I've been following some of the creators of House of Cards on twitter. It's been hilarious, because their schtick is to take what's actually happening in politics and make just a little more unbelievable. So what the hell are they supposed to do now? Any more unbelievable takes us squarely into science-fiction territory.

Twitter's a good resource. I like keeping up with the news by following Team Politico's twitter list. It's a list with a bunch of different politico reporters and editors. It's a great resource, because they'll talk about stories as they're writing them so you get a heads up what's coming, they'll link to other stories and other journalists so I end up seeing a lot of local news items or news from other specialist publications that I wouldn't otherwise find, you can get breaking news alerts and you find out cool behind the scenes stuff like what snarky remark which senator said to which journalist.

https://twitter.com/politico/lists/team-politico

Some of them are kinda assholes, but what else is new? I think spending too much time on Twitter does something to your brain to make you incapable of not reacting to everything with aggrieved sarcasm.


Also, going back to something we've talked about before, a new study is coming out today showing that working-class white folks are the biggest beneficiaries of the social safety net that Republicans want to cut. Back to the theme of people voting against their own best interests. But I still don't understand if people are voting against their own best interests because they don't understand how they personally might benefit from the social safety net or if it's because they don't understand what the Republicans want to do to the social safety net.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/won ... 677a695ccd

For those in the States, I'm just going to leave this here:
http://theagahfstore.bigcartel.com/prod ... -postcards

(It's one of my favorite webcomics anyhow, but I love that the author is offering these...)

Akili Li wrote:For those in the States, I'm just going to leave this here:
http://theagahfstore.bigcartel.com/prod ... -postcards

(It's one of my favorite webcomics anyhow, but I love that the author is offering these...)

These are lovely. Thank you!

I'm a big fan of actually writing to people as well as calling -anything in writing leaves a paper trail, as it were, and is harder to completely brush aside. Also because the effort is higher, it counts as more. Literally. When they're calculating how many constituents believe different things, they count letters received as x10 because they assume for every letter they actually receive there are at least 10 others who believe that way and didn't write.

Have you read the Indivisible Guide? It's a great resource, information compiled by former Congressional staffers on how to maximize your impact when you're contacting your representatives.

https://www.indivisibleguide.com/

OOOh, that's a great resource! I only knew about letters x 10 from a volunteer-orientation thing I ended up at. That's a much better spot to get info from!

So Trump issued his new immigration orders, and it seems like they're going to deport anyone they can get their hands on. I don't know if you guys have large immigrant communities in your area, but people around here are terrified. I'm thinking about joining a group that is volunteering as child care so that if anyone is arrested by ICE while their kids are at school, someone will be there to go get the kids. So far the group is still in the planning phase, organizers are working with school administrators to figure out the best plan.

Anyway, according to the new guidelines everyone is a priority for deportation, and anyone who gets into the country over the Mexican border will be deported to Mexico, whether or not they're Mexican. So that includes Central Americans, South Americans, Latin Americans, people from the Caribbean and Haiti...

They're even going to deport people who are in the middle of applying for asylum. According to this article in Pro Publica, the Mexican government would have to build new "facilities" (these facilities, in the US and Mexico, are always prisons and often for-profit prisons) to keep all these random people our government would be dumping over the border. https://www.propublica.org/article/trum ... ium=social

A lot of the time, people who are deported get dropped off in Nogales. It's not a great city, and so people who are stranded there with no money or family to come and get them are sometimes murdered or kidnapped, they wind up homeless or assaulted. These deportations were already ineffective and inhumane, now they will be even more so.

(If anyone is curious, here's an article about deportees in Nogales http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2 ... orted.html )

It makes no sense to just deport everyone to Mexico. This whole idea is just such bullshit...

Why does this not surprise me at all? It's complete bullshit for sure. Completely wrong in soooo many ways and I can't believe this is even allowed. Here I thought this country was based on accepting people and caring for them. And this is no where near it. God this is getting way worse.

I'm glad you are trying to get in that group. Sounds like an amazing idea. I hope it works out and everything works perfectly for everyone involved. Good luck Pwale. In Ohio I have no idea what is going on. I don't think we have a large immigration area. I mostly see whites and africans.

I haven't been able to keep in the loop of what is going on, lost hulu due to money issues which is where I pay attention to the news of the country. (Lack of sleep makes it hard to concentrate while reading)

Yeah. I have to keep up with this stuff for school and film work, and I can barely manage it. Every single day, there's never any break. It's just a constant deluge of political and international developments. And it's only been a little over a month. This pace is completely unsustainable. I have a hunch journalists AND administration officials are going to start dropping like flies from exhaustion over the next few weeks.

I mean, take my work...we document grassroots movements. Usually when we're documenting a movement, there's MAYBE an event a week that we have to go out and film. MAYBE. Usually it's more like a couple meetings and one big event in a month. But ever since inauguration day there's been stuff happening all the time, every day, and my job is to figure out what's happening next. So in addition to trying to keep on top of current local events, I also have to keep informed about national and international events so I can give my boss a heads-up about issues that will be arising soon (like tax reform). AND I'm still not getting paid much right now because there is NO grant money coming in.

I'm skipping two talks and an organizing training session so I'll have the energy to go to a town hall with one of my senators tonight. And that's just today. I've never seen anything like this. I was talking the other day to an old friend of my parents, who was part of Freedom Summer and went down to Mississippi to register black people to vote in the 60s, and he said that was the only time he'd ever seen something like this.

So it's exhausting, but it's also really exciting.

Well, it seems today's biggest stories are:

Tillerson and Mattis went to Mexico. Yesterday, Mexico's foreign minister said that if the US tried to implement Trump's immigration policies, they would go to the UN. According to international law, Trump's policies would violate Mexico's sovereignty. Not that that means much when its a country on the Security Council, as we learned with Ukraine, but there's a chance the international community would be more willing to support Mexico than Ukraine, because of Mexico's trade relations but also because I think Trump presents a very different calculus than Putin and I don't want to predict what the UN would do.

The Trump administration also rolled back protections for trans rights, sort of. They actually just withdrew guidance that had already been stayed by the courts, but there's a possibility that could effect next month's Supreme Court case deciding whether or not Title IX which prohibits gender-based discrimination in education, also applies to trans people (it does). But part of what they're going to be looking at is the Department of Education's position, so this change (though not particularly impactful in a legal sense) could have a huge negative impact next month.

And then I was interested to learn that Reince Priebus (former head of the Republican National Committee, now chief-of-staff at the White House) apparently asked the FBI to speak to journalists anonymously and try to undermine stories that have been coming out lately about Trump's ties to Russia.