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.

Tell us something new, John

Former National Security Advisor to Donald Trump and ultra-right wing neoliberal uber war hawk John Bolton, who pretty much wanted to use the US military to attack any country that even dared to look crosswise at the US, has given an interview about his upcoming book that describes Trump in ways that those of us who are sentient and not blinded by the glare of Trump worship have known all along, concluding that he is ‘not fit for office.’.

John Bolton, ahead of the release of his explosive new book about his 17 months at the White House, called Donald Trump not “fit for office”, claiming the president doesn’t have “the competence to carry out the job”.
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In a preview on Good Morning America Thursday, Bolton spoke to Martha Raddatz, chief global affairs correspondent, calling Trump a “stunningly uninformed” man whose ignorances could be easily manipulated by foreign adversaries.

“He was so focused on the re-election that longer-term considerations fell by the wayside,” He said. “There really isn’t any guiding principle that I was able to discern other than what’s good for Donald Trump’s re-election”.
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“I was sick at heart over Trump’s zeal to meet with Kim Jong-un,” he wrote according to an advanced copy seen by ABC, adding he would be “hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during [his] tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations”.

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Trump and Pence have to eat crow on Kaepernick

Donald Trump ranted about how players who knelt for the national anthem before sporting events were sons of bitches and should be fired, aiming most of his ire at Colin Kaepernick who started the practice. In 2017, Trump even sent vice-president Mike Pence, his wife, and his entourage all the way to Indianapolis to a football game just so that they could storm out when some players knelt at the beginning. It was clearly a pre-planned pure publicity stunt to feed red meat to their fans.

Vice President Mike Pence left a football game between the Indianapolis Colts and the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday after some players knelt during the National Anthem, saying he did not want to “dignify” the demonstration.

“I left today’s Colts game because @POTUS and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem,” Pence wrote on Twitter.
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The pool of journalists accompanying the vice president was not allowed into the stadium and was asked to stay in their vans. They were told by a staffer that “there may be an early departure from the game,” but were not given any further details.

Some criticized Trump and Pence for the walkout, with Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz tweeting, “Wait. This was orchestrated to make a point? That’s not an inexpensive thing to do.”

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These people really, really hate the LGBT community

Denver Riggleman is a Republican congressman from Virginia who is a member of the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus in the US House of Representatives. Donald Trump has endorsed him for re-election and Jerry Falwell, Jr., president of Liberty University, an utterly reactionary evangelical Christian who is one of Trump’s most ardent supporters, had also endorsed him. Thus you would think he was a shoo-in to once again obtain his party’s nomination to represent his congressional seat in Virginia. But on Tuesday he lost his primary race to rival Bob Good. Riggleman joins Democrat Dan Lipinski and Republican Steve King as the third incumbent congressperson to fail to win the party’s nomination in this election cycle.
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The Karen bestiary

‘Karens’ have been much in the news recently. I was generally familiar with the ‘Karen’ concept as the name given to middle-aged white women who have a great sense of entitlement and do not hesitate to demand that the authorities (police, managers, and the like) immediately act to satisfy any grievance that they think they have experienced at the hands of those they think are inferiors. Very often these inferiors are black people committing the offense of living while black.

What I had not realized is that Karen is an umbrella term that covers a spectrum of people. Communications professor Apryl Williams has studied the Karen phenomenon and says that Karens can be split by age and different economic and social classes. A ‘Kylie’ is the name given to 15-20 year olds, ‘Becky’ is from 20 to the mid-thirties, the paradigmatic Karens are in the mid-30s to mid-40s range and have reached the stage of being used to getting their own way and the ones who demand that the authority figure take their side. Then of course we have the names given to people in specific cases of Kanrenism, such as BBQBecky, PermitPatty, Golfcart Gail, and most recently CentralPark Amy. Karen is a form of behavior that is not gender exclusive in that men like GymSecurity Tom also fall under the umbrella.
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