Women’s Marches Sweep the Globe
There were an estimated 673 Women’s Marches around the world last Saturday, on every single continent. (Yes, even Antarctica). The flagship march, in Washington, DC (read our firsthand account here), numbered around 500,000 — estimated to be three times bigger than the crowd at Trump’s inauguration. Mediaite reports that Trump was “visibly enraged” by the comparison between his inauguration crowd and the crowds at the marches.
Around the Bay Area, 100,000 people marched in San Francisco, 100,000 in Oakland and 25,000 in San Jose, according to CBS.
[Click here to see more of our favorite signs from the Women’s March.]
They’re Coming for San Francisco
Four days into his term, Trump signed an executive order denying money to sanctuary cities — defined as cities where local law enforcement does not prosecute undocumented immigrants nor comply with federal immigration laws. That includes San Francisco, San Jose, Berkeley and Oakland.
From Zack Ford at ThinkProgress:
At his briefing on Wednesday, press secretary Sean Spicer explained that the executive order will “look at funding streams that are going to these cities of federal monies and figure out how we can defund those streams.” The order itself promises to deny eligibility to receive “federal grants” but doesn’t specify which funds would be cut.
Ford adds that the loss of federal monies for cities could be “devastating.” “If Trump’s order is interpreted broadly,” he writes, a large city like Chicago “stands to lose as much as $1.3 billion, about 14 percent of its budget for this year.”
Four Days into Trump’s Term, and Government Agents Go Rogue
Oh, how the tides have turned. Trump’s communication tool du jour, Twitter, is being used as a weapon of resistance. A brief timeline:
- On Friday, January 20, the National Park Service (NPS) Twitter account retweets this tweet from Binyamin Applebaum:
2. The retweet is deleted; meanwhile, the NPS Washington Support Office orders the National Park Service to “immediately cease use of government Twitter accounts until further notice,” per an internal e-mail reported on by Gizmodo.
3. The resistance builds. A rogue employee of Badlands National Park posts multiple tweets about atmospheric carbon dioxide levels; they are deleted hours later.
The National Park Service tells a BuzzFeed reporter, “Several tweets posted on the Badlands National Park’s Twitter account today were posted by a former employee who was not currently authorized to use the park’s account. The park was not told to remove the tweets but chose to do so when they realized that their account had been compromised.”
4. Some National Park Service employees go rogue. Trump had ordered a “media blackout” for the Environmental Protection Agency, among other federal agencies. In response to the media blackout and the squelching of other resistance tweets from official accounts, some anonymous National Park Service employees create an “Alternative National Park Service” Twitter account. Their Twitter biography reads:
“The Unofficial #Resistance team of U.S. National Park Service. Not taxpayer subsidised! Come for rugged scenery, facts & 89 million acres of landscape #climate
The resistance account, which now has over 1 million followers, has been tweeting about climate change, hypocrisy in the Trump administration, and NPS labor issues, among other things:
Are the Republicans Playing Trump like a Fiddle?
This is an intriguing theory that has gained traction in the past week. On January 22, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich (who is also a Berkeley resident) described a recent meeting he had with a former Republican congressman. To wit:
I had breakfast recently with a friend who’s a former Republican member of Congress. Here’s what he said:
Him: Trump is no Republican. He’s just a big fat ego.
Me: Then why didn’t you speak out against him during the campaign?
Him: You kidding? I was surrounded by Trump voters. I’d have been shot.
Me: So what now? What are your former Republican colleagues going to do?
Him (smirking): They’ll play along for a while.
Me: A while?
Him: They’ll get as much as they want — tax cuts galore, deregulation, military buildup, slash all those poverty programs, and then get to work on Social Security and Medicare — and blame him. And he’s such a fool he’ll want to take credit for everything.
Me: And then what?
Him (laughing): They like Pence.
Me: What do you mean?
Him: Pence is their guy. They all think Trump is out of his mind.
Me: So what?
Him: So the moment Trump does something really dumb — steps over the line — violates the law in a big stupid clumsy way … and you know he will …
Me: They impeach him?
Him: You bet. They pull the trigger.
Does that mean Pence is the true Machiavellian mastermind? Time will tell.
