CLEVELAND — On Wednesday, small-business owner Michelle Van Etten will address the Republican National Convention on the subject of Making America First Again. According to the convention schedule, Van Etten employs more than 100,000 people. Actually, the Guardian reports, she doesn’t employ anyone.
Almost every major-to-moderate media outlet will be working hard from their designated workspaces in the convention center this week to bring you the latest RNC news, just as fast as their little fingers can type. But not all designated workspaces are created equal.
Chaos on the Republican National Convention floor, where a group of yelling men and women tried and failed to force a vote that might allow for an outcome other than Donald Trump as a candidate for president.
CLEVELAND — In 2012, the non-TV press at least had a halfway decent view of the stage. The press stand seats here in Quicken Loan Arenas are effectively behind the podium, which will eventually have the unintended effect of making it clear to the media when any speaker goes off-prompter (not that anyone scheduled to speak this week is known for that, or anything).
CLEVELAND — In the public square on Monday, as religious fundamentalists condemned sodomy to anyone who would listen, William Hale made sure his dog, wearing a vest laden with GoPro video cameras, was staying hydrated. “A lot of people ask if the dog is a boy or a girl,” he told Gawker. “I try to be gender neutral. It’s just ‘Liberty.’”
I can’t seem to find it.
The Republican National Convention isn’t just about putting the GOP’s shiny new nominee on display. It’s also the perfect place for good, hard-working American vendors to hawk their wares. Wares like this rhinestone-covered box for Trump. Guess how much this box costs.
There is a foul odor emanating from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, and folks—it isn’t the party platform. This morning, just before the start of the convention, a police officer conversed with a dispatcher about the distinct smell of “rotten bananas and mildew” wafting out of the arena’s banjo-shaped stage. That back-and-forth, broadcast via police scanner, is captured above.
About 50 Donald Trump-supporting motorcyclists rolled out of the parking lot of the Rock-n-Roll City Harley-Davidson dealership this morning in Cleveland, headed to a rally where speakers such as the conspiracist radio host Alex Jones and right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos would extoll the virtues of the candidate later in the afternoon. Whether in an effort to better understand the Trump phenomenon or the Biker phenomenon, I can’t really say, but, I spoke with several of them before they departed for the event.
CLEVELAND — Outside the Republican National Convention on Monday, Gawker ran into Matthew Heimbach, a podcast host for The Daily Stormer, who is encouraging delegates to write in the late George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, for president. Donald Trump, Heimbach said, doesn’t go far enough. “He needs to become an ethno-nationalist. He needs to understand that a people is the basis of a nation,” he said. “Specifically, white people.”
News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and his two large adult sons, James and Lachlan, have decided that Roger Ailes must be dethroned from their company’s most consistent cash cow. Almost exactly one week after former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson hit CEO Roger Ailes with a sexual harassment lawsuit, Gabriel Sherman of New York magazine reports that the Murdochs arrived at their decision after “reviewing the initial findings of the [internal] probe” into Carlson’s allegations:
No professional group in America has a more direct interest in gun control than police officers. No labor group in America is more consistently despicable than police unions. There is an opportunity here.
I noticed the window display you see above at the Union Square American Eagle store while walking to work one day last week. It looks a lot like the streetwear brand Supreme, which is to say it looks like the work of the artist Barbara Kruger. A ubiquitous clothing line seducing its customers with the visual language of art, borrowed secondhand from a trendier competitor: this is what Kruger herself might term “a ridiculous clusterfuck,” and it’s exactly the kind of clusterfuck she examines in her work.
This morning, Baltimore police Lieutenant Brian Rice was acquitted on three charges stemming from the death of Freddie Gray, making him the third officer to be cleared of all wrongdoing in as many months.
ISIS this week claimed responsibility for an attack that authorities now say was perpetrated by a man the terrorist group would ordinarily want to violently murder, not champion.
Many areas of America—the areas where lots of people want to live—also have crushing housing shortages. One unorthodox, wild idea seems to be becoming more attractive... build more housing, faster.
