Dusty McGuire is a force of nature.

And that description is intended precisely because of what is going to happen on Arbor Day, which falls on Friday. We note Arbor Day often by planting a tree. But this year we’ll honor it by dedicating a section of Ellwood Park for neighborhood residents to use for their recreation.

McGuire is a driving force behind the walking and jogging and exercise area near the retirement homes on the east end of Ellwood Park. The area also will include an Amarillo Police Department substation, which will be staffed by officers on the lookout for potential trouble.

Ellwood Senior Park will be dedicated at 10 a.m. Friday. It will include a welcome from Mayor Debra McCartt, who also will present an Arbor Day proclamation. State forester Brian Scott will present the city with a Tree City USA Award. The event will feature tours and demonstrations of the exercise equipment that’s been installed at the park.

All in all, this is a wonderful addition to Ellwood Park. And Dusty McGuire, who’s been working tirelessly for many years to Keep Amarillo Beautiful, deserves high praise for her effort.

President Obama is facing a huge decision soon. He’ll get to select another justice for the U.S. Supreme Court. Sure, he’s getting lots of advice, most of it unsolicited. Here’s some more, Mr. President.

Don’t pick yet another Ivy Leaguer for the court. Look beyond — way beyond — that axis for the next court appointment. He’s already been getting advice from Texas to look, ahem, at the Lone Star State’s myriad law schools and courts for the next justice.

The current court lineup contains justices with Harvard and Yale pedigrees. They’re great schools, right? But the University of Texas has a great law school, too. Same for Texas Tech, Southern Methodist University and St. Mary’s University.

The decision confronting the president is somewhat similar to those facing governors, such as Rick Perry, who have to pick Supreme Court justices from time to time. Perry a few years ago broke through the Interstate 35/45 “cabal” on the Supreme Court when he reached out to Amarillo to select Phil Johnson, chief justice of the 7th Court of Appeals, for a spot on the high court. That decision illustrated Perry’s understanding that not all legal knowledge resides in that swath of real estate between those two major north-south interstate highways.

President Obama needs to look all across this vast country to find the next justice, replacing John Paul Stevens, who is retiring this summer. We’re rich in intellectual firepower, Mr. President.

I don’t condone cities breaking state law, but there’s something appealing — to me, mind you — about Las Cruces, N.M. officials continuing to operate red-light cameras at intersections controlled by the state of New Mexico.

The New Mexico Transportation Commission voted recently to give cities two months to remove the cameras. Las Cruces isn’t budging, apparently. Good for the folks there!

Texas transportation regulators haven’t yet done such a thing here, which gives Amarillo the authority to operate the red-light cams if the city deems that running red lights poses a safety hazard for motorists.

I concur with the city’s assessment that, yes indeed, red-light runners are a menace. Therefore, the city has acted in an effort to deter the motorists from running the lights. Traffic engineers have placed the cams at six intersections around the city.

I’ll admit to one close call at the corner of I-40 West and Coulter. I was making a left turn once onto Coulter and got stopped in the middle of the intersection by traffic that had stalled in front of me. I made the turn while the light was turning from amber to red. I saw the camera light flash behind me, but the city must have caught the guy in back of me sneaking through the intersection. Good for me; bad for him.

It’s troubling that the state deems it necessary to govern how cities seek to control local traffic problems. If Amarillo City Hall determines it has a traffic safety issue to resolve — and it installs red-light cams to correct the problem within its corporate boundaries — then the city has the right to act on its own.

Therefore, I applaud Las Cruces City Hall.

Bruce Beck had a standard greeting for those he would meet.

Alan Taylor seems like a mere interloper compared to the two men who preceded him as Amarillo city manager.

This came in overnight from a reader and (apparently) an avid TV viewer.

Some months ago, I posted a blog item that talked about the launch of the space shuttle and how I freeze when I hear the words “Go at throttle up,” at which point the Challenger blew up in January 1986. Those words still make me stop what I’m doing during launch.

Today, the shuttle Discovery came home. It streaked across the United States en route to a safe landing in Florida. The shuttle program only has three more missions before it comes to an end in September.

These landings do much the same for me as the launches. I now stop what I’m doing when the shuttle is coming home, recalling what happened that terrible day in February 2003 when the Columbia broke apart over Texas on its way home after a 16-day earth orbit mission. The mission commander was Amarillo’s own Rick Husband.

Both events, the destruction of Challenger and Columbia, remind us of how dangerous these missions always have been. They’ve never been “routine,” yet we’ve become bored by these missions. How sad.

I truly wish we could rediscover the excitement of those early Mercury and Gemini missions and the first half of the Apollo program; you’ll recall that NASA canceled the moon missions after Apollo 17 because the nation no longer was interested enough in space travel to justify the expense of sending crews to the moon and back.

This morning, I felt the excitement — as I always do — when a space ship came hurtling out of orbit toward a feather landing in Florida.

There are times when I sometimes question my own sanity.

Today is one of those times. I wrote a column for the newspaper about the birther movement, the cult of Americans who believe President Obama hasn’t proved sufficiently that he was born in the United States and, thus, is qualified to hold the office he’ll occupy at least until Jan. 20, 2013.

http://www.amarillo.com/stories/041810/opi_opin2.shtml

Read the responses to the column (see attached link) and you might get a sense of why I think I have rocks in my head. It’s not that I disbelieve what I wrote. It’s that most of the responses suggest I would have better luck arguing this point to the tree stump next to my driveway.

For the record, the birthers are entitled to their opinion. The First Amendment guarantees them the right to speak their mind, no matter how mindless their argument — which includes their insistence that the president produce “proof” that he was born in August 1961 in Honolulu, just as he has said.

But you can lay down the original birth certificate, you can interview the doctor (were he still living) who brought young Barack into the world, you can obtain every possible shred of physical evidence there is, but the birthers will find some pretext to dismiss it all as a fraud. “They’ll find something wrong” with the evidence, my colleague Jon Mark Beilue said.

Yes, and what they don’t find, they’ll fabricate.

Several Amarillo-area lawyers, and at least one sitting judge, have let it be known they want to become the next 47th District judge, replacing the late Hal Miner.

Their names have been forwarded to the Republican Party chairs of Potter, Randall and Armstrong counties. More names could surface before the filing deadline.

But there might be a catch for whomever the chairs select.

This gets a little complicated, but I’ll try to explain it.

Only Republican chairs will take part, given that no Democratic candidates are on the ballot this year; GOP Judge Miner was running unopposed for re-election when he died this past month. The chairs will get to select someone to run for election this fall.

But Gov. Rick Perry has the authority to appoint someone to serve the remainder of the term, which he very well could do.

The word on the street is that Perry would pick whomever the party chairs choose, allowing that person to serve as judge while running for election as the incumbent. But then again, he might veto that choice.

Why? Because name of the person chosen by the chairs could show up on a campaign contribution list for one of Perry’s GOP primary opponents, namely U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. Thus, is the governor going to appoint someone who gave money to his chief primary foe?

Yeah. That’ll happen about the time cattle start flying out of our feedlots.

Thus, it just might turn out that the county party chairs are going to be sure that their chosen successor has supported the “right” candidate for governor before publicizing his name.

Then comes the questions: Are they going to select the most qualified person for the job? Or will they be hamstrung by political loyalty?