The Great American State Fair Fiasco

Did you know that at this moment the Trump administration is running what it calls the The Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington DC from June 25th to July 19th to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? Me neither. And so it seems did most of the country since the attendance was to, to put it mildly, sparse, consisting of a handful of people wandering around a largely empty mall. There were supposed to be 56 booths each representing a state or territory but even that was was pathetic, with some states making merely a token effort and not even manning the booths, leaving just empty rooms.

The opening event was to be a big concert featuring musical acts, but they could only line up mostly B and C listers and even they pulled out for various reasons, so Trump decided to hold a rally with himself as the speaker. But that too proved to be largely a bust.

Malcolm Ferguson describes what he saw.
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This is supposed to frighten us?

Republican speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson thought he would scare people by reading out loud what the Democratic Socialists of America stand for and it sounded great!

“I don’t know if you’ve seen this,” said Johnson.

“This is their platform, this is actually quotes from their platform that they published about a day or two ago.… They put this on paper! They’re saying the quiet things out loud.”

Johnson continued: “Abolish the Electoral College, replace the two-party system with a multi-party ‘democracy,’ expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked-choice voting in all elections,” Johnson said.

He continued, describing how the DSA would establish public ownership of large corporations, abolish ICE, and end sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.

“End all military and economic aid to Israel, prosecute U.S. and Israeli leaders responsible for the genocide in Gaza,” Johnson continued.

It should be noted that while the DSA does support most of these points in its official platform, there is a debate about others, like ranked-choice voting and the merits of abolishing the Senate. But all in all, Johnson appears to be trying to fearmonger by threatening the American people with a good time.

In fact it sounded so good that supporters of the DSA have turned that clip into a TikTok video.

More Republicans should go out and spread the word about the DSA policies. It would be great if Trump did so too.

More good news for progressives

Yesterday saw primary races in Colorado and there was an upset when democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeated 15-term incumbent congresswoman Diana Diana DeGette for the congressional seat. Since this is a deep-blue seat centered around Denver, this means that Kiros will almost certainly be elected in November.

There were several interesting features about this race. One is that it was more of a generational than a political switch since the long-time congresswoman DeGette is by no means a reactionary.

Kiros sought to mount a generational challenge to the 68-year-old DeGette, a member of the Congressional Progressive caucus, who supported key progressive policies like Medicare for all and abolishing ICE. But since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Democratic voters have increasingly turned to younger, more aggressive candidates willing to take on their party’s ageing establishment.

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The Supreme Court finally puts some limits on Trump’s excesses

In a long awaited ruling, the court affirmed by a 6-3 margin the constitutional right of birthright citizenship, that anyone born in the US is a citizen irrespective of the status of the parents. (There are small exceptions such as the children of foreign diplomats.)

The US supreme court has upheld birthright citizenship, which provides nearly all people born in the country with citizenship, ruling against a central piece of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.

“Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause,” the ruling says.
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The supreme court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857 had ruled Black people were not US citizens, but “a separate class of persons”. But the 14th amendment which reversed the Dred Scott decision, was adopted in 1868 during the reconstruction era after the US civil war, to codify the rights of Black Americans – and confer citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”.
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Are hot and cold streaks illusions?

Following his team’s loss to Turkey in the final game of their group stage, the US soccer team’s manager Mauricio Pochettino complained about the use of the word ‘momentum’ in sports.

“[Momentum] is a topic that I don’t understand,” Pochettino said when asked about how the loss would affect his team’s prospects. “What is momentum? To play with the same team that we played against Australia? And to take the risk to receive a yellow card and not to play the next game? Did Germany lose the momentum too [in their 2-1 loss to Ecuador]? I don’t know. [There are] too many topics in soccer that I don’t understand. The objective was to finish first, and we are first, and now is the next stage, and it’s going to be a final, and we are ready.”

Pochettino has a point. There is no doubt that a team is happy when they win and sad or disappointed when they lose. But ‘momentum’ is one of those words that have a scientific sheen and used to give weight to the idea that there are ‘hot streaks’ and ‘cold streaks’ in sports, that a win will likely increase the chances of a win next time and a loss will lead to more losses. But one result is not a trend, though the word ‘momentum’ seems to suggest that it can be.
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Why euphemisms keep changing

People who are sensitive to avoid giving offense tend to be cautious in how they refer to groups of people because the polite (or at least inoffensive) ways of doing so keep changing. In the US we are perhaps most familiar with how the terms for Black people have changed over time, with ‘Negro’ and ‘colored’ falling out of favor, though African American is still acceptable. The change from ‘black’ to ‘Black’ is quite recent. This evolution can lead to mockery by right-wingers, especially white cis males, to make fun of this as political correctness run amok. Some even argue that they have the right to use whatever label they want to use, even if it seen as offensive by the targeted group, and that they should just suck it up.

Linguist John McWhorter explains why euphemisms keep changing, using many examples from all areas of life.

What the cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker has artfully termed ‘the euphemism treadmill’ is not a tic or a stunt. It is an inevitable and, more to the point, healthy process, necessary in view of the eternal gulf between language and opinion. We think of euphemisms as one-time events, where one prissily coins a way of saying something that detracts from something unpleasant about it. That serves perfectly well as a definition of what euphemism is, but misses the point that euphemism tends to require regular renewal. This is because thought changes more slowly than we can change the words for it, and has a way of catching up with our new coinages. Since that is likely eternal, we must accept that we’ll change our terms just like we change our underwear, as a part of linguistic life in a civilised society.
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The Lincoln Pool and Gandhi’s salt march

Trump really has egg on his face due to the mess he has made of the Lincoln Pool. He seems so acutely embarrassed by this fiasco that he has set his attack dogs in the weaponized (in)justice department to arrest people whom he alleges have vandalized the pool and caused the coating to peel off and algae to proliferate. He has made extraordinarily detailed claims that they cut through the paint layer with sharp items.

“The 350 foot gash, made by a very sharp knife or razors, is actually numerous slashes over a very long 350 foot length. It was purposefully and criminally done, and somebody had to work very hard, probably in the dark of night, to create such a condition. Likewise, the small area at the bottom of the Pool was cut and powerfully lifted off the surface leaving very jagged, uneven edges.”

No evidence has been produced in support of this claim of vandalism even though the pool is in a very public space and monitored 24/7/365 by security cameras so if anybody did try to ‘vandalize’ it, or even just dip their hands in the water, the evidence would be easy to produce. The fact that we have not seen any is a sign that the vandalism charge may have been cooked up to take attention away from the mess that Trump himself has created.

[UPDATE: For the first time, a named top official at the National Park Service has made the charge in court, although his “statement does not say when exactly the damage occurred or whether it was a suspected case of vandalism and does not identify anyone who might have been involved.”]
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Good riddance to Starmer

Owen Jones has no patience with those who are praising resigning UK prime minister Keir Starmer as a principled person of integrity who was unlucky and undone by circumstances.

No. This was not a decent man defeated by circumstance, a man of duty and integrity who was simply in the wrong job, a principled leader undone by events. This was an unprincipled politician who abandoned promises with as much enthusiasm as he trousered freebies from rich donors.
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Starmer was a frontman for a Labour-right operation whose purpose was clear: persuade a leftwing membership to hand the party back to those who despised everything it had just stood for. 
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To win over the membership, Starmer’s campaign promised tax hikes for the top 5%, public ownership of utilities, abolition of tuition fees, “an immigration system based on compassion and dignity”, human rights “at the heart of foreign policy”, and the abolition of the House of Lords. In power, Starmer has either failed to deliver on these promises or done the opposite.

Soon after being elected leader, Starmer suspended his predecessor from the party before finally expelling him in 2023, claiming that he and Corbyn had never been friends and distancing himself from his previous leadership pledges. This was deceit, not pragmatism. When he stood for leader, Starmer told the BBC that nationalisation of utilities was a pledge that would be in the next Labour manifesto. The following year, he denied ever saying this, and told the BBC: “I never made a commitment to nationalisation, I made a commitment to common ownership.”

The party would be a “broad church”, Starmer had promised. Instead, he suspended Labour MPs or prevented candidates from running for making comments critical of the state of Israel, and opposing the two-child benefit cap. His machine blocked leftwingers from standing, such as Faiza Shaheen and Lauren Townsend.
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As for his claim that he took over a Labour party that was “morally bankrupt”, he was the human rights lawyer who said that Israel had a right to cut off power and water to Gaza.
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His government broke promise after promise. Its housebuilding revolution failed to materialise. “No return to austerity” gave way to departmental squeezes. International aid was gutted. Meanwhile, Labour’s internal authoritarianism was exported to the country. Thousands were arrested for holding placards after anti-genocide direct action group Palestine Action were proscribed as terrorists on the same legal footing as Islamic State.
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Starmer believed in little other than his own advancement, a trait hardly uncommon among Labour MPs. The danger is that his dismal, disreputable premiership laid the foundations for the hard-right agenda of Nigel Farage. We will soon discover whether the next occupant of No 10, Andy Burnham, believes the answer is simply to paint a northern, charismatic gloss over a failed agenda. If he fails to offer a decisive break from this useless travesty of a government then he, too, will sink.

Yes.

Meanwhile Burnham’s pick for chief of staff is not good sign and seems to indicate that he will try and continue the Blair-Starmer policies of catering to the right. If that turns out to be the case, Labour is doomed and we can expect Reform to win the next election and Nigel Farage to be the next prime minister.

Good election day for progressives

Primary elections in the US are a test of the relative strength of intra-party factions. On the Republican side, the fight is between Trump and anti-Trump (or at least non-Trump) factions and the Trump side has been clearly dominant. On the Democratic side, the fight is between new and younger progressives on the one hand and the old guard favored by the party establishment led by their senate leader Chuck Schumer and their House leader Hakeem Jeffries on the other.

Yesterday’s primaries were a resounding win for the progressives. In New York, progressive candidates won their races.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani waded into Democratic U.S. House primaries to boost three progressives over establishment-backed candidates. All of them won Tuesday, defeating two incumbents and essentially ensuring that two self-described democratic socialists will be elected to Congress in their deep blue districts.
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