So ... POTUS 45 is said to be looking for a book publisher. This is a traditional thing for ex-President's to do, after all. More so than scheming for some fantasy "reinstatement" under the hidden reinstatement clause of the constitution. [It was written by the founders on invisible ink on the back of unused bamboo ballots. That clause.] Anyway, COLT 45 wants to sell a book about his presidency. But getting a prestige main-line publisher to sign on is, according to reports, proving to be difficult. Presidential memoirs are always ghost-written -- heck it can be an assembly-line operation. The Trump organization is up to the task of putting together a book to which he has put his name. They've done it before. But they don't want it to look like a vanity production. And they probably don't want a committed conservative publishing house like Regnery. Random House published Trump: The Art of the Deal in the '80s. There has been considerable consolidation ...
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She keeps coming back into our lives like the cat in a certain campfire song who wouldn't stay away though "they thought he was a goner." She, of course, is Omarosa Newman, who first appeared on pop culture's radar during the very first season of The Apprentice. That was fourteen years ago. She was fired in week nine, which means she finished in 8th place, but she made a memorable impression (the love-to-hate sort of impression) for avoiding elimination as long as she did through back-stabbing At any rate, in later seasons Trump kept having her back. In July 2016, the Trump campaign named her its Director of African-American Outreach. Apparently because she was black and sort-of famous. It isn't clear whether she had a regular work day during the campaign or what she did during such a day. Maybe her new memoir sheds some light on this. She got a similarly vague communications job in the new administration, leaving in December 2017. The manner of that le...
Some random web surfing one morning discovered the story to which I link you below. It was posted almost exactly two years ago now, but it's new to me, and I find it very affecting. The story of a young man who thought he had everything Figured Out -- a Christian fundamentalist planning on full time ministry, and attending a college that seems to have been designed NOT to challenge such as him. But he decided he didn't have everything figured out after all. He encountered philosophy and with it ... real questioning. I leave you to discover the specifics. http://www.philosophynews.com/post/2015/09/01/When-a-Fundamentalist-Finds-Philosophy.aspx
I write today in the line of my Jamesian interest in the varieties of religious experience. Terry Heaton, once executive producer at the Christian Broadcasting Network, the man responsible for getting Pat Robertson's The 700 Club on the air throughout the 1980s and early '90s, has a new book out. I haven't read it (and don't plan to) so I speak here only from mediating sources. But the book seems to be a memoir, a reflection, and at least in some part a recantation. It is called The Gospel of the Self: How Jesus Joined the GOP. There's an interview of Heaton on Vox. After discussing one of the editing decisions on which Robertson overruled him, Heaton says: "I knew that Pat’s rationale for all of this is that you don’t want to do anything on TV that will interfere with anybody’s faith. But I think you can take that to an extreme — and that’s what we did. We always showed people getting healed, overcoming the odds. The strong impression that the vi...
I'm thinking about this decision today, though I'm not sure why. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/471/539/case.html That link takes you to Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises , a 1985 Supreme Court decision about copyright and the limits of the "fair use" dissent. So you won't have to follow that link to know what is on my mind, here's the syllabus, pasted. In 1977, former President Ford contracted with petitioners to publish his as yet unwritten memoirs. The agreement gave petitioners the exclusive first serial right to license prepublication excerpts. Two years later, as the memoirs were nearing completion, petitioners, as the copyright holders, negotiated a prepublication licensing agreement with Time Magazine under which Time agreed to pay $25,000 ($12,500 in advance and the balance at publication) in exchange for the right to excerpt 7,500 words from Mr. Ford's account of his pardon of former President Nixon. Shortly before ...
Watson seems to be a good sidekick sort of name. It reminds some of us of the Dr. Watson who shared a flat with Sherlock Holmes and wrote up his adventures for the world. Also, those two syllables may call the mind Thomas Watson, the fellow who worked with Alexander Graham Bell, and was on the receiving end of the first message ever transmitted by telephone. "Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you," is how I think it went. Anyway, one famous Watson who was a member of a duo and who was most definitely not a sidekick was James Watson, the biochemist who in association with Francis Crick, developed the double helix model of DNA. Watson's famous 1968 memoir of that achievement, THE DOUBLE HELIX, begins with the statement, "I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood." A fair reading of the book generally indicates that Watson hadn't known many modest moods himself, either. In the above photo, Crick is standing, pointing out features of the model...
Earlier this month, I wrote about a dispute over the history of HAMP, the Home Affordable Modification Program. This was the program supposedly designed to help homeowners who were in over the heads. A couple of those who participated in the early Obama administration, notably including Neil Barofsky, portrayed here in full smile, have since said that Geithner administered the plan in an openly cynical bankers'-ass-protecting spirit. At the time I last wrote about this, Geithner's own view of the incident was known only through bits and pieces, such as his quote to an interviewed from The New York Times that I cited in that blog post. Since then, Geithner has come out with his own book on his tenure as Secretary of the Treasury. Does this shed any light? Fortunately, amazon allows me to read inside Geithner;'s book at will, so I don't actually have to buy the thing to see what he said about HAMP. He portrays himself as a faithful public servant who wo...