national news

No to ‘executive privilege’

Earth to Donald John Trump.

There is no “executive privilege” available to the former POTUS as he fights to prevent a House select committee from issuing subpoenas for key aides in its hunt for the truth behind the 1/6 insurrection.

The former POTUS said this, according to The Hill: “We will fight the Subpoenas on Executive Privilege and other grounds, for the good of our Country, while we wait to find out whether or not Subpoenas will be sent out to Antifa and BLM for the death and destruction they have caused in tearing apart our Democrat-run cities throughout America,” the former president said in a statement.

It’s not gonna work, Mr. Former Liar in Chief.

Executive privilege fight poses hurdles for Trump | TheHill

You see, there is no executive privilege for former POTUSes.

The House of Representatives formed a select committee to root out the cause and effect of the insurrection that erupted on 1/6. It also intends to seek recommendations on how to prevent attacks from recurring. I wish the panel well in that search.

As for the former Insurrectionist in Chief, he is whistling in the wind if he thinks he can find a way to prevent the likes of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former chief strategist Steve Bannon from testifying before the House committee.

President Biden said as well that he won’t allow such executive privilege requests to be processed through the White House.

The former president incited the riotous mob to storm Capitol Hill on 1/6. Its intent was to disrupt the certification of the Electoral College result of the 2020 election that chose Biden over his predecessor. It failed, but the riot managed to inflict grievous damage to our democratic process.

So the House select committee’s work will require members of the former POTUS’s administration to stand before it, take an oath to tell the truth and then to divulge what they knew and when they knew it. The former president’s effort to prevent that from occurring is doomed to fail … as it should.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news, State news

Texas AG under the gun

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is a disgrace to the office he occupies.

Thus, it is no surprise that he would lash out at the Texas State Bar’s decision to investigate his specious lawsuit that sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in four states that Joe Biden won over Donald J. Trump.

Paxton makes me sick. There. I got that off my chest.

Two of the AG’s pals, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, came to his defense in their criticism of the Bar’s probe.

As the Texas Tribune reported:

“Texans know exactly what’s going on here,” Paxton said in a statement. “It is no surprise that a cabal of President Biden donors and voters are finding a way to retaliate against the work of my office for the State of Texas’s challenge to the constitutionality of the 2020 elections. Nearly half the nation joined Texas’s cause and two Supreme Court Justices voted to take up the case. I stand by our lawsuit. This is a total misuse of the Bar’s power and responsibility,” he said.

Amy Starnes, a spokesperson for the Texas State Bar, said her office could not discuss or confirm the existence of a pending investigation because of confidentiality rules.

Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick defend Ken Paxton over Texas bar investigation | The Texas Tribune

This Texan, meaning me, knows as well that Paxton is awaiting trial for securities fraud after being indicted by a Collin County grand jury. I also know that several of his top legal eagles quit the AG’s office and filed a whistleblower complaint that Paxton has engaged in criminal activity while serving as attorney general; the FBI is looking into that complaint.

Now the Bar has come forward with a complaint of its own, contesting the legitimacy of the lawsuit that Paxton filed with the U.S. Supreme Court over the results in other states. The court tossed the lawsuit out, saying that Paxton didn’t have standing.

The man is a disgrace. He needs to go. I do hope the Republican primary challenge he faces next spring can bring about the much-needed result … which would be his ouster.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news

Abbott panders to ex-POTUS

“This is a weak Governor openly and shamelessly taking his orders from a disgraced former President. Governor (Greg) Abbott is wasting taxpayer funds to trample on Texans’ freedom to vote, all in order to appease his puppeteer.”

So said Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, a Democrat, in response to the governor ordering an audit of votes cast in Dallas County in the 2020 presidential election.

All told, four of Texas’s most populous counties, are going to have their votes audited in a fashion that seeks to find evidence of vote fraud.

Spoiler alert: They won’t find any such vote fraud.

The other counties are Tarrant, Harris and Collin. County judges in Tarrant and Harris counties have blasted the governor’s decision to knuckle under to the demand of the twice-impeached former POTUS, who lost his re-election effort to President Biden. All three of those counties cast most of their votes for Biden in 2020.

Oh, but what about the judge who presides over Collin County, where my wife, along with our son and daughter-in-law, also reside? He has been silent. Judge Chris Hill, another Republican, has yet to speak out about this nonsensical demand. I also should point out that Collin County voted narrowly for the former POTUS in 2020.

We are witnessing in real time a shameful exercise in intimidation by the former president of the U.S. of A., who continues to promote The Big Lie about widespread voter fraud … that does not exist!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

media news, national news

‘Missing white woman syndrome’?

The late Gwen Ifill once lamented the double standard the media apply to missing-person cases.

Pretty white women get lots of media attention, the esteemed journalist noted, while women “of color” get, well, passed over. The stories are good for a day, maybe two or three … then they vanish.

The media now are obsessed with whoever killed Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old woman whose body was found in Grand Teton National Park, Wyo., where she had been traveling with her boyfriend.

The cops have declared the boyfriend, Brian Laundrie, a “person of interest” and are now search high and low for him in Florida, where he returned several days ago … without Petito.

Ifill’s observation about the media makes an important point. Yes, Petito deserves the coverage she is getting. Then again, so do all the missing women, and men, and children — regardless of their race or ethnicity — deserve the attention that’s being leveled at the fate of one young woman.

Charles Blow wrote this in the New York Times:

In 2004, at the Unity journalists of color convention in Washington, Gwen Ifill coined the phrase “missing white woman syndrome,” joking that “if there is a missing white woman you’re going to cover that every day.”

It is not that these white women should matter less, but rather that all missing people should matter equally. Race should not determine how newsroom leaders assign coverage, especially because those decisions often lead to disproportionate allocation of government resources, as investigators try to solve the highest-profile cases.

Opinion | Gabrielle Petito and America’s Obsession With Missing White Women – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

It speaks quite graphically at how far we still have to travel to reach some sense of balance in the way the media handle certain stories.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news, political news, State news

Ex-POTUS turns his phony fraud case to Texas

The Donald Trump phony vote fraud fishing expedition has cast its line into our neighborhood.

What a … joke!

The Texas secretary of state’s office, kowtowing to demands from the former Liar in Chief’s team, has announced an audit of 2020 presidential election returns in four of the state’s largest counties: Dallas, Harris, Tarrant and Collin. Three of the four counties have something in common: Voters in Dallas, Harris and Tarrant counties cast most of their votes for Joe Biden; Collin County, where my wife and I live, voted narrowly for Biden’s opponent, the 45th POTUS.

Not surprisingly, officials in the three pro-Biden counties have proclaimed it a political ploy. Collin County Judge Chris Hill — a Republican and a supporter of the 45th POTUS — so far is silent. Imagine that, eh?

This is an exercise in grotesque stupidity.

Texas 2020 election audits called political ploy by county officials | The Texas Tribune

The former POTUS carried Texas by about 5 percentage points. He now is demanding that Gov. Greg Abbott add a “forensic audit” of the state’s returns to the Texas Legislature’s special session agenda.

What the former Numbskull in Chief continues to do is denigrate the hard work of county elections officials in those counties — along with those who worked in all the rest of the state — who produced a patently safe, fraud-free, legal and fair election.

How many times must we all say this: There was no “widespread voter fraud” in Texas! However, the Big Lie lives on in what passes for the minds of the cultists who swill the poison being served by the former POTUS.

This is a disgrace to our democratic form of government.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news, Sports news

Three cheers for public TV

Some readers of this blog might know that I am a big fan of public television. I worked for a time as a freelance blogger for a public TV station in Amarillo — Panhandle PBS, based at Amarillo College — not long after my print journalism career ended.

Whenever I hear the name Ken Burns attached to a public TV special, I perk up instantly and commit to watching whatever Burns assembles for the public air waves.

I just finished binge-watching a four-part special on The Greatest, aka “Muhammad Ali.”

Wow! What a special! What a man Ali became.

Ali died in 2016 at age 74 of complications from the Parkinson’s disease with which he had been diagnosed since 1984.

Burns and his staff of colleagues, producers, editors and writers assembled a fantastic broadcast journey that took viewers through Ali’s childhood in Louisville, Ky., to the 1960 Olympics in Rome, to his professional boxing career, his wins and losses, his exile for following his religious objection to the Vietnam War, his becoming a Muslim, his troubled marriages to four women (and his relentless womanizing along the way), his status as a cultural icon and how he became the Most Famous Man in the World and finally to his death.

You are reading the words of a longtime fan of Muhammad Ali. I cannot watch without crying his 1996 appearance at the Atlanta Olympics when he lit the torch. It was a seminal moment in Ali’s journey from world-class athlete to world-class human being.

Public TV brought all this to viewers. It was a stunning bit of television. Then again, none of us should be surprised that Ken Burns — arguably the world’s foremost documentary filmmaker — could deliver such epic TV programming to our living rooms.

If you get a chance, check out this latest contribution from Ken Burns. You will learn something about The Greatest.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump, national news

Who seeks to ‘rig’ election?

Oh, how I want to take the findings of an audit in Arizona seriously.

It’s hard when the audit of the 2020 presidential election in that state is done by an outfit with no experience conducting such an audit. They were brought in to find fraud that didn’t exist.

Now we hear from Cyber Ninjas that the Maricopa County, Ariz., returns were legitimate and that Joe Biden won that state’s electoral votes while winning the presidency.

Which brings me to this point, which is that the 45th POTUS keeps yammering about the 2020 election being “rigged.” It wasn’t. The Cyber Ninjas finding illustrates it nicely. The only “rigging” being done is by the 45th POTUS who keeps yapping about vote fraud. He is trying to overturn a legitimate election that he lost by more than 7 million ballots.

It all points to yet another irony of this individual’s brief stint as POTUS. He bellowed about “fake news” while pulling fake news out of his rear end almost daily. Now he is hollering about a rigged election while seeking to rig it all by himself.

How does anyone on this good Earth possibly take this clown seriously?

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

State news

Catch your breath, Texas Democrats

(Bob Daemmrich/Pool Photo via AP)

Texas Democrats no doubt are having trouble catching their breath over recent polling news regarding the state’s top Republican: Gov. Greg Abbott.

I word of caution: Don’t get ahead of yourselves.

Recent Texas Tribune polling shows significant slippage among Texas independents regarding the governor. Abbott now trails film star Matthew McConaughey by 9%. Then there’s former El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat who is sounding more and more like a Texas candidate for governor; O’Rourke is within spitting distance of Abbott … pollwise.

I am going to shake my head on all of this.

I also shall stipulate that I hope Abbott can be beaten next year when we elect the vast bulk of our state’s constitutional officeholders. Abbott is one of them. I am profoundly angry at the way he has governed since he first was elected in 2014.

He is tacking to the hard right. Abbott is facing Republican primary foes, such as former Texas GOP chair Allen West, the one-term Florida congressman who moved to Texas to further his political aspirations. We have former state Sen. Don Huffines, too, in the GOP primary contest.

I don’t know whether Matthew McConaughey will run as a Democrat or a Republican. He is being coy about his political orientation. Indeed, he is bobbing and weaving on plenty of specific issues as well.

As for the heavy breathing among Democrats that Abbott is on the ropes, it is way too premature to start ringing the death knell on the governor’s political career.

Texas is to this day a heavily Republican state, no matter the demographic changes that are turning this state into more of a political battleground. Let us not forget that GOP voters in Texas are capable of electing some serious losers to serious public offices.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

‘Fraudit’ proves Biden won after all

Stop the presses!

The so-called audit of Arizona’s election returns in 2020 have delivered a stunning blow to the former Liar in Chief: The Cyber Ninjas have determined that Joe Biden won Arizona’s electoral votes in a fair-and-square vote.

The Cyber Ninjas is the civilian group charged with combing through the Maricopa County returns to find enough votes to overturn the Arizona results, which Biden carried narrowly in November 2020.

GOP-backed Arizona election review confirms Biden 2020 win | TheHill

But … what do you know? Cyber Ninjas — with zero election audit training in its background has determined there was no fraud in 2020 and that President Biden’s vote totals hold up.

To be fair, I cannot imagine what my response would be had the Cyber Ninjas had reached another conclusion. I might go bonkers, bananas. I might be bumfuzzled, bamboozled and bombarded with emotion.

I am left now to wonder if the Cyber Ninjas had taken the criticism of its lack of credentials to heart. Might it have just tossed in the towel and delivered a summary that it knew would be palatable to those of who knew what was obvious from the get-go? That President Biden’s victory in Arizona, while not overwhelming, was sufficient to stand up under close scrutiny.

I won’t offer a full-throated cheer to what the Cyber Ninjas have decided about the returns in Arizona. Its effort to overturn an election was a monumental waste of time and money. Perhaps, too, these findings will fill officials elsewhere with courage to stand up against The Big Lie.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

DC riot

That’s only part of it, Rep. McCarthy

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(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

U.S. House of Representatives Republican leader Kevin McCarthy is only partly right about the mission awaiting the House select committee’s probe into the 1/6 insurrection.

McCarthy today said the panel should concern itself only with why the Capitol security was so lacking and “how to prevent” such a riot from recurring.

Wrong, leader McCarthy!

There’s also this thing about what the 45th president knew at the time of the riot, what he didn’t do to call a halt to it and did he really have that conversation with McCarthy in which he told him that the rioters cared more about the Constitution than McCarthy did.

The terrorists who marched onto Capitol Hill on 1/6 to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election committed an insurrection against the government. House members and senators were doing their constitutional duty in certifying the election.

The House select panel is tasked with finding out all there is to learn about what happened, why it happened and, yes, how to prevent it from recurring.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy needs to stop obstructing the panel from doing its job and adhere to the oath he took to “defend and protect the Constitution,” which the insurrectionists sought on 1/6 to destroy.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Commentary on politics, current events and life experience