During the most of the 1960s the Republican leader of the Senate was Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, and he was worth watching whenever he was on television. “Ev” was good for a quote. When he was in the House he had said “When a member of the House moves over to the Senate, he raises the IQ of both bodies.”

He was a conservative Republican. He supported Joe McCarthy, tried to get a school prayer Constitutional amendment passed, backed the Vietnam War etc., but he also worked to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The thing is, he wasn’t mean spirited. A fiscal conservative people remember a reported aside: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” I remember it as “million”, not “billion”, because in the days of the 15¢ hamburger, a million dollars was “real money”.

I don’t think Senator Dirksen would be pleased with what has been going on in the Republican Party of Florida.

The local paper carries the St. Petersburg Times/Miami Herald story: Sansom staffer rang up $1.3 million on credit card

ST. PETERSBURG — She was a 25-year-old junior staffer when the Florida Republican Party gave her an American Express card.

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The local paper reports that:

Maj. Randell D. Voas and Senior Master Sgt. James B. Lackey, both from the 8th Special Operations Squadron, died when a CV-22 Osprey carrying U.S. forces crashed about seven miles west of Qalat, the capital of Zabul province, according to an Air Force Special Operations Command press release.

Major Voas and SMS Lackey were the squadron’s flight evaluation team, rating pilots and flight engineers on their job performance. They were the primary instructors at the squadron for flight crews. It takes years for people to attain their proficiency.