Happy Trails, Part 189: Recalling a glorious Christmas

December 23, 2020 kanelis2012

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The structure you see here is the house my wife and I called home for more than two decades. I snapped this picture about four years ago, but the real story of this house commenced 24 years ago this week.

On Dec. 22, 1996, we closed on the purchase of this house. We had lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Amarillo for nearly two years. We decided it was time to sink our roots deeply into the Caprock. So we set out looking for some property on which we would build our house.

We found a lot in the far southwest corner of Amarillo. We had selected a floor plan that caught my wife’s attention. We met with the builder and in October 1996 his crews commenced work. Two months later, the house was finished.

We signed the papers. Then we moved in.

Why mention it here? Because our Christmas in 1996 turned out to be one of the more memorable holidays in our long and glorious life together.

We moved in three days before Christmas. We had boxes scattered in every room of our house. Our big stuff had been delivered: furniture, appliances, those kinds of things. Just seeing our belongings again after they had been stored away for nearly two years was in itself a Christmas blessing for us.

We opened boxes and found trinkets and assorted possessions we hadn’t seen while they were packed away and kept in storage. Every box we opened reacquainted us with our belongings.

Oh, what about a Christmas tree? Yes, we had one. It was a Norfolk pine that we had moved from Beaumont to Amarillo. It was a potted tree and was very much alive.

My wife found some Christmas lights and some ornaments among the boxes we opened. We strung the lights around the 4-foot tree along with a few ornaments. We then were able to place a few gifts around the base of the tree.

Christmas morning 1996 dawned like many others in our house. Our sons were there. We had a nice Christmas breakfast, opened our gifts and enjoyed ogling our new digs, which we had watched being built from the ground up.

It was home for a long time. Then came the moment we knew would occur when our granddaughter arrived in 2013. It was time to move closer to her in the Metroplex.

We made the move and bid goodbye to this special place that became all the more special because of a fabulous Christmas memory it provided for us.

national news

Trump goes ballistic … but why now?

December 23, 2020 kanelis2012 1 Comment

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Do I have this right?

Didn’t the White House negotiate with congressional leaders on the nuts and bolts of a COVID-19 relief package and spending bill? Did they act with Donald Trump’s imprimatur? Or didn’t they?

And where was Donald Trump his own self during all of this back and forth over the course of several months?

Didn’t Trump say once or maybe twice that he would sign the bill when it arrived at his desk?

So, what the hell is happening now? Trump says Congress needs to clean up the legislation, provide $2,000 payments per person and get rid of unnecessary add-ons before he would sign it.

At one level, I don’t really disagree with what Trump wants. I do disagree, though, with the timing of it and the appearance of his demand. His negotiating team hammered out the particulars and now Trump says he opposed to it.

His refusal to sign it now puts the whole process in dire peril. He is threatening to shut down the government. Folks who need the help won’t get it. The COVID pandemic is raging on and on. Trump is doing nothing to speak to the issues relating to the virus.

What the hell is going on? Chaos, anyone?

education news

An ed secretary with knowledge of public schools!

December 23, 2020 kanelis2012

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Imagine that, if you dare.

President-elect Joe Biden has presented to the nation a nominee for education secretary with actual knowledge, experience and appreciation for public education. Let this soak in for a moment.

Connecticut education commissioner Miguel Cardona is Biden’s pick to lead the U.S. Department of Education. Cardona would replace Betsy DeVos, who — to be charitable — knows nothing about the public school system she was nominated to lead in 2017.

Betsy DeVos for ed secretary? No way! | High Plains Blogger

DeVos was a do-nothing education secretary who was educated herself in private schools, who sent her own children to private schools and who has been a champion of the movement to take public money out of our public school system and directing it to private schools.

Cardona at the very least has hands-on experience as a public school student, as a public school educator and as head of a statewide public education system.

I welcome this nomination.

local news

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.

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