Today In Wyoming's History: February 8: 1924 President Coolidge signed a resolution ordering the Doheny and Sinclair petroleum leases to be nullified due to the Teapot Dome scandal.
And also:
The first execution by lethal gas was carried out in Carson City, Nevada. Gee Jon, a Chinese national, was the subject of the execution for a gang slaying.
Texas executed five prisoners on the same day, all African Americans, in the first use by Texas of the electric chair.
The Soviet Union created the Nakhchivan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within Azerbaijan. On January 20, 1990, it became the first part of the USSR to bolt.
Roncalio, a lawyer from Rock Springs, and a veteran of D-Day, was a Democrat.
Nearly everyone in Rock Springs was.
At that time, one of our two Senators, Gale McGee, a former University of Wyoming professor, was also a Democrat.
Now, to use the term "Democrat", even in street speech, is slanderous in the state. It's like calling somebody a wife beater or something. Republicans vying to be as extreme as possible accuse their fellow Republicans of being Democrats (even though many of those who do that routinely are imports from the South or elsewhere and are really, even if they don't know it, Dixiecrats or Rust Belt Democrats).
Gale McGee was our Senator until 1977, when he was replaced by Malcolm Wallop, a very conservative Wyomingite of English peerage, in a race in which it appeared that McGee didn't really have any interest in running. McGee was our last Democratic Senator, and he simply gave the race to Wallop.
Roncalio served in the House in 1978. He didn't run for reelection. He was replaced by Dick Cheney in a race that pitted Cheney, fresh out of the Ford Administration, against Cheyenne attorney Bill Bagley. Cheney won with about 60% of the vote against a lawyer who is now forgotten, but who held on in practice too long. Interestingly, showing part of how we got to where we are now, one of his county chairs was a then Democrat who would later be in the legislature as a very conservative Republican.
That's telling, as a whole herd of Democrats who were later conservative Republicans share that history in the state.
No Democrat has gone to Washington from Wyoming since 1978, but the party remained significant and a power well after that. It twice took the Governor's office and twice reelected Democratic Governors, with the last Democrat leaving Cheyenne in that role as recently as 2011. Either one of the Democratic Governor's could have had a House, and maybe a Senate, seat if they had wanted one. The Democrats routinely took the Secretary of State's office for much of the 20th Century, with the last Democratic Secretary of State, Kathy Karpan, leaving office in 1995. Karpan went on to become the director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement in 1997, being the first woman to hold that position, and being unanimously confirmed back when Congress still did its job. Like Governors Sullivan and Freudenthal, Karpan could have stepped into the House or perhaps the Senate if she had wanted to.
Freudenthal remains a significant figure in Wyoming politics.
The last really significant Wyomingite to make a serious run for office with a serious chance of success was Mary Thorne, a lawyer who ran against Governor Gordon in 2018. There have been other real Democrats who have run for office, with Sergio Maldonado for State Superintendent of Education coming to mind, but since the mid 1990s It's become increasingly difficult and many of the Sullivan/Freudenthal Democrats have dropped out of the party, in part because of the Democratic leftward (and anti-democratic) drift, and in part because at some point being a Democrat was pointless and the Republican primary race became the real election.
2022 really demonstrated the direction that the cancer of Donald Trump had brought about.
In 2022 the Republican Primary became a referendum on Donald Trump, with the Wyoming electorate, influenced by the import of Rust Belt and Dixie immigrants into the state, basically giving the insurrectionist a big wet kiss on the mouth by tossing out Liz Cheney. The whole thing was more than a little ironic, as Cheney, who had risen to her office late in her occupation of it, really was never a Wyomingite in the first place, but the party dearly loved her, in no small part because it had embraced Dick Cheney, after having elected him cynically originally. The Cheney's aren't Wyomingites and Dick Cheney had only won as the voters in 1978 were given a choice between somebody who seemed to have influence in Washington, Cheney had been Ford's Chief of Staff, and a Cheyenne lawyer who had, if I recall correctly, held off a challenge from a younger Casper lawyer who later became a Federal judge. Wyomingites of that era were pretty practical and cynical, and they never developed a love for their politicians like occured later. Cheney seemed to do a good job, so he held office. Liz Cheney won as the primary split the vote three ways. Chance are high had that not occured, Tim Stubson would have been our Congressman, and have gone on to suffer the same fate as Cheney by not searing allegiance to the Dear Leader for life.
Hageman was a Cheney acolyte but was good at reading the wind and beat out her former friend. Her competition was Lynette Grey Bull, a really interesting Democrat who had run twice and who drew 24.4% of the vote in spite of the times, in spite of being a Democrat, and in spite of being a Native American.
Who will run now.
Since 2020 the State's GOP has gone into a civil war, with the old party at war with the "Freedom Caucus", one of whose (California migrant) members wrote an op ed in the Tribune which clearly indicates their intent to wage a second Stalingrad in the 2022 Legislature. Two county organizations, Natrona and Laramie Counties, are in revolt against the GOP Central Committee who has fully adopted the Meine Ehre heißt Treue ethos. Hageman hasn't been as noisy as might be expected, in part because she probably correctly read the tea leaves over the trouble that Trump ass-kisser Kevin McCarthy was in for not kissing even more private parts before he fell to a quiet and scary Johnson. The House of Representatives had done nothing this term, and is on the edge of losing power due to attrition. Pundits claim that the GOP will gain House seats in 2022, but they claimed that about 2020 as well. The stench of Trump kept that from happening.
And so we have a non-functioning democracy, locally.
No Democrat can win any office in 2022. The House and one Senate seat will be up, and both of the Republicans contending for those positions will pledge their true honor to the Leader without question. Some in the race to come this year will go further with a full-blown Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer appeal. The Senate primary will see a GOP opportunistic upstart attempting to claim that John Barrasso is a "RINO", which really means that he's not a Dixiecrat or Rust Belt Democrat. While I've discounted that campaign, I don't really put it past it that it has a chance of success.
Will any Democrats run?
I sure hope so. And I mean a real Democrat, not the Left Wing Flavor Of The Month Democrats that the party has been fielding in some races locally. Putting up somebody who self declares to be a homosexual polyamorus trangendered drag queen Pacific Islander is not going to win any hearts at all, and really isn't believeable (the same people would decarel themselves to be cocker spaniels if that was edgy, or Orthodox starets if that was edgy). Soembody like Sullivan, Fruendenthal, Karpen, Thorne, or, once again, Grey Bull.
But who can be asked to be a sacrificial lamb.
Well, somebody had to be.
The state's honor, and the preservation of democracy, require it. With no choices now, we get further down the road to there being no choices, ever.
The Democrats are faced with that burden. What little there is the way of third parties here do as well.
A two week Allied hiatus of bombing of Italian targets came to an end. Milan and Turin were struck by the RAF, which also struck Berlin for the first time since May 21. U.S. bombers began a heavier attack on Rome and a precision bombing attack on Italian rail yards at San Lorenzo and Vittorio. The US bombed an Austrian target for the first time.
Fr. Jakob Gapp, age 46, was executed by the Germans.
Fr. Gapp was an Austrian with outspoken anti-Nazi views and had gone into exile, first in France and then in Spain, as a result. He'd been kidnapped by German agents posing as refugees needing help to cross the Spanish border and sentenced to death. He was beatified on November 24, 1996.
In Natrona County, the high was 87.4 F and the low 52.3F.
This slams a post by Robert Reich, who as readers here know I have sort of a love/hate reading relationship with.
Reich's an old liberal in an era in which it seems the ancient hands of the Baby Boom Generation just won't let go of the levers of government, even though they started operating those levers when they were mechanical rather than electronic. Given that, like all people do, they tend to have an understanding of problems based on the world of their youth, rather than reality,
I suspect Mr. Reich doesn't appreciate what this illustrates, which would principally be the introduction of technology more than anything else. Technological advances are making individual workers more productive, and therefore decreasing their need, and depressing wages.
By way of illustration, how many workers in heavy industry in 1955, when this graph basically peaks for union membership, were needed to do a task, as opposed to 2023?
Additionally, this graph goes from the point at which US industry was the major western survivor of World War Two, and therefore serving the world, through the point where much of American industry left to go overseas. That was a joint project of the left and the right. . .
gave rise to Rust Belt discontent, and fed the populist movement the nation is now contending with. I'm not saying the decline in Union membership is a good thing, but I am saying that the way politicians and pundits seem to imagine . . .
American industry as frozen in time when in fact the march of time and technology has totally changed the landscape needs to be recognized. So, yes, Mr. Reich, this really is the May 1 graph people need to see and understand, yourself included.
