Category Archives: political news

national news, political news

Cheney should rethink this notion

Lame-duck Liz Cheney is considering a run for the presidency in 2024. On one hand, I endorse the notion of the Wyoming Republican congresswoman running for the GOP presidential nomination.

On the other hand, the prospect of Cheney running for POTUS as an independent candidate — a notion she hasn’t yet ruled out — could prove disastrous.

Why? Well, Cheney said she is going to commit her remaining time in public life to ensuring that Donald Trump gets nowhere near the Oval Office ever again. I applaud her noble goal. And it is a noble calling, given the damage that Trump could deliver to the presidency were he sent back to the White House. Oh, jeez, the thought makes my gut tighten.

If Cheney were to run as an independent, from whom does she draw her votes? Those who would vote for President Biden only because they, too, cannot stomach the thought of Trump returning to power would be inclined to vote for Cheney. So, if Cheney runs as an independent candidate for POTUS, her presence on the fall 2024 ballot could serve as a major spoiler.

A part of me wants to see Cheney stand on a GOP debate stage with Trump and other Republicans seeking the White House. She would eviscerate The Donald. However, that doesn’t preclude Trump from winning the GOP nomination … presuming he runs, of course.

And therein lies the danger of Cheney staying in the hunt for the White House if she doesn’t win the GOP nomination. Does she run as an indy and, therefore, likely siphon votes from President Biden?

She wouldn’t like this comparison, but a Cheney presence as an independent reminds me of what Ralph Nader did to help elect George W. Bush president in 2000. The consumer advocate, Nader, drew votes that would have gone to Al Gore in that election, serving as legitimate spoiler in many states where his total exceeded the difference between Bush and Gore.

Play it carefully, Rep. Cheney. I am proud of the stand she has taken in this effort to investigate Trump’s role in the 1/6 insurrection. My pride would disappear, though, if she manages through her own hubris to help Trump blunder his way back into power.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news, media news, national news, political news

Is that all there is? Yep, that’s it!

The Wall Street Journal, a longtime champion of conservative causes and those who promote them, wants to know why all the fuss over the FBI search of Donald Trump’s home in search of incriminating evidence.

The Journal, owned by Trump sycophant Rupert Murdoch, questions the release of the heavily redacted affidavit that gave FBI permission to go through Trump’s posh estate.

The newspaper editorializes: It’s possible the redactions in the 38-page document release contain some undisclosed bombshell. But given the contours of what the affidavit and attachments reveal, this really does seem to boil down to a fight over the handling of classified documents. The affidavit’s long introduction and other unredacted paragraphs all point to concern by the FBI and the National Archives with the documents Mr. Trump retained at Mar-a-Lago and his lack of cooperation in not returning all that the feds wanted.

I have to ask: Why question the motive behind the search … and no, I will not call it a “raid”?

There remains a lot behind those redacted passages we don’t understand. There might be the ol’ smoking gun in there. But from what I have been able to glean so far, the FBI said it had enough evidence of “probable cause” that a crime has been committed on Trump’s property. Hell, there might even have been crimes committed within the White House.

The release of the redacted affidavit is enough to persuade me that the federal government appears set to prepare an indictment or maybe two or three against — oh, you know — someone very high up in the government.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news, national news, political news

Evidence is clear …

Merrick Garland is facing one of the most complicated decisions imaginable, even as he considers what appears to be a mountain of evidence that, by all rights, should simply that decision.

The U.S. attorney general, a former judge who understands the meaning of legal precedent, is likely poring over evidence gathered that suggests — strongly, I should add — that he must indict a former president of the United States.

On what charge or charges? Let’s consider obstruction of justice, or inciting violence, or violations of the Espionage Act, or conspiracy to commit sedition.

Donald J. Trump, to put it as succinctly as I possibly can, is in a deep pile of doo-doo.

The FBI search of Trump’s home in Florida has produced evidence of a possible crime. We’ve all seen it now that the heavily redacted affidavit authorizing the search warrant has been released. The chatter is getting louder about the national security secrets that well might have been compromised when the ex-POTUS took those documents with him when he left office in January 2021.

Therein is where the AG faces the conundrum for the ages.

He says that “no one is above the law.” The means former presidents are as vulnerable to prosecution as, well, anyone. No ex-president ever has faced a criminal indictment.

The AG appears to be a careful man, not to mention a meticulous prosecutor. May he take great care in preparing what has been laid out before him. Then he can deliver justice where it belongs!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news, political news

How do you campaign on Trump coattails?

Harriet Hageman is likely to become the next Republican nominee to run for Wyoming’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

If she defeats Rep. Liz Cheney in today’s GOP primary, she’s a sure bet to win the election this November against whomever Democrats nominate.

It causes me to wonder: How has Hageman campaigned against Cheney, whose only “sin” as I see it is that she has been highly critical of Donald Trump’s criminal behavior while he masqueraded as president of the U.S.A.

In latest primary night, 2 Trump critics face voters as Palin eyes a comeback (msn.com)

So, what does a Harriet Hageman stump speech sound like?

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Harriet Hageman and I am running as the protector of a twice-impeached U.S. president.

My opponent, Liz Cheney, has betrayed her office by standing for the rule of law. She has declared her intention to do all she can to keep the former president from getting anywhere near the Oval Office.  That is unacceptable!

Her voting record in Congress? That doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter that she voted with Donald Trump more than 92% of the time. Or that she has been adamantly pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, fervently anti-tax and equally fervently anti-Obamacare. 

Has she represented the will of our state? No. Because she won’t profess fealty to Donald Trump.

***

That, of course, is an absurd example of how Hageman has campaigned for the office. I just don’t know how she can be “more conservative” than Liz Cheney, or how she can justify running against a House member who is faithful to her party’s long-standing platform of favoring the rule of law.

If the polls are correct, and I tend to believe they are, then the rest of the country is going to see what happens to a politician who is (a) faithful to her oath and (b) critical of a president who is faithful only to his own lust for power.

These primary voters will be forever cast in shame.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news, political news

Next up? Liz Cheney!

Liz Cheney is facing the fight of her political life on Tuesday and from all appearances, it’s a fight she is likely lose.

The Wyoming Republican congresswoman is being challenged by a candidate in the GOP primary who carries Donald J. Trump’s endorsement. The Trumpkin appears headed for victory in the primary.

Cheney is the final GOP member of Congress who voted to impeach Trump who will face an electorate angry over that vote. Most of the other nine Republicans who cast affirmative impeachment votes have fared poorly as well as they have sought re-election to Congress.

Am I going to shed a tear for Liz Cheney? Not really. I want her to win the Wyoming Republican primary. Not because of her staunch conservative voting record. Instead, because she has shown enormous fortitude in standing up to Trump’s lies, his quest for power, his flouting of the rule of law and his persistent retelling of The Big Lie about non-existent 2020 wide-spread voter fraud.

Something tells me, though, that even if Cheney loses the GOP primary in Wyoming that she is far from finishing her final act on the political stage.

I’ll just be left to condemn what has transpired in the Republican Party in this age of Trump, when lying, cheating and corruption become accepted behavior.

Shameful.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news, political news

Trump gets support from CPAC … imagine that!

This is likely the biggest non-surprise of the current political season, but it’s still worth a comment or two.

It comes in the form of the endorsement of Donald J. Trump’s continuing presence on the political scene by the Conservative Action Political Conference, which met this past weekend in Dallas.

I cannot help but shake my noggin.

The CPAC faithful want Trump to run for president in 2024. They have decided, I reckon, to ignore the two impeachments during his term in office, the stunning pile of evidence that mounts from the House select committee’s probe into the 1/6 insurrection and perhaps the possible indictments for criminal activity that might come from the Justice Department.

Oh, and never mind that Trump has yet to lay any sort of agenda for the future. He continues to wallow in The Big Lie that he keeps alive by suggesting the 2020 election was stolen from him.

That’s leadership? That’s moving toward the future?

At CPAC, conservative Texans show Donald Trump loyalty | The Texas Tribune

The “conservative movement” has been hijacked, along with the Republican Party, by the cult of personality led by Donald J. Trump.

The Texas Tribune summed up nicely the theme of Trump’s keynote speech: Trump stuck to a familiar script and repeated the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from him, even as those claims have repeatedly been debunked by even his own former aides. He painted cities run by Democratic leadership as hellscapes awash in crime and lamented what he described as an open southern border with Mexico.

The Texas crowd ate it up. “I’m over the moon, I’ve been trying to see him for years,” said Therese Boehnlein, who drove from Waco to Dallas to see Trump.

Well … OK. The ex-POTUS dropped a hint or two that he’ll run again in 2024. That will be his third attempt at the White House. Just remember something: He got fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016 and a lot fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020.

Truly astounding.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news, political news

Wait for RINO epithets

Wait for it. They will come in due course, if they haven’t already been pouring in at Liz Cheney’s congressional re-election campaign office.

Rep. Cheney’s father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, is featured in a political ad in which he calls Donald J. Trump the “greatest threat to democracy” in the nation’s history.

You know what’s coming next, right? There will be exclamations from the Trump cultists that Dick Cheney’s views don’t matter, and that he’s a Republican In Name Only. Yep, Daddy Dick Cheney is a RINO in the eyes of those who continue to coalesce around Donald Trump.

Dick Cheney proclaims his pride in his daughter Liz’s efforts to expose Trump as the crooked fraud that he is.

The elder Cheney is trying to get his daughter re-elected to the House seat from Wyoming, the very seat Dick Cheney occupied before he left Congress to become White House chief of staff for President Ford. He then served as defense secretary for President George H.W. Bush before being tapped to run as VP with “W.”

The thing is, Dick Cheney also is right when he calls Trump a “coward” because he lies to his supporters about the so-called theft of the 2020 presidential election. The former VP says, instead, that Trump is the electoral thief, seeking to reverse the results of an election he lost handily.

I haven’t cheered much for Dick Cheney ever since he coerced President George W. Bush into going to war with Iraq on the false claim that the Iraqis played a role in events of 9/11; they played no role!

However, the ad he has participated in on behalf of his daughter give me pause to offer some much-appreciated praise for the man once called “the shadow president” during the two terms of the Bush administration.

Will the ad turn the tables and breathe enough life into Cheney’s campaign to resurrect it? It’s not likely. Then again, we ought to consider tossing the conventional political playbook into the crapper.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

political news

Cheney as a Democratic VP candidate? Seriously?

I want to stipulate that I have tremendous admiration for retired U.S. Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a former combat officer who also commanded hundreds of thousands of American military personnel.

There. Having said that, I now want to say that he is wrong to suggest that Rep. Liz Cheney should run as a Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2024.

Gen. McCaffrey wrote this today via Twitter: Cong Cheney is a principled public servant of great courage. An example of devotion to the Constitution. A great VP nomination for the Democratic ticket in 2024. A bipartisan ticket. Will give many disgusted Republicans a banner to rally behind.

I, too, admire Liz Cheney’s role in the 1/6 insurrection probe. She is a staunch, stellar and strong conservative member of Congress. Putting Rep. Cheney on a Democratic ticket would likely demand that she forgo all for which she has been a champion.

She is a strong right-to-life politician; she is a strong pro-gun rights pol; Cheney is fervently against tax increases; Cheney is no fan of the Affordable Care Act.

How in the world does this politician comport with a Democratic Party platform that would seek to yank her far away from the positions for which she has stood strong?

It won’t happen. Therefore, Gen. McCaffrey — as much as I admire this man’s service to the nation — is reaching way beyond his grasp.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

political news

Politics outshines politicians

I long have believed that politics is a noble profession, in that it is designed to serve the public, to do the public’s bidding. We pay for public policy decisions with our money, so those who enact that policy are doing noble work.

Except for this reality.

Politicians too often do not stand up under the standard set by their chosen profession.

I read in the Washington Post, for example, that U.S. senators say that a deal is within reach that would seek to curb gun violence in this country. However, what emerges from the Senate conference rooms will not contain all of the things on President Biden’s wish list. Therein lies the meaning of what I am suggesting.

The president — a lifelong politician, to be sure — has implored Congress to “do something” in the wake of the Uvalde school slaughter of those 19 precious children and two of their teachers. “Enough is enough,” he said the other evening.

Politicians heard him. Some of them ignored his plea because they are too beholden to the money that pours in from those who oppose any legislative remedy to the senseless slaughter. Others applaud the president.

What happens now? Some senators are huddling to find what they will call a solution. It won’t live up to the billing. Yet the politicians who cobble together this alleged remedy will praise themselves for their “bipartisanship.”

Pols do this every couple of years when the latest continuing budget resolution runs out. They take the nation to the brink of fiscal calamity, only to craft another continuing resolution. Oh, and then they slap themselves on the back and tell us all how great they are. They make me sick.

What will it take for politicians to live up to the standard set by the craft they pursue? Just stop playing games … especially now when lives are at stake!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

political news

Donald Trump: frontrunner

Donald J. Trump is demonstrating yet another trait I find loathsome … imagine that, if you can.

He is a frontrunner, a guy who latches onto candidates he perceives as winners. He’ll endorse ’em, but then is likely to abandon ’em if they prove to be — to borrow a term — losers.

Trump once stood foursquare behind former U.S. Sen. David Perdue of Georgia. He endorsed Perdue’s bid for Georgia governor. Then it became clear that the incumbent Republican, Brian Kemp, is going to wipe Perdue out in the Republican primary set for next Tuesday.

Now the ex-POTUS has tossed Perdue aside, just as he did in neighboring Alabama. You see, decided to back Rep. Mo Brooks in the race for the Senate seat being vacated by Richard Shelby.

Trump had all kinds of glowing platitudes to throw at Brooks. Then the congressman’s political fortunes faltered. What did Trump do then? He tossed Brooks into the crapper.

All this just goes to show the fickleness of a Donald Trump endorsement for public office … which is another way of saying it ain’t worth a damn!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com