Just in case you need a break from shills or politics or just plain like cats here is my diary for today. Feel free to post pictures and stories of your pets or in case of cats the cats who own you. If you are looking for dinner ideas this is what we are having tonight. After all I just live in the South now I haven't turned to cooking totally Southern.

The next president may be f*cked

April 14

"I question her judgement voting for the war in Iraq, the worst foreign policy in the history of this country," he said.

He then went on to attack the former first lady for voting for "virtually every disastrous trade agreement."

Good Morning 99%'ers. Today's Open Thread topic in another in the series on neo-liberalism. For those who may be interested in previous essays on this subject, here are the links to those essays.

Trump now in 4th place with millennials

Nobody much thought the Americans would bomb Nagasaki. Not even after they'd crisped Hiroshima. The Americans. Because Nagasaki, it was even less a "military" target, than had been Hiroshima. And, it was hard to fly the airplanes in there. Finally, also, there were all those Catholics, in the city. For more than 400 years, Nagasaki, it had been the principal redoubt, in Japan, of the alien faith of Catholicism. The place, it was veritably crawling, with Catholics. And, it was presumed, the Americans, they would be more averse, to frying co-religionists, than those Japanese adhering to their own, native, heathenist faiths.

The first problem with these assumptions, is that, there in 1945, many of the Americans, they regarded Catholicism as a faith every bit as strange and dangerous and deranged, as Shinto or Buddhism, or whatever heathenism it was the Japanese were always on about.

Less than 20 years before, Al Smith, candidate for US president, he had been beaten like a gong by Herbert Hoover, not least because so many of the Americans believed that Smith, as a Catholic, once in the Oval Office, he would immediately deliver the keys to the American kingdom unto the Vatican, which would then commence to forcibly seed the land with popery, and from sea to shining sea.

Four years before that, Smith had been blocked from receiving the nomination by members of his own party, the Democrats, as convention delegates from the Southern states, many literally members of the Ku Klux Klan, declared they'd be damned, if they would surrender the party to a man in thrall to the Whore Of Babylon, united with Jews, Freemasons, and—yea, verily—Satan hisself, in a fiendish plot to destroy everything White and Right, in Amurica.

Nagasaki was actually more or less founded as a Catholic city, by a daimyo who'd gone over to the Western weirdness, not so long after white people had first bulled their way into Japan, back in the mid-1500s.

With the bullers, came their priests. Who hopped around the islands like fleas. The various head-cutters then vying for power in Japan, they vacillated in their treatment of these pests: sometimes they were given free rein, sometimes they were crucified. Eventually it was decided some of the white people, and some of their pestiferous priests, could remain in Japan—but only stuffed into a couple remote holes, one of which was Nagasaki.

By the time August 9, 1945, rolled around, the Urakami district of Nagasaki, it had been considered the "heart and soul" of Japanese Catholicism, and, indeed, of Catholicism throughout the Far East, since the sixteenth century.

And that district, it was ground zero, for the Americans' atomic bomb.

The Americans. They blew it all. Away.

Greetings, non-sports fans! I care not at all about competition and exerting oneself. That's not fun, especially in the heat of summer! So let's grab an icy cold drink and do the opposite of Olympics.

But first, The Recommendations: