Tag Archives: Joe Biden

medical news

‘Pandemic of unvaccinated’

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

No one — and I mean not a single sane human being — wants to welcome this latest medical nightmare.

Which is that COVID-19 cases are on the increase, as are hospitalizations and, oh yeah, deaths from the worldwide pandemic.

Who’s responsible for this distressing turn of events? President Biden calls it the “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” That is a mantra repeated late this week by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Rachelle Wallensky.

Think of this for just a moment.

Those who dismiss the vaccines, who refuse to take them, who believe the foolishness being spread out there (that they turn bodies in magnets and plant the spores of Satan into our skulls) have contributed to this horrible new wave of infection and death.

CDC officials report the greatest spike in infection/hospitalization/death come from those parts of the country with the lowest vaccination rates. Those happen to be mostly in the southern part of the nation. Hmm. What does one make of that? Is there a political component to this horrible news? I happen to believe there is, but I’ll save that for another blog post.

Today I am concerned about my own family. Almost all of us are full vaccinated. The only one who hasn’t received the vaccine is our granddaughter, our 8-year-old. She will get hers soon.

But what does this mean for those of us who have been vaccinated? I keep hearing reports of fully vaccinated Americans being stricken by that delta variant COVID-19 strain that is knocking the stuffing out of us.

My wife and had not jettisoned our masks. We had them handy, partly for occasions such as what we are discussing today: a resurgence of the virus.

With that said, we’re donning our masks once again when we venture into public places with other human beings, many of whom do not bother with the masks. I don’t wish them ill, but I do wish they would follow our lead — my bride and me — and cover their faces while they mingle with the rest of us.

Oh, and the vaccines still are safe. They still are effective. They still are preventing needless headache, heartache and hysteria.

If only we all would heed the advice of highly trained medical professionals to get vaccinated.

national news

Biden calls out ‘Big Lie’

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By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

By all means, President Biden is correct to call out the Big Lie for what it is, an assault on democracy itself.

Moreover, the president is correct to lay the blame for this assault directly at the feet of the individual he defeated in the November presidential election.

Biden has joined the fight against Republican efforts to subvert Americans’ ability to vote. He also has joined the chorus of those of us out here who are appalled that POTUS 45 — who once swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution — has been leading the effort to undermine it … even while he served as president!

As The Hill reported:

Biden blasted efforts from Trump and others to sow doubt about the election months after it concluded, which have spurred action from GOP-led state legislatures to push new elections laws that would limit absentee voting and make it more difficult for certain groups to vote.

“It’s clear, for those who challenge the results or question the integrity of the election, no other election has ever been held under such scrutiny or such high standards. The Big Lie is just that, a Big Lie,” Biden said at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

Biden rips Trump’s ‘big lie’ in voting rights address | TheHill

By my understanding of the term, I consider the ex-POTUS’s effort to undermine a free and fair election to be an act of treason. He incited the Jan. 6 insurrection. He continues to tell the Big Lie about alleged voter fraud. He has broken state and federal laws by seeking to get state election officials to overturn balloting results.

And yet there are those among us Americans who want the ex-Liar in Chief to return to the White House? So help me, I don’t which factor angers me more: that the ex-POTUS keeps telling the Big Lie or the cultists continue to believe it … and act on it!

The duly elected POTUS has weighed in. I am glad to hear the stern language he has used to call the Big Lie what it is.

Joe Biden

A return to globalist view

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Let’s dispel a myth that has been propagated from the right and far right and made even more of an epithet in the U.S. presidential era that just recently passed into history.

I hereby declare that “globalism” is not a four-letter word. It is not a concept to be scorned, or feared, or ridiculed. It is the reality of the world that is changing damn near daily.

President Biden has launched — among many initiatives — a drive to return the country he leads to its post-World War II role as the world’s leading nation. However, we no longer can carry the load that comes with the role by ourselves.

Thus, a globalist view of international policy becomes essential.

Joe Biden’s presidential predecessor sought to craft a policy around an “America first” notion that too often was interpreted as an “America only” policy. POTUS 45 stiffed our allies. He coddled our foes. He spoke admiringly of dictators who exercised supreme control over people’s lives.

His policies appeared disjointed and chaotic.

President Biden’s world view appears to be a vastly more inclusive one that means the United States will restore its role as an international leader, but working in concert with other nations in search of shared goals.

Climate change is a global threat. So is terrorism. Same for the ever-present danger of armed conflict between and among nations.

These matters affect all of us and they require worldwide solutions. They require a globalist strategy to find solutions to common woes.

I am at a loss as to why, therefore, the term “globalism” became the same thing as a curse word. I welcome its return to the center of White House sessions led by a president who cares to study the complex issues that should be of dire concern to every human being on Earth.

International news

How can we declare victory?

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Twenty years ago, the United States decided to retaliate against the monsters who attacked us on 9/11.

I recall asking back then: How will we be able to know when to end this war against international terrorism? I also wondered how we can declare victory in a war that might seem to have no end.

Well, one aspect of that war is coming to a conclusion. President Biden has ordered all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, which had given safe haven to the terrorists who hit us on 9/11.

My questions remain the same today as they were when I posed them back in 2001. President Biden has made what amounts to an executive decision. The time has come, he said, to end the war. How does he know that? Well, he hasn’t explained that to us in terms that I have heard.

As for a victory declaration … there won’t be anything of the sort. We will see no “Mission Accomplished” banner hanging across the White House portico.

Indeed, the decision carries plenty of risk. The Taliban are on the march in Afghanistan. The future of women and children in that country now become tenuous. Biden’s predecessor as POTUS sought to negotiate with the terrorists; it didn’t go well for either side.

To be honest, it has been a haphazard withdrawal. There is no clear plan to offer safety for the thousands of contractors who worked with our forces during the Afghan War. I will retain plenty of hope that the president will come up with a plan to provide refuge for the translators and others who assisted our men and women on the battlefield.

However, a war against international terror cannot possibly signal that we have defeated the terrorists, that we have eliminated the threat. Indeed, the threat was always there, always lurking just below the surface, just beyond our consciousness.

It will be there even as we exit the field of battle in Afghanistan.

national news

Big Lie believers: lost cause

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

As far as I know no one in my circle of friends or my immediate family members is a believer in the Big Lie fomented by the disgraced former POTUS and his legion of fruitcakes.

Accordingly, that saves me from having to do what I believe is an impossible task: persuading them that the Big Lie about “rampant voter fraud” in the 2020 presidential election denigrates our cherished democratic process.

President Biden won that election. He won a free, fair and legal process. It was certified by the Electoral College. There is no evidence to suggest anything approaching vote fraud on a scale suggested by the former Liar in Chief.

However, it became abundantly clear to me months ago that there is no persuading the cultists who follow that nitwit of the folly of their desire to overturn what has been called “the most secure election in U.S. history.”

And it is folly to the nth degree. 

The cultists have swilled so much of the Kool-Aid offered by their disgraced leader that there is no turning back. Just as the former Imbecile in Chief has demonstrated, the cultists are incapable — or unwilling — to acknowledge they are wrong.

They call themselves “patriots.” They are traitors to the Constitution. To the government they purport to love. To our country and its grand tradition of electoral security.

I just am happy that no one in my circle of friends and acquaintances has taken any form of ownership of the Big Lie. Were they to do so and were I to find out about it, well … our relationship would end on the spot! Guaranteed!

Joe Biden

Biden: born for this job?

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

As I watch President Biden perform certain ceremonial functions — or even simply walk to and from the Oval Office or climb the steps leading onto Air Force One — I am struck by a recurring thought.

It is that this man has wanted the job he now holds for practically as long as he has been a national public figure. That goes back a good while.

He burst on the national scene as a freshman U.S. senator from Delaware. He won election in 1972; Biden was just 29 years of age when they declared him the winner, but would turn 30 (the minimum legal age to serve as a senator) between Election Day and his swearing in.

It is a fairly open secret that he lusted for higher office from almost the very beginning. Biden had to endure intense personal tragedy before taking office in 1973. His wife and infant daughter died in a car crash; his sons, Beau and Hunter, were gravely injured. They would recover.

Biden would remarry five years later.

He ran for president in 1988. Then he tasted humiliation when he got caught plagiarizing the remarks of a British politician, using the British pol’s life story as his own. Sen. Biden bowed out. He would run again for POTUS in 2008, but then quit after being steamrolled by the eventual Democratic nominee, Sen. Barack Obama — who then selected him to run with him as vice president. They won. They served two successful terms.

Now it’s the Joe Biden Show in the White House.

I just am filled with the strong sense that President Biden has been in a sort of training for half a century to do the job he is now doing.

My critique? He’s quite good at acting like a president. He sounds like a president. He behaves like a president.

After enduring the clumsiness, the chaos, the confusion and the cockamamie pronouncements of the president’s immediate predecessor, all this “normal” stuff seems quite, well … refreshing.

local news

CPAC loons stand out

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(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

If only this message could get to a former Texas congressman who retired at the beginning of the year and has been succeeded by a certifiable nut case.

I will post this rebuke anyway in the hope that Mac Thornberry sees what one of his former constituents thinks of the lunatic who took his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Ronny Jackson, a Republican (of course), attended the Conservative Political Action Conference festivities this weekend in Dallas. He then promptly made a case — from my vantage point — for why he should be stripped of his medical license.

The doc decided to offer a “diagnosis” of President Biden that, shall we say, was unflattering in the extreme. He asserted — without ever examining the president — that Joe Biden suffers from cognitive decline; that he has dementia; that he is unfit for office.

Jackson is now the 13th Congressional District representative in Congress. He tweets what he calls his brains out daily. Then he shows up at these right-wing feeding frenzies and says patently untrue things about the commander in chief.

Why mention Mac Thornberry? Well, I know Thornberry pretty well. I covered him while I worked as editorial page editor of the Amarillo Globe-News from 1995 until 2012. He took office the same week I reported for duty in the Panhandle. Not one time did I ever see or hear Thornberry use the kind of incendiary language that pours forth from Ronny Jackson’s pie hole. Did I agree with Thornberry? No. I didn’t. My point is that Thornberry conducted himself with a certain quiet dignity that clearly is missing in the loon who succeeded him.

Ronny Jackson, the former Navy rear admiral, is appealing to the same rabid fanatical base that supports the disgraced 45th POTUS. What’s more, he is offering medical diagnoses without any basis for them. For that reason alone this nut job needs to surrender his medical license.

Mac … are you out there? Speak to us! Tell us that your successor — not the current president — is unfit for his job!

media news, national news

Keep looking forward

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Your humble blogger — that would be me — feels the need to affirm a vow from an earlier post.

It is that I will not become fixated on the blathering, bellowing, bloviating and bombast coming from the mouth of the 45th president of the U.S. of A.

He is going to make a lot of noise for the rest of this year and perhaps even part of next year. He is going to repeat The Big Lie — that the 2020 election was stolen from him — in the hopes of energizing that fanatical and gullible base of dipsh**s who continue to adhere to his irrational rants.

I do not intend to comment on each rant as if he were still the POTUS. He isn’t. I don’t expect him to ascend to the nation’s highest office ever again. Hell, I don’t even expect him to be a serious candidate for the White House.

My only reason for commenting on him today is because the lunatic/imbecile/moron/con man/fraud continues to hold considerable sway among a large minority of American voters. For the life of me I don’t know why or how … but he does.

My intent is to keep looking forward.

I am acutely aware that some critics of this blog are going to suggest that I remain “fixated” on the 45th POTUS’s pronouncements. I will answer them with a plain no … I am not. 

I’ve already declared that I continue to endorse the presidency of Joe Biden. He has restored a sense of dignity and decorum to the high and exalted office he occupies. We are recovering from the pandemic. Our economy is revving up nicely. President Biden is re-establishing our nation’s role as a world leader. We are re-engaging in vital international partnerships that his predecessor stripped away because he wanted to “put America first,” whatever that meant.

This American patriot wants President Biden to succeed. I intend to keep my focus aimed toward the future.

Be advised on one point: I will not remain silent if POTUS 45 gets himself into deep legal trouble or if his machinations gin up the fanatical base to do things that mirror, say, the Jan. 6 insurrection.

My keen interest will lie in where the current U.S. president intends to lead us.

national news

Why support this POTUS?

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(Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

No one has asked for my opinion on this matter, but I feel the need to offer it anyway.

Pollsters overlook our household when asking Americans this question: Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of President Biden?

Here’s my answer in the event someone would ask: I have a highly favorable opinion of the leadership he is providing this country.

Do you want to know why? Here it is.

President Biden has restored dignity, decorum and a sense of normal behavior to the White House. He has signed a number of executive orders that have sought to reverse some bone-headed policies enacted by his predecessor. He has shown an ability to perform a sort of two-track function while working his Republican colleagues in Congress: He talks to ’em, listens to ’em and then if they don’t see things his way, he turns to his more dependable Democratic allies to move legislation forward.

Joe Biden was able to send us payments in a COVID relief package over the objections of his GOP friends in Congress. I appreciated the cash, just as I appreciated what came to us in the final year of POTUS 45’s tenure in office.

What I have learned to appreciate most of all, though, has been the restoration of the presidency as an office with dignity. President Biden vowed to restore our “national soul” when he ran for the office. I am not yet sure whether our soul has been brought back to life as we knew it just yet.

I do know, though, that the president no longer denigrates war heroes. Nor does he stiff our nation’s allies. The president no longer scolds public officials for certain policies while their cities and states are fighting nature’s wrath. The president now is able to step into his role as consoler in chief and he performs that role flawlessly.

Has the 46th president had a hiccup-free entry? Of course not. The crisis on our southern border needs to be called as such and it needs to come from President Biden.

I am willing to give this individual my support because — and this is critical — he is willing to conduct himself with the dignity that his high office demands from him.

That is why I believe we are heading in the right direction under President Biden’s leadership.

medical news

End the vaccine politics

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By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

My request is simple and straightforward.

Let us end the politicization of the COVID-19 vaccines … shall we?

I am sickened to the core at the yammering of right-wing talking heads/blowhards/gasbags who continue to insist that the government is trying to force us to do something we don’t want to do, such as take the vaccine that protects us against a virus that continues to kill Americans.

For starters, no one is “forcing” anyone to do anything of the sort. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is trying to tell us until they run out of breath that all the available vaccines are safe, they are effective and they will protect us from infection, sickness and death.

And yet we hear from right-wing politicians and their pals in the right-wing media continue to insist that President Biden should “fire Anthony Fauci” because the good doctor — and senior administration pandemic medical and health adviser — is trying to frighten us into taking the vaccine.

Good grief, man!

I interpret Dr. Fauci’s message differently. He seeks to speak to us using common sense. If you have a vaccine that works, and is safe, it makes sense to take it to ward off the effect of a virus that has killed 4 million human beings worldwide and more than 600,000 Americans. Why is that such a frightening concept?

Don’t answer that. I know why. Because it serves as political grist for those who adhere to the misplaced skepticism and deception about the virus expressed by President Biden’s immediate predecessor, the former Moron in Chief.

Joe Biden says the virus “is on the run.” I believe him. However, we are not out of danger. Indeed, the danger is heightened by those who continue to wage a political war in the middle of a fight for our lives against a virus.