Category Archives: national news

crime news, legal news, local news, national news

Impeachment coming? Sure, bring it!

Let’s assume for a moment that the political smart money is telling us the truth, that the next Congress is going to flip to Democratic control and that the House of Reps is going to launch an impeachment against Donald Trump.

We all have heard that Democrats might gain 30 seats on the Republicans who now control Congress. I can’t say whether the pundits think the 30-seat gain is at the top of their projection, at the bottom … or somewhere in the middle. If Trump continues on his slap-dash course it well could exceed the 30-seat turnover by a significant margin.

Is an impeachment necessary? I will allow my bias to peek through the haze and declare: Damn right it’s necessary! I will offer this caveat: I want Democrats to assure us that they can more than one thing at a time, that they can proceed with impeaching Trump and resume their constitutional role of making laws.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York is likely to be elected speaker and he ought to take a page from the book followed in Texas by then-Speaker Pete Laney. The West Texas cotton farmer said he always simply allowed “the will of the House” to have its way. And so it went during the years that Laney served as the Man of the House.

The will of the U.S. House should be allowed to play the hand it is dealt. If most members believe — as I do — that Trump has committed an impeachable offense or three, then it should act. It also should not allow the legislative process to get caught in a political vise that will clamp down around the White House.

We’ve all heard them say that lawmakers can “do more than one thing at a time.” Impeaching a president is serious business. So is legislating.

national news

Trump: consquential POTUS

Donald Trump declared almost at the moment he became a politician that he intended to become a “consequential” president of the United States. Nearly one year into this second term, I am going to declare that he has become a president of consequence.

Bear with me as I seek to chronicle some of the consequences of his actions.

  • Trump has added more to the national debt that all of his predecessors combined.
  • The annual budget deficit now numbers in the trillions of dollars.
  • He is the second man to be elected to two non-consecutive terms as president.
  • Trump is the only president to be impeached twice by the U.S. House and, by golly, he is staring at the prospect of a third impeachment — or more — once the next Congress takes office a year from now. That’s all pretty consequential, don’t you think? There’s more.
  • He hired the world’s richest human being to oversee the destruction of several government programs, including USAID, the Affordable Care Act and is threatening to slash Medicare, Medicaid and even Social Security payments.
  • Trump has taken aim at critics who have spoken the plain truth about following orders, ensuring that military personnel only are bound to follow lawful orders. He wants to demote one senator, a retired Navy captain, combat aviator, former astronaut and then subject him to a court martial for speaking that truth.
  • He has threatened to go to war with Venezuela, he wants to seize Greenland from Denmark and has talked openly about Canada becoming the 51st U.S. state.
  • And speaking of war, Trump is the first U.S. president to openly switch our alliance from a nation that was attacked by an aggressor state to the aggressor state. You want consquence? Trump’s got it in spades.

I won’t cheer any of these consequential acts. I will acknowledge, though, that Trump has delivered on his stated desire to be a consequential president.

We’ll be talking about Trump long after he’s gone. That’s consequential, too.

media news, national news

Change of heart on pledge

A few years ago — I cannot remember precisely when — I pledged to no longer make a resolution to begin the new year.

Why promise to do something that I didn’t expect to be able to do, or so I thought in the moment. Today I am taking back that pledge and declaring a new year resolution for 2026. I believe I can keep this one alive and functioning. I am pledging to use High Plains Blogger to make life as miserable as possible for Donald J. Trump, his administration of yes men and women and the MAGA crowd that remains loyal (for reasons that escape me) to the pretender in chief. I am acutely aware that my reach is somewhat limited. I don’t have a huge audience that reads my rants. I’ll start by asking those who do read them and who agree with my view that Trump is a threat to this country, that he is unfit for the office he occupies and he must be stopped … well, you can share those thoughts on your social media network of friends and acquaintances. Those of you who read this blog but who continue to support the dipshit in chief, you can react to my rants any way you see fit. It’s your call. I’ll be commenting throughout the year on issues that present themselves. My immediate aim is to flip the U.S. House from Republican to Democrat when the ballots are counted for the midterm election. One more word on this issue. If Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents knock on my door, I’ll have my birth certificate and passport handy to prove that I am an American patriot who has read the Constitution … and who understands the free speech liberty it grants for all citizens of this great country.
economic news, military news, national news

Trump: RINO in chief

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, the American Republican Party stood for principles the party deemed to be hard and fast … not to be trifled with.

Republicans opposed adding to the national debt. They opposed deficit spending each year on the federal budget. The GOP stood firm against “nation-building” wars overseas. Republicans stood with Democratic President Lyndon Johnson in passing the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts of 1964 and 1965. The GOP saw the Soviet Union as a national enemy and committed to the destruction of the tyranny preached in the Kremlin.

Hmmm. Those days are gone. Likely forever. Never to be seen again.

Donald Trump is now what I call the Republican In Name Only in chief. He is leading a party that bears no resemblance to the party of Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon.

I am trying to imagine President Reagan allowing the national debt to balloon to trillions of dollars. Or President Lincoln allowing the party to embrace white supremacists. Or President Nixon defending the USSR’s direct descendants, Russia, in disputes involving U.S. intelligence findings.

What we have now in charge in D.C., ladies and gents, is a party that has betrayed all those core values. It’s not just the president. He has GOP members of Congress, who are standing with him.

They all — not just Donald Trump — deserve our everlasting condemnation for the direction they have taken this great country.

national news

Wanted: Basic human decency … please!

Of all the areas where Donald Trump is deficient in the only office he ever has sought and held, I have settled finally on the one aspect of this individual’s being I find most lacking.

Basic human decency!

Trump lacks any semblance of the kind of humanity we have grown to expect from the person sitting in the Oval Office of the White House. Trump has demonstrated his lack of decency in the most profound ways imaginable in the wake of the deaths of Rob and Michelle Reiner.

Instead of remaining silent or at least offering a boiler-plate response that offers good wishes to the loved ones of the acclaimed filmmaker and his wife, Trump exhibited a level of abject boorishness millions of us never have seen in a U.S. president. On top of that, he followed his Reiner response with a hideous reaction to the passing of the daughter of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, Tatiana Schlossberg, who died of cancer just the other day.

This is the kind of thing too many Americans have grown to expect from Trump. He actually declared in that ghastly Truth Social message that Rob and Michelle Reiner died of what he called Trump Derangement Syndrome. Yep … that’s where it ended for Reiner who admittedly was a stern and ferocious critic of Trump.

Rather than leave the dispute in the dust where it belongs, Trump chose to rub the wound raw while the Reiners’ loved ones were mourning their horrific murders.

This is the kind of individual Americans elected not once, but twice, as president of the United States. What in the world does this say about us, not just about the moron chosen to lead the world’s most indispensable nation?

We are facing an opportunity this coming November to begin to right the ship of state by turning Congress over to the loyal opposition Democrats who stand an excellent chance of seizing back one of the three co-equal branches of government.

Maybe then we might see a return of basic human decency … in the Capitol Building.

national news

Year ends in frustration

I hereby declare that the final post on High Plains Blogger in 2025 will end with my hands thrown into the air accompanied by the sigh of frustration from an American patriot who still cannot grasp what has become of the country he loves more than life itself.

That would be me, of course.

The year that is drawing to a merciful close will give way soon to many new opportunities to correct what has gone so terribly wrong. I await 2026 with undying optimism that we’re going to snap out of it, we’ll come to our senses and we will begin charting the corrective course that will save us all.

Donald John Trump was elected in 2024 to another term as the White House gatekeeper. I am finding it difficult these days even to refer to him as president. I vowed after the 2016 election that I would decline to attach the word “President” directly in front of Trump’s name. I have been faithful to that pledge. I accept your congratulations.

Now that we’re one year into the second term, I cannot even refer to his second victory as a “re-election.” The dude did get his melon thumped in 2020 by President Biden and he debased the office even more by declaring his refusal to accept the result and then incited the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

The individual is a disgrace.

The year was spent hiring incompetent boobs to run multibillion-dollar government agencies. The more I think about it, the more logical it seems that the imbecile in chief would surround himself with agency heads who at some level make the man in charge seem smarter than he is. It really hasn’t worked.

What is the remedy? Midterm election. We’re going to elect the entire and House one-third of the Senate in November 2026. The notion that the House is likely to flip from R to D when the ballots are counted gives me hope that a competent House speaker will be able to steer that congressional chamber back to doing what we expect of it. The House will return to governing!

We also have to consider that a third Trump impeachment may occur. I don’t want that to happen. If it does, I want the House to produce proof that could persuade enough GOP House members that they have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump has violated his oath of loyalty to the Constitution.

The reconstruction of our democratic principles can begin in this new year. I will use this blog to do my tiny part to ensure the project gets completed.

national news, political news

How did we come to this?

For as long as I draw breath on this good Earth, I likely never will be able to understand the question that comes to me from my friends around the world.

They ask: What has happened to you Americans? How did you manage to elect Donald Trump twice to the presidency?

I guess my answer to Trump’s first election in 2016 would address the quirkiness of the U.S. electoral system that enables a candidate to be elected despite drawing fewer actual votes than the winner. Hillary Clinton finished that campaign with several million more votes than Trump, who won the election because he collected more than enough Electoral College votes than Clinton.

The second election, though, in 2024, is harder to explain. I mean, the guy was impeached twice by the House in his first term, he was found liable for rape against several women, he has demeaned his foes as “enemies” and the press as the purveyors of “fake news.” He told us he was going to seek revenge on those he said had done him wrong. He never said a word about hiring the world’s richest human being and ordering him to eliminate programs aimed at feeding the needy around the world. The individual has 34 felony counts tacked onto his criminal record.

My friends all tell me they have great respect for Americans. The love this country and those of us who call it home. They are baffled beyond measure at the tolerance of Trump’s petulance by Republican toadies who still stand with this clown.

I am left to admit to them: So am I.

national news

Trump: Proof that ‘anyone can get elected’

Surely you recall that when Barack Obama was running for president in 2008 that he proclaimed that “nowhere can my story be told.”

He intended to remind us that that a young man with a “funny name,” with parents of different races, his being raised by his mother as a single parent could be elected president. Millions of rejoiced at the prospect that, yes, “anyone can get elected” to the nation’s highest office.

Well, let’s fast-forward to 2024. Donald Trump was running for a second term as POTUS. Joe Biden defeated him in 2020. Yet there he stood, nominated by a political party that is willing to give him a pass on all his transgressions.

  • He had been impeached twice during his first term. The second time was for inciting the horrific assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 that sought to overturn the 2020 election result.
  • Trump had been convicted on 34 felony counts associated with mistreatment of women.
  • His business exploits have been exposed as failures.
  • He has been shown to be a pathological liar who can’t tell the truth under any circumstance.
  • Trump has been exhibiting signs of mental decline.

I hasten to add that the notion that “anyone can get elected” has taken on a different tone than what we relished when Barack Obama was elected in 2008.

“Anyone” now means a convicted felon, a serial philanderer, a liar, an insurrectionist.

Pretty damn ugly … y’know?

national news

Can’t get No. 44 to return … dammit!

Most of the politically oriented social media links I follow are yearning these days for Barack Obama to make a comeback. They want him to return to the Oval Office.

Well … you and I know that can’t happen. President Obama served his two terms as our elected leader and he’s busy these days working on his presidential center set to open in Chicago next year. He’s also making speeches reminding us — as if we need reminding — of the sparkling orator he continues to be.

He’s been highly critical of his immediate successor, Donald Trump, telling us “real strength” is not the result of bullying or insults.

It’s important for us to hear from past presidents in this fashion. They’ve been in the very spot that Trump now occupies. It’s also instructive to hear them recall how they responded to crises and compare them with the conduct exhibited by the current guy.

It is tempting to wish for a return to office of the likes of Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton, or George W. Bush. All of those men served two terms. The Constitution limits them to the time they served.

I am heartened somewhat by the lack of open chatter these days that Trump will try to circumvent the 22nåd Amendment. It might be that someone has persuaded the prevaricator in chief that a third term is a total non-starter. But, damn … the guy keeps scarfing up power as if he intends to stay put.

Sigh. It won’t happen. And that, ladies and gentlemen, gives me hope that our Constitution is strong and durable enough to withstand this full-on, flat-out, frontal assault on our government by the pretender in chief.

It won’t stop the calls for Barack Obama to find a way to sneak back into power. I’ll just wish the former president keeps speaking out with the grand eloquence he possesses. His message is powerful enough.

national news

Too early to assess Trump’s place in history

Let me be crystal clear on a key point: Although I remain a fierce critic of Donald Trump in his role as president, I am not going to join many other critics in assigning his place in history among all the men who have served in the office.

Why not? Because I am willing to give the guy the tiniest benefit of the tiniest smidgen of doubt as to where he will end up.

The guy still has three years to go before he is shown the door out of the White House for the final time. He isn’t likely to don the statesman’s garb and act like a president. Events, though, could break in this guy’s favor.

There could be a peace agreement that ends the Russia-Ukraine war. There could be a treaty hammered out between Israel and Hamas, ending the siege in Gaza. China and other industrialized giant nations could find a way to end the burgeoning trade war that Trump launched with his tariffs on everything we import into the United States.

Whatever role Trump might play in all of this remains to be seen.

His utterly callous remarks in the wake of Rob and Michele Reiners’ murder were too much for many critics. I agree that Trump demonstrated a level of crassness that defies description. Many critics have gone on social media to declare Trump to be the worst president in U.S. history as a result.

I don’t expect any of what I have to might actually occur.

However …

They might take place. With that I am going to withhold final judgment just in case.