Trump's character

The superficially crafted messaging of the Republican convention has been stepped on and obliterated every day. But Hillary better not feel powerful for having had anything to do with it. It's all Trump and his incompetent, deranged micro-campaign that's causing all the seemingly self-destructive chaos. Trump lifted those plagiarized passages from Michelle Obama's speech and put them into Melania's address and ate up two-and-a-half days of headlines that might have gone to republican messaging.

Tuesday's "Make America Work Again" was a follow-up to the Trump Convention's unhinged "Make America Safe Again" Monday theme. But there was basically nothing about work, jobs or anything related to either.

Tony Schwartz helped spread the disease of Trumpism... he regrets itDid Trump forget to get a non-disclosure agreement out of Tony Schwartz, the guy who wrote The Art of the Deal for him?

At this point, anyone not proceeding from the absolute certainty that Trump is a fraud and a con artist has to have his or her credibility questioned. The attempt by the Republican establishment and then the mainstream media to "normalize" Trump and Trumpism is breathtaking and frightening on an Orwellian level of social dysfunction.

After a day and a half, Trumpy-the-Clown even took down that ridiculous logo twitter-world was laughing at. I wonder how much he paid for that. Or did 10 year old precocious Barron Trump draw it? Trump was right to worry about the campaign's boneheaded choice of Mike Pence as his running mate. Pence is a divisive ideologue who offers virtually nothing to the ticket except an opportunity to shore up Trump's standing with perennially unhappy hard right movement conservatives. One poll showed that Pence isn't even known at all to 86% of Americans.

The essential Donald J.

Normally we expect presidential candidates to stick to making their case without a stream-- let alone a gusher-- of blatant lies. So far PolitiFact has checked 79 of Trump's controversial public assertions. They only found 4 to be true, although another 14 were "mostly true," which means 10% of what he said was true enough. 90% wasn't.

To my mind Woody Guthrie has always been a model for young artists. That The Clash picked up so quickly on what Woody was doing in using his music to fight against fascism, helped rocket them to the top of my charts-- and keep them there-- from 1977 through Combat Rock in 1982. Meanwhile, Woody had died, just 55 years old, in almost a decade before The Clash formed.

New polling from PPP shows Clinton running ahead of Trump in every battle-ground state (unless you count Arizona as a battle-ground state, where he is leading her narrowly. Here are their latest results:

Nick Confessore and Rachel Shorey must have mortified notorious braggart and cheapskate Donald J.