International news

Good job, Philae lander

As an American baby boomer who came of age during the Space Race, I am in absolute awe of the picture I saw this morning.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/photo/philae-probe-sends-back-first-photo-surface-comet-n247586

The European Space Agency’s comet lander, Philae, has sent back the first image from Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Holy cow!

That a mechanical device could be launched from Earth, travel 10 years through deep space and then land on a comet, for crying out loud, is enough of a scientific marvel all by itself.

Now we’re getting pictures that are being sent more than 300 million miles from Earth. What’s more, the clarity is astounding beyond measure.

I saw the news report earlier this week when Philae landed on the comet and watched space agency engineers cheering, back-slapping and hugging each other. It reminded me of the reaction at NASA when, for instance, the late Neil Armstrong told the world: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

Oh, those were the days.

I’m glad the ESA has accomplished this monumental feat. I’m delighted to see the pictures. A part of me, though, is a bit envious of the spectacular success that someone else has just achieved.

 

 

Uncategorized

Confiscate cell phones before giving thanks?

A conversation occurred this morning that has gotten my wheels to start spinning.

Some readers of this blog likely won’t endorse this idea, but a friend of ours told us of a possible plan to confiscate the cell phones of everyone who’s coming to her home for Thanksgiving dinner.

She’s planning to have a houseful over for a day of fellowship and food. So are we.

Should the fellowship include folks sitting throughout the house sending text messages to friends in other places? I think not.

Dare I set up a drop box or a wicker basket at the front door when everyone arrives for the Thanksgiving holiday? I’m not saying I’ll do so, but the idea does intrigue me.

Can I exercise my own self-control with my very own cellular telephone? My wife thinks I’m as guilty as the teenager who cannot put his or her device away.

As we were talking to our friend, my wife recalled our recent visit to Oklahoma City, where we attended a Friday night concert at a mega-church at the north end of the city. “It was a gospel concert,” my wife said to our friend, “so many of the folks there were our age — or older.” She noted how, during an intermission, she peered from the balcony where we were sitting and noticed “everyone” looking down at cell phones or texting devices. “You could tell because they were all lit up,” my wife said.

Is this the way to spend a Thanksgiving holiday with friends and family?

Probably not.

Will I demand that everyone turn in their cell phones when they arrive?

It’s highly doubtful. Heck, I’m not at all confident of being able to curb my own cell phone habit.

 

 

 

national news, political news

Slow down just a bit on immigration

Immigration policy needs to be reformed.

Democrats favor reform, as do reasonable Republicans. The outliers appear to be the tea party wing of the GOP, which appears to be calling the shots within the Republican caucus.

The question now is whether President Obama will take executive action to institute reforms during the lame-duck session of Congress. As much as the tea party — aka nut case — wing of the GOP angers me, I think the president should wait just a while longer before taking unilateral action.

Obama ‘nearing a final decision’ on immigration

Fox News reports Obama might take action next week.

It is sure to enrage Republicans, who already are loaded for bear in the wake of their stunning election victories on Nov. 4.

Obama is said to be considering a 10-point plan that includes deferment of deportation for 4.5 million illegal immigrants; it also includes a pay increase for Immigration and Naturalization Service employees.

Here’s a thought: Wait for the new Congress to take office; enlist some congressional allies to put forward your legislative proposals; debate it with Congress; let the Republicans have their say along with Democrats.

Then, if nothing gets done, drop the executive action hammer.

This is a fight worth waging … but when the time is right.

 

local news, medical news

R.I.P., Jim Simms

Sad news broke today in Amarillo.

Jim Simms has died at the age of 73. He’d suffered from a degenerative lung disease that, as I understood it, was similar to cystic fibrosis. He struggled with an oxygen tank over the past several years.

The sadness comes because the city has lost a serious public servant, someone who fought hard on behalf of what he thought was right the city he loved.

Jim was a friend. He was as energetic a public servant as any I’ve ever known over more than three decades as a journalist. His enthusiasm was boundless.

I made his acquaintance during my first year in Amarillo. I arrived in early 1995 and a serious debate was ginning up about the potential sale of Northwest Texas Hospital, which was owned by Amarillo taxpayers and managed by the Amarillo Hospital District; Jim Simms served on that hospital board.

The AHD put the hospital up for sale and then accepted sealed bids from companies seeking to run the hospital. The district eventually accepted a bid from Universal Health Systems and then put a non-binding referendum up for a vote in 1996 that asked: Should the city sell NWTH? The vote came in decisively in favor of the sale.

Simms became one of the key voices promoting the sale.  That’s when I got to know about his tenacity and vigor.

He’d served on the Amarillo school district board of trustees and since 2005 had served on the Amarillo City Council.

Jim enjoyed a successful business career and then sought to give back to the community. The city’s newspaper named him its Man of the Year.

Simms wasn’t always genteel in his approach to debating public policy, but he surely meant what he said.

You knew where he stood and that, I submit, is a testament to this man’s honesty.

The city has suffered a big loss.

 

national news, political news

Huckabee to get boot from Fox?

What might conservative media talking heads say if former Vice President Al Gore had an on-air contract with MSNBC and then began talking out loud about a possible run for the presidency of the United States?

They would demand the network get Gore off the air. And they would be correct.

Well, a leading conservative voice on the Fox News Channel is considering yet another presidential campaign bid.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is the Fox talking head. To its credit, Fox is considering yanking its contract with Huckabee.

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/223921-fox-takes-serious-look-at-huckabees-political-activity

The network should move quickly. Get the ex-governor off the air and let him proceed with his pre-presidential campaign planning without benefiting from the exposure he gets from his cable news network talk show.

Fox has had this dance with other politicians-turned-contributors. Former U.S. Rep. and House Speaker Newt Gingrich once had a Fox gig. Then he ran for president in 2012 and Fox let him go. Same for ex-U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, another contributor who ran for president two years ago.

It’s one thing to have has-been pols, such as former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, on the payroll. She won’t seek national political office again — I hope.

But these returning politicians present another problem for a network seeking to maintain its so-called and highly debatable “fair and balanced” reputation.

Let’s quit the charade, Fox execs. Cut the governor loose. Surely you can persuade Sarah “Barracuda” Palin to fill the void.

 

 

political news, State news

Davis's campaign in shambles?

Now we know what happened to Wendy Davis’s campaign for Texas governor.

She veered too far to the left, as if there’s really a “middle ground” among Texas voters.

The Texas Tribune is reporting that some internal memos within the Democratic nominee’s campaign for governor reveal a campaign in disarray. It was disorganized, not unified on the message it intended for the candidate to give. In general, it was doomed almost from the get-go.

http://www.texastribune.org/2014/11/12/internal-memos-detail-davis-campaign-dysfunction/

This is news?

Gov.-elect Greg Abbott was the prohibitive favorite the moment he won the Republican primary in March.

Davis actually needed for Abbott to either drool on his shirt during a televised debate or launch into an f-bomb tirade against something his opponent said.

Well, none of that happened.

Davis’s campaign had the misfortune of running under the Democratic banner in a strong Republican year across the nation, let alone in GOP-heavy Texas. As the Tribune’s Jay Root reports: “Given the national wave that swamped Democrats around the country, including in governor races that Republicans won in traditionally blue states such as Maryland and Massachusetts, it’s highly unlikely that any political strategy would have ushered Davis into the Texas Governor’s Mansion.”

Still, the memos reveal some serious dysfunction among the Davis campaign’s brass. As Root reports: “The warnings are contained in two internal communications obtained by The Texas Tribune and written at the beginning of the year by longtime Democratic operatives Peter Cari and Maura Dougherty.

“’The campaign is in disarray and is in danger of being embarrassed,’ Cari and Dougherty wrote in a lengthy memorandum on Jan. 6. ‘The level of dysfunction was understandable in July and August, when we had no infrastructure in place — but it doesn’t seem to be getting better.’”

Meanwhile, the Abbott-Republican “ground game” kicked into high gear.

The lesson for future Democratic candidates? Try like the dickens to stake out some middle ground, plant yourself firmly on it and stick with a structured plan of attack.

 

Sports news

Another poll determines playoff

I’m trying to clear my head over this college football playoff poll business.

The NCAA decided to create a four-team playoff at the end of the regular season. Check. I got that part.

The governing agency I guess had grown weary of polls determining the top two teams in the country and the criticism the final pairing drew — usually from loyalists of other college teams left out of the Big Game.

So the NCAA came up with the playoff system.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/ncaafb/college-football-playoff-rankings-oregon-over-fsu-sends-message/ar-AA7G4Is

But then had to wrestle with determining how to find the top four teams. Who picks them? It’s not a poll exactly. The selection comes from a committee of experts.

OK, now for full disclosure.

I kind of have a dog in this hunt. I’m a native of Oregon and the University of Oregon Ducks currently are rated the No. 2 team in the playoff hunt. They moved ahead of Florida State this week on the basis of their overall play against other ranked teams and the fact that the Ducks beat a very good Utah Utes team in Salt Lake City.

This playoff business, though, has me biting my fingernails each week.

Who’ll get the top nod? Who will the panel think did the best over the previous week? Can the panel of experts actually get it wrong and overlook a team that no one is seeing?

What happens from now until the end of the season? Well, your favorite team — whichever it is — has to win the rest of the way. That includes the Oregon Ducks.

Then comes the subjective analysis from the panel of experts — coaches, ex-coaches, ex-players, athletic directors, etc. — on who should be seeded in what order.

I’ll say it right now: Fans, alumni and boosters of whichever team finishes the regular season rated No. 5 in this poll of experts are going to raise a ruckus royale.

Some things, therefore, never change.

International news

No, Mr. President, we aren't safer

I’d like to take issue with former President George W. Bush about whether we’re safer because we invaded Iraq in 2003.

He says we are. I contend we are not.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/12/george-bush-saddam-hussein-iraq-war_n_6146280.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000013

The ex-president told National Public Radio that the world might have had a nuclear Iraq had Saddam Hussein been allowed to stay in power. Is that to be believed in its entirety? It stands as the Mother of All Hypotheticals.

One of the pretexts for going to war was that Saddam was building a nuclear arsenal. When we arrived, we found zero evidence of it, just as we found none of the weapons of mass destruction that Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell insisted were there.

We weren’t greeted as “liberators,” as Cheney had predicted. The nation erupted into violence — against Americans and against the government we helped install.

More than a decade later, and after nearly 5,000 Americans died in battle, the nation is now falling apart because of the sectarian violence that never really was extinguished.

And the former president now blames his successor, Barack Obama, for the rise of the Islamic State because we didn’t leave enough troops in the field to tamp down the terrorist threat.

I contend once again that the world isn’t safer because we invaded a sovereign country, overthrew a sovereign leader — yes, he was a very bad man — and built a nation essentially from scratch.

U.S. policy instead created a breeding ground for the kind of violence we’re now seeing because we believed a society with no history of democratic rule was able to understand fully the immensely difficult task of creating and maintaining freedom.

Are we safer because of this monumental blunder? Hardly.

 

 

environmental news, International news, political news

Shocking! GOP opposes U.S.-China climate deal

Does it surprise anyone at all that congressional Republicans would be highly critical of a deal struck this week between the United States and China to cut carbon gases over the next couple of decades?

I didn’t think so.

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, the incoming chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, wasted little time in calling the pact a “non-binding charade.”

http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/223823-inhofe-us-china-climate-pact-a-non-binding-charade

And the deal is … ?

President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao agreed the nations should cut carbon emissions by as much as 30 percent by 2030. Inhofe — one of the Senate’s premier climate change deniers — said China will continue to build coal-fired power plants and has “no known reserves” of natural gas on which to rely.

He calls the deal a fraud.

Inhofe also says the results of the mid-term elections repudiated the president’s policy agenda on such issues as climate change and that, by golly, he’s going to roll those policies back once he becomes chairman of the Senate environment panel.

I’ll add as an aside that there’s a certain irony in handing over the chairmanship of a key congressional environmental committee to someone who keeps dismissing the notion that Earth’s climate is changing and that there just might be a human cause to much of the warming that’s occurring — the current bitter cold snap that’s gripped much of the nation notwithstanding.

Obama said this in announcing the agreement in Beijing: “As the world’s two largest economies, energy consumers and emitters of greenhouse gases, we have a special responsibility to lead the global effort against climate change.”

And we have this, then, from House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy: “The president appears to be undeterred by the American people’s clear repudiation of his policies of more regulations and higher energy costs.”

Higher energy costs? McCarthy needs to ponder the ongoing trend in fossil fuel prices. They’ve gone down, Mr. Majority Leader.

I get that China doesn’t engender a lot of trust among many Americans. Count me as one who is skeptical of Beijing’s commitment to do what it promises to do.

At least we’ve got them on the record to cut carbon gases. Let’s hold them to that pledge.

 

local news

City embarks on new hiring course

Sometimes it takes an embarrassment to shame a public entity into making improvements in the way it hires key administrative personnel.

Amarillo has been embarrassed by controversy surrounding its Animal Control Shelter.

Its top two administrators — director Mike McGee and assistant director Shannon Barlow — “retired” from the city after allegations surfaced about the manner in which unwanted pets were being euthanized. The city launched a top-to-bottom review of those procedures, enacted some changes and then set out looking for a new administrator to lead the newly named department.

This week two finalists met city staff and, more importantly, were introduced to the public. They are Paul O’Neill of Midland and Richard Havens of Hutchinson, Kan.

The hiring process more or less mirrors the way West Texas A&M University hires its campus presidents. It’s a healthy process that enables the public to size up applicants for a key publicly funded position. It gives the public a chance to buy in to the individuals being considered.

So it is with Amarillo’s new animal control director.

You know, it sounds almost like the kind of vetting process the city could employ when hiring all its department heads.

The city conducted a national search and will choose one of two individuals. The hire will be made by City Manager Jarrett Atkinson.

Let’s hope everyone who gets face time with the candidates is allowed to express his or her opinion of them, so that the city manager can make an informed choice.

The city needs no more embarrassment.

 

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