Tag Archives: Barack Obama

national news

None of the inaugural trappings on tap

Photo courtesy of Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

You likely can take this to the bank.

Americans will not get to witness President-elect Joe Biden and Jill Biden arrive at the White House prior to the inauguration. There will be no scenes of Donald and Melania Trump greeting them with smiles, handshakes and hugs.

There will be no informal briefing between the outgoing and incoming presidents. The current and future first ladies won’t tour the residence, with Melania Trump showing Jill Biden where to find the linens.

No. All of that is tossed into the crapper.

When Barack Obama was leaving the White House in 2017, he and Michelle Obama greeted the Trumps at the White House. They mugged for the cameras and went inside. Obama talked to Trump about what to expect. Their wives visited informally. It was all done according to long-established custom.

It’s not that the Bidens don’t know their way around the people’s house. They’ve been there many times already, visiting many presidents … not to mention the one with whom Joe Biden worked for eight years, the aforementioned Barack Obama.

I will miss seeing the photos. Still, it’s probably just as well, given the river of bad blood that has flown from Trump in the wake of his loss to Biden in the election.

The Trumps will be gone. The Bidens will walk in and make themselves at home. That’s OK with me.

national news

Obama 2.0? OK, what’s wrong with that?

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

We’re hearing from right-wing media pundits and other critics of President-elect Biden that his Cabinet and top staffers comprise too many folks from the Obama administration.

Yes, I have expressed a concern about that, but I have to ask: Why is that necessarily a bad thing?

Biden served as vice president for President Obama’s two successful terms. He knows the players who comprised his team. Biden knows their strengths. He wants to parlay those strengths toward building a team of his own.

The Obama administration, let us remember, took office in the midst of the Great Recession. The nation’s economy was in free fall, it was collapsing and President Obama needed to act immediately to help rescue it from permanent ruin.

The team he assembled, along with Joe Biden, got the job done.

So, the new president wants to rely on their knowledge, their experience and their skill to help him restore a nation beset by new economic trouble and, oh  yes, that damn pandemic.

That’s OK with me.

national news

Ready for return of presidential symbolism

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

You can take this little item to the bank and remember that you saw it here for the first time.

President Biden will have a full plate of crises to confront when he settles in behind the Resolute Desk. He also must find time to engage in some of symbolism involved with the high office of president of the United States. Part of that involves conducting ceremonies; you know, the kind that honor Americans for the work they do on our behalf.

The nation’s highest civilian honor is called the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the waning days of his time as vice president, Biden received the medal in a surprise ceremony at the White House. President Barack Obama stunned him during an event aimed ostensibly to honor the work that Biden had done as VP during the Obama administration.

Can there be a more fitting recipient for the Presidential Medal of Freedom than Barack Hussein Obama? And can there be a more fitting person to drape the medal around the former president’s neck than the current president, who after Jan. 20 will be Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.?

Obama has been vilified and ridiculed unjustly for the past four years by his immediate successor. I am one American patriot who would find it most appropriate for him to receive the nation’s highest civilian award to honor the work he did as a successful two-term president of the United States.

Just remember … you saw it here first.

national news

‘Third Obama term’ taking shape?

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President-elect Biden keeps insisting he isn’t seeking to govern with an executive branch lineup that constitutes what amounts to a “third Barack Obama term” as president.

But wait a second.

His selection to be agriculture secretary served in that capacity in the Obama administration; his choice to serve as domestic policy adviser served as national security adviser to President Obama; his nominee to lead the Veterans Affairs Department served as chief of staff for President Obama; Biden’s selection to lead to the effort to deal with climate change served as secretary of state … for the Obama team.

Biden’s team includes other Obama retreads. Granted, they all are talented individuals who did well during their earlier stints in public office.

Let me be clear on this point: I consider President Obama’s two terms as president to be highly successful. Joe Biden served as vice president during that time. However, the president-elect has a vast reservoir of talent from which he can choose. I am curious as to the apparent leaning on former Obama aides to join him.

If he is going to insist that his term as president isn’t a “third term” for Barack Obama, then Joe Biden ought to populate the highest levels of his executive team with many more fresh faces and voices.

The president-elect’s selection of Obama hands makes it difficult for him to dispute the notion he wants to govern with a “third term” from Barack Obama’s time in office.

national news

Trump may invoke his M.O. and actually ‘concede,’ sort of

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Let’s flash back for a moment.

Donald Trump spent about five years fomenting the lie that Barack Obama was born overseas and was not a U.S. citizen, meaning he couldn’t run for president of the United States. It was a blatantly racist attack on someone who was born in Hawaii to an American woman; thus, he was a citizen by birth.

Then came a one-sentence admission in 2016 that Obama “is a U.S. citizen.” That was it. End of discussion, more or less. Trump demonstrated his shameless modus operandi.

Now he is continuing to challenge the results of an election he clearly lost to President-elect Joe Biden. He is ranting. He is riffing. He is bitching about all the grievances over alleged “corruption” in the electoral process which he continues to label as “rigged.”

Hmm. How might this play out? Here’s a thought.

The Electoral College is meeting in about nine days to certify Joe Biden’s victory. He has accrued 306 electoral votes; he needs just 270 of them.

When the Electoral College certifies Biden’s victory, I believe it is entirely possible that Trump could issue a terse statement that declares Biden is the duly elected president of the United States. He won’t concede in the traditional sense.

There likely won’t be a phone call to the winner, congratulating him and pledging his support for the remainder of the time he is president. He won’t say a word about the rigorous campaign that Biden waged.

He’ll just say that Biden won. Then he’ll be done.

Trump might not show up for President Biden’s inaugural. Indeed, I do not expect him to be there. Trump will get on Air Force One and jet off to Mar-a-Lago to play some golf and schmooze with his cronies.

Is that out of the question? I don’t think so. Nothing this guy Trump does should surprise anyone on Earth.

Just be gone … Donald.

legal news, national news

Replace ‘defund’ with ‘reform’ the police

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I didn’t come up with this theory, but I am going to endorse it.

It goes like this: Democrats didn’t do as well on down-ballot races during the 2020 election because voters might have been alarmed at the slogan “defund the police” that many progressive candidates appeared to support.

Republicans chipped away at Democrats’ majority in the U.S. House and they well might maintain their slim majority in the U.S. Senate if Democrats fail to capture two seats in the Georgia runoff election set for next month.

What was the trigger? Protests erupted around the nation after the hideous death of George Floyd by Minneapolis cops. One of them is charged with murder in Floyd’s death. The protests declared it was time to “defund the police” in communities around the nation.

I am quite unsettled by that notion. I realize now that “defunding” police departments really didn’t mean disbanding municipal or county police agencies. Efforts took root in many cities to re-allocate police money to community services.

I am much more comfortable with the idea that we need to “reform” police practices in many communities, make the cops more sensitive to how others perceive them when they arrest minority residents and how they treat them once they are in custody.

Former President Barack Obama, who has re-entered the political arena with his full-throated support of President-elect Biden, spoke to this police issue the other day. He expressed concern about the “defund” slogan and whether too many Americans took it literally.

Communities need police protection the way they need fire protection, or water service, or having their garbage picked up. I am unaware of any serious American who favors lawlessness on our streets.

Am I frightened by the conduct of officers who react as those cops did in Minneapolis when George Floyd was killed seemingly because he was a black man who committed a misdemeanor offense? Absolutely, I am! I also am frightened by other reports in other communities of police officers shooting African-Americans who weren’t resisting arrest, or were running away from officers.

Defunding police departments, though, is not the answer … even in the form it is actually taking. We should change the discussion topic to “reform the police,” which is where I hope President Biden can take this discussion as we move it forward.

national news

Welcome back, Barack Obama

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I feel obliged to say how glad I am to hear former President Obama’s voice once again as the nation continues its political discussion and debate.

He is critical of Donald J. Trump. No surprise there, right?

What is a surprise is that Trump’s immediate predecessor has weighed in now, at the end of Trump’s term as president. Then again, maybe it should not be such a surprise.

Trump spent a good bit of emotional capital during his term as president trashing the record compiled by President Obama. He took every chance he could find to denigrate Obama’s record, to declare his intention to undo the accomplishments Obama rang up.

The Affordable Care Act? Obama’s record on renewable energy development? Obama’s agreeing to join the Paris Climate Accords? Trump called them all a “disaster.”

So now it’s President Obama’s turn to strike back. Yes, the norm has been for former presidents to sit in a corner and let his immediate successor rise or fall on his own. Obama did that very thing during much of Trump’s term. No longer.

Welcome back, Mr. President. I enjoy hearing your voice.

International news

Lift the Muslim ban, Mr. POTUS-elect

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

On the night he declared victory in the 2020 presidential election, Joseph Biden’s team announced plans for the new president to sign a series of executive orders on Day One of his administration.

One of them would be to life a ban on entry into the United States by travelers from certain Muslim-majority nations. Donald Trump issued that order early in his presidential term.

The new president wants to revoke that order. To which I say … yes!

FBI Director Christopher Wray has told us a stark truth about the nature of terrorist threats to this country. It is that the biggest threat comes from home-grown, corn-fed white supremacists and not from Muslim nations.

The new president realizes what the nation’s top cop, the FBI director, has asserted.

I don’t mean to suggest that this nation’s security team should just shrug and look the other way at any terrorist threat that comes from abroad. I do mean to suggest that Donald Trump issued an informal declaration of war against Islam, a point that Presidents George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama sought assiduously to avoid when they were in office.

President Biden intends to revoke the Trump overstated declaration that Muslim countries pose a hideous threat. If we have learned anything since 9/11 I would presume we have learned how to detect and deal with international terrorist threats, especially from Muslim nations … which renders a ban on travelers from those nations to just an unnecessary show of presidential bravado.

national news

Yes, on DACA order

(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President-elect Biden has made clear his intention to walk directly into the Oval Office when he takes office and get right to work.

Biden’s transition team has announced the president-elect’s intention to sign several executive orders on Day One. One of them speaks directly to an issue that interests me greatly: restoration of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals order that Donald Trump revoked not long after he took office.

Former President Obama issued the DACA order initially, intending to shield from deportation those U.S. residents who had been brought here illegally by their parents; most of those DACA recipients have lived in this country since they were babies, infants, toddlers. They know no other country than the United States of America.

Obama sought to give them a fast track to seeking permanent legal resident status or citizenship. Trump wasn’t having any of it. He revoked his predecessor’s executive order. Now Trump’s immediate successor wants to restore the DACA program.

Good for you, Mr. President-elect!

I haven’t yet come to grips with precisely why Trump targeted DACA recipients in that manner. I wonder if he did it because he truly believed that they were lawbreakers as young children/toddlers because they came here illegally under the care of their parents. Or did he do it just to wipe away a vestige of President Obama’s time in office, which seems to have rankled Trump to no end.

I’m going to go with the latter rationale.

Indeed, many DACA recipients have carved out productive lives as U.S. residents. Many of them have achieved academic excellence and success in their chosen profession. They pay their taxes and they have become de facto citizens simply by virtue of their ability to live by the rules of the land to where they were brought.

DACA recipients don’t deserve a free ride. Nor do they deserve permanent amnesty. They should be allowed to seek legal resident status without fear of imminent deportation to the land of their birth, but a land with which they have zero familiarity.

That, I trust, is President-elect Biden’s goal by restoring DACA status to hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents.

local news

Dr. Jackson becomes U.S. rep.-elect

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I skedaddled from the Texas Panhandle a couple of years ago, so my thoughts on a just-completed political campaign in the 13th Congressional District should be considered in that context.

I am not as close to the action in the Panhandle as I used to be, but my interest in the region remains high.

13th District voters elected Dr. Ronny Jackson as their next representative. Rep.-elect Jackson presents a strange new turn in Panhandle politics, in my humble view.

Jackson is a former White House physician. He served three presidents: George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

Trump wanted to nominate Jackson to be secretary of veterans affairs. Jackson didn’t make the cut; he bowed out after questions arose about his lack of administrative experience and then about his conduct as a physician.

So, he looked for a place to run for Congress and set his sights on a district where he never lived. He wanted to succeed longtime Rep. Mac Thornberry of Clarendon, who decided he didn’t want to seek re-election to a seat he held since 1995.

Jackson doesn’t know much about the district he now will  represent. He was born in Levelland, but moved away to join the Navy  — attaining the rank of rear admiral — and never looked back. Until now.

During the campaign, he became something of a shill for Donald Trump. He said some goofy things about the soon-to-be-former president.

What he knows specifically about Pantex, about the Bell/Textron aircraft assembly mission, about water conservation, or wind energy, or farm policy remains a mystery to me. Mac Thornberry is a son of the Panhandle, coming from a longtime Donley County ranching family. Jackson is a new resident of the region, so I guess I can call him a carpetbagger.

In these times, I guess it’s OK for carpetbaggers to represent the interest of folks who formerly used to demand that their political representatives be proficient in the issues important to them.

Jackson won handily.

As for his shilling for Donald Trump, I am wondering how long he’ll want to stay in office with his main man no longer in office.