Monthly Archives: September 2019

national news

Trump’s big mouth is getting him into trouble … maybe, perhaps

Donald Trump doesn’t know about circumspection. When reticence would serve him well, he turns to his natural instinct, which is to blab, blather and bloviate.

So he happened to mention out loud the other day that he talked to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky about former Vice President Joe Biden, one of a large crowd of Democrats seeking to run against Trump next year. Specifically, he talked to him about Biden’s son, Hunter, and whether Hunter Biden had some sort of nefarious business relationship with a Russian oligarch who owns an energy country.

Trump’s big mouth has opened up the impeachment talk. Democrats are yapping about impeaching the president right now. Let’s not wait, many of them are saying, claiming that they need to do their “constitutional duty.”

Their “duty” can wait. What cannot seem to wait, though, is the president’s big mouth.

He vowed to be an “unconventional” president. Of all the campaign promises Trump made, this is one he has kept in spades. Building the wall? Replacing the Affordable Care Act? Hiring the “best people” in the White House? Pffft! They’re all down the tubes.

However, he remains unconventional in the extreme. Part of his unconventional approach has to be the way he shoots off his trap about discussions he has with foreign leaders.

Why can’t this guy, the president, ever learn that some things need not be repeated beyond the room in which he says them initially?

Oh, well. That’s just Donald.

It could sink him and his presidency. To my way of thinking, that’s not a bad thing. Not at all.

national news

Will impeachment pressure lead to explosion?

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is feeling the heat even more from her colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Is she strong enough to fend off calls to impeach Donald John Trump? That’s the question of the moment.

The president, to my mind, might have cut his own throat by acknowledging publicly that he spoke to Ukrainian officials about former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and alleged business dealings that Hunter Biden has had with a Russian oligarch.

Oh yes, I guess I should mention that Joe Biden is the leading Democrat running for the presidency of the United States.

But … did the president seek information from the Ukrainians? Did he offer them a quid pro quo? Did he offer ’em a bribe?

Trump says he is “considering” whether to release a transcript of the conversation he admits has occurred. Do you think he’ll do it? Well, I don’t believe it. Why? Because, I am willing to conjecture, Trump might have something else to hide from the public.

Pelosi has dug in against rushing to impeach Trump. I concur with her view. There needs to be more. Pelosi wants broad public buy-in. She also wants more than a congressional Republican or two to climb aboard the impeachment express.

The questions facing Pelosi are the same ones facing Donald Trump.

What precisely did he say? How did he present this issue to the Ukrainians? Has the president of the United States committed a treasonous act by soliciting campaign assistance from a foreign power?

The heat is growing under Speaker Pelosi.

It’s also getting hot under the president of the United States.

environmental news

Nature’s awesome power on display … even after it passes

TOPEKA, Kan. — We got here — finally!

As we proceed southward toward The House in Collin County, we have seen evidence of the awesome power that Mother Nature can deliver to we mere human beings.

The Missouri River runs adjacent to Interstate 29 through Iowa and into Nebraska. We saw a flashing electronic sign that told us that I-29 would be closed; a detour awaited.

So, we exited the freeway and proceeded east along Interstate 680. We had to drive about 16 miles out of our way toward our next stop here in Topeka. We turned south and then west along Interstate 80.

This leg of the journey was extended about 40 minutes.

What caused it? The Missouri River flooded. We didn’t see what it had done to the right-of-way. All we know river caused the state highway department to shut down the major thoroughfare.

But we damn sure did see the river. It is quite high at this moment. In places it is just a foot or two from spilling over its bank and onto the highway. We saw street signs below the Interstate that poked only a foot or two above the water. We noticed buildings half-submerged under the Missouri’s tides.

Yep, it’s an awesome sight.

Grand Forks, N.D., had just gone through what apparently occurred downstream. We watched crews seek to siphon water from ditches into retention ponds.

There’s water. Then there’s too much water. We saw evidence of what happens when you have too much of it.

Yes, our friends along the Gulf Coast are experiencing this very thing at this moment. Our hearts go out them. They are in our prayers.

Now that we’ve seen how far widespread nature’s wrath has become, we send our prayers to those we saw from a distance as we zipped along to our next destination.

media news

Time of My Life, Part 39: Beating out the big guys

Everyone appreciates recognition. We appreciate especially when it comes from one’s peers.

My journalism career wasn’t full of such recognition. I have said I enjoyed some modest success over 37 years as a reporter and editor of daily newspapers. One such moment presented itself early in my careers.

The Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association in 1981 awarded the newspaper I was editing at the time its annual award for Best Continuing Coverage of a Single Issue. What made the honor so special was that our newspaper, a five-day-per-week afternoon daily that circulated to about 7,000 subscribers, won out over much larger, more well-endowed newspapers in Oregon.

The issue we covered like a blanket involved a proposed “resource recovery” plant in Oregon City. Officials in the city wanted to build a plant to burn garbage and turn it into energy generated from the landfill. Our newspaper, the now-defunct Oregon City Enterprise-Courier, comprised a staff of six reporters. One of them, David Peters, received the assignment to cover this story for the newspaper.

Dave did a magnificent job!

The plant never got built. The story we presented was thorough in the extreme. We talked to all sides on this complicated issue. We reported every possible benefit and down side of this project.

What made the honor so sweet is that it came to us in 1981, the year that the Portland Oregonian was covering the eruption of Mount St. Helens in nearby Washington state. Oh, did I mention that the Oregonian circulated about 300,000 copies daily, or that it employed a staff many times larger than our little ol’ newspaper?

The state also comprised other much larger newspapers … in Eugene, Salem, Medford, Astoria, to name just a few communities served by healthy daily publications.

ONPA saw fit to honor us.

Yes, that was our moment. I am proud to have played a part in it.

environmental news

Weather vs. climate … short term and long term

When we gripe about the weather, we are speaking of an event in the moment.

If it’s hot out there, it’s hot at the time you notice it. Same if it it’s cold. We’re talking about the weather, not the climate.

Our climate, though, cannot be discussed in real time. It requires a longer look, a broader view.

Thus, when politicians or citizens conflate the two — weather and climate — they’re talking about non-parallel phenomena.

I have spoken already on this blog about my desire to see climate change assume the important role it deserves in the upcoming presidential campaign. Donald Trump calls climate change a hoax; scientific analysis calls it real. Who do you believe? I’ll go with the scientists who study these matters intently even though Donald Trump — in his own mind — is the smartest human being ever to inhabit Earth.

NASA, the agency that launches satellites and people into space, calls it correctly: The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time. Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere “behaves” over relatively long periods of time.

Earth’s climate is changing. We’re posting record high temperatures virtually every year. Those ice caps on either pole — North and South — are shrinking. Icebergs the size of cities are breaking off at alarming rates. Sea levels are rising as a result, threatening coastal cities on every continent.

Weather patterns are changing, too. Storms are getting more severe, more frequent. We see evidence of this each year. When have we ever seen, for instance, a storm drop 50 inches of rain in 24 hours as Hurricane Harvey did when it pummeled the Upper Texas Gulf Coast in 2017?

I want the candidates for president — even the one who occupies the office — to tell us how they intend to do battle with climate that threatens the nation and the world. No more platitudes. No more clichés.

No more phony denials about it all being a hoax. Climate change presents an existential threat to the very planet on which we all live.

national news

‘Troubling in the extreme’? Boy, howdy!

U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, put a tweet out today that said the following …

If the President asked or pressured Ukraine’s president to investigate his political rival, either directly or through his personal attorney, it would be troubling in the extreme. Critical for the facts to come out.

Gosh. Do ya think?

Donald Trump, quite naturally, is pushing back on reports that he and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, asked the Ukrainians to look for dirt involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, who reportedly has business dealings with a Ukrainian oligarch.

Yes, it is critical to get all the facts, as Sen. Romney has stated. Romney is trying to be fair by waiting for the facts. I accept that. I, too, want to know all the facts. Where I differ from the freshman senator — and former Republican presidential nominee — is that I get to state what I believe … which is that I believe Trump did what has been alleged.

Trump’s propensity for lying makes it difficult for me to assume he’s being truthful when he says a whistleblower is conducting “another witch hunt.” What’s more, it was Mitt Romney himself who said in 2016 that Trump is a “phony … a fraud.” Yep, Mitt was right then.

Look, let’s get to the facts at hand. Let’s find out what Trump did, what he said and to whom he said it.

Let us also not be bullied by Trump’s assertion that it’s just another witch hunt. There hasn’t been a witch hunt to this point. There have been serious investigations.

The next one ought to reveal whether Trump is telling the truth, that he didn’t do what has been alleged.

I am not willing to wager that he can tell the truth about this or anything!

environmental news

‘Climate change’ needs to take center stage

There can be no doubt in my own mind — none at all — that climate change must become the pre-eminent issue of the 2020 presidential campaign.

The incumbent president calls the issue a “hoax.” Donald Trump says it’s a figment of some plot concocted by China to undermine the U.S. fossil fuel industry.

The president is as wrong about this as he is about damn near everything. Except his error bodes grim for the country and the planet.

Most of the Democrats running for their party’s nomination have spoken with varying degrees of eloquence and detail about how they intend to tackle climate change if they are elected in 2020.

I am waiting to hear some more detail about what they intend to do and how they propose to pay for it.

I simply know this: Earth’s climate is changing and it is imperative that the world’s most powerful industrial power and the nation that is chiefly responsible for humankind’s role in changing the climate to do something about it … now!

Climate change deniers endanger the nation. Do you remember that idiotic stunt U.S. Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican, pulled on the Senate floor some years back? It was cold in Washington one winter, so Sen. Inhofe brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to prove, by golly, that Earth’s climate isn’t getting warmer. Of course, Inhofe conflated weather with climate, ignoring the science that separates the two phenomena.

The scientific community is speaking with increasing sameness on this the gravity of this issue. Climatologists tell us that it well might be too late for humanity to change the trend that already is developing. My response? OK, but that doesn’t mean we do nothing!

The Trump administration is backing away from air-quality emission standards. It has been silent on the issue of deforestation. The president nominated and the Senate confirmed an Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, who himself is a climate change denier; Pruitt forgot during his time at EPA that the agency’s mission is to “protect the environment,” not destroy it.

Climate change is real. It is endangering the planet we call home. It’s the only planet we have. Or, as someone noted just recently, there is “no planet B.”

The president takes an oath to protect Americans. The current president is far falling short of fulfilling that oath. The next one needs to step up.

environmental news

Some issues linger far longer than they should?

GRAND FORKS, N.D. — There’s chronic flooding, and then there’s Grand Forks, a nice city on the North Dakota-Minnesota border that turns into a gigantic pool of water when the rain comes in torrents.

We rolled into this city along Interstate 29 just south of the Canadian border to see  “Road Closed Ahead” staring at us. We exited the freeway, made a huge loop east of the freeway, then re-entered I-29 a good bit south of where we left it.

The rain had just fallen heavily here prior to our arrival.

We looked back and saw a huge flooded area under a bridge crossing the freeway that obviously was too dangerous for motor vehicle traffic. For all I know at this moment, someone might have gotten caught in there and paid a huge price for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I thought immediately of the 1997 flood that crippled Grand Forks. The Red River spilled over its banks and inundated the city. I remember reading at the time that farmers here had relied on levees to alter the river’s course; they used the water to irrigate their crops.

However, the river goes where the Almighty intends for it to go. Such was the case then when the Red River decided that little ol’ humankind wasn’t going to dictate its water flow.

I am unaware of the measures they took to prevent that kind of catastrophe from repeating itself.

However, we did see that lots of standing water — much of knee- or perhaps even waist-deep in some places as we made our way toward the RV camp where we spent the night.

As we prepare to leave this lovely community, I will express hope that the nice folks here have learned their lessons from that Red River tragedy.

Just remember: The river ain’t gonna go where human beings tell it to go; it goes where it is meant to go all along.

local news

Happy Trails, Part 169: ‘Half-bucket list’ journey completed

GRAND FORKS, N.D. — We’re settled overnight in a place that looks nothing like the scene pictured with this blog post.

What you see in this photo is a glimpse of Canada’s Rocky Mountain range. My wife and I saw it the other day while driving east from Banff National Park in Alberta. It rained for three days while we were parked in an RV park in Golden, British Columbia.

Still, this view presented itself as we trekked toward Medicine Hat, Alberta. So I snapped a few pictures of the mountains we would leave behind.

We completed what I have called our “half-bucket list” journey across Canada. The Trans-Canada Highway traverses the country across the southern regions of its provinces. We had intended to see the entire length of the highway, but decided to cut it short by roughly half; we plan to see the eastern half of the highway at another time.

Our retirement journey has enabled us to visit much of the United States already. We’ve hauled our fifth wheel to both coasts, to the Great Lakes, over much of Texas. We’ve seen national parks, national landmarks, scenic splendor … just name it, we’ve likely seen it.

Canada presented another trekking opportunity for us.

The Canadian Cascades are as gorgeous as I had known them to be. As for the Rockies, well, the picture I’ve provided with this blog post tell you that they, too, are breathtaking.

The rolling plains on the eastern slope opened up under a huge sky. We journeyed through range and farm land.

My wife spotted a grizzly looking down from a hillside in Alberta as we zipped past at 60 mph.

This has been a wonderful journey, one that we pledged long ago to take. So what if we didn’t do the whole thing in one sojourn? We’ll get to the rest of it in due course.

The journey will continue. For now, though, we’re content to head for the house.

national news

Waiting for Trumpsters to make positive case for POTUS’s re-election

The 2020 presidential election campaign is still in its formative stages. Democrats still are winnowing down a huge field of contenders/pretenders for their party’s nomination. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is gearing up as the Republicans’ nominee.

OK, so what might we expect to hear from the Trump Team as it seeks to get its man re-elected?

The economy will be front and center of Trump’s theme. Fine. The numbers have been good. Unemployment is low. Job growth has been brisk. However, there are danger signs lurking. Economists suggest a recession might be in the country’s near future.

However, even though he denigrates his immediate predecessor’s record over two terms as president, Trump did inherit an economy that was in far better shape than the one that dropped onto President Barack Obama’s lap in January 2009.

Beyond that, I want to hear from Trump’s allies why this man who has masqueraded as president deserves to be re-elected. I want them to make a positive case for him.

I’ll be clear that there’s nothing they can tell me that will change my mind. In my view, Trump is unfit for office. Name any category you wish — previous experience, business acumen, morality, ideology, presidential behavior — in my view he fails every test you can imagine.

I am willing to listen to those who are willing to make the case.

Who will stand up, grab a microphone and tell us that Donald Trump possesses all the essential qualities we expect in a president. Who will say he is compassionate? Or that he listens to Americans? Or that he studies the issues before acting on them? Or that he grasps the complexities of his office, or the massive federal government?

Trump’s own strategy likely will be steeped in innuendo, just as it was in 2016 when he surprised the political world by defeating Hillary Rodham Clinton. He won’t proclaim his own virtues, other than those he fabricates: his intelligence and his memory.

Trump’s campaign team will have to craft a message that echoes the boss’s own penchant for tearing down the opposition, just as it did when he won the previous presidential election.

Is that enough to send this guy back to the Oval Office for another four years? No. It damn sure isn’t.

However, I am awaiting something that resembles a positive message. To be candid, I likely won’t know how to react if I hear one.

Maybe I will just laugh out loud.