{"id":59760,"date":"2026-07-22T06:00:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T13:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=59760"},"modified":"2026-07-22T00:46:26","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T07:46:26","slug":"open-thread-july-22-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2026\/07\/22\/open-thread-july-22-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread July 22 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, I pretty much relaxed &#8211; and knitted. Which was nice.<\/p>\n<p>OK, I need to rant a little today. We all know that the Apricot ntichrist probably does not even know what a treaty is, let alone that the Constitution is clear that a treaty is the law of the land, that only Congress can ratify a treaty (so only Congress can get us out of one.) There is nothing in the Constitution about what to do if an ally we have a treaty with goes rogue &#8211; starts committing war crimes. So will someone please tell me WTF is a Constitutional President who is sworn to &#8220;take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,&#8221; supposed to do when that happens?? What pushed my button was a New Yorker headline &#8220;How Biden Emboldened Israel,&#8221; also a subject line in its daily email. Oh, sure, NOW &#8220;over a hundred Democrats are voting to withhold arms from Israel- wnich is not enough to break or rescind a treaty. How is any of this Joe Biden&#8217;s fault? If we had had Congressional blessing to pull out of our treaties (yes, plural) with Israel the instant the war crimes started (which we did not have the votes to do), then MAYBE Kamala would have been elected (but I would not bet a dime on that), but if not, we would be exactly where we are now. War crimes are a hell of a drug.<\/p>\n<p>I promised an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cpr.org\/2026\/07\/20\/aurora-ice-geo-shooting-victim-protests-again\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">update on the Colorado ICE shooting<\/a>, and here it is.<\/p>\n<p>Colorado also has closed primaries, but has been good about publicizing deadlines for switching or declaring parties, even under Republican Secretaries of State. I would not expect <a href=\"https:\/\/independentveteransofamerica.org\/the-door-just-closed\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Floridians<\/a> to be able to say the same. I switched parties once, back when there were still sane Republicans, and one was running in the primary against a Tea Party (remember it?) one for a state office. And I was far from alone. We got her into the general, where she won, and we had sanity even in those days (Colorado is blue now, but hasn&#8217;t always been so. And desperate situations require desperate measures.<\/p>\n<p>It bursts my bubble every time &#8211; and it is <a href=\"https:\/\/atlblackstar.substack.com\/p\/al-sharpton-fires-back-at-critics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pretty much always<\/a> &#8211; that so many people feel compelled to denigrate every person of color who has anything to say and speaks it publicly. Why do they feel this need? Because they have nothing to say so they make something up? Are they secretly terrified that if there is a person of color smarter and\/or wiser than they, that somehow makes them lesser? Or if there is a person of color who is more compassonae then they, or has higher ethical standards, that demeans them? There are difinitely contradictions in the stories of the witnwssws to what happened over the semiquincentennial weekend &#8211; contradictions which can&#8217;t be reconciled.<\/p>\n<p>.I lost track of the times <a href=\"https:\/\/open.substack.com\/live-stream\/287078\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Frank<\/a> said &#8220;under any other administration&#8221; or the equivalent. He does a deep dive into the background of the ICE agent who shot the young father in Biddeford, ME. I&#8217;m tearing my hair out about this one because there&#8217;s no transcript. I went to his main Substack page &#8211; still no trnscript. There was a YouTube link for the same video &#8211; but CC was not afailable, so no transcript there either. Frank is affiliated with Lincoln Square, so I checked there also &#8211; the show was there, but no transcript. Feel free to skip it. He covers more topics, but what I thought was most important was the background check he did was the background check, and unfortunately, that&#8217;s in the middle.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theroot.com\/sen-raphael-warnock-just-executed-a-masterclass-politi-2000116209\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Here&#8217;s a bonus<\/a> in case you want to skip Frank. But this is good new &#8211; yes, it&#8217;d dsigned to help people of color, but not just people of color &#8211; &#8211; it&#8217;d for everyone not an oligarch. And it doesn&#8217;t leave Black people out.<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, I already put up this in &#8220;250 to 250&#8221;, but this is only a bit over 4 minutes, and it has almost everything the 1 minute version leaves out.<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TP4a2piFRpA?si=L_P-8lVIPL3a0nsL\" 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\/AnDdk26CHdA?si=4sZQH4nuBx8ai0x-\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-59764\" src=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/M-McC.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"306\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/M-McC.jpg 400w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/M-McC-300x230.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/M-McC-150x115.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, I pretty much relaxed &#8211; and knitted. Which was nice. OK, I need to rant a little today. We all know that the Apricot ntichrist probably does not even know what a treaty is, let alone that the Constitution is clear that a treaty is the law of the land, that only Congress can <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2026\/07\/22\/open-thread-july-22-2026\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":58319,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[7620,7623,4355,4531,4283,7404,7622,3760,7619,3811,7625,7624,7626,7621,5154],"class_list":["post-59760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","tag-54th-massachsetts","tag-al-sharpton","tag-animals","tag-dogs","tag-florida","tag-frank-figliuzzi","tag-ice-hiring","tag-joe-biden","tag-mcconnell","tag-personal","tag-pet-peeves","tag-primaries","tag-righteous-rants","tag-senator-warnock","tag-treaties","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\/59760","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=59760"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59769,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59760\/revisions\/59769"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}