Monthly Archives: May 2018

political news

GOP might produce another election-year goofball

Don Blankenship well might become the new Roy Moore.

It must be “fun” to be a Republican these days. Alabama Republicans nominated Moore, an alleged pedophile, in 2017 as their party’s candidate for the U.S. Senate. Moore ended up losing a special election to Democratic Sen. Doug Jones — and the Republican Party nationally breathed a sigh of relief.

Ahh, but the fun may be starting all over again, in West Virginia.

Don Blankenship, who served time in prison after a mine he owns exploded and killed 29 mine workers, is reportedly surging just ahead of the GOP Senate primary that occurs on Tuesday.

Mainstream Republicans in West Virginia are concerned that a Blankenship primary victory will guarantee the re-election of Democratic U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin.

Hey, it gets better. Blankenship is not standing still letting the GOP attacks on him go unanswered. He has referred to “Cocaine Mitch” McConnell in describing the Senate majority leader.

Or, as Politico reports: This week, Blankenship began airing a TV commercial labeling McConnell “Cocaine Mitch,” an apparent reference to a 2014 report that drugs were once found aboard a shipping vessel owned by the family of McConnell’s wife, Taiwan-born Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. Then, a few days later, Blankenship began airing another spot declaring that McConnell’s “China family has given him tens of millions of dollars.”

Yep! That’s the guy who West Virginia Republicans just might nominate to run for the U.S. Senate this fall.

Ain’t this just a blast?

medical news

Yep, Amarillo is ready to welcome a vet school

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Mary Emeny is a friend of mine with a particular interest in a plot of land that she hopes will become home to a new school of veterinary medicine.

She chairs a trust that donated the property to Texas Tech University, which is considering whether to build a vet school in Amarillo.

I, of course, have no such vested interest. I merely want to endorse my friend’s column that appeared in the Amarillo Globe-News that pitches hard for the vet school.

Read the full column here.

Texas Tech University regents have declared their intention to build a vet school. Tech is getting a lot of push back from Texas A&M University, which at the moment has the only veterinary medicine school in Texas. A&M Chancellor John Sharp wants to keep it that way, or so it appears.

My own view is that Texas is a large enough state to accommodate more than one university’s desire to educate veterinarians. We comprise 28 million residents, spread across nearly 270,000 square miles. Tech regents — and Chancellor Bob Duncan — want to establish a veterinary medicine campus in Amarillo that could help train and retain vets who come from the Texas Panhandle and who might want to stay here after they earn their DVM degrees.

As Emeny writes in the Globe-News: Even as we urbanize, our base is still ranching, and more recently dairy and hogs, with farming that supports them all. The veterinary school will bring much needed assistance to overworked veterinarians, especially those that tend to large animals in the region. Moreover, it will do so in a wonderfully elegant way. By assigning students to practicing veterinarians in the area, the vets become the mentors and the students assist the vets. Such a model bypasses the need for a separate teaching hospital, significantly reducing student tuition while giving local vets a platform for interaction and ready access to the latest knowledge and technologies.

Does any of this diminish A&M’s role in training veterinarians? Of course not! It does add to the pool of aspiring veterinarians to a community — such as the Panhandle — that can serve a region with a compelling need for them.

Well stated, Mary.

national news

‘No one is above the law’?

I must presume that Rudy Giuliani is a good lawyer. He once was a federal prosecutor in New York before becoming mayor of the nation’s largest city.

He’s run for president a couple of times. He’s now back in private practice, representing clients, one of whom is the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

Now the ex-mayor says this, that Trump can ignore a subpoena issued by special counsel Robert Mueller if it comes. Yes, the president can ignore a federal subpoena, says Giuliani.

Hold on! I thought that “no one is above the law.” Presidents of the United States are citizens of the same country as you and I — and Rudy Giuliani. Aren’t they subject to the same demands that fall on the rest of us?

Giuliani has entered the fray involving Trump and Stormy Daniels, the porn queen who alleges having a fling with Trump back in 2006. Trump denies it. Yet his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 to buy her silence about the alleged tumble — that Trump said didn’t occur.

Mueller is likely looking into it to determine if there’s possibly a campaign finance law violation.

He might summon Trump to answer questions from the grand jury.

Giuliani says the president doesn’t have to testify.

So, is the president above the law?

national news

Looking for a redeeming quality in POTUS

Matthew Dowd wondered today why none of Donald Trump’s defenders is defending his integrity, his honesty, his character.

The Republican political operative posed a fascinating question. It got me thinking a bit. I came up with this: I cannot find — and, yes, I am a harsh critic of this president — a single redeeming quality that is worthy of defense.

I am a devoted fan of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton — even though I was disgusted by President Clinton’s conduct with the intern during his second term. I didn’t support George W. Bush’s presidency, but having had the honor of talking at length with him when he was governor of Texas, I found him to be engaging, devoted to his family and far smarter than many media snobs gave him credit for being.

I have said for many years that W’s father, George H.W. Bush, was the most qualified man ever to seek the presidency: World War II combat vet, successful businessman, CIA director, U.N. ambassador, special envoy to China, Republican Party chairman, vice president of the United States. And, yes, he is devoted to his marvelous family.

Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford both were decent men who became president after difficult tenures of their predecessors. President Ford might be the most underrated man ever to hold the office. I admired him greatly for the civility and decency he brought to the White House after the turmoil and tempest of the Watergate scandal. President Reagan could skewer his foes with the best of them, but he did so with wit and grace.

President Jimmy Carter was without question the godliest man who has served in the office during my lifetime.

This brings me back to Donald Trump. A serial adulterer. A man who lies on all matters, big and small. He treats women harshly. He insults his foes and has ridiculed a journalist with a serious physical handicap. He has hurled epithets at a Gold Star family. He has denigrated the Vietnam War service of a distinguished U.S. senator, while dismissing the fact that he sought to avoid service in that bloody conflict.

Do I disagree with every policy pronouncement Trump has made? No. I support his call for tougher border security. I applaud his get-tough approach to Syria. I wish him well as he prepares for a potentially landmark summit meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

However, I cannot find a redeeming personal quality about the president worth defending.

Part of me wishes I could find one. Just one!  I’ll keep looking, searching and hoping something surfaces.

national news

Nothing to this probe? Check this out

Matthew Dowd is no squishy liberal, a “snowflake.” He’s a long-standing Republican political operative.

He also serves as a broadcast and cable news “contributor” and, yes, he is a Donald J. Trump critic.

He sent out a tweet just a while ago that reiterated something he said this morning on ABC News’s “This Week” program: As i said on to give some perspective: “Benghazi was a 4 year investigation, there were zero indictments. The Clinton emails was a 2 year investigation, there were zero indictments. The Mueller investigation has been 14 months, there have been 23 indictments.”

“Benghazi” involved a terrible firefight that occurred at a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya on the watch of then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; the “Clinton emails” also involved the former secretary’s use of her personal email account while serving in the State Department.

The Mueller investigation? Well, it’s that probe that is occurring at the moment to explore questions relating to Trump’s presidential campaign and its possible relationship with the Russian government … among other things.

GOP hardliners want Robert Mueller’s probe to end. Now! They forget about the length of time they insisted on maintaining while GOP members of Congress looked at Hillary Clinton’s conduct.

All that time, money and effort produced zero indictments. None, man!

Mueller — who, by the way, also is a Republican — so far has harvested a much healthier crop of criminal complaints.

And, no, this isn’t a “witch hunt.” It is a serious investigation being conducted by a serious public servant.

national news

2nd Amendment ‘under siege’? Oh, no it isn’t

Donald J. “Demagogue in Chief” Trump managed once again to inflame his political base with an assertion that he then contradicted in the very same sentence.

“Your Second Amendment rights are under siege, but they will never, ever be under siege as long as I am your president,” he said this week at the National Rifle Association annual conference in Dallas.

His speech was typically Trumpian in its lack of focus, its meandering course and the politically tinged remarks.

He went off on the economy, the “fake news” allegedly ignoring the good job growth and dwindling unemployment, the Robert Mueller probe into the “Russia thing.”

He did devote a bit of his rambling soliloquy to gun issues, which is why he was in Dallas in the first place. He said the NRA’s foes have laid siege to the Second Amendment, then said it wouldn’t happen as long as he is president.

Which is it, sir? Is it under siege or not?

The truth is this: There is no “siege” being waged against the Second Amendment. Sure, there are some Americans who want it repealed or significantly modified. Many other Americans, though, want to legislate remedies to the spasm of gun violence in this country without destroying the Second Amendment.

Poll after poll indicate that Americans favor some additional controls on gun purchases. Those polls do not suggest Americans want to limit “law-abiding” citizens’ constitutional rights to “keep and bear arms.”

Yet the president keeps yapping about some phony “siege” he says is being waged against the Second Amendment. That, I submit, is the rhetoric of a demagogue.

Perhaps it was just as well that Donald Trump devoted so little of his podium time in Dallas to gun issues, as it only would have exposed further the president’s stunning ability to speak out of both sides of his pie hole.

national news

Where is defense of POTUS’s character, integrity?

I won’t take credit for this inquiry, but I’ll share it here just because it’s worth sharing.

Matthew Dowd, a veteran Republican political operative, posed an provocative question this morning on ABC News’s “This Week,” when he asked why Donald J. Trump’s supporters are not defending the president’s integrity or his character.

The president’s defense is centering on vilifying those who are opposing him. Donald Trump’s political base, comprising his most ardent supporters, isn’t rushing to defend him on the basis of his moral standing, his integrity.

The Stormy Daniels story is swirling. The Russia probe continues to gain steam. The Trump team keeps changing its story. The White House press operation cannot speak clearly and candidly about any of this because the president keeps changing the narrative.

Dowd’s question also seems to presuppose the terrible notion that if no one is defending the president’s character that we’ve become numb to the idea that our president is a scoundrel.

Think of that for a moment. The Rev. Franklin Graham, a leader in the evangelical Christian movement — and a Trump supporter — seemingly throws up his hands and tells us voters “knew what they were getting” when they elected Trump president.

We are ready to settle for this? Really?

Frightening.

International news

Earth to Beijing: Taiwan is a nation, not a ‘province’

The People’s Republic of China is engaging in what the White House calls “Orwellian nonsense.”

The PRC is angry at private commercial air carriers because they refer to Taiwan as a “country.”

Oh, brother.

It’s complicated.

Taiwan broke away from China in 1949 after a bloody civil war. The communists kicked the Nationalist Party out of power. The Nationalists moved to Taiwan and set up a separate government. The PRC runs the mainland; Taiwan has taken on a new identity, although it is not recognized throughout most of the world as a sovereign state. China calls Taiwan a “renegade province” and has vowed to take it back — by force if necessary.

Believe me. It is. I’ve been to Taiwan five times since 1989. It is a country.

Thus, the White House’s criticism of the PRC is on point. As The Hill reported: “This is Orwellian nonsense and part of a growing trend by the Chinese Communist Party to impose its political views on American citizens and private companies,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement.

Sanders also vowed that “China’s efforts to export its censorship and political correctness to Americans and the rest of the free world will be resisted.” 

“The United States strongly objects to China’s attempts to compel private firms to use specific language of a political nature in their publicly available content,” she said.

Sanders is correct to condemn China for seeking to dictate to private firms how it should refer to countries — and governments — with which they do business.

Taiwan operates in a sort of parallel universe with the rest of the world. The United States withdrew its diplomatic recognition of Taiwan — officially known as the Republic of China — in 1978. The United Nations expelled Taiwan at that time so that the PRC could join the body.

Yet, Taiwan continues to function as a de facto independent nation, although it has never officially declared its independence from the PRC. Taiwan has flourished and has become a vibrant state that functions with many of the trappings of sovereignty without the actual designation.

As for the People’s Republic of China, it need not impose its political will on private firms.

International news

DACA needs to stay in force

Hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents are being kicked around like the political football they have become.

They likely didn’t dream it would happen. But it has.

I’m talking about Dreamers, the former under-aged illegal immigrants who came here when their parents sneaked them into the country. They built their lives in the United States; they know no other country, let alone the country they left.

President Barack Obama issued an executive order called the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, aka DACA. It protected these U.S. residents from deportation to countries they do not know.

Obama left office. Donald J. Trump rescinded the DACA order, and then gave Congress a deadline to enact legislation that preserves it.

Now some states — including Texas — are suing the Trump administration demanding an end to DACA. Texas officials no longer want these individuals living here, even though so many of them — thousands of them — have become contributing de facto Americans.

As Buzzfeed reports: The Republican attorneys general argue that an injunction in the new case in Texas would make the nationwide orders requiring the administration to resume processing applications effectively moot — those cases dealt with challenges to how the Trump administration chose to end DACA, the states said, not the underlying question of whether DACA itself was lawful, which no court has directly addressed.

Some of them have excelled academically. They have graduated from high school, gone to college, earned degrees, stayed in the United States, paid their taxes, gotten good jobs, raised children of their own (who were born here and became instant U.S. citizens).

Now this nation wants to send these individuals back to nations they do not know? Are you kidding me?

This is inhumane. It is cruel. It is not by any stretch of the imagination a “family friendly” tactic that pleases only the “base” of one political party, the Republican Party.

I understand that Donald Trump wants to do whatever he can to eliminate illegal immigration. I, too, support efforts to bolster law enforcement efforts along our entire border — both north and south, as well as along the thousands of miles of Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coastlines.

However, many DACA recipients have earned their spurs. They belong here and shouldn’t be punished because of something their parents did by bringing their then-small children across the border illegally. Those former children are not “law breakers.”

national news

Trump polls are up? We’ll never hear the end of it

CBS News is about to join Fox News as a news outlet that Donald J. Trump won’t label as a “fake news” purveyor.

A new CBS poll shows the president’s poll numbers rising. Indeed, in New Hampshire — the state that conducts the nation’s first presidential primary election every four years — Trump trounces Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Arizona U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, two men who are thought to be considering a challenge of their fellow Republican.

As CBS News reports: Republican voters have had two years of watching Trump as a candidate and president and husband and Twitterer and embarrassing, tantrum-throwing child and—to their credit or shame—they’ve decided to stick with him. It truly is Trump’s party, and every other Republican is just renting space.

So unless Robert Mueller drags him out of the Oval Office by his artificially-golden locks, Trump will be on top of the ticket in 2020.

My hope all along has been that Democrats need to find a new face, a candidate with a new approach and ideas and someone who at this moment isn’t on most people’s radar. Democrats aren’t listening to little ol’ me, according to CBS: And what are the Democrats giving him? Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Oh, and Nancy Pelosi just promised “I’m not going anywhere,” while Congressional Democrats are debating what they want to do first once they take back the House: Impeach Donald Trump, or pass new gun control laws?

By every historic measure, President Trump should be the Walking Dead of American politics. But put him up against a Democratic campaign of “Pelosi, Pocahontas and Impeachment!” and he may walk right back into the White House.

I’ll concede the president’s uptick in the polls. But no one is asking me what I think.

Whatever fate awaits the president if he is able to finish his term, any effort by him to win a second term in the White House will never include a vote from yours truly.