The Morning After...

Night One of the freak show.

The GOPvention opened with ... a prayer...

This shows how weak Trump's political instincts really are. His team exploited a grieving mother, but instead of milking the exploitation, Trump called Fox during her speech, earning a cut away to himself. It would seem a clumsy W-style hug for this woman was called for, but Trump's sociopathy is accompanied by a germ phobia.

Of all people for Melania's speechwriter to plagiarize...

It is pretty astounding, considering how this team has spent the last eight years demonizing the First Lady.

The twitterverse soon contributed more, #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes.

And tonight...

It would be hard for Wingnuttia to top Monday's Make America Safe Again festivities, but they seem to be up for the challenge of riding their high horse on a low road. Tonight’s theme is Make America Work Again.

tengrain adds Brian Beutler's tweet of last night:

Will be hard for tomorrow night's theme of "a minority will take your job" to top tonight's theme of "a minority is going to kill you."

Influences

In Baton Rouge, post-police shooting of Alton Sterling: three police killed, others wounded,  in ambush on July 16.

As the Noise Machine publicizes suspect Gavin Long's one-time membership in the Nation of Islam, Steve M. offers some more telling details on Long's path to planning a massacre—

... he got there by a circuitous route. He spent a long time obsessed with self-help and self-improvement, and wanted -- in an almost Trump-like way -- to sell his alleged greatness to other seekers of human perfection...

It's a story of someone with a military background—and mental instability—who gravitated to Afrocentric versions of sovereign citizenship, along with self-improvement. He also came under the influence of the "Men's Rights" movement. In other words, he had multiple crank ideas that, had he been a white supremacist cop-killer, would have made him "a lone wolf" whose actions were unfathomable and thus of no greater social significance.

Readying The Show

Republican convention preparations, appropriately underway.

Back, By No Popular Demand

The public spectacle returns.

Drunken swaggering, or just his usual lack of impulse control?
Sam's take.

The Butler, Doing It Again

This guy.

This week —

Anthony Senecal, who worked as Donald Trump's butler for 17 years before being named the in-house historian at the tycoon's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, has repeatedly published posts on his Facebook page that express profound hatred for President Barack Obama and declare he should be killed.

The posts were later taken down, and Trump "disavows" the remarks by the "former butler." All of a sudden, Senecal isn't an employee, he just hangs around as a Trump "historian.".

As the NYT quoted him, in a March interview,

"You're a Hispanic and you're in here trimming the trees and everything, and a guy walks up and hands you a hundred dollars," Mr. Senecal said. "And they love him, not for that, they just love him."

When Trump married the current wife

...Mr. Senecal greeted guests at the door, including Hillary Clinton. (In the interview, he offered a profane description for Mrs. Clinton, the front-runner in the Democratic presidential race.)

Steve M. adds other sentiments from the Family Values heartland; one needs to take a shower after reading what's directed at Mrs. Obama and the kids.

Steve M. adds,

Here's what I want to know: When is the "respectable" political world going to recognize what a cesspool of hate and delusion conservatism has become in America?

Bottomless

Is the depth at which this walking malignancy functions.

Zimmerman's planned sale of his "American Firearm Icon" moved Charles Pierce to say, "I'm surprised he didn't mop up the blood and sell it by the pint."

The auction was later canceled, the BBC reports, adding Zimmerman's stated motives for the auction (beyond the unstated: further torment of Trayvon Martin's family)—

In an online posting to announce the auction, Mr Zimmerman said that he would use the profits to "fight" the Black Lives Matter movement and oppose Democrat Hillary's Clinton's presidential campaign.

RIP, "American Hero"

Sad to see this: the death of Michael Ratner today, at 72.

Will Bunch writes

...he kept going and going and won some of his greatest victories in the 21st Century, near what would prove to be the final years of his life. In his hometown of New York, he successfully fought to end the stop-and-frisk policies that unconstitutionally targeted blacks and Latinos. In the bigger arena, he challenged America's right to hold prisoners at Guantanamo Bay indefinitely without trial, and won his battle before the U.S. Supreme Court.

His words from 2002 about the United States and the so-called "war on terror" were particularly prescient:

"A permanent war abroad means permanent anger against the United States by those countries and people that will be devastated by U.S. military actions. Hate will increase, not lessen; and the terrible consequences of that hate will be used, in turn, as justification for more restrictions on civil liberties in the United States."