Roaming Charges: Great Balls of Ire at the RNC

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 yearspolitics as sophomoric trolling, all wrapped in an obsequious salute, not to the flag-spiked stages, but to Trump himself. The party doesnt 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, Trumps 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 omert 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

+ Mini-Trump tyro Charlie Kirk kicked the day off by proclaiming: Trump is the bodyguard of Western CivilizationI can see it, as long as by civilization you dont include literature, art, drama, music, dance, science, medicine, ethics, moral philosophy or spelling.

+ Heres a nice Christian-looking couple gazing admiringly at a segment of Trumps border wall, declaring: We want this nation to continue to be the beacon of hope for the world.

+ Its 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 Missouris 1st congressional district that Marxist revolutionary. Heres how Bush responded

+ A pro gun school shooting dad says, Thank god Mike Pence was vice president the day my daughter was killed. Thats weird, isnt 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 Californiaa 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.

+ Guilfoyles 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 Guilfoyles decibel level, close to The Who after the Ox died?

+ I am Trump woman, hear me roar!

+ Guilfoyles speech was on tape and they didnt reshoot it?

+ Back to the permission mechanism trope, tonight youve 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 Trumps policies, he would have been jailed and sent, not back to Cuba, but Honduras?

+ Eagerly awaitingBidens revelation of his inner Castro

+ Wheres ASAP Rocky?

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

+ Didnt Scott get the memo that hes 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?

+ Dont worry, Jr. Papas got a brand new bag

+ Not sure I really want to be part of the radical left, if Joe Bidens 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 dont about Trumps 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 Maines lobsterman dont fish there, President Obamas executive order offended us greatly.

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

+ Anti-immigrant activistMary Ann Mendoza waspulled 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 womens 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, its 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 hes 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, theres another generation of the Billy Graham clan!

+ In America we have not yet experienced physical persecution, warned Jane Graham Lynch. Whos she mean by we?

+Save a fetus, kill your granny.

+ Its Margaret Sangers 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 Trumps GOP was a safe space for the LGBT community. But after hearing Ms. Graham, I think thats 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 cant 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 evenings festivities are weird and unsettling, but also boring and dull. Why didnt 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.

+ Heres Pence in a video shot outside the Lincoln Boyhood Home in southern Indiana. Theres 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. Floridas Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nez 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.

+ Fidels 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 Nez 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, theres no place left to go? Ive counted four tonight and Ive 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 theyd raised any objections, ICE was there to jail them

+ No matter how hard he tries, Eric will never win hes dads 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 Id like to speak directly to my father

+ Couldnt he just text?

+ Calling Dr. Freud

+ Whens 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 wed 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 Israels 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 reasonsbehind the evangelicals desire to have the US embassy moved to Jerusalem?

+ Too bad Gore Vidal isnt 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 onApril Sands, a former attorney for the Federal Election Committee, who had posted Tweets in favor of Obamas reelection. She actually violated the Hatch Act its 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