local news

Good news … and news you need to ponder

Leave a comment

I have some good news and some news that we’ll need to consider as it takes shape

First, the good news. Donald Trump’s time as the nation’s leading loudmouth politician is drawing to a close. It’s not just around the corner. Not yet anyway. But each week that passes means it’s getting a bit closer and for that I am extremely grateful we have a U.S. Constitution that won’t buckle under pressure that the dipshit in chief will seek to apply to it.

Now for the questionable news. How is Trump going to react when they count the ballots in November 2028? Especially if the winner happens to be a Democrat? I suppose I could ask the same thing if the winner in two years is a Republican, one who isn’t of the MAGA moron variety, but is more of a principled conservative with actual ideas.

It well might be that the MAGA moron in chief will rant and rail against both major party nominees.

I read something earlier today that Republicans in Congress have endorsed a resolution allowing for Trump to serve a third term. It won’t happen. The 22nd Amendment is clear: Two terms and that’s all someone gets to serve as POTUS.

It’s the process, the inexorable march toward the end that allows me to wake up every morning feeling good about the day that is unfolding before me. Each day closer to the end renders this asshole less relevant.

OK, I’ll have to toss one more uncertainty onto the mix. Trump will be gone no later than Jan. 20, 2029, but that MAGA movement will still be around. Good news once more? Without their leading Main Man, the MAGA morons will be left to fend for themselves. My gut tells me they won’t survive.

media news

Not a normal Sunday for me

Leave a comment

On a normal Sunday evening in North Texas, I would be settling down for an hour of news analysis from “60 Minutes,” the heralded CBS News program that until this past week was a staple in my home for as long as I can remember.

No more, man. Not since the MAGA morons who run the network fired “60 Minutes” reporter Scott Pelley for telling the truth about what could be happening in this great country because of the whims and machinations of Donald Trump.

I’m going to have to figure out another way to spend the next hour or so. “60 Minutes” used to educate me on the story behind the story. It offered clear and unambiguous information on why these things mattered to us.

I’ve been treating myself to watching Pelley explain his view of what went down when he got word he was being canned. Trump called Pelley a “stiff” and a “low-IQ journalist” who “doesn’t care for his country.” Pelley told the interviewer he could buy the stiff description or the term Trump used to challenge the journalist’s smarts. He challenged Trump’s view that Pelley doesn’t love his country.

Pelleu said he’s “never worn the uniform, but I’ve been in combat” while covering war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait. “I’ve had people shoot at me,” he said, adding that he isn’t aware that Trump could make that assertion for himself.

He said journalists “love their country,” and declared that “democracy cannot exist without journalism.”

I am proud of Scott Pelley and I hope with all I have within me that he stays in the game of reporting our nation’s on-going story.

local news

‘Excited and engaged’ voters? Really?

Leave a comment

Jaisen Rutledge wants to serve on the Princeton City Council and he seems to think that a sweet-talk campaign is his ticket to City Hall.

Rutledge, a longtime Princeton resident, joined Jan Goria in a candidate forum on May 30, hosted by the League of Women Voters.

I was struck by something Rutledge said about the nature of the constituency he hopes to represent when the runoff election takes place on Saturday. Moderator Aaron Rodriguez of the LWV asked the candidates for their views on how they would describe Princeton to a newbie looking to move here.

Rutledge said this: “Princeton is a fast-growing city that still has a small-town charm to it,” he said. “I believe … it has done a really good job of retaining a lot of its culture and I think … there’s a lot of extremely excited and engaged residents that live here.”

Wow! That’s pretty darn nice of the candidate for Place 4 on the council to say. But wait a second. Let’s take a little deeper dive into one aspect of residents’ engagement in municipal policy. Rutledge and Goria finished No. 1 and 2 in the May 2 race to succeed former Councilman Ryan Gerfers, who resigned because of health concerns. The race was for all Princeton voters. The city has nearly 19,000 registered voters living here.

How many of them turned out May 2? 476, that’s how many! That figure amounts to 2.52%.

When I see numbers like that — I only can surmise that a relatively small number of votes is aware of the chaos that lurks at City Hall. We’re on a third city manager in less than four years; our fire chief is gone; we have a new city attorney; the public works director has vamoosed; the city is trying to find a permanent replacement for the manager who walked off his job in less than two years; the police chief is now doing double duty as acting city manager and as Princeton’s top cop.

All that being said, Princeton is not populated by an “excited and engaged” group of residents. I consider many of my fellow Princeton residents to be victims of that double curse of apathy and ignorance about what’s going on at City Hall.

The place is a mess.

crime news, political news

RFK: a serious political hero

Leave a comment

At 1:44 a.m., on June 6, 1968, a team of medical doctors gave up trying to save the life of a politician who suffered from a gunshot wound to his head. They declared this man dead.

Shortly after that declaration, Frank Mankiewicz stood before reporters and said, “Robert Francis Kennedy died today … he was 42 years of age.”

Mankiewicz served as RFK’s press secretary. He took no questions. He just walked away from the microphones and then let the political world try to make sense of the tragedy that befell arguably the nation’s premier political family.

Kennedy sought the presidency in 1968. He declared his candidacy in the same room his brother, John F. Kennedy, declared his own candidacy in 1960. We know what happened to JFK in November 1963 and many of RFK’s entourage feared the same thing could happen to the brother who guided JFK’s campaign to victory, served honorably as U.S. attorney general and then got elected senator from New York.

RFK was my first political hero. I miss him to this day. He’d be 101 years of age had he not been gunned down.

We cannot assess what kind of president RFK would make. He promised to end the Vietnam War. He vowed to work diligently to stem the deep racial divide in America. He wanted to improve health care. And yes, I believe he is spinning in his Arlington National Cemetery grave at the piece-by-piece dismantling of the nation’s health care system by his own son, RFK Jr. … in service to Donald Trump as secretary of health and human services.

I do believe that RFK’s victory in the 1968 California primary he was celebrating the night he was shot to death would have propelled him to victory at the Chicago Democratic convention and would have enabled him to defeat Richard Nixon in the race for the White House.

But the lunatic gunman who ambushed RFK in the hotel kitchen had other ideas. The pistol he used to kill RFK likely changed te course of U.S. history. He likely will live out his miserable life in the California prison system.

The rest of us who came of age politically in the turbulent 1960s will continue to mourn the passing of a 42-year-old politician who grew into the stature he claimed.

media news

Simple life gets even simpler

Leave a comment

Some of you might recall that I blogged about my life becoming simpler, less complicated than before.

Well gang, I’ve discovered that a simple life can get even simpler. I don’t have much to say today about what’s going on in the world of hard news.

Yep. Simplicity is a good thing. At least it is for me.

I get to devote blog topics to, oh let’s see, about blogging. This particular avocation does require a certain devotion to the news. I follow it some, but not so much these days in newspapers, or in standard commercial broadcast media.

The foolishness at CBS News recently has driven me away from that network’s news team. Yes, I know it still has dedicated professional journalists who risk their lives each day reporting on warfare and street crime. The shitty termination of Stephan Colbert from late-night TV and Scott Pelley from “60 Minutes” is too much to swallow. Even for me.

So … the simple life beckons. I hear its siren call. I’m in all the way.

media news

Trump has ‘murdered’ ’60 Minutes’

Leave a comment

At this very moment I am thinking of some of the titans of American broadcast journalism, men and women who sought the truth and told it to us without fear of recrimination.

You know who they are: Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, Leslie Stahl, Bob Simon, Harry Reasoner, Morley Safer, Diane Sawyer, Dan Rather and now … Scott Pelley.

They all worked for “60 Minutes,” the premier TV news show that exposed everything — good and bad — about the government for which we pay. Pelley, a West Texas native, recently spoke aloud about the dangers of censorship and government overreach being inflicted by the Donald J. Trump administration, which seeks to control the news that’s being reported.

Pelley has lost his job at “60 Minutes,” along with reporters Cecelia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi. This is a dark time for American journalism.

Pelley’s ouster hits me in a vaguely visceral way. I don’t know him, but I am good friends with a fellow West Texan who attended Texas Tech University with Pelley. My friend is now retired from journalism and he has told me a story or two about Pelley’s journey into the spotlight.

The First Amendment is supposed to guarantee a free and unfettered press. Congress “shall make no law” that seeks to control the media, the amendment declares. Trump has engineered the takeover of CBS News by MAGA-friendly execs. They have executed the removal of journalists they deem as threats to the POTUS. We are witnessing a disgraceful flouting of the very rights the First Amendment guarantees to maintin our representative democracy.

I just might join that movement to boycott CBS News.

crime news, legal news

Clown show adds another player

Leave a comment

Legal scholars need not apply for any position within the Trump administration that requires knowledge of the U.S. Constitution. All you have to be is a pal to Donald J. Trump.

Todd Blanche, who once served as Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, appears to be POTUS 47’s latest pick to be attorney general. He replaces the disgraced Pam Bondi, another dedicated Trumpkin who got canned a few weeks ago.

This is what it’s come down to, as Trump seeks to find “the best people” to fill these posts.

Blanche has been acting AG since Bondi got the boot. I’ll give him credit for reportedly persuading Trump to scrap the $1.8 billion slush fund that POTUS sought to set up to pay rewards for many of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

That’s not good enough, however, for Blanche to assume the role as the “people’s lawyer.”

I am left to breathe a heavy sigh of disgust.

local news, media news

Trump’s mind is officially a goner

Leave a comment

You might want to write this down if you’re inclined,  but just keep it in mind as you ponder the future of Donald J. Trump’s political career.

It’s now as clear as it gets that the 45th and 47th POTUS has lost what used to pass as what was left of his mind. Why? Because the dimwit in chief wants to unilaterally pull the broadcast license of ABC News because it has the temerity to broadcast “negative news” about his administration.

Holy … moly, man!

Scott Pelley, a West Texan known as the voice of “60 Minutes,” a CBS News program, spoke recently in quoting one of our nation’s founders, James Madison. The fourth president said in 1800, Pelley recalled, that a “free press guarantees the rights of all the civil liberties we enjoy.” That is why the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the existence of a “free press.”

No matter their political party — be they Democratic-Federalist, Whig, Republican, Democrat — every U.S. president has accepted the role of a free press in holding our government accountable to the people they serve.

That’s every president until this one.

No president likes all the coverage they get from the free press. No matter their party affiliation, they hve griped aloud that the media are unfair. One could argue, indeed, that the media went too far in covering President Clinton’s impeachment, or that it labeled President George W. Bush a dim bulb during his time in the White House. Did any of our presidents seek openly to revoke the license of a media outlet just becausse they don’t shade the news coverage to suit their shallow-skinned egos? Nope!

Trump is an idiot disguised as a martyr for the MAGA movement he created and is now leading toward history’s trash heap.

local news

Our crook? Pfffttt!

A letter to the editor that appeared in today’s Dallas Morning News dredges up an old saying that seeks to dismiss crooked politicians’ seedy behavior.

The writer refers to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s behavior since taking office in January 2015. “Paxton may be a crook,” the letter writer suggests, “but he’s our crook.” The writer sought to draw a parallel between Paxton’s shenanigans and those that bedeviled President Nixon in the 1970s, and how the GOP then sought to unify itself behind the wounded pol.

Sigh …

I must ask, though, when does a crooked politician ever seek to benefit his constituents with lawless behavior? Nixon sought to save his hide by covering up his involvement in the Watergate scandal of 1972-74. It didn’t work out well for the president.

Paxton has been alleged — or actually caught — to have done a number of seedy things. They involve marital infidelity, securities fraud, payoffs to political pals, bribery. None of it helps the people who he served as AG. Several highly experienced lawyers blew the whistle on much of that nonsense — and they lost their jobs as a result.

This “our crook” BS reminds me of what they used to say about a crusty ol’ Democrat who represented Southeast Texas in Congress until 1995, when he got voted out in the Contract With America election. They used to say of the late Jack Brooks, that he was a “son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch.” Brooks actually liked that description of himself. But he continued to deliver the goods to the labor union and Black families who supported him no matter what.

The DMN letter writer seems appropriately skeptical of Paxton’s history. However, I consider him a plain ol’ crook.

political news

Paxton didn’t get a mandate in that GOP runoff

Before the MAGA morons who supported Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Republican runoff victory over John Cornyn get too full of themselves, allow me to briefly put a this victory into some perspective.

Yes, the AG scored a decisive victory, beating the U.S. senator by 27 percentage points in the runoff. However, Paxton only tallied about 12,000 more votes in the runoff than he got in the GOP primary.

The runoff turnout fell into the basement compared to the already low primary turnout. That, by itself, is not unusual. Republicans, though, do not appear to be too enthused by someone topping their ticket who is so heavily damaged by political and personal scandal as Paxton.

Paxton’s wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, is divorcing him on “biblical grounds,” which is a sort of shorthand for all extramarital affairs he’s had. His top legal aides blew the whistle on him for alleged unethical behavior. A Collin County grand jury indicted him on charges of securities fraud. Texas Republicans impeached him in the Texas House.

And so, Texas Democrats are licking their chops waiting for the fall campaign to begin. Their Senate candidate, state Rep. James Talarico, is a choir boy compared to the AG.

As for Sen. Cornyn, do you really believe he is going to campaign for the MAGA dipshit who defeated him?

Commentary on politics, current events and life experience