Ruth's Report: Claudia Cardinale

Actress Claudia Cardinale passed away last month. I saw a headline and was tired and then forgot about it until today. STYLE RAVE notes:

Claudia Cardinale passed away on September 23, 2025, in Nemours, France, at the age of 87, surrounded by her children. Her death closed a chapter on one of European cinema’s most graceful and enduring icons, someone whose image, voice, and presence shaped a generation’s romantic imagination. She was known in her heyday as “Italy’s Girlfriend” — a title that hinted at both national affection and the personal magnetism she carried across screens and stages.

Born in 1938 in Tunis to Sicilian parents, Claudia’s path to stardom began almost by accident. In 1957 she won a beauty contest in Tunisia, which included a prize trip to Italy and exposure at the Venice Film Festival. From that moment, her face, poise, and the huskiness of her voice made her unforgettable. While early in her career her voice was often dubbed (due to her accent and linguistic background), she soon became deeply associated with Mediterranean sensuality.

Cardinale’s journey was one of talent, timing, and daring choices. In 1963, she starred in two cinematic milestones: Federico Fellini’s 8½ and Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard. These roles cemented her as part of the European film canon. In 8½, she embodied a dreamlike femme-figure; in The Leopard, opposite Burt Lancaster, she navigated aristocratic longing and societal rupture.

EL MUNDO noted:

The actress of 'Fellini 8 1/2', 'The Leopard', and 'The Artist and the Model' leaves an indomitable legacy far from canons, rules, and slaveries.

In 2017, the Cannes Film Festival featured Claudia Cardinale on its poster. A 1959 photo shoot of the actress dancing on a rooftop in Rome suddenly acquired the character of an emblem, a myth, a dream. In the new red-tinted image, on the facade of the Grand Théâtre Lumière, she - disproportionate, happy, and perfect - seemed to be the living image of a cinema always new, eternally renewed, and necessarily alive. And yet, something didn't add up. The Claudia Cardinale of 2017 was not the same as in 1959. Modern photoshop had lightened her arms, stylized her waist, and slimmed down her thighs, ankles, and calves. They even fixed her naturally wild hair. She took it well, excused the festival, and moved on.

But the damage was done. Beyond changing canons or the supposed updates claimed by the authors of the outrage (because that's what it was), the unforgivable part was seeing how the most prestigious film festival had not understood anything. They failed to grasp that Claudia, the Cardinale who died on Tuesday night at the age of 89, was first and foremost completely different from everything. What made her different was precisely her hunger for difference, her rebellion, her denial of the norm, the impossible modernization of a timeless woman. She was an atypical star in each of her decisions. And she remained so until the end.

Considered by many as the Italian Brigitte Bardot, she was defined at the time as sweeter than Sophia Loren and less artificial than Gina Lollobrigida. A striking beauty, almost hurtful, and ageless, caught between a deceptively innocent look and a hoarse voice of flint. This was her from the descent of the stairs after the bath in The Girl with the Suitcase (1961) to her last appearance in credits in 2022. Like her character in The Leopard, Cardinale was the noblest of commoners and the most outspoken of aristocrats.

Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Vanessa Redgrave, Glenda Jackson, Maggie Smith, Gina Lollobridida, Jeanne Moreau, Alain Delon, Jean Paul Belmondo, Catherine Deneuve, ,Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Monica Vitti, Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Michael Caine, Marcello Mastroianni, Michael York, and Anouk Aimee were just a few of the non-U.S. actors who became stars in the United States in the fifties, sixties and seventies. Some of them never made a film in the U.S.

But films used to be so much more than horror films and superhero films.

Since 1980, we have seen very few non-American actors become stars in the U.S. There has been Antonio Banderas, Pierce Brosnan, Daniel Craig, Russell Crowe, Tom Holland, and Hugh Grant. Am I forgetting anyone. Not any women I can think of except for Nicole Kidman. You could argue Cate Blanchett. But that is about it. Even if you consider Natlie Portman just as an Isralie (she has dual citizenship), Ms. Portmant is not a star. At 44 years old, she has never carried a movie at the box office. She is a leading lady. So was Jean Simmons. Neither woman qualified as a star.

Times have changed. We always had escapism films -- even in my day. But we also had films that tried to say something about life.

Today? Today a director makes a bad film glorifying war and we treat it as art when it is just a stunted man plying with plastic soldiers on a playground.

Films about life provided moments for a Vanessa Redgrave or Sophia Loren to dig deep into a character and hold up a mirror for us.

We are let down by even those regarded as our 'best' directors. Martin Scorse has not made a film that was of any real substance since THE AGE OF INNOCENCE. He makes endless vehicles starring Leonardo di Caprio but they are lifeless and they are vehicles, not films.

Claudia Cardinale existed in a time when film wanted something from actors and when actors could connect with audiences via film.

This is C.I.'s "The Snapshot" for today:

Friday, October 17, 2025. The Young Republican group chat was not children, it was adults speaking and their racist remarks are reflected in Donald Chump's policies.

This week, disturbing news regarding a Telegram chat carried out by adults in the Young Republicans was reported on by POLITICO's Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo:

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n--ga” and “n--guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

Giunta was referring to an upcoming vote on whether he should become chair of the Young Republican National Federation, the GOP’s 15,000-member political organization for Republicans between 18 and 40 years old.

“Im going to create some of the greatest physiological torture methods known to man. We only want true believers,” he continued.

The story remains in the news for several reasons including the fact that Vice President JD Vance thought this was another time he could lie. He's insisted that 'young boys' do things like this -- he's apparently unaware that women were involved as well -- and that this is going to impact his own sons because he's going to have to tell them not to put any statement like that ever on a digital exchange. He's not going to tell them don't say it, he's just going to say keep it off any digital exchange. We'll come back to him. David W. Chen and Megan Mineiro (NEW YORK TIMES) note:

The emergence of the texts and the disparate reactions to them among Republicans revealed not only a split in the party but also, for some, a comfort with rhetoric that once would have been routinely denounced. On the far right, some suggested that any condemnation of the racist, sexist and homophobic discourse was a betrayal of the conservative cause.

And JD can't leave it alone. Diana Nerozzi, Irie Sentner and Dasha Burns (POLITICO) notes:

Vice President JD Vance on Thursday continued to downplay the bigoted messages in a Young Republicans group chat,

[. . .]

Vance’s Thursday post marked the third time in two days that the vice president has waded into the firestorm over the trove of texts obtained by POLITICO and shows how the Trump administration’s strategy, articulated in the Art of the Deal, to never apologize and always hit back, extends well beyond the White House walls.

Vance has not defended the posts, which contained more than 250 racist, homophobic and antisemitic slurs, though he did refer to them as “edgy, offensive jokes.” The vice president has called the response to the posts “pearl clutching” and said “kids do stupid things, especially young boys” even though the chat group included men in their 20s and early 30s who hold local, state and federal government posts.

Right there is another reason it remains a news story. The administration refuses to call out the speech. It tries to distract and divert.

Donald Chump is supposed to be the leader of the United States. If he can't condemn racism -- and he can't -- that's a new story -- especially with all ov his other racist activites.

It's also news because it signals -- yet again -- that JD Vance does not love his children or his wife. Indians were degraded in these texts. And JD is married to a woman whose family traces back to India. JD converted to Catholicism late in life to please his sugar daddy Peter Thiel. He did so despite having children and a wife who were not Catholic and who have not converted. What kind of a father, what kind of a husband does that? One who doesn't really love them.

That's reality and no one wants to say it because of they're afraid of being the first. It's Chump's orange skin all over again where, throughout his first term, the media pretended like he might have some medical condition. No, he just had women's make up.

When I looked at him the first time with that orange crap on his face, I thought of Bette Davis. She was nominated for an Academy Award for playing Baby Jane Hudson in WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? and the look she came up with for the role was based on observations early in her career of extras who got painted up for a film and they wouldn't wash their faces. Each day, they'd apply more make up over it. They often didn't like the way they had looked prior but they thought the make up made them look better. So they'd just pile on more. Kind of like Chump who, in a rather well known incident on THE APPRENTICE, looked in the mirror and declared himself "pretty" after hair and make up finished with him. No, he wasn't "pretty," but that set him down the road he's on where he became the first US president to wear make up off camera repeatedly.

As for JD's eye liner, I have no idea on that. Firuge that out on your own. But JD's attitude towards his own family is an embarrassment.

His children are Indian-American, his wife is Indian-American and in yet another incident where racists attack people from India, he is found defending those racists and not defending his children and his wife.

Everything is odd in Chump World but maybe TIME magazine can provide a little perspective. In a piece entitled "Top 10 Memorable Debate Moments," they include this:

Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis didn't exactly charm his way into voters' hearts during the 1988 debates with his response about whether he would support the death penalty should his wife, Kitty, be raped and murdered. A longtime opponent of the death penalty, Dukakis responded to the startling question from CNN's Bernard Shaw, "No, I don't, Bernard, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime." While some criticized the fairness of the question, to viewers the answer seemed both dispassionate and dismissive. Years later, Dukakis would recall his response, saying, "I have to tell you, and maybe I'm just still missing it ... I didn't think it was that bad."

He gave a very calm response. And it didn't go over with Americans because we expect people to react when they're children and/or spouse are threatened.

JD refuses to protect them. And so wonder what that says about the nature of his soul. At THE NEW REPUBLIC, Alex Shephard offers:

This wasn’t a college group chat. Its members were leaders in the Young Republican National Federation, which includes members up to the age of 40. William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used variations of the n-word. Peter Giunta, who was chief of staff for a New York assemblyman until he was fired on Tuesday, joked about murdering his opponents. Hendrix is 25. Giunta is 31. Vance, for what it’s worth, is 41. Before being tapped as Donald Trump’s running mate last year, he was also known to hang out in group chats with other young Republicans, some younger even than Hendrix. Is 41 too old to face consequences for your actions?

Vance’s repeated insistence that young adults should never be held accountable for using racial slurs is notable in and of itself. But his larger refusal to condemn depraved allies or even to distance himself from them is part of a larger trend. Most political norms—and the laws of political gravity that helped keep them in place—are long gone, replaced by an intense tribal loyalty that turns any scandal into an opportunity for whataboutism. This, it seems, is an early preview of Trump’s lasting political legacy: Republicans are no longer apologizing, nor are they pushing out racist, bigoted allies when they inevitably find themselves embroiled in controversy.

The vile contents of this leaked group chat are, as many have pointed out, not especially different from a great deal of what passes for discourse on the MAGA right. What is most notable about it, as Andrew Egger wrote in The Bulwark, is that the people involved are the product of a post-Trump culture that rewards “the most amoral and psychotic political strivers, and has held them up as a professional ideal for the young people coming up behind them to copy and emulate. This is what they know as the ticket to power.”

We might be giving Trump too much credit, however. The radicalization of young Republicans predates his political rise in 2015. The racist, pro-Nazi far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 that left one young woman dead was full of young Republican leaders, many of whom had taken official positions before the start of Trump’s presidential campaign. As my former colleague Alex Pareene wrote in an extremely perceptive piece shortly after the Charlottesville rally, “Racial resentment has been a driving force behind College Republican recruitment for years, but at this point it’s really all they have left to offer.” Trump was a catalyst of the Republican Party’s transformation, but his rise was also a symptom of its radicalization and turn toward resentment, in other words. But young Republicans’ Nazi turn started long before his fateful trip down the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015.

Where Trump was different—and one reason why he is so uniquely beloved on the right—is that he provided a permission structure for Republicans to be publicly cruel and hateful. His rise came in no small part because he refused to be cowed or, for that matter, to ever apologize. In 2016, he was openly misogynistic to Megyn Kelly (now a staunch supporter), racist toward Blacks and Latinos, and contemptuous of anyone who opposed him (including war hero and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain). The controversy this generated was a virtuous cycle for Trump. He would say something inflammatory, pundits and politicians would criticize him, and he would not only refuse to back down but mock them as well—a media circus that sucked out all the oxygen from rivals and competitors.

And that is another reason this is a news story. The party of Abraham Lincoln now has a huge amount of members who live and breathe racism. They can't get through a day without expressing it and they can't see a future where racism isn't a major component. Harold Meyerson (THE AMERICAN PROSPECT) noted this week:

Today’s MAGA movement is nothing if not the ideological heir to those Redeemers, as determined to reverse every last vestige of the Second Reconstruction—the civil rights laws and values of the 1960s—as the Redeemers were to extirpate the First.

Yesterday, the Republican justices on the Supreme Court made clear their desire to redistrict Southern states in a way that would eliminate the districts, and the possibility of districts, that send, and could send, Black representatives to Congress. As my colleague David Dayen has pointed out, the more immediate impulse behind the justices’ determination to effectively revoke what remains of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is to ensure that Republicans will pick up a dozen or more House seats through the redistricting the Court will order. They clearly understand, however, that that will mean effectively disfranchising Southern Black citizens. To the extent that Chief Justice John Roberts has adduced a reason for this epochal reversal, it’s that the white racism that the Act’s supporters were combating in 1965 is now, 60 years later, a thing of the past.

But the actually existing Republican Party that the justices mean to keep in power is a veritable storehouse of white racism, reviving and initiating policies for which white racial bigotry is the only plausible explanation. The Trump administration has already made that clear by stipulating that the only foreign refugees it welcomes to our shores are a subset of South African whites, concerned that that nation’s elected leaders (predominantly Black) may use eminent domain powers to repurpose some land for public purposes. By contrast, refugees fleeing for their lives from the Taliban, the ayatollahs, or Central American gangs have had, and will have, America’s doors slammed in their face.

Yesterday, the Times reported that the Departments of State and Homeland Security had sent proposals to the White House for new refugee rules that would favor Europeans seeking to leave their homelands because they’d been “targeted for peaceful expression of views online such as opposition to mass migration or support for ‘populist’ political parties.” In other words, reducing our refugee policy exclusively to an ingathering of white Europe’s far-right and neo-fascists.

Trump’s administration and the Court’s Republicans still occasionally cling to the contention that they are simply reverting to policies of racial neutrality by striking down DEI and affirmative action policies. Trump’s actions, however, belie that argument with each passing day. He has fired, or tried to fire, Black, and female, leaders of prominent institutions—the armed services, regulatory agencies, the Federal Reserve—on either the slimmest pretexts or for no stated reason at all, while populating his administration with very disproportionately white male appointees, as if matching the demographic composition of the Eisenhower administration was his desired goal.

The Telegram chat was not some abhorrent diversion, it was a manifestation of what has become the heart of today's Republican Party. At TALKING POINTS MEMO yesterday, Josh Marshall noted:

I read a group email from Capitol Hill yesterday essentially predicting the extinction of the Democratic Party after what is predicted to be a decision from the Supreme Court overturning what remains of the Voting Rights Act. A less apocalyptic but still daunting version of this argument appeared in an evening piece published by Nate Cohn in the Times. Before getting to the partisan and vote count implications, let’s first discuss what this means, which is essentially ending African-American political representation in the states of the old Confederacy. Most if not all majority-minority districts disappear and Republican state legislatures are free to draw up districts which spread/dilute African-American voters into safely Republican districts. Cohn thinks it’s plausible that Democrats could permanently lose (as much as anything can ever be permanent) 12 House seats. And this is on top of the strong-arm restricting happening in a number of states across the country. The overall scenario is one in which the House becomes an even bigger electoral challenge than the Senate, one that is possible to win but only in a generational wave style election.

Racism is not a manufacturing flaw for today's Republican Party, it's a built-in feature, planned, intended, installed.

Now not all. Mike noted last night how Senator Markwayne Mullin (a Republican) has denounced the Telegram exchange. But Mullin's common sense approach does not represent all of the Republican Party and certainly not the majority of them on social media.

Chris Walker (TRUTHOUT) notes:

Explicitly racist language and symbolism is becoming increasingly common in Republican spaces.

Just this week, an image of an American flag with a Nazi swastika embedded in the stripes was spotted during a Zoom call behind Angelo Elia, the legislative correspondent to Rep. Dave Taylor (R-Ohio). Congressman Taylor claims he asked Capitol Police to investigate how the flag was placed in his office, but given the placement of the symbol, it’s unlikely that Taylor or his staffers wouldn’t have noticed it before the Zoom call.

Notably, President Donald Trump’s own rhetoric has frequently included racist dog whistles and explicit bigotry. Trump has also borrowed rhetoric from Nazi officials, including publicly claiming that immigrants are “poisoning” the blood of the country, and calling his political opponents “vermin.”

These adults in the chat demonized others and that's what Chump does. To destroy special education? You have to demonize. To destroy healthcare? You have to demonize. Every policy he's for is built around the premise that someone unworthy is getting something and you're not. It's grudge f**k politics and that's all these professional victims in MAGA can do, pretend that they're wronged and others are in a line that's moving while they're being left behind.

As we did in yesterday's snapshot, we're noting some video coverage of this issue with the hope that any drive-by reader (as opposed to a community member) who might not get what's going on will better understand it coming from someone other than me.

In other news, this morning at THE NEW REPUBLIC, Daniel Boguslaw reports:

Fifteen minutes east of Senator Bernie Sanders’s headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, sit the nerve centers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s national efforts to target immigrants for deportation. Two of ICE’s three main targeting facilities, in addition to its tip line, are located in the hamlet of Williston, which has seen mounting protests in recent weeks over plans to hire round-the-clock analysts to aid the Trump administration’s deportation goals.

The targeting centers are fueling an unprecedented immigration crackdown across the country, one that has drawn widespread condemnation from politicians and citizens alike. Harrowing videos have captured masked ICE officers arresting U.S. citizens, shooting at clergy, and threatening first responders with lethal force. And while ICE has abandoned some of its focused targeting practices in favor of broad sweeps, the targeting that remains is driven by two offices in Williston.

One of these facilities is the National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, or NCATC, which serves as the nexus for intelligence that is sent to ICE’s 25 enforcement and removal operations, or ERO, field offices across the country. The intelligence packaged by the NCATC for ERO “door kickers” includes biographical information, criminal history, immigration history, custody data, immigration benefit information, naturalization information, and vehicle and insurance data. Thanks to a memorandum of understanding signed in April by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, it now also includes IRS data, the legality of which is being contested in court.

Chump's war on immigrants continues across the United States but especially in Illinois. Too bad for him, Governor JD Pritzker is not intimidated by Chump.

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ICE needs to get out of Chicago. They are neither wanted nor needed. Danny Postel (IN THESE TIMES) explains:

If there’s one thing President Donald Trump and the people of Chicago might agree on, it’s that America’s third-largest city is currently a “war zone.”

But for most Chicagoans, it’s the Trump administration that has made it so, with its military-style “Operation Midway Blitz,” led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and “Operation At Large,” which Customs and Border Protection (CBP) launched in Los Angeles and brought to the Windy City in September.

“I have lived here for 28 years and I have never felt so profoundly unsafe until this week,” one resident recently posted on social media. “And it’s not because of gangs or crime or unhoused people or drug users or migrants. I feel unsafe because there are militarized units with loaded guns in the school parking lots of my district, kidnapping my neighbors.”

The statement echoes a citywide sentiment. Over the last five weeks in Chicago, federal agents have shot at least two people, killing one (Silverio Villegas González, a father of two who had just dropped one of his children off at school when ICE agents shot him); descended on an apartment building with a Black Hawk helicopter and used flash-bang grenades; tear-gassed protesters and first responders; smoke-bombed a street full of people; reportedly zip-tied children and separated them from their parents for several hours in the middle of the night; shot protesters with rubber bullets; handcuffed a city council member in a hospital; and fired a chemical weapon at a TV reporter as she was driving away, burning her face.

In one of the more shocking moments in this mayhem, on September 19, agents perched on the roof of an ICE detention center in the suburban village of Broadview shot the Rev. David Black, lead pastor at the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, in the head and body with pepper-spray projectiles known as pepper balls. Just moments earlier, Black, dressed in his clerical garb, had both arms up in the air and was “praying, verbally, for the ICE officers and those detained inside,” as he later recalled to CNN.

Other protesters were shot with pepper balls during the incident. They were chanting, singing and praying — peacefully, Black stressed. “We could hear [the agents] laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” he told CNN. “It was deeply disturbing.”

Meanwhile, self-deluded MAGA types keep telling themselves that Chump's only targeting violent criminals -- you know, people like Radule Bojovic. Who? One of the latest targeted by ICE. A police officer. Luke Barr and Meredith Deliso (ABC NEWS) report:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested a suburban Chicago police officer who is accused of being in the country illegally, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Radule Bojovic, a native of Montenegro, was working as a sworn officer for the Hanover Park Police Department, according to DHS.

He was "encountered during a targeted enforcement action" as part of "Operation Midway Blitz," a surge of immigration enforcement in Illinois that began last month, DHS said in a press release Thursday announcing the arrest.

[. . .]

The Village of Hanover Park said its police department hired Bojovic in January "in full compliance with federal and state law" and that the village "confirmed that he was legally authorized by the federal government to work in the United States."

In other disturbing news, Maanvi Singh (GUARDIAN) reports:

Queer and trans immigrants at a detention facility in south Louisiana have alleged that they faced sexual harassment and abuse, medical neglect and coerced labor by staff at the facility, and that they were repeatedly ignored or faced retaliation for speaking out.

In multiple legal complaints, immigrants detained at the South Louisiana Ice Processing Center (SLIPC) in Basile, Louisiana, said they were recruited into an unsanctioned work program that forced them to perform hard manual labor for as little as $1 per day. Detainees also alleged that queer people were targeted by an assistant warden who stalked, harassed and sexually assaulted them.

Three current and former detainees who spoke to the Guardian said that, between 2023 and 2025, they endured months of abuse from an assistant warden named Manuel Reyes and his associates. In their complaints to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the detainees also said that they faced retaliation for reporting the abuse to authorities, alleging that Reyes and other staff beat them and denied them medical treatment.

Let's wind down with this from THE BLACK COMMENTATOR.

The Black Commentator

Issue #1059

is now Online

October 16, 2025