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Where's the 'Welcome' sign?

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In the grand scheme of life, this isn’t a big deal to most folks.

But I am wondering: Why doesn’t Amarillo post a “Welcome” sign on either side of the city along Interstate 40?

We just returned from a quick weekend trip to the Metroplex and we noticed something we hadn’t noticed before on all the hundreds of trips we’ve made between here and there — and back again. It is that several of the smaller towns along U.S. 287 have erected scenic gateway entrances. Quanah comes to mind; Wichita Falls does too; same with Childress.

Heck, drive into Canyon from the north and you see a gorgeous gateway featuring a large Old Glory blowing in the breeze.

You drive into Amarillo from the west as you connect from 287 to I-40 and you see a simple sign that reads “Amarillo.” What’s more, it sits on a dirt-and-weed median.

It made me wonder on Sunday as we came back home about why the city doesn’t erect something a bit more, um, welcoming. Why not boast that Amarillo is, “The Gateway to Palo Duro Canyon,” or is the “Capital of the Caprock,” or is the “Hometown of … ” oh, Rick Husband, Syd Charisse, Carolyn “Morticia Addams” Jones, or Ron “TV Tarzan” Ely.

None of it is out there.

Just “Amarillo.”

It reminds me of a similar pet peeve, which is the shabby “landscaping” done at the I-20/I-27 interchange. Thousands of motorists pass through that interchange daily, many of whom are just passing through. Is this the best we can do to show these folks we know how to dress up a major section of interstate highway?

I believe we can do better.

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Benghazi explodes once again

The Sunday news talk shows were all over the Benghazi story this past weekend.

Big surprise, huh?

I didn’t catch all of them, but I did see what I think was one of the better debates on the subject. It occurred on ABC’s “This Week” segment and featured some fiery partisans on both sides arguing their respective cases over what the Obama administration knew about the September 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/05/04/this_week_roundtable_heated_benghazi_investigation_debate.html

It’s pretty good stuff.

Former GOP U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum and radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham argued for the right wing’s version of the story, which is that the White House and/or the State Department knew in advance that the attack on the compound was a terrorist deed and did little or nothing to protect the people inside. Former Obama campaign guru and senior policy wonk David Plouffe and former Obama administration adviser Van Jones argued the opposite view, which is that the administration erred in issuing its initial talking points, but didn’t conspire to keep the truth from the public.

ABC News correspondent Cokie Roberts also was present and while she tended to favor the Plouffe-Jones view, she sought to bring some balance to the discussion.

The U.S. House of Representatives is going to convene a special committee to determine whether the administration deceived the public on purpose. It’ll be led by a tea party guy, Rep. Trey Gowdy, who no doubt has an agenda of his own. He said something over the weekend about having “evidence” of a cover-up. Congressional Democrats are weighing the possibility of sitting this one out, letting Republicans make fools of themselves.

The debate Sunday was lively and often angry — and it provided an apt metaphor for the tone of debate in Washington regarding the Benghazi attack. Republicans want to keep hammering at an old story. Democrats want to refocus on some other things, such as, oh, the improving economy. Neither side is willing to give the other side any leeway.

The talkers on “This Week” followed that script to the letter.

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Some critics are unfair, but not all of them

Peter Beinert, writing for Atlantic Monthly, makes a fascinating case in defense of those who are highly critical of President Obama.

Yes, some of the criticism is race-based … but not all of it, not by a long shot. The article attached here is worth reading.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/radical-republican-opposition-is-not-new/361536/

He takes U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson to task for making some outrageous claims about how Barack Obama has been singled out merely because of his race. Here’s what Beinert writes: “I never saw George Bush treated like this. I never saw Bill Clinton treated like this with such disrespect,” Thompson told a radio show. “That Mitch McConnell would have the audacity to tell the president of the United States … that ‘I don’t care what you come up with we’re going to be against it.’ Now if that’s not a racist statement I don’t know what is.”

Beinert notes that Thompson then said that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas doesn’t like being black, which on its face is a preposterous notion.

Obama’s critics have been harsh. Have they been any more strident than those who went after, say, Preident Bill Clinton? Hardly.

Beinert makes some interesting comparisons between the two presidents’ critics. My all-time “favorite” criticism of Bill Clinton came from the late preacher Jerry Falwell, who sponsored a video called “The Clinton Chronicles” that suggested — no, it actually accused — that Bill and Hillary Clinton orchestrated the murder of long-time friend and adviser Vince Foster, who committed suicide early in the Clinton presidency.

Let’s also point out here that Beinert is a left-leaning journalist who generally is friendly toward policies advocated by progressive politicians.

He is right to calm down those who suggest things such as those brought forward by Rep. Thompson that all criticism of President Obama is race-based and is uniquely harsh.

Bill Clinton surely would disagree.

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75 mph? Hey, no big deal

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My good friend Paige Carruth is going to flip when he gets wind of what I’m about to write next.

I’ve gotten used to driving 75 mph on our highways.

There. It’s off my chest. I feel cleansed already.

Why the change of heart?

Flash back to the mid-1990s. I was writing editorials for the Amarillo Globe-News. Congress had just been taken over by Republicans in that historic Contract With America election. The federal government had enacted since the 1970s a federally mandated 55 mph speed limit on interstate highways. We took the position then that lifting the limit was dangerous on a couple of levels.

The feds had enacted the speed limit to reduce fuel consumption; the Arab oil embargoes of 1973 and 1979 frightened us, remember? Reducing the speed in fact reduced our consumption of fossil fuels. What’s more, it reduced the number of traffic fatalities, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Congress didn’t listen to us. The 1995 Congress removed the federal mandate and gave states the authority to jack up the speed limits. Texas jumped all over it and the 1995 Legislature bumped the speeds up to 70 mph on interstate highways. I was mortified. I said so at the time publicly, in my column; the newspaper editorial policy suggested it was a mistake as well.

Paige — a retired West Texas State University administrator — has never let me forget that I am a slow-poke by nature.

Well, that was true then. It’s not so true now.

I’ve gotten used to the 75 mph speed limit. The state has since boosted its speed to 75 on many highways — interstate freeways and state-run highways.

Allow me this tiny boast: My wife and I today returned from a weekend in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, where we visited our granddaughter — and her parents. We left their home in Allen this afternoon at 1:40; we pulled into our driveway in Amarillo at 7:37 p.m. That’s less than six hours in what usually takes us a lot longer.

The 75 mph speed limit helped us set what we believe is a personal land-speed record.

It helps that one of our two vehicles is a Toyota Prius hybrid that gets stupendously good fuel mileage, which enables us to justify our willingness to press the pedal to the metal. It also helps that the little car — to borrow a phrase used by the late great Hall of Fame baseball pitcher-turned announcer Dizzy Dean — can really “pick ’em up and lay ’em down.”

I feel better already having acknowledged that driving a little faster doesn’t give me the nervous jerks the way it once did.

Let’s not talk about driving 80 mph, which is allowed on some sections of Interstate 10 downstate. And Texas 130, where they allow you to goose it to 85? I’ll leave that stretch of roadway to the fools.

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Dingell the Dinosaur calling it quits

John Dingell is a congressional dinosaur and even might admit it himself.

The longest-serving member of Congress is leaving office at the end of this year and he doesn’t sound like someone who’s going to miss the place it has become.

Instead, he seems to be missing the place it used to be.

Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, is now 87 and has seen lots of change over many decades of service. He has led powerful House of Representatives committees and has put his name on key legislation. He worked to enact laws with the help of Republicans — and it’s that bipartisanship that appears to have taken leave of Capitol Hill.

Dingell expressed understandable frustration with the new climate in an interview with USA Today.

“We’ve accomplished very little,” Dingell said of recent Congresses. “We’ve been engaged in all manner of small, spiteful fights. We have failed to carry out our responsibilities in addressing the big issues the day.”

The culprit? It’s the tea party wing of the “other” party, the Republicans who share power with Democrats on Capitol Hill, according to Dingell.

“A lot of these new ones,” he said of his junior colleagues, “have no awareness … of the need to work together, no awareness of the need for members to be friends off the congressional campus, no need they see in their lives to be responsible in terms of building trust and relationships to let us work together.”

Dingell is far from being alone in wishing for the good old days. But, indeed, it’s the “good old days” that have become the target of the tea party members’ own anger and frustration.

Have they made Congress a better place to serve the people who sent them there? John Dingell doesn’t believe so.

The old curmudgeon is glad to be leaving and will leave the partisan bickering to others.

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Visiting urban oasis

FORT WORTH, Texas — This is what downtown living should look like.

We’re here for a quick visit and are enjoying the sights, sounds and smells of an urban environment that other cities should emulate.

Indeed, Amarillo — where we live — is seeking to do precisely that. On a smaller scale, of course.

Fort Worth has the Bass family to underwrite a lot of projects. Amarillo doesn’t that kind of resource available. Our city is seeking to use Fort Worth’s urban revival as a model. It cannot have picked a better one.

The Trinity River walking/jogging paths are a lovely attraction. Amarillo doesn’t have that kind of natural wonder running through it. We enjoyed a quiet walk this morning before the heat settled in. It was quiet and serene.

Downtown proper has its famous Sundance Square, which is a hopping and happening place at night. Can little old Amarillo replicate that? I have no clue at this point.

City planners are seeking to do what they can with what they have. Fort Worth’s success has become something of a legend among urban planners.

The downtown district bustles once the sun sets. Amarillo’s is busy enough during daylight hours. At night? It’s not happening, at least not yet.

I remain hopeful. We love coming to Fort Worth whenever we can … if only to dream about what our city one day hopes to become.

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Texas pulls in a big 'fish'

Score one for Texas.

Toyota announced that it is moving its U.S. headquarters from California to a site in Plano, just north of Dallas. The move means an estimated 3,000 job are coming to the Metroplex.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is touting the state’s business-friendly environment as a reason for the move. Even though I’ve been critical of the governor’s job-poaching forays into other states, I do commend him — and the state — for creating circumstances that attract high-dollar companies, such as Toyota, to set up shop in the Lone Star State.

http://www.texastribune.org/2014/04/29/texas-touts-lighter-regs-wooing-california-firms/

Texas has no state income tax. It doesn’t place burdensome regulations on businesses. The cost of living in Texas is significantly lower than many other states, such as California. You can get much better housing for the money here than you can in California and that has to be a huge selling point for prospective employers.

However, as the Texas Tribune reports, wages in Texas are lower than they are in other states. We are a “right-to-work” state where unions aren’t particularly strong.

I hasten to note that many of these aspects about doing business in Texas are well-known to Fortune 500 companies throughout the world. Thus, Gov. Perry did not need to venture to California or other so-called “high tax” states to poach jobs.

Still, the news about Toyota is good for Texas and it likely will signal a huge wake-up call to California and other states to do a better job of keeping their own businesses.

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Benghazi is back

Benghazi is the story with no end.

It’s back in the news, thanks to some emails uncovered by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group. The emails purport to buttress the idea that the Obama administration lied about what happened at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012.

They contend the administration engaged in a willful cover-up of the “truth,” whatever it is, about the violence that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/04/benghazi_white_house_emails_did_the_obama_administration_engage_in_a_cover.html

I’ve never believed in a cover-up. I do believe the administration made some big mistakes in trying to report what happened in that chaotic fire fight. They trotted out the U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, to say things about which she wasn’t briefed sufficiently. Rice had a set of talking points that turned out to be incomplete and wrong.

That constitutes a cover-up? Is it a deliberate deception?

No. It was a bungling attempt to get ahead of a still-developing story.

Still, the right-wing mainstream media has sought to keep this story alive and kicking — particularly if the then-secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, decides to run for president in 2016. It’s looking as though she’s going to run and that, all by itself, is reason enough — in the eyes of her critics — to keep hammering away at Benghazi.

Never mind that independent analyses have concluded there was no deliberate lying; they conclude that the U.S. embassy security network failed, but only because officials misjudged the intensity of the fight that was ensuing at the consulate; Clinton herself has taken responsibility for the failure to protect our personnel, but that’s not good enough to satisfy her critics on the far right.

The story will continue to boil and bubble. Were it not for Hillary Clinton’s still-budding presidential candidacy, it would have faded away long ago.

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Waiting for the next big horse race

Horse-racing buffs know that this is Kentucky Derby weekend.

I’m not one of them. I’ve never really gotten into horse racing, let alone betting on the ponies. As for racing’s Triple Crown, well, I don’t care much about that, either.

Except when a certain thing happens. I begin to care about when the same horse wins the first two races of the Triple Crown: the Derby and the Preakness.

Then comes the Belmont Stakes and that is when I get interested. I usually tune in to the final Triple Crown race to see if the Derby and Preakness winner can win the Triple Crown.

The first time I got really interested in this three-horse event occurred in 1973, when Secretariat astounded the world by winning the Belmont Stakes — and the Triple Crown — in utterly astonishing fashion. (See link attached to this blog and you’ll see what I mean.)

Of all the great stories and observations about that race I’ve heard, my favorite came from jockey Ron Turcotte.

As Secretariat galloped into the home stretch, Turcotte has said, he noticed he couldn’t hear any other horse noises; no horses grunting, no hooves pounding … only the sound of his own horse’s hooves pounding along at a record pace.

It was then that Turcotte turned around and saw that Secretariat was running all alone. The second-place horse was about 20 lengths back. I should add that at no point in the race did Turcotte hit his horse with the whip jockeys use to make their beasts run faster.

I’m sure some folks will get all excited about the Kentucky Derby. I’ll get excited if the Derby’s winner pulls off another win at the Preakness.

Then I’ll get excited.

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Dust is tough to mow

A word to the wise is in order as the Texas Panhandle recovers from this latest dirt/wind/mud-rain episode.

When you crank up the lawnmower, be sure you’re wearing some kind of mask.

I did precisely that — cranked up the mower — this morning and learned the lesson the hard way.

Every fourth pass I made with the mower across the lawn was downwind, meaning that the dirt that was embedded in the grass blew into my face. I should have known better than to try this chore without adequate protection.

I got the job done, then had to re-bathe to wash the dirt away.

All this is worth mentioning only to remind us all of how it used to be around here, many decades ago.

The Dust Bowl.

Its very name conjures up hideous memories among those old enough to recall when the sky filled with dirt from horizon to horizon. It blackened the sky. It blotted out the sun.

Those who didn’t flee to calmer locations, usually out west, stayed and fought their way through it. They were still standing when the dirt stopped flying. It took years for the weather to cycle its way back to something approaching “normal” around here. But it did.

When I think about that level of suffering, I don’t feel so bad about having to cope with a little dirt flying out of the grass as I cut it.

Still, a mask would have been nice.

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