Monthly Archives: February 2019

local news

Amarillo boosting its red-light camera deployment

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is on record saying he believes the state ought to yank cities’ authority to deploy red-light cameras at dangerous intersections.

Amarillo has responded to that declaration by increasing the number of cameras it has posted around the city from nine to 12.

Take that, Gov. Abbott!

I remain a supporter of the technology that the city uses to assist in catching red-light runners in the act of breaking the law.

The city is going to add seven cameras at intersections, while removing four cameras from other intersections. Thus, the city is continuing to use the technology to assist the police department. Moreover, the city is upgrading red-light camera assemblies at five intersections.

So, what does that mean for the future of the technology? I suppose you can say it lies in the hands of the Texas Legislature. Amarillo has two House members representing the city: Republicans John Smithee and Four Price; it also has a state senator, Republican Kel Seliger, who managed to make some news in recent days because of his dispute with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

What do these three men believe about the red-light cameras? I haven’t asked them directly. Maybe I will, even though I no longer live in Amarillo.

I don’t see any such cameras on the job in Collin County, where my wife and I now live. I don’t see them in Fairview, or Allen, or McKinney or in Princeton — where we’ll be moving into our new home quite soon. I would not object to any city in Collin County deploying these devices. The way I figure it, if it deters red-light runners then they are doing their job.

As for Amarillo’s red-light cameras, consider this little tidbit: Texas Department of Transportation officials say that the three intersections where the cameras are being removed recorded just four collisions from July 2016 to the end of June 2017. They are heavily traveled thoroughfares, so I am going to presume that the cameras did their job.

Cities should be allowed to determine for themselves whether or where to deploy these devices. They don’t need Bigger Brother looking over them.

local news

Puppy Tales, Part 65: A sibling . . . maybe?

Psst. Don’t let this get out just yet, but there might be a surprise awaiting Toby the Puppy in a few months.

When he joined our family more than four years ago, he entered a household with two cats: Socks and Mittens. Neither of his new siblings thought much of him when he took up residence in our home. They viewed him initially as an uninvited guest.

Socks grew to tolerate the new family member; Mittens, not so much. We lost them both eventually. They had grown older and had lived great lives with us. Then we just had Toby. He took over right away. It was love at first sight; us with him and vice versa.

Well, Toby’s mother and I are talking openly now about adopting another furry family member. It’s going to occur in a few months. We have a couple of trips to take in our fifth wheel RV. We’re heading soon to New Orleans by way of the Hill Country and the Golden Triangle. Later this year, probably in late summer, we’re hoping to take a “bucket list” journey across Canada; we would venture northwest toward Vancouver and head east along Highway 1 toward the Maritime Provinces. There might be a short trip or two between those two adventures.

After that epic journey way up north, though, we just might surprise Toby the Puppy.

We’ve long been cat parents. We raised many kitties over our many years together. Toby joined us in September 2014 in a strange fashion. However, we love him so very much. We tell him so every day. He knows what we are saying when we tell him we love him.

How might he react to a feline addition to our family? I am as confident as I can be that he will adapt beautifully. Toby is as well-adjusted, well-behaved and settled a canine as I can imagine.

So, with that, we intend to keep it a secret from Toby the Puppy until the moment we decide to expand our family.

Mum’s the word.

national news

Tax returns? Are they about to surface — finally?

Donald J. Trump’s mysterious tax returns might be about to see the light of day. Finally!

More than two years ago the one-time real estate mogul and reality TV celebrity announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. He then declined to do what other major-party candidates had done since 1976, which is release their personal income tax returns for public scrutiny.

Trump cited a “routine” tax audit. The Internal Revenue Service doesn’t comment on specific audits, but it said immediately that an audit doesn’t preclude release of returns.

That didn’t persuade Trump to do the right thing. He has kept ’em out of public view.

Now comes the House of Representatives with its new Democratic majority. The House Ways and Means Committee appears primed to get those returns, hold hearings and then will seek to release them. The president is likely to fight that effort — even though he says he has nothing to hide!

Wow! What do you think about that?

Republicans suggest Democrats are applying a double standard, that they aren’t demanding it of over presidential candidates. Others, though, have released those returns. Only the president has declined to follow a 40-plus-year political custom.

Think for just a moment:

  • Does a “routine” tax audit drag on for years? No. It doesn’t.
  • Has the president ever produced a letter from the IRS notifying him of an audit? I haven’t seen it. Have you?
  • If the president says there’s nothing to hide, no wrongdoing to be discovered, why doesn’t he release them? Well, I believe he is lying.

That leaves us with his tax returns still in hiding.

The House Ways and Means Committee says it is seeking the tax returns simply for “oversight” purposes, that it isn’t motivated by any “gotcha” effort. Whatever the motives, it is important — for the sake of the transparency that Trump advocates — for the public to see precisely how the nation’s top elected official has earned his fortune.

The president calls it “harassment.” He blames Democrats for conducting a witch hunt. He insists he has done nothing wrong, just as he said that there’s no evidence of “collusion” with Russian election thieves. His behavior and bullying of special counsel Robert Mueller III suggest something quite different.

I remain one of those nosy-Nora Americans who has every right to insist on seeing how the president of the United States has earned his fortune, whether he has followed the letter of the law.

Let us remember this critical point: The president works for us. We are the bosses. Not him.

national news

Get ready for the pounding, Mr. POTUS

Donald J. Trump is going to get a social media whipping over a gaffe he uttered today at the National Prayer Breakfast.

He made a reference to those who fought for “the abolition of civil rights.” As the saying goes, “Oops.”

I’m going to give the president a pass on this one. That kind of thing happens. Public figures say things mistakenly. They get thoughts muddled in their heads from time to time.

I do have two questions: Was the president reading those remarks on the Teleprompter or did he blurt it out extemporaneously?

I do hope it was an ad-libbed gaffe, which would be a bit more understandable than if he read it off some prepared text.

If it’s the latter, then we have to ask: Did the text actually contain that gaffe? If not, then what did the president think he was reading?

If Trump was reading the text and recited what was scrolling up on the device politicians use to keep them on track, well . . . then someone has some serious explaining to do.

national news

Pelosi isn’t the first to sit

The Internet is alive with idiotic chatter, as always.

Part of that chatter involves House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s reaction to most of Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech the other evening.

The goofballs out there just couldn’t understand why the speaker didn’t lead the cheers for the president. The picture I posted here, of course, tells the story of what is customary at these events.

Speaker Paul Ryan belongs to a different party than President Barack Obama. The picture shows Vice President Joe Biden clapping while Speaker Ryan sits there. Stone-faced. Expressionless. Have you ever noticed the dour look that Ryan’s GOP predecessor as speaker, John Boehner, would display when President Obama was being cheered by Democrats?

It’s all part of the time-honored game. Speakers from the opposing party do stand — on occasion — when the president says something that engenders bipartisan cheers. Trump did so the other night on more than one occasion and, yes, Pelosi joined Vice President Mike Pence in applauding the president.

Speaker Tip O’Neill sat on his hands often whenever President Reagan drew whoops and hollers from the GOP lawmakers. Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich did the same thing when President Clinton fired up the partisans on the other side. Democratic Speakers Jim Wright and Tom Foley also played the game when Republican presidents were cheered by their congressional brethren.

So, let’s cool it with the malarkey about Speaker Pelosi’s SOTU behavior. She did what all her predecessors have done since the beginning of the Republic.

national news

Virginia: It’s for political discomfort

They say that “Virginia is for lovers,” which is a slogan the state uses to market itself to the rest of the world.

These days, though, the state is taking on a whole new definition. It’s now a place where the highest echelon of the state’s government is squirming in extreme discomfort.

Gov. Ralph Northam is facing an enormous amount of pressure to resign after a picture surfaced on his medical school yearbook page showing two men, one of them in black face, the other in a Ku Klux Klan outfit. Northam’s name is on the page. He at first apologized for the photo, then said he wasn’t either of the men depicted in it and has resisted demands that he quit the governor’s office.

Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, the next in line for the top job in Richmond, has accused of sexual assault by a woman who said he raped her in a hotel room in 2004. Fairfax said the encounter was “consensual,” and has denied doing anything wrong. He’s also issued a type of apology for an act he said he didn’t commit. Go figure.

Attorney General Mark Herring, the next in line for the governor’s office after Fairfax, now reportedly appeared in black face in the 1980s, igniting yet another firestorm in the Virginia statehouse. Herring admitted to wearing black makeup to look like a rapper.

All three of these fellows are facing pressure to quit. They’re all Democrats. The next individual in line to take the top job, if all of them quit — as they likely should do — is the speaker of the Virginia House of Representatives. He’s a Republican.

It goes without saying that the balance of power in a significant “swing state” that has become vital to presidential candidates is teetering on the brink of a major shift.

Does all of this matter to a national audience? You bet it does! We’re talking about race relations and in the age of the #MeToo movement, any reference to sexual assault or harassment lifts it onto the national stage.

Oh . . . brother!

To think that Texas politics has been called a “contact sport.” In Virginia, it has become a “collision sport.” 

legal news

Time of My Life, Part 18: Serving as a judicial watchdog

Every so often reporters and editors encounter public officials who actually appreciate the work of holding those officials accountable for their actions.

I met a few of those folks along the way during my 37 years as a journalist. One of those individuals stands out. I want to discuss him briefly to demonstrate that some individuals do not view the media as “the enemy of the people.”

I arrived at the Amarillo Globe-News in January 1995 after spending nearly 11 years as editorial page editor of the Beaumont Enterprise way down yonder in the Golden Triangle region of the Gulf Coast.

We got into our share of scrapes in Beaumont. One fight we had was with a couple of state district judges in Jefferson County. They presided over courts with criminal jurisdiction, meaning that they only tried criminal cases; the civil caseloads were sent to other judges in Jefferson County.

Well, these two judges had to face the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct, which had received a complaint about the judges’ sentencing practices. These two jurists were in the habit of backdating sentences for individuals convicted of crimes. Example: If someone committed a crime on Jan. 1, but was convicted on Dec. 30, the judge would sentence the individual to a prison term that began prior to the commission of the crime. Such a sentencing practice dramatically reduced the amount of time the individual would serve behind bars.

Such sentencing policies don’t sit well with prosecutors. The judicial ethics commission got a complaint and it dropped the hammer on the two judges. It issued a public reprimand, which in the world of judicial punishment is a real big deal.

We at the Beaumont Enterprise editorialized in support of the Commission on Judicial Conduct’s ruling. We were highly critical of the backdated sentences that were handed down. Our criticism of the local judges obviously angered the two men, but that didn’t dissuade us from calling it the way we saw it.

My time in Beaumont ended and I gravitated to the Panhandle in early 1995. I quickly made the acquaintance of one of the judges who punished the two judges in Beaumont. He was John Boyd, chief justice of the 7th Texas Court of Appeals headquartered in Amarillo.

Justice Boyd knew of my background and for years after our first meeting he would invariably bring up the editorial support we gave to the judicial conduct panel on which he served. He would tell others with whom we would meet of the position we took to endorse the punishment handed out to those backdating judges.

I always appreciated — and still do! — the recognition that we sought only to hold judges accountable for their actions. If any of “our” judges got stepped on, well, so be it.

environmental news

Here is your ‘national emergency,’ Mr. President

Donald Trump keeps yapping and yammering about the “national emergency” he insists is occurring on our nation’s southern border.

I continue to doubt that such an emergency actually exists. I do know of an actual emergency that the president and his fellow Republicans keep ignoring.

It involves climate change, the meteorological condition known formerly as global warming. That emergency is real. It’s occurring 24/7. It is bringing harm to Earth, the only planet we are able to inhabit.

Here is a bit of good news. The Democratically controlled U.S. House of Representatives today had an actual hearing to discuss climate change. It was the first such hearing in about eight years. The GOP has controlled the House and it decided that climate change was a phony issue. It’s a “hoax,” as Donald Trump prefers to call it.

It’s not a hoax. It’s real. It is posing an existential threat to our coastal regions. It is putting our polar wildlife in dire peril. Polar ice caps are melting, creating a significant loss of hunting habitat in the Arctic for polar bears.

The hearings in Congress, which must continue, are meant to expose further the cause for this changing climate. Scientists from across the spectrum are arguing that human beings are a primary cause for the changing climate on Earth. Those carbon emissions are depleting oxygen, causing the atmosphere to warm at dangerous levels.

I know that’s at times a tough thing to swallow during winter months. The Upper Midwest is enduring frigid temperatures, causing climate change deniers to say, “See? We told you that climate change is ‘fake news.’ It’s phony. It ain’t happening.”

Except that it is happening.

Can we stop it? Slow it? Can we prevent Earth from suffering irreparable damage? Those, folks, are the questions we need to explore. I am glad to know that a change in the congressional command structure in one legislative chamber is going to elevate this discussion to where it belongs.

legal news, State news

By all means, change the Texas judicial election system!

Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Hecht has just elevated himself greatly among those of us who detest the way the state elects its judges.

Chief Justice Hecht wants the Legislature to do away with partisan election of judges. He wants a total overhaul of the judicial election system. He has called on merit selection and retention elections to replace the ghastly status quo in which highly qualified judges are tossed aside on a strictly partisan basis.

Hecht has walked this path before. I suppose I just haven’t been paying careful enough attention until now.

To be clear, the chief justice was stung by the loss of key Republican judges in the 2018 midterm election. Appellate courts flipped from GOP to Democratic control, which I guess alarms the Republican chief justice.

Whatever the case, or his motives, I totally support his call for judicial election reform.

Hecht made his remarks in his State of the Judiciary speech. He said, “Make no mistake: A judicial selection system that continues to sow the political wind will reap the whirlwind.”

So it happened in 2018. And so it has gotten the attention once again of the state’s top civil appellate court’s chief justice.

I long have bemoaned the partisan election of judges in Texas. I have sought over the course of many years in Texas to get judges and judicial candidates to explain to me the “difference between Democratic and Republican justice.” Not a single one of them ever explained the difference in any fashion that made a lick of sense.

To be clear about another point as well, not all judges want the kind of reform that Hecht has proposed. I remember asking the late state Sen. (and later a Supreme Court justice) Oscar Mauzy of Dallas whether we should go to a form of merit selection for judges. He came unglued. Mauzy, a ferocious, partisan Democrat, said appointing judges was akin to a “communist” system of justice. He loved running as a Democrat and wasn’t about to support any change in the Texas judicial election system.

Texas Republicans long have prospered in these judicial contests. The Supreme Court and the Court of Criminal Appeals — the state’s two highest appellate courts — comprise 18 GOP jurists. Thus, to hear a Republican chief justice call once again for this significant judicial reform is, well, the rarest of calls.

Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice, for trying to pound some sense into the state’s political power structure.

Donald Trump, national news

If only he had pledged an end to insults and innuendo

Donald Trump sought to strike some sweet notes during his State of the Union speech, asking for an end to politics of revenge, seeking more cooperation and compromise and less confrontation.

If only the president had made one more pledge, one that I wish would come from his mouth. I wish he would pledge an end to insult and innuendo.

To my ears, those have been the hallmarks of Trump’s time as president. He continues to hurl insults at his foes. He denigrates opponents’ patriotism, their intellect, their motives.

He just recently said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a “danger” to the country. Why? Because she resists spending billions of dollars to build The Wall along our southern border; she pushes back on the president’s effort to ascribe certain motives behind why she believes what she believes.

Trump’s call for compromise and his plea to reject revenge is fine as far as it goes.

The coarseness of the current political debate is attributable directly to the president’s continuing use of insults and innuendo. I won’t suggest that he has caused the coarseness solely, but he at the very minimum helps perpetuate it by the manner in which he hits back at critics.

Trump’s friends keep justifying his crude language by citing his obvious lack of fluency in politic-speak. He doesn’t utter politically correct sentences, they say; the president speaks from his gut while “telling it like it is.”

Well, that’s their view. It ain’t mine. Donald Trump cannot respond without hurling a verbal brickbat.

That doesn’t make America great . . . again.