Monthly Archives: June 2017

national news, Uncategorized

Mueller’s job appears safe … for now

I am going to give Donald John Trump the benefit of the doubt on what’s being reported about special counsel Robert Mueller’s immediate future.

Mueller will continue his probe of the president’s campaign and its alleged contact with Russian government goons/hackers who sought to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

Trump has decided — as I understand it — that he won’t ask a deputy U.S. attorney general to fire Mueller.

Did sanity overcome the president? Has he been infected with the “sound judgment bug” required for those who occupy the highest office in America? Did someone tell him about the horrendous political consequences were he to engineer Mueller’s ouster?

Trump’s staff reportedly talked him out any cockamamie notion of firing Mueller. He’s already canned the FBI director, James Comey. The Justice Department picked Mueller to provide a semblance of integrity to an investigation that needs to be done thoroughly.

Mueller’s on the job

I continue to be utterly flabbergasted at the president’s inability to control the messages that pour out of the White House. What’s more, he cannot find capable, competent staff members to operate his White House communications department.

These reports get leaked out about the president considering a patently and profoundly stupid act … which would be firing the special counsel.

Democrats and Republicans all over Washington are highly complimentary of Mueller, his reputation, his record and his dedication to detail.

Let the man do his job, already!

business news, national news

‘Most of America’ first, eh Mr. President?

I need some time to digest this idea a bit more completely, but what I see initially gives me stomach pains.

Donald J. Trump has pitched a budget that takes away oil royalties the federal government shares with four Gulf Coast states that bear the bulk of the responsibility for responding to disasters related to the drilling of oil off their respective shores.

The result could cost the states of Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama billions of dollars in revenue.

Who gets the dough? The feds do!

Is this how the president plans to “put America first”?

This is another baffling proposal that has to pass congressional muster.

Here’s a thought for Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn — two Republicans who are among the president’s seemingly dwindling roster of congressional allies: Don’t stand still for a budget proposal that robs your state of valuable revenue.

According to CNBC: “The plan is part of the president’s effort to contain the growth of the U.S. federal deficit. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that ending the royalty-sharing program would save the federal government $3.6 billion over a decade.”

I’m a deficit hawk, too. I get the need to reduce the deficit — which the Obama administration had overseen during its eight years in office. Why, though, take money from states that also rely on this revenue stream to help them deal with pressure to fund valuable state programs?

My hope now is for Congress to step in and dispose of a presidential proposal that appears to punish four of our United States.

media news, national news

Why give Alex Jones a platform?

People such as Alex Jones give me heartburn.

I happen to be a First Amendment purist. I believe in the amendment’s guarantee of free speech and I do not want it watered down.

Then along comes people like Jones, the radio talk show blowhard who’s been thrust into the news yet again. Broadcast journalist Megyn Kelly has booked him on her NBC News show and snippets of her interview with Jones have enraged some survivors of one of the nation’s worst tragedies.

Jones has spoken infamously about how the 9/11 attacks against the United States were an “inside job” and then — and this goes way beyond anything resembling human decency — he has alleged that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut was staged; he says the children who were slain were “actors.”

Kelly is giving this guy’s moronic views a platform.

Should he be allowed to spout that trash? Should he be given air time on a major broadcast network? That pesky First Amendment says “yes.” Tenets of good judgment and basic humanity suggest that this guy shouldn’t be given a platform to spout the filth that pours out of his pie hole.

Kelly deserves the criticism she is getting from at least one of the Sandy Hook parents who lost a child in that hideous act of cruelty.

And that damn heartburn continues to churn in my gut.

national news

Where are all the tributes to Sen. Byrd?

We drove through a good bit of West Virginia and all along the way I kept looking for signs of a legendary U.S. senator’s penchant for pork-barrel legislation.

We saw barely a trace of it.

I refer to the late Robert Byrd, the king of pork barrel spending. You know, of course, that the term “pork barrel” defines money dumped into legislation that is meant to benefit a legislator’s district or state.

Byrd was the “best of the best” at funneling public money to his home state of West Virginia. I noted his pork-barrel proficiency in a previous blog post.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2010/06/robert-byrd-d-pork-barrel/

As we motored along Interstate I-64, I kept waiting to see evidence of this or that bridge or stretch of highway named after Sen. Byrd. I found a bridge with the Byrd name attached to it in Charleston — which also honors another famous native son, a guy named Gen. Chuck Yeager, the man of the “Right Stuff” and supersonic flight.

Oh, I’m sure there must be many myriad public buildings, parks, city streets and rural roads with Sen. Byrd’s name attached to them.

He wasn’t bashful about his lust for luring money to his home state. What the heck. Why should he care? His constituents kept sending back to Washington to do precisely what he did.

Term limits? I look at it this way: If West Virginians were dismayed at how Byrd represented them in Congress, they had the option of removing him from office. They call them “elections.”

national news

McCain showing his fickle side

John McCain once called Barack Obama a “feckless” foreign policy president.

He nagged the president continually over this and that foreign policy matter. Obama wasn’t tough enough; he wasn’t stern enough; he failed to deliver on his myriad threats against bad guys around the world.

Now, though, the Arizona Republican U.S. senator — and President Obama’s 2008 rival for the presidency — says the 44th president exhibited more international leadership than his successor, Donald John Trump.

Hey, what gives? President Obama’s “fecklessness” looks good now to the fickle senator.

Trump mistakes prove maddening

American “leadership” around the world has suffered under the Trump administration’s missteps, misstatements and mistakes, according to McCain.

I’ll concede a couple of points about McCain. One is that I didn’t support his presidential candidacy in 2008. Two is that he has served his country with rare honor and distinction, owing to his years as a Vietnam prisoner of war and the brutal treatment he suffered at the hands of his captors. Those years as a prisoner give him credibility that most other politicians cannot claim for themselves.

I believe he takes a stark view of American leadership and assesses it in bold strokes.

It might be now that McCain has come to appreciate — as many millions of other Americans — that the presidency requires a level of understanding and knowledge of the complex relationships this country has built with nations around the world.

Trump doesn’t get it. Sen. McCain has acknowledged as much, albeit begrudgingly. Is he being fickle? Maybe. I also believe he is correct.

entertainment news

Happy Trails, Part 24

Retirement has allowed us to become reacquainted with elements of our individual and collective upbringing.

That’s not as strange as it might sound.

We travel in a 28-foot fifth wheel. We hook up at RV campgrounds usually looking at least for water and electric hookups; if we get sewer connections, that’s all the better.

Television reception depends on a couple of variables: Do we have cable or do we rely on our antenna? Most of the time, it’s antenna use.

Here is where the past meets the present.

We extend our antenna, program our “auto channel tuner” setting. Bingo! We get a plethora of channels. Many of them feature old-time TV.

We get to watch some of the programs we grew up watching. These old-timer networks broadcast programs such as “The Lone Ranger,” “Lassie,” “My Three Sons,” “Have Gun Will Travel,” “Perry Mason,” well … you get the idea. Then we get the cheesy game shows with those whopping $500 payouts to the winners.

The most entertaining aspect of watching this television programming is its innocence. The Lone Ranger, for instance, knows how to solve every situation that he and Tonto encounter. I find myself feeling a bit sorry for Tonto, who is portrayed as a know-nothing who has to ask Kemo Sabe for advice on how to solve every single crisis they encounter.

There’s a certain irony, if you think about it, in watching this flashback television. The older we have become, more exposure we get to the experiences of our youth.

national news

Moment of truth approaching? Tapes or no tapes?

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is going to testify behind closed doors in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

He might have plenty to tell his former Senate colleagues.

Meanwhile, congressional Republicans finally are beginning to turn up the heat on the president of the United States regarding a reckless tweet he posted some time back about the potential existence of White House tape recordings.

Show ’em if you got ’em, Mr. President.

Donald Trump made some snarky reference to tape recordings after he fired FBI Director James Comey. It was that “Russia thing” that produced the dismissal. Comey and Trump reportedly had some conversations about Russia and the FBI”s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian government hackers who sought to influence the 2016 presidential election outcome.

Tapes, Mr. President?

There are so many “Big Questions,” it’s becoming difficult to keep track of them. One of them is this: Did the president record the conversations or is he bluffing about their existence?

Now comes the heat from the president’s side of the partisan divide. Republicans want him to clear the air.

Of course, the president hasn’t shown much proclivity to listen to anyone, let alone act on the torrent of advice he’s getting.

So, I suppose we should expect the mystery to deepen and the chaos to continue.

national news, political news

Presidency no place to ‘learn how to do the job’

I damn near spit my coffee at the TV screen this morning when I heard U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan give Donald J. Trump a pass on the utter chaos that follows the president around.

Ryan said Trump “is new at this,” meaning he’s new at governing. No kidding, Mr. Speaker? He’s so damn new he continues to blunder and bluster his way through mistake after mistake.

And what do you suppose is the cost? It’s the loss of credibility among our allies; it’s the fear this man generates among Americans who cannot depend on the president to do or say anything sane.

I am trying to imagine how the speaker would react if Hillary Rodham Clinton would make the kind of mistakes that Trump has made. He’d be drafting articles of impeachment immediately. To be fair, Democrats likely would give a President Hillary Clinton a pass, too.

But here’s the thing: She’s not the president. Donald “Smart Person” Trump occupies that office. It should go without saying that being elected president creates a steep learning curve even for those who have years of experience in government. Trump came to the presidency with zero experience in any form of public service.

Trump hasn’t appeared to learn a damn thing about the office he inherited on Election Day 2016.

Hey, that’s OK, according to Speaker Ryan. The president of the United States is “new at this.”

Good … grief!

national news

Nation’s capital still stirs the emotions

WASHINGTON — This is the most political city in America, if not the world and politics being what it has become in recent decades, this city is full of a lot of hard feelings and recrimination.

You know my own feelings about the current president of the United States. But this blog post isn’t about that — and it damn sure isn’t about him. It’s about the myriad monuments, memorials and assorted structures throughout the city that pay testament to the nation’s greatness.

We came to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It’s like an outdoor church. Visitors lower their voices. They speak in solemn tones. They look at the 58,000-plus names etched into the stone, seeking to recall memories of the individuals who gave their last full measure.

I found a name I had spotted the first time my family and I came here in 1990. He was a young man with whom I served briefly in Vietnam. He was set to go home in a few days, but fate intervened at a landing zone where he and his Huey helicopter unit was ambushed in June 1969 by enemy fighters.

We toured much of the Washington Mall, walked through the World War II, read the inscriptions from the likes of Chester Nimitz, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, George C. Marshall that paid tribute to the brave Americans who — along with soldiers from many other nations — saved the world from tyranny. My all-time favorite veteran, my father, was one of the 16 million Americans who answered the call to duty. I thought of Dad while marveling at the grandeur of the WWII memorial.

Not far from that is the Korean War Memorial, which pays tribute to the “forgotten war.” It, too, cost tens of thousands of American lives. I prayed for the souls of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice.

We cast our eyes on the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial and toured the FDR Memorial.

For several precious hours while taking all that in, I was able to set aside the events of the moment. I didn’t think a single time about the confusion, controversy and contentiousness of the present day. I thought instead of the great Americans who built the country and created a nation that remains — despite rhetoric to the contrary — the greatest nation in human history.

We had to see these things to remind us of who we are.

national news, political news

Hold up on impeachment, Rep. Green

U.S. Rep. Al Green is getting way head of the parade as he prepares articles of impeachment against Donald J. Trump.

The Texas Democrat believes the president has committed obstruction of justice in the ongoing probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian agents who allegedly sought to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.

Here’s a thought, Rep. Green: Why not wait for the results of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the issues that have given you so much grief?

Mueller has been handed a huge pile of potential evidence to sort through, thanks to the testimony given this week by former FBI Director James Comey. It would serve the process well to let Mueller and his well-qualified legal team to sort through the evidence and determine whether the president committed an impeachable offense. Such an offense might include whether his campaign colluded with Russian spooks in hacking into the electoral process and whether he indeed obstructed justice by firing Comey.

https://www.texastribune.org/2017/06/07/al-green-pushes-forward-trump-impeachment/

I take a back seat to no one in my loathing of the president, not even to Rep. Green.

I just want to see the special counsel’s investigation concluded before the House of Representatives considers an impeachment of the president of the United States.