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Patrick seeks more partisan Senate

There can be no misunderstanding — zero, none — of what state Sen. Dan Patrick wants to do to the Texas Senate if Texans elect him lieutenant governor next month.

He wants to destroy the bipartisan atmosphere that often has helped govern the state’s upper legislative chamber. That effort, in my view, would be a bad thing for Texas.

Texas Tribune editor in chief Evan Smith’s interview with Patrick revealed the senator’s plans quite clearly.

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/09/19/triblive-patrick-on-democratic-chairmen/

Patrick is running against the incumbent, David Dewhurst, as well as against Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples in a crowded Republican primary. I cannot predict who will win this contest, but it’s looking more and more as though Dewhurst is among the underdogs in the fight for the man’s own seat.

Patrick recently chastised Dewhurst for selecting six Democrats to chair the Senate’s 18 committees, which is roughly proportional to the number of Democrats serving in the Senate. The count today is 19 Republicans and 12 Democrats. Dewhurst, therefore, has doled out chairmanships fairly, correct? Not so, says Patrick, R-Houston, who told Smith he might place, oh, maybe two Democrats in chairmanships … or he may select none for the 2015 Legislature.

Dewhurst, to his discredit, failed to fight back against that criticism, suggesting in a gutless response instead that the Democrats he placed in chairmanships led committees of little legislative consequence.

The lieutenant governor, whether it was Dewhurst, or Rick Perry before him, or Bob Bullock or Bill Hobby, all strived to maintain a semblance of collegiality and bipartisanship in the Senate, over which the lieutenant governor presides. That’s why they cross party lines to place senators from the “other” party in key leadership roles. Dewhurst and Perry, both Republicans, have been faithful to that tradition, as were Bullock and Hobby, two Democrats.

That spirit also has produced the two-thirds rule, which requires any bill to have at least 21 votes before it is decided by a full Senate vote. Many Republican senators, such as Kel Seliger of Amarillo, have said they support the two-thirds rule.

Patrick does not appear to have any notion of preserving that collegial spirit in the Senate.

For my money, that’s one key reason why he shouldn’t be elected lieutenant governor of Texas.

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Can’t believe rain causes giddiness

It’s raining at the moment here in Amarillo.

I’m positively giddy about it.

Strange? Perhaps. The strangest element of all is the fact that I actually am giddy. Why? Well, I was born, reared and came of age in a community where rain is all too distressingly common: Portland, the one in Oregon.

I’ve adopted over nearly 19 years in the Texas Panhandle the attitude of folks who’ve lived here longer than we have, which is that the rain is something to be cherished. You pray for it around here. You thank Almighty God in heaven when it arrives and you plead to the Almighty to bring it more often and in greater quantities.

Before moving to Amarillo, my wife, our sons and I spent some time — nearly 11 years — in another rainy locale: Beaumont, on the sticky-moist Texas Gulf Coast. It rains a lot there, too; even more annually than in Portland. But the difference between the two cities’ climates simply is this: When the rain comes in Beaumont, it arrives in torrents, several inches in an hour or two; in Portland, it rains for two, maybe three days before you ever notice it.

I grew up complaining constantly about the rain. As a kid, I was stuck indoors when it rained. I would gripe about it to my parents. “Go talk to God,” Dad would say, which was his way of telling me there was nothing he could do about it. “OK, Dad, thanks a lot,” I’d say to myself.

Now that we’ve been ensconced in Amarillo, we’ve adapted to the Panhandle appreciation for the rain.

No longer do I complain about it. I welcome it. I love it. At times, I feel like peeling off my shirt, a la Tim Robbins in the film “Shawshank Redemption” and just standing there, taking it all in.

This rain shall pass, likely rather quickly. I’ll wait anxiously for the next storm cloud.

Let it rain.

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A billion here, a billion there …

A Dallas Morning News blog notes that “A billion dollars isn’t what it used to be.”

Boy, howdy.

http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2013/09/a-billion-dollars-isnt-what-it-used-to-be.html/

It talks about a list of billionaires in which the starting point now stands at $1.3 billion. T. Boone Pickens, the one-time Panhandle oil-and-gas magnate, didn’t make the grade. He is worth a “mere” $950 million, according to Forbes magazine, which did the survey.

The blog takes note of Pickens’s reaction, which is that he is “doing fine.” Pickens also said his $1 billion in charitable giving is more than his net worth.

This item brings to mind just how much inflation has devalued money.

I remember when Aristotle Onassis died in 1975. The Greek shipping magnate was considered then to be the world’s richest, or second-richest man — depending on who did the figuring.

Onassis’s net worth at the time of his death 38 years ago? It was around $500 million.

In today’s terms, the value of Onassis’s wealth would be considered chump change when compared to the ledger sheets produced by the likes of, say, Bill Gates or Warren Buffett.

Or, as the late Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois once said about the cost of prosecuting the Vietnam War, “A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon we’re talking real money.”

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Boehner angry because Obama won’t negotiate?

U.S. House Speaker John Boehner’s office has released a video that criticizes President Obama for negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin over Syria while refusing to negotiate with Republicans over federal budget issues.

Hold on a minute, Mr. Speaker.

Here’s the video:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/09/19/boehner_why_is_obama_willing_to_negotiate_with_putin_but_not_republicans.html

I recall clearly during a previous budget battle that Boehner declared quite openly and vocally that he was finished negotiating with the president. He wouldn’t talk to Obama about budget matters, apparently out of anger over the way the budget talks had broken down. The speaker said there would be no more face-to-face contact with the president. Nothing. None.

Now he’s upset because Obama is talking to Putin about the Russians’ proposal to have Syria turn over its chemical weapons arsenal to international inspectors, even after Putin wrote an essay for the New York Times that criticized the United States for considering itself an “exceptional” nation.

I figure that President Obama thinks he has more to gain with Putin — a former head of the KGB spy agency — than with Boehner, whose own political party has been commandeered by a faction within it.

I believe the speaker ought to be angry with those within his own House Republican caucus.

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French onto something with pageant ban

The French have been whipped pretty hard in the United States since, oh, about the time of the 9/11 attacks. Some Americans have resented the French for failing to support our war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remember those “freedom fries”? Good grief!

I have not joined that chorus. I will, though, applaud the French senate for voting to end children’s beauty pageants.

http://news.msn.com/world/video?videoid=6003a601-048f-0f8c-f811-9c0675ed2b86&from=en-us_msnhp

I’ve long thought of these kiddie pageants as being — how to say it — vaguely perverted. The sight of these little girls prancing around provocatively, with their hair pulled up and their eyes laden with makeup frankly makes me want to hurl.

It is unnatural, unwarranted and unappealing.

Forgive me for saying this, too, but every time I witness a kids’ pageant, a certain name keeps popping into my head: Jon Benet Ramsey, the Colorado girl who also took part in these events and was murdered in a case that drew international attention. Some folks speculated that the killer might have held some disgustingly lustful urges before killing that little girl.

I have no clue as to whether France’s idea of outlawing these pageants ever will become law in that country, let alone catch fire in the rest of the world.

I hope it does.

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So long, champ

My pal Jon Mark Beilue hits it right on the button — like a left hook to the jaw — when he laments the passing of a great heavyweight fighter and the decline of a once-great sport.

http://amarillo.com/blog-post/jon-mark-beilue/2013-09-19/when-boxing-was-relevant

Ken Norton died this week at the age of 70. He’d been in declining health and he died of congestive heart failure.

What made Norton so special? Well, in the spring of 1973 he broke the jaw of another pretty good fighter, Muhammad Ali, and handed The Champ the second defeat of his legendary boxing career. Ali would go on to reclaim the heavyweight title the following year and would fight Norton twice more: later in 1973 and in 1976, when he was still the heavyweight champ. Ali won both those fights.

Boxing meant something back then. There was an unwritten code that to be heavyweight champion was to be deemed the baddest dude on Planet Earth. I heard someone once say that title Heavyweight Champion of the World was the most honored of all sports titles.

No more.

Ken Norton wore that crown for a time in 1978. The World Boxing Council bestowed it on him when it took it from Leon Spinks, who had defeated Ali for the title in 1978. Norton would lose the title to Larry Holmes in a grueling 15-round fight.

Norton was a very good fighter. Was he great? Did he attain the level of some of his peers, such as Ali, Joe Frazier, Holmes or George Foreman? Probably not.

However, he fought at a time when being champion meant something. These days, with so many governing bodies granting titles left and right, with so many weight classes — super and junior middleweights, welterweights, lightweights, featherweights, etc. — no one can name any of the champions in any of these classes. They’ve even added a super heavyweight division — on top of the “normal” heavyweight class. Heck, I remember when the late heavyweight champ Floyd Patterson, who weighed all of 185 pounds, would fight guys 30 or 40 pounds heavier … and would beat them like a drum!

Yes, Ken Norton represented a much-missed era in professional sports. It’s been cheapened and become almost farcical now.

Rest in peace, Champ.

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Help me understand this budget fight

A lot of things go over my head. I’ll admit to being a bit slow on the uptake at times.

Take the budget battle that’s building into a donnybrook — yet again — on Capitol Hill. I’m puzzled over why the Republican congressional leadership has allowed the tea party wing take it over and threaten to hijack the government because it dislikes a duly enacted law that’s been upheld by the Supreme Court.

The Affordable Care Act has become a bargaining chip in the budget battle. The right-wing crazies in Congress say they’ll approve a continuing resolution on the budget only if it defunds the ACA, President Obama’s signature legislative achievement. If they don’t get the resolution approved in about 10 days, the government shuts down.

Think about this for a moment. We’re still at war in Afghanistan; Social Security checks will need to go out to those who need them; so will veterans disability payments; roads are crumbling; Colorado residents are digging out from horrific weather events in their state … and there might be more weather-related misery occurring in Texas as storm clouds migrate north from Mexico.

You get the picture, yes?

Meanwhile, House Speaker John Boehner, a so-called “establishment Republican” who’s been whipsawed by the tea party cabal within his caucus, says the GOP-led House has “no interest” in shutting down the government. Who’s he kidding?

Everyone who hates “Obamacare” has forgotten that Congress passed the law, the president signed it, it survived a Supreme Court challenge when the high court ruled that the law indeed is constitutional. It has been settled.

What’s more, the Affordable Care Act hasn’t even been implemented fully — and still congressional Republicans have declared it a “failed policy.” Aren’t there independent studies out there showing that premiums have increased at a slower rate than predicted and aren’t there 30 million or so Americans who are about to have health insurance?

The moronic push to defund the health care law would deny those folks insurance. That’s a good thing for the country?

While our so-called “leaders” wage budget war, a lot of other pressing needs are being ignored. Does anyone remember immigration reform?

I don’t understand a lot of things. This battle is really pushing me to the limit.

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Dangerous on-ramp discovered in Amarillo

A lot has been written, spoken, tweeted, Facebooked — you name it — over many years about the quality of drivers in Amarillo and the engineering of some of the traffic infrastructure around town.

I found a location this morning that deserves some comment here.

I hauled some goods to the Salvation Army warehouse and store about 11 a.m. The warehouse/store is at 27th Avenue just a little east of Llano Cemetery. I dropped the stuff off and headed west toward Interstate 27; I turned north to catch the freeway toward downtown.

I then discovered something that had gotten past me the many times I’ve driven along that stretch of road: The on-ramp is very short and is located quite close to a lane in which the motorists all have to exit the freeway to catch another on-ramp toward Interstate 40.

The traffic was heavy at that particular moment. I was driving my big Dodge pickup, aka Big Jake. I had to come to a complete stop on the on-ramp, as traffic was not yielding, meaning no one was moving into an inside lane to give me room.

Why is that? Well, they had to stay in that lane to connect to I-40. Therefore, I understand why they couldn’t yield to little ol’ me.

I waited for what seemed like an eternity for a break in the traffic. When one occurred, I had to pounce on the accelerator to get enough speed to merge into the traffic that was approaching. I didn’t want to get in anyone’s way as they (a) headed toward downtown or (b) sought to make the exit onto I-40.

As I was stopped at the intersection, I thought of my wife. Yes, I love her dearly and I think of her often, but this time I recalled a terrible accident in which she was rear-ended by a driver while — yep — she waited on an on-ramp to merge into traffic. That was nearly a year ago. She was quite lucky she wasn’t hurt more badly than she was — or worse. That on-ramp, just west of Georgia Street, merges into the westbound I-40 lanes. It, too, provides little time or space for vehicles to merge. She had to stop because the traffic was too heavy. Then she got clobbered — by an individual traveling at an estimated 60 mph.

I’m wondering at this moment if it isn’t time for the Texas Department of Transportation and the Amarillo Traffic Engineering Department to do a comprehensive study of the safety of some of these access lanes and on-ramps to determine what they can do to improve them.

Well?

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Security, not gun control, becomes the focus

As authorities start building a motive for why Aaron Alexis opened fire at the Washington Navy Yard, killing a dozen people, I’m beginning to believe that the issue of gun control will not rise to the level it has in the wake of previous massacres.

After all, if the deaths of 20 precious children and six educators in Newtown, Conn., couldn’t produce meaningful gun control reforms, I’m believing that nothing will. A dozen innocent victims at a military installation doesn’t hit Americans with quite the emotional impact — as tragic as it was — as the deaths of those babies.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/18/us/navy-yard-shooting-latest-developments/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

With that, I’m guessing security issues will be the red-flag issue that emerges in the wake of Alexis’s rampage.

How does a guy with apparently visible mental anguish keep a security clearance into a highly classified military installation? How do authorities ignore the signals that this individual was “hearing voices” or acting strangely in other ways?

Alexis was a civilian contractor who apparently had clearance to enter the building. He was packing an assault rifle and a shotgun, in addition to a pistol he likely could have concealed, into a common area, where he opened fire from a floor above a crowd gathered below him.

Police reportedly killed Alexis in a fire fight to end the carnage.

But still, the questions must be dealt with head on about how this Fort Worth resident was able to obtain — and then keep — this security clearance. Where are the safeguards?

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Sen. Davis good to go … for governor?

I’m wrong about these things more often than I’m right, but it’s looking to me as though Wendy Davis is going to run for Texas governor next year.

The Fort Worth Democratic state senator will make her plans known on Oct. 3.

What’s interesting to me is the suspense she is building into the announcement. See the link here:

http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2013/09/wendy-davis-to-announce-plans-on-oct-3/

If she were to announce that she is going to seek re-election to her Senate seat, my hunch is that she’d just say so: “I’ve decided, after careful consideration and prayer, that I will not be a candidate for governor and will seek re-election to Senate District 10 and will seek to continue to serve my Fort Worth constituents.”

There. That would be it. Over and done.

But she’s asking her supporters to spread the word to others who they think would like to be the “first to know” her plans.

That feels to me as though a run for governor is in the wind.

All the excitement in this contest so far has been on the Republican side. Attorney General Greg Abbott is the odds-on favorite to be nominated by the GOP over former state Republican Party chairman Tom Pauken of Dallas. (Full disclosure: I’ve known Pauken personally for more than 25 years and I am pulling for him to at least make a contest of his party’s primary fight.)

It could be that the excitement quotient is going to shift dramatically toward the Democratic primary if Wendy Davis answers the bell. Davis burst onto the national scene with her dramatic filibuster of an anti-abortion bill in the waning hours of the Legislature’s first special session.

Will she win next fall?

That remains the multimillion-dollar question, given that’s how much it’s going to cost the next person who will become governor to succeed Rick Perry.

Texas remains a deeply ruby-red state, in the vise grip of Republican officeholders. Texans have shown a propensity in recent election cycles to elect Republicans over more qualified Democrats just because of their party affiliation. But, hey, Texans did the same thing in reverse back when Democrats were the top dog.

Sen. Davis would surely energize a moribund political party that’s been whipped so often it’s lost much of its will to win.

Please, though, don’t hold me to any of this. We’ll just wait for Wendy to give us the word.

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