local news, political news

‘Election day’ arrives

7 Comments

Notice the quotation marks around the words “Election day,” and also notice I didn’t capitalize “day.”

It’s because the actual election day will be15 days from now. However, I am going to march into the belly of the beast sometime Monday to cast my ballots for a slew of candidates and issues along my lengthy ballot in Princeton, Texas.

I still cannot define with clarity why I have decided to break with the tradition of waiting until Election Day to cast my ballot. I won’t try.

I am just going to drive to the polling place and wait to cast my ballot. I am going to vote enthusiastically for a number of races, such as for president and the US Senate. I won’t belabor the points on why. You know why.

It’s a full ballot and none of the candidates with whom I am most familiar present any real threat of a candidate making a deal-breaking mistake between now and the day they count all the ballots. I will split my ballot among Democrats and Republicans.

I do enjoy the pageantry, such as it is, about Election day or Day. Indeed, I would support shutting down everything for Election Day, which this year falls on Nov. 5. Why not make casting our ballots for whom we want to lead us a national holiday?

That’s another story for another day.

A big day awaits tomorrow as Texas goes to the polls.

Sports news

Big Ten: tough to swallow

It’s a beautiful, sun-splashed Saturday afternoon in North Texas … so let’s talk a little college football for a brief moment.

We’re about halfway through the season and I am still trying to get used to my favorite college football team, the Oregon Ducks, competing in the Big Ten conference.

Here’s a bit of history that will explain my discomfort.

Since the beginning of time, the Pacific Coast football gods had embarked on a program that would pit the winner of the Pacific Coast football conference (which has had several names) against the winner of the Big Ten in the final game of the season.

That would be the Rose Bowl. The so-called “granddaddy of bowl games.”

Those of us on the Left Coast hate the Big Ten. Why, many of us who don’t live in southern California, even hate the University of Southern Cal and UCLA. Then beginning this season, the Pac 12 dissolved and several of its member schools merged with the Big Ten. Oregon, Washington, UCLA and USC all became Big Ten members. The Big Ten came into being as a collection of schools gathered around the Great Lakes. It now comprises 18 schools stretching from coast to coast.

To be honest, the Ducks are having a stellar season. They are 6-0, having beaten dreaded Ohio State in a thriller in Eugene, and thrashing Michigan State and Purdue. But … what is wrong with this picture?

Oregon normally wouldn’t play a Big Ten foe until the final game of the year, presuming they would qualify for a Rose Bowl bid. The Ducks only recently ascended to the “elite” level of college football status. So, their appearance in the big game was a rare treat. for those of who hail from Oregon.

Whichever school came out of the Pac-12 to play the hated Big Ten — except for USC and UCLA — became the “favorite” team of Pacific Coast fans to whip the snot out of the Big Ten rep in the Rose Bowl.

That’s all changed. We now play a Big Ten school every weekend until the end of the regular season.

I just want to tell you this arrangement is going to test me … until I get used to it.

local news, media news

Yes on ward politics!

This won’t surprise many readers of this blog, but there was a time when I wrote editorials for daily newspapers that I penned opinions with which I disagreed personally.

Hey, I was getting paid to speak for the newspaper and my voice wasn’t the only one to be heard. I had bosses and I answered to them!

You want an example? I once wrote editorials endorsing Amarillo’s at-large voting plan for its five-member city council. I disagreed with that notion, but I sucked it up and spoke for the Globe-News.

I left the paper in August 2012 and wrote on this blog that I actually endorse the idea of creating single-member districts for Amarillo’s five-member council.

Well, the city is putting a proposal on its ballot next month that expand the council by two seats, and the two seats will be elected at-large along with the rest of the council.

Amarillo’s population has grown past 200,000 residents. It is a diverse collection of residents, comprising a growing Latino base, an expanding Black base, more immigrants are moving in. Residents have a wide variety of interests, ethnicities, creeds and values.

Why not divide the council into, say, four ward seats, two at-large seats and the mayor? I’ve seen such a system work in other Texas cities. Beaumont, where I first lived in this state from 1984 to 1995, operates on a hybrid system. It works well.

Yes, a ward system can go too far. I visited Charleston, W. Va., this past summer and learned that the city of fewer than 50,000 residents is governed by a council comprising more than 20 members, all of whom represent wards. Talk about tiny constituencies!

Amarillo, though, remains wedded to a system that worked well when the community was much smaller and much more homogenous than it is today.

Truth be told, I still wonder how a city can govern when the entire governing body — including the mayor — answers to the same citywide constituency.

Uncategorized

‘Fair, balanced?’ Bwahaha!

1 Comment

Do you remember the time the Fox Propaganda Network touted itself as an organization that presented the news in a “fair and balanced” manner?

Well, kids …  it’s never been true. We saw stark evidence of that lie during Kamala Harris’s interview with Fox’s Bret Baier the other evening.

Baier asked the Democratic presidential nominee to commend on remarks she had made accusing Donald Trump of threatening to use the military to exact retribution against his political adversaries. Then he broadcast a heavily edited version of Trump’s response to a question leveled at him by Fox colleague Harris Faulkner.

He told Faulkner he was the most “investigated” public figure since “Alphonse Capone.” That was the sum of his re-broadcast response.

Harris didn’t take the bait. She called Baier out on the spot, telling him that he had edited the remarks to cast Trump in a favorable light. The vice president demonstrated the kind of snap that media reps should be doing when Trump’s remarks are edited in that shameless manner.

As for Fox’s reputation as being “fair and balanced,” that’s never been the case, and the network is now nothing more than a shill for the moronic MAGA cult that has taken over a once-great political party.

Uncategorized

Sucking it up with an early vote

2 Comments

Command decision time at blogging HQ, which happens to be my North Texas man cave.

I have decided to cast my vote early in this year’s election, Early voting begins in Texas on Monday and it is possible I’ll be one of the first voters in line at my Princeton polling place.

As many of you know, I have preferred to wait until Election Day to cast my ballot. Not this year. I am going to get my preferences logged into the secure system early. I am going to get my civic duty out of the way.

Then I’ll just wait for the end of the campaign to exhaust itself until Nov. 5.

My concerns about candidates’ messing up between now and Election Day remain. I am just going to presume that the candidates of my choice will keep it clean until Election Day.

I also am announcing my plan to split my ticket. I am going to vote for some Republicans running in down-ballot contests. You know all about my preferences for the very top of the ballot. I won’t revisit those choices here or seek to explain them to you.

There is no point to trying to persuade readers of this blog about the unfitness of the Republican presidential nominee or try to explain how an incumbent US senator can hightail it to Cancun while hundreds of Texans were dying in the midst of the February 2021 deep freeze that smothered virtually the entire state.

Just know that I remain faithful to opposing straight-ticket voting. That principle remains intact.

Let it never be said that this old man is too hidebound to change the way he casts his ballot. I might not vote early in the next election, or the one after that.

This one? I hear the sound of my conscience telling me to do it.

national news, political news

Harris enrages Trump’s base … good for her!

2 Comments

Vice President Kamala Harris is employing a politically risky strategy as she enters the home stretch in her bid to become the 47th president of the United States.

Oh, how I want this effort to pay off.

She is talking to Donald Trump-friendly media organizations and is telling their audiences the hard truth about their hero.

He is a weakling masquerading as a tough guy, she has said. Trump panders to dictators, seeking favors in return. Harris reminds her audiences it takes far more strength to build people up than to tear them down.

We all know what this will do to the MAGA base that continues to support this buffoon. It will rile ’em up, get ’em stoked, provoke the MAGA morons to levy threats.

The VP is banking on another outcome as well, that she will rile women around the nation who want to restore women’s reproductive rights, who have grown weary of Trump’s dark vision for the future of the country.

Kamala Harris is mining the depths of the electorate for Republicans who can be persuaded that Trump’s darkness has no place in a country that for centuries has been the source of eternal optimism.

You are aware of my bias. I’m all in on what Kamala Harris’s 11th-hour political strategy is seeking to do for her. May it serve to persuade others of the danger that Trump presents for the nation we all love.

national news, political news

We aren’t that dumb … are we?

1 Comment

I have been wrestling with a nagging notion ever since the campaign between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump began taking shape.

It goes something like this: Are American voters really and truly ready for forgive the actions of a candidate who vows to weaponize the Justice Department to get back at his foes? Are we really prepared to hand over the nuclear launch codes to someone who cherishes love notes from dictators intent on destroying this country? Do we really want to entrust the health and welfare of ;poor Americans to someone who doesn’t give a rat’s rear end about them?

If we are, then we’re in a world of hurt, man.

I don’t know whether Trump will be able to win this election. Late polling indicators are causing me some mild dyspepsia. The idea that Americans would embrace this clown — whom they fired four years by 7 million votes — simply boggles my noodle.

His recent lies about the government being unwilling to assist storm victims are laced with ignorance, buttressed by loathing of those victims.

Furthermore, as a veteran who was sent to Vietnam in the late 1960s, I resent viscerally his description of my fellow vets as “losers and suckers” who answered their country’s call to report for duty in a hostile-fire zone.

But that, too, is OK with many of the MAGA cultists who comprise the bulk of this guy’s base.

If this guy can pull this charade off … well, God help us.

national news

RIP, Republican Party

10 Comments

May a once-great political party rest in peace while those who remain loyal to what it once stood for find the courage to shirk its current incarnation.

Republicans, you have a stern challenge ahead of you … even if hell freezes over and the MAGA warrior in chief actually wins the 2024 presidential election.

I fear the once-Grand Old Party has been hijacked by a huckster disguised as a politician. The men and women who are its stoutest adherents all comprise a group of dimly lit chuckleheads who somehow have managed to be heard above the din in this wildest of presidential election campaigns.

The MAGA cult would have us believe that Democrats caused Hurricanes Helene and Milton to ravage the Southeast. They also seem to believe that immigrants are eating our puppies and kitties. They also continue to insist that the2020 presidential election was stolen from their guy, who actually was indicted by the US House for …. trying to steal the election.

Republicans once called a candidate’s character to be the end-all to determine their fitness for high office.  These days? They embrace the blathering of a boastful Bozo.

More items are revealed daily.  My latest favorite involves reporting by Robert Woodward that the 45th POTUS offered to give COVID test kits to Russian thug Vladimir Putin while they were being rationed to Americans who also were suffering — and dying — from the killer virus.

The Republican Party I knew as a child and as a much younger adult no longer exists.

I am going to miss it as long as it remains captive to the gullible goons who call its cadence.

Uncategorized

Sabol earns her spurs

DRIPPING SPRINGS, Texas — Our first overnight trip away from home resulted early in a case of my new puppy, Sabol, showing her intelligence.

She’s a keeper.

Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version of what happened.

My brother -in-law and I went out for breakfast this morning. I sent Sabol outside to take care of business before we left. She came back inside and I closed the back door to the patio. We were gone for an hour and returned home.

Awaiting us in the driveway was my pooch. Her tail was wagging and she said something that I interpreted to be, “Hey Dad and Uncle Mike, I’m glad you came back!”

How in the world did she get out?

I checked the back door. It was wide open. Sabol pushed it open and ventured out to wait for us to return.

This is an astounding event on a couple of levels. First, she was in a location that was new to her. She could have panicked and run off, but she didn’t. Second, and this is my niece Mary’s theory, she might have recognized that my Ranger pickup was in the driveway; Sabol might have realized I was coming back. She applied her canine common sense.

I merely concluded that I didn’t allow the door to latch shut when I let my puppy into the house.

Yep. This smart girl has earned her spurs.

local news

New journey begins

High Plains Blogger came into being as a political platform for yours truly, but I decided a while ago to branch it out to include what I call “slice of life” matters.

I have chronicled my grief journey on this blog and it has given me great comfort in the time since I lost my dear wife, Kathy Anne, to brain cancer.

I am proud to announce that this blog is going to accompany me on another journey. It’s a weight-loss trek called MOVE!, and it is run by the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

Not long ago I rolled out from a fitful sleepless night feeling crabby, out of sorts, and I had pain in several parts of my overfed body. I hadn’t stepped on a scale in some time fearing what I might learn. That morning, I did … and I was bowled over by the number that flashed at my feet. That number told me I gained more than 40 pounds since the passing of my bride. I had smothered myself in comfort food.

I have tried dieting on my own. I have tried exercise routines on my own. They did nothing for me. What did I do next? I reached out to my VA doc and told of this struggle. What did she do? She arranged for me to visit a nutritionist at the Rayburn VA Medical Center in Bonham. where my doc works.

I visited with the nutritionist and told her the following: I am old fat man, I am grumpy a lot of the time, I don’t want to look at myself in the mirror, I am in constant pain, my vanity is taking a serious hit because of the way I look. I am reaching out for professional help!

The nutritionist delivered to me a detailed program titled MOVE! She told me veterans have enjoyed considerable success in peeling off the pounds. There appears to be a serious caveat: You gotta follow it to the letter! No cheating allowed! I must set goals, establish a firm eating pattern, exercise regularly, the whole nine yards, man!

OK. Deal. I’m all in.

I will not bore you to sleep with all the nitty gritty of what awaits this tired old man. I just want to share with you a life-changing decision I have made … and one that I intend to follow to its successful conclusion.

Commentary on politics, current events and life experience