CONGRESS JUST VOTED TO STRIP ALL POWER FROM OBAMA FOR THE REST OF HIS PRESIDENCY!

It will take a lot of work to clean up the mess created by Obama. The House of Representatives just gave President-elect Trump a head start.With fewer than 10 weeks left as President, President Barack Obama’s time in the White House is about to be finished.

It couldn’t happen soon enough!

Now, Obama’s team is rushing to pass countless last-minute regulations to implement even more of Obama’s radical agenda. Presidents are infamous for controversial, last-minute decisions.

Now, the Republican-lead U.S. House of Representatives just took a major stand against Obama. They voted 240-to-179 to allow Congress to stop and un-do any last minute rules and regulations approved by Obama.

As the bill’s sponsor Rep. Darrell Issa explained, this bill stops Obama’s last-minute, shameful regulations forever:

“This bipartisan bill is about reviving the separation of powers to ensure our laws are written by the Representatives we actually vote for – not unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats who are on their way out the door. Presidents of both parties have made habit of enacting scores of last-minute regulations, with little oversight, to sneak in as much of their agenda as possible before the clock runs out on their time in office. The bill helps ensure this President, and any future president, will be held in check and that their policies have the proper level of scrutiny by both Congress and the American people. I’m pleased to see the House pass this important measure and look forward to its quick passage by our colleagues in the Senate.”

This is a massive victory for conservatives, trying to make the transition to a Trump administration easier to enact pro-growth, pro-job creation policies:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent a letter Wednesday to congressmen alerted them to the cost of regulations put on the books by administrations on their way out the door:

A recent report issued by the Regulatory Studies Center at the George Washington University entitled The Final Countdown; Projecting Midnight Regulations found that executive branch agencies typically issue a significantly greater number of rules during the final months of an administration in a rushed effort to implement remaining policy objectives. Midnight regulations issued by prior administrations have proven highly problematic and required subsequent correction. The ability of Congress to disapprove these rules under the CRA is limited by tight deadlines for action that make separate debate and votes on a rule-by-rule basis impractical.

FreedomWorks CEO Adam Brandon says he’s pleased with the House vote and he committed his Washington-based logistics and policy hub for Tea Party and conservative activists to working with Capitol Hill conservatives to return law-making authority to Congress.

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The Trump Administration wants to do away with Net Neutraliy

From Demand Progress:

"Trump Win Means FCC's 'Net Neutrality' Regulation is Dead."
That's the blaring headline from Breitbart News, the website run by Steve Bannon, Trump's campaign chairman and now his chief strategist in the White House.1
And it's not just Breitbart. The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal are warning that Net Neutrality is in deep trouble.2,3

We're going to have to fight with all we have to save Net Neutrality. Will you chip in $5?
Yes, I'll chip in $5 to save Net Neutrality.

Trump has falsely called Net Neutrality a "top down power grab" and an "attack on the internet."4 And the front-runner for his choice as FCC chairman is an anti-Net Neutrality zealot and paid Verizon consultant.5

We know that we can't count on Republican leaders in Congress to push back they've gotten millions from Comcast and their telecom buddies and would be thrilled to overturn Net Neutrality.6

To save Net Neutrality, we're going to need a grassroots mobilization as big as what it took to enact it in the first place.

The good news is that Trump can't just get rid of Net Neutrality on his own. He's going to have to go through a lengthy rule-making process, giving us months to mount opposition.
But we're counting on you to stand with us—and to make sure we have the resources to fight back and win.

Net Neutrality is facing a mortal threat from the Trump presidency. Will you chip in $5 to help save it?
Thanks for standing with us,

Kurt Walters and the Demand Progress Team

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Tell your Senators to oppose the nomination of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General

From the Drug Policy Alliance:

This was our worst nightmare.

Donald Trump has picked Jeff Sessions to be the next Attorney General.

It really couldn’t get any worse.

Over these last four years we’ve made great gains across the political spectrum toward treating drug use as a health issue, not a criminal one. Jeff Sessions will try to dismantle all that.

Jeff Sessions is a drug war extremist. There’s really no way around that.

As a U.S. Senator from Alabama, Sessions called for increased federal marijuana enforcement, and said “good people don’t smoke marijuana.” He once joked that his only issue with the Ku Klux Klan was their drug use. He was even denied a federal judgeship 30 years ago, by a Republican-controlled Senate, for racist views.

Get ready for raids on marijuana businesses. Get ready for militarized, Reagan-era drug war tactics.

We can’t let this stand.

The Drug Policy Alliance and our allies will fight Jeff Sessions’ nomination in the Senate tooth and nail. He won’t be nominated until Donald Trump takes office and the new Congress is in session. But with only six new Senators taking office, we must start fighting now.

Tell your Senators to oppose Jeff Sessions for Attorney General.

This nomination makes it clear that the new administration will be an enemy of drug policy reform, and we’ll be fighting to defend our hard fought victories for the next four years.

You can help us fight any and all attempts to expand the drug war by becoming a sustaining member today. We’re going to need all the help we can get over these next four years, and just $10 a month will go a long way.

We will fight to preserve everything we’ve gained, and we’ll never stop advocating for drug laws grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights.

Donald Trump is considering marijuana prohibitionist Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General

From NORML:

We have some dire news to share. This morning, President-Elect Trump announced his pick for Attorney General and it couldn’t be much worse for the marijuana law reform movement and our recent legalization victories.

Trump’s pick, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, is a militant prohibitionist. We could go into great detail about how Senator Sessions has been an outspoken opponent of reform for decades, but in this case his rhetoric is so off the wall...we’ll let his past statements speak for themselves:

It was the prevention movement that really was so positive, and it led to this decline. The creating of knowledge that this drug is dangerous, it cannot be played with, it is not funny, it's not something to laugh about, and trying to send that message with clarity, that good people don't smoke marijuana.

Lady Gaga says she's addicted to (marijuana) and it is not harmless.

You have to have leadership from Washington. You can't have the President of the United States of America talking about marijuana … you are sending a message to young people that there is no danger in this process. It is false that marijuana use doesn't lead people to more drug use. It is already causing a disturbance in the States that have made it legal.

His former colleagues testified Sessions used the n-word and joked about the Ku Klux Klan, saying he thought they were "okay, until he learned that they smoked marijuana."

SOUNDS CRAZY, RIGHT? DONATE TODAY TO HELP US BE READY TO FIGHT BACK

Senator Sessions is clearly off the reservation on this one and is diametrically opposed to the overwhelming public opinion which stands in favor of the legalization and regulation of marijuana. This could foreshadow some very bad things for the eight states that have legalized marijuana for adult use and the more than half of the country that has operating medical marijuana programs. With the authority the position of Attorney General provides, Sessions could immediately get to work attempting to block the implementation of the recent ballot initiatives, start dismantling a legal industry in Washington, Colorado, Oregon, and Alaska, and begin conducting massive raids on existing medical and recreational retail stores.
We must be ready to fight back. We must be ready to mobilize in defense of all of our hard fought victories. We already have our opponents calling for a recount in Maine and prohibitionists in Massachusetts working to gut core provisions like home cultivation from their state's initiative. With an assist from a newly minted prohibitionist Attorney General, things might get worse before they get better.

Help us send a message to President-Elect Trump and his Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions that the American people won’t stand for intervention into state marijuana programs and that we want to move towards descheduling at the federal level and legalization in all 50 states.
DONATE $20 TODAY TO HELP US RAISE $4,200 FOR OUR EMERGENCY RESPONSE FUND!

It would probably be a good idea if we contact President-elect Donald Trump and let him know that we are not that thrilled with the idea of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. You can contact Trump on facebook and/or twitter and let him know that we don't like the idea of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. Tell him Ted Cruz is a better choice. Cruz is not the prohibitionist that Sessions is and he is being considered for Attorney General along with Sessions.

The man behind the marijuana ban for all the wrong reasons

If you look for the roots of America’s ban on cannabis, you’ll find nearly all roads lead to a man named Harry Anslinger. He was the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which laid the ground work for the modern-day DEA, and the first architect of the war on drugs.

Anslinger was appointed in 1930, just as the prohibition of alcohol was beginning to crumble (it was finally repealed in 1933), and remained in power for 32 years. Early on, he was on record essentially saying cannabis use was no big deal. He called the idea that it made people mad or violent an “absurd fallacy.”

But when Anslinger was put in charge of the FBN, he changed his position entirely.

“From the moment he took charge of the bureau, Harry was aware of the weakness of his new position. A war on narcotics alone — cocaine and heroin, outlawed in 1914 — wasn’t enough,” author Johann Hari wrote in his book, “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.” “They were used only by a tiny minority, and you couldn’t keep an entire department alive on such small crumbs. He needed more.” 

Consequently, Anslinger made it his mission to rid the U.S. of all drugs — including cannabis. His influence played a major role in the introduction and passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which outlawed possessing or selling pot.

Fueled by a handful of 1920s newspaper stories about crazed or violent episodes after marijuana use, Anslinger first claimed that the drug could cause psychosis and eventually insanity. In a radio address, he stated young people are “slaves to this narcotic, continuing addiction until they deteriorate mentally, become insane, turn to violent crime and murder.” 
In particular, he latched on to the story of a young man named Victor Licata, who had hacked his family to death with an ax, supposedly while high on cannabis. It was discovered many years later, however, that Licata had a history of mental illness in his family, and there was no proof he ever used the drug.

The problem was, there was little scientific evidence that supported Anslinger’s claims. He contacted 30 scientists, according to Hari, and 29 told him cannabis was not a dangerous drug. But it was the theory of the single expert who agreed with him that he presented to the public — cannabis was an evil that should be banned — and the press ran with this sensationalized version.

Narcotics Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger announces a series of raids in the nation’s big cities aimed at crippling the narcotics traffic in New York on Jan. 4, 1958. More than 500 suspected peddlers were bagged. AP

The second component to Anslinger’s strategy was racial. He claimed that black people and Latinos were the primary users of marijuana, and it made them forget their place in the fabric of American society. He even went so far as to argue that jazz musicians were creating “Satanic” music all thanks to the influence of pot. This obsession eventually led to a sort of witch hunt against the legendary singer Billie Holiday, who struggled with heroin addiction; she lost her license to perform in New York cabarets and continued to be dogged by law enforcement until her death.

“The insanity of the racism is a thing to behold when you go into his archives,” Hari told CBS News. “He claims that cannabis promotes interracial mixing, interracial relationships.”

The word “marijuana” itself was part of this approach. What was commonly known as  cannabis until the early 1900s was instead called marihuana, a Spanish word more likely to be associated with Mexicans.

“He was able to do this because he was tapping into very deep anxieties in the culture that were not to do with drugs — and attaching them to this drug,” Hari said. Essentially, in 1930s America, it wasn’t hard to use racist rhetoric to associate the supposed harms of cannabis with minorities and immigrants. 

So as the nationwide attitude towards cannabis began to fall in line with Anslinger’s, he testified before Congress in hearings for the Marijuana Tax Act. His testimony centered around the ideas he had been pushing all along — including a provocative letter from a local newspaper editor in Colorado, saying “I wish I could show you what a small marihuana cigaret can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents.”

All these years later, many of the threads in Anslinger’s arguments are still present in the American conversation about legalizing marijuana. The act was passed in 1937, and the rest, they say, is history.

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From an email 2

Right now is very troubling times for our country. I know I experienced it the other day. We are overreacting as a nation. For instance I have an reoccurring facial rash that makes me very self conscious so when I go out I usually wear a ski mask. Professionalism is dead. You would think that bank employees would conduct themselves with more calmness and professionalism but this is not the case. I merely had to make a withdraw the other day. I wanted to tell the bank teller to place the money in the envelope or else my hand. But the rash makes speaking difficult so I wrote "Place the money in the envelope or else". I know times are bad but doing your job while crying and screaming "Don't. I have a family. Please" is no way to run a proper business. There are a lot of things we need to work on because it seems like the world is going crazy around me.

Hillary supporters cry while Trump supporters laugh