Tag Archives: GOP

national news, political news

What’s happening to GOP?

You may choose to believe or disbelieve what I am about to say; it matters not one bit to me, but I just feel the need to ask: What in the world is happening to the Republican Party.

I do not detest all Republicans. Some of my better friends belong to that political party. FYI, my actual “best friends,” and I don’t count many of them, do not belong to the once-great party. We are friends for reasons that have nothing to do with politics.

I count many Republicans among those with whom I have good relationships. They are healthy. Many of my GOP friends happen to be active politicians. Some of them are conservative pols. Others of them are more moderate. One of them, a Texas state senator from Amarillo, is leaving the Legislature at the end of the year and I consider Kel Seliger’s departure a huge loss for the party.

Which brings me to the point. The departure of so many moderate Republican pols suggests to me that the nut-job, fruitcake, Donald Trump cultists are seizing control of the party that once stood for limited government, fiscal responsibility, equal rights for all Americans has become a cabal of cult followers who adhere to the whims and machinations of an individual. You know about whom I am referring, right?

Moderate GOP pols are fleeing Congress. They are leaving state legislatures. My fear is that they are being replaced in these important offices by goofballs and nut jobs, slobbering QAnon followers and those who adhere to The Big Lie perpetuated by the Liar in Chief.

This is a dark time in American political history.

I am going to keep looking for the light.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news, political news

Van Taylor a RINO? Wow!

Believe it or not, I am going to come to the defense of U.S. Rep. Van Taylor, a Plano Republican who is running for a third term as my congressman from the Third Congressional District of North Texas.

You see, a far-right wing outfit based in Dublin, Ohio, has targeted Taylor, calling him a RINO, the acronym that stands for Republican In Name Only. This nut job outfit, which calls itself RINOreckoning,org, says Taylor voted with Democrats too many times in his second term.

So, this group of wackos wants Taylor tossed out. RINOreckoning doesn’t recommend a successor; it just calls Taylor a bunch of names and suggests that his bipartisan outreach betrays “real Republicanism.” What utter bullsh**!

I’ll be straight with you: I am not a big Van Taylor fan. I likely will vote for the Democratic challenger this fall. However, one of the few bright spots in Taylor’s still-brief congressional career has been his willingness to reach for Democrats in Congress to work on bipartisan solutions. It has earned him a bit of a positive reputation among many of his colleagues.

There’s one half-truth I want to mention specifically in this anti-RINO screed I saw online. It chastises Taylor for voting in favor of an independent commission proposed by Democratic U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to look into the 1/6 insurrection. The measure never got out of the Senate; it died a quiet death in the other chamber.

What these right-wing fruitcakes don’t dare mention is that Taylor voted against creation of the select committee that Pelosi formed as an alternative to the independent commission. The RINO hunters don’t say a word about that, which of course is understandable as it argues the liars’ half-baked narrative.

Oh, and then there’s this one: It says that Taylor sided with “Liberal Liz Cheney.” Rep. Cheney a liberal? Are they fu**ing serious?

Take a look at the website:

Rino Reckoning

This outfit clearly is aligned with the QAnon wing of the GOP. Its message is as dangerous as, say, the kind of crap that flows from Donald Trump’s pie hole about the “rigged 2020 election” and the “widespread voter fraud” that elected Joe Biden. Spoiler alert: There was no widespread voter fraud, and the 2020 election was the most secure in U.S. political history.

The Dallas Morning News noted this about Taylor in its summary of editorial board recommendations for the upcoming midterm election: Taylor, 49, a businessman and Marine veteran in his second term in Congress, has demonstrated deeply conservative values dating back to his years as a member of the Texas House and Senate. He has a reputation as one of Congress’ most engaged and responsive members to his constituents.

There really is much to admire about Rep. Taylor. He served as a Marine officer in Afghanistan, fighting to protect the free-speech rights of fruitcakes who populate RINOreckoning.org. I likely won’t cast my vote for Congressman Taylor. However, he deserves better than to be mischaracterized in this manner by a dangerous group of right-wing outliers.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

DC riot, national news, political news

Mitch uses the ‘I-word’

How about that Mitch McConnell, invoking what I will call the “I-word” in describing what took place on 1/6? He has called it a “violent insurrection” that Donald Trump incited with his fiery “take-back-the-government” rhetoric.

Well … the Senate Republican leader has found his long-lost voice.

He has rebuked the Republican National Committee for censuring two GOP House members — Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — for serving on the select committee examining the 1/6 riot.

McConnell rebukes RNC, calls Jan. 6 ‘violent insurrection’ (msn.com)

“It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next,” McConnell said Tuesday.  Yes, i damn sure was all of that, Sen. McConnell.

You said so in an eloquent Senate floor speech a few weeks after the riot. Then you back away from all of that. You continued to support Donald Trump’s position as the leader of the GOP. Now, though, Trump has insulted McConnell perhaps once or twice too often.

I want McConnell to stand firm in his description of what took place and why it occurred. A mob of traitors stormed the Capitol Building seeking to overturn a fair election; they did so at the urging of Donald Trump.

The ex-Liar in Chief needs to be held accountable. The men and women charged with acting violently need to be prosecuted.

What’s more, Mitch McConnell and other Republican politicians need to stand for the rule of law.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

State news

Watch for phony heroics among GOP candidates

Clearly it has become open season on the Joe Biden administration among Texas Republican candidates for public office. They all seem intent on positioning themselves as the polar opposites of the Democratic president … even if the office they seek has little to do with anything related to federal policy.

The Texas comptroller of public accounts provides an interesting example of what I am talking about.

The GOP incumbent Glenn Hegar is running a TV ad in which he declares that he is going to fight the Biden administration over protecting our southern border. How is he going to do that?

Hegar’s ad proclaims that he spent $3 billion on border security. I was wondering about an issue related to that bit of braggadocio: Does the comptroller have the discretionary authority to just send $3 billion in that manner, or must he do what the Legislature and the governor tell him to do?

I asked someone who covers state government extensively about that matter. He responded that government agencies have limited authority in some cases to exercise discretion in spending money, but the border money to which Hegar referred isn’t one of them. I have posed the question to the public information officer for the comptroller’s office and haven’t heard back from him.

I am left to wonder whether Hegar is misrepresenting his authority on that border security issue so he can muster up some anti-President Biden anger among Republican primary voters.

I will report back to you the response I get from the comptroller’s media flack.

Meantime, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the state’s top bean counter — Glenn Hegar — might be, um, overstating his role in “keeping Texans safe from illegal immigrants.”

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

 

DC riot

Law and order party? Hah!

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There once was a time when Republicans across the country were proud of their party’s stand in support of police officers, police agencies and their quest to enforce the law in an orderly society.

Law and order? That was the Republican mantra. That was then. These days? This is the party that has just issued a censure punishing two GOP members of Congress and whose chairwoman has declared that the 1/6 riot on Capitol Hill was a demonstration of “legitimate political discourse.” The censured lawmakers — Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger — were slapped down because they are serving on a committee that seeks the truth and stands for the rule of law.

Oh, I now shall add that the treasonous insurrectionists attacked Capitol Police officers on Capitol Hill, injuring several of them, killing one of them.

Has the Republican National Committee condemned that act? Has it censured the rioters? Has it backed the congressional committee that seeks to find the truth behind what led to the riot, what happened during the event and how to prevent future events from occurring.

I damn near tossed something at the TV set this morning when I heard GOP Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas accuse Democrats of “politicizing” the riot of 1/6. Good ever-lovin’ God in heaven! The riot was a hideous political act that was aimed at stopping the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

What’s more, the traitors who stormed the Capitol Building trampled over police officers whose duty was to protect the members of Congress who were targeted by the mob!

Why in the name of enforcing the law don’t Republicans in Congress stand up for those men and women and against the traitors who sought to do them harm?

Law and order party? My rear end!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Honest Abe: unelectable

This is the face of an unelectable politician and, no, it is not because he isn’t particularly “telegenic.” It is because his ideas within his beloved Republican Party have become grist for the trash heap.

Consider the very notion that the man I consider to be our nation’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, is no longer the voice and face of a party that once called itself “The Party of Lincoln.” President Lincoln held the nation together during its darkest period, during the time when Americans fought each other over slavery and that thing one side referred to as “states’ rights.”

Then, as the Civil War drew to a close and as President Lincoln delivered his second inaugural speech after winning re-election in 1864, he said he would bind the wounds that divided us, that he would proceed with “malice toward none and charity for all.” An assassin struck a month later and denied the president the chance to deliver on his promise.

The party under which he ran for president twice has become something the president wouldn’t recognize. He certainly would not condone the tone it has taken in recent years. It has been hijacked and twisted into a form that bears no resemblance to the party of the so-called “big tent.”

Donald John Trump’s control over the party starting with the 2016 GOP presidential primary campaign has taken it on a destructive course. It’s not that the party is destroying itself. It is that the ideas it promotes has gained new followers who are wedded to the hideous notions espoused by its leader.

The Grand Old Party has become a cult whose followers are infiltrating the ranks of candidates throughout Congress and into statehouses, county courthouses and even into ostensibly non-partisan city halls and school board meeting rooms.

Imagine a Republican with the chops of Abraham Lincoln seeking public office today. Imagine how the 16th president himself would fare were he to become a candidate.

Abraham Lincoln likely couldn’t be elected as a Republican because his party would lack the good sense to nominate him in the first place. The future of civil discourse and debate in this country deserves better than what lies ahead.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Trump ‘shouldn’t lead the GOP’

Asa Hutchinson has just become persona non grata in the cult-following world of Donald J. Trump. Why? Because the Republican Arkansas governor spoke the blunt truth about Trump’s ability to lead his party, let alone to become president of the United States of America.

God forbid the latter from occurring.

Hutchinson leads the Republican Governors Association and he said this weekend that Trump is unfit for the office he once held. “I do not believe Trump is the one to lead our party and our country again, as president,” Hutchinson told Insider on the sidelines of the NGA Winter Meeting in Washington, DC.

He was responding, apparently, to a video that’s gone viral in which Trump declares himself to be the “45th and 47th president.” Good gawd.

Hutchinson now is likely to become a target of the Trump cultists/wackos/idiots who cling to the notion that the former Idiot in Chief is going to seek the highest office … yet again.

In truth, though, Gov. Hutchinson is speaking realistically about the absolute worthlessness that Donald Trump brings to any reasonable or rational debate that needs to occur.

Donald Trump should not lead the country again, says the Republican leader of the National Governors Association (msn.com)

His message will pass through the vacuous skulls of millions of Trumpkins, if you’ll pardon the pithy reference, like sh** through the proverbial goose.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news, State news

You tell ’em, Kel

Kel Seliger’s status as a lame-duck Texas state senator appears to have given the veteran Republican legislator some gumption as he has delivered a harsh reality to the state’s efforts at redrawing its legislative districts.

Seliger, who hails from Amarillo, said in a court deposition that the GOP-controlled Legislature broke the law in redrawing the boundaries in Senate District 10. “Having participated in the 2011 and 2013 Senate Select Redistricting Committee proceedings and having read the prior federal court decision regarding SD10, it was obvious to me that the renewed effort to dismantle SD 10 violated the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution,” Seliger said in his remarks to the court.

According to the Texas Tribune: Under the map passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, some Black and Hispanic populations previously in District 10 were split into two other districts with majority-white electorates. The Black and Hispanic voters who remain in the newly drawn District 10, in urban areas of south Fort Worth, were lumped in with several rural, mostly white counties to the south and west that drive up the district’s population of white eligible voters while diminishing the number of voters of color.

GOP Sen. Kel Seliger says Texas violated federal voting rights law | The Texas Tribune

Well … isn’t that what many critics of the Legislature have alleged against Republicans who control the body?

Now we have one of the Legislature’s top GOP senators saying that he agrees with the critics. Is that what I am reading? I believe that’s the case.

To which I say only that it would have been good to hear such candor coming when Sen. Seliger was still in the thick of the fight. As it stands now, he is on the sidelines and is heading for the exit at the end of the year.

I say this as a friend of the senator. I consider him to have been an effective representative for the Texas Panhandle, where I lived for more than two decades. Seliger and I go back a while and I have long admired him for his independent streak and his pluck while serving in the Senate.

I mean, any guy who can piss off fellow Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, as Seliger has done, is OK in my book.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

GOP = insanity

The Republican Party has gone insane. It should be declared incompetent to stand up to public scrutiny. It needs to be stripped down, dismantled, reassembled and reintroduced to the American political mainstream.

I say this as a good-government progressive who tilts toward the Democratic Party. I want the Republican Party to become the Grand Old Party, the Party of Lincoln and the party of inclusion and the so-called “big tent.”

Goodness, the party’s big tent now has become a haven for fruitcakes, insurrectionists, dangerous demagogues and, yes, those with treasonous instincts.

To think that the Republican Party would continue to align itself with a twice-impeached POTUS who continues to foment The Big Lie about alleged voter fraud is to consign the once-great political party to the scrap heap of history. I hope that is where the former POTUS is headed as well. Time will determine his Earthly fate.

The reason for my wanting a strong Republican Party is simple. I want the party to exist as a legitimate, viable political institution to challenge Democrats intelligently and with sane reason. What we have now is a party wedded to the fallacy that an insurrection that occurred in January 2021 was nothing more than a protest that got out of control. Oh, no. It was much worse than that. Republican congressional leaders keep denying what the entire world witnessed on 1/6.

This is the stuff of insanity. It must be excised from the Republican Party. If it takes a total dismembering of the party, then so be it.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Biden down, far from out

Listen up, Joe Biden haters. The president is down, to be sure. Do not, though, start ringing the death knell over the presidency of the man who fought for more than 30 years to attain the highest office in the land.

I acknowledge fully that President Biden has endured a rough first year. Let me remind everyone of a couple of recent historical events.

Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 and also had a bad first year. Yes, he was shot and nearly killed three months into the presidency. Then the Republican Party got drubbed in the 1982 midterm election. President Reagan, though, got re-elected in 1984 in a smashing 49-state landslide. That’s one.

Bill Clinton became president in 1993. He, too, suffered a rough first year. Republicans seized control of Congress in 1994. Ah, but then President Clinton cruised to re-election in 1996. That’s two.

Barack Obama assumed office in 2009. He set out to pass the Affordable Care Act; Congress obliged. Then Democrats got what Obama described as a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterm election. President Obama then went on to win re-election in 2012.

I know we have had plenty of one-term presidents who never got it together. George H.W. Bush fell from a 90% approval rating to losing his re-election effort in 1992; Jimmy Carter endured inflation and a general feeling of disgust and lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan in 1980; Donald Trump … well, you know what happened there.

President Biden is only in the “first quarter” of a long game, writes Paul Brandus in USA Today. There’s a way out of the morass, Brandus writes: The president’s biggest mistake has surprised me. He hasn’t spent enough time talking up last year’s economic achievements. “America’s economy improved more in Joe Biden’s first 12 months than any president during the past 50 years,” Bloomberg reported last month, “notwithstanding the contrary media narrative contributing to dour public opinion.”

Joe Biden has had a rocky year in office. But, folks, this is only the first quarter. (yahoo.com)

And so it might go moving ahead into the next year and the year after that. We still have that pandemic. It still is making people sick. We keep hearing that the end is in sight. Maybe. We hope.

I am going to stand with the president as he keeps fighting for the country.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com