Open Thread – 8/6/2018

Posted by TomCat at 1:41 pm Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Aug 062018

It’s a murderous day here in the CatBox. Today’s high should be high 90°s. Last night at bedtime, it was still 91° and over 50% humidity. ARGH!!

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:07 (average 5:06). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Fantasy Football:

The Holy Ellipsoid Orb is about to bless the earth with its divine light once again. The live online draft for our own fantasy football league, Lefty Blog Friends, is on Saturday, August 18, at 9 AM PDT (10 AM MDT, 11 AM CDT, 12 Noon EDT). I strongly recommend that players log into the league and participate in a mock draft between now and then. If you cannot attend, the league will draft for you. See you then!

Short Takes:

From YouTube (Robert Reich Channel): Robert Reich: The Biggest Threat to Our Democracy (That You Haven’t Heard Of)

Dang! For once, the Reich on the left, Robert Reich, is half wrong! While an Article V Constitutional convention, being pushed by the Reich on the right, the Republican Reich, is a BIG threat to our democracy, I had heard of it. Consider the Liberty Amendments (Hat-Tip Freya), that are really the Tyranny Amendments. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From CNN:

On Sunday morning, amid his latest tweetstorm about the ongoing special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, President Donald Trump turned his focus to the now-infamous June 2016 meeting between his top advisers and several Russians.

Here’s what he said: [pervert delinked]

"Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!"

And Trump’s lawyers grimace… [emphasis original]

Drip… Drip… Drip… Click through for the complete timeline on that conspiratorial meeting. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From The New Yorker: Asserting that “heroic measures” were needed to save the National Rifle Association from financial catastrophe, the N.R.A.’s president, Oliver North, announced plans to sell arms to Iran.

“Iran needs weapons, and, Lord knows, we have a lot of weapons lying around,” North told reporters on Sunday. “This is the definition of a win-win.”

North said that he came up with the idea of selling arms to Iran because “the Iranians were always great to deal with” and “never cared where the money was going to.”

Andy, coming from Ollie, I believe it. He has priors. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

Cartoon:

I made this in 2011. It’s been right ever since.

Republican pseudo-Christian Love

Posted by TomCat at 1:11 pm Politics, Religion

Aug 052018

I find myself indignant several times a week over the hypocrisy of Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians, the exact opposite of REAL authentic Christians, spew the hatred that starts with Trump, descends through the politicians and pundits who defend Trump, and escalates through the Republican bubble machine. Consider the Republican pseudo-Christian "love" of "MAGA".

Here’s Katy Tur, talking about Trump inciting rage (and ultimately violence) against the media.

"Yeah, we get it. You don’t like us. Fine," she said.

"But do you have to put our lives in danger? The president continues to call the press the enemy of the people. Even after four journalists and one sales assistant were shot dead in a Maryland newsroom by a man who was angry with what they factually reported about him. Even after the publisher of the New York Times stressed to him in a private conversation that his words were putting journalists in mortal danger. Even after CNN White House reporter Jim Acosta was taunted in a rally the other night in Florida. And even after the president’s own daughter, at least publicly, disagreed with her dad…

Inserted from <Crooks and Liars>

Here’s the video.

"I hope you get raped and killed" MAGA

What kind of monster says something like that? I know: a Republican.

RESIST!!

VOTE BLUE!!

93 DAYS!!

Open Thread – 8/5/2018

Posted by TomCat at 1:10 pm Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Aug 052018

It’s a busy Sunday. WWWendy is due in half an hour, and we have lots to do, including the dreaded task. With the return of the heat, the TomCat is fouler than normal. It’s a little slow for news, but I was able to find enough material. Sunday hugs!

Wendy left a few minutes ago, and I’m pooped!

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 5:24 (average 6:44). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From CNN: As President Donald Trump’s legal team continued its will-he-or-won’t-he dance this week on a sit-down interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, a federal judge in Washington issued a tome on why Mueller’s appointment was rock-solid in the first place.

Chief Judge Beryl Howell’s decision is not entirely novel; it falls in line with two other district court judges in DC and Virginia who have rejected challenges to Mueller’s appointment. But her robust analysis guts a potential avenue for Trump’s defense team at a critical time, as the President calls for the probe to end, his lawyers continue to negotiate over the scope of an interview, and speculation mounts about whether Mueller will ultimately serve Trump with a subpoena to testify.

Legal experts say that while Trump’s legal team still has other arguments to make on why he should not have to sit down with the special counsel, the door on challenging Mueller’s legitimacy appears to be nearly closed.

Anything that tightens the Fuhrer’s noose is fine with me. Click through for details about the decision. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From Think Progress: A federal judge slammed the Trump administration’s foot-dragging in reuniting parents and young children separated under the government’s harsh immigration policies, calling the slow progress in reunifying families “unacceptable.”

Judge Dana Sabraw rejected the administration’s efforts to pass the task of reuniting immigrant parents and children to the American Civil Liberties Union, saying in a hearing conducted by telephone late Friday that the government is “100 percent” responsible for bringing back together the families that it ripped apart with its “zero tolerance” policy.

What nerve! Racist Republicans want ACLU donors to pay for the effect of the Republican hate crime, so they can spend the money on welfare for billionaires. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From Axios: President Trump tweeted Sunday morning [Liar delinked] about the now-infamous June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Russians and Trump campaign officials, including his son, Donald Trump Jr.

"Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!"

Why it matters: Trump and his son have repeatedly changed their stance on the purpose of the 2016 meeting. In a statement to The New York Times last July, which investigators now know was dictated by President Trump, Don Jr. said the meeting was primarily about Russian adoptions. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen has also claimed that the president approved the meeting ahead of time. [emphasis original]

There WAS collusion! RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

Cartoon:

Bill Maher from 8/3

Posted by TomCat at 12:47 pm Politics

Aug 042018

It’s that time of week again, so here are three fine video clips from Bill’s show last night. Enjoy!

Monologue: Enema of the People

I had not heard that Putin’s NRA is broke to the point of folding. May it be so!

Nancy MacLean: The GOP’s Long Game

I like her. I was not familiar with Nancy before today, but she echoes some of the things that I have been saying for years.

New Rule: The Party of Putin

What a wonderful way Bill found to describe the Helsinki blowjob!

Good Show!

RESIST!!

VOTE BLUE!!

94 DAYS!!

Open Thread – 8/4/2016

Posted by TomCat at 12:46 pm Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Aug 042018

The heat is back and the sun hit the wall early. I’m tired. ARGH!!

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:52 (average 7:34). To do it. click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From YouTube (Late Show Channel): Rob Reiner: We Have Archie Bunker In The White House

I’m not sure that comparison with the Fuhrer is fair to Archie, but if anyone should know, it’s Meathead. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From YouTube (MSNBC Channel): Accused Russian Agent’s Alleged Fun Times With Donald Trump Associate

She seems to have dionked virtually every extreme right Republican of note. I wonder if she made it to the one with tiny hands, etc. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From Alternet: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) — who was once seen as the Republican Party’s best chance to defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential primary — is now in serious danger of being defeated by a Democrat in the race for his Senate seat.

The conservative firebrand is now neck-and-neck with challenger Beto O’Rourke, a relative unknown in Texas who has run a fierce campaign to oust the sitting senator. Not only would the win be a victory for those critical of Cruz, who has a deeply polarizing effect on the populace and is reportedly disliked even by his GOP colleagues — but if O’Rourke comes out ahead in November, Democrats will have a much better chance of taking control of the Senate.

Go, Beto! Go! How sweet would that be? RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

Cartoon:

Monthly Report for July 2018

Posted by TomCat at 1:09 pm Blog News, Monthly Report, Politics

Aug 032018

Compared to June, July results were down in Uniques and Pages and up in every other category. That means, we have fewer visitors who are gone in seconds, and more who do something here, but not quite as much as in June. That’s a small win.

Here is our latest summary:

Stats7-2018

Reported period	Month Jul 2018
First visit	01 Jul 2018 – 00:00
Last visit	31 Jul 2018 – 13:14
	Unique visitors	Number of visits	Pages	Hits	Bandwidth
Viewed traffic *	6,103	34,939 (5.72 visits/visitor)	255,528 (7.31 Pages/Visit)	475,746 (13.61 Hits/Visit)	19.80 GB (594.3 KB/Visit)
Not viewed traffic *			920,884	1,042,261	19.41 GB

Reported period	Month Jul 2017
First visit	01 Jul 2017 – 00:00
Last visit	31 Jul 2017 – 23:59
	Unique visitors	Number of visits	Pages	Hits	Bandwidth
Viewed traffic *	9,514	26,888 (2.82 visits/visitor)	81,608 (3.03 Pages/Visit)	233,353 (8.67 Hits/Visit)	8.96 GB (349.3 KB/Visit)
Not viewed traffic *			402,402	456,728	10.69 GB

Compared with last June, we are down in Uniques, and way up in all other categories. Fewer visitors doing much more is a win.

Here is our ClustrMap for 2018 YTD. This is seven months’ traffic.

ClustrMap7-2018

ClustrMap misses a lot of visits, because many visits can’t be easily traced to a location.

Here are our top five articles:

Fourth of July 2018 7/4/2018 865
Personal Update – 7/14/2018 – 7/14/2018 698
The Piñata Hit Back! – 7/13/2018 691
What Happened to Bill? – 7/8/2018 668
For Ogling Only – 7/9/2018 647

The count represents only the people who opened the page for that specific article. All were from this year. All were from July. I wrote all five. I would have been happier to see more of our other authors’ work represented here. JD’s, Nameless’ and Squatch’s articles have to be more interesting than a story of me blowing up eggs in the microwave. Lona has been making the great migration and has been nʍod ǝdᴉsdn for a week now.

Here are our top non-blog/news referrers (100 referral minimum):

Google 8,359
Care2 3,390
Stumbleupon 355
Baidu 164

All were down from last month. Facebook did not make the list.

Here are our top blog/news referrers:

http://infidel753.blogspot.com/
http://bildungblog.blogspot.com/
http://oakcreekforum.blogspot.com/
http://progressiveerupts.blogspot.com/
http://hamsandwich66.blogspot.com/
http://alterx.blogspot.com/
http://americablog.com/

We had 7 sites with 2 or more referrals, up 4 from June. Putting blogs’ links here increases the ratings of their sites, so this “linkey love” is our thank you for their referral support. We still need to improve this. Since May, I cleaned up our blog roll and found most of the sites either were gone or had not published for years. Now I still need to visit the few who remain.

As of midnight August 1, we had 8,372 articles and 100,278 comments.

Kudos to Mitch, who earned a Big Mouth Award in June for making the 100,000 comment. Mitch opted not to accept his prize and suggested I auction it for a charity. I don’t think he realized either how much extra work that entails, or how totally swamped I am. I just can’t do it. So I decided to give the prize of a Politics Plus mug and a Politics Plus T Shirt to the 101,000 level winner. From now on, Big Mouth winners at 10,000 levels will have their choice of a PP mug or a PP T Shirt. Staff will remain eligible to be winners at the 1,000 levels, Winners at prize winning levels will be the first non-staff commenter. If any staff member wants a mug or a T Shirt, let me know.

I recommend using your own avatar. Go to Gravatar. Sign up using the email address you use to post comments here and upload the image you want to use as your avatar. Whenever you comment under that email address here or on any WordPress blog (several others too), that image will become your avatar.

Your Administrators are Lynn Squance, aka Sasquatch or Squatch, SoINeedAName, aka Nameless, and I, aka TomCat, the Founder. Your Editors are Joanne Dixon, aka JD the Erynator and Lona Goudswaard, aka Lona the Napster. I promoted them from Author in August 2017 to give them the ability to add graphics to comments and the ability to correct my innumerable typos.

This is our policy on links. We do not embed links to extreme Republican websites, like Faux Noise, Breitfart or World Nut Daily. However I leave notes in square brackets when I delete such links, (example: [faux noise delinked]) so readers, who wish to follow them can click through to the source article. I also remove topical links. Finally, I blank the target on all links, so they open in a new tab or window.

We now have only days, before we will have a major opportunity to reclaim part of our nation from the fascist Reich that possesses all three branches of government. If you haven’t started working toward that end, you are way past due.

Thank you for your support here, and kudos for all the good you do, everywhere you do it.

RESIST!!

VOTE BLUE!!

95 DAYS!!

AvatarTC

Open Thread – 8/3/2018

Posted by TomCat at 1:07 pm Open Thread, Personal, Politics, Religion

Aug 032018

Today is my last relatively cool day, until the sun hits the wall, so I’m enjoying the fresh air, which I love, while I can. I was so exhausted that I overslept and awakened two hours later than my norm, so I’m just working through, despite my frequent yawns. On the test, I am cancer free, my lungs are no more damaged from COPD that they were last year and are clear. Everything else is healthy. It was the best result I could have had, and they even apologized for not allowing me to play with the cat that did the CAT-scan.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 4:37 (average 5:52). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Short Takes:

From YouTube (MSNBC Channel): Lawrence On Ivanka Trump’s Absence On Border Children

More than one Republican has said that it’s ok for Republicans who disagree with Trump, like Ivanka, to justify supporting Trump too. Thank you, Lawrence, for deflating such a vile argument. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From YouTube (Vox Channel): What a new Supreme Court means for abortion

That explains it in terms that even a Republican could understand, unless they willfully misunderstand, as they so often do. RESIST!! VOTE BLUE!!

From NY Times: Pope Francis has declared the death penalty wrong in all cases, a definitive change in church teaching that is likely to challenge Catholic politicians, judges and officials who have argued that their church was not entirely opposed to capital punishment.

Before, church doctrine accepted the death penalty if it was “the only practicable way” to defend lives, an opening that some Catholics took as license to support capital punishment in many cases.

But Francis said executions were unacceptable in all cases because they are “an attack” on human dignity, the Vatican announced on Thursday, adding that the church would work “with determination” to abolish capital punishment worldwide.

Kudos to Pope Francis, an authentic Christian. Nominally Catholic politicians, who are really Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians, have lost their excuse to demand that we execute another non-white jay-walker for Republican Supply-side Jeebus!

Cartoon:

WTG Cousin Pole Cat face !

Friday Fun: Happy 50th Birthday, Franklin!

Posted by SoINeedAName at 9:16 am Politics

Aug 032018

Truthfully, a belated “Happy Birthday!” because Franklin was actually “born” on July 31, 1968. And what a “birth” it was!

Undoubtedly you are probably asking yourselves, “Who is this Franklin that he’s talking about? Other than Benjamin, I don’t know any Franklins.”

But I bet dollars to donuts you do – even though Franklin was only a couple inches tall when he first came into the world fifty years ago.

As noted, the story of how Franklin came into being is one worth sharing!

During the Civil Rights struggles of the late 1960s, and only eleven days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Glickman, a retired schoolteacher and mother of three from the Los Angeles suburbs, sat down at her typewriter to craft a letter to Charles Schulz requesting the inclusion of a Negro character in his wildly popular and famous comic strip, “Peanuts”.

But Glickman’s sentiments were not created de novo. Her upbringing was exemplary as she explained in an interview almost three years ago about what motivated her to draft her letter in the first place.

My parents… were very concerned about others, and the values that they instilled in us about caring for and appreciating everyone of all colors and backgrounds — this is what we knew when we were growing up, that you cared about other people.

And so, during the years, we were very aware of the issues of racism and civil rights in this country. And remember, when I was young, black people had to sit at the back of the bus, black people couldn’t sit in the same seats in the restaurants that you could sit… the period before I wrote the letter was the major period of civil rights activities. Every day I would see, or read, about black children trying to get into school and seeing crowds of white people standing around spitting at them or yelling at them … and the beatings and the dogs and the hosings and the courage of so many people in that time.

So it wasn’t as if, one day, I said, oh things are bad and Martin Luther King was shot and I should do something. It was the accumulation of all the years of seeing the discrimination, the segregation, the hatred and all….

Glickman was amazed when she actually got a reply from Schulz. While he told her he liked the idea, he was worried that it would appear to be patronizing.

Glickman wrote back asking if it would be alright if she shared his letter with several of her Negro friends and then have them share their thoughts about it with him. He heartily approved, and her friends were very supportive of the idea in their correspondence to Schulz.

A short while later Schulz wrote to Glickman telling her to keep an eye out on his comic strip panels during the last week in July of 1968. And so the character Franklin was “born” on July 31, 1968.

It was over recovered a beach ball, baseball and crooked sand castles that Franklin and Charlie Brown form a friendship – a first for syndicated comics!

While widely acclaimed, that didn’t mean Franklin’s introduction didn’t meet with some resistance – particularly from editors in the South. They especially pleaded with Schulz to NOT show any panels with Franklin in the same school with the other characters, because they were dead-set against integration.

It wasn’t long before Schulz soon thereafter put Franklin in the same schoolroom … seated right in front of a little white girl, Peppermint Patty!

Schulz recalled a discussion with Larry Rutman, head of the company that distributed “Peanuts” (King Features Syndicate):

“I remember telling Larry at the time about Franklin—he wanted me to change it, and we talked about it for a long while on the phone, and I finally sighed and said: ‘Well, Larry, let’s put it this way: Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit. How’s that?’”

[Emphasis added]

In truth, it would be hard to argue against folks who have complained that Franklin is a little too one-dimensional and a little too perfect – always wise, fair and just.

And it’s true he does lack the eccentricities that all of Schulz’s other characters possess. But at the same time, I think we can agree that Franklin has gently nudged readers toward the notion that, as Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, the content of your character is more important than the color of your skin.

So “Happy 50^th Birthday!” Franklin! And thanks for all you’ve done!

NOTE:

The “Peanuts” comic strip ran until Mr. Schulz’s death in 2000. It was published in more than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries and translated to 21 languages, and it has reached more than 300 million people around the world.

BONUS FEATURE:

Interview with Ms. Glickman at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in 2014 on how she wrote to Schulz:

RESOURCES

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