A fitting climax to Trump’s very bad week

When I wrote on Friday that last week was terrible for Trump, I had no idea that the worst (best?) was yet to come. Because yesterday we saw two more debacles.

First we had the fiasco of the firing of Geoffrey Berman, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in what was clearly an act designed to get rid of someone who was conducting investigations that were likely getting too close for comfort to Trump, his family, and his cronies.

And then yesterday’s rally in Tulsa that Trump had been salivating over as the chance to get on top of things by riling up his rabid base with his racist, jingoistic rhetoric, out to be a damp squib. The Trump campaign had even built an outdoor stage so that Trump and Pence could address the expected huge overflow crowds before the main event. The rhetoric was on display for two hours but the crowd was not. The massive crowd that he had predicted failed to materialize. The stadium has a capacity of just 19,000 people but was nowhere near capacity. As a final indignity, the outdoor stage was dismantled even before the rally ended.
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Primary races to watch on Tuesday

On Tuesday, the state of New York holds its primary elections and Ryan Grim and Akela Lacy describes ome interesting races that are being closely watched, where progressives are trying to wrest the Democratic party nominations from entrenched establishment politicians, seeking to emulate Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise win in 2018.

THE FIRST INSIDE the gates was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when she knocked off Queens machine boss Joe Crowley in June 2018. Three months later, a slew of progressive and socialist insurgents beat incumbents in New York state legislative primaries: some who’d been serving decades, and others who’d been part of the renegade Independent Democratic Conference, which shifted power in Albany toward Republicans. Those primaries brought Jessica Ramos, Alessandra Biaggi, Julia Salazar, and a host of others to Albany, where they uncorked a burst of bottled-up of progressive legislation.

Then came Tiffany Cabán, a former public defender who ran a shoestring campaign for Queens district attorney and came out ahead on election day in the summer of 2019, only to lose by a few dozen votes when the absentee ballots were counted.

The campaigns of the last two years created a roadmap for left-wing insurgents this cycle, with the Cabán and Ocasio-Cortez races pointing progressives to the New York City neighborhoods where their strength is particularly strong, exposing opportunities to unseat new incumbents. The 2018 bids for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general, by Cynthia Nixon, Jumaane Williams, and Zephyr Teachout, respectively, left behind additional local data. While Jamaal Bowman’s challenge to Rep. Eliot Engel has gotten the most coverage, Reps. Yvette Clarke, Greg Meeks, and others are fending off spirited challenges from the left. ProgressiveMondaire Jones, meanwhile, has moved into the lead in an open congressional primary in a southern New York district. That same force is rattling the cages of the machine in down-ballot races throughout the city.

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The gang that can’t shoot straight

If the Trump administration were not so corrupt, dangerous, and harmful to so many people, their sheer incompetence would be laughable. Take for example their attempt to fire the Geoffrey Berman, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Attorney General William Barr announced at 9:00 pm on Friday night that Berman was “stepping down” effective immediately and thanked him for his “tenacity and savvy” while in the office he had led since 2018. The timing of the announcement immediately raised suspicions that this was another of the notorious ‘Friday night news dumps’ which administrations use to avoid media scrutiny of dubious actions.
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The Onion on the 15% of Americans who are just plain bonkers

Somme of you may be familiar with the ‘crazifiction factor‘, a term invented by John Rogers to explain the 27% of Americans who seem to be willing to vote for the most bizarre candidates. The Onion reports that the Pew Research organization that conducts polls on various aspects of American life has come up with a different figure.

WASHINGTON—Classifying millions of citizens around the country as “total goddamn mysteries,” a resigned Pew Research study released Friday found it was impossible to determine what the fuck was going on with 15% of Americans. “After an exhaustive, year-long venture, we are still just as confused, if not more confused, about what the deal is with all these indecipherable weirdos,” said lead researcher Jenna Kirkman, before throwing her arms into the air, and calling a large portion of Americans “lost causes.” “According to our very frustrating research, a large portion of Americans are just freaks who will never be understood, no matter how hard we try. Are they happy? Sad? Old? Young? Unfortunately, because so much of the nation are just total fucking randos, we may never actually know.” At press time, Kirkman added that the remaining 85% of Americans were basic as shit, allowing researchers to easily parse every detail about their boring, miserable lives.

(This is of course satire.)

Trump’s no good, very bad, horrible week

On Monday, the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that firing employees because they are gay or lesbian or transgender violated the law, thus striking a blow against Trump’s anti-LGBT agenda. Then on Thursday, they ruled against his attempt to get rid of the DACA program. On Wednesday accounts about John Bolton’s book describing Trump as an ignorant idiot unfit to hold his office appeared.

And that was not all. On Tuesday there was the announcement of another book, this time by Trump’s niece Mary L. Trump, a psychologist, who really lays into the highly dysfunctional Trump family.
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The 1921 Tulsa massacre

Today June 19 is Juneteenth, that commemorates the day in 1865 when Union general Gordon Granger gave the news to the last outpost of slavery in east Texas in Galveston that the civil war had ended and that all slaves were now free. Note that the Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 formally ending slavery, and confederate general Robert E. Lee had formally surrendered in April of 1865. Why it took more than two years for the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect in Texas was possibly because the federal government had such a weak presence in much of the country that it could not enforce its laws and edicts.
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Trump reeling from two Supreme Court defeats

The US Supreme Court delivered the second blow to Trump this week when it ruled 5-4 on Thursday that Trump’s executive order rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was not valid because the reasoning behind it was ‘arbitrary and capricious’.. This follows the 6-3 ruling on Monday that said that employers who fired employees because they were gay, lesbian, or transgender violated the law.
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How to make a comedy show during the quarantine

I have been impressed at how these shows have been able to put out such good stuff while everyone is at home. Samantha Bee takes us behind the scenes to show how she and her team did it. It is interesting to see all the people involved who are normally behind the scenes explain what they do. They all look so young! No wonder the show has such energy and topicality.
Part 1:

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This tells us a lot about the Trump White House

It turns out that not only did Trump not know about Juneteenth when he scheduled his rally for that day in Tulsa, none of his staff knew either.

Juneteenth celebrates the anniversary of the day in 1865 when an army general read out Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation in Texas, freeing slaves in a portion of the last un-emancipated state.
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But Trump told the Wall Street Journal that neither he nor any of his staff seemed to know the meaning of the holiday before the furor over the Tulsa rally.
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That lack of knowledge did not stop Trump claiming that his Tulsa rally had greatly helped popularize the holiday – which is already commemorated or observed by 47 states and the District of Columbia.

“I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous,” Trump told the newspaper. “It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it.

The Journal reported that Trump said he had asked many people around him about the holiday and none of them had heard of Juneteenth. He then “paused the interview to ask an aide if she had heard of Juneteenth, and she pointed out that the White House had issued a statement last year commemorating the day”.

Trump responded: “Oh really? We put out a statement? The Trump White House put out a statement? OK, OK. Good.”

I suspect that every single black person knows about Juneteenth so that supposed lack of knowledge about the date suggests either that his staff is exclusively white or that Trump is using the familiar ‘nobody knew’ excuse as a cover for his own ignorance, despite the fact that the term is widely known and the day commemorated.