Category Archives: national news

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.

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.

national news

LGBT bill needs to pass

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

As someone who believes a person’s sexual orientation is delivered at birth, I am perplexed — no surprise here — at Republican opposition to a bill that grants gay people protection against losing their job because of who they love.

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a bill that prohibits discrimination against LGBT Americans. It faces an uphill climb in the Senate because Senate Republicans believe it infringes on their religious freedom.

Oh, my.

I keep asking myself when I hear this argument: What part of the term “secular document” do these folks not comprehend? Yes, the U.S. Constitution is a secular document drafted by smart men who sought to keep religion out of the nation’s governing framework. Now, I know that they also granted us all religious liberty, that we are free to worship — or not worship — as we please.

The founders also wrote into the Constitution a clause that grants “equal protection under the law” for every single American. It makes no distinction among Americans’ sexual orientation.

This is a sticky issue. I am acutely aware of the toes it steps on.

BBC reports: The act would also federally codify into law the 2020 June Supreme Court ruling that said employers who fire workers for being gay or transgender are violating civil rights law.

Advocates for the act have argued that the current “patchwork” of state anti-discrimination laws does not provide enough comprehensive protection, and leaves many LGBT individuals at risk.

More from the BBC: Before the vote, the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank said the act “would make mainstream beliefs about marriage, biological facts about sex differences, and many sincerely held beliefs punishable under the law.”

US House passes bill protecting LGBT rights (msn.com)

I have sought to make this case before, but I’ll try once again. The U.S. Constitution governs a nation founded by individuals who sought to live free of ham-handed religious dogma.

Civil rights legislation approved repeatedly over the years and affirmed by the Supreme Court has sought to ensure that all Americans enjoy the same freedom from discrimination. Shouldn’t that include LGBT Americans, too? Of course it should!

national news

What has happened to conservatism?

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Someone a whole lot smarter than I am will have to explain what in the name of political sanity has happened to the modern U.S. conservative movement.

I am sitting out here in Flyover Country looking at the parade of goofballs, lunatics, seditionists and cult followers traipsing onto the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. I am shaking my head in utter disbelief.

These loons stand before the adoring CPAC crowd and denigrate actual conservatives and true-blue Republicans. These are the folks who have had the gumption to be critical of the Loon in Chief, Donald Trump. That’s it. That is their mortal sin, in the eyes of these morons.

The real conservatives aren’t invited to attend this event. They are basically booed in absentia off the stage whenever someone, such as Ted Cruz, mentions their names out loud.

I am not a conservative, so I have no particular dog in that fight. I am just a spectator and a blogger who wonders — as is my right — about the health of a once-vibrant political movement.

Were I to diagnose the well-being of the conservative movement, I would declare it to be taken over by body snatchers. They are no longer a viable political movement, a governing philosophy. They are loyal to an imbecile who in the course of four years as president of the United States managed:

To run up the greatest national debt in history, alienated this nation from our most valuable international allies, destroyed the decorum associated with the highest office in the land, took dead aim at ethnic and racial minorities, was impeached twice by Congress — the second time for inciting an insurrection — and then lied to the nation and allowed many hundreds of thousands of Americans to die needlessly from a killer virus that has swept over the world.

However, the cultists at CPAC have invited Donald J. Trump to speak and for him to declare that some phony “revolution” he proclaims to lead will continue into the future.

I believe with all my soul that Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley and Ronald W. Reagan are spinning their graves … and that were they around today none of them would be allowed to speak at today’s perverted gathering of so-called conservatives.

national news

Ya gotta watch this … really!

Ted Cruz speaks at 2021 CPAC: Full speech – YouTube

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The link I have attached to this very brief post is of Ted Cruz, Texas’s infamous junior U.S. senator, the guy who sought to flee to Cancun while the state he represents shivered in bitter cold weather.

I just don’t have anything to add to this video, other than it is about 17 minutes long. Cruz is speaking to fellow fanatics at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla.

He is one of the warmup acts, I suppose, for Donald John Trump, whose speech Sunday night will bring CPAC’s meeting to a close.

Cruz is just truly despicable.

That’s all I have. B’bye … for now.

national news

CPAC = idolatry

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

What you see in this picture is an utterly disgusting image I just had to share on this blog.

It was taken at the Conservative Political Action Conference meeting in Orlando, Fla.

The image here appears to be some sort of faux gold statue of Donald John Trump. I am trying to grasp the profound repulsiveness of it.

All I can come up with is that it depicts Trump as some sort of idol to be worshiped by the CPAC attendees who will listen this weekend to the message/lies that Trump will offer them.

I am out! You look at this picture and draw your own conclusions.

national news

Forget how they look … masks save lives

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

When I watch the news and notice President Biden making public appearances while wearing a mask, I cannot help but think of something his predecessor said about mask-wearing in light of the killer pandemic.

Donald J. Trump dismissed the idea of wearing a mask, saying something about how unbecoming it would be for the president of the United States to wear such a thing. He was worried about appearance.

Hmm. So, Trump exits the political stage — and not a moment too soon — and gives way to President Biden, who doesn’t appear to be worried about such mundane matters. Biden wears a mask. He has asked all Americans to wear masks for at least the first 100 days of his administration. My wife and I have heard his request and are following suit.

I am not going to suggest that we are doing it out of “patriotism,” which Biden insists ought to be the driving force. We are seeking to protect ourselves and those with whom we come in contact. Wearing a mask is not a big deal. Indeed, reaching for a mask before I enter a grocery store is becoming more “normal” than not reaching for it.

All of this is my way of welcoming the new outlook and the leadership that is coming from the White House.

Make no mistake, too, that President Biden is willing and able to talk candidly with us about the savage toll the pandemic is exacting on us. His predecessor routinely sought to downplay that, too. Amazing.

Watching the president of the United States conduct matters of state while wearing a mask only highlights the foolishness that came from his predecessor, an individual who was more concerned about appearances than he ever was about saving lives.

national news

Oh, Ted … please shut up!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Forgive this brief bit of “what aboutism.” I just cannot let this statement go without a response.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz said this today regarding President Biden’s nomination of Xavier Becerra to become the next secretary of health and human services:

The fact that President Biden was willing to nominate Xavier Becerra — someone with zero experience in anything related to health care — to the Department of Health and Human Services during this pandemic, illustrates Biden prioritizes partisan politics above all else.

Oh, my. Where do I begin?

I’ll start with this: Cruz had no difficulty supporting the appointment of two members of the Donald Trump Cabinet with no experience at all overseeing the agencies they were selected to run.

Exhibit A is Dr. Ben Carson, the housing secretary and then we have Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education.

Dr. Carson was a renowned brain surgeon. Did he have a clue about public housing? Had he ever led an agency the size of HUD? No and no. Indeed, he was hard-pressed during his confirmation hearing to answer simple questions related to public housing policy. He got confirmed.

DeVos never attended public schools. Her children never attended them, either. She favors giving taxpayer funds to finance vouchers for children to attend private schools. She is anti-public education. DeVos was, and is, ignorant on basics about education policy. She, too, was confirmed … although it took a tie-breaking vote cast by Vice President Mike Pence for her to take office.

Now we hear from the Cruz Missile saying that Becerra has no experience in health policy. Earth to Ted: Becerra served in the House of Representatives and was a key architect of the Affordable Care Act that Cruz has opposed since joining the Senate in 2013. Thus, Becerra had plenty to do with health care.

This kind of flippin’ nonsense from a loudmouth senator who doesn’t possess an ounce of introspection just sends me into orbit.

What’s more, to hear this kind of bullsh** coming from someone who sought to undermine a free and fair election and who ought to bear some responsibility for the hideous attack on our democratic system on Jan. 6 is reprehensible on its face.

My advice to Ted Cruz? Shut the hell up.