Monthly Archives: March 2018

local news

‘We are not anti-gun!’

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Of all the public pronouncements I heard today at the start of the March For Our Lives, one of them stands out foursquare in front of the rest of them.

“We are not anti-gun!” came the proclamation from an elevated stage calling the crowd to order as the march was about to commence.

It came from one of the student organizers who had rallied hundreds of Texas Panhandle residents, summoned them to Ellwood Park, where they would take their march through downtown Amarillo, Texas, to the Potter County Courthouse grounds.

The March For Our Lives took places in communities throughout the United States. It was spawned by the Parkland, Fla., high school slaughter of 14 students and three staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

The “We are not anti-gun!” proclamation reveals a certain sophistication among the students who organized this march. The Texas Panhandle students clearly know the audience to whom they are preaching. They want an end to gun violence. They do not intend to argue for the confiscation of firearms. They know better than that.

They know they live in a community that supports the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It’s always fascinated me that the nation’s founders sought to codify certain civil liberties; they started with guaranteeing the right to worship, protest the government and a free press in the First Amendment; then came the Second Amendment, which establishes the right to “keep and bear arms.”

Texas Panhandle residents take their Second Amendment rights seriously. Well, at least a lot of them do.

Thus, the March For Our Lives organizers sought to tell the marchers — and some onlookers who had come to Ellwood Park — about their intentions in staging this march.

They want “common sense” legislative remedies that assure that the Second Amendment remains viable. They say they have no intention of lobbying for repeal of the amendment. They want to assure the right to own firearms remains written in our nation’s government framework.

I haven’t yet heard of any proposed solutions that deny Americans the right to possess firearms. I also applaud the organizers of our local event for making clear that they intend to retain that right.

They simply have seen too many young people — just like themselves — gunned down while they are studying in school, a place where one can presume they would be safe.

They aren’t. The students who marched today want our politicians to do what they to ensure safety and to end the national scourge of gun violence.

local news

Responsible for deaths? Nope!

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I have to share with you a comment that came to me today after I posted a blog on today’s March For Our Lives in Amarillo, Texas.

I don’t like doing this, but I feel the need to share with you a point of view that is highly critical of yours truly, and it also accuses me of something I’ve never before heard.

Here it is, in part:

The writer of this article, with his slant, is partially responsible to the moral decline that has lead to children being killed and rights having been eroded.

You are accountable as a public writer, and I hold you responsible for lying to our youth and ultimately getting them killed.

I do not know the author of this comment. That is, if I do know who it is, the writer didn’t reveal his or her identity to me.

The item I posted on High Plains Blogger offered a word of encouragement to the several hundred marchers who trudged from Ellwood Park to the Potter County Courthouse in downtown Amarillo. They gathered and marched to protest the gun violence that has taken too many young lives in our country; the marchers want change and they want it sooner rather than later.

I don’t mind criticism of the items I post. I welcome it if it is constructive and well-reasoned. Most of it is. This item, though, isn’t. It ascribes some really nefarious consequences to my little ol’ blog.

As for who is responsible for causing the deaths of young people, my inclination is to lay that blame at the feet of those who support unrestricted gun ownership, believing that the Second Amendment guarantees it. These weapons do have a way of ending up in the wrong hands … you know?

Maybe I should feel somewhat — more or less — flattered that the individual who responded to this blog thinks I have that kind of influence on our society.

I’ve never seen myself as having such stroke. I like to think High Plains Blogger is able to have some impact on elements of the human condition. But to suggest that it is partly responsible for the deaths of young Americans, well … that’s going a bit far. Don’t you think?

I have no real ulterior motive in sharing these thoughts with you. Perhaps you can read them in their entirety when you click on highplainsblogger. com — which I invite you to do.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2018/03/they-marched-for-a-cause-that-could-make-history/

With that, I believe I’ll go about the business of coming up with other topics on which to pontificate.

local news

They marched for a cause that could make history

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They came. They marched. Perhaps they have added even more sizzle to a growing movement among young Americans.

I’m guessing a crowd of about 300 or so Texas Panhandle residents gathered today at Ellwood Park in Amarillo. From the park they marched toward the Potter County Courthouse, where they would bring a message of fear, anger and perhaps a healthy dose of hope to those in power who are willing to listen to their message.

It is this: We are tired of gun violence and we are tired of being afraid in our public schools.

It was a March For Our Lives, carried out by the Texas Panhandle “chapter” of a movement spawned in the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School slaughter of 17 students and staffers in Parkland, Fla., on Valentine’s Day. Parkland is the latest in a growing list of American communities scarred by gun violence on a mass-murder scale.

The students there went to Washington today to protest on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building. They want legislative change. They want stricter gun regulations.

But as the organizers in Amarillo noted today while commencing their march to the County Courthouse, “We are not ‘anti-gun.'” They do not intend to confiscate guns from responsible owners of firearms. They simply want what they call “common sense change” in the nation’s gun laws.

Violeta Prieto was one of the marchers who came to Ellwood Park. She is showing support for her daughter, Carla, one of the Caprock High School honor students who organized the Amarillo march. One of her sons, a middle-school student, said he came to the march “because my mom made me.” He’ll get the message that’s being delivered; of that I am quite sure.

“I am afraid to take my kids to school,” Prieto said. “I cannot know what will happen” any day here children are in school, she said.

“I want more control and I want to end this easy access to guns,” she said.

Prieto is a 1997 graduate of Palo Duro High School, an institution with some gun-violence history of its own. A student at PDHS opened fire in 1992, injuring six fellow students before he was arrested. Prieto said her older sister, who was attending PD, remembers the incident “very well.” The shooting occurred a couple of years before Prieto entered the high school, “but I remember it, too.”

“I support my daughter all the way,” Prieto said. “She is our future. All those kids are our future.”

To be sure, not everyone at the Ellwood Park gathering was singing off the same page in the proverbial hymnal. I chatted briefly with a couple of young men, one of whom was carrying a Confederate flag, the other a “Don’t Tread on Me” banner.

I asked if they were there to “counter protest.” One of the young men, whose name I didn’t get, said: “Oh, no. We’re here for the same reason. We want to end gun violence, too. We just believe there’s another way to do it.”

He said the emphasis should be on ending the bullying, making schools more secure, safer and “enforcing the laws we have already.”

The young men didn’t march with the rest of the crowd. When the marchers started walking away, they went to their vehicles and drove off, presumably to the courthouse — perhaps to listen and make their own statements heard.

My wife and I didn’t stay for the march. I wanted to get a feel for the Ellwood Park crowd’s mood and its sense of hope. I saw a lot of smiles and expressions of guarded optimism that we well might be seeing the dawn of a new era.

Even here. In Amarillo, a community not known as a hotbed for community activism. However, times — and communities — can change.

International news

Obama congratulated Putin, too? Hold on!

So, critics of the media on the right have become fond in recent days of defending Donald J. Trump’s congratulatory phone call to Vladimir Putin. They’re using an interesting — if nonsensical — argument.

Trump called Putin the other day against the advice of his national security team. He congratulated the Russian strongman on his re-election in what many have called a “sham election.” His soon-to-be-former national security adviser H.R. McMaster said that Trump shouldn’t congratulate Putin because of corollary issues that have clouded U.S.-Russia relations.

The president’s phone call has gotten plenty of criticism. I’ve joined the chorus of critics on this blog.

The push back was immediate. Trump defenders point out that Barack H. Obama congratulated Putin on his re-election in 2012.

Whoa! Hold on here! Let’s examine briefly the situation and how it compares with the here and now.

Vladimir Putin was a bad guy in 2012. I get that. He is worse now. Why? Oh, let’s see. He has meddled in our 2016 presidential election and is likely going to meddle in our midterm election this year, let alone in other countries’ elections; he used nerve gas on a former Soviet spy and his daughter.

President Obama did not have issues such as those on the table when he chatted with Putin in 2012. Donald Trump had a lot of them to toss at Putin when he called him just the other day.

There’s the difference.

national news

Bump stocks banned: it’s a start

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The U.S. Justice Department has acted — finally! — on a measure that well could start us down a more rational, sane world regarding firearm regulation.

DOJ announced it is going to implement a ban on bump stocks, those devices that turn semi-automatic firearms into fully automatic killing machines.

While the nation has been fixated since Valentine’s Day on the Parkland, Fla., high school massacre, let us remember an earlier slaughter.

A lunatic opened fire in Las Vegas with a semi-auto rifle he had converted into a machine gun, killing 59 people attending a music festival at Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino. He eventually killed himself.

The debate over bump stocks was joined immediately.

Is this measure going to strip legitimate firearm owners of their right to “keep and bear arms”? Not in the least. It is going to potentially deter future madmen from doing what the Las Vegas shooter did, which is turn a semi-automatic rifle into a virtual weapon of war.

In announcing the Justice Department directive, though, we had to leave it to Donald Trump to lay blame on his made-up nemesis, Barack Obama, for “approving” bump stocks.

Trump’s tweet is sort of correct, at a certain level. The decision to allow bump stocks was done at an administrative mid-level at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The president or the attorney general, Eric Holder, had no direct input on the deliberations being undertaken.

Leave it to Obama’s successor, though, to forgo a forward-looking statement and to assess blame on someone else on a problem that needed to be fixed.

So, the Justice Department has acted. It will ban bump stocks. It will seek to prevent gun owners from creating machine guns.

This is by no stretch of anyone’s imagination a decision that launches us down any sort of slippery slope. It makes sense.

national news

Trump still doesn’t get his ownership of issues

This comes as no new great news flash. I’ve known it all along. So have you.

Donald Trump today demonstrated with absolute clarity that he doesn’t understand a fundamental tenet of governing. It is that effective governance at the highest levels is a team sport.

The president signed that $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill. While announcing his signature this morning, Trump laid some heavy lumber on Congress, namely congressional Democrats. He blamed them for wanting to gut our military; he blamed them for opposing reforms on illegal immigration.

He blamed Congress for sending him a huge bill that “nobody has read,” yet he signed it anyway. Trump said he’d “never sign” another bill like this ever again.

What one never hears from this guy is that he is a player, too, in government’s fits and starts, its occasional paralysis. He does not fathom how effective government is supposed to work. It is designed to bring the executive branch and the legislative into the same room, to reach common ground, to compromise where possible.

Does this individual get it? No. He doesn’t. Trump continues to lay blame at everyone else’s feet. He continues to assert that the other guys are at fault. The other guys, in this case, are lawmakers of the other party.

The president’s business background did not prepare him for the delicate nature of legislating and negotiating with legislators. He’s always been the Big Man in Charge. It’s always been his game to win.

I keep circling back to this fundamental shortcoming in Donald Trump’s shocking ascent to the presidency: His entire professional career was centered solely, exclusively on self-enrichment, on self-aggrandizement and self-promotion.

Every time he opens his trap, every time he tweets out pronouncements and proclamations, we are “treated” to evidence of his utter lack of knowledge and understanding of how government works.

The president needs to take ownership of the failures that come along, just as he is all too willing to take ownership of the successes.

Once again, this morning, Donald Trump showed that he doesn’t understand — nor is he likely to ever understand — the immense complexities of his high office.

local news

A new day might bring a new era

As I write these few words, we’re about 15 hours or so from sunrise on a new day in the Texas Panhandle.

We intend to mark the day in a way I never thought would occur. We’re going to Ellwood Park sometime Saturday morning, look for a place to park our car and we’re going to visit with what I hope is a large crowd of marchers.

I’m not sure I intend to actually join the March For Our Lives. I do intend to bring my notebook, a pen and that trusty camera on my cell phone. I intend to talk to young people, some of their parents and perhaps an onlooker or two (or three) to get a sense of what they hope to accomplish.

The March For Our Lives is a national event that has washed over Amarillo. Caprock High School students are taking the lead on organizing the local event; they have the support of their teachers and, I’ll presume, their parents.

It’s not too much of a stretch to wonder if this march portends a new era, whether it signals an awakening among young students who feel endangered by the threat of gun violence.

By now you know that the March For Our Lives was spurred by the slaughter of 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The students are outraged, enraged and, yes, frightened. To their huge credit, they aren’t letting their fear overcome them. Many of these Douglas High School students are going to march on Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, their high school-age brethren are marching in streets throughout the country. I saw a map on TV showing communities where March For Our Lives is staging demonstrations; the map was covered with dots denoting such activity.

The students here who’ve taken up this cudgel deserve high praise. I intend to offer it to those I meet.

Amarillo will join the nationwide march. We’ll need to get there early enough to find some parking near Ellwood Park.

I’m looking forward to the new day. May it signal an awakening.

national news

That was close; POTUS signs bill after all

That ridiculous, confusing and chaotic individual who serves as president of the United States had some of our heads spinning.

Donald Trump had said he would sign the omnibus spending bill despite its shortcomings; then he threatened to veto it because it didn’t spend enough on illegal immigration reform and border security.

Then he signs it! While bitching about all that is wrong with it.

The president announced a “news conference” to accompany its signing. Then he rambled on and on — and on some more! — for more than 30 minutes. He blamed Democrats for gutting the military, for stalling on immigration reform while ignoring the reality that the bill he signed is a bipartisan measure with plenty of Democratic votes in favor of it.

I struggle to listen to Trump’s remarks entirely. His repetitiveness is mind-numbing in the extreme, not to mention his astonishing use of non-specific terminology that reveals utter ignorance of the subject matter at hand. How many times did this guy use the term “other things” to delineate supposed specificity?

Whatever.

The signature moment — please pardon the pun — came when he admitted he hadn’t read the 2,220-page bill. “Neither had anyone else,” he said.

So, he signed a $1.3 trillion spending bill that keeps the government running until September without knowing what’s in it. He said that. Correct? He signed it believing that its defense expenditure superseded the shortcomings he said the bill contained.

Oh, and one more thing. The president still refuses to take ownership of any of the failings he hangs on some members of Congress. I long have thought that effective governing was a team sport, with the executive branch working in tandem with the legislative branch of government.

I am quite certain that is what the nation’s founders had in mind.

So, the chaos continues.

national news

First he’d sign it, now threatens a veto

I cannot take credit for this observation, so I’ll give it to my friend David Stevens, a true-blue political libertarian and a newspaper editor in eastern New Mexico.

Stevens wondered on social media why Donald J. Trump is threatening to veto an omnibus spending bill that pours money into a budget, while at the same time he extols the virtues of a big tax cut. The president wants to spend even more money on Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals and, of course, on the wall he wants to build along our southern border.

Just for the record, I agree with Trump on DACA funding, but disagree strongly with him on the wall matter.

Still, my pal David is perplexed at how a so-called “conservative Republican” can make such threats. I agree with my friend.

I’ll just offer this observation: Trump can make these veto threats because he is a classic RINO, a Republican In Name Only. He isn’t an actual Republican, with an actual political philosophy, with a rock-solid ideological base. He governs on whims and on who is the last person to have his attention.

Trump said earlier in the week that he would sign the spending bill to prevent a government shutdown, even with his misgivings about it. Now, in a tweet (sheesh!), he threatens to veto the whole thing because it doesn’t spend enough money.

The other big mystery? How is it that Republican “base” voters continue to stand behind this clown?

International news, national news

Let’s see how this guy works out

Of all the things Donald J. Trump said while campaigning for the presidency in 2016, one of the few statements he made with which I agree dealt with the Iraq War.

He called it a “total disaster.” Which it turned out to be … on so many levels.

So, who does the president hire as his next national security adviser? John Bolton, an Iraq War advocate, a premier uber-hawk and a guy known for a fiery world view that seems to require that America embark on nation-building whenever it sees fit.

Trump shoved H.R. McMaster out the door this week after press secretary Sarah Hucakbee Sanders assured us that all is well between the president and the national security adviser.

It turns out it wasn’t. McMaster actually was one of the grownups within the Trump inner circle. He is a U.S. Army lieutenant general, a battle-tested scholar. He also disagreed with Trump on a number of key issues: Russia, the Iran nuclear deal come to mind.

Now the president has brought on board a guy who agrees with him on the Iran nuke deal. He’s extremely hawkish on North Korea, too, meaning that he just might counsel the president to go to war with Kim Jong Un if an opportunity presents itself.

Gosh, I feel decidedly less comfortable knowing that John Bolton is returning to the federal government.

Bolton did say that he knows his role, that the president sets policy. His new duties will be to provide advice and counsel on national security matters.

Throughout all of this chaos, though, is the pattern already established that Trump hardly takes a moment to listen to anyone. I am left to wonder: Is the president going to heed the reckless advice that John Bolton is capable of delivering?

Oh, my. I am gnashing my teeth.