The census shambles

I wrote earlier about how people who work for the Donald Trump administration eventually end up losing all self-respect as they are forced to defend the indefensible. This happened in the case of a veteran lawyer Sarah Fabian in the justice department as she tried to defend the government’s practice of denying basic health and sanitary essentials to detained migrant children.

We now have another career justice department lawyer seeing any sense of credibility and integrity slip away as he tries to cope with the utter shambles of the Trump policy on the citizenship question on the census form. I earlier wrote how, following the US Supreme Court’s rejection of the citizenship question because the government’s reasons for including it were ‘contrived’ and thus not credible, the Department of Commerce formally stated that it was no longer going to pursue the matter and that the census forms were being printed without the question. This would normally be the end of the story.
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The horrible conditions in speed warehouses

John Oliver on Last Week Tonight exposes the horrible conditions in the warehouses that serve companies that seek to make speed of delivery the main selling point, because that results on demands on the workers who have to rush around to fulfill those orders. Amazon is of course the gorilla in the business, driving up the demands on its workers to the breaking point while at the same time fighting their efforts to unionize.


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Trump might suggest Ivanka to head the IMF

hristine Lagarde, the current head of the International Monetary Fund, has decided to leave that post to become head of the European Central Bank. This leaves a vacancy to be filled at the IMF. The IMF plays a major role in the economies of developing countries and has been accused of pushing austerity policies at the expense of people’s welfare, policies that have harmed the poor and led to destabilization of nations.
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Increasing condemnation of US behavior

The human rights group Amnesty International usually criticizes the behavior of foreign governments, and when it has criticized the US it is usually for its actions against civilians in other parts of the world in the many wars and other military entanglements that the US is involved in. But it has now issued a stinging report criticizing what the US is doing within its own borders.
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Big win on census citizenship question

The Trump administration has decided to print the 2020 census forms without including the question that asked people to state their citizenship status. The Trump administration and Republicans had wanted this question despite fears being raised that this would result in non-citizens being afraid to take part in the census and not filling the forms, thus affecting the many ways in which resources are allocated to states and localities, including the number of congressional seats in each state, that depend only on the number of people that are there, not on the number of citizens. Of course, this likely was exactly what the Trump administration wanted to achieve, though they created some kind of cockamamie rationale for its inclusion.
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Exposing the rotten core of the immigration agencies

The scandal of how immigrant families are being treated by the Customs and Border Protection agency (and its related agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement and their parent organization the Department of Homeland Security) is finally getting the attention it deserves. Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus led by its chair Joaquin Castro are keeping the heat on by paying a visit to two of the detention sites in Texas and defying the CBP officials who tried to give them a guided Potemkin tour of just selected areas. They demanded access to other areas and the right to talk to the people being detained, and when they were denied, they did so anyway. They described what they saw as “horrifying”.
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What will the Democratic establishment do if Biden falters?

One of the ways that the political establishment (that includes the mainstream media) keeps progressive policies in check is to take as self-evidently true that the Democratic party must appeal to Trump voters if they are to win. Another way to say essentially the same thing is to assert that they must avoid alienating the party ‘moderates’ by adopting policies that are seen as too far to the left. It is only in the progressive media that one finds the argument being made that appealing to Trump voters is a futile strategy and that one would be far better off trying to reach disenchanted voters by pushing a more progressive message.
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An atheist ashram in India

In the west, Hinduism and Buddhism are seen as peaceful, contemplative religions that preach peace, tolerance, and harmony, and advocate for practices like mediation and yoga. But in those countries where those religions are the majority, we have seen the rise of militant religious chauvinists that have sought to discriminate against minority groups, sometimes using violence and even murder.
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Awkward!

You know the feeling when some people at a party are having a serious conversation and another person who knows nothing about the subject tries to force themselves into the group by making an inane comment and then smiling in a self-satisfied manner and the conversers, not wanting to tell the person to get lost because that person may be the self-important child of someone else at the party, instead freezes that person out using their body language?

That happened at the G20 summit when FrancoisEmmanuel Macron, Theresa May, Justin Trudeau, and Christine Lagarde were talking and such a child butted in.

This cringe-worthy video was released by the French government which suggests that they were sending a message.