Politicians and Cell Phones

Yet another narcissistic sanctimonious political clown blows himself up taking selfies with his mistress!

I mean, damn! I will whip out my cell phone and take a pic of my significant other person – at the winery sipping a glass of wine, or on a day out on the water…With their clothes on!

Being in the high-tech business I know damn well that anything you take on that phone is public property. That phone is connected to the world, and anything on it can be taken off of it from 10,000 miles away by a curious hacker. Even worse, some guy on the down low has got to know that at some point their significant other, or kids might just get curious…

Anthony Wiener (D), Ted Courser(R), Cindy Gamrat (R), Nebraska Lieutenant Governor Rick Sheehy,…

Sometimes Karma will just spin around and kick the sanctimonious right in the cajones.

“Family Values”…Indeed.

Indiana GOP’s House Leader resigns after texting sexually explicit video of himself cheating on wife to everyone on his “Contacts” list

The controversial House Majority Leader in Indiana — he cosponsored the state’s “religious freedom” law — resigned suddenly on Tuesday after a sexually compromising video was sent to all of the people on his “Contacts” list, the Advocate’s Bil Browning reports.

 After news of the mass-texting began to circulate, Representative Jud McMillin (R) claimed that his “phone was stolen in Canada and out of my control for about 24 hours. I have just been able to reactivate it under my control. Please disregard any messages you received recently. I am truly sorry for anything offensive you may have received.”

But his “Canadian girlfriend stole my phone” defense apparently didn’t convince many of his “Contacts” — or at least, not the ones who mattered — and so Tuesday night he released a statement in which he said that the “time is right for me to pass the torch and spend more time with my family.”

During his five years in the legislature, McMillin has crusaded to “protect the integrity of the institution of marriage,” but the Advocate reported that the woman on the video he texted was not, in fact, his wife. According to his campaign website, he claimed that “the family has always been the foundation of our strength of community” and that “[i]n these times of turmoil the rest of the country could learn something from our example.”

It’s unclear what the rest of the country could learn from his example at this time, other than — perhaps — opposing LGBTQ rights across the board could have karmic implications for conservative Republicans with a proclivity for taking videos of themselves cheating on their wives.

 

Why the Poor Stay Poor in America

In summary – America is Failing

At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations. A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints.

Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes.

Despite frequent references to the United States as a classless society, about 62 percent of Americans (male and female) raised in the top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths, according to research by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Similarly, 65 percent born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths.

Where you are born counts… What you should notice is that the Red State South still serves as the boat anchor holding the rest of the country back. That is in huge reason today due to failed Republican Tax CUt policies necessitating a reduction in every service from social services to education. You get what you pay for, and in the case of conservative tax cut and slash policy – what you get is stagnant economic mobility. Ergo the poor stay poor.

In America, the Poorer You Are, the Poorer Your Children Will Be

This country’s terrible social safety net is making it impossible for working-class parents to keep up with their wealthier peers.

When people talk about “balancing work and family,” they’re usually talking more about the workplace than what’s going on at home. Now we’re starting to get data on what the workaday life looks like from a kid’s eye view, and it doesn’t look good.

When debating the issue of work-life balance, arguments over unlimited vacation and employment discrimination center around women’s barriers to opportunity—the perennial glass ceiling that Anne Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg rage at when lamenting not “having it all.” For working-class folks crushed by on-call schedules or poverty wages, it’s often hard to find any life outside work, let alone to balance work and family lives. But centering the conversation not on career ambition but the life course of a family helps put the false dichotomy of work vs. life in perspective.

In their new book “Too Many Children Left Behind,”Bruce Bradbury, Miles Corak, Jane Waldfogel, and Elizabeth Washbrook help illuminate these gaps by comparing the impacts of inequality across four wealthy countries—the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. They found that poor children in the US are “doubly disadvantaged relative to their peers in the other three countries” because the government’s “social safety net and supports for working families do the least among the four countries to combat inequality”—particularly our national lack of guaranteed paid time off and vacation.

That’s old news, but the center of the researchers’ narrative is not necessarily workers’ lives but their children’s. Poverty limits access to basic resources like nutrition and decent childcare. But a geometrically expanding class divide looms over all income brackets, as wealthier parents zealously splurge on “enrichment expenditures”:

spending on books, computers, high-quality child care, summer camps, private schooling, and other resources that offer a motivating and nurturing environment for children. A generation or more ago, during the early 1970s, a typical family in the top fifth of the income distribution spent about $3,850 per year on resources like these, four times as much as the typical family at the bottom of the income distribution, which spent about $925…. by 2005 it had grown tremendously, to $9,800 versus $1,400.

So poor parents struggling just to cover basic food and shelter face both massive income inequality in their day-to-day lives, plus a seven-fold gap in the amount they can “invest” to help their children thrive in the future. Given that social mobility is already suppressed at all income levels—with children’s future earnings highly correlated with the earnings of their parents—the Herculean amount of “catch up” poor parents must undertake just to get on the same footing as their higher-earning peers makes the great American wealth gap seem even more devastating, for both today’s working households and generations to come.

Moreover, the gender gap straddles the class divide: the “earnings advantage” provided by parents’ wealth, or lack thereof, is skewed against women. A child is likely to inherit a greater share of his dad’s wealth than mom’s. Beyond the perennial “equal pay” debate and the simplistic notion of “78 cents on the dollar,” how does that reality of gender inequality play out in family dynamics, in those difficult late-night conversations on who should stay home with a newborn, or stay late at the office?

But the most enduring impact of these deficits may be impossible to quantify. Economic disadvantage intertwined with structural inequality has a savage effect on a child’s long-term educational prospects—including basic preschool-level skills, like language aptitude and sociability, and failing primary-school grades. And the “achievement gap” (which is itself a notion often politicized with complex racial biases) has folded into a deepening black-white education divide over the last three decades.

Other research has revealed that economic status is a growing factor in academic outcomes, as “the relationship between income and achievement has grown sharply” over the last 50 years. So wealth trumps intellect on many levels.

Closing the gap takes more systemic solutions than just “leaning in.” Class lines reflect a deficit of democracy, created by neglect of government institutions. Research suggests much of the education gap is perpetuated or aggravated while children are wending through the highly segregated school system.

Co-author Jane Waldfogel says via e-mail that in addition to better workplace benefits, policy solutions might come through richer, more accessible early education and childcare: “Universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds would help level the playing field by ensuring that all preschoolers receive educationally oriented early education (rather than the case now, where more affluent families can buy preschool, while lower income families have to make do with lower quality care).”

Federal programs like Head Start and childcare subsidies have for years suffered massive funding gaps, leaving tens of thousands of kids underserved. But some states are directing resources into expanding preschool—with pioneering programs in New York City—though it remains to be seen whether lawmakers who have failed to adequately fund K-12 are really willing to invest enough public dollars in the long-term to create a sustainable universal pre-K system.

Waldfogel’s research reveals a need for not just income supports but simply less need to work all the time. For young children of parents who are either out working around the clock, or constantly stressed at home, overwork translates into a materially and emotionally impoverished home environment. During the developmental years, research shows “inequalities in income and family resources are in turn linked with disparities in more proximal factors such as books in the home, lessons and activities outside the home, and parents’ spanking.”

Although many factors shape a household’s social climate, the connection between a parents’ economic frustrations and a pattern of a lack of nurture, even cruelty at home, suggests a troubling through-line in this inheritance of inequity: Wealth doesn’t trickle down, yet economic violence does.…More…

 

It’s Always About Race…

Another well written piece discussing the realities about political and social discussion in America…

Race Is Always the Issue

Blackness has been relentlessly disparaged in American discourse—both covertly and overtly.

Every conversation about resources in the United States is also about race and racism. Like parents choosing a neighborhood for its “good schools,” Americans talk about prison and crime as a means of discussing race and racism in polite company.

One needn’t hate Hispanics to choose a school system with no Hispanics. One need not say that black people are violent apes to call the police when an injured human being who happens to be black knocks on your door for help. Freedom—from being stopped and frisked; from predatory criminal justice fines; from cells—is arguably the resource from which every other resource flows: education, marriage, income, wealth, happiness, actualization. In “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a decoder ring for the language of criminality, revealing that it rests on the idea that America can only be great so long as America is fundamentally white.

The articulation of America’s greatness is rarely as strong as when the country is preparing to elect its next leader. If nothing else, the political class generates tons of text and ideas for ordinary readers to parse. Coates parses the ideology of white racism in crime policy and rhetoric from the Fugitive Slave Clause through Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and on to Bernie Sanders. The occasion is the 50th anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”

During my doctoral training, Moynihan was offered as a cautionary tale to young academics. Moynihan, they said, dared to tell the truth about the culture of poverty in black communities. As a result, the liberal elite and angry black-activist oligarchy ran him out of society’s good graces, if not exactly out of town. We were warned against dabbling in social prescriptions: “Look what they did to Moynihan!”

We should all be so lucky as to be punished the way Moynihan was punished. Moynihan was a sociologist and a junior government official when he wrote his now-infamous treatise on the moral and economic decay of the black family. By the time he died in 2003, Moynihan was more than just a sociologist. He entered the rarified world of power. He worked with presidents. He commanded audiences within the cognitive elite. He had, I was once told by someone at a conference who’d had a bit too much to drink, a fantastic office at Harvard. Moynihan made it.

That he made it despite being “made into a racist,” as he put it, refutes the idea that being labeled a racist is some scarlet letter. It also raises questions about the renewed interest in revitalizing Moynihan’s reputation. Orlando Patterson and Ethan Fosse wrote in a new book that “history has been kind to Moynihan.” I agree. History has been kind to Moynihan. But it is not that empirical evidence of a deep culture of poverty among blacks has proven Moynihan’s case. Instead, the rapid acceleration and ruthless efficiencies of incarceration have made Moynihan’s theses seem prescient by intensifying every structural condition of race, poverty, and criminality in the United States. Moynihan is prescient only if one ignores that Moynihan went on to participate in the kind of policies and ideology that perpetuated the conditions he was originally critiquing. That kind of prescience is called winning by owning the rules of the game.
As voters prepare to turn the board over to a new gamemaster, Coates argues that the rules are still the same. Bill Clinton signed a crime bill in 1994 that effectively paid states to build prisons and reduce parole so that those prisons might stay full. In 2015, activists are circulating clips of Hillary Clinton online. In one, she can be heard calling kids “super predators” as an argument in support of her husband’s crime policies. Hillary likely borrowed the “super predators” language from a 1996 book that predicted a new crime wave unless these hyped up, extra-terrestrial, mostly poor, and almost always dark young people were locked away.

As fortune (or power) would have it, the narrative of a crime wave is reemerging. In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests all across the country, standing against police brutality and extra-judicial murders, mass media, and the pundit class are coalescing around a narrative of growing violence in the streets. A Wall Street Journal reporter puts a fine point on the connection: “The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months.” Waves in the bathtub aren’t even that simple to explain, much less crime waves. No one with any serious training in data, statistics, and crime attributes isolated crimes to a national trend armed with only nine months of data.But when crime is really a proxy for talking about race, the threshold for conclusions to be seen as scientifically rigorous always shifts. Always. Were the issue actually crime, statistics would tell you that crime continues its longitudinal trend downward nationally. Were the issue criminality, science would tell you that civil unrest stems from very different social processes than those which produce criminals. Were the issue safety, public policy would protect black taxpayers from being indiscriminately murdered by the police.

 But the issue is race. There, the scientific threshold bows to the superiority of racial logic. Suddenly, crime waves exist in a vacuum and have arbitrary beginning and end points. The poor become at once both fragile and super predators. Blackness assumes the essential, biological, and irrefutable character of criminality. Donald Trump can run for president of the United States despite once allegedly saying, “Laziness is a trait in blacks.” Not only is history kind to those who espouse racist ideologies, but the present ain’t too bad either.

As yet, no candidate has engaged respectfully with Black Lives Matter, the contemporary analog to the black oligarchy that supposedly ran Moynihan into the ground. Hillary Clinton appeared tone deaf and high-handed in a recent video, showing her talking with some BLM activists. Bernie Sanders has probably fared the worst. When some activists who identified as members of BLM interrupted his speech at a Netroots event, Sanders came off as thoroughly exasperated.

On the other side, most of the Republican candidates ignore BLM activists or cast them as emblematic of a type of learned helplessness. Democratic action, it seems, is only for a white polity. Any democratic action taken by a black polity causes “strife,” as Republican candidate Ben Carson described BLM. On policy, both sides could not be more compatible. If resources are about race, then there isn’t much threat from either party to the status quo of commoditized black freedom.

Fifty years after the Moynihan report on the state of the black family, there is still no penalty for questioning the morality of black culture. From academia to politics to media, Americans talk about race and racism much as they always have. They fight proxy wars but the terms of battle are the same. Black freedom has always been circumscribed and the means of circumscription have proven resilient. Whether the supposed issue is crime or schools and whether the accepted cause is biological or cultural, black folks are always a problem not to be solved but contained.

 

Archibald Motley – Painter of the Jazz Age

Born in 1891, Archibald Motley would document, through his art – the next 70 years of black experience in Chicago and France.

Portrait of a Sophisticated Lady

Octoroon, 1922

Self Portrait

Archibald Motley, The Painter Who Captured Black America in the Jazz Age and Beyond

The artist Archibald Motley captured both the high times and cultural vibrancy of the Jazz Age, as well as graver themes of racism and injustice.

The sexy sway of a 1920s Paris nightclub, filled with light and dark-skinned people pressed against each other.

The bustling streets of the almost exclusively black “Bronzeville” neighborhood Chicago in the 1930s under a nighttime glow.

A depressing surreal scene of horror following the death of Martin Luther KingJr.and the failings of the 1960s Civil Rights movement.

These are just a handful of the diverse visual expressions of the African American experience that the artist Archibald Motley so adroitly and sumptuously captured throughout his career.

Bronzeville By Night

As versatile in his aesthetic style as he was committed to scrutinizing African American culture, Motley was a uniquely daring and sharp artist who stood out even among the Harlem Renaissance greats.

Yet, Motley’s name does not elicit the same nods of recognition and respect as his peers, like Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker, and Zora Neale Hurston. That could–and certainly should–change after the retrospective Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist opens October 2 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Traveling through different chapters of his career, though not boxed into a strict chronology, the exhibition showcases how Motley was a thorough and sensitive observer of the black community, documenting its diversity while bringing his own keen perspective to its traditions and subcultures.

Motley “set his work apart” because he “created a modern, vibrant world which, as seen through a pair of jaded, laserlike ‘Negro’ eyes, revealed the jazz-and-blues-accented absurdities that lay behind life’s facades and public face,” writes Richard J. Powell in “Becoming Motley, Becoming Modern” an essay in the book,Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist.

Mending Socks

Powell, who is an art historian and Dean of Humanities at Duke University, curated the Whitney exhibition.

In other words, Motley wasn’t afraid to capture the good and the bad of black life, as his peers made tremendous gains yet the community in general often struggled in poverty and disenfranchisement in a segregated, very racist America.

At least a significant part of Motley’s distinct perspective on African American life came from his unique upbringing for a black man of his era.

Born in New Orleans in 1891, Motley was raised in Chicago’s then largely white immigrant Engelwood neighborhood and married his white childhood friend, Edith Granzo, in 1924.

Trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Motley’s earliest critically-acclaimed paintings were portraits of different figures within the African American community.

His 1924 Mending Socks depicted his grandmother, Emily Motley, a former slave, sitting with a quiet pride and refinement.

Motley was not so forward-looking that he ignored the complicated, painful slaveholding past. Mending Socks features part of a portrait of his grandmother’s mistress in the upper left corner, hanging over her.

As important as it was for Motley to capture history, it was equally, if not more, significant to him depict the spectrum of skin tones considered black. A blend of ethnicities himself, he was dedicated to painting “the whole gamut,” as he said, of African American complexions.

1920’s Mulatress with Figuring and Dutch Seascape and 1925’s The Octoroon Girl speak to his commitment of not only visually presenting multi-racial figures, but doing so in a way that showed them as refined, strong figures.

As the Whitney exhibition notes of Motley’s artistic interest in these portraits: “On the one hand, he believed that seeing themselves in art would help African Americans feel pride in their own racial identities; on the other, he hoped that seeing beautiful contemporary black subjects would dispel stereotypes and undermine racism.”...More…

Street Scene

 

24 Questions for White People From Black People

Amusing…and a few are on point…

 

Don’t Argue With This Ref!

Argue with this Ref, you are not just out of the Park…

You are in the hospital or morgue!

A soccer referee in Brazil is facing serious disciplinary action after pulling out a gun on the field during the middle of an amateur regional league match. 

The shocking incident occurred over the weekend in the city of Brumadinho, according to The Telegraph. The referee, Gabriel Murta, was allegedly assaulted by members of visiting team Amantes de Bola before he went and got his gun.

Murta, who reportedly works as a police officer during the day, claims to have been kicked and slapped by the Amantes manager and his substitutes after they demanded a red card for a player on Brumadinho. Murta reacted to the attack by going to the locker rooms and returning with a gun, according to The Mirror.

When confronted, Murta wasted no time in pulling out the gun, keeping it down and to his side, but visible for all involved to see.

 

Along Came a Spider…Part 2

What is with these folks and spiders? There are only a couple of types in the USA which can hurt you, basically the Black/Brown Widow, or the Recluse…Which are fairly rare. They may be ugly – but for the most part they leave people alone.

So in mind of the woman who jumped out of a moving car with her child in it last wee, because of a spider…

We have this moron, who certainly killed the Spider in question…Along with his car and part of a gas station.

 

Man lights car on fire trying to kill spider with cigarette lighter

When a Michigan driver stopped at a gas station earlier this week, he spotted a spider on his gas tank. In a quick attempt to get rid of the spider, the man burned it with his cigarette lighter which caused his entire car to catch on fire.

Surveillance video from the Mobil gas station in Center Line shows first the gas pump, then the car becoming engulfed by flames as soon as the man strikes the lighter. Fortunately, nobody was hurt in the incident.

The driver put out the flames with a fire extinguisher. In an attempt to explain his actions, he told authorities that he’s deathly afraid of spiders and therefore pulled his lighter out somewhat thoughtlessly in his moment of panic. Employee Susan Adams told Fox 2:

“He didn’t have a cigarette. He didn’t have anything on him. All of a sudden I look out and I see flames.”
Next time this man attempts to get rid of a spider, we suggest a simple shoe drop.

 

Ted Cruz Gets Smacked Down by Fellow Republicans

This has been a long time coming…The Adults are moving to take control back.

Cruz sternly rebuked by GOP

Ted Cruz can’t even get a protest vote in the Senate anymore.

On Monday night, Cruz’s colleagues ignored his attempt to disrupt Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s efforts to fund the government without attacking Planned Parenthood. In an unusual rebuke, even fellow Republicans denied him a “sufficient second” that would have allowed him a roll call vote.

Then, his Republican colleagues loudly bellowed “no” when Cruz sought a voice vote, a second repudiation that showed how little support Cruz has: Just one other GOP senator — Utah’s Mike Lee — joined with Cruz as he was overruled by McConnell and his deputies.

It was the second time that Cruz had been denied a procedural courtesy that’s routinely granted to senators in both parties. The first came after he called McConnell a liar this summer.

 

“That Colored Fella”…Ben Carson

Don Black, founder of Stormfront, a leading white supremacist website, said he was closely following the 2016 election.

“We need to pay close attention to the election,” Black told members of Stormfront. “Some of the candidates, like Donald Trump, are addressing our issues. Of the two parties, the Republicans more closely align with our views. But they need to get rid of that colored fella Ben Carson, he not too bright, like most blacks. The Democratic Party is full of darkies, beaners, queers, feminazis and Jews.”

Black, who donated to Ron Paul’s campaign, urged other white supremacists to attend the 2016 RNC convention.

“We need go there, start networking and get our voices heard,” Black said. “As long as we cover our tattoos and wear khakis and button down shirts, we’ll fit right in.”

 

White Supremacists Invite Black Conservative to Their Convention

Sean Hannity’s favorite Lawn Jockey, Jesse Lee Peterson to join white supremacist rally…because “he hates black people as much as we do”.

Black Conservative Jesse Lee Peterson Invited to White Supremacists Convention

Black conservative the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson has been invited to be a speaker at the National White Alliance (NWA)’s annual convention.

Brian Blank, a spokesperson for the NWA, said Peterson was welcome at the conference, even though he was black.

“Well, he can’t help the color he was born, but he is one of the few good ones,” said Blank. “And he hates Blacks just as much as we do.”

Peterson, a frequent guest on FOX News, bills himself as a Black conservative and has been very critical of the African-American community. He criticized the Black residents of New Orleans who failed to evacuate during Hurricane Katrina for being “lazy and immoral.” He also thanked God for slavery, claiming that without it Black Americans would have never found Jesus.

Peterson has also made anti-women comments. He said women are not emotionally suited to hold public office.

“Jesse knows his place and the place of the white man,” Blank said. “If we had 100 more coloreds like him, my organization would go out of business.”

 

“christian” School Kick 5 YO Out For Having Two Mommies

So much for Christians being persecuted in the US… Come on, bigoted morons – It’s a kid!

Why exactly would you want to hurt a small child for the “sins” of her Mother?

Christian school kicks out kindergartener because she has two moms

Sadly, nationwide marriage equality simply isn’t enough to inoculate all children of same-sex couples from the cruelty and indignity that is anti-gay discrimination.

The latest example comes from San Diego, California, where a five year-old girl was recently barred from starting the first day of kindergarten after her school changed its nondiscrimination policy following the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, reports the local ABC News affiliate KGTV.

Mt. Erie Christian Academy, a private institution that does not appear to take any public funds, updated its handbook this summer to reserve the right to discontinue the enrollment of any student it finds “in opposition to the biblical lifestyle,” citing at least one Bible passage that calls for homosexuals to be murdered:

Mt. Erie Christian Academy is a religious, Bible-believing institution providing education in a distinct Christian environment, and it believes that its biblical role is to work in conjunction with the home to mold students to be Christ like. On those occasions in which the atmosphere or conduct within a particular home is counter to or in opposition to the biblical lifestyle that the school teaches, the school reserves the right, within its sole discretion, to refuse admission of an applicant or to discontinue enrollment of a student. This includes, but is not necessarily limited to, living in, condoning or supporting sexual immorality; practicing homosexual lifestyle or alternative gender identity; promoting such practices; or otherwise having the inability to support the moral principles of the school (Leviticus 20:13a; Romans 1:21-27; Matthew 19:4-6; I Corinthians 6:9-20).

 The new policy effectively barred one of the school’s pre-school students from entering kindergarten this school year.

The five-year old’s mother, Shenna (she asked that her last name be withheld) called the policy change “heartbreaking.” The stay at-home mother said the she was unaware of the school’s extreme anti-gay attitude and insisted that she wouldn’t not have subjected her daughter to such humiliation had she known of their discriminatory policy before enrolling at the academy.

“If we knew from the beginning that this was unacceptable, they didn’t condone or believe in this, if it was such a big deal, we would have never started her off there,” Sheena said. “I would never put my child’s emotional wellbeing in an unstable setting like that.”

Shenna said that although both her and her wife, whose is currently deployed with the Navy, are Christian, they never considered their sexuality to be in conflict with the faith or the school’s mission.

“What does our family life have to do with anyone else? Like no one’s gonna be in danger.”

She continued: “I want my baby to be safe when she grows up. I don’t want her to ever have to be discriminated against because of her lifestyle. That’s not fair.”

Shenna told KGTV that she is looking for legal recourse but that her daughter continues to be out of the classroom as they search for an alternative.

“I miss my friends. I miss my teachers,” the child told the news station.

 

You are More Likely to Die Violently … Outside the City

Whooops! Did I really say that?

That’s right, despite all the caterwauling by the racist right about “black on black crime”, the simple fact of the matter is that drunk white folks in Wyoming kill more people percentage wise than black folks in many cities.

Those who said they have driven within two hours after drinking any alcohol report an average of 11 such trips in the past year (males 14.4 vs females 5.9 trips). Whites account for 84 percent of all monthly trips, while this groups comprises 77 percent of the 16 to 64 year old population. The percentages for monthly alcohol trips and population are: Blacks — 5 and 9 percent; Hispanics — 5 and 7 percent; Asian Americans — 1 and 2 percent; and Native Americans and Eskimos — 3 and 2 percent. About 3 percent of whites, 2 percent of Blacks, 2 percent of Asian and 7 percent of American Indian/Eskimos age 16-64 report being stopped by the police for suspicion of drinking and driving.

What this feeds isa high DUI rate in rural and suburban areas.

You’re More Likely to Die a Violent Death in Rural America Than in a City

In one popular explanation for the mass exodus from urban America over the last several decades, people left the city because the city wasn’t safe. In suburban and rural America, by contrast, the cars drive slower down cul-de-sacs, random crime is less common, and gunfire is scarce. You’ve probably heard this before.

Here, however, is the data: Yes, homicide-related death rates are significantly higher in urban parts of the country. But that risk is far outweighed by the fact that you’re about twice as likely to die in a car crash in rural America than you are in the most urban counties. Nationwide, the rate of “unintentional-injury death” – car crashes, drownings, falls, machinery accidents and the like – is about 15 times the rate of homicide death. Add together all the ways in which you might die prematurely by intentional or unintentional injury (as opposed to illness), and your risk of death is actually about 22 percent higher in the most rural counties in America than in the most urban ones.

All together, your risk of injury death actually goes up the more rural the community where you live.

This finding comes from a new study by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, published in theAnnals of Emergency Medicine. The study looked at every injury death in America between 1999 and 2006 (excluding death by terrorism – the researchers considered Sept. 11 too much an outlier to contribute to our understanding of these public-health patterns). That number totaled 1,295,919 deaths. Each was tagged to the county where the injury took place, with counties classified on a 10-step continuum from urban to rural.

The main finding inverts many of our assumptions about danger and place: “When considering all mechanisms of injury death as an overall metric of safety,” the authors write, “large cities appear to be the safest counties in the United States, significantly safer than their rural counterparts.”

On the below two illustrations from the paper, the map of population density by county (top) directly contrasts with the map of death rates (bottom):

Across the whole population, the top three causes of death were motor vehicle crashes, firearms and poisoning. But start to break these numbers down by region, age group and even race, and the picture gets more interesting. Motor vehicle crashes, for example, lead to 27.61 deaths per 100,000 people in the most rural counties. But that number is just 10.58 deaths per 100,000 people in the most urban counties.

Other risks you might expect are more common in rural areas, like injury from machines and environmental events like flooding, animal attacks or exposure to the cold. As for guns, the risk of firearm-related death is actually pretty consistent across the country, population-wide. But firearm deaths are significantly higher in rural areas for children and people over age 45. In the city, they’re much higher for people aged 20 to 44.

Race also played a curious factor. Rural counties with large black populations had lower risk of injury death than rural counties with fewer blacks. For Latinos, the pattern was the opposite.(BTx3 thinks it’s the crazy white folks on Youtube effect)

 

 

Elizabeth Warren – Economics and Black Lives

Elizabeth Warren…Gets it. This is really straightforward.

Why is the right wing so deeply embedded in denial?

 

Elizabeth Warren Goes All In On Black Lives Matter

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Sunday forcefully called for a renewed focus on the fight for racial justice, arguing that “we have not made enough progress” since the civil rights movement of the 1960s and outlining three main policy areas in which black people continue to face discrimination, including her signature issue of economic inequality.

Speaking at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate in Boston, established by her late predecessor, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), Warren’s speech was tied to the legacy of the monumental 1960s civil rights laws that Kennedy championed.

“These laws made three powerful declarations: Black lives matter. Black citizens matter. Black families matter,” she said, according to her prepared remarks.

But she said it is clear that “we have not made enough progress,” organizing the speech around three major areas in which black people still face injustice: police violence, voting restrictions and economic inequality.

Linking her long-standing fight for the middle class to the fight for racial justice, Warren conceded that “economic justice is not and has never been sufficient to ensure racial justice.” However, Warren pivoted back to her signature issue throughout her speech, noting that African-Americans continue to face diminished economic prospects and discrimination in housing, education and employment.

She also reminded the audience that the March on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 was as much about economic justice as it was about racial justice.

“When Dr. King led hundreds of thousands of people to march on Washington, he talked about an end to violence, access to voting and economic opportunity. As Dr. King once wrote, ‘the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice.’”

Warren acknowledged that economic reforms are not enough to combat the racism that still persists in America. “Owning a home won’t stop someone from burning a cross on the front lawn. Admission to a school won’t prevent a beating on the sidewalk outside,” she said.

Citing the recent deaths of African-Americans in police custody, such as Michael Brown, Sandra Bland and Freddie Gray, as well as the aggressive tactics police used during the protests against these deaths, she lamented that black people continue to experience disproportionately unfair treatment from police. In proposing solutions, she echoed the recent calls for police reforms, including the need to create more diverse police forces that “look like, and come from, the neighborhoods they serve” and the demilitarization of police.

“This is America, not a war zone, and policing practices in all cities, not just some, need to reflect that,” she said.

Warren also railed against the continued assault against voting rights for minorities, particularly in the South, where lawmakers have resorted to more subtle tactics for keeping voters off the rolls, such as gerrymandering, voter ID laws and more complicated voting procedures. She scolded congressional Republicans for holding out on legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act, parts of which were struck down by the Supreme Court in a 2013 ruling. She also called on states to implement automatic voter registration to reduce the procedural hurdles of voting.

She tied the central argument of her speech back to her message of economic inequality, citing persistent housing discrimination against blacks, the high black unemployment rate, and how the housing bubble and economic recession disproportionately gutted economic opportunities for the black middle class. Warren hailed what is perhaps her most famous policy achievement, the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as the first step in curtailing discriminatory mortgage and banking policies.

“It’s time to come down hard on predatory practices that allow financial institutions to systematically strip wealth out of communities of color. One of the ugly consequences of bank deregulation was that there was no cop on the beat when too many financial institutions figured out that they could make great money by tricking, trapping and defrauding targeted families,” she said.

Warren acknowledged that as a white politician, “I speak today with the full knowledge that I have not personally experienced and can never truly understand the fear, the oppression, and the pain that confronts African-Americans every day,” she said. “But none of us can ignore what is happening in this country. Not when our black friends, family, neighbors literally fear dying in the streets.

“It comes to us to once again affirm that black lives matter, that black citizens matter, that black families matter.”

The speech drew praise from Black Lives Matter activists, like DeRay Mckesson, who has prominently called for lawmakers to make direct policy proposals that address police violence.

“Warren, better than any political leader I’ve yet heard, understands the protests as a matter of life or death — that the American dream has been sustained by an intentional violence and that the uprisings have been the result of years of lived trauma,” Mckesson told The Washington Post.

 

Justice in Sheets…A Jury of Peers – Dismissing Black Jurors

The process of eliminating black jurors from a trial has been around for a while, even though it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. It is a commonly used tool in some parts of the country where the prosecutor’s case is weak, the defendant is black and the victim is white – or to cover some misconduct by Law Enforcement. It typically assures conviction – even when obvious exculpatory evidence exists. Once again – this deception is headed to the Supreme Court, where by the fact of it’s conservative majority – there is little likely to be done about it. I mean – it is hard to believe based on past rulings that Uncle Tommie Clarence would object to a black person being convicted by a jury wearing white robes and hoods.

The Jury Selection has been perfectly fair, Your Honor!

How Prosecutors Get Away With Cutting Black Jurors

A curious thing happened at the trial of Timothy Tyrone Foster, a young black man accused of killing an elderly white woman: every black prospective juror was dismissed. He was convicted, and sentenced to death, by an all-white jury.

Even more curious: there were 42 prospective jurors that morning, five of whom were black.  All dismissed, four of whom by “peremptory challenge,” in which theprosecutor strikes a juror at his or her discretion.  In Georgia, where Foster’s trial took place, prosecutors have ten such options.

Peremptory challenges were entirely unreviewable for most of American history.  That was their function: in addition to dismissals with reasons, they were meant to give prosecutors and defense attorneys (in Georgia, defense attorneys get twenty such challenges) leeway to strike potentially problematic jurors without explanation.

That changed somewhat in 1986, when the Supreme Court decided Batson v. Kentucky.  In Batson, the Court held that using peremptory challenges to strike jurors on the basis of race was unconstitutional.

Foster’s trial, though, took place after Batson.  How is that possible?  BecauseBatson has proven to be almost worthless in practice.  All a prosecutor must do is provide some race-neutral reason for striking jurors, and that is extremely easy to do.  Maybe the juror didn’t make eye contact.  Maybe she was female.  Maybe he looked bored or inattentive—as most of us are at the end of hours of jury duty.

Any of these reasons will do, and so, in Foster’s case and countless others, winning a “Batson challenge” is basically impossible.

Except Foster’s case has turned out to be different.  During the lengthy appeals process (nearly thirty years and counting), the prosecutor’s notes were made public.  And they are laughable and tragic at the same time.  Black prospective jurors are annotated as B#1, B#2, et cetera.  Weighing the different options, the prosecutor noted that one has “the most potential to choose from out of the four remaining blacks.”  And so on.

And then there were the absurd pretexts the prosecutor provided to satisfyBatson.  First, he listed over thirty different reasons, basically throwing everything against the wall to see what would stick.  He said three didn’t make enough eye contact. He said another was a social worker, which in fact she was not.  He said one was close in age to the 18-year-old defendant; she was 34.

All this make it abundantly clear that race was the predominant factor in striking these jurors, notwithstanding the pretexts given for their dismissals.

And that’s why Foster’s case is now at the Supreme Court, which will have an opportunity to update Batson, and perhaps give it some teeth.  The Court will also, of course, determine the fate of Foster, who is developmentally disabled and who has now spent nearly thirty years on death row.

“Batson has failed miserably to prevent race discrimination,” says Stephen Bright, who is Foster’s lawyer, a professor at Yale Law School, president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, and one of the leading advocates for criminal justice reform, including abolition of the death penalty.  Bright has been down this road before, having won two Supreme Court cases on race discrimination and jury selection.  And he says that Foster’s case is not unusual in the least.

“What went on at trial was typical,” he told the Daily Beast.  “What’s unusual is we know what’s in the prosecutor’s files.  These notes that show not just a consciousness of race but an obsession with race.”

Batson has failed to prevent discrimination, says Bright, for at least three reasons.

First, “every prosecutor has a handy-dandy list of race-neutral reasons that they give.  They even distribute reasons in advance.  Some state training programs even distribute a list called ‘Articulating Juror Negatives.’”

That’s right, all prosecutors have to do is read from a prewritten list of reasons, and they’ll prevail.  “They just say, ‘take a lot of notes when you strike a black juror.’”

 

Supermoon!

Despite being cloudy last night there were enough breaks to get a view of the eclipse. This one (not my pic) shows the view in the East! I got a very similar view all the way through to full eclipse.