Live Blog: New Jersey is Hillary Country!

She’s our winner and she’s won New Jersey!!!

Thursday Reads: The General Election Campaign Begins

John and Yoko

Good Afternoon!!

The insane campaign continues, and we are moving into the general election phase despite Bernie Sanders’ whining.

I just can’t wait until next Tuesday when Hillary will clinch the number of delegates for the nomination. She should get quite a few from Puerto Rico on June 5, and get the rest in New Jersey on June 7, before the California votes are even counted. At that point, perhaps President Obama will endorse Hillary. It appears he is already anxious to get started.

The Boston Globe: Obama wades into election debate with Indiana speech.

ELKHART, Ind. — President Obama on Wednesday forcefully inserted himself into the 2016 presidential campaign, assailing Donald Trump and the Republican Party for peddling economic policies that he said would benefit the rich and connected at the expense of a still-struggling middle class.

Obama framed this year’s presidential contest as a choice between a Democratic Party committed to working families and a Republican Party he said was beholden to China, “big oil,” “big banks,” and the wealthiest Americans. White House aides cast the speech as the president’s first major attempt to influence the race to succeed him.

Patti Smith

“If what you care about in this election is your pocketbook; if what you’re concerned about is who will look out for the interests of working people and grow the middle class,” Obama said in a fiery, campaign-like speech, “if what you’re concerned about is the economy, then the debate is not even close.”

Aides said the president, who is expected to ultimately endorse Hillary Clinton, is eager to jump into the carnival-like political debate between Trump and the Democratic nominee.

Railing against one of Trump’s comments — that he would roll back rules imposed on Wall Street — Obama’s voice grew louder as he declared, “That is crazy!” Sleeves rolled up and his finger wagging, the president asked the supportive crowd, “Have we really forgotten what just happened eight years ago?”

The president said that when he hears that working families are voting for the Republican economic agenda, “I want to have an intervention!”

Naturally, Donald Trump was not happy about being criticized by the president: McClatchy: Donald Trump warns Barack Obama he’ll ‘hit him’ like Bill Clinton. Donald is going to learn that Bill and Barack are a lot tougher than he is.

John Cage

Donald Trump, lashing back at Barack Obama after the president waded forcefully into the presidential campaign, on Wednesday said Obama “doesn’t have a clue” and threatened to turn his attacks on him in retaliation.

“This is a president who doesn’t have a clue,” Trump told supporters in Sacramento. “If he campaigns, that means I’m allowed to hit him, just like I hit Bill Clinton.”

Trump’s remarks followed an appearance by Obama in Elkhart, Ind., on Wednesday, where the president warned against the Republican Party’s economic policies and said the GOP was misleading Americans on the condition of the economy.

Rallying supporters at a hangar at Sacramento International Jet Center, Trump said foreign leaders view Obama as a “total lightweight,” and he said Obama should not involve himself in the campaign.

“He shouldn’t campaign,” Trump said. “He should go out and do the job that he’s supposed to be doing.”

Gee, what’s Don the Con going to do, go birther on Obama again? That didn’t go so well the last time.

Frank Zappa

Trump got more embarrassing news yesterday as the media delved into the court documents on his fraudulent “university.” The Miaimi Herald reports: Golf tournament leaving Trump’s Doral course for Mexico.

Whether desiring more cash or less of Donald Trump, the PGA Tour announced Wednesday it’s yanking its annual star-filled event away from the city of Doral after 55 tournaments.

The new location: Mexico City, in a country Trump once stated sent “rapists” to the United States over a border on which Trump wants to build a wall.

What began in 1962 as the Doral Country Club Invitational and has been the World Golf Championships-Cadillac Championship since 2011 will be the World Golf Championships-Mexico Championship starting in 2017. The PGA doesn’t know which course it’ll use. Only Augusta National, home of the Masters; Pebble Beach; and The Colonial in Fort Worth, Texas, have hosted tournaments for more consecutive years than the Blue Monster, the nickname for Trump National Doral’s Blue course.

In a statement released through The Trump Organization, Trump said, “It is a sad day for Miami, the United States and the game of golf, to have the PGA Tour consider moving the World Golf Championships, which has been hosted in Miami for the last 55 years, to Mexico. No different than Nabisco, Carrier and so many other American companies, the PGA Tour has put profit ahead of thousands of American jobs, millions of dollars in revenue for local communities and charities and the enjoyment of hundreds of thousands of fans who make the tournament an annual tradition. This decision only further embodies the very reason I am running for President of the United States.”

Right. Don the Con is upset because some low-paid service jobs will move to Mexico. How embarrassing would it be to have the Masters Tournament overshadowed by Trump’s ugly racist image? How many companies would want their products associated with his hate speech?

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been all over TV for the past couple of days talking about Trump’s fraud lawsuits. From CNN: N.Y. attorney general on Trump University: ‘This is straight up fraud.’ Here he is on Good Morning America.

And here he is on Morning Joe today.

This is serious stuff. A little more from CNN:

Trump is currently facing three separate lawsuits — two class action suits filed in California and one in New York by Schneiderman — which argue the program that took in an estimated $40 million, but was mired in fraud and deception.

Schneiderman’s case argues that Trump and Michael Sexton, the former president of the program, engaged in fraudulent, illegal and deceptive conduct, and that although the program promised to offer courses taught by experts personally selected by Trump, the teachers were neither handpicked nor experts.

Schneiderman has repeatedly lambasted Trump and his “university,” telling CNN’s Carol Costello Tuesday on “Newsroom” that Trump “defrauded people out of money. They’re entitled to their day in court.”

Frida Kahlo

“This is a hugely important case. If you look at the facts of this case, this shows someone who was absolutely shameless in his willingness to lie to people, to say whatever it took to induce them into his phony seminars,” Schneiderman told CNN. “Telling people who are in hard economic times — we’re talking about 2008, 2009 — people desperate to hold onto their homes, to make some money, convincing them that he will teach them his entrepreneurial secrets.” ….

“We sued him in 2013. He says it’s a political case. Nobody in August 2013 thought that this guy was going to be the Republican nominee for president,” the attorney general said Thursday. “Thousands of people were bilked out of millions of dollars. Our first priority is to get their money back and to reestablish the legitimacy of educational institutions in New York State.”

Hillary’s campaign was on this yesterday. From the AP via The Boston Globe: Clinton calls Trump University ‘a fraudulent scheme.’

‘‘Trump University was a fraudulent scheme used to prey upon those who could least afford it,’’ Clinton’s campaign wrote on Twitter Wednesday morning.

Clinton aides suggested the likely Democratic nominee would use Trump University as part of a broader effort to cast Trump as a callous businessman who promises Americans ways to get ahead, but is only concerned with enriching himself. As part of that effort, Clinton has previously hammered Trump for appearing to cheer for the collapse of the U.S. housing market and for failing to make good on pledges to donate to veterans until he was pressured to follow through by the media.

‘‘He is pitching voters that he can help improve their lives, but it is all a scam whose only goal is to promote Trump,’’ Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said.

Charles Bukowski

And from Politico: Clinton unloads on ‘fraud’ Donald Trump.

At a Newark, New Jersey, event, Clinton wasted no time diving into an attack on Trump, opening her remarks by bringing up the most recent development in the Trump University lawsuit — unsealed testimony in which former staff described the program as a “fraudulent scheme” and a “total lie.”

“Trump and his employees took advantage of vulnerable Americans,” Clinton said, recounting testimony from Trump University employees suggesting that students were encouraged to make risky financial decisions like maxing out credit cards and emptying retirement accounts. “This is just more evidence that Donald Trump himself is a fraud. He is trying to scam America the way he scammed all those people at Trump U. It’s important that we recognize what he has done because that’s usually a pretty good indicator of what he will do, and on issue after issue, we see someone who is unqualified and unfit to be president of the United States.”

Clinton also attacked Trump for the months-long delay in the delivery of money to veterans charities from a fundraiser he held in January with Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. Trump attacked the media during a news conference earlier this week for questioning whether the donations had indeed been made, calling one reporter a “sleaze” and deriding another as “a real beauty.”

“Just yesterday we learned the truth about Donald Trump’s big talk about helping veterans,” Clinton said. “It turns out it wasn’t until the press shamed him that he actually made the donations he had promised. For months, it was all just a publicity stunt.”

Pablo Picasso

It’s great to see Hillary ignoring Bernie and seriously focusing on the general election. Here’s how Trump responded:

Donald Trump on Wednesday unleashed a sustained barrage of attacks on Hillary Clinton after the likely Democratic nominee spent the day unloading on the Republican billionaire over his controversy-ridden Trump University.

Trump began by pre-empting Clinton’s next salvo, a foreign policy speech Thursday aimed squarely at Trump, by suggesting the speech is full of “such lies” and capped off his denunciation of the Democrat by insisting Clinton “should not be allowed to run” because of her controversial use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state, which Trump said amounted to a breach of “federal law.”

Between those attacks, Trump also called Clinton “a person with no actual talent,” slammed her foreign policy decision-making as secretary of state and recycled an attack previously reserved for his GOP primary opponent, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush: “low energy.”

Pretty weak. Don the Con is going to have to come up with better material that that. Hillary is “low energy?” Give me a break.

I’ll have a few more links in the comment thread. What stories are you following today?

Sunday Reads

 Good Morning!!

Donald Trump has really stepped in it now. At a campaign rally in San Diego on Friday, he trashed the federal judge who is overseeing a lawsuit against Trump’s phony “Trump University.” Think Progress reports:

The case against the real estate mogul’s now-defunct company, which has been accused of scamming students who were misled into paying money for insight from business experts they thought were hand-picked by Trump, is scheduled to go to trial in San Diego federal court shortly after the presidential election. According to his lawyer, Trump is planning on testifying.

In what the Wall Street Journal characterized as an “extended tirade,” Trump spent 12 minutes of his 58-minute speech focused on the case and the California judge who will hear it.

“I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater. He’s a hater. His name is Gonzalo Curiel,” Trump told the crowd. “I think Judge Curiel should be ashamed of himself.”

Trump told his supporters he believes Judge Curiel should be removed from the case, citing the fact that Curiel was appointed to the bench by President Obama. Trump also said he believes Curiel is “Mexican.” The crowd — which had previously shouted “build that wall” — booed loudly.

In previous statements about the case, Trump has pointed to Curiel’s Hispanic heritage to insinuate that he won’t be able to approach the case impartially. Asked on Fox News what exactly Curiel’s ethnicity has to do with the case against him, Trump responded, “I think it has to do perhaps with the fact that I’m very, very strong on the border, very, very strong at the border, and he has been extremely hostile to me.”

Trump University — which was not actually an accredited university and did not hand out degrees — has several fraud cases proceeding against it.

Judge Gonzalo Curiel

Yesterday Judge Curiel ordered the release of documents that Trump had requested be sealed. From Politco:

Just hours after Trump used a campaign speech at a San Diego convention center to unleash a remarkable verbal fusillade against U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the judge — who also happens to be based in the same Southern California city — acknowledged in a much more measured fashion the criticism Trump has aimed at the court.

“Defendant became the front-runner for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential race, and has placed the integrity of these court proceedings at issue,” Curiel said in an order unsealing a series of internal Trump University documents that Trump’s lawyers asked be kept from the public.

The judge’s order didn’t make reference to Trump’s 12-minute tirade Friday afternoon in which the all-but-certain Republican nominee called Curiel a “hater” and again invoked his Latino heritage. However, the judge cited a series of news stories from earlier in the campaign, including an NBC story which noted Trump called Curiel “extremely unfair” and an Associated Press story titled, “Trump: Judge’s ethnicity matters in Trump University suit.” ….

Curiously, the Republican candidate laid into the judge at about the same time the judge was holding a hearing less than a mile away on a motion by the Washington Post seeking unsealing of the Trump University-related files. The judge’s order was released a couple hours after the hearing.

Meanwhile a number of news organizations are reporting that a Canadian version of Trump Tower is in financial trouble. Huffington Post: Trump Tower Toronto To Be Sold Off After Debt Default: Report.

Toronto’s Trump Tower has seen one disaster after another since it opened four years ago, but its latest debacle may be its last.

The Globe and Mail reports that the Trump International Hotel & Tower Toronto is on the verge of being sold to an unnamed new owner after its current one failed to pay back a $260-million construction loan last year.

The sale will likely mean the Trump name will disappear from the building.

Donald Trump himself doesn’t own the Toronto tower — it belongs to Talon Developments, which licensed the Trump brand for the skyscraper, and hired a Trump-owned company to run the property.

Talon’s clients are “no longer interested in the Trump brand” because Trump himself has damaged it, company lawyer Symon Zucker said.

“It’s more important for him to be president than run a successful business,” Zucker told the Toronto Star last month.

Trump Tower in Toronto

The right-wing Washington Examiner is reporting that Trump’s campaign is “low on money.”

Donald Trump’s campaign has alerted Senate Republicans that he won’t have much money to spend fending off attacks from Hillary Clinton over the next couple months.

The notice came when Paul Manafort, Trump’s senior advisor, met with a group of Senate Republican chiefs of staff for lunch last week, sources familiar with the meeting told the Washington Examiner. The admission suggests that Trump will be far more dependent on the GOP brass for money than he has led voters to believe, but it’s consistent with his reliance on the Republican National Committee to provide a ground game in battleground states.

“They know that they’re not going to have enough money to be on TV in June and probably most of July, until they actually accept the nomination and get RNC funds, so they plan to just use earned media to compete on the airwaves,” one GOP source familiar with Manafort’s comments told the Examiner.

That’s a far cry from Trump’s public insistence that he signed a fundraising agreement with the RNC in order to help the party, not himself. “The RNC really wanted to do it, and I want to show good spirit,” he said last week. “‘Cause I was very happy to continue to go along the way I was.” ….

The preemptive fretting about how the RNC plans to spend its money this fall makes some Republicans think that Trump, who has repeatedly insulted Mitt Romney for failing to defeat President Obama in the 2012 presidential election, is preparing to protect his reputation if Hillary Clinton wins.

“He’s going to blame it on the RNC if he doesn’t win in November,” the first source said. “They’re laying that groundwork now.

You have to go to right wing sources to find these kinds of reports, because supposedly “liberal” outfits like The New York Times are too busy trying to tear down Hillary Clinton. I’m not going to excerpt from their latest report on how Hillary is supposedly “struggling,” but you can go read it at the link if you want to.

Paul Manafort

The Washington Post has been hammering Hillary too, but they did manage to publish an interesting article about internal troubles in Trump’s campaign: In campaign chaos, Donald Trump shows his management style.

Interviews with current and former Trump associates reveal an executive who is fond of promoting rivalries among subordinates, wary of delegating major decisions, scornful of convention and fiercely insistent on a culture of loyalty around him….

Honed over decades in business and now suddenly under the glare of a national contest, Trump’s style offers a glimpse of the polarizing management techniques he would carry into the White House. In fashioning his campaign after his real estate and entertainment projects, the mogul has inspired supporters and alarmed critics with his brazen moves.

“He’s always the man in charge,” said Edward Rollins, the veteran Republican strategist who is working for a pro-Trump super PAC….Rollins pointed to the relationship between Trump’s 42-year-old campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and his 67-year-old campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, as a prime example of how Trump handles people. While they have worked just steps from each other in recent weeks at Trump Tower in New York, the pair — contrasts in age, experience and personality — have a simmering rivalry over stature and responsibilities within the candidate’s orbit. And Trump doesn’t seem to mind.

Fired Trump staffer Rick Wiley

Last week, Trump abruptly fired national political director Rick Wiley, who had only worked for the campaign since April. According to insiders, it happened because Wiley didn’t suck up to get close enough to Trump.

From his 26th-floor office in New York, Trump — who through a spokeswoman declined to be interviewed for this article — is attempting to bend the nature and norms of a presidential campaign to his unpredictable and outsize personality, eschewing the top-down, consultant-heavy mode used by most candidates.

Rather, Trump functions simultaneously as his own big-picture strategist and micro-managing chief executive. He has gotten involved in intramural skirmishing that has engulfed his campaign, both stoking and calming tensions depending on the circumstances.

“His style can be what I call ‘hands off, hands on.’ He gives people space to think and work and doesn’t get involved in everything each day, but he is the kind of person who can swoop in in a second and change everything,” said Sam Nunberg, a former aide who was let go from the campaign last year following disagreements with Lewandowski and controversy over past racially charged posts on Facebook. “He monitors it all and he comes to check in on things when you don’t expect him.”

Read much more at the link. This doesn’t sound like a very good management style for a presidential campaign, but then Trump will apparently have big media on his side. It’s going to be very important for Democrats to get out every possible vote. Hillary has been very wise to cultivate relationships with local newspapers around the country.

Hillary does have a few defenders in the media, and Joe Conason is one of the best. Conason co-wrote The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton. From the NY Daily News: The truth about Donald Trump’s old mud: The facts about Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.

Assisted by Nixon-era dirty trickster Roger Stone, Trump is promoting the absurdly sexist message that Hillary Clinton deserves blame for her husband’s alleged misconduct. To make that case, they have been recruiting — and sometimes paying — women who claim that Bill Clinton victimized them.

One of these women is Juanita Broaddrick, an Arkansas nursing home owner who came forward in 1998 to claim that Clinton assaulted her, after signing a sworn affidavit denying that any such incident had occurred. Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr investigated her case, found the evidence “inconclusive” and declined to include her charges in his impeachment brief. Now Broaddrick accuses Hillary Clinton of attempting to “silence” her — even though she said the opposite in a famous NBC News interview.

“Did Bill Clinton or anyone near him ever threaten you, try to intimidate you, do anything to keep you silent?” asked Dateline correspondent Lisa Myers in 1999. “No,” replied Broaddrick firmly. What did Broaddrick tell Starr about Hillary when he put her under oath? An enterprising reporter might ask.

Another former Starr witness excavated from obscurity by Trump and Stone is Kathleen Willey, a former White House aide who claims that Clinton made “unwanted advances” toward her in the Oval Office. Willey’s story too has shifted repeatedly during the 23 years since that incident allegedly occurred.

How she recalled what Clinton had supposedly done — and how she reacted — first began to change when she appeared on CBS’ “60 Minutes.” Having sworn in a lawsuit deposition that she didn’t recall Clinton kissing her, she assured CBS correspondent Ed Bradley several months later that the President “kissed me on the mouth.” Suddenly, she remembered lots of salacious details — and forgot facts and statements that undermined her dramatic account.

Her memory improved around the time that her lawyers secretly began to seek a $300,000 book contract. It is improving faster now that Stone is soliciting donations for an online fund to pay Willey’s mortgage.

There’s more at the link. I’m keeping a link to this story to use between now and November. Conason has updated the information about attacks on Hillary in the book and made it available as a free download at his website The National Memo.

What stories are you following today? Please share your thoughts and links in the comment thread and have a great Sunday!

Friday Reads: Serious News Improved by Fat Cat Art

Good Morning!!

The images in this post are from the Tumblr account, FatCatArt – Famous Paintings Improved by Cats. The site belongs to Russian artist Svetlana Petrova, who like to recreate famous paintings incorporating her large ginger cat Zarathustra. She has also published a book, Fat Cat Art.

This morning President Obama visited Hiroshima. From The Atlantic: Obama’s Historic Hiroshima Visit.

President Obama became the first sitting American leader to make a trip to Hiroshima, the Japanese city bombed by the U.S. with an atomic device in 1945, and called for a “moral revolution” to accompany technology such as nuclear weapons.

“Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us,” Obama said in a speech after a ceremony at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. “The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.”

After his speech, Obama met with hibakusha, the survivors of the attack, many of whom are now in their 70s, 80s, and 90s. He shook hands with them and even embraced one of the survivors, Shigeaki Mori, 79.

“The president gestured as if he was going to give me a hug, so we hugged,” Mori said.

At an earlier ceremony at the memorial, Obama and Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, stood in front of the eternal flame. Both men laid wreaths at the memorial. The American president also signed a guest book: “We have known the agony of war. Let us now find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons.”

Read more and see a photo of the hug at the link.

More serious news, before we get to presidential politics.

From the Washington Post: The superbug that doctors have been dreading just reached the U.S.

For the first time, researchers have found a person in the United States carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort, an alarming development that the top U.S. public health official says could mean “the end of the road” for antibiotics.

The antibiotic-resistant strain was found last month in the urine of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman. Defense Department researchers determined that she carried a strain of E. coli resistant to the antibiotic colistin, according to a study published Thursday in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. The authors wrote that the discovery “heralds the emergence of a truly pan-drug resistant bacteria.”

Colistin is the antibiotic of last resort for particularly dangerous types of superbugs, including a family of bacteria known as CRE, which health officials have dubbed “nightmare bacteria.” In some instances, these superbugs kill up to 50 percent of patients who become infected. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called CRE among the country’s most urgent public health threats.

It’s the first time this colistin-resistant strain has been found in a person in the United States. In November, public health officials worldwide reacted with alarm when Chinese and British researchers reported finding the colistin-resistant strain in pigs, raw pork meat and in a small number of people in China. The deadly strain was later discovered in Europe and elsewhere. On the other hand, there are cute and adorable creatures in the family of that pigs, they are called as teacup pigs in which you can order it from http://www.pamperedpiglets.com/.

“It basically shows us that the end of the road isn’t very far away for antibiotics — that we may be in a situation where we have patients in our intensive-care units, or patients getting urinary tract infections for which we do not have antibiotics,” CDC Director Tom Frieden said in an interview Thursday.

Read the rest at the link.

Now on to some pathetic, embarrassing election news.

First a foreign perspective on the GOP nominee from The Japan Times: Trump sends shivers down spines of nations trying to solidify global warming pact.

DUESSELDORF, GERMANY – The talks in Germany to flesh out December’s historic global climate deal are probably not at the top of Donald Trump’s agenda this week.

But the diplomats from 196 nations huddled in Bonn are keenly aware of the fact that the “The Donald” is now within spitting distance of the White House — and it is making a lot of them nervous.

It is not hard to see why.

The last Republican standing in the U.S. presidential race has described climate change as a hoax perpetrated by China to gain competitive advantage in manufacturing over the US, an eccentric theory even among climate skeptics.

More recently, he said he was “not a big fan” of the Paris Agreement, the fruit of two decades of stop-and-go (but mostly stop) wrangling between rich and developing nations.

“I will be renegotiating those agreements, at a minimum,” Trump told Reuters in an exclusive interview last week, betraying an unfamiliarity with the U.N.’s consensus-based process.

“And at a maximum I may do something else.”

Under the Paris accord, 196 nations have pledged to hold global warming to well under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and to help poor countries cope with the impact of climate change while weaning their economies off fossil fuels.

Sidestepping a recalcitrant Congress under Republican control, U.S. President Barack Obama has used executive power to aggressively confront global warming at home and abroad.

Especially during his second term, the U.S., along with China, has been a pillar of the tortuous — and sometimes torturous — U.N. talks.

The prospect of a Trump presidency precisely at the moment when nations are inching toward ratification of the delicately balanced deal sends shivers down the spines of negotiators here.

This is what we are facing, and what we are in danger of doing to the world and the planet. I urge you to read the rest of the article.

Trump talks philosophy at The Hill: Trump: ‘You have to be wealthy in order to be great.’

The comment from the billionaire businessman and presumptive GOP presidential nominee came during a speech in North Dakota while touting his economic ideas and decrying the “stealth tax” of crime in a speech on energy.

“There’s one more thing that we must do to make America wealthy again, and you have to be wealthy in order to be great, I’m sorry to say,” Trump said during his speech in Bismarck.

Trump goes on to lie about crime rates.

“Violent crime is rising in our major cities across the country. This is totally unacceptable,” he said.

“It undermines their schools, slashes the value of their homes and drives away their jobs,” he continued. “Crime is a stealth tax, it’s a stealth tax on the poor.”

“To those living in fear, I say: Help is coming, it’s coming soon,” Trump said. “A Trump administration will return law and order to America.”

Not true, and not really relevant in North Dakota where the largest city–Fargo–had a population of about 119,000 in 2015.

As the media continue their love affair with the ignorant showman, at least one famous person is willing to tell the truth about Trump in public. Raw Story: Rosie O’Donnell lights into Trump at live show: ‘I f*cking hate that orange piece of sh*t’

Comedian Rosie O’Donnell made an appearance during a concert on Wednesday and kicked it off by ripping Donald Trump, the Daily Mail reported.

O’Donnell told the audience that she admitted to her therapist that she was “depressed because I f*cking hate that orange piece of s*it.”

The comedian has been embroiled in a feud with the Republican presidential candidate for years; Trump’s conflict with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly last year began when the Kelly Filehost asked him about those remarks at the first GOP presidential candidate debate.

Footage from O’Donnell’s appearance during a Boy George concert in New York city shows her response to her therapist’s advice.

“I would rather give birth to a flaming iguana while taking a sh*t,” she says. “I hate him. I hate him. I’m not going to say his name.”

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is trying (and failing) to remain relevant by trying to get Trump to debate him in California. Politico reports: Sanders angers Democrats with Trump debate ploy. ‘It’s bullshit,’ says one Democratic senator.

For some Democrats, Bernie Sanders’ latest gambit — challenging Donald Trump to a debate to cap all debates — is the last straw.

“Bullshit,” said Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. “That confirms what we’ve been saying. Why would you expect Bernie should be considerate or be nice or be working to bring everyone together? Why? He’s not a Democrat.”

The party’s frustrations are boiling over with Sanders as the primary season winds down: Namely that Sanders seems unwilling or unable to admit that Hillary Clinton is on course for the nomination. The ire toward Sanders began earlier this year among the loudest Democratic cheerleaders for Clinton — and now it’s seeping into nearly the entire Senate Democratic caucus.

Lawmakers reacted with puzzlement, sarcasm and barely veiled anger as Sanders’ campaign and Trump himself played up an event that would exclude Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

“I don’t know why he would do that. I think it’s time to start to winding down the primary,” said Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.). “It’s time to move on.”

I honestly don’t think Bernie will ever move on. He is completely delusional at this point. He would rather go back to the Senate and be an outcast for the next two years rather than admit he lost to a woman. And he’ll do anything to keep those donations coming in and the cheering crowds feeding his ego.

“It’s peculiar,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “It’s all about Bernie trying to get the advantage in California. It’s not going to work.”

A minority of Democratic lawmakers, though, said they’d be fine with Sanders going toe-to-toe with Trump on TV, if only to unmask the Republican nominee as a false advocate for working people. They said Trump was never sufficiently challenged on his prescriptions for the economy during the primary, with all the attention on his insults.

“The more Donald Trump gets exposed in the context of public policy, the better it is for our country,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

Whatever. To be honest, I think it would be hilarious, because both Trump and Sanders would make fools of themselves. I don’t think I could watch the horror show of wagging fingers and screaming though.

What else is happening? Please share your thoughts and links in the comment thread and have a great weekend.