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Let’s de-construct the Sanders ‘revolution’

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I hope my friend Jon Talton has a stout spine, as I want to piggyback on an excellent blog he has written about U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

He poses questions for the man who’s battling Hillary Rodham Clinton for the party nomination. Talton covers a lot of ground, noting that Sanders has lied about Clinton’s alleged statements, oversold his Senate record, has failed to develop any foreign-policy platform.

I want to add another critical point regarding the Sanders candidacy.

Talton compares Sanders to the “gadfly” who gripes at city council meetings. I believe he’s worse than that. His one-note chorus about “income inequality” is bordering on demagoguery.

The dictionary defines a demagogue as one who “obtains power by appealing to the emotions and prejudices of the populace.” That term clearly applies to the leading Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump and to Texas U.S. Sen. Rafael Edward Cruz.

For months on end, Sanders has taken his “message” of income inequality around the country. He lays all the blame for whatever ails the nation on the “top 1 percent” who are acquiring virtually all the nation’s wealth at the expense of the other 99 percent.

The way I see it, Sanders is appealing to people’s “emotions” and “prejudices.”

What’s more, he isn’t offering substantive proposals for how to attack what he says are the nation’s most critical problems. He recently was pressed about how he would close the “big banks.” Sen. Sanders’ mumbled and bumbled his way through a virtually incomprehensible response.

I’m still waiting to hear how he intends to provide free college education for every student in the nation — without bankrupting the federal Treasury. Is there any surprise, then, that Sanders is wiping Clinton out among college-age voters?

One of the more fascinating arguments Talton makes in his blog deals with the reason why Republicans haven’t yet taken aim at him in the primary. It’s because the GOP wants to run against him in the fall. They are expending all their ammo during this primary season trying to take down Clinton.

Suppose lightning strikes and Sanders does win the Democratic nomination … is ol’ Bern ready for the onslaught that is sure to come?

Gosh, and to think I once lamented why only the Republicans were having all the fun during this nominating season. The Democrats have joined them.

I don’t know where to turn.

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Master panderer tosses it back

pander

Did you hear Donald J. Trump’s reaction to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “photo op” as she sought to enter a New York City subway?

It seems that Clinton — the leading Democratic candidate for president — had some trouble getting her subway pass approved by the machine that accepts these items. It made for a clumsy scene at the pay station.

Then we hear the leading Republican presidential candidate poke fun at Clinton. He suggested that Clinton likely had never ridden a subway in her life. He then accused her — get ready for it — of “pandering” to New York primary voters who ride the train regularly.

There you have it. Kettle, meet pot.

For the entire length so far of his GOP campaign, Trump can be heard pandering to every audience to which he has spoken.

He “loves” Jewish people, Mexicans, evangelical Christians, women, young people, old people … you name it, Trump loves ’em. He says so at every opportunity.

The best pandering job occurred at Liberty University, the well-known Christian college, where he recited a verse he found in “Two Corinthians.” He said “nothing beats the Bible,” and “the Bible is the best.” Does that really and truly sound like something that would come from an individual who actually understands the holy book?

Trump has redefined so much about presidential political campaigning in 2016.

He has become the nation’s panderer in chief.

I can’t help but recall how the late U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas once described then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton during the 1992 Democratic primary.

Tsongas coined the term “Pander Bear” for Gov. Clinton.

Wherever he is, Sen. Tsongas is laughing out loud.

 

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Gov. Kasich getting the faintest of praise

kasich

I can’t quite figure this out.

As Democratic candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton bicker over who between them is “qualified” to be president, they and fellow Democrats keep tossing the faintest of praise toward a Republican presidential candidate.

Here’s how it’s going.

Reporters keep badgering Sanders and Clinton about what they have said about each other’s qualifications. They both say the essentially the same thing about the other candidate: “I would prefer Secretary Clinton/Sen. Sanders any day over either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.”

Tonight, former Democratic candidate Martin O’Malley said he’d prefer either Clinton or Sanders over Trump or Cruz.

That’s four of the five candidates accounted for.

But what about the fifth one? Ohio Gov. John Kasich?

Neither Clinton or Sanders mention Kasich in the same breath with Trump and Cruz?

I am left to presume one of two things:

Either they secretly admire Gov. Kasich’s adult conduct during this campaign and his political background or … they believe he’s no longer a serious threat to become the Republican presidential nominee.

I hate to think they’re writing him off.

I also know better than to think Clinton and Sanders have some sort of secret admiration for someone who — if lightning strikes or Earth spins off its axis in the next 20 minutes — well might oppose one of them in this year’s presidential campaign.

I’m betting Kasich is going to take his non-mention in this bickering as a form of compliment.

 

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Wipe out national debt in eight years? Wow!

National-Debt

The list of Donald J. Trump’s idiotic statements has gotten so long it’s becoming almost impossible to give all of them the attention they deserve.

This one has flown largely past many in the media and the so-called Chattering Class. I’ll admit to being a bit slow on the fiscal uptake on this one.

The Republican presidential frontrunner recently vowed to eliminate the national debt in eight years.

He would wipe … it … out. Pfft! It would vanish. No more debt. We’re free of debt! In just eight years. Yes, Trump said “I will do it.”

The debt is now about $20 trillion.

How does this reality TV celebrity and real estate mogul-turned-politician propose to do this?

He also intends to cut everyone’s taxes. He vows to rebuild a military complex he says “always loses” and has been “decimated” by the current president. He’s going to round up 11 or 12 million illegal immigrants and send them back to wherever they came from. He also says he won’t do anything to reform Social Security or Medicare.

Yet he says he — yes, he alone — will eliminate the national debt in eight years.

The way I figure it, Trump would have to veto every single spending bill that Congress approves. Then he would have to be sure Congress upheld every one of them.

The annual federal budget totals about $4 trillion. So, if the government doesn’t spend another nickel for the next eight years, it could save $32 trillion.

Are we on board with that?

Ladies and gentlemen of the military, in the longest-shot possibility that Donald Trump gets elected president this fall, you should start preparing to fight for your country for free.

This man’s idiocy is utterly boundless.

 

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Who’s ‘qualified’ to be president?

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I am now going to weigh in on who I believe is qualified to become the 45th president of the United States.

The qualification issue has arisen in the Democratic Party primary. The candidates keep yapping about the other’s qualifications, or lack thereof.

But look, we’ve got four men and one woman running for president. Why not, then, take a quick look at each individual’s “qualifications.”

First, let’s stipulate the obvious: They’re all technically qualified, even Rafael Edward Cruz, the Canadian-born U.S. senator from Texas who earned his constitutional qualification by virtue of his mother’s U.S. citizenship.

No question about any of the others in that regard.

So, here goes, for what it’s worth — which ain’t much. In order:

Hillary Rodham Clinton is the most qualified. She served as first lady during her husband’s two terms as president. She was elected twice to the U.S. Senate from New York. She has served four years as secretary of state. She ran for president in 2008 and won many Democratic state primaries, including the Texas primary, that year.

She knows how government works and has a good knowledge of the limitations of the office of president. She once was a lawyer, after all.

John Kasich is a very close second. The Republican Ohio governor has a record as a member of Congress that should make him proud. He helped balance the federal budget as chairman of the House Budget Committee. He exhibits a good dose of the “compassionate conservatism” touted by former President George W. Bush. He reaches across the aisle and knows to compromise without sacrificing his principles.

He’s developed a solid record as Ohio governor. Kasich, too, understands government and its limitations.

Ted Cruz comes in a distant third. This one really is nearly a tossup with the next person. At one level, he might be the scariest candidate running for the White House. This freshman GOP U.S. senator keeps invoking theology, apparently disregarding that the Founding Fathers worked real hard to create a secular government. Cruz also seems too quick to “carpet bomb” Islamic State targets, which quite naturally is going to produce civilian casualties in direct contradiction to military policies established by two presidents, one Republican and one Democrat.

Bernie Sanders is fourth, but barely so. He’s served in Congress a lot longer than Cruz. However, his campaign for the Democratic nomination has begun to bore me. Why? He says the same thing over and over: Wall Street banks bad; wage inequality preys on women and minorities; we need to make the “top 1 percent” pay more in taxes.

Foreign policy? He remains strangely uninterested in talking about that.

Donald J. Trump is patently, categorically and unequivocally unsuited for the presidency. Sure, he’s a natural-born American. So … he’s “qualified.” But he is clueless about the limits of the office he seeks to occupy. He has vaulted to the top of the GOP heap by appealing to Americans’ darker instincts. His insults go so far beyond the pale that many of us have run out of words to describe them.

Read any transcript of the leading Republican candidate’s answers to direct questions and you are going to be blown away by his absolute incoherence.

 

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Amarillo’s political divide has been exposed

mayor and nair

Just when some of us had hoped the Amarillo City Council’s five-man lineup might learn to cooperate among themselves, we see an exhibition of non-cooperation.

Let’s see how this goes.

The council was going to consider two appointments to the Amarillo Economic Development Corporation, the city’s publicly funded development arm. The debate got a bit rowdy, as I understand it.

Two council members, Mayor Paul Harpole and Councilman Brian Eades, objected to the appointments being considered. The other three supported them.

Then came a motion from one of the other three, Councilman Randy Burkett, to shut down the public meeting and vote without any further public discussion.

Then the council voted 3-2 to seat the two new members — Craig Gualtiere and Brian Heinrich.

That was it.

I’m not going to comment — at least not today — on the individuals who’ve been seated. I know one of them pretty well. I consider him a friend.

What does trouble me are two aspects of this selection process: the effort to shut down the public discussion and the division that splits the three newest members of the council from the two more experienced hands.

Burkett, Mark Nair and Elisha Demerson all were elected to bring change, openness and transparency to the council. Their actions this week in shutting down the discussion speaks to other instincts that look a lot like what they accused the former council of doing.

Public comment be damned!

As for the division that laid itself wide open this week, that will need to be dealt with as the council moves forward on a number of citywide projects and policy decisions. I don’t mind tension among governing officials if it leads to constructive conclusions.

My hope here is that the division that erupted over the AEDC selection doesn’t stymie the work of the economic development agency, which in my view has done well for the city since voters approved its creation in 1989.

As for shutting out the public’s views on who should serve, let us also remember: The AEDC parcels out public money collected from a portion of the sales tax revenue contributed by, um, the public.

That is our business being conducted. The public has every right to have a say in determining who is making these decisions.

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Who’s qualified to become POTUS?

kasich and clinton

Politicians “walk back” comments all the time.

They get caught up in the heat of tossing verbal barbs and stones and then rethink what they say. Are the rest of us allowed to reconsider things we say out loud?

I’ll do so here. I won’t take back everything I said earlier.

At issue are the qualifications of the current crop of candidates for president of the United States. I said in an earlier blog post that I believe Hillary Rodham Clinton is the most qualified of the five people running for president — in either party.

Here is what I wrote earlier.

Then came a comment from a regular reader/critic of this blog. He tells me that Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s qualifications and record make him the most qualified candidate.

This reader, I feel compelled to note, is an Ohio native. So maybe — just maybe — his view is a bit colored by some home-boy bias. I hope he might concede that point. I won’t hold it against him if he doesn’t.

He does make a good point, though, about Kasich — who long ago emerged as my favorite Republican presidential candidate.

Why is Kasich my favorite? He works well with Democrats. He showed an ability to do so while he served in Congress. A good bit of his congressional service included his chairmanship of the House Budget Committee, which — as its title suggests — helps craft the federal budget.

While he sat in the chairman’s seat, the federal government managed to balance its budget. That means Chairman Kasich was able to reach a meeting of the minds with the Democrat who at the time was president; that would be William Jefferson Clinton.

That is no small task. It’s been made even more profound given the current political climate that has poisoned the air and water in Washington.

He’s my favorite Republican for that reason, plus his grown-up answers to today’s tough questions. He understands how government works, how Washington works. That also commends him for the presidency, rather than the blow-it-up approach preached by Donald J. Trump and Rafael Edward Cruz.

Does this make him more qualified than Hillary Clinton? My critic says Clinton’s service has been marginal; she “stood by her man” as U.S. first lady, served an undistinguished tenure in the Senate and her time as secretary of state was plagued by scandal … he said.

That’s his view. I honor that. I just disagree with it.

I do, though, admire Gov. Kasich’s service. I hope lightning strikes at the GOP convention this summer that produces a Kasich nomination for president.

Then the decision for yours truly becomes difficult.

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Bernie turns from nice to nasty

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Bernie Sanders once vowed never to speak ill of his chief rival for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

He said he wanted to stay on the high road. He barely mentioned her by name while stumping across places like Iowa and New Hampshire.

That was then. Today he went straight after Hillary Clinton, contending in New York that the former secretary of state, U.S. senator — from New York! — and first lady isn’t “qualified” to become the 45th president of the United States.

Why is Clinton now unqualified to hold the nation’s highest office? According to the Vermont independent-turned-Democratic senator, her acceptance of money from “big Wall Street banks and other establishment political action groups makes her no longer qualified.

Hmm. That’s an interesting accusation.

You see, from my perspective, Hillary Rodham Clinton is the most qualified candidate — among the five people in either party still seeking the presidency — to become the next president.

She served several terms as first lady as Arkansas; she became first lady of the nation for two terms and had a profound influence on her husband’s rather successful presidency; she was elected twice to the U.S. Senate from New York; she served as secretary of state during President Obama’s first term.

Surely, there have been other candidates over the years who’ve brought more sparkling resumes to the Oval Office. I keep thinking that of the presidents who served in my lifetime, the one with the glossiest history was George H.W. Bush. World War II fighter pilot, CIA director, member of Congress, U.N. ambassador, Republican Party chairman, vice president? The man had chops to be president.

As for Sanders’ own qualifications, well, he’s marginally so.

But the tone of this Democratic primary campaign has changed dramatically.

Now the nation is paying attention.

That’s the way it goes. Negativity works.

 

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Imagine this breakfast chit-chat

grassley

U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley is going to have breakfast next Tuesday with Merrick Garland.

Yep, he’s going to break bread with the Supreme Court nominee whose nomination he intends to block.

I’m trying to imagine how this conversation will proceed. Here’s what I have come up with:

Grassley: Welcome, Judge. I’m glad you could find time to meet me for breakfast.

Garland: Thank you, Mr. Chair …

Grassley: Oh, call me Chuck.

Garland: Sure thing … Chuck. (laughter)

Grassley: Let’s get down to brass tacks. I don’t think the committee I chair should consider your nomination. In fact, I’m on board as saying that the next president should make the nomination. The current president is a lame duck, you know. This election could change everything.

Garland: I get that. But why are we meeting? I’ve read the papers. I know what you’ve said.

Grassley: I just wanted to get together so I could explain in detail …

Garland: Detail? What detail? You don’t support President Obama. You’ve never supported him. Look, he sought to pick someone who wouldn’t rock the court. He looked for a moderate judge. He found one. Me. My time on the D.C. Circuit Court has been the model of moderation.

Grassley: But the Supreme Court balance is, well, in the balance. Antonin Scalia was a stalwart conservative justice. We need to maintain that balance on the court.

Garland: Why the need? Didn’t a majority of voters re-elect Obama three years ago? Didn’t they do so knowing full well what kind of judge he’d appoint if given the chance. I mourn Scalia’s death, too. He was a brilliant jurist. He had a seriously rigid point of view. But I’m no slouch, either. I just don’t lean nearly as far to the left as Scalia did to the right. He could have picked a flaming lefty activist. I’m neither a lefty or an activist.

Grassley: I get that, Judge. You do understand that we on the committee are politicians, correct? We’ve got political interests. I happen to like my job as a senator from Iowa. I’ve been doing it for some time. I’d like to keep doing it. We’ve got this faction within our party that won’t tolerate compromise. It won’t tolerate me or any other of my Republican ilk from compromising with those Democrats.

Garland: So, you’re not going to allow the president, who has another nine months in office, to fulfill his duty because you’re getting pressure from constituent groups and political action organizations?

Grassley: I wouldn’t put it quite that way.

Garland: But that’s what it sounds like to me. You know what? I just lost my appetite. Thanks for the invitation, Chuck.

Grassley: Uh, judge? On second thought, you now may call me “Mr. Chairman.”

 

 

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Wind power is in the wind

wind farm

ADRIAN, Texas — You have to squint your eyes a bit to take in the view in this picture.

It’s along Interstate 40 in the Texas Panhandle. I shot the picture this afternoon with my fancy-shmancy phone camera as I was returning home from a lunch meeting with a colleague in Tucumcari, N.M.

It’s a wind farm. Lots and lots and lots of wind turbines are blowing in the breeze, generating electricity — I reckon — to be shipped to points hither and yon. Given that I don’t get out as much as I used to, I was struck by the sight of hundreds of those turbines along nearly the entire length of I-40 through Oldham County after driving back onto the Caprock.

I want to call attention to this form of energy because of the presidential campaign that’s now in full swing in both major political parties.

Republicans and Democrats are seeking to nominate candidates for the White House, one of whom will succeed President Obama on Jan. 20, 2017.

That silence you’ve heard along the campaign trail has dealt with wind energy. You remember wind energy, don’t you?

Politicians are supposed to talk about it as a way to wean this nation from its dependence on fossil fuels. We’ve made some progress in one critical area: The United States is about to become the world’s leading fossil fuel energy producer, which means we’ve all but ended our dependence on foreign oil.

Of late, the only mention I’ve heard of energy production has been on the Democratic side of the campaign trail, with Bernie Sanders accusing Hillary Rodham Clinton of being in the hip pocket of fossil fuel producers; Clinton has fired back, saying Sanders also is beholden to campaign contributors who are associated with fossil fuel producers. The world has a glut of oil, demand is down, therefore so is the price of fossil fuel-related products — such as gasoline!

Oh sure, the candidates traipsed through Iowa corn fields in the first contest of the season and talked here and there about ethanol, the “bio-fuel” produced by corn. One of the big surprises of the campaign, of course, was Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s victory in Iowa — even though he stuck his neck out and criticized ethanol subsidies as a form of government giveaway the nation couldn’t afford.

The Republican/Democratic Road Show trekked eventually to Texas. Did you hear much around the Panhandle about how any of the candidates would seek to shore up wind power?

If you did, then were dialed in far more acutely than I was. I don’t recall hearing a peep out of that still-large herd of candidates in the time leading up to the March 1 Texas primaries.

I’m proud of my state for becoming a leader in wind energy. Think of it: Texas and California have something in common after all, as they are the two leading wind-producing states in the country. Who knew?

Heaven knows we have enough of it here. It’s renewable and clean — even when it kicks up tons of dirt from the cultivated fields that are spread out for miles upon miles along our vast horizon.

Here’s my plea to the candidates … if they or their staffers see this blog post: How about talking more about wind and other renewables? It’s no longer cool to just “drill baby, drill.” We’ve got a lot of wind out there that’s not coming from the mouths of political blowhards.

How about ensuring we find ways to put it to use?

 

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