Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Mueller probe should keep going

Congressional Republicans keep saying special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into the Russia collusion matter has gone on too long. It has run its course, they say. It’s time to wrap it up.

Allow me this respectful dissent. No, it hasn’t gone on too long. It’s not yet time to call it good. Mueller is getting closer to the end. To that we all can agree.

Mueller’s investigation has scored some key victories already. He has obtained guilty pleas from principals involved in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. It’s not a “witch hunt,” which Trump has alleged far too often and with far too much emotion.

I, too, want this probe to end. I simply want it to end on Mueller’s terms. The Justice Department appointed him special counsel amid near-universal praise. Democrats and Republicans alike cheered his selection by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

What has changed since that appointment? The way I see, the change occurred when Mueller rolled up guilty pleas and, in the case of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, conviction on eight felony counts; plus, Manafort has pleaded guilty to two more allegations and has agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s team.

So now the GOP wants the investigation to end?

C’mon, ladies and gentlemen. You cheered this man’s selection. Let him finish his job.

political news, Uncategorized

Go ahead, Mr. POTUS, make our day

Here we go again. The president is raising the issue of possibly firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions, maybe after the midterm election.

Donald Trump reportedly has made it known privately he is tired of the special counsel’s investigation into “the Russia thing,” and he blames Sessions for allowing it to continue.

Why? How? Because Sessions recused himself from the Justice Department’s probe into alleged Trump campaign collusion with Russian goons who attacked our electoral system in 2016.

Sessions was a key campaign adviser. He couldn’t possibly have investigated a campaign in which he was an integral part. Thus, he recused himself. The DOJ then appointed Robert Mueller to lead the probe.

A part of me actually wants Trump to fire Sessions. It is going to release a torrent of recrimination from Republicans as well as Democrats.

The midterm election? Oh, yes. Democrats appear set to take control of the House of Representatives. If Trump fires Sessions, he well might hand the new House majority an impeachable offense.

As if the conviction of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and the guilty plea of former Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen haven’t produced an arsenal of “smoking guns.”

Go ahead, Mr. President. Make our day.

Uncategorized

Regents chair lays it out: Chancellor spent too much

Texas Tech University System Board of Regents Chairman Rick Francis has come clean, albeit — and admittedly — a bit late.

He has declared that Texas Tech Chancellor Bob Duncan, who is retiring in a few days, spent too much money on administrative matters. Thus, the board of regents — in a 5-4 vote — decided to go “in another direction.” The regents didn’t renew Duncan’s contract.

So, he announced his retirement.

Here is Francis’s explanation, as published in the Amarillo Globe-News.

I accept the explanation. However, it doesn’t quite go far enough.

First of all, I need to know whether Duncan’s budgeting proved detrimental to Texas Tech’s growth. I keep reading about student enrollment growth; about how Tech achieved Tier One status; about the growth of its various colleges of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy.

And oh, yes, the school wants to build a college of veterinary medicine in Amarillo.

This is bad for the school? This has taken the university backward? No and no.

One more issue needs a resolution, Dr. Francis. It’s that “informal vote” you took in executive session. Texas Open Meetings Law requires governing bodies to vote in the open. They aren’t allowed to cast “informal votes” in secret, which apparently is what regents did.

I no longer live in Amarillo, but I remain a constituent of the Tech University System, given that it is run by the state; and, yep, my wife and I still live in Texas.

I would like to know how regents managed to circumvent state open meetings requirements by casting that straw vote in secret.

Yes, I appreciate the acknowledgement that the regents chairman was slow to respond to demands for an explanation.

But has the university suffered under Duncan’s tenure as chancellor? Oh, no. It has prospered.

Uncategorized

Happy Trails, Part 121: Getting used to this response

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. — So … I was waiting this afternoon for Old Faithful to shoot itself into the air.

I turned to a gentleman and his wife sitting behind us on a bench. We talked for a moment or two: about Vietnam (we both were wearing caps revealing our war connection) and about the fact we were sitting on a huge volcanic fault that might explode some day, maybe soon.

Then he asked, “Where are you from”? I stumbled for a moment.

Then I mumbled being “from near Dallas.”

My retirement has taken my wife and me to Fairview, just north of Dallas between Allen and McKinney. I haven’t grown entirely comfortable telling strangers that I am “from the Dallas area.”

I can’t explain it, other than to suggest that Fairview isn’t as widely known to folks as, say, Amarillo and Beaumont, where we lived for more than 30 years while I worked for a living in daily print journalism. Most people I have met over the years know where Amarillo and Beaumont are on the map. Indeed, when I mention “Amarillo,” I often get a response that goes something like, “Hey, isn’t that the place with the big steak?”

As I grapple momentarily for the right way to tell folks where I now reside, I am left sounding awkward and perhaps a bit feckless.

It’ll come. Soon.

Uncategorized

Waiting for an explanation, TTU regents

Tedd Mitchell has been named interim chancellor of the Texas Tech University System. Fine. Go for it, Mr. Mitchell … whoever you are.

I am still waiting to hear a thorough explanation from the Tech regents as to why they dropped the anvil on one of genuinely good guys in Texas politics and public life, the lame-duck chancellor, Bob Duncan.

Duncan announced his retirement effective Aug. 31. Why so quick? Why so sudden? Because five of the nine regents gave him a no-confidence vote in executive session — which is another story altogether; I’m likely to have more on that down the road.

Texas Tech’s constituents need to know why Duncan, a man wholly devoted to the university, was shown the door in a secret vote. To date — and I’ll admit to being a good distance away at the moment — I have yet to hear anyone offer an explanation on what the slim Tech regent majority saw in Duncan that it didn’t like.

There have been rumblings and rumors about the proposed Tech school of veterinary medicine which the school wants to build in Amarillo. Reports indicate that Texas A&M University System officials got to Gov. Greg Abbott and asked him to pressure Duncan to back off the vet school idea. But then the Tech regents issued a statement reaffirming their support for the vet school.

Which is it, regents?

Duncan said all the right things when he announced his retirement. Those of us who know the chancellor want to know the story behind the story.

I must remind the regents that they constitute the governing body of a public institution funded by public money. They work for the state, which comprises 27 million or so “bosses” who need to know the whole story.

We’re all ears.

Uncategorized

Blog accomplishes a key mission

A friend offered me a compliment about my blog, although I don’t believe he intended for me to accept it as such when he said it.

He lives in Casper, Wyo., these days and we were talking about our respective communities just the other day. He told me about how Casper is thriving, growing and changing its character.

I then weighed in with a comment about how Amarillo, Texas — where my wife and I lived until this past May — is now undergoing a radical makeover in its downtown business/entertainment district.

“Oh, I know all about it,” he said. How’s that? He’d been reading my blog as I have tried to chronicle the myriad changes under way in downtown Amarillo. “I have been following it all along through your blog,” he said.

Well …

How ’bout that? My old friend wasn’t intending to deliver that as a feel-good statement. He was stating it as a fact. High Plains Blogger has been telling a story that at least one reader of the blog has been following closely.

I will accept that statement from my pal as high praise. And it’s validation for one of this blog’s several missions.

I have stated that this blog intends to comment on “politics,” on “public policy” and also on “life experience.”

The downtown Amarillo message I send out on the blog I suppose could qualify on all three themes. There’s been a ration of local politics coming into play; the City Council has imposed plenty of public policy while moving the many projects forward; and the city’s own brand of life experience.

So it is with some satisfaction that I share this observation with you today. It appears this blog is performing one of the tasks I intended for it when I began writing it way back when — which is to chronicle one of the communities I have called “home.”

Oh, and there’s the political stuff, too.

Uncategorized

Oh, the fires leave lasting scars

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. — I feared this sight as we approached the nation’s original national park.

We looked all around us as we drove through the park from east to west and noticed thousands upon thousands of scarred trees.

They are the casualty of forest fires.

The sight of them breaks my heart.

Our return to Yellowstone, which we first saw in 1973 — when we came here with our then-infant older son — is off to a great start. We drove slowly through the park and saw three large herds of bison. One of the beasts was ambling down the highway at his own pace, stopping traffic along the way; fortunately we didn’t see any yahoos trying to taunt the cantankerous critter, like the idiot who did just the other day.

But those trees, or what is left of them, is a troubling sight to me.

I recall the huge 1988 Yellowstone fire that engulfed thousands of acres of timber. The National Forest Service was forced in the wake of that blaze to change its firefighting policy; in other words, the service went from a quick-suppression policy to a “let it burn” policy, understanding that fire is nature’s way of cleansing the forests.

Well, the fires have “cleansed” the park. Don’t misunderstand, there’s plenty of handsome timber still standing throughout the park. A lot of the mountain slopes, though, remain scarred by previous blazes.

The sight of them makes my heart hurt.

Uncategorized

Father and Son Goodlatte: miles apart

It’s often said about children and their parents that “The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Not so with Bob and Bobby Goodlatte, father and son.

Dad Goodlatte chairs the U.S. House Judiciary Committee; the Republican lawmaker serves the Roanoke Valley area of western Virginia. Son Goodlatte is a venture capitalist who lives in San Francisco.

Bobby doesn’t like the way the chairman treated former FBI agent Peter Strzok, who got fired today from the agency that employed him for many years.

Bobby Goodlatte is so angry with his dad that he has given money to the Democrat who’s running for the seat that Chairman Goodlatte is vacating at the end of the year.

Bobby wrote this via Twitter, according to Vox.com: “I’m deeply embarrassed that Peter Strzok’s career was ruined by my father’s political grandstanding. That committee hearing was a low point for Congress,” Bobby Goodlatte tweeted. “Thank you for your service sir. You are a patriot.”

Read the Vox story here.

You know, this isn’t all that uncommon. Many children of notable Americans veer far from where Mom and Dad earn their stripes.

Hey, I have a son who disagrees with me politically. I don’t hold it against him. To the best of my knowledge, he doesn’t hold my political leanings against me, either. I love him and he loves me … at least that’s what he says.

But I’m just a chump blogger.

However, that’s different from what is happening within the Family Goodlatte. Dad has been a key player in trying to get to the bottom of the “Russia thing.” The younger Goodlatte is angry over the way his father treated a career FBI agent, Stzrok.

This kind of thing happens on occasion.

As for whether the fruit has fallen far from the Goodlatte tree, it looks as though the wind carried it across our vast nation.

Uncategorized

Tension tonight at Trumps’ dinner table?

I am probably the only American who wants to be a fly on the wall tonight when the president and first lady sit down for dinner.

Donald J. Trump decided to post that moronic tweet in which he blasts pro basketball great LeBron James for saying some nasty things about him. Oh, and he also took a cheap shot at CNN anchor Don Lemon, who he called the “dumbest person on TV.” Racist … perhaps? Yeah. Pretty sure it is.

Oh, but then first lady Melania Trump’s spokesperson said the first lady salutes James for his work to improve the lives of children. “It looks like LeBron James is working to do good things on behalf of our next generation and just as she always has, the First Lady encourages everyone to have an open dialogue about issues facing children today,” said Stephanie Grisham on Mrs. Trump’s behalf.

What has James done? He has opened a school in his native Akron, Ohio, for at-risk children. He has invested a significant portion of his massive wealth to help aspiring students.

Indeed, James has done more for children than the president has done. Or for that matter, anything the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has done.

Still, the president saw fit to disparage LeBron James with what many — myself included — have construed to be a racist taunt.

The first lady’s minor break with her husband is significant mainly because she has chosen to speak out at all, even if it through her spokeswoman.

There might be a bit of tension tonight wherever the Trumps will be.

International news, Uncategorized

Putin: a man of many tongues?

I know I’m not the only person on Earth who believes this.

Still, I must wonder whether Russian President Vladimir Putin knows English far better than anyone really knows.

I’ve never heard the Russian strongman speak English. He had that translator in the Helsinki meeting with Donald J. Trump. He always communicates through a translator, for that matter.

But here’s the deal: Putin is a former head of the KGB, the highly sophisticated spy agency that operated during the days of the Soviet Union. Does it make any sense that the top KGB spook wouldn’t be fluent in English, the language of international trade, commerce, transportation? (And yes, I intended to type the word “wouldn’t.”)

All of this makes me wonder why we keep talking about translators and ensuring that they convey the messages delivered by whomever the Russian president is meeting.

My strong hunch is that Vladimir Putin understands perfectly whatever the U.S. president was giving up, er … telling him when they were behind closed doors.