Monthly Archives: August 2019

national news

POTUS exhibits bottomless pit of indecency

This is a Twitter message that the president of the United States fired off this morning.

Elijah Cummings is a Baltimore congressman with whom Donald Trump has ignited a feud regarding Cummings’s criticism of the president. He has called Baltimore a “rate- and rodent-infested” hellhole unfit for human habitation. He blames Cummings for it.

Then we hear that Cummings’s home was robbed. This tweet is the president’s response to the news.

Picture any president of the United States expressing such utter disdain for the misfortune that fell on a fellow elected official. What might the public reaction be?

Yet somehow, in ways that defy my ability to discern any sense of what goes through what passes for the mind of Donald Trump, he gets away with it.

This individual — our head of state — is a disgrace.

medical news

Cure for AIDS and childhood cancer on tap?

Donald Trump went way overboard in handing out grand promises during a political rally this week in Cincinnati.

First, he said he intends to find a cure for HIV/AIDS “very soon.” How soon? That remains to be seen and perhaps how the president defines the term “very soon.”

Second, he announced his intention to cure childhood cancer.

There you go. Two deadly diseases are headed for extinction on this president’s watch. Naturally, the crowd cheered. Hey, who can blame them? I mean, it was their guy making the dubious boasts, although the subject of the prediction certainly is worth cheering, no matter how serious one should take the claim being made by the miracle worker in chief.

What will happen, though, if we don’t find a cure for HIV/AIDS or childhood cancer by the time Trump leaves office? I am presuming he means in January 2025, at the end of his second term. Oh, the humanity, if he gets re-elected next year.

I suppose he’ll blame Democrats in Congress for however short he might fall in that grand prediction.

I am going to hope that Trump delivers on the grand effort, although I have about as much confidence in his delivering the goods as I do on his insistence that “Mexico will pay for The Wall.”

national news

Preferring a centrist/moderate to challenge Trump

The older I get the less radical my political thinking becomes.

I once considered myself a radical. In 1972, for instance, I got to cast my first vote for president of the United States. I voted proudly for Sen. George McGovern, who went on to lose 49 of 50 states against President Richard Nixon. It didn’t matter to me that I was backing a doomed candidate. I had just returned home from the Army, served some time in Vietnam, came home from that war wondering what in the world we were doing over there. I wanted the war to end; Sen. McGovern was going to end it.

I have learned over the years, now that I am a whole lot older, that radical politicians usually fare poorly at the ballot box.

To that end, I am leaning heavily toward a centrist/moderate Democrat to win the party’s nomination to run against Donald John Trump in November 2020.

The radical progressives running for POTUS this year tend to annoy me. I refer to the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Marianne Williamson, Bill DiBlasio for starters. Of the three I just mentioned, Sanders is the most annoying of all; he sings off a single page in his political hymn book, the one titled “income inequality.”

My tendency is to lean toward someone such as Joe Biden, the former vice president. I get that he has taken a lot of fire from many of his Democratic Party primary foes. Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, DiBlasio, Julian Castro and John Delaney have unloaded on him.

A large number of other Democratic candidates are likely to fade away. I am sorry to project that one of them might be Beto O’Rourke, the Texan who once captured the country’s imagination by giving Ted Cruz a serious scare in the 2018 midterm election for the U.S. Senate.

Is the former VP the man to beat Trump? Time will have to tell on that one. He hasn’t looked like it at these two Democratic joint appearances. However, it is still early, man.

There might be another moderate to emerge. If one does come forth, I intend to give that individual a careful look.

Radicalism doesn’t sell with me. I’m too old for that these days.

national news

Mitch McConnell: Partisan hack demonstrates his hypocrisy

There well might be no more demonstrably partisan political hack in the U.S. Senate than the man who runs the place … and who has the gall to accuse politicians on the other side of playing politics.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has blocked a bill that would seek to make our electoral system more secure and to prevent foreign hostile powers from hacking into our system.

Why did he do that? Because he says Senate Democrats have made it too “partisan.” They are “playing politics” with the legislation.

Wow, man!

Hmm. Let’s see how this works. Requiring paper ballots to back up the electronic ballots is “partisan”? Mandating that political candidates report to the FBI any suspected foreign-power interference is “partisan”?

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has stood with the Russians who did attack our election in 2016 and are likely to do so again in 2020. Trump’s partner in the Senate now is standing with him, declaring that Democrats are the partisan hacks.

Let’s flash back for a moment to 2016.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died while vacationing in Texas. The conservative icon’s body barely had gotten cold before McConnell declared that President Obama — serving his final full year in office — would not be allowed to seat a justice to replace the conservative icon, Scalia.

Obama ended up nominating Merrick Garland, an eminently qualified jurist. Garland didn’t get a hearing. McConnell was at his obstructionist worst in blocking Garland’s nomination and in denying President Obama the opportunity to fulfill his constitutional responsibility.

So now the majority leader calls Democrats the partisans? He says Democrats are playing politics with an electoral security bill?

The man’s hypocrisy takes my breath away.

entertainment news

Irksome Phrase, Part 2: ‘Reality TV’ has joined the club

Time for an admission. I watch an occasional “reality TV” show, even though I find it astonishing that contemporary culture has adopted the term in the first place.

There’s nothing real about “reality TV.”

What was the first one? I believe it was “Survivor,” correct? CBS TV launched this “reality” series that features individuals being “stranded” in some out of the way place, having to fend for themselves. They get voted out by their colleagues, I suppose, for not doing what they’re supposed to do to stay in the game.

I’ve never watched a single episode of this “reality TV” series. I’m going on what I have heard and read about it.

The roster of “reality TV” shows has too numerous to count.

I do watch “The Voice.” Why? Well, I enjoy the banter among the judges and I certainly enjoy watching the unknown talents competing for the title of being “The Voice” champion.

But this whole notion of “reality TV” is among the greatest misnomers I can imagine. The one where contestants race around the world against each other is kind of fun. I won’t watch the show where the contestants are enclosed in a room with the camera watching over them.

And all those “Real Housewives” series on Bravo? Puh-leeease!

I understand the economics of this type of programming. Networks pay these individuals far less than they pay established film and TV stars. The reduced overhead makes “reality TV” shows more affordable. So, I get that part of it.

What I don’t quite get is why the networks call it “reality TV.”

Those “Survivor” contestants aren’t going to be allowed to starve to death, or face wild animals, or have to cope with disease-carrying insects. The TV production crews are standing by to assist them.

Is any of that a form of reality?

I do not think so.

The very term “reality TV” simply irks me.

national news

Speaker Bonnen, you might have blown it royally!

I was willing to give Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen the benefit of the doubt when he sought the office after Joe Straus left the Legislature at the beginning of the year.

Bonnen, an Angleton Republican, was thought by many to be a politician who is able to work with pols from both sides of the aisle in Austin.

But now … it turns out he might have double-crossed members of his own GOP caucus, if we are to believe ultra right-winger Michael Quinn Sullivan, the godfather of Empower Texans, the political action committee he founded. Sullivan reportedly has revealed that Bonnen agreed to offer Empower Texans the names of 10 GOP lawmakers the right wingers could target in the 2020 election.

Would Speaker Straus have done such a thing? Or Speaker Tom Craddick? Or Speaker Pete Laney? Or Speaker Gib Lewis?

I doubt it strongly! Yet we now have evidence, apparently, of collusion (there’s that word again) between Speaker Bonnen and a right-wing outfit that has sought to yank the Legislature even farther to the right than it already stands.

Betrayal anyone?

This is a disgraceful betrayal if it turns out to be true. There’s something credible-sounding about what has been revealed so far.

Sullivan has talked about a meeting he had with Bonnen in which the speaker made the offer to hand over the names of legislators that would show up on Empower Texans’ hit list. Bonnen has said publicly he wanted to work for the re-election of all GOP lawmakers. The Sullivan account contradicts Bonnen and many of Bonnen’s legislative colleagues are buying into what Sullivan is saying.

This looks for all the world like dirty pool. It looks also to me that Speaker Bonnen’s time with his hands on the House gavel might come to an end when the next Legislature convenes in January 2021.

This is particularly troubling for me on a personal level, given my own intense distrust of Empower Texans and of Michael Quinn Sullivan. Empower Texans has sought to unseat at least two Republican legislators with whom I have a high personal and professional regard. I refer to two men from Amarillo, state Sen. Kel Seliger and state Rep. Four Price.

They both got “primaried” in 2018, only to beat back those challenges with relative ease. Both men’s GOP primary opponents were recruited and funded by Empower Texans, which seeks to push an ultra-conservative legislative agenda throughout Texas.

So, for Speaker Dennis Bonnen to crawl into the political sack with these clowns — allegedly! — is distasteful on its face.

national news

USA Today had it so right in 2016

On Sept. 29, 2016, the Gannett-owned USA Today newspaper broke with tradition it had set for itself.

It had vowed to avoid endorsing presidential candidates. It has chosen over the decades to comment on issues, but has shied away from suggesting how voters should cast their ballots. “Until now,” USA Today wrote in 2016.

It turns out that all the matters that concerned USA Today’s editors during his presidential run have distressingly true during his time in office. His “erratic” behavior, his lies, his lack of interest, his “checkered” business career, his prejudicial rhetoric … it’s all there.

You can read the editorial here. I encourage you to read what USA Today said in 2016. I looked at it just today and am stunned at how prescient the paper’s editors have proven to have been.

To be clear, USA Today was not enamored of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Trump’s 2016 opponent. It merely stated that Trump was so clearly unfit and unqualified for the office he sought that Clinton, by comparison, was the better choice by default.

It’s good to look back as we prepare to look ahead to the next presidential election.

I want to commend USA Today’s editorial board for expressing the vision that it saw with the election of Donald Trump. It saw a massive train wreck and, by golly, the 45th president of the United States has delivered it.

Do we really want four more years of what this man has brought?

I pray not.

national news

Democrats need to develop their beat-Trump formula

First, I want to state the obvious, which is that I want Donald Trump removed from the presidency of the United States.

My first choice would be for him to resign, and to take Mike Pence with him into the political wilderness. My second choice would be for the House of Reps to impeach them both and then for the Senate to convict them both of high crimes and assorted misdemeanors.

My third choice, and the one that makes the most sense, is for the Trump-Pence ticket to get drummed out of office on Election Day, 2020.

Will that third option come true? Not based on what many millions of us have witnessed in the first two rounds of Democratic Party presidential primary debates.

I heard the term “circular firing squad” after the Wednesday night encounter. The Man in the Middle was the former vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., the clear frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination … at least for the moment.

None of the candidates running for the nomination seem able to combat Donald Trump, the gut-fighter Republican incumbent who might be poised to insult his way to re-election.

Trump will not invoke a clear and grand vision for the future. He won’t offer a second-term agenda, because he doesn’t have one. He won’t appeal to our better angels by telling us the “best is yet to come.” He’s going to attach hideous nicknames on whomever the Democrats nominate for president and vice president and is going to toss out innuendo after ghastly innuendo at them.

What are Democrats doing to prepare for that? They’re beating the hell out of each other, notably former VP Biden. As for the ex-veep, he needs to find a formula to counter those attacks and to turn his sights directly — and with extreme focus and prejudice — on Donald Trump.

Is he capable of doing so? I do not know at this moment. Is there another in that huge field of Democrats ready to assume the frontrunner’s mantle and then take the fight directly to the carnival barker/con man in chief? Hah!

That’s the bad news. I have some good news to pass along.

We’re still very early in this nominating process. A lot can happen. It probably will. That huge field of candidates will start to thin out soon. Then we’ll get to the serious contenders and weed out more of the pretenders along the way.

However, at this moment I am not feeling good about what might be waiting for us down the road.

International news

Another bin Laden is wiped out … hooray!

Hamza bin Laden, the son of Osama bin Laden and a reported “heir” to the terror group al-Qaida leadership is dead.

That’s according to U.S. officials who today declined to give any details on bin Laden’s death, or whether the United States played a role in the individual’s demise.

Donald Trump said simply “I don’t want to comment on that” when asked by reporters to comment. That’s OK, Mr. President. No need to speak out just yet.

Hamza bin Laden’s death, if true, marks another milestone in the nation’s ongoing war against terror groups that have declared their mission to be to bring harm to Americans and others around the world.

On May 1, 2011, when U.S. special forces killed Hamza bin Laden’s father in that spectacular raid in Pakistan, President Obama told the world that Osama bin Laden was not a “Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims.” His son, Hamza, was cut from the very same blood-stained cloth as his old man.

Now he’s dead. That’s my hope. I also hope that the United States military did kill him. May he rot in hell.

local news

Is it Rep. Thornberry’s turn to announce retirement?

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About a half-dozen Republican congressmen and women have announced their intention to leave Congress at the end of their current term.

Some of those GOP lawmakers serve in reliably Republican congressional districts, so their re-election chances really are not in jeopardy.

My thoughts now turn to the man who was my congressman during my many years living in Amarillo, Rep. Mac Thornberry, a Republican from Clarendon.

Is it fair to ask whether he’s going to bail at the end of this term?

Hey, I just did. So there you have it.

Thornberry took office the same week I reported for duty at the Amarillo Globe-News. That was in early January 1995. I have kidded him over the years that we kind of “grew up together.” He served on Rep. Larry Combest’s staff before defeating incumbent Rep. Bill Sarpalius in that landmark Contract With America election in 1994 that saw Republicans take control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

He ascended a couple of terms ago to the chairmanship of the House Armed Services Committee. Then Democrats took back control of the House in 2018, relegating Thornberry to the role of “ranking member.”

He’s been in the House now for 24 years. I have disagreed frequently with his policy decisions or the votes he has cast. I say that while acknowledging that I like him personally. We had a good professional relationship and I always thought I worked well with his staff.

However, many Republicans in the House are finding it difficult to legislate in this Age of Trump. The president is untrustworthy and I am left to wonder whether his capriciousness wears thin even on those legislators who have supported him and his agenda.

That well could be you, Mac Thornberry.

If Thornberry decides he has had enough, I certainly would understand. Rest assured, too, that Thornberry is one of those politicians who represents a rock-solid Republican congressional district. The 13th Congressional District isn’t going to turn Democratic.

I don’t live in the 13th any longer, but it’s difficult to turn away from a politician with whom I share some history.