medical news

Annual COVID vaccine? Sure thing!

If the nation’s medical pros are right that we’re going to be consigned to getting annual vaccines to fend off the COVID virus, well, I’m all for it.

I keep hearing that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the president’s team of medical advisers are telling us that the virus won’t be exterminated, that we might have to get the vaccines each year. We do it with the flu, correct?

If that’s the case, then I am totally OK with that.

My wife and I this week obtained our second booster vaccine. We went to our CVS pharmacy in Princeton, Texas. We were in and out in just a few minutes. The nurse who stuck the needles into our arms was pleasant. Why, she even told us we didn’t have to wait 15 minutes in case of ill effect from the vaccine; “I just have to advise you,” she said.

This appears to be in our future. Whether it’s a long-term routine remains to be determined. Whether it’s long term, medium term or short term doesn’t bother me in the least.

We are both prepared to do what our government says it will take to protect us against the virus.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Yeah, listen to Newtie

Newt Gingrich makes me laugh, albeit derisively, as he tries to offer advice and a critique of the state of today’s Republican Party leadership.

The former (disgraced) U.S. House speaker doesn’t think much of GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s leadership style. He likes the notions being pitched by GOP Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and California’s U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy.

Newt Gingrich questions McConnell’s strategy for Republicans: ‘As bad as Pelosi’ | Just The News

Sigh …

I am left to wonder: What in the world is Newt Gingrich’s track record as a legislative leader?

It stinks, man!

Newtie became House speaker after the GOP took control of Congress in the 1994 Contract With America election. He managed to work pretty well (for a time) with Democratic President Bill Clinton. The two men found a way to hammer out a balanced federal budget. Good deal, yes? Of course!

President Clinton then got re-elected in 1996 and in 1998, Democrats retook command of Congress, which of course occurred on Gingrich’s watch as House speaker.

Then came the scandal that resulted in President Clinton’s impeachment. Who led the impeach-him chorus? Newt Gingrich! Oh, but wait. In real time, Newtie was boinking a staffer, cheating on his second wife, while at the same time decrying President Clinton’s behavior with the White House intern.

Gingrich eventually resigned from the House; he married the woman with whom he was taking the extramarital tumble. He went to work for Fox News and has become a royal pain in the patootie ever since.

So, when this clown critiques today’s political leadership, I am, umm … left to snicker.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news

Puppy Tales, Part 95: Body language speaks loudly

Toby the Puppy’s body-language “vocabulary” is expanding. I want to report briefly on a way he communicates to his Mommy and me and how we learned quickly to understand the message he was delivering.

When we want to take him for one of his twice-daily walks — yes, we’re on a schedule to take him twice each day through the neighborhood — we know he is ready to go … when we ask if he’s “ready” and he grabs the nearest toy and shakes it vigorously.

There you go. He tells us he’s good to go for a walk by grabbing a toy — preferably a squeaker, of which he has plenty laying around the house — and biting it so it makes noise and then shaking the daylights out of it.

It’s a fairly remarkable way of communicating, if you want my humble opinion on it. Well, whether you want my opinion or not, you have it. So there.

It’s just one more aspect of puppy parenthood that has made my bride and me laugh every single day since Toby the Puppy came into our lives.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

political news

RNC concocts phony excuse

The Republican National Committee has voted unanimously to no longer take part in televised debates featuring the party’s presidential nominee, saying that past debates have been biased against the GOP.

What a crock!

The Commission on Presidential Debates has failed, according to the RNC, to enact reforms demanded by the likes of Donald Trump and other fruitcakes insisting on formats that they say would provide viewers/voters with important information about the candidates.

Again … pure horsesh**!

The RNC and its chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, are concocting phony excuses, looking for ways to manipulate the format to their party’s and their candidate’s liking.

As Reuters reported: “We are going to find newer, better debate platforms to ensure that future nominees are not forced to go through the biased CPD in order to make their case to the American people,” the committee’s chairperson, Ronna McDaniel, said in a statement.

Republican Party withdraws from U.S. commission on presidential debates (msn.com)

How do they define “bias”? I will wait with bated breath to see what the RNC has in mind. Perhaps the committee could provide some examples of the “bias” it says existed during previous debates that somehow infringed on its nominee’s ability to get his message delivered.

I am all ears.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news, media news

Streak goes on

Allow me to boast about the blog you are reading at this moment.

I just posted an item for the 200th consecutive day of posts on High Plains Blogger. I like writing frequently. I have declared myself to be an expert on next to nothing, but I do have opinions on damn near everything.

When something piques my fancy, I like writing about it.

My current streak is now 200 days in length. I am far from finished.

The Ukraine War is keeping me fueled up. So is the 1/5 House select committee investigation on the insurrection.

The blog is mostly political but occasionally it strays into slice of life matters, feel-good items, commentary about retirement, grandparenthood and even about our precious Toby the Puppy.

OK. Bragging is now over. I encourage you to read the blog and to share it whenever you feel moved to do so.

Thus, I will thank each of you in advance for reading this blog. It gives me reason to keep going.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

How does POTUS tell his story?

Someone will have to explain to me why President Biden continues to struggle to win Americans’ approval over the way he is conducting himself in the office to which he was elected in 2020.

Maybe he just isn’t telling his story in a convincing fashion. Perhaps he is being outshouted by critics who continue to adhere to matters such as, oh, The Big Lie about the so-called theft of the presidential election.

I admit my bias. I want Biden to succeed and I want him to be able to sell his story to Americans who just aren’t buying into the Biden presidency. OK, so I have gotten that out of the way.

The economy continues to add hundreds of thousands of jobs each month; joblessness is less than 4%; we are winning the war against the COVID pandemic; we have restored our alliances around the world; the president is leading the worldwide response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and is crippling the Russian economy.

Life isn’t perfect. Inflation is hurting Americans. However, Joe Biden keeps reminding us that so much of the skyrocketing costs come from (a) supply issues created by the pandemic and (b) Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and the cutting off of Russian oil and natural gas to markets around the world.

The president needs to do a better job of securing our southern border. I acknowledge mistakes there. However, the border isn’t anything approaching an “open door” for anyone to walk into this country.

I am open to hearing from readers of this blog who has an idea of why Joe Biden continues to win the kind of approval from my fellow citizens that I believe he deserves.

So … with that I’ll sign off from this post.

Let’s discuss.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

State news

Siding with Sid Miller? Wow!

Hell has officially frozen over! How do I know that? Because Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has done something I never thought possible: He has enacted a policy that has me agreeing with the state’s goofball commissioner of agriculture, Sid Miller.

The Stetson-wearing ag commissioner has criticized Abbott’s decision to stop trucks coming into Texas across the state border with Mexico, citing the harm the decision to inspect all those vehicles is doing to Texas farmers and ranchers.

Abbott had decided to double- and triple-down on vehicle inspections at the border on the hunt for human traffickers. The intensity of the search delayed truckers’ stay along border crossings for many hours.

The delay drew Miller’s ire, which by itself is saying something, given that the Republican ag commissioner usually stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the GOP governor on policy matters.

Not this time.

Good news, though, has more or less arrived. Abbott met with the governor of Nuevo Leon, a state in Mexico, and said he would ease the inspections at one commercial bridge at Laredo. It gives some relief at one critical crossing point.

Will it assuage the criticism coming from Sid Miller? Probably not.

The Texas Tribune reported: As part of the deal, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers will stop inspecting every commercial truck on the Laredo-Colombia bridge as long as Nuevo León has checkpoints on its side of the Mexican state’s 9-mile-long border with Texas. The state inspections will continue for trucks coming from the other three Mexican states that border Texas.

Gov. Greg Abbott eases state inspections at one border bridge | The Texas Tribune

Miller had complained that Abbott’s inspection order could result in grocery store shelves being emptied as products imported from Mexico are held up for unreasonable lengths of time.

This latest Abbott order looks for all the world like another grandstanding measure by a Texas governor with his eyes on the White House prize around, oh, 2024.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

medical news

Abortion won’t end

Republican Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt’s declaration that the state seeks to end abortion is ridiculous on its face.

The state has made obtaining an abortion a violation of the law. Those who seek one and those who provide it face criminal prosecution.

What does that mean for abortion in Oklahoma or any state that bans the termination of a pregnancy? It means, from what I can gather, that women are going to obtain them anyway, no matter what.

You see, desperate measures have no rationale. They are the result of an individual seeking a solution to a problem they cannot solve through normal or legal means.

So very tragically, those desperate measures can result in tragedy to the individual seeking that solution.

Women have been terminating pregnancies since the beginning of human existence on this good Earth. That is a fact that cannot be ignored, no matter how many laws we enact to make such a deed illegal. They make that decision after searching deeply within their souls, after seeking guidance from their faith leaders, their families, their partners, or even to Almighty God himself.

And yet we hear politicians make these pious declarations about how they intend to “eliminate” an activity that has been occurring since the beginning of time. Are they serious? I guess they believe they are.

They also have delusions on what they believe they can accomplish.

Which is ... not a damn thing!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

International news

Biden calls it ‘genocide’

President Biden has ramped up the rhetoric in his face-off with Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin, calling the Russian troops’ conduct in Ukraine an act of “genocide.”

It remains for international courts to make that official determination, but I happen to have no difficulty with our president calling Putin out on with the strong language he is using to apply maximum pressure on a despot who is waging what looks to many of us to be an illegal war against Ukraine.

Putin invaded Ukraine with the stated hope of capturing the capital city of Kyiv within, oh, a few days. It didn’t happen. Russian troops have retreated from the area around Kyiv and are reportedly staging in the eastern part of Ukraine to launch another massive assault.

They have left evidence of enormous destruction and the slaughter of thousands of civilians. Ukrainian forces have discovered thousands of bodies with single gunshot wounds to their heads; the men and women executed by the Russians had their hands tied behind their backs.

Why do this? President Biden labels it “genocide,” which by definition is the planned extermination of people based on their race and/or their ethnicity.

We have known for a long time that Putin is a bad actor. He has demonstrated beyond any possible doubt that he is incapable of being an effective partner at any level with this or any nation that values human decency.

He also has shown that President Biden’s moral outrage, which he expressed during his recent trip to Europe that “for God’s sake this man cannot remain in power,” is spot on.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news

Prepared for worst …

My bride and I live by the credo that whenever we prepare for the worst the worst hardly ever arrives.

Thus, when the weather forecasters told us today that the latest round of North Texas spring storms could bring hail stones the size of golf balls or (gulp!) baseballs, we prepared for the arrival of the monstrous storm.

We moved our big ol’ pickup — Big Jake — into our garage. Jake’s rear end stuck out about a foot, given that it’s too big to fit completely into our garage. We covered the exposed portion with two layers of plastic. The wind was howling. We had a bit of rain.

The hail stones? Hah! They never arrived!

Is that an omen? Maybe it is. We won’t take anything for granted as we push our way through the spring, which in North Texas provides a weather-related surprise seemingly every day. It reminds us a bit of the Panhandle, where we lived for more than 20 years before we relocated to the Dallas ‘burbs.

So, we’ll trudge on preparing for the worst whenever the weathermen and women tell us to be alert to Mother Nature’s wrath.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Commentary on politics, current events and life experience