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,

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