Cartoonists – Politics Plus

Open Thread October 9 2025

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 5:52 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Oct 092025

Yesterday, an email from Justin Pearson – one of the “Tennessee three” along with Justin Jones and Gloria Johnson – remember “No Justins, no peace”? – announced his run for Congress. More power to him. Also, The F* News newsletter included this sentence, which shocked me and may shock you: “[T]he GOP leadership’s followers aren’t even following their leaders. TFN told you on Tuesday about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) demanding subsidy extensions. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is also cracking the GOP wall.” Finally, I re-watched “Judgment at Nuremberg.” It is on YouTube in full. If you are a member, you won’t need this link, but it not, here is a link which will shove no advertising on you. (if you just want the explanation of how ordinary people allowed it to happen – which I am by no means 100% behind – it starts somewhere around 2 hours 15 miutes.)

Many people dismiss the ideas of comedians and cartoonists as being “unserious.” I don’t. There is a long history of the “jester” or the “fool” being the only one in a kingdom who could speak truth to power and live. This goes back to the dawn of history, but if you want some 500 year old evidence, I challenge you to find me a comedy (or even a tragedy) by Shakespeare in which the fool, if there is one, is not the wisest character. Iiza Donnelly is a cartoonist for The New Yorker. Ann Telnaes was a cartoonist for the Washington Post until she quit because Bezos was censoring her truth. The two of then were recently the headliners at an international cartoonists convention in France. Here are some of Liza’s thoughts while returning home.

There’s been a great deal of news about MAGA freakouts over Bad Bunny being scheduled for the Super Bowl halftime show. Just so you know, Bad Bunny is a birthright citizen of America, as are his parents.

This from Wonkette appears to be under-reported, possibly because the perp is under 18. Two families devastated by one little creep. I hope New Jersey has some provision for victims’ rights. Our Mitch would probably know, unless the law has changed since he moved to Florida.

Open Thread March 27 2025

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 6:08 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Mar 272025

Yesterday, there was an interesting development. Last week the cartoonist Michael deAdder signed up to be exclusive to Meidas Touch. Then yesterday, Ann Telnaes did the same with the Contrarian. It appears that the Progressives on Substack are doing something right. Also yesterday, Joyce Vance wondered what it will take to break through the psychological chains which bind them to the Canteloupe Caligula and his ilk. I can answer that in one short phrase: a resounding defeat. I would like to think it wouldn’t have to be a military defeat, but there is no guarantee. I know this because I am old enough to remember that after the Allies occupied Germany, soldiers consistently said that it was impossible to find anyone who would admit to having been a Nazi. If – and I’m afraid it is an if – we manage to pull off that decisive a victory, it will be difficult to impossible to find anyone who will admit to having been MAGA. But it will have to be a victory as decisive as World War II was. And then we – although I don’t expect to be present – will have to come up with a way to have the First Amendment and at the same time be able to stifle MAGA opinions. That is not going to be easy. But if it isn’t done, there will be another takeover by authoritarians in about 80 years – two generations.

I’m not reading the New Yorker newsletter much any more, but this one’s subject line didn’t say New Yorker, it said Ronan Farrow, and I find him to be both accurate and readable. Besides the horrific callousness in this story, I hope you will pause for a few seconds and think about how much misogyny shared by how many people it took for this to happen. There are more predators here than just the obvious one.

Robert Reich tells it like it is – and without saying so in so many words, demonstrates that Nazi Germany existed not only because of the actions of tha Nazis, but also because of the inaction of non-Nazis. I don’t mean to demean the resistance in Germany – look up Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Society if you don’t know or don’t remember it. They were valiant. But meanwhile, many other Germans were collaborating. There’s a much quoted line from “Judgment at Nuremberg” (so much quoted I am likely not to het it exactly right) when near the end a character playing one of the convicted German judges says to Spencer Tracy’s character, “I swear to you that I did not know it was happening,” and Tracy replies, “You knew the first time you sentences a man to death whom you knew to be innocent.”

PHP is a programming language used to build websites. We have it at all through our hosting partner, BlueHost. In order to update it, we have to go through Bluehost. During his life, TomCat was the only one who had access to our account there. I (JD) am now the only one. I have been to BlueHost and investigated updating our PHP to 8.3 or even to 8.1. I found instructions to do so - in fact, I found two conflicting sets of instructions. I went through one set of the steps and got the message that Our site could not handle 8.3, but that it had successfully updated to 8.1. I then went back here to see what it looked like. But I couldn't get in - either as an administrator or as a reader. It was just gone. I had to reach BlueHost by phone. It was determined that Politics Plus is in fact not compatible with any version of PHP newer than the one we have. BlueHost therefore uninstalled it for me, and the site came back to normal. Of course, like everyone else, I care about security. But I also am aware that TomCat elected to use different providers for several of the services that BlueHost provides, for instance backups. We are backed up daily - but not by BlueHost. However, out PHP is through Bluehost. I feel that if they are not worried about the older version, I am not going to worry about it. I believe that our security here is all or mostly through WordFence, whom I trust.