Missouri is investing a small amount of money in an effort to answer long-held painful questions asked by many people. Representative Byrnes’ legislation is an infinitesimal part of the $50-Billion state budget. But it might turn out to be the most important part of it to a lot of folks, living and dead.

It is so easy to think of government as a massive, faceless, unemotional entity.  But what it really is, is thousands and thousands of small and very human stories. Perhaps we will someday hear who this man in Jefferson County was. And maybe, someday, we’ll learn who the suitcase baby and the freezer child in the Winnie the Pooh onesie were.  And why somebody gave up on them.