It’s been a very busy day. Store to Door came early, and Wendy is coming this evening. There will be no Monthly Report for January and only a partial report for February. A screw-up at our HSP, the site that owns the servers where Politics Plus lives, trashed all the usage data that I collect to put in our Monthly Report from 1/12 through yesterday. It’s fixed now, but rather than risk that happening again, I signed up for Google Analytics and bought a plugin to incorporate it into the Dashboard that I, the Administrators and the Editors use. Next month I will have a redesigned Monthly Report for the partial month of February. Unlike with most plugins, I had to hand install the Pro version onto our servers, something I had not done before, so it took me several hours. I’m running way late.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 3:25 (average 4:31). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From The New Yorker: In a blistering attack on the media, President Trump said on Monday that the press has consistently refused to report the voices he hears in his head every day.
Trump praised the “really terrific information” he gets from the voices, which often speak to him when he is roaming the White House in his bathrobe in the middle of the night.
“They tell me that I won by the most votes ever and had the biggest Inauguration crowd ever,” Trump said. “These are fantastic voices and they’re doing a great job.”
Trump said the refusal to report what the voices tell him makes the media “the most dishonest people on earth.”
“There might be a hundred people protesting outside the White House, and at the exact same time, five hundred voices talking to me inside my head,” he said. “Guess which the press will write about?”
Andy may be on to something there. RESIST!!
From Think Progress: Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are two terms that refer to the same piece of legislation. There are no differences between the two because they are in fact the exact same thing.
They are the same thing on the federal level. They are also the same thing on the state level. It is one thing.
Both Republicans and Democrats use the terms “Obamacare” and “the Affordable Care Act” to talk about the same thing. This is correct.
A recent poll found that approximately one-third of Americans believe that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are different laws. They are mistaken; it is the same law.
I wonder how a whole bunch of very stupid Trump voters are going to feel when they scream for ObamaCare to be repealed, until they realize their health insurance is gone. RESIST!!
From Raw Story: Historian Ron Rosenbaum spoke out this week about how President Donald Trump is using Adolf Hitler’s “playbook” from Mein Kampf for undermining democracy.
In a recent column for Los Angeles Review of Books, the author of Explaining Hitler breaks his silence about the recent U.S. election, and about how the “normalization” of Trump is strikingly similar to the Nazi Party’s march to power.
“What I want to suggest is an actual comparison with Hitler that deserves thought,” he writes. “It’s what you might call the secret technique, a kind of rhetorical control that both Hitler and Trump used on their opponents, especially the media.”
According to Rosenbaum, Trump is using the Mien Kampf “playbook” to throw the media off balance and to normalize actions and statements that would have been unthinkable just months ago.
“It looked like the right-wing parties had been savvy in bringing [Hitler] in and ‘normalizing’ him, making him a figurehead for their own advancement,” Rosenbaum notes. “Instead, it was truly the stupidest move made in world politics within the memory of mankind. It took only a few months for the hopes of normalization to be crushed.”
I’ve been saying the Fuhrer is using Nazi methods since he usurped the White House, but folks, who don’t know me, have no reason to believe me. Rosenbaum, on the other hand, is an expert. RESIST!!
Cartoon:
