A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

On November 23, 2012, the 300 member stations of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired  The Central Park Five: A Film by Ken Burns & David McMahon & Sarah Burns, a two-hour-long documentary about the five teenaged black and Latino boys who were arrested and coerced into "confessions" by overzealous New York City detectives and prosecutors in the infamous 1989 "Central Park jogger case." Co-written and directed by documentarian Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah, and producer/director David McMahon, The Central Park Five is a searing and often infuriating case study of racial prejudice, sloppy police work, wrongful prosecution, and the role of mass media in perpetuating a miscarriage of justice. The film, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival several months before it aired on PBS, tells the story of the long ordeal experienced by New York City teens Anton McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kevin Wise, and Yusuf Salaam after a...

Not in the slightest, considering that Donald J. Trump is neither one of the richest persons in the world nor one of the most successful, at least as far as his business expertise is concerned. So if you think that all the discontent with our current Chief Executive is based on mere envy, well…no. It’s not. If anything, I strongly dislike President Trump for various reasons, most of which are based on his behavior and utterances over the past 30 years, including: 1. His penchant for having extramarital affairs, divorcing two of his wives to marry the women he was having the affairs with, and constantly hitting on other women  even though he was married.  The first time he did this, he ditched first wife Ivana for Marla Maples; the second time he did this, he ditched Marla for Melania Knavs. 2. His spiteful campaign to bring back the death penalty to New York State after the “Central Park Jogger” rape case in 1989, as well as his stubborn insistence that the five tee...

If you are a regular reader of A Certain Point of View , you know that I'm not a fan of Donald J. Trump, the New York City real estate mogul and former reality TV star who now occupies the White House. I wasn't happy when he won the Republican Party nomination as its Presidential candidate last summer, and I was crushed when he won an Electoral College victory during the general election in November. I thought then, and I still think now, that Mr. Trump's moral character, code of ethics, and temperament make him the least suitable man to earn the title leader of the Free World.  I suppose that many of my readers - especially those of you who disagree with me about politics - think that I'm just a liberal Democratic voter who's sore because Hillary Clinton lost and The Donald won. Oh, if it were only that simple. Well, it's not.  First, as I may have said in other posts that I've written about Mr. Trump, I have never registered to vote as either a Repub...