Tag Archives: insurrection

DC riot

Trump ‘unfit for office’

Jeez, do ya think? The White House press secretary today declared that Donald John Trump is unfit for office — I’ll presume any public office, not just the presidency — after he declared he might pardon the traitors who stormed the Capitol Building on 1/6 if by some hideous fluke he returns to the presidency.

So it was that press flack Jen Psaki today called out the ex-POTUS for his outrageous comment delivered at a rally in Texas.

“It’s just a reminder of how unfit he is for office,” Psaki said of Trump’s comments. “It’s telling that even some of his closest allies have rejected those remarks as inappropriate in the days since.”

How in the name of all that is sacred and holy can anyone condone the actions of those who committed that hideous attack on our democratic process? Yet that is what Trump is doing by suggesting that the defendants are being treated “unfairly.” Unfairly? What the hell?

This man continues to ratchet up the danger he poses to our democratic system of government with every lunatic utterance that spews from his foul mouth.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

DC riot

Trump reaches for bottom

(AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Donald Trump operates with a bottomless trove of outrageous pronouncements from which he uncovers ways to make declarations that are profoundly offensive and reprehensible.

This weekend, the 45th POTUS did it again. He ventured to Texas to declare that he might — if hell freezes over and he is elected president in 2024 — offer unconditional pardons to the traitors who stormed the Capitol Building on 1/6 and sought to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

That’s right. He would pardon the men and women who threatened to kill Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, injured scores of police officers, defecated on the floor of the Capitol and vandalized the hall of government by smashing through windows.

There is a reason this blog never has refused to print the words “President” and “Trump” consecutively. It is because your friendly blogger cannot recognize this lawless, corrupt, amoral, profane individual as my head of state, head of government and commander in chief.

For this moronic dipsh** to suggest he might offer pardons to those who — at his incitement — stormed the Capitol Building and sought to dismember our democratic process is so utterly beyond the pale that it boggles my understanding how any sensible human being can cling to the crap that flows from this guy’s mouth.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Comply, or else!

Quiz time: What do you do when a duly constituted governing authority tells you to talk to them about a serious policy matter?

Answer: You do what they tell you to do; you show up under threat of prosecution for contempt of whichever authority has issued the summons.

So it must be for those who get subpoenaed by the House select committee looking into the 1/6 insurrection. The panel is going full force against those who might know details about what happened before, during and after the riot that sought to stop the 2020 presidential election result certification.

If I were to get a summons from those folks, well, dang … I would show up and tell ’em what I know. They won’t call me, as I was sitting in the cheap seats that day watching it unfold on TV. It was a frightening event to witness, even from afar.

Donald Trump’s minions keep resisting. Their Republican allies in Congress keep giving them a pass, even though they have declared in prior congressional investigations — those chaired by the GOP in search of dirt on Democrats — that anyone who gets subpoenaed must comply or face prosecution. Not now? C’mon!

We cannot choose which authorities to obey and which ones to stiff-arm. The House committee is a legitimate governing authority and those who get these orders must obey them … or else.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

In defense of 1/6 panel

I feel this overwhelming need to defend the work being pursued by U.S. House Select Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson and his band of truth-seekers.

The Mississippi Democrat is at the forefront of a probe into the 1/6 insurrection that sought to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election. None other than former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican, has said the panel has “run amok” and faces prosecution on criminal charges if Republicans take control of Congress after the midterm election.

Gingrich is spouting nothing less than pure horsesh**.

The panel wants to know several key things about the terrible events that occurred a little more than a year ago.

What did Donald Trump know in advance of what the insurrectionist rioters would do? Why didn’t he stop them from ransacking the Capitol Building? Why didn’t he summon troops to protect Vice President Pence, who was being targeted by chants to hang him?  What are the details of the fake elector plot that has been revealed, with electors pledged to the defeated POTUS casting their votes to support him and throw the election in his favor?

This is complicated and tricky stuff, folks! To suggest, as Newtie has done, that the 1/6 committee could be “jailed” if the GOP takes over Congress is beyond despicable. The committee is doing precisely what the duly designated speaker of the House asked it to do.

Let us remember, too, that Donald Trump brought several members of his family into his inner circle while he was pretending to be POTUS. Ivanka, Don Jr. and Eric Trump all were key players in this drama as it unfolded before our eyes on 1/6. If the committee wants them to testify to what they know, then they should be compelled to tell us all the truth behind that horrible event.

Chairman Thompson doesn’t need little ol’ me to defend him. Still, I cannot sit by while the enemies of the truth are maligning the work he and his committee are doing to protect our very government.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

DC riot

Pipe down, Newtie!

Newt Gingrich, the one-time Republican congressional bomb-thrower and former speaker of the House, needs to settle down and take a quick look back at a little Capitol Hill history.

“I think it’s clear that these are people who are literally just running over the law, pursuing innocent people, causing them to spend thousands and thousands of dollars in legal fees for no justification and it’s basically a lynch mob and unfortunately the attorney general of the United States has joined the lynch mob and is totally misusing the FBI,” Gingrich said over the weekend.

He is projecting that if the GOP takes control of Congress after the midterm election that Democrats on the 1/6 select committee could face criminal prosecution over the way they have conducted the committee’s probe into the insurrection that occurred on Capitol Hill.

What balderdash!

If we flash back to around 2016, when the GOP last controlled Congress, we can find evidence of the Republican-led House Oversight Committee badgering, tormenting and hectoring witnesses as it sought to find something for which it could blame for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Benghazi, Libya crisis. Remember that one? Terrorists attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and four Americans — including our ambassador to Libya — died in the melee. What did the House panel do? It launched a years-long probe into, subjecting Clinton, for example, to 11 hours of testimony before the committee.

That panel ran far more amok than the 1/6 committee that is trying to get the truth behind Donald Trump’s effort to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election result.

So, with that I’ll just demand that the ex-speaker shut his trap.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

DC riot, national news

‘They’ll go after children’

Donald J. Trump has every right to defend his grown kids. However, he ought to rethink — which he won’t do — his stated belief that the 1/6 House committee will “go after children.”

Here is part of what Trump said about a request from the committee to hear from Ivanka Trump: “It’s a disgrace, what’s going on. They’re using these things to try and get people’s minds off how incompetently our country is being run. And they don’t care. They’ll go after children.”

Oh, good grief.

Ivanka Trump is a grown woman who served during Daddy Trump’s term in office as a senior adviser. She was on the federal payroll, dammit, drawn a salary to advise her father on matters relating to public policy.

She is not a child. It’s as if the House select committee asked to speak with Trump’s son Barron, a teenager who his parents have kept out of the glaring public eye. Oh, no. Ivanka is part of the Trump presidential team and well might have information that the committee needs to collect to help it assess what Daddy Donald on 1/6 when the riotous insurrectionist mob stormed Capitol Hill in an effort to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election results.

Ivanka Trump crossed the line that separates family from public figure. As such, the House committee has every right and reason to ask her to tell lawmakers what she knows and when she knew it.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Uncategorized

This one is mind-blowing

Of all the revelations reported about the investigation into 1/6 and the circumstances that preceded the insurrection on that horrible day, none is more bizarre — to my way of thinking — than the report of fake electors being summoned to cast votes for the guy who lost the 2020 presidential election.

You know how it goes, right?

States that Joseph R. Biden won were being targeted by electors pledged to Donald J. Trump. They were being instructed to show up to cast their electoral votes for Trump. Yep, they would actually seek to reverse the results of a free and fair election and rig the result to suit the wishes of the guy who lost.

To think that Donald Trump is insisting that the results of the election were rigged against him. Good grief. He sought to actually rig the election in reverse!

So, the investigation into 1/6 proceeds.

The House select committee that is charged with finding the truth behind what happened is zeroing in on the principals involved in this elaborate plot to in effect stage a coup against the federal government.

They are issuing summons and making requests of people close to Trump to talk to committee members.

As I look at all these revelations, I sense a mountain of evidence building against former president of the United States. He clearly is an individual who would flout whatever law he could to keep a grip on power. Donald Trump’s lawlessness is unprecedented in an individual who took a sacred oath to uphold the law and defend the Constitution.

And still …

There are the cultists who insist the most recent presidential election is fraudulent; that their guy will be reinstated before the sun goes down; that they are the true “patriots”; that all the evidence we can see developing in real time is the result of “fake news.”

They conduct phony “audits” of statewide election returns and learn that Biden won by a handful more votes than originally reported.

They promote The Big Lie and their cultists believe it.

As for the phony electoral vote strategy that has been rooted out by the sleuths, I have to say it’s a doozy.

It also frightens the sh** out of me.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Uncategorized

Conflict of interest … anyone?

What am I missing here? Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenting vote on the high court that decided the National Archives must release hundreds of pages from Donald Trump’s files to the House select committee investigating the 1/6 insurrection.

Hmm. I thought about that dissent. I wasn’t surprised, given Justice Thomas’s rigid right-wing credentials.

Oh, but wait! Then came this bit of news. Ginni Thomas, the wife of the justice, is an ardent political activist who rails constantly against the 2020 presidential election. She is known to be a fervent supporter of the disgraced, twice-impeached former president. She just recently launched into a scathing attack on the 1/6 committee, challenging its legitimacy and its authority to look where it is looking.

So, then comes the decision from the highest court in the land. All the other justices, conservatives and liberals — including the three people nominated by Donald Trump — voted to require the documents to end up in the committee’s files.

Justice Thomas was the lone dissent. Is there a conflict of interest that the justice is ignoring?

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Uncategorized

SCOTUS deals blow to ex-POTUS

Part of me wishes I could have been in whatever room Donald Trump was in when he got word that the Supreme Court had delivered a potentially fatal blow to his cover-up efforts relating to the 1/6 insurrection.

More to the point, that same part of me wishes I could have heard his response when he learned that all three justices he nominated for the court voted with the majority in squashing the effort.

You see, Donald Trump expects the judges he nominates to be loyal to him, not to the law or to the Constitution.

The court ruled 8 to 1 to require the National Archives to turn over records to the House committee examining the insurrection. The only dissent came from Justice Clarence Thomas. As for Trump’s nominees — Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch — well, they stuck with the law.

That’s how it should be.

According to NPR.org: The court’s order paves the way for the release of records from the National Archives. The records could shed light on the events that led to the riot by Trump supporters protesting the results of the 2020 presidential election, which was won by Democrat Joe Biden.

The high court said lower courts had determined that Trump could not claim “executive privilege” in hiding those records.

“Because the Court of Appeals concluded that President Trump’s claims would have failed even if he were the incumbent, his status as a former President necessarily made no difference to the court’s decision,” the court said in its order.

Lifetime appointments to federal courts do have this way of freeing judges from a good bit of political pressure. That, too, is in keeping with what the founders had in mind when they wrote the Constitution. They were wise men.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Uncategorized

Legal team gets the summons

The subpoenas are rolling out with increasing frequency from the House of Representatives select committee charged with getting at the cause of the 1/6 insurrection.

The panel has issued summons for Rudy Giuliani and three other lawyers who are close to Donald Trump. The truth about them — in my view, at least — is that they are lousy lawyers, but they do have some information, apparently, that is germane to the investigation that is under way.

I don’t expect them to comply. They are likely to face contempt of Congress charges along with other Trumpkins who’ve been subpoenaed.

Here, though, is my fundamental question: If they have nothing to hide, why in the name of juris prudence would they resist talking to the panel?

The Hill reports: The subpoena to Giuliani, a former New York City mayor and close Trump adviser throughout his presidency, focuses both on his ability to offer insight into the former president state of mind in the days surrounding Jan. 6 as well as his work pushing claims of election fraud in appearances on television and in court rooms across the country.

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/590275-jan-6-panel-subpoenas-rudy-giuliani-sidney-powell

The House committee, chaired by Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., is facing what could be called a “target-rich environment.” Giuliani has been at the forefront of efforts to promote The Big Lie alleging voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election — and which was the root cause of the insurrection that stormed Capitol Hill in an effort to block the certification of the election’s result.

For his part, Trump continues to insist that The Big Lie is true. It isn’t. It is a lie that comes from the Liar in Chief. Trump cannot — or will not — tell the truth on anything at any level. His legal team led by the former New York City mayor, Giuliani, does his bidding, which by itself is the way that lawyer-client relationships are supposed to function.

However, by doing what his client orders him to do, Giuliani becomes a critical witness in an investigation that aims to find the truth behind a full, frontal assault on our democratic form of government.

That cannot be allowed to stand.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com