Tag Archives: Joe Biden

national news

Immigration reform on tap

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I want to look ahead to the new year, as I cannot wait for this one to disappear in the distance.

President-elect Biden got a question the other night from NBC News anchor Lester Holt: What do you want to accomplish in the first 100 days of your administration?

The new president’s answer? Immigration reform.

Biden said he intends to submit to Congress a detailed immigration reform package that he said must be done soon. It is time, he said, to improve an immigration system that has produced some horrific results, such as the separation of children from their parents when they are caught entering the United States illegally.

The president-elect already has declared his intention on Day One to sign an executive order that rescinds an earlier order that Donald Trump issued regarding the “dreamers” who live in this country. These are the individuals who came here illegally as children when their parents sneaked across the border.

Biden’s order would in effect restore an even earlier executive order that President Obama signed to protect those brought here under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. DACA recipients were protected from immediate deportation. Trump wiped that order off the books and then threatened to round up hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients and send them back to their birth country. He didn’t care that DACA recipients have no memory of their country of origin; they have become de facto Americans.

Whatever immigration package the president-elect presents to Congress should contain a fast-track provision for DACA recipients to (a) seek U.S. citizenship or (b) seek some form of legal resident status.

Donald Trump has been listening to dark advice given him by senior (anti-)immigrant adviser Stephen Miller, a young man who appears to have little tolerance for any immigrants of any kind. Being the grandson of immigrants, Miller’s point of view offends me greatly, as does the attitude that Trump adopted during his term in office.

President Bush wanted to reform immigration policy. As did President Obama. The reform effort stalled during the Trump era.

I welcome President Biden’s effort to deliver on his 100-day vow.

legal news

Barr does the right thing … finally!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

U.S. Attorney General William Barr, who’s been accused of acting more like Donald J. Trump’s personal attorney than a defender of the U.S. Constitution, has issued a statement that, to be candid, surprised me.

He said that the Justice Department has found no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could have any impact on the outcome of the presidential election.

Holy crap, man! Haven’t many of us out here been saying that? Sure we have!

Whatever the case, the AG has made a declaration that is music to me. It likely sounds like fingernails on the blackboard to one Donald Trump, to which I say: that’s just too damn bad!

The POTUS vows to continue his idiotic hunt for results that will turn around an election that President-elect Biden won handily. He is going to bleed funds from his campaign coffers to search for some court somewhere in the U.S. of A. that will declare there to be fraud where none exists.

For that matter, were I a Trump campaign contributor, I would be mighty pi**ed off that Trump is using this money for a foolish quest to prove wrongdoing where none exists.

Barr’s statement now guarantees he’ll get a nasty Twitter blast from Donald Trump. Mr. Attorney General, you should wear it proudly.

national news

Et, tu … National Review?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

William F. Buckley, the late, great iconic conservative thinker, surely would be proud of the publication he founded.

It has called on Donald Trump, the nation’s lame-duck president, to cease his “petulant refusal” to accept Joe Biden’s election as president. The magazine wants Trump to exit the White House quietly and leave the task of governing to the man who thumped him in the Nov. 3 presidential election.

The National Review — which Buckley founded in 1955 — published an editorial calling on Trump to throw in the towel.

“There are legitimate issues to consider after the 2020 vote about the security of mail-in ballots and the process of counting votes (some jurisdictions, bizarrely, take weeks to complete their initial count), but make no mistake: The chief driver of the post-election contention of the past several weeks is the petulant refusal of one man to accept the verdict of the American people,” the editorial said. “The Trump team (and much of the GOP) is working backwards, desperately trying to find something, anything to support the president’s aggrieved feelings, rather than objectively considering the evidence and reacting as warranted.”

There you have it. A legitimate, conservative publication founded on legitimate conservative principles has called on a phony conservative — the 45th president of the United States — to pack it in.

William Buckley would be a happy man.

national news

Trump making Biden’s task even more difficult

(Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I have been extolling the virtues of President-elect Biden’s mission to bring the nation together, to restore our “national soul.”

There was a time when I thought Joe Biden was up to the task, no matter its difficulty. I am now having second thoughts.

Why? Because the man he defeated on Nov. 3 is sowing some incredibly deeply planted seeds of mistrust in the democratic system that defeated him for re-election.

If Donald Trump had any sense of shame within his overfed body, he might heed the calls to dial it all back. He doesn’t. Instead, he continues to sow those seeds that are being scarfed up by the moronic base of supporters who actually  believe the lies he tells.

What’s more, we now hear from one of Trump’s lawyers saying that a man whom Trump fired should be “drawn and quartered and shot” because he declared the presidential election was the most secure in history.

The lawyer is Joseph DiGenova. The individual he wants executed is Christopher Krebs, whom Trump hired to protect the nation’s electoral system against corruption. Krebs did his job, except that his declaration flies in the face of Trump’s narrative, which is that the election is “rigged,” and that the presidency was “stolen” by millions of illegal voters.

This is a sample of the headwinds that confront President-elect Biden as he prepares to assume the nation’s highest office.

And this is an example of how the nation’s soul is in serious disrepair. I won’t say that Trump has destroyed our national soul. He clearly has inflicted grievous damage on it. He is doing so even as the clock ticks away the final weeks of his disastrous term as president.

President-elect Biden faced a difficult job even under better circumstances. I pray his pledge to unify the nation isn’t crossing the threshold of impossibility.

national news

Trump never learned how to be ‘presidential’

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump’s pending exit from the presidency really shouldn’t contain too many surprises to go along with the outrage many of us are experiencing.

He once vowed to be “presidential” once he took the oath of office.

It never happened. Even when he spoke to us with restraint, many of us thought: You know, he seems so stilted, so stiff, so … not himself.

I’ll be clear. I disliked intensely the “real” Donald Trump that would present itself when he would fly off on one of those rants. And yet when he would read prepared remarks, he did so with a discomfort level that I could feel in my living room watching on my TV set.

Donald Trump proved to be a bad liar and a president who, when handed opportunities to say the right thing, would do so under seeming duress. He didn’t like the role he was forced to play when he took that oath of office.

What are we getting in place of this? We’re getting a president, Joe Biden, who at some level has been practicing for the role during his entire and lengthy public service career. President-elect Biden chaired Senate committees, presiding over sometimes controversial hearings. He behaved like a distinguished gentleman most of the time.

So I don’t expect a lot of on-the-job training for the new president when he steps into the Oval Office. At least, though, we likely won’t have to endure the sight and sound of a president who never learned how to act and sound like someone elected to the most exalted office in the land.

economic news

OMB pick draws fire

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Neera Tanden wants to become the next head of the Office of Management and Budget in the Joe Biden administration.

But wait a minute. She’s running into some serious headwinds from Senate Republicans. Why? Well, it seems that she has been highly critical of GOP policymakers and policies, and of course of Donald Trump, the guy Biden defeated to become the nation’s next president.

I’ll be candid. Biden’s decision to select Tanden does puzzle me. She has been a sharp-tongued pundit. I really don’t know about her budgetary experience. Not only that, the president-elect’s pledge to “unify” the country seems at odds with the selection of a sharp partisan, such as Neera Tanden.

She runs a progressive think tank, the Center for American Progress. Tanden could be seen and heard throughout the Biden-Trump campaign blasting Donald Trump to smithereens. To be blunt, I have no problem with what she said about Trump.

I do have a problem with an appointment such as hers and whether it is faithful to President-elect Biden’s pledge to heal the wounds that have divided us.

media news, national news

Hoping to eradicate an ‘e-word’

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I suppose you could surmise that there is a virtually endless array of things I anticipate with the inauguration of Joe Biden as our next president of the United States.

One of those things is the elimination of certain epithets we hear far too often from the man he will succeed, Donald J. Trump.

I want to discuss one of them briefly here. That would be the term “enemy.”

Joe Biden is wired entirely differently than Donald Trump.

Biden has said categorically and without equivocation that political foes are not enemies. He has worked through many decades in public service seeking compromise with politicians from the other party. He works well with Republicans while being what he calls himself as being a “proud Democrat.”

The president-elect understands that effective legislation quite often is the result of compromise. He doesn’t see the GOP as comprising enemies. They merely are opponents. Donald Trump exhibited an all-too-often and annoying tendency to cast his foes as enemies.

Indeed, he infamously referred to the media as the “enemy of the American people.” My goodness, it is no such thing. Previous presidents have been made uncomfortable by harsh questions posed by the media. None of them to my knowledge ever referred to reporters as anyone’s “enemy.”

I expect to see President Biden restore the sense of respect we all can have for those with whom we disagree. I also expect to see him eradicate the careless and reckless use of the word “enemy” within the White House.

national news

Waiting for the pageantry

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I am a sucker for pageantry. I love military parades. I love patriotic music. I even get caught up in pomp and circumstance.

It’s especially true when it comes to presidential inaugurations. I guess you’ve heard but we have one of those coming up. It’s fewer than 60 days from today.

President Joe Biden will take office. His wife, Jill, will hold a Bible and Chief Justice John Roberts will instruct the president to recite 35 words contained in the presidential oath.

The pageantry will be immense, even if it’s scaled back. The coronavirus pandemic is likely to inhibit the crowd size that will be gathered before the new president and the former presidents who will be there to witness his moment of pageantry.

The absence of President Biden’s immediate predecessor won’t inhibit the majesty of the moment. I don’t expect to see Donald Trump there, given that he won’t acknowledge that Biden actually beat the stuffing out of him in the Nov. 3 election.

So what if he takes a pass? No big shakes for me, to be honest.

I am going to focus my attention on the new team, led by a new president, who will seek to right the ship of state that has been listing badly for the past four years.

Yes, the lunacy of the campaign, the tragedy of the pandemic, the chaos associated with the transition will do nothing to distract me from the pageantry and majesty that awaits as we welcome a new president and vice president.

I’ll make an admission, too. I am likely to shed a tear or two as Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden receive these words once they take their oaths: “Congratulations, Mme. Vice President” and “Congratulations, Mr. President.”

Yep, the pageantry gets me every time.

national news

Trump goes out as he came in: amid chaos

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald J. Trump is going out in a blizzard of incoherence, which to my memory reminds me of how he entered the presidency.

He was willfully ignorant of what it took to take the reins of government. He never learned a thing. Now he’s exiting the White House on Jan. 20 while offering a mysterious string of incoherent rants.

For instance, he said he will leave D.C. “if” the Electoral College certifies that President-elect Biden won the election on Nov 3. Whaddya mean “if,” dude? The Electoral College is going to certify Joe Biden as the winner, and a clear winner at that! His margin of actual vote victory is widening daily, surpassing 6 million ballots. The Electoral College count stands at 306-232, with Biden over Trump. Period. End of story.

Oh, but wait. Now comes Trump saying that he would leave the White House if Biden can prove that the 80 million-plus votes he has racked up came about legitimately. That they were all legally cast votes.

Huh? Hey, Donald, I have news for you. The states that have certified the results have declared they all are legal, free and fair votes. They say without hesitation that there is no “widespread” voter fraud. There isn’t even any minuscule voter fraud, they say. These are election professionals who know what they are doing, unlike the lame-duck make-believe president who has been in over his head from the moment he took the oath in January 2017.

Donald Trump is leaving the White House no later than Jan. 20. I am rolling around in my head the idea that he might depart before then, forgoing the niceties associated with attending his successor’s inaugural. I mean, if he’s going to refuse to acknowledge that President-elect Biden, what’s the point of him and Melania even bothering to show up?

I only can imaging what might happen as he and the first lady step aboard Marine One for the flight away from the Capitol. It might get real ugly.

Chaos reigns supreme at the end of the Trump Era, just as reigned at its beginning. Who knew?

national news

POTUS-elect an ‘elitist’?

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The Washington Post reported the following today …

“Biden’s cabinet picks went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumes, attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wrote on Twitter. “I support American greatness. And I have no interest in returning to the ‘normal’ that left us dependent on China.”

I truly don’t know whether to laugh or scream.

A Republican Party with one of its members was elected president as a populist, is now accusing President-elect Joe Biden of being an elitist.

This is the fellow who commuted by train daily between Washington and Wilmington, Del., when he served in the Senate. Why did he do that? Because initially he was a widower with two young sons who needed their daddy home at night while the boys fought through their grief over the death of their mother and baby sister in a motor vehicle crash.

Yes, Joe Biden has appointed some learned individuals educated at Ivy League schools to join the Cabinet.

This “elitist” canard, though, is as phony as the assertion over the voter fraud assertion that the Whiner in Chief keeps alive.