Category Archives: national news

national news, political news

Here come the conspiracy theories

GTY_hillary_clinton_donald_trump_split_jt_150912_16x9_992

Hillary Rodham Clinton has been deemed the “presumptive presidential nominee” for the Democratic Party.

Wait for it. Here come the conspiracy theories from the supporters of Bernie Sanders, who are saying that the media should have waited to report the news.

Sure thing. I believe that’s one definition of “prior restraint.”

I do not think that’s doable in a society that supposedly prides itself in a media that isn’t controlled, manipulated or coerced into hiding news as it happens.

The Associated Press has tabulated the pledged delegates and the so-called “super delegates” that the Democratic Party uses to nominate its presidential candidates. AP has determined that, yep, Clinton has put the nomination out of reach.

Sen. Sanders has been pledging to take this fight all the way to the party nominating convention this summer in Philadelphia. Fine. That’s his right.

Sanders and his supporters have said the “mainstream media” are in cahoots with the party brass in wanting Clinton nominated.

I’m not crazy about this super delegate business. I’d prefer that Democrats followed the Republican model in apportioning convention delegates. The “supers” comprise elected officials or other power party bigwigs who are free to vote for whomever they want. Given that the U.S. Constitution makes no mention of political parties, this process is done strictly at the party level; it’s not written in law anywhere.

This, though, is how the Democrats do it. It’s worked so far.

So now we have a presumptive Democratic nominee to join the presumptive Republican nominee. It’s likely “game over” for Sanders, just as it’s over for all of the 16 Republicans who ran against Donald J. Trump for that party’s nomination.

Let’s dispense with the conspiracy theories.

Now we get to witness Clinton vs. Trump.

Oh, boy! Now, if only we could hope for a dignified and high-minded contest for the presidency of the United States of America.

If only …

 

military news, national news

They fought to save the world

On June 6, 1984, President Ronald Reagan went to the Normandy coast of France to honor the 40th anniversary of the invasion that took place there.

He paid tribute to “the boys of Pointe du Hoc,” the U.S. Army Rangers who scaled the cliffs overlooking Omaha Beach on that horrifying day.

They had sailed across the English Channel to free Europe from tyranny.

Thirty-two years after that memorial commemoration, President Reagan’s speech is worth watching yet again.

I won’t try to glorify it here.

These men saved the world. God bless them all.

 

military news, national news, political news

Three words launched campaign to save the world

Eisenhower_d-day

“OK. We’ll go.”

Right then and right there, with those words, the order went out from the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe.

The invasion of Europe was on.

General of the U.S. Army Dwight D. Eisenhower faced a terrible dilemma. The weather over the English Channel had been horrible. The invasion of France had been delayed once already. Hundreds of thousands of men had assembled and prepared in Great Britain for Operation Overlord.

Ike then caught a bit of a break. The weather was going to cooperate — more or less — on June 6, 1944. That’s when he decided to issue the order.

The men set out in ships. They boarded landing craft and hit the French coastline along five beachheads. American and British soldiers stormed four of them; Canadians stormed the fifth one.

Eisenhower had drafted two statements in preparation for that event, one to proclaim victory on the beach, the other to take full responsibility in case it went badly. He didn’t have to deliver the latter statement.

It has become fashionable in the present day to invoke Ike’s memory as we discuss the merits of the individuals seeking the U.S. presidency. Those who defend the current Republican presumptive nominee’s lack of government experience often cite Eisenhower’s own lack of such qualifications when he ran for president in 1952.

No, he didn’t have that kind of experience. All he did, though, was save the world from tyranny.

Eight years after saying simply, “OK. We’ll go,” the presidency became his for the taking.

So it was on this day 72 years ago that thousands upon thousands of young men followed their commander’s order.

May God bless them all.

national news, Sports news

The Champ would revel in this reception

ali home

Just how far have race relations gone in the past five-plus decades?

Consider what is happening in Louisville, Ky., the city where a baby named Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. came into this world.

It is getting ready for one of the most awe-inspiring salutes imaginable for the man that baby became.

Louisville didn’t react this way around, oh, 1960, when Cassius Clay came home from Rome with an Olympic gold medal in boxing. He returned from the Olympics and was met with overt racism in his home town.

This young black athlete who had ingratiated himself to the foreign press and to the other international athletes who gathered for the Olympics did not find such warmth when he came home.

His struggle for acceptance began.

That young man eventually grew into a gigantic figure on the world stage. He won the heavyweight professional boxing championship in 1964. Clay converted to Islam and changed his name.

He became Muhammad Ali.

Ali experienced plenty of wrath for becoming a Black Muslim. Then came his refusal to be inducted into the armed forces, citing his religious belief and his role as a Muslim minister. He couldn’t in good conscience serve his country during a time of war, in Vietnam.

More wrath came his way.

The boxing authorities stripped him of his title. They denied him the right to earn a living. He was banned from boxing.

Then he became an iconic figure on university campuses during his three-plus years in boxing exile. He spoke out against the Vietnam War, against the racism that pervaded the nation and against injustice.

Then he became the world’s most famous person.

The court overturned his conviction for draft evasion. He returned to the ring. He won the heavyweight title twice more.

He retired from boxing in 1981 and in 1984 was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

Muhammad Ali died Friday at the age of 74.

Louisville, the city of his birth and the city where his neighbors formerly scorned him, now is preparing to say farewell to its most favorite son.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/more-sports/hundreds-pay-tribute-to-muhammad-ali-at-his-boyhood-home/ar-BBtT1G5?li=BBnb7Kz

Crowds are gathering at Ali’s boyhood home. People are flocking to Louisville. The mayor will speak at Ali’s funeral. So will former President Bill Clinton, who was among 80,000 spectators in the stadium who wept in the summer of 1996 as Ali emerged to light the Olympic flame in Atlanta. The noted comedian Billy Crystal also will eulogize The Champ.

The city isn’t the same today as it was when Cassius Clay entered it. It’s a much better place that will bid farewell on Friday to Muhammad Ali.

The Champ would revel in the sendoff he’s about to receive.

legal news, national news, political news

Former AG says Trump should challenge judge’s ‘fairness’

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Donald J. Trump has gained an interesting ally in his dispute with a federal judge hearing a case involving a “university” that Trump founded some years ago.

The ally is former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who says the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is right to question whether U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel can judge his case fairly and impartially.

I’ll give Gonzales his due in one regard: the Texan argues his point with clarity and nuance, which is something that Trump is incapable of doing.

At issue, according to Gonzales, is Curiel’s association with a group called La Raza of San Diego, which Trump says is affiliated with the National Council of La Raza, a group formed to advocate for Latino issues. The Washington Post, though, has reported that NCLR and the San Diego outfit are unaffiliated.

That hasn’t stopped Trump, who has said that Curiel is “a Mexican,” which makes him unfit to hear the case. Curiel, of course, is an Indiana-born American citizen born to immigrants from Mexico. Trump’s alleged “reasoning” is that Curiel “hates” him because Trump wants to “build a wall, OK?” along our nation’s border with Mexico.

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/282222-former-bush-ag-trump-right-to-challenge-judges-fairness

Gonzales, who served as AG during the George W. Bush administration, has said that Curiel’s association even with the San Diego La Raza group should cause questions about his fairness in hearing the Trump University case. Curiel is presiding over three lawsuits brought by former students of the for-profit educational program who contend they were bilked out of money they spent to take courses.

It’s important to note what Gonzales wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post: “As someone whose own ancestors came to the United States from Mexico, I know ethnicity alone cannot pose a conflict of interests. But there may be other factors to consider in determining whether Trump’s concerns about getting an impartial trial are reasonable.”

Here’s Gonzales’ essay:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/04/alberto-r-gonzales-trump-has-a-right-to-question-whether-hes-getting-a-fair-trial/

You see, that is what Trump did when he challenged Judge Curiel’s ability to adjudicate this matter. He laid it solely on the man’s ethnicity. What’s more, he did so with utter disregard for the fact that the judge is no more “a Mexican” than Trump himself is “a Scotsman,” given that Trump’s mother emigrated to the United States from Scotland.

So, let’s have this discussion about whether a judge can preside with impartiality and fairness over a controversial case … but let’s leave the judge’s ethnicity out of it.

 

legal news, national news, political news

Has the GOP nominee-to-be finally gone too far?

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This might be considered something of a rhetorical question with no answer at least readily available, but I’ll pose it anyway.

Has Donald J. Trump finally issued the nonsensical statement that delivers the message many of us have known all along — that he is temperamentally unfit for the office of president of the United States?

The presumptive Republican nominee is getting shelled not just by Democrats, but by his new “best friend,” House Republican Speaker Paul Ryan, over comments he made about a federal judge.

Trump referred to U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel as “a Mexican” while declaring that the judge is guilty of a conflict of interest in the case he is hearing regarding the defunct Trump University.

Some former students have filed suit against Trump and the “university” he founded, claiming they were bilked out of money they shelled out to attend this online educational program.

Curiel isn’t Mexican. He’s an American. He was born in Indiana. His parents are immigrants from Mexico. He went to California after completing law school and became a hard-charging prosecutor who put many drug lords behind bars.

Now he’s hearing this Trump U case, but Trump says he’s got a conflict because the presidential candidate wants to “build a wall” along our border with Mexico to keep illegal immigrants out. Therefore, according to Trump, Curiel cannot judge this case fairly because of his heritage.

The blowback on this comment has been intense and sustained.

Ryan, who just 24 hours before Trump made the “Mexican” comment had endorsed Trump’s candidacy, criticized the candidate’s “left-field” assertion.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-attacks-223898

And, of course, the comment has drawn relentless fire from Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, who said: “If our president doesn’t believe in the rule of law, doesn’t believe in our constitution with a separation of power with an independent judiciary, that is one of the most dangerous signals that we are dealing with somebody who is a demagogue.”

She added, “If we start disqualifying people because of who their parents and grandparents might be and where they came from,” Clinton continued. “That would be running counter to everything we believe in.”

I am leery of predicting that Trump has finally uttered the politically fatal campaign gaffe. He’s had so many such moments along the way that — in a normal election season –Trump’s candidacy would have been tossed aside long ago.

I am an optimist by nature. My optimism has been dealt a boost once again by the Republican candidate’s loud and uncontrollable mouth.

 

national news, political news

Fiery rhetoric producing violent reaction

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I believe it was Tonto who once provided a bit of sidekick wisdom to the Lone Ranger when he said, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

We’re seeing violence erupting at Donald J. Trump’s political rallies. It seemed to come to a full boil today in San Jose, Calif., when protestors attacked Trump supporters at the Republican presidential nominee-to-be’s rally.

It is utterly disgraceful for those who disagree with a political candidate to attack the candidate’s supporters, which is what happened in San Jose.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/donald-trump-campaign-violence-223893

That was the second wrong. The first one has been the candidate’s fiery rhetoric all along the campaign trail that has been inciting the violence.

Look, the violence we’re seeing at these rallies is absolutely uncalled-for. It’s un-American to deny people the right to exercise their right of political expression.

Oh sure, we’re hearing from those who say the protesters/hooligans are exercising their First Amendment rights of political expression. How? By chasing down Trump supporters and attacking them with fists and feet?

Have these demonstrators ever heard of “peaceful assembly”? Are they unaware of that provision?

Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is partly to blame for what has been transpiring at his rallies. The bulk of the blame, though, belongs to those who act on that rhetoric with violence.

It is long past time for the candidate, Trump, to condemn this violence and to tamp down his own incendiary comments.

Moreover, it also is long past time for those who feel the need to protest at these rallies to realize that there is a right way to do so and a wrong way.

What happened today in San Jose was wrong … in the extreme.

environmental news, national news

Those signs are up for a reason

BBtPTUl

Yellowstone National Park officials are unambiguous about how people should interact with the wildlife that roam the park.

Do not do it. Period.

That didn’t deter a Canadian visitor and his son from interfering with Mother Nature when they grabbed a newborn bison and put it into their SUV, thinking they were saving its life.

Well, they didn’t.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/canadian-men-defend-loading-yellowstone-bison-calf-into-vehicle/ar-BBtPHPl?li=BBnb7Kz

Shamash Kassam and his son, Shakeel, would learn in quick order just why the park insists that human beings keep their hands off these beasts.

The park took the critter and then tried to re-integrate it with its herd. The mama bison rejected her baby, which then sought to approach other human beings, putting itself into imminent danger.

It was then that park rangers had to euthanize the little critter.

My hope is that rangers gave Papa and Son Kassam a serious tongue-lashing for interfering with Mother Nature’s way.

Shamash Kassam said he and his son thought the animal was shivering. They didn’t want it exposed to the elements.

How can the National Park Service make it any clearer?

Human beings should not ever interact with wildlife, which are called “wildlife” for a reason.

legal news, national news, political news

Judge Curiel: hard-charging American lawyer

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Gonzalo Curiel was born in Indiana to parents who came to this country from Mexico.

He graduated from high school, went off to college, got his law degree and became an aggressive prosecutor.

He’s now a federal district judge. He’s an all-American guy, from what I know of him.

That, however, hasn’t stopped the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee, one Donald J. Trump, from launching a scurrilous attack on Judge Curiel. The reason for his attack? Trump called Curiel “a Mexican.” He called him a “disgrace,” and said other judges need to examine Judge Curiel.

Curiel, of course, is not “a Mexican.” He’s as American as Trump, whose own mother also was an immigrant.

That didn’t stop Trump from shouting from a campaign podium that Curiel needs to recuse himself from a case he is hearing involving the now-defunct Trump University. It seems that Curiel’s ethnicity disqualifies him from hearing the case because, according to Trump, he “hates” the nominee-to-be because of Trump’s inflammatory statements about Mexican immigrants.

Y’all, this is the latest in an interminable line of insults and provocation that have poured out of Trump’s pie hole ever since he announced his intention to seek the GOP presidential nomination.

Judge Curiel’s standing as a federal judge hearing this case is as solid as it gets. Trump’s suggestion that he cannot judge this case fairly is yet another attempt to denigrate someone solely on the basis of his ethnicity.

Trump’s accusations against Curiel are going to remain unchallenged by the target, the judge himself. As the Atlantic magazine noted: “Corrosive personal attacks aren’t new behavior for the presumptive Republican nominee. But unlike other targets of Trump’s ire, Curiel cannot defend himself in any forum. He acknowledged in an order last Friday that Trump had ‘placed the integrity of these court proceedings at issue,’ but will almost certainly go no further than that observation. Curiel is bound by the judicial code of ethics, which says that federal judges ‘should not make public comment on the merits of a matter pending or impending in any court,’ including their own. The code also says judges ‘should not be swayed by partisan interests, public clamor, or fear of criticism.’”

Here’s the rest of the article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/donald-trump-gonzalo-curiel/485636/

If only another disgraceful exhibition of intemperance would gain traction among those who keep standing behind this guy. Who’s to say what effect, if any, these latest remarks are going to have?

From my perch in the middle of what’s going to be called Trump Country, it’s just one more example of a presumptive presidential nominee’s unfitness for the job he is seeking.

 

legal news, national news, political news

‘Sic federal regulators on his critics’

2 Comments

trust-1

A single line jumped out at me as I looked at the New York Times article on Donald J. Trump’s view of the U.S. Constitution.

Adam Liptak’s story goes through a litany of concerns that constitutional scholars — across the political spectrum — have expressed about the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s views.

Then he writes of Trump: “He has threatened to sic federal regulators on his critics.”

That sentence stopped me cold. I froze.

Do you remember what happened to the last president who decided to “sic federal regulators on his critics”?

If you don’t, I’ll remind you.

President Richard Nixon did that very thing, we learned during the congressional investigation of the Watergate constitutional crisis.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/us/politics/donald-trump-constitution-power.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

That revelation — along with many others — led the House Judiciary Committee to approve articles of impeachment against the president, who then resigned his office on Aug. 9, 1974, thus ending, in the words of his successor, President Gerald Ford, “our long national nightmare.”

Trump wants to make it easier to sue the media for libel; he wants to ban Muslims from entering the United States; he attacked a federal judge solely on the basis of his ethnicity, calling the American-born jurist “a Mexican” who, according to Trump, “hates me.”

Any one of those occurrences would be a recipe for a top-of-the-line constitutional crisis. I’m trying to imagine what could happen if more than one of those things ever were to occur if a President Trump were to settle in behind that big desk in the Oval Office.

Here’s a comment from a conservative thinker, taken from Liptak’s article: “David Post, a retired law professor who now writes for the Volokh Conspiracy, a conservative-leaning law blog, said those comments had crossed a line.

“’This is how authoritarianism starts, with a president who does not respect the judiciary,’ Mr. Post said. ‘You can criticize the judicial system, you can criticize individual cases, you can criticize individual judges. But the president has to be clear that the law is the law and that he enforces the law. That is his constitutional obligation.’”

I believe this is a major part of what Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday when she described Trump as being “temperamentally unfit” to become president of the United States.