Month: November 2017

This is what happens when you put Republicans in chargeby digby

Here’s a truly scary story about America. The take-over in the states by the Republicans has resulted in a massive reduction in funding for higher education. And it’s not because they don’t have the money. It’s because they want to eliminate higher education. In the 21st century. Because who needs to be educated?

Frank Antenori shot the head off a rattlesnake at his back door last summer — a deadeye pistol blast from 20 feet. No college professor taught him that. The U.S. Army trained him, as a marksman and a medic, on the “two-way rifle range” of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Useful skills. Smart return on taxpayers’ investment. Not like the waste he sees at too many colleges and universities, where he says liberal professors teach “ridiculous” classes and indoctrinate students “who hang out and protest all day long and cry on our dime.”

“Why does a kid go to a major university these days?” said Antenori, 51, a former Green Beret who served in the Arizona state legislature. “A lot of Republicans would say they go there to get brainwashed and learn how to become activists and basically go out in the world and cause trouble.”

Antenori is part of an increasingly vocal campaign to transform higher education in America. Though U.S. universities are envied around the world, he and other conservatives want to reduce the flow of government cash to what they see as elitist, politically correct institutions that often fail to provide practical skills for the job market.

[…]

Antenori views former president Barack Obama, a Harvard-educated lawyer who taught at the University of Chicago Law School, as the embodiment of the liberal establishment. Antenori said liberal elites with fancy degrees who have been running Washington for so long have forgotten those who think differently.

“If you don’t do everything that their definition of society is, you’re somehow a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal cave man,” Antenori said.

Antenori was drawn to Trump, he said, because he was the “reverse of Obama,” an “anti-politically correct guy” whose attitude toward the status quo is “change it, fix it, get rid of it, crush it, slash it.”

Even though Trump boasts of his Ivy League degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Antenori said he “had a different air about him.” Unlike Obama, Trump has not emphasized the importance of Americans going to college.

During the campaign, Trump said many colleges “have gone crazy” and that young people were “choking on debt.” He criticized universities for getting “so much money from the government” while “raising their fees to the point that’s ridiculous.”

Hillary Clinton trounced Trump in the nation’s most educated counties, but Trump won white voters without a college degree by 37 points.

Though Trump has largely ignored higher education during his first year in office, his son Donald Trump Jr. recently excoriated universities during a speech in Texas, for which he was paid $100,000. On college campuses, he said, “Hate speech is anything that says America is a good country. That our founders were great people. That we need borders. Hate speech is anything faithful to the moral teachings of the Bible.”

Trump Jr. went on to say that many universities offer Americans a raw deal: “We’ll take $200,000 of your money; in exchange, we’ll train your children to hate our country. . . . We’ll make them unemployable by teaching them courses in zombie studies, underwater basket weaving and, my personal favorite, tree climbing.”

Antenori, who served as a delegate for Trump at the 2016 National Republican Convention, loves that kind of talk.

Finally, he said, people in power understand how he feels.

Why this guy hears Trump bragging about how smart he is and has a good brain and went to the best schools and thinks this is a guy who thinks education is meaningless is a little bit strange. The only thing that makes sense is that he can tell Trump is as dumb as a rock which proves higher education is completely useless.

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So proud to be an American these daysby digby

He is so fucked up:

Note the one in 2015 where he whined like a little baby boy about Angela Merkel winning.

Recall:

The framed copy of Time magazine was hung up in at least five of President Trump’s clubs, from South Florida to Scotland. Filling the entire cover was a photo of Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television smash!” the big headline said. Above the Time nameplate, there was another headline in all caps: “TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS . . . EVEN TV!”

This cover — dated March 1, 2009 — looks like an impressive memento from Trump’s pre-presidential career. To club members eating lunch, or golfers waiting for a pro-shop purchase, it seemed to be a signal that Trump had always been a man who mattered. Even when he was just a reality TV star, Trump was the kind of star who got a cover story in Time.

But that wasn’t true.

The Time cover is a fake.

There was no March 1, 2009, issue of Time magazine. And there was no issue at all in 2009 that had Trump on the cover.

In fact, the cover on display at Trump’s clubs, observed recently by a reporter visiting one of the properties, contains several small but telling mistakes. Its red border is skinnier than that of a genuine Time cover, and, unlike the real thing, there is no thin white border next to the red. The Trump cover’s secondary headlines are stacked on the right side — on a real Time cover, they would go across the top.

And it has two exclamation points. Time headlines don’t yell.

“I can confirm that this is not a real TIME cover,” Kerri Chyka, a spokeswoman for Time Inc., wrote in an email to The Washington Post.

Here’s the real cover:

The funny thing is that I don’t think he cares at all that everyone knows he did this ridiculous embarrassing thing.

Like I said, he’s so fucked up.

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Vlad’s issuesby digby

People wonder why Vladimir Putin put his chips on Donald Trump. There are obviously many reasons, some of which may very well turn out to be that he had certain “assurances” that Trump would lift sanctions and be more accommodating to his needs. And he allegedly blamed Hilary Clinton for protests after his last “election” since as Secretary of State she had the temerity to suggest that it might not have been on in up and up. (Imagine that.)
But there’s also this:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has always had — let’s go with “problematic” — views on women, but some of his latest comments in a new documentary are exceptionally offensive.

In a four-part series that will air on Showtime June 12 through 15, American filmmaker Oliver Stone talks to Putin about a range of subjects, from the president’s daily routine to his account of Edward Snowden’s defection to Russia. While the documentary “will teach you little about Putin and nothing about Russia,” writes Foreign Policy, it does capture the Russian leader making some snide, chauvinistic comments about women.

For instance, at one point while taking Stone through the Kremlin’s throne room, Putin tells the director that he doesn’t have “bad days” as president because he’s “not a woman.”

He then follows this with a false, pseudoscientific explanation: “I am not trying to insult anyone. That’s just the nature of things. There are certain natural cycles.”

In another charming moment from the interview, Putin denies that there’s any discrimination against gay people in Russia (there is), but adds that he isn’t comfortable showering next to a gay man because he wouldn’t want to “provoke” him. He also quickly points out that he’s a “judo master,” which sounds a bit like a threat of violence.

These comments may be hard to stomach, but they’re hardly out of character considering the kinds of things Putin has said — and done — as Russia’s leader.

In 2014, he made headlines in the US for how he responded to Hillary Clinton’s criticism of Russia’s annexation of Crimea: “When people push boundaries too far, it’s not because they are strong but because they are weak,” Putin said. “But maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman.”

In 2013, he said of a protest staged by topless women from the activist group Femen: “I liked it … I didn’t catch what they were shouting, I didn’t even see if they were blondes, brunettes, or chestnut-haired.”

Putin dismissed these protesters at Hanover as “pretty girls.” Sasha Mordovets / Getty Images
Putin’s latest — and frankly, tired — suggestion that women are less able to do their jobs because of their menstrual cycles is just one more example of his particular brand of misogyny: smug, demeaning, and backhanded.

It might be easy to brush off these comments until you remember that they reflect the attitudes of a man with a profound degree of power.

In February of this year, Putin signed a horrifying law decriminalizing domestic abuse, which, in Russia and elsewhere, disproportionately victimizes women. Estimates from police data suggest that more than 600 Russian women are killed in their homes every month, the BBC reported.

Under the new law, first-time offenders of domestic abuse won’t get a prison sentence unless their victims are injured to the point of hospitalization. They’ll face no charges at all if their partner chooses not to press charges.

Putin’s approval of this law is a disturbing reminder that when people in positions of power hold regressive views of women, the consequences can often be catastrophic.

I know that misogyny is irrelevant to almost anything. But it might have played just a tiny role in Putin’s personal loathing for Donald Trump’s opponent in the last election.

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Primal scream
by Tom Sullivan

Humans’ capacity for self-delusion is so boundless it is a shame it cannot be harnessed as a power source. Adam Serwer provided a short course on it this week at The Atlantic. Or rather, a tour de force in deconstructing the economic anxiety explanation for last November’s election and our current crisis of nongovernance.

It’s not that economic anxiety does not exist, but as a one-dimensional explanation for Trumpism, it is sciolistic, lazy and, Serwer would argue, a dodge. Money is fundamentally about power, as is politics. It’s about who has it and who doesn’t, about who is up and who is down, and, since we feel the need to, about how we measure ourselves against others. Even if we have no money to count.

At 10,000 words, “The Nationalist’s Delusion” is not a quick read, but an important one that highlights a flicker of promise in the long fight against racism in the body politic. Most people, even many racists, do not want to think of themselves as racists. Public opprobrium and the vestigial capacity for shame still has at least that much heft.

Serwer writes:

During the final few weeks of the campaign, I asked dozens of Trump supporters about their candidate’s remarks regarding Muslims and people of color. I wanted to understand how these average Republicans—those who would never read the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer or go to a Klan rally at a Confederate statue—had nevertheless embraced someone who demonized religious and ethnic minorities. What I found was that Trump embodied his supporters’ most profound beliefs—combining an insistence that discriminatory policies were necessary with vehement denials that his policies would discriminate and absolute outrage that the question would even be asked.

In fact, supporters of candidate Trump thought themselves antiracist, “as people who held no hostility toward religious and ethnic minorities whatsoever—a sentiment they projected onto their candidate.”

The ability to uphold a racist system while denying its essential nastiness goes back to the nation’s founding. It is evident in defenses of slavery that held enslavement was the black man’s natural condition and that slavery was beneficial. At the beginning of Civil War, vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, declared in a speech the “great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” Later, sitting in his cell, Stephens claimed his words had been misreported by sloppy reporters.

W. E. B. Du Bois recounted the post-Reconstruction re-establishment of white hegemony in the South was aided by Northern white acquiescence. Preserving white laborers’ position in the social hierarchy was more important than preserving the freedom for blacks so many of their friends had died to secure.

“North and South agreed that laborers must produce profit; the poor white and the Negro wanted to get the profit arising from the laborers’ toil and not to divide it with the employers and landowners,” Du Bois wrote. “When Northern and Southern employers agreed that profit was most important and the method of getting it second, the path to understanding was clear. When white laborers were convinced that the degradation of Negro labor was more fundamental than the uplift of white labor, the end was in sight.” In exchange, white laborers, “while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.” For centuries, capital’s most potent wedge against labor in America has been the belief that it is better to be poor than to be equal to ni**ers.

This is perhaps the heart of Serwer’s essay. The argument that conservative voters are “voting against their best interests” is one I have condemned time and again. Besides suggesting they are stupid while asking for their votes (who is stupid?), it presumes maximizing their financial well-being is the primary driver behind their political allegiance. It is not. Power is. And if it is not power in the form of money, they will settle for what Du Bois called a “psychological wage.”

It is not simply loss of actual wages behind Trumpism, but those psychological wages as well. It is about the perceived loss of white status in a browning America. It is why the complaint goes out across the land that whites face discrimination these days. Equality for all means less privilege for those who, consciously or not, believe themselves entitled to it by virtue of history and skin color.

Racism, sexism, xenophobia, hatred of the poor, the elite, the degreed: all overlays to the underlying threat Trumpists perceive to their position in the white, male-dominated social order.

Many whites who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 turned to Trump in 2016. In Appalachian towns where wooden houses march up the mountainside and threaten to fall down it. Where extension cords run across unplumb floors owners have no money to repair. And in towns such as Johnstown, PA, where the factories and mines have closed and much of Main Street. But also, as we have seen, in more upscale, white communities threatened by losing status to changing demographics. When one examines support for the reality TV star across all income levels, Serwer writes, his story “looks less like a story of working-class revolt than a story of white backlash. And the stories of struggling white Trump supporters look less like the whole truth than a convenient narrative—one that obscures the racist nature of that backlash, instead casting it as a rebellion against an unfeeling establishment that somehow includes working-class and poor people who happen not to be white.”

These voters are people who voted for hope at the beginning of Obama’s tenure and abandoned it by the end, believing if he had delivered at all, it was for people they consider their lessers, including immigrants. Not that they hold any animosity towards people of color or other religions, mind you.

Our sitting president is the primal scream of those whose American Dreams have turned to dust. They are not just economic dreams, but the promise of a better life. They used to measure that against their parents, true, but also against who stood below them on the social ladder. But with their finances unsteady, they will settle for better lives than people they consider inferior. Those are, after all, the bogeymen of GOP pitch men. In zero-sum politics, as in “The Art of the Deal,” for me to win, someone else must lose.

What Du Bois wrote in the 1930’s, Lyndon Johnson echoed in the 1960s:

If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you.

Candidate Trump gave white voters from across the wealth spectrum a rogues’ gallery of Others he promised would lose. Thus, would America become great again.

Serwer concludes:

Trumpism emerged from a haze of delusion, denial, pride, and cruelty—not as a historical anomaly, but as a profoundly American phenomenon. This explains both how tens of millions of white Americans could pull the lever for a candidate running on a racist platform and justify doing so, and why a predominantly white political class would search so desperately for an alternative explanation for what it had just seen. To acknowledge the centrality of racial inequality to American democracy is to question its legitimacy—so it must be denied.

If there is one thing at which America is exceptional, it is denial.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Friday Night Soother: Lions and elephantsby digby

Donald Trump is taking credit for backing off his administration’s proposal to allow big game trophies into the Unites States and acting like it makes him a hero. He’s no hero and neither are his sons.
But still, it’s good news that they won’t be doing the sick they they were going to do. So there’s that.

Here are some lions and elephants in the wild for us to enjoy:

People who want to kill these magnificent creatures are sociopaths.

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Yes, he screwed the pooch. Bigly.by digby
I wrote yesterday about Vanity Fair’s big story this week giving details of “May 10 meeting in the Oval Office where the president betrayed his intelligence community by leaking the content of a classified, and highly sensitive, Israeli intelligence operation to two high-ranking Russian envoys, Sergey Kislyak and Sergey Lavrov.”
This was the original story from last May in the Washington Post:

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said that Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State. 

The information Trump relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said. 

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said that Trump’s decision to do so risks cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and National Security Agency. 

“This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

Seriously people, what would he have to do to make Republicans think there might be something odd going on with Trump and Russia?

Josh Marshall notes the Vanity Fair piece and adds:

We’re seeing a lot of coverage today of reports that US intelligence officials warned their Israeli counterparts to be careful sharing information with Donald Trump because he might be compromised by the Russians. This is not new information. Indeed, it is an example of just how much and how early we’ve known about the crisis in the White House, with still relatively little attention being given to the fact of it. 

This news was first reported in January in the Israeli press – and not just in the Israeli press but in the English language Israeli press, so readily accessible in the United States. Indeed, a number of publications including TPM picked up this news at the time. Here’s a January 13th post of mine excerpting a key passage from the English language version of Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth. The unnamed top US intelligence official told his Israeli intelligence counterparts that Vladimir Putin had ‘leverages of pressure’ over then President-Elect Trump and that they should be cautious giving him or those working for him sensitive intelligence because it might end up in the hands of the Iranians.

He also notes that everything points to Trump being blackmailed. It does. Or at least to the fact that Trump believes he could be blackmailed.

Recall this weird moment:

Pres. Trump with Netanyahu: “I never mentioned the word or the name Israel” during Oval Office meeting with Russians https://t.co/9GH7DbBTm6 pic.twitter.com/eIJTROLiF9

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) May 22, 2017

What’s all this about Flynn?by digby

In case you were wondering what the significance of the Flynn news this week-end, this piece by former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade will fill you in:

The report by the New York Times that Michael Flynn has withdrawn from a joint defense agreement with President Donald Trump might indicate that he is cooperating with Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III. If so, this could be a significant turning point in the investigation.

First, what is a joint defense agreement? A joint defense agreement is a pact among attorneys for multiple targets or subjects in a criminal case in which they agree to share information. The agreement may be written or unwritten. Any joint defense agreement will be defined by its explicit terms, but generally, under such an agreement, attorneys have a duty to keep the confidences of all of the clients covered by the agreement. The attorneys also have a duty to avoid conflicts of interest as to any of the clients. The attorneys can compare notes, allocate work efficiently by dividing tasks and avoiding duplication, and develop a unified strategy.

The main advantage of joint defense agreements is that the information that they share is protected by a form of the attorney-client privilege, known by some courts as a joint interest privilege. These agreements can help targets or subjects sidestep the so-called “prisoner’s dilemma,” in which they must decide in a vacuum whether to help each other by remaining silent or betray each other by cooperating with authorities. When subjects or targets form a unified defense strategy, it is more difficult for prosecutors to “flip” targets, and use them as cooperators against their co-conspirators.

In the special counsel’s investigation, it has been reported that members of the administration have entered into a joint defense agreement. This makes sense because as they field requests from Mueller and his team for documents and interviews, they can work together to share the work and develop a unified defense strategy.

But what does it mean if Flynn has decided to withdraw from the defense agreement? It could mean that he and his attorney have decided that his interests have diverged from the other members of the agreement. Perhaps Flynn and his attorney have decided to pursue a different strategy. For example, they may decide against voluntarily turning over documents and instead to litigate disclosure issues in court. But such details can usually be worked out within the defense team. For that reason, it seems more likely that Flynn has withdrawn from the agreement because he has decided to cooperate with Mueller to provide truthful information and possibly testimony in exchange for leniency for any crimes of which he is convicted.

Recent reports suggest that Flynn has significant exposure to criminal prosecution. Mueller effectively fired a shot against Flynn’s bow when he charged Paul Manafort with violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act, among other offenses. Similarly, reports say that Flynn belatedly filed notice with the Department of Justice regarding his own lobbying work for the government of Turkey. Even more concerning, other reports indicate that Flynn participated in meetings to discuss the kidnapping and rendition to Turkey of cleric Fethullah Gulen from his refuge in Pennsylvania. Gulen is a rival of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The congressional testimony of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates in May provides further evidence of criminal exposure for Flynn. Her testimony about Flynn’s contacts with Russians suggest that his conversations may have been intercepted by a wiretap authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. This surveillance could yield a great deal of incriminating information about Flynn and his contacts with Russia on behalf of the Trump team. Yates was careful to protect classified information during her testimony, so we do not know all of the details about his conversations, but Yates testified that she was concerned that Flynn was “compromised.” If so, he could be charged with acting as an agent of a foreign government while serving as a U.S. government official.

We don’t really know what he’s doing. But Flynn is in the crosshairs for some very, very serious crimes including this news that he may have been involved in a kidnapping plot for 15 million dollars. People tried to warn Trump that he was crazy as a loon and he didn’t listen. In fact, they seemed to be very much on the same page.

Flynn was very, very close to Trump during the campaign, the transition and the first few weeks in the White House. He knows things.

Update: Paul Waldman at the Washington Post asks the most pertinent question:

Why was President Trump so intensely focused on protecting Michael Flynn?

You’ll recall that Flynn was supposedly fired because he lied to Vice President Pence about his contacts with Russian officials during the campaign and the transition, claiming he had only exchanged pleasantries with them when in fact they had discussed substantive policy matters, something Pence then repeated to the media. This was always an odd explanation for the firing. Even more odd was the fact that immediately, President Trump began telling anyone who would listen what a great guy Michael Flynn is and how unfair the whole mess was to him.

Given that Trump is not known for being loyal to those who work for him, that was rather curious. Donald Trump looks out for Donald Trump, and if you become a liability to him, he’ll very quickly start acting as though he barely knew you. Now consider what Trump proceeded to do with regard to Michael Flynn:

The day after Flynn resigned, Trump asked FBI Director James B. Comey to stop investigating the former national security adviser. “I hope you can let this go,” Comey reported Trump saying in a memo he wrote immediately after their meeting.

Trump asked Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats to intervene with Comey to get him to back off his investigation of Flynn.

Unlike with previous aides who have displeased him, after he fired Flynn, Trump made a very public show of praising him to the media.

Months after Flynn was fired and as the investigation was accelerating, Trump kept in contact with Flynn. “I just got a message from the president to stay strong,” Flynn told friends at a dinner in April.
In May, Trump scolded his staff for criticizing Flynn to the media and had his spokesmen issue statements lavishly praising Flynn.

It’s almost as though Trump wanted to make sure Flynn didn’t turn on him.

I will speculate wildly here that I would be wondering if Trump didn’t approve that 15 million dollar kidnapping plot. He is just that dumb and — he’s a man who has shown over and over again that the only attention he ever paid to politics was watching “the shows” on cable news. He had no ethical boundaries in business and he didn’t understand that they existed in government either. In fact, he’s still making money out of the oval office as we speak and there seems to be little appetite by the congress to do anything about it.

This plot would easily be one that Trump and his crazy pal Flynn would think was very, very clever. Flynn had a vendetta against the Intelligence Community and Trump is a fucking moron. That’s exactly the kind of thing they’d believe was a very excellent way to conduct foreign policy.

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Operation Rescue fundraises for Roy Moore. Of course.by digby

Women’s rights activists have always said that the “pro-life” zealots are hostile to women and girls. Their insistence that even victims of incest be forced to give birth to their own siblings was a clue. Here we have them making their priorities clear:

Fellow Pro-Life American, Radical abortionists, working hand-in-hand with the Obama-Clinton machine, are targeting pro-life hero and conservative Christian candidate for Senate Roy Moore. And establishment Republicans, led by spineless Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have abandoned him in his time of need! Roy Moore needs the support of pro-life grassroots conservatives like you and me more than ever. Can I count on you to help us come to Judge Moore’s defense and continue fighting for life against radical enemies with your most generous gift of $25, $50, $100, $250, or more today? I know Judge Roy Moore to be a dedicated Christian and social conservative who will not compromise on matters of life. He is staunchly pro-life and a fearless defender of religious freedom. Judge Moore is being unfairly targeted by unproven allegations cooked up by pro-abortion Democrats. And unfortunately, his poll numbers are starting to take a hit. But even worse than these dirty politics is the betrayal by the Republican Establishment. They have abandoned this pro-life hero, leaving him to fend for himself. Mitch McConnell would rather Alabama send a pro-abortion leftist to Washington than this proven defender of life! We can’t leave Judge Moore to fight this battle alone. Will you help us stand up for him today? After forty years in public service, Roy Moore would be one of our strongest advocates in the Senate. We can count on him to fight for pro-life legislation at every opportunity, to advocate on behalf of pro-life Supreme Court Justices, to work toward defunding Planned Parenthood, and to stand in the gap for the unborn. Establishment Republicans should be ashamed of themselves for jumping to rash conclusions and not standing by this conservative Christian. Roy Moore has been abandoned by the GOP and needs our support if he’s going to win on December 12. The attacks are only going to increase the closer we get to Election Day, so we need to do everything we can in our national PR campaign in support of Judge Moore. But, we need your emergency gift of $25 or more if we’re going to roll out this national strategy and ensure pro-life hero Roy Moore is elected in Alabama. Can we count on you to stand with this pro-life hero in this critically important special election? Thank you for your support, and please keep Judge Moore in your prayers. God bless, Troy Newman President Operation Rescue

Operation Rescue is a terrorist organization. Roy Moore is being supported by terrorists.

But you knew that. And they know it. And tens of millions of Americans are cheering them on.

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It’s not just us. The whole world has gone nuts.by digby

Granted, the world has always been nuts. But it does seem to be going particularly bonkers these days — with the US right in the lead what with Orange Julius Caesar and all.
Get a load of this:

The release of a highly anticipated Bollywood blockbuster has been delayed after a politician from India’s governing party offered a bounty of $1.5 million for the heads of the movie’s star and director amid outcry that the film distorted Hindu legend.

The movie “Padmavati” — depicting the life of legendary 14th-century queen Padmini — sparked the latest in a string of flash points from right-wing groups that perceive more clout under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has courted Hindu nationalists as part of his political base.

Often Hindu outrage is stoked by little more than rumors, including deadly riots and vigilante violence over false claims that Muslims were killing cows sacred to Hindu culture. But this time with the film, the reason for the outrage is even more puzzling.

Members of the Rajput Karni Sena, a group associated with the warrior Rajput caste, claim it misrepresents history by depicting a love affair between the queen and a Muslim invader. The group is further upset that the queen’s midriff is exposed in a song sequence. They have called for a nationwide strike and backed the death threats against star Deepika Padukone and the film’s director, Sanjay Leela Bhansali.

But Bhansali insists that the plot has no such love scene. And the movie trailer pays ample homage to Rajput bravery and their role in resisting Muslim armies.

The death threats — against one of India’s most popular actresses and a prominent filmmaker — brought quick backlash. They were sharply denounced by leaders of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, and the home minister in the southern Karnataka state, Ramalinga Reddy, ordered protection for Padukone and her family.

Also at stake are the boundaries for the world’s most prolific film industry, in which some directors have increasingly tried to push back against decades of film censorship for political reasons.

Chief ministers of a number of states demanded that controversial scenes be removed before the film is screened. The movie’s producers have indefinitely delayed the film’s release.

The news agency ANI reported that Surajpal Amu, a state-level media coordinator of the BJP, told a rally Sunday: “We will reward the ones beheading [Padukone and Bhansali] with Rs 10 crore, and also take care of their family’s needs.” A crore signifies 10 million rupees.

Amu repeated the statement to the Indian Express. Video from the rally also showed Amu saying, “There’s no need to discuss making cuts to the film. We won’t allow it to play in theaters at all.”

An official from the BJP condemned Amu and said the party was considering taking legal action against him.

“It’s absolutely appalling. What have we gotten ourselves into? And where have we reached as a nation?” said the actress Padukone, who plays the leading role of Queen Padmavati and who recently appeared in “XXX: Return of Xander Cage” alongside Vin Diesel.

More at the link.

By the way, Trump’s a big Modi fan. But he would be. Modi’s yet another neo-fascist strongman type. Trump’s favorite.

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There’s nothing at all suspicious about this. Why do you ask?by digby

The Trump administration really is slow-walking the Russia sanctions. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence:

For months, a bipartisan group of senators has put pressure on the administration over its reluctance to move forward on enacting new sanctions against Russia. The law stipulating those sanctions—which President Trump was forced to sign in August after the legislation passed with overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate—has come under direct assault from the White House, dating back to the dog days of summer when it was first being crafted.

More recently, though, the Trump administration blew past an Oct. 1 deadline to issue guidance on how it would implement the sanctions, which will target individuals and entities in the Russian defense and intelligence sectors in retaliation for its election meddling and incursions into eastern Europe.

When lawmakers asked questions about the delay, they were left in the dark. It was only after Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) pressed Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan directly late last month during a phone call that the State Department belatedly issued guidance on how it would implement the sanctions—26 days after it was due. Corker—who has been locked in his own feuds and disagreements with Trump—got results. But it shouldn’t have even reached that point, lawmakers argue.

“I don’t accept the premise that the president can ignore Congress, and that we can’t enforce that,” Cardin said. “The president has a constitutional responsibility to carry out the laws that we pass. That’s a constitutional responsibility. And he’s violating the Constitution if he doesn’t carry it out.”

Yeah? Well, so what?

Cardin and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, have threatened procedural tactics including blocking Trump’s nominees to key foreign policy and national security positions. The reality, though, is that Congress is close to powerless in compelling the administration to act.

“While we may not be able to directly enforce it, I understand that we have limits as to how we can enforce. Congress doesn’t have a military that’s under our command,” Cardin added. “The president does. But we have purse strings that are under our command. And we could use that. We have a lot of power that we can exercise.”

That would require the cooperation of the Republicans. Good luck with that.

I wrote about this issue for Salon last week.

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