PRIMARY NIGHT

Sarah Steelman tried but failed to topple Missouri's GOP machine and its chosen candidate, Kenny Hulshof.

A Matt Blunt-appointed circuit judge fails to hold onto his seat in Greene County.

And a Springfield sales tax sails to victory, 81-19, despite one tiny corner's loud attempts to bully people into voting "no."

Not quite 20-percent of registered voters in Greene County cast ballots on Tuesday. Pitiful that turnout was seen as OK.

At KSPR, the web served as platform for a nearly hour-long newscast, starting at 9 p.m. The newly installed news ticker digested and spit out results as fast as we could keyboard them into the system.

Did the primaries turn out the way you expected them to?

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN, 89

Death announced late Sunday by his son. He was a Nobel Prize winner.

According to The Associated Press:

Through unflinching accounts of the years he spent in the Soviet gulag, Solzhenitsyn's novels and non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown.

And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.

Ivan Denisovich lives on.