Tag Archives: Donald Trump

national news

Waiting for an apology that’ll never arrive

I am going to give tons of credit to an Oklahoma congressman.

Rep. Tom Cole, a Republican, wants Donald J. Trump to say he’s sorry for defaming President Barack H. Obama. He says the current president should apologize to his immediate predecessor for leveling a charge that he hasn’t proved — and will never be able to prove.

Wait for it, Rep. Cole. Wait a long, long time. It won’t arrive.

The president doesn’t apologize for anything.

Not even when he’s dead wrong. Or when he defames someone, as he has done with President Obama. Or when — in the minds of some constitutional scholars — he could face a potentially impeachable offense.

Not this guy. Not Trump.

The president has yet to say anything resembling contrition for suggesting the former president ordered a wiretap of the Trump campaign’s offices in Trump Tower. Never mind the laughable and ludicrous assertion from White House spokesmen that the president didn’t mean actual wiretapping, even though he said it in a series of tweets. Trump put the words  in quote marks, the argument goes, suggesting that he didn’t mean it, um, literally.

Of course he did!

What the president hasn’t done is tap into the vast intelligence network at his disposal to back up what he has alleged.

Why is that? Because he made it up. All of it. Every single word of it.

As Politico reports: “Obama and his former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, both publicly denied the claim quickly after Trump raised it, while FBI Director James Comey, also saying it was not true, privately urged Trump’s Justice Department to refute it.

“This week, the leaders of both the House and Senate intelligence committees have also come out and said they have found no evidence to suggest that the allegation is true.”

Should the president apologize, as Rep. Cole has suggested? Yes. Will he do so? I am not going to keep the light on waiting for it.

International news

What’s wrong with a handshake, Mr. President?

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There are awkward moments, and then there are events such as what we witnessed today at the White House.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel paid a visit to Donald J. Trump. The two of them posed for cameras. Someone yelled out about a handshake. The president didn’t offer his hand. The chancellor looked puzzled after she had asked for one from her colleague and host.

Hmmm.

Strange moment, indeed.

Hockey players shake hands after beating each other up during their matches; Little Leaguers shake hands after games, sometimes cheering “Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate … ?”

Gentlemen extend a hand to ladies. It can be interpreted, perhaps, as a game. Trump, though, doesn’t play games … apparently.

I heard about this moment and my thoughts flashed back immediately to something similar that occurred in 1990 right here in Texas.

Republican gubernatorial nominee Clayton Williams was running against Democratic nominee Ann Richards. The two of them were fighting each other viciously.

Then they appeared together at an event. I cannot remember its precise nature. Afterward, with candidates sharing a head table, Richards extended her hand to Williams — who promptly refused to take it; he called her a “liar.” He walked away.

Commentators said at the time Williams committed a cardinal sin among gentlemanly Texans by refusing to take a lady’s hand and it likely helped contribute to Richards defeating Williams in that year’s election for Texas governor.

The president of the United States need not worry about German voters should he decide to seek re-election in 2020.

But, geez, Mr. President. Show some manners.

International news, national news, political news

Now the Brits have tapped Trump? C’mon, Mr. President!

The hits just keep coming.

Donald J. Trump has accused Barack Obama of wiretapping his office. He has no evidence of it. Congressional intelligence committee chairs can’t find it, either. Trump stands by his lie.

Now he’s gone after the United Kingdom. He said the British wiretapped him, too. The president’s source for that whopper? Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano, a former judge who’s become a right-wing shill for the “fair and balanced” network.

Trump didn’t back off the accusation about the British. He hasn’t backed off his assertion that President Obama tapped his phones.

The British are rightfully quite angry.

Trump’s justification for the British wiretapping allegation is a beaut. He said he wasn’t offering any “opinion” on the matters, just repeating the statement that Napolitano made.

OK, Mr. President. That makes it all better. How silly of me or anyone else to assume you were fomenting a lie by repeating it.

The president is unfit to hold the office he occupies. Unfit, I am telling you!

media news

How long can Spicer keep defending the indefensible?

I believe it’s a reasonable question: How much longer can Sean Spicer keep defending a president who is unable to tell the truth?

Donald J. Trump keeps trotting out whopper after whopper, putting his press secretary in a patently untenable position of having to defend what he must know is a lie.

Brent Budowsky, a contributor to The Hill, posits the notion that Spicer should quit and that he well might become one of the president’s most high-profile casualties in his ongoing war with the truth.

Here is Budowsky’s essay for The Hill.

I believe Spicer has principles. Sadly — in my view, at least — he seems to have taken some sort of secret oath to bury them while he briefs the media about the president’s torrent of untruths.

The Barack Obama wiretapping fiction is the latest example. Spicer surely knows the president doesn’t have a shred of evidence to back up his allegation that Obama wiretapped his offices at Trump Tower. Then he is forced to dance this rhetorical jig with the media about so-called “air quotes” around the word “wiretap,” meaning that Trump didn’t mean what he said.

How long can this guy Spicer, who was Republican National Committee press secretary before joining the White House staff, continue this charade?

Everyone has his or her limits. Everyone. Even White House press spokesmen.

national news

Trump relies on talking heads for his wiretap allegation?

Donald J. Trump is in command of the world’s most impressive intelligence-gathering network.

He is commander in chief of the world’s greatest military machine.

Does he rely on those immense tools to inform him of the “fact,” as he put it, that Barack Obama wiretapped his campaign offices at Trump Tower?

Oh, no. He relied on talking heads, such as Fox News’s Bret Baier and Sean Hannity; he also has relied on news stories in the “failing” New York Times that “talked about wiretaps.”

With that, the president of the United States launched his Twitter tirade alleging that the former president broke the law.

In the meantime, Senate and House intelligence committee leaders — both Democrat and Republican — say they have “no evidence” of any wiretapping occurring at Trump Tower. Ditto, said House Speaker Paul Ryan.

It ain’t there. The president now wants us to believe yet another lie?

national news, political news

Secretary of state: vanishing before our eyes?

Here’s something you might not know about the secretary of state: The individual who occupies the office is No. 4 in the line of succession to the presidency.

That means to me that the office oozes importance. If, for some reason, the vice president, the speaker of the House of Representatives or the president pro tem of the Senate cannot succeed the president, the task falls to the secretary of state.

That person, therefore, is quite high on the executive branch of government’s pecking order.

Or one would think.

Then again, the State Department is facing a proposed 29-percent reduction in its budget, which doesn’t seem to bother Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Oh yes! There’s actually someone in the job. He’s been a sort of shadow figure in the Trump administration Cabinet.

He has held zero press conferences since taking office. He took off on an overseas trip and didn’t bring any media representatives along with him. Mexico’s foreign minister recently visited Washington and didn’t even call on the State Department, let alone on Secretary Tillerson.

Why has this individual become so, um, invisible? Donald Trump introduced him as secretary of state after parading a slew of high-profile pols to meet with him. Then came Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO who emerged out of seeming nowhere to get the president’s nod.

One more thing: Tillerson has no deputy secretary of state on hand. There’s no one to assist him with whatever heavy lifting he needs to perform while working to solve the nation’s myriad foreign-policy issues.

Recent secretaries of state seemingly have been everywhere at once, defying the laws of physics. James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry all became the face and the voice of U.S. foreign policy. Their respective impacts were immediate and profound.

Rex Tillerson? Where are you? What are you doing?

national news

Establishment Clause derails latest refugee ‘ban’

The nation’s founders were wise men. They didn’t craft a perfect governing document, but they got it mostly right.

They established the seven Articles within the U.S. Constitution, then set about to fine-tune it, tinkering with amendments, the first 10 of which guaranteed certain civil liberties to the citizens of the day.

The First Amendment is under discussion today as the nation ponders this idiotic idea by the current president to ban refugees from six Muslim countries.

Two federal judges have suspended the new rule on the grounds that it violates the Establishment Clause set forth in the very first amendment.

Interesting, yes? I think so. Here’s why.

The First Amendment protects three civil liberties: religion, the press and the right to assemble peaceably. It’s fascinating in the extreme to me that the founders constructed the First Amendment to prohibit the enactment of laws “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof … ” Of the three liberties outlined, the founders listed religion first.

Donald J. Trump’s Muslim Ban 2.0 does essentially the same thing  — with a few modifications — as the first executive order that a federal judge struck down. It targets Muslims, discriminating against them as they seek to enter the United States.

Sure, the president insists he seeks only to protect Americans against terrorists.

Three federal judges, though, have said violating the Establishment Cause is illegal. Judges in Washington state, Hawaii and Maryland have concurred that such an order is discriminatory on its face.

No can do, Mr. President.

Therein perhaps lies the beauty of our form of government, the one crafted by the founders who knew the value of restricting the power of the executive branch. They did it by parceling out power equally to the legislative and, yes, the judicial branches of government. They allowed for lifetime appointments of federal judges ostensibly to liberate them from political pressure and to enable them to interpret the Constitution freely.

The judicial branch has exerted its rightful authority yet again. It did not commit, as the president said, an “unprecedented overreach” of judicial power.

It has recognized the importance of the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment, understanding that the founders thought enough of that clause and the contents of that amendment to enact it first.

media news

Hands off PBS, NPR, Mr. President

Now he’s done it!

The president of the United States has just gored my ox. He has hit me where it hurts. He has taken aim at a government institution I revere.

Donald J. Trump is proposing elimination of public money that goes to National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting … a major arm of the Public Broadcasting Service; also slated for elimination is the National Endowment for the Arts.

Trump proposes zeroing out about $445 million for CPB and NPR. Wiping it out. No more public money for public broadcasting, either radio or television.

“PBS and our nearly 350 member stations, along with our viewers, continue to remind Congress of our strong support among Republican and Democratic voters, in rural and urban areas across every region of the country,” PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger said in a statement.

“We have always had support from both parties in Congress, and will again make clear what the public receives in return for federal funding for public broadcasting,” Kerger continued. “The cost of public broadcasting is small, only $1.35 per citizen per year, and the benefits are tangible: increasing school readiness for kids 2-8, support for teachers and homeschoolers, lifelong learning, public safety communications and civil discourse.”

So, with that the president wants to eliminate an element of public spending that in the grand scheme amounts to tossing a BB into the ocean, but which brings tangible benefit for millions of Americans.

I have a dog in this particular fight … more or less.

Not long after I left my job in print journalism in the late summer of 2012, I signed on as a freelance blogger for Panhandle PBS, the organization formerly known around the Panhandle as KACV-TV, based at Amarillo College. I wrote about public affairs television. My text was published on Panhandle PBS’s website.

I got great satisfaction writing the blog and I enjoyed my relationship with the public TV station immensely. It ended when the station went through some changes and decided to divert its “resources” toward more on-air production of local programming.

We bid each other adieu. However, I continue to love PBS and what it brings to the quality of life of all Americans, especially to those of us in the Texas Panhandle. Its programming features some first-rate, top-drawer, high-level production. Ken Burns’s documentary series on the Dust Bowl — and its impact on the High Plains region — will remain with me for as long as I draw breath.

I would hate with every fiber of my being seeing the government remove itself from that kind of programming.

And for what purpose? So we can buy more bombs, missiles and other weapons of war — as if we don’t have enough of it already to destroy Planet Earth a billion times over.

Am I angry over this budget proposal? You’re damn right I am!

Do not do this, Mr. President and Congress.

medical news

It’s his fault, no … it’s his fault, no …

I don’t know whether to laugh, curse or slap my forehead over what I perceive is transpiring in Washington over the development of this so-called “replacement” of the Affordable Care Act.

House Speaker Paul Ryan and his troops want to call it Trumpcare; the president’s allies want to label it Ryancare.

No one wants to touch the American Health Care Act with a hot poker.

The Congressional Budget Office has given the AHCA a bad “score.” Donald Trump’s budget director says the CBO’s numbers are faulty, that 24 million Americans really and truly won’t lose their insurance if the AHCA becomes law.

Meanwhile, Speaker Ryan is having to fend off the TEA Party wing of his Republican congressional caucus, because they hate the AHCA almost as much as they hate the ACA, which they say was forced down their throats in 2010 by President Obama and those rascally congressional Democrats.

Trumpcare or Ryancare? How about Tryancare?

It doesn’t matter what you call it. The GOP had seven bloody years to come up with an alternative to the ACA. The Republicans were too damn busy trashing the initial health care overhaul and its author — Barack Obama — that they didn’t give nearly enough thought to how they would actually replace it.

Now they have something that no one on their side seems to favor.

I’ll give Republicans credit, though, at least for their “diversity” of thought on this issue. Some of ’em like the AHCA, some of ’em hate it. Isn’t there some middle ground to be discovered here?

I think I know what I want to do. I’ll say a few curse words … under my breath, of course.

national news, political news

Delay from Trump adds to suspicion of a lie

Donald J. Trump’s job as president of the United States gives him direct access to the finest, most professional intelligence-gathering apparatus in the world.

He hasn’t availed himself of that apparatus. Yet, he has fired off that infamous tweet in which he accuses President Barack H. Obama of wiretapping his campaign offices.

Trump could — if he had the proof in hand — deliver it to Americans right now. He has access to it. He is the president … of … the … United … States … of … America, for God’s sake!

He’s not coming forward. The president isn’t producing it. Hmm. Why do you suppose that’s the case? Oh! He doesn’t have it! It’s a lie!

His tweet the other day declared as a “fact” that the former president had broken the law. A fact, man! Facts mean what they mean. It is that the purveyor of that “fact” has the proof of what he has alleged.

Where in the name of prevaricator in chief is the proof, Mr. President?

As some have noted already — so this isn’t an original thought — can you imagine what the Republican-led Congress would do if, say, President Obama had said such a thing about Donald J. Trump?

They would have filed articles of impeachment against him before the final words had left his lips.

Where is the outrage among those in command of the legislative branch of government?