local news

No ‘trampling’ of conservatives!

Ted Cruz has it exactly wrong when he says that “conservative values” are being trampled.

The junior US senator from Texas issued a statement endorsing Caroline Fairly in her run for the Texas House District 87 seat being vacated by Four Price of Amarillo. He said this:

“An Amarillo native, community leader, and passionate conservative, Caroline Fairly understands that at a time when our conservative values are being trampled on, there is nothing more important than standing up and fighting for our Texan way of life. Caroline is dedicated to ensuring that the Panhandle remains a strong beacon of conservative, Texan values, which is why I am proud to endorse her for Texas House District 87.”

I do not know where on this good Earth the Cruz Missile believes “conservative values are being trampled on.” It sure ain’t in Texas. Not in the Legislature, or among Texas’s congressional delegation, or the courts (which we elect in this state on partisan ballots).

If anyone can complain about their views being trampled, it would progressives in this great state who seemingly cannot get their voices heard above the clamoring on the other side.

If “conservative values were being trampled,” then someone will have to explain how Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton got acquitted of the impeachment charges leveled him.

local news

Severance coming … hmm?

Now comes a question that pops into my noggin whenever I hear about a senior public official being forced out of his high-paying, taxpayer-funded position.

Will he get a severance package to “soften” his landing?

The Princeton City Council on Friday accepted the resignation of City Manager Derek Borg, effective immediately. That tells me two things: He was told to resign and that had he resisted the council would have terminated him.

Does a city manager deserve a severance package when (a) he wasn’t doing the job, which prompted the meeting of the council in the first place and (b) resigns his office, which technically is a voluntary act.

Borg does not deserve a “golden parachute” to soften his landing. If he wasn’t performing to the standard set by his employers, the council, why “reward” him with a huge bonus … unless it’s an expression of thanks for saving the city from future grief?

I trust this information will come out in due course. I’m just offering an opinion on what I think should occur.

International news, Joe Biden, national news

Partisan fight over aid to fight Russia?

You live  long enough and you’re liable to see all kinds of manifestations of principle you once thought were set in steel-enforced concrete.

Take the U.S. position regarding aggression by Russian armed forces … for example.

Russia invaded Ukraine a year-plus ago. President Biden said this country would stand foursquare against the Russian aggressors. He vowed to stitch together a strong alliance of nations to resist the Russians. He succeeded.

We have helped Ukraine turn back the Russians. Ukrainian armed forces launched a counteroffensive. You’d think the Democratic U.S. president would enjoy the support of long-standing anti-Russian pols who belong to the Republican Party. Right? Guess again, pilgrim.

We now have the MAGA crowd resisting efforts to back Ukraine … for reasons that totally escape me! It has to be that their guy, the former POTUS, thinks the sun rises and sets on Russian goon/strongman Vladimir Putin.

The MAGA cult seemingly doesn’t believe as much in democratic principles as their political forebears — the real Republicans who fought the Russians and the Soviet Union with a passion. Then again, I don’t consider the MAGA morons to be real Republicans. They are political perverts who have twisted longstanding U.S. policy into something unrecognizable.

It is an evolution I never envisioned I would see.

education news

A sign of the times … eek!

If ever there was a sign that exemplified the era in which we live, it well might be this one, a picture of which I snapped at Lovelady High School in Princeton, Texas.

I am 73 years of age and the message on this sign — about armed security personnel using “whatever force necessary” to protect teachers, students and staff at Princeton Independent School District — is one I never envisioned seeing when I was coming of age.

Or, for that matter, when my sons were coming of age in Beaumont, Texas.

The spasm of gun violence in schools has prompted Princeton ISD to hire armed guards at all its campuses. The security personnel all are firearms-trained; some are retired police officers. Farmersville ISD, just seven miles east of Princeton, has a full-time police force with Texas-certified police officers on duty on its campuses.

This is what we have come to in this country. We must warn visitors to our schools that armed guards are on duty and will do whatever it takes to protect human life against loons with guns.

Amazing … simply amazing.

You want a sign of these troubled times? There it is, folks.

local news

Princeton manager search commences

President Biden said the other evening that the United States is “at an inflection point.” as it grapples with the complexity of world affairs. Well, so is the city in Collin County, Texas, that I now call home.

The Princeton City Council this week accepted the resignation of its city manager, Derek Borg. The council had called a special meeting to “discuss” the manager’s job performance. It met in closed session for two hours and then voted 5-0 to accept Borg’s resignation … effective immediately.

Inflection point? Boy howdy. Is it ever.

Princeton is in the midst of a growth explosion. Its population nearly tripled from the 2010 to the 2020 Census, from 6,807 residents to 17,027 residents. But the growth hasn’t even begun to abate. By most folks’ estimates, the population of Princeton has exceeded 25,000 people.

Which brings me to my point. The City Council must get this search, vetting and selection of a new chief municipal administrator right … or else!

The council makes one personnel hire under the terms of its charter. It chooses the city manager, who then selects department heads.

If I could write the ideal profile for a city manager to run a city on the move such as Princeton it would have to include “visionary.” It also must include someone with experience administering another city going through the growth that is happening in Princeton. The city manager must be creative and forward-thinking.

Princeton does not need a caretaker, a placeholder, someone who is just marking time until retirement. Princeton’s growth requires a city administration led by someone who knows where he or she wants to take this community.

I don’t want to overstate it, but I do believe this community has reached its form of “inflection” as it grapples with overwhelming growth. It needs a city manager who can take charge of City Hall’s municipal machinery.

To the City Council, I only can add that it is time to get busy.

national news

House GOP in tailspin

Well now … just how dysfunctional can the U.S. House Republican caucus get? Pretty damn dysfunctional as it appears to me.

The House GOP tossed Rep. Jim Jordan’s candidacy for speaker into the crapper today, ending the Ohio fire-breather’s effort to become the latest Man of the House.

Good grief, man. The GOP “controls” the House by an unworkably thin margin. Among those Republicans is the cadre of MAGA loons who call the shots. Jordan is one of them, or so we thought.

Jordan is a 2020 election denier and is a reported architect of the 1/6 frontal assault on our government and the attempt to overturn the 2020 election result that produced a Joe Biden presidency.

He lost the GOP vote initially to Rep. Steve Scalise, who then dropped out. Jordan tried three times to win the speakership, losing greater margins with each vote.

The MAGA goofballs cannot govern! Can’t anyone see how this is playing out?

To be candid, I don’t give a flying crap in a saucer about Jordan. I cannot stand his bullying, his boorishness, his bellicosity.

However, I do care about our government. I want a strong and principled Republican Party to go toe-to-toe with the Democratic Party. Yes, I favor Democratic principles more than Republican ones. However, the failure to elect a permanent speaker puts our very government in jeopardy.

The GOP has installed Rep. Patrick McHenry as “interim” speaker. The chatter now is to grant him a bit more authority, to buy him some time to get his political balance and then, perhaps, elect him speaker for the remainder of the current congressional term.

To do that, though, we need the MAGA clown show to lay down its trick balls and get real.

The Republicans are supposed to lead Congress. They aren’t doing anything of the sort. It looks to me as if they are writing their own political obituary … to be published Election Day 2024!

local news

Is this ‘premature’? Umm, no

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A statement from a woman whose acquaintance I made recently kind of caught me off guard … until I took a moment to process it.

She wondered if I was being “premature” in my effort to restart my life after losing my bride, Kathy Anne, to cancer in February. “It hasn’t even been a year,” she said, alluding to those upcoming “firsts” one endures after losing a loved one. You know, first birthday, first Christmas, first New Year’s Eve, first wedding anniversary one should commemorate with the loved one by your side.

I answered her forthrightly. “I believe I am ready” to proceed with my life, I said. Why? Because Kathy Anne would have it no other way. She made her point to me abundantly clear once or twice when we both were in the peak of health. “I want you to find happiness,” she instructed me in a stern voice, in the event she preceded me to her Great Reward.

My marriage succeeded over the course of 51 years largely because I followed the rule most husbands must follow: I did what my wife told me to do.

Do not ever misconstrue this carved-in-stone fact, which is that no woman ever can replace the love of my life. If I am able to find a new partner, she will understand that fact. My sons, my daughter-in-law, my granddaughter all know that about me. They know that Kathy Anne always will be first in my heart.

The task for me emotionally always will be to deal with the pain that is certain to flare on occasion. It will happen without warning. Indeed, I am functioning quite well while performing this or that task.

There can be no doubt that Feb. 3, 2023 was the worst day of my life and the lives of my family members. It happened near the beginning of what has turned out to be the crappiest year of my life.

However, I do possess an eternal wellspring of optimism. The future, as they say, is for the living. I intend to live my life on my own terms, albeit while following the instruction of my darling Kathy Anne.

Happiness is out there for me. I intend to find it.

Uncategorized

GOP set to lose House

I am going to venture gingerly out on the proverbial political limb to make an assertion about the future of the U.S. House.

It is that the Republicans’ razor-thin control of the lower legislative chamber is in serious danger of flipping back to Democratic control after the 2024 election.

Why is that? Because the Republican hierarchy that controls the House cannot function. It cannot elect a speaker after ousting the guy who once had the office. Failure to choose a speaker puts the shutdown of the federal government into even more jeopardy, meaning it is likely to occur.

Who will get the blame? The feckless Republican congressional leadership, that’s who! And they deserve it, too!

Rep. Jim Jordan, the unofficial chairman of the MAGA board in the House, will not be elected speaker, which is a good thing. The guy happens to be an election denier and an unindicted participant in the action on 1/6 spasm that threatened to overthrow the government.

The House does have an interim speaker, Patrick McHenry, who doesn’t want the job. To avoid the calamity of a government shutdown, the House might give McHenry some more power to at least get the legislative wheels turning to avoid the shutdown.

All of this sets up a potential rout in the 2024 congressional election. Democrats need to flip four seats to take back the House.

Bring it!

military news

Israel hits ‘too hard’?

This is a headline I didn’t want to read once war broke out between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas:

“Israeli airstrike kills 500 in hospital.”

The report came from the Gaza Health Ministry. So … it immediately becomes somewhat suspect. However, as we are learning all over again: War is hell.

Indeed, we might learn before this war ends that it is worse than hell. The “war is hell” comment, attributed originally to Union Army Gen. William “Tecumseh” Sherman during the Civil War, almost has become a cliche, a throwaway line.

It isn’t. It is the unvarnished, unadulterated truth about humanity’s ability to inflict misery on itself.

If the report is true that an Israeli airstrike hit a Gaza hospital and inflicted the kind of casualty count that is being reported, then much about this conflict might be changing. Israel said it intends to wipe Hamas “off the face of the Earth.” I, too, want Hamas destroyed. There cannot possibly be room in a civilized world for the scale of brutality that exists in what passes in the hearts of those who inflict it.

Hamas is among the worst of the worse.

However, Israel must be accountable for hitting a hospital in the manner that is being reported.

Israel denies hitting the hospital. “We did not strike that, and that the intelligence that we have suggests that it was a failed rocket launch by the Islamic Jihad, and I want to add, categorically, that we do not intentionally strike any sensitive facilities, any sensitive facilities, and definitely not hospitals,” Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus told CNN.

I am going to presume that Israel knows and understands the rules of modern warfare. One of those rules places hospitals off limits to attack. The penalty would be to charge the attackers as war criminals.

I also am going to insist that we cannot place Israel on the same plane as Hamas. Israel has pledged to avoid killing civilians as it plans a possible frontal ground invasion of Gaza. Hamas, though, targets civilians, as it did when it started this war more than a week ago with that horrific rocket barrage into Israel.

Israel, to my mind, deserves some benefit of the doubt as the probe into this attack proceeds … but, dammit! — this is a headline I clearly did not want to read.

 

local news, Sports news, State news

From ‘zero’ to ‘hero’

Let’s see now. At the end of the 2022 Major League Baseball season, Dallas/Fort Worth baseball fans were wondering if the Texas Rangers had lost their ability to compete at the big-league level.

The Rangers stunk. The were a laughingstock. They reminded longtime fans of some of the worst teams in American League history. Then came the offseason. They hired a new manager, Bruce Bochy, who brought in some new coaches. They went to work to rebuild the team.

Have they succeeded? Yeah. They have.

The Rangers so far — if you’ll pardon the baseball pun — are pitching a shutout in the 2023 playoffs. They went to Tampa to sweep the Rays. Then they went to Baltimore and took the first two from the Orioles and sent the Birds packing with a third victory at home.

Now the Rangers are playing the Houston Astros in the American League Championship series and have defeated the ‘Stros in the first two games. They have to win two more to advance to the World Series. Let’s see … that’s 7-0 so far in this playoff extravaganza.

Not a bad turnaround.

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