Tag Archives: Joe Biden

national news

Are we better off? Umm, no!

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Ronald Reagan once asked famously during a 1980 presidential debate with President Carter whether the nation was “better off than we were four years ago.”

The question seared the audience that heard him ask it. Voters responded on Election Day 1980 with a stunning verdict: The answer was “no,” and they delivered a landslide victory to Reagan.

Rahm Emanuel, a former Chicago mayor and an acknowledged Democratic partisan, asked  that question today in terms of Donald Trump’s tenure as president. The answer, according to Emanuel, is an equally resounding “no.”

Therein lies the reason why Trump lost his bid for a second term, just as President Carter lost his own second-term run 40 years ago. The nation is fundamentally worse off today than we were when Trump took office.

Trump has presided over a horrendous coarsening of our national debate; he has inflicted heavy damage on our international alliances; Trump has governed by chaos and tossed continuity into the crapper; the POTUS has made full-throated lying an acceptable form of communication … and we have the pandemic.

I will not blame Trump for the virus that has killed more than 300,000 Americans. I do blame him fully for the shabby, shoddy and shameful response he has orchestrated. He lied to us about its severity from the get-go; he has contradicted the advice of his medical experts; Trump has put Americans at grave risk of death as a result.

The pandemic is an existential threat to our national security and Donald Trump has failed to remain faithful to the oath he took when he became president.

Have there been successes along the way? Sure. Israel’s relationships in the Middle East with neighboring Arab nations gives us hope for a more lasting peace in that region; prior to the pandemic’s arrival a year ago, our economy was experiencing significant growth. I will not short-sell those positive outcomes.

The pandemic and all the other failures, though, have left us worse off today than we were when Donald Trump took office and delivered an inaugural address that produced precisely one memorable moment: that “the American carnage” would come to an immediate end. Well, guess what. It hasn’t ended.

President-elect Biden has a monumental task awaiting him when he takes office in 31 days. Just as Americans spoke decisively 40 years when we elected President Reagan — who posed what has become the threshold question for all politicians — we have spoken yet again in electing President Biden.

environmental news

Hoping for more than climate change lip service

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President-elect Joe Biden is giving an abundance of lip service to climate change, global warming, clean energy development as he continues to formulate an executive government.

He did so yet again today in revealing his choices to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department and the Energy Department.

Look, I believe the president-elect is sincere in his state desire to tackle what he has called the greatest “existential threat” to our national security. I agree with him. However, I intend to watch intently as the new president starts rolling out the policies that will put some meat on the rhetorical bones that President-elect Biden is delivering on the climate change issue.

I want to see investments made in clean energy development. Energy Secretary-designate Jennifer Granholm spoke to that desire when she spoke to us after Biden introduced her. Indeed, the POTUS-elect has talked about climate change initiatives as being job creators. He has said he wants to employ millions of Americans in clean energy development.

Climate change and global warming do present a grave threat to the nation. The gloom-and-doomers among us suggest it might be too late for humankind to stem the effects of our changing climate. I am not going to buy into that notion.

I want my government and the president I supported with my vote to contribute more than lip service. We need federal policies that will help us harvest the wind, the ocean tides and other clean renewable energy sources to do the job upon which we continue to rely on fossil fuels.

Those fossil fuels have their limits. They also are contributing to that existential threat that our new president says is endangering our planet.

Mr. President-elect, it’s time to get busy. As in immediately.

national news

Biden lines up many ‘firsts’

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President-elect Joe Biden keeps rolling out the executive branch lineup he wants to help him govern the nation he was elected to lead. In the main, I find his selections so far to be an impressive collection of folks.

Biden keeps touting all the “firsts” he is asking to serve with him. The first openly gay Cabinet official; the first women to lead the energy and treasury departments; the first Native-American in the Cabinet; the first African-American to run the Pentagon and the Environmental Protection Agency.

He says he wants the executive branch of government to mirror the nation. It looks as though the president-elect is fulfilling that goal.

One of the remarkable aspects of the government he is forming is the number of individuals who struggled as they came of age, found their way into the world. The new interior secretary-designate talked of being homeless as a girl; the new energy secretary nominee told of her grandfather taking his own life because he couldn’t struggle with poverty.

Sure, there are marvelous success stories in the group. There appears to be a marked absence of billionaires of the type that populated the Cabinet that Donald Trump put together when he assumed office four years ago.

The new government in the making is a diverse group, comprising plenty of ethnic and racial minorities, women and men of various backgrounds. Many of them come to the new government with plenty of prior government experience.

Yes, we see a number of hands brought back from President Obama’s two terms in office. The new veterans affairs secretary served as White House chief of staff, the treasury secretary designate led the Fed during the Obama years, the White House chief of staff once filled a similar role for the VP during the Obama years and the climate envoy once served as secretary of state during the Obama administration.

I want to give Joe Biden a bit of credit for bringing back some tried-and-true government hands who played a role in governing during the successful two terms of the Obama administration. Indeed, the president-elect himself is a creature of the government he is now going to lead, serving 36 years in the Senate and eight years as vice president. For that matter, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris served in the U.S. Senate, was attorney general of California and was district attorney in San Francisco County; she, too, is fluent in government-speak and one cannot overstate the value knowing the language.

Americans took a gamble in electing a business mogul as president four years ago. To my way of thinking, it didn’t work out, given Donald Trump’s ignorance of how government works and his unwillingness to learn how to operate its intricate mechanism.

The nation will not have to face that particular issue when Joe Biden takes office as president.

So it is that the new president is crafting a government that resembles the nation. Moreover, it will be populated by those who know how it works, which in itself isn’t a “first.” It merely feels fresh compared to the chaos we have seen during the past four years.

national news

Get ready for the losers’ mantra

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Let us steel ourselves for what I am certain is going to be an incessant drumbeat from those whose candidate for the presidency in 2020 lost the election … by a lot!

It will go something like this: more than 74 million Americans voted for Donald Trump and our voices deserve to be heard; and voices are going to insist that Joe Biden “stole” the election from our guy.

OK. How does one counter such an argument?

I’ll start by reminding anyone who tosses it at me that President-elect Biden garnered more than 81 million votes. He won with a 51.5 percent majority. Biden collected 7 million more votes than Trump. Biden carried 26 of the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia.

I encourage those Trumpkins out there to spare me the argument that for the past four years, many of the anti-Trump forces reminded everyone that in 2016 Hillary Rodham Clinton won more votes than Trump. I have noted that fact on this blog. I have acknowledged — often in the very next sentence — that Trump won where it counted: in the Electoral College. I know what the U.S. Constitution sets out for the election of a president; I honor it and accept that Trump was elected under the rules set forth by our nation’s founders.

So, the Hillary-won-more-votes-than-Trump argument doesn’t hold up. Nor does it matter one damn bit. The issue today is that President-elect Biden won more actual votes than Trump, he captured more than enough electoral votes than Trump and that every bogus legal challenge that Trump has mounted to overturn the results have been tossed out by every court that has heard them. That includes the U.S. Supreme Court.

The mantra will continue at least for the next four years as President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris seek to repair the damage that Donald Trump inflicted on our democratic process.

I will wait for the bumper stickers to appear as well, although I am not sure how you distill the message of discontent onto a foot-long piece of paper plastered onto a motor vehicle bumper.

Speaking of that, my favorite post-election bumper sticker appeared in the 1970s, about the time President Nixon was being swallowed whole by the Watergate scandal. You’ll recall that Nixon won re-election in 1972 in a historic 49-state landslide. Public opinion turned against the embattled president. Then came the bumper sticker that read: Don’t Blame Me — I’m From Massachusetts … the only state that cast most of its votes in 1972 for George McGovern.

That was then. The here and now presents a whole new set of challenges. One of them likely will be hearing from the losers that their guy didn’t actually lose.

Yeah. He did.

national news

Michael Flynn: moronic notion

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The man who for 24 days served as national security adviser for Donald J. Trump has come forward with a patently stupid — and treasonous — idea.

Michael Flynn, the pardoned former Army lieutenant general, said that Trump has the authority to call out the troops, dispatch them to various states and actually order them to overturn the election that resulted in Trump’s loss to President-elect Joe Biden.

Is this individual for real? Has he lost what passes for his mind?

Gen. Flynn has actually suggested that Trump — who continues to insist he won an election he actually lost — can mount what amounts to a military coup against the government. That’s if I understand what the former national security adviser has suggested.

“He could order, within the swing states if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities and basically rerun an election each in those states,” Flynn told Newsmax. What the hell? 

Thirty-three days from now, we are getting a new president. His name is Joe Biden. I want to be spared the idiocy that keeps pouring forth from Donald Trump and his cabal of kooks.

national news

Stop the phony outrage!

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The phony outrage and astonishing hypocrisy of Donald Trump’s sycophant brigade just take my breath away.

Here’s the latest.

President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, referred to Trump’s voter base as a “bunch of fu**ers.” Yep, she dropped an f-bomb on ’em.

Now, is that the way anyone should speak of a political opponent? I don’t like it. Then again, nor do I like the response that has emanated from the righteous right wing of the Republican Party that has turned the other way while Donald Trump has done the following:

Admitted to grabbing women by their genitals; mocked people with disabilities; downplayed a pandemic that has killed more than 300,000 Americans; ignored a cyber attack that threatens our national security; laid waste to the rule of law; damaged our international alliances … and what else? You get the point.

So now some of Trump’s followers are just enraged that a Biden campaign guru dropped an f-bomb?

Steve Schmidt is a former Republican political operative who went on to co-found the Lincoln Project, a political action committee dedicated to defeating Donald Trump’s re-election effort. I will leave it to Schmidt to offer his response to the faux outrage that’s making the rounds.

Steve Schmidt Tells Rubio to F Himself (maxnewstoday.com)

I cannot say it any better.

national news

Who should stay on?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Presidential transitions occasionally produce parlor games out here in Voter Land, the kind that prompts some of us to wonder: Who might the new president hold over from the administration he is replacing?

Joe Biden is forming his team in fairly rapid succession, despite Donald Trump’s efforts to derail him. I do wonder, though, whether the president-elect would be inclined to ask any member of the Trump team to stay on.

Two names come to mind: FBI Director Christopher Wray and CIA Director Gina Haspel. The rest of ’em? I don’t see any keepers among them.

Wray and Haspel seem to have something in common, despite the obvious commonality, that they were both selected by Trump. They both have fallen out of favor with the current president.

Wray has fairly openly challenged Trump’s assertions about the threat that Russia posed during the election and has asserted that he can find no evidence of widespread voter fraud, the kind that Trump keeps insisting occurred during the election. Haspel has done her job professionally and has kept her spooks in line, preventing them from doing Trump’s dirty work.

They’re both competent professionals. Haspel in particular impresses me, as she was a career deep-cover agent before ascending to the top rungs of the CIA organizational structure. Meanwhile, Wray has stood up for his team of agents in the face of mounting — and unwarranted — criticism from Donald Trump.

I have not a clue whether either of them would be interested in working in a Biden administration. If they do have an interest, I would hope President Biden would consider keeping them on the job.

No need to think of keeping anyone else, all of whom deserve a hasty “b’bye.”

national news

Phenomenal replaces the routine

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

It can be argued, which I will do here, that Donald Trump’s presidential re-election loss has produced one of the most remarkable phenomena in recent memory.

That would be how a simple acknowledgment that the winner of a presidential election is the president-elect can make such news.

So it was the other day when Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stood on the floor of the Senate and declared that his former Democratic colleague, Joe Biden, was the president-elect of the United States.

McConnell’s acknowledgment of the obvious became news all day.

Who is to blame or credit of this bizarre reaction? Donald Trump! He has sown a narrative that has taken hold among faithful GOP politicians who have signed onto the phony notion that Biden “stole” the election that Trump actually won. Think about this for just a moment.

Courts have ruled repeatedly that no such thievery occurred. Politicians who under normal circumstances would honor judicial opinions now cast aspersions on them. The Senate’s top Republican, ,McConnell, was among the politicians who refused to say publicly what he no doubt knew, which is that Trump lost and that Biden beat him like a drum.

So now we get to watch GOP politicians say — now that the Electoral College has certified the outcome — that Joe Biden is the president-elect. And the media cover it as if it’s really big news. Then again, given the tenor of the times and the suspicion that Donald Trump has created … I guess it is.

Ridiculous.

national news

Waiting for a POTUS to do his job

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

While we watch Donald Trump remained fixated on an issue he cannot change, it is good to look ahead toward an era when we get a president who is committed to doing his job.

Joe Biden will take an oath on Jan. 20 to defend and protect the Constitution and to defend Americans against our enemies.

Our enemies must include a pandemic that continues to kill Americans every hour of the day. The total has zoomed past 300,000 and will only grow for the foreseeable future. Yes, we have good news on the way in the form of vaccines developed by two major pharmaceutical firms; medicine is being injected right now into the arms of first responders.

The current president, though, is quiet about all the misery we’re still experiencing. He instead is focusing on court challenges to an election he lost bigly. He has lost more than 60 court battles, including at least two of them before the U.S. Supreme Court; indeed, he has been rebuffed by the three justices he nominated to the nation’s highest court, proving once again the value of an independent federal judiciary.

Joe Biden will bring an entirely different approach to governing. Of that I am absolutely, utterly and completely certain. The president-elect has spent his entire professional life in public service. He is wired for the job he is about to inherit, unlike Trump, who is wired only for self-enrichment.

Trump never acquired the knowledge of running a massive government enterprise. It’s now an open question whether he even knew how to run a business empire he acquired with substantial financial help from his father.

Donald Trump has been AWOL since losing his re-election bid. The new man, Joe Biden, is hard at work crafting an executive branch of government worthy of the effort that awaits it.

I am one American who looks forward to the new guy taking charge.

environmental news, national news

Push toward energy alternatives? Yes

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

A nation is watching a government take shape.

President-elect Joe Biden is systematically appointing Cabinet and high-level advisors at a brisk clip. They are by and large competent, knowledgeable and forward-thinking. I don’t see any real clunkers in the group.

We’re going to get an energy secretary who once served as governor of Michigan. Jennifer Granholm is expected to take over from Dan Brouilette as soon as the Senate confirms her. What do I want from the new energy boss? Well, I want something that’s been missing for the past four years under Brouilette and from former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who preceded him as energy boss. I want an emphasis on renewable energy.

Will this be part of the Granholm agenda when she takes over as head of the Department of Energy? It damn sure better be.

What was most troubling to me about Rick Perry’s tenure at Energy was his silence on the issue of renewable energy … the clean energy that could replace fossil fuel-driven energy. What disappointed me was that while he was governor of Texas, we saw wind energy farms sprouting like wildflowers all over West Texas. Perry’s tenure as governor saw a huge investment in the kind of energy that promotes environmental protection while heating and cooling our homes and delivering electricity to business and industry throughout the state.

Indeed, Texas became the nation’s leading producer of wind-generated electricity during Perry’s time as governor. Then he ran for president twice; he called Donald Trump a “cancer on conservatism,” pulled out of the 2016 contest and then got selected to serve as energy secretary during the first part of the Trump administration. He must have made a pledge to keep quiet about his record in Texas, because we didn’t hear much from him about alternative energy sources.

President-elect Biden is expected to select Gov. Granholm as the nation’s next energy secretary. He also is committing considerable interest and resources to battling climate change. He has named former Secretary of State John Kerry as his international climate envoy and former Environmental Protection Agency head Gina McCarthy as the nation’s domestic climate change guru.

Fossil fuel production and the carbon emissions that choke our air have caused a worldwide crisis with its impact on our planet’s climate. The nation’s energy secretary can play a key role in stemming that trend and perhaps guide us toward a reversal of fortune.

Jennifer Granholm must be able and willing to take that lead. So must the man who will nominate her to the key job. President Biden has stated clearly and without equivocation that climate change presents a dire threat to our national security. He needs to give the next energy secretary the go-ahead to attack that problem head-on.