{"id":57287,"date":"2025-07-30T05:53:38","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T12:53:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=57287"},"modified":"2025-07-29T14:56:52","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T21:56:52","slug":"open-thread-july-29-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2025\/07\/30\/open-thread-july-29-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread July 30 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, this showed up on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.democraticunderground.com\/1016410009\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Democratic Underground<\/a>. I usually prefer to go to the original source, but this is such a coherent summary, the USL provided is already cut so doesn&#8217;t need cleaning up, that I thought I&#8217;d just use it. Also yesterday, Roy Cooper announced for the US Senate\ud83d\udc4d. And, sadly, Tom Lehrer has died. He was 97. Finally, here&#8217;s a link to a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.meidasplus.com\/p\/top-scottish-protest-signs-of-trump\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Meidas post<\/a> &#8211; no video, no article, just photos of Scottish protest signs which met our F\u00fchrer when he disembarked there.<\/p>\n<p>OK, this from <a href=\"https:\/\/robertreich.substack.com\/p\/what-we-should-be-talking-about-imho\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Robert Reich<\/a> is from last week. But it&#8217;s still accurate, and it doesn&#8217;t look like it will get any better any time soon. Really, the readers here are so informed that there&#8217;s not much point to me covering the top stories unless I have a spin on them that&#8217;s not getting attention. Instead, covering the stories that will otherwise be missed is our mission. That&#8217;s not to say I will always guess correctly what is big &#8211; or get hooked into a big story for some reason &#8211; after all, I&#8217;m only human. But that&#8217;s my goal.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/heathercoxrichardson.substack.com\/p\/july-25-2025\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Heather Cox Richardson<\/a> only comments on this story by setting it next to a story from 1955 (a story which y&#8217;all are probably aware of). And that is all that is needed. As a nation &#8211; we haven&#8217;t come very far.<\/p>\n<p>From <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wonkette.com\/p\/uh-oh-sunday-show-hosts-did-journalism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Wonkette<\/a>. No way to tell at this point whether this had any effect at all on those who are addicted to lies, but it is still refreshing.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/QBCOX4LgmPE?si=nrZlxbmLs_6WMguU\" 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\/FSvHfM_u_Qo?si=LdmMeqFCmVqoiEOe\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-57293\" src=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Jphn-Gast-American-Progress-1872.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"595\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Jphn-Gast-American-Progress-1872.jpg 800w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Jphn-Gast-American-Progress-1872-300x223.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Jphn-Gast-American-Progress-1872-150x112.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Jphn-Gast-American-Progress-1872-768x571.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><br \/>\nThis is not a cartoon, nor is it new &#8211; it was painted by John Gast in 1872. It is named &#8220;American Progress,&#8221; and the blonde giantess represents &#8220;Columbia&#8221; (still a synonym for &#8220;The United States&#8221; almost a hundred years after the Revolution.) If yo see it credited to Thomas Kinkade, that is false, although DHS, which posted this at their website, also posted a picture by Kinkade, without permission from his heirs, who have protested. The Kinkade is fairly innocuous, but this image, propaganda for the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, is chilling when you think about how many totally innocent people were killed for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, this showed up on Democratic Underground. I usually prefer to go to the original source, but this is such a coherent summary, the USL provided is already cut so doesn&#8217;t need cleaning up, that I thought I&#8217;d just use it. Also yesterday, Roy Cooper announced for the US Senate\ud83d\udc4d. And, sadly, Tom Lehrer has <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2025\/07\/30\/open-thread-july-29-2025\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":57127,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[4355,6569,4111,5430,5259,4531,4354,6568,3748,6051,3795,6570],"class_list":["post-57287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","tag-animals","tag-brutality","tag-cats","tag-defamation","tag-dhs","tag-dogs","tag-journalism","tag-manifest-destiny","tag-racism","tag-resistance","tag-treason","tag-underpublicized-events","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\/57287","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=57287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}