Now that Bernie Sanders has endorsed Hillary Clinton, and I see this damned ad at “Progressive” sites…

…

as I hear some smattering of Bernie lovers still a’loathing Hillary Clinton…

a question…

Did candidates Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee ever get around to endorsing Hillary Clinton?  (Chafee had, apparently, earlier endorsed Sanders.)

Observation number one:  If, say, Clarence Thomas had made the same remarks about, say, Hillary Clinton as Ruth Bader Ginsberg did regarding Donald Trump… what would you, Mr/Ms Democrat / Liberal (and never mind what, precisely, you think of Hillary Clinton) be saying right now?

Yes, I know… Trump is just that unprecedented, as Ginsberg would never say that about — oh– George W or Jeb Bush, but…
Yes, I think Ginsberg should tread not at all into these partisan waters until she retires.

Observation number two:  See the same thing about the relationship between rhetorical excesses and the lone gun killer in Dallas… See, say, the immediate response on Giffords to align it to Sarah Palin, as pondered by Chuck Klosterman’s I Wear the Black Hat.

A blast from the past… a post at this very blog from April 2014, concerning candidate Bob Niemeyer who, based on losing two Republican primaries, I suppose can mean we can call him a “perennial candidate”…

…….

Hm.

Bob Niemeyer, a mechanical engineer, says his top goal is defending the U.S. Constitution—and would do so by rewriting it to create a fourth branch of the federal government, an executive called “the principal.” In Niemeyer’s redesign of the Constitution, the principal could veto any financial decision by the president or Congress. Niemeyer’s choice for the job: Donald Trump.

I’m sure that’s what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

……………

Well, if things go wrong for Trump in the coming November elections…
Given that Trump stomped his way through Oregon, why didn’t everyone line up for Niemeyer (Trump’s Biggest Fan) in the 2016 Republican gubernatorial nominating election?

I watched hordes of twenty-something year olds converge in roughly the same proximate location, hunting down Pokemon creatures whose images had been super-imposed on their cell-phones onto images of real space in front of them.

The Pokemon creatures are dancing in front of you right now, and someone’s zapping them by scratching on their cell phones.

Someone was talking about thinking of the song “We Didn’t Start the Fire“, in reference to thinking about current horrors — Oh, Orlando, Minnesota, and Dallas.  Sure,  And Pokemon Go is either a douser or opiate.  And, of course, we have been here before on mass popular crazes… which bring us all together, except for those who it doesn’t, or… is that great moment for a generation, unless it’s forgotten by the time the next one comes around…

It is worth noting that Kevin Durant did not start out playing for the Oklahoma City Thunder.  He was drafted second by the Seattle Sonics, a team which traded its entire roster and operations to the Oklahoma City Thunder, and in doing so folded — or, so it seems written in the fine print — was placed in hiatus.  (The curious thing on being drafted for fans of a major league team in Seattle was to see this promising young rookie and know there was a better than even chance he would be playing elsewhere next year.  The other curious thing is that once some team reappears in Seattle, they will claim the past legacies of their 1970s championship and that Gary Payton player and even the first year of Kevin Durant…)

Westbrook follows Durant in leaving Oklahoma City, meaning — it is believed — the end of any decent team in the city of Oklahoma City, and a curious “ugh” on the order of Lebron James joining with two other big names in forming a “Big 3” in Miami to, ultimately, win 2 championships and lose 2 others.

But now he’s played for three different logos / entities, and there is no link left in the NBA to the last Seattle Sonics one.  Ergo, fans in Oklahoma City should feel less badly than fans in Cleveland about James.

But basketball has gotten to annoy me as a sport, and I’ve diced it up to simply being that the limited roster leads to less of a sense of continuity and cohesion through the years, so goes Durant, so goes “Mr. Miami Heat” Dwayne Wade, so goes it all.

Sort of was annoyed in reading this article in today’s “Willamette Week”… A Brief History of Beefs involving a popular twitter troll artist… and we get this…

This was technically caused by a miscommunication when Banks reacted, shall we say, passionately to a fake online article that quoted Palin as saying slavery wasn’t forced on African-Americans—which, to be fair, doesn’t sound like too much of a stretch for Palin.

Um.  I’m not a fan of Sarah Palin to say the least, but… it kind of is a stretch for Palin.  To say that in particular.  This is different from, say, Tina Fey and “I can see Russia from my house”, and there’s plenty that she might say that she didn’t that you can throw in that “not too much a stretch” category, and probably some in the way of racial coding, but… to say this is just to provide your liberal bonafides of the problem with Palin while missing some nuances in creating a caricature of of this caricature.

And understand a chronology from Palin to Trump, starting with Pat Buchanan.  Pat Buchanan you ask “Did he really write a syndicated editorial entitled ‘Did Hitler Want War’?”  Palin:  “Did she really just quote Westbrook Pegler?”  And then Trump… “Did he just steal a Star of David image around Hillary Clinton from white supremacists?  Well…