Politics Plus

Stumpy is being more cooperative today, and barely squeezed into George this morning, after spending most of yesterday elevated above chest height.  I think he was retaining fluids, because I am mildly dehydrated from spending so much time at my desk and out and about that I paid too little attention hydrating myself.  Some guzzle water naturally, but I have to force myself.  I have my urologist appointment rescheduled for next month.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:22 (average 4:55).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From YouTube (GQ Channel): Michael Flynn Must Now Be Arrested | The Resistance with Keith Olbermann

Last Night Michael Flynn resigned to downplay and try to evade prosecution for his treason and to protect his equally guilty Fuhrer. Both Flynn and Trump must be investigated, indicted, tried, convicted and incarcerated! RESIST!!

From The Rachel Maddow Show: Spousal abuse testimony on Oprah a factor in Puzder confirmation

Rachel Maddow reports that video of a 1990 episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show in which the ex-wife of Donald Trump labor secretary nominee Andrew Puzder talks about being the victim of his abuse has been submitted to Senators considering his confirmation.

The Dems, with one exception, put up as good a fight as possible against Beauregard and Know Nothing. It would be nice to block Putzser.  That exception is Joe Manchin [DINO-WV].  He actually voted FOR both Sessions and DeVos!!  Why don’t you give him a call? – WV 304-342-5855 or DC 202-224-3954.  Tell him he’s a waste of skin and a good for nothing DINO turd!  If you wish, be even less complimentary.  RESIST!!

From The New Yorker: An exuberant Betsy DeVos said on Monday that Donald J. Trump’s forty-per-cent approval rating is a “clear indication” that more than half the country agrees with the job he is doing.

“I was so excited to see the President’s approval rating hit forty,” DeVos, the Secretary of Education, told reporters. “Just knowing that well more than half the country is with him gives us a great sense of confidence moving forward.”

She also criticized the media for failing to report “our powerful forty-per-cent mandate.”

“If you believed news reports, you would think that the people supporting the President are in the minority, when in fact they’re forty per cent,” she said.

Dang Andy! Is it any wonder that I just labeled her Know Nothing? RESIST!!

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Wendy just left and I'm just beginning my writing for the day.  Please expect no more than a Personal Update from me tomorrow, because I have a routine appointment with my Urologist.  I feel sorry for Fuhrer Tiny Hands.  His Urologist is no longer available, having died laughing.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today's took me 5:27 (average 7:14).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: When Republicans in Kentucky seized total control of the state government last year, Damon Thayer, the majority leader in the State Senate, began asking around for advice from counterparts in other capitals where the party already dominated both the legislative and executive branches.

How should we handle all this power? he wanted to know.

One answer impressed him, Mr. Thayer said, from a senior Republican lawmaker in Wisconsin: “Move quickly.”

Kentucky Republicans have done just that, swiftly passing laws to roll back the powers of labor unions and restrict access to abortion. But they are only getting started, Mr. Thayer said in an interview: They also plan to make sweeping changes to the education and public pension systems this year.

And they have plenty of company.

While Republicans in Washington appear flummoxed by the complexities of one-party rule, struggling with issues from repealing the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, to paying for President Trump’s promised wall on the Mexican border, rising party leaders in the states seem far more at ease and assertive. Republicans have top-to-bottom control in 25 states now, holding both the governorship and the entire legislature, and Republican lawmakers are acting with lightning speed to enact longstanding conservative priorities.

Democratic leaders, to their shame, have ignored building our state and local parties. That must change.

From YouTube (SNL Channel): Sean Spicer Press Conference Cold Open

She's good! In the real world, I like Baby Spice, Posh Spice, and even Scary Spice better than Shitty Spice.

From Think Progress: The Trump administration has elected not to contest a Texas federal judge’s injunction barring the federal government from implementing Obama administration guidelines that protect transgender kids in schools.

Oral arguments for the Obama Justice Department’s appeal of the judge’s decision were scheduled for Tuesday. The DOJ cancelled them in a legal brief submitted Friday.

“Defendants-appellants hereby withdraw their pending November 23, 2016 motion for partial stay pending appeal,” the brief says. “The parties jointly move to remove from the Court’s calendar the February 14, 2017 oral argument currently scheduled for that motion. The parties are currently considering how best to proceed.”

That brief was filed the day after Jeff Sessions was sworn in as Attorney General.

As ThinkProgress reported last August, the Obama administration’s guidance “stated that Title IX’s nondiscrimination protections on the basis of ‘sex’ protect transgender students in accordance with their gender identity, such that they must be allowed to use the bathrooms and play on sports teams that match their gender.” But the brief filed Friday signals that the Trump administration no longer wants to implement that guidance.

It took Beauregard only a day to translate GOP hate into disobeying the law to empower discrimination.

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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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