Category Archives: national news

business news, national news, political news

What? The U.S. economy is stronger than we thought

There goes — maybe — another argument that Donald J. Trump used so effectively to be elected president of the United States.

He griped for months that the U.S. economy was growing at an anemic pace. We had to do better and, by golly, he was going to bring jobs back; he is going to return those jobs that had fled to China and Mexico.

Then the U.S. Commerce Department shoots a hole in that argument. It said today the U.S. economy grew at a fairly robust 3.5 percent annual growth rate in the third quarter of 2016.

Hmmm. Interesting, if you ask me.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has tripled in value during the Obama administration; joblessness has been cut in half; we’ve had 81 consecutive months of non-farm job growth; the annual federal budget deficit has been cut by two-thirds.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/22/news/economy/us-gdp-third-quarter-last-revision/index.html?iid=surge-stack-dom

OK, it won’t mean the entire year that’s about to pass into history has been pulled out of the economic ditch. The first half of 2016 produced pretty slim growth.

But the third quarter is demonstrating the distinct possibility that the economy is in better shape than Trump and his legions of doom had been saying.

Might the president-elect and his team been spouting just more campaign rhetoric?

business news, national news

Trump looks more like a RINO

True-blue Republicans are fond of calling so-called GOP imposters as RINOs … or Republicans in Name Only.

Guess what. It appears that the president-elect of the United States is one of those RINOs.

Check this out: Donald J. Trump is kicking around an idea that would result in a 5 percent tariff on all goods imported into the United States of America.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/12/22/donald-trumps-seriously-bad-idea-a-5-tax-or-tariff-on-all-imports/#4c9ff2357216

Forbes.com calls it a “seriously bad idea.” Forbes, after all, is considered to be a mainstream Republican financial organ, yes?

It doesn’t like the notion of applying what’s historically been called “protectionist economic policy.” This is the kind of policy espoused by union movement leaders who seek artificial ways to protect U.S. jobs. Union workers historically have sided with, oh, Democratic politicians.

Now we hear that the president-elect, who ran for the nation’s highest office as a Republican Party nominee, considering a tariff on imported goods.

As Forbes writes: “To put it mildly this is not a good idea. For two rather important reasons. The first being that it’s not obvious that this would not be legal. The United States has a number of trade treaties in place and many of them will state that no such universal tariff will be possible. The second is that the idea itself is just not a good one. Why do we want to tax Americans more for the things they wish to purchase?”

That’s not a very free-market philosophy.

The president-elect — an apparently hard-core RINO — is making my head spin.

national news, political news

Yes, Trump’s presidency will be legit, unless …

I want to get something off my chest about Donald J. Trump’s pending presidency.

He will be the duly elected, legitimate president of the United States of America. The popular vote totals don’t matter. It won’t matter one damn bit to me — really and truly — that he got 46.1 percent of the vote compared to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s  total of 48 percent.

He will be as legit as Bill Clinton’s presidency was in 1992, when he won with 43 percent of the popular vote in that three-way race against George H.W. Bush and H. Ross Perot. His presidency will be as legit as Richard Nixon’s was in 1968, when he won also with 43 percent in another three-way contest with Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace.

I get that many on the left will say otherwise, just as many on the right tried to dismiss President Clinton’s 1992 victory as a fluke, given the presence of Perot on the ballot. It wasn’t. Nor was Trump’s victory.

The popular vote is not the issue that threatens Trump’s presidential legitimacy. It’s the other stuff involving the Russian hackers and whether they actually had a tangible impact on the election result.

Congress needs to get to the root of what happened there. The CIA needs to reveal — to the extent that it can without compromising its own intelligence-gathering capability — what it knows about Russian involvement.

I hope for the sake of the country that we learn the Russians did not actually affect the outcome. I have a serious fear, though, that we might learn something sinister.

But let’s steer away from this vote-total argument.

Trump won where it counted, in accordance with how the U.S. Constitution sets forth the election of presidents.

national news, political news

Historians have huge task ahead with this election

Is it too early to wonder aloud about how historians are going to chronicle the major story of 2016?

I don’t think so.

I’ve been thinking about it ever since the TV networks declared that Donald J. Trump — the former reality TV celebrity, billionaire, serial philanderer, beauty pageant owner — had just been elected president of the United States of America.

The world is full of historians who’ve made names for themselves telling us about the political exploits of previous presidents. The history lessons they’ve provided about our nation’s political leaders have been steeped in fairly traditional themes: lower-level political offices, business success, inherited wealth, abiding political philosophies.

Trump’s story tracks along vastly different lines.

He has zero public service experience; he violated virtually rule of standard political decorum; he had never sought public office; he lied through his teeth almost daily; he admitted to doing terrible things to women; he denigrated a war hero; he criticized a Gold Star family; he mocked a reporter with a serious physical disability.

However, he won! He was elected president without ever telling us precisely how he intends to bring jobs back, how he intends to destroy our enemies abroad, how he plans to pay for a mammoth infrastructure improvement plan.

Trump defeated a candidate who virtually every single political observer in America believed would win in a walk. He was outspent and out-organized … or so we all thought!

Historians will be scratching their heads. They’ll have to crack their knuckles and get their fingers limbered up as they prepare to write their first, second and third drafts of history.

The most puzzling element of this history-writing endeavor might be in determining how Trump managed to whip up anger among Americans who live in a country that is demonstrably better off than when the current president, Barack Hussein Obama, took office in January 2009.

Moreover, President Obama then sought to put his relatively high standing among Americans to the advantage of his preferred candidate — fellow Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton. He campaigned hard to Hillary; Michelle Obama delivered stunning speeches in support of Clinton while providing blistering critiques of Trump’s admitted misbehavior with women.

None of it mattered. None of it stuck. It didn’t gain traction.

I do not envy the task that awaits historians.

Good luck to you all. Many of us out here will be awaiting your conclusions.

national news, political news

Here’s a final shot at the popular vote issue

1 Comment

This likely will be the final entry on my blog about the popular vote result of the 2016 presidential election. I believe I need to make this point.

Some of my social media acquaintances have been yapping about a peculiar aspect of the popular vote, which Hillary Rodham Clinton captured over Donald J. Trump, who won enough electoral votes to be elected president of the United States.

They’ve been saying that “if you take away California,” Trump would have won the popular vote by 1.4 million ballots.

My reaction: huh? You can’t do that.

Clinton won California’s 55 electoral votes by winning more than 4 million votes in that state. It helped pad her national vote, which ended up around 2.8 million ballots cast for her than for Trump.

I get that Trump has been elected president. He won it fair and square. His team cobbled together a stunning electoral strategy that hardly anyone saw developing. He scored upsets in many of those “swing states” that had voted twice for President Obama in 2008 and 2012. Thus, the outcome was determined.

But you can’t manipulate the popular vote margin by removing certain states from the equation. All 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, are calculated in the final vote total.

Period. End of argument.

The debate over whether to throw out the Electoral College will proceed. I’m still undecided on that issue. I like the idea of giving additional clout to smaller states. However, the margin of the loser’s popular vote total in 2016 does diminish whatever “mandate” the winner will seek to claim.

The argument over Clinton’s popular vote victory, though, need not get muddled and conflated with nonsensical scenarios, such as deleting one or two states’ votes from the total count.

We are, after all, the United States of America.

I’m done now with this issue.

International news, national news

Texas lawmakers oppose Trump wall … who knew?

BorderFenceImage_jpg_800x1000_q100

Texas happens to constitute the largest single-state border with Mexico.

Do members of the Texas congressional delegation endorse Donald Trump’s notion of building a wall across our nation’s southern border?

Umm. No.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/12/20/where-texas-congressional-delegation-stands-trumps/

No Democratic member of the delegation favors the wall. Republicans who comprise a large majority of the state’s congressional delegation, interestingly, also are decidedly cool to the idea.

The Texas Tribune reports that Trump’s notion of building the wall runs headlong into a politically conservative principle. Check this out: “Among many Texas Republicans in Congress, the concept, while popular with the party’s base, collides with another conservative tenant: eminent domain.

“A wall would require the confiscation of ranching land near the Rio Grande, and several Texas Republicans expressed concern about the federal government taking away property — often held by families for generations — and the legal tangles that would inevitably arise from that.”

Well now. Do you think congressional Republicans will go along with federal seizure of private property, which happens to be a huge issue throughout our large state where private property owners possess almost every acre of land? There happen to be plenty of Republicans in New Mexico, Arizona and California who also adhere to the principle that private ownership is more important than a government takeover of property.

Eminent domain looms as the bogeyman that well could doom Trump’s ill-considered assertion that building a “beautiful wall” will end illegal immigration.

International news, national news, political news

No select panel, but let’s get to heart of hacking matter

bbhcr1a

Mitch McConnell says he won’t appoint a select Senate committee to examine the impact of alleged Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election.

OK. Fair enough, Mr. Majority Leader.

But let’s not allow these questions to wither and die now that your fellow Republican, Donald J. Trump, is about to become president of the United States.

We’ve got some questions that need clear, declarative answers.

What did the Russians do? How did they do it? Did their computer hacking efforts have a tangible impact on the election outcome? How in the world does the United States prevent this kind of computer hacking in the future?

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/mcconnell-rejects-calls-for-select-panel-on-russian-meddling/ar-BBxmZzP

If the majority leader were to ask for my opinion, I’d suggest that we need an independent commission that doesn’t answer to Senate Republicans or Democrats. We formed one of those after the 9/11 attacks and it came out with some serious findings about what went wrong and how we can prevent future terrorist attacks.

McConnell’s decision to nix a select committee is at odds with many Republicans — such as Sen. John McCain — along with Democrats are demanding. They want a select panel that would be tasked solely with looking at this most disturbing matter.

The new Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, said this, according to The Associated Press: “We don’t want this investigation to be political like the Benghazi investigation,” he said. “We don’t want it to just be finger pointing at one person or another.” Schumer added: “We want to find out what the Russians are doing to our political system and what other foreign governments might do to our political system. And then figure out a way to stop it.”

McConnell wants to hand this over to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Fine. Then allow them to clear the decks and concentrate on getting to the heart of what the Russians have done.

Seventeen intelligence agencies have concluded the same thing: The Russians intended to influence the presidential election. The president-elect has dismissed their conclusion, opening up a serious rift between his office and the intelligence community.

Trump and his team are virtually all alone in their view of this disturbing matter. Congress needs to get busy and tell us what the Russians did and when they did it.

national news, political news

POTUS, FLOTUS and kids take time off

2015-04-15-1429074557-4314458-president_vacations

A young Amarillo businessman — a friend of mine — griped recently that the Obama family would be jetting off to Hawaii for a little Christmas R&R.

It’s a tradition the president and first lady have followed since they moved into the White House in January 2009.

My friend seems to think that since the president is the lamest of ducks — with less than a month to go before he leaves office — he doesn’t need a vacation.

Actually, he does.

This brings up a point I want to make about presidential vacations … which is that they don’t really take vacations the way I — or my young friend, for that matter — understand the meaning of the word.

Presidents are never off the clock. They are accompanied by that military officer who’s carrying “The Football,” aka the briefcase containing the nuclear codes; the president gets his daily national security briefing; he is on-call 24/7.

I wrote about the Obamas’ vacation in a blog post two years ago:

https://highplainsblogger.com/2014/12/vacation-for-first-family-potus-will-need-the-rest/

I don’t begrudge presidents from taking time away from the office.

You may choose to believe or disbelieve my next point, but I’ll make it nonetheless. I won’t begrudge the next president and his family from taking time away.

Donald Trump will need some time away — presuming, of course that he works as hard at being president as his predecessors have done. Despite what my friend asserted the other day, Obama has worked his tail off, as did Presidents Bush 43, Clinton, Bush 41, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, Roosevelt … I’ll stop there.

They all faced crises and conflict. They need time to chill, to collect their thoughts, to spend time with their spouses and kids.

They are not out of touch or out of reach.

So, with that I say to the current president and his beautiful family: Surf’s up, enjoy yourselves … but keep the phone nearby. We might need you, Mr. President, in a pinch.

national news, political news

Take our ag commissioner, please

sid-miller

I don’t know if this will happen, but there’s some chatter out there about Donald J. Trump’s potential final Cabinet choice.

It would be a doozy if it comes to pass.

There’s some talk that Texas Agriculture Commissioner (and loudmouth) Sid Miller is under consideration to become the next secretary of agriculture.

Holy smokes, man! I don’t know quite how to react if such a thing happens.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/12/heres-why-usda-remains-trumps-last-unmade-cabinet-pick

Miller has not distinguished himself — in a positive way, by my reckoning — since becoming head of the Texas Department of Agriculture in 2015. Instead, he’s managed merely to call attention to himself through his reckless use of Facebook and his tasteless remarks about the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nominee.

Miller has been spreading “fake news” stories on the social medium and he infamously referred to Clinton in a tweet, using a hideously profane epithet that I won’t repeat here. He recently came to Amarillo and had a dinner at a downtown restaurant — and then made a big splash as he expressed his displeasure over the meal he consumed; suffice to say he didn’t make many new friends here in the heart of Trump Country with his ridiculous display of public petulance … over a steak!

Now it might be that Miller would depart Austin to serve in the president-elect’s Cabinet at secretary of agriculture.

He would be the third Texan selected by Trump: Rex Tillerson has been nominated as secretary of state, despite (or because of) his close friendship with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin; Rick Perry has been chosen to be energy secretary, despite his lack of any real experience in the energy sector.

What would Miller bring to USDA? He once was a champion rodeo cowboy. There. That’s all I know about him … other than his big mouth and penchant for making a spectacle of himself.

We’ll just have to wait for Trump’s final Cabinet call.

national news, political news

It’s not a ‘landslide,’ Donald … really

trump_donald_getty_1

May I call you “Donald”?

My head is about to explode as I listen to the president-elect refer to his victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton as a “historic landslide.”

Historic? Yes. Surely. No one saw this victory coming. No one predicted that Donald J. Trump would win this election, that he would become commander in chief of the world’s greatest military complex. No one predicted this showman/reality TV celebrity/real estate mogul/serial philanderer/admitted groper of women would actually get the keys to the White House.

It’s historic, man.

Landslide? Nope. Not even close to one.

http://thehill.com/homenews/news/311115-trump-touts-historic-electoral-college-victory

He is trailing Clinton by 2.8 million votes. He won enough electoral votes to become elected. He finished with 304 of them; Clinton’s total ends at 227. Interestingly, Clinton lost more “faithless electors” than Trump when the Electoral College cast its vote on Monday; that, too, is “historic.”

Trump cannot possibly actually believe he won in a landslide. He has seen the numbers. He must know about the nation’s great divide.

He keeps spouting this nonsense. I guess we just need to get used to it. There’ll be much more to come.