Monthly Archives: June 2023

national news

Judicial icon speaks out; pay attention, GOP

Leave it to one of the nation’s great legal minds to offer the bold, brash and unvarnished truth to those who have tossed aside their loyalty to the Constitution in favor of loyalty to a cheap politician.

Michael Luttig is a retired federal judge, a keen conservative legal thinker. He has zeroed in directly on the cult following that Donald J. Trump has developed and is cultivating in his quest for the presidency in 2024.

Listen up, you MAGA morons. He’s telling you the truth.

“If the indictment of Mr. Trump on Espionage Act charges – not to mention his now almost certain indictment for conspiring to obstruct Congress from certifying Mr. Biden as the president on Jan. 6 – fails to shake the Republican Party from its moribund political senses, then it is beyond saving itself. Nor ought it be saved,” Luttig said in a scathing New York Times op-ed published Sunday.

Wow! He’s got plenty more to say.

“No assemblage of politicians except the Republicans would ever conceive of running for the American presidency by running against the Constitution and the rule of law. But that’s exactly what they’re planning,” Luttig wrote.

To be brutally honest, this fealty to Trump — the twice-impeached, twice-indicted for POTUS — boggles my noggin beyond all recognition.

Trump has pledged to select a special counsel whose task will be to root out “the most corrupt president” in history. Trump isn’t talking about himself, although he damn sure should be. Oh, no. He vows to find a prosecutor to go after President Biden. That is the hallmark of a tinhorn dictator.

Judge Luttig isn’t some squishy liberal, some progressive bomb thrower. He is a highly regarded conservative legal expert who is siding with the rule of law and the notion that public officials — starting with the president of the United States — take sacred oaths to protect the Constitution.

He wonders what has become of the party of which he has been a member. “The stewards of the Republican Party have become so inured to their putative leader, they have managed to convince themselves that an indicted and perhaps even convicted Donald Trump is their party’s best hope for the future,” Luttig wrote in his op-ed.

Is anyone out there in MAGA Land going to pay attention?

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local news

Have to wait for tee time

Dang it! I was looking forward to teeing it up later this week with some fellows who attend a church I recently joined.

Yes, it’s another turn on my retirement journey. I had (more or less) given up the game of golf. But today I dusted off my clubs, hit the driving range to pound at a bucket of balls and made two quick discoveries.

  1. I haven’t forgotten how to hit a golf ball.
  2. My right shoulder that had been giving me fits allows me to take a full swing with a golf club.

Then came the bad news. The weather forecast for the date of our golf event in McKinney has the temps hitting 105 degrees with a heat index surpassing 110.

The fellow who coordinated the event asked all of us for our thoughts. It’s too hot, we said in unison. He called it off.

Jeez! It’s not even July yet! Damn climate change!

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military news

If only a good guy could emerge

Before we get too far down the road in wishing for a different outcome in that brief rebellion we witnessed in Russia, it’s good to put a couple of aspects in proper perspective.

One is that the alternative to Russian strongman/goon/tyrant Vladimir Putin was not a good one.

The commander of the Wagner military group of mercenaries is one bad dude. Yevgeny Prigozhin had led a march to about 125 miles south of Moscow before he called the whole thing off. Putin called him a traitor and vowed maximum revenge.

Then Prigozhin high-tailed it to Belarus after that country’s president brokered some sort of stand-down. Putin said Prigozhin wouldn’t face punishment after all.

That’s all the bad news. The good news is that there appear to be major cracks appearing in Putin’s ring of protection in the Kremlin, according to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

“I suspect that this is a moving picture and we haven’t seen the last act yet. But we can say this,” Blinken told CNN’s “State of the Union.” “First of all, what we have seen is extraordinary. And I think you have seen cracks emerge that weren’t there before: first in having Prigozhin raise front and center — questioning the very premises of the Russian aggression against Ukraine to begin with — the argument that somehow Ukraine or NATO posed a threat to Russia, and a direct challenge to Putin himself.”

Prigozhin’s forces have been fighting alongside Russians seeking to overthrow the Ukrainian government … and have been getting their asses kicked by Ukrainian forces. The Wagner leader is angry over the incompetence being shown by Putin and his military high command, which is why — apparently — he sought to toss Putin out via a military coup.

If it’s true that Vladimir Putin’s regime is showing signs of weakness, then it appears incumbent on those who want him removed to ensure that an actual democrat emerges to take the reins of power in the Kremlin.

Yevgeny Prigozhin is nothing of the sort.

Still, what we witnessed for about 48 hours was a remarkable attempt to unseat a wholly evil tyrant who should stand trial as the war criminal he has proven himself to be.

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national news

GOP becomes nationalist party

Just how topsy turvy has the political machinery become in this country? Consider this example.

Republicans once thought that the federal government should leave key decisions up to the states and local government entities. Big Brother had no business telling people how to live or how to handle their affairs.

But wait! Now we have abortion on the table. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that abortion should be legalized and is a protected right under the Constitution, conservatives stuck to the let-the-locals-handle-it argument.

The current SCOTUS has overturned Roe v. Wade, unleashing a torrent of efforts to ban the practice.

Now, though, they want to enact a national ban on abortion. They insist that Congress enact federal laws that ban abortion after, say, 15 weeks of a pregnancy. Some states, such as Texas, have gone even further, banning abortion after six weeks … which often is before women even know they are pregnant.

So, which is it?

I know the answer. It depends on the issue. It’s a form of selective principle. Go small on government interference, until the issue involves the hottest of the hot-button matters. Then you go big.

Conservative, small-government philosophies be damned!

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local news

Pictures present no obvious pain

My dearest Kathy Anne …

I thought I’d bang out another short note to you, per the advice of our friends. I thought I needed to tell you that I am having little difficulty looking at pictures of you.

You recall when Dad passed away in September 1980. I went to his office to clear out his desk. His colleagues gave me pictures of him to take with me. I couldn’t look at them. That unreasonable fear of looking at pics of Dad lasted a good while. It faded over time.

My loss of you was far worse than what happened that day more than four decades ago. It is no hyperbole, sweetheart, to tell you that Feb. 3, 2023, was the worst day of my life. My heart shattered into a million pieces. I am still trying to assemble it, but I know that’s an impossible task.

However, I am not suffering the kind of fear I felt at looking at pictures of Dad. I can look at your lovely face and I draw some form of comfort in seeing your buoyant smile.

Indeed, I have a lovely portrait of you hanging on a living room wall next to your angel collection. And, yes, I wish you good night when I turn at the end of the day.

I consider this to be a sort of triumph over the grief I continue to feel as I continue my journey through this dark period.

I also thought you needed to hear it from me.

Make no mistake that I think of you practically every waking minute of every day. I am heartened that I can look at your pictures and think of the moments they were taken and recall them with happiness.

I will miss you forever and then some.

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crime news

Prosecutor seeks postponement … good!

If you thought that special counsel Jack Smith was going to railroad a trial through to its conclusion by accepting a judge’s way-too-early court date, well, guess again.

Smith has asked the judge in the case involving Donald Trump and those classified documents to push the trial back to Dec. 14.

You know what it tells me? It tells me that Smith is so confident in the evidence he has gathered that he is willing to wait an extra few months to put his case before the people.

He also is exhibiting an extraordinary level of fairness to Trump and his legal team. There can be no doubt that Smith is playing his strategy out by the book. That he is leaving no room for appeal on any sort of “technicality” that Trump’s team might construe in the event Smith is able to get a conviction on any of the counts on which Donald Trump stands indicted.

As a cheap-seat witness to all of this, I am willing to wait until December to see what the federal government has in its first-ever indictment of a former POTUS.

Let’s allow the judicial process to do its work.

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International news

Anti-democrats: here and there

I have struggled — until just now — with trying to connect a few dots outlining the political alliances in this country and those that are playing out in the Kremlin and in Kyiv.

Here is what I have determined:

The forces that oppose democracy in Ukraine are being bolstered by those who oppose democracy in this country.  That’s it.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in early 2022 came with the tacit blessing of the MAGA morons and the ultra-right-wingers who questioned initially why the United States was just so damn committed to Ukraine.

You heard them, didn’t you? I surely did. They appeared on right-wing media outlets to suggest that American-led efforts to shore up Ukraine were being fed by a phony assertion that Ukraine wasn’t really a democratic state.

Who do you suppose led that amen chorus? Well, that would be the presumed front runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and the individual Joe Biden succeeded after the 2020 presidential election.

The MAGA cult is parroting many of the talking points coming from the Kremlin. And where is the outrage from the moronic right-wingers over the war crimes being committed against Ukraine by Russian military personnel? They have been silent!

This is all combined to suggest that small-d “democrats” — led by President Biden — are rallying to protect democracy as it is being pursued in Europe. They also are seeking to protect our governmental principles against the forces operating against it here at home.

Those who oppose democracy are fighting on the battlefield to defeat it in Ukraine; their American compatriots have stormed our nation’s Capitol Building to return a 2020 defeated candidate for president to the office he lost in a free and fair election.

The symmetry is quite stunning … don’t you think?

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International news, military news

Putin faces rebellion? Yes!

Vladimir Putin isn’t looking like such a tough guy after all, given the challenge mounted by the leader of what they call a “mercenary” army intent on challenging the dictator’s invasion of Ukraine.

The mercenary force was said to be marching on Moscow. Then the leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, reportedly ordered his Wagner forces to “stand down.”

What in the world does this mean? At first blush, it appears that Putin is likely to seek the harshest retribution imaginable against what he calls an act of “treason” against the Kremlin. Well, that’s not exactly how some of us beyond the Russian borders see it.

Prigozhin was acting out of a sense of desperation as Russian military forces are being defeated by Ukrainians seeking to regain territory taken by the Russians in their illegal and immoral invasion launched more than a year ago against Ukraine.

And it damn sure signals a serious fracture within the Russian military command that has acted incompetently and stupidly ever since Putin ordered the invasion in early 2022.

Meanwhile, the United States — led by President Biden — continues its aggressive support in providing aid and equipment to Ukraine.

This is serious stuff, folks.

Wagner Chief Marches on Moscow in Mutiny Challenging Putin (yahoo.com)

As Yahoo News reports: The insurrection is without precedent in Putin’s nearly quarter-century rule in Russia, jolting a country trying to sustain a war in Ukraine that’s the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II. It’s unfolding against the backdrop of a Ukrainian counteroffensive across some of the area where Wagner’s troops deployed for months in the war’s longest and bloodiest battle.

My strong hope is that Joe Biden continues to apply maximum economic pressure on Putin in a strategy he hopes will persuade the dictator to cease his aggression.

The United States cannot let up in its support of the valiant Ukrainians who are fighting for the survival of democracy in Europe.

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national news

Submersible? Umm … no!

OK, I will have to stipulate that I don’t believe I ever gave any thought to whether I would ride to the depths of the ocean in a submersible vehicle.

Then came the tragedy that took the lives of five men this week as they sought to take an up-close look at the wreckage of the RMS Titanic cruise ship that sank in 1912 and is resting 13,000 feet below the ocean’s surface.

For almost my entire life I have maintained a fairly fearless attitude about what I would do … or wouldn’t do. I am 73 years of age and I am taking a much more cautious outlook on those things I never would do. Riding to the floor of the ocean in a submersible is very near the top of the won’t-do list.

The Titan vehicle reportedly imploded shortly after launching toward the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The men on board died instantly, as the Coast Guard and the Navy have indicated.

Just because I have become a scaredy-cat who won’t do certain things doesn’t mean I disparage the fearless among us who are willing to take those risks. It’s part of being a human being, many of them have said in the hours since the revelation that the Titan had been destroyed in a “catastrophic implosion.”

Human beings are wired to explore, to test their limits, to reach perhaps beyond their grasp … or so the thoughts go. I am going to sigh and respond only with this: Not all human beings are hardwired in this manner; I know … because I am one of those who cannot do what those five brave men were able to do.

My heart breaks for the loved one who are mourning their unbelievable loss.

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local news

Retirement ain’t for the queasy

Retirement was sure to introduce me to many shifts, twists and turns and occasional bumps along the way. I knew it when I commenced that journey with my bride nearly a decade ago.

She opted to retire “early” not long after I left my career behind in August 2012. I would follow suit about three years later.

My lesson, though, about retirement is that one must be prepared for any eventuality. By “any eventuality,” I refer — to no one’s suprise, I am sure — to tragedy.

It crashed into me on Feb. 3 when my bride passed away. I am continuing on my journey, but I am now forced to find that “new normal.” I haven’t found it just yet, but it’s coming a little more sharply into focus with each day.

My friends and family have advised me to “take it one day at a time.” I am following that advice to the letter. I am putzing around my house each day, doing this and that chore.

I run errands. I mow the lawn. I have a laugh or two each day with my son, who has moved in with me.

But this new era of retirement has a different feel — quite obviously — than what Kathy Anne and I had expected when we embarked on this journey together.

Intellectually, though, I knew that it was entirely possible all of this could occur. Still, when my world changed forever the evening of Feb. 3, I wasn’t ready for it. I’ll be candid: This is the worst event ever to fall on me. The good news is that I have my family. They, too, are hurting but we give each other comfort when we need it.

I want to share this latest update with you just to let you know that I am pushing forward. Kathy Anne insisted on it if fate were to place me in this spot.

It has done so. The rest of it is up to me.

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