{"id":14636,"date":"2015-02-02T13:50:34","date_gmt":"2015-02-02T21:50:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=14636"},"modified":"2015-02-02T13:50:34","modified_gmt":"2015-02-02T21:50:34","slug":"open-thread222015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/02\/open-thread222015\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread&ndash;2\/2\/2015"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Day 89.&#160; Woe is me!&#160; The Holy Orb has gone dark and will shed no more light on the world until Autumn. :-(&#160; The Seachickens demonstrated, once again, why I have not become a fan.&#160; The game was theirs to win, but bwaaaack-buk-buk\u2026 They did the Seachicken Choke.&#160; Nevertheless, it was an excellent game.&#160; I have&#160; a pants-load of work to do.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><strong>Jig Zone Puzzle<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Today\u2019s took me 3:12 (average 4:48).&#160; To do it, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jigzone.com\/puzzles\/2015-02-02-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.dailykos.com\/story\/2015\/01\/23\/1359793\/-High-Schoolers-Post-Video-That-Scorches-Bill-O-Reilly-And-Fox-News-For-Lack-Of-Journalistic-Ethics#\" target=\"_blank\">Daily Kos<\/a> (Hat-Tip Lynn Squance): <\/font>Fox News has been proven repeatedly to be a purveyor of disinformation and outright lies presented as facts. Knowledgeable observers long ago ceased to take their reporting seriously. However, it&#8217;s one thing to be called out for shoddy journalism by experienced media analysts and news professionals. But when a high school class can demolish the highest rated cable &quot;news&quot; network with ease, the folks responsible should reconsider their career choices.<\/p>\n<p>Last July O&#8217;Reilly sent his stalker\/producer Jesse Watters to Bennington, Vermont in order to malign the residents of the city and the state as liberal, pot smoking, ski bums. It was a purely vicious exercise in childish insults that had no news value of any kind. But it is the sort of mean-spirited filler that Watters has made his specialty. Watters is also the founder and editor of Fox&#8217;s community website, Fox Nation, <a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/1yAE9SX\" target=\"_blank\">mangling the truth<\/a> is the primary objective. [Note: don&#8217;t miss this epic and hilarious <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=13507\" target=\"_blank\">take down of Watters by Stephen Colbert<\/a>]<\/p>\n<p>The students at Mount Anthony Union High School in Bennington happened to be studying journalism when they came upon this piece. So they used it as a case study to conduct a &quot;professional integrity audit&quot; based on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spj.org\/ethicscode.asp\" target=\"_blank\">ethics codes<\/a> of the Society of Professional Journalists. What they discovered was that O&#8217;Reilly&#8217;s program violated the ethics codes so many times they lost count.<\/p>\n<p>&#160;<iframe loading=\"lazy\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/VzYymuslGDw?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"640\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe> <\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Kudos to these kids, but were they right to hold O&#8217;Lielly and <em>Faux Noise<\/em> to ethical standards for journalists? The Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda are not journalists. They are Republican propagandists.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/02\/02\/us\/piling-on-work-to-escape-gap-in-health-law.html\" target=\"_blank\">NY Times<\/a>: <\/font>Alma Ramos, a soft-spoken prep cook at a Tex-Mex restaurant, was eager to sign up for health insurance through the new HealthCare.gov marketplace last year. But Ms. Ramos, a single mother of three, quickly hit a baffling hurdle.<\/p>\n<p>Because of a wrinkle in the Affordable Care Act, Ms. Ramos made too little money to receive federal aid for buying private insurance \u2014 and too much to qualify for Medicaid, the government health care program for the poor. But she found a solution&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;All told, four million adults in nearly two dozen states fall into the gap, and Texas has the most, nearly one million.<\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Republicans blame Obama for this, as do even some Democrats, but such blaming is incorrect, not just unfair. The ACA required states expand Medicaid to remain eligible for Medicaid funds, because the federal government would pay for it. However, Republicans filed suit and the Fascist Five Injustices of SCROTUS (Republican Constitutional VD) sided with them. This left Republican governors free to inflict this harm on their own citizens, trying to make Obama look bad. The fault here lies entirely with the Republican Party.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/gop-holds-security-hostage-to-immigration\/2015\/02\/01\/55776ae8-a8d3-11e4-a06b-9df2002b86a0_story.html\" target=\"_blank\">Washington Post<\/a>: <\/font>HOW FAR will Republicans in Congress take their reckless flirtation with undermining government this time?<\/p>\n<p>Will they, as seems increasingly likely, fail to pass a bill that the president can sign ensuring adequate funding for the Department of Homeland Security and its 280,000 employees before the agency\u2019s support expires Feb. 27? Are they ready to let funding lapse, secure in the knowledge that Border Patrol officers, Secret Service agents, airport security personnel and other so-called essential employees would still have to report to work \u2014 even though they would not be drawing paychecks?<\/p>\n<p>A number of prominent Republican lawmakers clearly believe that denying funding to the nation\u2019s premier organ of domestic security is no big deal, as long as the move expresses the GOP\u2019s anger about President Obama\u2019s executive actions on immigration.<\/p>\n<p>As Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) put it to Politico: Letting the department\u2019s funding lapse would not be \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.politico.com\/story\/2015\/01\/homeland-security-funding-cliff-114670.html\" target=\"_blank\">the end of the world<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">The Republican Party care nothing for our nation&#8217;s security. Everything the do is intended to do one of two things. One is the transfer of wealth from the poor and middle classes to billionaires. The other is the establish a permanent, totalitarian, Republican Reich, in which elections exist for show only. In this case, every penny spent keeping America safe is a penny Republicans can\u2019t give to a billionaire. Also, they hope that blaming Obama for their sedition will help them win the presidency.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><strong>Cartoon<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"0202Cartoon\" style=\"display: inline\" alt=\"0202Cartoon\" src=\"https:\/\/www.7thstep.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/0202Cartoon.jpg\" width=\"650\" height=\"450\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Day 89.&#160; Woe is me!&#160; The Holy Orb has gone dark and will shed no more light on the world until Autumn. :-(&#160; The Seachickens demonstrated, once again, why I have not become a fan.&#160; The game was theirs to win, but bwaaaack-buk-buk\u2026 They did the Seachicken Choke.&#160; Nevertheless, it was an excellent game.&#160; I <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/02\/open-thread222015\/' 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],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","category-35-id","category-3-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14636","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=14636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14636\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}