Tag Archives: Trump

crime news

Race to make history?

One of three people appears set to make history by being the first individual ever to indict a former president of the United States.

Who will get there first?

Will it be U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis or Manhattan, N.Y., District Attorney Alvin Bragg?

I won’t lay down a wager. One of ’em appears set to pull the proverbial trigger on Donald J. Trump. That would be DA Bragg, who appears ready to issue an indictment alleging that a $130,000 hush money payment to a porn star from Trump wasn’t properly reported by the Trump Organization.

Whoever goes first well might give the other two political cover to act as they should and indict the former POTUS for, oh, let’s see: inciting the 1/6 insurrection, squirreling classified documents from the White House illegally at his glitzy joint in south Florida, seeking to overturn 2020 presidential election results by demanding that Georgia officials “find” enough votes to turn the state’s electoral college tally to Trump’s favor.

All of those allegations appear solid to me. However, it’s no one’s call except for the prosecutors who are examining this stuff.

The ex-POTUS is heading for some very bad news.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Does he deserve a full sendoff?

A member of my family today posed a question I’ve not yet heard anyone else ask out loud.

“Do you think,” my family member asked, “that if Joe Biden is still around whether he would grant Donald Trump a full state funeral in case Trump were to die while Biden is in office?”

I don’t need to ask for a show of hands, but I’d bet real American money that more than one of us has given that question some thought.

I am one American who has thought it … but never said it publicly.

Suppose that the former president is not yet indicted, or tried or convicted of a crime before he keels over. Does he deserve a state funeral, the kind given, for example, to former President George H.W. Bush? If he does, who should show up? Who would pay their respects to the 45th POTUS?

To be sure, I would not be one of them. Trump still seems to command a substantial enough following to attract a large crowd of admirers to whatever funeral is arranged.

Does he lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda? Does the current president order flags lowered to half-staff? Does any dignitary whom Trump hasn’t insulted, vilified or defamed dare speak on his behalf? Do Americans take any salute to Trump seriously?

You see, these are the kinds of things that rattle around in my noggin these days as I watch the drama play out into whether the Justice Department or local district attorneys are going to indict the ex-POTUS and then put him on trial for multiple crimes.

One of them happens to be inciting an insurrection against the very government he took an oath to “defend and protect.”

Absent an indictment and a conviction, though, Trump is entitled to the legal presumption of innocence, which I suppose determines whether he would get a presidential sendoff that some would say he deserves.

The floor is now open for discussion.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

How does he do it?

How in the world — in the name of political sanity — can one explain Donald J. Trump’s bizarre hold on what remains of the Republican Party?

I keep seeing this polling data that has the the twice-impeached former president, who is headed for criminal indictment in the lead (for the moment) for the GOP’s presidential nomination in 2024.

Maybe I should be applauding this idiocy. Maybe I should welcome the fact that Trump, who is severely weakened by his moronic behavior and the acknowledgement among many leading GOP pols that he is doomed to fail, might well steal the nomination next year.

Hey, I am biased to the max against this moron. But you know that already. I want President Biden to win re-election next year. I ought to welcome a Trump candidacy. It would be run the way the first two were conducted: slipshod, chaotic, no-preparation, no-platform.

Hey, dude won in 2016. I get that. He lost in 2020 because he couldn’t formulate a vision for the future and then has continued to promote The Big Lie about voter fraud that did not exist.

So, I am going to relax for just a bit and not worry about Trump’s seeming standing among Republicans, who apparently are so damn gullible that they well might nominate a certifiable idiot.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Now will GOP reassess itself?

Mitt Romney’s loss to President Obama in the 2012 presidential election prompted the Republican Party to determine it needed a thorough examination of its future.

The party pledged to search its soul and look for ways to appeal to more Blacks, Hispanics, suburban women and other demographic groups known to be friendlier to Democrats.

I don’t know what the party came up with, but four years later it nominated a certifiable racist, sexual assailant, pathological liar as its presidential candidate. Donald Trump then won the 2016 election. The party since has taken many steps backward from where it was when Romney led the GOP.

I want the Republican Party to reassess its position these days as much as Republicans do … if only for different reasons.

I remain committed (more or less) to Democratic Party principles. I also want a return to honest debate pitting philosophies against each other. Today’s Republican Party is too enamored with The Big Lie, with MAGA demagoguery and with fealty to Donald Trump.

Furthermore, I want to state for the record once again that Trump entered politics in 2016 without spending a moment of his disgusting life working to improve people’s lives. Even after serving a term as president, public service remains an unknown concept to Trump.

I would welcome a return to honest and vigorous debate. I relish a good fight between politicians with serious policy disagreements. We aren’t getting that quality of discourse now. Instead, as we just witnessed, we saw a stable of Republicans defeated because they had earned the anointment of the twice-impeached former POTUS, who backed them because they swilled the Big Lie Kool-Aid.

We can do better than that.

Mitt Romney’s narrow loss a decade ago should have taught Republicans a valuable lesson. It didn’t. Maybe now the GOP will heed the message that voters are telling them.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

International news

No surprise that Trump would praise Putin

Does anyone really profess to be surprised or amazed that Donald Trump would heap praise on Vladimir Putin over his attempted takeover of a sovereign nation?

Donald, let us remember, once referred to North Korean Marxist dictator Kim Jong Un as a “smart cookie,” and professed to have “fallen in love” with the guy who starves his people to death while living in luxury and spending lots of money developing nuclear weapons.

He also has lamented how strongmen in other countries get tons of praise from local media, apparently ignoring the obvious fact that the government in those countries control the media; that ain’t the case in the United States of America, where the nation’s founders took great care to ensure that the media are free of government interference.

Now he calls his pal Vlad’s declaring the independence of two breakaway Ukraine provinces “savvy” for making that statement. All Putin did was provoke President Biden into invoking economic sanctions against Russia.

Yeah, Donald loves dictators. He wishes he could become one of them. Indeed, he made an effort at it on 1/6 in his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The dipsh** should be heading for prison.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

DC riot, national news

No privilege to invoke

Peter Navarro is the latest Donald Trump adviser to face a subpoena by the 1/6 House select committee, which has summoned him to testify before the panel that is searching for the truth behind what happened when the traitorous mob stormed Capitol Hill.

Navarro served as a trade adviser to Trump. He is now trying to invoke “executive privilege” in resisting the committee’s order for him to talk about what he knew about what happened in the White House while the mob was rioting.

Hmm. OK. He has no right under the law to invoke any privilege. There’s that.

Nor does Donald Trump have any right to invoke such privilege. Why? Because he is no longer the president. Joe Biden, the man who beat him in the 2020 election, has declared categorically that he will not allow any executive privilege for his predecessor. There’s that, too.

I’ll restate once more: The committee is legally constituted. It has the authority to order people to testify. The speaker of the House selected the bipartisan panel and gave the committee its assignment: get the truth behind the riot and seek solutions to prevent it from recurring.

Peter Navarro is an economist who provided Trump with advice on trade policy. He has been called a “lousy economist,” but that’s really beside the point. The real point is that he is close to Trump. He knows a lot of what happened on that terrible day. Navarro has been ordered to testify. He faces criminal indictment by the Justice Department if he refuses.

if this guy has a lick of sense — and that’s debatable, to be sure — he will sit before the select committee, take the oath to tell the truth and then … tell the truth.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump

I’m out, once again

So help me Almighty God in heaven, I am going to make yet another stab at turning my back on the antics and blathering of the most recent former president of the United States.

It has been hard to keep earlier pledges to do so. I mean, the guy keeps making news. He keeps roiling the waters. He keeps telling The Big Lie, which I have tried every way I know how to refute; I am exhausted trying to tell y’all the truth, which is The Big Lie is what it is and that the 2020 election was not “stolen” by “extensive voter fraud.”

The imbecile who got elected POTUS in 2016 just won’t let it die. Indeed, as he yaps and yammers about running for the highest office in 2024 he keeps bringing up the past. He has no future vision. I mean, holy sh**, he doesn’t have any vision of any kind that is worth discussing.

What do I go from here? Where do any of us go?

I am going to try once more to put this clown away. Put him in the Dumpster where his hideous legacy already is housed. The guy had no business being elected POTUS in the first place. He got precisely what he deserved when President Biden drummed his sorry oversized a** out of office in 2020.

He is a carnival barker. He is a fraud. He well might get indicted for criminal acts before too long; that, right there, might be cause to make make comment.

The rest of it? I’m out … I hope.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

If only he would call off the cultists

1 Comment

This won’t happen, not ever, but I feel the compelling need to get something off my chest.

One man can stop the intimidation, bullying and threats against local election workers, if only he possessed a shred of decency.

Donald John Trump is wholly responsible for fomenting the anger that continues to fester against those who do their jobs the best they can, only to be undermined by the former POTUS who continues to insist that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him via “widespread voter fraud.”

It wasn’t. President Biden won fairly, legally and ethically.

Yet the former POTUS continues to inflame passions with The Big Lie. He is posing a dire threat to those who acknowledge publicly that the cultists who follow the former POTUS are threatening them. Worse, they are threatening election officials’ families, including their children.

One such official from Pennsylvania told a congressional hearing today about the continual threats he gets from supporters of the man who lost the 2020 election. Supporters of the ex-POTUS have called this fellow a “traitor” because he refused to reverse the results of the election. Traitor! Think about that for a moment … maybe two.

This is the new normal? Is this where we have sunk? Is this the kind of nation we have become, that individuals who do their jobs in accordance with the law cannot go through the day without facing verbal and actual threats by those who disagree with the outcome of a free and fair election?

One guy holds the key to bringing all of this to an end. He could call a press conference and demand without equivocation that his supporters must stop … as in right now.

He won’t do that. Because he lacks the moral character to do the right thing.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Two thoughts on next ‘debate’

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

If Joe Biden and Donald Trump are going to “debate” each other next week, I want to stipulate two things that I believe must occur.

One is that the presidential candidates and the medical teams have to assure us that everyone within any distance at all will be safe from the COVID virus that has afflicted the POTUS. Nothing short of that will suffice. I mean, the virus is still infecting and killing thousands of Americans every day.

Second, if the next encounter resembles the first one, I want no part of it. A second shout fest — with Trump doing almost all of the interrupting and badgering — will do nothing to advance the cause of civil debate. It would be a waste of my time. I don’t know about you but I didn’t hear anything new during that first so-called “debate.”

Trump is resisting calls to change the format. Fine. Let him resist and then let the public see what a fool we have seeking re-election to a second term as president of the United States.