Monthly Archives: October 2013

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Downtown Amarillo’s rebirth taking shape

Maybe it’s just me — and perhaps I’ll include my wife, as she’s noticed the same thing — but downtown Amarillo is looking quite a bit more pulled together than it did when we first arrived way back when.

I don’t get downtown as often as I used to. I average about one visit per week. But I’m noticing something as I make the drive into the central business district.

I’m noticing fewer gutted-out building hulks; fewer vacant lots strewn with trash and weeds; and a decidedly more appealing appearances to existing structures, blocks and street corners.

I usually enter downtown around noon from the Canyon Expressway. I drive to Eighth Avenue and then turn left. I have noticed that the corner of Eighth and Taylor Street is cleaned up. I look toward the Marriott Hotel and see considerable pedestrian traffic along Polk Street. Eating establishments are quite busy with lunchtime activity. I look south and continue to marvel at the Santa Fe Building, which Potter County purchased for a song and turned it into a fabulous office complex.

To what should we credit all this? It’s not yet clear. Of course, I am aware of all the Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone activity and pledges to start busting up pavement to build a ballpark, a parking garage and a hotel downtown. It hasn’t happened yet. The old Coca-Cola distribution center will be moving out to make room for some of that activity.

The Potter County Courthouse Square is complete and the city has installed those fancy curbs along the corners that jut into the streets. I haven’t heard of a rash of accidents that some critics claimed would occur when the city installed those new curb designs.

I’ve heard about investment firms buying up commercial property, vowing to turn them into commercial successes.

Is it all rosy and bright downtown? Well, not really. The city still has that hideous Barfield Building at the corner of Sixth and Polk. The developer who owns that building cannot secure the money to do anything with it. It sits there, languishing and rotting more by the week. I will choose to look away from that eyesore whenever I travel past that corner.

But all in all, the years since our arrival in Amarillo in early 1995 have been good for the city’s downtown business district.

I’ve said all along that virtually all cities’ success can be measured by how it treats its downtown district. Amarillo is moving slowly — and I hope inexorably — toward that success.

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Time for a new HHS secretary

Kathleen Sebelius has served the nation mostly with distinction during her time as Health and Human Services secretary.

Until now.

The rollout of the Affordable Care Act on Oct. 1 as been beset with mountains of trouble, relating mostly to the glitches in the website set up to manage the implementation of the act.

http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/19/21040394-sebelius-will-be-a-no-show-at-obamacare-hearing?lite

The mess-up has been huge. Is it Sebelius’s fault that her team of computer technicians haven’t been able to handle the huge traffic flow onto the site? No. However, the foul-ups have occurred on her watch. They involve the unveiling of President Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment. It has gone badly … to say the very least.

Now the HHS boss says she won’t take part in congressional hearings set for next month, citing scheduling conflicts.

I believe it’s time for her resign and hand the job over to someone else.

The criticism of the ACA rollout, of course, comes from congressional Republicans. What does anyone really expect? They’ve been critical of the law since its inception, its approval by Congress, its affirmation by the Supreme Court and its place at the center of the debate over whether to fund the government and increase the federal debt ceiling.

The very least one could have hoped would be for the unveiling of the law, which took effect while Congress was tying itself in knots over the budget, to occur smoothly. Yes, many millions of Americans have sought to enroll in some insurance plan. But didn’t HHS officials realize that going in? Didn’t Secretary Sebelius foresee the need to ensure that the system would work effectively?

The system has crashed repeatedly. The Obama administration admits it’s been a rocky start since the Oct. 1 rollout. Well, do you think?

Kathleen Sebelius has been on the job since the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency. And as her GOP critics have noted, she had time for an appearance on Jon Stewart’s comedy show, but doesn’t have the time to answer questions from Congress.

It’s time for Sebelius to go.

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What has happened to David Dewhurst?

Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst has been bitten by the critter that has infested a growing segment of the Republican Party.

He wants Congress to impeach President Obama. Imagine that: A Texas Republican running for re-election to a powerful statewide office has weighed in with the call for a presidential impeachment.

http://www.texasobserver.org/david-dewhurst-calls-obamas-impeachment/

This is not the man whom Texans have elected several times to statewide office. Something has happened to him.

Oh, I forgot. He lost a U.S. Senate race last year after being considered the prohibitive favorite; he got outflanked on his right by Ted Cruz and more than likely vowed never to let that happen again.

Therefore, he’s now calling for the president’s impeachment.

On what grounds? He says Obama has exerted executive authority that go beyond the Constitution. He mentioned something about the Sept. 11, 2011 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that the White House knew from the moment the fire fight began that our officials needed help immediately, but failed to respond.

I used to think of David Dewhurst as a public official with an unparalleled work ethic. No one outworked this guy. He possesses an outstanding command of legislative detail. I thought that trait served him well as the Texas Senate’s presiding officer.

Now the climate has changed. Tea party activists have taken command of the stage. They’re hogging the spotlight. They are out for political blood. Dewhurst, once thought to be an “establishment Republican,” is now sounding as ferocious as his nemeses on the right.

Perhaps the most astounding aspect of his impeachment call is that, as he told The Texas Observer, he was speaking as a “private citizen.”

Listen up, Gov. Dewhurst: You are not a private citizen.

Something has happened to a once-serious public servant. I’m worried about him — and about the state he has been elected to lead.

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Even ‘our SOBs’ may need to get tossed

I’ve been thinking the past few days about my former congressman, the late Jack Brooks, a crusty Democrat who served Southeast Texas for more than four decades before getting beat in that landmark 1994 Republican sweep of Congress.

Jack used to refer to himself as Sweet Old Brooks, which translates into the initials SOB. He was proud of his irascible nature. In fact, Brooks embodied the saying of members of Congress that so-and-so “may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.”

Some polling has come out in recent days that suggests American voters may be more likely than at any time in memory to throw out their congressman or woman in the next election, largely because of the trumped-up drama that took us once more to the brink of defaulting on our financial obligations.

The faux drama ended late Wednesday when the Senate leadership cobbled together a deal to reopen part of the federal government and lift the debt ceiling so we can pay our bills.

The consequences of defaulting are quite chilling to consider. The financial markets would have collapsed, taking millions of Americans’ retirement accounts into the crapper.

Still, with that prospect hanging over Americans’ heads, a number of senators and House members voted against the deal to prevent the default. Who voted no? Among them were Texas’s two GOP senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz and my current Republican member of Congress, Mac Thornberry.

Thornberry said on TV tonight that he voted “no” because the deal didn’t solve any problems; it only postponed for a few months a situation that he thinks will repeat itself when the debt ceiling is set to expire once more.

I guess my question for the dissenters is this: How would you propose to solve all those problems at the last minute?

I’ll concede that the political system is badly broken. However, Thornberry, Cornyn and Cruz all are part of what ails it. They, of course, blame the other party — just as the other party blames them.

So, to fix the problem they proposed letting the government default on its debts, allowing the economy to crash, keeping federal employees furloughed and maintaining maximum dysfunction in our federal government. Reminds me of the old Vietnam War axiom of “destroying the village in order to save it.”

To think that some folks still wonder why Congress’s approval rating is in the sewer.

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Texas voter fraud: Is it a major problem?

Dan Branch wants to become Texas’s next attorney general and, by golly, the Republican state representative from Dallas says he’s going to get really tough on voter fraud.

I must ask, therefore: Is voter fraud a major problem in Texas? I am thinking it’s about as major an issue here as it is virtually everywhere else. Which means it isn’t that big a deal.

http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2013/10/branch-vows-to-attack-voter-fraud-in-texas/

Branch vows to monitor groups that seek to “subvert” voter integrity; he would appoint a special counsel who would prosecute those accused of voter fraud; and he vows to defend the Texas voter ID law against “spurious” attempts by the Obama administration to overturn it.

I’m still a bit dubious about the need for a voter ID law in Texas, particularly since those who sing its praises contend that voter fraud has reached epidemic proportions here. I’m still awaiting evidence that voter fraud is rampant.

Roughly 8 million Texans voted in the 2012 presidential election. Has anyone produced evidence that voter fraud has become a major concern anywhere in the state? I haven’t heard of it.

Yes, the state’s political history is full of stories of dead people voting. Duval County in South Texas provides the best-known example of corpses rising from their graves to vote for Lyndon Johnson. That was a very long time ago.

The state’s population has exploded in the decades since that era. The number of people voting in elections has boomed. Have we seen an accompanying explosion in cases of vote fraud? No.

Obviously, I do not condone voter fraud. Yes, the state needs to be vigilant to protect the integrity of the electoral process. I sense, however, that candidates for public office, as the San Antonio Express-News blog linked to this post notes, may be “creating a solution in search of a problem.”

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Time is getting away from me

This is the latest in an occasional series of blog posts commenting on impending retirement.

I am beginning to understand why retired people often discard their wristwatches.

They become superfluous and virtually without value. I know that cell phones tell time, too. So why wear something on your wrist that gets banged up, right?

My sister and brother-in-law have been retired for some time now and they both tell me how they laugh at well-meaning strangers who say, “Have a nice weekend.” They look at each other and might mutter something to each other like, “Well, OK. Thanks, I guess.”

Yes, time has becoming something that means less and less to wife and me as we move toward retirement.

This is a difficult transition for me, given that I spent 36 years toiling under deadline pressure. Time meant everything to me as a daily journalist. I had projects to complete by a certain time and I had to meet those deadlines … or else face the consequences.

No longer.

There have been moments recently when I cannot remember what day it is. Those moments usually occur on what full-time working folks would call “weekends.” Is it Saturday or Sunday? What do I have to do today? Oh, nothing. That’s a relief.

Our travel plans don’t usually revolve around weekends. Since my working life is now a part-time endeavor and my employers — I’m working three part-time jobs — are all pretty lenient with my requests for time off, my wife and I can schedule our road trips whenever we feel like it.

I’ll admit that this whole new time-management mode is going to take some adjustment. So far, though, we’ve managed to adjust to every change that we’ve encountered as we’ve entered this new phase of our life together.

Retirement, I’ve discovered, requires a high-level of adaptability.

We’re passing that test with flying colors.

What time is it? Oh, never mind.

 

 

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Cruz making more enemies daily

Sen. Ted Cruz cannot possibly understand what he’s doing.

The Texas Republican seems to be doing everything possible, all within his power, to alienate the leadership of his party, not to mention the elders of the U.S. Senate where he has served all of nine months.

As Dana Milbank notes in his Washington Post column, Cruz has done what was thought to be virtually impossible, which is create a massive amount of wreckage in record time.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-in-debt-limit-and-shutdown-defeat-ted-cruz-is-one-sore-loser/2013/10/16/d896d180-36b4-11e3-ae46-e4248e75c8ea_story.html?hpid=z7

McConnell brokered a deal with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that reopened the government and staved off a default of our national debt obligations. That wasn’t acceptable to Sen. Cruz, who said the Washington “establishment” caved in. To whom he wasn’t entirely clear.

Cruz then stormed in front of a bank of TV cameras at the very time McConnell was making his own statement about the deal. I am quite certain the Senate’s chief Republican is not going to forget what Cruz said and did any time soon. As McConnell was trying to put some kind of positive spin on what he and Reid accomplished, Cruz was turning the spin in precisely the opposite direction.

Team player? All for one and one for all? Neither of those notions has a place in Ted Cruz’s vocabulary.

Cruz said the Senate should have “listened to the American people.” My hunch is that the 81 senators who voted for the McConnell-Reid deal were listening to the people — who were telling them to end this madness, to get the government operating fully and to avoid plunging this nation into default.

It’s Ted Cruz who needs to have his hearing checked.

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Self-awareness has gone AWOL in Senate

The Huffington Post has taken note of a patently hilarious reaction to the deal struck by the Senate to end the government shutdown, which also increases the national debt limit.

It is that the U.S. Senate comprises 100 individuals who have next to zero self-awareness.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/16/senate-budget-crisis_n_4112253.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

There they were, applauding themselves for all the hard they did in getting the deal done. The applause seems to ignore the reality of what brought us to the brink of fiscal calamity — which was the senators’ role, along with the House of Representatives, in creating the problem in the first place.

Indeed, watching Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell pat each other — and themselves — on the back for all that work will present late-night comedians plenty of grist for the foreseeable future.

None of this needed to happen. None of the federal employees who were furloughed without pay needed to suffer. The nation did not need to endure this drama. Americans did not need to wonder whether their retirement accounts were going to evaporate because Congress and the White House couldn’t reach a deal sooner.

The deal struck, let us remember, provides only a short-term relief. More drama is just around the corner.

And for this the Senate is congratulating itself?

Give me a break.

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Attention now turns to budget panels

Let us now focus our attention on some members of Congress — from both political parties — who have been given the task of working out a long-term federal budget agreement that prevents charades such as the one that just ended.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/17/politics/shutdown-over-main/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Democratic Sen. Patty Murray and Republican Rep. Paul Ryan — who chair the Senate and House budget committees, respectively — are going to begin talking between themselves. They’re both serious politicians (no irony intended, honest) but their task is monumental, given the institutional refusal of both legislative chambers to adopt any kind of strategic approach to these problems.

We came within a few hours this week of defaulting on our nation’s debt obligations. The two-week-long government shutdown sucked an estimated $24 billion from the nation’s economy. It turns out we’ll pay our bills and the government has reopened fully.

President Obama signed the bills into law late Wednesday and said the end of this budget battle removes the “cloud of unease” that had been hovering over the financial world.

I beg to differ, Mr. President.

The unease has just taken a brief respite. It’ll likely return in January and again in February. The money to run the government runs out in January; our borrowing limit expires in February. Many of us out here believe we’ll be right back at it again when those deadlines approach.

Of the two budget panel chairs, Ryan has the more difficult task, given the role the tea party wing of the GOP — of which he is a member — played in prolonging the ridiculous drama that unfolded. The House Republican caucus will continue to fight to eradicate the Affordable Care Act, which only just now has been implemented. They don’t like it and predict all kinds of catastrophe will befall the nation if it is allowed to live on.

Ryan is considered to be a serious and thoughtful young man. I’m withholding my final judgment on him. I’m not sure he’ll be able to resist the enormous pressure he’ll feel from the extreme right wing of his party, although I retain some faith he’ll be able to work constructively with Democrats on his committee and with the likes of Chairwoman Murray in the Senate.

Here’s a bit of advice from out here in the Heartland. Work until you get a deal. You have no need to take extended recesses between now and Christmas. You have much to do and the public — into whose faces you spit when you closed much of the federal government — pay you folks a pretty fair wage to solve these problems.

Finally, Democrats and Republicans can learn from the memories of two presidents — Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan. Both men knew how to work the system. They perfected the art of principled compromise.

Now … let’s get busy.

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Debt deal is no ‘victory’ for anyone

President Obama has called the debt deal brokered by the U.S. Senate that reopens the federal government and saves the nation from defaulting on its debts as some kind of victory.

It isn’t.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/328985-obama-hails-debt-deals-passage-as-lifting-cloud-of-unease

It delays the next fight, which is going to occur early in 2014 when the federal government will come up against the next debt ceiling deadline and when the government runs out of money to keep many “non-essential” agencies running.

Sens. Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid struck a deal early Wednesday. The Senate approved it; then the House of Representatives followed suit.

The whole scene produced a disgraceful display of brinkmanship, showmanship, posturing, demagoguery and cheap politicization. In my view, the bad guys continue to be the tea party wing of the House Republican caucus, which fought almost to the very end to defund the Affordable Care Act and pursued that tactic as a method of getting their way.

What now? Well, members of Congress are supposed to begin meeting to hammer out a “permanent” budget solution. Good luck with that. Count me as one American who has no faith — zero, none — that Congress will negotiate any kind of long-term agreement that will prevent this kind of nonsense from recurring in the near future.