Category Archives: political news

political news, State news

Texas may prove to be Trump GOP testing ground

TrumpTexas_jpg_800x1000_q100

If Donald J. Trump is having trouble wooing Texas Republicans into his embrace, then he might be having even more trouble everywhere else.

Ross Ramsey’s excellent analysis in the Texas Tribune lays out the problem that the presumptive GOP presidential nominee is having as he tightens the grip on his quest for the White House.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/06/06/analysis-texas-pols-trying-muster-words-support-tr/

Ramsey hold up Ted Cruz as an example of Trump’s Texas dilemma.

A lot of Texas politicians backed the junior U.S. senator’s bid for the White House. Cruz backed out of the race after the Indiana primary. He’s been mainly silent about Trump’s campaign ever since. Cruz has returned to work in the Senate.

His friends and allies, though, aren’t any more eager to attach themselves to Trump’s train than Cruz has been.

Trump said some pretty spiteful things about Cruz during the campaign. And, no, they didn’t gin up much sympathy from me … as I didn’t want Cruz to be the next president of the United States. If you’re Cruz, though, you should take some of these epithets personally.

And then there was that hideous attack on Heidi Cruz, for crying out loud!

Gov. Greg Abbott is kinda/sorta backing Trump. Ramsey noted that recently Abbott made a speech backing Trump without ever mentioning the candidate’s name. How do you do that?

Then again, Abbott has his own Trump burden to bear, given the state’s investigation into the defunct Trump University and the campaign contribution that showed up immediately after Abbott — while he was Texas attorney general — dropped the state’s legal action.

Hmmm.

Let’s not forget former Gov. Rick Perry, who once called Trump a “cancer on conservatism.” He’s now backing him out loud and proudly. As Ramsey points out, Perry also said he’d accept a vice-presidential invitation if it came from Trump.

Many actual Republicans in Texas accuse Trump of being one of them in name only. You know, a RINO.

But as Texas Republicans have demonstrated time and again since ascending to power in this state, they are willing to put actual qualifications and fitness aside when selecting candidates for high political office. Party labels matter more than anything else.

To be fair, Democrats did much the same thing when they ran the show. We still actually have a smattering of those “Yellow Dog Democrats” out there who’d vote for a yellow dog before they’d vote for a Republican.

Trump’s fight for the love of Texas Republicans remains a daunting task. As Ramsey notes:

“Many others in the GOP seem stuck on the road between their original choices for the Republican presidential nomination and Trump, the apparent winner.  Some will convert. Some will get out and proselytize for the nominee.

“But not yet. That first sale is the hardest one to close.”

local news, media news, political news

Social media bite a council candidate in the … you know

Social Media speech bubble on white background.

If you’re going to put your name into the public arena and if you intend to present yourself as a candidate for a governing board, you’d better be prepared for extra-meticulous scrutiny.

That means you’d better be ready to have everything you put into the public domain examined with a magnifying glass.

I’m talking about what you say on social media. If you’ve said something you might regret, then it’s best you not say it.

Social media have all but eliminated potential public officeholders’ zone of privacy.

There. Now I need to mention one Sandra McCartt, who’s one of five individuals being considered for a spot on the Amarillo City Council.

It appears there might be a problem with some of the things this person has said on her Facebook account.

She seems to have said some things about others that might come back to bite her.

McCartt is vying for the chance to succeed Place 2 Councilman Brian Eades, who’s leaving office in July.

I do not know Sandra McCartt. Nor am I willing to say that these things she’s reportedly said are a deal-breaker as the City Council considers her among the other finalists who are seeking to join the council. She’ll need to have her answers ready when the council starts peppering her with questions about why she said these things.

http://amarillo.com/news/local-news/2016-06-04/posts-spur-questions-about-council-candidate?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook_Amarillo_Globe-News

According to the Amarillo Globe-News: “Facebook comments by Sandra McCartt, a professional recruiter vying for the Place 2 position on council, picked at Amarillo, referring to it as ‘Jackass Flats,’ mocked Chinese people and compared the mayor to ‘a psychotic trunk monkey.’

“McCartt refers to Millenials as a generation of ‘entitled little shits.’ In other comments, she mocks blonde women, uses a slur against Jews to label a landlord with whom she was arguing, repeatedly refers to a woman as a ‘kid’ and ‘little girl’ and discounts the participation of entire groups in the political process.”

Amazing, yes? Well, I believe it is.

I find this new council-selection process fascinating in the extreme. It marks a radical departure from what’s been done before. Previous council appointees were chosen by the council basically with little public input. The new process is designed to be more transparent.

City Councilman Mark Nair, who helped develop this new selection process, acknowledged to the newspaper that there was no “vetting” involved with selecting the finalists.

Maybe there ought to have been some vetting.

In one of her Facebook posts, she said there were things she do for $10 per City Council meeting, but that listening to “all the crap from the dear public is not one of them.”

There are some other, um, revealing statements as well.

It looks me as though the City Council has given itself a large array of traps to run if it is going to “open up” the machinery of this selection process to public review.

One place it needs to start is to ensure that the individuals it is considering for membership on the five-member panel haven’t put thoughtless or careless statements into the public domain.

Once they’re out there, it’s impossible to take them all back.

legal news, national news, political news

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

gon0-004

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.

 

political news, State news

A summation of Trump’s unfitness

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Erica Grieder writes a blog for Texas Monthly.

She is highly opinionated, which is why I enjoy reading her blog. She doesn’t hide her disdain for Republican presumptive presidential nominee Donald J. Trump.

She writes: “My contempt for Donald Trump is admittedly sincere and abiding, but I suspect that even observers who take a more temperate view of the man might agree that the Republican Party’s decision to accept him as their presidential nominee is a calculation that could haunt them for years.

Here is more of what she wrote about Trump’s candidacy: “Trump is GOP nominee for president. His opponent, in the general election, will almost certainly be Hillary Clinton. He is technically qualified to hold the office, should he win 270 electoral votes, as he was born in the United States and is over the age of 35. At the same time, Trump is an uninformed and emotionally unstable plague who has, over 70 years of life, proven himself incapable of wielding any form of power without immediately looking for some ham-fisted way he can leverage it to serve his profoundly fragile ego.”

Here’s the entire blog posted on the Burka Blog website:

http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/greg-abbotts-trump-problem/

She writes that Gov. Greg Abbott is backing Trump even though he knows Trump is a phony and a fraud.

Back to one of the points in her paragraph that I shared with you here.

Trump’s candidacy is not built on a commitment to public service. It is built solely on his monstrous ego. Listen to what he says about his supposedly immense wealth, about his “world-class business” ventures, about the women in his life, about his singular plans to “make America great.”

Public service? It’s a foreign concept to this guy.

Say what you will about the ills of the nation — which I believe have been grossly overstated by Trump and those who have glommed on to what passes for this fellow’s campaign message.

We must do better than elect an entertainer with zero experience dealing with a government he now proposes to fix. He has no template from which to pattern whatever he intends to do.

If he intends to repair the government, someone needs to explain to me what he intends to produce.

Does this guy have a clue about anything that resembles an understanding of the massive governmental machine he intends to operate?

legal news, national news, political news

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

trump

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.

 

political news, Sports news

Ali’s era: simple and complex all at once

Mohammed Ali

As I’ve spent the day pondering last night’s sad news about Muhammad Ali’s death, I was struck by a realization of the era in which he was such a dominant force.

It was that he flourished in a simpler and more complex time.

Ali died of Parkinson’s disease at the age of 74. He apparently had become quite frail in the final months of his life. But what a departure from the picture of strength he exhibited back in the day.

The simplicity of his era is marked by this fact: As the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, Muhammad Ali was the baddest man on the planet.

The night he stopped Sonny Liston after the sixth round to win the title the first of three times, he yelled, “I shook up the world! I’m a ba-a-a-a-d man!” Yes he was.

In those days, without the multitude of boxing commissions and sanctioning bodies we have today, you had an undisputed champ. Ali was that man.

Today, well, it’s far different. You’ve got at least three heavyweight champions of the world. There are times when you have something called “interim champion”; I don’t even know what the hell that means.

All these “world champs” are recognized only by certain governing bodies. If you’ve got the patience, you can slog through all of them.

I quit following the sport — certainly the heavyweight division of it — about the time Larry Holmes walked away from the championship.

The complexity of Ali’s prime time is reflected in the political climate of the era.

Ali got his draft notice from the Selective Service Administration. He had converted to Islam. He vowed never to take up arms against people. Ali refused to be inducted into the armed forces to protest the Vietnam War.

And by 1967, the political mood of the nation had turned against the war. We weren’t winning it the way to which we had grown accustomed. Ali’s refusal to serve rubbed many millions of Americans raw. How dare this brash, young fighter refuse to serve his country, many people said. Why, he had amassed tremendous wealth because of all that the country had offered him.

That didn’t matter to Ali. He stood on principle.

The boxing authorities — the few of them that existed at the time — stripped him of his title. They denied him permits to fight. He was denied an opportunity to do the one thing he did better than anyone on Earth: beat people up.

The Vietnam War raged on while Ali was denied permission to fight.

The champ did not recede quietly into the shadows. He spoke out against the war. He spoke against what he perceived to be the systemic racism that was denying him his right of free expression.

Muhammad Ali became “the most recognizable person on Earth.”

Who today can make that claim?

The U.S. Supreme Court finally would undo the injustice brought to Ali. It voted unanimously to throw out Ali’s conviction for draft evasion. He returned to the ring.

The rest became history … and what a story Muhammad Ali was able to tell.

national news, political news

Fiery rhetoric producing violent reaction

protest

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.

political news, State news

What does former GOP chief really think … of Trump?

Fort Worth, Texas USA Feb. 26, 2016: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gets the endorsement of former candidate New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie during a rally at the Fort Worth Convention Center. Texas is the big prize in the upcoming Super Tuesday primary on March 2. (Bob Daemmrich/Polaris)

I don’t get to talk much these days with my old pal, former Texas Republican Party Chairman Tom Pauken.

He lives in Dallas; I’m way up yonder in Amarillo. Pauken has had business dealings in Amarillo, but I sense he’s backing away from them, as he would call whenever he came to town.

Here’s what I know about him.

He is a true-blue conservative. He’s the real thing. He doesn’t think much of the “neo-cons” who advised President George W. Bush; he also doesn’t think much of the former president, for that matter.

Pauken served as an Army intelligence officer in Vietnam and he believes the Iraq War was a mistake. He believes in low taxes, less government spending and he is fervently pro-life on abortion.

He’s also penned an essay in which he declares his belief that the Texas Republican National Convention delegation will line up to support the party’s eventual nominee Donald J. Trump, even though most voters endorsed U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in the Texas GOP primary this past March.

https://www.tribtalk.org/2016/06/03/trumps-in-charge-but-he-shouldnt-take-it-for-granted/

What I didn’t read in Pauken’s essay is a personal endorsement from him for the man who’s about to become the GOP’s presidential nominee. I attached the link to this blog, so you can see for yourself. Pauken seems strangely detached from Trump — which has become sort of the norm for many of the party’s elder statesmen and women.

What goes around ...

Trump is getting a lot of endorsements, to be sure. U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan announced his intention to back him, but one could not escape the feeling that the speaker was swallowing real hard before he uttered his words of endorsement.

My trick knee is acting up again. It’s telling me that former Texas GOP chairman Pauken is getting a lump in his own throat as he ponders his party ‘s nomination of someone such as Donald Trump.

 

legal news, national news, political news

Judge Curiel: hard-charging American lawyer

trump

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.