crime news, national news

Who’s dumber?

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The dumbest individual to ever be elected president of the United States never should question another public figure’s intelligence.

Never! Not ever should he go there. But … Donald Trump has ventured down that blind alley.

He said this week that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris isn’t intelligent enough to stage a press conference with national media. He said President Biden is “smarter” than the person he wants to succeed him in the White House.

This, of course, comes from an individual without a single forward-looking policy agenda. He has offered no plan on how he intends to govern, other than to exact revenge on his political foes by siccing the Justice Department on them.

He hasn’t developed a single constructive thought. He doesn’t understand how government works.

Republicans have nominated a certifiable dumbass — oh, and a convicted felon — to be their nominee for president of the United States.

I believe I am going to scream!

national news

Two dates coincide historically

For the life of me I never gave this issue a first thought — let alone a second one.

Aug. 9 is important for two unique reasons, yet they both occupy huge spots in our nation’s history.

On that date in 1945, the U.S. Army Air Force dropped the second of two atomic bombs, this one on Nagasaki, Japan. The first one exploded over Hiroshima, Japan, three days earlier, President Truman wanted to send a message to our remaining World War II enemy that further resistance was futile and could be a very deadly to the Japanese.

Give ‘Em Hell Harry ordered the second bonbing and … well, there you have it. Japan waved the white flag five days later and the street dances commenced all across our nation as we celebrated VJ Day.

The world never would be the same.

Twenty-nine years later, on that date in 1974, President Nixon quit the office to which he was re-elected in a historic landslide just two years earlier. In June 1972, some doofus burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex in D.C.; they rifled through some desk drawers, looking for dirt on the Dems.

If there was a more stupid political stunt ever conceived, you would have to explain it to me. Nixon was cruising to his huge victory, yet the Committee to Re-Elect the President, aka CREEP, just had to break the law.

Nixon got into trouble by covering up the crime when he ordered the CIA to intervene on his behalf. The House of Representatives then would prepare articles of impeachment against him. An impeachment was a done deal; so was a Senate trial conviction.

Nixon got the word from his Republican allies in the Senate that he was toast.

So … he resigned, becoming the first POTUS ever to leave office in this shameful manner.

Both of these events stand alone as monumental episodes in our nation’s long and complicated history.

Let’s not allow either of them to repeat themselves.

media news

Go for it, Lawrence O’Donnell

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Lawrence O’Donnell has earned a gold star, a blue ribbon and a hearty “you go, young man” from High Plains Blogger.

The MSNBC host of “The Last Word” decided Thursday night to devote the first half of his broadcast to take down all the news networks that were on hand to ostensibly “cover” a press conference called by Donald J. Trump.

According to O’Donnell, they did nothing of the sort. They allowed Trump to lie to the public without ever fact-checking the GOP presidential nominee on the lies that flew out of his overfed pie hole.

And, yes, he included his own network in the criticism.

I watched O’Donnell’s takedown likely with a stunned look on my puss. I should not have been surprised. In 2016, when Trump was campaigning for POTUS the first time, O’Donnell emerged as the first national news anchor to call Trump’s falsehoods what they were, and what they are today: They are lies told deliberately by a politician who feels somehow protected by the media he despises.

Imagine that for just a moment.

O’Donnell said it was difficult to find a single sentence that Trump uttered during his hour-long presser that didn’t contain a lie. And yet … the reporters gathered at Trump’s estate never saw fit to challenge a single lie.

The reporters’ negligence forced O’Donnell to slam his papers on his desk out of disgust. I must add that O’Donnell wore his anger openly.

“It is 2016 all over again,” O’Donnell kept repeating.

Let us hope that the 2024 election campaign produces a vastly different outcome than what we got eight long years ago.

local news

Carters’ work thrives

I cannot help but think of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter whenever I drive past a short street in Princeton, Texas.

It is a street where crews are building the second in a series of houses for Habitat for Humanity, a program promoted vigorously by the former 39th president of the United States and his late wife.

President Carter is about to turn 100. He’s already lived far longer than any man who served as president. He said recently he wants to live enough to cast his next presidential vote for Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for the nation’s highest office.

This blog post, though, is about the legacy that President Carter will leave for many worthy families across the nation and to the nation itself. Other houses will go up eventually on Harrelson Street and they will be occupied by families that qualify for receiving the gift of home ownership.

If only he was well enough to travel to North Texas to see the work being done for Habitat for Humanity and, in an important way, on behalf of the project for which the Carters were fierce advocates.

national news

Harris reshapes election

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Kamala Harris’s stunning 11th-hour arrival in the center of the US political conversation drives home a point I want to make about the length of our election process.

It need not drag on for months and months!

It’s almost impossible to comprehend, but the vice president has been campaigning for president for less than a month. Less than one month!

She and her team have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, she has picked a vice-presidential candidate to run with her, she and Donald J. Trump have agreed to a debate on Sept. 10, Harris is formulating an economic strategy.

All of this and more has occurred in less than a month.

Circumstances overwhelmed the previous presumptive Democratic frontrunner, President Joe Biden. He pulled out and endorsed Harris to take over the top spot. If there has been a more perfect roll-out of a presidential campaign, then someone will have to show it to me. Because this one looked like perfection in real time.

It all just goes to demonstrate that we need not drag this process out forever and then some!

I’ve never wondered aloud how we could shorten the length of time we devote to political campaigning. Would it require a federal law enacted by Congress? An amendment to the U.S. Constitution? Does each state have the power to ban campaign activity?

We ought to look at all of the above.

military news

Veterans do battle

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I don’t like the tone the 2024 presidential campaign has taken quite suddenly, with the vice-presidential nominees questioning the other man’s service in the military.

Veterans everywhere — and there are millions of us out here — will be paying attention.

Republican VP nominee J.D. Vance served for three years as a US Marine, leaving the Corps as a corporal. I salute Vance and thank him for his service.

However …

Vance has fired the first shot in the fight against fellow vet and Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz, who retired from the US Army National Guard as a command sergeant major. Vance has accused Walz of misrepresenting his service by saying he fired his service rifle in combat. I honor Walz’s service as well.

Let’s be careful, Corporal Vance. Accusing a veteran of what they call “theft of valor” is about as serious as it gets. Walz denies ever saying what Vance has alleged. Vance also says Walz chickened out of deployment by retiring prior to his National Guard deploying to Afghanistan. Walz said his unit received its deployment orders months after he retired.

I do not want to see this campaign wallow in the stolen valor gutter.

How about sticking to pertinent issues, such as which one of these fellows is better qualified to become POTUS should the need arise? On that matter, my mind is made up,

national news

GHW Bush set the stage

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Before we get all lathered up about the potential differences between Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the new Democratic ticket for president, I want to share a fairly underreported story over the past four decades.

Former California Gov. Ronald Reagan had locked up the GOP primary process in 1980., He was looking for a VP nominee to run with him. He briefly considered asking former President Ford to join him; Ford said “no.”

Reagan looked around. Then he found an eminently qualified individual to run beside him. George H.W. Bush was a former CIA director, former UN ambassador, former special envoy to China, a former member of Congress from Houston.

It’s the last item that deserves focus. As a House member, Bush acquired a fascinating nickname among his colleagues. They called him “Rubbers.” Why? Because Rep. Bush was an ardent supporter of Planned Parenthood and endorsed the organization’s role in providing counseling for abortion services.

The “Rubbers” nickname, of course, was an homage of sorts to Planned Parenthood’s support of prophylactics.

But when Reagan tapped Bush to become his running mate in 1980, Bush immediately — and by that I mean instantaneously — became an ardent anti-abortion candidate for VPOTUS. His entire history of supporting abortion rights, birth control, and his embrace of an organization that counseled women on how to end pregnancies was swept up and tossed into the dust bin.

Reagan and his staff clearly obtained a pledge from Bush to march to their cadence.

And no one gave it a second thought. Reagan and Bush won election that year in a massive landslide.

national news

Walz is the one!

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As is always the case, the person to whom I directed an unsolicited recommended ignored my advice … but I am not crestfallen over it.

Vice President Kamala Harris this morning revealed that she has chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her 2024 Democratic Party running mate on a ticket she — and millions of others – hopes will remove Donald Trump from our political landscape forever.

Walz has been described in terms used for another well-known Minnesotan. He’s been called a “happy warrior,” which is a title worn with pride by the late Vice President and Sen. Hubert Humphrey.

I preferred Sen. Mark Kelly among the finalists under consideration. But … Harris went in another direction.

That’s OK with me. Gov. Walz will acquit himself in a stellar fashion. Of that I feel comfortable in asserting. He’s the author of the “weird” quip now being used to describe the policies espoused by Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance.

May this campaign now begin in earnest and may it produce an outcome for which many millions of us are hoping.

local news, media news

Blogging gets new life

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I resigned from my final full-time journalism job on Aug. 31, 2012, having been informed by my publisher that I no longer would do what I had done for the Amarillo Globe-News for the past 18 years …. and I thought I was pretty good at it.

Silly me.

I would learn later that the publisher had me in his crosshairs when he announced that everyone’s job description had been changed. I fought for my job fiercely, telling the publisher ultimately that the industry I entered in 1976 bore no resemblance to what it had become by 2012. And that he was asking me to do things only a little different.

It didn’t work.

Immediately, I. began focusing my attention full time to High Plains Blogger, a platform I created a few years earlier.

I have mentioned many times on this blog how much I enjoy writing on it, offering my assorted views on this and/or that policy issue.

I have boasted from time to time that writing comes easily to me. I won’t brag about the quality of the prose I produce, just say that it does flow fairly easily off the tips of my fingers.

The subject matter helps determine the ease. I’ll be candid. Prior to President Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential campaign, it was becoming a bit problematic to find issues on which to comment.

Up stepped ‘vice President Kamala Harris. Biden endorsed the VP. She launched a full-frontal campaign from a virtual dead stop, raised a few tons of cash and injected this campaign with an energy level I haven’t seen since, oh, 2008 when Barack Obama took the nation by storm.

What does this mean for your friendly blogger? It means the proverbial chest where I store my ideas is full again.

I intend to remain engaged fully in this campaign. The blog is the only venue I have to offer commentary on the status of the effort.

So … I will weigh in. It feels good to be relevant.

local news

Waiting for monstrous project

When you mention the word “infrastructure,” there is a decent chance you’re talking about traffic.

And when you mention “traffic,” particularly in North Texas, you well might be thinking of US Highway 380.

You might wonder: What do these elements have to do with each other? The Texas Department of Transportation is fixin’ to hopefully correct the traffic problems by working on alternatives to traveling along US 380.

It’s a nightmare right now.

When we moved to Princeton five years ago we learned TxDOT’s plans for the region. They involve construction of loops around several cities from Denton to Greenville. Princeton sits about 35 miles from Denton and 21 miles from Greenville. TxDOT wants to construct a loop south of 380. It would attract through traffic to use the bypass, leaving local traffic on 380.

It’s expensive, man. I cannot remember the total cost of the highway work, but it runs in the tens of billions of dollars.

Now for the downer. I am 74 years of age, turning 75 in December. I mention that because I might not live long to see this project completed. I keep hearing how it’s going to take decades to finish this task.

Which brings me to the most important point. What will happen as this region continues to grow at its breakneck pace, which is projected for the greater Dallas-Fort Worth metro area?

Will the highway loops around the cities that straddle US 380 be enough to loosen the traffic flow? If not, then what does the state do?

I surely get how important infrastructure is for growing communities such as those strung along the highway. I am going to hope that TxDOT is thinking past when it completes this huge project .,.. and prepares for the next big one.

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