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Plunging his hand into an opened computer chassis, Vichon Ward sorted through a mess of colorful cables, fans and motherboards. The 28-year-old served eight years as a mechanic in the Air Force, repairing massive jet engines at military bases around the world — but before starting a tech training course here last month, he had never seen the inside of a computer.

"I've fixed planes my whole life," said Ward, pulling out a hard drive. "This is brand new."

A controversial anti-diversity memo written by a now-fired Google employee isn't just sending shockwaves across the search giant's Silicon Valley campus — it's setting off alarms in the U.S. Congress, too.

In response to the screed by former engineer James Damore — which attributed a lack of women in tech to "personality differences between genders" — lawmakers on Capitol Hill are slamming Google and its peers for failing manifestly to recruit, retain and protect workers of diverse backgrounds.

President Trump's gibes about the failure of our foreign policy establishment and his call for a still rudimentary "America first" policy have led hawkish Republican neoconservatives to close ranks with "indispensable nation" Democrats. A remarkably unrepentant establishment has moved to resistance. If the United States is to avoid the limited choice between the delusional and the disastrous, a new progressive stance on foreign policy is utterly imperative.

Alumni of the Obama administration are heeding their former boss' call to get in the game themselves and run for office in response the election of President Donald Trump and to continue what the former president started.

Sam Jammal, an Obama appointee in the Commerce Department who is running in California's 39th District against Republican Rep. Ed Royce, said he was heeding those words.

"The president's message was to get into the arena," Jammal said.

For Jammal, the son of a Jordanian father and a Colombian mother, President Barack Obama's personal story hit home.

President Trump's plan to limit immigration to all but highly skilled English speakers is bad news both for Silicon Valley and the country, said Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, whose South Bay district includes includes that high-tech hub.

While talented immigrants are both needed and welcome in Silicon Valley, he said in a video discussion with Chronicle political writers Joe Garofoli and John Wildermuth, "people aren't just software engineers. They have mothers, sisters, families," all of whom want to be part of the American community beyond the tech world.

Democratic leaders in Congress are offering to cooperate with Republicans on solutions to stabilize the Obamacare exchanges, but progressive groups and their congressional allies are heading in the opposite direction.

Following the defeat of Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, left-leaning organizations are accelerating their long-standing goal of establishing a single-payer system in which the government provides health insurance for all.