Monthly Archives: March 2018

local news, political news

Is a GOP incumbent benefiting from split in nut-case vote?

West Texas Republicans — at this very moment — are showing that they’re a pretty smart bunch of voters.

Texas state Sen. Kel Seliger of Amarillo might be able to stave off a runoff against one of two men who are challenging him for his Texas Senate District 31 seat.

Mike Canon of Midland is running No. 2 with nearly half the vote counted; Victor Leal of Amarillo is running in third place.

Which brings to mind this notion: It might be that the TEA Party wing, powered by Empower Texans, has split what I call the “nut-case wing” of the Texas Republican Party, leaving Seliger to harvest what I consider to be the “reasonable wing” of the Grand Old Party.

We’re still some distance from the Texas GOP primary finish line.

But … I am hoping.

business news, national news

Trump tariff tirade costs him a top adviser

Gary Cohn had to know what he was getting when he agreed to become Donald John Trump’s chief economic adviser.

He was hiring on to a team led by someone who doesn’t take advice. Trump flies by the backside of his britches. So, when the president decided to impose punishing tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, Cohn had seen enough.

He bailed. He’s gone. Cohn has decided t leave Trump’s economic team.

Cohn believes in free trade. Trump the populist believes in protectionism, which on its face flies directly opposite from traditional Republican economic policy.

But that doesn’t matter one damn bit to Donald Trump. He got angry at something or someone, so he decided to take it out on our nation’s trading allies. Canada, Mexico and many friendly trading partners in Western Europe are going to feel the pinch of the tariffs. What’s more, they are discussing retaliation.

Can you say, um, trade war?

As for Cohn, he sought to advise the president against acting so impetuously. Nice try, Mr. Cohn. Again, you had to know the guy for whom you were working was prone to this kind of knee-jerk behavior.

He won’t leave immediately, according to statements issued by Cohn and the White House. What the hell! Why not just hit the road?

According to Politico: Cohn, known in his decades on Wall Street as a pugnacious trader, is not leaving the fight right away. He plans to stay on for at least a couple of weeks and continue to battle Trump and the White House nationalists to more carefully tailor the tariffs to avoid antagonizing allies and inviting retribution.

For all the good it does to surround himself with actual experts on trade policy, Donald Trump will remain his own closest adviser.

Except that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

national news

Another Trump campaign nut case emerges

No one had heard of Sam Nunberg until special counsel Robert Mueller decided to subpoena him to testify before a federal grand jury.

So what does this guy do? He blusters and bellows that he won’t answer the call to testify before the panel that is looking into whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russians who meddled in our electoral process.

And then …

Nunberg has second thoughts. He says he might testify after all.

Oh, but first he went on cable news broadcasts — CNN, Fox, MSNBC — to offer lots of goofy bluster about how he “laughed” at the subpoena.

My initial question was this: Who in the hell is this guy?

I have learned that he attended some meetings and has some inside information about what Donald Trump might know. He has said some disparaging things about his former boss.

This clown is playing with some seriously hot fire if he intends to stiff the special counsel. Mueller is no fool. He’s not a partisan hack. He is a former FBI director and a first-class lawyer. Mueller is known to be meticulous in his approach to evidence-gathering and highly circumspect about what he says in public.

A loudmouth like Nunberg is the antithesis of Mueller. Sadly, he is the kind of clown with whom Donald Trump has surrounded himself.

Come to think of it, he mirrors the Big Man himself.

Weird.

national news

How will POTUS find the ‘best people’?

Donald Trump insists all is well within his presidential administration.

This is despite evidence to the contrary. His son-in-law’s security clearance has been downgraded; his communications director has resigned; former campaign aides are pleading guilty and are cooperating with the special counsel who is investigating the “Russia thing”; the attorney general is being humiliated publicly; the president is threatening to start a trade war because, as it’s being reported, he is just plain angry; and another campaign aide has threatened to tear up the subpoena that the special counsel issued, only to back off that threat.

And this just in: Trump’s chief economic adviser has resigned because he disagrees with the president’s decision to impose punishing tariffs on imported steel and aluminum.

Chaos, anyone?

This all begs the question: How in the name of human resource development is the president going to hire anyone who is worth a damn to work in this White House?

No. Nothing is going well within this administration.

local news, State news

Texas set to take political center stage

It hasn’t been often of late that Texas has drawn the nation’s political attention. This big ol’ state is about to do that in just a few hours.

Texans are casting their primary votes and national pundits are looking at how the state votes not just in the Republican Party primary, but also in the Democratic primary.

Election officials report a significant surge in Democratic early voting, suggesting that Texas Democrats — for the first time since The Flood — are more energized than Texas Republicans. Democratic voting numbers are outstripping GOP early voters in places such as Dallas, Harris, Bexar and Travis counties.

Might there be a Donald Trump backlash developing in a state the president carried in 2016 by nearly 10 percentage points?

This is merely anecdotal evidence, but if the plethora of campaign signs is any indication, then I am inclined to believe the pundits are on to something with regard to voter interest in this year’s primary.

In Allen, Texas, where my wife and I have been visiting for the past few days, several corners along Bethany Road are festooned with signage proclaiming the virtues of candidates. Hey, I’ve even seen some Democratic candidates’ signs alongside the Republicans who usually dominate the discussion.

So, the first round of campaigning is about to conclude. Our mailboxes have been stuffed to the brim with campaign flyers and assorted forms of propaganda.

I am looking forward to the end of this round. I also am looking hopefully toward some outcomes I want to come true in the Texas Panhandle.

There will be plenty to say about those races once the results come in. You’ll be the first to hear from me.

Meanwhile, let’s all bite our fingernails and watch our cherished representative democracy do its work.

State news

Happy Trails, Part 81

SHERMAN, Texas — My wife and I have been recreational vehicle owners for about three years.

We have joked in the past while we have traveled that we have arrived “home” when we return to where our RV has been parked.

Then came the realization sometime today. We spent some time visiting with our granddaughter and her parents. Then we called it a day and returned home.

Except this time it’s no throw-away line, or good-natured joke.

We understand that as of three days ago, we no longer own a home attached to the ground.

Our former home is now in someone’s hands. I was half-expecting to feel just a tad lost. It hasn’t happened. I don’t expect it to happen. If it does, then my hope is that it’s just a feeling that passes by quickly. I’ve been known to feel such emotional tugs; they come and they go.

As of this moment, though, we are feeling strangely liberated. Neither of us has gone through this kind of change of life. We’ve always been tethered to property. I spent a couple of years in the Army and moved around a little bit: Fort Lewis, Wash., to Fort Eustis, Va., to Vietnam, back to Fort Lewis — and then home. Uncle Sam always looked over my shoulder to ensure that I would get to my next place on time.

This is different. We’re on our own. We have no deadlines. No timetable.

We have instead the open road.

Pretty damn cool.

local news

This gadfly is baaack!

Mary Alice Brittain once ran for public office in Amarillo, Texas. She lost the mayor’s race to Kel Seliger, who thumped her badly in that contest.

Then she disappeared from public view. I thought she’d never be heard from or seen again. Silly me. I was wrong.

She’s back, nagging her former foe. Brittain now lives in San Antonio, far from the Texas Panhandle and nowhere near the West Texas Senate District 31 seat Seliger has served since 2004.

She’s now backing Victor Leal, one of two challengers who’s trying to sling enough mud at Seliger to defeat him. Brittain has been posting material on Facebook, which I guess is her social medium of choice.

Check it out

Here’s why this brief blog post is worth my limited amount of time. It’s that Brittain knows nothing about Seliger or the job he has done for his Senate district.

What’s more, when she ran for the mayor’s office, she displayed a remarkable streak of ignorance about the office she sought. She put out a political ad that called on “good Republicans” to rally behind her candidacy.

This idiocy was remarkable for a single reason: The Amarillo City Commission (as it was called then) is a non-partisan body. Commissioners and the mayor don’t run on partisan ballots.

Brittain didn’t know that. Thus, she was unfit for that office.

And while she is entitled to weigh in on this race, I feel compelled to put this person’s political credibility — or lack thereof — into its proper context.

national news

AG Jeff Sessions deserves some support

So help me, I cannot quite explain why I am about to write these next few words. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has become a sympathetic character in a presidential administration that appears to be unraveling before our eyes.

Donald J. Trump is getting pinched by a special counsel who was appointed by the Justice Department because the AG did the right thing by recusing himself from what Trump has called the “Russia thing.” Why did he do that? Because the attorney general was a key Trump campaign adviser and then moved directly into the Trump presidential transition team that has been ensnared by allegations of “collusion” with Russians seeking to interfere in our 2016 presidential election.

Sessions’s recusal has enraged the president, who’s now taking to disparaging him publicly via Twitter. The men have a frosty relationship, even though Sessions was among Trump’s earliest supporters in the U.S. Senate, where Sessions served before being picked to run the Justice Department.

What can the president do? Does he fire Sessions? Yeah, good luck with that — and with finding someone the Senate can confirm. The word is out about the president: No one worth a damn wants to work for this guy. He’s making a mess of everything he touches. He cannot govern. He cannot administer a political organization such as the White House.

That shouldn’t surprise a single American. Trump had no government experience. He had no political credibility. He cannot keep key White House advisers. I mean, he has just received the resignation from the fourth White House communications director in a little more than a year.

Sessions now stands as a man with a semblance of ethical conduct — and for that he is being punished by the president of the United States, who calls a decision to hire inspector general lawyers to conduct a probe “disgraceful.”

Trump also has said that had he known Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia probe he would have nominated someone with more “loyalty” to the president. Hey, that’s not why these people serve. They serve to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, just like the president.

From my vantage point, the president is doing a pi**-poor job of fulfilling the oath he took.

As for Sessions, as much as I opposed his appointment in the first place, I am fearful of the bloodbath that will occur if he calls it quits and the president tries to pick someone to do his bidding.

Good luck with that, Mr. President.

local news, national news, political news, State news

Conservatives are winning the labeling war

Let’s give a sort of shout-out to the conservative media and the politicians they are backing.

Those on the right wing of the spectrum are winning the war of epithets, labeling and name-calling. They have turned the term “liberal” into a four-letter word.

I see it daily as I watch the political debate swirl and churn across the land. To be called a “liberal” in Texas — which is run by Republicans at every level of government — is to be called the son of Satan himself. A candidate for the Texas Senate who is running against state Sen. Kel Seliger, an Amarillo Republican, has called him “liberal” and “corrupt” — in that order. Do you get it? The implication is that to be liberal is to be corrupt. By the way, Seliger is campaigning for re-election as a dedicated conservative, which he is.

It’s gotten so bad among liberals that they no longer are even identifying themselves with that epithet. Oh, no. The operative word now among those on the left is “progressive.”

Admission time: As one who tilts to the left, I find myself using the this new P-word when describing myself. Have I gotten, um, self-conscious about what liberalism? Oh … maybe.

Liberals, er, progressives, haven’t yet been able to turn the right wing’s labeling against them. I suppose they could shorten the word “conservative” to, oh, “con,” which of course brings up another connotation altogether. I mean, liberals are called “libs” on occasion. But I digress.

The political debate often becomes a contest of sorts. One side seeks to demonize the other with words that sound a bit jarring. Republicans back in the early to mid-1990s began using the term “Democrat” as an adjective, referring to “Democrat politicians,” which doesn’t sound quite the same as “Democratic politicians.” That word usage was part of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s strategy to label “Democrats as the enemy of normal Americans.”

If I were wearing a cap at this moment, I would tip it toward Republicans, conservatives and those in the right-wing media for the success they have enjoyed in this rhetorical battle with those on the other side.

However, as a dedicated political liberal, I offer my salute as a form of damning them with faint praise.

business news

Trump must have been sleeping in trade-policy class

Didn’t the president of the United States, Donald John “Smart Person” Trump learn a thing while getting his economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania?

Someone surely must have taught those econ students about the consequences of trade wars, of how badly many of those conflicts can go. If so, then what was Donald Trump doing when his prof offered that counsel? Was he asleep? Was he skipping class that day, spending his time chasing women and grabbing them in their private parts?

Trump reportedly got so out of sorts that he announced a decision to impose a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum. Then he said that winning a trade would be “so easy.”

So easy? Is he out of what passes for his mind?

Trump has declared economic war on our closest allies. They are, oh let’s see, Canada, Mexico, Germany and Great Britain. Yet he seeks to punish China because, according to the president, they have stolen jobs from U.S. steelmakers.

He now is making mainstream Republican officeholders — those who adhere to the party’s policy of free trade and its opposition to protectionism — queasy in the extreme.

Trump’s decision has sent the stock market into a frenzy of unpredictability.

He thinks he knows what he is doing. Analysts who actually do know something about international economics and its impact on geopolitics have a different view.

They say the president doesn’t know a damn thing. He is acting out of pique. He doesn’t listen to the advice of economic advisers he has gathered around him — folks like the Treasury secretary and the head of his Government Economics Council — who oppose this tariff nonsense.

Hey, he told us in the summer of 2016 that “I, alone” can repair what he thinks ails the country. No, Mr. President. You, alone are making a shambles of our economic alliances.