Politics Plus

I’m still feeling tired and pretty queasy.  WWWendy is due ten minutes from now to de-stink me, and I’m a VERY stinky TomCat!  I’ll finish this afternoon.  All work done.  WWWendy said Hi.  I’m pooped.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:09 (average 5:26).  To do it click here.  How did you do?  Humming Burp!

Short Takes:

From YouTube (MSNBC Channel): The Power of Black Women

JD has been telling us that for ages! RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From Politico: Days before President Donald Trump embarked on a North Korea summit meant to solve one nuclear crisis, Iran hinted at another.

The Islamic Republic announced last week that it has expanded its ability to enrich uranium, a key ingredient for nuclear weapons. The move came just weeks after Trump abruptly quit the Barack Obama-era deal that largely dismantled Iran’s nuclear program, and it could be a first step toward an eventual Iranian dash to a nuclear bomb.

Iran probably didn’t time its move to throw a stink bomb into Tuesday’s summit in Singapore between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, experts say. But the news served as a vivid reminder of how the troubled Iran nuclear deal will haunt Trump’s talks with Kim.

The North Koreans are certainly watching.

“In my informal conversations with North Korean officials they have consistently brought up the Iran deal,” said Suzanne DiMaggio of New America, who, like many North Korea analysts, occasionally engages in unofficial discussions with the country’s representatives.

I said it at the time. When Trump violated the Iran deal, he showed Kim he won’t keep a deal with North Korea either.  RESIST!!  VOTE BLUE!!

From Think Progress: \Kris Kobach’s effort to upend the way Americans vote has suffered another setback.

The Kansas Secretary of State has been hard at work trying to expand upon his fatally flawed Crosscheck program, which he cooked up following the 2016 election, after President Trump made totally baseless claims of voter fraud as the reason he lost the popular vote.

Kobach has used Trump’s bogus claim as a rationale to bring voter suppression to the whole country, has been marred with security breaches, risky data management, and embarrassment. But Indiana isn’t joining in — at least, not for now.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt blocked Indiana from trying to enforce a law passed in 2017 that would have allowed state election officials to kick people off the voter rolls if they were flagged by the Interstate Crosscheck Program.

A small win for the good guys and gals! RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

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Unfortunately I’m still sick as a dog.  I’ll have some catching up to do.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:29 (average 5:14).  To do it, click here. How did you do?

Cartoon:

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!!

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Vintage 2011 and still valid.

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!!

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