Category Archives: medical news

medical news, national news, national security, political news

Mental acuity test for The Donald?

Ronny Jackson keeps yammering nonsense that challenges President Biden’s fitness for high office, without bothering to offer any solutions of his own on how to guide the nation.

I have stopped expecting anything constructive from the Amarillo Republican member of Congress.

As long as we’re talking about mental acuity, though, I want to offer a suggestion for Donald J. Trump to ponder: The former Imbecile in Chief ought to consider submitting to such a test for himself.

I mean, any former POTUS who would suggest he could “declassify top-secret documents simply thinking about doing so” clearly has a screw loose in his fluffy noggin.

What kind of brainless idiocy is that? Trump took top-secret documents from the White House and squirreled them away at his Florida mansion.

Earth to The Donald: You can’t “declassify” anything just by “thinking” about doing it.

As for Jackson, he ought to ponder whether the moronic observation from his hero should require him to take another test of his mental fitness.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Joe Biden, media news, medical news, political news

Pandemic is not ‘over’

OK, Mr. President, I feel the need to set the record straight on something you reportedly blurted out on national TV the other evening.

You told “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley that the coronavirus pandemic “is over.” Uh, Mr. President? It’s not over! It’s still with us. Pharmaceutical companies are producing new vaccines and boosters. They’re making them available for schmucks like me to take … and I damn sure am going to receive my second booster shot in very short order.

What troubles me about your careless assertion that the pandemic is “over” is that it well might cause too many Americans to let down their guard.

I also heard what you told Pelley about how so many more millions of Americans are getting vaccinated than there were when you took office. I also heard how you said that the death toll has dropped off dramatically. That’s all true.

However, if the pandemic is “over,” why make such a big deal of having this vaccine booster available?

To be clear, I am not going to join the right-wing cabal of critics in suggesting that you’re “out of touch” or that you don’t have the intellectual heft to stay on the job as president. I am with you, Mr. President.

It’s just that your words carry tremendous weight. I mean, jeez, don’t say things that reverberate the way public pronouncements do. That reverberation is amplified when it involves statements that have killed nearly 1 million Americans and caused enormous anxiety among millions of other Americans.

Look, Mr. President, a member of my immediate family became sickened right after Christmas 2020. We could have lost her! We didn’t. However, she isn’t right just yet.

Others, too, are suffering recurrences of the disease.

Businesses are still “strongly encouraging” masks. Hospitals are offering free instant exams to patients checking in with unrelated emergencies.

Does that sound like a pandemic that has run its course?

It’s still with us, Mr. President.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

medical news, national news, State news

Abortion: state or national issue?

Lindsey Graham once thought and talked like a traditional Republican, such as the time he said that abortion laws needed to be settled by states.

Now, though, the South Carolina Republican is ratcheting up the argument, pitching for a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Which is it, Sen. Graham, state issue or national prerogative?

Politicians on both sides of the divide have criticized Graham’s about-face. Then, of course, are those of us who dislike the government dictating how a woman can govern her own body.

Public opinion polls suggest Graham is on the losing side of this debate. He isn’t dissuaded. Graham believes the nationwide ban will become law despite those polls and despite some election results that suggest Americans want to retain a woman’s right to choose whether to end a pregnancy.

I will give Graham some credit for recognizing the need for excepting cases involving rape and incest from the ban. Certain statewide bans, such as what’s been enacted in Texas, require girls impregnated by their lecherous uncles or fathers to carry their pregnancies to full term.

However, Graham is getting way ahead of himself if he believes most Americans will line up behind what he’s proposing. According to the Huffington Post: “I am confident the American people would accept a national ban on abortion at 15 weeks,” Graham told “Fox News Sunday.” “And to those who suggest that being pro-life is losing politics, I reject that.”

Graham ‘Confident’ Public Backs U.S. Abortion Ban Despite Elections Proving Otherwise (msn.com)

Instead, he has joined the wacky wing of the Republican Party that now wants to nationalize what used to be part of the GOP mantra: it is better to leave some things up to the states than to have the feds impose their iron will.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

medical news, national news

Land of the Free? Hah!

Didn’t this country found itself as the “Land of the Free,” a nation that prided itself on delivering freedom to all Americans, a land that honored our civil liberties?

I ask because of what has transpired in recent months with the U.S. Supreme Court rescinding one of our sacred civil liberties, the one that granted women the right to determine how to control their own bodies, as covered in the rights of privacy spelled out in the U.S. Constitution.

The court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that made abortion legal in this country. Over the nearly five decades of its existence, legal scholars and other courts had determined that Roe was “settled law.” In other words, we couldn’t mess with what had become part of the nation’s legal fabric.

Not so, according to the current Supreme Court.

When the court rescinded Roe v. Wade it essentially determined that on this key issue, women are longer free to make critical, gut-wrenching and highly emotional decisions involving their own bodies.

There doesn’t appear to be any remedies available, given the current makeup of the U.S. Senate and certainly given the ideological bent of the court, with its six conservative justices. Senate Democrats want to “codify” legality of abortion legislatively, but they would have to overcome a certain Republican filibuster; they need 60 votes to end such an obstructionist act. A 50-50 Senate split isn’t likely to bend.

Oh, but wait. The midterm election could give Democrats an actual majority, enabling them perhaps to toss out the filibuster. We’ll have to see.

I just am baffled at the frontal attack that the GOP and their allies on the Supreme Court have leveled against a fundamental principle established by our nation’s founders. It is that American citizens enjoy the freedom to make decisions that only they can make for themselves.

I would say that a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy qualifies as a critical component of living in the Land of the Free.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

 

local news, media news, medical news

Blogging: preventative measure

I have read countless articles over many years about the value of maintaining one’s interest in matters such as, oh, national and world affairs can help stave off mental decline.

I mention this today because I just marked the 38th year since my dear mother died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. You surely know what that ailment entails. My family and I had little knowledge of it in the early 1980s when Mom was first diagnosed with it. She left us on Sept. 17, 1984 at the age of 61.

I have learned since then, though, that mental stimulation can be used as a preventative measure to fend off the symptoms of a decline in cognition. To be brutally frank, Mom’s life essentially ended when she no longer could work. She didn’t have interests outside of home or away from her profession as an administrative secretary, a career at which she excelled for many years.

It’s strange to say this out loud, but I will anyway: I think about Alzheimer’s disease almost every time I sit in front of my computer keyboard and pound out thoughts on this or that issue. My interest in these matters has outlived my career in print journalism by more than a decade. My full-time career ended on Aug. 31, 2012. The end came suddenly but given the state of decline in newspapers at the time, it wasn’t a surprise.

I have been able to transfer my modest skill at stringing sentences together to this avocation I have enjoyed. I also am able to continue writing for other media outlets: I freelance for a weekly newspaper in Collin County and for a public radio station affiliated with Texas A&M University-Commerce. I have told my employers at both places I intend to keep writing for them until (a) they no longer want me or (b) I lose my ability to string thoughts together … whichever comes first.

If the first event occurs, at least I will have this blog to keep me engaged. My hope now is that all I have read about how intellectual stimulation can stave off Alzheimer’s-related dementia is true.

So … let’s continue to enjoy the ride.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news, local news, medical news, State news

Personhood debate enters absurdity level

A North Texas woman got pulled over by a police officer because she was the sole occupant in a vehicle that was traveling down a high-occupancy vehicle lane — which requires two or more passengers to qualify.

Except that the woman is pregnant, so she has contested the citation issued in Dallas County, contending that her unborn child is a person, which makes the HOV restriction moot.

Hmm. How do I say this? This incident goes beyond absurd. It is ridiculous in the extreme, but it surely opens the door to endless debate over the whole “personhood” issue brewing now that Texas has made abortion illegal.

The driver in question, Brandy Bottone, said she isn’t trying to make this a “political” issue. Yeah, sure thing. It’s like the pro athlete who holds out for more money who then says, “It’s not about the money.” Of course it is … about the money. Bottone’s bitching about the traffic ticket is most certainly a political issue.

The Texas Tribune reports: Bottone argued that under Texas’ abortion laws, which went into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, a fetus is considered a living being. She argued the same should be true when it comes to the state’s traffic laws. “I’m not trying to make a political stance here,” Bottone said, “but in light of everything that is happening, this is a baby.”

Fetal personhood law is complex and Texas is only beginning to untangle it | The Texas Tribune

I have a fear that other would-be political activists are going to test this law and well could clog up municipal courts with ridiculous arguments that suggest that even though a woman is, say, six or seven weeks pregnant that she is therefore allowed to flout a reasonable law aimed at helping motorists who have actual passengers sitting next to them navigate their way through traffic congestion.

This whole matter appears to be taking an absurd turn.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump, local news, medical news

Rep. Jackson sings a single note

(Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

Ronny Jackson is becoming the master of a one-note samba, except that he’s terribly out of tune when he sings it.

Jackson is the Republican U.S. representative who lives in the Texas Panhandle. He’s a charter member of the Donald Trump cabal of cult kooks. As a physician assigned to care for the president, Jackson did that for Trump and for President Obama.

His time as the White House doc must make him — in what passes for his mind — an expert on the health of Trump’s presidential successor. Jackson keeps yammering about Biden’s mental acuity. He keeps saying incessantly that President Biden needs to submit to a cognitive ability test.

Bullsh**!

Jackson is no more qualified to question Joe Biden’s mental fitness for the job than I am. He’s never seen the president’s medical record. He’s never examined him. Jackson has never consulted with the president. Indeed, the idiot Trumpkin spends a good portion of his day appearing on right-wing media outlets and putting out Twitter messages talking about matters — such as Biden’s health — about which he knows nothing.

Here’s an idea: How about crafting legislation that will do some good for the Texans he represents in Congress?

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

medical news

Go after Fauci? Why?

Did I read this right, that if Republicans take control of Congress after the midterm election that they’re going to “go after” Dr. Anthony Fauci?

This prompts two immediate questions: What has he done to provoke this vengeful reaction? Why go after a man who has decided to retire from public service after serving presidents of both parties with distinction for many decades?

The threat comes from Sen. John Kennedy, the Louisiana Republican who bears not a single similarity to the late president whose name he shares.

Fauci announced this week he is stepping down in December as President Biden’s chief medical adviser. The man has had a full plate over many years. It became a heaping plate when the coronavirus pandemic broke in late 2019.

His advice rankled many on the right, including the man who brought him on board to help deal with the pandemic … Donald J. Trump.

So now there might be another persecution in store, if the cards align and the GOP takes back Congress.

So says John Kennedy.

Good grief! The man saved many thousands of lives with his advice to two presidents of the United States, Donald Trump and then Joe Biden.

It looks for all the world to me as though Kennedy wants to make as much hay as Americans can stand.

Well, he can count me out.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

medical news

Many thanks, Dr. Fauci

Just got word of what many of us expected all along: Anthony Fauci is going to retire from a several-decades-long career in public service.

To which I want to offer the good doctor a heartfelt expression of thanks and gratitude for all he has done to help protect us against infectious disease.

Fauci, of course, became the face of medical awareness during the COVID-19 pandemic that spanned two administrations, from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. He is the nation’s — if not the world’s — leading expert on infectious disease. He spoke the truth to us when he had the answers to a disease that was killing thousands of Americans daily. When he didn’t know the answers, he had the guts to say so.

Oh, but the man who served as President Biden’s senior medical adviser, had to endure the defamatory criticism that came from the far-right wing of our political life. They didn’t trust him. They bristled at mask mandates, at calls for social distancing, at government telling citizens what they needed to protect themselves and others from a killer virus. He even had to endure the undermining of his public statements that came from Donald J. Trump, who hired him to manage our pandemic response.

Fauci served through several administrations, going back to the time of Ronald Reagan. He served with honor and with dedication to the practice of medicine and public health.

Fauci said he will leave in December. Presumably he will head toward a private life with his wife and family.

The man has earned some time off.

As the saying goes to those who have devoted their life to the cause of serving the public … thank you for your service, doc.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

medical news

Where’s the compassion … doc?

It never ceases to amaze how the man who claims to represent the Texas Panhandle in Congress — the Dipsh** Doc, if you will — can exhibit so little common decency when it involves the commander in chief.

Ronny Jackson, the Republican who once, served as White House physician for Donald Trump and Barack Obama — keeps tweeting the idiotic messages calling attention to President Biden’s struggle to get past the COVID-19 infection that continues to register on his test results.

And yet … there is no expression of concern or of any good wishes for the president’s complete recovery from the ailment. It ain’t coming from Jackson, who continues to enrage many of us out here with assertions about the president’s mental acuity … which is absolute rubbish.

I must remind Jackson and other GOP critics that Joe Biden sent Donald and Melania Trump wishes for a speedy recovery when they contracted the virus.

Any reciprocity from the other side? Hah!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com