Monthly Archives: November 2020

national news

Mask-wearing: not a political statement

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, whom I have dubbed the Cruz Missile, is demonstrating once again why I dislike him so intensely.

He decided to describe his fellow senator, Democrat Sherrod Brown of Ohio, as acting “like a complete ass” because Brown insisted that the senator presiding over the body wear a mask.

Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska was without a mask when he presided. Brown wanted him to put one one, believing that he posed a potential threat of infecting other senators, given that they were meeting in an enclosed room, aka the Senate chamber.

As The Hill reported: “This is idiotic,” Cruz tweeted Monday night, adding that Brown “is being a complete ass. He wears a mask to speak – when nobody is remotely near him – as an ostentatious sign of fake virtue.”

No, Ted. Your colleague is acting out what some have referred to as an “abundance of caution” in light of the pandemic that continues to kill Americans at an alarming rate each day. Perhaps he has read about it; this pandemic’s been in all the papers, man.

Cruz is now being discussed as a possible 2024 GOP presidential candidate. Hmm. His theme well might be: Wear a mask and be an ass.

national news

Focusing now on Joe Biden

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I want to make two quick points, then I’ll step aside.

First, I have declared that Donald Trump is sliding rapidly into irrelevancy as a defeated candidate for re-election as president of the United States.

Therefore, I am going to spend equally rapidly declining effort commenting on his still-incessant lying.

Second, this blog is going to concentrate instead on President-elect Joe Biden’s transition into the nation’s highest office. I want to offer him advice when I feel I can provide it. I might even scold him if he says or does something that displeases me. Hey, no one is perfect … you know?

It’s time for High Plains Blogger to turn the proverbial page.

Thus, I have just done so.

Good night.

national news

Putin is laughing his a** off

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Do you know who among all the world leaders is laughing so hard he is having trouble catching his breath?

It has to be Russian strongman/despot/dictator/former Soviet spy chief Vladimir Putin. That’s who.

Think of it. His boy, Donald Trump, lost his re-election bid for a second term as U.S. president. Trump is refusing to concede to President-elect Joe Biden. He is withholding national security information from the new president’s team. He is fighting the results in courts all over the place; and he’s getting them tossed by judges.

Trump is sowing seeds of discord in our electoral system.

Isn’t that precisely what Putin sought to do in 2016? And again in 2020? Isn’t this kind of activity that former special counsel Robert Mueller III warned us would happen?

Trump is fabricating a story where none exists.

And yet Vladimir Putin must be laughing his keister off as he watches from the Kremlin while Trump continues this ridiculous effort to undermine a political system he took a sacred oath to defend and protect.

I do hope the new president is taking plenty of notes and will get Putin on the phone soon and read him the riot act, warning him of serious consequences for his interference in our electoral system.

national news

Can Biden resist the extremists?

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump demonstrated during his term as president an inability to resist the demands of those on the far right wing of the Republican Party.

As an aside, I’ll resist referring to the GOP as “his” party because I consider Trump to be a Republican In Name Only.

No such qualifier is required of President-elect Joe Biden, a center-left Democrat with years of credentials to illustrate the point.

So, the question of the day is this: Will the new president be able or is he willing to resist the tug from those on the far left wing of his own party? 

I am just a single voter, but I’ll offer this: I hope he can and does. I voted for a “good government” presidential candidate, which is what I see in President-elect Biden. By “good government,” I favor a federal government that is prepared to step up and help when needed, but is not willing to capture all the duties and responsibilities assigned to state and local governments, or the private sector.

I sense the president-elect is of the same ilk as yours truly. If that proves out to be the case, then I will be happy.

Meanwhile, the president-elect will have to steel himself for the onslaught of pressure he no doubt will feel from the “democratic socialist” wing of the Democratic Party. To be candid, I still am not sure what a democratic socialist is, other than perhaps being someone who doesn’t want the government to assume control of every aspect of our lives.

Still, I sense in Joe Biden a reluctance to avoid the socialist label, despite what Donald Trump and the GOP sought to attach to him. Trump accused Biden of being “anti-God,” of wanting to take guns away from Americans — while destroying the Second Amendment to the Constitution, of disarming the military, of taxing us into oblivion.

I have looked at Biden’s record and to be honest I don’t see evidence of any of that during his 44 years as a U.S. senator and vice president.

The man is a mainstream Democrat. I want him to govern that way. I am going to hold out hope that he will do as I wish. If not, then he will hear from me. Hey, if he does govern the way I want him to govern, he might still hear from me.

national news

He no longer matters

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The 2020 presidential election has affirmed what I have thought now for years.

It is that Donald John Trump’s lies no longer matter. He is soon to be gone from the scene. A new president, Joe Biden, will take over on Jan. 20.

Yes, it is clear that Trump remains president until Joe Biden takes the presidential oath. He will be vested with all the power of the office. I merely pray as we watch the clock tick away the final moments of his tenure that he doesn’t do anything foolish. I have no need to explain what such foolishness might entail; I am certain that you get my drift.

As for Trump’s lies, well, I quit listening to them long ago. I accept nothing he says. I do not believe anything that flies out of his lying mouth.

And so we are left with a lame-duck president who is doing nothing to curb the killer virus that is raging across the country; he does nothing to re-engage Congress on a stimulus package to help families stricken by the virus; he does not a single thing to advance our alliances abroad.

Instead, he will foment the phony lie about a rigged election, about “widespread voter fraud” and will continue to insist that he actually “won” the presidential when he actually lost it by the same Electoral College total he won in 2016. Oh, and remember when he called his victory over Hillary Clinton a “landslide”?

Donald Trump is history. For that I am grateful that democracy has worked its magic on a system that cried out for help.

The voters have delivered it.

national news

Waiting for this spin

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I am waiting with bated breath for Donald Trump or someone from his gang of thieves to assert the following …

That the 5.6 million-vote gap between Trump and the winner of the 2020 election, President-elect Joe Biden, comes almost exclusively from California, where Biden is leading Trump by roughly 5.5 million votes.

So here is how it might go: If you take out California’s total, Donald Trump actually won the vote among Americans.

Get it? It would remind me of the time the late Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry said that “if you don’t count the murders” in D.C., the crime rate in his city “isn’t so bad.”

national news

How can this election be corrupt?

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

All this yammering and blathering from Donald J. Trump about a “rigged election” and “rampant voter fraud” keeps bringing me back to a single question.

Which is this: How in the name of national security, after all this nation endured with Russian hacking of our electoral system in 2016, could there possibly be a more secure election than the one we have just had?

Donald Trump lost his re-election bid to President-elect Joe Biden. His insistence that Biden won only because the election was “rigged” to produce that outcome is far more than laughable on its face. It is dangerous and demeaning.

Trump’s refusal to concede the results of the election is dangerous because it gives comfort to despots around the world who run nations hostile to ours comfort. It well might embolden them to do things that could undermine our national confidence even further. We are taking our eyes off the threats abroad, concerning ourselves with phony allegations of voter fraud.

His refusal also is demeaning to the thousands of state and local election officials who are charged with conducting these elections. They hold the responsibility of protecting our electoral system against “rigging” or other forms of corruption that the president of the United States — our head of state for God’s sake! — keeps suggesting has occurred.

President-elect Biden has a difficult enough task ahead  of him without the idiocy being fomented by his immediate presidential predecessor. That is what this is. It is idiocy of the lowest order.

As President Obama said on “60 Minutes” Sunday night, a president must always put the nation’s interests ahead of his own ego. Donald Trump is being ruled by his fragile sense of self-worth and in the process is putting our entire system of government in potentially dire peril.

And to what end?

If there was any reason to have confidence in the integrity of this election, the foolishness that erupted in 2016 provided it in spades.

Dear folks, we are watching the cultivation by Donald Trump of fake news in real time.

International news

Lift the Muslim ban, Mr. POTUS-elect

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

On the night he declared victory in the 2020 presidential election, Joseph Biden’s team announced plans for the new president to sign a series of executive orders on Day One of his administration.

One of them would be to life a ban on entry into the United States by travelers from certain Muslim-majority nations. Donald Trump issued that order early in his presidential term.

The new president wants to revoke that order. To which I say … yes!

FBI Director Christopher Wray has told us a stark truth about the nature of terrorist threats to this country. It is that the biggest threat comes from home-grown, corn-fed white supremacists and not from Muslim nations.

The new president realizes what the nation’s top cop, the FBI director, has asserted.

I don’t mean to suggest that this nation’s security team should just shrug and look the other way at any terrorist threat that comes from abroad. I do mean to suggest that Donald Trump issued an informal declaration of war against Islam, a point that Presidents George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama sought assiduously to avoid when they were in office.

President Biden intends to revoke the Trump overstated declaration that Muslim countries pose a hideous threat. If we have learned anything since 9/11 I would presume we have learned how to detect and deal with international terrorist threats, especially from Muslim nations … which renders a ban on travelers from those nations to just an unnecessary show of presidential bravado.

national news

Biden’s unity pitch hits roadblock … from Trump!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I always knew that President-elect Biden’s promise to unify the country after four years of Donald Trump’s tenure as president would be a heavy lift.

What I didn’t know,  until just recently, was that Trump himself would be piling on the weights to make that effort even more difficult.

Donald Trump keeps insisting that Biden’s victory is the result of a “rigged election.” It is no such thing. The problem for the president-elect, though, is that so many millions of Trumpkins have bought into the clap trap that Trump is offering, not to mention the vast majority of Republican members of both congressional chambers.

Therefore, you have a situation with a Democrat– that being Biden — scoring a significant vote-count and Electoral College victory over the Republican incumbent, but with Trump’s “base” of sycophantic voters and politicians buying into the phony charge of “widespread election fraud.”

Call me a cynic, but Donald Trump has zero interest in uniting the country. He has not a scintilla of care for the damage he is doing by fomenting yet another lie. He blathers about “fake news media” endorsing Biden while at the same time offering his own fake news by suggesting voter fraud where none exists.

I have harbored some glimmer of hope that Trump eventually will concede in some fashion to the president-elect; my sense is that it won’t be a traditional concession … if it comes.

The longer this ridiculous game goes on, the harder it might get for Donald Trump to say publicly what the rest of us know already.

Which is that he has been drummed out of office!

I now worry about the worsening of the difficulty of the task of unification that awaits President Biden. What’s more, I am enraged that the future former president is putting his own narcissism in front of the nation’s future.

So help me, Hanna. Donald Trump is a dangerous man.

national news

Outrage set to persist?

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

It appears the outrage that Donald Trump is fomenting is going to persist until the bitter end of this man’s hideous tenure as president of the United States.

He continues to say he won’t concede he lost to President-elect Biden. He continues to resist providing the president-elect’s team with the intelligence briefings they need to prepare to protect us from hostile powers. It is not known whether he will do the right thing and stop insisting the loss he suffered was because of a “rigged” election.

Oh, no. You can’t make this stuff up.

Trump lost in a free and fair election. It is arguably the most secure election in U.S. history. I mean, the shenanigans that occurred in 2016 set in motion safeguards that states and counties enacted to protect the sanctity of our democratic process.

Trump, though, continues to insist the election is “rigged.” It is nothing of the sort.

I am left simply to wish for Jan. 20 to come and go and for the new president to take the oath and begin the task that Trump is maliciously making more difficult: to unify a deeply divided nation.

Donald Trump is providing all the disgraceful examples we need to see of a man who was patently unfit for the office he now is about to surrender. Thank goodness for the democratic process.