{"id":23314,"date":"2016-08-03T15:11:43","date_gmt":"2016-08-03T22:11:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=23314"},"modified":"2016-08-03T15:11:43","modified_gmt":"2016-08-03T22:11:43","slug":"open-thread-832016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/03\/open-thread-832016\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread – 8\/3\/2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/font><\/p>\n

Jig Zone Puzzles<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n

Yesterdays took me 4:01 (average 5:49).  To so it, click here<\/a>.  Today’s took me 4:56 (average 5:43).  To do it, click here<\/a>.  How did you do?<\/font><\/p>\n

Short Takes<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n

From NY Times<\/a>: <\/font>Donald J. Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, the parents of an Army captain killed in Iraq. And in an extraordinarily provocative interview with The Washington Post<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

That’s horrible!! Rump Dump’s refusal to endorse them just might help get McConJob and Lyin’ Ryan reelected.<\/font> <\/p>\n

From Alternet<\/a>:<\/font> National Committee after an embarrassing breach<\/a> of its email system continued Tuesday with the departure of three senior officials.<\/p>\n

But purging the DNC of top officials won\u2019t remedy the DNC\u2019s problems. Those problems aren\u2019t attributable to individuals who didn\u2019t do their jobs. To the contrary, those individuals probably fulfilled their responsibilities exactly as those jobs were intended to be done. <\/p>\n

The DNC\u2019s problems are structural. <\/p>\n

The Democratic National Committee\u2014like the Republican National Committee\u2014has become little more than a giant machine designed to suck up big money from wealthy individuals, lobbyists bundlers, and corporate and Wall Street PACs. <\/p>\n

As long as this is its de facto mission, the DNC won\u2019t ever be kindly disposed to a campaign financed by small donations\u2014Bernie\u2019s, 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\u2019t want to eliminate superdelegates or support open primaries because these reforms would make Democratic candidates vulnerable to non-corporate interests.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s needed is structural reform. The DNC has to turn itself\u2014and the Democratic Party\u2014into a grass-roots membership organization, with local and state chapters that play a meaningful role in selecting and supporting candidates. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

The Reich on the left, Robert Reich, is right, and I could not agree more.<\/font><\/p>\n

From Crooks and Liars<\/a>: <\/font>Scarborough: Trump Asked Three Times ‘Why Can’t We Use Nuclear Weapons?’<\/p>\n