Monthly Archives: June 2018

legal news

Yes, POTUS can ‘obstruct justice’

I am not a lawyer, but you know that already.

However, I know enough about history to understand this basic truth: Presidents of the United States can “obstruct justice.” Indeed, two of them — Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon — were accused of obstructing justice. One of them got impeached partly on that accusation; the other came within a whisker of being impeached before he resigned the presidency.

Thus, I am baffled in the extreme by lawyers serving the current president who says he cannot obstruct justice because, well, he’s the president. They are saying in effect that Donald J. Trump is above the law.

I beg to differ. I offer a strenuous objection to the notion that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, cannot determine that Trump obstructed justice in the hunt for the truth behind “the Russia thing.”

I don’t quite understand the logic being offered by Trump’s legal team that suggests Mueller cannot accuse the president of obstructing justice. Trump himself has acknowledged on network television that he fired FBI Director James Comey because of “the Russia thing”; then he told Russian visitors to the Oval Office that his dismissal of Comey had relieved him of pressure from the Russia probe and whether the Russian government meddled in our 2016 presidential election.

To my way of thinking, that constitutes at the very least circumstantial evidence of obstruction, but I know that Mueller’s team doesn’t operate on circumstance; it needs hard evidence. Whether it comes up with anything actionable remains to be seen.

As the nation watches this investigation lurch toward some conclusion, many of us are conflicted about the argument being offered that the president can do anything he wants — because he is the president.

Richard Nixon famously told David Frost that very thing, that the president cannot break the law simply by virtue of his office. The U.S. House Judiciary Committee eventually saw it quite differently when it approved articles of impeachment against the president.

I am pretty sure the law hasn’t changed since the 1970s. The current president took the same oath to follow the law that all of his predecessors took. The law in my view allows for presidents to be accused of obstructing justice.

business news

POTUS has weird view of ‘respect’

Donald John Trump keeps telling us how the United States is now “respected” around the world.

Let me think. Is that what the finance ministers of the six other industrialized nations said when they commented on the president’s absurd trade policies? That they really “respect” the United States now that Trump has imposed harsh tariffs on imported goods?

Um, I don’t believe that’s the case.

As the Wall Street Journal reports: The ministers of the six non-U.S. members of the Group of Seven industrialized nations—the host Canada, along with France, Germany, the U.K., Italy and Japan—on Saturday issued a joint statement excluding the U.S., and conveying their “unanimous concern and disappointment” with the U.S. decision last week to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from the European Union, Canada and Mexico.

Respect, eh? Is that what we are getting these days?

Trump’s penchant for protectionism does not breed respect at any level among the other industrialized nations. Indeed, what is laughable on its face is how the president considers U.S.-Canada trade policies as presenting a “national security threat” to the United States. National security threat? Is he kidding?

I believe a serious “national security threat” exists with Russians meddling in our electoral process, which is what happened in 2016 and which well might occur again this year!

Where is the outrage at that threat, Mr.

President?

Instead, Trump decided to vent his anger at a nation whose sons have fought and died alongside our warriors for most of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Shameful.

national news

What might have been had tragedy not struck

A gunman changed the course of American political history. Dammit, anyhow!

We are left 50 years since that terrible day to wonder what might have occurred had the shooter missed, or had a presidential candidate taken another route from a hotel ballroom to his next stop.

Robert F. Kennedy had just won the California Democratic presidential primary on June 4, 1968. A few minutes after midnight, he spoke to a crowded Los Angeles hotel ballroom. He said, “On to Chicago and let’s win there.”

He didn’t make it to Chicago. Sirhan B. Sirhan shot Sen. Kennedy, inflicting a mortal wound not just on one man, but on the hearts of millions of Americans who had hope that this individual could change the direction of a nation at war with itself over the conduct of a conflict in a place called Vietnam.

RFK spoke uniquely to a nation that had just endured the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., and watched as its young warriors were dying daily on battlefields in Vietnam with no clear strategy to bring that war to an end.

I have my own Bobby Kennedy story. I’ve told it before. I want to restate it here, but with a twist.

A week before he died, RFK was campaigning in my home state of Oregon. He would lose the Oregon primary to Sen. Eugene McCarthy. On the last night of that campaign, Sen. Kennedy showed up at a tony Chinese restaurant next door to where I was working.

I saw his profile back-lit by a parking lot light, grabbed a pen and a piece of adding-machine paper and ran across to where he stood with his wife, Ethel. I walked up to Sen. Kennedy, thrust the paper and pen toward him. He signed it “RF Kennedy,” and handed the piece of paper back.

Then he asked, “Are you old enough to vote?” Stupid me. I didn’t have the presence of mind to lie at that moment. I wasn’t old enough to vote; the voting age was 21 in 1968. I should have said “yes.” I should have equivocated somehow, perhaps by telling him I would be old enough to vote in 1972.

I didn’t. I said, “No, I am not. I just want to wish you well, senator.”

Bobby’s response? He turned around and walked into the restaurant. He didn’t say another word to me. It was as if I no longer mattered to him.

Well …

Did that single act make me admire him less? Did I lose hope that he could change the nation’s political course? No on both counts.

One week later, he was gone.

A little more than two months after that, I reported for duty in the U.S. Army. My journey would take me to Vietnam, where I got a brief up-close look at the war that had torn the nation apart and given Robert Francis Kennedy a reason to seek the presidency.

This will be a difficult week for me as TV networks will broadcast remembrances of what might have occurred had fate not intervened.

I am likely to weep without shame.

business news, International news

Trump ‘insults’ Canadians … nice!

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has some strong thoughts about Donald Trump’s decision to impose punishing tariffs on Canadian steel sent to the United States.

He said: “Our soldiers who had fought and died together on the beaches of World War II … and the mountains of Afghanistan, and have stood shoulder to shoulder in some of the most difficult places in the world, that are always there for each other, somehow — this is insulting to them.”

At a personal level, Trudeau has taken serious offense to the president’s curious decision to go to “war” against the nation with which the United States shares the longest unsecured border in the world.

Yes, Canadians fought alongside Americans and Brits at Normandy. Curiously, we are about to honor the D-Day invasion in a few days.

Sure, Trump recognizes the longstanding alliance between the United States and Canada. Then he said our allies are taking advantage of us in trade. His response is to get back at them; impose these tariffs in a classic protectionist move.

Trudeau is looking for some sign of “common sense,” but says he cannot find it in the policy announced by the “U.S. administration.”

Well, Mr. Prime Minister, a lot of Americans are just as confused as you are. Let us know when common sense presents itself.

national news

Another presidential directive tossed aside

Donald Trump told us he would be an “unconventional” president.

Oh, man, has he ever delivered on that campaign promise.

Case in point: Trump fired off a tweet about an hour before the Labor Department announced the May jobs figures. He said he was “looking forward” to the announcement. It came and the numbers were good. They were great! Joblessness is now at 3.8 percent, the lowest in many years.

Although the president didn’t break any law with the tweet, he violated a directive handed down some years ago that counseled presidents to avoid scooping these reports. They idea is to protect the integrity of the announcement and avoid any premature reaction by big-time financial investors.

This guy, the president, just cannot control himself. Sure, the news was good. He wanted to share it. I can’t blame him for that. I can, however, question the judgment of a president who cannot exhibit any sort of discipline that all of his predecessors have shown.

His getting ahead of the jobs figures once again betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the complexity of the office to which he was elected.

As I’ve noted before, the presidency of the United States is no place for on-the-job training.

national news

How do you defend the indefensible?

Maybe it’s just me, but has anyone else noticed something odd about the tone that Donald John Trump’s “defenders” use when they respond to criticism of the president?

When someone accuses Trump of being a pathological liar, do they rush to defend his veracity, integrity, his honesty?

When someone speaks critically of Trump’s behavior, his crass and foul language, do his allies defend his decency and compassion for others?

No on both counts. What we get from presidential “defenders” are epithets against the accusers. They’ll say that others lie, too. They give him a pass on so-called “locker room talk” and say that critics should stop being “snowflakes,” that they need to toughen up.

The Trumpkins around the country go on the attack. They’re attacking the credibility of the special counsel, Robert Mueller. They say his legal team comprises too many Democrats, many of whom worked for “Crooked Hillary” Clinton. They use terms like “witch hunt,” “hoax” and “fake news” to degrade, denigrate, disparage and dismiss criticism of the president.

I just find it odd and curious that their attempts to defend the indefensible end up raising more questions about the man at the center of this storm.

national news

‘Speaking truth to power’

When historians start chronicling the events surrounding Donald J. Trump’s time as president of the United States, they will face an enormous challenge in trying to find an answer to this question: How in the world did this man manage to get elected to the nation’s highest office?

An article about a former director national intelligence reminds me of what has perplexed, angered and outraged millions of Americans since the November 2016 presidential election.

James Clapper has written a memoir that tells of how his post public service life took a dramatic turn when Trump won that election. Clapper wanted to retire quietly and “clean out my basement.” He has remained in the public eye while becoming a ferocious critic of the president.

He considers Trump a threat to national security. The president has embraced Russia, the nation that — in Clapper’s view — meddled in our electoral process and well might have produced a Trump victory. As Clapper told Wired: As Clapper writes, in explaining his decision to write a memoir, Trump’s embrace of Russia “made me fear for our nation.”

Trump doesn’t speak the truth. He cannot tell the truth. His aim is to twist facts to enrich his own standing. He thinks first of himself and then, if he thinks at all about the nation, he gives a cursory nod to the well-being of others. That’s according to Clapper.

Is the former DNI perfect? Has he always been totally truthful himself? He acknowledges misspeaking during a Senate hearing in 2013. Wired reports: He duly addresses his much-criticized and picked-over comment in a 2013 hearing where he appeared to mislead Senator Ron Wyden about whether the NSA gathered call details on American citizens. He later said that he misunderstood which program Wyden was asking about and that he couldn’t later correct the record because of the demands for secrecy.

No one is perfect, right?

Still, I give a retired Air Force general — and a veteran of intelligence work at the highest levels — a fair amount of credence when he speaks of the shortcomings he sees in the president of the United States.

Again, from Wired: The truth, Clapper argues time and again, is critical. “I don’t believe our democracy can long function on lies,” he writes. “I believe we have to continue speaking truth to power, even—or especially—if the person in power doesn’t want to hear the truth we have to tell him.”

Read the Wired piece here.

Presidential historians will have their hands full, indeed.

business news

Jobs report: once cooked up, now legit?

Donald John Trump has this maddening capacity for talking out of both sides of his mouth and for avoiding accountability for it.

The U.S. Labor Department’s jobs report this week is an example of it. The bean counters at the Labor Department reported that 223,000 jobs were added to non-farm payrolls in May. Unemployment fell to 3.8 percent.

Good news? Of course it is! The president should take a victory lap on this one. He hailed the report so much that he actually sort of spilled the beans an hour before the data were released, breaking with longstanding presidential protocol. Some critics are concerned that he might have manipulated stock markets around the world by offering that hint of the good news that was about to be revealed.

But wait! He once derided those same bureaucrats’ findings when they delivered stellar jobs report numbers during the Barack Obama administration. He called them phony, cooked up. He said the actual jobless rate during President Obama’s time in office was many times greater than what the Labor Department said it was.

So, which is it? Were they cooked up then and have gained validity just because Trump is in office?

This is the kind of duplicity that Trump gets away with. It simply is astonishing in the extreme that the man’s “base” continues to cheer him on, giving him more incentive to keep lying to the nation.

Weird.

State news

Texas ag commissioner needs to go

Why is it that the only time we hear Sid Miller’s name mentioned in the news is when he says or does something outrageous?

Miller, a Republican, is the Texas agriculture commissioner. He’s a buffoon and a loudmouth who cannot control his impulse to make an ass of himself.

His latest bout of assery involves a picture he posted — and then removed — of TV talk show co-host and actor Whoopi Goldberg wearing a t-shirt depicting Donald Trump shooting himself in the head.

Except that the picture was doctored. Goldberg wasn’t wearing such a shirt. That didn’t stop Miller from committing this idiotic act.

So he took the post down? Too late, dude. The damage gets done immediately on social media. You can’t unhonk a horn, as an old friend used to say. You put something out there on Facebook, or Twitter or any social media platform and it becomes part of the public domain … boom! Just like that!

The Texas Tribune reported: Todd Smith, Miller’s campaign spokesman, told the Austin American-Statesman that neither he nor Miller knew if the doctored photo was real before it was posted to Facebook. 

“We post hundreds of things a week. We put stuff out there. We’re like Fox News. We report, we let people decide,” Smith told the Statesman.

They “report”? Did he really say that? No, you foment idiocy, which bears no resemblance to reporting events accurately.

This guy is no stranger to public buffoonery. He once went to Amarillo and ate a meal at a trendy downtown restaurant, OHMS. He didn’t like the steak he ordered and made a big show of his displeasure. Then, as with the Goldberg t-shirt episode, revealed a penchant for acting stupidly that Miller is all too capable of exhibiting.

Oh, how I hope Miller — who’s running against Democrat Kim Olson of Weatherford — gets thumped this fall when he stands for re-election. The guy embarrasses me.

International news

Trump-Kim summit back on … for now?

Just when you thought Donald J. Trump had tossed aside a chance to make peace with a decades-long enemy, well, he announced that he now plans to take that chance after all.

The president today announced that his meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is back on. It’s set for June 12 in Singapore.

The president made quite a show of his decision to cancel the meeting after Kim said some angry things about the United States. I thought the summit was a goner. It bummed me out.

It’s back on. Trump had a meeting today at the White House with the No. 2 man in North Korea, Kim Jong Un’s right-hand guy. He delivered a note from Kim. Trump, curiously, then admitted he didn’t read Kim’s letter before agreeing to meet with him later this month.

Eh? Huh? What?

Well, he’s going to fly to Singapore for what he now hints might be the first of a series of meetings with North Korea. The goal is to get Kim to “denuclearize,” meaning to get rid of the nukes in his arsenal. Plus, there might be an actual peace treaty on the table, given that the Korean War shooting ended in 1953 only because of a ceasefire that both sides signed; there is no peace treaty, meaning that North and South Korea — and the United States — are technically in a state of war.

Can we trust Kim Jong Un? No. We cannot. However, can we trust our own president to carry these noble goals across the finish line? Sadly, no on that one, too.

However, let us hope for the best once these two mercurial leaders shake hands and start talking to each other.