Monthly Archives: September 2017

environmental news

More chaos from Trump; this time it’s those Paris Accords

This is what I mean when I mention the chaos that emanates from Donald J. Trump’s White House.

He said he would pull out of the Paris Climate Accord, citing the worldwide agreement to cut carbon emissions as endangering U.S. jobs. Then comes word that the president is having second thoughts.

Major media outlets — such as the Wall Street Journal — report that Trump is having second thoughts about his decision to pull out of the agreement. The White House says “no!” that’s not the case at all. The president intends to pull out; he’s going to keep one of his major campaign promises, White House flacks insist.

Then there’s confusion over whether he wants to renegotiate the accords to make them more acceptable to whatever concerns he has over them. Is he willing to renegotiate or not? A European Union officials said the United States won’t renegotiate the deal, but will review the terms to decide if there’s some wiggle room to allow continued U.S. participation.

Sheesh! I keep wishing for a No Drama Obama type of White House operation. Former President Barack Obama used to operate under a premise that the less drama, confusion and, yes, chaos, the better for the White House.

Donald Trump’s modus operandi is to pursue precisely the opposite result. The more chaos and confusion, the better.

Can we get our stories straight? Ever?

national news

Happy Trails, Part 42

SILVERTON, Colo. — Our retirement trail took us to what I believe is one of the most picturesque towns I’ve ever seen.

Silverton sits in a valley surrounded by peaks of the San Juan Mountains. It’s perched 9,318 feet above sea level.

They run a narrow-gauge train between Silverton and Durango. We chose to drive it ourselves along one of the most spectacular stretches of U.S highway I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

It’s U.S. 550. It tops out between Durango and Silverton at a pass that measures 10,640 feet above sea level. And, yes, the aspen are starting to turn into that spectacular yellow one sees on those Rocky Mountain postcards.

I want to mention this visit because it kind of surprised us when we arrived at this town. We hadn’t planned on making it a destination during our day on the road. It turned out to be.

It’s a small burg, to be sure. It looks rustic in the extreme. City Hall was built in 1908. It’s single street is lined with a series of gift shops, coffee houses, joints that serve craft beer, barbeque restaurants.

Interestingly, I didn’t see any, um, head shops or places that sell marijuana. They made “recreational marijuana” legal in Colorado a year ago. Actually, on our most recent visits to Colorado, I haven’t discovered a huge cannabis influence in people’s daily lives. Then again, I might not be looking in the right places to find it.

Silverton, though, has emerged as one of those post-retirement discoveries we have made on our journey across North America. The only other town I can compare to it might be Deadwood, S.D., which we saw not quite a year ago on our way home from Mount Rushmore.

I am willing to bet the farm that we’ll have many more of these discoveries in the years to come.

 

International news

Military options? They’re quite limited, Mme. Ambassador

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley thinks our country’s options regarding North Korea’s continual belligerence include using our immense military power.

I, uh, beg to differ with the distinguished diplomat.

The North Koreans keep launching missiles to demonstrate their own military capability. They fire them over Japan, which has caused the Japanese to rethink their own military posture, which has been limited since the end of World War II.

If Haley is suggesting that the United States launch a first strike against North Korea, then I believe she is talking about an eminently dangerous and frightening outcome.

National security adviser H.R. McMaster insists the United States is still seeking a diplomatic solution. Do you think that would be far preferable a solution than to hit the North Koreans with some kind of tactical strike aimed at destroying its missile launchers or its nuclear weapons production plants? Uhh, yeah. I do!

‘Fire and fury.’

Let’s try to get into North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s skull for just a moment. Does the boy with the bad haircut really and truly believe he can survive any kind of frontal military assault from the world’s most powerful nation? Is he suicidal? I cannot pretend to know what is driving this clown’s nuclear ambition. However, I just cannot believe he intends to use his weapons against South Korea, or Japan or certainly against the United States of America.

The economic sanctions we have applied against North Korea are working. They’re strangling the reclusive country.

As for Ambassador Haley continuing to talk the talk about keeping the military option alive, I believe Kim has received the message, which is that we can blow him and his country to Kingdome Come.

State news

J.J. Watt now can concentrate fully on his day job

J.J. Watt is a tremendous football player.

He also is a young man with a huge heart. You see, this Houston Texans defensive lineman took it upon himself to help raise money for the stricken residents of his adopted hometown, Houston.

He started out with a goal of raising $200,000 for those who were suffering from the wrath of Hurricane Harvey, which pummeled Houston in late August.

Watt has called a halt to his fundraising effort. He’s raised a cool $37 million.

Watt shows his true stuff.

The National Football League honors one of its players annually with the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award. It’s named after the late, great Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton, who routinely devoted much of his off-the-field activity to helping those who needed help.

J.J. Watt has gone not just above and beyond the call to help his fellow Houstonian and other Texas Gulf Coast residents. He has orbited Earth and at least a couple of other planets in providing assistance to those who remain in serious trouble as a result of Harvey’s savagery.

As Sports Illustrated reports: “Watt recently closed the fundraiser after raising an astonishing $37,097,298, which is more than 185 times his initial goal. More than 200,000 people donated, meaning Watt got as many donors as he expected dollars.”

Astonishing, yes?

I believe young J.J. has earned the Payton Man of the Year Award.

media news

Events give media chance to shine brightly

I never got the chance to serve on a Pulitzer Prize jury, to select winners in print journalism’s top prizes.

This year is going to produce a Pulitzer juror’s “nightmare,” if you want to call it such. The media, namely the folks who work in the print end of it, have distinguished themselves grandly while covering compelling issues of the day.

Were it not for the media, we wouldn’t know about the various crises threatening to swallow the Donald J. Trump administration whole. Many of print journalism’s top guns — at the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Washington Post — have been distinguishing themselves with top-drawer reporting that would give Pulitzer jurors fits. It’s interesting in the extreme to me that so many of the cable news outlets keep referencing stories that have been broken first by print organizations.

Then something else happened this summer.

Two killer hurricanes boiled up out of the warm water offshore and delivered death and destruction, first to the Texas Gulf Coast and then to the Caribbean and to all of Florida.

Reporters, photographers and their editors all have worked very long days and nights trying to cover the story of human misery. Newspapers from the Coastal Bend, Houston and then to the Golden Triangle have answered the call. Indeed, one of my former employers — the Beaumont Enterprise — has called at least one of its veteran former reporters out of retirement to assist in telling the community’s story as it seeks to recover from Hurricane Harvey’s savage wrath.

The story of media intrepidity is being repeated now in Florida as that state struggles to regain its footing in the wake of Hurricane Irma’s own brand of immense savagery.

There you have it: severe political tumult and potential constitutional crises and Mother Nature’s unimaginable power have combined to create circumstances that make the media answer the call to duty.

To think, as well, that the president of the United States refers to these dedicated men and women as “the enemy of the American people.” Donald Trump knows nothing about the dedication to their craft — and in many instances the heroism — they exhibit in trying to report important issues to a public that wants to know what’s happening in their world.

Good luck, Pulitzer jury, as you seek to find winners in this most eventual period in history.

To my former colleagues, I am immensely proud of you.

media news

Get over the media criticism, will ya White House?

Donald J. Trump’s White House press operation has developed as thin a skin as the boss.

Someone on the media pops off stupidly and the White House gets all over this reporter’s case. Then it launches a dual-front campaign accusing a cable network of practicing a double standard: one for conservative commentators and another one for liberals.

Get over it, White House!

ESPN talking head Jemele Hill popped off the other day about the president, calling him a white supremacist who surrounds himself with other white supremacists. I’ll just state here that Hill’s comments were stupid and had no place coming from someone who has made a name for herself commenting on matters that have nothing to do with the president of the United States and his alleged political tendencies.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is ratcheting up the White House attacks on ESPN. C’mon, young lady. Don’t you know about that First Amendment thing in the U.S. Constitution, the one that protects the media from government pressure? Sanders has said ESPN should have fired Hill. She made the statement while conducting a White House press briefing; her suggestion, thus, becomes something of a government policy statement relating to the conduct of a “free press.”

The president himself takes great joy — or so it seems — in blasting what he keeps calling “fake news” outlets. He calls the media “the enemy of the American people.” He singles out individual reporters at press events, criticizing their character and their organization’s integrity.

Now his press flack has joined that chorus.

I agree that Jemele Hill shouldn’t have said what she said, using her standing as an ESPN talking head to make her point. She has apologized. ESPN said it won’t punish her any further.

The president has much bigger fish to fry than this. I can think of, oh, North Korea, DACA legislation, tax reform … you know, those sorts of things. Media criticism? Set it aside and let other media — and even some bloggers out here in the heartland — take the talking head offenders to task.

national news

Happy Trails, Part 41

DURANGO, Colo. — I want to proclaim that RV campers are the friendliest, most cooperative, most helpful and most eager people my wife and I have ever encountered.

We pulled into our RV park in the middle of a magnificent setting in southwest Colorado. We thought we had a pull-through site reserved for our 28-foot fifth wheel and Big Jake, our 3/4-ton Dodge pickup.

Wrong! All they had were back-in sites. We quibbled only for a moment with the park host, telling him we were promised a pull-through site when we made the reservation a couple of weeks ago.

“Can you back it in?” he asked. “Sure,” I said. “We’re not expert at it, but we’ll make it work.”

“I’ll be out in a minute to help,” he said.

We didn’t need him.

We pulled up to our site and began the process of backing ‘er up.

Then, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere came two gentlemen. They were roughly our age. They began guiding me back. They were barking out instructions. My wife was left merely to stand there, smiling and chuckling at the fellows’ wonderfully noble intentions.

I tried to tell one of the fellows that I am not a complete novice at this, that I am able — with some thought and patience — to back the rig up. It didn’t matter. He actually reached into the truck while standing outside the driver’s side door and began cranking the steering wheel to get our fifth wheel angled just right to back into our site.

Meanwhile, the second fellow stood at the back guiding the first fellow toward where the RV was supposed to go.

After just a couple of mid-course corrections, we got our fifth wheel lined up properly with our utility connections.

Mission accomplished!

I want to mention this because it is one of the many pleasures my wife and I have discovered as we have begun our serious travel journey throughout North America.

I’m pretty sure there are many more of these types of guys awaiting our arrival. And, indeed, we intend to offer our own knowledge and RV experience to other newbies as we meet them along the way.

International news, national news

Is POTUS getting it, finally?

Pity the president of the United States’s “base” of supporters. Well, actually, I don’t.

They’re suffering acute apoplexy because Donald J. Trump is beginning to show the faint signs of understanding something about the high office he occupies. It is that he even though he didn’t win a popular vote plurality in 2016, he won enough Electoral College votes to become elected and, therefore, he has to deal with the wishes and needs of those who voted against him.

Immigration is the issue of the day.

Trump is sounding like someone who wants to strike a deal with congressional Democrats and moderate congressional Republicans that would give so-called “Dreamers” a path to citizenship and/or permanent immigrant status. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals order issued by President Barack Obama has been rescinded. Trump, though, says he wants to strike some sort of deal to protect the DACA residents, to keep them in the only country they’ve ever known.

You see, about 800,000 of these U.S. residents came here as children — some of the infants and toddlers — when their parents sneaked into the country illegally. The Trump “base” considers these folks “criminals.” Well, their parents broke U.S. immigration law. But does that mean we punish the children for the sins of their parents? Let’s get real here.

The president still wants to build that wall along our southern border. We’ll have to see how that struggle plays out with the aforementioned Democrats and moderate Republicans in Congress. In my mind, the wall is a non-starter. Mexico won’t pay for it. American taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for something the president said would be financed by another government.

What’s more, the wall won’t make this country any safer from terrorists, and assorted criminals who want to come into this country to do grievous harm.

I don’t feel a single bit of sympathy for the Trumpkins who just can’t stand the thought of their guy working to fulfill the interests of the rest of the nation he now governs.

national news

POTUS looking like he’s ready to dicker over DACA

I’ve spent most of the past eight months or so telling you why I believe Donald J. Trump Sr. is such a loser as president of the United States. I now want to say something good about him. Shocking, I know. But here it comes.

He has infuriated many of his more conservative core of supporters by doing the unthinkable: negotiate with Democrats in Congress. The latest attempt at deal brokering involves the Differed Action for Childhood Arrivals matter.

Trump rescinded the DACA order a few days ago. He set a six-month phase-out window, enticing Congress to act on a legislative fix that would allow undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children to remain in the United States so they could seek citizenship or permanent legal immigrant status.

He dined with Chuck and Nancy, aka Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi at the White House. They struck a form of an “agreement.” Trump would work with Democrats to preserve DACA. Schumer and Pelosi said they and the president agreed to a deal that would preserve DACA, enhance border security, but forgo money to build the wall across our southern border.

Trump has disputed the wall issue. He still wants to build the wall. I and many others think that’s a bad idea.

Trump stuns nation’s capital.

The heartening aspect of all this, despite the chaos arising from the dinner date at the White House, is that the president is now working constructively with those who oppose his policies.

For the 65 million or so Americans out here who voted for Hillary Clinton for president, this is a hopeful sign that the president is finally — finally! — understanding that governance is a team sport that requires presidents to seek common ground with what is euphemistically called the “loyal opposition.”

Have I changed my mind about Trump’s fitness for his job? Not in the least. However, in the spirit of fairness, I am delighted to offer a good word and encourage the president to do what he can to preserve DACA — and to keep working with congressional Democrats.

education news, local news

AISD might join important national debate

Amarillo isn’t known as a community to get involved deeply in intense national debates.

So it is with some surprise that I have learned that the Amarillo Independent School District is considering whether to change the name of an elementary school named after a Confederate army general.

Robert E. Lee Elementary School is now in the AISD crosshairs, joining other such public structures that have been targeted in the wake of recent controversy surrounding the a sad and tragic chapter in our nation’s history.

Lee School sits in the middle of a largely African-American neighborhood. We all know, of course, who Robert E. Lee was. For those who don’t, I’ll just explain briefly: He was the commander of Confederate army forces that fought on the losing side of the American Civil War. Oh, and why did the Confederates fight against the United States of America? They wanted to break up the Union.

Those who fought for the Confederacy fought against the United States. By my way of looking at it, the Confederates were traitors. Do we honor them, therefore, by putting their names on public buildings?

So, AISD trustees next week are going to visit with legal counsel to discuss a possible name change. The decision to consider such a thing has met with approval from local NAACP leaders.

AISD building-naming policy follows that new schools are named after the neighborhood they serve. AISD does make some exceptions, such as naming a school in a largely black neighborhood after a man who fought to preserve slavery.

This issue came to a full boil in the wake of the Charlottesville, Va., riot involving white supremacists, Klansmen and neo-Nazis who fought against counter protesters. It’s simmered down somewhat, but a serious national conversation has continued.

It has arrived in Amarillo, Texas.

AISD board president James Austin said he hasn’t yet made up his mind on whether to support a name change. That’s fine. Take your time, Mr. President.

I happen to think a name change is in order. But that’s just me.