So now the guy who created the Trump Beats Up CNN meme is the new martyr-hero of the noble cause of Free Speech With No Consequences For Internet Harassers And Stalkers And Bullies. Abby Ohlheiser at the Post reports that the new martyr-hero apologized in a Reddit post, and called for peace.

“This is one individual that you will not see posting hurtful or hateful things in jest online. This is my last post from this account and I wanted to do it on a positive note and hopefully it will heal the controversy that this all caused.”

It didn’t.  

#CNNBlackmail was the top trending Twitter topic  Wednesday morning, thanks to the efforts of a furious Trump Internet, who had concluded that the user’s apology was forced by a “threat” from CNN. Their evidence? A story CNN itself published, detailing its attempts to contact and identify the anonymous Reddit user ahead of their apology, whose offensive posting history suddenly became part of a national news story.

Did CNN do anything underhanded to find Martyrhero’s identity? CNN [with ss swapped for ** in HanAssholeSolo]:

The apology came after CNN’s KFile identified the man behind “HanAssholeSolo.” Using identifying information that “HanAssholeSolo” posted on Reddit, KFile was able to determine key biographical details, to find the man’s name using a Facebook search and ultimately corroborate details he had made available on Reddit.

On Monday, KFile attempted to contact the man by email and phone but he did not respond. On Tuesday, “HanAssholeSolo” posted his apology on the subreddit /The_Donald and deleted all of his other posts.

CNN found him via biographical details he’d published himself. Is that underhanded? No. It would be shitty if they’d done it to bully him for no good reason, but they did it after he bullied them for no good reason. See how that changes the moral equation? Apparently this is beyond the Trump Internet.

Back to the Post:

The part of the article that infuriated the Trump Internet — and people on both sides of the political spectrum, who questioned the ethical standards of the network’s decision — had to do with how CNN described its reasoning for not identifying the Redditor by name. Reporter Andrew Kaczynski wrote that CNN had spoken with the person behind the account, and would not identify the user because “he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology,” who had promised not to continue flooding the Internet with offensive memes.

But, he wrote, “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.”

The TrumpInternet is shouting that that’s blackmail.

Is it?

Here’s the thing. Martyrhero is a private citizen who was using his private citizen status to stir up hatred against individuals and classes of people. Why should his “privacy” be respected when that’s what he’s using it for? Why should anyone else respect the secrecy of his identity when the secrecy is protecting him from social opprobrium for being a bullying harassing shit? Internet harassers are like that – they carry on like ardent believers in their own campaigns of harassment and yet they do it from behind a mask. If they’re such ardent believers, why the mask? We’re not talking resistance to a tyrannical government, here, we’re talking harassment of people who advocate egalitarian political ideas. They don’t rely on privacy for their safety, they rely on privacy for their ability to talk shit at strangers with social impunity. They want to have it both ways. They want to bully strangers online, but they don’t want their friends to know they do that.

The media has often struggled to cover Trump’s online supporters, whose skepticism of mainstream publications has evolved into a total rejection of the idea that places like CNN are even trying to report the truth. At the head of that rejection is the president himself, who regularly tweets that news outlets he doesn’t like are “fake news.” Media ethics experts who look at CNN’s article on all this might discuss it in the context of a long and tricky media discussion about outing anonymous, racist Internet trolls. On the Trump Internet, however, the subtext of the meme is that “blackmailing” sources is a normal part of mainstream journalistic practice. The difference is, they believe, that someone finally got caught.

And so the battle is raging.

Meanwhile the US Ambassador to the UN was grumpy about the whole North Korea ICBM thing because it trashed her 4th of July, which is an official holiday I’ll have you know.

Spending my 4th in meetings all day. #ThanksNorthKorea

— Nikki Haley (@nikkihaley) July 4, 2017

Damn don’t you hate when that happens? Thanks North Korea! I thought we were friends.

BuzzFeed’s Jason Leopold offered Haley a link to an ABC News explainer of her job description — “in the event you are unaware of what it entails.”

We’ll save you the trouble of reading it yourself. The former South Carolina governor, who had no foreign policy experience before President Trump appointed her, is paid to advocate for American goals at the United Nations, to its nearly 200 member nations, especially in times of crisis.

And this is a crisis, according to the experts. They say North Korea had not been expected to deliver a weapon with intercontinental range so soon, and will likely manage to eventually attach a nuclear warhead to one of them. According to a former acting CIA director, any military response to Pyongyang would risk a catastrophic war.

But don’t worry, if they do throw it they’ll just throw it at Seattle, which is just some poky little town up in the far corner that nobody cares about.

Anyway. I feel really sad that Nikki Haley missed out on the beer and hot dogs, and I hope she gets a day off next week to make up for it.

Robot hotties. Yay. Good for people who don’t get out much, people who don’t like people, people who don’t feel like talking to the bitch for hours first.

But. Perhaps they might tend to objectify women.

Oh surely not.

Surely not.

H/t Glosswitch

Seattle’s Congressional Representative Pramila Jayapal – first elected this past November – has an op ed in the NY Times.

Seventeen years ago, I celebrated my first Independence Day as a United States citizen. I couldn’t have predicated then that I would one day have the enormous privilege of being the first Indian-American woman to serve in the United States House of Representatives, and one of only six members of Congress who are naturalized citizens.

This is our better side – the side that welcomes people, and includes them.

She had a struggle to get citizenship because of random bits of bad luck.

When I finally walked into the cavernous hall at the old location of Immigration and Naturalization Services (now called United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) south of downtown Seattle, I was prepared for a simple transaction that would finally grant me citizenship and ensure that I would always be with my son. I did not anticipate the emotion that would come with the moment, or the way it would shape my future, and my understanding of this country.

There were hundreds of others at the ceremony from all over the world, and I could hear languages from every continent spoken. We all carried small American flags. Grandparents held children; moms and dads held hands. As we took the oath of citizenship, the solemnity of the moment spiked through me. Tears welled up and rolled down my cheeks as I took in the mixed emotions of renouncing any allegiance to my birth country of India where I had been a citizen for 35 years and embracing my new country.

America, a country that had embraced me as a 16-year-old who had come here by myself to study and build a life of better opportunity.

America, a country built on the idea of being a refuge for those in need, “the tired masses, yearning to breathe free.”

America, a country that has always celebrated itself as a nation of immigrants.

In that moment, as I took my oath, I realized how lucky I was. I knew that my future had opened up, and that citizenship would offer me the chance to seek opportunity and to take part in our democracy. I knew, too, that with those freedoms and opportunity came enormous responsibility: to do everything I could to preserve and build our democracy, to vote, and to use my life to pay it forward and ensure opportunity for others.

I became an immigrant, civil and human rights advocate, then the first South Asian elected to the Washington State Legislature and the only woman of color in the Washington State Senate, and then was elected in 2016 to the United States Congress.

These are difficult times for immigrants and for Americans across our country. President Trump has harnessed the fear and prejudice that have accompanied every wave of immigrants in United States history, and stoked those fears to further his own agenda.

Restricting immigration from Muslim-majority countries, and cracking down on unauthorized immigration in a way that tears families apart and creates an atmosphere of fear, cuts at the very fabric of what really does make America great: the diversity that is our greatest strength.

This Fourth of July, as I remember my own naturalization ceremony and give thanks for the honor of being a United States citizen and a member of Congress, I call on the president and my fellow Americans to remember our history. What makes America great is our commitment to our values of inclusivity and opportunity for all. Immigration is about more than just who comes here and who is allowed to stay. It is about who we are as a country and what we are willing to stand up for.

I’m glad I got to vote for her.

This again. “There are millions of City People in this state so we Rural People get ignored.”

Well, since there are far fewer Rural People and politics is people-based, that’s kind of inevitable, isn’t it. Actually Rural People are heavily over-represented in the US, because of the two senators per state rule. Montana, Wyoming, Nevada all have smaller populations than many US cities, yet they get their two senators and so do California and New York and Texas. So frankly I’m kind of tired of hearing about how Rural People resent the fact that they get ignored.

“When people see you’re from California, they instantly think of ‘Baywatch,’” said Mr. Johnson, the associate pastor of Bethel Redding, a megachurch in this small city a three-and-a-half-hour drive north of San Francisco. “It’s very different here from the rest of California.”

Mr. Johnson lives in what might be described as California’s Great Red North, a bloc of 13 counties that voted for President Trump in November and that make up more than a fifth of the state’s land mass but only 3 percent of its population.

From Hollywood to Silicon Valley, California projects an image as an economically thriving, politically liberal, sun-kissed El Dorado. It is a multiethnic experiment with a rising population, where the percentage of whites has fallen to 38 percent.

California’s Great Red North is the opposite, a vast, rural, mountainous tract of pine forests with a political ethos that bears more resemblance to Texas than to Los Angeles. Two-thirds of the north is white, the population is shrinking and the region struggles economically, with median household incomes at $45,000, less than half that of San Francisco.

And it’s very very sparsely populated, so what do you want us to do about it? It’s like the people who live in tiny towns in West Virginia and wonder why there are no jobs. I can tell them why there are no jobs: because tiny towns never have a huge array of jobs, because they’re tiny towns. That’s always been a major reason people moved to cities: to find work. It’s in the nature of sparsely populated areas that they don’t have all the amenities of cities, and that they don’t always have a lot of political influence…except, again, in the Senate.

The residents of this region argue that their political voice is drowned out in a system that has only one state senator for every million residents.

Meaning what? That instead there should be one state senator per X number of square miles? That the rural north should be wildly over-represented while the cities are wildly under-represented? How would that be fair? Why should square miles have votes instead of people?

This sentiment resonates in other traditionally conservative parts of California, including large swaths of the Central Valley, which runs down the state, and it mirrors red and blue tensions felt in areas across the country. But perhaps nowhere else in California is the alienation felt more keenly than in the far north, an arresting panorama of fields filled with wildflowers and depopulated one-street towns that have never recovered from the gold rush.

“People up here for a very long time have felt a sense that we don’t matter,” said James Gallagher, a state assemblyman for the Third District, which is a shorter drive from the forests of Mount Hood in Oregon than from the beaches of San Diego. “We run this state like it’s one size fits all. You can’t do that.”

Blah blah blah. You could always take over a wildlife refuge.

Taxation and hunting are two issues northerners are quick to seize upon when criticizing laws they feel are unfairly imposed by the state. But there are also more fundamental issues related to incomes and job opportunities that split California into a two-speed economy.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, unemployment rates hover around 3 percent. In the far north, where many timber mills have shut down in recent years, unemployment is as high as 6 percent in Shasta County and 16.2 percent in Colusa County.

Because industries shut down as technologies change. That happens. One possible solution would be to adapt accordingly. Another apparently would be to vote for Trump. How’s he doing on that bringing the timber industry back to Shasta County thing?

United States Representative Doug LaMalfa, a Republican representing Northern California’s First District, blames regulations that have shut down industries for the economic disparities.

“They’ve devastated ag jobs, timber jobs, mining jobs with their environmental regulations, so, yes, we have a harder time sustaining the economy, and therefore there’s more people that are in a poorer situation.”

The agriculture, timber and mining industries, on the other hand, have done no damage to anything at all, and if left alone could continue into infinity. Or something.

Residents here have long backed a different proposal for a separate state, one that would be carved out of Northern California and the southern reaches of Oregon. Flags of the so-called State of Jefferson, which was first proposed in the 19th century, fly on farms and ranches around the region.

Jefferson, named after the president who once envisioned establishing an independent nation in the western section of North America, is more a state of mind than a practicable proposal. Many see it as unrealistic for a region that has plenty of water and timber but perhaps not enough wealth to wean itself away from engines of the California economy.

Precisely. If they did that I wager most of them would not like the results.

“I wake up in the morning and think, ‘What is California going to do to me today?’’’ said Mr. Baird, a former airline pilot who owns a ranch about an hour’s drive from the Oregon border. In a grass valley framed by low-lying hills, Mr. Baird’s pastures are filled with his small herd of buffalo and a few pens of horses and donkeys.

Mr. Baird complains of restrictions on the types of guns he can own. “It’s tyranny by the majority,” he said. “The majority should never be able to deprive the minority of their inalienable rights.”

Of their genuine rights, no. Of highly debatable rights? Different story.

According to Adam Liptak, the newbie on the Supreme Court has been acting like the boss of everyone.

New justices usually take years to find their footing at the Supreme Court. For Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who joined the court in April, a couple of months seem to have sufficed.

His early opinions were remarkably self-assured. He tangled with his new colleagues, lectured them on the role of the institution he had just joined, and made broad jurisprudential pronouncements in minor cases.

In other words (if all that is accurate), he’s being strikingly annoying. Nobody likes being lectured to by the newbie.

Liptak says justices normally take years to feel as if they’re fully up to speed.

“I was frightened to death for the first three years,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who joined the court in 1994, said in a 2006 interview.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined the court in 1991, said he had asked his new colleagues how long it would take to hit his stride. “To a person, they said it took three to five years under normal circumstances to adjust to the court,” Justice Thomas said in 1996. His own circumstances, he added, referring to his bruising confirmation hearings, pushed him toward “the outer limits of that period.”

Estimates have not changed over time. “So extraordinary an intellect as Brandeis said it took him four or five years to feel that he understood the jurisprudential problems of the court,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote of Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who sat on the court from 1916 to 1939.

Justice Robert H. Jackson rejected Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes’s estimate of three years to “get acclimated,” saying it was “nearer to five.”

But Gorsuch thinks he’s there already, in Liptak’s account.

“If a statute needs repair,” Justice Gorsuch wrote, “there’s a constitutionally prescribed way to do it. It’s called legislation. To be sure, the demands of bicameralism and presentment are real, and the process can be protracted. But the difficulty of making new laws isn’t some bug in the constitutional design: It’s the point of the design, the better to preserve liberty.”

“Congress already wrote a perfectly good law,” he wrote. “I would follow it.”

Commentators wondered whether that vivid writing was a proportional response in a decidedly minor dispute.

“Dude, pick your spots,” Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said on First Mondays, an entertaining podcast that explores developments at the Supreme Court. “You don’t need to pull out all this stuff in every statutory case.”

So not just Liptak then.

In a concurring opinion in Maslenjak v. United States, a case about when naturalized citizens may be stripped of their citizenship, Justice Gorsuch said Justice Kagan, writing for the majority, had provided more guidance than was warranted and proper.

The Supreme Court should announce general principles, he said, and let lower courts fill in the gaps.

Justice Kagan, writing for six members, responded that she had a different conception of the Supreme Court’s role. “Such a halfway decision would fail to fulfill our responsibility to both parties and courts,” she wrote, adding that one federal appeals court had already called the Supreme Court’s failure to provide clear guidance on the subject “maddening.”

Justice Gorsuch, who is 49, concluded his opinion with a nice aphorism of the sort that some justices might have waited decades to deploy.

“This court,” he wrote, “often speaks most wisely when it speaks last.”

Yep, he definitely sounds annoying.

Aw, there’s one of Obama’s environmental protections that Trump doesn’t get to ditch. One of those pesky lawyery judgey court type deals has said no he can’t.

Dealing another legal blow to the Trump administration, a federal appeals court ruled on Monday that the Environmental Protection Agency cannot suspend an Obama-era rule to restrict methane emissions from new oil and gas wells.

The 2-to-1 decision from the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is the first major legal setback for Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, who is trying to roll back dozens of Obama-era environmental regulations. The ruling signals that President Trump’s plans to erase his predecessor’s environmental record are likely to face an uphill battle in the courts.

Environmental protections. Republicans call them “regulations” to make them sound like a pain in the ass and a violation of our precious freedom to breathe dirty air and watch our national parks turned into golf courses. We call them protections.

A number of other E.P.A. actions to undo regulations it inherited, including a rule on landfills and another on chemical spills, are likely to receive close scrutiny from the courts because of this ruling.

I hope the courts can take a very hard look at that move to get rid of the protection of streams.

The methane rule was part of a broad suite of climate regulations enacted by former President Barack Obama. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

Oil and gas companies have argued that the rule requiring them to report and fix any methane leaks in their equipment is an unnecessary burden because many oil-producing states already have their own regulations. The E.P.A. announced on June 5 that it was suspending enforcement of the rule, arguing that the industry had not had enough opportunity to comment. The court rejected that argument.

Aw just let the oil and gas companies leak all over the place, willya? How will we drive our SUVs to the mall if the fossil fuel people can’t make a big mess any more?

How we live now.

A former mayor has been suspended by the Tories after allegedly posting a racist ‘joke’ on Facebook.

Racist. Are we sure? Are the Tories being too politically correct?

I took my dog to the dole office to see what he was entitled to. The bloke behind the counter said “You idiot, we don’t give benefits to dogs”. So l argued “Why not, he’s brown, he stinks, he’s never worked a fuckin day in his life, and he can’t speak a fuckin word of English”. The man replied “His first payment will be Monday.”

Ok then, the Tories are not being too politically correct.

She didn’t create the “joke” though. Somebody composes that crap. You can see it on Facebook from 2013.

Human beings leave a lot to be desired.

Nice work, Donald.

Their robot may have permission to travel, but six teenage Afghan inventors are staying put this summer.

They’ve been rejected for a one-week travel visa to escort their robot to the inaugural FIRST Global Challenge – an international robotics competition happening in Washington DC in mid-July.

The all-girl team representing Afghanistan hails from Herat, a city of half a million people in the western part of the country. To interview for their visas, the girls risked a 500 mile trek cross-country to the American embassy in Kabul – the site of several recent suicide attacks and one deadly truck bomb in early June that killed at least 90 people. Despite the recent violence, the teenagers braved the trip to the country’s capital not once, but twice, hoping a second round of interviews might help secure their 7-day visas after the team was rejected on its first try. But no luck.

Roya Mahboob, who founded Citadel software company in Afghanistan, and was the country’s first female tech CEO, brought the group of girls together for the project.

It’s a very important message for our people” Mahboob says. “Robotics is very, very new in Afghanistan.”

She says when the girls first heard the bad news about their visas, “they were crying all the day.”

But this is about the safety of the American people. Maybe those teenage girls would have killed a bunch of people once they got here. You can’t prove they wouldn’t have! Therefore it’s necessary to tell them to stay home.

Brian Stelter at CNN has a detail I didn’t know:

On Sunday morning the president’s personal Twitter account, which has 33 million followers, posted a 28-second video of a WWE broadcast. The video was edited to show Trump beating up a man with a CNN logo on his face.

A short time later, the official @POTUS Twitter account retweeted Trump’s tweet to its 19 million followers.

The official potus account. Oyyyy. Goes in the library and all, that does.

Sunday’s video was part of an escalating anti-media campaign by the president.

CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post have been some of the targets.

On Saturday Trump tweeted that he wants to rebrand “Fake News CNN” as “Fraud News CNN.”

Sunday’s video reiterated that message with a Photoshopped “FNN” logo.

The video was immediately scrutinized on social media and television.

Some commentators, especially those inclined to support Trump, laughed at the video and savored the president’s latest media critique.

Others, perhaps, began planning to seek out particular journalists for the named outlets, to get in their faces or body slam them to the floor or shoot them in the face. Trump is working them up, and who knows how far it will go?

Some media figures expressed real concern that the video could encourage violence against journalists.

“It’s not just anti-CNN. It’s anti-freedom of the press,” CNN political analyst Carl Bernstein said on “Reliable Sources” on Sunday. “It’s very disturbing. There’s nothing lighthearted about it whatsoever.”

Bernstein, who with Bob Woodward broke the Watergate story as a reporter for the Washington Post in the 1970s, noted that Trump praised campaign coverage that was critical of Hillary Clinton.

“When it suits him, it’s great news,” Bernstein said. “When it doesn’t, it’s fake news.”

On ABC’s “This Week,” Ana Navarro called Trump’s tweet “an incitement to violence. He is going to get someone killed in the media.” Navarro, a Republican who is fiercely critical of the president, is a commentator on both CNN and ABC.

I’m sure Trump just wants them to get beaten up a little. I’m sure he doesn’t want them actually killed. Well ok I’m not sure, exactly, but I think it’s possible. Maybe.

Today in Trump. Worse than ever, I’m afraid.

Some late yesterday first.

The FAKE & FRAUDULENT NEWS MEDIA is working hard to convince Republicans and others I should not use social media – but remember, I won….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2017

….the 2016 election with interviews, speeches and social media. I had to beat #FakeNews, and did. We will continue to WIN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2017

Yes, and a harsh indictment of our society, politics, discourse, education system, and much else that fact is…but bracket that, and it’s still the case that winning the election is not the same thing as succeeding in the job. Tragically and horribly and shamefully, Trump won the election by being a sexist racist xenophobic bullying pig, and despite being a liar and fraud and cheat. That says terrible depressing things about us as a country. But he is not winning the presidency. He’s failing dismally…and dragging us down with him. He won’t “continue to WIN” because what he’s doing can’t be described as winning. He’s trashing everything in sight, yes, but that’s not winning.

I am thinking about changing the name #FakeNews CNN to #FraudNewsCNN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2017

Again with the relentless Hitler-Goebbels-like attack on the free press. Not winning.

My use of social media is not Presidential – it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2017

No. Bullying, insulting, and lying are not MODERN DAY anything. They’re just bullying, insulting, and lying. An evil malevolent enraged toddler-man is not MODERN DAY anything. It’s just an evil malevolent enraged toddler-man destroying everything in his path, like a hurricane.

Think Progress provides a transcript of that fascist video of Dana Loesch barking at us about the libbruls. Do watch it in addition, because mere words on the screen can’t convey the menacing venom of her delivery. The way she emphasizes “they” over and over again for instance is chilling.

They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance. All to make them march, make them protest, make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia and smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law abiding — until the only option left is for police to do their jobs and stop the madness.

And when that happens, they’ll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth. I’m the National Rifle Association of America and I’m freedom’s safest place.

She’s on Twitter telling people that’s a call for the police to do their jobs and not at all a call to violence against libbruls. That’s a crock of shit. It’s literally true, and no doubt lawyers read it first to make sure, but the message it sends is another matter. Her words and presentation present “them” as a detested enemy and alien. Then she says “the only way we stop this” is with the clenched fist of truth and that she’s the National Rifle Association. That’s an implicit call to violence. The fact that it’s implicit probably protects it from the law, but that doesn’t mean we have to pretend the implicit call to violence isn’t there. It’s there.

It’s there the way it’s there when a man’s voice goes metallic with rage as he tells a woman off for making him angry. It’s meant to strike fear in the hearts of “them” and patriotic manly Caucasian fury in the hearts of “our” men.

The ad was played at the National Rifle Association’s Leadership Forum in April. As we reported at the time, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre’s speech to thousands of members was characterized by a similar type of us-versus-them rhetoric.

“It’s up to us to speak up against the three most dangerous voices in America: academic elites, political elites, and media elites. These are America’s greatest domestic threats,” he said.

That too is frightening. The people who know the most and have the most expertise are America’s greatest domestic threats, and the most dangerous voices.

It’s funny that people think it’s exaggerated to say this is fascism or Nazi-like. Fascism isn’t special, after all – it’s not like some higher class of violent bully. It’s just ordinary people drunk on this kind of thing, and putting it into action. It can happen anywhere. Right now it’s happening here in the US.