For the most part, life while sheltering in place hasn’t been that much different since my last entry three weeks ago. Same routine of working from home, exercising in the evenings, grocery shopping on the weekends in a mask while using a precious bottle of sanitizer in my car in between stops. My supply comes …
Not much different to report from my corner of the world this week. Grocery stores are tightening their social distancing policies, almost by the day, with some items returning to the shelves and others disappearing. Authorities seem increasingly to be acknowledging publicly that the situation is going to last much longer than was previously hoped, …
Just finished my first week of working from home, and I can report a few developments from my tiny corner of the world. First of all, as you can see from my pictures, my pets are not at all perturbed by this recent course of events. There is something to be said of the bliss …
Those of you who read my post on visiting Shanghai last month might have noted my expressed hope that the coronavirus, which had sent my daughter stateside when her English school closed, would not follow us home. Though both of us, currently living in my home in Redding, CA, are healthy and hope to stay …
Back in 2016, a new politics podcast, Keepin’ It 1600, appeared on Bill Simmons’s website, The Ringer, and it was nothing like anything I had heard before. Then current White House aides Jon Favreau, Dan Pfeiffer, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor talked about the presidential campaign in a way that made you feel like you’d stumbled into …
Driving to work a few weeks ago, I was surprised to see billboards announcing a visit to my neck of the woods by Franklin Graham, son of his recently departed father Billy. An online search found the website of his Decision California tour, intending to bring the Gospel to a state which, as Graham made …
This clip of Dean Martin is amazingly good. If only he was always this funny when drunk. If it’s an act, it’s a great act. Note his outfit: years before Miami Vice he is wearing Don Johnson’s trademark white jacket. Note also Bob Hope’s seeming indignation. It’s hard to say whether Dean was truly in …
It was a little surprising that Billy Graham got a full state funeral treatment for his memorial: lying in state in the US Capitol, flags across the nation lowered to half mast, and President Trump attending the funeral service in Charlotte, NC. Perhaps it was to be expected, given the current coziness between Trump and …
In light of last Tuesday’s special election results, we now know that if a Republican gets outed as a child molester in Alabama, he might actually lose an election by the landslide margin of one and a half percentage points. This was also with the Democrat, Doug Jones, running a vigorous and intelligent campaign and, …
Yesterday, the NPR show Fresh Air featured the legendary spy novelist, John Le Carre. Over the course of the interview, Le Carre offered some interesting perspectives on the current investigations of the Trump campaign. If nothing else, the interview is worth a listen solely for the opportunity to hear a cultured and authoritative English voice …
My recent NFL post included the following: Speaking of which, NFL owners made a very short-sighted decision with their blacklist, informal or otherwise. Somehow, they appear to have forgotten that 75% of NFL players are black, with many of them having likely experienced firsthand the issues with law enforcement that Kap had protested. Two weeks …
In the recent discussion about San Francisco 49ers ex-QB Colin Kaepernick’s extended vacation, the focus has been much more on the politics of the situation than what he would likely contribute on the field. Some thoughts on the latter are in order. The Kap who came within five yards of adding a sixth Lombardi Trophy …
This interview speaks for itself, other than to confirm that, yes, this is Donald Trump’s communications director. http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/anthony-scaramucci-called-me-to-unload-about-white-house-leakers-reince-priebus-and-steve-bannon – Vino Knight-Trane
Thomas Ricks followed up his Fresh Air interview with some choice words about Trump in Politico: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/28/general-mcmaster-step-downand-let-trump-be-trump-215199 For those unfamiliar with Ricks, he has been one of the leading writers on the American military for the last two decades. His book Fiasco is the definitive work on the Iraq War, and his influence is such …
Tom Ricks was on Fresh Air this week. (The podcast may be heard below.) I’ve always enjoyed his interviews, but this portion of it, when the subject of Fox News came up, made me sit up and take notice: GROSS: You must be wondering what’s going to happen at Fox News now, especially after the …
James Fallows of The Atlantic linked HST’s Nixon obituary in his post on Friday following the Comey dismissal: He Was a Crook: Hunter S. Thompson on Nixon – The Atlantic www.theatlantic.com He Was a Crook. A scathing obituary of Richard Nixon, originally published in Rolling Stone on June 16, 1994. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/ I’m not sure how …
There’s no one like adult conservatives (such as there are) for eviscerating Republicans as they plumb the depths of imbecility. Today’s column in The Atlantic from David Frum, a former speechwriter for Dubya, is exemplary in this regard. His analysis of the Republicans’ failure on Obamacare is instructive in a couple of ways: on the …
The NYT posted a video today of Trump’s supporters letting it all hang out at his rallies. The footage is instructive, but not for the squeamish. – Vino Knight-Trané http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000004533191/unfiltered-voices-from-donald-trumps-crowds.html
This one’s one of the best podcasts I’ve heard in a while in terms of knowledgeability and candor. Mark Salter was on McCain’s staff for a long time, including during the 2008 campaign. One of the points he makes draws from that experience, when they knew for the last couple of months that they were …
I suspect the Republican nomination will either go to Trump or be a big-time mess, or both. Someone like Paul Ryan could emerge as the nominee, but only after a public bloodletting in a non-brokered free-for-all of a convention that might put 1968 to shame. He would start the general election with serious disadvantages in …
Norm Ornstein’s one of my favorite political writers, even though the think tank he belongs to, the American Enterprise Institute, leans right. His most recent piece in the Atlantic addresses the images of 1968 that are in a lot of people’s minds nowadays (bold type mine). http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the-grim-reality-of-american-politics/474198/ I found this passage particularly interesting: “Some prominent …
I’ve enjoyed David Axelrod’s podcasts of late. His most recent interview with Mark Leibovich of the New York Times is pretty insightful. Axe seems to be pretty good at getting his subjects to relax and open up, and he asks good questions. One of the more interesting exchanges was about Hillary Clinton’s limitations as a …
Don’t know if this makes any sense if you haven’t seen John Oliver’s (above) epic takedown of Trump (my wife was nonplussed), but the image below is my first effort at agitprop. This is the perfect time to point out that Trump was accused, today, of leading his followers in a pledge which looked suspiciously …
Recent coverage of the U.S. Presidential campaign has been interesting in its perspective. After a 5% loss in Nevada, all of the prognosticators suggest that Sanders is done–one article suggesting that he’ll be at a disadvantage because his twenty-something army will be on spring break during upcoming primaries. This seems very premature. On the Republican …