Monthly Archives: October 2017

State news, Uncategorized

‘Real disaster’ struck Texas … no kidding!

Texas emergency officials have reported that Hurricane Harvey has killed 88 people.

Eight-eight families have lost loved ones. They are grieving to this day. Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas Gulf Coast twice, first as a Category 3 hurricane and then as a tropical storm.

Watching the storm’s savagery from afar, I am convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that it constitutes a “major disaster.” The hurricane blasted the Coastal Bend region with killer winds and storm surge. The tropical storm deluged Houston and the Golden Triangle with unprecedented rainfall: 50 inches in one 24-hour span of time, a record for the continental United States of America.

Harvey hit us real hard

I want to mention this because of something that Donald John Trump Sr. told our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico. He seemed to chide them because — at the time of his visit — “only” 16 people had been killed by Hurricane Maria, which destroyed the island’s power grid and its potable water supply.

Yet, the president seemed to suggest that Puerto Rico was “fortunate” to have suffered so little loss of life, unlike what happened to New Orleans in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina stormed ashore.

Well, I guess I ought to remind the president that the Texas coast didn’t suffer the amount of deaths that other storms have brought, but he dare not dismiss the damage from the Coastal Bend to the Golden Triangle as anything short of a major disaster.

national news

Settled: Rex T called Trump a ‘moron’

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has been given more chances than he likely cares to count to take back a news report that he called Donald John Trump a “bleeping moron.”

Tillerson keeps clamming up. He did it again today on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He won’t engage in “petty” matters. Let’s move on, Tillerson said.

OK, then. The more he refuses to take back what NBC News reported he said the more it becomes clear: Tillerson called the president a “moron.”

The men reportedly have a testy relationship, which is a difficult circumstance, given the state of the world these days. North Korea is threatening to blow up South Korea; the Middle East remains a powder keg with several fuses lit; those pesky Russians keep hacking into other countries’ electoral systems, just as they did ours in 2016.

Tillerson made some appearances today on the news talk shows to say he’s still on the job, he’s still offering Trump his opinions on this and that, and that he intends to keep serving the president.

My question always arises when Donald Trump is involved: How much longer can someone like Tillerson, himself a big-time business mogul before entering public service, continue to work at the pleasure of someone who doesn’t have a clue about how to govern the world’s greatest nation?

Tillerson has exactly distinguished himself as secretary of state. Then again, he hasn’t been given a chance to put his stamp on the nation’s diplomatic strategy. The chaos continues within the Trump administration — and it’s all a direct reflection of the man who calls the shots.

As Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., points out so, um, graphically: You can’t “publicly castrate” a secretary of state. Tillerson insists that he remains “fully intact.”

We’ll see.

environmental news

Let’s call it ‘Environmental Destruction Agency’

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Scott Pruitt long has been known as a friend of the oil industry. He denies the existence of climate change. Pruitt is no friend of the environment.

So, what does Donald John Trump do? He puts this guy, the former Oklahoma attorney general, in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Now the EPA boss is showing his chops, as if there was any doubt. He is revoking protection of an Alaska salmon fishery, one of the most valuable in the world. He has met with a mining company executive who wants to start mining within the bounds of that fishery.

I hereby propose we rename the EPA. Let’s call it the Environmental Destruction Agency. Shall we?

The Bristol Bay Watershed was placed under federal protection by the Obama administration, which concluded that any mining or other industrial activity would destroy the fish habitat that is so valuable to fishing interests, sportsmen and women and consumers who enjoy the taste of salmon.

Barack Obama leaves office. Donald Trump takes over. Then the new president installs this guy Pruitt, who has met with Tom Collier, CEO of Pebble Limited Partnership, a mining outfit that wants to work within the watershed.

Pruitt continues to play footsie with interests that have little interest in environmental protection.

I’m quite sure Collier never would admit to wanting to destroy the fishery or the watershed. The Obama administration took three years of review to decide to set the watershed aside. It determined that any mining within the watershed would destroy permanently a resource upon which so many people rely.

Pruitt, though, appears to have decided that protecting the watershed isn’t in the national interest.

How about changing the name of the EPA to the Environmental Destruction Agency?

Sad.

education news

‘Paid leave’ while investigating wrongdoing?

I’ve only worked one public service job in my entire life — if you don’t count the two years I served in the U.S. Army: six months as a juvenile corrections officer in Randall County; the job didn’t work out for me.

Public service employment does have its quirks that are unique to it and not usually found in the private sector. Take the issue of “paid administrative leave.”

The Perryton (Texas) Independent School District superintendent is on paid leave after someone filed a sexual harassment complaint against him; the assistant superintendent also has taken paid leave. The school board is considering what to do about Superintendent Robert Hall and Assistant Superintendent Keith Langfitt.

I don’t know about the nature of the complaint that’s been filed against these fellows. I won’t comment at all on that.

Pay now or pay later

I do find it curious that a public institution would continue to pay someone a hefty salary while he awaits his fate at the hands of his employer, in this case the Perryton ISD board of trustees.

If these fellows worked for a private company, they likely would be suspended without pay. Done deal. Don’t ask questions. We’ll get back to you when we decide.

Suppose the Perryton school board had decided to withhold payments to Hall and Langfitt. Suppose, too, that a careful investigation clears them of the complaint. Couldn’t the school board then reimburse them for back pay when they returned to work? Paying them while they are on “administrative leave” exposes the school district to being stuck with the salary tab if the complaints are shown to have merit.

Legalities sometimes get in the way of common sense.

national news

Firefighters earn their heroes’ chops

GRASS VALLEY, Calif. — I didn’t want to be a fireman when I was a kid. My dream was to be a professional baseball player. I had a couple of issues, though, that prevented me from fulfilling that dream.

One is that I lacked the natural talent needed to play hardball for a living; the other is that I was too lazy to work hard enough to improve on the talent that I did possess.

Fighting fires wasn’t on my radar.

It took me a good while to understand and appreciate the firefighters’ ability, their courage and their instincts. I certainly get it now.

First responders are my heroes. Police officers, firefighters, paramedics/emergency medical techs all have earned exalted status in my book.

I’ve been able to use this blog to proclaim my admiration for those who run toward danger. I will do so again with this post.

We came to the Sierra Nevada to spend time with family members and to relax in the woods. We didn’t realize when we made our plans that our Nevada County Fairgrounds RV park would become a staging area for firefighters struggling against forest fires that — according to one of the approximately 1,100 firefighters on duty here — has burned about 14,000 acres.

We have spared no expression of thanks and gratitude to the young men and women we’ve seen moving through our RV park. I’m delighted that some of them have expressed their own appreciation in return for getting a good word.

I extend those expressions of gratitude just to get a thank-you in return. I do so because I mean it with all sincerity.

My police officer friends know how much I appreciate their work. I know many more cops than I do firefighters. My work as a journalist in Oregon and Texas exposed me more to police officers than firefighters.

Now that I am a “civilian,” having retired from journalism, I have been able to watch firefighters up close as they do their dangerous work. Our travels across the country have given my wife and me the opportunity to tell these young heroes how much we appreciate all they do.

They’ve got their work cut out for them here in Grass Valley. What’s more, they damn sure have a huge fight on their hands over yonder in Santa Rosa, which has been incinerated by the flames.

These young heroes deserve all our thanks.

entertainment news

Hillary is right: We’ve got serious sexual conduct issues to answer

Harvey Weinstein, the film producer and mentor to the stars, apparently has a serious problem  on his hands. He stands accused of sexually molesting women. He is seeking help for his problem, but his career likely is toast — as it should be.

Then we have another notable individual, the president of the United States of America, who’s actually acknowledged groping women and, in effect, committing sexual assault.

Hillary Clinton addressed both men’s issues in a United Kingdom television interview.

As The Hill reported: “Look, we just elected someone who admitted sexual assault to the presidency. So there’s a lot of other issues that are swirling around these kinds of behaviors that need to be addressed,” Clinton said when asked if she had heard rumors of Weinstein’s behavior before the bombshell reports. “I think it’s important that we stay focused, and shine a bright spotlight, and try to get people to understand how damaging this is,” she continued.

No one should dismiss what Weinstein has been accused of doing. That he would check himself into a rehab clinic is an acknowledgment that he has done what many women have accused him of doing.

The astonishing aspect of this is that while the media are zeroing in on Weinstein we seem to have looked askance at what the leader of the free world has admitted doing. The “Access Hollywood” recording of Trump admitting in 2005 to hideous behavior with women raised a ruckus for only a brief period before this fellow was elected president of the United States.

Do values matter?

Many of us talk all the time about “values” and their impact on contemporary culture. We expect our elected leaders to be paragons of virtue. We bristle — or at least we used to bristle — when they don’t measure up.

Donald Trump has defied every conventional norm one can name in his quest for the presidency.

Should we be alarmed at what Harvey Weinstein is alleged to have done? Certainly. But what about the president?

national news

Gold mining not exactly ‘safe,’ but the lack of loss is stunning

EMPIRE MINE STATE PARK, Calif. — Whenever I visit historic sites, I try to take something away from each visit.

We came to this mining exhibit in Sierra Nevada and discovered something quite unusual.

After they struck gold in California in 1849, they opened the Empire Mine and began digging the precious metal out. For 106 they mined gold at Empire Mine. The takeaway?

Only 26 miners died during the entire time the mine was operating.

I heard that statistic and was astounded.

The mine was primitive by the standards we know today. They lugged the metal out from deep within the surface of the planet by hand. They brought mules in later, treated them very well, and used the pack animals to haul it out.

Of the 26 miners who died while the mine operated from 1850 until 1956, only a handful of them — fewer than a half-dozen — died from rock falls. Cause of death might have been equipment failure or perhaps even mine-related illness.

The state park system has established a wonderful exhibit here, in Grass Valley, that gives visitors a marvelous look into the past. The offices contained an upright typewriter, an adding machine, table tops with T-squares and protractors and a vault that looked vaguely like a washing machine.

We stood at the top of a mine shaft that sank hundreds of feet into the dark. The shafts are now filled with water to about the 450-foot level below the surface, we were told; the water table here has filled it naturally.

Hundreds of men worked the mines at any one time. When you think of the thousands of men who toiled deep in the belly of the planet, I find it astonishing in the extreme that only 26 of them died doing this torturous work.

They were paid in the beginning $3 per day; they worked 10 hours a day; they worked six days a week. A state park ranger told us “That was good money in those days.”

They were sturdy, industrious men, to be sure. I quit long ago trying to imagine myself doing that kind of work, given that I live in the moment — today, in the here and now. Perhaps I could be a miner had I lived in that day and in that era.

A corollary question might be to wonder how those tough-as-nails men might fare in today’s world. My hunch is that they likely would fare about as well as we would being transported back to that era.

national news

Watergate-style blowout awaits GOP?

Ted Cruz thinks congressional Republicans face the possibility of a “Watergate-style blowout” in 2018 if they fail to enact a health care overhaul and reform federal taxes.

I think the Texas Republican U.S. senator is on to something, but perhaps for the wrong reasons.

Indeed, I agree that the GOP is vulnerable to a big mid-term election shellacking, but I disagree with the reasons cited by Cruz.

Republicans might take their hits if they seek to enact a health care overhaul similar to what they sought to do already. As for tax reform, those big cuts for the wealthy aren’t going over well, either, with the public.

The president of the United States already has drawn a bead on the Affordable Care Act. He is using his executive authority to dismantle the ACA even before Congress approves any sort of replacement.

All the while, the president hasn’t yet spoken with any semblance of detail about how he intends to replace the ACA. He just keeps yammering about the “disaster” that awaits if the ACA remains on the books.

As for tax reform, Donald Trump is equally vague about how his planned tax cuts will boost a national economy that’s already rocking along fairly nicely.

And so the drama continues. Sen. Cruz thinks the public will vote Republicans out of Congress if they fail to deal with these two issues. I tend to believe the public will rebel if they proceed along the wrongheaded paths they’ve already staked out.

Should the Republicans suffer those kinds of losses, count me as one American who won’t shed any tears.

national news

POTUS uses executive authority … but wait!

I normally wouldn’t complain about Donald Trump’s use of executive authority, given that he’s doing what the Constitution allows him to do.

But you see, the president has been a royal pain in the posterior over his gripes about the executive orders signed by the man he succeeded, Barack H. Obama.

Now he has set a sort of dubious record. Trump has just signed his 49th executive order, the most orders signed at this stage of the presidency since President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The LBJ standard stood for the past 50 years.

CNN reports: Why does it matter? Because Trump was a vociferous critic of then-President Barack Obama’s use of executive orders — casting them as a purposeful end-run of the legislative branch.

I happen to believe strongly in presidential prerogative. Trump is using the authority granted to him by the U.S. Constitution.

But the president doesn’t respect that the same authority also has been bestowed on others who came before him. President Obama’s use of that authority often came amid strong criticism by those who were hell bent on opposing everything he sought to do.

Trump was among those critics.

Trump signs ’em quickly

Given that the president has been unable to push any significant legislation through Congress in the nine months he’s been in office, it stands to reason he would rely on the executive authority he has been handed.

Except that he launched a ridiculous tirade against Barack Obama for doing the very thing that he, too, had the power to do.

Oh, by the way, President Obama signed 26 executive orders at the same point in his presidency … a little more than half of what Trump has signed. I won’t say that Trump is abusing his authority.

But still …

national news

Trump vows to bring Christmas back into vogue

Donald Trump must be channeling Bill O’Reilly.

You see, O’Reilly is fond of declaring annually that the “liberal mainstream media” are declaring war on Christmas. The former Fox News Channel host would rail constantly about the alleged war, chiding merchants across the nation for their habit of wishing “happy holidays” to their customers.

Now comes the president of the United States. He spoke to the Values Voter Summit and said that, by golly, we’re going to forgo “political correctness” and start saying “Merry Christmas.”

Where does one begin with this one? I’ll start a discussion.

War on Christmas?

I am a practicing Christian who understands the meaning of the Christmas holiday. Do I take offense when someone wishes me a happy holiday? Not in the least! The merchant who wishes me a happy holiday has no idea of my faith. He or she doesn’t know me.

I am more likely than not to wish the individual who offers me the generic holiday greeting a Merry Christmas in return.

Then I go on my way. No harm no foul.

Why, though, does the president choose to make such a big deal of it? I guess it’s because he can and because he seeks to appeal to the more narrow-minded among us who take offense at those who wish them happy holiday rather than Merry Christmas.

I do respect the fact that this nation comprises many millions of citizens who don’t celebrate Christmas. Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, agnostics, atheists — you name them — don’t relish the holiday’s religious significance the way many millions of others Americans do.

While campaigning for the presidency, Trump once promised he would ensure that merchants would display “Merry Christmas” signs in their places of business … as if the president has any real authority to mandate such a thing. He doesn’t.

The president, though, is now declaring war against some non-existent culture conflict.

As if Donald Trump or Bill O’Reilly don’t have enough conflict already on their respective plates.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2014/12/one-more-time-on-war-on-christmas/