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Talk to all Texans, Sen. Cruz

Something struck me as I looked at U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s planned series of town hall meetings across Texas.

He’s going to be speaking to groups friendly to his point of view.

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/08/15/ted-cruz-staging-events-across-texas/

Local Republican women’s groups are hosting him; same for local tea party organizations; an event in Dallas will be put on by the Heritage Foundation; he’ll be talking to a chamber of commerce audience too.

That’s all fine and good. I’m curious, though, as to whether the Republican junior senator from Texas is going to engage individuals in actual debate and discussion over differences they might have in public policy.

I’m going on out a limb here, but I’m quite sure liberal Democratic senators in, say, California or New York don’t spend much time talking to conservative audiences. So the query is posed to them as well.

Cruz was elected by a majority of Texans in 2012 to represent the entire state. I get that Texas leans hard right in its political view. All its statewide elected officials are Republicans; there’s not a Democrat to be found … or none on the horizon with a prayer of winning a statewide election. But not every Texan adheres to that world view. A few of us out here lean the other way and do not like the notion, for example, of shutting down the government in order to defund the Affordable Care Act – which Cruz is pushing.

Sen. Cruz also is thought to be considering a run for the presidency in 2016, a notion that was noticed by Tanene Allison, spokeswoman for the Texas Democratic Party. “He’s not talking about the issues that matter most to Texans,” Allison told the Texas Tribune. “A movement to try to shut down the government is not on the top of the list of what most Texans want at the moment.”

A more productive town hall series would be to include constituents who aren’t particularly friendly to the fiery conservative. Maybe someone with a different point of view will sneak into one or more of these meetings and actually challenge him. Let’s hope so.

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Feds block airline merger

The federal government’s intervention in the proposed merger between American Airlines and US Airways leaves me a bit puzzled.

The link attached to this blog notes that the feds want to prevent further escalation of air fares, which they believe will occur with this merger; but previous mergers have had precisely that effect already.

http://news.yahoo.com/airline-mergers-already-led-higher-fares-040223675.html

Amarillo is served by American Airlines, which flies several times a day to and from Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. The city has skin in American’s future here, given that we once subsidized – through economic development money collected from sales tax revenue – jet service between AMA and DFW.

On one hand, I applaud the government for looking out for the flying public. On other hand, the feds seem a bit tardy in joining this fight, given the direction air fares already have gone during the past decade.

My wife and I have made something of a pact between us already that from here on, virtually all our future travel throughout North America will be aboard our shiny new travel vehicle. We plan to spend extensive time on the road from this day forward.

But we do have some overseas destinations on our agenda. We’ll make that decision when the time is right.

But the airlines that serve AMA need not look to us to spend much time sitting in cramped seats, with our knees tucked up under our chins – all the while having to pay extra for a bag of peanuts.

I reckon we’re not alone in our view of air travel these days. I also am presuming that the marketplace will determine whether we continue to pay through the nose for air travel.

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Newt hates being negative?

Now I’ve heard just about everything there is to hear in contemporary American politics.

Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, the one-time bomb-thrower in chief of the Republican, the one-man wrecking crew against all things Democratic, now says his party has gone too “negative” in its effort to roll back the Affordable Care Act.

http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/14/20026954-gingrich-hope-key-to-progress-for-gop?lite&ocid=msnhp&pos=4

I need to have my hearing checked?

Gingrich is now trying to be the paragon of positive thinking in his party. Imagine that.

My favorite Gingrich tactic came to light in the early 1990s when, while building what would become the House Republican majority, once counseled his congressional colleagues to adopt a glossary of terms to demonize his Democratic opponents. Among them was this notion that Republicans had to label Democrats, get ready for this one, as the “enemy of normal Americans.”

Remember how he tore after then-House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas for his ethical lapses? Turned out that Wright was dirty and he resigned from the House, but he did so after being bloodied badly by Gingrich’s relentless attack.

Gingrich’s scorched-Earth strategy succeeded in 1994, as the GOP captured both houses of Congress in one of the party’s more stunning mid-term successes. He then sought to give first-term President Clinton the dickens masterminding the infamous government shutdown. That didn’t work out too well for Gingrich, as his party got clobbered in the 1996 and 1998 elections. He eventually quit the House a broken political leader.

Gingrich has become the poster boy for those who know to acquire the power to govern, but who don’t know how to actually govern.

So here he is today, giving advice to his Republican progeny on how to woo disaffected voters.

Good luck with that, Mr. Speaker.

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Kerry to get Nobel Peace Prize?

Israel and the Palestinian Authority have commenced peace talks in secret.

If the talks prove successful and the ancient enemies — the Israelis and the Palestinians — actually forge a working peace agreement, I have a candidate for next year’s Nobel Peace Prize: Secretary of State John Kerry.

http://news.yahoo.com/israelis-palestinians-kick-off-peace-talks-182226376.html

Kerry managed to persuade the two sides to restart talks that would seek a so-called “two-state solution” to the longstanding conflict. The Palestinians want an independent state next to Israel. The Israelis are now talking about that outcome being acceptable — under certain conditions. One of them would be that the Palestinians would stop shelling Israeli homes. The two sides have until October to seal the deal.

Meanwhile, Kerry and the Israelis will need to hammer out some solution to the continuing construction of settlements in territory that Israel captured during the Six-Day War in 1967. The Palestinians say the settlements are a barrier to a peace agreement; the Israelis say they are necessary to keep the Palestinians at bay.

I’m not an expert on Israeli-Palestinian relations, but I have seen up close just how precarious the situation is within Israel. I’ve visited cities — such as Sderot and Ashkelon — that have been shelled by Palestinians living in Gaza I understand the Israelis’ fear of continuing attacks on civilians. I’ve been able to peer into Gaza from just outside the region’s border with Israel.

Gaza is governed by Hamas, the infamous terrorist organization dedicated to Israel’s destruction. Whatever comes out of these peace talks, there must be some accounting for how to handle Hamas and to reel in the terrorists who continue to rein violence down on Israel.

Secretary Kerry has many decades of international experience under his belt. He knows the players on both sides personally. The civilized world, therefore, should be pulling for a successful resolution to these talks. Peace must come to the Holy Land.

If it does, John Kerry should start working on his Peace Prize acceptance speech.

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Euro recession over? Tell that to Greeks

This just in: The recession in the European Union is over.

But if you’re a citizen of those countries hit hardest by the financial crisis, you’re pain hasn’t yet let up.

http://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/world/article/Eurozone-recession-end-is-cold-comfort-for-Greece-4731488.php

I get that the Germans, French and even the Italians are faring better these days. Their economies grew for the second quarter in a row, prompting EU economists to declare the recession to be over.

The story in Greece and Spain, for example, is quite different.

Let’s look at Greece, my ancestral home that became an international laughingstock when the financial crisis nearly took it down.

The Greek economy is still in the tank, down about 24 percent since 2008; just in the past year alone, it shrank 4 percent. Unemployment is about 25 percent, nearly as bad as Spain, which has Europe’s worst unemployment rate. Barry Bosworth of the Brookings Institution describes the Greek economic condition as far worse than a recession. “It goes way beyond anything that looks like a recession,” he said. “It’s absolutely appropriate to refer to Greece as in a depression.”

***

This characterization hurts me at a personal level.

I’ve visited Greece three times: twice with my wife in 2000 and 2001, and again by myself in 2003. It’s a magical place. My three visits there came as the country was preparing to play host to the 2004 Summer Olympics. They cleaned up Athens, scrubbed the graffiti off building walls and highway overpasses, built a sparkling new airport, constructed a state-of-the-art subway system and, in general, presented themselves as more than ready to host such a magnificent worldwide event.

But they did it on borrowed money. They went into hock up to their armpits … and then the bills came due.

I’m not sure the Euro recession is as “gone” as the EU folks say it is. Another hiccup in Greece, or Spain, or Portugal – where the recession/depression is lingering – could send the continent into another tailspin.

I keep thinking of when I walked to the top of the Acropolis in 2000 and stood in front of the Parthenon. My thoughts were of enormous pride that my ancestors were able to build such structures and were able to produce great genius.

If only they could revive that brilliance and find a way out of the economic mess that is largely of their own making.

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Ex-GOP boss right about impeachment talk

Michael Steele offers living, breathing proof that the Republican Party hasn’t been overrun completely by those with lunatic notions.

Republicans who are full of all those crazy ideas, though, are hogging the platform.

Steele, the former Republican National Committee chairman, told MSNBC that talk of impeaching President Obama is “asinine.” You got it that right.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/michael-steele-blake-farenthold-impeachment-95520.html?hp=r6

The latest impeachment talk came from, yep, another Texas Republican member of Congress. The goofball this time is Blake Farenthold, who told a small group of fans and supporters that the House of Representatives could impeach the president, but that he wouldn’t be convicted in a Senate trial.

Farenthold doesn’t specify on what charge the House would impeach the president. Why? Because nothing exists. He seems to be among those on the far right who dislike the president’s policies so much that they want to throw him out of office.

What an utter crock.

My hope is that Michael Steele and other reasonable Republicans can outshout the loons within his party. Clear your throat, Mr. Chairman.

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Osprey takes off with new assignment

That big aircraft assembly plant next to Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport has a new gig.

The MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft being assembled out there is now being assigned to carry key White House personnel as part of the Marine Corps presidential security detail.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/ospreys-get-a-big-presidential-lift-95478.html?hp=l8

Maybe one day, the cutting-edge birds will be hauling the president himself (or herself) to and from the White House.

The Osprey has come a long way from its formative years when Bell Helicopter returned to Amarillo in 1999 thanks to a grant awarded by the Amarillo Economic Development Corporation. The plane, which lifts off like a helicopter and then flies like a conventional fixed-wing aircraft, has had its fits and starts — and its share of tragedy. It has crashed with Marines aboard, killing 19 of them once on a training mission in Arizona. The Marine Corps and Bell engineers fixed what was wrong with the bird and put it back into the air.

Mechanical difficulties have grounded the Osprey on other occasions. The Pentagon stayed with it, lobbying Congress to keep funding the program.

It’s been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, where it has ferried troops and supplies to and from the battlefield.

Now, according to Politico, the Osprey has been used to fly White House support staff and equipment to Martha’s Vineyard, where President Obama has been vacationing with his family.

Any kind of state-of-the-art aircraft is going to have trouble. That’s been the history of U.S. aviation. The Osprey in that context is no different from other aircraft.

The bird that’s being built in Amarillo is earning its wings with an important new mission.

Well done, Bell.

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Is Cruz qualified to run for POTUS?

National political media are starting to probe the issue of a possible presidential candidate’s constitutional qualifications.

The target this time is junior U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas.

http://us.cnn.com/2013/08/13/politics/natural-born-president/index.html?sr=sharebar_facebook

Let’s flash back to 2008 when another candidate came under amazing scrutiny. He was then-junior U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois. Some folks on the right said he couldn’t run for president because, they alleged, he was born in Kenya, homeland of his late father. Obama’s late mother, however, was an American citizen. Sen. Obama had said all along he was born in Hawaii, the 50th state of the U.S., in August 1961. That wasn’t good enough for the critics, who kept harping on his birth.

Eventually, Obama settled it by producing his birth certificate. He was re-elected in November 2012 and the yammering — save for a few crackpots on the far right — has stopped.

Now we have Cruz. The senator indeed was born in Canada. His father is Cuban. His mother is American. Cruz acknowledges he was born north of our border. And that has some folks questioning whether Cruz — who might run for president in 2016 — is qualified under the Constitution.

Article II stipulates that only a “natural born citizen or a “citizen of the United States … shall be eligible for the office of president.” Scholars have interpreted that to mean that Cruz could serve as president, given that his constitutional qualifications were earned at birth by virtue of his mother’s citizenship.

I tend to believe Cruz is qualified under the Constitution to serve as president, which means Obama would have been qualified to serve as well — had he been born in a foreign country, which he wasn’t.

Let’s wait to see how this Cruz story plays out. My bet, as I’ve noted already, is that the left won’t make Cruz’s birthplace nearly the issue that those on the right sought to do with Barack Obama.

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Hey y’all, the deficit is shrinking

I consider myself a deficit hawk. I dislike as much as anyone the idea that the government spends more money than it receives.

It is with that stipulation that I hail news that the federal budget deficit is shrinking. Dramatically, I should add.

http://www.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130813/BIZ/308130307

The Congressional Budget Office — which is about as nonpartisan and unbiased as it gets — pegs the 2013 federal deficit to be at $670 billion. That’s still a lot of money to be in the hole. It’s also about half of what the annual deficit totaled when President Obama took office in January 2009.

The cause for the shrinkage? More revenue created by more taxes being paid by more Americans getting back to work.

Interesting, don’t you think?

Yet the critics keeping yammering about the president’s “failed economic policies.”

Another report out this week shows that immigration reform would help grow the economy significantly over the next two decades, thus putting downward pressure on the deficit. How does that happen? By allowing undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows and work in the open while they set out on that vaunted “path to citizenship.”

Another “failure”? I think not.

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‘The show must go on’

You’ve heard the clichĂ©, I’m sure, that “The show must go on.”

I’m not an entertainer. I don’t understand fully the entertainer’s mindset about whether to go on with the show in the wake of tragedy. The cast of the acclaimed outdoor musical “Texas” is wrestling with whether to go on with their own show at the Pioneer Amphitheater in Palo Duro Canyon in the wake of a horrific tragedy that befell it early today.

Five cast members were killed in a car crash north of Amarillo.

My friend Jon Mark Beilue wrote eloquently about his own son’s friendship with one of those who perished. It’s worth a look here.

http://amarillo.com/news/local-news/2013-08-13/beilue-when-their-world-was-smaller-one#.UgpZvZ-Cwkw.facebook

I do not know as of this moment what the cast will decide. They’ll need to get over their shock. The grief will linger.

I’d be inclined to counsel them to go on with the show, as their friends would want them to be true to the creed of their craft.

If they decide they can’t, well, I understand that, too.

My prayers are with you all.

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