Hip Hop Mogul Chris Lighty Commits Suicide

Ny Daily News

Hip-hop mogul Chris Lighty killed himself Thursday after a heated argument with his estranged wife in the Bronx, police sources told the Daily News. Lighty — a longtime manager who worked with the likes of 50 Cent, Busta Rhymes, Diddy, Ja Rule and Mariah Carey — walked away from the argument after declaring “I’m tired of this,” before shooting himself in the head behind his South Riverdale home about 11:30 a.m., the sources said.

Cops found Lighty, 44, the founder and chief of Violator Management, lying faceup on the basement patio in a pool of blood with a 9-mm. pistol at his side, the sources said. The shocking suicide followed a wild spat between Lighty and his 36-year-old wife, Veronica, who filed for divorce last year.

Not a Mystery Why the White Empire State Shooter Wasn't Stopped & Frisked

Newsday

The laid-off clothing designer who shot his former colleague to death outside the Empire State Building last week told his landlord he was leaving -- and not returning, police said Thursday.

Jeffrey Johnson left his keys and said he wouldn't be back after Friday, the day his former co-worker Steven Ercolino was fatally shot. Police shot and killed Johnson when he pointed a gun at them after killing Ercolino and slipping into the busy rush hour crowd on Fifth Avenue. Nine bystanders were wounded by police gunfire, ricochets and fragments. They suffered nonlife-threatening gunshot and graze wounds.

Racist GOP Freak Russell Pearce Loses Comeback Bid

Huff Post

Recalled Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce's bid for a comeback was rejected by voters in a Mesa-area district Tuesday night.

Businessman Bob Worsley defeated Pearce 56 percent to 44 percent in the GOP primary for the Repubican-leaning seat, the Arizona Republic reported. Pearce, who was recalled by voters last November following his authorship of Arizona's controversial immigration law, was seeking a return to the Senate in the newly drawn district.

Will he make a good witness? White Judge to Sue NYC Over Assault by NYPD Officer

NY Post

A state Supreme Court justice yesterday took the first steps in suing the city after being stung by the refusal of the Queens district attorney to prosecute cops who he says assaulted him.

Queens Supreme Court Justice Thomas Raffaele, 69, walked into the Kew Gardens courthouse on his day off to file the notice of claim against the city, expressing his intention to file a lawsuit for the “untruths” and “slander” he claims were reported by two transit cops to undercut criminal charges.

The judge filed the papers himself, naming the city, the officers and “other organizations” as defendants. “The untruths said by the police to the prosecutors and how I behaved are all slander,” said the judge.

Oh yeah, the forgotten Plot to Assassinate Obama and Overthrow U.S. Government from 2 days ago - Part of Rising Domestic Extremism & racial media coverage

Daily Beast 

A U.S. Army soldier’s revelation that his group, FEAR, planned terrorist attacks at home, including trying to assassinate the president, underscores the growing threat of domestic extremism—and vindicates a 2009 DHS report warning of right-wing radicals recruiting military-service people.

Stop saying "they're not racist"...

Democratic Underground

With all the gutter politics the repukes have thrown out about food stamps, saying Obama favors "European" policies, birther jokes, corporate media has said over and over that they are not racist. 

It has been on full display at the convention minus the white sheets. You've got attendees pulling obscene racist antics toward an employee of CNN. The outright maneuvering of delegates from places like the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico are getting better seats so that wide camera shots will show the lie that the Repub party consists of differing ethnicities. That's been highlighted by several news outlets. Then there is the incident of a Puerto Rican delegate was literally silenced by loud "USA" chants when she attempted to give her speech. 

Over and over, the mantra has been "they're not racist". I've heard it said so on both MSNBC and CNN. It's almost as if they're having to work hard as hell to convince America that the repuke party isn't racist. 

We know it's a lie and I think inwardly, they know it, too.  

It's past time they stop insisting the repukes are not racist.

Virginia gym denies racism claims Gabby Douglas made to Oprah

LA Times

Gabby Douglas told Oprah Winfrey in an interview that aired Sunday night that she felt bullied at her former training facility in Virginia, and wondered "Is it because I'm black?" She also described an incident in which another athlete at the gym referred to her as a slave.

Now the some people involved with Excaliber Gymnastics in Virginia Beach are stepping forward to defend the gym, its coaches and its athletes.

Isaac steers clear of direct blow on New Orleans

AP

Hurricane Isaac sidestepped New Orleans on Wednesday, sending the worst of its howling wind and heavy rain into a cluster of rural fishing villages that had few defenses against the slow-moving storm that could bring days of unending rain.

Isaac arrived exactly seven years after Hurricane Katrina and passed slightly to the west of New Orleans, where the city's fortified levee system easily handled the assault.

The city's biggest problems seemed to be downed power lines, scattered tree limbs and minor flooding. Just one person was reported killed, compared with 1,800 deaths from Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi. And police reported few problems with looting. Mayor Mitch Landrieu ordered a dusk-to-dawn curfew just to be sure.

Condi Rice Can't Name a Specific Obama Foreign Policy Failure (Because Obama is Implementing the Bush Doctrine)

Citizens for Legit Gov

Today on CBS’s morning show, former Bush administration Secretary of State and top Mitt Romney surrogate Condoleezza Rice could not offer any specific foreign policy failures made by President Obama. Romney’s allies, led by Rice and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), are expected to attack Obama on national security grounds tonight in at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. [No wonder: Obama has continued and expaned every one of Bush's foreign policies. She can't find anything wrong with them because she helped design them!]

Fox News' Gutfeld: Democratic Policies Have "Infantilized" African-Americans And "Made Them Addicted To Crappy Programs"

Media Matters

From the August 29 edition of Fox News' The Five:

Previously:

Gutfeld: Some Blacks Say They Voted For Obama "Because It Would Sound Traitorous If They Didn't"

Fox's Gutfeld: People Like Sheila Jackson Lee Are Race-Baiters While "There Should Be HBO Specials About Allen West"

Loving And Hating The "Race Card"

Yahoo News Chief Fired for saying "Mitt Romney and his wife were happy to have a party with black people drowning.”

The Griot

Yahoo News has fired its Washington bureau chief after he was caught on a microphone saying Mitt Romney and his wife were “happy to have a party with black people drowning.”

Company spokeswoman Anne Espiritu said Wednesday that David Chalian’s remark was inappropriate and does not represent Yahoo’s views. She says Yahoo is apologizing to the Republican presidential candidate and his supporters, and has reached out to the campaign to convey the message.

Chalian made the remark during a moment before Yahoo began its live coverage of the Republican convention on Tuesday evening. Yahoo is streaming coverage in association with ABC News.

The remark is an apparent reference to the Republican convention happening as Hurricane Isaac hits the Louisiana coast.

NYPD Abuses Cost New York $22 Million In Civil Rights Lawsuits

ThinkProgress

The New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program is demonstrably ineffective and damaging to police reputation. Now it comes to light that stop-and-frisk is also very expensive. The New York City taxpayers paid a total of $22.8 million to end 35 lawsuits against the NYPD worth over $100,000 each in the past year, DNAinfo reports.

The NYPD has been hit with lawsuit after lawsuit claiming police violated civil rights between July 1, 2011 and June 30, 2012. Examples include a 12-year-old girl arrested for doodling on her desk with a green erasable marker and a 38-year-old veteran who was punched and pepper-sprayed while discussing Memorial Day barbecue plans with friends on a street corner. The two plaintiffs received $115,000 and $324,000 respectively. A class-action lawsuit accusing police of illegally arresting people for loitering cost the city $15 million.

The Fraudulent Voter Fraud Game: South Carolina Voter ID Law Author Cannot Cite Single Example Of In-Person Voter Impersonation

ThinkProgress

As a federal court considers whether to reinstate a South Carolina state voter identification law — denied pre-clearance by the U.S. Department of Justice for violating the Voting Rights Act — one of the bill’s authors took the stand Monday to defend the bill. But when pressed, state Sen. George E. “Chip” Campsen III (R) acknowledged that none of the isolated examples of possible voter fraud that he could identify would have been prevented by requiring a photo identification to vote in-person.

The Associated Press reports:

[Campsen] cited examples of fraud that he took into consideration while drafting early versions of South Carolina’s law. These included vote buying, voter rolls indicating a woman who showed up at the polls had already voted, and press reports of voters being registered in both South Carolina and North Carolina. But under questioning from Justice Department attorney Anna Baldwin, Campsen, a Republican, said the examples he gave did not involve the type of fraud that requiring photo identification would address.

“None of the examples you gave in your testimony involved incidents of impersonation?” Baldwin asked.

“Correct,” Campsen answered. He also said he could not find cases of voter impersonation in South Carolina, but added that the state lacks the tools to root them out.

Last month, the Republican Attorney General of South Carolina also admitted that requiring a photo identification to vote would not actually prevent a determined voter impersonator from voting as someone else. But happily, as Campsen noted in his testimony, it almost never happens.

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SPLC Intelligence Report: Deadly Attacks Raise Specter of Vigilantism on Arizona Border

SPLC

The unsolved murders of two undocumented immigrants near Eloy, Ariz., this spring, coupled with four remarkably similar killings in the same area in 2007, have pointed to a possible vigilante campaign to murder Latino border crossers, according to the Fall 2012 issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, released today.

Mitt Romney’s Tax Mysteries: A Reading Guide

ProPublica

Last week, the website Gawker published more than 900 pages of documents from Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mitt Romney founded, and headed from 1984 until 1999. The document dump didn't reveal much about Romney's personal investments, but it added a bit more to the pressure on Romney to release more of his tax returns. Romney and his wife Ann have repeatedly rebuffed such calls. In a primary debate in January, Romney said he'd paid "all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more."

So what do we know about how he avoided that extra dollar? For an overview of the questions surrounding Romney's tax strategies, see Vanity Fair's comprehensive story “Where the Money Lives,” and this commentary from tax lawyers Edward Kleinbard and Peter Canellos. We've also rounded up the best reporting on the central controversies.

 What's Been Disclosed?

Romney has released his 2010 tax return, and an estimate of his 2011 return. (He filed for an extension this year and has said he'll release the full returns when they are finished. The deadline is Oct. 15). We also have 2010 returns for blind trusts for Romney, Ann, and their family, and the family foundation, as well as financial disclosures from his campaigns, beginning with his 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial run.

Mitt Romney said recently that he has paid “at least 13 percent” in federal income taxes each year, but the campaign won't go into more detail (for a closer look at his 13.9 percent rate in 2010, see our previous reading guide). Ironically, it was Mitt Romney's father, George, who set the precedent for the kind of comprehensive disclosure that's standard for most presidential candidates: During his 1967 bid for the Republican nomination, he released 12 years of tax returns, saying that just one or two seen in isolation could be misleading.

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Limbaugh Offers "Idea" For Hurricane Isaac: Getting Rid Of Poor Dems In Louisiana By Building Levees Out Of Money

Media Matters

From the August 28 edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show:

RUSH LIMBAUGH: Okay, folks, it's a moment of truth.  We are mere hours away now from Tropical Storm Isaac, which everybody is desperately hoping becomes a hurricane. I can't believe this. They are desperately hoping that it becomes a hurricane. It's the Democrats' wet dream that this thing hit New Orleans. So, you know me. My middle name is Solutions. I have some ideas for the Republicans. How to deal with the tropical storm, slash, hurricane hitting New Orleans. 

The first thing we do is offer to send 500 bus drivers to New Orleans, paid for by us, to make sure that the buses that were not used by the Democrat mayor during Hurricane Katrina will be used to evacuate people should it become necessary. The second thing that I think the Republicans ought to do is send bags of money instead of sand. Bags full of money to shore up the levees in New Orleans.  This would accomplish many things. A, it would show our compassion.  B, we could have Romney's five sons who CNN last night asked, "What's it like to be rich as sin," or whatever. They did.  Piers Morgan asked Romney's sons, (paraphrasing) "What's it like to be stinking rich?" So we have Romney's five sons deliver the bags of money to shore up the levees. 

Now, this will accomplish much. It will show our compassion, and it will do something else. Once we publicize that we have sent 500 bags of money -- well, whatever number of bags, bags filled with money to shore up the levees, what will happen? The poor of New Orleans will storm the levees and steal the bags, thereby putting themselves at risk for the eventual flooding that will happen once they remove the bags of money. And that way the Republicans can get rid of even more Democrats in Louisiana and shore up the state for themselves. How about those two ideas, folks? Am I not thinking or am I thinking?

Ex-Ohio Secretary of State & Current Uncle Tom, Ken Blackwell Questioned on Vote Suppression, from '04 to Wave of ID Laws

DemocracyNow

A recent study by the Brennan Center estimates that new voter ID laws could disenfranchise more than five million people across the country in November, including voters in swing states such as Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Virginia and Wisconsin. On Monday, Democracy Now! producer Mike Burke spoke with a prominent supporter of the new voter IDs laws, Ken Blackwell, vice chair of the Republican National Committee’s platform committee and the former Republican secretary of state in Ohio. In 2008, Blackwell oversaw the election process for Ohio while serving as state co-chair of the committee to re-elect George W. Bush. His role in the Ohio election, which saw George W. Bush narrowly beat John Kerry, remains controversial to this day, making him the target of over a dozen lawsuits.

Voter Intimidation Fears Grow With 'Poll Watcher' Network

ColorLines and DemocracyNow

Brentin Mock, a New Orleans-based journalist and reporting fellow with Voting Rights Watch 2012, a partnership between Colorlines.com and The Nation magazine, was a guest on Democracy Now on August 28th, 2012. His latest article is called, "How the Right's Building a 'Poll Watcher' Network for November."

Ohio Democratic officials fired for attempt to extend early voting

Citizens for Legit Gov

Two Democratic officials in Ohio, a key battleground state and huge electoral prize in the November 6 presidential election, were fired for trying to extend early voting to weekends in defiance of a state ban, officials said on Tuesday. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, issued a directive earlier this month that the hours for early in-person voting should be consistent throughout the state, where voting rules are a hot-button issue.

CLG adds --[Notice that Barack Obama is *silent* on this issue? He's fine with a RMoney victory, since their policies, with the exception of cultural issues such as abortion, are virtually the same -- slumming with Monsanto and Goldman Sachs; deploying killer drones; supporting the PATRIOT Act; implementing detention without trial; engaging in endless wars for ExxonMobil and Blackwater; slashing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to pay contractors to pretend to train police forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- etc. --LRP].  -- well the media is defintely fine with a mittens victory. 

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Suicided by Cop: Arresting Officer Reprimanded, Returns To Work after Chavis Carter Houdini Death

NewsOne

An Arkansas police officer was reprimanded for not properly searching a young man who authorities said subsequently shot himself while handcuffed in the back of a patrol car.

Jonesboro Police Chief Michael Yates said Tuesday that an internal investigation found Officer Ron Marsh did not conduct a thorough enough search of 21-year-old Chavis Carter before Carter’s July 28 shooting death.