Category Archives: national news

national news

Insurrectionists abound!

DEBORAH CANNON / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Congress can provide many surprises.

One of them has surfaced in recent days. For instance, I did not know that the House of Representatives contained so many insurrectionists, people who are willing to contest a fundamental concept of the government they took an oath to defend and protect.

These are the idiots who have said they intend to contest the election of President-elect Joe Biden. They’ll get the chance to have their undemocratic voices heard next Wednesday when the House and Senate meet to ratify the results of the Electoral College certification of Biden and Kamala Harris’s victory over Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

At last count, 140 House members — all Republicans — say they intend to contest the results. They will join the Missouri moron in the Senate, Republican Josh Hawley, in contesting a result that on Nov. 3 produced a clear, decisive and legal victory by the Biden-Harris ticket over the Trump-Pence ticket. I am happy to report that my congressman, Republican Van Taylor of Plano, did not join the loony bin crowd; he remains loyal to the oath he took.

This, of course, is a disgraceful perversion of the democratic process. These dipsh**s continue to insist there was “widespread voter fraud.” There was none. The U.S. attorney general has said there was none. More than 50 courts across the land have ruled there was none. Donald Trump’s handpicked steward over the election process — whom Trump later fired for speaking the truth — said the election was the most “secure in U.S. history.”

Will that deter this cabal of kooks? No. They’re going to proceed with the clown show egged on by their guy, Trump.

I am somewhat heartened by the apparent refusal of Vice President Pence to play along with this idiocy. I say “somewhat” because Pence has remained silent for too damn long while Trump has continued his moronic claim of being “robbed” of a victory.

All of this sheer nonsense will end where it should. Congress will ratify the Electoral College result. VP Pence will gavel the results into the record and will declare that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been elected president and vice president.

And Trump and Pence more than likely will never speak to each other ever again. That’s fine with me … as long as they take their estrangement with them out the door and into oblivion.

national news

Obama 2.0? OK, what’s wrong with that?

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

We’re hearing from right-wing media pundits and other critics of President-elect Biden that his Cabinet and top staffers comprise too many folks from the Obama administration.

Yes, I have expressed a concern about that, but I have to ask: Why is that necessarily a bad thing?

Biden served as vice president for President Obama’s two successful terms. He knows the players who comprised his team. Biden knows their strengths. He wants to parlay those strengths toward building a team of his own.

The Obama administration, let us remember, took office in the midst of the Great Recession. The nation’s economy was in free fall, it was collapsing and President Obama needed to act immediately to help rescue it from permanent ruin.

The team he assembled, along with Joe Biden, got the job done.

So, the new president wants to rely on their knowledge, their experience and their skill to help him restore a nation beset by new economic trouble and, oh  yes, that damn pandemic.

That’s OK with me.

national news

A new year will dawn; may it bring hope

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The sun will rise at 7:29 a.m. Friday, although it is unlikely we’ll see it peek over the eastern horizon, given the crappy weather we’re having in North Texas.

It doesn’t matter. The darkness will give way to the light (more or less) and a new year will have arrived.

We all feel the same way about 2020. It sucked out loud. The pandemic continues to bring untold misery to millions of Americans and others around the world; it has killed more than 340,000 of us. And the president of the United States, Donald Trump, blew it off publicly. He told us early in the year that the pandemic is “under control.” It damn sure isn’t!

Our nation’s economy collapsed. Millions of Americans lost their jobs. Trump kept gloating about the stock market’s rise. Oh, the jobs lost? He spoke next to nothing about the suffering and strife occurring in homes throughout the land.

Then came that election. Americans sent a message of their own to Donald Trump. It was, if you’ll accept this generalization, simply this: Donald, we are sick of your policy-by-Twitter, your insults, your boorish behavior, your incessant lies and the utter incompetence you demonstrate daily about how to run the government; we want a return to the old normal.

Step right up, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. A weary nation awaits your ascent to the pinnacle of power.

We’ve got 19 days to go before Biden takes over. He has selected a governing team that he says resembles the nation he was elected to lead. It is full of ethnic and racial minorities, of men and women. It is full of individuals with prior government experience and an appreciation and understanding of its complexity, which to my mind is the most important component of the government that is taking shape.

And so … we commence the new year with a sense of hope. We must maintain our patience and vigilance as the pandemic battle continues. Those vaccines are being administered. The crisis won’t vanish any time soon.

The new president has made a solemn vow to ramp up that fight, to wage all-out war against the pandemic. I await the result of that fight and the day we can declare victory against this enemy.

I am not foolish enough to believe that declaration will come during this upcoming calendar year. However, I am enough of an optimist to believe that we are going to make a significant advance toward that end. May we start advancing right now.

Happy new year!

media news, national news

Awaiting a new blog year, too

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Much of the world is awaiting the tick of midnight and the dawn of a new year.

A good bit of our good Earth already has welcomed 2021. Not yet in the U.S. of A.

I look forward to the new year as an American patriot, a father, grandfather, husband, brother, cousin and uncle who worries about the health and well being of his extended and immediate family.

Moreover, I look ahead to 2021 as a full-time blogger who spends a lot of time commenting on issues of the day. Yes, it is clear to everyone that Donald Trump has dominated this blog. He has consumed much of my waking hours as I look for ways to provide some context to the conduct of this individual.

Even though Jan. 1 is just around the corner, Donald Trump will remain as president until the 20th of the month. Then he steps aside and President Joe Biden takes the reigns of power. I will continue to provide comment on this blog on those issues and on how the new president deals with them.

I cannot offer a pledge cast in stone on the tone and tenor of this blog, but my sincere hope — and that’s all it can be — is that I will be able to look more constructively at the actions of our new administration.

Donald Trump was a lost cause in that regard from before he took office four years ago. He is unfit for the office. Trump remains an impeached president. I consider him to be a danger to our system of government. I have said so over the years and I make no apology for anything I have written about him.

However, at noon on Jan. 20 Donald Trump becomes irrelevant. He will tweet this and that. I intend to ignore his blathering, bloviating and bluster. I also intend to focus instead on how President Biden intends to repair the damage that Trump has left for him.

I hope to awake in the morning feeling refreshed and ready to go. The old  year really sucked, man. The new year? We have nowhere to go but straight up.

national news

Well, Mitch? What about ‘need’?

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I am not a particularly avid fan of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist from Vermont, the independent who pretends to be a Democrat.

However, grouchy ol’ Bernie has posted a message on Facebook that I must share here. I cannot express the outrage over Sen. Mitch McConnell’s duplicity any better.

Take it away, Bernie:

All of a sudden Mitch McConnell is “worried” that someone in America might get a $2,000 check “who doesn’t need it.”
Funny. He had no problem giving a $1.4 billion tax break to Charles Koch and his family with a net worth of $113 billion.
He had no problem giving a $560 million tax break to Sheldon Adelson, the casino tycoon who is worth $34.3 billion.
He had no problem giving a $104 million tax refund to Amazon over the past three years combined after it made $30 billion in profits.
He had no problem giving a $1 trillion tax break to the top one percent and profitable corporations.
Tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs. They have lost their incomes. They have depleted their life savings. They are going hungry.
And they are scared to death that they will be evicted from their homes.
I say to Senator McConnell: Start worrying about the people in this country who are hurting and not just your billionaire campaign contributors.
Stop blocking legislation from coming to the floor which would provide a $2,000 direct payment that the working class of this country desperately needs.
Let the Senate vote, Mitch!
national news

Who is the real ‘enemy of the people’?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The New York Daily News published an editorial this week that peels the bark off Donald Trump and his infantile effort to subvert the nation’s democratic process.

It begins this way:

Nearly four years ago, Donald Trump swore an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Trump now violates that oath on multiple fronts as he continues to insist he won an election he decisively lost, toys with disrupting the Jan. 6 count by Congress of the Electoral College tally — and lets his administration withhold vital cooperation from President-elect Joe Biden’s team in the pivotal closing weeks.

Editorial: Enemy of the people? Donald Trump seems dangerously determined to make Joe Biden’s job difficult (msn.com)

The Daily News takes Trump to task for the manner in which he is resisting, fighting, scrambling fecklessly to cling to the power he lost when Americans voted in significant numbers to reject him as president. He doesn’t deserve a second term in the eyes of a majority of American voters.

To think, too, that Donald Trump had the balls to declare that the media are the “enemy of the people” because they reported the unvarnished truth to Americans who were getting nothing but lies from their head of state.

Donald J. Trump is the real enemy.

national news

Let’s look closely at alleged treason, OK?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Social media memes have this way of occasionally telling us startling truths about issues of the day.

For instance, a meme showed up on my Facebook news feed this morning that offered some advice to the nation looking at possible crimes committed by Donald Trump, the outgoing president of the United States.

It says we should examine “possible treason as thoroughly” as the nation investigated whether a previous president was, um, pleasured by a White House intern.

President Clinton got impeached for his dalliance with a young woman, but not until a special prosecutor revealed his findings while examining other alleged misdeeds involving the president.

Fast-forward to the present day. Donald Trump is being investigated for a wide variety of alleged crimes. The probe is occurring in state jurisdictions. The allegations go far more deeply than what Bill Clinton did more than two decades ago. They involve possible treason and betrayal of the nation’s security … by the president!

Is that worth the time, the effort and, yes, the expense of a thorough investigation?

Yes. I believe it is.

national news

Yep, it’s personal!

(AP Photo/Jeffrey Phelps)

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Readers of this blog have long understood that I loathe Donald Trump. I loathe him because of his fundamental unfitness for the job he is about to vacate, for the way he has conducted himself before and during the time he became a politician.

It’s not ideological.

For starters, I don’t consider myself to be an ideologue. I have fashioned my political view in good-government terms, which suggests that I favor compromise over rigid ideology.

More to the point, I don’t consider Trump to be an ideologue, either. He is a panderer. Trump, though, is a clumsy panderer. He just isn’t very good at it. He is inartful, inarticulate, inept. Trump is as Sen. Mitt Romney described in 2016: a “phony” and a “fraud.”

All this is my way of saying that I welcome anxiously the moment U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts extends his hand to Joe Biden and says, “Congratulations, Mr. President.”

I am weary of the constant chaos that Trump has delivered during the past four years; I am sick and tired of this individual’s constant effort to take credit he doesn’t deserve; I am flabbergasted that he lies continually, incessantly and with no hesitation.

Even more than that I am astounded and amazed that the core of Trumpkins who continue to support this individual give him a pass on the lying. It’s as if the lies he tells have become some form of “truth” to their tone-deaf ears.

My hope for the new president is that he will spare us the constant Twitter tirade, the lying, the chaos that have been the signature of the president who is about to leave the White House for the final time. Truth be told, I hope he’s left it already for the final time, given that he and his wife are in Florida soaking up the sun and lounging in luxury while the nation suffers from the pandemic.

I am heartened and relieved we are soon to be spared the dangerous behavior of someone who in a more normal political environment would have been laughed off the political stage.

I am waiting for your arrival, President Biden.

national news

Don’t let up on ‘former president’

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

In normal times I would be inclined to not be terribly concerned about the legal troubles of a politician who is about to leave the public stage.

These aren’t normal times. The soon-to-be former pol happens to be someone who is leaving the office he inherited in complete shambles. Donald Trump, that would be you … you dolt, you seditious provocateur!

I don’t believe President Biden needs to unleash the federal hounds in pursuit of whatever crimes that Trump might have committed. However, the 45th POTUS is in serious danger of being targeted by state and local prosecutors who are probing plenty of issues related to the individual’s use of campaign money.

Donald Trump’s de facto attorney, Attorney General William Barr, covered Trump’s ample backside before he had enough and resigned this past week.

We now have a district attorney in Manhattan, New York City, who is loosing his own legal hounds in pursuit of plenty of questions regarding hush money payments to women with whom he had trysts.

Trump’s efforts to subvert our democratic process just fills me with enough rage to actually hope that the Manhattan DA delivers the goods on the moral reprobate who is about to leave office.

Whether he actually pardons himself successfully, Trump’s presidential pardon power means nothing where it regards prosecutions that occur outside the federal realm.

Go for it, Manhattan prosecutors. Let’s see what you have!

national news

Let the game begin in the Senate … ridiculous

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Josh Hawley has just tossed his hat into a mythical ring signifying a campaign for Dipsh** of the Year in the U.S. Senate.

Hawley is a freshman Missouri Republican who has announced his intention to challenge President-elect Biden’s victory in the just completed election. Hawley’s intention is to force a debate on whether there is widespread voter fraud, the kind of bogus allegation that Donald Trump has been making, that resulted in Biden’s election as the next president of the United States.

Hawley plans to object to the Electoral College certification of Biden’s clear and decisive — and honest — victory.

Hawley vows to challenge Biden electors, forcing vote McConnell hoped to avoid (msn.com)

The idiotic display won’t change the outcome. It merely delays the Senate ratification of the electoral vote tally until after senators and House members have a debate.

What in the hell they plan to debate is beyond me.

Hawley’s grandstanding move comes in direct defiance of what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has implored of his fellow GOP caucus members. However, it plays straight into the wheelhouse of Donald Trump — the Dipsh** in Chief — who is seeking to obstruct the president-elect’s smooth transition into the presidency.

Way to go … senator! You, young man, are an idiot!