Tag Archives: Ukraine war

economic news, Joe Biden, national news

Are we better off … ?

The Republican leader of the U.S. House of Representatives sought to make some political hay by asking if we are “better off today than we were two years ago.”

Well, Kevin McCarthy of California, your effort to denigrate Joe Biden’s presidency deserves a look. So … here goes:

  • On Biden’s watch, Congress approved a bipartisan bill — the first in 30-something years — that seeks to stem gun violence.
  • When Russia invaded Ukraine this past February, President Biden was able to present a unified NATO and European Union front in response to the illegal and criminal act of war.
  • The president was able to shepherd through Congress a massive infrastructure improvement bill that seeks to repair our nation’s roads, bridges and airports.
  • Joe Biden nominated and then welcomed the nation’s first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
  • We have turned the corner on the international pandemic.
  • Fuel prices, which skyrocketed and led the inflationary surge of recent months, have retreated dramatically.
  • The United States has created more private-sector jobs in the first two years of President Biden’s term than at any similar time in its history.
  • Unemployment currently stands at 3.5%.
  • Congressional Democrats — fighting unanimous Republican opposition — managed to pass the nation’s first-ever meaningful law dealing with climate change; it also seeks to curb health costs and reduce inflation.
  • We have cut by roughly half the nation’s annual budget deficit.

So, taken together, I think I have an answer to Leader McCarthy’s question.

Yes. We are better off than we were when President Joseph R. Biden Jr. took office.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Failed presidency? Hardly!

I have no clue whether President Biden is going to seek a second term in the White House. I hope he does because I now intend to seek to dispel the myth being kicked around that he stands over a “failed presidency.”

Whether he steps away after a single term or manages to win re-election in 2024, I believe Joe Biden can — and will — look at his current term as a successful venture.

One of the more remarkable aspects of Biden’s success has been his ability to achieve it without the kind of bipartisan support many of us — including yours truly — expected he would be able to generate.

The just-enacted Inflation Reduction Act is heading to his desk without a single Republican vote in either congressional chamber. No GOP senators or House members joined Democrats in endorsing a bill that seeks to slow inflation, makes a huge investment in clean/green energy and reduces the cost of prescription drugs.

That the president was able to resurrect a version of Build Back Better — which had been given up for dead — is itself a political miracle.

That was just the president’s latest success. He also was able — with a smattering of GOP help — push through a modest gun control bill in the wake of the Uvalde school and Buffalo supermarket massacres. He had help from GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who worked with Democratic Sen. Patrick Murphy of Connecticut in coming up with a legislative compromise that ends a decades-long stalemate on stemming gun violence.

Biden’s presidential success also must include his ability to muster international support for sanctions against Russia over its lawless, immoral and criminal invasion of Ukraine. NATO and the European Union have stood foursquare with us as Biden has taken measures to punish Russian goon/strongman Vladimir Putin for his criminal behavior.

Has the Biden term been flawless? No, it hasn’t. The most significant policy setback, in my view, has been along our southern border. Then again, the administration has not — as critics have suggested — created an “open-border” policy.

However, I will not accept any argument that Joe Biden has failed in the job to which he was elected.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

International news

War is shoved aside

I so hate to acknowledge the obvious, but the Ukraine War — once the talk among Americans from coast to coast — has been shoved aside, away from the top of our collective minds.

I suppose we can lay blame on an array of domestic issues: inflation, threats of an economic recession, legislative wheeling and dealing, and — oh, yeah! — the congressional probe into the insurrection of 1/6.

Meanwhile, in that faraway land, Russian tinhorn Vladimir Putin is committing war crimes daily. He is bombing civilian targets, killing women and children with impunity. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy vows to not negotiate an end to the fighting by giving up territory taken by Russians.

If only we could get the International Court to actually charge Putin with war crimes against humanity. My goodness, the evidence is plastered all over our TV screens.

The one-time Soviet spymaster is as bad a dude as there is on the world stage. President Biden wants to punish Russia greatly and by many accounts, the sanctions are having the desired effect.

Our attention span, though, seems limited. Remember the kidnapping of Nigerian women and girls by Boko Haram? Wasn’t that once at the top of the world’s list of outrages? Or the Saudi human rights record in light of the hideous slaying of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi? President Biden has fist-bumped the Saudi crown price responsible for Khashoggi’s murder.

I am not willing to let Putin get away with his crimes against humanity. Neither should anyone else.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

International news

Putin: international terrorist

Vladimir Putin’s evil intent has been placed on full display for the entire world to make a simple determination, which is that he is a state sponsor of international terror.

The Russian goon today launched a missile into a crowded Ukrainian shopping mall. I haven’t yet heard the casualty count, although I understand that several civilians lost their lives in the terrorist attack.

Yes, that is what it was: a terrorist attack. Putin now intends to terrorize Ukrainian civilians. He is no better than Osama bin Laden, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein.

Putin’s conduct of the Ukraine War tells me that he needs to stand trial for his crimes against humanity.

Did the Russians blast the shopping mall to smithereens by mistake? Were they actually aiming the missile at a military target? Did the Russian intelligence network mistake a shopping mall for a weapons depot?

Oh, no. Putin intends to terrorize Ukrainians into pressuring their heroic president to sue for peace at any cost.

That he would kill civilians on purpose tells me he is as untrustworthy as any human being on Earth.

This individual must pay for the crimes he is committing against humanity.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

International news

And the war slogs on

We have been fixated – and rightly so – on gun violence and ways to reduce it, if not end it altogether. I just want to remind everyone that we have a war underway on another continent that deserves our attention as well.

Those damn Russians continue to bombard Ukrainian targets and they continue to kill Ukrainian civilians in their attempt to further the aims of the dictator who sent them into battle illegally. That would be Vladimir Putin, the despot about whom Donald J. Trump used to speak so glowingly in his effort to make nice with a known killer.

Joe Biden has all but declared Putin to be a pariah among world leaders. Which is an apt description. He has called Putin a war criminal. By my reckoning, war criminals need to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity and, if convicted, they deserve to be punished.

Does that mean Putin needs to go to prison for his crimes against Ukraine? For his targeting of hospitals, schools, churches and apartment complexes?

Well, uh, yeah! Do you think?

The Ukraine War slogs on. It continues to break my heart, which already is shattered by tragedy here at home.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news

What about that war?

Now we know what it takes to push an illegal, immoral and unjustified war off the front page and off the air.

It takes a madman who walks into an elementary school and slaughters 19 third- and fourth-grade children and two of their teachers. Yes, the Uvalde, Texas, massacre has dominated the news and yanked our attention away from that war in a faraway place called Ukraine.

To be candid, I don’t yet know which story depresses me more.

The Ukraine War was doing a nice of job of sending me into prolonged periods of funk. The Russians invaded Ukraine intending to drive out the government and installing a puppet regime to do Moscow’s bidding; it hasn’t worked. Indeed, the chatter now is beginning to telegraph a different sort of message, that Ukraine actually might win the battle on the field.

Weird, man.

Meanwhile, a grieving United States of America is coming to grips with the Uvalde tragedy and our citizens are now asking pertinent and legitimate questions about whether the police responded properly to prevent further carnage.

All of this is enough to tax anyone’s emotional strength.

We all need to remain strong.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

International news

Bush’s ‘gaffe’ was no gaffe

George W. Bush spoke an unintended truth the other day that raised eyebrows all across the nation, not to mention in the room at the Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Dallas.

The 43rd president was trying to make the case against Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Then he said this:

“In contrast, Russian elections are rigged. Political opponents are imprisoned or otherwise eliminated from participating in the electoral process. The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.”

As another former Texas governor, Rick Perry, once said: Oops.

I cannot possibly suggest that President Bush intended to make that statement. However, he did tell the truth. The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was based on “false intelligence,” and that’s being generous. It well might have been that the Bush team knew all along that the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

Whatever the case, I suggest the former president draft a statement aimed at telling the loved ones of those who died during the Iraq War that he didn’t really mean what he said this week in Dallas.

Then again, would that be truth?

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

International news

Can he declare victory?

The late U.S. Sen. George Aiken, a great Republican from Vermont, once lamented that the nation could conclude the Vietnam War simply by saying: “Let’s just declare victory and go home.”

The war was going badly, even though American forces were winning on the battlefield. Our victories were overshadowed by protests at home as Americans grieved over the casualties we suffered for a mission that no one at the Pentagon was able to articulate.

Russians are facing possibly the same the dilemma. Their forces invaded Ukraine months ago. The idea was to subdue Ukraine quickly, tossing out the government led by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and installing a pro-Moscow puppet to dance to the tune called by Russian despot Vladimir Putin.

It didn’t happen.

The Ukrainians are fighting for their survival against Russians who are fighting to soothe the ego of a dictator.

Can the Russians now just “declare victory” the way Sen. Aiken saw many decades ago? It’s all right with me.

I want the bloodshed to end. I am sickened by the destruction brought to Ukraine. I am heartened, though, by the courage that Ukrainians are demonstrating — under Zelenskyy’s leadership — in fending off the invaders.

As for Putin’s possible victory declaration, I want to stipulate that none of that would preclude an international trial on charges of war crimes being leveled against this monstrous tyrant. By any measure one can make that charge against Putin, given that his forces have struck soft targets — schools, hospitals and apartment complexes — in direct violation of the Geneva Accords meant to govern the rules of war.

Let the bastard declare victory and then then commence a trial to convict him of crimes against humanity.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news, International news

Putin’s big aim? Pffftt!

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine those many weeks ago to prevent an expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Hah! What happened then? Oh, Sweden and Finland have applied for NATO membership. Indeed, if Finland is accepted as a NATO member, the Russian tyrant will watch his country’s border with NATO expand by roughly double what it is at the moment.

So, this begs the question: How is it working out for you … Vlad?

It ain’t!

Russian troops are getting their butts kicked on the battlefield by dedicated Ukrainian soldiers and militia. Putin sought to conquer Kyiv and Kharkiv — Ukraine’s two largest cities — only to watch those efforts literally go up in flames.

Russian soldiers are suffering from low morale, lack of ammunition, faltering equipment, resupply crises and are showing signs of insubordination on the field of battle.

None of this is likely to stem the assault that Putin launched against a sovereign nation. He now is threatening Finland with reprisal if NATO accepts the Finns and the Swedes.

I must point out, too, that NATO — thanks to the diplomatic efforts led by President Biden — is more united than ever in its mission to stand as one against any threats from Russia.

If I were advising Putin, I would consider offering a suggestion for a way to declare victory and just get the hell out of Ukraine.

Johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

International news, military news

How does Ukraine persist?

When the Russians invaded Ukraine I was skeptical that the Ukrainians would be able to declare victory on the battlefield. The Russian army was numerically and technically superior to Ukraine.

Then the Russians discovered something in real time on the field of battle. The first thing, apparently, was that they weren’t as fearsome a fighting force as they — or many of the rest of us — thought they were. The second thing is that they likely underestimated the Ukrainians’ will to fight to protect their homeland against a foreign invader.

What astounds me is that the Russians’ misjudgment of Ukraine’s will to fight would exist at all, given their own country’s military history.

In June 1941, Adolf Hitler launched the invasion of the Soviet Union. He likely didn’t think the Russians would fight to the death in the manner that they did. The Red Army then turned the tide against Hitler’s forces in a city once known as Stalingrad. Let us not forget that Ukrainians were fighting alongside Russians in their struggle against the Nazi invaders. Oh … the irony.

This is what happens when a nation invades another sovereign state. They learn that their adversary is committed to the struggle to survive and their commitment well could carry them forward against a supposedly superior military force.

We hear now several things are going badly for the Russians. They have lost several field generals in the battle; the Russian troops are suffering from low morale; Russian soldiers aren’t obeying officers’ orders; Ukraine is getting plenty of help from allied nations — such as the United States; the Ukrainians are putting their military hardware to good use.

Don’t get me wrong here. I am not about to declare that Ukraine will declare victory and that Russia is going to skulk off the battlefield. There likely will be much more struggle to take place.

It does make me wonder how much more humiliation Russian despot Vladimir Putin can take. Moreover, I will stand on my belief that Putin is not stupid enough to launch a nuclear strike, given his knowledge of how “mutually assured destruction” would play out.

If there is an exit to be found, my strongest hope is that Putin can look for it and get the hell out of Ukraine. I wouldn’t even mind if he decides to declare victory. Let him crow all he wants. The world will know better.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com