I am baffled at the right wing’s obsession with cutting federal money for programs that actually educate people.

Take public broadcasting, for example.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s debate performance this past week has been hailed largely a success. But when he went off on the issue of government waste, he took dead aim at the Public Broadcasting Service and, that’s right, Big Bird.

There are literally thousands of more wasteful government programs than the money the government spends on public television. Why do right-wingers keep flogging public television when they trot out ways to cut government spending?

PBS’s programming – which comes to the Panhandle via KACV, based at Amarillo College – is educational at so many levels. It’s children’s programming has become legendary, creating the popular characters such as Big Bird and the whole cast of Sesame Street. It provides comprehensive news coverage of current events. Next month, PBS will show a documentary on the Dust Bowl, produced by the renowned filmmaker Ken Burns – and that broadcast will resonate throughout the Panhandle, which lived through that horrific event in the 1930s.

PBS’s contribution to the federal debt amounts to spitting in the ocean.

If Romney and the base of his party were truly serious about the debt, they would start trotting out all the waste everyone on the planet knows exists in, say, the Defense Department. My strong hunch is that the savings realized right there could pay for PBS all by itself – and retain America’s status as the world’s pre-eminent military power.

http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/10/06/4316884/hampton-change-needed-atop-criminal.html

I’ve stopped overestimating the intelligence of some voters, so I won’t dare to predict how this campaign will turn out.

But Texans have a chance to make a serious statement about the nature of their criminal court system. They ought to back the election of Keith Hampton as the next presiding judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals.

Hampton is a Democrat running against Republican incumbent Judge Sharon “Killer” Keller. He’s drawn the endorsement of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (see link), among other papers. The S-T makes a compelling case that Keller has embarrassed the state long enough. The paper makes an equally compelling argument in favor of Keith Hampton.

As the editorial points out, the nadir of Keller’s time as presiding judge was when the court’s office closed at 5 p.m. and wouldn’t hear the last-minute of a death row inmate. She’s been hit with ethics charges and has generally been seen as an ardent friend of police and prosecutors. Let me be clear, I too have great respect for cops and prosecutors – but I haven’t taken an oath to administer justice without bias.

I hate the fact that we elect judges on partisan ballots in Texas. Back when the state was heavily Democratic, many good Republican judicial candidates were swept aside in the partisan tide. The state has turned Republican and the same fate has fallen on many qualified Democratic judicial candidates.

In this case, a true injustice will be done if Texas voters return Sharon Keller to the state’s highest criminal appellate court simply because she has an “R” next to her name.

http://www.texastribune.org/

The Texas Tribune has done a good job of outlining West Texas’ water woes.

But it could have been a bit more thorough. The article attached to this blog talks at length about the current water troubles in the Midland-Odessa and San Angelo regions. And yes, those communities are in deep trouble over the short term. The Tribune notes they might run out of water as early as next year.

But Amarillo is in a different position. The city has been buying water rights throughout the Panhandle. Boone Pickens recently sold a gazillion acre feet of water rights to the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority, thus ending his dream of piping water downstate to water-starved regions of Texas.

Local water planners keep telling us the city is in good water shape for, oh, the next couple of centuries. Yes, our drought is as grim as it’s been in the Permian Basin, but our water planners have been pretty far-sighted with their water strategy.

All this makes me wonder, though: What happens when the water does run out in, say, 2212? I realize that none of us will be around then; nor will our kids or grandkids. But a few generations down the road will feel the pinch when the water does run out. And it will.

I do take some comfort, though, in Amarillo City Hall’s proactive approach to developing new water sources – even though the city could do even more to promote aggressive water conservation.

Nothing – not even our water – lasts forever.

I’ve been laughing for two days now over the allegation from Jack Welch, former head of GE, that President Obama’s campaign cooked the jobless figures to make the president look good one month before the election.

The jobless rate fell to 7.8 percent in September. It’s now below that 8-percent threshold that Republican nominee Mitt Romney has been using as a benchmark for Obama’s “failed economic policies.” What’s more, the job growth totaled 114,000 in the past month, which isn’t exactly a sparkling number.

What proof did Welch produce to back up his claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics manipulated the numbers? None. It was a gut feeling, he told TV talking heads. And yet the media have reported this hunch as all but fact, ginning up a frenzied reaction among commentators and pundits on the right.

Let’s just point out a couple of things. First, the BLS is run by career bureaucrats, not political hacks. Also, this is the same outfit that revealed disappointing jobs numbers the day after the Democrats renominated Obama in early September at their national convention in Charlotte, N.C.; indeed, those tepid job-growth figures likely tamped down the post-convention bounce that Obama got afterward.

I say we ought to file Welch’s contention away with the rest of the baloney spewed out by the conservative media, which attach themselves to any phony conspiracy that damages Barack Obama.

The Sunday morning talk shows were abuzz with chatter about Mitt Romney’s debate performance this past week.

One of the talking heads – a Republican “strategist,” I believe – spoke of Romney’s promise to work across the aisle with Democrats in Congress, just as he did when he was governor of Massachusetts. The talker also noted that the Bay State legislature comprised 85 percent Democrats.

Which brings up a fascinating lesson, brought to us by none other than the current GOP pariah, former President George W. Bush, whom no Republican mentions in the context of the 2012 race against President Obama.

Dubya brought a similar skill to the White House when he became president in 2001. He, too, worked well with Democrats in Austin when he was governor. He had no choice. The Legislature was controlled by Democrats; the Senate was run by a Democratic lieutenant governor, Bob Bullock, who was proud of his cantankerous nature; the House speaker was a cotton farmer from the Panhandle, Democrat Pete Laney of Hale Center.

Dubya had to learn quickly that to get things done in Austin he needed to enlist lawmakers from both parties, not just his own Republican brethren.

Then a strange thing happened. He got elected president in 2000 in that bizarre contest featuring a contested recount of ballots in Florida and a one-vote U.S. Supreme Court victory that stopped the recount, granting Bush the electoral votes he needed to take office. His electoral vote margin was 271-266, which is as narrow a margin as it gets.

How did Bush govern once he took the presidential oath? Well, kind of like his dad when when he won the office in 1988 in a virtual landslide. Dubya didn’t quite take the same spirit of bipartisanship with him to Washington. He had Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, so he could push through whatever he wanted without the help of them stinkin’ Democrats.

Of course, the problem was worsened by the anger many Capitol Hill Democrats harbored against Bush for being elected in the first place – and in the manner in which the election was decided. (For the record, I have believed all along in the legitimacy of Bush’s first election, as it was done precisely as the Constitution dictates.)

But now, a dozen years later, another Republican is trying to persuade Americans he’ll be a bipartisan president. Barack Obama said the same thing four years ago, only to hear from his Republican foes that their No. 1 goal is to deny the president a second term.

Politics is a contact sport, as the late, great Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas used to say. My guess is that if Romney pulls of the unexpected victory next month, his Democratic foes will ensure continued gridlock, just as Republicans have done with Obama, and as Dubya and the Democrats did with each other.

I don’t agree much with Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s view of the world.
But he’s right to insist that children of Texans who are here illegally – the young people who’ve lived in Texas virtually all their lives – deserve to pay in-state tuition costs when they go to public colleges and universities in Texas.
Recall that when Perry was running for president early this year, he got pilloried by his hard-nosed Republican opponents for sticking up for those young people. But he stayed true to his principles even at the expense of many of those who supported his presidential bid.
I wasn’t one of them, even though I admired his stance on that single issue at the time – and I’m in his corner now as he threatens to veto legislation next year that might seek to end that benefit for some of our resident Texans.
Perry sounds much like his predecessor as governor, George W. Bush – and even like the president of the United States whose job he sought – when he stands up for those who are Americans in virtually conceivable way. All they lack is citizenship – or legal immigrant – documentation.
Is that their fault? Is it their fault that they were brought to Texas as children by parents who sought work? No. Perry’s in-state tuition view reminds me a good bit of President Obama’s decision to cease deporting younger illegal immigrants, those who were brought to this country when they were children and who have grown up as Americans.
The 2013 Texas Legislature – which is controlled by Perry’s Republican Party – is likely to try powering through some legislation that seeks to crack down on those prospective college students. The Texas governor, who doesn’t possess much actual power, does have the veto pen at his disposal. He needs to uncap it and have it ready if and when that bill reaches his desk.

The foes of Amarillo’s recently approved cellphone ban ordinance are dredging up all kinds of red herrings to state their case.

My favorite canard suggests that the cellphone ban symbolizes a loss of freedom.

To do what? To operate a motor vehicle while trying to call up someone on a handheld device … in the middle of traffic, or when children are present? The “freedom” argument is nonsense.

It should be noted that the City Commission decision to ban cellphone use while driving doesn’t prohibit the activity altogether. Here’s all you have to do: When the phone rings, pull your vehicle over – if you are able to do so safely, of course – stop your vehicle and then answer your phone. Then you can blab all you want, freely and without interruption.

The other option is to let the phone keep ringing until the caller hangs up. My little flip-phone tells me when I’ve missed a call; it even tells me who tried to call me. So I can call the person back when I get to a safe location.

The lost-freedom society out there ignores another basic truth, which is that we have all kinds of laws that result in similar losses of freedom. As my wife wondered this morning, “Why stop when the stop sign tells me to stop when I can just keep driving through the intersection?” She joked that stop signs deprive her of the “freedom” to keep driving, but she chooses to stop – “especially when cars are coming from the other direction.”

The cellphone ban is a public safety issue. Being a good-government kind of guy, I think one of government’s primary duties is to protect the public.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/05/news/economy/welch-unemployment-rate/index.html?source=cnn_bin

I’m a bit surprised it took this long for someone to level the charge that Jack Welch, former head of GE, has leveled at the Obama administration.

Welch said the jobless numbers released today have been cooked up to make President Obama look good. He doubts the veracity of the report that joblessness fell to 7.8 percent, the lowest race since Obama took office. The jobless rate this past month was 8.1 percent.

I’ve long pondered whether these numbers could be verified independently, or whether the media just accept the figures handed to them by the U.S. Department of Labor. Do I necessarily believe that the figures are rigged, as Welch has suggested? No.

As a believer in a free press and one who dismisses the notion that the “mainstream media” have some insidious liberal bias, I tend to take Labor Department figures at face value. I also believe that the media would report independently whether the feds are rigging these outcomes.

And lest we forget, the “mainstream media” also include plenty of conservative outlets – both print and online – who would spare no expense or effort to embarrass those on the other end of the political spectrum.

If there was any funny business, don’t think for an instant that conservative talkers wouldn’t blow the whistle.

http://amarillo.com/blog-post/enrique-rangel/2012-10-04/seliger-doesnt-get-committee-appointment-he-wanted

Texas state Sen. Kel Seliger wanted to chair the Senate Education Committee. He really, really wanted it.

But the chairman’s gavel went to someone else after Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst announced chairmanships for the upcoming legislative session. The new education chairman is right-wing firebrand Dan Patrick of Houston. It’s too early to predict what will happen, but Patrick isn’t exactly a friend of public education in Texas.

I sincerely hope public education doesn’t take too big a hit in the 2013 Texas Legislature.

Seliger, an Amarillo Republican, would have been a better friend of public education than Patrick. Seliger wasn’t exactly skunked in the chairmanship sweepstakes. He is the new chairman of the Senate Higher Education Committee; with Amarillo College and West Texas A&M University in his district – along with Frank Phillips College and Clarendon College – in his sprawling Senate district, Seliger will have no shortage of local interest in what his new panel will consider.

But the Amarillo lawmaker would have been a great fit for the Education Committee chairmanship. Why? Because he decidedly is not part of the extreme wing of his party. Patrick, though, is a firebrand who on occasion has been known to shoot from the hip.

Hard to know precisely why Dewhurst passed Seliger over for the Education chairmanship. One theory is that Dewhurst was stung by his U.S. Senate Republican primary loss to tea party golden boy Ted Cruz and that he’s trying to make nice with the conservative wing of his party.

If so, that’s too bad … not for Dewhurst, but likely for the cause of public education, the health of which remains vital to Texas’ future.

http://thehill.com/video/campaign/260373-gore-suggests-high-altitude-to-blame-for-obama-debate-performance

Former Vice President Al Gore has posited a doozy of a possible explanation for President Obama’s poor debate showing.

He says Denver’s mile-high altitude might have been to blame – to which I must ask: Huh?

I’m pretty sure Mitt Romney was on the same stage as the president the other night at the University of Denver, which would have exposed him to the very same altitude as the president.

Is the former Massachusetts governor some kind of bionic man who is immune to these things? Probably not.

I have much respect for the former vice president. I happen to think he’s right on a lot of things, including his concerns about global warming and whether human beings’ overuse of carbon fuels is at the root of its cause.

However, he ought to refrain from nutty diagnoses about the president’s poor debate performance.

My own guess is that President Obama just didn’t spend enough time getting into fighting trim. Don’t expect him a repeat performance from him the next time.