We’re hearing some grumbles around Amarillo that the City Commission should put a cellphone ban ordinance to a popular vote, as was done twice some years ago with an indoor smoking ban.

The commission voted 4-1 recently to ban the use of handheld cellphones while driving motor vehicles. It’s been a tough road for the city, but I have concluded finally that commissioners made the right call.

The yammering for a referendum, though, is getting tiresome.

We elect these five individuals to make some difficult decisions on occasion. And they do it for virtually nothing; getting 10 bucks per meeting doesn’t exactly constitute a living wage for these folks. The cellphone ban is one of those tough calls. Let them make the decision.

Municipal governing bodies make these decisions all the time in communities across the state and nation. But yet we keep hearing from the vocal minority in Amarillo that the city “shoves laws down our throats.” What utter nonsense.

It’s not as though voters are powerless in the face of these City Hall mandates. Amarillo does have municipal elections every other year. All five commission members – including, of course, the mayor – have to stand for re-election if they decide to seek another two-year term. If you don’t like the decisions they make, vote them out and elect someone who’ll do your bidding. Isn’t that the essence of a representative democracy?

And if you or your candidate happens to lose fail to get enough votes to win, well, understand the time-honored political truism: Elections have consequences. I’ll just add “for good or ill.” The cellphone ban is a constructive step that commissioners needed to take.

I have to agree with Jim Messina, campaign manager for President Obama re-election team: If the other side’s major gripe is about your guy’s facial expressions and manners, then you know you won a debate on the issues.

In my view – and you can take it for whatever it’s worth – Vice President Joe Biden cleaned Republican VP nominee Paul Ryan’s clock the other night in their only debate. Did I like Biden’s constant snickering and occasional guffaws? Not really. But that’s not how you should measure these events. Yes, the administration has some explaining to do regarding the tragic security lapse at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where four diplomats died recently in an attack on the compound. But on issue after issue, the vice president was in command and on the attack.

Which brings us to the next debate, set for Tuesday in Long Island, N.Y., between President Obama and GOP challenger Mitt Romney.

Yes, Biden teed it up for the president. Now it’s up to Obama – if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor – to hit it out of the park. The pressure is going to be immense on the president to follow up on the vice president’s fire-and-brimstone performance.

And for Romney? He’s read all the media accounts along with the rest of us. He’ll have to be ready to counter whatever the president throws at him. I’m guessing he’ll be prepared too.

Quick historical note …

The 1960 televised debates between Sen. John Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon started out with a relative whimper, with Kennedy “winning” on style points – not to mention superior makeup. The subsequent encounters got testier. Few of us talk these days about the follow-up contests between these guys. They both were aggressive and in each other’s faces.

I think history is going to repeat itself as we head down the stretch.

After watching the vice-presidential debate Thursday night, I came away with this thought: I would love to have been a fly on the proverbial wall when President Obama called Vice President Biden to congratulate him for some pretty stellar work on behalf of the Democratic ticket.

Imagine that the phone rang in Biden’s limo as he left the debate venue.

Biden: Hello, Mr. President?

Obama: After watching you tonight, Mr. Vice President, I only can say that you took me to school. And by the way, I’m going to call you “Mr. Vice President” from now on. No more just plain “Joe” from me, sir.

Biden: What do you mean, I took you to school?

Obama: You instructed me with cold precision on just how a politician brings his A-game to a debate. I messed up the other night in that first debate with Mitt Romney. It won’t happen again. I guarantee it. After watching your full frontal assault on Paul Ryan, I now know what I have to do the next time Romney and I get together for Round Two.

Biden: Well, thank you, Mr. President. I’m a loyal soldier and, let’s face it – to borrow a phrase they say down in Texas – this wasn’t my first rodeo. But as you probably will find out, the Republicans thought their guy won and Democrats will think I won. But here’s the thing: We got our base fired up once again. I’m pretty sure we’ve at least stopped the momentum Romney gained after the Round One of your debate. And don’t forget that their base is fired up too.

Obama: OK then. Thanks for teeing it up for me. But if you don’t mind, I probably won’t laugh next week as much as you did.

Biden: Suit yourself, Mr. President. But you’d better bring it or else we both may be out of a job in January.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/11/tech/social-media/facebook-politics-friends/index.html?hpt=hp_bn5

I’ll have to admit that Facebook is testing my friendships.

As the CNN link here tells, politics is getting in the way of friendships. Apparently millions of folks have “unfriended” people over their political views. I hope it doesn’t come to that for me.

I’ve been on a political rampage lately with this blog. These posts go directly to Facebook, where they are shared with my Facebook friends, many of whom don’t share my own center-left leanings; indeed, some of those very friends might accuse me of being a commie. In return, I’ve endured some of their own rants.

I don’t intend to disavow my association with them over politics. The way I look at it, we all love our country equally. We just disagree on some of the finer points of how we should govern this great nation.

Is that worth losing a friendship? Hardly, except of course if you take yourself too seriously.

And yes, I do know some of those folks too.

Chill out, friends. It’s only politics.

Tonight’s vice-presidential debate between the incumbent, Democrat Joe Biden, the challenger, Republican Paul Ryan, is likely to produce some embellishment, a bit of braggadocio and maybe even some prevarication.

The run-up to this encounter has included some interesting sound bites from previous VP debates. My all-time favorite, of course, has been the 1988 face-off between Democratic VP nominee Lloyd Bentsen of Texas and Republican nominee Dan Quayle of Indiana. Both men were serving in the U.S. Senate at the time.

During the debate, which occurred in Danville, Ky. – where Biden and Ryan will square off tonight – Quayle sought to make a comparison between his congressional experience and that of a previous president, John F. Kennedy. He said that his experience matches up favorably with JFK’s experience in the House and Senate before Kennedy’s election in 1960.

Bentsen pounced. He was waiting for Quayle’s ill-advised comparison.

“I knew Jack Kennedy,” Bentsen said. “I served with Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Bentsen brought the house down. It was a devastating blow to Quayle, who retorted that the remark was “uncalled for, senator.” Bentsen responded, “But you brought it up … senator.”

OK, but was Bentsen really as close to JFK as his snappy response suggested? No.

Bentsen and Kennedy served together in the House for about five years; Kennedy left the House when he was elected senator from Massachusetts in 1952. Bentsen stayed in the House until 1955, and didn’t return to Washington until 1971 after his election to the Senate, more than seven years after Kennedy’s death.

Bentsen and Kennedy were little more than casual acquaintances during their time together. They represented vastly different regions of the country: Kennedy hailed from New England, Bentsen represented South Texas. They both served during World War II, they both came from wealthy backgrounds.

They weren’t exactly pals.

But hey, why let context get in the way of a good sound bite?

http://amarillo.com/news/latest-news/2012-10-10/11-teammates-testified-case-against-armstrong
I was so hoping that Lance Armstrong would be able to clear himself of the long-held belief that he won all those Tour de France titles with the aid of chemicals.
Now the anti-doping agency that’s been probing the allegations against Armstrong says it has mounting evidence the bicyclist doped himself up to prepare for what arguably is the most arduous athletic endurance event on the planet.
Armstrong recently declared his intention to quit fighting the allegations, which many have described as an implied admission of guilt.
This is a heartbreaking turn. The agency’s contention that it has evidence that incriminates the Texan makes it even worse.
Here’s what has troubled me, though, from the beginning of this doping controversy. It’s been the nature of Armstrong’s so-called “denial.” His answer seems almost like a rote response. He keeps saying he’s “never failed a drug test.” I don’t ever recall him denying categorically ever taking performance-enhancing drugs. His response has been simply that he’s passed all the tests administered to him. And that begs the obvious question: Has the one-time cycling icon been gaming the system, enabling him to pass these tests with what amounts to a “false negative”?
If all this comes to pass and the governing body that is supposed to watch over this misbehavior determines that Armstrong cheated to win the Tour de France, removing Armstrong’s titles will create a gaping hole in the roll call of past champions.

I am baffled at the right wing’s obsession with cutting federal money for programs that actually educate people.

Take public broadcasting, for example.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s debate performance this past week has been hailed largely a success. But when he went off on the issue of government waste, he took dead aim at the Public Broadcasting Service and, that’s right, Big Bird.

There are literally thousands of more wasteful government programs than the money the government spends on public television. Why do right-wingers keep flogging public television when they trot out ways to cut government spending?

PBS’s programming – which comes to the Panhandle via KACV, based at Amarillo College – is educational at so many levels. It’s children’s programming has become legendary, creating the popular characters such as Big Bird and the whole cast of Sesame Street. It provides comprehensive news coverage of current events. Next month, PBS will show a documentary on the Dust Bowl, produced by the renowned filmmaker Ken Burns – and that broadcast will resonate throughout the Panhandle, which lived through that horrific event in the 1930s.

PBS’s contribution to the federal debt amounts to spitting in the ocean.

If Romney and the base of his party were truly serious about the debt, they would start trotting out all the waste everyone on the planet knows exists in, say, the Defense Department. My strong hunch is that the savings realized right there could pay for PBS all by itself – and retain America’s status as the world’s pre-eminent military power.

http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/10/06/4316884/hampton-change-needed-atop-criminal.html

I’ve stopped overestimating the intelligence of some voters, so I won’t dare to predict how this campaign will turn out.

But Texans have a chance to make a serious statement about the nature of their criminal court system. They ought to back the election of Keith Hampton as the next presiding judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals.

Hampton is a Democrat running against Republican incumbent Judge Sharon “Killer” Keller. He’s drawn the endorsement of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (see link), among other papers. The S-T makes a compelling case that Keller has embarrassed the state long enough. The paper makes an equally compelling argument in favor of Keith Hampton.

As the editorial points out, the nadir of Keller’s time as presiding judge was when the court’s office closed at 5 p.m. and wouldn’t hear the last-minute of a death row inmate. She’s been hit with ethics charges and has generally been seen as an ardent friend of police and prosecutors. Let me be clear, I too have great respect for cops and prosecutors – but I haven’t taken an oath to administer justice without bias.

I hate the fact that we elect judges on partisan ballots in Texas. Back when the state was heavily Democratic, many good Republican judicial candidates were swept aside in the partisan tide. The state has turned Republican and the same fate has fallen on many qualified Democratic judicial candidates.

In this case, a true injustice will be done if Texas voters return Sharon Keller to the state’s highest criminal appellate court simply because she has an “R” next to her name.

http://www.texastribune.org/

The Texas Tribune has done a good job of outlining West Texas’ water woes.

But it could have been a bit more thorough. The article attached to this blog talks at length about the current water troubles in the Midland-Odessa and San Angelo regions. And yes, those communities are in deep trouble over the short term. The Tribune notes they might run out of water as early as next year.

But Amarillo is in a different position. The city has been buying water rights throughout the Panhandle. Boone Pickens recently sold a gazillion acre feet of water rights to the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority, thus ending his dream of piping water downstate to water-starved regions of Texas.

Local water planners keep telling us the city is in good water shape for, oh, the next couple of centuries. Yes, our drought is as grim as it’s been in the Permian Basin, but our water planners have been pretty far-sighted with their water strategy.

All this makes me wonder, though: What happens when the water does run out in, say, 2212? I realize that none of us will be around then; nor will our kids or grandkids. But a few generations down the road will feel the pinch when the water does run out. And it will.

I do take some comfort, though, in Amarillo City Hall’s proactive approach to developing new water sources – even though the city could do even more to promote aggressive water conservation.

Nothing – not even our water – lasts forever.

I’ve been laughing for two days now over the allegation from Jack Welch, former head of GE, that President Obama’s campaign cooked the jobless figures to make the president look good one month before the election.

The jobless rate fell to 7.8 percent in September. It’s now below that 8-percent threshold that Republican nominee Mitt Romney has been using as a benchmark for Obama’s “failed economic policies.” What’s more, the job growth totaled 114,000 in the past month, which isn’t exactly a sparkling number.

What proof did Welch produce to back up his claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics manipulated the numbers? None. It was a gut feeling, he told TV talking heads. And yet the media have reported this hunch as all but fact, ginning up a frenzied reaction among commentators and pundits on the right.

Let’s just point out a couple of things. First, the BLS is run by career bureaucrats, not political hacks. Also, this is the same outfit that revealed disappointing jobs numbers the day after the Democrats renominated Obama in early September at their national convention in Charlotte, N.C.; indeed, those tepid job-growth figures likely tamped down the post-convention bounce that Obama got afterward.

I say we ought to file Welch’s contention away with the rest of the baloney spewed out by the conservative media, which attach themselves to any phony conspiracy that damages Barack Obama.