Category Archives: national news

DC riot, Donald Trump, national news

What is Trump’s legacy?

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REUTERS/Sarah Silbiger

Donald J. Trump’s presidential legacy is being written at this moment and from my standpoint — as if it’s a big surprise to anyone who reads this blog regularly — it will contain many more negatives than positive achievements.

It will start with two impeachments and two Senate trials. He skated clear of conviction both times, although for reasons that had more to do with the cult following he built in Congress than the merits of the articles of impeachment brought against him.

It will wind its way through the alleged corruption that congressional investigators are uncovering as they pore through evidence related to the 1/6 insurrection.

It will contain plenty of mention of the myriad lies that poured forth from Trump, including the lie about the pandemic’s initial seriousness and how Trump withheld that knowledge from a public that needed to know what it faced.

The legacy will include the insurrection, the riot on Capitol Hill by the mob of traitors who sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election that Trump lost. Accordingly, it also will include Trump being the only president in history to refuse to concede an election that he lost fairly and legally.

I have said more times than I can remember that Trump never should have been elected president in the first place. He won the 2016 election in the most astounding political fluke in American history.

The end of the 1/6 probe by the House select committee is getting closer to its conclusion. The panel does not have a lot of time left to finish its work. It is working with breathtaking speed in its search for the why, the how and the consequence of that hideous assault on our democracy. It will offer solutions to preventing it from recurring.

It’s going to have Donald Trump’s grimy fingerprints all over it … and that, I dare say, is going to be where the ex-president’s legacy will be engraved forever.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump, national news

Trump flushes records? Hah!

I cannot stop shaking my head over reports that Donald J. Trump, in an effort to keep the public’s prying eyes off his presidential records, flushed many of the documents down a White House toilet.

Of all the baloney associated with the former Dips**t in Chief, this one kinda/sorta takes the proverbial cake.

It’s not only illegal for him to have (allegedly) flushed these papers down the crapper, it speaks to a sort of ignorance that the rest of us have known since we were old enough to know damn near anything. It is that you don’t flush anything other than toilet tissue down a toilet … for criminy sakes!

The Presidential Records Act requires those who serve as president to keep all official records for storage in the National Archives. It’s part of our national history that these individuals must preserve for historians to pore through. Donald Trump broke the law! He should be punished not only for breaking it, but also for being a total dumbass.

Do you think The Donald was trying to hide something?

Huh … do ya?

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Joe Biden, local news, national news

POTUS is up to the job

I am running out of ways to say what I believe in the deepest regions of my gut, which is that those who suggest that President Biden doesn’t have what it takes to do the job just aren’t paying attention, they aren’t listening to his words or watching how he interacts with other heads of state and political leaders here at home.

And yet …

I keep hearing from some of my own critics that Biden has lost a step. That he needs what Congressman Ronny Jackson of Amarillo keeps insisting is a “cognitive test.” That he lacks the mental acuity to figure out the myriad problems that plague the nation.

Good grief! Give me a fu**ing break!

The president is sharp enough to do the job. He remains engaged in the political process. He continues to remind us that he’s on top of matters. And, yes, the man can string sentences together and can communicate in a way that makes sense … at least he does to me.

Now, to be sure I have been accused myself of being a little slow on the uptake. One critic recently said I am “naive” to think that the inflated cost of goods and services are dragging down the president’s poll numbers; he said many factors have contributed to Biden’s polling decline, that he cannot do the job.

Please. Stop this nonsense.

Is the president a flawless orator? Do the words flow like fast-moving stream from his mouth? No. They don’t. Remember this about Joseph R. Biden Jr.: He grew up fighting a debilitating stutter. He conquered it through tough persistence and patience. Anyone who has suffered through such a challenge can relapse on occasion.

Believe me when I say such a thing, because I know how that happens; it happens to me on occasion. I, too, suffered through some speech issues as a boy. I can get rattled when speaking in public. When that happens, the words at times do not flow freely.

Is the president of the United States immune from the occasional lapse? Of course not!

And if we’re going to compare how this president communicates with, say, his immediate predecessor, I encourage anyone to read the text of Biden’s unrehearsed comments and compare them with what rolls out of Donald Trump’s mouth.

President Joe Biden has all the snap he needs to do the job to which he was elected.

Case closed.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

DC riot, national news

Trump channels Hillary?

Donald Trump probably never realized this when he sat in the Oval Office, but everything the president does is open to public scrutiny … and that includes phone calls, especially those he makes during crises.

Such as, oh, the 1/6 insurrection … the one GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnel termed a “violent” event.

It turns out that some of the calls that Donald Trump made during that hideous episode a little more than a year ago are not logged in the White House phone records.

It brings to mind the chiding of Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign in which candidate Trump insisted that Clinton had deleted those emails to hide them from public view during the time she served as secretary of state.

Do you get it? Trump now might have done the very thing he accused Hillary Clinton of doing while he sought the presidency more than five years ago. He said famously during one his debates with Clinton that were he in office when she ditched the emails that she would be “in jail.”

Don’t make me say out loud what I am thinking at this very moment about whether the ex-POTUS deserves to spend some time behind iron bars.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Compromise possible on guns

Guns usually prompt passionate and occasionally unreasonable arguments over the constitutional amendment that says Americans are entitled to “keep and bear arms.”

The issue shows up during election season when conservatives argue that progressives want to “take away your guns.” Well, maybe some ultra-progressive politicians want to disarm Americans. They are swimming against a riptide of opposition to that notion. That won’t happen. Why? Because doing so would essentially eliminate the Second Amendment to our Constitution.

I consider myself to be a good-government progressive, which means I am not a flaming progressive who wants to rewrite the Constitution. The one we have with its 27 amendments (so far) suits me more or less just fine.

What I do want to happen, though, is for our political leaders to find some legislative remedies to curb the gun violence that keeps erupting on our streets. We sit in our suburban Dallas home each day and watch the news tell us of shootings in Dallas, or Fort Worth, or in other suburban communities nearby. Children are stricken by random violence; some of them die from the wounds inflicted.

Then, of course, we all hear and agonize over the mass shootings that kill so many innocent victims.

Some pols want to put more guns out there, believing they create a safer society. I disagree with that notion. I want fewer guns, but to get to that goal requires some remedies to take these weapons away from individuals who don’t deserve to carry them.

Does any of that violate the Second Amendment? It might, but only if it goes too far. Thus, I want our Legislature or our Congress to seek legislative solutions that keep faith with the Constitution.

The amendment that our founders wrote is a bit of a mishmash, if I could offer that critique. It speaks of a “well-regulated militia” and then declares that the right to “keep and bear arms” must stand.

Our courts have ruled that the amendment says the right to bear arms belongs to us all. I accept that.

However, as a law-abiding, tax-paying American patriot, I believe a legislative solution to the gun violence is out there. It’s somewhere in the weeds. We just need some courage to find it and to craft it and to enact it into law. I will not listen to gun lobbyists who insist that there is no solution to be found.

Get busy, politicians. We need some leadership from you.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

DC riot, national news

No privilege to invoke

Peter Navarro is the latest Donald Trump adviser to face a subpoena by the 1/6 House select committee, which has summoned him to testify before the panel that is searching for the truth behind what happened when the traitorous mob stormed Capitol Hill.

Navarro served as a trade adviser to Trump. He is now trying to invoke “executive privilege” in resisting the committee’s order for him to talk about what he knew about what happened in the White House while the mob was rioting.

Hmm. OK. He has no right under the law to invoke any privilege. There’s that.

Nor does Donald Trump have any right to invoke such privilege. Why? Because he is no longer the president. Joe Biden, the man who beat him in the 2020 election, has declared categorically that he will not allow any executive privilege for his predecessor. There’s that, too.

I’ll restate once more: The committee is legally constituted. It has the authority to order people to testify. The speaker of the House selected the bipartisan panel and gave the committee its assignment: get the truth behind the riot and seek solutions to prevent it from recurring.

Peter Navarro is an economist who provided Trump with advice on trade policy. He has been called a “lousy economist,” but that’s really beside the point. The real point is that he is close to Trump. He knows a lot of what happened on that terrible day. Navarro has been ordered to testify. He faces criminal indictment by the Justice Department if he refuses.

if this guy has a lick of sense — and that’s debatable, to be sure — he will sit before the select committee, take the oath to tell the truth and then … tell the truth.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news, national security, political news

Lock him up?

What the hell is going on here? I could swear that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign made a lot of noise about Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email account while she served as secretary of state and the candidate himself allowed crowds to yell “Lock her up!” over the inadvertent use of that email server.

Now we hear that the former POTUS took classified material with him to Mar-a-Lago, Fla., after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. Moreover, he reportedly flushed some presidential papers down the White House crapper to keep it from falling into the hands of, oh, the National Archives.

Hey, isn’t that a violation of the Presidential Papers Act? And … isn’t that punishable by jail time for those who violate it?

Hmm. What the hell, indeed!

I believe there is much more drama to follow. Stay tuned … eh?

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news, political news

Wanting to put the past … in the past

Almost nothing in this good old world would please me more than to put the past in the past, that we would just stop talking about the 2020 election, the one in which Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump.

If only we could put the past behind us.

The problem is that Trump keeps repeating The Big Lie. He keeps telling us the election was “stolen” from him. That Biden won only because dead people cast ballots and that elections officials in many key states were so corrupt that they manipulated ballots to create a Biden victory.

None of that happened! Hence, we have The Big Lie!

Why doesn’t Trump let the issue just wither away and die? Because he can’t. He won’t. He refuses to accept that he lost the election.

So, The Big Lies lives on. We keep talking about it. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to talk about the future. I want to look ahead.

I want Donald Trump to disappear. I want him to vanish behind the gilded gates at Mar-a-Lago, never to be heard from or seen again.

Go … away … Donald!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

DC riot, national news

Subpoena = direct order

What do you do when a governing authority orders you to do something, such as … oh … testify under oath about what you might know about a criminal act?

I know what I would do. I would report to the authority and tell it what I know. Or don’t know.

The 1/6 House select committee is issuing subpoenas to former Donald Trump aides, friends, family members (who also worked for the government) about what they know about the events that led to the insurrection on 1/6. Many of them are refusing to comply with what I would describe as a “direct order” from the committee.

I will add that it is a direct lawful order by a duly constituted congressional committee charged with finding the truth behind the insurrection.

The committee chaired by Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., is working with breathtaking speed. It is proceeding at a pace I didn’t think was possible. Congress isn’t known as a breakneck organization. Yet, the chips have been thrown down and this panel is moving with remarkable speed and efficiency toward what I hope is a well-researched conclusion.

As for the subpoenas it is issuing, the subjects of those summonses need to understand the gravity of the orders they have been given. They are issued in the name of an American public — at least most of it — that is horrified at the events of 1/6. We all witnessed what Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell has rightly defined as a “violent insurrection” against the U.S. government. Such hideous violence cannot be allowed to stand.

When the powers that be issue an order for those with direct knowledge of the circumstance to report, well, they need to comply or else face the consequence of their refusal.

I believe that is what they call the “rule of law.”

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

DC riot, national news, political news

Mitch uses the ‘I-word’

How about that Mitch McConnell, invoking what I will call the “I-word” in describing what took place on 1/6? He has called it a “violent insurrection” that Donald Trump incited with his fiery “take-back-the-government” rhetoric.

Well … the Senate Republican leader has found his long-lost voice.

He has rebuked the Republican National Committee for censuring two GOP House members — Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — for serving on the select committee examining the 1/6 riot.

McConnell rebukes RNC, calls Jan. 6 ‘violent insurrection’ (msn.com)

“It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next,” McConnell said Tuesday.  Yes, i damn sure was all of that, Sen. McConnell.

You said so in an eloquent Senate floor speech a few weeks after the riot. Then you back away from all of that. You continued to support Donald Trump’s position as the leader of the GOP. Now, though, Trump has insulted McConnell perhaps once or twice too often.

I want McConnell to stand firm in his description of what took place and why it occurred. A mob of traitors stormed the Capitol Building seeking to overturn a fair election; they did so at the urging of Donald Trump.

The ex-Liar in Chief needs to be held accountable. The men and women charged with acting violently need to be prosecuted.

What’s more, Mitch McConnell and other Republican politicians need to stand for the rule of law.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com