"John Bolton Tried His Best to Draw the U.S. Into a War," writes Alex Emmons at The Intercept. "Luckily, He Failed." But don't suggest that our President was crazy-like-a-fox and brought Mr. Bolton into the fold so he could expose his fraudulent ideas, because our President flat-out pissed all over the Iran nuclear agreement when it was working and reimposed sanctions on Iran, supposedly so he could get a "better deal." And with what leverage? You'll recall the shot-down drone and the seized tankers and you'll see that our President never had any leverage -- after all, are you going to bomb the crap out of a country that's playing the diplomatic equivalent of I'm-not-touching-you?
A retired Air Force colonel blows the whistle on what he calls "gross financial mismanagement" and "gross waste" at our Guantánamo Bay detention center. I'll admit I was gobsmacked to discover that even one conviction (and exactly one conviction!) has ever come out of Guantánamo. But that's what you get when you create drama over "dangerous people" who would "go back to terrorism" if they were ever released, never mind that we can hardly convict them of anything after 10, 15, or almost 20 years. (See, it's not just our President who creates drama. George W. Bush was a master at it.)
Voter ID, Interstate Crosscheck, and voting roll purges you know about, but states and localities have been suppressing the vote in one other important way: closing polling places, too often without notice. 13 states now have over 1,000 fewer polling places than they did six years ago; I wonder why? A lot of them close polling places supposedly because they're not compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act, but why close it and not, say, make it ADA-compliant? Don't say "because that costs money," because that answer won't win in court.
Ho hum, leaked documents reveal how our FBI is hiding data about how it responds to white supremacist violence versus black protestor "violence." They call it all "Racially-Motivated Violent Extremism," just as not too many years ago they called it all "Abortion Extremism" when mainly anti-abortion folks committed the violence. Yet the FBI still tabulates the "Racially-Motivated Violent Extremism" by race, and thus should be able to account for their actions.
Finally, the number of folks without health insurance in America went up in 2018 for the first time in nine years. You won't be surprised at the main culprit -- a drop in public health insurance program coverage under a reactionary Administration -- nor will you be surprised that Southern and Hispanic children seem to get hit harder. Boy, it sure is a good thing our President promised really great health care for everyone, and then said he'd do something about high drug prices before declaring that high drug prices were all Medicare's fault. Also, too, why is he so desperate to annihilate pre-existing condition bans? Pre-existing condition bans are the one thing about Obamacare everyone likes. Oh, I guess that's our answer.
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