sashayed:

I heard something amazing last night: a longterm Congressional aide who said “I got 30,000 calls a week to impeach Bill Clinton. I’ve gotten 5,000 this week about the ACA.”

That’s partly because we communicate differently now than we did in the 90s, of course. But in my opinion, it’s a sign of something else. This first-week offensive of jaw-droppingly vile legislation is intended to fragment the opposition. We can’t all fight every battle–and if we try, the aides we speak to won’t tabulate us in all of them. So while 30,000 or more of us may be calling, some of us are focusing on the ACA and some on Jeff Sessions and some on the wall and some on the Muslim ban and on and on and on. 

This is important and necessary. We must and will focus on the many, MANY different issues that brought us to this point. But it is also time to pull Congress’s attention to one, and that one is impeaching Donald Trump. 

When you call your reps tomorrow, try something like this. (Feel free to send me corrections.)

Hi, my name is [your name], I’m a constituent from [your town], and I want to tell [representative’s name] that Congress needs to act immediately to impeach President Trump. Not only has his behavior been unhinged, but he is in direct and obvious violation of the Foreign Emoluments clause of the Constitution. He is empowering deluded bigots like Steve Bannon over national security experts. He is dangerous and unfit to lead. As a [parent, lawyer, child of immigrants, friend and neighbor of immigrants], I have a stake in this fight, and I will personally work to remove any member of Congress who doesn’t stand against Trump. Thanks.

This is ESPECIALLY important if you have a Republican representative. Make it personal for them. Tell them how hard you and your community will work to ensure they lose in the next election if they don’t stand up to Trump.

Mike Pence is a nightmare, but he’s not a nightmare who wants to put Steve Fucking Bannon on the National Security Council. He’s not a nightmare with populist cachet. He is not the nightmare that makes David Duke and Richard Spencer so fucking happy. We must and will fight him as President – but we will be able to do it on our terms. Impeach this motherfucker now.  

grumpsaesthetics:

while we were all focusing on the muslim ban, trump took the opportunity to quietly remove the joint chiefs and director of Intelligence from the national security council and put steve bannon there instead [x]

for those unfamiliar with bannon, this is the neo-nazi who used to run breitbart, have previously said he wants to “destroy the state, bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment”, and could likely be the mind behind all of trump’s executive orders (including the muslim ban)

so to say this is scary would be an understatement

theunitofcaring:

I think grad schools should accept the best students for their programs. I think taking less qualified students because by random accident they were born in the country, instead of people who are actively choosing to spend their lives in this country, does not strengthen the country, it weakens it. 

And I think that the costs imposed by suddenly yanking the rug out from under someone who has been here five years are unacceptably high, and that if we decided to go full racist xenophobes we should at least be racist xenophobes with some semblance of trustworthiness and integrity by making the ban one on evaluating or accepting future students, instead of stranding people who have already built lives here. 

Doing it this way is not just horrible, it is demonstrating a willingness to be gratuitously horrible on a whim, and one of its consequences is that no one should ever again expect that the U.S. government will behave consistently or make it possible to make long-term plans that involve travel into or out of the country. And the cost imposed by that expectation is extraordinarily high. If you care about financial outlooks more than the lives of people stranded in foreign countries away from their newborn children (yes, I personally know of a case of that), you might care that lots of companies have frantically recalled departments of overseas workers lest they later not be able to return to the country, and that they’ve said research and development and their success as businesses will be damaged by the necessity of coping with an immigration system that is suddenly bucking wildly at the whims of an appallingly ignorant corrupt cronyist.

But mostly it’s just that if you think where people are born should decide what rights they have, then we’re fundamentally on a very different page about everything.

halaltequila:

If you are or know anyone who is at an airport:

DO NOT GIVE UP YOUR GREENCARD OR OTHER PAPERS! YOU WILL NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEMAND THEM BACK.

DO NOT SIGN FORM I-407! YOU WOULD BE WILLINGLY ABANDONING YOUR PERMANENT RESIDENCY STATUS.

TRUST NO IMMIGRATION OFFICER OR ENFORCER.

ACLU HAS SENT OUT LAWYERS. MAKE SURE YOU GET ONE.

Please protect yourself.

EDIT: Also, if you’re a green card resident who is a citizen of or from IRAN, IRAQ, LIBYA, SOMALIA, SUDAN, SYRIA, OR YEMEN:

Please make sure you DO NOT LEAVE THE UNITED STATES UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. YOU WILL NOT BE PERMITTED TO RE-ENTER THE COUNTRY.

scottfriday:

searching for that fine line between “i need to stay informed” and “i can’t take any more of this.”

lesbianhawkeye:

I feel a little apprehensive to post this but damn, I’m tired of Poland during WWII being mentioned only in the context of “Hitler invaded it first” (which is not technically accurate anyway).

SO:

• during WWII, around 6 000 000 Polish people were killed, over 3 000 000 of it were Jewish. The vast majority were civilians. To give you the perspective on those numbers, 35 000 000 people lived in Poland before the war. That means that over 22% of all Polish people were killed in WWII.

• The first actual report of the scope of Holocaust was conducted by the Polish Underground State. Jan Karski gathered a detailed account of the mass murders that were being committed and presented it to the Allies on the West as early as 1942, asking for help. USA and UK did nothing.

• (by the way, while giving Jan Karski posthumously the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Barack Obama used the very loaded phrase “Polish concentration camps” – which were, you know Nazi Germany concentration camps where Polish citizens were killed. Not to rag on Obama personally but this goes to show what’s the general American attitude towards this)

• Speaking of the Polish Underground State – did you know that it was the biggest resistance movement under the Nazi Germany? And it was an actual underground state, with underground cabinet, diplomatic channels, education, judiciary system, the press, etc. There was a branch called “Żegota” that provided help for Jewish people in gettos and accomodated their hiding on the “Aryan side”. (You should consider that in Poland only the punishment for helping Jewish people was death).

• Don’t forget too that Hitler first offered Poland a deal and the Polish response was “We in Poland don’t know the notion of peace at any cost. There is only one thing in the lives of people, nations and states which is priceless: that thing is honor”.

• (that probably wasn’t very smart but you have to admit it’s pretty badass)

• Subsequently, both Nazi Germany and USSR invaded Poland while France and Britain (who formally “declared war” on Germany) did nothing.

• Also don’t forget that Polish Underground State was forced to work with Stalin even though USSR invaded Poland and committed terrible war crimes. For our troubles, we got sold to the Soviets after WWII. By the way, NKWD (secret police) was actively arresting Polish freedom fighters and Jewish people even BEFORE the war was done (sometimes those “freed” from the concertration camps were transferred directly to the Soviet prisons). USA knew about this.

There’s more but I wrote this off the top of my head and I’m tired.

American followers, be aware of this.