When cops don't get it right, and when a presidential candidate is caught in another lie.

Some of our boys in blue across the country are really going to have to start doing a better job when it comes to some things.

Field's Exhibit A is this case from Newark New Jersey:

"On August 11, a ten-year-old in Newark, New Jersey, named Legend Preston was chased by the police....


... and he claimed that the cops had drawn their guns as they chased the child, who had been in the street retrieving a basketball, according to his mother. The Newark Police Department claimed to WABC 7 that weapons were drawn, but never pointed at the child. In the end, the family says the police did not apologize to them, even when they caught the suspect that they had been sure Preston resembled. The suspect is 20 years old with a beard and dreadlocks. Preston is 10 with a baby face and short hair.

Solomon recorded the aftermath of the incident because she “knew [she] had to get some type of documentation.” She told the New York Daily News that she thinks it’s important to always keep phones charged in case a need to document an encounter with an officer arises. The merits of recording police interactions have been a hot topic this summer, especially, in the wake of a woman livestreamingthe death of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, at the hands of police officers in Minnesota.

In their latest piece on the incident, the New York Daily News is reporting that Solomon doesn’t want an apology from the department at all. She explained that she never wanted to be an activist of any kind but now sees no other option. She said this:

What option have they given me but to speak out? I didn’t ask for any of this. My prime concern is not an apology. My concern is reform of this system. I want to see accountability and responsibility.

She also spoke with the paper about how upset she gets, even two weeks later, thinking of what could have happened to her son if he had tripped or reached for a toy as he ran.

The incident is reminiscent of what happened to Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old who was playing with a toy gun in a public park in the open-carry state of Ohio in 2014. Officers shot and killed him “one-and-a-half to two seconds” after pulling up to the park." [See video and story here]

And if you think it's only black folks catching it, you would be wrong.

Field's Exhibit B is a tragic story as well:

"Daniel Kevin Harris, 29, was shot and killed by North Carolina state trooper Jermaine Saunders Thursday after a pursuit that ended at Harris' home, authorities said.

"Daniel's death is just a shock — what is it for? It's definitely worthy, it has value, and I'm angry about it," Harris' brother, Sam Harris, who is also deaf, told mourners using sign language at a memorial service Tuesday.

"You know that night, he was driving home, he was excited, he had a new job … and he died just a few yards from home," Sam Harris said.

The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation is conducting a criminal probe into the shooting. The district attorney's office will also review the shooting.

The director of the state Department of Public Safety, which oversees the highway patrol, called the deadly shooting "tragic" but urged the public not to rush to judgment before investigations are finished.

"Any loss of life regardless of the circumstances is truly a tragic and sad event for all involved," DPS Secretary Frank L. Perry said in a statement Tuesday.

"While the Highway Patrol, the State Bureau of investigation and the District Attorney's Office conduct their respective reviews, we are keeping all those affected by this tragedy in our thoughts and prayers," he said.

The National Association of the Deaf said police need more training in dealing with the deaf and officers sometimes act aggressively when verbal commands aren't immediately followed." [Source]

Finally, speaking of the police, it turns out that Donald was caught in yet another lie about a meeting he had (in his twisted mind) with the Chicago police department.

"Earlier this week, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trumprecounted, in great detail, a conversation he says he had with a top police source in Chicago. According to the Chicago Police Department, however, that conversation never happened.

On Monday’s episode of The O’Reilly Factor, Trump explained to host Bill O’Reilly just how quickly a Trump administration could restore law and order by relating a conversation he’d had with a “top police officer”:

I went to a top police officer in Chicago, who is not the police chief, and he—I could see by the way he was dealing with his people, he was a rough, tough guy. They respected him greatly, he said. I said, ‘How do you think you do it?’ He said, ‘Mr. Trump, within one week, we could stop much of this horror show that’s going on.’

On Tuesday, the Chicago Police Department refuted Trump’s accountin a statement to the local NBC station:

“We’ve discredited this claim months ago,” CPD spokesperson Frank Giancamilli said in a statement. “No one in the senior command at CPD has ever met with Donald Trump or a member of his campaign.”

…”Beyond that, the best way to address crime is through a commitment to community policing and a commitment to stronger laws to keep illegal guns and repeat violent offenders off the street,” Giancamilli added.

Perhaps the CPD should check their visitor’s logs for an entry indicating a visit from Trump spokesman John Miller." [Source]

 

Ouch!

Yes, the man is a liar. 

But this too shall pass. Because...you know....e-mails and stuff.

*Pic from theroot.com

   

 

 

The Donald's America.

    I just watched  a video of yet another African American man being shot to death by someone who is supposed to be in a position of authority. This is becoming an all too familiar theme in our country. I bet you wouldn't have to tell the officer who executed Laquan McDonald that white lives matter.

Anyway, he is being charged with first degree murder, so it seems that we are making some progress, although it took over a year for us to be able to view the video tape. (TY Craig Futterman)

 This is the climate in which Donald Trump (and his handlers) have chosen to turn up his racist rhetoric and  let his minions loose on all those who disagree with him. So while some folks in the majority population continue to worry about Syrian refugees committing acts of terror, I will worry about the men and women who are sworn to protect us----- men and women who wear uniforms and bulletproof vests, catching a sudden case of "color arousal" at the wrong time.

Speaking of the aforementioned Mr. Trump, here is another cut and paste worthy article about his antics of late:

"We’re now on day two of the latest media controversy to engulf Donald Trump, namely his insistence that he personally saw footage that featured “thousands” of American Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. For a time, Dr. Ben Carson even backed up Trump’s delusion by claiming that he had also seen the footage, a claim that was subsequently retracted by his campaign. For two days now, the media has been parsing Trump’s claim, which he now supports with an unsourced paragraph in an old Washington Post article that describes “law enforcement authorities” questioning people who were “allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops.”

The controversy is obviously a big deal to the media, and even has some predicting that this could be the thing that finally puts a dent in Trump’s poll numbers. On Tuesday’s Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski predicted that this could really hurt Trump:

'This is what could really hurt Trump. I mean if — he’s got to be smart and strong and correct, and if he’s not correct, when push comes to shove people will coalesce around a different candidate.'

This is hilarious on so many levels, starting with the notion that being “correct” means anything to Republican voters, who lap up GOP candidates’ weird fantasies like kittens with a saucer of milk. In this case, though, the media is blinding itself to the fact that Trump’s claim has more then enough truthiness to give him the cover he needs.

That old WaPo report, it has to be said, is pure bullshit. The reporters who wrote it have since said that they were unable to verify the allegation, but no one has questioned them on where it came from in the first place. Based on the lack of attribution, the only possibilities are that it was from some law enforcement source who insisted on deep background attribution (not likely given the broad nature of the claim), or it was from residents and/or local political figures who claimed knowledge of the incidents.

 

In any case, in the weeks following the attacks, literally everyone I ran into in New Jersey had a story about how they had personally seen the FBI or the cops raid their local convenience store/gas station/other business that happened to be owned by brown people, and that they knew for a fact the people scooped up in the raid had been plotting against America. People were scared shitless, and talking out of their asses.

For some reason, though, none of the coverage of Trump’s remarks has included the footage that Trump was probably talking about, footage that every American either saw or heard about that day and was deeply traumatized by. While still reeling from the tragedy, Fox News viewers got to see this footage of Palestinians allegedly celebrating the attacks:

Appearing when it did, this footage gave many Americans a distorted view of Muslim reaction to the attacks, which was, in fact, widespread condemnation. It is perhaps out of concern for this sort of distorted impression that media outlets are now reluctant to replay that footage, but it bears direct relevance to the political price Trump will pay for his current campaign of lies. To the Americans who matter to Trump, the resentful Republican base and low-information independents, Trump’s conflation of this footage with that unsourced WaPo report will be seen as a forgivable transgression at worst, and at best, something that feels true.

What I find even more bizarre about this current controversy is the immense gulf between coverage of Trump’s bogus 9/11 memories and the balls-out anti-black racism he displayed almost simultaneously. There may or may not have been people celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11, but the racist tweet Trump sent out this weekend was definitively a lie, definitively racist, and yet became a one-day footnote to the 9/11 story.

 

Some have correctly expressed concern that Trump’s 9/11 story could lead to violence against Muslims, but his supporters’ anti-black sentiments have already led to violence against at least one black man. Tweeting that black people are doing all of the murdering would seem to be at least as problematic, and orders of magnitude more racist, yet it has been treated as a sideline. Only Bill O’Reilly has managed to press Trump about it, and even then, it was only to warn him that it might give people an excuse to falsely believe that racism is even a thing.

To her credit, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow became one of the very few media figures who has even been willing to use the word “racist” to describe Trump’s tweet on Monday night’s show, but even that was a small part of an 18-minute segment on the 9/11 story. The rest of the media is apparently allergic to calling Trump’s tweet “racist” and a “lie” in equal measure, instead often referring to the completely fabricated statistics from a made-up source “questionable.” No, people, “slugging percentage” and “QB rating” are questionable statistics, these are lies.

As outrageous as Trump’s lies are, I find the media’s treatment of them even more of an outrage, because Trump has no duty to serve the public. Apparently, the media doesn’t think it does, either, or at least not that segment of the public." [Article]


*Pic from chicagotribune.com taken by Zbigniew Bzdak



  

Why are white men angry?

The Field Negro education series continues.

"Hillary Clinton’s entry into the race for the presidency has goosed the egos of some conservative ganders.

 

Wayne LaPierre, the C.E.O. and executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, on the eve of Clinton’s announcement said of President Obama at the group’s annual meeting, “when he’s finished, he intends to go out with the coronation of Hillary Rodham Clinton.” There were boos. LaPierre continued: “Yeah, I have to tell you, eight years of one demographically symbolic president is enough.” There were cheers.

 

Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly ratcheted up the rhetoric on Monday. With the words “HILLARY CLINTON FOR PRESIDENT” in yellow and all-caps next to his face, he bemoaned the idea that “our traditional American values are under siege nearly everywhere,” and then added: “If you’re a Christian or a white man in the U.S.A., it’s open season on you. Therefore, Hillary Clinton has an advantage.”

 

In a way, one would expect nothing more from these men. They are simply playing to their bases.

As U.S. News and World Report put it in 2013 when noting a Pew Research Center report: “White men represent just a third of the U.S. population, but about 60 percent of adults with guns in America today are white men.”

 

And as for Fox, the website Mediaite reported in December that just 1 percent of Fox News viewers are black.

 

And yet, this faux oppression makes a mockery of very real oppression. Aside from the hilarity of the incongruous spectacle of two incredibly powerful white men grousing about the lowly plight of white men in general is the utter ridiculousness of the idea itself.

 

And unfortunately, this isn’t a new idea, but the resurrection — or elongation — of an existing one.

In 2012, the conservative commentator Matt K. Lewis wrote an entry on The Daily Caller under the headline “The silent war on noncollege-educated white men.”

 

That same year, the conservative blog RedState.com published an essay under the headline, “The Democrat War on White Men.” It included lines like “Democrats hate White Men” (capitalization theirs), “White Men in unions are tolerated and helped by Democrats — but only if they fall in line to punish other White Men” and “White Men were politically neutered and forgotten about.”

 

Suzanne Venker wrote an opinion piece in 2013 on FoxNews.com under the headline “Men — the new second class citizens.” She included the following passage:

 

“Yet it is males who suffer in our society. From boyhood through adulthood, the White American Male must fight his way through a litany of taunts, assumptions and grievances about his very existence. His oppression is unlike anything American women have faced.”

 

In August, Representative Mo Brooks, a Republican of Alabama, said on Laura Ingraham’s radio show that there is a “war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party.”

 

One thing that makes this line of reasoning so grating is the degree to which money and power in this country continue to be dominated by white men. As The Guardian reported in 2013, the “U.S.’s top-paid executives in 2012 represent technology, coffee, and sporting goods companies — and all are white and male.”

 

ThinkProgress, expanding on the report, explained:

 

“A big part of the lack in diversity on the list is the lack of diversity among executives overall. Women hold few of the top jobs at major companies. There are now 22 at the helm of Fortune 500 companies with Lynn Good’s appointment as CEO of Duke Energy in July, which means less than 5 percent of those positions are filled by women.

 

“Top executives are also not racially diverse. Among Fortune 500 CEOs, six are black, making up just 1.2 percent. There are eight Latino and eight Asian CEOs, accounting for just 1.6 percent each.

“But even when they reach the highest rungs, women are still paid less than their peers.”

"...the new Congress is 80 percent white, 80 percent male and 92 percent Christian.”

So much for white Christian men being under attack."

 

So much indeed. [Read entire article]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Suitgate, and Bill O'Reilly's Negro jones keeps getting stronger.

You know we have some issues as a country when we obsess over a president's suit and not what he is actually talking about at a press conference.


For the record, I moved past clothes pony to clothes horse status a long time ago. I am very much in touch with my sartorial side. Therefore I believe that I am more than qualified to comment on the president's suit.


In my not so humble opinion, the color is fine. The suit  itself could use a little more tailoring (he is a slender man), but he is the president, not a GQ model.


Had he worn that suit at a press conference next week sometime it might have been a different story, but Labor Day has not yet arrived, so it's all good. The tie, on the other hand, well...


But look at me; I am embarrassed to say that I am doing the exact same thing that I accused a fickle American public of doing.


But hey, I am not a United States Congressman.

"The overload of coverage over Barack Obama‘s tan suit has led to some unexpected consequences: Rep. Peter King (R-NY), called into The Steve Malzberg Show to rage about how “trivial” the summer suit was.


Summer suits, according to Rep. King, are not appropriate garb for talking about terrorism or ISIS, and especially when the President says he doesn’t have a strategy to deal with the resurgence of terrorism.


“For him to walk out — I’m not trying to be trivial here — in a light suit, light tan suit, saying that first he wants to talk about what most Americans care about the revision of second quarter numbers on the economy,” he seethed.


“This is a week after Jim Foley was beheaded and he’s trying to act like real Americans care about the economy, not about ISIS and not about terrorism. And then he goes on to say he has no strategy.”


Yes, how dare he talk about the economy and not some dude with a James Bond accent cutting off Jim Foley's head?


Well, with all due respect to the family of Jim Foley, maybe because most Americans care more about what is going on in their homes and putting food on their table than the horrific acts of terrorists on the other side of the world.


And how dare he talk about ISIS in a tan suit? *shaking head*


Honestly, the last person I would ever listen to when it comes to fashion is an old white republican.


I am pretty sure Barack Obama feels the same way.


Besides, Mr. King and others in his gang worshiped a man who always wore lighter colored suits. Heck, he even wore one to meet the pope.


Speaking of old white men, over at FOX VIEWS Bill O'Reilly's Negro obsession continues.


"In his latest print column, Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly says Michael Brown‘s affinity for rap music may have led him astray and influenced him to have a negative attitude toward police.


Brown is the black 18-year-old who was unarmed in Ferguson, Mo., when he was shot dead by a white police officer in early August. Brown was reportedly a fan of rap music and wrote some of his own rap lyrics.


“Michael Brown rapped about violence, smoking weed, making big money, and having sex with ‘hos,’” O’Reilly wrote. “[T]hat does not automatically mean he was a thug. Far worse, it shows that he was not all that different from so many other young men who are stewing in a pernicious culture that glorifies violence and misogyny.”


O’Reilly says in the op-ed that for “suburban” kids, rap music is usually a mere distraction. “But to young men with no fathers, no guidance, no structure, and very little hope, the thug life depicted in the music is a siren song.”The column then turns to criticism of President Barack Obama and the first lady for promoting what O’Reilly sees as similar entertainment:

So the President and First Lady honor a dubious “poet,” [Common] invite a foul-mouth rapper [Big Sean] to “sing” as part of an Easter celebration, and regularly pal around with Beyoncé and Jay-Z. That’s when Beyoncé isn’t slithering salaciously and Jay-Z isn’t talkin’ ’bout some bitches. The First Family sets a stellar example for young blacks in many ways, but they seem to have a blind spot when it comes to popular culture.

“Rap music didn’t kill him, a policeman’s bullets did,” O’Reilly concludes. “But who knows whether his attitude towards cops, shaped by violent music, played some role in any possible confrontation?”


So not only does the president wear the wrong color suit, he causes the killing of a Missouri teen at the hands of a policeman as well.


I think I would rather follow the example of a solid family man and father over some dirt bag who has all kinds of issues with his own family life, and who is a serial sexual predator in his work place.


But hey, that's just me.















 

"White Girl Bleed a Lot". And so do black boys.

"One of the reasons for being glad to be as old as I am is that I may be spared living to see a race war in America. Race wars are often wars in which nobody wins and everybody ends up much worse off than they were before.

Initial skirmishes in that race war have already begun, and have in fact been going on for some years. But public officials pretend that it is not happening, and the mainstream media seldom publish it at all, except in ways that conceal what is really taking place.

For American society, a dangerous polarization has set in. Signs of this polarization over the years include opposite reactions between blacks and whites to the verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder case, the “rape” charges against Duke University students, and the trials resulting from the beating of Rodney King and the death of Trayvon Martin.

More dangerous than these highly publicized episodes over the years are innumerable organized and unprovoked physical attacks on whites by young black gangs in shopping malls, on beaches, and in other public places all across the country today.

While some of these attacks make it into the media as isolated incidents, the nationwide pattern of organized black-on-white attacks by thugs remains invisible in the mainstream media, with the notable exception of Bill O’Reilly on the Fox News Channel.

Even when these attacks are accompanied by shouts of anti-white rhetoric and exultant laughter at the carnage, the racial makeup of the attackers and their victims is usually ignored by the media, and public officials often deny that race has anything to do with what happened.

These attacks have sent many people to the hospital, and some victims have died, but the attacks are often carried out in a festive atmosphere. What are called “troubled youths,” in this and other contexts, are often in fact young people enjoying themselves greatly by creating big trouble for others.
Some of these many attacks are covered in detail in a book titled White Girl Bleed a Lot, by Colin Flaherty. It was a phrase that I recognized immediately from my own previous research.

That phrase was uttered by one of a group of black attackers who descended on a group of whites at a July 4th fireworks show in Milwaukee. But what happened there was not unique, either in itself or in the efforts of police and political authorities to downplay what happened — and to say that race had nothing to do with it.

When the Chicago Tribune was criticized for editing out the race of the attackers in a series of similar organized attacks in Chicago, it replied that race was irrelevant. Yet race is not considered irrelevant when indignantly editorializing on a disproportionate number of young black males arrested and imprisoned.
Sadly, what happened in Milwaukee and Chicago were not isolated incidents. They were part of a pattern repeated in dozens of cities, in every region of the country. Colin Flaherty’s book, which is subtitled “The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It,” reveals this pattern in painful detail.
Other books are emerging that are more clearly a white backlash, in the sense that they attack behavior patterns among contemporary blacks in general.

Perhaps the most clearly “backlash” books are those written by Paul Kersey, whose central theme is that whites have created thriving cities, which blacks subsequently took over and ruined. Examples include his books about Birmingham (The Tragic City) and Detroit (Escape from Detroit).

Kersey even takes a swing at Rush Limbaugh (and at yours truly) for saying that liberal policies destroyed these cities. He says that San Francisco and other cities with liberal policies, but without black demographic and political takeovers, have not been ruined. His books are poorly written, but they raise tough questions.

It would be easy to simply dismiss Kersey as a racist. But denouncing him or ignoring him is not refuting him. Refuting requires thought, which has largely been replaced by fashionable buzzwords and catchphrases when it comes to discussions of race.

Thought is long overdue. So is honesty." [Source]

That was Thomas Sowell, writing about, and apologizing, for black on white people. He did so under the guise of reviewing a book called "White Girls Bleed a Lot" written by a man named Colin Flaherty. (Mr. Flaherty recently sent me an e-mail asking me to promote his book. I am a sucker, because with this article it seems that I am doing just that.) 

I call bull s**t.

Unfortunately, America is a violent place, people are going to be violent towards each other. And, sadly, it is usually people of the same race (and family) committing acts of violence against each other. To try and make it look as if black folks have suddenly become violent towards only white people is ludicrous and disingenuous. It's fear mongering and demagoguery to make a point: That blacks are violent sub human predators. (I wonder if Thomas Sowell looked in the mirror lately.)

Here is the deal, no matter how violent some young black punks act and wild out towards groups of white people--or a single white individual, it will never make up for all the violence that was practiced against people of color throughout this nation's history. So spare me the isolated (and high profile) incidents of horror.

There have been over 200 murders in Philly this year, and I am quite sure that I can count the cases of black on white murders on one hand.

Thomas Sowell and Paul Kersey are one and the same. The tragedy is that Sowell doesn't even realize it. Or, even sadder, maybe he does.
 

Not all "thugs" are created equal.

Oh, so I get it, if you are an old white male "thug" you earn millions, but if you are a young black male "thug" you get shot to death by an out of control vigilante. Nice. Only in America.

"Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly appeared on CBS’ 60 Minutes on Sunday night to discuss his latest book, Killing Jesus. O’Reilly opened up about his show preparation, his media empire, and how he has matured since his youth. “I was a little thug, and now I’m being paid millions of dollars for being a big thug,” the Fox host said of his youth" [Source]

Anywhoo, we are almost 24 hours into our government shutdown, and  the gangs on both sides are digging in. Let the battle of the talking points begin.

I know that most of you reading this haven't felt it yet, but my fear is that we will feel it in unspeakable ways down the line. Our national security is at stake. The safety of our air travel will be jeopardized and the lives of poor children will be disrupted.

Michele Bachmann can kiss a million veterans in a DC national park, it won't change the fact that her party is responsible for the park -and others like it- being closed.

"Officials said roughly 800,000 federal employees would be affected by the shutdown after a half-day on the job Tuesday to fill out time cards, put new messages on their voice mail and similar chores.

Among those workers were some at the National Institute of Health’s famed hospital of last resort, where officials said no new patients would be admitted for the duration of the shutdown. Dr. Francis Collins, agency director, estimated that each week the shutdown lasts will force the facility to turn away about 200 patients, 30 of them children, who want to enroll in studies of experimental treatments. Patients already at the hospital are permitted to stay." [Source]

I bet Michele won't be kissing any of them.