local news, medical news

Pandemic paranoia?

Paranoia is no fun when you are dealing with a deadly disease and the potential — no matter how remote it might seem — of being sickened by it.

I now shall explain.

I came down three days ago with a head cold. Classic symptoms: a little scratchy throat, a bit of a cough, runny nose, sneezing. You know, the usual. But wait! My mind started racing. Was it COVID-19, the virus that is still making people sick, sending them to the hospital, forcing medical personnel to roll out the ventilators, putting people into medically induced comas?

No. It wasn’t that. I sought to get a test. I couldn’t find a place to obtain one immediately. So, I waited it out. I’m well now. I am back to my usual effervescent self.

This is one of the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic that is annoying me to no end. I know what a head cold feels like. I’ve been getting ’em for, oh, more than seven decades. 

It kinda reminds me of when someone cuts me off on the street. My initial instinct used to be to lay on my horn, possibly shout a bad word or two and maybe offer an obscene gesture. No more, man! This is Texas! You never know who’s got a firearm with him. Too many damn road-rage episodes are being reported and too many of them are ending tragically.

Am I paranoid when I drive my truck? Not really … but I could get that way.

No, I am not paranoid because I caught a three-day head cold. It’s just that the killer virus has given me pause.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

DC riot

Trump reaches for bottom

(AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Donald Trump operates with a bottomless trove of outrageous pronouncements from which he uncovers ways to make declarations that are profoundly offensive and reprehensible.

This weekend, the 45th POTUS did it again. He ventured to Texas to declare that he might — if hell freezes over and he is elected president in 2024 — offer unconditional pardons to the traitors who stormed the Capitol Building on 1/6 and sought to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

That’s right. He would pardon the men and women who threatened to kill Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, injured scores of police officers, defecated on the floor of the Capitol and vandalized the hall of government by smashing through windows.

There is a reason this blog never has refused to print the words “President” and “Trump” consecutively. It is because your friendly blogger cannot recognize this lawless, corrupt, amoral, profane individual as my head of state, head of government and commander in chief.

For this moronic dipsh** to suggest he might offer pardons to those who — at his incitement — stormed the Capitol Building and sought to dismember our democratic process is so utterly beyond the pale that it boggles my understanding how any sensible human being can cling to the crap that flows from this guy’s mouth.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

Here come the epithets

President Biden’s pledge to nominate a black woman to become the next Supreme Court associate justice has produced a highly predictable, and thoroughly reprehensible, round of criticism from those who suggest that Biden is implementing an “affirmative action” policy to fill this key judicial slot.

It’s all pure crap.

Justice Stephen Breyer is retiring soon from the court. President Biden has pledged to find a candidate with impeccable credentials, high ethical standards, legal brilliance and a record of sterling, stellar achievement.

That the individual he selects is an African American woman should be of little consequence with regard to the qualifications required of the next Supreme Court justice.

You can count me as one American patriot who believes the president will have no difficulty finding a supremely qualified candidate among the pool of individuals from whom he will choose.

As for the critics who will question whether the next SCOTUS nominee is smart enough or has the required experience, I also am certain they will be revealed as possessing a racial bias that has no place in determining the fitness of the person to be considered.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Sports news

Hail the GOAT!

Most of us who follow football — even a little bit — understand that it is a game of numbers. You know, yards gained, yards lost, interceptions, tackles, penalty yards, sacks, punting yardage. Whatever …

Tom Brady reportedly is retiring after 22 seasons of professional football becoming arguably the greatest quarterback of all time.

I want to focus on a particular number as we ponder the effect this guy had on the game he played with excellence and precision.

The number is 198. What does that number signify?

It is the number players selected ahead of Brady in the NFL draft of 2000. Now think for a moment if you’re a general manager who had the chance to select this young man what you might have thought after he won all those Super Bowls and led the New England Patriots and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to all that glory.

One hundred ninety-eight players got into the NFL ahead of the GOAT. Granted, not every team drafting in that sequence needed a quarterback. Still, Tom Brady quite unexpectedly became the gold standard for winning in the National Football League.

The Patriots drafted him out of the University of Michigan even though they had a decent QB calling signals for them. Drew Bledsoe then got hurt; Brady replaced him on the field. And the rest, as they, is history.

I know, we had that “Deflategate” matter involving the footballs that were allegedly tampered with by the Patriots, giving Brady some sort of advantage over his foes. Phooey.

Now, let’s look at some other numbers.

Seven Super Bowls; five Super Bowl MVP awards; more than 84,000 yards passing; 624 touchdown passes; three league MVP awards. I won’t go on. You get the picture.

The guy was a stellar athlete. He possesses an incomparable work and dietetic regimen that has allowed him to play the game at a high level until the very end of his playing days. He led the NFL in passing yards at the age of 44, for crying out loud.

Perhaps, in my mind, the greatest measure of this guy’s greatness can be found in this episode. He left the Patriots after the 2019 season and joined the Buccaneers. The Patriots, who had won six Super Bowls with Brady at QB, missed the playoffs that year; the Bucs went on to win the Big Game, beating the defending champs, the Kansas City Chiefs.

Oh, Brady did that at the age of 43.

Yep. This guy is the greatest of all time.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Trump ‘shouldn’t lead the GOP’

Asa Hutchinson has just become persona non grata in the cult-following world of Donald J. Trump. Why? Because the Republican Arkansas governor spoke the blunt truth about Trump’s ability to lead his party, let alone to become president of the United States of America.

God forbid the latter from occurring.

Hutchinson leads the Republican Governors Association and he said this weekend that Trump is unfit for the office he once held. “I do not believe Trump is the one to lead our party and our country again, as president,” Hutchinson told Insider on the sidelines of the NGA Winter Meeting in Washington, DC.

He was responding, apparently, to a video that’s gone viral in which Trump declares himself to be the “45th and 47th president.” Good gawd.

Hutchinson now is likely to become a target of the Trump cultists/wackos/idiots who cling to the notion that the former Idiot in Chief is going to seek the highest office … yet again.

In truth, though, Gov. Hutchinson is speaking realistically about the absolute worthlessness that Donald Trump brings to any reasonable or rational debate that needs to occur.

Donald Trump should not lead the country again, says the Republican leader of the National Governors Association (msn.com)

His message will pass through the vacuous skulls of millions of Trumpkins, if you’ll pardon the pithy reference, like sh** through the proverbial goose.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Comply, or else!

Quiz time: What do you do when a duly constituted governing authority tells you to talk to them about a serious policy matter?

Answer: You do what they tell you to do; you show up under threat of prosecution for contempt of whichever authority has issued the summons.

So it must be for those who get subpoenaed by the House select committee looking into the 1/6 insurrection. The panel is going full force against those who might know details about what happened before, during and after the riot that sought to stop the 2020 presidential election result certification.

If I were to get a summons from those folks, well, dang … I would show up and tell ’em what I know. They won’t call me, as I was sitting in the cheap seats that day watching it unfold on TV. It was a frightening event to witness, even from afar.

Donald Trump’s minions keep resisting. Their Republican allies in Congress keep giving them a pass, even though they have declared in prior congressional investigations — those chaired by the GOP in search of dirt on Democrats — that anyone who gets subpoenaed must comply or face prosecution. Not now? C’mon!

We cannot choose which authorities to obey and which ones to stiff-arm. The House committee is a legitimate governing authority and those who get these orders must obey them … or else.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Cancel culture? Really?

As a general rule I don’t usually quote “Star Trek” actors to buttress a point I want to make, but this one attributed to Mr. Sulu seems to ring so very true to me.

GOP politicians in Texas and everywhere else keep raising hell about “cancel culture” politics they allege are espoused by progressives. You know how it goes: Someone finds a phrase or a term to be offensive, so they set out to blot that from our vernacular; “cancel culture” has resulted in the bringing down of Confederate memorials honoring traitors who sought to topple the U.S. government during the Civil War.

The right wingers among us just can’t stand that notion.

And yet … they seek to ban books that teach students about racism in our nation’s history, about slavery and about certain damning chapters in the building of our nation.

Isn’t that more than just a little hypocritical?

It sure looks like it to me.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

Waiting for return of confirmation comity

There once was a time when U.S. Supreme Court nominees sailed blissfully through the confirmation process, with senators giving presidents all the latitude in the world to select the person of their choice. They asked some tough questions, occasionally, but were respectful and a bit deferential to presidential prerogative.

Not … any … longer.

President Biden is going to select a black woman to succeed Stephen Breyer on the court once Breyer retires at the end of the current court term. The president can expect a donnybrook. He might be able to find the most brilliant legal mind this side of the Magna Carta, but that person won’t be confirmed without shedding a good bit of blood as she takes incoming rounds from the Republican obstruction brigade in the Senate.

When did it come to this? I guess you could trace it to 1987, when President Reagan nominated Robert Bork to the SCOTUS. Bork was known to be a strict constitutional constructionist. He was a brilliant legal scholar, but he had some seriously offensive views about the role of women and racial minorities. His nomination went down in flames.

Then came the 1991 nomination of Clarence Thomas, whom President George H.W. Bush called the most brilliant legal mind in America. He sought to succeed the late Thurgood Marshall. Then came allegations of sexual harassment and the testimony of Anita Hill. The debate was ferocious. The Senate confirmed Thomas, but it was a narrow mostly partisan vote.

I am thinking at this moment of a nominee put forth by President Eisenhower in 1953. Earl Warren was governor of California when Ike asked him to join the court. He had never served as a judge. I wonder now how an Earl Warren nomination would fare in today’s climate. Would senators question his qualifications? Would they hold him to the same sort of careful examination that they appear ready to do to whomever Joe Biden presents? If the answer is yes, would Gov. Warren hold up?

For the record, I am glad Earl Warren served as chief justice, given that the court on his watch approved some amazing landmark rulings; e.g., Brown v. Board of Education.

I want President Biden’s first high court nominee to be judged carefully but fairly by senators. I am concerned they will respond with red herrings, specious arguments and phony concerns.

I remain committed, by the way, to presidential prerogative in these cases. Elections, as they say, do have consequences. I have been faithful to that truism with respect to whomever is in office.

So, let the process move forward. I hope for a semblance of judicial comity as the Senate ponders this most important selection.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

economic news

Morning in America dawns again

Ronald W. Reagan campaigned for re-election in 1984 as president on the theme that it was “morning in America.” By golly, it worked as President Reagan steamrolled to a smashing landslide victory, winning 49 states and rolling up an Electoral College margin of 525 to 13.

Well, guess what, ladies and gentlemen. I believe it’s “morning in America” is dawning yet again in the good ol’ U.S. of A.

Economic reports show that the Gross Domestic Product grew at a rate not seen since 1984. Unemployment is now down to 3.9%, which is about where it was prior to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. More jobs have been added to non-farm payrolls at any time in the first year of a presidency, which is something that Joe Biden has been proclaiming for a good while.

What does this mean for the president? It means he has some grist on which to build a campaign in advance of this year’s midterm election, which will be a setup for the 2024 presidential campaign.

I am aware of the hurdles that remain. We need to rein in inflation; the Federal Reserve Board is poised to do that by increasing interest rates this year. There are some foreign-policy issues with which to deal, such as Russia and Ukraine, China’s bellicosity and threats against Taiwan, the ongoing Middle East tensions. Of course, we also have climate change … and the pandemic.

Economically, it is morning once again across the land.

The president needs to be careful to avoid hogging more credit than he deserves. I have noted for longer than I can remember that POTUSes don’t deserve all the blame nor do they deserve all the credit for swings in the economy.

The good and the bad, though, occur on their watch. Thus, they become the hero or the zero, depending on which way the economy is tracking.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news, State news

You tell ’em, Kel

Kel Seliger’s status as a lame-duck Texas state senator appears to have given the veteran Republican legislator some gumption as he has delivered a harsh reality to the state’s efforts at redrawing its legislative districts.

Seliger, who hails from Amarillo, said in a court deposition that the GOP-controlled Legislature broke the law in redrawing the boundaries in Senate District 10. “Having participated in the 2011 and 2013 Senate Select Redistricting Committee proceedings and having read the prior federal court decision regarding SD10, it was obvious to me that the renewed effort to dismantle SD 10 violated the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution,” Seliger said in his remarks to the court.

According to the Texas Tribune: Under the map passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, some Black and Hispanic populations previously in District 10 were split into two other districts with majority-white electorates. The Black and Hispanic voters who remain in the newly drawn District 10, in urban areas of south Fort Worth, were lumped in with several rural, mostly white counties to the south and west that drive up the district’s population of white eligible voters while diminishing the number of voters of color.

GOP Sen. Kel Seliger says Texas violated federal voting rights law | The Texas Tribune

Well … isn’t that what many critics of the Legislature have alleged against Republicans who control the body?

Now we have one of the Legislature’s top GOP senators saying that he agrees with the critics. Is that what I am reading? I believe that’s the case.

To which I say only that it would have been good to hear such candor coming when Sen. Seliger was still in the thick of the fight. As it stands now, he is on the sidelines and is heading for the exit at the end of the year.

I say this as a friend of the senator. I consider him to have been an effective representative for the Texas Panhandle, where I lived for more than two decades. Seliger and I go back a while and I have long admired him for his independent streak and his pluck while serving in the Senate.

I mean, any guy who can piss off fellow Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, as Seliger has done, is OK in my book.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Commentary on politics, current events and life experience