Republican convention: So far, so blah

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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Ailes out?

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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Trump’s ghostwriter gives a tell-all interview

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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Book and film review of Peyton Place (1957)

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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Where the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant came from

As the Republican convention gets underway tomorrow in Cleveland and the Democrats the following week in Philadelphia, expect to see a lot of images of elephants and donkeys during the two events. In Sri Lankan politics, all political parties have an associated symbol that they choose for themselves. The symbols can be animals or inanimate items like a chair. These are prominently displayed at all party functions and are even present on ballot papers next to the party candidate’s name. This serves a practical purpose for voters who might be illiterate because they can identify whom to vote for by the symbol alone.
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The chaos behind Trump’s choice of Pence

It now turns out that the initial speculation that Donald Trump’s botched announcement of Indiana governor Mike Pence as his running was due to him not being sure he wanted him seems to be correct. Usually, such an announcement is made with great fanfare in the hope of gaining positive coverage for the ticket. But yesterday Trump made the choice on Twitter and Pence accepted the same way, a low-budget affair if there ever was one, just the kind of thing Trump hates.
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