military news

How’s this for irony?

Irony can be found all across the political landscape, such as when “family values” politicians are caught taking a tumble in the sack with someone other than their spouse.

Let’s try this one on for size, too: Naming a U.S. military installation in honor or memory of someone who once fought against the U.S. military during the bloodiest conflict in our nation’s history. 

A move is afoot to change the names of several such installations — primarily Army posts — because they carry the names of Confederate officers who went to war against the United States of America.

Donald Trump — the Dipsh** in Chief who doesn’t understand anything about U.S. history — won’t have it. He vows to veto any legislation that comes to his desk that seeks to change these names. He stands behind the Confederate traitors rather than understanding or appreciating the supreme irony in their names being attached to these military installations.

Of course, Trump is appealing to that “base” of voters who believe that the Confederate States of America wasn’t all that bad a chapter in our nation’s history. I mean, all those CSA officials wanted was to retain the right to own human beings, to enslave them and treat them as three-fifths human, personal property. So, they seceded from the Union and went to war with the United States. The Civil War, incidentally, killed more than 600,000 individuals on both sides of the divide.

And some of us still want to continue to honor the memories of these men who went to war against the United States? Please. No.

national news

Flag means more than ‘heritage’

I am so glad that NASCAR has decided to strike down the Confederate flag, banning it from being displayed at its events.

My Southern friends contend the flag symbolizes their “heritage.” Here’s my take on it.

The “heritage” includes:

  • States rights. Sure it does. The states rights issue precipitated the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in our nation’s history. The Confederate States of America started that war so that they could preserve states rights to own slaves, to put Americans in bondage.
  • Racial hatred. That, too. It is no mystery why the Confederate flag is seen flying at Ku Klux Klan rallies. The hate group that used to lynch African-Americans flies the Stars and Bars at its rallies to this day as a statement of solidarity with what the flag represents to them. In the KKK’s eyes, the Stars and Bars symbolizes their desire to continue their hatred against citizens who happen to be of African descent.

NASCAR shouldn’t be condemned necessarily for waiting so long to do the right thing. Instead, I merely will salute the racing governing body for doing it … period.

The organization that was born in the South but which seeks to expand its fan base far beyond its Southern base has lined up on the right side of history.

national news

Apologize for poll? Seriously, Mr. POTUS

Knock it off, Mr. President.

Your demand that CNN retract and apologize for a public opinion poll that puts you 14 points behind Joe Biden is ridiculous on its face.

It’s also a bald-faced, hardly veiled ploy to fire up your shrinking base of supporters who just cannot accept your failure to lead in the wake of the COVID pandemic and your ghastly response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

CNN says it stands by its polling. Your damn right it does. It certainly should stand by it. Your childish claim that CNN’s polling is faulty deserves to be laughed out of any room where it is brought up.

Let’s get real, Donald. You very well might lose your re-election bid. Sure, I get that you pulled your chestnuts out of the fire at the last minute in 2016 and surprised everyone on Earth by defeating Hillary Clinton. I suspect you surprised even yourself, as it has been reported over the years that you were so sure you’d lose that you hadn’t done any pre-transition planning prior to declaring victory on Election Night 2016.

Well, that was then.

I doubt the former VP is going to get sucked into the trap that swallowed up Hillary four years ago.

As for the polling, you’d better just live with it, accept the grim numbers and seek to turn them more in your favor.

Oh, and just for the record … I hope you fail in that effort. I will do my part to ensure you get drummed out of the office you had no business winning in the first place.

Sports news

So long, Confederate flag!

What do you know about that? Hell has this way of continually freezing over.

NASCAR, the Southern-based sports giant that features cars that roar around race tracks, has decided to ban the display of Confederate flags at its events.

It’s a response to the Black Lives Matter movement that has erupted around the country in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. What’s more, Floyd’s death is just the latest involving the death of African-Americans at the hands of police officers.

Race car driver Bubba Wallace, one of the few black drivers active with NASCAR, called on the sports giant to ban the flag. NASCAR heard Wallace’s demand and, by golly, acted on it!

In some way, this isn’t all that surprising. NASCAR has sought for years to expand its fan base beyond its Deep South roots. It conducts races at tracks all over the nation. It’s big in California, in New England, in the upper Midwest, in the Rust Belt, all along the Atlantic Seaboard, in the desert Southwest.

The Stars and Bars to some represents a symbol of Southern heritage. To others it represents slave ownership, repression of human beings, disloyalty to the United States … given that the Confederate States of America went to war with the U.S. of A. to preserve their right to continue slave ownership.

It’s no coincidence, of course, that the Confederate flags fly during Ku Klux Klan rallies or those events sponsored by neo-Nazis and assorted white supremacists.

NASCAR did what it had to do. I am delighted to see this news. I am glad Bubba Wallace’s demand did not go unheard. It remains to be seen, of course, how NASCAR will deal with fans who come to these races in the future carrying the Confederate flag or wearing it on t-shirts.

Striking the Stars and Bars colors from NASCAR events, though, is a constructive start in the effort to rid the nation of a symbol that means divisiveness and hatred.

medical news

This isn’t ‘success’ in COVID fight

Donald Trump keeps yapping about the “fantastic” job he and his administration have done and are doing to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

Hmm. I looked at some numbers compiled by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As of this very day:

  • The world has logged 7.3 million confirmed cases of COVID-19. The United States reports 2.04 cases. The United States comprises about 5 percent of the world population, but we have reported nearly 30 percent of the world total of infection.
  • Earth reports 413,854 deaths from the killer virus. The U.S. total is 114,452. That’s 27 percent of the world total, again in a country that comprises about 5 percent of the world population.

That’s success? That is a “fantastic” job?

No. Neither is true. What is true is that Donald Trump’s pledge to protect Americans against all our adversaries, even those we cannot see, has gone unfulfilled.

Yet the Imbecile in Chief keeps insisting he is doing so well that we simply must send him back to the presidency for another four years.

Aye, caramba! Perish the thought.

Those numbers all by themselves tell me he is failing the fundamental test of presidential leadership. I will concede there might be a discrepancy in the reporting of illness in some of places on Earth. Indeed, I am willing to argue that even in the United States — the most advanced nation on the planet — infection and death rates likely are underreported, too.

We are failing — not succeeding — in the fight against COVID-19.

crime news

Trump to talk about ‘police reform’? Really? C’mon!

Donald Trump, the guy who famously encouraged police to get rougher with criminal suspects, now is going to talk to the nation about police reform.

To which I say, simply: You gotta be kidding!

Trump is responding to the outcry and uproar over the death of George Floyd and the calls to “defund police” around the nation. Floyd, a native of Houston, died when that rogue Minneapolis cop snuffed the life out of him by kneeling on the back of Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes, 46 seconds.

So now the president of the United States is going to offer his view on how to reform police procedures? Is that right?

Oh, my. Donald Trump has nothing constructive to add to this debate. How do I know that? Because his political record contains zero evidence of any commitment to the issues that have roiled the nation in the wake of Floyd’s death.

Trump doesn’t speak to the issue of police practices. He doesn’t reach deep into his gut to speak to the misery that so many Americans of color feel when they hear of these incidents. Trump doesn’t express a scintilla of empathy or genuine sorrow over the death of a man who was killed while lying on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back. 

Trump has saved his public outrage — every bit of it — for the rioters who went berserk in cities across the nation.

What is so profoundly weird is the thought of Donald Trump reading a prepared text from a Teleprompter and trying to persuade us that he means what he is reading. You’ve seen Trump in these moments, yes? When he reads such text, I get the sense that he looks like someone reading a statement with a gun pointed at the back of his skull. Donald Trump simply is incapable of sounding sincere in that context.

What are we going to hear from Donald Trump. More tripe, I fear that it will demonstrate once again to us out here this clown’s fecklessness and recklessness.

national news

Time has come for federal police reform

The nation is facing a watershed moment in its struggle to correct a problem that has grown into a full-blown crisis.

We must debate honestly, completely and comprehensively the issue of police reform at the federal level. What does that take? It requires our Congress — House members and senators — to determine that racist policies in local police departments have contributed to the needless deaths of too many African-Americans.

George Floyd’s tragic demise two weeks ago in Minneapolis, Minn., ad the hands of a rogue white cop appears to be the tipping point.

Democrats are calling for a national response. Republicans so far have been quiet about that. Democrats see racism as a national crisis; Republicans appear to view it as a local matter to be solved at the local level.

I believe today that we are entangled in a national crisis that needs a solution enacted by Congress and signed into law by the president of the United States.

We can talk all we want about police departments enacting policies that ban chokeholds or other restraint techniques that inhibit people’s ability to breathe … for crying out loud! Do we trust all PDs to do the right thing? No. We cannot.

I believe the time has come for Congress to enter this fight. There ought to be a solution that that makes use of these techniques a violation of federal law. I am not not altogether certain that we can endure the kind of response we have seen in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

Will a federal prohibition end this mistreatment of U.S. citizens? Probably not. However, there must be ways to apply deterrent pressure on beat cops and the brass sitting in police headquarters to ensure that they follow federal law or else face serious consequences.

Call it the George Floyd Law if you wish, or name it after any of the individuals who have died as a result of police brutality.

Let’s get it done!

national news

Get ready for revulsion, America

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Donald J. Trump reportedly is preparing to speak to the nation about race relations.

Yep, the Birther in Chief — the godfather of the movement that sought to deny the first African-American president to right to run for the office to which he was elected twice — is going to give us his view of how to mend race wounds in this country.

Donald Trump is utterly clueless on that matter.

If that’s not astonishing enough, we hear now that the aide who is drafting Trump’s remarks is Stephen Miller, the author of the Trump administration’s ghastly immigration “policy,” the one that seeks to deport every illegal immigrant immediately and seeks to put children in cages.

I don’t know whether to shudder or scream.

Maybe I’ll do both.

medical news

Goodbye to a social custom

This damn global pandemic is claiming many social customs along with the human beings it is sickening and, tragically, killing.

I refer to one of them: shaking of hands when you greet friends.

Doctors and assorted other medical experts tell us that handshakes are being put aside while the world fights against the global viral infection that has killed 110,000-plus Americans.

This disturbs me. I am a hand-shaker. I enjoy greeting old friends and making new friends with a hearty handshake. I consider my handshake to be firm, but not crushing. I expect the same from those I meet for the first time or those with whom I reconnect.

We’re left now with “fist bumps” and “elbow bumps” and waving at each other from across the room. My wife and I ventured to Amarillo recently over the Memorial Day weekend. I had hoped to see old friends while we were there. I got cold feet. The instances of viral infections in Randall and Potter counties made me jittery. Thus, I was unwilling to see old friends, offer a handshake or an embrace.

This fist- and elbow-bumping ain’t my style, man.

The latest edition of the AARP Bulletin arrived this week and it tells us that the custom of shaking hands, which dates back to ancient Greece, is a goner … at least for well past the foreseeable future. AARP quotes Harvard University epidemiologist William Hanage, who recommends we greet each other with a “sanitary Star Trek salute and a hearty ‘Live long and prosper.'”

The pandemic, says Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California, has created the “single greatest disruption of our lifetime.”

So, you thought it was only a handshake, right? Hardly. Get ready for the “new normal.”

local news, Sports news

Heart hurts for baseball fans

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I might be one of the few and not-so-proud baseball fans out here who is concerned that Major League Baseball’s 2020 season is in dire peril.

It might not happen. The MLB’s owners have pitched a 76-game schedule that cuts deeply into the money the players would earn from a regular season and from a playoff system resulting in the World Series.

They’re still dickering, quarreling and negotiating over the terms of the season. It doesn’t look good, at least not to these eyes.

Furthermore, it’s beginning to look equally bleak for all those minor-league teams and the communities that support them for what they hoped would be a stellar season in 2020.

Yep, that’s you, my friends and former neighbors in Amarillo, those of you who root hard for the Sod Poodles, the city’s AA franchise affiliated with the San Diego Padres.

The Soddies won the Texas League title in 2019. They had high hopes of defending their title this season … until the coronavirus pandemic shut everything down.

This hurts fans all across the land. The big leagues have their faithful fanatics. So do the minor leagues. MLB has its players union. Minor league baseball isn’t affected so much by that governing body.

That damn pandemic is threating to wipe out an entire season.

My heart hurts for the fans who have been waiting … patiently.

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