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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A disturbing collection of police abuses against protestors

A North Carolina lawyer named T. Greg Doucette has been collecting videos of the acts of police brutality against protestors from across the country. He has over 600 already and has received more than a thousand more that he is still processing. He is entering them into a spreadsheet database that you can search on. The sheer number of abuses is breathtaking.

The videos have a disturbingly repetitive style. There is a peaceful demonstration. Then the police arrive, often in riot gear and with military style assault vehicles, and then the violence starts as they attack the protestors with tear gas, rubber bullets, bean bag guns, and ‘flash bangs’ (the label given to stun grenades that temporarily disorient the target). The police say that these weapons and others such a tasers are non-lethal but when demonstrators pick up tear gas canisters and throw them back at the police, they are charged with “assault with a deadly weapon”.
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Looking deeply into the Supreme Court’s LGBT opinion

Yesterday I wrote about the 6-3 decision by the US Supreme Court that ruled that discrimination against gay, lesbian, and transgender people in employment violated Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that says that it is “unlawful . . . for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

This case was a consolidation of three separate cases. Gerald Bostock and Donald Zerda were both fired from their jobs when their employers learned that they were gay, and Aimee Stephens, who had presented as a male when she was hired, was fired from her job when she told her employer six years later that she planned to live and work full-time as a woman. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Bostock’s firing but the Second Circuit in Zarda’s case and the Sixth Circuit in Stephens’ case said that the firings violated Title VII. Sadly, Zarda and Stephens have died since the cases were filed and thus were not able to savor their victory but their heirs who continued the cases can.
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