Facebook Friend Ron Fournier notes yet another similarity between Hillary! and The Donald:

An open government is an honest government, a trusted government, a government directly responsible to people. It says so on the White House website: “Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their government is doing.” But even while the internet made finding and sharing information easier than ever, government transparency in the 21st century has been a bust.

President George W. Bush’s administration changed the Presidential Records Act to make the White House more opaque. After promising to run the most transparent government in history, President Obama has set records for censoring government files or outright denying access to them. On a range of issues, veteran White House reporters say each successive president has brought less openness, honesty, and accountability to the West Wing.

It’s about to get worse. Judging from their actions, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are to transparency what Kryptonite is to Superman.

While Obama severely restricted the public’s access to information under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, his secretary of state effectively gutted the FOIA—at least as it pertained to her. Clinton stored all of her work-related email on a secret server in her home, an unprecedented action that skirted federal policies and put her digital correspondence outside the reach of the general public and congressional overseers.

The FBI is investigating whether the covert email system violated criminal laws involving the protection of U.S. secrets. No investigation is needed to understand that if every government official played by Clinton’s rules, there would be no public access to government email.

A lesser example of her allergy to transparency: The private speeches she gave to Wall Street firms, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars after leaving the State Department. In their Democratic nomination fight, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has pressed Clinton to release transcripts of the speeches to show whether her tough talk against Wall Street today is consistent with the paid remarks.

“I will certainly look into it,” she said in February. More recently, Clinton said she would only release the transcripts if “everybody else” is transparent about their paid speeches. Sanders has complied, which means Clinton won’t do the right thing until every Republican does. No champion of transparency, this one.

Which is what makes Clinton such a lousy advocate against Trump, who among other things has refused to release his tax records.

“So you’ve got to ask yourself, why doesn’t he want to release them?” Clinton asked a Democratic crowd last week. “Yeah, well, we’re going to find out.”

Yeah, well, one might also ask, why did Clinton stash her government email on a homebrewed server? Why won’t she release her speech transcripts?

The shame is that Trump deserves a public shaming. For four decades, presidential candidates have released their tax records. Bill and Hillary Clinton have released annual tax returns since 1977 and she posted eight years of returns on her campaign web site.

Trump refuses. “There’s nothing to learn from them,” he says. That is absolutely untrue. Trump’s tax returns would allow the public to see whether he pays his fair share of taxes, how much he gives to charity, whether his finances are free of conflicts, and whether he’s lying about his wealth.

Before becoming a candidate, Trump repeatedly promised to release his tax returns if he chose to seek the presidency. He now blames a government audit for his reluctance to cough up the documents, but that is a weak excuse.

The only thing stopping Trump from keeping his promise is Trump.

If the metaphor for government transparency is sunshine, Trump is darkness personified. His campaign keeps a “blacklist” of critical reporters. He refuses to say how he would “eradicate” ISIS. He masquerades in telephone calls as his own spokesman. He makes erratic policy shifts while insisting that nothing has changed, such as when his “absolute” ban on Muslim immigrants suddenly became Syria-centric.

What makes Trump the least transparent presidential candidate in modern history is his lack of candor. “There’s never been a presidential candidate like Donald Trump—someone so cavalier about the facts and so unwilling to ever admit error, even in the face of overwhelming evidence,” wrote Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post in a story that aggregated 39 fact-check columns involving Trump, in 69 percent of which he received the worst-possible rating of four Pinocchios.

“Since Trump never takes anything back and often repeats the same false claims,” Kessler wrote, “voters are likely to hear these time and again during the campaign season.”

Lie after lie—read them here and consider how open government would be under President Trump.

I am not drawing an equivalence: When it comes to sleight of hand, there is no equal to Trump. But no matter who wins in November, transparency loses.

So you think the Republican Party has problems with its presidential candidate? (Yes, it does.)

James Taranto reports …

“Thrown chairs. Leaked cellphone numbers. Death threats spewed across the Internet. No, this is not the work of Donald J. Trump supporters . . .” That’s the arresting, not to say biased, lead of a New York Times story on the Democrats—specifically, Saturday’s Nevada Democratic convention, where “angry supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders . . . were directing their ire” at what they see as “a rigged political system”:

Although Hillary Clinton won the Nevada caucuses in February, the Sanders campaign worked hard to win delegates at county conventions and was hopeful that it could emerge from the state with an equal number of delegates or more. But the state convention, held at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel, deteriorated into chaos after nearly 60 of Mr. Sanders’s potential delegates were deemed ineligible amid a dispute over the rules. The convention concluded abruptly after security staff no longer felt it could ensure the safety of the participants, many of whom were yelling and throwing things.

Though the raucous Republican nominating fight was the one that appeared to be careering toward a contested convention, the drawn-out fight on the Democratic side has emerged as an ugly intraparty feud in its own right, threatening hopes for unity ahead of the July convention in Philadelphia. Mr. Sanders faces a virtually insurmountable delegate deficit, but has pledged to carry on his campaign despite the long odds. …

“What Nevada shows is the kindling is there,” Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist, said of the energy within Mr. Sanders’s base of support. “The question is, what is he going to do with it?”

Hasn’t he been answering that question for months with “feel the burn”? Journalists across the country are feeling it now, as the Los Angeles Times demonstrates: “Will the fire that Sanders has lighted among millions of supporters with his critiques of Wall Street greed and political corruption burn the party this summer?”

Democrats are now forcing Sanders to disavow violence, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

After the convention, the Nevada Democratic Party took the unusual step of filing a complaint about Mr. Sanders and his supporters with the Democratic National Committee, the national arm of the party. In the letter sent Monday, Nevada Democrats said Mr. Sanders’s supporters had a “penchant” for violence and disruption, warning that the party’s national convention in Philadelphia this summer could see similar actions.

Mr. Sanders responded in his Tuesday statement that claims of a penchant for violence were “nonsense.” He added: “Our campaign of course believes in nonviolent change and it goes without saying that I condemn any and all forms of violence, including the personal harassment of individuals.”

“It goes without saying” is a curious phrase, because it inevitably means its opposite. You never see a sentence that ends “it goes without saying.”

Talking Points Memo reports that the DNC’s chairman, the unwieldily named Debbie Wasserman Schultz, isn’t ready to make up with Sanders: “Unfortunately, the senator’s response was anything but acceptable,” she said on CNN. “It certainly did not condemn his supporters for acting violently or engaging in intimidation tactics and instead added more fuel to the fire.” Bern, baby, burn.

This is all a bit surprising given Hillary Clinton’s inevitability. As the Times notes, “the raucous Republican nominating fight was the one that appeared to be careering toward a contested convention.” Instead the last of Donald Trump’s rivals left the race two weeks ago, while Sanders soldiers on.

[Tuesday] the Democrats held primaries in Oregon and Kentucky; Sanders easily won the Beaver State, while Mrs. Clinton edged him by fewer than 2,000 votes in the Bluegrass State. “Wounded Hillary Limps to Kentucky Win,” reads a Daily Beast headline. A CNN.com section header: “[Mrs.] Clinton finally wins a state.”

Another CNN story reports on Sanders’s election-night rally:

Speaking in Southern California Tuesday night, Sanders fired up the crowd by calling out the Democratic leadership.

“The Democratic Party is going to have to make a very, very, profound and important decision. It can do the right thing and open its doors and welcome into the party people who are prepared to fight for real economic and social change. That is the Democratic Party I want to see,” Sanders said.

“I say to the leadership of the Democratic Party: Open the doors, let the people in! Or the other option for the Democratic Party, which I see as a very sad and tragic option is to choose and maintain its status quo structure, remain dependent on big money campaign contributions and be a party with limited participation and limited energy,” he said.

The crowd responded by chanting, “Bernie or Bust!” the equivalent of the Republican #NeverTrump slogan for the Democratic race.

That seems to us a dubious equivalence. The Bernie-or-busters are enthusiastically (if sometimes violently) for a candidate, whereas the Nevertrumpkins are against one. If anything, the more persuasive parallel is between Sanders and Trump (and their supporters): Not only are both challenging their parties’ establishments, but neither has a history of identifying with the party whose nomination he now seeks.

For that reason, if Comrade Sanders were honest in running for president, he should bolt the Democratic Party (to which he does not belong; he was an independent in the House of Representatives and is an independent in the Senate) and run a third-party campaign. (Trump should have done that from the beginning.) The fix has been in from the beginning, and it’s obvious to everyone except perhaps Sanders.

About which, The Blaze reports:

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski called for the Democratic National Committee’s chairwoman, Florida Rep. Debbie Wassserman Schultz, to resign Wednesday, citing unfair treatment of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Democratic presidential campaign.