{"id":56647,"date":"2025-04-24T06:00:53","date_gmt":"2025-04-24T13:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=56647"},"modified":"2025-04-23T18:15:39","modified_gmt":"2025-04-24T01:15:39","slug":"open-thread-april-24-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2025\/04\/24\/open-thread-april-24-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread April 24 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, The Mango Moron accused Volodymyr Zelensky of &#8220;sabotaging [the] U.S. peace plan for Ukraine&#8221; because of course he did. And a disagreement between Elon Musk and Scott Bessent &#8220;erupted into [a] West Wing shouting match.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a reason why Dan Froomkin calls his Substack <a href=\"https:\/\/criticalread.substack.com\/p\/the-trump-regime-should-be-covered\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">&#8220;Press Watch&#8221;<\/a> &#8211; because it&#8217;s all about, not just truth, but how truth should be presented. In other words &#8211; it should be read by journalists so that we don&#8217;t have to read it. Unfortunately, that isn&#8217;t happening. This article is a case in point.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve never been a &#8220;first let&#8217;s kill all the lawyers&#8221; person. I do appreciate the jokes, and I may just tell one (with a slight twist) &#8211; but the lawyers we see on YouTube such as Glenn Kirschner, Michael Popok, and Harry Litman are honest and dedicated defenders of how the rule of law is needed to &#8211; and needs to &#8211; define and maintain democracy. This from <a href=\"https:\/\/harrylitman.substack.com\/p\/we-will-not-stand-silent\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Harry Litman<\/a> I&#8217;m going to call a full disclosure post. (And may I suggest that the signers are in general also lawyers who can be trusted.) OK, joke. A man goes into a curio shop (in a place like Galveston, Atlantic City, or San Francisco &#8211; you&#8217;ll see why) and is fascinated by a brass rat. The owner advises him the rat has mysterious properties and warns him the price is non-refundable. He buys it anyway and leaves and continues walking around the city. Soon he notices he is being followed by rats, and that the number is increasing. As he continues walking the number of rats continues to grow, and he starts to run. The rats also start running, and there continue to be more and more of them. He speeds up and runs to the beach. When he gets there, he throws the brass rat as far out into the ocean as he can. All the rates follow it and drown. He then returns tot he curio shop, where the owner says, &#8220;I told you no refunds.&#8221; The man says, &#8220;I don&#8217;t want a refund. I want to know if you have any brass Trump** voters.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/riPxoDmkOKM?si=HDmz53giuRpxRmuU\" 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\/Qwvq8wknIbo?si=cG9Mzez2CHbtUIpv\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-56651\" src=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/liberation-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"695\" height=\"695\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/liberation-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/liberation-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/liberation-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/liberation-768x768.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/liberation-96x96.jpg 96w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/liberation-24x24.jpg 24w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/liberation-36x36.jpg 36w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/liberation-48x48.jpg 48w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/liberation-64x64.jpg 64w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/liberation.jpg 1100w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 695px) 100vw, 695px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, The Mango Moron accused Volodymyr Zelensky of &#8220;sabotaging [the] U.S. peace plan for Ukraine&#8221; because of course he did. And a disagreement between Elon Musk and Scott Bessent &#8220;erupted into [a] West Wing shouting match.&#8221; There&#8217;s a reason why Dan Froomkin calls his Substack &#8220;Press Watch&#8221; &#8211; because it&#8217;s all about, not just truth, <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2025\/04\/24\/open-thread-april-24-2025\/' 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":[4355,6096,6353,4531,3709,4354,6294,5963],"class_list":["post-56647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","tag-animals","tag-birthright-citizenship","tag-clown-show","tag-dogs","tag-humor","tag-journalism","tag-lawyers","tag-tariffs","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\/56647","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=56647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56647\/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=56647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}