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What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White

What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White

Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.


This video clearly demonstrates how racist America is as a country and how far we have to go to become a country that is civilized and actually values equal justice. We must not rest until this goal is achieved. I do not want my great grandchildren to live in a country like we have today. I wish for them to live in a country where differences of race and culture are not ignored but valued as a part of what makes America great.

Monday, February 29, 2016

Is #MSNBCSoWhite? The departure of Melissa Harris-Perry raises the issue - The Washington Post

MSNBC spent about six years building itself into a different kind of cable-news network, with a diverse cast of hosts, anchors and contributors. It has taken a matter of months for people to call that image into question.
The network on Saturday dropped host Melissa Harris-Perry after she walked off her program to protest a series of preemptions because of campaign coverage. Harris-Perry, an African American intellectual, effectively sealed her fate by issuing an email to her colleagues that implied the network had mistreated her because of her race.


Is #MSNBCSoWhite? The departure of Melissa Harris-Perry raises the issue - The Washington Post

After Tense Weeks, Melissa Harris-Perry’s MSNBC Show Is Canceled - The New York Times

I am disgusted and I have had it with MSNBC. Once again the Sisyphean nature of racial progress and the dominance of white privilege manifests itself in America,   "It all began to unravel for Melissa Harris-Perry four weeks ago.



It was a day before the Iowa caucuses, and despite being in Des Moines, she was not hosting the weekend show on MSNBC that bears her name. That privilege belonged to the network’s legal correspondent, Ari Melber, who quickly introduced her in a split-screen at the beginning of the show.



“It’s a very exciting day here in the ‘Place for Politics,’ ” he said, referring to MSNBC’s slogan. “We are going to get to Melissa, who everyone can see there live in Iowa, in just a second.”



Ms. Harris-Perry vanished from the screen and Mr. Melber added, “That’s what we call proof of life.”



Mr. Melber was joking but the phrasing turned out to be eerily prescient when it came to how Ms. Harris-Perry felt she was treated by the network in the following weeks.



Two days after an email became public in which Ms. Harris-Perry said she felt “worthless” to NBC News executives, and after two weeks of her show being pre-empted so that the network could cover other news, an MSNBC spokesman on Sunday confirmed that the network and Ms. Harris-Perry were “parting ways.”



After Tense Weeks, Melissa Harris-Perry’s MSNBC Show Is Canceled - The New York Times

Sunday, February 28, 2016

Florida students face criminal charges for putting pepper in teacher's drink | US news | The Guardian

Three 12-year-old girls in Florida are facing criminal charges after they allegedly poured red pepper into a middle school teacher’s soft drink.
The girls were arrested on Friday night, according to the Daytona Beach News-Journal, after their teacher at Deltona Middle School in central Florida complained to police.
Volusia County sheriff’s spokesman Gary Davidson says one of the girls was angry because their teacher, 52-year-old Jayne Morgan, had disciplined her Monday for dumping glue into another student’s backpack. The next day, the student brought crushed red pepper from her home and grabbed Morgan’s open can of soda off the teacher’s desk.
Davidson said that an investigation revealed two other girls were involved. One distracted Morgan while a second girl poured the pepper into the can, and then placed it back on the teacher’s desk.
When Morgan took a drink, she began choking and experienced shortness of breath, and later said she experienced a sore throat and stomach pains. She discovered the pepper flakes when she poured the soda into a clear cup.
According to local news station WPBF, the students will go to Volusia Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Daytona Beach. Two girls were charged with felony offenses of tampering with a consumer product and poisoning, and the third was charged with tampering with a product and being a principal to poisoning food or water.
The teacher also believes one of the girls may have stolen a laptop, WPBF reported. The teacher chose to press charges, a school spokesperson told the Orlando Sentinel.
“It should be noted this act was done in retaliation for the teacher upholding her duties and responsibilities as a teacher, maintaining control of her classroom and attempting to protect the other children from [the disciplined student’s] unacceptable behavior,” the sheriff’s department wrote in affidavits obtained by Florida Today.
Florida students face criminal charges for putting pepper in teacher's drink | US news | The Guardian

Saturday, February 27, 2016

Apple vs FBI encryption debate

San Bernardino Police Chief Sees Chance Nothing Of Value On Shooter's iPhone : NPR



In Republican Debate, a Feisty Marco Rubio Lays Into Donald Trump - The New York Times

Clinton regrets 1996 remark on ‘super-predators’ after encounter with activist - The Washington Post

This is weak but we must confront all politicians about what they do and say about life.  With politicians you often have to be "rude" or they will ignore you.



"In a written response to The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart on the issue Thursday, Clinton said: “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today."



"My life’s work has been about lifting up children and young people who’ve been let down by the system or by society, kids who never got the chance they deserved," Clinton continued in the statement. "And unfortunately today, there are way too many of those kids, especially in African-American communities.  We haven’t done right by them.  We need to.  We need to end the school to prison pipeline and replace it with a cradle-to-college pipeline."



Clinton regrets 1996 remark on ‘super-predators’ after encounter with activist - The Washington Post

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Tim Cook says FBI order 'could expose people to incredible vulnerabilities' | The Verge

This is a serious legal issue and I believe Apple is on the right side of history.  Fear creates the worst laws.  Look at the Patriot Act under Bush, The 1994 Crime Bill under Clinton.  In addition you are trying to force a company to create a technology.  That raises issues under the 13th Amendment.  This is only the beginning.




ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos


Tim Cook says FBI order 'could expose people to incredible vulnerabilities' | The Verge

Why the Oscars really lack diversity In his latest Rewrite, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell discusses why he thinks the film 'Beasts of No Nation' was overlooked by the Academy Awards this year and why the Oscars lack real diversity.



The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC

Black Lives Matter protesters confront Hillary Clinton at a fundraiser In South Carolina - Black Lives Matter activists confronts Clinton with a horribly racially tinged quote when she was defending her husband's 1994 crime bill. As Michelle Alexander wrote that she does not deserve our vote. Her refusal to apologizes show she still does not deserve Black votes. In the general election she may be the lesser of two evils, but no more than that.

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Meet the 24-year-old who could change how the US handles sexual assaults

Meet the 24-year-old who could change how the US handles sexual assaults

"In what they hope will become a bipartisan bright spot, Democrats in the Senate on Tuesday introduced a sweeping new bill to guarantee and standardize certain rights for people who have experienced sexual assault.

The bill is the latest attempt to fix a system for prosecuting sex crimes that many public figures agree is broken. But where many bills focus on expanding resources for law enforcement, this is the first national proposal to focus so directly on improving legal protections for those who are sexually assaulted."

The Plan to Shut Down Gitmo - The New York Times

The Obama administration this week will begin the task of trying to persuade Congress to support its plan to shut down the prison in Guantánamo Bay before the president leaves office in January.



Republican lawmakers all too often have been reflexive and thoughtless in their opposition to closing Guantánamo, one of the most shameful chapters in America’s recent history. Closing the prison by the end of the year is feasible. It would make the United States safer, help restore America’s standing as a champion of human rights and save taxpayers millions of dollars.



The Plan to Shut Down Gitmo - The New York Times

Lack of Videos Hampers Inquiries Into Houston Police Shootings - The New York Times

Since 2005, the police have shot 268 people, 111 of them fatally, records show. The rate of shootings by police officers was higher in Houston between 2010 and 2014 than in New York or Los Angeles, and the Houston police killed more people than the Los Angeles police despite having half as many officers, according to police data. (Officers in Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, killed civilians at a higher rate than the Houston police did over that period, records show.)



Despite the troubling statistics, the Houston police have largely avoided the intensive public scrutiny directed in recent months at other large departments, including those in Chicago, Baltimore and Philadelphia. The reason, critics say, has been the lack of videotapes capturing the most questionable shootings of unarmed civilians.



Without videotaped evidence to contradict police accounts, shootings are far less likely to galvanize the public and to result in disciplinary action against the officers involved, criminologists say.



Lack of Videos Hampers Inquiries Into Houston Police Shootings - The New York Times

Friday, February 19, 2016

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution Full Film | Video | Independent Lens | PBS

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution Full Film | Video | Independent Lens | PBS: The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution sheds light on the Black Panther Party — and all its reviled, adored, misunderstood, and mythologized history.

More Harm Than Good: How Children are Unjustly Tried as Adults in New Orleans | Southern Poverty Law Center

The Orleans Parish district attorney is prosecuting children as adults in unprecedented numbers. Although nothing in the law requires Louisiana prosecutors to charge children as adults, District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro chooses to transfer children to adult court in almost every possible instance. He transfers children who have no prior delinquency record or played a minor role in the alleged crime. He transfers children who have a mental illness or developmental disability. He even transfers children accused of nonviolent offenses. Some of the children he transfers are found innocent of any crime – but only after enduring the stress and danger of the adult system.



Prosecuting children as adults is, in fact, Cannizzaro’s default practice. Between 2011 and 2015, his office has transferred more than 80 percent of cases involving 15- and 16-year-olds where there was an option to prosecute in either juvenile or adult court. Under state law, a judge has no say in these decisions. Discretion rests solely with each parish’s district attorney.



Cannizzaro has sent 200 children to adult court since assuming office in 2009, but it has not made us safer. Arrests for offenses eligible for transfer to adult court are up. Recent data also show that teenagers prosecuted in Louisiana’s juvenile justice system are less likely to reoffend than those prosecuted in the adult system. The district attorney’s practice is wrong for New Orleans’ children, their families and the community. It does more harm than good.



More Harm Than Good: How Children are Unjustly Tried as Adults in New Orleans | Southern Poverty Law Center

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Why You Should Care About Apple’s Fight With the FBI

Why You Should Care About Apple’s Fight With the FBI

Why You Should Care About Apple’s Fight With the FBI

Kate Knibbs

The FBI wants Apple’s help to investigate a terrorist attack. Apple says providing this help is the real danger. We’ve reached a boiling point in the battle between tech companies and the government over encryption. And what happens will affect anyone who uses a smartphone, including you.

After the San Bernardino shootings, the FBI seized the iPhone used by shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. The FBI has a warrant to search the phone’s contents, and because it was Farook’s work phone, the FBI also has permission from the shooter’s employer, the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, to search the device. Legally, the FBI can and should search this phone. That’s not up for debate. If the FBI gets a warrant to search a house and the people who own it say okay, there’s no ambiguity about whether it can search the house.

But if the FBI comes across a safe in that house, the warrant and permission do not mean it can force the company that manufactures the safe to create a special tool for opening its safes, especially a tool that would make other safes completely useless as secure storage. That’s the situation that Apple’s dealing with here."

Georgia to Execute Ex-Navy Crewman Travis Hittson Who Killed Fellow Sailor - NBC News

Georgia to Execute Ex-Navy Crewman Travis Hittson Who Killed Fellow Sailor - NBC News

"A former Navy crewman is set to be executed Wednesday in Georgia for killing a fellow sailor whose remains were found buried in two states.

Travis Hittson, 45, is scheduled to receive an injection of the barbiturate pentobarbital at 7 p.m. at the state prison in Jackson. He was convicted in the April 1992 killing of Conway Utterbeck.

The State Board of Pardons and Paroles, which is the only entity in Georgia authorized to commute a death sentence, rejected Hitton's request for clemency after a hearing on the matter Tuesday."

Sunday, February 14, 2016

NYTimes: Emmett Till and Tamir Rice, Sons of the Great Migration

NYTimes: Emmett Till and Tamir Rice, Sons of the Great Migration

"Eventually his case attracted lawyers who managed to place before the United States Supreme Court the question of whether it is constitutional to put to death a defendant who has erased much of his brain.

The high court, however, refused to hear Rector's case, declining to explain or expand upon its decision in Ford v. Wainwright (1986) 477 U.S. 399, in which it had determined that it was unconstitutional to execute a defendant who is insane. Rector's lawyers had urged the Court to likewise hold that it is unconstitutional to execute a defendant who is incompetent.

But in Rector v. Bryant (1991) 501 U.S. 1239, the United States Supreme Court denied cert, meaning that it declined to hear the case, because five justices were not willing to consider it. As occurs in only a decided minority of such rejected-cert cases, one justice, Thurgood Marshall, filed a dissent to the denial of cert. In that dissent, Justice Marshall wrote:

The issue in this case is not only unsettled, but is also recurring and important. The stark realities are that many death row inmates were afflicted with serious mental impairments before they committed their crimes and that many more develop such impairments during the excruciating interval between sentencing and execution. Unavoidably, then, the question whether such persons can be put to death once the deterioration of their faculties has rendered them unable even to appeal to the law or the compassion of the society that has condemned them is central to the administration of the death penalty in this Nation. I would therefore grant the petition for certiorari in order to resolve now the questions left unanswered by our decision in Ford v. Wainwright."

NYTimes: Emmett Till and Tamir Rice, Sons of the Great Migration

"Tamir Rice would become to this young century what Emmett Till was to the last. In pictures, the boys resemble each other, the same half-smiles on their full moon faces, the most widely distributed photographs of them taken from the same angle, in similar light, their clear eyes looking into the camera with the same male-child assuredness of near adolescence. They are now tragic symbols of the search for black freedom in this country."

NYTimes: Justice Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court Legacy

NYTimes: Justice Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court Legacy

"From abortion rights to marriage equality and desegregation, Justice Scalia opposed much of the social and political progress of the late 20th century and this one. He wanted to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision on women’s rights to privacy, he dissented on the decision that said anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional, and he dissented on decisions that it was unconstitutional to execute mentally disabled or teenage prisoners. He disapproved of the Miranda decision that requires police to read prisoners their rights."

Friday, February 12, 2016

Eric Garner's Daughter Endorses Bernie Sanders -- NYMag

This is huge for me. This occurred very close to where I grew up. This is the most important issue for African Americans, even if it is not number ! for white liberals. If their family members and neighbors were dying this issue would jump to the top of their list. Once again White Supremacy rears it's ugly head.



Eric Garner's Daughter Endorses Bernie Sanders -- NYMag

Saturday, February 06, 2016

How Would You Do in Supermax? The Answer May Lie with Imagination and Grit

Solitary confinement has been linked to a variety of profoundly negative psychological outcomes, including suicidal tendencies and spatial and cognitive distortions. Confinement-induced stress can shrink parts of the brain, including the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory, spatial orientation, and control of emotions. In addition to these measurable effects, prisoners often report bizarre and disturbing subjective experiences after they leave supermax. Some say the world regularly collapses in on itself. Others report they are unable to lead ordinary conversations, or think clearly for any length of time. The psychiatrist Sandra Schank2 puts it this way: “It’s a standard psychiatric concept, if you put people in isolation, they will go insane.”
Yet Perez pauses when he is asked how it felt to be confined for so long. “That’s an interesting question,” he says. “Because in a sense, you are confined, and in other senses, you’re free.” Perez says he left solitary confinement a better man than he entered it. He is now fully rehabilitated, and works for the Urban Justice Center, where he helps recently released inmates adjust to the world outside.
Perez calls himself an “anomaly,” and says he can only guess at the factors that made him succeed where so many others have failed. However he did it, what’s clear is that the process began with his own imagination.
How Would You Do in Supermax? The Answer May Lie with Imagination and Grit

Friday, February 05, 2016

Flint water crisis: Michigan officials ignored EPA warnings about toxicity | US news | The Guardian

The Environmental Protection Agency warned of an unfolding toxic water crisis in Flint but was “met with resistance” by Michigan authorities, a fiery congressional hearing into the city’s public health disaster has heard.
Expert advice was dismissed, prompting Michigan’s government to issue an apology to the people of Flint at the hearing for sidelining people who raised concerns over dangerous levels of lead in in the city’s water.
Congress was also told that flawed water testing practices, now eliminated in Flint, are happening unchecked across the US, risking a much wider public health crisis in other cities.


Flint water crisis: Michigan officials ignored EPA warnings about toxicity | US news | The Guardian

Thursday, February 04, 2016

Republican Party suddenly wants to pretend to give a damn about Latino accomplishments?

The liberal bias alarm is sounding. Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, just became the first Latino candidate to win a presidential caucus or primary, and conservatives are complaining that the mainstream media is overlooking the achievement.
"Where is the media on this, right?" Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus said Tuesday in an interview on Fox News Channel. "I mean, this is a big deal."



Republican Party suddenly wants to pretend to give a damn about Latino accomplishments?

Korean youth are sleeping out in the cold by a 'comfort woman' statue

Korean youth are sleeping out in the cold by a 'comfort woman' statue

SEOUL — Each night on a street of the South Korean capital, college students slide into their sleeping bags and hunker down for the night in subzero temperatures.




They're not homeless; they are making a statement. For more than a month, they have been sleeping rough to protest the Japanese government’s calls for the removal of a statue that memorializes thousands of Korean “comfort women” forced into prostitution by the Japanese empire.
Korean youth are sleeping out in the cold by a 'comfort woman' statue