Monthly Archives: May 2017

International news, military news, national news, political news

‘Awful … but lawful’

A friend of mine asks whether Donald J. Trump has is perhaps guilty of being “treasonous” or “galactically stupid” if reports of what he allegedly did while visiting with Russian dignitaries turns out to be true.

I’ll stick with galactically stupid, although it’s a close call.

Media are reporting that the president revealed some highly classified/sensitive national security information to the Russian foreign minister and that country’s ambassador to the United States while they were calling on him in the Oval Office.

National security adviser H.R. McMaster — one of the few grownups comprising the president’s inner circle — offered a brief statement that said the story “as reported is false.” He said the president didn’t divulge any operational strategies. End of story … McMaster said.

Then the president fired up his Twitter account this morning and declared he was within his right as president to say what he said to his Russian guests.

I’m going to stick with what I heard National Public Radio’s Maura Liasson say this morning about what the president did. She said it falls into the “awful … but lawful” category of misdeeds.

Remember how candidate Trump pounded Hillary Clinton relentlessly over her use of a personal e-mail server while she was secretary of state? Do you remember the chants he invoked at his rallies: Lock ‘er up!”?

What do you know? The president might have supplanted Hillary in the careless and reckless realm of irresponsibility.

He likely didn’t break any laws, given that as president of the United States, he can declassify information merely by stating it in an unsecure context. If you or I were to do such a thing, we’d be arrested, cuffed, thrown into a cell and likely would spend the rest of our lives behind bars. Hey, rank has its privileges, you know?

The Washington Post and the New York Times are all over this story. The Post broke it Monday night and observers have been clamoring all over creation about how — if true — the president has endangered the trust that our allies have in sharing valuable security information with the United States of America.

Trump is about to fly to Saudi Arabia, Israel and The Vatican for his first overseas trip as president. What do you suppose the Saudis and Israelis will tell him about their plans to combat the Islamic State? What do you think they’ll feel safe telling him — even though none of this latest explosive news has been proven beyond a doubt? My gut tells me they will keep their knowledge of ISIS activities and their plans to fight the terrorists to themselves.

What the heck. Another week awaits. More drama is sure to erupt. Let’s all stay tuned and watch as this circus act takes wing.

national news

Hold up on ‘impeachment’ talk

Donald J. Trump may have committed a monumental mistake by divulging highly classified information to visiting Russian diplomats.

He well might have put some intelligence operations in jeopardy; indeed, let us pray we don’t lose any lives as a result of whatever he might have told the Russians who he welcomed into the Oval Office.

Social media are buzzing with talk about impeachment, that the president might have committed a treasonous act.

Let hold on here.

I detest Trump as much as the next guy. However, it’s good to realize that in order to be impeached by the House of Representatives and tried by the Senate, a president needs to commit a “high crime and misdemeanor.” Trump likely didn’t do anything illegal.

You can bet that he might have done something that is far more “careless” and “reckless” than anything Hillary Rodham Clinton did when she used her personal e-mail server while she was secretary of state. Did the president commit an impeachable offense?

It’s not likely.

Trump pops off

There well might be other grounds on which to impeach the president. I can think of obstruction of justice, for one thing, dealing with his decision to fire FBI Director James Comey, who at the time of his firing was in the middle of an investigation into whether Trump had an improper relationship with Russian government officials.

The Emoluments Clause in the U.S. Constitution also might prove problematic for Trump as he continues to have interests in businesses that have dealings with foreign governments.

As outrageous as Trump’s relationship with Russia is proving to be, his reported carelessness with classified information doesn’t rise to the level of impeachment.

The founders set a high standard for such an action, although President Clinton’s impeachment did seem to stretch far beyond what one would constitute grounds for impeachment. Congressional Republicans hung their impeachment vote on the president’s failure to speak the truth under oath to a federal grand jury which asked him about his relationship with that White House intern; U.S. senators, though, acquitted him in the trial that ensued.

It’s good to scale back the impeachment talk regarding Donald Trump as it relates to this latest bombshell. What he might have done stinks to high heaven and there well could be blowback. Impeachment? It doesn’t appear to be a natural consequence of what the president might have disclosed to his Russian guests.

local news

Happy Trails, Part 18

You are likely aware that a move is in our future. We’ll be departing Amarillo — our home for more than 20 years — for an undetermined location somewhere in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

I’ve made you aware as well of our desire to live near our beautiful, precious granddaughter. Our friends tell us, “That’s the best reason I can think of” to make such a big change in our lives.

But there’s this slight quandary that has nothing to do with our granddaughter. It has everything to do with this blog.

What am I going to call it?

I came up with “High Plains Blogger” because (a) our location here on the High Plains of Texas and (b) I am a big Clint Eastwood fan and the title of the blog reminds me of “High Plains Drifter.”

I wrote an item earlier in which I suggested I might keep the name in spite of our relocation. I’m leaning farther away from that option.

I’ve actually come up with a potential, possible name for this collection of musings. I’m a bit reluctant to tell you now what it is. I think I’ll wait just a little while.

My intention is to have the title reflect the nature of the blog, which is to provide me a forum to share my view of politics and public policy. I want to share my own acknowledged bias.

My quandary over the name change is heightened just a bit because “High Plains Blogger” has gained some traction with those who read these posts regularly. I don’t want the blog to lose that traction. I am afraid of “spinning my wheels.”

I am grateful for those who comment positively on the opinions I share in this blog. I also am grateful for the critics who keep me humble. I expressed that gratitude for critics repeatedly during my lengthy career in daily print journalism.

Retirement has taken me in its embrace. I am enjoying the time I get to spend writing this blog.

It’s just this name-change thing that’s giving me a bit of heartburn. I’ll get over it.

local news

Randall County office also set for major makeover

I have been commenting from time to time about the extreme makeover under way in downtown Amarillo.

Given that I don’t get out quite as much as I did when I worked for a living, I recently discovered another makeover project for which many Randall County employees — and perhaps residents, too — have been waiting.

We were driving south on Western Street when I shot a glance to the right and noticed a building that used to house an insurance company. Eventually, it’s going to house the Randall County Courthouse Annex.

Work on the building is well under way.

County Judge Ernie Houdashell told me some weeks ago about the purchase of the old Nationwide building and the realization of his longtime effort to relocate the county annex from its cramped quarters at South Georgia Street and Interstate 27.

I give Houdashell a huge dose of credit for bringing this project together. He had dickered and bickered with the Amarillo Economic Development Corporation to sell the Nationwide structure to the county. AEDC apparently had some issues that it was able to resolve with the county.

So now the county owns the structure and is refitting it to meet its needs.

The annex does the vast majority of the county’s tax business, even though the county seat is in Canyon, about 15 miles south of Amarillo, which straddles the Randall-Potter County line. Amarillo contains about 75 percent of Randall County’s population and generates about 80 percent of the tax revenue used to finance county government.

The annex will include the auto registration operation, along with a sheriff’s department presence and Precinct 4 Justice of the Peace court. I cannot recall the precise square footage increase that the county will get in the new structure, but I am aware that it’s going to be substantially more than it has at the Georgia Street site.

What’s going to happen to the current annex building? Houdashell hopes the county can deed it over to the Texas Panhandle War Memorial, which is in the process of raising money for its new interpretive center.

Houdashell, always the dealmaker, already has added an F-100 fighter jet to the War Memorial grounds, along with a Vietnam War-era UH-1 Huey helicopter, the kind of ship on which Houdashell served during the Vietnam War.

Yes, the downtown work is important to Amarillo and will bring tremendous value to the city over time when all the work is done. It’s not the only place, though, that’s undergoing a serious change.

I will look forward to watching the courthouse annex work progress — along with Randall County’s continuing evolution.

International news

Did the president reveal intelligence sources to our foe?

My head has just blown apart.

Donald John Trump reportedly has given Russian diplomats information they shouldn’t ever have, not ever! According to the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, NBC and other “enemies of the American people” media outlets, the president got way too chatty with Russian foreign ministry officials during an Oval Office meeting.

I believe I’ll add that U.S. media were not invited into that meeting, which was photographed by Tass, the official Russian media outlet.

This bombshell is still developing. It hasn’t yet fully detonated. But the Post and other media are reporting that the president’s disclosure — while possibly not a specific discussion — could have compromised U.S. intelligence sources working with our allies in the Middle East in the ongoing war with the Islamic State.

Did the president get a briefing on what the hell he could say to the Russians? Didn’t his “crack” national security team tell him to avoid certain talking points with the Russians?

Or did the president veer “off script,” as is this guy’s modus operandi?

Let’s all see whether this latest live grenade explodes.

national news, political news

As long as POTUS keeps talking about the election …

I’m going to presume that as long as the president of the United States insists on talking about the 2016 election that it’s OK for the rest of us to bring it up, too.

Donald Trump won. He got the requisite number of Electoral College votes he needed to take the presidential oath of office on Jan. 20. But as a story in the New York Times notes, he keeps feeling the impulsive tug to remind visitors to the White House that — by golly! — he won.

Trump get past the win

The story relates how Trump hands out cards showing the electoral map, which gave the president a reasonably comfortable margin over Hillary Clinton. He doesn’t mention to visitors, though, that Hillary won nearly 3 million more popular votes. But that’s all right; Hillary’s “victory” meant far, far less than Trump’s actual win.

The story draws an interesting comparison between Trump’s victory and the previous win by a president who collected fewer popular votes than his opponent. That would be, of course, George W. Bush in 2000.

How did President Bush deal with his skin-of-the-teeth victory? Here’s how the Times analyzed it:

“After President George W. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 but won the narrowest of Electoral College victories after the Supreme Court stopped a hotly disputed Florida recount, he did not publicly dwell on the way he had gotten into office.

“Instead, Mr. Bush plowed forward with his agenda and put the election behind him, rarely speaking of it again. He also made a point of reaching out to Democrats in the early days of his administration on issues like education and tax cuts to try to heal some of the wounds caused by the election, eventually winning bipartisan votes on major legislation in his first year.

“’He knew he won, but he knew many people didn’t see him as a legitimate president and needed to reach out,’ said Matthew Dowd, a senior strategist for Mr. Bush in 2000 and chief strategist for his 2004 re-election campaign. ‘But he didn’t look back in any kind of insecurity because he knew he could only control what was happening today or in the future.’”

That’s how a grownup deals with close calls. If only we had one in the White House these days.

national news, political news, religious news

Trump speech venue laced with irony

One word came to mind when I heard over the weekend that Donald J. Trump would deliver a commencement speech at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va.: ironic.

There was so much to confound us about the 2016 presidential election that I am hesitant to rank the most puzzling element that arose from it.

I’ll place one development near the top: the support Trump earned from the evangelical community. The president’s Liberty University speech is a continuation of that relationship.

One line has gotten the most attention. It’s when the president said Americans “don’t worship government, they worship God.” Gee, do you think?

Why the ironic view of this venue?

Liberty U. was founded by the late Jerry Falwell, a highly political preacher. Falwell was a sworn enemy of former President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary. He once produced a hideous video that purported that the Clintons were complicit in the death of their dear friend Vincent Foster, who committed suicide not long after Bill Clinton became president. That’s not a Godly thing to do, you know?

Liberty is a religious-based university of some renown. Its curriculum espouses conservative values. Biblical studies are required for graduation. All of that is common at faith-based institutions.

Why, though, the embrace of Donald Trump? I’ve never perceived Trump’s life to be necessarily informed by a devotion to the holy word, to the Gospels, to the teachings of Jesus Christ. Quite the contrary, my perception of Trump — and I believe the perception of millions of other Americans — is that he has placed great value on material wealth, on personal enrichment, on self-aggrandizement; he’s also boasted publicly about his boorish behavior and he has routinely denigrated women.

Does Scripture lift all of that up, to be something to which we should aspire? It’s not in the Bible I have read for my entire life.

So there he was, telling the students at Liberty U. about the virtues of swimming against the tide, telling them to be unafraid of criticism. They cheered, clapped and hollered.

Great!

Liberty U. is now run by Falwell’s son, Jerry Jr., who recently referred to Trump as evangelicals’ “dream president.” The younger Falwell must have turned his TV off during the campaign when word leaked out about Trump’s admitting that he has grabbed women by their genital area, that he has forced himself on them because he’s a “celebrity” and a “star.”

Jerry Jr. also must have turned away at the news of Trump’s two divorces and his acknowledged marital infidelity as it regarded his first two wives.

This clown is a dream come true?

Go figure, folks.

national news, political news

Trump seeks to plug leaks … how?

Someone might have to explain this to me.

Donald John Trump reportedly is mad as hell. The White House leaks like a sieve. Someone or some people inside the place might be blabbing to the media about the inner workings of the Trump administration.

So what might the president do to curb the leaks? Why, shoot, he might just fire the press secretary, the White House chief of staff, the president’s legal counsel and his chief political strategist.

That’s the report being discussed by the chattering class in Washington, D.C. Press flack Sean Spicer, chief of staff Reince Priebus, legal eagle Don McGahn and strategist Stephen Bannon could be out.

What, then, might happen to the leak issue? It could turn into a deluge if the president decides to cut these four guys loose. They would be untethered from the White House and could tattle to their hearts’ content about all they know, what they have seen and heard and who has done what to whom inside the Trump White House.

Look, we’re only 100-and-some days into an administration that hopes to last another three-plus years. The president already is talking about running for re-election and, in fact, has released what looks and sounds like a 2020 campaign commercial.

Each day brings new surprises. Each dawn produces news of a not-so-flattering kind. The president cannot contain his Twitter fetish.

He’s worried about leaks. So his remedy might be to unleash four of his top guns into the public to, um, possibly spill their guts?

This is not how you govern, Mr. President. Really and truly.

media news

Spicer a goner at the White House?

The Washington, D.C., rumor mill is clattering like crazy as the next work week gets set to commence.

It involves White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who might be on his way out after only 100-some days on the job. Reports have surfaced that Donald John Trump might axe Spicer; that he’s angry with him; that the White House’s chief spokesman has been inarticulate and clumsy during his daily press briefings.

I am going to concede that Spicer might have the toughest job in the federal government. I mean, think of it. He has to interpret the musings of the president of the United States who one might say is, well, a bit inarticulate and clumsy himself.

How does the press spokesman expect to be on top of his game when the president is nowhere close to being on top of his game?

Spicer once served as press flack for the Republican National Committee, which was led by Reince Priebus, who’s now the White House chief of staff. Many other reports are circulating, too, that Priebus might be another victim of a Donald Trump purge of senior White House staffers.

This has been a rough intro to government and public policy for a presidential administration led by someone who spent his entire professional life enriching himself. He has zero public service experience, let alone any knowledge of how government works.

Now he might be getting ready to jettison his press spokesman and also — perhaps — his chief of staff.

You know what I sense? I sense a feeling of relief if the axe falls on both men.

national news, political news

Bipartisan calls for Trump to produce ‘tapes’?

What do you know about that?

Democrats and Republicans in Congress are starting to sing in unison on something. It regards a threat that Donald John Trump made toward the former director of the FBI, James Comey.

The president fired Comey a few days ago for reasons that still seem a bit muddled. But as the hubbub began to build, Trump fired off a tweet that said Comey had better hope no tapes exist that recorded the conversations the two men had prior to Comey’s dismissal.

“If there are any tapes of this conversation, they need to be turned over,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham, R-S.C., told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Now we have Democrats and Republicans saying that if Trump has tapes, he needs to produce them. He needs to validate the threat he leveled against the FBI director.

If the president has no such tape recordings — and few observers really doubt that he does — then we well might be talking about something else altogether. There might be a case built that suggests the president was using a blind threat to intimidate the former FBI director who — as it happens — was in the midst of an investigation of allegations that the Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russian hackers seeking to influence the 2016 election outcome.

Do you follow me?

My line of thinking suggests that the absence of any recordings exposes Trump to potential obstruction of justice accusations. Was the tweet he sent out warning Comey meant to coerce the lawman? Might a coercion attempt ripple its way to others within the FBI who are up to their armpits in this investigation.

The president’s obsession with Twitter as a form of “communication” well might swallow him whole. I say it might because no one has any proof — at least not yet — of his intentions while he continues to fire off these petulant messages.

Polls show Trump support falling in the wake of the Comey dismissal. Indeed, given the president’s obsession with polls — especially when they’re favorable — is going to continue to hound him perhaps for his entire presidency. Americans don’t like the way he handled the Comey firing.

They would like it even less if Trump were to destroy any recorded evidence rather than surrendering it to Congress.

What, though, happens if he didn’t record those conversations? What happens if it turns out he is just making empty — but still dangerous — threats against a law enforcement official and the agency he once led?

Now are you frightened?

Trump promised to “unify” the country. It just occurs to me that he well might have brought warring political parties together in Congress, thus unifying the country’s representatives in our government.