Monthly Archives: July 2017

local news, national news

They’re stepping into the arena

I once wrote a blog post about a bumper sticker I spotted in Amarillo that told of someone being afraid of “the government.”

This individual seemed to imply that his government represents someone other than himself … or herself. That’s not true, of course. Our government belongs to us.

I encouraged this individual to seek public office at the earliest possible moment.

Here’s what I wrote in 2009:

https://highplainsblogger.com/2009/07/i-have-seen-the-enemy/

I’m happy to report that two friends of mine have done precisely that. I’ve written about one of them already: Greg Sagan is going to run as a Democrat for the 13th Congressional District right here in the Texas Panhandle against Republican incumbent Mac Thornberry.

Today, I want to offer a brief word of praise for another friend. He’s also a Democrat who once taught journalism at West Texas A&M University. He moved about a year ago back to his native Alabama.

Butler Cain is another Democrat who now is going to run for the 5th Congressional District in Alabama, where the incumbent is Republican Mo Brooks, who is rumored to be considering a campaign for the U.S. Senate seat that was vacated when Jeff Sessions became attorney general in the Donald J. Trump administration.

Cain’s rationale for seeking this House seat follows the advice I gave to that unknown bumper sticker owner. He said on social media that he had grown tired of bitching about government, so he has decided to climb into the ring and start tossing — and receiving — those rhetorical haymakers.

He took a job as a journalism department head at the University of North Alabama. I’m not altogether clear what his political campaign will do to his standing at the school. My hope for Cain is that he’ll get to continue influencing young journalists in the making.

We have folks who continually gripe about this and/or that public policy decision. I guess I’m one of them.

Then you have those who decide that the time for bitching about it is over. They decide to make a tangible difference in the political system that angers many millions of us.

I salute them.

medical news, national news

Sen. Cruz crawls into the belly of the beast

Ted Cruz deserves some high praise.

The junior U.S. Republican senator from Texas came back home for the Fourth of July and ventured into the heart of the Loyal Opposition — where he got an earful from constituents about the Senate GOP plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Cruz went to McAllen, deep in the Rio Grande Valley and the base of one of the strongest bastions of Democratic voting loyalists in Texas.

Cruz’s constituents told him point blank that they detest the Republican plan to replace the ACA with something concocted in secret, with no Democratic input.

According to the Texas Tribune, Cruz took the criticism well. “Isn’t freedom wonderful?” Cruz said shortly after taking the stage. “Think about it: In much of the world, if protesters showed up, they would face violent government oppression. In America, we’ve got something different.”

Yes, we do, senator.

With so many of his Republican colleagues forgoing direct communication with their constituents, I want to applaud Sen. Cruz for listening to their complaints.

Will he act on what he hears? I’m not holding my breath for that to happen. I do applaud him nevertheless for stepping into the line of fire.

Read the Tribune story here.

International news

North Korea launches ICBM: What now?

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has done it. His military apparatus has launched an intercontinental ballistic missile — successfully at that!

The communists in Pyongyang now apparently have the means to strike the United States with a nuclear weapon. Yes? U.S. military and intelligence officials are analyzing the launch.

What is the U.S. option? None of them is good.

A pre-emptive military strike is seemingly out of the question. It would provoke Kim Jong Un to launch an all-out war on the Korean Peninsula. And as MSBNC military analyst Jack Jacobs — a Vietnam War Medal of Honor recipient — said this morning while referencing the capital of South Korea, “Seoul is just footsteps away from the demilitarized zone.”

Hit them economically

Jacobs believes strong economic sanctions are the most effective immediate answer to preventing North Korea from doing something amazingly stupid, which would be to provoke a war with the United States.

North Korea is a poor nation that has spent almost all its national fiscal treasure on its military machine. The tinhorn dictator doesn’t care one bit, of course, about the citizens of his country.

It would be easy to say that here is where Donald J. Trump would earn his presidential salary, except that Trump supposedly isn’t getting paid to be president.

I’ll just stick with the notion that the president needs to weigh his options … very carefully.

national news, political news

Yep, the founders got it (mostly) right

Two hundred forty-one years later, it’s good to look back on what the nation’s founding fathers signed.

They stated in that document of independence declaration that “all men are created equal.” They put their names on the Declaration of Independence, many of them picked up their muskets and then went to war against the British Empire.

The fighting stopped in 1781. Then the founders went to work crafting a governing document we now know as the U.S. Constitution.

Did they get it 100 percent right when they signed off on that framework? Not really. I can think of two egregious errors of omission in that document.

The founders did not grant “all men” equal rights. Black men were enslaved. They were considered to be three-fifths of a human being. All men were created equal? No. The Emancipation Proclamation would set the slaves free in 1863, but it would take the nation two more years to ratify the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that abolished slavery once and for all.

Nor did the founders grant women full rights of citizenship, although they likely thought they were doing so at the time. Women couldn’t vote. They were mere spectators. It took the government a good bit longer to correct that error. In August 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified, granting suffrage to women.

Thirty or 40 years ago, I might be inclined to dwell on those negative elements of our nation’s history. Today, I choose to concentrate on what the founders did right.

Their forebears came to this new land to escape religious persecution. Thus, the founders created a secular Constitution. They granted every citizen religious freedom, which also means they were free to not worship if they chose.

The founders separated the government into three co-equal branches, granting equal power to each of them. The president proposes laws; Congress disposes of them; the courts ensure their constitutionality.

The great Winston Churchill famously declared that representative democracy is the worst form of government ever created, but is superior to anything else. The founders, of course, didn’t anticipate such wisdom coming from the British Bulldog.

I also am quite certain they would agree with him.

Therefore, I choose to salute the founders’ success today. Their government is being tested yet again. I remain confident it will continue to function as those great men intended.

media news, national news

Keep yammering about ‘fake news,’ Mr. President

I used to have mixed feelings about Donald Trump’s use of what is becoming an-almost hackneyed term.

“Fake news.”

The president tosses it out there with utterly no self-awareness, that he is the King of Fake News.

Barack Obama was a foreigner; thousands of Muslims cheered the Twin Towers’ collapse; Obama wiretapped the Trump campaign office; millions of illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton.

There’s more. It’s all fake news.

Yet the president persists in using that term to hang around media organizations that report actual news that he deems to be too negative.

Negativity equals “fake news.” You got that?

Thus, the president has established a mantra that plays well among the media-hating base of American voters who more than likely — as then-candidate Trump once famously said — would still vote for him even if he were to “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue.”

Do I want him to stop using the “fake news” dodge?

Not really. It just demonstrates that this president doesn’t know a single thing about the difference between what’s “fake” and what’s real.

media news, national news

POTUS redefines response strategy

Donald Trump’s communications team is defending The Boss by repeating a troubling dodge.

It is that the president is a human being and that he shouldn’t have to endure constant attacks without responding to his critics as he has done.

Deputy White House press aide Sarah Huckabee Sanders was called out the other day by White House reporter who skewered her for the White House’s constant yammering about “fake news.” He said the media are simply “doing their job.” Sanders objected to the gist of what he said and implied that the media, in effect, are conspiring to concoct reports designed to put the president in a negative light.

Sanders is as wrong as wrong gets.

As for Trump’s human instincts, I feel compelled to remind the young press flack that the president’s recent predecessors all avoided the kind of petulance exhibited by the current leader of the free world.

Barack Obama also was hammered repeatedly during his two terms in office. Did he say anything even remotely similar about his critics that we are hearing from Donald Trump? Umm. Nope.

George W. Bush his share of fire from opponents as well. Did the president respond in kind? Did he go on social media to portray the media as “the enemy of the people”? No once again. Instead, President Bush understood what all presidents have known, which is that the media perform a valuable service in keeping public officials accountable for their deeds and statements.

Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford all knew as president that criticism goes with the territory. Even Richard Nixon, who came closest to the Trump model of media response, knew better than to say out loud that the media were the enemy.

I no longer have any serious hope that Donald Trump will grasp what his most recent predecessors all knew about the media and their relationship with the president.

I do, though, expect better from his spokespeople, who should cease insulting Americans with the idiocy that the president is reacting like any normal, run-of-the-mill human being.

The men who preceded him were human beings, too.

national news

Let’s enjoy the nation’s birthday … and wish ourselves well

I make no secret of my dismay and disgust at the state of our national government.

It starts at the very top of the political food chain.

Here’s the thing, though. We’re about to celebrate the 241st year of our nation’s existence, or at least when it declared itself to be independent of the English monarch, King George III. Our revolution already was underway when those men signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

It would be another decade before our Constitution would be written and ratified.

Over the many decades since then, we’ve been through hell as a nation. Four of our presidents have been murdered while in office; others have died from other causes. We endured the Civil War, two world wars, and various conflicts that tore at the nation’s soul.

We have been hit twice — real hard — on our soil by our enemies. We have mourned the deaths of Americans we did not know.

Two of our presidents have been impeached. One of our president was on the verge of impeachment — and then he resigned. Congress has suffered through myriad scandals of varying types.

Our economic life has been imperiled. We had the Great Depression and something that we recently have referred to as the Great Recession. 

All this turmoil and tumult we’re going through today only serves to remind me of something most of have known all along: We are a resilient nation; we are filled with resolve and grit.

On this national birthday, I am driven to think of who we are, the journey we’ve taken, the wounds we have suffered and the healing that has occurred.

I plan, therefore, to set aside my disgust for a day at what is unfolding at this moment in the halls of power. I plan to cherish what I know to be true: We continue to be the greatest, most indispensable nation on Planet Earth.

Are we perfect? Of course not. We’ve been through hell as a people and we’re still standing tall.

Those men who signed that declaration knew what they were creating. Despite all that has transpired since that signing, I am as certain as I am writing these words that those men would proud of what they created.

national news, political news

Why should we care about one governor’s hubris?

I live a long way from New Jersey. I have no particular vested interest in public policy in that state, given that I live half a nation away, out here in Flyover Country.

However, I do care when that state’s governor agrees to shut down its government, closes its parks, and then takes his wife and children to the Jersey Shore for a little sunshine, surf and family fellowship.

Gov. Chris Christie remains defiant. He is chiding the media for reporting on the notion that the governor is using a public park that has been shut down to the very public that pays for it.

It’s the optics, dude! All politicians should be aware of how things look to those who are watching.

I suppose I care about this issue because Christie, the bellicose former Republican presidential candidate, thinks he casts a shadow that goes far beyond the state’s borders. He sees himself as a major player. He thinks he matters to the rest of the country.

On this score, he’s right. So now he gets all juiced up because the media are reporting on his public policy pronouncements and how they square with his actual conduct as governor.

Give me a break, Gov. Christie!

Christie said: “If the Legislature would pass a budget then the park would be open.”

OK, fine. Here’s an idea, governor. Until the New Jersey Legislature does that very thing, stay the hell out of your state parks.

national news, political news

Donald John Trump: Grifter?

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The term “grifter” isn’t one that I toss around as a matter of routine.

It’s a fairly new addition to the English lexicon. I found a definition that read: “Someone who swindles others.”

Grifter equals swindler. Got that? Good.

Well, I heard a contemporary political pundit the other day use the term to describe Donald John Trump, the nation’s 45th president of the United States. My first reaction was “ouch, man!”

The guy on TV didn’t articulate in precisely what context Trump is a “grifter.” I’ll make a bit of a leap right here. I am going to presume he means that the president has swindled Americans into believing the things he said he would do right away if he were elected to the very first office he ever sought.

He’d toss out the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something else; he’d negotiate a deal to secure peace in the Middle East; he would pull the United States out of the North American Free Trade Act; he would act more “presidential” and stop using Twitter as much as he did while running for the presidency; he would stay on the job at the White House and forgo golfing outings at any of his many luxurious resorts.

By my count that would be zero for five — and just on those particular pledges he made! Were there others? Sure. Let’s just stick with those for a moment. They’re pretty major things.

I haven’t (yet) mentioned the Trump University matter in which he settled with some plaintiffs who said they were, um, swindled out of money they paid for Trump’s defunct school. How about the money he said he would donate to veterans’ causes, but still hasn’t done so?

I’m not yet certain that the term “grifter” is going to become a regular part of my vocabulary. I get what it means and what it implies about the president of the United States.

It does seem to fit this individual’s modus operandi — as a businessman, TV celebrity and now as our head of state and commander in chief.

national news

Do as he says, not does in New Jersey

The dictionary definition of “chutzpah” is as unambiguous as it gets. “Utter nerve; gall,” says my trusty and tattered American Heritage volume.

That would describe New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to a “t.”

The Republican governor shut down the state government on Friday and then took his family to a state park on the Jersey Shore to soak up a few rays.

Did I mention that the state park system was closed to the public? Oh, I guess I just did.

Christie doesn’t get it.

This guy has ripped a page out of Donald J. Trump’s playbook, the one that instructs government executives on how to act and sound boorish while inflicting some hurt on the folks who pay the bills that run the government.

The beach was, of course, deserted. No member of the public could enjoy the park because of budget issues that created the government shutdown.

Christie’s response was typical of the blustering blowhard. ‘‘The governor has a residence at Island Beach (State Park),’’ he said. ‘‘Others don’t. That’s the way it goes. Run for governor and you can have the residence.’’

There you have it. Rank has its privileges, or so the governor would seem to suggest.

Except for this: The governor works for the residents of his state, not the other way around.