national news

Gov. Cuomo … you’ve messed up

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Andrew Cuomo isn’t your run-of-the-mill governor of one of our 50 states. He has a famous political name; he once was married to a member of the Kennedy clan; he became a national media star with his COVID pandemic press briefings.

However, he appears to have messed up big time.

Three women have accused him of sexual harassment. The New York Democrat is under fire from his fellow Democrats to resign in the face of the accusations that appear to be credible.

What gives them credibility is his non-apology. Cuomo has declared that he didn’t intend his actions to be “flirtatious,” that he was trying to be “funny,” and that he apologizes for any “misinterpretation” that was derived from the way he talked to these women.

Oh, brother.

The 60-something governor has had a very rough couple of weeks. It started with reports of how he undercounted the deaths at nursing homes of COVID victims. It then got worse with the accusations of sexual harassment.

Gov. Cuomo is known in New York as someone who treats others badly. He reportedly can be downright mean and belittling in his confrontations with those who disagree with him.

So, as I watch this drama play out I am inclined to give the accusers the benefit of the doubt. As for that ridiculous, phony “apology” that Cuomo offered, well … it only worsens matters.

Were he to ask for my advice, I would say Gov. Cuomo needs to find something else to do.

International news

Open borders? Bullsh**!

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Demagogues make a handsome political killing by throwing out key words and phrases that have little to do with any sort of reality.

Let’s look at the term “open borders.”

Right-wing demagogues are fond of accusing those who oppose their policies of favoring “open borders.” They suggest that any view that opposes construction of walls means by definition that one favors just throwing the borders of this nation open to anyone who wants to enter the United States of America.

These demagogues should be ashamed of themselves.

I dislike building a wall along our border, namely our southern border, which has gotten all the attention during the past four years. I also dislike the notion of throwing our borders open to everyone. I happen to believe in border enforcement. I believe we must insist on legal entry for those who want to live in the United States.

What’s more, I am not going to tolerate any notion that those of us who oppose the build-the-wall fanatics favor “open borders.”

The term is a canard. It seeks to drive wedges between Americans. “Open borders” implies favoring lawlessness. My goodness, let’s not go there.

The demagogues among us are going to keep throwing that inflammatory term out there just to gin up support for a policy that seeks to wall this country off from the rest of the world comprising individuals who believe the United States should stand for opportunity.

Do we need comprehensive and total immigration reform? Absolutely. President Biden has brought back the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program enacted by President Obama but rescinded by Donald Trump. Biden wants to streamline the legalization process for undocumented immigrants to obtain citizenship or permanent resident status.

I do not hear Joe Biden espousing an open-border policy that allows anyone into this country. Demagogues need to be called out when they suggest their foes favor a lawless border policy.

medical news

Getting a vaccine … is a secret?

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

How does one process this bit of news?

Donald and Melania Trump, the nation’s former president and first lady, received a COVID-19 vaccine in January, being among the first Americans to get the shot. But they kept it secret! They did it under the cover of secrecy!

Compare that with the public display by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the current POTUS and VPOTUS, who along with their spouses got their shots in front of cameras.

President Biden and Vice President Harris wanted to make a public show of them getting vaccinated against the killer virus. They chose to lead by example, as opposed to the modus operandi followed by Trump, who continued to give the notion of vaccination the short shrift.

I am scratching my head. Not in disbelief, mind you. I am baffled by the idiocy of the protocol followed by the former administration.

This is how you politicize an action that in a more perfect world should be utterly free of politics. Getting a vaccine against a disease that has killed 500,000-plus Americans ought to be something to be hailed, for government leaders to pronounce loudly.

The news about Donald and Melania Trump, along with Mike and Karen Pence, getting the vaccine in January has just been made public. I am wondering whether the ex-president and ex-VP ever intended to say whether they got the vaccine.

The politics of this news tracks the same way as MAGA followers and others on the far right have sought to denigrate mask-wearing as a deterrent against the virus. They disparage those who wear masks, preferring to congregate closely among themselves, shouting loudly and proudly their approval of rhetoric they endorse.

This past week’s meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla., could provide some evidence of the folly of those who continue to disrespect the notion of masks and social distancing. The crowds that gathered in the meeting hall comprised individuals who shunned the masks. Will there then be an uptick, or even a serious spike, in infection rates among those who attended the CPAC gabfest?

Time well could reveal much about the wisdom of politicizing vaccinations and taking measures to prevent illness or even death.

Donald Trump’s secret is now known. He got the vaccine. How might that bit of news play among those who (a) follow Trump’s rhetoric over the cliff and (b) denigrate the very action their hero took to keep himself safe.

Hmm …

national news

Just a hunch about Trump

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Hunches usually aren’t very reliable barometers of political trends and Lord knows my own hunches have let me down a time or three.

However, I am going to toss one out there for you to ponder. It is that Donald John Trump will not run for president in 2024.

He stood before the Conservative Political Action Conference crowd over the weekend and said he won’t form a third political party. Trump wants to remain active in GOP politics. They took a straw poll of CPAC attendees and Trump finished first with 55 percent of those attending who said they wanted him to be the Republican Party presidential nominee in ’24.

The ex-president no doubt took all of that to heart. He might run again for the office he lost bigly after a single term to Joe Biden.

But … why? How? To what end?

Trump is facing multiple crises unrelated to politics. They are totally related to whether he will face criminal charges regarding his business “empire.” How in the name of rational thought does someone run for president if he is indicted by a grand jury for, let’s see, campaign finance violations? Or income tax fraud?

How does even someone as slippery as Donald Trump do that?

Trump once boasted that he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes.” A lot of us laughed when he said it in 2016. His acquittal in the Senate trial of inciting an insurrection wiped that smile off my face.

None of that means he will be able to win the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. Yeah, he’s got that faithful base. Is it sufficient to carry him to victory in the primary with the potential crises exploding all around him?

That hunch of mine says, um, “no.”

I just hope it doesn’t let me down again.

national news

Die, Big Lie … just die!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Some lies take on lives of their own.

The Big Lie from the 2020 presidential election is one of them. It won’t die. It can’t die. It lives in what passes for the hearts and minds of millions of Americans who are willing to swill the poisonous notion that Donald Trump actually won that election despite the numbers that tell us he lost it … bigly!

President Joe Biden beat Trump soundly. Trump, though, keeps feeding the Big Lie to those who are willing to swallow it. He did it again at the Conservative Political Action Conference this past weekend.

Trump repeats false claim he won 2020 election, teases potential future White House bid during CP… – YouTube

He recited the Big Lie. The faithful cheered him on. He kept it up. They cheered some more.

The Big Lie lives on for as long as there are people among us who believe it.

State news

Special legislative session awaits

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I am not a huge fan of special legislative sessions in Texas.

We send our legislators to Austin for 140 days every other year to take care of legislative business. We don’t pay ’em very much money; I mean, they’re “citizen legislators” and we pay them a pittance to do our work.

The 2021 Legislature has a huge task ahead of it that it might be able to finish in time for the regular session to adjourn sine die.

Gov. Greg Abbott needs to ensure they finish the one major task: That would be finding money to pay for a major overhaul/reform/strengthening of our state’s electrical grid.

The grid came within about four minutes of collapsing a couple of weeks ago. It damn near failed the entire state, throwing us into prolonged darkness and cold. How did that happen? Well, the jury is still pondering that one, but one element seems clear: The state has not “winterized” its generating system to cope with the zero-degree temperature that blanketed much of the state.

Special legislative sessions too often are the product of lawmakers running out of time because they spend so much time dawdling at the beginning of these regular sessions. The 2021 Legislature doesn’t have time to waste. It has begun some key hearings peppering utility officials with questions about what went so damn wrong this past month.

Texas has a Rainy Day Fund that it can use to help pay for the cost of weatherizing its energy plants. There needs to be some serious priority-setting as well.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the electrical grid, is under intense fire from critics who wonder about some of the bone-headed decisions that reduce energy output at critical times during the deep freeze.

We have lots of energy in this state. We also have some pretty good minds in key places that can figure out what went so terribly wrong and find solutions to fix it.

If it takes a special session to finish the job, I would hope — and I expect — Gov. Abbott will be quick to summon legislators back to get it done.

national news

Trump talks to CPAC

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Well now … that was no surprise. Or was it? Nah. Not even close.

Donald Trump strode to the stage in front of the Conservative Political Action Conference and tore into President Biden and his critics within the Republican Party.

As The Hill reported: “We all knew that the Biden administration was going to be bad, but none of us even imagined just how bad they would be and how far left they would go,” Trump told a crowd of enthusiastic supporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Fla.

Sigh …

Trump tears into Biden, GOP critics in first post-presidency speech | TheHill

The ex-president also let it be known that he won’t form a third political party and that he plans to remain active in Republican Party matters well into the future.

I think I’ll just sigh again.

The twice-impeached, the defendant in multiple lawsuits alleging sexual misconduct and the target of potential criminal indictments vows to be a GOP player.

What is undoubtedly most astonishing to me and others is that the GOP faithful appear to be lining up behind this clown. Good luck with that.

My favorite line from Trump’s speech? “If Republicans do not stick together, the RINOs that we’re surrounded with will destroy the Republican Party,” he added. Yep, he called his critics RINOs, Republicans In Name Only.

Wow, man!

I won’t predict it, but I have difficulty understanding how someone so deeply flawed at every level possible can be a factor on the American political stage. It surely must speak to the nature of the modern Republican Party, which is that it is totally without any moral compass.

That fits Donald Trump to the letter. Don’t you think?

national news

Let’s talk about existential threats … OK?

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Among the reasons I have welcomed the presidency of Joe Biden is  the return of frank and open discussion by our head of state of existential threats to our nation and to Planet Earth.

Donald Trump called climate change a “hoax”; he said the same thing about the pandemic. He chose to ignore those subjects whenever he appeared in public, which was quite often given his penchant for self-aggrandizement.

President Biden has turned our attention toward issues that really matter. They present serious  threats to all of us.

Climate change? Biden is all in on efforts to combat the change in our worldwide climate. Do not tell me that the bitter cold wave that recently swept in over much of the nation, including Texas, puts the lie to the notion that our climate is changing.

President Biden at least is talking about developing cleaner energy sources, which will — make no mistake about it — produce jobs that could be lost from the fossil fuel industry.

The major beneficiary will be the planet. That’s a bad thing? I think not.

The pandemic? We are welcoming a third vaccine, from Johnson & Johnson. It’s a single-shot dose. It joins Pfizer and Moderna as vaccines that are inoculating millions of Americans each week. Again, Trump chose to downplay the sickness, misery and death that afflicted the nation. Joe Biden is talking openly about it, reminding us to not let up in taking safety measures to prevent infection. Did his predecessor issue such warnings? I cannot remember hearing those warnings fly out of Trump’s blow hole.

Human rights? Donald Trump wouldn’t dare talk about human rights abroad while proclaiming he and North Korea tyrant/despot/killer Kim Jong Un had fallen “in love.” At the very least we are hearing President Biden give needed lip service to the quest for human rights in places where human beings are enslaved, starved, abused by those in power.

Domestic terror? It exists in the form of white supremacists who, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray, pose the greatest existential threat of all to Americans. President Biden vows to attack it head-on and is saying so loudly.

These threats have been all but ignored for the past four years. They require laser focus from the president of the United States. I happen to believe President Biden is devoting the attention to all of them that they deserve.

local news, national news, political news, State news

Ted Cruz: ‘sniveling coward’ of the year

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Ted Cruz takes the grand prize as the “sniveling coward” of this still young year.

I kind of like the term “sniveling.” It’s so, um, descriptive. You can draw a mental picture of someone cowering in a corner, sobbing while crouched in some sort of fetal position.

It’s an epithet that the Texas U.S. senator threw at a fellow Republican presidential candidate in 2016. Yep, that would be Donald John Trump, the guy who eventually won the presidency that year. You recall the moment, yes? Trump tweeted an unflattering picture of Heidi Cruz, Ted’s wife. Ted went after Trump with ferocity, calling him a “pathological liar,” a guy with “no morals,” and yes, he called him a “sniveling coward.”

Trump is all of that. So, too, is Ted Cruz … I mean the sniveling coward part.

You see, after Trump got elected Cruz began sucking up to The Donald. They became best friends. Cruz became afraid of the damage Trump might cause were he to remain committed to his earlier view of Trump’s morals, his lying and his lack of courage.

He cowered in the face of potential payback. Thus, he became a “sniveling coward.”

I suppose you could say he burnished his “sniveling coward” credentials by jetting off to Cancun while Texans shivered in the dark during that horrible winter storm. Oh, and get this: Cruz then decided this weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference to mock Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York progressive member of Congress, who came to Texas and raised $5 million in storm relief … while Cruz was hightailing it to the beach in sunny, balmy Mexico.

All of these examples I have cited offer plenty of evidence to suggest that Ted Cruz is very much the “sniveling coward” he once said of an ex-president to whom he now professes blind fealty.

Cruz makes me want to puke.

medical news

ACA gets new life

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

You might recall when Congress approved the Affordable Care Act. Then-Vice President Joe Biden warmed up the podium for President Obama and then whispered a remark got on a hot mic.

“This is a big fu**ing deal,” Biden said. Obama signed the bill into law and then commenced a decade-long fight with congressional Republicans who wanted to kill it. They never came up with an alternative. They never sought to improve the ACA. They wanted it wiped off the books. Why? Because the law had President Barack Obama’s name on it.

Donald Trump was the top GOP cheerleader, but he never had an alternative, either. Now he’s gone. Democrats control both legislative chambers. VP Biden is now the president.

And the ACA is still a big … deal.

Improvements to it are contained in a COVID relief bill that the House has approved. It’s now in the Senate and is likely to pass narrowly.

The New York Times reports: Now the Biden administration and a Democratic Congress hope to engineer the first major repair job and expansion of the Affordable Care Act since its passage. They plan to refashion regulations and spend billions through the stimulus bill to make Obamacare simpler, more generous and closer to what many of its architects wanted in the first place.

At Last, Democrats Get Chance to Engineer Obamacare 2.0 (msn.com)

The link I have attached to this blog post goes into detail what Democrats have in mind.

Suffice to say that the ACA isn’t perfect. Its rollout was a disaster. However, it has managed to provide health insurance to millions of Americans. Barack Obama always stated he would welcome improvements to the law.

Republicans who controlled the White House and Congress had their chance to produce an alternative to law they despised. They failed. Now it’s Democrats’ turn. Perhaps they can deliver the goods to Americans who continue to support the act, no matter how much venom is spewed by its foes.

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