Monthly Archives: June 2018

International news

Do we stay engaged or do we withdraw?

The United States has pulled out of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council.

Donald J. Trump doesn’t like the council’s bias against Israel, nor does he like the human rights records of many of the nations that are members of the council.

The president’s response? He decided to withdraw. He’ll let the Human Rights Council do whatever it does without direct U.S. involvement.

That’s no way to lead, Mr. President. Hey, it’s a form of “leading from behind,” which is what Trump so often accused his predecessor, Barack Obama, of doing.

My own preference would be for the United States to stay engaged in the Human Rights Council, exerting pressure on the U.N. body to cease its bias against Israel and to remind many of its members that they have little moral standing to talk about human rights abuses.

I refer to nations such as Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Venezuela, and Cuba as members of the HRC. I get that those nations all have hideous human rights records.

Why does the president want to withdraw from yet another world body? He’s backed out of the Paris climate accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, threatened to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement.

He recently refused to sign the joint communique of the G-7 economic powers that met in Quebec. What’s more, Trump has threatened to launch a worldwide trade war with our most reliable trading partners and allies.

This is how you “make America great”? This is how you “put America first”?

Nope. It’s a prescription for isolating the world’s most indispensable nation from the world community. The Human Rights Council needs improvement, to be sure.

The more constructive posture would be to have our voices heard — at the table.

International news, national news, State news

Is the president creating a crisis where none exists?

I keep getting this feeling in my gut that Donald J. Trump’s insistence that we have an immigration “crisis” is a figment of the president’s imagination.

Or worse, it is a ploy he is using to curry favor with Americans who have this fear about immigrants of all stripes, legal or otherwise.

Trump keeps harping on the flood of immigrants pouring through our “open border” to do harm to Americans. He is managing to cast all immigrants in the same ultra-negative light: They’re murderers, rapists, drug dealers, sex traffickers, kidnappers.

Here’s the nasty part of it: Trump appears to be succeeding in this hideous effort.

The media are covering this “zero tolerance” story with zeal and aggressiveness. The children who have been separated from their parents and sent to something called “tender age” internment camps have broken our hearts. Former first ladies have issued statements condemning the practice.

I keep asking myself: Why? Why are we reacting with such hysteria over this story?

I heard a statistic the other day about how border crossings are down. Yet to listen to the president tell it, the nation’s southern border is awash in people pouring northward into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

I don’t spend a lot of time along the Texas border with Mexico, although I recently did travel to Laredo. My wife and I spent a few nights at a Texas state park along the Rio Grande River. We also spent some time on the road traveling southeast along the river.

What did we see during those few days along the border? We saw Texans going about their daily lives. We looked at families playing at parks. We saw people shopping. They were enjoying meals. They were walking their pets along city streets.

We saw life continuing at a normal pace.

We did not see a community in crisis. We didn’t see a region gripped by a flood of illegal immigrants/criminals.

This was two years ago. Has it changed dramatically since then?

I think not.

I also believe the president of the United States — who launched his first political campaign in 2015 with a pledge to curb immigration along our southern border — has created a crisis where none exists.

Sickening.

local news

Happy Trails, Part 111: Loving the term ‘retired’

Time for an acknowledgement.

It took me some time to get used to telling strangers that I am “retired.” I wasn’t uncomfortable saying it. I have enjoyed virtually every minute of full-time retirement.

It’s just that when someone would ask me, “What are you doing these days?” or “What line of work are you in?” I would freeze for just an instant before answering the question.

These days, my wife and I are encountering many more strangers than longtime friends and acquaintances, given our new place of residence just north of Dallas in the pleasant community of Fairview.

We meet folks. The question comes about my occupation. I now answer without taking a breath: I’m retired.

Then comes the follow-up inquiry: You’re retired … from what?

Then I tell them I was a journalist for nearly four decades.

I’ve long noted since I resigned from the Amarillo Globe-News in the summer of 2012 that “separation anxiety from working every day is highly overrated.” I feel the same as what my wife and I felt about “empty nest syndrome,” which we also considered to be an overrated condition as well. Our sons left home right after high school to attend college and — to be totally candid — my wife and I felt a certain liberation.

We feel the same way about retirement. We’re liberated from the obligation of reporting to The Man, of having to be certain places at certain times and having to do certain tasks for certain people.

Now that I getting acquainted with a new community filled with people I’ve never seen until now, I find myself answering the question about how I spend my days with increasing ease.

I’m retired.

It’s easy to type on my keyboard and it’s easy to say out loud.

We’re having the time of our lives.

media news

‘These aren’t our kids’

1 Comment

Brian Kilmeade needs a serious whuppin’.

The “Fox & Friends” co-host said this today while defending Donald J. Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, which the president ostensibly ended with an executive order that stops the practice of yanking kids from their parents along the southern border of our nation.

“Like it or not, these aren’t our kids. Show them compassion, but it’s not like he’s doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another country and now people are saying that they’re more important than people in our country who are paying taxes and who have needs as well.”

Let’s hold the phone, dear reader. Time out! Take a breath and digest what this clown has said on national TV.

Has anyone, ever hinted, implied or suggested — let alone say it out loud — that the young immigrants at the center of this immigration firestorm are “more important than people in our country”?

Kilmeade was trying to make some sort of cheap point, I reckon, when he blurted out that misstatement.

It is false. It is yet another lie. He has demonized in one of the most hideous examples we’ve heard in all this tumult the critics of the Trump administration policy that has swept the entire globe.

If the president is going to go after the mainstream media for telling lies, right there is a glittering example of “fake news.”

national news

Now you’re lying, Mr. AG

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions can’t yet shake the malady that afflicts the president of the United States.

He is now lying through clenched teeth, just as Donald J. Trump does with such ease.

Sessions told the Christian Broadcast Network that the administration “never intended” to separate children from their parents as part of the government’s “zero tolerance” policy regarding illegal immigration.

Yep. That’s what he told CBN’s David Brody.

Oh, but wait.

Just the other day he stood before the nation and cited Romans 13 — from the New Testament — as justification for doing the very thing he said he and his colleagues “never intended” to do. Romans 13 tells us how the Apostle Paul admonished others to obey the government; follow the law to the letter. Therein lies the justification, as Sessions cited it, for the policy that results in the arrest of illegal immigrants and the separation of children from their custody.

If you enter the nation illegally, he said, you will be arrested. If you smuggle children illegally with you, the government may take them away

How can the nation’s chief law enforcement officer lie so recklessly?

Hold on a second! I almost forgot. Donald J. Trump — the nation’s Liar in Chief — selected him for the job.

national news

Nothing ‘phony’ about these tales of woe, Mr. POTUS

1 Comment

I am slapping myself silly out of frustration, outrage and anger at the president’s utter ignorance.

He fired off this little ditty this morning via Twitter:

We must maintain a Strong Southern Border. We cannot allow our Country to be overrun by illegal immigrants as the Democrats tell their phony stories of sadness and grief, hoping it will help them in the elections. Obama and others had the same pictures, and did nothing about it!

Where do I begin? Or end, for that matter?

Democrats aren’t telling “phony stories of sadness and grief,” Mr. President. Yet that’s the message that Donald J. Trump sought to deliver.

No, sir. Nothing “phony” is going on at the nation’s southern border. The children are in distress. So are their parents. Yes, they should enter the United States legally. On that point, I am with the president. However, their reasons for seeking entry are as complex as the problem that has erupted.

Many of them are fleeing brutality, gang violence, poverty. They want a better life for their families. Why is that so difficult for the president to understand? He implies through his tweets and other public statements that every illegal immigrant is “infesting” this country intent on doing something evil. He suggests they are bringing “crime” into the United States.

This is nothing short of a disgraceful display of bald-faced prejudice and bigotry.

Phony stories of sadness? Hardly, Mr. President. These tragedies are real and they need answers — not recrimination.

national news

‘The Jacket’ shrouds first lady’s actual mission

I think I’ll paraphrase a message that appeared on the back of first lady Melania Trump’s jacket … so bear with me.

I really don’t care about what it said.

What I do care about is that the first lady chose to wear this particular jacket while she was heading toward South Texas to tour a migrant camp that houses children who had been taken from their parents. The message on the back of the jacket read: “I really don’t care. Do U?”

I also care about the decidedly mixed message from Donald J. Trump’s self-proclaimed “fine-tuned machine” that runs the executive branch of government. Melania Trump’s staff said the first lady never intended to deliver a message with the jacket. Then the president himself tweeted something that said, yep, she did intend to deliver a message, which was aimed at what he calls “fake news.”

Message or no message? Which is it?

How about we hear from the first lady herself?

I am acutely aware that nothing gets done spontaneously at this level of public appearance planning. These events almost always are tightly scripted affairs. So, when the first lady is seen boarding a plane en route to South Texas wearing a jacket that sends a troubling message about whether she cares about the kids, well, then we have a problem.

The message itself isn’t all that weird. It’s the context of the first lady of the United States deciding to wear it while preparing to represent the president at an event that has gripped the nation by its throat.

If it is true — and that’s an iffy prospect, at best — that, according to the president, the first lady’s visit to McAllen was “100 percent” her call, then we need to hear directly from her.

Was she sending a “message,” or was it just an astonishingly sloppy display of ignorance about how the “optics” would play?

Talk to us, Mme. First Lady.

national news

Tax returns, Mr. President?

A Rhode Island state senator has pitched a fascinating idea that I hope becomes law. Indeed, her idea has already passed the state Senate. Where it goes next is anyone’s guess.

I fear that it won’t see the light of day.

Democrat Gayle Goldin authored a bill that would keep Donald J. Trump’s name off the 2020 ballot unless he releases his income tax returns, something he has so far refused to do.

Trump already has launched his re-election effort. He won’t win Rhode Island’s electoral votes in 2020, just as he didn’t win them in 2016. Sen. Goldin wants him to do something that every presidential candidate has done for the past 40 years, which is release his tax returns for public scrutiny.

Trump’s excuse for refusing to do so is as lame as it gets. He says the Internal Revenue Service is auditing his returns. The IRS says an audit doesn’t prevent someone from releasing their returns to the public, although it has not commented specifically on whether it is actually auditing Trump’s returns.

For that matter, the president hasn’t even produced any evidence that the IRS is in fact auditing his returns, which makes many of us question whether any such audit even has taken place.

Democrats control the Rhode Island Senate. Goldin’s bill passed 34-3. It now goes to the state House. I don’t yet have confidence that this gutsy measure will become law.

I hope it does. I also hope it catches on in all 50 states. I know. It’s not likely to happen. One can hope.

medical news

One more point about Dr. Krauthammer

I have written a couple of blog posts in recent days about Charles Krauthammer, the great columnist who died today of cancer at the age of 68.

Both pieces have omitted a reference to Krauthammer. I mentioned — until now — the fact that he lived most of his life as a paraplegic.

Why? It turns out that Dr. Krauthammer didn’t want to be defined by the accident he suffered in his early 20s. He went swimming with a friend. He dived into a pool, hit his head on the floor of the pool — and never walked again.

He went on to pursue his education. He received his medical degree. He developed a psychiatric practice. Then he went into politics and eventually into journalism. He wrote speeches for Vice President Mondale and won a Pulitzer Prize for his commentary. He did all this while sitting in a wheelchair.

Dr. Krauthammer never let his paralysis derail his ambition. Nor did he want to wallow in it.

He was a champion of the first magnitude.

International news, national news

Was there a message in the jacket? POTUS says ‘yes’

So-o-o-o-o. It turns out first lady Melania Trump was sending a message after all with that weird jacket she wore today.

That’s according to Donald J. Trump, who wrote via Twitter:

“I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” written on the back of Melania’s jacket, refers to the Fake News Media. Melania has learned how dishonest they are, and she truly no longer cares!

But … wait! Mrs. Trump’s staff said she wasn’t sending a message with the jacket. She was photographed with the “I REALLY DON’T CARE … ” message on the back while she boarded an airplane bound for South Texas; the first lady made a surprise visit to an immigrant center near McAllen.

Man, I hope she lost the jacket when she visited with those who are holed up in the Rio Grande Valley awaiting disposition of their case … not to mention getting reunited with their children who the president ordered taken from their parents.

As for the media message mentioned by Donald J. Trump’s tweet, something tells me he made it up — kind of like the way the president does with most statements that fly out of his pie hole … or flutter into cyberspace.