Heidi, you need to keep up.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz isn't just resigning. She's being welcomed into the Hillary campaign as Honorary Chair. Rather fitting.

Sigh. Is Clinton going to fuck this up? She's letting DWS be the big story of the day.

Isn't it ironic (don't you think) that the Right -- which largely denies value, or even the existence, of social capital, social goods, social contracts, even Society itself -- is vastly more capable of strategically-cooperative collective action, while the Left eats its own and shits on its friends?

For decade after decade the Right successfully, incrementally, strategically buried its divisions and chipped away at New Deal and Great Society progressive legacies, leaving the Left swimming against the current in every pool, park, lake, stream and river.

Rank-and-File Dems have been complaining about DWS for a long time - and the Bosses have waited until the convention to confront the issue?

HRC et al deserve to have the issue of DWS blow up in their faces and hijack the first day of their convention.

Meanwhile, Trump is beating Clinton in every recent poll, apparently getting a bump from the most negative convention in recent history.

Of course Sawant is supporting Stein. Sawant is not a democrat; she's a socialist. Hillary is a mainstream centrist democrat, and Sawant is far, far to the left of Hillary. Her support of Stein shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

I like Sawant's push for a better minimum wage, and I enjoy having her zeal on the city council, but I'm happy to ignore her presidential endorsement. I'm a pragmatist. The practical reality is that either Trump or Hillary will be our next president. Hillary has her faults, but Trump is the worst presidential candidate I can remember in half a century. The choice is clear.

Stein is an anti-vax wackaloon. She's immediately disqualified as a serious leader and should be running as a Republican where wackaloons rise to the top instead.

@ 5, After the RNC epic shitshow--in which the best thing one can say is that at least no one was killed--Trump's surge in the polls is even more surreal. It's not exactly a secret that American voters are aggressively stupid and gullible, yet still... Wow.

@ 6, Failing upwards into even more wealth and power is the key feature of our 1% kleptocracy.

@ 3, It's not surprising because they turn out to vote even though the majority of Americans agree with the values of the left.

Republicans control 2/3 of state legislatures, governors offices, and Congress despite being grossly incompetent, corrupt, and destructive because they play to their base and turnout voters.

Establishment/Corporate Democrats denounce, ridicule, and betray their base. That doesn’t seem to be working well for them.

@5: Romney got a bump, McCain got a bump. Everyone gets a bump. Bumps happen.

@8 Stein herself, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, does not appear to be anti-vax personally. As far as anyone knows she vaccinated her kids, and inasmuch as you can parse any meaning at all out of her infamous word-salad salad answer to that question, she acknowledged that vaccines are effective.

The problem is that she is reflexively unable to not give an answer to that question without pandering to the lunatic fringe contingent of her own party, which believes that there is no question about science or health policy that cannot be succinctly answered by yelling "Monsanto! GMOs! Big Pharma! Chemtrails!"

Whether a willingness to indulge the special feelings of complete idiots on the topic of vaccinations is better or worse than being directly anti-vax herself is, of course, a personal judgment call.

The Greens are the Tea Party of the left, and Sawant is an idiot. A useful idiot, who loves to her herself speak, but an idiot nonetheless.

Does this mean that you guys are not going to allow The Stranger to be the Sawant campaign's de facto media/propaganda arm in the future?

I mean, she is refusing to fall in line behind the queen of establishment democrats. Quite the Sophie's Choice for you guys, I can imagine.

@ 14, Her point is that we should question the multiple conflicts of interest between government and the medical/pharmaceutical community due to funding and revolving door employment. The regulators of our finance and energy industries have already been bought off, so this would seem obvious. She never said that she is against vaccinations--that is simply a glib lie spread by intentionally dishonest Clinton supporters.

@8:

Given the Wikileaks "expose'" of private DNC emails is now being traced back to Russian hackers, you bet it has all the earmarks of a smear campaign, with Trump's BFF Putin probably behind it. Sounds just like what an ex-KGB cointel op would do.

@ 15, You know what the Tea Party gets? Results.

In under a decade they seized control of the Republican Party and 2/3 of the states. If only the left in this country were nearly as effective, we'd all be better off.

@19:

The difference being of course that the Tea Party/Freedom Caucus worked WITHIN the GOP to get that control. The Green Party OTOH thinks they can achieve the same results externally, and that's their fundamental error.

@18 No it's not. That's a Clinton campaign story designed to distract you from the emails. The sources for the story are Robby Mook, HRC's campaign manager, and Crowdstrike, the internet security company they "hired."

I certainly don't care about the e-mails. I don't care about what socialists have to say about Hillary either.

In the end politics are about parties. What does the GOP represent vs. what the Democratic Party represents. For over half a century the GOP has embraced bigotry as a means to power, and middle class white Americans have rewarded that party for their efforts. As the country has become more aware of racism, the GOP drove their bigotry underground with dog whistle campaign slogans, until decades later Donald Trump came upon the scene and outright appealed to the inherent racism in the party.

Meanwhile, for nearly 3 full decades the GOP has waged a campaign of hate and lies against the Democratic Party by way of the Clintons. "Scandal" after so-called "scandal" have all amounted to zilch. No crimes, no indictments.

What is the nature of these new e-mails? The Democratic Party was figuring out how best to promote Democratic Candidates during the National Election?? Oh my... how horrible. A socialist? An atheist? How will the Democratic Party respond? By promoting the candidate they felt would succeed in November! How shocking.

@15, so pretentious and angry (and wrong (and lonely?)). also, rather buffalo bill-ish.

@19 Results = Obstruction/Burning government to the ground

So now we know what the extremist left think of as "results."

Great. That's just great.

@21:

Well, the FBI is certainly taking the accusati…. And IIRC Crowdstrike was hired AFTER the initial Russian hack was discovered back in June. So, how could they be the "source" of a story about a leak of emails that had already occurred - and been widely reported on - prior to their being hired?

@22 Then you also don't care if you lose without the far left vote. Good to know!

@7 nailed it -- "Trump is the worst presidential candidate I can remember in half a century. The choice is clear." Any vote not for Hillary Clinton works to put Trump in the White House. Remember Ralph Nader.

@26:

The REAL question is: what will the far Left do when Clinton wins in November WITHOUT them?

In 2000 Ralph Nader and the Green Party gave GW Bush the opening to steal the election. Bush went on to be asleep at the wheel on 9/11, dragged us into Iraq, appointed supreme court justices that made Citizens United the law of the land, restricted voting rights, and those are just the debacles I can think of off the top of my head.
Now Kshama Sawant and the Green Party want a repeat. That's like jumping feet first into a cesspit, finding the firmest pile of S#!T and declaring it the moral high ground.

Don't have much of an opinion on Kshama Sawant, but I'd like us to start talking a little more about who we are going to vote WITH along with who we are going to FOR. Sawant want's me to vote against 95% percent of the Black electorate, against the majority of the Latino/a electorate, against the majority of women, and judgementally and self-righteously apart from my LGBT brethren. I'd rather vote WITH them. I'm with her!

@26 I'm guessing you were a Kucinch supporter when he was still out running around.

What has Jill Stein done aside from grin for Green niceties every 4 years?

@26: I don't like Hillz, DWS, or the democratic apparatus at all. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool lefty. But there are so many more votes to the right of the democratic platform than to the left. Sorry. National elections are about coalition building which necessitates compromising your principles. I caucused for Bernie, donated, told all my friends, etc. I think he would have been a much better candidate. But I have no qualms at all about voting Hillary. I would encourage you 'far lefters' to be pragmatic -- but if not, fine, take your toys a go play elsewhere. Our best chance to win, esp. this election, is with a center-left coalition which will contain a lot of voters you and I find odious.

Pretentious and angry? Well, certainly pretentious. But angry? Far from it, dear. And as long as I have Slog, I'll never be lonely. (I'm not sure about your Buffalo Bill reference)

I've had experience with Ms. Sawant, and she's at best an empty suit. I'd probably still vote for her, if I lived in her district, as I like how she upends the staid council politics, but I wouldn't count her as any great intellectual. And the thought of *any* Seattle City Council Member making *any* sort of national endorsement just makes me giggle.

The real difference between the Greens and the Tea Party is that the Tea Party had/has corporate funding, while the Green Party seems to be mostly a hobby for the Sisters of Perpetual Outrage. They have good policy positions, but they use up all their oxygen desperately trying to prove that they are The Smartest Kids In The Room. (Which really makes me surprised that there has never been a Green on the Seattle City Council. It's the perfect venue for that sort of thing)

Or put another way:

"I refuse to believe that my singular, white experience equips me to make a better decision than 95% of Black people or a majority of women."

--Hillary does not need to earn my vote. The majorities of Black, Latino/a, female and LGBT voters who choose her as our nominee can have my vote for free!

@11 -- That's just more of your Dolchstosslegende Lite .. as expected.

Factions on the Right work together for power and influence despite sharp factional conflicts. In power, they "betray" each other because there's no alternative -- they have so many conflicting goals and motives -- and they're OK with that because they work together to achieve the achievable and settle for that.

@26. Oh fuck the extremist left. They are materially no different than than the far right. Petulant ignorant children who don't do any of the work. They were never going to be happy no matter what.

Their own messiah endorses Clinton and they immediacy call him a traitor or somehow bullied into the endorsement. Nothing was going to satisfy them. So we're going to route progress and civilization around them just like we're going to havre to do with the extremist right.

And JC, what's with the email 'scandal'? I've not seen anything remotely problematic reported from the wikileaks DWS shit (OMG, some folks there were pulling for Hillz -- SHOCKING to expect that the DNC would be behind long-time party mover and shaker!!!). Exactly the same situation as the 'classified' emails that Hillz supposedly lied about -- it ended up being a handful of innocuous messages with no real content. The more of this conspiracy-theory type shit I see out the far left the more I think you guys are full of gamer-gate style anti-woman sentiment.

@ 36, Is that some kinky German secks act? Sounds sehr heiss.

I don't agree with the notion that the various nutty Con factions are OK with each other and working together. If you read the interviews with Trump voters for example, they plainly state that they feel betrayed by the RepubliKKKan political class and want to destroy it. Their intraparty relations are even more kopf gegen schlagen than the liberals.

Long live political purity!
Let's vote for Nader like we did 16 years ago
The outcome will be just as good if not better with Trump at the driver's seat.

@17: yeah, I got that. The problem is that it's an near-completely irrelevant thing to say in the context of a question about the safety/efficacy of vaccinations. It's like being asked if you think cigarette smoking causes cancer and saying "well of course there's strong evidence that cigarettes are carcinogenic, but we need to investigate the conflicts of interest between the FDA regulators (from Monsanto!) and the pharmaceutical companies that profit off of cancer treatments." It's an intentionally misleading answer that serves no purpose other than to pander to crazy people and muddy the very clear facts.

There is zero, repeat zero evidence that there has been any sort of regulatory capture issue that has swept either a safety or efficacy concern about vaccines under the rug, and anyone making that assertion bears the burden of providing that evidence. There is rather a lot of evidence that the "concerns" about vaccinations have been ginned up from whole cloth by a group of hucksters and charlatans, and I expect a viable candidate for president of the united states to be smart enough to know that.

LOL!!! Pulez!! Hillary will easily win in November and as every expert has said before Trump is completely unelectable

Stop clutching your pearls in fear Merle!!

First, Clinton is more than just no-trump. Reproductive health, SCHIP, pro-labor and union, START treaty, Iran. A lifetime of service.

And more important than her specific accomplishments, or Sanders', or anyone's, is having any Democrat to ensure good appointments to federal agencies, departments and courts.

"Any Democrat" is going to appoint good people -- who think the government is more than something to just be dismantled -- to the DOJ, State Department, EEOC, EPA, NLRB, and more. "Any republican" is going to appoint climate-deniers to run the EPA, union-busters for the NLRB, and probably Cliven Bundy to the DOI.

These appointees, one way or the other, will set policy and law through administrative decisions and rule-making, which have more impact on our daily lives than most people would ever imagine. Through administrative decisions and rule-making, these appointees will set the direction of the country with respect to labor, consumer protections, the environment and more.

Oh, and as many people, have already mentioned, the US Supreme Court: Citizen's United, District of Columbia v. Heller, ATT v. Concepcion, Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Hobby Lobby, striking down medicaid expansion and more, all brought to you by the Roberts Court.

One might expect Hillarybots to be nicer to the 45% of Democrats who voted for Bernie. Hillary is losing in the polls and the Rahm Emanuel approach to party unity -- calling us "fucking retards" -- isn't going to soften our progressive hearts.

As for me personally, don't even bother trying. There are no circumstances under which I would help give that self-enriching, neoliberal, Wall Street/Big Health/MIC/billionaire/corporation-servicing, warmongering neocon shyster a mandate. (Newsflash: Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth Báthory, Isabella I of Castille? Women too! Also: Clarence Thomas, Bokassa, Mobutu, Papa Doc? Black men!) The only way the Dems are getting my vote is if the superdelegates flip and nominate the more viable candidate, Bernie ... and if he doesn't move one inch to the right. Otherwise, I'm voting for Jill Stein (who is not an anti-vaxer, by the way, but who just has issues with using enlisted personnel as guinea pigs for dangerous experimental vaccines without their informed consent). One of the ways you build a viable third party is to vote for their candidates and to accept spoilers as the cost for a few elections. And if the top two parties make no move to eliminate the spoiler effect by replacing first-past-the-post elections with something more representative, well ... one might see that as further confirmation that they are united in representing the beneficiaries of the status quo -- corporations and billionaires. So please, go ahead and call me a "fucking retard." Your logic and charm are lost on me.

@40:

And an important point I have yet to see any fervent GP member address: let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Stein, through some unforeseen miracle, did somehow manage to win the election. Then what? Do they honestly believe Congress, comprised as it will be exclusively of members from the two major parties (with perhaps one or two Independents scattered in their midst) is going undergo some sort of spontaneous collective epiphany and all decide to follow her policies in lock-step? Because, that's what they've done for years whenever a member of the opposing party wins the White House? And what is their plan at the state or local level? Is the idea that a Stein Presidency will somehow translate into an instantaneous resurgence of Ecotopian Idealism in legislatures across the land? Are their 100 or so city council, school board, and public utilities board members suddenly going to rise up and storm across the countryside bringing their victorious message to the great unwashed masses, who will, having suddenly seen the light of superior reason, follow along in some sort of populist groundswell that sweeps through the halls of power like a proverbial tsunami? What will be left in their wake?

I mean, seriously, have they even THOUGHT about any of this? My sense is that not only have they not, but that they don't seem to be capable of doing so. Big picture, long-term strategic planning and structure building just doesn't seem to be part of their political tool box, so far as I can tell.

@26: The far left actually votes???

@45:

Serious question here: what are people like you on the far Left going to do when, come November, Clinton wins the general election? How will you have served your cause by deliberately locking yourself out of the political process? You won't have any skin in the game, as the saying goes, you won't have a seat at the table, you'll have no elected representation at the national or even state level to exert even a modicum of leverage, and the Democrats won't be in any way beholden to you as a result. So, what's the next step? I keep hearing the term "party building" bandied about, but the Greens have had 30-plus years to engage in that and it's literally won them as of today a grand total of 100 low-level offices scattered in a mere handful of states. What is the GP actively doing to change that?

@48, I don't think @45 is a far left idealogue; he's just an angry person who hopefully won't get to the point of buying a gun.

As for Sawant, she's not an idiot; she's an ideologue. She's doing good stuff in Seattle because although this city is called "liberal", it's just conservative according to how conservative used to be defined, which is now called moderate. It needs Sawant.

Sawant just lost any and all future votes of mine. Her own position of privilege will protect her during a Trump administration. Everyone else - you're on your own.

Ah, some people have the brain of a pea. At this point, those that don't vote for Hillary are voting for Trump. Even if they don't cast a ballot and select Hillary, then they are voting for Trump. What kind of idiot would vote for a horrible person such as Trump I wonder. Please don't answer that question.

@2, no Clinton is not fucking this up. The voters are. Put the blame where it belongs. Accountability.

Am just curious who paid for her flight out there.

She's objectively pro-Trump, and pro-fascism and misery and all that comes with it, because chaos, breakdown, and suffering are good for politicians who take the position that the system is fundamentally broken.

It's morally bankrupt, but it makes good practical sense for an ambitious politician.