GOP's - RNC Opening Night - Opening Acts - Chaos Rolls~~~

July 18, 2016 10:57 AM

CLEVELAND (CBSNewYork/AP) — A video posted online shows “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert taking over the microphone on stage in Cleveland in a “Hunger Games” themed prank at the site of the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday.
The video shows Colbert behind the podium saying it’s his honor “to hereby launch and begin the 2016 Republican hungry for power games” and banging a gavel. A man who appears to be security then confronts Colbert, who says “I know I’m not supposed to be up here, but let’s be honest, neither is Donald Trump” before being led off stage.
Colbert dressed like “Hunger Games” emcee Caesar Flickerman for the spoof, complete with a blue wig.
He’s worn the same getup on his show in a recurring bit about the presidential campaign.
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2016/07/18/stephen-colbert-rnc-hunger-games/

Politics
Jul 18 2016, 9:50 am ET
Anti-Trump Delegates Make Their Last, Last Stand
by Leigh Ann Caldwell
CLEVELAND, Ohio — After suffering a stinging defeat last week in the tedious Republican Convention Rules Committee, delegates who are opposed to Donald Trump are planning a final stand-off for Monday, the first day of the convention.
When the convention opens Monday afternoon at 1:00 p.m. ET, among the first order of business will be to pass the rules governing the convention, which a 112-member committee of delegates hashed out last week.
The anti-Trump delegates now plan to use the support they have among the full body of delegates to push their demands, organizers of the effort tell NBC News.

The Trump campaign and the Republican Party, who are opposed to the efforts, say they are prepared for a variety of efforts by anti-Trump delegates. And Ben Ginsberg, convention rules expert, said that it's going to be "very difficult" for the rebel delegates to be successful.
Delegates who don't want to vote for Trump have sided with activists who believe delegates are free to vote their conscience. Together the groups have been working in concert to pass their respective, but closely intertwined agendas.

The leaders of the movement said they have the support of a majority of delegates in seven states to force the rules passed last week be thrown out. And what they want is the 2016 rules to be void and the convention to be governed by the 2012 rules.

Why do they want this?                
Because this year's Rules Committee successfully passed a rule that explicitly says that delegates are bound. But under the 2012 rules, delegates are bound outright, giving them cover if they wanted to vote their conscience.
Current delegates couldn't vote for whatever candidate they'd like unless they broke party rules. And many Republican delegates do not want to break party rules, which doing so has repercussions from within the party.
If those rules are thrown out, then the convention would most likely be governed by the 2012 rules that doesn't say outright that delegates are bound, giving delegates room to vote as if they were unbound, proponents argue. (Republican Party leaders and many delegates interpret the rules to say delegates are bound).
The last time the rules explicitly said delegates were bound was during the 1976 convention when party officials put the measure in the rules to protect President Gerald Ford from insurgent candidate, California Governor Ronald Reagan.

A coalition of delegates backing Donald Trump and members of the Republican Party (while all delegates are Republican not all delegate are members of the Republican Party and some oppose the party because they think it's too heavy-handed) defeated a series of measures in the convention Rules Committee last week, greatly diminishing their chances of success.
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/anti-trump-delegates-make-their-last-last-stand-n611316

GOP Convention Opens in Cleveland

Republican speakers twist facts on immigration, crime, Benghazi and employment.

By Lori Robertson  

Summary

CLEVELAND — The 2016 Republican National Convention opened with the first day’s theme “Make America Safe Again.” But in some cases the facts weren’t safe from distortion:

• Two security contractors at the CIA annex in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, repeated their claim that they were told to “stand down” and not help Americans under attack. But multiple official reports say such an order was never issued.
  
• The sister of a slain Border Patrol agent said President Obama has left “border patrol agents thinly equipped,” and undermanned. In fact, both funding and staffing have increased under Obama.
  
• A Senate candidate claimed “neighborhoods have become more violent” under President Obama. In fact, the violent crime rate has gone down 20 percent under Obama, as of the most recent FBI statistics for 2014.
  
• Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Rep. Michael McCaul both wrongly claimed that Hillary Clinton supports “open borders.” She supported a bill that would have created a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally, but it also would have increased border security.
  
• Giuliani said that Clinton “advocated for the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya” and should be “accountable” for the country’s chaos. But he failed to mention that Trump, at the time, also supported the ouster of Gadhafi.
  
• Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions claimed that wages “have fallen,” when they’re up under Obama. He blamed immigration for a low labor force participation rate, when it’s mainly the result of demographics, including the aging of baby boomers.
  

For the entire first nights review >
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/gop-convention-opens-in-cleveland/ 

4EVER2 wrote:

GOP Convention Opens in Cleveland

Republican speakers twist facts on immigration, crime, Benghazi and employment.

By Lori Robertson  

Summary

CLEVELAND — The 2016 Republican National Convention opened with the first day’s theme “Make America Safe Again.” But in some cases the facts weren’t safe from distortion:

• Two security contractors at the CIA annex in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, repeated their claim that they were told to “stand down” and not help Americans under attack. But multiple official reports say such an order was never issued.
  
• The sister of a slain Border Patrol agent said President Obama has left “border patrol agents thinly equipped,” and undermanned. In fact, both funding and staffing have increased under Obama.
  
• A Senate candidate claimed “neighborhoods have become more violent” under President Obama. In fact, the violent crime rate has gone down 20 percent under Obama, as of the most recent FBI statistics for 2014.
  
• Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Rep. Michael McCaul both wrongly claimed that Hillary Clinton supports “open borders.” She supported a bill that would have created a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally, but it also would have increased border security.
  
• Giuliani said that Clinton “advocated for the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya” and should be “accountable” for the country’s chaos. But he failed to mention that Trump, at the time, also supported the ouster of Gadhafi.
  
• Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions claimed that wages “have fallen,” when they’re up under Obama. He blamed immigration for a low labor force participation rate, when it’s mainly the result of demographics, including the aging of baby boomers.
  

For the entire first nights review >
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/gop-convention-opens-in-cleveland/ 

And despite all of the congressional hearings - the millions of wasted tax dollars on the 'NO PROOF' that Benghazi was anything more then what it ended up being - that the FBI's years of going over all of those emails and their end report has been given and testimony before congress - these speakers are going to stand before these delegates and regurgitate the lies - lies - lies as if none of those utter BS have not been proven FALSE!

‘Art of the Deal’ Ghostwriter Tony Schwartz Describes Trump as a ‘Sociopath’ in New Yorker Article
by Menachem Rephun    
In an interview this month with The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Donald Trump’s “Art of the Deal” ghostwriter Tony Schwartz expressed grave reservations about his role in shaping Trump’s image as a brash, take-no-prisoners real estate tycoon. In the interview, Schwartz, who spent a significant amount of time with Trump while working on the 1987 bestseller, described the reality star-turned-presumptive Republican nominee as a “sociopath” who could instigate World War II if elected.“I put lipstick on a pig,” Schwartz, a former New York Times reporter and Newsweek associate editor, lamented in the interview. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” Schwartz added that he genuinely believes that “if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.” Schwartz reserved criticism for Trump’s temper, flagrant narcissism, and short attention span with regard to any subject other than himself. “It’s impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes,” Schwartz was quoted saying, noting that this “fundamental” aspect of Trump’s character is not fully understood by the public at large. “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” Schwartz added.
http://jpupdates.com/2016/07/19/art-of-the-deal-ghostwriter-tony-schwartz-describes-trump-as-a-sociopath-in-new-yorker-article/

Donald Trump's son said that the family's greenskeeper missed his sister's wedding to work.
Brooke Binkowski  6 hours ago
Claim: Donald Trump Jr. tweeted that the family's greens keeper missed his own sister's wedding to work.
true 
Example: [Collected via Twitter, July 2016]
Origin: In June 2012, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted that the family's greens keeper missed his sister's wedding in order to work:

Donald Trump Jr.Verified account ‏@DonaldJTrumpJr 22 Jun 2012
At dinner w our greenskeeper who missed his sister's wedding 2 work (luv loyalty 2 us) "No big deal hopefully she'll have another someday"

The tweet lay dormant for several years until 19 July 2016, when Trump Jr. spoke in support of his father, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. As the younger Trump received praise and some accusations of plagiarism for his speech, someone found and began circulating the old post, which quickly picked up steam on social media. Whether Trump Jr. was describing an actual event is not known. The tweet, however, is real.
http://www.snopes.com/donald-trump-jr-tweet/ 

5 takeaways from Donald Trump's convention speech

After a week of missteps, it seems the Republican nominee is finally learning how to play the game.
 By Glenn Thrush

07/22/16 04:00 AM EDT

CLEVELAND — The bar was low, and Donald Trump cleared it.
 After days at one of the most mismanaged conventions in recent history — and less than 24 hours after his rival Ted Cruz refused to endorse him — the Republican nominee delivered an impassioned and conventional plea to restore to America “the respect that we deserve.”

But even the most competent, professional, pre-written and telepromptered address of Trump’s career couldn’t free him from his demographic and partisan cul de sac. It was the Trump stump on steroids. The most important speech of the candidate’s life began with an inviting crossover appeal to Blue America — and ended up as a standard red-meat message to his overwhelmingly white base.

It was a raw, at times powerful, at times meandering — and really, really long — monotone broadcast of the pessimism that unites his divided party: build the wall on the Mexico border, restore “law and order” in America’s bloody inner cities, fight Hillary Clinton’s (phantom) effort to “abolish” the Second Amendment, destroy ISIL without deploying troops.
 Whether it will be enough to help the most unpopular presidential nominee in modern history to move beyond his base remains very much in doubt.

Here are five takeaways.

1. What a bummer. Trump’s closest advisers often compare him to Ronald Reagan. But the candidate who took the stage Thursday night was less the sunny President Ronnie who summoned the optimism to rally a dispirited country in 1980 than the dour California governor of the 1960s whose dark vision of national decay earned him a gloomier-than-Dick-Nixon reputation.

To be a conservative implies preserving a cherished past, and vividly illustrating the threats your political opponents pose to the country’s legacy is an important part of making the case for a national shift to the right. But Trump, despite the lavish praise of his children and surrogates and his natural talent as a showman, doesn’t really do optimism. He can project certainty, or confidence in his capacity to solve problems, but he lacks the uplift of a Reagan, Barack Obama or even Bill Clinton.
Presidential politics is all about tone, and the talented newcomer hasn’t quite mastered it. “These wounded American families have been alone,” he said, referring to war-scarred veterans, “but they are alone no longer.”

It was a good line on the page. The problem is that Trump put a lot more emphasis on the first part of the sentence than the second part.

2. Ivanka’s appeal. After days of long-winded paeans of praise from the sleek Trump boys (who seemed destined for future congressional candidate-dom), the nominee’s poised, elegant and socially liberal daughter delivered a convincing case for her dad as a tolerant, nonpartisan leader.
“I do not consider myself categorically Republican or Democrat,” the 34-year-old Ivanka — who hadn’t even registered to vote before her father’s historic bid. “Sometimes it’s a tough choice. That is not the case this time ... Donald Trump is the person to make America great again.”
The daughter seemed intent on expiating the sins of the father — pitching as liberated a man who has talked candidly about his sexual exploits, derided Ted Cruz’s wife as unattractive and suggested Megyn Kelly was mean to him because she was menstruating. She went considerably beyond Trump’s own policy promises, pledging that her dad (who was noncommittal about the Democrat-backed Lilly Ledbetter fair pay act) would “fight for equal pay for equal work” – adding, “I will fight for this, too, right alongside him.”

And thus, in a flourish of rhetoric that elicited applause from the convention floor, the party that opposed the Equal Rights Amendment and most subsequent efforts to impose pay equity flipped positions (for the moment) on a core gender equality issue.

3. Mayor of the USA. Ivanka is the face Trump wants to project. But the thematic heart of Trump’s law-and-order, America-on-its-knees message is borrowed from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose 1990s crusade to reverse urban decline most closely mirrors Trump’s 2016 attempt to stem what he believes to be the nation’s downfall.
Giuliani’s politics — encapsulated by his shouted demand for “greatness!” from the rostrum Monday night — is, of course, a Gothamized version of the Nixon-Agnew-Reagan message that grew out of the cities-aflame urban unrest of the 1960s.

Trump’s version is tethered less to fact than to feeling. The crime rate in America’s big cities has been creeping slowly up in the past few years, but it remains at or near historic lows — yet Trump’s rhetoric, laser-targeted at his party’s aging, white base, is rooted in Giuliani’s 20-year-old call to arms, raised at a time when New York’s neighborhoods were still ravaged by crime and the remnants of the crack epidemic. “I have a message for all of you,” Trump told his supporters at the Quicken Loans Arena. “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. … The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. A government that fails to do so is a government unfit to lead.”

Powerful stuff, to be sure, but it’s aimed less at the statistical realities of American life (despite the horrific massacres of cops in New York, Dallas and Baton Rouge, violence against law enforcement is relatively low) than the sense of unease among the party’s white base.
If conventions are supposed to be about expanding a candidate’s appeal beyond the party base, Trump’s tough message — of a piece with his Muslim ban and Mexico wall — has proven to be a crossover flop with Hispanic and black voters.

4. Populist pay dirt. Trump was most effective — and devastatingly so — when he stuck closest to the classic insurgent’s cookbook and eschewed his signature off-script flourishes casting himself as Bernie Sanders’ revolutionary soulmate, attacking a corrupt and elitist Democratic cartel headed by the Clintons.

“My message is things have to change and they have to change right now,” he said.

For the most part, Trump (who favors riffing off of a few talking points scrawled in black Sharpie) stuck to the punchy script his 30-year-old speechwriter, Steve Miller, loaded into the prompter. Trump sounded stilted but not straitjacketed, and his formality approximated something presidential. His most notable improvisation was uncharacteristically self-deprecating, telling the crowd he didn’t think he “deserved” the overwhelming support he now enjoys from evangelical Christians.

“Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because she will keep our rigged system in place,” he declared to wild applause, a statement that could have been uttered by any Sanders surrogate. “They have total control over everything she does. She is the puppet, and they control the strings.”

This is the message Clinton and her allies fear most. “We win when Trump talks about himself. We are in trouble when he makes it about us,” one Clinton adviser told me last month.

5. He’s learning how to play the game. Trump is nothing if not a fast learner. If the preceding three days were amateur hour, Trump’s speech had the whiff of a proto-professionalism — and that could be bad news for Clinton. It was too long, too dark and too narrow, but it was a reasonably well-delivered speech, and to his target audience — fed-up, working-class, swing-state independents — it could pass as presidential.

Plus it was insult-free — with nary a reference to “Crooked Hillary.”

The question going forward: Can Trump sustain the under-control dignity of Thursday — without losing the edge that made him so appealing in the first place?
 http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/rnc-2016-donald-trump-speech-takeaways-226003#ixzz4F93F6QW8

But I was going to switch over to something else, that was my intention; but, I thought I needed to hear if this 'Cheeto-Jesus' could carry the night and behave better than he had for the past 2 times he'd cut and run from the election process - better than he'd behaved out on the debate cycle - better than he'd behaved on his nation wide public speaking tours!  And he didn't to as badly as I'd feared

4EVER2 wrote:

GOP Convention Opens in Cleveland

Republican speakers twist facts on immigration, crime, Benghazi and employment.

By Lori Robertson  

Summary

CLEVELAND — The 2016 Republican National Convention opened with the first day’s theme “Make America Safe Again.” But in some cases the facts weren’t safe from distortion:

• Two security contractors at the CIA annex in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, repeated their claim that they were told to “stand down” and not help Americans under attack. But multiple official reports say such an order was never issued.
  
• The sister of a slain Border Patrol agent said President Obama has left “border patrol agents thinly equipped,” and undermanned. In fact, both funding and staffing have increased under Obama.
  
• A Senate candidate claimed “neighborhoods have become more violent” under President Obama. In fact, the violent crime rate has gone down 20 percent under Obama, as of the most recent FBI statistics for 2014.
  
• Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Rep. Michael McCaul both wrongly claimed that Hillary Clinton supports “open borders.” She supported a bill that would have created a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally, but it also would have increased border security.
  
• Giuliani said that Clinton “advocated for the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya” and should be “accountable” for the country’s chaos. But he failed to mention that Trump, at the time, also supported the ouster of Gadhafi.
  
• Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions claimed that wages “have fallen,” when they’re up under Obama. He blamed immigration for a low labor force participation rate, when it’s mainly the result of demographics, including the aging of baby boomers.
  

For the entire first nights review >
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/gop-convention-opens-in-cleveland/ 

And despite all of the congressional hearings - the millions of wasted tax dollars on the 'NO PROOF' that Benghazi was anything more then what it ended up being - that the FBI's years of going over all of those emails and their end report has been given and testimony before congress - these speakers are going to stand before these delegates and regurgitate the lies - lies - lies as if none of those utter BS have not been proven FALSE!