Man with Vagina (pharrell) Caught Stealing from Marvin Gaye to Enrich White Folks

Neely Fuller on the Radio: "There is No Such thing as Part White. You're either white or you're not."

Farrakhan: ‘Israelis and Zionist Jews’ played key roles in 9/11 attacks

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Greg Palast: From White Sheets to Spreadsheets

GregPalast.com

I hate to spoil a happy ending.

The movie “Selma,” like this week’s commemorations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s march from Selma, Ala., 50 years ago, celebrates America’s giant leap from apartheid.

Half a century ago Alabama state troopers and a mob of racist thugs beat African-Americans and others as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, demanding no more than the right to vote. By the time King led 25,000 demonstrators singing “We Shall Overcome” into Montgomery, the state capital, on March 24, the president of the United States had introduced the Voting Rights Act. Free at last—to vote. Roll credits.

Yet, just a few months ago, Martin Luther King asked me, “How long until African-American citizens of Alabama—and Mississippi and Georgia—get the unimpeded right to vote?”

Obviously I was not speaking with King Jr.—a bullet stole him from us in 1968. The question was posed by his son, Martin Luther King III. I spent an afternoon at his home in Atlanta, where we pored over the latest evidence that Americans of color were blocked at the doors to the polls in the 2014 midterm elections—by the hundreds of thousands.

As King’s 6-year-old daughter serenaded us with her toy drum set, we dived into a massive, secretive database used by elections officials—almost all of them Republicans—in 28 states. The scheme, called “Interstate Crosscheck,” threatens to disqualify the ballots of over a million voters, overwhelmingly citizens of color.

It took six months for my investigations team, in coordination with Al-Jazeera America, to get its hands on the names of those tagged for the voting rights slaughter.

According to the GOP officials, these citizens had voted twice in the same election, in two different states—a federal crime. As punishment, their mail-in ballots would be junked and their registrations annulled. But no reporters had seen (or, for that matter, asked for) the lists. State officials, the modern-day equivalents of Bull Connor, refused our requests on grounds that these Americans were all suspects in a criminal investigation and therefore the files were confidential.

Nevertheless, we managed to get hunks of the lists—2.1 million names of a total 3.5 million “suspected double voters.”

Who are these criminal voters? A typical example: Kevin Antonio Hayes of Durham, N.C., allegedly voted a second time in Virginia as Kevin Thomas Hayes. The Durham Hayes, however, swears to me that he has never used the alias Thomas or set foot in Virginia. Another: James Elmer Barnes Jr. of Georgia allegedly voted a second time as James Cross Barnes III of Arlington, VA.

The lists go on like that: huge numbers accused solely on the basis of sharing a first and last name with a voter in another state.

It is clear what attracts Republican Katherine Harris wannabes to this absurd method of

identifying fraudulent voters. The prevalence of name-sharing among black Americans is a legacy of slavery. The “Crosscheck” name-match game is also a darn good way of knocking off Hispanic voters. (According to the national census, at least 91.5 percent of Americans named Aguirre are Hispanic and, according to Gallup, two out of three vote Democratic).

I was suspicious—if Kevin Hayes really voted twice, authorities should have arrested him. They should have arrested 589,393 “criminal double voters” in North Carolina alone. But they busted none. Nevertheless, the officials got what they wanted: For example, enough voters of color were blocked, purged and disqualified to help knock a Democrat out of the U.S. Senate this past November.

This situation deeply concerns Martin Luther King III, founder of the Realizing the Dream Foundation. Fifty years after Bloody Sunday and the Voting Rights Act, he said, “The irony is that when you look at Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, where you have significant African-American populations—Mississippi close to 50 percent—those states still have leadership that is totally Republican.”

The black vote should have turned those states solid Democratic blue. What happened?

Meet the New Jim Crow. Fifty years ago, African-Americans were kept from the polls by the threat of beatings and lynchings. Today, Jim Crow has traded in his white sheets for spreadsheets. He’s Dr. James Crow, systems analyst. His method is lynching by laptop.

At the end of the film “Selma” we are told that the brutal, racist county sheriff was tossed out of office by newly enfranchised black voters. True. But today, Dr. James Crow has a magic machine that can reverse the Voting Rights Act.

Here’s one example uncovered by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: On the night of Nov. 5, 2002, it appeared that Democrat Gov. Don Siegelman, the favorite of the African-American voters, had won re-election. But at 11 p.m., the white, Republican elections officials of Baldwin County declared they needed to recount the ballots. The county courthouse doors were locked. No press (or black Democrats) were allowed inside. By dawn, the white officials announced they had corrected a “glitch” in the count. Upon recounting, the tally for Siegelman dropped miraculously by 6,334 votes, handing the race to his opponent.

Could we see the ballots? Of course not; they were simply tallies on computer files. The files had been “corrected”—and Siegelman, the choice of the black voter, was gone.

(Siegelman was warned not to complain. He did—and before long he was imprisoned on corruption charges that Kennedy dismisses as “laughable, ginned up by a cast of crooked GOP attorneys.”)

Purging phantasmagorical “double voters” and finding thousands of votes in magical computer systems are but two of the methods at Dr. James Crow’s disposal. Working with Kennedy, I’ve counted nine sophisticated, racially dubious methods for blocking the black vote, costing—by a conservative estimate—5.9 million Americans their voting rights.

Despite the glorious story of the Selma march, the truth is that the USA and Old Dixie in particular are marching backward over the bridge. Disenfranchisement—a fancy word for ballot-box apartheid—is worsening, especially since June 2013 when the U.S. Supreme Court nullified key provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

It would be wrong and demeaning to the memories of those who gave their lives to this cause—including the fathers of King and Kennedy—to say that we’ve won no voting rights victories. This weekend we can congratulate ourselves on America’s great strides against racism at the ballot box. But let’s remember that Dr. King had to lead a dangerous march from Selma for voting rights that were supposedly guaranteed a century earlier by the 15th Amendment to the Constitution—rights won after 600,000 Americans fought to their deaths between Bull Run and Gettysburg.

The struggle for civil and human rights did not begin 50 years ago, and it will not end in another 50. It is a centuries-long story of advance and retreat.

And that’s the lesson. The movie’s over, but not The Movement. It is left to us to march over the bridge again. And again. And again.

New Ezell Ford wrongful-death suit Against LAPD alleges race as a motivation

From [HERE] and [HERE] Relatives of a mentally ill Black man shot and killed by police in South L.A. have filed a new wrongful death lawsuit in state court. Ezell Ford’s parents allege police in August killed him while he was unarmed and lying on the ground.

They’re seeking unspecified damages. It’s unclear if this new lawsuit will replace the first complaint the family filed in September in federal court.

The allegations outlined in Friday's lawsuit mirror those Edsell and Tritobia Ford made in a federal lawsuit they filed last fall in connection with the Aug. 11 death of their son, Ezell Ford. The state suit, however, also alleges that the actions of the two officers who shot Ford were "motivated" by the fact that Ford was black and by their "prejudice, disdain and contempt for African Americans or persons of black skin tone."

The federal suit alleges the Los Angeles Police Department maintained policies and practices that allowed racial profiling and the use of excessive force against African Americans. Attorneys representing the two officers denied those claims in a response filed with the court, as did lawyers for the city of Los Angeles.

The attorneys for the officers — identified by the LAPD as Sharlton Wampler, who is Asian American, and Antonio Villegas, who is Latino — did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

Ford's death came amid a wave of nationwide protests over the high-profile deaths of black men at the hands of police and was frequently invoked during local demonstrations that stemmed from the killings. Ford died only two days after a white police officer shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

The state lawsuit filed Friday alleges that the two officers involved in Ford's death used excessive force, were negligent and violated his civil rights when they shot and killed him. Like the federal suit, the state case also names the city of Los Angeles and the LAPD, alleging that the department was also negligent in "hiring, training or failing to supervise" the officers.

Attorney Steven Lerman, who is representing Ford's family, said the goal of filing both lawsuits was "covering all the bases" and allowing a jury to consider several potential violations by the officers. For example, he said, jurors could decide whether the officers intentionally violated Ford's civil rights, as alleged in the federal lawsuit, or that they were negligent, as alleged in the state case.

Ford, 25, was walking to the family's home on West 65th Street shortly after 8 p.m. on Aug. 11, when the two LAPD gang officers got out of their car to speak with him, according to the LAPD's account of the incident. He looked at the officers, walked away and attempted to conceal his hands, police said.

The officers followed Ford to a driveway, where, police said, Ford crouched between a car and a row of bushes. As one of the officers reached for him, Ford forced him to the ground and grabbed his gun, according to police.

The officer yelled to his partner that Ford had his gun, and the partner fired two rounds at Ford, police said. The first officer used a backup weapon to reach around Ford's body and shoot him in the back, leaving a muzzle imprint.

One woman, who said she was a friend of Ford's family, told The Times that she witnessed part of the encounter and saw no struggle between Ford and the officers.

Labor Leader To Immigrants In Selma: ‘Organize Against Racist Laws’

Think Progress

Among the tens of thousands of people who converged on Selma this week to honor the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday were hundreds of immigrants from across the country marching to advocate for their own civil rights.

Dolores Huerta, who organized farmworkers with Cesar Chavez in the 1960s, told a crowd of activists Sunday morning that they must continue to fight.

“Organize, organize, organize,” she said. “We’ve got to be sure we get people elected who will get rid of some of these racist laws they’ve passed and pass laws that will actually support our community.”

In 2011, Alabama passed the one of the harshest immigration enforcement laws in the nation — making everything from seeking work to renting an apartment a crime for undocumented people. It also required the state to publish the names and private information of immigrants unable to prove their legal status. Most of these measures were found to encourage racial profiling and violate constitutional rights.

Congressman John Lewis (D-GA), who helped lead the voting rights march 50 years ago and was beaten and tear gassed in Selma, also cited immigrants’ rights as an area that still needs serious work today.

“It is a major civil rights issue to have millions of people living in the shadows,” he told NBC this weekend. “They come here and are called illegal, but there is no such thing as an illegal human being.”

On Sunday, switching between English and Spanish, Huerta praised local activists for organizing against the law and defeating most of it in court, but told them to keep fighting against anti-immigrant proposals and for comprehensive reform.

“Many people may say, ‘I’m not a citizen so I can’t vote.’ But you don’t have to be a citizen to knock on doors, to pass up leaflets, to call people and remind them that not only do they have the right to vote, they have the responsibility to vote, because the people we elect will decide whether our tax dollars go to build more jails or more schools,” she said. “We’re here remembering that people died just because they were registering people to vote. They marched with everything against them and didn’t give up.”

Wearing a shirt showing the Selma march 50 years ago emblazoned with the words “Black and Brown Unity,” Alabama organizer Cornelio Reyes told the crowd that while the community is grateful for the President’s executive action to protect some parents from deportation, millions of people including himself do not qualify.

“It’s time to re-take the path our African American brothers and sisters have taken,” he said. “We know the path is not easy, but if all our communities organize, victory will be certain. As we commemorate 50 years since Bloody Sunday, we are going to cross that bridge too. ” [MORE]

Supreme Court to rule in Florida death penalty case

[JURIST]

The US Supreme Court [official website] on Monday granted certiorari [order list, PDF] in Hurst v. Florida [docket; cert. petition, PDF ] to determine "whether Florida's death sentencing scheme violated the Sixth ... or Eighth Amendment." This court granted certiorari in light of its decision in Ring v. Arizona [opinion], in which it held that a sentencing judge, sitting without a jury, may not "find an aggravating circumstance necessary for imposition of the death penalty." In the case at hand, Timothy Hurst was convicted and sentenced to death in 1998 for one count of first degree murder. It was found that the murder was "especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel," and thus justified the sentence. Although it was found that Hurst suffered from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and thus was of "limited intellectual capacity," the court did not consider this as mitigation, and thus did not assign it any weight.

US declares Oil Rich Venezuela a ‘security threat’ after failed coup attempt

Non-Aligned Media

Reuters reports that on Monday the regime in Washington “declared Venezuela a national security threat and ordered sanctions against seven officials in the worst diplomatic dispute with the oil-rich country.”

Washington’s sanctions come just on the heels of an attempted coup against the revolutionary government in Caracas led by Hugo Chavez’s successor Nicolas Maduro. In late February of this year Maduro expelled three US officials from the country for allegedly plotting with the US-backed opposition to oust him.

In a televised broadcast, Diosdado Cabello, the president of Venezuela’s national assembly, presented evidence of the right-wing coup plot. Computers seized by Venezuelan authorities revealed plans by the opposition to carry out attacks on the Miraflores presidential palace and the headquarters of the news channel teleSUR. [MORE]

Poverty, Not the ‘Teenage Brain’ Account for High Rates of Teen Crime

4th Media

While many blame the “teenage brain” for high rates of teen crime, violence, and driving incidents, an important factor has been ignored: teenagers as a group suffer much higher average poverty rates than do older adults.

A new study out today in SAGE Open finds that teenagers are no more naturally crime-prone than any other group with high poverty rates.

“Within every race and community, adolescents suffer poverty rates two to three times higher than older adults do,” stated study author Mike Males, Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, San Francisco.

“It is astonishing that researchers have compiled decades of theories and claims about teenagers’ supposed risk-taking, impulsiveness, brain deficiencies, and crime-proneness without examining whether these are due to young people’s low socioeconomic status, not young age.” [MORE]

You’re 55 Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist [stats not broken down by race]

BlackListedNews

We previously reported that Americans are 9 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist.

But it turns out that our numbers were incorrect …

This isn’t surprising, given that:

“Reliable estimates of the number of justifiable homicides committed by police officers in the United States do not exist.” A study of killings by police from 1999 to 2002 in the Central Florida region found that the national databases included (in Florida) only one-fourth of the number of persons killed by police as reported in the local news media.

The Guardian reports today:

An average of 545 people killed by local and state law enforcement officers in the US went uncounted in the country’s most authoritative crime statistics every year for almost a decade, according to a report released on Tuesday.

The first-ever attempt by US record-keepers to estimate the number of uncounted “law enforcement homicides” exposed previous official tallies as capturing less than half of the real picture. The new estimate – an average of 928 people killed by police annually over eight recent years, compared to 383 in published FBI data – amounted to a more glaring admission than ever before of the government’s failure to track how many people police kill.

The revelation called into particular question the FBI practice of publishing annual totals of “justifiable homicides by law enforcement” – tallies that are widely cited in the media and elsewhere as the most accurate official count of police homicides.

As shown below, that means that you’re 55 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist.

YOU’RE MUCH MORE LIKELY TO BE KILLED BY BRAIN-EATING PARASITES, TEXTING WHILE DRIVING, TODDLERS, LIGHTNING, FALLING OUT OF BED, ALCOHOLISM, FOOD POISONING, CHOKING ON FOOD, A FINANCIAL CRASH, OBESITY, MEDICAL ERRORS OR “AUTOEROTIC ASPHYXIATION” THAN BY TERRORISTS

Daniel Benjamin – the Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the United States Department of State from 2009 to 2012 – noted last month (at 10:22):

The total number of deaths from terrorism in recent years has been extremely small in the West. And the threat itself has been considerably reduced. Given all the headlines people don’t have that perception; but if you look at the statistics that is the case.

Time Magazine noted in 2013 that the chance of dying in a terrorist attack in the United States from 2007 to 2011, according to Richard Barrett – coordinator of the United Nations al Qaeda/Taliban Monitoring Team – was 1 in 20 million.

Let’s look at specific numbers …

The U.S. Department of State reports that only 17 U.S. citizens were killed worldwide as a result of terrorism in 2011.* That figure includes deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq and all other theaters of war.

In contrast, the American agency which tracks health-related issues – the U.S. Centers for Disease Control – rounds up the most prevalent causes of death in the United States:

Police killed more than twice as many people as reported by US government

BLN

As President Obama calls for better data and Justice Department exposes Ferguson, trusted FBI count of ‘justifiable homicides’ omits 545 people per year in study An average of 545 people killed by local and state law enforcement officers in the US went uncounted in the country’s most authoritative crime statistics every year for almost a decade, according to a report released on Tuesday.

Prosecutors criticize D.C. crime lab’s handling of some DNA evidence

WashPost

D.C. prosecutors have stopped sending DNA evidence to the city’s new state-of-the-art crime lab after they said they discovered errors in the way analysts determined whether a sample can be linked to a suspect or a victim.

Prosecutors have hired two outside DNA experts to review 116 cases, including rapes and homicides, and have been notifying defense attorneys.

In one federal case, prosecutors said, the D.C. lab concluded that a defendant’s DNA could have been on the magazine of a gun seized as evidence. But an expert who reviewed the data said the lab should have interpreted the results to mean that the defendant was not the source of the DNA.

In other cases, prosecutors said, the lab either understated or overestimated the likelihood that a particular person’s DNA was left at a crime scene.

Officials at the Department of Forensic Sciences, which is located in a $220 million facility that opened in 2012, defend their work and say disagreements among scientists in the field are not uncommon. The dispute has essentially created a standoff between the city-run lab and federal prosecutors in the nation’s capital.

U.S. Attorney Ronald C. ­Machen Jr. said that his office has been paying to send evidence for testing at outside labs and that so far an additional 102 cases have been farmed out. At the same time, independent experts are taking a fresh look at the cases analyzed by the District’s lab.

“To date, we have not found any evidence to suggest any wrongful conviction and have not acted to dismiss any cases,” Machen said in a statement. “However, in an abundance of caution, we are conducting a rigorous review of the analysis done in current and older cases to ensure that criminal defendants are treated fairly.”

Max M. Houck, director of the Department of Forensic Sciences, said that the lab follows the same protocols in place at many city and state labs across the country and that experts may disagree on how to interpret evidence. The lab has made recent improvements, he said, but he stands by the work done before those changes.

“This is an estimate — an estimate of probability,” said Houck, a former FBI supervisor who worked in the agency’s anthropology and trace evidence unit.

“The issue is that their experts would do the analysis differently. Differently isn’t wrong,” Houck said. “It’s like a financial planner doing a financial assessment of someone’s net worth in U.S. currency and in Japanese yen. They’re both correct, just different measurements.”

Houck said he could not explain why the outside experts sometimes reached very different conclusions, because he does not know which methods they used.

The issue involves the analysis of combinations of genetic material from more than one person — such as samples collected from weapons, cars or a victim’s body. The scientists try to tease out who left the DNA behind. Although TV dramas such as “CSI” make DNA testing look simple, experts said, such disputes are not uncommon and the industry does not have a single accepted method for interpreting DNA mixtures. John M. Butler, special assistant to the director for forensic science at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, based in Gaithersburg, Md., recently wrote a 600-page book on the topic. 

“You can have the same data, and scientists at different labs — or even within the same lab — can interpret that data differently,” Butler said. “We are trying to help standardize things. We are in the process of working on that.”

Prosecutors said they first became concerned in September, when they asked an outside expert to look over the DNA evidence in an upcoming case, a practice they said is not uncommon. Tavon Barber was accused of two 2013 burglaries, prosecutors said. In one case, laptops and car keys were taken from a home while two people slept inside, and the thief used the keys to steal a car. In the other case, a robber woke a sleeping couple and sexually assaulted the woman while holding her husband at gunpoint.

The expert found errors in the interpretation of six pieces of evidence analyzed by the Department of Forensic Sciences, according to the U.S. attorney’s office. The biggest mistake involved the analysis of DNA found on the stolen car’s gearshift, prosecutors said. D.C. analysts looking at the evidence found that the car owner’s DNA could have been on the gearshift and said the chance that a randomly selected person had the same genetic traits was 1 in 3,290. The outside experts said the more accurate finding was 1 in 9. [MORE]

Taser International has seen its stock price double since Michael Brown was killed.

AlterNet

Taser International, one of the nation's largest suppliers of body cameras, has direct connections to some police chiefs who have been advocating on its behalf.

According to an AP report, the company is covering travel costs for cops that praise their products at international conferences. It's also hiring retired chiefs as consultants, after their cities sign contracts with Taser. After the police chief in Fort Worth, Texas obtained a contract with the company, he wrote one of their representatives an email, insisting that he deserved a raise. In Salt Lake City, the police department bypassed City Council approval to secure a contract with Taser and, in Albuquerque, Taser's connection to the police chief sparked an investigation by the city’s inspector general.

After the death of Michael Brown, body cameras became a staple of calls for police reform. President Obama proposed a $75 million effort to equip departments with the cameras, in an attempt to quell distrust of police. The move was supported by a number of liberals, but it was also adamantly supported by Taser International. According to aNation story by Raven Rakia, Taser has seen its stock price double since Michael Brown was killed. The company viewed Brown's murder as, " massive awareness campaign’ for police body cameras."

According to a 3-month Fusion investigation, body cameras can often benefit the police more than victims. It's clear that, sometimes, this benefit is also financial. 

All-white jury, All White Lawyers and White Judge will hear Boston Marathon bombing trial

Reuters

An all-white jury that includes a restaurant manager, several retirees and a social worker will hear the trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, which gets underway with opening statements on Wednesday.

The two-month-long jury selection process wrapped up on Tuesday when lawyers for both sides winnowed the pool to 10 women and eight men. They will form the panel of 12 jurors and six alternates who will hear a trial that may run into June.

Tsarnaev, 21, is charged with killing three people and injuring 264 with a pair of homemade bombs at the race's crowded finish line on April 15, 2013, and with fatally shooting a police officer three days later. If he is found guilty, the jury selected on Tuesday will determine whether to sentence him to death.

While the jurors' names are secret, some details about them can be gleaned from their answers to the in-person "voir dire" questioning that took place at U.S. District Court in Boston over the past few weeks.

The panel includes a male telecommunications engineer who was at Massachusetts General Hospital the day of the attack, a female legal secretary who said she believed Tsarnaev was guilty but would evaluate the case based on its evidence and a woman who works at an area school system who bought some merchandise with the "Boston Strong" logo that became the city's rallying cry after the attacks, according to a tally compiled by the Boston Globe.

Tsarnaev and his family immigrated to the United States from Russia's restive Chechnya region a decade before the attack. They settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just outside Boston.

The jury selection process began in early January when more than 1,350 potential jurors filled out questionnaires on their ties to the attack and their views on the death penalty. To be eligible to serve, candidates needed not to have formed a set opinion of Tsarnaev's guilt and to be willing to consider voting for execution if he was found guilty.

U.S. District Judge George O'Toole, defense lawyers and federal prosecutors huddled quietly in court on Tuesday as they winnowed the field of 75 provisionally qualified jurors. Each side had the opportunity to reject 23 candidates without giving a reason. [MORE]

Protesters rally against Police Brutality in Los Angeles

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