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Obama kills it on 'Between Two Ferns'

A few conservatives, not all of them, need to find a sense of humor.

Some of them are criticizing President Obama — no surprise there — for appearing on a mock talk show with a comedian, Zach Galifianakis. “Between Two Ferns” aired recently on the Internet and it showed the president of the United States engaging in a bit of repartee one doesn’t usually see involving the commander in chief and the Leader of the Free World.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/18e820ec3f/between-two-ferns-with-zach-galifianakis-president-barack-obama

He took to this forum to sell the Affordable Care Act to young Americans who so far have been reluctant to sign up for the exchanges offered by the law.

Conservatives, though, have tweeted some messages about how FDR, Reagan, Ike, Truman or JFK never would do such a thing. This kind of stunt is beneath the office of the presidency, they say.

You know what? I could see The Gipper or JFK doing it. Maybe not Truman, Ike or FDR. President Reagan surely had a flair for the dramatic, given his movie career before he entered politics in the mid-1960s. And President Kennedy, you’ll recall, made presidential press conferences something of an art form during his 1,000 or so days in the White House.

I’m reminded of what the late great East Texas congressman, Charles Wilson, once said about those who criticized his well-known reputation as a lady’s man. He said his constituents were actually envious of his lifestyle. “They don’t want their congressman,” Wilson once was quoted as saying, “acting like a constipated hound dog.”

I see nothing wrong at all with my president showing a bit of his human — and humorous — side while discussing a serious national policy issue.

Lighten up out there.

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Spring is springing forth

The long, cold winter is about to end. Spring’s official arrival isn’t set for another week.

However, I need to share what I just witnessed on a walk through the neighborhood with my bride.

I witnessed the first signs of spring. They’re showing up in people’s lawns, on the trees that are beginning to bud, if ever so imperceptibly. I’m hearing more lawnmowers roaring. I’m seeing more people out walking — just like my wife and me — with their children in strollers or their puppies on leashes.

This truly is my favorite season of the year.

Other people tell me they love autumn the most. The summer gives way to the cooling breezes, the leaves turn colors and then they fall off the trees. That’s all fine.

The leaves also die. The trees grow dormant. The grass loses its luster and it, too, goes to sleep for the winter.

Me? I am a revival sort of fellow. I like the season where Mama Nature wakes everything up.

We’ve lived on the High Plains of Texas for slightly more than 19 years now and we’ve watched these cycles play out with each passing year. This year — or maybe it’s just my imagination — it seems the Texas Tundra became barren more quickly than in many previous years. I recall around early November driving past McDonald Lake at the corner of John Stiff Memorial Park just north of our home and noticing that the grass around the lake had gone from green to brown virtually overnight.

Then I noticed everyone’s yards had done the same thing.

The cold set in. It didn’t let up. We didn’t set any low-temperature records this year, but it surely seems as though the winter clamped its grip on us early and kept it there for what seemed like forever.

Snowfall? The National Weather Service said we’ve gotten 12 inches or so this winter, down a couple of inches from normal.

It’s been dry. And cold. For a long time.

It is now giving way to that time of renewal. I saw it this afternoon on a lovely walk through the ‘hood. I’m hoping, though, we avoid one of those late-season blue northers.

I am officially ready for spring. Bring it — and some drenching rain too.

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Time to lift Cuba sanctions

highplainsblogger_wordpressTime has this way of changing public attitudes as the old ways give way to new ideas.

Witness what’s happening in the Cuban-American community — particularly in southern Florida — as it relates to this country’s non-relationship with Cuba.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/exiles-america-soften-stance-cuba-ties-n44121

Cuban expatriates, or their direct descendants, are softening their hardline view that the United States must continue to strangle Cuba. I keep asking: To what end?

Fidel Castro overthrew a dictator in 1959. He pledged to “reform” the country. By many accounts, he made it worse. He fomented revolution less than 100 miles from the Florida shoreline. By 1961, the United States closed its embassy in Havana and clamped strict economic sanctions on the island nation.

Then, in October 1962, came the missile crisis that nearly brought the United States to war with the Soviet Union because of those missiles being installed in Cuba.

The bad guys blinked. The missiles went away. So did the Soviet Union, eventually. Fidel Castro has left office, although his brother, Raul, isn’t any better.

But why do we keep seeking to punish a nation that poses no threat to us?

Some Cuban-Americans think the time has come to restore a relationship with Cuba.

According to NBCnews.com: “’Cuba is a completely different country than what we left in the fifties. Folks here have no clue. They continue to see Cuba from Miami or New York or wherever they are located. You have to spend time there and talk to the Cuban people. The hard line position is dying and it will disappear,’” says Zamora, who was once an active member of the Cuban American National Foundation, an organization that has been a leading voice of Cuban exiles against relations with Cuba.”

That feeling isn’t unanimous, obviously. Florida state Sen. Anitere Flores, who was born in Miami, says Cuba is a sponsor of terrorism. My response? So what? So are Yemen are Saudi Arabia. We have diplomatic missions there, as we do in the People’s Republic of China, Venezuela — and, oh yes, in Moscow, the capital of a country that is provoking the United States hourly with its aggression in neighboring Ukraine.

The Cuban trade embargo is a vestige of a Cold War that no longer exists. It’s time for it to go. If more and more Cuban-Americans who comprise a huge political powerhouse in south Florida have come to that conclusion, why can’t the White House follow their lead?

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What in the world happened to that jetliner?

You know, I always had thought that the Age of Instant Communication and Surveillance meant that no one could disappear off the face of the planet without a trace.

I must have been delusional.

Witness the search for Malaysian Air Flight 370, which did exactly that about a week ago.

http://www.connectamarillo.com/news/story.aspx?id=1017979#.UyHEjVJOWt8

The plane took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, en route to Beijing. Then it vanished.

The family and friends of 239 passengers and crew are grief-stricken. Everyone’s heart is broken for them and one only wishes for closure, for some clue as to the fate of those people.

How, though, does a plane vanish like that? What am I missing?

The Malaysians are now being forced to defend their search for the Boeing 777, which is a mighty big airship. The world is getting mixed messages daily, if not hourly, on what authorities know what happened to the bird.

Did the flight crew reverse direction? Did the crew take the ship sharply west over the Indian Ocean? Did the ship crash on land? Did it plunge into the Gulf of Thailand or into the South China Sea?

And how is it that with all the global positioning system technology — and the radar — available to track these aircraft in flight that this plane has managed to disappear without a trace?

I hear now that people are calling cell phones numbers of the passengers on board — and that the phones are ringing. What? How does that happen? Isn’t there technology that tracks cell phone locations?

This tragic story might develop into the greatest aviation mystery since, oh, Amelia Earhart’s disappearance — in 1937.

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Tide is turning seriously against Democrats

Democrats beware.

A congressional election on the Gulf Coast of Florida has just spelled impending disaster for your party this coming November.

Republican David Jolly has just defeated Democrat Alex Sink for the seat vacated by the death of longtime Republican U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young. Democrats thought the special election could provide a breakthrough in a traditionally strong GOP district. They were mistaken.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/local/adam-c-smith-column-david-jolly-victory-spells-trouble-for-democrats/2169745

Jolly won, although by a narrow margin.

He managed to make the Affordable Care Act the issue. He nationalized a local contest. Sink was sunk by her support of the ACA, which Republicans have demonized successfully — and wrongly, in my view — as some kind of evil government intrusion.

How will this play out in all 435 congressional districts? Not well if you’re a Democratic candidate, or so it appears at this moment.

Democratic candidates are spooked, or at least they should be spooked, by the prospect of running for Congress with public disapproval of the ACA so high. Tampa Bay Times political columnist Adam Smith put it this way: “Don’t be surprised to see vulnerable Democrats across the country start distancing themselves from health care reform in a way that Sink did not.”

None of this discussion, of course, matters for the 13th Congressional District of Texas, one of the most reliably Republican districts in the House of Representatives. Incumbent Mac Thornberry of Clarendon faces a Democrat this fall, someone named Mike Minter; Thornberry will cruise to re-election.

The contested races involving potentially vulnerable Democrats do pose a problem. Democrats have all but given up the idea of regaining control of the House and they are in serious danger of losing control of the Senate.

What happens if the GOP gains control of both congressional chambers? Well, gridlock will tighten. Dysfunction will intensify. Tempers will flare. Relations between the White House and Capitol Hill will go from bad to worse to abysmal.

Government will not work.

When the new Congress takes over in January 2015 we just might be longing for the “good old days” that are about to pass into history.

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Rose in the Hall of Fame? No way

Gosh, I hate disagreeing with a pal of mine, but I can’t let this one go.

Lance Lahnert, sports editor of the Amarillo Globe-News, said in his weekly “My 2 Cents” column today that Pete Rose belongs in Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame.

Umm, I don’t believe so, Lance.

“I saw that Sports Illustrated put Pete Rose on its magazine cover since it’s been 25 years since his banning from baseball,” Lahnert writes. “It’s a tired issue if Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame or not. Rose didn’t bet on baseball as a player setting the all-time hit record. He belongs in the Hall of Fame as a player.”

There you have it. That’s what my buddy said about Rose.

Why do I disagree with him?

Well, for starters I’m kind of a fuddy-duddy about some things — such as rules and regulations. I believe they ought to be obeyed to the letter.

Big league baseball has this clause in its rulebook that says that betting on baseball shall result in a lifetime ban from the game. By definition that means the offender doesn’t qualify for the Hall of Fame, no matter how prodigious his statistics.

Rose’s stats are impressive, starting with him being the all-time career leader in base hits.

He had a stellar career with the Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies and Montreal Expos. I do no deny that he played the game with unbridled verve and enthusiasm that more than likely made up for whatever pure athletic skill he lacked. He was a gamer.

But while managing the Reds he bet on games involving his team. That darn rule book stipulates in black and white that betting on baseball games while being active in the game is a no-no. It doesn’t say that doing it as a manager but not a player somehow shades the infraction enough to allow Hall of Fame induction as a player; indeed, Rose compiled only a so-so record as a manager.

It pains me to insist that MLB continue to ban one of the game’s true stars from the Hall of Fame. However, the guy committed a major violation. The punishment is clear. He’s banned for life. Save the Hall of Fame for the players — and managers — who followed the rules.

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HRC sick of the media? Duh!

Sometime around late 1999, I offered a prediction.

Hillary Rodham Clinton would not run for the U.S. Senate in New York, I said then. Why? Well, my notion was that she had grown weary of the constant battering she and her husband, President Bill Clinton, had taken from the right-wing media, not to mention the members of the Senate who voted to convict her husband of “high crimes and misdemeanors” relating to the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

She ran anyway — and won handily — in 2000.

The columnist Roger Simon, one of D.C.’s smarter political analysts, writes that Clinton is sick of the media.

Will that prevent her from running for president of the United States in 2016? Part of me says “yes,” but I now know better than to suggest that HRC doesn’t have the stomach for another campaign.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/hillary-clinton-media-simon-says-104497.html?hp=l18

I cannot quite figure Clinton out. Her husband cheated on her with a White House intern less than half his age. She forgave him — apparently. The House of Representatives impeached the president for lying to a federal grand jury about the affair. The Senate then put the president on trial, but acquitted him on all three counts relating to obstruction of justice and abuse of presidential power.

The then-first lady decided she wanted to serve with those individuals in the Senate after she and her husband vacated the White House. By all accounts, she became a stellar senator from New York and earned the respect of her colleagues. Interestingly, one of her best friends in the Senate happens to be John McCain, R-Ariz., who was among those senators who voted to convict the president. Go figure.

The media beat her up as she ran for president in 2008. Her campaign ended just before the convention that year and then — wouldn’t you know it? — she ended up serving as secretary of state in the Obama administration.

The media kept dogging her. She had at least one major misfire, her handling of the Benghazi consulate tragedy. Again, the media poured it on.

Now, at least one leading Republican, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky — a possible presidential candidate himself in ’16 — is dredging up the Lewinsky matter as a way to besmirch Hillary’s reputation. Give me a break.

Still, the media keep digging into all this stuff.

Why should Hillary Clinton want any part of this?

Beats me. I remain baffled that she ran for the Senate in the first place.

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Paper or plastic … bags, that is?

Texas might find itself in the middle of yet another legal snit.

This time it could be over whether cities have the authority to ban plastic grocery bags. My hope, given my environmentally friendly attitude about such things, is that cities can do this on their own if they see fit.

http://www.texastribune.org/2014/03/11/push-tra-bag-ban-goes-attorney-general/

State Rep. Dan Flynn, R-Canton, has asked the Texas attorney general’s office to rule on it. He believes cities’ efforts to ban plastic grocery bags don’t comply with state health and safety laws.

I’ll ask the question here that I’ve asked regarding cities’ authority to install red-light cameras at intersections: Doesn’t local control mean that cities and other local jurisdictions have the right to do what’s best for their communities?

Today in the Texas Panhandle offers a prime example of why such a ban makes sense. The wind is howling at this moment, gusting at 60 mph and greater. I shudder to think what I’m going to see in the morning. I’m betting I’m going to see plastic grocery bags strewn across large stretches of open country, piled up against fences, snagged in trees, wrapped around utility poles or piled up in my front yard.

Would paper bags be immune from that kind of wind-driven mess? Of course not. The paper, though, is quite biodegradable and a better fit for the landfills.

Cities all across the country are enacting bans on plastic bags. That’s their call and individual states empower the cities to act independently. In Texas, though, the Legislature retains control over municipal affairs, despite contentions from politicians — starting with Gov. Rick Perry — who espouse the value of “local control.”

Grocer associations hate the idea of the ban. Their lobby is strong in Austin. In my view, it is too strong.

I’d prefer to see a more environmentally friendly policy enacted in cities, such as Amarillo, that does away with the plastic bags. If only the state would allow it.

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Hats off to Hildebran

I’ll be brief with this post.

My hat goes off to Harvey Hildebran for saving Texans money by conceding the Republican race for Texas comptroller of public accounts to Glenn Hegar, the Katy state representative who finished first in the GOP primary, far ahead of Hildebran.

Yes, there will be other runoffs, but just not one for comptroller.

http://www.texastribune.org/2014/03/07/hilderbran-drops-out-comptroller-runoff/

First of all, I kind of liked Hildebran’s TV ads. They were constructive and they dealt with how he would run the comptroller’s office. They didn’t attack the other guys.

Then he decided he didn’t have enough votes among the also-rans in the GOP field to challenge Hegar, who came within less than 200 votes statewide of capturing the party nomination outright.

Hildebran could have fought on. He didn’t. He is backing Hegar.

In the process, he’s saving Texans some money by not requiring the state to have a runoff election in this contest.

Thanks, Mr. Hildebran.

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Worst Congress ever?

Great day in the morning! I think we have an area where congressional Democrats and Republicans actually agree.

They all seem to agree that this is the worst-performing Congress in history.

Worst Congress ever?

Of course, that’s where the consensus ends. They’re blaming each other for the dysfunction that that ails the legislative branch of the federal government.

I’ve long been a good-government kind of guy. I like government to work for the country and believe government has a role to play in helping those who need a hand. Thus, I tend to lean to the left. No surprise, probably.

The Republicans who have run the House of Representatives since 2011 have a different view. Many of them believe Congress shouldn’t do nearly as much as it’s allowed to do. So, when the president has proposed legislation and ideas to help folks, Congress has been prone to resist disposing of those ideas.

“I tell people, we’re not getting anything done and that’s good,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who intends to leave the Senate at the end of 2014.

Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., who has served in Congress since The Flood, recently announced his intention to retire at the end of the year. He said the place no longer is fun, no longer productive and no longer worth his time and effort.

Dingell is not alone.

Does the president deserve some of the blame for this dysfunction? Sure. Governing is a shared responsibility, which is why I get so annoyed at those who blame the president for all that ails the nation’s political system. Barack Obama promised to break the gridlock loose. He hasn’t delivered on that promise. One of the common criticisms of the president is that he isn’t fond of schmoozing with legislators the way, oh, Lyndon Johnson would do. Thus, when he proposes an idea, Obama prefers to let the merits of the idea win the day, without actually working with legislators to persuade them to push the idea into law.

It seems, though, that whenever he reaches out, his “friends” on the other side slap his hand away.

Therein lies the crux of the problem.

Republicans blame Democrats for Congress’s failure to deliver … and vice versa.

At least they agree that the legislative branch is a loser.

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