Before we begin, we should mention that this week's talking points section consists of a few extended excerpts from President Obama's recent speech on fighting the Islamic State. What he had to say was important, and it counters several insidious talking points that have been used against him in the past, so we felt it was worth taking over this week's talking points. Just to warn everyone up front.

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Whither the fabled "Party of Lincoln"? That was the question on the minds of many Republicans this week, at least based on how often they used the phrase. Now, we're used to scathing attacks on character being hurled in the frenzy of a presidential campaign. Indeed, it's woven into the fabric of American politics. It's just that in normal years, these attacks are flung across the aisle, at the other party's nominee. It is extraordinary that all of the vicious attacks we're going to feature in our talking points section this week came from Republicans, all aimed squarely at their own party's presidential nominee. Seriously, when in the past have you ever heard the term "unendorse" used? We haven't checked, but we believe it just got coined and added to the political lexicon. It hasn't existed before because the concept hasn't ever existed before (again, in our own memory, at the very least). But we're going to get to all this in great detail later, so let's just move along for now.

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Senator Bernie Sanders, barring extraordinary unforeseen circumstances, is not going to be president. He has fallen short of his goal of winning the nomination of the Democratic Party. No tricky delegate math is going to save him now. His campaign is now over, whether he wants to admit it or not quite yet. But I for one am thankful he ran, and thankful for what he did manage to accomplish. Because though his campaign is done, his political revolution should continue.

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Once again, we've got a rather long end section today, so we're going to present our wrap-up of the week's news in rather abbreviated fashion. This is because we are finally (only a few weeks late!) unveiling the finalists in our "come up with a playground taunt for Trump" contest (which initially ran back in FTP [391]), so there's that to look forward to, down in the talking points section.

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Barack Obama's job approval polling in May stayed remarkably stable. His job approval rating improved slightly, and his job disapproval rating very slightly got worse. In other words, he stayed almost exactly where he was in April. Though boring (nothing is more boring on a graph than a flat line), this was important because it reinforced and solidified the large gains Obama made since the start of the year. His improvement was no blip, in other words. Take a look at the new chart to see this.

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I can now say I have felt the Bern, from beginning to end. I am able to make this statement since I attended my second Bernie Sanders rally yesterday, in Santa Cruz, California. I attended my first Bernie rally all the way back in July of last year, in Phoenix, Arizona (held right after the Netroots Nation blogger conference). So I have seen how the Bernie revolution began and I have also seen it entering the homestretch of campaigning during the primary season, one short week before California and a few other states become the last to vote.

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Has Paul Ryan become so disaffected with Donald Trump that he quietly changed political parties, when no one was looking? The Washington Post, in an unrelated story, ran a photo of Orrin Hatch standing next to Ryan with the caption (emphasis added):

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Is Senator Elizabeth Warren actively auditioning for the role of Hillary Clinton's vice presidential pick? At this point, it's rather hard to come to any other conclusion, since Warren has been so outspoken of late on the subject of how horrible Donald Trump would be as president.

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There's a question on the minds of many Democratic Party leaders right now, which might be phrased: Will there be PUMAs? Or, to update it a bit: Will there be BOBs? Or maybe even PUMA BOBs? Perhaps you'll hear, at the convention: "I'm Bob Puma, glad to meet you"?

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This column was written from bottom to top today. The reason we started with the end and worked our way back up is that we were inspired to go off on a rant (rather than our usual talking points for Democrats). This was due to unusually high levels of panic in the media this week (actually it's not that rare that mainstream media panic causes us to go off on a rant, just in general). But because we started with this extended rant, we're going to have to summarize the week in lightning fashion here in this intro, because we are way behind schedule now. So without much extraneous commentary, here are the stories we noticed during the week.

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