Monthly Archives: August 2013

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Presidents never take ‘vacation’

Presidents of the United States of America do not take vacations the way you and I take them.

Got that?

Thus, it was with some dismay that I heard Michael Smerconish — sitting in for Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball show this afternoon — chronicle he number of days recent presidents have taken time away from the Oval Office.

President Obama is spending a few days in Massachusetts with his wife and daughters. He’s playing a little golf, showing his girls a little attention and in general acting like a husband and father. He’s also receiving national security briefings and is being told constantly about developments around the world and in the huge country he governs.

Smerconish ticked off the number of so-called vacation days Obama has taken this far in his presidency. He noted that President Clinton took fewer days at a similar stage in his presidency and also noted that Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush took far more days away during their time in the White House.

Big bleeping deal!

Smerconish did say that he, too, never has begrudged presidents for taking time away. Good for him.

None of this matters not one bit as far as I can tell. Oh sure, some of Obama’s critics have needled him for taking time away to play golf. I believe they need something — anything — with which to gripe about him.

And remember how White House reporters complained about George W. Bush’s vacations at his ranch in Crawford, Texas — in the middle of the summer when the heat was unbearable? I reckon they aren’t complaining now about covering Obama’s vacation in posh Martha’s Vineyard.

Whatever. As Smerconish noted, presidents deserve some time away from the grind to stay sharp and remain grounded in things that really matter — such as their families.

Even when they’re “vacationing,” presidents are on the clock. Always.

Enjoy yourself, if you can, Mr. President.

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Fox News might have to clam up about HRC film

The Fox News Channel has been all over the tumult involving CNN and NBC’s involvement in projects involving former Secretary of State (and possible 2016 presidential candidate) Hillary Rodham Clinton.

CNN is planning to air a film about Clinton; NBC is hoping to air a four-part miniseries. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus is threatening to shut the two networks out of GOP presidential debates when the 2016 campaign kicks into gear.

But wait. The New York Times reports that Fox Television Stations is involved in the production and distribution of the CNN project.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/reince-priebus-hillary-clinton-miniseries-nbc-95431.html?hp=r2

What say you now, Fox News Channel talking heads?

Priebus clammed up about the NY Times report, preferring to focus instead on the creative minds behind the works. Priebus, of course, loves FNC — as do political conservatives all over the country, given the network’s right-leaning slant.

Oh, I forgot, Fox is “fair and balanced.”

Whatever. I’m going to lay down a bet that Fox commentators might have to tone down their outrage.

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Rose shows off his ignorance

Pete Rose once was a heck of a baseball player — who then got caught violating one of the cardinal rules of the game. He placed bets on games involving his own team.

Then-Major League Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti made it clear to Rose: You’re out. You’re banned for life.

Now the all-time hit king has decided he chose the wrong vice. He should have used illegal drugs, or beat up on his wife/girlfriend, he said. That way he’d get a second — maybe a third — chance at getting back into baseball’s good graces.

Rose shows why he’s such a slug.

http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/08/12/pete-rose-i-should-have-picked-alcohol-or-i-should-have-picked-up-beating-up-my-wife-or-girlfriend/related/

He probably hasn’t been paying attention to the piles of invective that have been heaped on those who’ve been caught using performance-enhancing drugs. Narcissist that he is, Rose cares only about what’s been said about him since his lifetime ban went into effect in 1989.

I’ve seen the clause in the baseball handbook that deals with gambling. It says anyone caught gambling is banned from the game for the rest of his life. Rose knew that, yes? But he did it anyway.

As for the PED scandal that’s erupted once again with the pending suspension of super-duperstar Alex Rodriguez and a dozen other players, baseball only recently enacted a ban on the drugs’ use. And that was after other big-time players — Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Roger Clemens to name just four — either were suspected of using them or actually admitted to it.

Rose doesn’t deserve to be reinstated. He remains what I’ve thought him to be, a top-notch athlete with gutter-level morals.

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College athletes already are ‘paid’

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Today’s question: Should the NCAA allow college athletes to get paid while they are in school?

Not even close. No … as in “hell no!”

The Beaumont Enterprise, where I used to work as editorial page editor, has this interesting feature in which it poses a question and then offers competing points of view. This week, the paper addressed the issue of paying college athletes.

http://www.beaumontenterprise.com/opinions/editorials/article/PRO-CON-VIEW-Should-college-sports-let-athletes-4721405.php

I’m an old-fashioned guy when it comes to sports. Heck, I don’t even like the designated hitter rule, artificial turf, domed stadiums, or all the commercial signage pro golfers and race car drivers have to wear.

Thus, I believe college athletes have no compelling need to actually get paid for playing football and basketball, the two money-making sports for virtually all colleges and universities in America.

The question comes up in the wake of the Johnny “Football” Manziel matter involving whether he got paid for signing autographs while playing Heisman Trophy-winning football for Texas A&M University.

My take on it is this: Manziel already is getting paid by virtue of his receiving a fully funded college education. He, along with all blue-chip athletes, go to college with all their schoolwork paid for by scholarships, funded usually by huge endowments paid by big-time contributors. Texas A&M is among the richest universities on the planet, endowment-wise.

I prefer to see these young athletes also perform as students in the classroom, without the perk of capitalizing on their athletic skills through payoffs handed to them under the table.

I cannot predict what the NCAA will rule in the Manziel case. From my perch, it doesn’t look good for Johnny Football.

As for paying college athletes? A free college education is payment enough.

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Tiger will be just fine, thank you very much

Tiger Woods didn’t win the PGA this past weekend. He’s still looking to win his 15th major golf tournament.

And strange as it seems, golf’s pundit class is giving him a bad time because he hasn’t won a major since 2008.

Get off it, already.

http://msn.foxsports.com/golf/story/pga-championship-tiger-woods-departs-a-major-empty-handed-again-081113

Even if Tiger Woods never wins another major championship, he’ll be able to look back on what has been an extraordinary golf career. He’s won 79 PGA events overall, second to Sam Snead’s 82 wins. He is stuck on 14 major wins, with Jack Nicklaus ahead of him with 18. The way I see it, being mentioned in the same sentence with Slammin’ Sammy and the Golden Bear puts Tiger in the middle of some pretty tall cotton.

I think he’ll win more majors. Whether he catches Jack is another matter. Still, it shouldn’t really matter when measuring the impact Tiger Woods has had on the game of golf.

All of this armchair handwringing reminds of what sports talkers used to say about auto racing legend Mario Andretti, who’s generally recognized as one of the greatest drivers in the history of his sport. But he won only a single Indianapolis 500 race, in 1969. He figured to win many Indy races when he arrived on the scene in 1965. He had bad luck at Indy.

Someone finally asked Mario to comment on one of his many failures to win a second Indy 500. His answer, which I only can paraphrase now, was classic. He said he doesn’t measure the success of his career by what he didn’t do at Indy. He prefers to look instead at the big picture: Daytona 500 victory in 1967, Formula One championship in 1978 … and a host of victories at tracks worldwide of all kinds and shapes racing open-wheeled cars, NASCAR stock cars, Formula One road course vehicles.

I believe the totality of Tiger Woods’s career, when it finally concludes, will measure up.

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What happened to new freedoms, Russia?

Two decades ago, the Soviet Union receded into history. Russia was reborn supposedly as a country where its citizens could live in freedom.

It’s now painfully obvious, however, that freedom in Russia has its limits.

Freedom doesn’t include gay people.

http://news.yahoo.com/video/gay-russians-seeking-refuge-131300654.html

The Russian government has issued some kind of mandate that makes it illegal for homosexuals to demonstrate for their rights. One of the results of this crackdown has been an outmigration of Russians to other countries. Gay Russians no longer are welcome in their country. As the link attached here notes, Vancouver, British Columbia, is seeing a significant increase in Russians fleeing to that city on the Pacific Coast of Canada.

The communists who founded and later ruled the Soviet Union seized many people’s freedom. They couldn’t own property. They couldn’t acquire wealth, or worship freely. They couldn’t speak out against their government without fearing for their lives. They couldn’t love whomever they wished.

The commies are gone from power — more or less — and the Russian Federation has restored many of the aforementioned freedoms. The government, though, has declared in effect that it is illegal to be gay.

Is it any wonder, then, that President Barack Obama — who keeps speaking out on behalf of the rights of all the world’s citizens — and his Russian colleague, Vladimir Putin, can’t get along?

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A new world awaits

OK, my fellow travelers. You’re about to have some company on the open road.

My wife and I have recently joined the world of recreational vehicle owners. We purchased a 29-foot fifth wheel travel vehicle. It’s going to be hitched up to a new pickup we purchased. Very soon — we hope — we’re going to hit the road for some serious traveling.

I have some more good news. This past week we completed a three-night trial run with the fifth wheel. We didn’t go far with it. Just across town, to the east side of Amarillo, not far from the world-famous Big Texan Steak Ranch.

We hitched our fifth wheel to the back of our 3/4-ton pickup and drove it about eight miles to the other side of the city. We parked it in a space that included hookups for city water, electricity, cable television, and a place to dump our sewage.

We couldn’t ask for anything more.

So, we spent three nights getting acquainted with our fifth wheel. The first night was interesting, given that a fierce thunderstorm blew in over Amarillo. How did we fare during the storm? Beautifully, I’m happy to report. We had leveled our vehicle with front and rear jacks, plus a tripod stabilizer we installed under the fifth wheel hitch.

We spent two more days and nights there, visited with other travelers — those who actually were traveling — and laughed as we told them we were locals who drove across town to inaugurate our travel vehicle. “That’s smart of you to do that,” came the response.

Saturday morning, we woke up, cooked our breakfast and began the task of breaking camp. We had some help from one of the RV park managers who came over to watch us unhook the water lines, flush out our wastewater tanks, and button everything up. He left before we hooked the truck up with the fifth wheel. But hey, no problem. We got it done.

We drove back to our storage garage, unhooked truck from fifth wheel and went home quite satisfied with how much we learned. Yes, we still have questions, but now we’re able to ask them more intelligently.

With that, we’ve entered the world of semi-retirement. Neither of us is retired fully just yet. That day is approaching. But our venture into this new world of travel is the culmination of a discussion my wife and I have been having for, oh, about 25 years.

We’re ready to hit the road.

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The Donald is back in the political arena

He’s baaaack.

Donald Trump showed up this weekend on the ABC-TV news show “This Week,” and yep, started talking like someone who wants to run for president in 2016.

http://thehill.com/video/campaign/316533-trump-would-spend-whatever-it-takes-to-win-gop-nomination-in-2016

I almost cannot add to the video attached to this blog.

It’s hard to understand why a serious news show would interview someone who is likely to do exactly what he did in 2012: sound like someone who wants to run for the White House but who couldn’t give up his lucrative TV gig, “The Apprentice.”

The Donald is a lot of things: showman, successful businessman, egomaniac … to name just three.

A serious public policy expert he is not.

He said in the interview with ABC that the Republicans have to nominate “the right candidate” to be someone such as Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016.

The Donald is not — and never will be — that candidate.

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Cornyn vs. Gohmert? Really?

Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka reports that U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert is being pushed to challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in next year’s Texas Republican Party primary.

Please, please, say it is so.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/gohmert-v-cornyn

Gohmert is running neck and neck with Rep. Steve Stockman of Friendswood in the contest to be Texas’s goofiest Republican member of Congress. Gohmert enjoys tremendous strength among the party’s tea party wing. Cornyn — the former Texas attorney general and state Supreme Court justice — is a more “establishment-type” Republican, meaning that his support comes from the more mainstream sources.

Gohmert remains committed to the notion that the president may have been in a foreign country. His list of idiotic statements in recent years has become the stuff of legend.

It puzzles me, though, as to why Cornyn might become a tea party target. As head of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, Cornyn has earned his spurs criticizing President Obama at every turn. He certainly was no shrinking violet during last year’s presidential campaign, as he tried repeatedly to derail the president’s successful re-election effort.

That doesn’t appear to be good enough.

What would happen if Gohmert were to run? He’d likely lose the primary, but that would mean he’d also surrender his House seat in 2014. But whoever his East Texas constituents send to the House to succeed him remains a dicey proposition.

If next year’s Texas primary features these two gut-fighters, though, it’ll embody the intraparty warfare that’s brewing between those who want government to do something and those who want it to do nothing.

I’m hoping Gohmert runs. Texans need a good laugh.

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One of MLB’s best gets his dander up

Albert Pujols is my favorite baseball player. He’s the only one I track daily, kind of like the way I used to track Mickey Mantle’s hit stats.

Pujols is on the shelf at the moment, trying to recover from a foot injury that’s hampered him all season. However, he’s back in the news. Jack Clark, a former major leaguer of some repute, has accused Pujols of taking performance enhancing drugs.

Pujols’s reaction? He’s threatening to sue Clark.

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/jack-clark-fired-los-angeles-angels-albert-pujols-ped-steroids-tigers-justin-verlander-080913

Clark made his rant on a radio show. He got fired immediately after he delivered it.

As for Pujols, I am going to stand behind him. Pujols has said many times during his 12-year career that Major League Baseball can test him for drugs “every single day.” He has vowed repeatedly never to dishonor the game he loves, his wife and children, his teammates, his employers … or even his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

He’s an angry man today, vowing to take legal action against Clark.

I know what you’re thinking. Rafael Palmiero, another big leaguer of considerable renown, once wagged his finger at members of Congress and said he “never took” performance enhancing drugs. Turns out he fibbed — in a big-league way.

Still, I am inclined to believe Albert Pujols’s angry response is sincere. I might just give up the Grand Old Game altogether, though, if he disappoints me.