Monthly Archives: December 2020

legal news

Good news and better news

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

There might be some good news and even better news to come from the U.S. Supreme Court.

The good news would be that the court will declare that a profoundly stupid and senseless lawsuit will not get a hearing; that the court will dismiss it summarily.

The lawsuit comes from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the state’s indicted top lawyer, who is suing to have the presidential vote results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania tossed out because, Paxton alleges, they were cast illegally. Seventeen state attorneys general — all Republicans (imagine that) — have joined Paxton’s idiotic legal maneuver.

The better news would be that all nine justices lock arms and declare in a stern rebuke of Donald Trump’s attempt to undermine, subvert and destroy the democratic electoral process. Chief Justice John Roberts can issue the order to fire off the rhetorical barrage. My hope is that the chief does so.

Donald John Trump needs to be exposed as the fraud that he is and the nation’s highest court can lend its voice to that important message by telling us why it is tossing his baseless, phony complaint about “widespread voter fraud” into the trash can … where it belongs!

military news

Lloyd Austin needs to lead DOD

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I will get to the point immediately. Lloyd Austin is an outstanding selection to become our nation’s next secretary of defense and the U.S. Senate should confirm him.

Indeed, Austin’s nomination from President-elect Biden comes with a caveat: He needs a congressional waiver to serve as the leading defense official in the government. Austin retired four years ago from the U.S. Army; federal law requires that defense secretaries need to have been out of the military at least seven years.

Austin served with honor and distinction. He was a four-star general. He led the Central Command before retiring from the Army. He has led men and women in combat. Austin would become the nation’s first African-American defense secretary.

I get the need to ensure civilian control of the military. Thus, Austin is now “Mr. Austin,” not “Gen. Austin.” He is a civilian.

Congress granted a waiver for Donald Trump’s first defense secretary, James Mattis, who needed the exemption because his service in the Marine Corps fell within the seven-year window. Mattis served well as defense secretary until he resigned in a major snit with the commander in chief.

I should note that my hope would be that future defense secretaries shouldn’t require the waiver that Austin will need. Future presidents, or even the president who’s about the take office, should be able to find competent, capable patriots to lead our military services who do not have the conflict that confronts Lloyd Austin.

Lloyd Austin, though, is highly regarded by the individuals who served under his command. The waiver should be granted. President-elect Biden needs a defense secretary he can trust. He found one in Lloyd Austin.

Let this patriot serve the nation.

national news

Pressure builds on Constitution strength

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I am on record as stating my belief in the strength and resilience of the U.S. Constitution.

It has withstood crises. We have argued over the impeachment of presidents. The Constitution stood firm against the pressure. We fought a Civil War. The Constitution survived the nation’s bloodiest conflict.

It is being tested again arguably in a manner no one likely could have foreseen. A president has lost an election. Rather than accept Joe the defeat, he has challenged its veracity. Donald Trump has filed dozens of court challenges. He has lost every one of them.

Now he has a Texas attorney general — Ken Paxton — who has filed a challenge to our election. Paxton, who is under indictment for securities fraud and under investigation by the FBI on an assortment of unrelated allegations, argues that four states  that voted for Joe Biden must have their vote totals overturned.

Paxton went to the U.S. Supreme Court. My own sense is that the court will reject Paxton’s moronic argument summarily. I hope it is soon. The Electoral College will meet to certify what all 50 states have done already, that Joe Biden was elected president. Then Congress will meet early next month to do the same thing: declare Joe Biden to be the next president.

The Constitution will work. I have faith in the durability and strength of the document. However, it is going to suffer serious damage by the idiotic challenges that Donald Trump is mounting.

Trump is pressuring state GOP election officials to overturn their states’ results. A man with no understanding or appreciation of our democratic system of government is committing what some have called an act of sedition against the Constitution. Think of that for just a moment. The nation elected this lunatic as our president in 2016? My goodness!

A nation that is grieving the loss of hundreds of thousands of its citizens to a killer virus is being stiffed by a president who is fixated on reversing an election he lost. Donald Trump is disgracefully derelict in his duty to protect us. He violates his oath damn near daily, if not hourly.

However, through all of this I remain convinced as certainly as I am typing these words that the U.S. Constitution will guide us through this morass. The pressure is mounting. The document, though, is strong enough to withstand it.

medical news

FDA issues the call

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The Food and Drug Administration has issued the call many of us have been awaiting.

The FDA has granted Pfizer emergency authorization to begin distributing a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus that has killed more than 290,000 Americans.

Is this the end of the virus? Are we now able to hug each other as if nothing happened? Have we returned to normal life as we once knew it? No, no, no … and more.

However, the vaccine has arrived. It will be distributed in a complicated logistical operation. It will go first to those in dire need. Medical personnel, first responders, educators, elderly Americans with pre-existing conditions get it first.

The FDA will decide soon on a vaccine developed by Moderna. Then one developed by AstraZeneca should get the OK from the FDA.

I remain hopeful the end to our misery is coming. It might take a while, but it’s on its way.

national news

‘Third Obama term’ taking shape?

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President-elect Biden keeps insisting he isn’t seeking to govern with an executive branch lineup that constitutes what amounts to a “third Barack Obama term” as president.

But wait a second.

His selection to be agriculture secretary served in that capacity in the Obama administration; his choice to serve as domestic policy adviser served as national security adviser to President Obama; his nominee to lead the Veterans Affairs Department served as chief of staff for President Obama; Biden’s selection to lead to the effort to deal with climate change served as secretary of state … for the Obama team.

Biden’s team includes other Obama retreads. Granted, they all are talented individuals who did well during their earlier stints in public office.

Let me be clear on this point: I consider President Obama’s two terms as president to be highly successful. Joe Biden served as vice president during that time. However, the president-elect has a vast reservoir of talent from which he can choose. I am curious as to the apparent leaning on former Obama aides to join him.

If he is going to insist that his term as president isn’t a “third term” for Barack Obama, then Joe Biden ought to populate the highest levels of his executive team with many more fresh faces and voices.

The president-elect’s selection of Obama hands makes it difficult for him to dispute the notion he wants to govern with a “third term” from Barack Obama’s time in office.

medical news

Yes, bring on the vaccine!

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I am astonished to learn that about one-third of Americans polled say they wouldn’t take a COVID vaccine if it is offered to them.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that two-thirds of us would take it.

You may count me as one American who is ready and more than willing to take the shot in my arm when it becomes available to folks such as me.

I am an elderly American. However, I suffer from zero pre-existing conditions. Which means I am a bit down the list of recipients. That’s OK. I am fine with that. The first responders need it now, as do nursing home residents.

Pfizer and Moderna both boast of 95 percent efficacy in their proposed vaccines. From what I have heard that is an exceptional success rate. Docs are calling it “extraordinary.” That is good enough for me.

I want to take the vaccine. I have long been a proponent of mandatory vaccines for children. I took them all as a kid because Mom and Dad insisted I become immunized against childhood illness. I passed that insistence on to my own sons when they were in school.

An anxious nation awaits Food and Drug Administration approval of the Pfizer vaccine. I am one anxious American. If the FDA gives it a “go,” and if the drug firm is able to get it distributed, I will wait patiently for my turn.

When they call my name, I will be there to take the vaccine.

Uncategorized

Oh, the post-Trump era awaits

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I am staring straight into the face of a serious quandary.

What in the word am I going to do when Donald Trump exits the political stage on Jan. 20?

He’ll actually be out of the White House before then — more than likely. Trump won’t have the good manners or sense of decorum to attend President Biden’s inaugural. He’ll be sitting somewhere off-site, no doubt with his Twitter fingers itching to say something, anything derogatory about the new president.

That is going to leave bloggers and other commentators such as me without the grist on which we have relied since the day Donald and Melania Trump rode down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce that The Donald was running for president.

Good gawd, it’s been a hideous period since then. However, it has given High Plains Blogger plenty of material on which to comment.

Now comes President Biden. Boring ol’ Joe. He’s such a regular guy. He’s a product of public service, having served in the public eye since before he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972.

Joe Biden stands in stark contrast to the background that Donald Trump brought to the only public office he ever sought. Biden wants to serve the public. He puts others’ interests ahead of his own. He knows about “regular order” in the Senate and plans to insist on it as president.

Biden won’t be firing angry Twitter messages at all hours of the day and night. He likely won’t fire Cabinet members who displease him simply by contradicting some wild statements he might make.

Folks, we are re-entering a time of political norms that have been plowed asunder by the ghastly whims of Donald Trump.

What to do? I pledge to look at policy pronouncements that come from the president, or from his senior Cabinet leaders, or from Republicans and Democrats in Congress who will serve with Joe Biden as partners in the complex federal government.

I will seek to resist the temptation to blast those who make preposterous statements … although I cannot possibly make an ironclad promise to never speak ill of them.

As for the 45th president. He becomes irrelevant in my eyes on Jan. 20 … if not sooner!

legal news

Sanity must prevail … or else

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I am a firm believer in judicial sanity, which is to say that sane minds are likely to prevail in the face of insane legal challenges.

Thus, we have a U.S. Supreme Court roster of justices who will get to decide whether a lawsuit brought forward by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has merit and is worth hearing.

Judicial sanity would seem to dictate that this is a slam dunk for the nation’s highest court. It should toss the matter aside. My hope for the sake of judicial sanity prevailing is that it does so with a terse statement that says in effect: Texas has no standing to bring this case to this court.

Paxton, who appears to be a lousy lawyer, wants the SCOTUS to overturn the results of four states that voted Nov. 3 for President-elect Joe Biden. From the get-go my question has been this: How in the name of election meddling can one state purport to intervene in the electoral affairs of another state? 

Therein might lie the case for judicial sanity presenting itself. The high court should tell AG Paxton to mind his own bee’s wax and butt the hell out. He cannot bring a lawsuit against four states that all have certified the results of their presidential balloting results.

I would say that sanity is a sure thing to prevail, except for this: 17 states’ attorneys general have joined Paxton’s clown show and signed on as intervenors in this idiotic lawsuit. All the AGs have swilled the Donald Trump Kool-Aid and are seeking — and this is as rich as it gets — to overturn the legitimate electoral results of a free and fair election.

I believe in the U.S. Constitution. I believe in the power of reason. I continue to believe that judicial sanity is going to have the final say on this profoundly un-American legal challenge.

national news

Baptist preacher a Marxist? Huh?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Republican U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler is cracking me up … except that I ain’t laughing.

She is running for election to a seat in Georgia against the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat who happens to be the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached to his congregation.

Loeffler brands Warnock as a Marxist sympathizer.

Hold on! Marxism is a philosophy that espouses the notion that God does not exist. Thus, it seems more than a bit of a stretch to suggest that an ordained Baptist preacher — a fellow who speaks to his flock about the love of Jesus Christ — could also sympathize with a God-less society endorsed by Karl Marx.

How does that work. Sen. Loeffler?

national news

Trump testing faith in strength of U.S. Constitution

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald J. Trump is testing my resolve, my belief in the strength of the U.S. Constitution.

I don’t expect that faith to collapse. I do not expect the defeated president to prevail in his effort to undermine, subvert and destroy our democratic form of government.

I say all that, though, while expressing concern about the course this post-election fire fight is going. It’s making me nervous.

Seventeen states joined the moronic Texas lawsuit that seeks to overturn the election results of four states that voted for President-elect Joe Biden. They’re all states that voted for Trump. They all are governed by those with the same imbecilic view that the election was stolen from Trump by “widespread vote fraud.”

Dammit to hell! There was no such thing! Joe Biden won a free, fair and honest election. Fair and square! If the U.S. attorney general, William Barr — who’s served as Trump’s water carrier — says so, then it must be true. Isn’t that right?

Donald Trump is making a shambles of this transition, which historically has been done without malice, with no outward anger. Not this time. Trump is clinging desperately to an illusion and he’s making a mockery of our sacred political institutions.

Moreover, he is embarrassing the nation he was elected in 2016 to govern. Our allies are laughing at us; our foes are relishing the confusion and discord he is sowing.

This likely will end OK. Joe Biden will take the presidential oath on Jan. 20. He will get to work. I am less confident today than I was a few days or weeks ago about the outcome of this protracted battle. I retain my faith in the U.S. Constitution and the sturdiness of the framework that our founders built.

But … dang! Donald Trump is making it harder to maintain my eternal optimism.