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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I saw the 1984 film Ghostbusters a few years ago because I kept hearing references to it that made it seem like it was a great comedy. I was frankly underwhelmed. It seemed just so-so to me and I do not remember anything from it. In general, I avoid seeing remakes of films in which I thought the originals were good, but will see a remake of a bad film if I hear that it was done much better.
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After the initial allegations of sexual harassment against Roger Fox News head Ailes came out following Gretchen Carlson’s lawsuit, some prominent media figures in the company defended Ailes. Conspicuously silent was one of their stars Megyn Kelly and speculation abounded as to why, with one theory being that she wanted to take the high road and not get down into the mud since her contract was due for renewal next year.
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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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Gabriel Sherman writes that a preliminary report by the law firm commissioned by 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox News, to investigate the sexual harassment charges brought by Gretchen Carlson against For News head Roger Ailes has been issued, and on the basis of that report the decision has been made to ease Ailes out his job, the only remaining question being when.
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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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A few weeks ago I watched the 1957 film Peyton Place because I had read the book by Grace Metalious a long time ago and thought it pretty good, though not great. The film was pretty bad, though. I was surprised to learn that it had been nominated for nine Oscars but not surprised that it failed to win any. What prompts me to review it is that the way that the book was transformed into film reveals something interesting about the standards that were imposed unevenly on the two forms of art.
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The Washington Post highlights some interesting results from a new Pew Research Center Survey about atheism and the electorate, the key one being that their has been a dramatic rise in the number of people who say they are not religious when compared to just eight years ago,
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