Cleveland had a good week, especially on the transgender front

There has been a lot of praise for the way Cleveland handled the Republican National Convention. Everything seemed to go smoothly and many of the visitors, either first timers to the city or people whose last visit was decades ago, seemed surprised to find that it was not the gritty, crime-filled scene that they anticipated to see but was instead a pleasant place with friendly and helpful people and many things for visitors to do and see. There have been long-standing plans to improve the downtown and all those efforts were pushed to completion because of the convention. The city had put its best face forward and it showed.
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The Democrats start getting their act together [Updated with full speeches]

The first day of the Democratic convention got off to a rousing start. As I am still away from home and have had to do a lot of other stuff, I could not watch the speeches but did find time to read about them online. It looked like the proceedings had a somewhat rough early start with some of the Sanders supporters booing Hillary Clinton’s name and some even picking up the Republican chant of “lock her up”.
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“If you feel it, it is true”

John Oliver reviewed the Republican convention and was astounded, as many of us were, at how the party has entered into a fact-free world. It recalls how a member of the Bush administration (suspected to be Karl Rove) derided those of us he described as being part of the “reality-based community”, saying “That’s not the way the world really works anymore, We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”. Of course that was rubbish then and this belief that raw power could achieve anything led to hubris on an enormous scale and has got the nation stuck in one unwinnable war after another,
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Great moments in parking

Reader G. sent me the link to this video of someone trying and failing miserably to parallel park and giving up after spending more that five minutes, even though the space was so large you could have parked an ocean liner there. I have seen and posted videos like this in the past but this is absolutely the worst I have seen. It is excruciating to watch.
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Neoconservative warmongers are enthusiastic about Clinton

Rani Khalek reminds us about something that many of us already knew and that is that Hillary Clinton is a neoconservative war hawk. Further evidence of that is that pretty much the entire neoconservatives and Republican foreign policy are gung-ho about her, seeing her as even more likely than the Obama to threaten to use of force against other nations, even though the Obama administration has hardly been restrained in its willingness.
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The Clinton-Kaine ticket

The choice of Virginia senator Tim Kaine to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate was not really a surprise. She was unlikely to pick the other names being dropped (Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker) because they are all senators from states that have Republican governors which means that if Clinton wins, the appointee who replaces the senator will be a Republican. Since the Senate has been so obstructionist of Barack Obama, you have to think that Clinton would not take any action that harms her chances of getting a Democratic majority.
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The Republican convention fiasco

I have been catching up on the news while traveling and it seems to me like the Republican convention was, by most measures, a rage-filled fiasco. While the Trump campaign clearly wanted to portray the nation as going to hell with the only possible salvation occurring in Donald Trump being elected president, their message got lost in the mistakes, often self-inflicted, that riddled the proceedings.
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