Here is the petition
Here are articles about growing protests.
The Washington Post.
BBC World News: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38781420
The Guardian: Green cards holders included in ban: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2017/jan/28/world-digests-donald-trumps-order-to-ban-refugees-from-muslim-countries?CMP=share_btn_tw&page=with%3Ablock-588c89d3e4b0b3e971af3c71#block-588c89d3e4b0b3e971af3c71
Dana Milbank covers politics for the Washington Post. Here are his favorite signs observed at the Women’s March on Washington. By the way, more people –women and men–showed up for the March than for the presidential inauguration the previous day. There were marches all over the nation and in cities around the world, all protesting Trump’s hateful words about women and others.
Milbank wrote:
“Some were vulgar, others were angry. Most were earnest. These were my favorite signs at Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington:
#FreeMelania
No Country for Dirty Old Men
Sad!
Resistance is Fertile
Too Worried to be Funny
If Mom’s Not Happy, Nobody’s Happy
I Have a Vagenda
Manchurine Candidate
Orange Is the New Fascism
There Is So Much Wrong It Cannot Fit on This Sign
Super Callous Fragile Ego, Trump You Are Atrocious
Super Callous Fascist Racist Extra Braggadocious
Actuaries Against Repeal and Delay
Leave it to the Beavers
Viva la Vulva
(Older woman’s sign:) I Can’t Believe I’m Still Protesting This S—
J Edgar Comey
(On image of President Trump as a scarecrow:) If He Only Had a Brain
(On a drawing of ovaries:) Grow a Pair
This P—- Grabs Back
Donald You Ignorant Slut
Melania, Blink Twice if You Need Help
Impeach Trump, Convert Pence
#emoluments
Sorry World, We’ll Fix This
(On needlepoint:) I Made This So I Could Stab Something 35,000 Times
Patriarchy is for D—-
There Will Be Hell Toupée”
Meanwhile, Trump went to visit the CIA and blamed “the media” for falsely portraying a dispute between him and the intelligence community. Lucky we have a short memory and a vast tolerance for lies.
Meryl Streep won the Golden Globes Lifetime Achievement Award last night. Her acceptance speech was powerful. (Please note that she emphasizes the fact that she went to the public schools of New Jersey.)
She said:
Please sit down. Thank you. I love you all. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend. And I have lost my mind sometime earlier this year, so I have to read.
Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said: You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press.
But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island; Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids in Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy. And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in London — no, in Ireland I do believe, and she’s here nominated for playing a girl in small-town Virginia.
Ryan Gosling, like all of the nicest people, is Canadian, and Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.
They gave me three seconds to say this, so: An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that. Breathtaking, compassionate work.
But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose. O.K., go on with it.
O.K., this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.
One more thing: Once, when I was standing around on the set one day, whining about something — you know we were gonna work through supper or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me, “Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?” Yeah, it is, and we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight.
As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.
The Network for Public Education and the NPE Action Fund has created a toolkit for citizens to use to protest the confirmation of a totally unqualified person for Secretary of Education. Billionaire Betsy is a lobbyist for vouchers and charters. She has wrecked the schools of her home state. Do not let her ruin the nation’s public schools. Resist!
Please use the toolkit to let your Senators know that you oppose her confirmation.
Kentucky is one of the few states that did not have any charter schools until the Republicans swept into power. Republicans have longed for school choice, because choice and competition are baked into free-market ideology. Besides, their neighboring state Tennessee has charter schools. They didn’t care that Kentucky’s students perform better than those of Tennessee on the National Assessment of Educational Performance. The Republicans in Kentucky want the same failed ideas as everyone else.
The school board of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, passed a resolution saying that they don’t want charter schools. They want to protect and improve their public schools, not destroy or privatize them. They don’t see the point of a dual school system.
In the resolution, the board expressed concerns about charter schools siphoning money from public schools, lacking similar transparency and accountability standards as public schools, and failing to help at-risk students.
“The Elizabethtown Independent Board of Education opposes any Charter School legislation that will establish a separate system of state-authorized public charter schools that are funded through a funding formula that unilaterally takes critically needed funds from the local school districts and redirects them to charter schools, thereby debilitating the significantly underfunded existing system of funding for public education for all Kentucky students,” the resolution states.
The board held a discussion on charter schools before unanimously passing the resolution.
“We know with very good confidence that charter schools will continue to defund what is already underfunded,” said Tony Kuklinski, a board member. “They will take taxpayer money, money from the people we represent, and put it into a private enterprise for personal gain with no substantial data to support a better education system than a public school system.”
Kuklinski added that once the charter schools fail or decide to close shop, children will return to public schools undereducated.
“We already have things in place where if we don’t meet certain requirements and standards that the state has implemented, there can be sanctions up to and including the state coming in and taking over a school district,” he said…
Kentucky is one of seven states that does not have charter school legislation. Other states without charter schools are Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and West Virginia.
Hardin County Schools Board of Education Chairman Charlie Wise, who also opposes charter schools, said the district will discuss and consider writing a similar resolution next month once new board members have been sworn in.
Congratulations to the Elizabethtown school board, which is far wiser than the Kentucky legislature.
Here is hoping that your courage and resolve spreads to many other school districts across the state and that it wins bipartisan support from every citizen in every school district. Everything in your resolution is correct. Charter schools are under private management; they are NOT public schools. If you sue them for excluding your children with special needs, they will tell the judge that they are a private corporation, not a “state actor.” They will drain resources from your local public schools, because the legislature has no intention of replacing the money you lose when kids are lured away with false promises. If charters are opened in your district, your public schools will lose money, teachers, and programs. Stay the course. Don’t let the corporations or representatives from ALEC bully you.
I found this on the Internet and think you will find it important to know:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DzOz3Y6D8g_MNXHNMJYAz1b41_cn535aU5UsN7Lj8X8/mobilebasic
It is a practical guide to resisting the reign of Trump.
Mike Klonsky, a longtime political activist in Chicago, warns that the rise of Trumpism in the US and Europe signals a dangerous white nationalism that threatens the fabric of civil society.
The rise and seizure of political and military power by a narrowly-based clique of white supremacists and neo-fascists, in the U.S. and much of Europe, combined with an inadequate response on the part of liberal democrats, is plunging the world closer to a global conflagration than it’s been since World War 2 and Trump hasn’t even been inaugurated yet. The Trumpists are too weak and their base too narrow to rule primarily through diplomacy and negotiation. Their strong suit is their control of military (including nuclear capacity) and police powers (including an apparent willingness to use torture)….
Then there’s the Trump’s war on the press; trade war with China; Betsy DeVos’s war on public schools; Trump’s war on science; Trump/Pudzer’s declared war on labor unions; Trump/Perry/Tillerson’s war on the environment; Sessions’ war on civil rights; and so it goes….
As for teachers and educators, we have a significant role to play in resisting the Trumpists drive towards war and in defense of civil society. War is the enemy of education, families, children, women, and democracy. Resistance to Betsy DeVos war on public education will be a key part of the opposition movement. Defense of public space and of public decision-making, teaching students to think critically and to become shapers of their own future, are some of the essential pieces of the resistance movement based in the schools.
Rev. Charles Foster Johnson has organized strong resistance to the vouchers touted by the most powerful elected official in Texas, not the governor, but the Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a former talk show host. Rev. Johnson is leader to Pastors for Texas Children, which has 2,000 members across the state. They are united in their opposition to vouchers and their support for public schools. Year after year, they have defeated vouchers in the legislature, and they are gearing up to fight them again. You can read more about his and his organization here, at “Reporting Texas.”
I am happy to place Rev. Johnson and Pastors for Texas Children on the blog’s honor roll for their stalwart defense of public schools, of the children of Texas, of religious liberty, and of the principle of separation of church and state.
Johnson, 59, is the Fort Worth-based executive director of Pastors for Texas Children, a network of about 2,000 church leaders around the state who work to support pubic schools.
Johnson and his group have emerged as chief adversaries of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Patrick champions a breed of education reform forged around vouchers — which steer money from public schools to parents to pay private school tuition.
“The lieutenant governor said, a couple of weeks ago, he’ll keep bringing it up until it passes,” Foster told the pastors, who were gathered for a meeting of Texas Baptists Committed in Waco. “It’s up to us to stop him.”
In his baritone southern drawl, Johnson told the pastors that vouchers siphon funds from schools in low-income neighborhoods and violate the separation of church and state enshrined in the First Amendment. School vouchers contradict God’s law of religious liberty, he said, by providing government support for religion.
The organization’s mission is twofold: To advocate for public education with state lawmakers and to mobilize individual churches to support public schools by providing services such as student mentoring and teacher appreciation events.
Members have linked dozens of churches with public schools, met with more than 100 lawmakers since the organization’s inception in 2013, and published dozens of anti-school voucher editorials in newspapers across Texas.
This post is a very interesting analysis of how the newly elected Democratic Governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, can use his bully pulpit to pound the legislature, which has passed dreadful laws in the past five years.
Why did McCrory lose? The author credits Reverend William Barber’s Moral Monday for standing strong, pushing hard, and never giving up.
He quotes Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling with a lesson for all of us:
“(T)he seeds of McCrory’s defeat really were planted by the Moral Monday movement in the summer of 2013, just months after McCrory took office….
“He allowed himself to be associated with a bunch of unpopular legislation, and progressives hit back HARD, in a way that really caught voters’ attention and resonated with them….
“(T)he Moral Monday movement pushed back hard. Its constant visibility forced all of these issues to stay in the headlines. Its efforts ensured that voters in the state were educated about what was going on in Raleigh, and as voters became aware of what was going on, they got mad. All those people who had seen McCrory as a moderate, as a different kind of Republican, had those views quickly changed. By July McCrory had a negative approval rating- 40% of voters approving of him to 49% who disapproved. By September it was all the way down to 35/53, and he never did fully recover from the damage the rest of his term….
“And it’s a lesson for progressives in dealing with Trump. Push back hard from day one. Be visible. Capture the public’s attention, no matter what you have to do to do it. Don’t count on the media to do it itself because the media will let you down. The protesters in North Carolina, by making news in their own right week after week after week, forced sustained coverage of what was going on in Raleigh. And even though it was certainly a long game, with plenty more frustration in between, those efforts led to change at the polls 42 months after they really started.
“Keep Pounding.”
The most important lesson on how to survive the next four years: KEEP POUNDING. NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER.
Look west for hope!
The New York Times has a good article about the new generation of leaders in California who have the dynamism and energy to replace the aging lions, the national leaders who are now in their 70s.
The leaders of the party affirmed their intention to ward off the worst of Trump’s policies.
Previewing an adversarial relationship between California and the federal government over the next four years, legislative leaders opened a new session on Monday by vowing to preserve California’s liberal agenda and passing a resolution rejecting President-elect Donald Trump’s hardline immigration stance.
Members of both houses directly confronted Trump’s tough-on-immigration rhetoric, which has included calls to deport millions and block immigration by Muslims. Lawmakers passed a resolution that says “California stands unified in rejecting the politics of hatred and exclusion” and exhorts Trump “to not pursue mass deportation strategies that needlessly tear families apart, or target immigrants for deportation based on vague and unjustified criteria.”
“We have all heard the insults, we have all heard the lies, and we have all heard the threats,” said Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Paramount, adding of an undocumented immigrant population that is the nation’s largest, “if you want to get to them, you have to go through us.”
Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, opened his chamber’s business by accepting the election results but rebuffing Trump. He urged Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress to “treat immigrant families and children humanely, with a modicum of dignity and respect.”
“They are hard-working, upstanding members of our society who contribute billions of dollars to our economic activity and tax revenue to our state each year,” de León said.
The immediate challenge to Trump drew criticism from Republican members who said Democrats were demonizing a man who had not yet taken office. Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez, R-Lake Elsinore, said the tactic “seeks to flare up tension between communities.”
“To throw down a gauntlet and say ‘here we go’ without ever having time to discuss this” is inappropriate, said Assemblyman Rocky Chavez, R-Oceanside.
But dark warnings about the coming Trump administration set the tone, with Assemblyman Marc Levine, D-San Rafael, saying the president-elect had advocated “ethnic cleansing policies.”
With fiery language that broke from his usually staid public demeanor, Rendon said California faces a “major existential threat.” He spurred raucous applause for an apparent dig at Trump aide Stephen Bannon, saying that “white nationalists and anti-Semites have no business working in the White House.” Bannon’s Breitbart website has drawn admiration from nationalists and opponents of multiculturalism as well as criticism for pushing bigotry into mainstream discourse.
“It is up to us to pass policies that would firewall Californians and what we believe from the cynical, short sighted, and reactionary agenda that is rising in the wake of the election,” Rendon said, adding that “unity must be separated from complicity…Californians do not need healing. We need to fight.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 