Category Archives: State news

State news

Ex-congressman faces a possible prison term

I would feel a hint of compassion for a former congressman.

Except that I cannot.

Steve Stockman once was a Republican member of the House of Representatives. He served two non-consecutive terms. He now faces a possible decades-long prison sentence if a jury convicts him of mail and wire fraud, money laundering and election law violations.

He allegedly treated himself to lots of campaign cash, not to mention using it to pay for non-political related expenses for staffers and family members.

I don’t know whether he’s guilty of the charges brought against him. That will determined by a Houston-area jury. I do know of Stockman as one of the strangest politicians I’ve ever encountered.

He first won election to the House in 1994 as part of the GOP Contract With America tidal wave. He managed to sweep from Congress a powerful Democratic committee chairman, Jack Brooks of Beaumont, who at the time was the senior member of the Texas congressional delegation. Brooks chaired the House Judiciary Committee when he lost to Stockman — who knew next to nothing about the congressional district he represented for two years.

He most recently invited the angry man of rock ‘n roll music, Ted Nugent, to attend President Obama’s State of the Union speech in 2013; that occurred during Stockman’s second term in the House.

He didn’t distinguish himself at all during his time in the House. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 2014, but lost to incumbent John Cornyn in the GOP primary.

Stockman was a goofball while he served in the House. As the Texas Tribune reported, Stockman once had a bumper sticker printed that read: “If babies had guns they wouldn’t be aborted.”

Doesn’t this jokester just crack you up? Naw, me neither.

Well,  I’ll await his verdict and I might offer a comment when the jury delivers it.

I would wish him well, if only he had learned how to behave himself while he served in the People’s House.

State news

Bob Bullock would be proud of this one

AUSTIN — Wherever he is, I am quite certain Bob Bullock — the late and legendary Texas lieutenant governor — is a happy man.

Why? Because a museum built and dedicated in his memory is a sight to behold. Its artifacts are educational in the extreme. Its ambience is welcoming, as are the docents scattered on all three of its floors willing to explain the whys and wherefores of Texas history.

I pledged to go to the Bullock Museum of Texas History upon visiting the Texas capital city. Today I did so.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2018/03/planning-for-an-education-on-texas-history/

It is so very interesting.

The museum opened in 2001, two years after Bullock’s death. He had lobbied hard to get a history museum built. He managed to persuade the powers that be to erect the museum not far from the University of Texas and the State Capitol where Bullock toiled for the last part of his lengthy public service career.

It is a marvelous tribute to someone I didn’t know well, but someone about whom I had learned a great deal upon arriving in Texas in the spring of 1984.

I learned that he was one tough son of a bi***. He was irascible, a bit of a grouch. He didn’t suffer fools at all — let alone lightly. He was a classic conservative Texas Democrat, which meant that he favored the working man and woman but didn’t take up the cudgel often for progressive social causes.

He also worked well with Republicans. Bullock and a fellow Democrat, former House Speaker Pete Laney, developed a constructive — and productive — working relationship with Republican Gov. George W. Bush. They worked as an effective team until 1999, when Bullock left office; he would die later that year of cancer.

The Bullock Museum tells the story of Texas in multiple parts. It tells visitors about the wreck of the LaBelle (the remains of which are pictured above), a French ship that sank in Matagorda Bay in 1684 after sailing to the New World from Europe, a mission it wasn’t even designed to complete.

It walks visitors through the fight to gain independence from Mexico, Texas’s nine-year existence as an independent nation and then its annexation into the United States in February 1845.

I won’t go through all that the museum contains.

I’ll just add this takeaway: As much as the state celebrated the sesquicentennial of its independence from Mexico, while giving relatively short shrift to the 150 years since its annexation into the United States, so does the Bullock Museum.

I say this not as a criticism, per sue, but merely as an observation.

I am thrilled to have finally seen this sampling of Texas’s rich history.

political news, State news

Cruz vs. O’Rourke: a fight to watch

I’ll lay this out there right away: You know where I stand regarding U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, whom I have dubbed “The Cruz Missile.”

For those of you who don’t know, I’ll just say this: I do not support him. There. That’s out of the way.

I’m going to watch his fight for re-election with intense interest. He has a Democratic challenger who hails from way out yonder, El Paso. Beto O’Rourke is a member of the U.S. House. He wants a promotion to the other end of the U.S. Capitol Building.

I am not going to predict how this year’s election will turn out. I’m not smart enough to make such a prediction. Yes, I consider The Cruz Missile to be the favorite. Texas is seriously Republican. Our voters are more conservative than liberal. Cruz is banking on the voters’ party loyalty.

But wait! O’Rourke is raising lots of money. He has raked in more campaign cash than Cruz. It’s coming from somewhere. He is tapping the state’s pockets of progressive voters.

Political observers do suggest that O’Rourke needs to build his brand. He needs to establish a political identity. Many of us know how to ID Cruz. I consider Cruz to be a front-running media hog. He loves the spotlight. He’s good at basking in it. He ran for president in 2016 after serving just partly into his first term as a senator; that’s not a strike by itself against him, as Barack Obama did the same thing in 2008.

If there is a “blue wave” set to sweep across the land in the 2018 midterms, I suspect that the Cruz-O’Rourke contest will determine just how angry voters are at the manner in which Republicans have governed the nation. We’ll know whether that wave is for real or whether it’s a mirage created by wishful thinkers.

My heart hopes that Cruz gets the boot. My head prevents me from suggesting it will happen.

It will be among the critical U.S. Senate races to watch.

State news

An alternative to the SH 130 race track uncovered

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LOCKHART, Texas — I am happy to report a bit of good news to you as a follow up to an earlier blog post about getting caught on the race track that also is known as Texas 130.

We found our RV camp location at Lockhart State Park, after some difficulty finding our way off of Texas 130, and its posted 85 mph speed limit. That’s all fine. It’s history.

What we discovered is that U.S. 183, which is the highway we intended to take from Austin to the state park, actually runs parallel to Texas 130.

It serves as a sort of frontage road for the nearly 30 miles we need to drive from visiting family members to the place where we’ve parked our fifth wheel RV for a few days.

Good grief, man! If I could have found this highway the first time — the day we arrived in the Austin area — I wouldn’t have had so much angst to share with you in that earlier blog post.

As it turns out, U.S. 183 allows us to cruise along at a “leisurely” 60 to 65 mph, while we watch the speed demons roar along at breakneck speeds just a bit over yonder on Texas 130.

What’s more, we get to do so without being charged a toll.

Who knew?

Life is full of surprises, yes? Some of them are nice surprises to boot!

 

State news

Why push the panic button on the border?

Donald Trump has an itchy panic-button finger.

The president is prone to pushing that button at the slightest provocation, such as his decision to order National Guard troops to the southern border with Mexico.

He contends there’s a tidal wave of illegal immigrants pouring over our border with Mexico. However, as the Texas Tribune reports, the federal government’s own figures show such crossings are at historic lows.

So, again the the question must be asked: Why the rush to essentially militarize a border with one of this nation’s closest and strongest allies?

As the Tribune reports: ” … U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s own statistics indicate that despite the uptick in March, the total number of people apprehended or turned away since October, when the federal government’s fiscal year began, was lower than during the same six-month time frame in the previous fiscal year. This year, there have been about 237,000 apprehensions, compared to 2017’s 271,000.”

This appears to be Trump’s modus operandi. He prefers sowing seeds of fear. Remember his inaugural speech in which he declared “this American carnage” is going to stop? That became the signature statement from a dreary and frightening speech that is usually intended to appeal to Americans’ noble instincts.

Not from this guy.

I keep circling back to the notion that we have plenty of assets to deploy — local law enforcement, customs agents, Border Patrol — to accomplish what the president wants.

State news

Happy Trails, Part 90

LOCKHART, Texas — It’s time for me to come clean.

I once wrote an essay about a Texas state highway that I swore I’d never travel. It is Texas 130, a stretch of toll road between Austin and San Antonio.

Why come clean? Our retirement journey took us to Texas 130 this afternoon. This is the highway with the 85 mph speed limit. Eighty-bleepin’-five miles per hour, man!

I was alarmed enough that the Texas Department of Transportation allowed motorists to blast along Interstate 10 west of San Antone at 80 mph.

But … 85 mph?

That was the last straw. I am not prone to breakneck speeding on the highway. I won’t poke along, but I cannot fathom having to keep up with my fellow travelers who are so willing to drive faster than most sane motorists would travel.

Well, we ventured to Central Texas from San Angelo today. Our trusty GPS hasn’t been updated to include some of the new construction that’s been finished.

Suddenly, without much warning at all, we ended up on Texas 130 with our fifth wheel in tow behind our Dodge pickup. How in the world did that happen? Well, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.

We blundered our way to our next RV campsite at Lockhart State Park. We found a suitable site. We got hooked up. Then we sat under some shade trees to enjoy an adult beverage. We toasted each other for “navigating” our way through the highway chaos that exists in Austin.

As for Texas 130, I now intend to renew my vow to never return to it.

We’ll spend the next few days visiting family in the Austin area. And by golly, we are going to do all we can to stay far away from the state-sanctioned race track disguised as a public thoroughfare.

Wish us luck. Please.

State news

Happy Trails, Part 88

SAN ANGELO STATE PARK, Texas — I chatted up a young tow-truck driver this morning and then said something that sort of just flew out of my mouth.

I was telling him about being retired, about selling our house and how our fifth-wheel RV is our “residence.”

“That means we have nowhere to go,” I said. An instant later, I corrected myself. “Or, you can say that it means we have everywhere to go.”

Yes. I should have said the second part first, and then omitted the rest of it.

You see, the RV lifestyle we have adopted means that (a) our “house” is hooked up to the back of our pickup and (b) we have an entire continent to explore while we are still able.

We have embarked on another fairly short-term trip. It’ll last about two weeks.

We’ll depart San Angelo State Park soon, heading to Lockhart State Park just south of Austin. After that we haul our “house” to Village Creek State Park just north of Beaumont.

We owned property in Beaumont fro 1988 until 1995. We loved that house. We enjoyed the street. It was quiet and heavily wooded. A hurricane took care of much of the tall timber in our old neighborhood not long after we departed for the Texas Panhandle.

Hurricane Harvey inundated the Golden Triangle this past summer and we want to see the damage that the storm did to our house. I hope it’s intact these days.

After visiting friends in Beaumont, we will shove off for North Texas to see our son, daughter-in-law and our granddaughter.

Then we return to Amarillo.

I hesitate now to call Amarillo “home,” for the reason I cited at the beginning of this blog post. Our “home” is riding along with us wherever we go.

***

Pickup update: I am happy to report that our pickup truck, which broke down on U.S. Highway 87 yesterday afternoon, is fixed. It’s healthy. Good as new … or almost!

I spent a good bit of time trying to find a towing company and then a mechanic to repair our truck. The power steering broke. It turned out to be that the water pump also blew apart.

It’s all repaired.

And we are on the road again — in search of the next big surprise. We just want it to be a pleasant one.

legal news, State news

Ethan Couch is back in the news … oh, joy!

For as long as he lives — more than likely — Ethan Couch is going to be remembered for one infamous occurrence.

How he received a probated sentence after he killed four pedestrians in Tarrant County, Texas — while driving drunk.

Couch was 16 years of age at the time. His lawyer defended him by saying that because he comes from a wealthy family, he didn’t know that what he did was wrong. It became known as the “affluenza defense.”

Funny, huh? Not really. Then the boy violated the terms of his probation when he fled with his mother to Mexico. He was returned to Texas and spent two years in the slammer.

The young man is now 20. He’s out of jail. He’ll try — I presume — to restart his life.

Do I feel sorry for him? Hah! Not in the least. I feel even less sorry for Mom, who truly knew better when she spirited her kid to Mexico. She’s awaiting trial on a charge of hindering the apprehension of a felon and money laundering.

Good grief!

If she’s convicted, this person needs to spend the maximum sentence available.

Welcome back to the spotlight, Ethan. Mind your Ps and Qs.

State news

Happy Trails, Part 87

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SAN ANGELO, Texas — How do I say this without sounding too much like a whiny baby.

Let me try this out just for kicks: Our retirement “trail” isn’t particularly “happy” at this moment. My wife, Toby the Puppy and I are spending the night in a Texas rest area. We’ve put the orange cones in the rear of our fifth wheel. We’ll wait for the morning before someone hauls our pickup off to a dealership service center to get repaired.

Dang it, anyway!

We were driving southeast along U.S. Highway 87 this afternoon just a few miles out of San Angelo. I pulled across the median to park briefly at the rest area for an, um, pit stop. We made the turn and then — boom! — just like that, the power steering went out. The engine overheated dramatically.

We limped into the rest area. We made a few phone calls, most of which were futile. Then we made a command decision: We’ll unhook the truck from our RV in the morning after we call a towing service to retrieve our truck for what we hope is a fairly quick service.

It’s not all bad news. We have electricity available. We hooked up our lengthy power cord to the outlet. We have some fresh water in our tank, so we can wash up.

Hey, we knew all along that our journey along the retirement road wouldn’t always result in a pothole-free drive. There would be this or that bump along the way. We’ve had a couple of them already but they involved a fifth wheel we owned prior to the one we purchased in 2017. This is the first truck-related boo-boo we’ve suffered since we embarked on this retirement trek.

We won’t sweat it. We’ll just get past it.

Then we’ll head on down the road.

State news

Are helmet laws a ‘nanny state’ rule? No!

Whenever I mention the subject of requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets, I often get a response that refers to the “nanny state.”

I brought the subject up a message the other day in which I wondered whether the Texas Legislature could reconsider its decision to rescind the requirement back in 1995.

I’m going to stand by my view that the Legislature ought to rethink that decision, which I said at the time was ill-considered — and which I still believe it to be today.

Let’s explore the “nanny state” canard.

If the state is seeking to impose intrusive rules on motorists, rules that violate a certain “choice” factor, then why does government impose speed limits? Why does the state make it illegal to drive with an open container of alcohol? And here’s my favorite: Why does the state require drivers — and passengers — to wear safety restraints in a moving vehicle?

You see, requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets is no more intrusive and invasive than any of those other rules.

Let’s understand that the state already mandates headgear for minors riding on motorcycles. Indeed, any parent who would operate a “crotch rocket” with one of his or her helmetless children on board should be arrested and thrown in the slammer … for a long time!

I once got into an argument with someone in the Golden Triangle who tried to talk me out of a column I wrote about helmet laws; and this was before the Legislature decided to rescind the statewide requirement.

This clown, whose name escapes me at the moment, actually argued that he shouldn’t have to wear a helmet because he wanted “to feel the wind blow through my hair.” I damn near flipped!

I have argued that motorcyclists who refuse to wear head protection cost us all a lot of money when they are debilitated by the injuries they suffer. Helmets can prevent such grievous injury.

And you may spare me the notion that the $10,000 insurance policy suffices as protection. Why? Because a patient can eat up that 10 grand policy the moment he or she checks into an acute-care hospital.

Am I pushing a “nanny state” agenda? Not in the least.

I merely am wishing for sanity to return to our Legislature. I’m realistic enough to understand that it likely won’t happen.

***

Here is an item I posted eight years ago, just to remind you that I am steadfast in my opposition to this notion of “individual liberty.”

https://highplainsblogger.com/2010/03/we-all-pay-for-helmet-less-riders/