Tag Archives: GOP

national news

30 years? Already?

I was talking to a family member a while ago and told her of my intention to visit the Bill Clinton presidential library in Little Rock, Ark., when I pull into the city some time Thursday.

Then I said, “I cannot believe it’s been 30 years since he was elected the first time. Thirty years!”

I cannot guarantee I’ll get there, but I certainly intend to see it, given that I’ll be in Little Rock overnight.

I want to relive the days when Democrats and Republicans could find common ground, even as GOP lawmakers and their acolytes sought to dig up dirt on President Clinton and his wife, Hillary. Indeed, the Clinton administration, working with Republicans in Congress, crafted the first balanced budget in 30 years in 1999.

Remember, too, that the GOP took control of Congress with its Contract With America theme in 1994. The Republican victory gave us Newt Gingrich of Georgia as speaker, the guy who told us he intended to make Democrats the “enemy of ‘normal’ Americans.'”

Yes, I am acutely aware of the impeachment that fell on Clinton. The GOP was looking for reasons to impeach the Democratic president, and he gave it to them by lying to the grand jury about the soiree he was having with the White House intern.

All told, we witnessed one of the more successful presidencies in recent memory. President Clinton has assembled an exhibit that I am sure will accentuate the successes.

I hope to take it in … and long for a return of the good old days that in Clinton’s case are fading rapidly into the distant background.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

media news

World has gone bonkers!

I am not usually prone to wondering about the state of play in today’s world, wondering out loud about contemporary trends.

But so help me, I cannot fathom these public opinion polls showing Donald Trump actually defeating President Biden in head to head matchups prior to the 2024 presidential election.

The guy — that would be Trump — was impeached twice while he worked in the White House. He has been indicted twice for felony crimes; one of the indictments came from the Manhattan District Attorney, the other from the U.S. Justice Department.

It all makes me wonder: what the hell is wrong with this nation of ours?

I am heartened by the knowledge that we are a long way from Election Day. Polls can change.

Yes, I tend to trust polling as a stop-gap measure of the national mood.

I am just shaking my noggin.

Johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

media news, national news, political news

Time limit on campaigns?

Does it seem like an hour or so ago that the 2020 presidential election came to a conclusion … and already we are in the midst of the next campaign for the U.S. presidency?

It does to me. It also makes me wonder whether the Europeans have the right idea on how to manage these campaigns.

It varies from country to country, but many nations — and I am looking at Europe at the moment — place a time limit on when candidates can campaign actively for high office.

I cannot recall the specifics, but I have heard anecdotally about campaigns for head of government or head of state lasting no more than six weeks or so.

Given the nature of our presidential campaigns, including the incessant and relentless fundraising that must occur to pay for them, I am willing at least to consider implementing such restrictions here.

The 2020 campaign began almost immediately at the end of the 2016 campaign and on and on it has gone through the past many presidential election cycles.

It never ends!

The news media feel compelled to report on the comings and goings of candidates in and out of, say, the early primary states. They speculate on who’s in and who’s just out for a weekend eating bad fair food and kissing children.

I lose interest in the early reporting of these campaigns. I get it back closer to the stretch drive. In the meantime, though, I have to suffer through endless news reports of what this potential candidate is saying about himself or herself and about the other candidates.

Hey, I consider myself a political junkie. Maybe I should change that to “recovering political junkie.” My recovery, though, is made more difficult by the non-stop campaigning that just won’t cease.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Judicial icon speaks out; pay attention, GOP

Leave it to one of the nation’s great legal minds to offer the bold, brash and unvarnished truth to those who have tossed aside their loyalty to the Constitution in favor of loyalty to a cheap politician.

Michael Luttig is a retired federal judge, a keen conservative legal thinker. He has zeroed in directly on the cult following that Donald J. Trump has developed and is cultivating in his quest for the presidency in 2024.

Listen up, you MAGA morons. He’s telling you the truth.

“If the indictment of Mr. Trump on Espionage Act charges – not to mention his now almost certain indictment for conspiring to obstruct Congress from certifying Mr. Biden as the president on Jan. 6 – fails to shake the Republican Party from its moribund political senses, then it is beyond saving itself. Nor ought it be saved,” Luttig said in a scathing New York Times op-ed published Sunday.

Wow! He’s got plenty more to say.

“No assemblage of politicians except the Republicans would ever conceive of running for the American presidency by running against the Constitution and the rule of law. But that’s exactly what they’re planning,” Luttig wrote.

To be brutally honest, this fealty to Trump — the twice-impeached, twice-indicted for POTUS — boggles my noggin beyond all recognition.

Trump has pledged to select a special counsel whose task will be to root out “the most corrupt president” in history. Trump isn’t talking about himself, although he damn sure should be. Oh, no. He vows to find a prosecutor to go after President Biden. That is the hallmark of a tinhorn dictator.

Judge Luttig isn’t some squishy liberal, some progressive bomb thrower. He is a highly regarded conservative legal expert who is siding with the rule of law and the notion that public officials — starting with the president of the United States — take sacred oaths to protect the Constitution.

He wonders what has become of the party of which he has been a member. “The stewards of the Republican Party have become so inured to their putative leader, they have managed to convince themselves that an indicted and perhaps even convicted Donald Trump is their party’s best hope for the future,” Luttig wrote in his op-ed.

Is anyone out there in MAGA Land going to pay attention?

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

GOP not more corrupt than Dems, however …

There is not a chance in hell I am going to declare that Republicans as a human subspecies are inherently more corrupt than Democrats.

However … we are seeing a disturbing trend that seems to give substance to that assertion. I refer to the incidents involving GOP-appointed justices who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Rather than recuse themselves from cases involving wealthy benefactors, three justices seem to go on as if, well, there’s not a damn thing wrong with accepting lavish gifts from individuals who have business before the court.

This is a matter of perception. If the public believes a justice is influenced by those gifts, there remains little room for the justice to set the record straight.

Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted lavish vacations from Texas billionaire Harland Crow. He hasn’t recused himself from any decisions involving his big-time pal. Thomas was nominated for the court in 1991 by GOP President George HW Bush.

Justice Samuel Alito has been accepting lavish gifts from an uber-rich Republican activist. No recusal from Alito, either. President George W. Bush nominated Alito in 2005 to the highest court in the land.

Chief Justice John Roberts’s wife has been working as a head-hunter for big-time law firms that have cases before the high court. Oh, Roberts is another G.W. Bush appointee.

OK, enough about the high court. I have witnessed judicial misbehavior in Texas at lower courts. For instance, I offered criticism of a Democratic district judge in Jefferson County who used facsimile letterhead stationery to help him acquire a private business license to operate a restaurant in the county courthouse.

These recent examples of lax ethics standards on the Supreme Court, though, does involve Republican-appointed justices. It is troubling in the extreme to see the court’s public opinion standing plummet in real time.

Americans have every right to demand and expect their justices to adhere to high ethical standards. We aren’t getting it at this time from some members of the high court’s conservative super-majority.

I am, therefore, demanding it from the U.S. Supreme Court.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Christie gives up ‘favorite’ status

Chris Christie nearly had me … then he nearly lost me.

I was prepared to anoint the former New Jersey governor as my favorite Republican running for president in 2024. Then he popped off with a statement on TV this weekend in which he declared Joe Biden to be the “most incompetent president since Jimmy Carter.”

Ouch, man!

OK, let me try to clear a couple of things up. First, President Carter was far from an incompetent chief executive. He scored a couple of huge foreign-policy triumphs, starting with the Israel-Egypt peace treaty as well as turning over the Panama Canal to the Panamanians. Carter has gotten a bum rap for the past 40-plus years and I am one American who is sick of it.

Second, I am still trying to determine where in the world these GOP pretenders keep seeing “incompetence” on the part of President Biden.

Joe Biden has managed, while facing the MAGA-led caucus in Congress, to do a number of memorable deeds. With the help of Democrats, we have an infrastructure improvement bill enacted; Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act that saves jobs and cuts the deficit by billions of bucks; we have policies aimed directly at battling climate change; the president and the GOP speaker of the House cobbled together a package that takes the debt ceiling non-crisis off the table for two years; the jobless rate has dropped to historic lows.

On Biden’s watch, we are adding hundreds of thousands of jobs each month; we are aiding Ukraine in its war against naked aggression by Russia; our European alliances are stronger than ever.

To be clear, Biden’s term hasn’t been perfect. I have never said it has been.

Chris Christie is repeating the MAGA mantra about presidential incompetence because it plays well with the slobbering GOP base that buys into issues such as The Big Lie and goofy QAnon conspiracies.

I will give Christie credit for taking on directly the immense personal and political failures of the 45th POTUS. It doesn’t give him license, though, to repeat the lies about POTUS No. 46, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

C’mon, Gov. Christie. If you expect many of us to take you seriously, you need to stick with the facts. Here is one fact worth remembering: Joe Biden has gotten more done in the first half of a term than any president in history.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Sham ‘hearing’ worthy of scorn

You may take this straight to the bank because it is the unvarnished  truth, which is that I could have lived my entire life without hearing about a sham “hearing” conducted by MAGA cult members of Congress that actually saluted the criminals who stormed the Capitol Building on 1/6.

There they were: Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar, among others, pretending to conduct a congressional hearing on the events of that terrible day.

All the while, the MAGA cultists insisted that the traitors who stormed the Capitol that day were being treated as political prisoners. The government, they said, wrongfully prosecuted them for crimes against our democracy because the 2020 election indeed was “stolen” from the guy who lost it legitimately.

What’s just as horrifying, of course, is that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who owes his speakership to these MAGA morons — let it happen in the first place.

None of these yahoos hold chairmanships in any actual House committee. The hearing they conducted today was made up to look like an official event, when in fact it was nothing of the sort. It was a staged propaganda performance designed to denigrate the prosecutions that have put many of the “witnesses” who spoke today behind bars.

And why are the convicted felons? Because they stormed the Capitol, assaulted police officers assigned to protect members of Congress from the frothing mob, they smashed windows, defecated on the floor of the Capitol Building and threatened to execute Vice President Mike Pence, who was presiding over a congressional hearing to certify the Electoral College results of the 2020 presidential election.

Oh, did I mention that that the Republican incumbent lost that election to Joe Biden?

The traitors who answered the call to assault the government from the guy who took an oath to “defend and protect” the Constitution do not deserve anything other than the nation’s scorn for the crimes they committed.

That goes as well for the president who incited them.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

My favorite Republican is … ?

Eight years ago I took up for a man I labeled my favorite Republican running for president of the United States.

He is John Kasich, a former Ohio governor and a former chair of the U.S. House Budget Committee who, working with President Clinton, helped the nation achieve its first budget surplus since the 1960s.

Kasich had an impressive resume of accomplishment and I declared during the 2016 GOP primary campaign that were he to emerge as the party’s presidential nominee I just might cast my vote for him that fall.

It didn’t happen. The nomination instead went to a serial liar/philanderer/bomb thrower.

It was a large GOP field, as you recall. Too bad Gov. Kasich didn’t make the grade.

Another large field of Republicans is gathering to run for the party’s nomination in 2024. I am going to stick with the Democratic incumbent, Joe Biden, this time around … but I do have a favorite GOP contender emerging from the field.

It’s Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, who is the only GOP candidate willing to speak clearly, unequivocally and without hesitation against the party’s seeming frontrunner, the guy who got elected in 2016.

Christie ran against the field in 2016, along with Kasich. He got drummed out. He then became a sycophant for the guy who would be elected. Christie led the transition team for a time before he got pushed aside.

I am not yet clear on what kind of policies Christie would adopt were he nominated next year to run against President Biden. If he adheres to a more moderate tone than the MAGA cult’s wishes, then I just could consider him as a recipient of my ballot-box support.

I need to hear more. For now, though, I am delighted to hear him peel the bark off the GOP frontrunner. We’ll see how he holds up when the Big Dog bites back.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Rep. Santos: without shame

George Santos is that rare politician who believes he can function as a “normal” elected official despite the enormous baggage he’s lugging around as a result of his lies and deceit.

The first-term Republican congressman from New York is an absolute, hands-down laughingstock. No one can possibly take seriously a single word that flies out of the mouth of this serial liar.

He got elected in 2022 by lying his way into office. Let’s see, he lied about:

His parentage, his professional career, his educational background, his marital status, his family’s connection to the Holocaust and 9/11. Oh, then he is accused of swindling money from someone he knows.

Santos’s constituents elected a mystery man.

Yet he now functions as if he hasn’t a care in the world beyond his duties as a congressman.

Good grief, man!

I don’t even know why I’m getting worked up over this. Dude represents a district far from my home in North Texas. But … he is able to vote on federal laws that affect all of us. I guess that gives me justification to gripe and bitch about this fraud.

Like the man who once sat in the White House, I am left to question every single utterance that flies out of Santos’s mouth.

He is just one of 435 House members. He needs to be shown the door. My hope is that the New York congressional district voters who sent him to D.C. in the first place will wise up when they cast their ballots again next year.

The guy is without shame.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news

They’re ‘eating their young’

A friend and former colleague recently invoked the memory of the late Teel Bivins, a state senator from Amarillo who was fond of suggesting that Republican politicians occasionally engage in a form of political cannibalism.

“They eat their young,” Bivins once said of his fellow Republican legislators, referring to the every-10-year exercise called “redistricting.”

Bivins isn’t around to see what has become of his once-glorious political party. I imagine he would be, well, aghast at the sight of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton being impeached and now awaiting trial in the Texas Senate.

Bivins was long gone from this good Earth when Paxton was elected AG. I don’t recall Bivins being cut from the same slimy cloth that produced the MAGA cult that is backing Paxton. He was more of a “traditional conservative,” favoring private property ownership, low taxes and fiscal restraint.

But, yes, the GOP is “eating its young” at this moment as the party grapples with the consequences of the stunning and overwhelming vote in the Texas House to impeach Paxton over a series of allegations, involving bribery, abuse of power and something called “official corruption.”

Collin County’s GOP House delegation all voted to impeach Paxton, who also hails from Collin County. How can that possibly bode well for the AG? It can’t … I tell ya!

Thus, the Republican cannibals are picking away at the bones of an AG who’s been in some sort of legal difficulty ever since he took office in 2015.

I just hope they have concluded what many other Texans have done. Which is to say “enough is enough” with this clown.

There is no way to know what Teel Bivins would think, but my fondest hope of the man I knew pretty well would be that he, too, would be repulsed.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com