National

I wasn't impressed by Paul Ryan's statement that he wasn't "ready" to support Trump. In the very construction is the implication that the support is coming, just not yet. Republicans always unify around this year's idiot, so Ryan's statement struck me as a perfunctory nod in the direction of Redstate commenters in order to keep his conservative street cred. Then I read this:

So, a lot happened yesterday. Speaker Paul Ryan, the highest ranking elected Republican in the country, broke with his party's presidential nominee and said he could not support Trump. It is not surprising, but it is shocking when you stop to think about that. Trump responded as you would expect, childishly and petulantly, shooting himself in the foot in the process. He said "Oh yeah, well I don't think I can support Speaker Ryan's agenda." Speaker Ryan's agenda, such that it is, is the conservative agenda. That was a fucking bullhorn signal to conservatives that Trump is not on their side. That might have devastating consequences, all because Trump is an immature child who always has to respond insultingly. And I am somehow supposed to fear this man? Yeah, no. We also got a lot of leakage in the Hillary Clinton/FBI story, which always tells you that the investigation is wrapping up and a conclusion has been reached on the nature of it. CNN reported that "some of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, including her longtime adviser Huma Abedin, have provided interviews to federal investigators, as the FBI probe into the security of her private email server nears completion[.]" While the investigation is still ongoing and will conclude after a final interview of Hillary herself, "so far investigators haven’t found evidence to prove that Clinton willfully violated the law." Meanwhile, The Washington Post is reporting that “[p]rosecutors and FBI agents investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server have so far found scant evidence that the leading Democratic presidential candidate intended to break classification rules[.] This was always going to be a Republican non-scandal, just like Whitewater, just like Benghazi. The most disappointing thing about the Democratic primary this year was seeing just how many supposed progressives gleefully repeated Republican talking points about Benghazi and her emails.

Markos says no, the superdelegates will not be bailing Bernie out.

Hillary Clinton will end the contest with the most pledged delegates, and it won’t even be close. It was closer in 2008—and it wasn’t close back then, either. Best case scenario for Sanders at this point is that he splits the delegates through the end of the contest, but he’ll likely lose even more ground. So whether Clinton needs the superdelegates to get her a majority of all delegates is irrelevant. Obama needed the supers to get him a majority, too, and no one called it a “contested convention” because that would’ve been stupid and asinine. [...] It’s undemocratic for a party elite to ignore the will of the voters and substitute their preferences for that of the party base. It was bullshit when Clinton made these arguments in 2008, and it’s bullshit today [when Sanders makes them]. You can rail against the establishment all cycle and sue the Democratic Party. It was good politics! It won him lots of votes! But then don’t expect that very same establishment to bail you out. If you go to war against them, you must beat them on the electoral battlefield. And it can be done! Because Barack Obama did it in 2008. And if the supers wouldn’t bail out Clinton that year, when Clinton was on the losing end, why would they turn on her this year, when she’s on the winning end?

Bernie’s insistence that the process is “rigged” and that he expects a contested convention are exasperating, especially when you consider, and Bernie admits himself, he will need the "rigged" super-delegates to make the convention contested. And it is all the more exasperating because it would be overwhelmingly anti-democratic.