Thanks for the heads-up! ...really wanna catch his speech.

It's always nice to have Clinton supported by a Republican demagogue who called the current Democratic NYC mayor, Bill de Blasio, "racist" for featuring his own biracial kids in his campaign ads and advocating for a tax increase on those making over $500k.

Did I mention that Bloomberg wasn't even running for that office when he said it?

The reality is that it is either Trump or Clinton. If wish we had a parliamentary system that made third parties a viable alternative, but we don't. Neither the Greens nor the Libertarians have the field organization to be anything but spoilers. Honestly, even if Jill Stein could get 3X the turnout she did the last time she won, all that could do is hand the country to Trump. Sorry folks, Trump is courting White Supremacists. I may not like either Bloomberg or Hillary Clinton, but I'd vote for the most corrupt Democrat to stop Trump any day. I worked too hard for Bernie to let Trump destroy what recovery we've had since the last Republican,

How did African Americans in attendance respond to Mayor Stop-and-frisk?

@2 gee whiz, by the time we've purged the party of everybody who rubs you the wrong way, there won't be enough Democrats left to carry Capitol Hill

@5 Bloomberg isnt a Democrat.

He was last seen being a Republican, and then declared himself an "Independent."

I thought you lot hated Johnny-Come-Late-To-The-Democratic-Party-People.

I mean, if Sanders gets raked over hot coals for his not being a "Democrat," surely Bloomberg should be flayed for being an actual Republican.

@5 Also, Bloomberg is the 1%. More than that, he's the 0.0001%. He's in the top ten richest people of the world, and Ameriva. Make what you will of that.

Reason for Bloomberg to be on stage:
NOT to persuade leftist SLOGkins
but to make it OK & to reassure centrist Republicans etc to vote against Trump.
Is that clear?

@9 Ross Perot was at least right about one thing in his 1992 campaign. NAFTA did make a Giant Sucking Sound of American jobs, and both Bush the First and Clinton the Bill strongly supported it.

TPP and TTIP are going to make NAFTA's giant sucking sound seem like it came from a Slurpee straw.

@10 It also has the optics of Hillary shoving aside the progressive promises she made during her campaign.

Chapter One
Leftists: We think Bernie is just fine as a progressive candidate.
Clintonistas: Hillary is a progressive candidate.
Leftists: She gets money from Wall Street, loved the TPP before her candidacy, supported NAFTA, hates single payer universal health care, and is a greedy 1%er.
Clintonistas: No, she's actually moved to the left to capture your vote, and she has a chance of winning.
Leftists: We think she's lying and will tack to the right during the general.
Clintonistas: HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO TELL YOU? SHES PROGRESSIVE!! SHE'S GEBUINE IN HAVING BEEN MOVED YO THE LEFT.

This week:
Clinton selects a very pro-TPP candidate, gets a platform that refuses to denounce TPP, and has one of the richest Republicans stump for her. Meanwhile, the convention bans anti-TPP signage, Obama steals notes from All Lives Matter, and a comedienne calls the progressive activists "ridiculous."

Where is your progressive candidate now??

@14 Where is "good?"

I don't need a "perfect" candidate (lord knows Sanders was far from perfect, especially in minority outreach). Stein isn't a perfect candidate either.

But Hillary? She isn't good. She's an awful candidate running against a horrible candidate.

That quote should be "don't let good be the enemy of awful."

#16, Stein sounds like a ridiculous candidate, actually:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016…

Pretty sure the trolls on this page aren't actually watching the convention and remain ignorant of Hillary's devotion of her life to progressive causes and her myriad of accomplishments in making life better and more secure for so many. Meanwhile, what a night at the convention. Proud of my country, proud of my President, and proud of Hillary Clinton. As Obama noted, tons of work remains to be done to move the country forward. Which is of course why we need to do all we can to help elect Hillary to keep progress moving forward and to defeat the dangerous demagogue the Republicans have put forward. I do get why @12isn't on board, invested as he is in insulting and attacking anyone with whom he disagrees and making people into simple and absurd one dimensional characters, i.e., a Trumpie at heart.

@17 What is ridiculous is to believe that having the .01% on that stage is going to convince voters to turn out and vote for a fake progressive candidate. Clinton already had wall street behind her. It's just more evidence that Clintonites would rather lose this election than forgo their neoliberal agenda.

Bloomberg tied his own shoes once. He knows the struggle.

@19:

The problem with being so far to the Left is that you can't help but perceive everyone else as being squarely on the Right, as if there was no significant gradation. But for those somewhat closer to the middle, the appreciable differences are much easier to apprehend.

It's like that old New Yorker cover: when you're looking at the rest of the country from 9th Avenue everything west of the Hudson appears as just one big, amorphous mass of sameness.

@19, Right, because when it comes to Hillary, one wrong move ALWAYS negates all the positive ones in the ways that it never does for her male counterparts. Just look at the applause Biden got, for example. He's become the Democrats' beloved grandpa despite all of the negatives in his career, which are now downplayed in the media as "gaffes."

But for Hillary, despite the fact that her convention has had numerous speakers for LGBTQ rights, people with disability's rights, women's rights, Latino rights, civil rights, labor union rights, the mothers of the movement, and gun control, Mayor Bloomberg PROVES that she simply doesn't give a shit about progressive values.

@17: That was a good read. Thank you for that.

How many of these Hillary is horrible commenters are really closet Trump voters? Maybe even on his payroll.

Partisan politics is a team sport, and even if your guy isn't selected to captain the team, you don't be trashing the one who got the position. (Yes, I know, not everyone is cut out to be a team player.)

Also, for those who continue to claim that you don't know what she stands for or what her policies are, she has 37 of them listed on her website along with her plans for enacting them:
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/

By comparison, Trump has seven, two of which are about building that fucking wall: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/

@12 A question I'm always asking myself when I see the endless prattling on about the TPP from the fringe dwellers: do you even have any fucking idea what is in it?

@27 BBC has a primer.

The government has a website with the text and a MASSIVELY oversimplified cutesy video featuring the Washington Cherry.

@27 Do YOU know what's in it?

Heh. Did you read the primer before forming your opinion?

For the record, I don't know a whole lot about it. From what I know the outrage is completely overblown however. It is mostly about enriching rent-seekers like pharmaceutical and media companies. Impact on American workers: probably not good. Probably not the apocalypse.

I've read the primer.

I've read what Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz had to say: (Worst Deal Ever)

Among other articles.

I highly recommend you look into it before criticizing others' opinions of it. It's a lot more complex and brutal than you think.

Not sure that inquiring as to whether you had any idea what is in it constitutes criticism of your opinion. If I understand correctly your knowledge about it comes from a short article you read about Joseph Stiglitz's views on it. I read Krugman's column about it. I'd say that makes us about equally as well informed. I don't really have much of an opinion other than a general view that trade deals never have enough protections for labor or the environment, and as stated - the outrage is overblown.

@32, I also think it's funny that Bernie's college kids (the ones holding the signs in all the photos) even care about trade deals. For one thing, it's not the most interesting topic and young people tend to be more passionate about things like racism, gun control, or abortion, and for another, most of them are probably wearing clothes from H&M and Forever XXI and using IPhones. Young people are huge consumers of cheap products made over seas.

Bernie has them worried about what he asserts would be a massive loss of jobs, but he made the same assertions about Nafta, and the facts don't support his claims (Politifact has a lot of information about both deals).

@32 Ive been reading about it for months, my dear. Robert Reich has been a huge critic of it. Elizabeth Warren is against it and released a video last month. Krugman initially thought it was unnecessary before he jumped on the Clinton over Sanders bandwagon and lost his last shreds of respectability.

Do you have preferred economists you'd like to listen to?

@33 Politifact is grossly biased towards Hillary and the DNC.

Krugman is for it? Ambivalent leaning toward against last I heard.

Well, factcheck.org states the same about Nafta: http://www.factcheck.org/2008/07/naftas-…

@37 That cherry picks one specific element of NAFTA and conflates it to be a success.

Let's say the number of jobs has increased by 25m. Over that same time period, the U.S. population has increased by 60m. So, jobs aren't keeping up with supply.

At the time of NAFTA, the U.S. had about 110m jobs. So, 25m additional "jobs," without specifying important factors like wage, or type of job, represents an increase of 20%. Given that the GDP has increased by 70% in the same time period, even after adjusting for inflation, one might expect wages to have skyrocketed. Instead, adjusted wages have actually decreased since NAFTA. So, the benefits of the GDP increase has not been passed on to the worker. This is called the wage share, and it has been declining since NAFTA (barring the 2000 bubble).

So, lower wages, jobs not keeping up with population, and a vast difference in wage share? NAFTA is a failure on most LABOR accounts. It has been a boon for profits and corporations.