Tag Archives: Barack Obama

Let’s not condemn them all

November 17, 2015 kanelis2012

The image that jumps out at me from this picture might not be what you think it is.

It’s not the low-life cloaked in that robe. It is the burning crosses in the background.

What do the crosses symbolize? Well, I suppose you can say they represent Christianity’s holiest symbol, the crucifix on which Jesus Christ lost his earthly life.

Yet the Ku Klux Klansman pictured here no doubt proclaims he burned those crosses to stand up for “Christian values.” Isn’t that what those loons proclaim?

Well, as a practicing Christian, I do not consider them in any shape or form to represent my faith. They are outliers in the extreme.

So, too — in my view — are the terrorists who commit their horrible acts today in the name of Islam.

And yet …

There are individuals around the world — including Americans, some of whom are friends of mine — who continue to tar all Muslims with the same brush with which they are painting the monsters who commit hideous crimes against humanity.

This prejudice and bigotry goes far beyond declarations by state governors, such as Greg Abbott in Texas, that seek to ban refugees from Syria from entering their states. They are concerned over whether some so-called refugee is a closet terrorist seeking to deliver more misery.

The bigotry being displayed by many against all Muslims is no more acceptable than it would be to label all Christians as believing in the hatred that is spread by Klansmen.

Yes, the Islamic State carries the name “Islam” in its own label. It does not, however, represent the tenets of what remains one of the world’s great religions. It is a murderous cult that has perverted Islam’s teachings to suit the demented ends of a terrorist organization.

And that, I do believe, cuts straight to the view that’s been expressed by the nation’s two most recent presidents — Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack H. Obama — that the war in which we are engaged is not a war against Islam.

It is a war against murderous perverts.

International news, national news, political news, State news

Gov. Abbott slams door on Syrian refugees

November 16, 2015 kanelis2012

Honestly, I have a measure of sympathy for what Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has declared with regard to refugees from Syria.

He has informed President Obama that Texas won’t accept any refugees from the nation they are fleeing. Why? One individual who entered France as a “refugee” reportedly was part of the attack force that terrorized Paris this past week, killing 129 people and injuring hundreds more.

Abbott doesn’t want to take any chances by allowing Syrians into this state. He joins the governors of Alabama and Michigan in banning Syrian refugees.

On the other hand, I believe it is fair to ask: Is this what the United States of America stands for?

An Austin immigration lawyer told the Texas Tribune that Abbott’s order is legal, but questions whether it is right.

“Given the tragic attacks in Paris and the threats we have already seen, Texas cannot participate in any program that will result in Syrian refugees — any one of whom could be connected to terrorism — being resettled in Texas,” Abbott wrote to President Obama.

I get that. But aren’t there intense security measures a state such as Texas can take screen all applicants coming here from Syria to ensure that they do not have any ties to the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah … or any sinister terrorist organization?

Here’s more from the Tribune: “House Speaker Joe Straus on Monday took a more nuanced position, saying he agreed with Abbott’s ‘concern’ and that refugees needed “thorough background reviews” in order to be placed in Texas. ‘I share Gov. Abbott’s concern that relocating refugees to Texas without thorough background reviews compromises our security,’ Straus said in an emailed statement. ‘Our highest priority as a state has been and should continue to be the safety of all Texans.’”

Virtually all the refugees coming here are fleeing terror, murder, warfare, mayhem, bloodshed. You name it, they’re seeking to escape that misery. What is to become of them? Do we send them to other states? Do we — as Donald Trump suggests — send them back to the chaos they are fleeing?

We proclaim ourselves to live in the Land of Opportunity. We profess our nation to be a bastion for the dispossessed.

Of course no one wants to create a safe haven for terrorist monsters. What, though, does the world do with those who deserve protection from those who would kill them?

International news, national news, political news

Does it matter what we call the enemy?

November 15, 2015 kanelis2012

Hillary Rodham Clinton did not use the words “radical Islam” during the Democratic presidential debate Saturday night to define the enemy with whom the civilized world is at war.

Does it matter? Is it vitally important for Clinton — or any leading politician — to use those words when describing terrorist organizations?

Her Republican opponents say it is. The leading Democratic presidential candidate, though, answered with a statement of her own, invoking the words — of all people — of former Republican President George W. Bush.

We are not at war with Islam, President Bush said in September 2001 after the 9/11 attacks. The fight, he said, was against extremists, those who have perverted what he called a religion of “peace.”

Clinton and President Obama have gone to great lengths to avoid using the words “radical Islam,” giving their foes plenty of ammo to use against them.

Personally, I think the words “radical Islam” are quite appropriate to describe our foes.

But does it really matter more what we say about them more than what we do to fight them?

No.

This debate is getting bogged down in a game of semantics. From my perch out here in Flyover Country it appears to be that our national leadership knows the name of the enemy — and is taking the fight to them.

International news, military news

ISIL clearly not ‘contained,’ however ….

November 15, 2015 kanelis2012

President Obama might have been a bit more precise in his answer to a question this past week regarding the U.S. war against the Islamic State.

He told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos that ISIL has been “contained.” Twenty-four hours later, terrorists launched the hideous attacks throughout Paris, killing nearly 200 innocent victims.

The president’s foes have seized on the “contained” remark as proof, they say, that he’s clueless.

What he said later in his answer to the question dealt with ISIL’s battlefield capabilities and whether the fighters’ advances in Syria and Iraq have been stopped. He believes that our air campaign has stalled the Islamic State’s march.

Clearly, though, the terror cabal is capable of launching the kind of attack that it did Friday in Paris. Richard Clarke, the anti-terror expert who’s worked for administrations of both political parties, said this morning that ISIL is far more capable and fearsome than al-Qaeda.

ISIL has committed “an act of war” against the civilized world, said French President Francois Hollande. How do nations respond to such acts? By going to war.

Contained or not, the Islamic State needs to face the combined fury of the immense military power of the nations it has chosen to fight.

International news

Up next? A ‘pitiless’ response to terror

November 14, 2015 kanelis2012

There can be nothing good to come from the Paris attacks this week that killed at least 120 French citizens.

However, the response from French President Francois Hollande gives one hope that the civilized world has gained another full-time participant in the world war against terrorism.

Hollande has vowed a “pitiless” response to the coordinated, well-planned attacks at several locations throughout the City of Lights. And from across the English Channel, British Prime Minister David Cameron told the French that “their fight is our fight.”

France brings considerable muscle to this global effort. The country has a significant military force capable of bringing great harm to whomever it engages. Its intelligence network ranks as one of the more sophisticated on the planet.

Meanwhile, the United States has been waging its own brand of warfare against the Islamic State — which has taken “credit,” if you want to call it that — for the horrifying act it committed in Paris.

Air strikes are continuing. President Obama has decided to send in a small cadre of special operations forces to help train the Kurds in their fight against ISIS in Syria. The British continue to provide air support for the air strikes against terror targets. And, yes, the Russians have joined the fight, too — although it remains an open question whether the MiG fighter jets are actually hitting ISIS targets or merely going after rebel forces fighting the brutal regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who remains a sworn enemy of the United States.

What will it take to defeat the Islamic State? Perhaps it will take more acts of brutality by the monstrous organization against more of our allies throughout the world.

We should continue to accept and welcome all the help we can get.

International news

Is this what world war looks like?

November 14, 2015 kanelis2012

Paris has been hit. Again.

Terrorists went on the attack in a concert hall. Dozens of victims were killed. French police then stormed the hall, rescued some hostages and killed two attackers.

World leaders around the globe have issued statements of condemnation. President Obama called the tragedy today an “attack on all of humanity.”

Is this what world war looks like? Have we been fighting this international war against terrorism around the globe to such a degree that someone can declare this to be the start of World War III?

Paris was hit a couple of years ago at a magazine publishing office. Twelve victims died in that act of terror. And there have been countless other attacks all around the world.

The 9/11 attacks in 2001 in New York and Washington seemed to ignite the inferno. There have been so many others they are impossible off the top of one’s head to count them.

We knew when President Bush sent the troops into Afghanistan to hunt down al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists that this war wouldn’t be won with a surrender document. There wouldn’t be a Battleship Missouri Moment. This looks for all the world like a war without end.

Paris is suffering yet again.

Our hearts go out to the French, its leaders and its people.

Will there be more heartache somewhere else? Most assuredly. Yet the fight must go on wherever we find monsters willing to commit gruesome acts of terror against innocent victims.

For as long as it takes.

International news, military news, national news, political news

Patience is the key to eliminating these monsters

November 13, 2015 kanelis2012

American and British intelligence officials are beginning to talk now as though they believe they have killed Mohammad Emwazi, aka Jihadi John.

The strike was quick but it was months in the planning.

It goes to show that patience is a critical ingredient in this war against terrorism and the people who commit these horrific acts.

Emwazi was a British citizen, born in Kuwait but reared in the U.K. He became a propaganda tool for the Islamic State and was video-recorded beheading captive foreigners, the first of whom was U.S. journalist James Foley.

Yes, a lot of folks demanded immediate justice. As it turned out, though, in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, these efforts require tremendous coordination, attention to the tiniest detail and absolute certainty that we’ve got the bad guy right where we want him if we intend to strike.

The hunt for bin Laden commenced right after the 9/11 attacks. The Bush administration hunted far and wide across Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bin Laden almost got it at Tora Bora, Afghanistan. He got away. President Bush left office in January 2009, handed the operation off to President Obama, who then took up where his predecessor left off.

Detailed analysis of intelligence led the Navy SEALs and CIA spooks to the Pakistan complex, where they found bin Laden — and then shot him to death.

Emwazi’s death — which is beginning to sound more certain — was delivered after tremendous effort by U.S. and British intelligence agencies and military planners from both countries.

What’s the lesson?

It’s that we cannot antsy when we don’t bring justice to these monsters right away.

Patience, folks. Patience.

International news, national news, political news

Trump plan = Operation Wetback

November 13, 2015 kanelis2012

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wants to round up all illegal immigrants hiding in the United States and ship ’em all back to their home countries.

He’ll do it humanely.

Sure, Donald.

We tried that once in this country. President Dwight Eisenhower — one of the better presidents this country ever elected — launched Operation Wetback in the 1950s.

The program didn’t work too well.

It carried a disparaging name attached to Mexican immigrants. Agents fanned out across the country and rounded up the immigrants, sent them to detention centers and then shipped them off. Many of those individuals died while being held or while they fended for themselves under terrible conditions.

Trump has used the program as a benchmark for the kind of initiative he said he would launch if — perish the thought — he were to be elected president of the United States next year. At least he doesn’t identify it by the name it was given when Ike decided on the immigrant roundup.

President Obama, interviewed tonight on ABC News, talked about the images that would be flashed around the world as “deportation agents” took parents away from their children and prepared to send them back to their native country.

“That’s not who we are,” the president said.

No, it is not.

But yet, Trump continues to gain traction with his party’s primary voter base by declaring his intention to hire 25,000 officers and deploy them to hunt down every single one of the estimated 11 million individuals who are here illegally.

Is the leading GOP candidate seeking to redefine this country?

local news, medical news, national news

ACA adds another insurance client

November 10, 2015 kanelis2012

The number of Americans insured by the Affordable Care Act grew by one today, I am happy to announce.

I also am happy to disclose that the enrollment process went quite smoothly.

You’ve heard of the ACA, I’m sure. It’s the federal health insurance program also known as Obamacare. It is President Obama’s signature piece of domestic legislation. His critics like calling it Obamacare, adding the appropriate derisive inflection in their voices at times whenever they want to make some kind of critical point about it.

Yes, it got off to that rocky start a couple of years ago. The healthcare.gov website broke down right out of the chute. Then the government computer geeks went to work to fix it. They did.

They rolled it out a second time it and then millions of Americans got signed up.

Oh, but congressional Republicans are still angry about the ACA. They’re trying to sue the president to get it tossed out. Indeed, a federal judge recently ruled that the GOP has legal standing to actually file suit.

Never mind that the insurance is working. Or that millions of Americans will lose their health insurance if the law gets tossed out.

Oh, but hey. It’s only us out here.

Well, today my wife got enrolled. Her previous health insurer is getting out of the health insurance business at the end of the year. So, with a good bit of help from our trusted insurance broker — with whom we’ve done business for as long as we’ve lived in Amarillo — we got my much better half signed up with a new insurance carrier.

And you know what? It’s going to cost us less than my wife’s previous policy did.

On that note, I want to offer a word of thanks to the president of the United States for pushing through the legislation that enables us to purchase health insurance at a price we can afford.

business news, national news, political news, State news

Keystone decision makes sense

November 8, 2015 kanelis2012

Politicians’ positions can “evolve,” yes?

That means bloggers can change their mind, too, I reckon.

So it has happened with the Keystone XL pipeline. I once blogged in support of the notion of running the pipeline from Canada, through the heart of the Great Plains to the Texas coast.

The price of gasoline was skyrocketing. We needed some way to put more fossil fuel into the international market, I said back then.

What has happened? Jobs came back. Oil prices fell sharply. So did the price of gasoline.

The need for the pipeline? Well, it’s no longer compelling.

President Obama said “no” to the pipeline this week. The fallout has been reduced significantly because of economic and environmental factors that have turned in our nation’s favor.

I now believe the president’s rejection of Keystone makes sense.

The president nixed Keystone because it wouldn’t help the U.S. consumer market, given that the oil would be refined here and then shipped offshore to … wherever.

Plus, there is that environmental concern about possible spillage and leaks from a pipeline that would coarse through nearly 2,000 miles of U.S. territory. Those things do happen, you know. The damage is significant.

Oh, and the jobs it would create? They now appear to have been minimized because private-sector job creation has been heating up nicely over the course of the past half-dozen years.

So, good bye to Keystone.

Sure, our Canadian friends are unhappy. So are some refiners on the Texas Gulf Coast.

The rest of us? Well, I think we’ll be all right without building the Keystone XL.

High Plains Blogger