The choice of Virginia senator Tim Kaine to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate was not really a surprise. She was unlikely to pick the other names being dropped (Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker) because they are all senators from states that have Republican governors which means that if Clinton wins, the appointee who replaces the senator will be a Republican. Since the Senate has been so obstructionist of Barack Obama, you have to think that Clinton would not take any action that harms her chances of getting a Democratic majority.
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I have been catching up on the news while traveling and it seems to me like the Republican convention was, by most measures, a rage-filled fiasco. While the Trump campaign clearly wanted to portray the nation as going to hell with the only possible salvation occurring in Donald Trump being elected president, their message got lost in the mistakes, often self-inflicted, that riddled the proceedings.
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I have been traveling a lot since Wednesday and so have not been blogging and only occasionally catching up with news. This sporadic blogging will continue until I return home.

When I found time to catch up recent events, the big news politically was of course Ted Cruz’s extraordinary speech at the Republican National Convention where he not only refrained from endorsing Donald Trump, he went so far as to urge people to ‘vote their conscience’. By itself, voting one’s conscience is what anyone should do in any election so it should not be controversial. But in this context, it was clearly meant to suggest that people not vote for Trump, a curious call at an event that was meant to be a springboard to propel the party candidate towards the general election.
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We have entered day two of the Republican convention and so far things have been peaceful, at least outside the convention hall. Inside the basic message of the first day in the speeches was that we are all going to die horrible deaths unless Donald Trump is elected president, and that Hillary Clinton should be in jail because she is directly responsible for the deaths in Benghazi.
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The attempted coup in Turkey has failed and the government there has blamed the uprising on a cleric who lives in a rural retreat in Pennsylvania. They have demanded that the US hand the cleric over to them.
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Tony Schwartz was the ghostwriter for Donald Trump’s 1987 book The Art of the Deal that Trump touts as evidence of his ability to make deals that he thinks is the key to why he would make a great president. That process threw Schwartz into close and extended contact with Trump. He has viewed with alarm in the past year Trump’s rise in politics and has felt guilty for his own role in painting him in a better light than he deserved and now has decided to describe the person he really saw.
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