medical news

Welcome, Secretary Becerra … now, get to work

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Xavier Becerra is going to do just fine as the nation’s newest secretary of health and human services.

He takes an otherwise obscure Cabinet post in a time of a national medical crisis. The pandemic is still around.

The 50-49 U.S. Senate vote to confirm came after some Senate Republicans bitched that the former California congressman and state attorney general lacks medical training. He isn’t a doctor, some of them said, which makes him “unqualified” for the HHS job.

What an utter crock of dookey!

Alex Azar was a drug company executive who preceded Becerra in this job. Was he qualified for the job?

GOP lawmakers are getting pretty damn clumsy in hoisting up these straw man arguments. Ben Carson became head of housing and urban development after spending a career as a renowned brain surgeon. Betsy DeVos led the education department despite having no hands-on experience with public education. Rex Tillerson served as secretary of state even though he earned his millions running a giant oil company. These are just four examples of Cabinet picks endorsed by Republicans during the Trump administration.

So now they’re holding President Biden’s HHS pick to a higher standard?

I want to reiterate something about Becerra: He served in Congress when the Obama administration sought to approve the Affordable Care Act. Then-Rep. Becerra played a key role in writing that legislation.

So, spare me the “he ain’t a doc” argument.

The man is qualified. He will do well in his new role leading the Department of Health and Human Services.

Let’s get busy, Mr. Secretary.

national news

DACA may be victim of surge

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

This surge of underage migrants coming across our southern border might produce a casualty that many of us don’t want to see occur.

That casualty well could be a push toward comprehensive immigration reform.

Republicans are suing President Biden over what they contend is a failed immigration policy. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wants the Biden team to do more to prevent this surge in undocumented, unaccompanied children coming into Texas. Everyone is focused on the crisis of the moment.

My fear is that the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals — aka DACA — is going to get caught up in the sausage grinder of recrimination. DACA is an act restored by President Biden that allows those who were brought here illegally as children by their parents to remain as U.S. residents. Biden wants to give them a faster track toward legal residency or citizenship.

DACA is part of a comprehensive immigration reform effort that was thought essential by President Bush, a Republican and by President Obama, a Democrat. Donald Trump wasn’t interested in reforming the immigration protocol, other than to deport all illegal immigrants immediately back to their country of origin.

That included DACA recipients, who were here because their parents brought them here when they were youngsters. They grew up in the United States, they have paid their taxes, many of them have excelled academically, professionally and have raised their families here.

DACA might be on the bubble as the nation struggles with this surge and as President Biden tries to find firm footing on which to move the administration forward.

I don’t want to see DACA disappear again.

State news

GOP = voter suppression

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Honest to goodness, this is the truth, which is that I do not want to believe Republicans favor limiting Americans’ access to voting.

However, it is clear to anyone with a working brain that the GOP is aligned with those who want to restrict many Americans’ rights as citizens of this great land.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has sharpened his political long knife in endorsing a Republican plan to limit access to voting while the state is fighting the pandemic. He targets one of the state’s largest Democratic leaning counties, Harris County.

The Texas Tribune reports: At a press conference in Houston, Abbott served up the opening salvo in the Texas GOP’s legislative response to the 2020 election and its push to further restrict voting by taking aim at local election officials in the state’s most populous and Democratically controlled county. The governor specifically criticized officials in Harris County for attempting to send applications to vote by mail to every registered voter and their bid to set up widespread drive-thru voting, teeing up his support for legislation that would prohibit both initiatives in future elections.

“Whether it’s the unauthorized expansion of mail-in ballots or the unauthorized expansion of drive-thru voting, we must pass laws to prevent election officials from jeopardizing the election process,” Abbott said on Monday. Harris County planned to send out applications to request a mail-in ballot, not the actual ballots.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott backs bills that restrict efforts to expand voting | The Texas Tribune

Texas is not alone. Other states where Republicans command power are taking similar actions.

“These kinds of attempts to confuse, to intimidate, to suppress are a continuation of policies we’ve seen in this state since Reconstruction,” Democratic Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said. “It is a continuation as well of the big lie that’s being peddled by some far-right elements that the election in 2020 was somehow not true and should be overturned.”

What troubles me is that the phony charge of vote fraud is being used as political cover for more nefarious motives designed to prevent racial and ethnic minorities from being able to vote. My goodness, I hate thinking that is the real reason, but the actions of Texas Republican legislators — as well as Gov. Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — leave me with no choice but to assume the worst.

It sickens and saddens me.

International news

Abbott looks for immigration scapegoat

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was looking for someone to blame for the immigration crisis that is building along our southern border.

So he found one. You’re it, President Biden.

Abbott came to Dallas today to blame Biden for the influx of unaccompanied children who are entering the state. He said the president’s immigration policies are “enticing” Latin Americans to enter the United States illegally.

Oh, but wait. President Biden has said categorically — in plain English — that those people shouldn’t come here. “Don’t come,” Biden told ABC News this week, adding that critics are blasting him because he’s a “good guy” who will treat immigrants more humanely than Donald Trump ever did.

As the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports: “I can say quite clearly, don’t come over,” Biden said, noting that the administration is setting up a process for applying for asylum in place. “So don’t leave your town, or city or community.”

When it comes to children crossing he border, Biden said most are 16 and 17. He advocated for trying to connect the minors with an adult contact in the U.S.

Greg Abbott decries immigration under Biden while in Dallas | Fort Worth Star-Telegram (star-telegram.com)

None of that stops Gov. Abbott from levying heavy criticism on President Biden.

Yes, the child immigration problem has worsened. I get it. What is lost on me is what precisely the Biden administration is doing to lure these children into the country.

My request for Gov. Abbott would be to cool down the anti-Biden rhetoric and spend more of his waking energy on coming up with solutions he can implement along with whatever the feds intend to do.

And please, governor, spare me the “open borders” canard.

International news

Yep, Putin is a ‘killer’

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President Biden has hit an important reset button.

It’s the one that calibrates this nation’s relationship with Vladimir Putin, the one-time chief spook who governs Russia.

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos this week asked Biden directly, “Is he a killer?” The president answered, “Mm-hm. I do.” So, with that we well might witness a new era of competition between the leaders of two former Cold War adversaries, rather than a relationship in which Putin seemingly called all the shots and the man who served as our president marched to Putin’s cadence.

The ABC interview with President Biden came at a fortuitous time, as Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines released declassified findings that showed how hard Russia worked to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

The good news? The DNI’s findings have determined that the Russians failed in their effort to re-elect Donald Trump. The election was carried off without foreign interference, the report said.

What happens now?

President Biden said Putin is going to “pay” for the misbehavior in which he engages. Biden said he knows Putin “fairly well” and that he once told Putin that he looked into his eyes and didn’t see his soul, to which — according to the president — Putin responded that “now we understand each other.”

I am not willing to support a buddy-buddy friendship between our president and the Russian despot/strongman. Donald Trump simply could not bring himself to speak critically of Putin, seemingly believing that overt criticism held too many risks for this nation.

Sigh. What the ex-president never appeared to grasp is the reality that Russia is a third-rate economic power and that — beyond its vast nuclear arsenal — it is a relatively feckless military power as well. The United States truly is the world’s remaining military superpower and our economic heft is far greater than anything that Russia or Putin can imagine.

Donald Trump operated from a position of weakness with regard to Putin. Joe Biden intends to flex our economic and military muscle and appears set to remind Vladimir Putin that he no longer is dealing with a patsy who is working in the White House.

national news

Asian-Americans under attack!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

What the hell is happening to this country?

The latest victims of hatred now belong to a group of people of Asian descent. We are witnessing a hideous outgrowth of our national fight against a killer virus.

The coronavirus had its beginning in China, or so we have been told. It spread around the world. It entered the United States either in late 2019 or early 2020.

To worsen it, we heard our nation’s president refer continually to the disease as the “China virus,” or making mocking references to something he would call the “kung flu.”

Have we heard anything from the now former president urging Americans to stop the attacks on Asian-Americans? Has Donald Trump raised a single objection to what is happening throughout the nation he once led as its president? No! He has said nothing.

Individuals are being captured, jailed and prosecuted for hate crimes against Asian-Americans. And why? Because they are being vilified only because a virus took root in a foreign land.

President Biden has condemned the hate crime wave. However, the hate crime perps aren’t listening to the current president; they cling to the rhetoric from the man he defeated in 2020. The MAGA mob needs to hear this condemnation from Donald Trump. Tragically, Trump doesn’t appear wired to say what he must to those who are attacking elderly people, inflicting physical harm or bullying individuals over social media.

This terrible spike in hate crimes against Asian-Americans is no way to “make America great again.”

medical news

Politics overpowering pandemic battle

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

One of the more astonishing aspects of this fight against the coronavirus pandemic — and there have been so many of them — has been the political tug-of-war over whether to get vaccinated against a disease that has killed 500,000-plus Americans.

On one side we have the MAGA-hat crowd, the folks who continue to stand with an ex-president who spent much of the previous year denying the pandemic was anything to cause worry. They oppose getting vaccinated.

It fell, then, on Dr. Anthony Fauci — the world’s leading infectious disease expert — to implore Donald Trump to encourage his minions to get vaccinated. The ex-president did so and for that I applaud him.

For the life of me I cannot fathom how vaccination protocols have become something to kick around like a proverbial political football.

The evidence of all three U.S. government-approved vaccines’ efficacy is overwhelming. They are helping curb the infection, hospitalization and death rates. Still, we hear reports of individuals declining to get vaccinated because of some lie that refuses to be exterminated that the vaccines aren’t working.

In a related matter, we also hear about individuals refusing to wear masks while doing business with companies that their customers to wear them. Did you see the video of the woman in Galveston getting arrested in a bank because she refused to mask up even though bank policy requires her to do so? She shouts idiotic cliches about her “personal liberty” being infringed by rules aimed at protecting her life and those with whom she comes into contact. Ridiculous!

If there is a sign that the politicization of society has veered out of control, I believe we are seeing it play out in real time … at this very moment. It has to stop!

local news

Happy Trails, Part 190: The journey continues

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Earlier today I realized something that I should’ve known when I crossed that threshold.

It is that I have lived most of life in a place I never dreamed when I was much younger I would find myself in retirement. That is Texas.

I am now 71 years of age. We moved to Beaumont, Texas in the spring of 1984 when I was a mere pup of 34. We gravitated from Beaumont to Amarillo nearly 11 years later. Then we pulled up our deeply rooted stakes on the Caprock and ventured to Collin County with our No. 1 goal to be near our granddaughter.

I mention all of this because when my wife and I got married nearly 50 years ago we never imagined, never even discussed the notion of moving to a place so far away from Oregon, where I was born and where my wife essentially grew up and came of age.

Texas beckoned in late 1983 with a phone call from my former boss, who had relocated to Beaumont to become executive editor of the Beaumont Enterprise. He wanted to know if I would be interested in working there as an editorial writer. My first reaction was to laugh.

One thing led to another in the course of the next day or two and I decided that, yes, I would like to explore that opportunity. I flew to Beaumont from Portland and spent a couple of days visiting with my old friend and mentor.

I returned to Oregon. I told my wife that the job looked appealing. My friend called, offered me the job, I accepted his offer and then relocated. Our sons were still quite young, 11 and 10 years old. My family joined me that summer.

My wife and I considered Beaumont to be part of a “three- to five-year plan.” We would live there, I could develop some more experience and then try to peddle my skills to another employer … somewhere else! Maybe back “home” in Oregon.

It didn’t transpire that way. Another opportunity did present itself in Amarillo. I flew from Beaumont to Amarillo in late 1994, spent a day interviewing at the Globe-News, returned home to Beaumont. The publisher offered me the job … etc. You know how this played out.

We are now happily retired. I still get to write. I have my blog. I also work as a freelance reporter for a couple who owns a group of weekly newspapers in Collin County. I write for the Farmersville Times. It is a serious, unabashed blast. I have returned, in a way, to where it all began for me in the 1970s: covering city council, school board and writing the occasional feature.

It has been a marvelous journey. Retirement is everything it’s cracked up to be. The road ahead still beckons and to be honest, I am thrilled that our three- to five-year plan never panned out.

media news

Had to break this vow

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I had made a vow after Donald Trump left the presidency that I wouldn’t purchase any more books that discussed his time in office.

Today, I broke that vow. I purchased the paperback version of “Front Row at the Trump Show” written by ABC News White House correspondent Jonathan Karl.

Karl is making the talk show rounds to talk about what happened in the White House after the pandemic hit the nation. His initial version of “Front Row” was published prior to the pandemic’s arrival here. So he had to rewrite some of the book and added a new afterword to freshen up the news contained within its covers.

So I bought the book. It will arrive tomorrow.

There is just so much to learn about what a total clusterf*** operation Trump ran at the White House.

environmental news, State news

Then there were none

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

What the hell?

The last remaining member of the Public Utility Commission of Texas has resigned … at the request of Gov. Greg Abbott.

Holy cow, man! Arthur D’Andrea was the last man standing at the PUC. His two colleagues had quit already, including the chairman DeAnn Walker. Why the exodus?

Well, the PUC overseas the management of the electrical grid, which is run by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. ERCOT, though, made some boneheaded decisions during the February snow and ice storm that paralyzed most of the state. Millions of Texans lost power. More of them lost water.

The PUC along with ERCOT became the whipping kids.

According to the Texas Tribune: “Tonight, I asked for and accepted the resignation of PUC Commissioner Arthur D’Andrea,” the governor said in a statement, adding that he plans to name “a replacement in the coming days who will have the responsibility of charting a new and fresh course for the agency.”

Abbott added: “Texans deserve to have trust and confidence in the Public Utility Commission, and this action is one of many steps that will be taken to achieve that goal.”

I’m glad spring is about to arrive. There is no time to dawdle. We need to “chart a new and fresh course” for the PUC.

It’s time to get busy. As in, um, right now!

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