Category Archives: national news

national news

Wanting to be done with 2020

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Is it too early to wish 2020 a none-too-fond farewell?

If not, I will do so. If it is too early, I will do so anyway!

For reasons of which we are all aware, this has been one of the worst years imaginable. That damn coronavirus has shut us down, allowed a partial reopening, shut us down again. It has forced confinement to many of us to our houses. We can’t eat at our favorite restaurants.

We are wearing masks. We carry hand sanitizer with us.

Oh, and the young people? They have been denied proms, graduation ceremonies and in-person learning in classrooms.

We cannot go to our house of wor. Or watch our favorite sports teams in person.

And on top of all that, we have endured a miserable presidential campaign and watched the incumbent POTUS make an ass of himself by refusing to comply with the rules set forth by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He has created an environment that has infected hundreds of his followers.

I am ready for the year to end. The next year won’t bring immediate relief from the misery when it arrives on Jan. 1.

But that brings me to a glimmer of hope that might await us.

My new year celebration will be enhanced if we are able to welcome 2021 with the prospect of a new president getting ready to take office. I cannot even begin to ponder the possibility that we’ll be stuck with the Liar in Chief for another four years.

My hope springs eternal that we can shove 2020 out the door with the hope of a brighter future on the horizon.

national news

Impeachment: remember it?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I want  to bring up an issue that is getting next to zero attention among the media as we hurtle toward this highly anticipated presidential election.

It is that Donald J. Trump is the first impeached president in U.S. history who is running for re-election.

Yep. The first one! Ever!

Remember that the House of Representatives impeached Trump on two counts: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Trump went to trial in the Senate and was acquitted.

Why and how? Because almost all of the Senate’s Republican majority — with one notable exception — gave Trump a pass on the abuse of power he exhibited when he solicited from Ukraine a political favor and then obstructed Congress’s efforts to get to the truth of what happened.

Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah was the lone Republican to vote to convict Trump on abuse of power.

So now Trump wants a second term in office after being impeached by the House. How should that play? How does he sell himself as deserving re-election even after the House impeached him?

He calls it all a hoax. Which is fine with the GOP bloc that stands with this guy.

Many of the rest of us don’t see it that way. I believe Trump should have been tossed out of office because he sought Ukrainian help in digging up dirt on Joe Biden. Not good, Mr. President. Plus, he ordered top aides to refuse to comply with congressional summons to appear before committees to talk openly about what they knew and when they knew it. Also not good, Mr. POTUS.

Here we are. Donald Trump wants another term in office after being impeached by the House because he broke the law.

Incredible.

national news

Republicans face a reckoning

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Republicans should ask themselves a serious question as they prepare to vote for president of the United States.

Is the guy at the top of our ballot, Donald J. Trump, really one of us?

I submit that Trump isn’t a real Republican. He isn’t a real anything, other than a real a**hole who has co-opted a party he has grabbed by the throat.

A party that once used to vilify Democrats because of budget deficits cannot use that cudgel any longer thanks to Donald Trump. This guy vowed to eliminate the national debt; on his watch, the debt has tripled. The deficit? It’s on track to ratchet up to $3.1 trillion, nearly double the previous annual record.

Fiscal responsibility? The party that once touted itself as the party that would protect our money has spent it recklessly. That ain’t very Republican, if you know what I mean.

The party of Lincoln once sought to embrace civil rights legislation. It fought hard for African-Americans’ desire for the full rights of citizenship. Democratic President Lyndon Johnson needed help from his GOP friends in the Senate to enact the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the mid-1960s. Can you imagine Donald Trump doing the same thing?

The GOP used to stand toe-to-toe with our international adversaries. Such as, oh, Russia. What in the world has the current GOP president done? He has sided with Russia and chided U.S. intelligence analysts over the issue of Russian interference in our national election. Russia denied doing it; Trump said he believes ’em. Amazing, man.

The GOP used to be a party that insisted that our political leaders have squeaky clean family reputations. Hmm. Does that fit Donald Trump in any fashion?

I don’t expect any Republicans who might happen to read this blog to change their mind just because I am calling Trump a Republican In Name Only. I do hope they ask themselves that critical question about Donald Trump: Is he really one of us?

national news

It’s almost over

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

In the spirit of Donald Trump’s reported plans to declare victory prematurely on Election Night if certain things happen, I want to declare victory of another sort.

We’re just two days out from the presidential election and I am proud to report that we got through it.

Trump has managed to wage the most miserable re-election campaign in anyone’s memory. I don’t believe it will work for him; I am cautiously optimistic — with emphasis on “cautiously” — that Joe Biden will win the election Tuesday and take his place as the 46th president of the United States.

We sought to endure the incumbent’s incessant lying, his innuendo, his invective and insults, his boorishness. I remain baffled that Trump continues to hang onto the supporters he has held for as long as he has been in office.

The COVID crisis is out of control; Trump hasn’t yet spelled out a plan for a second term; he downplays the seriousness of the crisis; Trump criticizes the pre-eminent infectious disease expert on the White House response task force; he has insulted the men and women who serve in the military; he kowtows to dictators; he lied to us about the pandemic when he broke at the start of the year.

In a normal political environment, Biden would be headed to a 40-state landslide. These aren’t normal times. Yet my hope springs eternal that enough Americans have had enough, have had their fill of Trump’s relentless anger that they’ll turn to someone who can feel their hurt, their angst and is unafraid and is willing to express it publicly.

Trump himself has defined and embodied the abnormality of this political climate. He ran for president in 2016 proclaiming to be a self-made business success. We have learned that was a lie. He said “I, alone” can fix the nation’s problems. We learned that to be a form of code that disguised a desire to become an authoritarian leader, rather than part of a political partnership with other branches of government.

Trump has ignored the best advice he could receive. He has relied on his gut. Trump’s gut has resulted in a presidency that has left a trail of wreckage. My hope is that Joe Biden’s team can clean it up.

Here we are, on the verge of the most consequential election perhaps in U.S. history.

I am glad I have maintained some semblance of sanity watching this drama unfold in real time. I am ready for it to end … and I am hoping for the dawn of a new era.

national news

Trump will do what? Declare ‘victory’ early?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I thought I was hearing things this morning. Turns out I heard it right.

Donald Trump reportedly is going to “declare victory” prematurely Tuesday night if the early returns show him leading the contest over Joe Biden. Yep. That’s what might happen, according to Axios.com, which broke the story.

That is weird, man. Totally strange and bizarre. In a way, though, it illustrates a bit of daffy cunning on Trump’s part.

The early voter returns likely won’t have a winner declared in the Electoral College. The winner needs 270 electoral votes to be elected. So if Trump decides to declare “victory” before all the votes are counted, he might be banking on voters deciding against casting their ballots believing that Trump’s actually been re-elected.

Far-fetched? Yeah. It is. There is a strange plausibility to trying such a thing.

In 1980, the TV networks declared Ronald W. Reagan the winner over President Carter early on election night. He had rolled up enough electoral votes to oust Carter after a single term. The polls had not yet closed way out west, where I was living and working at the time.

There was plenty of anecdotal evidence that night of voters walking away from the polling place when they heard that Reagan had won, forgoing their own casting of ballots. The evidence also showed that in at least one key congressional race, the one between U.S. Rep. Al Ullman and Denny Smith in the Second Congressional District of Oregon, that the walkaways cost the Democrat Ullman enough votes to deny his re-election. I watched that one up close as I was working for a newspaper that covered a portion of that congressional district in Clackamas County, Ore.

Donald Trump has a few tricks up his sleeve. I guess this might be one of them he could deploy to deny Joe Biden a victory. For the sake of the Republic, I hope Joe Biden holds a strong lead when the early returns are broadcast around the world.

national news

This is what ‘cult of personality’ produces

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

There he was, standing in front of adoring fans, telling yet another egregious lie just the other day about the coronavirus pandemic.

Donald Trump’s fans nodded, applauded and hollered their approval over a blatant falsehood, which is that doctors and nurses are inflating COVID-19 death rates because “they make more money” when patients die.

This, I submit, is the essence of what has been called a “cult of personality.” Trumpkins don’t give a sh** about policy. They adore the liar who stands before them. They buy into the lies. They give him a pass when he defames an entire learned profession — doctors and nurses — with an outright lie.

This is the kind of menace against which Joe Biden is running as he seeks to remove Donald Trump from the presidency he won in 2016 in arguably the greatest political fluke in American political history.

Biden is campaigning against an individual who can lie out loud and in full public view and receive the same level of cheer and applause as he would were he to actually say something true, which of course doesn’t happen with this clown.

Hitler had that cult of personality. So did Stalin and Mussolini. So did Idi Amin and Ho Chi Minh. So does Kim Jong Un. So does Vladimir Putin.

Donald Trump is following them all down the road to infamy with his lying, defaming and patently vicious rhetoric.

To think the Trumpkin Corps continues to buy into this trash. Simply astonishing in the extreme.

national news

Enjoying sight and sound of No. 44 on the stump

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I was proud to vote for Barack Hussein Obama when he ran for election and re-election as president of the United States.

And I will be candid: I miss him and wish there was some way he could still sit in the Oval Office. He cannot do that. The U.S. Constitution prohibited him from seeking a third term as president.

Now, though, he has back on the political stage, stumping for his “brother,” Joe Biden, who served as vice president during Obama’s two successful terms as president.

I admit as well to enjoying listening to the former president peel the hide off of his successor, Donald Trump, whose lies and misrepresentations seemingly have been more than President Obama can stomach.

I also wonder if Trump’s incessant attacks on Obama’s record, replete with their litany of lies, has gotten under the former president’s skin. If I had been the subject of those defamatory attacks, I know for damn certain I would be pi**ed off beyond measure.

Obama stood with former VP Biden today in Detroit, telling the horn-honking socially distanced audience what many of us already know: that Donald Trump is an abject failure as president. Obama wondered aloud about why Trump and his GOP cohorts, after 10 years of complaining about the Affordable Care Act, haven’t yet produced anything resembling a replacement. And yet, as President Obama noted, they want to toss aside health care insurance that many millions of Americans depend on during this pandemic crisis.

Amazing, yes? And stupid!

I know I am not the only American who has missed the sound of President Barack Obama’s voice, the tenor of his message or the sight of him laying waste to the unfit individual who succeeded him as president.

Welcome back to the battle, Mr. President.

national news

Will we know who won on Election Night?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I have been rubbing balm on my trick knee to keep it from throbbing during this election season.

Now, though, I think it might be time to let my joints “talk” to me about what might happen when they count the ballots for president of the United States.

Here is what they’re saying:

They are telling me that we are going to have a winner declared sometime during the night. It could be in the wee hours. Or it might come much earlier than any of us expects.

How might we learn early? Joe Biden could pick off a few key swing states early — such as, oh, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and perhaps Georgia. Without Florida in the bank, Donald Trump has virtually no path to re-election.

Then there could be the shocker of all: Biden squeaking out a win in, gulp, Texas. The early vote here has been stupendous, with Democrats in Harris, Dallas and Travis counties rushing to vote early.

I say all this while resisting the urge to predict it will happen. The West Coast states of Oregon, Washington and California are in the bag for Joe. There’s also Nevada, New Mexico and Hawaii. Toss in Arizona and you’re looking at a possible Biden landslide.

Trump is talking up a big Election Day surge among Republicans. They might turn out en masse as well. Will it be enough to overcome the potential early vote surge we’ve seen in Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa where the COVID crisis also is surging? Time will offer an explainer.

My trick knee also could be sending me another sort of message, which is that Trump will enjoy enough of a surge at the end to squeak out an electoral college fluke that mirrors what transpired in 2016. That is the scenario that could keep the result in limbo for several days past Election Night.

OK, one more thought: If we know the evening of Nov. 3 or the early morning of Nov. 4, I believe Donald Trump will concede. He won’t do it in the normal way, offering his congratulations to the winner and promising his full support. He will surrender the White House with gritted teeth.

That’s my call and I’m sticking with it. Such as it is.

medical news, national news

Hey, Don Jr.: Shut … up!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald J. Trump Jr. said what?

Let me see if I have this straight …

On a day when 1,000 Americans died from the coronavirus pandemic, Don Jr. told Laura Ingraham, a Fox News talking head, that pandemic deaths were “almost nothing.” Don’s dad, The Donald, has said pretty much the same thing, that we are “turning the corner” and that the pandemic “is under control.”

I’ve already implored Donald Sr. to keep his yapper closed, to leave the medical analysis to the scientists and assorted experts with whom he has surrounded himself. Dad ain’t listening to little ol’ me.

I don’t expect Junior to listen, either. However, I must pass along this bit of advice to the elder Know Nothing Son of the Know Nothing President:

Don Jr. … shut the f**k up!

national news

Docs are conspiring?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I just picked my jaw off the floor.

Why did it fall so far? I just heard Donald Trump say out loud to a campaign rally that the nation’s doctors and nurses are conspiring to fake death counts by the coronavirus because they, um, get more money.

He said also that if we hear about deaths from the coronavirus that we shouldn’t believe what we are hearing. It’s all fake, says the president of the United States of America.

I am baffled. Flummoxed. Enraged.

Donald Trump’s lying has plunged to new lows and that, my friends, is saying patently frightening.

He says if people catch the killer virus, they aren’t likely to die. They’ll just get better; they become immune from further infection; they get on with their lives.

Oh, but wait: More than 1,000 Americans died yesterday from the coronavirus. How could that happen? Donald Trump says docs and nurses are faking it. The media are reporting “fake news.”

This individual is as despicable as they come. He needs to lose this election … bigly.