With all the so-called anti-Trump protesters wreaking their havoc, one thinks those rioters might just help Donald Trump getting elected. Perhaps many are anarchists. I just don’t know what people want. I know I don’t want Trump to be president. Jeez Louise!
With apologies to Jimmy Buffett: Trying to reason with hurricane season
What time is it, boys and girls? How the hell should I know. Shut up you old fart! Well, I don’t know if my topic will get any interest. If I were to form a club right now it might be the Pessimists Club. But I would be worried that no one would show up. Same thing with an Apathy Club. I don’t know if anyone would care to join.
To answer my own question, it’s hurricane season. Now the hurricane season officially starts on June 1. But it would be quite a chore trying to explain that to a hurricane breathing down your neck on Memorial Day. The National Hurricane Center is looking at system in the Atlantic that could form into something tropical or sub-tropical during the next few days to northeast of the Bahamas. If something did form it could be carried by steering winds toward areas in northern Florida to the Carolinas.
The chance of development into a tropical or sub-tropical system is about 30 percent, says the NHC. That isn’t a really huge chance. Although having slept through Hurricane Humberto, the Category 1 storm that intensified faster than any other tropical system on record, I found that betting on hurricanes are a losing proposition. I was really kind of bummed I slept through that 2007 storm. Though I am fortunate the storm was much less worse that Rita in 2005 and Ike in 2008.
I pay much more attention these days when hurricane season comes around, or before if there is a developing storm out there. I’m not paranoid. Rather, as folks who are concerned of mugging or other violent acts, I am aware of my surroundings. Anyone in the path of a hurricane needs to take heed. Sure, one might not get strong winds and certainly those far from the coast need not worry about storm surge. But there are more problems. These tropical systems can cause extreme flooding for anyone in the path of the storm remnants. Depending on the climate, a concern of tropical and post-tropical systems can be tornadoes.
I suppose if you live in areas where it seldom rains, hurricanes should not be a worry. But these storms, whether called tornado or cyclone or typhoon or whatever, these are forces of nature. And until man learns to completely control the weather — and let’s hope like hell that doesn’t happen — tropical systems will always remain something to reckon with and respect.
History keeps repeating itself in Jerusalem on the Brazos
You can put lipstick on a bear but it better be knocked out with animal tranquilizers. That is my piss poor attempt at using some old saying a different way. If you get my drift, you might know I am talking about a pig. But I used a bear as a better symbol since the bear is the mascot for the largest Baptist school in the Universe. Yes, I speak of the Baylor Bears.
Two major stories came out of Waco — home of Baylor University — this week. One story was a good attempt by CNN’s Ed Lavendera to show that jack hasn’t happened with the Twin Peaks bikers shooting that happened a year ago this week. I say good attempt because when you have such a case involving so many people and so many lawyers, to say things can become complicated is way overstated. Some nine bikers were killed and nearly two dozen were wounded. The case resulted in nearly 180 arrests, most for engaging in organized criminal conduct. The abnormally slow justice system was shown in the CNN piece to move slower than Interstate 35 on a Baylor game day.
The second major story from Waco is ongoing. It involves a criminal culture among the Baylor football team with several arrests and even more allegations of sexual assault, and perhaps a cover-up either within Baylor, (including the university’s president Good ol’ Ken Starr, who was the special prosecutor in the Clinton-Lewinski affair) or even maybe a cover-up by the Waco Police Department and Baylor, according to some media stories.
I suppose that if these two stories mean anything it is that bad juju is quite frequent down there in the place the 19th century columnist — and no Baylor fan — William Cowper Brann called “Jerusalem on the Brazos.”
Brann was such a disagreeable cuss that he wound up in a shootout with a local Baylor supporter over alleged sexual indiscretions involving housemaids from South America and the Baylor elite. Brann, who preferred to be called by the name of his paper, The Iconoclast, was shot in the chest. He turned around and fired multiple rounds at his assailant, who then fell dead in the door of a local cigar shop. Brann died the next day. As ancient history that it was, the shooting of Brann The Iconoclast, was quite a story way back when as the The Iconoclast, the paper had around 100,000 subscribers.
What happened just outside of Waco in 1993 in which David Koresh and his followers engaged in a gunfight with Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents at Mt. Carmel is more recent history, as was the fiery ending to that saga less than two months later. I know some of the individuals, both Davidians and other parties who were there both at the beginning and the end of the siege.
So now we get to more recent history. It was history that happened this century, but it is still history and likewise carries a lesson that should have been learned, although from the news coming out of Waco today shows that apparentl the lesson was forgotten.
I speak of the scandal involving the men’s basketball team in 2003 in which team member Patrick Dennehy had gone missing only to be later discovered dead. His fellow teammate Carlton Dotson was found guilty in his murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison. The missing player set off the scandal in which then-head Baylor basketball coach Dave Bliss portrayed Dennehy as a drug dealer to hide the fact that Bliss had paid Dennehy and another player under the table after limits had been reached on team scholarships.
I think this commentary I came across today by CBS Senior Sports Writer Jon Solomon puts the whole sordid basketball scandal in better perspective that I can. I happened to be working then in Waco, fortunately I had limited exposure to the story. If one looks back to these stories of the past — both ancient and the more recent one — one might find a common thread throughout was religion, in some form or the other. That’s not to say religion is bad but I would say religion and pride is poor two-some. One might even say it is as terrible an ordeal as is putting lipstick on a fully-conscious bear.
Mr. Trump grow some hide
Much ado about nothing has been made concerning the Donald Trump-N.Y. Times dust-up over the latter’s weekend article painting the presumptive GOP presidential candidate in a misogynistic light. How on earth would the average reader think such a thought, especially since his public feud with Fox News host Megyn Kelly?
I have to say that the two latest stories about Trump, one the story in the Times on his relations with women and the other where Trump presumably calls a reporter claiming to be The Donald’s publicist, are pretty weak as important journalism is concerned.
What these stories and his reactions to these articles do express — again and again — is that Trump has to be the most thin-skinned politician ever. I thought George W. Bush would hold that title for a while, at least in recent times. But no, Trump has Bush Junior beat all to hell.
It is Trump speaking about how he would open up liable laws that should make a Republican think deeply as to how much of the elephant brand Trump rides upon?
Aren’t the folks like the Koch Brothers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the latter which publishes several newspapers across the nation — including one in my neighborhood — supposedly the right’s last bastion for tort reform?
Well those aforementioned entities do not like so-called frivolous lawsuits. Although, it has yet to be determined whether the Koch boys will join behind Mr. Trump in his foolish presidential exercise.
Donald Trump has not been exactly silent over his use of the court system to help his business — be that bankruptcy courts or varied civil lawsuits.
Now surely a self-respecting Republican, considering there is such a creature, would not open themselves to charges of being a hypocrite. But the moniker does not seem to bother GOP members at all.
One charge I do not lodge against our local U.S. Chamber of Commerce tort-reform rags is its journalistic ethics. The paper makes its position known in editorials. But it is usually “just the facts ma’am” when it comes to giving details of lawsuits. When I covered civil suits as a reporter for a “real” newspaper, I did not often stray from what was charged and what was replied in the charging document.
As one who was sued in a fairly well-known story that, luckily, my company at the time paid for and the suit being tossed by a federal judge, I realize how frivolous suits are a pain in the ass and are potentially harmful. Still, lawsuits are part of justice. I feel such cases are an extra level of care for our society.
If we are so unfortunate to elect a meathead like Donald Trump, and yes, if he can call people names then so may I call hi names as well, we must hope that future new justices of our highest courts do not reverse New York Times v. Sullivan nor other important media legal precedents. We ask for such not because people should be called names or have hurtful allegations made against them which are not true. We should ask for such a helpful case so those with no power may defend themselves against the Trumps of the world
Does coffee fuel the separatist Texas nut movement? I hope not.
Today might be a slow news day for Time.com. The website for the long-running news magazine reports today that a screwball amendment for screwy right-wingers who say Texas should secede from the United States is up for a vote in a state GOP convention.
Texas Republicans will vote on the secession measure Friday during the state GOP convention taking place at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas. How appropriate is it that the Texas Republicans are convening in the former Dallas Convention Center? The center was renamed after the former GOP U.S. senator from Texas, who was also state treasurer and legislator as well as a television legal correspondent in Houston and a University of Texas cheerleader.
I didn’t always agree with Hutchison — I did let her use my office bathroom on a RV stop to my little East Texas newspaper during her treasurer candidacy — but I don’t remember hearing really off-the-wall ideas from her like her fellow Texas U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn.
The idea of Texas succeeding from the union is nothing new in the Lone Star State. I suppose one act by Texas military hero, former president of the Republic of Texas and later governor of the state, Sam Houston, which makes him an American patriot as well as a Texas hero was his opposition to Texas leaving the Union during the Civil War. Houston was removed from office and refused a Union army offer to put down the rebellion then quietly retired to his home in Huntsville, Texas. If you happen to pass on the southern outskirts of Huntsville on Interstate 45, either in day or night, you will see the 67-foot-tall statue of this larger than life hero.
Since the United States put the kibosh on states taking off on their very on — with a heavy price to both the Union and the southern confederacy — talks of secession have been just talk.
Most of the recent talk has been fueled by one man, a Daniel Miller who lives about 15 minutes away from me in the city of Nederland, Texas, and someone who does make great use of the internet. But the Texas Nationalist Movement, or TMN, claims to have had a 400 percent jump in membership since the 2012 elections.
Among the reasons why the TMN seek a separate nation in Texas is a government wholly in the state, and “an end to the siphoning of Texans’ hard-earned money by D.C. bureaucrats.” The movement also says that: “Independence is what the people of Texas want.” Well, I suppose I can’t argue with that although the independence is the one that many have sought in coming to the United States.
More than 125,000 people have signed the Change.org petition asking the White House to grant Texas independence. Only 25,000 signatures are needed to elicit a response from the office of the U.S. chief executive.
Jon Carson, director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, responded to the 2012 petition. He said that debate is healthy in our nation of 300 million people and can get noisy, but it shouldn’t tear our nation apart. Carson said the founding fathers created within the Constitution a right to change our nation through the power of the ballot. It didn’t create a right for a portion of the country to walk away from that union.
“Although the founders established a perpetual union, they also provided for a government that is, as President Lincoln would later describe it, “of the people, by the people, and for the people” — all of the people,” Carson wrote. “Participation in, and engagement with, government is the cornerstone of our democracy. And because every American who wants to participate deserves a government that is accessible and responsive, the Obama Administration has created a host of new tools and channels to connect concerned citizens with White House. In fact, one of the most exciting aspects of the We the People platform is a chance to engage directly with our most outspoken critics.”
It is difficult to imagine what makes people seriously believe that life in the United States is so horrible that they would want to set off what would surely be a battle with the federal government, no matter how many “Texas Nationalists” there really are.
I served in my nation’s armed forces during the Vietnam era and the Cold War. By the time I served it wasn’t at all a really “hot” war. Still, the specter of terrorism was lurking around even back then in the mid 1970s. Three Navy Seabee officers were killed by Philippine terrorists while inspecting a road about three months before I enlisted in 1974. Three years later I would spend quite a bit of time near that same site in the Philippines on a ship. Some of that time included petty officer of the watch duty, armed with a .45-caliber pistol at my side. Knowing what had happened and what could happen would give me a scary edge, no matter that it was “peace time.”
Maybe the kind of strong coffee one gets down here in Southeast Texas, itself considered Cajun country, has something to do with the wild ideas like those who seek a separate nation in Texas. I note that the TMN website listed locally manufactured Seaport Coffee, a family owned and operated company in Beaumont, as it the “official fuel of the Texas Nationalist Movement.” Whether Texas Coffee Co., which makes Seaport as well as many different wonderful kinds of spices, knows of its TMN distinction I do not know. What I do know is that the nationalist movement does not speak for Texas nor Texans. A separate Texas nation is just a dream, a joke, and a dream.