Monthly Archives: January 2019

national news

Wishing the new Congress well as it gets to work

This picture was published today in The New York Times, which wrote a feature on the new Congress that takes office today.

The photo illustrates the new look. On the left are nine new Democratic members; nine new Republicans are on the right.

I see a Muslim woman, a well-known self-proclaimed socialist and an Asian among the Democrats. I notice a wounded veteran of the Iraq War, a former Florida governor and the 2012 GOP presidential nominee on the right.

They join a House of Representatives that will be under Democratic control for the first time since 2011. The Senate will be nominally more Republican than it was during the past two years.

They all face amazing challenges ahead. They have to find a way to reopen the government. Once they get that done, and let’s hope it is soon, they will deal with a whole array of knotty matters: immigration, climate change, judicial appointments, war and peace. Their plate will be heaping.

The House will comprise more women than ever. The number of veterans in both chambers is increasing, which also is a good thing.

So, let’s wish them all the best of luck. Let them also exhibit wisdom and discernment.

It’s time to get busy.

media news

‘Fair and balanced’? Sure thing

They call themselves the “Fox ‘News’ Channel.” It’s a conservative-leaning cable network that has purported to present the “news” in a “fair and balanced” manner.

Well, check out the caption under the TV image that flashed on the Fox “News” Channel. It parrots the epithet that Donald J. Trump has used to disparage U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who has just announced the formation of an exploratory committee to help her decide to run for president in 2020.

The “Pocahontas” label, of course, is Trump’s way of ridiculing Warren’s contention that she has some Native American blood in her background. The president has decided Warren’s claim is without merit, so he has hung that label on her.

Fox has glommed onto it as well.

Is that how one might define a mainstream “news” network’s “fair and balanced” coverage of a still-developing presidential campaign?

Imagine what political conservatives might think — and say — if CNN or MSNBC broadcast an image of Donald Trump with the caption that read “Cadet Bone Spur,” or “Liar in Chief,” or, well . . . you get the idea.

The Fox “News” Channel simply demonstrates yet again that it is neither “fair” or “balanced.” It serves instead as a de facto presidential mouthpiece.

Disgraceful.

national news

Trump v. Pelosi: May the better person win

Donald Trump apparently has difficulty with strong, opinionated women. I make that presumption based on how he reacts to their challenges to him. He resorts to insulting them with varying levels of disgusting references.

So it is against that backdrop that the president of the United States is entering a new era in his so-far futile attempt at learning how to govern. The Woman of the House will be Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who is returning to her post as speaker of the House, one half of the legislative branch of the federal government.

I have this sneaking, gnawing suspicion that the president is not going to do well as he battles Pelosi over legislative priorities.

You see, Pelosi is something that her immediate predecessor Paul Ryan is not. She is no patsy who is likely to roll over to demands from (a) the White House and (b) rebellious members of her own partisan caucus. Indeed, Ryan’s predecessor as speaker, John Boehner, quit the speakership and the House because he got fed up with the TEA Party wing of the GOP House caucus.

Pelosi certainly faces her own challenges from the far-left-wing base of her Democratic caucus. Do you think she’s going to knuckle under to its every demand? My gut tells me “no.” She is a stern leader, but one who also knows how to schmooze malcontents.

Trump possesses none of those political skills. He barks insults, makes demands and little happens. He gets on his Twitter feed and fires off policy pronouncements, surprising his own key aides and Cabinet. He calls himself a razzle-dazzle dealmaker, but couldn’t cobble together a deal to keep the government functioning even when he and his Republican Party controlled the entire Congress and the White House.

That’s is changing, effective today.

Nancy Pelosi will take the speaker’s gavel. Democrats will manage the legislative flow from the House. She will do battle when necessary with her GOP House “friends” as well as those who still control matters at the other end of the Capitol Building, the Senate.

Donald Trump will be whipsawed by the back-and-forth in the House.

Checks and balances, anyone?

Here we go!

State news

This plaque is a museum piece

The presumptive speaker of the Texas House of Representatives is making his presence felt even before the next Legislature convenes.

Republican Dennis Bonnen has joined the chorus of those who want to remove a plaque in the State Capitol Building that declares that the Civil War was “not a rebellion” and that its “underlying cause (was not) to retain slavery.”

Duh! Of course it was to keep allowing people to enslave fellow human beings. And, yes, it was a rebellion by 13 states comprising the Confederate States of America to separate from the United States of America.

Bonnen has joined Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, a fellow Republican, in calling for the removal of the plaque. Indeed, Gov. Greg Abbott — yet another GOP officeholder — has assigned a board in charge with managing state grounds to consider whether to remove the plaque. Abbott’s decision comes after Attorney General Ken Paxton ruled that the board has the authority to remove the plaque if it sees fit to do so.

The plaque contains text under the heading “Children of the Confederacy Creed.” It revises history to suggest that the Civil War, which began when Confederates opened fire on the Union garrison stationed in Charleston, S.C., was not a rebellion. It most certainly was!

As for the slavery issue, the CSA formed to preserve what it called “states’ rights,” which included the “right” for citizens to keep owning slaves, denying fellow human beings any semblance of citizenship.

According to the Texas Tribune, state Rep. Eric Johnson, D-Dallas, whose office is next to the plaque, wrote Texas Historic Preservation Board, telling the agency that the plaque “is not historically accurate in the slightest, to which any legitimate, peer-reviewed Civil War historian will attest.”

Yep, the plaque needs to come down. As George P. Bush stated in a tweet, “these displays belong in museums, not in our state capitol.”

national news

The clown show is getting even more bizarre

That astonishing sideshow that commenced today in the Cabinet Room of the White House left me fairly speechless.

Why? Because there is too much on which to comment. Donald Trump’s non-stop riff covering the government shutdown, The Wall, the military, James Mattis’ resignation/firing, and God knows what else has left many of us out here grasping for something on which to analyze.

I’ll go with two items that jumped out at me.

Trump said, “I think I would have been a good general, but who knows?” Well, Mr. President, you had your chance back in the 1960s. While many of us were answering the call to duty during the Vietnam War, young Donald Trump received (cough, cough!) medical deferments associated with, um, bone spurs.

I had flat feet in 1968, which I always thought was a disqualifier. The U.S. Army induction center in Portland, Ore., didn’t accept that idea. So . . .  off I went.

The future president got five deferments. The New York Times recently revealed that the circumstances of those deferments were at best questionable, that the doctor who “diagnosed” the bone spurs allegedly did so as a favor to young Donald’s father, Fred. Thus, I won’t buy into his goofy notion about how good a general he would have been.

Then he said this about James Mattis, the now-former secretary of defense. “What did I get out of” his service? “Not much,” Trump said.

OK. Let’s see. The oath that Mattis took was to protect the country, to serve the country, to defend the Constitution. He did not swear an oath to serve the president. He did not declare his adherence to the individual who nominated him to run the Pentagon.

Then the president said he “essentially” fired the defense secretary.

Right there is yet another demonstration from Donald Trump that this individual does not understand the true meaning of public service. He has shown one more time how patently unfit he is to serve as commander in chief of the finest military apparatus the world has ever seen.

media news, national news, political news

Does voting compromise one’s objectivity?

Every now and then you hear journalists say something like this: I don’t vote because doing so would compromise my ability to cover candidates fairly.

You even hear such things from public officials, namely those in the legal or law enforcement professions. They don’t vote because they want to be able to investigate wrongdoing without regard to whether they are investigating a politician they might have endorsed with their ballot.

I do not harbor such reticence. I have voted in every election since I became eligible to vote, which was, shall we say, a long time ago. I do so with pride. I take a great deal of interest in the political and electoral process.

I was a journalist for more than 37 years. I spent most of those years as an opinion writer and editor of opinion pages.

Not one time did I ever ponder whether my job interfered with my performing a basic act of good citizenship, which is voting for the candidates of my choice or deciding on the issues of the day.

During the years I wrote editorials for newspapers in Oregon and Texas, I authored endorsements for candidates who did not get my vote at the ballot box. I saw no conflict there.

Of course it helped that none of the newspapers where I wrote those editorials — one in Oregon and two in Texas — required me to put my name on the editorials. I wrote them on behalf of the newspaper and its editorial board, which usually comprised me, the publisher and at times the editorial page staff.

Did the issue of whether I should vote in elections ever come up? No. Publishers to whom I reported never raised the issue. Nor did the executive editor who was my supervisor in Beaumont, Texas. It was generally understood that we were free to exercise our right to vote.

Prior to becoming an opinion writer and editor, I did work as a general assignment reporter who covered city councils, school boards, county commissions as well as writing features — and the occasional investigative piece. The issue of who got my vote never came up. No sources ever asked it of me and I never brought it up to any of them; we do vote in secret, correct?

I view voting as a fundamental right. I exercised it with unbridled enthusiasm when I was working for a living.

Did it inhibit my ability to do my job? Not for a single instant!

national news

Tax returns might answer our questions about Trump, Russia

I cannot shake the feeling that the most interesting and sought-after findings in Robert Mueller’s investigation into Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign will exist in the tax returns the president has refused to release for public scrutiny.

The special counsel reportedly is winding his exhaustive probe down. He’s been at since mid-2017 when the Justice Department hired him to examine those allegations of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russian goons who interfered with our electoral process.

The tax returns keep refusing to go away.

Trump promised to release them after the Internal Revenue Service completed an audit. The IRS said an audit doesn’t preclude release of returns. Trump has gone silent on the tax returns, which presidential candidates dating back to 1976 have opened up for public review. The idea is to give the public a full accounting of the financial activities of the men and women seeking to become our head of state.

Trump hasn’t gone there. He won’t do it. He is breaking a campaign pledge, kind of how he pledged to make Mexico pay for The Wall he wants to build along our southern border.

Mueller’s investigation has been thorough, or so we have been led to believe. I happen to accept the notion that the former FBI director, a highly efficient prosecutor, has discovered a mountain of information about the president.

My strong sense echoes what many of us have heard already, that he has obtained those tax returns or at minimum has developed enough knowledge of what is in them. The returns well might reveal a trove of information about the nature of Trump’s business dealings around the world. After all, he has boasted repeatedly about the vastness of his empire — even though he has told us he has “no deals” in Russia. And we believe him, right?

The tax returns have been of considerable interest to many of us, especially those of us who have suspected that Donald Trump isn’t quite the fellow he presented himself to be, the kind of guy who won enough Electoral College votes to be elected to the only public office he ever has sought.

It might be that Mueller’s findings won’t reveal a thing about Donald Trump’s business dealings. However, I still insist, along with others, that the president should show us what is in those returns to allow us to make that determination for ourselves.

If he won’t, then I have this hunch that special counsel Robert Mueller will do it for him.

political news

‘Calculated political treachery’?

“Make no mistake. This was calculated political treachery,” Jevon O.A. Williams wrote to other Republican National Committee members in the wake of an op-ed penned by former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

Hmm. Let me think about that one. Actually it isn’t. It isn’t treacherous for a serious politician such as Romney to speak candidly and honestly about a president who he believes lacks the essential character to be the kind of leader the nation deserves.

That’s what Romney did in his essay published on New Year’s Day by the Washington Post.

He spoke truth to power, as the saying goes.

Donald Trump wants Romney to be a “team player.” He said today in a bizarre White House press “availability” that he thought Romney would have waited a little longer before launching his attack on the president.

Whatever. The RNC member from the Virgin Islands said this in his note to the committee: “I couldn’t believe this was coming from our party’s 2012 nominee, who despite differences in politics, still professes to be a Republican. With Republicans like him who needs Democrats.”

In truth, Mitt Romney is more of an actual Republican than the president of the United States.

Jevon Williams should reconsider his view of GOP purity.

national news

Take a few minutes and listen to this man

The video attached to this blog post is about 17 minutes long. It’s of Mitt Romney talking ostensibly about the “nominating process” for president of the United States.

In fact nearly all of it is a barrage of criticism leveled at Donald J. Trump, who in 2016 was the leading candidate for the Republican Party presidential nomination.

Buried deeply inside the middle of the speech is a brief, but equally scathing criticism of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democrats’ nominee in 2016. But it’s 2012 GOP presidential nominee’s critique of Trump that got all the headlines when he first delivered it.

Seriously, I urge you to take just a few minutes from your busy day and listen to these remarks. They are prescient and, in my view, so very accurate.

national news

Mitt shows his hand regarding POTUS

Well, that didn’t take long.

Utah Republican U.S. Sen.-elect Mitt Romney, who takes office later this week, wasted no time in establishing himself as a Donald Trump watchdog on Capitol Hill.

I am thrilled to read what the new senator had to say about the president of the United States.

I also am delighted to know that he poked the president sufficiently to prompt yet another Twitter response, calling on Mitt to be a “team player” and urged him to concentrate on issues such as, oh, border security.

Back to the point of Mitt’s essay published New Year’s Day in the Washington Post. He said Trump has taken the Republican Party to new lows. He questions the president’s principles, his competence, his commitment to the office he occupies.

What’s even more fascinating is the Republican Party’s response to Romney’s criticism. A GOP RNC member from the Virgin Islands is pitching an idea to make it more difficult for someone to challenge Trump in the upcoming presidential election. Current rules apparently give a well-funded challenger a relatively clear path to challenging an incumbent president.

The RNC member notes that no GOP incumbent who has faced a primary challenge has been returned to office. Two of them come immediately to mind: President Ford in 1976 and President Bush in 1992.

Read the Romney essay here.

Trump, of course, has pointed out that Romney lost the 2012 election as the GOP nominee to President Obama, while he won in 2016. I’ll just add that Romney faced a more formidable opponent in Obama than Trump did in defeating Hillary Rodham Clinton. But that’s beside the point.

The relevant point is that Utah’s new junior senator has presented himself as a serious member of the U.S. Senate, someone who’s been around a while and understands government and the way it works. What’s more, his personal background suggests that he is a credible critic of a president who lacks the “character” we need in our head of state.

What follows is a snippet of Romney’s essay:

To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow “our better angels.” A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit. With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.

There you go.