Today is Juneteenth, recognizing the day in 1865 when Union soldiers landed in Galveston, Texas and told slaves there that they were free and that the Civil War had ended.

Currently, 47 states recognize the date as a state holiday, but legislation to declare it a national holiday has repeatedly stalled in Congress.

“We’ve reached a point in our society where we dissect everything and try to ascribe some nefarious notion to it. We need to move away from being offended by everything, of going through history and looking at everything, you know, of renaming everything.”

— HUD Secretary Ben Carson, quoted by Politico.

President Trump suggested Harris Faulkner in a Fox News interview that the Civil War ended questionably.

Said Trump: “I think I’ve done more for the black community than any other president, and let’s take a pass on Abraham Lincoln because he did good, although it’s always questionable, you know, in other words, the end result.”

Faulkner, who is black, interjected: “Well, we are free, Mr President, so he did pretty well.”

President Trump on Twitter:

Our great National Guard Troops who took care of the area around the White House could hardly believe how easy it was. “A walk in the park”, one said. The protesters, agitators, anarchists (ANTIFA), and others, were handled VERY easily by the Guard, D.C. Police, & S.S. GREAT JOB!

Of course, the SS were Adolf Hitler’s personal bodyguards and later became one of the most powerful and feared organizations in all of Nazi Germany.

The Secret Service actually uses the acronym USSS.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the EU Anthony Gardner told Politico that President Trump “evokes memories of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and that former Trump officials who are now criticizing the president, like ex-Defense Secretary James Mattis, are ‘collaborators’ who should have spoken out sooner or never joined the administration in the first place.”

Said Gardner: “You know I am glad that these people are speaking out, but I’ll be very honest here, and undiplomatic: I don’t welcome those statements in the sense that those people served this president. And to me quite bluntly they are accomplices … So when you choose to work for this kind of administration, which showed its true colors very early on, at some point you abet the policies even if afterwards you decide that they’re terrible, that the man you were serving is a terrible person. So while I am glad they are saying what they are saying, it comes too late.”

Former Rep. Michael “Ozzie” Myers (D-PA), who was caught in the Abscam bribery scandal in the 1970s, is apparently in the middle of a Philadelphia election fraud probe, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

Myers served a three-year prison sentence for bribery and a vote by his House colleagues to expel him. He is best known, though, for one of the most enduring lines to emerge from that sting operation, which involved undercover FBI agents posing as representatives of an Arab sheik offering bribes in exchange for political favors.

Said Myers, while taking a $50,000 bribe: “Money talks in this business and bullshit walks.”

Susan Glasser: “Of course Trump is trying to distract. The emerging politics of the pandemic are not good for him, nor are they likely to get better. They have recast the fall election as a referendum on Trump’s basic competence to lead the country through a once-in-a-century convergence of crises.”

“During the pre-pandemic impeachment era, Richard Nixon was the inescapable historical point of comparison for Trump’s corruption-ridden Presidency. Now it is Herbert Hoover. Running for reelection after the stock market crash of 1929 and three failed years of trying to stop the Great Depression, Hoover promised Americans that ‘Prosperity Is Just Around the Corner.’ Upbeat predictions amid bread lines didn’t cut it, and Hoover lost badly. The brutal political reality of running for another term while the country is experiencing mass unemployment is one that almost no President can overcome. In fact, the last time an American incumbent successfully won during a recession was in 1924.”

Then again, Hoover’s campaign slogan seems like a winner today compared with the clunker Trump has been trying out in recent days: ‘Transition to Greatness!'”

“For months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the nation ached together in televised memorials, joining in a collective catharsis of uniformed salutes, bagpiped dirges and President George W. Bush declaring a national day of mourning and remembrance,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“The space shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986 turned classrooms into grieving sessions, with President Reagan directly addressing the national wounds. The Japanese attack on Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor in 1941 was a day that President Franklin D. Roosevelt said would live in ‘infamy,’ uniting the mainland to enter a world war.”

“Yet as the nation nears 100,000 deaths from COVID-19 — far more than all those tragic events combined or the entire Vietnam War — there is little sense this Memorial Day weekend that Americans are grieving together or uniting in a sense of purpose.”