{"id":56304,"date":"2025-03-01T06:00:39","date_gmt":"2025-03-01T14:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=56304"},"modified":"2025-02-28T16:09:12","modified_gmt":"2025-03-01T00:09:12","slug":"open-thread-march-1-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2025\/03\/01\/open-thread-march-1-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread March 1 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, I learned that one of my Senators, along with two other Democratic Senators, voted to advance the nomination of the Peach Pasha&#8217;s cabinet nominees &#8211; this one for the Department of Labor. If all Democrats on the committee had voted not to advance her, she would not have advanced. (The other two were Maggie Hassan and Tim Kaine.) I immediately sent him an email telling him to expect to be primaried in 2026. Jared Polis&#8217;s term as Governor ends at the same time Hick&#8217;s Senate term does, and I think Jared would be better. I am having more and more difficulty getting through a single day without being reminded of a short story told by Igor Stravinsky in a book of reminiscences titled <em>Dialogues and a Diary<\/em> (co-author or maybe a translator Robert Craft.) I have been looking for it on the internet in order to provide a link, but I cannot find one now, and, short though it is, it is too long to make into a meme. Fortunately I have kept a copy, and will quote it in full after today&#8217;s cartoon. It makes me somewhat uneasy that it can&#8217;t be found now, actually. Are there already people editing history? And is this where we are headed?<\/p>\n<p>I realize this is already long, but the disgusting display that our so-called President and Vice president put on with Zelenskyy prompted a DU user to share this link.\u00a0 It&#8217;s to what you might call a &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/u24.gov.ua\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">GoFundMe for Ukraine<\/a>.&#8221;\u00a0 Right up front, don&#8217;t touch the &#8220;necessary&#8221; box, do click the other three, and select the middle choice (if you do it wrong, the next page&#8217;s lower left has an odd little icon you can go back with.)\u00a0 This is the only way Ukraine is going to get any money from the US for the next four years.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/robertreich.substack.com\/p\/musks-rubbish\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Robert Reich<\/a> on some of the more egregious lies Dork Vader Muskrat is telling. Honestly, if I have to hear or read much more projection, I&#8217;ll likely be projectile vomiting.<\/p>\n<p>Another by <a href=\"https:\/\/robertreich.substack.com\/p\/more-reasons-for-moderate-optimism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Robert Reich<\/a>. I am not putting this into Sunday&#8217;s Thread because he&#8217;s right about the &#8220;modest&#8221; part. For example, sure, it&#8217;s good that DOGE staffers are quitting because they refuse to help Dork Vader dismantle government. But it won&#8217;t be good if they are replaced with loyalists.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/xjYHSRgP5Ow?si=nIGNhp-ECxniQYOk\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/7WFexmG4Gew?si=du1Kx-yEhIfrqKBk\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-56249\" src=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/greedy-1024x775.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"695\" height=\"526\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/greedy-1024x775.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/greedy-300x227.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/greedy-150x114.jpeg 150w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/greedy-768x581.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/greedy.jpeg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 695px) 100vw, 695px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=Here is the Stravinsky story:<\/p>\n<p><em>Though my visual impressions of world events were derived largely from films, they also were rooted in personal experience.\u00a0 One day in Munich, in 1932, I saw a squad of Brown Shirts enter the street below the balcony of my room in the Bayerische Hof and assault a group of civilians.\u00a0 The civilians tried to protect themselves behind sidewalk benches, but soon were crushed beneath these clumsy shields.\u00a0 The police arrived, eventually, but by then the attackers had dispersed.\u00a0 That same night I dined with Vera de Bosset and the photographer Eric Schall in a small Allee restaurant.\u00a0 Three men wearing swastika armbands entered the room, and one of them began to talk insultingly about Jews and to aim his remarks in our direction.\u00a0 With the afternoon street fight still in our eyes, we hurried to leave, but the now shouting Nazi and his Myrmidons followed, cursing and threatening us the while.\u00a0 Schall protested, and at that they began to kick and hit him.\u00a0 Miss de Bosset ran to a corner, found a policeman, and told him that a man was being killed, but this piece of intelligence did not rouse him to any action.\u00a0 We were rescued by a timely taxi, and though Schall was battered and bloody, we went directly to a police court where the magistrate was as little perturbed with our story as the policeman had been.\u00a0 &#8220;In Germany today, such things happen every minute,&#8221; was all he said.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, I learned that one of my Senators, along with two other Democratic Senators, voted to advance the nomination of the Peach Pasha&#8217;s cabinet nominees &#8211; this one for the Department of Labor. If all Democrats on the committee had voted not to advance her, she would not have advanced. (The other two were Maggie <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2025\/03\/01\/open-thread-march-1-2025\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":56112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[4355,4531,5922,3736,3721,3866,4065,6060],"class_list":["post-56304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","tag-animals","tag-dogs","tag-federal-budget","tag-gop-greed","tag-gop-lies","tag-history","tag-optimism","tag-the-cabinet","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\/56304","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\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}