As she frets that Bernie Sanders has much greater success in appealing to younger voters than she has, Saturday Night Live reveals that Clinton has put out a new ad that tries to get them to like her.
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I had been really looking forward to seeing this film because of the strong reviews it had received, such as this one. Macbeth is my favorite of all the plays of William Shakespeare and because it had excellent actors in Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in the lead roles, I expected a lot. I tend to like his tragedies and histories a lot more than his comedies and this story is a timeless morality tale of a once-honorable man whose ‘vaulting ambition’ turns him into a ruthless and disturbed monster, egged on by an even more ambitious wife and led astray by deceptive promises of success and invincibility.
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Predicting the results of American politics was once quite simple: The candidate with the most money won almost all the time. The logic behind that was that running a political campaign, especially at the congressional and presidential level, cost a lot of money because of ad buys, consultants, staff, and the like and only those who could depend upon big money backers were the ones who could afford to do so. It was only if you had big money backing that the media treated you as a credible candidate and gave you respectful coverage while those who did not have money were ignored and marginalized or even ridiculed.
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Watching these young children talk politics with Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show makes me wonder why being accused of being ‘childish’ is viewed as an insult. Quite a remarkable group.
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The US has long been considered an outlier when it comes to religious beliefs, with much higher numbers of believers and churchgoers than in other parts of the developed world. But a new study says that that gap seems to be closing, and once again it is the young who are leading the way.
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There is a question on my mind that is something that can perhaps only be answered by Donald Trump when he writes his memoirs many years from now or by his closest confidantes and that is the following: When he decided to enter the race last June, did he really think he would do so well and get this far and throw the Republican party into chaos? Or did he just do it for the laughs, thinking that he would make a big splash initially by making outrageous statements and insulting others, grab some newspaper headlines, and then go back to his regular life when the effort fizzled?
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On her program Full Frontal Samantha Bee reflects on the tragedy of these events and the absurd responses by those who want to avoid the implications of the easy access to guns that enable such shootings to more easily occur.
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When people refer to the ‘old boys network’, they usually think of gatherings in boardrooms, country clubs, and the like. But there is a weird variation of it that is less well known and that is the Bohemian Club that takes place for two weeks annually at a place called the Bohemian Grove. A sociological study of the club suggests that at these gatherings very little plotting and scheming takes place. In fact, such things are actively discouraged. What is encouraged is drinking and playfulness bordering on the downright gross and ridiculous. What that does is build social cohesion among the movers and shakers in society, because when men (and it is open only to men) let their hair down and act silly in a group, it apparently creates bonds among them.
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Last night’s 12th Republican debate was decidedly different in tone from the previous ones, even if the actual content consisted of the same right-wing extremist positions we have heard before. There were no insults and name calling, no interrupting and talking over each other, and no repeated requests to the moderators to be called upon to rebut someone else. The moderators tried a couple of times early on on to get the others to respond to Donald Trump’s statements but they did not take the bait.
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