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Why Warren … and not Clinton?

Conservatives seem to have hitched themselves to a possible candidacy by a leading U.S. Senate liberal.

Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has been wowing crowds at political events lately. She’s been firing up the political base of her Democratic Party. Warren also has gotten the attention of conservative commentators and pundits, such as Byron York, who contends that Warren offers a plan while Hillary Rodham Clinton is running essentially on her resume.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/will-elizabeth-warrens-fight-for-causes-put-hillary-clinton-in-the-shade/article/2551098

I’ll hereby offer my own explanation of why York, a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a Fox News Channel contributor, is so taken by Warren: He wants the Democratic Party to marginalize itself the way Republicans might be willing to do when they nominate their candidate for the 2016 presidential campaign.

You see, Hillary Clinton is a centrist Democrat in the mold of her husband, the 42nd president of the United States. Bill Clinton was the master of “triangulation,” and he parlayed his skill at working the extremes against each other so well that he won two smashing election victories in 1992 and 1996.

Republicans don’t want any more of that.

So some of them have glommed onto Warren’s candidacy, talking her up.

Don’t get me wrong. Elizabeth Warren is a powerhouse. She’s smart and courageous. She’s taking on big-money interests and is talking a darn good populist message about income equality, marriage equality, and financial and tax reform.

York and other conservatives likely don’t give a damn about the content of Warren’s message. They’re just thrilled to have someone out there willing to possibly challenge Hillary Clinton’s perceived inevitability as the Democratic presidential nominee in two years.

She reminds me vaguely of the late Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who in 1968 took on President Lyndon Johnson when it was perceived widely that LBJ would run for re-election. McCarthy stunned the president by nearly beating him in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. On March 31, 1968, LBJ declared he wouldn’t seek “another term as your president.”

The news thrilled Republicans in ’68. I suspect similar news from Hillary Clinton this time around would have the same effect on the GOP if Warren jumps in and then mounts a serious challenge to Clinton’s perceived invincibility.

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Militarize the Texas border?

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is deploying 1,000 or so National Guard troops to the state’s southern border.

I am moved to ask: For what purpose? To round up those children? Arrest them? Detain them? Send them back to their home country?

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro said Perry is “militarizing” the border in the absence of a legitimate national security threat. The kids aren’t going to undermine our defense … are they?

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/rick-perry-texas-border-national-guard-109165.html?hp=r6

“We should be sending the Red Cross to the border not the National Guard to deal with this humanitarian crisis,” the congressman said in an email. “The children fleeing violence in Central America are seeking out Border Patrol agents. They are not trying to evade them. Why send soldiers to confront these kids?”

Hey, this is Rick Perry we’re talking about, Mr. Castro.

I have to agree with Castro’s assessment. Sending troops to do the job that the Border Patrol already is doing is little more than political symbolism, which is how the White House has described it.

Let us remind the governor of something. The Texas border with Mexico is being tightened already. Those children are being captured, detained and are being housed by U.S. authorities as they seek a way to humanely repatriate them to their home countries. As Castro noted, the kids are “fleeing violence in Central America.”

Do we just send them back to the misery they seek to escape? I think not.

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End of a life puts it all in perspective

We’ve all done it.

We awake from a fitful sleep. We’re out of sorts. We’re a bit crabby over this little thing or that. We struggle through our morning. Get ready for work. We arrive at our place of employment still a bit under the emotional weather.

We start working at our job. Then a jolt of reality strikes you right in the gut, as it happened to me this afternoon. A colleague asked me, “Did you hear the news?” I responded, “About what, or whom?”

Then it came. A young service technician at the Amarillo auto dealership where I work was on his lunch break. He had been riding his motorcycle en route back to work — or so I understand. He was hit by a motorist, apparently very hard.

This young man died today. He was 18 years of age. Eighteen.

I was shaken in a way I wouldn’t have expected.

I didn’t know the young man all that well. We spoke often as our paths crossed at work. He once had intended to enlist in the Marine Corps. In fact, my very first conversation was an ice-breaker as I introduced myself to him. He told me of his plans to become a Marine.

This young man was quite fit. He told me when we met he enjoyed “working out and being a bad ass.” I chuckled and told the young man, “Let me give you just this bit of advice: Lose the ‘bad ass’ attitude. The Marines have a way of dealing with that and you won’t like the way they disabuse you of that notion.”

We both laughed and went about the rest of our work that day.

His sudden death today served to remind me — it should remind everyone — about how precious life is and how quickly it can be snatched away.

My young colleague had his whole life ahead of him — or so he thought when he fired up his motorcycle today.

Tonight the young’s man life on Earth has ended.

And that niggling stuff that had me so out of sorts this morning? It doesn’t mean a damn thing.

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It's been 45 years since that 'giant leap'

Allow me this admission: I didn’t do much thinking Sunday about the 45th anniversary of man’s first steps on the moon.

I was too busy traveling home from a glorious weekend with my family.

And to be frank, thinking of that day saddens me a little. It’s not because of the event itself. The late Neil Armstrong’s first step off the Apollo 11 lunar lander was captivating at a level I’d never experienced. “One giant step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind” became a mantra to be repeated by proud Americans everywhere.

No, the sadness comes in realizing where we’ve gone — or not gone — in the decades since then.

We landed a few more times on the moon, had a near-tragedy when Apollo 13 exploded en route — only to be brought home in a miraculous seat-of-the-pants rescue effort. Alan Shepard, America’s first man in space, got to land on the moon and hit that golf shot that went miles.

Those were heady times.

Then the missions became “routine.” How sad. NASA pulled the plug after Apollo 17. It embarked on the Skylab mission to test humans’ long-term endurance in space. Then came the space shuttle experiment, with its huge highs and devastating tragedy.

Then it ended. The shuttle fleet is retired. We’re piggybacking into space aboard Russian rockets.

I admit to longing for the days when we could get re-inspired the way we were when President Kennedy made it the national goal to “put a man on the moon before the decade (of the 1960s) is out and return him safely to the Earth.” We had that big, bad Soviet Union to race to the moon. We won that contest.

Now there’s some vague talk about going to Mars — eventually. Why “vague” talk? Because one hardly ever hears anything publicly about what’s going on. NASA engineers are toiling in obscurity — apparently — designing a vehicle to take humans to the next planet out there in our solar system.

My late mother and I spent many mornings awaiting the launches of the early space missions. Mercury and Gemini preceded the Apollo program. We agonized over the delays. Cheered at the launch. Wept with joy when the men landed safely in the ocean.

I’ve never grown tired of watching these vehicles lift off from the pad and roar into space. It pains me that the nation became bored with it.

I am grateful to have watched humanity’s first steps on the moon. I surely now want to live long enough to hear someone say, “Houston, we have landed on Mars.”

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Hamas bears full responsibility for violence

The Hamas terrorists who are part of the Palestinian Authority government bear all the responsibility for the violence that has erupted in Gaza.

All of it. Every last ounce of it.

http://news.yahoo.com/scores-dead-first-major-ground-battle-gaza-202146112.html

It amazes me to the max that so many world observers actually are critical of Israel for its heavy response to the violence that Hamas instigated when it began launching rockets into Israeli neighborhoods — targeting civilians.

Now the Israelis have sent troops into Gaza, the most densely populated region in the world. Casualties have been great, particularly on the Palestinian side. Why is that? Because Hamas started this fight.

I listened on CNN this evening to James Woolsey, a former CIA director, who offered an important piece of wisdom to the question: Can there ever be peace in the Middle East between Palestinians and Israelis?

Woolsey said they’ve been living together for centuries. He noted that one-sixth of Israel’s population comprises Palestinian Arabs. He mentioned that they serve in local and national government; an Arab once held a cabinet position; another Arab sits on the Israelis supreme court. They are part of life in Israel.

Hamas, though, won’t accept that. Neither will other terrorist organizations that populate other countries that border Israel.

Woolsey’s answer to the question was this: As soon as Hamas recognizes that Arabs have lived peacefully in Israel for many years, that’s when we can find peace in the region.

A follow-up question ought to be: How do you persuade madmen to think rationally?

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Ukraine crisis goes global

Suddenly and with maximum shock and grief, the struggle between Ukraine and Russia has become far more than just a regional conflict.

It’s gone global.

The apparent shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine jacks up the ante in this struggle to a level that cannot yet be calculated.

More than 300 innocent victims are dead reportedly from a missile strike launched by pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists who want their country to rejoin their giant neighbor to the east.

What is the world to do about this?

Well, President Obama is considering even tighter economic sanction against Russia, given reports that Moscow might have had a hand in supplying the weaponry used to down MH 17.

My own belief is that we mustn’t keep issuing “targeted” sanctions, if that’s the course we’re going to take. We ought to start freezing some serious assets, slap embargoes on Russia or perhaps remove large numbers of embassy and consulate personnel.

Should we sever diplomatic relations? No. The plane did carry a single American passenger but that’s not enough of a reason to end our diplomatic relations with Russia.

But someone in Moscow needs to be held accountable for what happened. What on God’s Earth possesses even the most fervent militants to do this, if that indeed is what happened?

It appears we’ve got an increasingly global fight on our hands. It’s not a cause for us to become militarily, but there ought to be some economic hell to pay for this heinous act of terror.

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Take ownership, not possession

Every now and then a politician and/or a pundit with whom I disagree offers a nugget of perspective that I find, well, agreeable.

Such was the case recently in a commentary written for CNN by a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives who raked President Obama over the coals for what he called the president’s constant trip to “fantasyland.”

I refer to Newt Gingrich, one of the smarter conservatives around – but also one of the more bombastic.

I’ll stipulate up front that I disagree with Gingrich’s wholesale analysis that Obama is a failed president.

But then he offered this tidbit of “truth” as he sees it, and frankly, so do I.

He referred to a recent speech in which the president used the first-person pronoun – “I,” “my” and “me” – 207 times. That was 207 times in a single speech, according to Newtie.

Bingo, Mr. Speaker. The president’s use of that personal pronoun annoys the daylights out of me as well.

I’ve noticed almost from the day the president took office in January 2009.

At the very beginning, it was an impressive display of ownership that the young president had demonstrated as he took office to tackle the horrible economic crisis that threatened to swallow up the nation’s financial infrastructure.

Nearly six years into his presidency, and after a stunning re-election victory in 2012, I am finding the use of the first-person pronoun a bit of a distraction.

Listen to the president’s speeches or off-the-cuff public comments. He refers to “my administration,” “my vice president,” “my attorney general,” “my national security team,” “my economic advisers,” etc., etc., etc.

Let’s not draw any inaccurate conclusions here. I continue to believe that Barack Obama has done a good job in fixing the economic crisis he inherited. I also believe he is correct in relying more heavily on diplomacy than military action whenever crises erupt.

However, I do not believe taking ownership of the responsibilities of a high public office means that you can take possession of the office itself.

The government belongs to us, citizens who take the time to vote on those who seek to operate the government on our behalf. Yes, I mean those who actually vote, although I certainly recognize that non-voters’ tax money is just as important to funding the government as those who have cast ballots.

Therefore, it would seem more appropriate for the president to perhaps use the second-person pronoun – “your” attorney general, “your” vice president and so on – when referring to the tough issues that face those who run “your” government.

All these folks work for us – you and me – not the guy who sits in that big Oval Office.

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Lamar educator ends 40-year stint

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Time does fly, doesn’t it Sam Monroe?

The president of Lamar State College-Port Arthur is leaving the post he has held for 40 years. That’s four decades as head of an institution of higher learning. Let me repeat that: Four … decades!

http://www.texastribune.org/2014/07/18/longest-serving-college-president-prepares-step-do/

I got to know Monroe when I worked in Beaumont, just up the road from Port Arthur. I knew him as an earnest and upstanding fellow, which one would hope held in good stead at a college that went through some tremendous change over many years. Most of it was good; some of it was not.

It was the good stuff — Lamar-Port Arthur’s growth and academic progress — that helped keep Monroe on the job he’s held longer than any other higher education administrator in Texas history.

I cannot let it pass, though, that Monroe almost got caught up in some bad times at Lamar.

The two-year campus used to be part of a free-standing university system — the Lamar University System. Back in the 1980s, the Lamar system got entangled in some serious personnel issues. Regents fired the Lamar chancellor, C. Robert Kemble, and replaced him with George McLaughlin. I recall at the time I didn’t believe McLaughlin was qualified for the job, but Kemble got crossways with key regents, so he was out.

The firing sent shockwaves throughout the system, of which LU-Port Arthur was a part. The Lamar system has since been rolled into the Texas University System.

Monroe survived all that tumult and has carried on.

As the Texas Tribune article notes, Monroe was a boyhood friend of arguably Port Arthur’s most famous resident, the late Janis Joplin. Monroe used that friendship to promote the region’s unique and interesting musical history, which might have been as key to his keeping his job this long as anything he did administratively.

Higher education can become a sausage grinder for administrators, as University of Texas-Austin President Bill Powers might attest.

I am totally amazed that Sam Monroe stayed the course through the good times and the bad.

Nice going, Sam. Enjoy your retirement.

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U.S.-Russia dispute gets even more tense

If you thought the U.S.-Russia tensions couldn’t worsen short of an actual shooting war between the nations, well, you thought wrong.

They just did on the basis of what appears to be the deliberate downing of a commercial airline carrying more than 300 passengers and crew, including one American.

http://news.msn.com/world/obama-condemns-russia-after-airliner-downed-in-ukraine

A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 has been shot down in eastern Ukraine, allegedly by separatists allied with Russia, which seems to want to re-annex the former Soviet republic.

President Obama has condemned the Russians for supporting the separatists and it is now believed he is considering even more sanctions against Russia.

Of course, critics will contend the president should have prevented the shoot-down. For now, I’ll settle for encouraging the administration — and I would implore Congress to back Obama on this one — to tighten the screws even more against Russia.

The Russians are playing a dangerous game with their support of these separatists — who now have demonstrated that they will go to any lengths to make some political point.

Someone will have to explain to me, though, what on Earth was to be gained by shooting down a commercial jetliner with innocent and unsuspecting civilians aboard.

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Oh man, that's eatin'

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

The late singer and talk-show host Mike Douglas once offered a piece of wisdom that has stuck with me in the decades since I heard him say it.

He asked a guest on his afternoon talk show: “Why is it that a hot dog tastes like a filet mignon when you’re eating it at a baseball game?”

Why, indeed?

Well, my wife and I have discovered on our brief excursions in our fifth wheel that we can ask essentially the same question about any meal we eat inside our recreational vehicle: Why does our breakfast taste like a gourmet meal prepared at the finest restaurant on the planet?

OK, so maybe I’m being a bit hyperbolic. So what? I hope you get the point.

We prepared breakfast at a campsite at Lake Tawakoni State Park east of Dallas and, by golly, it tasted like something that came straight from Paul Prudhomme’s kitchen in New Orleans.

What was it? Turkey bacon, scrambled eggs and cantaloupe.

Hey, we aren’t gourmet chefs, but we do enjoy the taste of a meal in our recreational vehicle.

I trust others who read this blog – particularly those who also like to travel in their RVs – can understand what I’m saying here.

I totally understood Mike Douglas’s question about hot dogs at the ballpark. I’ve consumed more than my share of ‘em while watching a ballgame. He’s totally right about how they taste well, um, different in that context than they do around the dining room table at home.

The same can be said about eating in an RV.

We haven’t done enough of it – yet – to become expert commentators on it.

Maybe we’ll tire of the food cooked on our propane-fired oven once we hit the road more frequently and for longer period of time.

But I doubt that will happen.