Tag Archives: GOP

national news

GOP is capable of nominating weirdos, nut jobs

MAGA candidates are running amok in the Republican Party primary elections throughout the nation.

One or two MAGA goofballs are likely to be nominated for high public office by Republican voters in places such as Pennsylvania and North Carolina. There will be more of them.

They have earned the endorsement of Donald J. Trump — the MAGA in Chief.

My favorite candidate to earn the Trump seal of endorsement has to be Mehmet Oz, the one-time Dr. Oz who’s running for a U.S. Senate in seat in Pennsylvania. Get this: Oz doesn’t live in Pennsylvania. That didn’t matter one little bit to Trump, who gave Oz his endorsement because, I suppose, he’s a celebrity; Trump likes celebrities, right?

I’m not sure whether Trump’s anointing of Oz is going to work; he’s facing another MAGA-ite in Pennsylvania.

Republican voters have some key decisions to make. Do they want to throw their party over to the cult leader who keeps putting his ample ass into these primary fights?

Aww, hell. I don’t care if they do. Let them follow their cult leader over the cliff.

Trump is a menace to our governmental system simply by being on the fringes of a major party’s primary fight. Accordingly, it will fascinate me to no end to watch how the GOP primary season plays out.

Whether it becomes a MAGA haven or returns to semblance of its senses will depend on whether the voters have become intoxicated by the snake-oil swill served up by The Donald.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

RBG spoke wisely

God bless the memory of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The nation is beating itself senseless over a leaked draft opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court that proposes to do the very thing that Justice Ginsburg feared.

The opinion suggests the court should toss aside Roe v. Wade, the ruling that legalized abortion in January 1973. Doing so, I fear, would turn women into “less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”

The fight has commenced. The U.S. Senate will vote next Wednesday on legislation that provides federal protection for those seeking an abortion. It isn’t likely to pass, given the Republicans’ strategy to filibuster the bill. Since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to end a filibuster, such a move is virtually doomed in a 50-50 Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, though, wants to put his GOP colleagues on the record in opposing granting women the right to control their own bodies. Go for it, Mr. Leader.

Justice Ginsburg would be proud

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

political news

Way to go, Ohio GOP!

Donald J. Trump endorsed a guy who once pounded him for this and that. The endorsee, J.D. Vance, on Tuesday won the Ohio Republican Party primary vote for U.S. Senate.

Get this, though. Trump attended a rally on primary election eve and forgot the guy’s name. He stood there in front of the cheering mob and fluffed Vance’s name on at least two occasions.

Still, Vance won the GOP nomination.

I don’t know what that means, other than Ohio Republican voters must be, um, as lame-brained as their hero. Eek!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

GOP could doom itself

Were I to rub a crystal ball and seek to predict the outcome of the 2022 midterm election, I might come up with …

The notion that the Republican Party is going to nominate enough certifiable fruitcakes to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Take the leading GOP candidate for Arizona governor, Kari Lake, as one example.

The nimrod whom GOP voters might nominate has declared that she won’t recognize President Biden as being legitimately elected in 2020. She will work to overturn her state’s electoral result and hand the victory in Arizona to the loon Biden defeated for the presidency.

Therein might lie Democrats’ best chance to keep control of government. That is if Republicans manage to nominate similarly demented candidates for the U.S. House and Senate this year.

Hey, it can happen.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Greene vs. Boebert? Wow!

What in the … ? Do you mean to suggest there might be trouble in Looney Tunes Land with two right-wing nut jobs — Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert — at each other’s throats?

Get a load of it. Greene, R-Ga., and Boebert, R-Colo., apparently aren’t quite the QAnon soul sisters many of us outsiders perceived them to be.

It appears Boebert detests being associated with Greene. The two freshman Republican congresswoman got into a heated exchange over Greene’s recent appearance before a white supremacist organization, which I guess didn’t go down well with Boebert.

Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene got into such a heated confrontation that another lawmaker had to step in to intervene: report (yahoo.com)

They both belong to the right-wing Freedom Caucus. Boebert reportedly is seen more as a “team player” than Greene, who I understand tends seek headlines on our own. Hey, she’s pretty good at that, you know?

I don’t really give a rat’s rear end about these two individuals, other than I want them defeated, never to darken Congress’s door again.

I just find it strangely satisfying to know about the fracture within the GOP loony bin caucus.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

How bad will it get?

Karl Rove, the man once known derisively as “George W. Bush’s brain,” has laid out what he believes will occur when they count the midterm election ballots in November.

He writes in the Wall Street Journal, “Even Democratic strategists now admit the midterms will be disastrous for their party. “It’s going to be a terrible cycle for Democrats,” Doug Sosnik, one of the party’s best grand strategists, recently told the New York Times. The question is how big the calamity will be. A freeway pileup? Category 5 hurricane? Or Krakatoa with all the attendant consequences?

I do not intend to question the sincerity of Sosnik’s assertion, as reported by Rove, but it kind of begs a question that’s been rattling around my brain for the past few weeks.

It goes like this: Might it be even remotely possible that Democratic strategists are laying out a worst-case scenario with a glimmer of hope that if their losses are less than expected that they can claim a sort of moral victory?

Or, there’s this: Is it possible that the gloom-doom-despair prognosis is hiding some positive outcome, that Democrats actually could retain control of one of the congressional chambers?

I realize that politics can be a cynical game. Politicians and their hired guns — be they Democrat or Republican — look for any angle they can find to suit their agenda.

Since I am perched in the cheap seats out here in Flyover Country, I am nowhere close to the heartbeat of the nation’s political center. I am just wondering whether there could be a bit of gamesmanship being played.

These things do happen. I am just sayin’, man.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

We are sinking ever lower

Have we really devolved into a society that applauds a candidate who says a medical official hired to guide the nation out of a killer pandemic should be stood in front of a firing squad and executed?

Never mind. I know the answer. It is yes. It sickens me to my core.

John Benett is chair of the Oklahoma Republican Party. He told a cheering crowd that Dr. Anthony Fauci should be shot by a firing squad. The worst part? The crowd cheered and clapped at the congressional candidate’s hideous message!

The Huffington Post reported:

“We’re fighting communist Democrats, establishment RINOs!” Bennett ranted in a video that Right Wing Watch shared online Tuesday and has now gone viral.

“We’re fighting against a system that stole the election in 2020 and nobody had been held accountable,” he continued, parroting former President Donald Trump’s baseless election fraud claims. “We’re in a war with bureaucrats that have forced vaccine mandates on us, mask mandates on us.”

Oh my goodness.

“In a war”? Is this clown serious? Yeah. He is.

Republicans Cheer As Congressional Candidate Demands Fauci’s Execution By Firing Squad (msn.com)

There is not a single thing I can say that is going to sink into the thick skulls of those who buy into that bullsh**.  I am left only to condemn in the strongest terms possible the kind of hateful demagoguery that has become the norm within what used to be known as a great political party.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news

Condemned woman might get a new trial

It surely isn’t every day that someone convicted of a capital crime wins bipartisan support in her quest for a possible new trial to see if the individual is truly guilty of the crime for which the state has leveled a charge.

Melissa Lucio is that rare case.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals today blocked her scheduled execution in a move that has drawn widespread praise across the vast political landscape. Republicans and Democrats alike are hailing the CCA’s decision, given that the state’s highest criminal appellate court isn’t known as being “defendant-friendly” in its handling of these matters.

What’s more, one of the legislators most adamantly in Lucio’s corner happens to be a Republican from Plano, state Rep. Jeff Leach, who next year will become my state representative in the Texas Legislature. OK, that last part doesn’t mean a damn thing, other than my recognition of Leach’s possible impact on my life.

Leach told Lucio the court had granted her the stay, prompting her to cry out and, yes, to cry.

Why the stay?

A court convicted Lucio in 2008 of killing her 2-year-old daughter, Mariah Alvarez, who had fallen down some stairs. The little girl went to sleep a couple of days later and never awoke.

Lucio’s trial reportedly was fraught with vague testimony from key witnesses. The defense team reportedly was denied access to information acquired by state prosecutors. Lucio, of course, denied harming her daughter.

The defendant has drawn support on both sides of the political aisle, an event I find to be remarkable, given the great divide that exists in this state, with liberals seen as “soft” on crime and conservatives seen as those who want to “throw the book” and everything else at criminal defendants.

Melissa Lucio’s execution halted by Texas Court of Criminal Appeals | The Texas Tribune

And so, does Lucio deserve a new trial? It looks as though there well could be enough doubt cast on her conviction to warrant a judicial do-over.

I mean, if the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals — inhabited entirely by Republican judges — thinks there is merit to those questions, then by all means let’s try this case again … and do it right!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

 

Uncategorized

Election wasn’t ‘stolen’

David Perdue began a debate in Georgia by declaring that the 2020 presidential race was “rigged” and “stolen” from the idiot who lost the contest.

Oh, then he said his own race for re-election to the U.S. Senate was stolen, too.

Sigh …

Perdue once served in the Senate until Jon Ossoff defeated him. He now says “the evidence is compelling” that he and Donald Trump were victims of “theft” from “widespread voter fraud” in Georgia.

No. He wasn’t. Neither was Trump.

The “compelling” evidence? We still have seen nothing.

The Big Lie needs to be squashed.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump

Remember that this guy still got elected

Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin have written a book that lays bare even more of the reprehensible examples of how Donald Trump conducted himself as president of the United States.

It is titled “This Will Not Pass.” We have learned a lot of its contents already. How Trump sought help to overturn the 2020 election and how he demanded that governors flatter him and “ask nicely” for federal aid to help them cope with natural disasters.

The book by two seasoned New York Times reporters is just the latest in a string of tell-all tales about life working in the Trump administration. It ain’t pretty, man.

Let us remember something, though, as we ponder whether any of this might forestall a Trump for the presidency a third time in 2024. It is that this disgusting excuse for a human being managed to get elected POTUS in 2016 after:

  • Disparaging a war hero and declaring that he preferred warriors who “aren’t captured.”
  • Mocking a New York Times reporter’s disability.
  • Admitting in an interview that he grabbed women by their genitalia.
  • Admitting to committing adultery on his first two wives and then paying a woman hush money to keep quiet on a tryst he had while married to his third wife — who had just given birth to the couple’s son.
  • Mocking a Muslim Gold Star couple who had the temerity to criticize him during the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

Just so we’re clear. I am not at all convinced that The Donald is even going to run for POTUS in ’24. I see evidence that his support among actual Republicans is eroding. He is making bizarro endorsements of candidates, picking individuals on the basis of their fan appeal and not on any policy pronouncements.

I just want to caution everyone — and I have to remind myself of this, too — against throwing dirt on the former A**hole in Chief’s face.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com