Donald Trump has the habit of effusively praising anyone who supports him or says something nice about him. So when in the last debate, he spoke about meeting with “high representatives of India”, people scratched their heads wondering whom he might have been referring to, since there seemed to have been no meeting with any representatives of the government of India.
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The excellent radio program This American Life on their show today tried to understand how it is that the voters who identify as Republicans seem, in this election, to have ditched all their traditional concerns about small government, less regulations, and lower taxes and replaced it with an overwhelming concern about stopping the immigration of Mexicans and Muslims and how this change is threatening to split the party apart.
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When I was in Boston over the last few days, I was in a waiting room for about two hours and, as usual, they had a TV set on. I noticed that no one, neither the staff nor the visitors, was watching the TV and so I asked the person at the desk whether it could be turned off or the volume at least lowered so that I could read my book. I was seated as far from the TV as possible but it still distracted me. When the person tried to comply, it turned out that the volume setting was fixed.
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The boasts of sexual assault by Donald Trump has triggered a wave of many women who have said that it was not mere ‘locker room talk’ but that he actually carried out those actions. Trump’s defenders have suggested that the women are not credible because they did not make these charges public at the time the assaults occurred, though many did confide in friends and relatives.
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I just returned from a trip to Boston. While waiting for my return flight, I had breakfast at an Au Bon Pain cafe at Logan airport and noticed that the people working there consisted of a black woman, a white man, a Latino, an east Asian woman, and a South Asian man, all working together in seeming harmony.
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Lost in the hoopla surrounding Donald Trump’s recordings boasting of sexual assault were the vile remarks he made about the Central Park Five. For those who don’t recall the case, Wikipedia describes what happened. On April 19, 1989, a female jogger was brutally raped and beaten almost to death. That same night, five teenagers were arrested as part of a sweep in response to a large number of young people who had been randomly attacking people. They were wrongfully convicted of the rape and assault but later the actual guilty person was found. The convictions of the five were vacated in 2002 after all had served their sentences and the city settled a lawsuit against it for $41 million.
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Donald Trump boasts about himself incessantly, talking in superlatives about his achievements, many of which cannot be substantiated and for which he refuses to reveal supporting information. We already know that he has refused to release his tax returns, something that every major party candidate has done for the last few decades and which would reveal, among other things, his annual income, the amount of tax he pays, and his charitable contributions.
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Among the many awful things that the Bush-Cheney administration did was to normalize torture, coming up with various convoluted rationales as to why the ghastly practices they carried out did not constitute torture and thus were not war crimes. Alex Emmons writes about an important unanimous ruling by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals last Friday that has been largely overshadowed, like so much else, by this weird election season.
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On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver reviewed Donald Trump’s performance at the last debate and at the charity event the following night at the Al Smith dinner, a white-tie exclusive affair hosted by the Catholic church at which the two presidential candidates are expected to indulge in largely self-deprecatory humor. Of course, Trump did not do that, instead seeing the occasion as one in which he could score off Hillary Clinton and say the things that he wished he could have said at the debate but didn’t. His performance was not well received, to put it mildly.
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