Donald Trump's faithful manservant, Chris Christie, might be in a spot of bother, again!

Back in 2013, Christie did a press conference where he vehemently assuring reporters that he had no idea at all about any of those political vengeance bridge closings!

 http://wonkette.com/605379/surprise-chris-christie-is-a-lying-liar-who-lies-about-stuff-love-his-staff

Americans deserve more than an apology for the foreclosure fraud epidemic

Despite talk of "recovery," former homeowners remain scarred after their government abandoned them

By David Dayen

(Credit: Reuters/John Gress)

“I lost my home of 30 years to fraudclosure.”

“I have been fighting this bank for over five years now. I am finally losing everything to their fraud.”

“We feel captive in our own home.”

This is a sampling of what I have awakened to practically every day for the past few months, since my book “Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud” came out. Hundreds of people have emailed me, sent me letters, attended my public events, to relate their personal horror stories of foreclosure and dispossession. They come from across America, from different social and economic backgrounds. Some lost everything, and some haven’t given up.

They contact me, a non-lawyer who has only written about and not participated in their struggle, because they have been abandoned, by a government that chose sides against them after the crash of 2008. They seek answers that I mostly don’t have and support I mostly cannot provide. Outside of referring them to legal aid, I cannot solve their foreclosure problems. I cannot convince a judge disinclined to rule in their favor, or a bank disinclined to see them as anything but a financial asset to be plucked, to change their minds. I can only note in sorrow that the massive netting of fraud laid by the mortgage industry over a decade ago continues to capture people like them.

But despite my lack of assistance, they typically express to me their gratitude, for one simple reason: just by giving voice to similar nightmares, I have instilled in them hope that they aren’t utterly alone in their misery, that they haven’t been singled out by a vengeful nation, that somewhere out there they have an ally and a confidant.

I wrote my book for them, for everyone who suffered as a result of the largest consumer fraud in American history and the greatest economic collapse in nearly a century. They shouldn’t be forgotten. In fact, somebody should apologize to them for having to bear the weight of the financial collapse on their shoulders, even while that suffering was exacted through outright fraud. It might as well be me.

In “Chain of Title”, I detailed how three foreclosure victims uncovered an unparalleled pattern of deceit: mortgage companies systematically using false evidence in courtrooms and county offices to take people’s homes away. This routine document fabrication covered up the unspeakable crime of breaking the chain of title on millions of home mortgages, confusing the underlying ownership and damaging 350 years of functioning property records law.

It was a work of history, depicting events mainly in 2009 and 2010. But that history lives on in my email inbox, to this very day.

Julian Soncco of Phoenix, Arizona, told me how his bank, GMAC Mortgage, broke into his home and changed the locks while he was supposed to be under bankruptcy protection. He received a favorable judgment on two occasions but has still never recovered his home. “In this country,” Soncco wrote, “no such person, no matter how much power they hold, should have the right to take or rob a family from their home without any just reason.”

Michael Powell of Albuquerque, New Mexico, said he survived two foreclosure cases over the past five years, with a third attempt possible. “People would look at me like I was crazy when I’d talk of bogus documents and robo-signing,” he wrote. Diane Bauman of Baldwin, New York, described a foreclosure case against her by JPMorgan Chase going on six years, where affidavits suddenly turned up in the last month, purporting to fix defective documents.

Kim Bolin of St. Louis, Missouri, was told to stop making payments while she negotiated a modification, and then was put into foreclosure simultaneously. The lender submitted as proof of ownership an assignment dated 2013 from the original lender Intervale Mortgage, which went out of business in 2008. Kim, her husband and her three kids expect to be out on the street in the next two weeks. “The feeling of failing your kids is unbelievable,” Bolin wrote. “I now have a heart condition that is causing rapid breathing and a rapid heart rate – the only reason they can find is the huge amount of stress I’m living with every day.”

It’s impossible to expend the time and resources necessary to verify these and the hundreds of other stories I get daily. I can’t even get through all the names of these victims. But I can paint a picture of the type of people who write them, which is nothing like the one the industry frames, a tale of deadbeats and losers who miss mortgage payments and try to scam banks into acquiring a free house.

These people are meticulous. They’ve kept every scrap of paper related to their cases, probably to preserve their own sanity. They know how the law works. Their perseverance, even while recognizing the odds against them, is remarkable.

Andy Williams drove four hours from Chicago to St. Louis to see me speak last month. His foreclosure case began eleven years ago, and he’s compiled a half-dozen law firms to help borrowers in foreclosure in the Chicago area. His lonely battle for consumer rights occurred in parallel with the subjects of my book, thousands of miles away in Florida. There was no wide-ranging community to bring all these voices together, nobody to tell them they weren’t alone.

Which I guess made me the conduit. So I hear all these stories, knowing that years after the foreclosure crisis began, judges and lawyers and prosecutors and politicians don’t want to hear them anymore. Any drive to protect the public, if it was ever there, has withered. Having exhausted other options, foreclosure victims have to approach a writer as a last line of defense. It powerfully illustrates the dislocation people feel, of being stuck in a Kafka-esque trauma without resolution.

Political analysts still manage to wonder why people are angry in a time of economic recovery, without ever even hinting recognition of the scarring impact of the foreclosure disaster. More than 9.3 million American families gave up their home between 2006 and 2014, either in a foreclosure or a short sale or some other transaction. That translates to about 14 million people, all of whom have family and friends and colleagues who at least know of the pain caused by the foreclosure crisis. 

There have been more since then.

It didn’t have to turn out that way. All of the losses didn’t have to be placed upon homeowners. Somebody could have been held responsible. We could have enforced the simple rule that you can’t take a person’s home with false evidence. This bare minimum would have engendered some faith that the system works, that justice still burns somewhere in America.

So to those who have reached out to me, and those who haven’t, to everyone still feeling the pain of foreclosure, I have just one thing to say. Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And when in your desperation you turned to me, I failed you. Because I wish I had something better to express than an apology.

POSTSCRIPT: This is my last column for Salon as a contributing writer. I am tremendously thankful to everyone I worked with here for their encouragement and support, and I exit with the best wishes that this incredible operation will thrive in the future. Thanks.

David Dayen is a contributing writer for Salon. His first book, "Chain of Title," is out now. Follow him on Twitter at @ddayen.

More David Dayen.

Are You Ready For The End Of The Republican Party?

It's been a long, a long time coming...

Getty Chip Somodevilla

By Charles P. Pierce

(Optional Video Accompaniment To This Post)

In Friday's New York Times, the former director of the CIA wrote something that's going to leave a mark even through nine layers of spray-on tan.

Mr. Putin is a great leader, Mr. Trump says, ignoring that he has killed and jailed journalists and political opponents, has invaded two of his neighbors and is driving his economy to ruin. Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests—endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia's annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States. In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.

The polls have gone so utterly sour on the Republican presidential nominee over the past week that many Very Serious People inside the Beltway have developed an even more devastating night-terror than El Caudillo de Mar-A-Lago with a nuclear arsenal at his beck and call—namely, that Hillary Rodham Clinton will get elected and then try to govern according to the progressive platform that was hashed out with so much sturm und drang with the Democratic primary process. This likely is also true of the many billionaires who have rushed to her side as the GOP nominee cratered.

There already is a strong undertow pulling HRC toward "reaching out" to the GOP, toward governing from "the middle," and toward not accelerating the now-rapid descent of the Republican Party into the final madness of the prion disease it has welcomed so warmly into itself ever since the late 1970's. 

Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker even posited that, as a gesture of good faith, HRC should allow the Republicans to pick a Supreme Court justice, a stratagem that has been proven to work only on The West Wing, which was not a documentary series.

Professor Krugman has knocked down most of the arguments in favor of this rainbows-and-unicorns idea. First of all, it's insane politics. It will divide the Democratic Party just as the Republicans are engaging in what is bound to be an entertaining interlude of public fratricide.

Second, it would be an act of astonishing bad faith that would set in concrete all of the most unflattering opinions held about HRC by the people who trust her the least.

Third, it assumes Democratic control of the Congress, which remains a long shot. As long as the Republicans still hold the House of Representatives, where all the bills involving federal spending are born, and assuming that the Democrats aren't gifted with a super-majority in the Senate, it's logical to expect that the GOP won't be any more willing to cooperate with a President Clinton II in governing the country than they were with either President Clinton I or Barack Obama.

 

And, finally, and this is something Professor Krugman touches on only briefly, there is a more important reason for a President HRC to press her advantages on all fronts to put in place the policies she committed herself to run on: For the good of the nation, the Republican Party as it is presently constituted has to die.

Ever since the late 1970's, when it determined to ally itself with a politicized splinter of American evangelical Protestantism, having previously allied itself with the detritus of American apartheid, the Republican Party has been reeling toward catastrophe even as it succeeded at the ballot box, and taking the country along with it. 

Crackpot economic theories were mainstreamed in the 1980's. Crackpot conspiracy theories and god-drunk fantasies were mainstreamed in the 1990's. Crackpot imperial adventures abroad were mainstreamed in the 2000's. And all of these were mainstreamed at once in opposition to the country's first African American president over the past eight years.

Modern conservatism has proven to be not a philosophy, but a huge dose of badly manufactured absinthe. It squats in an intellectual hovel now, waiting for its next fix, while a public madman filches its tattered banner and runs around wiping his ass with it. It always was coming to this.

For the good of the nation, the Republican Party as it is presently constituted has to die.

There have been three chances since 2000 for the Democratic Party to beat the crazy out of the Republicans. The first was after the thumping that the Avignon Presidency received in the 2006 midterms. The second was immediately after the election of Barack Obama. Both of those went a'glimmering because the Democrats listened to people who convinced them that, because they were the grown-up governing party, they had to make nice with the pack of vandals on the other side of the aisle. Even this president bought this line of argument, until it became obvious to him that the prion disease was too far gone.

 

Ever since he looked deeply into that big back of fucks and discovered that it had been empty for a while, the president obviously determined to keep proposing sensible measures even though he knows the Congressional majorities will decline to do even the minimal work required of them by the Constitution. My god, they won't even come back into session to address the Zika epidemic that is now breaking out in Florida. Merrick Garland is sipping a cool one on the veranda somewhere, waiting for someone to tell him where he'll be working come winter. The president is not budging.

Why should he? He's not the crazy one. He doesn't belong to the party that, with its eyes wide open, nominated a vulgar talking yam for president.

It long has been the duty of the Democratic Party to the nation to beat the crazy out of the Republican Party until it no longer behaves like a lunatic asylum. The opportunity to do this, to act unilaterally in returning sanity to the Republic, never has been as wide and gleaming as it is right now. To argue that responsible government requires that you treat sensibly a party that has gone as mad as the Republicans have is to argue for government by delirium.

Trump doesn't need an intervention. His party does.

Nina Turner weighing offer to join Green Party ticket as Vice President

By Nathan Wellman

Nina Turner, former Democratic state senator from Cleveland and high profile Bernie Sanders supporter, has confirmed that she’s received an offer from the Green Party to run for Vice President under Jill Stein. Turner said that she is still considering the offer to cleveland.com today in a telephone interview.

Both Stein and Turner have become rallying figures for Bernie Sanders supporters who have become disenchanted by the Democratic party and the Clinton campaign.

Turner was at the center of controversy last week when her previously scheduled speech nominating Bernie Sanders for President was cancelled by the Democratic National Convention at the last minute. A small rally protesting her treatment by the Democrats was held on Wednesday involving Hollywood actors Rosario Dawson, Susan Surandon, and Danny Glover. Some Sanders delegates at the DNC even pushed to nominate Turner for Vice President as an alternative to Senator Tim Kaine.

The Green Party holds its convention in Houston starting this Thursday, so Turner’s answer to the Stein campaign’s invitation is expected within the next few days.
 

Tim Kaine has belonged to a black church for more than 30 years

By kwassa

Kaine and his wife, Anne Holton attend St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in a poor, predominantly black working-class neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia. It is the same church that they have been attending for 30 years, and where they were married in 1984. 

Kaine is also a Tenor in the church choir. In an interview with NPR, Father Jim Arsenault, the priest at St. Elizabeth, had the following to say about Kaine as church parishioner and member of the close-knit community:

This past Good Friday, we were about ready to start the procession for the veneration of the cross. And Tim was in back of church. And I said to him, hey Tim, we need your help. Help us carry this cross. It was sort of life-size. And he said sure. And gospel choir was singing some gospel spiritual songs. And Tim was there as people with tears in their eyes would venerate the cross. And they’d come up, and he’d help them up after they were kneeling or something. And he’d shake their hand, and he’d practically pull them up. And then they’d give Tim a nice hug. Everybody knows Tim Kaine.

http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/tim-kaine-religion-catholic-jesuit-religious-faith-church-missionary-wife/



Tim's wife, Anne Holton,

As a schoolgirl in 1970, she was on the front lines of the fight to desegregate Virginia’s public schools. Holton is the daughter of Virginia Gov. A. Linwood Holton (R), who championed integration in a state that was known for its vigorous efforts to resist it. To drive home this point, he sent his daughters to a historically all-black Richmond City public school, escorting Anne Holton’s sister to class in a gesture captured in a historic photograph.

“I have spent much of my working life focused on children and families at the margin, with full appreciation of the crucial role education can and must play in helping young people escape poverty and become successful adults,” Holton wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in June 2015.

Holton and Kaine also sent their three children, who are now grown, to Richmond public schools.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/7/23/1551522/--Meet-Tim-Kaine-s-Wife

Gig economy workers: Independent contractors or indentured servants?

By Julie Gutman Dickinson


(Credit: Reuters/Chris Keane)
This article originally appeared on Capital & Main.

What if millions of American workers were being denied health insurance, job security and the most basic legal protections, from overtime pay to workers compensation to the right to join a union? What if tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer revenues — money desperately needed to address everything from crumbling roads to education to health care — were never making it to local, state and federal treasuries? What if thousands of companies were violating the law with impunity?

That is exactly what is happening in the United States today, thanks to a rampant practice known as worker misclassification — illegally labeling workers as independent contractors when in fact they are employees under the law. In some cases it’s occurring in plain sight, in others it’s more hidden — but regardless of the circumstances, it is taking an enormous toll on the country.

According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), workers misclassified as independent contractors can be found in nearly every industry, and the phenomenon has grown considerably with the rise of the gig economy. Uber, the ride-hailing company, has become the poster child for worker misclassification, with numerous lawsuits alleging that Uber wrongly classifies its drivers as independent contractors. But Uber is hardly alone — examples of worker misclassification can be found in scores of new sectors, from house cleaners to technical workers.

Workers misclassified as independent contractors are also legion in established sectors of the economy, notably residential construction, in-home caregiving and the port trucking industry. Conditions for these workers have been compared to indentured servitude, and for good reason.

Misclassification enables employers to get away with widespread wage theft and a range of other illegal practices.

In a 2015 report, EPI described the advantages to employers of misclassifying workers. “Employers who misclassify avoid paying payroll taxes and workers’ compensation insurance, are not responsible for providing health insurance and are able to bypass requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act, as well as the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.” If this weren’t enough, the report continues, “misclassified workers are ineligible for unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, minimum wage and overtime, and are forced to pay the full FICA tax and purchase their own health insurance.”

How do employers get away with such violations? The answer is complex, involving anemic labor laws, lax enforcement of the protections that do exist and the savvy exploitation of both by companies in key industries. While some businesses misclassify their workers out of ignorance, others do it very deliberately, and have spent millions of dollars defending the practice.

A case in point is the port trucking industry, which was deregulated in the 1980's, leading to a proliferation of companies whose business model was predicated on the use of independent contractors. That model has resulted in a workforce of close to 75,000 truck drivers at ports across the country laboring in mostly abysmal conditions. Among the indignities endured by drivers are such neo-Dickensian schemes as negative paychecks — an inconceivable but well-documented occurrence in which drivers labor full time or more, yet actually owe money to the trucking companies they work for due to paycheck deductions for everything from truck payments to insurance to repairs.

In the last several years, port truck drivers and their labor, community and political allies have begun to successfully challenge misclassification, winning a series of legal victories, particularly in California. Every government agency that’s conducted an investigation into the practices of the port trucking industry — from the United States Department of Labor and National Labor Relations Board to the California Labor Commissioner and Economic Development Department — has determined that port drivers are employees, not independent contractors. The state’s labor commissioner alone has issued more than 300 decisions on misclassification of drivers in Southern California, and drivers have prevailed in every decision, winning over $35 million in back pay.

How can these successes be replicated and enhanced to end misclassification? Three strategies stand out:

Litigation: The successful track record in California has proven that misclassification is vulnerable to sustained litigation. An important factor is whether elected and appointed officials are willing to aggressively pursue or support such litigation — if not, the efforts will yield far less favorable results.

Policy changes: The enactment of policies that clamp down on misclassification, increase penalties and ban law-breaking companies from operating can have significant impact. However, as with litigation, this strategy depends on the presence of lawmakers willing to take on the issue.

Worker organizing: In Los Angeles, port truck drivers frustrated with the exploitative conditions in their industry have waged a multi-year campaign to expose the practice of misclassification. That effort, which has included multiple strikes, has been supported by a broad coalition of community groups — a potent combination that has played a crucial role in challenging the trucking industry’s “independent contractor” business model.

Taking on misclassification is important not just to workers, but to businesses and taxpayers as well. In the current system, law-abiding companies are forced to compete with low-road operators, creating an uneven playing field. Likewise, the cost to taxpayers in lost revenues from employers that illegally misclassify workers as independent contractors is enormous, cheating government out of resources that could and should be used for the common good.

Reining in worker misclassification and the abuse of so-called “independent contractors” is one of the more daunting challenges in taking on economic inequality. But any serious plan to address the nation’s economic divide must include an aggressive strategy to take on this costly epidemic.

Trump: Republicans 'have no choice' but to vote for me

By Jesse Byrnes

 

Getty Images 

 

Donald Trump said Thursday that Republicans wary of his campaign have little choice but to vote for him anyway.

 

"If you really like Donald Trump, that's great, but if you don't, you have to vote for me anyway. You know why? Supreme Court judges, Supreme Court judges," Trump said at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

 

"Have no choice, sorry, sorry, sorry. You have no choice," Trump continued, calling the late Justice Antonin Scalia a "great guy" and acknowledging tied decisions at the Supreme Court after his death.

 

Trump said the next president "will probably have three, could be four, could even be five" appointments to make to the Supreme Court, alluding to the ages of senior justices.

 

Trump dismissed critics who speculate he may appoint liberal judges and said if Hillary Clinton appoints judges: "You're going to end up with another Venezuela. You're going to be Venezuela."

 

Senate Republicans have denied hearings and a vote on President Obama's Supreme Court pick to fill the seat vacated by the death of Scalia in February, arguing the next president should make the pick.

 

Trump scheduled his rally Thursday night to counteract speeches in the final night of the Democratic National Convention, where Clinton will officially accept her party's nomination.

IGN Presents the History Of Bourne

In the mid-1970s notorious Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal orchestrated a high-profile attack on an OPEC meeting in Vienna, Austria which resulted in the deaths of three people. It was just one of a string of crimes committed by Carlos across the continent, making him one the most-wanted fugitives of the era.

Back in the 70's American author Robert Ludlum didn’t know a great deal about Carlos the Jackal, but that soon changed.

One night Ludlum and his wife tuned in to a radio program featuring journalist Pierre Salinger; Ludlum wasn’t aware what he was on air to speak about and had chosen to listen largely due to the fact Salinger had written an introduction to the French edition of Ludlum’s 1977 novel The Chancellor Manuscript.

It turned out Salinger was discussing Carlos the Jackal, which piqued Ludlum’s interest. He immediately began researching the infamous assassin.

Outraged By DNC Leaks, More And More Sanders Supporters Plan To Vote Third Party

By Rania Khalek

“I’m a life-long Democrat and life-long disappointed,” said 47-year-old Bill Frantal of Indiana.

Frantal was among hundreds of Bernie Sanders supporters who gathered outside Philadelphia’s City Hall in the sweltering heat on Sunday afternoon to protest the Democratic National Committee ahead of the convention.

Outrage at the Democratic party establishment was magnified by the batch of internal DNC emails published by WikiLeaks over the weekend proving that the DNC conspired with the Clinton campaign and the media to undercut Sanders during the primary.

Anger was also directed at the corporate media, as demonstrated by the crowd’s reaction to the presence of a CNN news crew at the rally. For ten minutes, Sanders supporters surrounded CNN, chanting, “shame, shame” and “CNN has got to go!” out of frustration over biased anti-Sanders coverage from the establishment press.

Bernie Sanders supporters want cod CNN to leave. Yelling "CNN has got to go!" and "shame, shame!" And " pic.twitter.com/GHc4csaEXi

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) July 24, 2016

“When I was brought up, Republicans were for corporate interests and Democrats were for public interests,” Frantal told Shadowproof. “Unfortunately, the Democratic Party is now the left-wing of the Republican Party. They’re all for corporate interests.”

While Frantal remains undecided about voting for Clinton in November, he was one of the few people I could find who would even consider casting a ballot for her, and it was purely out of fear of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Far more people said they plan to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Protester at the March For Bernie. Photo by Rania Khalek.

Pasu Tivoret likened the race between Trump and Clinton to “choosing to vote for Lex Luthor or the Joker.” Formerly a Green Party member from California, Tivoret became a Democrat to support Sanders but plans to re-register with the Green Party. “I dropped the Dems just like they dropped Bernie,” he reasoned.

Scott Brown, a 31-year-old Sanders delegate from Atlanta, Georgia, is “withholding judgment” about voting for Clinton until after the convention. “I just have to think about the right strategy for a progressive future,” he told Shadowproof. While he recognizes the importance of stopping Trump in the short term, Brown argued that “in the long term, if we keep electing Democrats with a neo-liberal agenda, we’re going to keep enabling them.”

As for Sanders’ call for party unity in the aftermath of the DNC leaks scandal, Brown said, “There’s a contrast between unity and having the strongest party you can, not just to win this election but to win the long-term ideological battle in this country. If we let our party get away with short-changing its constituents, then people will lose faith in our party.”

Brown’s friend, Astrid Rodas, 37, flat out refused to vote for Clinton because “she doesn’t represent my values, she sides with Wall Street.”

A sign from the March For Bernie at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Photo by Rania Khalek.

“The Democratic Party lost me,” said Rodas, who plans to cast a ballot for Jill Stein. She also expressed disappointment in Sanders’ endorsement of Clinton ahead of the convention. “It hurt everyone a lot,” she observed, though she still appreciates Sanders’s push for a progressive agenda.

Brown agreed that Sanders’ premature endorsement was painful. “That bothered me a lot at first too. I thought it hurt our momentum,” he said. But he now believes “it gave Democrats a chance to see Clinton’s poll numbers without Bernie in the race” and they’re still terrible.

Indeed, with Sanders out of the race, Clinton is polling within the margin of error against Donald Trump. In key battleground states, he’s polling ahead of her.

Lauren Teffers, 18, and Madi Aha, 20, from Baltimore, Maryland, are both registered Democrats who plan to vote for Stein. “[Clinton’s] not for the people. She’s taking money from Banks and big oil companies” and will be returning the favor once elected, said Aha, who also expressed concern about Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy.

Maureen Maske, 37, is also Democrat who plans to vote for Stein. Clinton, she says, is “too aggressive” on foreign policy. “I think it’s an insult to make Americans choose between this lesser-of-two-evils crap,” argued Maske.

It’s appears that the treatment of Sanders throughout the primary has exposed the corruption within the Democratic Party like never before. Based on the reaction of some of his most enthusiastic supporters, it’s clear that the outrage he unleashed can’t be tamed by his endorsement of Clinton, especially among his younger supporters.

Protester at the March For Bernie. Photo by Rania Khalek

According to one poll, nearly half of millennials who supported Sanders plan to vote for a third party despite his endorsement.

Seattle councilwoman Kshama Sawant believes that progressive disillusionment with the Democratic Party presents a unique and pressing opportunity to finally build an independent and viable third party alternative.

Asked how she responds to those who argue that a vote for a third party is a vote for Trump, Sawant replied putting energy into supporting another corporate Democrat is the more dangerous option.

“I am as horrified as any other progressive who finds Trump’s agenda stomach-turning. But what I’m worried about is far bigger than Trump himself. Trump’s rise signifies decades of betrayal by both the Democratic and Republican parties, that is why he’s risen up,” Sawant argued.

“In 2010, the Tea Party made gains not because the country was turning right-wing, but because people were angry at the corporate bailouts of Obama,” she continued. “And the left and the labor movement stood by at that time, passively cheer leading Obama. Meanwhile, there was burning anger among ordinary people.”

“What’s happening now is Trump is tapping into it. That’s dangerous, because if Trump can tap into it, far more dangerous right-wing elements can tap into it,” Sawant explained. “We could even see the formation of a far-right party. The only way to stop that from happening is to build the left immediately and have a sense of urgency about this.”

“Black Men For Bernie” bus at the March For Bernie. Photo By Rania Khalek.

“Folding our movements behind Hillary and her Wall Street agenda will feed into the right because people are angry and they need an alternative. The right-wing right now has a monopoly on that. We need the left to take that monopoly.”

While Sawant’s message resonated in the street, the idea of supporting a third party remains a major point of contention among Sanders supporters.

State Representative Carol Ammons, a Sanders delegate and the first black woman to be elected in Illinois 103rd district, understands that people are frustrated, “but at the end of the day we must consider the outcome of a Trump presidency,” she told Shadowproof.

“I would hope that those of us who were Sanders supporters would not get lost in discussion of a third party candidate only to give it over to Trump. Numerically that is what it will do,” Ammons insisted, adding that “we have a candidate in the White House that we can work with.”

Judging by the attitudes witnessed among Sanders supporters outside City Hall, Ammons argument has little chance of persuading a significant slice of Sanders supporters who are fed up.

DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign

DNC chair Wasserman Schultz leaving under fire 

 

© Patrick T. Fallon Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee, speaks during a campaign event for Hillary Clinton on Saturday, July 23, 2016, in Miami. 
 
PHILADELPHIA — Debbie Wasserman Schultz is resigning under pressure as Democratic Party chairwoman, a stunning leadership shakeup as party officials gather in Philadelphia to nominate Hillary Clinton.

Wasserman Schultz's announcement Sunday follows a firestorm over hacked emails suggesting the Democratic National Committee favored Clinton during the primary, despite pledging neutrality. The leaked emails prompted primary runner-up Bernie Sanders to call for Wasserman Schultz's immediate resignation.

In a statement, Wasserman Schultz said she will step down at the end of the four-day convention. She said she plans to formally open and close the convention, as well as address delegates.

Her statement does not address the email controversy.

Wasserman Schultz's swift ouster underscores party leaders' desire to avoid convention confrontations with Sanders' loyal supporters. The chairwoman has been a lightning rod for criticism throughout the presidential campaign, with Sanders repeatedly accusing the DNC of backing Clinton.

Sanders said the 19,000 emails published by the website Wikileaks appeared to confirm his suspicions.

In one leaked email, a DNC official wondered whether Sanders' religious beliefs could be used against him, questioning whether the candidate may be an atheist.

Sanders pressed for Wasserman Schultz to quit as chairwoman immediately. He also suggested that Clinton's choice of running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, was a disappointment and that he would have preferred Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a favorite of liberals.

"His political views are not my political views. He is more conservative than I am. Would I have preferred to see somebody like an Elizabeth Warren selected by Secretary Clinton? Yes, I would have," Sanders told NBC's "Meet the Press."

The Clinton team worked to portray their party's convention in a different light from the just concluded Republican gathering in Cleveland, where Donald Trump accepted the GOP nomination but party divisions flared when his chief rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, refused to endorse the billionaire businessman.

Trump cast himself as the law-and-order candidate in a nation suffering under crime and hobbled by immigration, as the GOP convention stuck to a gloom-and-doom theme. Democrats said they wanted to convey a message of optimism and improving the lives of all Americans.

But party disunity also seems to be a factor in Philadelphia, given Sanders' demands for a new leader and general unhappiness among his many supporters about how the nomination process unfolded.

Norman Solomon, a delegate who supports Bernie Sanders, says there is talk among Sanders' delegates of walking out during Kaine's acceptance speech or turning their backs as a show of protest.

Solomon said he believes a "vast majority" of Sanders delegates support these kinds of protests to express their dismay. Sanders' supporters say they are concerned that Kaine is not progressive enough.

Dan O'Neal, 68, is a retired school teacher and delegate from Arizona, said Wasserman Schultz has to be censured.

"We knew they were stacking the deck against Bernie from the get-go, but this type of stuff coming out is outrageous," he said. "It proves our point that they've tried to marginalize him and make it as difficult as possible."

Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, agreed, saying Sanders' supporters "have a lot to complain about."

"The emails have proven the system was rigged from the start," Manafort told "Fox News Sunday."

Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, tried to shift blame away from DNC officials to "Russian state actors" who, he said, may have hacked into DNC computers "for the purpose of helping Donald Trump," the Republican presidential nominee.

How the emails were stolen hasn't been confirmed.

"It was concerning last week that Donald Trump changed the Republican platform to become what some experts would regard as pro-Russian," Mook said.

Clinton is within just days of her long-held ambition to become the party's official presidential nominee.

After the DNC released a slightly trimmed list of super delegates — those are the party officials who can back any candidate — it now takes 2,382 delegates to formally clinch the nomination. Clinton has 2,814 when including super delegates, according to an Associated Press count. Sanders has 1,893.

Sanders has endorsed Clinton, but his delegates are pushing for a state-by-state tally. The state-by-state roll call is scheduled for Tuesday.

Also Sunday, Kaine and his wife, Anne Holton, were back at their longtime church in Richmond, Virginia, a day after he made his campaign debut with Clinton.

Kaine, a former choir member at St. Elizabeth Catholic Church, sang a solo during Communion. He later told reporters outside the church: "We needed some prayers today and we got some prayers, and we got some support and it really feels good."
___
Associated Press writers Chad Day and Hope Yen in Washington, Alan Suderman in Richmond, Virginia, and Alex Sanz in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/dnc-chair-wasserman-schultz-leaving-under-fire/ar-BBuKYdJ

Bernie Sanders Must Disavow Hillary Clinton Endorsement: Rigged Election

Bernie Never Had a Chance: The Fix Was In

By Samantha Chang, July 24th, 2016 

Bernie Sanders is being pressured to disavow his endorsement of Hillary Clinton after a WikiLeaks release of 20,000 DNC e-mails shows the DNC rigged the primary election. (Photo: Twitter)

Bernie Sanders is facing mounting pressure from his supporters to disavow his endorsement of Hillary Clinton after a WikiLeaks release of 20,000 internal e-mails of the Democratic National Committee indicates the primary election was rigged.

Bernie’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, said someone must be held accountable for cheating voters out of a fair and impartial election.

“Someone has to be held accountable,” Weaver told ABC News. “The DNC, by its charter, is required to be neutral among the candidates. Clearly it was not.

“We spent 48 hours of public attention worrying about who in the Donald Trump campaign was going to be held responsible for the fact that some lines of Mrs. Obama’s speech were taken by Melania Trump.”

The WikiLeaks release of 20,000 internal DNC e-mails shows DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz routinely harangued “journalists” like CNN anchor Jake Tapper and MSNBC’s Chuck Todd to provide positive news coverage of Hillary Clinton and to squelch bad publicity.

Tapper and Todd often tried to placate the ill-tempered Wasserman Schultz.



Another e-mail shows DNC chief financial officer Brad Marshall suggested that staffers orchestrate a media campaign to paint Bernie Sanders (who is Jewish) as an atheist in order to turn religious voters in Kentucky and West Virginia against him:

“It might may no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage.

“I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”


In another email, national press secretary Mark Paustenpach told DNC staffers to plant a story to further the narrative the Sanders campaign was in total chaos:

“Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess.”

DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz — who was scheduled to speak at the convention this week — will no longer preside over the event. Ohio Congresswoman Marcia Fudge was named the new chair of the DNC.



The Clinton campaign blamed Russians hackers for hacking into the DNC database in order “to help Donald Trump,” without any evidence to support their accusations.

Meanwhile, Hillary has repeatedly claimed the personal e-mail account she used during her four years as Secretary of State — which she operated from an unsecured secret server in her basement — was never hacked by enemies of the United States, despite multiple reports suggesting otherwise.

Bernie Sanders is set to speak at the Democratic National Convention in support of Hillary, but his followers say he must disavow his endorsement.

In TV interviews July 24, Bernie said Wasserman Schultz should resign, but he stands by his endorsement of Clinton.

For months, the Sanders campaign and his supporters had accused the DNC of having its “finger on the scale” to rig the election in Clinton’s favor. The DNC and Wasserman Schultz laughed off the suggestions, calling them silly conspiracy theories.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz was the co-chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

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Brazilian Doctor’s Chilling Warning To Olympic Visitors: ‘Don’t Get Sick’

By Joe DePaolo 

Add a public healthcare crisis to the ever-growing list of problems plaguing this summer’s Olympics in Rio.

As part of an episode of HBO’s Real Sports set to air Tuesday at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT, the network examined the condition of Brazil’s public hospitals. What they found wasn’t pretty.

Denied permission to tour a hospital by Brazilian officials, HBO managed to sneak a hidden camera inside for their investigation. Watch the disturbing footage below of patients lined up along hospital walls, with some even forced to lay on the floor.

Dr. Jorge Darze, President of the Rio De Janiero Doctor’s Union, called the images “revolting.” He alleges criminal negligence on the part of Brazilian officials who’ve allowed the healthcare crisis to escalate by wasting money on Olympic-related projects unlikely to provide much benefit to residents after the Games conclude.

“I would say it’s a criminal situation,” Darze told Vice News earlier this year. “One that breaches basic human rights.”

His chilling advice for Olympic visitors?

“Don’t get sick.”

RNC: Random Observations on a Pathetic Parade

Posted By Rude One

1. If the first night of the Republican National Convention is remembered for anything other than the insistent invocation of the United States as a scorched hellscape of a nation in the wake of the presidency of Barack Obama, a nation that is as much a fiction as a shining city on a hill ever was, it will be that the campaign of nominee Donald Trump exploited and embarrassed two women before tens of millions of people.

2. The most appalling sight of the appalling evening was Pat Smith, mother of Sean Smith, who was killed in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Smith has long been on a tear to get at some kind of truth for her child's death over what she claims she was told by Hillary Clinton at a memorial for her son, that an anti-Muslim video caused the attack. Frankly, it doesn't matter if it was an anti-Muslim video, a planned terrorist attack, or goats with guns. None of those would bring back her son, but, hey, fuck that Hillary. So Trump had Smith go out and speak to the delegates, many of whom, probably drunk, started crying watching this obviously grieving and Valiumed to the gills woman try to make policy from her pain. Which was more disgusting is up for grabs. "I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son. That's personally," Smith said, as if Clinton had gone to Benghazi and put a bullet in her son's skull. But the blood lust was rising as outrage grew among the idiot hordes on the floor, an outrage that never fucking occurred at the Republican Convention in 2004 when the man who was president during the 9/11 attacks took the stage. Smith put a bow on it by saying, "Hillary for prison. She deserves to be in stripes." Then she turned around, confused, wondering where she should go, lost, with seemingly no one to guide her away.

2a. Oh, wait. The most disgusting thing was that Donald Trump called into Bill O'Reilly's Crematorium of Reality on Fox "news" at the same time as Smith's speech, which meant that he wasn't even watching it.

3. It doesn't fucking matter if Melania Trump speaks six languages, as Trump lackeys kept telling us today. It doesn't fucking matter that she spoke at the convention without shitting herself, as if that was the measure of quality. Part of her generally terrible, platitudinous, vacuous speech was plagiarized. 

Purely and simply, two paragraphs of it came from Michelle Obama's amazing 2008 convention speech. Using my crazy English professor skills, I know from plagiarism. If a student had written that in my class, I would make them scrap that paper and start from scratch as punishment. (Others would look to have the student drummed out or at least fail the class, but I'm not a dick.) And the Trump campaign, which shouldn't have pushed Ms. Trump to speak when she reportedly didn't want to, which should have anally probed the speech for problems no matter who wrote it, should just admit it fucked up and stop trying to bend the truth to its will. That's totalitarian bullshit, man. That's 2+2=5 and you're a traitor if you think otherwise.

3a. Bonus points to dunderheaded conservative commentator S.E. Cupp on CNN, who said of Melania Trump's speech, "I don't really see a bad ending to however this goes for her tonight." Punditry at its best.

4. But, honestly, the plagiarism is the least of the sins of the evening, which included parading out people whose loved ones were killed by undocumented immigrants. What the fuck are we supposed to do with that? Oh, hey, how about countering with the undocumented man who saved a young girl from abduction? Or the one who helped save the life of a 9 year-old boy in an auto accident in the desert? Those are children who likely would have been dead or seriously harmed without the intervention of an undocumented immigrant. Should they speak at the Democratic convention? No, because this whole fucking argument is dumb and besides the point. All Trump wanted to tell the idiot hordes on the floor and at home is that "illegal aliens" will fucking murder you where you sit because they are naturally evil.

4a. Let's not even talk about Chachi.

5. No one represented the insane asylum that is the modern GOP more than former New York City mayor and man most likely to send back a half-eaten steak and claim it wasn't properly cooked, Rudy Giuliani. Gesturing wildly, screaming, and jumping around like a pug on PCP, Giuliani warned us that the country has become something it quite demonstrably has not. "The vast majority of Americans today do not feel safe. They fear for their children. They fear for themselves," he said, and the only response is "Motherfucker, we're only afraid because you keep telling us to be afraid.  Crime is down, jobs are up, and more people can get medical care than ever. All the shit that's bad - income distribution, guns everywhere - that's on you Republican spoogerags." On and on Rudy went, in that man-cunt way of his, where everything is shit and Barack Obama is a fey demi-man who won't keep you safe and Hillary Clinton is a cold-blooded bitch who murders soldiers and only one man can save us from choking on our own vomit as we're raped by Muslims in our homes and that man is Donald Trump, who is qualified to do this because he got building plans past zoning commissions. Or something. Fucking ridiculous.

6. We've got three more days of this. Three more days of hearing about how Benghazi was the worst crime in the U.S. history. Three more days of people trying to tell us that a bloated pile of shit topped with orange cotton candy is the superhero American needs. As we wallow in the easily understood plagiarism nonsense, we can ignore the racism, the xenophobia, the misogyny, the hate, emanating from the convention center like a shit smell from a diaper.

RNC Day Two: The Motherfucker and the Prick

Part 1: The Motherfucker

The Fat Man strode onto stage at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last night absolutely cocky in his Fat Man suit and tie. His job was one he relished like a corndog on the Seaside Heights boardwalk: to demonstrate that he could fuck mothers better than any other motherfucker in a whole convention center of them. The Fat Man declared himself the prosecutor in a case against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Oh, how the Fat Man loved the attention, the adulation, as he lied and prevaricated and exaggerated Clinton's record as Secretary of State. God, how the Fat Man could have awkwardly reached under his stomach to jerk himself off as the idiot hordes chanted, "Lock her up," turning policy disagreements into high crimes, the better to tee up the inevitable impeachment hearings when Clinton is elected. The Fat Man used his accusations to dance and prance on the stage, the cruel Fool twisting this way and that, all this buffoonery for the enthralled rabble, eager to sate its bloodlust, and the pampered, primped family of Donald Trump sat in the gallery, looked on approvingly, as if all that was needed was a guillotine and the scene would be complete.

The Fat Man obviously felt powerful in his motherfucker role, as if this was what he was always destined to do. He made logical leaps that were astonishing to behold, like when he misrepresented Clinton saying that Syria's president is "a reformer" and "a different kind of leader." It didn't matter at all that she was merely reporting what others had told her and that she was adopting a wait-and-see attitude. Oh, no. The Fat Man decided that was enough to imply that Clinton was partly responsible for the deaths of 400,000 people in Syria. Clinton, according to the Fat Man, is the nexus of all evil around the world, from Nigeria to Cuba to China.

The Fat Man was just the mightiest fucker of mothers of an evening spent fucking mothers. Prior to him, Clinton had been accused of causing the Benghazi deaths, of essentially intentionally leaking classified information through her email server, of attacking women that had been, according to a cruel woman earlier, allegedly "sexually abused" by Bill Clinton. Outside, in just the last few days, there have been calls for Hillary Clinton to be hanged or shot.

To the Fat Man, the cruel woman, all the other motherfuckers, in Cleveland and elsewhere, one has to ask: What the fuck do you think you know? Seriously, what special knowledge about Hillary Clinton do you have that no one else seems to have? No, really. What do you know that multiple congressional committees, for 25 years, including ones led by Republicans, multiple investigations from the FBI, and multiple independent counsels don't know? You read some shit on a website. Every fucking time that someone has attempted to even get Hillary Clinton charged with a crime, it has failed once the facts were clearly ascertained. If you're holding back some super-secret piece of evidence that fucking Kenneth Starr, Rick Lazio, and Trey Gowdy couldn't find, then you better get that out now. Otherwise, just admit that you've got jack shit to back up anything you're saying. But you won't. Because you're motherfuckers, and you'd rather just keep fucking mothers than pretend there's anything like "truth."

Part 2: The Prick

Without a doubt, Donald Trump, Jr. is a douchebag prick. Only douchebag pricks proudly shoot down elephants and display their cut-off tails as trophies. And only a douchebag prick could get up there to give a speech with his greasy, slicked-back hair and try to make himself sound like he comes from a humble background when, really, he is just the prick prince in a kingdom of pricks. Look at the shit he said, like when he tried to Horatio Alger his father's story: "When people told him it was impossible for a boy from Queens to go to Manhattan and take on developers in the big city, rather than give up, he changed the skyline of New York." Yeah, it was really fucking hard for a millionaire with shitloads of connections from his developer father to become a developer.

Or look at this: "The other party gave us public schools that far too often fail our students, especially those who have no options. Growing up my siblings and I, we were truly fortunate to have choices and options that others don't have. We want all Americans to have those same opportunities." This little prick went to the Hill School in Pennsylvania, which doesn't take vouchers and costs $35-55,000 a year, depending on if you board there. To pretend that "all Americans" would be able to get an $8,000 voucher and go to Hill is absurd. It's a fucking lie from a prick.

You want to know where the game is? You want to know the big lie in Junior's seemingly populist speech? It's when he attacked the Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed some regulation on the financial services industry. Junior said that it was a thousand pages long and that "What it does is destroy small business in favor of big businesses, who can afford the vast number of lawyers and accountants needed to comply." Except, of course, for all the protections in the actual law that help small businesses. Getting rid of it will only enrich the Wall Street pricks who probably giggle when Donald and Junior mock them.

And he ended with one other line that gave away the whole sham. In his big finish exhorting everyone to bow down to his father, Junior said, "When we elected him, we'll have done all that, we'll have made America great again, greater than ever before." All by himself, just by putting his ass into a chair in the Oval Office, America will become great. No work needed. Just a sign on what will no doubt be rebranded, "The Trump White House."

By the way, the prick also told an adviser to John Kasich, when they offered the vice-presidency to the Ohio governor, that the VP would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy. What would Trump be in charge of? "Making America great again," Junior said.

The chanting idiot hordes and larger idiot hordes of voters don't give a fuck about democracy. They want a king who can simply clap his hands and make what is not real into reality, or at least the reality he tells them it is.  They want a myth and they want to kill or jail anyone who tries to get in the way of their myth. The faithful shall not be denied their reward of a great America, even if they have to destroy America to get it.

RNC Day Three: Notes on a Traitor

Yesterday, over on the Twitter machine, I made a simple suggestion to Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

Couching it in terms of his crushingly awful performance as Samuel Parris in The Crucible when he was a student at Harvard, I asked Cruz to think about John Proctor in Arthur Miller's play about a man standing firm on principles against forces that want him to abandon them and give in to their power. Proctor doesn't, and he is executed for refusing to lie about himself. I asked Cruz to think about who the Devil is in his life and what he should do about it.

And then, last night, lo and behold, Cruz walked up to the snack table at the Republican's party and took a giant dump in the punch bowl while everyone screamed at him to stop.

Yeah, after a pretty boilerplate right-wing Republican speech - blah, blah, Hillary sucks, blah, blah, blah, Constitution, yadda, enemies, whatever - Cruz ended by exhorting the idiot hordes to "vote your conscience," which the delegates took not only as a non-endorsement of nominee Donald Trump but outright heresy, with screams of "Traitor" and "Honor the pledge" and "Fuck you."

Trump himself appeared to gaze, like an angry toad, on the chaos as his minions egged it on and his horrible family looked on. Cruz's wife, Heidi, derided as ugly in something Trump re-tweeted, had to be escorted out lest the idiot hordes rip her limb from limb. Cruz wiped his ass on the tablecloth, perhaps while looking the toad straight in his eyes, and strode away. And nobody really gave a dry mouse shit about Newt Gingrich telling us about his night terrors or Mike Pence's lumbering monologue about how Trump will Trump you with his Trumpiness or that Scott Walker even exists.

This morning, Cruz met with the Texas delegation, most still wearing their dumb ass cowboy hats. At first, Cruz tried to walk a line. He coyly asked why anyone would boo for him saying, "Vote your conscience" (a line that the Hillary Clinton campaign took and ran with). He said he wouldn't speak negatively about Trump, but that Trump hadn't earned his vote yet, and, oh, no, he won't vote for Hillary. But then the questions started and the smarmy, faux-chummy facade cracked. "I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father," Cruz said, and in that moment his heart grew three sizes and his spine unbent to make him completely upright. He would not be "a servile puppy dog" to Trump, he said. And when he asked, " Can anyone imagine our nominee standing in front of voters answering questions like this?" he wasn't talking about answering questions period. He meant answering them with forthrightness, clarity, and honesty.

For an example, look at Trump's interview in the New York Times about foreign policy, where he said, among other terrifying shit, that he would shit-can agreements with NATO if the other countries didn't pay protection money to the United States, as if somehow a stable Europe isn't in America's best interest. Here, though, is the exact quote from the transcript: "If we cannot be properly reimbursed for the tremendous cost of our military protecting other countries, and in many cases the countries I’m talking about are extremely rich. Then if we cannot make a deal, which I believe we will be able to, and which I would prefer being able to, but if we cannot make a deal, I would like you to say, I would prefer being able to, some people, the one thing they took out of your last story, you know, some people, the fools and the haters, they said, 'Oh, Trump doesn’t want to protect you.' I would prefer that we be able to continue, but if we are not going to be reasonably reimbursed for the tremendous cost of protecting these massive nations with tremendous wealth — you have the tape going on?"

That's some Mafia shit right there. "I would prefer to offer you my good graces, but you must be willing to pay what I ask and kiss my ring. And then my ass." And it's expressed in almost Palin-esque gibberish. Dumb fuck. And you're a dumber fuck if you support him after that. No, fuck that. You're a terrible human being if you support Donald Trump, and you deserve every bad thing that would happen to you if he's elected.

Not Ted Cruz, though. He stood there and taunted the idiot hordes. And it was a thing of beauty.

Now you, dear, dear liberal, may feel conflicted about feeling even an inkling of positivity towards Ted Cruz. After all, he is an asshole, a son of a bitch, a dick, a fart in human form, and lots of other things rolled into one odious, annoying package. He believes appalling things, about abortion, about voting rights, about LGBT rights, about...well, pretty much everything. But let's not care about that for a moment. Let's not care that Cruz might be positioning himself for 2020. Fuck 2020. And let's not care about any of the spin from the Trump campaign, which is trying to make itself seem so magnanimous by allowing Cruz to speak. Let's just not give a shit about that.

In this moment, Cruz is Cersei Lannister taking out the High Septon. He is William Munny gunning down Little Bill. He is Walter White rescuing Jesse. An awful person can rise to the moment to do something good, to do away with those worse than them. You don't have to like them. You don't have to get all warm and fuzzy.

You can sit back with a drink and say, "I'd rather have a narcissistic motherfucker working for me than against me, even if it's just this once."

RNC Day Four: We Beheld What We May Become

If I could pinpoint one thing in Donald Trump's sweaty, screechy, masturbatory "Tales of American Armageddon" last night that might actually give other Republicans pause, as they figure out how to deal with a presidential nominee who has tossed out many of their most cherished beliefs, it would be this: One word that was conspicuously absent from the speech was "Congress."

At no point in the entire exhausting, tedious, repetitious series of barks and growls did Trump say he would go to Congress to ask for something. Not once did he even hint that he understood that he couldn't just clap his wee hands and make it so. In fact, everything in his acceptance speech was pointedly about how he and only he can solve the problems in the country. "I am your voice," he said, twice, along with "I will be your champion" and "I will restore law and order to our country." That last one was followed by an unscripted, emphatic "Believe me. Believe me." On it went: "I am going to bring jobs" to various states; "I am not going to let companies move to other countries;" and more. Even worse, "I alone can fix it." If Barack Obama had said that one night, he'd've been lynched before sunrise by conservatives for being a tyrant.

What is going to happen if Trump is elected and Democrats in the Senate block a bill to build the stupid border wall? Or a bill to change the Affordable Care Act? What is he going to do? Trump would say that he'll make deals with them, as if that never occurred to President Obama, who gave Republicans nearly everything they asked for in many negotiations while still getting stabbed in the gut by them when it was time to vote.

Senators have a long memory, and Democrats will want payback. So what will Trump do? He'll do what his idiot hordes demand, up to and including violence. Because when you have a cult of personality, the leader of that is the only thing that matters. You have to believe whole-heartedly in him and support even his most heinous acts because that's easier than admitting you're wrong. You would rather pretend that a crass, bourgeois piglet is a man of the people than face the reality that he's just a puny, pampered pig.

You can find fact checks of all the lies in a speech that Trump promised would be filled with "facts." You could drive yourself mad trying to get your mind around so much of the shit he said. For instance, apparently, Hillary Clinton is the alpha and omega of all bad things going on in the world.

Egypt turmoil? Hillary. Iraq? Hillary. Hot Lebanese dude didn't message you back on Grindr? Hillary. In fact, Clinton is such an evil genius and agent of destruction that we'd better elect her before she has us all killed.

And Trump went further than any of the fear mongers before him in portraying the United States as a nightmare, a lawless landscape of rampant crime (which is really down), cops being gunned down (fewer than ever), and undocumented immigrants murdering the fuck out of us (very rarely). The world itself is falling to pieces (despite it being one of the most peaceful periods in the planet's history). Every one of Trump's assertions is factually wrong. That's not just an opinion. Facts, actual numbers, something that Trump is very fond of mentioning, bear that out. But, no, the whole place is turning to shit, according to Trump. The only solution Trump offered is Trump. Trump will make it all better. All you gotta do is vote him in. Then America will be great again. He'll do it all by himself.

Or maybe, just maybe, this is the con: You make everyone believe that the world is turning to shit and then when you're elected, you just change the spin. "Oh, hey, look, crime is way down," you say, not even hinting that it was down before you were elected. "Oh, hey, look, my strategy on ISIS worked," you say, not mentioning that it was headed that way anyways. "Oh, hey, look, I've put into place a nearly two-year process for incoming refugees," you announce, leaving out that that's how it's been for a long time. See how easy it is to make America great again? You just start saying it is and then, racist blinders off, everyone looks around and says, "Well, shit, things really are pretty good." And for shit that wasn't getting done because Republicans wouldn't let it get done, like child care and infrastructure spending, hell, all of a sudden, the GOP will be the biggest fan of funding bridges and roads. And who gets all the credit? Not the nigger president who obviously fucked it all up because he's such a nigger. All accolades go to Trump.

Along those lines, I have a theory about how we got here. I call it the "Nigger Rejection Theory." See, lots of white people have staked a great deal of their identity and political beliefs on the notion that whiteness is superior to any other race. Niggers aren't good for anything other than basic shit. Sure, sure, black people could entertain them, in movies, music, and sports. Those niggers are fine because they exist only as images and they don't have a day-to-day effect on the lives of these white people. However, along comes Barack Obama, and he's not only president, but he's pretty good at it. In fact, the nigger president succeeded in making the lives of these white people better than they were under the last white president.

They simply couldn't reconcile that. These white people all of sudden found themselves with health insurance, many with jobs, most with lower taxes, and it all happened because of the nigger president. What can you do? You can either admit that your life-long, family-passed-down prejudices are completely wrong and that niggers can do lots of things, including leading the free world. Or you just go into complete denial because you just can't stand to give a nigger credit. Now, here is Trump, telling you that everything is wrecked and it's all turning to shit and, well, fuck, that sounds good because it makes the nigger and his cunt sidekick look bad.

Goddamn, it must feel good to have to give up on a challenging thought and just get your primal racism nerve massaged.

The greatest slap in Obama's face in the whole Nazi rally was when the idiot hordes started chanting, "Yes, you will" at Trump. It was the bizarro version of "Yes, we can," Obama's campaign rallying cry. Obama was saying that we all needed to work together and, even if you think, like I do, that he didn't ask us to do enough, at least he was including us. For Trump and the idiot hordes gazing up at his bloated visage, framed in gold, no such effort is needed beyond making sure that their godhead gets into office. All good things will pour from that. Trump is like the high school asshole guy who tells a girl that giving blow jobs will improve her complexion. No, it won't. All she'll end up with is a mouthful of jizz and a satisfied jerk going home.

Almost a year ago, I joked that "Kneel before Zod" was Trump's guiding principle. Now it appears that that will be his governing policy. If none of this scares you, then you are too fucking dumb to breathe, but you'll still vote.  And if the media makes this into just another day at the races, then we should all invest in kneepads.