national news

‘W’ extends a hand

(Photo by Paul McErlane/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

It turns out that not every prominent Republican politician in America has dug in his or her heels while refusing to congratulate the next Democratic president, Joe Biden.

George W. Bush, the 43rd president, the former Texas governor and former owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, has called the president-elect to congratulate him on his victory over Donald Trump.

As the Texas Tribune has reported: “Though we have political differences, I know Joe Biden to be a good man who has won his opportunity to lead and unify our country,” Bush said in a statement. “The President-elect reiterated that while he ran as a Democrat, he will govern for all Americans. I offered him the same thing I offered Presidents Trump and Obama: my prayers for his success, and my pledge to help in any way I can.”

You know, I would be willing to bet real American money that it didn’t hurt President Bush a single bit to say those kind words about the next president.

Compare that with the idiocy spouted by Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has urged Trump to refuse conceding to President-elect Biden. Concession, he said, would mean “no Republican” ever would be elected president … ever!

Good grief, Lindsey. Chill out, man. Take a hint from President Bush.

media news

TV silence is so golden

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

My immediate family and I sat in the middle of one of America’s “battleground states.”

Yes, Joe Biden and Donald Trump believed Texas’s 38 electoral votes were worth the fight. Those votes will go to Trump when the Electoral College meets next month, but not before both sides emptied much of their campaign cash into our TV sets.

They blanketed the air waves with ads. They were incessant. They were harsh. And oh they were frequent.

Well, I am so happy to disclose the obvious: the election is over … and the ads have ceased!

I found the ads annoying. I suppose it was due mostly to the fact that my mind was made up long ago. Still, they were so very repetitive.

I don’t know about you but I am going to cherish the silence.

environmental news

Bring back climate accords!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President-elect Biden vowed during his winning campaign to commit to restoring our nation’s effort to head off climate change.

Donald Trump had pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accord agreement, citing perceived damage to U.S. jobs. Well, Trump is leaving office and Biden has listed a number of executive orders he intends to sign on Day One of the new presidency.

One of them would revoke Trump’s order removing the nation from the climate accords. It would return to the United States to the community of nations that believes — as many Americans do — that climate change needs international attention.

The climate accords intend to reduce carbon emissions that are blamed for much of the planet’s changing climate.

I am one American who fears the effect of climate change. I am afraid of the rising sea levels; the frequency and increasing intensity of hurricanes scare the daylights out of me; the prolonged droughts out west and the intense wildfires that this year have destroyed millions of acres of forestland and timber give me grave concern.

Donald Trump’s response to the wildfires? Do a better job of raking up dead and dry tinder from the forest floor!

Joe Biden sees the climate change for what it is: an existential threat to Planet Earth.

He wants to reassert our national leadership throughout the world.

One of the executive orders he intends to sign to restore our commitment to the Paris Climate Accord is a signal of our return to the world stage.

national news

Yes, on DACA order

(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President-elect Biden has made clear his intention to walk directly into the Oval Office when he takes office and get right to work.

Biden’s transition team has announced the president-elect’s intention to sign several executive orders on Day One. One of them speaks directly to an issue that interests me greatly: restoration of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals order that Donald Trump revoked not long after he took office.

Former President Obama issued the DACA order initially, intending to shield from deportation those U.S. residents who had been brought here illegally by their parents; most of those DACA recipients have lived in this country since they were babies, infants, toddlers. They know no other country than the United States of America.

Obama sought to give them a fast track to seeking permanent legal resident status or citizenship. Trump wasn’t having any of it. He revoked his predecessor’s executive order. Now Trump’s immediate successor wants to restore the DACA program.

Good for you, Mr. President-elect!

I haven’t yet come to grips with precisely why Trump targeted DACA recipients in that manner. I wonder if he did it because he truly believed that they were lawbreakers as young children/toddlers because they came here illegally under the care of their parents. Or did he do it just to wipe away a vestige of President Obama’s time in office, which seems to have rankled Trump to no end.

I’m going to go with the latter rationale.

Indeed, many DACA recipients have carved out productive lives as U.S. residents. Many of them have achieved academic excellence and success in their chosen profession. They pay their taxes and they have become de facto citizens simply by virtue of their ability to live by the rules of the land to where they were brought.

DACA recipients don’t deserve a free ride. Nor do they deserve permanent amnesty. They should be allowed to seek legal resident status without fear of imminent deportation to the land of their birth, but a land with which they have zero familiarity.

That, I trust, is President-elect Biden’s goal by restoring DACA status to hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents.

legal news, local news, State news

Time to quit, Mr. Texas AG

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

It is highly doubtful a major Texas newspaper read my blog from this past month before declaring it is time for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to resign from public office.

Here is what I wrote on Oct. 7:

https://highplainsblogger.com/2020/10/should-ag-paxton-quit/

Now the Dallas Morning News has weighed in with a strong and meticulously reported editorial that says it’s time for Paxton to go.

The Sunday DMN laid out in detail the transgressions that Paxton has allegedly committed. Now, I won’t take credit for influencing the Morning News’s editorial position. Oh, what the heck … I’ll take all the credit I deserve.

Still, for the major newspaper which happens to be Paxton’s hometown newspaper — as he represented Collin County in the Legislature before being elected AG in 2014 — to call for his immediate resignation is a big deal, man.

Read the Morning News editorial here.

It wasn’t enough that a Collin County grand jury indicted Paxton on securities fraud. He still is awaiting trial five years after the indictment. Oh, no. Seven top AG’s office legal eagles blew the whistle on allegations of criminal activity within the office. They have called for a federal investigation of the myriad allegations they have leveled.

Paxton has managed to fire most of them; others have quit.

The AG’s credibility is blown to smithereens.

Hit the road, AG Paxton.

national news, political news

Trump fails referendum

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I am still trying to digest the results of the 2020 presidential election, so allow me this moment to ponder what they might mean.

I’ll go with what I have heard others suggest already, that Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden and the failure of Democrats to sweep the GOP away under an anticipated “blue wave” in both congressional chambers tells me the election was a referendum on Trump.

Donald Trump failed the test.

He suffered a fairly decisive defeat. He likely will end up on the short end of a 306-232 Electoral College tally, and will trail President-elect Biden by roughly 5 million ballots in the actual vote. Biden will have won by roughly 3 percent overall.

What that tells me is that Americans had heard enough of the lying, the insults, the innuendo, the divisive rhetoric, the endorsement of Nazis and Klansmen as “good people,” and the constant pitting of Americans against each other based on their political affiliation.

It also tells me they were sickened by the sight of Trump ignoring the recommendations given by medical experts as the nation continues to fight the pandemic that has killed 230,000-plus Americans. Mask wearing, keeping an appropriate “social distance” from others have been scoffed at by Trump.

I haven’t even mentioned, until now, the catering to dictators around the world, especially the one in Russia who has offered to pay bounties to Taliban terrorists who kill American service personnel in Afghanistan.

Congress remains a mixed bag. The best case for Democrats is they win the two George runoff elections and attain a tie in the upper chamber. The GOP whittled away at the Democratic House majority.

The good news from a policy standpoint is that President-elect Biden has a long record of working well with Republicans. He might need that skill as he seeks to govern after Jan. 20.

Donald Trump called his narrow victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 a “landslide.” It wasn’t. Neither is Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. However, Biden sold himself as the preferable alternative to Trump’s four years of division, anger and ignorance.

That is just fine with me.

national news

Cheers to the career politician

1 Comment

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The term “career politician” long ago became a four-letter word.

People would toss the term out there with the sound of derision in their voice. Well, I intend at this moment to tell you that the term does not deserve the derision it attracts.

President-elect Joe Biden is a career politician who has devoted his adult life to public service. I am going to place my faith in my belief that the nation’s next president is going to parlay that commitment to public service into constructive governance as the head of the executive branch of the federal government.

Contrast that with the pre-political background that his predecessor, Donald Trump, brought to the presidency. Trump spent his entire adult life to enriching himself. He sought to make buckets of money. Trump took that background with him into the White House.

There can be no doubt about the effect that a non-political background brought to the presidency. It brought relentless chaos.

Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris tonight spoke to the nation in their new elevated roles. They spoke to a nation’s aspirations and renewed their pledge to “restore the soul of the nation.”

So now the job will begin. Trump hasn’t conceded anything. He might never concede to the president-elect. As a Biden campaign aide said tonight, the Constitution doesn’t require a concession from the losing presidential candidate. All it spells out is that the winner must accrue enough Electoral College votes to take office. Biden and Harris have done that.

They bring a record of public service to the nation’s highest, greatest and most exalted political perch.

I won’t shy away from recognizing that the next president is a career politician. After what we’ve been through for the past four years, we need someone in the presidency who knows and understands the complexity of governance.

President-elect Biden’s experience has prepared him well for the task he and the vice president-elect are about to assume.

national news

Trump’s exit mirrors his entry

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I admit to being a bit naive on an issue we are witnessing in real time.

I thought it was possible — and I said so publicly on this blog — that Donald Trump would accept the results of an election even if Joe Biden would win. I thought there was a chance he would concede and would leave office with relative calm.

It isn’t playing out that way, so far.

President-elect Biden defeated Trump, who then said he would fight the results in court, that he would seek to reverse the results of an election that Biden won fair and square. Trump hasn’t conceded anything. He has refused to accept the result.

Meanwhile, the president-elect will proceed with the transition without any cooperation from the man he will succeed in the White House.

Trump came into office vowing to be an  unconventional president. His entry into politics defied political convention. His first statements as a candidate denigrated Mexicans as rapists, murderers and drug dealers. It went downhill from there … if you can believe it.

Trump’s time as president was a study in chaos and confusion. More unconventional behavior produced equally unconventional governance.

Now he is going to exit the office. At this moment he hasn’t yet indicated if he ever will accept the result, that he lost the actual vote by 5 million ballots and lost the Electoral College vote in numbers that mirror the “landslide” he said he scored against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The good news? It is that Trump is slipping further into irrelevance.

national news

Looking for electoral perspective

1 Comment

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The dust hasn’t yet settled on this presidential election, but it’s time nonetheless to seek to put some perspective on the impact of this momentous result.

President-elect Joe Biden is en route to an Electoral College victory that will mirror the win that Donald Trump scored four years ago. Trump called it a “landslide” victory over Hillary Clinton.

It wasn’t. It was a squeaker. Trump won on the strength of 77,000 votes cast in three Rust Belt states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — that previously had voted for President Barack Obama.

On another matter, Trump was outvoted at the ballot box. Hillary Clinton collected nearly 3 million more votes than Trump, but just didn’t win the Electoral College votes she needed to become president.

Biden will finish with 306 electoral votes. Just as significantly, he will garner at least 5 million more votes than Trump; that number sits at 4.1 million at this moment, but they are far from finished counting all the ballots across the nation.

Does this election result constitute a landslide? No. It doesn’t. Joe Biden’s victory, though, is going to produce more of a mandate than Donald Trump ever was able to claim.

One more matter of perspective is in order. The composition of the U.S. Senate remains undecided. Two Senate races in Georgia are headed for runoffs. If two Democrats win those races, the Senate will end up with 50 Democrats (including two Democrat-leaning independents) and 50 Republicans. That puts Vice President Kamala Harris, as the Senate’s presiding officer, in position to cast tie-breaking votes if the need arises. You’ll recall that Vice President Mike Pence performed that task to confirm Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Joe Biden’s victory was historic to be sure. He was reduced to so much political road kill after early miserable primary showings early this year. He stormed back on the strength of an endorsement from Rep. James Clyburn in advance of the South Carolina primary, which he won. Biden never looked back.

He is now set to become president of the United States thanks to a victory that is decisive and clear cut. The great American experiment in electing an individual with no political or public service experience is about to end.

We’re about to welcome a president and vice president to the pinnacle of power who have political capital — which Donald Trump never acquired — they can spend. My hope is that President Biden and Vice President Harris spend it wisely.

national news

Trying to avoid spiking the ball

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I have been resisting with all the strength I can muster the temptation to spike the proverbial football in light of the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as president and vice president of the United States.

I won’t go there.

However, I do feel the need to reveal that I am surrendering to the temptation  to send Donald Trump into the world of irrelevance. To that end, I do not intend to launch criticism at Trump … unless the president forces me to do so.

How would he do that? By insisting he will take his loss into the courts to challenge a free and fair election, to suggest it was “stolen” from him. He well might commit some boorish acts along the way. He could forgo the usual courtesies that outgoing presidents extend to their successors. He could skip President-elect Biden’s inaugural. Trump could decline to pledge a “peaceful transfer of power” to the new president’s team.

He also would incur my wrath if he makes dangerous policy dangerous in the next 10 weeks before he exits the political stage. The court challenges he intends to mount will be accompanied by relentless Twitter messages.

Donald Trump will humiliate himself and will do significant additional damage to the “legacy” he will leave behind once he exits the White House.

Accordingly, I do not intend waste any more of my attention than is absolutely necessary on a man who deserved to lose the presidential election.

President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris have delivered the nation from the chaos and confusion that have been the hallmark of an administration that is on the verge of disappearing.

Commentary on politics, current events and life experience