Tag Archives: Democrats

political news

Elections always have consequences

I have long understood and appreciated the consequences that elections bring to those in public service.

It’s an accepted part of the electoral process. If the individual you want doesn’t get elected to any office, you then must face the prospect of the other individual doing something with which you likely will disagree.

It happened certainly in 2016 with the election as president of Donald J. Trump. He won the Electoral College as prescribed by the Constitution, but more of us cast ballots for his major foe than for the winner. Still, we are paying the consequences of the previous presidential election.

Well, here we are. Two years later and the president finds himself facing his own consequential electoral result in the wake of the congressional midterm election. The House of Representatives, half of the legislative branch of government, is about to flip from Republican to Democratic control; the gavel-passing occurs on Jan. 3 when Nancy Pelosi ascends to the speakership. Committee chairs will get their respective gavels, too.

Get ready, therefore, for hearings. Get ready for lots of questions that House Republicans so far have been  unwilling to ask of the president of their own political party.

The president appears to be in trouble. His GOP “allies,” and I use that term guardedly, have been reticent in seeking the truth behind the many questions that swirl around the president. They aren’t “friends” with Trump as much as they are frightened by him. He has bullied them into remaining silent.

The president won’t be able to play that hand with Democrats who are in charge of the lower chamber of Congress. Thus, it remains increasingly problematic for the president to do something foolhardy, such as fire the special counsel who is examining those questions concerning the alleged “collusion” between the president’s campaign and Russian government agents who interfered in our electoral process.

Yes, indeed. Elections have serious consequences. We are likely to witness them play out in real time . . . very soon.

political news

Corker might vote for a Democrat? Big . . . deal!

Lame-duck U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., says he “might vote” for a Democrat for president in 2020.

To which I say: Big . . . bleeping . . . deal!

Does it really matter one bit what a U.S. senator might do when he gets a chance in a couple of years to vote — in private! — for the candidate of his choice?

No it doesn’t.

I grow weary of hearing from these politicians who believe that expressing their voting preferences in public somehow gives their ballot-casting some added significance, some gravitas.

Corker is a fine man. He announced about a year ago that he wouldn’t run for re-election to the Senate from Tennessee. That’s when he grew a pair of ’em and started speaking out against the president of his own party. If only he had been as stern prior to his becoming a lame duck. But . . . whatever.

Now he says he might vote for a Democrat.

The founders made sure we could vote in private for a reason. It was to protect citizens against recrimination, coercion and pressure. Sure, I occasionally reveal my own voting preferences on this blog. I also know that it doesn’t mean anything to damn near anyone because readers of this blog have their minds made up already; I just choose to use this forum to vent.

So, to Sen. Corker I only want to add, feel free to vote for whomever you choose, sir. You are entitled to write in The Man in the Moon if that’s your choice. You’re under no obligation to tell us about it.

Indeed, I care about that as much as I care about knowing you might cast your ballot for a Democrat next time around.

International news

Trump on the wall, who’ll pay for it and that shutdown . . .

Donald Trump is sending a dizzying array of mixed messages — on a single issue all by itself.

  • The president wants to build a “big, beautiful wall” along our southern border.
  • He insisted again today that Mexico is going to pay for the wall; Mexico’s government has said it won’t do as the president insists.
  • Democrats in Congress say that Trump’s insistence that Mexico pay for the wall takes Congress off the hook; there’s no need for Congress to worry about the money.
  • Thus, we need not worry about a government shutdown, which Trump insists will happen if Congress doesn’t cough up $5 billion to pay for the wall that he insists Mexico will finance.

Are you as confused as I am? If so, then I don’t feel so badly.

I cannot keep up with Donald Trump’s messy mix of messages.

national news, political news

The 2020 horse race has begun

Candidates say they dislike it. So do journalists who cover these events.

But bet on it! The 2020 presidential campaign/horse race has commenced. The media are all over themselves in covering who’s up and who’s down in the upcoming Democratic Party presidential primary campaign.

MoveOn.org, the left-leaning political action group, now has Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke narrowly ahead in the race to become the Democrats’ next presidential nominee. Former Vice President Joe Biden is right behind him.

Beto’s fans are no doubt going nuts. Fine. Let ’em whoop and holler!

I find this kind of coverage annoying in the extreme. Why?

For starters, Beto O’Rourke’s poll standing doesn’t mean a damn thing. It won’t matter at the end of this week, let alone next week. It could change overnight. These polls are as fluid as running water.

The 2016 Republican primary campaign revealed the same kind of shallowness of the media coverage of these issues. The media become fixated on the “horse race” element, not the issues on which the candidates are running.

So it is shaping up for the 2020 Democratic primary campaign.

Beto is up this week. Last week it was Joe Biden. Sen. Kamala Harris might emerge as next week’s media favorite. Then there’s former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, who has formed an exploratory committee to assess whether he wants to run for president in 2020.

The media are going to be all over this horse race matter.

I tend to tune this stuff out fairly quickly once the coverage begins. The media — the very people who say they detest this sort of political coverage — are forcing me to close my ears early.

national news

Let the socialist congresswoman learn her way

I am amused and slightly baffled at all the attention a rookie member of the next Congress getting.

Ocasio-Cortez is the talk of D.C. Democrats love her; Republicans ridicule her. She’s a Democrat, having knocked off a well-known member of her own party’s congressional leadership in the New York state primary, then cruising to election this past month.

Ocasio-Cortez is 29 years of age. She’s a socialist, at least that’s what she calls herself. GOP foes are equating that to her being the daughter of Satan.

Her entry onto the national stage hasn’t gone all that well. She has made a gaffe or two along the way. Democrats are giving her a pass; Republicans are, um, ridiculing her. Oh, I already said that last part.

Ocasio-Cortez is a freshman lawmaker. She hasn’t developed any kind of congressional record on which to pass judgment. I intend to wait to see how she matures on the job. Maybe she’ll learn the difference between the various branches of the federal government.

As for this fascination with her, Democrats need to cool their jets; Republicans, meanwhile, need to quit piling on. They have enough troubles within their own party to make them squirm.

national news

No need to dwell on the negative

I can’t help myself. I cannot stop writing good things about a man I opposed when he was living, but who deserves the tributes and salutes he is receiving now that he is gone.

President George H.W. Bush didn’t get my vote when he ran twice for election and re-election. You know that already.

However, I keep seeing some commentary from liberals/progressives who believe that the 41st president somehow needs to be placed in some sort of “proper context.” They want to shove the negative things about his public life next to the positivity he brought.

I won’t go there. I might, over time, write more critically of Bush 41. Just not now.

I am struck by the notion that his goodness, his decency and his empathy for others stands in the sharpest contrast possible to what we’re seeing and hearing from one of his presidential successors. I refer, of course, to Donald John Trump. But . . . I am going to resist piling on the current president for the time being.

I want to remember the political life that George H.W. Bush represented. He symbolized compromise. Some of his best political friends were — heaven forbid! — Democrats. Yes, this quintessential “establishment Republican” would be seen in the company after hours of Democratic politicians such as, oh, Sonny Montgomery or Dan Rostenkowski. He made friends of all political stripes, not unlike, I should say, the way former Vice President Joe Biden has been able to befriend Republicans as well as his fellow Democrats.

President Bush pledged during the 1988 Republican presidential nominating convention to create a “kinder and gentler nation.” He was only partly successful in achieving that noble goal. It wasn’t for lack of effort on his part. He was a “kind and gentle” man — as well as a gentleman.

The anecdotes and recollections of the late president’s friends tell us so much about the man. Even those who disagreed with him can find plenty of kindness to spread around when remembering his lifetime of service to the nation to which he was so deeply devoted.

national news

Hating the political climate

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Mom always taught me that hating anyone was a step too far. One shouldn’t hate, she said.

OK, Mom, but you won’t mind if I declare my unabashed, unapologetic hatred for the political climate that has infected the atmosphere. I’m glad Mom and Dad aren’t around to see what has happened to our nation . . . not that either of them were particularly political.

Who’s to blame for this? I’m going to lay most of it at the feet of the man elected to “unify” the country. The president of the United States promised to be a unifier once he took office. Donald Trump touts his “promises made, promises kept.” Mr. President, you have failed miserably at keeping this promise.

Trump doesn’t own this poisonous atmosphere exclusively. I’ll concede readily that his political foes continue to whip up the frenzy against him. I also will concede that many of them — I include myself — were stunned speechless Election Night 2016 when the TV networks and other news outlets declared Trump the winner over Hillary Rodham Clinton.

At one level, it’s hard to fathom that event happening. Thus, it well might be that we haven’t gotten over it.

So, Trump knows that. Has he done anything to reach out? Has he sought to mollify the concerns of those who opposed him at the ballot box, those who comprise a solid plurality of Americans who voted for the candidate who lost the Electoral College?

No. He hasn’t. Indeed, he has fanned the embers, whipping them into a firestorm. He speaks only to his “base,” the roughly 38 percent of Americans who stand by their guy. He fires ’em up! He speaks of waves of criminals pouring into the country to commit mayhem; he talks about building that damn wall across our southern border; he threatens to shut the government down if Congress doesn’t pay for it (he has given up trying to get Mexico to pay for it).

The president had the utter gall to say that there were “good people on both sides” of a riot in Charlottesville, Va., in which one of the sides comprised Nazis, Klansmen and white supremacists. How in the world does that unify anyone?

The debate atmosphere has become toxic to the max. There appears to be no end to it. Democrats and Republicans detest each other. The president detests Democrats, accusing them of wanting a nation full of lawbreakers, of wanting to take people’s guns away from them.

Donald J. Trump is largely responsible for fomenting an atmosphere of poisonous rhetoric.

It is worth every ounce of hate I can muster.

national news, political news, State news

‘W,’ Clinton showed us how divided government can work

Since I’ve already noted the arrival in Washington this coming January of a form of “divided government,” I feel the need to offer a two brief examples of how it works.

One party controls one branch of government, the other party controls the other. Such a circumstance doesn’t guarantee gridlock or incessant bickering, bitching and backbiting.

Donald J. Trump is going to report for work in January with Democrats controlling the U.S. House of Representatives; his fellow Republicans will retain control of the Senate. It won’t be a fun time to govern. It doesn’t need to be this way.

I give you two examples, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Before he became president, Bush was governor of Texas. He was elected in 1994. The Republican governor took office with a solidly Democratic Legislature in power. Unlike the man who now is president, he didn’t insult, defame or denigrate legislative Democrats. He learned quickly how to forge alliances — even friendships — with those on the other side.

Two men became his BFFs — before the term became widely accepted. They were the late Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, the crotchety, curmudgeonly Democrat who controlled the Texas Senate and House Speaker Pete Laney of Hale Center, the affable Democrat who ran the People’s House.

They formed a trio who respected each other’s skill and who managed to notch some notable legislative victories among them. They sought to give public school teachers a pay raise and increase test scores among students, they dipped into the state’s budget surplus to enact a tax cut, they furthered the push to invest in renewable energy resources.

Two Democrats learned to work with a Republican governor who, after all, had defeated a Democratic incumbent, the late Ann Richards, in a bitter campaign.

But “W” didn’t denigrate his legislative foes. He worked with them, understanding the need to cooperate when possible. To their credit, Bullock and Laney  understood precisely the same thing.

Bill Clinton watched the Democrats lose control of Congress in 1994, two years after his election to his first term as president. Newt Gingrich became the speaker of the House, Bob Dole rose to majority leader in the Senate.

Did the president let that loss of congressional power dissuade him? Hardly. He, Gingrich and Dole managed over time to work together to accomplish a budgetary miracle: a balanced federal budget, the first one of them in about 30 years.

They understood each other, just as “W” understood his legislative partners in Austin.

What lies ahead for the next Congress and the president as they embark on the second half of the president’s term? The indications are that it’s going to be a rough and rocky ride. It doesn’t help that Donald Trump doesn’t have the political chops needed to navigate and manage a political agenda with discipline and finesse. Nor does it help that he has bruised and battered so many congressmen and women with his insults and nasty pronouncements on Twitter.

Oh, and he’s that got that “Russia thing” hanging over his head.

I wish it were different. I fear we’re headed down the slipperiest of slopes. It need not be this way.

national news

Welcome to the world of divided government

I didn’t realize the value of divided government until Americans had the bad sense to elect a patently unfit human being to be president of the United States.

Moreover, they elected a Congress dominated by politicians from the same party as the unfit president.

Two years on, the equation is about to change fundamentally in Washington, D.C. Republicans who controlled the House of Representatives are turning the gavel over to Democrats, who gained possibly 40 seats once all the ballots are counted from this year’s midterm election.

Republicans gained a couple of seats in the Senate, but their margin is still is pretty narrow.

Donald Trump’s GOP — which bears little resemblance to the party it used to be — now is facing a stern wall of resistance in the lower chamber of Congress. Democrats who’ve been insulted and denigrated for two years by the president now are going to control the congressional chamber where all tax and spending measures originate.

What’s more, they are now likely to start asking tough and probing questions about the Trump administration that their GOP colleagues were too chicken to ask when they controlled the House.

Do I want government to grind to a halt while Democrats exact their revenge on Donald Trump? Of course not. However, the president and his closest aides and advisers need to be held to account for the questionable actions that are being examined by, oh, special counsel Robert Mueller.

I don’t give a hoot about how all of this is going to affect Donald Trump’s agenda. For one thing, I don’t know what his agenda really is, nor where he intends to take the country.

I do care that Democrats are going to speak with a more significant voice on public policy and will be able to apply the needed checks on Donald Trump’s misplaced and misguided efforts to do whatever it is he intends to do.

national security, political news

Espy vs. Hyde-Smith: Race still matters . . . sadly

I do wish this weren’t the case, but race still matters in determining our elected leadership in many of our states.

I fear we’re going to see an example of it at the end of today when they count the ballots in Mississippi, a state long held up as an example where bigotry and racism run rampant.

U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is running for election to a seat to which she was appointed. The Republican is facing Democrat Mike Espy, a former agriculture secretary in the Clinton administration and a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s a runoff election, with Hyde-Smith and Espy competing as the top two finishers in an open contest featuring candidates from both major parties.

It doesn’t look good for Espy at this moment. Why? Well, Espy is an African-American candidate. He also is known as a moderate Democrat, a thoughtful fellow with extensive government experience.

Hyde-Smith has been caught in a number of troubling incidents. She said just a few weeks ago that she would be on the front row if she were invited to a “public hanging.” Many substituted the term “hanging” with “lynching,” which of course sounds the siren to African-Americans who know what that entails.

She then offered one of those idiotic non-apologies, saying she is sorry to “anyone who was offended” by her remarks. She also had her picture taken in 2014 wearing a Confederate cap, packing a rifle under a caption that extolled the Confederacy’s glowing role in state history.

Sheesh, man!

Mississippi is a deeply Republican state. Espy is hoping to capture lightning with a record African-American turnout today, while winning roughly a quarter of the white vote. Will it happen? I hope it does.

Here, though, is one more kick in the gut: The third-place finisher in that earlier election was a Donald Trump sycophant, Chris McDaniel; most of the votes that McDaniel got are damn near a cinch to end up in Hyde-Smith’s column at day’s end.

Yes, we should all should be interested in this race, even though it’s down yonder in Mississippi. The winner will help write national laws that affect all of us.

Thus, I am pulling for Mike Espy.