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Roaming Charges: Great Balls of Ire at the RNC

Posted By Jeffrey St. Clair On In articles 2015,Leading Article,Roaming Charges | Comments Disabled

Day One

+ The Republican convention began, as all conventions should from now on, by deplatforming its platform. The stale ideologies of the pre-Trump party were replaced over the course of four days by a parade of the ridiculous and the repugnant, gun-slingers and fetus-worshippers, conspiracies and histrionics, white grievance, fake piety and unabashed money-grubbing. The convention itself unfolded like a mockumentary of the last four years–politics as sophomoric trolling, all wrapped in an obsequious salute, not to the flag-spiked stages, but to Trump himself. The party doesn’t a platform, a policy map, a daily briefing. The platform is whatever Trump says it is and that is subject to change, week to week, day to day, hour to hour. Consistency is for losers. Ideologies are for the weak. And the new GOP, Trump’s GOP, dominated by his own bloodline, is all about winning the moment.

+ With Trumps speaking every night, the big question on Monday was: will Donald, like some enfeebled Plantagenet monarch, announce the line of succession?

+ Law and Order week kicked off with Trump and Pence vowing to defend “cops no matter what.” They soon got the chance to prove they meant it.

+ Does Mike Pence realize that the “thin blue line” refers to the police omertà code of “law enforcement officials not enforcing the law against dirty, and even killer, cops?”

+ As Pence yowls about the “thin blue line” (cops who refuse to rat out dirty cops), Jacob Blake fights for his life after being shot in the back 7 times by Kenosha cop in front of his family after breaking up a fight between two women..

+ It happens multiple times a day, day after day…

https://twitter.com/GhostUnit7/status/1297909435965136896

+ Mini-Trump tyro Charlie Kirk kicked the day off by proclaiming: “Trump is the bodyguard of Western Civilization”…I can see it, as long as by ‘civilization’ you don’t include literature, art, drama, music, dance, science, medicine, ethics, moral philosophy or spelling.

+ Here’s a nice Christian-looking couple gazing admiringly at a segment of Trump’s border wall, declaring: “We want this nation to continue to be the beacon of hope for the world.”

+ It’s refreshing to see Andrew Cuomo get hoisted by his own fat mouth…

+ In his rant, gun-pointing, St. Louis trial lawyer Mark McCloskey called activist, nurse and pastor Cori Bush— the Democratic nominee for Missouri’s 1st congressional district — “that Marxist revolutionary.” Here’s how Bush responded…

+ A pro gun school shooting dad says, “Thank god Mike Pence was vice president the day my daughter was killed.” That’s weird, isn’t it? Did he check with Alex Jones that the Parkland shooting really took place?

+ During the GOP roll call, of 55 people speaking:

– 42 were men, 13 women.
– 5 of the 55 were people of color, 4 Latinx and 1 Asian-Pacific Islander.

+ Kimberly Guilfolye: “If you want to see the socialist Biden-Harris future for our country, just take a look at California…a place of immense wealth, immeasurable innovation [and] an immaculate environment that has been transformed into a land of discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets and blackouts in homes.”

+ Guilfoyle’s attack on California was a kind of revenge porn blasted at her ex…

+ Kimberly makes Pat Buchanan seem like a wimp.

+ Are they “cosmopolitan elites” or “Marxist revolutionaries,” Kimberly?

+ Did anyone check Guilfoyle’s decibel level, close to The Who after the Ox died?

+ I am Trump woman, hear me roar!

+ Guilfoyle’s speech was on tape and they didn’t reshoot it?

+ Back to the “permission mechanism” trope, tonight you’ve got permission to be a fascist, America.

+ Does the Cuban exile oil executive, who fled Cuba with his family at the age of 13, understand that under Trump’s policies, he would have been jailed and sent, not back to Cuba, but Honduras?

+ Eagerly awaiting Biden’s revelation of his inner Castro…

+ Where’s ASAP Rocky?

+ Tim Scott pretty thoroughly skewers Biden for reactionary views on race, but then claims two minutes later that Biden and Harris are promising a ‘socialist utopia”.

+ Didn’t Scott get the memo that he’s got to mention Trump at least every 30 seconds?

+ How Chick-fil-A saved Tim Scott…

+ Two South Carolina politicians speaking at GOP convention, neither of them Lady G…

+ Kevin Alexander Gray: “The only ‘sympathetic’ outrage a black man gets from US public opinion is after being shot & most likely killed by a police until the case against cop is dropped or he/she is acquitted in court. Black women, shot & killed under similar circumstance are still not even given that.”

+ Cancel Student Debt Culture!

+ “Imagine the life you want to have. You can have it: with Trump steaks and ZPak.”

+ Do all Trump men suffer from nasal drip?

+ Don’t worry, Jr. Papa’s got a brand new bag…

+ Not sure I really want to be part of the radical left, if Joe Biden’s also a card-carrying member…

+ This was the antithesis of Empathy Night, call it Great Balls of Ire.

Day Two

+ Peter Navarro says that Melania is the Jackie Kennedy of the Trump White House. Does he know something we don’t about Trump’s future?

+ Overnight ratings for night one of the conventions. Six networks combined,
10-11p ET: Democratic – 14.6 Republican – 11.6. The solution for these soft ratings is pretty clear: Dr. Phil interviews the Falwells on family values…

+ If only the CDC would issue a warning about violent cops…

+ Maine lobsterman Jason Joyce: “4 years ago, the Obama-Biden Admin. used the Antiquities Act to order thousands of square miles of ocean off-limits to commercial fishermen. Although Maine’s lobsterman don’t fish there, President Obama’s executive order offended us greatly.”

+ By the time he was done, the Maine lobsterman seemed more enthused about Trump’s attempts to overturn Roe v. Wade and move the US embassy to Jerusalem than the lobster haul over the last four years…

+ Anti-immigrant activist Mary Ann Mendoza was pulled from RNC schedule of speakers tonight hours after she tweeted an anti-Semitic conspiracy thread referring to QAnon. Ok, but what was the real reason they cancel her? Did she stutter?

+ David Bernstein: The one useful thing we did get tonight was a delineation of exactly how blatant the anti-Semitism you promote must be to get excluded from official Trump/GOP company. That is, you can promote a theory that places rich Jews such as Soros and the Rothschilds behind vast global conspiracies, including one to obtain the blood of Christian children — but not if it actually mentions the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by name.

+ As the nation celebrates the centennial of women’s suffrage, RNC is featuring Abby Johnson, an antiabortion zealot who has supported policies that would bar women from voting. This is the very same woman who said she understands why the police might want to profile her adopted Latinx son: “Statistically, my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons.”

+ Trump himself once supported late-term abortions.

+ Imagine the adjectives this anti-abortion woman would use to describe a botched execution in Oklahoma or Alabama…

+ Speaking of cocaine, it’s Larry (hey, leave me some kids) Kudlow, to let us know Covid is a thing of the past and, once freed from “Draconian banking regulations,” the economy will lift off into the stratosphere…

+ Fred Kaplan: “Kudlow keeps up his spotless record of being wrong about everything. This time he’s wrong about not just the future but the present and past too.”

+ At this point is it really possible to “sully” the grounds of the White House?

+ Oh, no, there’s another generation of the Billy Graham clan!

+ “In America we have not yet experienced physical persecution,” warned Jane Graham Lynch. Who’s she mean by “we”?

+”Save a fetus, kill your granny.”

+ It’s Margaret Sanger’s time in the barrel (deserved)…

+ In the words of my grandfather Billy Graham, “Dick, you should bomb the dikes outside of Hanoi.”

+ Last night Tim Scott said Trump’s GOP was a safe space for the LGBT community. But after hearing Ms. Graham, I think that’s a trap to lure them in. Get out!!!!

+ Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron slams Joe Bide for his long history of specious remarks on race: “Mr. Vice President, look at me. I am Black. We are not all the same, sir. I am not in chains. My mind is my own. And you can’t tell me how to vote because of the color of my skin.” Good for you, Cameron. Now arrest the killers of Breona Taylor…

+ I prefer to listen to LeBron James, “I know people get tired of hearing me say it, but we are scared as Black people in America. Black men, Black women, Black kids, we are terrified.”

+ Beware the “Chinese Communist bankers!”

+ Tiffany Trump, who only saw her father a couple of times a year after his divorce from Marla Maples, is making her bid tonight for a bigger slice of the Trump estate (debt)…

+ Tiffany: “A country founded on ideas not identity?” I mean, identity is inscribed into the Constitution, in the most appalling ways…

+ During her time at Georgetown Law, Tiffany seems to have gone full Qanon…

+ This evening’s festivities are weird and unsettling, but also boring and dull. Why didn’t they bring Joni Ernst out to castrate a hog…

+ The word “narrative” is getting canceled tonight. About time. Alex and I sent it to the tumbrils 10 years ago…

+ Trump wants you to try unapproved drugs, but still wants to jail you for smoking pot.

+ Here’s Pence in a video shot outside the Lincoln Boyhood Home in southern Indiana. There’s a reason Lincoln fled Indiana for Illinois: people like Pence.

+ It may come as a shock to Mike Pence, but the party of Lincoln was the party of Marx, at the time…

+  As governor, Pence oversaw the rise of the opioid crisis in Indiana and a spike in new AIDS cases.

+ This patriotic music is nauseating. Come on Neil, let him use some of yours again…

+ Unborn babies are getting much more airtime than the babies in cages.

+ Some immigrants are more equal than others. And Cuban exiles are more equal than all others. Florida’s   Lt. Gov. Jeanette Núñez swayed before the microphone, rhapsodizing how great her family had it under the Batista regimen and warning how the US crumble into a Cuban-style socialist utopia under Biden and Harris. The whole presentation was farcical, especially her depiction of Colombia as a model “ally of democracy” in Latin America, a regime where police, the army and paramilitaries have conspired to murder thousands of indigenous people and labor activists.

+ Fidel’s been dead for four years and still scares the hell out of them…

+ They must be desperate for the Cuban exile vote and money. Otherwise, why would they invite Núñez to speak, given that during the 2016 Republican primary, when she was backing Marco Rubio, she called  Trump “the biggest con man there is” and implied that he supported the Ku Klux Klan…

+ How many times are they going to trot out that threadbare Reagan adage about “If we lose ‘freedom’ here in America, there’s no place left to go”? I’ve counted four tonight and I’ve scarcely been listening.

+ Enter Sandmann, the teenage MAGA-hat wearing, abortion-hating, tomahawk-chopping Catholic high schooler, who became a cause celebre on the FoxNews right after a confrontation with Native American activists in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

+ Sandmann denounced his nemesis, Nathan Phillips, Lakota, as a “professional protester.”

+ Chad Wolf, the person giving the citizenship oath, demanding that the new citizens abide by the law is violating at least two federal laws while presenting the oath…

+ At least two of the immigrants who participated in the naturalization ceremony at the White House that was later aired during the GOP convention said they were not told they would be used as props during the convention.

+ Is the new price of citizenship under Trump being forced to take your oath without wearing a mask and with no social distancing?

+ Of course, if they’d raised any objections, ICE was there to jail them…

+ No matter how hard he tries, Eric will never win he’s dad’s affection…

+ Still Eric Trump delivered some stunning news: “Peace in the Middle East! Never-ending wars ended!!”

+ Every day my father fights for the American people, especially in the sand traps.

+ Eric Trump going poetic is not a pretty sight.

+ Eric Trump: “In closing I’d like to speak directly to my father…”

+ Couldn’t he just text?

+ Calling Dr. Freud…

+ When’s Bari Weiss speaking?

+ “Anarchists” seem to have eclipsed Antifa as the GOP bogeymen of the week…

+ The camera must have been shooting north when Pompeo Maximus gave his belligerent, China-bashing speech atop the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, otherwise we’d have been seeing the ongoing Israeli air strikes on Gaza in the background…

+ In a weak attempt to evade the restrictions of the Hatch Act, Pompeo Maximus claims to have traveled to Jerusalem as a “private citizen.” Yet under Israel’s COVID restrictions,  foreigners, including U.S. citizens, who are not Israeli citizens or permanent resident,s are banned from entering Israel.

+ When violating federal law is described as destroying a “norm”…

+ Pompeo Maximus is clearly one of the most blood-thirsty secretaries of state since, well, HRC…

+ Has anyone ever told Trump the eschatological reasons behind the evangelicals’ desire to have the US embassy moved to Jerusalem?

+ Too bad Gore Vidal isn’t around to write a sequel to Live from Golgotha…

+ In Pennsylvania earlier in the day, civil rights marchers were shot at with a rifle by a white man, who fired into the crowd, put his rifle down and “then started talking about Jesus“…

+ Mark Meadows today: “Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares” about Hatch Act.

Mark Meadows in 2014 on April Sands, a former attorney for the Federal Election Committee, who had posted Tweets in favor of Obama’s reelection. “She actually violated the Hatch Act… it’s troubling.” 

+ Trump getting a wave of applause for successfully walking down the new sidewalk in the Rose Garden without stumbling or need to take the arm of a US Marine…

+ If you need to “humanize” yourself and your husband, perhaps you’re not human or at least humane to begin with…?

+ If Hammer Horror films had made a presidential vampire movie, Melania could have played herself…ah, the plasma.

+ Don’t tell Florida’s Lt. Gov, but it looks like Melania’s wearing one Che’s field jackets…

+ Be prepared. My husband and I always bring extra paper towels when we visit hurricane victims…

+ “Be Best” you can be in your cages, kids.

+ When Melania visited Africa, she wore a designer version of a British colonial uniform…

+ The people’s house, Melania says she is so dedicated to preserving, was built, cleaned and maintained by slaves.

+ Melania wants you to rat yourself out as a drug user. She’ll give you Bill Barr’s home number…

+ When Melania went to Kenya, did she search for Obama’s birth certificate?

+ Melania: “It’s a harsh reality. We are not proud of parts of our history.”

+ History? Jacob Blake was shot in the back 7 times by Kenosha police only 48 hours ago…

+ Melania’s profound comments on racial unrest were to …”stop the looting.”

+ Wolf Blitzer: “Poignant and moving…”

+ Who’s doing the Google word-string searches on that speech…

+ Think how smitten Wolf would have been if Melania had urged more airstrikes on Gaza!

+ David Brooks, ladies and gentlemen…

+ D.C.’s current health guidelines prohibit gatherings larger than 50 people. More than 75 gathered in the newly denuded and paved Rose Garden to listen to Melania’s speech. Only 7 wore masks and 5 of them were reporters. There was no social distance and FLOTUS’s chief staff later admitted that not all of the guests had been tested for COVID.

+ Responding to criticism that Trump, Chad Wolf and Mike Pompeo violated the Hatch Act during their presentation tonight, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows snapped, “Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares” about the Hatch Act. The law and order party!

Day Three

+ Jacob Braun was shot seven times in the back by Kenosha cops in front of his family for breaking up a fight. The cops said he didn’t “yield.” A white teenage vigilante spent the night roving the streets in front of the Kenosha cops with an AK-15 rifle, who pat him on the back and offer him a bottle of water. He later shoots three people, killing two, and flees back to Illinois.

+ Where you lead, LeBron, the rest will follow…and if they don’t, fuck ’em.

+ Jack Brewer, a member of Black Voices for Trump who is scheduled to speak at the RNC convention tonight, was charged with insider trading by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this month.

+ Cell phone video shows Kenosha police officers in an military vehicle telling armed White militia members they “appreciate them being there” and giving them bottled water, while ordering protesters to disperse.

+ Rittenhouse was acting out the violent revenge fantasy fed to MAGAland on Monday night by the gun-toting trial lawyers from St. Louis…

+ James Fallows: “I can’t recall any pairing of events as closely-comparable-yet-starkly-different: Black man is shot in the back 7 times, while getting in car w his kids; White youth carrying AR-15 walks away, after killing people. By the same police force, in the same town, in the same week.”

+ Then the Kenosha police chief blamed the victims of a white racist terrorist for being out on the streets where he could shoot them. According to Chief Miskinis, the 17-year-old militia-kid was there “to resolve whatever conflict was in place.”

+ Kyle Rittenhouse’s social media posts are flush with him posing with weapons, proclaiming “Blue Lives Matter,” and pronouncing his support for Trump. Footage from the Des Moines, Iowa rally on January 30 shows Rittenhouse feet away from the president, in the front row, to the left of the podium. He posted a TikTok video from the event.

+ Nick Estes: “Fascist logic: Destroying property to stop murder is wrong. Murdering to protect property is right.”

+ Beats me why Sara Nelson wasn’t invited to give a keynote speech at DNC convention. Not really. I know why. And its why they risk losing in November or winning and implementing economic policies that are indistinguishable from Larry Kudlow’s…

+ Keeanga-Yammatta Taylor: “Where is the rest of the labor movement? We need a general strike against racism and injustice. We need the labor movement to act. We don’t have time for bills that never arrive and reforms that never work. In Kenosha the racists are the police and they collaborate with the militias. Enough!”

+ A preview of coming attractions under the Biden Health Care plan…12 million people have now lost their employer-sponsored health plans.

+ Lezmond Mitchell, only Native American on federal death row, was executed today in Indiana. Trump executing a Native American, over the objections of his tribe, during his convention is almost Clintonian (see Ricky Ray Rector). It’s certainly Lincoln-like, who oversaw the largest mass execution in US history, 38 Sioux warriors hung on Dec. 26, 1862.

+ “Why should we run in Mexico City only to crawl home?” – the 1968 Olympic Project for Human Rights (h/t Dave Zirin)

+ Tomi Lahren inadvertently called Trump a “jackass” in a message thanking members of the Indian community for supporting the president. Parapraxis is a bitch. Literally it seems…

+ The Democrats devour their young, the Republicans eat their seniors…

+ Has anyone checked former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz, brought on to call Biden a bad Catholic, for CTE?

+ Holtz: Nothing says “love” like welfare reform.

+ The administration at Notre Dame moved swiftly to make it clear that it doesn’t endorse what Lou Holtz’s allegation that Biden was a CINO, “Catholic in name only,” though Cardinal Dolan implied as much himself.

+ If it wasn’t clear before, it as after tonight. Portland is Trump’s Public Enemy No. 1.

+ And yet, after nearly 90 straight days of protests, the conduct of the Portland Police Department is more brutal and racist than ever. Black people made up 5.8% of the city’s population in July 2019. But in the first quarter of this year, 16.8% of drivers stopped by Portland police were Black, nearly three times their proportion of the population. That percentage jumped to 18.4 % in the second quarter.Black pedestrians were even more likely to be stopped by police, accounting for 16.4% of stops in the first quarter, 21.1% in the second.

+ Here’s the sheriff of Kenosha, back in 2018, unleashing a racist rant, about warehousing young black men for the rest of their lives so “the rest of us can be better”….

+ If the Democrats start calling the GOP the ‘radical right’ that makes it harder for Biden to work with them on Day One. And he really, REALLY wants to work with them…

+ Jack Brewer: “I stand against Obama who changed the biblical definition of marriage which normalized the black gay culture and I can’t support the killing of over 20 million black babies. It’s outright demonic & killing the soul of our culture.”

+ Brewer is under indictment for insider trading. I wonder if he thinks about why he got charged and Kelly Loeffler didn’t…

+ BLM: First, destroy the nuclear family, then the seize the suburbs!

+ Here’s another bigoted right-winger quoting MLK. Wake me when they start appropriating Malcolm X and Kwame Turé..

+ Madison Cawthorn, the 25-year-old Republican House candidate in North Carolina, declared “James Madison was just 25 years old when he signed the Declaration of Independence.” Madison did not sign the Declaration of Independence. He also got the ages of Washington and Lincoln wrong. Yet it’s all about preserving the heritage! Imagine if AOC had made similar inconsequential blunders…

+ Was there ever a metaphor that turned into a vapid cliché quicker than “a shining city on a hill?”

+ Clarence Henderson, the 60s civil rights activist turned Republican, making one of the stranger assertions of the night, given Trump’s role as a super-spreader of  birtherism : “I don’t even have a birth certificate.” Perhaps, Trump can send “his people” to find the long-form one…

+ Henderson also supported George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Trump in 2020…

+ Apparently, every speaker tonight must quote Reagan, MLK and Lincoln. Extra points for mentioning Frederick Douglass, James Madison and Susan B. Anthony…

+ Biden backed the Hyde Amendment restricting the use of federal funds for  abortion since before there was a Hyde Amendment…

+ Lara Trump: “This is the election where we decide if we keep America America or we head down a frightening path towards socialism.” Inhale, Lara, you’ll like it….

+ “To my father in law…” Is this really the only way to communicate with him?

+ You’d think that America’s gullible corporate titans, 75% of whom believe Biden is on his way toward taking the White House, would understand by now that the former neoliberal is in fact a creaky Trojan Horse for the socialist takeover of America plotted by the Lipstick Lenin of the Bronx. (We can, of course, take comfort in the fact that they’ve never be wrong before.)

+ This is more boring and tedious than last night, right?

+ Sister Dierdre Byrne waddled out in a full habit to declare that: “Donald Trump is the most pro-life President that this nation has ever had, defending life at all stages.” It’s also true, sister, that Trump just presided over the execution of a Navajo man, over the objections of his tribe, the family of his victims and the precepts of your own church…

+ Every speech tonight – with the exception of Mike Pence’s – was pre-taped.

+ By the time Pence started speaking, the sustained winds of Hurricane Laura had topped 175 MPH.

+ Pence: “America is at a crossroads…” The same one Kasich was standing at?

+ Pence’s speech, stiff and ponderous as always, can be summed up as: God, Cops and Country…

+ Mike wants us to know that he and Trump reopening the reopening of America…

+ Pence: “Mom follows politics very closely. And the truth be told, sometimes I think I’m actually her second-favorite candidate on the Trump-Pence ticket.” Does Pence ever confuse Mom with Mother?

+ Mike Pence: Pomposity in the cause of banality.

+ What was the ratio of god-to-Trump references in that speech?

+ Listening to Pence tonight, you’d think that the “violence and riots” plaguing America’s cities would only happen under a Biden/Harris administration…

+ Jesus H. Flag…Citing scripture, Pence switches out Jesus for the American flag in convention speech — outraging some Christians.

+ A view of the US tonight: fires from California and Oregon to Idaho and Montana, a Cat 4 Hurricane heading toward Chemical Alley, all hell breaking loose in Wisconsin and a black hole opening over DC…

Day Four

+ The first item that confronted me on my Mac this morning was the slumlord Jared Kushner’s deprecating comments on striking athletes: “NBA players are very fortunate that they have the financial position where they’re able to take a night off from work without having to have the consequences to themselves financially.”

+ To which, John Carlos countered: “They ain’t trying to tear the arena down. They ain’t trying to destroy America. All they’re doing is crying out by saying, ‘Enough is enough. And if you won’t do something, we will.’”

+ The black NBA players are, indeed, “very fortunate” they weren’t shot while driving home from practice, while jogging in their neighborhood, while trying to stop a fight, while walking home from the store, while sleeping in their beds…

+ Here’s Tucker Carlson defending, even celebrating and inciting, murder.

+ Any word from you, Glenn Greenwald?

+ And the ghoulish virago, Ann Coulter, upped the ante on vigilante murders…

+ When the rightwing comes to cancel you, all that will be left is a chalk outline on the pavement…

+ Readers of Gravity’s Rainbow will remember Slothrop’s hallucinations about the Kenosha Kid, induced under Sodium Amytal by Army shrinks, who, for their own nefarious reasons, were probing the psychological dynamics of America’s racial conflict. I always it took to be a reference to Orson Welles, who was born in Kenosha. In fact, it appears to be a reference to an avenger character in pulp westerns.

+ Kenosha, coming soon to a Missouri town near you, as state legislators just passed a law making it legal to give guns to kids without parents’ permission…

+ Or they might try to burn you with their ray guns: Two weeks before the 2018 midterm elections, Trump officials talked about deploying a “heat ray” at the border that would make people’s skin feel like it is burning when they get within range of its invisible beams.

+ Another day, another squad of former McCain, Romney and Bush staffers rushing to endorse Biden. It won’t matter. Nobody cares what any of these jerks think and few ever did. Say this for Trump, he has revealed just how politically impotent these neocons have really been all these years. The real power they held was in the minds of the media & Democratic Party elites, who either feared them (because they are constitutionally timid) or quietly (and some openly) agreed with them…

+ What the Democrats should have learned this week, but won’t, is that if the Republicans can call the neoliberals Biden and Harris “radical left socialists” they’ll call anyone that. So you might as well nominate one….

+ Trump sees the “unrest” in Wisconsin as playing to his political advantage. That’s the plan, n’est-ce pas?

+ Trump doesn’t have to make any case against Biden tonight. Biden indicts himself, almost every time he opens his mouth. Biden: “I condemn violence in any form, whether it’s looting or whatever it is.”

+ I wish the Democrats had had the guts to invite Cardi B to perform the national anthem…

+ UFC’s Dana White, epidemiologist, “No one person and no one place could have anticipated the challenges that COVID would bring.”

+ If the Democratic convention had a funereal air, Trump’s closing night is downright necrophiliac.

+ House Leader Kevin McCarthy says America will defeat the coronavirus because Trump has unleashed a “Marshall Plan for Main Street….The socialist Democrats have different agenda.” Is there anything more globalist than the Marshall Plan?

+ Over the past 10 years, an average of 157 police officers have died while “on duty”, almost half of those of heart attacks, strokes and in accidents from unnecessary high speed chases. By contrast, police shoot nearly 1000 people a year, every year.

+ Pat Lynch, representing 8000 bad apples in the NYPD…

+ Today, the U.S. collectively spends $100 billion a year on policing and another $80 billion on incarceration.

+ You can see why Rudy has been reading the DSM lately.

+ Giuliani: “[Joe Biden’s] a Trojan Horse with Bernie, AOC, Pelosi, Black Lives Matter, and his party’s entire left wing just waiting to execute their pro-criminal anti-police socialist policies.”

+ Rudy: BLM and Antifa are coming to your suburbs…!

+ Before aliens invaded Giuliani’s body? When was that, in utero?

+ Trump’s criminal justice “reforms” included reinstitution the federal death penalty. Barr scheduled two executions for convention week. They killed one man and only a federal judge prevented them from killing another.

+ The real question is why didn’t Obama grant clemency to Alice Marie Johnson who was serving a life-without-parole sentence for a minor role in a drug conspiracy? Why did that task fall to Kim Kardashian, Jared Kushner and Trump to exploit?

+ Tom Cotton: “President Trump’s strength has kept us out of war…”

+ The ICE princess…

+ Ivanka: “My father has a deep compassion for those treated unfairly.” Still hasn’t apologized to the Central Park Five.

+ The peace deal with UAE was actually a weapons deal (F-35s) between three countries who weren’t at war.

+ This sounds like a mediocre State of the Union address of Clintonian length, which means that Ivanka’s definitely running…for something. (Aside from a subpoena.)

+ Now Ivanka’s talking directly to “Dad.”

+ Tension in the House of Trump…

+ Trump: “I want to thank Ivanka and all of my children, whatever your names are.”

+ Trump: “We will protect America against all dangers.” What if America is the leading danger to America?

+ Trump’s squealing voice tonight sounds like Elvis’ last moments, described by the coroner as “straining for stool.”

+ Good joke about Biden taking money from blue collar workers, giving them hugs and even kisses, before flying back to Washington to vote for legislation that would ship their jobs overseas…

+ A good Trump joke, because it hits home: Biden took money from blue collar workers, gave them hugs, and even kisses, then returned to Washington to pass trade bills that shipped their jobs overseas. But it flounders on its own contradictions by alleging that Biden is a tool of  radical socialists.

+ Do socialists send millions of jobs overseas?

+ Big cheers for the American gestapo from Border Patrol and ICE, who are attending the super-spreader convention.

+ Too bad Bernie didn’t frontally attack Biden on all of these trade, economic and military issues. What was holding him back? Why was Tulsi so muted about Biden?

+ This is basically Ivanka’s speech with nasal drip, wheezing,  and slurred words…

+ People in DC have given up trying to drown this out with honking, because it’s such an uninspired and themeless rehash of every speech he’s given in the last 6 months.

+ Lots of Castro bashing this week, but Trump’s doing a half-a-Castro tonight, in length at least…

+ Is there an intermission?

+ Well, here’s Bernie Sanders, a man not known for his humor, to lighten the tedium with the funniest Tweet of the night, perhaps his entire political career.

+ There may well be a safe COVID vaccine in circulation before this “speech” ends.

+ Tim Scott gets credit for opportunity zones? Who will tell Jack Kemp?

+ Trump is bragging a lot about his wall, but try as he might he still trails Obama in deportations…(Amy Pope, a former Obama homeland security adviser, is leading a Biden working group on immigration. Pope defended the Obama administration’s expansion of the family detention policy in a 2018 interview.)

+ The man from NYC said he nobody had ever seen blackouts like in California…

+ Bernie Sanders is a “wild-eyed Marxist”? More like a sedate Keynesian.

+ You call this justice reform?: “All federal crimes are being enforced to the fullest extent of the law.”

+ Who has the radical left shot?

+ An hour & half into this themeless banality, the sentences starting and stalling and sputter into the next, and we’re hearing stories about Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill?

+ In a throng of repulsive people, bored to tears by the stilted perorations of their chieftain, Rudy remains the most execrable of them all…

+ The maskless, standing and shouting…”Four more years”, as they project COVID particles 12 feet in every direction.

+ Those 500 people risked getting Covid for that?

+ Back to things that matter. With seven bullet holes in his back and a severed spinal cord, Jacob Blake, currently paralyzed from the waist down, remains handcuffed to his hospital bed, according to his father…

+ You support Jacob Blake and his family directly at their GoFundMe page.

+ The Washington Mystics wore Jacob Blake shirts with seven bullet holes in the back.

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent
Priyamvada Gopal
(Verso)

Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth
Brian Stetler
(Atria)

The Mountains Sing
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
(Algonquin Books)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Dialogues on Race, Volume 1
Gregg August
(Iacuessa)

Trickster’s Dream
Miles Okazaki
 (Pi)

Joy Unlimited
Harry Beckett
(Cadillac)

They kick you down and then they just deny it…