Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 112, No. 219, Ed. 1 Tuesday, March 8, 2016 Page: 3 of 16
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STATE/NATIONAL
3A
Denton Record-Chronicle
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
GOP establishment fears loss of standing
T
#
pled with a divide between party
leaders and grass-roots support-
ers. Recent presidential elec-
tions papered over the fissures
rather than resolved them, with
Republicans sending centrist
candidates John McCain and
Mitt Romney into the general
election even as the GOP elec-
torate became more conserva-
tive.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg an-
nounced Monday that he would
not take that step. He concluded
that doing so could make it easi-
er for Trump or Cruz to win the
presidency.
“That is not a risk I can take
in good conscience,” Bloomberg
said in an online post.
Rubio, of Florida, and Kas-
ich, of Ohio, have one last
chance to emerge as viable alter-
natives. Their home states vote
on March 15 and offer winner-
take-all caches of delegates that
could revive sagging candida-
cies.
By Julie Pace
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Republi-
can leaders in Washington have
spent years casting tea party al-
lies and hardliners in Congress
as merely a restive minority, a
fringe element to be tolerated.
Now, with Donald Trump
and Ted Cruz rising to the top of
the 2016 GOP presidential pri-
mary, those party leaders are
confronting the possibility that
they may be the outliers.
One by one, Washington’s fa-
vored candidates have dropped
out of the White House race.
Those who are left — Marco Ru-
bio and John Kasich — face long
odds and sudden-death prima-
ries in their home states next
V
&
V
\
r.
Leaders expected the 2016
election to follow the same pat-
tern. Money flowed toward for-
mer Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the
son and brother of presidents,
who seemed to embody the spir-
it of inclusiveness GOP leaders
called for after Romney’s stag-
gering lack of success with mi-
nority voters in 2012. Even when
Trump shook up the race last
summer, more traditional Re-
publicans confidently predicted
his appeal would be short-lived.
But Trump has maintained
his grip on the GOP field, with
Cruz emerging as his strongest
competitor. As establishment fa-
vorites like Bush have dropped
out, Trump and Cruz’s share of
the vote has increased. In a di-
verse array of states, from Maine
to Georgia to Nevada, they’ve
carried more than 60 percent.
i
I
p.
Rubio does not plan to leave
Florida until after next week’s
primary. Campaign officials
concede it will be virtually im-
possible to stay in the race with-
out a home-state win, but have
expressed confidence voters will
move toward him as primary
day draws closers.
But with Florida’s easy access
to absentee and early voting,
more than 571,000 Republicans
have already cast their ballots.
With about 2 million people
projected to vote, that’s at least
one in four Florida GOP voters
who can’t be persuaded to
change their minds.
A
Joe Jaszewski/ldaho Statesman/AP
Republican candidate for president Sen. Ted Cruz greets supporters after speaking at a rally
on the campus of Boise State University in Boise, Idaho, on Saturday.
week. In private conversations
and public newspaper editorials,
talk of a historic splintering of
the GOP centers on the prospect
of the establishment, not the in-
surgents, dissolving or breaking
away.
“It’s a weird election year,”
said Trent Lott, the former Mis-
sissippi senator who is backing
Kasich. “Depending on how this
election turns out, the party may
be different.”
To some Republicans, that
would be welcome.
“For the party to fix itself, you
need to destroy the establish-
ment lane,” said Michael Need-
ham, head of Heritage Action, a
conservative advocacy group
that has pushed for ideological
purity among GOP elected offi-
cials. “The party that we’ll see 10
years from now is going to share
a lot of Trump’s willingness to
speak truth to power, to not be
cowed by political correctness.”
Trump’s rise in particular has
sparked discussions among
Washington Republicans about
blocking the real estate mogul in
a contested convention or per-
haps rallying around a third-
party candidate who could keep
him from the White House.
After flirting with an inde-
pendent run, New York City
“Something important is
ending. It is hard to believe what
replaces it will be better,” Peggy
Noonan, a speechwriter for
Ronald Reagan, wrote in a Wall
Street Journal column.
Republicans have long grap-
path shapes up
Trump’s victory
Studies: Weight
not whole story
By Nicholas Riccardi
Associated Press
DENVER — Should he win
the Republican nomination,
Donald Trump’s most plausible
path to victory in the general
election would be a GOP map
unlike any in years. He’d be rely-
ing on working class, largely
white voters in states that have
long been Democratic bastions
in presidential contests, from
Maine to Pennsylvania to Michi-
gan.
obesity. Someone who is 5
feet, 9 inches would hit that
obesity threshold at 203
pounds.
But it’s not a perfect
measure
Some people have a high
BMI because they’re more
muscular. More common are
people who harbor too little
muscle and too much body fat
even if their BMI is in the nor-
mal range.
Body composition shifts
as we age, with the proportion
of muscle decreasing and the
proportion of body fat in-
creasing. That slows metabo-
lism, making it easier to put
on pounds in middle age even
if people haven’t changed
how they eat or how much
they exercise.
Fitness counts
A high BMI is one of the
biggest risk factors for Type 2
diabetes. But a second study
reported in Annals Monday
suggests people can still be at
risk if they’re skinny but not
physically fit.
Low muscle strength and
low aerobic fitness each were
associated with an increased
diabetes risk — regardless of
whether the men were nor-
mal weight or overweight.
By Lauran Neergaard
AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON - The
bathroom scale may show a
good number but how much
of that weight is fat, not mus-
cle? New studies are adding
to the evidence that the scale
doesn’t always tell the whole
story when it comes to
weight-related health risks.
Keeping body fat low is
more important for healthy
aging than a low overall
weight, researchers reported
Monday in the journal An-
nals of Internal Medicine. A
separate study found young
people who aren’t physically
fit are at greater risk of devel-
oping Type 2 diabetes later in
life even if their weight is
healthy.
Here are some things to
To make that work he’d have
to thread a narrow needle — not
only holding on to those core
supporters but also softening
rhetoric that has alienated black
and Latino voters and calming
those in the GOP who vow to
never vote for him.
<y
V
_ T
Nam Y. Huh/AP
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a rally at Wexford County
Civic Center on Friday in Cadillac, Mich.
It could be tricky, but the past
eight months have taught politi-
cal professionals in both parties
not to underestimate the man.
“He attracts a different kind
of voter,” said GOP pollster
Frank Luntz. “It’s a completely
different equation.”
Trump has signaled he’s al-
ready thinking about the general
election, bragging that “we’ve
actually expanded the Republi-
can Party” and slamming Hilla-
ry Clinton as part of the political
establishment that’s to blame for
the sour economy.
“She’s been there for so long,”
Trump said after notching seven
victories on Super Tuesday in
states as diverse as Massachu-
setts and Alabama. “I mean, if
she hasn’t straightened it out by
now, she’s not going to straight-
en it out in the next four years.”
Trump has dominated a ma-
jority of Republican primaries
by combining his celebrity and
can-do demeanor with a mes-
sage that once was off-limits in
both parties — a full-throated
demand to restrict both trade
and immigration. That’s now a
potent mix for voters from any
party who’ve seen jobs vanish
and wages stagnate in an in-
creasingly globalized economy.
“Immigration and trade pol-
icy changes the winners and los-
ers, and the people who are go-
ing to be in play are the ones who
are the losers in that process,”
said Roy Beck of Numbers USA,
which advocates limiting immi-
gration. “This has the potential
to turn out a lot of voters.”
Trump has boasted that he
could win even Democratic
strongholds like his home state
of New York. Analysts say that’s
unlikely, and he may face a
tough climb in more diverse or
well-educated states like Colora-
do, Florida and Virginia that
have traditionally been presi-
dential battlegrounds.
Instead, Trump may best ap-
peal to the Rust Belt, from Penn-
sylvania through Wisconsin, an
area that’s been a bedrock of
Democratic presidential victo-
ries but is reeling from job losses
and still struggling to recover
from the recession.
“The path for Trump is
through the Rust Belt,” said Si-
mon Rosenberg of the New
Democrat Network, a center-
left group in Washington that
studies the electorate. “It doesn’t
mean it can’t get done, but he
will have to do things that no one
has ever done as a Republican.”
Trump will also have to con-
tend with basic mathematical
realities of an electorate that has
been favoring Democrats as it’s
become increasingly diverse.
know:
Isn’t BMI important?
Yes. Body mass index, or
BMI, is a measure of a per-
son’s weight compared to
their height. For many peo-
ple, that’s plenty of evidence
to tell if they’re overweight or
obese and thus at increased
risk of heart disease, diabetes
and premature death.
Generally, a BMI of 25 and
above indicates overweight,
while 30 and above indicates
Volunteers help to track bad weather in Texas
In the late afternoon of May
27, 1997, a massive storm was
bearing down on Austin. Clarke,
at the time working for a non-
profit for property tax profes-
sionals, was the only person still
in the office. When she finally
decided to head home, “the sky
behind me was just black.”
She raced down U.S. 183 to
her Southeast Austin home,
where she hid in the bathtub
with her cats. A few days later,
she and her boyfriend drove
through Jarrell, a town of just
more than 1,300 residents that
had been ripped apart during
the storm by a tornado, leaving
27 dead. A whole subdivision
was simply gone.
“There was mulch every-
where,” Clarke said. “The trees
had just been mulched.”
That tornado, she said, made
nature’s power clear to her. It’s
the kind of phenomenon she
mentions when making a dis-
tinction between what she does
and what she does not do.
“A storm chaser is someone
who goes on a mission to find a
tornado,” Clarke said. ‘A storm
spotter could be someone going
out in their backyard and
looking up. I have no desire to
see a tornado. I hope I never see
one.”
thusiasts earn basic certification
in storm spotting — both what
to look for and how to stay safe
while doing it.
The conference was attended
mostly by ham radio operators
and public safety employees
(current and retired) — the peo-
ple meteorologists long relied
upon for ground truth. Clarke
loved it, she said. She set up a
Twitter handle — @atxwxgirl,
of course — and began sending
out weather photos and reports.
In August, weather service
officials held a meeting with
some of the area’s most prolific
and credible weather enthusi-
asts.
sourcing. But sorting all that in-
formation can be difficult —
particularly in the midst of a di-
saster like a flood or fire — and
misinformation tends to spread
faster than officials can correct
By Martin Toohey
Austin American-Statesman
AUSTIN
—
Tricia Clarke
stood on a Lakeway hilltop,
winds threatening to snatch the
ball cap from her head, and
pointed across miles of rolling,
scrub-covered limestone coun-
tryside, past the distant blue line
of Lake Travis, to a spot nearly
55 miles away.
That’s where one of the re-
gion’s main Doppler radars sits
at Fort Hood. Another, at the
National Weather Service’s New
it.
One of the weather service’s
ideas is to rely on small teams of
volunteers like Clarke and har-
ness the enthusiasm of her fel-
low weather geeks. The teams
would help the professionals
gather reliable information and
release it to the public. If the ap-
proach works, it may be expan-
ded.
Braunfels office, is 46 miles
away in the opposite direction.
Radar, Clarke said, accomplish-
es a lot, but “radar doesn’t pick
up everything close to the
ground.
David Minton/DRC file photo
Crepuscular rays shine out from a break in the clouds after
heavy rains and thunderstorms passed over Denton County
on Oct. 2, 2014.
‘We’re trying to utilize the in-
terest of people,” said Paul Yura,
who directs public outreach for
the San Antonio/Austin branch
of the weather service. “The
more ground-truth reports we
can get and the more effectively
we can get word out to the pub-
lic, the better.”
When Clarke was growing
up in the Dallas suburb of Gar-
land, one of the main ways of
getting word out was the torna-
do sirens, which she said were
“the most terrifying sound imag-
inable.”
Her interest in weather was
strong enough that as an adult,
co-workers called her “weather
girl.” The Doppler channel pro-
vided the soundtrack to her
By December, three of them
had decided to form a team, cre-
ating the TravisCountySeve-
reWx Twitter feed.
In January the weather ser-
vice named them “weather-
ready national ambassadors”
and designated them the state’s
third “virtual operations support
team.” They work directly with
the weather service.
Under such arrangements,
weather enthusiasts get to
scratch an itch, while the weath-
er service essentially gets free
additional resources, said Mi-
chael Lyttle, a team member
who said he was “raised in a fam-
ily of weather nuts” and carried
the interest into adulthood.
“That,” she said, “is where
spotters like me come in.”
The Austin American-
can get an untrained person
killed. But they say there are
many other ways to help. The
city of Austin and the Lower
Colorado River Authority have
websites that compile data peo-
ple send from their phone after
checking a backyard rain gauge.
The curious can check rainfall
patterns, but more importantly
it allows people to check if floods
are imminent and helps public
officials prepare responses.
From her favorite hilltop — a
short drive from her home,
where she lives with her hus-
band and 6-year-old son —
Clarke can see cloud formations
miles away. To people savvy to
storms, clouds have subtle tells
about what is coming. The pret-
tier and more latticed the pat-
terns in a thundercloud, the
more violent it is likely to be, for
example.
“Clouds fascinate me,” Clarke
said. “I think they’re so beautiful.
They’re pieces of artwork, I
think.”
Statesman reports Clarke is
part of an experiment the Na-
tional Weather Service is trying
in Central Texas and a few other
places around the country as it
adjusts to the age of social me-
dia. The age is both a blessing
and a curse: Weather authorities
have more ways than ever to ac-
quire the “ground truth” that is
invaluable in the still-young sci-
ence of forecasting.
Public safety agencies, too,
are experimenting with ways to
leverage the potential of crowd-
She does not remember how
she heard about the 2012 Sky-
wam conference. Probably
through Facebook, she guesses.
The annual Austin conference is
one of the nation’s largest of its
kind, a place where weather en-
Public officials discourage
the sort of storm chasing that
mornmgs.
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Parks, Scott K. Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 112, No. 219, Ed. 1 Tuesday, March 8, 2016, newspaper, March 8, 2016; Denton, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1127422/m1/3/?q=technical+manual: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .