{"id":56713,"date":"2025-05-05T05:53:28","date_gmt":"2025-05-05T12:53:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=56713"},"modified":"2025-05-04T15:54:06","modified_gmt":"2025-05-04T22:54:06","slug":"open-thread-may-5-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2025\/05\/05\/open-thread-may-5-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread May 5 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I did receive by email the approval of the documents I sent to San Carlos (where Virgil is.) Not in time to visit that day, though. I had sent a note through the electronic system – they print it out and give it to him on paper, so it’s not immediate – asking him to call me, but, as I type, I haven’t heard from him yet. (The other thing I did was put the need for a new form on my calendar for next year – with about 2 weeks to spare. In the meantime, I don’t really know how to plan. I expect I’ll hear from him in time to plan effectively, but just now, it’s frustrating.<\/p>\n

Robert Reich<\/a> on the May Day demonstrations. This is helpful but not, IMO, good enough to run on Sunday. Particularly since the following day Trump** issued an executive order defunding NPR and PBS. My local public radio station is not a member of NPR, but it does – or it did – receive some federal funding.<\/p>\n

HuffPost<\/a> covers the Apricot Antichrist’s declaration that being poor is good for you. You may think that sounds like St. Francis – but nothing could be farther from the truth. Sur, Francis lover poverty, but that was because he chose to be poor. That’s 180 degreed from being forced to be poor because everything you had was taken away from you. Francis would not have been in favor of that at all.<\/p>\n

Heather Cox Richardson<\/a> writes about the media – not the mainstream media, and not the media of the resistance, but the Turmeric Tyrant’s own media – which may be the direst threat to democracy of all, more so than his flouting of the law and the courts, because it creates and intensifies a cadre of true believers who are beyond the ability of reason to influence. Yes, we’ve already observed that in his first term and in his campaigns, but this is an escalation on an undreamed of scale.<\/p>\n