Semiquincentennial – Politics Plus

Open Thread September 17 2026

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 6:00 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Sep 172026

Yesterday, Heather Cox Richardson announced what she calls the end of the first phase of 250 to 250. I still have a few pre-selected ones, and I may go back and pick up more, but today I’m running the closing video. To me, the whole series demonstrates why we need comprtent and accurate historians to keep a free society.

Barf Bag Alert. Yes, this is from last month. But I only just found it – in a footnote. Specifically footnote #3 out of 13. I thought it was the must disgusting, but it was close, and you might not agree. But I can’t link to the list, because it was in an email with no link to the conttent – only a link to a petition. If anyone cares to see the complete list, send me an email at jvdix@tutamail.com and I’ll forward it. I’ve put it into a temporary folder so I don’t have to look at it all day long.

Archived from Huff Post. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Shared by VoteVets. I’m skeptical of anything said by any AI creator, including Anthropic. But it might be factual – it’s certainly consistent with Russian ethics (or the lack thereof.)

Open Thread June 24 2026

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 6:00 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Jun 242026

No, I did not make a point of finding news which required me to use long and unusual words in the tags. It just worked out that way. And the tags are still shorter than they would have been if I had gone for periphrasis.

Monday, Alan Greenspan died at 100. Here’s a link to Robert Reich’s obituary for him. Of course there are many more, but this one would be my choice. You won’t have any trouble finding others.

I’m aware that many in the military do not vote for persons or issues which will make the United States better for everyone – and also that many misguided people in the military go so far as to encourage this and call it religion. But there are equally many in the military who understand their oath and take it seriously. Either way, no one eligible to vote should ever be disenfranchised. And it does seem to be particularly ironic to blanket disenfranchise people who are willing to risk their lives on behalf of the nation.

This from CPR is not good news – but not bad news, or news at all, except in the sense that you may not have known it (I didn’t). I doubt that it’s widely known. And I found it interesting.

Defend Our Courts dot com shared this in an email. It took a little time to find the actual story (partly because Alito’s article in Wikipedia shows 2 children, but doesn’t provide their names), but I think it was well worth the effort.

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.