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.

The Sunday morning talk shows were abuzz with chatter about Mitt Romney’s debate performance this past week.

One of the talking heads – a Republican “strategist,” I believe – spoke of Romney’s promise to work across the aisle with Democrats in Congress, just as he did when he was governor of Massachusetts. The talker also noted that the Bay State legislature comprised 85 percent Democrats.

Which brings up a fascinating lesson, brought to us by none other than the current GOP pariah, former President George W. Bush, whom no Republican mentions in the context of the 2012 race against President Obama.

Dubya brought a similar skill to the White House when he became president in 2001. He, too, worked well with Democrats in Austin when he was governor. He had no choice. The Legislature was controlled by Democrats; the Senate was run by a Democratic lieutenant governor, Bob Bullock, who was proud of his cantankerous nature; the House speaker was a cotton farmer from the Panhandle, Democrat Pete Laney of Hale Center.

Dubya had to learn quickly that to get things done in Austin he needed to enlist lawmakers from both parties, not just his own Republican brethren.

Then a strange thing happened. He got elected president in 2000 in that bizarre contest featuring a contested recount of ballots in Florida and a one-vote U.S. Supreme Court victory that stopped the recount, granting Bush the electoral votes he needed to take office. His electoral vote margin was 271-266, which is as narrow a margin as it gets.

How did Bush govern once he took the presidential oath? Well, kind of like his dad when when he won the office in 1988 in a virtual landslide. Dubya didn’t quite take the same spirit of bipartisanship with him to Washington. He had Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, so he could push through whatever he wanted without the help of them stinkin’ Democrats.

Of course, the problem was worsened by the anger many Capitol Hill Democrats harbored against Bush for being elected in the first place – and in the manner in which the election was decided. (For the record, I have believed all along in the legitimacy of Bush’s first election, as it was done precisely as the Constitution dictates.)

But now, a dozen years later, another Republican is trying to persuade Americans he’ll be a bipartisan president. Barack Obama said the same thing four years ago, only to hear from his Republican foes that their No. 1 goal is to deny the president a second term.

Politics is a contact sport, as the late, great Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas used to say. My guess is that if Romney pulls of the unexpected victory next month, his Democratic foes will ensure continued gridlock, just as Republicans have done with Obama, and as Dubya and the Democrats did with each other.

I don’t agree much with Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s view of the world.
But he’s right to insist that children of Texans who are here illegally – the young people who’ve lived in Texas virtually all their lives – deserve to pay in-state tuition costs when they go to public colleges and universities in Texas.
Recall that when Perry was running for president early this year, he got pilloried by his hard-nosed Republican opponents for sticking up for those young people. But he stayed true to his principles even at the expense of many of those who supported his presidential bid.
I wasn’t one of them, even though I admired his stance on that single issue at the time – and I’m in his corner now as he threatens to veto legislation next year that might seek to end that benefit for some of our resident Texans.
Perry sounds much like his predecessor as governor, George W. Bush – and even like the president of the United States whose job he sought – when he stands up for those who are Americans in virtually conceivable way. All they lack is citizenship – or legal immigrant – documentation.
Is that their fault? Is it their fault that they were brought to Texas as children by parents who sought work? No. Perry’s in-state tuition view reminds me a good bit of President Obama’s decision to cease deporting younger illegal immigrants, those who were brought to this country when they were children and who have grown up as Americans.
The 2013 Texas Legislature – which is controlled by Perry’s Republican Party – is likely to try powering through some legislation that seeks to crack down on those prospective college students. The Texas governor, who doesn’t possess much actual power, does have the veto pen at his disposal. He needs to uncap it and have it ready if and when that bill reaches his desk.

The foes of Amarillo’s recently approved cellphone ban ordinance are dredging up all kinds of red herrings to state their case.

My favorite canard suggests that the cellphone ban symbolizes a loss of freedom.

To do what? To operate a motor vehicle while trying to call up someone on a handheld device … in the middle of traffic, or when children are present? The “freedom” argument is nonsense.

It should be noted that the City Commission decision to ban cellphone use while driving doesn’t prohibit the activity altogether. Here’s all you have to do: When the phone rings, pull your vehicle over – if you are able to do so safely, of course – stop your vehicle and then answer your phone. Then you can blab all you want, freely and without interruption.

The other option is to let the phone keep ringing until the caller hangs up. My little flip-phone tells me when I’ve missed a call; it even tells me who tried to call me. So I can call the person back when I get to a safe location.

The lost-freedom society out there ignores another basic truth, which is that we have all kinds of laws that result in similar losses of freedom. As my wife wondered this morning, “Why stop when the stop sign tells me to stop when I can just keep driving through the intersection?” She joked that stop signs deprive her of the “freedom” to keep driving, but she chooses to stop – “especially when cars are coming from the other direction.”

The cellphone ban is a public safety issue. Being a good-government kind of guy, I think one of government’s primary duties is to protect the public.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/05/news/economy/welch-unemployment-rate/index.html?source=cnn_bin

I’m a bit surprised it took this long for someone to level the charge that Jack Welch, former head of GE, has leveled at the Obama administration.

Welch said the jobless numbers released today have been cooked up to make President Obama look good. He doubts the veracity of the report that joblessness fell to 7.8 percent, the lowest race since Obama took office. The jobless rate this past month was 8.1 percent.

I’ve long pondered whether these numbers could be verified independently, or whether the media just accept the figures handed to them by the U.S. Department of Labor. Do I necessarily believe that the figures are rigged, as Welch has suggested? No.

As a believer in a free press and one who dismisses the notion that the “mainstream media” have some insidious liberal bias, I tend to take Labor Department figures at face value. I also believe that the media would report independently whether the feds are rigging these outcomes.

And lest we forget, the “mainstream media” also include plenty of conservative outlets – both print and online – who would spare no expense or effort to embarrass those on the other end of the political spectrum.

If there was any funny business, don’t think for an instant that conservative talkers wouldn’t blow the whistle.

http://amarillo.com/blog-post/enrique-rangel/2012-10-04/seliger-doesnt-get-committee-appointment-he-wanted

Texas state Sen. Kel Seliger wanted to chair the Senate Education Committee. He really, really wanted it.

But the chairman’s gavel went to someone else after Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst announced chairmanships for the upcoming legislative session. The new education chairman is right-wing firebrand Dan Patrick of Houston. It’s too early to predict what will happen, but Patrick isn’t exactly a friend of public education in Texas.

I sincerely hope public education doesn’t take too big a hit in the 2013 Texas Legislature.

Seliger, an Amarillo Republican, would have been a better friend of public education than Patrick. Seliger wasn’t exactly skunked in the chairmanship sweepstakes. He is the new chairman of the Senate Higher Education Committee; with Amarillo College and West Texas A&M University in his district – along with Frank Phillips College and Clarendon College – in his sprawling Senate district, Seliger will have no shortage of local interest in what his new panel will consider.

But the Amarillo lawmaker would have been a great fit for the Education Committee chairmanship. Why? Because he decidedly is not part of the extreme wing of his party. Patrick, though, is a firebrand who on occasion has been known to shoot from the hip.

Hard to know precisely why Dewhurst passed Seliger over for the Education chairmanship. One theory is that Dewhurst was stung by his U.S. Senate Republican primary loss to tea party golden boy Ted Cruz and that he’s trying to make nice with the conservative wing of his party.

If so, that’s too bad … not for Dewhurst, but likely for the cause of public education, the health of which remains vital to Texas’ future.

http://thehill.com/video/campaign/260373-gore-suggests-high-altitude-to-blame-for-obama-debate-performance

Former Vice President Al Gore has posited a doozy of a possible explanation for President Obama’s poor debate showing.

He says Denver’s mile-high altitude might have been to blame – to which I must ask: Huh?

I’m pretty sure Mitt Romney was on the same stage as the president the other night at the University of Denver, which would have exposed him to the very same altitude as the president.

Is the former Massachusetts governor some kind of bionic man who is immune to these things? Probably not.

I have much respect for the former vice president. I happen to think he’s right on a lot of things, including his concerns about global warming and whether human beings’ overuse of carbon fuels is at the root of its cause.

However, he ought to refrain from nutty diagnoses about the president’s poor debate performance.

My own guess is that President Obama just didn’t spend enough time getting into fighting trim. Don’t expect him a repeat performance from him the next time.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/10/03/chris_matthews_freaks_out_at_obama_after_debate_romney_was_winning.html

I’ve had a good night’s sleep since watching Barack Obama and Mitt Romney engage in Round One of their debate series and I’ll acknowledge that my initial off-the-cuff response to what I saw last night doesn’t comport with what most “experts” are saying about it.

I called the event essentially a draw immediately after it ended. The pundit class says Romney won the first round.

Maybe he scored more points. He was more aggressive. The president seemed a bit out of sorts. Obama didn’t bring his “A game” to the event.

But a larger question looms: Does a single debate determine who should be elected commander in chief of the greatest military apparatus in the world, or who should fix the economy or guide the nation through troubled waters? I hope not.

The next two presidential debates and the VP debate set for next week will help clarify many things for us. Only after hearing the combatants talk about the whole range of issues should we make up our minds.

And for those who now believe that they witnessed a “game changer” last night, I only would refer them to the 1984 debate series between President Reagan and Walter Mondale. Reagan was simply awful in that first debate, stumbling through answers. In the second debate, one the journalists on the panel questioned whether the president, who was 73 at the time, was too old for the job. “I am not going to make age an issue in this campaign,” the president said. “I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

Reagan brought the house down … and won re-election in a 49-state landslide.

http://amarillo.com/news/local-news/2012-10-02/beilue-mud-slinging-it-used-be-worse-political-campaigns

My pal Jon Mark Beilue makes a critical point in his latest column: You might think Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are tough on each other, but their attacks seem downright tame compared to what’s been done before.

Romney in particular has been whining about the personal nature of the president’s attacks. He ought to gaze back through history to see what tough campaigning really looks like.

For my money, the most negative presidential campaign was the George H.W. Bush-Michael Dukakis mudfest in 1988. That contest featured a murderer named Willie Horton, for whom Dukakis granted a furlough when he was governor of Massachusetts. Horton killed someone while on furlough from prison. Bush seized on the issue and pounded Dukakis mercilessly over a matter that was brought to light during the Democratic primary by none other than U.S. Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee.

President Lyndon Johnson’s campaign in 1964 portrayed Republican challenger Barry Goldwater as a war-monger who would destroy the world in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. And go back even farther and you’ll find political brutality the likes of which we haven’t seen since.

A larger point of Beilue’s column is that negativity works, which is why campaigns use it to make whatever point they want to make. If voters didn’t respond to negative campaigns the candidates wouldn’t take their campaigns in that direction.

But is this campaign among the most negative in history? Not even close.

http://www.texastribune.org/texas-newspaper/texas-news/brief-top-texas-news-oct-3-2012/

I wish it hadn’t come to this. Former Democratic Texas state Rep. Paul Sadler and former Republican state Solicitor General Ted Cruz engaged in a debate last night and Sadler resorted to cheap name-calling.

“What you don’t do is do your job as a legislator worried that some troll will come along 10 years later or 20 years later and try to run a campaign against you,” Sadler said of Cruz, his opponent in the race to become the state’s next U.S. senator.

I always thought Sadler was better than that. Remember when Gov. Ann Richards referred to George W. Bush as a “jerk” back in 1994 when she ran for re-election. That was an unseemly utterance and it might have played a part in Bush defeating Richards that year.

It’s not as though Cruz and Sadler are locked in a tight match. Every poll under the broad Texas sky shows Cruz is the prohibitive favorite to take the seat held by fellow Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison.

Some have seized on the troll comment as a shot at Cruz’s height; he’s a good bit shorter than Sadler. Let’s not go there. No, the troll reference merely is a gratuitous bit of petulance that should not have become part of what is supposed to be a serious public policy discussion.