Monthly Archives: July 2017

national news

Kelly vs. Mooch: All bets are off

John Kelly is about to take on the job of his nightmares.

He is the next White House chief of staff, replacing Reince Priebus, who was booted out of his job this week by the president of the United States, one Donald John Trump.

The president, moreover, has hired a communications director who is exhibiting the conduct of a madman. Anthony “Mooch” Scaramucci went on a profanity-laced tirade and predicted correctly that Priebus would be gone by the end of the week.

Now into this maelstrom comes Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general. He is a no-nonsense general-grade officer. He has served his country heroically and with supreme honor. He moves into the White House from the Department of Homeland Security, where he served as secretary.

It’s the Kelly vs. Mooch situation that ought to cause concern throughout the massive federal government.

Mooch reports to the Donald Trump. Tradition — something for which the president has zero regard — has made the communications director answer to the chief of staff.

Here’s my question: How long will it take Gen. Kelly to slap some sense into Mooch and tell this loudmouth that the chief of staff controls the message?

It’s being said in recent hours and days that no previous president would have put up with the hideous tirade that Mooch launched against Priebus. Mooch called Priebus a “schizophrenic,” adding a colorful f-bomb adjective in front of that term.

Can you imagine someone referring to, say, previous WH chiefs Leon Panetta or James Baker III with that kind of language?

With all of that said, Gen. John Kelly is walking into a White House that is in an utter state of confusion and chaos. It’s a direct reflection of the man who refused to let the previous White House chief of staff do his job.

Moreover, it all reflects directly on the incompetence demonstrated daily by Donald John Trump Sr.

Good luck to you, Gen. Kelly. You will need every bit of it.

local news, national news

Happy Trails, Part 33

This ongoing series of blog posts is supposed to chronicle the joys of retirement that my wife and I are enjoying.

We are enjoying many of them. We just returned home today after traveling 3,175 miles from Amarillo, to East Texas, to Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota. We spent some glorious family time with our sons, our daughter-in-law and her sons, our precious granddaughter, our daughter-in-law’s parents, my cousin and her husband.

My wife and I saw a lot of beautiful country along our sojourn and spent plenty of great “quality time” with our family members.

We had a serious blast, folks.

But …

Our trip had a couple of serious hiccups, which I’ll explain.

On our return home from St. Paul, Minn., we pulled into a truck stop/travel center in Springdale, Ark., where we discovered one of our RV’s wheels was seriously out of alignment. We looked closely and discovered it had burned through some bearings. The wheel was shot.

We summoned a service guy, who told us the axle was damaged. We needed a new one. He brought it the next afternoon — after my wife and I, along with Toby the Puppy, spent a sleepless night in the truck stop parking lot. The noise of semi-trailers coming and going all night — along with the oppressive heat — kept us up all night. We ran our fifth wheel off the battery, which didn’t run our air conditioner.

The service guy replaced the axle the next day and we proceeded onward.

Then came the trip home from Allen, Texas, where we spent a couple of days and nights with granddaughter Emma and her parents.

We journeyed home with our shiny new rear axle holding up just fine. We pulled up to our Amarillo house, got out, then tried to open the slide on our fifth wheel so we could empty our pantry.

The slide doesn’t work. No response to the switch. It’s deader than dead, man.

We’ll get that problem fixed quickly.

So, the upshot of this story? Not every excursion is trouble-free. We have to learn to cope with stumbles and hiccups along the way. I believe we did all right in that regard.

We don’t need more opportunities to present themselves.

national news, political news

OK, Mitch … time to get to work — with Democrats!

Mitch McConnell isn’t going to take any advice from me, given that he likely won’t even know I’m offering it.

I’ll go to bat anyway. Here’s my advice to the U.S. Senate majority leader, who has just witnessed the collapse of the Republican-authored overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

If I were Mitch, I’d get on the phone in the next day or two. Pick up the phone, Mitch, and place a call to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

McConnell would do well to say something like this:

“Hello, Chuck? This is Mitch. OK, pal. You win. You won this fight. You held your Democratic caucus together to fend off our effort to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something we crafted all on our own. I get that we didn’t do what we should have done at the beginning, which is seek Democrats’ advice and counsel on how to replace the Affordable Care Act.

“But look, Chuck. I know how this system is supposed to work. I’ve been around the Senate a long time, as you have and I understand fully that cooperation and compromise aren’t four-letter words. Except that I’ve got that damn TEA Party wing of my caucus that keeps giving me the dickens whenever I talk to you folks.

“Hell, man, Lyndon Johnson worked the Senate like a craftsman; he played senators like fiddles. He got things done when he ran the Senate.

“So, here’s my idea. Let’s all sit down together. I want to toss out the ACA. You support it in principle. But surely you have problems with it. Those damn premiums are too high. Insurers are bailing out in some states. Patients can’t always get the docs they want to treat them.

“Why don’t we put our heads together to fix the Affordable Care Act. We can call it whatever we wish. I tried to get it tossed. It’s still the law of the land. It’s going to remain the law of the land possibly until hell freezes over. But I’m willing to work with you to fix what you and I both know — along with members of our respective caucuses — that the ACA isn’t perfect. Far from it. It needs fixing.

“Are you in?”

Chuck Schumer, having heard all of this, likely would answer:

“Welcome aboard, Mitch.”

military news, national news, political news

Mr. POTUS, apologize to Sen. McCain

Gregory Wallance is a lawyer and author who has written a wonderful essay for The Hill in which he declares it’s time for Donald J. Trump to say he’s sorry for defaming John McCain.

What’s more, according to Wallance, Trump defamed an entire corps of warriors who served their country with honor and valor in precisely the manner that McCain did.

Here is Wallance’s essay.

Sen. McCain, an Arizona Republican, has been diagnosed with brain cancer. His prognosis is not yet known to the world, although my sense is that doctors have given the McCain family a full briefing.

The point is that Sen. McCain served more than five years as a Vietnam War prisoner. He was shot down in 1967 over a Hanoi lake. He suffered broken limbs after he ejected from his stricken jet. The North Vietnamese who captured him stuck a bayonet in his abdomen. He was tortured, beaten and berated by his captors.

He was offered an early release. The communists thought they would win points by releasing the son of a senior Navy officer. The young aviator refused, and was subjected to more torture.

What did then-candidate Trump say about McCain’s service during a war that Trump managed to avoid? He said McCain was a “hero only because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”

No one on Earth thinks Trump has it in what passes for a heart to say he’s sorry for defaming a valiant and gallant war hero. Gregory Wallance, though, has offered a stirring account of why such an apology should be made to honor all the individuals who endured the kind of wartime misery inflicted on John McCain.

Wallance writes: “In the decades after World War II, when more than 120,000 Americans had been POWs, insulting a former POW the way Trump did would have ended any politician’s career.”

Wallance writes about the raid conducted on Japan immediately after Pearl Harbor, about how Col. Jimmy Doolittle and his fellow Army aviators took off from the USS Hornet aboard land-based B-25 bombers. Their mission was fraught with peril from the get-go. They struck targets in Japan. Many of the men were captured by the enemy.

“American servicemen and women become POWs because they are serving their country in harm’s way,” Wallance writes.

He doesn’t expect Trump to apologize. He wants the country to salute those who served their nation and paid a heavy price because they fell into enemy hands.

I join in that salute. Fruitless as it is, though, I also demand that Donald Trump apologize for the hideous insult he leveled at a true American hero.

national news

Now, an apology from the offender?

I hereby accept the apology delivered to the nation by the head of the Boy Scouts of America.

BSA boss Michael Scurbaugh wrote an apology to those who were offended by Donald John Trump’s remarks to the Boy Scout Jamboree. The president politicized his talk in a manner not fitting for the event.

Instead of concentrating his talk on the great service the Scouts provide to the nation, the president boasted about his election victory, blasted his defeated opponent and criticized his immediate predecessor in the White House.

Scurbaugh wrote: “For years, people have called upon us to take a position on political issues, and we have steadfastly remained non-partisan and refused to comment on political matters. We sincerely regret that politics were inserted into the Scouting program.”

There. That’s all we’re likely to get in the form of an apology. It’s a heartfelt statement of contrition and regret from Top Scout.

What about the offender? How about an apology from the clown who uttered those remarks to the Scouts?

Scout leader on target

OK. You can stop laughing now. I realize it won’t come, not from Donald John Trump. I still had to ask.

national news

Who, what is Donald J. Trump?

A family member and I had an exchange earlier today about Donald J. Trump in which my kin sought to make a point that the president isn’t a conservative.

This family member is the real deal. He considers himself to be a true believer and that Trump is not of the same mindset as he is.

I’ll concede that point to my young relative.

The truth, as I see it, is that Trump has no ideological grounding. He entered politics seeking to shake up the world. He said he wants to “make America great again.” As I’ve watched him stumble, bumble and fumble his way through the first seven months of his presidency, I am left to wonder: What in the name of all that is holy does this guy believe? What does he stand for?

He appointed a White House communications director who used to support Barack Obama. Indeed, the president himself used to be friends with Bill and Hillary Clinton. He used to be pro-choice on abortion. The president once favored some controls on guns ownership.

He ran for president as a populist, vowing to restore American jobs. Trump then vowed to propose a trillion-dollar infrastructure improvement program. He wants to overhaul the tax code.

He has trashed our intelligence community. Trump has disparaged our nation’s most valued allies.

Through this maze of ideological confusion and nonsense, he remains the favorite son of the evangelical Christian community … even though he’s never — that I can tell — spent any significant time understanding the teachings of Jesus Christ.

His Republican Party “base” adores him because he “tells it like it is.”  Good grief, man! That’s it?

I have said until I am nearly hoarse that Donald Trump has no business being president of the United States. However, that’s what he has become.

As I continue to watch his flailing and — so far — failing administration, I am left to wonder: What in the world does this clown stand for, what are his core beliefs and what in the world is he doing to this great nation?

national news

Mooch shows us why POTUS hired him

Anthony “Mooch” Scaramucci is cast, apparently, in the same mold as the guy who has just hired him.

He’s a loud-mouthed, profane insult machine who happens to serve as communications director for an administration that is seeking desperately to change the subject from pressing matters. You know, things like possible business conflicts of interest and that “Russia thing” aka the investigation into whether Russia meddled in our 2016 presidential election.

Mooch has called White House chief of staff Reince Priebus a “f****** schizophrenic, a paranoiac.” Priebus will be gone shortly, according to Mooch.

The die was cast when Trump hired Mooch to become communications chief and then said Mooch would report directly to the president, rather than the chief of staff, which has been the custom for, oh, many decades.

Mooch took that as his cue to trash Priebus, who deserves far better than he’s getting from Mooch or Trump or, frankly, the media that cover the White House. Priebus had to know what he was getting when he accepted the job as chief of staff. The former head of the Republican National Committee has worked with grownups. It’s just that he is now surrounded in the White House by goofballs, thugs, know-nothings and rank political amateurs.

This is part of the Trump modus operandi. He has hired a profane communications chief who parrots the boss — who, in my humble view, is utterly, profoundly and glaringly unfit to be president of the United States of America.

This is what we now have in charge of the executive branch of the federal government.

Do you feel good about it? Neither do I.

military news

Policy by tweet: no way to run a government

Donald John Trump has compiled an endless list of broken campaign promises. I’ll take a glance briefly at just one of them.

He vowed to become more “presidential” once he took the oath of office. He hasn’t done so. He’s become even less presidential.

Consider his latest blockbuster tweet in which he declared that transgender service personnel no longer could serve their country. He is governing by Twitter. The tweet caught the Joint Chiefs of Staff, congressional committee leaders, the Department of Defense and military field commanders all by surprise.

The president fired off the tweet and then — bang! — ignited a firestorm.

This idiotic tweet has provided yet another glaring, glowing and ghastly example of how the commander in chief is not fit for the position he occupies.

Senate and House committee leaders have expressed dismay that the president would govern via this social medium.

Oh, and then we had Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford declare that no change would take place for now regarding transgender personnel until he gets some specific direction from Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis. Until then, Gen. Dunford said, all personnel will be “treated with respect.”

The president, who never wore the nation’s uniform, has disrespected a handful of patriotic Americans simply because they have sought to change their sexual identity.

***

As a brief aside, I’m now awaiting a comment from my congressman, Mac Thornberry, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee. His Senate colleague, John McCain, already has spoken about the president’s latest Twitter tempest and the idiocy associated with the president’s insistence on using Twitter to make sweeping policy pronouncements.

Where are you on all this, Mac?

national news

Here is how you address a Scout Jamboree

Donald John Trump delivered a hideously inappropriate message to the Boy Scout Jamboree.

In it, the president chastised former President Obama for non-attendance at one of these events while he was in office. The president, though, was correct to say that Obama didn’t attend a Jamboree in person, but he did record a message to the 2010 event to commemorate scouting’s 100th anniversary.

You can see the former president’s remarks here.

They are totally in keeping with the tradition that presidents of the United States have followed for decades to help the Scouts celebrate their service.

That is, until this year.

military news, national news

Transgender ban shakes ’em up in military

Donald J. Trump has issued another stunner. He possesses an endless, bottomless supply of them.

The president tweeted something today about a total ban on transgender Americans serving in the U.S. military. He contends that the cost of providing them health care is too onerous.

But … does he provide any evidence that transgender service personnel are any less capable than others? Does he suggest that they cannot do the duties of their military obligation? Is he suggesting that individuals who have changed their sexual identity are unpatriotic?

This is yet another disgraceful example of presidential caprice. He said he talked it over with “my generals and military experts” and has determined that transgender service personnel — who comprise a tiny fraction of the more than 1.3 million individuals in uniform — no longer can wear their nation’s military uniform.

His tweet apparently caught the Pentagon brass by surprise; it also stunned many in Congress who didn’t know the president was going to make the declaration. As The Hill reports as well, U.S. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry — yours truly’s  member of Congress — was notably silent on the policy decision.

Read the story from The Hill here.

Congressional Republicans, not to mention Democrats, were angry at the presidential tweet.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain said Trump’s policy pronouncements via Twitter are an unacceptable vehicle. He, too, was kept out of the loop.

The president appears — yet again! — to be appeasing his base at the expense of the rest of the nation he was elected to govern.

I am now going to await some evidence from the president that transgender military personnel have harmed the nation’s ability to defend itself.

It’s going to be a long wait, but that’s all right. I can find the patience.