business news

Obama got the blame … where’s the credit?

oil prices

Let’s flash back to around 2010.

Oil prices were spiking. They surpassed $100 per barrel of crude. The price of gasoline also skyrocketed. It passed $4 per gallon in some parts of the country; it got nearly that high in the Texas Panhandle.

Who got the blame? President Barack H. Obama. His congressional critics, namely the Republicans, kept hammering the president over the price spikes. Why, they just couldn’t stomach the idea of watching these gas prices heading into the stratosphere and they had to blame someone. Obama was the target.

Then something happened.

Automakers began making more fuel-efficient cars after they were bailed out partly with federal government stimulus money. Research on alternative energy sources ramped up. Other oil-producing nations’ economies began to falter, diminishing demand on fossil fuels around the world.

The price of oil today is less than $40 per barrel, less than half of where it was five years ago. The price of gasoline? Today in Amarillo, regular unleaded is being pumped at $2.26 per gallon in most stations.

Is the president getting the “blame,” let alone the credit, for any of this?

Not on your life.

How come?

 

national news

This shooting defies all logic

gunviolence

What in the name of all that is holy happened in Roanoke, Va.?

An apparently disgruntled former television station employee opened fire on a broadcast journalist interviewing someone and then on the cameraman who was video recording the event.

Then the shooter fled and later turned the gun on himself. His two victims died on the scene; the gunman died later.

The act went viral on social media. I’ve seen a clip of the event. It sickens me to the core.

Alison Parker was 24. Her cameraman was Adam Ward, 27. The man believed to have shot them was Vester Lee Flanagan, 41.

How in the world does one make sense of this?

There’s an element to this story that needs fleshing out. Someone turned in a fax to the station where Parker and Ward worked that declared Flanagan, an African-American, acted out of revenge over the Charleston, S.C., church massacre a few months ago in which a white man killed nine African-Americans. Flanagan’s victims were white.

As the Washington Post reported: “Why did I do it?” stated the fax, which was received shortly before 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday. “Why did I do it? I put down a deposit for a gun on 6/19/15. The Church shooting in Charleston happened on 6/17/15…” The document goes on to state: “What sent me over the top was the church shooting. And my hollow point bullets have the victims’ initials on them.”

It’s not yet been determined if the fax came from Flanagan.

If it did, then we have a serious hate crime on our hands. Authorities cannot prosecute the shooter, given his death.

I hope with all my heart that someone other than Flanagan submitted the document.

However, even if that’s the case, are we now talking about a major ratcheting up of racial tension — yet again?

 

national news, political news

‘The Hispanics’ won’t love this media spat

jorge ramos

Donald Trump keeps harping on what he believes is a love affair between himself and “the Hispanics.”

They’ll love me, Trump proclaims, because he employs so many of them to work in his business empire. The anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric that labels Mexican immigrants coming into this country — albeit illegally — as “rapists, drug dealers, murderers” … along with “some good people, too” — well, that doesn’t matter, according to Trump.

Then he got into this highly visible spat this week with Jorge Ramos, a new anchor and reporter for the Spanish-language network Univision.

Trump was taking questions from reporters in Dubuque, Iowa, when Ramos interrupted him. Trump got agitated at Ramos’s persistent questioning of how Trump intended to build a 1,900-mile wall across the country’s southern border.

To be fair, Ramos did barge into another reporter’s question. He shouldn’t have been so rude to his colleague.

Then again, Trump could have answered Ramos’s question and gone on to the next questioner. He didn’t do that.

He waved a bodyguard over, and then the bodyguard forcibly removed Ramos from the meeting room.

Outside the room, a man wearing a Trump lapel badge, told Ramos to “got back to your country,” to which the Mexico-born Ramos replied that he is an American citizen.

Ramos came back into the interview room later and got to ask his question. He sparred with Trump a bit more.

I just wonder how Trump actually believes — if he truly does believe it — that Hispanic voters are going to continue lovin’ on the candidate when he treats individuals such as Jorge Ramos so rudely.

The word “delusional” keeps coming to mind.

 

political news

David Duke endorses Trump

duke_ap

Former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke has declared his support for Donald Trump.

I should just let that statement stand on its own.

But I cannot.

This’ll be brief.

Duke’s past is as reprehensible as it gets. He’s now thrown in with Trump, the current Republican Party presidential front runner.

“So although we can’t trust him to do what he says, the other Republican candidates won’t even say what he says. So he’s certainly the best of the lot. And he’s certainly somebody that we should get behind in terms, you know, raising the image of this thing.”

I’m not for a nanosecond going to suggest that Trump share’s Duke’s KKK dogma. I am going to suggest that Duke — no matter what he says about himself or the organization to which he belonged — cannot shed his past.

Duke’s obituary is going to include a KKK reference. And we all know about the murder, misery and mayhem that it has committed against other Americans.

There. Now I’m done.

 

national news, political news

GOP ‘horse race’ turning into match race

candidate

Some of us have lamented the horse-race emphasis on the media’s political coverage.

The media become much too focused on polls and on who’s up and who’s down.

Donald Trump is clearly “up” in the Republican presidential primary campaign. All 16 of the other GOP candidates are “down.”

But as in an actual horse race, the GOP campaign is turning suddenly into a match race — featuring just two candidates.

They are Trump and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

The rest of them include some serious and intelligent individuals. I would rate Gov. Bush in that serious and intelligent category. Trump? He’s in another category altogether. He’s intelligent. He’s also inarticulate and doesn’t possess an ounce of nuance, decorum — or an understanding that the presidency is not an oligarchy, that it contains far less power than Trump seems to suggest it does.

The two of them are resorting to some serious character attacks. Trump calls Bush a “low-energy candidate.” Bush counters that Trump isn’t a “true conservative.”

Indeed, it fascinates me that conservative Republicans are taking the gloves against Trump, accusing him of being a RINO, aka Republican in Name Only. As Jeb Bush said, according to the Texas Tribune, of Trump’s proposal to build a wall along our nation’s southern border: “Mr. Trump’s plans are not grounded in conservative principles,” Bush said. “The simple fact is his proposal is unrealistic, it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, it will violate people’s civil liberties, it will create friction with our third largest trading partner, it’s non-necessary, and I think he’s wrong about this.”

It’s also interesting to me that Democrats have been oddly silent as Trump goes after Bush, and Bush returns fire against Trump. They’re leaving the anti-Trump rhetoric to the rest of that increasingly anonymous Republican field.

I remain amazed that this year’s GOP campaign has become so entertaining. I thought the 2012 Republican field set the entertainment bar so high that no future primary campaign in either party would reach it.

Silly me. The 2016 GOP field has exceeded my expectation.

However, right now it’s just the two “leaders” — Donald Trump and Jeb Bush — providing the entertainment.

 

national news, political news

Biden may be channeling RFK

RFK

While continuing to ponder the idea that Vice President Joe Biden might jump into the 2016 presidential race, my mind keeps turning to another prominent Democrat from a distant era.

About two generations ago, U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy straddled the fence on whether he should seek the 1968 Democratic Party presidential nomination, just as the vice president is considering it today.

In 1968, an incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, was going to seek re-election to a second full term. He already had a challenge from Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

RFK remained on the sidelines.

Today’s front runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, also is facing a serious challenge, from Sen. Bernie Sanders. She also is facing a possible problem of her own making, those e-mails she sent out while serving as secretary of state.

LBJ had his own headache. It was the Vietnam War.

President Johnson then ran in the New Hampshire primary and finished first — but barely. McCarthy nearly beat him.

It was then that Sen. Kennedy joined the race. LBJ dropped out. Kennedy mounted a furious and frantic campaign against McCarthy and then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

He won the California primary on June 5, 1968, declared “on to Chicago and let’s win there.” Then he walked into the hotel kitchen, where the assassin was waiting.

It was over in burst of gunfire.

There’s a curious parallel between then and now.

I keep wondering if Biden is waiting for Clinton to make a politically critical misstep. What if something emerges from this e-mail probe that inflicts a mortal wound on the party’s front runner?

Would he then seek the party nomination to “rescue” it from someone who cannot win the election, just as RFK sought to rescue the party from McCarthy’s insurgency and HHH’s damage caused by his support for the Vietnam War?

The vice president seems be leaning toward running. If Hillary Clinton makes a mistake that dooms her candidacy, it had better occur quickly.

The difference between 1968 and 2016 shows itself in the preparation that’s now required to get one of these campaigns off the ground.

media news, national news, political news

Trump to apologize for dissing Kelly? Yeah, right

Donald Trump arrives to his Comedy Central Roast in New York, Wednesday, March 9, 2011. (AP Photo/Charles Sykes)

Fox News Channel boss Roger Ailes is demanding an apology from Donald Trump for his gratuitous criticism of network anchor Megyn Kelly.

Good luck with that, Roger.

Or, to paraphrase a hackneyed film line from the 1970 film “Love Story”: Arrogance means you never lower yourself to say you’re sorry.

Trump dissed Kelly upon her return to the air after taking a brief break. Kelly had the temerity during the initial Republican primary presidential joint appearance to ask Trump about comments he’d made about women that many had considered to be misogynistic and sexist.

Trump then ripped into Kelly for asking the question. The Trump vs. Fox feud has been boiling over ever since.

Ailes is right to demand an apology. He won’t get one.

It’s not Trump’s style.

As Trump himself keeps telling us: Why should he change a thing? Those polls give him all the affirmation he needs.

 

International news

Deal makes it easier to bomb Iran

iran20a

You’ve got to hand it to the Obama administration. It’s finding intriguing ways to sell a nuclear arms deal to its critics.

Consider a tactic being employed by President Obama’s team as it seeks congressional support for the deal that blocks Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear bomb.

It goes like this: Allowing inspection of nuclear development operations will give the United States greater intelligence capabilities — in case it decides to bomb the Iranians.

What a deal. Such intelligence thus, the theory goes, placates those who hate the deal because it’s the result of negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which they don’t trust as far as they can throw them. Heck, they’d rather bomb them than talk to them. This deal, though, makes it easier to bomb Iran if they break the rules regarding inspections.

As one who supports the deal, I find this marketing strategy quite intriguing.

Politico reports: “If you want to bomb the program, you should be super-excited about this deal,” said Austin Long, a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs who studies U.S. military options against Iran. “The more you know about Iran’s nuclear program and the industrial infrastructure behind that program, the better you will be able to target it.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/iran-nuclear-deal-argument-bomb-121613.html#ixzz3jq412Fxk

The Obama administration — along with the officials from the other great powers that negotiated the deal — insist that it “blocks all pathways” to Iran’s ability to obtain a nuclear weapon.

They have rules they must follow. If they don’t, we’ll have inspectors on the ground collecting intelligence.

Then it could be “bombs away!”

 

local news

‘Bought and paid for’? Why … I never

Amarillo_Downtown_Development28July_36_copy

Social media can be a lot of fun to use. I’ll admit to getting somewhat hooked on a couple of those media outlets.

However, it can be a bit distressing when someone you don’t know, have never met, wouldn’t know if he sat in your lap, makes assumptions about total strangers.

It’s happened to me on the issue of downtown revival and the fate of the proposed multipurpose event venue.

Someone named Cory Traves wrote this on a Facebook post: “Obviously this blogger has been bought and paid for by Advance Amarillo.”

“This blogger” is me. The source of this guy’s angst is a series of blog essays I’ve posted that favors the MPEV as it’s currently configured, including the ballpark aspect of it. He posted that comment on a recent blog item I posted regarding the MPEV.

Amarillo voters are going to decide the fate of the MPEV’s current design on Nov. 3. I guess Cory Traves will vote “no” on the referendum, meaning he doesn’t like the ballpark element. I plan to vote “yes.” Our votes will cancel each other out.

Advance Amarillo is a political organization formed to support the downtown Amarillo revitalization plan as it’s been presented. I happen to agree with Advance Amarillo’s view of this downtown effort.

Have I been “bought and paid for” by this group? Umm. No. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

I haven’t a clue as to what drives those who oppose the MPEV, or the downtown effort in general. I will not pretend to assume anything about them.

My wish would be that those with whom I disagree on this issue would keep their assumptions about me — or anyone else on the “other side” — to themselves.

You’re entitled to think whatever you wish. You aren’t entitled to make assumptions — out loud and in public — about others.

Especially when you’re flat wrong.

 

national news, political news

Unraveling has begun in Perry campaign

Texas Governor Rick Perry made his final appearance (in office) at a Texas GOP convention on Thursday, June 6,2014 in Fort Worth, Texas. (David Woo/The Dallas Morning News)

Maybe it’s just me, but the resignation of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s Iowa campaign chairman has the appearance of the beginning of the end of Perry’s second bid for the White House.

Sam Clovis, a popular Iowa radio talk show host, has resigned as Perry’s state campaign chair. It’s a pretty deal in a campaign that’s struggling to get traction as the Iowa caucuses are approaching.

The Perry camp continues to talk bravely about the Texan’s commitment to campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination.

But it’s just talk.

Perry has quit paying his campaign staff because his fundraising has dried up. He languishes far behind the front runners in the polls.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way for the former governor, who entered this campaign far better prepared than he was for the 2012 GOP nomination fight which, shall we say, ended badly.

Can the Pride of Paint Creek pull it together? Well, only if every other Republican in the race starts drooling or commits some serious verbal gaffe.

Then again, Donald Trump is showing that even crass stump rhetoric doesn’t do any damage.

 

 

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