Some Americans who have always celebrated the anniversary of our country’s independence see us losing independence and so much else on the eve of our 250th. They aren’t in the mood for a parade.

But maybe this is a good time to remind us of one chapter of relatively recent American history that also tore us in two, and no longer does. I’m going to tell you that story through one woman, 79-year-old former U.S. Army nurse Anita Malott, who volunteered to serve in Vietnam and then, when she came home to Kansas City, Kansas, was treated just as despicably as the men she’d helped keep alive in the war zone. At least now we can agree that it took so much longer than it should have for us to see that Anita and those men whose wounds she bound deserved much better far sooner.

She was 22 in 1968, a year out of nursing school and working in a hospital. She was watching a Bob Hope special when she felt the call. “I realized that there were so many young men that didn’t want to be there but went because they were fulfilling a duty, and I felt for them,” she told me. “There were the people who went to Canada, and those who could get deferments, and then there were the guys that just did it; they just went. So my good friend and I, who had graduated from nursing school together, we decided that we were going to join the Army and go to Vietnam.”

To do what they could for those men.

“I’m Going Anyway”

Anita came from a military family – her dad had been in the Army Air Corps during the Second World War, two of her five brothers had already served, and a third had joined the U.S. Navy. Yet they all thought this plan outrageous: “My father ranted, raved and had a fit, pacing back and forth, totally upset. He said when your country calls you to serve, you serve, but you don’t have to. I remember sitting there thinking, ‘I’m going anyway, I don’t care.’”

She never considered herself pro-war. Quite the opposite, in fact. And beyond her altruism, “if I’m honest, wanderlust” – a pull to see the other side of the world, and even to see the conflict for herself – were factors in her enlistment, she tells me. Her war, though, was as a soldier for the soldiers.

After she signed up and trained at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Anita had to serve a year stateside first, in Denver. During that time, her friend from Topeka met someone and decided not to go to Vietnam after all. So “I didn’t know a soul” when she got on the plane to Saigon.

In her initial assignment in Pleiku, in the lush Central Highlands 60 miles from Cambodia, she worked in the surgical ICU of the Army’s 71st Evacuation Hospital. By the time she arrived, in 1970, the area was no longer the hotspot it had been during the Tet Offensive; the guerrilla war had for the most part moved on.

Yet she was still on the job 12 hours a day, six days a week, treating mostly Americans but also “a few Vietcong, or a Vietnamese soldier. A village would get bombed and we’d see a mix.”

“His Life Would Never Be the Same”

The faces of some of her patients have never left her – the young southerner telling his father in a brief phone call that he’d lost his leg and would be coming home. The 10-year-old Vietnamese boy with shrapnel in his abdomen who she finally got to smile. And most of all, one of the two American soldiers who’d suffered burns over 80 to 90 percent of their bodies after a fire they’d started to clear the brush – better to see where the enemy was – blew back on them when the wind changed.

Even now, she says, “I get a twinge in my stomach thinking about it. In the States we had tanks of water we would submerge people in to clean burn wounds. And you had to keep the wound clean, or they would die of sepsis.”

Without any such equipment, “I had to take a sponge, sterile water and soap and wash his wound. And I know it hurt. We gave him morphine before. He yelled every profanity at me, screaming like he hated me. His life would never be the same, ever. Those scars would be on him. His arms were tied in a spread-arm position and wrapped in gauze; I had to take off the gauze – it would stick, it was a process, it was oozing. He’s in pain, and he wants me to stop because he wants the pain to stop, but I can’t because I have to keep the wound clean. That was one of the worst; I think I got off and got drunk.”

She never knew what happened to him, beyond that he did survive to be evacuated to another hospital. But she feels sure he understood that she had to do what she did, just as she understood that he had to lash out at her.

The War Within the War

After six months, Anita was transferred to the 85th Army Evacuation Hospital in Phu Bai, where she treated more war wounds and also saw uglier aspects of the war, as the U.S. Army was disintegrating.

“I became aware of soldiers fighting each other, and that was shocking to me,” she recalled. “There was a breakdown in moral principles. When you’re there and you don’t have supervision and you’re angry at someone, some of those young soldiers would strike out at the sergeant. It wasn’t like it was common, but it wasn’t rare that a sergeant would be in his hooch and somebody would throw a grenade in there.”

When these men came into the hospital to be treated, “it came out muttered that he’d been in his hooch. This was an American that threw a grenade in there. So there was a war within a war. They didn’t want to be there. They didn’t want to be told what to do. I was shocked that this kind of thing would go on. And then, I saw a lot of friendly fire injuries.”

At the same time, “I have to say that the men I worked with – the surgeons, the nurses and the corpsmen, nurse’s aides, 18 or 19 years old – they were good. They dug their heels in and took care of people. And the other thing is, you bonded with them. If we worked the night shift, we’d go to the mess hall and eat breakfast, then go drink, sit and talk – tell our life story.”

When it came time to leave, after her year was up, the celebration was there, where she would be missed, not here, where “no one in my family asked, ‘What was it like?’ No one asked that question. No one.”

Unlike so many coming back from Vietnam, she said, she did have a profession to return to, and she took a nursing job at the University of Kansas Medical Center in her hometown. But “if I brought up Vietnam, the subject would get changed.”

They wanted to talk about their cool new jeans, or music, she said. And that was the nicer part. “The feeling that I got when I got home is that I was a traitor; there was a lot of suspicion.”

Even friends told her they just didn’t want to hear about it. “So I quit putting myself in that position. I wanted to talk about the experience. I wanted to talk about the bonding, the soldiers, the men I saw who thought they were going to go home, were so excited, and then something happened and they got worse and died. I wanted to tell those stories, of men who didn’t make it and men who did.”

In a KU Med Center family practice clinic where she worked in the early 80s, now a dozen years since her return from the war, Anita had a great working relationship with the doctor in charge until she finally dared to say something about serving in Vietnam.

“I was a good nurse in that clinic, looked up to, and I’d felt safe bringing it up,” but the doctor let her know otherwise. “She looked at me like she’d found out I’d killed somebody. She’d protested the war, and she was really upset.”

First Supportive Comment

The first time she got the slightest validation or expression of interest in hearing about her experience, she said, was while she was working on an advanced nursing degree in Chicago between 1992 and 1994. This, in other words, was more than 20 years after her return from the war and a full decade after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s November 1982 dedication. It was even after ‘China Beach,’ the soapy TV presentation of an evacuation hospital that ran between 1988 and 1991.

Figuring she’d never see those Chicagoans again after she finished the program, Anita brought up her experience in the war during a hospital shift in the cardiac surgical unit. But this time, two completely new things happened: The phone clerk said, “I knew there was something about you,” in an approving way. This, she said, was literally the first positive feedback she had ever received.

Later, another nurse on the unit asked if she’d be willing to speak to her husband’s high school social studies class. Of course, yes. But “I had stuffed it down for so long, what was my story?” That was a great day, as it turned out, because “they were so full of questions.”

Since then, all of this has changed.

It’s meant a lot to Anita to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, too. The former exposes the magnitude of the sacrifice so long ignored, she said, while the latter, dedicated in 1993, “was finally, finally something that acknowledges that women left their homes and went there, too. Women exposed themselves to some really tough stuff they didn’t have to do.”

The best–selling 2024 novel, The Women, by Kristin Hannah, about a Vietnam nurse, may be made into a movie. And “now I’m a heroine,” Anita says. “Oh, you served in Vietnam? Can you tell us?” After the decades of being hushed and treated like a criminal instead of someone who saved lives, though, “I hate ‘Thank you for your service.’ It’s so disingenuous to me.”

When it comes to taking credit for what she did, Anita reminds me more than you might think of the World War II veteran I interviewed a couple of years ago, who saw an incredible 171 days of consecutive combat in Europe, and yet was adamant that I steer clear of calling him a hero, or anything of the kind. (He didn’t liberate any concentration camp, but only rolled by in his tank, he said.) In case you’re wondering, I talked to him again this week, to thank him for helping get us to 250, and he’s still sharp and well at age 100.

Blamed for Sins That Were Never Theirs

When I asked Anita about saving lives, she too acted like she’d just rolled by in her tank: “I was there, I was a dedicated nurse, as most of us – I can’t think of anybody who wasn’t. We were dedicated to the profession, we were dedicated to serving our patients, so yeah. We took our positions seriously. And it wasn’t as if, ‘Oh, this is just a Vietnamese patient, we don’t have to take care of them.’ So absolutely, we saved lives.” We, she insisted. We.

Instead of understanding this, she was blamed for sins that were never hers.

So I also thank Anita Malott, who calls herself a disillusioned Pollyanna wannabe, for helping get us to 250. It should never have taken America so long to see that the men and women who “just did it – just went” were done a great disservice, first by their government and then by the public.

And if we are going to get much past 250, there will have to be a lot less demonizing and a lot more “we.”

This column first appeared in RealClearPolitics.com

A survey!

We’re about a month away from the primary — and important decisions on ballot initiatives in Kansas and Missouri.

Mailers and television ads are popping up everywhere.

Today’s quiz: Which of these three political pieces is most misleading? Answer in the comments! Or add one you’ve seen somewhere else.

1. Electing judges on the Kansas Supreme Court.

This one popped up in my mailbox last week. It’s about the constitutional amendment, on the Kansas ballot, that would require voters to elect judges to the state Supreme Court.

Um.. Kansans already have a say in who its justices aren’t. In fact, there is a state retention vote requirement for state Supreme Court judges; two of them are on the ballot this November, assuming this measure fails in August.

Kansas voters can remove both justices from the bench if they want.

Kansas Supreme Court judges don’t run for election. A panel of lawyers picks three nominees, and the governor chooses one.

The governor must answer to voters about his or her picks.

2. Missouri Amendment 5, allowing the legislature to phase out state income taxes.

You’ve seen this guy on TV, I’m sure.

I’m not sure what he’s talking about.

Amendment 5 would give the Missouri legislature the right to phase out the state individual income tax, and “state and local sales and use taxes … may be expanded by legislation to impose taxes on transactions involving any goods and services,” according to the proposal’s language.

There’s nothing on the ballot about corporations, though. In fact, the whole argument for Amendment 5 is helping corporations, by shifting taxes away from income to consumption. That’s pretty much the opposite of making corporations pay.

It is about making poor people pay more so rich people pay less.

This claim may have something to do with data centers, and tax breaks they now enjoy. But the ballot language says nothing about taxing data centers, either.

3. Amendment 4, changing Missouri vote requirements for citizen-led amendment petitions.

This campaign is all over the place.

Amendment 4 would require majority votes in each of the state’s eight congressional districts in order to pass citizen-initiated constitutional amendments in Missouri.

That means some amendment outcomes would be based on land, not votes.

This video claims the amendment gives small towns an “equal voice.” But rural voters already have an equal voice — their voices count the same as an urban voice.

Every citizen-led ballot measure criticized by pro-Amendment 4 supporters passed by majority vote. There’s no reason a bootheel vote should be worth more, or less, than a Kansas City vote.

Amendment 4 would not apply to every constitutional amendment, by the way. Amendments proposed by legislators would still need just a simple majority vote statewide. In fact, Amendment 4 itself only needs a statewide majority to pass.

That’s right: It doesn’t have to meet the very standard it seeks to impose on citizens.

If you’re trying to make up your mind on this issue, though, try this thought experiment: what if Missouri required statewide candidates to win in every congressional district?

The state might never have a government.

We’ll keep an eye on other ads, right here at Kansas City Stack.

I ask the reader’s indulgence: Let’s pause for a moment, in the middle of another political season, to think about the Declaration of Independence, and its adoption 250 years ago this week.

The Declaration remains the most astonishing document in the history of western civilization, and maybe the world. It’s stunning for its structure alone — in some ways, every good opinion column written since 1776 follows its template.

State your principles. Give examples. Take action.

It’s famous for the claim that “all men are created equal,” with rights that are inherent and unalienable. There are books written about this sentence.

The equality clause loses a few points, though, because 1) the Founders clearly didn’t believe all men are created equal, and 2) Not everyone back then had unalienable rights.

Equality was a goal, not a fact, when Thomas Jefferson wrote the words.

No — for me, the most incredible part of the Declaration comes next, when Jefferson says natural rights are protected by government, and that governments get their power from the consent of the people.

Natural rights like life and liberty and happiness may be self-evident, Jefferson is telling us, but they are not self-executing, which is why governments must exist.

Then the stunner: “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,” the Declaration says, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”

This was the real treason in the Declaration — a claim that the people can change or end a government when that government abuses natural rights.

It’s radical in practical terms alone. Who gets to decide when a government is abusing life and liberty? What if some people disagree? What does it mean to “abolish” a government?

Governments aren’t changed for “light and transient” reasons, the Declaration says. How can we decide what is, and isn’t, a transient cause? It isn’t clear.

The claim is also quite dangerous. Abolishing a government almost certainly requires violence — the Declaration didn’t start a war, after all; we were already in the middle of one. Governments don’t surrender power easily. Blood must be spilled.

In fact, we eventually fought a civil war over the concepts of natural rights and consent, and slavery and its abolition.

And what comes after the people have “abolished” an established government? Again, the Declaration doesn’t say. Instead, it writes a blank check: the replacement government should be based “on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Well, sure. Easy for you to say.

This to-be-figured-out-later phrase led to the real magic of America, of course. The Declaration establishes natural rights, but if it had stopped there it might have been forgotten.

Instead, it sets up a profound challenge for a new nation: It must create a government that can be peacefully altered, by and with the consent of the governed.

This would turn out to be extraordinarily hard. It would take 13 years before the states could agree to operate under a federal constitution with a common framework for ongoing peaceful change. Eventually, though, Americans drafted a governance scheme that redeemed the promise of the Declaration.

The U.S. Constitution was, and is, flawed in many ways. It had to be amended right off the bat. Some words and phrases are so confusing we still argue over what they mean. The Electoral College system is an undemocratic nightmare.

And we now know the Constitution does not fully protect the nation against a government that ignores its restraints, violates its requirements, and tramples on natural rights with impunity.

So this week let’s remember: The Constitution, not the Declaration, provides a correction mechanism for peacefully altering or abolishing government, by establishing the framework for expressing or rejecting consent.

Seen in this light, voting isn’t a civic duty, it’s a revolutionary act. We fulfill the promise of the Declaration every time we go to the polls.

And that’s why Donald Trump’s repeated attempts to restrict voting, and to claim election fraud where none exists, and to infringe on ballot access, are so destructive to the nation’s foundational aspirations.

Trump is clearly terrified of the people’s right to peacefully alter their government. (And so, it must be said, are some of the president’s fellow travelers in state and local government.)

In this country, we said — 250 years ago — that government protects unalienable natural rights. We also said the people’s consent could be withheld, and government altered or abolished, after “a long train of abuses and usurpations.”

Let facts, we said, be submitted to a candid world.

What are we to make of a recent Kansas public opinion poll showing Democrat Cindy Holscher with a commanding lead in her party’s race for governor?

To start with the obvious, it’s good news for Sen. Holscher, and worrisome for her opponents, Sen. Ethan Corson and Overland Park Mayor Curt Skoog, at least for now.

But it may also reflect the growing importance of less establishment Democrats and independents — those who have not been crowned by those currently in power and are looking to do things differently.

If you’re thinking New York, don’t.

But as popular as Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly has been, nationally the interest in status quo candidates is not high, to say the least. And that may explain the current preference for Holscher over Kelly-endorsed and maybe too-tightly-embraced Corson.

Corson, who is a lawyer, has said that his work as an Obama-era advisor for the U.S. Department of Commerce and his time running the International Trade Administration in Washington have given him the right executive experience to lead the state.

Holscher, who grew up on a farm and is the first college graduate in her family, is running on her legislative work in Kansas — on schools, seniors and women and families, “not the coattails of the establishment or endorsements,” she said at a recent forum.

That’s the race so far, and it seems to be working for her.

The Capitol Bee, through Change Research, polled 1,022 likely Democratic primary voters — and found Holscher with a commanding lead of 37% of those surveyed.

Corson had 10% of the vote in the poll, followed by new entrant Skoog at 7%.

A full 44% of those surveyed are still making up their minds, which isn’t surprising, with six weeks to go before the August primary.

The Bee says the electorate remains fluid. “Before we pushed them, a 55% majority were undecided, with Holscher at 31, Corson at 8, and Skoog at 5,” the organization says. “Nearly half the people who say they’ll vote in August have not committed to anyone.”

All three candidates are from Johnson County, and Holscher and Corson have similar voting records.

But there’s no doubt that Holscher is the change candidate in the race. She’s someone who is less go-along-to-get-along with the Republican majority in Topeka than Kelly has been, and someone who is willing to break with her own party, too.

Corson is from the bluest senate district in the state, running as a bipartisan moderate in the realpolitik mode of Kelly. Voters in Holscher’s majority red district have split tickets to vote for her and for Trump, though her opponents definitely paint her as the leftiest of the three candidates in the Democratic field.

She is without question most likely to shake things up. If elected, her running mate, Wichita data analyst and State Rep. KC Ohaebosim, a Nigerian American, would be the first Black official elected statewide in more than a century.

Differences on data centers, stadium deal

There are real policy differences, too: Corson supported the Chiefs stadium deal, while Holscher opposed it as a giveaway to billionaires. She also criticized the lack of guarantees written into the bill that local labor would be used.

Another key difference is on data centers: Holscher has called for a moratorium on them. Corson and Skoog believe communities should decide on the local level.

In the Kansas Senate, both Holscher and Corson voted for a sales tax exemption for data centers that meet state requirements. But Corson sticks by that vote, while Holscher says that knowing what she knows now, and especially after hearing from people across the state about how they feel, she’d instead vote no.

At a recent forum hosted by KCUR, Corson said that he’d now support some new guardrails for such centers, and let each community make the decision: “We want to put these structures in place,” he said, referring to decommissioning agreements, a payment plan for energy use, a commitment to a community benefits agreement and a closed loop system of operations. “We want to make our communities, which are very diverse all across the state, we want to give them the ability to make the decision that is best for themselves.”

Holscher said that doesn’t go far enough. A statewide moratorium is needed, she said, “to make sure that parameters are in place. That’s what people are wanting, they’re wanting that protection. Because the fact of the matter is, they’re afraid that if these big tech companies come in and basically go right directly to the city council, they’re afraid they’re not going to get the protections. They’re asking the state to do this for them.”

Corson, with Kelly’s endorsement in his pocket, has just started running TV ads. “I wanted to pitch for the Royals,” he says. He promises to protect abortion rights, and says he “fought” for Medicaid expansion, which of course never happened in Kansas.

The spot seems pretty tepid. Corson clearly has some work to do, but he has time and money to do that work.

The poll Corson touts did not include Holscher

As for the money race, campaign spending reports are outdated. At the end of last year, Corson had raised about $902,000 for his race, a figure that has undoubtedly risen. Holscher raised $400,000 — but that figure, too, is likely much higher now.

Corson’s campaign also ballyhoos a poll — of Republican voters, conducted by former Rep. Tim Huelskamp, which says Corson “appears to be” the front-runner in his party, but it did not poll any voters on Corson versus Holscher, so that’s nothing more than an assumption.

That poll, taken in May, was aimed at GOP voters, not Democrats and independents. It showed Jeff Colyer in the lead for the Republican nomination for governor; Colyer is no longer in the race.

Curt Skoog’s fundraising numbers aren’t yet available online. He’s published his own poll, based on a “survey text sent to Kansas Democrats”, that shows the mayor with nearly 20% of the voters with a preference, with Holscher about half that.

Two-thirds of those responding are undecided.

The Bee says it’s possible, perhaps likely, that the Overland Park mayor is splitting the not-Holscher vote in the Democratic primary, helping her.

“The path to denying Holscher the nomination almost certainly runs through consolidating the non-Holscher vote behind a single challenger,” the organization says.

There are no indications that’s likely to happen.

I’m just going to put out there that if we are not alone in the universe, the case for first contact with a Kansas City empath is strong.

Even Emily Blunt at the peak of her powers, however, I would advise against driving away from a KC cop making a traffic stop.

To anybody who doesn’t know what I’m talking about because you haven’t yet seen ‘Disclosure Day,’ what a pleasure you have ahead of you.

Unlike my husband, I’m not a big sci-fi fan. But it was Father’s Day, and I’m so glad he picked the picture. Otherwise, I might have missed this joyride through important ideas – and since when is that even a thing?

Read no further if you want no spoilers, though at this point, you’d almost have to be an extraterrestrial not to know what happens.

We know from the start that Emily Blunt’s Margaret Fairchild is one extraordinary weatherwoman. Not because she does her apparently trademark shimmy while cooing that hail is her absolute favorite precipitation — hubboy — but because she looks to be living in a loft somewhere out East while working for a Kansas City news station. No wonder she was stopped for speeding on her way to work.

‘The foremost evolutionary advantage’

Spielberg has said this is a chase movie, and that chase starts almost at once, as goodnik whistleblower Dr. Daniel Kellner, played by Josh O’Connor, smuggles some mysterious device out of the building where he works.

But his evil-doing employers, led by the former Mr. Darcy, Colin Firth, whose misdeeds are not enhancing either his health or his allure, will do anything to stop him from spilling that the U.S. government has been covering up its sometimes brutal interactions with aliens for 75 years.

All Daniel is trying to reveal, along with Margaret, who after a visit from you-know-who can suddenly see into the hearts and heads of all those around her, is proof of long-suppressed truth about alien life that our government has been hiding.

Sometimes on Daniel’s side and sometimes not is his girlfriend Jane, played by Eve Hewson, whose own Big Secret is that she used to be a nun.

What I love most about this movie is how Margaret can neutralize any threat from someone who means her harm by appearing to that person as someone they loved, and speaking in that person’s voice not some calming nonsense, but some core truth.

The aliens in ‘Disclosure Day’ know that empathy is "the foremost evolutionary advantage,” and before those who today mock that truth ever get to some other planet, they may have to learn that, too.

What the movie suggests is that you do not have to have an experience of the kind Margaret has had, or be able to offer the kind of specifics she does — your wife didn’t mean it; she just needs a nap, she informs the cop who pulled her over — to have this kind of otherworldly impact in your own daily life.

‘Brad, get out of the chair’

The tension never lets up alongside all this uplift, and there are some laugh-out-loud lines, too, as when, near the end, the female co-anchor at the Kansas City news station orders the refusing-to-budge male anchor outta the chair so Margaret can tell the whole world about the story that will presumably change everything.

Then she asks Margaret, who has just recovered a mind-blowing childhood memory, jumped on a moving train and an invisible fire truck and learned that only she and Daniel can speak to extraterrestrials, whether she’s changed her hair.

As I said, I am not into sci-fi, and I will see this movie again.

Sure, there are a couple of false notes. When Jane the ex-nun tells Daniel that he simply can’t tell the truth that there are other evolved life forms in the universe, because then people wouldn’t believe in God anymore, that makes zero sense to me.

Eventually, Jane’s former novice master Sister Maura, played by Elizabeth Marvel, salvages this silliness by telling her, “Why would He make such a vast universe and save it only for us?"

(I told my husband I was sure we’d seen Marvel play a nun before. Close: She played the POTUS in Homeland.)

If there were one moment in the movie I could cut, it would be the one that some ninny kneels before this Margaret who knows things and makes the sign of the cross.

But to me, the ending is perfect. If we only did what Margaret tells us the alien right in front of her has whispered — it’s just one word, and one thing we’ve stopped doing — then we could not go wrong.

‘

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If I lived in New York’s 10th Congressional District, I’d be voting for Rep. Dan Goldman in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. Because from what I can see, Goldman has done an excellent job in holding the president to account, especially as bulldog lead counsel in Trump’s first impeachment.

His challenger, former city comptroller Brad Lander, also seems like a good guy. I certainly liked what I saw of him when he was standing up for immigrants unlawfully detained by ICE while he was running for mayor. “You have no authority to arrest U.S. citizens,” he kept repeating as he, too, was hauled away, shirttails out.

Not at all good, though, is the increasingly common attitude expressed by the Brooklyn coffeehouse owner who told Goldman on social media never to come back for a latte because he doesn’t agree with him on Israel.

Here’s how the owner of Poetica Coffee in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, put it, after Goldman stopped by with his 7-year-old daughter on Sunday: “We see that you stopped by our shop today for a coffee. Do you see how it doesn’t taste like genocide juice? Or are you still having a hard time telling the difference? We don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers or anyone in between. Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”

Wake up, woke coffeehouse owner, because this is the way to get someone hurt.

It is also the way Jews of any political persuasion are being treated around the world now, and have we forgotten everything we ever learned about that story goes?

Antisemitic assaults in the United States reached record levels in 2025. Since March, London has had a surge of antisemitic violence. Last summer in Neuilly-sur-Seine outside Paris, a rabbi was attacked twice in one week.

A Jewish author who was supposed to speak about the composer Richard Wagner’s antisemitism at the opening of next month’s Bayreuth Festival was cancelled because of security issues, and then after some pushback was told they’d try to work something out.

So no, mean talk on Insta is not just mean talk on Insta, even if you did pull it down.

Lander’s position on Israel does differ from Goldman’s, in that Goldman favors continued military aid to Israel and Lander does not. But maybe more importantly, Mayor Mamdani has blessed Lander so poof, Goldman hates Palestinians and thus is poison.

This post from me, someone who hasn’t lived in New York since Rudy was mayor, is not about who should win on Tuesday.

It’s about othering, and how much I hate seeing us throw out those with whom we disagree. Where does this ever end, unless we all own private islands, and I’ve also heard some bad things about what happens there.

Instead, what a perfect opportunity for this man who actually owns a coffee shop to say hey, my first instinct was to get mad and run to my corner, but resetting here, though I’m still pretty sure I could not disagree with you more strongly, on second thought let’s, I don’t know, have a coffee.

The ‘unfriend me right now’ culture could not be more toxic. But culture is constantly in flux, and just as this shop owner could do a lot of good by publicly inviting Goldman back to talk, we could all invite someone back to talk.

If we’re going to make it far past 250, I think we’re going to have to do that.

By all accounts, transportation to and from the Truman Sports Complex for Saturday’s soccer match went much more smoothly than it did for Tuesday’s Game 1, when patrons waited for hours and walked miles to see the contest.

This improvement is a good thing on its own terms, of course. But it will be a better thing if it helps tamp down loose talk of the need for “mass transit” to the Chiefs’ new football stadium in Wyandotte County.

I’m sure you heard the chatter. Soren Petro, for example, on WHB, said it was time for the region to “get serious” about mass transit after the Argentina-Algeria stadium headaches (to be clear: Petro first said the new Chiefs stadium must include better parking and better access, which is the correct answer.)

Let’s assume “mass transit” in this context means fixed-rail transit, either by streetcar or light rail. (There was mass transit for soccer, called buses.) The plain truth is fixed-rail transit to the new football stadium would be ruinously expensive, inefficient, and politically impossible.

Here’s why.

Light rail, today, costs roughly $400 million a mile (in some places it’s much more.) It’s about 15 miles from downtown Kansas City, Mo., to the new stadium; that’s $6 billion for light rail to the Clarkiseum, more than the cost of the Chiefs’ stadium and the Royals stadium combined.

Who would pay that cost? The federal government, which covered part of Kansas City’s streetcar system, faces enormous pressure to spend less on subsidizing new light rail. And, with a national debt now greater than $39 trillion, that posture isn’t likely to change soon.

It’s highly unlikely Wyandotte County, or Kansas, could or would bear the cost of light rail alone. They’re already paying for the stadium, and Wyandotte County groans under its current tax burden. Most of its residents would struggle to afford tickets to games anyway, let alone a light rail fare (rides would definitely not be free.)

Johnson Countians would also balk at supporting light rail to the Legends area. Its residents will soon be a fifteen-minute drive to the new football stadium; no one thinks its fans would drive to Union Station, or downtown KCK, just to board a light rail car and go back west.

Kansas Citians? Convincing Missourians to fund light rail in Kansas seems like a stretch. Northlanders wouldn’t be interested at all. And Missourians are already furious at Kansas for stealing the Chiefs in the first place.

No: paying to build 15 miles of light rail, not to mention maintaining the line, would cost an enormous amount of money over many decades (one reason Clay Chastain’s light rail plans always collapsed was his drastic underestimation of the costs.)

Even a 30-year, one-cent sales tax in Jackson, Johnson, and Wyandotte Counties would likely fall short of the annual debt service needed for one light rail line to the stadium.

And for what? The Chiefs play 10 games a year. Adding six additional events annually — concerts, games other than football — could never justify a $6 billion or $7 billion investment, on top of the $1.8 billion taxpayers are shelling out for the stadium.

(Yes, there’s a soccer stadium nearby. Sporting Kansas City plays around 17 home games, at 16,000 people per match. Parking and transportation seem easy enough, though, making light rail less attractive.)

What about another World Cup, or NCAA Final Four, or a Super Bowl? Again, no: you might get a Super Bowl every decade or so, or a Final Four. It’s been 32 years since the U.S. hosted a World Cup; it might be another three decades before the tournament returns, with no guarantee Kansas City would host any games.

Building light rail for $6 billion for one Super Bowl would be a gigantic waste.

All of this might make sense if there were other uses for a light-rail-to-the-stadium system; alas, there are not. There are few jobs along the route (there are few houses or businesses) and only a few jobs at the Legends.

In other cities, that’s what light rail is really for: getting commuters to and from work, not to the game. Here, there are few employment centers to be had.

Finally, the politics are hard. Local and state authorities are already facing fierce criticism for supporting new stadiums with taxpayer dollars; imagine adding billions to the price tag — coming from people who can’t or won’t use the system. Not a vote I’d like to take.

Does all this mean light rail should never come to the region? Not necessarily. Light rail to the airport might make sense; KCI handles a million passengers a month. Fixed-rail transit from downtown KCK to the University of Kansas Hospital might also be doable, and worth the doing.

Rail transit through Johnson County, from downtown KC to the Panasonic battery facility, might move enough people from home to jobs and back again (and might help with baseball parking.) Extending the streetcar east is under review and could be made to work, although it will be difficult.

All of this should be a part of a comprehensive, focused, region-wide transit system that combines well-financed buses and fixed-rail with cars and highways. The Kansas City region lacks that kind of approach, and has routinely fallen short of the political will, or the money, to address the issue.

A traffic jam at a World Cup soccer game won’t change that. And bad traffic shouldn’t be reason enough to spend billions on inefficient transit to a football game.

We never thought much of the rumor, denied of course by his campaign, that Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall would join the Trump administration before November, when he faces real competition in his re-election race.

Now, though, Marshall is parroting Trump’s absurd and infuriating line about how it’s only right that Iran’s new, even harder hardliners should keep some ballistic missiles so they can defend themselves.

At first, you hear this drivel and think maybe Doc has spent too much time in the sun at his “vacation” home in Sarasota. Because whether you supported this war or not, there can’t be many Kansans who agree with his missiles-are-okay position.

But then again, maybe he doesn’t care what Kansans think because he really is auditioning for RFK Jr.’s job.

What makes Trump and Marshall’s talking point particularly hard to take is that the major criticism of the 2015 nuclear deal that Trump derided and then shredded in 2018 is that it did not deal with missiles or terror proxies. And now, ta-da, neither will this one, according to the memo of understanding.

In defense of Trump’s deal, Marshall actually told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Iran had never before agreed to give up on attaining a nuclear weapon. We will refrain from throwing around a bunch of exclamation points, but no: Not only was that promise made in the 2015 nuclear agreement that Trump called “the worst deal ever,” but it’s what Iran has always promised.

In George Will’s column today, he correctly says that in “trumpeting Iran’s assurance, which it has reiterated for decades, that it would not acquire nuclear weapons, Trump accepted a “memorandum of understanding” under which Iran will be bribed (with reconstruction money from undetermined sources) to accept U.S. capitulation.”

‘They have to be able to defend themselves’

Collins asked Marshall whether he, too, was OK with Iran having the substantial missile capabilities that our intelligence says it does retain. “I would prefer they didn’t, but I don’t think that’s the key issue here,” Marshall said. “I think that they have to be able to defend themselves.”

What, then, is the key issue here? Defend themselves from us? From our allies?

The only alternative, Marshall said, would be “a forever war. You’re never going to get them, short of boots on the ground.”

So why, as of April, was eliminating Iran’s ballistic missile program one of the “clear and unchanging objectives” of Operation Epic Fury?

That we were “never going to get them short of boots on the ground” is just one reason we either should never have gone to war — which is what we said — or else had to be in it for the long haul, which was never going to happen.

‘Missiles aren’t the problem’

Ahead of the signing in Versailles — perfect place to sign a treaty, btw — Trump poured vinegar on the wounds of the Iranian civilians he’d promised to rescue and then sold out by saying that it was only fair for their oppressors to get to keep some of their ballistic missiles, because what nice folks:

“If other countries have them, it’s a little bit unfair for them not to have some. If Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and they all have some, I would say that in relative proportion, I think it’s okay. Missiles aren’t the problem… They hurt a little location, but they don’t blow up the planet.”

Unless you’re in the “little location.” Or think that not blowing up the planet is nothing to brag about. All about fairness, our president.

When Marshall essentially repeated this horrific babble in defense of a bunch of terrorists who oppress their own people, which again should repulse you no matter how you vote or what you thought of the war, maybe he did that reflexively, because echoing Trump is what he always does.

Or… maybe he knew Kansans would recoil but did not care, because soon he’d no longer have to pretend to live in a cabin off a dirt road, or get booed by constituents, or called out for thinking that a Kansas City statue of the Churchills instead honors Ewing and Muriel Kauffman.

Yes, Marshall could accept a job in the Trump administration this year, paving the way for an absurd delay in the 2026 election for the Senate seat, until 2028.

How’s that? A law passed last year, reportedly pushed by Marshall’s office, would require Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly to replace him with another Republican — from a list of three candidates chosen by Republican leadership in Topeka. It also says that if a vacancy occurs after May 1 in an even-numbered year, then it will be filled two years later.

Positioning himself for RFK Jr.’s job?

Erik Murray, a Kansas City, Kansas real estate developer and one of the 11 Democrats running against Marshall, who is an ob-gyn, said in a statement to the Stack that he does see Marshall’s comments on the Iran deal as part of his audition tape for Trump:

“If you want a job in the Trump administration, you go on cable news and do a clown show for an audience of one. We believe Roger Marshall is doing this to position himself to take RFK’s job. Kansans want solutions and every person we talk to across this state is fed up with Marshall and this administration. That’s why these shenanigans are happening: this seat is in play, and they know it.”

As much as Kansans might be happy to see Marshall off, a resignation now would be problematic. The law putting off an election for two years is almost certainly unconstitutional and would create a legal nightmare. A state can’t extend a senate term beyond six years because it feels like it.

The Kansas-Senate replacement plan is yet another example of Kansas Republicans seeing voters as an inconvenience to be overcome, not people with rights. But let’s also save some anger for Gov. Kelly, who allowed the measure to become law without her signature.

Laura Kelly left Kansas vulnerable

In failing to put up a fight, she may have left the state facing an outrageous power grab, certain to be challenged in court.

Republicans haven’t lost a U.S. Kansas Senate seat since 1932. But Marshall is clearly worried. Two years of tariffs and high fuel prices and a wobbly economy have left many Kansans angry and bitter at the GOP and at him, whose list of accomplishments is short. At a minimum, his defense of this terrible end to a war Trump started and then declared himself bored by can’t be helping his chances, and even he must know that.

To those brave Iranians Trump once told “help is on its way,” he now says the younger, angrier new leaders this war put in charge of terrorizing them and the world are “very rational people. They were nice to deal with. They were strong people, smart people. ... not radicalized and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.”

What Marshall is doing in propping up the president in these arguments is perfectly consistent for him. But it is also a betrayal beyond politics, and whether or not he takes a job in the Trump administration, makes us hope all the more fervently that he is soon replaced.

Thanks to Trump, Iran is back, like the algae in the Reflecting Pool.

The younger, more hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps running that country as a result of our reckless war can begin to build back in any number of ways now. And anyone who doubted Obama’s hard-won deal should be twice as skeptical about this one.

Yet at least $29 billion, 2,211 lives and one historic humiliation later, the same Donald Trump who said this folly of a “skirmish” could end only in “unconditional surrender” — by them, I thought he meant — recently informed those who still believe at least some of what comes out of his mouth that he never cared about regime change at all. Here’s how he put it at the G7: "I never cared about regime change.”

Negotiations on ending what began because he had no idea what he was getting us into had “started to get very boring,” he told CNBC on June 1. “I don’t care if they’re over, honestly. I really don’t care.”

I have never heard of any commander-in-chief anywhere proclaiming himself felled by ennui while bombs were still falling. But that’s our president, who as far as I’m concerned should have stayed in Versailles, where French President Emmanuel Macron invited him this week. Since 47’s idea of heaven is clearly King Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors, he would have been so pleased to have stayed, and with him across the ocean, we might have remembered that we have a Congress.

While Trump may have been manipulating the markets with his gyrating daily proclamations that the war on Iran was either over — wait, no, or was only just beginning — he never acknowledged the obvious truth that even an enfeebled Iran was a lot more than he bargained for: “It’s going to work very easily. It’s going to work like in Venezuela,” he said in early March.

It’s because he hadn’t thought through any aspect of this war, or listened to pre-war intelligence that told him what he didn’t want to hear, that Iran is back. Yes, just like the green bloom in the Reflecting Pool that was also supposedly gone forever.

History was on Iran’s side all along, though even Trump’s fiercest critics might not have predicted a door-to-door debacle of this magnitude.

A New York Times story reported on Tuesday that this war will reshape the world economy in ways that will benefit Russia and China, among others, and will hobble us.

In France on Wednesday, Trump actually thanked Putin and Xi for mostly staying neutral on Iran, which is not what happened. Over and over, you have to ask whose side this man is on.

The Washington Post just reported this about the contours of the Iran deal:

The U.S. and Israel went to war on Feb. 28 in part to prevent Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon, although Trump’s goals in the conflict have repeatedly shifted. The interim deal stops the war before that aim is secured. Instead, it opens a two-month period for nuclear negotiations and appears to offer Iran several benefits up front while extracting little in return.

The U.S. agreement to immediately allow Iran to sell its oil freely and the offer to eventually lift all sanctions, for instance, represent major concessions that go beyond the terms of Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. Trump withdrew America from that pact in his first term, declaring it the “worst deal ever.”

Maybe worst of all, he said the “beautiful” Iranian people should come into the streets and take back their country. They are that, and brave too, and they did stand up to their oppressors, and were slaughtered by the thousands. Today, those who survive them are far worse off than before, and that is Trump’s fault.

So when I hear him say he really doesn’t care, it makes me extra hot because I know it’s true.

“In the opening hours of the U.S. attack on Saturday,” the New York Times reported on March 6, “Mr. Trump declared that the goal of the attack was to destroy the existing order so that Iran’s people could emerge from their homes, rise up and overthrow their government. But in the following days, both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pivoted away from the emphasis on regime change, saying that the United States was simply focused on assuring that Iran’s nuclear program was permanently destroyed, and that it no longer had the missile capability to attack Israel, its Arab neighbors, or perhaps some day the United States.”

Remember when we accomplished that goal last year? That’s what he said.

Remember in February when one of the reasons he gave for going to war was that the nuclear threat to the United States was imminent? That’s what he said.

Not one of the goals of our ping-pong president has been achieved, except that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened, though toll-free passage is only guaranteed for the next 60 days, while negotiations continue.

What puzzles me is not that he’s said and done any of these things, because it’s true to who he’s always been. He’s the same man I understood him to be when I moved to New York in 1989. And millions of others already living there knew this.

No, what puzzles me is the number of smart people who continue to believe him, when anyone else who had told them so many lies would have been written off long ago. Anyone else who’d gotten 13 Americans killed and jacked up gas and grocery prices and given a bunch of different reasons why would be cursed instead of looked up to and fiercely defended.

Why, then, when I’m sure you in this situation can see the constant flipping and flopping as well as anybody, do you seem so sure that it’s the best you can do or maybe even ever have done or could do?

Is this:

a) a pose, since you stopped believing him some time ago, but are not about to admit it,

b) a religion, which you will stick with no matter what its contradictions, or

c) a situation in which whether he’s telling the truth or not — in this case or more generally — no longer matters?

You tell me.

Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas is now the apparent hero of the animal rights movement.

Is there an election coming up?

Two weeks ago, we told you a group called American Meat Producers had purchased time on Kansas City television to attack Marshall’s support for something called the Save Our Bacon act.

That act — which might have been attached to the Farm Bill, now under discussion — would allow Washington to override state-based animal welfare laws. California, for example, prohibits farmers and businesses from selling pork products in the state if they raise sows in cages.

Save Our Bacon would have allowed DC to preempt the law. Which, in turn, prompted American Meat Producers, which opposes SOB, to clobber Marshall, a sponsor of the bill.

Last week, though, Marshall dropped his support for Save Our Bacon. Now, American Meat Producers is running local ads congratulating Marshall for his flip-flop.

The National Pork Producers Council isn’t happy. “It appears … pressure campaigns filled with falsehoods have succeeded where facts and sound policy have not,” it said, according to National Hog Farmer, a website.

What lessons can we draw from this?

We’re not sure on the policy. On the politics, though, Marshall likely tired of getting fried on local TV. Which suggests the Republican is at least a little nervous about November.

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas called for a fastball last week, in the middle of the World Cup hoopla, when he proposed substantial city help for the KC Current’s massive riverfront development project.

The women’s soccer team wants to expand its stadium, add parking(!), and improve infrastructure, at a cost of $1.4 billion. The city would issue up to $235 million in special bonds for the project, create a tax increment financing district for public incentives, and ask the state for additional help.

Not a Maserati, but close — a BMW, maybe.

The city’s Finance Committee is expected to discuss the plan on June 30. It seems almost certain to pass, at least in some form, because 1) The Current are popular, 2) women’s sports are popular, particularly here, and 3) Kansas City is placing a huge bet on college and pro sports as economic drivers in the region.

This last item — the Kansas City area’s ongoing enthusiasm for sports and sports subsidies — seems the most interesting.

Evidence of the region’s bet on sports is everwhere. After spending hundreds of millions of dollars to keep the Royals and Chiefs at the Truman Sports Complex over several decades, the public will apparently spend billions for new stadiums for both.

Two decades ago voters agreed to tax rental cars and hotels for the T-Mobile Arena. The decision meant the end for Kemper Arena as a venue for pro- and college-level competition, even though taxpayers supported Kemper for years.

Municipal Auditorium is still in use, too. UMKC will play men’s basketball there.

“The agreement includes facility enhancements tied to the arena experience, including coach’s suite renovations and basketball-related upgrades,” the news release says. “The city is paying for those upgrades.”

There’s a hockey arena in Independence and a minor league baseball stadium in Kansas City, Kan. There’s a men’s soccer stadium there, too, built in part with incentives. Across the road you can find Kansas Speedway; it, too, got public help.

Colleges? The University of Kansas just opened a rebuilt football stadium. Missouri is upgrading its football venue. Both will end up costing hundreds of millions of dollars (to be fair, some of the cash comes from donors.)

To all of this, and more, you can add the city’s fierce efforts to host sports-related events: the World Cup, the women’s World Cup, various NCAA tournaments, the NFL draft, NBA exhibitions. (Interestingly, pro golf seems to have skipped us by.)

This region loves sports, and loves handing out subsidies and incentives to keep team owners, and fans, happy.

And they appear to be happy. Kansas City routinely ranks at or near the top for viewership of national sporting events. Just last week it had the highest national ratings for the U.S. soccer team on Fox television.

Nationally, sporting events are incredible over-the-air television draws; of the top 50 TV shows in 2025, 47 were game broadcasts.

Two Kansas City-area radio operations devote their entire day to sports discussion. The most predictable stories for internet traffic, for media content providers, are sports-related.

More broadly, sports remains one of the central unifying endeavors of any city or state, and Kansas City is no exception. We disagree on lots of stuff, of course, but we can all root for the Chiefs, or Royals, or the KC Current.

Politicians love sports, too: they don’t pollute very much, they’re highly visible, they’re only occasionally controversial, they provide a handful of jobs, they’re often a welcome distraction from tougher problems. Swish.

Yet there are warning signs for a region so enthralled with sports, and a seemingly open checkbook. Fans’ enthusiasm for events can tumble in a hurry; Kansas Speedway draws far fewer attendees than it once did, for example. The Chiefs and Royals, in down years, find it hard to fill seats too.

The minor league park in KCK once struggled to pay the bills. The Woodlands was expected to save western Kansas City, Kan., with horse and dog racing. No more.

College sports are in the middle of a financial revolution. Will fans be there on the other side? Who knows?

Mostly, though, the addiction to sports subsidies puts Kansas City in a competition with other cities and states, a sporting arms race that will become more expensive in future years. Lots of cities and states are signing sweetheart deals for teams, or paying for new venues, or both.

There are opportunity costs for such largesse. Kansas City will end up spending well over $1 billion in principle and interest for the Royals’ downtown ballpark, for example. Might that money be better spent on something else? Or not at all?

The Chiefs’ stadium in Kansas is highly controversial, and may become an issue in the governor’s race. Yet Wyandotte County, one of the state’s poorest counties, faces enormous pressure to redirect its new sales tax revenue to the Chiefs project.

You can hear whispers of opposition to these deals, of course, but they are only whispers. No one, it seems, wants to stand in front of the victory parade.

It isn’t clear if or when this arms race will end. It is certain that Kansas City will be among the last cities to ask for a truce.

The first time I remember being told that our two major parties had “few major differences,” I was seated next to Ralph Nader on a plane for a story I was doing on him just ahead of the 2000 presidential election. He was the Green Party alternative to Al Gore and George W. Bush that year.

“A bumbling Texas governor would galvanize the environmental community as never before,” he said of Bush, suggesting that at a minimum there would be a shiny silver lining to a Bush presidency. Welp, we know how that turned out.

Our current president has repeatedly pushed another false equivalency – that our country is morally no better than any other. “We have a lot of killers; you think our country is so innocent?” Trump once said in defense of Vladimir Putin, after Bill O’Reilly stated the simple fact that “Putin is a killer.” As I’ve said before, Trump has since then worked hard to make that slur a reality, and has made us less innocent in ways I would not have thought possible.

In recent years, whenever I’ve heard someone say all politicians are fundamentally bad people, I’ve a) known I was talking to a Trump supporter and b) thought this was just another way he’d convinced his America that standards are for losers.

Now, the cancer has spread.

I’ve already written that I found evidence of Democratic Maine Senate nominee’s Graham Platner’s disrespect for women disqualifying. And the way that was defended or actually seen as a selling point – hey, let’s win back some of those young woman-haters – was even worse.

Charlotte Clymer, who wrote that she doesn’t trust or believe Platner, said she would still have voted for him if necessary. And of the many non-Republicans who disagreed with me about him, it was her argument I found most compelling, even though it did not change my mind:

I wouldn’t like it, but I’d do it. I would choose the candidate who could do the least harm in that seat, and I know Senator Collins doesn’t give a damn about holding Trump accountable. This is the same reasoning so many of us gave those annoying folks on the far left who decided to sit out the 2024 presidential election. They didn’t like Vice President Harris because of their anger at the Biden administration over Gaza and other issues, and they claimed both parties were the same and both candidates were repulsive.

So, they didn’t vote. But both parties aren’t the same and elections do matter, which is why we told them that, whatever their most important issues, Trump would be a thousand times worse and that’s why voting for Vice President Harris was essential. They didn’t listen. They were wrong. Trump did, in fact, turn out to be a thousand times worse on every issue.

Did they not know what was at stake?

I heard all of that, because those who sat out ’24 had galled and bewildered me, too. Did they not know what was at stake? Did those whose chief issue was Gaza not see that Trump would make them even sorrier?

Yet if I lived in Maine instead of Missouri, I could not have supported Platner.

So let’s just say that with his overwhelming win in Tuesday’s Maine primary, I have a new understanding of those “annoying folks on the far left” who made the decision they did two years ago. Maybe because it was the only one they could make.

Some friends who think control of the Senate has got to come first, second, and third right now – yes, of course I understand – do in turn know why I feel as I do: I told a couple I hardly ever get to see and had dinner with in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last week that if one more person used that go-to sexist phrase “pearl-clutching” as a synonym for an unhappy reaction over this, I might lose it. “What classist bullshit; I have no pearls,” one of these women said, and made me laugh.

Yet others told me that if I really cared about women, then I’d see the bigger picture and would as a consequence support someone who doesn’t seem to. Well, I’ve been hearing that argument since the Clinton administration and still don’t see that working for us.

So as of now, I no longer want to hear from Ro Khanna about how much he cares about the Epstein victims. A Silicon Valley bundler told Politico that Khanna was “enjoying being forward with his support in a time of need” for Platner. How lovely for him and his future presidential run.

The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens was right when he said you can either care or not about the treatment of women, but:

What ought to stop is what we have now: inconsistent standards selectively applied according to our political bias.

“Seems like a lot of nothing,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who once thundered over the meaning of the word “ralph” in [Brett] Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook. Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have also been notably agnostic when it comes to the charges against their Maine favorite. What ever happened to #BelieveWomen?

The term for this is “double standard,” if not outright hypocrisy, and among the consequences is that it merely fuels the pervasive national cynicism about any moral judgments made about any political leader. If Platner can pass muster among Democratic primary voters, then the differences between him and Donald Trump are mainly of degree, not of kind.

Misogyny rewarded

Yes. So please do not write to inform me that Trump is worse. On every imaginable level this is true, and yet it cannot make me unsee what I see, which is misogyny rewarded.

Not all Democrats are becoming what they hate; Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran I’ve long admired from my home state of Illinois, said Platner “has to account for his own actions.”

But I never understood my Republican friends who ignored the dozens of women who accused Trump of sexual misconduct long before he was in politics, so why would I want to do likewise? “He’s not perfect,” they said in his defense.

Yet now, this completely meaningless answer to all questions is the template: “We’re not looking for perfection,” a Maine Democrat told MS NOW, when asked how she was processing all she’d learned about Platner. “Nobody’s perfect,” another Mainer told Fox News.

No one is perfect, of course. No one. But to see Democrats adopting this who-cares language about character, integrity, and basic respect has made me realize how few really do, or ever did, care about how women are treated.

#MeToo was such a long time coming and has not only slipped away, but has left behind few traces. This is not our post-Reconstruction, no, but the pushback to long overdue gains has still been swift and painful. I can’t see that the way out is voting for the new guy who is so much like the old guy. Who, by the way, called Platner a “thug” and an “outright pig” on Wednesday.

I spent part of last week in a silent Ignatian retreat in Gloucester, Massachusetts, thinking about Psalm 42:7, which says about human suffering that “Deep calls to deep.” If all like calls to like, then I can’t say I’m surprised that Trump recognizes his blue MAGA brother in Platner. But I am sorry to see that for some, that’s the appeal.

This column first ran on RealClearPolitics.com

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas tried again Tuesday to slide around the implications of a petition involving the new Royals stadium downtown.

Last week, as you know, a petitioners’ committee submitted signatures seeking a vote on an ordinance barring the city’s “material support” for a stadium unless that support is first approved by voters.

If there are enough valid signatures — the committee filed roughly double the number needed — the City Council has 60 days to either enact the ordinance or put it on the ballot.

Friday, Lucas vaguely referred to “binding agreements” concerning the project, implying the stadium could finalized before the voters get their say. Tuesday, he said a petition-imposed vote might not matter “because the deal is likely to be done before you would actually have a public vote on the deal itself.”

This seems dubious, practically and legally.

It’s hard to see the city, or the Royals, rushing to complete a development agreement by August, which is the deadline for deciding if the petition ordinance should go on the ballot. Arranging full financing for a $1.9 billion stadium project — and then issuing that debt — in a few weeks seems a stretch, to say the least.

And Lucas surely knows the petition ordinance would not require a citywide vote on “the deal,” whatever that means. It would require a vote on city participation in the deal — participation that would likely continue for years after construction begins.

Signing a deal in July wouldn’t turn off the city’s clock, or the ordinance. Bonds must be issued, infrastructure reviewed, occupancy determined. That seems “material,” which would presumably trigger the citywide vote requirement.

But don’t take my word for it. If the mayor truly believes the petition ordinance would have no impact on the project, he can ask the council to simply enact it, eliminating the need for a referendum this year.

Doesn’t seem likely, either.

But let’s set aside the legal and practical implications of Lucas’ petition stalling. What does it say politically?

As you also know, a petitioners’ committee wants a Missouri vote on new gerrymandered congressional maps. That petition effort is now in court. Republican officials seem intent on delaying final action until after this year’s elections, rendering the petitions moot.

You know who’s worried about this? Why, Quinton Lucas. “More than 300,000 Missourians signed petitions to put the map before voters in the face of direct efforts to undermine our voices and our rights,” he said in May. “That fight continues.”

Perhaps you can see the problem. How can the mayor insist on a petition-referendum on a new congressional map while denying a petition-referendum on a new stadium? Seems inconsistent.

Petition rights in Missouri are under savage assault. Power-hungry legislators and lobbyists are spending millions to push Amendment 4, a Missouri plan to eviscerate citizen-led petition efforts — while leaving politicians’ amendment rights fully intact.

You’re not required to have petitions in any city or state. If you have them, though, they should be respected, not stalled by elected officials, or gamed through the courts, as they are repeatedly today.

Kansas Citians, and Missourians, have said clearly: We want to vote on issues of broad significance, like stadiums and taxes and abortion and gambling and health care. Today, rather than honestly repeal those rights, office holders use sophistry and the legal system to erode them.

It’s appalling, and it should stop. Now would be a good time.

I’ve now been practicing law for 48 years, here in Kansas and in Texas, where judges run for office with political party affiliation. That’s the system we could wind up with in Kansas, too.

All Republican gubernatorial candidates support a constitutional amendment that will be on the August 4 ballot that asks voters to change the way Kansas Supreme Court justices are selected from a merit-based system to a popular vote. The Republican candidates all want judges to run with political party affiliation, too.

But this would make judges politicians.

Here’s why I oppose that change:

In Texas, I’ve had a judge with whom I had no relationship other than cases pending before her call asking me for political campaign money. That did not feel right, because it isn’t.

The basis for American prosperity isn’t our abundant natural resources, but is man-made, found in the ideas expressed by the words written in our founding papers.

Article III of the U.S. Constitution is short, unambiguous, and sweet, vesting the power to decide all cases, civil and criminal, not in the office of the President, nor in Congress, but in United States courts. And Article 3 of the Kansas Constitution vests all judicial power in Kansas in our Kansas courts.

During the past 250 years millions of people and trillions of dollars have migrated and emigrated into the United States, where life, liberty, and property are protected by written laws dependably enforced in honest courts.

Though subject to human foible, and not without fault, at its core American democracy has been characterized by fairness and the predictability of our courts. And our prosperity has depended upon it.

Holding the scales of justice, Lady Liberty wears a blindfold, preventing her from seeing who stands before her, judging cases by the weight on her scales, solely on their merits.

To appoint its Supreme Court justices, Kansas has a 9-person commission made up of 4 lawyers, 1 elected from each of its 4 Congressional Districts by the lawyers in that district, and 4 lay persons, again 1 from each Congressional District, appointed by the governor. The 9th member is a lawyer chairperson elected state-wide by members of the Kansas Bar.

In Kansas hospitals, where medical staff appointments are made by the hospital’s board of trustees, the hospital medical staff first researches and approves the medical credentials of applicants. No one goes to the board for appointment without medical staff approval. Similarly, for judicial appointments, the lawyer members of the Supreme Court Nominating Commission judges the professional qualifications of applicants.

The Commission reviews Supreme Court applicants and recommends 3 candidates to the Governor, who must choose 1 of the 3.

Federal Judges have lifetime appointments, protecting them from political influence.

They’re not immune from politics; but they’re insulated. And they’ve been a firewall that’s holding. Just this week, three Federal Judges enforced the rule of law stoppingwhat’s, to me at least, clear political corruption.

Judges in Virginia and Florida halted the $1.776B fund from taxpayer money Trump designed to pay-off friends and January 6 rioters. And on the same day a judge in Washington D.C. put a stop to Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center.

I haven’t always agreed with decisions made by Kansas judges in my cases. But I’ve always believed they were trying to get it right and I trust our Supreme Court.

Let’s not make Kansas Supreme Court Justices mere politicians condemned forever to seek political favor. They shouldn’t be forced into gladhanding donors, or into dialing for dollars from the litigants standing before them. They need protection from that and so do we.

Recently a highly respected lawyer, Bill Sampson, wrote a letter to the LawrenceJournal World warning that the proposed change in the Kansas Constitution that would give the legislature control over Supreme Court appointments was really about abortion rights.

He said that its purpose was to give politicians control of the Kansas Supreme Courtthat they would use to overrule the will of the people — that the legislature would use its newly minted power over Supreme Court appointments to change the Supreme Court, reversing the vote made in 2022 that supported abortion rights. Mr. Sampson is undoubtedly right, but to me the issue is even larger.

In Kansas we have good courts because we’ve insulated our Supreme Court Justices from the economic pressure of politics. Let’s keep it that way.

In August, make sure you vote, and when you do, vote “NO.”

Two videotaped interviews made the news over the weekend. Let’s take a look!

Kristen Welker interviewed President Donald Trump for Meet the Press. She met him in Wisconsin.

The interview was more performative than informative, which they always are. No one truly expects Trump to break down and admit his policy errors, misleading statements, or misbegotten decisions in an interview. No one expected an Epstein confession.

We know the president to be liar. We know he doesn’t understand how government works. We know he will make outrageous claims unmoored to evidence or facts. That’s his schtick.

But interviews like Welker’s are still valuable, fascinating events, particularly when taped and televised, as this one was. It’s important to see the president turn colors when pushed in the slightest by an interviewer.

(A single interviewer, not shouted questions at a rope line, with helicopter noise in the background, yields better results.)

Trump’s only reaction — deny, obfuscate, interrupt, lie — suggest the president himself knows he’s all crust and no cheese. Stomping off the set at the end reflects this self-knowledge: he’s getting nothing from this exchange, so he takes his ball and goes home.

It also shows how little pushback he gets from the people around him. If you’ve ever watched the sickening spectacle of Trump-worship at a cabinet meeting, you know how unprepared the president is for even a slight nudge from the press.

That was Welker’s success. She was prepared, firm, unintimidated — yet never rude or self-centered. She knew, as reporters know, that her subject would evade direct answers — that’s normal in political interviews.

But she also knew he would turn the interview into a personal confrontation, accusing her of being “crooked,” which may one of the biggest self-owns of all time, broadcast for all to see.

Sitting in a barn in Wisconsin, the president became unhinged.

Early in my career, at the age of 24, I was offered an opportunity for a one-on-one interview with Sen. Ted Kennedy, who was then running for president against Jimmy Carter. I prepared for the brief interview with notes, prepared questions, the works.

Kennedy ate me up. I was intimidated by his Kennedy-ness, and too focused on my own agenda. I learned an important lesson that day, which is: rote preparation is less important than actually listening to answers. Oh, and that politicians are not gods.

Kristen Welker was not intimdated. As a result, we got an important look at a disintegrating Donald Trump.

The New York Times taped and transcribed an interview with Scott Pelley, the CBS reporter who was fired last week after hammering new leadership at 60 Minutes, the program where he worked.

The interview clearly revealed Pelley’s deep investment in his work, and his despair at the changes at 60 Minutes, and CBS News in general. He supported the show’s staff for a reason: anyone who has ever worked in TV news knows most of 60 Minutes reflects the work of producers and editors, not just correspondents like Pelley.

Newsrooms are fascinating places. Everyone in a newsroom is expected to think and act with independence and focus (and, sometimes, aggression.) Successful newsrooms are collaborative and non-hierarchical, not top-down dictatorships.

At the same time, someone has to call the shots — who’s on the front page, who leads the newscast, who goes where and does what when news breaks. Otherwise, it’s chaos.

So there’s a typical tension between reporters and editors who like to think for themselves, and newsroom supervisors who sometimes have different ideas. The best newsrooms understand that tension and use it to produce better stories.

Sometimes, though, the folks at the top have a fundamentally different outlook than the reporters on the streets. That seems to have been the case at 60 Minutes, for Scott Pelley.

When that happens the only real choice is to leave, which Pelley seems to have understood as well. No newsroom employee launches into the broadside Pelley used against new management and expects to survive in the job for very long.

Pelley used the New York Times interview to explain his outbursts, and to suggest he wasn’t aware of the damage they would cause. But I’m pretty certain any newsroom veteran knows that Pelley’s language, right or wrong, was the beginning of the end.

CBS News’ reputation, earned over decades, is in tatters, of course. It’s clear the owners of the network think the newsroom needs some kind of ideological reset — which sucks, and won’t work, and is anti-Constitutional and scary, but which is also their decision to make.

I’ve worked for crappy news directors, too. (Not, though, at the Kansas City Star, which, for all its bad business decisions, remained committed to high quality reporting during my time there, and still does today.)

It’s one of the first lessons of journalism, and television news: No one is irreplacable.

There will be more stories about Graham Platner and his behavior with women, Graham Platner and what he said when, Graham Platner and dramas as yet unimagined.

After Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Maine, those will have only begun to bloom, like toxic algae on the Platner oyster operation that mostly seems to sell to his mom’s upscale restaurant. I know this is only the preview of coming attractions – and you do, too – because we all know that guy, though not this particular guy.

You know him even if you’re out there mouthing some wishful thing about what a beautiful redemption arc his is. I believe in those, but sexting between 6 and 12 women not that long ago, as a newlywed raring to run for high office, makes me doubt that this is a man who is no longer reckless.

You know this even if you’re blaming The New York Times for failing to cover for him, which is not their brief. You know this even if you discount every abusive detail from his ex who was a Republican operative, though hers is not the only voice sounding the alarm.

So the question is not whether we know but whether we care to admit it, and if we do, consider behavior over time that suggests a basic disrespect for women disqualifying.

We can’t ignore 600 red flags and then wonder why MAGA can’t see the thousands flapping in the breeze over in Trump world.

As friend-of-the-Stack Barb Shelly said, Platner sounds like someone Trump would nominate for secretary of defense.

Only the names change

I know I have gotten shirty with some very dear friends over this, and that is because I have been having this conversation since the 90s, and only the names change. For my entire adult life, I have been told to get over this thing I have about finding even the most clearly abusive behavior disqualifying for those seeking office, as if this were the niche-est of niche issues.

Somehow, the bigger picture always requires the sacrifice of this one issue, and look where that’s gotten us. Women are half of humanity; that’s not a big picture?

How depressing that this particular form of disregard is still characterized as ‘personal stuff that shouldn’t matter.’ Sexting anonymously on an app notoriously favored by predators is written off as nothing for us in the public to worry about, but only between a man and his wife.

If you think otherwise, then you are not a fighter for the people but an elitist, though I don’t know how that follows. Someone who does have more elite ties than he says, though, is the candidate, and the only thing wrong with that is his lack of forthrightness about it.

Platner served four combat tours, and paid a price that I do not underestimate. But as the grandson of a Cornell-educated Modernist designer who won the Rome Prize for Architecture and the son of a real estate attorney who went to Dartmouth, his working-class persona is a little on the schticky side.

“This is not a salt-of-the-earth guy coming up from a hardscrabble existence,” former Maine Democratic Party Chairman Tony Buxton told The New York Times. “If he’s an oysterman, I’m a florist, OK? Because I raise roses and give them to my wife.”

Where’s the police report?

Whatever happens in this race, what is making me sick at heart is how little the conversation has changed in the last umpteen years, and how not just our culture but men I actually know – on the left as well as the right – still can’t see misogyny.

Where’s the police report attesting that Platner’s Republican former girlfriend was really afraid, one asked, as if that’s a thing that definitely happens. Where are the criminal charges? I would ask if we’d learned nothing about intimate partner violence in the last half-century, but the answer is clear.

What a distraction from the latest Trump corruption scandals, someone I like a lot said, as if seeing through this man in any way hobbles our ability to appreciate the rolling disaster of this presidency.

Messy, or messed-up?

Platner is not appealing to academics and journalists, but to those of us with messy lives, said another man I think well of. Not only do we scribblers have no protective cloak from anything anybody else is going through, but with the academy under attack and the business I spent my working life in all but going going gone, Platner’s VA pension and family support is more of a cushion than many of my former colleagues have.

Ken Klippenstein, the same independent journalist who went after Susan Collins for her essential tremor, called the sexting “scandal” – and yes, he put quotes around that word – exactly what folks in the real world like about Platner. Great, because we definitely need more of “those.” Is Ken Paxton also refreshingly masculine, then? On that basis, Donald Trump must be the ultimate hero.

“People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly,” Klippenstein wrote. “I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.”

In my many years of covering politics, this somehow escaped me as a problem, but Platner is in any case here to help end that suffocating “era of smoothgroin politicians.”

I also have to say that the men I know who have said they’re done with these guys have my gratitude, and lots of it.

Of course I fully understand those who say that without the Senate, well, hope we like it in Gehenna, because we’ll be here in hell indefinitely. But to those who think this man is their ticket to anything but more of the same, I say: Janet Mills is still on the ballot. And when Platner disappoints you, please spare me your surprise.

My friend Patrick Tuohey helped break the news Friday that a citizens’ group planned to file petition signatures regarding the Royals’ Crown Center stadium project.

Reports say the submitted petition doesn’t directly involve the stadium itself; rather, it proposes an ordinance that would require another public vote before the city can become involved in stadium construction.

Put another way: If the petition is valid, Kansas City would have a November vote; if “yes” prevails, there would be an up-or-down vote on the stadium itself in 2027.

The second-vote requirement would not apply if the stadium is built with federal, state, county, or private funds. If city money or borrowing were to be involved, however, a citywide vote would be needed.

The stadium petition was apparently modeled after a similar petition, more than a decade ago, on the airport terminal plan.

This new petition effort forces the city and the Royals into a difficult political corner.

Do the team and stadium supporters want to finance a major campaign against the November initiative? If so — and they win — the stadium issue would appear to be settled.

If they lose, though, they face another expensive campaign on the stadium itself, next year. That’s two costly campaigns in a six-month period.

Mayor Sly James and the city council faced a similar dilemma in the years before the KCI vote. Supporters of the old terminal gathered enough petition signatures to require a public vote on a public vote requirement for a new terminal.

Our friend Lynn Horsley reported next on a possible work-around:

Councilman John Sharp … said the council should just agree to the petitioners’ proposal for a future election on any airport improvements and be done with it, without requiring an election.

That is, of course, what happened. Petitioners dropped their effort after the city agreed to put the airport itself on a future ballot.

You’ll remember the airport proposal passed overwhelmingly.

We’ll soon see if Mayor Quinton Lucas and/or councilmembers agree to negotiate with the petition committee. Regardless, it now appears — assuming the petitions are valid and sufficient — that the stadium project is headed to polls, one way or another.

My friend John Holt at WDAF-Fox 4 Kansas City hosts a debate Friday involving four Republican candidates for Kansas governor — Ty Masterson, Philip Sarnecki, Charlotte O’Hara and Scott Schwab.

At least that’s the lineup as I write this, Thursday evening. There have been rumors all week that Masterson, with a Donald Trump endorsement in his hip pocket, would skip the debate. He’s now expected to show up at Johnson County Community College, where the debate wil be held.

It’s from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., and is available on Fox 4’s website, its streaming app, other stations’ websites, and available for later viewing, one assumes. If you want to watch you can find a way to do so.

(UPDATE: John confirms the debate will be broadcast over the air, on WDAF and on stations in Wichita, Topeka, and Joplin.)

What will we see?

Masterson, the Kansas Senate president, is now the clear favorite in the August primary, given the Trump endorsement. We can expect O’Hara — who was Trumpy before Trump, and Sarnecki — who thinks he’s Trump — to present themselves as the only choice for all the Trumpists in the GOP electorate.

Me? I’ll be watching Scott Schwab. He faces the most interesting decision of all of the candidates in the Republican primary (Vicki Schmidt, Stacy Rogers, and Nick Reinecker are not on the bill, apparently.)

Schwab is not a moderate, of course — no one in today’s Republican party can truly make that claim. But he’s far more centrist than his debate opponents, which means there is an open lane for the current secretary of state, if he wants it.

There is simply no way for Schwab to get to the right of Masterson, O’Hara, or Sarnecki. When they finish Friday’s debate, Kansas will have no taxes, no services, no schools, no government. Schwab could be a candidate who can offer efficiency and competence, not Trumpy bombast, as an alternative.

Why would he do that? Because Kansas voters like good government, particularly in Topeka. Bill Graves promised to pack ‘em high and tight, and won. Mike Hayden came from the right-center of the party.

Sam Brownback was conservative, sure, but Tim Shallenberger lost to Kathleen Sebelius, and Kris Kobach lost the general election to Laura Kelly. Kansans appear to prefer their governors in the middle lane.

The Kansas GOP’s unmistakable drift to the Trumpist right is the main reason Johnson County has turned independent-Democratic in the last decade. And nearly one in four Kansas voters (!) lives in Johnson County.

Which is where Schwab comes in.

It isn’t likely he, or any semi-moderate, can win a Republican primary. But what does he have to lose by moving to the center? You can make the argument that he is more electable in the fall than any of his opponents on the stage Friday.

It’s likely Democrats will make Trumpism the issue in November: If you like what Donald Trump has done to America, they’ll say, you’ll love what Ty Masterson will do to Kansas. Schwab, who has won a statewide race, won’t have that baggage.

We’ll see if he makes that case in Friday’s debate. Importantly, we’ll see if Kansas Republicans prefer the middle lane in August.

The field is set for the 2026 statewide elections in Kansas, with a few last-minute surprises — former Gov. Jeff Colyer is out of the governor’s race, for Republicans, and Overland Park Mayor Curt Skoog is in that race, for the Democrats.

There are now three candidates for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination: Skoog, state senator Cindy Holscher, and state senator Ethan Corson.

Whoever wins the nod will be an underdog in the general election. Not because Democrats struggle in governor races — surprisingly, Kansans seem willing to elect Democrats for the job (Laura Kelly, Kathleen Sebelius, Joan Finney and John Carlin are recent examples.)

But all three Democratic candidates are from Johnson County. And that, my friends, is a serious factor in gubernatorial races, and in fact all statewide races in Kansas, with just a few exceptions.

The last time a Johnson Countian was elected governor in Kansas was in 1974, when one-time Prairie Village Mayor Bob Bennett defeated jump-out-of-the-car Democrat Vern Miller. That was more than 50 years ago.

There have been more recent governors from Johnson County, including Colyer and Mark Parkinson, a Republican-turned-kinda-Democrat, but both entered the governor’s mansion after an incumbent (Sam Brownback, Sebelius) resigned.

Winning an election, statewide, from Johnson County, seems pretty difficult.

(Let’s pause for a moment and ponder the fact that all three gubernatorial Democrats hail from what was once the most important Republican county in Kansas. The electoral map has changed, dramatically.)

This anti-JoCo record could be in jeopardy if Kansas Republicans also nominate a Johnson Countian, which they have a chance to do. Charlotte O’Hara, Scott Schwab and Philip Sarnecki are Johnson Countians. If one wins the GOP nomination, it’ll be an all-Johnson County November election for the governor’s job.

But that doesn’t seem likely. Ty Masterson, of Andover, now seems the favorite for the GOP’s primary blessing. (Skoog told reporters Monday he entered the race because he fears a Masterson victory.)

Why would Johnson Countians struggle in Kansas elections?

Some explanations seem obvious. Kansas is still a rural state, and rural voters naturally distrust urban candidates (is that distrust mutual? Maybe.)

Sedgwick County (Wichita) and Shawnee County (Topeka) have long been Democratic strongholds, and, until recently, have not been in sync with Republican Johnson County (in fact, Johnson County seems to have flipped its party affections with Wichita, which now leans more Republican.)

Mostly, though, Johnson County — like many urban and suburban counties — lacks a political culture that encourages and rewards aggressive political ambition.

Johnson County lawmakers are smart and hard-working. Few, though, seem willing to engage (or invest) in the years-long positioning needed to ascend the political ladder in the state.

Dole, Roberts, Moran. Bill Graves. Marshall. Brownback. All were well-known in Kansas Republican circles for years before seeking statewide office. Even Nancy Kassebaum could claim one of the state’s favorite sons as her father.

All came from other places in Kansas. The political game seems less important, somehow, in the state’s biggest county.

This observation isn’t limited to the Kansas side of the state line, by the way. Kansas City, Mo. and Jackson County are rarely a significant consideration in Missouri’s political machinery. Rural interests, and St. Louis and Springfield, are far more important politically than our own community.

Even Claire McCaskill had to move to St. Louis to win a Senate seat.

Statewide politics, as a focus, seems to take a backseat in our region, often to our detriment (although stadium funding success has changed that calculus a bit.) We’ll see in 2026 if the pattern holds.

A quick story: In 2001, Democrat Bob Holden held a lavish inauguration ceremony after winning the governor’s race in Missouri. Chagrined after sharp criticism of the spending, Holden promised to raise $1 million privately to cover the costs of the shindig.

I got a chance to look at the list of donors once the fund drive ended. St. Louis interests gave Holden hundreds of thousands of dollars, as I recall. Kansas City? Around $5,000, from Jim Nutter.

Kansas Citians wondered why they had smaller voice in Jefferson City than St. Louis. The explanation seemed clear.