Monthly Archives: April 2018

national news

FBI launches raid and the mystery deepens

FBI agents conducted a quick-hit raid on the office of Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

He’s the guy who shelled out that $130,000 hush-money payment to porn queen Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about an affair that the president denies ever occurring.

Stay with me on this.

Cohen allegedly paid the money without his client’s knowledge. It supposedly came from a personal account. Trump has said he didn’t know about the payment. And surely we believe the liar in chief’s denial. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? I mean, he’s the president of the United States … after all.

I’m no expert on legal ethics, but this one just doesn’t pass the smell test. It stinks to high heaven.

So the FBI wants to take a look at the documents that Cohen had squirreled away in his office. They may — or may not — have anything to do with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in the “Russia thing” that Trump calls a “witch hunt” and the product of “fake news” and Democrats who are still steamed over losing the 2016 presidential election.

As an American taxpayer with a keen interest in seeing this mystery play out, I welcome the FBI raid on Cohen’s office. It tells me that the nation’s premier law enforcement agency is on the hunt. It is seeking the truth behind — at a bare minimum (no pun intended) — this seedy, tawdry story involving our nation’s head of state.

There might be some element to this story and the payment of the hush money that hasn’t come out just yet.

So, the mystery deepens. Same for the intrigue.

national news

‘Welcome back,’ ballooning budget deficits

Ronald Reagan and his fellow Republicans made lots of hay in 1980 about the “spiraling” budget deficit during that presidential election year. It totaled a whopping $40 billion.

The GOP presidential nominee’s campaign ridiculed those big-spending Democrats en route to a smashing landslide election victory over President Jimmy Carter.

Ah, yes. Republicans were the party of “fiscal responsibility.”

Hah! Not any longer. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the current fiscal year will end with an $800 billion budget deficit and will surpass $1 trillion by the next fiscal year.

Hey, what happened? Oh, it’s that tax cut that the Republicans wrote into law — at the insistence of Donald J. Trump, and the $1.3 trillion spending bill approved by Congress.

What happened to fiscal restraint? Where are the controls on runaway government spending? Aren’t congressional Republicans — who control the House and the Senate — supposed to rein in free-spending tendencies usually associated with liberal Democrats?

A Democratic president, Bill Clinton, managed to craft a balanced budget in the late 1990s with help from congressional Republicans. Then came Republican George W. Bush, who succeeded Clinton in 2001. We went to war at the end of that year, but didn’t increase taxes to pay for it. The deficit soared out of control.

Democrat Barack Obama came aboard in 2009 with the economy in free fall. He pushed a tax hike and a spending boost through Congress. The economy recovered. The deficit was pared by roughly two-thirds annually by the time he left office in 2017.

Now we’re hurtling back to Square One. The deficit is exploding.

And no one in power seems to care about things that used to matter a lot.

military news

Too many generals around Trump? Maybe, but then again …

A former Joint Chiefs chairman says he is concerned that Donald J. Trump has surrounded himself with too many generals.

Retired Navy Admiral Mike Mullen — who served as Joint Chiefs chairman under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama — said that Defense Secretary James Mattis and White House chief of staff John Kelly, two former U.S. Marine Corps generals, lack “political experience.” The same can be said, according to Mullen, about former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who is an active-duty U.S. Army lieutenant general.

“Jim Mattis, and John Kelly and H.R. McMaster are not politicians, but they’re operating in this political world inside the White House,” Mullen said. “It is a tough, difficult, political environment.”

OK, I get Mullen’s concern.

I’m not sure he needs to be overly concerned. I look at the generals’ presence a little differently. These men all have combat experience, which means they understand the consequences of war. It’s been said that warriors quite often are the last individuals who want to go to war. They know too well the grief and misery it brings.

Admiral Mullen perhaps ought to be more concerned that the commander in chief is reluctant to listen the best advice he gets from those “best people” with whom he pledged to bring aboard his administrative team.

International news

Trump telegraphing our next move in Syria?

Wait a second. Didn’t the Republicans in Congress climb all over President Barack Obama for “telegraphing” our withdrawal of fighting troops from Iraq?

Now the next president has declared his intention to remove our small contingent of troops from Syria. What happens after Donald J. Trump’s statement of intent? The Syrians launched a chemical attack against their citizens, prompting one prominent Trump critic, Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain, to lay blame squarely at the president’s feet for this “crime against humanity.”

McCain asserted that Trump has “emboldened” the Syrians. What’s more, he wants the president to respond as he did the first time the Syrian government gassed its citizenry, with targeted air strikes.

Now, to his credit, Trump is slamming Russia for its continuing support of Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad.

“The question now is whether he will do anything about it,” Sen. McCain said. “The President responded decisively when Assad used chemical weapons last year. He should do so again, and demonstrate that Assad will pay a price for his war crimes.”

Back to my original point. Why did the president reveal his hand by declaring his intention to get our troops out of that civil war?

It can be argued, I suppose, that Barack Obama opened the door for the Islamic State to ramp up its activities in Iraq by revealing a deadline for our withdrawal from the Iraqi battlefield. It damn sure brought out the GOP critics; I believe Donald Trump was one of them.

As for McCain’s urging an armed response, I believe the president needs to hit Syrian forces … hard!

State news

Bob Bullock would be proud of this one

AUSTIN — Wherever he is, I am quite certain Bob Bullock — the late and legendary Texas lieutenant governor — is a happy man.

Why? Because a museum built and dedicated in his memory is a sight to behold. Its artifacts are educational in the extreme. Its ambience is welcoming, as are the docents scattered on all three of its floors willing to explain the whys and wherefores of Texas history.

I pledged to go to the Bullock Museum of Texas History upon visiting the Texas capital city. Today I did so.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2018/03/planning-for-an-education-on-texas-history/

It is so very interesting.

The museum opened in 2001, two years after Bullock’s death. He had lobbied hard to get a history museum built. He managed to persuade the powers that be to erect the museum not far from the University of Texas and the State Capitol where Bullock toiled for the last part of his lengthy public service career.

It is a marvelous tribute to someone I didn’t know well, but someone about whom I had learned a great deal upon arriving in Texas in the spring of 1984.

I learned that he was one tough son of a bi***. He was irascible, a bit of a grouch. He didn’t suffer fools at all — let alone lightly. He was a classic conservative Texas Democrat, which meant that he favored the working man and woman but didn’t take up the cudgel often for progressive social causes.

He also worked well with Republicans. Bullock and a fellow Democrat, former House Speaker Pete Laney, developed a constructive — and productive — working relationship with Republican Gov. George W. Bush. They worked as an effective team until 1999, when Bullock left office; he would die later that year of cancer.

The Bullock Museum tells the story of Texas in multiple parts. It tells visitors about the wreck of the LaBelle (the remains of which are pictured above), a French ship that sank in Matagorda Bay in 1684 after sailing to the New World from Europe, a mission it wasn’t even designed to complete.

It walks visitors through the fight to gain independence from Mexico, Texas’s nine-year existence as an independent nation and then its annexation into the United States in February 1845.

I won’t go through all that the museum contains.

I’ll just add this takeaway: As much as the state celebrated the sesquicentennial of its independence from Mexico, while giving relatively short shrift to the 150 years since its annexation into the United States, so does the Bullock Museum.

I say this not as a criticism, per sue, but merely as an observation.

I am thrilled to have finally seen this sampling of Texas’s rich history.

political news, State news

Cruz vs. O’Rourke: a fight to watch

I’ll lay this out there right away: You know where I stand regarding U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, whom I have dubbed “The Cruz Missile.”

For those of you who don’t know, I’ll just say this: I do not support him. There. That’s out of the way.

I’m going to watch his fight for re-election with intense interest. He has a Democratic challenger who hails from way out yonder, El Paso. Beto O’Rourke is a member of the U.S. House. He wants a promotion to the other end of the U.S. Capitol Building.

I am not going to predict how this year’s election will turn out. I’m not smart enough to make such a prediction. Yes, I consider The Cruz Missile to be the favorite. Texas is seriously Republican. Our voters are more conservative than liberal. Cruz is banking on the voters’ party loyalty.

But wait! O’Rourke is raising lots of money. He has raked in more campaign cash than Cruz. It’s coming from somewhere. He is tapping the state’s pockets of progressive voters.

Political observers do suggest that O’Rourke needs to build his brand. He needs to establish a political identity. Many of us know how to ID Cruz. I consider Cruz to be a front-running media hog. He loves the spotlight. He’s good at basking in it. He ran for president in 2016 after serving just partly into his first term as a senator; that’s not a strike by itself against him, as Barack Obama did the same thing in 2008.

If there is a “blue wave” set to sweep across the land in the 2018 midterms, I suspect that the Cruz-O’Rourke contest will determine just how angry voters are at the manner in which Republicans have governed the nation. We’ll know whether that wave is for real or whether it’s a mirage created by wishful thinkers.

My heart hopes that Cruz gets the boot. My head prevents me from suggesting it will happen.

It will be among the critical U.S. Senate races to watch.

national news, political news

Maybe he could ‘shoot someone on 5th Avenue … ‘

It occurs to me that Donald Trump’s most hideous bit of campaign braggadocio just might have had more than a nugget of truth to it.

He once stood at a 2016 presidential campaign podium and declared he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and I wouldn’t lose any votes.”

We laughed out loud. Many of us gasped in horror. Others of us simply shook our heads in disgust that a candidate for the presidency of the United States would actually say something so ghastly.

And, yes, others of us cheered him.

It is turning out that — maybe, possibly — that Trump’s boast might be more truthful than many of us thought in real time.

He’s got that “Russia thing” hanging over him. There are questions about whether his business dealings might violate the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Several women have accused him of sexual assault/harassment. Two women have alleged having sex with him while he was newly married to his third wife, the current first lady of the United States.

And still …

His core support remains solidly behind him. Granted the Trump “base” still comprises only about 35 to 40 percent of the total electorate. The rest of us remain highly skeptical, critical — and actually outraged — at the president’s conduct in office.

It’s looking for all the world to me, though, that he well might have spoken a bit of truth when he made the boast about “shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.”

Weird, man. Weird.

local news

Happy Trails, Part 92

LOCKHART STATE PARK, Texas — We are glass half-full types of people. My wife and I have tried to live that way for our entire life together, which totals more than 46 years.

Thus, it is with that optimistic outlook that we ponder what could have been a catastrophe, but which turned out to be only a minor hiccup on our retirement journey.

We ventured to San Angelo State Park a few days ago. As we approached the park, about 30 miles from our first night’s destination, we made a sharp left turn across the median on U.S. 87.

The steering wheel locked up. The brakes weren’t nearly as responsive as they should have been. We limped across the highway and onto the parking lot of a state rest area.

I noticed at that moment the water temperature gauge on the dashboard was registering “very hot.” We managed to get the truck — with our fifth wheel in tow — to a spot out of the way, next to a curb.

We spent the night in the rest area. We got the truck repaired the next day and proceeded to the state park.

Why is this good news? Because what happened to us about 30 miles from our destination could have happened in the middle of nowhere. It could have happened, say, in the middle of the Eisenhower Tunnel just west of Denver; it could have occurred on the bridge crossing Lake Pontchartrain west of New Orleans; it could have happened in the middle of the Nevada desert, or in some remote area of southern California.

That it happened at a well-lit rest area in West Texas just a few miles northwest of a significant city — San Angelo — sent us a clear message that we should count our blessings.

We do that. Every day. We are blessed with sons who make us proud; our health is good; we sold our house in a timely fashion; we are enjoying our freedom and mobility.

Our pickup difficulty only slowed us part of a single day. We have proceeded to Central Texas. We will head soon to the Golden Triangle to catch up with friends who were bedeviled by nature’s fury, which came to them this past summer in the form of Hurricane Harvey. Then we’ll head for the Metroplex to visit with our granddaughter, her brothers and her parents.

It could have gone a lot worse than it did on that first day of our latest sojourn.

We must be living right.

military news

It’s ‘Secretary,’ not ‘General’ Mattis, Mr. President

I am going to quibble briefly over something I keep hearing from Donald J. Trump.

The president keeps referring to the secretary of defense, James “Mad Dog” Mattis, by his former title. He once was a Marine four-star general. He’s a combat veteran who’s quite proud of his service to the country. I happen to be a fan of “Mad Dog” Mattis.

However, he’s no longer in the Marine Corps. Yeah, yeah. I know: Once a Marine, always a Marine. Blah, blah, blah.

He is a civilian. I want the president to refer to James Mattis as “Secretary Mattis,” which would reflect the principle of civilian control of the U.S. military.

Trump recently made the reference while discussing the deployment of National Guard troops along our southern border.

“Mad Dog” Mattis no longer wears a uniform to work, Mr. President. He wears suits and ties, just like you do.

So, please refer to him by his current title of “Secretary” Mattis.

There. Quibble over.

State news

An alternative to the SH 130 race track uncovered

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LOCKHART, Texas — I am happy to report a bit of good news to you as a follow up to an earlier blog post about getting caught on the race track that also is known as Texas 130.

We found our RV camp location at Lockhart State Park, after some difficulty finding our way off of Texas 130, and its posted 85 mph speed limit. That’s all fine. It’s history.

What we discovered is that U.S. 183, which is the highway we intended to take from Austin to the state park, actually runs parallel to Texas 130.

It serves as a sort of frontage road for the nearly 30 miles we need to drive from visiting family members to the place where we’ve parked our fifth wheel RV for a few days.

Good grief, man! If I could have found this highway the first time — the day we arrived in the Austin area — I wouldn’t have had so much angst to share with you in that earlier blog post.

As it turns out, U.S. 183 allows us to cruise along at a “leisurely” 60 to 65 mph, while we watch the speed demons roar along at breakneck speeds just a bit over yonder on Texas 130.

What’s more, we get to do so without being charged a toll.

Who knew?

Life is full of surprises, yes? Some of them are nice surprises to boot!