At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday,  Trump vowed to “destroy” the Johnson Amendment – a tax provision designed to help maintain the separation of church and state.
The Johnson Amendment prohibits organizations like churches and charities from participating in campaigns for or against specific political candidates under threat of losing their tax-exempt status.
Trump has not said how he plans to scrap the Johnson Amendment, but doing so would allow religious leaders to endorse candidates from the pulpit and churches to pour money into campaigns. Read more
We are one Senate vote away from voting down billionaire mega-donor Betsy DeVos for education secretary!
If you’re in Pennsylvania, call Senator Toomey’s office NOW: (202) 224-4254. He’s a critical vote. Tell his office we need a qualified leader who wants to strengthen public education and that’s not DeVos. Ask your contacts who live in Pennsylvania to call if you’re out of state!
When you struggle with your mental health on a daily basis, it can be hard to take action on the things that matter most to you. The mental barriers anxiety creates often appear insurmountable. But sometimes, when you really need to, you can break those barriers down. This week, with encouragement from some great people on the internet, I pushed against my anxiety and made some calls to members of our government. Here’s a comic about how you can do that, too. (Resources and transcript below.)
Motivational resources: There are a lot! Here are a few I really like:
Sharon Wong posted a great series of tweets that helped me manage my phone anxiety and make some calls.
Kelsey is tweeting pretty much daily with advice and reminders about calling representatives. I found this tweet an especially great reminder that calls aren’t nearly as big a deal as anxiety makes them out to be.
Informational resources: There are a lot of these, as well! These three are good places to start:
Unlike popular belief that there exists an infinite number of shapes that snowflakes can occur in, there are only 35! Albeit no snowflake is the same from an atomic standpoint, these are the 35 shapes of snowflakes which have been documented thus far to occur in nature.
Ever since I did my post about how Thomas Jefferson would go to hell, people have been like “can you do Andrew Jackson too” to which my answer is a resounding HELL NOPE. That dude will LITERALLY MURDER ME and the fact that he’s dead WILL NOT DO A THING TO STOP HIM BECAUSE HELL CANNOT HOLD HIM. Like, most U.S. Presidents are murderers by proxy, but this dude was a LITERAL SERIAL KILLER WHO LIKED TO GET HIS HANDS DIRTY. He is responsible for the only time in American History that the president’s bodyguards had to save the ASSASSIN’S LIFE from the PRESIDENT. You know how we called Nixon “Tricky Dick” because he was a liar and we called George W. Bush “Dubya” after his middle initial and we called Abraham Lincoln “Honest Abe” because he was a pretty above-the-board type of guy? They called Andrew Jackson “Old Hickory” because he liked to BEAT PEOPLE ABOUT THE FACE AND BODY WITH HIS CANE. Like he was absolutely a genocidal maniac who apparently only held the office of President because everyone was too afraid to ask him to leave but now that I’ve said that, I want you all to know that if I’m found beaten to death with a blunt object, I can save the police the trouble of investigating: It was former U.S. President Andrew Jackson come back from the dead for revenge.Â
Mainers/New Englanders CALL SUSAN COLLINS. She fucking voted DeVos through to the floor but is wavering AND pointed out that she’s changed votes from the committee to the floor before. It might be a long shot but if you live in Maine or are from there, here are the numbers for her Augusta office and other offices:
Senate Democrats deployed a dramatic eleventh-hour maneuver to deny committee votes to two of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks Tuesday, arguing that those nominees had lied to them.
Senators on the Finance Committee were set to vote on Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and Steve Mnuchin to lead the Treasury Department. But on Tuesday morning, they simply didn’t show up for the votes, denying Republicans the quorum they needed to move forward toward confirmation. At least one Democrat needs to be present for the vote to happen.
Explaining the boycott, Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said the two nominees “misled the public and held back important information about their backgrounds.”
this is a reminder not to support the australian government, not to ignore the australian government, and not to let major developed countries fall to a deeply fascist regime.
 if you live in australia, please call up your local, state and federal members about this now.
A Middleground 