Open Thread – Page 496 – Politics Plus

Open Thread – 6/6/2018

Posted by TomCat at 11:50 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Jun 062018

Fifty two years ago today, I graduated high school and celebrated with a three day trip to NYC with debauchery of Republican proportions, except there were no Russian Hookers or Golden Showers. still fighting Republicosis, I’m not feeling well. I’m forcing myself to stay up for my grocery delivery and to collect the data for May’s Monthly Report. Tonight is a WWWendy night.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 5:21 (average 5:52). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From YouTube (MSNBC Channel): Scott Pruitt Tried To Get His Wife A Chick-Fil-A Franchise

Imagine, if if you can, the Republican response, if a member of the Obama cabinet had done the same thing. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From The New Yorker: The Philadelphia Eagles have accepted Robert Mueller’s invitation to come to his office and celebrate their Super Bowl victory with him, Mueller has confirmed.

The special counsel said that he was “absolutely tickled” that the Eagles had accepted his invitation. “I’m a huge fan of the Philadelphia Eagles, and it turns out the feeling is mutual,” he said.

According to one member of the team, the Eagles accepted Mueller’s invitation only after being assured that their visit would not in any way distract the special counsel from “getting his job done.”

Dang Andy! Those Eagles are fantastic! RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From NY Times: Facebook has data-sharing partnerships with at least four Chinese electronics companies, including a manufacturing giant that has a close relationship with China’s government, the social media company said on Tuesday.

The agreements, which date to at least 2010, gave private access to some user data to Huawei, a telecommunications equipment company that has been flagged by American intelligence officials as a national security threat, as well as to Lenovo, Oppo and TCL.

The four partnerships remain in effect, but Facebook officials said in an interview that the company would wind down the Huawei deal by the end of the week.

Saying they will wind it down, years after China has downloaded your personal data, is much too little much too late. With Facebook, the only way to win is not to play! UNPLUG!! RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

Cartoon:

0606cartoon

Vintage 2011 and still valid.

Open Thread – 6/5/2018

Posted by TomCat at 12:45 pm Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Jun 052018

Last night street noise awakened me around midnight, and that was fortunate. I was up the rest of the night with Republicosis. I’m feeling very tired.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 5:24 (average 10:02). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From YouTube (Media Matters Channel): How cable news poisons the conversation about abortion

How about fining the Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise, $100,000 per lie about abortion and use the $millions in raised revenue to fund Planned Parenthood? RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From YouTube (Inequality Media Channel): The Unconstitutional Census Power Grab

The Reich on the left is right. Republicans have more ways to steal elections than dawgs have fleas. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From The New Yorker: In what they believe is a legal masterstroke, lawyers for Donald J. Trump are now claiming that he cannot be impeached because he was never actually elected.

In a lengthy memo sent to the special counsel, Robert Mueller, the lawyers pushed back vehemently against any allegation that Trump was legally elected President.

“Because Russian interference made the election of Donald J. Trump wholly illegitimate, any attempt to remove him from an office that he does not legally hold is clearly impossible,” the memo asserted.

The memo claimed that the Constitution contains “no provision for removing a person from office when that person was installed there by a foreign power.”

Dang Andy! That’s a compelling argument!! RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

Cartoon:

0605Cartoon

Vintage 2011 and equally valid today.

Open Thread – 6/4/2017

Posted by TomCat at 1:02 pm Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Jun 042018

I still haven’t recovered from my parade, and it’s been very busy here in the CatBox. Yesterday, I was so exhausted that I fouled-up uploading my articles to Care2. Today I’ve been scheduling medical mayhem. I wanted to prepare for the monthly report, but I had to write a letter to the parole board for one of my guys.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:32 (average 4:24). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From YouTube (MSNBC Channel): President Donald Trump’s Mind-Control Superpowers

The pundits overcomplicate the matter. Trump is a perfect reflection of the beliefs and policies of the Republican Party in the mind of an addled pervert. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From CNN: Former President Bill Clinton said that impeachment hearings would have begun if a Democratic president, instead of Donald Trump, were in power and the Russia investigation was as far along as it is now.

"I think if the roles were reversed — now, this is me just talking, but it’s based on my experience — if it were a Democratic president, and these facts were present, most people I know in Washington believe impeachment hearings would have begun already," Clinton told "CBS Sunday Morning."

Bill should know why! IOKIYAR! RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From Think Progress: For all the horrible things that President Donald Trump says and does from the Oval Office, his own words and deeds may not actually pose the greatest challenge to our democracy. Rather, the real threat to our way of life might be the countless, unnamed, mostly-white Americans who approve of — and feel emboldened by — the illiberal, white-supremacist tinge to the rhetoric that emanates from the White House on a near-daily basis.

Hyperbole? Alarmist, left-wing extremism? Over-the-top balderdash, you say? Not at all. But don’t take my word for it. Instead, allow me to point in the direction of a groaning shelf of scholarly research that suggests the current White House occupant may only be the spear’s tip of America’s unraveling democracy.

The most recent such study comes from political scientists Steven V. Miller at Clemson University and Nicholas T. Davis at Texas A&M University. Their working paper – “White Outgroup Intolerance and Declining Support for American Democracy” – fires a warning shot to signal a budding threat to the nation. Miller and Davis collected and compared polling data compiled between 1995 and 2011 by the World Values Survey and discovered an escalating impulse among some white Americans to embrace “an unwillingness to associate or fraternize with individuals whose cultural, racial, or religious ideas or ways differ” from their own. They identified such attitudes as “socially intolerant,” which they also found to correlate with a willingness to sacrifice democratic notions, such as political compromise or respect for minority rights, if such principles conflicted with their selfish interests.

Miller and Davis, for example, found the percentage of socially intolerant whites doubled from 12.6 percent in 1995 to 24.9 percent in 2011, when the most recent survey figures were available.

Chick through for the rest. I question the willingness of Trump and the Republican Party to cede power, when legally required to do so. They are preparing storm-troopers to help them keep power by force. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

Cartoon:

Open Thread – 6/3/2018

Posted by TomCat at 1:22 pm Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Jun 032018

Dang! I was made a dishonerary Republican. Surprised smile I got a parade! I had completely forgotten that the Portland Rose Festival Starlight parade, which passes under my window, was last night. I had just fallen asleep when the bands started playing. It was almost midnight when the street cleaners finished up, so I’m pretty pooped today. Here’s a pic:

0603Parade

WWWendy will be here in about 40 minutes, and I hope to finish writing by the time she arrives.

She just left, and I am WAY pooped.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:36 (average 5:17). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From YouTube (NY Times Channel): Palestinian Medic Killed by Israeli Soldiers at Gaza Protest

What a tragic loss this courageous young woman was when the state of Israel murdered her with the full support of the US Republican Party. I have a reason for calling the war criminal that executed her Butcher Bibi. It’s time to reinstate Nuremburg. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From Washington Post: L’etat, c’est Trump.

For months we’ve heard President Trump’s TV lawyers, as he calls them, bandy about the argument that he — or any president, for that matter — couldn’t have obstructed justice because justice is what he says it is.

In other words, that because, they claim, a president possesses absolute power to cut short a criminal investigation, he cannot by definition be guilty of obstructing it. Or, in the famous Nixonian formulation, as Richard M. Nixon told David Frost, “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

But as much as the president’s legal team foreshadowed this contention, it was nonetheless breathtaking to see it spelled out, in uncaveated black and white, in a letter from Trump’s legal team to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

“A President can also order the termination of an investigation by the Justice Department or FBI at any time and for any reason,” the lawyers, John Dowd and Jay Sekulow, wrote in the January letter, obtained by the New York Times. “Such an action obviously has an impact on the investigation, but that is simply an effect of the President’s lawful exercise of his constitutional power and cannot constitute obstruction of justice.”

Republicans have pushed this absurd Nazi claim for a long time. The last time we saw it was from Fuhrer GW Bush of the Fourth Reich. He claimed to be the unitary executive. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From The New Yorker: President Donald J. Trump made Vice-President Mike Pence watch him issue pardons for several hours to see how it is done, a White House source confirmed.

According to the source, Trump pardoned a number of disgraced political figures and former reality-show cronies for the sole purpose of training Pence in the art of issuing pardons.

After signing pardon after pardon while Pence looked on intently, Trump commanded the Vice-President to sign a “practice pardon” to prove that he “wouldn’t mess anything up,” the source said.

Before trying his hand at issuing a pardon, Pence heaped praise on Trump for the pardoning demonstration he had just given.

Andy is reporting straight news again. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

Cartoon:

A flashback from 2011.

Open Thread – 6/2/2018

Posted by TomCat at 12:48 pm Open Thread, Personal, Politics, Religion

Jun 022018

We’re having a one day heat wave, so the CatBox is buttoned up with A/C blasting. Yesterday’s trip was interesting. The unit even had a private bath, although a small door and a pipe left too small an opening to get my chair into it. I could have put my hospital bed in the unit, but to do so, I would haveto give up computing, internet, tv, and eating. Anne (my program Manager) was very encouraging and understands my needs better than before. I hope the next is larger. Tomorrow is a WWWendy day, so I hope to get the poll switched and the Monthly Report done early next week.

I just exchanged texts with Nameless. His brother’s condition is still very bleak, but they aren’t giving up. Please keep the prayers coming.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:26 (average 5:47). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From YouTube (NY Times Channel): Watch: U.S. Allies Denounce President Trump’s Tariffs Decision

With friends like US Republicans, our allies have no need for enemies. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From NY Times: Senator Heidi Heitkamp, the centrist Democrat from North Dakota who is fighting a pitched battle to save her seat, has gotten a lift from an unlikely source: the conservative billionaire Koch brothers.

Americans for Prosperity, the political advocacy group backed by Charles G. and David H. Koch, unveiled a digital ad campaign on Friday thanking Ms. Heitkamp for her support of recently passed legislation that loosened regulations on small and medium-size banks that were swept up in the 2010 Dodd-Frank law passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

The ad is the latest evidence that the brothers, often at odds with President Trump, may be moving away from strictly partisan work on behalf of Republicans in favor of initiatives that will advance their libertarian-leaning legislative priorities, including free trade, immigration legislation and access to medicines, regardless of party affiliation.

I would support even this horrid, Koch sucking DINO over a Republican, but we really need to challenge her in the primary. There is apparently nobody running and the primary is 6/12. ARGH!! RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From Alternet: To hear the Religious Right tell it, men like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were 18th-century versions of Jerry Falwell in powdered wigs and stockings. Nothing could be further from the truth…

…Here are five founding fathers whose views on religion would most likely doom them to defeat today:

1. George Washington. The father of our country was nominally an Anglican but seemed more at home with Deism. The language of the Deists sounds odd to today’s ears because it’s a theological system of thought that has fallen out of favor. Deists believed in God but didn’t necessarily see him as active in human affairs. The god of the Deists was a god of first cause. He set things in motion and then stepped back.

Washington often employed Deistic terms. His god was a “supreme architect” of the universe. Washington saw religion as necessary for good moral behavior but didn’t necessarily accept all Christian dogma. He seemed to have a special gripe against communion and would usually leave services before it was offered.

Washington was widely tolerant of other beliefs. He is the author of one of the great classics of religious liberty – the letter to Touro Synagogue (1790). In this letter, Washington assured America’s Jews that they would enjoy complete religious liberty in America; not mere toleration in an officially “Christian” nation. He outlines a vision of a multi-faith society where all are free.

“The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation,” wrote Washington. “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.”

Stories of Washington’s deep religiosity, such as tales of him praying in the snow at Valley Forge, can be ignored. They are pious legends invented after his death.

Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians, the exact opposite of real authentic Christians, would befoul their pants and accuse Washington of being a damn librul. I shared one of five. Click through for the other four. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

Cartoon:

Personal Update – 6/1/2018

Posted by TomCat at 1:40 pm Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Jun 012018

I leave at noon to check out what could become a new CatBox. I’ll have more info tomorrow. This is my only article today.

I just returned, and it’s much too small. ARGH!

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:57 (average 5:09). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Take:

From NY Times: So, the trade war is on. And what a stupid trade war it is.

My regular column for tomorrow is about health care, but I felt I needed to weigh in on this idiocy, and not just on Twitter.

The official – and legal – justification for the steel and aluminum tariffs is national security. That’s an obviously fraudulent rationale, given that the main direct victims are democratic allies. But Trump and co. presumably don’t care about telling lies with regard to economic policy, since that’s what they do about everything. They would see it as all fair game if the policy delivered job gains Trump could trumpet. Will it?

OK, here’s the point where being a card-carrying economist gets me into a bit of trouble. The proper answer about the job-creation or -destruction effect of a trade policy – any trade policy, no matter how well or badly conceived – is basically zero.

Click through for a fascinating read. Paul Krugman is spot-on. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

Cartoon:

Open Thread – 5/31/2018

Posted by TomCat at 1:08 pm Open Thread, Personal, Politics

May 312018

It’s been a hectic day here at the CatBox. CCC may have found me a new CatBox. Tomorrow, please expect no more than a Personal Update. I’m wheeling to the Golden West Building about sixteen blocks away with a CCC Manager to check it out and see if it can accommodate my needs. That will also interfere with my EOM routine here, so the new poll and monthly report will probably be late. My second article was Samantha Bee, but her videos from yesterday’s show have been removed from YouTube.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:28 (average 4:19). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From YouTube (MSNBC Channel): Uncovered Secret Memo Could Shed More Light On President Trump Firing Comey

Drip… Drip… Drip… RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From Alternet: Federal prosecutors have charged two brothers with bilking Republicans across the country of “more than $50 million” in a giant scam where they posed as conservative political action committees (PACs) dedicated to furthering right-wing causes like supporting law enforcement and opposing reproductive rights.

“These nine PACS—which collectively raised more than $23 million between 2014 and 2017, and more than $50 million the last 10 years—were scams, operated to enrich the defendants and their co-conspirators,” the federal indictment said. “The PACs targeted victims across the country, including in the Southern District of New York, raising funds on the fraudulent basis that donations would support education regarding, and the political campaigns of those who supported, ‘autism awareness,’ ‘law enforcement appreciation,’ and pro-life causes.”

“In truth and fact, virtually all of the money raised was paid to the scheme participants or else used to perpetuate the fraud through additional telemarketing and fundraising expenditures,” the indictment continued. “Less than 1 percent of all donor money to the PACs was spent on political contributions during the relevant time period.”

The brothers had the audacity to compete with the party’s own sheeple fleecing. Either way, SCAMS are all Republicans have to offer. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From Daily Kos: The study was sui generis: Two Harvard Law professors, Alma Cohen and Crystal S. Yang, set out to analyze 1,400 federal judges’ sentencing practices over a 15-year period affecting more than 500,000 defendants. The results were predictable but disheartening.

They unearthed a stunning number of influences on sentencing, from years of experience and level of racism in a state to the party of appointment. Its major finding: Republican-appointed judges give black defendants harsher sentences than their white counterparts.

“Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants to three more months than similar nonblacks. … These differences cannot be explained by other judge characteristics and grow substantially larger when judges are granted more discretion.”

Three months’ discrepancy accounts for 65 percent of the baseline racial sentence gap, meaning the average sentence disparity between similarly situated white and black defendants. The convictions driving the gap: serious drug and violent offenses.

Racism is a plank in the Republican platform. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

Cartoon:

Open Thread – 5/30/2018

Posted by TomCat at 12:48 pm Open Thread, Personal, Politics

May 302018

It’s a busy day here at the CatBox. I had some paperwork to do. Store to Door delivered my groceries, and I have unpacked and put them away. WWWendy will come later to de-stink the rancid TomCat. I don’t know why, but I feel sleepier than normal.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:54 (average 5:41). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From YouTube (Parody Project Channel): SAVE THE RICH (Cover) Original by Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome

That’s the anthem of the Republican Reich! RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From The New Yorker: The White House was reportedly in panic mode Tuesday afternoon, shortly after news broke that a television star with a racist Twitter feed had been fired.

According to a White House source, Donald J. Trump immediately huddled with close advisers to discuss the firing, which, staffers agreed, “set an ominous new precedent.”

“We’ve been living under assumption that a TV personality could tweet out as many racist things as he or she wanted with no consequences,” the source said. “Now, all of a sudden, our worst nightmare has come true.”

White House staffers are reportedly combing through Trump’s thirty-seven thousand tweets, searching for ones that could be deemed fireable offenses, and have so far flagged more than thirty-six thousand of them.

Andy, I think they are lying. 36,000 is way too low an estimate. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From Alternet: 7. Co-opt and Make Institutions of Military and Police Power into Loyal Sycophants.

Without the police and the military on their side, a tyrant’s days in office are inevitably numbered.

That’s why one of the hallmark behaviors of authoritarian leadership and its media supporters is to praise and empower, to the point of fetishizing, the police and the military. They then amplify this with elaborate displays of symbolic patriotism like singing the national song and hyper-displaying the flag.

From attacking NFL players for protesting police violence against unarmed Black people to telling a crowd of police officers to not be professional or respectful when arresting people, to chest-thumping about our military as “the most powerful ever,” Trump doesn’t even try to be subtle about his threats. The next step, if he follows the well-worn authoritarian path, is to put on Saddam Hussein-style military parades.

Meanwhile, the process that Ronald Reagan began, and Newt Gingrich sped up with his 1033 program, of redirecting billions of dollars of military funds, hardware and training to police departments, begins the process of turning ordinary police agencies into praetorian guards to solidify the power of the now-captured state.

Exempting police unions from crackdowns on other government employee union activities, like Scott Walker did in Wisconsin, hastens the process by ensuring the loyalty of the one legally armed, duty-sworn agency of government.

This is the seventh of nine ways that Trump fosters authoritarianism, or more descriptively, Nazism. Click through for the other eight ways! RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

Cartoon:

The contents deserve celebration.

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