Tag Archives: Barack Obama

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.

national news

Enjoying sight and sound of No. 44 on the stump

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I was proud to vote for Barack Hussein Obama when he ran for election and re-election as president of the United States.

And I will be candid: I miss him and wish there was some way he could still sit in the Oval Office. He cannot do that. The U.S. Constitution prohibited him from seeking a third term as president.

Now, though, he has back on the political stage, stumping for his “brother,” Joe Biden, who served as vice president during Obama’s two successful terms as president.

I admit as well to enjoying listening to the former president peel the hide off of his successor, Donald Trump, whose lies and misrepresentations seemingly have been more than President Obama can stomach.

I also wonder if Trump’s incessant attacks on Obama’s record, replete with their litany of lies, has gotten under the former president’s skin. If I had been the subject of those defamatory attacks, I know for damn certain I would be pi**ed off beyond measure.

Obama stood with former VP Biden today in Detroit, telling the horn-honking socially distanced audience what many of us already know: that Donald Trump is an abject failure as president. Obama wondered aloud about why Trump and his GOP cohorts, after 10 years of complaining about the Affordable Care Act, haven’t yet produced anything resembling a replacement. And yet, as President Obama noted, they want to toss aside health care insurance that many millions of Americans depend on during this pandemic crisis.

Amazing, yes? And stupid!

I know I am not the only American who has missed the sound of President Barack Obama’s voice, the tenor of his message or the sight of him laying waste to the unfit individual who succeeded him as president.

Welcome back to the battle, Mr. President.

national news

Simple decency, anyone?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I am going to share something that arrived on my Facebook news feed. It comes from a friend of mine in Amarillo, Texas; he is a retired physician.

I will post it here … and then I will get the heck out of the way.

Oh, The Humanity!
I saw something on television yesterday that moved me greatly. Obama was standing outside the Philadelphia football stadium, waiting his turn to address a crowd in their cars in support of Joe Biden. No coat, shirtsleeves rolled up, mask on, clear space around him. On the periphery were a young black woman with a toddler, maybe four, both masked. The mother urged the girl to approach Obama, which she did very hesitantly, looking back to Mom. Obama recognized the problem: he is 6’1″ and a semi deity. So he squatted down to the child’s height, extended his arms and the child ran to him. What moved me was the simple decency of the act. I could easily picture George W., Clinton, George H.W., Reagan or Carter doing the same thing. Trump? No way.
national news

The ‘most important line’

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza listened to Barack Obama peel the bark off Donald Trump’s hypersensitive hide Wednesday and came away with what he believes is the former president’s most cogent line about his successor.

Cillizza writes: “And with Joe and Kamala at the helm, you’re not going to have to think about the crazy things they said every day. And that’s worth a lot. You’re not going to have to argue about them every day. It just won’t be so exhausting.”

As Cillizza noted in his own analysis, the discussion won’t turn on specific policy statements. Instead, he writes, “It’s about a country absolutely exhausted by Trump — his norm-busting, his misinformation, his junior high school bullying, and his tweeting, his tweeting, his tweeting.”

There you go.

I admit to being worn out by Donald Trump. Every single day of the presidency on this individual’s watch has been exercise in “Can he top the previous day?” Sadly, Trump has managed to do it.

I don’t want, as President Obama said, to awaken every morning wondering what in the world the president has done to cast a pall over this nation.

I want normal behavior in the president. I want Joe Biden to restore the dignity that used to personify the office.

national news

The end is near

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

OK, settle down. I don’t mean The End, as in … you know.

I mean the end of a presidential campaign is coming up. It’s right around the corner. They are calling this the “election season,” given that so many Americans are voting early.

My wife and I did. So did our sons. We are among the 30 million or so Americans who have decided to cast our ballots early to ensure they get counted, given the suspicion that Donald Trump is trying to lay over the entire electoral system. Think of that for just a moment: The doubt is coming from the individual who took an oath four years to protect the system. Now he wants to fear it, to believe it’s corrupt, that it’s fake, phony.

What a moron!

But the end of the season is coming along. We’re 13 days to go when they shut down the polls from coast to coast to coast and start counting those ballots.

I cannot speak for anyone other than myself. I want former two-term Vice President Joe Biden to win this election just about more than any single candidate I’ve ever wanted to win — with the possible exception of Barack Obama in 2008 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

My intense desire to see Sen. Obama win the 2008 contest had more to do with the historic nature of his election than his opponent, the late Sen. John McCain, for whom I had great respect given the suffering he endured during wartime in defense of this country. Eight years later the intensity ratcheted up again as Hillary Clinton sought to defeat Trump. I believed then and I do today that she is eminently qualified to serve as president.

Now it’s Joe Biden who has earned my undivided attention. I have been aware of him since he first won election to the U.S. Senate in 1972. I knew about the tragedy that befell him as he prepared to take office with the death of his wife and daughter in a motor vehicle crash.

He served in the Senate with distinction until Barack Obama tapped him to run as VP in 2008.

And yes, I am aware of his missteps, such as his failed 1988 presidential campaign when Biden got caught copying the rhetoric of a British politician.

Joe Biden is the man of the hour today. I want him to win bigly. I want Trump to be shown the door and I want Joseph Biden to be given the chance to deliver on his pledge to restore dignity to the presidency.

I want this season to end.

legal news, national news

Merrick Garland haunts this hearing

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Merrick Garland is very much alive and well but his “ghost” floated throughout the hearing room today as a congressional hearing commenced on an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee welcomed another federal judge, Amy Coney Barrett, as she began her confirmation hearing to the U.S. Supreme Court. She would take the seat occupied by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in September.

Garland’s role in this drama? Well, he once got nominated to the high court by President Barack Obama. Another justice, Antonin Scalia, died in February 2016 while on vacation in Texas. President Obama wanted to nominate a successor. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wasted no time in declaring his intention to block that effort. Why? Because the voters had a right to be heard before a SCOTUS nomination would be considered by the Senate.

We had a presidential election in 2016. Obama couldn’t run again. It turned out that Donald Trump would win the election. So, Trump got to select someone to succeed Scalia; he chose Neil Gorsuch.

The hypocrisy between then and now is stunning in its scope.

We were 10 months away from the previous election when a vacancy occurred. Now, we’re just 22 days before the next election. Don’t Americans have a right to have their voices heard before the Senate considers a nominee to succeed Ginsburg? Of course we do.

Except that Republicans who at the moment hold the majority of Senate seats are pushing full speed with the Barrett hearing.

Most astonishing of all is the comment that Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham made in 2018. He said then that if an opening occurs during Donald Trump’s term as president and the “primary season has begun,” the Senate should hold off until after the election before considering a possible replacement.

Graham said we could hold his words against him. Fine. Many of us are doing that, Mr. Chairman.

Amy Coney Barrett wouldn’t be my choice to join the court. I much prefer a jurist in the Merrick Garland mold: moderate, center-left in philosophical judicial outlook. Garland, though, never got the courtesy of a hearing, let alone a Senate vote, that appears to be in store for Judge Barrett.

It’s all because the Senate GOP majority played politics with the judicial nomination process in 2016 … and is doing so once again right now.

Shameful.