Can you believe it? Pretty great stuff happened last week.
3 min readMay 1, 2017
- New Orleans began removing four monuments dedicated to the era of the Confederacy and its aftermath. They had long been symbols of racism and intolerance.
- California’s single-payer healthcare bill, which would establish government-run universal healthcare in the state, passed its first committee test.
- Ruling that the president had overstepped his powers, a judge in San Francisco blocked Trump’s attempt to withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities.
- A North Carolina Republican judge resigned to protest his own party’s behavior — and to allow the governor to appoint a Democrat (and the court’s first openly gay member) to replace him.
- A district attorney in Georgia made the rare decision to fire and then charge two police caught assaulting Demetrius Hollins, a black man, during traffic stop. The cops kicked and punched Hollins, who was not armed — and not resisting arrest. As he was punched in the face, his hands were seen in the air. He was also stomped in the head while lying on the ground, handcuffed.
- Koi, the restaurant in the Trump Soho building, will be closing due to a sharp drop in business since the election.
- Billionaire Paul Allen pledged $30 million towards permanent housing for Seattle’s homeless population.
- Florida’s Senate passed a resolution calling for the posthumous pardon of the Groveland Four, and apologizing to the families of the four black men who were victims of racial hatred and gross injustice when they were falsely accused of raping a white woman in 1949. Tragically too late for the four innocent men, but it was a clear bipartisan acknowledgement of a historic miscarriage of justice.
- 200,000 people marched at the Peoples Climate March in Washington, D.C. this past weekend, and many thousands more marched throughout the country in 370 Sister Marches to support stronger efforts to combat climate change and protest the administration’s anti-environment stance.
- The healthcare vote for TrumpCare 2.0 was delayed by the GOP when they realized they didn’t have enough votes to pass it. Every delay is a victory to be celebrated!
- Trump acquiesced in budget negotiations to a deal that would not include money to build a wall (although in true Trump fashion he assured his Twitter followers that the wall would, somehow, still magically happen).
- A North Carolina house committee voted down a bill that would have increased penalties on protesters that engaged in civil disobedience.
- Ireland took a significant step forward in the fight to legalize abortion when its Citizens Committee, an advisory group of members of the public assembled by the Irish government, voted overwhelmingly to allow abortion for a wide range of reasons.
- Top White House aide Sebastian Gorka abruptly departed from a Georgetown University cybersecurity conference after students subjected him to a round of tough questions.
- EPA Chief Scott Pruitt had to back out of a GOP fundraiser for which he was going to make the keynote address because it was illegal and violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits executive branch employees from leveraging their authority or influence to affect elections.
- Republicans tried to create an exemption for themselves that would allow them to keep popular Obamacare provisions for themselves and their staff but vowed to eliminate the loophole once the media reported it.
- Men in Wyoming are wearing tutus in protest of Sen. Mike Enzi’s victim-blaming comment when he said that a man who wears a tutu to a bar “kind of asks for” a fight.
