Tag Archives: RINO

local news, political news

RINOs are everywhere!

Seems as if it takes damn little to be labeled a RINO these days … you know, a Republican in name only.

Donald Trump, the nation’s RINO in chief, throws the term around with utterly no understanding of the irony that he calls anyone a RINO.

Texas is going through its primary election today. State Rep. Jeff Leach has been called a RINO by his challenger Henry Thorsen. Why? Well, it seems that Leach had the temerity to serve as a prosecutor in Attorney General Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial in the Texas Senate.

Never mind the body of work that Leach compiled while representing Collin County in the Legislature. You turn against a crook like Paxton? You’re toast.

It’s happened to other anti-Trump Republicans, such as former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney. She stood her ground and went for Trump’s jugular. She remains a conservative Republican. But she’s now out of office, scorned by the very party to which she once dedicated her political life.

Paxton and Trump are now besties. That’s the connection between the Texas AG and the POTUS.

I won’t vote in the Texas GOP primary today. I am going. to pull for Jeff Leach. I don’t know him well, but I do know him to be a conservative with a conscience. What’s more, he is no RINO!

national news, political news

Will I survive these days of tumult?

Every now and then, the thought of survival crosses my noggin … particularly after Donald Trump has inflicted more than his usual share of havoc on our beloved democratic republic.

Before I venture too deeply into the weeds, I want to declare that my “survival” does not involve my presence in this world of ours. I have zero intention of ending my life. I do, though, worry about my state of mental capacity at times when I see the man elected POTUS ranting on incessantly and incoherently about this or that matter of the moment. Then I wonder: How in the name of the founding fathers did this clown ever get elected?

That’s water over the ol’ dam, if you will. He did get elected and there’s nothing we can do about what’s happened. We can, though, control the future. Which gives me reason to cling to my sanity.

My hope for a brighter future is beginning to glow a little more brightly. Republicans in Congress are starting to grow spines by opposing Trump. They’re voting against his initiatives. They’re pissing the RINO in chief off royally (no pun intended) and he is responding with social media tirades that sound as if they’re coming from a junior high school hot head.

Some are suggesting that Trump’s mental acuity (if that’s what we should call it) is slipping away. I have declared my intention to stay away from that guessing game and I won’t engage in it here … other than to report what others might be saying.

All of this is allowing me to hold onto my sanity.

I realized a long time ago that I should never take myself too seriously. Today I am searching for a way to transfer that self-awareness into the issues that keep nipping at our heels.

I once took politics too seriously. That was in the late 1960s when it became a matter of life or death to young men of my age. I got through all of that and have settled into a quiet life of semi-retirement. The issues today are just as serious as they were in the old days. I am just seeking to cling to the marbles rattling around in my skull.

economic news, military news, national news

Trump: RINO in chief

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, the American Republican Party stood for principles the party deemed to be hard and fast … not to be trifled with.

Republicans opposed adding to the national debt. They opposed deficit spending each year on the federal budget. The GOP stood firm against “nation-building” wars overseas. Republicans stood with Democratic President Lyndon Johnson in passing the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts of 1964 and 1965. The GOP saw the Soviet Union as a national enemy and committed to the destruction of the tyranny preached in the Kremlin.

Hmmm. Those days are gone. Likely forever. Never to be seen again.

Donald Trump is now what I call the Republican In Name Only in chief. He is leading a party that bears no resemblance to the party of Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon.

I am trying to imagine President Reagan allowing the national debt to balloon to trillions of dollars. Or President Lincoln allowing the party to embrace white supremacists. Or President Nixon defending the USSR’s direct descendants, Russia, in disputes involving U.S. intelligence findings.

What we have now in charge in D.C., ladies and gents, is a party that has betrayed all those core values. It’s not just the president. He has GOP members of Congress, who are standing with him.

They all — not just Donald Trump — deserve our everlasting condemnation for the direction they have taken this great country.

national news

Donald Trump: RINO in chief

Donald John Trump’s game of charade as he pretends to be a “conservative Republican” has been called out many times by many people and in many forums. So what I am going to provide isn’t an exclusive.

He is a Republican In Name Only. Trump is the nation’s RINO in chief.

There once was a time when Republicans stood for fiscal responsibility. They railed against budget deficits, no matter their size. The 1980 GOP landslide win for the presidency rested in part on Ronald Reagan’s intense criticism of President Carter’s $43 billion budget deficit that fiscal year. Forty-three billion bucks wouldn’t even get a mention these days!

Trump’s big ugly bill runs up deficits in the trillions of dollars. It piles on another $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. About the only GOP-friendly policy in the big ugly bill are the tax cuts that benefit the mega-rich. Those cuts come at a cost … the aforementioned deficits and debt.

Republicans hate Marxist dictators. Trump calls them “smart cookies,” says he admires their leadership strength, wishing he had the kind of popular support that they enjoy.

GOP pols normally would rally to the side of a sovereign nation attacked by Russia. Not this RINO in chief, who scolded the Ukrainian president for daring to suggest he could defeat the Russians on the battlefield.

Donald Trump has turned Republican orthodoxy on its ear. Yet he continues to bully GOP members of both congressional chambers into backing his idiotic tariffs, which real Republicans such as George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford all have said are taxes that result only in inflation.

Donald Trump once admitted that he ran for president as a Republican only because the GOP offered him the easier path to the pinnacle of power. There you have it right there. He cannot articulate a party policy issue because he is too stupid to understand one.

All hail the RINO in chief!

national news

Get ready for some serious pain

I am going to doff my proverbial cap and proclaim that Donald J. Trump did the nearly impossible by persuading enough Republican members of Congress that it was in their best political interest to approve Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” that gives tax cuts to rich folks who don’t need them while yanking money away from programs that help millions of other Americans who need the assistance.

I don’t recall Trump ever campaigning for the issues he managed to accomplish with this legislation. He never said he would slash Medicare and Medicaid while giving more tax cuts to the mega-wealthy. He never pledged to gut the USAID funds that help feed starving children abroad. He didn’t say he would all but destroy the social fabric of our government.

That is what Congress has signed on to do. The Senate needed a tie-breaking vote from Vice President J.D. Vance to send the bill to the House. And the House needed to get a first-class bullying job from Trump to send this piece of sh** legislation to Trump’s desk for his signature.

What’s next? I suppose we now have the 2026 congressional election coming up. There must be a formula for turning Congress over to the control of the opposition party that actually cares about the entire country, rather than just those who support what passes for the Republican Party … and the RINO in Chief.

I will offer a left-handed tribute to Trump for defying all the odds and getting his fellow nation-haters to climb aboard the clown car that now governs us.

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, have been exposed as a powerless collection of men and women who cannot find their backside with both hands. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries set a House record for speaking for the longest stretch ever. Big deal. Congressional elections are coming up next year. This is the best opportunity voters will have to change the dynamic in Washington and restore some semblance of compassion in a government that today demonstrated that it has nothing to offer.

national news, political news

Trump redefines conservatism

Donald J. Trump, through the force of his enormous will, has managed over the past decade to reshape the political landscape into something few of us recognize.

Take the definition of the term “conservative.”

I came of age politically in a time when Barry Goldwater and later Ronald Reagan became the gold standards for political conservatism. Their view was the term meant minimal government influence in our lives. Goldwater later became known more as a libertarian, taking the view that government had no role to play in determining people’s sex lives or whether a woman could obtain an abortion.

Trump has taken the conservative movement in an entirely different direction. He wants to use government as a weapon to wield against his political enemies. He vows to sic the FBI and the Justice Department on those in the media who criticize him.

He wants the government to go after colleges and universities who teach certain subjects in class. He recently withheld a huge fund from Harvard University because the Ivy League school refused to knuckle under his demand to stop teaching about racism, slavery and other low points in our nation’s glorious history.

Trump wants the government to ban transgender athletes from competing, he wants transgendered patriots to be barred from serving in the military.

None of this is “conservative” as I grew up understanding the term. An activist government is more of a — dare I say it? — liberal effort. In the old days, liberals were seen as wanting to deploy government to bring meaningful change.

These days, it’s all been tossed into a cocked hat.

Which brings about a key question. Who in our modern political world stands out as a Republican In Name Only? The Republican Party used to be thought of as the conservative party, yes?

I’ll cast my vote for Donald Trump as the nation’s RINO in chief.

national news, political news

Who’s the real RINO?

The adherents of the 45th POTUS have redefined a long-held term: Republican In Name Only.

The only way now to be classified a RINO these days is to disagree with the cult leader’s world view or criticism him for it … such as it is. You agree with the idiot, you’re good. You disagree, you become subject to censure or worse, expulsion from a once-great political party.

Sen. Mitt Romney recently declared that “absolutely not” will he vote for the presumptive GOP presidential nominee this November. He hasn’t said who will get his vote, not that I care. Let’s remember that we cast our votes in secret, so it’s no one’s damn business who votes for whom.

He’s already getting the RINO barbs flung at him by the cult followers. He earned their misplaced scorn by voting to convict their hero in the first impeachment trial held in the Senate.

In reality, though, the real RINO is the cult leader. He ran as a Republican in 2016 because it provided him the easiest path to victory. Dude actually said so!

Does he know about basic Republican doctrine? Does he care to learn about it? Does he give a crap about anything other than fattening his own wallet? No, no and no!

The term RINO these days ought to be seen as a badge of honor by real Republicans who happen to be appalled at their party’s most recent and reportedly future presidential nominee.

If only they could — or would — deny him the power he craves.

national news

RINO gets re-defined

An amazing transformation has occurred within the American political dictionary over the past, oh, six year or so.

The term RINO has taken on a new meaning, one that has nothing to do with what I understand the acronym was created to symbolize.

RINO is shorthand for Republican In Name Only. I long have understood the term as one that describes someone who talks a good Republican game, but who veers far from normal GOP orthodoxy with his or her votes or public policy decisions.

These days? It is used as an epithet for anyone who opposes the presence of Donald John Trump on the political stage. Here’s where the irony gets so rich you damn near choke on it: Of all the prominent Republicans in action today, Trump himself is the personification of a RINO.

He once said that abortion should be legal, then he changed his mind. He has disparaged the men and women who serve in the military. Trump has cozied up to dictators such as, let’s see, former KGB spy Vladimir Putin, Marxist North Korean thug Kim Jong Un. He trashes our intelligence network. Trump wants to yank the United States out of NATO. He applauded Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. During his term as president, the nation rang up the largest debt in history.

Do you get where I’m going here?

And yet those who adhere to Trumpism contend that those who don’t are the RINOs of this world.

Trump has redefined Republicanism, turning into something barely recognizable to real Republicans.

Therefore, he has reshaped the American political glossary, turning it into … damn, I don’t know what to call it.

Go figure.

State news

Senators aren’t RINOs

Robert Nichols and Kelly Hancock already have been labeled Republicans In Name Only by the Ken Paxton acolytes who are angry at the state senators for voting their conscience in the just-completed Senate impeachment trial of the formerly suspended attorney general.

Sens. Nichols and Hancock did what they felt was the right thing to do, which was vote to convict Paxton on the impeachment articles tossed onto senators’ laps by the overwhelming House majority that impeached him for misconduct of his office.

I would laugh out loud at the notion that Nichols and Hancock are RINOs, except that it isn’t a funny accusation to make. Hancock, from Tarrant County, is considered one of the more conservative members of the Senate; Nichols, who hails from Jacksonville, isn’t far behind.

And yet … the Paxton crowd is going to tar these men for agreeing with their fellow House Republicans that Paxton committed misdeeds worthy of him getting tossed from office.

This signals arguably the start of a sort of “civil war” among the MAGA wing of the Texas GOP and the rest of the Republicans in the Legislature. The MAGA wing won the argument when the Senate acquitted Paxton and allowed him to return to work.

Nichols and Hancock aren’t up for re-election until 2026, which might explain why they showed the backbone missing among their Republican colleagues. Perhaps they see tempers cooling enough until the 2026 GOP primary season kicks into high gear.

Whatever. Neither man is a RINO, period. Given the state of the Republican Party these days, the RINO label just might stick to them.

That would be a shame.

State news

Cornyn says Trump can’t win? Hah! Ya think?

The minute I heard about what Sen. John Cornyn said about Donald Trump’s chances of become POTUS once again, I thought instantly of a friend of mine in Amarillo … who called Cornyn a RINO.

I chuckled when my friend said such nonsense, because Cornyn is nothing of the sort. The San Antonio native is as rock-ribbed a Republican as you’ll find. He just happens to believe that the GOP is going to lose the 2024 presidential election if it nominates the twice-impeached former POTUS to run against President Biden.

It’s time, Cornyn said, to nominate someone without all the baggage that Trump is lugging around. Starting with the very real probability he is facing multiple future indictments for criminal activity.

Frankly, I don’t know why I am even remotely concerned about any of this. I try like heck to shove Trump aside. I am refusing to comment on every single lie that flies out of his pie-hole.

It’s just that when a solid GOP politician such as John Cornyn says Trump would take his party down the drain, the party ought to heed the advice this Texas wise man has to deliver.

Then again, were he to run for POTUS yet again, maybe it’s good that he would lose once more.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com