I slept poorly last night.  In what continues to be the weirdest winter I can remember, the temperature at midnight was 57°, prompting the homeless in the neighborhood to throw a party on the street below.  The noise level did not abate until it was almost time to get up, and although I did sleep, I was awakened frequently.  I discovered that our new analytics package was set by default that only Administrators could see the dashboard  I fixed it to include Editors.  Tweak away, Lona.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:39 (average 5:43).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?  A kitty has to be damn careful around that place.  I could get peed on by a dawg!!

Short Takes:

From The New Yorker: Infuriated after Senator Elizabeth Warren read a scathing letter from 1986 about Jeff Sessions by Coretta Scott King, Donald Trump vowed on Wednesday to secure an endorsement for Sessions from Frederick Douglass.

“I know Frederick Douglass will write a great letter, much better than that bad letter Coretta Scott King wrote,” Trump said. “I said really nice things about Frederick Douglass last week, so I’m sure he will do this for me.”

Visibly angered by the King letter, Trump contrasted the “great job Douglass has done” with the “terrible, very bad job that Coretta Scott King has done.”

“I don’t know who this Coretta King person is, but she should stay away from writing letters because she has zero talent for it,” Trump said.

At the daily White House press briefing, Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, said that, while Trump is confident that Sessions will be confirmed as Attorney General, “a strong endorsement from Frederick Douglass will clearly seal the deal.”

Andy, If Douglas endorsed Beauregard, color me scared stiff and gone! RESIST!!

From YouTube (GQ Channel): Life in Trump’s America Just Got Worse for Your Pet | The Resistance with Keith Olbermann

If torturing and poisoning animals increases profit, Fuhrer Drumpfenfarten supports it. RESIST!!

From Think Progress: National Security Adviser Michael Flynn discussed sanctions with the Russian Ambassador to the United States around a month before President Donald Trump took office, the Washington Post reported Thursday night.

Flynn allegedly told Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that any sanctions put in place under the Obama administration could be reversed. The allegations could put Flynn in hot water, as officials say they were inappropriate at best and possibly even illegal. The situation gets worse for Flynn, as he said on Wednesday he hadn’t discussed sanctions with Kislyak. He backtracked on Thursday.

“While he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up,” Flynn’s spokesman told the Washington Post… [emphasis added]

The traitor had no recollection, huh? Remember this?  RESIST!!

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It’s been a very busy day.  Store to Door came early, and Wendy is coming this evening.  There will be no Monthly Report for January and only a partial report for February.  A screw-up at our HSP, the site that owns the servers where Politics Plus lives, trashed all the usage data that I collect to put in our Monthly Report from 1/12 through yesterday.  It’s fixed now, but rather than risk that happening again, I signed up for Google Analytics and bought a plugin to incorporate it into the Dashboard that I, the Administrators and the Editors use.  Next month I will have a redesigned Monthly Report for the partial month of February.  Unlike with most plugins, I had to hand install the Pro version onto our servers, something I had not done before, so it took me several hours.  I’m running way late.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:25 (average 4:31).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From The New Yorker: In a blistering attack on the media, President Trump said on Monday that the press has consistently refused to report the voices he hears in his head every day.

Trump praised the “really terrific information” he gets from the voices, which often speak to him when he is roaming the White House in his bathrobe in the middle of the night.

“They tell me that I won by the most votes ever and had the biggest Inauguration crowd ever,” Trump said. “These are fantastic voices and they’re doing a great job.”

Trump said the refusal to report what the voices tell him makes the media “the most dishonest people on earth.”

“There might be a hundred people protesting outside the White House, and at the exact same time, five hundred voices talking to me inside my head,” he said. “Guess which the press will write about?”

Andy may be on to something there. RESIST!!

From Think Progress: Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are two terms that refer to the same piece of legislation. There are no differences between the two because they are in fact the exact same thing.

They are the same thing on the federal level. They are also the same thing on the state level. It is one thing.

Both Republicans and Democrats use the terms “Obamacare” and “the Affordable Care Act” to talk about the same thing. This is correct.

A recent poll found that approximately one-third of Americans believe that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are different laws. They are mistaken; it is the same law.

I wonder how a whole bunch of very stupid Trump voters are going to feel when they scream for ObamaCare to be repealed, until they realize their health insurance is gone.  RESIST!!

From Raw Story: Historian Ron Rosenbaum spoke out this week about how President Donald Trump is using Adolf Hitler’s “playbook” from Mein Kampf for undermining democracy.

In a recent column for Los Angeles Review of Books, the author of Explaining Hitler breaks his silence about the recent U.S. election, and about how the “normalization” of Trump is strikingly similar to the Nazi Party’s march to power.

“What I want to suggest is an actual comparison with Hitler that deserves thought,” he writes. “It’s what you might call the secret technique, a kind of rhetorical control that both Hitler and Trump used on their opponents, especially the media.”

According to Rosenbaum, Trump is using the Mien Kampf “playbook” to throw the media off balance and to normalize actions and statements that would have been unthinkable just months ago.

“It looked like the right-wing parties had been savvy in bringing [Hitler] in and ‘normalizing’ him, making him a figurehead for their own advancement,” Rosenbaum notes. “Instead, it was truly the stupidest move made in world politics within the memory of mankind. It took only a few months for the hopes of normalization to be crushed.”

I’ve been saying the Fuhrer is using Nazi methods since he usurped the White House, but folks, who don’t know me, have no reason to believe me. Rosenbaum, on the other hand, is an expert.  RESIST!!

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These last few days sure have been busy, and I hope that I can finally get the data collection  and graphics for January’s report done later in the day.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:00 (average 4:53).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From YouTube (GQ Channel): The 50 Craziest Things Trump Has Done As President | The Resistance with Keith Olbermann

If Keith could go longer without breathing, he could have made it 500. RESIST!!

From Think Progress: \Authoritarianism” is one of the most misunderstood words in America today.

As Cornell government professor Thomas Pepinsky writes, authoritarian nations rarely resemble Nazi Germany. People don’t necessarily live in fear of a secret police, or even fear that there will be consequences for dissent. Rather, the dividing line between democracy and authoritarianism comes down to something much more basic: “you know that you are no longer living in a democracy because the elections in which you are participating no longer can yield political change.”

By this definition, there is a thick cord of authoritarianism winding its way around the Republican Party.

Think of the gerrymanders. The voter suppression laws. The voter purges. The lawsuits asking courts to toss out ballots. None of these cancel elections outright, or even prevent most Democrats from participating in elections. But they make it much less likely that voters who are dissatisfied with Republican governance can bring about political change.

Those of you that have known me for years know that, as long as you have known me I have said that what Republicans do can always be explained by one of their two defining goals. One is the transfer of wealth from the poor and middle classes to the super-rich. The other is the establishment of a permanent totalitarian Republican Reich, a fascist plutocracy in which elections exist for show only, because Republicans control who votes and how the votes are counted. RESIST!!

From Salon.com: “The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert agrees with President Trump: Just because the Bowling Green massacre never happened, doesn’t mean the media should be ignoring it.

Where were you, when you didn’t hear nothing happened? RESIST!!

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