Tag Archives: Joe Biden

national news

GOP testing POTUS’s patience

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(AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Every human being who’s ever lived has limits to his or her patience.

My strong sense is that the today’s Republican Party leadership is testing the wellspring of patience that rests within President Biden.

If only the GOP honchos would wean themselves of the Big Lie being fed to them by Donald J. Trump and his minions about the 2020 election. If only the Republican hierarchy would divest its interest in seeking to overturn a free and fair election. If only they would act as American patriots instead of lunatic wackos.

Trump sits on the sidelines these days. He isn’t silent. He keeps yammering about the phony vote fraud that has prompted the “audit” of Arizona’s election returns. He continues to suggest the election was stolen. He never provides a scintilla of proof for any of the outrageous lies he keeps repeating.

Yet the GOP congressional leadership keeps gobbling it up. It presents itself as being responsible stewards of our federal government. They aren’t. They are responsible only to the former Imbecile in Chief. Damn few of them can say a single critical word about the Big Lie.

Meanwhile, we have a president who wants to enact some big programs. We are fighting a pandemic. We are trying to recover economically from the havoc it has brought. President Biden cannot get the GOP to sign on to what should be a bipartisan effort. Why is that? Because too many of the loyal opposition’s leadership is too wedded to the Big Lie.

The president’s patience surely has its limits.

national news

POTUS to speak to sparse ‘crowd’

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Joe Biden campaigned for the presidency in the midst of a pandemic, meaning that he avoided staging big campaign rallies.

As president, he is getting set to speak to a joint session of Congress this week. Hmm. Guess what … the House of Representatives chamber will contain a fraction of the number of people who usually listen to these speeches.

The Cabinet won’t be there. Only the Supreme Court chief justice, John Roberts, will be present, with the rest of the court staying away. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Army Gen. Mark Milley will represent the military brass. Members of the House and Senate will be there. First lady Jill Biden and second gentleman Doug Emhoff will be in the VIP section, but they will be virtually unaccompanied.

But … the event will show off a bit of history-making. Sitting behind President Biden will be two women: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris.

I understand they’ll be masked up, as will the audience in the chamber.

An earlier blog post wondered how the partisans will react. Will they cheer the president’s arrival? Will they stand and applaud when Speaker Pelosi introduces him?

I am not going to obsess over things we cannot control. I am, however, going to applaud the precautions that the powers that be are taking to avoid creating one of those “super spreader” events.

After all, the pandemic is still raging.

national news

Time and money wasted

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By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

You need to pay careful attention to what I intend to say here, which is that an invaluable amount of time and money is being spent in Arizona to determine whether a free and fair election was conducted, well … freely and fairly.

Spoiler alert: It was conducted fairly and was relatively corruption-free.

That, however, is not dissuading Arizona Republican Party officials from conducting an “audit” of more than 2 million ballots cast in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, which — I hasten to add — voted for Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president in 2020.

Now, to be fair, the Biden margin of victory over Donald J. Trump wasn’t huge. It was only a little more than 45,000 votes out of the total cast in the sprawling county. Will the election audit produce the kind of swing that GOP loons want to occur? Hah! I wouldn’t bet your sturdiest pair of jeans on that happening.

And what do you suppose it would do to the overall Electoral College outcome if by some miracle that hell freezes over and they overturn the election result in Arizona? Not a damn thing. Joe Biden still would be elected president and Donald Trump still would be banished to his posh south Florida resort.

The Arizona Republic reported:

Former President Donald Trump on Friday praised GOP senators in Arizona for their “tireless efforts” to recount millions of Maricopa County ballots, predicting the massive review would produce startling findings.

Despite prior audits — and a host of election lawsuits — failing to turn up evidence of Joe Biden “stealing” the presidency, Trump thanked the lawmakers for “the incredible job they are doing in exposing the large scale voter fraud” in the 2020 election.

Startling findings? Hah! There he goes again, fomenting the Big Lie about phony vote fraud.

Arizona election audit updates: Pause in recount appears off as Democrats won’t post bond (msn.com)

I am going to say this for as long as I can string a cogent thought or two together: There was no rampant vote fraud in the 2020 election.

Think for just a moment about this fact: If you are an election official anywhere in the United States and you know about the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, you are going to work double- and triple-overtime to ensure that the process is squeaky clean.

Does anyone with a half a noodle in their skull believe there was anything approaching the hanky-panky that Trump and his cabal of goons suggest occurred?

Donald Trump talked about the media being the “enemy of the people.” He has it all wrong. The 45th president of the United States is the enemy we all should fear.

economic news

POTUS: Someone has to pay for what we need

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President Biden’s many decades in government taught him a hard lesson, which is that everything the government does comes with a cost.

Taxpayers have to foot the bill.

He pushed a COVID relief package through Congress. He now wants to enact an infrastructure overhaul through the legislative body. Both of them together are projected at around $4 trillion.

Ouch … yes? Yes, but here’s the deal: In order to pay for all this, the president seeks to levy taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Now he is talking about an increase in capital gains taxes.

Donald Trump talked about infrastructure deals, too. Nothing happened. Congress didn’t move anything through. The president never articulated a way to pay for whatever it was he wanted done. He seemed to suggest that the tax cuts he rammed through Congress would jumpstart the economy sufficiently so that any major government project would pay for itself.

It didn’t happen. Then the pandemic brought the economy to its knees.

Trump lost his re-election bid and now a new president is trying to craft a workable plan to pay for a massive effort to rebuild our economy.

The tax plan already pushed out there will not increase taxes to a level prior to the cut enacted during the Trump years. It still gives congressional Republicans fits, so they’ll fit it along with everything else that the Democratic president proposes.

Reasonableness be damned!

International news

Yes, it was genocide

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Joe Biden never has struck me as a politician willing to blaze many new trails. Still, as president of the United States, Biden has made a declaration that seemed to scare off every one of his predecessors for the past century.

No U.S. president, Democrat or Republican, has been willing to categorize the Ottoman Empire’s massacre of Armenians as an act of “genocide” … until now.

Biden made the declaration today after talking with Turkish President Tayycip Erdogan, apparently warning the strongman of his intention to do what he did today.

So, you might wonder: Why the presidential reticence?

Turkey is a key member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was founded after World War II to deter possible aggression from what was called the Soviet Union. Thus, previous U.S. presidents were concerned about offending Turkey, upon which NATO depends as an important military ally.

President Biden has tossed those concerns aside.

The reality is that in 1915, Turkey set about to execute more than 1.5 million Armenians in what only can be described as a form of “ethnic cleansing.” Put another way, they engaged in genocide against an ethnic minority.

According to Yahoo News:

“Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination,” Biden said in a statement on Saturday, marking Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. He emphasized the need to recognize and remember such atrocities “so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history.”

“The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today,” Biden said. “We honor their story. We see that pain. We affirm the history. We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated.

Biden recognizes as ‘genocide’ the killing of 1.5M Armenians by Ottoman Turks (yahoo.com)

Yes, President Biden is trying to walk along a nuanced line. I get that. It also signals a presidential intention to ensure that human rights remains at the top of our foreign-policy consciousness.

International news

Human rights returns!

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President Biden has laid the law down on a dictator with whom this nation is bonded through a military alliance.

Biden and Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan have talked. The president told Erdogan that he considers the Ottoman Empire’s extermination of millions of Armenians to be an act of genocide. He intends as well to bring it up when the men meet in a bilateral encounter later this year during the annual meeting of nations that belong to NATO, of which Turkey is a member.

This is a big deal. Why? Because the American presidency has lacked any open discussion of human rights violations for the past four years. Donald Trump chose to ignore these and other international abuses of human dignity during his tenure in the White House. President Biden is returning human rights to the table.

To which I say … yes!

The Hill reports: The White House readout of the call noted the two men would meet this summer but made no mention of discussion about the potential genocide declaration, which Turkey has long lobbied against strenuously. Bloomberg News later reported that Biden informed Erdogan that he plans to recognize the massacre of Armenians as genocide.

Biden, Erdoğan speak amid tensions over Armenian genocide (msn.com)

The world is full of human rights abuses — and abusers. You can spare me the rejoinder about such abuses occurring here at home. I am fully aware of them. As is President Biden. Still, he intends to exert his moral authority as the leader of this great nation to remind others around the world that all humans have inalienable rights that deserve honor and respect.

I welcome the president of the United States engaging in  that critical discussion.

Joe Biden

Who will cheer this POTUS?

(Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Presidential speeches to joint congressional sessions have devolved over many years into partisan events.

Presidents of one party stand before senators and House members and deliver lines designed to draw applause. The way it usually plays out is that lawmakers from the president’s party stand and cheer while those on the other side of the room sit silently while their “friends” offer the cheers.

So that will be the backdrop next week as President Biden strides to the podium to tell Congress about his big plans to help the nation continue to recover medically and economically from the pandemic that has ravaged us.

Joe Biden has trumpeted himself as being a politician with plenty of friends on the other side of the room. He is a Democrat who has worked well — in the past — with Republicans in the Senate, where he served for 36 years before becoming vice president in 2009. Why, he’s even drawn high praise from his GOP colleagues over those many years.

They aren’t about to praise him now. The mood is markedly different these days from the time in 1973 when Biden first joined the Senate. There’s a whole lot of snarling taking place these days.

He’ll have a Democratic House speaker sitting behind him at the joint session, along with the vice president, Kamala Harris. We’ll get to watch them cheer the president’s remarks.

My curiosity will be piqued, though, when President Biden enters the room as the sergeant at arms announces his arrival. Will congressional Republicans have enough good manners about them to stand and cheer when our head of state enters? Or will they continue to exhibit their petulance over losing the 2020 presidential election?

I am willing to acknowledge that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at times bristled openly at Donald Trump’s remarks and behavior during his speeches to Congress. Her anger manifested itself spectacularly when she stood and tore up the text of Trump’s speech to pieces in front of the whole world.

If only we could expect better behavior this time around.

Joe Biden

Biden keeps going big

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(AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President Biden isn’t wasting a moment of time in pushing hard for an agenda he hopes will transform the nation and perhaps the world.

I welcome the president’s intensity.

He went hard in declaring his intention to get 100 million COVID vaccines into Americans during his first 100 days in office. He has doubled that goal by getting 200 million vaccines injected … and the 100 days isn’t even here yet.

Biden pushed for a COVID relief bill that has helped millions of American affected by the pandemic. The Democratic Party majority in Congress listened and got it done.

Now he is imploring other world leaders to join the United States in battling climate change. Biden took part in a virtual summit of heads of government and state and declared his intention for the United States to cut its carbon emissions in half by the end of this decade. President Biden said, in effect, it’s now or never for the world to act to combat what he has called the world’s greatest existential threat.

I agree with the guts of Biden’s agenda so far. I  want him to succeed. I also agree that climate change poses the most serious threat to our lives — and not just our way of life.

President Biden is making me proud of our head of state again. Many millions of Americans agonized during the previous four years living in a nation governed by a carnival barker who had no prior government experience before taking the presidential oath of office. His ignorance was on full display damn near daily.

I intend to keep pulling for President Biden as he seeks to go big on all manner of important issues.

environmental news

Green New Deal is back!

 

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Just in time, a newer version of legislation that got stalled a couple of years ago in the U.S. Senate, has returned to the center stage of environmental policy discussion.

The Green New Deal — the bogeyman of the Republican Party — has been reintroduced by U.S. Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York; indeed, AOC herself has become a favorite target of GOP critics.

Why is this so timely? Because we have Earth Day coming up Thursday. It’s the one day of the year — as if we should dedicate just a single day — we call attention to the fragility of the only planet we can inhabit.

I’ll save a discussion on the nuts and bolts of the Green New Deal for another day. I do want to make a point about the importance of what the GND intends to accomplish. It seeks to preserve our environment, to retain Earth as a place where human beings can inhabit.

President Biden has made climate change one of the linchpins of his tenure in office. He appointed former U.S. Sen. and Secretary of State John Kerry as a special international envoy on climate change. The president signed an executive order upon taking office to return the United States to the Paris Climate Accord, from which Donald Trump had walked away when he took office.

Climate change presents an existential threat to our national security. Never mind the spring chill that has swept across the nation in recent days. The evidence continues to show that Earth’s median temperatures continue to increase year over year. Ice caps are melting. Sea levels are rising. Third World nations continue to fell millions of acres of forest each year. The industrialized nations of the world continue to pour millions of tons of carbon-related pollutants into the air.

We must find some answers to these crises. Many of us say it when Earth Day rolls around every year: We only have one planet … and we have to protect it.

Is the Green New Deal too much? Too little? I don’t know. However, I believe we must not continue to do what we have been doing. We are contributing to the destruction of our Good Earth.

Joe Biden

‘President’ returns to this blog

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By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

It clearly is no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I am thrilled to be able to speak of the president of the United States the way I normally speak of that individual.

That is, I have restored the use of the term “President” directly in front of the name of the person who holds the title.

As in “President Joe Biden.”

I have written previously of my boycotting of that terminology during the presidential tenure of Donald J. Trump. I refused for four years to attach the title “President” directly in front of Trump’s name; indeed, I will continue to follow that dictum even in Trump’s blessedly forced retirement from political life after the 2020 election.

My desire was to see a return to normal dignity and decorum in the nation’s highest office. It returned when President Biden took his oath on Jan. 20.

Trump’s conduct after the election was even worse than the four years prior to it. He incited the insurrection on Jan. 6 and got impeached a second time by the House of Reps. Indeed, he still hasn’t formally acknowledged that Joe Biden is the duly elected president.

That’s in the past now. Perhaps soon it all will be forgotten. I welcome that day.

For now I will just relish the notion of being able to comment on presidential activities by referencing President Biden the way I have (almost) always referenced presidents of the United States. Yes, even those for whom I didn’t cast my vote.

Along came Donald Trump to relegate that title to the back of the lowest shelf I could find.

President Biden will make mistakes. He’s made a couple already. His behavior while serving as our head of state/commander in chief, I am certain, will be fitting that of our president.