CHAOS IN CLEVELAND: Trump fundraiser resigns in anger after floor eruption.

Gary Emineth, the former North Dakota GOP chairman who joined the Trump-RNC joint finance committee earlier month, says he was disgusted by the floor vote and immediately texted his resignation to Priebus.

Emineth says he’s furious the campaign and RNC worked in tandem to keep delegates from voting their conscience.

“I was on the Trump finance committee and I just resigned because that bully tactic is absurd,” Emineth said. “I just texted them right now. Why can’t the people be heard? I’ve been texting Reince for 10 minutes. He said we didn’t have the votes. We had 10, 11 states. They peeled people back. They were calling delegations asking people to step off the committee. You don’t do this in America. You do this in other countries.”

Today was supposed to be the “law and order” opening of the convention.

HMM:

Iowa and Colorado delegations have left RNC convention. Will not return. #GOPinCLE

— Erdogone? (@DefendWallSt) July 18, 2016

FLOOR FIGHT: Chaos breaks out on the RNC floor.

A roll call vote was called over loud chants from the floor of the Republican Convention in Cleveland.

Known as the “Never Trump” movement or the “Unbind the delegates” movement, Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia from 2010 to 2014, put his credentials on the podium and walked off.

“The chair was abandoned, it’s never happened like that,” said Sen. Mike Lee, R-UT.

As they say, “Developing…”

CLAIM: Facebook Is Ready To Replace TV News.

I still prefer blogs, myself.

CHANGE, WITH CONTINUITY: Trump Inserts Obama’s Ukraine Policy Into RNC Platform.

OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT, WHY THE REBOOT WAS DOOMED TO FAIL: Ghostbusters was first and foremost a Reagan-era comedy.

21ST CENTURY PARENTING: With kids away at camp, parents revel in drug-fueled sex parties.

The 1970s called and they’d like their key parties back.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Venezuela’s inflation is set to top 1,600% next year.

A shortage of medical supplies means infants and other sick patients are dying of treatable illnesses. Soldiers guard empty grocery store shelves. Inflation is so bad, the government has had to order bolivars by the planeload.

As Caracas extends its declared state of economic emergency, it’s no wonder many economists say the nation will soon have to ask the IMF for a bailout. It’s gotten so bad, the government this week handed over control of food stocks to the military, ceding even more power to the armed forces.

And:

Thursday. My day of the week to buy staples. I head over to the local supermarket just after 10 a.m. Sixty people or so are waiting outside. They’ve come from all over the city, especially the poorer neighborhoods where food is scarcest, to stand in line. No one knows anything: what time the regulated goods will be put up for sale; which items, if any, will be offered; nothing. They just wait, doggedly, under the blistering Caribbean sun.

“This is the line of hope,” one woman says to me. “We are hoping they have something to sell us.” Nice. A little bit of gallows humor. I laugh. A couple hours later, though, with the line still at a standstill, I’m out of hope. I abandon my spot and walk away.

Socialism is about caring.

HMM: Rebel F-16s Had Erdogan’s Jet in Sights, Reuters Source Says.

The Turkish leader was returning to Istanbul from a holiday near the coastal resort of Marmaris after a faction in the military launched the coup attempt on Friday night, sealing off a bridge across the Bosphorus, trying to capture Istanbul’s main airport and sending tanks to parliament in Ankara.

“At least two F-16s harassed Erdogan’s plane while it was in the air and en route to Istanbul. They locked their radars on his plane and on two other F-16s protecting him,” a former military officer with knowledge of the events told Reuters. “Why they didn’t fire is a mystery.”

Indeed.

SHOT: Turkey coup could threaten country’s Nato membership, John Kerry warns.

CHASER:

BREAKING: Turkey's Prime Minister says country might review its friendship with the United States

— The Int'l Spectator (@intlspectator) July 18, 2016

Moscow smiles.

HERE COMES THE GAS GLUT: Oil Prices Steady but Products Glut Looms.

There are signs that an increasing glut of refined products could begin to weigh on crude prices. The oversupplied products markets, especially gasoline, means refiners will pull back on crude purchases, especially as the autumn maintenance season is only two months away, the New-York-based bank Morgan Stanley said.

“The bottom line is that the gasoline market faces a nasty reckoning, as the consequences of the market’s rush to bid up summer gasoline values last winter are now becoming clear,” the London-based Energy Aspects said in a note.

In China, one of the largest consumers of oil, growing inventories of refined fuels is also jolting some investors, who expect the country’s oil demand to taper off in the coming months as domestic production of fuels, such as gasoline and diesel, outpaces demand.

Getting sub-$2 gasoline again would be nice.

YOU DON’T SAY: 8 years after hope and change, voters are angry, anxious.

A stunning 79 percent of Americans now believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, a 15-point spike in the past year, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll. Voters are strikingly unhappy with the candidates who will be on the ballot this fall, with only 22 percent saying they would be proud to see Trump win and 27 percent to see Clinton.

Tom Brokaw said over the weekend that he thought “we’d be a different country by now,” a mere eight years after admitting that “we don’t know a lot about Barack Obama.”

Maybe this isn’t the “fundamental transformation” Tom was looking for.

IT SURE LOOKS THAT WAY: Was Turkey’s coup attempt just an elaborate hoax by Erdogan?

Why did the coup attempt begin with blocking one side of Istanbul’s Bosporus Bridge? Why was the passage from the Asian side to Europe blocked while the passage from Europe to Asia was allowed to flow?

Why did the putschists — knowing that Erdogan was neither in Ankara nor Istanbul but instead spending his vacation in the Mediterranean seaside town of Marmaris — not move to detain him? They let him travel from Marmaris to the nearby Dalaman airport and then fly to Istanbul on a flight that took over an hour.

Why did the putschists not seize the main TV news channels and instead waste precious time taking over the least-watched state TV channel, TRT, allowing their targets to regroup and use more popular channels and social media effectively to challenge the coup attempt?

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim spoke first on the NTV channel, alleging that it was not a coup but a rebellion perpetrated by a small faction in the military. Erdogan then spoke through CNN-Turk via FaceTime and called on his supporters to take to the streets.

Seemingly a headless and disoriented coup attempt crumbled after a few hours, leaving 265 dead, some 1,440 wounded and at least 2,839 military personnel in custody.

And then this from John Schindler in response to CNN’s report that “8,777 officers from the Turkish Ministry of Interior” had been removed over the weekend:

Somebody had some VERY LONG lists of people to be purged all ready to go ….https://t.co/8fnAmPSkI4

— John Schindler (@20committee) July 18, 2016

It wasn’t a failed coup; it’s a successful purge.

Events of the past couple of years have me paranoid enough to wonder if we shouldn’t be looking for Vladimir Putin’s fingerprints.

CHANGE: Turkey’s Erdogan ‘cleanses’ security forces with iron fist after failed coup.

Erdogan is wasting no time to “cleanse” the country’s security forces of “viruses,” as he put it, vowing that those behind the attempt to overthrow his government “will pay a very heavy price for this act of treason.”

Among the arrested are 103 generals and admirals, a third of the general-rank command of the Turkish military, according to state-run Anadolu news agency.

A total of 8,777 officers from the Turkish Ministry of Interior have been removed from office, Anadolu reported, adding that the majority were police officers.

It wasn’t a failed coup; it’s a successful purge.

WHEN YOU STRIKE AT A KING… Turkey Coup Supporters Arrested in Greece After Landing in Helicopter.

The helicopter landed after sending a distress signal. All eight people were arrested by Greek police as soon as it touched down on charges of illegal entry into the country and transferred to the local police station, according to local officials.

The eight coup supporters have all requested political asylum in Greece and these requests are being processed, although Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has asked Greece to extradite those on the helicopter seeking asylum.

Olga Gerovasili, a spokeswoman for the Greek government, told state TV that international law procedures are going to be followed.

“It will be taken into consideration that in their country they are accused of attempting to overturn the constitutional democracy and violate legality,” Mrs. Gerovasili said.

JEFF SANDERS: 8 Helpful Tips for Defending Yourself Against Multiple Attackers.

RESPECTABLE: Mick Jagger Is Reportedly Going to Be a Father Again.

STUDY: E-cigarettes could cut smoking-related deaths by 21 percent.

WOW: ‘Land’ on Pluto’s Icy Plains in This Amazing New NASA Video.

THERE ARE COUPS AND THEN THERE ARE COUPS: Military coups have long been a feature-not-a-bug of Ataturk’s secular Turkey, but Erdogan’s emasculation of the military leadership was supposed to protect him from a coup as he de-secularized the country.

If this coup has worked, then… “Oops!” for Erdogan.

PS Austin’s book on Ataturk comes with the VodkaPundit Seal of Approval™. Excellent reading.

(Reposted from the comments to Austin’s post.)

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Florida man fighting to keep pizza-eating pet alligator in garden.

BUT OF COURSE: Promoting gender equality through emoji.

MOLON LABE: The CDC wants your semen.

ZERO HEDGE: On Manhattan’s “Billionaire’s Row”, A Death Knell Just Tolled For Luxury Real Estate.

Having followed the collapse in the New York luxury housing segment, most recently in “Desperate Sellers Resort To Dramatic Price Cuts In Manhattan’s Luxury Real Estate Market“, as a result of the sudden halt in inbound offshore hot money mostly of Middle Eastern, Latin American and Chinese origin due to the crackdown on anonymous LLCs, money laundering and just the general drop in offshore ultra high net worth over the past year, we thought that we were prepared for ongoing news of a sharp slowdown in NYC luxury retail sales.

That said, even we were surprised by the following NYT narrative of just how dramatic the slowdown in the most opulent segment of NYC housing has been.

Read the whole thing.

Downtown Tokyo was once enjoyed a valuation greater than all of California — and this was when California was still worth something. That was nearly a quarter century ago, and Japan has yet to fully recover from the crash.

BIG SPENDER: Buffett donates nearly $2.9 billion to Gates charity and four others.

Buffett’s 11th annual donation to the five charities comprised 19.61 million Class “B” shares of Berkshire, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday.

The Gates Foundation, which focuses on improving education and health and reducing poverty, received about 14.96 million shares.

The donations were made on Wednesday, and brought Buffett’s total contributions to the charities to more than $24.3 billion since 2006.

I wonder how Buffett’s “giving rate” compares to his secretary’s.