http://www.texastribune.org/2013/01/29/lawmakers-renew-push-texting-while-driving-ban/

Texas lawmakers are considering whether to make another run at enacting a state law banning texting while driving.

I wish it would happen. But based on some highly unscientific evidence I’ve been able to gather since the start of the new year, it could be a tough law to enforce.

How do I know this? I don’t know it as fact, but here’s what I’ve noticed around Amarillo: The number of motorists I’ve witnessed talking while driving seems to have diminished very little since a city ordinance banning the activity took effect.

I’ve swung three ways on this issue: undecided, to opposing the ordinance and finally to favoring it.

The City Commission showed some guts in voting 4-1 to enact the ordinance. The police department has begun issuing warnings to motorists. But as I sit in my car at intersections watching motorists drive by in other directions, I continue to see many of them yakking on the phone as they whiz by.

What will it take to ban this activity? Time might have to lapse. There might have to be – God forbid – a horrific accident caused by some idiot motorist dialing a cellphone while driving through heavy traffic. The city might have to kick off an intense public-relations campaign to inform motorists of the new law and warn them in stark terms what happens if they break it by operating a handheld cellphone while sitting behind the wheel of a motor vehicle.

I’ll concede that my findings aren’t fool-proof. But I do pay attention to these types of things.

I just wish we had enough traffic cops to catch all the violators.

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/01/27/personal-professional-lives-can-guide-lawmaking/

The Texas Tribune has an interesting analysis of a quirk in state law that enables state legislators to obtain personal gain from legislation they carry.

What a crock!

I’ve long had this notion that the term “government ethics” is a bit of an oxymoron as it relates to Texas. There ought to be stringent prohibitions against any whiff of personal gain from legislation in Texas. But those prohibitions don’t exist.

The Tribune reports that the Texas Constitution contains no such ban as long as others in Texas can benefit from the same legislation. So, if a lawmaker authors a bill that benefits his or her company, it’s all right as long as others who work in the same field reap an identical benefit.

The term “public service” lacks a certain altruistic quality in Texas.

I recall a time years ago when a state lawmaker from the Gulf Coast got entangled in a situation that raised this kind of question. It turned out to be all right, in some folks’ eyes. I had a problem with it.

Then-state Rep. Mark Stiles, D-Beaumont, worked for a company that sold concrete. He then lobbied the state corrections department to build a maximum-security prison near Beaumont. The state agreed to build the prison, but then it needed to seek bids from contractors and subcontractors to provide material to build the lockup. Stiles’ company submitted a bid to provide the concrete for the prison. It was all done according to state law, meaning that Stiles had no direct hand in the bid or the state’s consideration of it. The state awarded the bid to the company that employed Stiles. The firm made a ton of money by selling the concrete to the state.

And then, astoundingly, the state named the prison unit after Mark Stiles.

I saw a problem with it at the time and said so publicly in my role as an opinion journalist. The entire transaction simply didn’t pass the proverbial smell test.

The state should toughen its rules governing personal gain, and restore a purer meaning to the term “public service.”

http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/28/opinion/kurtz-palin-commentator/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7

Howard Kurtz is a pretty savvy media critic, but I think he touches too briefly on an essential element of why Sarah Palin and the Fox News Channel have parted company.

Fox had grown tired of Palin’s look-at-me persona. She had become bigger than her bosses in the eyes of many of her adoring fans.

Let me stipulate that I am not one of them … but I digress.

Fox decided to cut Palin loose because, in my view, she embarrassed her network employers. And for my money, that’s really saying something. The 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee turned into something of a cartoon character and it became impossible to take her seriously.

Look at just a bit of the record:

* Daughter Bristol got embroiled in a seamy relationship with some goofball named Levi Johnston; they had a child together and that in itself became fodder for late-night comics. Then Bristol showed up on “Dancing With The Celebrities/Has Beens,” er “Stars.” As any national political figure will attest, their adult children became fair game rapidly when the media and the public start prying.

* Sarah launched her own TV “reality” show on The Learning Channel in which we got to watch her doing whatever she does in Alaska, a state she governed for half a term before quitting not long after she and John McCain got thumped in 2008 by Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

* “Sarah Barracuda” got caught in some silly televised mishaps. The most (in)famous of them perhaps was the time just after the 2008 election when she was being interviewed while in the background turkeys were being slaughtered – as they were shoved into some kind of decapitation machine. Happy Thanksgiving.

* The book “Game Change” and the film of the same title reported that Sen. McCain and his staff did next to zero vetting of Palin before choosing her as his running mate … and it showed. She was ill-prepared for the national spotlight and the public, as Kurtz noted in his essay (see attached link), lost interest in her.

How does one take an individual like this seriously. Indeed, Palin was, as liberal critics noted, an “empty vessel” devoid of serious principles or ideas.

Does any of this mean she’s going to disappear? Hardly. Social media will provide her with all the forum she needs or desires.

My hunch – and my hope – is that her once-adoring public will tune her out. Like the proverbial tree that falls in the Alaska forest, she won’t make a sound because no one will be listening.

Amarillo is going to spend the next few days looking back at an event that touched many residents here deeply, while also bringing tears to many others around the world.

It was a decade ago, on Feb. 1, 2003, that the space shuttle Columbia broke apart in the sky over Texas as it hurtled back to Earth after a 16-day mission. Rick Husband, an Amarillo native, was at the stick when tragedy struck. He and his six space-traveling colleagues perished at that moment. And the image of Columbia’s shattered pieces glowing in the sky en route to Florida are stuck forever in our minds.

Husband never left home, even though he and his family had moved to Houston, where he trained to fly into space. He came back often to visit his family and his wife Evelyn’s family. He is buried at Llano Cemetery. Husband was tied inextricably to this community.

But the tragedy that struck at the world’s heart a decade ago brings to mind two matters that have gone largely unnoticed in recent times … at least in my view.

One is that human beings are meant to explore space and the nation should recommit to a robust manned space program. NASA has what’s left of the shuttle fleet and as of this moment, American astronauts are hitching rides into orbit aboard Russian rockets. Imagine that: We’re now passengers on spaceships launched by a nation with which we had this intense competition to be the first to land on the moon. Americans got there first – and the Russians have yet to do so.

The second is that space travel never has been, nor ever will be, a “routine” endeavor. It’s like the so-called “routine traffic stop” that police officers perform daily. Every cop on the beat will tell you that something can go terribly wrong during one of those stops. Occasionally it does. The same can be said of space travel.

The mission Husband and his crew carried out was done under the immense threat of something going terribly wrong. They didn’t expect disaster to strike, but on that day it did. A piece of debris that flew off the shuttle hit the leading edge of one of its wings, damaging it and exposing it to the hyper-intense heat of atmospheric re-entry.

The result broke our hearts.

As President Kennedy said in 1961 while committing the nation to landing on the moon, “We don’t do these things because they are easy, we do them because they are hard.”

Space travel is hard, no matter if it’s to another celestial body or circling this planet. It’s dangerous and it is fraught with deadly peril.

But it’s something we must do.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/25/saxby-chambliss-to-retire-at-end-of-term/?hpt=hp_bn3

Now it’s Saxby Chambliss who’s tossed in the towel on his public service career.

The Georgia Republican has announced he won’t seek re-election next year to a third term in the Senate. His reason is sounding like a worn-out replay: gridlock and extreme partisanship.

Chambliss gave notice this week that he’s done, joining the likes of former Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine who last year was among the more notable retirees to lay blame on the Senate’s lack of compromise. Wyoming Republican Alan Simpson said much the same thing when he quit the Senate in 1997.

Republicans should have no fear, though, of Chambliss’s seat being captured by those nasty Democrats. Georgia is one of many solidly Republican Southern states that more than likely will keep the seat in GOP hands … and may in fact send another tea party ideologue to the Upper Chamber in 2014.

“This is about frustration, both at a lack of leadership from the White House and at the dearth of meaningful action from Congress, especially on issues that are the foundation of our nation’s economic health,” Chambliss said in a statement declaring his intention to step down.

This is too bad.

Texans last year jumped fully onto the tea party bandwagon by electing Ted Cruz to the Senate to succeed Kay Bailey Hutchison, who gave up her seat to challenge Rick Perry unsuccessfully in the Republican gubernatorial primary. My sense is that Hutchison had grown weary of the Capitol Hill bickering, given her own record of working well with Democrats. She, too, might have walked away, citing the same frustrations as others in her party have noted in their departures.

Serving in the Senate or in any other public office shouldn’t become a blood sport. But it has, at least in the eyes of good men and women who no longer have the stomach for the never-ending fight.

Very sad …

You’ve got to hand it John Kerry, the presumptive next secretary of state.

He was making an opening statement Thursday in front of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a panel he still chairs. Then a woman erupted in the back of the hearing room, shouting about needing to find peace with the Iranians. She yelled something about killing innocent people and how it must stop. She yelled her protest for perhaps about 30 seconds.

Then Capitol Hill security officers escorted her out of the room.

Sen. Kerry turned to listen to her and then, after she left the room, he turned back to the committee and recalled his first exposure to D.C. power, which was in the 1970s when he was protesting our nation’s conduct of the Vietnam War, in which he served in combat as a Navy officer. Kerry said his own protest in those contentious times underscored the American virtue of valuing dissent and said that is a quality that must exist to this day.

Thus, he said, the young woman’s protest on Thursday also was an appropriate expression, which he said served to punctuate perfectly his own appearance in front of the Senate panel.

That’s what I call a cool customer who thinks well on his feet.

And that coolness will serve John Kerry well as he takes over as the nation’s top foreign service officer.

I hate re-plowing old ground.

But …

A report out of Florida concerning a former top Amarillo municipal administrator brings to light the dangers of failing to screen applicants thoroughly for these jobs.

According to an Amarillo Globe-News story co-written by my friends Karen and Kevin Welch, Jihad El Eid has been charged with bribery and is being sought – along with his brother – by federal authorities who want to arrest them. El Eid is charged in Broward County, Fla., with taking $150,000 in bribes in exchange for landing construction contracts from a company also under investigation.

Why does this matter to us here in Amarillo? Because El Eid once was hired to be the city’s traffic engineer, a post that pays a handsome six-figure salary financed with public money. The problem with El Eid, though, was that he was under suspicion of bribery at the time he was hired in December 2010. El Eid was a traffic engineer in Florida, but had been demoted from that job. No one here at the time thought to inquire about the demotion and what led up to it.

Amarillo officials acknowledged this major hiring breakdown. El Eid left the city and eventually the country – ending up in his native Lebanon – while on the job in Amarillo. City Manager Jarrett Atkinson fired him when he failed to report to work.

To his great credit, Atkinson – who was fairly new in his own job at the time – called for a top-to-bottom review of the city’s hiring practices and has instituted a policy that requires background and reference checks on all applicants.

That revamped policy is the good news coming out of this embarrassing tale. The bad news is that the city is having to relive this nightmare all over again while authorities in Florida seek to solve a criminal act.

It’s time for me to come clean on something that happened this afternoon.

While driving home from a noon meeting in downtown Amarillo, I was flipping through radio channels when I came upon Rush Limbaugh’s AM radio gabfest. It didn’t take long to remind myself why I virtually never listen to the blowhard. (Note: I said “virtually never,” because the comments here disqualify me from proclaiming that I “absolutely never” listen to Limbaugh.)

He was bloviating about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s appearance before two congressional committees Wednesday in which she explained what happened on Sept. 11, 2012 in that horrific fire fight that erupted at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya that killed four heroic Americans, including Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya. I read Wednesday that he described the hearings as a “pukefest,” apparently out of disgust over the way Democratic senators and House members praised Clinton’s service to the country.

For the record, I concur that she’s been a spectacular secretary of state.

Limbaugh noted that Clinton has this “aura of invincibility” about her, which he apparently doesn’t believe is warranted. And why not? “She’s never been elected to anything,” he bellowed.

Stop. Hold it. Time out.

My memory is clear on this. Hillary Clinton, after serving eight years as first lady of the United States, was elected to the U.S. Senate from New New York in 2000 and re-elected in 2006. Both victories were landslides. Thus, she has been elected to something … a pretty important office in fact. And if I remember it correctly, she won plenty of Senate admirers from both political parties for her work ethic, intelligence and her own ability to forge bipartisan compromises.

Is this a major point? Probably not in the grand scheme of things, but it does demonstrate how one individual continues to hold such sway with an adoring public that ignores his glaring aversion to the truth.

There, now I feel better.

http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/23/military-to-open-combat-jobs-to-women/?hpt=hp_c1

It’s going to happen, finally. Women will be allowed to serve in combat roles in the U.S. military. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will make the announcement later today in what figures to be the most talked-about policy overhaul since the racial integration of the armed forces in the late 1940s.

Yes, it’s bigger than lifting the ban on gays serving openly, given that everyone knew that gays were serving already.

But here’s the question: Aren’t women serving already in combat roles? Yes they are and they’re doing so with distinction. They’re flying combat aircraft – helicopters and fixed-wing; they driving truck convoys through hostile territory, and some of them have died as a result; they are serving with civil affairs units in combat zones, working with indigenous populations in what was called “pacification” during the Vietnam War.

What Panetta will announce is that women will be allowed to serve in the combat arms: infantry, armor and artillery. And that’s where some disagreement may emerge. I think it’s overblown, given the role that women have been playing already on the battlefield.

Will women be strong enough to walk on patrols carrying rucksacks full of gear? That seems to be the top concern among infantry personnel. What about handling artillery ordnance? And what about their skill at operating an M-1 Abrams battle tank? I understand the concern, but the Pentagon brass now believes female military personnel will rise to the challenge that is being thrown in front of them.

I’ll make this personal point of privilege. A cousin of mine is serving in the Army. She’s been ordered on several tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of the Afghanistan tours of late have been of relatively brief duration. She has worked in a civil affairs capacity and has been armed to the teeth while working with civilians trying to build infrastructure in their communities. She also has engaged in fire fights with enemy personnel. I have no doubt, none, that she can hold her own in any male colleague.

OK, I’m biased. I’m immensely proud of my cousin. But my sense is that she is just one of many thousands of women who can carry out any order given them.

Yet another new day is dawning at the Pentagon, and it will result in the strengthening of the world’s most powerful military force.

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/01/23/slow-start-to-legislative-session-part/

The Texas Legislature meets every other year for 140 days. That’s about five months’ time to get lots of business done for a state of 26 million inhabitants and one of the world’s largest economies.

Yet as it always happens, our 150 state representatives and 31 state senators lollygag around for far too long, getting into a rush at the end to try to wrap up the business for which they have so little time to complete.

It’s happening again in this session, apparently.

I have been watching this spectacle unfold since 1984, when my family and I first moved Texas, first to Beaumont and then to Amarillo. I simply don’t get it.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, given that we pay our “citizen” legislators so little money. They earn $600 a month. In addition, they get a per diem expense payment while the Legislature is in session. It’s less than $200 daily and it’s supposed to cover ancillary expenses related to the job, such as lunches with special interest representatives and the like, office supplies, staff expenses … those kinds of things.

It’s probably unrealistic, then, to expect our legislators to hit the ground at a full sprint when they’re sworn in at the beginning of the session. I don’t doubt that our state lawmakers – Reps. John Smithee and Four Price, and Sen. Kel Seliger, all of Amarillo – work hard while they’re in Austin.

It’s just that the collective legislative body seems to cram so much work into so little time. Do they have time to read at the last minute the volumes of text contained in legislation? I suppose that’s why they have staff members and chiefs of staff. It’s their job to do the heavy lifting, which includes plowing through those gazillions of words.

Still, a part of me wishes the Legislature could get down to serious business earlier than it does. The result might be thoughtful laws that make sense, which is a key component of good government.

That assumes, of course, that Texans still believe in such a thing.