Tag Archives: GOP

national news, political news

How do you campaign on Trump coattails?

Harriet Hageman is likely to become the next Republican nominee to run for Wyoming’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

If she defeats Rep. Liz Cheney in today’s GOP primary, she’s a sure bet to win the election this November against whomever Democrats nominate.

It causes me to wonder: How has Hageman campaigned against Cheney, whose only “sin” as I see it is that she has been highly critical of Donald Trump’s criminal behavior while he masqueraded as president of the U.S.A.

In latest primary night, 2 Trump critics face voters as Palin eyes a comeback (msn.com)

So, what does a Harriet Hageman stump speech sound like?

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Harriet Hageman and I am running as the protector of a twice-impeached U.S. president.

My opponent, Liz Cheney, has betrayed her office by standing for the rule of law. She has declared her intention to do all she can to keep the former president from getting anywhere near the Oval Office.  That is unacceptable!

Her voting record in Congress? That doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter that she voted with Donald Trump more than 92% of the time. Or that she has been adamantly pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, fervently anti-tax and equally fervently anti-Obamacare. 

Has she represented the will of our state? No. Because she won’t profess fealty to Donald Trump.

***

That, of course, is an absurd example of how Hageman has campaigned for the office. I just don’t know how she can be “more conservative” than Liz Cheney, or how she can justify running against a House member who is faithful to her party’s long-standing platform of favoring the rule of law.

If the polls are correct, and I tend to believe they are, then the rest of the country is going to see what happens to a politician who is (a) faithful to her oath and (b) critical of a president who is faithful only to his own lust for power.

These primary voters will be forever cast in shame.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news, political news

Next up? Liz Cheney!

Liz Cheney is facing the fight of her political life on Tuesday and from all appearances, it’s a fight she is likely lose.

The Wyoming Republican congresswoman is being challenged by a candidate in the GOP primary who carries Donald J. Trump’s endorsement. The Trumpkin appears headed for victory in the primary.

Cheney is the final GOP member of Congress who voted to impeach Trump who will face an electorate angry over that vote. Most of the other nine Republicans who cast affirmative impeachment votes have fared poorly as well as they have sought re-election to Congress.

Am I going to shed a tear for Liz Cheney? Not really. I want her to win the Wyoming Republican primary. Not because of her staunch conservative voting record. Instead, because she has shown enormous fortitude in standing up to Trump’s lies, his quest for power, his flouting of the rule of law and his persistent retelling of The Big Lie about non-existent 2020 wide-spread voter fraud.

Something tells me, though, that even if Cheney loses the GOP primary in Wyoming that she is far from finishing her final act on the political stage.

I’ll just be left to condemn what has transpired in the Republican Party in this age of Trump, when lying, cheating and corruption become accepted behavior.

Shameful.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

economic news, environmental news, Joe Biden

Democrats have earned it

President Biden is going to get a bill quite soon that won’t have any Republican votes attached to it. The blunt truth is that I wished for at least a smattering of GOP support from Congress to send the Inflation Reduction Act to the president.

Alas, it didn’t happen. However, I am going to say loudly and clearly that Democrats in the Senate and the House have done well for those of they represent across the land.

House Democrats today stood together to enact the IRA. It seeks to reduce inflation, seeks to reduce carbon emissions, seeks to reduce the cost of drugs.

Republicans, of course, say it doesn’t do anything to help us. I will disagree with their bloviating.

The Inflation Reduction Act represents a significant effort to curb climate change. Indeed, it is this nation’s largest-ever investment to help curb carbon emissions.

I have to ask: Why is that a bad thing?

It’s not a bad thing at all! Republican obstructionists, though, remain bound to their commitment to block anything President Biden and Democrats want to accomplish.

It is to their everlasting shame. Democrats, meanwhile, have earned the nation’s gratitude. They have, as Joe Biden once declared, produced a big fu**ing deal.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news

AG shows his anger

Merrick Garland doesn’t strike me as an individual who usually wears his emotions on his shirt pocket.

However, today he demonstrated an angry streak that, frankly, I found reassuring. The attorney general took dead aim at those critics on the far right who have leveled bizarre accusations against the FBI, accusing agents of “planting evidence” at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

President Barack Obama wanted Garland to take a seat on the Supreme Court. He nominated the former D.C. Appeals Court judge to the court in early 2016, only to be stymied by Senate Republicans.

Now he’s the nation’s AG and is investigating whether Donald Trump broke the law in seeking to deny the transfer of power from the Trump administration to the administration led by Joe Biden, the winner of the 2020 presidential election.

U.S. Attorney General Garland confirms FBI investigating Trump (msn.com)

Garland is working against considerable blowback by the right-wingers among us. They are threatening him with congressional persecution. They have accused federal agents of planting evidence at Trump’s glitzy resort.

The AG fired back today, reminding us that the men and women who work for the FBI are patriotic professionals and that he will not tolerate the agency’s enemies leveling the kind of accusations they are leveling at the FBI.

Think of the irony. Republicans long have been associated with the belief that law enforcement is the friend of Americans. Now they are vilifying the FBI. Why? Because they are examining whether the far-right’s guru, Donald J. Trump, has broken the law.

The far-right wingers among us are exhibiting a shameful demonstration of hypocrisy as they denigrate the FBI and threaten the attorney general.

AG Merrick Garland should not have felt compelled to defend the men and women who protect us every single day against those who would do us harm, but he did so today … and he made me proud.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news

Reaction puzzles me

The initial Republican Party reaction to the FBI agents’ search for records within Donald J. Trump’s glitzy south Florida mansion has me a little bit puzzled.

I don’t hear much defense of the ex-POTUS’s conduct coming from the GOP faithful. Who out there is willing to say that it’s all right for a president to squirrel away classified documents taken from the White House? Who is willing to say it’s OK for a president — as it has been reported — to flush documents down the toilet or burn ’em in a fireplace?

No, we’re hearing instead are accusations about “weaponization” of the Justice Department and the FBI. Some GOP lawmakers are suggesting that Attorney General Merrick Garland needs to either resign or be impeached. For what? For following up on his pledge to ensure that “no one is above the law”? When the AG says “no one,” he means, well, no one, not even a former president of the United States.

The hysterical reaction from the hysterical right wing, though, is laughable … except that it ain’t funny.

What does make me chuckle — but only a little bit — is that the right-wingers just aren’t going to say that Donald Trump didn’t do anything wrong.

The man is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.

As for the Justice Department’s search for wrongdoing, it would be foolish to believe that DOJ — at this juncture of the probe — is going to go easy on what appears to be a mountain of evidence that implicates the man who once took an oath to protect the Constitution, but who in reality launched an all-out attack on it.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news, political news

Trump gets support from CPAC … imagine that!

This is likely the biggest non-surprise of the current political season, but it’s still worth a comment or two.

It comes in the form of the endorsement of Donald J. Trump’s continuing presence on the political scene by the Conservative Action Political Conference, which met this past weekend in Dallas.

I cannot help but shake my noggin.

The CPAC faithful want Trump to run for president in 2024. They have decided, I reckon, to ignore the two impeachments during his term in office, the stunning pile of evidence that mounts from the House select committee’s probe into the 1/6 insurrection and perhaps the possible indictments for criminal activity that might come from the Justice Department.

Oh, and never mind that Trump has yet to lay any sort of agenda for the future. He continues to wallow in The Big Lie that he keeps alive by suggesting the 2020 election was stolen from him.

That’s leadership? That’s moving toward the future?

At CPAC, conservative Texans show Donald Trump loyalty | The Texas Tribune

The “conservative movement” has been hijacked, along with the Republican Party, by the cult of personality led by Donald J. Trump.

The Texas Tribune summed up nicely the theme of Trump’s keynote speech: Trump stuck to a familiar script and repeated the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from him, even as those claims have repeatedly been debunked by even his own former aides. He painted cities run by Democratic leadership as hellscapes awash in crime and lamented what he described as an open southern border with Mexico.

The Texas crowd ate it up. “I’m over the moon, I’ve been trying to see him for years,” said Therese Boehnlein, who drove from Waco to Dallas to see Trump.

Well … OK. The ex-POTUS dropped a hint or two that he’ll run again in 2024. That will be his third attempt at the White House. Just remember something: He got fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016 and a lot fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020.

Truly astounding.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

environmental news, national news

Not even close …

This isn’t anything like the way I envisioned legislation would proceed upon the election in 2020 of Joe Biden as president of the United States.

I envisioned a return to the type of collegiality and compromise one could see with a president with decades of legislative experience working with members of Congress to enact laws that would do good things for Americans.

What have we seen? More gridlock. More obstruction from the loyal opposition. More partisan wrangling.

Democrats are cheering the enactment of what they call the Inflation Reduction Act. The Senate vote was 50-50, leaving the tie-breaking vote to come from Vice President Harris.

The bill isn’t perfect, but it includes the nation’s largest investment ever on ways to battle the planet’s changing climate. It seeks to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. It is paid for by taxes being leveled on corporations.

The Grand Obstructionist Party fought all of it. Tooth and nail. Hammer and tong.

President Biden’s predecessor took office without a lick of government experience … and it showed. He couldn’t negotiate his way out of a phone booth. Biden took office in January 2021 making what I thought at the time was a reasonable pledge to restore a sense of commonality between Democrats and Republicans.

Silly me. It hasn’t worked. GOP members of both congressional chambers continue to dig in, even to the point of denying that Joe Biden even is the “legitimate president of the United States.” Yes, they have swallowed The Big Lie and are obstructing the president at every turn.

But … Democrats won this latest battle. I am glad and grateful at least to see one side of the great divide working on my behalf.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Senate clears big bill

OK, so it doesn’t constitute a stunning bipartisan mandate, but it does demonstrate how Senate Republicans — once again — appear to be on the wrong side of history.

The U.S. Senate approved by the thinnest margin possible a procedural vote that clears the way for approval of a slimmed-down package that President Biden has been seeking to do a number of positive things for the economy.

The bill seeks to cut carbon emissions and help stem the changing climate; it seeks to pay for itself by raising taxes on the richest Americans; it seeks to lower drug costs, giving more Americans access to medication.

Harris breaks 50-50 deadlock to advance landmark climate, tax, health bill | The Hill

Hey, it’s a good package.

All 50 Senate Republicans voted “no.” All 50 Democrats voted “yes.” That left it to Vice President Harris to cast the deciding vote to send the measure on to a full vote sometime Sunday.

This is the same deal that was given up for dead when Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin declared he couldn’t support it. Then the senator met with Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer to work out a pared-down version. Manchin changed his tune; the deal was back on the table.

This gives President Biden a much-need push toward keeping a major campaign promise, which was to help reduce the threat caused by climate change.

As for the Republicans, they continue to push policies that Americans do not support. How can they sustain that stubbornness going into the midterm election?

My hope is that they cannot.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

RINO: misdirected term

It is an astonishing thing to watch and to hear as Republicans seek to hang RINO tags on fellow party members in this age of Trump as the former POTUS seeks to tighten his grip on a once great and grand old party.

Donald Trump’s hijacking of the party has turned it into a cult of personality in which actual long-standing and principled Republicans are being demonized because they, in so many cases, simply stand for the rule of law.

RINO, of course, is the acronym that stands for Republican In Name Only. What is baffling to me in the extreme is to hear so-called Republicans who — prior to Trump’s arrival in politics — had little to do with the party or with crafting policy positions on which the party ran for public office.

Donald Trump is one of them. In that context, he is the ultimate RINO, an empty vessel who becomes a champion of whatever cause someone tosses out there for him to scarf up.

Liz Cheney is seeking re-election to her House seat in Wyoming. She has been censured and cast out of her state’s GOP. Why? Because she had the temerity to criticize Trump for inciting the insurrection of 1/6 and for refusing to adhere to the long-standing tradition of handing over power to the man who beat him in the most recent presidential election.

And yet she is as a Republican as they come. Her record is replete with votes in favor of gun ownership, against abortion, in favor of lower taxes, favoring a strong military.

You get the idea, right? Her Republican credentials cannot possibly measure up to the standard that the Trump Cabal of Cultists have set. You have to be loyal to the former POTUS, or else you’re out!

It is truly astounding.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

medical news

Where’s the compassion … doc?

It never ceases to amaze how the man who claims to represent the Texas Panhandle in Congress — the Dipsh** Doc, if you will — can exhibit so little common decency when it involves the commander in chief.

Ronny Jackson, the Republican who once, served as White House physician for Donald Trump and Barack Obama — keeps tweeting the idiotic messages calling attention to President Biden’s struggle to get past the COVID-19 infection that continues to register on his test results.

And yet … there is no expression of concern or of any good wishes for the president’s complete recovery from the ailment. It ain’t coming from Jackson, who continues to enrage many of us out here with assertions about the president’s mental acuity … which is absolute rubbish.

I must remind Jackson and other GOP critics that Joe Biden sent Donald and Melania Trump wishes for a speedy recovery when they contracted the virus.

Any reciprocity from the other side? Hah!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com