Hello and welcome back to Maine Justice.

It is Tuesday morning, August 12th.

I'm Andrew Weissman, and I'm here with my wonderful, inimitable,

Catherine Hepburn-esque co-host Mary McCord.

Good morning. And by the way, a busy Mary McCord. Well, aren't we all busy right now? My goodness.

And if you're not busy, then get busy. Exactly. So, Mary, we actually have a theme today. This is one where we actually were trying to figure out what's a good way to think about what has happened this past week. And actually before, but it seemed to really come to the four. And that is alternative facts is the way that Kelly Ann Conway famously described it, but it is lies, but also a effort to make it much more difficult to learn the truth. So it's not just telling

lies, but it's an eradication of the means by which the public can learn

exactly what its own government is doing and what the facts are. We have been here before,

and people have thought about and written about government regimes that tried to control sources of information so that

not only can they tell lies, but it's harder to find out the truth. And speaking of which,

George Orwell in 1984 wrote about the Ministry of Truth and the three slogans that were up on the wall of the

Ministry of Truth were war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.

That is obviously fiction, a novel, and he was basing it on a parable of authoritarianism that he was

seeing and witnessing. And unfortunately, that is, I think, so reminiscent of what we're going to

talk about today. So, Mary, how are we going to illustrate it? What are the topics for today?

Well, that's a great lead-off because that feels like the weird Orwellian 1984 world we're in,

where the words coming out of the mouths of government officials from the president on down through lawyers in court from the Department of Justice,

oftentimes what they are saying

does not actually resemble the truth on the ground. And so we're going to focus on that today.

We will start with the president's announcement yesterday about federalizing basically the

D.C. local police, sending in the National Guard to deal with a crime problem that he claims

is an emergency in D.C., but those of us who live and work here, I think, would say is not such an

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