Monthly Archives: January 2020

national news

Cruz joins McConnell in pre-judging POTUS’s Senate trial

The Cruz Missile has launched a podcast on which he intends to vent his belief that Donald John Trump, the nation’s current president, is innocent of the charges brought forward by the House of Representatives impeachment of him.

Impartial justice, anyone? Anyone?

Sen. Ted Cruz has begun a podcast titled “Verdict.” He is one of 100 U.S. senators who swore an oath to judge the president with impartiality. Nope. Not gonna happen.

He has aligned himself with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in pre-judging this case. The House impeached Trump on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges. We haven’t heard any witnesses … yet! However, Cruz is ready to declare that Trump hasn’t committed any crimes.

That remains to be seen.

Many Senate leaders have warned their colleagues against pre-judging this case. They want to remain faithful to the oath that Chief Justice John Roberts issued to them.

Has the Cruz Missile followed that oath? In the first episode he labels the impeachment as a partisan political attack.

McConnell has demonstrated that he is not going to adhere to the oath he took. Now he has Ted Cruz joining him in revealing how intends to vote when the time arrives.

national news

Trial muzzles loquacious group of lawmakers

Hear ye! Hear ye!. All persons are commanded to keep silent, on pain of imprisonment.

One hundred Americans who now serve in the U.S. Senate got that command at the start of a trial to determine whether the current president of the United States, Donald John Trump, gets to keep his job.

Four of those 100 senators are running in a primary campaign for the right to face that president in an election later this year.

I am trying to imagine the difficulty it was for those senators, a group of men and women with enormous egos — many of whom are deeply in love with the sound of their own voices — to hear that mandate come from the Senate sergeant-at-arms.

The late Sen. George McGovern once said that the first prerequisite for a successful politician is to have a large ego. So the Senate is now sitting on its hands, its collective lips zipped while House members — from that “other” legislative branch — argue on behalf of the case that produced an impeachment of the Donald Trump.

My goodness. It’s bad enough for these men and women to have to sit there and not say a word. What makes it worse is that they are being forced to listen to House members talk for hours on end about a case they have brought to the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.” Senators tend, as I understand it, to look down on their colleagues in the House. Except for those few sparsely populated states that have just a single House member in Congress, senators represent their entire states while House members represent a “mere” congressional district. Senators have greater power, or so they believe, than their House colleagues.

The impeachment accuses Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

You and I are all quite certain that senators have plenty to say about those articles of impeachment. Except they cannot say a word about it, other than to comment — when the media ask them for their comment — on the presentation they are being forced to hear without being able to respond in real time.

In a strange sort of happenstance, we are witnessing the members of one legislative chamber elevating their profile to the same level as the members of the other.

I find it entertaining.

national news

Yes on Bolton, no on Hunter Biden!

I am now willing to accept the strategy being played out in the U.S. Senate trial of Donald John Trump, the current president of the United States.

House of Representatives prosecution managers want to summon John Bolton, the former national security adviser, to testify before the Senate; they believe he would be a material “fact witness” who could tell senators what he heard on the day Trump made that fateful phone call to the president of Ukraine, when Trump sought a political favor from a foreign government.

The strategy enacted by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is to decide whether to allow witnesses such as Bolton after opening arguments are concluded. Fine.

However, some GOP senators keep insisting that they also need to hear from Hunter Biden, the son of the former vice president who is at the center of this impeachment matter. Why? Because they want to establish that Hunter Biden is somehow corrupt, that he took a lot of money for working for a Ukrainian energy company.

Hunter Biden is not a material witness. He is a target of GOP senators who want to conduct a sideshow, distracting us from the issue under discussion: It is whether Donald Trump violated his oath of office by seeking foreign government interference in the 2020 election by asking Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden’s role in Hunter Biden’s employment.

Let’s see. Oh, yes! The Ukrainian prosecutors have said categorically that Joe and Hunter Biden did nothing illegal. That isn’t dissuading the GOP “outfitters” who keep wanting to take the Senate on a fishing expedition … that won’t catch any fish.

I remain afflicted by acute impeachment fatigue. I want the trial to end sooner rather than later. The House managers are doing a fine job in presenting their case, in my view. We’ll get to hear from Trump’s legal team soon. I want to hear their side of the story. I want to hear whether they will attack the evidence as presented or whether they will continue to assail the process that brought us to this history-making point.

Then let’s hear from witnesses with actual knowledge of the issue at hand and let’s dispense with the sideshow.

local news, media news

We’ve lost a first-rate print … and broadcast journalist

Jim Lehrer is gone. I just learned it a few minutes ago and I am saddened by the news.

He was a longtime PBS news anchor, co-hosting the “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on the public TV network. Before he went to broadcasting the news to us, he was a print guy, a solid newspaper reporter who earned his spurs right here in Texas, where he spent much of his youth.

That brings me to a brief recounting of an encounter I had with Jim Lehrer.

I was working at the Beaumont Enterprise in the early 1990s when I spotted a gentleman standing in front of our newsroom secretary’s desk. I walked across the newsroom, turned the corner and stood at the elevator. I looked back at the secretary and whispered, “Is that Jim Lehrer?” To which the gentleman answered, “Yes. It is.” I was embarrassed to the max.

I came back around the corner, introduced myself and he returned the intro to me. We chatted right there and then headed into the newspaper library. He was looking for newspaper clippings as part of his research for a book he was writing. He attended French High School in Beaumont and spoke of his Golden Triangle connection.

We had a wonderful and fruitful visit for seemingly forever in the library.

Then he left. I felt as if I made a new friend. I don’t know how he felt about me. It would be my hope that he got as much out of our visit as I did. I never continued that relationship.

A year later, he came back to Beaumont to offer the keynote speech to the Press Club of Southeast Texas. We met again in the buffet line at lunch. I said “hello,” and — as God is my witness — he remembered our meeting the previous year.

Was I a bit star struck? More than likely. It is my story and I am sticking to it.

R.I.P., Jim Lehrer.

local news, media news, political news

Listen up! No politics in church!

I have sought to follow a time-honored credo, which is that I don’t discuss politics or my work while I am in church.

My response usually goes like this when someone would challenge something I wrote in the newspaper where I worked at the time: I came here to talk to God, not to you … about my work; call me in the morning, then we’ll chat.

We have relocated in the past year to a lovely community in Collin County, Texas. We have found a new church where we like to worship each Sunday. It’s a small congregation, but it fulfills our need. Everyone is welcoming, warm, hospitable and the place is full of love.

However … we have run into individuals who like to talk politics with us, or I presume just about anyone who’ll listen. It wouldn’t surprise you to learn that the congregation is a pretty conservative bunch, which is all right with me. That’s their call. I adhere to, um, a different point of view.

Thus, when one of our new friends decides to engage us in a political discussion, I am inclined to nudge them away. I change the subject. I haven’t yet offered up my longstanding retort. Hey, I don’t know them well enough yet. Perhaps over time, they’ll get the hint and I won’t need to drop the verbal hammer on ’em.

If not, I am ready to put them into what I perceive to be their place.

national news

Election security becomes a highly critical ‘back story’

An essential element of the impeachment and Senate trial of Donald John Trump, the current president of the United States, is being pushed toward the back of the proverbial shelf.

I refer to election security. Specifically, the security of our sacred rite of citizenship against foreign interference.

You know the story. Russia attacked our electoral system in 2016, the same day that Donald Trump invited the Russians to look for the “missing emails” produced by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was Trump’s presidential campaign foe that year.

Then the president, immediately after Robert Mueller III released his findings into a two-year-long investigation into the Russia hack and interference, placed a phone call to Ukrainian President Volodyrmyr Zellenskiy. He asked Zellenskiy for a “favor,” which was to launch an investigation into Joe Biden, a potential foe for Trump in 2020. Yes, the president asked a foreign government for political help. He wants to “cheat” his way to re-election.

How in the name of cybersecurity can we stand by and let this happen?

I am acutely aware that government cyber geeks are hard at work trying to provide fool-proof locks against this kind of intrusion. What troubles me in the extreme is that the individuals at the highest levels of our government are stone-cold silent on this matter.

Donald Trump, the intended beneficiary of the 2016 Russian election attack, continues to dismiss the interference. He disparages intelligence analyses that says, “Yes, the Russians did it!” He calls that phone call to Zellenskiy “perfect.”

It was “perfect” only insofar as he delivered a clearly defined message to a foreign head of state. He wanted a “favor” and asked that government to attack our electoral system — again! 

What measures are we taking to protect our election system throughout its massive network?

national news

Whatever happened to the Republican Party?

Oh, yoo-hoo! Are you out there, somewhere, Republican Party members, folks who once stood for principles that appear to have been vanquished and trampled asunder in this Age of Donald John Trump?

I have been looking for those folks for some time. To no avail, I am afraid to admit. You remember how those good folks. If not, I’ll offer a reminder.

I think of the Republicans of 1980 and those of 1994. They presented candidates and platforms that represented a specific ideology and point of view.

The Grand Old Party in 1980 was led by a former B-movie actor-turned California governor, Ronald “The Gipper” Reagan. Gov. Reagan became the Republican nominee that year. He and his party then proceeded to savage President Jimmy Carter because he had the temerity to stand watch while the federal budget ran a deficit of $43 billion in that election year.

Fort-three billion bucks, man! Why, you’d have thought the nation was heading for bankruptcy to hear the Republicans tell it.

Fast-forward 40 years and the budget deficit this year is going to top $1 trillion. Yes, a Republican is now president of the United States. Where is the outcry? Where are the calls for fiscal restraint?

The sound of crickets you are hearing is the sound of a political party that has tossed aside the principle of fiscal efficiency because its members have become beholden to the man who leads the party, the man who before he ran for president had no discernible connection to the party under whose banner he ran for the only public office he ever has sought.

Amazing, yes? I believe so.

Then the GOP of 1994 came and went. These were the politicians who campaigned for Congress on the Character Matters mantra. The object of their scorn in that election year was a Democratic president who had been elected two years earlier despite allegations of womanizing. Bill Clinton won the 1992 election and then two years later, the GOP — led by a House backbench flamethrower named Newt Gingrich — set about campaigning on the Character Matters platform.

Republicans won control of both congressional houses that year, then sought the impeachment of President Clinton, ostensibly after seeking the goods on a scandal called Whitewater, a real estate deal that caught the GOP’s attention. The probe ended up producing a tawdry relationship between the president and a White House intern. Clinton took an oath to tell the truth to a grand jury, then he lied to jurors. Perjury! Clinton broke the law! Then he got impeached. He stood trial and was acquitted in early 1999.

Well, that version of the Republican Party has vanished, too. Gingrich became speaker of the House after the 1994 congressional takeover, then the GOP lost seats in Congress in the 1998 midterm election, all while Gingrich was being revealed as a philanderer … even as he was bemoaning the president’s crappy conduct.

It’s gotten worse. The GOP these days rallies behind a president who makes all of that seem like schoolyard frolic.

So, I have to ask: What in the world has become of a once-great political party?

national news

What in the world is POTUS hiding?

I remain a baffled American taxpayer.

Donald John Trump, the current president of the United States, keeps insisting he did nothing wrong when he made that “perfect phone call” to the president of Ukraine.

There are eyewitnesses to that telephonic “perfection,” or so the president says. They need to testify before the U.S. Senate, which has commenced its impeachment trial to determine whether Trump keeps his job as president.

The House of Representatives has impeached Trump on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The abuse charge stems from that phone call, the one in which Trump asked the Ukraine government for a favor. He wanted Ukraine to launch an investigation into Joe Biden, a potential foe of Trump. He asked Ukraine to, that’s right, interfere in our 2020 election. 

Except that Trump keeps saying the call was “perfect.” Well, perfection might lie in the eye of the beholder. White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was there. So was national security adviser John Bolton. These men need to tell us what they know, what they heard, what they told the president at the time.

If there is nothing to hide, then — if logic holds up — there wouldn’t be a reason on God’s treasured Earth for them to resist testifying before the U.S. Senate.

Am I right? I believe I am.

national news, political news

Time for also rans to run for the sidelines

I won’t pussyfoot around on this matter.

The time has come for the Democratic Party presidential primary field to narrow itself to the leading, five or maybe six, contenders.

The rest of them need to go. Away. To the back of the room.

The leading candidates are now obvious to even the most casual observer. They are Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and — yes, this one — Michael Bloomberg.

The rest of them are still polling in low single digits. They won’t gain any traction, no matter what they say or how much they contend their campaigns are about to ignite.

A couple of those back of the pack members disappoint me. I had some hope that perhaps Tulsi Gabbard might emerge. She didn’t. She cast that strange “present” vote on whether the House of Representatives should impeach Donald John Trump. Then we have Deval Patrick, a late entrant. The former Massachusetts governor sought to light a fire among African-American voters. I haven’t seen the spark yet.

Why include Bloomberg in the field of contenders who should continue? Well, dude’s got a lot of cash. About 50 billion bucks. He’s going to drop a few million of those dollars into this race. He has a message. He needs to be heard. Yes, I am skeptical of a mega-rich guy jumping in late, skipping the early primaries and then presuming to be the candidate for whom primary voters will flock because only he can defeat Donald Trump this November.

I’ve noted already that I am highly satisfied with the quality of the Democratic field that is angling for an opportunity to run against the president. I damn sure don’t support all of them.

The field, though, needs to winnow itself down to a roster of candidates who can compete strongly for their party’s presidential nomination.

To be candid, I am weary of the constant bickering and dickering over who among them is being left out of these campaign joint appearances.

Take a hike, also rans. Thank you for offering yourselves for our consideration. This isn’t your time.

local news

What? Right-wing Amarillo bucks governor’s refugee ban?

How about that New York Times, for my money the greatest newspaper in the nation if not the world? It is reporting that Amarillo, Texas, the unofficial “capital city” of the right-wing Texas Panhandle is taking a dim view of Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to ban refugees from settling in Texas.

We used to live in Amarillo. We had a wonderful life there. We are forging a new wonderful life in the Metroplex. But I was fully aware of Amarillo’s reputation as a hotbed for far right-wing political thought. The NY Times article suggests a latent reservoir of good will. God bless Amarillo and the NY Times.

The article cites how Amarillo has been a magnet for refugees for many years. Many refugees have become part of the community. They contribute to the community’s life. They have been embraced by their neighbors. They call themselves Americans.

Abbott, though, has issued an order that declared that Texas would become the first state in the Union to opt out of a presidential edict that gives states the option of accepting or rejecting refugees; Abbott has shut the door on new refugees.

That ain’t the American — or the Texan — way, governor. The Times article spells out how Amarillo has opened its door — not to mention its heart — to those who have ventured to the Panhandle, which the Times article describes as a somewhat desolate, wind-swept, dusty place.

As the Times reports: Here in Amarillo, which for a time took in more refugees per capita than any other Texas city, few share the governor’s alarm over refugees, and those who do have a far more nuanced view. They have long lived with refugees, not as abstract political talking points, but as neighbors.

Refugee Services of Texas and Catholic Charities of the Texas Panhandle have taken on the refugee issue head-on, helping resettle 7,000 individuals from 2007 to 2017, the Times reports.

The article makes me proud of the city my wife and I called home for more than two decades.

Here is the full article in the New York Times.

Amarillo will remain a stronghold of support for Donald Trump and for Gov. Abbott. It is full of many fine individuals who understand that they live in a place that serves as a beacon for those who need a refuge from oppression and tyranny