http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/268587-obama-only-two-paths-available-in-fiscal-cliff-talks

What is it about people in power in D.C. that makes them want to engage in gratuitous brinksmanship?

They’re at it again. This time it’s because of the so-called “fiscal cliff” that threatens Americans’ investment accounts – including mine. The cliff looms only if Republicans and Democrats cannot reach an agreement on ways to cut the deficit. President Obama, fresh off his re-election, makes the most sense of all: Cut the deficit with a combination of spending reductions and modest tax increases for the wealthiest Americans, those who earn more than a quarter-million dollars annually.

As Obama and his allies have noted, asking the rich to pay a little more won’t make them poor. They’ll still be rich. Meanwhile, the rest of us can keep our tax breaks and, therefore, be able to invest our own money.

What happens if the two sides don’t agree by the end of the year? Everyone’s taxes go up and the government kicks in with automatic 10 percent spending cuts across the board. That means defense. And, oh yes, Republicans don’t want to cut a dime out of the Pentagon budget. Are they paying attention here?

This nonsense must not continue. I’m quite sure I share the views of many Americans who are getting a bit antsy watching their investment portfolios shrink while the power-brokers in D.C. keep playing games with each other.

Must I remind them that they work for us – not the other way around?

You’ve heard the mantra from Republicans for many years, that local control of public policy provides the best form of government.

Texas Republicans say it all the time. I’ve heard ‘em say it. Many times. Keep “big gub’mint” out of people’s lives, they say.

And yet …

When it comes to red-light cameras, Texas legislators – again, led by Republicans who dominate the Legislature – keep trotting this notion out that the state ought to outlaw cities’ right to deploy red-light cameras to help the police stop lawbreakers from endangering themselves and, more importantly, other motorists and/or pedestrians.

My good buddy Enrique Rangel, writing for the Amarillo Globe-News, details in a story published Monday some of the ideas that the Legislature might consider when it convenes in January. One of those bright notions is a law banning red-light cameras statewide.

http://amarillo.com/news/local-news/2012-11-11/pre-filing-period-opens-daunting-issues-loom

What’s wrong with these people? Do they believe in local control or don’t they?

Amarillo installed red-light cameras at several intersections around the about five years ago. They have been nabbing law-breakers by taking pictures of vehicle license plates as they run through red lights. The city sends a citation to the owner of the vehicle and orders him/her to pay the fine … or else. What’s the drawback? Well, the registered vehicle owner might not be the one breaking the law; it might be a relative or a friend behind the wheel. Still, if that’s the case, then the driver of the vehicle, if not its owner, and the owner need to figure out a way to get the pay fine paid.

The money collected goes to several places: the vendor who leases the cameras to the city, the state and, most importantly, to the city, which must, under state law, use the money for traffic safety improvements. You know, it’s frivolous stuff, like hiring more patrol officers and improving traffic signalization.

Several cities have instituted the camera-aided enforcement because their leaders have determined they have a specific need. Amarillo made that determination and acted. The state, which once banned cities from taking this action, now just might consider taking it all back.

I ask once more: Are legislators, particularly those who oppose Big Brother intruding into communities’ well-being, going to let cities and towns act in their own best interests, or are they going to let paternalistic impulses strip communities of local control everyone – especially Republicans who run things in Austin – insist on protecting?

Well?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/us/politics/a-vote-for-unlimited-campaign-financing.html?ref=politics&_r=0
This link tells a sad truth about the election that just concluded.
The biggest – and most welcome – victim of the outcome were the big, deep-pocketed campaign donors. But the result did not deal them a fatal blow.
President Obama’s re-election came as a surprise to the super PAC crowd, led by Karl “Bush’s Brain” Rove, who went into an apoplectic fit the moment the TV networks called “game over” when Ohio’s electoral votes landed in the president’s lap. Moreover, the super PACs that had given truckloads of cash to Senate and House candidates saw their efforts go for naught. The super PACs, namely the GOP-leaning conservative crowd, watched Democrats tighten their grip on the Senate and gain a handful of seats in the Republican-led House.
And of course, the president’s decisive Electoral College win showed that voters’ loyalty cannot necessarily be purchased with negative ads financed by anonymous benefactors.
The Citizens United ruling in 2010 unleashed this electoral monster. The Supreme Court declared that big corporations had just as much right as normal folks – people like you and me – to express their political views. The amount of their money does allow them to buy more TV air time than your Average Joe or Jane. Thus, they can speak more loudly.
It’s far from a done deal that the thumping these big spenders took at the polls last week will silence them. Indeed, now we hear that the conservative action groups are gearing for the next big fight, the 2014 midterm election, to knock off some of those traitorous moderates who just can’t stop saying nice things about the monsters on the other side of the aisle, which includes President Obama.
Still, by my reckoning, the 2012 election produced – at many levels – a most satisfying outcome.

I’ve just watched a preview of an upcoming public television special, “The Dust Bowl,” directed by acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns. And there’s a chilling message near its end.

We’d better be mindful of our water. The consequences of doing otherwise are too chilling to ponder.

The special takes note of this fundamental truth: If we lose the water we lose the land.

There are still many of our Texas and Oklahoma Panhandle neighbors who remember the Dust Bowl well. It turned daylight into dark in an instant, as black clouds of choking dirt rolled for years across the landscape, enveloping everything – and every being – in their path.

What caused it? Two factors: indiscriminate plowing of native grasslands and crippling drought.

It’s the drought that should cause us great concern today. We’ve developed better plowing techniques that help reduce soil erosion. However, we haven’t yet stopped using Ogallala Aquifer water to a degree that threatens its existence – and our communities’ survival.

One of the people interviewed in the documentary, which will air on KACV-TV on Nov. 18 and 19, says we could run out of water in sections of the Texas Panhandle in the next 20 years. Then what? Well, think of the worst, and it’s likely to happen.

Irrigated farmland is gulping huge quantities of groundwater every hour. The aquifer doesn’t regenerate nearly fast enough to replace it.

The Dust Bowl special doesn’t dwell too much on the water supply, but there’s enough of it in the broadcast to cause anyone who’s paying attention some serious concern.

Many of us now are quite aware of what occurred Tuesday evening on the Fox News Channel. It involved Fox’s call that President Obama would win Ohio’s 18 electoral votes and, thus, would be re-elected to another four years in office.

Karl Rove, aka “Bush’s Brain” and once considered the smartest political operative in all of human history, went ballistic. He questioned his colleagues’ call and said that with so few votes counted, it was at best premature to call the Buckeye State for the president. The Fox news staff tried to talk him down. They told him the numbers were right and that they were virtually 100 percent certain of it.

What drove Rove to question his Fox colleagues’ wisdom? Money. Specifically, it was the amount of money he – Rove – raised and spent in places like, um, Ohio, to defeat the president. Rove’s super PAC spent tens of millions of dollars in Ohio, and about $300 million nationally, to defeat Obama. He came up short. Therefore, I think the nation witnessed a key political operative fall into deep denial about what he had just witnessed – which was that all the effort, time and money were for naught.

The very next day, Rove was back on the air – on Fox, of course – to say that “voter suppression” was the key to Obama’s victory. He said the Obama team did a masterful job of tearing down GOP nominee Mitt Romney, discouraging voters to turn out. He just couldn’t get past the fact that the president was re-elected with a smaller majority than he got the first time. Fox News anchor Megan Kelly, to her great credit, sought to inform Rove that the size of the president’s majority didn’t matter. “He still won,” Kelly reminded Rove.

The most hilarious aspect of that exchange was that Rove was complaining about negative campaigning. Flash back to 2004 and recall Rove’s financing of the “swift boat” attack on Democratic nominee John Kerry, which sought to defame the candidate’s reputation by questioning whether he really earned all those medals for valor while fighting for his country as a naval officer in Vietnam.

Rove, 61, incidentally, never served in the military – let alone in Vietnam.

Nice try, Mr. Rove.

http://amarillo.com/opinion/editorial/2012-11-08/editorial-ted-cruz-cant-cruise-washington

U.S. Sen.-elect Ted Cruz will hit the ground with both feet in full sprint when the next Congress convenes.

The soon-to-be-newly minted Texas Republican lawmaker is a darling the tea party, the GOP’s informal wing that had its head handed to it in the just-completed election. Tea party favorites Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock got trounced in Missouri and Indiana, respectively, as they sought to take their places in the U.S. Senate. U.S. Rep. Allen West of Florida got bounced out of office after one term by a Democratic challenger.

But while the tea party floundered elsewhere, it is alive and kicking its way across Texas. Ted Cruz’s easy win over Democratic former state Rep. Paul Sadler drives home the point about the tea party’s strength here.

I’m troubled by the signal it sends. There once was a day when Texas Democrats and Republicans worked together for the entire state. The state’s congressional delegation was known for its inter-party collegiality. That was when Rs and Ds met regularly to discuss ways to advance legislation favorable to Texas. That doesn’t happen these days.

Indeed, Democrats and Republicans spend little time talking to each other. They’ve gotten eaten up by their desire to disrespect the other side. Oh, for old days.

I love telling the story told to me years ago by former U.S. Rep. Larry Combest, who used to be my congressman when he represented Randall County in the House. Combest once worked on the staff of another fiery Republican senator, John Tower. Combest told me once how Tower would argue vehemently with Sen. Hubert Humphrey, D-Minn., an equally fiery liberal. The two men would argue on the Senate floor. They would gesture wildly, trying to one-up each other with rhetorical flourish. Then, when it was all over, they would walk to the middle of the Senate chamber, shake hands, laugh and then walk out arm in arm.

Those were the days when politics didn’t get in the way of politicians’ mutual respect.

I’m trying to imagine Sen. Ted Cruz doing the same thing with, say, Sen. Al Franken.

The Texas Board of Education is going to be loaded with seven new faces when it convenes next year.

One of them will represent District 15, which comprises a huge swath of West Texas, including the Panhandle. His name is Marty Rowley, who – although I don’t know him well – I consider to be a good man.

But there might be some alarms worth heeding as Rowley and other new SBOE members take their seats. It involves mixing religion with public education.

Rowley brings a unique perspective to the 15-member board. He is a lawyer who specializes in mediation. He also is a clergyman who served briefly as pastor of a huge evangelical church in Amarillo. Rowley is a man of deep religious faith, and it is his background in the pulpit that ought to concern those who frustrated with the head-butting that’s occurred on the board between the so-called “social conservative” wing of the SBOE with the more moderate wing.

Count me as one of those who is concerned about the ongoing ideological battle.

The man Rowley is replacing, fellow Republican Bob Craig of Lubbock, belonged to the moderate wing of the SBOE. Over the years, Craig expressed at times his own concern that religious-based ideology was dominating public education policy. Craig, a lawyer, decided to step down this year. My guess is that he’s had enough fun in public life.

The SBOE is charged with setting curriculum policy for public education in Texas. But as the two sides have dickered – and bickered – over curriculum, ideological differences too often have gotten in the way of what all board members insist is their first priority, which is to educate the state’s 5 million public education students.

My hope is that Rowley avoids the ideological fight and serves as a moderate voice. He is, after all, a mediator.

Conservatives are angry at losing the 2012 presidential election to Barack Obama, a man they thought was dead meat. The economy was his albatross and they knew – simply knew – he could be had. They nominated a successful businessman in Mitt Romney. The White House was theirs for the taking.

Then came this storm called Sandy. It pounded New Jersey and New York mercilessly a week before Election Day. The New Jersey governor, a fiery Republican named Chris Christie, stood under a cold, gray sky and heaped praise on a Democratic president for doing his job as the nation’s elected leader. President Obama went to the Jersey Shore, examined the damage, hugged grief-stricken residents, offered them comfort and consolation and said his administration would do all it could to make the region whole after Sandy brought its wrath.

Christie recognized that and said so publicly … time and again.

But now the right-wingers – his fellow Republicans – are angry at Christie for speaking so effusively in praise of the president they loathe. Some chatter is emerging from the Republican wreckage that Christie might be the tea party’s next target when he stands for re-election. They want that turncoat out of there. Why? Apparently for giving the president too much credit for the swift response he exhibited in the face of the killer storm. It reminds me a bit of the fate that fell on former Republican Florida Gov. Charlie Crist who had the audacity to hug the president. The embrace enraged tea party Rs so much he lost the 2010 GOP primary for the U.S. Senate to Marco Rubio. Crist left the party and ran for the Senate as an independent; he lost eventually to Rubio.

Crist eventually endorsed Obama for re-election.

I see a pattern developing here. Chris Christie might become a metaphor for what ails the Republican Party as it seeks to reclaim the White House. A party that won’t tolerate an elected official praising another elected official – irrespective of party – may be in more trouble than it is willing to recognize.

This is what some of us would call blind rage.

A startling set of numbers coming off the 2012 election results is jumping out at me.

It’s the total vote turnout for the two major presidential candidates.

With 99 percent of the vote counted, President Obama and Mitt Romney collected not quite 118 million votes between them this time around. Four years ago, then-Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain gathered slightly more than 128 million votes.

Turnout four years ago was 58.2 percent of registered voters, which was pretty good, but down from the more than 60 percent turnout in 2004, when President George W. Bush won re-election over Sen. John Kerry.

What is the turnout this time? That’s to be determined when every single ballot is counted. But a decline of 11 million ballots, give or take a few thousand, from the previous four years – along with the increase in individuals registered to vote in that same time span – suggests a serious decline in voter interest in what both sides kept claiming was “the most important election of our lifetime.”

I’ll be anxious to learn what kept so many Americans away from the polls.

Any ideas?

What a night. Everyone “in the know” seemed to think Americans were in for an all-nighter, waiting for the returns to determine who would win the presidency.

Turns out the experts had it wrong. President Obama’s re-election came in shortly after 10 p.m. Central time. Bingo. Done.

Mitt Romney gave his concession speech and offered to work to bridge the divide that splits Democrats and Republicans. Barack Obama reciprocated, offering to meet with Romney to seek common ground.

Will this be the result of the amazingly divided outcome? Let us hope so.

But at least two key points need to be made before we start looking too far into the future.

* Obama’s re-election doesn’t constitute a “mandate.” He is leading, with almost all the votes counted, with a little more than 50 percent of the popular vote. Romney’s 48 percent of the total isn’t chump change. The split still suggests an extremely divided country. George W. Bush declared after his re-election that he intended to spend his “political capital” earned. W’s re-election margin was about the same as Obama’s, meaning that he to find a magnanimous streak while governing. Obama needs to do more to reach out to Republicans who, for their part, need to set aside their anger at Obama. They failed in their mission to “make Barack Obama a one-term mission.” Get over it, GOP.

* The House is more Republican than before. The Senate’s Democratic majority is stronger than before. The Congress itself is divided. One commentator said this morning that now is the time for Obama to summon House Speaker John Boehner, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to the White House; he should set them down and lay out Priority No. 1, which is to start producing results for the country.

Those of us who are pleased with the outcome need not crow over beating the other guys. And the other guys need not spend a solitary minute looking for recriminations. The country has been through a contentious, occasionally bitter, presidential campaign.

It’s over. And as it has been said many times, the nation endures.

Time to get back to work.