Why Trump is going after the judiciary

Donald Trump’s attack on a federal judge who ruled against him as being an ‘Obama judge’ and thus acting in a biased way resulted in an unusual rebuke from US Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts who decried adding labels to federal judges once they are on the bench, declaring that they should be presumed to be above partisan interests. To no one’s surprise, Trump did not take Robert’s comments lying down and has issued a new series of tweets against the judiciary.
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Banning women from wearing ‘nighties’ in public

An Indian village council has created a stir by banning women from wearing ‘nighties’ in public, with the threat of a fine for the women who do and a reward for informants who snitch on them.

Village elder Balle Vishnu Murthy told a visiting colleague from BBC Telugu that the ban was to stop women from exposing their bodies. “It is okay to wear nighties at home but wearing them outdoors could attract attention and cause trouble for the wearer,” he said.

Westerners might be forgiven for thinking of the ‘nightie’ as some kind of flimsy revealing item of nightwear that one sees in stores like Victoria’s Secret. Far from it. It is a one-piece tunic along the lines of a long smock that is slipped over the head and covers the body from the neck to the ankles. It is far more functional than the traditional sari for doing chores and getting around. It did originate as nightwear but expanded its role as its comfort and utility became more widely recognized, pretty much like how sweatpants and yoga pants are now commonly seen in public in the US.
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Trump and Saudi America – following the same old script

To no one’s surprise, Donald Trump has sided with Mohammed bin Salman in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. All that Trump required was a denial by bin Salman and his father the king to feel that the there was sufficient uncertainty to prevent his taking any meaningful steps. Of course, in these days, there is no amount of evidence that can be produced that he could not dismiss by saying that it was fake news, so this was a foregone conclusion.
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You call this is a debate?

Mississippi is going to have a run-off election on November 27 to decide its senate seat. This should have been an easy win for the incumbent Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith against her Democratic opponent Mike Espy. But Hyde-Smith, who was appointed to the seat to replace Thad Cochran who had to retire due to ill health, had managed to make the race more competitive by various bone-headed moves such as wearing a confederate cap and praising a secessionist general from the civil war, suggesting that suppressing the votes of liberals would be a good idea, and worst of all, saying that she would gladly be in the front row for a lynching. The last was particularly egregious given that state’s history of public lynchings and the fact that her opponent is black.
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Creating the lone wolf terrorist

The investigative public television series Frontline has partnered with the investigative journalists at ProPublica on a series that they have called Documenting Hate where they chart the recent actions of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. Their first episode Documenting Hate: Charlottesville premiered in August and I reviewed it here. Yesterday they showed the second episode Documenting Hate: New American Nazis and you can see the full episode online here.
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The never-ending election

It is now two weeks since election day and four Congressional seats are still undecided as votes are still being counted. Perhaps the most turbulent one is in Utah where Republican incumbent Mia Love is locked in a tight race with Democrat Ben McAdams. The lead kept switching as votes came in from various districts and the latest reversal has McAdams up by just 739 votes out of nearly 270,000 cast. He seems to feel confident enough that this lead will hold up to declare victory when the final votes are certified later today.
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Backsliding democracies

Authoritarian governments are bad enough but it is disturbing when we have ‘backsliding democracies’ where countries actually choose authoritarian leaders in elections, as John Oliver points out in a survey of the current trend around the globe. He looks at the characteristics of authoritarian societies before getting to the issue of whether the US is one or heading towards becoming one.

Serial Saudi admissions of lying about Khashoggi murder

Can anyone trust anything that the Saudi Arabian government says about the death of Jamal Khashoggi? Their lies have been so shameless that it is no wonder Donald Trump and Mohammed bin Salman are so close because they are both cut from the same cloth, using one lie to cover up earlier lies and never bothering to explain why they uttered the earlier lies. Take the latest concessions by the Saudi government.
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The guilt and shame of killing someone

Life is such a precious gift that unless one is a sociopath, killing someone is such a horrific thing that one shies away from it. It takes extraordinary circumstances for someone to lose control of themselves sufficiently to kill another human being. So governments have elaborate methods by which they encourage ordinary people to join their military and then turn them into killers. These involve training them to unquestioningly follow orders and to dehumanize those perceive as the enemy, by portraying them as less than human or so outlandishly evil that they deserve to die, and to shower the killers with medals and honors upon their return in order to make them feel like heroes.
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She needs to hire a better joke writer

In Mississippi, a run-off election is scheduled for November 27 since no candidate obtained the required 50% of the vote. The contest will be between incumbent Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democrat Mike Espy. I wrote before about how Hyde-Smith had already got herself into trouble by saying that “”If [Tupelo cattle rancher, Colin Hutchinson] invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” Her opponent Espy is black and given the racist history of public hangings of black people, especially in the deep south, the comment was seen as reprehensible. She dismissed criticisms by saying it was a joke.
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