Scary things happened last week. And beautiful, hopeful things, too.
4 min readApr 24, 2017
- Bill O’Reilly was fired from Fox News!
- Jon Ossoff may not have gotten 50% of the vote in Georgia but he had 48.6% of the vote, incredible given the fact he is pro-LGBTQ, pro-choice, pro-ACA in a once-solid GOP district. Remember what Rebecca Solnit reminds us. “Most victories will be temporary, or incomplete, or compromised in some way…When activists mistake heaven for some goal at which they must arrive, rather than an idea to navigate Earth by, they burn themselves out…don’t believe the moon is useless unless we land on it.” Instead, we must recognize success in small victories and delays.
- The Southern Poverty Law Center sued a neo-Nazi leader who targeted a Jewish woman and her family in an anti-Semitic harassment campaign.
- The Trump administration delivered a setback to Exxon Mobil this week, announcing that it would not grant the oil giant a waiver from sanctions against Russia that would allow drilling in the Black Sea.
- Republican Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV), who wanted to defund Planned Parenthood, is now vowing to protect it after a rowdy Town Hall made him change his mind.
- Georgetown University hosted a reconciliation event attended by more than 100 descendants of the Georgetown 272, the enslaved people who were sold in 1838 to pay the university’s debts. They also dedicated two buildings, one to Anne Marie Becraft, a free woman of color who founded a Georgetown neighborhood school for black girls in 1820; and another to Isaac Hawkins, a man sold in the 1838 transaction.
- Charlottesville City Council voted to sell a Robert E. Lee statue at Lee Park and to hold a contest to rename Lee Park because the statue’s messages is “offensive and negative to a principle our community holds dear.”
- A leading Black Lives Matter activist and self-identified democratic socialist named Khalid Kamau won a city council seat on Tuesday in South Fulton, Georgia, a newly incorporated municipality outside Atlanta.
- Prosecutors in Georgia dismissed 89 cases and are reviewing others called into question after two law enforcement officers with a central role in them were fired for kicking and punching a 21-year-old black man at a traffic stop. According to the county solicitor general, “The actions of these officers completely undermine their credibility, and they cannot be relied upon as witnesses in any pending prosecution.”
- Representative Jason Chaffetz, the powerful chairman of the House oversight committee who has continually cozied up to the Trump administration, announced that he would not seek re-election to Congress — or run for any office — in 2018.
- Tom Brady and numerous teammates skipped the Patriots’ visit to the White House that celebrated their Super Bowl 2016 win. Media attention about the size of the crowd bothered Trump enough that he posted defensive tweets about the success of the event. The resistance is working if it gets a rise out of Trump!
- An analysis released this week showed that Massachusetts is on track to make faster progress than even New York towards their goal for renewable energy. The two northeastern states are seeking to ramp up their generation of renewable energy through new policies adopted last summer.
- Municipalities and school districts across the country are organizing to offer sanctuary to their immigrant communities. In Milwaukee, for example, the school board just voted unanimously to protect students with undocumented families from ICE raids “by all legal means available.”
- Common Cause North Carolina is suing to overturn state lawmakers’ unconstitutional power grab after they hijacked a special legislative session (meant to deliver aid to hurricane victims) to try to nullify the results of an election won by a Democrat. They rammed through a bill that stripped away the executive powers of the incoming Democratic governor, and they took those powers for themselves.
- After Devin Nunes (R-CA) canceled an open panel that would have allowed Attorney General Sally Yates to testify publicly in the panel’s probe into Russian interference in the US election, the House Intelligence Committee announced this week that Yates will once again be allowed to testify, along with FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers, on May 2nd.
- Volkswagen has been ordered to pay a $2.8bn criminal penalty in the United States for cheating on diesel emissions tests after the German automaker pleaded guilty to conspiracy and obstruction of justice.
- A Canadian judge who wore a Donald Trump campaign hat into court after he US election is facing a disciplinary hearing and possible removal from the bench after his actions triggered an unprecedented number of formal complaints.
- An international timber trader who used his business as cover for smuggling weapons into West Africa in defiance of a UN arms embargo was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to 19 years in prison.
- About 50,000 leftist demonstrators disrupted the two-day congress of Alternative for Germany (AfD), the rightwing populist party that was meeting five months before the country’s general election.
- Mike Pence announced that the U.S. will accept the 1250 asylum seekers agreed to in a deal with Australia that Donald Trump has previously called dumb.
