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Panhandle trio makes senator jealous?

Texas state Sen. Tommy Williams came to Canyon to take part in an interesting event put on by the Texas Tribune, but offered a comparison that I cannot let pass without some comment.

Williams, a Republican from the Houston area, was on hand at West Texas A&M University to honor state Reps. Four Price and John Smithee and state Sen. Kel Seliger, all Amarillo Republicans. He joked about how jealous he is that the three of them get along so well, unlike his colleagues in Southeast Texas, who — according to Williams — don’t enjoy the same level of legislative collegiality.

The reference drew some laughs in the packed room at the Jack B. Kelley Student Center. The Tribune’s editor in chief and CEO Evan Smith moderated a discussion with the three legislators, grilling them with questions about the state of the state, water planning, infrastructure development, taxes, education … the whole range of issues.

Back to Williams’s brief expression of envy …

Of course Smithee, Price and Seliger get along. They’re all from the same party and they all represent constituencies that look virtually identical. They’re three peas in a pod, triplets, if you prefer.

Williams, however, represents a part of the state where residents — let alone officeholders — cannot agree on the time of day.

I lived for 11 years in Beaumont, which comprises part of Williams’s Senate District 4. I know the region pretty well. It’s contentious, hot-headed, racially and ethnically mixed and politically diverse with a healthy portion of Democrats and Republicans finding reasons to disagree with each other.

For all I know, there might even be some Cajun influence at work there, with typically opinionated Cajuns named Boudreau, Thibideaux and Guidry preferring to disagree rather than work together.

It doesn’t surprise me in the least that Williams would draw such a comparison between his region of the state and this one. It’s also why I found the upper Texas Gulf Coast such a fascinating place to live and work for more than a decade.

It is a journalist’s version of Heaven on Earth, made that way by the contentiousness that is inbred in the good and colorful folks who live there.

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Politics shows nasty side once again

Once upon a time I thought of politics as a noble profession. I subscribed to the Robert F. Kennedy view that politics should be a force for positive change and reform of what we think is broken in our society.

I continue to believe politics has the potential for nobility.

Then we hear the carping that arose from the U.S. Labor Department’s jobs report for January.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/02/07/republicans-slam-president-over-jobs-report/?hpt=hp_bn3

Republicans were quick to pounce on the numbers, which weren’t as good as the White House had thought would come out. The nation added “only” 113,000 jobs in January, down from the expected 178,000. The jobless rate ticked down a bit, to 6.6 percent. It’s down from its high of 10 percent in 2009, but still too high to suit the loyal opposition.

“Today’s jobs report underscores that there remains a real crisis for the chronically unemployed in this country. It’s too hard for many to find good jobs, wages are stagnant, and it’s harder to get ahead,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.

I guess the most annoying aspect of the reactions to these jobs numbers is that the “other side” is quiet when they’re good, as they were in November and December. The labor market added about 400,000 jobs at the end of 2013. Did we hear anything then from Cantor and his congressional Republican colleagues? Their silence was deafening.

Yes, I am acutely aware that Democrats do the same thing to Republican presidents. George W. Bush couldn’t buy a break from congressional Democrats whenever his administration welcomed good economic news.

The nobility of politics has been replaced by something far less high-minded. It’s become a game of who can get the better of the other guy. It goes on and on.

I’m going to talk today to U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Clarendon, who’s running for his 10th term in the House. I intend to ask him what he’s going to do to restore some sense of comity in Congress and repair its relations with the White House.

Let’s hope he can offer a noble answer.

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Hey, Sen. Paul, Bill Clinton’s not running for president

Rand Paul needs to break out his copy of the U.S. Constitution and turn to the 22nd Amendment.

It says that no person can serve more than two full terms as president of the United States. Were he to read it again — I’m sure he knows what it says — then he might be brought back to Earth in his budding campaign to become the 45th president.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/02/07/rand-paul-keeps-attacking-bill-clinton-why/

The Kentucky Republican U.S. senator keeps mentioning the 42nd president’s scandalous relationship with a White House intern in the late 1990s, which led to his impeachment by the House of Representatives. He says Democrats cannot claim the mantle of being the Party of the Woman because the president committed a terrible act of sexual harassment against that intern.

Paul also is urging those who took money raised by Clinton should give it back.

Oh, did I mention that Bill Clinton isn’t running for the presidency, that the Constitution forbids the former two-term president from seeking the office?

I also haven’t mentioned — yet — that the ex-president’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is a possible candidate for the high office in 2016.

Do you get it? Sen. Paul is seeking to link Hillary Clinton to the misdeeds of her husband — even though Bill Clinton’s popularity has soared into the stratosphere in recent years because of his great work on all kinds of worldwide issues.

Rand Paul is sounding like a fool if he intends to smear the former secretary of state and ex-U.S. senator with that kind of defamatory rhetoric.

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Texas Hispanics lean GOP? Imagine my surprise

Why am I not surprised to learn this little tidbit?

A Gallup Poll suggests that Texas Hispanics — who are comprising a rapidly growing segment of the state’s population — are more Republican than Hispanics in other states.

http://www.texastribune.org/2014/02/07/texas-hispanics-less-democratic-those-other-states/

And to think that Democrats have been banking on the growing Hispanic population to turn the state more in their favor.

“Texas remains a Republican-leaning state because its white residents are becoming increasingly Republican and its large Hispanic population, though solidly Democratic, is less so than Hispanics nationally,” the Gallup website says.

This new polling data suggest that the Texas Democratic Party has a huge mountain to climb in its quest to turn the state into more of a battleground, let alone into a state that returns to its Democratic roots.

White Texans are continuing to support Republicans heavily. No surprise there. What does surprise some of folks, me included, is that Texas Hispanics aren’t as upset with the GOP’s refusal to act on issues dear to them. Immigration reform comes to mind, as does voter identification — two issues that play well into Democratic hands in many other parts of the country.

I’ve long been skeptical of Battleground Texas’s claim that 2014 will be a turnaround year for the state’s Democratic Party. It won’t happen this year, or maybe not even in 2016.

I hope it does turn from deeply Republican into something of a more competitive state. I long have held that competition keeps both major parties more honest. It diminishes the chances of one-party arrogance that arises from total domination.

The Gallup survey suggests, though, that more arrogance is going to in our state’s immediate political future.

Too bad.

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LBJ was the toughest of the tough guys

A friend and I were visiting the other day about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s troubles over the bridge lane-closing fiasco.

Some of Christie’s critics have called him a bully. “I have a three-word answer to that,” my friend said. “Lyndon Baines Johnson.”

Agreed. Ol’ Lyndon was tough, vengeful, mean, coarse, profane … and whatever else you want to say about someone who knows how to exact painful revenge. I think my friend’s point is that LBJ makes Christie look like a piker in the bully department.

Then another friend wandered into my workplace the other day, Rick Crawford, a former Republican state representative who now sells commercial real estate in Amarillo. Crawford’s been around the political pea patch for longer than many folks. He grew up here, knows the lay of the land, knows many big hitters.

As we talked, the conversation turned to Lyndon Johnson. Crawford made a remark about LBJ’s decision to close the Amarillo Air Force Base in the late 1960s. He repeated something I have heard ever since I arrived here in January 1995, that Johnson closed the base because he “hated the Panhandle” and because the region voted for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, which LBJ won in a landslide.

Whoa. Not quite. I reminded my friend of something he admitted not knowing. It was that of the 26 counties comprising the Texas Panhandle, Goldwater won majorities in eight of them. And, I noted, Potter County — which is where the air base was located — voted for Lyndon Johnson.

So the question has lingered for nearly 50 years: Did Lyndon Johnson act out of spite or did he make a strategic decision based on a needs assessment given to him by the Pentagon?

Crawford and I talked about LBJ’s friends here who have insisted the president acted nobly. I have concluded that the LBJ-hates-Amarillo reason for closing the base has evolved into urban legend. It’s one of those things no one can prove, given that I am quite sure no one living in the Panhandle was in the room — the Oval Office, the Situation Room, the White House kitchen, wherever — when Johnson made that fateful decision.

The story, as it’s been told and retold over many decades since — and with embellishments added along the way — does illustrate President Johnson’s toughness.

I don’t doubt he was one mean SOB. I’ve read enough accounts over the years about how he treated those around him. I’ve heard many stories of how he could bully lawmakers into voting the way he wanted them to vote on legislation. I know all that.

However, I’m waiting for someone to prove he nearly destroyed the economy of a region in his home state just because a portion of it voted for the other guy in a presidential election.

Oh, but yes. Lyndon Baines Johnson was a whole lot more of a bully than Chris Christie ever thought of being.

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LaGuardia airport like ‘Third World country’?

Vice President Joe Biden is prone to overstatement at times, which I guess every American knows already.

How about when he recently compared New York’s LaGuardia Airport like a Third World country.

Mr. Vice President, I’ve flown in and out of LaGuardia. Yes, it’s crowded and old. Third World country-like, however, is a serious stretch.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/02/06/biden-laguardia-like-a-third-world-country/?hpt=hp_t2

If you’ve flown into Belize City, or Phnom Penh, or Hanoi or Delhi, well, those are Third World airports. Actually, Hanoi and Phnom Penh have undergone serious upgrades and reconstruction since the times I flew into those terminal.

Athens’s airport — the one in Greece, the Cradle of Western Civilization — once looked like it began operating during Greece’s Golden Age. It, too, has been replaced by a modern, gleaming terminal.

I guess the vice president’s larger point is that infrastructure needs serious help in the United States. We keep falling farther behind other countries in the quality of our transportation amenities, and that includes airports, highways, bridges and rail lines.

“Just in the last decade the United States has fallen 20 spots when it comes to the quality of infrastructure in America. It’s embarrassing and it’s stupid. It’s stupid. That puts us literally behind. They rank us behind Barbados. Great country, one airport,” he said.

“Look folks, not a joke, we need to reinvest and modernize our whole infrastructure, especially in rail,” Biden added.

The country needs investment in these things. Yes, “investment” means spending money. These projects create jobs and, yes, move people around more efficiently and safely.

I’ll excuse Joe Biden’s overstatement about LaGuardia. His larger point is worth heeding.

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Learning curve continues

I’ve said many times that election cycles are learning experiences for me.

The lessons are taught to me by candidates for public office. Many of these candidates have long years of public service under their belt when they seek another office or seek to return to the office they occupy. They know about their community than I do and they usually are unafraid to share that knowledge with others.

This has occurred in cycles over nearly two decades in Amarillo. I’ve been here for just more than 19 years now, most of that time as a working daily print journalist.

I’m no longer subjected to the daily grind of producing a newspaper but a new role awaits — and it will enable me to keep learning more about our community.

I write a blog for Panhandle PBS. It’s titled “A Public View.” The folks at the public TV station have provided me a forum to comment on public affairs programming and other matters relating to public policy.

Beginning this morning, I’m going to take part in the first of three candidate forums that will be aired later this month on Panhandle PBS — formerly known as KACV-TV. I’ll get to question candidates for — in order — the 13th Congressional District, Texas Senate District 31 and Potter County judge.

It’s a new role and an old role for me all at the same time.

I’ll be doing the thing I’ve done before, only in a different medium — although I have taken part in previous televised candidate forums representing the newspaper that used to employ me.

Every election cycle teaches me something I didn’t know about my surroundings. It did in Beaumont, where I worked for nearly 11 years before landing in Amarillo. It did in my home state of Oregon, where this grand adventure all began.

I cannot define precisely what I learn through each election cycle. It’s just that the candidates fill in nebulous blanks here and there.

It’s doubtful I’ll ever know everything there is to know about the Panhandle. Frankly, I don’t want to know it all. How much fun would it be to stop learning about the place I call home?

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Boy’s probation still hard to swallow

Ethan Couch’s probationary sentence has been lined out.

It still stinks.

Couch is the 16-year-old Tarrant County boy whose drunken recklessness killed four people in June 2013. He lost control of his big Ford pickup while driving at three times the legal limit for blood-alcohol content. Several of the victims who were injured may never recover fully from their wounds. One of them suffered brain damage. Couch had been drinking at his parents’ house and stole some beer from a retailer.

Four people are dead because this youngster was too drunk to drive. A Tarrant County trial judge, Jean Boyd, decided Couch didn’t need to serve any time behind bars. She sentenced him to 10 years probation. How did the boy manage to skate past any jail or prison time? His parents were able to hire top-notch lawyers to defend him.

The case has coined a new term: the “Affluenza” defense.

http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2014/02/no-time-for-ethan-couch-no-justice-for-his-many-victims.html/

On Wednesday, Boyd formalized the terms of Couch’s probation. He’ll have to serve some time in a rehab center. It’s supposed to be a highly regulated environment. Couch will complete his rehab, will finish his probation and will be able to go about his life.

Many of his victims won’t be so fortunate.

Even from my vantage point a good distance from where this tragedy occurred, it’s apparent that justice wasn’t done.

Prosecutors sought a 20-year prison sentence to teach this youngster a lesson for the carnage he created and the misery he brought to victims and their families. Dallas Morning News blogger Mike Hashimoto said the sentence sought “didn’t seem unreasonable as accountability for the trail of death and destruction Couch left behind.”

Eric Couch needed to be taught a tough lesson.

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Carry guns in the open? I don’t think so

State Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, is taking heat from her liberal supporters for advocating a law that allows people to carry guns openly.

The Democratic candidate for governor is making a mistake with that one.

http://www.texastribune.org/2014/02/06/davis-takes-friendly-fire-gun-issue/

Texas’s concealed handgun carry law has worked better than I ever thought it would. However, there ought to be some restrictions on where and how people can pack heat. The concealed carry law works. Why broaden it?

I can remember when the concealed carry law debate began in 1995. Our newspaper opposed it. Why? We believed street-corner shootouts could occur in cases of road rage gone amok. We were wrong.

However, I remember vividly my boss at the time, publisher Garet von Netzer, questioning then-state Sen. Teel Bivins, R-Amarillo, about the law. Bivins supported the legislation allowing concealed handgun carry. Von Netzer asked Bivins point-blank — no pun intended — “If it’s such a good idea, why don’t you just allow folks to strap six-shooters on their hips? For that matter, why not allow them in the Capitol Building?”

The question caught Bivins flat-footed, if memory serves.

It was a good thing to ask then and it’s good to ask the likes of Wendy Davis now.

Concealed-carry laws are sufficient. Why change what’s working?

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TV ad wars begin in Texas election ’14

The television ad wars have commenced in the heated races — on the Republican ballot at least — for some of Texas’s key statewide offices.

Dan Branch is running for Texas attorney general. His main foe is Railroad Commission Chairman Barry Smitherman. Both men are talking like prosecutorial tough guys.

http://www.danbranch.com/

Branch’s TV ad, which I saw early today, is quite fascinating.

The Dallas-area legislator says Texans need someone in the AG’s office who’ll “fight Obama.” OK, how’s that supposed to help the state? I guess he’s joined the GOP amen chorus in proclaiming that President Obama is picking on Texas, is trying to exert federal authority over the state which — they contend — he doesn’t deserve.

The camera pans across a “Don’t Mess with Texas” bumper sticker, further perverting the slogan’s actual intent. You remember that, right? The slogan became popular when then-Land Commissioner Garry Mauro — a Democrat, by the way — started a statewide anti-littering campaign in the 1980s. Don’t mess with the state means don’t throw trash out of your car onto our highways. Since then, though, the slogan has come to mean something quite different to many people. It has become a statement about Texas machismo, our tougher-than-you-are mantra.

What utter hooey.

These AG candidates need to focus more on how they intend to make constructive improvements in the office. Previous attorneys general, Democrat and Republican, used to make child support enforcement their mantra. My time in Texas dates back to the days of Democrat Jim Mattox. Others who followed him in that office, such as Democrat Dan Morales and Republican John Cornyn all have sought to make improvements in some of the duties unique to the office.

The current AG, Greg Abbott, has become lawsuit-happy in his effort to keep the feds at arm’s length. I guess Dan Branch is running as Greg Abbott 2.0.

To me, this continuing combativeness against the hated federal government is a small-minded turn-off.

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