Terence Crutcher did not plant any bombs.

 I am glad that law enforcement caught caught that maniac who was making and planting bombs in New York and New Jersey. We can rest a little easier as a nation now that one less depraved lunatic is off the street.

Having said that, I find it ironic that law enforcement  was able to shoot and take down a terrorist who attempted to cause mass destruction and carnage without actually killing him, while police officers in Tulsa, Oklahoma killed an innocent man who actually had his hands raised.

"Video footage released Monday showed Tulsa police shooting an unarmed man to death on Friday night after he approached his SUV with his arms raised.

In footage filmed from a police helicopter, Terence Crutcher, 40, can be seen slowly walking from the edge of a street north of Tulsa toward his vehicle, which authorities said had been reported abandoned at 7:36 p.m. (8:36 p.m. ET) and left running in the middle of the road.

For several seconds, an officer follows Crutcher from behind with a gun trained on him. Three more officers then converge on the scene as Crutcher lowers his hands and approaches his SUV. While standing beside the driver's side door, he suddenly drops to the street. Moments later, blood can be seen saturating his white t-shirt.

The Tulsa Police Department also released dash-cam video of the incident.

During a news conference Monday, Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan said that Officer Tyler Turnbough tasered Crutcher, and a second officer, Betty Shelby, fired at him after telling a dispatcher "that she's not having cooperation from" Crutcher.

Citing an ongoing investigating, Jordan declined to provide additional details, though he said that no weapon was found on Crutcher or in his SUV. Jordan, who called the footage "disturbing," said that he asked the Justice Department to review the case.

"I will make this promise to you, we will achieve justice," he said.

Shelby, who was hired in 2011, was placed on routine administrative leave with pay.

During a news conference Monday, a Crutcher family lawyer, Melvin C. Hall, said that Crutcher was only having problems with his SUV before he was shot to death. "They treated him like a criminal," added a second lawyer, Benjamin Crump. "They treated him like a suspect. They did not treat him like somebody in distress who needed help. Instead of giving him a hand, they gave him bullets."
Crutcher's twin sister, Tiffany, described him as a brother and father who was enrolled in Tulsa Community College and loved singing at church.

And she criticized one of the officers in the chopper who can be heard telling a second officer aboard that Crutcher looks like "a big bad dude."

"That big bad dude — his life mattered," she said." [Source]

Of course his life matters, but when we remind people of that we are told that "all lives matter," and that we shouldn't just single out the blacks ones.

Still, when you see what happened to Terence Crutcher, you have to wonder if some folks in law enforcement got the all lives matter memo.

And folks, if you are having a  Déjà vu  kind of feeling after reading this article, your instincts are not failing you.

"A jury found a sheriff's deputy guilty of second-degree manslaughter Wednesday in the fatal shooting of an unarmed suspect.

Robert Bates, who was a volunteer reserve sheriff deputy for the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office last year at the time of the shooting, never denied shooting Eric Courtney Harris.

Bates, 74, said he meant to use his Taser stun gun, not his revolver, on the suspect, who had been tackled by other deputies and was being held on the ground." [Source]

We will soon be getting that feeling again, because sadly, some lives still matter more than others. Even the lives of terrorists.   

*Pic from rawstory.com

Racism on a bus.

A friend of mine sent me this incredible link of a town hall meeting on race in South Africa, and I think that it should be watched by every American.

We don't like to hear this, but America, like South Africa, has some issues when it comes to race.

I know that it's 2015, but if we are going to be honest with ourselves we will acknowledge that not much has changed in the hearts of many of our fellow brothers and sisters since the days that racial ignorance was more overt.

 Americans like to think that we have grown beyond such things as judging others by their skin color, but news report after news report shows us that we have not. But  we still like to point to others whenever they make a public pronouncement of what we are thinking privately. And when we do find the dumb culprit who dares to embarrass the rest of us, our public condemnation of them is often swift.

The latest case of racial shaming comes to us from Oklahoma.

We all know by now the story of the two frat boys on the bus who openly sang about hanging Niggers to anyone who would listen, and no one seemed to even notice or batted an eye.  

The culprits have been exposed and summarily kicked out of school. (I am not even sure that the actions taken by the OU president passes constitutional muster, but we will see.) I personally take no joy in seeing that. These two frat boys represent what happens when we ignore racism and allow society to shape and mold testosterone filled bigots. Move on, there is nothing to see here.

I am not sure why we are even surprised. We are talking about a racist fraternity founded by racists in the South.  And SAE is not alone. There are a lot of Sigma Alpha Epsilons on college campuses all over America.

"How could this happen in 2015? I’d say the early history of SAE is very instructive on this point. This fraternity brags on its website that it was started in 1856 in the “Deep South.” (I can’t help but think racial dog whistle when I see that term, given the SAE’s founders’ ties to the Confederacy.) And SAE was at one time was a whites only fraternity as noted in its 1903 “book of rituals” that limited membership to “members of the Caucasian race”. Keep in mind that the students on the bus were heading, per media reports, to a Founders Day event to celebrate very white men who gave us these policies.
And this is not the only racist event featuring SAE. It’s merely the first incident to attract national headlines. Just three months ago, the Clemson University chapter was suspended after white students held a “Cripmas” party (“Cripmas” being a weird and really not remotely funny combination of Crips and Christmas) where they dressed in bandannas, Tupac T-shirts and sported fake “thug” tattoos.” And an SAE chapter at Washington University in St. Louis was suspended in 2013 after members sang racial slurs to African-American students pledging the fraternity."


All par for the course as far as I am concerned.  College campuses are where we train and educate our future leaders. 

This is how we train them to maintain the status quo.


They just have to be more careful while training in the future.







  

The Apartheid president.

Congrats to The Butler for being the number one movie at the box office this past weekend. As I wrote earlier, it was destined to be a hit. I won't be seeing it, but apparently conservatives have been watching it and they don't like what they see.

"Ronald Reagan biographer Craig Shirley appeared on Fox News Monday afternoon to criticize Lee Daniels’ The Butler an Oprah Winfrey-produced biopic of the White House butler who served under numerous presidents, a film that is drawing heat from conservatives over its portrayal of Reagan.

Most objectionable to Shirley and others is the film’s take on Reagan’s refusal to sanction South Africa over Apartheid. “It’s a very complex issue, and it was presented in a very simplistic fashion,” Shirley said. “It’s accurate to the extent that Reagan opposed the sanctions, but not accurate as to why he opposed the sanctions.”

Shirley argued that Reagan was constrained by Cold War politics". [Source]

This is classic conservative speak. Rather than acknowledge that they were on the wrong side of history; they try to rewrite it.

Seriously, what could have been so "complex" about Apartheid? Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the conservative movement, is the same guy who chose Philadelphia, Mississippi- a place where three civil rights activists were murdered- to give a speech on states rights, disparaged America's greatest African American hero, and tried to appeal to bigots in his base when he tried to paint African American women as "welfare Queens."

Nope, there was nothing "complex" about Apartheid. It was a racist policy("state sanctioned segregation") put in place by a racist government to hold down blacks in that country. Reagan knew that and he supported it. It's really that simple.

Finally, there is sad story out of Oklahoma. Three young thugs shot some poor dude from Australia to death just for fun and because they could. In case you Aussies didn't know, that's how we roll here in A-murder-ca. It's all about the guns.

There were a couple of killings last night in Philly as well, and three more in a little town 20 minutes from here called Chester. Just another typical summer night in Killadelphia.

Conservative radio and wingnuts in general are playing up the racial angle of the killing in Oklahoma, and there are even calls to label it a hate crime. Some idiot named Mike Gallagher was ranting on the radio about a white march for justice and a movement led by white people for this Aussie baseball player like there was for Trayvon Martin.

Not quite. Maybe, like Zimmerman, they thought that they could just kill someone and get away with it. But, unlike Zimmerman, they were all immediately arrested ---as they should have been--- and will be tried as adults for their alleged crime.

But still, I will be willing to march for justice with my white brothers and sisters, as long as we march against the NRA and their enablers as well.