Monthly Archives: August 2015

national news, political news

Isn’t America still ‘great’?

ballcap trump

Tod Robberson, writing a blog for the Dallas Morning News, poses a question that’s been nagging at me since I first heard Donald Trump make a certain proclamation.

Trump has promised to “make America great again.” He’s been wearing a gimme cap at campaign rally with the words written across the front of it.

My thought always has been that the United States is a great nation. It’s a superpower with unprecedented military capability. It’s economy remains — for now, at least — No. 1 in the world.

And people from other nations are flocking here — yes, even legally — to start new lives. As Robberson pointed out: “In fact, the very immigration issue that Trump has made the focal point of his campaign belies the assertion that America isn’t great. Why would millions of people risk their lives to come to this country, legally or illegally, if there weren’t something of overwhelming value drawing them specifically here? It’s actually a lot easier to migrate to Canada, Europe, Costa Rica or Brazil. But for some reason, people want to come to America. That’s because we are still the greatest nation on earth.”

Trump, though, is suggesting that the United States no longer is “exceptional,” to borrow a popular Republican mantra of past campaigns against the current Democratic president.

Robberson also shoots down the notion that during the Ronald Reagan years in the White House that the United States stood as the model for greatness that today’s GOP seeks to emulate.

It’s worth a look: http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2015/08/make-america-great-again-trump-needs-to-rethink-his-rhetoric.html/

I’m just wondering how Trump gets away with asserting the United States of America isn’t still the greatest nation on the planet.

 

 

media news

Jorge Ramos: advocate or journalist?

1 Comment

Illegal-immigrants-2

Jorge Ramos sought to call Donald Trump to account for the Republican presidential candidate’s controversial views on illegal immigration.

He stood during a press conference and peppered the candidate with questions about his plan to build a wall along the nation’s southern border. Trump then called a bodyguard over to escort Ramos from the room.

It was an unattractive scene, to be sure.

Then Ramos, a noted news anchor for Univision — a leading Spanish-language TV network — went on ABC’s “Good Morning America” the next morning to discuss the incident. He said a curious thing, in my humble view.

GMA host George Stephanopoulos asked Ramos if he was acting more as an advocate than a journalist. Ramos responded by saying “journalists must stand for something.”

His answer had me scratching my noggin.

Journalists, as I understand the meaning of the term, basically fall into two categories: reporters and editorialists. I spent most of my nearly 37 years as a full-time print journalist on the opinion side, writing editorials and commentaries for publications in two states.

But on occasion, when the opportunity presented itself, I was able and willing to write news copy for those publications. I was able to set personal bias aside and deliver information for readers to consume — and for them to make up their own minds about the topic about which I was writing.

I don’t know if at the press conference, in which Trump was fielding questions from reporters, whether Ramos was representing himself as a reporter or an editorialist.

His answer to the question, then, on GMA was incomplete.

A journalist, if he is writing or broadcasting opinion, is certainly entitled to “stand for something.” If the journalist is there to report on a story, well, then he or she should stand for nothing.

Jorge Ramos doesn’t think a 1,900-mile-long wall along our border is practical or even feasible. He doesn’t think Trump’s idea of rounding up 11 million undocumented immigrants is possible without breaking up families and causing considerable heartache and grief.

If that is what he believes, then he should simply state it.

If, however, he is asking a serious question on the issue, I believe he should do so without inserting his personal views on the matter.

Perhaps his effort to “stand for something” ought to include fulfilling his entire obligation as a journalist — which includes reporting the story and leaving his own bias out of it.

 

media news

‘Like members of the family’

alison and adam

A USA Today article spells out a grim truth about the latest tragedy that has gripped the American public.

Alison Parker and Adam Ward, two broadcast journalists who were slain on live TV this week, were like “members of the family.”

That is why their deaths in Roanoke, Va., has body-slammed the community they served.

Think about that.

Television news viewers invite the people who deliver it into their homes. The reporters and camera people who provide the information are in viewers’ homes because the viewers want them there.

Thus, when they’re taken from viewers — particularly in such a graphic fashion — the public reacts perhaps a bit more viscerally than it does to reports of other tragic events.

Do no misunderstand my point. I am not downplaying other tragedies as being less worthy of public grief. The Sandy Hood Elementary School shooting in Connecticut — in which 20 precious children and six educators were gunned down — drove millions of us to tears … and one American in particular, President Barack Obama, couldn’t restrain his own personal grief while commenting on it to the nation.

Yes, there are many other events that affect us deeply.

The deaths of two journalists who were just doing their job on what was supposed to be a “routine story” and who were transmitting their story into people’s homes at the very moment of their death just hits us so very hard.

They hurt us so very deeply.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/journalist-killings-like-deaths-in-the-family-for-viewers/ar-BBm980G

 

local news

Hunt for Katrina survivor comes up empty

hurricane katrina

Emma appears to have moved on.

I hope she’s happy and healthy.

Word came from City Hall earlier this week that my search for a woman I met 10 years ago here in Amarillo after Hurricane Katrina devastated her home town of New Orleans has come up empty.

She and more than 100 other refugees from the devastation of the storm fled to the High Plains. Several communities welcomed them. They lived for a time in makeshift quarters assembled at the Amarillo Civic Center, which had been turned into a refugee center.

The Amarillo Public Health Department and the city’s Emergency Services Department had mobilized quite efficiently to accept the individuals — and the families — that sought to escape the devastation brought to the Gulf Coast in August 2005.

They set up health clinics, providing medicine and immunization. Counselors were available to talk to the refugees who were coping with the enormous emotional shock of what they were enduring.

From my recollection of the events as they were unfolding, the city response represented one of its finer moments.

None of those storm refugees remained.

The city reportedly had 48 clients registered through it Community Development office, but all of them, according to the city, appear to be “inactive.”

Perhaps it was her heart that was talking when Emma agreed to meet with me shortly upon arriving in Amarillo. She said she had intended to stay here. She was going to give up her life in the Big Easy and settle, perhaps, for a quieter existence way up yonder here on the Caprock.

She had plenty to say a decade ago about the incompetence of the emergency response in New Orleans. She blamed everyone — local, state and federal authorities — for the confusion and mayhem that ensued as residents struggled to cope with the loss of homes, not to mention the loss of loved ones.

Emma was fortunate in one important aspect: No one in her family died from the storm.

My hope was to find her and to visit with her yet again, to assess how she’s coped.

I’ll put my faith in the belief that she’s doing fine and that the city she called home, if only for a brief time — Amarillo — helped Emma find her way to a new life.

business news

Obama got the blame … where’s the credit?

oil prices

Let’s flash back to around 2010.

Oil prices were spiking. They surpassed $100 per barrel of crude. The price of gasoline also skyrocketed. It passed $4 per gallon in some parts of the country; it got nearly that high in the Texas Panhandle.

Who got the blame? President Barack H. Obama. His congressional critics, namely the Republicans, kept hammering the president over the price spikes. Why, they just couldn’t stomach the idea of watching these gas prices heading into the stratosphere and they had to blame someone. Obama was the target.

Then something happened.

Automakers began making more fuel-efficient cars after they were bailed out partly with federal government stimulus money. Research on alternative energy sources ramped up. Other oil-producing nations’ economies began to falter, diminishing demand on fossil fuels around the world.

The price of oil today is less than $40 per barrel, less than half of where it was five years ago. The price of gasoline? Today in Amarillo, regular unleaded is being pumped at $2.26 per gallon in most stations.

Is the president getting the “blame,” let alone the credit, for any of this?

Not on your life.

How come?

 

national news

This shooting defies all logic

gunviolence

What in the name of all that is holy happened in Roanoke, Va.?

An apparently disgruntled former television station employee opened fire on a broadcast journalist interviewing someone and then on the cameraman who was video recording the event.

Then the shooter fled and later turned the gun on himself. His two victims died on the scene; the gunman died later.

The act went viral on social media. I’ve seen a clip of the event. It sickens me to the core.

Alison Parker was 24. Her cameraman was Adam Ward, 27. The man believed to have shot them was Vester Lee Flanagan, 41.

How in the world does one make sense of this?

There’s an element to this story that needs fleshing out. Someone turned in a fax to the station where Parker and Ward worked that declared Flanagan, an African-American, acted out of revenge over the Charleston, S.C., church massacre a few months ago in which a white man killed nine African-Americans. Flanagan’s victims were white.

As the Washington Post reported: “Why did I do it?” stated the fax, which was received shortly before 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday. “Why did I do it? I put down a deposit for a gun on 6/19/15. The Church shooting in Charleston happened on 6/17/15…” The document goes on to state: “What sent me over the top was the church shooting. And my hollow point bullets have the victims’ initials on them.”

It’s not yet been determined if the fax came from Flanagan.

If it did, then we have a serious hate crime on our hands. Authorities cannot prosecute the shooter, given his death.

I hope with all my heart that someone other than Flanagan submitted the document.

However, even if that’s the case, are we now talking about a major ratcheting up of racial tension — yet again?

 

national news, political news

‘The Hispanics’ won’t love this media spat

jorge ramos

Donald Trump keeps harping on what he believes is a love affair between himself and “the Hispanics.”

They’ll love me, Trump proclaims, because he employs so many of them to work in his business empire. The anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric that labels Mexican immigrants coming into this country — albeit illegally — as “rapists, drug dealers, murderers” … along with “some good people, too” — well, that doesn’t matter, according to Trump.

Then he got into this highly visible spat this week with Jorge Ramos, a new anchor and reporter for the Spanish-language network Univision.

Trump was taking questions from reporters in Dubuque, Iowa, when Ramos interrupted him. Trump got agitated at Ramos’s persistent questioning of how Trump intended to build a 1,900-mile wall across the country’s southern border.

To be fair, Ramos did barge into another reporter’s question. He shouldn’t have been so rude to his colleague.

Then again, Trump could have answered Ramos’s question and gone on to the next questioner. He didn’t do that.

He waved a bodyguard over, and then the bodyguard forcibly removed Ramos from the meeting room.

Outside the room, a man wearing a Trump lapel badge, told Ramos to “got back to your country,” to which the Mexico-born Ramos replied that he is an American citizen.

Ramos came back into the interview room later and got to ask his question. He sparred with Trump a bit more.

I just wonder how Trump actually believes — if he truly does believe it — that Hispanic voters are going to continue lovin’ on the candidate when he treats individuals such as Jorge Ramos so rudely.

The word “delusional” keeps coming to mind.

 

political news

David Duke endorses Trump

duke_ap

Former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke has declared his support for Donald Trump.

I should just let that statement stand on its own.

But I cannot.

This’ll be brief.

Duke’s past is as reprehensible as it gets. He’s now thrown in with Trump, the current Republican Party presidential front runner.

“So although we can’t trust him to do what he says, the other Republican candidates won’t even say what he says. So he’s certainly the best of the lot. And he’s certainly somebody that we should get behind in terms, you know, raising the image of this thing.”

I’m not for a nanosecond going to suggest that Trump share’s Duke’s KKK dogma. I am going to suggest that Duke — no matter what he says about himself or the organization to which he belonged — cannot shed his past.

Duke’s obituary is going to include a KKK reference. And we all know about the murder, misery and mayhem that it has committed against other Americans.

There. Now I’m done.

 

national news, political news

GOP ‘horse race’ turning into match race

candidate

Some of us have lamented the horse-race emphasis on the media’s political coverage.

The media become much too focused on polls and on who’s up and who’s down.

Donald Trump is clearly “up” in the Republican presidential primary campaign. All 16 of the other GOP candidates are “down.”

But as in an actual horse race, the GOP campaign is turning suddenly into a match race — featuring just two candidates.

They are Trump and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

The rest of them include some serious and intelligent individuals. I would rate Gov. Bush in that serious and intelligent category. Trump? He’s in another category altogether. He’s intelligent. He’s also inarticulate and doesn’t possess an ounce of nuance, decorum — or an understanding that the presidency is not an oligarchy, that it contains far less power than Trump seems to suggest it does.

The two of them are resorting to some serious character attacks. Trump calls Bush a “low-energy candidate.” Bush counters that Trump isn’t a “true conservative.”

Indeed, it fascinates me that conservative Republicans are taking the gloves against Trump, accusing him of being a RINO, aka Republican in Name Only. As Jeb Bush said, according to the Texas Tribune, of Trump’s proposal to build a wall along our nation’s southern border: “Mr. Trump’s plans are not grounded in conservative principles,” Bush said. “The simple fact is his proposal is unrealistic, it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, it will violate people’s civil liberties, it will create friction with our third largest trading partner, it’s non-necessary, and I think he’s wrong about this.”

It’s also interesting to me that Democrats have been oddly silent as Trump goes after Bush, and Bush returns fire against Trump. They’re leaving the anti-Trump rhetoric to the rest of that increasingly anonymous Republican field.

I remain amazed that this year’s GOP campaign has become so entertaining. I thought the 2012 Republican field set the entertainment bar so high that no future primary campaign in either party would reach it.

Silly me. The 2016 GOP field has exceeded my expectation.

However, right now it’s just the two “leaders” — Donald Trump and Jeb Bush — providing the entertainment.

 

national news, political news

Biden may be channeling RFK

RFK

While continuing to ponder the idea that Vice President Joe Biden might jump into the 2016 presidential race, my mind keeps turning to another prominent Democrat from a distant era.

About two generations ago, U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy straddled the fence on whether he should seek the 1968 Democratic Party presidential nomination, just as the vice president is considering it today.

In 1968, an incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, was going to seek re-election to a second full term. He already had a challenge from Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

RFK remained on the sidelines.

Today’s front runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, also is facing a serious challenge, from Sen. Bernie Sanders. She also is facing a possible problem of her own making, those e-mails she sent out while serving as secretary of state.

LBJ had his own headache. It was the Vietnam War.

President Johnson then ran in the New Hampshire primary and finished first — but barely. McCarthy nearly beat him.

It was then that Sen. Kennedy joined the race. LBJ dropped out. Kennedy mounted a furious and frantic campaign against McCarthy and then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

He won the California primary on June 5, 1968, declared “on to Chicago and let’s win there.” Then he walked into the hotel kitchen, where the assassin was waiting.

It was over in burst of gunfire.

There’s a curious parallel between then and now.

I keep wondering if Biden is waiting for Clinton to make a politically critical misstep. What if something emerges from this e-mail probe that inflicts a mortal wound on the party’s front runner?

Would he then seek the party nomination to “rescue” it from someone who cannot win the election, just as RFK sought to rescue the party from McCarthy’s insurgency and HHH’s damage caused by his support for the Vietnam War?

The vice president seems be leaning toward running. If Hillary Clinton makes a mistake that dooms her candidacy, it had better occur quickly.

The difference between 1968 and 2016 shows itself in the preparation that’s now required to get one of these campaigns off the ground.