Monthly Archives: April 2018

national news

‘I don’t get confused’

Chaos, anyone?

Yep, the Donald John Trump White House is showing its chaotic side once again.

United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley said out loud that the United States is planning to impose stronger sanctions against Russia as punishment for its complicity in the recent gas attack on Syrian civilians.

Not so fast, said the new national economics adviser, Lawrence Kudlow, who walked Haley’s comments back for her. According to the New York Times: “She got ahead of the curve,” Mr. Kudlow said. “She’s done a great job. She’s a very effective ambassador, but there might have been some momentary confusion about that.”

Told Dana Perino of Fox News, “I don’t get confused.”

There you have it. More chaos within what the president has called a “fine-tuned machine.”

Kudlow apologized to Haley for his remarks. I presume Ambassador Haley accepted his apology. Kudlow then said the policy had changed but no one apparently bothered to tell the U.N. ambassador.

As the Times reported: “As it turns out, she was basically following what she thought was policy,” Mr. Kudlow added. “The policy was changed and she wasn’t told about it, so she was in a box.”

Good grief, man! Nikki Haley has been talking tough about the Russians while the president keeps giving them a pass. Yes, the president ordered those air strikes against the Syrians — and I applaud him for that. He’s also beginning to speak with increasing harshness about Russian policy objectives.

He needs to walk the walk. Economic sanctions against Vladimir Putin and his henchman is one way to demonstrate that the president means what he says.

As for undercutting the nation’s U.N. ambassador, the White House needs to speak with a single voice.

national news

RIP, ‘The Enforcer’

What does one say only moments after learning that one of America’s most beloved public figures has left this good Earth?

Barbara Pierce Bush has died at the age of 92. It was no surprise. She was in “failing health,” surrounded by her family. She had ordered an end to preventative health care, focusing instead on “comfort care.”

The wife of the nation’s 41st president made no pretense about the fake pearls she wore around her neck. She said they were intended to cover up her wrinkles. But everything else about her was so very real. She was known to her kids and grandkids as “The Enforcer.” She set the rules and she made them stick.

And the nation fell madly in love with this woman, a proud first lady — but more importantly a proud wife, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.

She promoted literacy. She became an advocate for research on HIV/AIDS.

She also was unafraid to disagree with her husband, President George H.W. Bush, or her son, President George W. Bush.

The nation will grieve. The president will order flags to fly at half-staff at the nation’s federal buildings. We’ll all remember Barbara Bush as the matriarch of one of the nation’s most iconic political families.

She was a great American.

local news

Happy Trails, Part 94: Home is where you park it

It’s not often at all that I adopt a bumper sticker slogan as a mantra for living.

But I have done that very thing. We now live according a slogan we saw on an RV: Home is where you park it.

We just returned from a two-week sojourn — all in Texas — through the South Plains, the Hill Country, the Piney Woods, the Golden Triangle and the Metroplex.

Along the way, I adopted a new manner of referring to “home.” You see, now that my wife and I are no longer tethered to property attached to the ground, we now refer to our fifth wheel as home.

So, instead of saying I’m “going home,” I find myself referring to some geographical location. Home is attached to the back of our pickup, or it’s anchored to an RV campsite temporarily — until we head for the next place.

Our return to Amarillo reminded us of one of the “charms” of living on the High Plains of Texas.

It’s the wind, man!

Holy moly, it was howling when we departed in early April. It was howling today when we pulled into our RV park/temporary residence. We had read about the wildfires that scorched lots of ranch land; this afternoon, we saw evidence of them along U.S. 287 just west of Clarendon, where we understand the fire caused closure of the highway for several hours while heroic firefighters battled the blaze.

This arrangement — an RV serving as our “home” — won’t last forever. I don’t want to give away too much, but we might have located a precise location to resettle once we depart Amarillo on a (more or less) permanent basis. I’ll have more on that later.

In the meantime, our life now is a reflection of a slogan made popular by other RVers.

It’s cool.

national news

Mrs. Bush embodies class and grace

I don’t know about anyone else, but I do have difficulty watching admired public figures struggling as they fall into “failing health.”

So it is with former first lady Barbara Bush, who lived in the White House with her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, from 1989 until 1993.

She is now at home in Houston. Mrs. Bush has declined any further medical treatment. She has requested “comfort care.” Her family has gathered around her.

Yes, it looks as though the end is near. More than likely.

My difficulty deals with watching this marvelous woman struggle to remain among us. The love story that unfolded in January 1945 when she and the young Navy aviator married. They now hold the presidential record for marital longevity.

Mrs. Bush always acquitted herself with class as well as with candor. Her children and grandchildren call her The Enforcer. No one put anything past this marvelous individual.

She made literacy her hallmark while serving as first lady. She read to children. She sought to imbue in our kids a love of literature. Mrs. Bush created a foundation to continue that work after her time as first lady had expired.

The world has joined in offering love and support for this iconic American political family that has been led by a matriarch who stood tall next to her husband — and her oldest son, George W.  Bush, who also ascended to the presidency.

Still, it is damn hard to watch this story unfold.

political news

Founders got this one precisely correct

I posted an item on High Plains Blogger that sought to explain that the U.S. Constitution need not state matters in black and white for issues to remain relevant.

My particular target dealt with a statement in a column published in the Amarillo Globe-News that the words “separation of church and state” are not in the Constitution, as if to suggest that there really is no “separation.” Well, there is.

Here is what I wrote:

https://highplainsblogger.com/2018/04/separation-of-church-state-need-not-be-written/

I want to reiterate a point I’ve made a time or three already.

It is that the founding fathers did not create a perfect governing document, but on the issue of church/state separation, they got that part perfectly.

They didn’t liberate the slaves when they drafted the Constitution. They didn’t give women the right to vote.

However, on the issue of whether to establish a secular state, they hit it out of the park. They sought to form a government that did not dictate how people should worship. They gave us the right to worship as we please, or not worship at all.

The First Amendment contains four elements: a free press, the freedom of speech, the ability to seek redress of grievances against the government and of religion.

Of those four elements, the founders listed the religion part first.

Does that suggest to you that the founders’ stipulation in the First Amendment that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof … ” was the most important civil liberty they wanted to protect?

That’s how I interpret it.

The founders’ direct ancestors fled religious persecution in Europe and they damn sure insisted that it must not happen in the United States of America.

national news

Gowdy grows a spine, finally!

Man, I certainly wish many politicians could show the spine they need before they announce their intention to retire from public life.

U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy has just joined the growing list of pols who’ve found some much-needed courage — as lame ducks!

Gowdy said on “Fox News Sunday” that there is no reason for Donald Trump to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who selected Robert Mueller as special counsel to lead the investigation into Russian meddling in our 2016 presidential election.

According to Politico: The president’s ire over the investigation into possible Trump campaign ties with Russia, which Rosenstein stepped in to oversee after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself last year, has grown considerably over the past week after Rosenstein authorized the raid in New York on longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen.

Gowdy is not alone among Republican lawmakers cautioning the president to avoid doing something profoundly stupid and foolish. Firing Rosenstein or Mueller — or both — would create a political earthquake that actually might register something on the Richter Scale … if you get my drift.

As Politico reports further: Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor, noted that the decision to conduct the raid had to be made at the “highest level” of the Justice Department and that a “neutral, detached” federal judge “who has nothing to do with politics” had to sign off on the warrant, which was, in part, made on a referral by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Republican U.S. Sens. Flake Flake and Bob Corker are retiring at the end of the year. So is GOP U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan. Flake and Corker already have joined the list of Trump critics who keep reminding the president — and the rest of us — of the need to show restraint, decorum and judgment.

Speaker Ryan hasn’t yet weighed in and I’m unsure he will.

Gowdy, though, is exhibiting some of the “growth” that occurs when politicians liberate themselves from the pressure of holding onto public office.

media news

The cat’s out of the bag, Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity isn’t a journalist. He’s a talking head with lots of opinions. He works for the Fox News Channel and has a radio show on which he gets to bloviate and bellow his right-wing screeds.

I don’t begrudge him that privilege. He’s even won some awards for his on-air work. He also has earned some condemnation for his promoting of false conspiracies, aka “fake news.”

Oh, but now we know that his defense of Donald J. Trump and his relentless attack on the FBI raid on Trump’s lawyer’s office has a qualifier that, um, should have been disclosed when Hannity began unloading on the FBI. Hannity and Michael Cohen, the lawyer in question, have a professional relationship.

Cohen also represents Trump. He paid out $130,000 to Stormy Daniels to keep the porn queen quiet about a tryst she had with Trump in 2006. The FBI is looking for more information relating to that payoff. So, it obtained a search warrant from a federal judge and seized some documents.

Hannity has gone ballistic over it.

But don’t you think viewers and listeners deserve to know about Hannity’s particular interest in this matter? The tenets of full disclosure require it. Journalists know it.

According to The Hill: Hannity downplayed his interactions with Cohen, asserting that he’d never formally represented him in legal proceedings.

“I have occasionally had brief discussions with him about legal questions about which I wanted his input and perspective,” Hannity tweeted, adding that those conversations “dealt almost exclusively about real estate.”

Fine, young man. Any dealings with a lawyer in the news — let alone one who is involved in a sleazy, tawdry controversy involving the president of the United States — need to be disclosed to ensure that viewers and listeners can put what they’re hearing in a more complete context.

Not that it likely would matter to Sean Hannity’s fans in TV and Radio Land.

But, still …

national news

Cell phones in prison? Really?

LAKE ARROWHEAD STATE PARK, Texas — I know I am missing something, but I have to offer this rant nevertheless.

My wife and I are parked overnight in this state park. While relaxing in our RV, I heard a news report about a prison riot in South Carolina. Seven inmates died in the stab fest.

Officials blame “illegal cell phones” for the riot that became a battle over territory inside the maximum-security lockup.

Illegal cell phones? What does that mean? Oh, I guess it means the inmates acquired them through mail that had been sent to them from The Outside.

Let me think about this. If I were King of the World, here’s what I would do:

I would confiscate every piece of electronic equipment inside the prison.

I would start by ordering prison security officers to enter every cell in the lockup, strip-search every inmate, tear their bedding apart if need be and look for these cell phones.

Then I would set up a sort of “extreme screening” of every piece of mail that comes into the prison. Every package would get opened and examined for contraband. Cell phones constitute “contraband.”

These individuals broke serious state laws in South Carolina. They sacrificed most of their rights. Sure, they deserve some rights as citizens. They do not deserve to be subjected to “cruel and unusual punishment.” The deserve to live in quarters that allow them a modicum of space; Texas prisons were put under a federal court control over that issue, if you’ll recall.

Living in a cell-phone-free zone, though, doesn’t qualify as “cruel” or “unusual” in this context.

There you have it. Rant is over.

national news

U.S. has set a new standard for morality

Call me old-fashioned. Maybe even a bit of a prude — when we’re talking about officials who hold high public office.

Thus, when I hear the former director of the FBI declare that the president of the United States is “morally unfit” to hold the office, I nod my head in agreement.

James Comey delivered a blistering attack on Donald Trump, saying that the president’s moral character doesn’t measure up to the office he won in the 2016 election.

Comey — whom Trump fired a year ago because of what he called “the Russia thing” — cited a couple of key examples: Trump’s willingness to place “moral equivalency” between KKK’men, Nazis and white supremacists and those who protested their march in Charlottesville, Va.; and the president’s history of treating women “like meat.”

To be honest, Comey is far from the first American to declare that Trump is “morally unfit” to be president. Many millions of others of us have been said that before he ever won the election.

And that brings me to the critical point: Americans have redefined morality and have exhibited a clear and present tolerance for the kind of behavior that would have disqualified a presidential candidate.

Let’s get real for a moment, OK?

Trump admitted on that “Access Hollywood” recording how he is able to grab women by their “pu***”; he has admitted publicly cheating on his first and second wives; Trump has stated out loud how he was able to walk into beauty pageant contestants’ dressing rooms while they were half-dressed.

We hear now that Trump’s lawyer paid $130,000 to a porn queen to keep her quiet about a sexual encounter she and Trump allegedly had a year after he married Wife No. 3. The president denies the tryst occurred, but … the lawyer paid the money!

Trump has lived an existence filled with excess and moral depravity.

And yet …

He won enough Electoral College votes in November 2016 to enable him to slip into the Oval Office and take the reins of government.

This is the height — or the nadir — of political confusion.

Trump’s base, which comprises a huge chunk of the evangelical Christian movement, gives this clown a pass on his litany of debauchery and infidelity. Why? Because he promises to appoint conservatives to the federal judiciary; and those judges will rule against issues that evangelicals find repugnant: gay marriage, abortion and the prohibition on preaching Scripture lessons in public schools.

James Comey is as correct as he can possibly be in assessing Donald Trump’s moral unfitness for the presidency.

Some of us out here in Voter Land still want officials elected to high public office to represent the best in us. Donald Trump represents damn near the very worst in us.

The man is a disgrace.

national news

Comey: friend turns to foe

James Comey continues to make the turn. Hey, he might make a full circle before this drama is finishing playing out.

The former FBI director once was hailed by Donald Trump when Comey revealed he had more information to explore regarding Hillary Rodham Clinton’s use — or misuse — of her personal email account while she was secretary of state.

Eleven days before the 2016 presidential election, Comey tossed the outcome into serious confusion mode with the revelation about the so-called new evidence.

Trump was ecstatic. The GOP nominee bellowed that Comey had done his job well.

Then came the news that Comey said there was nothing more to investigate. Case closed. But the damage well might have been done to Clinton’s campaign.

Then the new president took office. He allegedly sought some assurances and a reported pledge of loyalty from Comey. He didn’t get them.

Then the president fired Comey from his FBI job. Ever since, Comey has been called everything but the Son of Satan.

Ahh, the fortunes do turn dramatically.

Now the ex-FBI boss has written a new book. He told ABC News that Trump “might have” obstructed justice. He called the president “morally unfit” to serve.

And then the Twitter tirade came from the president, who responded with “worst FBI director in history … by far!”, “slime ball,” and “serial liar.”

I don’t know about you, but I intend to hold with both hands for the foreseeable future as this dispute plays out. If it ever does!