Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[y66]

How is Trump's ignorance of basic facts about homelessness different from his ignorance of basic facts about everything?

[y66]

Guest post from Paul Krugman:

 

I’ve been reading a recent Rockefeller Institute report on states’ federal “balance of payments” — the difference for each state between what the federal government spends in that state and what it gets back in revenue.

 

The pattern is familiar: Richer states subsidize poorer states. And the reasons are clear: Rich states pay much more per person in federal taxes, while actually getting a bit less in federal spending, because Medicaid and other “means-tested” programs go disproportionately to those with low incomes. But the magnitudes are startling.

 

Take the case of Kentucky. In 2017, the state received $40 billion more from the federal government than it paid in taxes. That’s about one-fifth of the state’s G.D.P.; if Kentucky were a country, we’d say that it was receiving foreign aid on an almost inconceivable scale.

 

This aid, in turn, supports a lot of jobs. It’s fair to say that far more Kentuckians work in hospitals kept afloat by Medicare and Medicaid, in retail establishments kept going by Social Security and food stamps, than in all traditional occupations like mining and even agriculture combined.

 

So if you really believe that Americans with higher incomes shouldn’t pay for benefits provided to those with lower incomes, you should be calling on “donor” states like New Jersey and New York to cut off places like Kentucky and let their economies collapse. And if that’s what you mean, you should let Mitch McConnell’s constituents know about it.

 

The point is that while you can criticize particular Democratic proposals, you can only portray progressives as radical or irresponsible, especially as compared with the modern G.O.P., by ignoring or suppressing a lot of facts. I guess facts really do have a liberal bias.

[johnu]

How is Trump's ignorance of basic facts about homelessness different from his ignorance of basic facts about everything?

 

OK, Dennison is a psychopath who lies because he doesn't care if people might know he is lying. His ignorance of facts required to run the country is frightening. So he lies because he knows he is lying, and he lies because he is so ignorant he doesn't have a clue what the truth is.

 

That being said, almost without exception he lies to make himself look better. Biggest inauguration crowds in history? In the decades since photography was invented, how is that lie supposed to be believable? Of course, that lie was supposed to make him look better. He could have lied and said that the inauguration crowds were the smallest in history. That would have made him look bad, maybe humble, but not a favorable comment about his popularity.

 

It's the fact that "creating" homelessness in the US would be a devastating indictment of his presidency and overwhelming proof that the economic recovery is only really helping the already rich. Why would he want to go there? I can only credit that to the beginning of a psychotic breakdown where he has completely lost track of reality.

[y66]

From Frank DeFilippo at the Virginia Mercury:

 

Here’s one set of eyes and ears that won’t be fastened on President Donald Trump’s speech on Thursday at the Lincoln Memorial.

 

The aural and visual blackout has nothing to do with politics or ideology, though Trump’s policies and politics are 18th century leftovers, at best. Everything a president says, good, bad, even ungrammatical, is important to the nation and the world. Forget that he lies, misrepresents and dissembles.

 

The personal boycott has more to do with the remarkable sense (hearing) that converts sound waves into language, and the visual impression of body language that acts as a decoder to the intent of the spoken word. They clash and they’re harsh. They create confusion and cacophony.

 

Simply put, the man is a lousy speaker.

 

So what we have here is an invitation that’s being consigned to the shredder. On Feb. 4, Trump tweeted his plans to speak to America on the Fourth of July: “HOLD THE DATE! . . . Major fireworks display, entertainment and an address by your favorite President, me!”

 

The president will speak. There’ll be fly-overs and fireworks and the fife-and-drum tootling of John Phillip Souza polluting the air.

 

Great speeches, like all great writing, are all nouns and verbs. Trump certainly is no Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama, probably among the best orators to occupy the White House. And right up there with the best of them is Sen. Edward Kennedy, brother of the president. These men could sell a phrase or a line the way Sinatra sold a lyric.

 

And no one really knows whether the man can write, and if he can, he’s surely no match for Theodore Roosevelt or Obama.

 

And let’s remember that Trump will be occupying the sacred space that is reserved for Abraham Lincoln, who wrote and delivered some of the most memorable oratory in the nation’s history, and where Martin Luther King Jr. elevated the phrase, “I have a dream,” to a meditation.

 

But give Trump his propers. He is a “stable genius,” in his own estimation.

 

Great orators speak with their ear as well as their voice. They hear the richness of the words and the cadences of the phrases and the sentences. They hear when to let the words rise and fall and they hear when to pause and when to let the rhythm and the punctuation do the work for them.

 

Obama is a good example. His speech, or eulogy, at the funeral service following the shootings at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, S.C., captured in its delivery not only the solemnity of the occasion, but it had the lyrical flow of a spiritual and a cadence that strummed to the black patois of the audience. It was rap for the religious. Obama’s singing of “Amazing Grace” was the coda to a beautifully written and delivered speech, among his most memorable.

 

The great British writer and wit, Max Beerbohm, wrote a series of essays on the difference between words that are written for the ear and those that are meant for the eye. Beerbohm was bedeviled by the difference when he switched from writing for publications to writing for radio broadcasting.

 

Trump has a tin ear. Working from a teleprompter, he usually delivers two or three words in a puff, with no rhythm or cadence to carry a thought, and he pauses where there is no punctuation, or worse, no reason to halt except that he can’t carry a sentence, let alone a tune. A read-through of the printed text reveals well-structured and smooth sentences. But there are no distinguishing style points to Trump’s speeches aside from his awkward delivery.

 

Trump has another annoying speech tic. He often sounds like Jimmy Two Times in the mob movie “Goodfellas,” repeating in rapid sequence words or phrases that he believes are important.

 

And it’s even more awkward to watch Trump, a grown man of self-ordained brilliance, use his forefinger as a pointer when he reads a type-written text from a binder or note cards.

 

Another key to solid public speaking is proper breathing. Breathing from the diaphragm, and not from the back of the throat, as Trump seems to do, is essential to putting the proper force behind words and carrying sonorous phrases to their maximum effect. And this is not about shouting but about giving the microphone enough air to do its work.

 

Come to think of it, in Trump’s nearly three years in office, with the millions of words and thousands of tweets and hundreds of gaggles in the White House driveway, he has yet to produce a single memorable phrase or figure of speech that sums up. . .well, anything. (Name-calling doesn’t count. Neither do campaign slogans.)

 

When Trump speaks, the result sounds as if he’s trying to convert six diphthongs into a primitive language, or that he’s mashing his fricatives against the roof of his mouth. Demosthenes, among Greece’s greatest speakers, overcame his oratorical shortcomings, it is said, by practicing with pebbles in his mouth. He also studied the speeches of previous great orators.

 

In fact, in ancient Greece and Rome, oratorical skill was considered a condition of fitness for public office. Competitions were held regularly in the Agora, kind of like our modern-day television debates only with competence and substance and prose powerful enough to call people to action.

 

Yes, Trump would flunk Rhetoric 101.

 

Trump drew his inspiration for pageantry from a Bastille Day display he witnessed in Paris. He vowed to replicate the event in America, though this country frowns on displays of military might as it rumbles and roars on boulevards, passing balconies, in other nations.

 

He attempted to stage an extravaganza on the last Veterans Day, Nov. 11, but was discouraged and unable to marshal the necessary machinery. And now Trump has co-opted the nation’s birthday to stage what many view as an extension of his campaign rallies at public cost.

 

In addition to his uninvited presence at America’s birthday party, Trump has promised additional entertainment (the circuses part of “bread and circuses”) to the goers and the TV audience (which is what it’s really all about).

 

They include a relocated burst of fireworks and a fly-over as a tribute to the armed services along with military demonstrations and a parade, something Trump knows little about since he ducked the draft five times and never put on a uniform. All of this adds to the assault on the ear that emanates from Trump’s vocal cords.

 

R.S.V.P. No thanks, and no excuses, Mr. President. The Fourth of July comes with reverence for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, along with echoes of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan and Obama.

 

They were speakers who had something to say and said it well.

Did he say no tanks?

[y66]

From Jeffrey Toobin at the New Yorker:

 

A Mississippi prosecutor went on a racist crusade to have a black man executed. Clarence Thomas thinks that was just fine.

[kenberg]

Guest post from Paul Krugman:

 

 

 

I took a look at the Rockefeller report. I often advise skepticism about data and this seems to be exhibit A. Even if we want to look at which states do better and which do worse, and use this to speak of fairness, surely the per capita figures are more relevant. On per capita basis, Connecticut has last place nailed down at negative $4000 per person. New York is 4th fr, bottom at $1792 while North Dakota is 5th from bottom at $720.

 

Krugman makes the point he wants to make by citing Kentucky, 2nd from the top with a positive balance of $9,145 but of course he does not mention the top state, Virginia, with a positive balance of $10,301 since this would be less supportive of the point he wishes to make. Virginia has areas of poverty, most states do, but much of the state does pretty well.

 

But what to make of the report? Very little, I think. I do not think that the high listing of Kentucky and Virginia is a reason to move to either or the low listing of New York, or North Dakota, is a reason to not move there. Or a reason to do much of anything.

 

My favorite example of meaningless data: Eleanor Roosevelt High School, in Prince George's County Maryland, would score well on any list of average wealth per graduate. Sergei Brin graduated from Roosevelt. So parents, if you want your kid to become wealthy, obviously you should send him to Roosevelt High. I have nothing against or for Roosevelt, but I do not think a decision on where to send your kid should be based on the average wealth of graduates.

 

[y66]

Although Table 6 in the Rockefeller Institute report does not show all states, of the states shown Kentucky is at the top of the list in terms of direct payments per person where direct payments are mostly (75%) Social Security + Medicare payments. Therefore, as Krugman notes, people living in the Kentucky part of the Trump/McConnell heartland and their politicians are not in a strong position to say it's morally wrong for people to receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes. But yes, Krugman is most definitely making the point he wants to.

[Winstonm]

There will be tanks but no citizenship question apparently.

 

So, they have tanked on the citizenship question? :)

[barmar]

I took a look at the Rockefeller report. I often advise skepticism about data and this seems to be exhibit A. Even if we want to look at which states do better and which do worse, and use this to speak of fairness, surely the per capita figures are My favorite example of meaningless data: Eleanor Roosevelt High School, in Prince George's County Maryland, would score well on any list of average wealth per graduate. Sergei Brin graduated from Roosevelt. So parents, if you want your kid to become wealthy, obviously you should send him to Roosevelt High. I have nothing against or for Roosevelt, but I do not think a decision on where to send your kid should be based on the average wealth of graduates.

Bill Gates walks into a bar. Now the average patron of that bar is a billionaire.

[kenberg]

Although Table 6 in the Rockefeller Institute report does not show all states, of the states shown Kentucky is at the top of the list in terms of direct payments per person where direct payments are mostly (75%) Social Security + Medicare payments. Therefore, as Krugman notes, people living in the Kentucky part of the Trump/McConnell heartland and their politicians are not in a strong position to say it's morally wrong for people to receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes. But yes, Krugman is most definitely making the point he wants to.

 

In this case I was criticizing the report, any criticism of Krugman was (mostly) incidental. It seems to me that with such a report more or less anyone can cite the report in support of more or less any view. Take Connecticut. I don't really know, but my guess is that there are a lot of rich people living in Connecticut, successful wallstreeters close to Manhattan. So they pay a lot of taxes, and so a lot of money flows to the Feds. But it flows from rich people, the fact that they are living in Connecticut is of little importance. Which was really Krugman's point I think, and there I agree with him. Data can be useful, but it can also be irrelevant or misleading. There are times I read data presentations and think "yeah, and so?"

[Winstonm]

From Jeffrey Toobin at the New Yorker:

 

I have to admit to a degree of ambivalence toward stare decisis as there have been some truly horrible SCOTUS decisions in its past.

[awm]

In this case I was criticizing the report, any criticism of Krugman was (mostly) incidental. It seems to me that with such a report more or less anyone can cite the report in support of more or less any view. Take Connecticut. I don't really know, but my guess is that there are a lot of rich people living in Connecticut, successful wallstreeters close to Manhattan. So they pay a lot of taxes, and so a lot of money flows to the Feds. But it flows from rich people, the fact that they are living in Connecticut is of little importance. Which was really Krugman's point I think, and there I agree with him. Data can be useful, but it can also be irrelevant or misleading. There are times I read data presentations and think "yeah, and so?"

 

The interesting point is that the US government transfers quite a bit of money from wealthy people to poor people, and from wealthy states to poorer states. Virginia is somewhat of an exceptional case because of its proximity to Washington DC -- most of the government money spent in Virginia is paying people (and companies) who work for the government. For the most part on this list though, you will see the more affluent states contributing more money than they get in return, and the poorer states receiving more than they contribute.

 

You'd think that if some people/states were opposed to this transfer of money and wanted to reduce the magnitude of such transfers, these people/states would be the ones that are net negative. The interesting point is that exactly the opposite is true! Most of the "red states" are net receivers of federal money whereas most "blue states" are net donors (there are some exceptions, Virginia being very notable; another exception is states which are relatively wealthy primarily because of oil and gas such as North Dakota and Texas, which tend nonetheless to vote Republican).

[kenberg]

The interesting point is that the US government transfers quite a bit of money from wealthy people to poor people, and from wealthy states to poorer states. Virginia is somewhat of an exceptional case because of its proximity to Washington DC -- most of the government money spent in Virginia is paying people (and companies) who work for the government. For the most part on this list though, you will see the more affluent states contributing more money than they get in return, and the poorer states receiving more than they contribute.

 

You'd think that if some people/states were opposed to this transfer of money and wanted to reduce the magnitude of such transfers, these people/states would be the ones that are net negative. The interesting point is that exactly the opposite is true! Most of the "red states" are net receivers of federal money whereas most "blue states" are net donors (there are some exceptions, Virginia being very notable; another exception is states which are relatively wealthy primarily because of oil and gas such as North Dakota and Texas, which tend nonetheless to vote Republican).

 

My thinking was that the study suggested a crazy match-up of the transfer of money from the rich to the poor and the transfer of money from one state to another, but I have given it a l bit more thought.

 

I imagine a rich person in Montgomery County Maryland paying his federal taxes and saying "I don't mind if this goes to Baltimore but I surely object to it going to someone in Kentucky". This seemed unimaginable to me, we are all in the same country, but perhaps I was wrong. Maybe some people really do think this way. It's the only way that the cited study, with its emphasis on the unfairness to New York, makes sense to me. I was thinking that if a rich guy in Manhattan pays taxes and some of that money goes to food stamps he would not care if the person receiving the help was in Brooklyn or Louisville. I guess the authors of the study care a great deal. I don't get it. I grew up in the middle of the last century and I had a broader view than that.

[Winstonm]

I was thinking that if a rich guy in Manhattan pays taxes and some of that money goes to food stamps he would not care if the person receiving the help was in Brooklyn or Louisville.

 

 

It is much worse than that. Many of these people who object do so because their taxes may go to non-whites, regardless of state.

[y66]

From America the Beautiful by the NYT Editorial Board:

 

America in 2019 is a nation that locks up migrant children after separating them from their families. And yet it is also a nation that gives sanctuary and charity to tired, poor people as they seek to join this community, built by immigrants.

 

It’s a nation that walked out on its commitment to help preserve a livable planet for future generations. And a nation whose engines of ingenuity are working to make the planet healthier and safer.

 

Its underpaid women’s World Cup soccer team competes wearing the national colors, even as the nation’s symbols and traditions are fiercely contested back home.

 

The country has always been stronger for its capacity to peacefully manage contradictions, like these, that can seem untenable.

 

Along the southern border, an archipelago of detainment centers is filled beyond capacity with desperate people seeking a better life or fleeing places so deadly that they risk swimming the Rio Grande with toddlers.

 

Dolly Lucio Sevier, a pediatrician, treated one girl who she noted was an “underweight, fearful child in no acute distress.” The problem was “severe trauma being suffered from being removed from primary caregiver.”

 

After the exam, as reported in agonizing detail by The Atlantic, “the child lingered, and Sevier offered to hold her. She climbed into the doctor’s lap and fell asleep in less than a minute.”

 

Adults are faring little better. “At one facility, some single adults were held in standing-room-only conditions for a week and at another, some single adults were held more than a month in overcrowded cells,” the Department of Homeland Security’s independent watchdog wrote in a report released this week.

 

Ordered to administer this harsh system, an alarming number of the men and women who patrol the nation’s international frontier, it was learned this week, belonged to a closed Facebook group that guffawed over anti-immigrant, misogynistic and racist filth. While the group discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting the detainment centers, the offline civilian hecklers of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the delegation instead hurled curses and racial slurs.

 

Anyone curious about the effects of anti-immigration policies of the Trump administration needs look no further than the sad faces on the pictures of jailed children drawn by jailed children. For the strong of stomach, photos from the government’s own inspectors are even more disturbing.

 

Yet there are also stories from the border that showcase this country’s virtues.

 

After reading about the conditions inside detention facilities, Austin Savage and a group of friends walked into a store in Texas. They walked out, having spent hundreds of dollars on diapers, wipes, soaps and toys. When they arrived at a Border Patrol station that was holding children in Clint their donation was refused. While at the station, they also found a bag in the lobby holding soap, toothpaste and a note: “I heard y’all need soap + toothpaste for kids. Maybe more will be on its way soon.”

 

(There has been such a deluge of donations for detained families that aid groups have asked for financial gifts instead of material goods.)

 

Last year, the government filed felony charges against Scott Warren, a geography teacher who helped a pair of migrants in the desert who were hungry, dehydrated and with blistered feet.

 

Last month, jurors refused to return a guilty verdict. (On Tuesday, federal prosecutors said they would drop some charges, but plan to retry him for “harboring illegal aliens.”)

 

Meanwhile, the democratic mechanism to fix the situation at the border, along with other vexing national problems, is instead grinding its gears.

 

The Supreme Court last month made democracy of the people, for the people, harder for the people to repair, ruling in a 5-to-4 decision that political gerrymanders — fueled by big data and designed by partisan operatives — are allowable under the Constitution.

 

Along with the court’s decision, the country’s long-term political and demographic trends forecast continued worsening of the problem of entrenched minority rule.

 

But even as its decision made the country’s democracy less fair, the court did rise to the demands of justice, and it showed due concern for the rights of the least powerful.

 

Last month, the court overturned the conviction of Curtis Flowers in the 1996 murders of four people inside a Mississippi furniture store, finding that blacks had been illegally excluded from the juries that eventually convicted him. “Equal justice under law requires a criminal trial free of racial discrimination in the jury selection process,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority.

 

The justices also laughed out of court (or as close to it as the law allows) the Trump administration’s specious argument that sticking a citizenship question on the census had nothing to do with intentionally undercounting individuals in immigrant communities.

 

On Tuesday, the Trump administration said that it would print the census without the question. But President Trump tweeted Wednesday that the effort — whose larger goal is to improve the political fortunes of “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” as one architect of the question put it — would continue.

 

In other courtrooms, justice continues to be meted out, in fits and starts.

 

Prosecutors in Alabama this week, for instance, announced that they would drop charges against Marshae Jones, whom a grand jury indicted last month on manslaughter charges, after she was shot in the stomach and lost her pregnancy.

 

It may seem odd that a country so prosperous, so powerful and so free would at the same time be so anxious and angry, so riven by factionalism. It’s even more puzzling — and not unrelated — that this same country, with such resources to draw upon, would nevertheless tolerate such high levels of poverty and homelessness, of addiction to pharmaceutical drugs, of inequality in wealth and application of justice and quality of education.

 

Versions of these American contradictions have persisted for a very long time, but they seem particularly acute on this national birthday. The question to Americans, as ever, is whether they can summon the spirit to address them. So far, eventually, they’ve found a way.

It feels like we're summoning the spirit to address these contradictions in Virginia where Dems picked up 15 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates in 2017 when picking up 5 seats was considered optimistic and flipped 3 U.S. congressional seats in hard fought races. Dems have their work cut out for them as they try to take control of the Virginia House and Senate this fall. If they pull that off, it would be something.

[johnu]

Dennison wants to be the president of everybody in the world.

 

The Real Americans In Trump’s New Ads Are Foreign Stock Models

 

President Donald Trump’s latest online ads for his reelection campaign feature what’s supposed to look like testimonials from real Americans. But it turns out the people in the ads are stock footage models from overseas.

In Dennison's defense, at least all the fake people were white. Faking testimonials from non-white Americans is a bridge too far :rolleyes:

[Winstonm]

Today is July 4th. I can't wait to see the Space Force flyby over the capitol building. :blink:

[Winstonm]

This is rather chilling seeing that some states don't use paper backup ballots:

 

July 3, 2019

 

The Democratic primary for district attorney in Queens, a race that drew nationwide attention, was thrown deep into uncertainty on Wednesday after a count of paper ballots flipped the primary-night result.

 

The count of paper ballots turned an 1100 vote loss into a 20 vote win.

 

Five states in the U.S. — Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, New Jersey, and Delaware — run their elections using direct recording electronic machines (DREs), which provide no paper trail of the votes. That means if there’s a contested election or a suspected breach or tampering attempt in those states, there is no way to verify the election result.

 

This is from a February 2018 Axios article - I hope by now it is obsolete but I am pretty sure Georgia remains at risk. About the others I am unsure.

 

Here is an article with 2019 updates.

 

Voting Machines at Risk: Where We Stand Today

While significant progress has been made in shoring up this country’s electoral infrastructure in recent years, local election officials maintain that much still needs to be done ahead of the 2020 election.

[Winstonm]

Happy Fourth.

 

“This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”

― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die

[Zelandakh]

This is rather chilling seeing that some states don't use paper backup ballots:

What is chilling here is that the Democratic Party are once again in the middle of vote-fixing allegations. Particularly given the current national climate, once would think they would be bending over backwards to avoid such a situation. For those not in the know, Katz is strongly favoured by the local party, who were in tun responsible for allocating the commissioner and even did the vote monitoring for Katz's campaign. Let's see if the 2300 spoiled ballots hold up when checked by truly neutral arbiters. If not, well I think the national level of the party needs to come in and take some responsibility here. Given all of the vote-rigging going on on he other side of the aisle, it is just a terrible look for the Democrats to portray themselves as the party not to be trusted on elections.

[Winstonm]

What is chilling here is that the Democratic Party are once again in the middle of vote-fixing allegations.

 

Two questions:

1) To which other vote-fixing allegations do you refer?

2) Why did you take a non-partisan post and make it about partisanship?

[johnu]

Dennison's 4th of July political rally is a huge failure

 

President Whose ‘Bone Spurs’ Kept Him Out Of War Finally Gets His Tank-Adorned Celebration

 

Thursday morning, he had bragged on Twitter: “People are coming from far and wide to join us today and tonight for what is turning out to be one of the biggest celebrations in the history of our Country.”

 

That claim, however, wound up being clearly untrue. The crowd in the portion of the National Mall close enough to see the massive television screens set up for the event numbered possibly as little as the high tens of thousands ― in large measure because of the White House’s failure to give away enough tickets to people who would be certain not to boo or protest his speech.

In contrast, the concert and fireworks show that has been a staple of Washington, D.C., July Fourth celebrations for decades routinely draws hundreds of thousands of people to the Mall.

 

Trump supporters arriving without a “VIP” ticket were turned away at the entrance gates. Some were told ― falsely ― that entrance tickets had been awarded by lottery.

 

In fact, the White House gave away tickets last week to political appointees in executive branch agencies and Republican donors through the Republican National Committee and Trump’s reelection campaign ― even though Trump’s “Salute to America” was described as a nonpolitical event.

I guess the 4th of July is now going to be Dennison fundraising and rally event going forward B-)

 

Of course, all this is costing the park service millions of dollars that were supposed to go for park maintenance, even though the the park service is short on money.

 

National Park Service to use park improvement funds to pay for Trump July 4th event: Report

 

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday night that the National Park Service will divert $2.5 million in money from entrance fees intended for maintenance to pay for the Salute to America events on Thursday.

[johnu]

Speaking of the 4th of July,

 

Donald Trump trips up on history in 4th of July speech, mentions airports during Revolutionary War

 

President Donald Trump read most of his Independence Day speech from a prepared text, but stumbled on his history at one point: He talked about airports during the American Revolution.

 

"Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over airports," Trump said of the fighting force created by the Continental Congress in 1775.

 

Ah yes, the Revolutionary War precursor to the space force. Why is this an error about history? I'm sure the Fox Propaganda Channel has cell phone pictures and video from some of the actual participants in the war. How can you argue with facts? :rolleyes:

 

The full part of the quote

 

"In June of 1775, the Continental Congress created a unified Army out of the Revolutionary Forces encamped around Boston and New York, and named after the great George Washington, commander in chief. The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized victory from Cornwallis of Yorktown.

 

"Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rocket’s red glare it had nothing but victory. And when dawn came, their star-spangled banner waved defiant."

Of course, victory at For McHenry wouldn't have been possible without a surprise paratrooper drop behind enemy lines which was led by General Eisenhower, and the return to the battle by Gen MacArthur who kept his promise to return.

[johnu]

DOJ Lawyer Told Judge He’s Doing ‘Absolute Best To Figure Out’ Trump Census Mess

 

As the DOJ reverses course again and plans to fight to get a citizenship question into the next Census, George Conway has a legal argument that the DOJ can use to explain to the judge why they are changing their minds again.

 

“Your Honor, as best as we have been able to determine, the executive power is vested in a unstable, dimwitted, subliterate reality television host who didn’t like what he saw on Fox News Channel this morning. That seems to be what’s going on, Your Honor.”

[barmar]

DOJ Lawyer Told Judge He’s Doing ‘Absolute Best To Figure Out’ Trump Census Mess

At least they've stopped lying that it's supposed to help minorities.