Emails have leaked showing that the inner circle of Democrats in charge of the party were supporting Hillary, and some had discussed how to stop Bernie from getting the nomination. 
It’s true that Hillary spent years cultivating support among Democrats (which is what you’re supposed to do if you’re running for President). All the leaders of the party were in favor of her.
Bernie comes along and decides to run and changes into a Democrat from an independent. The insiders are kind of upset about that (as probably any group would be if someone who was never a member suddenly joined and announced that he wanted to take the group over).
They talked bad about him in private emails and otherwise discussed campaign strategy, because they were worried that if he got the nomination, they would lose in November. (I disagree with their analysis, but you can understand why they think that way.) One staffer even discussed attacking him for being an atheist.
Now, I’ve talked bad about people in private emails, too. Everyone does. Glad no one sees them. Nothing illegal about that.
However, I have seen nothing to say that they “fixed” the primaries as some of the Bernie people are saying. Were they pro-Hillary? Of course. Did they do political stuff to try to get the nomination for her? Yes, this is politics. Politics happens in politics.
Having the people in power support someone you disagree with does not make an election “fixed.”
Further, it doesn’t look like anyone did anything other than talk. There was no attack on Bernie about religion, for instance.
Part of the problem comes from people who don’t really understand politics. I’ve railed against Bernie supporters who don’t know the voting laws (but think they do), who don’t realize that Superdelegates aren’t “illegal”, who don’t comprehend that the way a party chooses its candidate does not have to be open to the public.
Wasserman-Schulz should still resign over this (EDIT: And she did, a few hours after I posted this. I am mighty!) This is not the image the Democrats want. The party leadership should be neutral during primaries. But it’s not illegal. (I’ll bet the RNC emails are even worse, as they really didn’t want Trump to get the nomination.)
I’m willing to look at any evidence that says that something illegal occurred. Haven’t seen it yet.
by Guest Blogger Andrea Phillips
So here’s the thing: I support Hillary. I support her, I am all-in, I fucking love her and I love that she was my Senator and I love about 90% of the policies she plans to put into place. She is for raising minimum wages. She is for background checks for guns. She is for LGBTQ equality. She is for abortion rights. 
She is for campaign finance reform. She is for paid family leave. She is for universal health care. She is for clean energy and disability benefits and a better, more compassionate world.
She is a woman who has literally made it her life’s work to improve the lives of women. She has evolved and grown to care about issues around sexuality and people of color, and from where I sit, changing your mind when you get new information is a strength, not a weakness.
Most of all, I love her because she knows how to compromise. This is the thing about a better world: you can’t will it into place single-handedly. You can’t drag the half our nation that are Republicans kicking and screaming into a socialist paradise. It’s exactly as unfair to them as creating a Christian theocracy would be to us. Compromise. That means sometimes you won’t get your progressive way, yes. But I’ll take incremental change over trench warfare while the world burns any day of the week.
I don’t think she’s a saint nor is she some progressive avatar here to lead us to a utopia. She is a human being making human choices in a problematic environment. But I hate that I even have to say that. And I hate that I can’t even say how much I fucking love her as a candidate because of the abuse I’m expecting to get over it, not even from trolls out for lulz, but from my own family. I feel like I don’t even get to have an opinion in public. This is the climate Bernie made.
Folks, “I’m voting for Jill Stein because the other candidate isn’t progressive enough” is exactly the kind of thinking that got Canada almost a decade of Harper. Go on, ask them how that went.
I’ll be waiting here.
Andrea Phillips is an award-winning transmedia writer, game designer and author. She has worked on projects such as iOS fitness games Zombies, Run! and The Walk, The Maester’s Path for HBO’s Game of Thrones, human rights game America 2049, and the independent commercial ARG Perplex City. Her projects have variously won the Prix Jeunesse Interactivity Prize, a Broadband Digital award, a Canadian Screen Award, a BIMA, the Origins Vanguard Innovation Award, and others. Her book A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling is used to teach digital storytelling at universities around the world.
You can find Andrea on Twitter at @andrhia. I mean, if you like that sort of thing.
Get out the popcorn. This just keeps getting better. Let’s look at the third day of the GOP Hatefest. I swear, if I were writing a satire of the extremism of the party, it would be less ridiculous than this.
Republicans spent much of their time seriously debating Hillary Clinton, with the two options being “Should we jail her, or just kill her?” 
Apologists for Melania Trump’s stolen speech continued to ignore the obvious theft, with one Brony even arguing with a straight face that since a character on My Little Pony has said similar things, then clearly there was nothing wrong with plagiarism. But hey, you have to admit that Melania’s speech certainly made her sound like a First Lady — That First Lady being Michelle Obama.
Trump, whose catch-phrase is “You’re fired,” did not fire Meredith McIver, the woman who wrote Melania’s speech. What is interesting though is that the writer works for Trump in his business, meaning that it is illegal for him to be paying her with his business’ money to to work for the campaign. But is anyone surprised at that? What makes this story even better is that some media outlets are claiming that Meredith McIver is not a real person but another alias Trump uses, like “John Miller.”
Ted Cruz got most of the attention last night when he spoke and refused to endorse Trump, telling people instead to “vote their conscience.” Who would have thought that the tons of insults Trump threw at Cruz during the primaries would cause Cruz to think that maybe this guy wasn’t fit to be President?
Apparently Ted, unlike Chris Christie, survived the primary season with his balls intact. Christie, meanwhile, is having a fit over the fact that he wasn’t picked for Vice President. (Insert Nelson laugh)
But my favorite part of the convention was when right-wing nutcase Laura Ingraham ended her speech with the nazi salute. Seriously, this actually happened. “Have you seen my friend Kyle? He’s about this tall. We need to seek Kyle. Seek Kyle! Seek Kyle!”
Highlights from day two of the Republican convention:
Republicans one by one helped keep the Melania plagiarism scandal afloat by insisting that it never happened instead of taking responsibility and moving on. That’s the current Republican way of dealing with things, of course — deny facts over and over again and hope people don’t notice. The press certainly did, with Chuck Todd being amazed at how incompetent the Trump campaign was at handling this.
The band Third Eye Blind trolled the GOP by accepting an invitation to play at some party and then refusing to play any of their hits — except the one about the gay kid who commits suicide because he’s bullied. They then ended their set with a plea for acceptance which, of course, was met with boos from the bigots in the audience. When one fan there tweeted that she had never been so disappointed, the band tweeted back “Good.”
The Republican platform is being celebrated, and it includes a passage that calls for the reversal of environmental standards, and calls coal a “clean” energy. Coming soon from the GOP: War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.
At the actual convention, speakers spent most of their time trying to paint Hillary as the most evil person in the world because, hey, the alternative would be trying to come up with something nice to say about Trump.
Chris Christie claimed that Hillary helped Boko Haram kidnap girls because you know, anything that happens in other parts of the world while a Democrat is President is entirely their fault, as opposed to say when the largest attack in history to happen on American soil occurs in the middle of New York City — that’s totally not the fault of Republicans in charge.
Trump’s top adviser for veteran’s affairs called for Hillary Clinton to be executed for treason, and of course, the GOP cheered him on.
The RNC co-chair got up and called President Bill Clinton a rapist. Yeah, good, set the standard for class, people.
Donald Trump Jr. then rattled off a bunch of lies which everyone cheered, the strangest of which was that Hillary Clinton wanted to get rid of medicare. The Washington Post fact-checker politely reported that this “appears to have no factual basis” — which is a nice way of saying “liar, liar, pants on fire.”
Seriously, which party has spent 50 years trying to get rid of medicare? Let’s see, was it the Greens? No… I’m sure it will come to me.
Political conventions are inevitably boring, because the campaigns turn them into a four-night free commercial for their candidates. They’re meant to show unity in the party and to brag about accomplishments and make promises for the future. 
Everything is safe, planned, and approved, and nobody wants any surprises.
Surprise!
The rules are once again being rewritten as we see the further destruction of the Republican party at the hands of the egomanic Trump monster.
My wife and I watched a little and came up with a great new drinking game: Spot the non-white delegate! Every once in a while, we thought we found one but it always turned out to just be a reporter. We remained sober all night.
Anyway, let’s summarize the first night:
Before it began, the Cleveland police asked that open carry not be allowed in the area even though Ohio law permits it. This makes absolute sense but of course would expose the Republicans as complete hypocrites. As it was, the law is still there and people are walking around outside of the convention guns in hand — while the police nervously stand by. We’ll see if it remains peaceful but it’s generally not the image you want for your convention.
Then the convention opens and absolutely none of the previous Republican Presidents are in attendance, nor are a huge percentage of Republican Senators and representatives.
It starts with a huge floor fight where some of the states walked out in protest while trying to keep Trump from being nominated. Yeah, that looks good on television. Unity!
Republican Steve King — the guy from Ohio who has a Confederate flag on his desk — then talked about how all civilization is thanks to white people. I am not making this up.
Some old TV star gets up on stage after calling Hillary Clinton a “cunt” and another one explains how Obama is a Muslim. Hey, come on, don’t criticize them for being TV stars. They’re just as qualified to be President as the Republican nominee.
Trump walks out surrounded by dry ice smoke, like he’s a professional wrestler about to enter the ring, and to the tune of “We Are the Champions” — a song by a gay man that the party would like to remove all rights from.
Then Trump’s wife gives a speech that copies almost word-for-word the speech Michelle Obama gave eight years previously, and that’s what makes the news.
Republicans are thrilled. Better to have that as the headline than all of the terrible things that preceded it. Maybe that was the plan all along?
Nah. That implies Trump has a plan.
Donald Trump announced that his running mate would be Mike Pence. We’ll discuss Pence’s neanderthal positions on creationism, religion, and logic later, but for now, let’s look at what happened when they rolled out their logo. It was immediately satirized in great ways:
Comments include:
“When you turn the Trump/Pence logo upside down, it literally looks like a handjob.”
“When a T and a P love each other very much and want to start a campaign…”
“I guarantee you there’s no problem with the size of the T.”
“This logo is not allowed in certain Indiana pizzerias.”
Thanks to the internet, it only took one day for them to remove the logo from their web page and scrap its use. What a well-run campaign this is!*
*that was sarcasm
When Bernie Sanders announced his long-shot candidacy last year, he made it clear that he wanted to emphasize issues that the other Democrats were ignoring: income inequality, universal health care, increasing the minimum wage, campaign finance reform…
He may not have gotten the nomination, but I think he has done much better than even he expected.
He’s shown you can call yourself a socialist and move to the left and still get votes; you don’t have to suck up to Wall Street to raise enough money to run a campaign; and it is possible to energize a large portion of the American voting populace even if you don’t have a typical candidate profile. (Honestly, I think if Bernie looked and sounded like George Clooney, he’d have the nomination. Charisma does matter.)
But some of Bernie’s more idealistic (and naive) supporters can’t take it, which was to be expected. After all, they had shown in the past that they didn’t understand how primaries work, didn’t understand election laws, didn’t understand how fundraising worked, and otherwise made the rest of us Bernie supporters look bad.
“He’s sold out!” they claim. “He is betraying everything he stood for by endorsing Hillary. He lied to us!”
Well, no. He said from day one that he would endorse Hillary if she won the nomination. Had he not done so, then he would be be a liar.
Then they post dishonest memes like this one. 
Talk about being a liar! Bernie never said any of those things. Those kind of quotes come from radical Bernie followers. Oh, and also from Trump supporters, who love the “useful idiots” on the left doing their work for them.
“He’s just another politician!” the Bernie Bots scream. Yes, of course. That’s how he became a Senator. That’s how he has been able to get stuff done. That’s how any politician gets stuff done, since the ancient days of Rome and Greece. Bernie, like any good politician, has made deals. He’s voted for bills he didn’t like that much because it was the best he could accomplish at the time. He’s supporting the candidate who is the best even if she is not perfect. That’s how you accomplish things in politics. He knows how to play the game.
And if you don’t play the game, you can’t win.
Politics without principles is always bad. But principles without politics gets you nowhere.
The Bernie Bots just don’t get it. Playing the game is how he got his issues into the Democratic platform. It’s why he waited so long before endorsing Hillary — because he wanted to force her to embrace these positions.
The Bots should be happy. He won. He broke down walls, opened doors, and set the stage for future accomplishments.
Bernie supporters: You may not have won the war, but you won some major battles. And that is something to celebrate.
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