Voters Remorse – Politics Plus

Open Thread February 14 2026

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

Feb 142026

Happy Valentine’s Day, All.

Yesterday, I woke up early (for me) and couldn’t get back to sleep. I was hoping that would at least help me to get up this morning – it may have, or it may not.

From The Talking Points Memo – The Apricot Antichrist takes on the entire judicial branch. This could be funny if it weren’t so – venal.

This from The Intercept just gobsmacks me. And also makes me glad I froze my information at all three credit bureaus. I hope y’all have done the same.

Yes, this from Law & Crime is a political story. The young woman died on January 10, 2025, just 10 days before that inauguration. The justice system in Texas has done nothing, so the police in Cheshire, England are now getting involved. The story is also in The Root – each has details the other doesn’t.

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.