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

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

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 … Read the rest

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

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

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 … Read the rest

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,

Robert Reich on Facebook:

The Senate bill to replace the Affordable Care Act is much worse than even the Congressional Budget Office found, because the CBO looked only at the first 10 years. During the next 10 years, the elderly and disabled lose 25 percent more, children lose 30 percent more, adults on Medicaid almost 40 percent, and working class people who relied on the Medicaid expansion lose over half of what they had before. The 1965 Medicaid program is gutted.

 … Read the rest

It’s a good thing The Nation has Ari Berman on staff, because there sure is a lot of voting rights reporting to do under the Trump putsch. Just yesterday, he reports, there were four ominous moves against voting rights.

 1. The House Appropriations Committee voted to defund the Election Assistance Commission, the only federal agency that helps states make sure their voting machines aren’t hacked. The House Administration Committee previously voted to kill the EAC in February, but yesterday’s vote makes it one step closer to reality—practically inviting Russia to try to hack our elections again.

I for one welcome our new Putinist overlords.

 2. The Department of Justice sent a letter to all 50 states informing them

But does misogyny really matter?

Sally Feldman at the New Humanist:

In their recent memoirs both [Harriet] Harman and [Jess] Phillips – the head girl and naughty first former of Parliament – not only offer impressive accounts of their formidable achievements, but also chronicle the endless sexism that poisons political life. And both are committed to making the path easier for the next generation.

…

But while Harman deplores the prejudices that women in public life have always had to face, Phillips rages against the newest weapon in the sex wars: internet trolling.

Revealing that she once received 600 rape threats in one day, she gives us a sample of the kind of abuse that comes tweeting her way.