Politicization: astounding and moronic

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Never did I think back when I was bringing two boys through childhood and into their teen years that we would engage in an astonishing — and frankly moronic — debate over vaccination against an infectious killer.

When our sons required vaccines, they received them. No questions asked. No concerns over the damn politics of the moment.

They were inoculated against polio, smallpox, flu, measles, chicken pox, mumps … you name it.  So was I. So was their mother.

Here we are now. The COVID-19 virus has killed nearly 600,000 Americans and 2 million or so around the world and yet Americans are arguing among themselves over whether to receive one of three certified vaccines that have been deemed overwhelmingly effective against the disease.

And why is that? Why are we debating it? Because some of us still cling to the idiocy that the pandemic isn’t real, that it’s a hoax, that it is the product of some conspiracy cabal intent on doing something, anything to bring mysterious harm to us.

OK, I know … we’ve got that J&J vaccine that’s been reapproved for use after that overblown scare involving six women who contracted serious blood clots after taking that vaccine. Six out of — how many? — 2 million doses. That sent red flags up everywhere.

Meanwhile, President Biden’s medical team is trying to tell us that the vaccines — all of them — are safe for human use.

Most of us are listening. Others are not. There have been arguments at family dinner tables over the vaccines and over whether we should be vaccinated.

It makes me want to pull out my hair!

POTUS to speak to sparse ‘crowd’

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Joe Biden campaigned for the presidency in the midst of a pandemic, meaning that he avoided staging big campaign rallies.

As president, he is getting set to speak to a joint session of Congress this week. Hmm. Guess what … the House of Representatives chamber will contain a fraction of the number of people who usually listen to these speeches.

The Cabinet won’t be there. Only the Supreme Court chief justice, John Roberts, will be present, with the rest of the court staying away. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Army Gen. Mark Milley will represent the military brass. Members of the House and Senate will be there. First lady Jill Biden and second gentleman Doug Emhoff will be in the VIP section, but they will be virtually unaccompanied.

But … the event will show off a bit of history-making. Sitting behind President Biden will be two women: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris.

I understand they’ll be masked up, as will the audience in the chamber.

An earlier blog post wondered how the partisans will react. Will they cheer the president’s arrival? Will they stand and applaud when Speaker Pelosi introduces him?

I am not going to obsess over things we cannot control. I am, however, going to applaud the precautions that the powers that be are taking to avoid creating one of those “super spreader” events.

After all, the pandemic is still raging.

Time and money wasted

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

You need to pay careful attention to what I intend to say here, which is that an invaluable amount of time and money is being spent in Arizona to determine whether a free and fair election was conducted, well … freely and fairly.

Spoiler alert: It was conducted fairly and was relatively corruption-free.

That, however, is not dissuading Arizona Republican Party officials from conducting an “audit” of more than 2 million ballots cast in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, which — I hasten to add — voted for Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president in 2020.

Now, to be fair, the Biden margin of victory over Donald J. Trump wasn’t huge. It was only a little more than 45,000 votes out of the total cast in the sprawling county. Will the election audit produce the kind of swing that GOP loons want to occur? Hah! I wouldn’t bet your sturdiest pair of jeans on that happening.

And what do you suppose it would do to the overall Electoral College outcome if by some miracle that hell freezes over and they overturn the election result in Arizona? Not a damn thing. Joe Biden still would be elected president and Donald Trump still would be banished to his posh south Florida resort.

The Arizona Republic reported:

Former President Donald Trump on Friday praised GOP senators in Arizona for their “tireless efforts” to recount millions of Maricopa County ballots, predicting the massive review would produce startling findings.

Despite prior audits — and a host of election lawsuits — failing to turn up evidence of Joe Biden “stealing” the presidency, Trump thanked the lawmakers for “the incredible job they are doing in exposing the large scale voter fraud” in the 2020 election.

Startling findings? Hah! There he goes again, fomenting the Big Lie about phony vote fraud.

Arizona election audit updates: Pause in recount appears off as Democrats won’t post bond (msn.com)

I am going to say this for as long as I can string a cogent thought or two together: There was no rampant vote fraud in the 2020 election.

Think for just a moment about this fact: If you are an election official anywhere in the United States and you know about the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, you are going to work double- and triple-overtime to ensure that the process is squeaky clean.

Does anyone with a half a noodle in their skull believe there was anything approaching the hanky-panky that Trump and his cabal of goons suggest occurred?

Donald Trump talked about the media being the “enemy of the people.” He has it all wrong. The 45th president of the United States is the enemy we all should fear.

Trump policies? What are they?

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Not in a million, a billion, a gazillion years will I ever accept the dubious notion that Donald J. Trump’s followers are enamored of his policies … such as they are.

As a social media acquaintance of mine said this weekend, they were in love with his lies, his hatred of certain ethnic groups, with the manner in which he led them down some garden path.

They are waiting for some signal from their guy, the ex-president, that he’ll be back in the arena. The 2024 presidential election might beckon him.

Wait a second, though. Trump told Fox News that he cannot yet divulge what he intends to do in the future because of “legal issues.” Legal issues? What are they? He said he will decide in due course whether he’ll run for president again.

The legal issues hanging over his noggin likely have to do with the possible criminal indictments that might come from Manhattan (N.Y.) District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., or from Fulton County (Ga.) DA Fani Willis, both of whom are investigating separate but serious criminal complaints leveled against Trump.

As for the Trumpkins awaiting the possible return of their guy, well, they have been snookered into the cult that Trump developed from the moment he declared his 2016 presidential candidacy by declaring that Mexican immigrants were “rapists, murderers and drug dealers” coming to the United States to poison us.

Policies? He cannot speak to any of it.

POTUS: Someone has to pay for what we need

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President Biden’s many decades in government taught him a hard lesson, which is that everything the government does comes with a cost.

Taxpayers have to foot the bill.

He pushed a COVID relief package through Congress. He now wants to enact an infrastructure overhaul through the legislative body. Both of them together are projected at around $4 trillion.

Ouch … yes? Yes, but here’s the deal: In order to pay for all this, the president seeks to levy taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Now he is talking about an increase in capital gains taxes.

Donald Trump talked about infrastructure deals, too. Nothing happened. Congress didn’t move anything through. The president never articulated a way to pay for whatever it was he wanted done. He seemed to suggest that the tax cuts he rammed through Congress would jumpstart the economy sufficiently so that any major government project would pay for itself.

It didn’t happen. Then the pandemic brought the economy to its knees.

Trump lost his re-election bid and now a new president is trying to craft a workable plan to pay for a massive effort to rebuild our economy.

The tax plan already pushed out there will not increase taxes to a level prior to the cut enacted during the Trump years. It still gives congressional Republicans fits, so they’ll fit it along with everything else that the Democratic president proposes.

Reasonableness be damned!

POTUS calls it a ‘crisis’

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President Biden calls the immigrant situation on our nation’s southern border a “crisis.”

Which it is. It has been one for several weeks. The Biden administration has been reluctant to call it such.

But … it is a crisis. Too many children have migrated to our border unaccompanied by their parents. They are filling up temporary shelters all along the border.

Look, I am not going to beat the hell out of President Biden because of his prior reluctance to label this matter a “crisis.” He’s done so. That’s good enough for me.

Now he needs to get busy with finding a solution.

If nothing else the president might be able to get his right-wing critics to muzzle their bloviating about it and start offering some suggestions for how to fix the problem.

Yes, it was genocide

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Joe Biden never has struck me as a politician willing to blaze many new trails. Still, as president of the United States, Biden has made a declaration that seemed to scare off every one of his predecessors for the past century.

No U.S. president, Democrat or Republican, has been willing to categorize the Ottoman Empire’s massacre of Armenians as an act of “genocide” … until now.

Biden made the declaration today after talking with Turkish President Tayycip Erdogan, apparently warning the strongman of his intention to do what he did today.

So, you might wonder: Why the presidential reticence?

Turkey is a key member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was founded after World War II to deter possible aggression from what was called the Soviet Union. Thus, previous U.S. presidents were concerned about offending Turkey, upon which NATO depends as an important military ally.

President Biden has tossed those concerns aside.

The reality is that in 1915, Turkey set about to execute more than 1.5 million Armenians in what only can be described as a form of “ethnic cleansing.” Put another way, they engaged in genocide against an ethnic minority.

According to Yahoo News:

“Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination,” Biden said in a statement on Saturday, marking Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. He emphasized the need to recognize and remember such atrocities “so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history.”

“The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today,” Biden said. “We honor their story. We see that pain. We affirm the history. We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated.

Biden recognizes as ‘genocide’ the killing of 1.5M Armenians by Ottoman Turks (yahoo.com)

Yes, President Biden is trying to walk along a nuanced line. I get that. It also signals a presidential intention to ensure that human rights remains at the top of our foreign-policy consciousness.

Mourning a painful loss while honoring a glorious legacy

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

My heart is shattered.

An anticipated phone call came this morning, but hearing the news that our family had expected didn’t make it any easier. My cousin died this morning of cancer that she had battled ferociously for a quarter century.

Her name was Becky Phillips Olson; she was the second child of the younger of my mother’s two brothers.

I want to share with you what made Becky so very special to all of us who loved her.

Simply put, Becky taught us how to live. She fought through five recurrences of cancer that started in her breast. Along the way, she committed her life’s work to giving comfort to others who endure the agony, the emotional and physical pain, as well as the fear that accompanies this killer disease.

She co-founded an organization she named Breast Friends. She and her foundation partner became motivational speakers. Becky would tour the nation sharing her story with others. She did so with humor and with blunt talk.

Becky wrote a book that she titled “The Hat That Saved My Life.” It tells of her struggle through cancer, of the hat she wore when she lost her hair from the chemotherapy treatments. The hat gave her some measure of strength to go through her days while engaging in this brutal struggle. The truth is that she didn’t actually need the hat to see her through. Her immense strength came from within her marvelous soul.

The cancer that began in one part of her body had spread dramatically. Becky was the quintessential force of nature who was blessed with a spirit and inner strength that were as formidable as any I ever have witnessed in any human being I have encountered along the way.

Our world today is significantly dimmer because Becky Olson has left it. However, Becky Olson’s legacy lives on in those who sought assurance from someone who turned her suffering and pain into tools she used to provide strength and comfort.

One cannot possibly have done more than that.

Did he say that? Really?

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Complete candor requires us to realize that we didn’t think a U.S. senator was a certifiable nut job when he took office.

Still, Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has provided ample evidence that he might need to be committed.

Johnson has been a COVID denier since the pandemic broke out. Now he says that there is “no reason” for Americans to get vaccinated if their neighbors have the vaccine. He is actually seeking to dissuade us from getting vaccinated against a virus has has killed just a bit south of 600,000 Americans.

Yes, the death rate is declining. The infection rate in many states, though, is spiking. Vaccines are rolling out. Three drug companies have produced enough vaccine to inoculate tens of millions of Americans.

Ron Johnson wonders, “Why the push for vaccine?”

Republican Ron Johnson tries to explain why there is “no reason to be pushing vaccines on people” (msn.com)

I think I can explain. We want the vaccine injected into as many Americans as possible so we can protect ourselves –and them — from the virus. Holy cow, man! It ain’t complicated!

As the Business Insider reports: Last month, the congressman claimed that he doesn’t plan on getting vaccinated because he already contracted the disease, which he argued “probably provides me the best immunity possible.” According to the Centers for Disease Control, with regards to natural immunity, “experts don’t know for sure how long this protection lasts, and the risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19 far outweighs any benefits of natural immunity. COVID-19 vaccination will help protect you by creating an antibody (immune system) response without having to experience sickness.”

This is the same guy who said the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill took place even though most of the rioters are law-abiding citizens who have a deep respect for law enforcement. Uh, senator? I saw the video of that riot. There wasn’t a lot of abiding by the law taking place. He also believes the Big Lie about phony voter fraud.

Now he is popping off about vaccines.

Hmm. Shut up, Sen. Johnson.

Bad move in Greenville

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Allow me this bit of unsolicited advice to educators everywhere: Do not engage in “jokes” that seem to mirror hideous news events.

So it is, then, that a Greenville Independent School District teacher has resigned after being suspended over a picture of her placing her foot on the back of a Lamar Elementary School student’s neck. Sound familiar? Yep, the teacher took part in this supposedly good-natured stunt on the day that a Minneapolis jury convicted former cop Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd by pressing his knee on the back of Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes in 2020.

The ”joke” went over like the proverbial lead balloon. Could the timing of this incident have been any worse?

When the picture went viral, the school district suspended the teacher. The youngster on whom the supposed joke was perpetrated said he didn’t take offense. The boy’s mother said her family has a good relationship with the teacher and she, too, spoke in support of the educator.

Then the teacher quit. I should point out that the teacher is white and the student is African-American.

Good grief.

KETR’s Mark Haslett reported: “We take this situation very seriously. It will be thoroughly investigated, and appropriate action will be taken,” Superintendent Demetrus Liggins said in an email that went out to parents of Greenville ISD students. “We have heard from many community members, and we understand their concern and anger.”

The anger apparently prompted the teacher to resign rather than face possible recrimination for her action.

The entire world’s sensitivity to this kind of conduct has been heightened tremendously by the Chauvin trial and the incident that resulted in his conviction of murdering George Floyd. Chauvin is a white former police officer who applied unreasonable force to restrain Floyd, a black man who was arrested for – get this – passing some counterfeit currency in a Minneapolis convenience store.

So, for a Northeast Texas educator to take part in a so-called prank and have the image of her foot on the back of a youngster’s neck released on the very day of Chauvin’s conviction smacks of the height – or the depth – of poor judgment.

So, there’s a lesson to be learned from all of this. I believe the world’s eyes have opened wide to people’s perception of actions intended ostensibly to be done as a good-natured joke.

NOTE: This blog post was published initially on KETR.org.