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:

Vintage 2011 and still valid.

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:

Vintage 2011 and equally valid today.

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:

Dang!  I was made a dishonerary Republican.   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:

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.