Category Archives: national news

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

national news

Ghost guns: yes on this order

Does it surprise anyone that the National Rifle Association would oppose President Biden’s executive order to get rid of that thing called “ghost guns”?

I didn’t think so.

The NRA has condemned Biden because he wants to stop the basement manufacturing of guns that have no serial number or any identifying features that allow authorities to track their origin.

According to The New Republic: “These updated regulations make clear that parts kits that can readily be converted into assembled firearms will be treated under federal law as what they are: firearms. And the manufacturers and sellers of these kits will be subject to the same federal laws as all other gun manufacturers and sellers,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in an op-ed published in USA Today on Monday. The new rule will amend the definition of “firearm” and “frame and receiver” to cover kits and components that create ghost guns, allowing them to be treated like firearms under federal law. It will also require manufacturers who sell components to assemble into ghost guns to be licensed and run background checks on potential buyers.

Biden Finally Makes a Move on the Ghost Gun Scourge | The New Republic

I want to understand the notion that the NRA is going to pitch that regulating the manufacture of these weapons infringes on the Second Amendment guarantee of the “right to keep and bear arms.” It doesn’t.

This needs to be restated: Law-abiding citizens need not acquire these weapons to “keep and bear arms.” They can purchase mainstream firearms manufactured by actual gun makers. These firearms have appropriate serial numbers that allow authorities to keep tabs on the source of these firearms — without affecting anyone’s ability to own them.

I applaud the president for signing this order.

As John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety noted, “Ghost guns look like a gun, they shoot like a gun, and they kill like a gun, but up until now they haven’t been regulated like a gun.”

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

GOP pledges grim future

(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

When the Republican leader of the U.S. Senate pledges to make life difficult for a Democratic president and his Democratic colleagues in the Senate, we had better sit up and pay careful attention.

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell has a proven record of employing his enormous obstructive skills to block legitimate efforts to move the country forward if they will benefit the agenda being followed by the right wing of his party.

Republicans appear poised to take over control of Congress after this year’s midterm election. If they do, the rumbling we hear comes from those Republicans who intend to exact revenge on Democrats. It will come in the form of blocking appointments or derailing legislative proposals. Hell, it might even result in Republicans unplugging congressional investigations into the criminal activity perpetrated on 1/6 by the previous GOP president.

This isn’t how good government is supposed to work.

McConnell exhibited his obstructionist skill in February 2016 when, after Justice Antonin Scalia died, he blocked then-President Obama’s attempt to replace Scalia with a SCOTUS nominee. It was “too close” to a presidential election that at the time was months away, McConnell said. He played his hand skillfully, as the GOP nominee won the election that year and then was able to push through three SCOTUS picks before his term ended in 2021.

The final pick was rammed through the Senate just weeks before the 2020 election, which made McConnell’s “too close to the election” call in 2016 nothing more than a ruse.

Don’t bet your last bitcoin that Congress will flip from Democratic to Republican control this year. But in case it does, then we had better prepare ourselves for a politically bloody clash.

It won’t be pretty.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Liar endorses Quack? Wow!

Donald “Former Liar in Chief” Trump has given his “full and complete endorsement” for Mehmet “The Quack Doc” Oz in the race for the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania.

The two are made for each other.

I won’t belabor the point about Trump, as you’ve heard enough from me about him. Oz, though, deserves a brief mention.

Oz has remained friends with Trump over the years. Indeed, Trump’s endorsement seems to rest chiefly on Oz’s TV career, something with which Trump has some familiarity. Oz also proclaimed Trump to be in “excellent health,” which Trump also values more than policy pronouncements.

‘Romney 2.0′: Trumpworld Implodes Over Ex-POTUS’ Endorsement Of Dr. Oz (msn.com)

I call Oz a “quack” because of his endorsement of a product he once said produced “miracle” medical results. No serious physician ever would proclaim any product to result in a “miracle” in human healing. It ain’t scientific, man!

Trumpworld reportedly has gone ballistic over the endorsement. Imagine that!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Anger pre-dates Trump

Donald Trump gets blamed for a lot of what is wrong about today’s political climate and I take a back seat to no one in expressing my loathing for the man and what he brought to the table when he entered political life in the summer of 2015.

However, I want to give the former A**hole in Chief a pass on something that’s been kicked around since his arrival on the political stage, which is that he introduced this era of intensely bitter feeling.

Wrong. It pre-dates Trump.

The actual bogeyman, in my view, happens to be the Republicans who ran for Congress on that Contract With America platform cobbled together by a back-bench House of Representative member by the name of Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich called the cadence to which the GOP insurgents marched. Gingrich infamously declared that he wanted Republican officeholders and candidates for public office to label “Democrats as the enemy of normal Americans.”

They did. You know what? That message worked with Americans who had grown angry with “politics as usual.” The Republicans took control of Congress after the 1994 midterm election and Gingrich got chosen by the GOP caucus as speaker of the House, where he continued his anti-other-party bombast.

The anger carried over into the 2000 election cycle and the balloting that resulted in George W. Bush being elected by the slimmest margin possible.

Donald Trump, therefore, inherited a climate already tilled and planted with all manner of antipathy. But it was Newt Gingrich who sowed the ground with a form of nastiness that enabled Trump to take it to the next level and perhaps even to the level after that.

Those of us who are old enough to remember how the major parties were able to work together for the common good likely want a return to the “good old days.”

Political adversaries need not become enemies.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Trump woulda marched?

So … Donald J. Trump says he would have marched with his fellow insurrectionists on 1/6 but the Secret Service detail told him he couldn’t go, that it posed too great a security risk.

Hmm. Let me think about that. Nah. I don’t believe him.

Trump’s latest proclamation about that horrible day reminds me of the time he said in the wake of a school shooting that he would have stormed the building with guns blazing had he been given the chance to end the massacre.

Armchair heroes, of course, can say all kinds of things. The Donald is known to say, umm, all kinds of things in all kinds of contexts.

Let’s remember that when he had the chance to fight for his country during the Vietnam War, he found a doctor who would diagnose that he had “bone spurs” that, as luck would have it, kept him from serving.

He keeps insisting that he told the so-called “massive” crowd to mark “peacefully” and “patriotically.” Yes, he spoke those words. What is most bizarre, though, is trying to understand why The Donald didn’t call off the rioters when they became violent as they stormed Capitol Hill. He remained stone-cold silent during the riot that sought to subvert Congress’s constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Sigh …

The man cannot tell the truth. Not ever!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

So much for cheering this big moment

Roy Blunt is a chump lame-duck Republican U.S. senator from Missouri who this past weekend declared to the world that Ketanji Brown Jackson’s pending confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court would be a high point in American history, as she would become the first Black woman to take her rightful place on the nation’s highest court.

Blunt then voted “no” on her confirmation.

What, then, did this GOP nimrod do when Vice President Kamala Harris declared that the Senate’s vote had officially confirmed Judge Jackson to the court? Blunt joined the rest of his GOP colleagues in walking out while the Democratic senators stood and applauded the history-making confirmation.

The only Republican to join the Democrats was Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, one of three GOP senators to vote to confirm Jackson; the other two, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, also walked out of the chamber.

I am singling out Blunt, though, because of his idiotic comments praising Judge Jackson’s legal skill, her educational background, her standing as a jurist, her obvious qualifications.

I was left to wonder: If she is all the things that Sen. Blunt said of her — which she is! — why in the name of political reason did he vote against her?

Roy Blunt, who is retiring from the Senate at the end of the year, demonstrated his true self by refusing to cheer for the history that the Senate made in confirming this eminently qualified Supreme Court appointee.

Disgusting!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Longing for old custom

There once was a time in Washington, D.C., when freshmen members of Congress — senators and House members — spent their first terms learning to locate the Capitol Hill restrooms, which they did without hardly ever uttering a word out loud.

Those days are gone. The media these days bestow instant celebrity status to congressional newbies. I wish we could silence some of them.

There were exceptions to the old way of senators and House members having to earn their way under the spotlight. I can think of Robert F. Kennedy, who took office as a senator from New York in 1965. He became an instant star, even though he never really liked serving in the Senate. The rest of ’em largely stayed quiet until they earned their spurs. Hillary Rodham Clinton took her Senate seat in 2001 as her husband was leaving the presidency. Indeed, Sen. Clinton was a household name — as was RFK — before she decided to seek elected public office.

These days? We get the likes of Republicans such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. I’ll lump at least one Democratic lawmaker, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, in that camp of instant celeb. The media seem to enjoy reporting on the things these people say, even when they make little sense.

Lately, too, we have heard from that GOP nut job Madison Cawthorn, who yapped about sex parties, bringing a dose of embarrassment to fellow Republicans in the House.

I fear this all is a consequence of social media. Everyone has a recording device on their “smart phones.” Whatever one can say is recorded instantly and shared with every human on Earth.

I guess I’ll just have to sigh out of frustration, knowing there ain’t a thing I can do to change the world in which we live. Maybe I’ll just have to learn to tune out the blatherings of these newcomers and listen more intently to those with actual governing experience.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Let the AG do his job

Congressional Democrats are grumbling about the pace that Attorney General Merrick Garland is setting as he considers whether to indict The Donald for alleged crimes committed during the transfer of power from the Trump administration to the Biden administration.

And whether The Donald committed crimes by, oh, inciting the insurrection and blocking efforts to allow the winner of the 2020 presidential election to take power as prescribed by the U.S. Constitution … the document that The Donald has never read, nor understands.

I believe we ought to let the AG do his job at the pace he determines is fitting for what he intends to accomplish.

Garland has pledged — and I believe he is an honorable man — to follow the law wherever it leads him. If he has enough to prosecute the former POTUS, he is going to do it. He won’t be swayed, he said, by political favor or by public opinion.

The grumbling among Democrats is intended, I believe, to push Garland to speed the process along.

Give it a rest, eh? The attorney general is a seasoned, experienced and fair-minded legal pro. Do I want there to be enough to prosecute Donald J. Trump? Absolutely, I do.

It’s not my call. Nor is it anyone else’s call.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news, national news

Elections do matter

You have heard it said that “elections have consequences.” I have stated as much many times on this blog platform and I still believe it to be so very true.

We are seeing how those consequences are playing out in President Biden’s nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court. Biden won the 2020 presidential election and, thus, has been granted the opportunity to find a qualified jurist to take her seat on the nation’s highest court.

This process plays into the notion of “presidential prerogative,” meaning that presidents earn the right to select whomever they desire simply by winning the most recent election.

What you might not remember, though, is that I have carried my belief in presidential prerogative across party lines. I am a dedicated supporter of Democratic Party ideals, but I also recognize that elections that produce Republican presidents also have consequences equal to those that produce Democratic presidents. Accordingly, I recognize that Donald Trump’s election in 2016 entitled him to select the three individuals who currently serve on the SCOTUS.

When President George H.W. Bush selected Clarence Thomas in 1991 to succeed Thurgood Marshall on the high court, I said the same thing. Same with President George W. Bush, when he chose John Roberts to become chief justice and Samuel Alito to an associate justice position.

All of these individuals are technically qualified to serve and the presidents who nominated them were entitled under the Constitution to select them.

I want to revisit this notion because of the hassles that President Biden is getting over his choice of Judge Jackson to join the court. Senate Republicans are digging in for a fight. They belong to a government branch that is entitled under the Constitution to reject or approve any nomination that comes before them. They are fighting Judge Jackson for reasons that escape me.

Joe Biden’s standing as president allows him to find a qualified candidate for a lifetime appointment. He has done so and therefore he deserves to have the individual he has chosen approved by the Senate and then be allowed to take her place on the Supreme Court.

One of the harshest challenges to this prerogative occurred in 2016 when Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly. President Obama selected Judge Merrick Garland to succeed Scalia. Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell then decided to play political hardball by denying Garland any confirmation hearing, saying that because it was an election year that the winner of the next election deserved to select the individual he or she wanted for the court.

The winner turned out to be Trump. McConnell’s strong-arming of the constitutional process was a hideous display of politicking and I am one American who never will forgive him for denying a sitting president the chance to seat a qualified jurist on the Supreme Court.

Juxtapose that with the speedy confirmation process that McConnell allowed when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just weeks before the 2020 election; Amy Coney Barrett received Senate confirmation in a record-setting fashion. Any sign of hypocrisy there? Oh, yes! Absolutely!

Elections always have consequences, indeed … and they should.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com