Last Call For Debbie, Done

For better or for worse, I've been calling for the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as DNC chair since leading the Dems' disastrous midterm efforts in 2014 resulting in the lowest election turnout in modern history and the loss of the Senate to Mitch McConnell and the GOP, and this week's events finally proved too much to save her position.

The controversial chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, announced she would resign at the end of her party’s convention this week, a victim of her toxic relationship with peers and a trove of embarrassing internal emails.

“Going forward, the best way for me to accomplish those goals [of winning the presidency for Hillary Clinton] is to step down as Party Chair at the end of this convention,” Wasserman Schultz said in a written statement. “As Party Chair, this week I will open and close the Convention and I will address our delegates about the stakes involved in this election not only for Democrats, but for all Americans.”

Donna Brazile, a Democratic Party stalwart, is expected to run the DNC through the election, according to multiple sources briefed on the plan. Brazile, who briefly served as chair in 2011, is a CNN contributor, and must forgo that contract to take the reins of the DNC. And she's still subject to a party vote this week in Philadelphia.

President Barack Obama paid tribute to her in a statement: For the last eight years, Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has had my back. This afternoon, I called her to let her know that I am grateful."

And that she was fired, of course.

The WikiLeaks story was the last straw in a string of screw-ups.  It's easy to blame the Russians or Assange over this, and yes, it was the mother of all dirty tricks, but Schultz botched the handling of the leak from hour one, and let's not forget that she sandbagged President Obama on the Iran nuclear deal last year, which was when I started calling for her resignation.

Again Donna Brazile will be taking over, and I believe she's infinitely more competent than Schultz at this point (and I think she should stay on.)

This is something that should have happened early last year after the midterms, and now the Dems can correct it and move on.  Not thrilled about Schultz joining the Clinton campaign as an adviser, but I guess that was the price of her stepping down.

We'll see how this goes.

Comic Relief

Marvel rolled out the big guns Saturday at San Diego Comic Con for their Cinematic Universe presentation, focusing on their upcoming 2016, 2017 and 2018 films, including Doctor Strange, Black Panther, Captain Marvel and more.

Amid fog and lasers on Saturday, Marvel gave frenzied fans at Comic-Con their first look at a new Black Panther movie cast, the mysterious Doctor Strange, a Spider-Man teen movie and an Oscar-winning actress as the new Captain Marvel.

The 6,500-plus audience, many of whom had queued overnight at San Diego's annual film and pop culture event, were introduced to the lead cast of the "Black Panther" movie, directed by "Creed" filmmaker Ryan Coogler.

Chadwick Boseman plays the titular hero while Michael B. Jordan is his arch nemesis, Erik Killmonger, and Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong'o plays the warrior Nakia.

"I'm looking forward to kicking some ass," Nyong'o said.

Walt Disney Co-owned Marvel showcased diverse casts for its upcoming films after facing criticism over recent years for a superhero franchise dominated by white male actors.

Oscar-winning "Room" actress Brie Larson was revealed as "Captain Marvel," but no details were given on the 2018 movie.

Benedict Cumberbatch entered amid a cloud of fog to show a scene from "Doctor Strange," out in November, in which neurosurgeon Stephen Strange, who lost the use of his hands in an accident, meets the Ancient One to harness the mysterious world of magic and alternate dimensions.

Director Scott Derrickson said "Doctor Strange" comics brought "a whole new voice" to the Marvel universe.

"It's very, very different and the scale is something else," Cumberbatch said.

All of this plus Spider-Man: Homecoming and Guardians of the Galaxy 2, along with Thor: Ragnarok, all will be leading up to the Avengers: Infinity Wars movies in a few years.  I really can't wait.

Sunday Long Read: Attention To Derail

This week on Sunday Long Reads we have author Laurie Penny's piece in Medium about the "attention economy", the world of professional right-wing social media trolls who only exist to self-aggrandize and cause as much chaos as possible to their own benefit.  Donald Trump has lead the way on monetizing this mindset, and if Trump is king, the Crown Prince is right-wing bomb-juggler Milo Yiannopolous.

This is a story about how trolls took the wheel of the clown car of modern politics. It’s a story about the insider traders of the attention economy. It’s a story about fear and loathing and Donald Trump and you and me. It’s not a story about Milo Yiannopoulos, the professional alt-right provocateur who was just banned from Twitter permanently for sending racist abuse to actor Leslie Jones.

But it does start with Milo. So I should probably explain how we know each other and how, on a hot, weird night in Cleveland, I came to be riding in the backseat of his swank black trollmobile to the gayest neo-fascist rally at the RNC.

Milo Yiannopoulos is a charming devil and one of the worst people I know. I have seen the death of political discourse reflected in his designer sunglasses. It chills me. We met four years ago, before he was the self-styled “most fabulous supervillain on the internet,” when he was just another floppy-haired right-wing pundit and we were guests on opposing sides of a panel show whose topic I don’t remember and can’t be bothered to look up. Afterwards we got hammered in the green room and ran around the BBC talking about boys. It was fun.

Since that day, there is absolutely nothing I have been able to say to Milo to persuade him that we are not friends. The more famous he gets off the back of extravagantly abusing women and minorities, the more I tell him I hate him and everything he stands for, the more he laughs and asks when we’re drinking. I’m a radical queer feminist leftist writer burdened with actual principles. He thinks that’s funny and invites me to his parties.

“Feminism is cancer” is one of Milo’s signature slogans, and yet it took him only seconds after learning we’d both be at the Republican Convention in Cleveland to offer me a lift to his ‘Wake Up!’ rally, billed as the most fabulous shindig at the end of America. This time—god help me and the things I do for journalism—I said yes.

So here we are at the Convention, where howling psychopath Donald Trump has just been confirmed as the presidential nominee, to the horror of half of the party and every remaining moderate conservative in America as well as the 15,000 members of the international press who flocked to see the circus in realtime. Milo is loving every second of it. He lost no time climbing on the back of the clown car of the billionaire demagogue who, with ghoulishly oedipal glee, he calls ‘Daddy.’

These are the nihilists and nutjobs riding the Trump Train, and they're surfing the wave after destroying the dam and flooding the country with chaos and hatred.  Some of Milo's fellow travelers are convinced he'll help them build a new twisted version of America, but Penny is right about Milo himself.

Some people just want to see the world burn.

Putin Together The Pieces

TPM's Josh Marshall constructs a pretty good case that the public relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is more than just being members of a mutual admiration society, rather that the relationship involves a great deal of money and that Trump's closest advisers are at the very minimum doing everything they can to favor Moscow.

Over the last year there has been a recurrent refrain about the seeming bromance between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. More seriously, but relatedly, many believe Trump is an admirer and would-be emulator of Putin's increasingly autocratic and illiberal rule. But there's quite a bit more to the story. At a minimum, Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.
Let me start by saying I'm no Russia hawk. I have long been skeptical of US efforts to extend security guarantees to countries within what the Russians consider their 'near abroad' or extend such guarantees and police Russian interactions with new states which for centuries were part of either the Russian Empire or the USSR. This isn't a matter of indifference to these countries. It is based on my belief in seriously thinking through the potential costs of such policies. In the case of the Baltics, those countries are now part of NATO. Security commitments have been made which absolutely must be kept. But there are many other areas where such commitments have not been made. My point in raising this is that I do not come to this question or these policies as someone looking for confrontation or cold relations with Russia.

Marshall lays out facts here, that Trump has been receiving significant financing over the years from Russian oligarchs as investors., that Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort and Russia policy advisor Carter Page are both on the payroll of Russian interests (in Page's case, Gazprom), and that Trump's convention staff made a huge deal about opposing US military aid to Ukraine and effectively ignored the entire rest of the GOP platform battles.

To put this all into perspective, if Vladimir Putin were simply the CEO of a major American corporation and there was this much money flowing in Trump's direction, combined with this much solicitousness of Putin's policy agenda, it would set off alarm bells galore. That is not hyperbole or exaggeration. And yet Putin is not the CEO of an American corporation. He's the autocrat who rules a foreign state, with an increasingly hostile posture towards the United States and a substantial stockpile of nuclear weapons. The stakes involved in finding out 'what's going on' as Trump might put it are quite a bit higher.

There is something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence for a financial relationship between Trump and Putin or a non-tacit alliance between the two men. Even if you draw no adverse conclusions, Trump's financial empire is heavily leveraged and has a deep reliance on capital infusions from oligarchs and other sources of wealth aligned with Putin. That's simply not something that can be waved off or ignored.

So yes, as if we needed yet another reason not to see the man elected president, there's all this somewhat sinister relationship between Trump and Putin.

Last Call For Sour Grapes

Bernie Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver is outright accusing the Democratic National Committee and chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz of fraud in the 2016 Democratic primary process, demanding that "someone" be "held accountable" for the information contained in the leak of DNC emails stolen by Russian hackers and released by WikiLeaks.

Weaver said the emails showed misconduct at the highest level of the staff within the party and that he believed there would be more emails leaked, which would "reinforce" that the party had "its fingers on the scale."

"Everybody is disappointed that much of what we felt was happening at the DNC was in fact happening, that you had in this case a clear example of the DNC taking sides and looking to place negative information into the political process.

"We have an electoral process. The DNC, by its charter, is required to be neutral among the candidates. Clearly it was not," Weaver said, responding for the first time to the growing controversy. "We had obviously pointed that out in a number of instances prior to this, and these emails just bear that out."

Another member of Sanders' staff, Rania Batrice put it this way: "Everything our fans have been saying -- and they were beaten down for and called conspiracy theorists -- and now it's in black and white."

I've been asked to comment on this by Sanders supporters here, and my response is this:

Are you serious?

Are we seriously going to let Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump play Sanders supporters like the idiots you are here over this non-story?  Leave it Trump and the Russians to actually make me have to defend Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a person whose resignation I've called for on numerous occasions as DNC chair, when it's painfully clear Weaver is more than happy to take a bit from this poison apple in order to try to give Putin his preferred candidate in November.

Let me be absolute about this: this was an operation by the Russians to steal email from the Democrats in order to sow discord, and a purposeful leak in order to try to wreck the DNC convention.  The timing was 100% on purpose here, and if you can't see how ridiculously obvious this is, I can't help you.

Christ.

The Gunmerican Disease Spreads

Friday saw yet another mass shooting, this time in Munich, Germany. Nine people were killed in a McDonald's near a shopping center by what looks like an 18-year-old obsessed with mass shootings. Plenty of those in the news, yes?

The 18-year-old gunman who killed nine people in Munich was obsessed with mass shootings but had no known links to the Islamic State group, German police say.

Written material on such attacks was found in his room. Munich's police chief spoke of links to the massacre by Norway's Anders Behring Breivik.

The gunman, who had dual German-Iranian nationality, later killed himself.

His name has not been officially released but he is being named locally as David Sonboly.

He had a 9mm Glock pistol and 300 bullets in his rucksack.

Police do not yet know how the weapon was acquired, but said he had no permit for it and the serial number had been obliterated.

They are investigating whether he may have lured his victims through a Facebook invitation to the McDonald's restaurant where he launched his attack on Friday evening.

 He ended up injuring 27 more, some critically, including kids.

The disease is spreading around the world, it seems.

Voted Off The Island

So apparently Virginia's Supreme Court has no problem taking the right to vote away from thousands of people.

The Supreme Court of Virginia on Friday struck down Gov. Terry McAuliffe's sweeping executive order that restored voting rights to more than 206,000 Virginia felons.

In a 4-3 ruling, the court declared McAuliffe's order unconstitutional, saying it amounts to a unilateral rewrite and suspension of the state's policy of lifetime disenfranchisement for felons.

The court ordered the Virginia Department of Elections to "cancel the registration of all felons who have been invalidly registered" under McAuliffe's April 22 executive order and subsequent orders. As of this week, 11,662 felons had registered to vote under McAuliffe's orders. The court gave a cancellation deadline of Aug. 25.

"Never before have any of the prior 71 Virginia Governors issued a clemency order of any kind — including pardons, reprieves, commutations, and restoration orders — to a class of unnamed felons without regard for the nature of the crimes or any other individual circumstances relevant to the request," Chief Justice Donald W. Lemons wrote in the majority opinion.

"To be sure, no Governor of this Commonwealth, until now, has even suggested that such a power exists. And the only Governors who have seriously considered the question concluded that no such power exists."

The ruling is a potentially fatal blow to an executive action that could have been a highlight of McAuliffe's gubernatorial legacy.

"He spent 90 days bragging about this being the high point of his governorship," said Del. Robert B. Bell, R-Albemarle, who's running for attorney general in 2017. "And the court made it very clear that he acted unconstitutionally."

Governors have no unilateral right of clemency?  Well, okay then.

Maybe it's because the majority of the people getting back their right to vote under McAuliffe's executive order are black?  Just going to put that out there.

Virginia has always kinda had a problem with that.

Last Call For Kaine Do Attitude

So I read way too much into the Tim Kaine as a smokescreen theory, turns out he really is Clinton's VP pick and I should have taken the stories at face value.

Kaine, from Virginia, would give Clinton a running mate with wide governing experience but picking the self-described "boring" senator could anger progressive groups hoping for a more liberal choice.

Kaine had a clear edge over two other candidates among the final contenders: Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a Democratic source with knowledge of the discussions said.

Clinton's campaign declined to comment.

Clinton is expected to announce her running mate through a text message or Twitter, possibly as early as Friday when she has two afternoon events scheduled in Florida. NBC News said she would make the announcement on Friday.

That text message came out around 8:15 PM this evening confirming Kaine as the pick and on social media.

I'm thrilled to announce my running mate, @TimKaine, a man who's devoted his life to fighting for others. -H pic.twitter.com/lTVyfztE5Z

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) July 23, 2016

So, no surprises, no guesswork, Kaine was always the choice apparently and had been the top contender for weeks.  

Well, here we go.

Bailing Out Of The Zeppelin

In blue state areas where The Party Of Trump might not be able to win without more than just "working class" white voters, at least some Republicans see the writing on the wall when it comes to what Trump will do to the GOP brand in November and well beyond.

The vice chairman of the Washington, D.C., GOP party plans to resign from his post and vote for libertarian candidate Gary Johnson in November, the longtime Republican operative told The Daily Beast. Gary Teal, a delegate at the Republican convention, said he had already told fellow delegates that he will resign. 

“If I’m not going to vote for the nominee, then I have to resign my position,” Teal said. “I’m prepared to do that.” Three additional delegates from Washington, D.C., joined Teal to announce their support for the libertarian candidate. Justin Dillon, Kris Hammond, and Peter Lee—who were wearing #NeverTrump buttons—spoke to The Daily Beast in the hallway of Quicken Loans Arena, just minutes after Donald Trump finished his keynote speech on Thursday night. 

“The RNC has bungled this nomination process by having bad rules,” Teal said, referring to a controversy over nominating rules that caused chaos on the convention floor Monday. “And now at this convention, they’ve sacrificed integrity in favor of unity.” 

In a CNN poll released last week, Johnson polled at 13 percent against the field of Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Republicans jumping ship for the Libertarians?  The more the merrier.  It's nice to see that people who really do see their party as coming apart are willing to leave.

Trump Cards, Con't

Donald Trump's acceptance speech was one for the history books, under "Prime examples of American infamy".  It was a terrifying speech in the clinical sense of the word, it was meant to terrify people into voting for him lest they suffer the consequences of not doing so, and it was meant to terrify those voting against him and reminding them, as Steve M says, that Donald Trump can very well win this thing in November.

It isn't just that Trump's speech successfully tapped into the anxieties of many Americans -- it's that the entire convention did, in between all the things that were so fascinating to political insiders. And while the four days of speeches, up to and including Trump's own, didn't provide solutions beyond "Donald Trump will magically fix everything because he's all-powerful," they did offer up a scapegoat for all the world's ills: Hillary Clinton, the worst person in the world.

I'm not supposed to worry about this because the presidential electoral is supposedly etched in stone: Yes, older whites always vote Republican, and whites are a majority, but they're a dwindling majority; Barack Obama built a coalition that can't lose a presidential election anymore. But Obama's coalition never stopped liking him; his approval/disapproval numbers always hovered within a few points of 50-50, and those who approved of him really admired him. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has a 40%/58% favorable/unfavorable rating right now, according to the average at Huffington Post's Pollster. To win in November, she needs the votes of a lot of people who simply don't like her and don't trust her. So why are we so certain the Obama coalition will turn out for her?

In the Obama years, we've seen dogma-driven Republicans expand their near-monopoly on white people's votes from the South to supposedly blue parts of the North -- see the governors' mansions in Maine, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio. I know -- they won because the Democrats' presidential electorate doen't show up in off years. But which electorate will show up for Hillary Clinton if she doesn't get her disapproval ratings down?

The answer to those questions was provided by Trump himself in one of his ad-libbed parts of his speech when he promised to end Muslim immigration into the United States:

"We don't want them in our country!"

He was speaking about Muslims.  But you can apply that to any group of Americans not sufficiently Trump-approved.  That phrase doesn't just describe the Trump campaign, but the entire Republican party.  Every single person planning to vote for Donald Trump in November (and that's going to be at least sixty million of your friends, neighbors and co-workers, guys) has a "them" that they want out of "our" country.

Put that on a bumper sticker.  Hell, I'm sure people will.  But that's what Donald Trump represents, and that's what the people voting for him want.  It doesn't matter that some of the people supporting Trump are the very people other Trump supporters want America to be rid of permanently.

It's to stop this man that the Obama coalition will turn out.

If we don't, well, we end up the "them" in this equation, now don't we?

StupidiNews!

• FOX News head Roger Ailes has left the network after sexual harassment claims by multiple women, chairman Rupert Murdoch will serve as the network's acting CEO.
• Philadelphia's largest police union is blasting Hillary Clinton for allowing Black Lives Matter activists to speak at the Democratic Convention next week, but no police officers.
• Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is appealing his conviction on genocide charges by an international tribunal, saying the court was biased against Serbs.
• The United States wastes 50 million tons of food worth $160 billion each year, but a new survey finds few Americans are willing to change their behavior.
• A Dutch company wants No Man's Sky creator Hello Games to pay up for using a patented "superformula" that designs the game's many planets and moons.

Last Call For NC Goes Down The Crapper, Con't

Looks like the NBA has finally pulled the plug on the 2017 All-Star Game in Charlotte over Pat McCrory's bigoted bathroom bill.

Without any movement by state legislators in North Carolina to change newly enacted laws targeted at the LGBT community, the NBA is pulling the 2017 All-Star Game out of Charlotte, league sources told The Vertical. 

The NBA is focused on the New Orleans’ Smoothie King Center as the host for All-Star Weekend and the All-Star Game on Feb. 19, league sources told The Vertical. 

For now, there are still other cities trying to lure the All-Star Game, sources said. 

A formal announcement on the NBA’s withdrawal out of Charlotte is expected as soon as this week, league sources said Thursday. 

NBA commissioner Adam Silver had threatened to move All-Star Weekend out of Charlotte unless a discriminatory North Carolina law aimed at the state’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community was changed – and time to do so has run out because of the logistics and planning the NBA needs to run its marquee midseason event, league sources said. 

The issue is centered on North Carolina’s House Bill 2, a law that mandates transgender people use public restrooms corresponding to the sex listed on their birth certificates. The law also omits LGBT people from North Carolina’s anti-discrimination protections, forbids local governments from widening LGBT protections and excludes all forms of workplace discrimination lawsuits from North Carolina state courts. 

Charlotte Hornets owner Michael Jordan had been counting on All-Star Weekend as a signature event for his franchise, and the economic impact of losing the All-Star Game for the franchise and region promises to be dramatic.

Dramatic, you say?  Yeah, try tens of millions of dollars.  So guess what, North Carolina? Republicans just cost you a crapload of money and made you look like bigoted assholes in front of America.

The good news is you can fix it in November.

Trump Cards, Con't.

It's important to remember that while Trump certainly wanted the press over a fight with Ted Cruz (because to hell with what his own running mate has to say) it's what wasn't said on the convention floor that we should be paying attention to.  First of all, Trump more or less announced the end of US military participation in NATO if he's elected president.

In his strongest remarks to date on the future of the western military alliance, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said the U.S. would only defend NATO members attacked by Russia after reviewing whether those nations “have fulfilled their obligations to us.”

In an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday, the billionaire cast doubt on whether he would automatically extend the security guarantees that give the 28 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization the assurance that they have U.S. military support in the event of an attack. He specifically referred to the small Baltic states which share borders with Russia.
Trump’s comments deepen his criticism of NATO after he called it“obsolete” in April during campaigning for the nomination. They come less than two weeks after the NATO summit in Warsaw agreed to enhance deployment of forces in Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia as a deterrent following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin is overseeing the biggest Russian military buildup at its western border since the collapse of communism. The Kremlin is spending 20 trillion rubles ($314 billion) on an ambitious defense upgrade through 2020, while NATO’s plans involve rotating four battalions through the region.

“The geopolitical situation is worrying, we see how the Kremlin is trying to
increase its sphere of influence,” Inara Murniece, speaker of Latvia’s parliament, said in a Latvian television interview Thursday. “We will have to speak about security a lot no matter who is the next U.S. president.” 

Hey Baltic states, sure would be a shame if Vladimir Putin came in and ransacked the joint, but we're not going to help you unless...what?  They pay up?  We're shaking down Latvia and Estonia, or throwing them to the tender mercies of Moscow?  If Putin decided to bring the thunder down on these countries, there's not a hell of a lot we could do about it militarily anyway, but the the point is Putin would pay a price, or should.  Trump's basically saying "Oh well, who cares, right?"

And we could have a nice, long, unpleasant conversation about Trump's financial ties to Putin, too, and how basically every foreign policy wonk out there is screaming that Trump is a mad man who will absolutely give Putin everything he wants, including turning America's back on the Baltics should Vlad and several hundred tanks come knocking.

"OK," you're saying, "but that makes Trump a non-interventionist, and frankly Bush and Obama have gotten us into way too many foreign entanglements over the last 15 years.  Let Europe defend NATO." Sure, we've got our own problems here in America.  Seems enticing on foreign policy, until you remember Trump's awful domestic policy.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is considering nominating Oklahoma oil and gas mogul Harold Hamm as energy secretary if elected to the White House on Nov. 8, according to four sources close to Trump's campaign.

The chief executive of Continental Resources would be the first U.S. energy secretary drawn directly from the oil and gas industry since the cabinet position was created in 1977, a move that would jolt environmental advocates but bolster Trump's pro-drilling energy platform.

Dan Eberhart, an oil investor and Republican financier, said he had been told by officials in Trump's campaign that Hamm, who has been an informal advisor to Trump on energy policy since at least May, was "the leading contender" for the position.

Eberhart said he had discussed the possible appointment with top donors at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this week, where Trump was formally nominated as the party's candidate in the Nov. 8 presidential election.

Three other sources close to the Trump campaign confirmed Trump was considering Hamm for the post. One of the sources said he first heard that Hamm was a contender from Trump officials on Sunday. None of the sources was aware of who else Trump may be considering for the job.

Representatives for Trump and Hamm did not respond to a request for comment.

Addressing the convention on Wednesday night, Hamm called for expanded drilling and said too much environmental regulation threatened to limit U.S. oil production and increase the country's dependence on Middle Eastern oil producers.

"Every time we can’t drill a well in America, terrorism is being funded," Hamm told the cheering crowd. "Every onerous regulation puts American lives at risk."

Yeah, so Trump is going to make the CEO of the country's biggest fracking company his energy secretary. It's almost comical except this is real folks, he would literally turn over US energy policy to the fracking industry to conduct.  Amazing.

Deadly real.  Serving up the Baltics to Putin and our environment to the frackers?  Gosh, Trump seems like a great guy.

No difference between him and Hillary after all.

Clinton Derangement Syndrome 2.0, Con't

Hey guys, I know Donald Trump sure is amusing and Cleveland's RNC convention is an utter nightmare of a dark comedy and all.  Meanwhile, the GOP continues to openly call for the execution of their political opponents.

An adviser to Donald Trump on veterans issues said on Tuesday that Hillary Clinton should be put in a firing line and shot for treason. 

New Hampshire state representative Al Baldasaro, who is also a Trump delegate from the state and has appeared with Trump at campaign events, made the comments on the Jeff Kuhner Show. 

“I’m a veteran that went to Desert Shield, Desert Storm. I’m also a father who sent a son to war, to Iraq, as a Marine Corps helicopter avionics technician. Hillary Clinton to me is the Jane Fonda of the Vietnam,” he said. “She is a disgrace for the lies that she told those mothers about their children that got killed over there in Benghazi. She dropped the ball on over 400 emails requesting back up security. Something’s wrong there.” 

“This whole thing disgusts me, Hillary Clinton should be put in the firing line and shot for treason,” he added. 

Baldasaro has spoken at several Trump events, introducing Trump multiple times, including at an event in late May where he admonished the media for focusing on questions over Trump’s donations to veteran’s charities. 

He later added in the radio interview that Clinton was a “piece of garbage.”

So again, how long before somebody tries to take Baldasaro (again a sitting Republican lawmaker and Trump supporter) up on his idea?

Can you imagine the unholy fecal hurricane if anyone in the Democratic party said this about Donald Trump? It would be front-page national news for months.

Republicans want to murder Hillary Clinton?  Meh, who cares, right?

StupidiNews!

• Republican convention delegates booed Sen. Ted Cruz off the stage after he refused to formally endorse Donald Trump last night in Cleveland.
• The 5th Circuit has struck down parts of Texas's voter ID law, saying the state's strict photo ID requirements violate the Voting Rights Act and disenfranchises black and Latino voters.
• An international tribunal has rejected Moscow's appeal to reinstate Russian track and field athletes over doping, paving the way for a possible total ban on Russian athletes in Rio.
• Economic forecasters are officially predicting a UK recession based on the country's Brexit vote, economists have sharply cut British growth predictions for the rest of the year.
• Tesla Motors chief Elon Musk says the company's "master plan" is to become America's leading sustainable energy company as well as having self-driving cars.