There are dangers in that.

One of them is that the memory of several of us (such as me) is less than dependable, so what we have to offer may or may not be valid, even if we may actually have known the truth at one time.

Another is that even if a statement may be truly factual, the fact-giver may have been caught in error enough times in the recent past that he is now not credible, at least for the present.

And the chronic problem, of course, is that we may have settled a particular issue one or more times already, but can’t remember what we finally agreed on.

This is all by way of introduction to one of the questions that arose at a recent session: can you really hear the corn grow?

Like most of the other Bean Boyz city slickers, I refused to believe it. I had heard the claim since childhood, but had always stuck the idea in a class with the existence of jackalopes, or Bigfoot, or whether you can get cramps and drown by going swimming within a hour after eating.

But the aggies in our group—those who had farmed until recently, or who had taught ag in school, or who had grown up on a farm—claimed the opposite. Yes, they said, you can hear the corn grow.

What does it sound like, I asked, smiling inwardly. They replied that it sounds like a bunch of small pops, or a crackling. “Crackle” and “pop”—I thought they would probably add “snap” if I kept asking. There was no way that botanical maturing could be heard by the human ear, in my confident opinion.

Well, I was wrong—again.

Apparently, if you go stand in or near a cornfield on a quiet night with very little wind and no extraneous noise nearby, what you will hear is what sounds like radio static, sort of what I sometimes get when I call up a radio station that carries the St. Louis Cardinals games and from which I’m more than 100 miles away.

I know this from an answer I got by asking Google—where else?—whether you could hear the corn grow. Here’s what I learned:

On humid nights, when ideal conditions promote the growth of a cornstalk at a rate of 1 1/4 inches every eight hours, the cells in the stalks are breaking and rapidly reforming. It’s the breakage that you can hear, if there’s little wind or other nearby sound. In fact, there are online time lapse audio-videos that “show and tell” exactly that.

I was gobsmacked. One of these hot, humid evenings I’ll drive out in the country, park next to a cornfield, and catch the crackle.

Now I wonder what other urban myths, or rural for that matter, are actually true. My understanding of reality is now more suspect than I like, and I don’t know whom to trust for the straight skinny.

What’s next? Are flying saucers for real? Or living organisms elsewhere in the solar system? Or the Chicago Cubs?

And must I rely on Bean Boyz to set me straight the next time? That’s a really scary thought.

Some public policy questions keep rolling around in my head. Two deal with foreign policy, and the other two with federal taxes. I’d like to see them move up on the priority scale among people in a position to act on them. They’re not all that complicated, and you may have wondered about them as well.

1) Why doesn’t Congress appropriate more military and economic funding for Ukraine?

Ukraine deserves to defend itself against Russia’s expansionist attempt. To allow Putin and Russia to succeed would violate more than 75 years of Western defense of Europe against both Soviet and then Russian nationalist threats. The U.S., until the last few years, has been a pillar of that support for NATO.

President Trump shows himself at least sympathetic, and maybe favorable, toward Putin’s plan. It’s hard to believe most members of Congress share that attitude.

America’s allies in NATO have stepped up to bolster Ukraine’s defenses with arms and economic support. That aid appears to rankle Trump. Consequently Ukraine’s Zelensky is turning more and more to European countries for the help he desperately needs.

Trump’s claim to be working toward a brokered peace appears more hollow as time goes on. Russia’s invasion is now in its fifth year.

Are Congressional Republicans so abjectly fearful of the President that they are willing to let Russia succeed?

2) Why doesn’t Congress simply declare war on Iran?

For decades Congress has abdicated its constitutional power to make war to the presidency. The last time Congress issued a war declaration was after the Pearl Harbor attack at the start of America’s entry into World War Two. That was nearly 85 years ago.

Almost all Republicans, who control both houses of Congress, appear to at least acquiesce in Trump’s military action against Iran. If they truly support the President, they should have the courage to reclaim their constitutional war powers, as the Founders intended, and make the battle an official war.

The reason they don’t is probably because they fear retribution from their constituents, most of whom polls show disapprove of the “police action” against Iran. So most of them remain silent while the President does as he wishes. Trump refrains from asking Congress for a war declaration for the same reason; he fears it would not pass.

As with so many other issues, most Republican members of Congress fear risking antagonizing either the President or their constituents who voted them in. Their timidity—willing neither to officially support Trump or to oppose him on the issue—is disappointing.

3) Why should Donald Trump, his family, and his businesses be forever exempt from government probes into his federal taxes up to now, unlike everyone else in the United States?

The summary backstory of how the possibility came about is as follows:;

Donald Trump sued the Internal Revenue Service in January 2026 for $10 billion over a leak by an IRS contractor of some data from his federal tax returns for 1995 and 2005. (Leaks of tax returns of a few other wealthy people also took place.) Trump claimed that the leak caused him financial and reputational harm and public embarrassment, and negatively impacted his public standings and business operations. He also said the leak unfairly portrayed him in a false light and damaged his voting support in the 2020 election.

His personal attorneys and the IRS fewer than 3 1/2 months later settled the lawsuit. In the settlement was an agreement that the U.S. is “forever barred and precluded” from examining or prosecuting Trump, his sons, and the Trump organization’s tax filings prior to May 2026.

The contract leaker had earlier been prosecuted and received a sentence of up to five years.

During his several presidential campaigns, Trump had said dozens of times that he would release his tax returns, as all his presidential predecessors since Richard Nixon, and his Democratic opponents, had done. Thereafter he backtracked, either postponing the release or giving reasons why it wouldn’t be possible for him to do so.

A logical connection between the leak and the settlement is hard to figure out.

Bottom line: as President, Trump sued his own IRS for $10 billion, and reached a settlement with his own Department of Justice that permanently protected him, his family, and his businesses from any inspection of their tax returns up to the May 2026 date of the settlement.

ANY member of Congress—whether Democrat, Independent, or Republican—who sees no problem with that should undergo an olfactory exam immediately.

4. Why not take a look at Jeff Bezos’ proposal to completely eliminate federal income taxes on households in the lower half of Americans’ income scale, and reduce federal spending to make up for the lost revenue?

Bezos recently made the proposal in an interview a few weeks ago. He noted that taxes paid annually by the lower half of American income earners—about 76 million households—represent only three percent of federal income tax revenue. Taxes paid by the upper one percent on the scale equal about 40 percent.

Three percent of federal income tax revenue is about $75 billion. Bezos thinks Congressional appropriators could find enough spending cuts to make up for the revenue reduction, without seriously harming important government programs.

He didn’t say so, but one way to do that might be to eliminate a number of tax loopholes, with which the federal tax code is rife. Increasing tax rates on the wealthy could also be considered, but going the loophole route would probably be more palatable to members of Congress.

Bezos’ proposal deserves a look. At a time when President Trump and his Congressional supporters are considering a $900 billion annual increase in defense spending, Bezos’ suggestion is not out of line.

And Bezos doesn’t take increasing taxes on the wealthy off the table. He says that option would not necessarily need to be coupled with the tax reduction proposal for the bottom half of earners, but he’s not opposed to making it a topic of discussion.

The lower half of income earners make less than about $56,000 a year. Reducing their federal income tax liability to zero would leave more money in their pockets, and they would no doubt spend it on necessities.

Private consumer spending accounts for about 70 percent of the American economy; a boost to that figure would boost the nation’s economic growth, a goal for most members of Congress. For years Republicans have claimed that tax cuts would increase investment, especially from those with higher incomes. The same should be said for tax cuts for those with lower incomes as well.

Those are my questions. Maybe someday before long they’ll get some answers.

This is a trivial column.

I turned 85 last Monday. Family saluted me with a birthday dinner, thoughtful gifts, and lots of well wishes. Many friends congratulated me as well. It all warmed my cockles.

I’ve always considered 85 to be the starting line for the “really elderly.” And now I am there.

But I had also always thought that having been born before the Pearl Harbor attack, I had amassed a huge storehouse of useful knowledge. And an equally large one of the useless kind.

Armed by all that stuff, I thought I would be a valuable addition to a team at any trivia contest. Lucky’s, the restaurant at Wild Rose Casino here in Jefferson, holds just such an event every Thursday evening, with at least half a dozen teams competing. A few months ago I approached the leaders of one of the teams and asked if they had space for another member.

They immediately welcomed me into their group, and I anticipated providing highly valuable, and correct, answers to the questions.

Wrong.

The weekly jousts consist of several sets of five questions, each question in a different category. Each question must be worth a different number of points to the team, with its members deciding how many points to assign to a particular question. The maximum possible number of points for the team’s evening (I think) is 150.

It soon became evident to me that the master of the contest—the one who selects and calls out the questions—chooses categories that wander far from my store of factual knowledge.

I’m generally OK on U.S. Presidents, historical events, geography, classical literature—the stuff of the liberal arts courses I took in college.

But fashion? Current pop music? Stars of recent movies? Math and science? Even the champion teams of various sports in recent years? Uh-uh. I find myself sitting there stone-faced while the much younger team members knock out all that data, sometimes even before the questioner has finished asking the question.

What’s more, some in the team’s membership of maybe seven or eight are teachers or former teachers. They know most of the stuff I know, and can recall it much quicker than my 85-year-old brain can dredge it up.

On the infrequent occasions when the team turns to me for a particular answer that I should know, I’m often wrong. I’m surprised they still ask me each week if I can be there on the coming Thursday night. They may be hoping I say no.

My attendance has been spotty of late, but the team places at or near the top of the contest each week whether I’m there or not. That says it all.

My trivia experience brings me to a startling and disquieting revelation: I probably know more about the 85 years that preceded my birth in 1941 than the 85 years since.

The United States, and much of the rest of the world, underwent enormous change from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. Most Americans born in the mid-1700s, for instance, and in much of the rest of the world as well, experienced pretty much their same kind of life for the rest of their existence, unless they pulled up stakes and moved westward. But even then, their livelihood wasn’t all that different.

But someone who was born in 1855 and died in 1940—an 85-year span—lived through unbelievable changes, in transportation, communication, household maintenance, and on and on. And American government, business, commerce, workers’ rights, education, and other crucial sectors changed dramatically as well.

That’s the span of years I feel competent to discuss in trivia contests, because I’ve studied them all my life. The years since the end of World War Two? Not so much, even though I’ve lived through all of them.

When I attended college, the Recent American History course usually ended around 1950 or so. That sounds comical today.

I have no clue about modern culture, anything even remotely related to technology, fashion fads, in fact fads of all kinds.

I identify closely with the hero of Robert Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. My inner world recedes continually in my rear view mirror, to the time when students and writers took notes on paper, relied on typewriters, searched card catalogs for books in libraries, and—believe it or not—did research in actual books and documents instead of on line.

I miss it.

I started losing ground decades ago. At the Jefferson Bee and Herald newspapers, everyone else had already converted to computers while I continued to output my stories on my trusty Royal Standard cloth ribbon manual typewriter (may it rest in peace).

I slipped up, and went out of town to a conference. When I returned, my typewriter had been filched. In its place on my desk, staring at me defiantly, rested an Apple IIE with a note: “If you’re going to work here, you’re going to use this computer.” (I owned the place.) The note included an appendix with operating instructions. The first one: “Turn on.”

I asked the staff the obvious question: “How do I do that?” It’s been like that ever since.

I’ve mentioned the towering changes that occurred from mid-19th to mid-20th Century. My life experiences also tell me that today’s America is tremendously different from the one into which I was born, starting in 1941.

My humbling trivia Thursday nights tell me the same thing.

The end of a high school career is always a whirlwind for high school seniors. In a few years they probably won’t remember much about the ceremony, embedded as it was in the excitement of the season and the congratulatory family reception that often follows it.

The only thing I remember about my high school commencement back in 1959 is a quote from our ceremony’s guest speaker. He said, “If you don’t remember anything else I say here today, remember this:”.

That’s it. I forget what he said I was supposed to remember.

Anyway, I watched the ADM graduates file in and file out, with the ADM band playing “Pomp and Circumstance,” and I ruminated: what would I want to say to an Iowa high school graduating class?

I decided it was this: Iowa needs your help.

We’re lagging in several areas, and not making much satisfactory progress.

Iowa’s government, and hundreds of its communities, spend millions upon millions of dollars annually trying to keep the state’s head above water—in economic health, personal health, educational health, agricultural health, recreational health, hospitality health, and yes, water health too.

Many thousands of Iowans willingly donate volunteer hours to those goals as well. But despite all the good intentions, we’re not gaining on most of the rest of the country or even on our neighboring states.

Take median household income. For a family of three, the national figure is $103,668 per year. Iowa’s median figure is $98,013 per year, a number that ranks us 28th in the nation. That’s lower than Minnesota ($121,094), Wisconsin ($107,009), Illinois ($106,922), and Nebraska ($100,273). Only South Dakota ($97,793) and Missouri ($96,521) rank lower than Iowa among our six contiguous states, and not by very much.

Our gross domestic product (GDP) ranking probably has a lot to do with our ho-hum income picture. Iowa’s GDP in fourth quarter 2025 grew only 1.16% from our state’s GDP level a year earlier, in fourth quarter 2024. That’s a lower growth rate than ANY of our contiguous states.

Here’s the sad GDP growth truth: Minnesota 1.65%, Illinois 1.62%, Wisconsin 1.47%, Nebraska 1.42%, South Dakota 1.38%, Missouri 1.32%.

The health of Iowa’s streams, rivers, and lakes? It’s no secret they’re filthy—many of them unfit for usage without major expensive treatment, and unhealthy for native creatures. We contribute a significant portion of the toxic chemicals that feed the Dead Zone just beyond the Mississippi Delta off Louisiana’s coast, most of them the result of agricultural runoff, as documented by Iowa State University.

And Iowa ranks at the very top in cancer prevalence. I didn’t smoke, but 15 years ago part of my right lung was removed because of cancer. The cause in my case is unknown. Does application of chemicals to farm fields play a role? Is radon a factor? Theories abound, but no one knows, and meanwhile cancer continues to rage.

But at least our people are known to be “Iowa Nice,” right? Well, maybe not.

A recent poll, taken from a tabulation of impressions of large numbers of tourists nationwide, found Iowa to be the 29th friendliest state to travelers and newcomers. Once again, we came in dead last among our contiguous states.

Minnesota was dubbed The Nation’s Friendliness State. They’re Number One. Apparently “Minnesota Nice” really means something. The other states bordering Iowa finished as follows: Nebraska 13th, Illinois 14th, South Dakota 20th, Missouri 22nd, and Wisconsin 26th.

Why aren’t we more like Minnesota?

I could go on, but there’s no point to so doing. We need some help. Iowa’s state government leaders haven’t found the magic secret, either because they’re looking in the wrong places or they prefer not to look in the right ones.

Iowa doesn’t have a major metropolitan city. Nor does it have mountains, a seashore, perpetually pleasant weather, or nationally recognized historic attractions.

But it does have incredibly rich soil, hundreds of proud communities, hard-working employers and employees, and three million-plus people, most of whom would like to do the right thing for themselves, their families, their friends, and others whom they can call neighbors regardless of who they are or where they come from.

The state needs to tap those assets for a more pleasing and prosperous future than where we now find ourselves. Young high school graduates with their education, their high-tech skills, and their promise for a more productive economy can be a vital component toward that goal. Their efforts, including their active participation in Iowa’s political world, would contribute enormously to the state’s future.

That would be my message to a high school graduating class, right after “If you don’t remember else I say here today, remember this:”.

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The strange meander of the Voting Rights Act

Suppose your Republican legislature is trying to carve up your mostly black Democratic congressional district and distribute its parts into two or more mostly white Republican districts? If you don’t like that, how do you prove that the legislature’s motivation is racially based (which is illegal) instead of politically based (which is legal)?

That’s a very steep climb today.

It didn’t used to be. For decades after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the courts summarily found race to be the deciding factor in such cases. Congress adopted the Voting Rights Act specifically to protect black voters from the governmental discrimination that whites had foisted on them ever since the end of Reconstruction in 1876.

The courts protected districts that were “majority-minority” (the standard term for mostly black or mostly Latino), essentially as a way to right past wrongs that still prevailed. That started to change in 2013 with a series of three U.S. Supreme Court decisions that culminated this year.

The 2013 decision—Shelby County v. Holder—found illegal the Voting Rights Act requirement that jurisdictions that had a history of voting discrimination must get federal preclearance before changing their voting laws.

Then the second decision—Brnovich v. DNC in 2021—changed the decisive factor in voting rights cases from effect to intent. That meant that a challenge to a voting law change had to show that racial discrimination was the goal of the change. Simply weakening black voting rights in a district was not proof enough.

Finally, the third decision—Louisiana v. Callais, handed down just a few weeks ago, at the end of April—extracted the rest of the teeth from the Voting Rights Act. The Court ruled that Louisiana’s congressional district map unconstitutionally established two black majority districts out of the state’s total of six districts. The reason? The two districts were illegally based on race—because they intended to favor black voters, according to the court.

And what about political intent? Is that legal grounds for overturning a voting rights law?

Certainly is, said the Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decision in 2019—in Russo v. Common Cause—the Court found that partisan gerrymandering is not a matter to be decided by the federal courts. While it may be incompatible with democratic principles, as the court acknowledged, it is nevertheless the province of state constitutions and state courts to deal with.

So the Louisiana Legislature immediately reworked its congressional map to draw just one black-majority district, a serpentine creation that meanders from east to west across the state.

What it all means is that the Supreme Court has found unconstitutional Congress’s Voting Rights Act attempt in 1965 to redress discrimination against black voters.

A significant portion of Republican leaders and voters will maintain that the blizzard of redistricted maps drawn this year by Southern states, both before and after the Callais decision, are entirely politically motivated, and that race played no part. Some who claim that belief are no doubt sincere.

But evidence is strong the other way.

When President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, signed the federal Civil Rights Act in 1964, the year before enactment of the Voting Rights Act, he said, “We have lost the South for a generation.” He was certainly right. The region had been known as the Solid South for its overwhelming Democratic support for many decades.

The “Solid South” nickname continues accurate today. But the parties switched places. Most Southern blacks became Democrats, and most Southern whites migrated to the Republican Party, where they have remained ever since.

There’s a reason for that.

Key conservative leaders in the Republican Party—like Kevin Phillips and Lee Atwater—quietly developed the party’s “Southern Strategy” in the two decades after enactment of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, consciously shifting Republican emphasis toward attracting Southern white conservatives, who traditionally had supported the Democratic Party. The Republican leadership showed itself willing to drop open support for blacks, and fish instead in the pool of conservative whites, of whom there are a great many in the South.

Who would have guessed there were so many political theorists among white Southerners for whom “devotion to states’ rights” was the supposed deciding factor?

The shift proved successful politically for Republican politicians, especially in the Deep South, which has remained dependably devoted to the GOP for more than four decades.

Southern Republican legislatures can, and do, claim that racism is no longer a factor in their state’s politics. They maintain that their only desire in redrawing their congressional districts is to grow the number of their GOP members of Congress, despite the Supreme Court’s admission that such political gerrymandering is undemocratic.

The Supreme Court has made sure that it’s nearly impossible to prove them wrong. An unbalanced number of white-majority districts is no longer relevant for federal court challenges. And the racial factor is now employed as an argument in favor of the redrawn maps, rather than against them, by maintaining that the former maps were racist—because they favored black voters.

The arc of the moral universe may ultimately bend toward justice, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, but apparently it takes some strange detours.

Barrels upon innumerable barrels of ink have graced the pages of court documents for many, many decades in the quest for American justice. Attorneys for both sides have marshaled their best arguments for their clients, hoping to convince a judge of the rightness of their position.

In civil court it’s plaintiff vs. defendant, and in criminal court it’s prosecution vs. defendant. But the procedures are similar. The judge’s task is to decide which side has the better case.

Traditionalists maintain that the judge’s job is simply “to call balls and strikes.” That’s exactly the phrase John Roberts employed during the 2005 Senate committee hearing on his nomination by then-President George W. Bush to become Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Roberts laid out the analogy: “I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability, and I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”

For conservatives who look only to the Founders’ Constitution—so-called originalists or textualists—or to a relevant state constitution for the answer in a contested case, the process must be simple: just research what the original document says or implies to determine the proper judgment in a particular case, then rule on that basis.

If that’s the way it’s supposed to be, modern technology may indeed supply a revolutionary answer. Artificial intelligence (AI) can go back to the actual wording of the Constitution, consider the available record of the Founders’ discussions on that particular subject, and also wade through all previous cases that relate to the one at hand. AI can research that in just a few seconds, infinitely faster than any collection of judges or judicial clerks ever could. And AI can then render the decision based on what the data says.

If that’s what a judge is supposed to do, as originalists claim, AI makes him or her obsolete. It’s the perfect way to call balls and strikes. Just have a court functionary plug the court briefs into a computer, ask for the judgment, and almost immediately the answer is forthcoming.

“Justice delayed is justice denied” is never heard again.

There are at least a couple of problems with that approach. In the first place, AI spits out information based on what it’s gathered in its instantaneous search. If the material it “reads” is false, then so is its response. And there is now a growing group of malevolent tech-savvy individuals who create false data, resulting in an erroneous AI response. In the real world, AI has been known to cite court cases that don’t exist.

In the second place, originalism itself has major weaknesses. One of them is that the Constitution, sort of like the Bible, can be used to argue for or against different positions.

For instance, the Constitution’s preamble lays out the purposes for which the document was created. Six specific reasons are listed, including to “promote the general welfare.” Then one of the First Amendment’s five basic rights in the document is that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of one’s religion.

If free exercise of someone’s religion clashes with the people’s general welfare, and a lawsuit is brought over the issue, how does an originalist decide the case? Which constitutional provision is more basic?

Examples of clashing court decisions on a single question are not hard to find. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson ruled that racial segregation of schools does not violate the Constitution. But in 1954 the Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, countermanded that decision and ruled that state-sanctioned segregation of education is indeed a violation of the 14th Amendment and therefore illegal.

Another example: in 1973, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decided that the Constitution’s due process clause of the 14th Amendment guarantees a pregnant woman the right to abort her pregnancy before fetal viability. Then in 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court reversed itself and ruled that abortion is not a constitutional right under the Constitution. The court turned legal decisions on abortion’s legitimacy over to the states.

In both cases the 14th Amendment played an important role in the various decisions: in the first instance, overturning school segregation, and in the second instance, legalizing abortion. How artificial intelligence would have decided those cases, and whether AI’s decisions would have been allowed to stand, would have posed huge problems for American constitutional scholars and the entire judicial system.

For me at least, it comes down to a realization that AI would not be a dependable tool to lean on in judicial judgment, and that originalism and textualism in jurisprudence fall short of what’s needed for the American people. Judicial wisdom and understanding of modern American society constitute more dependable and more valid pillars of justice.

PLUNDER AS FOREIGN POLICY NEEDS TO END

“Thou shalt not steal.” - Eighth Commandment

—God, as reported by Moses

——————

Americans have rarely faced the facts about the role of national theft in the history of their nation. From the time of the first Europeans’ arrival in North America, the newcomers employed theft to secure their well-being. Europeans stole land and resources from native Americans for centuries. They stole free labor from imported African slaves for 250 years.

Those facts are undeniable and thoroughly documented. They contributed mightily to securing the wealth and power of the United States as we know it today.

It’s an uncomfortable truth, but without those thefts from indigenous Americans and black Africans, the United States would not have reached the level of prosperity that has enabled it to achieve all it has for Americans and others around the world.

The history of the United States, like that of other nations, is both admirable and lamentable. A number of politicians today, in this 250th year of United States existence, would like to erase, or at least minimize, recognition of the lamentable parts. That would not be fair, either to America’s students or to the scholars charged to teach them about their nation’s past.

We’re a stronger nation when we acknowledge both the good and the bad about our past. The place of theft in America’s history is part of our story.

That said:

Rarely, probably never, have we been led by someone for whom theft of other countries’ land and resources appears to be such a driver of foreign policy.

President Donald Trump has mused, threatened, and openly advocated American thefts from Greenland, Iraq, Syria, Venezuela, Gaza, Iran, and Canada. There are others as well.

In a number of instances, the prize is oil. In others it’s land, strategic sites, or rare earth minerals. Trump seems willing to violate the Eighth Commandment without compunction.

And it’s not a new thing for him. Back in 2015, during his successful first presidential run, Trump campaigned on seizing Iraq’s oil to repay U.S. costs of occupation. He accused past administrations of failing to take that step.

“We go in, we spend $3 trillion, we lose thousands and thousands of lives, and then . . . what happens is, we get nothing,” he said. “You know, it used to be to the victor belong the spoils. Now, there was no victor there, believe me. There was no victor. But I always said: Take the oil.”

Three years later he pushed the same argument, this time with Syria. As Bashar al-Assad’s government weakened, Trump said the U.S. had a right to Syria’s oil because we had intervened in the Middle East.
“We’re keeping the oil. I’ve always said that—keep the oil. We want to keep the oil, $45 million a month. Keep the oil. We’ve secured the oil. . . . What I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an Exxon Mobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly.:”

Venezuela? Same thing. As that nation’s government deteriorated in 2023, Trump, no longer in office, sounded his regret: “We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil, it would have been right next door.”

And he hasn’t dropped the idea. This past December, now back in the presidency, he brazenly laid it out. Referring to Venezuela’s partial nationalization of oil back in 2007, Trump proclaimed, “They took all of our oil and we want it back, they illegally took it.”

Then just a month ago regarding the current tension with Iran, Trump told reporters, “If it were up to me, I’d take the oil, I’d keep the oil, it would bring plenty of money.”

Iraq, Syria, Venezuela, now Iran: seizing and keeping other countries’ oil resources has occupied Trump’s mind for more than a decade. He has yet to lay out how such thefts coincide with America’s values.

Sometimes it’s not just another country’s natural resources: it’s the whole lebowski.

After Trump failed to negotiate an American purchase of Greenland during his first presidential term, he upped the ante in his second term. He had said for years that the United States must own Greenland, for defense purposes as well as the potential prize of the island’s buried rare earth minerals.

In January 2026 he took a more in-your-face position. Existing treaty rights, he claimed, are insufficient, and an American lease of Greenland is not enough: American full ownership “is psychologically needed for success.” He threatened Greenland, and its partner Denmark, in brutal terms. Among his statements:

The U.S. “would do something” about Greenland “whether they like it or not.” He would take Greenland “the hard way” if Denmark did not yield. “ . . . the fact that Denmark had a boat land there 500 years ago doesn’t mean they own the land.” And “one way or the other, we are going to have Greenland” and “we’re talking about acquiring, not leasing and not having it short-term.”

And Greenland didn’t seem to be enough for Trump’s expansion dreams in the Western Hemisphere. Ever since his inauguration in January 2025 he has talked about annexing Canada, and making it the 51st U.S. state. He sometimes calls the Canadian Prime Minister “Governor,” suggests that the U.S.-Canada border be moved northward, and notes that if the U.S. and Canada were united, Canada would not be saddled with the present American tariffs.

The President has soft-pedaled such statements in recent months but has never forsworn them.

And Gaza? In February 2025, shortly after his inauguration, Trump proposed that the United States “take” Gaza and transform it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” The Gaza Palestinians would be temporarily relocated to other countries while the reconstruction took place; whether and how soon they would return was unclear, and Trump has waffled about Gaza’s inhabitants off and on thereafter. Finalization of the plan, and buy-in from the region’s stakeholders, remain undecided.

Most of the world, and most Americans as well, view President Trump’s desire for rapacious predation of other nation’s possessions with dislike, disdain, and distress. While depredation used to hallmark America back in the day, that day is past, or should be, in most people’s minds.

Thievery on an international scale is no longer admired; it’s thought of as simple bullying of the weak by the strong. It should end, and it’s up to Congress and the courts to bring that about.

It’s sadly ironic that the terrifying disruption of the dinner, just as it was getting underway, took place at an event designed to honor the First Amendment. Violence is the antithesis of free speech. It seeks to erase and replace open dialogue and the exchange of ideas, silencing them instead.

But it’s not really a surprise in America these days. Our country harbors a growing number of individuals who see violence as the answer to their hopes, concerns, and challenges. If that involves diverting or eradicating other people’s freedoms and rights, so be it.

Political violence is not restricted to either right or left. It’s been practiced by both persuasions in America for many, many years. And today it seems to be on the upswing.

A number of political leaders publicly and proudly connect physical dominance with masculinity. It’s only a small step from that to the theory that might makes right. That, too, is the antithesis of the First Amendment.

Our Constitution (as amended) promises that everyone, no matter how personally strong or weak, smart or not so smart, of whatever persuasion or category, possesses the same legal rights as everyone else. That means that no matter how different you think I am, or how much you disagree with me, you can’t take it out on me physically. Or on anyone else, no matter how strong, or “masculine,” you think you are.

For some people that’s hard to accept. And they have plenty of support, on movie screens, TV screens, phone screens, communication options of all kinds. And directly, from other people who think like them.

Though I hope I’m wrong, I suspect that the Washington emergency last Saturday won’t be the last like it.

If anyone, anywhere, has the answer, now would be a good time to divulge it.

As the nation prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday this year, it seems worthwhile to consider how closely we’ve hewed to the Founders’ vision for their new creation, and likewise how far we’ve strayed.

One way the path we chose diverged almost immediately was the spontaneous explosion of political parties. President Washington, in his iconic 1796 Farewell Address, warned Americans against “the baneful effects of the spirit of party.”

Washington, and many others at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, envisioned a distinguished collection of benevolent statesmen sitting in concert in Congress, especially in the Senate, fashioning laws solely for the public good. They feared the rancor that factional political parties would inevitably create within the American body politic.

History, not least in recent days, has justified their concern. Political infighting has become so embedded in our way of life, for so long, that it’s hard to imagine America without it.

But a few of today’s politicians—Independents, for that’s what they are—want to abandon that debilitating development, with a return to the Founders’ concept of party-less government. They have deep beliefs about what American government can and should do, but they choose to work toward it without the benefits, and the constraints, of party.

Today there are only two Independents in Congress: Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine. There are no Independents in the U.S. House, and there haven’t been since 2008. Sanders and King both caucus with the Democrats, as the Democratic caucus allows them to do.

(It’s ironic that King and Sanders represent the only states that voted against Democrat Franklin Roosevelt in the 1936 election. Maine and Vermont both went for Republican Alf Landon of Kansas. Both states have been noted in recent years for their independent-minded politics.)

Strong factors mitigate against electoral success for Independent political candidates in America. One of the biggest, of course, is money. Modern congressional campaigns have routinely spent millions and millions of dollars for their parties’ candidates. That largess comes with an expectation: support for the legislative wishes of the donors. Traditionally the political party of the candidate is the conduit, or at least the cooperative entity, for the funds, and an Independent candidate lacks that competitive advantage.

Political money greases the wheels of a campaign: advertising, staffing, consulting, traveling, public gatherings, all the factors necessary for election success.

But today’s communication revolution, where everyone can now be a publisher or broadcaster through social media, offers at least the theoretical possibility that a campaign can be run without the really big bucks. An attractive candidate who speaks to the key desires of the voters possesses the possibility of making a run without a huge campaign checkbook.

Of course, it helps if the candidate is already known for one reason or another in the public sphere. Name recognition is at least half the battle in today’s elections.

Independent candidates face another tough headwind: political parties, fearful of Independent opponents siphoning off the party’s potential support, can make nomination filing requirements for Independents hard to meet. Laws requiring Inordinately large numbers of signatures, from large numbers of counties, are a common method parties try to keep non-party candidates off the ballot.

Bottom line: a serious Independent campaign requires careful planning and coordination throughout the potential candidate’s district or state. It’s not something to be undertaken on whim, without preparation and organization. The candidates with the best chances of success are those already well known for non-political reasons, or who have left a party and chosen to strike out on their own.

But despite the challenges facing political Independents, now may be the hour for Shakespeare’s insight: “There is a tide in the affairs of men; Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

Both houses of Congress are so evenly divided that just a few more Independents could create a voting bloc that in turn could determine the future of all-important legislation, either through the bloc’s support for or against a bill, or through forcing the two parties to meet in the middle on the issue.

Either way seems preferable to me than what we have now. At least four states have Independent Senate candidates with at least an outside shot at a successful run this fall. Depending on how the November election goes, there may be more in the years to come, and partisanship may loosen—at least occasionally—its grip on the reins.

After 250 years, an antidote to poisonous party politics would be welcome.

Winnie the Pooh turns 100 years old this year. Not bad for A Bear of Very Little Brain, as he was wont to describe himself. My folks introduced me to Pooh some 80 years ago, about 20 years after his first appearance, and he and his sidekicks have remained stars in my literary pantheon ever since.

Pooh Bear’s creator A. A. Milne (full name Alan Alexander Milne) also created Christopher Robin, the sole human character in the Pooh stories. A. A. likewise co-created with his wife Dorothy the real Christopher Robin Milne, born in 1920, their true life son who inspired the Winnie the Pooh books.

Pooh is a British bear. The elder Milne based Winnie the Pooh on Winnipeg, a tame and friendly bear in the London Zoo whom his young son Christopher much loved. Christopher’s stuffed teddy bear was originally named Edward, and that remained Winnie the Pooh’s actual name as well in the stories. However, he rarely referred to himself that way, and Christopher Robin always called him Pooh. The “Pooh” came from a swan that Christopher Robin Milne christened with that name.

The other characters in the Pooh stories were also based on stuffed animals in five-year-old Christopher’s toy menagerie: Piglet, Kanga, Roo, Tigger, and the perpetually morose donkey Eeyore. A. A. Milne dreamed up Rabbit and Owl himself.

The fictional Hundred Acre Wood? Milne borrowed it from Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest of East Sussex, England, where the Milne family’s home adjoined its northern edge. A. A. and Christopher regularly hiked its forest paths. As an adult, Christopher commented that “Pooh’s Forest and Ashdown Forest are identical.”

Winnie the Pooh as a character made his first public appearance in a Christmas Eve 1925 poem in the London Evening News entitled “The Wrong Sort of Bees.” The book Winnie the Pooh was published in October 1926, followed by The House at Pooh Corner in 1928.

A. A. had published the nursery rhyme collection When We Were Very Young in 1924, and the second such collection, Now We Are Six, came out in 1927.

The four books together comprise Milne’s best-known writings and are often sold as a single set.

A. A., like some other early 20th Century English writers, had impressively wide-ranging life experiences upon which to draw. He had taught himself to read at age 2, and had H.G. Wells as one of his elementary school teachers. A mathematics graduate of Trinity College at Cambridge, he excelled at cricket and played on a couple of amateur cricket teams, including ones composed largely of writers like J.M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and P. G. Wodehouse.

Milne served at the fighting front in France during World War One before contracting trench fever, after which he was transferred to British intelligence as a propagandist. He later served in the British Home Guard in World War Two.

Shortly after the Winnie the Pooh series ended, Milne stopped writing children’s literature, for two reasons. First, he disliked being pressured to write in any one particular genre, including children’s books. And second, he felt “amazement and disgust” over his son Christopher’s immense fame from being the namesake of the child hero in the Pooh books. As he said, “I do not want CR Milne to ever wish that his name were Charles Robert.”

But Christopher couldn’t escape the notoriety, and resented it. Feeling exploited, he became estranged from his parents.

After A. A. Milne’s death in 1956 at the age of 74, the rights to the Pooh books went through various owners before finally ending up in 2001 in the sole hands of the Disney Corporation, which paid $350 million for them. Disney cemented Winnie the Pooh as an international icon.

In the United States, copyright on the four Pooh books expired in the early 2020s. Under British law, the United Kingdom copyright on the prose will expire on January 1, 2027. The original illustrations in the books, however, drawn by Stephen Slesinger, will remain under copyright in the UK until 70 years after Slesinger’s death; in other words, until 2047.

Winnie the Pooh ain’t beanbag. Forbes magazine in 2002 named Pooh the most valuable fictional character of all. Winnie the Pooh merchandise overall generated $6 billion in annual sales in 2005, surpassed only by Mickey Mouse. It’s probably much more now.

And Winnie the Pooh received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2006.

There are spinoffs, too. “In a galaxy far, far away,” as Star Wars puts it, the Ewoks on the forest moon of Endor closely resemble teddy bears, drawing unmistakably on the lovable character of Winnie the Pooh. Youngsters today seem particularly drawn to Ewoks, as I was (and am) to Winnie the Pooh.

There’s just something about teddy bears. One of our granddaughters received for Christmas at the age of 1 1/2 or so a teddy bear named—what else—Teddy. She and Teddy were immediately joined at the hip, and he became a very important part of her young life. He remained there as she grew older.

By her sixth grade, Teddy’s cuddly coat had withered away, he’d lost much of his stuffing, and one button eye had gone missing. The other followed a while later. But she remained as attached to him as ever.

A few years ago, her mom asked Kathy if she would take a crack at restoring Teddy’s woeful appearance to a semblance of his former cuddliness. Happy to give it a try, Kathy undertook the challenge, and was able to make him almost presentable for public viewing.

But he wasn’t the same. Granddaughter was given other bears as substitutes, but the magic wasn’t in them. Teddy remained at home, in repose in her bedroom, after she went away to college

However———

When she was married two years ago, her sister surprised her during one of the festivities by presenting her with good old Teddy, scruffiness and all, and well over 20 years of age, which would be pretty old for a bear in the wild. It was a highlight of the event.

There’s just something about teddy bears, a fact recognized by Christopher Robin, who in the Pooh book series regularly addressed Winnie the Pooh as “Silly old bear.” It was his way of showing Pooh his fondness for him. It’s my endearing mantra for the Milne books as well.

To explain the war, Trump originally stated we needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability, including its enriched uranium stockpile and missile delivery system. Then he said that people of Iran needed to be liberated from their brutal theocratic regime. And then Israel and its neighbors needed freedom from attacks fomented on them by Iran itself and its proxy allies like Hamas and Hezbollah. And then the world needed the Strait of Hormuz to be reopened and kept open for oil tankers. And for some of Trump’s conservative Christian appointees, human decency required a crusade against an evil Muslim power.

On February 28 when Trump initiated his first military attacks, he said the war would be over in four or five weeks. That prediction changed a few days later to four to six weeks. Later he stated he would end it when it felt right—to him—to do so. It’s now approaching six weeks, and unless current negotiations produce an immediate cease-fire, his predictions will once again fall short.

The President says he loves the Iranian people and wants to help them, but American bombs and drones have already killed thousands of Iranian civilians. Trump threatens to destroy Iran’s energy infrastructure and other installations essential to decent living conditions, and to bomb the country “into the Stone Ages.” Remember the supposed Vietnam saying that “we had to destroy the village in order to save it?”

In 1949 the U.S. signed the four Geneva Conventions, which included a ban on targeting civilians and their necessary infrastructure during war. It’s impossible to reconcile that requirement with Trump’s threat to bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages. It’s one more signal that the President expects to ignore signed agreements with impunity when he decides it’s in his interest to do so.

Last week Trump suggested on his Truth Social website that the United States could defeat Iran, “take the oil,” and make “a fortune.” In his address this past Monday he said that the U.S., after it wins the war, could charge tolls for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. In the next sentence he advocated free passage through the strait.

Is that what it’s all about? Does the President view Iran like another Venezuela? Is seizing other nations’ resources, like Greenland’s rare earth minerals, a keystone of the Trump foreign policy? Does that comport with American principles?

Trump is a negotiator and dealmaker. He’s doing Israel’s bidding in undermining Iran’s military abilities. He and some of his family have openly talked about acquiring American development rights in Gaza after Israel takes complete control of the enclave and moves Gaza Palestinians out. It frankly looks suspicious. If that’s not a quid pro quo—a toothless Iran in return for American/Trump Family development in Gaza and American access to Iranian oil—Trump should say so.

Another worrying sign pointing toward American exploitation: Trump has often said that America doesn’t need Europe and NATO, at the same time that he’s forging closer military and economic relationships with Israel and Middle Eastern Arab powers, like Saudi Arabia. The overall appearance is that for financial reasons, he’s swiveling U.S. foreign policy away from its 80-year alliance with Western Europe alliance toward allegiance with the Middle East.

Where is Congress while all this is going on? Most Republicans, and a few Democrats, seem at best quiescent and at worst complicit in Trump’s foreign policy initiatives. The meekness of elected Senators and Representatives betrays cowardice—fear of retribution from the President and/or their most rabid party constituents. It’s not a time for that.

Zoroastrianism, a religion more than 2,500 years old, took root in ancient Persia (now Iran). It has only one or two hundred thousand adherents worldwide today, mostly in India, but with some also in Iran and North America. Its recognized defining hallmark belief is that there’s an ongoing battle between good and evil in the world.

Zoroastrians today have reason to identify with their theology. For them It must be hard to spot the good guys in the Iran War. It’s pretty tough for some of the rest of us too.

30rm

My wife Kathy underwent reverse right shoulder replacement last Friday. If someone had told that to me before a few weeks ago, I’d have replied, “Huh?” So I’ll try to explain it in nonprofessional terms, as an example of medical fine-tuning.

Kathy’s shoulder has been a problem for her for quite a while. A few years ago it was already causing her pain. So she had rotator cuff surgery to repair it. The rotator cuff is a group of muscles and tendons that hold the arm bone (humerus) within the shoulder socket, stabilizing the shoulder joint.

Her surgery back then was successful, but over time, problems resurfaced. Examination revealed nearly complete disintegration of part of her repaired rotator cuff. Her surgeon explained that for patients more than 80 years old, replacing the shoulder is usually more successful than attempting to re-repair the rotator cuff. Kathy falls into that age category.

So after a series of tests, she was scheduled for last Friday’s surgery. She’s among the older people whose loss of rotator cuff muscles and tendons makes standard shoulder replacement (installation of an artificial shoulder with ball and socket in their normal positions) ineffective.

Surprisingly to me, shoulder replacement dates way back to 1893. But reverse shoulder replacement was a long time coming, not appearing for nearly another century.

In 1974, Oklahoma native Dr. Charles Neer, a graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia University Medical School, proposed reversing the structure of the artificial shoulder. He suggested reversing the ball and socket: installing an artificial apparatus with the socket on top of the arm bone, and the ball attached to the underside of the shoulder blade, allowing the deltoid muscles of the upper arm to do the work of the shoulder.

Enter French doctor Paul Grammont, who did his medical studies in Lyon and became chair of the orthopedic department of the Medical University at Dijon, France. A skilled handyman, Dr. Grammont performed biomechanical experiments on the knee and shoulder in his own garage before moving to the labs at the Dijon university.

In 1985 Dr. Grammont developed and performed a reverse shoulder replacement, following up on the procedure suggested by Dr. Neer. The reverse procedure allows the deltoid muscles to take over. The shoulder thereby recovers both mobility and stability.

Various adjustments to Dr. Grammont’s surgery method took place, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the procedure for America in 2003. So it’s now been only about 25 years since American surgeons have been able to perform it here.

Kathy’s prognosis is that in a few months she’ll regain significant movement, flexibility, and function in her right shoulder, and will be able to use it comfortably once again.

Her operation is a classic example of the importance of medical research. Improvements over the past century or so have lengthened life spans significantly and made people more comfortable. But there are plenty more discoveries to be made to improve the practice of medicine and health care.

When I began my newspaper career at the Jefferson Bee and Herald in 1967, I handled obituaries. Most of them, as I recall, were for people who died in their 70s. By the time I retired in 2012, most obituaries were for people in their 80s, with several in their 90s or 100s. That trend has continued.

In 1967 the expected life span of Iowans, who paralleled Americans generally, was 71. By 2026 that had increased to 79, after taking a small dip during the COVID pandemic around 2020. It appears to me to be at least 80 now in west central Iowa.

The trend is a direct result of medical research and development, led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and by American universities that traditionally have received large research grants from the federal government. Private corporations depend on those two institutions for development of their drugs and other products.

Funding for NIH and universities is now under threat from the current administration and Congress, which no longer appear to place health care advances on their priority list. Both financial and cultural reasons seem to drive the government’s decisions in that regard.

Americans’ health future will suffer without critical research to stay ahead of various biological and environmental threats, to say nothing of the natural deterioration that happens to the human body as people live longer.

Grateful thanks to federal officials, elected and otherwise, who have heretofore supported and protected America’s longstanding tradition of medical research. May that tradition survive and prosper.

Tuesday of last week was St. Patrick’s Day, “the day when everyone’s Irish,” as the saying goes. I’ve always gone along with the celebration, wearing green and saying “top o’ the mornin’,” although I never thought I had any squeezings of the Old Sod in my veins.

Between Kathy and me, she’s been the legitimate celebrant on St. Paddy’s Day, proudly celebrating her 50 percent Irish heritage, through her father’s side. Me, my melange has always been Norwegian, German, English, French, and Scots-Irish. That last flavor is close, but it’s not the real thing. So no Irish in my stew.

At least that’s what I thought.

Dad always told us kids that the name “Morain” is a variant of “Moraine” or “Moraigne,” and that that strain was French Huguenot. My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Diillavou, since she was born and raised in northwest Greene County as part of the clan for whom the Dillavou Cemetery is named. So I figured I had French ancestry from two sources.

C’est bien.

But - - -

Brother Bill, studious and inquisitive as ever, decided to test Dad’s theory. A few months ago he dug into the clan’s heritage using the Family Search app. And he found Dad was wrong. “Morain” is a variant of the name “Moran,” a widely known Irish surname. Some of our ancestors spelled it one way, others spelled it the other. But they’re all Irish.

Bill traced the line back to (as Irish luck would have it) his namesake William Moran, born 1616 and died 1677, all in Edenderry, County Offaly (Contae Uibh Fhaili), near County Kildare, Ireland. County Offaly lies halfway between Dublin on the east coast and Galway on the west coast. It’s replete with peat bogs.

As Bill wrote, there “the known line ends (or starts, if you prefer).” But that’s twice as far back as Jonathan Morain of Piatt County, Illinois, the most ancient ancestor with whom we had been familiar.

Jonathan Morain’s great-great-grandfather, Gabriel Moran (1691-1733), was born in Edenderry, Ireland, but died in Charles County, Maryland, in British Colonial America, where he was a tobacco planter. He was our adventurer who crossed the pond. He was the grandson of the aforementioned William Moran of Edenderry.

So the morning of March 17 this year I put on my green shirt for real, and passed the day in certain knowledge that I’m one of the gang. Kathy made her truly delicious potato leek soup from her Irish cookbook for dinner.

The skills of Irish writers are legendary. I’m still just a trainee. But erin go bragh, and slainte, whether you’re the real thing or a pretender as I used to be.

THE ROOT CAUSE OF THE WAR WITH IRAN

In times of war (and that’s what the U.S. is engaged in with Iran, regardless of what our government calls it), there is usually more than one cause. That’s true in spades for the current conflict.

From the American side, it’s the unsettling potential threat of eventual Iranian nuclear weapons. It’s also Iran’s mortal enmity with the nation of Israel, a close American ally. It’s also Iran’s sponsorship of client terrorist proxies like Hezbollah, the Houthis, and (to some degree) Hamas. It’s the Iranian regime’s brutal treatment of dissidents within its own nation, although the U.S. is selective about which repressive governments it finds disturbing. And America has not forgotten that the Iranian revolution held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days in 1979-81.

From the Iranian perspective, it’s the damage that the U.S. and Israel have in recent years inflicted on key Iranian military facilities and on individual leaders. It’s also the evil of “The Great Satan” (the United States) in the mind of the hardline Islamist ayatollahs who govern Iran. It’s also America’s friendly relations with Iran’s Muslim neighbor states, which generally subscribe to a different version of Islam.

But the wellspring of Iran’s undying hatred of the United States dates from 1953, when the CIA, with the blessing of the State Department and the Administration, and with the aid of the British spy agency MI-6, secretly engineered a coup under the name Operation Ajax that toppled Iran’s elected nationalist Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh.

Mossadegh had campaigned fervently to win Iranian control of the nation’s natural resources, including oil. The corrupt and pliable Pahlavi royal family years earlier had granted the British-owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later BP Oil) exclusive development rights of Iranian oil deposits.

Mossadegh fought bitterly against the arrangement for years, and as a result won strong support among the Iranian people. In April 1951 the Iranian parliament named him prime minister, and he promptly nationalized Iran’s oil production.

By then Senator Joe McCarthy had initiated his “Red Scare” campaign in the United States, claiming large numbers of Communists skulked within the U.S. government. Anti-Communism rose sharply in America, spurred by the Soviet Union’s successful production of an atomic bomb in 1949.

Enter President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, both of whom Ike appointed when he took office in 1953. Before assuming their government offices, both Dulleses had been powerful attorneys in the New York-based multinational law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell.

For decades the firm had urged, and then facilitated, the creation of business behemoths like Edison General Electric (later General Electric) and United States Steel. Its attorneys worked directly to create the Panama Canal Railway Company, then to carve off the northern peninsula of Colombia to create the new country of Panama, which swiftly allowed the United States to dig the Panama Canal, completed in 1914. Sullivan and Cromwell also advised and represented Standard Oil and General Motors during their years of strong corporate growth.

The Dulles brothers perceived little daylight between the interests of international business and those of the United States government. With an almost religious hatred of Communism, they convinced themselves that a potentially weak Mossadegh government in Iran was vulnerable to a Soviet-inspired Communist takeover. And their fellow believers, British colonial business enterprises, desperately desired to reclaim their Iranian oil rights.

Kermit Roosevelt, the head of CIA operations in the Middle East and grandson of former President Theodore Roosevelt, entered Iran on July 19, 1953, using a fake ID under the name James Lochridge. Through false media stories, bribery, and paid protestors, within weeks he crafted a plan to depose Mossadegh, which he sprung the night of August 15 using members of the shah’s Imperial Guard.

The operation failed miserably, and the guardsmen were themselves imprisoned by soldiers loyal to Mossadegh. The shah heard about it on the radio the next morning, hurriedly packed a pair of suitcases and fled into exile.

The Eisenhower Administration ordered Roosevelt home. But the operative stayed in Tehran instead, and four days later helped guide a mob, of bribed men and others who were loyal to the shah, to Mossadegh’s house, where a pitched battle resulted in 300 deaths. By dawn Roosevelt’s attack proved successful. Mossadegh was arrested, jailed for three years, and then placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

The shah returned from Paris, and the royal house assumed power once again. The shah awarded 40 percent of Iran’s oil rights to British oil companies and another 40 percent to U.S. companies in gratitude for the two nations’ help in returning him to leadership.

The royal Pahlavi family thereafter enriched itself at the expense of the nation, brutally putting down any opposition through its secret police, until in 1979 Iranian dissidents overthrew the shah. By then, most secular dissidents had been killed, imprisoned, or exiled, leaving only the religious clergy capable of organized opposition to the royal family. Thus the current theocratic regime.

For 60 years the U.S. government officially denied the CIA’s role in the overthrow, although it was an open secret. It wasn’t until 2013 that some documents, partially acknowledging it, came to light. However, in 2000 U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright had noted the CIA’s “significant role” in the coup. In 2009 President Barack Obama, speaking in Cairo, said the CIA project created the “overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.”

Finally, in October 2023, a CIA spokesperson in a podcast officially described some key elements of the 1953 coup, acknowledging that the coup undemocratically returned Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as ruler of Iran.

The 1953 coup provided the template for CIA attempts to overthrow uncooperative nationalistic governments elsewhere in the world over the next several years, including Guatemala, Indochina, Indonesia, Congo, and of course Cuba.

And to this day the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew the elected government of Mossadegh is cited as the primary cause of anti-American sentiment in Iran.

Did the combination of Western colonial hunger for oil and the fear of potential Communist influence in Iran justify the coup of 1953? Americans continue to grapple with that question, now more than ever, since today’s war is a fruit of Operation Ajax.

A DIFFERENT DEFINITION OF SCHOOL CHOICE

Kathy and I attended a Greene County High School performance last Saturday evening of Anastasia the Musical. It’s based on the animated film Anastasia, about the Romanov princess who, according to myth, might supposedly have survived the 1917 Bolshevik assassination of Russian Tsar Nicholas II’s royal family.

The production highlighted our week. We were impressed by the musicianship and the dramatic performances from the cast, the professional sound from the orchestra, the attention-getting sets, and the dramatic electronic visual backdrops made possible through the school theater’s new short-throw video projector. The school secured the projector through a pair of generous grants and some funds from the school district itself.

During the intermission, activities director David Wright introduced the five school alumni who had been inducted that afternoon into the school’s Fine Arts Hall of Fame: Dr. Douglas Miller, Kate Cuddy, Marty Aldrich, Peter Thompson, and Michael Kennedy. At the induction Wright described the career accomplishments of each of the five.

All five inductees had been honored as outstanding musicians in their high school years, and they have received significant honors in their subsequent music education, instruction, and/or performance careers.

Doug Miller and I were Jefferson classmates, with Doug’s father Don Miller serving as high school principal for several years up through 1957-58. We were able to spend most of the weekend together, and he and I reminisced about the “olden days,” giggling about various episodes we could remember. We shared recollections of our years in the Jefferson High bands and choral groups, and our experiences in Scouting, including pushing burros over the mountains at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico.

Doug went on to nine years of intensive music study at Drake University and Indiana University, earning bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. He served for 32 years on the faculty of Penn State University, including 15 years as director of orchestral studies and 20 as director of choral studies.

So he had spent his entire impressive career coaching college students in musical performance. He is more than qualified to judge the caliber of a musical stage performance.

The reason I’m highlighting Doug’s expertise: he was stunned at the musical and dramatic quality of Saturday night’s performance, especially given the relatively modest size of Greene County High School’s student body. And of course the impressive theater venue at the school commanded his admiration as well.

That all brings me to the reason for this column: It’s supremely important that Iowa schools have the resources to offer a variety of strong extracurricular programs. And that students can explore those options wherever their interests steer them: music, athletics, drama, speech, student government, whatever the paths.

Greene County High School continues to encourage students to follow their inclinations in many areas, just as Doug and I were able to do back in the 1950s. For example, in addition to participating in band and choral music, sports, and student government, I was chosen to sing the role of The Mikado in a production of the Gilbert and Sullivan musical of that name. (I wore a hairless skull cap, foreshadowing what was to come.) Hollywood and Broadway didn’t ring up my home phone afterward, but it was sure fun.

Kids today deserve the opportunities that high schools can offer them in activities as well as academics. If the Legislature and the Governor shortchange schools with their appropriations decisions, or shift resources away from them, or cut state or local taxes to the extent that there’s not enough money for expansive curricular and extracurricular offerings, they’re shortchanging young people as well, and eventually Iowa’s vibrant future.

Iowa’s students deserve education opportunities as least as engaging as those that their parents and grandparents had. It’s a different, and valid, definition of “school choice.”

JEFFERSON PROTECTED FIRST & FIFTH AMENDMENTS

When it comes to the First and Fifth Amendments, I’m a Jeffersonian Jeffersonian. The amendments are two of the ten in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Thomas Jefferson didn’t write them, since he hadn’t yet returned to the U.S. after serving as Minister to France by the time James Madison proposed the Bill of Rights in Congress in June 1789.

But Jefferson heavily influenced Madison’s authorship, urging Madison to make sure a guarantee of personal liberties was incorporated into the Constitution. Jefferson’s fingerprints are all over the First and Fifth.

The First Amendment stipulates that Americans enjoy the freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. The Fifth, among other provisions, guarantees U.S. residents due process of law.

In 1798 the presidential administration of John Adams pushed through Congress the Alien and Sedition Acts, very early challenges to the guarantees of the First and Fifth Amendments. The nation, under a Constitution only 10 years old, had already split into two political camps, the Federalists led by President Adams (as successor to George Washington) and the Democratic-Republicans led by Vice President Jefferson.

(Before the 12th Amendment, adopted in 1804, the top two vote-getters for the position of chief executive earned the offices of President and Vice President respectively. In the election of 1796 Adams narrowly received the most electoral votes and Jefferson came in second. They were elected despite their leadership of opposing parties.)

After the French Revolution of 1793, Britain and France continued their military and naval belligerency that had been underway during the American Revolution. Various diplomatic and quasi-military disputes involving the United States with both empires led to the two American political parties choosing sides, with the Federalists favoring Britain and the Democratic-Republicans favoring France.

Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts sought to punish Jefferson’s supporters. The Alien Act allowed the President to deport any noncitizens he considered to be a threat to national security. The Sedition Act provided imprisonment and/or fines for anyone convicted of stating or publishing false or malicious statements against Congress, the President, or any other branch of government.

The acts directly challenged Jefferson’s version of American freedoms, and he would not brook them. He called the Alien Act “a most detestable thing . . . worthy of the 8th or 9th century.”

The Alien Act shocked most Americans, and their voices of opposition were loud and vociferous. Consequently the Adams administration never actually charged anyone with a crime under it, so no one suffered the three years’ imprisonment it threatened. But a number of foreign nationals, fearful of arrest, did leave the country voluntarily, including some well-known French sojourners.

The Sedition Act, a cousin to the Alien Act, raised even a greater ruckus with the public. Under the act, Adams’ legal team prosecuted, convicted, fined, and imprisoned a handful of publishers and printers, at least one Congressman, a pamphleteer, and a particular drunken bystander over a period of three years.

(Significantly, the Adams administration prosecuted no one for demeaning the Vice President, who of course was Jefferson at the time.)

The guilty parties were not shy to state their opinions. One called the President “the blind, bald, crippled, toothless, querulous Adams.” Fortunately, or unfortunately, for him, that perpetrator died of yellow fever before his trial.

You just never know, though, what course history might take. Luther Baldwin, a garbage scow pilot at Newark, New Jersey, was witnessing a summer of 1798 presidential parade in Adams’ honor when Adams visited Newark. When the honorary 16-gun salute got underway, Baldwin, who had been drinking, yelled out that he didn’t care if the volley was fired through Adams’ arse (Baldwin’s word).

Under the Sedition Act, the statement earned the pilot a $150 fine, court fees, and jail time until he paid up. Big mistake for Adams and the Federalists. Baldwin immediately became a cause celebre across the young nation, and the Democratic-Republicans latched onto the issue for their presidential campaign against Adams and for Jefferson in the year 1800. The Baldwin episode is credited with helping Jefferson’s victory.

When Jefferson won the election, he pardoned everyone convicted under the Sedition Act and apologized to them on behalf of the government.

The Alien Act and the Sedition Act were allowed to expire at the end of Adams’ term in 1801. It was good riddance in the opinions of most Americans at the time.

But if the two acts remind you of today’s conservative attitudes toward foreign nationals and toward critics of government actions, you’re not alone. Me too.

What’s missing today is someone with Thomas Jefferson’s stature and persuasive power to bring today’s radical nationalistic bullying to heel.

Jefferson had his faults. He publicly castigated slavery as a “hideous blot” and “moral depravity,” yet during his lifetime he owned some 600 slaves. He proved himself unable to live his life without the perquisites of slave ownership. Like many of us, he fell short of what his conscience required of him.

But his public advocacy for civll freedoms was spot on, and rings as true today as it did more than 200 years ago.

This coming Independence Day will mark the 200th commemoration of the deaths of both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who died within a few hours of each other on July 4, 1826. That date, of course, was the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Regardless of President Jefferson’s personal faults, I’ll be proud on that day to call myself a Jeffersonian Jeffersonian.

To public officials and political candidates of all stripes: enough already with the foul language.

Government leaders since the founding of the United States have used off-color words. According to one associate professor of presidential studies, “President and Vice Presidents who don’t swear are the exception.”

But there’s a difference today—and it’s huge. Until very recently, officials and candidates limited their strong talk to private conversations, with their friends, staffs, and colleagues. If one was caught uttering those hot words, it was usually because they had forgotten that the microphone was turned on, or because recordings of their private conversations had gone public for whatever reason.

A few Presidents developed reputations for foul language, nearly always said in private. The chief executives best known for potty-mouth are probably Andrew Jackson, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. Nixon was careful to restrain himself in front of the voters, but the Watergate tapes found him out. The other two were likewise pretty circumspect in public venues.

President Jackson had a pet parrot named Polly on whom he doted. Polly was his constant companion, and consequently had every opportunity to pick up his words and phrases.

Jackson’s 1845 funeral, eight years after he left office, was held at his home, with Polly present. The large crowd upset the parrot, and she began swearing loudly and colorfully, to the point that she had to be removed from the service, according to a reverend who was present, recounting the episode years later. A truly fowl-mouthed bird.

Back in Jackson’s time, the most shocking swear words had to do with the Almighty. That has changed. Today those involving human anatomy have moved to the top—or the bottom—of the no-nos. They describe bodily functions and body parts located at the base of the abdomen.

And it isn’t just Presidents, of course. Many people appear to link swearing with authenticity, so any official or candidate who swears in public gains stature with some voters. It didn’t used to be that way.

And political protestors both left and right show no reluctance to wear shocking T-shirts or carry scurrilous signs, or to chant smut in unison.

Lots of folks think that’s cool.

It’s ironic that at a time when legislatures like Iowa’s shrink classroom discussion of sex and gender topics, they have no trouble giving a pass to public officials whose language would send a kid to the principal’s office if he or she used it in class.

I’d love to hear a voter immediately call out an official during a political speech for using what President Trump calls “locker room talk.” Confronting foulness directly may be the only way to raise the level of political discourse.

The most admired American leaders used more acceptable, and more creative, words to make their point.

The works of William Shakespeare exist in the public domain. That means any writer can use, or copy, anything The Bard (1564-1616) wrote in his 39 plays, 154 sonnets, 3 long narrative poems, and other verses. For writers, including me, that’s a very good thing.

Great Britain in 1710 adopted the Statute of Anne, the first known official copyright statute in the modern world. The concept of copyright, although it has changed somewhat through the centuries, in most countries today protects authors from plagiarism for 70 to 100 years after their death, or for 95 years after publication. In the United States copyright does not apply to anything written before 1931.

Anything written before that concept was legalized is not subject to it, and that of course includes Shakespeare’s works. If copyright applied to him, and if the spoken word were included under the law as well as the written word, we would all be drastically verbally constrained. And we would have to deny ourselves many, many cliches.

For instance, consider a narrative like this one:

Aloysius arose early today to a brave new world. Yesterday was eventful: he had given up his addiction to alcohol, and his eyeballs already looked clearer. “Good riddance,” he thought. Most of his former friends had deserted him, and he was lonely, but he hoped his life style change would bedazzle his acquaintances and bring them back.

He knew his job, though, would continue to bug him. His manager in the majestic downtown office building where he worked was certainly not generous. The guy, who swaggered through the offices, regularly sent him on wild goose chases, leaving him in a pickle. Some of the manager’s written messages made no sense: “It’s Greek to me,” Aloysius mused. “And he’s a critic of everything I do.”

Aloysius frequently daydreamed about his co-worker Ellie Sue, whose desk sat next to his. She exuded a radiance that constantly drew his stares. Aloysius fretted about how to break the ice.

He would mumble a few words to her from time to time, and always waited with bated breath for her response, but the naked truth seemed to be that she had no interest in him. Instead, Ellie Sue coyly flirted with Bennie at the desk on the other side of hers. Aloysius didn’t know how to fight fire with fire against Bennie, and feared making himself a laughing stock; consequently the green-eyed monster ruled his thoughts at work.

But maybe, he thought, now that he was shaking his addiction, things could be different. That night, as he undressed for bed, he told himself, “To thine own self be true.”

As you have guessed, Shakespeare coined all the bold face words and phrases, variously in “The Taming of the Shrew,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “The Tempest,” “Othello,” “Henry VIII,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Troilus and Cressida,” “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” “As You Like It,” “Julius Caesar,” “King John,” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” There are many, many more examples.

This is not to say that the concepts of the words and phrases were unknown during Shakespeare’s lifetime. But he was the first writer known to spell them out in his works.

So many words and phrases that seem stale today owe their existence to Shakespeare; that they seem trite is not his fault. Writers and orators have swiped them from him for centuries. He wrote his 39 plays over a period of 22 years, roughly from 1591 to 1613. That’s roughly two per year, and most of the dramas are classics today.

Legend has it that Shakespeare was born and died on the same day of the calendar: April 23. But that possible fact, like so many others about him, is shrouded in mystery (that cliche could be Shakespearean as well, come to think of it).

Anyway, lazy writers for many, many years (I include myself in that company) have owed Shakespeare big time. Will, we hardly knew ye, but we’re eternally grateful.

It would take five separate steps to eliminate standard majority-rule control of state income tax decisions in Iowa. Three of those steps have already been taken.

In 2024 both the Iowa House and the Iowa Senate approved a resolution to amend the Iowa Constitution, to require a two-thirds vote in each house in order to increase state income taxes.

The resolution also would change the Constitution to require an identical “flat tax” rate on state income taxes paid by Iowans, regardless of their income. The Constitution henceforth would require someone earning, say, $30,000 a year to pay the same percentage income tax rate as someone earning $1,000,000 a year.

The 2024 House and Senate votes were two of the five steps to achieve the two-thirds requirement. When the Iowa Senate in 2025 approved the resolution again, in exactly the same language, that was the third step.

All that’s left now for the anti-taxers’ goal of the two-thirds requirement to succeed is for the Iowa House to pass the resolution again some time this year, and then for Iowans themselves to approve the constitutional amendment in a public referendum. The Governor has no official role in the state’s constitutional amendment procedure.

If the amendment were approved, simple math reveals that all that would be necessary to prevent a state income tax increase in Iowa would be for 17 Iowa state senators to vote “no.” The same would be true for 34 Iowa state representatives. (The Iowa Senate has 50 members, and the Iowa House 100.) Either house could kill an increase.

It’s simply undemocratic for one senator to wield the same power as two others when it comes to increasing state income taxes. And even more disturbing, the same would not be true for reducing income taxes; that could be done by simple majority. A 51 percent vote, as opposed to a 67 percent one.

The votes in the Iowa Legislature on the resolution have been strictly party line: all “yes” votes have been by Republicans, and all “no” votes have been by Democrats.

The two-thirds requirement would be ill-advised in any situation, in my judgment. It’s not the way democracy in America has operated.

But right now it means even less sense. The Iowa budget currently has about a $900 million shortfall, with expenditures outstripping revenues. The state has been dipping into its full reserve coffers to cover the red ink, and can probably do that for another one or two years.

However, at a time when the state’s prime economic base—agriculture—continues in the doldrums, with not much optimism for an upswing in the foreseeable future, state revenue predictions are shaky at best. Iowa’s economy lags nearly all the other states right now.

And the Legislature has made property tax reduction its Number One priority for this year’s session. With that in mind, if the state’s economy remains anemic, putting income tax increases realistically out of reach seems just weird. And the state can do little about the national economic cycle and its potential for furthering Iowa’s economic lethargy.

Even more budget danger: the state this year will be paying out some $300 million for education savings accounts for parents to send their children to private schools. Those payments have no income requirement: they’re available equally to the wealthy and those of modest incomes.

At the same time, an Iowa Senate subcommittee has advanced a bill to increase state supplement aid (public preK-12 school appropriations) only 1.75 percent for the 2026-27 fiscal year, an amount that doesn’t come close to the increased costs that schools face.

If income taxes and property taxes are off the table as potential sources of government revenues, sales taxes would be the only remaining resource. Higher sales taxes would weigh heavier on people of smaller incomes than on the well-to-do. Doesn’t seem fair.

Given all these red flags, it’s strange that the proposed constitutional amendment has remained pretty much under Iowans’ radar. I don’t know when the Iowa House expects to act the second time on the resolution for the amendment, but I’m sure the Republican leadership there plans to do so before legislative adjournment. Given the overwhelming Republican majority in the House, passage of the resolution is all but a given.

That would leave only the people of Iowa to make their “yes or no” decision on the amendment. Simple majority approval in the public referendum would be required for adoption.

Iowans have been understandably cautious in recent decades about amending their constitution. Once something is in the constitution, it’s almost always there for all time.

The proposal to make it tougher for the Legislature to increase income taxes is one that the state’s voters would be wise to reject. A “no” vote would be in keeping with Iowans’ sound conservative judgment on economic matters.

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Laws and leaders that ban diversity, equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices of public institutions, and even try to extend the ban to the private sector, argue that DEI potentially discriminates against individuals who are not of a race, religion, ethnicity, gender orientation, or other group that DEI seeks to protect.

Individuals from the dominant groups in the nation or a state, they reason, deserve to be treated fairly, as individuals, in competition with minority individuals for college admission, employment, housing, and other sectors. No one should be favored because he or she belongs to a group that is supposedly discriminated against in our society and culture.

That argument has won the day for the past year in the federal government, and for longer than that in Iowa. Anti-DEI laws and executive orders are bringing major changes to public institutions like state universities, for example.

Best Colleges, a major national higher education analytics firm, finds Iowa to have the nation’s “most extreme anti-DEI law” affecting public colleges in the nation. Enacted in Iowa’s budget bill of May 2024, the legislation doesn’t just ban DEI offices at the state’s three Regents universities. It also limits the types of positions and viewpoints those institutions can promote in any way.

The new Center for Intellectual Freedom, which opened in December on the University of Iowa campus in Iowa City, puts an exclamation point to the situation. It remains to be seen if the new Center actually turns out to be neutral and open to free expression, or whether it devolves primarily into a conservative thought outlet.

And that’s exactly the point. Are anti-DEI efforts, here and throughout the nation, truly bent on eliminating favoritism for minority groups, or do they instead intend to maintain superior marketplace advantage for the majority “heritage” or “legacy” (translate “straight white European ethnic”) American group? Not as individuals, but for the group itself.

For more than 50 years Donald Trump has spoken out against minority groups who are not of the dominant collection. His many, many comments, and actions through executive orders, are way too numerous for a column like this one. Just go to the internet and call up “Racial views of Donald Trump.” The Wikipedia site goes on and on and on, for 19,000 words.

The crucial point is that the President’s comments don’t limit themselves to denigrating just certain individuals. He has no problem castigating entire ethnicities and nationalities.

If the supposed problem with DEI practices is that they favor entire minority groups over individuals in the dominant group, then the reverse should be equally abhorrent: the entire dominant group should not be favored over individuals in the minority groups. For example, when Trump complained that the U.S. has too many immigrants from “hellhole” countries (he earlier had reportedly used a more vulgar term), he added, “Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let’s have a few from Denmark.”

That kind of talk—and it’s very common throughout his public statements—violates the essential principle of anti-DEI philosophy. It turns the argument on its head: entire ethnic groups (in this case, Scandinavian) should be given a head start in access to the benefits of America, while individuals of other groups should be held back.

It can’t be both ways. If one group deserves benefits that those from another one can’t get, then the whole argument falls like a house of cards. It turns out to be just racial, or ethnic, or religious, or gender-based prejudice.

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