Tag Archives: Joe Biden

medical news

GOP resists POTUS’s effort to keep us safe? Really?

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Did anyone out there ever believe we would see politicians rise up against a presidential decree that seeks to keep all Americans safe from a killer pandemic virus?

If you did, then you are the smartest individuals in all of human history.

I never saw it. Then again, I can be a dim bulb at times … but that’s not the point.

President Biden has issued a stern executive order aimed at private businesses and all federal employees. He insists that employees and federal workers get vaccinated. No debate on it, he said. Companies that do business with the feds must ensure their employees are vaccinated, the president said.

This is a comprehensive effort by our head of state that we no longer will tolerate a pandemic that is caused by those who are unvaccinated against the COVID-19 virus. The overwhelming majority of those who are being hospitalized in this moment are those who haven’t been inoculated against the virus. President Biden said “enough is enough,” or words to that effect.

Now, though, we hear from Republican governors vowing to fight like hell against any effort from the president to do the right thing, which aims to protect all Americans against potential death.

Why are these governors resisting? Oh, I almost forgot. They adhere to the weird whims of the 45th POTUS, the moron who sold us all out by downplaying the severity of the pandemic when it first started killing Americans in late 2019.

Man, oh man. We live in the strangest political climate I ever have seen. It’s weirder than the late 1960s and the Vietnam War protests; or the mid-1970s and the Watergate scandal.

Not only has the former POTUS fomented the Big (damn) Lie about phony vote fraud in the 2020 presidential election. He has persuaded GOP governors that it’s all right to issue orders that result in the sickening and the death of Americans.

Now these nitwits are challenging President Biden’s effort to rid us of this pandemic.

Astonishing.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Joe Biden

Biden pledges to save lives

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President Biden today took on the role of commander in chief in our nation’s fight against a killer virus.

The president has issued an order that every federal employee shall be vaccinated against the virus. Moreover, he said that every private company that does business with the federal government will have its employees vaccinated. He signed an executive order and declared that he now is going to act like a wartime president in the fight against the COVID-19 virus and its assorted variants.

This is what presidents need to do!

Biden’s immediate predecessor as POTUS once famously — and wisely — declared that he saw himself as a “wartime president” when the pandemic took root. The problem, though, is that he didn’t follow through on the declaration. He didn’t walk the wartime walk.

President Biden is demonstrating that he understands the power of his office and the overwhelming priority he must place in protecting the health and the lives of Americans.

We have lost more than 600,000 of our fellow citizens to the virus. It has stricken more than 40 million of us.

Biden’s order figures to affect as many as 80 million Americans who aren’t currently vaccinated. Yes, there might be some out there who cannot take the vaccine on religious grounds. I understand that resistance. I don’t agree with it, but I accept that others have such sincere religious belief.

However, the obstinance being shown by those who want to make some sort of hare-brained political statement about the vaccine is ridiculous on its face.

The Hill reports:

A senior administration official told reporters that under a new executive order to be announced by the president, federal employees will have 75 days to be fully vaccinated, with limited exemptions for religious or medical reasons. There will be no testing option. The order will cover about 100 million workers. 

“It’s simple; if you want to work for the federal government, you must be vaccinated. If you want to do business with the government, you must vaccinate your workforce,” the official said.

Biden to require COVID-19 vaccines, tests for millions of private workers | TheHill

I stand with the president.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

DC riot, national news

Well … how should this end up?

The following comes from Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

It states: No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may be a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Let’s see now. How is this going to play out?

A House of Representatives select committee is in the process of rounding up phone records of members of Congress or any other communication they might have had with White House officials on Jan. 6. Oh, that was the date of the insurrection that the former POTUS sought to incite, the one that sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

A number of those messages apparently involve Republicans who supported POTUS 45’s phony allegation of “widespread voter fraud.” Now, were they culpable in inciting the riot that resulted in the deaths of police officers and others? Or did their acquiescence contribute to the mayhem that occurred on Capitol Hill on 1/6?

You know who some of them are, right? GOP Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Matt Gaetz of Florida and Jim Jordan of Ohio … just to name five of ’em!

Most of us know the truth about the election, that President Biden won it fairly, squarely and legally. We also know what we witnessed on 1/6, the cursing, screaming, the battering administered by the terrorists who stormed into the Capitol Building.

The question of the day, in this context, appears to be this: If the select panel determines that members of Congress aided and gave “comfort to the enemies thereof,” will Congress have the courage and commitment to the oath they all took to remove them from the halls of power?

I hope they will. I fear they won’t.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

International news

Afghanistan: Will it get better?

A young friend of ours came over this afternoon to wish us a happy 50th anniversary.

We sat in the living room and he turned back to face me and asked: What do you think about Afghanistan?  He meant the withdrawal, of course, which he described as a “mess.”

I didn’t know quite how to respond. I did not — I do not still — want to offend our young neighbor; he is too sweet of a young man and I don’t want to end up on his “bad side.”

All I could come up with was that the commander in chief, President Biden, had no choice but to end a war that had dragged on for two decades. “To what end does he stay in the fight?” I asked. I reminded our young friend that we had fought there for more than two decades. Do they keep fighting?

My friend smiled. We both changed the subject.

The inglorious end to an inglorious war is bound to bring friends to a rhetorical dead end when the subject comes up. My young friend and I agreed that it will take time for this post-Afghan War period to sort itself out.

I will continue to hope for the best outcome, which I hope means we can keep our eyes and ears dialed in to the nth degree and listen and look for any signs of trouble from the Taliban or any terrorist organization that seeks to do us harm.

My hope, then, is that we keep the drones armed and ready to strike.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

International news

Putin has it right, strange as that seems

Leave it to Russian strongman/dictator/killer Vladimir Putin to put our Afghan War effort into some sort of semi-reasonable and rational perspective.

“The result is one tragedy, one loss… American troops were present in this region, and for twenty years they tried to civilize people, and to introduce their own norms and standards of life in the broadest sense… including in the political organization of society,” Putin said. “The result is zero, if not to say that it is negative.”

He should know. Putin was a big-time spymaster while Russia was known as the Soviet Union, and during the time the Soviet Union sent troops into Afghanistan to seek to defeat those who opposed the Marxist regime that ran the country in the1980s.

Putin: U.S. Has Nothing, “Zilch” To Show For 20 Years Of Occupation Of Afghanistan | Video | RealClearPolitics

The communists fared no better than our forces did during the 20 years Americans fought there.

Which to my way of thinking tells me that President Biden made the right call when he ended our military engagement.

Hmm. Imagine that. President Biden and Vlad Putin agreeing on something. Who knew?

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news, Uncategorized

Sen. Manchin is making me crazy

U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin seems to know how powerful he is, being an influential “moderate Democratic member” of the Senate.

He is flexing his political muscle with glee.

Manchin speaks in favor of the infrastructure plan that puts a gleam in President Biden’s eye … and now he says Congress and the president need to “pause” on the effort to spend $3.5 trillion to fix our nation’s roads, bridges, rails, airports, ship channels, Internet and other matters.

Why? Because it’s too costly. Manchin, the cagey West Virginian, now stands as the one senator who can put the whole damn thing into dire jeopardy.

Which it is, Sen. Manchin? It looks to me, sitting out here in the peanut gallery, that Manchin is using his muscle to satisfy a politician’s ego.

That would be his own.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

military news

Rumor hot spots keep flaring

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As the United States moves into a post-war world now that it has pulled out of Afghanistan, the Biden administration is left to extinguish right-wing-generated rumor-mill hot spots.

Such as the one about us supposedly leaving $83 billion worth of military equipment for the Taliban to use, possibly against Americans or our allies.

The rumor is false.

That won’t stem the fake news coming from the mouths of conservative politicians and media personalities. They keep harping on the equipment left behind. They suggest that the Taliban is now the second-best equipped military force in the world — behind the U.S. of A.

According to The Associated Press:

Their $85 billion figure resembles a number from a July 30 quarterly report from SIGAR, which outlined that the U.S. has invested about $83 billion to build, train and equip Afghan security forces since 2001.

Yet that funding included troop pay, training, operations and infrastructure along with equipment and transportation over two decades, according to SIGAR reports and Dan Grazier, a defense policy analyst at the Project on Government Oversight.

“We did spend well over $80 billion in assistance to the Afghan security forces,” Grazier said. “But that’s not all equipment costs.”

In fact, only about $18 billion of that sum went toward equipping Afghan forces between 2002 and 2018, a June 2019 SIGAR report showed.

FACT FOCUS: Trump, others wrong on US gear left with Taliban (msn.com)

Is that the end of it? Hardly. It only goes to underscore the public-relations battle that awaits the Biden team as it tries to keep this withdrawal in its proper perspective.

national news

Political snipers taking pot shots

The political sniper squad is at it hot and heavy.

They are suggesting that President Biden will be a one-termer. That his “performance” in announcing the U.S. withdrawal from the Afghan field of battle has sealed his political fate. They suggest the voters have lost “confidence” in his leadership.

Hmm. Allow me this pithy response: Bullsh**!

The president ended an unwinnable war. Our armed forces executed the evacuation of more than 100,000 Americans and Afghan allies.

We fought al-Qaeda for two decades. We killed the monstrous mastermind behind the 9/11 attack — which is why we went to war in the first place. The Taliban had revived itself long before Joe Biden took office. President Biden’s predecessor negotiated a withdrawal with the Taliban; he set a May 1 evac date, but he lost re-election in November.

President Biden was dealt a bad hand when he took office. Dare I mention, too, that his predecessor provided him with zero national security intelligence because, um, he is continuing to insist that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him?

So, for the first time in two decades, we have no Americans on a battlefield anywhere on Earth.

I could swear as well that I heard President Biden declare his intention to hold the Taliban accountable for the pledges they made in ensuring safe passage for any American still in Afghanistan who wants out. I also heard him say our intelligence forces will be on the highest alert possible for any potential terror threat that may surface in Afghanistan … or anywhere else in the world.

Lost confidence? This drama has yet to play out fully.

We have a pandemic that well could be eliminated in the months ahead. And, oh yes, our economy continues to produce jobs at a record-breaking rate.

All that said, I am not going to join the amen chorus that suggests that Joe Biden tenure as president is toast.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

medical news

Appreciating a POTUS who stays out of the way

The coronavirus pandemic has gripped two presidencies hard, which brings me to this thought.

The first president snagged by the pandemic, No. 45, kept stepping into the spotlight and talked over the advice we were getting from the experts he had brought in ostensibly to “assist” him in fighting the killer virus.

He hired a first-rate team. Then he refused to let them do their job, which was brief the public on what they know and how to advise us on dealing with the peril.

The next president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., aka No. 46, has stayed the hell out of the way. He kept a couple of his predecessor’s key medical advisers. President Biden has brought in some experts of his choosing.

The refreshing and, frankly, encouraging aspect of the current president’s modus operandi is that he is letting the experts talk directly to us. He isn’t stepping on their lines. He is not contradicting them. Biden is not hurling epithets, such as “idiot” and “loser” at them.

Yes, we are experiencing a surge in infection. A variant has emerged that has dodged its way out of medicine’s best strategies to deal with it. Children have become a major concern.

However, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, is letting the experts do what they do better than anyone else, which is convey information we need and provide counsel to the nation in need of some level of expertise.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

International news

It’s over … finally!

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Say whatever you wish about the end of the Afghan War.

That we can declare an end to our fighting there is in itself a moment worth saluting. Our longest war came to an end this morning when the last C-17 transport jet took off from Kabul airport, cleared Afghan air space and we declared an end to our evacuation of all U.S. citizens and allies who wanted out.

I have said since we went to war in Afghanistan 20 years ago that there could be no way for us to “declare victory” in the way we were able to do, say, at the end of World War II. Our military brass accepted the terms of surrender of enemy forces in 1945; the fighting stopped and we danced in the streets from coast to coast.

There would be no such celebration after the Korean War, certainly not after the Vietnam War, nor after this war.

Indeed, our war against terrorism is likely to persist, but without the hackneyed “boots on the ground” fighting a cunning enemy.

I will stand with President Biden’s decision to end this war. He knew what his three presidential predecessors — George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama and Donald J. Trump — couldn’t understand. It was time to end a war that had gone badly not long after it started in the wake of the 9/11 attack.

President Bush went to war after 9/11 intending to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban government. He succeeded. He vowed to get the men responsible for the attack on New York and Washington. That task fell eventually to Obama’s national security team that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011. Trump’s team got the leader of the Islamic State.

One thing remained constant. The Afghan War kept on going.

Joe Biden took over in January. He assessed the return on the investment we were getting in Afghanistan and determined it was time to end it. Now! So … he did.

Those who write the history of this big day will need time to evaluate all the nuance attached to it. I am going venture out on that limb and presume that history will look more kindly than President Biden’s critics are viewing this landmark day in real time.

It’s over. Thank God in heaven!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com