Monthly Archives: December 2020

media news

Close … but no cigar!

By JOHN  KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I have had a pretty good run over the past week or so.

By that I mean this blog I have been writing full time since the summer of 2012. Here’s what I mean.

I came within a few hundred hits on my blog of setting a single-day record. My traffic was exploding over the course of several days. Then, just as suddenly as it skyrocketed, it settled back down to a more, um, normal pace.

My blog-traffic explosion filled me with some sense of hope that High Plains Blogger had reached a whole new audience out there in cyberworld. I don’t think that’s really the case.

I love writing this blog. It has given me a sense of purpose, although it surely isn’t my sole purpose for awakening each day. It’s just one of them. It allows me to vent. It gives me an avenue to share some thoughts with those who take the time to read them. I encourage folks to share them with their social media contacts/friends/loved ones/adversaries as well.

I don’t know who is doing it. I just want to take this opportunity to encourage everyone who looks at my spewage each day to share them with whomever you think might want to see it, or should see it.

Maybe I’ll get another surge like the one I have just enjoyed.

Thank you in advance.

legal news

D’oh! It’s about a pardon?

2 Comments

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I am just slapping myself upside my own noggin.

Two blog posts have commented on Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s goofy lawsuit that seeks to overturn the presidential election results in four states that President-elect Joe Biden won over Donald Trump: Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Now comes the chatter over the GOP Texas AG’s lawsuit. The dipsh** is angling for a pardon from Trump.

D’oh! Why didn’t I snap to that conclusion.

The FBI is investigating Paxton on allegations leveled by former top legal aides in the Texas AG’s office. They contend that Paxton broke the law by dishing out favors for a key political crony/ally/contributor. In come the feds to look more closely at the allegations. Trump, of course, has the power to grant a full pardon for any federal crime or suspicion of a federal crime.

That might explain why Paxton is launching this idiotic legal challenge. I have yet to see a serious legal or constitutional scholar suggest that the challenge Paxton is mounting has an ounce of legal merit. They have labeled it everything from a fishing expedition to a publicity stunt.

There well might be a pardon in the Texas attorney general’s future if Donald Trump gives a damn about what Ken Paxton is trying to do.

Reprehensible!

national news

Country already scored a ‘victory’

2 Comments

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump fired off this Twitter message today …

“We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case. This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!” 

The “Texas … case” to which Trump referred is the moronic lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that seeks to overturn the duly cast votes in four states in the presidential election.

It’s not clear to anyone how Trump plans to “intervene,” whether as an individual or as a spokesman for his failed re-election campaign.

I just want to add this: The nation already got the “victory” it needed when it elected Joe Biden as its next president.

legal news, political news, State news

Paxton seeks to bask in some perverse glory

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I have concluded, based on zero hard data and only on my inherent bias that I admit to freely, that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is hellbent on making a spectacle of himself.

He seeks to bask in some sort of perverse glory derived from Donald Trump’s idiotic pursuit of “widespread voter fraud” where none exists. Thus, Paxton has filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Supreme Court that seeks to overturn the free and fair election results in four states that cast most of their votes for President-elect Joe Biden in the just completed presidential election.

Paxton’s alleged “logic” is beyond belief.

He says the four states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia — changed their voting rules in an unconstitutional fashion by allowing more voters to cast their ballots using the U.S. Postal Service. He wants the high court, therefore, to toss out those states’ election returns.

To its credit, the SCOTUS — with three justices nominated by Donald Trump already aboard — has declared already that another lawsuit brought by a Pennsylvania GOP member of Congress has no merit; it has tossed it aside with a single-sentence ruling.

So what the hell is Paxton trying to do here? I mean, the dude already is in trouble already. He is awaiting trial in Texas courts for securities fraud allegations. He also is being investigated by the FBI for allegedly doing favors illegally for a campaign donor. Seven key legal aides have quit or been fired by the AG after they blew the whistle on what they allege is illegal conduct.

The word on Paxton is that he was a mediocre lawyer prior to his election to the Texas Legislature, where he didn’t distinguish himself as the author of much key legislation. Then he got elected Texas AG in 2014 and was almost immediately showered with suspicion when a Collin County grand jury indicted him for securities fraud.

Now this? The AG must have a screw loose.

Let me be as clear as possible: Joe Biden won the election; there is no evidence of the kind of “widespread” fraud that Trump and his Trumpster Team allege. Even the U.S. attorney general, William Barr, has reached that conclusion.

Ken Paxton needs to stop meddling in other states’ affairs.

legal news

‘Yes’ on lifetime appointments!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Let’s shout out a cheer for the U.S. Supreme Court and the Constitution that allows its justices to receive lifetime appointments as part of the federal judicial branch of government.

The court has tossed out with little comment yet another frivolous lawsuit that sought to get the Pennsylvania legislature to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The suit, brought by Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, wants to hand Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to Donald Trump instead of Joe Biden, who won them in a free and fair election on Nov. 3.

What is so gratifying is that the high court ruled unanimously against the complaint brought by the Trumpkin Kelly. That means Trump’s three appointees — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — ruled against The Donald.

Hey, this is a big deal. Why? Because Trump declared it essential to have a nine-member court seated to enable him to win a close call in any complaint brought to challenge the results of the election.

Well, it wasn’t a close call. The justices, all of them, saw fit to toss this latest complaint onto the scrap heap where it belongs.

Yes, the nation’s founders had the right idea when they established a judiciary that should be as free as possible from political pressure.

medical news

Trump turns normal into exceptional

1 Comment

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

A curious thought entered my noggin this afternoon as I watched the nation’s next president roll out his health and human services team for public review.

Joe Biden sounded so cotton-pickin’ presidential today. He sounded reasonable. He was careful. Circumspect. Cautious. Articulate. Knowledgeable about the challenges that await him.

The strange thought was this: Why is such a statement from a leading politician even worth mentioning? It’s because of what we have endured through four years of the idiocy that pours routinely out of Donald John Trump’s pie hole.

I have heard others say much the same thing as they, too, have watched President-elect Biden reveal his team. He has done so in careful increments. He speaks to us like a politician who actually cares to communicate with an entire country. He speaks of others’ suffering. Biden tells us repeatedly he will surround himself with aides and advisers who tell him what he needs to hear, not limit the messages to what he wants to hear. Joe Biden made that point once again today, with crystal clarity. 

You see, this is the kind of thing that were he coming after a normal president wouldn’t be worthy of any comment. Except that he isn’t. He is following an individual who has no sense of the gravity of the job he inherited. Trump has no historical knowledge of the office he occupied. Trump sees all relationships as transactional and communicates that perspective to us daily.

Donald Trump has done seemingly the impossible: He has turned something that should be routine into a cause to celebrate.

Therefore, I am cheering the pending arrival of a president who speaks to us the way the duly elected leader of this great nation should speak.

entertainment news

Imagine he had lived

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I am recalling today a stroll my wife and I took some years ago in New York City.

We ventured to Central Park and found the memorial a grieving widow worked to have installed in the park. She called it “Strawberry Fields,” which happened to part of the title of a song that her late husband composed in the 1960s.

John Lennon died 40 years ago today at the hands of an assassin who ambushed him outside the apartment complex where Lennon lived with his wife, Yoko Ono, and their young son, Sean.

I won’t type the name of the lunatic who killed my favorite Beatle … because you know it already and I won’t sully this text with it.

Our stroll took us eventually to the Dakota, where we stood across the street and peered toward the gate where the gunman opened fire on John Lennon. That moment, looking at the murder scene, sent chills through me.

That was then. Four decades later I still grieve the loss of a musical genius and one of the bandmates who helped raise me.

If only John Lennon had been given a chance to live a long, joyful and music-filled life.

legal news

Texas AG files ridiculous lawsuit

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Texas, we have an attorney general who is now showing the extent to which he is willing to engage in cheap publicity stunts and it’s going to cost us all a pretty penny to boot!

Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the presidential election results in four states: Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. They were states that President-elect Joe Biden won over Donald J. Trump.

The basis of Paxton’s lawsuit is as idiotic as the complaints that Trump has pursued in all those states: Paxton contends there was widespread voter fraud that resulted in Biden’s election as president.

Oh, let me add: Paxton doesn’t provide a shred of evidence of such voter fraud in his filing with the U.S. Supreme Court. Indeed, judges in all those states have dismissed summarily complaints that the Trump campaign has filed. What’s more, they have counted the ballots three times in Georgia, with the result remaining the same: Joe Biden won the state’s 16 electoral votes.

Good grief, man. Paxton already is under investigation himself for allegations of criminal activity brought to light by whistleblowers who used to work in his office. They have all left the AG’s office, either by dismissal or resignation.

Now we have the AG engaging in a patently stupid attempt to meddle in other states’ electoral business.

The Texas Tribune reports:

In a filing to the high court Tuesday, Paxton claims the four battleground states broke the law by instituting pandemic-related changes to election policies, whether “through executive fiat or friendly lawsuits, thereby weakening ballot integrity.”

Paxton claimed that these changes allowed for voter fraud to occur — a conclusion experts and election officials have rejected — and said the court should push back a Dec. 14 deadline by which states must appoint their presidential electors.

I will predict right here that this lawsuit will get as much traction as any of the legal actions that Trump’s team has filed already in state and lower federal courts already. Which is to say it will go nowhere.

The Texas attorney general is engaging in a patently absurd fishing expedition … and wasting Texans’ valuable taxpayer money.

military news

Biden to make history with DoD pick

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin is President-elect Biden’s choice to become the next secretary of defense.

I applaud the choice. Gen. Austin would be the first African-American to lead the Pentagon. He is a former Central Command leader and a warrior with a distinguished and heroic military career.

But oh yes. There’s an issue with Austin. The law requires that a former military man or woman must be out of the service a minimum of seven years before assuming a top-level Cabinet post. Austin’s been out of the Army for only four years.

What does the Senate do? Simple! It does what it did for retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis when Donald Trump nominated him to be defense secretary. Mattis received a waiver from the Senate because he, too, hadn’t been a civilian for the requisite length of time.

The Senate can — and should — do the same for Lloyd Austin. Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the Senate shouldn’t grant another waiver so soon after it did so for James Mattis. “Waiving the law should happen no more than once in a generation,” Reed said in 2017. “Therefore, I will not support a waiver for future nominees. Nor will I support any effort to water down or repeal the statute in the future.”

Hooey! Lloyd Austin is an outstanding choice who deserves a Senate waiver to enable him to take command of the Pentagon.

local news, medical news

Wear a mask … dammit!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

This item comes to me via social media from a friend of mine who lives in Amarillo, where my wife and I lived for 23 years before relocating in 2018 to Collin County.

My friend writes: The Amarillo “statistical metropolitan area” i.e. Potter and Randall counties, has 357 COVID-19 deaths. With a population of 265,053, that puts our deaths per million at 1,346 which is higher than all but 5 of the 50 states. Out of 220 countries only 4 have a higher death rate. Respect science. Respect your neighbor. Wear a Mask.

There you go. How in the world does one argue with that? How do you dismiss the advice given to us by infectious disease experts who tell us until they get hoarse to don masks, to observe social distancing, to stay away from indoor crowds, to wash your hands frequently?

Yet some of us are doing that. They are dismissing the advice. They are rebelling against government seeking to protect us from a deadly virus. Spoiler alert: The COVID virus has killed 280,000-plus Americans already and the death rate is accelerating.

President-elect Joe Biden plans to do two things when he takes office next month. One is that he will issue a directive that orders anyone working or doing business on federal property to wear masks; the other is that he is going to ask all Americans to wear a mask for the first 100 days of the Biden administration.

I hear you, Mr. President-elect. If only the rest of us would follow your lead.