Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) was left flabbergasted by the prospect of giving Donald Trump classified briefings on the campaign trail after the nominee's comments about Russian hackers.

“How would the CIA and the other intelligence agencies brief this guy? How could they do that? I would suggest to the intelligence agencies, if you’re forced to brief this guy, don’t tell him anything, just fake it, because this man is dangerous,” Reid said in a Wednesday interview with The Huffington Post. “Fake it, pretend you’re doing a briefing, but you can’t give the guy any information.”

1. All the other discussions of Trump's finances aside, his debt load has grown dramatically over the last year, from $350 million to $630 million. This is in just one year while his liquid assets have also decreased. Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks.

2. Post-bankruptcy Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia, most of which has over the years become increasingly concentrated among oligarchs and sub-garchs close to Vladimir Putin. Here's a good overview from The Washington Post, with one morsel for illustration ...

To put this all into perspective, if Vladimir Putin were simply the CEO of a major American corporation and there was this much money flowing in Trump's direction, combined with this much solicitousness of Putin's policy agenda, it would set off alarm bells galore. That is not hyperbole or exaggeration. And yet Putin is not the CEO of an American corporation. He's the autocrat who rules a foreign state, with an increasingly hostile posture towards the United States and a substantial stockpile of nuclear weapons. The stakes involved in finding out 'what's going on' as Trump might put it are quite a bit higher.

There is something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence for a financial relationship between Trump and Putin or a non-tacit alliance between the two men. Even if you draw no adverse conclusions, Trump's financial empire is heavily leveraged and has a deep reliance on capital infusions from oligarchs and other sources of wealth aligned with Putin. That's simply not something that can be waved off or ignored.

Bill Clinton did a thing on Tuesday night that I wasn’t completely sure he was capable of: he moved deliberately, persuasively out of the spotlight and to the loyal side of his wife....

And then, at the end, the speech turned elegiac. Bill looked old on Tuesday night, and you could feel his mortality weighing on him, as it has for some years. “I have lived a long, full, blessed life,” he said, “and it really took off when I met and fell in love with that girl.” He went on, “Those of us who have more yesterdays than tomorrows tend to care more about our children and grandchildren, and the reason you should elect her is that in the greatest country on earth we have always been about tomorrow.”

This treacly crescendo was notable mostly for the familiarity of its frame: the speaker advocating for the spouse in comfortably familial terms, appealing to voters through references to children and grandchildren. But for the first time, the spouse wasn’t a wife. It was a husband, who was managing, for once in his life, a moment of self-control and of submission. Bill was reversing the order of things by doing what Hillary had done for him so many years ago: putting himself and his ambitions and achievements and career second to hers.

Kelly has followed Martin O’Malley’s career for years. Though she has never met the Governor, her mother saw his band, O’Malley’s March, play at a pub in Ireland once. “She thought it was great fun,” Kelly said.

This past weekend, Kelly was appointed chieftain of the O’Malley clan at their 62nd consecutive summer gathering in Limerick, Ireland. Nearly 200 and 250 friends and members of the O’Malley clan attended to participate in genealogy workshops, where they could research their family tree (Kelly herself is an O’Malley on her mother’s side – her grandfather was an O’Malley)....

Kelly plans to invite Governor O’Malley to next year’s clan gathering, which will take place in her own hometown of Galway, near to Galway County, where the former mayor’s own family is from. She has a letter all ready to go, and she’ll send it as soon as she finds his mailing address. “Obviously he’s a busy man,” she said, but she hopes he might find time to attend – perhaps with his guitar in tow. “We love if he might play a tune,” she said.

Though the governor may have lost his bid for president, Kelly said he could be eligible to become a future chieftain of the O’Malley clan.