Hope I'm not committing a huge faux pas, but it says this is an open thread. So I have to ask since I haven't seen it mentioned on here yet.

Does anybody know what the hell was going on here on Sunday? I tried all day to get on and my connection just wouldn't go through. Later in the evening, I got a couple connections, but the stories were from April 12. Finally I got something about maintenance, but if there was an announcement about this in advance I missed it.

So was it a planned outage, hack attack, or did we break the site?

Is it anti-Semitic for HRC to continue running against Sanders?

[video:https://youtu.be/xblrujICzmw]

From Shut Down the Democratic National Convention

The convention is not our party. It is their party. It costs a lot of money to attend. Donate $100,000 and you become an “empire” donor, with perks such as “VIP credentials for all convention proceedings,” along with tickets to lavish corporate and Party receptions, photo ops with politicians at the convention podium, four rooms at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel and a suite at a Yankees game, where a “special guest” will be present. Short of $100,000? You can become a “gold” donor for $50,000, a “silver” donor for $25,000 or a “bronze” donor for $10,000.

We have the best democracy money can buy. The Wells Fargo Center and the fancy hotels in Philadelphia will be swarming with corporate representatives and lobbyists from Comcast, Xerox, Google and dozens of other companies that manage our political theater.

...

“Philadelphia has a poverty rate of 26 percent,” she said when I reached her by phone. “It has the highest number of people who die from drug overdoses in the country. The city has not housed anyone within the homeless population within 10 months. It has lost its state certification for the Department of Human Services child protection agency because of gross negligence and substandard conditions for children. Foster kids are stuck in an abusive system. Hundreds are not being placed. And at the same time, the city will spend $43 million on security for the convention. It will spend upwards of $60 million to house millionaires and billionaires while it ignores the vulnerable and attempts, by denying us a permit to march, to render them invisible.”

The Drone War:
[video:https://youtu.be/1JRgZiGQCNo]

While this article is from 2015, it gives a good background on one of the many things US Americans are not usually aware of when it comes our military. Since this article was written, the number of countries in which our military in one form or another are present has increased to 147. From American military extends its reach worldwide

Since at least the decolonization era of the 1950s, U.S. officials have feared the kind of protest increasingly seen in places like Vieques, Puerto Rico and Okinawa, Japan. Planners covet safe, worry-free bases insulated from opposition, military constraints and the danger of eviction. They want bases free of the kinds of restrictions the military faced during the Arab-Israeli wars of the 1970s, when several European allies prevented the use of their bases and airspace to support Israel, and again in the lead-up to the second invasion of Iraq in 2003, when Turkey and other European countries limited the use of U.S. bases on their soil. A Pentagon official explained in a 2009 presentation that the new aim is to “lighten U.S. foreign footprints to reduce friction with host nations” and avoid offending “host nation and regional sensitivities.”1

Avoidance of local populations, publicity and potential opposition is the new goal. And to achieve it, the Pentagon is increasingly turning to small, covert sites scattered around the globe — the “cooperative security locations” frequently referred to simply as “lily pads.”

Highly Inappropriate:
[video:https://youtu.be/VfwQcxfyYb8]

What Sanders should do: