Category Archives: national news

International news, national news

Coalition building … then and now

James Baker III is a great American who’s served with honor over many years as secretary of state, secretary of commerce and White House chief of staff.

It was his job at the State Department that has brought him into the discussion over how President Obama should handle the fight against the Islamic State.

Baker appeared today on Meet the Press and expressed — no surprise there — misgivings about Obama’s plan to fight ISIL. Specifically, Baker questioned the ability of the president to gather the coalition needed to destroy the terrorists. He compared the latest coalition-building plan to the effort launched in 1990 in the run-up to the Persian Gulf War.

I have great respect for Baker, but the comparison isn’t entirely apt.

Baker was tasked with recruiting nations to aid in the ousting of Iraqi forces that invaded Kuwait, the oil-rich emirate. The mission was clear and simple: Oust the Iraqis from Kuwait using maximum military force.

President George H.W. Bush ordered the deployment of 500,000 American troops. Baker persuaded allies to send in another 200,000 troops. The allies — including the British, French and, oh yes, the Syrians — sent troops into combat to oust Saddam Hussein’s forces.

The task before Barack Obama, according to Baker, is to persuade Sunni Muslim nations to actually aid in a fight that hasn’t yet been defined. The president won’t commit ground troops; Baker believes we need to send special operations forces into Syria and Iraq to aid in locating targets for the air campaign that Obama has planned.

My point here is that the enemy isn’t nearly as clearly defined as the enemy was in Kuwait. Baker knows that as well. The Muslim nations need to have a clear mission, as do Americans who are weary of sending young warriors back into battle.

The conflict we’re entering now is infinitely more complicated than the 1990-91 Persian Gulf crisis.

Can it be done? Yes. With great care.

business news, national news, State news

Export oil, deplete supply, price goes up

Pressure reportedly is mounting on Capitol Hill to lift a four-decade ban on exporting U.S. crude oil.

This notion gives me pause. I’m not totally against it. It surely, though, does raise a fundamental economic question: If supply-and-demand policy regulates the price consumers pay for a product, would exporting oil overseas reduce the supply here at home and, thus, mean we pay more for what we purchase?

Momentum builds to allow US oil exports

I watched the price of gasoline drop twice Saturday while I was working. The price of regular unleaded gasoline is now around $3.07 per gallon in Amarillo.

Then this morning I read in the Wall Street Journal that prices might be coming down even more. And this comes as the pressure builds to allow U.S. exports of oil. Why? Because we have so much of it now being produced here at home, thanks to the enormous shale oil reserves being developed in places such as North Dakota and Montana — not to mention the production that’s occurring in West Texas and Oklahoma.

Some Republicans want to lift the ban enacted in the 1970s when oil was relatively scarce. We had been through those oil embargoes slapped on us by rogue Middle East nations. The price of fossil fuel products has gone nowhere but up ever since … until now.

The price is coming down, thanks to a lot of factors: better motor vehicle fuel efficiency; increased development of alternative energy sources, which means less reliance on fossil fuels to generate electricity.

All of this has contributed to a glut of oil supply in the United States.

Do we want to draw down that supply when Americans might start to see some serious relief as they fill up their motor vehicles with fuel?

Supply goes up, prices go down. Isn’t that what we want? I need to think some more about this idea.

national news, political news

Mark Sanford's back in the public eye

Mark Sanford had dropped off my radar. Indeed, I thought he was gone forever.

Until now.

He’s back. The reason has something to do with why he was such a notorious character in the first place.

http://news.msn.com/us/us-rep-sanford-calls-off-engagement-to-soul-mate

Back when he was the Republican governor of South Carolina, he famously disappeared for a few days. He told his staff to put the word out he was “hiking on the Appalachian Trail.” Turns out he was cavorting with his mistress — way down yonder in Argentina.

He lied to the public about his whereabouts and as AWOL from his elected duty as governor of the Palmetto State.

What a goofball.

Well, he later got engaged to his “soul mate,” Maria Belen Chapur, after his wife, Jenny, divorced him. He then got elected to Congress, where he served before becoming governor.

Now the nutty guy says he’s calling off his engagement to Chapur, apparently because of continuing difficulties with the former Mrs. Sanford, the one on whom he cheated with Chapur.

“No relationship can stand forever this tension,” wrote Sanford in a Facebook message to Chapur. He alluded to possibly getting re-engaged if his situation with Jenny Sanford calms down. There has been trouble over visitation with one of the couple’s children.

According to MSN.com: “His Facebook posting comes after attorneys for Jenny Sanford last week asked a family court judge to limit the lawmaker’s visitation with his youngest child. They also want Mark Sanford to undergo psychological tests and take anger management and parenting courses.”

Let’s remember that Mark Sanford once slept on his couch in his congressional office so he could be sure to get home every weekend to be with his wife and their children; he cited his belief in strong “family values.” Then he cheats on his wife, lies to his constituents, gets engaged to his mistress, and then breaks off his engagement while lawyers try to get this goober to undergo “anger management and parenting courses.”

Go away, congressman. Please?

International news, national news, political news

Did we abandon an ISIL captive?

My heart breaks for Diane Foley, whose son James was beheaded by Islamist terrorists.

Accordingly, I can understand her bitterness that the U.S. government perhaps could have done more to save her son’s life.

Perhaps.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/12/us/james-foley-mother-us-response/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Is it fair, though, so soon after this terrible tragedy to suggest the government failed to do all it could do to secure the journalist’s release?

It’s been revealed that in July the U.S. sent a Special Forces team into Syria to rescue Foley. It failed. The team arrived at where it thought Foley was being held but discovered only an empty building.

Diane Foley now alleges that national security officials threatened her with prosecution if she continued to raise money to pay a ransom for her son. Indeed, U.S. law now prohibits the government from negotiating with terrorists. It’s unclear — to me at least — just how Ms. Foley intended to pay the money if she was able to raise the amount the terrorists demanded.

Secretary of State John Kerry — who’s in Turkey seeking to build an international coalition to fight ISIL — adamantly denies any personal knowledge of a prosecution threat. Kerry told reporters: “I can tell you that I am totally unaware and would not condone anybody that I know of within the State Department making such statements.”

Quite clearly nothing can bring James Foley back. As for U.S. law prohibiting negotiating with terrorists, it needs to stay on the books.

A mother’s grief is overwhelming. A nation still mourns her son’s gruesome death. But let’s not overlay that grief with an understanding of what the government did — or couldn’t do under the law — to secure her son’s freedom.

Let’s concentrate instead on finding the murderers and administering battlefield “justice,” which is what the president and secretary of state already have vowed to do.

International news, national news, political news

OK, it's official: We're at war

Is it war or is it a counter-terrorism campaign?

I’d thought out loud in an earlier blog post that the terminology didn’t matter. We’re going after the Islamic State with heavy weapons. Secretary of State John Kerry — who’s been to war … in Vietnam — was reluctant to use that term. Now the commander in chief, Barack Obama, says we’re “at war” with ISIL.

http://news.yahoo.com/white-house-makes-official-us-war-220808683.html

Let’s be mindful, though, of what this “war” actually means, or doesn’t mean.

It doesn’t mean we’re going to take over a foreign capital, run up the Stars and Stripes and declare victory. Nor does it mean we’re going to receive surrender papers from a foreign government aboard some warship. It won’t result in our rebuilding (I hope) some nation that we’ve blown to smithereens trying to root out and kill terrorists.

What the “war” means is that we’re going to be in this fight for perhaps well past the foreseeable future. I suspect we’ll still be fighting this “war” when Barack Obama leaves office on Jan. 20, 2017. He’ll hand the battle plans over to his successor, wish that person good luck and then the new commander in chief will be left with trying to kill all the ISIL fighters our military can find.

The war against terrorism is something we launched after 9/11. Everyone in America knew the war wouldn’t have an end date. Heck, there really wasn’t an strategy to conclude the war when President Bush declared it after the terrorists killed thousands of Americans on that terrible Tuesday morning 13 years ago.

I still don’t give a damn what we call this conflict. If it’s war, then we’re going to have to redefine how we know when it’s over.

First, though, we’ll likely have to redefine when it ends. Good luck with that.

national news, political news

Palins were punchin' 'em out?

1 Comment

This little tidbit from the tundra almost defies anything that makes sense.

Almost …

It’s been reported that the family of former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin got involved in a brawl at someone’s home near Anchorage.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-loop/wp/2014/09/11/stretch-hummers-a-bloody-brawl-and-sarah-palin/

The Palin Gang showed up in a stretch Hummer — allegedly — went inside and then a fight broke out. Involved in the altercation reportedly were Sarah Barracuda’s husband, Todd, son Track and daughters Willow and Bristol. It apparently also involved a former boyfriend of one of the daughters.

And then, supposedly, someone apparently from the Palin Gang yelled, “Don’t you know who we are?”

Here’s how the Washington Post reported the story:

“Anchorage Police Department’s communications director Jennifer Castro confirmed to the Loop that there was a fight at a party where the Palins were in attendance. Castro said ‘just before midnight Anchorage police responded to a report of a verbal and physical altercation taking place between multiple subjects…’”.

Ugghhh!

And to think some people actually take seriously what this one-time Republican vice-presidential nominee has to say about anything.

I suppose equally interesting might be that on the day the news broke about this brawl, Sarah Barracuda appeared on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity” show to discuss President Obama’s strategy for destroying the Islamic State. Of course, Palin was critical of the president’s plans. However, Sean Hannity didn’t bother to ask her anything about the fight and whether she and her family were involved.

She still thinks of herself as a serious political pundit? You betcha.

national news

Obama better economically than Reagan? Wow!

Here’s a bit of a surprise: Barack Obama’s presidency has had a greater positive impact on the national economy than the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

You want more of a surprise? This assessment comes from Forbes Magazine, hardly known as a liberal-leaning publication prone to sing the praises of lefties.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2014/09/05/obama-outperforms-reagan-on-jobs-growth-and-investing/

Nope. Forbes isn’t exactly Mother Jones or The Nation.

But in the essay attached to this post, it notes that the unemployment rate has dropped more quickly during the Obama administration than it did when Reagan was president. The deficit? It’s dropped significantly while during the Reagan years it grew way beyond what was considered prudent at the time.

Forbes cites the Bureau of Labor Statistics as its source for the glowing economic report. It notes that the August job-growth figure was a disappointment; the nation added “only” 142,000 jobs in August, breaking the string of 200,000-job string of monthly reports. There’s no need to wallow in despair, according to Forbes: “Despite the lower than expected August jobs number, America will create about 2.5 million new jobs in 2014.”

This is worth noting — and I encourage you to read the Forbes article — because Obama’s critics continue to do an effective job of poor-mouthing the economy. There continues to be this perception among the public that the economy remains in the tank. For the life of me I cannot understand how the right wing is able to sell that notion. But it does.

I suppose one can pick apart all these economic indicators and find negative elements to highlight. It’s just interesting to me nevertheless that Forbes — founded by the late Malcolm Forbes’s father and continued by his one-time Republican presidential candidate son, Steve — would find so much good news to report about someone with whom the organization has so little in common.

International news, national news, political news

War or counter-terrorism effort?

We’re beginning now to parse the meaning of the word “war” and whether our effort to destroy the Islamic State means we’ve entered yet another armed conflict.

Secretary of State John Kerry disputed that terminology, declaring that the United States is embarking on a comprehensive “counter-terrorism” campaign to eradicate the hideous terrorists.

It doesn’t matter one damn bit to me what we call it.

All of this harkens back to when we declared “war” on international terrorism. President Bush reacted to the 9/11 attacks by tossing out the Taliban in Afghanistan. In doing so, he said the nation would be waging a multi-front war against terrorists, hunting them down wherever they lurked or hid.

Indeed, the 9/11 attacks on Washington and New York served — if you’ll pardon the use of this term — the Mother of All Wakeup Calls to this country. We’ve known about terrorists. We’ve understood intellectually they can do us harm. However, the 9/11 attacks were so brilliantly conceived and executed — and it pains me terribly to say it that way — that we were forced to ratchet up our vigilance to unprecedented levels.

So the war goes on.

Our campaign now to eradicate the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant can be called a war, or it can be called a counter-terrorism offensive.

I don’t care what they call it. The strategy just announced by President Obama is a continuation of what we’ve been doing ever since the terrorists committed their heinous act 13 years ago.

It’s a new kind of conflict with a new kind of enemy. I’m still hoping to learn how in the world we’ll ever be able to declare victory.

national news, Sports news

Independent probe needed in Rice case

The case of Ray Rice is getting serious.

The former Baltimore Ravens running back who hit his fiancée — who’s now his wife — is out of a job after knocking his wife unconscious in a New Jersey casino elevator.

http://www.foxsports.com/nfl/story/investigation-has-bought-nfl-roger-goodell-time-he-needs-ray-rice-091114

But it’s getting complicated now.

National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell said he didn’t see the video of Rice smashing his wife in the face until just the other day. The Associated Press reports that the league office got the video in April, two months after the incident.

The question: Did the commissioner cover up what he knew and when he knew it?

That’s where former FBI director Robert Mueller comes in. He’s going to conduct (presumably) a thorough, independent investigation of what happened. He’ll report back to the NFL and to the public.

At issue is whether the NFL sought to whitewash this case to protect its image. If it turns out Goodell knew far earlier than what he’s acknowledged, he ought to be fired summarily.

The bigger issue, of course, is how the organization is going to handle domestic violence cases involving its employees in the future. Rice initially got a two-game “suspension.” Then the video showing him punching his wife came out. The league suspended Rice indefinitely and the Ravens fired him from the team.

Robert Mueller needs to get to the bottom of this case and he needs to follow every lead he gets to get to the truth — and to who knew what and when they knew it.

national news, Sports news

Rice caught on camera; cut by Ravens, suspended by NFL

Ray Rice doesn’t think so, but it’s a good thing an elevator camera didn’t blink.

It happened to catch the former Baltimore Ravens running back in the act of cold-cocking his then-fiancée — who’s now his wife — in a hotel elevator.

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/11489134/baltimore-ravens-cut-ray-rice-new-video-surfaces

TMZ released copies of the video. The National Football League expressed appropriate outrage. The Ravens released Rice and the league has slapped him with an “indefinite” suspension.

This all comes after the league announced a tough new policy regarding domestic violence and after NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell — in an extraordinary mea culpa — disclosed that he “got it wrong” when he imposed a two-game suspension on Rice for allegedly beating the woman unconscious.

The camera now has revealed that there’s no “allegedly” about it. He did the deed and has been kicked out of the league presumably for the foreseeable future.

In July, Rice said this about what he did: “I know that’s not who I am as a man. That’s not who my mom raised me to be. If anybody knows me, they know I was raised by a single parent, and that was my mother. I let her down, I let my wife down, I let my daughter down. I let my wife’s parents down. I let the whole Baltimore community down. I let my teammates down. I let so many people down because of 30 seconds of my life that I know I can’t take back.”

That’s not who he is as a man? Well, I will differ with him on that. The video reveals something quite different.

Yes, he let a lot of people down. Still, he must face the punishment he’s been given.

The Ravens and the NFL have made exactly the right call.