local news

Home is where I live

CORVALLIS, Ore. — Long ago I adopted the mantra that “home is where I live.”

That always prevented me from saying that I would be “going home” upon returning to Oregon, the state where I was born and came of age.

Now that I have gotten that out of the way, I feel a strange sense of being “home” while coming back to Oregon.

My wife and I embarked on a remarkable journey through life nearly 50 years ago. It took us eventually to Texas — with excursions along the way to virtually all 50 states and about 20 countries.

Going “home” to Oregon usually fills me with a sense of familiarity. I know Portland. I know the Willamette Valley, the Columbia River Gorge, the Cascade Range, the Pacific Ocean coastline.

I know these places because I frequented them many times before my career led me to Texas, where we reared our sons and brought them into manhood.

Our most recent return to the Pacific Northwest has filled me with an added pleasure. It has enabled me to hook up with young men of my youth. These are fellows who were awkward and gawky once in their lives … in our lives. They have grown up just as I managed to do.

We all have enjoyed success in professional and personal aspects of our lives. It hasn’t been a joy ride devoid of potholes along the way. It’s just life as we all know and expect it to be.

I still believe that “home is where I live.” Coming back to where I used to call “home” has given me a strange sense of belonging. It feels mighty good.

national news

How does this guy run for POTUS?

(Photo by Bryan Thomas/Getty Images)

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The Hill had this to report today:  Cruz, who won reelection to the Senate in 2018, regularly spars with progressives and political enemies on Twitter and is widely expected to consider a run for president in 2024. 

“Cruz,” of course, is Ted Cruz, the junior Republican U.S. senator from Texas who has aspired to be president from the moment he took office in 2013. He tried in 2016 before losing the GOP primary to Donald Trump.

He wants to run again for president, or so many political observers apparently believe.

Ted Cruz knocks MSNBC’s Brian Williams over ‘Kremlin Cruz’ label | TheHill

I am wondering: How in the world does the Cruz Missile for the office if Donald Trump wants his old job back?

You see, Cruz morphed from a ferocious Trump critic when he ran against him in 2016 to one of his most sycophantic followers after Trump took office.

To this day Cruz does not dare repeat the things he said about Trump back then: sniveling coward, amoral man, narcissist, pathological liar. 

Here’s the deal: Cruz was right when he said those angry things about Trump.

What happens if Trump decides he can actually be nominated by the GOP in 2024? Cruz might have to put his presidential ambitions on hold until 2028. He dares not repeat the truth about the former Idiot in Chief.

Uncategorized

‘Youthful indiscretion,’ anyone?

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh had a contentious Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, to be sure.

He argued that he shouldn’t be held totally responsible for how he might have acted as an irresponsible teenager.

What, then, does one make of a decision he signed off on that keeps a man in prison for life after he killed a grandparent when he was just 15 years of age?

Brett Kavanaugh Remains As Incorrigible as Ever | The Nation

The Nation magazine, a left-leaning publication, calls Kavanaugh “as incorrigible as ever” and criticizes him for the decision he rendered regarding the young murderer.

I know one cannot possibly compare the act of someone who kills another human being with what Kavanaugh was accused of doing — sexual assault and assorted other related activities.

Still, The Nation’s Ellie Mystal does pose an interesting question about how one can ask for leniency for his own behavior but can dig in so deeply when a young man commits a crime and is being forced to spend his life behind bars for a “youthful indiscretion.”

What’s good for the proverbial goose … you know?

national news

Flynn: pandemic a fraud

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By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Here is the latest from the nuthouse known as the Donald Trump administration.

The disgraced former national security adviser for Trump — Michael Flynn — alleges that the COVID-19 pandemic was made up to distract us from the 2020 election.

See? It wasn’t real. It was concocted out of whole cloth, says the lying ex-national security guru who was fired — or resigned — from his job just 24 days into the new administration in 2017.

This also is the idiot who led the 2016 GOP convention chant to “Lock her up!” when Hillary Clinton’s email SNAFU was still under serious discussion.

Now he’s done it. He has joined the conspiracy cabal about the pandemic, suggesting it was all “fake news.”

Hmm. I wonder how Michael Flynn accounts for the deaths of 580,000-plus Americans.

national news

I hate conspiracies

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I hate conspiracies, conspiracy theorists and I truly laugh out loud at times at those who keep conspiracies alive and kicking.

The latest conspiracy du jour is what has been called the Big Lie. It’s the one pitched, promoted and perpetuated by Donald J. Trump, the ex-POTUS who lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden. He keeps feeding the conspiracy that the election was stolen by rampant vote fraud. It wasn’t. That should be the end of it, but oh no-o-o-o!

The Big Lie lives on.

We know all about the other big conspiracy theories that do not die as dead as the victims of the original act.

Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger three times and killed President Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963. A commission led by Chief Justice Earl Warren confirmed that Oswald acted alone. I believe the Warren panel. I do not buy into the nutty notions that have been kicked around for 58 years since since that terrible day. They talk about the mob conspiring to kill JFK; or the CIA; or it was President Lyndon Johnson. They talk about a second shooter that day in Dallas, or a third one, maybe even a fourth shooter.

Accordingly, Sirhan Sirhan shot Sen. Robert Kennedy in the head in June 1968, delivering a mortal wound after RFK won that state’s Democratic Party presidential primary. He was wrestled to the ground by those accompanying the senator. Now, though, comes the conspiracy theorists led by the late senator’s own son, RFK Jr., to suggest that Sirhan didn’t do it or that he didn’t act alone.

In both of those cases I am left only to ask what I consider the threshold question: How in the name of state secrets does anyone keep such a conspiracy hidden from public view for nearly 60 years? Answer: They don’t because there is no conspiracy to keep hidden.

We hear conspiracies all the time. Most of the time they make for silly entertainment. Nothing more.

The Big Lie, though, is a conspiracy theory that presents a serious danger to our cherished system of government.

That one needs to die a quick death.

national news

Go away, Donald

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I continue to await the day when I no longer can wonder what in the world is going to fly out of Donald Trump’s mouth, what ends up on the news, what gets people yapping and yammering about this and/or that bit of nonsense.

Sadly, that day hasn’t yet arrived. The 45th POTUS keeps making news. Damn that dipsh**, anyway!

Some of the news isn’t of his making, at least not directly. We have those ongoing investigations that have turned into criminal probes of alleged illegal conduct. That’s newsworthy, right?

Then we have the other stuff, such as his declaring war against certain Republicans — politicians from his own political party (allegedly!) — who fail to do his bidding … as if it matters any longer what he says or does. I mean, the guy lost an election bigly against President Joe Biden.

And then — and how can we forget this — he continues to foment the Big Lie about how President Biden “stole” the election by taking advantage of “rampant vote fraud.”

There … was … no … vote … fraud!

That hasn’t stopped the butt wipes in Arizona from conducting that phony “audit” looking for miscounted ballots that would give the state’s electoral votes to Trump instead of where they already have been certified, in President Biden’s cache of votes.

I am sick and tired of Donald J. Trump. I want him off the grid. I want to concentrate on people in public life who really matter to me — and to the rest of the country that is trying to come back from the pandemic chaos that the ex-POTUS only worsened.

DC riot

What about these ‘blue lives?’

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Congressional Republicans and their followers around the country are proud to declare that “blue lives matter.”

I join them in that mantra. It is true that police officers put their lives on the line whenever they suit up for duty to protect and serve us all.

Why, then, are GOP congressional members digging in while resisting efforts to get at the whole truth behind what happened on Jan. 6 when a Capitol Police Department officer was killed while trying to fend off a horde of insurrectionists intent on overturning the results of a free, fair and legal election?

Doesn’t the “blue life” that was lost that day matter? Of course it does!

But now the GOP is claiming that Democrats and others among the Republican caucus are playing politics with whatever findings could come from a bipartisan commission tasked with determining the root cause of the insurrection.

Who is playing politics? It is the Republican leadership in Congress that shudders at the notion that we are going to learn once and for all what we all know: that Donald Trump, the insurrectionist in chief on that horrible day, is responsible for the attack on the government he took an oath to protect and defend.

national news, Uncategorized

What happened to GOP?

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By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

This question needs asking: What in the world has happened to the Republican Party?

It was hijacked decades ago by conservatives who grew weary of the party’s longstanding tradition of liberal thinking, of outreach to racial minorities, even of reasonable fiscal restraint and limited government interference.

It now has become a cult of personality. A once-great party is driven by its belief in the lunacy of the Big Lie, that an election was stolen through something they call “rampant vote fraud.”

The cultist who leads this moronic notion is Donald Trump, a former one-term president who actually incited a mob of terrorist rioters to overturn an election he lost.

As CNN’s Fareed Zakaria has noted in a special on his cable network, “Trump is gone” but his movement lives on.

Yes, this is the party that Trump once led even though he lacked any knowledge, let alone experience, in political life.

In an odd way, today’s GOP has switched places with what used to constitute the bulk of the Democratic Party. The old Democrats — particularly in the South — was populated by segregationists who resisted efforts to grant equal rights to black Americans. That version of the Democratic Party did not adhere to the loony notions of an individual, however, the way that the current Republican Party has glommed onto the imbecilic notions pitched by The Donald.

It is distressing for me to watch this devolution of a once-great political party. I say that as someone who hasn’t yet voted for a Republican for president. I go back a ways, having cast my first presidential vote in 1972.

Now that I am older, I could be persuaded to vote for a Republican for the nation’s highest office — except that the party is an extension of what is now being called “Trumpism.”

It is a horrible — and horrifying — fit, to be sure.

science news

UFOs? Absolutely

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

A few of the leading media talking heads have been yapping lately about unidentified flying objects.

Which brings me to this question: Do I believe in UFOs?

You bet I do!

Now, before you think I have flown off the rails, I need to stipulate one important caveat: I do not believe that UFOs are alien beings that have flown to Earth to invade us, to observe us, or to just make us ask dumb questions.

I also want to stipulate that I have seen hundreds of UFOs over my more than seven decades on Earth. I don’t what they are. Hence, they were “unidentified.” However, this speculation from some media types about whether the UFOs might be from some world out there carries as much weight as the discussions about a second gunman in Dealey Plaza the day President Kennedy was murdered … which is to say that I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted all by himself.

This UFO chatter serves only to give some folks something about which to talk. That’s it.

I am not inclined to get into any discussion about whether we’ve been visited by space creatures. It’s just not in my wheelhouse.

However, we need to come up with another name for those things we see that we cannot identify. The term “UFO” takes on an entirely different meaning that it does not deserve.

State news

Permitless carry? Oh, boy!

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By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Texas state senators and state House members are so proud of themselves. They should be ashamed.

They have struck a compromise that clears the way for enactment of a “constitutional carry” bill that allows Texans to pack heat without passing even a simple test to determine that they know what to do with a firearm.

They say they are protecting “law-abiding citizens'” right to carry weapons. As if the state’s current concealed carry law wasn’t enough? Get real, man.

Texas constitutional carry deal made, author of House bill says | The Texas Tribune

I find this legislation to be an abomination beyond belief.

Gov. Greg Abbott says he’ll sign the bill when it gets to his desk. Big surprise there. Actually, it isn’t.

This is an absurd notion, making it easier for Texans carry firearms into public places.

It’s life in Texas, I suppose. I’ll just have to mind my Ps and Qs even more going forward.

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