Category Archives: political news

business news, International news, national news, political news, State news

Gov. Abbott sheds the dogma … and heads to Cuba

November 25, 2015 kanelis2012

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is using his office the right way while steering away from some of the dogma we’ve been hearing from those in his party about a particular issue.

Abbott is going to Cuba next week on a mission to promote Texas-Cuba trade.

Abbott is a proud Republican. But unlike some of his GOP brethren, he is putting common sense and what I call “enlightened self-interest” ahead of posturing.

Some prominent Republican politicians — namely Texan Ted Cruz and Floridian Marco Rubio, who are running for president — have called the re-establishment of relations with Cuba virtually a pact with Satan himself. These two Cuban-Americans still seem to fear the island nation that is governed by dedicated communists.

Why, how can President Obama grant those commies any favors while they still have one of the world’s worst human-rights records? That’s part of the mantra we’ve heard from some on the far right about this sensible diplomatic initiative.

Gov. Abbott often has joined some on the far right on a whole host of topics with which to criticize the president.

Not this time. Good for him. Better still, good for the state he governs.

The Texas Tribune’s Aman Batheja reports: “Texas was once a leading exporter to Cuba in a quiet partnership that helped produce hundreds of jobs and millions in revenue for the Lone Star State. Even following the implementation of the U.S. trade embargo more than 50 years ago, the relationship continued to thrive for decades.”

That stopped in the early 1960s when the United States ended all relations with Cuba in the wake of Fidel Castro’s takeover of the island nation’s government. The deep freeze in U.S.-Cuba relations lasted through eight American presidencies; meanwhile, Fidel Castro and his brother, Raul, have remained in power.

President Obama made the right call to restore relations. The Cold War is over. Cuba presents no threat to the United States. It’s still dirt poor. Yes, it’s still run by communists, but Cuba is far less of a threat to U.S. interests than, say, the People’s Republic of China, a nation with which we’ve had relations since 1978.

Texas has a lot of goods and commodities it can sell to Cuban interests. Let me think … what can we sell them from, oh, this part of the state? Oh, how about some beef, or maybe cotton for starters?

Travel safely, governor.

political news, Uncategorized

Time to suspend politics

November 23, 2015 kanelis2012

The business card I have been handing out for some time now talks about High Plains Blogger’s intent, which is to comment on “politics, current events and life experience.”

Well, dear reader, I’ve made a command decision regarding this blog.

I am suspending the “politics” part of this blog’s mission effective on Thanksgiving Day. My intention is to stay out of the political dialogue through Christmas. Heck, I might be inclined to wait until New Year’s Day before re-entering the fray.

Why the change?

I am weary of the anger and the nonsense that’s coming out of the mouths of all the presidential candidates … in both major political parties. What’s more — and this is even more to the point — I am weary of the back-and-forth that has ensued, not just among the candidates but also among their legions of supporters and opponents.

I’ve at times entered the fray with my own commentary, only to be sniped at by those who disagree with me. I don’t mind the disagreement. I’ve merely had it up to here with the anger that such commentary — not just from me — has engendered in partisans on both side of the aisle.

So, High Plains Blogger is going to take a breather from all of that.

Will this blog comment on current events as they occur? Certainly. It will not, though, engage in the political discourse that emanates from those events. And by all means the blog will comment on life experience, both personal and of things the author — that would be me — observes on his journey.

Rest assured on this point: I am not giving up totally on politics cold turkey. I will continue to comment on politics through my Twitter and Facebook feeds.

I do not intend to use this blog as a forum to state my own political bias. The way I figure it, Twitter only gives me 140 characters to make a statement. That’s efficient and doesn’t require too much emotional energy on my part; plus, my tweets are posted automatically to my Facebook feed, so — pow! just like that — I’m able to perform a two-fer.

But I’m also thinking of scaling back significantly the political commentary on those two social media outlets. Nor am I going to argue any point.

So, those of you who spend a lot of time engaging others in political debate and name-calling on social media are welcome to knock yourselves out; I will not join you in that exercise in futility.

Here’s my final thought on all of this.

Thanksgiving is a time to give thanks for all that we have. I am grateful beyond measure for the many blessings in my life. Christmas? Well, that is the time we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. What more can I say about that?

In keeping with the Christmas spirit, I hereby refuse to be dragged into the emotional gutter by politicians whose mission is to distort the other guys’ world view.

Thanksgiving is almost here. High Plains Blogger will stay in the game for a little while longer.

After that? I’ll see you on the other side.

International news, national news, political news, State news

Refugee fight pits states vs. the feds

November 23, 2015 kanelis2012

Just about any day now I expect some governor to declare that his or her state has the right to protect residents against foreigners, that the governor is preserving the “state’s right” to self-protection.

This might become the leading back story coming out of governors’ refusal to let Syrian refugees into their states.

But according to a University of Michigan law professor — not to mention constitutional scholars all over the place — the governors don’t have the authority to supersede federal law.

The bottom line, according to Richard Primus is this: “They can’t do it. The decision to admit a person to the United States belongs to the federal government exclusively. Once a person is legally admitted to the United States, she can live wherever she chooses. States don’t issue visas any more than they declare war. Indeed, putting foreign affairs under the firm control of one central government was one of the primary motivations of the Founders in creating the Constitution in the first place.”

Primus argues, though, that governors resisting the feds — such as what Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has done fairly routinely — makes good politics, even though it runs directly counter to what the law allows.

Primus writes that the states do have some say in refugee resettlement: “That’s not to say governors are totally powerless to shape the flow of refugees. There are things states can do to make themselves less attractive destinations. Most refugees need help getting their lives restarted—housing, language education, employment leads, and other social services. A fair amount of that resettlement work is run through state social-service agencies with the support of federal dollars. The states are the one with the boots on the ground in education, housing, and so forth—and they could simply decide not to take the federal money and not to provide resettlement services. Several governors have actually taken this line, saying that they’ll cease providing resettlement assistance.”

But to declare categorically that Syrians — or any other foreigner — cannot come to this country? That’s the federal government’s call.

national news, political news

Memo to GOP: You don’t want to anger Trump

November 23, 2015 kanelis2012

Donald Trump’s latest shot across the bow of the Republican Party leadership leaves me with decidedly mixed feelings.

He again has refused to rule out categorically an independent run for president if he doesn’t get the GOP nomination next summer.

He wants fair treatment by the party. He wants to be treated, I gather, with respect.

Well, if I were to advise Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus, I’d tell him to be very nice to Trump. Treat him right. Baby the fellow. Tell him constantly how bright he is and how right he is … on everything.

I’m not sure what Trump means by insisting on fair treatment by the GOP.

Suppose he shows up in Cleveland next summer without the party presidential nomination locked up. Suppose another candidate has the delegate count in the bag. I’m guessing Trump will want a prime-time slot to make his speech.

Based on what we’ve heard so far along the campaign trail, such a concession could blow up in the chairman’s face. You’ve heard Trump, yes? He tends to, uh, ramble a bit. He says some rather insulting things about world leaders, his fellow politicians and tends to shoot from the hip on, oh, just about any subject under the sun.

However, does the party want to deny him that chance and risk having him bolt the GOP and launch that independent candidacy, which surely is going to siphon off more votes from the Republican nominee than from whomever the Democrats nominate?

Chairman Priebus, I reckon this is why the party pays you the big bucks.

national news, political news

Louisianans try a new way

November 22, 2015 kanelis2012

Edwin Edwards once was, shall we say, a colorful Louisiana politician.

When I think of the former Democratic governor I think of two quotes attributed to him. One was that the only time he’d ever lose an election is if he got “caught with a dead girl or a live boy.” Another alleged Edwardsism goes that the people of his state not only expected their politicians to be crooked, they “demanded it” of them.

Well, today the voters of the Pelican State showed a different side of themselves. They rejected Republican candidate David Vitter’s bid to become governor and elected instead a Democratic state senator, John Bel Edwards … no relation to the infamous former Gov. Edwards.

Vitter, you see, is a sitting U.S. senator who in 2007 was caught fooling around with a prominent District of Columbia madam. His name appeared in some hookers’ black books.

His tawdry conduct became part of Edwards’s campaign strategy.

In deeply conservative and Republican Louisiana, Vitter was thought to be the prohibitive favorite to become the next governor, replacing Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal. Then Edwards, a former Army Ranger who had served in Iraq, launched a vicious attack ad that accused Vitter of “choosing prostitutes over patriots”; the ad took aim at Vitter’s Senate votes against veterans benefits.

Vitter’s campaign sought to portray Edwards as a liberal in the mold of President Obama, hoping that the president’s unpopularity in Louisiana would — if you’ll pardon the pun — turn the trick.

It didn’t.

I am heartened, though, to see that Louisianans decided they’d had enough of Vitter’s foolishness. They turned their back on a well-known incumbent senator who had sought another office back home — in the state that knows him well.

Perhaps, it turns out, they know him a little too well.

national news, political news, religious news

Cruz splits with Trump over Muslim registry

November 21, 2015 kanelis2012

Are you sitting down?

Of course you are. So … I’m about to say something positive about Sen. Ted Cruz, who has actually expressed a difference of opinion with Donald Trump, a fellow Republican candidate for president of the United States.

Trump’s offensive notion of establishing a registry for Muslims has come between the men.

The only thing about Cruz’s criticism — such as it is — that bothers me is that he qualified it by calling himself a “big fan” of Trump. He differs with him on the idea of keeping such an eagle eye on Muslims because of their faith.

Cruz said the “First Amendment protects religious liberty.”

That, folks, is the central reason why Trump’s idea is a non-starter.

Some critics have compared the idea of a religious registry — even for U.S. citizens — smacks of what Nazi Germany did to Jews living in that country prior to the outbreak of World War II. We all know where that effort led.

Trump has been trying to take back what he apparently told a reporter about whether he’d like to establish a data base to monitor Muslims. He said he didn’t say that precisely. The record, though, suggests he did when pressed by a reporter.

As the Texas Tribune reported: “I don’t know what Mr. Trump did or didn’t say,” Cruz told reporters after a town hall Friday afternoon in Harlan. “On the question of should the federal government keep a registry of any religious group? The answer’s of course not.”

So, there you have it. Cruz and Trump actually disagree on something.

From where I sit as I watch Cruz’s campaign for the presidency, that’s progress.

International news, national news, political news

What would ‘W’ do?

November 21, 2015 kanelis2012

Mark Shields comprises one-half of a talk show tandem that appears Friday nights on public television.

He and the other half, David Brooks, were spot on in their analysis of the political talk arising from the Paris terrorist attacks one week ago.

Shields, a noted liberal columnist, noted how President Bush responded immediately after al-Qaeda monsters hijacked those four jetliners and inflicted the terrible carnage on U.S. soil on 9/11.

“He went to a mosque,” Shields noted, and said “we are not at war with Islam.”

Shields and Brooks — the more conservative member of the “PBS NewsHour” duo — then both described the white-hot rhetoric we’re hearing today from politicians of both parties as being un-American and unpatriotic.

President Barack Obama has sought to make the same case that his immediate predecessor made. Yet the Republicans who 14 years ago saluted President Bush’s stance contend that the current incumbent, a Democrat, is “soft,” that he isn’t serious about this war against radical Islamic terrorists.

George W. Bush was the first leading politician to declare that the current war against terror must not be seen as a war against a religion. Barack H. Obama is the latest one to say the same thing.

Yet we hear other leading politicians talking about shadowing people of a certain religious faith. One of them, Republican candidate Donald Trump, hasn’t yet told us whether he would intend to track U.S. citizens who also happen to be Muslim, which if that is the case is categorically in defiance of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of religious liberty.

This is what this current discussion has revealed.

George W. Bush had it exactly right. His political descendants have it exactly wrong.

International news, national news, political news

Immigrant tide is reversing itself

November 20, 2015 kanelis2012

The world remains focused on events in, say, Syria and Europe.

However, get a load of this item: More Mexican citizens returned to their home country over a five-year period than came into the United States.

The Pew Research Center said that from 2009 to 2014, more than 1 million Mexicans returned home while 870,000 of them came to the United States.

Does that change the debate in this country? Quite possibly.

Presidential candidates — particularly some of them on the Republican side — have made immigration a theme of the upcoming White House campaign.

I’m not at all sure what the trend suggests. Pew is a reliable research outfit, with findings that are well-documented. One theory being kicked around is that the Great Recession of 2008-09 in the United States removed an incentive for Mexican citizens to come to the United States in search of jobs.

The inflow of migrants could increase as the U.S. economy continues to improve, according to Mark Hugo Lopez, a Hispanic researcher for Pew. According to USA Today, “In coming years, he said, the number of Mexicans may increase again if the U.S. economy continues to improve. But steady growth of Mexico’s economy and tighter controls along the southwest border mean the United States won’t see another massive wave of legal and illegal immigration like it did in recent decades, when the number of Mexican-born immigrants ballooned from 3 million to nearly 13 million, he said.”

Lopez added that the era of Mexican migration might be at an end.

So, while our attention is diverted to places far away, we see some interesting trends right at our doorstep.

Don’t look for critics of U.S. immigration policy to proclaim this as good news. Indeed, if foreign nationals anywhere in the world can find prosperity at home, well, that reduces the strain on the Land of Opportunity.

I consider that to be good news.

International news, national news, political news

WW II internment camps serve as justification?

November 20, 2015 kanelis2012

This takes the cake.

Of all the things that have been said in recent days about Syrian refugees and whether the United States should ban any more of them from coming to this country, the mayor of a significant U.S. city invokes the memory of … Japanese-American internment camps.

Roanoke (Va.) Mayor David Bowers, a Democrat, said this: “I’m reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from Isis now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”

Oh, my.

The internment of Japanese-Americans after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 — over the course of history — been declared a national tragedy. Yes, FDR felt compelled to order the internment of those loyal Americans out of fear of what he thought might happen. It was in fact a xenophobic response aimed at imprisoning people of a certain racial minority. The U.S. government did not respond in nearly that fashion to German-Americans or Italian-Americans, whose own ethnic ancestors also had declared war on the United States.

Now we have the mayor of Roanoke suggesting that the internment camps justify the near-panic being expressed in many political corners of this country in response to what occurred this past week in Paris with the massacre of 129 innocent victims by European jihadists.

I should add that many decades after the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans the U.S. government issued a formal apology to the descendants of those who were held captive by their own government. The actions taken then are now considered a shameful breach of our Constitution’s guarantee of civil liberties for all its citizens.

The ACLU of Virginia issued this statement: “The government’s denial of liberty and freedom to over 100,000 individuals of Japanese descent — many of whom were citizens or legal residents and half of whom were children — is a dark stain on America’s history that Mayor Bowers should learn from rather than seek to emulate.”

Mayor Bowers has said he never intended to offend anyone with his remarks.

Well, Mr. Mayor, you damn sure did.

See story here.

national news, political news

When did we devalue ‘executive experience’?

November 19, 2015 kanelis2012

The third Republican candidate for president has dropped out of the 2016 race.

Bobby Jindal of Louisiana joins Rick Perry of next-door Texas and Scott Walker of Wisconsin as GOP hopefuls who didn’t make the grade with an increasingly angry primary voter base.

What do these men have in common? They’re all either active governors or former governors. Which prompts the question: Whatever happened the notion that governors bring more “executive experience” to these campaigns than, say, senators or members of the House of Representatives?

A wise man — I can’t remember who — said that governors usually are better positioned than legislators to take the reins of government.

As RealClearPolitics reported: “Experience and expertise seems to be a non-factor this year, which is kind of mind-boggling,” Jindal supporter and Iowa GOP activist Shane Vander Hart told RCP.

Read the whole story here.

Indeed, one can look back into recent political history to see how voters have responded to presidential candidates with gubernatorial experience: Democrat Jimmy Carter of Georgia, elected in 1976; Republican Ronald Reagan of California, elected in 1980 and re-elected in 1984; Democrat Bill Clinton of Arkansas, elected in 1992 and re-elected in 1996; and Republican George W. Bush of Texas, elected in 2000 and re-elected in 2004.

Gov. Perry made the case when he announced his candidacy that governors are better prepared for the presidency than legislators. I wrote about it in my blog. See it here.

This year? Republican primary voters are going for a real estate mogul/reality TV star and a retired brain surgeon. Governors and former governors? They’re being ignored, tossed aside and relegated to virtual asterisks.

Democratic voters have one remaining former governor in the race: Martin O’Malley of Maryland. And of the three Democrats running for the White House, he’s polling a distant third behind a former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state, and a sitting U.S. senator.

Governors used to be the main men and women in these contests. They would tout their experience actually running state governments and how that experience prepared them for the Big Job.

Not any longer.

You want a measure of just how weird the upcoming presidential campaign is going to get? Take a look at what’s happening to those candidates with “executive experience.”

Commentary on politics, current events and life experience