Gone Mild

Kansas City’s powerful business interests are having backroom, secret meetings with Jefferson City bureaucrats about stripping the residents of the district of democratic representation.  It sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, but it’s the truth, as reported in the newspaper.  Ironically, one of the few people we know participated in the secret meeting is the president of the so-called Civic Council of Greater Kansas City, which is a business group including many of Kansas City’s TIF Pigs, who have robbed the School District’s coffers of needed tax dollars for years.

(If you want to check out the leadership of the Civic Council, good luck to you.  They have taken their website down.  For “scheduled maintenance”.  Sure.)

The effort is part of a hasty, shaky statutory interpretation trying to seize control without allowing this board the mandated 2 years to fix a problem that has been growing since the 70s.  Why the sudden rush?  Why the secrecy?  Why the Civic Council?

If the Kansas City power-brokers really want to control the School District, I think that is wonderful.  They are welcome to run for the School Board just like any other person who cares about the students (some prefer “scholars”), assuming they haven’t fled our city for the suburbs.

One of my favorite activists forwarded an email about using Wall Street’s business reply envelopes against them.  Whenever you receive a prepaid envelope from a bank, don’t throw it away!  Instead, mail it back to the bank, so they have to pay the postage.  If you have the time, include a note or something.

Through a remarkable and unlikely series of events, I found myself in the front row of the upper deck of Busch Stadium last night, watching the most memorable sporting event I have ever seen in the company of one of the most knowledgable sports fans I have the pleasure of knowing.  Right now, the memories are jumbled with the rigors of driving home through the night, but, damn, that was a GREAT game!

Too tired to rephrase an explanation of why it means more than a baseball game should, I’m going to take the liberty of rerunning what I wrote back in 2004:

A zombie lie is one that is killed time after time by the truth, yet arises zombie-like to suck the brains of the public until it becomes universally or nearly-universally accepted as true.  The examples are numerous – the lie that Al Gore claimed to invent the internet, the lie that Al Qaeda was operating in Iraq before we invaded, etc..  The latest lie to be perpetrated by people of ill will and perpetuated by their sloppy and blinded enablers is the lie that only 51% of Americans pay taxes.

It is not true.  It is not true.  It is not true.  (No matter how many times I repeat that, it will not rival the number of times that lie is stated as fact.)

Like many “false facts”, this one has a germ of truth in it that is warped and distorted until it becomes a complete lie.  This particular lie is based on the fact in one year, one element of taxation from one taxing authority had a temporary anomaly that has expired.  As explained by the The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “The 51 percent figure is an anomaly that reflects the unique circumstances of 2009, when the recession greatly swelled the number of Americans with low incomes and when temporary tax cuts created by the 2009 Recovery Act — including the ‘Making Work Pay’ tax credit and an exclusion from tax of the first $2,400 in unemployment benefits — were in effect. Together, these developments removed millions of Americans from the federal income tax rolls. Both of these temporary tax measures have since expired.”

Not only is the lie misleading as to income tax, the lie ignores the majority of taxes paid in this country, and pretends that income tax is the only tax in this country!  If you add payroll tax, 86% pay federal taxes.  If you add in gasoline excise taxes, state and local taxes, etc., the number dwindles to almost nobody.

Why is this lie so infuriating and wide-spread?  Because it supports the bigoted victimhood of the average taxpayer.  ”However, this class warfare-like rhetoric plays to a perception that the income tax is a chump tax: Only hard-working folks like us pay it. The welfare queens don’t. The super-rich don’t. It is a powerful emotional argument. It is also flat wrong.”  So says Howard Glickman of the Tax Policy Center, whose report on taxation is the source of this zombie lie.

When you see this lie getting spread, take a second to correct it.  Do not let it stand unchallenged.  It is not true, and the more it is accepted as true, the more it fosters class bias against the losing side of the class warfare being waged against the poor.

I sincerely love and appreciate KC as a place to live.  I like most of the people, the restaurants have made me 1/3 of who I am, and I love the fact that a everything is within 20 minutes of everything else.

But, it is a perfect inversion of the old quotation “It’s a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”  Honestly, Kansas City is not a great place to visit – it’s an okay place, if you’re from someplace epically dull (KS, IA, NE), or if you have relatives or business here.  But it’s not at the top of anyone’s list as a destination spot.

Except for Frommer’s, apparently.  Frommer’s has listed Kansas City as the only US destination in its Top Ten Destinations in the World!  Step back New York, New Orleans, Yosemite, Santa Fe, Carmel, South Beach, Boston, Washington DC, San Francisco, Cooperstown, Yellowstone, Aspen, and every other place in the United States that most people would rather visit than KC.  Frommer’s thinks that spread-out, drowsy, banal Kansas City trumps you all!

It’s not April 1, and it’s not another too-convincing Onion article, so I have to call BS.

The Frommer’s article gushes about the new Kauffman Performing Arts Center (but who wouldn’t rather hear an opera in Vienna?), the WWI Museum (cool, but if you’re looking for museums, go to the Mall in DC), the Nelson (a great museum, but exceeded by many and rivaled by legions), and even suggests a Harley plant tour (really?) and Worlds of Fun (oh, come on now!!!). For good measure, they recommend the night-life of the segregated, concrete and chain-store Power and Light district (uggh) while tipping their hats to KC barbecue that can’t even be found there.

I love Kansas City, but if I really believed it is one of the top 10 tourist destinations in the WORLD, I would truly be in despair.  If going to the WWI Museum and than to the Kauffman Performing Arts Center before having a drink at some creepy chain bar downtown is supposed to be the best that this world can offer, I give up.

But before I give up, I want to check out Istanbul, even if Frommer’s ranks it behind Overland Park.

Only outlaws will accidentally shoot their grandsons in the head.

Do you know why my deviled eggs are better than yours, your mother’s, or any deviled eggs at any restaurant in the world? Because mine are actually going to be in front of me this afternoon.  Actual deviled eggs are always better than theoretical deviled eggs.

I’ll go ahead and share how I’m making them.  I hesitate to post this for two reasons.  First, I’m not really a savant with deviled eggs; I merely make the sort that people enjoy.  There’s nothing super-special about my deviled eggs – I will never win a deviled-egg making contest (unless it’s against those theoretical deviled eggs that aren’t actually there).  Second, it’s almost insulting to tell someone how to make deviled eggs, because you already know how to make them, even if you’ve never tried.

In a nutshell an eggshell, you just hard-boil eggs, cut them in half, put the yolks in a bowl, mash them with mayonnaise and flavorings, and put the mixture back in the half-eggs.  That’s it.  Everything else is just window-dressing.

(If you like someone to go into immense detail on how to boil the eggs, how to cut them in half, how to remove the yolks, etc.,  etc., the gold standard of detailed instructions may be found at DeviledEggs.com, a truly amazingly detailed site.)

Here’s a little window dressing if you want just a few tips.

1.  Think about the texture you’re after in the filling – some like it kind of dry and stiff, others like it oozy.  I aim for middle of the road.  The best way to control the texture is to add the mayo last – if you add it first, and then decide it needs more mustard or capers or hot sauce, you can wind up oozier than you wanted.

2.  As a hedonist, it’s tempting to insist on real mayo, but you’ll probably be adding only a few tablespoons, so you can get away with “light mayo” or Miracle Whip or whatever pseudo-mayo product lurks in your fridge.

3.  Get some Spanish Smoked Paprika from Penzey’s to sprinkle over the eggs.

4.  Put in more hot sauce than you think you should – egg yolks can absorb a lot of flavor.

5.  Don’t let the hard-boiled eggs soak in ice-water a long time before peeling them, because the egg shells are water-permeable, and the outer part of the whites gets soft and clingy to the eggshell membrane.

6.  You can’t go wrong with dill and capers.

7.  You can use a piping bag to make pretty designs, but nobody will care if you spoon the filling in.  Go with the spoon method unless you really, really enjoy cleaning piping bags.

Amidst the hoopla brought on by the indictment of Bishop Finn for allegedly failing to report suspected child abuse, little commentary has focused on the separate indictment of the Diocese itself.  I suppose the problem is partially conceptual – it’s easy to imagine a person going to jail or standing trial, but Perry Mason never broke a corporation down on the witness stand, and the police have never subjected a corporate charter to a “perp walk”.

The Diocese is a corporation, organized under Missouri law. As such, it is a separate legal entity subject to all the laws that apply to any other legal entity.  If it is proven that it had a duty to report and that it, as an entity, failed to report suspected child abuse, the Diocese itself, above and beyond any individual employee of the Diocese, would be responsible, and could be subject to a fine.

Legally, charging the Diocese is a wise prosecutorial tactic.  It prevents blame-shifting and potential juror unease about convicting a person (Bishop Finn) if they cannot be certain that he personally had all the information about Fr. Ratigan that the Diocese had accumulated.

Personally, though, the separate charge brings to a very sharp point a far more troubling issue.  Assuming that the facts come out as reported, how does one look at the Church, and the crimes that have been committed by its priests and leaders through the years.  (I have no personal knowledge of the facts of this case, and I don’t mean to imply that Bishop Finn or the Church or even Fr. Ratigan is guilty of anything until proven so.) It’s easy to condemn a guilty priest or a complicit Bishop for raping children or hiding abuse.  But, in a deeper sense, is the Church itself to blame?  Is there something inherently misguided about an entity that is aggressively non-diverse in its leadership, and absolutely pyramidal in its hierarchy, to the extent that the human leader claims to have the ability to speak for God?

I have grown up Catholic, and have struggled to actually be Catholic in the loving and accepting manner of my parents.  I’ve never quite made it to their level, but I’ve come close at times, just as I have come close at other times to abandoning it altogether.  I’ve never wanted to be merely a “cultural Catholic”, going through ceremonies and claiming a faith I don’t have merely to have license to participate in the Catholic community I truly love.

I haven’t been to Mass since this story broke.  That, in itself, is a sin.  In the eyes of the Church, at least.

Pulled from a right-wing friend’s facebook update.

Because politically-inspired murder is always good for a laugh.