From HuffPo: “The Most Dangerous Bill You’ve Never Heard Of Just Passed The House”

Oh great. Wonderful.

This is where we’re headed…

The Most Dangerous Bill You’ve Never Heard Of Just Passed The House

Last, week, under the cover of a media bliss-out except among Koch funded right-wing channels, the House of Representatives passed a bill which would effectively repeal future standard setting under every important environmental, public health, consumer protection, labor standards, occupational safety and civil rights law on the books.

The bill, called the REINS Act, requires that any future major regulation adopted by an Executive Agency — say a new toxic chemical standard required by the recently enacted Chemical Safety Act, or a new consumer protection rule about some innovative but untested kind of food additive — must be approved by a specific resolution in each House of Congress within 70 days to take effect.

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Chelsea Manning Will Be Free in May 2017

Y’all probably already know it, but I just want to join the celebration:

President Obama has commuted Chelsea Manning’s sentence. She is to be released in May 2017.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday overruled his secretary of defense to commute the sentence of former Army soldier Chelsea Manning, who was convicted of stealing and disseminating 750,000 pages of documents and videos to WikiLeaks.

I cannot express in words how happy I am. Chelsea Manning was unjustly imprisoned, and she will finally see the freedom she deserves.

I’ve always supported her, and I will continue to. She deserves it.

Sadly, being the relentless cynic that I am, I have to reign a little bit on the parade…

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No One Will Miss 2016

So… I originally had this idea to do a 2016 retrospective timeline, highlighting the tiny bit of good and the ridiculously huge amount of bad. But there was so much that this would have had to have been a multi-post series, and I don’t feel like doing that. Then I thought that I would just highlight the major events in politics and deaths, and devote some time to the US’s racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, murderous police force. But even that turns out to be more of a daunting task then I’m willing to take on.

So, instead, I’m going to share some thoughts, some links, a book for you to read, and a video that many of you probably already saw, but I want to share again, anyways. Sadly, I’m afraid I won’t be able to end this post with hope. While I am a cynic first and foremost, I’ve always worked hard to balance that out with optimism, always deliberately assuming that a human being I meet for the first time is fundamentally good (before they inevitably prove me wrong). I hate being a downer, and I really hate bringing other people down with me.

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Voting for Donald Trump is Not Progressive; It’s REgressive

To start off, I need to say that I am NOT voting for Hillary Clinton. To be honest, I may just skip the primary all together and vote against the Republicans in the general. I was very much excited about Bernie Sanders in the beginning, but I’m simply not anymore. I watched his failure with black people, including what looked a lot like racial profiling at one of his events, read his distinct inability to get specific on any of his promises, and basically just lost any of that excitement I had in him when I finally accepted that, really, he’s just another politician.

If you want more details, I recommend you go here and watch Elon James, Imani Gandy, and Aaron Rand Freeman of This Week in Blackness Prime discuss it all.

With that, however, is my unshaken belief that while Democrats in general are pretty terrible, they aren’t even close to being as bad as Republicans, and so what should be galvanizing the left is keeping the Republicans as far away from government as is possible. Democrats are bad, sure, but Republicans are actively evil.

Apparently, though, not everyone who claims to be “progressive” believes this. Some people, apparently, have decided that if Hillary Clinton is indeed the Democratic nominee (and it looks like she will be), they are going to vote for Donald Trump.

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