Educator Jeff Garrett has worked with historically underserved schools in New York City and Los Angeles and is a passionate advocate for social justice. He wrote the following piece at Project 1461. It is reprinted by permission: 

Oppose. Obstruct. Resist.

All right everybody, [the Women's March] was awesome, in the literal sense of the word. To see millions take to the streets, led by women, in a show of intersectional solidarity, opposing ascendency to power of the most dangerous and hateful right wingers among us, was critically important.

But now we must sustain the outrage, the unity, and continue the work. There are a few things we can be sure of:

1. Republicans don't care about our marches.
    
2. They will only care about them when our marches, and other forms of resistance, come with clear demands and the power to force changes in their behavior.
    

3. 

   To do this we must be willing to sacrifice and change our behavior. To move our money, to use our time, to call and call and call, to speak up even when uncomfortable, to risk arrest, to vote differently, to build with our neighbors, to check our privilege, to unite across difference, to deny our labor, and sustain our moral outrage.
    
4. The agenda the Republicans are pushing is as unjust as it seems. We must maintain clarity about this. In a world where denying people the right to health care is called "relief from Obamacare" and where allowing dumping in our rivers is called the "clean drinking water act" we must not be distracted.
    
5. The basis of the right's communication at this moment in history is lies and manipulation. Do not assume positive intent. Distrust, and verify. Be a critical consumer of information.
    
6. We must hold liberals and progressives accountable in our movement. We cannot afford to compromise our principles for justice. Although politics in a democracy usually requires some compromise, that is the last step in the process of exercising power, not the first.
    
7. We must not begin to tear one another down. They will try to make us use our energy and resources to fight amongst ourselves. We will disagree, but we must remain focused on our principles and the objectives we have for change.
    
8. We must be willing to engage on the boring stuff. The leasing rights for mining given out by the Department of the Interior are not sexy. But they are core to the work of protecting our planet. We must know that the harm the right will attempt is often in the details, and we're going to have to get in there with them.
    
9. Mainstream media has shown itself to be inadequate, at best. Use alternate media. DemocracyNow, the Young Turks, social media, foreign press, there is diversity of reporting out there. We must seek it out to find the truth.
    
10. We must be willing to agitate. Frederick Douglass said this best I think: "Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

Oppose. Obstruct. Resist.

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” 
                    —Frederick Douglass, 1857, speech in Canandaigua, New York

TWEET OF THE DAY

 BLAST FROM THE PAST

At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—Fiorina's fail train at top speed:

The hits keep on coming for Carly Fiorina, the failed CEO gasping for air in the GOP primary to take on Senator Boxer. Carly's campaign has been one unmitigated boatload of fail since its inception. Let's summarize:

• The company she nearly ruined has now maxed out to Senator Boxer.

• She trails primary opponent Tom Campbell badly in all the latest polling.

• She has lied--twice--about her fundraising numbers.

• And to top it off, her website rollout is often considered a nominee for all-time worst.

The California Democratic Party has definitely taken notice, and today announced the creation of a parody site dedicated to exposing Carly's floundering campaign: carlyfailorina.com (it's pleasing that we blogger types aren't the only ones using the alliterative "fail" to describe Carly's drain-circling campaign).

HIGH IMPACT STORIES • TOP COMMENTS 

On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Where we you when it didn’t happen? #NeverRemember. #BowlingGreen. Muslim ban fallout: the OLC memo, former Norwegian PM detained. Commander Cuckoobananas skips the situation room. Trump threatens to yank the Johnson… amendment.

Ouch. Andy Puzder, the fast food CEO Donald Trump wants to put in charge of the Labor Department, had his confirmation hearing delayed for a fourth time earlier this week. The latest delay is reportedly because of hold-ups with his ethics review. He’s not pulling out, though, despite being called on to do something his future boss man flatly refused to do:

Puzder began working on his ethics paperwork three weeks ago but encountered complications because CKE, which includes burger chains Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, is privately held, spokesman George Thompson said. Shares of publicly held companies can be sold easily on the stock market, but it can be more difficult to offload private holdings.

If confirmed, Puzder would step down as chief executive of his fast-food business.

Initially, Puzder wanted to move his stake in the company into a blind trust but was told by the Office of Government Ethics that he would need to divest, Thompson said. 

Even without a hearing to draw attention to his awfulness, Puzder faces growing opposition. Campaign for Accountability has asked a court to unseal Puzder's divorce records, while 100 food and agricultural groups, including Friends of the Earth, Food Chain Workers Alliance, and Corporate Accountability International, have come out in opposition to Puzder as labor secretary. 

Oddly enough, having run a company that commits rampant wage theft raises some eyebrows when you seek to be put in charge of preventing and punishing wage theft.

It’s the story that Trump has been trying to avoid since he started his campaign. The one that Senate Republicans promised to investigate, then hoped that everyone will forget.

Don’t need a select committee, don’t need to add staffers or increase the budget … oh, yeah, Republicans are all over this one. 

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who's made a long career out of outraged sanctimony at Democrats doing the very thing he championed himself under the last president, now says that he's so tough on Republican cabinet nominees so that he knows they're clean.

Nevertheless, no Republican asked by The Huffington Post over the last couple of weeks expressed the least bit of doubt about the sincerity of Trump’s nominees or whether their disagreements with their boss might be purely strategic. […]

“No. These are big-time people. They know they’ve got to be truthful,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). “Listen, I work them over pretty hard when they come into my office. They know they’ve got to tell the truth to me.”

So when confronted with the myriad and widely reported ethics problems of Rep. Tom Price and Steve Mnuchin's out and out lies to his own committee, Hatch blames it on the Democrats.

He said he saw no attempts to deceive ― except maybe by Democrats, who he said were just out to derail the Trump administration.

“These two candidates are about as honest and decent as you can be,” Hatch said, with particular contempt for the worries that Price’s activities, involving a company that benefited from his legislation, amount to insider trading.

“Oh, come on. They found $300,” Hatch said, although he misstated the amount of the investment. “He invested $300 in this company, and it’s probably not going to be profitable. I mean, that’s bush-league crap. It really is.”

Insider trading by a member of Congress—reported by that liberal rag The Wall Street Journal!—doesn't mean anything to Hatch. No more than the vaunted institution of the Senate he's constantly preaching about, until the rules of that institution get in his way. Then he's happy to trash them.

Trump’s ill-timed, poorly planned Muslim ban did make someone very happy:

A Toronto immigration lawyer says the time is ripe for Canada's technology sector to take advantage of the uncertainty created by a recent clampdown on immigration by President Donald Trump. … 

"Right now there is a huge skill shortage when it comes to tech individuals," Stephen Green, a partner with the Toronto-based law firm Green-Spiegel who specializes in immigration law, told The Morning Edition host Craig Norris Wednesday. 

"You've got some highly skilled people in the United States now that are quite candidly stuck or can't come back into into SIlicon Valley if they left," he said. 

Meanwhile, on the side of the border where the Statue of Liberty looks increasingly ironic, the 100,000+ visas already chopped off by Trump’s ban are having an impact on science and technology.

In the days since President Trump signed the executive order, it has already disrupted science communities in the United States and around the globe. Students and researchers have found themselves trapped out of the country, seen field work plans scuttled, or had long-awaited visits canceled. For many scientists engaged in the work of understanding and addressing the world's next great challenge—a changing climate and the transition to cleaner energy sources—it's clear that you can't stifle immigration without stifling innovation, too.

If Republicans knew that Trump’s order was destroying the next generation of clean energy jobs, they would … definitely cheer even louder, since dragging out the transition from fossil fuels to generate maximum dollars to smokestack power is right at the top of their to-do list. But that’s not the limits of the damage.

America 2017, ladies and gentlemen:

Authoritarian leaders greet Trump as one of their own

That is an actual New York Times headline that accurately characterizes the content of an article with many data points. It’s not just Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Or murderous Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. For instance:

In Kazakhstan, the country’s “president for life,” Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose poor human rights record is well documented, said Mr. Trump had called him in December and complimented him on the “miracle” he had wrought in his country over its 25 years of independence. Mr. Trump was apparently not referring to Mr. Nazarbayev’s 2015 re-election, which the Kazakh leader won with 97.7 percent of the vote.

And also:

Mr. Erdogan, who has jailed more journalists than any other leader in the past year, was almost gleeful after Mr. Trump shouted down the CNN reporter Jim Acosta at a news conference in January, responding to CNN and BuzzFeed reports on intelligence briefings regarding unsubstantiated allegations of Russian efforts to blackmail Mr. Trump.

“Those who carried out that game back then in Turkey have done him wrong again during the news conference,” Mr. Erdogan said after the event, referring to CNN. “And Mr. Trump put the reporter of that group in his place.”

No wonder Reuters editor-in-chief Steve Adler cited the news service’s coverage of Iran as a model for its future coverage of Trump.

Republicans have gotten down to the business of gleefully slashing and burning their way through regulations, and they’re employing a tool that’s only rarely been employed in the past. The Congressional Review Act makes rules that were finalized within a few weeks of the end of an administration particularly easy to depose. Even though it may have taken years to gather the information, work through public review, and implement a rule with the CRA, Republicans can kill regulations with a simple majority vote in the House and Senate, with no chance to filibuster. 

They’ve applied this power to destroying a rule that protects rivers and streams near mines.

The Stream Protection Rule was worked on throughout the Obama administration, finally getting published in its waning days. Its repeal, while not unexpected, is a blow to environmentalists who helped shape the regulation and Appalachian communities concerned about the health of their waterways and water supplies.

Republicans are treating the repeal as a “job creator” after mining companies complained that the rule was meant to drive coal out of business. Neither is even close to true. The Stream Protection Rule was simply a clarification of rules that have been in the Clean Water Act from its inception and which hadn’t been reviewed since 1983. The new rule would have affected exactly one type of mining—mountain top removal. In repealing this rule, Republicans won’t generate a single mining job, but they will make it possible for companies to increase their profits through techniques that create more pollution while employing fewer workers.

But Republicans aren’t stopping with making sure that the ground and the water suffer. They’re also reaching for the sky.

The Republican-controlled House has voted to overturn an Obama administration rule intended to clamp down on oil companies that burn off natural gas during drilling operations on public lands.

The rule seeks to reduce waste and harmful methane emissions as part of a strategy to address climate change. It was finalized in November.

A federal judge in Seattle on Friday afternoon temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s Muslim ban nationwide. The judge, James Robart, was appointed by former President George W. Bush. Buzzfeed writes:

A federal judge in Washington issued the furthest reaching order yet against President Trump’s refugee and travel ban executive order, media at the Friday hearing reported, granting a nationwide order halting enforcement of significant parts of the order.

“The decision shuts down the executive order immediately,” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in a news conference outside the courthouse after US District Judge James Robert issued his ruling in the lawsuit, brought by Ferguson on behalf of the state.

Ferguson had been seeking an order halting enforcement of both the refugee and the section addressing travel from seven majority-Muslim nations. A written copy of the judge’s order, however, was not immediately available to determine the precise confines of the judge’s ruling.

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

Late Night Snark: Documenting the Tiny-Handed Atrocity

"I did a lot of hallucinogens when I was younger in order to prepare me for any eventual reality. I never saw this one coming."

---Lewis Black on The Late Show

"The nation's airports were filled with people protesting President Trump's Muslim ban. It was the largest collection of angry people at an airport since every United Airlines flight."

---Conan O'Brien

"At Dulles Airport, a 5-year-old Iranian boy was detained for hours and kept from his mother. Or as Kellyanne Conway calls it: alternative daycare."

---Stephen Colbert

x

Anyone point out that a Donald Trump anagram is Lord Dampnut?

— Colin Mochrie (@colinmochrie) January 21, 2017

"If Donald Trump stops all the immigrants from coming into the country, where's he going to find his next wife?"

---Jimmy Kimmel

"I, Donald J. Trump, do pronounce that America now finally has an official language. The new official language of the United States is bullshit. I have instructed my staff to speak only in bullshit."

---Jon Stewart reading other Trump executive orders on The Late Show

And some perspective:

"So far our new overlord has torn up treaties, taken the first steps toward a Muslim ban, ordered the construction of his dumbass wall, and threatened to invade Chicago like his own little Crimea. … So as the curtain goes up on Shit Show: The Musical, I want you to take the hands of the people sitting next to you, squeeze tight, and remember…really remember…that the president could only get Three Doors Down to play at his inauguration."

---Samantha Bee

Remember, kids: from now on, it’s Lord Dampnut. Your west coast-friendly edition of Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

You can guess how Fox News framed a good January jobs report, right?

Fox News correspondent Heather Nauert praised the January jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on the February 3 edition of Fox & Friends, referring to it as “the first jobs report under President Trump” and labeling it as “fantastic news.” Nauert praised the report for showing that 227,000 new jobs were created in January, which she described as “a lot more than expected.” Nauert failed to mention Barack Obama, who was still the president of the United States for most of January. She concluded the segment by reiterating that this is “great news on the jobs front this morning” and suggesting Trump “would call that huge.”

He was president for 11 entire days of January, after all. That’s time to make a HUGE difference on jobs. Except, uh:

University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee, a former chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, pointed out that the "reference week" for the latest jobs data ran through January 12, meaning the entire report predates the Trump administration by over a week. Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler, who runs the paper's fact-checking research, also noted that the report "still reflects the Obama administration.” Fox also neglected to mention that the report marks 76 consecutive months of job growth -- the longest on record -- for Obama.

I can’t wait to hear how they manage to blame Obama when there’s a month of job loss that comes—legitimately—under Trump.

The first military operation approved by Donald Trump was described by the New York Times as "risky from the start and costly in the end.” Especially costly for the Navy Seal, the 8-year-old girl and an unknown number of other children:

The death of Chief Petty Officer William Owens came after a chain of mishaps and misjudgments that plunged the elite commandos into a ferocious 50-minute firefight that also left three others wounded and a $75 million aircraft deliberately destroyed. There are allegations — which the Pentagon acknowledged on Wednesday night are most likely correct — that the mission also killed several civilians, including some children. The dead include, by the account of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Qaeda leader who was killed in a targeted drone strike in 2011. 

We also know Donald Trump didn't even bother watching the raid in the Situation Room. 

The Pentagon released a video to show the raid was partially successful in collecting intelligence, but even that move was bumbled. From Buzzfeed:

The US military on Friday took down the link to a video that it said it secured from a raid in Yemen last week just hours after posting it, having realized that far from showing off the intelligence gained from the raid, the videos were a decade old.

The video, titled “Courses for Destroying The Cross,” was first released in 2007 and had been online for years, as it turns out. In the less than two-minute long clip, which was widely circulated after it was pushed out on Friday morning, there are several cuts showing a man in a white robe and black mask explaining how to make chemicals.

Republican panties are all in a wad, as usual about social insurance spending, worried there won't be enough money to spend on obsolete weapons systems. Just wait until they get a load of what the Trumps are going to be costing us. There's the small change that Uday (or is he Qsay) Trump costs the nation for a business trip to Uruguay a few weeks ago.

When the president-elect’s son, Eric Trump, jetted to Uruguay in early January for a Trump Organization promotional trip, U.S. taxpayers were left footing a bill of nearly $100,000 in hotel rooms for Secret Service and embassy staff.

Let's reiterate. That was for a Trump Organization promotional trip. Not state business. But hey, that's nothing compared to what we're spending on Trump himself for this weekend off.

President Donald Trump’s trip to his luxury resort in Mar-a-Lago this weekend could saddle taxpayers with a bill upward of $3 million and is already drawing the type of scrutiny Trump and other Republicans regularly heaped upon former President Barack Obama.

But, hey, don't worry. Politico assures us in addition to attending the American Red Cross’ annual fundraising gala and socializing, "Trump will have several meetings and phone calls as he maintains his aggressive work schedule." The kind of aggressive work schedule that had him tweeting about his ongoing feud with The New York Times instead of being in the Situation Room during the botched raid in Yemen.