Tuesday, December 23, 2014

R's Haven't A Clue About 'Peace On Earth Goodwill Toward Humankind'

Not even the holidays will deter the spreading of hate by Republicans (and Fox News) who capitalize on the sorrow and tragedy of others. They have no notion of the words “Peace on Earth Goodwill Toward Humankind”. There is no money and power in that. Facebook wants to know how I feel:
SAD, at all the hatred those who quest for complete control over others, spread across the land.
Read more of the "R's" hateful proliferations here.
5 Outrageous Right-Wing Reactions to the Tragic NYPD Shootings
Conservative pundits and pols blamed the tragedy on everyone from protesters to the president.
Excerpt:1) Rudy Giuliania man who has repeatedly proved that there is no politically cynical low to which he will not stoop, blamed President Obama for the shootings. Appearing on “Fox News Sunday” Giuliani stated, “We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police.”
He went on to bring up the right’s favorite red herring, black-on-black crime, before stating that “the people who do the most for the black community in America are the police."
He also suggested that Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and the Rev. Al Sharpton have all, in criticizing systemic inequalities in policing and criminal justice, created "an atmosphere of severe, strong anti-police hatred in certain communities."
2) Tucker Carlson proved his bowtie was tied a little too tightly during an appearance on “Fox and Friends” on Sunday night. Carlson initially stated that he didn’t want to “start speculating about why this happened or casting blame unfairly. Again, we know who pulled the trigger, he is ultimately responsible.”
He then went on to speculate and cast blame, saying, “[I]t’s such an emotional thing, it’s so wrong, immoral, unfair, that it’s almost hard not to point at some of the people who have been whipping race hatred in this country for the past couple of months, and saying, you know, they do bear some responsibility for this.”
The pundit and his TV “friends” went on to play a clip that made more specific which leaders Carlson was referring to: Obama, Atty. Gen. Holder and Rev. Al Sharpton.
Carlson wrapped up the segment by going after President Obama for ever having associated with Sharpton in any context, ever: “For [President Obama] to embrace Sharpton, who is just an open bigot and a criminal and a tax cheat, who’s been whipping up race hatred in New York for all these decades. For the president of the United States to embrace this guy as a personal friend, and adviser, to show up at the NAN meetings, to have him in the White House again, and again, and again, and again, to endorse his message....Boy, no wonder you’ve got craziness going on in the streets.”
3) Convicted felon and right-wing blowhard Bernard Kerik penned a piece for TIME in which he stated there’s a “war on cops” that is “as dangerous as any global enemy we face” — including “ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban” and other “radical extremists.”
Kerik’s crazy gets nuttier from there, with the crooked ex-cop suggesting that “some in the media,” Sharpton and de Blasio have been convincing people that “nearly all of America’s local and state police are out to kill minorities.”
Kerik states that “it’s a lie that has inflamed the hearts and minds of many and turned them against every cop in the nation. It’s a lie that has the potential to rip America at its seams and cause damage far worse than any attack on our country, including that on 9/11/2001. It’s a lie that has caused protests and riots all over this nation, communities to be burned to the ground, police officers to be attacked and beaten, and horribly, two New York City police officers to be assassinated.”
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/5-outrageous-right-wing-reactions-tragic-nypd-shootings

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Another Propaganda 'Tit for Tat' From Fox News

Well, here we go again... FOX NEWS stirring up white hatred towards anyone who thought the white cop on unarmed black killings because of alleged trivial crimes was an injustice. Of course there’s no mention, in their reporting, of how a deranged person got a hold of a SILVER SEMIAUTOMATIC HANDGUN in the first place. I'll bet Fox News, Limbaugh et al. are celebrating their ‘schadenfreude’ windfall, sharpening their fingers that they will point towards anyone who believed injustice took place when two grand juries refused to convict the two white cops, claiming not enough evidence, even though there was a video showing the whole murder of Eric Garner from start to finish.  Facebook again asked how I was feeling and again I cry out: 
at still another mis-information foul ball tossed out to the public by the extremist in the right-wing propaganda media. Fox News or better known as a Fifth Column strikes again.
thinkingblue

DEC. 20, 2014
EXCERPT: Two police officers sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn were shot at point-blank range and killed on Saturday afternoon by a man who, officials said, had traveled to the city from Baltimore vowing to kill officers. The suspect then committed suicide with the same gun, the authorities said.
The officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were in the car near Myrtle and Tompkins Avenues in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the shadow of a tall housing project when the gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, walked up to the passenger-side window and assumed a firing stance, Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said. Mr. Brinsley shot several rounds into the heads and upper bodies of the officers, who never drew their weapons, the authorities said.
Mr. Brinsley, 28, then fled down the street and onto the platform of a nearby subway station, where he killed himself as officers closed in. The police recovered a SILVER SEMIAUTOMATIC HANDGUN, Mr. Bratton said.
Continue: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/nyregion/two-police-
officers-shot-in-their-patrol-car-in-brooklyn.html?_r=0
~~~
PS: An inquiring mind would like to know why they (Fox News Types) are not blaming the police officer, Daniel Pantaleo? Also , thinkingblue


"Any use of the names of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in connection with any violence or killing of police, is reprehensible and against the pursuit of justice in both cases," Sharpton said. "We have stressed at every rally and march that anyone engaged in any violence is an enemy to the pursuit of justice for Eric Garner and Michael Brown."
~Al Sharpton~

 http://www.komonews.com/news/national/
2nd-NYC-cop-killed-in-ambush-shooting-286469791.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Excerpt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner
Daniel Pantaleo is a New York City Police Department officer who was, at the time of Garner's death, age 29 and living in Eltingville, Staten Island. Pantaleo's father was a New York City Fire Department firefighter, and his uncle was a NYPD officer. He graduated from Monsignor Farrell High School and received a bachelor's degree from College of Staten Island. He joined the NYPD in 2006. Pantaleo was the subject of two civil rights lawsuits in 2013 where plaintiffs accused Pantaleo of falsely arresting them and abusing them. In one of the cases, Pantaleo and other officers ordered two black men to strip naked on the street for a search and the charges against the men were dismissed.
~~~
'Schadenfreude' - What a fearful thing is it that any language should have a word expressive of the pleasure which men feel at the calamities of others; for the existence of the word bears testimony to the existence of the thing. And yet in more than one such a word is found. ... In the Greek epikhairekakia, in the German,'Schadenfreude.' [Richard C. Trench, "On the Study of Words,"1852]

Friday, December 19, 2014

Are 'Iran, China and Russia, OH MY' All Part of the Sony Hack Job?

It looks like George W Bush's "Axis of Evil" is winning after all.  With Sony, sticking its head in the sand and caving to the hackers’ demands, thus strengthening the hacking department of all terrorist regimes, empowering them to believe they can take us down byte-by-byte instead of human-by-human.   America's most famous and highest-paid entertainer of the 1930s, Al Jolson, said it best with the popularization of the phrase: "You Ain't seen nothing yet"; And Baby, Hold Onto Your Hat (or Gigabyte), because we (the technological world) are in for the hacking ride of our life.
PS: I couldn't agree more.
OPINION: When lack of principle meets personal cowardice.
EXCERPT: Iran, Russia or China could have worked with North Korea -
Sony's surrender will strengthen hackers, experts say
Could hack attack and fallout sink Sony Pictures?
----
Sony's 'The Interview' Will Eventually Hit Screens: Experts
BY BILL BRIGGS

The Hollywood maxim that even bad publicity is good news will hold true for Sony's hack-a-licious picture "The Interview," say film industry experts who foresee merely a delayed debut and a modest box-office boon.

"A movie with this much press behind it, honestly, you know it has people kind of in a fervor to see this, and it is going to find a home in theaters," said Jeff Bock, senior box office analyst for Exhibitor Relations Co., Inc. in Los Angeles.

Sony Pictures Entertainment, which reportedly invested $42 million to make the film, decided Wednesday not the release "The Interview" as planned on Christmas Day, due to security concerns.

Sony did not return an email or a voice mail from NBC News, seeking comment on the predictions of an early 2015 release. A Sony spokesperson confirmed to NBC News on Wednesday the studio "has no further release plans for the film." That includes no video-on-demand release, the spokesperson said.

The movie — a James Franco/Seth Rogen comedic romp about a CIA plot to kill North Korea's dictator — is a casualty of an unprecedented hack attack against Sony that revealed reams of sensitive internal emails, many embarrassing.

The hackers vowed violence at theaters if the film opened as scheduled.

U.S. government officials suggested Wednesday that the regime of Kim Jong Un appears to be behind the Sony breach and the threat, though some cyber-sleuths still harbor doubts that North Korean leaders masterminded the online assault.

"The movie would have recouped anyway, would have been very successful without all of this happening," said David Poland, a film industry analyst, movie critic, and founder of the website Movie City News.

"We're at the beginning of the story. Once you go down that road to who did this, it may become a much bigger story, a political story, not a Hollywood story. I personally think once they get some stability in terms of knowing who's responsible, and it's not just all this swiping at ghosts, I think the movie will come out in January or February," Poland said.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Tamir Rice, Michael Brown & Eric Garner Protests, Canadians Ask, NOTHING NEW, WHY NOW?

Who better to ask about the injustices in our Nation than someone who lives outside of it? This article “Ask An American: Explaining Ferguson, Eric Garner And Tamir Rice To Canadians” has come along at a time when much of the America psyche has either slightly questioned or is in total agreement that cops should not be held responsible for their crimes (even if it’s subliminal at the moment). Inspirited protests that will soon be seen as superfluous in a matter of days and eventually wind up as a blip on most people’s minds with the names Timor Rice, Eric Warner and Michael Brown eventually getting lumped together to become one ubiquitous question; Who?
I get overly excited about protests against injustice; (Remember the 99 percent-ers) always ‘sort of’ believing that maybe this time they will work and things will change. Yeah right, then after just a short time, watching them fade away, returning America to business as usual with personalities that should be laughed at, getting elected to the highest governmental posts. But, in spite of my pessimistic nature, I still hold a pinch of faith that perhaps this time it will be different and injustice will become a fluke rather than a status quo. Hmmm, I wonder how long this interlude of my strict belief in Murphy’s Law, will last.  
(Murphy's Law is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.)
EXCERPT: The officers who killed Eric Garner and Michael Brown won’t be charged because of grand jury rulings. Canada got rid of its last grand juries 30 years ago. They seem open to serious manipulation by prosecutors. Why are they still around and is there any way to get rid of them?
Grand juries play roles both symbolic and practical in the criminal justice system. All of which are arguably vestigial. From a practical standpoint the grand jury proceedings allow a prosecutor to lock down sworn testimony from witnesses (to guard against their stories changing), and make a test run of the case in front of a jury pool. Symbolically, the grand jury is supposed to be a guard against prosecutorial misconduct -- ordinary citizens essentially vet the case and, in theory, this is supposed to guard against a rogue prosecution. Additionally, America's governing bureaucracies at all levels tend to allow "activity" to pass for "achievement." Grand juries are supposed to serve as proof that the justice department is working. After all, prosecutors are out there, getting indictments!
If you've read Thomas Wolfe's book "The Bonfire Of The Vanities," then you have probably encountered the saying, "A good prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich." The phrase is attributed to a judge named Sol Wachtler, who learned this the hard way when he was himself indicted for extortion.
The Huffington Post's Sam Stein recently hosted an edition of his "Drinking And Talking" roundtable series about the Michael Brown/Eric Garner cases, in which two of his guests -- civil rights attorney Donald Temple and civil attorney Doug Sparks -- discuss the results of the grand juries in both cases. I recommend readers check it out, but their salient point is that a grand jury will do whatever a prosecutor leads them to do. It would appear in the Ferguson case that the prosecutor, Bob McCulloch, simply did not want to indict a cop. So the evidence was presented in a way that favored Wilson's point of view. Typically, a prosecutor just uses the grand jury to determine whether there is probable cause -- a reason to have a trial. I don't think the evidence in Michael Brown's case necessarily made for a slam-dunk prosecution of Wilson. Still, I would have preferred to have a trial sort all of that out.
McCulloch's behavior was pretty unusual for a prosecutor. In the tedious, twenty-minute oration that he gave when releasing the grand jury's decision, McCulloch made it clear that to his mind, it was simply ridiculous that anyone even asked for an investigation into the killing of Michael Brown. To McCulloch, Brown's death was simply the natural order of the universe, and questioning that was inconceivable. He made that point, over and over again, along the way blaming the national press and "social media" for essentially perverting what he saw as the natural order of things. The grand jury, McCulloch said, "gave up their lives" to render a decision in this case -- clearly he thought the entire matter wasn't worth even a moment of skepticism, and those who humored the skeptics made great sacrifices.
But prosecutors of all stripes have a fairly cozy relationship with the police. This is somewhat understandable -- the police help prosecutors make cases, after all. But what happens when the suspect is a cop? A grave imbalance, as it turns out: as Trevor Timm, making the case for reforming the grand jury system in The Guardian, notes: "If you are an ordinary citizen being investigated for a crime by an American grand jury, there is a 99.993% chance you’ll be indicted. Yet if you’re a police officer, that chance falls to effectively nil."
Will we get reform? I think it will be discussed in some circles, and reforms will be proposed, and then those reforms will quietly die on the vine.~~~For the last generation the Republican Party has branded itself as the "law and order party," but the recent libertarian strain in the conservative caucus is forcing a re-think of supporting police and prosecutors unquestioningly. There is a possibility that Senators like Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Representatives like Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) can help create bipartisan reforms to the criminal justice system that would change the way non-violent drug offenders are sentenced, ending the practice of mandatory minimum sentences. It's not like Eric Garner's death had a lot to do with these things that we are close to reforming -- but sympathy for a man unjustly killed could nevertheless inspire a heroic act of legislation. Or, nothing will happen, because conservative legislators won't want Obama to get "credit" for signing a legacy-boosting sentencing reform bill into law. (There's that zero-sum thinking again!) 
But look, you have really come to the wrong person if you want optimism. It wasn't long ago that the shocking video of James Foley's death at the hands of ISIS inspired the nation to once again get its war on. These days, I'm still watching execution videos -- but the killers aren't people who flamboyantly cast themselves as the enemies of our way of life. Rather, they are the police we assign to protect it. And these cops demonstrate a similar level of brutality, and an equal lack of remorse, in and for their actions. What's lacking is the effort to really do something about it. I don't expect that to change.
I recently read a blog post from the mother of a mixed-race family -- her two sons, Owen and Kyle, were adopted from Haiti. () Two days before Thanksgiving, she wrote, "Today, we are dealing with the Ferguson decision. It is another sad, sad day for mamas of black boys. Deeply demoralized and shaking scared, we keep on fiercely loving them, and wait and hope for the world to see them as we do." This is a rare instance of a white mother who is able to empathize -- not merely sympathize, empathize -- with the fear that African-American women who raise sons and daughters (but especially sons!) live with every day. Fostering empathy is brutally impossible work, I recommend her piece as a tool in at least doing the necessary thought-exercises. I fear, however, she has much longer to wait. As do we all.More Here: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/12/09/
ferguson-eric-garner-tamir-rice-canada_n_6297150.html
ferguson-eric-garner-tamir-rice-canada_n_6297150.html

Saturday, December 06, 2014

Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner Is Your Son Next?

Video Published on Dec 6, 2014
I hope all these peaceful demonstrations will help make it safer for young black males to walk the streets of so-called freedom. Right now, they are up for grabs by white police who can't think rationally beyond their ingrained prejudice. The saddest element in all this is that up until now… no one in authority seemed to care, which indicates that the value on human life decreases with the increase of the brown pigment (melanin) within the skin. thinkingblue