Category: Politics

Last night I came across this blog post in Federal Times. I read Federal Times as well as other Gannett-owned “Army Times” papers including  Army Times and Navy Times. I posted it for a short while on my Facebook page but later decided it belonged here.

The post describes how GOP members want to force deep cuts in the health reform bill that Congress passed. They are talking of forcing the Democrats’ hands by shutting down the government. I made the snide remark about how mature such a move would be.

A friend responded to the article saying something to the effect of what about the $2 trillion the bill is costing? I then figured this would be the place to link the story. I don’t like arguing with my friends on Facebook. I just think shutting down the government means a lot more than an unimaginable figure like $2 bazilliontrillion. It means hardship on several million people and millions more of their family members.The last one ended up costing close to a billion dollars and that was 15 years ago.

I wish people could somehow divide their vision between “government the entity” and “government the people.” There are a lot of good people who work for the federal government, I know some of them. They don’t deserve to be punished because GOP politicians want to play grab-ass with the well being of our country.

The headlines today — parroting all punditocracy — give varying grades to the speech given last evening by President Barack Obama on the end of combat in Iraq and the economy. I thought it was probably one of his best speeches since he was elected. Then I turned on CNN to see how bad everyone thought it was. Yes, CNN and not Fox. I mean, why Fox? I knew what they were going to say.

A so-called “end to combat in Iraq” evokes some very deep feelings inside me. For one thing, I saw a little of that war in the making perhaps up closer than I would have been had I not been a reporter working near former President Gee Dubya Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. That is not to say I would go for spins in the propane-powered pickup truck Bush drove to prove he was a “real Texan.” But I heard a few of the more important words he spoke on Iraq while listening to him in person, or a foot or two away while I was trying to stay upright in a journalistic herd. I say a few important words, not by any means all.

But I witnessed in person a little piece of American history and it was one of the most disgraceful eras in my lifetime. I would say even more so than all the shenanigans with Vietnam by Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and their merry band. The great difference was I was not a child as I was during Vietnam, and one who was truly scared shitless by so much of what I was seeing and experiencing. The Sixties were scary, no doubt. What the war did and did to the millions involved is just too vast to comprehend. Regardless of those pulling the strings, thankfully we had people who served and continue to serve our nation with so much valor and honor.

There was no valid, lawful reason — despite what the U.S. managed to finagle out of the United Nations — for our nation to invade Iraq. I  predicted an end as we’re seeing. I don’t even know if we are really seeing the end. That, even more so than the economic problems, are square on the back of G.W. Bush. Oh, he gave the nation a ventilation mechanism for 9/11 to pile on top of Afghanistan. But the U.S. still looks as if it has no good options upon leaving Iraq completely.

Conservatives are programmed to say, on many occasions, that the “left-wing, liberal” press continue to favor their darling president. But it’s funny because I don’t see it that way. Many who can look at both the left and right wings and tell them apart see something very different. Maybe a lot of the national media lean left. And really, I speak of the punditry class here. Those who are more left than Obama don’t like that the president has been unable to make gay marriage a right throughout the land or in the military, or that his administration has not implemented more “green.”  A lot more than just the left doesn’t like our involvement in Afghanistan at all.

And George W. Bush? He was battered and beaten to a pulp by the mean ol’ liberal press wasn’t he?

Let’s think about that. Bush, probably more president than any in history had the chance along with his vice president and some top aides to be playing harmonicas in a federal prison after both an illegal invasion and for spying upon American citizens. But the mainstream American media just kind of whistled past the graveyard while the Bush gang was digging up bones.

A large majority of Americans, supposedly, are against the Islamic center being built near Ground Zero. Many are really fed up with Obama and the Democrats. Meanwhile, the opposition offers nothing but anger, and retribution and investigations and if they can find a trumped-up charge with which to impeach Obama, just as they did with Clinton before him, you can bet they will. The Republicans in Congress and some of their supporters are a perpetually pissed-off tribe. I’m angry too, but at least I take medication for it.

This post rambles, somewhat, and intentionally so. That is because it is hard to be consistently coherent when you see so much of the World you love crumble around you like the leavings in a box of oatmeal cookies. There really isn’t much to do about it. Well there is, but that would take effort. And, you know, we’re all to busy to make the World a better, safer and saner place, aren’t we?

You go to the lake house for a week and do the normal lake house routine. You fix things. You have a beer. Then you have another. It’s good that you fixed things.

In the morning, you get the boat all ready and  you take off for a round of fishing. You come home, your luck was worse than poor. You take a nap. You get up. The wife has the ribeyes all thawed and you are ready to fire up the old grill. You eat. You sit out on the porch and enjoy the lake sounds, the loud outboard motors, the drunks next door, the loud music from across the lake. It’s time for bed. So much for the first full day. But what about tomorrow?

Well, if the lake where your home is located is Cedar Creek Lake, some 60 miles southeast of Dallas, then you might think of going to catch a performance of the Seven Points City Council. It seems there are always fireworks there, perhaps you might see someone get arrested there or even shot.

Seven Points is a town of 1,334, according to the 2009 U.S. Census estimate. It’s grown somewhat over the years with Cedar Creek, a reservoir built on the Trinity River, being a fishing and recreation haven for both East Texans and those from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It also seems to have a history of the worst that comes out of small town politics.

A political donnybrook of epic proportions, proportionally speaking, erupted in 1997 when then-Mayor Marian Hill was removed from office by the city council for a number of zoning law violations and some matters over purchasing a pager and copying machine. Hill had divorced earlier that year. Keep that in the back of your mind.

Not long after she was removed from office, Hill was prosecuted for a number of the zoning law violations, something that had never or rarely had been done in that town.  Hill later claimed in a lawsuit that her ex-husband, the town’s police chief, zoning official and some other city council members had cooked up a scheme to “run her out of town,” according to an ultimate ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Read it and good luck following it.

I remember reading about all of this and my thoughts returned to Cedar Creek Lake this weekend. A group of my college friends and I got together at some friends’ place near Fort Worth. One of this group of friends had access to a lake house when we were in college, as his parents owned the very pleasant getaway. When one or more of this group of friends or I were there we would generally be the ones making noise, fueled usually by keg beers or playing “quarters” with what kind of “bear in a bottle” that was handy.

This afternoon I decided to look at some newspaper Web sites of towns in the Cedar Creek area and I came across a story in the Cedar Creek Pilot that made me think I was just reading a continuation of the Marian Hill story in some form or fashion.

The extremely thorough and often hilarious news story written by the Pilot’s Art Lawler told of the hijinks of the now former mayor in which the ex official engaged in a tirade in the city council chambers after a quorum for their meeting failed. The failing quorum, caused by three members missing, seems to be a serial occurance there since this made the fourth-straight failed meeting since a new mayor was elected.

Now, just as it takes a program to know the players in the Marian Hill story, one likewise needs to be “read into” this affair before trying to figure just who hates whom and why. The so-called “shouting match” at the council was allegedly at the behest of former mayor Gerald Taylor, after his reported political enemy Mayor Joe Dobbs canceled the meeting.

Taylor was arrested in December 2009 on charges he cashed personal checks using municipal court funds. The city judge, Monica Corker,  had been arrested the month before on charges she helped Taylor cash the checks.

As for the source of animosity between Taylor and Dobbs, I’m not sure. Dobbs is openly gay and he says that Taylor and others have a vendetta against him. Dobbs was also fire chief and demoted Taylor from assistant fire chief to firefighter after ethical concerns, he said in an article on the Dallas Voice Web site, the DF-W area’s leading gay-lesbian newspaper. Taylor reportedly responded to  Dobbs with a rather colorful homophobic epithet.

Dobbs say some in Seven Points are “playing games with him,” the article, written by David Webb, said. While that remains a distinct possibility just because of the way certain people are wired, it also is possible that Dobbs is just a player himself in what seems to be continual political theater at Seven Points. It seems a little bit like old time soap opera fare. Watch and then tune back in sometime 20 years later and you catch up but everything seems pretty much the same. That is a lot like the way it is in Seven Points. The more things change, the more they the remain the same old thing.

This is shaping up to be one of the nuttiest mid-term elections on record. Here in Texas you have Republicans possibly funding the Green Party. In Nevada, even a lot of Democrats would love to have just about anyone but Harry Reid back in the Senate, with the possible exception of that anyone being GOP candidate Sharron Angle. Reid and Angle are currently squabbling over the Senate Majority Leader’s campaign using snippets from previous Angle Web sites when she was going more toward the “Tea Party Look.” Hey, that Prohibition thing worked well didn’t it Sharron, and you think we should try it again along with continuing to criminalize pot?

Best of all in the race for the kookiest candidate contest has got to be Al Greene. No, not the smooth-voiced purveyor of soul and R & B, the Rev. Al Green, who gave us classics such as “Take Me to the River” and “Love and Happiness.”

No, instead, we’re talking Alvin Green, the 32-year-old unemployed veteran who came out of nowhere to win the South Carolina Democratic primary election for the U.S. Senate. Some Democrats have suspected that Green was a plant by GOP for some odious reason or the other. That would be intriguing enough, given Green’s persona is one of having been put into his present situation as some kind of Dave Chappelle character. But the topper is that Green believes he can make jobs for those in South Carolina who go work making Alvin Green, the action figure. You heard me. Action Figure Alvin Green, come to save the day in South Carolina!

I can just see those percentages of the unemployed falling like a Rocky Mountain avalanche. And only an hour ago I was wondering what the hell was there to write about.