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CHAPTER 32 – THE MIRACLE OF ME

 PISSING OFF YOUR FRIENDS

 OK, if you are one of those reading this book, you might want to skip this chapter.  For you, I fear it is a long sleep-inducing snore, but for me it was seminal, and so I must tell it all.

 The elation felt during my first election victory was not duplicated during the second.  I was thankful I won, and I celebrated with a lot of people who still strongly believed in me. But I now knew what being a State Senator was like and I did not think that I made for a very good one, nor did I think there were many others better.  And a growing few were real stinkers.

 The reasons I was a poor senator made me odd.  I did not like giving speeches, wasn’t much good at wheeling and dealing and I found it difficult, if not impossible, to compromise a principle to achieve a necessary end – you know, that business of supporting a measure you didn’t like in order to get one that you did. In other words, what makes democracy work.

 A legislature thrives, like any business thrives, by catering to the customers who come in the front door, and it was big money, in the form of paid lobbyists that came in the door each and every morning and hung around for the day.  They are paid to get their bosses money or protect the money they already have. They know the legislation affecting their bosses’ interests better than any legislator and, unlike everyday constituents who rarely came through the doors, these lobbyists had the dough that fueled legislators’ re-elections.  One day, some fifteen years after leaving the legislature, I decided to go back for a visit. Not a single member I served with would still be there but many of the lobbyists prowling the halls were the very same and the bureaucrats that ran the place where almost to a person identical.

 Today, with term limits (something I once supported, like most frustrated citizens), no new legislators know what they are doing. Term limits dilute the citizens’ power to elect whomever they want, while also immensely increasing the power of lobbyists and bureaucrats who do know what they are doing.  New legislators lean on them for everything, starting with directions to the bathroom on up to how a bill becomes law.

 Blue collar types seemed to like me in politics, and I was a bit partial to them.  I just liked people that work and produce, I was more comfortable around them and thus I naturally supported carpenters, machinists, steel and construction worker types, teachers, and of course fireman and policeman.  They were always either sweaty, dirty, tired or all three at the end of their days.

 I had discovered during that second campaign that the only time I would comment in front of a crowd was when I thought something important to say had been left unsaid and could be said quickly. One gathering of laborers fit those criteria.

 Labor supported me as they do almost all democrats, for the same destructive reasons all selfish interests in society latch on to one side or the other…it is the gimme, gimme, gimme that all lobbyists for special interests represent.  I do not mean to pick on labor alone here.  Lobbyists are paid to represent doctors, lawyers, bankers, bakers, butchers, and candlestick makers at the expense of everyone else.

 Labor’s political clout had been on the decline for some years, but they did support me, even when on occasion I did not support them, or in this case, even talk to them nicely. This particular election year gathering was of AFL-CIO members who came to watch a parade of candidates appear on the stage and plead for their support.  It was the kind of ritualistic begging that goes on each election and degrades all involved.  At this event each candidate was given 10 minutes to tell the Union why they thought they should get union support.   By the time it was my turn, I had seen enough groveling, and I had something to say, thought it had been left unsaid, and I could say it quickly.

 “This is Arizona. It is a Republican state with a Republican legislature, and they don’t like you very much. You are seen as liberal, and your public support will be a liability to me.  If you know me as well as you might know a close friend or family member, you know I will support people who work, whether they support me or not. So be smart, don’t support me, endorse my opponent. His name is Joe Haldiman, and he may win, and if he does you will need his door open to you.  In other words, if you think you are buying influence with me or that labor’s support isn’t being used against me, you can take your endorsement and stick it.”

 It took me less than a minute; I walked off the stage to an audience silently gawking at me.  But as I approached my seat, and to my astonishment, people began standing and cheering.  People who work can be funny that way.

 The me, me, me of lobbyists knows no bounds. They are “just doing their job” they like to say, but their job is dragging legislatures from sea to shining sea into the grimy selfishness of me, me, me. In that work they would play a big part in my long brewing and now imminent rebirth, at the end of my second term.

 It did not matter if a candidate had been absurdly but successfully labeled liberal or conservative.  If an organized selfish interest on either side helped you get in, deliverance of the goods to that interest was expected.

 During my experience in the Twilight Zone of my re-election, and oddly during my divorce, one of my biggest backers was the National Organization of Women.  Again, by sheer coincidence, they liked me because of beliefs I already possessed. Long ago my mother and Lacy Scanlon, my grade school love wish, taught me that women were a superior gender.

 Guys have been running the show since human time began. As for women, well, we want their friendship, loyalty and of course their bodily submissions.   They serve in every imaginable way without a fair or even reasonable stake in life.

 Most men are so blind when it comes to women. They fail to recognize or simply accept and expect that women will be of service to them.  That is why women are not fairly paid or promoted, why they are given inferior health care, constitute the majority of the poor and are abandoned by the millions with our children. Open a door for them? Sure! Adjust a chair as they sit? Sure! What a cheap price it is we pay. And if they object, well that is why one out of every four housewives are abused at home and 600 a day are raped or sexually assaulted.

 Superheroes defend women and children, legislatures do not.  And they don’t because …… well, …… I really don’t know why.  There are more women than men, they have the vote.  I just don’t get it, but I am damn glad I am not a woman, and it is a good thing for men that I am not a woman. For after 250,000 years of this shit, I would surely support all abortions, both pre and post birth, as long as they were of the male gender.

 I was the sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment, a now long dead effort to ensure women equal protection under the constitution.  Protection they had historically and statistically lacked since the very moment they tricked the rest of us into eating healthy apples.  They had a little difficulty with my occasional remarks against some abortions since I did not feel I could competently divine exactly when a conscious life began but they were willing to overlook it.

 But women’s groups behaved no differently than organized labor unions, oil interests, bankers, bakers or those candlestick makers.  Anyone of which makes a good representation of how tortured and convoluted representative government can become.

 Once money from selfish interests is accepted, the bargain is struck — you have a friend, they have a friend, and it is these friendships that make such a mess of our struggle to self-govern. It is as simple as understanding that if you give $50 tips rather than $5 tips you will get a better table.

 Now this is as absurdly convoluted as it gets: The National Organization for Women slammed me for sponsoring the ERA. They had decided on a strategy that would demonstrate a lack of support by the “insensitive” Arizona legislature, to anger contributors out of more money so they could then spend it in other states they thought had better chances of success. It seemed not to occur to them that this Machiavellian scheme to cast the legislature as completely insensitive in order to raise revenue was disingenuous.  It was also unsuccessful, and the Equal Rights Amendment, that great equalizing legislation of the women, largely by women, for women perished from this earth.

 I was beginning to hate being in public office, not just because of those whose views I often opposed but because of those whose views whom I had often supported. Elected representatives thoughtfully considering the various courses that might be taken on problems facing society seemed non-existent. There was no real debate or any sort of open communion on the roads that might be taken on any contentious matter — just an endless process of deals, where blame, brag and accusation swirled in endless conflict over some morsel of advantage for one party or the other.

  I regretted that I was now obligated to serve another two years and knew I would never run for the legislature again and was happy to just quietly live out the term.   But happy and quiet was not to be. It appears I was primed to blow a gut and be the talk of the town.

 The weeks, issues and votes went by, including one that called for the biggest tax increase in the state’s history. It was a gas tax designed to build better roads that would be collected primarily from the Ford and Chevy owners of the world. Roads are very expensive largely because they need to withstand the enormous pounding they take from the tonnage on eighteen-wheeled semi-trucks.  If all you had on the roads were Fords and Chevys, they would essentially last forever.

 Anyway, the tax was designed to be little more than a subsidy to the trucking industry, so I voted no.  My argument seemed logical to me: The people creating a cost and receiving the benefit should pay that cost, in this case trucking interests.  But my old friends in labor who wanted road building jobs, bankers and realtors wanting more growth, truckers, of course, and just about every business that wanted more people and what they buy had their thumbs in the pie and opposed me.  It was not unusual for those interests to feel that way and not unique for me to be on the losing end of a vote. 

 However, this legislation, strongly supported by a Republican controlled legislature and our Democratic governor, would be forced into a second life at the hands of thousands of angry, vengeful citizens who saw no common good in any tax.

 The bill and the events surrounding it would be a life-shaping experience for no one but me.  I would take the silent, invisibility that was me, spanning back over the decades and make up for it in one foot stomping blast of words that would not be silenced for 5 days and nights.  That “another day” of my youth was about to arrive. I was 31 and about to be born again—and insist on making my life, if not worthwhile, at least not worthless.

 The story actually starts in 1912 when Arizona became a state and adopted an extraordinarily progressive and unique set of citizen protections in its Constitution. One was the citizen’s right to stop the legislature from imposing any law they thought a bad idea, called a referendum.  It required an ungodly number of petition signatures to do it, but if citizens chose to go out and get them, they could then vote on the matter themselves and tell their government to go to Hell.

 Well, for the second time since statehood the citizens of Arizona looked at what the governor and legislature were doing and did just that on the gas tax bill.  They organized and got the needed signatures requiring their government to put it up for public vote. I had played a small part in getting those signatures, but the real leader was Terry Goddard, a good, decent, honorable fellow, close friend and son of a former governor.

 This caused a great deal of shuffling amongst the well healed powers of the state.  The banks, unions, realtors, developers of every sort, weren’t going to get what they had paid for with their lobbyists and political contributions if citizens were allowed to vote the gas tax increase down.  So, they decided to sponsor a secret meeting, not at the people’s capitol building, but in a private meeting on the 25th floor of a bank building in Phoenix. There the governor and legislative leadership of both parties would hold a private conclave without pests like me, the public or the media, and decide what to do about the ignorant masses who didn’t want the wall-to-wall paving of Arizona.

 Their plan was deviously simple: The governor would call the legislature into a special session where they would pass a new gas tax bill that would do the exact same thing as the original bill that the citizens had stopped. Only the new bill would have a different bill number and title.  And for this new bill they would put enough pressure on legislators to pass it with what is called an Emergency Clause, forcing it into effect before citizens had any time to gather the signatures necessary for another referendum.

HERE

 I got wind of the plan and the secret meeting. The arrogance of it was ludicrous, I thought. “They will never get away with that!” I told Terry.  They did not invite me to the meeting, which was fine because they did invite Terry. He and I got together and devised a sure-fire counter measure.  A piece of cake we thought, there was no way we could fail to stop them, we would embarrass the whole shifty group.  He would go home, get dressed, and let me know when he went into the meeting and then just sit and listen politely to what they had to say.  I would hit the phones and contact all of the media, tell them of the secret meeting and its location.  When the media arrived Terry would simply step out and expose the effort to trample the State Constitution and the people’s will. Game Over!   He would be the people’s hero.

 It was a slam dunk, Terry let me know when he went into the meeting, I went down to have a visit with the capitol press corps and made my calls. As expected, the media stormed the bank building. The easy job, my job was done.  I patted myself on the back and waited for Terry to return with their heads.

 An hour later (it apparently did not take long),  the Democratic majority leader, one of the meetings sponsors, came prancing down the hall.  I gave him a big snooty smile and said, “I guess it didn’t go so well.” He went striding right past me and flipped a chuckle into the air, “You must not have your television on.”

 The smile dripped off my face. It just couldn’t be. I ran into my office and turned on the tube just at the right time.  There was my was Terry, my buddy, who on behalf of the Governor and the legislature, was announcing that he thought the new legislation great and would help lead the charge for final passage of the Gas Tax Bill.  

  I no longer cared about the damn gas bill, this was now legalized, corruption at its worst, a theft, a trampling of what was still right with the world. No one knew the truth of it, no one to expose the truth of it, no one but me.   I could feel my father’s eyes riveted on me and saying, “Kimmy, it is now or never.”

  I was numb. I had never had a friend, someone I trusted, even admired, turn and do such a despicable thing.  Was everyone on the take? What had Terry sold out for, what did he get?  I didn’t want to believe it, there must be some explanation, something I didn’t see, didn’t understand and Terry would surely show up soon and tell me what had happened.  But no, Terry didn’t show up, he never showed up. . .well, not until the wee hours one night 10 days later to sit in the gallery and watch me struggle to stay awake on the Senate floor.

 The rumor mill went crazy.  What deal had the governor’s son gotten?  I certainly didn’t know. I was concerned with one thing: was there anything I could do to stop it?

 The governor called the Special Session the following week, the Gas Tax Bill would be introduced, and I had something to say.  As the Senators filed in, I was sitting at my desk and after the Secretary read the bill, for the first time I reached for the microphone to speak.  I simply said, “In the three years I have served as a State Senator I have not taken your time with a single speech in this chamber, but if you do this thing, you will hear from me.  I will give you three years’ worth in a single standing,” and I sat down.  The senator sitting next to me stopped reading his newspaper and asked, “Did you say something?”

 That night I didn’t sleep. I was sad, angry, and very worried that I wouldn’t fight, that I would find some excuse to just let it go and remain quiet and hidden in the dark. I knew if I did remain invisible it would leave a hideous scar, even if no one could see it but me, along with the knowledge that my life really wasn’t worth the living of it.

  Late that night I called a few other Senators I thought might be willing to fight with me and asked them to meet me for a very early morning breakfast. Then I spent the night walking up and down the same streets I had walked so many times before, filing past all the people’s homes that I had visited during my campaigns, going over and over in my mind what I might say the next day when the fight began. At 6:00 A.M. I walked into the nearby Denny’s to meet with the “Breakfast Bunch,” the other Senators I had called.  I had not slept but I wasn’t the slightest bit tired.

 I sat down. There were only six of us, but it was a start.  They all talked outrage, but they just weren’t as crazed as I.  One, Marsha Weeks, intended to go on vacation that day.  Another seemed to see a filibuster, the only stalling tactic available, as a good press opportunity.  But two others seemed spirited and ready to audition with me for the key role in The Man of La Mancha.  At the morning session when the Gas Tax Bill came up, I would ask to be recognized by the President of the Senate and start: speak as long as I was able, then, just like in a relay race, yield the baton or in this case control of the Senate floor to one of the “Breakfast Bunch.”  They in turn would go as far as they were able, pass it on to another, and another and eventually back to me.  And so, we would go until we had shaken things up enough to stop the vote or simply run out of steam.  We hoped we could keep it up for a day or two until citizens had a chance to see in the news what was happening and get a chance to make a fight of it all their own.

 Our breakfast meeting ended, I went home, took a quick shower, got dressed, and entered my Senate office 30 minutes before the morning session would begin.  The Senate was called to order, and I was about to blab like no one had ever blabbed before.  I had thought about what I would say for a long time the night before and thought it was important—if to no one else, it sure was to me.  I had asked my secretary to record it and had set up a machine to do so under the speaker in the ceiling of my office. I knew I would want to listen to it later to make sure that I said what I meant to say, what needed to be said.  

 As I took my Senate seat, I noticed that the gallery was filling up with the usual lobbyists and guests but also with an unusual gathering of Senate staff, pages, janitors, and secretaries, including my own secretary, who it turns out never punched the record button on the machine I had set up. People were in the gallery who were never there–people around the Capitol knew something was up. I took the microphone with something to say for the second time in two days and three years. I do not remember precisely what I said, and I am not willing to try and reinvent it over forty years later. My short two or three minutes dealt with people, their struggle to self-govern, responsibility and the dignity of the Senate and was effective enough to have a few members slump in their seats and a few out of place hand claps from the gallery.

 After some moments of silence another Senator stood up in an effort to defend the plan created in the bank building meeting. I had expected this and had also thought of something to say should someone stand and disagree with me.  My response was neither mean, nor abusive but it was so blistering and humiliating that he slunk off the Senate floor. Those who were part of the secret meeting, I thought might also have something to say but were all suddenly distracted, looking away and backed off their microphones as if they might bite.

 The Senate President thought it a good time to take a recess. I walked off the Senate floor where a number of Senators gathered around me slapping me on the back, one older member said, “Son you need to speak up more often, that was worth every day of the time it took you to say it.”  Another Senator, one of my Breakfast Bunch and a long-term Senate veteran said, “They were the most eloquent remarks ever uttered on the Senate floor.” When I got out in the hall some of the people who had been listening from the gallery came down to thank me, even the Senate Minority Counsel said, “I thought your first remarks were brilliant but then when you took that other Senator down, I almost screamed with joy.”

 Now normally I would feel elated at such wondrous compliments and slaps on the back, and now, on reflection, I feel exactly that way. But I did not then. I was completely riveted to my mission. I was going to beat them.

 Thirty minutes later the Committee of the Whole was gaveled to order.  It was clear that trouble was coming so all other legislative matters were disposed of, putting the Gas Tax Bill up for debate. It was Wednesday morning just about 10:30 a. m. when I was recognized, stood and grabbed the microphone for the third time, and this time I would not give it up.

 The first half dozen hours went by easily, I never ran out of things to say. When I really wanted to make my point, I would simply read off a few hundred more names of those citizens struggling to govern their own lives, who signed the petitions that were now stacked on my desk.

  Eventually I had to go to the bathroom, and I nervously turned over the microphone to Senator Alston, the most loyal member of the Breakfast Bunch. She continued to read the names into the night as I sat there and kept her company. Then I took the wee hours shift.  By midnight the gallery was down to just two or three diehards, a few members of the press, the recording secretary, a page and one other Senator unlucky enough to be selected to sit as the presiding officer. Should I falter, he would gavel me out of business.   My other fellow Senators had all departed for home hours ago. I just stood there and kept reading those names.

 When the morning paper hit, it was not supportive, its fake decorated military leader made sure. And since almost every other news outlet was “rip and read” (meaning they had no staff and just regurgitated the news from the major paper), the point of the filibuster got zero coverage.

 That wasn’t a total surprise, but the following day people started showing up and sitting in the gallery.  Radio station KOY came in and set up microphones and broadcast “the filibuster that would not end” live on and off throughout the day.     

 This picked up my spirits because I knew someone had to be listening.  As an additional moral builder, it just happened to be the same radio station where my mother had once had a radio show back in the day when my father was the Senator, and she was trying to preserve some of her Hollywood dreams.

 On Thursday night I still did not feel any end to my energy, and as I spoke on, I marveled at the fact that I could stay awake so long.  When one of the Breakfast Bunch would relieve me, I would get something to eat, use the restroom or check with my office for messages and then come back and sit until it was time for me to take over again.

 On Friday various appeals were made to get me to stop. Some were from friends actually concerned for me, but most of the appeals came from those who had been in the “secret” meeting and just wanted to get me out of there and go home.

  Naively, I assumed other media would eventually investigate what had happened, about the bank meeting, Terry’s sell out, and explain how the Gas Tax issue had been trumped by the vastly more important issue of circumvention of constitutional intent. They did not.

 As I stood on the Senate floor hour after hour, the leadership worked the press.  Few in the media understood what had happened but some sympathetic stories began to leak out.  Thousands of calls started pouring into the senators’ offices demanding to know why the hell they were shoving this tax increase down citizens’ throats.

  The pressure was on.  More secret meetings were being held in the Capitol’s back offices. Votes needed for the Emergency Clause that would strip citizens of their right to do another referendum started to collapse. Knowing that, would get me through another night.

 On Saturday morning, I realized I had not been in a bed since Tuesday, I had not left the Senate floor except for bodily requirements since my Wednesday speech, and I was beginning to feel it.   When one of the Breakfast Bunch would come to relieve me I would go to the back of the room and tilt a chair against the wall, close my eyes and try to sleep, but I couldn’t.  I was convinced that if I did sleep, something bad would happen. About noon Senator Alston came, asked to take over and insisted that I go look out the front windows.

 Down on the mall in front of the Senate Building a group of demonstrators had arrived and were setting up tables, passing around new petitions, carrying placards, and doing chants about taxation without representation.

 I wanted to go down and tell them to forget the tax bill, the issue was now far greater, that their representatives, corporate leaders, and unions were doing a hat trick that would, if successful, turn them into chattel.  I wanted to get them to leave the Capitol and go stomp around in front of the Senators’ homes because that is where they were.  Senator Alston, me and the unlucky lottery loser selected to preside were the only Senators at the Senate that Saturday.

 Senator Alston, who I adored beyond her politics and support, was right.  The scene out front was a big boost to my spirits.

 There is no place deader on earth than a state Capitol building on a Saturday night. Generally, you could go into any state senate chamber in the country, fill it floor to ceiling with actual bull shit and no one would notice until it opened for business the following Monday. The complete deadness of the place, no one in the gallery, no press, just the legal minimum sitting in the presiding chair, made me begin to doubt myself. The lack of sleep was getting to me in a way I had not expected, it didn’t make me feel sleepy as much as it made me feel punchy. It reminded me of my college days getting sloppy headed drunk but without the morning after hoping-to-die stuff. 

 Sometime late into Saturday night I was analytical enough to notice my sentences were not holding together very well and sometimes I couldn’t remember what I had just said. The presiding Senator, for whom I was clearly ruining a weekend, leaned over from his chair above the Senate floor and with a mixture of concern and hope for a middle of the night finally asked if I was all right.

 His questioning of my stamina made me feel indignant, flushed me with new-found energy and I began speaking loudly and clearly again. As he shook his head, I swung around to say a few words to the empty gallery, only it was no longer empty.  There was someone sitting up in the shadows off to one side.

 Leaning forward in a gallery seat, with his elbows on his knees and head in his hands was my good friend, the former Governor’s son.  I said nothing to him, I just turned around grabbed a handful of the petitions he had gathered and championed for the people that had trusted him.  I read them very slowly, one syllable at a time. I imagined that each one was like a dart to his heart, but when I turned back to the gallery he was gone.

 Early Sunday morning I was having a little trouble thinking clearly again when one of the Breakfast Bunch relieved me.  He said, “Don’t worry, I’ve got it.”  I hadn’t been outside of the capitol building in four days and decided to take a short walk on the capitol grounds.  I walked out the front door and around the corner, took off my shoes and socks and walked through the grass so that I could feel the tender shoots punch up between my toes. As I approached some trees I looked around and realized I was completely alone, I was invisible again.  And then suddenly, out of nowhere and for reasons I can’t explain because I really don’t know, I began to sob.

  At about mid-day on Sunday members of the Senate started to show up. I didn’t know why, and was too spent to really care, but I should have.

 The approach was made in the interests of my health. “We want to get you a doctor, we need to get you a doctor, let us call a doctor,” the Democratic Minority Leader and key member of the secret meeting said to me.  “NO, I am fine,” I said. “Well at least take a break, go home and get some sleep, you have to rest,” he insisted.  “NO, I am fine,” I said. “Listen, I am the Minority Leader. You helped elect me as the Minority Leader of our party. I give you my word that I will not let anything happen while you go home and get a few hours of sleep.  We are all very worried about you.”

 I thought about it, I knew that my supporting cast of Senators wanted to end the filibuster the next day during the Monday session and let the votes fall where they may. I knew that I couldn’t go on forever. And I knew that no matter how clean and fresh I felt when I started, people had started standing a measured distance away from me. I stunk!

  I turned it over to Senator Alston, that closest member of the Breakfast Bunch.  And on the promise of the Minority Leader, I drove the five miles home, hopped into the shower and flopped down on the bed. Almost immediately I sensed something was not right and then remembered with a start, that when Senator Alston had done her turn, she would turn it over to the weak link. He was the same Senator that had told me days before that my remarks were the most eloquent he had ever heard, but he was also a close loyal friend of the Minority Leader. The shower had revived me a bit and brought some of my senses back. As I raced to my closet, I knew I was in trouble. Why had some Senators started showing up on a Sunday morning?  I was out the door like a shot and running into a Senate chamber still trying to tie my tie.

 Turns out that during that hour I was gone the leaders pressured my weak link and got him to agree that when Alston passed the microphone to him, he would stop the filibuster.

 An hour later and it would have been over.  My weak link had cut a deal with the leadership, he would pass the microphone over to the opposition and the filibuster would be ended. My sudden and totally unexpected appearance stopped him. Embarrassed, he left the Senate Floor, and I was gritted to make to Monday.

 As it turns out some of the other Senators had not shown up just for the killing—at least not willingly.  They wanted deals.  They had been trying to cut deals for days and every once in awhile one would come out of a meeting and look upset.  I wouldn’t understand it until the media broke a few stories.

 The votes had started to collapse, and the leadership was in a full-court press, ready to break arms and threaten constituencies and political careers in order to keep the big money deal hammered together. There was the story from the angry legislator upset about the “unheard of” pressure tactics, another from a Senator who claimed that they threatened to withhold money from his reelection campaign if he didn’t stay the line.  Sicklier was the story threatening a legislator’s constituents with the loss of a bridge needed for fire and police protection.

  If the leadership didn’t get two-thirds of the Senate, meaning most of the majority and a good portion of the minority, they couldn’t pass the bill with an emergency clause. Without that emergency clause the bill was worthless; citizens were angry and getting the necessary signatures again? No problem.   A lot of Senators took heat that day.

  At 10:00 a.m. Monday morning, five days after it had begun, it all came to an end. There wasn’t anything left to do.  All the attention that the issue was going to get had been gotten, all the tactics that could be employed were done. I relinquished the floor.  It was time to call the vote.

  It was unclear how it would go until the very last vote was tortured and locked.  Many Senators tried to explain their votes when they were called upon. Those who voted YES broke into three categories: Those who had attended the bank meeting or represented safe districts were sheepishly silent. Those who were not from safe districts tended to apologize for their yes vote and the manner in which the issue had been mishandled, manhandled and coerced. Others were clearly pained by events and even made remarks in opposition to the measure, and then inexplicably voted for the bill.

  Those of us who voted NO, said little and anxiously kept track of the tally.  It came down to a single vote and the Senator who cast it, clearly under enormous pressure, began with a blistering attack against the leadership, the bank meeting, and the way the legislation had been managed.  Then she hesitated and angrily barked, “I vote YES,” and stomped off the floor.

                          Luise Gonzales, me, Lito Pena, and Lela Alston 

       The Breakfast Bunch minus the traitor and vacationer.

  A researcher would later tell me it was the longest filibuster anywhere by anyone. I’m not sure that is true, but I was grateful to think it. I had lost the vote but as odd as it may sound, I was fine, better than fine. I felt selfishly good about myself, if not for all those I had failed.  I had come out of the dark, was visible and convinced that I had fought as hard as anyone could fight. I had done the right thing. I had lost but felt that my life might one day find some way to become worthwhile after all.   

 As I walked off the Senate floor, I was asked to meet with the media who had all gathered in the Republicans’ caucus room. As I walked in and stood at one end, the television lights came on and I was bombarded with questions. While talking, I noticed at the far end of the room another, even larger group of reporters had gathered around some fellow.  He wasn’t a member of the victorious leadership, nor any member of the legislature, nor staff, or any government figure or person I recognized.  When I asked a reporter who it was, he was surprised and said, “Why that is the guy who sponsored the private meeting you’ve been trashing these past five days. He’s the Bank President.”

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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VoteSmart.org is born.

 There were no roads through the mountains to it, no phones, or any access to anywhere but by a 40-minute pounding ride in a boat the locals called a panga. The dirt path through the little fishing village was swept clean each morning by a few in huts selling local produce, brooms made from long thin sticks, candles, and a few other necessities. All led down to the half dozen fishing boats pulled up on shore next to the “The Yacht Club” a little place cooking whatever food the fishermen caught that day and with a shared shelf they called the library.

 For me, living there in a thatched palapa with swinging rope bed covered in mosquito netting was heaven. It was there that I came to terms with my brief political career. It was there that I found my life’s calling.  It was there, after weeks of pondering, that it hit me: it was simple.

 With the loss of common ground Americans were being fractured.  With trust lost in all media, there was no anchor to which both conservatives and liberals could depend upon for the truth and the facts essential to successful self-government.

 Without that, I thought, there would be no democracy.

 There was only one solution I thought, to create a source where facts were sacrosanct but never interpreted, to which any citizen could turn for the truth.

 Within the day I left my little chunk of paradise and hopped a ride to go create VoteSmart.org.   Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, Barry Goldwater, Michael Dukakis, John McCain, and a few dozen others of both parties, understanding how essential it was, hopped on that ride with me to go build it.

 For your good and that of the country, use and support VoteSmart.org

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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PART 2 of THE TWIGHLIGHT – CHAPTER 31

 After reviewing my little brother’s business inventory, I didn’t take time to re-pack; I just bundled up everything in my arms and threw it all in the back seat of my car. I started the engine, looked down the street and saw the not so inconspicuous car of plain clothes officers watching my house and realized I had forgotten something.  Two minutes later I drove away and pulled in behind The Bombaro bar and heaved the bricks of marijuana into the dumpster.

 That night, about 2 a.m. my baby brother found me at a friend’s house on the other side of town and wanted to say, Hi with a ballpeen hammer. In some drug induced insanity he came at me brandishing the hammer and stammering about his young daughter’s welfare.  She had just turned three and was to be the beneficiary of his drug sales. I got him to drop the hammer and then let him swing away at me. Finally, he hit me square in the mouth, popping off two caps on my teeth and saying, “This is going to be a lot easier than I thought it would be.” Realizing he really intended to hurt me, I ended it.

 The campaign stubbled on and re-election was in serious doubt, not because the Republicans were aware of much of this netherworld I had come to live in, but because they had cleverly chosen a candidate who had both the industry and ethics of a Praying Mantis in heat. The candidate they had chosen had the same name as, and was a close relative of, a popular and very well-known Phoenix Democrat named John Haldiman. Joe Haldiman, the candidate, was making good use of it and a half-hearted effort to walk the streets as I did.

 I had heard stories about what he was saying at each door but thought them so absurd as not to be believed.  Then with a bit of good fortune, I was going door-to-door one afternoon and saw him turn the corner.  I ducked behind a bush to watch.  As he made his way down the street, I saw him walk up to the door of Fay Weidman, one of my campaign volunteers who I had nicknamed Mother Superior for her penchant to dress me, feed me, and protect me in all that I did.  I quietly made my way up behind him with my index finger across my lips so that Mother Superior would know not to give me up.

 His pitch went something like this: “Hi, I am Joe Haldiman running for the State Senate and I wanted to talk to you about Richard Kimball, that embarrassing bum currently representing us. You must have heard by now that he is a baby killing abortionist, that he never graduated from college, that he is a pawn of labor, and is lying when he says he was born in Arizona.  He moved here from Illinois with the backing of their unions. We need to send him packing. That is why I agreed to run for this office.”  I looked over his shoulder at Mother Superior. The demonic expression now roasting on her face forced me to intercede, less she add to the mounting pile of shit that my life had become.

  “Hi, Fay,” as I put my arm around Haldiman’s shoulder, “This is my good buddy, Joe.”

 Election Day was getting close, and they still hadn’t found the assassin who had threatened the President and me. His wife, who had become a good friend, and I were still in hiding. Then for some inexplicable reason Broom walked right into the Democratic Party Headquarters as if it were just another day on the job. Everyone had been given an emergency number on the unexpected chance that he might appear.  I happened to already be on my way there for a meeting but wasn’t as quick as the various forces looking for him. When I arrived, Broom was sequestered in a back room surrounded by a couple of Secret Service Agents and the local police.  After an hour or so an agent came out and I asked if I might see Broom alone for a minute. The agent, thinking me naive, said that it wasn’t a very good idea.  “Listen,” I said, “He was my trusted friend, he is not armed and if I just have a minute, I might find out some things that would be helpful to all of us.”  Surprisingly, they agreed, which instantly suggested that they were far more interested in protecting Jimmy Carter than they were me.

 As I entered the room, Broom was sitting in a lone metal fold-up chair with the four or five officers standing around. The agent said, let’s give Senator Kimball a minute and they all walked out and stood just beyond the door, which they left ajar.

 Broom, who was not scared, sad, worried, or flustered in any way, just sat and stared at me. I went over to a stack of folded cafeteria chairs and set one up right in front of him and sat down. ”Broom, what is going on, this is absurd,” I pleaded. His expression did not change. He said not a word, just sat comfortably and looked at me. “Listen, do you want me to get you a lawyer, or some counseling? I know some good people, some good programs where we can get you some help. Whatever you need, I can help. Just talk to me.”  Broom Hall’s eyes had never left mine; he just looked a bit burdened but resigned.  Then he leaned forward a little and in a soft perfectly calm voice said something that you do not hear every day but was definitely a talk ender. “I am sorry Richard, but I must kill you. I have been ordered to kill you.”

 The officers came back in and although the authorities could never get enough evidence to imprison Broom, I never saw him again. I would on occasion worry about where he was and if I would get another early vote in the mail.

 Three days before the election, which was becoming an acknowledged loser for me, I was spent and went straight to bed in spite of an unsettling phone call from someone claiming to be one of my supporters.  He spoke so loudly and angrily that I had no difficulty making out these words. “What a lousy bastard you are.  You lied to me and everyone else.” He then hung up.  I took the phone off the hook and slept.  At first light I was up and walked outside to get the paper, only this time I found it amongst a half dozen of my yard signs that were broken or ripped and strewn on the lawn. Scribbled on the back of one, “I thought you were a decent man. You’re scum.”

 I went back inside and put the phone on the hook, it immediately rang, “Did you see what Haldiman did?” a campaign volunteer bellowed.

 As it turns out the opposition had mailed a hit piece to every household in my district saying essentially what I had heard candidate Haldiman say to Mother Superior at her door, only with emphasis on the “fact” of my having moved to Arizona from Illinois with a bundle of labor money.  There was one important difference: this time it lacked crudeness. It was done professionally, in a polished convincing way that had clearly been drafted by the best the opposition could hire.

 The campaign was over; even some of my volunteers were calling to ask if the hit piece was true. We called the Arizona Republic demanding that they correct the lie by doing a story. But that same editor who was later caught masquerading as a highly decorated warrior refused.

 My campaign was broken, and I was broken in just about every way I could be broken. But even if we had the money there was no way we could create a response, mail it, and have the Post Office deliver it to everyone’s door before Election Day.

 With all good hit pieces there is usually a grain of truth somewhere to lock in its bite.  In this case, it was the backing by labor charge.  The local fire fighter’s union was one of my strong supporters and the opposition was about to find out just how strong.  Turns out, they can put out more than one kind of fire.

 Down the street from my home, Pat Cantelme, President of the Phoenix Firefighter’s union owned that firefighters’ hangout called The Bombaro.  By 2 a. m. the night after the hit piece arrived at homes all over my district, I had become the best customer The Bombaro had that day.   I was tired, resigned to my election defeat and well into my bottomless glass of scotch.  Pat leaned over the bar and said, “You know, Richard, we don’t need no stinking postage stamps, if you can think of a way to respond I will have every firefighter in this city and most of the policeman turned into Postmen by the time the sun comes up.

  By 3 a. m. I had my idea.  It would be a wild crazy shot into the dark. I was about to wake up a person I had never met in the middle of the night.  I pulled the phone over and asked for a phone book.  Luckily, unlike most insurance company presidents, particularly wealthy, prominent, honest ones, John Haldiman, the patriarch of the Haldiman family had his number listed.

 I dialed, a women’s sleepy voice answered. She was clearly concerned as anyone would be from a call in the middle of the night and said, “Who the Hell is this?” I told her I was so sorry to wake her but that it was an emergency and I just had to talk to her husband.

 The next few hours ended candidate Joe Haldiman’s hopes of taking over my seat in the Senate and any future in politics.

 Not only did the prominent, honest Haldiman support me, but he thought less of his namesake relative than most people do of maggots. I told him what had happened.  By my third or fourth sentence he interrupted me, “Be at my house by 4:30,” and hung up.

 I arrived a few minutes early amongst a stream of other cars.  He had essentially ordered every Haldiman in Phoenix, a very large group as it turns out, to wake up, get out of bed, get dressed and come to his house – NOW!

 By 5:15 am I was at one of my brother Bill’s shops. He had yanked himself out of bed, ready to go to war. As fate would have it his shops were printing shops and they were up and ready to run. I handed him a card and he was off and at it, saving my ass, just as he did back when we were kids.  By 7 am firefighters getting off duty from throughout the city started showing up and taking out crates of brightly colored yellow cards, all of which would somehow manage to be delivered to every door in my district before supper time.

  Although I no longer have a copy, something I have kicked myself for years over, the card essentially read:

 A PUBLIC APPOLOGY TO SENATOR RICHARD KIMBALL FROM THE ENTIRE HALDIMAN FAMILY

 All of us in the Haldiman family strongly endorse the re-election of Senator Richard Kimball. He has been an honest, strong, and honorable Senator.

 We also want you to know that we are embarrassed over the outrageous behavior of Joe Haldiman, a member of our family who has lied to you and has dishonorably and dishonestly attacked Senator Kimball with a series of vicious lies.

 Please re-elect Richard Kimball a good and decent man to the Arizona State Senate!

                A dozen signatures splashed over the card.

                All with the last name of Haldiman.

 Some years later I heard that candidate Haldiman unsuccessfully tried a second career in fraud and ended up with a number tattooed to a prison shirt.

OH YEAH!

 Somewhere in the Twilight Zone there was a Gary Marston, a one, maybe two-day long Kimball for Senate Campaign Manager, hired either just before or just after Broom.

 It was a sweet elderly woman that came to me at a barbecue I held at my home for volunteers. She said, “I feel funny and am not sure I am well.”

 Turned out that Gary thought it a good idea if one of the side deserts was marijuana brownies. Of all that happened those miserable months, it was Gary I most wanted to kill.

 I do not think I have given my experiences in the Twilight Zone justice, but it is the best I could do.  To Carole, my first wife, I weep to this day. To the rest of you that may be offended by my recollections, go frig yourselves!

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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THE REPUBLICAN SPLITS

  I stand tight with Republicans on the battlefield slashing at half their number with stupefying fealty to an American horror.

  Like Mark Twain, the older I get, the more clearly I remember things that may never have happened and tend to forget those that did.

  So it is with that Republican half, who either ignore or believe that:

Blackmailing the Ukrainian President

Advising us to use ultraviolet light and disinfectant in our bodies

Attacking NATO and friendly democracies

Slathering praise on barbaric dictators Putin and Kim

Grabbing pussy

Violating the Emoluments Clause

Separating children from their parents

Subverting the 2020 election

Inciting insurrection

Politicizing the Justice Department

Befriending white supremacists

Firing whistle blowers

Refusing to divest to profit from his election

Stealing classified documents

Obstructing justice

Nepotism

Espionage

are the qualities to seek in our leader.

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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RE-ELECTION-PART I – CHAPTER 30

RE-ELECTION – PART I – CHAPTER 30

 WARNING: You are about to enter an alternate universe.

 It was during my campaign for a second term that my recollections arrive in the Twilight Zone. So surreal I do not imagine you will believe, but they are so, and although my memory might confuse the exact order of things, they all happened just as I will describe them.

 I had not enjoyed being a State Senator but without ideas leading elsewhere I decided to run for re-election. Besides, my favorite part was coming up, meeting with thousands of voters in a re-election effort, a goodly number of which had become friends.

 It was in that happy spirit that my first mailed vote arrived, a few months early, in a plain white envelope without any return address or markings.  When I opened the letter, its sole contents, a shiny, heavy lump dropped out and landed in my lap.

 Now, I had not been much interested in hunting since I was about 10 when I hit a dove with my Christmas BB gun and watched it die. As result, I cannot tell you the caliber. I wasn’t worried and didn’t even report it.   This was long before such threats and shootings became common place.  Asking around, no other Senator had received such a gift and I just shrugged it off.

 I was more concerned with the pending flop.  The flop being my major re-election fund raiser that disabled my toilet plunger and completely unable to handle the mountain of crap to come.

  It was about two days before the fundraiser when I pointed out to my wife that no one would be attending.  The “no one would be attending,” remark was referencing the event’s dismal ticket sales, and I thought served as a punch to her midsection, since it was she who was managing my campaign and presumably the fundraiser. She wasn’t hurt or concerned. She had her own life to run and had handed off most responsibilities to a campaign manager she had hired with the kind of skills and experience we could afford.  His name was “Broom” Hall. Broom, a name he earned for an ability to beat all comers in pool halls using only a broom handle.

 Anyway, the flop had been advertised as vaudeville, and as it turned out there were more people signed up to be on the stage than there were people in the audience.  It was a bit humiliating, but partly saved by the local firefighters and my brother Bob.

 The firefighters, who adopted me during the campaign, went backstage and put on pillowcases in such an unusual way that they made them all look like four-foot-tall Pillsbury Dough Boys without elbows or knees. They humored the seated dozen or so with five minutes of relief, and then we all went back to waiting for a crowd that would never appear.

 I walked over to my mother, who never wanted me to follow my father into political life and now stood there, as only my mother could, with that same cocked, rigid look that used to say, “It’s your bedtime.”

Concerned or just embarrassed for me, my brother Bob, who spent a few months on the streets singing my praises to anyone that would listen, didn’t like such events or crowds suddenly stood up.  Bob was not supposed to be part of the program, but he marched up to the stage and began an impromptu 15-minute monologue that had the lucky few howling with laughter again and again. More importantly, he made them and me feel all was right with the world despite the empty room.  It was a peerless performance that would later that night make me cry, and as unassociated as it was, tell my wife I wanted a divorce.

 The fundraiser had little to do with my decision to separate from my wife. The fundraiser failure was only an event, but I felt it made as good a catalyst as any, to make my long agonized-over position known. I was just coming to recognize a flaw in my character: no activity, no matter how initially exciting, ever sustained my interest.  I would get bored with most every game, sport, hobby, friend, or person I ever knew. I inevitably just wanted to experience something else.  However, as it applied to people, this did not mean I did not care or was not loyal. I was perhaps offensively loyal, always struggling to sustain any and every relationship, but much the way most keep the relics of their past in pictures, to recall how much fun it once was, I wanted to keep the people themselves, only at a space apart.

 I had not yet come to grips with this character flaw and so duped myself into believing that there were two episodes that caused the breakup.

 One was coming home early one day, some weeks earlier and overhearing my wife tell her friends how she had demanded that she be able to keep her own last name when we married.  She did not know I was there. 

 For days before proposing, I had agonized over the precise words and arguments I would use to persuade her to keep her maiden name. I had never understood why women gave up the name they had been born with and so closely associated with for their entire lives.  A woman keeping her maiden name was still unusual, but I was pretty sure Carole would want to but might feel a little uncomfortable talking to me about it.  I wanted her to feel great about keeping hers and thus in my marriage proposal I included a virtual insistence that she do so.

 My often-unforgiving nature in the face of some perceived injustice could not forgive this violation of trust.  This indirect condemnation of me in front of ultra-liberal friends was minuscule but impossible for me to choke down.

 More fundamental and perhaps not entirely as self-duping was that we were entering our thirties and she had informed me that she still did not want to have children.  I wanted them badly but was in no position to force her cooperation.

 My handling of the divorce was unconscionable. I would not make the slightest effort to reconcile or talk to anyone about it. She could have everything (which was nothing) and within a day she had moved to her parents, I had thrown out my campaign volunteers, locked the doors and went on a cowardly three-day binger, drinking as heavily as one can and remain breathing.  I had desperately wanted to make sure I was more miserable than I imagined I had made Carole, who I loved and greatly admired to this day.  I just could not live with her.

 When I did come out filthy, unshaven, and not particularly coherent, volunteers asked if I would see a doctor. Being there “leader” and still in my self-absorbed early years, I refused, instead deciding to give a little more door-to-door a try. It was then that one opened into the Twilight Zone.

 Getting close to home, maybe three blocks away, I knocked on a final door. A heavy-set woman, maybe in her 60s, in a coffee stained and tattered robe, threw the screen door wide open hoping to hit me. The hatred smeared across her face was real, possibly dangerous.  She backed me up the sidewalk with her thundering voice, “You bastard!  I heard what you did.” She kept coming at me.  “What are you talking about?” I blurted. “You liberal commie bastard! You think we all do not know what you did.  Everyone knows your wife caught you sleeping with that blond bimbo. We saw, we all know she chased you out with a frying pan.”   She kept coming at me. “I knew you were a lying bastard when I heard you moved here from Illinois with all that labor money. You lying, fucking bastard!”

 It was, of course, difficult to know exactly how to handle this particular voter, who had gotten her information from the Klingon Star Ship. But getting her vote was not likely, so I kept backing away. Bodily harm was her desire, but I was pretty sure I could out jog her slippers if need be.

 Her bit about a blond, money and Illinois, a state I had never been to – what the Hell was that all about?  I wouldn’t find out until sometime later when tens of thousands of leaflets arrived in voter’s mailboxes. For the moment, I was just thinking of an escape route. She continued to rant as I back peddled. I heard sirens approaching on our street and thought, please hurry. My hands were raised palms out in a gestured effort to pause the onslaught and protect myself from any knives or hatchets that might suddenly appear. I made it to the corner and my chance to escape. Spinning around I jogged down the street toward my house and it was then that I entered the Twilight Zone.

 The pace of my escape was as in a dream, where try as you might, with all of your might, you just can’t accelerate in the goo.  For as I gazed down the street, I saw a number of police cars at my house with two more squealing around a corner, doors popping and guns out.

 Starting with no supporters coming to my fundraiser, the kind of guilt that only comes from hurting someone you love, piled on by a neighbor and constituent’s revulsion of everything that is you, and now this massive police presence: Exactly how horrid a creature was I?

 I slowed as I approached home.  What I thought must be a policeman, only very nicely dressed in a suit, approached me. He explained the scene around my house as well as anyone could. “Senator Kimball, you and the President have been threatened.” The President of what I asked. “President Jimmy Carter,” he said. “Huh!” was the best I could manage.  He repeated himself and I struggled in vain to digest the comment. It was as if all the parts of my brain had suddenly become unscrewed.  I didn’t feel worried, threatened or concerned about anything that he said, I just couldn’t grasp it. I was only concerned with the crazy lady who I was certain must have tracked me and about to pounce from behind. Thankfully she had vanished.

 Oddly, as I began to mull over what the officer had said, I noticed that I felt a tiny twinge of pride. “The President and me you say?” Some wacko put us in the same category.  “I am with the Secret Service,” he said, “Please come with me.”

 We walked over to a group of Phoenix’s finest, who informed me that I couldn’t go into my home right now, that they were searching for the suspect and evidence. “Do you know who it is?” I asked. “We are looking for a fellow named Broom Hall.”

 Admittedly, Broom was a little strange and I had learned that much of his money came from an adorable little wife who made itsy bitsy stage outfits for strippers, but an assassin?  No, this was all wrong.  Despite his oddities, he seemed such a nice, even thoughtful fellow.  “Listen there has to be some mistake here,” I said to the various badges now surrounding me. “NO! There is no mistake,” the agent barked. “We deal with threats all the time; we had him on the phone for some time and this one fits the profile we do not mess around with. We have to find him, now.”

 An hour later I was to learn that Broom owned a number of guns that were now missing from his home, that he had gone after his pregnant wife because she knew too much. She was now nowhere to be found.

 The warning or threat began with a police caller, who the Secret Service, with little difficulty, figured out was Broom himself.  The caller had said that I would be taken down at a Democratic Party fundraiser scheduled for later that week by a man pretending to be and made up to look exactly like my campaign manager.

 The various officers in charge insisted that I not sleep at home for a few days while they staked it out.  After hearing about Broom, the guns and his wife, and the event to happen at the party fundraiser, I thought the idea of my sleeping elsewhere a good one, so I picked my jaw up off the pavement and dragged it down the street where my little brother had just moved into a little house.  

 Out of the blue, just as I was packing up a few things, Broom’s pregnant wife showed up. She was scared as hell and after the Secret Service interviewed her, she asked if I could help her find a place to hide out. I found a place that the officers thought a good one on the other side of town and then got us out of there.

 I didn’t have to go far, which was good, because I would still have access to my home office and files when needed, but what had been bizarre was about to go freakish.

  My littlest brother, who if anything spent more time in the Black Hole of adolescence than his four siblings had a surprise of his own.  My brother’s place was perfect, I thought. He wasn’t involved in my politics at all, few knew him, his house was just few doors away, and no one knew him. Perfect I thought, the police could stake out my house, try to trap Broom and I could still access my campaign files when necessary.

 A policeman escorted me over and agreed it would be fine. An hour after the officer left, I was putting some my stuff on the top shelf of my new bedroom closet and discovered that my baby brother was in the drug business. He had a little marijuana trouble with the law years earlier and spent months in a Mexican prison for it. There were two rather large foil-covered bricks of tightly packed marijuana.

 The coming headlines scrolled through my imagination!

 The Arizona Republic, the state’s largest newspaper, was led by a heavily-medaled military leader, who no longer served in the military but greatly enjoyed his uniform and commendations and wore them at formal occasions. It would later be discovered that he had never earned those ribbons or medals, or even served in the military, but unfortunately for me, this absurd masquerade had yet to be exposed and for the moment, he possessed real power and a lack of affection for me.

 When he got wind of all that was going on around my house, I thought he would have a difficult dilemma.  What headline would he choose?

 KIMBALL IN SEX SCANDAL

 KIMBALL CAMPAIGN MANAGER PLANS HIS ASSASSINATION

 KIMBALL CAUGHT IN BROTHERLY DRUG DEALS

 It would all be bullshit but that never seemed to matter to this fellow and his paper. I imagined that an after the fact simple headline might be the best result for me:

 KILLED DEAD – CAMPAIGN MANAGER CHARGED

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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HUNTER BIDEN

Years from now honey I will be blamed for everything you do!

You would do well to have a Maxine Christy Kimball as President.

She raised four boys alone. By rough calculation she had changed almost 5000 diapers, prepared 65,700 meals, swept, vacuumed, and scrubbed 10,200 rooms and laundered a pile of clothes, that if neatly folded and stacked (not always the case), would have roughly equaled the cruising altitude of a 747. The number of motherly events she shepherd, Sunday masses, birthdays, holidays, PTAs, Cub Scouts, football, baseball, basketball, swimming, science fairs, school shows, doctors’ visits, teacher conferences, summer camps, picnics, vacations, and at least one enema on yours truly, were more numerous than my memories can reasonably be expected to calculate. Not to mention the budgeting, taxes, investments, house maintenance, debts and such other adult fare we never knew about. (excerpt from my Autobiography of a Nobody).

As for the four boys she pushed into college: Well, with them there was alcoholism, thievery, drug use and smuggling, which got one a bit of prison time.

She was qualified to be President, we weren’t!

— —

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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A DUMPSTER LOAD OF THE SMELLY STUFF

Richard Kimball

Richard Kimball

7 min read

·

Just now

Carole and I moved to Phoenix, where she studied for the Arizona Bar while I tried to do anything I could to help pay some bills. When she passed her Bar exam, I knew I was in trouble. My talents were miniscule, my education little better than that of a performing monkey, fortunately the one profession left to me needed no training and most monkeys could do it and actually do, do it — politics.

It was Christmas 1979, I was sitting in the living room with Carole, now a lawyer, and Steve, her former boyfriend, a talented artist, teacher, and good friend to us both. What should I do with my life was the question and run for office became the answer.

We knew a bit about politics, or at least enough to know that voters would elect just about anyone. None of us knew anything about local Phoenix politics or had any money. In fact, Carole and I had just moved to Phoenix, where her family lived, had no idea who the State Legislative incumbents were, let alone whether they were doing a good job or not. That not knowing, made us no different than you, or close to 100% of you who wouldn’t recognize your state representatives if they dropped in for dinner. Despite these impediments, we made 2 decisions that evening that 11 months later would remove a nice guy and pretty fair legislator from office.

First, was a catchy slogan. Every new, first-time, unknown candidate should have a good slogan I thought, some message that helps people remember the name. A very big deal when running for those little offices that few citizens ever go to the polls for. As with all local candidates we would largely be dependent upon the spillage from those on the top of the ticket, the Presidential, Gubernatorial or Congressional candidates who get the ink, resources, and attention necessary to be known and stimulate the electorate. All of which is completely backwards. The top of the ticket gets all the glamor while it is the bottom, those little candidates, the state legislators, city councils and school boards that have the power to impact you, and your family’s everyday life. Constitutionally the president may decide what to do with the people of Iraq, but he can’t do much about your neighborhood and most of us spend a lot more time there.

Anyway, after much discussion, I decided on, “Richard Kimball is Running.” An absurd slogan for sure, but political success is often built on the absurd. In this case, my name happened to be the same as a popular Hollywood TV series and later movie called the Fugitive, where an innocent man named Dr. Richard Kimble, is forced into running from the law. It was perfect. We even put a little running man logo on our signs so the point wouldn’t be missed.

It was an instant hit. And arguably, the only popular thing I ever did in my 7 years as a politician. The second important decision we made that night was that I would run for the State Senate against a popular Republican incumbent who also happened to be a local television personality. It would clearly be an uphill slog but a person who has a lot of energy and nothing else to do, can do a lot as a political candidate.

I would spend the next 11 months going door to door, thousands of doors, speaking to an amazing assortment of beings living in anything from dumps to palaces, but all with two things in common — They all lived in my district, and none knew who the Hell I was.

I distinctly remember the four doors I knocked on early that first morning. The first two, I was a little nervous and to my relief, no one was home, so I wrote out a note that as it turned out, I would write thousands of times on my campaign brochure. It said, “Sorry, I missed you. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call me at my home.” Signed Richard with my number.

She was home at door number three, and the image is forever etched in my memory. She wasn’t more than 22 or 23, with tangles of long blond hair sweeping over her shoulder and sleep still dozing in her beautiful round blue eyes. She stood barefoot, dressed only in a bathrobe that was gloriously snagged on the doorknob. This vision launched my desire to knock on door number four and the thousands to come over the next eleven months.

Door number 4 was different, a whole lot different, and a revelation that would steel me for all the doors to come that would close in my face, beginning and ending with me in mid-sentence about my running for office.

My mind still smothered in the delights of door number 3, I knocked. “Who is it?” the voice barked. Shocked out of my dreamy fantasies, “Sorry to bother you Mame,” I stammered. ”My name is Richard Kimball, I’m running for the State Senate. I just wanted…” Suddenly the door swung open. Her hand grabbed to secure the lock on the screen. “I just have one question for you,” she huffed. “Great, what is it?” I said. Glaring at me, she jammed her words into my ears, “If elected, will you promise to support a law requiring the castration of all men accused of rape?”

Now I had given a great deal of thought to many issues, but castration of the accused had not been one of them. We talked for quite a while. I was pleasant, sympathetic but never told her that I could support mutilation before conviction as a proper punishment. None the less my concern convinced her that I was a sympathetic friend, and as I imagined what horror this woman must have suffered, she became my first vote.

For a pitiful few, it is a most valuable lesson. It isn’t so much what you stand for as it is what you feel, the language you use and manner with which any normal human would instinctively respond. All of this came very naturally to me, I did not need to pretend, be bombastic or solicitous in any way. I needed to follow Franklin Roosevelt’s advice, “Be short, be sincere and be seated (or in this case quiet).”

Never liking to draw attention or talk, I was a gifted listener and empathizer with almost anyone’s view no matter what it was. It was where it came from that was of interest to me.

Going door-to-door suddenly became fun, often stimulating and endlessly educational. In fact, it would occur to me some years later that I may have been the only candidate ever who truly enjoyed campaigning but hated serving. When serving, I would learn, real people were part of your past.

In the months ahead, door after door, with my passion and interest clear to all I slowly gained support. I walked the streets of central Phoenix seven days a week, every week, from 8 in the morning to 8 in the evening for those 11 months. At some point a few people started to welcome me, they had heard I was coming from friends or relatives in neighborhoods I had been through weeks before. Sometimes they would offer me a soda or a sandwich and actually seemed to enjoy talking to me. One day a photographer showed up and wanted to take a picture of all the shoes I had worn out. I was having a good time. Most of the people were kind, thoughtful and full of all kinds of notions, and it was clear that no one had ever shown any interest in what they thought.

NEWSPAPER PHOTO OF MY WORN OUT SHOES

My little running man went up in yards and on street corners. On Election Day, State Senator Tim Hayes, a popular television personality, a good and decent man and fair Senator was gone. I don’t think he ever knew what hit him. For me, winning was one of those precious moments in life never to be repeated. The experience was pure joy.

Thousands of Arizonians took time out of their day to go to the polls, grab a ballot find my name and say, “Ya! You’re our guy!” That is the nonsensical notion that germinates the “BIG HEAD” all politicians grow. It is a complete dumpster load of the smelly stuff, as I said, people are drawn to the polls by the top of the ticket and just blindly vote for one party or the other on down the ballot. My funny little running man nudged me over the top in what had been thought a Republican district.

The experience of winning with family, friends, and supporters all about, was the purest joy but had sobered by morning.

Now what?

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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WHO AM I? Conservative or Liberal?

The person most qualified for the job should get the job.

People that borrow money should pay it back.

Limits should be placed on access to abortion.

Separation of church and state should be absolute.

Citizens’ access to weapons of mass destruction should be limited.

Collecting taxes to exceed the defense spending of the next 10 largest countries is a dangerous squander.

We should invest in knowledge and be guided by our discoveries.

WHO ARE YOU?

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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MAKE IT BIG

Richard Kimball

Richard Kimball

2 min read

·

Just now

MAKE IT BIG

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You will never hear a politician tell you,

“Hey, things are just great, we are doing just fine,” not even incumbents. Fear is what sells in politics. In politics the world is always about to end. Complain about your current circumstance to any survivor of the Revolution, the Civil War, The World War, Great Depression, World War II or a dozen other trials they somehow bested to give you the life you have, and you’ll know regret.

“No generation of Americans have had it easier, yet every successful politician knows that fear works, it’s what drives people to the polls to vote for the very savior making them fearful. Politicians are the very definition of the expression “Drama Queens.” They can sensationalize anything, it is what gets attention, creates audience sells product and GOD DAME IT, advances the very world they harp against.

Once a researcher noted, “You are four times more likely to die drowning in a bathtub than you are from a terrorist attack.” Bathtubs have been knocking Americans off for a very long time now, but no one suggests we commit the nations treasure and tens of thousands of lives in an all-out attack against porcelain producers and plumbers. Even though it could scarcely be a lesser undertaking than what we did in Iraq, Afghanistan, or any American war in my lifetime.

The most minor issues are blown enormous when enormous issues are not apparent…”

(Excerpt from my The Miracle of Me — Biography of a Nobody)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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CAPTURED

Democracy Requires Free Will

What if there was nothing that molded you, nothing that pulled you this way or that, inclined you to like or dislike, you existed in an eventless void without the thinnest tinsel of influence?  What would you think, would you even know to think?

That world once existed for each of us, at that split second our consciousness began. From that instant on, each of us has been led, guided to our thoughts, ushered to our judgements of all that surrounds us.

Each of us is the product of incalculable variations in experience. It is those variations that make me so different than you.

Those profound differences that developed, could once make mouths water at the thought of a nice slab of whale blubber in Alaska or a pile of fried or nicely aged maggots in Italy.

Starting slowly and now accelerating to starship speed, our world is homogenizing into manageable clusters of conformity where one can easily forecast what the members of one cluster or another do, want, think, and believe.

The deletions in experiences and the bundlings of commonalities are increasing in most every aspect of our lives, whether it be in how we live, what we do, where we buy, what we see and listen to. One can now easily forecast what the members of one cluster or another do, want, think and believe.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in politics, where we are captured in clusters of like view, all pulled and inclined to identical judgements, shaped by today’s unscrupulous sources.

With the loss of trusted sources of information and the growing inability to know what is so and what is not, there is no escape. And now with A.I.’s foot on the first step of the human ladder the end of unmanaged thought or what we think of as free will is near.

All that is left is the uncontrolled molding of billions of malleable minds.

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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HAVE YOU WOKE UP YET?

No one seems certain what WOKE means. All words have a life, like people, they change with age and never more so than a newly born one.

It is how a word is used that defines its meaning.  Right now the use of WOKE seems most like a synonym for political correctness particularly as it applies to any class of disadvantaged.

If it stays on that track I hope that one day it will get its due: That is to say, every single one of us owes a debt to WOKE.  If there were not enough WOKE, no one would have the vote, certainly not women, we would still have slavery, ovens for Jews would still be in operation and Christians could find themselves lion food in the Colosseum.

WOKE works. It pushes us to be better.

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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SEX and POLITICS

Cupid is a Little Devil?

To preserve a modicum of sanity and friendly relations if I take a walk when someone talks politics. I have found there is comfort in not knowing another person’s views.

However, this week as so many liberal friends celebrate Trump’s indictment drawn from a sexual affair, I just want on the highest hill to scream how dangerously desperate that inditement will be made to appear.

Is paying off a prostitute really the important issue?

When the conservatives wanted to impeach Clinton for Whitewater, found nothing but Monica Lewinski and so impeached him for that, was the world made right. Does anyone really think men in power won’t follow the urge to pollinate the flowers that gather about them. Hell, even Jimmy Carter “lusted in his heart.”

Be careful what you wish for? You better.

This celebration will play the key role in turning what is an imbecile into a martyr with his millions of nymphlepts. He had sex. He tried to hide it. Ya, that’s unusual, let’s get him for that and engorge his line, “The liberals are on a witch hunt and will do anything,” with real value.

This indictment helps build him a silken cushion to fall upon when it comes to the serious issues that truly matter, like insurrection, election interference and tax fraud.

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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UKRAINE

Finding an exit

Sanctions will not succeed and rarely, if ever, have been the deciding factor in conflicts.

American media continues to push narratives that suggest the sanctions have real teeth and suggest the Russian people will rebel as the bodies return home.

The reality is that the Russian economy continues to expand, even out pacing Britain and Germany and will continue to do so as their trade with powerful economies such as China, India and Turkey explode, none of which support sanctions.

The Russian people’s support for the war does not faulter as had been hoped, but grows in patriotic fervor as their sources of information pitch the West as working toward Russian destruction.

The end game we hope for and need:

  1. The West recognizes roughly 7% of Ukraine as Russian, including Crimea and the Russian-speaking areas of Donetsk and Luhansk — roughly the territory Russia claimed in 2014.
  2. Ukraine, whose economy has crashed, gets to retain all of the territory they had prior to the 2022 invasion, gets peace, and the funds to rebuild, substantially but not solely provided by Russia.

Neither Russia nor the West can lose in this conflict. Anything much less or much more than such a compromise will put world disaster on the table.

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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.

TO: CANDIDATES

FM: VOTERS

The GREATEST GENERATION is Going, Going, GONE.

Now we, as the LUCKIEST GENERATION, choose to live unearned lives on the gains made by our fathers and their fathers before them. Lives that all previous generations in human history could never have imagined.

 Yes, we spent much of what was earned and saved in the past and much of what has yet to be earned in the future, all to enjoy today.

Mention rational adjustments to our spending on Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid or defense and we will butcher you.

______

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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GOOD COP / BAD COP

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Brandon and Saudia would have been in jail instead of on a plane headed for home if my wife and I hadn’t been there. Two brilliant students just finishing internships working for us. One was headed back to work for the governor of Indiana and the other into health care in her native Georgia.

With an early pre-dawn flight, we decided to give them a lift on the two hour drive up to the Portland airport.

Now this gets a little tricky to explain, it is a “you had to be there” kind of thing. But here is my best effort: I was driving and Adelaide, my wife, was sitting in the back seat directly behind me, while Brandon was sitting shotgun and Saudia directly behind him. In the dark of the night, we came up to a stop sign before turning left on to a main but poorly lit street leading out of town and to the Interstate. Off in the distance, parked under a tree, I noticed what I thought was a parked police car. I turned left, drove five or six blocks as the police car slowly approached from the rear and then suddenly hit its lights and siren at the same instant that another police car came screeching around the corner in front of us, hitting its siren. I pulled over.

I was completely fuddled and asked Brandon what I had done. I knew I hadn’t been speeding. He shrugged his shoulders and Adelaide said, “Maybe one of our brake lights is out.” Two police cars for that?

I didn’t think so. I watched as the policemen that pulled up behind us quickly jumped out of his car and put his hand on his holster, while the other car put on its brights and blocked the road in front. “Wow! What the Hell is this?”

The officer with his hand on the gun quickly approached me from behind, then seeing me, slowed as his hand dropped to his side. Now it was he who looked fuddled.

Nervously I asked him what I had done. In an odd, suddenly cautious and disappointed voice he said, “Never mind, you can go,” and blurted out an inaudible something to the other police car and briskly walked back to his. Both cars pulled out and disappeared into the night.

Brandon, Saudia, my wife and I just sat silent for a minute or so. I glanced over at Bradon and then back at Saudia. Neither would look at me and then I got it.

I just exploded. When we had turned left onto the main street the police car down the block only saw Brandon and Saudia in the windows. with two others in the dark shadows next to them. They saw a car full of black people.

Apoplectic would be the word to describe my reaction. I had never seen it up close and personal, but now that I had there was blood in my eyes. I wanted floggings or at least a couple of badges.

I ranted about how I was going to some friends in the local press and city council. When I finally came up for breath Brandon and Saudia just looked up and stared at me, and then as if in tag-team manner asked that I not do that.

I was now the student and to be taught by two who had clearly earned their PhDs.

They told me that if I did those things, it would only make it worse for other blacks. Their suggestion was simply this: “If you really want to do some good, if you want to be helpful, Richard, sponsor some community discussions on racism and tolerance. It will bring it out into the open and maybe strike a note with a few who will make such things less likely.”

The effect those two had on me came in level parts of shame and awe. Of course they would know, this was no first time for them.

Yes, some community discussion, it was the thing to do, the smart, effective, helpful, proper thing to do. But I was none of those things, and by noon I could be found in the mayor’s office unrolling an obscenity-laced review of the night’s events.

She, of course, promised to have a stern discussion with the Chief of Police who would make sure everyone was properly chewed out and made all the more hateful.

There were more important pressing things to do with my time than sponsor forums on race. Besides I had stirred up a nice angry pot and could now, like most of the self-righteous, point my countenance skyward and arrogantly walk on, confident that I had busted some ass and created peace on earth.

Score one for me on the Mutant’s team.

The other side of the coin is this — a defense that will upset some who read this. Not a defense of those policemen in my story, but one that knows they are not the norm. I could give you equally vivid emotional descriptions of the hundreds of ethical, honorable police officers slaughtered on America’s streets each year, putting their bodies between you and real evil.

It isn’t a desire to hurt others that generates generations of police cadets. It is a desire to do good, to serve, to be of value to their community, friends, and family and to feel value in themselves.

It isn’t unusual, it is normal for some in any profession to turn to the dark side, particularly in a profession that finds a few hundred of its number murdered on the streets every year.

Could it be that showing more value and far better screening might be a more fruitful response?

You do not want to give up the protection of those willing to protect you, but we might fork over bigger salaries and a lot more training to avoid those on the dark side.

— –

(Excerpt from Kimball’s Autobiography of a Nobody — The Miracle of Me)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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Are you a New Wave Republican?

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Deny elections, deny vaccines, deny climate change, deny wages, deny all abortions and health care for the poor. Defund social programs and public education. Support assault weapons, a paralyzing defense budget, and a Christian nation.

Eisenhower, Nixon, Goldwater, Ford, Reagan, the Bush’s, and every other Republican leader in history weren’t!

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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The Miracle of Me  – CHAPTER 15

TEACHERS: GOOD, BAD, ODIOUS AND CODDLING

Walking through your day you step past the most undervalued, precious assets we have: those few still willing to be our children’s teachers.

As parents, we no longer pay them, encourage, or respect them as our parents and their parents once did. Worse yet, since parents don’t, the children don’t either.

The temporary shell was needed to relieve the school’s overcrowding, a lonely cube of a portable classroom deposited out on the back lot. Students sat on their desk-tops, happily laughing and tossing whatever was at hand at each other across the room. They were celebrating that happy event when their teacher was out sick, and a substitute was needed. Then I walked in.

I had been substituting for about a month at some of Tucson’s tougher schools. All of them had serious problems due to funding requirements that reduced the number of teachers while retaining each student no matter how disinterested, disruptive, and abusive they were.

As I began taking the roll, I asked the students to settle down and please take a seat. Most did, with a few I had to repeat myself and one, a 13-year-old named Tommy — well he was different. Tommy remained seated on his desktop with his back to me. “Very funny,” I joked, “but I need you to take your seat so we can get started.” His response commanded the clear vocal projection of a seasoned actor on the Broadway stage, “Fuck You,” along with a crowd-pleasing hand gesture on a limb streaking toward the ceiling, announcing to all that I was his number one.

Now I was an imposing presence, 6’ 4” and 245 pounds of mostly muscle at the time. I instantly wondered how Mrs. Shenfield, my third-grade teacher at 5’ 2”, would have handled this. I had no idea, so I simply towered over him and with a stern voice ordered him to take his seat or he would be sent to the principal’s office. Tommy redelivered his line and gesture, adding that they didn’t have to do anything some dumb substitute said.

I wrote out a pink slip and told him to get out and go to the principal’s office. He sneered, snatched it from my hand and stomped out. For what remained of the 50-minute class the portable was rocked, first by him launching his body against its sides and then by rocks and bricks, until just before the bell rang when I had to unplug the air-conditioner because it started to spit out dirt and then smoke.

As soon as the bell rang, I was out the door chasing Tommy around the building where he entered the class from the opposite door. Pushing over all the desks and chairs he could, he ran out the opposite side.

I did not catch up to Tommy until the last bell of the day. He was trying to sneak out through the one gate students could get to their school bus. The march through the school’s halls to the principal’s office was a long one and for the ages. Every disgusting, vile thing he could think of, and I dare say you too, was disgorged in an endless tirade of colorful descriptions regarding my privates and how I used them. I was amused, silent and just made sure he stayed on track directly to the principal’s office.

When we got to the office, the principal was on her way out, and as I quickly explained about the destruction of property, she blurted, “I don’t have time to deal with this now,” and walked away.

Arriving the next morning there was a note on my desk saying, “Report to the principal’s office immediately.” It was there that I found the principal, Tommy and his two angry parents. The principal immediately announced that I was being dismissed. As my jaw went slack and I dumbly responded with a ”Huh?” there was a knock on the door. It was another teacher who said she had something to say. As she closed the door and began to speak there was another knock on the door, then another. Within less than a minute the room was filled with strangers, all teachers, none of whom I knew.

It appears that Tommy caused such an uproar in our walk down the halls to the office the previous day that teachers had streamed out of their classes to watch the scene as we passed. I had never seen them, nor do I remember what each one had to say that morning in the principal’s office, but it was pretty much along the lines of what that first one said who claimed she had never seen anyone suffer through such outrageous abuse and yet remain so perfectly calm.

Turns out neither Tommy nor I got released that day. With Tommy the school needed to continue counting him as a student because funding depended upon student retention. With me, well that was because if I had been fired a dozen or so other teachers were about to take a walk.

I think the world of schoolteachers (unlike college professors, who are unfortunately better paid, often full of themselves and get to teach people who pay to be there). Schoolteachers are never full of themselves and are given our youngest minds, at their most vulnerable, absorbing, educable time in life, yet we strip them of authority, money and our respect, yet still expect our children to excel in reading, math and have some knowledge of civics — all of which plummeted in recent years.

THE GOOD

Next to my 3rd grade teacher, Mrs. Scheinfeld, Mr. Evans became the greatest teacher ever with nothing more than a moment out of his day. He was the school’s track coach with a sideline as the remedial math teacher. Or maybe it was the other way around, I really didn’t know.

I was working on some simplistic bit of math designed for pinheads in the school’s remedial math class. He walked up behind me, stood there a second checking my work. Then he did something no other teacher had ever done, would do, think to do, or have any cause to do: He put his hand on my shoulder, smiled, and said, “You’re good, too good to be here.”

With that moment from an adult I admired, I took off like a rocket into the unknown. I devoured math, excelled at math, and suddenly became better than anyone I knew at math. Within two weeks I had been taken from Mr. Evan’s remedial class and dumped into Mr. Karloff’s advanced trigonometry class. I had begun having dreams of being a great architect or astronomer.

That moment of encouragement would live on in my recreations of it for other children to this present day, whom I have strived to have that same effect upon.

THE BAD

Well, I did not become an architect, and my astrophysicist dreams ended abruptly with Mr. Karloff’s trigonometry class.

On my first day in his class. Mr. Karloff a mean, craggy 300 pounder with a scowl cemented to his face, caught my best buddy Stevie Bogard, who had been in the advanced class for some time, chewing gum. Mr. Karloff explain to the class that “Stevie must not have been on his mommy’s tit long enough,” as he picked him up by his heels and shook him until the gum fell out.

Unseen, in the back row I swallowed my split of Stevie’s gum and slunk deep into my seat, invisible again, my glory days with digits over.

THE ODIOUS

Now Mrs. Upham, the history teacher, was the school’s oldest, with long gray-white hair pulled back so tight it must have hurt. A joyless woman and devoted sleuth, searching for any and every fault a child might have.

Now back in the 1960s, and maybe even with some teachers today, being unappreciated as they are, what they taught in history class was tested something like this:

Event #1, who was involved and on what date?

Event #2, who was involved and on what date?

And so on.

Little effort, at least in my experience, was made to make history exciting and relevant. Tests were simply exercises in memorizing names and dates, apparently with the purpose that you can still remember them to this day.

But one Friday, Mrs. Upham really hit a homer with me. She said, your homework assignment is to do a report on Arizona’s gubernatorial history.

Wow, now that is relevant, that is the office my dad ran for, and I was all in. Screw the neighborhood games and TV. I didn’t work on it all weekend, I reveled in it all weekend.

When Monday morning came around and the other students put in their one and two-page papers I handed in a 30-something page manuscript of each governor’s accomplishments, records, and dates, complete with what pretty pictures I could find of governors visiting historic sites cut from Dad’s stack of old Arizona Highways magazines. I gave Mrs. Upham a big smile as I set my masterpiece in front of her, knowing my work would be as unexpected as it was treasured.

Mrs. Upham picked it up, quickly leafed through it and then wasted no time on her evaluation. “You didn’t do this,” she scowled, then ordered me back to my seat.

I got a D.

NURTURING TO A FAULT

Almost all teachers, in my experience, were on the student’s side. My French teacher was named Mr. Gauntlet. How perfect is that? It was my sophomore year, and I am pretty sure that I chose French because I thought it would impress girls. In fact, one day it did impress one. She was very cute, a new student who came to school wearing a blouse with La Fleur de Jardin printed on it. A remarkable streak of luck, since those happened to be the only four words of French I knew and would provide me with the only truly impressive opener I ever had.

She did not know what the words meant. “Why you are the flower of the garden,” I said. She turned beet red and gave me a smile to die for.

It made me want to follow up with, “Would you like to go out, fall in love, make babies and spend the rest of our lives together?”

At the end of that sophomore year a remarkable event was brought to my attention. It looked like I was going to make the Honor Roll. The Honor Roll! Me, the invisible idiot? The Honor Roll? All I had to do was somehow not flunk French. Not possible I thought, I had flunked every French test, quiz and question Mr. Gauntlet had given me. It had become so hopeless that I had stopped handing in homework assignments weeks earlier simply because I no longer understood what the assignments, now given in French, were. Mr. Gauntlet, who seemed to like me despite the grinding wreckage I made of his native tongue had mercifully stopped calling upon me in class.

But with the Honor Roll there was the chance I could announce to the world that I was not as stupid as I thought and was sure everyone else knew me to be. I went to see Mr. Gauntlet, told him about my Honor Roll dream, “if only I could somehow pass French.” A kind, gentle fellow, he wanted to protect me from myself, and told me that if I could get just enough questions right on the final exam to get a D he wouldn’t flunk me.

I went home and crammed for a full 20, maybe even 30 minutes. It was too painful, just too hopeless. When the following week’s exam was scored Mr. Gauntlet pulled me aside and told me that I did not do well, that I had not only gotten the worst grade in class but that I had the second worst grade in the entire school. “Second” I thought, well that’s something. Then to my excellent surprise and what I would later see as symptomatic of the lax educational system’s “keep students happy” horror spreading across the land, Mr. Gauntlet gave me my D.

For that D, he wanted a deal, as he put it. “I’ll give you a D on one condition.” “Yes, anything,” I said. “That you promise me you will never take French again as long as you live.”

No winning lottery ticket ever felt so good. I made the Honor Roll, dubious as it was, and Mr. Gauntlet would not have to worry that I would enter some colleague’s French class claiming to have passed his.

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

or

Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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America’s Covid Response

BRAVO!

So much politics to write about and suddenly struck dumb, unable to hold a solitary thought for more than a blink of my red puffy eye. A strobe blinks out endless distractions, a sneeze, an aching jaw, hip, shoulder, an uncontrolled “toot” of the troubles below to come, a throat wincing at the endless hacking release of gluey phlegm so indigestible by the bathroom sink my wife begs me to spit into the trash instead.

Three years after the “Shit Show” started in Wuhan, after getting every vaccine and booster, and a few cases of N95s, I have the Covid.

And yet, I feel lucky. I live in a country that saved and is saving millions of lives all over the world, including mine. We Americans did that. As I come out of my misery, I toast us!

free clip art

Richard Kimball — Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org or Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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The Miracle of Me

CHAPTER 14

DAD DIES

My father’s passing was altogether different.

His burial ended with what seemed every police officer in town, off their motorcycles and out of their cars, in a long line of helmets in hand and in salute as the hearse rolled passed. It surprised me to see that, but I instantly understood. Even at just 13 years I quite naturally got it. The greatest person ever born was passing.

He had come to Arizona from Massachusetts in 1927 as a sick 17-year-old. He had fought ill health much of his life and when his father died his mother brought him out, hoping the dry desert air would do him good. It worked! By the end of his first year, starting as a junior at Tucson High School, he was elected Student Body President, starred in the school play, was President of both the Junior and Senior Clubs, led the Latin Forum, became the state’s debate champion, and captained the school’s tennis team. That last one, the tennis team thing, didn’t seem like a big deal until I found out the school didn’t have a tennis court at the time. In fact, I doubt there was a tennis court anywhere in town. Somehow, he got 50 of his classmates wanting to play tennis and thus convincing the town to build its first tennis courts at his high school.

He had been president of his high school, the University of Arizona’s lawyer, Tucson’s Chief Magistrate, the State Senate’s Majority Leader, and the target of a long-distance javelin thrower who stuck it in his back (or that at least is the tale he liked to tell about that long scar down his right shoulder). He had come from a family that landed in Boston in 1632, the first being a fellow by the name of Richard Kimball (my name sake), a wheelwright. By the 1880s they had created the Kimball Opera House in Atlanta (where they convinced the governor to move the capitol), and had factories and hotels from Boston to Waikiki. All of it anchored in that carriage business Richard had started and where Thomas Edison would one day display his new-fangled lights, not long before Henry Ford heard of the carriage assembly line they developed and converted it to some newfangled put puts. I knew none of this until long after his death. He just never talked about himself or his family.

Dad and Me

All that he had been to others was insignificant to me. When you are 13 years old and the greatest influence in your life becomes seriously ill, and the seriousness is kept protectively secret from you, and when he is suddenly announced dead at your kitchen door, the devastation is an indescribable torment that you never fully recover from.

The 13 years I spent with him pointed the way to every important career decision I ever made.

I was maybe six when we had our first political discussion. It was simple and to the point. As we pulled out of the St. Ambrose School parking lot, he noticed that I was staring up at the Stars and Stripes fluttering at the top of a pole in the school yard. He asked me if I knew what that was. I shrugged and said it’s a flag. He turned around, looked at me, “Do you know what it means?” I had no idea; it was just a flag. “Kimmy, that’s our flag,” he said. “For a great many years thousands have fought for that flag and many have died defending it. You should be very proud of our flag.” That was all he said, but the impact was colossal. To say that I was then proud is a whopping understatement. As we drove along, I started to notice the flag over the bank, over the post office, over the tallest office buildings in town. With each sighting I became more excited, and my sense of pride swelled. In that short drive I had become bigger, taller, and more full of myself than I ever would be again. When we finally reached home and pulled into the driveway, I saw my best buddies, Butchy Becker and Stevie Bogard, sitting under a tree across the street. I didn’t wait for the Packard to come to a complete stop, I jumped.

After Dad scolded me and disappeared into the house, I sauntered over to where Stevie and Butchy were sitting. Slowing to a shuffling swagger as they noticed me, I said, “You know that red and white flag that’s over just about every building in town?” “Yeah,” they said, glancing at each other. “Well, that’s our flag,” I triumphantly announced. Butchy and Stevie were unimpressed and gave a puzzled condescending response to the enormity of my revelation. “So what?” they said.

“Well that is our flag! It is everywhere, people have died defending OUR flag. Where is your flag?”

Everybody knew my Dad, no matter where we went folks seemed to know who he was. As a kid I didn’t know why but traveling around was just different with my dad than it was with anyone else. With him I wasn’t invisible, couldn’t be invisible but did not care, because I was very popular and didn’t have to do anything or say anything to earn people’s affection.

I knew so little about him when he was alive. My discovery of who he was, what he was, and where he came from happened long after his death. Most important to me in those early years is that he never thought I was slow or stupid. If anything, he seemed to think I was special and took me everywhere.

I loved it! Particularly the track meets, baseball games, basketball games and the U of A’s football games, where he would introduce me to the players and even got the U of A football coach to be my confirmation father (a big deal in the Catholic Church). At games, which Mom rarely went to, Dad would sometimes get us a room in the press box, where he would announce the games — something he had volunteered to do back when he was a law student in the early 1930’s because the university would not pay anyone to do it. The university changed its mind after Dad’s first game, when they heard him occasionally interject announcements about the latest sale down at the Ford dealership or the after-the-game hamburger specials at Burger Boy.

He got us one of the press box rooms hoping to keep an eye on us and keep us out of trouble. It didn’t work. Inevitably by the second half, the school would be down by a dozen points or so and Dad’s idiot children would fill the time by doing the kinds of things idiots do. If we had nothing of value to destroy, we could always toss airplanes made from the program pages or bits of popcorn down on the crowd below.

By the time he died I was old enough to know that he was a pretty big deal to a lot of people. Everyone knew him, respected him, liked him but no one more than me. My world simply cycled around his presence and anything we might do together.

The only political campaign he was ever in that I felt old enough to help with was in 1956. I was 7 and it was a race for something called Governor. I didn’t understand much about it, but I noticed one afternoon as we pulled into the neighborhood drug store a stack of colorful stickers on the back seat next to me that said, “Kimball for Governor.”

As we pulled into the drug store parking lot, I asked him what they were for. “Oh, people put those on their bumpers to show their support,” he replied, then hopped out of the car saying, “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Now it is a parent’s lot in life to provide for their kids, always helping you, encouraging you and such, but it is a rare event when a child thinks of returning the favor.

As he entered the drug store, I was instantly on the job and a few minutes later Dad came out just as I was gluing the last bumper at the far end of the parking lot.

Dropping your jaw and having it slap against your chest is, I believe, a unique ability, and I feel certain no one but my father had it. Just as surprising was his ability to run, something I had never seen him do as he grabbed and slung me into the car. Sadly, the only thanks I got was from the super-exciting squeal the tires made as we headed for home.

Dad was always suffering from some ailment that stole his breath. A few weeks after the “bumper sticker incident,” he got sick again, which was a part of our family life from time to time. He kept up his unsuccessful campaign for Governor from a hospital bed.

Giving Dad my tough look for a campaign picture

When he was healthy, I would sometimes feel trapped into listening to him talk with his friends. I cannot recall much of the adult subject matter discussed but I did notice that everyone seemed to care what he had to say and on occasion he would notice me and dumb down the conversation in efforts to include me. And that was the thing about Dad, sometimes he would treat me like I was an adult, or at least I felt like he did. The day that he spoke to me about his being the Majority Leader was to become a memory of considerable significance to me. I can’t remember his exact words, but I do remember his exact meaning. He said, “If you are interested in doing good in life, public service allows you to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” Twenty years later, I would sit as the youngest member of the Arizona State Senate where he sat and wonder what the Hell had happened to that idea.

Serious floor debate did not exist because outcomes were known in advance, the outcomes pre-arranged either in the majority party caucus or, if absolutely necessary, in concert with the minority leader, who might be able to corral a few cross over votes. On my first depressing day, after all the senate members filed out, I sat silently in what might have been my father’s seat thinking, “My God, was my father one of these people?”

He wasn’t, and I think I can prove it, prove that it is honor, ethics and public good that has deteriorated before I am ended with this book.

At 13, you are just old enough to know what death means, but you’re not old enough to cope. As I came home from school on a perfectly good day Mom met me at the back screen door. Her manner was matter of fact, no nonsense, just get the painful truth of it out. “Kimmy, your father passed away this morning.” In an instant, what had been ordinary, his struggling up stadium steps to his press box, the wheezing for breath, his never used old tennis racquet and golf clubs, and that odd look he gave me during my last visit to the hospital blasted into an unbearable reality. He would never talk or walk, never see, smell, touch, laugh or breathe. I would never see him again, forever, forever and ever.

To this young boy the effect instantly crushed every bone from my body. The wailing went on for hours and would re-emerge for days.

Mom, unable to console me, started sending in seconds, my older brothers, and friends of the family. They would enter my room in futile efforts to calm me down. It wasn’t until late that first night when I saw how worried she was about me that I bit into my tongue to relieve the pain that was the most excruciating I had ever known. To say I wanted to die and join him wherever he was, would be spot on the mark.

Adults are forever casting a child’s traumas as less significant than their own.

They aren’t!

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

or

Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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Say it isn’t so!

Decades ago, my congressman boss would joke: You know what the difference is between a cactus and a congress? With a cactus all the pricks are on the outside.

HUH?

Give me a switch and it would be tough to choose who to smack first: The Republicans who cower at the feet of their lowliest, or those Democrats acting joyous at the spectacle.

This is what happens when the mindless self-obsessed of our number, once only seen in the crassest of local politics, are elevated to the highest offices in the land.

This is the opportunity, for what is left of reason, to come together from both sides and put our nation back on track. Not Republican vs. Democrat, but the rational/thoughtful vs. the galactically stupid.

Richard Kimball — Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org or Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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New Year’s resolutions

Losing weight.  The most popular New Year’s resolution.  Started with dogged determination and ending with that first tempting French fry, potato chip or cream puff.

Hard to imagine a resolution more made and less kept.

Maybe this year try something new, less narcissistic and a little more egalitarian, something that helps us all.

Something that gives an option to the easily digested partisan news and provides us with the nutrition we all so desperately need: Supporting a source of accurate, abundant, dependable facts on those that govern or wish to replace those who do:  VoteSmart.org

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

or

Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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E = mc2

A simple equation of enormous significance to anyone that understands it and now with this week’s useful proof of it, stand ready to save the world.

equation by Vote Smart

equation by Vote Smart

Democracy equals education/facts multiplied by infinity.

You simply cannot govern yourself without unlimited education and access to facts.

It is that equation that you must focus on and why Vote Smart began. Vote Smart: a simple idea, where people get the facts and citizens have enough knowledge (education) to use them successfully.

At its core, it is not difficult to understand. If you support turning over the rules that govern your life to millions of strangers that you do not know, who you will never know, you must struggle to insure they have access to education and the facts. That is what was began begun at VoteSmart.org.

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THE MIRACLE OF ME CHAPTER 12

I’ve got this Mom! Free clip art

I’ve got this Mom!

Birth begins the struggle to be free, and with most boys, somewhere along the line, there is an event where a man begins to emerge, takes out the scalpel he never knew he had and severs the emotional umbilical he has been tethered to since that birth. For me it was the day that Mommy became Mom and was no longer entirely the boss of me. I have never noticed this ritual of passage with daughters. Most daughters seem to remain close to mothers for life, even interdependent. Not so much with boys.

The years following my father’s demise were a great struggle for my mother. There was some insurance, some savings, and nothing owed on the house but most income had stopped. Year by year the house was left without repairs and the four sons grew as did the size of their infractions, which became more than just adolescent mischief. She tried to cope by bringing other males into our family’s life. I am not talking any romance for her here, I am talking priests who poured bottomless buckets of advice over her and absolution over the four of us, and certainly not Mother’s financial councilors, who lost much of what little money she had left.

It was 1965 when mom talked a marine recruiter into recruiting me and my little brother. She wanted us to start thinking about manly things and have a manly influence in our lives. I was 17, Johnny 15 (why not have him listen in). My oldest brother, Billy the eldest, had joined the Navy. Bobby, second in line, who famously said in a high school newspaper interview, “You couldn’t pay me to walk a mile,” was off adventuring into the growing world of San Francisco’s mind-altering alternatives.

As for the youngest two, well, a little male influence might be just the timely thing. She would have the Marine visit us in our game room just as the delicate free world was beginning to cower from a never-ending stream of pissed-off Vietnamese peasants — peasants who would begin down the road of our destruction by tottering the first of what were called “Dominos.”

The North Vietnamese or what would become flatteringly referred to as “Gooks,” or the results of one friend’s work, who later oversaw military incendiary devices, “Crispy Critters,” were the enemy. They were according to our leaders, worth the 2 million lives lost, including 55,000 Americans, to keep anyone from collapsing that first “Domino.”

This is what happens to school yard fights as we age and whoever has the megaphone yells, “Fight, Fight, FIGHT.” Almost all those yelling getting to watch as “Seconds” do all the back lot brawling. But again, I get ahead of myself.

Back to the day of my surgical removal of the umbilical. My brothers and I were all given chores and on rare occasions when Mom ran out of ideas, we were sent off on some make work chore just to keep us out of trouble — in my case, from starting fires and such. “Kimmy,” she said, “Take this new hoe,” a hoe she had purchased to replace the one brother Bobby had intentionally broken the week before on a similar order, “and weed the back lot behind the house.” Now the back vacant lot was a half-acre plot Mom and Dad had purchased as an investment. My rebellion came on suddenly without plan and a neighborhood football game in the waiting. I looked at the lot, I looked at the hoe, and then said the most powerful two letter word representing freedom for any child said to any parent, “NO.” And then ran into the neighborhood, a neighborhood every child knows better than their parents. She searched but as she would recall sometime later, that was it, the moment when things flipped.

The transition wouldn’t be obvious to anyone on the out looking in. As my brothers and I were now in our teens our bad judgment had gone from childishly moronic to dangerously idiotic. The crashing of cars was merely one symptom of other acts of passage, in our case, booze or drugs, and all the death-seeking recklessness that resulted and makes us marvel that any of us are still alive today.

But somewhere in our more malignant, viperous adventures the mommy caring for her kiddy’s flipped. Despite the pain our stupidity caused her, when Dad died it was clear: we might be irresponsible in a great many things but now would protect her. Mom rarely knew what was going on in our supersecret and largely self-destructive years. As crummy as we all turned out to be as teenies, that same engagement that infected our childhood years of defending each other now would put our widowed mother in a protective chrysalis.

Mom was cocooned between nukes, each primed in an impregnable mommy shield.

In my case, I can remember three incidents that came dangerously close to putting a victim — or perhaps me — in the hospital, if not a jail. The first was when I was in 7th grade and she first thought she might sell our home. The finances had dwindled, the house was in need of every repair imaginable and the two oldest of her brood out of the house and on adventures of their own. On a Monday, she had listed our home with a realtor. The following Thursday, I was again on my bike with Stevie on our way home from school. As I entered our driveway, I saw my mother sitting on the front steps, her head drooped in her hands. It was not a scene I was familiar with. A realtor was standing over her shaking a finger and angrily admonishing her — for what, I did not know.

Confused, I rode up and heard the realtor say, “You said you would sell if I got a buyer.” Then the realtor looked at me, as if to solicit support, and continued, “She lied to me. I have a buyer and now she says she isn’t sure.”

As I looked down at my mother, she glanced up at me with moist eyes, the closest I had ever seen her come to crying and with an expression I had never seen on her face — embarrassment.

I have no recollection whatsoever of what I did, what I said or how I acted. If anger can cause amnesia, then I had amnesia. What I do recall is the real-estate agent running out our driveway and screaming for help to anyone that might hear. Later Stevie said, although I didn’t believe him, and my mother never talked about it, that I moved mom out of the way before I swung, but that I had stumbled on the step and the blow only glanced off the realtor’s shoulder.

Stevie, as it turns out, was most impressed, not because I hit the agent or that I then chased the agent off the property, but for what he considered the most spectacular of reasons: the agent was a woman.

I would not strike another person for 40 years, when I delivered a wondrously successful left hook to the jaw of the director of my branch office at the University of Arizona (more later).

The second time I went Kimball Boy-Kablooie, I had started high school and my mother was running a little short on cash and took on a job as a travel agent. She had been told by the owner of a travel agency that she could see something of the world on the cheap if she worked for him. I suppose we all want to see something of the world before we go. It is what I am trying to do now, at roughly the age my mother was when she took that job.

She had been hired, not because of her great sales skills, but because the agency owner knew that she knew just about everyone in town with money. The kind of people that did or could travel the world. As it turned out she wasn’t very good at pressuring her friends to purchase expensive excursions and one day I came home from school to find her in tears. This time she was really crying. I pressed her for a reason and when she finally came clean she said, “The owner yelled at me and said I wasn’t doing a very good job, and that…………….” I didn’t hang round to hear the rest — the “yelled at me” was enough. It just didn’t take much for the Kimball Boys.

I was out the door, peddling my two-wheeled stallion to the electric chair for murder. When I got to the travel agent’s office a secretary looked at me in horror, for no better reason than my bicycle continued after my running dismount and crashed into the agency’s plate glass front window. As I entered, she stood up and unintentionally blocked the most direct route to my destination. And my destination was that that MOTHER-FUCKING SON OF A BITCH that stood behind her. In the time that it took me to circumnavigate her and her desk he dove into his office and bolted the door.

I don’t know if my mother had intended to quit her job, but she thought it best not to return.

Twenty-five years later I would go mommy-ballistic a final time. It was as Mom was beginning her life’s decline. This time, I would be a not-so-fully-grown-up of 39 and would write a piece about the episode for the local paper about how injustice can sprout greater injustice.

It happened just as I was beginning what would become my life’s work, the creation of an idea that would be called Vote Smart.

Seemed the idea occupied my every waking moment. I honestly thought the idea would save me and democracy. I was intensely focused, then the phone rang.

It was Mom, she said she had just been to Walgreens to pick up her heart medication but had gotten confused and couldn’t remember the exact name. The pharmacist poked around with some suggestions of what he knew it wasn’t, including one dealing with menopause which solicited laughter from other staff and those waiting in line behind her. Embarrassed, she walked out and asked if I would go get it for her.

“YOU BET, MOM.” With that I was off to the races again. Frothing at the bit, mouthing to myself what I had to say when I got to that pharmacist.

I never saw him — he was gone when I arrived at Walgreens, which was a fine thing, because by the time I got there I was in remorse.

You shouldn’t drive angry. It is my guess that angry driving might cause as many accidents as alcohol.

I had gotten in my old beat-up clunker and hit the gas hard, storming down a street called Speedway, only to find myself stuck behind a slow poke who just wouldn’t go. I hit the horn, not in a quick pop but a long leaning scream. When the light turned green, I angrily swerved around with just enough time to glare over. What I saw was a shaking elderly fellow. He was about the same age as Mom and drooped over his steering wheel, confused, scared, wondering what he had done wrong.

Within a block as I slowly turned into the Walgreens parking lot, I was drooped over my own steering wheel.

“A Kimball Boy,” an expression my older brother coined in reference to those moments of gargantuan stupidity, that on occasion bubble to the surface in each brother.

“A Kimball Boy” has some demented itch that renders them brainless when confronted by some imagined injustice. Say like my oldest brother Bill closing a desk drawer on the tip of his pinky finger, resulting in a half dozen crescent-shaped hammerhead indentations on the guilty — in this case Dad’s mahogany desktop.

Even as I type this sentence looking at the moon-shaped indentations on that desk that I have now inherited, I can recall back before I obtained a laptop, when I would neatly pen letters, only to have the ball point punch through the paper as it rolled over one of those indentations. Had I, like my older brother had a hammer handy, the temptation to add depth, character and numbers to those crescents would have proven irresistible.

In my experience anger rarely corrects injustice, and once the explosion subsides the added unjust results become apparent. And they are never more apparent than in the little things. Like not that long ago:

I hadn’t slept well, I was on a deadline for a foundation grant, my computer kept crashing and when my work finally was done and ready to print, I discovered the printer was out of ink. I was handling the problem sensibly well until I decided to enjoy a cup of coffee for my trip to the store to purchase another ink cartridge. The coffee spilled, scorched, and I jerked up only to crack my head on the cupboard door I inadvertently had left open.

Now the butter had done nothing to me, but suddenly, in a magical transition, it had departed the plate and reappeared in large goblets dripping from the ceiling down onto the cabinets, floor and utensils that had likewise left the security of their drying rack and repositioned themselves across the kitchen floor. Thirty minutes later my clean up ended with me asking forgiveness from the spatula I had used to corral much of the abused butter.

“Ahhh,” to be a Kimball Boy.

####

New chapters coming each week — Full book thus far under THE MIRACLE OF ME / autobiography of a nobody

Richard Kimball — Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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Entertainer for Mass Murderer

Arms Dealer

Griner for Bout — Huh!

What are we thinking?! We get an entertainer if we free a mass-murdering thug selling arms to our enemies, anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down our pilots, someone convicted of conspiracy to kill Americans.

What a deal!

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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THE MIRACLE OF ME — CHAPTER 11

Getting or Giving?

free picture art

That is the Question

“Me, Me, Me,” the mantra of the young. Forever you want stuff, to be the center of attention, to draw the focus and admiration of your parents and anyone else around.

He could twirl me above his head, putting me on top of the world, even when I was almost as tall as he was. He chose me to play ball with his older friends when mine were left on the side lines. When I dropped popcorn on some older loud-mouth kids from dad’s press box who later came for me after a football game I was scared. He simply asked me to take a run at him and then tossed me high into the air as the toughies thought better of it and turned the other way. When he needed someone to cut up or float in his magic shows he made me the star.

Kimball Picture

Delivering unexpected joy became his life’s calling card.

Might be a daughter with friends thrilled to visit the Eiffel Tower and discover an extravagant lunch waiting for all at the very top. Or a daughter scared in a hospital bed in the middle of the night after a complicated birth, to find her father had snuck in through the emergency room as if a doctor on call to spend the night with her in her room.

I was always in awe of him but never so much as I was with what he taught me early one Christmas morning.

Like many kids, my year simply rotated around Christmas, wondering the day after how we could survive the eternity of 364 more days until another Christmas rolled around.

But on the Christmas morning of 1960 my view forever altered. Everything was as I had come to expect: the glittering tinseled tree stretched to the ceiling, the felt Mr. and Mrs. Clause our grandfather had made hung on the wall, the fireplace already aglow, and Mom and Dad in their robes holding cups of coffee. What was different was what wasn’t under the tree. The number and size of the packages did not fit under the boughs, and instead were scattered all about.

I am sure my eyes went big and wide, but they were about to become saucers. It wasn’t any one gift that did it. I was not taken aback by any gift marked from Santa or from Mom or Dad which were their normal great (???). What blew me away was that most of the perfectly- wrapped gifts, often the biggest and most expensive gifts, were all marked from Billy, my 16-year-old oldest brother.

Turns out he hadn’t spent all that money from his double newspaper route on himself. He spent it on us. And just like that, I went from wanting to giving, and then spent the next 60 years getting my thrills lighting up others just the way I was lit up that one Christmas morning when I was 11 years old.

His giving and surprising others had no end, not even years later, when he dragged himself out of bed in the middle of the night just to hand me a seat in the Arizona State Senate (more later).

New chapters coming each week — Full book thus far under THE MIRACLE OF ME / autobiography of a nobody

Richard Kimball — Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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Al Gore for President !!!

Free pics

“Raging moderate”

Won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Created the Internet — Yes, he pretty much did.

Devoting his life to stop the Global Warming that is frying the future.

Actually, won popular vote for president but didn’t tear the country apart to gain power.

Very young, by current presidential standards.

Good enough for me.

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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BIDEN SAYS “HAND ME THAT BONE SAW”

free pics

Yard Sale on American Ethics

If you, as an American citizen are captured, tortured, murdered, and dismembered with a bone saw it’s A-OK with Joe.

That is precisely what your President said last week when he gave immunity to Prince Muhammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, in an obviously agreed to subterfuge using international precedents.

That would be the same Prince that imprisons, tortures, and kills dissenters in Saudia Arabia and sends his agents elsewhere in the world to torture and dismember our fellow Americans like Jamal Khashoggi.

That would be the same two-faced Joe who previously called the prince a “thug” who had “shocked him to his very core.” The same Joe that promised he would make him a “pariah” on the world stage.

Want to celebrate American backbone Thursday by eating some off a turkeys? Just go to Joe’s house.

Richard Kimball

Vote Smart Founder

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THE MIRACLE OF ME — CHAPTER 10

free pictures of fire

BURNING DOWN THE HOOD?

It is impressive to me that my three brothers and I survived adolescence and continue to survive a half century later. In Mom’s lonely years, after Dad died, her sons managed to trash four cars starting with her dream car, her baby blue ’57 Chevy convertible that couldn’t see red lights and ending with me taking her dream’s diminishment, a baby blue VW bug off a 20 ft. cliff. There would be some hard drugs, a lot of booze and a stint in a Mexican prison. Those shorts are not unique or even representative of the worst things my brothers and I did and would do.

But this book is not about us, it is about Me, Me, ME! so let’s stick to the point and go back a few years one more time.

My mother was fun, tough but far less harsh than she should have been. She was the family disciplinarian even when Dad was alive. With Dad you simply feared his disapproval, which was as bad as the world could get for me. With Mom it was a too rare a hand, switch, or belt which on one, forever-to-be-disputed occasion, caused a few deserved but unintended “welts”.

In fourth grade, I thought she was unfair, too tough, but now in reflection it is a marvel that she did not end her misery by just end us all.

The “welts” incident started when my best friends Stevie Bogard and Butchy Becker were playing in the “game room” of our house where my brothers and I had our toys, balls, childhood drawings, and various knicknacks of childom. It was designed and still occasionally used as a place for adult entertainment. It was quite large and everything in it matched: knotty pine walls, ceiling, built in matching knotty pine bar with a knotty pine couch, knotty pine poker table and knotty pine bar stools.

Butchy saw it first, folded and tucked neatly behind the bar’s sink, a $10 bill. It was early December, and I knew the tradition. Each Christmas my grandfather, who couldn’t travel and join us for Christmas sent $10 to buy our Christmas tree. Mom tucked it behind the bar until it was time to make the big buy. But Butchy and Stevie got so excited with the treasure, I got excited too. Treated as treasure found, it was instantly seen as free money, now our money.

After all, I did not actually see Mom place the money there, a crack in the sink was such an odd place to put such a treasure. YEAH! That’s right Butchy, you found lost money, BIG MONEY!” Ten dollars in the 50s, is about as rich as three kids can get.

The negotiations started immediately:

Me — “Sure you found it Butchy, but it is my house, my bar, my sink, so it is my $10.”

Butchy — “OK! We’ll split it”.

Stevie- “Hey, that’s not fair, what about me, I was here too.”

Me — “What are you talking about, you didn’t find it, and this isn’t your house. You don’t get anything”

Stevie — “That’s not right, let’s ask your mother.”

Stevie, who became a very good lawyer as an adult, always had a knack for ending an argument with just the right line.

On the way to the Five and Dime the discussion was all about toys, a new football, a whole bunch of trading cards with gum, or . . . “I got it,” I said, “the toy to beat all toys. We have enough money here to buy each one of us a Zippo cigarette lighter.” The idea was an immediate hit, not because we smoked, at least not yet, but because we were fascinated with what all young men of seven are fascinated with, FIRE.

We were just smart enough to know that the store might not want to sell lighters to kids, so we devised a brilliant and as it turns out successful plan. Since Stevie’s handwriting was clearly at a crude stage and I could barely read, let alone write, we decided Butchy would do the honors. As neatly as he could, which was pretty darn good as I recall, we wrote out: “I hav givn Kimmy $10 to by three liters — (signed) Mrs. Kimball.” I remember that the fellow at the drug store looked at me a little funny but didn’t seem to mind selling us the lighters or that my mom was illiterate. So, with lighters in hand, off we ran toward the arroyo and into neighborhood history.

The arroyo was a dry four-foot-deep rut in the neighborhood landscape that had water in it maybe six days a year. It ran right by our house and was perfect for hiding our mischief. It was sheathed in a thick forest of mesquite trees and at this time of year, tall baked brown grasses.

With all the life-molding first time experiences that would come that day, it wasn’t Mr. Franklin, our neighbor that was first to see the smoke billowing over the neighborhood and did that spectacular rendition of Paul Revere. Nor was it the distant approaching sirens that converged on the scene, not even the odd smacking sound my mother’s lips made when she heard it was me, that sticks most clearly in my mind. It was the speed at which a little Zippo could turn solitude into Armageddon when it touches a few blades of dried grass in a breeze under a forest of parched desert trees.

I can’t remember what happened to Stevie that day, I wasn’t able to see him for a month, but I did hear from my brother about Butchy, who clearly had the best strategy; he ran into his house and immediately bolted himself in the bathroom. After considerable time, his parents finally managed to convince him that he would not be put to death, and he dared to unlock the door.

I, on the other hand, would be put to death immediately. My mother, having struggled with this odd, stupid, and now clearly-dangerous child for some years, cracked. She took me back into what we called the maid’s room, although we had not had a live-in maid for years..

Forced to explain what we had done and how we had done it, she then told me to take off my belt. The fire was not what upset her, it was the “Thou shall not steal” stuff I was about to get it for. She gave me one good whack for every dollar I took.

In time what happened would become a humorous contention between my mother and me until her death 50 years later.

Was it ten good smacks with my cowboy belt or not? Now this is important because in the ’40s and ’50s the world had yet to be completely overrun with synthetics. Belts were leather and if you had a real kid’s cowboy belt it would very likely have a metal tip on the end to keep it from curling up on itself in the wet and grime of kiddom.

free pictures of belts

Never mind that I deserved to be euthanized, she would swear over the years that she would have noticed the tapered metal tip and never used such a thing. I, on the other hand, remember proudly showing the kids in school, with a certain manly pride, the lightly-matching pointed marks on my butt.

Metal tipped or not, I got the best of it. Kids, once adults, are forever blaming their mom’s for imagined errors in their upbringing. The “welts” from the fire of ’56 would become my most effective weapon as I needled my mother for the next half-century, even knowing I had gotten the best of it. I got the $10, the lighters (she assumed the Fire Department or someone else had confiscated them — they had not), and my exaggerated stories about “bloody welts” from the metal whip I was smacked with. The stories were always good for effecting motherly screeches of remorse and denial.

In the end, her defense of all my and my brothers’ transgression was that look of exasperation that every mother successfully past her child rearing duties can appreciate and that shirt she enjoyed wearing emblazoned with, “IT’S ALL MY FAULT”.

New chapters coming once each week — Full book thus far under THE MIRACLE OF ME / autobiography of a nobody

Richard Kimball — Vote Smart Founder

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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The “Deplorables” lose!

Hard to win a gun fight with a butter knife but turns out that slathering deplorables with butter seems to be a survivable strategy.

I am a BANG! BANG! kind of guy. I will always want a gun, but I have now been given a lot of leeway in my wrongness. Turns out most American’s, including a lot of captured Republican’s and a whopping number of Independents have said, “Take it easy Richard, we’ve got this.”

Hate for now, grows weaker, making November 8th a day for celebration, when the responsible showed their muster. When the red tide of galactic stupidity was turned away at the door.

Richard Kimball

Vote Smart Founder

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THE MIRACLE OF ME – CHAPTER 9

EINSTEIN AND ME

 Despite the trials that stick out like blades of grass on a finely mowed lawn in my childhood, I had a wonderful young life.  My recollections are filled with an endless series of seemingly undramatic events, smells, tastes, feelings, a wonderful never to be replicated sense of freedom to dig in the dirt, build a fort, climb a tree, do some good long-distance spitting, or just fart, that you will never know again as an adult. It was a world of excitement filled with what now appears to be insignificant things but then were wondrous and fun.  Even now, more than a half century from my childhood, every rare, wonderful once in a while, some unique mixture within a moment will plunge me into some distant memory of my youth when the mixture was precisely the same.  It can be something as simple as the angle of the sun sparkling off a puddle of rain, the warmth and color of the sky at that moment in the day, the taste of dirt picked up in a gust of wind, the smell of a broken branch or some crushed fresh leaves in my hand, the sound a bird makes when you have crept so close you can hear the flap as it flies away, the jarring shock of a thunderbolt when you were told to come inside, or the rich scent of a freshly mowed lawn at the park. At the right receptive moment, almost anything has the potential to let you close your eyes and send you back decades when you were tasting, smelling, feeling, hearing, and seeing it all for the very first time.

 School, church, neighborhood friends were important, but the real action was at home.  I have been fortunate to come into contact in my adult life with a number of wealthy, famous, powerful people but none ever rocked me like my brothers Billy, Bobby and Johnny.

 It would be so much more entertaining to review the childhood behavior of my three brothers than that of my own.  They were so much more adventurous in life than I.  In almost every measure that you could make of a child I was more cautious and less courageous than my brothers.

 My adventures seemed always unplanned and unintended.  If I had a hazardous harrowing experience it was inevitably a mistake. Like the first time I unwittingly slammed against death’s door and tried to shove my family through it.

 It started when my mother put in a swimming pool.  She did it at about one thousandth of the cost of our neighbor’s pools which she had no desire or ability to compete with. Instead, as only our mother could or would, she paid a truck driver to haul in a round metal cattle tank. As cattle tanks go it was a large one about 10 feet wide and 2 1/2 feet deep. She then stuck a hose in it, which we let run endlessly.

 No pool anywhere on the planet was ever such a hit.  No one wanted to swim in the parentally supervised, take a shower, don’t get dirty, crystal blue water affairs of our neighbors.  We were forever removing the bottom metal plug and refilling ours with fresh water to ready another day’s duty.  The area around the cattle tank was a mud bog of infinite possibilities where the muddy water closest to the tank was simply a slimy extension of the “pool” itself. The mud a little further away was perfect for a style of gluey bathing all its own and the mud furthest from the tank brought the kind of impromptu heaven known only to a hot desert childhood – a far more colorful version of a snowball fight. 

 The tank itself was a true wonder.  With just a couple of kids it could be instantly transformed into a cleansing vortex of what appeared to be chocolate milk.  My mother had created the nation’s first water park and not one of my neighborhood friends did not prefer it to their own chlorinated, parental law-laden show piece.

 The only fascination I had with the other neighborhood pools had to do with what creatures might be trapped in the gutter or filter. More importantly, what was with all those cleaning chemicals emblazoned with the skull and cross bones stamped on barrels and jugs of stuff?  Ah, the mystery of the innocent-looking fluids and powdered chemicals. 

 My brother Bobby was the “should have been a scientist” of our family.  At 15 he could already explain to me Einstein’s theory of relativity, how we were made of mostly nothing, and that you could not really touch anything because atoms repelled each other.  I was fascinated by his stories and more dangerously by his experiments, the most dramatic being how he could take a little yellowy powder (sulfur), mix it with this or that and create little poofs of fire and smoke.  Wow! In the kiddy land of our 1950s world, that was downright atomic.

  One day, when Bobby was off studying or reading some boring intellectual fare, I borrowed a little capful of his magic sulfur and took it over to Stevie’s, whose family possessed a few large jugs of those cleaning chemicals emblazoned with the word DANGER.

 We mixed a few things together, but nothing happened. Then we saw the large barrel of chlorine.  We took a pinch of it, mixed it with our last bit of sulfur and waited, but again nothing happened. To give it a little assistance Stevie went in to find some matches. A few minutes later Stevie and I entered the ranks of other great scientists.  The match instantly ignited the concoction with a brilliant, gagging, choking, gaseous stench.   To me the world of science would never again be as exciting or as educational as it was about to become.  In the dusk we ventured off into what should have been our deaths, and if the timing was right the death of everyone in my entire family.

  We didn’t know how people got chemicals, but we decided if anyplace would have them it would be the drug store, a short few blocks’ walk.  Down every aisle we carefully examined the bottles and powders we thought most promising and worthy of scientific research. There were all sorts of exotic-sounding substances; we considered potassium, rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide and glycerin. Ah, glycerin, we thought. That is at least half of what we need for nitroglycerin. Then I saw it, couldn’t believe it was super-sized, but there it was: a big yellow pint-sized bottle marked sulfur, a sure thing, and absolutely essential for any good research.

 Using money we had saved up from neighborhood yard work, we purchased two of the largest bottles they had and headed for the basement at my house. A basement that was just large enough to house a furnace and a table to conduct experiments on.  It may have been small but it had all the other essentials:  it was dark with gray walls and one naked ceiling bulb for light. Adding to the ambience was a damp earthy odor that fit perfectly with the low growling noises the furnace made.  It was precisely the kind of site Dr. Frankenstein would have chosen for his finest work.

  It was getting late, almost dinner time, and we decided not to mess around. We went right for the sure thing: the five or six pounds of chlorine Stevie had brought bundled in a large colorful beach towel from his house and the two giant canisters of sulfur, our most prudent purchase.

 As the sky turned black, we decided to leapfrog over incremental scientific investigation and simply poured the sulfur, all of the sulfur, into the towel bundling up with the chlorine. It was our intent to go into the back yard and light it. The towel was heavy, and it took both of us to twist the towel ends together and pick up the massive ball.  I think it was Stevie that felt it first, “my hands are getting hot.”

 It was just one of those fortunate little coincidences in life, that the stairs I was walking up happened to be on the outside of the house and built out of cement. At the first step the towel began to smoke, a few more and I doubted my ability to hold on to the steaming buddle. By the top the towel was in brilliant white flame, we dropped the bundle and fell sprawling into the gravel gasping for clean air.  But even as I crawled through Stevie’s vomit and began some of my own, I was able to marvel at the towel which was now a brilliant crystal white light that turned the neighborhood night into day.

  I would later be told that the light from the ball of purest white light could be seen at the neighborhood edge and that the chlorine gas created would have terminated everyone in the house had we not managed get it out the door and crawl away.  Although my brothers had little to say in any admiring way, Stevie and I had clearly made an impression on our parents who now saw us as scientists to be reckoned with.

New chapters coming once each week — Full book thus far under THE MIRACLE OF ME / autobiography of a nobody

Richard Kimball — Vote Smart Founder

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Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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VOTE THE BEST YOU CAN

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It is too bad you didn’t run!

I have employed hundreds of people over my years helping to run a company called the United States of America.

In the old days most applicants I reviewed made a real effort to impress me. They were often pleasant, always seemed to appreciate my time, sometimes nervous but always smiling through it, and to a person, each would struggle to answer the questions I required answers to.

Questions that always had to do with their experience, and how much they knew about the job they were applying for, or issues I was concerned about. More often than not, they would give cogent responses about what they would do if they were given the responsibilities.

Today, that is all gone. Now I am not given time to talk and must listen instead to each one moan on and on about how horrid the other applicants are.

I, of course don’t feel very good about hiring any of these kinds of people. Hell, I wouldn’t hire a dishwasher that behaved that way, but what choice do we have when those are the only ones applying?

I will tell you why: Because no respectable member of your community would put themselves up or push their families into such a bloodbath. So, you are left with NO choice.

These people do not make your causes right, they just use your anger to claw their way to power.

Now, the end of this round is coming Tuesday, and most of us will toss in the towel, knowing it a mess and we’ll simply vote for what money we imagine can be kept for ourselves. To paraphrase a famous line, “My money, stupid, my money.

For those of you that still believe in the dream, I would suggest you try VOTESMART.ORG, an organization that has collected the facts about those craving the power to control your life.

Richard Kimball

Vote Smart Founder

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ABORTION

Aborted fetus — free clip art

My Take

Back when I was in politics there were many legislators who wanted to find means to reduce the number of abortions and the means to protect a woman’s determination regarding her own life. Had we politically survived and worked together, millions of women would never have felt the need for an abortion and millions of fetuses would never have been aborted.

But such rational communication is long dead.

Such leaders no longer survive and the views now so hardened — “I’m right, you’re wrong”, to win at any cost, effectively causes millions of avoidable abortions.

Over time, resignation and acknowledgement of the absolute victory these two intransigent sides have had, has changed my view somewhat. Now my position on abortion simply depends on my mood when I wake up in the morning.

Some mornings I am full of love and want to save every life. So I am an absolute NO. After all, I say to myself, I am the kind of guy that catches indoor spiders to set them free outdoors. If I can avoid it, I won’t step on an ant. I just do not want to cause the end of any kind of life.

On other days, I wake up pretty sour, thinking of what my species has done to countless other species (like the Bambi experiment pictured above), including our own. I think YES, abortions should be required of every pregnant woman and post-birth abortions should be the law of the land for anyone not obeying. Only in that way can we rid the earth of my species’ befoulment of it.

Now I know on those days all people are aghast at my position, but I feel confident that every other species on the planet stands in thankful celebration and ovation.

Which leads me to my point and the truth of it. Most voters standing self-righteously on either side of abortion, really don’t care all that much. That is why a few weeks ago abortion may have been the #1 issue in this year’s election but, as always, as the election draws near, such issues of grand importance fade, taking a distant second to the true heart of voters’ real concern: MY MONEY! MY MONEY!

Richard Kimball — Vote Smart Founder

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THE MIRACLE OF ME — CHAPTER EIGHT

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Mark Watson

I had an exceptionally happy childhood draped in countless adventures with friends, brothers and two never-could-be-duplicated parents.

So, I ask myself, why have I spoken mostly of traumas? I think it is because the traumas we recall seem to stick up like weeds on a nicely mowed lawn.

Like Mark Watson, the only other person I would ever know who struggled so between the black art of invisibility and the desire for acceptance. There is a Mark Watson in everybody’s life. Now, even sixty-five years later, when I think of Mark, I still cringe with self-loathing.

He was a slightly odd new kid in class, so anxious to make a friend that he became the brunt of the kind of cruel jokes children are capable of.

At a class party of sorts, Mark and I were the two self-designated wall flowers when it came time for everyone to sit at a long table to enjoy some cake. It was then that a fun idea came to me that I was sure the “mob” would enjoy. When Mark followed me to the cake table I kindly offered him a chair and as he turned and sat, I pulled it away. He hit the floor in a humiliating sprawl and the class exploded in cackles of laughter.

His eyes were welling with tears as he pulled himself up, staring at me. He was completely broken and then ran out. It was the kind of look that eats your heart and burns into your brain forever.

At Mark’s expense I learned one of the most valuable lessons of life. The next morning, I became Mark’s friend but never forgot what I was capable of if I simply followed the mob.

It is easy, comfortable, and safe to follow the mob. It is why, I suppose, so many are mob followers today, rather than taking the harder, lonelier, more constructive road of thinking for oneself.

I would feel a debt to Mark Watson later in life, as I tried to be one of the constructive, and would, at least in part, thank Mark for it.

Anyway, arriving at school that next morning I became Mark’s friend. Arriving, I saw some in the class were doing their best to have a little more fun with Mark. They had grabbed the cap off his head and surrounded him, tossing it around in a circle. Mark, upset and on the verge of tears again (a schoolboy taboo of galactic proportions), was desperately trying to retrieve it. As I walked up, Mark glanced at me and just gave up, going over and taking a seat on a bench.

Thinking I was now part of the game, one in the mob suddenly tossed the hat to me. I turned my back on the mob and walked over and sat next to Mark placing it on his head. Not done with their fun, my classmates came over to snatch it off Mark’s head again, but that did not happen, and Mark and I had my reputation from the fancy-dancer Rudy fight to thank for it.

I may have done things worse in my life than jerk that chair out from under Mark Watson, but none that ever made me feel smaller or where I learned more.

New chapters coming once each week — Full book thus far under THE MIRACLE OF ME / autobiography of a nobody

Richard Kimball — Vote Smart Founder

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OUT WITH THE OLD

IN WITH THE NEW

Cuckoo Bee
Shrew

CUCKOO BEES vs SHREWS

CUCKOO BEES lay their eggs amongst the eggs in another bee’s nest, hoping their larvae hatch earlier, allowing its young to feed on the provisions stored for the other’s eggs. Then with their extra-large mandibles they dessert on the others’ eggs as well.

Feeding on the haves to engorge the have nots with little demanded in return.

SHREWS don’t look like much to worry about but are total bastards. They secrete venom from their jaws, paralyzing prey, not to kill but to keep alive for prolonged feeding.

At first, Shrews look like a joke, no real threat but now they come for November 8th where democracy will be paralyzed, and the main course served.

EXTREMISTS now control the dialogue, the considerations, and in the end, the actions with too few remaining to bring reason.

Get the facts at VoteSmart.org and good luck to us all this election.

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org . or Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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THE MIRACAL OF ME — CHAPTER SEVEN

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GOD

If you want to scare the hell out of a child and assure stunted emotional development and a twisted perception of the world, send them to a 1950s nun at St. Ambrose for an education. More specifically, send them to Holy Sister Mary Margaret.

She is probably dead now, and the children of the world are better for it. Should I think her still alive I would have a moral duty to seek her out, rip out her tongue and stitch her mouth closed forever. In the 1950’s, she and her ilk could cause serious damage to any child true to the faith.

Religious instruction was not a matter of faith to a child at St Ambrose, it was fact. Front and center in a child’s mind and training was not God or Christ but the “everlasting fires of Hell,” where, as Sister Mary Margaret put it, “your flesh would be consumed by fire, yet continually be reborn so that you would suffer the unimaginable agony of your flesh burning for all of eternity.” God’s desire was to get you to Heaven through your fear of Hell.

According to the good sister the great joy of getting to Heaven was not to be found in mounds of candy bars, cookies, cakes, and endless feature cartoons, but the ability to “look upon the face of God.” To a seven-year-old, my age at the time, I simply wondered how someone could possibly look so good that seeing them would beat out a Root Beer Float.

But Holy Sister Mary Margaret had much more to offer, not the least of which was her informing us that it was not necessary to actually commit a sin in order to be guilty of the sin. All you had to do was think of the sin and you were equally guilty. This was very discouraging. Now I was guilty on so many layers of sin that I had no hope of escaping the fiery pits.

It was the stuff that put thinking and believing believers into insane asylums as they aged. At seven years of age, I had not yet come to realize that these nuns torturing children with their unforgiving, cruel nature of God should be imprisoned, if not themselves thrown into that everlasting roaster.

Holy Sister Mary Margaret understood that our minds were too young to comprehend such horror. To remedy this unacceptable situation, she would tell us stories that were sure to reach into our imaginations with lasting effect. One juicy illustration was her telling of the “very real possibility” that our classroom might be broken into by Nazis. Nazis, who would shove us up against the wall and then ask with a gun pressed against our heads, “Are you a Catholic?” The holy Sister Mary Margaret, wanting to tempt an incorrect answer said. “If you deny that you are a Catholic, they will let you live.” But then quickly followed with, “If you love God and admit that you are Catholic, then you will be shot and experience the joy of looking upon the face of God.”

Years later I would remember thinking of all the children she must have tortured with that kind of question, and fanaticized entering her classroom, gun in hand, and offering her that very choice.

However, at seven years old, I hung on every word she said and believed every story that horrid human being told. That was until she told us how God handled the dead guy.

The previous week she had gone through some pains to explain the difference between a Venial Sin and a Mortal one. With Venial Sin (a small sin), God would place you in Purgatory, a place much the same as Hell only with a possibility that at some future time, after you experience adequate flesh burning you would be given a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free-Card. However, Mortal Sin was a sin so egregious that you roasted for all eternity in the real Hell. She just loved telling a little story or two to make certain her little charges could understand.

All her stories kept us in frozen attention, but the story about the dead guy stands alone and still rots away in my brain.

The following, minus modest changes, since I cannot remember each word precisely, is a fair if not precise representation of Sister Mary Margaret’s example for Thou Shall Not Kill:

“A long, long time ago there was a man suffering from a very strange disease causing him to fall into a deep, deep sleep where his heart quieted to a soft undetectable murmur. The people thought he was dead. They dug a deep six-foot hole, took his body, and placed it in the tight confines of a coffin and nailed down the lid. They lowered the coffin into the pit and filled it over with dirt.

Sometime later the poor, sick man woke up in the darkness. Alone and unable to move in the black tightness of his coffin, the man realized his predicament, was terrified and began to scream. But in the blackness, six feet under the ground he knew no one could hear his cries for help. Unable to withstand the horror of it, the man drove the forefingers of his hands into the temples of his head to kill himself. Even he, today, is burning in the everlasting fires of Hell.”

That night when I went to bed I could not sleep. I was tired but every time I started to doze off, I woke with a start. If I slept, I was sure someone would think me dead. Finally, in the wee hours of the night I had an idea. I got up, stumbled over to my desk and switched on the light. Searching around in the drawers I found my drawing book and ripped off a little piece of paper and wrote out a short note. I then quietly crept down the hall to the bathroom where my mother kept the safety pins. A few hours later she came in to wake me up for Sunday church. Pinned to the middle of my pajama shirt, where no one could possibly miss it, was the note: “Pleese do not berry me, not dead.”

You must understand that I believed the Holy Sister Mary Margaret’s story, absolutely. I had not the slightest doubt that was exactly what God did. Only the effect of the story was not what the Holy Sister hoped for. That morning at church, sitting at my mother’s side as she dutifully focused on the word of God, I was staring above the alter where Christ was draped on his cross, thinking, “Asshole!”

Today, I think a kind of God may exist but one that is wholly unlike the insanely narcissistic jackass preached by so many religions.

My best guess is if there is a God, it is far beyond any lowly human’s ability to comprehend its existence and would clearly be powerful enough to talk to me directly, without need of some self-anointed human middleman. The same middlemen so galactically arrogant to presume to speak in God’s name that billions pay homage to and fund their nonsense.

If there is a God, and I hope there is, he already knows how to and actually does speak to me directly through the guilt, shame, pain, and pleasures I feel with my every intention and action I take.

And what is this with so much unimaginable, often inconceivable, grotesque agonies that consume the utterly innocence? No God — not yours and not mine — can answer for the unfairness of life, the damnable repugnance of the hulking injustice that puts one existence in the convulsions of death before a single step is had and another’s anointed with a passel of servants to care for their every need.

The line, “God works in mysterious ways,” exposes the poppy cock heart of much religious training for any willing to open their own eyes. What is the mystery in a child who has done nothing, can do nothing, unable to speak, raked with painful cancerous cysts, gasping a final breath in a struggle to whisper, “Please help me mommy?” Every conscious soul on this planet would struggle so to stop such a horror if they could, but the “all-powerful” God of organized religions does not.

The incomprehensible suffering of incalculable numbers of starved, enslaved, diseased, burned, bombed, drowned, murdered, maimed, tortured living things repudiates any notion of, or any need to be humbled before the nonsense of an all-powerful, “loving,” living God. I may have a good life, you may have a good life, and we feel compelled to thank our lucky stars, but we do not represent, nor can we poll the countless, faultless others who never asked to be born and now largely reside amongst the gratefully dead.

Ok, ok, I am just a bit bitter about Sister Mary Margret’s loving God. There is some part of me that hopes I am wrong, that there is an answer that an ignoramus-like human such as myself has no hope of grasping. There is even a part of me that envies friends who have faith in this kind of God. It is clearly desirous: stats show you live longer if you are comforted and smother yourself in such beautiful, irrational, thoughtless delusions of a loving God.

There are few things more uncomfortable than that moment in an argument when you realize you are wrong. Perhaps that moment will come for me when I die, and somehow, magically, miraculously, and thankfully I will be given the power to see that all is right with God’s world. I am just not ready to bet on it. In fact, after an adult life in politics, being God is the only job I feel certain to be better at, or at least fairer, only it never comes up for election.

Richard Kimball — Vote Smart Founder

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Featured Post

THE ASCENDANCY OF STUPID!

First, they took my civics education.

Then they de-funded my school.

Then uneducated, ignorant of democracy and unable to think critically, I was set free and found my faith in what I wanted to believe rather than what I should believe.

Once American education was the envy of all, our student performance second to none, our skill at self-governance a beacon the world over.

The attack on education, truth, and the facts is no accident. The dimmer we become, the more malleable we are.

The only remedy is to sustain at least one source for trusted facts that any citizen can turn to in confidence — facts without interpretation and protected from influence.

VoteSmart.org is exactly that, but requires a people’s will to use it, believe in it, and to support it. A source to which all conservative and liberal citizens can turn in confidence for the facts and the truth that is dependent upon those facts. Without that, we cannot sustain an ability to self-govern successfully.

It can be done, ensuring its integrity with an elected board balanced between the multiple sides on major national issues. Supported without dependence upon self-serving interests and operated by those willing to commit their time and expertise in the national interest and not financial self-gain.

That is what VoteSmart.org strived to be. As a young man, my boss once said, “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.” Without VoteSmart.org or an organization very much like it, it is not the meek that shall inherit the earth, but the stupid.

Richard Kimball

Vote Smart Founder

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ARE YOU PEOPLE?

You decide on November 8th.

If you are not white, male and don’t own land, you can’t vote. That is the way we introduced self-governance to the world, with most people still not being actual people, as in “…of the people, by the people, for the people.” Women and most non-whites were not really defined as people in that wonderous American phrase.

It wasn’t till 1920 that most Americans would finally be considered people and allowed to vote — but not all, including the first Americans, native Americans. For those that were first, one or maybe two gazillion years before anyone else — well for them, it would take a tad longer.

The freedom and the liberty that comes with that vote, has been a slow, torturous march for most of us, with barriers erected by the people, against those not yet people, all along the way.

Your vote is your personal hard chunk of power, fought for through the suffering of others, and finally giving you a say. If you do not use it, your power doesn’t go away, it simply marches over and adds its power to those other chunks that are used, by the people who get to order you about.

VOTE !

And use VoteSmart.org to vote smart.

Richard Kimball

Vote Smart Founder

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Featured Post

“Let Them Eat Rocks.”

I have often wondered why God did not say that, but “he” didn’t. He said, “Let them eat Life.”

Rocks are mixtures of one or more minerals. Just like apples, butter, flour, and sugar are the ingredients of apple pie, minerals like quartz, mica, and feldspar are the ingredients of granite. Mixing and matching various proportions and degrees of heat make an unlimited variety of could have been, should have been foods. Not to mention other types of rocks.

We could have evolved with suckers, dissolvers or diamond encrusted teeth and systems that made good use of such nutritious minerals. But he didn’t, he said, “Let them eat life.”

Was it an error in judgement or did he really intend the consequences?

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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LOOKING TOWARD DEATH

 If you are getting on in years, do you worry about having a bad ending, a long and painful one. Does it trouble you that you cannot find a peaceful means to pass on, on the internet?  If you look, what you will first find is some message that amounts to “Don’t Do It!” followed by a jaw droppingly number of (cover my ass) equivocations, and finally a listing of the two gruesome options most of the 49,000 annual U. S. suicides are funneled into: blow your brains out or hang yourself.

This is due to the power of cults or what we think of as religious leaders.  A power given by most of us seamlessly devoted to those claiming to be God’s representatives on earth, all of whom insist that regardless of your agony you suffer through it.

So silly is the notion that God is all powerful but cannot get it up to talk to each of us without some self-anointed mediator.

I for one hear God’s messages every day:  pleasure, guilt, contentment, misery, happiness, sadness, anxiety, longing, pride, humility, jubilation, terror, sorrow, hope, on and on. Messages bounce off me like my tennis ball on the backboard.

But I digress. All I asked the internet was a simple answer to what are the most peaceful methods for ending one’s own life should one enter terminally agony.

NO! I have no interest in taking my own life, but many suffering do, and I may one day.  Many elderly, such as I wonder about it, think about it and worry about it for a multitude of unselfish reasons.  Do you know the answer?

Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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 Tiananmen Square?        

Some weeks ago, following Waltz’s performance at the Democratic Convention I unfortunately wrote this:

“It is that precious thing, the real thing, that I finally saw tonight in politics when Tim Walz spoke.  There is no mistaking the real thing. If you see it, you know it.  It is a thing no human can counterfeit. So thrilled with finally seeing it in my life it dampened my eyes just as it did with his teary-eyed son. Something else you just can’t counterfeit.”

Then as so often, disappointment and embarrassment set in. My endless need to find purity in someone, anyone in politics found my shoulders adjusted and now slung low:

WALTZ:  “As the events were unfolding, several of us went in (to Tiananmen).”

WALTZ: “Donald Trump’s asking for a nationwide abortion ban.”

WALTZ: “When (Trump) left office, we had more people unemployed, percentage-wise, than the Great Depression.”

  1. Waltz was nowhere near those heroic people.
  2. Trump has said for months that he wants abortion policy to be set by each individual state, not set by the federal government for the whole country.
  3. The unemployment rate was 6.4% when Trump left office while the unemployment rate was above 20% during the Great Depression.

Waltz did not “misspeak,” he was not taken out of context or confused.  He had simply been swallowed by the whale that has become the accepted, even required deportment in the politics of our day.

Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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My position on abortion depends on how I wake up.   

Some days I wake up and answer with a very big NO!  I am the kind of guy that catches indoor spiders to set them free outdoors. So, I don’t want to play a part in the ending of any living thing. 

On other days, I wake up and answer with a very big YES! Abortions should be required of every pregnant woman and post-birth abortions should be the law of the land for anyone not obeying.  Only in that way can we rid the earth of this human befoulment.   Now I know, on those YES days, all people are aghast at my position, but I feel confident that every other life form on the planet would stand in ovation.

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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Your Companions!

In politics, as in all life your fans can become your biggest maligners.

You do not know what people really think of you until you are seen as used, vulnerable and expendable, which gives courage and makes bold those that were never at your side.

But also, for those lucky enough to have them, there stand naked are your friends.

Richard Kimball

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Where do you cut it off?

Back 40 years ago, when I was a State Senator and had something meaningful to say about abortions, I was a knee jerk.  That is to say, I believed it was none of my business, even on the Senate issue I am currently recalling (should a teenager seeking an abortion be required to tell her parents) I was a NO as long as the rules set by Row vs. Wade, (the wisdom of its day) were applied.

Now a half century later, knowledge (wisdom) has adjusted somewhat. And now, as then, I turn to those in the business of knowing for a knowing of what to believe and a what to do.

Most involved in prenatal medicine believe there’s clear evidence that a fetus – a developing baby in the womb – can’t feel physical pain until after the 24th week (6th month) of pregnancy. But many others say it’s possible for a fetus to feel pain as early as 12 weeks (3 months) into its development.

Today 93% of abortions were done at or before 13 weeks. While 5.5% were done between 14 and 20 weeks and less than 1% were performed after 21 weeks.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM), and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (RCOG), say that a fetus isn’t capable of feeling pain until at least 24-25 weeks.

The conclusions say these lifelong experienced, in what I know nothing about is:

  • The cortex, the outer layer of the brain thought to be largely responsible for consciousness, and the thalamus, which relays sensory information (like pain) to the cortex, develop only after 24 weeks.
  • Just because a fetus has other brain structures that process pain doesn’t mean the connections that can cause it to feel pain are working yet.
  • The nerve connections that allow a fetus to tell the difference between a harmless touch and a painful one don’t develop until late in the third trimester. 
  • When a fetus under 28 weeks seems to respond to “noxious stimuli” (actions an adult would perceive as unpleasant), it’s a reflex or hormonal reaction.
  • While doctors may use pain-relieving drugs during fetal surgery, it’s mostly to keep the fetus from moving or prevent long-term damage from stress.

Today 93% of abortions are done at or before 13 weeks. While 5.5% are done between 14 and 20 weeks and less than 1% are performed after 21 weeks.

The lack of consensus is as confounding for me, as it is for the “experts.”

Bottom line: Where do you draw that line between life’s urge to fornicate and the growing life that results?

It has become harder for a thoughtful someone, anyone, even me who is careful not to step on an ant not to sympathize WHEN two bodies share the resources of one. WHENEVER that is!

How about you?

Richard Kimball

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A guest commentary from a friend worth hearing: Air Force Veteran Speaks Out; Why Republicans Must Vote For Democracy

Air Force Veteran Speaks Out; Why Republicans Must Vote For Democracy

For some of you receiving this email, we may not always agree on politics, but I always respect your opinion and reasoning and your right to disagree with me and think differently about things.  Many people don’t know, but I have deep Republican roots on my Mom’s side.  My Grandmother Peggy Hurley was good friends with Barry Goldwater and served as an alternate delegate for him at the 1964 Convention.  Nana’s house was covered in GOP inspired memorabilia.  There was an elephant piggy bank, elephant coasters, elephant coffee mugs, GOP ashtrays, lighters, plaques, hand towels, coins, you name it, the house was a GOP museum. I’m sure some of you can relate… My grandmother was the kindest, smartest, most loving person you would ever meet, and she was also a proud, right wing Goldwater Republican.  So, I understand and respect traditional, Old Republican Party values like: hard work, free markets, individual responsibility, self-determination, lower taxes, less regulation, less bureaucracy, strong defense, fiscal responsibility, etc. 

If you are a Republican reading this, I’m not trying to convert you into a Democrat and I think that having a strong, principled Republican party is a necessary component of a stable democracy here in the U.S.  In other words, we (all of us) need the Old Republican Party back.  The problem is that the Fake Republican Party under Trump is trying to undermine democracy as we know it and if Trump succeeds, we won’t have any policy issues to argue about. 

So, I have made a few videos in hopes that I can help shift the paradigm back to what it used to be and persuade maybe just a few undecided voters to reject Trump and vote for Vice President Harris.  And if you are a Republican, then maybe it’s just this once because the times call for it. 

If you agree with what I’m saying about Trump and you think that someone else would benefit from seeing the videos, please feel free to forward or post them.  Also, if you are interested, the long version on my Youtube channel is more persuasive, but fairly long at 20 minutes. 

Thank you,

Pat DeConcini

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Preview YouTube video Air Force Veteran Speaks Out; Why Republicans Must Vote For Democracy

Air Force Veteran Speaks Out; Why Republicans Must Vote For Democracy

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Love vs. Hate

It’s just not possible to comprehend the hate being injected into those crushed but still surviving in Gaza or struggling for freedom in Ukraine, if you have not suffered as they do.

Gaza and Ukraine are the best modern-day examples of human vengeance and greed before us.

I, for one, have never experienced such horror, which leaves me without any tools or experience to guide my empathy.

The best I can do was during my 14th birthday, a year when some communist named Khrushchev said he would bury us and started shipping nuclear missiles off our shores to do just that.

I was scared, particularly my Senator, a guy named Barry Goldwater said if you lived in Tucson, (my town) and they fire you might as well sit on your roof and watch the show. Tucson was surrounded by a dozen or so Titan nuclear missiles of our own.

That was as close as I got to worry about bombs landing in my backyard. But they never came and I went right back to my pleasant life in Lala Land.

What would you do, if the lives you loved, your town and home were just splattered about you?

For me, like most of you, I would instantly learn hate and be engorged with a desire for blood boiling, vicious, vengeance.

Then there are those that don’t react as me, won’t kill, can’t kill, yet run into the horror of it all to save lives, offer comfort, sanity and hope. Where are the monuments to them?

Richard Kimball

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“It is not our job to educate but to win!”

That was the furious, in my face, response to a speech I once gave about the need to provide voters with easy access to accurate relevant facts about candidates that anyone, conservative or liberal, could turn for the truth in absolute confidence.

That quote was from Arizona’s representative on the Democratic National Committee, the “The oldest continuing party… leading with its values…” says their website. It is exactly that horror of hypocrisy that has led to the frustration that Trump feeds and grows on.

Are you going to be a problem

It is not too late. Do your homework. VoteSmart.org, the organization I had been referring to in that speech, is still a place that can help you do it.

Richard Kimball

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THE EVIL WITHIN US ALL

Much like me, “I never met a person I didn’t like,” said Will Rogers a century ago.

It’s a sad lesson learned by life’s end that, that feeling is not always reciprocal. As such, it was with Will who later said, “There ain’t nothing that breaks up homes, country and nations like someone exposing (what they really think of you)”

A slap me in the face awareness of this, first smacked me when opening my mail as a State Senator and this dropped out:

Turns out that the slug was from my campaign manager who thankfully also threatened then President Jimmy Carter, bringing in the Secret Service to hog tie him.

People you trusted can be taught to blame or hate from sources you never realized existed for reasons so foreign to your experience, you never, even in your darkest thoughts, fantasized where there.

So it is that most of my fellow Americans, who I trusted and have been so proud and encouraging of, MAY turn to the dark side on Election Day and unleash the lesser, angrier, more hateful selves that nests within us all.

Richard Kimball

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VOTING HAS STARTED FOR ALL BUT THE PROFESSOR!

I once heard a Political Science professor arrogantly brag that he never voted, because the chances of HIS vote making the difference was infinitesimal.

It infuriated me that someone with a doctorate, teaching others would say such a stupid thing.

His self-aggrandizing argument completely ignored what was even obvious to the simpletons amongst us. His power to vote was not tossed away. It did not evaporate with his pomposity.

A vote is a little hard nugget of power each one of us is given.  Its power cannot be thrown away, when tossed, it lives on, on its own.  If it is not used, it simply moves on and doubles-up the power of someone that does vote.

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder — Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org or Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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THE DEBATE

Debate performance may earn your vote for an Academy Award but not something as precious as your vote for President.

Tonight’s Presidential debate is the first Presidential Debate I have refused to watch since Nixon (who sweated too much) vs Kennedy. Largely won because Kennedy’s people recognized Kennedy never sweated and had the heat turned up on the debate stage.

Presidential debates have nothing to do with being President and everything to do with theater. So, if your vote depends on theater, presidential debates to professional wrestling matches are for you. All are choreographed by dozens of experienced manipulators of you, the duck they hope to shoot.

Richard Kimball

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TIM WALZ

The real thing is so rare that the only time I ever saw it was on an early episode of West Wing when Leo McGarry asked a cynical Josh Lyman to travel up north to see some Governor speak. What he saw was the real thing. You instantly wanted him to become President and in TV land he did.

It is that precious thing, the real thing, that I finally saw tonight in politics when Tim Walz spoke. 

There is no mistaking the real thing. If you see it, you know it.  It is a thing no human can counterfeit.

So thrilled with finally seeing it in my life it dampened my eyes just as it did with his teary-eyed son. Something else you just cannot fake.

Richard Kimball

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NO ONE IS QUALIFIED TO BE PRESIDENT

.

There are only the unqualified, some grossly more so than others.

You learn to be President when President. Well, not everyone, but it has been our good fortune that many have risen above themselves to learn and tough out the task honorably. Presidents like Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt (yes both) and Reagan are rated amongst the best by historians, while the likes of Buchanan (led us into the Civil War), Trump and Harrison (Corrupt) amongst the worst.

This is to say nothing about the lower politicians, you know little about, now peddling their elixirs to seize your vote.

I offer myself as example: My first job after college was as an Automative Manager “in training” at Kmart.  I knew nothing about cars, had never even owned one, but there I was one day, giving advice to some customer complaining that their car was losing power going up hills. My response, “Did you check your battery,” became a company joke.  Well, that was until I bested myself when my garage crew became overloaded, and I decided to sell four of our best radials and put them on myself.  I did a good job.  I put on a green smock to keep my clothes clean, used one of those lug nut guns, zapped the nuts off, slapped the tires on and sent them on their way with a sense of newfound pride.  It took less than a minute for one of the mechanics, to ask, “What or those?”  At my feet were the five lug nuts belonging on the right rear tire.  My whimpering sprint was Olympic, toward the freeway entrance I flew just in time to see the tire crumple and bend out the fender of that shiny new Cadillac.

 I used to enjoy telling that story AFTER citizens elected me to the Arizona Corporation Commission, where I became chairman and eventually led Texas, California, New Mexico and Arizona in its efforts to regulate the countries largest nuclear power plant, something I knew far less about than changing tires.

Flogging myself with that story should worry you about how little you really know about most of the candidates you will choose from this November.

As it turned out, I learned on the job, studied hard and did a pretty fair job defending consumers.  But the vast majority won’t know that, nor about most of the candidates they select from this November.  Not because they cannot know, but because they are busy and comfortable enough with the way things are.  Most will select based on what they’ve been told by whatever media source soothes the whatevers they already think.

There is a cure for this.

Richard Kimball

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YOU’RE NOT LIKELY TO KNOW HIS NAME,

but Tom Matthews was the Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth wannabe clipping Trump’s ear.  Had he been an inch closer to center, what would have happened?

Would MAGAS go supernova and attempt to dismember all the fantastical goblins Trump has fingered in the “Dark State?”

Would one of the Trump wannabes grab his banner and carry forth or would they just feed on one another?

Would the Republican Party be regained by lifelong conservatives riveted on reducing spending but for military protection?

Would the ebbs and waves of politics return to that world of responsible give and take that has so continuously inched America and the world forward toward fairness?

I don’t know, but it is my guess that Trump is the one Gorilla Glue that holds MAGAS from each other’s throats.

Richard Kimball

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In Politics, Even the Weird Call the Weird, “WEIRD!”

Campaigns are like Swap Meets only where opinions are traded for votes……….well, ya, sometimes cash!

Who amongst you would quickly flip and then flop on the opposite side of yourself?  Say on:

A fracking ban?

Medicare for all?

Decriminalizing immigrants?

Defunding the police?

Eliminating private insurance?

A politician would!

Richard Kimball

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Getting Old

It was the late 1970s, I think. Ed, Tim and I, college buddies, returning for our university’s Homecoming were just getting on with our careers in business, law, and politics. As we walked a street popular with college students a group looked at us and passed by mumbling to each other, we picked up on a single line, “Ugg, old people.”

That was 45 years ago. Now they, if they have been lucky enough to live as long as we have, are in their mid-sixties wondering where all the time went and wondering why their pee pees have to wee wee all the time.

Even with the wrinkles and sags glaring at them each morning they won’t yet get it with a brain insisting, “You’ve got this, you’ve always had this,” while their bodies cringe and mumble, “What the fuck were you thinking.”  

After a recovery of a month or so that once took a few days, they might consider their brains inability to adjust to their bodies slow decay. Not likely yet, as they struggle to hold on to what they once knew.

It is not until the brain starts giving them hints, like the time at breakfast not long ago when my wife suddenly remembered that she promised to call someone.  Not knowing the number, she jerked up from her seat went to the counter asking, “Do you by any chance have a phone book?”  “Well no,” they responded but went into the kitchen to check.  A few minutes later, delivering a small miracle, they had an old phone book and handed it to her. She fumbled through a few pages and then with that puzzled look known to all of us in our 70’s, she returned to our table to ask, “Who was I going to call?”

Or that favorite example of me, when I needed to rush to the bank before it closed to get a document notarized for a grant request.

 I frantically looked around my desk. Couldn’t find it. I went up to the bedroom, thoroughly searched the car, the patio, the living room, the kitchen, both bathrooms and storeroom. Nothing!  I then did it all again. When it was too late to make it to the bank even if I found it, I flopped down on the couch spewing every vile expression I had collected in life, just as the document appeared.  There it was in the one place I had not looked, flailing in the air in my very own hand. 

No, it would not matter if I ran into those youngsters calling Ed, Tim and I old and tried to tell them how their bodies and brains were trumpeting that the end was coming.

But it is, and I just feel lucky to have lived long, known many, enjoyed much, besides, like Mark Twain, “I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

Richard Kimball

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The Lost Chapter

Chapter 53.5

 Like Biden, I am old now. Well maybe not that old, but close and like him, no one much thinks about coming to me for council.  I make silly mistakes. Like not long ago toward my end at Vote Smart, when I needed to rush to the bank before it closed to get a document notarized for a grant request.

 I frantically looked around my desk. Couldn’t find it. I went up to the bedroom, thoroughly searched the car, the patio, the living room, the kitchen, both bathrooms and storeroom. Nothing!  I then did it all again. When it was too late to make it to the bank even if I found it, I flopped down on the couch spewing every vile expression I had collected in life, just as the document appeared.  There it was in the one place I had not looked, flailing in the air in my very own hand. 

That is my excuse for having bypassed a chapter I wrote many chapters ago, but somehow overlooked in my countless revisitation to the things I wrote.

So here it is the lost chapter:

 NATIONAL POLITICAL COURAGE TEST

 Land disputes with well-educated Oregonians soiling themselves over the thought of darker peoples were not the only distractions.

 More fateful was the growing number of less accomplished, self-serving political applicants muddying elections with misinformation.

 It would be an expensive effort and called The National Political Awareness Test. A stupid name for the crucial test of any applicant for any job, only applied to in this case to those that wanted to run citizen’s lives.

We began the effort as the means to gather the issue positions of the candidates during our early testing back in in 1990 in North Carolina and Nebraska. Back then, our staff of one, Lorena O’Leary, and I contacted each congressional candidate or their campaign and asked them to respond to questions, polls showed voters were interested in. But it was not until the news media picked up on what we were doing that most candidates were scared into doing the right thing and responding.

 It gave us the notion that it took a certain amount of courage for a candidate to take the test and we should be calling it a Courage Test.

 By the time we set up our offices at Oregon State, in 1992, the staff and students were applying the test to all congressional candidates including the presidential election.

 The staff put on the most amazing full court press to pressure every candidate to do what we called “the right and honorable thing” by answering the people’s questions.

It was an exhausting effort, to ensure that every campaign was well pressured, we convinced the media and all our board members to participate.

The test was meticulously designed:

First, for an issue question to make it on to the questionnaire it had to overcome a number of hurdles.

  1.  At least one polls over the prior three-year period would have to show that the employer (the people) thought it was of importantance.
  •  Party leadership comments had to be gathered showing the issue was likely to be dealt with in the coming congress and the various interests concerned with the issue had to state that it was a key concern.
  •  Questions for the test then had to be reviewed by a cadre of Political Scientists, representing every state. Their jobs were to make sure the issues were germane in their state and that the language of our questions was in proper form and staff was not tripping over some sub-conscience partisan prejudice.
  •  Finally, each question had to be reviewed by our entire Founding Board to make sure they did not see some advantage or disadvantage to their Democratic or Republican parties or any other party. We had several independents and third parties on our Board.

 When the questions had passed this extensive muster, staff were set free to test each candidate’s willingness to provide what we considered essential information to voters.

 The staff was not just told to send out the questionnaires. Oh no! The demands placed on them were of a standard that had never been seen before and would never be equaled again.

 They first had to organize over 200 daily newspapers and national media to partner with and help apply pressure to the candidates along with key members of both parties from our Founding Board.

 In the mix of demands to take the test would be those by national leaders of the candidates own party, a national media outlet (CNN, Fox News, PBS, National Journal, etc.) and a key one from their own district.

If the candidate did not respond to any of them, they received a final written red warning card saying the deadline was up and they must respond or be listed as having flunked the test.

 Furthermore, every communication had to be documented. If a staff member or student talked to a campaign they had to report when they communicated to the campaign, who they talked to, and what transpired in the conversation.

 From Vote Smart’s standpoint everyone took the test whether they answered questions or not.  It was a measure of their courage to answer the voter’s questions. If they passed, they made our Honor Roll, if they failed, they were put on a Flunk List.

 Most of the candidates, even most of the presidential candidates, some angrily. However, the two that actually won their primaries:  Bill Clinton responded by sending us four creates of position papers saying you can find my answers in here, while Jeb Bush, helping to run his father campaign said, “Yes he definitely going to answer. It is on the President’s desk.”  But the answers never came.

Criticisms were expected and immediately dealt with:

“The test is to long.” We shortened it to 20 minutes or about .0001% of the average time congressional candidates spend collecting money.

“True and false or multiple-choice questions are too confining.” We allowed them to just comment on the question, any response was considered passing. One commented, “This is a dumb question, and you are a dumb ass organization.” That answer passed our test. The answers did not need to be germane to the question. All we wanted was a response that we could print word for word.

“I am campaigning now and too busy.” – We gave them six weeks to answer.

“I have not considered all these issues.” –  We let them leave 30% of the questions blank and still pass the merits of the test.

 We treated all candidate responses just like any other factual data we collected:

  1.  It was entered into a hidden database verbatim.
  2.  It was proofed and verified by the person  

 data entering.

  •  Like in all of our systems, supervisors

   put in intentional errors forcing proofers to catch       them all and no other.

With the responsibility to ensure voters the facts, just the facts, and to protect the candidates with precise accuracy about what they said, did and their histories the data had to be perfect.

We did not make mistakes.  In fact, when the Markle foundation did an independent study using one thousand randomly selected families to review the political databases of the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, Harvard University and a half dozen other institutions they discovered that Vote Smart was by far the best, most accurate and most useful.

 Sometimes candidates would try and contort the test for political advantage.

 There were hundreds of examples. Here are a few:

 A long-term Democratic congressman from Michigan had passed the test as did his opponent. Michigan being a strong NRA state they both reported opposition to any gun control measures.  However, a massacre had just occurred at Columbine High School, so two weeks before the election with polls showing the incumbent in danger of losing, he called to say he had made a mistake on that gun control question. He demanded to be allowed to change his position and state that he was opposed to guns like those used in the massacre.  Well, we cannot say a position is other than what the candidate is now saying. With new knowledge a candidate can have a change of opinion.  So, we changed his response in our records and then, within a matter of hours, he saturated TVs with ads condemning his opponent for “His heartless support of such deadly firearms.”

 Or then there was this: Both George W. Bush, running for governor against the Texas incumbent Ann Richards took and passed the test.  Allegedly reviewing Governor Richards responses, Bush put out advertising condemning Ann Richards for supporting the status quo on welfare reform and adding, if you don’t believe me call the non-partisan, non-profit Project Vote Smart.

 There was no record in our data that showed Richard’s had said any such thing. Many Texans, including supportive Vote Smart members got very upset with us, thinking we were taking part in his campaign. I called the prominent republicans on our board and asked if they would stick with and defend our staff, students and volunteers or would they defend Bush? To a person they agreed to put out a letter condemning the Bush ads as a willful effort to mislead.

In several cases, candidates threatened lawsuits should we not remove them from our records. We did not. Thankfully they never filed. We could not afford to hire attorneys to defend ourselves in every state.

Attacks like these ended up requiring us to have two letters at the ready.  If a candidate was using Vote Smart in an attack ad and the information the attack was using was false, we condemning the attacker for a willful effort to mislead voters. If an attack used Vote Smart’s name and what they were saying was true, a made a more modest response saying the candidate was not authorized to use our name and should emphasis their own credentials for office.

 It was Vote Smarts naive view that if you would not accept such attracts from someone applying to be your babysitter, perhaps you shouldn’t accept it from someone applying to run your life. It was of course a completely ineffective letter.

 Occasionally candidate efforts to avoid us became truly goofy as in one student’s sixth effort to compel a democratic congressional candidate:

Intern: “…You said you were going to provide your answers. Tomorrow we are announcing the California results, you need to get them in today or we must report that you would not.”

Candidate: “Oh, is the Vote Smart. You guys are so terrific and so long overdue in this country.  I am going to get my answers in, I promise. But I just cannot focus on it today.  My mother passed away last night, and I am just not able to focus on politics right now.”

 Vote Smart is not heartless, so we announced the results but did not include this race to give her a chance to respond later. After two weeks passed the intern noticed that the candidate was making campaign appearances and called her again.

Intern: “Hi, I’m with Vote Smart, we noticed that you were again campaigning and to be fair to your opposition we really cannot wait any longer for your responses. Can you send them in today?”

Candidate: “Yes, Vote Smart. I got up this morning thinking about all of you and got my check book out to contribute to your terrific work.  I am going to get those answers to you right away, but I cannot do it today.  My mother isn’t feeling well, and I have to take her to the doctor.”

 That story became staff famous as “The Resurrection!”

 The real problem was becoming clear: The candidates were scared, not of Vote Smart but of opposition research, their opponents would review their answers find vulnerabilities and attack them.  Back then, many candidates still naively thought that for an attack to be effective it had to be grounded in some measure of reality. Not so! Today, you can say anything you like and find partisans defending the absurd.

 But back then it was different. Jim Sasser, a Tennessee U.S. Senator with a would be Majority Leader future took the most irregular route to flunking the test, he decided to cheat.  We had some experience with candidates suing us, for simply reporting that they would not answer questions, but this guy had a head too big to fit outdoors.  When his campaign heard that we announced the results of each state delegation’s response rates at each state’s capital, he had his press secretary call our Oregon office. “If you guys come to Nashville and announce that Senator Sasser refused to answer your questions, we are going to take you in front of the IRS and strip you of your non-profit 501-c3 status.”

 It was nutty but intimidating. All we did was ask questions and report responses. But a week later Sasser’s guy called again making the exact same threat only, this time, following it up by demanding that we send copies of our Articles of Incorporation, our IRS 990’s and copies of any letters validating our tax-exempt status, all in an effort to bully one of our interns and the organization.

 Sasser was a Democrat, so I conferred with some of the prominent democrats on our board and asked, “Are you going to stick with the staff and students here or are you going to back this guy.”  To a person, they all agreed to tell Sasser to take a leap.  Well, they didn’t exactly say that, but that is the way I interpreted the conversations and conveyed it to our staff and students.

 A few days later I found myself in the Nashville state capitol holding a press conference.  I simply gave a standard report on the results on Tennessee candidates and then closed by stating that we had this threat from a Sasser staff member, that I thought was probably just a “lose cannon” on his staff.

 Sensing blood, the media sharks bolted from the newsroom over to the Sasser campaign headquarters. Unfortunately for  Senator Jim Sasser, he was in and came out trying to find some room for his head and claimed that his campaign had never heard of Vote Smart, that we were lying, that no one had contacted them, that we were “probably part of the right-wing Christian Coalition.” His press secretary chirped in with some comment about us being just a bunch of young students, “Yah, they’re lying.”

 The young students, who had worked so hard on the test went supernova because they had been extra careful “With this Sasser guy.”

They rushed to me, in an overnight all their documentation.  Even I was impressed. They did not have just the 6 required documented contacts; they made a dozen documented contacts because they were pissed about the threats. In the box of documentation, they had all their notes on each contact, even the fax receipts from the times Sasser’s campaign manager asked to have more information or additional copies of the questions sent. Plus, one very interesting item that was about to make national news and make Bill Frist, not Jim Sasser your future majority leader.

The day after the press conference, I invited any media that was still interested to meet with me in my hotel room at noon. The room was packed. There, on the bed, I laid out all of the evidence. Notes from calls with his campaign manager, press secretary and two or three other staff, the fax receipts and copies of all the letters and emails that had been fired back and forth. When the media was finished looking it all over, one reporter who clearly was there to defend Sasser asked, “How do we know you didn’t just manufacture all this junk? Senator Sasser’s press secretary would never have made any of the calls you claim.” I gave him a baleful look and asked him if he knew Sasser’s Press Secretary?  He said, “Yes, very well, I went to school with him “he wouldn’t lie like this.”

  “Well then, you won’t have any trouble recognizing his voice, will you?”  His jaw slackened as I hit the play button. The voice making the threat on the tape was so arrogant and nasty most of the media just chuckled and off they went, a day or so later Sasser issued us an apology which the national wires picked up on and a month or so later we took both credit and blame for the victorious new Senator Bill Frist.

 In the early years of Vote Smart most candidates did take the test with both republicans and democrats doing so at about the same rate. The major parties grew uglier, more vicious and far less able to reconcile anything. They found success in making each other look like pigs but they both grew up on the same slop in the trough.

 These ignoble behaviors would become increasingly despicable in the years ahead and become accepted, expected even required attributes of America’s elected leadership. Honorable conduct was leaving the building and would become a detriment to any candidate that wanted to win.

 This behavior and the anger it engendered would come to defile mainstream media where traditions of dispassionate objective reporting would fall victim to more entertaining, more lucrative, partisan political preachers who happily exchange responsible journalism for twisted impressions of the truth to gain the mobbish loyalty of whatever viewer group they can muster to sell products.

 At Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, I sat down with the Wall Street Journal which said they were interested in a story we had about an astonishingly deceitful organization called the Club for Growth.  The group had stolen our logo, stolen our name, then did a mock-up of our web site and fabricated nasty facts about a candidate they did not like.  They stuck this entire fiction in a television attack ad.

 I went over all this with the Journal, showed them all the proof that made for a solid piece on the disintegrating conscience of America’s political culture. Turns out that fear of any penalty for maligning facts, honor or principle was no longer a coin on the table. In part this was due to the fact that today it is hard to find the difference between politicians running for office and politicians masquerading as journalists.

  Things could be said and done without regard for truth, it simply no longer mattered what one said. Reality was becoming expendable, even a liability if you wanted to win office or win an audience.

 Dishonesty had become so common place that it garners little interest. Viewers rivet their attentions to more siliceous stories, whether they be true or not true.

 Not long ago this Club for Growth, with its millions spent manipulating voters’ fears, now caught with its pants down, would have gotten some media attention. But only the Wall Street Journal fainted any interest at all.  At the Mayflower the facts were laid out and the “journalist” sent to consider the story pretended real interest and concern in the meeting and assured me he would follow up.

 Nothing came of it.  Turns out that Steve Moore, one of the Journal’s golden boys, the one assigned to meet with me that day at the Mayflower was a founder of The Club for Growth.

 A hundred years earlier, Mark Twain noted that “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”  Today the lies are so many, fired with such rapidity and with an effect so alarmingly instant, that the truth no longer bothers to get out of bed.

(New chapters will be added roughly once a week)

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder 1988

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

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LIE TO YOUR POLLSTER !

I have been saying that every election for years.  There are all sorts of polls of course and some, like say in health care, can be good, good for all of us.

But think about it, are those done by candidates used to find out what you think so they can thoughtfully represent you, or are they used to learn what you want to hear and tailor messages to fit?

If you think those polls are not used to manage you, manipulate you, well then, you are in the modern La La Land of every disingenuous candidate’s dream.

So, I say, lie to political pollsters!  What fun it would be if they couldn’t finger who you are and were forced to be what they are?

Richard Kimball

Sign up on my Blog at: richardkimball.org

or

Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016

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