Monthly Archives: March 2020

State news

Take it from this fellow: Texas judicial election system stinks

There can be no diplomatic, or judicious way to say this.

The system we use in Texas to elect our judges stinks to high heaven … and beyond. It is filled with the stench of rotten money.

There. Now that we’ve laid that all out, I now shall offer some evidence. It comes from a marvelous Texas Tribune article about a fellow I don’t know well, but someone about whom I have known for many years.

Salem Abraham lives in Canadian, which I call “the pretty part of the Texas Panhandle.” He earned a fortune trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He knows how to play numerical probabilities.

As the Tribune reports, Abraham knows as well as anyone in Texas that the more you donate to Texas judicial candidates the better your chances of winning a judicial verdict/settlement in their court.

Texas is one of six states that elect judges on partisan ballots. The Tribune notes, too, that many judges owe their campaign donations to “the white-shoe lawyers and law firms who appear before them.”

The Tribune also reports that every living former Texas Supreme Court chief justice has called for reforming the system. To no avail. Their pleas have fallen into the abyss of indifference to — at a bare minimum — the appearance of impropriety.

Abraham notes in the article that the more money that pours in the more likely one will get a favorable ruling from the court.

Pass the collection plate?

This is no way to adjudicate fairly, impartially and without bias.

local news

There go the early votes

Pete Buttigieg’s sudden, but not surprising, withdrawal from the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary race illustrates brightly the hazard of casting one’s vote early.

Texans have been casting early-vote ballots. The final day was Friday. Super Tuesday occurs in two days. Buttigieg remains on the ballot. He has suspended his campaign.

He no doubt will get a lot of votes when the ballots are counted Tuesday night. However, it just goes to show what many of us have said all along, which is that casting one’s votes early exposes us to last-minute surprises involving the candidate of our choice.

To be candid, I haven’t addressed specifically the notion of dropping out as one of those surprises; my concerns usually have centered on candidates’ behavior that sullies one’s vote for them.

I suppose, though, that my own decision to wait until Election Day to cast my ballot allows me to vote for candidates who are still in the hunt for the nation’s highest public office.

religious news

Trump still manages to fool those of faith

A cruel, egotistical, unChristlike man pretending to be a person of faith is not fooling me.

The above statement comes from a friend of mine who posted it on a social media outlet. I happen to agree wholeheartedly with him.

The “unChristlike man” is none other than Donald John Trump, who offends me at so many levels I cannot even begin to list them all. So I’ll examine just this one level briefly.

The president pretends to be a man of faith only because it suits his political ambition, which he discovered shortly before he announced his presidential candidacy in June 2015.

You remember the showy ride down the escalator at Trump Tower when he declared his intention to run for president and then in virtually the next breath declared that all immigrants from Mexico were “rapists, murderers and drug dealers,” and then added that “there are some fine people, too.”

The man who once courted Democratic pols became a shill for Republicans.

Meanwhile, the guy who said publicly he’s never sought forgiveness for any sin he’s ever committed has become a darling of the evangelical Christian movement.

For the ever-lovin’ life of me I cannot fathom how that has come to pass.

People of faith with whom I am familiar have scolded me for not being more forgiving of this guy. They say everyone deserves grace, that even Donald Trump deserves empathy.

Sure. I just keep asking: When has he ever demonstrated an ounce of empathy? When has he shown the ability to grant forgiveness to anyone else? When has this individual ever acted like the man of faith with a devotion to God that he professes to be?

My friend is right. The president of the United States is a cruel egotist. He shouldn’t fool anyone. Amazingly, though, he does.

national news

Rising star flames out

There once was a time when I thought sincerely that Democrats needed a fresh face, another Jimmy Carter-type to jump out of the weeds to capture the nation’s imagination. Then he or she could wrestle the presidency away from the most unqualified man ever to hold the office.

Pete Buttigieg kinda fit the bill.

Now, though, he has flamed out. The former South Bend, Ind., mayor has suspended his campaign for the presidency.

He leaves another center-left lane open to others on which to travel. It might be tailor-made for Joe Biden to gather up Mayor Pete supporters for his own political bandwagon.

Why didn’t Buttigieg catch fire? Hmm. Well, my sense is that this incredibly bright young man — Harvard and Oxford grad, Navy intelligence officer who saw duty in Afghanistan, multilingual — simply didn’t have a defining message.

He spoke for months about governing in a way that would “do things in a new way.” I found myself asking: What things do you want to do and in what way do you intend to do them?

Now he’s stepping aside, leaving the field to others with a far more realistic chance of being nominated.

At some level I am saddened that Buttigieg couldn’t catch fire. He did score a bit of a victory only in that he is an openly gay man who managed to gather up some delegates to the party’s nominating convention. Hey, that is no small feat! But he said he didn’t want to defined only by his sexuality.

Indeed, Pete Buttigieg has much to offer. The good news, though, is that time is on his side. I’m betting Mayor Pete will be back.

national news

Can the ‘Black Belt’ deliver for Biden in Alabama?

Take a look at this map. It is of Alabama. The blue counties depict those that Donald Trump carried in the 2016 presidential election; the counties in red show those that voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The red swath across the middle of Alabama is what is known as the “Black Belt.”

Check it out here.

I became aware of the Black Belt while visiting my dear friend and former colleague, the late Claude Duncan, in 1985. I had attended a conference in Atlanta and I stopped for a brief visit in Tuscaloosa, where Claude lived. We went to the race track one evening in Green County, the heart of the Black Belt, to bet on some greyhounds. We were among the very few white guys in the crowd.

Duncan told me how this part of Alabama is as reliably Democratic as many parts of Texas used to be before the Lone Star State converted from Democrat to Republican.

I thought of Claude the Saturday night as I watched Joe Biden pile up that big win in South Carolina, carried over the finish line after lapping the field on the backs of the African-American vote that rallied to the former vice president’s cause.

And then I thought of how Biden might fare in Alabama, which is one of 14 states voting Tuesday in the Democratic Party presidential primary, aka Super Tuesday.

There was a lot of talk about Biden’s “firewall” of African-American support in South Carolina. I am wondering now if the ex-VP can parlay that black voter support into a big payoff in Alabama and in other states with large numbers of African-American voters.

Greene County voted 82 percent for Hillary in 2016, even though only 4,880 ballots were cast. The Black Belt, though, contains many other more populous counties, such as Montgomery County, that also voted heavily for Clinton over Trump.

If Joe Biden can parlay a 60 percent black vote in South Carolina into something similar in Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas on Super Tuesday, he might be able to withstand the onslaught of delegates Bernie Sanders is slated to win in California and New England.

national news

How does the liar in chief get away with this?

I am baffled beyond belief at how Donald John “The Liar in Chief” Trump gets away with saying the things that fly out of his mouth.

He stood before the Conservative Political Action Conference — the outfit he has taken over with his cult of personality — and declared that Mexico is paying for “The Wall” he is building along our southern border.

Mexico is not paying for it. Two of Mexico’s presidents have said they never will pay a peso for it. Yet the president continues to foment that lie. What’s more, he is actually paying for the wall by usurping appropriated Defense Department funds; he is taking billions of dollars approved by Congress on military hardware and diverting it to construction of The Wall.

Furthermore, he makes these outrageous claims about Mexico footing the bill for The Wall in front of the frothing faithful at CPAC … and they cheer themselves hoarse.

I am left dumbstruck at the idiocy of those who continue to buy into this clown’s falsehoods and the notion that a group such as CPAC — which once stood for conservative principles — would shun the likes of real conservatives to curry favor with a president who adheres to no known moral code that any of the rest of us can detect.

One actual conservative would be U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, who had the temerity in the Senate impeachment trial of Trump to vote to convict DJT on a count of abuse of power. Romney was correct to vote his conscience. CPAC and other Trump toadie groups are wrong condemn him for doing what he believed was the only path he could take in determining whether the president should stay in office.

So, the president keeps lying … and lying some more.

And he gets away with it. Astounding, man.

national news

Money can’t buy love … or votes?

Tom Steyer thought money could buy him a path to the White House.

He was mistaken. The billionaire folded up his campaign tent after the South Carolina votes were cast and he ended up with 11 percent of the total, several miles behind the lead piled up by Joe Biden.

What now? What lies ahead for the other billionaire in the Democratic Party presidential primary campaign, Michael Bloomberg, the ninth-richest person on Earth, who’s already spent a half-billion of his own dollars on this race?

He hopes to do well on Tuesday, aka Super Tuesday. Will he win any of the states where he’s been airing all those TV ads, such as in Texas? I doubt it.

Bloomberg ought to rethink this exercise in futility as well.

The former New York mayor entered the race vowing to defeat Donald J. Trump. The way I see it, the longer he is in the contest siphoning off votes that could go to another centrist who actually can beat DJT — Joe Biden — the more he helps Trump than hinders his path to re-election.

Bloomberg has crashed and burned at two debates. He doesn’t play well live and in person. He looks disinterested, annoyed and cannot craft anything resembling the kind of sharp rhetoric one needs to develop a message.

Furthermore, I just am one Democratic-leaning voter who doesn’t believe he is faithful to the party to which he purports to belong. He ran for NYC mayor as a Republican; then he became an independent; now he’s a Democrat. He’s good on gun issues and on climate change. What else? Who knows?

As for Bernie Sanders, I do not want a “movement” leader or a “revolutionary” to carry the banner against Donald Trump. I much prefer a seasoned, veteran politician with a record of actual accomplishment to take the fight to the carnival barker in chief.

To my way of thinking, that would be Joe Biden.

We need to cull this field down immediately to the two men left standing: Biden and Bernie. Let pragmatism prevail over passion.

national news

Firewall stood firm for Biden

All that talk about the Joe Biden “firewall” in South Carolina showing cracks, fissures, weakness now appears to have been, well, just talk.

It held firm as the former vice president of the United States cruised to a smashing victory today in the Democratic Party presidential primary.

More than half of the state’s primary voters are African American. Biden depended on that base of support to carry him to victory. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ early wins in New Hampshire and Nevada and his strong showing in Iowa cast doubt on whether that firewall would withstand the pressure being applied.

Commentators described African American voters as “pragmatic,” that candidates’ strength becomes a factor in how voters would cast their ballots.

Then came an apparently pivotal endorsement from U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, a South Carolina political icon and the most powerful African American in Congress.

So, the firewall — if that’s what we’ll call it — got plenty of reinforcement.

It held the former VP in good stead. Now it is time to see whether a similar firewall forms in other states with substantial numbers of African American voters. You know, states such as, let’s see … Texas!

The primary caravan is on its way here.

national news

Get ready, Mr. VPOTUS, for the barrage from the current POTUS

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Now that Joseph R. Biden Jr. has cemented a smashing victory in the South Carolina Democratic Party presidential primary, it is time for the former vice president to gird himself for the expected barrage from the current president of the United States.

Yep, it’s going to happen.

Donald John Trump and his surrogates will resume their barrage that they turned on Bernie Sanders, still the front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

They managed to pillory and plunder Biden’s name and reputation during the U.S. Senate impeachment trial by trying to link him to his son Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine.

Then Biden stumbled in early primary states. Now he’s back in the game. I believe Trump and his team are most concerned about facing Biden in the fall than any other Democrat.

Thus, I believe Joe Biden needs to prepare for the onslaught.

Get ready, Joe.

national news

I guess endorsements do matter

It must be that some voters actually heed politicians’ endorsements of other politicians.

So it appears as the votes roll in from South Carolina polling stations. Former Vice President Joe Biden is piling up a huge victory in that state, thanks it appears in large part to an endorsement delivered Wednesday by U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, the most powerful African American in Congress and an esteemed political icon in his home state of South Carolina

Now, what does it mean for the rest of the Democratic Party primary race for the presidential nomination? I am unable to predict how it shakes out.

Here’s my sincere hope.

It is that Joe Biden can wrest the momentum away from Sen. Bernie Sanders, the frontrunner at this moment for the Democratic nomination. I do not want a far-left ideologue to run against Donald John Trump, the current president of the United States.

I want instead for Democrats to nominate a seasoned political pro, someone with mileage on his wheels, someone who can work across the political aisle. Joe Biden is that individual.

There. I’ve said yet again that Biden is my No. 1 choice. He is in the hunt as the primary parade heads to Texas and the other Super Tuesday states next week.

I remain committed to defeating Donald Trump. My desire hasn’t wavered a single bit since the moment this carnival barker declared his candidacy in June 2015. I intend to use this blog to the extent that I am able to advance that cause.

As the political junkies among us watch the results from South Carolina roll in, I am hopeful that Democrats are going to avoid driving off a cliff by nominating someone who I believe stands a frightening chance of losing to a president who never should have been elected.