Congressman answers question … sort of

December 23, 2020 kanelis2012

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

My congressman stood on the correct side in a dispute between the Texas attorney general and the president-elect of the United States.

How do I know that? I asked his office directly and someone in his Plano office told me that Rep. Van Taylor was one of the Republican lawmakers who did not join a lawsuit filed by Ken Paxton, who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

I applauded Taylor for keeping his distance from the litigious idiocy launched by our state’s attorney general.

Then I got a letter with Taylor’s signature at the end of it.

I’ll be candid. I read the letter and it sounded like a boiler-plate response that he sends out to anyone who asks his staff a question. He thanked me for “taking the time to contact me and share your thoughts regarding the 2020 Presidential Election. Our representative democracy works best with active participation from the people and I appreciate you sharing your thoughts with me.”

There you go. The rest of it reads like a statement that congressmen and women provide to deal with issues of the day.

Taylor again offered his congratulations to President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Taylor said he and his wife, Anne, are extending their “prayers and well wishes to both the Biden and Harris families as they prepare for this momentous undertaking.”

I want to thank the congressman — who was just re-elected to his second term from the Third Congressional District — for the letter. If only he had spoken to me a bit more directly.

Rep. Taylor noted the letter that former President George H.W. Bush left for the man who defeated him in 1992, President Bill Clinton. Bush told the new president: “Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you.” Taylor added, “We must follow this example of putting political differences aside and upholding the integrity of the Constitution instead of the typical Washington dysfunction that has so many Texans frustrated.”

A final point: There is not a damn thing “typical” about the way Donald John Trump has conducted himself in the weeks since losing the election.

national news

An abuse of power? Yes, most certainly

December 23, 2020 kanelis2012

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I won’t dignify the individuals who tonight received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump by printing their names here.

They are four contractors who, while working in Iraq during a war, committed war crimes by killing men, women and children. They were tried extensively by federal officials. They were convicted of those crimes and sentenced to prison.

Donald Trump today pardoned them, set them free in exercising his full presidential pardon power as prescribed in the U.S. Constitution. I don’t question that Trump has the power to exercise that provision. I do question why he would pardon four men who were convicted of murdering innocent victims.

We have just witnessed a supreme abuse of power. Donald Trump, I dare say, has committed what could be considered an impeachable offense. It is sickening in the extreme.

We have 29 days to go before this madman leaves office. My goodness. Donald Trump is an evil despot.

Just think of the hideous miscarriages of justice that could be offered up prior to Trump’s departure from the Oval office.

Donald Trump

Pardons make my head spin

December 23, 2020 kanelis2012

(Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

My head is spinning around like Linda Blair’s noggin did in “The Exorcist.”

Donald Trump handed out 20 presidential pardons for assorted crimes and criminals who committed them. They are an array of corrupt politicians, former campaign aides, former military contractors. They all have something in common: They’re all friends and allies of Donald Trump.

One of them really caught my eye. The POTUS pardoned former Congressman Steve Stockman, a two-non-consecutive-term politician from Southeast Texas who was in the middle of a lengthy federal prison term for assorted campaign finance violations.

Stockman is a buffoon. He’s a corrupt one at that. He also had the amazing good luck in being a member of the Contract With America Republican class of candidates in 1994. His luck played out when he defeated a veteran Democratic lawmaker, the late Jack Brooks, who at the time of his 1994 election loss was chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

Former Rep. Stockman convicted … who’s next? | High Plains Blogger

I was at the tail-end of an 11-year run as editorial page editor of the Beaumont Enterprise when that stunner occurred. I left the Golden Triangle in January 1995 so I didn’t have the, um, pleasure of watching Stockman make an ass of himself from a ringside seat.

Stockman served one term before losing his re-election two years later. He then would be elected some time after that and served another single term before deciding to run for the U.S. Senate.

Stockman — along with the other pardon recipients — remains a convicted felon. I hasten to point that fact out. Indeed, the acceptance of the pardon only serves to admit wrongdoing.

So those who get the pardons will go to their graves as convicted felons. What’s more, Donald Trump will check out of this world eventually as the man who once again has abused the pardon power he inherited as president of the United States.

national news

Trump does what? Threatens COVID relief package?

December 23, 2020 kanelis2012 7 Comments

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald J. Trump’s threat to derail a long-awaited, long-debated COVID-19 relief package might be worthy of praise … except for this little factoid.

Trump took no part, none at all, he was AWOL during Congress’s agonizing debate over how to help Americans affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

Now he has a bill on his desk. It was approved by rousing bipartisan majorities in both congressional chambers. Trump’s reaction has been to withhold his signature from a $1.4 trillion spending package that offers $900 billion in COVID relief; the bill includes $600 stimulus checks to be sent to Americans who qualify.

Trump wants more money sent to Americans. He calls the package a “disgrace.”

What? Wait a minute! Where was Trump during the negotiations? He didn’t call legislative leaders. He didn’t pressure anyone to craft a bill to his liking. He was nowhere to be seen or heard — except when he was yammering about an election he lost!

Heads up, congressional Republicans: Aren’t you glad you stood with this clown, the guy who has just threatened to put your political future in dire jeopardy?

local news

Lame-duck lawmaker blasts … Trump

December 23, 2020 kanelis2012

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Now he speaks out,

U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry, who rose to the ranks of one of his party’s top lawmaking leaders, had remained virtually silent about the conduct of Donald J. Trump.

Then he announced his retirement from Congress, where he served since 1995. What do you suppose happened to the Clarendon, Texas, Republican? He found his, um, voice.

He has needled his fellow GOP colleagues for following a “mindless sort of obedience” to the lame-duck president. He says their blind fealty “undermines our institutions.” Well, yeah!

Thornberry told the Dallas Morning News that “Congress was created to be and meant to be a separate branch of government — not one in which its members take their direction from a president of either party.”

Thornberry also had some choice words for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and the 126 GOP members who joined him in a loony lawsuit filed in the U.S. Supreme Court. The suit sought to nullify millions of votes that went to President-elect Biden. Paxton had no standing or right to intercede in other states’ electoral processes, the court ruled. Thornberry agreed, saying that had Paxton had succeeded there could be no end to the type of mischief that other states could do to Texas’s own electoral system.

Suffice to say that Thornberry did not his colleagues’ effort to climb aboard the Paxton clown car.

I appreciate Thornberry’s newfound candor. He was my congressman for more than two decades when I lived and worked in Amarillo. I had a fruitful professional relationship with him and I wish him well as he charts a new course in his life.

I just wish he had revealed his candor a whole lot earlier.

medical news, science news

And now … a good word about Operation Warp Speed

December 23, 2020 kanelis2012

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Admittedly, this blog has spent a great deal of time, emotional energy and cyberspace over the past four years bashing, slashing and smashing at the Donald J. Trump administration.

Trump is about to exit the political stage in less than 30 days. I now want to say a good word about what — in a normal world — should stand as an enduring legacy to his term in office.

This isn’t a normal world. Operation Warp Speed is a creation of someone within the White House to define the mission of finding a vaccine for the coronavirus that has killed more than 300,000 Americans and nearly 2 million people around the world.

The COVID-19 virus arrived early this year. Trump dragged his feet in recognizing publicly the peril it posed. Then he owned up to its consequence. He also announced the strategy he said would expedite the research and development of a vaccine that could cure the world of the pandemic.

Trump predicted during his failed re-election campaign that we could have a vaccine by the end of the year. Skeptics scoffed. I don’t recall speaking directly to Trump’s boast, but it did ring a bit hollow. Others in the White House task force formed to come up with a response strategy said it would take longer.

Well, guess what. Donald Trump was right. Pfizer and Moderna have produced highly efficient vaccines that are now being administered around the world. A third pharmaceutical firm, AstraZeneca, is about to bring a vaccine on line.

There is plenty of debate about the impact that Operation Warp Speed had in delivering these vaccines. Some experts say the drug firms were well on the way to producing it already; others give Warp Speed a ton of credit for goosing the companies to delivering the goods in a timely fashion.

I am willing to dole out praise to Donald Trump for providing some of the impetus to get this vaccine developed and approved. But not all of it. Indeed, I am weary beyond belief of hearing Trump take undue credit for work that others did.

Drug company researchers and scientists worked their butts off to produce a vaccine with an efficacy level that experts have called “extraordinary.” Yet there was Trump the other day stepping into the limelight to say that no other politician in human history could have produced those kinds of results.

Mr. President, the program that came to be under your watch has done well. Accept the congratulations that belong mostly to the researchers … and then get the hell out of the way.

local news, medical news

COVID test didn’t hurt a bit

December 22, 2020 kanelis2012

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

My name is John and I am a statistic.

So is my wife of more than 49 years. No, we’re not that statistic. We are now among the millions of Americans who have been tested for the coronavirus that is infecting millions of our countrymen and women and, tragically, killing far too many of them.

We ventured this morning to a clinic in nearby McKinney. We walked in without an appointment. We were advised it might take a while to see a medical pro. It turned out to be not quite as lengthy a wait as it could have been.

I need to stipulate that we’ll know the results of our tests in three days or so. The clinic staff will call us with the … news, which we both certainly hope is good news.

We decided to seek the test because we both have a case of the heebie-jeebies, given what we hear about the multitude of symptoms that others have experienced — before they tested positive for the virus.

Both of us have been mindful of the measures we need to take to stave off infection. We have practiced them carefully: masks, social distancing, hand-washing; you name it, we do it!

Next up for my bride and me? The vaccine, that’s what!

We hear that we well could be on the very next list of those who qualify for the COVID-19 vaccine. We’re both of age. We don’t suffer pre-existing conditions that would push us to the head of that line, but we do qualify simply because our dates of birth say we do; and we can prove we qualify on the basis of age.

I am heartened to see high-profile Americans — VP Mike Pence and Karen Pence, President-elect Biden and Jill Biden, VP-elect Harris and her husband Douglas Emhoff, Dr. Anthony Fauci to name just a few — make a show of getting inoculated against the virus. It’s not that I need their endorsement to obtain the vaccine. As soon as it’s available to us, we’re going to get the shot immediately if not sooner.

We’ve taken the next logical step, which is to get a test to see if our good behavior has paid dividends for us. I remain optimistic that neither of us will become that other statistic.

national news, national security

‘Under control,’ Mr. POTUS?

December 22, 2020 kanelis2012 1 Comment

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Here is a word to the wise.

When you hear the words “We have it under control” come from Donald J. Trump, you should pull the blanket up tightly over your head and not move for as long as you can remain still.

Trump decided to utter that phrase when asked the other day about the Russian hacking of our security system, which intelligence officials have called the worst such incident in U.S. — if not world — history.

Trump said it’s “under control” and said China might be the culprit … not those Russians.

Well, let’s harken back to a previous time the POTUS declared something to be “under control.” It was earlier this year. The COVID-19 coronavirus had just stormed ashore. We had a handful of cases. Trump said then it was “under control.”

Well … it wasn’t. It isn’t yet. It has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Help is on its way in the form of vaccines that have been developed and are being developed. However, Donald Trump’s so-called assurance that something is “under control” should be cause for serious alarm.

Therefore, I am terribly concerned about the latest Russian attack.

national news

Can Trump’s exit get any uglier? Uhh, yeah

December 22, 2020 kanelis2012

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald John Trump’s exit from the presidency of the United States is getting uglier by the day.

I wish I could find a bottom to its ugliness. Sadly, I cannot locate it.

So many reports are coming out daily about Trump’s seeming disinterest in the nation’s actual existential crisis: the coronavirus pandemic that is killing thousands of Americans each day. He is obsessed with an election he lost and fixated on ways he could possibly remain in power.

Trump hates the term “loser,” except when he uses it to describe others. Now that he must wear the label himself, Trump has become some sort of monster in the White House. He convenes meetings that include a disgraced national security adviser who received a presidential pardon and a campaign lawyer who insists that Trump could seize voting machines in precincts that voted for President-elect Biden.

The Russians have hacked into our security network and Trump is silent, except to downplay its significance.

I don’t fear necessarily for the future of our democratic system of government. It will survive this maelstrom of misery and mayhem. However, it is going to require some repair from the new president and his team. To that end, my hope is that President Biden deploys his vast knowledge of government and its workings to set about restoring the regular channels of communication and retooling government’s machinery.

I guess my deepest concern at this moment, as Trump’s term as president staggers to a close, is the prospect of the commander in chief doing something profoundly foolish and reckless intending to take our attention away from the Russian hacking operation. That would be for Trump to start an armed conflict, thrusting young Americans into harm’s way.

Is that beyond the capacity of a president who appears fixated solely on holding onto power? Absolutely not!

This is a dangerous man and this is a dangerous time.

We have 30 days to go before sanity returns to the Oval Office. I am holding my breath.

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