Monthly Archives: June 2017

medical news

Trumpcare in trouble … put on hold

Trumpcare is in trouble. There’s no way to spin this any differently.

Nine Senate Republicans are now on the record that they oppose their party leadership’s version of the alternative to the Affordable Care Act. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is as adept at tea-leaf reading as anyone in Washington, delayed the vote on the GOP plan until after the Fourth of July recess.

I live out here in Flyover Country, in the heart of Trump Land, where the president polled something like 80 percent over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

But my gut tells me that rank-and-file Trumpkins are none too happy about what the GOP Senate leadership has come up with.

We’ve got a lot of folks out here who depend on Medicaid to cover the cost of medical care. The GOP plan guts Medicaid. A lot of those same folks voted for Donald J. Trump on his promise that he wouldn’t touch Medicaid, or Medicare, and would ensure a better, cheaper, more efficient health insurance plan than the one provided by the ACA. He isn’t delivering the goods, based on what the House of Representatives has approved and what’s on the table in the Senate.

Republicans can afford to lose just two votes in order to approve a Senate version of Trumpcare. They hold a 52-48 majority in the Senate; two “no” votes means Vice President Pence casts the tie-breaking vote to approve Trumpcare.

McConnell said today that Democrats have no intention of working with Republicans to craft an ACA replacement. Really!

How about this, Mr. Majority Leader? How about agreeing to preserve the good aspects of the ACA and work to improve those elements that need work? I’ve heard Democrats say they would be willing to with Republicans to mend the ACA. One of them happened to be the former president, Barack H. Obama, who has said repeatedly that if Republicans can improve the ACA he’d be willing to work with them.

Obama is out of office now. Republicans are in complete charge. They control Congress and the White House. They had eight years to come up with a reasonable alternative to the ACA. They dickered, dawdled and dissed the Democrats for that entire time and then came up with a plan that cannot please enough Republicans to make it law.

Cue music. The dance goes on.

local news

Tex Randall gets a plaque

Tex Randall has joined a lengthy list of roadside attractions that now have the imprimatur of the Texas Historical Commission.

I’ll refer to him as “Tex,” given his size.

Tex happens to be a statue that looms over U.S. Highway 60 in Canyon, Texas. The Historical Commission has unveiled a historical plaque that takes particular note of Tex’s significance to the Texas Panhandle.

Tex stands 47 feet tall. He weighs about 7 tons. He’s been standing alongside the highway since the 1950s. He recently received an extreme makeover. He got whitewashed and his limbs were strengthened. Then he got a fresh coat of paint depicting some new duds.

I certainly like the idea of putting a historical marker next to Tex.

I had the pleasure of writing a series of stories for KFDA NewsChannel 10 about these historical markers. Texas has tens of thousands of them along many thousands of miles of highway. I was able to learn about the Battle of Adobe Walls, Charles Goodnight, Woody Guthrie and a whole host of other events and colorful characters who helped shape the Panhandle’s history.

OK, so Tex isn’t a real guy. He’s just a gangly statue. However, he’s seen by a lot of people every day as they pass through Canyon. According to KVII-ABC7: “Texas has the largest historic recognition program in the country,” said Richard Bowers, Chairman of Randall County Historic Commission. “They’re to recognize important historical sites or where events occurred within the state and to be an arm of education for those outside and for our own people.”

Here’s the ABC7.com story.

I’m going to make a point of stopping at the marker next time I pass through Canyon to learn about Tex Randall’s historical significance to the region.

Stand tall, Tex!

national news, political news

Housing allowance? Don’t think so, Rep. Chaffetz

Jason Chaffetz is about to walk away from his public service job as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Before he goes, he is leaving with a parting gift in the form of an idea that fellow House members ought to reject out of hand. Chaffetz thinks Congress should enact a $2,500 monthly housing allowance for its members. It would give members of the House and Senate a little bit of financial cushion to enable them to live like normal human beings.

I don’t think so, young man.

Chaffetz earns $175,000 annually to serve his Utah congressional district constituents. It’s a handsome salary to be sure. However, during his time in office, Chaffetz decided to perform a bit of a publicity stunt by sleeping on a couch in his office, rather than renting an apartment/condo/flat somewhere like many other members of Congress.

As The Hill reports: “A $2,500 monthly allowance would cost taxpayers about $30,000 a year per lawmaker, or roughly $16 million a year for all 535 members.”

That’s a lot of money

I’ll stipulate that $16 million doesn’t measure up when compared to the size of the federal government budget. It’s not even significant compared to the size of the annual budget deficit, let alone the national debt. It’s still 16 million bucks. Boil that down to terms as they relate to me — and perhaps most of you who are reading this post — then we’re talking about some real money.

Again, according to The Hill: (His idea) “would allow the non-millionaires to participate and you would be able to have your spouse join you here,” said Chaffetz, 50, who’s spent 1,500 nights away from his wife and children during his eight-plus years in Congress. “If I wasn’t buying as many airline tickets, it would ultimately be less expensive.”

I wish the Utah Republican well as he embarks on a new career and life, reportedly as a “contributor” to the Fox News Channel. He represents a political party, though, that prides itself on personal responsibility and fiscal prudence.

Tossing potentially another $16 million a year at Congress to create what amounts to a public housing fund for well-compensated lawmakers, though, strays a bit too far from the GOP’s long-standing tradition.

media news

CNN does that rare deed: retracts a story

CNN officials don’t need me to take up the cudgel for them, but I’ll do so anyway.

The news outlet has just done something quite rare in journalism. It has retracted a story it broadcast. There was no mere “correction” or “clarification.” CNN took it all back. Moreover, the principals involved in the bogus story have resigned; they well likely would have been fired by the network.

I mention this because of the Twitter tirade that Donald John Trump has launched against the network. The president calls CNN “fake news”; he says the network’s ratings are plummeting; he is castigating CNN for the story that was broadcast.

Trump unloads on CNN

The president is an angry man! Then again, he’s always angry when the media are involved. Am I right?

The CNN story alleged that a close Trump ally was tied to a Russian investment fund that the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee is investigating. The story is false. CNN admitted its mistake, took it off its website, accepted the resignations of the reporter, editor and producer involved in the story.

My experience in journalism — which totaled nearly four decades — tells me that CNN acted responsibly in reaction to the mistake it made. Do I know whether the story was published with a willful intent to do harm to the president? No I don’t.

I do know, though, that for a media organization to retract a story means that it has acknowledged an egregious error. And, yes, by golly, journalists — those fallible human beings — do make mistakes.

That won’t stop conservatives, though, from unloading on the “mainstream media,” a term that has become a four-letter word among those who detest the media.

The simple truth, though, is that CNN acted responsibly and with integrity in taking back a report it learned to be untrue.

national news, political news

(Crowd) size really must matter

You mean we’re still talking about the size of that inaugural crowd this past January? We’re still arguing over whether it measured up to what the brand new president of the United States called it — the largest gathering of human beings in world history … or something like that?

I guess in Donald J. Trump’s world, size matters.

The National Park Service’s inspector general now says the agency didn’t mess with the crowd size estimates of Trump’s inaugural nor did it leak any information to the media.

The Hill reports on the IG’s findings. Read the story here.

This malarkey about crowd size seemed to get under the president’s skin early this year. Various media published pictures showing the crowd gathered in front of Capitol Building at President Barack Obama’s first inaugural in 2009 and compared it to the crowd that heard Trump’s speech this past January. Obama’s crowd was, um, quite a bit larger.

Trump didn’t like hearing that. White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s initial press briefing included a serious scolding of the media for failing to report that the president’s inaugural crowd was the largest in history. The pictures, though, tell a different story.

Will this spell the end of this mini-tempest? Probably not, as long as Donald John Trump is president of the United States.

media news

Trump vs. Media battle rages on … and on

Donald J. Trump in one important way is no different from the 44 men who preceded him as president of the United States of America.

They all disliked, distrusted and at times disrespected the media.

The difference between Trump and those other guys is the tone and tenor of the response he levels at the media for doing their job.

Trump has branded all media that report stories that aren’t totally favorable as “fake news.” Moreover, he is making admittedly superb use of social media to carry that message forward. Beyond that, his base is loving it! The folks who voted for him and who bought into his “tell it like it is” mantra continue to give him a baseline of support that barely creaks under the weight of the negativity that the president heaps onto himself.

Is this guy, though, any different from his predecessors in his dislike of the media? Nope. Not at all.

Trump assails media again

Every single predecessor — certainly those who served as president during the past 60 or 70 years — have griped openly about the coverage the media provided. Even when they complained, though, many of them did so with a smile/smirk on their face. I believe it was President Franklin Roosevelt who referred to the media’s coverage of his dog Fala, noting how reporters should lay off the presidential pooch.

On and one it has gone.

Do you think President Kennedy wanted the media to cover the Bay of Pigs fiasco in the manner that they did? Of course not. He took the criticism like a man.

President Johnson didn’t much care for the media’s coverage of the Vietnam War, either. He understood the role of a free press and accepted it as part of the job he inherited when his predecessor was gunned down.

I don’t recall hearing President Reagan bitching loudly about the coverage of the Iran-contra controversy.

President Clinton was bombarded with negativity during his eight years in the White House. His wife was a frequent target, too. And occasionally, the media actually poked maliciously at their daughter, for crying out loud.

Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama also took their share of hits over the course of their combined 16 years in office. And, by the way, President Obama was the victim of actual “fake news” promulgated by the likes of, oh, Donald J. Trump — the originator of the lie he kept telling that Obama was constitutionally ineligible to serve because he was born in a far-off land. Can there be a greater example of presidential hypocrisy than that?

The rules of president-media engagement have changed in the Age of Trump. The media are doing the job the U.S. Constitution allows them to do. The president doesn’t like what they report, so he — in effect — defames reporters and editors for serving the public interest.

Worst of all? The complainer in chief  is getting away with it!

local news, Sports news

Let’s still call it an ‘MPEV’

I get scolded from time to time by readers of this blog. One of them scolded me mildly because I keep referring to the still-to-be-built sports and entertainment facility as a “multipurpose event venue.”

He wants the upcoming downtown Amarillo site called a “ballpark.”

I believe I’ll take his suggestion/edict under advisement, but for now I’ll continue to use the MPEV reference.

The MPEV is going to be home to a AA minor-league baseball franchise. The city recently announced the relocation of that franchise from San Antonio to Amarillo. The San Antonio Missions — as the team is now called — plan to play ball in Amarillo beginning in April 2019, which means the planners here need to get cracking. They need design plans approved and construction to begin immediately … if not sooner.

The strategy, though, puts many other events in the MPEV. Plans call for the venue to play host to myriad other activities that have nothing to do with balls and strikes, home runs, hot dogs and beer. Yes, the baseball team will be the primary tenant of the MPEV, but not the only one — if the grand plan is developed fully.

Thus, MPEV remains to my way of thinking a suitable term of art to refer to this upcoming venue.

I always appreciate constructive criticism.

For now I’ll pass on the latest suggestion on how we ought to refer to the MPEV.

medical news, national news, political news

Now the economists weigh in: GOP health care overhaul stinks

I suppose politicians are predisposed to think more highly of their own opinions and agendas than anyone else’s.

How else does one explain Senate Republicans’ stubborn insistence that their version of an overhaul of the nation’s health care insurance system is good while actual experts say it’s bad?

The Congressional Budget Office, the famously non-partisan agency charged with “scoring” legislation, has said the GOP plan would cost 22 million Americans their health insurance over the next decade.

Now we hear from some Nobel Prize laureates, economists with a proven track record of expertise and knowledge about such matters, saying the GOP bill is bad news for Americans.

Not to be derailed or dissuaded, the Senate Republican leadership is going to trudge ahead with a vote — possibly as early as Thursday — on this so-called alternative to the Affordable Care Act.

I’ll call it Trumpcare, named after the president of the United States. I have refused to refer to the ACA by its more colloquial term named after former President Barack Obama; that’s just me, though, and my bias speaking out loud.

Trumpcare is a turkey, according to the Nobel laureates.

Here’s how The Hill reports on it.

According to The Hill: “We call on Congress to work on legislation to improve the health delivery system, in general, and The Affordable Care Act, in particular,” the economists wrote. “The goal should be to hold down health costs and increase access to affordable, quality health coverage for all.”

The plan under consideration doesn’t do any of that. It also makes dramatic cuts in Medicaid insurance, upon which millions of Americans depend because they cannot afford to pay the full freight for health insurance.

The Senate plan has made conservatives angry because it doesn’t go far enough in repealing the ACA. It makes GOP moderates angry because it is every bit as “mean” — to borrow a term used by the president — as the plan that House members approved by a narrow 217-213 vote.

Nobel laureate economists dislike it, too, as do apparently millions of just plain average Americans who are worried about what it will do to their insurance plans.

The only folks who like it are the 13 Republican U.S. senators who cobbled this legislation together.

Are these men the only people in America who have it right, that everyone else is wrong? I think not.

national news

More defamation is coming from Trump

My vertigo is getting serious as I listen to Donald J. Trump’s latest 180-degree pivot on that so-called “Russia thing.”

The man who has called the Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election a “hoax” and a product of “fake news” now has defamed his immediate predecessor — again!

Trump says Barack H. Obama “colluded” with Russians to influence the election. He says Hillary Clinton did, too.

This man, the president, make no sense … at all! None. He blathers, bloviates and blusters about this and that. He cannot differentiate between fact and fiction. He has just promulgated another fictitious story line — a lie, if you will — about President Obama.

Trump seemed to dovetail from a Washington Post story that details in tremendous detail about the Obama administration’s struggle to deal with Russian hacking in advance of this past year’s election. Then he went further, suggesting that Obama’s flinching on action against Russia means he colluded with them.

How does this make sense? U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia sought to influence the election to favor Trump. He now seems to suggest that Obama worked with the Russians to elect the fellow who was running against Obama’s preferred candidate: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Here is what Trump tweeted:

“The reason that President Obama did NOTHING about Russia after being notified by the CIA of meddling is that he expected Clinton would win and did not want to ‘rock the boat,'” Trump wrote before 9 a.m. in Washington. “He didn’t ‘choke,’ he colluded or obstructed, and it did the Dems and Crooked Hillary no good.”Source: http://us.pressfrom.com/news/politics/-62484-trump-blames-obama-for-russia-once-again/

This crap comes from the president of the United States, our head of state, our commander in chief? Oh, brother.

I need to sit down.

medical news, national news, political news

CBO verdict is in: health care bill is ‘mean’

The Congressional Budget Office doesn’t use language such as “mean” to assess its analysis of legislation, but that’s what one can surmise of its latest analysis of a key Senate bill.

The CBO today turned in its “score” of the Senate Republican-passed health care legislation and it has told us:

* 22 million more Americans are going to be uninsured.

* The budget deficit will be cut more than $300 billion over the next decade, but that’s because of cuts in Medicaid spending for those Americans with financial need.

* There will be lower premiums, but there also will be less coverage.

It’s still a “mean” overhaul

Donald J. Trump said he wanted a less “mean” health care insurance plan than what the House of Representatives approved. The CBO score suggests that the Senate version of health care overhaul doesn’t make the grade.

Is the GOP plan in trouble? That depends on who’s doing the talking. Since this blog gives me a voice to speak out, I’ll suggest that Senate Republicans on the fence or leaning against the overhaul well might be inclined to vote “no” on this new plan if it comes to a vote later this week.

The president promised he wouldn’t touch Medicaid, that Americans who rely on Medicaid will continue to rely on it once he repealed and replaced the Affordable Care Act with something else.

It looks to me as though this promise won’t be kept.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has his work cut out for him as he looks for the votes to approve this bill.