Tag Archives: 2020 election

national news

‘Clarifications’ reveal lack of coherence

It’s no secret to readers of this blog that I have admired Joe Biden for many years.

Thus, it pains me to realize that the former U.S. vice president and longtime senator from Delaware may be in the midst of inflicting a mortal self-inflicted wound.

He inflicted the latest wound by saying he would ignore a senatorial subpoena if it came to him during the Donald Trump impeachment trial. He said he wouldn’t comply.

Then it came. The “clarification,” that is.

I heaved a sigh of frustration when I heard he had to issue another clarification. When I hear such things coming from politicians and/or their staffs I am left to believe only that a clarification reveals a lack of coherence from the politician who makes a statement that needs to be clarified.

However, I will give Biden credit at least for seeking more clarity from the statements he makes. That stands in contrast to Donald J. Trump, who during his time as president of the United States has blathered a countless number of incoherent rants that damn sure need to be clarified … except that Trump doesn’t clarify anything.

Still, I am looking for a politician who can speak in complete sentences, have them stand on their own so that the public can digest what the politician says without him or her having to say what he or she intended to say.

Joe Biden, despite what I consider to be his admirable record of public service, appears to be squandering his presidential chances because he can’t say what he means the first time. He has issued formal clarifications or has been forced to restate with different verbiage what he said initially.

Donald Trump’s idiotic riff on wind power recently provides the perfect example of incoherent rambling that needed to be clarified.

I continue to hope Joe Biden can be the guy to replace Trump. However, we don’t need only a different type of rhetorical buffoonery.

national news

Turnabout isn’t always ‘fair play,’ Mr. Former VP

My politically induced heartburn is flaring up again. The cause is the statement by former Vice President Joe Biden, who says he would deny a Senate subpoena if he’s called to testify during the upcoming impeachment trial of Donald John Trump.

Dang it, Mr. Vice President! You cannot do that.

Here’s the deal: Critics such as me and millions of others have been hammering Trump over his refusal to let key White House aides testify after being summoned by lawfully authorized congressional subpoenas. That means fairness requires Biden to show up if the Senate does the same thing to him.

I happen to agree with Biden that a Senate subpoena would divert attention away from the allegations that have been leveled against Trump, that he abused his power and obstructed Congress; he sought a foreign government’s help for political purposes and has gotten in the way of Congress performing its oversight functions as prescribed in the Constitution. Thus, the Democratically controlled House impeached Trump.

Now comes the trial. The GOP controls the Senate. Republicans want Biden to testify in a trial. The idea stinks. However, it’s a lawful request if that’s what the Senate decides to do.

Just as I’ve said all along about Trump, if he’s got nothing to hide, he shouldn’t obstruct Congress. The same can be said of Biden. I happen to believe that the former VP didn’t break any laws with regard to Ukraine; prosecutors there have said so. Neither has his son, Hunter, who’s another key player in this drama.

My heartburn is only going to worsen the longer this idiocy plays out. That’s what my sense of fairness is doing to me. I just want to ask Joe Biden to spare me from having to reach for the Pepto.

I fear this trial is going to produce an unwelcome result, no matter whether Biden testifies or sits it out.

national news

Looking ahead to third decade of 21st century

We’ve put our Christmas gifts away, finished our dinner, we’re relaxing around the house.

And, by golly, I’m already looking ahead to the next year. It commences the third decade of the 21st century.

Wow! That’s about all I’ve got to say about that specific item.

However, the year coming promises to be one for the books. A U.S. president will stand trial for high crimes and misdemeanors, only the third one in the nation’s history. I shudder to think how the trial will turn out, so I won’t mention it specifically.

Then we’ll have a presidential election. Candidates and assorted politicians always tell us that the next election is “the most important in history.” This one actually might be the most crucial.

Donald Trump’s bid for re-election is fraught with plenty of peril. I don’t want him re-elected; but you knew that already. Another four years of this individual in the White House is bound to produce a volume of drama and chaos that will make the past four years seem like a game of patty-cake. It won’t be fun.

I just want a “normal” politician to take office. I don’t know who that would be, or should be among those seeking to replace Trump.

In a curious sort of way I am looking forward to the campaign. I just hope my sense of anticipation isn’t overtaken by a sense of dread that turns to nausea.

Trump will keep telling the lies about presiding over the greatest economy in human history, how he took over a military that was “decimated” by his immediate predecessor, how he is “making America great again” by stiffing and scolding our international allies.

Why are they lies? Because the economy isn’t doing as well as it did right after World War II; because our military always has been the most powerful such apparatus in world history; and his quest for American greatness has turned us into an international laughingstock.

We need to take stock of what we have gotten from this individual so far and we must decide whether we want more of the same. I do not want an acceleration of what we have experienced.

The new year of 2020 will give us a chance to perform a serious course correction.

national news

Watch out, Mr. ‘Current’ POTUS

If Donald J. Trump is going to refer to Christopher Wray as the “current” director of the FBI, I am going to take it upon myself — through High Plains Blogger — to hereby refer to Trump as the “current” president of the United States.

Fair is fair, right?

I mean, to imply that Wray’s status as head of the world’s pre-eminent investigative agency might be in peril gives many of us license to infer the same thing about the man who appointed him.

Donald Trump’s status as the “current” president well might imply the same thing, if not through impeachment and removal in a Senate trial, then via the next presidential election.

national news

Memo to Steyer: Congress isn’t ‘appointed’

As if yet another billionaire presidential candidate is more astute than the one who’s in office already.

I heard a TV ad today from Tom Steyer, one of two billionaires seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Steyer, who burst onto the national scene by financing an impeach Donald Trump effort nationally, needs a basic civics lesson if he’s going to make a pitch for good government.

Steyer’s advertisement, which makes the pitch for mandated term limits, referred — in Steyer’s own voice — to Congress being “appointed to what amounts to a lifetime job.”

C’mon, Tom! Get with the program, dude!

Congress isn’t appointed to anything. House of Representatives members run for election and/or re-election every two years. Senators serve for six-year elected terms.

Therefore, we already have a form of term limits on the books. The U.S. Constitution has taken care of that matter by requiring elections for the entire House every other year, along with one-third of the Senate. Voters have plenty of opportunities, I submit, to limit the terms of members with their ballots.

Whether they choose to keep their House member or their senator in office until hell freezes over is their call exclusively. If their elected official is doing a good job, then they get to keep doing a good job. If not, well, voters can boot ’em out.

Term limits? We have them already!

State news

Texas Democrats optimistic; but let’s keep it (more or less) in check

Texas Democrats reportedly are optimistic heading into the 2020 election season. They think a Democratic presidential nominee can carry the state, handing Texas’ 38 electoral votes to the party’s nominee.

Were that to happen, the GOP president, one Donald Trump, can kiss his re-election goodbye. Indeed, I figure that if Texas is going to flip from Republican to Democrat, then the 2020 election will be a dark, foreboding time for the GOP throughout the ballot in Texas.

However, Democrats would be wise to curb their optimism in Texas.

It’s not that I don’t want Texas to help elect someone other than Donald Trump, or that I don’t want the Texas Legislature to turn from GOP to Democrat. I want to see at minimum a contested political playing field, one that features two strong political parties arguing vehemently to persuade voters to buy into whatever ideology they are trying to sell.

However, Texas’ turn from Democratic to Republican control was dramatic and total over the course of about 20 years.

I get that Democrats got all fluttery when Beto O’Rourke nearly defeated GOP U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018. O’Rourke then tried to parlay that near-miss into a presidential candidacy. He failed.

Texas Democrats have been floundering in the wilderness since the late 1990s, when they won their last statewide political campaign. Is the upcoming year going to mark the turnaround for the Texas Democratic Party. My bias tells me to hope it does.

My more realistic side tells me to wait for the ballots to be counted.

national news

How will Trump lay out his next agenda?

As I look ahead to the upcoming presidential campaign, I keep wondering just how Donald J. Trump is going to campaign for a second term.

Will he actually offer an agenda for the next four years? Or will he get into the name-calling game that helped get him elected in the first place?

Texas Gov. Ann Richards sought re-election to a second term in 1994, but got beat by a political newcomer, George W. Bush. Part of Gov. Richards’ undoing was her seeming inability to lay out a second-term agenda as Texas governor. Bush, meanwhile, stayed focused on his own agenda and campaigned relentlessly without veering too far from his talking points.

Richards, meanwhile, got too negative in her effort to derail the up-and-comer. It didn’t work.

So, will the president borrow a page from the failed Ann Richards playbook?

The major issue, from my standpoint, is that Trump’s initial agenda has been buried under the chaos and confusion that has been hallmark of his term in office. How will the Democratic nominee campaign against that first term? I suppose he or she will point correctly — in my view — to the chaotic nature of the president’s (hoped-for only) term.

Trump, meanwhile, likely will be true to form and respond with the blizzard of insults and innuendo that became the centerpiece of his victorious campaign in 2016.

Second-term agenda? Hah! There well might not be a mention of it.

national news

Democratic POTUS field thinning out as it should

You cannot refer to U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris as a “top-tier” Democratic Party presidential hopeful, because were she such she wouldn’t be announcing her withdrawal today from the 2020 race for the White House.

She joins Montana Gov. Steve Bullock as the most recent presidential wannabes to call it a campaign.

This in-and-out business with the current field of Democrats vying to be nominated to run against Donald Trump is getting a bit difficult to track. Harris and Bullock never got traction. Neither did Beto O’Rourke, or Tim Ryan, or … whomever else has come and gone. There remain a boatload of others who should call it quits and leave the contest to the actual frontrunners.

Then we have these late entries. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is in because, he says, the current field is too weak to take on Trump. No one stands out as someone who can defeat the president; so, Bloomberg says he’s the one. He surely can outspend Trump, given that his personal wealth dwarfs that of the president, who has boasted about his own filthy richness. And then we have former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, whose entry baffles me. I don’t know what he brings to the campaign that isn’t already personified in many of the others.

As for Harris, she was another one who entered the contest with high hopes and high expectation. She’s now about to be history — in terms of the presidential campaign.

I will await the further culling of the field as these joint appearances continue and the Democratic National Committee keeps setting the bar for inclusion in these events even higher.

Moreover, I am looking forward to the Democratic Party getting a nominee who can deliver a knockout blow to the fraud who masquerades as president of the United States.

economic news

Hey, wasn’t the ‘national debt’ considered a deal breaker?

Check it out! Twenty-three trillion! As in dollars, man!

What does it represent? The national debt.

It crossed yet another milestone. The national debt keeps growing, despite bold — and arguably reckless — predictions that the president of the United States all by himself was going to eliminate the annual budget deficit by the end of his second term.

It, too, keeps growing, adding to the debt that those in Donald Trump’s Republican Party used to warn would bankrupt the country.

Has it bankrupted the United States of America? I don’t think it has, although the debt does pose a serious potential threat.

I guess my concern is that Donald Trump’s penchant for braggadocio persuade enough Americans to vote for him in 2016. He made that bold promise. He called himself “the king of debt,” whatever that was supposed to mean. Trump also pledged to balance the budget.

The current fiscal year deficit is growing at a breakneck pace, owing to the tax cuts enacted for the richest Americans along with still-uncontrolled federal spending.

I recall vividly the mantra repeated throughout the 2012 presidential campaign that the national debt, which totaled about $16 trillion, was the deal-breaker among Republicans. GOP nominee Mitt Romney said President Obama must not be re-elected because the national debt was just unsustainable. The message didn’t sell, as Obama was re-elected with a handsome margin — although it was diminished from the margin that Obama rolled up in 2008.

The debt has piled on another $7 trillion since 2012. It is still growing. What is Donald Trump going to promise to do about it to ensure his re-election in 2020?

I’m all ears.

national news

Count me as one who is ‘satisfied’ with Democratic field

No one has asked for my opinion on this matter, but I’m going to offer it anyway.

You may count me as one American voter who is satisfied with the quality of the Democratic field competing for the chance to run against Donald J. Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

So, with that I should declare that Michael Bloomberg’s relatively late entry into the contest strikes me as more than just a tad presumptuous on the part of the former three-term New York City mayor.

He once was a Republican. Then he became an independent. Now he wants to run as a Democrat. Make up your mind, Mr. Mayor! Who are you and what, precisely, do you believe? Yes, I have stated my preference for a moderate candidate to emerge from the large field, but this guy is nearly impossible to peg.

Bloomberg, who once said he wouldn’t run for president, says he fears the current field lacks the heft needed to knock off the Republican president. I beg to differ.

The Democratic herd of candidates is full of talent, full of ideas, full of executive government experience and full of integrity needed to compete against the carnival barker masquerading as our president.

I am struck by the notion that Bloomberg plans to skip the early primary and caucus states and hit the trail in time for the big super Tuesday event later in the spring.

He’s worth about 50 billion bucks — give or take a billion or three — and is saying (a) he won’t take any political contributions from anyone and (b) won’t accept the chump-change presidential salary if he’s elected in 2020; the office pays a measly $400,000 annually, but hey, the office provides the best public transportation possible, not to mention 24/7 security.

I get that Bloomberg is a smart guy. Well-educated and all of that. He did a good job running the nation’s largest city. He’s richer than God and can add some considerable gravitas to the campaign.

However, I want to arc back to my initial point: Does the Democratic Party field need this guy to give it the oomph Bloomberg thinks it needs to kick Donald Trump out of the Oval Office? I do not believe that’s the case.