Monthly Archives: August 2019

environmental news

Trump now wants to kill off endangered species?

This is far from a flash, but here goes anyway: Donald John Trump is off his ever-lovin’ rocker.

The Trump administration now wants to seriously weaken a 1973 law — signed by a Republican president — that helped save several valuable species of wildlife from extinction.

Yep, Donald Trump is taking dead aim at the Endangered Species Act. He wants to weaken provisions that allow for the protection of these species. He claims the regulations are too burdensome.

According to Smithsonian.com: The new rules also impose limitations on how threats are assessed. Officials used to take into account factors that could harm species in the “foreseeable future,” but now lawmakers have more discretion in deciding what “foreseeable future” should mean. So they may choose to disregard climate factors—like rising sea levels and extreme heat—that will likely impact species several decades from now.

President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into law in 1973. At the time of its enactment, species such as the American alligator and the bald eagle were in serious trouble. Their numbers had plummeted. The eagle had suffered terribly by consuming fish that were poisoned by DDT. The alligator had been hunted to near extinction along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts.

Trump endangers the Endangered Species Act

So what in the world is this president trying to do? Why on God’s cherished Earth does this man seek to endanger wildlife that has become part of the American landscape. Consider, too, that the Endangered Species Act helped save the creature that symbolizes the nation itself: the bald eagle!

The Trump administration continues to make moves it aims to help industry, with little or no regard to the consequences they might deliver to God’s cherished creatures.

This is the mindset of an administration led by someone with zero interest — let alone knowledge — of matters he cannot comprehend.

Protecting wildlife? Hah!

International news

Immigration fight has taken a dangerous turn

You can count me as one American who believes the Donald Trump administration has declared war on immigrants who aren’t blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned, well-to-do, well-educated.

This is a frightening occurrence as this president has ramped up his fight against those who seek to come here from sh**hole countries.

The administration is seeking to implement policies that exclude those who come here in search of a better life. There is a growing discussion that the administration is now targeting Latin Americans, those from Africa, those from certain countries in Europe, those from South Asia.

My goodness. How does one cope with this?

I am not coping well.

All this discussion we’re hearing about that Emma Lazarus poem welcoming the world’s dispossessed, the wretched and the poor “yearning to breathe free” is making me tremble. If this is the direction the president wants to take this country, then we are heading into dangerous territory, indeed.

I keep thinking of that young policy adviser, Stephen Miller, who has had Trump’s ear since the beginning of the administration. Miller is looking more like the architect of this hideous policy. This zealot has said more than once in public that the nation is too generous, too welcoming, too open in its history of welcoming foreigners to our shores. He wants to change it. He wants to slam the door shut. He wants to deny entry to those who want the United States to lend a hand to them as they try to build new lives in the Land of the Free.

Indeed, the president himself has said that “it’s not fair” for American taxpayers to pay for those who come into this country.

What? Does the president want to toss aside the entire ethos on which this country has been built?

We must not become a nation of snobs.

national news

Wondering: Why are conservatives turning on Trump?

Donald John Trump talks occasionally about espousing “conservative” ideals while lambasting “liberal politicians” over their own ideals.

The president campaigned as a sort of “conservative populist,” although there seems to be a counter-intuitive tilt to that description.

Millions of Americans swallowed the bait. Millions more of us spit it out.

For me, I am left to wonder: If the president is such a conservative icon and a believer in conservative principles, ideology and principle … why are so many notable conservative thinkers turning on him?

There might be a couple of thoughts at play here. One is that Trump is not the conservative he purports to be. Another is that actual political conservatives — except for evangelical Christians — are appalled, astonished and aggravated at this man’s history of hideous behavior.

I want to reel off just a few notable conservatives who now count themselves as anti-Trumpers: George F. Will, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist; Jennifer Rubin, a noted conservative columnist for the Washington Post; William Kristol, former VP Dan Quayle’s chief of staff and founder of the now-defunct Weekly Standard; David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times; Bret Stephens, another right-wing columnist for the NYT; Joe Scarborough, a former Florida Republican congressman who’s become a virulent anti-Trump spokesman; David Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush 43.

Those are just a few names. They all have significant megaphones from which to comment on the state of political play.

I continue to maintain that Donald Trump is the classic, quintessential Republican In Name Only. He is the RINO’s RINO. I get that he appoints conservative judges and names conservatives to surround him within the White House.

He’s not the real deal. Donald Trump is a panderer who doesn’t understand how government works. He built his business career with one aim, to fatten his wallet and enrich his brand. He is a serial liar who is unwilling to tell the truth at any level.

True conservatives should have nothing to do with this individual. A good many notable conservatives have been willing to speak out and to declare their antipathy to what this man is pitching.

Good for them.

national news

Immigration battle bordering now on the absurd

The Donald Trump administration now wants to make legal immigration more difficult for those who want to enter the United States.

You got that? The fight to stem the flow of immigrants has spread to those who play by the rules, abide by our laws and want to work hard to craft a better life for their families.

That’s so very American of the president, yes? Actually, no! It isn’t. It is as un-American as damn near everything he has said or done since taking office.

What’s more, here is where it gets absurd. I saw a social media meme that said the following: Trumpsters yell immigrants are freeloaders, but ICE always raids workplaces. Strange …

Yes. It is strange.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided those food processing plants in Mississippi on the same weekend as the El Paso and Dayton massacres. They arrested hundreds of undocumented immigrants. then released many of them almost immediately.

As the meme notes, though, ICE is busting those immigrants who are working for a living, not the so-called “freeloaders” whom Trump insists are “infesting” our nation.

As the grandson of immigrants who came here in the early 20th century with virtually nothing, I resent this abhorrent trend that’s playing out.

All four of my grandparents had little formal education. They sought to build good lives for themselves and their children. I wonder at this moment if they would have qualified for entry under the rules being laid out by Donald Trump.

The absurdity of this debate is astonishing.

national news

Biden’s gaffes don’t measure up to Trump’s lies

Oh, here we go again.

Joe Biden said that the Parkland shooting survivors called him while he served as vice president of the United States.

Oops! Except that the high school massacre occurred in 2018; Biden left the vice presidency in January 2017.

The gaffes have been piling up lately. The former VP blurted out he would accept “truth over facts.” Before that he uttered something about “poor kids” doing as well academically as “white kids.”

My goodness. The gaffes reportedly have Democratic voters worried about the former vice president’s intellectual stamina were he to secure the party nomination and then face off against Donald J. Trump.

Which brings me to my point. Are the Biden gaffes as serious as the Trump lies? Hah! Not even close, man! The Trump penchant for prevarication is much, much worse than the occasional blooper that flies out of Biden’s trap.

However … we have this problem with Trump’s incessant lying. We’re getting used to it! The Trump lies — which have totaled something far north of 10,000 since he became president — are becoming part of the dialogue these days. “It’s just Trump,” some Americans are saying.

Many voters don’t seem to care that the president cannot tell the truth if his life depended on it. He lies about everything. Big things. Small things. Important matters. Trivial matters. Trump lies when the truth wouldn’t hurt him in the least. He just lies.

It’s pathological, man … which is how I believe Ben Carson, the nation’s housing secretary, described it when he and Trump were competing for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

If Biden manages to win the Democratic nomination, all of us — you and me — can expect the president to seek to make hay over Biden’s occasional verbal hiccups.

My question is this: Are we going to hold the president to any kind of truth-telling standard? We damn sure had better.

crime news

How about an independent probe into Epstein death?

Jeffrey Epstein was under the “watchful eye” of the U.S. Department of Justice. He was being held in a Manhattan jail cell. He was arguably the most notorious criminal in federal custody, a guy who needed the DOJ’s relentless and unblinking attention.

Then he hangs himself. The DOJ is denied the opportunity to put a known pedophile on trial for allegations of sex trafficking underage girls.

The multimillionaire also had two high-profile relationships, with Bill Clinton and Donald Trump … a former and current president of the United States.

Now we hear from Attorney General William Barr blasting to smithereens the security detail at the Manhattan jail. He has called Epstein’s death a monumental failure.

Really, Mr. AG? Well, who is responsible for that failure? I contend that the AG himself is to blame. This happened on Barr’s watch.

The medical examiner has reportedly determined Epstein’s cause of death. There appears to be no evidence of “foul play,” or so we’re led to believe. I won’t join conspiracy theorists who have ideas and notions aplenty about what happened to Epstein.

However, does the DOJ investigate itself? Does the Justice Department look deeply into this a**hole’s death?

I don’t know how the DOJ does that. Nor do I accept that the department can peel away all the layers to expose the truth behind what happened to this guy.

Epstein was put on suicide watch in late July after he was found unconscious in his cell; he reportedly had ligature marks on his neck, suggesting an attempt at hanging himself. Then they removed the suicide watch. Then we hear that the security staff was overworked and didn’t keep an eye on this bastard at all times, allowing him to string himself up inside the jail cell.

That sounds like incompetence. I believe the incompetence goes far beyond the walls of that correctional facility.

Attorney General Barr needs to step aside. He needs to find an independent investigator to take over and determine how such a high-value, high-profile and infamous prisoner can kill himself while he’s in the hands of a federal agency charged with keeping him alive while his notorious case works its way toward adjudication.

local news

Puppy Tales, Part 76: Doggie door update

Listen up. I am making an announcement.

Toby the Puppy has mastered the doggie door his mother and I purchased just for him.

Is that a big deal? You bet it is!

It’s not that I ever doubted Toby’s ability to learn how to work the door. I knew he would. I was just not prepared initially for his mastery of the device to take as long as it did.

But you know already that I believe — with all due love and respect to our grandpuppy Madden — that Toby the Puppy is the smartest pooch on Earth. Toby is so smart, he responds to people’s names. For instance, when we mention our granddaughter Emma is coming over, Toby the Puppy goes nuts. He stands at the living room window waiting for her. When we drive to her house, he knows the moment we make the turn prior to turning directly onto her street that he’s close. He starts wagging his tail and rushes out of the car when we park it.

OK, so we’ve cleared this latest hurdle. He knows how to use the doggie door without requiring us to stand nearby. He goes in and out … all by himself.

I am a happy fellow.

national news

Own your role in this tragedy, Mr. President

I want to endorse a contention that is coming from those who support Donald J. Trump.

It is that the president of the United States is not exclusively responsible for the carnage that erupted in El Paso and Dayton … or at any of the other American communities that have experienced the wrath of anger spewed by lunatic shooters.

I also agree with the president who has blamed an array of circumstances for what transpired in El Paso and Dayton: the lack of mental health awareness; the Internet and its propensity for spreading hate speech; and, yes, video games, although the last target of blame seems dubious.

However, I must once again implore the president to expand the level of responsibility for the madness that keeps erupting.

Donald J. Trump needs to own the rhetoric he has spewed since taking office and while he was running for the presidency.

I realize I am asking for an impossible occurrence. Donald Trump doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t take ownership of the things he does wrong. He won’t acknowledge that his anti-immigrant, anti-Latino, anti-Muslim rhetoric has inspired these madmen. He won’t recognize that as president of the United States, his words weigh far more than others, such as, say, chump bloggers who live out here in Trump Country.

He is our head of state. He is our commander in chief. Donald Trump is the president of the world’s mightiest nation.

That role should compel him to measure his words with great care.

He does not measure anything. He has no filter. He blasts out those Twitter messages with no outward regard for the consequences that they deliver.

I am not going to endorse the notion that Donald Trump is “responsible” for the carnage. I am, however, going to say once more with feeling that he needs to recognize his own role in the complicated morass that produced this dangerous moment in our nation’s history.

If only he would listen.

national news

‘Mooch’ turns on Trump

Anthony Scaramucci no longer supports the re-election of the man he once admired, whose friendship he coveted.

The Mooch says Donald Trump’s rhetoric has gone way past the pale in recent weeks and months. So, the one-time White House communications director says he’s done with Donald.

But a CNN analyst, Chris Cillizza, disputes The Mooch’s characterization of Trump’s rhetoric. He says Trump is the same old, race-baiting, insult-hurling xenophobe he’s been since he entered political life. Cillizza, moreover, wonders whether The Mooch is trying to cover his own backside by asserting that Trump’s rhetoric of late has gotten worse.

I believe The Mooch is trying to seek some justification for his former support of this disgraceful man masquerading as POTUS.

Indeed, Trump’s rhetoric in reality is no more inflammatory than it has been since he declared his candidacy in June 2015.

As Cillizza pointed out, Trump did mock a New York Times reporter’s disability, he criticized a Gold Star family who made anti-Trump remarks at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, he said the late Sen. John McCain was a “war hero only because he got captured” and was held captive during the Vietnam War, he told an “Access Hollywood” interview how he grabbed women by their genitals … and on and on it has gone. You get the idea.

The Mooch, who served as communications chief at the White House for 11 days before getting fired, once stood firmly behind the president. No more.

Hey, I’m fine with The Mooch saying these critical things about the president. He just doesn’t need to fabricate some notion that what Trump is saying now is different in tone and tenor from what he’s been saying all along.

Many millions of us saw it from the beginning, Mooch.

Welcome aboard.

local news

Is a GOP retirement announcement coming from the Panhandle?

The Texas Tribune published a story on Nov. 28, 2018 that speculated about the possibility of several retirement announcements coming from Texas’s substantial Republican congressional majority.

One section of the story said this: ” … many Republican operatives bet that U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry, the most senior Republican from Texas in Congress, could make the upcoming term his last. That’s because Thornberry, currently chairman of the Armed Services Committee, is term-limited out of being the top Republican on that committee, in 2021.”

Thornberry no longer is chairman of the panel. He currently serves as ranking GOP member, which gives him some clout on the panel. Still, it’s not the same as chairing it.

I want to defend my former congressman on one point. He campaigned for the office in 1994 while supporting the Contract With America, which contained a provision that called for limiting the number of terms House members could serve. Thornberry never said he would impose a personal limit on the terms he would serve representing the 13th Congressional District.

He has voted in favor of constitutional amendments in the House; the amendment proposals always have failed.

Twenty-four years later, Thornberry has emerged as one of Texas’s senior congressional lawmakers.

I, too, wonder whether he might pack it in after this term. I’ve speculated on it publicly in this blog.

I don’t talk to Thornberry these days, although I still believe we have a good personal relationship. I rarely have supported personally his policy pronouncements during his years in the House. I’ll admit, though, that my position as editorial page editor of the Amarillo Globe-News required me to write public statements in support of Thornberry against my personal beliefs; hey, it’s part of the job of writing for someone else.

The way I look at it, a Mac Thornberry retirement likely wouldn’t result in the 13th District flipping to a Democrat. The GOP majority in the Texas Legislature has created a rock-solid Republican district that stretches from the top of the Panhandle to the Metroplex.

If there’s a retirement announcement coming from Mac Thornberry, you can consider me as someone who won’t be surprised.