Monthly Archives: July 2019

local news

My new favorite holiday? Umm, maybe

The older I get the sappier I become.

My wife and I spent a glorious evening with Emma, our 6-year-old granddaughter. We ventured to the other side of Princeton, Texas — which isn’t all that far, to tell you the truth — to enjoy some Independence Day festivities.

The city put on its Fourth of July Spectacular at Caldwell Park, which happens to include a one-time World War II prisoner of war encampment where Nazi soldiers were kept near the end of the war.

Emma enjoyed some rides, sipped and nibbled on a snow cone, then sat with us as we listened to music superstar Lee Ann Womack belt out some country/western tunes before a large crowd gathered in front of the stage.

Then the fun really got started. The fireworks display — which I sought to capture with the photo that accompanies this blog post — was nothing short of spectacular.

I love the pageantry associated with the Fourth of July. The older I become the more I enjoy listening to the patriotic music while the rockets’ red glare lights up the night sky.

Truth be told, I’ve always been a bit of a sap about this particular holiday. My parents imbued it in me as a youngster. Perhaps it has something to do with Dad’s role in ridding the world of tyranny during World War II. He was proud of his Navy service, although he didn’t brag about. The Greatest Generation is not full of braggarts; it is full of heroes who did their job, answered their country’s call to duty, then returned home to start or restart their lives. That was Dad in a nutshell.

Mom, too, told me of how the Port of Portland, Ore., turned into a “liberty ship” assembly line, cranking out cargo vessels at a clip of one per month. You remember these tales of greatness in the face of international crisis.

So we watched the fireworks tonight. We listened to music. It was our way of saluting this great nation of ours.

What’s more, we did it with our precious little girl.

How in the name of all that is good can it possibly get any better than that?

education news

A defeated AISD trustee wants back on?

Another applicant has jumped into the soup.

It’s official! I just submitted my application to be considered for one of the two vacant seats of the Amarillo ISD Board of Trustees! If you would like to support me in this process please contact the Board via the Contact Board Form link. Voice your support and ask that I get appointed to the board. Thank you everyone who has supported me along this process!

Well, I will offer a brief rejoinder to this applicant’s request for an appointment to a governing board … from which he was just ousted in a districtwide election in early May.

John Betancourt, a former Amarillo Independent School District trustee, wants the current board to select him to fill one of two vacancies on the seven-member board. He announced his application on his Facebook page today.

I normally would endorse such an appointment, given that Betancourt would represent an underserved constituency on the board: the AISD’s growing Hispanic population.

Except that he stood for re-election in May and was defeated in that effort. AISD voters — those who bothered to cast their ballots — decided he wasn’t worthy of being re-elected.

I shall stipulate that I don’t have a tangible role to play here. I don’t even live within the AISD boundaries. I am just a former Amarillo resident who retains an interest in the community where I lived for 23 years.

Betancourt well might deserve to return to the AISD board — one day. Were he to run for a spot on the board in the next election, that would be OK. However, for the board to appoint Betancourt so soon after the voters spoke against him would in my view be the epitome of insult to the constituents whose voice will have been ignored.

The AISD board, which comprises mostly new faces at the moment, is still trying to get its bearings in what I believe is an uncertain political climate. The district is still reeling a bit from the controversial resignation of a high school volleyball coach, the resignation of two trustees — including one trustee who was implicated in the coach’s resignation.

Betancourt was part of that dust-up, which well might have played a role in his being defeated for re-election. Return him now, so soon after he was kicked out of office?

Don’t do it.

national news

Rep. Taylor wants to get along

I am quite certain that when U.S. Rep. Van Taylor finishes his time in Congress that he will have earned high marks from conservative watchdog groups and political action organizations.

That’s fine. It’s who he is. He also seems to be demonstrating an attitude that’s been missing in the halls of Congress for, oh, several decades. He wants to forge friendships, alliances and partnerships with his colleagues across the aisle.

That’s right. This conservative freshman Republican wants to work with Democrats.

Taylor came to the McKinney Sunrise Rotary Club this morning to make the case that “Congress is broken” and that it needs a few healing hands to repair it. The young man from Plano just might be what the doctor has ordered.

I was impressed with a small gesture he extended to someone who asked him a question, while addressing Taylor as “Congressman,” to which Taylor said, “You can call me ‘Van.’ I work for you. I am the employee here.” He took office just in January, succeeding a living legend in the House, Sam Johnson, also of Plano. More on Johnson in a moment.

The idea that Congress is broken isn’t exactly a “news flash,” Taylor said. “I am trying to build relationships with Democrats. Most bills I sponsor are bipartisan bills,” he said.

Taylor honed his bipartisan leanings serving in the Texas Senate, where he worked prior to being elected to the U.S. House. So he knows about certain rules that promote bipartisanship, such as the Texas Senate’s two-thirds rule that requires at least 20 members to consider legislation on the Senate floor.

He told us this morning that “the proudest day of my time in the Senate was when I got to introduce my congressman,” Rep. Johnson, whose story of heroism during the Vietnam War is legendary, to his  Senate colleagues. He was held captive as a prisoner of war for seven years in the “Hanoi Hilton,” after being shot down and was kept in solitary confinement for four of those horrific years.

Indeed, Taylor’s own military experience commends him well to serve in Congress. He was a Marine Corps intelligence officer. He was on active duty and was planning to leave the Marines while touring the Pentagon, a place he said he had never visited.

Then he watched the Pentagon burn on 9/11. He returned home to North Texas, served in the Marine Corps Reserves and was called up in January 2003 as the nation was preparing to go to war in Iraq. Taylor then served a year in Iraq after the shooting started in March 2003.

So, this newcomer to the Big Show wants to do well. He wants to get things done. He knows the system on Capitol Hill is in bad shape. It needs repair. Taylor acknowledges that Texas congressional Republicans meet regularly with each other, but also wants to further the outreach to include Texas congressional Democrats.

I wish Van well in his search for common ground.

military news

Once more, with passion: Military display is a bad idea!

I feel the need to restate once again something about which I feel quite strongly.

Donald Trump’s method of saluting the United States of America is a ridiculous sideshow. He wants to militarize the event. He wants to make some kind of speech that I fear will be highly political. He intends to divert attention away from what the founders created back in the late 18th century and focus more on himself.

That’s what narcissists do.

I don’t want to see tanks. I don’t want to see jet fighters zoom overhead. I don’t want to see the Joint Chiefs of Staff standing at attention next to the commander in chief. I don’t want to see military personnel dressed in their finest marching down the street.

We all know the obvious, which is that the U.S. military is the strongest the world has ever seen. Really! It is! I get it. I once wore an Army uniform and went to war for my country. I love the military. I just don’t want to see it used as a political prop for a president who has no understanding of just why we celebrate our nation’s independence.

Flexing our military muscle is not what we normally enjoy when we celebrate the Fourth of July in the nation’s capital.

Donald Trump is changing all of that. He can do whatever he wants. He is the president. It’s his call. It just is the wrong call.

That’s it. I’m out.

local news

Frustration mounts, then subsides with this blogging business

I get along mostly just fine with this blogging technology I am learning how to navigate.

Until things happen such as what occurred this evening.

I was sailing along, pontificating about this and/or that. Then I posted an item about Donald Trump’s plan to stage a military parade on July 4. I don’t like the idea and said so. Except that my post didn’t see daylight.

Why? Because the Word Press platform on which I post these blogs failed to function properly. I lost my ability to “publicize” my entries.

I was so mad I could spit.

I called the hosting company I use to manage my blog “domain.” A young man walked me through the process of “restoring” my blog. I hedged, balked and said I’d call him back.

Then I turned to another expert, a young man with whom I am quite close: my son. He was busy at home and said he’d call back.

I then called the tech support outfit back, got another young man on the phone, told him my problem, he troubleshot it, then fixed it.

One little problem. All the text I had posted over the past 24 hours was wiped out. Gone. Pfftt. Vaporized.

I won’t repost this stuff that I lost. I’m just using this little episode to express my frustration and my gratitude for getting my blog back up and running.

Yes, I do love writing this blog. The technology is great … when it works properly. When it doesn’t it, um, is a pain in the posterior.

I’m marching on.

national news

Census returns to some semblance of normal

Donald Trump has thrown in the towel, although he won’t say he did.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the administration’s effort to ask U.S. residents a citizenship question, meaning that respondents were not going to be asked to prove whether they are citizens of this country.

Trump wanted to add that proviso to the census-taking that is scheduled to occur in 2020. He had threatened to include it on the form to be sent out.

Well, now the president has said he won’t do it. There will be no citizenship question to be posed to U.S. residents.

That means tradition has been upheld. The prospect of serious undercounting of U.S. residents has been reduced, if not virtually eliminated, by the president’s decision to back off his initial threat to seek citizenship answers.

The Commerce Department led the charge for the Trump administration. As Roll Call reported: The retreat follows the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision last week, which it based on objections to the Commerce Department’s reasoning for adding the question. President Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to delay the census to get the question approved.

The court didn’t like the way the administration sought to explain its reason for adding the question. So it handed the president a defeat.

He won’t acknowledge the loss at the hands of a court that he thinks leans strongly in his direction. That’s fine, as long as the justices’ ruling holds up. Which it will.

national news

Harris scores big, but now faces some blowback

Kamala Harris pounded Joe Biden with some serious body blows at that debate this past week. The U.S. senator and former California attorney general caught the former senator and former vice president flat footed when she questioned him about his senatorial relationships with avowed segregationists.

Oh, my. Then came the initial response. Harris now is on the front rank of Democratic challengers to Donald Trump. Her fans think better of her, if that’s possible. Biden’s fans initially were somewhat dismayed.

Now, though, the senator is getting a bit of push back, some resistance from those who think she might have let her ambition get the better of her. She shouldn’t have gone low with that attack against the ex-VP, some are saying.

Let’s play this out for a moment.

Suppose Biden remains the favorite among Democrats. Suppose, too, he gets the party’s presidential nomination in the summer of 2020. Who would he choose as his running mate. One Biden anonymous supporter said, “That sh** ain’t happening.”

Really? Let’s see. George H.W. Bush called Ronald Reagan’s fiscal policy “voodoo economics” when the two of them ran for the Republican nomination in 1980. Reagan then selected Bush to run with him; they served as a team for two terms and Bush got elected president in 1988.

Oh, then we had Biden running against Barack Obama in 2008. They fought hard for as long as Biden was in the hunt. Then the Delaware U.S. senator dropped out. Democrats nominated Sen. Obama — who then chose Biden to run with him. You know the rest of it.

Moral of the story? If Biden gets nominated, do not count out Sen. Kamala Harris as a potential running mate.

national news

What is Jared doing to our foreign policy?

One of Donald Trump’s “best people” is being heard once again.

He is former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who went from hero to zero in less than two years. Trump hired him as the nation’s top diplomat, heaping praise on the former ExxonMobil CEO as a man of unsurpassed brilliance; he booted him out, saying he was dumb as a stump.

But the former secretary of state is being heard again. He is telling interviewers about how the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner — a young man with zero diplomatic experience — pushed Tillerson aside to conduct foreign policy … in the Middle East, of all places!

Tillerson met with the House Foreign Relations Committee recently and gave a scathing report on working within the Trump White House. According to the Daily Beast: “One of the challenges I think that everyone had… to learn to deal with was the role, the unique situation with the president’s son-in-law [Kushner] and daughter [Ivanka] being part of the White House advisory team,” Tillerson said, according to the transcript The Daily Beast obtained. “There was not a real clear understanding of the role, responsibilities, authorities… which made it challenging for everyone, I think, in terms of how to deal with activities that might be undertaken by others that were not defined within the national-security process itself.”

I want to stress with all the energy I can muster that Jared Kushner has no business conducting sensitive negotiations with Middle East heads of government and heads of state. He is as totally unqualified to negotiate with anyone in that region as the president is to hold the office to which he was elected. Yet the president has given this hanger-on the responsibility of hammering out a comprehensive peace agreement in the Middle East?

Let’s face it, Rex Tillerson was right when he called Trump a “fu**ing moron,” an epithet he never has denied hurling in the president’s direction.

And the president has placed an empty suit in charge of one of the most challenging diplomatic tasks anywhere on Earth.

Amazing.

national news

Oregon GOP returns to work, but one lawmaker faces complaint

The current Republican TEA Party/Freedom Caucus lunacy has taken a weird turn in Oregon.

Oregon’s Republican state senators ran into the tall grass, preventing the Senate from voting on a climate change bill that the state’s Republicans opposed. State Senate rules required at least 20 members to conduct business; the GOP holds 12 of 30 seats, leaving the Senate with just 18 lawmakers.

The bill couldn’t get a vote.

The renegade GOPers came back to work, but the Senate had to scuttle the bill because it still lacked the number of senators needed to do business.

Here is where it gets weird. One of the runaway Republicans, Sen. Brian Boquist, had threatened to shoot an Oregon state trooper who had been dispatched by Gov. Kate Brown to find the renegades. Fortunately, Boquist never took a shot.

However, a Democratic senator has filed a complaint over Boquist’s threat. As The Hill reported: “State Sen. Floyd Prozanski, chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Conduct, told Oregon Public Broadcasting … that he had filed a formal complaint against Boquist, adding that a hearing would held early next month.”

This is not how you govern any of our 50 states. To be fair, Oregon Republicans aren’t the first legislators to pull off such a stunt. Texas Democrats, nicknamed the “Killer Bees,” did something similar in the early 1990s in defiance of then-Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby. I don’t recall, though, any of the Killer Bees threatening to shoot a Department of Public Safety trooper.

Good governance requires sanity. It’s missing in action way up yonder on one side of the aisle in the state of my birth.

Weird.

State news

Empower Texans endorses Trump, but am wondering why

At one level, this is no surprise. Empower Texans, the far-right political action group that often targets “establishment Republicans” for defeat in favor of far-righties, has endorsed Donald J. Trump for re-election as president of the United States.

I want to share the endorsement here. 

It is authored by Michael Quinn Sullivan, the CEO of the outfit. He calls the 2020 election a watershed event for Texans and it is utterly critical, he said, for Texans to join the rest of the country in sending Trump back into office for four more years.

It amazes me. I am stunned. Astonished. Perplexed. Baffled. Bumfuzzled.

I always thought of Empower Texans as a rigid ideological organization. It adheres to a doctrine that calls for extreme fiscal restraint. Empower Texans was born out of the TEA Party movement and I figure it has morphed into an ally of the Texas Freedom Caucus, which is part of the larger conservative movement that has taken control of the Republican Party.

Trump, though, doesn’t have an ideology. He tilts at whatever forces are pushing him.

But he kowtows to tyrants. He denigrates our intelligence agencies. He actually invited the Russians to attack our electoral system in 2020 the way they did in 2016. He ridiculous our allies in Europe, Australia, Asia and Latin America.

Trump, moreover, has talked about spending a trillion or so dollars to rebuild our nation’s transportation infrastructure, which by itself isn’t a bad thing. The problem, though, is that he cannot work with Democrats to come up with a plan on how to do it, or certainly how to pay for it.

Trump promised to “drain the swamp.” It only has gotten even swampier since he took office. Oh, yeah … let’s not forget those key aides who have been indicted, pleaded guilty or are actually serving time in the slammer.

Empower Texans has managed to stick its collective political nose into local races around the state, seeking to elect legislators who cotton to its rigid ideology. It has failed even in the most conservative regions of Texas, such as the Panhandle, to elect legislative candidates to its liking. Why? Because local folks don’t like being dictated to by ideologues of any stripe, even far-right-wingers such as Empower Texans.

This group never is going to win me over. Its endorsement of Donald John Trump is no surprise to me, even though I still cannot comprehend why, given the president’s utter lack of moral/political/ideological base.

Nor should it surprise readers of this blog that I believe Empower Texans has made a patently foolish decision to stand with a president who is completely unfit for the office he occupies.