Monthly Archives: September 2018

political news

Big crowds don’t necessarily mean big vote totals

I must offer a word of caution to Beto O’Rourke’s fans who take great pride in the size of the crowds the U.S. senatorial candidate is drawing as he stumps his way across Texas.

The Democratic challenger to Sen. Ted Cruz has my vote. I want him to win in a big way. Cruz hasn’t distinguished himself as a champion for Texas causes and interests; he’s more fixated on his own ambition.

Having said that, Cruz must be considered the favorite to win re-election. Yes, polling indicates a close race. However, Texas is a Republican state. O’Rourke has to to overtake The Cruz Missile quickly and open up a bit of a spread between the two of them.

How does he do that? Well, he is drawing big crowds at rallies in rural Texas. Let me caution O’Rourke’s faithful followers: Big crowds don’t necessarily translate to a winning trajectory.

Example given: the 1972 presidential campaign of Sen. George McGovern.

I was a campus coordinator for Sen. McGovern in my native Oregon. I had returned from the Army in 1970. I was disillusioned about our Vietnam War policy. I spent some time in the war zone and came away confused and somewhat embittered.

I wanted Sen. McGovern to defeat President Nixon. He drew big crowds all across the nation as he campaigned for the presidency. They were vocal, boisterous, optimistic.

My task in college was to register new voters. We got a lot of new voters on the rolls that year. I was proud of my contribution.

On Election Night, it was over … just like that. The president was re-elected in a landslide. 520 electoral votes to 17. He won about 60 percent of the popular vote.

The big crowds, including a huge rally in the final days in downtown Portland, didn’t mean a damn thing!

Will history repeat itself in Texas in 2018? Oh, man, I hope not!

national news

This is how a POTUS with no shame functions

Donald John Trump is actually proud of his shamelessness.

He takes pride, or so it appears, in the notion that he won’t apologize for mistakes. He won’t even acknowledge them. He speaks from his gut and let’s it stand. Or … he doubles or triples down on the thoughtless and arrogant statement that flies out of his mouth, or gets blasted into the Twitter-verse.

Thus, we have a president of the United States refusing to back down on that idiotic, brainless, evidence-free, crass and despicable statement that nearly 3,000 Americans didn’t die when Hurricane Maria blasted through Puerto Rico one year ago.

The president has said, in effect, that the loved ones who lost 2,975 of their own in that terrible storm are fake. They aren’t really grieving. They aren’t mourning their loss.

Trump has disparaged the independent review of the Puerto Rican territorial government that established a death toll that, by golly, exceeded the number of victims who perished when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast in 2005.

Trump tweeted this: “When Trump visited the island territory last October, OFFICIALS told him in a briefing 16 PEOPLE had died from Maria.” The Washington Post. This was long AFTER the hurricane took place. Over many months it went to 64 PEOPLE. Then, like magic, “3000 PEOPLE KILLED.” They hired….

And then this: ….GWU Research to tell them how many people had died in Puerto Rico (how would they not know this?). This method was never done with previous hurricanes because other jurisdictions know how many people were killed. FIFTY TIMES LAST ORIGINAL NUMBER – NO WAY!

Meanwhile, as the Carolina coast was bracing for the Hurricane Florence onslaught, the president had the gall to declare the federal response to Hurricane Maria an “unsung success.”

It was nothing of the sort.

A president with a sense of shame would acknowledge that the government he was elected to lead could have done better.

Not this fellow. He is merely “telling it like it is.”

Disgraceful.

military news

Is the defense boss next one to go?

Oh, I was hoping James Mattis could survive the on-going purge of grownups within the Donald J. Trump administration.

It appears the hope is fading.

Mattis is the defense secretary, a retired U.S. Marine Corps general, a decorated combat veteran, a seriously competent military expert and a man known to be a bona fide check on the president’s lack of knowledge of damn near anything involving foreign/military policy.

He once was one of Trump’s favorites. He’s no longer among those folks, according to The New York Times.

As the Times reports: In the second year of his presidency, Mr. Trump has largely tuned out his national security aides as he feels more confident as commander in chief, the officials said. Facing what is likely to be a heated re-election fight once the 2018 midterms are over, aides said Mr. Trump was pondering whether he wanted someone running the Pentagon who would be more vocally supportive than Mr. Mattis, who is vehemently protective of the American military against perceptions it could be used for political purposes.

Mattis has become a subject of some chatter of late, given the release of Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear.” Mattis reportedly has actually explained to Trump that U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea to “protect us against World War III.” Trump supposedly asked out loud just why in the world do we have those troops on duty in South Korea.

Mattis reportedly has said the president has the attention span of a fifth- or sixth-grader.

Mattis is pushing back

Ah, yes. The grownup speaks a version of the truth about service within an administration run by a man who once claimed to “know about ISIS than the generals.” Actually, he doesn’t … know anything, let alone “more about ISIS.”

There’s this from the Times as well: Mr. Mattis himself is becoming weary, some aides said, of the amount of time spent pushing back against what Defense Department officials think are capricious whims of an erratic president.

This, according to the president, is how a “fine-tuned machine” functions.

Donald Trump is delusional. To the max!

media news

The media hits just keep comin’

I no longer have many friends left at the Amarillo Globe-News, where I worked for nearly 18 years. They’ve all gone on to, um, “pursue other interests,” retired or have been laid off as the newspaper industry continues to struggle in this new media environment.

Here, though, is what I have heard … and I believe this is firm: The newspaper is going to vacate its remaining structure at the corner of Ninth Avenue and Harrison Street, a building it has occupied since 1950. The newspaper will set up its offices in that 31-story bank building formerly known as the Chase Tower, but which will be known soon as the FirstBank Southwest Tower.

This is a profoundly sad development.

Since the early 20th century, the Amarillo Globe-News has been a physical presence in Amarillo and, by association, in the Texas Panhandle. The newspaper reported on community affairs as far away as Dalhart, Perryton, Plainview and Dimmitt. It has retrenched.

The paper even had a presence in Oklahoma Panhandle communities, such as Guymon, Boise City, Woodward. It sold a few copies daily in Liberal, Kan., too, along with running a news bureau out of Clovis, N.M.

It has slashed its physical presence. Its footprint is a lot less visible.

Now the newspaper that once won a Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service is going to be absorbed by another corporate identity.

Those of us who grew up revering newspapers, who practiced the craft of print journalism, who once were associated with media organizations that everyone in the community knew about — even if they didn’t necessarily embrace it — should be saddened by this impending turn of events.

The Harrison Street Building has an inscription over its front door. It says that a “newspaper can be forgiven for lack of wisdom, but not for lack of courage.” It came from the late Gene Howe, the publisher of the Amarillo Globe-Times, the one-time evening newspaper.

They were words to live by if you sought to tell the community’s story to readers who wanted to know about it. The words won’t disappear even after what is left of the Globe-News’s staff leaves that old building for the final time; I trust they’ll continue to appear on the newspaper’s Opinion page masthead.

However, there is something profoundly sad about a newspaper that lacks a physical presence in the community it serves. I get that it will still be there, somewhere, hidden on some upper floor of a skyscraper that will carry another company’s name.

It will not be the same.

education news

Hey, didn’t Hillary make ‘history’ in 2016?

I swear I thought Hillary Rodham Clinton made “history” in 2016 when she became the first female to be nominated for president of the United States by a major political party.

She ran a tough race against Donald J. Trump, but lost the Electoral College vote to the 45th president of the United States.

But wait! The Texas State Board of Education — a body of 15 elected politicians who represent separate districts around the state — wants to remove any historical reference to Clinton from public school textbooks.

It also wants to remove any mention of Helen Keller, the social activist who became the first blind and deaf woman to earn a college degree.

I’m scratching my head over this stuff.

Is this the wave of the future in Texas? Are we doing to deny teaching our students about historical figures because they, um, might be unpopular or controversial?

Hillary Clinton also served for eight years as first lady of the United States. The was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York in 2000 and re-elected in 2006. She then served as secretary of state during President Obama’s first term.

First lady, senator, secretary of state? Then she became a Democratic Party presidential nominee?

That’s unworthy of study in public school curricula?

The SBOE decision is a tentative one. It can reverse itself in November when it casts a final vote.

I hope it does and returns these women of enormous accomplishment to the curricula to be studied by our public school students.

education news, State news

SBOE switches gears: They were ‘heroes’ at the Alamo after all

The Texas State Board of Education came to its senses, with a little push from Gov. Greg Abbott.

The SBOE had voted tentatively to remove the term “hero” from its description of the men who died at the Alamo in 1836. Hey, we all know that they died heroically while defending the mission against superior Mexican armed forces.

SBOE reverses course

The board of education, though, almost knuckled under to some form of “political correctness” by deciding they weren’t heroes after all. Abbott said the SBOE should resist such PC activity. Late this week, the 15-member elected board reversed itself and said the heroes at the Alamo will be labeled as such in Texas public school curricula.

I’m not a native Texan, but I certainly accepted the idea long ago that the men who died in the Alamo battle were heroes. That’s how we were taught in Oregon when I was growing up and studying these historic events.

I’m glad that the SBOE has declared what the rest of us knew already: Those men were heroes.

Donald Trump, legal news, national security, political news

The walls are closing in on the president

I am pretty sure we can toss aside the comment from the White House that Paul Manafort’s guilty plea will have no impact on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 presidential election.

We have come to expect such false bravado from Donald J. Trump’s team. It delivered the goods yet again when Manafort pleaded guilty to two felony charges and gave Mueller a promise to “cooperate” with his probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russians who attacked our electoral system.

Manafort is the biggest fish that Mueller has reeled in. Manafort is the former campaign chairman for Trump. He left the campaign in mid-stride, handing over campaign management duties to Kellyanne Conway.

I, of course, have no way of knowing with any certainty about the mood within the White House. However, when I do the math, I find that two plus two still equals four.

Manafort’s guilty plea and pending cooperation cannot bode well for the president. That brings me to the question of the day: Will the president pardon Manafort and expose himself to accusations of obstruction of justice?

The threat is growing

Trump shouldn’t go there. Then again, he has shown a tendency to do things just because he can. The president has unquestioned power to pardon anyone he chooses. Is this president enough of a fool to do the most foolish thing imaginable at this point in the investigation? I am not putting a single thing past this guy.

Yes, the walls are closing in. However, I won’t predict the president’s downfall. I mean, he wasn’t supposed to win the 2016 election in the first place.

We all know what happened.

environmental news

Ship ahoy, Cajun navy!

Every major event always seems to produce something of a “back story” that brings a smile to our face and expressions of gratitude for the bravery of average Americans.

Hurricane Florence stormed ashore this morning and delivered a punishing blow to the Carolina coastline. It meandered inland and has been “downgraded” to a tropical storm.

Five people have died from the storm’s wrath. We are saddened at that news.

Cajun navy enters the fray

Then we have the Cajun navy, which has raced to the Carolinas from Texas and Lousiana. The Cajun navy is a collection of watercraft. As MSN.com has reported: As Hurricane Florence trudged west off the sea into the Carolinas, an armada of kayaks, fishing boats, shallow-draft duck hunting boats, airboats and pirogues moved north and east from Texas and Louisiana to meet the storm. As the rains and winds began to whip the coastline, the all-volunteer flotilla settled in.

Bring it on, they said. The Cajun Navy has arrived.

The task of this “fleet” has been to rescue Carolinians stranded by the storm’s fury. They have been pulling people out of their flooded homes and motor vehicles and taking them to safety.

Man, this is what Americans do for each other.

There’s more from MSN.com: Just as they did last summer in Texas during Hurricane Harvey, a group of grass-roots, ragtag search and rescuers have moved into Florence’s path, hoping to offer their services to the flooded, the marooned, the injured. Credited with rescuing thousands of people and pets during Harvey’s unprecedented rains, they plan to do it all again, a vigilante crew trying to assist the government’s rescue efforts.

Yes, federal, state and local governments are rallying at this moment to provide assistance. Yet it’s the outpouring of selflessness exemplified by the Cajun navy that gives many of us hope in the goodness of a nation that rushes to the aid of those in distress.

This story fills me with pride.

local news, State news

‘Open borders’: the stuff of demagogues

I am weary in the extreme of Donald John “Demagogue in Chief” Trump’s assertion that opposition to building a wall along our nation’s southern border means a favoring of “open borders.”

Trump wants to build that damn wall. Others don’t want it. I am one who opposes the wall. The nation is full of politicians who oppose construction of a wall, too.

Trump said initially Mexico would pay for it. Mexico responded, um, no we won’t. Now the president wants to stick U.S. taxpayers with the bill.

He’s planning to come to Texas soon to campaign for “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz (which is Trump’s one-time epithet for the Republican U.S. senator). Cruz favors the wall. His Democratic foe, Beto O’Rourke, opposes it. Trump will declare at some undisclosed political rally location that O’Rourke favors “open borders.” He’ll draw cheers, whoops and hollering from the crowd.

It’s a lie. Donald Trump knows it’s a lie, but he’ll say it time and again anyway.

I have grown weary of the demagoguery that keeps flowing from the president’s pie hole. This “open borders” canard is just one statement that I cannot let stand.

For the record, I favor stronger border security measures along our borders — south and north. I mean, if we’re going to insist on cracking down on illegal immigrants who try to sneak in along our southern border, then let’s devote more emphasis and energy along our northern border with Canada.

Walling off this nation from a neighbor with whom we share a 2,000-mile-long border is utterly un-American on its face. That doesn’t bother Trump, who took office without an understanding at any level of what this nation has stood for since its creation in the 18th century.

Does any reasonable American favor an “open border” where we don’t enforce immigration laws? Of course not!

Yet that doesn’t stop the demagogue who sits behind the big desk in the Oval Office from uttering the disgraceful rhetoric that suggests otherwise.

I grew sick of it long ago.

local news, political news, State news

O’Rourke, Cruz settle it: three debates … bring it!

2 Comments

Beto O’Rourke pitched initially a plan to stage six debates with the man he wants to beat in this year’s midterm election to the U.S. Senate seat in Texas.

Ted Cruz balked. Ah, but the candidates have settled on three debates. One in Dallas, one in Houston and one in San Antonio.

This is good news for Texans who are interested in this contest. O’Rourke is the Democratic challenger to the Republican Cruz. I’ve already laid out my preference: I want O’Rourke to win.

But the notion that the men will debate three times is good for the process. The Dallas event will focus on domestic policy; same for the Houston debate; the San Antonio debate is going to focus half on domestic, half on foreign policy.

Debates are an important element in helping voters decide for whom to vote. Polling in this race suggests a still-large body of undecided Texans, although I remain a bit dubious that those who say they’re undecided are actually telling pollsters the truth.

But I’m glad that O’Rourke and Cruz will share a stage. They’ll get to answer questions, perhaps will get to pepper each other with questions. They’ll get to demonstrate their mental acuity and quickness on their feet.

It well might be that six debates would have been too much. Voters can — and often do — grow weary of seeing and hearing too much from politicians.

I’ll settle for three debates.

Bring it, gentlemen!