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Men's basketball champ will be …

OK, sports fans, here is my call for the much-anticipated NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

The Final Four has been set. I have had next to zero interest in this March Madness malarkey. I say “next to zero” only because one team from my home state of Oregon was in the tournament at the beginning.

The Oregon Ducks beat BYU in the first round, then lost to Wisconsin in the second round. Wisconsin? Oh, yeah, the Badgers are one of the Final Four teams.

Back to that in a moment.

The other three are Connecticut, Florida and Kentucky.

I do not follow college basketball the way I follow college football. Don’t misunderstand, I’m no expert on either sport. I played a little high school freshman football a hundred or so years ago, but I cannot pretend to know much about the nuances of the game.

But I do follow the Ducks, the Oregon State Beavers and on rare occasions I like to watch the University of Washington Huskies.

Who’ll win the NCAA men’s basketball championship?

My unscientific, unknowing and uneducated pick will be Wisconsin.

Why? Because I want the Ducks of the University of Oregon to have some meager bragging right to having lost their tournament bid to the eventual national champions.

I have an extended family connection to Wisconsin as well. My wife’s Aunt Margaret lives in Kenosha, as does my wife’s cousin Tom; another of my wife’s cousins, Joanne, lives in Milwaukee.

OK, there you have it.

I will retain my virtual non-interest in the tournament, except for “rooting” — if you want to call it that — for the Oregon Ducks to look back and say, “Hey, we lost to the best team in the country.”

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GHW Bush earns ‘Courage’ award

When a young man who would become president of the United States wrote “Profiles in Courage,” he sought to honor those who made difficult decisions against tall odds.

It took courage to fight the so-called conventional wisdom and to face down critics who would scorn them. John F. Kennedy’s book won him a Pulitzer Prize and it created a benchmark for others to emulate.

President Kennedy died in 1963 and in 1990 the library built to honor his memory and his family launched the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. In May, the president’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, will honor one of JFK’s successors to the presidency, George H.W. Bush, for showing true courage in the face of withering criticism that — some have said — cost him re-election in 1992.

http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/domestic-taxes/202101-george-hw-bush-to-receive-profiles-in-courage-award

President Bush made his famous pledge at the 1988 Republican National Convention: “Read my lips, no … new … taxes.” The Louisiana Superdome crowd roared its approval and the then-vice president went on to win a huge victory that year in the race for the presidency.

Then in 1990, the president signed into law a federal budget that included — that’s right — tax increases along with spending cuts that sought to curb the federal budget deficit.

He was vilified by those on the right. Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist to this day calls it a “betrayal of the American people.”

He is mistaken. The president sought to take back a promise he made in the heat of a highly charged political environment. He acted reasonably and faced down his critics.

For that the Kennedy Library is going to honor the 41st president of the United States.

President Bush has demonstrated that he truly cut a profile in courage.

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No conspiracy theories, please

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Call me a non-conspiracy theorist.

I believe, for example, that:

* Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in murdering President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

* Men actually landed on the moon, beginning with Neil Armstrong’s “one small step … one giant leap” on July 20, 1969.

* Barack H. Obama was born in Hawaii — the 50th state to enter the Union — in August 1961 and, thus, is fully qualified to serve as president of the United States.

* Islamic madmen flew airplanes into the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and sought to fly a jetliner into the Capitol Building before they were thwarted by passengers on 9/11.

* Adolf Hitler killed himself in the Berlin bunker in April 1945 as the Red Army was closing in on his location.

* Elvis Presley actually died on Aug. 16, 1977 of a drug overdose in his Memphis, Tenn., bathroom.

I mention all these things because of the nutty theories being bandied about — to this day — about the fate of Malaysian Air Flight MH 370. I won’t repeat the goofy notions here.

My strong belief all along has been that something happened aboard that airplane to cause it to turn sharply off course on March 8. Its remains now are lying at the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean, along with the remains of the 239 people on board.

Our hearts break for those who are awaiting official word of their fate.

I just wish society, fed by social media and goofball Internet “sources,” would cease with the crazy talk. Let the searchers do their job, let them find the flight recorder, retrieve it and let its contents reveal the truth without all the mindless second-guessing.

Enough already.

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Young people today …

Thomas Friedman writes a fascinating essay in today’s New York Times in which he tells of a night he spent aboard the USS New Mexico, a nuclear-powered attack submarine.

The New Mexico ducked under the North Pole ice cap, punched its way through, and then went back under.

Friedman’s essay deals with several aspects of serving for months on end underwater on one of these ships.

He writes: “My strongest impression, though, was experiencing something you see too little of these days on land: ‘Excellence.’ You’re riding in a pressurized steel tube undersea. If anyone turns one knob the wrong way on the reactor or leaves a vent open, it can be death for everyone. This produces a unique culture among these mostly 20-something submariners.”

He tells of how the ship examines the effects of climate change and how it functions as a self-contained world within our world.

He asks a young sailor how he is able to spend so much time underwater, with severe limitations on the communication with his family.

The sailor responds: “Whenever you board this submarine in port, that American flag is flying and you salute that flag. And every time I salute that flag, I remember the reason I joined the Navy: service to country, being part of something bigger than myself and in memory for the attacks of 9/11.”

Then he asks: “Remind me again what we’re doing in Washington these days to deserve such young people?”

It’s an arresting conclusion to an interesting and informative essay on life aboard a very dangerous weapon.

It also should serve to instruct us all that generations going back, oh, to the beginning of time have questioned whether the next generation will be capable of carrying on.

The young sailor’s response to a seasoned reporter tells me our nation will be in good hands.

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If they can locate galaxies …

This question sort of falls into that “If they can land men on the moon … ” category of queries.

I heard it asked late this week on a CNN newscast: If they can locate galaxies millions of light years from Earth, why can’t they find the wreckage of a jetliner at the bottom of the ocean?

Provocative question, to be sure. It’s also an apples/oranges comparison.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/29/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

The technology used to find those galaxies, black holes, nebula, dwarf planets, asteroid belts and whatever else is out there past our solar system cannot be used to find a jetliner missing since March 8. The jet, of course, is Malaysia Air Flight MH 370, which vanished after taking off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing.

It’s likely in the bottom of the Indian Ocean, about 1,400 or so miles southwest or Perth, Australia. Why it ended up there — in the opposite direction of its intended destination — remains the No. 1 mystery on the planet at the moment.

Satellites have spotted debris of some sort floating in the ocean, as have manned aircraft. They’ve fetched some of it from the water and are analyzing it to see if it belongs to the Boeing 777 that went missing.

The tediousness of the investigation is maddening. It’s also necessary. The loved ones awaiting word on the 239 individuals on board MH 370 are in shock. They are angry. They are beside themselves. Believe me, I know what they’re going through. I lost my father in 1980 in a boating accident and it took police eight days to find his body after he was thrown into an inlet on the British Columbia coast. The family members’ minds are playing cruel tricks on them as they await definitive word that the plane has crashed and that all aboard were killed.

The authorities are getting closer to finding out the fate of MH 370.

Believe this as well: It’s far more difficult to find the wreckage of a jetliner right under our noses than it is to find a galaxy billions of miles away.

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Amarillo's mayor does what, exactly?

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A friend and former Amarillo city commissioner posed a simple question at lunch the other day: “How do you think Paul Harpole is doing as mayor?”

Hmmm, I thought about it for just a second.

Then I wondered aloud, what precisely does the mayor do? Not just this mayor, but anyone who occupies that office.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since — and about whether our municipal voting plan produces the kind of government that entices large numbers of qualified individuals to run for municipal office every other year.

The answer to my friend’s question went something like this: The mayor’s office is basically a symbolic one. The mayor has no real power. He represents the same constituency as the other four City Council members; they’re all co-equal. The council relies on a well-compensated and competent staff, led by the city manager, to do all the heavy lifting; they prepare the budgets and make administrative decisions all across the board. The council sets policy with its votes and then instructs the staff to carry them out.

That was a long-winded way of telling my friend that the mayor — who I happen to like and respect very much, by the way — hasn’t done enough for me or anyone else to really make a solid assessment of the job he’s doing.

We pay these individuals $10 per meeting. That’s it, plus some reimbursement for expenses they might incur while representing the city, say, by attending some seminar or business-recruitment outing.

I am circling back to another idea I posited on this blog some months ago about some rethinking I had been doing about the city’s at-large voting plan. We elect all five governing council members from the same citywide voting pool. Why not expand the council’s numbers by two, elect one or two council members at-large and divide the city into three or four voting precincts from which we could elect the rest of the City Council?

At this point, I’m no longer totally opposed to the notion of creating an all single-member district council, with just the mayor being elected citywide.

The city’s population is on the brink of hitting the 200,000 mark. It’s becoming increasingly diverse ethnically and racially. It has become something of a haven for immigrants who leave their homeland and find their way to Texas.

The time might be at hand to consider a serious reshaping of our municipal government structure. We could create one that allows for some diversity on a governing body that represents the population it represents. We could give the mayor some actual clout by allowing him or her to represent the largest pool of residents. Perhaps we could actually pay these individuals more than coffee money for the service they perform on our behalf. We also might consider giving them some oversight over departments within the city and enable them to have some actual influence to ensure the policies are being carried out in accordance with City Council members’ wishes.

Maybe one day when someone asks me how the mayor’s doing, I can respond with a meaningful answer.

What are your thoughts? I’m all ears.

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Vlad calls Barack to talk diplomacy

Why do you suppose Vladimir Putin called Barack Obama today to talk about diplomacy?

As in finding a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis, the one instigated when Russia sent troops to Crimea and massed tens of thousands of troops on its border with Ukraine — after Ukraine ousted its pro-Russian president?

http://news.yahoo.com/russias-putin-calls-obama-discuss-u-proposal-ukraine-212358384.html

What do you suppose is going on here?

It might be that those economic sanctions, the ones that President Obama’s critics said were mere pin pricks in the hide of the old Russian bear are beginning to take their toll. It also might be that the European Union’s threat of political isolation and NATO’s insistence that any further military action will not be tolerated by the Western European alliance.

Tough guy Vladimir Putin, the former KGB spook in chief turned Russian president, called the president of the United States today to talk about a diplomatic solution to this crisis. The two leaders agreed to have their countries’ chief foreign emissaries — Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov — meet soon to begin hammering out a solution.

The targeted sanctions have begun taking a serious bite out of some key Russian backsides. President Obama has vowed deeper, more sweeping measures if the Russians escalated their encroachment even more. To date, the sanctions have involved freezing access to cash for some of Russia’s key money men and political insiders.

Obama has made the point repeatedly in recent days that Russia has acted against Ukraine out of weakness, not strength. He’s insulted Putin by referring to Russia as a “regional power” not worthy of consideration by this country as a major geopolitical foe. Russia has been kicked out of the G-8 conference of industrialized nations and has seen the next economic summit pulled from Sochi, Russia and relocated to Brussels, Belgium.

He’s now willing to talk about a diplomatic solution.

Methinks those “toothless sanctions” have grown some fangs.

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Public records access not so cut-and-dried

This one baffles me.

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, is saying that attempts to secure release of public records relating to her travel expenses while serving as governor violate the U.S. Constitution.

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/governor-enforcing-public-records-law-unconstitutional/article_9c112dd6-c704-5d0c-b7e8-717c4a02f0d9.html

News organizations in New Mexico have been trying for some time to obtain those records because of questions raised about expenses incurred by Martinez’s staff and family members. They contend the governor is violating the state public information act by refusing the release the records.

Here’s how the Santa Fe New Mexican reported the matter this week: “One of the AP’s lawsuits, against Martinez and the Department of Finance and Administration, was over the wire service’s request for copies of Martinez’s work calendars, including travel for political purposes and personal matters. The suit claims the administration provided copies of cellphone logs for the governor and her staff but redacted phone numbers.

“The other suit, against the departments of Public Safety and Finance and Administration, is about a request for expense reports and receipts filed by Martinez’s security detail. Part of the request was for time sheets and other documents indicating when and why officers filed for overtime pay in months leading up to the 2012 presidential election. But the agencies released only aggregate tallies of expenses and overtime.”

Martinez is countering that the U.S. Constitution’s “supremacy clause” supersedes state law and makes the requests for public information, well, invalid.

The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government is understandably — and correctly — upset with Martinez’s claims of constitutional protection against releasing these documents. Susan Boe, head of the FOG, said this: “No court has ever held that IPRA (Inspection of Public Records Act), which is a straightforward access-to-records statute, violates the state or federal constitutions or separation-of-powers principles. We do not believe that any constitutional analysis is required in this case. The only issue is whether IPRA allows the records to be withheld from the public, and we believe that it does not.”

The Associated Press has filed suit to obtain the records, along with various other New Mexico media outlets. So far their efforts have been futile.

I guess the question ought to be this: If the governor has nothing to hide, nothing to keep from public inspection, why doesn’t she just release the records as requested under a clearly defined and legally binding state law, such as IRPA?

Something stinks in Santa Fe.

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War hero departs

A hero has just left this world. I want to call attention briefly to what this man did during a terrible time of duress.

Jeremiah Denton was captured by North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. He was a Navy aviator who was shot down over Hanoi in 1965. In 1966, the North Vietnamese put him on television supposedly to tell the world of his “war crimes.” They sought to use him as a propaganda tool.

But Denton instead blinked out the word “torture” in Morse code, informing the world of what his captors were doing to him and his fellow prisoners of war. Denton would spend several years in solitary confinement at the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” encampment.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeremiah-denton-ex-senator-and-vietnam-pow-who-blinked-torture-in-morse-code-dies-at-89/

I wonder how it is that some individuals have the presence of mind under such terrible circumstances to do something creative and meaningful.

Young Jeremiah Denton showed the world how a hero can resist his foes and inform his allies far away of the terrible circumstances of a captivity that should have been conducted under the rules of war.

Denton served more than seven years as a war prisoner. He came out in 1973 along with many other young men. He went on to serve Alabama as a Republican U.S. senator.

Denton, who died today at age 89, spoke with simple eloquence when he stepped off the plane in 1973 upon his release from captivity. He was the senior U.S. officer aboard the aircraft that flew him and his comrades to the Philippines. Denton said, “We are honored to have had the opportunity to serve our country under difficult circumstances. We are profoundly grateful to our commander-in-chief and to our nation for this day. God bless America.”

A nation is grateful for this man’s service.

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Ted Cruz works for me, too

“I don’t work for the Party bosses in Washington, I work for 26 million Texans.” – Cruz

The above quote was tweeted this morning by the Heritage Foundation, perhaps the nation’s pre-eminent conservative think tank.

The “Cruz” at the end of the tweet is none other than U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who spoke to Heritage today. I caught a little bit of his remarks in which he criticized President Obama for saying at the State of the Union that if Congress doesn’t act on some legislation, “I will.” Cruz noted that Democrats stood and cheered the president. Cruz compared the moment to something out of Alice in Wonderland.

OK, back to the tweet.

He works for Texans, not party bosses. I admire that statement. He does work for us. A majority of Texans who voted in November 2012 elected Cruz to the Senate seat held formerly by another Republican, Kay Bailey Hutchison who, I feel compelled to add, served in a manner that bore no resemblance to the way Cruz has served his bosses back home. Hutchison managed to work quite well with Democrats. As a Republican moderate, Hutchison didn’t feel the need to appeal to the base of her party. She knew that legislating requires compromise.

Yep, Cruz works for all Texans, not just those who voted for him. I was part of the minority of voters who in November 2012 cast a ballot for Democrat Paul Sadler. That doesn’t mean I disavow Cruz’s election. I honor it. However, I expect my elected representatives in Congress to honor my wishes too.

I support the Affordable Care Act. I do not want Congress to threaten to throw this nation into default by reneging on our debt obligations. I support the president’s response to Russian aggression in Ukraine. I believe the president has been measured, nuanced and careful in conducting foreign policy. I favor comprehensive immigration reform. I believe long-term unemployed Americans deserve some help from the government as they look for jobs.

There’s more, but you get the idea. I take positions opposite of where Cruz stands. I am not alone, either.

He works for millions of Texans who oppose his world view. Those of us on the other side of the fence deserve to have our voices heard by our congressional delegation. That includes Sen. Cruz.

I understand the concept of majority rule. That doesn’t mean, though, that the minority is shut out completely. Sen. Cruz acts very much as though he’s listening only to those who agree with him.

He works for 26 millions Texans, not just some of us.

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