Wendy has been here, and she fluffed, buffed, polished and shined the TomCat.  I think I’ve got the site back in reasonably good repair.  I’m very tired, as I have not had a Lona Nap since Sunday.  Tomorrow, please expect no more that a Personal Update, as I have PT with Courtney the Inquisitor.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 5:38 (average 7:26).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes: From The New Yorker: …Even if the Russian government is not responsible for the hack on the D.N.C., Putin’s affinity for Trump is clear. Some part of it may be a matter of kindred temperament. Just as Trump talks ominously about Mexican “rapists” and tens of thousands of “illegal immigrants … roaming free” in the land, Putin won early popularity by vowing to dispense with terrorists from the Caucasus: “We will ice them in their shithouses.” Trump is, after all, a kind of parody of Putin: the bluster, the palaces. As the historian Timothy Snyder puts it, “Putin is the real-world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television.”

The fellow-feeling between the two is complex, but it is not hard to see who gets the better of whom. Trump sees strength and cynicism in Putin and hopes to emulate him. Putin sees in Trump a grand opportunity. He sees in Trump weakness and ignorance, a confused mind. He has every hope of exploiting him… [emphasis added]

Is it any wonder that RT News has aired continual attacks against Clinton from a so-called progressive perspective? That’s a fire Putin [R-RU] and Trump [R-Hades]  will just keep on fueling, but when you see the RT logo, know that Putin controls the content.

From NY Times: Republican voters in Kansas rebelled against the policies of Gov. Sam Brownback on Tuesday, ousting his fellow conservatives in at least 11 state legislative primary races amid widespread angst about Kansas’s financial situation.

With some races still undetermined on Wednesday, but also leaning toward moderates, the primary was a tangible sign of the grumblings that have been going on under the surface in heavily Republican Kansas, as deep cuts to taxes, a centerpiece of the Brownback agenda, have left the state short on revenue and led to cuts to government services.

Republi-speak Dictionary
Moderate Republican: a Republican that dresses in hoods and sheets, but rarely attends a lynching anymore.

From Crooks and Liars: The ugliness of ignorant racial prejudice and hate in 2016 America is deeply unsettling, yet far too familiar in the age of Trump. White people saying slurs like ‘wetback’ to American citizens (who have the right to speak any damned language they choose) is exactly the type of climate a hateful Republican nominee has fostered.

The Flores family was forced to record an incident when a racist woman made horrible assumptions. The cell phone video has gone viral after someone from Univision viewed the ranting racist family attacking the Mexican-Americans.

Barf Bag Alert!!

Pienso que las racistas estan completo de mierda.

Cartoon:

Please see yesterday’s Open Thread to see how hectic it was.  I worked nonstop, except to eat and use the facilities from 5:30 in the mourning until 8:00 in the evening.  Today will be as bad or worse.  Yesterday it was time to renew our HSP service, the servers that contain PP.  I was able to negotiate an excellent deal by buying three years of service.  If I do not survive for three years, the Squatch and Nameless will own the site.  I upgraded to a service on redundant servers so that, if one server goes down, the site stays up.  Performance will also improve.  The migration was last night, and I woke up to learn that my email settings had changes, so I had to find the new settings and reconfigure Outlook.  Then I learned that the migration had trashed our theme.  WordPress has completely changed the way themes are configured, since the last time I had to to it, and with my poor vision, I was lost in no time flat.  I tried a couple other themes, but could not get them to work, so I went back to Suffusion, and finally figured it out.  It should look better than it did before.  The morning was gone.  Now I get to write.  Today is grocery delivery day, so I’ll have to put those away.  Once I’m done I have paperwork to do.  ARGH!  Now, if Lona were not Ozifying herself, I’d be napping restfully right now.  Tomorrow, I just might be too pooped to pop and Wendy will be here, so don’t worry if I post little and late.

Jig Zone Puzzles:

Yesterdays took me 4:01 (average 5:49).  To so it, click here.  Today’s took me 4:56 (average 5:43).  To do it, click here.  How did you do?

Short Takes:

From NY Times: Donald J. Trump’s unabashed and continuing hostility toward the parents of a slain Muslim American soldier, and his attacks on Republican leaders who have rebuked him for it, threaten to shatter his uneasy alliance with the Republican Party at the outset of the general election campaign.

Ignoring the pleas of his advisers and entreaties from party leaders in Washington, Mr. Trump only dug in further on Tuesday. He told a Virginia television station that he had no regrets about his clash with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of an Army captain killed in Iraq. And in an extraordinarily provocative interview with The Washington Post, Mr. Trump declined to endorse for re-election several Republicans who had criticized him, including the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, who both face primaries this month.

That’s horrible!! Rump Dump’s refusal to endorse them just might help get McConJob and Lyin’ Ryan reelected.

From Alternet: National Committee after an embarrassing breach of its email system continued Tuesday with the departure of three senior officials.

But purging the DNC of top officials won’t remedy the DNC’s problems. Those problems aren’t attributable to individuals who didn’t do their jobs. To the contrary, those individuals probably fulfilled their responsibilities exactly as those jobs were intended to be done.

The DNC’s problems are structural.

The Democratic National Committee—like the Republican National Committee—has become little more than a giant machine designed to suck up big money from wealthy individuals, lobbyists bundlers, and corporate and Wall Street PACs.

As long as this is its de facto mission, the DNC won’t ever be kindly disposed to a campaign financed by small donations—Bernie’s, or any others. Nor will it support campaign finance reform. Nor will it be an institutional voice for average working people and the poor. It won’t want to eliminate superdelegates or support open primaries because these reforms would make Democratic candidates vulnerable to non-corporate interests.

What’s needed is structural reform. The DNC has to turn itself—and the Democratic Party—into a grass-roots membership organization, with local and state chapters that play a meaningful role in selecting and supporting candidates.

And it has to take a lead in seeking public financing of campaigns, full disclosure of all donations, and ending the revolving door between government and the lobbying-industrial-financial complex.

The Reich on the left, Robert Reich, is right, and I could not agree more.

From Crooks and Liars: Scarborough: Trump Asked Three Times ‘Why Can’t We Use Nuclear Weapons?’

If Morning Joe, a routine goose-stepper for years, is willing to repeat this, a President Trump would use nuclear weapons. At this point I have to question the wisdom of worrying about Hillary’s foreign policy.

Cartoon: