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Border crisis expands

Linda Chavez asks in a New York Post column why the Obama administration doesn’t “do more” to stem the flow of children from Central America into southern border states such as Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

http://nypost.com/2014/06/20/behind-the-horrible-border-crisis/

I kind of expect that from Chavez, a noted conservative thinker and pundit.

I’ve been wracking my brain the past few days with this question: Why doesn’t Mexico do more to stop the flow of these unaccompanied children all the way through that country and into the United States of America?

Chavez and others have noted that the kids have to travel about 1,300 miles through Mexico to reach the southern border of the United States. How is it that those children are given free passage through a fairly large country to end up in the Land of Opportunity?

If President Obama has a bone to pick, it ought to be with the Mexican government.

Chavez lays out a grim scenario: “According to recent reports, these kids walk right up to border agents as soon as they see them and turn themselves in. They’ve been instructed to do so, sometimes by the criminal ‘coyotes’ who extort hundreds, even thousands, of dollars from the kids’ parents to get them across the border.

“These human traffickers are telling parents their children will be granted a legal right to stay in the U.S. once on our soil. This is absolutely false — but that word is slow in getting to gullible would-be border crossers.”

She wants the U.S. government to blanket Guatemala and Honduras TV airwaves to public service announcements urging parents to stop selling their children to traffickers. That’s fine.

However, geopolitical neighborliness compels one country to do all it can do to protect its orders with another nation.

Critics keep harping on the openness of the U.S. side of our border with Mexico. They forget — or ignore — the fact that we’ve deported record numbers of illegal immigrants in recent years. The problem just has been compounded many times by the flood of these children from beyond Mexico’s southern border.

Whose fault is that? Ours? I don’t think so.

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Pay us a visit, Mme. Secretary

Just thinking out loud here.

Watching the reporting on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s book tour brings to mind a 2008 campaign stop her husband, the former president of the United States, made here on her behalf — in Amarillo, in the Texas Panhandle, of all places.

Bill Clinton came to campaign for his wife as she fought Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

He packed the Grand Plaza Ballroom at the Amarillo Civic Center. Indeed, it overflowed. A lot of Republicans attended the event just to get a glimpse of the 42nd president and to determine for themselves if he is as charismatic as everyone says he is.

President Clinton didn’t disappoint anyone, Republican or Democrat. Clinton would win the Democratic primary that year, but eventually lose the nomination fight to Obama.

http://www.texastribune.org/2014/06/20/hillary-clinton-book-tour-comes-austin/

I’d bet real U.S. money that Hillary Clinton would get a smashing reception here if she chose to come to Amarillo to hype her new book, “Hard Choices.”

She’s a possible, if not probable, candidate for president in 2016. There would be interest in that campaign as well.

The Texas Tribune reported on her book-tour stop in Austin, which everyone knew she’d make. Austin is one of the last Democratic bastions left in Texas. It’s a no-brainer for her go there and visit with friendly audiences.

Why not pay a visit to us here, on the High Plains of Texas, where no one would expect her to go?

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More to come on Animal Shelter?

My gut’s been rumbling a bit the past few days.

I’m wondering if there’s another shoe about to drop at Amarillo City Hall regarding changes in the way it runs the Animal Control Shelter, you know, the one that’s been in the news of late.

The top two hands at Animal Control — Mike McGee and Shannon Barlow — have “retired” from public service. A Randall County grand jury heard evidence of alleged animal abuse at the shelter but then declined to indict anyone for criminal wrongdoing — a decision that caught many of us by surprise.

Is this the end of the story?

Something tells me “no.”

A lengthy newspaper article published this past Sunday told of how the city was a tad slow reacting to reports of abuse involving the euthanizing of animals at the shelter. Shelter staff had failed to weigh the animals prior to administering the lethal drugs, which is required by state law. Thus, they didn’t know how much of the drug to administer and it reportedly produced suffering by the animals as they died.

Still, the grand jury reported no “abuse” of the animals occurred? Someone will have to explain that one to me.

The city has a new interim director. Assistant City Manager Vicki Covey — who was charged with overseeing the animal control operations from her office — has been taken off that task. The city manager, Jarrett Atkinson, has been hit with yet another troubling case of lack of oversight on his watch.

I’ve spoken with a couple of former city council members about this matter. One of them thinks McGee and Barlow should have been canned on the spot when the allegations came to light; he disagreed with their being placed on “administrative leave.” The other ex-council member thinks the story has been overplayed in the media; I disagree quite vehemently with that assessment.

The care of animals means a lot to people, for better or worse. It’s part of many humans’ DNA to carry a soft spot in their hearts for defenseless animals who’ve been tossed aside by their caretakers.

If nothing else, the city ought to embark on a concentrated, proactive and aggressive campaign to educate pet owners about the need to neuter their animals. I know full well the message will be lost on many folks, but given the embarrassment caused by this scandal it’s worth the time, the effort — and the expense.

As for whether any more heads should roll at City Hall, well, I wouldn’t bet against it.

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Immigration takes center stage

Kevin McCarthy’s election as the new majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives puts the Republican majority in the House in a quandary.

It’s because of the congressional district McCarthy represents.

McCarthy comes from the Bakersfield, Calif., area. It’s a bit like the Texas Panhandle in this sense: They pump oil there, cultivate a lot of farmland, the wind blows a lot and its residents are fairly conservative. One more thing: the region has a large and growing Hispanic population.

And that is why Majority Leader McCarthy is facing a bit of a test as he tries to manage one key issue: immigration reform.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/inside-the-house-gop-leadership-shake-up-108103.html?hp=l7

The tea party wing of the lawmakers he leads in the House don’t favor the kind of comprehensive reform that many Democrats and Republicans want. It’s the kind of reform that former leader Eric Cantor has supported — and which might have cost him his House seat in that stunning GOP primary upset in Virginia earlier this month.

McCarthy, though, doesn’t work for the tea party wing of his party in the House. He works for the folks back home. His congressional district is about 36 percent Hispanic. My hunch is that many of them have relatives who are non-citizens living in the United States. They want their immigrant kin to be able to enjoy the fruits of citizenship.

They vote and, thus, could apply pressure to Leader McCarthy as he seeks to manage the unwieldy wing of his fractious Republican congressional caucus.

So, the new leader well might be asking himself: For whom do I work?

He knows the answer, and it isn’t the Republican Party zealots in Washington, D.C.

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Alzheimer's brings the long goodbye

The Summer Solstice — the longest day of the year — has arrived in the northern half of Planet Earth.

The longest day also has another meaning for those with intimate knowledge of a deadly disease that destroys the human brain and turns its victims into shells of who they once were.

It’s called Alzheimer’s disease, named for Alois Alzheimer who first diagnosed the disease in the early 20th century. The longest day is meant to characterize how time no longer is relevant to Alzheimer’s patients. Days turn into nights, and vice versa. It all runs together for these people — and often for those who care for them.

The Summer Solstice is going to bring in a lot of public ceremonies around the country today as we celebrate National Alzheimer’s Month. It’s a symbolic time to commemorate this disease.

I have some knowledge of how it ravages families.

My mother died in 1984. She was diagnosed officially in the spring of 1980, but the blunt reality is that she showed symptoms long before the neurologist delivered the grim news to us.

The doctor was blunt. There’s no cure. There’s no way to identify the disease, he said, other than to eliminate every other pathological reason. It’s terminal, he said. Your mother will die from it eventually, he added.

We tried our best to care for her. Dad did his best as well, until he met his own untimely death in September 1980.

A month is hardly enough time to commemorate this disease. It should be on-going. It afflicts many millions of Americans that number is growing as the median age of this country increases. Do we have all-star concerts with rock stars, film icons, mega-rich philanthropists calling national attention to this disease? No.

It’s not a “sexy” disease the way, say, AIDS became more than three decades ago.

Alzheimer’s disease afflicts old people — mostly. Mom wasn’t old by any stretch of the imagination when the first symptoms presented themselves. I cannot recall precisely when we noticed changes in behavior or when she made statements that didn’t quite compute.

When the end came, she was just 61, which by my way of thinking is getting younger all the time.

It’s not pretty. In fact, it’s heartbreaking in the extreme to watch your loved one slip farther away.

So, enjoy the Summer Solstice, this first day of summer.

While doing so, give some thought to those you may have lost to Alzheimer’s disease or perhaps say a prayer for someone who’s caring for a loved one gripped by this tragic ailment.

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Welcome … the Washington Indians

An earlier post on this blog took note of the controversy surrounding the Washington Redskins’ name and whether it ought to be changed.

I have concluded that it should. I said so in the post, which then was distributed via Twitter and Facebook. One of my Facebook friends — and he’s an actual friend, not just a social media acquaintance — took serious exception to my notion that the Redskins name is offensive to Native Americans.

We went back and forth. My friend says we’ve fallen victim to political correctness run amok. Indeed, the Redskins name stood virtually unchallenged for many decades until the nation heightened its civil rights awareness. I keep returning to my point about the term “Redskins” and whether it originated as a term of endearment. I doubt it strongly.

Then a member of my family entered the fray. One of my sons noted that “Redskins” is a “descriptive term” coined by white people. It is meant as an epithet. His example: “Look at them Redskins. Let’s go take their land and stuff.” I died laughing.

His larger point is a valid one, which is that the term offends some people. Why not, then, simply change it?

He came up with this notion, which I’ll pass along here. Call ’em the Washington Indians, he said.

Interesting. We already have the Cleveland Indians in baseball. We also have several other duplicate team nicknames: The San Francisco and New York Giants, the Arizona and St. Louis Cardinals, the New York and Texas Rangers, the Winnipeg and New York Jets. There might be more … but you get the drift.

Besides, he said, you wouldn’t even have to mess with the Washington team logo.

Has anyone griped about the Cleveland Indians, a non-descript term that doesn’t offend anyone?

Problem solved.

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You want a drink, Texas?

This bit of information might not seem like a big deal in this part of Texas, given our decided lack of surface water — but it is.

Environment Texas — an Austin-based environmental awareness group — says the Lone Star State is the second-worst polluter of water of all 50 states, trailing only Indiana.

http://www.texastribune.org/2014/06/19/texas-among-nations-worst-water-polluters/

The Texas Tribune reports: “Texas polluters released about 16.5 million pounds of toxic chemicals into waterways in 2012, second only to Indiana, according to a report released Thursday by Environment Texas, an environmental advocacy group based in Austin.”

OK, if you’ve been along the Gulf Coast, seen the Houston Ship Channel, or the Intracoastal Waterway, or perhaps driven along the Neches or Sabine rivers you’ll appreciate the findings released.

To be candid, they give me the heebie-jeebies.

The Tribune reports further: “And in terms of a measurement that compares pollutants according to how toxic they are, Texas is without rival. According to the report, Texas produced 34 million “toxicity-weighted pounds” in 2012 — 30 times more than the next state, and more than double the rest of the country combined. Almost all of that toxicity comes from one source: the Dow Chemical Company plant in Freeport.”

In an odd way, these findings make me even more glad to have left that part of the state for the drier region way up yonder.

I lived in Beaumont for nearly 11 years with my wife and sons. My boys boogied away from there to attend college in the early 1990s. My wife and I moved to Amarillo in January 1995 and learned that our water supply comes from deep underground. Our water supply isn’t immune from pollutants, but take it from me, you have to wonder what flows from the many refineries and petrochemical plants into the surface water downstate along those major waterways.

Those plants aren’t the worst polluters. No. 1 is the Pilgrims Pride chicken processing operation in East Texas, according to Environment Texas. According to the Tribune, the plant “dumped 2.8 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the Tankersley River in Northeast Texas, the report says. Most of those toxins were nitrates, chemicals found in fertilizer that can cause infant health problems and oxygen-depleted ‘dead zones’ in waterways.”

So, a word to the wise is in order. Are we monitoring our Panhandle feed lots carefully enough?

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That slope is slippery, Mr. President

The Vietnam Generation remembers a time when U.S. military assistance overseas went from “advisory” to engaging in bloody combat. It didn’t take terribly long for our role to change in Vietnam.

It is that memory that’s been stirred in recent days as President Obama has announced the return of U.S. advisers to Iraq to aid the Iraqi military in its fight against Sunni insurgents seeking to take back the government Americans overthrew when it went to war there in March 2003.

http://time.com/2901449/obama-iraq-isis-troops/

The president has declared categorically that the United States will not send combat troops back into Iraq. I and no doubt million of other Americans will hold him to his word on that.

I just watched an interesting segment from CNN’s series “The Sixties” that dealt with the Vietnam War. President Kennedy was killed in November 1963 and by then our advisory role in ‘Nam had grown to several thousand troops. President Johnson fairly quickly granted military requests for more troops, ratcheting up our involvement to a level where Americans were shouldering the bulk of the combat operations against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army.

By the time I arrived at Marble Mountain, just south of Da Nang, South Vietnam, in March 1969, American troops strength was at its absolute peak: 543,000 of us were deployed there. But soon the drawdown began as President Nixon implemented his “Vietnamization” program of turning the combat responsibility over to those who had the most skin in the game.

Surely, the wise men and women at the White House and perhaps even at the Pentagon will remind the current president — who was not quite 8 years old when I arrived in ‘Nam way back when — of the folly of resuming a ground combat role in Iraq.

Listen to them, Mr. President. Please.

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Yep, Perry 'stepped in it'

Let’s give credit where it’s due: Texas Gov. Rick Perry knows he messed up when he answered a question about whether homosexuality is a “disorder.”

Speaking at a luncheon sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, Perry said this: “I got asked about an issue, and instead of saying, ‘You know what, we need to be a really respectful and tolerant country, and get back to talking about, whether you’re gay or straight you need to be having a job, and those are the focuses I want to be involved with,’ instead of getting — which I did, I readily admit, I stepped right in it.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/rick-perry-gay-comments-alcohol-108069.html?hp=r6

The problem the Texas governor is going to discover is that it will be next to impossible to shake “it” off his boots, if you get my drift.

That’s the trouble with considering whether to run for the highest public office in the land. When you make mistakes with careless speech, it comes back to haunt you because many Americans won’t let you forget it.

Perry compared gay sexual orientation with alcoholism in remarks to a political club in California, where he was attending a meeting to promote Texas business initiatives.

The comparison drew immediate and withering fire from critics — such as yours truly.

Alcoholism is a treatable disease; someone’s sexual orientation is part of one’s DNA — period.

I’ll give Perry credit, though, at least for recognizing aloud that he made a mistake.

It’s thought he’s considering a second presidential campaign in 2016. He says he’ll be better prepared than he was in 2012 when he fumbled, faltered and failed.

Gov. Perry needs more work to get ready for the next campaign.

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Redskins name on its way out

I’ll admit that my opinion about the name of Washington, D.C.’s professional football team hasn’t gotten my dander up … until just recently.

As is popular to say in political circles, my view on the Redskins name has, um, evolved.

At one time I didn’t think much of the stink being raised by Native Americans about the name. They object to the Redskins name, calling it offensive and disparaging.

This week, the U.S. Patent Office weighed in with those who object to the name, pulling the patent trademark for the name, meaning the team no longer can use the Redskins name to market its products.

http://amarillo.com/opinion/editorial/2014-06-18/editorial-feds-fumble-redskins

Should the feds get involved? Sure, but only at that level, I suppose.

My own feeling, as of today, is that enough people now have complained loudly about the name of the team that it should change. The NFL team’s brand has been all but destroyed by the controversy. It won’t recover. Some media outlets no longer print or say the name of offensive team nicknames, which is their call to make.

I guess I’ve ended up with this threshold question, which leads me to support those who want the Redskins name to be dumped:

Would I ever call a Native-American a “redskin” to his or her face?

The answer is no.

There you have it. Change the name.

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