Category Archives: history

Notes from a Quiet Hill (Geography Edition)

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Saw this pop up on the internet the other day.  We always like to remind folks the founders weren’t Europeans but were the people who met them when they arrived (as Will Rogers once remarked about his ancestors).  The t-shirt is being sold on the Honoringthetribe.com, which we couldn’t reach when we looked for it.

But we appreciate the image.  Our President might not be caught wearing this t-shirt even if they had one large enough to fit him. Even if he wore it, it’s doubtful that he would give a hoot about the message.

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I used to think, “This man cannot be more absurd that this” but he quickly dissuaded me of that opinion on a daily if not hourly basis, much of it driven by childish pettiness.  In recent days he has “punished” Canada by signing an executive order renaming Lake Superior “Lake America.”  Now, most recently, he has shown a new map of New Mexico with “Mexico” crossed out and the word “America” written in.

Why don’t he end this ridiculous business and sign an all-encompassing executive order and make it “Planet Trump” and be done with it?

Would it be enough or would he want more?  You don’t need to answer that.

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From a January, 1922 Jefferson City newspaper: “It is said to be an open question whether Congress at present represents public opinion.  If not, next fall will be open season on congressmen.”

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Question for folks in Jefferson City: When was the last time our member of Congress showed up in our town? I don’t mean slipping in to say hello to the office staff, but to meet with the voters. He cannot recall any visits in recent years. Your intrepid correspondent stopped by Congressman Luetkemeyer’s office one day. The door was locked.  When somebody let me in the basic attitude was, “What are you doing here?”  I had a note for the Congressman I wanted to drop off. I doubt he ever saw it because I didn’t even get one of those “Thank your four your interest” form letters.

I think I have run into Northwest Missouri’s Sam Graves more times at the Capitol than I have heard of our own members of Congress being around except to file for election.

Our current Congressman (we think) Bob Onder is one of two GOP politicians asking the U. S.  Supreme Court to overturn our Missouri Supreme Court order reinstating non-gerrymandered district lines.

We could not do any worse by having a Congressman from Kansas City.  In fact, it’s hard not to think a longtime Methodist minister would be anything but better.

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Went to Colorado to visit the granddaughters and their parents last month. We rather like driving across Kansas because of ancestral ties that help us appreciate the Flint Hills and the Tallgrass Prairie and the rolling limestone hills that used to be the floor of the Great Inland Sea.  We even like when we get West of Hays and the upland prairie begins under a wide-open sky not obscured by billboards (there are few of them).  But once again we were reminded when we cross the state line that there still is too much Kansas in Colorado.

Your observer has often felt that a new state should be carved from the area between Hays and Burlington, Colorado, extending south to include the Oklahoma Panhandle and north to include the Nebraska Panhandle

Stopped in Bennett to fuel up. We were a little, uh, stunned.

The cheapest stuff was 15% ethanol. The Subaru is accustomed to a diet of 10% but we were sure it wouldn’t cough and sputter on the strong stuff.   12.2 gallons.  55 dollars.

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This is St. James’ Church in the English village of Ormside, near Appleby (hope that helps you understand its location).  The BBC reports this church is getting something for the first time in its long history. A £10,000 gift from a private trust will pay for an indoor loo, which the church never has had.

A loo over there is a bathroom.

For centuries, people in Ormside carried buckets of water from the village well to operate the primitive indoor plumbing. The BBC reports that the church hopes the improvements “will make the site more welcoming and hospitable, after attendees at weddings and funerals had previously had to rely on nearby residents homes for bathroom access.

The new toilet won’t be in the church itself. A disused hearse house will be modified for people who have to go while sending someone on their way

When we traveled across the pond a couple of years ago we visited the community of Looe, which is the case with many towns and cities, has public bathrooms. Admission, we think, was 25 pence.

The town of Looe is pronounced without the “e.”   I took a picture of the public bathrooms. I refer to it as Looe’s Loos.

 

The Home Time Capsule 

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Two or three houses ago, we sold the big 1904 uninsulated house that was the first home we bought (and found the heating bills in the dead of winter were double our mortgage payment)  sooner than we thought we would. We had put it on the market when the snow was so deep our realtor couldn’t get the “for sale” all the way into the ground.  We found another house quickly—-too quickly because the people who were selling it hadn’t bought THEIR new house. They did let us store our stuff in their basement and we rented a dark apartment with a terrible green shag rug and a one-window living room that looked out onto a parking lot while the bedroom windows looked onto High Street.

When we finally were able to occupy the new place a couple of months later (it might have been more; it certainly felt like it), and started bringing stuff up from the basement, a peculiar thought came to mind.  It was as if we were doing an archaeological excavation.  Here was the lamp table for the living room.  There was the frame of a bed for one of the children’s rooms. That box had 20th century bathroom supplies and another held late 20th century kitchen appliances.

It was different from usual moves where professionals with a big truck lug things out of one house and sets them up in the new one. These were things that had disappeared from our lives for a period of time and now were being rediscovered, if you will.

Kind of exciting.

Sometimes when we’ve been gone for a couple of weeks, I play a little mind game and try to imagine that we are entering Jefferson City for the first time.  What are my impressions?

From the west we get a stunning view of the Capitol framed by the Dix Road overpass.  From the east we drive past back yards and roadside businesses and offices as the traffic seems to funnel into an unimpressive area of concrete and traffic lights and ultimately an interchange if we want to take it. Sometimes don’t even notice the Capitol.  From the south we crest the Ellis Boulevard hill and there’s the dome dramatically shining above the trees and against the dark bluffs and from the north, there’s the view of the Capitol overlooking the great river.

And when we come home to a place that has been empty and silent (except for Max and Minnie and once a day a visiting cat-sitter, Mary), I briefly imagine we have entered a well-preserved early 21st century townhouse that appears to have been frozen in time by the people who once lived there.

The feeling dissipates quickly, of course, as life returns to normal within an hour or two.

But it’s kind of fun and it lets me see today’s world from a little different perspective. We’ve visited a lot of famous homes of notable figures or barracks rooms at 1870s frontier forts or other historic sites restored or recreated with period furnishings and in fifty years or so there really will be houses from our times that let our descendants see how we lived today.  Today’s possessions are tomorrow’s artifacts.  Today’s nick-nacks will be found in antique store sale cases.

The wonders of our age will have become museums or museum pieces.  The things we think are advanced technology today will seem primitive then.

We will be what our great grandparents are to us.

The experience can have a leveling effect on our pride of having the things we have. Maybe it will trigger some thinking about our attitudes and how they will be regarded generations hence by those who wonder, “How could they think like that?” or “How did they get along with just those_______,” or “It took a lot of work to live in those days,” or maybe just, “Isn’t that interesting?”

It never hurts to try to look at our life and times through pretend new eyes. You never know what you might see.

The Phrase Becomes Real: A Political Football 

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

We usually offer a roundup of the week’s Missouri sports news on Tuesdays but before we do that, we want to observe how Donald Trump is not the only person in Washington who thinks history needs to be re-written.

(MIZTHEN)—I was there that day the Missouri Tigers lost to the Kansas Jayhawks 23-7 at Memorial Stadium (it was not then Faurot Field).

But that’s not the way Congress and the NCAA record it. Congress has done something the sportswriters and the coaches did not do in 1960 when Missouri lost a game it later won, later won a conference championship it had lost, and until recently a national championship it could not reclaim.

Kansas and Missouri fought for superiority in the Big Eight Conference that year. Kansas temporarily won its first outright conference championship in thirty years.  The Jayhawks finished ranked 11th in the AP Sportswriters poll, only the second time the Jayhawks were ranked (the first time was 1947).

However—-KU running back Bert Coan, who scored the only two Kansas touchdowns that day was found to have been ineligible in games against Colorado and Missouri and on December 8, the Big Eight declared that KU big-bucks recruiter Bud Adams had illegally recruited Coan while he was at TCU. The two Kansas victories had to be forfeited.  The Big Eight and MU consider the Tigers record to be 10-0 in the regular season. But KU and the NCAA still consider the record is 9-1.

Coan later played seven years in the American Football League, six of those years with (it seems appropriate) the Kansas City Chiefs, the team right between the two states. He caught a 19-yard touchdown pass and ran for 37 yard TD in the Missouri game.

Coan and most of the other players from both sides in that 23-7 Kansas victory are gone now.  The AP and the competing UPI (United Press International) did not do polls after the bowl season—which concluded on January 2 in those years before the national championship playoff system came along.  The last polls put Minnesota first and Missouri 4th and 5th.

But the Golden Gophers lost to Washington in the Rose Bowl. Ole Miss, which went 10-0-1 and Iowa (also with one loss) also got some championship votes.

Missouri went to the Orange Bowl to face a Navy team that was ranked 4 and 6,  and starred Heisman Trophy winner Joe Belino.  The opening minutes were electrifying with Navy picking a fumble out of the air and returning it 98 yards for a touchdown. Navy threatened again until the Tigers’ Norm Beal ran a pick-6 back 90 yards for the tie.

CBS television had the game that year with one of the greatest pairs in the booth at the time making the calls—Ray Scott and Paul Christman.  Christman was Missouri’s first great star as a pre-war quarterback who later played for the Chicago Cardinals which he led to the NFL championship in 1947, the franchise’s only championship (they now play in Arizona after stop in St. Louis for a while). You won’t hear Christman but you can catch the game highlights with Scott making the calls:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zKUfYF84h8

(QB Ron Taylor hands off to Donnie Smith–who led the conference with 13 touchdowns—with Ed Mehrer (35) and Norm Beal (21) with Gordon Smith (89) looking to take out the right side of Navy’s defensive line)

Missouri stuffed Navy’s run game in the 1961 Orange Bowl while Dan Devine’s “student body right,” and “student body left” running game that featuring pulling guards and blocking backs ground out more than 200 yards and ate up a lot of clock.

The Tiger rush was led by Norris Stevenson and Mel West, the first two African-American Tiger football players.

Coach Devine always thought Missouri would have finished the year with the national championship if there had been a post-season poll, but the University has never claimed the national title.  Missouri finished 11-0* with the asterisk noting the game on the last day of the regular season, that they actually lost.

Well, if the University of Missouri and the now-Big 12 Conference won’t claim the national championship, it’s time for the politicians to get all huffy and fluffy about it these 66 years later and say, “Ignore the asterisk.”

One of our intrepid United States Senators, Eric Schmitt, has stepped boldly forth and introduced a Senate resolution declaring the Tigers were undefeated national champions. Such resolutions have no force of law and certainly have no authority over the Big 12, the NCAA, or the history of the game (which Missouri played poorly, by the way).  But the Senate has had bigger things to do than take time with this resolution and there were no objections, not even from Kansas’ Senators, so it stands as passed.

The University of Missouri will take the resolution for whatever value it has and will celebrate the 1960 national championship during its September 19 game against the Troy Trojans.  The halftime event also will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Memorial Stadium.

It would be greater fun if the celebration could be done when MU plays KU this year, but that game will be in Lawrence and the Jayhawks are not just about to let Missouri do any whoopeeing that day.

Memorial Stadium’s original capacity was 25,000. We were one of the 41,000 who watched Kansas win that loss in 1960.

With the new quarter-billion addition intended for use by high-roller Tiger supporters, the stadium will hold almost 65,000, including those sitting in 2,280 new premium seats, 628 loge box seats, 270 mezzanine club seats and mingling in 71 suites.

And in a few weeks there will be a celebration of a game that truly has become a political football.

(MIZZNOW)—The season kicks off Thursday night shortly after Mizzou alumnae Sheryl Crow sings the national anthem. The game is a sellout. Arkansas-Pine Bluff will give the Tigers someone wearing a different uniform to hit.

Ahmad Hardy won’t play but ESPN’s Pete Thamel says the Tigers hope he can be ready my mid-September.  After the Thursday game, Missouri plays Kansas in Lawrence on September 11 and then is at home against Troy on the 19th.  SEC play starts with Mississippi State on the 26th.

(MIZCUTS)—Twenty-five former Tigers will start the season on NFL 53-man rosters.  On3.com lists:

  • Kris Abrams-Draine – CB, Denver Broncos
  • Tyler Badie – RB, Denver Broncos
  • Nick Bolton – LB, Kansas City Chiefs
  • Larry Borom – OL, Detroit Lions
  • Luther Burden III – WR, Chicago Bears
  • Jaylon Carlies – LB, Indianapolis Colts
  • Kevin Coleman Jr. – WR, Miami Dolphins
  • Brady Cook – QB, Miami Dolphins
  • Jordan Elliott – DL, Tennessee Titans
  • Akayleb Evans – CB, Carolina Panthers
  • Javon Foster – OL, Cincinnati Bengals
  • Ty’Ron Hopper – LB, Green Bay Packers
  • Khalil Jacobs – LB, New England Patriots
  • Drew Lock – QB, Seattle Seahawks
  • Chris McClellan – DL, Green Bay Packers
  • Isaiah McGuire – DL, Cleveland Browns
  • Armand Membou – OL, New York Jets
  • Harrison Mevis – K, Los Angeles Rams
  • Toriano Pride Jr. – CB, Cleveland Browns
  • Ennis Rakestraw Jr. – CB, Detroit Lions
  • Darius Robinson – DL, Arizona Cardinals
  • Keagen Trost – OL, Los Angeles Rams
  • Josiah Trotter – LB, Tampa Bay Buccaneers
  • Zion Young – EDGE, Baltimore Ravens

Players Waived or Released

  • Marcus Bryant – OL, New England Patriots (injured reserve)
  • Joshuah Bledsoe – S, Washington Commanders
  • Stephen Hall – CB, Houston Texans
  • Xavier Loyd – WR, Kansas City Chiefs
  • Albert Okwuegbunam – TE, Las Vegas Raiders
  • Cody Schrader – RB, Denver Broncos
  • Theo Wease Jr. – WR, Miami Dolphins

Injured Reserve

  • Jaylon Carlies – LB, Indianapolis Colts
  • Yasir Durant – CB, New England Patriots
  • Johnny Walker – WR, Denver Broncos

(TRAGEDY)—A William Jewell College football player who had; just scored the first touchdown of the year for his team collapsed on the sidelines Saturday and was pronounced dead at a Liberty hospital a short time later. MicahJo Barnett. He was 20, a business administration major.  The game was suspended and later canceled.

Barnett was a home-town boy, the captain of the Liberty Eagles when they won their first state championship when he was a senior. He ran for 1,450 yards, scored 20 touchdowns and made the all-state team that year.

(MIZBB)—Former Tiger basketball star Mark Mitchell might be a Tiger basketball star again.  He’s enrolled at the University of Missouri.  The court system will decide if he can have a fifth year of eligibility.

Mitchell went undrafted by the NBA after his all-SEC year last year. He played for the Denver Nuggets Summer League team and appeared to be headed to the Nuggets training camp before he changed his mind.

He’s one of several players—more than 25—who were not grandfathered in by the NCAA’s “five for five”  rule. His future is in the hands of a federal district judge in Colorado, Charlotte Sweeney, who has granted fifth years of eligibility in other cases before her. In all of those cases, the players had not signed a professional contract. The NCAA opposes such rulings and the SEC doesn’t like it either.

Financially, returning to Mizzou is a better deal.  He made $45,000 playing in the G-league last season and would get as much as $85,000 if he goes to camp. Sources indicate he’ll make more at Mizzou under the NIL system.

(BASEBALL)—Baseball seems to be eternal during the summer months and it is something akin to a shock to realize there are only 25 games left for our two teams. One has a slight chance of making the playoffs but it’s going to have to get its act together in a significant way to do it.

Our two teams seem to be headed in different directions again. It’s the Royals that have been hot for the last couple of weeks. Although they were hammered by the Guardians on Sunday, they have won 11 of their last 13, 13 of their last 16,  and remain in the playoff picture, as unlikely as that might seem. But they are playing in the weakest division in baseball.

Royals reliever John Schreiber, put on waivers during the weekend, was quickly snapped up by the New York Yankees. He had been in 55 games this year and had put up a 3.65 ERA. He held right-handed batters to a .143 average but lefties were hitting .326.   Schreiber likely on his way out anyway. He was going to be an unrestricted free agent at the end of the season.

The Cardinals have dropped to two games under .500 again and now they’ve put J. J. Wetherholt on the IL.  He’s been dealing with tendinitis in his right wrist.  The Cardinals started the week 68-70.

One notable achievement, however—Alex Burleson, who was a much-discussed trade possibility in the offseason, has become the first left-handed Cardinals batter to drive in 100 runs since Jim Edmunds did it in 2004, with 111—a number Burlison has 23 games to beat.

He came into this week ranked number two among first basemen in all of baseball in batting , base hits, and doubles.

The Cardinals have decided during the weekend that Caleb Ferguson wasn’t such a good deal after all and cut him loose. He was designated for assignment three weeks after the Redbirds picked him up from Cincinnati. He pitched 8.1 innings in relief, gave up eight walks, 11 hits and eight earned runs in his short stint after doing pretty well for the Reds where he had 22Ks in 24.2 innings and a 4.01 ERA.

His roster spot will be taken by pitcher Hancel Rincon when rosters expand. Also coming up will be Leo Bernal. Rincon has spent eight years in the minors although he’s only 24. He’d been a starter but was moved to long relief this year. In 41 games this year in Memphis he has thrown 71.1 innings with a 4.04 ERA.

Bernal is a catcher prospect, a minor league gold glove winner last year and has been voted the best defensive catcher in the International League this year. He has hit .278 with 16 home runs and 77 runs batted in through 101 games. His callup leaves the Cardinals with some choices to make. Their roster already carries three catchers—Ivan Herrera, Padro Pages, and Jimmy Crooks.

—-Moving along, quickly:

TWO FOR PATO; FIVE FOR PALOU; AND A BIG ONE FOR PREECE

(NASCAR)—Somehow the NCAA Tournament phrase “Sweet Sixteen” isn’t appropriate for the field that will run for the NASCAR Cup Championship in the next ten races. But sixteen it is, the field established with a dramatic win Saturday night on the high banks of Daytona Saturday night with the sixteenth driver making it by winning while a big part of the field crashed behind him.

Ryan Preece had never won a Cup race until then. The win boosted him past Shane Van Gisbergen into the sixteenth and final playoff slot.  It’s his first win in 249 races covering eight seasons.

The race, run with a new aero package for the cars, was fairly sedate for a Daytona race until four laps from the finish when a crash and subsequent cleanup sent the race into overtime. Zane Smith led at the start but when he tried to block an oncoming Tyler Reddick, he was turned with the rest of the field bearing down upon him.  Preece got through the melee first and was leading when the caution flag was thrown, locking him into the position.

The sixteen drivers who will try to accumulate the most points in the next ten races to claim the cup are regular season champion Denny Hamlin, Ryan Blaney, Tyler Reddick, Ty Gibbs, Chase Briscoe, Christopher Bell, Kyle Larson, Chase Elliott, Joey Logano, Chris Buescher, Daniel Suarez, Carson Hocevar, William Byron, Bubba Wallace, Austin Cindric, and Preece.

The field includes the winners of the last seven championships: Logano in 2018, 2022, and 2024; Larson in 2021 and 2025, Blaney in 2023 and Elliott in 2020.

The Chase begins at Darlington next weekend.

(INDYCAR)— Two for O’Ward; Four of Five for Palou

Pato O’Ward has won both weekend IndyCar races on the Milwaukee Mile but he had to do it on the same day.  Saturday’s race was stopped by rain before the halfway mark, with O’Ward in the lead, forcing the race to be completed Sunday, after the regularly-scheduled Sunday race also went his way.

The day was a historic one for O’Ward, who became the first IndyCar driver to win two races on the same day since Rick Mears did it 45 years ago.  Only six other drivers in the series have achieved that distinction—and they’re pretty big names.  Mears, Mario Andretti, Al and Bobby Unser, Dan Gurney, and Johnny Rutherford.

 

“Those are heavy names. Then you hear mine, you’re like, ‘What?'” he said in a post-race interview. “I’m just writing my own story. I really don’t know what’s in store for my IndyCar career. So far I’ve dedicated my whole life to this. I always really dedicate myself to everything that I do to the best of my ability. I’m one hungry competitor. I love to go out there and compete and to challenge.”

His double victory was overshadowed by Alex Palou, who did not win but accumulated enough points to guarantee his fourth championship in a row, his fifth in six years. Only Scott Dixon, with six, and A. J. Foyt with seven, have more series championships than Palou, who is by far the youngest driver to win five.

 

“I never thought I would be, first of all, an IndyCar driver. Never thought I could make it. Never thought that I would have the chance to be a professional race car driver. That was my dream,” Palou said after the race. “When I had the opportunity to be an IndyCar driver, that was already a huge achievement for me. I was living the dream. I remember also then Chip (Ganassi) giving me that chance to drive for a championship-winning team at that moment. They just won in 2020 with Scott. That was mind-blowing. Since then I feel like I’ve been on this incredible cloud where everything has been so good for me… It’s just super fun.”

The last driver to win four straight titles was Sebastien Bourdais, who took his fourth one in 2007.

One race is left on the IndyCar schedule. It’s next week at Laguna Seca.

(Photo credits: Student Body Left—1961 Savitar; Stadium—MLR Group; Preece—Bob Priddy at Brickyard ’26; Palou—Rick Gevers, WWTR;  O’Ward—Bob Priddy, Indy, 2026; NASCAR playoff field—Facebook)

The Carrier 

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There are no golf courses on aircraft carriers, no places where our military people can fly off to for a leisure weekend no matter that the world is falling apart.

There are no gold-plated ballrooms where admiring throngs can gather to pat the Commander in Chief on the back while thousands of Americans are stuck on Navy ships, at Air Force bases, and in Army compounds where weekend is mostly just a word and the world is dangerous.

Some of those young people have died and might die and others have been wounded and more will be wounded while their commander in chief plays golf and suggests that nine months of isolation on a boat isn’t long enough.

He putters while miliary families pray; they are Charlie Browns and he is a petty, vindictive, uncaring Lucy with a football.

There is something he can’t feel, has never written, and shows no capacity for: empathy.

I am not, a veteran and I have no family members who are in the active military so my feelings of outrage at the cavalier attitude the President and his Secretary of Defense toady have shown toward our service people in this needless war on Iran must be small compared to the feeling of friends and families of those who prosecute Trump’s game of playing soldiers with the real thing.

Several years ago I was privileged to be a guest for 24 hours on the Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier and of spending a day on the USS Jefferson City submarine, so I have had a taste of the small and a taste of the huge in our arsenal. A miniscule taste which is far more than their biggest commander has had.

A man whose greatest personal link to the military is his obligatory presence when the coffins come home is incapable of respecting those unfortunate enough to be carrying out his irrational orders.

My experiences left me incredibly impressed with the deep commitment and the high-level of professionalism of the young people who crew these vessels. When we visited the bridge of the Roosevelt about 120 miles out in the Atlantic, we saw a 24-year-old woman driving the ship.  Down on the deck, a large number of her generation was efficiently and safely launching and landing F-16 fighter/bombers.

On the submarine we watched young sailors running a boat that was more than 400 feet underwater.  We peered through a periscope and lined up possible shot, knowing that someone in their 20s might someday be responsible for programming the torpedoes and determining if the target is an enemy or a friend before a commander far younger than we were makes the firing decision, .

These are people who not only are on duty for weeks at a time; some are underwater for weeks while their commander in chief plays golf, spends his overnights writing insults, and who cannot wait for each weekend so he can get aboard a luxurious jet to take him away from whatever cares he has, has no appreciation for the people who live on highest alert 24 hours a day while he thinks up new ways to honor himself and denigrate others.. Stories that an aircraft carrier is short of everything from food to feminine hygiene products cause him no sleep loss.

And now might be the greatest insult to those on the front lines:

The Navy, cleansed by the administration of Navy loyalists and largely run by Trump amateur appointee-loyalists, reportedly wants to name a new aircraft carrier for Donald Trump.  Of course, he who recently posted an AI generated image of himself as a highly decorated Army General despite his personal record of avoiding the draft, and who suggested the Abraham Lincoln had not been on alert in a war zone long enough, has no objections at all to removing the name of a Pearl Harbor hero and replacing it with his own—despite the custom of naming the current class of carriers after dead Presidents.

The racial overtone of this case cannot be overlooked, given President Trump’s track record. The planned name had honored Cook Petty Officer First Class Doris “Dorie” Miller.  It was going to be the first carrier named after a black person—who also was the first African-American to be awarded the Navy Cross and to be nominated for a Medal of Honor.

WKTR-TV in Newport News, Virginia talked to Miller’s great-nephew, Thomas Bledsoe, who said he was shocked by the reports.  He told the station, “One of the things about Doris Miller’s story is not only about him being the hero that he was on that day at Pearl Harbor but it was also about an individual stepping beyond the means of what they were assigned to do and going above and beyond. That ‘why not me’ moment was very significant, not only for the African American community but for Americans overall.”

The Navy says the suggested change has not been made official.

Miller helped wounded crew members to safety during the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and even operated a machine gun—although he had no training—and shot down two of the attacking airplanes. In 1943, Miller was assigned to the escort carrier Liscombe Bay that was torpedoed in November and sank within 23 minutes, taking Miller with it.

Some have suggested his name would be better applied to a destroyer or to a cruiser.  A frigate was christened with his name in 1973.

The keel of the new carrier is to be laide later this year. At the 2023 ceremony announcing the naming of the carrier, President Trump lamented that he hasn’t had a ship named for him.

As for the Abraham Lincoln, 

It finally is headed to port.  Ship spotters on Saturday saw it passing through the Singapore Strait apparently headed to a port in Thailand where at last the crew can step onto dry land and have some time to unwind—-

—while their well-fed commander in chief lines up his next putt on the soft green grass of a Florida golf course, having taken time away from his stressful thinking about invading Greenland, Cuba and maybe the Falkland Islands, making Canada the 51st state among other adventures both foreign and domestic, and what the next memorial to himself should be.

(Photo Credit: Miller—WTKR; Lincoln—U. S. Navy)

Smithsonian Museum of Un-American History 

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If Donald Trump thought he could get away with naming the Smithsonian Museum of American History something such as a Museum of Un-American History, he would already have signed an executive order doing it.

While most of us were paying attention to celebrating Independence Day, Trump’s White House Domestic Policy Council was issuing its latest accusations targeting that museum. For months his administration has been busy “reforming” our national parks, monuments, and museums to get rid of “anti-Americanism.”  He prefers to pretend that slavery was a friendly relationship between master and slave, that the Confederacy and its key figures who repudiated the United States Constitution and fought with a breakaway segment of our country openly based on protecting slavery were just advocating for state’s rights, that nothing serious happened to Native American nations, and that his White Christians are the only important religious policy setters of our society.

Last year, Trump ordered the Smithsonian to remove anti-American ideology from the 21 museums and galleries (and the National Zoo) that fall under the Smithsonian system.

The Trump Domestic Policy Council’s 162-page report refers to “thinly veiled anti-Americanism” at the history museum and accuses it of showing this country is “a fundamentally oppressive nation.”  The council accuses the museum of moving “toward an extreme political activism.”

Then it breaks down that activism as “anti-white activism,” and “illegal alien activism,” and “transgender activism.”  It is also critical of the museum for having exhibits and programs depicting slavery, race, and systemic inequality, as ABC News put it in one of its reports.

I have been to many of those 21 museums, some of them—including American history—many times.  I am a white Christian with an ancestor who settled in Virginia on a land grant given him by the first Queen Elizabeth and I can tell you the council report, as is the case with the majority of Trump’s appraisals of the general history of our nation, is pure BS.

Perhaps Trump doesn’t like to see (as if he has ever visited the place) the whites-only Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina where four black college students sat down on February 1, 1960 and politely asked for service.  They refused to leave when asked to leave, setting off demonstrations that led to eventual integration of the lunch counter and helped trigger the civil rights movement in the south and its large student base. Four years later, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

One of the museum’s directors, Anthea Hartig, has called the exhibit in question, “central to our mission to explore, preserve and share the complexity of our past (that would be part of the America 250 celebration)…a bold and immersive experience across all three exhibition floors of the National Museum of American History. Suggestions that the Smithsonian had planned or intended to remove the lunch counter and stools are false. Daily, thousands of visitors view and learn from these cherished objects in the national collection.”

The Organization of American Historians charged the Trump administration with trying to “coerce Smithsonian leadership to shape ​its presentation of ⁠U.S. history so that it serves the administration’s political agenda – part of an ongoing and multi-pronged assault by the Trump administration against accurate and evidence-based history in American public life.”

Trump has issued an executive order directing notices be put at the entrances to the history museum with a warning that “the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.”

It is precisely love of country that makes Trump’s signs and his attacks on this and other Smithsonian museums so putrid.

This statue in the history museum by Horatio Greenough might be the symbol of Trump’s America.  Washington, all-victorious and all-virtuous, a symbol of American courage, a legendary figure whose human shortcomings are overlooked—including owning 317 slaves at the time of his death and dispatching the Army to punish Native Americans in the new Northwest Territory objecting to white settlers taking their lands (resulting in an ignominious defeat), a man who refused a $48,000 salary to lead the army and asked only to be reimbursed for his expenses that turned out to be about $450,000.

Next thing you know, the man who thinks Mount Rushmore is incomplete without him will decide this museum needs a Trumpian figure like the one of George Washington. I’m afraid a marble image of Donald Trump without his shirt might make the museum for adults-only because the statue would be too frightening for children.

One wonders if Trump ever saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the great western film about a man credited with killing a dangerous outlaw who actually was killed by another man.  After telling the truth to a newspaper editor near the end of the film, James Stewart’s character asked, “You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?”  And editor Maxwell Scott (played by Carleton Young) responds, “This is the West, sir.  When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

That’s Trump’s preferred history. Ignore the truth. Ignore the reality. Believe a legend—and he’ll tell you what the legend will be.

But this isn’t the West.  It’s America. Our history has had its troublesome times (including this seemingly endless period). How we overcome those troubles is a part of history that says we can always do and be better, a concept he has trouble grasping for himself as well as for the nation.

In this time of heightened awareness of our nation’s history, we cannot let the bigotry of our historically-illiterate President prevail. We cannot become a better people if we ignore the times when we were at our worst and a President who desires a return to that era should be resisted strongly by an unafraid nation.

We are likely to have more about Trump’s desire to make us as historically ignorant as he prefers to be.

(Photo credits: Smithsonian)

Massive Repudiation

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

It was not just a historic election—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No.

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

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

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

Government needs to be operated like a business.

You can’t cut your way to prosperity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving on to the pithy observations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(picture credits: Instagram)

Heather

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

Notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facebook:

lasvegassun/posts/cisco-aguilar-who-also-chairs-the-democratic-association-of-secretaries-of-state/1471435425029177/

YouTube:

watch?v=NoyiHAMTk3g

X:

atrupar/status/2078136910694715775

i/status/2078225308503671116

rcohen/status/2077528414852984883

Bluesky:

mcopelov.bsky.social/post/3mquj46i4hk2r

muellershewrote.com/post/3mqspe3ohnk2r

marcelias.bsky.social/post/3mquxehtpf22t

Instagram:

p/C712zy5Nk-X/?hl=en

The Stolen Celebration 

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You might have gathered if you read Wednesday’s entry that I was a little peeved that our President torpedoed the national celebration of our country’s 250th birthday.

A few days ago, Sabrina Haake, a federal trial attorney from Gary, Indiana specializing in First and Fourteenth Amendment defenses, wrote this piece that appeared on Altnet. She also has The Haake Take on Substack. It explains and amplifies my resentment at President Trump’s hijacking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  Here she reports on an investigation into those events.

Trump just robbed America of a sacred reckoning that may never come again | Opinion

House Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee have released a report describing how the  White House cheated the American public on its 250th birthday. It outlines interim findings that the Trump organization put together a shell company to supplant the Congressionally-created commission, America 250, with a partisan one, Freedom 250, defrauding donors and pilfering donations along the way.

In 2016, ten years in advance of the country’s 250th birthday, Congress created a nonpartisan commission called America 250 to plan and orchestrate the largest commemoration in U.S. history. Its mandated purpose was to encourage all Americans to ‘remember the nation’s past, celebrate the present, and look forward to building a promising future.’

America250 spent ten years organizing events, volunteer campaigns, and educational initiatives across all 50 states to celebrate our Semi-quincentennial. America250’s slogan, “350 for 250- Engaging all 350 million Americans in celebrating our nation’s 250th anniversary,” stresses civic inclusivity devoid of politics.

But last year, after his attempts to pack America250 with loyalists were unsuccessful, Trump created a competing commission, Freedom 250,  via executive order. Falsely describing Freedom 250 as the “national, non-partisan organization leading the celebration of our Nation’s 250th birthday,” Freedom 250 was incorporated as an LLC in October 2025. Under the National Park Foundation, governed by a board of Trump loyalists, Freedom 250 solicited pay-to-play from companies with major federal contracts pending— including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Oracle —to financially support Freedom 250 instead of America250.

Defrauding the nation on its 250th birthday

The report describes how Trump demanded that his name and name-branded politics should dominate the historic celebrations. When America250 pushed back on Trump’s plan as too partisan, he supplanted the commission by creating his own.

After Freedom 250 hijacked federal planning activities, most scheduled performers withdrew from the celebration. They had agreed to perform at a national, nonpartisan concert, but cancelled when they found out it was overtly partisan. Other activities planned by Trump’s Freedom 250 included the very on-brand Military Parade for Trump’s birthday and this year’s White House UFC cage fight, along with the controversial Great American State Fair.  The latter featured partisan exhibits complete with a confederate flag; the 16-day event caused extensive damage to the lawns and the National Mall. Meanwhile, Freedom 250 continues the Trump-centric assault, planning construction on his  250-foot-tall “triumphal arch.”.”

Trump illegally billed his July 4 culminating speech on the National Mall as a “TRUMP RALLY,” making himself—not the nation, not our history— the central figure of America’s only 250th birthday celebration. Trump’s rally, replete with partisan rhetoric and fearmongering about Democrats, concluded with “the largest fireworks display ever,” costing taxpayers an estimated $45 million..

Millions for Trump’s cronies

A separate report from Public Citizen describes how a “Trumpified series of events at the public’s expense” awarded over $100 million in no-bid contracts to celebrate our 250th birthday to a network of Trump-affiliated political allies. One of those contracts awarded tens of millions of dollars to Event Strategies, Inc., the same firm behind the J6 attack on the U.S. Capital.

Out of $120 million in public funds Congressionally earmarked for America250 planned celebrations, over $100 million was funneled directly to entities with political ties to Trump, essentially turning it into Trump’s slush fund with little or no transparency, accounting, or public reporting. Overall, Trump’s Freedom 250 received between $65 and $80 million of the funding Congress allocated to America250.

Alas, the fraud and self-dealing didn’t stop there. Aside from the deceptive rebrand, awarding hundreds of millions in no-bid contracts to Trump cronies, inviting pay to play federal contractor donations, and diverting Congressional funds to Trump’s partisan commission, public donations intended for America250 were purposely diverted to Trump’s organization.

Wire fraud and deception are not Presidential activities entitling Trump to criminal immunity

According to interim findings, donors who tried to send money to America250 were misled and given Freedom 250’s banking information, meaning contributions solicited in the name of the Congressionally mandated commission were routed instead to the President’s substitute entity. As yet unverified, the facts suggests that America250 donors were defrauded through wire transfer instructions, bank account numbers, and routing numbers that funneled their donations to Trump’s Freedom 250 commission.

Trump converted America’s once-in-250-years celebration into a parade of self-regard and personal enrichment, embodying our founders’ warning about men like him. Assuming the evidence matches the allegations, his tactics constitute criminal fraud, and the evidence won’t be hard to track down. Electronic records of online donations and routing can’t be erased; metadata will prove what was sent, by whom and when, and how it was diverted to Freedom 250. Such deception also likely constitutes wire fraud as well as charitable solicitation fraud.

Democratic lawmakers are now demanding a full accounting of diverted donor records and contracts, while Republican leadership has largely blocked information, shielded people involved, and refused to hold hearings on the matter. Democrats, in the minority, have diminished subpoena power, but that is likely to change in November.

Trump’s criminal immunity will be challenged after the midterms; even now, it only applies to “presidential acts” arising from core constitutional duties. Establishing an entity to compete with the Congressionally mandated America250 commission was illicit, extra-judicial, and purely partisan, and very likely exceeds any official, constitutional, or statutory authority. Trump billing our 250th July 4 celebration on the national mall as a TRUMP RALLY sealed the deal.

Trump robbed Americans of a sacred commemoration that won’t come again for many generations, if ever. He wanted to make our nation’s 250th birthday all about him. History books will likely oblige.

CC250

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I was a member of the Cole County 250 Committee that was convened to celebrate the nation’s birthday.  Fifty years ago (have trouble being comfortable with starting a sentence about something I’ve done with such a phrase—I find it easier to say, “In 1976….”) I was Secretary of the Jefferson City American Revolution Bicentennial Committee.

My role with the CC250 commission was minimal compared to the work done by our leaders who worked tirelessly to make sure every community in the County was involved.  At the end, we four survivors of he JCARBC couldn’t help but compare this celebration to the one we pulled off in 1976.

In 1976, we had a national ARBC that funded projects and programs and events and helped develop and coordinate events in each state.  We hosted a statewide conference for local Bicentennial events. We opened a little store that sold tickets to our attractions (the main one being the American Freedom Train’s visit) or sold Bicentennial flags of varying sizes and mementoes, and publicized the events we coordinated locally.  On July 4th weekend, we had a big blowout downtown on Saturday and Sunday, concluding with the first major fireworks show at the Capitol—establishing an event that has been done every year since.

Restoration of Lohman’s Landing, one of the few surviving steamboat commerce sites still in use along the Missouri River, was a state-designated a state American Revolution Bicentennial Project. We installed a time capsule there.

Our Cole County group this year was led by people connected with the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution but included several others. We have planted trees in Cole County communities that we hope will grow tall and strong and beautiful, symbolizing our nation’s growth by the time the 300th anniversary comes alone. We have done programs about the American Revolution at our library. We sponsored a poster contest for our school children with the winning poster going to a national competition.

Saturday, July 4, we had booths on the Avenue of History—Madison Street in front of the Governor’s Mansion—-that included local historical and civics organization until storm clouds gathered and we decided to bail out.  The high winds that struck our area were not something we wanted to deal with.

The city had a parade and a fireworks display—-at the Capitol—when the storm had passed.

I’m proud of the work CC250 did.  The city, the county, and the state might have done more had the same kind of commitment been seen from the national commission formed to celebrate the anniversary.

Congress created the United States Semi Quincentennial Commission in 2016. It was to be like the 1976 commission—bipartisan and nonpartisan. It was given a $150 million budget to coordinate the nationwide celebration. There even were plans to pull one of the three locomotives used in the 1976 Freedom Train away from a museum in Baltimore, restore it, and use it for a 2026 Freedom Train.

The legislature in 2022 established The America 250 Missouri Commission to “plan, promote, and implement public celebrations and commemorations of the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Intendance.  The next year the legislature authorized the state commission to coordinate with the federal commission as well as other state and local programs for the occasion.

Then came Donald Trump.

He established the White House Task Force on “Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday. It was to organize events in Washington, D.C. while the America 250 was left in charge of coordinating national events. But by the middle of this year, the America 250 Commission had received only about $25 million of the $150 million originally approved by Congress.

While funding dried up for the Congressionally-approved commission, Trump’s task force was getting $68 million in taxpayer money from the Department of the Interior run by Trump appointee Doug Burgum.

In April, the American Freedom Train Foundation 250 announced there would be no national train tour for this anniversary.

Its news release did not directly blame Trump while saying, “Coming out of the tumultuous period at the start of this decade, planning for the Quarter-Millennial was behind schedule in relation to planning for the spirited Bicentennial. In an effort to honor America’s history and heroes, Ross Rowland, the visionary behind the 1975-76 Bicentennial version of the American Freedom Train, sought to get the train back on the tracks for the Quarter-Millennial celebrations. Following Ross’s unexpected passing in June 2025, others stepped up and worked to realize his goal.”

… The team was unable to secure the necessary operating agreements with railroads, and there was insufficient interest on the part of corporate America in sponsoring the train. These challenges, in combination with the tight timelines involved, proved to be insurmountable.”

The kind of national celebration of the anniversary we had in 1976 was replaced by the Trump show on the Mall in Washington that did not come close to the hype and the expenditures the president trumpeted.   His speech was hardly inspirational and as usual was delivered as if he were seeing the copy for the first time.

And so our nation’s 250th birthday fizzled despite the record amount spent on fireworks over the mall (which left the damaged reflecting pool littered with trash and fireworks debris and caused enough severe air problems that several people went to the hospital).

We did well in Cole County by way of honoring the 250th anniversary.  It was dignified and it left behind a series of trees to remind our descendants that some people sought more than the self-indulgent events on the National Mall that had less to do with the Declaration of Independence than it did for a president’s ego. But for some of us—and I want to emphasize that am not demeaning the things this year’s committee accomplished—a spark was missing.

Friday, we turn to a report revealing whole stole it and what might happen next.

But tomorrow we have a special message