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.

Many regions in Texas and the South boast of being the “buckle of the Bible Belt.” Deep East Texas just might be the real deal.

A dust-up has occurred at Kountze High School, just a few miles north of Beaumont, over whether cheerleaders can display Bible verses on banners during football games. The case has made national headlines and has created a bit of a stir in that part of the world.

I consulted recently with my pal Tom Taschinger, the editorial page editor of the Beaumont Enterprise – where I used to work – about his take on the story. He responded with an email that said in part, that the paper sided with those who say the display of the Scripture verses is a “clearcut violation of church-state separation.” He complained that the “local judge, and now the Texas AG are refusing to call a spade a spade and are leaving that job to a higher court.”

But then Tom offered this bit of a back story: “Lost in all this nonsense is the fact that the run-through banners are trampled into the mud and then thrown into the trash with soda cups and popcorn boxes – a clearly disrespectful way to treat Scripture. Yikes!”

I guess I would disagree respectfully with my friend’s view that the banners violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, given that the displays are a result of the students’ initiative and not a demand placed on them by school authorities.

But he’s totally right to chide the kids for treating these holy verses in such a – dare I say it – blasphemous manner.

My wife and I recently were the victims of what could be called a form of profiling.

The brief tale I’m about to tell is true and it provides an example of the deep divisions within our country.

We recently welcomed a relatively new friend into our home. She was visiting Amarillo from the Permian Basin, where she lives with her husband. She came here for a quick overnight stay before returning home.

Our friend, who we haven’t known all that long, entered our home and noticed the stars-and-stripes banner in the front window, the flag hanging on a back window and a small banner hanging next to the front porch. She took note of the displays. “Oh yes, we’re flag-wavers around here,” I said. “That’s a good thing. I’m glad to know that,” she answered before telling us how concerned she is that the president of the United States “doesn’t have a heart for this country.”

“Oh really?” I asked. Our friend wondered about my response and began immediately to sense she might have stepped into some tricky territory. “Are you Obama supporters?” she asked. We said yes.

We engaged in a brief political joust over whether the president really loves America. I noted that he has proclaimed his love of country repeatedly during his time in office. Our friend, a lifelong Republican active in party politics in her hometown, harbors some doubt about his sincerity.

We moved on quickly to other topics, all of us sensing that we didn’t want this discussion to get out of hand.

My point? The divisions that exist in this country have succeeded in labeling people on the other side incorrectly far too many times. Our friend seemed to assume that because we are admitted flag-wavers that we necessarily oppose the re-election of President Obama. That, of course, is a dangerous assumption to make. It reminds me a bit of another friend, a true-blue Democrat, who once chided me for wearing a flag pin in the lapel of my jacket. He seemed to suggest that only Republicans wear those cheesy lapel pins. I reminded him that wearing the flag pin has no bearing on my own political proclivity.

We take a back seat to no one in expressing our love of country. We fly our flag proudly. My eyes still well up at the sound of patriotic music. I love military parades.

Outward expressions of patriotism aren’t the exclusive domain of any single political party. It would do us good to appreciate that patriots come in all forms and political persuasions.

And have no concern about our relationship with our friend. We remain very fond of her.