Category Archives: national news

national news

Will senators grow some courage?

Matt Gaetz is gone from Donald Trump’s newborn Cabinet, as he was toast from the moment the new POTUS announced him as attorney general.

Trump, though, still is far from finding his way into the clear.

He’s got Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Robert Kennedy Jr. as head of health and human services, Pete Hegseth as defense secretary and maybe a half-dozen others with skeletons in their closets.

Senators have the right to confirm these picks. Trump, though, also has the right to grant recess appointments if the Senate is adjourned. It’s fair to ask: Will the Senate allow Trump to launch a political flea-flicker by denying them the right under the Constitution to debate and then vote on these nominees?

Something is whispering in my ear that senators won’t take kindly to being denied that right by a president who just might try some razzle-dazzle, particularly with the remaining troublesome appointees whose names are still under discussion.

That’s my hope, anyway. The other option would be for them to roll over and allow Trump to flatten them on his way to the Oval Office.

We’ll see what our senators are up to doing … and whether they have stiffened their spines.

crime news, legal news, national news

Trump: Slipperiest man alive

Donald J. Trump has just earned a new title that smacks of royalty.

I hereby crown this guy King Donald, The Slipperiest Man Alive. The dude received this unofficial title when special counsel Jack Smith announced today he would move to dismiss all the federal charges leveled against Trump.

They include his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on our government as well as his keeping of classified documents at his Florida estate.

What happened to force Smith to make this decision? Near as I can tell, it was the Supreme Court ruling that granted Trump immunity from prosecution while he sits in the Oval Office.

So, the two federal charges appear headed for the dustbin. All that’s left to prosecute is the Georgia case alleging that Trump sought to pressure state officials to “find” enough votes in Georgia to swing that state’s total in 2020 to Trump’s column.

The feds have no authority over DA Fani Willis’s right to prosecute that case as an elected state official. Then again, that case appears to be sucking wind at this stage.

Here we stand. A man who was impeached twice during his first term in office, convicted of 34 felony counts in New York on a hush-money payment to an adult film actress and then was charged in multiple cases on state and federal felonies has been re-elected to the nation’s highest office.

He now wears the crown awarded to the Slipperiest Man Alive.

Stunning … simply stunning.

national news

Biden shows his class

Joseph R. Biden Jr. is a much better man than I am … and he’s a damn sight better man than the nimrod who will succeed him as president of the United States at noon on Jan. 20.

I was frankly moved by the demonstration of class and grace that Biden showed toward Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office the other day when the two men met to discuss policy matters and the transition of power from one administration to the next one.

This was the sort of photo op media event that Trump denied Biden four years ago after Biden defeated Trump’s bid for re-election to the presidency. Accordingly, after what Trump did on Jan. 6 and after all the phony claims of being robbed of victory by unproven voter fraud, I would have expected Biden to say something crass to his successor. He didn’t go there … to his enormous credit!

I am going to say something nice about Trump, too. He accepted Biden’s hand and said that “politics is tough” and “not always nice,” and added that he looked forward to a smooth transition of power. As with almost everything that Trump declares out loud, it good to question his sincerity. I won’t do so — just yet!

Biden’s reverence for the institution of the presidency steered him toward the show of grace and dignity. To be honest I do not know what guided Trump’s demonstration in response to the president.

I want the new president to turn the page and act like a man who reveres the office he will inherit. Wanting it and expecting it, however, remain distant possibilities.

national news

Trump loses majority vote? Pffftt!

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The media are making some noise about Donald Trump losing a majority of the popular vote victory he earned with his Nov. 5 presidential election victory.

His popular vote margin has slipped from about 3% on Election Day to around 1.6% as of today. He has earned about 49.8% of the total vote. It is far from the “mandate” he keeps suggesting he won.

But here’s the deal. He was elected legitimately by earning 312 Electoral College votes; he needed 270 of them to secure victory. The Constitution says candidates need to win a majority of Electoral College votes.

I get it. Begrudgingly … but I get it.

What’s more, earlier presidents also have failed to win popular vote majorities. The most recent example was George W. Bush, who in 2000 finished second to Al Gore, but won just barely enough Electoral College votes, thanks to the infamous 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that stopped the recount of ballots in Florida.

Bill Clinton won election and re-election with fewer than 50% of the popular vote. So did John F. Kennedy in 1960. Same for Harry Truman in 1948.

You get the picture, I am sure.

The media need not spend so much effort wondering about the “mandate” that doesn’t exist for Trump. A mandate occurs when presidents score landslide victories, a la Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. Trump’s victory, while significant, doesn’t fall into the category of sweeping mandate for wholesale change.

When they count all the votes and Kamala Harris ends up with more actual votes than Trump, well … then we can talk some more.

national news

Loser showed grace; the winner showed … up

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It was a little thing, but the gestures spoke volumes about the man who won the 2024 presidential election and the woman who lost it.

Vice President Kamala Harris conceded the election the day after they declared  Donald Trump the winner. In her speech, she told the crowd that she had phoned the president-elect to congratulate him on his victory. The response from her supporters gathered before her was understandably muted. But she made the gesture and acknowledged it publicly with grace and class.

How did Trump respond to his stunning victory? He stood before his rally goers … and didn’t say a single word about Kamala Harris.

To be candid, I found his snubbing of his opponent to be worthy of scorn.

I’ve listened to many winning candidates over many years watching elections and listened to the voice they used to accept victory. To a man, they have always recognized the concession call that came from the loser. To varying degrees, they also managed to speak well of the candidate’s losing effort. You’ve heard it, too: “I want to thank my opponent for the tough campaign and for accepting defeat with grace and dignity.”

We didn’t get that kind of magnanimous gesture from Trump. Nope. He chose to refuse to recognize the history that Harris made as the first woman of color ever nominated to run for the presidency. He also refused to recognize the spirited and, yes, hard-charging campaign she ran.

Am I dismayed at Trump’s lack of class in declaring victory? Yes. Am I surprised? Not one single bit!

local news, national news

Move over, Paul Revere!

A supporter of this blog has informed many of my critics that I am now traipsing through some mighty tall cotton.

I need offer a quick-and-clean thank you to this fellow, who I have known for nearly 30 years, dating to when I arrived in the Texas Panhandle to take over as editorial page editor of the Amarillo Globe-News.

My friend, a former Randall County judge, has been chiding a critic over the tone he takes in chastising my arguments opposing Donald J. Trump’s choices to join his newly elected administration. He told the critic that “John Kanelis is a modern-day Paul Revere,” while berating him as a “disgrace to our country as you aid and abet the unhinged fool known as Donald Trump.”

See what I mean about the tall cotton reference?

I am not going to accept the Paul Revere reference. That is my friend’s opinion, to which he — and my critic — are entitled. However, my friend is a lawyer, which means he knows the language quite well. He’s a smart guy. I do not know my critic beyond what he says frequently while commenting on my blog; I just know him as an ardent Trump supporter … meanwhile, I am not.

There you go. Step aside, Paul Revere. You have company … I suppose.

legal news, national news

McConnell leaves cheap legacy

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I won’t think often of Mitch McConnell once he leaves his post as US Senate Republican leader.

But when I do …

I will remember the cheap partisan game he played by blocking President Obama’s decision to name a justice to the U.S. Supreme Court.

You remember, right. Justice Antonin Scalia was vacationing in Texas when he died suddenly in February 2016. Scalia was the intellectual leader of the conservatives who sat on the high court. A brilliant jurist to be sure. Obama had a right under the Constitution to select a successor.

President Obama paid his respects to Justice Scalia and then turned to the D.C. appellate court and nominated Judge Merrick Garland to succeed Scalia. Garland, by all accounts, was a serious judge, fair-minded and scholarly and, yes, a good bit more liberal in his judicial philosophy than Justice Scalia.

Not so fast, said McConnell, who then led the GOP majority in the Senate. The president shouldn’t be allowed to make an appointment in an election year. He said there would be no confirmation hearing for Garland. The Senate would wait for the election results, McConnell said.  He took a huge gamble, as Donald Trump was a decided underdog in early 2016 in his race against Democratic Party nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton.

What happened? Donald Trump got elected, took the oath in January 2017 and then selected conservative judge Neil Gorsuch to succeed Scalia.

I shall be clear.  McConnell acted legally. He had the right as Senate majority leader to block the president’s nomination.

However, McConnell’s stiff of a president from doing his constitutional duty still doesn’t pass this blogger’s smell test.

The tactic stunk to the highest of the heavens and that should stand as this partisan hack’s most enduring legacy.

medical news, national news

Trump adds new ‘wack job’ to lineup

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Wack jobs have found a home in what is shaping up as the weirdest presidential administration in history.

The latest of them also happens to be a scion of one of America’s most revered political families: Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr.

How in the world can I begin evaluating Donald Trump’s selection of RFK Jr. to be health and human services secretary? I’ll start with the obvious. Dude is an anti-vaccine activist who then says he doesn’t oppose vaccines per se, only those used to combat the COVID pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of people around the world.

He also once picked up the carcass of a bear cub and delivered it to a national park and also declared that a worm got into his brain and ate some of the tissue inside his screwed-up noggin.

This is the moron Trump said he would allow to “run wild at HHS” in an effort to protect Americans against disease.

What the … ?

I feel compelled to re-state that RFK Jr.’s father, the late U.S. senator and U.S. attorney general — who I believe would have been elected president in 1968 were it not for the asshole with the pistol in Los Angeles — was my first political hero,

To think that Junior has become such a weirdo only makes me wonder: What would daddy think of his namesake?

national news

Trump at war with experts

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Donald J. Trump has declared war … not against an enemy of the nation he was elected to lead, but against anyone who has a lick of knowledge of the myriad issues that need government’s attention.

Consider these choices for key Cabinet posts: Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence; Pete Hegseth as defense secretary; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary; John Ratcliffe as CIA director; Matt Gaetz as attorney general.

These are some of the serious clunkers Trump has chosen to lead these agencies. He’s tapped some folks with considerable promise. I like Marco Rubio as secretary of state, provided he holds the line on the illegal Ukraine war.

Trump, though, is managing to slap the crap out of all the mid- and lower-level professionals who do the work in the trenches. These folks get their fingernails dirty carrying out public policy. They are not political appointees.

I do not believe Gaetz or Gabbard will pass the confirmation gauntlet in the U.S. Senate. RFK Jr. also looks to be too badly damaged to lead HHS. Hegseth’s claim to fame is as a Fox Propaganda Channel weekend talk-show co-host.

Imagine you’re a highly trained defense analyst. You spend your days crunching numbers and trying to determine the most efficient ways to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to protect Americans from our enemies. Then you have a defense secretary — Pete Hegseth — who has spent much of his career advancing partisan political matters and who has no earthly idea what is happening deep in the bowels of the Pentagon.

Similar analogies can apply to many of the agencies that might be led by an assortment of fruitcakes, blowhards and know-nothings. They all have a single element in common. They are blindly loyal to a president … and not to the Constitution they took an oath to uphold.

national news

Gaetz as AG? Holy crap!

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Donald J. Trump’s Cabinet hit parade just picked up a huge head of steam today with his announcement of who he wants to serve as U.S. attorney general.

It is none other than Republican Party human grenade launcher Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman who says the Justice Department is a cesspool of corruption. What’s more, he vows to clean the place up from top to bottom.

Oh, there’s more. Gaetz has been investigated by the very same DOJ on corruption charges himself. So now, the new POTUS wants him to run the DOJ? Is this for real? Don’t answer that. I know that it is.

Trump has been on a roll as he seeks to fill out the Cabinet. He announced today that former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard will be the director of national intelligence. And …. he has selected former North Texas congressman John Ratcliffe to lead the CIA. Gabbard and Ratcliffe both have negligible intelligence backgrounds. Indeed, Trump once picked Ratcliffe to be DNI, only to have his name pulled because of questions about his intelligence background.

The Gaetz pick clearly is going to spark a sh**storm on Capitol Hill as the AG nominee will be forced to answer questions about the ethics probe and what on Earth he intends to do about all the dedicated professionals who toil day and night to keep us safe.

Gaetz’s rhetoric about the agency he might lead is most troubling. He has levied specific accusations against FBI director Christopher Wray and a host of other officials. Gaetz has behaved like the right-wing blowhard he is and has brought nothing but shame and embarrassment to anything he touches.

How in the world is this guy going to get 50 Senate votes to confirm him as attorney general? Let the rumble begin.