{"id":20825,"date":"2016-03-24T13:38:43","date_gmt":"2016-03-24T20:38:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=20825"},"modified":"2016-03-24T13:38:43","modified_gmt":"2016-03-24T20:38:43","slug":"open-thread3242016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/24\/open-thread3242016\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread–3\/24\/2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

I took another nap this morning, because ii was cold, and I felt tired.  Portland is weird at this time of year.  When the sun hits the bricks in my building, it warms up and stays warm until late in the evening, but the temperature drops into the low 40\u00b0s at night, so my apartment is very cold in the morning.  Tomorrow I\u2019ll be gone half the day or more for PT\/OT with Courtney.  Expect no more than a Personal Update then, and I probably won\u2019t be sending link messages at Care2.<\/font><\/p>\n

Jig Zone Puzzle<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s took me 3:12 (average 5:15).  To do it click here<\/a>.  How did you do?<\/font><\/p>\n

Short Takes<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n

From Daily Kos<\/a>: <\/font>The infamous decades-long "War on Drugs" was actually a tool for the federal government to crack down on leftist protesters and "black people," a former Nixon White House adviser admitted in an interview published Tuesday.<\/p>\n

John Ehrlichman, who served as counsel to former President Richard Nixon, explained the unfortunate use of the controversial policy in a 1994 interview with writer Dan Baum, that he revisited in a new article for Harper’s published this wee<\/a>k.<\/p>\n

"You want to know what this was really all about," Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said after Baum asked him about government policies regarding drugs. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying," Ehrlichman continued.<\/p>\n

"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities<\/strong>.\u201d [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n

At the time, we leftist protestor-hippies knew exactly what was going on, but we had lost our credibility, because the Weathermen had turned the antiwar movement violent.<\/font><\/p>\n

From NY Times<\/a>: <\/font>It turns out that the most important voice in the Supreme Court nomination battle is not the American people\u2019s, as Senate Republicans have insisted from the moment Justice Antonin Scalia died last month. It is not even that of the senators. It\u2019s the National Rifle Association\u2019s.<\/p>\n

That is what the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said the other day<\/a> when asked about the possibility of considering and confirming President Obama\u2019s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, after the November elections. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine that a Republican majority in the United States Senate would want to confirm, in a lame-duck session, a nominee opposed by the National Rifle Association,\u201d he told \u201cFox News Sunday.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Fecal Dump Trump would make Supreme Court Appointments up to The TEAbaggers at the Heritage Foundation, while Bought Bitch Mitch would make it up to Ammosexuals at the NRA.  ARGH!!<\/font><\/p>\n

From Think Progress<\/a>: <\/font>Renewable energy investment set a new world record in 2015, with emerging economies led by China topping the investment of developed nations for the first time, according to a United Nations-backed report unveiled Thursday.<\/p>\n

Last year, the world invested $286 billion in green energy \u2014 some 3 percent more than the last record set in 2011 \u2014 mostly on wind and solar, according to the report<\/a>, put together by the Frankfurt School and United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). On the other hand, coal and gas-fired electricity generation drew less than half the investment made in solar, wind, and other renewables. <\/p>\n

\u201cChina is by far in the lead, but you also have quite a few others,\u201d Eric Usher, head of UNEP Finance Initiative, told ThinkProgress. \u201cIn the lead table of the top 10 countries, six of them are in developing countries \u2026 so we see a transition taking place.\u201d China, the world\u2019s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is responsible for about a third of worldwide investment, or $102.9 billion. The United States, the second largest emitter, is a distant second with $44.1 billion \u2014 20 percent less than it invested in 2014.<\/p>\n

Other countries in the top 10 list include Chile, Mexico, South Africa, Brazil, and India.<\/p>\n

I consider this news mixed. World-wide, it’s great news, but for the US to be investing about 40% of the Chinese investment and 20% less than a year ago is terrible news.  That makes it more likely that China, not the US, will own most of the green energy technology and have most of the green energy jobs.  Republican seditious sabotage is to blame.<\/font><\/p>\n

Cartoon<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n

\"0324Cartoon\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I took another nap this morning, because ii was cold, and I felt tired.  Portland is weird at this time of year.  When the sun hits the bricks in my building, it warms up and stays warm until late in the evening, but the temperature drops into the low 40\u00b0s at night, so my apartment […]<\/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-20825","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\/20825","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=20825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}