The young minds behind the anti-police violence resource Campaign Zero launched an online tool on Monday that shows activists how to resist President Donald Trump's agenda at the local level. "Our States," a website that Mic previewed exclusively, gives users a state-by-state breakdown of bills that, if enacted, would strip civil rights and other legal protections from communities of color, women and LGBTQ people.

With Trump more than halfway through his first 100 days in the White House, much of the left's resistance has focused on the president's attempts to round up undocumented immigrants and restrict the travel of people from Muslim-majority nations. But focusing the fight at the federal level is potentially dangerous, Our States creators say. As Trump stumbles through his first months in office, Republican-controlled state legislatures are considering laws that would criminalize protests, restrict protections against LGBTQ discrimination and limit women's access to safe and legal abortions, among other proposals.

"The purpose of Our States is to ensure that citizens know the legislation being proposed in their respective state, so that they can mobilize to either support or oppose it," activist and Campaign Zero co-founder Deray Mckesson said in a statement to Mic. "The stakes are high."

There's urgency at the state level, Sam Sinyangwe, the data scientist behind Campaign Zero and lead coordinator of the Our States project said in an interview. Most of the 32 GOP-led legislatures will end their sessions for summer recesses in two months — and they'll have either passed anti-progressive measures out of committee, approved them for signature by their governors or defeated them on the floor.

https://mic.com/articles/172102/campaign-zero-creators-launch-tool-to-show-you-how-to-fight-trump-s-agenda-in-your-state#.asSrSHgXw

Nunes has been under scrutiny over the past week for other reasons. He is reported to have gone missing on Tuesday night, under mysterious circumstances. The Daily Beast reported that Nunes received a message on his phone while travelling in a Uber car with a senior committee staffer in Washington, and then left the car abruptly without telling the staffer where he was going.

The next day he called a press conference, without telling his senior staff what he was going to say, and announced that he had seen “dozens” of intelligence reports that showed US intelligence agencies had “incidentally collected” material on members of the Trump transition team.

Such incidental collection happens when court-approved surveillance of an intelligence target picks up communications involving US persons who are not the formal target of the surveillance.

Nunes did not share the intelligence material he claimed to have seen with Democratic members of his committee, and instead outraged them further by briefing Trump. He said later: “I had a duty and obligation to tell him because, as you know, he’s taking a lot of heat in the news media.”

The president later said he felt “somewhat” vindicated in his repeated claims to have been the target of an Obama administration wiretap, even though those claims have been repudiated by Comey, intelligence chiefs and senior Republicans who said there was no evidence for them.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/26/trump-russia-investigation-house-intelligence-devin-nunes

Thanks to changing climates, Michigan will be the best place to live by 2100, according to Popular Science.

The fine folks at Popular Science took a look at future climate in the US over the next 900 years, and decided that everyone would be moving to Michigan.

While many areas around Michigan would be suffering from rising sea levels, wildfires, mosquitos and hurricanes - Michigan would escape most of the drastic changes from climate change.

https://www.facebook.com/PopSci/videos/10154988157226411/

http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/michigan-will-be-best-place-to-live-by-2100-ad-due-to-climate-change

I personally don't think anyplace on earth will be fit to live

Paul Ryan says he fantasized about cutting health care for the poor at his college keggers

Oh, college! It’s a time when young adults discover their professional interests, when they live alone for the first time, when many people come into their sexuality, and when youth get to explore other adult pleasures.
And, if you were House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), it was a time to dream about how, someday, you would take health care away from millions of poor people.
In a conversation with the National Review’s Rich Lowry on Friday, Ryan bragged about how conservatives now have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to take health coverage away from the most vulnerable Americans.

“So Medicaid,” Ryan told Lowry, “sending it back to the states, capping its growth rate. We’ve been dreaming of this since I’ve been around — since you and I were drinking at a keg. . . . I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a long time. We’re on the cusp of doing something we’ve long believed in.”
Ryan is 47 years old, which means that, if he started “drinking at a keg”

https://thinkprogress.org/paul-ryan-says-he-fantasized-about-cutting-health-care-for-the-poor-at-his-college-keggers-7aa0accc928b#.udd5i4xtv

America is set to witness a celestial treat as a full solar eclipse is set to occur on Aug. 21 this year. The range of the eclipse will stretch from Oregon to South Carolina.
The other U.S. states will witness a partial eclipse. On the day, the afore-mentioned regions will feel as if all the lights have been blotted out, as the sun will completely disappear in the middle of the day.


http://www.techtimes.com/articles/202041/20170317/total-solar-eclipse-to-cross-us-first-time-in-99-years.htm

We've seen this combination of shameless greed and incompetence before — when Republicans tried to govern Iraq

This week’s rollout of Paul Ryan’s “repeal and replace” Obamacare bill is an excellent reminder of what the country would look like if any Republican other than Donald Trump had won the presidency — not that different. We can now say for sure that the problem isn’t just that the party nominated an crude, unprepared conman for the top job. The problem is that the party itself is a big sloppy hot mess. How could we have forgotten?

Like the old Republican cry of “tort reform,” which nobody really understood, “Repeal Obamacare” became a slogan that would evoke lusty cheers from an audience of partisans. If you asked any of them what it meant in practice, not one could tell you. Not that it mattered. The whole issue was political kabuki once the Affordable Care Act was rolled out and tens of millions of people signed on to it, and the Republicans knew it. Their elected legislators just kept voting for repeals they knew would never be enacted and screaming their empty slogan at rallies to keep their base excited.

When Trump unexpectedly won the elections, after having promised that he too would “Repeal Obamacare!” and “replace it with something terrific” which he promised would happen immediately, cover everyone and be much cheaper and much better, Republicans were suddenly stuck with a problem that had no solution. Now that he’s president, Trump has discovered that “nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” Based on what we’re seeing from the GOP Congress, he’s actually right about that.

I won’t go into all the machinations here because they’re changing by the hour. First Trump’s on board and then he’s not and then he’s back on. (He’s been saying for weeks that he’d really prefer to let Obamacare fail — sabotage it from the executive branch —and then blame the Democrats.) He does not want people to call this monstrosity “Trumpcare” — but everyone is doing it anyway.

http://www.salon.com/2017/03/10/republicans-loot-the-palace-gops-plan-to-govern-looks-a-lot-like-the-way-they-rebuilt-iraq/

A mass grave containing the remains of babies and children has been discovered at a former Catholic care home in Ireland where it has been alleged up to 800 died, government-appointed investigators said on Friday.

Excavations at the site of the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, have uncovered an underground structure divided into 20 chambers containing “significant quantities of human remains”, the judge-led mother and baby homes commission said.

The commission said analysis of selected remains revealed ages of the deceased ranged from 35 weeks to three years old. It found that the dead had been mostly buried in the 1950s, when the facility was one of more than a dozen in Ireland offering shelter to orphans, unmarried mothers and their children. The Tuam home closed in 1961.

The home, run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic religious order of nuns, received unmarried pregnant women to give birth. The women were separated from their children, who remained elsewhere in the home, raised by nuns, until they could be adopted.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/mass-grave-of-babies-and-children-found-at-tuam-orphanage-in-ireland

Most died from neglect at the hands of nuns because they were born out of wedlock, pure evil cults.

MUSKEGON, MI - The whereabouts of the Confederate treasury have been a mystery since the end of the Civil War, but two West Michigan men believe they've solved it.

One of the country's most illustrious mysteries, the theories about what came of the fabled "Confederate Gold" are as numerous as they are various.

Two history buffs are putting forward their own theory, one that feels like a real life "National Treasure" movie in which many seemingly unrelated events are brought together into one narrative. At the center of it is Muskegon's most generous philanthropist.

Charles H. Hackley, a lumber baron, is arguably the Lake Michigan community's most influential historical figure.
Although he has been dead for more than 100 years, his name lives on through his many gifts to the community, including Hackley Park, Hackley Public Library, Hackley Hospital and the Hackley Administration Building.
Yet, Hackley's legacy contains a mystery of its own.

When he died in 1905, his net worth was about $10 million, or $261 million in today's dollars, according to the Hackley and Hume papers at Michigan State University.

But a biography Hackley authorized in 1899, in which he gave notes to author Lois Haight, says that he earned $3 million in his lifetime.

http://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/index.ssf/2017/03/did_missing_confederate_gold_h.html