The Nominee Strikes Back

The press jumped on Trump's claim that he raised $6 million for veterans in his rally back in January.  Trump replied by jumping on the press.  He held a press conference in which he hammered the media, calling them sleazy and dishonest.  It is a moment like this when I really like Trump.  For decades, I have seen the media hound Republicans about things that they ignore in Democrats.  Why aren't these same reporters quizzing Hillary about the Clinton Foundation?  The mainstream media is composed almost exclusively of Democrats.  Republican voters know this and have been frustrated by how Republican candidates just accepted it without comment.  When speaking to George Stephanopolous, Trump reminded the viewer that Stephanopolous was a Clinton operative.  Trump must also have taken note of the huge boost that Newt Gingrich received in the 2012 campaign when he blasted the media for 'gotcha' questions.  The Republican base knows that the media is just as much the enemy as the Democrats are.  The base is so starved for a Republican who fights that it has nominated a marginal Republican to get that long-missing trait.  Romney made a passable impression of a doormat, especially when he let Candy Crowley derail him in the third debate.  Though there are many other Republicans I would prefer to have as president, I really appreciate Donald Trump as a nominee who won't just sit back and let the media walk on him.  Unlike Romney, he strikes back.  As Lincoln said when asked to remove Grant from command: "I can't spare this man; he fights."

The Last Chase

In 1981, I saw this movie and liked it.  Yesterday, I watched it on YouTube.

Frank Hart (Lee Majors) had been a race car driver before the pandemic struck.  Much of the population was wiped out and what was left congregated mostly in the cities.  Soon, cars were confiscated, planes were no longer in use, purportedly to preserve what little fuel was left.  That was twenty years ago, putting the 'present' somewhere between 2000 and 2010.  Now Frank is a spokesman for the mass transit system, an unhappy cog in what has become a police state.  The only sign of hope is the occasional transmission from Radio Free California.

 

Speaking of a police state, Ms. Santana is getting a report on how Hart was 3 minutes later than usual to work and there was footage of him prowling around a confiscation yard (where the confiscated cars are) for the third time in the last month.  He is called in and told he will have a hearing that may result in jail.  His response is to curse out Ms. Santana.  That night, he goes to his garage and starts excavating.  Hidden away is his prototype race car.

 

Meanwhile, Ring (Chris Makepeace) is a brilliant, anti-social prep school student who has been hacking into government servers and vandalizing campus statues with homemade explosives.  It just so happens that Frank gives a fiery anti-government speech at that very prep school.  With the police on his trail, Ring opts to flee to Frank's house.  The pair make an escape from Boston in Frank's car.  The golf cart police vehicles don't stand a chance.  It is California or bust.

 

Once out of the city, the fugitives appear to be mostly home free.  There are people who roam the mostly unpopulated land but there are otherwise few obstacles.  Thus Captain J. G. Williams (Burgess Meredith) is recalled from retirement.  An ace pilot from both Korea and Vietnam, he is enlisted in restoring an old jet and then hunting down the race car.  The jet is an F-86 Sabre, a fighter that was mostly retired by the Vietnam War.  Why this jet?  And weren't there any younger pilots?  Had pilots suffered a higher casualty rate in the pandemic?  The movie does not answer these questions.

 

Frank and Ring have reached Kansas before Captain Williams shows up.  After one strafing run, the car goes into hiding with an Indian tribe who have reclaimed the land since the pandemic.  Frank meets and falls in love with Eudora; this may be a place to end his run.  Ring wants to keep going.  The government is determined that the car must be destroyed and Frank must be made an example.  Troops descend on the Indian town and start shooting civilians.  And the chase is on again.

 

There is a lot of promise in this movie but little of it is realized.  Lee Majors was the wrong man for the part and doesn't have the acting talent to pull off the character.  The script does him no favors either.  The growing father-son relationship with Ring is poorly executed as is his flash love affair with Eudora.

 

Burgess Meredith is likewise not the best choice.  He comes across as being on the edge of senility.  Moreover, this is a man who remembers the days of freedom and clearly misses his flying days.  It would be hard to pick someone more unsuited to assassinating an unarmed race car driver.  However, it is quite clear that Meredith had a great deal of fun playing the role.

 

The setting is interesting but not sufficiently explained.  Is this police state government really so toothless that it must get a septuagenarian crackpot pilot to stop Frank?  The world must have fallen much farther than it appears.  Are we in a Dark Age with a few pockets of humanity?  No, that doesn't quite work.  Somehow, the controller in Boston is able to locate exactly where the car is and how fast it is going.  Ditto for the F-86.  Here is a totalitarian government that knows all but has very little ability to influence anything beyond the cities.

 

At times, the movie does feel like a defense of automobiles.  The car itself is central and the Washington fixer is concerned that people will want to drive cars again.  Even today's government is ever so keen on mass transit (witness the train boondoggle in California) and down on privately owned cars.  But even here, the movie only hints at being a pro-car movie.

 

The car itself, so integral to the story, is ludicrous.  Who makes a race car with two seats?  The car is NASCAR meets Formula 1.  The design needs to have a second seat so Ring can come along.  I don't follow racing and am far from a car guy and yet I see the car as impractical and silly.  If it was something he had built over the last two decades, maybe.  Nope, this is something he buried to prevent it from being confiscated.

 

The Last Chase is available on YouTube.

The Lobster

His wife has fallen in love with someone else, therefore David (Colin Farrell) must leave The City and go to The Hotel.  At The Hotel, he has 45 days to fall in love again or he will be transformed into an animal.  His animal of choice is a lobster.  When he has only a week or so left, he fakes interest in a woman who is best described as a psychopath.  It does not work out well.  He flees The Hotel and joins the Loners.  The Loners live in the woods and it is a high crime for them to have any romantic involvement, a sudden reversal of the other parts of the world.

 

The dystopian world is, like Gaul, separated into three parts.  There are the couples who live in The City.  The police are suspicious of people wandering about alone in the city; at one point, a woman is interrogated regarding the whereabouts of her husband and the cops don't appear satisfied by the answers.  At the Hotel are the singles who want to be couples and avoid being turned into animals.  In this bizarre universe, attraction appears to be predicated on a shared oddity.  There is a woman who suffers regular nosebleeds who couples with a man who fakes nosebleeds.  See, they have something in common.  When David becomes an outcast and joins the Loners, he finds himself attracted to a woman (Rachel Weisz) who is short-sighted like he is.  However, when that common ailment ends, he finds it difficult to be attracted to her.  Very strange.

 

Singles at The Hotel can extend their limit of 45 days by capturing Loners.  There are nightly hunts where Singles charge into the woods and shoot Loners with tranquilizer darts.  Captured Loners are transformed into animals and sent back into the woods.  As such, there are odd animals stalking about through the later part of the movie; the camel was the most humorous.

 

Virtually everyone met in the movie is socially awkward.  Indeed, if you are single and, despite knowing your fate is to become an animal, still have trouble pairing off, you must be awkward.  Some have said that Farrell provides a powerful performance but I didn't get that feeling.  This movie would work just fine with a bunch of people who couldn't act, in fact it might work better.  The emotional ranges go from A all the way to B.

 

Fun dark comedy and worth seeing.

No Sense of Humor

Here is a post that makes you shake your head.  Apparently, the t-shirt wearer should have panicked because the other refugees were Muslim too.

Why I prefer Republicans

Glenn Reynolds has a great article today that explains one of the main reasons I prefer Republicans to Democrats.  The Founders had expected the press to be antagonistic of government power, regardless of who was wielding it.  They had not foreseen the rise of the party system but early in the republic, each party had party-run papers.  Andrew Jackson had newspaper men in his Kitchen Cabinet so that he could get the right propaganda to the masses.  Want to read that Jackson is a murderous villain who is exceeding his authority and ruining the nation?  Read a Whig-supported paper.  The bias was out in the open and everyone knew which papers supported which party.  Today, the press is composed mostly of left-leaning journalists who cheer when a Democrat is in office.  However, when a Republican is in office, it is a sin if he goes golfing.  The press is a lapdog or an attack dog depending on the letter (D or R) after the president's name.  I want attack dogs; I'm with Glenn.

On the Lunatic Fringe with Glenn Beck

I first encountered Glenn Beck in 2005 or 2006.  The first show of his I remember, he was talking to one of his co-hosts - probably Pat - and kept asking if he sounded normal.  This led to a discussion about his attention deficit disorder and was now taking drugs to address it.  Hmm.  Despite that very odd introduction, I tuned in more often and then followed him to TV.  He had a show on CNN for a couple of years that I watched pretty frequently.  Then he moved to Fox News Channel.  I watched that a fair amount.  After that, he went independent and started his own network, Blaze TV.  I have watched virtually none of that.

What drew me to Glenn was that he said stuff that you weren't supposed to say.  I had been watching Bill O'Reilly back in those days, and Bill was considered a grenade thrower.  He had nothing on Glenn.  Where others were asking 'What have we done to deserve the enmity of Muslims?', Glenn was explaining the tenets of the Koran that called for jihad against the non-Muslim.  He would bring up topics that others would not.  Sure, sometimes those were in the vein of conspiracy theories but there was enough valid stuff to keep me watching.

Glenn is a doomsayer.  The world is on the brink of destruction and has been ever since I first tuned in.  He is always telling his listeners/viewers that they must take action or doom will fall.  In fact, doom is still going to fall but you need to be ready so you can help those who aren't ready.  And he was right!  The housing collapse came just a couple of years after I started following him.  I suspect that fueled his rise.  Eventually, his constant chicken little routine offered with more emotion than reason and rivers of tears drove me away.

 

On today's program, Beck and Brad Thor discussed a 'patriot' assassinating Trump if/when he becomes Hitler:

 

If Congress won’t remove him from office, what patriot will step up and do that if, if, he oversteps his mandate as president, his constitution-mandated authority as president, I should say.

 

I am no Trump fan but this is lunacy.  It is quite possible that this has been taken out of context but Beck has been massively anti-Trump.  Both he and Thor fear the Republican Congress will continue to be spineless but that only shows neither of them understand the current political atmosphere.  The Republican Congress is spineless because any opposition to a black president is prima facie evidence of racism.  A white heterosexual Republican male will benefit from none of that.  Moreover, the Democrats are going to tear into President Trump.  Most of the media, which has been cheerleading Obama, will pounce on Trump's every action in much the way they pounced on George W. Bush.  Trump will not be able to get away with even a fraction of the unconstitutional actions that Obama has.

When the Shoe is on the Other Foot

One of many reasons that I want a very constrained and limited government, even when those who share my views are in office (who am I kidding, that doesn't happen), is that I know it won't last.  Eventually, someone with whom I profoundly disagree will get the reins of power.  If I have been a cheerleader while my guy was riding roughshod over the traditional give and take of a Representative Republic, it is going to look really bad when I change my tune when the other party does the same thing when the shoe is on the other foot.  If he is elected, Donald Trump is going to have no more power than Obama currently has and yet the left is panicked as if he is going to impose fascism with his first executive order.

 

While Obama has by his own definition exceeded the authority granted to him by the Constitution, the left has cheered.  These short-sighted boosters may now be seeing the light.  If a President Trump follows the precedents of President Obama but instead uses them to impose a non-leftist agenda, how does the left complain?  Obama set a precedent when he rewrote immigration law without the participation of the Congress.  He decided certain immigrants would not be deported even if they were caught.  Very well, then if President Trump decides that no Muslims can emigrate to the US, the principled argument has already been lost by supporting Obama.

 

Here is another take.

An Unexpected Turn of Events

For months, there has been speculation that the Republicans would have a contested convention in which Donald Trump would duke it out with Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and the Republican establishment.  It was going to be exciting and probably destroy the Republican Party for a generation, if not longer, regardless of the outcome.  But Ted Cruz lost in Indiana and dropped out leaving the field clear for Trump to get the 1237 delegates he needed.  Exciting convention averted.

Also for months, it has been said that Hillary will easily win the nomination.  In fact, she should get the necessary delegates in the next batch of primaries.  However, there is a problem.  Thanks to the super delegate system, Bernie will be well within the margin for a switch by these party leaders to make him the nominee.  Even though Hillary will have secured in excess of the 2382 she needs before the convention, there is yet wiggle room.  Super delegates aren't locked to the candidate like those earned in the primaries and caucuses.  Thus, if Hillary was suddenly indicted by DOJ, the super delegates could abandon her en masse and Bernie would get the nomination.

Ever since the 2000 election disaster, Democrats have been big fans of popular vote rather than delegates.  In that regard, Hillary has crushed Bernie.  She has received 12,989,134 votes to Sanders 9,957,889, a gap of more than 3 million.  She has garnered 56% of the popular vote to Bernie's 43%.  Clearly, she should be the nominee.  However, her trend is not good.  Her portion of the popular vote is shrinking.  In February, she won 59.7% of the votes.  In March, she dropped to 58.2%.  April was 55.4%.  In May, she has fallen to 46.3%.  It is too late for Bernie to overtake Hillary in the primaries but you can be assured that party bosses are aware of this trend too.  Will super delegates reconsider?

 

We were promised a contested convention, it was just assumed that it would be the Republicans who would be having it.  Apparently not.

Blind Spot

General David Petraeus, the former CIA head and the commander who turned a failed war in Iraq into a success, has written an editorial in which he suggests we institute Sharia with regards to speech about Islam.  Oh, he doesn't put it that way but speaking out against Islam or Muslims will only compound the threat.  Keep quiet in the corner and maybe they will leave us alone.

Petraeus repeatedly gives examples where Muslims were beneficial in defeating terrorists.  Do we dare risk losing these allies by speaking ill of their religion?  Does General Petraeus realize we allied with Communist Russia to defeat the Nazis.  Does that mean we should not have spoken ill of communism in the wake of that joint victory?  Should we not have questioned the validity of communism because they helped us defeat another totalitarian system?  What will the communists think if we speak out against gulags, mass starvations, oppression, and invading countries?  It didn't play out that way, fortunately for everyone on earth.

 

Despite years in the Middle East, Petraeus still doesn't understand Islam:

Again, none of this is to deny or diminish the reality that we are at war with Islamist extremism — a fanatical ideology based on a twisted interpretation of Islam.

 

No, it is not a twisted interpretation.  Why has the same "twisted interpretation" been implemented again and again since the death of Muhammad?  Because it is what the Koran says.  The only times that Islam is quiescent is when it has been defeated in war.  Islam is a totalitarian belief system that calls upon the followers to conquer non-Muslims.  There is nothing bigoted in non-Muslims disliking Islam.  Islam cannot be reformed and will forever be at war with non-Muslims.  If not for its religious aspects, it would be viewed as no different from Italian Fascism, German Nazism, Japanese Imperialism, or Soviet Communism.  Because it is a religion, it is politically incorrect to treat it based on its tenets.

 

General Petraeus is a smart man and a competent general.  However, as his fall from grace demonstrates, he has blind spots and sometimes spotty judgment.  Here is another of his bad judgments.  Wow, I actually prefer Donald Trump on this issue.

Don't Listen to Losers

Stop attacking the nominee of your party, loser!  It is a done deal.  Are you stupid?  This is the guy.  Attacking him prior to his nailing down the nomination is fine but once he has it, you need to line up behind the nominee.  You make the best with what you have but you don't torpedo your party's nominee?

Where was Mitt Romney when Obama refused to release (and still hasn't) his college transcripts?  What 'bombshells' were hidden there that you and the rest of the Republican Party just ignored?  How about when Bill Clinton refused to release his medical records?  How many times was he treated for venereal diseases was not going to reflect well on his campaign.  Better to refuse to release it.  And he never did.  And Romney complaining about tax returns?  Holy crap!  You are doing to Trump what Harry Reid did to you in 2012.  It was wrong when Reid did it and it is wrong that you do it.  How about you let Hillary and her surrogates attack Trump - as they should - and you attack Hillary?  Which party do you want to win in November?

 

If Romney had gone after Obama as strenuously as he is now going after Trump, maybe he wouldn't have lost in 2012 and the Republican base wouldn't be so righteously indignant at a bunch of spineless Republicans in Washington that they nominated Trump!  This is your fault!  Own it!  Figure out how to make the best of it but stop trying to make Hillary president.

 

Loser!

 

- end of rant -

Captain America: Civil War

Captain America (Chris Evans) is in Africa, tracking down a Hydra agent.  With him are Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Falcon (Anthony Mackie), and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson).  There is much action but Cap finally finds himself face to face with Crossbones, a man he once considered an ally.  But Crossbones isn't going down easily and a part of a building is destroyed and people are killed.  Back at Avengers HQ, General Ross (William Hurt) confronts the Avengers about the destruction in their wake and insists that the Avengers can no longer be free agents; they must act only under the authority of the UN.  Ironman (Robert Downey Jr.) is all in favor.  Cap is opposed.  When the UN meets in Vienna to sign the Sokovia Accords that will require all 'super humans' to register, the bomb goes off and kills many of the delegates.  The perpetrator appears to be Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) the Winter Soldier.

 

The primary loyalties of all the Avengers are tested.  Cap wants to save the Winter Soldier, his childhood friend.  Falcon sides with Cap.  Ironman is for registration.  Vision (Paul Bettany), who is effectively Ironman's creation, sides with him.  So does War Machine (Don Cheadle).  Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) wants to avenge his father's death at the UN meeting and thus joins Ironman.  And on it goes.  What is great about this is that everyone's reasoning makes sense.  No one is just being stupid and joining a side because that is what the scriptwriter decided.  Moreover, unlike Batman vs. Superman, the characters do a lot of talking to one another before it finally escalates to fisticuffs.  And even then, they aren't trying to kill one another.  Batman went straight to kill!

 

The movie does demand that the viewer has been keeping up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  The sudden appearance of Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) would be jarring for one who had not seen that movie.  Despite that vast array of characters, no one gets short shrift.  Everyone gets an opportunity to shine.  Black Panther, who makes his first appearance here, has a great story arc. 

 

The big draw of this movie will be the airport fight where the Avengers face off with a surprise visit from Spider-Man (Tom Holland).  Spider-Man is great.  Ant-Man is really cool too.  Yeah, the bugs really take the show here.  It is a big and elaborate fight that tests the resolve of many of the characters to really force their view on their friends.  Some cannot.

 

Great, great, awesome film.  Highly recommended.  However, it is very long so use the restroom before you go.

Super Delegates

Bernie Sanders has won yet another primary, further chipping away at the inevitability of Hillary.  Even so, Hillary still dominates the delegate count.  She has 2,240 to Bernie's 1,473.  She just needs 142 more delegates to clinch the nomination.  That is just 14% of the remaining delegates.  By contrast, Bernie needs 909, or 87% of the remainder.  Bernie may be on an upswing but that is not going to happen.  That looks pretty hopeless.

Let's look at it a little differently.  What if the super delegates switched?  If Bernie had 524 super delegates and Hillary had only 40.  Suddenly, Bernie would be 200 delegates in the lead with 1957 to Hillary's 1756.  He would only need 40% of the remaining delegates while Hillary would need 60%.  Isn't that interesting?

 

Hillary has the support of 524 super delegates while Bernie has only 40.  These delegates are not allocated based on how their state voted.  Looking at the delegate count without super delegates, Hillary has won 54% vs. Bernie's 46%.  But Hillary has the support of 93% of the super delegates.  That hardly sounds democratic.  If the super delegates were dumped into the pool, Hillary would still have the majority of them and be the likely nominee.  As it is, the gap between Hilary and Bernie is close enough that a switch of the super delegates could change the nominee.  Because that is the case, Bernie has an excellent argument for a contested convention.

Trump is the Nominee

With Ted Cruz suspending his campaign after his loss in Indiana, Trump is the presumptive nominee.  Indiana was a last chance for Cruz to prevent Trump from getting the 1237 that would preclude a floor fight at the convention.  No floor fight, no chance for Cruz.  As for Kasich, he is in Neverland and doesn't want to grow up.  He wins the state where he is the sitting governor and thinks that makes him a competitor.  I wonder how long before he suspends his campaign.  He may not.  He can't catch up to Cruz in delegates, so what is he thinking?  It will be fun while it lasts.

 

The Republican Party has no one but itself to blame for having Trump as the nominee.  After years of betraying their voters, the voters decided to pick an extreme outsider.  George Will thinks it is the duty of every Republican to vote for Hillary to prevent a Trump presidency.  The establishment will have its choice, the voters be damned.  If only we had this sort of fire from the establishment through the last 7 years, maybe the Republican base wouldn't have voted for Trump.  Ah, the schadenfreude!  Really, a desire to inflict pain on the establishment may explain the current situation.

 

Interestingly, there is now a poll that shows Trump beating Hillary.  Can he pick up enough independents and disaffected Democrats to make up for the conservatives and establishment Republicans that he will lose?

 

Trump is a mixed bag.  If he follows through with his plans on immigration, he may delay a descent into madness that is currently falling upon Europe.  As for other policies, I am doubtful.  He has admitted being a crony capitalist, is comfortable with a big and intrusive government, and spouts a foreign policy that Ron Paul could love (except for that bombing ISIS bit).  His Supreme Court picks are likely to be in the mushy middle, a serious problem with the power the court has accumulated.  His habit of attacking opponents on a personal level is troubling but it wouldn't be much different from the current president.

Green Room

The Ain't Rights, a punk rock band, are touring on a shoestring budget.  A bad gig leaves them in dire straits but they are offered another spot for $350, enough to get them back to the east coast.  The middle-of-nowhere bar hosts skinheads.  The band plays their set and then head out.  However, one of them sees a dead girl and calls 911.  He managed to say there was a stabbing before the phone was snatched away.  The band is quickly locked in a room as the owners find a way to cover up the murder.

 

The movie is much more thoughtful than most of this type would be.  The criminals know that if the band is found full of bullets, the police will eventually come back.  No, they must be found in some way that doesn't lead back to the club.  Thus, they are hesitant to blast through the locked door with guns.  There is much effort made to convince the band to come out willingly.

 

Patrick Stewart makes a good villain and should be cast as such more often.  I remember his turn as Dr. Jonas in Conspiracy Theory as particularly good.  Here he is calculating, cold-blooded, and unflappable.  His iconic voice just emanates reasonableness.  Who can resist Captain Pickard saying it will all be fine if you just come out?

 

The movie is often gory but not scary.  As the story is told from both sides of the locked door, we mostly know what everyone is doing and thus there are few scares.  The gore is plentiful.  One band member has his arm hacked up so there are half a dozen gaping wounds and his hand is half-way severed.  There are throats torn out or cut, an abdomen sliced open, a shotgun blast to the face, and other grisly scenes.  No shortage of blood.

 

Directed by Jeremy Saulnier, it has a very similar feel to his last movie, Blue Ruin.  The scene of walking to the villain's house through the woods really echoed from that movie.  Green Room is okay, but Blue Ruin was better.  Through that movie, I came to like the hapless Dwight (Macon Blair) whereas I didn't much like any of the punk rockers.  The one I most liked didn't survive.  The lack of character development was a real problem with Imogen Poots' character, who is never explored and has virtually no backstory.  She is an ally of the band but a mostly blank slate.  Initially, that was fine to provide some distrust but by the end, she is still mostly a blank slate.

 

Not a bad film but I would suggest The Jungle Book instead.  Or rent Blue Ruin.