{"id":11787,"date":"2013-12-12T00:54:05","date_gmt":"2013-12-12T08:54:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=11787"},"modified":"2013-12-12T00:54:05","modified_gmt":"2013-12-12T08:54:05","slug":"open-thread12122013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2013\/12\/12\/open-thread12122013\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread&ndash;12\/12\/2013"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Yesterday I moved.&#160; The day had two low points.&#160; The first was discovering that, after losing my appointment for yesterday, <strong>Comcast<\/strong> cannot install my service until Tuesday, and learning that the landlord dies not allow a dish, so I can\u2019t tell them to take a long flying ____ off a short pier.&#160; The second was discovering that, after I had carefully left the wires attached to network equipment, the movers pulled them all off, leaving me with electronic spaghetti.&#160; Kudos to me.&#160; Everything works.&#160; The high points were looking out my window onto 4th Avenue, Chinese food delivery, crawling into bed, and writing to let you know I\u2019m back.&#160; Today is a rest day, and tomorrow comes the task of unpacking lots more boxes.&#160; Hopefully, I\u2019ll be back to full time blogging within a week to ten days.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><strong>Jig Zone Puzzle<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Today\u2019s took me 3:58 (average 4:42).&#160; To do it, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jigzone.com\/puzzles\/2013-12-12-CE2504A965A9\" target=\"_blank\">click here<\/a>.&#160; How did you do?<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><strong>Short Takes<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.upworthy.com\/a-congressman-goes-off-on-congress-after-being-told-to-not-talk-about-the-people-congress-wont-help\" target=\"_blank\">Upworthy<\/a>: <\/font>A Congressman Loses His Temper When Told To Not Talk About The People Suffering In The Room.<\/p>\n<p>&#160;<iframe loading=\"lazy\" height=\"480\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/V5FxIEo5xXs?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"640\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe> <\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Kudos to both Democrats. Polis is right. It IS simple!&#160; Americans overwhelmingly favor common sense reform, not racist Republican exploitation.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/online\/blogs\/borowitzreport\/2013\/12\/record-for-worst-congress-of-all-time-so-close-boehner-can-taste-it.html\" target=\"_blank\">The New Yorker<\/a>:&#160; <\/font>With six fingers of Johnnie Walker swirling in his favorite tumbler, John Boehner speaks with the quiet assurance of a man on the brink of something big. <\/p>\n<p>Just three workdays remain until Congress packs it in for 2013, and the House that Boehner presides over is about to set the record for the least productive year in its history\u2014a quixotic goal that the tawny Ohioan set for himself when he arrived in Washington, in 1991.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLike most of us, I came to this town hoping to make history,\u201d he says, refilling his tumbler. \u201cAnd, damn it, that\u2019s what I\u2019m about to do.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>Downing his glass in one gulp, he reflects upon \u201call the little things that had to go right\u201d to make the year of epic underachievement possible\u2026<\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Andy is so right. Agent Orange and his cronies have been the least productive Congress in history.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailykos.com\/story\/2013\/12\/10\/1261723\/-For-Republicans-a-Homeless-11-Year-Old-Black-Girl-Named-Dasani-is-a-Useless-Eater-That-Should-Die\" target=\"_blank\">Daily Kos<\/a>: <\/font><a href=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.com\/politicsnation\" target=\"_blank\">Al Sharpton did some great work on Monday&#8217;s PoliticsNation<\/a> where he further exposed the politics of cruelty that have possessed the Republican Party.<\/p>\n<p>Republicans want to cut food stamps, believe that kicking people off of unemployment insurance who cannot find a job in an economy where there are 3 people for every available position, and that a particularly evil and twisted version of &quot;Christian faith&quot; justifies punishing and hurting poor people as righteous deeds and acts that mark conservatives as the elect who are destined for heaven.<\/p>\n<p>I am not a &quot;Christian&quot;. But my understanding of the &quot;historical&quot; Jesus was that he was a man who died fighting State tyranny and would do anything to help the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable. The Tea Party GOP&#8217;s bastardization of Jesus Christ remakes him into a figure who puts his foot on the throats of the hungry, weak, the vulnerable, and the needy, in order to motivate them into self-sufficiency&#8211;or alternatively die from a lack of breath.<\/p>\n<p>For the Tea Party GOP, either outcome is acceptable\u2026<\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">As a rule, I&#8217;m not a big Sharpton fan, but once again he deserves major kudos. Historical Jesus and Republican Supply-side Jesus are polar opposites.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><strong>Cartoon<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"1212Cartoon\" style=\"display: inline\" alt=\"1212Cartoon\" src=\"https:\/\/www.7thstep.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/1212Cartoon.jpg\" width=\"650\" height=\"500\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday I moved.&#160; The day had two low points.&#160; The first was discovering that, after losing my appointment for yesterday, Comcast cannot install my service until Tuesday, and learning that the landlord dies not allow a dish, so I can\u2019t tell them to take a long flying ____ off a short pier.&#160; The second was <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2013\/12\/12\/open-thread12122013\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","category-religion","category-35-id","category-3-id","category-5-id","category-47-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11787\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}