Donald Trump’s speech for his vanity July 4th event contained some real howlers such as when he spoke of how George Washington’s Continental Army captured the airports from the British, thus presumably grounding their fleet of Spitfires and giving the American Blue Angels complete superiority of the air. Of course, the history textbooks never mention this great achievement because they are written by liberals who hate America.

Watch.

Did he say the army took over the AIRPORTS during the Revolutionary War? I rewound and play it twice. #TrumpParade pic.twitter.com/DtkObSgk3q

— Terri2uus 🇺🇸🇩🇪🇮🇹 (@terri2uus) July 4, 2019

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…. get a load of what is happening in Brazil. The Intercept has published, along with major Brazilian media, a series of articles that constitute a brutal expose of how the current justice minister Sergio Moro, supposedly an anti-corruption crusader as a judge, engaged in utterly distorting the judicial system in order to convict political opponents, including former president Lula, on corruption charges. The scandal was triggered by the leak of a massive trove of secret documents from an anonymous source, a la Edward Snowden.
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Rick Snyder was the governor of Michigan during the period 2011 to 2018. During that time, he appointed an ’emergency manager’ to replace the elected city government of the city of Flint and that manager switched the city’s water supply from Lake Huron to the highly polluted Flint river without putting in place adequate cleaning up processes. The result was devastating for the residents of that impoverished city. They got filthy water with dangerously high levels of lead that led to all manner of ailments. This also led to one of the lowest points of the Obama presidency when, as Michael Moore showed in his documentary Fahrenheit 11/9, Obama flew in in grand style, staged a photo op where he pretended to drink the water, and then swept out again without doing a damn thing, infuriating the residents who had been hoping that he would take the major drastic actions required to clean up their water.
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Rebecca Traister writes thoughtful pieces examining important issues. I last linked to one of her articles where she argued that the sexual abuse issues highlighted by #MeToo was a watershed moment for the feminist movement. She now has another excellent article where she examines how far behind the times the political pundit class is, which is why so many of them tend to see only Joe Biden as ‘presidential’ and ‘electable’, because he reflects the entitlement period from which they too emerged
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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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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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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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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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