Tag Archives: New York Times

media news, State news

Newspaper gets it right with its non-endorsement

I questioned the New York Times’ decision to endorse two candidates for president in the Democratic Party primary.

Also, I cast aspersions on the Dallas Morning News’ decision to recommend two candidates for the U.S. Senate in Texas, also in the Democratic Party primary.

However, I see where the DMN is coming from in announcing Sunday that it will not endorse anyone in the race for president in 2020. Instead, the paper said it plans to focus on the issues that it deems important for voters to consider.

The paper is planning a series of articles titled “What’s at Stake 2020.” It will examine issues such as climate change, education reform, energy policy, war and peace, taxation, federal budgeting, defense policy … a whole host of issues that it believes should be the focus of the presidential campaign.

The paper didn’t say so, but my strong hunch is that the editorial board at the Dallas Morning News might have made a critical determination about the candidates seeking to win election. One is that the incumbent, Donald Trump, has not earned — nor will he ever earn — the paper’s endorsement based on his term in office. The other is none of the Democrats running to succeed him excite the paper enough to win its endorsement.

Near the end of its lengthy editorial, the paper appears to long for a return to civil discourse and declares that its turning to the issues is an avenue toward that noble goal. The Morning News cites President Lincoln’s second inaugural, given as the Civil War was drawing to a close. The president declared his intention to govern “with charity for all and malice toward none.” An assassin, tragically, prevented President Lincoln from fulfilling that noble pledge.

The paper says the election is bigger than Donald Trump or bigger than any of the men and women running to succeed him. It wants to turn its focus on the issues that matter, and away from the personalities who seek to outshout each other.

To that end, the Dallas Morning News has set a constructive path forward as we move more deeply into a contentious election year.

local news

What? Right-wing Amarillo bucks governor’s refugee ban?

How about that New York Times, for my money the greatest newspaper in the nation if not the world? It is reporting that Amarillo, Texas, the unofficial “capital city” of the right-wing Texas Panhandle is taking a dim view of Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to ban refugees from settling in Texas.

We used to live in Amarillo. We had a wonderful life there. We are forging a new wonderful life in the Metroplex. But I was fully aware of Amarillo’s reputation as a hotbed for far right-wing political thought. The NY Times article suggests a latent reservoir of good will. God bless Amarillo and the NY Times.

The article cites how Amarillo has been a magnet for refugees for many years. Many refugees have become part of the community. They contribute to the community’s life. They have been embraced by their neighbors. They call themselves Americans.

Abbott, though, has issued an order that declared that Texas would become the first state in the Union to opt out of a presidential edict that gives states the option of accepting or rejecting refugees; Abbott has shut the door on new refugees.

That ain’t the American — or the Texan — way, governor. The Times article spells out how Amarillo has opened its door — not to mention its heart — to those who have ventured to the Panhandle, which the Times article describes as a somewhat desolate, wind-swept, dusty place.

As the Times reports: Here in Amarillo, which for a time took in more refugees per capita than any other Texas city, few share the governor’s alarm over refugees, and those who do have a far more nuanced view. They have long lived with refugees, not as abstract political talking points, but as neighbors.

Refugee Services of Texas and Catholic Charities of the Texas Panhandle have taken on the refugee issue head-on, helping resettle 7,000 individuals from 2007 to 2017, the Times reports.

The article makes me proud of the city my wife and I called home for more than two decades.

Here is the full article in the New York Times.

Amarillo will remain a stronghold of support for Donald Trump and for Gov. Abbott. It is full of many fine individuals who understand that they live in a place that serves as a beacon for those who need a refuge from oppression and tyranny

media news

NY Times double endorsement: a head-scratcher

The fuddy-duddy in me is making me scratch my noggin over the New York Times’s decision to split its endorsement in the Democratic Party presidential primary, offering its nod to two of the challengers remaining in the still-large field.

The Times, admitting it was “breaking with convention,” went with U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar for the party’s nomination. Warren is a champion of the party’s liberal/progressive wing, while Klobuchar bears the standard for the party’s more moderate wing. Therefore, the Times figured, why choose just one of ’em? They went with both.

Here’s where this endorsement strategy breaks down for me. Only one of them can emerge as the party nominee this summer. One candidate will get the nomination and will face Donald John Trump, the current president who is seeking re-election.

I am going to presume — and this is no giant leap into the unknown — that the Times likely will endorse whoever is running against Trump. Why won’t the Times take the leap that Democratic voters all across the land in primary states are going to take? They can’t choose two candidates. Voters’ choice is limited to just one.

A few years before resigning from my final job as a daily print journalist I enacted a policy that did away with endorsing in party primaries when there was a contest in the other party. The Amarillo Globe-News decided to make endorsements only in those primary races where there was no candidate waiting for the nominee in the fall. In the Texas Panhandle, that almost always meant that Republicans would have contested primaries while Democratic primaries had no candidates on the ballot.

My thought then was that primary contests generally are the work of political parties. A one-party primary, though, was tantamount to election. Thus, we would weigh in on a primary.

In all the years I interviewed political candidates and wrote editorials offering a newspaper recommendation on who voters ought to choose, I never wrote a two-fer.  My thought always has been that if we’re going to ask voters to make a choice, then the newspaper ought to show the same level of courage … and make a single choice.

Here is the Times editorial: You make the call.

I won’t argue the merits of the candidates’ points of view. I merely question a great newspaper’s decision to hedge on a critically important decision.

media news

Trump escalates shameful war against media

2 Comments

Donald J. Trump’s shameful war against the media is proceeding  unabated.

He calls The New York Times the “true enemy of the people.”

Why? Because the Times is doing its job. It is reporting the news regarding the Trump administration. It is seeking to chronicle what the president knew about possible “collusion” with Russian government agents in 2016.

Throughout all the Twitter tirades that Trump has launched against the media, he never seeks to refute specific elements of the reporting that’s been published. He simply denigrates the work of professional journalists with epithets like “loser,” “fake news,” and of course, “enemy of the people.”

He told us he would be an “unconventional president.” That is one campaign pledge he has kept. He is unconventional in the extreme.

Trump has declared war against the media. No president in modern history — with the exception, perhaps, of Richard Nixon — has been so wrong about the media’s role as watchdog and their responsibility to hold government officials accountable.

Donald Trump keeps shaming himself and his high office.

Disgraceful.

national news

Just wondering: What about that ‘anonymous’ essayist?

It just dawned on me: In 2018 when that anonymous essay appeared in the New York Times that talked about the “resistance” within the White House, Donald Trump said he was going to root out who wrote it and take appropriate action.

The essayist said there were members of the “resistance” who were concerned about the president’s curious impulses and worked to protect the nation against some rash decision Trump was capable of making.

The essayist said he or she was part of a group of White House staffers who are concerned about the president’s ability to do something that endangered the nation.

Trump as furious, enraged, angry to the max. He was fuming. He vowed to root out the author and then on it.

What happened to that effort? Has the White House swept it away? Has the president given up the search? Did he find the culprit, scold him or her?

C’mon! Some of us — maybe many of us — want to know these things.

Read it here. It’s still a fascinating essay.

national news

More armchair diagnosis is coming

1 Comment

John Harwood is an educated man. He’s smart. He is well-spoken. He can string sentences together.

He lacks, however, a certain credential that is important in his assessing the president’s state of mind and, I’ll presume, his medical competence: Harwood lacks a medical degree.

He writes for the New York Times, he once wrote for the Wall Street Journal and he is a contributor to CNBC, the cable news network that specializes in business news. He graduated from Duke University with a degree in history and economics.

But here he goes, popping off about Donald Trump’s mental state. He said the president’s press conference before departing the G-7 summit was a stumbling, bumbling performance.

Then he said this on MSNBC: I got to say that the upshot about this press conference was about tariffs. I’ll be honest as a citizen: I’m concerned about the president’s state of mind. He did not look well to me in that press conference. He was not speaking logically or rationally. It sounded as if he was making stuff up, saying China told me nobody’s ever talked to us, saying, ‘Oh, I talked to Justin Trudeau and can’t believe he was getting away with so much trade stuff.’

I don’t think those things are true. And he — there was something about his affect which was oddly kind of languid for him. I don’t know what it means but he did not look well to me.

C’mon, Mr. Harwood. Leave the diagnoses to the pros, the individuals who have training in observing people’s behavior.

This kind of cheap-seat evaluation is getting tiresome. A journalist’s national forum does not give him license to discuss issues of which he knows nothing.

national news

Are mainstream Republicans wising up to Trump?

Peter Wehner is no Republican in Name Only.

Neither is John Danforth, or Mitt Romney, or Jeb Bush, or John McCain. They are among an increasing number of serious-minded individuals — some of whom have been in public service for decades — who are speaking out finally against another prominent member of their political party.

I refer to the president of the United States of America, Donald John Trump.

I mention Wehner in this post because I want to include an essay he’s written for the New York Times.

Here it is.

The overarching issue for the president seems, in my mind, to be fairly clear cut. He’s not a Republican. He’s a classic RINO. He attached himself to a political party because it suited his personal ambition. Besides, he had spent years defaming a Democratic president, Barack Obama, suggesting he wasn’t a “natural born” American, that he was born overseas and, therefore, wasn’t qualified to hold his high office.

It didn’t stop there. He questioned President Obama’s academic credentials. He suggested that the president really didn’t earn Harvard law degree, or that he didn’t excel academically. He said Obama was a fraud.

So, he sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Then, of course, he was elected.

But he’s no Republican. Wehner, who has served under three GOP presidents, laments the wreckage that Trump has brought to the presidency. It’s almost as if Trump has formed a sort of de facto political party that is neither Republican or Democratic. As Wehner writes in the Times:

“The more offensive Mr. Trump is to the rest of America, the more popular he becomes with his core supporters. One policy example: At a recent rally in Phoenix, the president said he was willing to shut down the government over the question of funding for a border wall, which most of his base favors but only about a third of all Americans want.”

Yes, his base — even though it is shrinking — still loves the guy. They cheer his idiotic rants. They proclaim their adherence to an individual who “tells it like it is.” They dismiss any notion that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, that he doesn’t understand how government works, that he has spent his entire adult professional life with one mission only: to enrich himself.

I have conceded many times that this guy has defied the laws of conventional political gravity. The idea that he could be elected after hurling the insults, defaming his foes, and lying virtually daily is in itself a stunning testimony to the national mood — which Trump managed to mine.

Peter Wehner’s essay, though, is worth reading. It reminds us — or at least it should remind us — that governance requires a depth of knowledge and an understanding of history that the 45th president has demonstrated repeatedly that he lacks.

Just think, too, that this criticism is coming from a member of the president’s own political party.

media news

‘Russia thing’ is producing a form of vertigo

I no longer am an active member of the so-called “mainstream media.”

Thus, I am merely a watcher and reader of news. So help me, though, the speed and intensity of the “breaking news” that keeps busting out is making my head spin.

I refer to the Donald Trump/Russia/Jared Kushner/Michael Flynn/FBI director firing/special counsel elements that keep bursting out with bombshell after bombshell.

I’ll just say that I am immensely proud of the media’s role in revealing these stories. The New York Times and the Washington Post news staffs have been performing an immense public service in their work to root out all the information they can find.

Good on ’em. Keep up the great work.

For now, though, I think I’ll need a dose of Dramamine.

media news

Thank you, mainstream media, for doing your job

The media keep getting a pounding from those who hang nasty labels on them.

Enemy of the people. Biased. Unfair. Mean.

I want to give them a serious shout out for the job they have been doing in reporting some of the most explosive news stories in, oh, a couple of generations.

The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal … the big guns of the so-called “mainstream media” have served their craft well. They make those of us who toiled in that craft — and are doing so to this day — so very proud.

Donald J. Trump’s tenure as president might be in serious jeopardy. Why? Because big-city newspaper reporters and editors are telling the public what they need to hear about the president of the United States. They are reporting on incidents that could result in charges of obstruction of justice; they are chronicling events and reporting the news to the public that must always be informed about how the government is being run on its behalf.

A former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, said recently — and quite stupidly — that he is “personally offended” by the media. He just cannot stand reading negative news about the president and so, as is customary among some thin-skinned politicians, he blames the messenger. Gingrich ignores the undeniable fact that all of Trump’s wounds — every one of them — have been self-inflicted.

The president himself has labeled the media “the enemy of the American people.” Why? Again, because they are doing their job. They are reporting to the public the mistakes that the president is making. Trump’s senior political adviser, Stephen Bannon, has referred to the media as the “opposition party.” What absolute crap!

Conservative media outlets have waged war against the so-called “mainstream media” for years, using that very term as an epithet against media outlets that dare to tell the truth.

It’s far too early to know where all of this reporting will lead. As the current House speaker, Paul Ryan, has implored, “We need the facts” before making judgments.

I am going to rely on the media to keep presenting the facts. They make me proud. I plan to keep reading … and learning.

International news, military news

War with no end goes on and on and on

Brian Castner calls it a Forever War.

The man knows war when he sees it. He is former explosive ordnance disposal officer who has written a provocative and thoughtful op-ed article for the New York Times.

Here it is.

Indeed, Castner tells a sad tale of Americans who are likely going to die or suffer grievous wounds in a war being fought in multiple countries, on multiple fronts, against multiple enemies who likely cannot be eradicated.

This war began, for all intents, on that glorious Tuesday morning, Sept. 11, 2001. Terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York, into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and fought with passengers aboard a third jetliner before it crashed into a Pennsylvania field.

President Bush gathered his national security team and in short order sent military forces into Afghanistan to kill the individuals responsible for that heinous act.

The war was on.

Many of us worried at the time — while supporting the president’s decision to retaliate — about whether there ever could be a way to win this war. Could we ever declare victory and then bring all our troops home? Many of us are old enough to remember when the late, great Republican senator from Vermont, George Aiken, thought we could do just that in Vietnam: “Let’s just declare victory and go home,” Sen. Aiken said.

The answer, nearly 16 years later, is “no.” We cannot make such a declaration about the Forever War.

Castner’s essay centers on the death of a 42-year-old sailor, Scott Dayton, who became the first American to die in combat in Syria. Castner’s Forever War has now expanded to that country, where we are working with Syrian resistance forces against the government of Bashar al Assad and against the Islamic State.

Castner writes: “The longest conflict in American history — from Afghanistan to Iraq, to high-value target missions throughout Africa and the Middle East — has resulted in the nation’s first sustained use of the all-volunteer military, wounding and killing more and more service members who resemble Scotty: parents, spouses, career men and women.”

Then he writes: “The Forever War is unlikely to end soon, and for those not in the military, continued voluntary service in this perpetual conflict can be hard to understand. Popular explanations — poor outside job prospects, educational enticements, the brashness of youth — don’t hold up under scrutiny.”

I would challenge only this: A war that lasts “forever” not only won’t “end soon,” it will never end.

We have taken a long march down the road to a sort of “new normal” when it comes to modern warfare. President Bush’s decision to go to war in Afghanistan was righteous, given what al-Qaeda — based in that desolate nation — had done to us. Then he expanded that fight into Iraq, a nation that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks; the president and his team concocted some scenario about weapons of mass destruction. They were tragically, horribly wrong.

Barack Obama continued the fight and has handed it off to Donald Trump.

This interminable war has expanded now to several nations. How does it end? How do we know when we’ve killed the last bad guy?

Think of it as our nation’s internal fight against hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. How do we remove the last Klansman? How do we persuade the KKK to give up its hate, to stop intimidating Americans?

Accordingly, how do we know when the last international terrorist who’ll ever pick up arms against us has been taken down? We cannot know any of it.

Yet this Forever War continues.

And I fear that it will continue … forever.