local news

No longer out of sorts during the day

This is the latest in an occasional series of blog posts commenting on upcoming retirement.

I was walking down the street this afternoon toward the cluster of mailboxes in our neighborhood when the thought occurred to me: No longer do I feel strange puttering around the house at mid-day during the middle of a work week.

I think I’ve turned yet another corner. Actually, I likely turned that corner some time ago, but the thought came to mind consciously this afternoon.

It wasn’t always the case.

I worked for a living until I was 63 years of age. Then it ended. Quickly, although not without some warning. I smelled something fishy when my boss announced in the summer of 2012 a “company reorganization” at the Amarillo Globe-News. The smell grew more pungent when, after applying to keep doing the job I had held at the paper for nearly 18 years, a former colleague and I were called back for a “second interview.”

Then the news came from the guy who held a newly created title at the paper: the vice president for audience. “There’s no easy way to say this, but we’ve offered your job to someone else. He accepted,” this VP for audience told me one morning.

I walked out of the building, bid goodbye to a couple of friends, came back the next day, cleared out my office … and resigned.

For some time after that — even as my wife and I departed for a vacation on the East Coast and then returned home — I would feel a strange sense of disorientation. Suddenly, I wasn’t busy during the work week. I was free to come and go pretty much as I pleased. It felt strange.

I got over it fairly soon after the end of my working life.

Since then I’ve learned there truly is life after full-time work.

I have just turned 67. Full-time retirement is still a ways off. It’s coming on, though. I’m quite prepared emotionally for the moment it arrives.

I know this because my disorientation has vanished.

local news

A new Amarillo city manager on the horizon?

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Amarillo might not be wallowing in the administrative darkness much longer, according to Mayor Paul Harpole.

Good deal? Let’s hope so.

The City Council reportedly has culled a list of 30 or so city manager applicants to around 10 … give or take an undisclosed number. Harpole said the council will announce a list of finalists quite soon, maybe next week.

Then the city will interview the finalists in a sort of public audition, Harpole explained.

http://amarillo.com/local-news/2016-12-20/amarillo-city-council-narrows-hunt-city-manager

This public audition more or less falls in line with what has been done at Amarillo College as it has sought to select college presidents. It’s a good way to go. It enables the public to size up the individuals who are competing for a chance to assume a highly public office.

In the case of the city manager, we’re talking about someone who would oversee a significant government bureaucracy. He or she will command a budget of several hundred million dollars, which pay for services for a city comprising around 200,000 residents.

Amarillo City Hall has been through a pretty rough spell for the past year or so.

City Manager Jarrett Atkinson quit more than a year ago. The City Council hired an interim manager, Terry Childers, who immediately got into a significant public relations kerfuffle involving a misplaced briefcase and the Amarillo Emergency Communications Center. The council commenced a search, then called it off. Childers then popped off to a constituent and called him a “stupid son of a b****.” Childers then quit and went back to Oklahoma City.

This is the backdrop that the crop of finalists will confront.

The winner of this contest then will get to steady the municipal ship.

Let’s all hope for the best as the council proceeds with the only hiring decision the City Charter empowers it to make.

The City Council needs to get this one right.

national news, political news

Historians have huge task ahead with this election

Is it too early to wonder aloud about how historians are going to chronicle the major story of 2016?

I don’t think so.

I’ve been thinking about it ever since the TV networks declared that Donald J. Trump — the former reality TV celebrity, billionaire, serial philanderer, beauty pageant owner — had just been elected president of the United States of America.

The world is full of historians who’ve made names for themselves telling us about the political exploits of previous presidents. The history lessons they’ve provided about our nation’s political leaders have been steeped in fairly traditional themes: lower-level political offices, business success, inherited wealth, abiding political philosophies.

Trump’s story tracks along vastly different lines.

He has zero public service experience; he violated virtually rule of standard political decorum; he had never sought public office; he lied through his teeth almost daily; he admitted to doing terrible things to women; he denigrated a war hero; he criticized a Gold Star family; he mocked a reporter with a serious physical disability.

However, he won! He was elected president without ever telling us precisely how he intends to bring jobs back, how he intends to destroy our enemies abroad, how he plans to pay for a mammoth infrastructure improvement plan.

Trump defeated a candidate who virtually every single political observer in America believed would win in a walk. He was outspent and out-organized … or so we all thought!

Historians will be scratching their heads. They’ll have to crack their knuckles and get their fingers limbered up as they prepare to write their first, second and third drafts of history.

The most puzzling element of this history-writing endeavor might be in determining how Trump managed to whip up anger among Americans who live in a country that is demonstrably better off than when the current president, Barack Hussein Obama, took office in January 2009.

Moreover, President Obama then sought to put his relatively high standing among Americans to the advantage of his preferred candidate — fellow Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton. He campaigned hard to Hillary; Michelle Obama delivered stunning speeches in support of Clinton while providing blistering critiques of Trump’s admitted misbehavior with women.

None of it mattered. None of it stuck. It didn’t gain traction.

I do not envy the task that awaits historians.

Good luck to you all. Many of us out here will be awaiting your conclusions.

national news, political news

Here’s a final shot at the popular vote issue

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This likely will be the final entry on my blog about the popular vote result of the 2016 presidential election. I believe I need to make this point.

Some of my social media acquaintances have been yapping about a peculiar aspect of the popular vote, which Hillary Rodham Clinton captured over Donald J. Trump, who won enough electoral votes to be elected president of the United States.

They’ve been saying that “if you take away California,” Trump would have won the popular vote by 1.4 million ballots.

My reaction: huh? You can’t do that.

Clinton won California’s 55 electoral votes by winning more than 4 million votes in that state. It helped pad her national vote, which ended up around 2.8 million ballots cast for her than for Trump.

I get that Trump has been elected president. He won it fair and square. His team cobbled together a stunning electoral strategy that hardly anyone saw developing. He scored upsets in many of those “swing states” that had voted twice for President Obama in 2008 and 2012. Thus, the outcome was determined.

But you can’t manipulate the popular vote margin by removing certain states from the equation. All 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, are calculated in the final vote total.

Period. End of argument.

The debate over whether to throw out the Electoral College will proceed. I’m still undecided on that issue. I like the idea of giving additional clout to smaller states. However, the margin of the loser’s popular vote total in 2016 does diminish whatever “mandate” the winner will seek to claim.

The argument over Clinton’s popular vote victory, though, need not get muddled and conflated with nonsensical scenarios, such as deleting one or two states’ votes from the total count.

We are, after all, the United States of America.

I’m done now with this issue.

medical news, political news, State news

‘War against women’ takes new turn in Texas

Let’s take a moment or two to connect a few dots.

* Democrats accuse Republicans of waging a “war against women.”

* Republicans deny such a thing.

* Republicans — many of them, at least — are adamantly opposed to Planned Parenthood, one of the nation’s leading providers of health care services for women. Yes, Planned Parenthood refers women to abortion clinics.

* The Texas Legislature, which has a GOP uber-majority, has now decided to cut Planned Parenthood off from the state’s Medicaid program, which enables low-income Texans to get medical assistance at a drastically reduced cost.

* Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, another Republican, has signed on to this effort.

* Oh, and the government does not provide any money for abortions.

So, Planned Parenthood is now in the Republicans’ sights because, the GOP leadership insists, the organization allegedly treats aborted fetuses cavalierly; there also have been unspecified allegations of billing fraud. The video recording shows staffers supposedly talking about harvesting “fetal tissue” for medical research — even though there’s been zero proof provided that it’s even occurring.

Planned Parenthood denies any wrongdoing and the activists who insist that there is haven’t produced evidence to back up their assertion.

Is there a “war against women” going on in the Texas Legislature?

Planned Parenthood has become the prime bogeyman among legislators who are enraged that the organization has anything to do with abortions.

Here’s the thing: The government doesn’t pay for the procedure. Planned Parenthood, though, does provide a wide range of other health-related services to women who need them. Medicaid is a state-run assistance program aimed at helping low-income women obtain medical services they otherwise couldn’t afford.

State health officials have delivered the bad news to Planned Parenthood. In about a month, the state is going cut off millions of dollars in aid, affecting thousands of Texas women.

The women who rely on state assistance to obtain medical advice from Planned Parenthood deserve better treatment than they’re getting from Texas legislators and the governor.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/12/20/texas-kicks-planned-parenthood-out-medicaid/

According to the Texas Tribune: “In the final notice, Texas Health and Human Services Inspector General Stuart Bowen said the undercover videos — which depicted Planned Parenthood officials discussing the use of fetal tissue for research — showed ‘that Planned Parenthood violated state and federal law.'”

And there’s more from the Tribune: “Planned Parenthood has vehemently denied those claims, and it has criticized the videos the state is pointing to as evidence as being heavily edited to imply malfeasance. Its health centers in Texas have also said they do not currently donate fetal tissue for research. Their Houston affiliate did participate in a 2010 research study with the University of Texas Medical Branch.”

This is looking for all the world to me as though the Legislature has found a solution to an unspecified and unproven problem.

Meanwhile, thousands of Texas women will be chewed up in the political buzzsaw.

Is there a war against women being waged? Looks like it to me.

International news, national news

Texas lawmakers oppose Trump wall … who knew?

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Texas happens to constitute the largest single-state border with Mexico.

Do members of the Texas congressional delegation endorse Donald Trump’s notion of building a wall across our nation’s southern border?

Umm. No.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/12/20/where-texas-congressional-delegation-stands-trumps/

No Democratic member of the delegation favors the wall. Republicans who comprise a large majority of the state’s congressional delegation, interestingly, also are decidedly cool to the idea.

The Texas Tribune reports that Trump’s notion of building the wall runs headlong into a politically conservative principle. Check this out: “Among many Texas Republicans in Congress, the concept, while popular with the party’s base, collides with another conservative tenant: eminent domain.

“A wall would require the confiscation of ranching land near the Rio Grande, and several Texas Republicans expressed concern about the federal government taking away property — often held by families for generations — and the legal tangles that would inevitably arise from that.”

Well now. Do you think congressional Republicans will go along with federal seizure of private property, which happens to be a huge issue throughout our large state where private property owners possess almost every acre of land? There happen to be plenty of Republicans in New Mexico, Arizona and California who also adhere to the principle that private ownership is more important than a government takeover of property.

Eminent domain looms as the bogeyman that well could doom Trump’s ill-considered assertion that building a “beautiful wall” will end illegal immigration.

International news, national news, political news

No select panel, but let’s get to heart of hacking matter

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Mitch McConnell says he won’t appoint a select Senate committee to examine the impact of alleged Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election.

OK. Fair enough, Mr. Majority Leader.

But let’s not allow these questions to wither and die now that your fellow Republican, Donald J. Trump, is about to become president of the United States.

We’ve got some questions that need clear, declarative answers.

What did the Russians do? How did they do it? Did their computer hacking efforts have a tangible impact on the election outcome? How in the world does the United States prevent this kind of computer hacking in the future?

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/mcconnell-rejects-calls-for-select-panel-on-russian-meddling/ar-BBxmZzP

If the majority leader were to ask for my opinion, I’d suggest that we need an independent commission that doesn’t answer to Senate Republicans or Democrats. We formed one of those after the 9/11 attacks and it came out with some serious findings about what went wrong and how we can prevent future terrorist attacks.

McConnell’s decision to nix a select committee is at odds with many Republicans — such as Sen. John McCain — along with Democrats are demanding. They want a select panel that would be tasked solely with looking at this most disturbing matter.

The new Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, said this, according to The Associated Press: “We don’t want this investigation to be political like the Benghazi investigation,” he said. “We don’t want it to just be finger pointing at one person or another.” Schumer added: “We want to find out what the Russians are doing to our political system and what other foreign governments might do to our political system. And then figure out a way to stop it.”

McConnell wants to hand this over to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Fine. Then allow them to clear the decks and concentrate on getting to the heart of what the Russians have done.

Seventeen intelligence agencies have concluded the same thing: The Russians intended to influence the presidential election. The president-elect has dismissed their conclusion, opening up a serious rift between his office and the intelligence community.

Trump and his team are virtually all alone in their view of this disturbing matter. Congress needs to get busy and tell us what the Russians did and when they did it.

International news

Now he’s a ‘great guy’

bbxo0nc

Carlos Slim is a “great guy,” says Donald J. Trump.

Hey, wait! We all thought he was a tool of the Democratic Party. Isn’t that what the president-elect said of the Mexican gazillionaire? Didn’t he disparage Slim because of made-up suspicions about the U.S. presidential election being “rigged” against Trump?

Not so. Apparently.

Trump and Slim had dinner the other night at Trump’s Florida resort. They had a good time. Trump and Slim now are BFFs.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-now-says-carlos-slim-a-frequent-campaign-target-is-a-great-guy/ar-BBxnNkm?li=BBnb7Kz

So help me, my head is spinning. I cannot even begin to keep up with the way Trump turns enemies into friends. How he manages to take back all those angry and reprehensible things he says about others.

For his part, Slim had been critical of Trump’s policies toward Mexico, such as his plan to build that wall across the nations’ border. Now he says Trump’s presidency will mean success for Mexico.

Politics has this way of making people switch positions on a dime. Which view are we supposed to believe?

national news, political news

POTUS, FLOTUS and kids take time off

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A young Amarillo businessman — a friend of mine — griped recently that the Obama family would be jetting off to Hawaii for a little Christmas R&R.

It’s a tradition the president and first lady have followed since they moved into the White House in January 2009.

My friend seems to think that since the president is the lamest of ducks — with less than a month to go before he leaves office — he doesn’t need a vacation.

Actually, he does.

This brings up a point I want to make about presidential vacations … which is that they don’t really take vacations the way I — or my young friend, for that matter — understand the meaning of the word.

Presidents are never off the clock. They are accompanied by that military officer who’s carrying “The Football,” aka the briefcase containing the nuclear codes; the president gets his daily national security briefing; he is on-call 24/7.

I wrote about the Obamas’ vacation in a blog post two years ago:

https://highplainsblogger.com/2014/12/vacation-for-first-family-potus-will-need-the-rest/

I don’t begrudge presidents from taking time away from the office.

You may choose to believe or disbelieve my next point, but I’ll make it nonetheless. I won’t begrudge the next president and his family from taking time away.

Donald Trump will need some time away — presuming, of course that he works as hard at being president as his predecessors have done. Despite what my friend asserted the other day, Obama has worked his tail off, as did Presidents Bush 43, Clinton, Bush 41, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, Roosevelt … I’ll stop there.

They all faced crises and conflict. They need time to chill, to collect their thoughts, to spend time with their spouses and kids.

They are not out of touch or out of reach.

So, with that I say to the current president and his beautiful family: Surf’s up, enjoy yourselves … but keep the phone nearby. We might need you, Mr. President, in a pinch.

entertainment news

Here it is: the greatest song ever recorded

A friend and former colleague of mine and I have engaged in a bit of social media repartee regarding the greatest song ever recorded.

Jim and I disagree. He is pitching “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin. My verdict is where it has been since I first heard this song. “Hey Jude,” the 7-minute 11-second classic by The Beatles has my vote for the greatest song ever recorded.

How do I know that it is? It just is.

I long have argued that a song’s impact on the listener can be measured by this simple metric: Do you know where you were the first time you heard it?

I remember where I was the moment I first heard The Beatles singing this classic. Members of my family and some of my best friends have heard this: It was late summer 1968. I had just returned to my barracks at Fort Lewis, Wash., where I was spending a few weeks undergoing U.S. Army basic training. I turned on my transistor radio, put it on my bunk and then I heard the closing refrain this song I’d never before heard. It goes on seemingly forever: “nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, naaah …”

Who in the world is that? Then the DJ told me as the song wound to its close, “And that’s the latest from The Beatles.”

Jim, to his great credit, said he couldn’t remember where he first heard “Stairway to Heaven.” I applaud his honesty.

I get that such judgments are strictly subjective. “Stairway” is a great song. Led Zeppelin is a great rock band. Neither the song, nor the band, are the greatest.

That’s my opinion and I’m sticking with it.

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