Uncategorized

A word about Sabol

Leave a comment

Readers of this blog have been patient and receptive to my tales about Toby the Puppy, the pooch who was a key family member for nine years.

I lost him to cancer on Dec. 1, 2023, an event that continues to fill me with sadness.

However, upon returning from vacation September, I had the good fortune to meet another Chihuahua mix puppy named Sabol. We fell in love with each other immediately. She joined the family and — as God is my witness — she has exhibited many of the traits that endeared me to Toby.

Sabol is smart. She is so very affectionate. She is a road warrior in the pickup. When it’s bedtime, she responds to the words “It’s bedtime” by running straight to her bed. 

Whereas Toby never got overweight, Sabol joined us with a pudgy midriff. I have put her on a strict meal regimen: A half-cup of kibble and half a Milk Bone in the morning; another half-cup of food and the other Milk Bone half in the afternoon. The result of her eating plan is quite encouraging: she has lost four pounds since September. Sabol has a way to go but she is making exceptional progress. What’s more she has developed a lively spring in her step.

That’s the latest about my new pooch. I will close with this declaration: I must be the luckiest puppy parent imaginable, having hit home runs with two puppies in a row.

Joe Biden, military news

Putin threatens to go MAD

Leave a comment

Vladimir Putin needs no explanation of what used to pass as a nuclear deterrence policy followed by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The Russian dictator reportedly is angry that President Biden has given Ukraine permission to use long-range missiles to strike deeply into Russia as it seeks to defend itself against Putin’s immoral and illegal invasion of its sovereign neighbor.

What is the Russian goon/thug/madman/tyrant/despot threatening to do? He is threatening to use “tactical nuclear weapons” against Ukrainian forces.

Let’s see. How do I say this tactfully? Oh, hell. I can’t.

It would be a mistake of catastrophic proportions!

You see, U.S. and Soviet nuclear deterrence was based on a policy of “mutually assured destruction.” Putin, who once led the Soviet system of spooks, knows the policy as well as any Russian alive today.

Using tactical nukes in the largest ground war in Europe since World War II well could produce a response from NATO — and the United States — that could destroy Russia.

Therefore, I am hesitant to buy fully into the notion that Vladimir Putin has gone MAD.

Then again, Putin did invade Ukraine … and his forces are getting their butts kicked in the field of battle.

Donald Trump

Mika and Joe make nice with Trump?

Leave a comment

Someone will have to explain to me why the liberal establishment has its shorts in a wad over an interview that two MSNBC hosts had with the next president of the United States.

Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, co-hosts of “Morning Joe,” went to Mar-a-Lago to interview Donald Trump. They said they remain opposed fundamentally to what he intends to do when he becomes president. They said they want to “restart” the dialogue they once had with the future POTUS.

Someone please explain to me why that is a big … deal among those who continue to loathe the future president. You may count me as a “never Trumper” who wouldn’t vote for Trump if he were the last man standing. However, if I was a practicing daily journalist, I would really embrace the chance to talk frankly with him, trying to pin him down on what he intends to do in office.

Brzezinski and Scarborough are real-life wife and husband. I am utterly certain they talked through many nights trying to decide whether this was the right call, given the angry rhetoric they exchanged with Trump in recent years.

Who knows? This effort to restart communication between them and the next POTUS might backfire. If it does, then the critics can bellow “We told you so!” If not, then they are able to do their jobs as journalists and try to plum what passes for a brain in the skull of the next president.

Uncategorized

Speaker excels in lame excuses

1 Comment

Stand tall, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, for you have just coined the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard into why a former member of your governing body shouldn’t have to be held to account for allegations of severe misconduct.

Former Republican U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz has been nominated by Donald Trump to be the next attorney general. He quit the House and, thus, delivered Johnson the ammo he fired off to earn the title of King of Lame Excuses.

Republicans and Democrats alike believe the House ethics committee needs to release findings of an investigation into whether Gaetz had sex with an underage girl and used illegal drugs.

Johnson said the panel should keep it secret because — drum roll — Gaetz “is no longer a member of the House.”

So, there you have it. A nimrod whom the incoming president wants to become the nation’s next chief law enforcement official should skate simply because he’s no longer in Congress?

The public has a compelling need to know whether someone who could become AG is a child molester and/or someone who engages in rampant drug abuse.

Maybe I am getting too worked up over what well might not occur, as I hear a growing number of Gaetz’s fellow Republicans in Congress believe he is unfit for the office he seeks.

national news

Loser showed grace; the winner showed … up

1 Comment

It was a little thing, but the gestures spoke volumes about the man who won the 2024 presidential election and the woman who lost it.

Vice President Kamala Harris conceded the election the day after they declared  Donald Trump the winner. In her speech, she told the crowd that she had phoned the president-elect to congratulate him on his victory. The response from her supporters gathered before her was understandably muted. But she made the gesture and acknowledged it publicly with grace and class.

How did Trump respond to his stunning victory? He stood before his rally goers … and didn’t say a single word about Kamala Harris.

To be candid, I found his snubbing of his opponent to be worthy of scorn.

I’ve listened to many winning candidates over many years watching elections and listened to the voice they used to accept victory. To a man, they have always recognized the concession call that came from the loser. To varying degrees, they also managed to speak well of the candidate’s losing effort. You’ve heard it, too: “I want to thank my opponent for the tough campaign and for accepting defeat with grace and dignity.”

We didn’t get that kind of magnanimous gesture from Trump. Nope. He chose to refuse to recognize the history that Harris made as the first woman of color ever nominated to run for the presidency. He also refused to recognize the spirited and, yes, hard-charging campaign she ran.

Am I dismayed at Trump’s lack of class in declaring victory? Yes. Am I surprised? Not one single bit!

local news, national news

Move over, Paul Revere!

Leave a comment

A supporter of this blog has informed many of my critics that I am now traipsing through some mighty tall cotton.

I need offer a quick-and-clean thank you to this fellow, who I have known for nearly 30 years, dating to when I arrived in the Texas Panhandle to take over as editorial page editor of the Amarillo Globe-News.

My friend, a former Randall County judge, has been chiding a critic over the tone he takes in chastising my arguments opposing Donald J. Trump’s choices to join his newly elected administration. He told the critic that “John Kanelis is a modern-day Paul Revere,” while berating him as a “disgrace to our country as you aid and abet the unhinged fool known as Donald Trump.”

See what I mean about the tall cotton reference?

I am not going to accept the Paul Revere reference. That is my friend’s opinion, to which he — and my critic — are entitled. However, my friend is a lawyer, which means he knows the language quite well. He’s a smart guy. I do not know my critic beyond what he says frequently while commenting on my blog; I just know him as an ardent Trump supporter … meanwhile, I am not.

There you go. Step aside, Paul Revere. You have company … I suppose.

legal news, national news

McConnell leaves cheap legacy

3 Comments

I won’t think often of Mitch McConnell once he leaves his post as US Senate Republican leader.

But when I do …

I will remember the cheap partisan game he played by blocking President Obama’s decision to name a justice to the U.S. Supreme Court.

You remember, right. Justice Antonin Scalia was vacationing in Texas when he died suddenly in February 2016. Scalia was the intellectual leader of the conservatives who sat on the high court. A brilliant jurist to be sure. Obama had a right under the Constitution to select a successor.

President Obama paid his respects to Justice Scalia and then turned to the D.C. appellate court and nominated Judge Merrick Garland to succeed Scalia. Garland, by all accounts, was a serious judge, fair-minded and scholarly and, yes, a good bit more liberal in his judicial philosophy than Justice Scalia.

Not so fast, said McConnell, who then led the GOP majority in the Senate. The president shouldn’t be allowed to make an appointment in an election year. He said there would be no confirmation hearing for Garland. The Senate would wait for the election results, McConnell said.  He took a huge gamble, as Donald Trump was a decided underdog in early 2016 in his race against Democratic Party nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton.

What happened? Donald Trump got elected, took the oath in January 2017 and then selected conservative judge Neil Gorsuch to succeed Scalia.

I shall be clear.  McConnell acted legally. He had the right as Senate majority leader to block the president’s nomination.

However, McConnell’s stiff of a president from doing his constitutional duty still doesn’t pass this blogger’s smell test.

The tactic stunk to the highest of the heavens and that should stand as this partisan hack’s most enduring legacy.

Donald Trump

Picks mirror the boss

4 Comments

Donald Trump’s choices for many Cabinet posts are revolting, but truth be told they shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Many of them mirror the boss’s own lack of government experience.

Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick to be attorney general, has a law degree but has barely practiced law. RFK Jr., Trump’s choice to head health and human services, has not a lick of experience in health or human services. Tusli Gabbard, the designated director of national intelligence, has zero experience as a spook.

Do you get where I’m going with this?

Trump’s Cabinet not only will reflect POTUS’s demand for loyalty, but will reflect his own ignorance of how government works.

I smell a whole lot of chaos brewing within the West Wing.

medical news, national news

Trump adds new ‘wack job’ to lineup

7 Comments

Wack jobs have found a home in what is shaping up as the weirdest presidential administration in history.

The latest of them also happens to be a scion of one of America’s most revered political families: Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr.

How in the world can I begin evaluating Donald Trump’s selection of RFK Jr. to be health and human services secretary? I’ll start with the obvious. Dude is an anti-vaccine activist who then says he doesn’t oppose vaccines per se, only those used to combat the COVID pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of people around the world.

He also once picked up the carcass of a bear cub and delivered it to a national park and also declared that a worm got into his brain and ate some of the tissue inside his screwed-up noggin.

This is the moron Trump said he would allow to “run wild at HHS” in an effort to protect Americans against disease.

What the … ?

I feel compelled to re-state that RFK Jr.’s father, the late U.S. senator and U.S. attorney general — who I believe would have been elected president in 1968 were it not for the asshole with the pistol in Los Angeles — was my first political hero,

To think that Junior has become such a weirdo only makes me wonder: What would daddy think of his namesake?

national news

Trump at war with experts

2 Comments

Donald J. Trump has declared war … not against an enemy of the nation he was elected to lead, but against anyone who has a lick of knowledge of the myriad issues that need government’s attention.

Consider these choices for key Cabinet posts: Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence; Pete Hegseth as defense secretary; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary; John Ratcliffe as CIA director; Matt Gaetz as attorney general.

These are some of the serious clunkers Trump has chosen to lead these agencies. He’s tapped some folks with considerable promise. I like Marco Rubio as secretary of state, provided he holds the line on the illegal Ukraine war.

Trump, though, is managing to slap the crap out of all the mid- and lower-level professionals who do the work in the trenches. These folks get their fingernails dirty carrying out public policy. They are not political appointees.

I do not believe Gaetz or Gabbard will pass the confirmation gauntlet in the U.S. Senate. RFK Jr. also looks to be too badly damaged to lead HHS. Hegseth’s claim to fame is as a Fox Propaganda Channel weekend talk-show co-host.

Imagine you’re a highly trained defense analyst. You spend your days crunching numbers and trying to determine the most efficient ways to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to protect Americans from our enemies. Then you have a defense secretary — Pete Hegseth — who has spent much of his career advancing partisan political matters and who has no earthly idea what is happening deep in the bowels of the Pentagon.

Similar analogies can apply to many of the agencies that might be led by an assortment of fruitcakes, blowhards and know-nothings. They all have a single element in common. They are blindly loyal to a president … and not to the Constitution they took an oath to uphold.

Commentary on politics, current events and life experience