It's another day...update #7

Be Like Sally.

• “Two Wildly Different Perspectives.”What “Things Going Wrong” Can Look Like
• 6 Reasons Why A New Civil War Is Possible And Terrifying
• You knew I was a snake when you picked me up
• Very relevant poem.
• Poems for the resistance.
• Merriam-Webster is still stirring up shit and snowflakes.
• And noting what people look up.
• Here are some streamlined ways to express your boiling inner rage to Washington
• Fun with Photoshop.
• Obama speaks.
• "Whatever our flaws and tendency toward fear of outsiders, humans also have a sometimes astounding capacity for compassion and altruism."
• Sam Bee gets a dinner gig.
• How long is this going to last?
• Where to find the next protest.
• Indivisible Guide.
• Trump's astrological year.
• Trump's astrological next six months.
• Of course that happened.
• How to support your immigrant coworkers.
• Ways to be an ally.
• Stocking up on your future.
• That's something to order.
• Google walkout.
• Good luck with that.
• "Gregg Phillips, whose unsubstantiated claim that the election was marred by 3 million illegal votes was tweeted by the president, was listed on the rolls in Alabama, Texas and Mississippi, according to voting records and election officials in those states."
• Why yes, we should be worried about five-year-olds.
• Five-year-old with diabolical plans (Washington Post)
• Bitches are in my grill, man! 
• How to Build a Mass Movement
• "it's had more leaks about the personal lives and foibles of the principals than the Obama White House did in 8 years. They all hate each other and love whining to the press about how stupid and mean everyone else is."
• Raccoons of the Resistance.
• Senate phone lines are flooded with callers opposing Betsy DeVos. Only Democrats are listening.
• The White House Could Start Using Social Media Accounts to Screen Visitors to the U.S.
• A simple guide to how you can throw sand in the Trump administration’s gears
• One key reason Republicans are in disarray over the future of Obamacare
• The World Leaders Who Aren’t Condemning Trump’s Ban
• All the Constitutional violations.
• The real goal of all of this.
• "This is what winning the culture war looks like."
• A call to action.
• "One of the signs at the DC march yesterday was "I'M RUNNING OUT OF POSTER BOARD"
  I will give this to the Trump administration: it is stimulating the art supplies sector of the economy."
•  "In return I offer these printable postcard templates. The images are of old tweets by Paul Ryan and Mike Pence saying a Muslim ban is unconstitutional. You may print them, mark them up in red Sharpie (I suggest "HYPOCRITE" or "COWARD"), and send them to Ryan and Pence (contact info is included)."
• SCREAMING ABOUT TRUMP INTO A WELL: A TEXT ADVENTURE
• Trump toilet paper.
• One hour a week for political change.
• The very long list of Republicans in Congress who have taken no position on Trump's refugee ban
• The controversy over the White House Holocaust statement, explained
• Bannon explained.
• Two Wildly Different Perspectives
• What happens if Trump refuses a court order.
• How to handle the Oscars
• Review of Final Fantasy VII is all about Trump.
• "Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who dostudy history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it."
• Judge wears her pussy hat to court.
• Seth Meyers.
• Ellen comments on recent use of Finding Dory.
• Protest stories.
• Feeling trumpled.
• "Given how things are changing, I'm not even sure if I'll be able to set that narrative for myself. That's a scary thought — to live an identity that is so politicized even when you wish for it to not be."

In Venezuela, we couldn’t stop Chávez. Don’t make the same mistakes we did. (Washington Post)

"The problem is you.
How do I know? Because I grew up as the “you” Trump is about to turn you into. In Venezuela, the urban middle class I come from was cast as the enemy in the political struggle that followed Chávez’s arrival in 1998. For years, I watched in frustration as the opposition failed to do anything about the catastrophe overtaking our nation. Only later did I realize that this failure was self-inflicted. So now, to my American friends, here is some advice on how to avoid Venezuela’s mistakes.
    Don’t forget who the enemy is.
Populism can survive only amid polarization. It works through the unending vilification of a cartoonish enemy. Never forget that you’re that enemy. Trump needs you to be the enemy, just like all religions need a demon. A scapegoat. “But facts!” you’ll say, missing the point entirely.
What makes you the enemy? It’s very simple to a populist: If you’re not a victim, you’re a culprit.
During the 2007 student-led protests against the government’s closure of RCTV , then the second-biggest TV channel in Venezuela, Chávez continually went on air to frame us students as “pups of the American Empire,” “supporters of the enemy of the country” — spoiled, unpatriotic babies who only wanted to watch soap operas. Using our socioeconomic background as his main accusation, he sought to frame us as the direct inheritors of the mostly imagined “oligarchs” of our fathers’ generation. The students who supported Chavismo were “children of the homeland,” “sons of the people,” “the future of the country.” Not for one moment did the government’s analysis go beyond such cartoons.
The problem is not the message but the messenger, and if you don’t realize this, you will be wasting your time.
    Show no contempt.
Don’t feed polarization, disarm it. This means leaving the theater of injured decency behind.
That includes rebukes such as the one the “Hamilton” cast gave Vice President-elect Mike Pence shortly after the election. While sincere, it only antagonized Trump; it surely did not convince a single Trump supporter to change his or her mind. Shaming has never been an effective method of persuasion.
The Venezuelan opposition struggled for years to get this. We wouldn’t stop pontificating about how stupid Chavismo was, not only to international friends but also to Chávez’s electoral base. “Really, this guy? Are you nuts? You must be nuts,” we’d say.
The subtext was clear: Look, idiots — he will destroy the country. He’s blatantly siding with the bad guys: Fidel Castro, Vladi­mir Putin, the white supremacists or the guerrillas. He’s not that smart. He’s threatening to destroy the economy. He has no respect for democracy or for the experts who work hard and know how to do business.
I heard so many variations on these comments growing up that my political awakening was set off by the tectonic realization that Chávez, however evil, was not actually stupid.
Neither is Trump: Getting to the highest office in the world requires not only sheer force of will but also great, calculated rhetorical precision. The kind only a few political geniuses are born with and one he flamboyantly brandishes.
 “We are in a rigged system, and a big part of the rigging are these dishonest people in the media,” Trump said late in the campaign, when he was sounding the most like Chávez. “Isn’t it amazing? They don’t even want to look at you folks.” The natural conclusion is all too clear: Turn off the TV, just listen to me. The constant boos at his rallies only confirmed as much. By looking down on Trump’s supporters, you’ve lost the first battle. Instead of fighting polarization, you’ve played into it.
The worst you can do is bundle moderates and extremists together and think that America is divided between racists and liberals. That’s the textbook definition of polarization. We thought our country was split between treacherous oligarchs and Chávez’s uneducated, gullible base. The only one who benefited was Chávez.
    Don’t try to force him out.
Our opposition tried every single trick in the book. Coup d’etat? Check. Ruinous oil strike? Check. Boycotting elections in hopes that international observers would intervene? You guessed it.
Look, opponents were desperate. We were right to be. But a hissy fit is not a strategy.
The people on the other side — and crucially, independents — will rebel against you if you look like you’re losing your mind. You will have proved yourself to be the very thing you’re claiming to be fighting against: an enemy of democracy. And all the while you’re giving the populist and his followers enough rhetorical fuel to rightly call you a saboteur, an unpatriotic schemer, for years to come.
To a big chunk of the population, the Venezuelan opposition is still that spoiled, unpatriotic schemer. It sapped the opposition’s effectiveness for the years when we’d need it most.
Clearly, the United States has much stronger institutions and a fairer balance of powers than Venezuela. Even out of power, Democrats have no apparent desire to try anything like a coup. Which is good. Attempting to force Trump out, rather than digging in to fight his agenda, would just distract the public from whatever failed policies the administration is making. In Venezuela, the opposition focused on trying to reject the dictator by any means possible — when we should have just kept pointing out how badly Chávez’s rule was hurting the very people he claimed to be serving.
    Find a counterargument. (No, not the one you think.)
Don’t waste your time trying to prove that this grand idea is better than that one. Ditch all the big words. The problem, remember, is not the message but the messenger. It’s not that Trump supporters are too stupid to see right from wrong, it’s that you’re more valuable to them as an enemy than as a compatriot. Your challenge is to prove that you belong in the same tribe as them — that you are American in exactly the same way they are.
In Venezuela, we fell into this trap in a bad way. We wrote again and again about principles, about separation of powers, civil liberties, the role of the military in politics, corruption and economic policy. But it took opposition leaders 10 years to figure out that they needed to actually go to the slums and the countryside. Not for a speech or a rally, but for a game of dominoes or to dance salsa — to show they were Venezuelans, too, that they weren’t just dour scolds and could hit a baseball, could tell a joke that landed. That they could break the tribal divide, come down off the billboards and show that they were real. This is not populism by other means. It is the only way of establishing your standing. It’s deciding not to live in an echo chamber. To press pause on the siren song of polarization.
Because if the music keeps going, yes — you will see neighbors deported and friends of different creeds and sexual orientations living in fear and anxiety, your country’s economic inequality deepening along the way. But something worse could happen. In Venezuela, whole generations were split in two. A sense of shared culture was wiped out. Rhetoric took over our history books, our future, our own sense of self. We lost the freedom to be anything larger than cartoons.
This does not have to be your fate. You can be different. Recognize that you’re the enemy Trump requires. Show concern, not contempt, for the wounds of those who brought him to power. By all means, be patient with democracy and struggle relentlessly to free yourself from the shackles of the caricature the populists have drawn of you.
It’s a tall order. But the alternative is worse. Trust me."

We should probably all pay attention to this:

"This is exactly how the Sacramento Airport protest happened yesterday, and that one person was me. I looked on social media for information on any planned airport protests in Sacramento and all I found were questions about whether anyone was planning an airport protest in Sacramento. I sort of reverse-trolled and reverse-engineered that situation and began responding to people's questions with "Yes. Noon. Terminal B." They believed me, and it spread.
Here is what I learned:
People want to show up. They're motivated to show up. But they still feel like they need to be told, or asked, to show up. People here were asking whether any groups were organizing a protest. And I'm like, people, YOU ARE THE PEOPLE! You don't need a group to organize your protest!
But you can't say that, because in doing so you're telling THEM to organize. Most people don't want to be organizers -- they want to be protesters. They just want to show up.
I learned on Sunday that you can make people -- strangers -- show up by telling them to. Act like the authoritative, motivated organizer and people will do what you tell them to do.
I'm pretty much the most introverted person you'll ever find, but I totally anonymously organized a protest of 500-700 motivated people just by telling 10-12 strangers something they wanted to hear, and encouraging them to spread the word. Then I went to the protest and pretended not to know anything and happily regressed to being the introvert I am.
We all have power. Mine is tricking people into thinking a protest has been organized, when all that really needs to happen is that they show up to protest, organization or no.
Find your power. You might end up realizing that it falls within your comfort zone."

And from the NY Times:

"We’re witnessing the stirrings of a national popular movement aimed at defeating the policies of Mr. Trump. It is a movement without official leaders. In fact, to a noteworthy degree, the formal apparatus of the Democratic Party has been nearly absent from the uprisings. Unlike the Tea Party and the white-supremacist “alt-right,” the new movement has no name. Call it the alt-left, or, if you want to really drive Mr. Trump up the wall, the alt-majority.

Or call it nothing. Though nameless and decentralized, the movement isn’t chaotic. Because it was hatched on social networks and is dispatched by mobile phones, it appears to be organizationally sophisticated and ferociously savvy about conquering the media.

Over two weekends, the protests have accomplished something just about unprecedented in the nearly two years since Mr. Trump first declared his White House run: They have nudged him from the media spotlight he depends on. They are the only force we’ve seen that has been capable of untangling his singular hold on the media ecosystem.

But in such a short time, the movement has proved unusually adept. It can marshal crowds quickly, as we saw over the weekend, and it can go big, as we saw in the women’s marches, which some crowd scientists believe were the largest day of protest in American history.

The movement has other skills. It’s capable of coming up with catchy slogans, funny signs and even branding efforts to rival Mr. Trump’s own. The president has his Make America Great Again hats. Protesters at the women’s march had pink woolen hats with cat ears — “pussy hats,” a reference to the president’s confessed penchant for grabbing things.

But unlike Mr. Trump’s hats, the pink caps came from the crowd. Thousands of knitters created them in the weeks between the election and the inauguration, then mailed them off to strangers who shared their views.

There’s money, too. Since Mr. Trump’s win, the inchoate online movement has sparked millions in donations to progressive groups such as Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union. Over the weekend, the A.C.L.U. raised more than $20 million.

The movement can also compel the attention of elites. In large part because of pressure from their connected work forces, the leaders of many technology companies denounced Mr. Trump’s immigration orders. Between Friday and Monday, thanks to the movement, Silicon Valley was transformed. An industry that was once merely skeptical of Mr. Trump largely became opposed to him, only because crowds forced change.

Most important, though, the movement can command the media narrative. The president has promised a lot of bold change. His boldness will involve lots of real-world consequences. Millions might lose health care coverage if he repeals the Affordable Care Act. Many might be deported if he achieves his immigration proposals.

If the last two weeks are any indication, though, none of this will happen quietly. There will be pictures and viral videos of real people facing hardship, and those pictures are sure to inspire hordes. When people are turned away from hospitals, when people are deported to Mexico, you will see large gatherings on Facebook, and then on TV.

Already, a group of scientists are planning to march on Washington in opposition to what they say is Mr. Trump’s disdain for science. There are other protests planned for Tax Day in April to remind the nation that the president once promised to release his tax returns, then reneged.

You might wonder if the protests will achieve much. Americans have protested before (the war in Iraq comes to mind) and the protests did not, in themselves, alter national policy.

But if Mr. Trump has proved anything, it’s that everything is different now. We live in a culture ruled by social media streams, one in which most people are skeptical of what they see and read in the “mainstream media.”

This explains why Stephen K. Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart News who is a close adviser to Mr. Trump, has been seeking to paint the news media as Mr. Trump’s primary opposition. The weakened news media is an easy mark for Mr. Trump. If the media is his only opponent, he’s got nothing to worry about.

Unlike the news media, though, protesters produce an undeniable reality. Protesters can’t easily be dismissed as “fake news.” They come to you unmediated — not from The New York Times, but from your friends and friends of friends on Facebook.

They are, in other words, just another version of your social network — the physical manifestation of an outraged News Feed. Because they’re people you know, they can’t easily be maligned as biased or unfair.

When politicians take on political crowds rather than other politicians, it usually ends badly. Hillary Clinton had to apologize for calling Mr. Trump’s supporters “deplorables.” After first bashing the women’s march on Twitter, even Mr. Trump had to praise the demonstrators.

There’s another reason for believing that protests could prove effective against Mr. Trump’s policies: The protesters seem to drive him crazy. Mr. Trump is enamored of crowds. Throughout the campaign, he and his surrogates argued that the polls were rigged, and that his large rallies suggested there was a growing tide of support for his candidacy. The crowds, in other words, became the whole ballgame. They were the only reality that mattered. If he won the crowd, he’d win the election.

Now Mr. Trump faces the same dynamic, in reverse. The crowds at his inauguration were supposed to certify his popularity. When they fizzled, and were then outmatched by opposition protests, he couldn’t help relitigating the matter for days.

Things haven’t gotten better. Now there are crowds on every screen and every feed. The people aren’t saying nice things about him. And there’s something worse than that, too: They’ve stolen the limelight for themselves."

And then there's this (Washington Post):

 

 

"In Donald Trump’s America, there may be no more weekends — just an incessant cycle of shocks, of actions and reactions. For the second weekend in a row, Friday to Sunday was wall to wall with resistance and outrage.
On Friday, President Trump signed an executive order banning people from seven nations in the Middle East and Africa from entering the United States.
On Saturday, protesters began heading to the airports to welcome international travelers, some of whom were detained for hours without access to lawyers.
On Sunday, thousands pushed peacefully against the fences around the White House in protest of Trump’s order. The signs spelled out embarrassment and resolve — and a cheeky self-awareness that only Washington can muster.
“SHAME ON AMERICA.”
“DEATH TO FASCISM.”
“PROTEST IS THE NEW BRUNCH.”
Is this what we’re in for, even on weekends? Will every news alert force us to ask ourselves who we are or send us out into the streets in a spontaneous counterattack?
You were out drinking, or at home playing Cards Against Humanity, when suddenly you were wondering how many Syrian refugees you could hide in your basement. Or how many hours you could drive for a protest. Or maybe the Islamic State has made you so panicked that you greeted the weekend’s news with relief: Finally, you thought, we are safe, and all these new walls will only make us safer.
Either way, this weekend didn’t feel like a drill. This was no longer, “What would you do if?” Something profound was happening, under the auspices of “extreme vetting.” It felt like time to figure out what kind of person you were, or would become.
As the president signed the executive order at the Pentagon, it quickly began to resemble, for many, the Muslim ban he once proposed on the campaign trail.
Lawyers set up legal triage centers on the floors of airports.
More than 356,000 people clicked “donate” on the website of the American Civil Liberties Union between Saturday and Sunday.
Friends sent up flares on Facebook: “If I know you and you need a recommendation letter for your citizenship application or green card, message me immediately.”
Others uncapped Sharpies and took to poster board: “IMPEACH PRESIDENT BANNON” and “FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE MUSLIMS AND WE SAID ‘HELL NO.’ ”
This weekend was a call to action or, for some, a call to reflection. A call to examine the choices we made — to reaffirm them or to question them, quietly and to ourselves.
President Trump signed an executive order to halt U.S. entry for refugees, migrants and foreign nationals for 120 days starting Jan. 27. Fiery protests and lawsuits made for a tumultuous weekend. Here's what you need to know. (Video: Dalton Bennett, Erin Patrick O'Connor, Katherine Shaver, Monica Akhtar, McKenna Ewen/Photo: Jewel Samad, Agence France-Presse via Getty Images/The Washington Post)
On the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a sales representative named Marcus sat in his bedroom Saturday, by his Donald Trump poster, and watched his Facebook feed fill with photos of protesters at John F. Kennedy International Airport, where even taxi drivers briefly went on strike in solidarity.
“This is discrimination,” thought Marcus, who had voted for Trump because he thought he would make good deals for America. “Trump is not seeing Muslim people as equals.”
In a split-level in Bethesda on Saturday night, Caitlin Moriarty was opening her home to 20 friends and strangers who came to write postcards to senators expressing dismay over the border wall with Mexico and the travel ban.
“This is the first time I’ve been overtly politically active in my life,” said Moriarty, 46, a high school teacher. “And I think that comes from a sense of not acting doesn’t seem like an option. . . . So this is all disturbing, but also exciting.”
A few time zones west, in Blackfoot, Idaho (population 12,000), a 20-year-old named Chelsey Waddell was feeling heartbroken. Like 65.6 percent of Bingham County, she had voted for Trump, and supported the concept of increased scrutiny at the borders.
“My friends who supported Hillary kept telling me to turn on the television and see what was going on, see what I started,” Waddell said. “So I did, and the kids in the ban — I just can’t. I care about kids a lot. The adults can take of themselves, but the kids . . . ”
In Washington, Trump had wrapped up his first official call with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin. He skipped that night’s black-tie dinner of the Alfalfa Club, the elite gathering of moguls and politicos, but sent Vice President Pence in his place.
The president is “going to build a big, beautiful, impenetrable wall,” Pence said, according to Axios, setting up a joke that riffed on Wednesday’s order to build a wall on the Mexican border. The wall is “gonna be nine feet tall, and it’s gonna run right between the West Wing and the press corps. And the New York Times is going to pay for it.”
That night, after a federal judge in New York signed an injunction against the executive order, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) went on Fox News. “This last week, I think, has been a week where [Trump] has done more than Roosevelt did in 100 days,” he said triumphantly.
Hundreds of protesters gathered at the arrivals gate of Washington Dulles International Airport to push back against President Trump's executive order that targeted citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries. A federal judge in New York blocked deportations nationwide late Saturday of those detained on entry to the United States. (McKenna Ewen/The Washington Post)
Over at Dulles, a heartsick Iranian mother was reunited with her 5-year-old son, who was detained for several hours. A few hours later, just after midnight, Ivanka Trump tweeted a photo of herself and husband Jared Kushner in formal attire. The social-media hordes stormed the tweet as if it were the Bastille.
“Only in America could the Kushners go in just two generations from desperate refugees to shutting out desperate refugees,” tweeted journalist Jon Schwarz.
On Sunday morning, Rachel Burns came to Washington from Arlington to protest. This wasn’t even a protest of the immigration ban, but a previously scheduled one against Trump’s nominee for education secretary, Betsy DeVos, in the shadow of the Capitol dome, a dull white against the hazy winter sky
“We know the Constitution,” said Burns, 38, of her fellow Washingtonians. She was wearing a Wonder Woman costume and was accompanied by her husband and two kids. “We can take the Metro to the Archives and see it. So it’s very dangerous to mess with people in D.C., because we’re very smart, we know protocol, and we know right from wrong.”
Meanwhile, a Boeing 777 was preparing for descent. It had left the seaside city of Jiddah at 6:48 a.m. Saudi time Sunday. It had flown over Greece, where refugees from Iraq and Syria have washed ashore, and over Germany, whose chancellor explained the Geneva Conventions to Trump during a phone call a few hours earlier. It had crossed the Atlantic and flew over Ottawa, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had that day tweeted a photo of himself welcoming a young refu­gee to Canada. And after 13 hours in the air and with an unknown number of potential detainees on board, Saudia Airlines Flight 35 landed at 12:07 p.m. Sunday in a country that was beside itself with anxiety.
Attorneys were waiting.
“Are there any detainees that we know of?” one asked another, as the arrivals board showed Flight 35 had landed at Washington Dulles International Airport.
“We don’t know,” the other replied. “They’ll have to go through customs. It will still probably be 30 minutes.”
The lawyers waited at the ready, with boxes of documents, papers, a portable printer, hand-scrawled name tags, and a sign that said “Free Legal Assistance at Baggage Claim 13.”
“Immigration lawyers know: We have been pushing this rock up hill for so long, but this moment feels huge,” said Mirriam Seddiq, an Afghan American immigration attorney from Maryland, gesturing to the cheering supporters. “Look at all of this. Last night they were chanting, ‘Let them see their lawyers.’ Nobody ever chants for lawyers. Everyone is realizing this is something.”
How people in the District reacted to Trump’s immigration ban
At the White House, a protest that had been organized via Facebook less than two days earlier was getting underway, drawing thousands from the region. Protests also erupted in Boston, Detroit, Louisville, Omaha and Nashville.
“I did three tours in Afghanistan,” said John Lee, a resident of Southwest Washington, who wore a camo vest emblazoned with the words “NOT WHAT I FOUGHT FOR.” Now, he said, “the values I was fighting for over there are being trampled here.”
Around 1 p.m., the first passenger from Flight 35 emerged from customs at Dulles: a middle-aged woman in a velour track suit and matching blue headscarf, pushing a luggage cart and scanning the crowd. She had not been detained — perhaps she was from Saudi Arabia, which was not on Trump’s list of banned countries — but she got an effusive reception anyway from ralliers.
“We love you!” the first sign-holder called to her, and the woman shook her head in confusion at the unexpectedly warm welcome. The friends who had come to meet her, also in headscarves, ran over, wrapping their arms around the passenger, helping her with the luggage cart. “It was okay,” she murmured. “All okay.”
“Welcome to America,” another sign-holder shouted to her. “This land is your land.” And the woman burst into tears."