Samantha Bee entertained us last night at the Not the WH Correspondent’s dinner about the last 100 days, now let me remind you of what went right just this past week (4/29/17)

1. The Mayor of New Orleans had a public statue honoring racism in New Orleans removed. The statue honored members of a white supremacist paramilitary group who fought against the city’s racially integrated police force in 1874. The mayor said, “We will no longer allow the Confederacy to literally be put on a pedestal in the heart of our city” after a federal court granted permission for four such statues to be removed
2. The Governor of Indiana signed a religious liberties bill which symbolically and primarily codifies case law to protect student religious liberties in schools allowing; schools to teach survey courses on world religions, student to pray in school and express their views on God in schoolwork and to wear clothing or jewelry with religious symbols, religious student groups to use school facilities, and prohibits discriminated against students based on their religion.
3. In a dramatic response to a power-grab by Republicans in the NC legislature, Republican Judge J. Douglas McCullough resigned 36 days prior to his mandatory retirement age to purposely circumvent efforts by republicans to strip power from the Democratic governor. His resignation allowed the Governor to appoint Arrowroot (who is openly gay) to the Court of Appeals, just hours before the republicans were going to restrict the Governor’s power by overriding the Governor’s veto of a law that reduced the number of judges on the panel.  Sorry if I made your head spin on that explanation.
4. A coalition of progressive citizens in Morgantown West Virginia, inspired by the Indivisible Guide, took control of the seven member city council in their deep red state, in an election that brought a large turnout.  Each of the seven seats was contested in the council race unlike the 2015 election that had just three contested seats. Repeat after me, change begins from the ground up.
5. S. District Judge William Orrick of California temporarily blocked the executive order defunding “sanctuary cities”, finding that San Francisco and Santa Clara could prove that it violates the Constitution because the president doesn’t have the power to withhold federal money. As other judges have done in the past, Orrick found that the government’s arguments in support of the order directly contradicted WH public statements, trump tweets, and Spicer and Sessions comments at press conferences. A federal judge ordered ExxonMobil to pay nearly $20 million plus attorney’s fees for spewing millions of pounds of air pollution higher than allowed by law from its Houston-area industrial facilities as a result of a lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club and Environment Texas.
6. A white principal of a predominantly black elementary school in Florida was forced out when it became pubic that she told her staff to put white students in the same classrooms, separate from the black students. This school district is also currently under investigation for racial discrimination.  I don’t think this will help their case. Wyoming residents banded together to support the LGBTQ community by wearing tutus to bars and other places after Senator Enzi made insensitive comments about tutu wearing gay man at a high school.
7. Showing yet again how boycotts work, the restaurant Koi, located in the Trump Hotel Soho in New York City is closing because business has been down significantly since Election Day. Staffers said that former clientele told them they don’t want to patronize anything with “Trump” in the name. NRA members should have boycotted this year’s annual convention when the Secret Service banned their guns at Atlanta’s Georgia World Congress Center during the by keynote speech by 45.  Why would the Secret Service think anyone with an AK47 at an NRA gathering posed a threat to 45? and why did NRA members stand for this unreasonable gun ban?
8. 45 continues to back down on some of his racist and ridiculous ideas, and this week that included removing his demand for funding his border wall as part of a temporary budget bill. Those calls to congress and the angry crowds at congressional town halls have members of congress too scared to give him what he wants, keep up the good work.
9. Astronaut Peggy Whitson not only broke the record for oldest woman in space, but she just broke the U.S. record for most time in space at 355 days, Whitson is also the first woman to command the space station twice and the only woman to have led NASA’s astronaut corps. Female Scientist Rock! And so did the amazing number of people who believe in science who turned out for the March against Climate Change all over the world.
10. The Fair Labor Association, an industry monitoring group, found two dozen violations of international labor standards during an audit of the factory owned by the company that produces Ivanka Trump branded clothing.

I continue to be amazed at the ingenuity this election has inspired. We have text alerts for daily actions that directly connect you to the right legislator, government office, or even a random trump property, at the click of a button, the ability to fax and mail letters for free to elected official through a few simple text messages, apps to message your representative and keep track of congressional voting, an online national resistance calendar, an app variation of a drinking game that will allow you to automatically donate to worthy causes every time the twittler-in-chief texts (with a maximum cap or you would go broke), and winner for most creative this week is the immigrants’ rights activists who have organized a campaign to overwhelm the new ICE hotline for crime victims of aliens 1-855-48-VOICE with complaints of crimes committed by space aliens. Which one will you use this week?

Shout out to my local peeps, Trump coming to NYC May 4^th, be a part of the protests that day to let him know what New Yorker’s think of him, let’s make the Women’s March look like a warm up.