Anniversary

I was among those asked to keep a daily journal during the pandemic so that people of the next great pandemic would know how we survived the anxious pre-inoculation months did it, the apprehensions we felt, the isolations we dealt with,  and the things we witnessed from a distance.

This is my lengthy entry for this day, four years ago. I offer it so we can recall the astonishing, abhorrent events and the reactions to them.

This recollection became more poignant when I read the reaction in 2021 of former President Jimmy Carter—-and the contempt for him by the man who will resume power in the White House in two weeks.

Although Donald Trump issued a statement of sympathy after Mr. Carter’s death, he cannot escape history recording that he once called Carter “the worst president” and when Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, Trump reacted in a way that surprised no one:

“Crooked Joe Biden is the worst president in the history of our country. He’s the most incompetent and he’s the most corrupt president in the history of our country. And it’s not even close. In fact, I said, today, the happiest person alive today is Jimmy Carter because his presidency looks brilliant. Brilliant by comparison.”

Historians, on the other hand, who are not as self-absorbed as Mr. Trump, a few years ago ranked the worst presidents as James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Donald Trump.

President Biden has asked that flags be flown at half-staff for a month in honor of Mr. Carter, not an unusual way to recognize the death of a past President—-and Trump has again shown his usual self-absorption and lack of class by complaining that the flags will be at half staff during his inauguration.

Jimmy Carter, a man who lived his faith in word and deed, is being disrespected by a man who borrowed a Bible for a photo op at a church across the street from the White House, someone who worships the putter on Sundays and who will never build a house for Habitat for Humanity.

Remember January 6, 2021? A newspaper article yesterday carried the headline that memories of it  are \fading. If we love our country, love it more than we love ourselves, we cannot let those events “fade” as the  inspiration behind them prepares to move back to the scene of the event. So I have decided today to recall what I—and others—wrote and thought that awful day, four years ago today, even as it unfolded. (I am omitting the pictures from the original entry.)

Wednesday, January 6, 2021

I begin this entry at 1:50 p.m. while watching something happen in Washington that neither I nor my citizen ancestors going back to the days of Washington, Jefferson, and even earlier founders could have imagined—thousands of supporters of our president, egged on by him in an hour-long tirade near the White House—have laid siege to the United States Capitol, interrupting the debate on certifying results of the Electoral College. I am watching FOX, the network that has been uncomfortably friendly with our president for years, as some demonstrators are trying to break through the doors into the House of Representatives.

Reporters just said law enforcement officers are guarding the doors with guns drawn, and another of the reports said moments ago that he’s been getting text messages from ambassadors saying this country would be highly critical of other countries if anything such as this happened there.

What we are seeing is appalling.  One observer calls it “a breakdown of the constitutional process.”  It’s the most significant incursion inside our Capitol since the British attack in 1814.  There is no doubt our president stoked this outrage and has been doing it for months, years. This morning, he and his children and other supporters had a rally near the White House.  His son, Donald Junior—who hopes to become the next national chairman of the Republican Party—told the crowd that their presence should tell mainline Republicans their day is past. “It should be a message to all Republicans who have not been willing to actually fight, the people who did nothing to stop the steal. This gathering should send a message to them: This isn’t their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party. We’re going to try and give our Republicans the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”  Then his father ranted for about 90 minutes, speaking to a crowd he had been begging for several days to show up in Washington today.  He urged the protestors to go to the capitol.

They did and about an hour after Congress started the process and started dealing with the first protest—of the Arizona results the House and Senate suddenly adjourned.  When I saw that happen (on C-SPAN) I switched to CNN and then to FOX because I suspected there was trouble developing.

FOX reporters are as stunned as anybody on the other (less Trumpish) networks by what is unfolding in front of them. Others got into the hallways and office areas.

Protestors get into the capitol and are shown on video walking through Statuary Hall.

One reporter on Pennsylvania Avenue just reported things are becoming increasingly violent in the streets. Senators and Representatives are locked in their offices. The Vice-President, who was presiding over the joint session, has been evacuated.  The President apparently is in the oval office where he earlier sent a Tweet criticizing the VP for lacking courage to overturn the election results today.  That was after VP Pence told members of Congress he would not try to singlehandedly throw out electoral votes. He had sent a letter to all members of Congress saying, “It is my considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.”

A few minutes ago he tweeted, “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our country. Stay Peaceful!”

One senator just tweeted a picture of protestors in the Senate Chamber.

The Mayor of Washington has instituted a 6 p.m. curfew.

So far, Josh Hawley has been silent—and he’s one of those who lit this fire several days ago when he announced he would challenge the election results. He was later joined by a dozen others, and the president who “rallied” his supporters in Georgia Monday and who encouraged demonstrators this morning to march on the Capitol.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, interviewed on FOX “cannot be sadder or more disappointed. This is not the American Way. I’m with capitol police; I’ve heard on the radio shots have been fired.”   (we later learned a woman had been shot, apparently while with the crowd trying to break into the House chamber.) “This is Un-American, what’s going on.” He called on Trump to make a statement.  The president sent out a Tweet shortly after that, about 2:15: “I am asking everyone at the U. S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No Violence! Remember WE are the Party of Law & Order—respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!”

About the same time, Brett Baier on FOX reported Speaker Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had asked that the National Guard be deployed to clear the protestors.

2:30—FOX shows protestors breaking windows and climbing into the building.

Fox at 2:50 showed a photograph of a demonstrator sitting in the chair in Nancy Pelosi’s office.

The New York Times reported later that night that he’s from Arkansas, Matthew Rosenberg, who left a quarter on the desk and took a personalized envelope from the office. And he could be in very bad trouble. His Congressman, Steve Womack, tweeted about him, “I’m sickened to learn that the…actions were perpetrated by a constituent. It’s an embarrassment to the people of the Third District and does not reflect our values. He must be held accountable and face the fullest extent of the law. This isn’t the American or Arkansas way.”  And Arkansas Senator Jim Hendren tweeted “Don’t know this guy, but he needs to go to jail.”

Another photo shows a demonstrator sitting in the Senate President’s chair.

Haven’t seen an I-D of this creep yet.

(all Photos in this post are from Getty Images unless otherwise noted)

2:52—Pelosi and Shumer call on president to go on the air and call on protestors to leave.

2:55—DOD mobilizes troops.  A barrier will be set up around the capitol, crowd to be cleared out. And a tight lockdown will be put in place.

2:20—FOX reports at least one person has been shot.

2:20—senate secured and demonstrators are being pushed out of the second and third floors of the rotunda.

3:05—President-elect Biden goes on the air.  He began, “At this hour, our democracy is under unprecedented assault, unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times. Let me be very clear: The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect the true America, do not represent who we are. I’m genuinely shocked and saddened that our nation, so long a beacon of hope and light for democracy, has come to such a dark moment. America’s about honor, decency, respect, tolerance. That’s who we are. That’s who we’ve always been.”

He demanded the president call on his supporters to end an “unprecedented assault” on democracy. “I call on President Trump to go on national television now to fulfill his oath and defend the Constitution and demand an end to this siege.”  He urged the protestors to end their occupation of the House and Senate and blamed today’s violence on Trumps refusal to accept defeat. “At their best, the words of a president can inspire. At their worst, they can incite…This is not dissent. It’s disorder. It’s chaos. It borders on sedition, and it must end now. I call on this mob to pull back and allow the work of democracy to go forward.” He finished, “President Trump, step up.”

A few minutes later the White House released a taped message from Trump encouraging people to go home—-but most of his 61-second message was a whine about the election:

“I know your pain, I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us, it was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side.  But you have to go home now, we have to have peace. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order we have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt. It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a time like this where such a thing happened where they could take it away from all of us from me from you from our country. This was a fraudulent election. But we can’t play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home and go home and peace.”

We love you. You’re very special. ??????  No condemnation, no criticism.  Whine and pat these domestic terrorists you have encouraged on the heads and tell them to go home.

3:40—FOX shows video of woman shot in the capitol. She’s reported critical at a hospital. This is the only reported shot fired and only reported person injured.

It’s dusk in Washington now and reporters and city officials are worried about what will happen tonight, despite the curfew.  The Mayor and metropolitan police have announced anybody on capitol grounds after 6 p.m. will be arrested.

4:15: Rep. Steve Scalise says he hopes to get the capitol open and continue the debates tonight. Some other members reportedly feel the same way but we haven’t heard from the Congressional leadership yet.

At some point in all of this, this afternoon, the networks proclaimed John Osoff had won the Georgia Senate election although the margin is so thin that a recount is likely. He’s 33 and will be the youngest member of the Senate although not the youngest person elected. That honor goes to Joseph Biden.

About 4:55 it was announced that police think the capitol is secure again.

About an hour ago, Hawley tweeted: Thank you to the brave law enforcement officials who have put their lives on the line. The violence must end, those who attacked police and broke the law must be prosecuted, and Congress must get back to work and finish its job.

He drew three quick responses:

Samuel George

Sir – you inflicted this by rejecting the vote of the people

Your name will always be associated with today. Cool legacy.

Alex Rozar

This was your doing.

Former President George W. Bush released a statement late this afternoon “A statement on the insurrection at the Capitol,” a pretty plainspoken comment.  It’s especially impactful because he has seldom spoken about things since leaving the White House—as past presidents traditionally have done.  But there’s no love lost between the Bush family and Trump.

“Laura and I are watching the scenes of mayhem unfolding at the seat of our Nation’s government in disbelief and dismay. It is a sickening and heartbreaking sight. This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic — not our democratic republic.

“I am appalled by the reckless behavior of some political leaders since the election and by the lack of respect shown today for our institutions, our traditions, and our law enforcement. The violent assault on the Capitol — and disruption of a Constitutionally-mandated meeting of Congress — was undertaken by people whose passions have been inflamed by falsehoods and false hopes.

“Insurrection could do grave damage to our Nation and reputation. In the United States of America, it is the fundamental responsibility of every patriotic citizen to support the rule of law. To those who are disappointed in the results of the election: Our country is more important than the politics of the moment. Let the officials elected by the people fulfill their duties and represent our voices in peace and safety.  “May God continue to bless the United States of America.” 

Former President Clinton: “Today we faced an unprecedented assault on our Capitol, our Constitution, and our country. The assault was fueled by more than four years of poison politics spreading deliberate misinformation, sowing distrust in our system, and pitting Americans against one another. The match was lit by Donald Trump and his most ardent enablers, including many in Congress, to overturn the results of an election he lost.”

Former President Obama: “History will rightly remember today’s violence at the Capitol, incited by a sitting president who has continued to baselessly lie about the outcome of a lawful election, as a moment of great dishonor and shame for our nation. But we’d be kidding ourselves if we treated it as a total surprise. Right now, Republican leaders have a choice made clear in the desecrated chambers of democracy. They can continue down this road and keep stoking the raging fires. Or they can choose reality and take the first steps toward extinguishing the flames. They can choose America.

“I’ve been heartened to see many members of the President’s party speak up forcefully today. Their voices add to the examples of Republican state and local election officials in states like Georgia who’ve refused to be intimidated and have discharged their duties honorably. We need more leaders like these — right now and in the days, weeks, and months ahead as President-Elect Biden works to restore a common purpose to our politics. It’s up to all of us as Americans, regardless of party, to support him in that goal.”

Jimmy Carter: “This is a national tragedy and is not who we are as a nation. Having observed elections in troubled democracies worldwide, I know that we the people can unite to walk back from this precipice to peacefully uphold the laws of our nation, and we must. We join our fellow citizens in praying for a peaceful resolution so our nation can heal and complete the transfer of power as we have for more than two centuries.”

Twitter has shut down our president’s access for 12 hours because of a message he put out this afternoon.  Facebook took down his “We love you” video and has banned him for 24 hours.

The Kansas City Star tomorrow morning:

“No one other than President Donald Trump himself is more responsible for Wednesday’s coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol than one Joshua David Hawley, the 41-year old junior senator from Missouri, who put out a fundraising appeal while the siege was underway.  

“This, Sen. Hawley, is what law-breaking and destruction look like. This is what mobs do. This is not a protest, but a riot. One woman was shot and has died, The Washington Post reported, while lawmakers were sheltering in place.

“No longer can it be asked, as George Will did recently of Hawley, “Has there ever been such a high ration of ambition to accomplishment?” Hawley’s actions in the last week had such impact that he deserves an impressive share of the blame for the blood that’s been shed.

“Hawley was first to say that he would oppose the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College win. That action, motivated by ambition, set off much that followed — the rush of his fellow presidential aspirant Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and other members of the Sedition Caucus to put a show of loyalty to the president above all else.

“After mayhem broke out, Hawley put out this uncharacteristically brief statement: “Thank you to the brave law enforcement officials who have put their lives on the line. The violence must end, those who attacked police and broke the law must be prosecuted, and Congress must get back to work and finish its job.” So modest, Senator, failing to note your key role in inspiring one of the most heartbreaking days in modern American history. We lost something precious on Wednesday, as condolence notes to our democracy from our friends around the world recognize.

“Among those Hawley got to emulate him was Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, whose very first act as a member of the world’s greatest deliberative body was to sell out his country by attempting to overturn the outcome of a legitimate election.

“This revolt is the result, and if you didn’t know this is where we’ve been headed from the start, it’s because you didn’t want to know.”

“’The Frankenstein just tore down the doors to the palace,” U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri, told The Star. Which happened because, as he said, “One-third of the nation has bought into a bald-faced lie, and they are living in a fact-free America.’

“’I’m currently safe and sheltering in place while we wait to receive further instruction from Capitol Police,’ tweeted U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, a Democrat from Kansas. ‘Today is a dark day for our country. It’s unacceptable that we have a President who has repeatedly condoned and even encouraged this despicable behavior. It must stop.’”

“We’ll say again what Davids is too polite to say: Trump did not manage this madness on his own. Far from it.

REPUBLICANS KNEW TRUMP’S FRAUD CLAIMS WERE BOGUS

“Just before the putsch began, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said sadly that we need to once again work from an agreed upon set of facts. Only now has he noticed that lying to the public on a daily basis poisons democracy.

“People have taken this too far,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said on Fox News. Until he had to run for cover, McCarthy was fine with this sick stunt.

“U.S. Rep. Andy Barr, a Republican from Kentucky, said in a statement, ‘Today’s events at the U.S. Capitol are tragic, outrageous, and devastating. They are wholly inconsistent with the values of our constitutional Republic.’

“Yes, they are. But they are wholly consistent with Trump’s calls to overturn this election to address nonexistent fraud. And they are wholly predictable, given the willingness of most Republicans to repeat these baseless claims.

“When we wrote that Hawley’s actions were dangerous — and that those of Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt and others were too, in their pretending for far too long that the election wasn’t over — some readers found that absurd. ‘Oh my goodness, how will democracy and our country survive?’ one reader wrote in sarcasm. ‘How will Biden possibly govern? The Star editorial board’s hysteria over nothing is approaching CNN levels.’

“No doubt plenty of Americans will see even this free-for-all in the temple of democracy as defensible. And those of you who have excused all of the brazen lawlessness of this administration can take a little bit of credit for these events, too. They couldn’t have done it without you.

“Hawley, Marshall and other Republicans who upheld Trump’s con about widespread fraud knew all along that his claims were bogus. Now that they’ve seen exactly where those lies have landed us, decency demands that they try to prevent further violence by making clear that Joe Biden did not win by cheating. Please, gentlemen, surprise us.”

(Hawley gestures to the demonstrators this morning as he goes into the Capitol.)

About 9:30 tonight the Senate defeated the challenge to Arizona’s electoral votes 6-93 as several of the original protesting Senators withdrew their support of the challenge after today’s actions.

A TV station in San Diego (KUSI) says it has confirmed the identity of the woman who was shot to death inside the capitol.  It says she’s Ashli Babbit, a USAF 14-year veteran who did four tours overseas. The French news agency, AFP, said tonight that Babbit tweeted yesterday about those going to Washington for the rally, “Nothing will stop us….they can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours….dark to light!”,

I had said right after the election that one of my greatest concerns was how much damage Trump could do before he left.  I’ve written a couple of pretty harsh blog pieces (the most recent one was Monday) about him.  I can’t say I was surprised by what happened today—I was surprised by the scope of the events but not that there was mob violence based on his encouragement of it. Now, with two weeks to go before he departs the White House, there are some concerns being voice in tonight’s news coverage about this deranged man with his finger on the nuclear trigger remaining in his job for those 14 days.

Tonight (it’s 10:15 p.m.) there’s talk about whether steps need to be taken under the 25th Amendment to remove him.  And there are reports of several resignations from his staff and possible resignations from his cabinet or high-level staff.  There are also a lot of questions being asked about how the mob could have penetrated the Capitol security.

I don’t think I would want to be in the White House tonight.  Our president must be in a rage that borders on insanity, not only because Pence hasn’t done his bidding and Congress not only won’t do his bidding and because some of his closest associates are on the verge of bailing out, but because he has no access to s social media, no way to rant and rave at an unprecedented level.

This has been one of those days that will be a “What were you doing when….” question is asked. It’s a landmark day in national memory much as the Kennedy assassinations and the King murder and the Moon landing, and the Twin Towers attack (and in Jefferson City’s case, the 2019 tornado). This one is so special because even the Kennedy and King assassinations didn’t leave people this shaken about the future of our republic.

It’s now after midnight.  The TV nets are reporting the streets of Washington are quiet.  The day’s toll, according to various reports:  Four dead—one shot to death by a police officer and three who had medical emergencies.  Fourteen police injured , two hospitalized, one critical.

The joint session re-convened. Two or three protests were offered but none had a Senator’s name on it—the first House member with one protest said the Senators had withdrawn their names. The count stopped with Pennsylvania when several House members and Senators Hawley and Cruz filed a protest.  The Senate dispatched with the Hawley-Cruz part of it 7-92.  The House is voting down the protest on its side of things but it’s time to call it a terrible day and go to bed.

While all of this has been going on, the common folks were dealing with the coronavirus.  MODOH reports yesterday’s positivity rate was 21.5% and hospitalizations just under 2800. Nationally, yesterday was the deadliest day in the pandemic.

MODOH was my shorthand for the Missouri Department of Health.

—A week later, I added to the journal the text of Trump’s remarks so that those a hundred years from now (I hope we don’t have another pandemic for at least that long) will understand how Trump encouraged those events and how stunning it was to watch them.

And how our then-junior Senator fanned the flames.

Jimmy Carter is dead and today the House and Senate will make the electoral college vote official with the same ceremony Trump tried to stop four years ago.

And the flags will be at half staff. Read into that circumstance what you wish.

 

Fifty 

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

(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

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?

Let the Ethnic  Cleansing Begin—Part One 

Our retread President has promised that deportation of 11-millon undocumented aliens will be started on his first day in office. A number of economists or economy-watchers say the consequences could be severe. But that is immaterial to the incoming Commander/Demander in Chief of our country.  Others have raised serious humanitarian questions about the policy. But nobody has ever accused our incoming President of having any humanitarian interests except for his own, which are closely tied to his personal wealth.

Today we are going to start describing a plan that will mitigate any economic or diplomatic damage resulting from this deportation efforts. We expect no recognition from the incoming administration for these helpful ideas. However, if an invitation were extended to attend the State of the Union speech during which it would be announced that our necks soon will be decorated with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, we would not object.  Much. We are offering this advice at no cost, something that will please Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world who seems to have a plan to reduce government spending no matter what the cost.

Some might find this plan slightly off-the-wall. Or entirely so. But somebody has to provide some insight into how to deal with this issue and your faithful scribe will jump into the breach.

Mother Jones magazine, which some people dismiss as a liberal rag, took a hard look at Trump’s proposal a few months ago.  The incoming president has blamed foreign drug cartels and gangs have “invaded” the United States and have established a foothold at an apartment complex in Colorado, a claim contested and/or debunked by the town mayor and residents of the apartment complex in much the same way that leaders of a town in Ohio deny there’s any cat-eating going on there. Regardless, the “invasion” deserves a forceful response from this country.

The incoming President also has asserted that brown people from Venezuela and other countries that have emptied their prisons and lunatic asylums are killers, rapists, fentanyl importers, and probably don’t wear clean underwear every day.

Mother Jones describes a lot of problems with 47’s plan (actually he’s the 45th person to be President. He’s the second one to have two different administrations):

The magazine  says it’s going to take 95,994 chartered flights to get the 11-million people out of the country and going to wherever they will be  unloaded.  Projected costs, spread through 20 years because you can’t do this in two weeks would be $300-Billion.

Who would profit?  Private prison companies such as CoreCivic and the GEO Group were paid $1.5 billion by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to run immigration detention centers in 2022. They’ll improve our economy by building new facilities and hiring a lot of people to guard the women and children—and men—at new lockups.  A GEO Group subsidiary, BI Incorporated, got a five-year deal to produce ankle monitors and phone tracking apps worth $2.2 billion to ICE and will do quite well making 11-million more of these shackles. CSI Aviation has a $128.3 million contract for daily transport flights that they’ll have to increase, again pumping more money back into economy.

And this business expansion will offset the loss of jobs elsewhere in our economy.

There probably will be inconsiderate and ungrateful lawyers who will sue the government if the 1798 Alien Enemies Act is used to justify the deportations.

This might be the time to invest in a critical industry: hardware and home improvement companies. All of those detention camps will require a lot of posts and poles and wire and plywood buildings for the large facilities for undesirable Canadians, Mexicans, etc. A spokesman for the American Immigration Lawyers Association likens such camps to Soviet Gulags.

If there aren’t enough people in our regular military services who are guarding Taiwan, and South Korea and other pressure points in the globe and a decision is made not to lessen those protections, then nationalizing the National Guard is a possibility, he says. Fine and dandy but the Posse Comitatus Law forbids the National Guard from doing civilian law enforcement jobs.

Let’s face it, establishing military guard posts at every road in and out of all of our states is going to take a lot of people making sure no undocumented aliens can seek safety in a different state from their illegal homes here.

The article suggested we brace ourselves for big increases in food costs, decreases in important segments of the workforce, cuts in housing development, and cuts in some health programs.

The magazine quotes an agriculture and economics professor at the University of California-Davis who estimates food prices for hand-picked products will go up 21% because the deportations will eliminate half of the hands doing the picking. The survey also estimates 25% of the people who process our chicken, turkeys, pork, and fish are undocumented aliens. And it says we can look for a doubling of the price of milk if the people doing the milking are shipped out.

Illegal migrants are not eligible to collect Social Security. But they pay about $13-Billion a year into it. Undocumented immigrant households paid $35.1 Billion in state and federal taxes in 2022. That’s a pretty big economic hole. We’re waiting to see the plan for dealing with that.

It’s estimated about 350,000 undocumented immigrants work in health care, two-thirds of them in providers or in supporting positions. Rebecca Shi, who heads the American Business Immigration Coalition says, “They are the people that pick our crops, prepare our foods, clean our hotel rooms and empty our bedpans.”

This roundup also could affect the roofs over our heads. A study indicates one third of the crews that are whizzes at installing new roofs on our homes and businesses are potential deportees.  The construction industry already is short an estimated half-million workers.

But don’t worry.  The incoming President knows who will replace all of these workers.  If he doesn’t, we’re going to tell him in our next installment.

It might seem bizarre and crazy.  It isn’t.  It’s just the new normal.

The Ones Most Interested  

—and the places most damaged.

We’ve had three weeks or so to digest the results of the November 5 election.  We are going to offer some insights in the next few entries.

One of the amendments we voted this month proposed something that we’ve seen before—a statewide vote to force a city or an area to allow something the people there did not want.

That was Amendment 5, which would have forced the people living and working at the Lake of the Ozarks to accept a commercial casino in their midst.  Two areas of Missouri were involved: the area where a casino is proposed and an area fearful that it would be the next place forced to accept one.

We’re talking about the Lake of the Ozarks and Branson.

It might be instructive to see their thoughts about the sports wagering amendment and the casino-placement amendment. We looked at the votes in five lake counties and in five Branson-area counties.

Both groups wanted nothing to do with either proposal, sports wagering or a casino.

The five lake counties were 57% against sports wagering, Amendment 2, that barely passed statewide with only 50.074% of the votes (as of last night), a margin so small a recount can be justified if the losers want to pay for it.  The five Branson-area counties opposed it to the tune of 60%.

Amendment 5 was the issue that was most stark in its possibilities for these two areas and the message sent by these ten counties was more than no. It pretty much amounted to a “Hell, No.” Camden County rejected the proposal 10,621-14,375. Taney County swamped it 9,875-16,071.  Sixty percent of the voters in the five lake counties rejected the casino. In the Branson area, the rejection was even greater, 61.4%.

End result: People in those ten counties don’t like sports wagering but their people can do it if they want, but they’re sure don’t want them ever to do it in a local casino.

Both of these counties have promoted their areas as family-friendly tourism destinations.  Branson was worried that a Lake of the Ozarks casino would be the precedent-setter for a casino campaign in Branson. Amendment 5 would have forced one area to accept something the voters clearly did not want, and exposed the other area to a similarly unwelcome intrusion later.

Branson had a taste of this issue twenty years ago when voters defeated a proposal to put a casino next to the White River at Rockaway Beach.

How about counties that have casinos?  Amendment 3 failed in three of them—Cape Girardeau (46.4%), Lewis (Mark Twain Casino in LaGrange—46/7%), and Cooper (Boonville 48.5%).

This time, the casino industry spent ten-million dollars on a petition effort and an election campaign for Amendment 5.  Their efforts netted them less than 48% of the statewide vote.

In St. Charles County, the home of Missouri’s most lucrative casino, Amendment 3 got only 53.4%.

The spending on the Lake of the Ozarks proposal was pocket change compared to the huge amount invested in the sports wagering amendment. It took $41 million from the two biggest internet bookies to overcome the $14 million dollar opposition campaign financed by another bookie. The victory margin was only (as of last night) 4,360 votes out of almost three million votes cast.  The certified final results will be posted after the Missouri Board of Canvassers meets on December 10.  Presidential electors meet a week later. Congress is to certify the federal results on January 6.

The casinos will get their money back pretty fast.  The host cities of the casinos will lose millions because of the support their voters game to Amendment Two.

How much will they lose?  There are two factors.  The state tax rate on gambling (table games and slot machines is 21%.  Host cities get ten percent of that amount. In the last fiscal year, ten percent of the state gaming taxes collected provided $39,711,780 to the host cities.

But sports wagering will provide ZERO money from the state gaming tax, which will be only ten percent to begin with.  The State Auditor estimates casino revenues in the first five years will be $1,044,684,612.  The states ten percent will amount to $104,467,878, all of it earmarked for higher and lower education. None of it goes to the home cities. None.

If Amendment 2 followed current law, the casinos’ own home dock cities would split an additional $10,446,788.

But it’s worse than that.  If the tax rate on sports wagering were the same as it is on other forms of gambling—and the industry has never given a consistent answer why is should not be—the home dock cities would have split an additional $21,938,377 in those first five years.

The casino industry will recover more than one-half of the money it spent on the campaign by giving their own host cities the shaft. Permanently.

I can show you the math; the casinos wouldn’t.

The manifest shortcomings in taxes can only be remedied by adoption of another amendment. A campaign that focuses on those shortcomings and either corrects or overturns Amendment 2 might be considered, given the paper-thin margin of victory for sports wagering. It would be interesting to know the reactions of city councils in the thirteen host cities if they are ever shown these numbers. I doubt the industry, its leaders, or its supporting organizations have ever given these figures to the cities

The casino industry has never been put on the defensive at the Capitol or at the ballot box.

And maybe it should be, as we will discuss in our next commentary because what could be coming will be only worse.

What Next? 

The casino industry spent a record $41 million dollars to convince few more Missourians to vote in favor of sports wagering than voted against it—very few—out of about three million votes cast.

It will be a mistake to think the industry is satisfied with the sweetheart arrangement voters approved. The casino industry is changing rapidly, and the legislature and the voters need to be preparing for the next change in law that will benefit casinos and disadvantage the state, our schools, and their own host cities.

We don’t profess to be an expert or some kind of Casino Nostradamus, but we have been studying this industry and its proposals for several years now. It is not hard to find industry and scholarly articles pointing to a much different industry materializing in the next ten years or less. The casino industry is being altered by demographic changes. But rapidly changing technology will let the industry respond to those demographic changes.

Amendment 2 was just the first step. The policy set by Amendment 2 is likely to be the template for state policy as casinos move increasingly to remote betting on ALL gambling offerings.

We know from experience that technology often moves faster than the development of reasonable and fair regulation of it, making this a time for correction of shortcomings of the past coupled with anticipation of problems in the future. The state will be well-served by a adopting a policy of correction and anticipation, although there is considerable doubt that such a policy will be enacted a Missouri Legislature that is heavily influenced by industry pressure and largesse. Whether voters who can be wooed by absurd amounts of money spent on advertising that is low on the honesty scale would approve a policy unfriendly to the casinos is problematic.

A couple of years ago, Joey Richardson wrote for Gamblingsites.org, “(Casinos) are going to need to change what they offer and how they offer it if they want to continue to attract new customers.”

Millennials who have grown up on video games and who learned during the pandemic how to live their lives without leaving their homes already are having a major impact on the future of businesses of all kinds. Past discussions of internet sales taxes as a meager protection for brick and mortar businesses were one of the beginnings of this trend that gained momentum in the pandemic era when working from home became viable.

Hoosier Park Racing & Casino in Indiana became one of the first casinos to have a Pac-Man video slot machine, in September of 2017. Blackjack revenue for casinos is about half what it was in 1985 when it was responsible for 85% of table game revenues. Richardson noted in his article that casinos already had brought in new games to fill the gap—Caribbean stud, Three Card Poker, and Casino Holdem among them. All can be played remotely—if laws are changed to allow it.

Although Richardson doubts brick and mortar casinos will die out, Mehul Boricha, at Techrival.com has suggested virtual reality casinos could be on the way. He wrote, “Rules and regulations will always continue to influence future casinos. Various regulatory bodies come up with new and stricter policies that online casinos and games have to adopt without losing their grip on their innovation and creativity.” The new world of casino gambling that is being born in front of us will be a challenge not only to tomorrow’s legislature but to the gaming and lottery commissions that will have to regulate it. The gambling industry prefers not to make or be forced to make an investment that will allow regulatory bodies to prepare for the changes they must make to balance public responsibility with private profit.

Marketing Manager Emily Rodgers with driveresearch.com reported on August 2, 2023 that the growing preference for online or mobile app betting among three-quarters of sports bettors indicates a significant shift in the gambling industry towards digital platforms, offering convenience, accessibility, and potentially contributing to the overall increase in sports betting activity worldwide. She says convenience (78%) and easy deposits (75%) are the top reasons people prefer online/mobile sports betting. She argues that these top factors highlight the importance of user-friendly and seamless platforms in the gambling industry, factors that not only attract more bettors but also contribute to increased customer retention and engagement. She says digital channels are in the future for casino gambling, beginning with sports wagering..

Online sports betting revenue is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate (CAGR) of 10% during the next 5 years.

The introduction of AI (artificial intelligence) in sports betting will undoubtedly have a profound impact on the industry. One example is the way systems record information in digitized ledgers  known as blockchain, which is being adopted globally. Blockchain applications will help automate real-time data, expedite payments and wagers, and provide in-the-moment security and monitoring – including cryptocurrency transactions that are not allowed in Missouri, yet.

The sports betting marketplace grew ten-fold from 2019 to 2021 while netting nearly  $7B in revenue from $83B in total bets placed on sports in 2022.

Another report by marketdecipher.com revealed similar findings. In fact, its estimated $85B in bets placed in 2023 is forecast to balloon to $288B total by the end of 2032.

Virtual reality sports betting took a step forward with the launch of the VR22 sports betting  platform last October. The service allows users to take in a 360-degree live gaming experience as if they were there in person. Users can interact with the game or match in real time including the ability to place wagers down to a specific play – and even purchase merchandise or NFTs.

Missouri already has remote betting although it has been on a small scale.  In the past several years, a few of our casinos have had what they call “hybrid” wagering.  If a table is too crowded to allow additional players, gamblers are referred to a computer terminal that lets them place bets at the table as if they were physically there. It has been done on a small scale and has generated generally small profits. But it’s an experiment and it works.  Whether the terminal is fifty feet from the table or 50 miles and at someone else’s table, it is still sports wagering. And it is part of gambling’s future.

Another reason present casinos need to reach the public where it is, instead of waiting for the public to come back, is the threat of widespread competition. It is a very real threat and the first part of it could be in business in a few years.  We’ll talk about that in our next edition.

The Majority Rules, Chapter Two

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 Majority Rules

Whatever else we discard during our electoral processes, we maintain the concept of majority rule, whether through the electoral college or, in all other elections, the popular vote.

The system guarantees disappointment for some, gratification for others, and exultation for some, depending on the margin of victory or defeat.

Some have pronounced the Democratic Party dead after the election. That is a mistake. It has not been that long ago that the Republican party was considered to be on life support. We have seen through history many times when one party suffers a disastrous loss only to come back a few years later and regain its prominence. The winning party of 2024 will be the defensive party in 2026 and 2028. The fickleness of American politics gives voters a chance to correct the nation’s course every two and four years.

The majority thinks it has done that this year. But the first chance that those who cast minority votes to turn the tables comes in just two years.

There is no time for self-pity. Likewise, there is no time for superior attitudes.  Now, it is nothing more than a matter of doing. And measuring whether that doing is correct—

—-because voters always have the right to change their minds, to change their parties, and to change their leaders or representatives.

Historian Jon Meacham, one our favorite writers on contemporary events viewed against the background of the past, told Morning Joe the morning after election day, in part:

We’ve had 59 presidential elections in American history and only fifteen of them have unfolded in the electorate that voted yesterday.  So more than two-third of our elections unfolded at a time when women couldn’t vote or black folks couldn’t vote; immigration was even more restrictive.

…The question now is all our Republican friends who said, and I wish I had a quarter for every time someone said this over the last twelve months or so is, “Yeah, I don’t like the way Trump acts, but I liked his policies;” the second point, that I also want a quarter for, is “You guys exaggerate this whole ‘guard rails’ thing.” 

Well, now we’ll find out. And if they were right, and I pray they were—and I don’t say that lightly; I genuinely want to have been wrong, that the constitutional order, that his election result put it too much at risk, that now it’s on those whom the country has entrusted power to prove that we were wrong.

And, look, the success of an incumbent Congress, the incumbent White House, is also the country’s success.  And so I think we take a deep breath. I think citizenship itself is about the hard work, as St. Paul said and President Kennedy used in the coda to his inaugural address, is “being patient in tribulation.” And there are a lot of people this morning who are waking up and feel that the world is ending. There are a lot of people who are waking up who think, “Okay, we’re on the right track.”  The point of America is that we all should be able to have those different views but to move forward together.

I’m not trying to preach here, but that’s what democracy is. It’s disagreeing and dissenting within a common vernacular. And the country’s made a very clear decision and now we’ll find out if, in fact, the folks who have been entrusted with power are worthy of that power.

…The old phrase from Revolutionary times, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” and everybody who found this election to be existential, you don’t set those concerns aside. But what you DO do is, you have to watch carefully; you participate in the arena, and the people, the remarkable number of our neighbors and friends who made a different decision now face a test, themselves.

The New York Times ran a lengthy editorial the day after the election emphasizing the responsibilities that this election places on new Trump appointees who will be asked to place loyalty to him over loyalty to country and the responsibility the Senate will assume to act as an independent check and balance on his actions on appointments. But, it says, the ultimate responsibility rests with those who fought at the ballot box for the future course of our country:

…The final responsibility for ensuring the continuity of America’s enduring values lies with its voters. Those who supported Mr. Trump in this election should closely observe his conduct in office to see if it matches their hopes and expectations, and if it does not, they should make their disappointment known and cast votes in the 2026 midterms and in 2028 to put the country back on course. Those who opposed him should not hesitate to raise alarms when he abuses his power, and if he attempts to use government power to retaliate against critics, the world will be watching.

Benjamin Franklin famously admonished the American people that the nation was “a republic, if you can keep it.” Mr. Trump’s election poses a grave threat to that republic, but he will not determine the long-term fate of American democracy. That outcome remains in the hands of the American people. It is the work of the next four years.

We, you and I, have our marching orders regardless of which side we were on a few days ago.  Benjamin Franklin gave them to us a long time ago.

(If you want to read the entire editorial: Opinion | America Makes a Perilous Choice – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

The Rules Don’t Apply to Me

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.