Tag Archives: MAGA

local news, political news

We aren’t a battleground yet

Democrats in the state where I have lived for the past 40 years keep crowing about how we are becoming a “battleground state” for the candidates seeking the U.S. presidency.

Spoiler alert: Texas is not a battleground state. At least not in this election cycle.

How do I know that? Because if we truly were up for grabs, we would be seeing Kamala Harris and her Republican opponent as frequently as they are being seen in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia.

It’s not happening. At least not yet.

Now, this isn’t intended to denigrate my wish that we would become a place where Democrats can compete statewide against Republicans. We’re inching closer to that day.

In 2020, Joe Biden lost Texas to Donald Trump by about 5 percentage points. That is tantalizingly close to the margin of error in most reputable political polls. I live in Collin County, just northeast of Dallas County, which — and this might be difficult to believe — has become a Democratic stronghold. 

Yes, I was aware that a lot of Democrats got all wound up when Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson announced he is a Republican. My reaction: B … F … D! He is elected mayor as a non-partisan; that’s all that should matter to the residents who are concerned about potholes and police protection.

I am going to presume that Trump will get Texas’s 40 electoral votes. I will be curious and anxious to see how the final results roll in.

If only Kamala Harris could get it through the thick and vacuous skulls of the MAGA cultists here about the danger of putting Trump anywhere near the Resolute Desk. If we continue to close the gap between Ds and Rs, then I might be able to accept that our days as a battleground state are closer than I fear at this moment.

national news

It’s the brevity … stupid!

Just suppose for a moment or two what the public reaction to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign would be had she been in the hunt for, oh, the past year and a half.

Do you think we’d still be as excited about the energy the vice president has brought to the race? Would she wear us out with her exuberance, her enthusiasm, her energy?

I want to offer a notion that might not go over well among some readers of this blog. It is that Harris’s late entry into the campaign after President Biden pulled out of the race has filled the air with excitement that might not have the staying power that many of the VP’s allies say it would.

Vice President Harris launched her campaign from a dead stop with fewer than 100 days to go before Election Day. Joe Biden’s horrible debate performance got tongues wagging about his mental acuity. He stood firm, said he would stay in, then, in an instant he was gone.

Harris stepped up with the wind blowing hard at her back.

Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, are in a dead sprint toward the finish line, which is just 70 days from now. My strong hope is that Harris and Walz win, that they vanquish Donald Trump and JD Vance to history’s dust bin and then deliver on the myriad promises they are making.

A part of me, though, just might always wonder if the brevity of this campaign could have been the decisive factor in her victory.

Whatever. A win is a win.

political news

Biden made unprecedented move

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I want to bask for just a little while longer in the afterglow of the Democratic National Convention, which wrapped up Thursday and sent its presidential and vice-presidential nominees to fight the Republican ticket.

My point is to echo the praise we heard from the convention podium about the selflessness exhibited by President Joe Biden as he dropped his re-election bid, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him … and he did this on his own.

I won’t quibble or quarrel over what motivated him to take that dramatic action. Biden said he loves being president but added quickly that “I love my country more.”

Indeed, when you ponder it for just a moment, the act of voluntarily giving up political power has to rank as one of the most improbable acts imaginable.

Could the president reverse his political fortune and defeated the GOP ticket? I believe it was possible. The seamless handoff to Kamala Harris, though, has energized Democrats beyond all expectation.

I also agree with Biden about the imperativeness of keeping Donald Trump away from the Resolute Desk … forever!

If that was Joe Biden’s primary motivation in surrendering power, then I’m all in on that effort.  I also join others who have hailed this act as one of high political courage.

As former President Obama said at the end of his stemwinding speech at the DNC: Let’s get to work!

national news

RFK Jr. betrays his family

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Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. should be damn glad his father cannot emerge from the ground at Arlington National Cemetery and give his son the whoopin’ he has earned.

Kennedy decided to suspend his presidential campaign and then did the unthinkable: He endorsed the Republican Party’s twice-impeached, four-times-indicted, convicted felon nominee for president of the United States … Donald Trump.

Junior, the scion of the nation’s premier family of partisan Democrats, turned his back on the principles championed by his forebears, namely his father, Robert F. Kennedy, his uncles JFK and Sen. Edward Kennedy and a host of aunts, siblings and cousins.

I am scratching my noggin over this endorsement. So help me, it makes zero sense.

RFK Jr. long has fancied himself as a man of action. He developed a nice environmental law practice and has been at the forefront of environmental causes almost since his graduation from law school. Trump doesn’t give a rat’s rear end about the environment.

And yet RFK Jr. is now backing the disgraced former POTUS.

What does RFK Jr.’s endorsement mean in terms of the election outcome? Probably not enough to matter. I won’t waste any time seeking to evaluate that particular consequence.

I only can imagine what Junior’s sainted mother, Ethel, must be thinking as she watches her son spit in the face of her beloved husband and throw his support behind a moron who stands before the nation and the world as the Republicans’ only nominee ever convicted of multiple felonies.

I may never catch my breath over this one!

military news

This ‘sucker’ fires back

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As I look back over the past four days of the Democratic National Convention and its myriad examples of Donald Trump’s unfitness for public office, I am drawn to the one area that hits me right where I live.

It is Trump’s disrespect for those of us who have donned our nation’s military uniform. I am one of those “suckers” and “losers” who answered the call to duty when it arrived at my parents’ mailbox one hot summer day in July 1968. Uncle Sam summoned me to duty … and so I went to do as I was ordered to do.

Trump didn’t do that very thing. He avoided service through those infamous bone spurs.

The DNC highlighted — or “lowlighted,” if you prefer — Trump’s utter disdain for those of us who did serve. Former GOP U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois stood before the convention and decried Trump’s disrespect for him. So did U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego, a candidate for the Senate in Arizona — who brought along a number of veterans to embrace his condemnation of Trump. So did Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a former Navy pilot and former astronaut.

Then we had former Defense Secretary, former CIA director, former congressman Leon Panetta echo all of that as well.

Trump never should have donned the commander in chief’s mantle in the first place and he damn sure should never assume that role ever again.

The men and women who serve in our military deserve to have complete trust in their commander in chief. Vice President Kamala Harris, nominated last night to confront Mr. Bone Spurs in this year’s campaign for the White House, pledged to maintain and support the world’s most “lethal” fighting force if she is elected president.

She also has pledged to protect all the “pre-paid” benefits our veterans have earned through their service to the nation we love beyond all measure.

I believe in Kamala Harris’s commitment to those who continue to serve with honor, distinction and valor.

Donald Trump

How is this contest still close?

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I consider myself to be reasonably well-educated, with above-average intelligence, one who is still alert at my advanced age and who has a deep love of the country of my birth.

OK, now … someone will have to explain to me how a twice-impeached former POTUS who wants his old job back is still in the race to win the 2024 election.

Bear with me while I review where we stand.

He served a single disastrous term as president; he lost re-election in 2020; he had been impeached twice by the House for high crimes and misdemeanors. He then was convicted on 34 felony criminal counts, found liable in the sexual assault of a journalist. Federal and state grand juries in four jurisdictions have indicted him on a range of alleged criminal acts, including the Jan. 6 assault on the government that sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

All the while, he has hurled insults at veterans, Gold Star families, immigrants, gay people, women of all stripes, a physically challenged reporter for the New York Times and admitted to grabbing women by their private parts because he’s a “celebrity.”

These issues don’t even touch the myriad cluster-fu** acts that he committed as POTUS.

We fired this guy four years ago. We told him he wasn’t fit the job he had. Now he wants it back.

How in the name of all that is sacred, holy and sane does this add up?

I’m sure some High Plains Blogger critics will see fit to tell me I don’t get it. They are right.

I don’t.

national news, political news

Yep. the man is unfit

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Dawn  finally is breaking over the pundit class that is covering the third presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.

Ever since he announced his bid for the presidency the first time in 2015, some of us have been saying that Trump’s zero experience with public service would render him unfit for the presidency. Now, others are seeing the proverbial light.

Consider what the numbskull said about those who receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and how it compares to the Medal of Honor. He put them on an equal footing, suggesting further that the Medal of Freedom is “more important” because Medal of Honor recipients “always are wounded” and some have died to earn the recognition.

What an absolute crock of bull dookie!

The Medal of Freedom is the nation’s highest civilian honor; it goes to those who contribute greatly to our cultural life, through athletics, art, music, drama. The Medal of Honor is our nation’s top military honor; it is awarded to those who perform heroically on the battlefield.

Both medals are big deals.

However, for the former POTUS to put down Medal of Honor recipients because they are “wounded or killed” betrays a profound lack of understanding or appreciation of those don the nation’s uniform in service to their country.

It also reveals what I have noted many times on this blog, which is that Trump never has committed a single moment of his existence on this Earth to public service.

I am running out of ways to say this … but this moron is unfit for public office at any level, let alone as commander in chief.

national news

What about Trump’s laugh?

True story: I really hate “what aboutism,” which often surfaces when your candidate gets jabbed by a foe and you respond with, “Well, what about your guy?”

Kamala Harris’s reportedly annoying laughter has been drawing some flak from foes of the vice president who’s running for the presidency. Rather than picking apart policy matters, her foes have taken to reminding us of the laugh that annoys them.

Here comes the “what aboutism.”

What about Donald J. Trump? What about his laugh? Indeed, has anyone ever heard him laugh out loud? That’s the rejoinder making the rounds on social media.

I confess I haven’t heard anything that sounds like laughter coming from the indicted/convicted/twice-impeached former president.

I have long thought that Trump had zero discernible humor. He’s a crabby sorehead who cannot stop relitigating matters over which he has zero control. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is having the time of her life … and this is an American patriot who enjoys seeing a presidential candidate exhibit such joy.

Keep laughing, Mme. Vice President.

national news, political news

Crowd size doesn’t matter

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Donald J. Trump keeps crowing — apparently falsely — about the size of the crowds to which he has been speaking.

He calls them “the largest anyone’s ever seen.” His critics, led by Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz, accuse him of (what else?) lying about the size of the crowds.

Allow me for just a brief moment to put the issue into another perspective.

Crowd size doesn’t matter. Size might matter in a lot of different contexts — if you’ll take a moment to ponder them — but not the size of crowds.

When I returned home from the Army in 1970, I got politically active. I guess you could call me a member of the “Vietnam Vets Against the War” in Vietnam. In 1972, we rallied behind a candidate who vowed, if elected POTUS, he would end the war.

Sen. George McGovern spoke to huge crowds all across the land. They were gigantic. They set unofficial records, as I recall.

In Portland, Ore., where I grew up, McGovern held a rally in downtown Portland. Huge crowd, man! Thousands of people gathered. I was one of them.

McGovern got us all fired up. We were ready to kick ass and take names … you know?

You’ll remember what happened on that Election Day. Sen. McGovern lost 49 of 50 states to President Nixon.

This is my way of saying that Donald Trump’s empty boast about big crowds means absolutely nothing …. particularly when he lies about it!

crime news, national news

Who’s dumber?

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The dumbest individual to ever be elected president of the United States never should question another public figure’s intelligence.

Never! Not ever should he go there. But … Donald Trump has ventured down that blind alley.

He said this week that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris isn’t intelligent enough to stage a press conference with national media. He said President Biden is “smarter” than the person he wants to succeed him in the White House.

This, of course, comes from an individual without a single forward-looking policy agenda. He has offered no plan on how he intends to govern, other than to exact revenge on his political foes by siccing the Justice Department on them.

He hasn’t developed a single constructive thought. He doesn’t understand how government works.

Republicans have nominated a certifiable dumbass — oh, and a convicted felon — to be their nominee for president of the United States.

I believe I am going to scream!