education news

Still stewing over the ‘Dr. Biden’ dust-up

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I admit to being a bit miffed over an essay that appeared in the Wall Street Journal that takes Jill Biden to task for her generous use of the honorific term “Dr.” in front of her name.

The author of the piece refers to her as “Jill” and “Kiddo,” the latter term I cannot imagine him ever using while referring to a man. But the future first lady was fair game, I suppose, for the writer and for the editors of what I consider to be one of America’s great newspapers.

I watched Biden and her husband, the president-elect, last night on “The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert. Colbert asked her about the controversy and she brought up the “Kiddo” comment with something of a pained expression on her face. She didn’t belabor the content of the op-ed column, other than to take offense at the sexist nature of the criticism.

She kept her day job as an educator while serving as second lady during Joe Biden’s vice presidency and hinted that she will do so again once she becomes the nation’s first lady. Jill Biden once said that teaching young people isn’t just what she does, it is “who I am.”

She is well-educated, having earned a doctorate in education from the University of Delaware. Suffice to say, moreover, that she is far from the first doctorate-level academician to use the “Dr.” term in front of his or her name.

If she wants to call herself “Dr. Biden,” well … that’s OK with me.

national news

Stop the phony outrage!

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The phony outrage and astonishing hypocrisy of Donald Trump’s sycophant brigade just take my breath away.

Here’s the latest.

President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, referred to Trump’s voter base as a “bunch of fu**ers.” Yep, she dropped an f-bomb on ’em.

Now, is that the way anyone should speak of a political opponent? I don’t like it. Then again, nor do I like the response that has emanated from the righteous right wing of the Republican Party that has turned the other way while Donald Trump has done the following:

Admitted to grabbing women by their genitals; mocked people with disabilities; downplayed a pandemic that has killed more than 300,000 Americans; ignored a cyber attack that threatens our national security; laid waste to the rule of law; damaged our international alliances … and what else? You get the point.

So now some of Trump’s followers are just enraged that a Biden campaign guru dropped an f-bomb?

Steve Schmidt is a former Republican political operative who went on to co-found the Lincoln Project, a political action committee dedicated to defeating Donald Trump’s re-election effort. I will leave it to Schmidt to offer his response to the faux outrage that’s making the rounds.

Steve Schmidt Tells Rubio to F Himself (maxnewstoday.com)

I cannot say it any better.

national security

POTUS has gone AWOL

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Can there possibly be a more glaring, graphic and grotesque example of a president who has gone AWOL than what we are witnessing at this moment of dire peril?

Never mind (for just a moment) that the nation is suffering grievously from a pandemic that has killed more than 300,000 of our citizens. The pandemic is dire enough of a threat. Yet the president ignores it.

Russia has just conducted what is believed to be the largest national security breach in our history and Donald Trump — the current president of the United States — is silent. He hasn’t said a word publicly to or about his pal, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. The Russians are now believed to hacked into our national security network in a sophisticated full assault on our cyber system.

What has Trump said or done about it? Not a damn thing!

Hell no! Instead, Trump continues to rant and rail about election “corruption” that simply does not exist. He continues to insist that President-elect Joe Biden’s victory is illegitimate because of “widespread” voter fraud. Courts all over the land have dismissed Trump’s phony allegation out of hand.

Meanwhile, real threats have emerged that have placed the nation in dire peril. Trump’s response has been to, uh, not respond at all!

I’m going to say it one more time with extreme malice: Donald Trump is a menace to the nation he has governed for the past four years. Thank goodness — oh yes! — that Trump’s time in power is coming to an end.

medical news

Impossible to dismiss good news in time of peril

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

It is virtually impossible for me to hold back the joy I feel as I watch news reports from around this great nation of individuals receiving shots in their arm.

We are subjected daily — even hourly — to reports of death and misery from the COVID-19 virus. It has killed more than 300,000 Americans. Many more will die. It has infected more than 17 million of us. Millions more infections are on their way, too.

And yet … we watch news reports, read about them in the newspaper (yes, we still read newspapers in our home) about millions of doses of vaccine being distributed. There is hope. There is a glimmer of optimism. However, the doctors in charge of this good news tell us to hold off on popping the champagne corks. We’re going to endure a lot more suffering before we can “turn the corner,” or recognize the “light at the end of the tunnel” as the end of this pandemic.

The good news is tempered by the heartache we are enduring. It also is tamped down a bit by the hideous non-response of the current president of the United States, who remains fixated on his re-election loss and the bogus claims of fraud, illegal voting, a “rigged election” … or whatever the hell pops into his vacuous skull.

Donald Trump is almost out of there.

In the meantime, I intend to watch the news with a mixed set of emotion. I want to relish the good news and I will do so in the moments I see those reports flash in front of me. Still, we all must be realistic about what we know also is occurring. For all the good news we watch as nurses, doctors, police, firefighters and essential government leaders get immunized against the killer, we must hold dear our feeling of empathy and compassion for the loss that continues to occur around the world.

These are trying times for the human spirit. The optimist that lives within me will grasp the good news as it arrives and pray for the moment that our joy will bury our sadness.

national news

Get the vaccine, Mr. POTUS!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump says he will receive a vaccination shot to protect him against COVID-19 at the “appropriate time.”

Well, if I might make this suggestion: Right now is the time, Mr. President.

Trump is on his way out of office. However, he remains the one president in charge of our nation’s executive branch of government. That means, as near as I can tell, he is an essential government official. He occupies a position of maximum need.

Vice President Mike Pence is going to get his vaccine on Friday. President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are getting their vaccines very soon. Dr. Anthony Fauci, our nation’s top infectious disease expert, is urging the president and the president-elect to get vaccinated ASAP.

Listen to the doc — for once! — Mr. President. Now is the time!

national news

Who should stay on?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Presidential transitions occasionally produce parlor games out here in Voter Land, the kind that prompts some of us to wonder: Who might the new president hold over from the administration he is replacing?

Joe Biden is forming his team in fairly rapid succession, despite Donald Trump’s efforts to derail him. I do wonder, though, whether the president-elect would be inclined to ask any member of the Trump team to stay on.

Two names come to mind: FBI Director Christopher Wray and CIA Director Gina Haspel. The rest of ’em? I don’t see any keepers among them.

Wray and Haspel seem to have something in common, despite the obvious commonality, that they were both selected by Trump. They both have fallen out of favor with the current president.

Wray has fairly openly challenged Trump’s assertions about the threat that Russia posed during the election and has asserted that he can find no evidence of widespread voter fraud, the kind that Trump keeps insisting occurred during the election. Haspel has done her job professionally and has kept her spooks in line, preventing them from doing Trump’s dirty work.

They’re both competent professionals. Haspel in particular impresses me, as she was a career deep-cover agent before ascending to the top rungs of the CIA organizational structure. Meanwhile, Wray has stood up for his team of agents in the face of mounting — and unwarranted — criticism from Donald Trump.

I have not a clue whether either of them would be interested in working in a Biden administration. If they do have an interest, I would hope President Biden would consider keeping them on the job.

No need to think of keeping anyone else, all of whom deserve a hasty “b’bye.”

national news

Sure, Donald, deny all you want

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump wants us to believe he has nothing to do with a federal investigation into the business dealings of the son of the man who defeated him for re-election.

Do we take the word of the Serial Liar in Chief? Umm, I don’t think so.

Hunter Biden, son of President-elect Joe Biden, has declared that the Internal Revenue Service is investigating his business affairs. He has cooperated with the IRS. Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to throw up roadblocks to Joe Biden’s transition into the presidency and his minions continue to raise the issue of Hunter Biden’s business dealings, as if to smear his father.

So now we have Donald Trump declare he has nothing to do with the feds investigating Hunter Biden. Do you believe him? Neither do I.

Indeed, I stand by my refusal to take a single thing that comes from Trump’s mouth at face value.

national news

Phenomenal replaces the routine

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

It can be argued, which I will do here, that Donald Trump’s presidential re-election loss has produced one of the most remarkable phenomena in recent memory.

That would be how a simple acknowledgment that the winner of a presidential election is the president-elect can make such news.

So it was the other day when Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stood on the floor of the Senate and declared that his former Democratic colleague, Joe Biden, was the president-elect of the United States.

McConnell’s acknowledgment of the obvious became news all day.

Who is to blame or credit of this bizarre reaction? Donald Trump! He has sown a narrative that has taken hold among faithful GOP politicians who have signed onto the phony notion that Biden “stole” the election that Trump actually won. Think about this for just a moment.

Courts have ruled repeatedly that no such thievery occurred. Politicians who under normal circumstances would honor judicial opinions now cast aspersions on them. The Senate’s top Republican, ,McConnell, was among the politicians who refused to say publicly what he no doubt knew, which is that Trump lost and that Biden beat him like a drum.

So now we get to watch GOP politicians say — now that the Electoral College has certified the outcome — that Joe Biden is the president-elect. And the media cover it as if it’s really big news. Then again, given the tenor of the times and the suspicion that Donald Trump has created … I guess it is.

Ridiculous.

national news

Waiting for a POTUS to do his job

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

While we watch Donald Trump remained fixated on an issue he cannot change, it is good to look ahead toward an era when we get a president who is committed to doing his job.

Joe Biden will take an oath on Jan. 20 to defend and protect the Constitution and to defend Americans against our enemies.

Our enemies must include a pandemic that continues to kill Americans every hour of the day. The total has zoomed past 300,000 and will only grow for the foreseeable future. Yes, we have good news on the way in the form of vaccines developed by two major pharmaceutical firms; medicine is being injected right now into the arms of first responders.

The current president, though, is quiet about all the misery we’re still experiencing. He instead is focusing on court challenges to an election he lost bigly. He has lost more than 60 court battles, including at least two of them before the U.S. Supreme Court; indeed, he has been rebuffed by the three justices he nominated to the nation’s highest court, proving once again the value of an independent federal judiciary.

Joe Biden will bring an entirely different approach to governing. Of that I am absolutely, utterly and completely certain. The president-elect has spent his entire professional life in public service. He is wired for the job he is about to inherit, unlike Trump, who is wired only for self-enrichment.

Trump never acquired the knowledge of running a massive government enterprise. It’s now an open question whether he even knew how to run a business empire he acquired with substantial financial help from his father.

Donald Trump has been AWOL since losing his re-election bid. The new man, Joe Biden, is hard at work crafting an executive branch of government worthy of the effort that awaits it.

I am one American who looks forward to the new guy taking charge.

environmental news, national news

Push toward energy alternatives? Yes

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

A nation is watching a government take shape.

President-elect Joe Biden is systematically appointing Cabinet and high-level advisors at a brisk clip. They are by and large competent, knowledgeable and forward-thinking. I don’t see any real clunkers in the group.

We’re going to get an energy secretary who once served as governor of Michigan. Jennifer Granholm is expected to take over from Dan Brouilette as soon as the Senate confirms her. What do I want from the new energy boss? Well, I want something that’s been missing for the past four years under Brouilette and from former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who preceded him as energy boss. I want an emphasis on renewable energy.

Will this be part of the Granholm agenda when she takes over as head of the Department of Energy? It damn sure better be.

What was most troubling to me about Rick Perry’s tenure at Energy was his silence on the issue of renewable energy … the clean energy that could replace fossil fuel-driven energy. What disappointed me was that while he was governor of Texas, we saw wind energy farms sprouting like wildflowers all over West Texas. Perry’s tenure as governor saw a huge investment in the kind of energy that promotes environmental protection while heating and cooling our homes and delivering electricity to business and industry throughout the state.

Indeed, Texas became the nation’s leading producer of wind-generated electricity during Perry’s time as governor. Then he ran for president twice; he called Donald Trump a “cancer on conservatism,” pulled out of the 2016 contest and then got selected to serve as energy secretary during the first part of the Trump administration. He must have made a pledge to keep quiet about his record in Texas, because we didn’t hear much from him about alternative energy sources.

President-elect Biden is expected to select Gov. Granholm as the nation’s next energy secretary. He also is committing considerable interest and resources to battling climate change. He has named former Secretary of State John Kerry as his international climate envoy and former Environmental Protection Agency head Gina McCarthy as the nation’s domestic climate change guru.

Fossil fuel production and the carbon emissions that choke our air have caused a worldwide crisis with its impact on our planet’s climate. The nation’s energy secretary can play a key role in stemming that trend and perhaps guide us toward a reversal of fortune.

Jennifer Granholm must be able and willing to take that lead. So must the man who will nominate her to the key job. President Biden has stated clearly and without equivocation that climate change presents a dire threat to our national security. He needs to give the next energy secretary the go-ahead to attack that problem head-on.

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