Busy night on death row…
Georgia Executes Inmate Troy Davis After Supreme Court Denies Appeal
White Supremacist Executed for Texas Dragging
Oh yeah… And that suicide?
It just doesn’t get any dumber than that.
Busy few weeks for the “hangman” here in the USA. Lots to cheer about for Rick Perry’s Tea Party crowd, as the executions stack up as they did at the Tea Party “debate”. From Supreme Court intervention stopping an execution Texas, to the planned execution of Troy Davis in Georgia – it seems killing for vengeance has become big business in a few southern states.
One has to wonder though – just how loudly the same crowd would have cheered to the execution of this miscreant – one of their own fellow “Republicans”…
Lawrence Russell Brewer - Next on Rick Perry's List?
One of three men convicted for his involvement in the infamous dragging death of a black man 13 years ago is scheduled to be executed Wednesday.
Lawrence Russell Brewer, 44, is scheduled to die by lethal injection in the killing of James Byrd.
Brewer and two other white men chained the 49-year-old black man to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him to death on a country road near Jasper, Texas.
Accomplice John William King also was sentenced to death and is awaiting an appeal. A third man, Shawn Berry, received life in prison.
A prosecutor called Brewer a racist psychopath during his 1999 trial.
During the trial, Brewer took the witness stand and contended that he was a bystander, not a killer.
He tearfully admitted being present when Byrd was dragged to his death but, he said, “I didn’t mean to cause his death. I had no intentions of killing anybody.”
Brewer, a former jailhouse Ku Klux Klan leader, said King initiated the killing by fighting with Byrd. He also said the third defendant, Berry, slashed Byrd’s throat and then chained him to Berry’s pickup. Brewer admitted kicking Byrd and spraying Byrd’s face with black paint.
But he said it was a reflex action taken to try to break up the fight between Byrd and King.
The execution would be the 11th this year in Texas, the most active death-penalty state.
Indeed, I’ll be surprised if we don’t get another of those “5-4” conservative block Supreme Court decisions to save Brewer at the last minute, with the “usual suspects” suddenly finding the penalty as too extreme. Of course the $500k “donation” to Ginny Thomas’ PAC required to flip conservative votes…
Is probably beyond Brewer’s means.
And then there is this…
“You can’t fight murder with murder,” Ross Byrd, 32, told Reuters late Tuesday, the night before Wednesday’s scheduled execution of Lawrence Russell Brewer for one of the most notorious hate crimes in modern times.
“Life in prison would have been fine. I know he can’t hurt my daddy anymore. I wish the state would take in mind that this isn’t what we want.”
One of the ways to find out how good or bad a candidate is…
Is to ask the folks at home.
Not Just and Empty Suit... But an Empty Toupe
Perry’s standard line is that he can do for the nation what he has done for Texas, which he says is create jobs, maintain public education and balance the budget without raising taxes. But the numbers, and Black residents of the state, tell a different story.
“I just want America to wake up and look at the true picture,” said Karen Hasan, a postal service supervisor and Texas resident for 32 years. “He’s [Rick Perry] talking out both sides of his neck.”
Residents speaking to the AFRO about Gov. Perry were largely in agreement, citing unemployment, substandard jobs and a failing public education system among the governor’s biggest shortcomings. “I haven’t seen him try to create any jobs for people or anything,” said Texas native Regina Holley, 53. “I don’t think he’s done anything that’s worked out well for Texas.”
Charles Dorsey, 62 and a Texan for 35 years, said many of the jobs being created don’t even pay minimum wage, adding, “Texas has the lowest average hourly income of any state in the United States other than Mississippi. I think people need to understand the type of jobs being created.”
Along with the unemployment and jobs situation in the state, native Texan Ronni Bowman, third year student at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law, referenced the large number of residents without health insurance.
Saying that he panders to special interests, Melanie Spratt-Anderson, the first Black and three-term Upton County attorney, said Perry’s only interest in health care came in the form of a 2007 executive order to inoculate girls, by the sixth grade, with Merck’s Gardasil while at the same time refusing to sign legislation to renew the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The state legislature was able to stop this action and Perry’s connections to Merck were under scrutiny. She said, “Anybody that has enough money to contribute to him, will get what they pay for.”
Dorsey questioned Perry’s transparency. “Unfortunately, the people of Texas cannot even get his calendar for last month or months before. … One of the things that really bothers me is that the guy is so secretive about what he’s doing that every seven days all of his emails are purged. So people don’t really know what he is doing and what he has done.”
Dorsey also called Perry “one of the biggest phonies I have ever seen,” with George Powell, a 15 year Texas resident, adding, “He has a reputation for being all fluff. Everything is ceremonial.”
Which probably explains why each one dismissed Perry’s Houston day of prayer and fasting. Powell said, “Clearly it was just to jumpstart his campaign.” Hasan added, “I think it’s a ploy to get more votes.”
Saying that Texas politicians pander to conservative Christians, Spratt-Anderson added, “It was purely to get the votes. I wish Christians would stop falling for that.”
“That’s why I’m saying he’s a phony,” said Dorsey. “Up until recently, Rick Perry has not been a very religious person. In fact, if you ask his church, he’s only tithed like $98 for the whole year. But now, all of a sudden, he’s become this religious person, [saying] that we can pray everything away.
“Unfortunately if people fall for this, we’re in a world of trouble.”
No one recommended Perry as a candidate to look at when voting for president. “I think we’d be looking at another George Bush,” said Spratt Anderson. “… I don’t think it would be good.”
Powell concurred, saying that while Perry is probably the best in the Republican field right now, all that really means is that he is just the least objectionable of a lot of really bad choices. Holley said, “He’d just bring more destruction to the people of the United States.”
“The country is in trouble and needs someone with the ability to get us out reasonably,” said Dorsey. “I want people to really look at the true Rick Perry. Because if they did, they would never vote for him.”
Don’t hurt ’em Chris!
Chris Matthews didn’t mince words on his Friday show when it came to the newest entrant into the GOP presidential race.
Rick Perry formally entered the 2012 campaign on Saturday, but everyone knew that he was running days before. On Friday’s “Hardball,” Matthews made it clear that he doesn’t think much of the Texas governor. As he watched the footage MSNBC was playing of Perry, Matthews openly mocked him–and his Texas ways.
“He looks like a clown,” Matthews said. “He dresses very fancy. There’s something about the way that he puts himself together that doesn’t look authentic. He looks like, I don’t know, a wax figure pretending to be governor. There’s something about him that doesn’t add up to me. Maybe it’s this Texas B.S., this boots and tuxedo thing they do down there. Why does it work? Outside of Texas it doesn’t travel very well.”
Matthews also criticized Perry for mangling the history of Texas’ relationship with the rest of the U.S. Matthews said that, unlike what Perry has claimed, Texas never had any clause in its founding documents that allowed it to secede from America. He wondered whether Perry was being “deliberately ignorant” in his telling of the state’s history.
Texas - Don't Want Your Kind Comin' 'Round Here...Except to Trim the Bushes.
Texas Republican would like to join their whack job bretheren in other states like Arizona on bashing illegal immigransts and implementing Jiminez Crow…
Honest they would…
But then who is going to cut the grass and change Junior’s diapers? And then there is the small problem that there are now fewer white Republicans in Texas… Than folks with a permanent tan. Come election time, that is a sure remedy to a State’s Red stature.
In a scene from the movie “A Day Without a Mexican”, a Texas legislator bellies up to getting really tough on people who hire illegal aliens…
Except at home.
The latest bill addressing illegal immigration and the hiring of undocumented workers in Texas would broaden the scope of employers subject to scrutiny — and extend the penalties for violators to include possible jail time and thousands of dollars in fines. Exempt from the proposed rule? People who hire undocumented workers as domestic helpers in their family homes.
House Bill 1202, authored by state Rep. Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball, would make it a state jail felony to knowingly hire undocumented workers in Texas. The bill would punish those who “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” hire or contract with an “unauthorized alien”, or with someone who knowingly subcontracts with an undocumented worker. The maximum fine is $10,000, and guilty parties could face a stint in prison of 180 days to two years. (Riddle has also filed HB 17, legislation that would make being in the state illegally a trespassing offense.)
There are exemptions in HB 1202, however, including one that could make the proposal more acceptable to House Republicans concerned with the federal electronic employment verification system known as E-Verify. While several Republicans have filed bills mandating the use of E-Verify, others suggest it has proven flaws and could potentially act as a deterrent to otherwise capable and legal applicants. Riddle’s bill doesn’t specify E-Verify and says employers have an out if they make a concerted effort to verify status in any manner “that is more likely than not to produce a correct and reliable result.”
Jon English, Riddle’s chief of staff, said E-Verify wasn’t specified because Riddle didn’t want to constrain employers to one system. “As far as we’re concerned, it will be up to whoever is prosecuting the case, what juries are going to say fits the definition of ‘recklessly,'” he said. “But we’re pretty sure that if you make anything that amounts to a good-faith attempt to verify anybody’s information … that that would prevent you from being prosecuted.”
There is also an exception for domestic help. People who hire or contract with someone for work “exclusively or primarily at a single-family residence” are off the hook.
English said that exception was geared toward not “stifling the economic engine” in Texas, so that people who contract out for work in or on their homes don’t have to vet everyone.
What do the Texas “Education Miracle” and the Texas “Budget Miracle” have in common?
Really Big, Really Deep Holes...Good Places to Put Dead Rogue Elephants.
They are both frauds perpetrated by Republicans.
The Texas Education Miracle? This from one of the first people who broke the story about the fraud, George Scott –
The leadership of the Texas Republican Party in the Legislature and at the TEA made a calculated decision (individually and collectively) to permit the State of Texas to lie to parents about the academic skills of Texas students.
In validating, promoting and enshrining the lie, Texas Republicans have followed the path of many of their national counterparts. They abandoned their principles and recruited allies to validate the academic corruption. In sum, politicians, bureaucrats, many academicians and scores of public policy researchers reaped great financial, professional or political benefits from the schemes.
The same Texas Republican Party and Legislature is now doing it with the Texas Budget. After supposedly defying the national trend by fueling growth by tax cuts and budget cuts… The Piper has come home with a vengeance. The State is now projected to be $25 BILLION in the red. But like the Enron disaster of cooked books…The $25 billion number may well be the tip of the iceberg, in that the books may have been cooked to show the state with a surplus all along when it was in the red.
Conservative philosophy fails… Again.
These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.
Wait — Texas? Wasn’t Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn’t its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that “we have billions in surplus”? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years. Read the rest of this entry »
This one sounds a bit flaky. Sort of like previous cases of a mysterious black man murdering a husband or wife – or the recent “acid attack” in Seattle…
Appears that Mexicans have become official black people.
Wouldn’t be surprised on this one if the woman didn’t kill her husband, or was involved in drug smuggling… And blame it on “dem Mex’cans”!
Dodging gunfire from pirates on a Texas-Mexico border lake, Tiffany Hartley was forced to make an impossible choice: risk her life by staying with her husband or return to land and seek help.
The couple were sightseeing on Jet Skis on the Mexican side of Falcon Lake on Thursday when Hartley says several boats of gunmen opened fire, striking her husband in the back of his head.
A recording of her 911 call released this weekend and reports from law enforcement officials detail the tragic incident.
“He was thrown off the Jet Ski and I couldn’t pick him up to get him on mine,” Hartley, 29, told the 911 dispatcher after she safely made it to shore. “Oh, God.”
Texas authorities believe David Hartley, 30, died in the attack.
“[Tiffany Hartley] said she was seeing bullets hitting close to her in the water and realized that her husband had been hit behind the head,” Zapata County, Texas, Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr. told ABC News. “She went back trying to find, trying to help him. She went in the water trying to load up her husband to her Jet Ski … trying to get his body and Jet Ski back to the U.S. side. She was being shot at so she finally had to let go of the body, climb back in her Jet Ski and head back over here to the United States.”
Hartley told police that the armed men, who Gonzalez said he believes are pirates associated with a Mexican drug cartel, chased her into U.S. waters as she fled.
“I’m alive because of God’s protection. There is no other reason,” she told The Denver Post.
Officials are still searching Falcon Lake for David Hartley’s body, according to Fox News.
“The one thing I dreaded on Falcon Lake has happened,” said the Zapata County sheriff. “The lake is not secure, the border is not secure because the incident that I dreaded the most has in fact happened. We cannot go to Mexico, we cannot recover that body, we cannot conduct an investigation, we have to tell the family we can’t do anything about it.”
Fresh from disappearing minorities, including Thurgood Marshall and Caesar Chavez from textbook – The Texas Textbook Taliban is at it again…
This time trying to disappear one of the world’s major religions… Islam.
Textbooks May Be Too Pro-Islam, Anti-Christian, Texas State Education Board Says
Students in Texas may be getting a glorified view of Islam, according to some state education leaders who are pushing for a resolution that would denounce social studies textbooks as biased against Christianity.
Though the president of conservative-leaning Texas State Board of Educationsupports the measure as promotingreligious equality in schools, faith leaders and activists have condemned the board’s proposal as intolerant and anti-Muslim.
“It’s clearly just an attempt to propagandize the state’s student population against the faith of Islam,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Washington D.C.-based Council on Islamic-American Relations. “Somehow they were getting too rosy a picture of Islam.”
The Texas Board of Dis-Education… A group of sanctimonious conservative twits taking child molestation to a whole new level.
Once upon a time there was an Arms Race between the United States and the old Soviet Union…
Now, in certain parts of this country there is an arms race – just to be well enough armed to be safe to see your congressman or, for that matter Jesus in a Church.
Everyone from lobbyists to lawyers and journalists is rushing to get permits to carry guns inside the Texas Capitol, where legislators already often tote pistols in boots and purses or stow them away inside their desks.
A unique loophole in a new security procedure means a gun permit is like a special-access pass into the domed building, allowing people who are certified to carry a gun to bypass lines at the metal detectors that were set up after a shooting incident earlier this year.
“Nobody wants to be the one standing in line behind three hundred kids wearing the same colored T-shirt,” said University of Texas political scientist Jim Henson. “If you’re trying to get in and out really quick and there’s going to be choke points, well, people don’t want to have to deal with that.”
There’s now a frenzy for folks to get trained and licensed to carry a firearm, especially before the legislative session begins in January. It’s not required that people have a gun to enter the Capitol through the express lane. Merely holding a valid permit, and presenting it at the entrance, will get them expedited entry.
“Everybody is doing it or is planning to do it,” said lobbyist Bill Miller, who has taken the required training and is waiting for his license to arrive in the mail. Read the rest of this entry »
Meet Kesha Rogers, Democrat Candidate from Texas who wants to impeach President Obama
She wants to impeach President Obama, ran on a campaign platform that includes the colonization of Mars, and thinks the US educational system should focus on the works of Plato and Leibnitz. Meet Kesha Rogers, winner of the Democratic primary for Tom DeLay’s old US Senate seat in Texas’ 22nd district. While South Carolina Dems are still baffled about how to deal with Alvin Greene, their Texas counterparts are rushing to disavow Rogers,Time reports.
Rogers, a 33-year-old Lyndon LaRouche Youth Movement activist, campaigned on the slogan “Save NASA. Impeach Obama.” She won 53% of the primary vote in an aerospace-industry-heavy district that includes the NASA Johnson Space Center. The state party has denied any support for her. “I can’t explain the result,” a Houston Dem said. “Stuff just happens sometimes, especially in races where not much attention is being paid.” “I don’t think the Democratic Party leadership is getting it,” Rogers countered. “The people continue to see more and more economic devastation and they don’t see any real leadership.”
Beginning to think about starting a scientific study on whether radiation from cell phones is driving Americans batshit crazy.
In Texas, Charter school teachers are not required to be certified – they are not even required to have any education above High School. Indeed, regulation of Charter schools is so loose in Texas – the only surprise is incidents like this don’t happen daily.
Worse – Janiqua Johnson and other witnesses told KHOU that four or five school employees were present in the classroom. The students claimed they felt intimidated by some teachers after the video became public. The beating took place 2 weeks ago – and the school apparently did nothing until the video became public, despite – as can be seen on the video numerous witnesses.
13 Year Old Isaiah Reagins’ family says the boy suffered a black eye and other bruises.
Sheri Lynn Davis, who was fired on Monday night as a science teacher at Jamie’s House Charter School, a centre for children with disciplinary issues in Houston, Texas, was not required to be certified, the Houston Chronicle reported. Texas law requires charter schools to hire certified teachers only in areas of bilingual and special education.
After her firing, it was learned Davis had a warrant out for her arrest since March 2009, according to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. The D.A’s office said Davis was accused of slashing a woman’s car tires, all four of them, and she was wanted on a “criminal mischief” charge.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Texas City Revives Paddling In The Classroom
In an era when students talk back to teachers, skip class and wear ever-more-risque clothing to school, one central Texas city has hit upon a deceptively simple solution: Bring back the paddle.
Most school districts across the country banned paddling of students long ago. Texas sat that trend out. Nearly a quarter of the estimated 225,000 students who received corporal punishment nationwide in 2006, the latest figures available, were from the Lone Star State.
But even by Texas standards, Temple is unusual. The city, a compact railroad hub of 60,000 people, banned the practice and then revived it at the demand of parents who longed for the orderly schools of yesteryear. Without paddling, “there were no consequences for kids,” said Steve Wright, who runs a construction business and is Temple’s school board president.
Since paddling was brought back to the city’s 14 schools by a unanimous board vote in May, behavior at Temple’s single high school has changed dramatically, Wright said, even though only one student in the school system has been paddled.
“The discipline problem is much better than it’s been in years,” Wright said, something he attributed to the new punishment and to other discipline programs schools are trying. Residents of the city’s comfortable homes, most of which sport neighborly, worn chairs out front, praise the change.
Some countries, most notably Singapore utilize corporal punishment which may be utilized in lieu of jail time for certain minor crimes, and as a sentence “accelerator” for serious crimes. If tightly regulated and controlled – it seems a much better alternative than imprisonment – especially for younger offenders.
Temple’s system requires both the approval of the parents, and the approval of the student, in that paddling is offered as an alternative to suspension. With the “super-sizing” of kids in this country by fast food – I wonder if the old Military System of 20 push-ups, or a jog or two around the track might be more advantageous…
One of the features of the rise of the Tea Bagged nation and other extremist right wing groups facilitated by Faux News commentary – is the permissive atmosphere generated for racism.
Segregated Schools, segregated proms, racial attacks, and racial intimidation still continue to be prominet fixtures in the most conservative regions of our country, the so called “Red Zone”.
Conservative and Republican politicians freely associate with extremist groups, including Hate Groups.
So it isn’t any real surprise that in America, 40 years after the passage of Civil Rights Legislation – the racism continues…
Especially not in Texas, where conservatives have gone so far as to virtually erase the Hispanic population from the states school text books.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
First the Tea Baggers paid $100.000 to listen to some inane drivel by the Sno’ Ho’, who basically self-destructed by using her Hillbilly Palm Pilot…
Debra Medina, the Tea Party candidate for the Republican nomination to run for Governor of Texas (the Texas Gun Ho’?) blew her candidacy up this morning on the uber friendly Glenn Beck Show.
Tea Party Candidate - Texas Gun Ho', Debra Medina
Debra Medina self-destructs on Glenn Beck radio show
This candidacy will self-destruct in five seconds…
Texas Republican gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina imploded on the Glenn Beck radio program this morning when she said she didn’t have an opinion on whether the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks.
Medina, who has literally come out of nowhere to quickly become a legitimate candidate in the Republican primary, first laughed when Beck said he had received emails from listeners saying she was a “9/11 truther.”
“That’s the first time I’ve heard of that accusation,” she said, not exactly denying the charge.
Government conspiracy?
So Beck asked her straight up: “Do you believe the government was in any way involved in the bringing down of the World Trade Centers on 9/11?”
Easy answer, right? Nope.
“I think some very good questions have been raised in that regard,” Medina replied. “There are some very good arguments, and I think the American people have not seen all of the evidence there, so I have not taken a position on that.”
That answer caused a stir in the studio. Beck quickly followed up by asking her if she would disavow any of her staff if they were “9/11 truthers.”
“Well, you know, that’s a federal issue. We’re very focused on issues in Texas, on Texas state government,” she said. “I’m certainly not into mind control or thought policing people. “We’ve got a very diverse team in this state and that’s because Texans are standing shoulder to shoulder to support and defend the Constitution. I frankly don’t have time, you know, to go through and do psychological testing on people and know every thought or detail that they have.”
Buh-bye
After that, Beck politely thanked Medina for appearing on his program and dismissed her future political hopes.
“I think I can write her off the list,” he said. “Let me take another look at [candidate] Kay Bailey Hutchison, if I have to.”
“Rick, I think you and I could French kiss right now,” he said of Texas’s current governor, Rick Perry who is running for re-election.
“Wow,” Beck continued. “Wow. The fastest way back to four percent,” he said of Medina’s one-time standing in the polls. A recent survey showed her only four points behind Hutchison with 24 percent of the vote.
What I meant to say was… Read the rest of this entry »
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