"Donald Trump has asked why I did not speak at the Democratic convention. He said he would like to hear from me. Here is my answer to Donald Trump: Because without saying a thing, all the world, all America, felt my pain. I am a Gold Star mother. Whoever saw me felt me in their heart."

Ghazala Khan, grieving mother of Army captain Humayun Kahn, killed in action in Iraq trying to save his soldiers and innocent civilians.

I enjoyed that Democratic Convention a lot, and mostly for the right reasons. In fact, I'm still enjoying it, because I'm currently five time zones ahead of Philly time and so watch the major speeches the next day. [SPOILER ALERT: Don't tell me who they nominate in the finale!] The Democrats presented a positive vision about candidate, cause, and country: inspiring reminders about what they are about, what we are about, and what America is about. It's great, and also I'm walking around London with Stevie's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" stuck in my head. I am one happy Democrat.

It would really be great if DNC delegates would stop, you know, booing black people.

End of post.

Trump and his circus have left town, and so have I. But before I turn myself over entirely to watching the DNC on GMT, let me point out a few local Cleveland issues that bothered me about this convention. I've already blogged about the big stuff. Let me just get some Cleveland things off my chest.

Please reserve space in the comments below for Hal to make fun of me if Hillary Clinton picks Tim Kaine as her running mate this afternoon.

The rest of you do not have to wait, though, and can make fun of me now.

Happy Friday!

I've had enough of the Republican Convention. I'm getting out of Cleveland today and flying to London. So I won't see Trump's speech in real time. I'll just get the replays tomorrow, and spend the next two weeks reassuring frightened Brits that the end of the world is not approaching. (Someone, please, reassure me.)

On Tuesday, July 19, the second day of the 2016 GOP convention, Donald Trump, the inexperienced, inarticulate, potty-mouthed, dubiously reputable business man turned anti-government carnival barker officially became the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. 

Surreal as that nomination appears, even in the topsy-turvy world of 21st Century Republicanism, it came about because the Party hardliners were helpless to stop it. The people--their people--had spoken. Unwittingly, unintentionally, they had managed to churn up their portion of the masses so effectively they made it easy for a fast-talking charlatan like Trump to pounce on this most golden of opportunities, winning vast numbers of hardened hearts and brainwashed minds.

So, they're finally here. After months of anxious preparation here in our city, the Republican National Convention has come to Cleveland. The city is as carefully groomed and as nervous as a teenager before the prom. The pedestrian walk on East 4th Street is filled with broadcast booths. High-end restaurants have turned into the temporary headquarters of Bloomberg or Twitter. The park in Public Square has been completely, and beautifully, renovated; we had to close it down for more than a year.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg issued some mildly opinionated statements questioning Donald Trump's fitness to be president and now the idiot wing of lefty America has stirred to admonish her for... saying what any reasonable person would expect her to believe about Donal Trump any way.

Hillary has been labeled a closet conservative by some in the progressive movement; from that political vantage point, what issues is she's to the right of Donald Trump on?  

Is Bernie's endorsement of Hillary a sign of compromise or betryal? 

What's the best argument for a Trump presidency?

Lee Greenwood first released God Bless America in 1984. After 911 it was re-released and has become the new unofficial national anthem. It's a song that invokes patriotism and unity. I've heard this song an uncountable number of times; I read the lyrics a few times before I sat down to write this. God Bless America gave me the inspiration to write about the public killings that were on display last week. I wish I lived in the America Lee Greenwood sang about. I wish I felt like I was part of the American fabric the way he did in 1984. In an age when people are more and more envious of the material wealth others have, I find myself envying the sense of patriotism people like Lee Greenwood have. It hurts to knowing America has never loved me the way Lee Greenwood loves her.

You don't need me to recount the week of police-violence and resulant lone wolf terrorism, so let's just stipulate that you all read and watch the news.  In New York Magazine, Johnathan Chait assures us "It Is Not 1968." It's a well done essay but somehow when Chait says something declarative, I suspect it just isn't entirely true.

So, Hillary Clinton is not getting indicted. The media presents this as a surprise. But it is pretty obvious that no major political actors are surprised. The press has talked for a year as if Clinton could possibly be indicted. The players (the national Democrats, the Republicans, the White House, the donors) have acted as if they knew she would not. Even politicians who publicly said that she was in danger of indictment acted as if she would not. The simplest answer here is that this story has not been covered honestly.

People have been asking if we're seeing a realignment of American electoral politics, with Donald Trump  scrambling the campaign map. There are no real signs of that yet: polls show the presidential electoral map unchanged so far, with the Democrats and Republican leading in the same states they carried last time and the time before that. The real story is the realignment that has already happened, without fanfare, over the past quarter-century. This Fourth of July weekend I'd like to talk about Maine and Vermont.

The shocking result of the "Brexit" referendum, with Britain leaving the European Union, has widely been taken as Good News for Donald Trump. He was happy to say so himself, and to attempt to take credit somehow for the referendum's success. And people have been panicking about the danger that Trump's campaign could beat the conventional wisdom just as the British "Leave" campaign did. That danger is probably overrated, as Jamelle Bouie points out: the UK is much whiter than the US, so the angry white vote doesn't carry as far here any more, and we should remember that the Brexit result wasn't really a surprise: "Leave" and "Remain" had been polling neck-and-neck down to the wire, so the 52-48 result wasn't unlikely. But Trump, who led the Republican primary polls wire to wire, is clearly behind in the general-election polls. On the other hand, it's easy to see Trump and the Brexiteers as part of a wider movement: angry nativist populists, hostile to policy experts and welcoming to xenophobes and racists.  That movement won't meet with the same success everywhere, but it's real.

In the three and one-half years I've been here, we have not been allowed ONE VOTE, NOT ONE VOTE on matters of gun safety. This was why we had to protest."

- Rep. John Larson, Sit-in ringleader whose Connecticut district is near Sandy Hook.

On June 23, around 11:25 AM, Democrats in the House of Representatives, fed up over the lack of action on simple, common-sense gun control measures after years of failed attempts, and led by Civil Rights icon John Lewis, announced a sit-in on the floor of the House chamber, and then, one by one, sat themselves down on the hard floor in front of the speaker's podium.  (Watch it here.)

Quick thought here --

On the merits, were I a UK citizen, I believe I'd have voted to stay with the EU.

However, that would have been in spite of a lot of preaching and hectoring by the elites who brought the Uk into the EU in the first place.  As an outsider, I kind of hoped for an "exit" outcome if only to see, for once, a referendum pushing back against what we've all been assured is "the right thing to do," by people who seem immune to the falling wages and abdications of democracy that seem the result of the new capitalist global order.

America: where it takes a Muslim Killing homosexuals for Christians to view the LGBTQ community as people.

Many Americans are (in my amateur opinion) experiencing a severe case of Anxiety Separation. Get the image of a toddler throwing a tantrum because mommy left them with the sitter out of your head. This anxiety is the result of a come to Jesus moment: America no longer looks like the America of the “good ole days”. Back when America was “great” those of us on the margins of society lived huddled in our respective corners; we bowed in fear and accepted the indignities we were dealt. That America is dead! I don’t know exactly when It died, but the rotting corpse of a separatist society tied to the legacies of white supremacy, patriarchy, and religious purity is on display for anyone who chooses to look at it. The realization that the future promises even more diversity has pushed some of those clamoring for the good old days to their breaking point. Without some violent reactionary response to the racial and cultural shifts in our society people of color, women, religious minorities, and homosexuals will be the future symbols of America. This makes me smile. After 41 years of living in the south I appreciate the symbolic seat at the table, but the demographic path we’re on almost guarantees an end of the crony tokenism that passes for diversity.

Some years ago, an unstable young man committed one of the most notorious terrorist acts in U.S. history. He was American-born, but his parents were immigrants, and his allegiance to a radical ideology with foreign origins terrified the public. “They and those like them should be kept out of this country,” railed Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, “and if found here they should be promptly deported to the country whence they came.”

The young man was Leon Czolgosz, a Polish-American anarchist. On August 31, 1901, he fatally shot President William McKinley in the abdomen with .32 caliber revolver. The nation reacted with shock and outrage. McKinley’s successor, President Theodore Roosevelt, denounced anarchy as “a crime against the whole human race” and demanded legislation to restrict immigration and deport suspected anarchists. Congress answered the call with the Anarchist Exclusion Act, which barred anyone “who disbelieves in or who is opposed to all organized government” from becoming citizens.

Full story at The History Reader

Today we woke up to news of another mass shooting, this time in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.  The facts about it are sketchy but it looks like a hate crime, an obvious act of terrorism.  The horrific news, coming in bits and spurts, is that 50 people are dead and 54 have been injured.  It's being classified as the worst mass shooting in U.S history.

The shooter's name is Omar Saddiqui Mateen, an American on the FBI watch list thought to be inspired by Isis.  The motive, it appears, is a murderous hatred of gays, but the ease of owning military-style assault weapons gave him an opportunity to act on it. It was about as carte blanche as it gets.