The Environment – Politics Plus

Open Thread June 18 2026

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

Jun 182026

Yesterday, The Broadview 6 case was dismissed – but that is not the punchline. Instead, the ex-defendants through their counsel have requested the judge appoint a Special Counsel to investigate the DOJ for criminal contempt. My link is to a video, which is about 21 minutes long, which is normal for Glenn Kirschner alone – and here he is with Adam Klasfeld. Also, the Dekleptocracy Alliance reported it is very close to taking its January 6 tracker live, ans requested donations accordingly. I furst reported on this group lasy August, when they were mounting a general Corruption Tracker. Now they are mounting a specific Jan 6 tracker, to follow crimes committed by Jan 6ers afyer they received pardons (and therefore subject to potential prosecution.) It’s not up as I type, but the email suggested it is only “a few days” away.

I kind of feel the moral rot has been exposed for decades myself. But Isuppose if that were true for Americans in general, we woud not be where we now are.

If these crazy-a$$ righties want to give up their votes, I’d let them. But they won’t take mine away.

Jonathan Larson gets a bit fanciful trying to build an analogy between what hospice care actually does for people and what Repubicans are trying to do to hospices. Hopefully that doesn’t get too confusing – because he’s right.

Open Thread May 1 2026

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

May 012026

Today, in addition to being May Day, is also Law Day in the US.

Yesterday, Joyce Vance made a Substack video with Norm Eisen and April Ryan from The Contrarian, and the subject of James Comey’s new indictment came up. I know almost everyone is still upset with him on account of the 2016 election and “her emails.” But the more time goes by, the less I believe that that remark had anything to do with Hillary’s loss. I think pure misogyny was more than enough to sink her. But I digress. April, who had worked at the FBI when Comey was its Director, said something about him that I didn’t know and you probably don’t either. She said he would take every new hire to the MLK Memorial, and show them the FBI files on Dr. King, and say “This is what overreach looks like.”

From The Conversation. The Panamanian company Congress just authorized to mine the Boundary Waters for copper sulfite may be the most egregious example of this. It doesn’y just pollute the water. It also poisons the air.

As Liza Donnelly points out, Heather Cox Richardson nailed the difference between the two speeches. And Liza goes a bit farther by linking to videos. (This from Borowitz is just a footnote.)

There’s been noise about Rep Chuck Edwards (R-NC) being under ethics investigation, but nothing about why. Unless this is it. Not that this sounds like something Republican would care about. I guess we’ll wait and see.

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.