environmental news

Hoping for more than climate change lip service

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President-elect Joe Biden is giving an abundance of lip service to climate change, global warming, clean energy development as he continues to formulate an executive government.

He did so yet again today in revealing his choices to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department and the Energy Department.

Look, I believe the president-elect is sincere in his state desire to tackle what he has called the greatest “existential threat” to our national security. I agree with him. However, I intend to watch intently as the new president starts rolling out the policies that will put some meat on the rhetorical bones that President-elect Biden is delivering on the climate change issue.

I want to see investments made in clean energy development. Energy Secretary-designate Jennifer Granholm spoke to that desire when she spoke to us after Biden introduced her. Indeed, the POTUS-elect has talked about climate change initiatives as being job creators. He has said he wants to employ millions of Americans in clean energy development.

Climate change and global warming do present a grave threat to the nation. The gloom-and-doomers among us suggest it might be too late for humankind to stem the effects of our changing climate. I am not going to buy into that notion.

I want my government and the president I supported with my vote to contribute more than lip service. We need federal policies that will help us harvest the wind, the ocean tides and other clean renewable energy sources to do the job upon which we continue to rely on fossil fuels.

Those fossil fuels have their limits. They also are contributing to that existential threat that our new president says is endangering our planet.

Mr. President-elect, it’s time to get busy. As in immediately.

media news

Social media reveal true friends

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

It didn’t take me long to become swallowed up by the social media culture that seems so prevalent.

I am attached to many social media platforms, most of which I use primarily to circulate this blog. Facebook remains my No. 1 social media platform and I appreciate very much the attention that the outlet provides this blog of mine.

Social media, though, do have plenty of downsides. They become primary conveyers of falsehoods, conspiracy theories … those kinds of things. They also reveal to me who out there are our friends.

Here is where I want to make an admission. I have valued many friendships with individuals of varying political persuasions. Then came social media and and I admit to losing some of those friends because of our varying, um, political leanings. Dang, that just makes me want to spit … you know?

I am not proud to acknowledge that the end of those relationships means I’ve been suckered into placing far more value in them than the other party. One of them recently severed a social media relationship after being an actual friend for more than 30 years. He never told me why he was cutting me loose; he just did it. I am left to presume it was our different world views, as we had jousted in recent years about political matters.

Whatever. It’s done. I will continue to use social media to distribute this blog. I enjoy using the various media platforms. I reckon I need to view the relationships I have with others in a more critical light and avoid overvaluing them.

I’m a grownup. I know how these matters play out.

national news

Biden lines up many ‘firsts’

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President-elect Joe Biden keeps rolling out the executive branch lineup he wants to help him govern the nation he was elected to lead. In the main, I find his selections so far to be an impressive collection of folks.

Biden keeps touting all the “firsts” he is asking to serve with him. The first openly gay Cabinet official; the first women to lead the energy and treasury departments; the first Native-American in the Cabinet; the first African-American to run the Pentagon and the Environmental Protection Agency.

He says he wants the executive branch of government to mirror the nation. It looks as though the president-elect is fulfilling that goal.

One of the remarkable aspects of the government he is forming is the number of individuals who struggled as they came of age, found their way into the world. The new interior secretary-designate talked of being homeless as a girl; the new energy secretary nominee told of her grandfather taking his own life because he couldn’t struggle with poverty.

Sure, there are marvelous success stories in the group. There appears to be a marked absence of billionaires of the type that populated the Cabinet that Donald Trump put together when he assumed office four years ago.

The new government in the making is a diverse group, comprising plenty of ethnic and racial minorities, women and men of various backgrounds. Many of them come to the new government with plenty of prior government experience.

Yes, we see a number of hands brought back from President Obama’s two terms in office. The new veterans affairs secretary served as White House chief of staff, the treasury secretary designate led the Fed during the Obama years, the White House chief of staff once filled a similar role for the VP during the Obama years and the climate envoy once served as secretary of state during the Obama administration.

I want to give Joe Biden a bit of credit for bringing back some tried-and-true government hands who played a role in governing during the successful two terms of the Obama administration. Indeed, the president-elect himself is a creature of the government he is now going to lead, serving 36 years in the Senate and eight years as vice president. For that matter, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris served in the U.S. Senate, was attorney general of California and was district attorney in San Francisco County; she, too, is fluent in government-speak and one cannot overstate the value knowing the language.

Americans took a gamble in electing a business mogul as president four years ago. To my way of thinking, it didn’t work out, given Donald Trump’s ignorance of how government works and his unwillingness to learn how to operate its intricate mechanism.

The nation will not have to face that particular issue when Joe Biden takes office as president.

So it is that the new president is crafting a government that resembles the nation. Moreover, it will be populated by those who know how it works, which in itself isn’t a “first.” It merely feels fresh compared to the chaos we have seen during the past four years.

International news

32 days to go … hurry up!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

It might be the longest 32 days in memory, but there’s an end to the madness we are experiencing at this moment.

Donald Trump has downplayed what the intelligence community and even our secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, have said about the attack on our national security system. Pompeo and the spooks say that Russia is behind the hacking into our system; Trump said it might be China and said the matter is “under control.”

Uh huh. And the pandemic was “under control” in March when Trump was downplaying the COVID virus that has killed, oh, about 314,000 Americans.

Trump had been silent on the Russian attack until today. Then he took to Twitter to say the consequence of the Russian hacking is being hyped up by the “lamestream media,” the “fake news” purveyors.

Shut the hell up, Mr. POTUS! You are a disgrace to the office, to the nation. When I am willing to take the word of your boy, Mike Pompeo, over you … well, then the sun might rise in the west tomorrow morning.

“This was a very significant effort, and I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity,” Pompeo told radio talk show host Mark Levin.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to give his pals in the Kremlin a pass. Oh, my. May the next 32 days zoom past us so we can welcome a president of the United States who will cease making excuses for a hostile foreign nation.

national news

Anxious to bid farewell to miserable year

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

If we’re honest with ourselves and our deepest feelings, we are going to admit that the year that is about to pass into history cannot exit soon enough.

By almost any measure, 2020 has been the uber-pits. It has sucked out loud. We have endured more misery, heartache, grief than in any 12-month period since, oh, possibly forever.

OK, I get that history tells us a different story. The years of the Civil War were hideous in the extreme. World Wars I and II brought a lot of tears to families of service personnel who died in the struggle against tyranny. The Great Depression that occurred between those conflicts created plenty of grief as well. Let us not forget 1968 with its political assassinations and the anger over an unpopular war that spilled into our streets.

This one, though, has so damn few redeeming qualities … except for one, which I will touch on in a moment.

The pandemic has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions around the world. Our national government has failed to protect us against the killer virus and we all hold the person at the top of that chain of command ultimately responsible for the failings.

Our daily routines have been upended. Our children have watched their parents struggle with disease. Yes, the measuring stick we use to gauge the quality of the year we are about to usher out the door is full of too much negativity.

There is hope on the horizon. The vaccines that drug companies have perfected are being fast-tracked onto the market. Two of them have received federal emergency authorization and are being injected into Americans’ arms as I type these words. We mustn’t let our guard down. It will take time for the medicine to kick the crap out of the virus.

And we did elect a new president of the United States in 2020. I am grateful for that outcome. If only that act of democratic wisdom, though, could erase the suffering that preceded it. Sadly, it doesn’t — at least in my view.

I am going to say so long and good riddance to the old year. May we never see its like again.

national news

Get ready for the losers’ mantra

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Let us steel ourselves for what I am certain is going to be an incessant drumbeat from those whose candidate for the presidency in 2020 lost the election … by a lot!

It will go something like this: more than 74 million Americans voted for Donald Trump and our voices deserve to be heard; and voices are going to insist that Joe Biden “stole” the election from our guy.

OK. How does one counter such an argument?

I’ll start by reminding anyone who tosses it at me that President-elect Biden garnered more than 81 million votes. He won with a 51.5 percent majority. Biden collected 7 million more votes than Trump. Biden carried 26 of the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia.

I encourage those Trumpkins out there to spare me the argument that for the past four years, many of the anti-Trump forces reminded everyone that in 2016 Hillary Rodham Clinton won more votes than Trump. I have noted that fact on this blog. I have acknowledged — often in the very next sentence — that Trump won where it counted: in the Electoral College. I know what the U.S. Constitution sets out for the election of a president; I honor it and accept that Trump was elected under the rules set forth by our nation’s founders.

So, the Hillary-won-more-votes-than-Trump argument doesn’t hold up. Nor does it matter one damn bit. The issue today is that President-elect Biden won more actual votes than Trump, he captured more than enough electoral votes than Trump and that every bogus legal challenge that Trump has mounted to overturn the results have been tossed out by every court that has heard them. That includes the U.S. Supreme Court.

The mantra will continue at least for the next four years as President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris seek to repair the damage that Donald Trump inflicted on our democratic process.

I will wait for the bumper stickers to appear as well, although I am not sure how you distill the message of discontent onto a foot-long piece of paper plastered onto a motor vehicle bumper.

Speaking of that, my favorite post-election bumper sticker appeared in the 1970s, about the time President Nixon was being swallowed whole by the Watergate scandal. You’ll recall that Nixon won re-election in 1972 in a historic 49-state landslide. Public opinion turned against the embattled president. Then came the bumper sticker that read: Don’t Blame Me — I’m From Massachusetts … the only state that cast most of its votes in 1972 for George McGovern.

That was then. The here and now presents a whole new set of challenges. One of them likely will be hearing from the losers that their guy didn’t actually lose.

Yeah. He did.

media news

Well done, Mark Shields

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I want to hail the end of an era in journalism.

It occurred this evening when Mark Shields said “goodbye” to viewers of PBS’s NewsHour, where Shields served for 33 years as half of a Friday evening give-and-take on the political news of the week.

His friend, New York Times columnist David Brooks, served alongside Shields for 19 of those years. The men expressed their mutual admiration and respect for the work they did together on public TV’s premier news broadcast.

I want to share just a brief thought about Shields … and about Brooks.

They reminded me weekly that politics can be a civil and respectful exercise. Shields comes from the liberal/progressive end of the political spectrum; Brooks hails from the center/right end. They would joust on occasion, expressing differences in opinion, context and perspective on issues. However, they did so with grace, class, decorum and mutual respect.

Shields announced earlier this week he would be stepping away from his role as one-half of an indispensable team of thinkers.

I want to share the broadcast he did tonight with Brooks and with NewsHour moderator Judy Woodruff. Shields and Brooks celebrate a lifetime in American politics – YouTube

And while I’m at it, I want to share a column that Brooks penned for the New York Times. Opinion | Mark Shields and the Best of American Liberalism – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Public television is a national resource. It has been depleted just a bit today by the departure of Mark Shields from the PBS NewsHour.

Well done, Mark Shields. Thank you for the wisdom you shared.

national news

Michael Flynn: moronic notion

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The man who for 24 days served as national security adviser for Donald J. Trump has come forward with a patently stupid — and treasonous — idea.

Michael Flynn, the pardoned former Army lieutenant general, said that Trump has the authority to call out the troops, dispatch them to various states and actually order them to overturn the election that resulted in Trump’s loss to President-elect Joe Biden.

Is this individual for real? Has he lost what passes for his mind?

Gen. Flynn has actually suggested that Trump — who continues to insist he won an election he actually lost — can mount what amounts to a military coup against the government. That’s if I understand what the former national security adviser has suggested.

“He could order, within the swing states if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities and basically rerun an election each in those states,” Flynn told Newsmax. What the hell? 

Thirty-three days from now, we are getting a new president. His name is Joe Biden. I want to be spared the idiocy that keeps pouring forth from Donald Trump and his cabal of kooks.

national news

Census should count ‘residents,’ not just ‘citizens’

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I concede that I am not a constitutional scholar, but I recognize clear and definitive language contained within the U.S. Constitution when I see it.

For example, the Constitution declares that the census should be taken every 10 years and must count all those who live this country. It doesn’t say “citizens.”

So, the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that a challenge to a Donald Trump administration effort to limit the census count to just citizens doesn’t have merit. Hmm. The court ruling doesn’t make sense to me.

The court ruled 6-3 — with the conservative majority holding firm — that the complaint was “premature.” The decision by the SCOTUS doesn’t preclude any future challenges, just stops this one at this time.

The court’s conservative majority comprises justices I presume to be “originalists,” meaning that they take the founders’ words as written literally. The founders were clear on who should be counted. That’s why they said the census should include all “residents.”

What does this mean? It means that if the Trump exclusion holds up, states — such as Texas, which is home to many thousands of residents who aren’t U.S. citizens — can be denied the congressional representation they deserve. In addition to counting all U.S. residents, we’re going to reapportion the House of Representatives alignment; Texas stands to gain as many as three more House members because of our state’s population growth since 2010.

As ABC News has reported:

Immigrant advocates who sued Trump over the policy stressed that the Court’s move does not mean the fight is over.

“This ruling does not authorize President Trump’s goal of excluding undocumented immigrants from the Census count used to apportion the House of Representatives,” said ACLU attorney Dale Ho. “The legal mandate is clear — every single person counts in the Census, and every single person is represented in Congress. If this policy is ever actually implemented, we’ll be right back in court challenging it.”

Yes, this ruling does involve undocumented immigrants. Indeed, that is the crux of the conservative argument in support  of the Trump exclusion. Let’s not forget to include the so-called “Dreamers” who were brought here as young children by their parents who entered the nation illegally. Those folks once again are being punished unfairly because of something they could not control.

The Supreme Court has punted on this issue for now. My hope would be that judicial conservatives stick to the principle that they believe the founders had it right when they inscribed the method for counting every person who lives in this country.

national security

Russian cyber attack: a frightening act of aggression

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Those nasty, sinister Russians are at it again, only this time they have leveled their latest attack against this country at a target with which I have happen to have a touch of familiarity.

I used to live in and work in Amarillo, Texas, which is just a bit southwest of a massive complex where the Department of Energy stores nuclear weapons. The Pantex plant employs a lot of folks in the Texas Panhandle. It also stores thousands of nuclear warheads. The Russians reportedly hacked into DOE’s system and possibly have obtained vital information related directly to the Pantex operation.

This is frightening stuff, man. Meanwhile, what is the commander in chief — Donald John Trump — doing about it? Hmm. Let me think. Oh, I know! Not a damn thing!

He remains fixated on election results and phony allegations of fraud and illegal ballot-casting in an election that resulted in his loss to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

I used to comment on occasion while working at the Amarillo Globe-News about issues relating to Pantex. I cultivated many sources associated with the operation in Carson County. I became acquainted, too, with those associated with the Peace Farm, a site near the Pantex plant with the aim of protesting the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

Pantex is a big part of the Texas Panhandle community. So, when I hear about a Russian hack into our nuclear weapons storage operations — of which Pantex is a key player — this story hits close too close to home for comfort.

Meanwhile, it is damn time for Donald Trump to condemn in the strongest language possible the Russians for mounting this latest frontal assault on this nation’s security.

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