Aaaaaaaaaand, Happy Friday everybody!

Just like day follows night (or night follows day depending on your perspective), just like jelly follows peanut butter, just like “who goes there?” follows “halt!”, just like Star Trek III follows Star Trek II, just like Mac follows Big or Pounder follows Quarter or McMuffin follows Egg, just like “oh fuck, not another one of these” follows “Happy Friday everybody!”, and even just like shitty reviews follow “starring Ben Affleck,” every four years the political convention of one party is followed by the the political convention of the other party.

And so inevitably, this week the Democrats held their national convention in Philadelphia. Historical note — the Democratic Party’s 1924 convention lasted for 16 days. This one only felt like it.

The stakes were high for nominee Hillary Clinton this week, but really her biggest win would be to skate through the whole week without being indicted for anything. In other words, this week was just like every other week.

Rival candidate Bernie Sanders in his speech assured his supporters that Hillary will break up the banks on Wall Street. At least, the ones that never paid her money. If there are any. Spoiler alert, there are not.

Not surprisingly, the most booed candidate at this year’s DNC was Donald Trump. Second most booed candidate? Hillary Clinton.

New polls from mid-week showed that the 2016 race has taken a turn. Apparently “poked in the eye with a sharp stick” is now leading “swallow a cup full of angry bees” by 7 points.

In the long run I think the Democrats will regret holding their convention in Philadelphia and not getting a speech from Nightman or Dayman. Rookie mistake there, Democrats.

There were some questionable music choices this week as well. At one point they used Love Train to introduce a speaker but that speaker was not Bill Clinton. Talk about missed opportunities.

And in another musical note, somehow the Democrats were able to get Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton on the same page, but couldn’t do it for Simon and Garfunkel. A bridge over troubled waters indeed.

One of the week’s highlights was former President Bill Clinton’s speech. The man sure does know how to tell a story. When he opened with a tale about a woman he fell in love with back in 1971, I was on the edge of my seat. I couldn’t wait to find out who he was talking about, and what the hell it had to do with Hillary.

Bill Clinton’s speech ultimately covered the history of his relationship with Hillary (well, more or less…mostly less). No one told me it was going to unfold in real time, though.

This just in, Bill Clinton’s speech has just gotten up to 1987.

Former 2004 candidate Howard Dean also gave a speech this week. It was basically the classic rock tour of convention speeches. It got mild interest and polite applause until he did that damn scream at the end. It’s like his Freebird.

The Democrats spent much of the week trying to win over people who have been ripped off or insulted by Donald Trump, which makes sense because those are some very large groups. If they can get those groups and the group of women Bill cheated on Hillary with, this thing is a lock.

Even if they can just get the women Bill hooked up with while in the White House this is possibly an epic landslide.

According to Neilson, the ratings for the DNC were higher than the ratings for last week’s RNC. Clearly the American public prefers its politics to be deChachinated.

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, in countering a line in Michelle Obama’s speech that said the White House was built by slaves, said that those slaves were well-fed and given comfortable beds. And he’s got his great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s log books to prove it.

According to Yelp, three of the top search terms during the DNC were Vegan, Kosher, and Distilleries, which suggests that nobody could agree on what to eat but after the third round nobody cared.

Yelp said three of the top search terms at last week’s RNC were Hawaiian, Hot Dogs, and Gay Bars, which suggests a couple of planks from the GOP 2016 platform may not have made it out of Cleveland intact.

In a tense moment, Vice President Joe Biden had to be talked out of throwing his hat into the ring during his speech after taking a quick look at 2016’s shit show and realizing the opportunity he had missed.

Actress and convention attendee Susan Sarandon said she was having the worst time of her life at the DNC this week. Then party officials moved her out of Bill Clinton’s row.

Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg was five minutes late for his speech after stopping in the convention hall to smack a couple of 32-ounce sodas out of people’s hands.

As for Bloomberg’s speech itself, if there was ever a time to bust out his middle-school Spanish, it would have been while he was blasting Trump on immigration. Bloomberg knows how to say “Gringo es loco,” doesn’t he?

Bloomberg actually first asked to speak at the RNC but he failed the mandatory “Your Wallet Must Be This Small or Smaller to Speak on Donald’s Stage” test.

Vice President nominee Tim Kaine’s speech was thrown into disarray at the last minute when he realized Joe Biden had used the word “malarkey” already that evening and he would have to use the even less common “codswallop” instead.

In retrospect, Bernie Sanders spent most of the week looking like he was told he’d get his car back after Hillary was done speaking and not a moment before.

This just in, DNC staffers have finally woken up the last of the delegates who nodded off during Tim Kaine’s speech.

In an unexpected turn of events, President Obama actually referenced Republican icon Ronald Reagan more times than Donald Trump did. And even more surprising, he mentioned Kenya more times as well.

A previously-unknown Clinton scandal was revealed this week when Bill copped to watching all 7 of the Police Academy movies. Which is at least two more than anyone who worked on the movies ever watched.

While giving a speech at the convention the father of a deceased Muslim soldier offered Donald Trump his copy of the Constitution to read. But in all fairness, Trump has already tried to read the Constitution before. He just had to stop after skimming the first couple of sentences and not seeing his name anywhere.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio referred to the DNC as a disaster. And after seeing how well he executed his campaign, I am ready to accept him as an expert on the subject of disasters.

In a sign that he’s not convinced Trump will win in November, this week Paul Ryan added Hillary Clinton’s first impeachment hearing to his calendar for January 21, 2017.

This week’s speech by Hillary Clinton was historic. Not because she gave it as the first woman to accept the nomination from one of the two major parties, though that is historic by itself. No, this one was historic mainly because she charged a discounted rate of $100K to deliver it.

Bill Clinton almost missed his wife’s speech when he had to suddenly run off the convention floor to finish his application for the Katy Perry Fan Club.

You know, it’s 2016. A candidate for President of the United States should not have to mention in her acceptance speech that she believes in science. And yet, sometimes it’s really just that easy to distinguish yourself from your opponents.

As soon as Hillary Clinton said, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” the Internet crashed under the weight of right wing tweeters crying “Plagiarism!” True story.

This just in, Bernie Sanders has announced that those damn kids need to get off his lawn now.

In her speech, Hillary said that Wall Street banks will start paying their fair share once she’s President. And if there’s anyone who knows how big a share the Wall Street banks can afford to pay, it’s Hillary Clinton.

So, despite the fact that the DNC got high ratings, that it managed to nominate Hillary Clinton before she got sent to jail for something, that Bernie Sanders offered an endorsement without requiring so much arm twisting that it left visible marks, or that Bill Clinton kept his hands to himself, there were still a few things the Democrats stumbled over, as you’ll see when you take a look at…

Tgreen’s Top Twelve Missed Opportunities at the 2016 DNC:
12. Didn’t settle Bernie vs Hillary feud on an episode of Lip Sync Battle

11. Didn’t hand out shots every time someone on Fox News said “Lewinsky”

10. Had no one on stage who could out-yell Trump or Giuliani

9. Failed to capitalize on Republican ire over Bradley Cooper’s appearance at the DNC by featuring other movie stars Republicans thought were on their side, like Darth Vader, Dracula or Mothra

8. Passed on appearance of Dukakis in a tank that could’ve reminded everyone the party has done worse

7. Were unable to get #Donaldisapoopyhead trending on Twitter

6. Couldn’t get Lin-Manuel Miranda on board for Hillary — An American Musical

5. Forgot to ban selfies of people standing next to Tim Kaine in the mistaken belief he was a lifeless statue

4. Cancelled previously scheduled primetime version of “Pin a Charge on Hillary”

3. Missed out on obvious Steve Guttenberg endorsement

2. Could not lock down whether or not Vince Foster’s original autopsy report was ever on Hillary’s email server

1. Couldn’t find anything to offer Hillary if she’d just step back and let anybody else run

And that’s all we have time for this week. Until next time, renew that passport, finalize your escape plan, don’t open any emails from Hillary that look like they have Cyrillic letters in the subject, decide if you wanna see no evil or hear no evil or speak no evil when we blast ourselves into our inevitable Planet of the Apes future, try to figure out a distinguishing feature about Tim Kaine in case you’re ever asked to identify him in an emergency, figure out if there is possibly a way you can boo and vote at the same time, stop it with the Fight Song already and, as always, have a Happy Friday!

T “these jokes were way better before Russia hacked my email” green

While we sit in between the two party conventions this weekend, kind of like we’re in the eye of the shitstorm, I thought it would be fun (and lazy) to take a quick peek into the old Happy Friday Archives to see what the first appearance by our 2016 candidates looked like way back when. A couple of disclaimers. First, the old Happy Friday Archives are kind of a mess and I’m pretty sure I’m missing a lot of them from the first couple of years. And second, it looks like all the Hillary jokes at the beginning were more jokes about her husband and I lost interest in trying to find the first shot that wasn’t mostly at Bill. Perhaps some other day. And third, damn, I came out of the blocks running on the Trump hate, huh? With that in mind, fire up an episode of Friends, break out the Crystal Pepsi, grab a Chalupa and read these two jokes that are both shorter than this whole damn introduction:

From Happy Friday, May 31, 1996
First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton shocked the nation this week when she told Time Magazine reporters that she and the President are considering adopting a child. Their plans may have hit a snag a few days later, though, when they visited several local adoption agencies and found that the majority of the infants up for adoption bore a remarkable resemblance to the President.

From Happy Thursday, February 17, 1997
A gunman opened fire at the Empire State Building this weekend. Unfortunately, neither of the building’s owners, Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley, were there at the time.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand, Happy Friday everybody! Any big news this week? Anything going on? Anything? Oh yeah, that’s right. This week the city of Cleveland hosted the 2016 Republican National Convention, or as it’s more commonly known, Scared & Angry Lives Matter.

Actually, with Trump running the show this week, this convention was less typical politics and more like the worst episode of The Apprentice. It’s tied for that honor with every other episode of The Apprentice. Though to be fair, any random episode of Celebrity Apprentice had more famous people than all 4 nights of this convention.

And that was an issue. The Republicans did have some problems with their guest list this week. Tim Tebow was invited to speak, but he turned them down. Tim Tebow, who played for the New York Jets, finally found a group too lame even for him.

Apparently Trump wanted Don King to speak but the Republicans said no. No one’s sure if he wanted King there to prove he actually does have a black friend, or to prove that there are worse haircuts out there than his.

The big story from the start of the convention was Melania Trump’s speech, which included passages borrowed from a speech given by First Lady Michelle Obama in 2008. After a couple of days of denials, a Trump speechwriter finally claimed responsibility for the plagiarized parts of the speech and offered to resign, but Trump rejected her offer. He also rejected resignations from Hillary Clinton, My Little Pony, the words “a”, “and” and “the”, and the English language itself, all of whom were blamed at one point or another for this nonsense by the Trump campaign.

After the flare-up over Melania Trump’s speech, Donald Trump Jr’s speech also came under fire for being plagiarized. However, in this case the Conservative writer who wrote the speech explained that he also wrote the article Trump Jr allegedly cribbed from, so there was no plagiarism involved. Now if only he hadn’t copied the speech’s themes from 1954.

And in honor of Melania Trump’s speech, I promise that this week’s Happy Friday will only be 7% plagiarized, because Chris Christie says that’s an appropriate amount. Though I only ever steal from my own stuff and Trump Jr’s speechwriter says that’s okay, so look out! There’s gotta be an OJ joke in this mess somewhere.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie used his speaking time at the RNC to roast Hillary Clinton over numerous offenses for which she has never been legally punished. Because if there’s anyone who knows anything about committing numerous offenses and not getting punished for them, it’s Chris Christie.

Christie also said that if elected, Donald Trump will immediately seek to purge the government of officials appointed by Barack Obama. That should take all of two seconds. It’s not like Congress ever let any of them get appointed in the first place.

Many photos of row upon row of empty seats at the convention have appeared online this week, but the situation is even worse than the pictures suggest, since the arena was even emptier before someone set it up as a Pokemon Go stadium.

And there were problems even when they found people to aim a camera at. I don’t want to say that some of the Republican politicians in attendance weren’t happy to be there, but I’ve seen more enthusiastic smiles in a hostage tape.

You know, I don’t think Rudy Giuliani yelled quite so much back when he still had the combover. Just saying.

During his acceptance speech, Trump talked about how he’s going to create jobs in this country, and he’s probably telling the truth about that. The man knows how to create jobs. I mean, he managed to get all his kids on the payroll and a couple of them don’t appear to be overly employable, if you know what I’m saying.

Actually, Trump isn’t even President yet and he’s already created a ton of new jobs. Every major media outlet in the country has been forced to triple its fact-checking department just to try to keep up with him.

I kid, of course. Everyone knows Trump is immune to fact checking like he got the vaccine for it. Really, he created all those jobs when Canada put a second and then a third shift on the construction of their border wall.

In his acceptance speech Trump also promised that at his convention, there would be no more lies. Then he wrapped things up five seconds later to give himself a fighting chance at keeping that promise.

Probably the worst thing to come out of this convention, besides the fact that we weren’t allowed to actually watch Chris Christie get the news that he wasn’t going to be the Vice President nominee, is the idea that Scott Baio has opinions about politics that rate interviews on legitimate news programs. Because he does not.

Though the sad thing is, Scott Baio actually lifted the fame level of the convention guests to a solid D+.

Senator Ted Cruz caused a big uproar when he chose not to endorse Donald Trump during his RNC speech. Instead, Cruz urged voters to vote with their consciences. Or, alternatively, to not vote at all until 2020, when maybe a dashing, youngish, Canadian-born candidate might catch their eye and rate a second look, maybe.

Chris Christie called Cruz’s decision pass on an endorsement “totally selfish,” and if there’s anyone who knows anything about being totally selfish, it’s Chris Christie.

Even worse than the snub from Cruz, the Trump campaign was dealt a huge setback when only 3 Horsemen of the Apocalypse endorsed the candidate.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable moment in the convention was when the representatives from WomenTrumpCheatedOnHisWivesWithsylvania were refused the chance to speak. This despite the fact that they had more delegates than, say, New Hampshire.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell got booed during his time on stage this week. Said McConnell, “If I wanted to get treated like this I could’ve just stayed at home.”

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker had an awkward moment on stage when he used part of his speaking time to say, “It’s just sad in America that we have such poor choices right now.” Oh, wait, sorry, that’s what he said before he got the invitation to speak at the convention.

When the state delegates announced their votes for Trump, Chris Christie allowed his son to announce for New Jersey. Which is appropriate, because if there’s anyone who knows anything about letting someone else do his job while he’s busy holding Trump’s jockstrap, it’s Chris Christie.

Newt Gingrich left Cleveland without being the worst thing about the convention. In a statement released after he left town, Gingrich explained that he was as surprised as you are by this turn of events, and he will just have to try harder next time.

The convention ended rather suddenly when, immediately after his acceptance speech, Donald Trump shook hands with car accident survivor Johnny Smith, who seemed visibly upset by the encounter and ran from the stage with an intense look in his eyes.

Not every speech in Cleveland was at the RNC. In a speech given outside the convention, Caitlyn Jenner said this week that it was harder for her to come out as a Republican than as transgender. In large part this was because it’s so hard to figure out which bathroom to use during an anti-LGBT rights rally.

While not at the convention or even in Cleveland, former New York governor George Pataki was also busy this week, announcing his four-point plan for building the perfect burrito bowl at Chipotle.

In media news, Fox News founder Roger Ailes resigned from the network this week in the wake of a sexual harassment suit filed by former correspondent Gretchen Carlson. While battling for his job over the past two weeks, Ailes expressed surprise at the problem, claiming that Bill O’Reilly never complained even once at any of the sexual advances, and actually claimed to enjoy them.

The theme to this week’s RNC was “Scare America Shitless Again,” because the GOP always goes with what works. But after a week of piling on the fear, in his acceptance speech, Donald Trump offered himself as the one man who could save us from such horrible ends. It took him a little over an hour, but he managed to list every threat he stands ready to defeat, as you’ll see when you take a look at…

Tgreen’s Top Ten Things Donald Trump Promised to Protect Us From:

10. Return of the Burger King from those old commercials

9. Creepy clowns in sewers

8. Man buns

7. Sharknados

6. Reboot of Star Trek: Voyager

5. Billy Ray Cyrus comeback tour

4. Any more pictures of him grabbing at Ivanka’s ass

3. Facts

2. Opportunities to discuss legitimate problems in anything longer than a shouted slogan that blames immigrants

1. Secretary of State Gary Busey (wait, sorry, that’s one of Tgreen’s Top Ten Things Trump’s Totally Gonna Try To Make Happen If He Gets Elected)

And that’s all we have time for this week. Until next time, stock up on orange spray tanner, build that wall, try not to let work ruin a perfectly good Friday, don’t waste too much time worrying if his $80 million payout is enough to get Roger Ailes through his golden years, win Powerball, stay out of the heat, try to figure out if Reince Priebus is a politician’s name or a rare Pokemon, go see that new Star Trek movie and stand up in the middle of it and shout “where the hell is Scotty?!?”, try and figure out how many times I’ve made that same “joke” in the last 20 years, don’t fuck with Leslie Jones on Twitter, bust out your DVDs of The Apprentice and wax nostalgic over the good old days, don’t lay a finger on Chris Christie’s Butterfinger, and, as always, have a Happy Friday!

T “wait a second, I have to watch another week of this shit? Goddammit” green

Donald Trump’s wife Melania gave a speech on the first night of the RNC this week and immediately came under scrutiny when part of her speech seemed to have been copied from a speech Michelle Obama gave at the DNC in 2008. And the similarities are unmistakeable. However, upon closer review of the speech it appears that there was more plagiarism involved than anyone initially thought, as you’ll see when you take a look at…

Tgreen’s Top Ten Other Lines From Melania Trump’s Speech That May Have Been Copied:
10. Just say no

9. Ask not what your country can do for you

8. I am not a crook

7. We hold these truths to be self evident

6. This is a day that will live in infamy

5. I did not have sexual relations with that woman

4. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name

3. May the force be with you

2. Say hello to my little friend

1. It’s easy to grin when your ship comes in and you’ve got the stock market beat; but the man worthwhile is the man who can smile when his shorts are too tight in the seat.