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.