Here are excerpts from recent editorials in Texas newspapers:
Waco Tribune-Herald. Dec. 9, 2017.
In his typically thoughtful, insightful way, local philanthropist and former ambassador Lyndon Olson Jr. added to our understanding of Doris Miller during the recent unveiling of a statue honoring the hometown hero’s action under fire in the 1941 attack on the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Olson told of his widowed grandmother, Lillie McLaughlin, living on a Speegleville farm during the Great Depression and how Miller’s father, Conery, without being asked, showed up to help plant cotton for the devastated family. This story of kindness takes on special significance when one remembers racial tensions marking our area during much of the turbulent 20th century. The men who came to the house to help were black. The McLaughlin clan was white.
The story of Doris Miller’s bravery during the Japanese attack - pulling wounded men to safety and manning an anti-aircraft gun in a racially segregated U.S. Navy - has been retold sufficiently to need little elaboration here. Yet his statue and the rest of the Doris Miller Memorial, when erected, should do more than testify of his heroic deeds 76 years ago. They should remind us not only of our shared values but also of challenges that require similar courage in fighting racism and condemning those among us who encourage or ignore it - a message as relevant now as then.
The statue in Bledsoe-Miller Park is well-placed (though it’ll be moved slightly when the memorial is finished). As Olson recalled in his address, late Mayor Mae Jackson, Waco’s first popularly elected black mayor, remarked on the barriers between largely black East Waco on one side of the river, the rest of the city on the other. “That river,” she said of the Brazos, “has been a divider.” And while the Waco Suspension Bridge is a powerful icon of unity for our city, those in the know can’t forget that Miller’s 9-foot-tall statue stands closer to the Washington Avenue Bridge where Sank Majors, an African American, was murdered by local whites in 1905, part of our area’s horrifying lynching heritage. It’s also near Martin Luther King Jr. Park, named for the slain civil rights leader.
The reader who complained because the Dec. 7 Trib “omitted any mention of Pearl Harbor” apparently refused to consider the 1,021-word story about Doris Miller. Indeed, Miller’s example speaks beyond wartime heroism (though Bettie Beard’s column offered a stirring account of his valor aboard the USS West Virginia during the Pearl Harbor attack, as well as noting his perishing with 701 mostly white shipmates aboard the USS Liscome Bay in the 1943 Battle of Makin).
Certainly, the enormous potential of America could be sensed during the ceremony when mostly white former shipmates of the destroyer escort and frigate USS Miller, named for Miller more than 30 years after the Pearl Harbor attack and decommissioned in 1991, reverently took part in the bronze statue’s unveiling Thursday. And while an African-American couple pausing to admire the statue Friday assumed it was a likeness of Waco-born African-American singer Jules Bledsoe, famous for his 1927 rendition of “Ol’ Man River,” Miller’s muscular, reassuring presence along the Brazos reminds us of how far we’ve come in matters of race, even as disturbing new events remind us of how much further we must go.
___
The Dallas Morning News. Dec. 9, 2017.
The Dallas Police Department has been alarmingly tight-lipped with details about the case of Tony Timpa, who died in August 2016 in police custody when officers responding to his 911 call wrestled him down and put a knee in his back as he suffered cardiac arrest.
News that three officers were indicted on misdemeanor deadly misconduct charges is a positive - and unusual - step.
But it underscores how much we still don’t know about this case. Police had denied misconduct but rebuffed requests from Timpa’s mother, her lawyer, The Dallas Morning News and NBC5 for all the records. It took a family lawsuit and a yearlong Dallas Morning News investigation showing discrepancies in reports to get this far.
And that’s at the heart of why this family waited 16 months from the time their son died to see indictments in the case.
We still aren’t sure what happened to Timpa, 32, who was arrested and handcuffed after calling police from the parking lot of a porn store, high on cocaine and panicking. The DPD, citing the ongoing investigation, has refused to release information.
Dallas Police Sgt. Kevin Mansell, Officer Danny Vasquez and a third unidentified officer have been placed on administrative leave, but the DPD isn’t providing details. The body-cam video would shed some light, but officials are refusing to release it.
It’s another example of government efforts to keep public information private.
Records help hold government accountable - to determine whether an arrest was appropriate or tax dollars were being misspent. In this case, a grand jury has decided something went terribly wrong that night during Timpa’s arrest.
It shouldn’t take a federal trial to find out the details.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus need to get moving on appointing members to a joint interim committee to study Texas’ open-government laws. It’s time to get serious about improving public access to government information.
We seem to be moving in the right direction in the Timpa case. His mother has a right to know exactly how he died. It’s heartbreaking that she’s had to fight for more than a year to do so.
___
Beaumont Enterprise. Dec. 11, 2017.
With members of the Texas Legislature earning only $7,200 per year, it’s not surprising that most have outside jobs unless they come from wealthy families. And that’s the way many Texans prefer it, having a House and Senate made up of people who live in the real world and thus can relate to them.
There’s a lot to be said for that model, but it does create one possible problem: Lawmakers who support or oppose bills based on how they will affect their jobs or professions.
This is not an idle concern. A study by the Center for Public Integrity and The Associated Press revealed that more and more state legislators are combining their personal financial gains or losses with the legislation that comes before them - sometimes without fully reporting those conflicts of interest. When public and private interests clash, the taxpayers should not come in second.
Many lawmakers defend the system, saying that it gives them special insight into areas like real estate or medicine that frequently come before state legislatures. And if they use their specialized knowledge to make a good bill better or stop a bad one, that’s fine. But all too often, their familiarity leads to legislation that benefits their bottom line, sometimes at the expense of competitors or other taxpayers.
One state legislator in Iowa made sure that sales taxes would not have to be paid by business that buy certain supplies like saws or cutting fluids. Since he owns a machine shop and welding company, the change saved him a lot of money.
One obvious answer here is a familiar one: disclosure. As long as taxpayers know about potential conflicts of interest like this, they are better able to judge if their state representative or senator made the right decision.
Lawmakers also should not hesitate to recuse themselves from certain issues if they affect their finances too much.
When the Texas Legislature meets again in 2019, issues like this should be studied by the House and Senate ethics committees, and existing safeguards should be strengthened when necessary.
Public service shouldn’t harm lawmakers’ finances, but it shouldn’t enrich them either.
___
Houston Chronicle. Dec. 11, 2017.
We’ve heard this song before, not that we don’t enjoy the tune.
President Donald Trump stood before the nation on Monday and signed a directive ordering NASA to send astronauts to the moon. Consider it a reversal of the Obama administration’s Mars-first plan that, so far, resulted in a single launch of the Orion capsule.
Second verse, same as the first.
The audience watching at home got to see the president make his announcement and shake hands with Houston’s U.S. Rep. John Culberson - a major NASA fan - before darting out the back door.
That’s probably the most action you can expect to get out of “Space Policy Directive 1.”
Rockets may run on liquid hydrogen, but NASA runs on cash. Or as they said in “The Right Stuff:” ’’No bucks, no Buck Rogers.”
At its peak during the moonshot era, the space agency consumed more than 4 percent of the federal budget. Now it hovers around one-half percent. Trump’s budget request from earlier this year would have slashed that even further, and the Senate still hasn’t confirmed his nominee for NASA administrator.
It is a simple budgetary fact that NASA cannot send a manned mission to the moon, let alone Mars, while also maintaining the International Space Station. Until Congress adds more funding, these promises of astronauts’ footprints on lunar soil will be just that - promises.
When Congress does add money to NASA, there’s no guarantee it will be spent on manned missions. Culberson has made it a personal priority to fund an $8 billion series of probes to explore the Jovian moon Europa, which he thinks may harbor alien life. Not a cent of that is likely to be spent at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Sometimes it feels like Houston’s current role as Space City has shifted from making history to preserving history. At this point, it has almost become a tradition for presidents to tout NASA in a hamfisted attempt at grasping a “vision thing” - as Bush 41 put it - after the White House honeymoon starts to fade. Usually that doesn’t happen until after the first year in office.
We’re glad that Trump has put a new focus on NASA, but until funding catches up with the mission, he’s just whistling that same old tune past the launchpad.
___
San Antonio Express-News. Dec. 11, 2017.
Even U.S. military actions off the battlefield protect Americans. This is well known. Less well known is that the military is failing in one key aspect in this regard. It has not been forwarding all its information on criminal convictions of service members - information that would prevent them from buying firearms from sellers required to tap into a federal background check system.
The former airman who recently killed 26 parishioners and wounded 20 others at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs was convicted in 2012 in a military court for assaulting his wife and stepson, fracturing the boy’s skull. He served a year in prison. However, that information was not forwarded, and he was able to buy four guns, including the semi-automatic rifle he used to such deadly effect at the church.
In other words, he was never flagged by the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System when he bought those guns because his name and information had not been entered.
Unfortunately, this was not as infrequent a lapse as one might think. An Express-News article by Sig Christenson, relying on a Pentagon inspector general’s report, explained that the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines all failed to forward all such information.
The services were not submitting all fingerprint cards to the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which uses this to inform the background check database.
The Pentagon, Christenson reported, reviewed 2,502 fingerprint cards for service members convicted and found that 24 percent had not been forwarded. It broke down this way: 14 percent for the Air Force didn’t get forwarded, 28 percent for the Army, and 29 percent for the Navy and Marines.
Of final disposition reports following court-martial convictions - documents also used to inform the background-check system - it was 14 percent for the Air Force, 36 percent for the Navy and Marines, and 41 percent for the Army.
The military says it will fix this. But it pledged to do better after similar disclosures in the past. The inspector general examined fingerprint cards and disposition reports for a two-year period ending Dec. 31.
This is why legislation by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, has merit. It would create penalties for federal agencies that fail to report records to the National Crime Information Center and reward states that do comply. This should include the military.
As we saw in Sutherland Springs, one lapse is one lapse too many.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.