Meanwhile it was The Meeting of the Dictators today.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin met on Friday, and while their face-to-face encounter was not officially the main event at the G-20, for many, it might as well have been. Scores of journalists shouted questions as the two leaders sat side by side for photographs before the actual meeting.

“President Putin and I have been discussing various things, and I think it’s going very well,” Mr. Trump said. “We look forward to a lot of very positive happenings for Russia and for the United States, and for everyone concerned.”

See we don’t actually want “a lot of very positive happenings for Russia” when Russia=Putin. That’s not the goal.

Only six people

Harvard is still Harvard.

Harvard University’s exclusive and historic Fox Club — whose members have included Bill Gates and T.S. Eliot — has reverted to male-only after revoking membership for its nine “provisional” female members, according to The Harvard Crimson, the university’s daily newspaper.

The traditionally all-male social club had given the nine women “provisional” status in the face of looming sanctions by Harvard on single-gender groups, The Crimson reported on Monday. But screenshots obtained by the newspaper of messages allegedly among recent graduates indicate that the club’s graduate board revoked membership for all of its provisional members and invited only the men to reapply for full membership.

Well you know how it is. Harvard is Harvard. It’s the … Read the rest

Huh. It turns out that Hobby Lobby is a tad lacking in the scruples department.

The packages that made their way from Israel and the United Arab Emirates to retail outlets owned by Hobby Lobby, the seller of arts and craft supplies, were clearly marked as tile samples.

But according to a civil complaint filed on Wednesday by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, they held something far rarer and more valuable: ancient clay cuneiform tablets that had been smuggled into the United States from Iraq.

Prosecutors said in the complaint that Hobby Lobby, whose evangelical Christian owners have long maintained an interest in the biblical Middle East, began in 2009 to assemble a collection of cultural artifacts from the Fertile

Originally a comment by Dave Ricks on Towns that have never recovered from the gold rush.

The Times article shows Mark Baird waving a flag for the State of Jefferson movement in Northern California. The Times reports the SOJ movement is about representation within California on issues of rural versus urban, etc. But the Times totally missed the SOJ relationship to the Federal government that I’ll write here.

If you click my SOJ link above, and you pull down Resources > Videos, you’ll see Mark Baird showing you the same pocket US Constitution that I pointed out in this B&W thread about Ammon Bundy. I’ll repost some things I wrote on that thread for convenient reference here.

That pocket … Read the rest

So now, of course, the CNN reporter (Andrew Kaczynski) is being threatened, and so is his family.

A CNN reporter is facing harassment, death threats, and a potential protest at his house after he wrote a story that did not name a Reddit user who created a GIF posted by Donald Trump but suggested he might publish the user’s identity if their social media behavior changed.

Social media personality and alt-right commentator Mike Cernovich is among those leading the charge against the reporter, Andrew Kaczynski, saying on Twitter, “We are coming for you.”

See? This isn’t a joke. It isn’t fun and games. It isn’t legitimate free speech. It’s a form of terrorism.

https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/882683121451376640

Earlier in the day, Cernovich

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

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

— Archive: Ambassador Nikki Haley (@AmbNikkiHaley) 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

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… Read the rest

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

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,