{"id":59955,"date":"2026-08-22T06:13:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T13:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=59955"},"modified":"2026-08-21T21:15:01","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T04:15:01","slug":"open-thread-august-22-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2026\/08\/22\/open-thread-august-22-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread August 22 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, I got up early for me, which was not all that early, but early enough to call an institution on a 9 to 5 schedule and reach a human being. Turned out not to be necessary. It appears that if Virgil calls and I don&#8217;t answer, for whatever reason, the company that provides the phone service thinks I don&#8217;t have an account with them, and sends a recorded message to that effect. But the caller ID, instead of showing the phone company, as calls from Virgil do, but instead shows the name of the facility. I jumped to the conclusion that his case manage was trying to reach me for some reason, and that I needed to call it back during working hours. I was pleasantly surprised that that wasn&#8217;t the case.<\/p>\n<p>From the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.brennancenter.org\/our-work\/research-reports\/does-ai-fight-or-fuel-election-disinformation\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Brennan Center<\/a>, an analysis piece about the effects of AI on elections. There is a smorgasboard of sentence fragments and hypotheticls before you get to the actual article, so don&#8217;t give up.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.cpr.org\/2026\/08\/18\/immigrant-geo-group-ice-unpaid-medical-bills-aurora\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Colorado Public Radio<\/a>. The &#8220;Listen&#8221; does duplicate some of the written word, but with different empgasis, and has a little information not in the written part.<\/p>\n<p>This is from Thursday. <a href=\"https:\/\/malcolmnance.substack.com\/p\/im-furious-trump-renaming-aircraft\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Malcolm is pissed<\/a>. I am too. I don&#8217;t have a family history like his &#8211; although my father was in the Army during WWII as a telegrapher &#8211; and his grandfather did fight in the Civil War for the Union &#8211; that&#8217;s defnitely not unbroken. I didn&#8217;t learn about Dory Miller until long after I was out of the service &#8211; but it&#8217;s a truth I have treasured since I did learn it. Upgrading the decoration to the MOH while renaming the ship is like throwing a piece of candy after killing his or her parent. It&#8217;s not proportionate. It&#8217;s a little bit of sweet compared to an avalanche of grief. CNN has a recorded livestream here from its <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/kpa-QEHQEnk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Laura Coates Show<\/a>, in which Malcolm speaks, (about ten minutes total.) The first seven minutes are mostly with Dory&#8217;s grand-nephew, and about the last three minutes with Malcolm, who somehow manages to communicate the importance of decisions like these with no expletives &#8211; a minor miracle, according to him. I might just add he also exhibits his own dignity and with it the dignity of everyone who has ever served &#8211; and Malcolm is not a man who normally stands on dignity. But it was needed here.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/eb0-KUgVu6A?si=M0JQPw3prPdcYTvz\" 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\/RYb3t-QjlW8?si=aLp9ax3IqNfpUSnb\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-59957\" src=\"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/H-Z-e1787349643814.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"450\" height=\"293\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, I got up early for me, which was not all that early, but early enough to call an institution on a 9 to 5 schedule and reach a human being. Turned out not to be necessary. It appears that if Virgil calls and I don&#8217;t answer, for whatever reason, the company that provides the <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2026\/08\/22\/open-thread-august-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":[4201,5908,4355,4344,4531,7708,3781,4283,4132,7707,3866,7709,3811],"class_list":["post-59955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","tag-ai","tag-analysis","tag-animals","tag-colorado","tag-dogs","tag-dory-miller","tag-elections","tag-florida","tag-health-care","tag-hero-and-zero","tag-history","tag-immigrant-detention","tag-personal","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\/59955","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=59955"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59959,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59955\/revisions\/59959"}],"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=59955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}