Category Archives: political news

political news

Town elects black female mayor … resignations follow

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Tyrus Byrd is the new mayor of Parma, Mo.

She’s the town’s first African-American female mayor.

She also is having to start governing without the aid of some senior city officials and some police officers, who quit shortly after Byrd took office.

http://www.kfvs12.com/Clip/11389937/some-police-city-officials-resign-after-new-parma-mayor-elected#.VTQ3WwbrBpI.twitter

What gives here? What in the world did the new mayor say during her campaign that would cause such a tempest?

And is it fair to ask if the issues are related mainly — if not exclusively — to the race of the new mayor?

There. I’ve just asked it.

 

national news, political news

Why do media keep referring to 'Hillary'?

I don’t intend to belabor this point, but it’s worth noting nevertheless.

The media seem quite comfortable referring to the presume favorite for the Democratic Party presidential nomination only by her first name.

It’s “Hillary says” such and such, or “Hillary need to explain” this or that, or “Hillary has hit the road.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/hillary-clinton-2016-election-media-strategy-117118.html?hp=t4_r

Is it a sexist thing? Or is it just that the former first lady, U.S. senator, secretary of state and 2008 presidential candidate has become so familiar that only a first name is needed. Or are media representatives seeking to knock her down a peg or two by using the first-name-only reference?

Athletes often ascend to that status: Wilt, Arnie, Magic, Julius, Mickey and Reggie come to mind.

Hillary Rodham Clinton has achieved some kind of mysterious air of familiarity with the media.

The task ahead of her, though, is to build some familiarity with average Americans. Folks like you and me.

I dislike referring to the first declared 2016 Democratic presidential candidate by her first name. I continue to believe that to treat her the same way one should treat all the men who will run for president, it’s good to refer to her in precisely the same manner we do those men.

But think about this for a moment. Republicans might have a female candidate of their own to consider during the primaries. That would be Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett/Packard and one-time GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate in California.

Is she going to become “Carly”?

Somehow, the ring of familiarity just isn’t there as it is with Hillary.

 

political news

Rubio is right: Sexual orientation is no 'choice'

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Sen. Marco Rubio wants to be president. To do that he’s got to sound reasonable.

The young Florida Republican, by golly, is starting to get some traction on the reasonableness bandwagon.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/19/marco-rubio-gay-rights_n_7096180.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

One’s sexual orientation, he said today on “Face the Nation,” is not a choice. It’s who that person is.

Good call, senator.

He stops short of endorsing gay marriage, though. He believes marriage should be a union involving a man and a woman. He says he favors “traditional” marriage.

I am heartened, though, to understand that he does not buy into the tripe being tossed around that someone states a “preference” for being intimate with someone else. I’ve long believed sexual orientation — whether it’s heterosexual or homosexual — is part of a person’s DNA.

I’m glad to see that Marco Rubio understands it, too.

Now, if we can just get him to change his mind about normalizing relations with Cuba …

 

national news, political news, Uncategorized

President, Congress head for rocky stretch run

There ought to be little doubt left that President Barack Obama’s final laps at the White House are going to be full of bitter quarrels with another “co-equal branch of government,” the U.S. Congress.

It didn’t need to come to this. But it has.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/barack-obama-delaying-loretta-lynch-vote-embarrassing-gop-117081.html?hp=b1_r1

The president took particular umbrage the other day at the Senate’s inexcusable delays in confirming Loretta Lynch to become the next attorney general.

“Nobody can describe a reason for it beyond political gamesmanship in the Senate,” Obama said during a news conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. “I have to say that there are times where the dysfunction in the Senate just goes too far. This is an example of it.”

As Politico reports, part of the reason for this dysfunction appears to be that the previous Congress opted out of deciding Lynch’s nomination, preferring to hand the job over to the current Congress. I’ll admit to supporting that view, given that the 113th Congress was leaving office. I put some measure of faith in the 114th Congress being able to do right by Lynch, the president and the cause of ensuring that we have a fully functioning Justice Department.

I guess I should have known better. My bad.

The delay now has nothing to do with her qualifications, which are superlative. It has everything to do with side issues that Senate Republicans have concocted as a pretext.

And the president calls it an “embarrassment.” Do you think? I do.

And get this, also from Politico: “Lynch was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Feb. 26, so her nomination has lingered on the Senate floor for 50 days. That is longer than the previous seven attorneys general had to wait from committee approval to floor confirmation vote — combined.”

No wonder the president is angry.

It’s not going to get any better, Mr. President. Bet on a rough ride until the end of your presidency.

 

national news, political news

Proud of my hyphenated heritage

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Bobby Jindal says he’s tired of “hyphenated Americans.” The Republican governor of Louisiana and possible 2016 presidential candidate said his parents didn’t come to America to raise Indian-Americans.

So, let’s all just be known as Americans, he says.

Well, OK, Gov. Jindal. I respect your desire to be known as an American without the hyphen.

However, I am a hyphenated American and am damn proud of it.

Jindal ‘tired of the hyphenated Americans’

My grandparents came here from southern Europe. My dad’s parents grew up in neighboring villages in southern Greece. Mom’s parents grew up on a tiny island in the Sea of Marmara, the small body of water that separates European Turkey from Asian Turkey; they were of Greek heritage as well.

They all came to this country to become Americans, just as Jindal’s parents came here from India.

My grandparents, though, never lost touch with their heritage and they passed it along to their grandkids.

It might be that my sisters and I have a fairly unique distinction of being “full-blooded” something, rather than a mix of various heritages. Perhaps that’s why I have this particular desire to identify myself as a Greek-American. It’s easy to say. Most people know about Greece and its profound contribution to the development western civilization.

They also ought to know about the ancient rivalry that persists to this very day between Greece and Turkey, nations that have gone to war with each other more times than I can even count.

Having proclaimed my pride in my hyphenated heritage, I take a back seat to no one in my love of the country of my birth. For that matter, all four of my grandparents — all of whom chose to move here — felt the very same way about their adopted home.

Jindal spoke to the First in the Nation summit in New Hampshire. “I don’t know about you, I’m tired of the hyphenated Americans. No more ‘African-Americans.’ No more ‘Indian-Americans.’ No more ‘Asian-Americans,’ ” Jindal said, drawing applause.

Fine, governor. That’s your call.

Me? I’ll stick with the hyphen. It’s a source of pride.

military news, national news, political news

Mr. President, you see … we have this bomb

I posted earlier today a blog item about how Franklin Roosevelt’s death changed the vice presidency for the better.

Vice President Harry Truman became president upon FDR’s death in April 1945. He took office, asked his Cabinet to pray for him and then set about finishing off the Axis Powers as World War II came to an end. Nazi Germany surrendered just about three weeks after FDR’s death. The Pacific combat remained to be fought.

But he knew next to nothing about the secrets that FDR took with him to the grave. One of them involved the Manhattan Project. Imagine the conversation taking place between Secretary of War Henry Stimson and the president of the United States.

Stimson: Uh, Mr. President? I’ve got something to discuss with you.

Truman: Sure, Henry. What is it?

Stimson: Well, sir, we’re developing this bomb out in New Mexico. We’ve been working with really smart fellow: Bob Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein, to name just three.

Truman: Bomb? We’ve got all kinds of bombs. We dropped them by the thousands every day in Europe and we’re still doing so in the Pacific.

Stimson: But Mr. President, this bomb is a big one. Really, really big. It’s an atomic bomb. I mean, when it explodes, it registers enough firepower to equal several thousand pounds of dynamite.

Truman: Holy s***, Henry. One bomb equals all that power?

Stimson: Yes sir. We’re going to detonate one of them in July out in Alamogordo. It’ll be the first one. If it works, we’re going to propose something quite dramatic.

Truman: And that is … ?

Stimson: We think we ought to use it on Japan. Send them a message that if they keep fighting we’ll use it again and again. Mr. President, we don’t think the Japanese will have the stomach for many of these.

Truman: OK, Henry, we’ll wait to see how the test blast goes and then we’ll make that call.

***

The test went off successfully. Less than a month later, President Truman issued the order to bomb Hiroshima. The Enola Gay took off on Aug. 6. Three days later, Nagasaki was demolished by the second A-bomb — and the rest is history.

God bless President Truman.

national news, political news

Yep, VPOTUS is an important office

Jeffrey Frank’s essay in The New Yorker lays it out clearly.

The office of vice president of the United States is the second-most important office in the country, if not the world. It took the death of a president to make that fact abundantly clear.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-f-d-r-s-death-changed-the-vice-presidency

Frank writes about Franklin Roosevelt’s death 70 years ago, on April 12, 1945. Vice President Harry Truman was told of FDR’s death in Georgia. He was rushed to the White House and sworn in as president.

It’s what President Truman didn’t know at the time that has been the subject of discussion ever since.

He didn’t know about the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb, which then ended World War II in August 1945.

Truman only that there was something afoot in New Mexico. Secretary of War Henry Stimson told the president he had something to tell him involving a top-secret project. He informed him of the bomb and said, in effect, that if we use this device it could end the war in a hurry.

The gist of Frank’s essay is that the vice presidency was fundamentally changed after FDR’s death. Presidents have had to rely on their No. 2 men, required to keep them briefed on everything of importance that goes in the government. Why? Well, as we’ve learned, presidents can leave office quickly and without warning.

President Kennedy was murdered in November 1963. President Nixon resigned in August 1974. Both men had selected steady and seasoned men as their vice presidents who could take over at a moment’s notice. Lyndon Johnson did so while the nation grieved JFK’s death and Gerald Ford took the oath after Nixon’s resignation and reassured us that “Our long, national nightmare is over. The Constitution works.”

Presidential nominees have picked well since FDR’s time. Some have chosen not so well, as Frank notes.

But the notion that vice presidency — in the (sanitized) words of Texan John Nance Garner — “isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit” was laid to rest forever when Harry Truman was handed the keys to the Oval Office.

We’ll be sure to keep this in mind when the next nominees for president pick their VPs.

 

business news, national news, political news

Estate tax is worth keeping on the books

Time for a confession, which some of you might already have suspected.

I used to write editorials for daily newspapers that ran counter to my own beliefs and principles. Why? Well, as a former colleague once told me: If you take the man’s money, you play by the man’s rules.

So, there you have it. I was getting paid to write editorials for newspapers that had different slants than mine, so I wrote the words, gritted my teeth on occasion — and then accepted the paycheck.

One issue with which I had a disagreement with our newspaper’s editorial policy was the estate tax, or “death tax,” as some have called it. My bosses wanted it repealed. My former publisher at the Amarillo Globe-News (not the guy who runs the place now, but his predecessor) was adamant that we repeal the estate tax. Why punish heirs to estates, he argued, when the person who built the wealth wants to be able to hand it down to his or her heirs?

I’m sure my ex-boss is happy with the U.S. House of Representatives voting this week to repeal the estate tax.

I am not.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/04/17/why-are-republicans-pushing-estate-tax-repeal-its-their-nature/

As Paul Waldman writes in the Washington Post: “Republicans say that they aren’t really trying to help wealthy heirs; instead, this is motivated by their deep concern for the fate of family farms and small businesses. But today, the first $5.43 million of any estate is exempt from taxes. That’s the single most important fact to understand about this tax.”

Did you get that? Nearly $5.5 million of any estate is tax exempt!

My congressman, Mac Thornberry, R-Clarendon, Texas, has been at the forefront of the estate tax repeal effort since joining Congress in 1995. He’s got a dog in that hunt. His family owns a lot of ranch land in Donley County and he doesn’t want any of it taxed when the day comes to hand it over to his heirs. I understand Thornberry’s interest in repealing the estate tax.

Here’s a bit more from Waldman: “According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, ‘In 2013, the most recent year for which final numbers are available, there were 2.6 million deaths in the United States, and 4,700 estate tax returns reporting some tax liability were filed. Thus, taxable estate tax returns represented approximately one-fifth of one percent of deaths in 2013.’”

One-fifth of one percent!

Is that enough of a tax to call for its outright repeal? If yes, then who benefits from it? I reckon it’s the extremely wealthy who have estates valued at far more than $5.43 million, which already is exempt from taxes. Remember?

What will be the fate of this repeal effort? If the Senate approves it as well, President Obama will veto it.

 

political news, State news

Julian Castro: right pick for HRC's ticket?

OK, here’s the deal.

I’ve already noted that it is absurd to try handicapping who will be the Republican and Democratic vice-presidential running mates next year. It’s still absurd to try to look so far in advance.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2015/04/12/running-mate-selection-way-too-early-for-that/

That all said, one name keeps popping up on the Democratic side that’s beginning to make some sense.

Let’s assume a couple of things.

One is that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the Democrats’ presidential nominee. Another is that Democrats are going to seek to tighten their grip on the Latino vote. Still another — and this remains a long shot — is that Texas, of all places, might be brought into play as the major party candidates fight for enough electoral votes to put one of them over the top.

Here’s a name to consider: Julian Castro.

This does originate with this blog post. Others have said Castro would be a nearly ideal choice for Clinton.

He’s currently the secretary of housing and urban development. Before that he was mayor of San Antonio. He has an identical twin, Joaquin, who serves in Congress.

Why should Clinton pick this young man? Well, he’s a handsome fellow. He speaks Spanish fluently; he also speaks English just as fluently. His story is compelling: raised by a single mother, graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Law. He’s an up-by-bootstraps kind of man.

Democrats have done well in recent election cycles with Latino voters. Republican President George W. Bush made serious inroads with that demographic group in 2000 and 2004, but it’s gone downhill ever since.

Clinton could cement the Democratic hold on Latino voters by putting Castro on the ticket.

As for Texas? Well, let’s just say that the hill for Democrats in Castro’s home state remains quite steep. The state remains heavily Republican and at this moment I cannot see how a Democratic presidential ticket — even one with a Latino in one of the spots — carries the state in 2016. Maybe in 2020.

Castro, though, could make the state competitive, forcing Republicans to invest campaign money in a place that since the 1980 election has been a shoo-in for the GOP.

Am I predicting Clinton will select Castro? Come on. Give me some credit. I’ve said it’s too early to make that call.

However, it wouldn’t surprise me.

 

 

national news, political news

Reid to go 'nuclear' on Lynch nomination?

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U.S. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is a lame-duck Democrat in a body controlled by Republicans.

He’s not going back into private life without a fight. He’s picked a doozy to wage with his GOP colleagues.

Frankly, it’s a fight worth having.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/harry-reid-says-he-can-force-vote-loretta-lynch-nomination

Reid wants to force the Senate to vote on the nomination of Loretta Lynch to be the nation’s next attorney general. She’s been waiting seemingly since The Flood to get a vote by the full Senate, but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell keeps digging in, resisting the vote for this reason and that reason — none of which has any bearing on Lynch’s qualifications for the job to which she’s been nominated by President Obama.

She is highly qualified. She has deserved a full vote since the Senate Judiciary Committee recommended her appointment.

McConnell, though, is holding her hostage to other legislation.

Reid’s role as minority leader is supposed to put him in a subordinate capacity. However, he said this week that if he gets 51 senators to sign on, he can call for a full Senate vote and circumvent the authority reserved customarily for the majority leader.

He’s going to enrage McConnell if he manages to schedule the vote. A majority of senators already has said they plan to confirm Lynch as AG. The trick, then, is to get a majority to agree simply to a vote.

Lynch would succeed Eric Holder at Justice. Republicans already detest Holder. Every day Lynch is delayed from taking her job is a day that Holder remains at his post. Why in the world, if you’re a Senate Republican, do you want to keep someone on the job that you cannot stand?

Senate protocol and decorum are supposed to inviolable. A lot of it has been tossed aside in recent years as the parties have fought tooth-and-nail with each other. Democrats changed the filibuster rules in the previous Congress. And just recently, a group of Republicans sent a letter to the Iranian mullahs telling them the nuclear deal worked out could be tossed aside when the next president takes office in January 2017.

Decorum? Protocol? It’s gone, mostly.

Harry Reid’s set to play some hardball. If it gets Loretta Lynch confirmed as the next attorney general, well, let him throw the first pitch.