Politics Plus

It’s another muggy day here at the CatBox.  Tomorrow I may have no more than a Personal Update or an Open Thread.  It’s a grocery delivery day, and WWWendy has a baby shower, so she’s coming to de-stink the sticky TomCat in the morning, instead of tomorrow evening.  That will thoroughly flummox my writing schedule, and I’ll need to see how it goes, before I know what I can do.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:25 (average 6:15).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From YouTube (Parody Project Channel): WHAT DOES THE GUN SAY (parody of) What Does the Fox Say

Apologies for letting this slip by a few days ago. RESIST!!

From YouTube (Full Frontal Channel): Full Frontal At The March For Our Lives

Sam feels it’s important to publicize her support. So should we. RESIST!!

From NY Times: President Trump ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian officials on Monday, joining a coordinated campaign by two dozen countries to retaliate for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain in a Cold War-style escalation that again highlighted the disparity between the president’s words and actions.

The mass expulsion of Russian personnel stationed in the United States was the largest ever, eclipsing even the darkest days of the global showdown with the Soviet Union. But Mr. Trump avoided any public condemnation of Russia’s role in the attack just days after phoning President Vladimir V. Putin to congratulate him on a re-election widely considered a sham.

In approving the expulsions and ordering the closure of the Russian Consulate in Seattle, Mr. Trump followed the lead of Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, who rallied a multinational coalition to respond to the poisoning. With London pressing for action, Mr. Trump called foreign counterparts to see if they would join, too. Aides said he encouraged them to take part, but he also knew that failure to go along would have left the United States isolated.

In addition to the United States, at least 22 other nations backed Britain by expelling about 57 more Russian diplomats and intelligence officers as of Monday evening, including France, Germany, Italy, Australia, Poland and Canada. Mrs. May originally expelled 23 Russians shortly after British authorities determined that Moscow was likely responsible for the nerve agent that left Sergei V. Skripal, the former Russian spy, and his daughter in a coma.

I’m surprised Trump did this. He should have done far more. Why did he do it? Maybe he and Putin are putting on a show to try to hide their partnership. Or maybe Stormy threatened to pank Donnie Piddle on his widdle Twump wump. RESIST!!

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WWWendy should be here in less than a half hour to de-stink the TomCat and help with chores, so I’ll have to finish after she leaves.  In the meantime, I’m hurrying.

WWWendy just left.  I fed her BBQ ribs.  They were messy, but !

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:09 (average 5:02).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From The Verge: Facebook has been collecting call records and SMS data from Android devices for years. Several Twitter users have reported finding months or years of call history data in their downloadable Facebook data file. A number of Facebook users have been spooked by the recent Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, prompting them to download all the data that Facebook stores on their account. The results have been alarming for some.

“Oh wow my deleted Facebook Zip file contains info on every single phone cellphone call and text I made for about a year,” says ‏Twitter user Mat Johnson. Another, Dylan McKay, says “somehow it has my entire call history with my partner’s mum.” Others have found a similar pattern where it appears close contacts, like family members, are the only ones tracked in Facebook’s call records.

With Facebook, the only way to win is not to play. UNPLUG!! RESIST!!

From Nation of Change: According to a new study, the large accumulation of ocean trash in the Pacific Ocean known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has rapidly grown to twice the size of Texas. Composed of garbage, abandoned fishing gear, and nearly 80,000 metric tons of plastic, the floating isle of trash has expanded up to 16 times larger than expected. [emphasis added]

Let’s relocate the entire Republican Party there. RESIST!!

From Huffington Post: President Donald Trump announced Friday that he’s sticking to his ban on transgender people in the military, even though the Pentagon showed little enthusiasm for the proposal.

In a memo released Friday night, the White House said that transgender individuals are “disqualified from military service except under limited circumstances.” The full ban was set to officially take effect Friday, though a pair of federal courts in December ordered the U.S. military to allow the recruitment of transgender citizens into the armed forces despite Trump’s declaration.

“Transgender persons with a history or diagnosis of gender dysphoria ― individuals who the policies state may require substantial medical treatment, including medications and surgery ― are disqualified from military service except under certain limited circumstances,” the memo says.

They should be allowed to serve. It would be different if they had imaginary bone spurs. RESIST!!

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It’s a cooler day here at the CatBox, so it should be far less muggy tonight.  I’m waiting for the locksmith again.  He was here this morning, but had the wrong parts.  Apparently my desk has a very rare lock, and finding a replacement is difficult.  I’m running behind.  Update:  the lock is finally fixed.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:05 (average 4:33).  To do it, click here.  Hoe did you do?

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: ABC News is reporting that before Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired senior FBI official Andrew McCabe for “lack of candor,” McCabe had been leading an investigation into Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly accused Sessions of misleading them in congressional testimony and called on federal authorities to investigate, but McCabe’s previously-unreported decision to actually put the attorney general in the crosshairs of an FBI probe was an exceptional move.

One source told ABC News that Sessions was not aware of the investigation when he decided to fire McCabe last Friday less than 48 hours before McCabe, a former FBI deputy director, was due to retire from government and obtain a full pension, but an attorney representing Sessions declined to confirm that.

The irony that McCabe was investigating KKK Beauregard for lack of candor is extreme. RESIST!!

From NY Daily News: The hacker Guccifer 2.0, who claimed responsibility for providing WikiLeaks with the stolen Democratic National Committee emails, has been identified as an officer of Russia’s main intelligence directorate, or GRU, according to a new report.

Guccifer’s identity was uncovered after he failed on one occasion to activate a virtual private network, or VPN, to disguise his IP address — which appeared on the server logs of an American social media company, a source told the Daily Beast.

Investigators pinpointed Guccifer’s identity, and U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller has enlisted the help of the FBI agents who traced the persona back to a GRU officer who works out of the Moscow headquarters, according to the report.

We always presumed Guccifer (R-RU) was Russian, but now we know which Russian he is. RESIST!!

From Think Progress: Student activists across the country are ready to fight for solutions to gun violence during the March for Our Lives on Saturday, which was organized by students who survived the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. One of the ways students are preparing for the march is by making sure that marchers can also vote — or are at least ready to vote when the time comes.

Marlena Tyldesley, a 17-year-old high school junior at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, is sending politicians a message and mobilizing young people to be politically active by raising money to make and distribute stickers that display the year young people can vote. When students come to the Washington, D.C. March for Our Lives event, many of them may be wearing her stickers.

She began organizing after she had a conversation with her family about the student-led movement to end gun violence. A family friend sent the family a check in the hopes that she would use it to fight for gun control and they started throwing around some ideas.

“The idea came up that we need a way to show politicians that we’re coming and my dad said, ‘Why don’t you just get a sticker with the year you can vote. That’s pretty simple,’” Tyldesley said. “And it’s not self explanatory, so it forces someone to come up and say what is that? And you can say well this is the year I can vote. Watch out.”

Kudos to the kids for seeking a long-term solution. RESIST!!

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