{"id":32633,"date":"2018-06-04T13:02:43","date_gmt":"2018-06-04T20:02:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=32633"},"modified":"2018-06-04T13:02:43","modified_gmt":"2018-06-04T20:02:43","slug":"open-thread-6-4-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/04\/open-thread-6-4-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread &#8211; 6\/4\/2017"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">I still haven&#8217;t recovered from my parade, and it&#8217;s been very busy here in the CatBox.&#160; Yesterday, I was so exhausted that I fouled-up uploading my articles to Care2.&#160; Today I&#8217;ve been scheduling medical mayhem.&#160; I wanted to prepare for the monthly report, but I had to write a letter to the parole board for one of my guys.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><strong>Jig Zone Puzzle<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Today&#8217;s took me 2:32 (average 4:24).&#160; To do it, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jigzone.com\/puzzles\/2018-06-04-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=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=pOodR8AQRG4\" target=\"_blank\">YouTube<\/a> (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/msnbcleanforward\/videos\" target=\"_blank\">MSNBC Channel<\/a>): <\/font><font color=\"#000000\">President Donald Trump&#8217;s Mind-Control Superpowers<\/font><\/p>\n<p>&#160;<iframe loading=\"lazy\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/pOodR8AQRG4?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"640\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe> <\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">The pundits overcomplicate the matter. Trump is a perfect reflection of the beliefs and policies of the Republican Party in the mind of an addled pervert. <strong>RESIST<\/strong>!! <strong>VOTE BLUE<\/strong>!!<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2018\/06\/03\/politics\/bill-clinton-donald-trump-russia-investigation\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\">CNN<\/a>: <\/font>Former President Bill Clinton said that impeachment hearings would have begun if a Democratic president, instead of Donald Trump, were in power and the Russia investigation was as far along as it is now.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I think if the roles were reversed &#8212; now, this is me just talking, but it&#8217;s based on my experience &#8212; if it were a Democratic president, and these facts were present, most people I know in Washington believe impeachment hearings would have begun already,&quot; Clinton told &quot;CBS Sunday Morning.&quot;<\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Bill should know why!&#160; <strong>IOKIYAR<\/strong>! <strong>RESIST<\/strong>!! <strong>VOTE BLUE<\/strong>!!<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">From <a href=\"https:\/\/thinkprogress.org\/new-study-trump-white-supremacy-awakening\/\" target=\"_blank\">Think Progress<\/a>: <\/font>For all the horrible things that President Donald Trump says and does from the Oval Office, his own words and deeds may not actually pose the greatest challenge to our democracy. Rather, the real threat to our way of life might be the countless, unnamed, mostly-white Americans who approve of \u2014 and feel emboldened by \u2014 the illiberal, white-supremacist tinge to the rhetoric that emanates from the White House on a near-daily basis.<\/p>\n<p>Hyperbole? Alarmist, left-wing extremism? Over-the-top balderdash, you say? Not at all. But don\u2019t take my word for it. Instead, allow me to point in the direction of a groaning shelf of scholarly research that suggests the current White House occupant may only be the spear\u2019s tip of America\u2019s unraveling democracy.<\/p>\n<p>The most recent such study comes from political scientists Steven V. Miller at Clemson University and Nicholas T. Davis at Texas A&amp;M University.&#160; Their working paper \u2013 \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/svmiller.com\/blog\/2017\/08\/usa-intolerance-xenophobia-racism-strong-leader-democracy-trump\/\" target=\"_blank\">White Outgroup Intolerance and Declining Support for American Democracy<\/a>\u201d \u2013 fires a warning shot to signal a budding threat to the nation. Miller and Davis collected and compared polling data compiled between 1995 and 2011 by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.worldvaluessurvey.org\/wvs.jsp\" target=\"_blank\">World Values Survey<\/a> and discovered an escalating impulse among some white Americans to embrace \u201can unwillingness to associate or fraternize with individuals whose cultural, racial, or religious ideas or ways differ\u201d from their own. They identified such attitudes as \u201csocially intolerant,\u201d which they also found to correlate with a willingness to sacrifice democratic notions, such as political compromise or respect for minority rights, if such principles conflicted with their selfish interests.<\/p>\n<p>Miller and Davis, for example, found the percentage of socially intolerant whites doubled from 12.6 percent in 1995 to 24.9 percent in 2011, when the most recent survey figures were available. <\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">Chick through for the rest. I question the willingness of Trump and the Republican Party to cede power, when legally required to do so. They are preparing storm-troopers to help them keep power by force. <strong>RESIST<\/strong>!! <strong>VOTE BLUE<\/strong>!!<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><strong>Cartoon<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.7thstep.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/0604Cartoon.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"0604Cartoon\" style=\"border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; display: inline; padding-right: 0px; border-top-width: 0px\" border=\"0\" alt=\"0604Cartoon\" src=\"https:\/\/www.7thstep.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/0604Cartoon_thumb.jpg\" width=\"650\" height=\"380\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I still haven&#8217;t recovered from my parade, and it&#8217;s been very busy here in the CatBox.&#160; Yesterday, I was so exhausted that I fouled-up uploading my articles to Care2.&#160; Today I&#8217;ve been scheduling medical mayhem.&#160; I wanted to prepare for the monthly report, but I had to write a letter to the parole board for <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/04\/open-thread-6-4-2017\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32633","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\/32633","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=32633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32633\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}