{"id":58314,"date":"2026-01-02T00:31:05","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T08:31:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=58314"},"modified":"2026-01-02T00:31:05","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T08:31:05","slug":"open-thread-january-2-2025-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2026\/01\/02\/open-thread-january-2-2025-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread January 2 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday was, of course, New Year&#8217;s Day. I hope yours was both happy and as productive as you wanted it to be. And if that was not at all, that&#8217;s great. On New Years Eve, I had it on my calendar to repost &#8220;featured images&#8221; used by other authors at the end of December so they could be found more easily, and I missed the moment of midnight. As I was cussing myself, it occurred to me that if I temporarily changed the blog time zone from Pacific to whatever they call Alaska and Hawaii, I might be able to put them in in fake December, and them turn the time zone back again and they might stay in December. By golly, it worked. I haven&#8217;t tried to use the scheduling feature again to see whether it is working again, but I will again tonight since on Saturdays I get up for the opera &#8211; at 9:00 Pacific &#8211; so if it&#8217;s late it won&#8217;t be horribly late.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/joycevance.substack.com\/p\/inherent-contempt\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Joyce Vance<\/a> explains &#8220;Inherent Contempt&#8221; and why the House is contemplating using it on Pam Bondi.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/news\/minimum-wage-increase-2026\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Good news for workers<\/a> in a few blue and purple states &#8211; including Colorado, Ohio, and Missouri. Not so good for workers in states who still are stuck with the federal minimums. The article mentions a couple of the amounts by which the minimum changes, but none of the full new amounts. I looked up Colorado, and our new minimum is $15.16, and by law, it increases every year as the CPI increases.<\/p>\n<p>Whether or not this affects you (it doesn&#8217;t affect me directly on account of a long series of lucky decisions which turned out to be consequential), it will almost certainly affect someone you care about. <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/affordable-care-act-health-subsidies-expire-35060610e82ca3257821c53f2a34ecf6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Effing Republicans<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/YjwpknvJXg8?si=iAHEo-Su74doU5ry\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Cat<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/fKHJvpzSLHs?si=c0HhwzLZmOkSrEDZ\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>h<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-58320\" src=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Health-.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"720\" height=\"542\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Health-.jpg 720w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Health--300x226.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Health--150x113.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday was, of course, New Year&#8217;s Day. I hope yours was both happy and as productive as you wanted it to be. And if that was not at all, that&#8217;s great. On New Years Eve, I had it on my calendar to repost &#8220;featured images&#8221; used by other authors at the end of December so <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2026\/01\/02\/open-thread-january-2-2025-2\/' 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":[31,35,3,5],"tags":[6999,4355,4111,5640,3725,4410,4515,6998,6883],"class_list":["post-58314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-news","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","tag-inherent-contempt","tag-animals","tag-cats","tag-health-insurance","tag-holiday","tag-minimum-wage","tag-new-york","tag-premium-increases","tag-zohran-mamdani","category-31-id","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\/58314","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=58314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58314\/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=58314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}