Monthly Archives: March 2023

local news

Wrestling with outreach effort

I am in the midst of trying to determine whether I should accept a fellow’s attempt to reach out to me in my time of intense grief and mourning.

You might wonder: Why? He means well. Give him a chance to provide some help.

My wife passed away a little more than a month ago. I have received dozens of cards, notes, expressions of love and support from loved ones, friends, even some strangers. Kathy Anne would be pleased beyond measure with the compassion that has been extended. I know she is watching over all this.

This fellow who reached out to me today is a member of the church I have been attending and which I plan to join officially in due course. He heads a group of men who have lost their wives. For the record, I am going to refuse to use the word — which I detest — that identifies such men.

I told him I would call him back. I will keep that promise.

However, I am not interested in sitting around with a group of men reminiscing about our lives with the women who made us whole. Nor am I interested in sharing with them the misery I am enduring. I am reading a book titled “It’s OK To Be Not OK,” written by Megan Devine. It’s an excellent book … and an easy read. She says that others who share their like-minded tragedy mean well when they offer advice on how to deal with grief, but it seldom provides much comfort.

If they want to socialize, fine. If they want to get together to talk about, oh, college football or share life experiences associated with our careers, I’m in.

I am just not certain I am ready for some form of a 12-step program aimed at ridding me of the grief I am feeling. It’s all too damn fresh in my mind and in my still-broken heart.

I’ll get back to you later when I make a final decision. Meantime, I have determined that writing about my dark journey on this blog gives me sufficient comfort from my intense loss.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

How about the ‘I’ word?

The MAGA cabal within the Republican Party wants to impeach President Biden for … what, precisely, is beyond me.

We keep hearing the yammering from the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who proclaims that the president is a failure. She doesn’t specify a “high crime or misdemeanor” on which she would base an impeachment. She just talks about it.

Actually, Greene is as stupid a member of the MAGA cabal as there is.

It’s good to remember the last three presidential impeachments that occurred within the past 25 years. Two of them were legit; the third was, well, questionable.

House of Representatives Republicans were looking for a reason to impeach President Clinton throughout the 1990s. When the late Kenneth Starr, the special counsel appointed to examine a real estate deal called Whitewater, began snooping around beyond his original charge, the president handed the GOP a reason to impeach him.

He lied to a federal grand jury about an affair he was having with a White House intern. Yes, Clinton committed a crime by perjuring himself. That was all Republicans needed. They impeached him on three counts. He was acquitted. I question the political motivation behind that impeachment and wonder to this day why impeach a president for lying about a dalliance.

Then came the twin impeachments of Donald Trump, who in my mind committed far worse offenses. The first impeachment was triggered by his seeking a “favor” from the Ukrainian president; Trump wanted a foreign leader to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. Wrong! He can’t do that, says the Constitution.

Then came his incitement of the assault on the Capitol on 1/6, which was a clear violation of his oath of office.

The House impeached him for each offense. The Senate trials ended up with Trump staying in office. The second trial resulted in a 57-43 vote to convict, but it wasn’t enough, as the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority to boot a POTUS from office.

One can argue that all three were “legitimate” issues for which a president could be impeached. The Clinton case was technically legit; both Trump cases were the real thing.

Now we have the MAGAites calling for Joe Biden’s impeachment.

I am left to ask: for … what?

Impeachment madness must end in the House. Joe Biden has done not a damn thing that falls remotely into the category of “impeachable offense.” All he has done is seek to right a ship of state that was damaged when he took office.

To my reckoning, he has largely succeeded. That won’t shut down the MAGA cultists. They are a shameful pack of demagogues.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

media news

Lamenting slow demise of proud craft

As I lament the agonizing, excruciating, painful demise of a once-proud craft — print journalism — I remind myself of this frightening fact.

I worked for four newspapers during my nearly 37 years as a print journalist and two of them are long gone, while the other two are mere shadows of their former selves.

In 1976, I landed a job on the copy desk of the Oregon Journal, the evening newspaper of record in my hometown of Portland. In 1982, the Journal folded. It was gone forever.

I had moved by that time to Oregon City, to work at a suburban newspaper just south of Portland. We published five days each week. I became editor of the paper in 1979, which probably was a serious career mistake, as I wasn’t prepared to take on that task. The Enterprise-Courier folded in 1988. It, too, was relegated to the dust bin.

I had moved on to Beaumont, Texas, in the spring of 1984 to become an editorial writer for the Enterprise. I was promoted to editor of the opinion pages later that year. I stayed until January 1995, when I moved to Amarillo to become editor of the opinion pages of the Globe-News.

What happened in Beaumont and Amarillo is nothing short of heartbreaking. Both papers are still around … so to speak. Their staffs have been obliterated. The Enterprise’s parent company is trying to sell the building where the newspaper once was a thriving presence. The Globe-News’s parent company sold to another media giant and it moved the paper out of its iconic structure and has sold that property to another business.

The Enterprise and the Globe-News once were pillars of their communities. Now they are battered hulks. They once covered vast distances. The Enterprise reached into Deep East Texas and as far east as Lake Charles, La. The Globe-News once had a bureau in Clovis, N.M. and covered everything in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles and even reached into southwest Kansas.

The Globe-News once won a Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service for its work in revealing corruption in county government.

No more.

Maybe it’s me, that I jinxed all of ’em. Just kidding.

I simply am saddened at the pending demise of what used to be communities’ major source of information about themselves and told many thousands of readers the news of the state, nation and the world.

I am left just to sigh.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

media news

Another media icon closes

Word from the Texas Panhandle hit me like a punch in the puss: the Canadian Record is shutting down after 132 years providing top-notch community journalism to arguably one of the more fascinating communities in the region.

Laurie Ezzell Brown, publisher of the newspaper and daughter of a Panhandle journalism legend, Ben Ezzell, has surrendered to the forces of change in the media.

This saddens me terribly. It is one more iconic community institution to fall victim to what we call the “Digital Age” of what passes for journalism these days.

Jon Mark Beilue, a former columnist at the Amarillo Globe-News, where I worked for nearly 18 years, wrote a touching tribute to the work that Brown did as publisher of the Record.

Here is part of what Beilue wrote on his Facebook post:

Like her father, (Brown) didn’t shy from calling it how she saw it with the best interest of her hometown at heart …

But more than anything, Laurie and a revolving small staff covered the 2,300 people of Canadian. They were the town’s conscience, the stitches in the fabric that knitted the community together. Achievements, disappointments, the memorable, the mundane, the Record was there. They were there for every school board meeting, every city council and county commissioner meeting, every time the hospital district met.

Jon Mark Beilue | Facebook

Communities once relied on their newspapers to tell them what happened next door, or down the street, or around the block.

The Canadian Record is far from the first such iconic institution to close. It won’t be the final one, either. That doesn’t make this news any easier to swallow.

Well done, Laurie Ezzell Brown.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

This is ‘diversity’?

Republicans are entitled to spin the conflict within their political party any way they wish.

However, the conflict is real and I do not believe it has anything to do with what the GOP honchos might refer to as “diversity of thought and policy” within a once-great political party.

It has more to do — indeed, seemingly everything to do — with whether the party will be hamstrung by the hammerlock placed on it by the MAGA/America First/election denier wing of the GOP led by the former president of the United States who claims to want his old job back.

The alternative to that wing continues to be the “establishment” Republicans who, to my way of thinking, have a long to go to resemble the Dwight Eisenhower/Teddy Roosevelt/Nelson Rockefeller/George H.W. Bush wing that once dominated thought within the GOP.

Instead, it has been hijacked by nut jobs who insist that the United States is a “Christian nation,” all the while vilifying any non-Christians. Think about that for just a moment. Is that the way Jesus Christ taught his disciples when he walked the Earth? Didn’t he counsel us to love your enemy? You get that point, I am sure.

The nut jobs rely on conspiracy theories that make no sense, have no basis in fact and which only prey on the fear of the gullible among us who seem to want to believe the rubbish that flows from the pie holes of those in power.

Black Americans aren’t welcome in the Republican Party that once was thought to be the only party that sought to free Blacks from their enslavement. Oh, how times have turned everything on its ear!

The conflict within the party that is playing out by all the notable no-shows at the Conservative Action Political Conference gathering tells me that the party isn’t seeking to highlight its “diversity.” It suggests a battle between the crackpot cabal and those who are running away from the insurgents who pose a threat to our democratic process.

I am pulling for the non-crackpots … because I want our democracy to survive!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news

Here come the ‘firsts’

Anyone who has suffered the loss of a loved one knows about the subject with which I will deal in this post.

The “firsts” are on their way for my family members and me. Indeed, my granddaughter’s upcoming birthday will be her first birthday without Grandma … my beloved bride Kathy Anne.

More such firsts are going to follow and I am preparing to deal with them as they arrive. The first Easter, my bride’s first birthday, our first observance of our wedding anniversary (which will be No. 52), our first Thanksgiving, first Christmas … and on it goes.

You get my drift, correct?

As I have noted already on this blog, I am far from the first and far from the last person who undergo this level of grief. I am reading some books on how to deal with it. Part of my therapy is writing about it, as I am doing with this post.

Indeed, I am preparing a lengthy feature for KETR-FM radio’s website that will publish soon. It deals with grief and mourning and I look forward to completing that task. Heck, I even look forward just to performing the task, as it gives me a measure of relief as I continue along this dark journey.

That journey is going to contain is occasional gut checks along the way. Those are the firsts I have mentioned.

Most of you have been through it already. So have I, with the loss of my parents when I was a younger man. I remember sitting on my living room floor in late 1980 and tearing up when I realized it was the first Christmas without Dad, who had succumbed a couple of months earlier.

This one, however, is dramatically different, to be sure.

I’ll need to be ready.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news

O.J. weighs in … wow!

I cannot possibly, not in a zillion years, believe what came from O.J. Simpson, who decided to tell the world what he thinks of the guilty verdict handed down in another controversial murder case.

Alex Murdaugh is guilty of murdering his wife and son and today he received two consecutive life sentences as punishment.

What did Simpson say via Twitter? That he believes Murdaugh is guilty of the crime but that there was a chance he could have been acquitted.

What the hell?

OJ Simpson said he believed Alex Murdaugh ‘more than likely’ killed his wife and son: ‘Once the guy’s a liar, you can’t believe anything he says’ (msn.com)

I could have lived the rest of my life without hearing a damn thing from Simpson about this case. It is Simpson, after all, who — in my view — got away with killing his wife and her friend in 1994. He was aided by some of the best criminal defense lawyering witnessed by the entire world in a trial that resulted in his acquittal the following year.

But so help me, for this individual who I believe is a killer to weigh in on Murdaugh’s trial is to redefine the term “chutzpah.” Simpson has it by the bucketload. He should have just kept his trap shut. Period. End of story.

Unbelievable!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

political news

Has GOP gone mad?

For the life of me I cannot come to grips with the astonishing hold that a twice-impeached, likely-to-be-indicted former president of the U.S.A. has on the Republican Party.

I keep seeing these polls that suggest that the aforementioned disgrace continues to lead the GOP field in the preliminary jockeying for the 2024 party presidential nomination.

Maybe I should be thankful that Republicans continue to slobber over themselves at the notion that the party convention actually could nominate this moron in the summer of 2024.

It does make me wonder: What in the name of all that is holy has happened to a party that once was the champion of equal rights, of racial equality, of fiscal responsibility and adamant opposition to tyranny and tyrants?

It has been hijacked by a first-time politician who had no clue what to do when he got elected to the presidency in 2016 and then proceeded to engage in two impeachable offenses. The only thing that saved his sorry ass from being tossed out of office was that sickening loyalty he demanded from those in the Senate who refused to do the right thing and convict him of the crimes for which the House impeached him!

OK. I’ve gotten all of that off my chest. I am going to stand by my earlier assertion that I remain dubious that this idiot won’t be nominated.

But if he is … then my ol’ trick knee tells me there is no way on God’s good Earth that he will be elected. I just hope the trick knee doesn’t let me down.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news

‘Fun’ coming to quick end

That was fun … actually, it wasn’t fun at all.

The wind roared through Collin County. The tornado siren in our Princeton neighborhood blared. The rain fell in a torrent. We didn’t get the baseball-sized hail the forecasters had thought might pummel us.

Toby the Puppy was a bundle of nerves. So was I, truth be told.

They told us the storm would blow through quickly. And it did.

More wind is in store for the rest of the night and into the morning. Then it will be a good bit chillier around here.

Hey, that’s OK with me. March has arrived like a roaring lion, folks.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news

Sanity prevails at Princeton ISD

Well now, it appears that the Princeton (Texas) Independent School District board of trustees has stepped away from the slippery slope over which I feared it would plunge.

This is a good thing. The Princeton ISD board announced this week that it will not change fundamentally the district’s policy regarding use of public venues by special interest groups. The policy has been upgraded, according to board president Cyndi Darland, who, according to the Princeton Herald, said that administrators “made great recommendations that we approve of.”

They call it the Facility Use Policy, aka FUP. The adjustments will include some “adjustments” in the rates that groups would pay to use the venues.

The issue surfaced a few weeks ago when trustees questioned whether Princeton ISD should allow certain groups to use the venues. One group intended to rent space to celebrate its “pride” in the community’s gay community. Trustees took the issue under advisement and sent the matter to legal counsel to consider what to do about it.

I am going to presume the lawyers thought better of any notion that the district could ban anyone, or could institute an outright total ban for any group wanting to use the facilities. A PISD spokeswoman said, according to the Herald, “There will be a few rate adjustments and restrictions on certain activities that will be permitted.”

This past year, the issue of a drag show surfaced as a matter of concern. I didn’t see the show, mainly because that’s not my “thing,” if you know what I mean.

The revisions will take effect after spring break, Superintendent Don McIntyre said.

I am one red-blooded Princeton ISD taxpayer who would shudder at the notion of my school district banning anyone from using public facilities, let alone approving a total ban for all groups. These venues belong to us. Think of how Princeton ISD would tell a 4-H group, or a church group, or the Boy and Girl Scouts they couldn’t use these public venues because of resistance to, say, a “Gay Pride” event.

The school district has backed off that silly notion, to which I will offer a hearty hand clap.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com