business news, International news, national news, political news

Divest, Donald! Divest

Of all the unexploded political ordnance laying in front of Donald J. Trump as he prepares to become president, one of them poses a seriously grave threat.

It’s this issue of divestiture … or Trump’s stubborn refusal to do what he should. That would be to divest himself fully of the enormous fortune he has acquired around the world.

He has chosen instead to hand all business operations over to his eldest son. Don Jr. is going to handle all the business dealings and Dad won’t have anything to do with it. None whatsoever.

That’s good enough for the president-elect to clear him of any potential conflicts of interest. Or so he says.

I am afraid it likely won’t provide nearly enough separation.

Indeed, this is just yet another demonstration of the non-traditional approach that Trump is taking toward his transition from fully private billionaire business executive to fully public leader of the free world/head of state and government/commander in chief.

The situation facing Trump is written in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. It’s called the “emoluments clause,” which has become common knowledge now among many Americans who before this election had never even heard of it.

The emoluments clause is founding father-speak that translates to “anti-bribery.” It prohibits a president from taking money from a foreign government, the acceptance of which opens the president up to being compromised as he conducts the affairs of state.

Trump is facing tremendous exposure, say, if Don Jr. consummates a business deal with a foreign government that deposits a few billion dollars into an account that has Daddy Donald’s name on the letterhead. The president-elect believes simply allowing his son do the transaction clears him of any suspicion. Wrong!

Divestiture of one’s assets is not a novel concept. My goodness, Trump’s team is going to make incredible sacrifice serving him and the government he will run. It is a reasonable expectation for the president himself to separate himself completely from his business holdings.

Short of complete divestiture, a much better option than the one Trump has chosen would be to put his holdings into a blind trust, to be operated and administered by someone with no ties at all either to the president-elect or his family.

The next president is playing a dangerous game of chicken with those who are waiting for a big mistake to occur.

local news, political news

Amarillo council ballot is filling up … good deal!

Amarillo voters won’t lack choices when they troop to the polls in May to elect their five-member City Council.

This, I submit, is an early victory for the cause of representative democracy.

Three residents are running for mayor. I’ve got my favorite picked already, but I’m just one voter.

All five council seats are up, as they are every odd-numbered year. This year’s election could produce a unique set of issues for voters to consider.

You’ll recall that two years ago, the prevailing issue appeared to be some grumbling among voters about the performance of the council and the city’s top administrative staff. The anger, to my mind, seemed misplaced. Municipal property taxes remain low, the city is growing, downtown is improving, projects are getting done. But there was anger out there.

Two incumbents got bounced out of office; a third incumbent, who was appointed to fill a seat vacated by the death of Jim Simms, decided not to run for election. So the city welcomed three new guys to the council.

Then the trouble got serious. City Manager Jarrett Atkinson quit; the council picked a combative interim manager, Terry Childers, who quit near the end of 2016; and some of the new guys squabbled openly with Mayor Paul Harpole.

Ugghh!

Now the new guys’ seats are on the ballot. Another incumbent who was re-elected in 2015 resigned his seat. The council chose Lisa Blake to succeed Brian Eades. Blake says she’s undecided about running for election. I hope she runs.

As for Harpole, he says he’ll announce soon his intention. I quite sure he’s going to pack it in to pave the way for someone else.

I’m anticipating a full municipal ballot for voters to consider on May 6. That’s how it should be.

As for the issues that voters might have to ponder, they likely will include the occasional flare-ups that occur among certain council members. Is it good for the city for its elected council members to bicker as they have done from time to time? What about the most recent dust-up involving the mayor and someone on the council who allegedly “leaked” information from an executive session to the media?

This kind of open sparring has been rare, indeed, on Amarillo’s governing board.

Municipal governance has become a contact sport at times. I’m going to bet that harmony vs. conflict is going to become one of the issues that candidates will get to discuss among themselves.

Ah, yes. Choices. Won’t this election be fun?

International news, national news

CIA boss issues stern, correct warning to Trump

The time will arrive, possibly quite soon after Donald J. Trump becomes president of the United States, when the new president will ask for advice from his intelligence network.

What will he think when the spooks tell him that, oh, the Russians are about to launch an attack on Ukraine, or on the Baltic States, or on Georgia? How might he respond to reports from the CIA that Russians are killing civilians in Syria?

CIA Director John Brennan said today that Trump is treading onto some dangerous territory with his continued dismissal and disparagement of the CIA over its findings that Russian hackers sought to influence the 2016 presidential election.

He needs to make peace with the intelligence professionals who work in the trenches of the CIA, of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the FBI.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/cia-director-warns-trump-as-tensions-rise-with-intelligence-agencies/ar-AAlTpg8?li=BBnb7Kz

Brennan said this — among other things — on “Fox News Sunday”: “What I do find outrageous is equating intelligence community with Nazi Germany,” said Brennan, who served in the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “I do take great umbrage at that, and there is no basis for Mr. Trump to point fingers at the intelligence community for leaking information that was already available publicly.”

Trump’s continual dismissal of the intelligence apparatus goes directly against traditional Republican orthodoxy, which historically has sided with the spies when questions arise about foreign threats to the nation. Indeed, Trump’s tweet tirades against the CIA have drawn pointed criticism from GOP officials as well as from Democrats.

Then we have Brennan, who served Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic President Barack Obama weighing in with stern words of warning for the next president.

As Bloomberg News reported about Brennan’s “Fox News Sunday” appearance: Brennan admonished Trump, who’s recently suggested he might lift sanctions on Russia, “to be mindful that he doesn’t yet, I think, have a full appreciation/understanding of what the implications are of such a move” amid Russia’s actions in Ukraine, Syria and online. He added that Trump “needs to be very, very careful.”

Does the new president have an appreciation or understanding of anything having to do with national security?

This is the kind of thing that frightens the daylights out of millions of Americans.

I am one of them.

local news, media news, national news, political news

Criticism should keep us all humble … not make us angry

This is going to sound presumptuous and for that I apologize up front.

Donald J. Trump’s knee-jerk reaction to criticism via Twitter got me thinking about how most folks who say or write provocative statements react to comments from those who disagree with them.

I want to count myself in that category. I write this blog and it draws its share of negative reaction. I take all of it seriously. I choose not to respond to all of it directly.

If only the president-elect would show just a little more reticence when someone delivers a barb. I mean, c’mon! You’re about to become president of the United States of America, dude!

I pulled a blog post I wrote nearly seven years ago, back when I was working for a living at the Amarillo Globe-News. Here it is:

https://highplainsblogger.com/2010/01/damnation-to-the-max/

I used to keep a “Praise and Damnation” file full of notes that, um, praised and damned me. I regret that I have destroyed that file. I did so when I got into a file-cleaning frenzy about a year or so ago. My thought was, “What’s the point?” The bulging folder was taking up room in my filing cabinet and I rarely, if ever, looked at the submissions in it.

I recall what I said in 2010 about that folder and about a particular letter that caught my attention back then. Now, as it was then, I believe criticism keeps me humble. It kept me grounded while I was writing opinion pieces for newspapers and it does so today now that I am writing strictly for myself.

I was unaware of Twitter seven years ago, if memory serves. Heck, I don’t know if it even existed then.

The world is full of know-it-all smart alecks like me who think they know better than those in the public eye. However, we smart alecks have something in common with celebrities such as, oh, the president-elect: We get our share of criticism in return for our comments.

The difference, though, lies in our reaction to that criticism. Grown-ups just let it ride and not fire back angrily. The more childish response is to do what Donald J. Trump has been doing.

In the words of Vice President Biden: “Grow up, Donald. Grow up.”

national news

That’s not the point, Sen. Paul

Sen. Rand Paul has missed the point — by a mile! — over the brewing controversy surrounding one of his congressional colleague’s criticism of the president-elect of the United States.

U.S. Rep. John Lewis said he doesn’t consider Donald Trump to be a “legitimate president.” Why? It’s the Russian hacking stuff, according to Lewis, who said allegations of hacking by the Russians to swing the election in Trump’s favor had “destroyed” Hillary Rodham Clinton’s own presidential candidacy.

It got even better. Then came Trump’s response, via Twitter, in which he said Lewis is “all talk, talk, talk. No action. Sad!”

Anyone with an inkling of knowledge of U.S. history would know that John Lewis is a legendary figure in the civil rights movement who was beating to a bloody pulp by police squads while he demonstrated for the cause of voting and civil rights for all Americans.

He is a man of profound action. Trump should know that and he should not have responded in that hideous manner.

Now we get Rand Paul, R-Ky., weighing in, saying that Lewis’s status as a civil rights icon doesn’t make him “immune from criticism.”

Good bleeping grief, senator!

No one said he is immune! I’ve criticized him in this forum for his “not legitimate” comment about Trump’s presidency.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2017/01/hold-on-rep-lewis/

Rep. Lewis ought to be immune, however, from idiotic tweets that suggest that he’s “all talk and no action.”

http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/314395-paul-lewis-status-doesnt-make-him-immune-to-criticism

What’s more, the timing of Trump’s tweet — on this weekend in which we honor the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with whom Lewis stood during those bloody, violent days — is yet another point of contention.

Those issues, Sen. Paul, are at the crux of the criticism that has been fired back at the president-elect.

environmental news, local news

Water management must remain a top city priority

Maybe I am preaching to the proverbial choir, but I’ll preach this “sermon” anyway.

Amarillo City Council members’ decision to hire Jared Miller as our next city manager came after a discussion of issues that lacked one critical component: water management and conservation.

I don’t know, of course, what council members discussed in executive session with Miller and the four other finalists for the city manager job. Perhaps they talked openly, candidly and freely with them all about an issue that had become a top priority of the man they succeeded, Jarrett Atkinson.

It needs to remain there.

I say this feeling a bit strange, given all the moisture that’s fallen on the High Plains during the past 24 hours. It’s only a drop in the grand scheme of our water needs.

Atkinson came to the city after serving as a water planner for the Panhandle Regional Planning Commission. He is an acknowledged expert on water resources and knowing how to conserve what is without question the most valuable resource we have in this region. I am quite certain he is going to bring that knowledge to bear in Lubbock, where he has just begun as that city’s manager.

The city — working with the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority — has done a great job of securing water rights to keep us flush with water (pun intended, I suppose) for the next couple hundred years. Atkinson played a big role in securing those rights.

The city’s aggressive water-rights-acquisition policy has helped us forestall many of the mandatory water-use restrictions that have been implemented in many cities throughout the state.

The city’s need to conserve and protect this resource doesn’t diminish even with the acquisition of those water rights and the relationship the city has with CRMWA and other water planning entities.

One of the Amarillo city manager’s many duties must be to keep both eyes focused intently on water we’re pulling out of the Ogallala Aquifer and from Lake Meredith.

I will anticipate hearing Jared Miller’s perspective on how we manage the one resource that gives life to the High Plains of Texas.

national news, political news

Once again: Trump didn’t win in a ‘landslide’

My head is exploding as I write these words.

The incoming White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, has just said — twice, in fact! — that Donald J. Trump was elected “in a landslide” over Hillary Rodham Clinton on Nov. 8, 2016.

I am about to scream.

Trump was elected with 304 electoral votes; Clinton garnered 227 votes.

Clinton collected 2.8 million more popular votes than Trump.

Read my lips: That is not a landslide victory for the president-elect.

Priebus, appearing on ABC News’s “This Week” program, suffers from a form of selective amnesia. Yes, Trump won 30 of 50 states, as Priebus said; yes, again, he won “more counties” than any presidential winner since President Reagan in 1984.

However, we cannot cherry-pick certain barometers and use them to deliver a message that conflicts with reality.

I don’t question that Trump was elected. He won the states that he needed to win. He won more than enough Electoral College votes to be elected.

But if we’re going to pick and choose which criteria we want to cite, let’s try this: A switch of 175,000 votes in three swing states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — and today we’d be getting ready for the inauguration of President-elect Clinton.

Landslide? Hell no!

Sports news

Chargers’ owner shows his greed … go figure

I’m not a huge San Diego Chargers fan.

Still, as someone who used to follow the Chargers when they played exciting football in the American Football League, I am dismayed at the news that the team is moving up the Pacific Coast — to Los Angeles.

Greed drove the relocation, in my humble view.

The team’s owner, Dean Spanos, is worth billions. Does he need more money? He thinks so. The city wouldn’t pony up the dough for a new stadium, so he’s taking his football team to LA, he’ll build a new crib for his fellows — and the loyal San Diego fans who filled the Chargers’ stadium for decades will mend their broken hearts.

It sounds familiar, yes?

The Cleveland Browns left the Dog Pound for Baltimore, leaving those fans to mourn their loss; the Baltimore Colts skulked out of town in the middle of the night and made their getaway to Indianpolis; the Oakland Raiders once played in LA, then moved back to Oakland; the St. Louis Rams most recently relocated to the City of Angels; oh, and the Houston Oilers vacated the one-time Eighth Wonder of the World — the Astrodome — for Nashville.

Greed, man! It’s all greed!

My heart usually moans for the fans who are left behind. The owners of these teams — and there have been plenty others — often say the right things while thanking the fans for their loyalty.

However, business is business. Fan support? Who needs it? Now it’s the Chargers’ turn to stiff the fans who’ve ponied up good money over many years to watch their professional team play tackle football.

It saddens me.

medical news, national news, political news

Why not just repair Obamacare?

All this talk about repealing the Affordable Care Act seems to ignore a possible alternative that’s been done already with other landmark legislation.

Congressional Republicans have been adamant about getting rid of the ACA. They’ve had six years to find a replacement mechanism to provide health insurance to Americans who cannot afford it otherwise. They have failed. They’ve come up with … nothing!

The alternative to flat-out repeal is to repair the ACA.

Congress enacted Medicare in 1965 to provide medical insurance to elderly Americans. It wasn’t perfect, either. Congress and President Johnson got together to tinker with it, to fine-tune it, to make it better. The same can be said of what Congress and other president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, did with Social Security when they created that program in 1935.

Reasonable minds can come together to make landmark laws better. It’s been done. Why not now?

Well, my theory is that it’s because the ACA has President Obama’s name on it. It’s been called Obamacare chiefly by those who use that term as a pejorative. They don’t like something that carries the name of a president who House and Senate Republicans have opposed since the beginning of his time in the White House.

I get that the ACA isn’t perfect. I understand that premiums have increased, that health insurance companies are bailing out, that consumers are having trouble finding doctors who will treat those covered by insurance provided by the ACA.

Aren’t there reasonable solutions to fix these problems? Can’t the ACA opponents huddle with those in Congress who support the plan to repair the law?

Oh, no! They’ve got to toss the ACA into the trash heap. They want to declare victory by calling it a “monumental failure,” a “disaster,” a “terrible idea.”

Twenty million Americans have health insurance today who didn’t have it before the ACA became law in 2010. Congressional Republicans are quite sure they can repeal the ACA. Finding a replacement is a bit more of a hurdle.

They have precedent, though, for seeking ways to repair what many folks believe is a flawed idea.

Compromise, folks! That’s how you govern effectively. You either have Americans’ interests at heart, or you are thinking only of your own political futures.

national news, political news

Honeymoon? There is none for Trump

Have you ever seen a presidential transition that has hit as many land mines as the one that is about to conclude?

Donald J. Trump is going to become president of the United States with a public opinion approval rating in the 30s. Yes, that’s right: 30-plus percent of Americans approve of the 45th president. Meanwhile, the 44th president — Barack H. Obama — is about to leave the White House with an approval rating in the mid-50 percent range, which isn’t great, but it’s a damn sight better than what he was registering for much of his second term.

Presidential honeymoon period? There ain’t going to be one for Donald Trump.

Questions are piling onto questions about the new president. They include:

* Potential conflicts of interest involving his myriad business interests and the president-elect’s stubborn refusal to divest himself of the fortune he has amassed through real estate ventures around the world.

* Allegations of Russian spooks hacking into Democratic Party electronic files while looking for dirt to toss as that party’s presidential nominee, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

* The quality of some of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, such as the secretary of state-designate, Rex Tillerson, who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin; housing secretary-designate Ben Carson, who once declared himself to unqualified to lead a federal agency; education secretary-designate Betsy DeVos, an avowed critic of public education; EPA administrator-designate Scott Pruitt, who detests the very agency he is being asked to oversee; attorney general-designate Jeff Sessions, who once was denied a federal judgeship because of his stated views on civil rights.

I am not predicting this will happen, but I won’t be surprised in the least if Donald Trump — somehow! — is unable to finish his term as president. There’s already dull roar developing about impeachment, given all the potential for missteps.

I have lived long enough to have witnessed a couple of presidential crises that tore the nation to pieces. The first of them came close to a presidential impeachment before President Nixon resigned during the Watergate crisis; the second of them occurred with an actual impeachment and Senate trial of President Clinton over a sexual relationship he had with a White House intern.

Tradition always has granted presidents a honeymoon period. They enter the Oval Office flush with high praise and hope. Donald Trump will have squandered that good feeling with his response to the criticism he has received. He tweets his rapid-fire reactions to seemingly every critical comment leveled at him.

So help me I am trying to give this guy some semblance of benefit.

Damn! I do not feel good about the presidential hand-off all of America is about to witness.

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