local news

Cumulative voting is here to stay

I had thought initially about using this particular blog post to argue for a drastic change in the Amarillo City Council voting plan … but I won’t argue for it today, although I intend to mention it.

Instead, I’ll discuss briefly a voting plan that will elect members of the Amarillo College Board of Regents and the Amarillo Independent School District Board of Trustees.

It’s called “cumulative voting,” and it has worked well for both governing bodies.

Cumulative voting was enacted some years ago by AISD to settle a lawsuit brought by the League of United Latin American Citizens, which argued that the AISD at-large voting plan made it too difficult for Latinos to get elected to the board. AISD settled with LULAC and came up with this cumulative plan.

It’s an interesting concept.

If a governing board has, say, three seats up for election, voters can opt to bunch up their votes in any combination they choose. They can cast all  three votes for one candidate; they can parcel them out, casting two ballots for one candidate and one for another; or they can cast one vote apiece for each candidate. The number of votes they cast match the number of seats up for election.

Cumulative voting has worked well for AISD and for AC. It has produced a level of diversity among the respective governing boards. It enables voters in a particular neighborhood to rally around one of their own by allowing for one candidate to collect a greater portion of votes.

Amarillo City Council continues to have its at-large voting plan. The council elects candidates to fill individual places. Voters cast ballots for the candidate of their choice for each place. All council members represent the same citywide constituency, the same as the mayor. The city’s at-large plan has the effect of diminishing the power of the mayor, who is the presiding officer of the City Council in name only.

Should the city change its voting plan? I’ve argued already on this blog that my longtime opposition to any change has softened. I wouldn’t object to a change, such as expanding the council from five to seven seats and then electing two council members — along with the mayor — at-large, while electing four others from wards/precincts.

The city’s plan will likely remain intact for the foreseeable future — if not even longer than that.

Amarillo College and Amarillo ISD, though, are continuing on their own paths to electoral reform that I find quite appealing.

They would do well, though, to explain it clearly and completely to their constituents how it works.

national news, political news

Secretary of state: vanishing before our eyes?

Here’s something you might not know about the secretary of state: The individual who occupies the office is No. 4 in the line of succession to the presidency.

That means to me that the office oozes importance. If, for some reason, the vice president, the speaker of the House of Representatives or the president pro tem of the Senate cannot succeed the president, the task falls to the secretary of state.

That person, therefore, is quite high on the executive branch of government’s pecking order.

Or one would think.

Then again, the State Department is facing a proposed 29-percent reduction in its budget, which doesn’t seem to bother Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Oh yes! There’s actually someone in the job. He’s been a sort of shadow figure in the Trump administration Cabinet.

He has held zero press conferences since taking office. He took off on an overseas trip and didn’t bring any media representatives along with him. Mexico’s foreign minister recently visited Washington and didn’t even call on the State Department, let alone on Secretary Tillerson.

Why has this individual become so, um, invisible? Donald Trump introduced him as secretary of state after parading a slew of high-profile pols to meet with him. Then came Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO who emerged out of seeming nowhere to get the president’s nod.

One more thing: Tillerson has no deputy secretary of state on hand. There’s no one to assist him with whatever heavy lifting he needs to perform while working to solve the nation’s myriad foreign-policy issues.

Recent secretaries of state seemingly have been everywhere at once, defying the laws of physics. James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry all became the face and the voice of U.S. foreign policy. Their respective impacts were immediate and profound.

Rex Tillerson? Where are you? What are you doing?

national news

This story just keeps getting better

Consider this item to be the “gift that keeps on giving.”

It involves a teenage girl from Mississippi and a U.S. Air Force pararescue jumper who became acquainted at a time of intense national tragedy: Hurricane Katrina.

LaShay Brown was struggling to escape Katrina’s wrath in New Orleans in September 2005. Airman Michael Maroney rescued her from the torrent. The picture of them embracing after the rescue went viral.

They reconnected a decade or so later. They have remained BFFs ever since that reunion.

LaShay is now 14 years of age; Maroney is set to retire from the Air Force. But they have a date to keep. LaShay has invited the man who saved her life to her junior ROTC ball in Waveland, Miss., where she now lives with her family.

Maroney says LaShay saved his life too. Her embrace of him that day meant the world to the young airman.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2015/09/emergencies-often-build-lifetime-friendships/

The above link is of a blog I posted in 2015 of the two getting reconnected. It warmed my heart then to read of the initial rescue and of Maroney’s efforts to catch up with the little girl he pulled from Katrina’s wrath.

The idea that he now would be the girl’s “date” at an ROTC ball warms my ticker even more.

“I am proud of her no matter what she does and will support her in everything she does,” Maroney says. “I think she understands service and I believe that she will do great things no matter what she chooses.”

Hearing of this upcoming event makes my day.

national news

Establishment Clause derails latest refugee ‘ban’

The nation’s founders were wise men. They didn’t craft a perfect governing document, but they got it mostly right.

They established the seven Articles within the U.S. Constitution, then set about to fine-tune it, tinkering with amendments, the first 10 of which guaranteed certain civil liberties to the citizens of the day.

The First Amendment is under discussion today as the nation ponders this idiotic idea by the current president to ban refugees from six Muslim countries.

Two federal judges have suspended the new rule on the grounds that it violates the Establishment Clause set forth in the very first amendment.

Interesting, yes? I think so. Here’s why.

The First Amendment protects three civil liberties: religion, the press and the right to assemble peaceably. It’s fascinating in the extreme to me that the founders constructed the First Amendment to prohibit the enactment of laws “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof … ” Of the three liberties outlined, the founders listed religion first.

Donald J. Trump’s Muslim Ban 2.0 does essentially the same thing  — with a few modifications — as the first executive order that a federal judge struck down. It targets Muslims, discriminating against them as they seek to enter the United States.

Sure, the president insists he seeks only to protect Americans against terrorists.

Three federal judges, though, have said violating the Establishment Cause is illegal. Judges in Washington state, Hawaii and Maryland have concurred that such an order is discriminatory on its face.

No can do, Mr. President.

Therein perhaps lies the beauty of our form of government, the one crafted by the founders who knew the value of restricting the power of the executive branch. They did it by parceling out power equally to the legislative and, yes, the judicial branches of government. They allowed for lifetime appointments of federal judges ostensibly to liberate them from political pressure and to enable them to interpret the Constitution freely.

The judicial branch has exerted its rightful authority yet again. It did not commit, as the president said, an “unprecedented overreach” of judicial power.

It has recognized the importance of the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment, understanding that the founders thought enough of that clause and the contents of that amendment to enact it first.

media news

Hands off PBS, NPR, Mr. President

Now he’s done it!

The president of the United States has just gored my ox. He has hit me where it hurts. He has taken aim at a government institution I revere.

Donald J. Trump is proposing elimination of public money that goes to National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting … a major arm of the Public Broadcasting Service; also slated for elimination is the National Endowment for the Arts.

Trump proposes zeroing out about $445 million for CPB and NPR. Wiping it out. No more public money for public broadcasting, either radio or television.

“PBS and our nearly 350 member stations, along with our viewers, continue to remind Congress of our strong support among Republican and Democratic voters, in rural and urban areas across every region of the country,” PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger said in a statement.

“We have always had support from both parties in Congress, and will again make clear what the public receives in return for federal funding for public broadcasting,” Kerger continued. “The cost of public broadcasting is small, only $1.35 per citizen per year, and the benefits are tangible: increasing school readiness for kids 2-8, support for teachers and homeschoolers, lifelong learning, public safety communications and civil discourse.”

So, with that the president wants to eliminate an element of public spending that in the grand scheme amounts to tossing a BB into the ocean, but which brings tangible benefit for millions of Americans.

I have a dog in this particular fight … more or less.

Not long after I left my job in print journalism in the late summer of 2012, I signed on as a freelance blogger for Panhandle PBS, the organization formerly known around the Panhandle as KACV-TV, based at Amarillo College. I wrote about public affairs television. My text was published on Panhandle PBS’s website.

I got great satisfaction writing the blog and I enjoyed my relationship with the public TV station immensely. It ended when the station went through some changes and decided to divert its “resources” toward more on-air production of local programming.

We bid each other adieu. However, I continue to love PBS and what it brings to the quality of life of all Americans, especially to those of us in the Texas Panhandle. Its programming features some first-rate, top-drawer, high-level production. Ken Burns’s documentary series on the Dust Bowl — and its impact on the High Plains region — will remain with me for as long as I draw breath.

I would hate with every fiber of my being seeing the government remove itself from that kind of programming.

And for what purpose? So we can buy more bombs, missiles and other weapons of war — as if we don’t have enough of it already to destroy Planet Earth a billion times over.

Am I angry over this budget proposal? You’re damn right I am!

Do not do this, Mr. President and Congress.

medical news

It’s his fault, no … it’s his fault, no …

I don’t know whether to laugh, curse or slap my forehead over what I perceive is transpiring in Washington over the development of this so-called “replacement” of the Affordable Care Act.

House Speaker Paul Ryan and his troops want to call it Trumpcare; the president’s allies want to label it Ryancare.

No one wants to touch the American Health Care Act with a hot poker.

The Congressional Budget Office has given the AHCA a bad “score.” Donald Trump’s budget director says the CBO’s numbers are faulty, that 24 million Americans really and truly won’t lose their insurance if the AHCA becomes law.

Meanwhile, Speaker Ryan is having to fend off the TEA Party wing of his Republican congressional caucus, because they hate the AHCA almost as much as they hate the ACA, which they say was forced down their throats in 2010 by President Obama and those rascally congressional Democrats.

Trumpcare or Ryancare? How about Tryancare?

It doesn’t matter what you call it. The GOP had seven bloody years to come up with an alternative to the ACA. The Republicans were too damn busy trashing the initial health care overhaul and its author — Barack Obama — that they didn’t give nearly enough thought to how they would actually replace it.

Now they have something that no one on their side seems to favor.

I’ll give Republicans credit, though, at least for their “diversity” of thought on this issue. Some of ’em like the AHCA, some of ’em hate it. Isn’t there some middle ground to be discovered here?

I think I know what I want to do. I’ll say a few curse words … under my breath, of course.

national news, political news

Delay from Trump adds to suspicion of a lie

Donald J. Trump’s job as president of the United States gives him direct access to the finest, most professional intelligence-gathering apparatus in the world.

He hasn’t availed himself of that apparatus. Yet, he has fired off that infamous tweet in which he accuses President Barack H. Obama of wiretapping his campaign offices.

Trump could — if he had the proof in hand — deliver it to Americans right now. He has access to it. He is the president … of … the … United … States … of … America, for God’s sake!

He’s not coming forward. The president isn’t producing it. Hmm. Why do you suppose that’s the case? Oh! He doesn’t have it! It’s a lie!

His tweet the other day declared as a “fact” that the former president had broken the law. A fact, man! Facts mean what they mean. It is that the purveyor of that “fact” has the proof of what he has alleged.

Where in the name of prevaricator in chief is the proof, Mr. President?

As some have noted already — so this isn’t an original thought — can you imagine what the Republican-led Congress would do if, say, President Obama had said such a thing about Donald J. Trump?

They would have filed articles of impeachment against him before the final words had left his lips.

Where is the outrage among those in command of the legislative branch of government?

International news

There goes the ‘revised’ Muslim ban

It’s back to the drawing board, or perhaps to another piece of scratch paper, for Donald J. Trump’s effort to ban Muslims from entering the United States of America.

U.S. District Judge Derrick K. Watson today has issued a restraining order that prohibits the president’s revised travel ban from taking effect.

The judge, based in Hawaii, ruled that Trump’s revised ban is just as discriminatory against people of a certain faith as his first ban. Thus, said the judge, the president is violating the U.S. Constitution.

What’s next? The case is likely to return to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld an earlier ruling by another federal judge that struck down Trump’s initial refugee.

The president had a response, according to National Public Radio: Trump, speaking at a rally in Nashville, Tenn., called the restraining order “unprecedented judicial overreach.” He said, “The law and the Constitution give the president the power to suspend immigration — when he deems — or she, fortunately it will not be Hillary, ‘she’ — when he or she deems it to be in the national interests of our country.”

At least Trump didn’t call Watson a “so-called judge,” which he labeled U.S. District Judge James Robart, who struck down the first refugee ban.

Trump sought to soften the ban by removing Iraq from his list of banned countries. He also removed the word “Muslim” from the new order. That wasn’t good enough, according to Judge Watson, who said the order still singles out Muslims, which he said is discriminatory on its face.

Watson then ticked off a long list of anti-Muslim statements Trump made while campaigning for president and while he has served as president.

Those of us who thought the new order was better than the first one, but who remain opposed to the policy itself, are heartened by the judge’s decision.

I have an idea for the president to consider. Yes, he’s concerned about protecting Americans from international terrorists. I get it and I endorse his concern. But Mr. President, why not just instruct our federal security authorities to be hyper-vigilant at every entry point?

That’ll protect us, too.

environmental news

Thanks be to Mad Dog for sounding rational

That did it.

It’s official. James “Mad Dog” Mattis is my favorite member of Donald J. Trump’s Cabinet.

The secretary of defense has spoken in direct contradiction to the head of the Environmental Protection Agency and the president of the United States by declaring — be sure you’re sitting down — that climate change is real and it presents a threat to our national security.

Who would have thought that a retired Marine general with the nickname of “Mad Dog” would emerge as the premier grownup in the new president’s Cabinet.

Here’s part of what Mattis said, according to the Huffington Post: “Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today,” Mattis said in written answers to questions posed after the public hearing by Democratic members of the committee. “It is appropriate for the Combatant Commands to incorporate drivers of instability that impact the security environment in their areas into their planning.”

Trump has said climate change is a hoax perpetrated by “the Chinese.” The EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, has sued the EPA more than a dozen times and has called for its elimination. He has expressed openly his belief that climate change is not real, joining a paltry list of climate change deniers.

Now we have a defense secretary making sense. He calls climate change a national threat. His remarks well might reveal fissures within the Trump administration. As the Huffington Post reports: “These remarks and others in the replies to senators could be a fresh indication of divisions or uncertainty within President Donald Trump’s administration over how to balance the president’s desire to keep campaign pledges to kill Obama-era climate policies with the need to engage constructively with allies for whom climate has become a vital security issue.”

Semper fi, Gen. Mattis.

entertainment news, national news

POTUS takes on Snoop Dogg? What … the … ?

The president of the United States of America is now going after — gulp! — a rapper in yet another Twitter tirade?

Do I read that correctly?

Donald J. Trump vs. Snoop Dogg? In a battle of tweets?

The president is — or should be — concerned with, oh, international terrorism, bringing in more jobs for Americans, Russia, wiretapping of his offices in New York, the Islamic State, health care overhaul, a new federal budget, frayed relations with members of Congress, North Korea’s missile launches … and this guy is now engaging in a Twitter tempest with a rapper?

Are you bleeping kidding me?

A video has Trump all lathered up. Snoop Dogg put something out there that includes the firing of a confetti gun. The Trumpkins say it simulates an “assassination attempt.”

And then the president of the United States weighs in. On this?

My head just exploded.

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