Tag Archives: Joe Biden

national news

DACA recipients get a boost from judge

(Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)exe

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents have gotten a welcome boost from a federal judge who has informed the Homeland Security department to start accepting applications to become involved in a program established during the Obama administration.

These residents are those who came here illegally as children, brought to the United States by their parents. They’re called “Dreamers,” and the Obama administration shielded them from deportation through the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals act. President Obama established DACA by executive order; Donald Trump rescinded that order, seeking to end the DACA initiative.

Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis’ ruling restores DACA for those Dreamers, giving them a chance to seek citizenship or legal resident status.

Indeed, as I’ve noted already on this blog, DACA recipients need some compassion from the U.S. government. Many of them came here as children, some as toddlers or infants. They know no other country than the United States. They have no connection to their country of birth. The Trump administration sought to round them up and send them packing to their birth country, which to my way of thinking is absolutely cruel in the extreme.

President-elect Biden is vowing immigration reform legislation in his first 100 days in office. It must include a permanent restoration of DACA for those who are willing to do what they must to become citizens or legal residents.

They have been given another reprieve from a federal judge to start that process once again.

As CNN.com reported: “Immigrant youth have resisted this cruel administration’s continuous attacks, and once more we have won,” said Johana Larios. “Now, first-time applicants like me will be able to have access to the DACA program and current recipients will be able to breathe a little easier as DACA is restored to its original form. I am now able to look forward to returning to school, and feel safe that I won’t be separated from my community.”

I am hoping for a return to humane immigration policies.

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.

medical news

Yes, to Dr. Fauci staying on the job

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Imagine that you’re the nation’s — if not the world’s — leading infectious disease doctor and you’ve been “advising” a president of the United States who dismisses your advice and calls you an “idiot.”

Then the president loses his re-election effort and you get a call from the fellow who beat him, the guy who pledged throughout his successful campaign that he would “rely on the science” to help set a course to battle a killer pandemic. He new president wants to you stay on as his “chief science adviser.”

What do you do? Well, you do what Dr. Anthony Fauci did when President-elect Joe Biden asked him to stay on. You say “yes” on the spot, which the president-elect said was Dr. Fauci’s response.

Uh, Mr. President-elect, you can count me as one American who is glad to know that you’re going to keep Anthony Fauci nearby to offer his best, learned advice on how to handle this pandemic. Joe Biden will become the eighth president for whom Fauci has worked.

All of them, Democrat and Republican alike — except for Donald J. Trump — have heeded his advice and plotted courses of action to battle prior medical emergencies based on what he has told them.

As for The Donald, his description of the Ivy League-educated physician and scientist as an “idiot” tells me all I need to know about the numbskull approach Trump has taken to the pandemic response.

national news

Trump behavior … would we allow our kids to do this?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump’s relentless petulance in the wake of his smashing re-election loss as president of the United States brings to mind what we have taught our children.

We teach  them to accept losses with a modicum of dignity and humility. We don’t want them to gloat when they win; nor do we want them to pout when they lose. Society has winners and losers. You win some, you lose some.

When you lose you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, congratulate the person who beat you and then you move on. When we played Little League baseball, we all cheered our opponent in victory and defeat with that quaint cheer when we yelled, “Two, four, six, eight … who do we appreciate?”

Donald Trump has become the Sore Loser in Chief, the antithesis of what we have taught our children, what our own parents have taught us. I have no clue how it was in the Trump household when young Donald was a boy. For all I know he is behaving today precisely the way he was taught to behave by his mother and father.

Which makes me think his folks would be proud of the way he has been undermining the democratic process. How he has endangered us by holding up the transition to a new administration and denying the president-elect access to the intelligence briefings he needs to establish a strategy for protecting Americans.

Well, the good news is out there just ahead of us. It will arrive in about, oh, 46 days when President Joe Biden takes the oath and restores adult behavior to the West Wing of the White House.

national news

At least someone is talking about the pandemic

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I get that Joe Biden isn’t president of the United States just yet.

He insists that he knows we have only one president at a time. Indeed, we do. However, I am glad as the dickens that at least one leading political figure — that would be the president-elect — is talking to us candidly and openly and truthfully about the pandemic that continues to rage out of control.

Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris sat down for their first post-election interview together with CNN anchor Jake Tapper. They spoke on a day when we set yet another hideous record for hospitalization and deaths from the pandemic.

Biden pledged that upon taking office he will issue an order declaring that anyone doing business or working on federal property will wear masks and will maintain social distancing.

Got that? Then he asked all Americans to wear masks for the first 100 days of the Biden administration. The president-elect believes that if all Americans don masks and stay way from each other we will see a “dramatic decrease” in the infection rate. Well, I am going to heed his advice … we’ll just have to see how it plays out.

Back to my point, which is that the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, hasn’t seen fit to talk at all about the pandemic. Since he lost re-election on Nov 3, Trump has been preoccupied with sowing distrust in our electoral system. He won’t concede that Biden whipped his a** in the election.

Trump should be talking, too, about the pandemic. He should be meeting weekly, if not daily, with his White House pandemic response team that has been rendered virtually useless as Trump pouts over losing an election. Speaking of the response team, what in the world has become of Vice President Mike Pence, the man who is supposed to be in charge of that effort? He is MIA along with the president.

I am grateful beyond measure that the election turned out as it did. As everyone knows — and I have been willing to acknowledge — elections have consequences.

We are witnessing one of those consequences play out in real time as the president-elect steps into the breech that the current president has abandoned.

national news

Biden, Harris set a refreshing pace

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I just watched our new president and vice president on TV, interviewed together for the first time since the election.

My first  reaction? What a remarkable change from what we have endured for the past four years!

President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris spoke candidly, openly and thoroughly with CNN’s Jake Tapper, who I should add did not lob only softball questions at them. They spoke clearly and cleanly about whether they would allow family members to stay involved in business interests that could conflict with their roles as president and VP; they both said “no.”

And so … we are heading toward a return to the norms of the nation’s highest offices that Donald Trump has trashed.

I don’t know about you, but I am looking forward to when President Biden and Vice President Harris take their oaths of office.

I no longer want to see public policy dished out via Twitter; Biden says it won’t happen. Nor do I want to see the president bullying and pressuring the attorney general to investigate so-and-so for such-and-such; Biden says that won’t happen, either. I yearn for a return to this nation as a world leader among the nations of the world; Biden and Harris said the United States will restore our alliances.

I want the president and vice president to lead our fight against the COVID pandemic by demonstrating they, too, will wear masks and practice social distancing. President-elect Biden said he will issue a direct order as president that anyone doing business in federal buildings will be wearing masks and staying apart from each other; moreover, he pledged tonight to ask all Americans to mask up for the first 100 days of the Biden administration.

Biden believes nationwide mask-wearing will help reduce the rate of infection, illness and death. If he wants us to wear a mask, then I am going to do as he asks.

Yes, the nation is about to leave the age of chaos and confusion on the side of the road. I like what I heard tonight from the new team.

national news

Biden won’t go after Trump

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I am willing to take President-elect Biden at his word that he has “no interest” in pursuing federal charges against his presidential predecessor, Donald Trump.

I also am willing to accept that glimmer of magnanimousness from the new president as the statesmanlike thing to do.

However, my gut also tells me that Biden is going to coast on that one because he might be willing to step aside and let state prosecutors in, say, Manhattan have their day in court with the president.

Whatever pardons Trump might hand out — for himself or members of his family, for example — are good only for federal charges that might be on the horizon. He has no say over what states might do.

I am guessing, therefore, that the president-elect is lying low to give Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. time to conclude whether he wants to indict and then prosecute the former president for assorted campaign finance violations.

That’s just a hunch on my part. What the heck. Hasn’t Donald Trump framed his non-response to the pandemic on a “hunch” that it will just vanish? My own hunch might be as worthless as Trump’s pandemic hunch … but I am free to offer it as a possible explanation for President Biden’s pledge to keep his hands off Trump’s troubles.

national news

Post-election period: mind-boggling!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

It might be just me, but this period after the latest presidential election is about as mind-boggling as anything I ever have witnessed.

And, yes, that includes the period after the 2000 election that ended up being decided by a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that resulted in George W. Bush taking office as the 43rd president of the United States.

This is one takes the proverbial cake.

Donald Trump got thumped by Joe Biden. The president-elect has rolled up an impressive popular vote margin and a decent Electoral College majority to become the next president. As for Trump, well, he has managed to shower himself with embarrassment upon embarrassment with his petulant, boorish and childish refusal to recognize that he won’t be president after Jan. 20, when Joe Biden takes the oath to become President Biden.

Beyond that, he has endangered our very democracy by encouraging governors to overturn the results of the elections in their states … which they cannot do by law. Trump has denigrated the electoral process, asserting the existence of “massive” voter fraud where none exists. He has fought and lost 30-plus court battles. Meanwhile, states that Biden won are certifying the results, as are the states that Trump carried.

The way I see it, there is no way in the world that Donald Trump will attend President Biden’s inauguration. He will skulk off long before the new president takes his oath and begins the work of repairing the damage done  under Trump’s tenure as president.

I am left at this juncture to merely wish that the new president can finish his pre-oath-taking preparation — which should he should be able to do — and then get to work.

As for Donald John Trump … don’t let the door hit you in your backside, podnuh.

national news

GOP senator: profile in cowardice

(AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin knows the truth about the 2020 presidential election. Joe Biden has been elected president of the United States. Donald Trump has been booted out on his a**.

The Republican senator, though, just cannot say it out loud within earshot of anyone who would hear him. He cannot acknowledge that President-elect Biden is going to take office next month as the 46th president.

Johnson says he would commit “political suicide.” That’s it. He speaks to the obvious outcome and he fears some kind of push back from the GOP base that has swilled the battery acid potion that makes folks believe that Biden’s free and fair election was the product of phony voter fraud.

Best of all, Sen. Johnson wants Attorney General William Barr — who says there is no evidence of fraud in the electoral process — to prove the absence of such evidence.

Um, let’s see. How does one prove the absence of something when the burden always falls on those to prove the existence of evidence?

So, there you have it. A leading GOP minion of Donald Trump just cannot acknowledge what most of us know already … that Joe Biden is going to take the oath as the next president of the United States.

Johnson casts a profile in cowardice.

national news

Blogging is just so much fun

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I once thought that the terror attacks on 9/11 broke open a dam for opinion writers. I went through a lengthy spell while writing opinions for a daily newspaper that I had to confront more topics that I could comment on each day.

My task after 9/11 became difficult: I had to decide what I could set aside for another day.

I left daily journalism more than eight years ago. I now am a full-time blogger. I am relearning now that the Donald Trump Era of American politics has given me a new surge in subjects on which I can comment.

Soon, though, the Trump Era will come to a merciful end. I am hopeful for a new day in American politics. President Joe Biden promises to restore our national soul. I hope he does. Our soul is in dire need of restoration.

If he does, then I hope that the trove of topics on which to comment will remain full. I am going to use this blog to offer all manner of opinion on issues of the day.

It gives me reason to keep on blogging.