Category Archives: voting

Massive Repudiation

Posted on by
2

It was not just a historic election—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No.

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

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

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

Government needs to be operated like a business.

You can’t cut your way to prosperity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s Talk Tennessee Some More

Posted on by
Reply

Maybe this will help you decide how to vote tomorrow, if you haven’t visited the county clerk’s office already.  There’s a lot that backers of Amendment 5 have kept from you as they hold up Tennessee as a utopian land of no income tax.

Although we’ve been told we won’t be paying sales taxes on all kinds of things, here is what your Tennessee friends and relatives pay extra for.  We thank Madras Accountancy for this information.

The basic state sales tax rate is 7 percent. Our state rate now is 4.225.  Local sales taxes are allowed for another 2.75%.  Citing the Tax Foundation, Madras says the rate applies to clothing, furniture, electronics, restaurant meals or other prepared foods, some digital products, motor vehicle purchase—familiar to us.  However:

A sales tax also is applied to gasoline and fuel products. We don’t do that unless you buy a can of oil, for example.

Groceries are taxed, although at four percent—including the rotisserie chicken, deli meals, candy and sugary snacks, soft and energy drinks, dietary supplements.

If you download or stream things, you’re likely to be charged a sales tax in Tennessee for such things as e-books and digital text books, downloadable music and movies, streaming subscriptions if the provider had an office in the state; computer software downloads and licenses, cloud-based software and SaaS platforms.

What’s exempt in Tennessee—

Prescription drugs and insulin, medical devices and durable medical equipment—such things as oxygen tanks and wheelchairs, farm equipment and agricultural supplies, some textbooks, machinery used in manufacturing or processing, and things you’re going to resell.

Services charge sales taxes.  Car repairs and replacement parts, appliance servicing, extended warranties and service contracts, pre-written software (including cloud-based tools), internet and telecommunications services, lodging and short-term rentals, as well as parking services and storage units.

We have a lot of special district taxes or specific taxes for such things as conservation, soil conservation efforts, state parks, police and fire safety, etc., that will continue because they’re part of the state constitution.  All of those will add to the basic state tax.

Supporters also talk of lowering property taxes—-which are the life blood of our schools, local roads and bridges, and city and county governments (do you know that two cents of your property taxes are earmarked for the state blind pension fund?).

No income tax and lowered property taxes sound good but we could be setting ourselves up for some difficult financial times if we buy the simplistic campaign arguments of supporters of Amendment 5.

As mentioned earlier—-we shouldn’t want to be Tennessee, nice as it is to visit.  We should expect our leaders to show us how we can be something better than 34th or lower.

Do We Really Want To Be Like Tennessee?

Posted on by
Reply

Advocated for Amendment 5, the income tax elimination, like to point to Tennessee as a state that flourishes without an income tax.

As usual, campaigns—whether personal or policy in nature—cherry-pick simple issues and dislike honest discussion of the complexity of our way of life.

The Pro-Five campaign has been long on deception.  Equaling Tennessee is not big deal. In most cases our lives will be no better if we decide to move from being 30-something in sales taxes to Tennessee’s 7th highest in the nation.

I don’t want to be like Tennessee. I want to be Missouri—the best Missouri

Let’s look below the deception and see if the things that really matter in how we live are worth voting for 5.

The newest ranking of states by U.S. News says it would not be much of an improvement.  Among the fifty states, Tennessee ranks 24th.  Missouri is 31st.

Ending the income tax might please Missouri’s rich folks but it will not appreciably benefit Missourians as a whole.  U.S. News ranked the states in eight categories and in 22 subcategories.  Here is how we match up with Tennessee, the sweetheart of the Pro-Five set: The numbers on the left are Missouri. Tennessee is on the right.,

44  Crime and Corrections 40

22  Economy  13

32  Education  31

17  Fiscal Stability 5

43 Healthcare  39

35  Infrastructure  39

17 Natural Resources 34

8  Opportunity  22

The survey breaks down the categories this way:

CRIME AND CORRECTIONS

35 Corrections Outcomes  8

40 Public Safety  46

ECONOMY

9 Business Environment 17

28 Employment 15

34 Growth 11

EDUCATION

30  Higher Education 37

27 Pre-K-12 20

FISCAL STABILITY

18 Long-term stability 1

18 Short-term stability 22

HEALTHCARE

40 Healthcare Access  37

39 Healthcare Quality 21

39 Public Health  48

INFRASTRUCTURE

22 Energy 31

33 Internet Access 13

36 Transportation 14

NATURAL RESOURCES

23 Air and Water Quality 16

20 Pollution  39

OPPORTUNITY

12 Affordability 17

34 Economic Opportunity 39

14 Equality 26

You can go to the U. S. News website to get some breakdowns of these categories.

Here is the main point:  Missouri’s goal is not to be as good as Tennessee but to be BETTER THAN TENNESSEE.  That is going to take some really deep and non-partisan (if there’s any chance of that) policy-making that sees our state holistically and encourages Missourians to see beyond themselves.

Abraham Lincoln told Congress in 1861 that circumstances had forced a break from the status quo: “As our case is new, we must think and act anew.”

We the people, and those we elect must not be afraid of thinking and acting anew if we want a better state.  A simplistic step being offered Tuesday that favors some and disadvantages many others is the wrong direction to go.

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Moving on to the pithy observations:

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

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

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

-0-0-0-

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

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

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

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

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

000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(picture credits: Instagram)

Heather

Posted on by
Reply

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

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

0-0-0-0-0-0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

Notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facebook:

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

YouTube:

watch?v=NoyiHAMTk3g

X:

atrupar/status/2078136910694715775

i/status/2078225308503671116

rcohen/status/2077528414852984883

Bluesky:

mcopelov.bsky.social/post/3mquj46i4hk2r

muellershewrote.com/post/3mqspe3ohnk2r

marcelias.bsky.social/post/3mquxehtpf22t

Instagram:

p/C712zy5Nk-X/?hl=en

Amendment 1 

Posted on by
Reply

(We intended to post this last Friday but it didn’t make it (we don’t think it did anyway)

Missouri is one of eight states without state park admission fees. Amendment 1 maintains that distinction.

We might think Amendment One would be a no-brainer.  It extends a popular, small, sales tax for ten more years.  But those disposed to vote “No” on everything next month might add a touch of uncertainty to this issue.

Voting “no” on everything is irresponsible.  So is voting “yes.”  Government, even something so small as one-tenth of a cent, requires responsible thought.

This one-tenth of a cent sales tax is earmarked for financing state parks and programs retarding soil erosion. When it was initially approved, Missourians weren’t so sure it was a good idea.  It was a 50.1-49.9 approval, about 1700 votes..  But it was renewed with a 69% favorable vote in 1988,  renewed again eight years later with two-thirds of the vote, with a 71% majority in 2006 and most recently almost 80% in 2016.  It has won with an average of about 71.5%.

Renewal should easy. But in 1984 it was on the ballot with  a Kansas City proposal to let the city issue bonds without voter approval if two-thirds of the property owners in a special benefit district wanted them. Fifty-nine percent of the voters said “no” on that one.

The third issue seemed benign—renaming the Department of Consumer Affairs, Regulation, and Licensing (CARL) the Department of Economic Development. It passed 61-39 percent, so we know voters were discriminating in casting their ballots.

DNR observes, “Since 1984, Missouri farmers have implemented more than 295,000 structural and management conservation practices on cropland, hayland, pastureland and woodlands. Through these conservation efforts, Missouri has stopped more than 194 million tons of soil from eroding, enough to fill the lanes of I-70 from St. Louis to Kansas City over 52 feet high. These practices were supported by over $975 million from the Parks, Soils and Water Sales Tax since 1984.

And what do our state parks get?  “Free admission to all state parks and historic sites,” and these other bullet points—

  • Enriches visitor experiences with improvements, such as the new Spirit Trail and playground at Knob Noster State Park, a new visitor center at Deutscheim State Historic Site and upgraded playgrounds at Bothwell Lodge, and Bennett Spring state parks.
  • Offers a variety of overnight accommodations from walk-in campsites to full service cabins and modern lodges.
  • Enhances campground amenities such as upgraded electric, showerhouses and restrooms.
  • Improves accessibility, including track chairs, 360-degree virtual tours and tram tours for senior citizens.
  • Provides ongoing maintenance and repair of more than 2,000 structures, 3,000 campsites and 1,000 miles of trail.

We are proud of our state parks.  We like not to see soil erosion providing a problem for our streams.  It’s only a tenth of one percent. We’ve gotten our money’s worth from this little tax and we should keep getting it.

-0-

Amendment 5

Posted on by
Reply

We pay income taxes at our house because we know that we have to pay for the things we expect government to provide for us at various points in our lives. We’re both retired and we live on a flexible income rather than one popularly described as “fixed.”  But Amendment Five nonetheless is more ugly sister to us than it is Cinderella.

I don’t think I can count how many times our legislature has cut this or that tax with the promise that it will bring more businesses to our state, that it will create more jobs, or even that it will keep us from losing another congressman.

If all of those promises were true, our Center State would be bursting with national company headquarters and international trade offices and hundreds of new jobs. But since we aren’t, the solution to the problem might not lie in cutting taxes again.

Supporters of Amendment 5 repeat the same tired promises.  They’re bombarding us with manipulative advertising that never addresses the specifics of the proposal. We expect opponents to respond in similar fashion, reminding us again that political advertising and truth are, at best, cousins.

Governor Kehoe has trotted out the moth-eaten Republican statement that, “State government doesn’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem, and continuing to spend faster than we grow our economy is not a sustainable path forward.”

So the answer is to cut funding for services Missourians want our government to supply to them?  Or to shift the burden of taxation?

How long will we have to wait this time for the economic boom to arrive and everything comes up roses for me and for you, too?

Continue reading →

The People Will Not Be Defeated 

Posted on by
1

I walked out of the Missouri Supreme Court building last Tuesday and saw large crowd across the street chanting:

“The People,

United

Will Not Be Defeated.”

It was a “People Not Politicians” demonstration urging the court to throw out the new congressional district map enacted by the legislature  to protect President Trump from a new Congress that would hold him more responsible for his acts than his timid GOP Solons are doing now.

Later the group crossed the street and paraded in front of the court building.

—-and about four hours later, the court ruled against People Not Politicians on all three cases it had heard that morning.

Please do not take this to suggest people should not gather for this purpose, but protest demonstrations and marches in these situations are of limited utility.

Rallies to get and to keep people involved in public policy-setting are important. But in terms of forcing a change in direction by government far more is required.

Every year during a legislative session, thousands of people representing one cause or another, or one profession or another, organize “Day at the Capitol” events when they bus in dozens of people, many of whom have no experience in Capitol politics, to go to legislative offices to make their cases. For many, perhaps most, of these people, this is the only time they relate to their lawmaker, who usually is in the chamber working on legislative business.  So they drop off some brochures or information packets and then check their lists to see whose office they will visit next.

Days at the Capitol join demonstrations and marches, in general, with having little lasting impact.

Here are some things that do work:

Money.

Sayings such as “Money greases the wheels of politics,” or “Money is the lifeblood of politics” are, unfortunately, part of our system of government. This is not to say that those we elect can be bought, at least not directly.  But money buys lobbyists. Money for campaigns speaks loudly.

It is often said that money doesn’t buy politicians; it just buys access to politicians. However, the more access you can have, the more influence you might be able to exercise. That is the world they live in. It is wrong, however, to assume that all who live in this world are corrupt. In all my forty-some years of covering Missouri government, probably no more than twenty legislators and state officers were sent to prison or removed from their jobs, less than two percent of all of the people I covered in the pressure cooker of Missouri politics.

When your legislators drive across the bridge or under the viaducts to enter Jefferson City, they are entering a bubble that has a tendency to be all-absorbing of their attention.  It is a special world where the focus of those working in it is entirely on the issues in front of them. Home can become a long ways away.  The pressure is enormous and it grows even greater as the pages are peeled off of the calendar.

On Tuesday, the day the Supreme Court heard the redistricting cases, the House and the Senate met for the 68th time this year.

The session ended after 71 working days. Here’s what the lawmakers were facing: 1,002 Senate bills and resolutions introduced this year and 2,101 bills and resolutions introduced in the House—by our count. That’s 3,103 proposals, many of them duplicates or more.

The legislative process becomes a highly-selective and highly subjective matter. What goes on in the Capitol is an intense winnowing that will produce, in a good year, 100-125 agreements on legislation. This year, the total was about 90, a big improvement over recent years when a few members of the Senate decided that if they could not get their way, the large majority wouldn’t get anything done.

About twenty of those bills each year detail the way the state will spend money on programs and services that people want or need.  Even the most skilled lobbyist for even the wealthiest interest group realizes that legislative sessions resemble a crap shoot. Few things are guaranteed from the outset. Not even the governor is guaranteed approval of his issues.

It is easier to get some things approved when one party occupies two-thirds of both seats in the House and Senate—such as the protect-the-President redistricting plan upheld by the Supreme Court last Tuesday. Many of the protestors likely would have asserted that some words carved into a Missouri Senate wall were clearly ignored: “Nothing is politically right that is morally wrong.”

Noble words carved into Capitol stone are easier said than honored at times, in a system that is shaped by humans.

None of this should be considered excuses. It’s just the real world.

While all of this might sound as if there is no hope for principled protestors such as the People Not Politics demonstrators Tuesday, there is hope.

The congressional districts are drawn presumably to change our 6-2 Republican delegation in the United States House to 7-1. Even some Republicans have admitted publicly that the new maps should not be considered a predetermined result. They know a lot of public opinion can be swayed between now and November.

If that is going to be the case, Tuesday’s marchers will have to be more effective at home than they have been in Jefferson City. One day at the Capitol cannot replace many well-organized days on the streets at home. Their cause is more persuasive among the voters than among the lawmakers and judges. No Republican candidate should feel comfortable in their re-election campaigns this year, especially since the court has upheld that map. Donald Trump can be his party’s own worst enemy regardless of congressional district lines. The PNP demonstrators can become a formidable force if they organize at home and advocate against those who support President Trump in spite of all of his sins—especially those who passed the redistricting bill that manipulates our political system.

The battleground is not in front of the Supreme Court building. It is in the cities and counties of each congressional district and each legislative district. Redistricting can become a major issue against the party that did it, whether it’s the legislators who drew the lines or the congressional candidates who want to take advantage of them.

The Republicans have gotten what they wished for. But you know the old saying about being careful that what you wish for because what you got can become an issue of voter retribution.

This is not a suggestion that all of the rascals should be turned out.  It is, instead, an observation of how those opposed to the redistricting scheme can turn it against the scheme’s advocates and a warning to those advocates to be prepared in their own defense.

In 2016, Senator Ted Cruz told ABC’s Face the Nation, ““If we’re given the White House and both houses of Congress and we don’t deliver, I think there will be pitchforks and torches in the streets. And I think quite rightly,” a metaphorical reference to England’s Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 against a perceived unjust government.

Will the Supreme Court marchers from last Tuesday go home and become the organizers and the activists—the pitchfork and torch carriers—whose biggest and most effective protest will be at the ballot box?

Will they create a united people who will not be defeated?

We’ll all see an answer in a little more than five months.

Don Jr., Sends Me an Email

Posted on by
Reply

I’m going through my phone messages Saturday afternoon and I come across one from 571-470-0894.

The message says, “Hi, it’s Don Jr. My father an….”

I don’t know any Don Juniors who would have my phone number. And the message doesn’t tell me why I should care about his father.  He’s only an “an.”

An what?

An engineer?

An astronaut?

An animal lover who wants me to donate 19 dollars a month so I can get an adorable plush toy?

An alien?

And why would a Don Jr., address me, someone he’s never met (because I don’t think I ever met him) is so casual a way?

I’ve known several people named Don although I don’t know any Don Juniors, or I don’t think I do.

So I go on the internet and check several sites that will look up phone numbers and after each one of them takes several minutes of my time they want me to pay thirty dollars or something to find out who belongs to this number.

By now I’m thinking this must be a burner phone and we know burner phones are used by blackmailers and the like.  But I know all of my family is safe so this must be a fake blackmailer—maybe one of those calls from someone who says, ”Grandpa, I’m down here in Alabama and I’ve been arrested and I need you to send me $500 to get out of jail.”  I got one of those once and my “grandson” didn’t seem to know his first name so I began to think this was a con.  So I hung up.

Well, I decided to open the message to see if Don Junior had a last name.

The rest of the sentence added a “d” to the “an.” And it told none other than Donald Trump Junior was concerned about my voting status.   “My father and I (he didn’t mention his name so I wondered if there’s some reason he’s embarrassed to do so) need you to do one thing: update your voter verification record. Robert, go to—(hmmmm, I thought, this is strange. The only time anyone calls me “Robert” is when I have an appointment with someone on my increasingly long list of doctors that have accumulated with each passing year and a nurse says it’s my turn for whatever ceremony I’m about to undergo.).

Well, it gave me an email address to open but I didn’t at first because opening those unsolicited things means a raft of future emails that I move to the Spam folder without looking. But I gambled because Don’s dad must be a pretty important guy to want this kind of information from me.

So I took a gamble and clicked on it. It’s labeled “The Official 2025 Voter Verification Questionnaire,” and we all know that when the word “Official” is on something, it is not something to be ignored.

The message invited me to tap on a website—

And when I did, there popped up a picture of a very serious—in fact he looked pretty pitiful, like a lost soul who needed a shave—badly—Don Jr. (Remember Emmett Kelly, the famous circus clown known as “Weary Willie?”  Well, he looked kind of like that although Don Jr. was dressed better.

Weary Willie always carried a head of lettuce that he gave a leaf from  to people in the audience, symbolizing his good heart because all he could afford to give people was a lettuce leaf. I had my suspicion that Willie’s lettuce wasn’t the kind of lettuce we’d eventually get around to discussing in this “survey.”

His father—-again, his name was not mentioned so I wondered why he was hiding his father’s name—“needs every Republican reading this message to update their official voting record.”  Then red ink—as in a dramatically increased federal deficit—the message said, “”With enough feed back nothing can stop us from making America great again.”  I was asked to fill out a form that asked it I agreed that only American Citizens should be allowed to vote.  I had only a yes-no choice but I would like have asked, “Who decides who is good enough to be an American citizen,” but Don apparently hoped I would fill out this form without thinking and I have some friends who think that would make me a regular MAGA person which I am not and besides it’s unfair to stereotype many otherwise intelligent people that way. Shame on my friend Don for wanting me to treat so many of my friends like that. I know them better than he does, apparently.

“Are you an American citizen?” was the next question.   If I’m not why did you contact me? If I say “yes” are you going to have the Department of Homeland Security see if I lied?

“Could you prove your American citizenship?”  Can you?  Why should I trust someone who looks at me like a circus clown?

Please confirm my zip code.  You have my area code and that ‘s enough. I expect to get a lot of phone calls at meal times from you and I don’t want to get mail.

Did I vote in the 2024 Presidential election?  That’s supposed to be a secret, or have you bothered to read election laws?  It’s none of your business.

If so, who did I vote for?  President Trump, Kamala Harris (wait a minute. If Trump can carry a title for this election, shouldn’t my other choice be VICE PRESIDENT HARRIS just to put things on a courteous and equal footing.)   I also thought that if I said I voted for “other,”  there would be a following question asking if that person was a transexual, gay, brown or black or a question accusing me of perjury if I had indicated I really was a Republican (which I am not; I am a radical independent although using the word “radical” might be dangerous in this context.).

He wanted to know what state I voted in, if I voted.  Well, he knows my area code so he must know where I voted, or where I likely voted, if a voted, so why ask?

Did I cast my vote by mail, in person, or did I not vote. You already know whether I voted so the last alternative is silly.  Actually, I voted absentee because I might be out of town on election day (and I was.  Just to make sure I was within the law, I drove outside the city limits, turned around and came home so I could say I was out of town—-although I think that qualification ended during the Pandemic.).

Do I want free and fair elections?  I certainly do, which is why I find attempts to redraw congressional district just to benefit one old man who is scared that he might have to face some consequences if he doesn’t do all he can to do something he has falsely accused others of doing odious.

Do I think voters should have to show photo ID before voting? Ehhh.  I have a driver’s license and I registered in person and the election folks at my precinct know me by name but, okay, if you insist, I’ll make sure I have a government issued ID card. My driver license will do it although I’ve lost some weight since the picture was taken.

Do I identify as a Republican?  What’s a Republican these days?  For that matter, what’s a Democrat?  Why should I identify with either?

Do I support Free Speech?  Of course I do.  But your dad—I assume that’s who you’re asking all of this information for—apparently does not.  So sue me. I’d be honored.

Do I believe big tech is censoring Republicans. Define big tech. Do Elon Musk and DOGE constitute big tech?  Do I believe Republicans want to censor anybody who doesn’t worship a certain creator of monuments to himself?  Ask the head of the FCC.

Do I believe our country is better off under President Biden and Kamala Harris? Have you noticed that they are not in charge of things anymore?

Which issue facing our country concerns you the most moving forward?  Well, I think moving forward is a big issue.

And then we get down to the real reason that I should  verify my voter record.  “Can we count on you to give $10 to ensure Senate Republicans can fight back against extremist Democrats in the Senate?”   No. In fact you should send me ten dollars for the time I spent filling out your fake “update.”

Plus, you said at the start your father wanted me to do only one thing. I would have filled in a lot of blanks, which is more than one thing. And then making a donation is another.

Don Junior, I am starting to think you weren’t honest with me from the start. But be assured that my opinion of you has not changed.

I was given a chance to contribute more.  Let me calculate my hourly rate and I’ll let you know how much YOU owe ME for considering  your, uh, survey.

At the bottom in little print is the notice that I had been given 25 minutes to ensure my response was recorded. However, ”the timer has expired, but you can still donate below!”  And I was given several choices ranging from $35 to$1,000 or “other.”

And in little print I was told my contribution “will benefit the NRSC.”

“Nurse?” I muttered.  What does this have to do with nursing?   And why are nurses interested in my voting record?

Then this “survey” really goes off the rails because it warns me that those dirty Democrats are “ALWAYS fund raising.  ALWAYS organizing. ALWAYS plotting their comeback.”  Think of Snidely Whiplash, who surely must be a Democrat in the eyes of Willie—or, I mean Don Jr.

“The only answer is consistent monthly support from patriots who refuse to blink.”

I’m sorry, but this patriot is presently tied up supporting NPR and Public Broadcasting. When they raise funds, they don’t try to hide behind FAKE surveys.

Then there’s a FLASH POLL that doesn’t quite meet the standards most legitimate polls use to formulate questions. “Should Congress DEFUND every radical left-wing organization trying to destroy our democracy? Vote YES and pledge another gift…to help us win!”

Does “every radical left-wing organization mean I should not give money to the Democratic Party?  Our two parties are in such disarray that I think I will make my donation to the Whigs.

Then we were told “Campaign Finance Law requires us to collect your employment information.”  Which campaign law is that?   And does it also require me to give you the phone number you asked for?

I’d prefer you not have it.  I get enough calls about Medicaid while I’m trying to each breakfast, lunch, or dinner.  I don’t need to be getting calls about nurses.

(Photo Credits: Emmett Kelly—State Historical Society of Missouri; Snidely—ClipArtMax.com; Don Junior—Don Junior, I guess)

-0-

A Congressman Steps Down; Thousands Protest 

Posted on by
Reply

It would be nice if the headline reflected reality.  But in the case of Congressman Sam Graves, a native of Tarkio in the far northwest corner of Missouri, it’s not his retirement that has triggered the protests.  We’re going to offer some quick, surface, observations about these two separate events and how Missouri’s chaotic 2026 elections just got more interesting.

I remember Sam Graves mostly because he caused me some sleepless nights. More on that later.

Sam is now 62. He has served 26 of those years in Congress. He might just be hitting his prime and he’s leaving. The website legistorm.com calculates the average age of members of the U.S. House is 58 (for all of Congress it’s 61.5). However, he has served twice as long as the average length of service for U.S. Representatives. In fact, Graves is 32nd in seniority among the 435 members of the House (the Dean of the House is Kentucky Congressman Harold Rogers who is 88 and in his 45th year, his 23rd term and he will seek a 24th.).

The longest-serving Congressman from Missouri was Clarence Cannon, from Elsberry, in northeast Missouri. He died in office after 41 years 69 days and planning for more before a fatal heart attack in 1964. He ranks 29th as the longest-serving member of the U.S. House, 49th  on a list that also includes Senators.

In 1963, the year Graves was born, country music star Jim Reeves put out a song by fellow singer and songwriter Bill Anderson called “I’ve Enjoyed About as Much of This as I Can Stand.”  We don’t know if he has heard the song but in joining 35 other Republicans who are leaving, we wouldn’t be surprised if several of them felt that way (there are 21 Democrats who have decided there’s more to life, too).

Already, several fellow Republicans and at least three Democrats have filed or expressed an interest in filing for his seat and it would be no surprise if the numbers did not increase on both sides.

The Sixth Congressional District is a rural one that covers the entire sparsely-settled rural north Missouri—36 of our 114 counties. It has been solidly conservative for a long, long time.

But the political climate nationwide seems to be changing. Last weekend there were at least 33 “No Kings” rallies in Missouri, nine in the Kansas City area, eight in the St. Louis area, thirteen outstate and three more in northwest Missouri.

Here is something to ponder for the sixth district.  A “No Kings” rally in Quincy, Illinois—not listed among 33—probably had some attraction for some northeast Missourians in the sixth district. TEN of the scheduled rallies on the Missouri side of the Mississippi were in Graves’ present district.  Ten of them. Excelsior Springs, Harrisonville, Kearney, Liberty, Platte City, Madison, Moberly, Maryville, Chillicothe, and St. Joseph.

The “No Kings” movement has survived the winter and the Trump administration’s headline activities from Minnesota to Iran.  The sixth district will not have an incumbent with all of the vote-getting power that goes with incumbency.

The sixth district—in whatever form it winds up being after legislative action and courts reviews—might be more in play than it has been for two decades. And both parties know it full well.

Getting back to Sam—pardon the unfamiliarity but he was “Senator” when I covered him in the legislature and the last time I saw him I called him, “Sam,” an uncharacteristic familiarity that I almost never allow myself with present or past political figures.

There he is from the Missouri Official Manual (the Blue Book by more familiar name) for his first term in the Senate. He was in the Senate for the last years of Democrat-domination of state government.  I recall that he was collegial with good relationships on the other side of the aisle.

But the main thing about him that I recall is that he kept me up all night on at least two occasions.  Sam was not afraid of a filibuster but he rarely took a leading role and didn’t do it so often as to be tiring—as some have done more recently. And he was entertaining, something most filibuster participants never approach.

There were some senators after him who were so boring that I gave one of them a list of books to read that would at least educate those who had to endure them.  Sadly, the list went unused.

He talked about being a poor farm boy whose only pet, a three-legged dog named “Tripod,” was the star of some of his stories. The best performance, however, was the night he threatened to read the names of every high school student in his district who was graduating that year. Every time he was interrupted, he started over. As I recall, he finally forced a compromise on the issue under discussion—which is what filibusters should be for if participants respect them.

The only better filibuster story-teller than Sam Graves was Senator Danny Staples of Eminence.  I made sure I turned on my recorder whenever he asked another member, “Senator, did you know…..” because I knew what was coming.  The State Historical Society has several hours of Staples’ recordings. There are hundreds of other cassettes in the oral history collection that I have to listen to and label one of these days and there has to be some Sam Graves stories on them.  Or on the memory chips we used in later recorders.

He was a work horse not a show horse in his political career, as we observed him up close and from a distance. He’s young enough to have a long and prosperous K-Street career in Washington. K-Street is a street known for its offices of the special interest groups.

The folks in the sixth district would be well-served to seek out another work horse in November.

-o-