Monthly Archives: May 2019

national news

‘Consensual rape’? No such thing, buster

A Republican state lawmaker has joined the ranks of politicians who “misspeak” when they discuss the rape of an individual.

The latest inductee into the Rhetorical Hall of Shame is Missouri state Rep. Barry Hovis, who declared that most rapes occur during dates or when a woman “consents” to it.

Yes, he called it “consensual rape.” The reason for the discussion in the first place is the Missouri Legislature’s action on a bill that outlaws abortion with only one exception: the health of the mother.

Rape or incest don’t qualify as exceptions, under the proposed Missouri law.

Rep. Hovis, of course, was dead wrong in calling an act of violence against a person to be a “consensual” event. Rape is rape. No one “consents” to being sexually assaulted against their will.

Of course, Hovis said he “misspoke”; he added that he doesn’t believe rape is “consensual.”

Too late, bub. The damage is done.

local news

City turning into a form of ‘urban eye candy’

AMARILLO, Texas — We were walking this morning to an appointment we had with someone in her office at Seventh Avenue and Taylor Street when my wife spoke up.

“You know, the city certainly is a lot more attractive to the eye than it used to be, when we first moved here” in early 1995, she said.

To which I said, “Absolutely!” As we drove toward our appointment we couldn’t help but notice the appearance of Polk Street, Amarillo’s one-time “main drag,” the place where kids used to hang out, where adults did the bulk of their retail shopping.

Yes, the city’s physical appearance has leaped way past where it used to stand back when we first laid eyes on Amarillo more than 24 years ago.

The Potter County Courthouse square is all dolled up. They’re tearing the daylights out of the formerly rotting hulk called the Barfield Building. The Paramount Theater building remains full of activity. Polk Street is busy these days with lunchtime crowds deciding where to eat. A bit west of Polk we see that the West Texas A&M University Amarillo campus is all but complete inside what used to be called the Commerce Building.

I am acutely aware of the political turmoil that has accompanied the city’s work toward downtown revival. Some folks like it. Others dislike it. Some of the city’s power elite have been accused of feathering their own bank accounts.

We don’t get the chance any longer to watch the downtown district repurpose itself in real time. We only get to take a gander at where it is in the moment.

At this moment, therefore, we happened to notice that the city’s central business and entertainment district is looking much more appealing than it used to look.

How in the world is that a bad thing?

local news

CAVE people: Eating their words?

A friend of mine — who communicates with me these days on social media — brought up an unofficial group of Amarillo-area residents who have had their heads handed to them.

He mentioned “CAVE” people. “CAVE” is an acronym for Citizens Against Virtually Everything. I commented briefly the other day about how the Amarillo Sod Poodles, the city’s new Texas League baseball franchise, are leading the league in average attendance while playing ball at Hodgetown, the new 7,000-seat ballpark in downtown Amarillo.

My friend noted that the CAVE folks were “against” the baseball team, against building the ballpark, against efforts to revive Amarillo’s once-moribund downtown district.

The CAVE folks aren’t an official group, such as Amarillo Matters, which has formed to promote downtown revitalization and other economic development efforts.

But they’re out there.

Sure, there has been healthy skepticism about downtown efforts. Some folks want he Herring Hotel to get a boost from City Hall. Others have lamented the absence — yet! — of any retail outlets springing up in that parking garage across the street from Hodgetown.

I do recall the CAVE cadre/cabal saying the multipurpose event venue would fall flat. I’m happy to notice, even from some distance these days, that the MPEV hasn’t done what the CAVErs predicted.

If anything, it is proving — and, yes, it’s still early — to be one of the wisest investments the city has made since, oh, the arrival in 1999 of the Bell/Textron aircraft assembly plant next to Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport.

That project has worked out well. I believe the Sod Poodles, Hodgetown and the city’s effort to pump new life into downtown will work out, too.

national news

Abortion-ban law blowback: a big surprise

I have to admit to being quite surprised at much of the response to the Alabama Legislature’s decision to ban virtually all abortion in that state.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed the bill into law. Democratic/progressive response has been predictable: Alabama has launched an assault against women’s reproductive rights, the lefties are saying . . . correctly, in my view.

But then there’s been a negative response from the Republican/conservative movement.

Get a load of this from Tomi Lahren, a right-wing commentator and contributor to the Fox News Channel. Lahren calls herself a “pro-choice” conservative who favors limited government involvement in people’s lives. She wrote: “I’m . . . someone that loves the Constitution, I’m someone that’s for limited government. So I can’t sit here and be a hypocrite and say ‘I’m for limited government, but I think the government should decide what women do with their bodies.'”

Televangelist Pat Robertson said the law is too harsh, too “extreme.” Lahren said it won’t save any lives because it “forces women into more dangerous methods, other states or countries.”

This debate is causing my head to spin. I used to think the abortion divide fell along certain partisan and ideological lines.

The Alabama law has just blurred those differences beyond my ability to recognize them.

national news

How does the NRA defend this?

Here’s a statistic that makes me quake.

The United States of America experienced 288 school shootings since 2009. The punchline? That number is 57 times greater than six other industrialized nations combined.

The other nations measured were the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany, Italy and Canada.

Fifty-seven times greater!

Jaw-dropping, yes?

And yet . . .

Gun-rights groups led by the National Rifle Association continue to tell us that we cannot enact constitutional legislation that would somehow stem that terrible tide. How in the name of good government does the NRA defend this view?

I don’t have a legislative cure in mind. Congress cannot muster up the guts to enact universal background checks for every individual who purchases a firearm. Why? Well, I have concluded that the NRA has bullied members into cowering away from taking any measures that would make it harder to buy a gun.

I will not accept the notion that any legislation would violate the Second Amendment guarantee citizens’ right to “keep and bear arms.”

Yet the demagogues keep yammering about how politicians are intent on “destroying” the Second Amendment, how they are dedicated to “taking your guns away.”

They are wrong.

The statistic about the number of school shootings tells me that we have to stop the bloodbath. I mean, Donald Trump pledged during inaugural speech to stop “this American carnage.”

Yes. It needs to stop. Now!

national news

Isn’t an attack on our electoral system … an attack on U.S.?

I would have thought that a documented, proven attack by a foreign hostile power on our electoral system would produce an all-out, full-throttle, frontal assault on future attacks.

I must have been mistaken.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he is going to prevent any consideration of election security measures by the Senate. McConnell, a Republican lawmaker, has taken aim at Democratic senators’ election security measures, calling them some sort of “Democrat protection” notion.

If we take the long view, we need to grasp what happened in 2016 and again in 2018. Russian government agents hacked into our electoral system. They interfered in our presidential election three years ago. They sought to help Donald Trump get elected president. Our nation’s top intelligence analysts have said the same thing: The Russians did it!

Why aren’t members of the House and Senate debating some measure to prevent this kind of electoral sabotage in the future?

I shudder to think that McConnell is running interference for the president who recently has referred to the 2016 attack as a “Russian hoax.”

What else am I going to conclude?

national news

Still miffed that Sen. Warren has stiffed Fox News

I’m still peeved at Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts U.S. senator and Democratic Party primary candidate for president of the United States.

She got an invitation to appear on a Fox News Channel town hall event. Fox News, which is not normally friendly to progressive such as Sen. Warren, was offering her a forum, a platform from which she could offer Fox News viewers the reasons why they should endorse her for president.

She turned Fox down! She said Fox uses its outreach to preach “hate” and she would have none of it.

Sen. Warren has made a big mistake. I believe she should have accepted Fox News’s invitation. She should have shown up. She should have taken questions from the audience and from the commentators who would moderate the event.

But she chose to stiff the network.

I agree with her about Fox News, that it is a “hate for profit” organization. Still, she should make her case even in front of a media outlet she opposes.

I believe that would be more of an American course than the one Sen. Warren has taken.

national news

Hell freezes over: I agree with Pat Robertson

Hell has frozen over and the sun is going to rise above the western horizon tomorrow morning.

How else to explain that televangelist Pat Robertson and yours truly are on the same page regarding arguably the most emotionally charged issue of our time . . . or any time, for that matter?

Robertson says the Alabama Legislature has “gone too far” in banning abortion in that state. Gov. Kay Ivey signed the bill into law earlier today.

Robertson calls the Legislature’s move “extreme.” Indeed, he is right. Imagine that, if you can; he and I agree on something.

The law bans abortion except only when the mother’s health is in peril. Rape victims? Those who are impregnated by their, oh, fathers or uncles or older brothers? They’re out of luck. A doctor who terminates those pregnancies are going to face prison terms of as long as 99 years.

Well, I don’t know yet how to act this late in the day.

I know the sun will rise in the morning. I just hope it comes up on the correct side of the house.

military news

Space Force: It’s back and it’s still a dumb idea

I cannot believe they’re talking yet again about forming another military branch, this one based in outer space.

On second thought, yes I can believe it.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is pitching the goofy idea one more time. He says we need a “space force” to protect us against pirates who’ll attack us from beyond our atmosphere.

Oh, please help me. Give me strength.

How many times must we say this? The United States already has a military branch — several of them, actually — committed to defending us from outer space attack.

The U.S. Air Force has a Space Command led by a four-star general. The U.S. Navy also has dedicated qualified personnel to monitor the great beyond from ships at sea as well as at naval air stations positioned around the world. The U.S. Army has long deployed units committed to high-tech air defenses.

What in the world are talking about here?

The proposed U.S. Space Force is redundant. It is duplicative of tasks already being done.

The Space Force idea does have its fans. Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX guru, is all in. “It’s cool,” he said, to have a Space Force, noting that they scoffed in the 1940s when the Air Force was split off from the Army.

Donald Trump wants to create this force as a national security matter. He signed a directive calling for additional study of the issue.

Whatever. A Space Force is still a nutty notion.

We do not need to form yet another military service branch. I’m tellin’ ya, the military we have on duty at this time — the most potent fighting force in human history — is quite capable of defending us against space pirates.

national news

‘Chaos president’? Trump sees it as a compliment … maybe?

Jeb Bush told us during the 2016 Republican Party primary campaign for president that Donald Trump would govern under an aura of chaos.

Yep. He was right. Trump vanquished the GOP field bigly, then went on to eke out a victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The White House has become a place where sensibilities go to die. The president fights with the media, with Democrats, with Republicans who oppose him, with his national security team, the national intelligence network, our nation’s historic allies in North America and Europe.

I’m at the point of this individual’s term in office that I am considering tossing aside the word “chaos” to describe him and the manner he seeks to govern the nation. Why? I am beginning to believe that Trump sees the terms “chaos” or “chaotic” as endearments.

He likes governing this way. Is it possible that he sees chaos, confusion, controversy as his ticket to re-election?

That question is not as dumb/idiotic/moronic as you might think. You see, this president vowed to be an unconventional head of state when he won that Electoral College victory in 2016. Of all the promises he has made, this is one that he has kept in mega-spades.

He has fired no fewer than a half-dozen Cabinet officials; sure, some of ’em “resigned,” but we all know they were shoved out the door.

He changes his mind at the sound of the last person to whisper in his ear. He governs with his Twitter account. He makes pronouncements that serve as policy and doesn’t tell the “best people” he purportedly hired to surround him and give him the “best advice.”

Oh, but wait! This is the same guy who said during the campaign that he knows “more about ISIS than the generals.” Trump declared the Islamic State was “defeated” in Syria, only to watch as ISIS launched another terrorist attack.

I thought Jeb Bush’s prediction of a “chaos presidency” was correct. I also thought that it would frighten enough voters away to deny this clown the election as president of the United States.

Silly me. I was wrong. Jeb Bush was right, but it doesn’t matter to this guy that so many Americans are worried about the chaos he has brought to the White House.

Why should it bother him? It’s the way this nitwit rolls.