Monthly Archives: May 2017

business news

This a ‘disaster,’ Mr. President?

The job numbers came in this morning — and they look pretty darn good.

The U.S. Labor Department reported today that the economy added 211,000 non-farm jobs to payrolls in April and the unemployment rate fell to 4.4 percent.

The boost in jobs was considerably greater than analysts had predicted. The jobless rate has inched a bit closer to what one might consider to be “full employment” in the United States.

Donald J. Trump used to disparage the Labor Department figures as phony, bogus, cooked up, fake. That, of course, was during the Obama administration. The president doesn’t say those things now that he’s on the job.

Hey, I’ll give the president credit for presiding over this sparkling jobs report. Let there be many more of them.

I do have one question: A little more than three months into your presidency, is this the economic “disaster” and the “mess” you have said repeatedly you inherited from Barack Obama?

military news

Another Army nominee hits the road … what gives?

The United States is chock full of qualified individuals capable of administering the U.S. Department of the Army.

But now we’ve just witnessed the departure of the second consecutive nominee to become the Army secretary. Why is it so damn hard for Donald Trump to fill this post?

The first fellow to pull out, billionaire Vincent Viola, cited his myriad business dealings, that they were too complicated to unravel. He hit the road.

Now we learn that Mark Green, the president’s second Army secretary nominee, has pulled out because of his rather weird statements regarding transgender Americans and whether public school students are being “indoctrinated” by Islamic influences.

Good grief, dude.

According to The Hill newspaper: “He’s said that ‘transgender is a disease’ and agreed with a questioner who said ‘we need to take a stand on the indoctrination of Islam in our public schools,’ among other controversial statements.”

Green was a Tennessee state senator when he popped off about transgender individuals and Islam.

A person’s sexual orientation is no “disease.” It is part of an individual’s persona. Is there some virus that is infecting individuals with transgenderism? As for a so-called “indoctrination of Islam” in our public schools, someone will have to demonstrate to me where and how that’s occurring anywhere.

Green said he is being attacked because of his “Christian beliefs.” Please. The man’s faith has nothing to do with it! At issue is the belief that this man seems to exhibit a strong vein of intolerance.

Back to my initial point.

This country has many capable administrators who have not expressed themselves in a manner that gets them in such trouble.

Where are they?

medical news

As if we needed reminding … POTUS is clueless

Donald J. Trump’s endorsement of the Australian universal health care system confirms what many of us have thought for as long as this individual has been involved in politics.

He doesn’t know anything. Not about public policy. Or governance. Or public service. Nothing outside the realm of personal enrichment and self-aggrandizement.

The president and his Republican colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives had just passed a bill that repeals the Affordable Care Act and replaces it with something called the American Health Care Act. Then he jetted to New York and sat next to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull — and then lauded the Australian health care system.

The president said we should pattern our system after the Aussies’ system of providing universal health care for every citizen. How do they do it? The government pays for it.

But wait! Didn’t the GOP members of Congress want to do away with government mandates? Didn’t they insist on letting the marketplace set the price for health care insurance? Haven’t they been savaging the ACA as some sort of “socialized medicine” scheme cooked up by the socialists ensconced in the White House, led by President Barack Obama?

The GOP’s main man, the president of the United States, just endorsed a government-run health care system that reportedly works pretty well for the people it serves.

The president doesn’t know anything! He is utterly and completely unaware of the very public policy he says he favors.

He’s been involved in politics for less than two years. He rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his presidential campaign. He got elected and has continued almost daily to demonstrate his absolute ignorance of the office he now holds and the awesome responsibility he has assumed.

I truly don’t expect him to learn all there is to know about everything in such a short span of time. However, it wasn’t too much to expect that he at least had some semblance of a grasp of policy matters before deciding to run for president of the United States.

medical news

Mr. POTUS, you’ve just contradicted yourself on health care

I am scratching my head so vigorously now that my scalp is likely to start bleeding.

Donald J. Trump sat next to the Australian prime minister, Malcom Trumbull, and praised his the health care system provided in the nation Down Under.

Australia has a universal health care system, which the U.S. president declared is far superior to ours.

GOP goes in the opposite direction

Why, then, did the president praise House of Representatives Republicans for approving a bill that some analysts suggest is going to deprive as many as 20 million Americans of their health insurance?

Trump declared victory after that vote. He said premiums will decline, no one will lose health coverage and he intends to march forward with an effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

The alternative appears to provide less coverage than the ACA.

But, but …

The president now sings praises to Australia’s universal health care system — which the government provides for every citizen — as being better than what we’re doing here.

Here’s how the Washington Post described the Australian plan: “Australia has a government-funded health-care system, called Medicare, that exists alongside private insurance. The system is funded in part by taxes, including on the wealthy.”

Go … figure, man.

Sports news

You go, Patch!

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t give a hoot about the Kentucky Derby, a horse race that occurs each May in Louisville, Ky.

This year, though, is different.

A thoroughbred named Patch is going to take his place Saturday in the starting gate. I want Patch to win the race.

Why? The beast has just one eye.

I get excited about horse racing only when the same horse wins the first two legs of the Triple Crown — the Derby and the Preakness. My favorite horse races of all time were the 1973 and 2015 Belmont Stakes, the final Triple Crown race.

In1973, Secretariat won the Triple Crown by damn near lapping the field at the Belmont. In 2015, American Pharoah broke a 37-year Triple Crown drought by leading from wire to wire in a stunning race.

This year, I’m hoping to watch the Kentucky Derby and am going to cheer for Patch to show up those other horses. He’s about a 30-to-1 underdog. Hey, horses have come from farther down on the odds chart to win.

Go for it, Patch!

medical news, national news

Cheers have ‘Mission Accomplished’ ring to them

All that back-slapping and high-fiving at the White House today seems a bit premature — to say the very least.

Congressional Republicans sauntered down from Capitol Hill to the White House to congratulate themselves for approving a measure that repeals the Affordable Care Act and replaces it with the American Health Care Act.

“Today we made history by taking the first important step toward rescuing hardworking families from the failures and skyrocketing costs of Obamacare,” House Majority Whip Steve Scalise,  R-La., said in a statement.

They all are members of the House of Representatives. The bill, which passed 217-213 — with zero Democratic votes — now must go to the Senate, where their fellow Republicans are sending signals that the House bill is dead on arrival. It’s a goner. The Senate is going to craft an entirely different bill.

As The Hill reported: “The bill, known as the American Health Care Act, repeals the core elements of ObamaCare, including its subsidies to help people get insurance coverage, expansion of Medicaid, taxes and mandates for people to get coverage.

“In its place, the bill provides a new tax credit aimed at helping people buy insurance, though it would provide less help than ObamaCare to low-income people.”

The Hill also reported: “The measure is expected to undergo a major overhaul in the Senate, especially on the Medicaid front, where several Republican senators from states that accepted the expansion are wary of cutting it off.”

Cheers are quite premature

I was reminded of another celebratory moment in recent U.S. history.

It was in 2003 and President George W. Bush flew onto the deck of an aircraft carrier, jumped out of the jet aircraft wearing a flight suit, changed his duds and then delivered a speech under a banner that declared “Mission Accomplished.”

The president was saluting the capture of the late dictator Saddam Hussein, who our troops pulled out of a spider hole in which he was hiding. The Iraqi dictator was put on trial, convicted and hanged.

The Iraq War, though, raged on … and on … and on. Thousands of American service personnel were killed and injured for years as they sought to bring the fighting under control.

The “Mission Accomplished” banner was premature in the extreme.

So was today’s GOP cork-popping at the White House.

Sports news

Mixed-gender relays in the Olympics? Sure, why not?

I kind of like this notion.

The International Association of Athletics Federations is considering an idea to allow track and field relay teams to comprise men and women competing in the same races.

It’s not as though the IAAF would allow female shot putters to compete against the men. Or pole vaulters. Or discus throwers. This idea deserves a fair hearing.

Let the women run with the men

They’ve done this already at a meet in the Bahamas. The 4-by-400 relay featured two men and two women on each team. They ran in no particular order. The home team won the event, which thrilled the fans. But the race reportedly drew a lot of attention leading up to it.

“The crowd was incredible, I still have goosebumps thinking about it. These are the kind of things we need to look at,” said Olivier Gers, head of the IAAF.

My own preference would be to have men and women running against competitors of the same gender in each leg of the relay. But what the heck, it’s not my call.

Frankly, such an event at the Olympics would spur my interest even more. I suspect it also would gin up interest around the world as well.

local news

Happy Trails, Part 15

I don’t get this question very often, but I have heard it from a few of my friends: What hobbies are you going to be able to enjoy now that you’re retired?

Hobbies? I am not a hobby kind of guy.

I am not a hunter or much of a fisherman. I like to hike in the wild, which my wife and I do together … but I don’t consider “hiking” to be a hobby. I don’t play board games and I haven’t played a hand of poker since I was in the Army a century or two ago.

If pressed to declare a hobby, I’m going to say that I am doing it at this very minute. I am writing this blog, which I suppose you could call a hobby, given that I enjoy it greatly.

Some of my better friends have handed me compliments over the volume of blogs I post daily. “You are so damn prolific,” said one of my dearest friends, who lives in Portland, Ore., with her husband and son. I tell her, “Well, it’s what I do.”

I don’t intend to let up on pursuing this hobby of mine even as my wife and I get deeper into full-time retirement.

I’ve griped at times about the Internet and what it has done to the industry where I worked for 37 years. Newspapers are struggling to find their way as the Internet takes bigger bites out of daily print circulation. Newspaper publishers are looking for business models that allow them to keep making money while changing to a “digital presence.”

The Internet, though, does provide yours truly a forum to keep writing — some would say “spewing” — opinions about this and/or that public policy issue.

I won’t limit the blog to those matters. I want to comment also on “life experience,” which more or less is what this post is all about.

I guess retirees need hobbies to keep them fresh and reasonably alert. Therefore, I’ll keep writing this blog.

International news

‘Greatest threat … on Earth’

FBI Director James Comey had a big day earlier this week fielding questions from the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

The bulk of the attention regarding his testimony dealt with the 2016 presidential election and how he justified blowing the whistle on Hillary Clinton’s e-mail matter while staying quiet about an FBI probe into Donald J. Trump’s alleged connection with the Russian government.

Buried in all that testimony came his answer to a question about whether Russia poses a threat to the United States.

Comey’s answer? He called Russia “the greatest threat of any nation on Earth.”

I heard the FBI director’s response and wondered immediately: Why cannot the president of the United States treat Russia as the “greatest threat of any nation on Earth”? Why doesn’t the president condemn the Russians for seeking to influence the outcome of the 2016 election? Why couldn’t he acknowledge flat out on national TV that Vladimir Putin is a “killer”?

Comey’s assessment of Russia’s threat to this nation harkens back to a Cold War-era fear of the Big Bear, the Evil Empire. Putin’s rule of Russia only heightens that reminder.

If only the president of the United States would speak as strongly against Russia and its subversion of our electoral process as the FBI director as just done.

His relative silence on Putin and the nation he governs seems to speak eloquently about something no one in this country should want to hear.

national news, political news, religious news

Trump is evangelicals’ ‘dream president’?

Jerry Falwell Jr. attended an executive order signing ceremony today and declared that Donald J. Trump is the “dream president” for the nation’s evangelical Christians.

Wow. Let’s ponder that one.

* Trump has been married three times. I don’t fault him for that, per se. However, he has boasted about cheating on his first two wives.

* The president was riding a bus a dozen years ago with Billy Bush and was overheard telling the “Access Hollywood” host that he grabbed women by their private parts. He said he could get away with that kind of behavior because he is a “celebrity,” a “star.”

* The president has mocked a reporter with a serious physical disability.

* Trump has talked about how he was able to walk in on half-dressed beauty pageant contestants because he owned the pageant.

Today, though, the president signed some executive orders that allows preachers to endorse political candidates from the pulpit. He also signed an order that enables business owners to cite religious objections when they refuse to provide services to, say, gay customers.

He did all this in the name of “religious liberty,” which pleases Falwell, the president of Liberty University.

Thus, evangelicals’ dream has come true. All the other stuff, the boorish behavior, doesn’t matter.

Oh, boy.