So I'm listening to Thom Hartmann yesterday, as I always try to do, and this woman who is a Bernie supporter calls in to talk about supporting Jill Stein going forward. Thom goes off on her about how Jill Stein is a 'professional' and 'vanity' candidate. He then says Stein won't release her tax returns giving the impression that she is just in it for the money.

The latest attempt to undermine third party dalliance - I mean voting - voting is under way, as exemplified by the NYT this morning:

“In the summer before an election, that’s generally when a third-party candidate will look their best,”

From Politico:

New Clinton email fight: Bill Clinton's schedules

Republicans have opened a new front in the sprawling legal war over the release of State Department emails: a battle to open up thousands of pages of schedules for former President Bill Clinton.

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In case you didn't get it. This is SATIRE.

Donald Rumsfeld endorsed Hillary Clinton earlier today, saying “I believe Secretary Clinton is the steady hand we need in the various wars we are fighting”. This was greeted by the DNC as yet another sign that moderate, mainstream, responsible Republicans are deserting their toxic nominee.

Rumsfeld, who served as defense secretary under George W. Bush, is remembered for his commitment to sharing enduring freedoms with unfortunate countries requiring an assist to vault into the age of democracy. “I believe Hillary Clinton understands American exceptionalism and how much the world needs us” Rumsfeld is quoted as saying.

Though an unlikely endorsement, this is not the first time Hillary Clinton and Donald Rumsfeld have found themselves on the same side of a political issue. In 2002, Hillary Clinton crossed the aisle in a courageous vote to deliver the benefits of liberty to the people of Iraq, via the agency of the US armed forces. Donald Rumsfeld was the defense minister at the time. This is a “known known”.

Spokespersons for the Clinton campaign and Mr. Rumsfeld said the two had developed mutual respect and a close rapport over the years. “They both call Chicago home and share a certain mid-western simplicity. Also a common work ethic. They work very hard. Mr. Rumsfeld has a standing desk.” said the Clinton spokesperson. “This is what you might call an unknown unknown”, a spokesperson replied when asked why Mr. Rumsfled had switched his support.

With Mr. Rumsfeld’s endorsement, the Clinton campaign has been reluctantly endorsed by dozens of senior Republicans. Staffers speculated as to whether former vice-president Dick Cheney would join them. “If Cheney were to come on board, that would soften up a lot of formerly unreachable Republicans. We will always have our differences with them, but on some things, such as keeping America safe, we can agree that Secretary Clinton will be the better choice” a senior DNC official who requested anonymity said.

The biggest possible prize remains elusive, the Clinton campaign continues to pursue the highly coveted Kissinger endorsement. The pursuit continues despite recent revelations that the Carter administration was incensed at Mr. Kissinger’s 1978 trip to Argentina. On that occasion, Mr. Kissing publicly praised the military junta responsible for thousands of “disappearances”.

I found Hillary's speech yesterday interesting in that she sounded very much like Bernie Sanders in some ways. Of particular interest was the section of her speech where she lambasted wall street and the bankers and promised to rain them in and tax them properly.

Nobody much thought the Americans would bomb Nagasaki. Not even after they'd crisped Hiroshima. The Americans. Because Nagasaki, it was even less a "military" target, than had been Hiroshima. And, it was hard to fly the airplanes in there. Finally, also, there were all those Catholics, in the city. For more than 400 years, Nagasaki, it had been the principal redoubt, in Japan, of the alien faith of Catholicism. The place, it was veritably crawling, with Catholics. And, it was presumed, the Americans, they would be more averse, to frying co-religionists, than those Japanese adhering to their own, native, heathenist faiths.

The first problem with these assumptions, is that, there in 1945, many of the Americans, they regarded Catholicism as a faith every bit as strange and dangerous and deranged, as Shinto or Buddhism, or whatever heathenism it was the Japanese were always on about.

Less than 20 years before, Al Smith, candidate for US president, he had been beaten like a gong by Herbert Hoover, not least because so many of the Americans believed that Smith, as a Catholic, once in the Oval Office, he would immediately deliver the keys to the American kingdom unto the Vatican, which would then commence to forcibly seed the land with popery, and from sea to shining sea.

Four years before that, Smith had been blocked from receiving the nomination by members of his own party, the Democrats, as convention delegates from the Southern states, many literally members of the Ku Klux Klan, declared they'd be damned, if they would surrender the party to a man in thrall to the Whore Of Babylon, united with Jews, Freemasons, and—yea, verily—Satan hisself, in a fiendish plot to destroy everything White and Right, in Amurica.

Nagasaki was actually more or less founded as a Catholic city, by a daimyo who'd gone over to the Western weirdness, not so long after white people had first bulled their way into Japan, back in the mid-1500s.

With the bullers, came their priests. Who hopped around the islands like fleas. The various head-cutters then vying for power in Japan, they vacillated in their treatment of these pests: sometimes they were given free rein, sometimes they were crucified. Eventually it was decided some of the white people, and some of their pestiferous priests, could remain in Japan—but only stuffed into a couple remote holes, one of which was Nagasaki.

By the time August 9, 1945, rolled around, the Urakami district of Nagasaki, it had been considered the "heart and soul" of Japanese Catholicism, and, indeed, of Catholicism throughout the Far East, since the sixteenth century.

And that district, it was ground zero, for the Americans' atomic bomb.

The Americans. They blew it all. Away.

This went out yesterday afternoon to the email list:

Political pundits and the billionaire class are watching very closely to see what Bernie supporters do next. Some of them might be tempted to believe our political revolution is toast.

They want our extraordinary phone banking, door knocking, and grassroots organizing efforts to stop. They want us to get discouraged. They want to vanquish our movement once and for all.

We aren't going to let that happen.