Category Archives: Politics

Seeking honesty

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Last week’s entry encouraged participants to look carefully at and listen skeptically to claims and accusations that will be blowing over us at hurricane velocity as election day nears. We’ve always felt it dangerous for citizens of a republic to restrict themselves to one news source and accept statements from candidates, surrogates, and social media without question.  The internet offers us opportunities to seek the truth but it also floods us with untruths. Responsible citizens will be unafraid to check sources of information and investigate truth or only truthiness, or outright falsehood.

The sources we list today will provide evaluations of the stuff we hear or see. Although all of us are busy, the search for truth always is time well-spent and these sources can provide important perspectives quickly.

The Berkeley Library at the University of California calls its site Real News/Fake News: Fact Checkers. It has a list of sites on its webpage and we’ve added a few more.

Pollitifact: Pulitzer Prize winning site run by editors and reporters from the Tampa Bay Times (Florida) newspaper. “PolitiFact is a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics…. The PolitiFact state sites are run by news organizations that have partnered with the Times.”  Politifact offers a Pants on Fire Truth O Meter.

The organization rates statements as True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, False, and Pants on Fire.  It has made 140 checks on Biden statements and finds 39 percent true or mostly true, 25% half true. 19 percent mostly false, 15% false and 3% Pants on Fire. It has made 840 checks on Trump and found 13 percent true or mostly true and an equal percentage half true. Twenty percent were mostly false, 35% false, and 16 percent Pants on Fire.

FactCheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania….a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases.”  FactCheck.org recently was asked if a video shown on social media purportedly showing Joe Biden asleep during a television interview was genuine.  The answer: No, it was manipulated and fairly recently was circulated n Twitter by White House Chief of Staff Dan Scavino.

Flack Check: “Headquartered at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, FlackCheck.org is the political literacy companion site to the award-winning FactCheck.org. The site provides resources designed to help viewers recognize flaws in arguments in general and political ads in particular.”  The site reports on politics, science, and health. On the “politics” page you will find a helpful video about how to spot fake news.

OpenSecrets.org: “Nonpartisan, independent and nonprofit, the Center for Responsive Politics is the nation’s premier research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy.” Among the topics on the web page is one about Dark Money and another about Political Action Committees. There also are specific stories about inside political influence and activities.

Fact Checker: “The purpose of this Web site, and an accompanying column in the Sunday print edition of The Washington Post, is to “truth squad” the statements of political figures regarding issues of great importance, be they national, international or local.” The web page bills it as “The Truth Behind the Rhetoric.”  This is the site that rates truthfulness by awarding Pinocchios, using the famous puppet whose nose grew with each lie he told.

Snopes: “The definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.” One fairly new posting asks if “The CDC readjusted the COVID-19 death toll from 60,000 to 37,000.”  Snopes’ investigation rated the statement “false.”

Duke Reporters’ Lab: Fact Checking: Includes a database of global fact-checking sites, which can be viewed as a map or as a list; also includes how they identify fact-checkers.

AP Fact Check: Associated Press Journalists throughout the world check facts and accountability.

There are other resources, too:

CNN Facts First: This one recently had entries about nine conspiracy theories our president is pushing and a review of his opponent’s speech on Social Security, fracking, and crime. It also fact checks FOX News.

FOX News: We checked numerous sources for a FOX News fact checker but found no indication it has such a service.

ABC News: The Australian Broadcasting Company has a fact-check page but it focuses on that Australia, not the United States. (See below).

Traditional Networks: We searched for independent fact-checking efforts at the big three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and ABC. None of them seem to have their own fact-checking staff that we could determine. But they do report on the fact-checking by other entities.

C-SPAN: Does not appear to have its own fact-checking staff.

Unfortunately there are those who will look at all of these resources and decide to ignore them because they know all of them are liars, fake news, or some kind of joint anti-American conspiracy.

But for those whose minds might be open, even if only for a small sliver of light, they’re worth looking into. They might help convince a few folks that if they’re the only ones going a different direction than the rest of the traffic on a one-way street, it might not be the other drivers who have a problem.

More Great

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(The quality of greatness, explored in our entry for Dr. Frank Crane about a month ago, deserves exploration from a slightly different direction. We’re going to hearing of greatness a great deal in the next two months, so it’s appropriate we offer an additional perspective as Dr. Crane writes about—)

GREATNESS

The greatness of a man lies in his ability to interpret his age.

Such a man must have that rarest of traits and genius: he must instinctively feel his fellow men.

He is not a leader. The whole strong-man theory is a humbug. He is a servant.

The greatest man in the man who comes nearest to executing the will of the people. He is “servant of all,”

If he is a poet, he utters the word they dumbly feel.  If he is an artist, he bodies forth their impotent fancy. If he is a statesman, he materializes their political convictions. If he is an orator or a writer, he says what they all would say. Always behind him is the mass from which he draws his force.

It is this power of submerging one’s self in the current of others’ feeling that is the gift of greatness.

The lawyer is great who loses himself in the interests of his clisents.

The physician is great who gives himself up to his patients, serving the poorest of them as loyally as any subject ever served his king.

The teacher is great who is the exponent of his pupils, the expression of their intellectual curiosity, the will of their highest ambitions.

The workman is great who feels the profit of his employer, the care of his goods, and the perfecting of his work as if it were his own.

The merchant is great who senses his customers, divines their needs, ministers to their wants; and he is greater yet if he feels his responsibility to those he employs, if he is the personal embodiment of the activities of all his working force.

A president, a governor, a senator, a congressman, a mayor, is great if he knows his people; if their conscience is his conscience; if his voice is their thought; if their desires and ideals move his hand and brain.

Homer, Goethe, Voltaire, Shakespeare, spoke their time.

The great men are the manufacture of the people.

David, Caesar, Washington, Napoleon, these knew how to ride the crest of the multitudinous wave.

Even of Jesus no greater thing can be said than that He uttered the heart of all mankind.

Just the facts, ma’am*

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Well, we’ve endured two more political conventions, their tiresome tirades, their excessive exaggerations, their profound puffery, their ferocious flag-waving, their multiple misstatements, and sometimes their litany of lies.

We want to think those we root for in their pursuits of public office are pure in thought, word, and deed.  But we know better.  And we would be better if we were unafraid to challenge them, even those we support, when they mislead us.

One of the greatest responsibilities we have as citizens is to demand truth from those who seek our votes and our money. But experience shows we citizens fail to meet those responsibilities time after time.

It would be nice to say our candidates owe us their integrity.  But politics doesn’t work that way. Integrity often must be forced by those who are picking the men and women who will lead them.

So our conventions are finished. Dancing With the Candidates is down to the finals. Now it’s not Dancing with the Candidates.  It’s a World Wrestling Federation match. In the mud.

No, it isn’t.  It’s more real.

It’s a street fight until November 3. A sweaty, nasty, bloody, anything-goes brawl.

It’s too bad that we who want to be led will too much expect too little of those who want to lead.

One thing is abundantly clear after the conventions.  The busiest people in the country for the next few weeks will be:

Fact-checkers.

We should pay attention to them. We should know when the people who want to be (presumably) the most powerful person in the world aren’t shooting straight with us.  We should notice those who spout conspiracy theories—-and they seem to be more outlandish every day.  Watch out for those who say, “I have heard…” and those who, when challenged to prove their statements say, “I’ll let you know later.”

More than ever, this is a time to tell our candidates, “Prove it,” or because we’re Missourians, “Show me the proof.”

Conservative organizations are going to be especially watchful of liberal candidates. Liberal organizations are going to be especially watchful of conservative candidates.  We should pay attention to both of them.  We should pay attention to those doing their analysis from the middle. And in the end we should think for ourselves despite the plentitude of loud voices on our airwaves telling us they can think for us.  No, they can’t—unless we let them. Have enough citizen responsibility to think for yourself.

There will be carloads of commercials that wave at truth from a distance. Don’t believe them.

There already have been manipulated videos on our social media. Question them.  Better yet, turn off the social media except for person-to-person communication with people you know.

We’ll get all kinds of flyers in the mail that are not worth the postage that sent them.  Recognize them for what they are. Fill up your recycling bins with them.

It will be easy to throw up our hands, abandon our responsibilities to ourselves and to our neighbors, and just mark a ballot so we can say we voted.

Congratulations.  You just trashed your country. Or your state. Or your city.  You just put it in a big blue plastic container and rolled it out to the curb.

CARE, dammit!  Find the truth.  Demand the truth.

After two weeks of political conventions, it should be clear to all of us that we have a responsibility to reach beyond ourselves and understand who is most trustworthy in a time when truth too often takes a back seat to bombast, accusation, misrepresentation and conspiracies.

We won’t find absolute truth from either candidate at the top of our tickets or from some of their supporters. But we have a responsibility to ourselves and to our neighbors from coast to coast and border to border not to elect the biggest liar.  That’s an awful thing to say, isn’t it?  But it’s also the

Truth.

And we have to be honest with ourselves, for ourselves, to determine who that is. Sometimes that means traditional party loyalties have to give way to loyalties to something bigger. Increasingly, it means we have to get our noses away from the social media screens.

Keep up with the legitimate, established fact-checkers.  These campaigns will keep them up all night in pursuit of truths we haven’t heard from our candidates during the day.

Just the facts.  That’s all we should ask for. It’s all we should demand. There are reliable sources that will provide them because our candidates and their surrogates might not.

In a later entry we’ll try to recommend some fact-checking resources.

*Los Angeles Police Detective Joe Friday, badge number 714, the main figure in hundreds of police investigations dramatized on radio and television for decades, never said, “Just the facts, ma’am.”  Snopes.com, one of the longest-running reliable fact checking websites, says that the character typically said, “All we want are the facts, ma’am,” or “All we know are the facts, ma’am.”

The danger of finger-pointing

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Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was summoned to recent congressional committee meetings for what became a partisan public flogging or a partisan public head-patting because of the mess the current administration has put the United States Postal Service in at a critical time. Does he deserve such a flogging or congratulatory head-patting?

The correct answer is “yes,” largely depending on whether you are an R or a D.

The USPS does have problems but the timing of the correction and some of the justifications offered for it have created a climate of suspicion.  Last weekend, the Associated Press ran a lengthy fact-checking article that covered an entire page of our local newspaper. It looked at claims made during the Democratic National Convention by Joe Biden and claims made at various recent times by our president.  Part of the article examined President Trump’s claim that the post office “probably” loses “three or four dollars” on every package it delivers for Amazon. The AP says the truth is that package delivery is NOT the cause but something else is—and that’s where today’s observation fits.

The House has approved $25 billion for the Post Office to make sure it can operate at full speed during the election. Most Republicans opposed it (26 voted with the Democrats) and the bill has to get through the Republican-controlled Senate before the president can veto it—as he has indicated he will.

We have heard precious little discussion by either party in Congress or in the White House about fixing the real cause of USPS’s financial distress.

Long ago someone told me the danger of pointing a finger is that there are three fingers pointing back at you. A few days ago a retired mail carrier friend suggested I look at legislation passed in 2006 as the root cause of the turmoil that has engulfed today’s most visible but perhaps most under-appreciated public servants.

Last year, the Institute for Policy Studies, which bills itself as a “progressive think tank” (and please, let’s not dismiss these findings because it comes from somebody calling themselves “progressive,” another honorable word that has been ruined by raving talk show hosts) issued a study called “How Congress Manufactured a Postal Service Crisis—and How to Fix It.”  The opening paragraphs could not be more clear:

In 2006, Congress passed a law that imposed extraordinary costs on the U. S. Postal Service. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation.

If the costs of this retiree health care mandate were removed from the USPS financial statements, the Post Office would have reported operating profits each of the last six years. This extraordinary mandate created a financial “crisis” that has been used to justify harmful service cuts and even calls for postal privatization. Additional cuts in services and privatization would be devastating for millions of postal workers and customers.”

The study—you can read it on the internet—clearly states that the action of Congress in 2006 placed a burden on the Postal Service that is choking it. If that burden did not exist, we might not be in a crisis ripe for political exploitation because the USPS would be profitable.

Is it fair to blame the Trump administration for today’s postal service brouhaha? Perhaps better, is it fair to blame the administration for taking advantage of the mess Congress created to seek an advantage in this year’s election?  Strong Trump critics will say, “definitely.” Trump supporters are likely to accept the president’s finger-pointing at Amazon and its owner, Jeff Bezos who—as we noted last week—owns a Washington newspaper that aggressively challenges the truth of many Trump statements, as the reason for poor financial performance.

The law was passed when Bush 43 was President and both chambers of the Congress were Republican.  Today’s Republican administration appears to be trying to capitalize on the crisis created by a Republican Congress in an earlier Republican administration.  But it is unfair to put the problem entirely in the lap of the majority party.  Democrats controlled the Senate 2009-2015 and controlled the House 2007-2011 and did nothing to ease or eliminate the problem.

The reality is this: It makes no difference which party created the problem.  Both parties have a responsibility to correct it.  And reducing services instead of correcting bad policy enacted in 2006 is not the responsible step to take, particularly at a time when a worldwide health crisis will keep many voters at home on election day and wanting to use the mails to vote.

Some people on both sides of the aisle need to get their priorities straight.

But when a congressional blunder becomes a matter of seeking political advantage rather than seeking to correct a mistake that is now hampering a public service, correction might be an unrealistic hope absent change in partisan numbers or political attitude in Washington.

Here’s a suggestion:

Although it is too late to do anything now, write letters to your U.S. Senators and your member of Congress asking them to fix the crisis they or their predecessors caused.  We can be sure the letters will be delivered.  We wish we could be as sure that the right people will read them and act in your best interest and the best interest of the people who carried your letter to them.

Congress can point all the fingers it wants to point at somebody else. But it needs to be reminded that the number of fingers pointing at IT as the cause of this crisis is three times as many.

Congress caused the problem. Some of those who were there in 2006 will be expecting the United States Postal Service that they crippled fourteen years ago to put their campaign literature in your mail box telling you what good servants they have been.

It does not feel good in this election year to think the people who bring us that campaign mail have more commitment to service and more public integrity than the people whose mail they are delivering.

Today is what we have

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(By the end of the week our political conventions will have finished, each positively assuring us that the names at the top of the ballot will make us great or build us better, each speaking as if those candidates alone can do these things—as if there are not two other branches of government that could or must  have a say.  Dr. Frank Crane suggests that candidates and their parties and their promises are less important to us the we are to ourselves, not just today but—-)

EVERY DAY

Every day!

In those two words lies the secret of all attainment.

It’s not what we do once, with all our hearts, and with every splendid ounce of strength, that counts so much as the things we’ve been doing every day, whether we felt like it or not.

Every day! Therein is mastery.  The marvelous, velvet, utterly exquisite beauty of such piano-playing of Paderewski’s, or such violin performances as Maud Powell’s—it looks spontaneous but it is the result of many a hateful day’s laborious routine.

Every day! That is the road to perfection.  The speaker who can hold and charm an audience, the debater quick and ready and not to be confused, the baseball player, the woman always socially at ease—everybody, in fact, that can do anything well owes that poise and finish to the slow efforts of every day.

No matter how gifted an actor, how naturally endowed, he cannot be a master without infinite practice.

Young people do not realize the tremendous cumulative power that lies in time.  Take ten years. Say you are twenty. By the time you are thirty what enormous efficiency you might build up if you would only use every day a certain amount of time.

Almost everybody wastes enough hours in ten years to get a doctor’s degree in any university.

In ten years you might be speaking and reading fluently in Spanish or French or Japanese, you might be an authority upon geology, botany, chemistry, English literature, history, or whatever fits your ambition, if you would only be faithful every day.

Every day!  The universe is constructed on routine. The sun rises every day, the stars revolve, the seasons come and go by schedule, your heart beats and your lungs fill and empty as regularly as the clock ticks, every generation of men or of animals is the result of numberless preceding generations, over and over again Nature tries her hand and her matchless perfection is only the stored-up treasure of endless practice.

And in character every day means even more than anywhere else. The most honest man is the man who has been honest every day; the most virtuous woman is she who has behind her present virtue the inertia of a whole life full of virtuous thought and deed; the happiest person is the one who has long practiced being happy, and that soul is coolest and surest in a crisis who every day has schooled himself in self-mastery.

No force is so great in any man as the stored-up power of what he has been doing every day.

(Ignace Paderewski (pronounced Pad-er-efski’) was a Polish statesman, pianist, and composer who, as his country’s new Prime Minister and Foreign Minister signed the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. He was a spokesman for Polish independence who, during a concert tour of the United States, encouraged President Wilson to support an independent Poland as part of the Fourteen Points discussions that led to the treaty. He was 81 when he died in 1941, about two years after Hitler ended Poland’s freedom.

Maud Powell was the first American woman to achieve worldwide notoriety as a violinist. She was among the first instrumentalists to record for the Victor Talking Machine Company’s red seal records, which later became the classical label for RCA Victor’s recordings. Her recordings are still considered a standard for violin performance. She died in 1920, at 52.)

 

 

Ode DeJoy

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(Not to be confused with Schiller’s poem and Beethoven’s composition setting it to music.)

I have a friend who delivered tons of mail in his forty-year career who has a simple answer to what’s going on with the Trump administration and the United States Postal Service: “It’s all Trump and Jeff Bezos.”  Bezos is the owner of Amazon. The President thinks the USPS should charge Amazon a lot more than it does to deliver Amazon’s packages. Bezos also owns the Washington Post which maintains one of the nation’s biggest and best-known fact-checking systems. It reported on July 13 that President Trump had given out more than 20,000 lies and misstatements since taking office. Our president does not like it when someone differs with him.

The Post doesn’t just target our president and it doesn’t just target Republicans. It recently jumped on Amy McGrath’s claim that Mitch McConnell made millions of dollars from China. McGrath is McConnell’s Democratic challenger for his U. S. Senate seat.

I have a friend who remembers when mailmen used to deliver census forms and then take the completed ones to the post office where they were kept until local census workers came in later in the process and determined which four percent of the residents had not replied—and then went out and started knocking on doors.

I have a friend who receives the Catholic Missourian, the weekly newspaper of the Jefferson City Diocese—although in the summer it comes out every two weeks, I understand. He usually receives it on Friday. But recently it arrived a day late. When he checked with the local post office he learned the newspapers had been brought in on Thursday for Friday delivery but the carriers had been told to wait until Saturday—part of the slowdown in service we’ve been hearing about.

For 250 years or so we have been spoiled by the service of postal carriers such as this fellow from about 1910, who have lived by a creed adapted from the writings of Herodotus in 430 B. C.:

It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.

We don’t expect much from our postal service.

—Bring us our mail faithfully.

—If we mail something on time, deliver it on time.

Easier said than done especially when there’s too much snow in our driveway for us to drive out.  But we nonetheless expect to find mail in our mailbox when we struggle through the snow on foot to get there.

Our postal service has become a political football or maybe a pawn in a campaign chess match.  Our president thinks mail-in balloting will be bad for him—-although Republicans can mail in their ballots as well as Democrats.  He’s balking at additional funding for the USPS that would pay for extensive use of mail-in ballots.  He has appointed a Postmaster General whose main qualifications for the job seem to be that he has given a lot of money to the Trump campaign.  Postmaster General Lous DeJoy started removing machines that sort 30-40,000 pieces of mail per hour, presumably to be replaced by machines that can sort 30,000 pieces of mail per MINUTE although we have yet to see any accounts of the new machines being on site and ready to install when the present machines are yanked.  The Kansas City Star says four machines have been taken out in Kansas City and two more in Springfield.

He also banned overtime and late trips by mail carriers, meaning mail not delivered during normal working hours will sit in the post office until the next day, at least—including prescription medications, checks, and other time-sensitive materials.

With those policies and changes, the Postal Service expressed doubts it could handle the volume of mail ballots it will get this year. The volume is expected to jump because an increased number of voters want to vote by mail instead of going to a polling place and increasing possible exposure to the Coronavirus. The announced changes came at an important time in our democratic process and have led to suspicions that our president is using them to limit the number of mail-in ballots that are not expected to go his way.

Suggestions that the postal service is incapable of handling the volume of mail-in ballots that will go into the system increase suspicions the system is being manipulated to affect the outcome of the November election. Under normal circumstances, there should be little doubt the USPS is capable of doing that job.  After all, these are the people who year after year process a Christmas mail load that is likely to be much heavier than the load of mail ballots.  My former mailman friend, who hauled a lot of Christmas presents in his time, finds the election concerns or allegations insulting.

Just as we were about to post this entry, DeJoy announced he was going to “suspend” several proposals that had been moving ahead until after the election.  His quick turn-around came only after twenty states announced they would sue him if he continued with his plans. Yesterday afternoon he said no more changes would be made until after the election “to avoid even the appearance of impact on election mail.”  He went on, “We will deliver the nation’s election mail on time.”

The states drawing up lawsuits are nonetheless wary. Forbes reported yesterday they still plan to file their lawsuits. It would be nice if we could tell you Missouri is one of the twenty states but, alas, we cannot.  In fact, it was not until the Kansas City Star contacted Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and reported last Friday that he had received a letter from the USPS dated July 31 saying the service might not be able to deliver mailed absentee ballots in time for them to be counted because of DeJoy’s policies. The newspaper reported Ashcroft’s office did not appear to have told local election authorities about the letter.

If DeJoy thinks he has defused the controversy with his announcement yesterday, he is likely to be disabused of that notion Friday when he explains himself to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Although the committee is led by Republicans, he won’t be able to avoid anticipated sharp questions from Democrats. As we file these observations, the White House has not blocked his appearance.

Our president, who has supported DeJoy’s plans, has made a completely unproven case that mail-in voting will result in massive voter fraud if he loses. Unsubstantiated voter fraud allegations are a familiar theme to him. Four years ago he appointed former Kansas Secretary of State Chris Kobach to lead an investigation of massive voting fraud (mostly by illegal immigrants, as we recall) in the Northeast. Kobach couldn’t get a whiff of voter fraud.

“Voter fraud” has been a theme of the president’s party for several years.  It was voiced with great passion by supporters of Voter Photo ID legislation enacted in Missouri. Four years ago in this space, we reported looking at every statewide election from the August Primary of 2008 through the November, 2014 general election.  We compiled these statistics when we referred to Voter Photo ID legislation as a “solution in search of a problem.”  We found 18 prosecutions for voter fraud (17 of them in registrations) out of 36-million opportunities in Missouri, less than one for every two-million opportunities. We have heard of NO prosecutions by our Secretary of State for voter fraud since that post in May, 2016.

With a slight bow to fairness when it comes to Voter Photo ID in Missouri we observe that critics argued, as they argue now in the mail-in voting controversy, that the real reason these things are being advocated is to suppress voting by certain demographics that do not endorse the policies of the party in power.  Those critics have been pretty quiet since photo ID went into effect.  We have yet to see any trustworthy studies showing fears of voter suppression have come true because of Photo ID.

Regardless of whether you buy into our president’s unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in mail-in ballots or into suspicions that our postal system is a campaign pawn, we citizens deserve a postal system that does the two simple things mentioned earlier. We citizens deserve and the people who bring us our mail every day deserve to be treated better than we are being treated by those in charge of our country.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calling the House back from its August recess to pass a bill providing the funding needed to make sure the Postal Service can handle the election mail crush. We will suggest in our next entry that the roots of this mess were created fourteen years ago and  it would be good also for her chamber—and the Senate—to clean it up.

Before we go, we anticipate in a few days the first trickle of direct mail political crap arriving in our mail box.  It’s called junk mail because it is junk and it treats the people receiving it as junk. We offer this suggestion to the USPS:  Deliver the newspaper on time to our Catholic friends and delay the political junk mail.

November 4 would be a good day to deliver it.

(About the dedicated mail carrier whose photograph you saw above: We don’t know for sure but we suspect it is a staged picture taken on his first day of work about 1910. Robert Milton Priddy, Sr.,–friends knew him by his middle name—was a rural mail carrier in the Beloit, Kansas area for more than 25 years. He died at the age of 57, three years before his grandson was born.)

Us vs. It—Part XI, Reasons to Act

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I bought something from the internet the other day—a photograph from a company that sells archived news photos from decades ago.  No sales tax was charged by the company, which is in a nearby state.

The purchase is a reminder.

If the state needs money—and it surely does—

There is no better time to finally approve collecting a sales tax on purchases made through the internet.

The Missouri General Assembly has gone to great lengths to avoid enacting such a requirement for a decade or more. It has refused to create a collection policy of our own and it has rejected suggestions Missouri join a multi-state compact that collects sales taxes.

Past efforts have been attacked by those who use a faulty argument to avoid the responsibility needed to enact the bill.  “It’s a tax increase,” opponents claim.

Dishwater!

The state sales tax is not—let me emphasize that, NOT—being increased. If the law requiring the state sales tax be paid on purchases on the internet were to pass, the state tax you and I pay when we buy from an internet vendor would be the same as the tax charged when we buy from a hometown business. I should be able to duck a citizen responsibility to contribute to the well-being of others by buying something through the internet.

The argument in favor of an internet sales tax is even more compelling in today’s plague-mangled economy.  Hundreds of local businesses have closed because of stay-at-home orders. Many have not reopened and some never will reopen.  But one of our neighbors (yours and mine) who owns a brick-and-mortar business knows that customers who used to buy things at that store have been buying them on the internet while the store has been closed.

The problem of local folks visiting stores, checking the prices, and then buying the same thing from an internet vendor already was a problem before virus-caused closings forced consumers to increasingly rely in the internet.  Now the question becomes whether they will go back into the hometown stores when they open?

Passing a law requiring Missourians to pay the same sales tax on internet items that they have to pay for local in-store purchases is more symbolic than profitable for the merchant.  But at the same time, promoting the reopening of brick-and-mortar businesses without taking a step that offers a slight whiff of equality with internet vendors seems pretty inconsistent (although you might have a stronger word).

The need to do this has been increased by an executive order signed by our president that he says will resume the expired supplemental unemployment payments.  The executive order will pay $400 but the states will have to contribute $100.

The legality of the executive order aside, Missouri’s general revenue fund needs every penny it can generate whether for supplemental unemployment payments, virus-fighting efforts or maintaining services even at their reduced levels.

Our state leaders have insisted time after time that testing is the key to controlling the Coronavirus in Missouri.  At this point, it’s anyone’s guess whether Congress and our president can agree on a stimulus package that will include billions of dollars for state testing. Lacking that, it’s hard for someone well detached from the ins and outs of the statehouse these days to imagine where the state will find money for that testing without further wrecking the state budget, let alone where it will find money for its share of unemployment payments without the same result.

Where the state of Missouri would find $100 multiplied by several thousand each week is a troubling question.  The governor already has withheld or vetoed hundreds of MILLIONS dollars to balance the state budget.  Schools are opening and education at all levels has been badly bruised by the necessary budget actions. Inflicting deeper cuts to the biggest places to cut, education and social services, could be tragic at a time when schools, in addition their normal expenses, have to face the costs of keeping students, faculty, and staff safe from the virus.

By making Joe or Josephine Missouri pay the same sales tax on a coat from a Internet Inc., as Sarah and Samuel Showme have to pay for the same coat from a Main Street store, Inc., Missouri’s leaders and lawmakers can send a little positive message to the businesses they want to reopen despite health uncertainties at home by collecting needed funds from consumers who want to avoid a few pennies in sales tax by buying online.

The virus has produced all the justification needed to finally impose an internet sales tax. It won’t entirely solve the state’s financial problems. But it could at least partly equalize the competition for the local dollar, provide at least some of the funding for the state’s contribution to the supplemental jobless benefit, and/or ease the depth of any additional budget cuts or withholdings.

Unfortunately, this is a campaign year and candidates will stampede away from advocating anything that can be called, however erroneously, a tax increase no matter how desperate the virus causes the state to be for additional funds. Perhaps we’ll have to wait until January to see if those whose political futures have been determined by then will screw up the courage to take this step.

Dr. Crane appreciates our imperfections  

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(For the next ninety days or so we will be subjected to hour after hour—in 30-second bites—of attacks and counter-attacks on those seeking our support at the ballot box.  In fact, probably we’ve already had some of that in the primary campaigns. We know it will become intolerable noise until the November elections, though.  Dr. Frank Crane, however, suggests we might find something redeeming in our imperfections as he is—)

IN PRAISE OF FLAWS

The old priest’s pale face lit up with a curious one-sided smile. It was a find face, of a certain marble composure, as if he were a living carven stone rather than flesh and blood; yet there was a glint of humor in his eye, and of wisdom, for the two are akin, though one be the gift of God and the other the harvest of experience.

He spoke to her, a disheveled mass of self-pity and helpless remorse, one of the kind that picks at sin like a child at a hangnail, and said,

“Do not lacerate yourself, lady. Sack-cloth and ashes have virtue when applied to the body, according to tradition, but I know of no warrant for applying irritants to the soul. Your fault is the fault, it is true, and for sin, even the smallest, there is no excuse, but I question if you are the worse for it.

“Far be it from me to say a word that might encourage one to evil, condone heresy in the slightest degree, or justify imperfection. But the smooth polish of angelic sanctity is not for mortals. To be human is not the unpardonable sin.

“So, while I may not say a word for wrongdoing, yet I may speak in praise of flaws. For it is not by their strength but by their weakness that human creatures get their hold on one another.

“No one has a mightier grasp of love than a baby, that holds its mother in a grip of steel and binds strong men to its service; and the secret of this strange influence is but the child’s sheer helplessness….

“And doubtless it is because we are so blind and helpless, stumble and grope so pitifully, and are altogether so marred with ignorance that the divine hand is reached out to help us.  Thus the Almighty is the servant of the feeble, as it is written, He is servant of all, for it is ever the business of the strong to serve the weak.

“It is not the classic beauty in a face that moves us. Hearts hang upon the little pegs of imperfection. If we were perfect no one would love us; we might be admired but not loved. Let us then be thankful for our tentacular blemishes. They are like the little tendrils of climbing vines; by them we cling and rise.

You recall what the cardinal said, in Ariadne in Mantua.* ‘There is, I notice, even in yoru speaking voice,’ he said to the singer Diego, ‘a certain quality such as folk say melts men’s hearts; a trifle hoarseness, a something of a break, which mars it as mere sound but gives it more power than that of sound.’

“Hate not yourself, dear lady, because you are mortal; but rather study to make use of your limitations, that you may weave all your little failings into a strong web of success. Souls can go forward even by falling. Walking has been called a succession of forward fallings. And more people slip and blunder into happiness than capture happiness by shrewdness.”

Whereupon the lady went her way, a little heartened and much puzzled, while the good priest murmured to himself: “Heaven forgive me if I have said anything she could understand.”

(*Ariadne inMantua, a Romance in Five Acts, was written in 1903 by prolific supernatural fiction British author Violet Paget 1856-1935), who wrote under the pen name of Vernon Lee. Thomas B. Mosher wrote in a foreword to the book:  “As for her vanished world of dear dead women and their lovers who are dust, we may indeed for a brief hour enter that enchanted atmosphere. Then a vapour arises as out of long lost lagoons, and, be it Venice or Mantua, we come to feel ‘how deep an abyss separates us—and how many faint and nameless ghosts crowd round the few enduring things bequeathed to us by the past.’” The work is available to read on the internet.)

Invasion

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Our president has decided cities with Democratic mayors are so hopelessly overridden by violent crime that the only solution is an invasion by federal forces who presumably will get rid of the crime problem.

Your observer isn’t sure criminals in those cities should start “shaking in their boots” because of his rhetoric, but he sure scares the hell out of me.

His insertion of 114 federal law enforcement agents into Portland a couple of weeks ago ostensibly to protect the federal courthouse from “anarchists” (a nice phrase borrowed from the late 19th and early 20th centuries) has shown to many of his critics that he is a man with a can.

Not a man with a PLAN.  A man with a can

—of gasoline.

The behavior of those agents, captured on cell phones and in stories of some of those hauled into vans and spirited away to lockups, does not indicate that this strategy is providing any significant increase in the protection of the general population, nor is it showing any concern for stopping violent crime—unless you consider all protestors to be in the same league with murderers, rapists, armed robbers, arsonists, and others of that ilk.

Based on reports we have read and seen, the presence of these forces has intensified the protests in Portland.

A few days ago Portland’s mayor was among those gassed by federal agents. Our president found that gleeful. “They knocked the hell out of him,” he declared.

How he wants to “help the cities” is something few of us could ever have imagined and few of us want to contemplate. “We’ll go into all of the cities, any of the cities. We’ll put in fifty-thousand, sixty-thousand people that really know what they’re doing. They’re strong. They’re tough. And we can solve these problems so fast,” he told a FOX interviewer last week, adding, “but as you know, we have to be invited in.”

He says it but he doesn’t believe it—the part about being invited in, that is.

So far he has sent or threatened to send agents to Kansas City and Portland, Chicago and Albuquerque.

Let’s do some invasion math—-because what he’s proposing isn’t assistance. It’s invasion.

Number of mayors asking for hundreds (and ultimately thousands perhaps) of agents to come in to fight violent crime: 0

Number of governors who have asked for such actions by the Trump administration: 0

Number of congressional delegations who have sought this “help” in their states: 0

One of the first surges of federal agents was the insertion of 225 of them into Kansas City to help catch and prosecute violent criminals. The administration says it is sending more.

Number of violent crime charges the administration claims have been filed in Kansas City since Operation Legend began: 200

Number of charges really filed by federal prosecutors: 1

Attorney General William Barr last week, speaking of Operation Legend, said, “Just to give you an idea of what’s possible, the FBI went in very strong into Kansas City and within two weeks we’ve had 200 arrests,”

That was news to the U. S. Attorney who told inquisitive reporters for The Kansas City Star that his office has filed ONE charge and it was against a guy with a drug conviction on his record who had a gun. Convicted felons cannot have guns under the law.

Last weekend, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said on FOX News Sunday he welcomed the federal agents in his town, but for a “pinpointed and targeted focus on solving murders.”  But he was frustrated by our president’s rhetoric about the George Floyd Protests and the Black Lives Matter movement because “that’s not the case in Kansas City.”

“What we don’t need is more fuel on the fire from federal agents to make, I think, an exciting political issue.”

He told NBC’s Chuck Todd our president’s talk about Black Lives Matter protests causing murders is “asinine” as well as “inaccurate and unfair” and does nothing to address the real issue—national gun trafficking that make guns readily available on cities’ streets.

There are many people, whether they are supporters of our president or supporters of someone else, who argue the cause of states’ rights. These actions should provide fertile ground for spirited arguments on both sides of whether the federal government has a right to invade cities at the whim of a president, a person who thinks he can order fifty or sixty thousand people “who really know what they’re doing” into a city for whatever purpose he might have—including looking good to his political base by creating “an exciting political issue.” Forget about any invitation.

States rights advocates, in our observations, generally seem to fall on the right side of the political spectrum.  But we haven’t heard or seen any of those folks questioning the administration’s uninvited invasion of cities as a violation of states rights. We might have missed it, but the issue deserves louder discussions than we have heard. There is no doubt that discussion will take place. Among judges.

The administration’s choice of locations for these invasions also is curious. The most recent FBI final non-preliminary data (whatever that means) that we’ve seen for cities with the highest violent crime rate lists none of these cities among the top 20 cities for violent crime. Kansas City is 23rd.

It is interesting that our president was not as concerned about mobilizing federal forces to fight a pandemic as he has been in fighting mostly-legal protests (destroying public buildings is hardly legal). You might recall that early in the pandemic, states were pleading with the administration to help them find the equipment needed to fight the virus, particularly the protective equipment needed to protect those on the front lines.  But the states were told to fend for themselves, that federal help was a “last resort,” at a time when many states were seeing the federal government in precisely that way and our president said he felt no responsibility for the spread of the virus.

The administration’s handling of the pandemic has undermined our president’s re-election hopes.  He hopes to regain that ground by his “tough on crime” approach.  A key question for the public to consider is whether his approach has been appropriate in either case.

He relied on the Tenth Amendment for his defense that fighting the virus was a state responsibility. States and cities see Tenth Amendment as their defense on the local issue of crime.  This crime-fighting strategy already is headed to the courts. It appears the pandemic defense is headed to the ballot box.

The polls indicate most potential voters consider his response (or non-response, depending on the way the question was answered) in the spring produced tragic results. We can only hope the crime fighting strategy of the summer does not also turn tragic before the courts define the bounds of presidential power exercised or suggested by the man with a can.

(For those who lean right who see this entry as an attack on them, we plan our next entry to question the left, with the rights of states at the center of that argument, too.)

Us vs. It—Part X, Becoming Invisible

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When you were a child, did you at one time believe you could become invisible if you closed your eyes?   Or that some evil being (a parent with discipline on its mind) would go away?

We learned the hard way sometimes—-didn’t we?—that closing our eyes was not a good strategy.

We are going to dive deeper into current political/health issues than we like but the thought won’t go away.

Our president appears to still believe that closing his eyes to a deadly situation will make it go away.  If it wasn’t for all those tests, we wouldn’t have a problem, he seems to say.  In this case, the old saying that “Ignorance is bliss” is most certainly not operative.

The Washington Post reported this week that the administration is trying to block a proposal from Senate Republicans for billions of dollars in the next stimulus bill to be spent on conduct testing and contact tracing.  This comes at a time when the number of cases is steeply climbing in many states and the rate of increase is clearly more than the number of cases found through testing. The increase is so steep that some states are struggling to get test results done in any kind of a timely manner.

The effects of the virus on the economy have driven states such as Missouri to make extraordinarily painful cuts to services to their citizens, especially in education at a time when there is heavy pressure to reopen schools to in-person classes. If the new stimulus bill does not include money for improved testing, what will happen at the state level?

Testing likely will not improve and might decline because the states have no way to finance critically-needed improved testing while maintaining even low-level services. That will mean more undiscovered carriers of the virus, more hospitalizations, and more deaths.  It is difficult to see any more hopeful scenario.

Of course, we have been assured, this virus will just go away some day?  But how many people will it take away with it?  And should not this be a concern of our president?  The answer is “yes,” and here’s why it’s important to him that he realizes that.

Let’s see if we can frame this situation in language that our president can understand by changing the focus from cases to deaths. If the stimulus bill does not include billions of dollars for testing, more people will die because their illness will not be recognized in time for them to receive life-saving treatment. That’s not a stretch. It’s a simple A plus B equals C.

As we compose this observation, Johns Hopkins University (as of 11:27 yesterday morning) counted 141,426 Coronavirus deaths in the United States.  The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington is projecting 224,546 deaths nationally by November 1, a week before the election.

The Gallup Organization, a polling company whose numbers have been respected for decades, found last month that only 39% of likely voters approve of our president’s job performance.  If that rating holds until November, that would translate (using the IHME projection) into 87,572 Trump supporters who will be dead by then. Can our president risk losing that many potential voters?

If his attitude does not change, he will not have become invisible by closing his eyes although 87,572 of his possible voters will have become invisible because the virus will have closed theirs.