Friday, June 30, 2017

LENA HORNE AT 100

"Lena Horne’s stage career began in the early 1930s and ran until the 1990s. Raised by a feminist grandmother, she left school when she was sixteen to work as a chorus girl in the Cotton Club where she and other African American entertainers performed for an exclusively white audience. A few years later, she worked in New York nightclubs and toured with the all-white Charlie Barnet Orchestra, making her the first African American to do so.


She continued to face racial barriers, however, and was often barred from staying at the hotels where she performed, especially in the Southern states..."

Lena was popular with black and white G.I.s  When she performed for them, she noticed that black soldiers were forced to sit further back from the stage. This marked the beginning of her turn toward Civil Rights Activism. 
"Lena Horne once said that World War Two helped make her a star. She was popular with both black and white servicemen. She sang on army radio programs and traveled to perform for the troops. During one event, she noted that German prisoners of war were permitted to sit closer to the stage than black soldiers. She criticized the way black soldiers were treated by the army. These experiences led to Lena Horne’s work in the civil rights movement."
https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/lena-horne-1917-2010-a-star-who-broke-racial-barriers-131919363/114610.html


Lena Horne was also very much a feminist, like her grandmother, though I've never seen her identify herself as such. But something of her grandmother rubbed off. It was thought a story about Lena Horne and Rosa Parks that I became interested in the roots of male supremacy in the black community.  

Apparently, Lena that tried to take Rosa Parks around to give interviews to reporters during THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON.  When she did so, the male supremacy came flowing out of the black men running the event. They made sure black women did not talk and did not give interviews.  Daisy Bates wound up being allowed to speak for all of 60 seconds. 
Josephine Baker's agent made arrangements to insert Josephine into the day's events. And she was actually allowed to speak BEFORE but not during the main stage events--which is why she is not on the program that day. 

Not only did black men make sure Rosa and other women were pushed to the back and forget to seat at least one prominent black female activist, according to Dorothy Height(?) interview I heard, a lot of black women activists were sent back to the hotel before the March was even over. A number of black women activists were in a cab on their way to the hotel listening to Martin Luther King's "I have a dream speech" on the cab's radio.  

As a result of the story of Lena and Rosa at the March On Washington, I decided to dig and learn. One of the other things that I learned was that other black women, like Anna Arnold Hedgeman, were indeed offended by treatment as second class citizens by black men and wound up meeting after The March On Washington. Some became founding members of the N.O.W., the National Organization For Women.

Today, as a result of a little research, I've found out that Lena was very aware of colorism's benefits and costs too. 
"She soon moved to Hollywood where she began acting in movies. Due to her lighter skin tone, MGM pushed her to “pass as a Latin” rather than as a black woman, but she refused. Instead, she was cast in insubstantial roles, and her scenes could be easily removed (as many scenes with African American actors were in the South). She did star in two “all-black” musicals, Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, both released in 1943."

Like most black women, Lena Horne was beautiful inside and out. She pushed back against overt racism of whites, the sexism of black men she revered, and the unacknowledged colorism of blacks and whites both. That means Lena Horne was braver than most.



PERJURY CHARGE DROPPED IN THE SANDRA BLAND CASE



I hate to say it, but this was probably for the best since we weren't ever going to get any justice for Sandra anyway. 
All Brian Encinitas was charged with was perjury when his crime led to Sandra Bland's death. The driver of a getaway car is guilty of murder if someone dies accidentally during a robbery. To me this means Encinitas could have been charged with other crimes even if they decided they couldn't get as an accessory to Bland's death
Texas held up Encinitas' itty-bitty case for so long thinking we'd forget. And this strategy pretty much worked. After putting charging Encinitas with the most minuscule charge he could get away with, prosecutor didn't even bother to prosecute Encinitas for perjury. 
And now prosecutors are acting like they got something better. They making out like telling Encinitas he can never be a cop again or seek to have his record expunged was some sort of victory....like this little slap on the wrist is going to make black folks safer from people like him. 

If the prosecutor had been interested in prosecuting Encinitas he could have done all three things 1) charge Encinitas like he was serious about stopping police abuse of power 2) prosecuted him in court or pursued a plea bargain that involved jail time, and 3) made sure Encinitas could never hold a gun again or be in law enforcement. 

Encinitas thanked the prosecutor because they prosecutor deserved thanking.  Once again, the prosecutor did more for the cop defendant than his own defense attorney did.

After reading the article, I'm not sure that Encinitas can't leave Texas to become a cop in another state 


Thursday, June 29, 2017

VENUS WILLIAMS BLAMED FOR FATAL CAR CRASH AFTER TRAFFIC LEAVES HER STUCK IN INTERSECTION

Feeling Rebloggy
A police report obtained by TMZ Sports says the 37-year-old tennis star was trying to make it through an intersection in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, on June 9. Traffic was backed up and she got stuck in the middle of the intersection, blocking oncoming cars. 
Another car then T-boned Williams' SUV, injuring the driver and her husband. The woman was hospitalized with broken bones and other injuries, but her husband Jerome Barson suffered head trauma and died two weeks later. [The woman said Venus suddenly drove into the intersection and she couldn't stop.] 
...Venus Williams is being blamed for a fatal car crash, according to a new report.
~Syracuse.com

Read More 

MEDICAID TO BE CUT BY MORE THAN 1/4 by 2026 and MORE THAN 1/3 BY 2036 VIA REPEAL AND REPLACE

Feeling Rebloggy

The Congressional Budget Office says Medicaid cuts in the Senate Republican health care bill would take a 35 percent bite off the program's projected spending by 2036.



That's a deeper cut than the nonpartisan office has projected for 2026. That year's reduction would be 26 percent below projections under current law. 
The report released Thursday does not quantify how many fewer people the health care program for the poor and disabled would cover in 2036 due to proposed GOP cuts. It says enrollment "would continue to fall" compared to current law.  
~TIME.COM 
 headline

GOP Health Care Bill Would Slash Medicaid Spending 35% by 2036, Budget Office Says

http://time.com/4840394/cbo-congressional-budget-office-health-care-bill-senate-republicans/ 
 Sooo...

Does that mean the republicans plan to cut benefits so deep that the most altruistic doctor on the planet can't afford to treat the poor and the elderly?

Or does that mean the republicans plan to kick 1/4 to 1/3 of the poor and elderly off medicaid altogether?


I guess both intentions accomplish the same thing -- reduce the numbers of poor and elderly by letting them die. 

- - - - -

By the way, I heard on the early morning news that Fox News polled its audience and they like OBAMACARE better than the GOP Senate Plan or the GOP House Plan to the tune of 52%--which is only a percentage point or so below the national average. 


Sooo...

Does this mean that the white supremacist jackals who voted Trump into office finally figured out that the upper-level Cheeto Satan-ettes are taking aim at them, the low-life-lower-level Cheeto Satan-ettes too?

(Naaah!  I don't think so either.)

----
Rumor has it, if the Senate plan fails -- and I'm not sure it will-- the B word will be considered. The "B" word being "bipartisanship."

Like I said yesterday, the logical thing for the GOP to do is to drop kick the ultra-conservative demons and reach across the aisle to fix Obamacare.

What happens next depends on how afraid "the republican moderates" are of not getting re-elected... since we're still pretty far from the 2018 election and American memories short.

AN OBSESSED RACIST AS PRESIDENT

feeling rebloggy


"Clearly, not only was Obama’s blackness in the front of Trump’s mind, but Trump also appears to subscribe to the racist theory that success or failure of a member of a racial group redounds to all in that group. This is a burden under which most minorities in this country labor. 

Trump’s racial ideas were apparently a selling point among his supporters. Recent research has dispensed with the myth of “economic anxiety” and shone a light instead on the central importance race played in Trump’s march to the White House."
~Charles M Blow 
NY TIMES

Read More: 

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

REPEAL AND REPLACE: OBAMACARE AND MEDICAID ARE ONLY STEPS ONE AND TWO

The republicans are pro-industry. That doesn't sound that bad in and of itself, does it?

But it is bad when rabidly ambitious, pro-industry people connect themselves to greedy people who run healthcare insurance companies. Together they are hell bent on helping one another get richer and more powerful

"In 2013, the CEO of Aetna earned $33.7 million dollars. The average health insurance CEO salary was over $10 million in that same time period. While many will say that is capitalism at work, I really wonder, as I fight to get another MRI covered for a patient, how many MRI’s were denied to generate that kind of salary? And 2014 saw great increases in member enrollment in insurance plans under the ACA. Profits for these plans jumped up 10’s of millions of dollars...

My patients are suffering. They cannot afford the premiums they are now forced to pay, often against their will. They cannot afford the high deductibles most of these plans now carry. I have seen patients decide between two needed medications and which of their family members was the sickest to take to the doctor. They could not afford both....


Do you understand that we have not begun to talk about republican's attempt to destroy Obamacare and Medicaid yet? 

Do you understand that the republican backed health insurers are coming for all of us? 

The Congressional Budget Office said 22 million people will lose their healthcare under the Senate Healthcare plan (BRCA). You do understand that the republicans are currently taking aim at Obamacare and Medicaid and that our employer paid health insurance is next, right? 



The republicans are trying to use the real need to fix Obamacare to destroy Medicaid as we know it.

The way medicaid works now, even though it doesn't pay nearly enough in some cases, it DOES move with an index that measures rising medical costs. The Senate's health care bill proposes to tie Medicaid to an index that doesn't move up nearly as fast as rising medical care costs

...which will wind up kicking the elderly and the poor off Medicaid,  as planned for decades. 

This is what being pro-industry looks when you are an ethnoracist CINO with a rabidly ambitious mindset who assumes "poor" means lazy black and brown-skinned people. This is the root of your deciding not to care about people being unable to go to the doctor.


CINOs either ignore scripture when it's convenient or, more likely, legalistically rely on semantics to avoid the obvious meaning of passages like this one:

"And the King will say, 'I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!'  from Matthew 25.

This is pretty simple for Christians, not to mention all people of all other faiths too. You do not gouge the poor.

In my opinion, in 2007 when the U.S. nearly started a worldwide financial collapse, it started with an attack on the poor. Those sub-prime loans sold to the black and brown poor were the first investments to go belly up. Then as the banks scramble to cover up that mess more investment vehicles that were giant, complicated ponzi schemes.

In other words, we almost reaped what we sowed in 2007.

We didn’t go into the depression the one-percenter's almost set off because President Obama saved us. 

And, in my opinion, he chose saving us over putting those banksters in jail because he couldn’t do both at the same time the way our financial system is set up. But eventually, I think, we’re going to pay the piper for not putting them in jail.  

If we had put the banksters in jail the rest of the greedy might be a little more reluctant to snarl and bite and tear at the middle class and the poor in order to get even richer...and that includes health insurers.

Do not think REPEAL AND REPLACE is just about poor folks and Obamacare

The healthcare industry has been out of control for years. Those of us WITH employer paid healthcare really haven't seen our premiums go up THAT much over 20 years. Yes, it looks like it's gone up a lot. And it has, cumulatively. But the continual climb upwards has been slow.

However, what’s been happening a lot faster is that health insurance company’s pay-outs per procedure/drug has gone down and dramatically.

I have a high maintenance body that requires repairs form time to time. Not only am I paying a lot more for medication than I once did, the co-pays for surgery are scary.

And they've got this deeply crooked sh*t they do now where, if you have PPO type insurance, every single person that gets near you at a hospital, that is supposedly IN YOUR NETWORK, is charging you separately. 

There always seems to be ONE Provider, PERSON X, that you don't even remember meeting (the anesthesiologist) that is NOT in your network somehow OR IS in your network if he treats you at Hospital A, Hospital B, and Hospital C, but not IN YOUR NETWORK if he treats you at HOSPITAL D -- where you just happened to opt to have your surgery

Whoops

In another instance, I finally told a doctor of mine, "Look, I did everything I was supposed to in order to make sure everybody was inside my plan. I even contacted the health insurance company to choose you as my assigned doctor. Therefore, I'm not going to be the one paying for the "mistake" of doing my MRI in your office because that southeast corner of your office where the MRI machine sits is outside my network.... somehow.

I'm exaggerating a bit. It wasn't that the MRI was located in the southeast corner of the office. But the MRI machine IN his office was OUTSIDE my insurance network somehow. And they wanted to charge me hundreds of dollars more than my co-pay.
When the doctor's insurance person wanted to argue with me, I said, “Where is it in writing that the mistakes made between you and the insurance company will be paid for by me?”
That doctor’s office backed off because I almost always ask every question I have about costs and what is covered by e-mail. They knew I had them. 
Later I found out that my in-network doctor’s office stopped doing business with yet ANOTHER company between themselves and my health insurance company in regards to the MRI
LESSON 1 FOR TODAY: A doctor is as good as the person who handles the insurance for his office.   
LESSON 2 FOR TODAY:  When discussing what's covered and co-pays, act confused in the office. Ask or re-ask questions by e-mail once you're at home. Get everything you can in writing.
LESSON 3 FOR TODAY: When you cannot afford to hire an attorney every five minutes, the health insurance company can take your money as easily as a mugger with a gun. And that's what health insurers are doing --to those of us with “good insurance.”
Our best shot to fix this decades long mess, so far, has been Obamacare WITH public option. But a republican caucusing democrat, named Joe Lieberman made sure the public optionfailed. And he made sure public option failed because, like republicans, he did not want to do anything that caused health insurance companies to have to compete with a government health insurance provider that was providing care at a much lower cost.

I heard one republican come right out and say they were against providing low priced competition for health insurance companies.  And in my opinion, THAT is one of the key answers.

Yeah, I don't like the idea of a government run health insurance either  --as messy as the government is about everything else. But government healthcare is better than no healthcare. And providing COMPETITION to the healthcare industry, enough competition to bring their prices down, was likely THE KEY to making Obamacare work.

In addition to pulling the relatively wealthy folks taxes back out of Obamacare, the republicans want to protect healthcare insurers' profit margins not healthcare for everyone. That’s why Sarah Palin ran to the television cameras and started screaming about "death panels" when they were discussing  the public option. But trust me, the only thing republicans were scared of was low cost competition for health insurers.

The Aetna CEO mentioned above would have brought home 12 million dollars in 2013 instead of 33 million if Obamacare had been put into place with public option AND those penalties were triple what he put in place. The penalties needed to be ferocious to chase the young into OBAMACARE.

Eventually, if those Trumpthuglican maggots do not fix Obamacare, as it is, they are going to get their way. I think 22, 24, or 26 million people who have insurance now will not have it in the nearish future. Obamacare will be effectively repealed but not effectively replaced.

If you don't care about the poor, then care about yourself.
If the health insurers jump this Obamacare hurdle and don't have to sacrifice one thin dime to care for the poor what they are going to do is continue on as they have been. They are going to continue to hike health insurance premiums while providing less and less coverage. And health insurers were on this greedy path when President Obama was still in high school. 

This is not just about Obamacare

This is not just about medicaid.

This is about all of us and our ability to get care at a reasonable price. 


If you haven't had an injury or a disease where you need a procedure done under your employer paid insurance, you are due for a nasty surprise at some point. You're going to be shocked at how different your bills look as compared to the promises made when you signed up for your health insurance.

I got nasty surprises...and yet I have that "Cadillac health insurance" the republicans used to be rattling on about.  I've seen others get cancer and be surprised about what is and is not covered...then die.

So, imagine what's happening to people with lesser insurance. Imagine what's going to happen in the near future if Health Insurance Providers get the republicans stamp of approval to make money hand over fist no matter how many people you want to kick off your plans.

Obamacare cannot go on the way it is and neither can the rest of our healthcare system. It's broke. And it's broke because of corporate greed endorsed by the republicans.

I can’t even envision how much better this country would be if those evil motherf***ers in the republican party would turn that business acumen toward trying to make companies remain profitable while also being just as focused on making sure everybody has the basics -- food, clothing, housing, education, and the ability to go to the doctor when you are sick.


Conservative white people in other countries are not mad dog mean. I've seen conservatives in Canada say poor people have to have healthcare. And if foreign white conservatives are mean in other ways too, at least they aren't so mad dog mean that they're trying to grind their OWN white tribe to make a few extra bucks... when they are ALREADY RICH. 

So what the hell is wrong with our white people? It's like the white folks here are cursed and passing that curse down through the generations.     

  • Remember rich cheeto-satanettes know the deal. They know they are grinding up white poor most. 
  • As for the middle class/poor cheeto-satanettes, the numerical majority? For them, this is a YEA-WHITE-TEAM time.  'Grind the non-white folks to dust!" That's why they voted Trump. These "low education folks" ---who haven't learned a thing since junior high school no matter WHAT KIND OF DEGREE they have hanging on their walls -- they do NOT know their toe are already in the same meat grinder as black and brown folks.

By the way, these health insurers claiming they'll go bankrupt if they provide care for the poor and the elderly through Obamacare? This isn't the first time these rich folk have cried poor. They cried foul before between 1997 and 2000 too, the first time they were told that their gouging of the American public wasn’t  going to be a free for all.
Read it for yourself:

Look, we may not be able to stop these greedy so-and-so-s by voting all the time. But we can sure as hell slow their roll. So get out and vote during the midterm elections in 2018.

Voting democrat slows the rich down quite a bit  -- even when there's not as much overt white supremacy being pumped in by Trump. The only thing slowing the republicans down right now is Trump's stupidity.

However, I can see the repugnants putting the wheels back on the cart. Getting rid of that tap dancing Sean Spicer was part of that.

And since they haven't been able to shut Trump's mouth or stop his tweets, they've finally figured out that they should be secretive, which decreases the likelihood of saying anything that directly contradicts Trump within a 24 hour news cycle. This alone has made their party look less like a clown car -- a  clown car full of evil, red-eyed, blood drenched, shark-toothed clowns. 


So I think the republicans are about to do what they do best. They are going put aside all their differences for the good of the team. 

This means Repeal and  Replace will pass the Senate and the House.  It's only a matter of when and how bad it will be. I still think we're looking at Obamacare-light though. 

The logical thing for the repug-nicans to do would be to drop their hard right wing and reach across the aisle for right leaning democrats -- which again leads to Obamacare-light. But maybe a better version of Obamacare light would pass than what republicans would pass on their own(?)

The only way we stop the republicans from executing their decades long agenda is to vote them out.

They way this union if currently formed, the one-percenters either move fast or slow. Stopping them from moving fast, by keeping republicans out of office, for now, is JOB #1  -- not Job# Only because the democrats have too many problems to be borne too.

Vote in 2018






Tuesday, June 27, 2017

SHONDALAND'S STILL STAR-CROSSED TO BE CANCELLED AFTER THREE EPISODES?


Shondaland’s Still Star-Crossed‘s Monday run is over after three low-rated outings. 
Starting this coming week, the Romeo & Juliet sequel no longer will air in its assigned Monday time slot. After a break, the ABC series will continue its freshman run on July 8, airing on Saturdays.
http://deadline.com/2017/06/still-star-crossed-abc-series-move-saturday-monday-canceled-one-season-schedule-downgrade-1202118753/

I'm sad. But it was bad.  Wasn't it?

The casting was off. The female star didn't look right with the black guy or the white guy.  Something about the men chosen to play her love interests were just wrong -- the black guy and the white guy were both cute but too small in some way. I never could quite put my finger on it.
Starting the series in summer on Mondays was dumb. Not having it follow something like Grey's Anatomy (which already has a following) was dumber still. 

But maybe it was just bad?

I love Shonda

I love Shakespeare
I love Romeo and Juliette

And I still forgot the third episode had come and gone for a week.

So, maybe it was just bad.

Can't win them all. Not even Shonda. 


Something about the colorblind casting just didn't work. I've seen it work before...I think. But this was done too widely. I mean, this is supposed to be a story about two families. And with a period piece you're already working to understand the language, the times, and the customs. And then you add not being able to figure out who is related to who when there are only two families? Really? 

I mean, even when there are all white folks there's some sort of an attempt to do some physical matching with hair or something  -- isn't there?
Maybe not. But I don't remember being this confused in a story about who is related to who before. 

Or maybe it's just that we started in the middle of Romeo and Juliette when there were dozens of characters "already on the stage," all being introduced at once.

Or maybe if you don't have skin colors match when two families are at war, you should have all the men of one family be in one color uniform then have all the men of the other family be in another uniform -- so you know which set of people you're watching.

I knew all the players because I know the play, and my confusion STILL didn't wane until the second episode --where nothing had really happened.

Maybe STILL STAR-CROSSED will save itself in the Saturday time slot? Maybe something will happen that makes the character's interesting.

But maybe it was just bad. Three episodes in and the characters are all saying the same things in the third episode that they were in the first. 


Even so, ABC seems to have given this show the short shrift. A Jimmy Kimmel  special or re-run replaced STILL STAR-CROSSED in the third week. 
So ABC decided the show was a failure by episode two and killed what little momentum it might have had?  
Was it that bad? Was it bad enough to put a Steve Harvey game show on instead of the fourth episode? Is FAMILY FEUD really going to get more ratings if you switch it out last minute? Really?   
That seems like a slap in the face.
Or maybe they extended Shonda all the grace they could. I mean, I don't think THE CATCH is that great. I think it got a time slot where the other shows are carrying it. 

And I think some black folks, like myself, love HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER because so many people of color are in it --even the black extras, black minor characters, and famous black guest stars. But the ratings aren't so great that it seems safe. Viola Davis winning acting awards helps keep it on the air, I'm sure.

In any case, I'm sad STILL STAR-CROSSED is dying on the vine. I really am -- and in less than a month.  I really wish it had been given a chance during the fall when people are gearing up to watch new shows...instead of putting it on in a place where it was almost guaranteed to fail unless it was awesome.

And STILL STAR-CROSSED definitely wasn't awesome.

However, I am going to try to give it some love on Saturday's hoping it manages to pull itself out the hole it's in. I'll be DVR-ing it at the very least.

The Muslim Ban: Did Trump Really Win?



Feeling Rebloggy

On Monday, the US Supreme Court partially revived President Donald Trump's revised travel ban, agreeing to hear arguments in October and allowing the administration to suspend travel for some foreign nationals and refugees until it decides the case. Trump immediately took to Twitter to declare triumph, but many travellers he hoped to ban can still enter the US, claiming their own victory.   

And the Court has not reached the merits of the case ...[The Court only made a decision on the Emergency Application]

US Supreme Court agrees to hear Trump Muslim ban case [later in the year.] Until the Court issues its final decision, the ban "may not be enforced against foreign nationals who have a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States". That connection would allow those with familial ties and students and employees to enter....

Trump claimed the travel ban was a temporary pause necessary to allow his administration time to review its internal procedures and develop "extreme vetting" protocols without the burden of processing ongoing travel applications. But Trump's national security urgency is belied by his administration's delays in developing the safeguards whose absence it claims imperils the country and justifies the ban.
Aljazeera.com



White Supremacy got a 1/2 to 3/4 point win yesterday. Or maybe they scored a full point. It depends on how badly the partial decision is implemented.

The Emergency Application of the MUSLIM BAN will likely take effect on June 29th.  It seems the most clear effect will be that refugees will not be allowed into the country temporarily. How the people who enforce our borders interpret and enforce keeping out those that don't have a "bonafide relationship" to the United States remains to be seen.

Sounds messy, as usual. And I think it's rather ironic that refugees are being blocked as the United States is threatening to create more refugees in Syria.  



Apparently, there's some sort of wind up toward another gas attack like the one in April. Trump is threatening to respond. If he bombs another airport and misses the runway again, there COULD be more people in Syria trying to get out....a.k.a. more refugees.  
It takes a lot of damn nerve to have created ISIS (by bombing Iraq) then refuse to help mop up the outcome by taking in refugees.
I'm not sure how much of a protest there will be in response to MUSLIM BAN this time. The big companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook....they all got what they wanted. The people they wanted to be able to move freely in and out of the country are safe. 

We're about to see how many people care about ethnoracism now that the money-folk may be mostly out of the debate.

There may not be much of a protest come June 29th. But, I'm glad I'm not going to be in an airport within the next week. 

Monday, June 26, 2017

MIKE BROWN SETTLEMENT IS JUST ONE MORE WAY TO COVER UP THE COVER UP OF MIKE BROWN'S MURDER


"U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber....ordered the settlement agreement sealed, writing that its disclosure "could jeopardize the safety of individuals involved in this matter, whether as witnesses, parties, or investigators," the newspaper reported."





In case you missed this news from a few months back:

The Ferguson police were very selective about which part of the store surveillance video they showed the public.
You remember the video right? The one where they showed Mike Brown shoving a man that grabbed him, turned out to be the person running the store. Well, Brown was at the store hours before that more "damning" piece of video that the Ferguson police called a "strong arm robbery.


This new section of the same video makes it look like Brown might have been retrieving something that was ALREADY HIS.  
This, in turn, might mean that the older gentleman who grabbed Brown hours later -- during what the Ferguson police called a "strong arm robbery-- didn't understand what was going on.  
And if it was a misunderstanding, maybe this is why the store owner never called the police; a customer in the store called the police about the incident in the store.  

Now lets go back and remember the sequence in which the information about Mike Brown's murder was revealed

When I first heard of Mike Brown's shooting, Wilson had stopped Brown and his companion because of jay walking.
Then when the incident started getting national attention and therefore national heat, then the Ferguson police said Wilson stopped Brown because he matched the description of the "strong arm robber."
Then when it started looking like Wilson couldn't have known about the incident in the store before he stopped Brown and killed him, that's when the crazy n-word story starts to take shape.
Wilson didn't give his official statement, as far as I know, until after the autopsy. Was he waiting for the autopsy results to come back to see if any of the bullets hit Brown in the back? Was he waiting to see if he'd blown a hole in Brown's raised hands?  
Wilson was panicked by the big black demon, remember? He probably didn't know where he hit Brown at all.
 When the strong arm robbery story gets wobbly -likely because Wilson didn't know about the robbery when he killed Brown- that's when white Ferguson law enforcement starts with the crazy n**ger story 
You remember the crazy n-word story right?
In the racist white mind, if a person is black and also willing to snatch cigarillos in broad daylight they must be crazy violent enough to reach down into a cops car grab his gun for no reason.
That's why holding back that other piece of surveillance tape was important. The trumped up robbery story makes the crazy n-word story work for a wider variety of white folks.

No matter which way you turn Mike Brown's death was a murder.

In my opinion, hiding a part of the surveillance video was white law enforcement helping make Wilson's ridiculous story more solid. And now we have a judge ordering 1.5 million dollar settlement sealed when such settlements aren't usually sealed ...so as to protect all the lying white supremacists that helped Wilson get away with murder, maybe?

FERGUSON POLICE THEORY OF MIKE BROWN SHOOTING HAS BEEN SHOT TO PIECES...EVEN FOR WHITE PEOPLE


http://blackchickrocked.blogspot.com/2017/03/ferguson-police-theory-of-mike-brown.html

Saturday, June 24, 2017

BETWEEN CHARLEENA LYLE AND CHARLIE SHEEN LIES RACISM, CLASSISM, GREED, AND CALLOUSNESS

Charleena Lyles called police because she thought somebody broke into her home. Mentally ill and pregnant, police shot and killed her in a home full of children. Police are, once again, stating that they were just defending themselves.

According to her family and police records, Ms. Lyles wrestled with significant mental health issues. An audiotape reveals officers discussing her police and mental health history immediately before the shooting. 
Seattle Police Department officers had been called to her residence more than 20 times before this Sunday, with mental illness often figuring in those encounters. 
The department had placed an officer caution on her address for this reason, meaning officers should be on alert for dangerous behavior from her. 
~NY TIMES
When I was a kid in grade school, the teacher told us what policemen did for a living. One of the things the white teacher said is "The policeman is  your friend." Having seen footage of police with black civil rights protesters, I knew the policeman was not MY friend.

But when I was little I thought it was the old people with old views that were bad. I thought my generation was going to be so much better because we saw each other day to day and knew each other. That was before I realized that little white Suzie and I could be looking at the very same event at the very same time and be seeing totally different things. 

I cried because I saw innocent people peaceful requesting their rights as U.S. citizens being attacked by white police officers. Little white Suzie cried right beside me wondering why black people won't behave so they won't have to be treated so harshly.

I was in my teens before I realized two people could be sitting side by side and crying over having witnessed two totally different things.


Before I realized little white Suzie was seeing life very differently than I was, all occupations were open to me -- princess, doctor, lawyer, superhero. I had an endless list. Things dropped off as I got older.

When I was a little older and saw a television news report where a police officer followed a suspect into a dark alley, I knew my being a police officer was out of the question. 

There was no way I was going to risk my life in such a direct way for strangers
I realize now that I had no idea that there were a bunch of little white boys sitting all around me thinking something totally different. Such as:  
1) 'I'm going to become a police officer and protect the public. 
'2) 'I'm going to save my own life first before I do anything else...'especially if the person I'm supposed to protect is not of my own tribe.

Cops, mostly white, have been making choice 2 be made over and over again. 

This is why Philando Castile is dead.

I'm not exactly sure this is why Charleena Lyles is dead. But I feel certain that a lack of empathy born of lack of concern for those not of my tribe is at the root.

The shift away from hospital treatment of mental illness was not matched by an offsetting commitment to fund the health care people needed to live on the outside. Medicaid reimbursement rates are so low that it is difficult to find providers who will accept it....  
[AND THE SENATE HEALTHCARE BILL IS CURRENTLY TRYING TO CUT MEDICAID LOWER]
African-American[s] are at least as likely as white people to experience mental health distress but are half as likely to receive mental health treatment. This helps to explain why it’s easy to recall other high-profile cases of police use of deadly force involving black victims with documented histories of mental illness....
~NY TIMES 
I'm sick and tired of white run newspapers trying to tell us that police officers are simply untrained when it comes to the mentally ill. This may be true. But so what? This is less than 33% of the story most days. 

Charleena Lyles didn't wind up encountering police because her out-of-control behavior drew them when she died. She called the police for help. She called them over and over again for help. 

Maybe something inside her knew she needed help


  • Two Seattle police officers went to an apartment police had been to 20 times before. 
  • Charleena Lyles was known to be mentally ill, so 
  • The Seattle Police marked her address in their system so that police officers would know to expect dangerous behavior from her  

In other words, the local police department marked her address so as to know they should protect themselves but they didn't do it. They put themselves in a situation where they didn't search her, couldn't get back to the door and get out of her space, and wound up shooting their way out --past a small pregnant woman with a knife.

Hard to imagine this happening to say...Charlize Theron, isn't it?



  • If you know a person is mentally ill before you get there, then you know you are going to have to take special precautions to stop her from escalating things --even if you haven't had training to know exactly how to do that.  
  • If you know a person is mentally ill before you get there, then you know that you may wind up having the protect that person from themselves AND yourself too
Police had been to Lyles' home just two weeks before, on June 5th. A police officer had to talk her into giving up a pair of scissors she was using to threaten them.  


The police report of Lyles' June 5 arrest states that she allegedly threatened two police officers with “a pair of extra-long metal shears” while they responded to a domestic violence call she made at her home. The report, written by responding officer Davidson Lim, says both officers were "eight to ten" feet away from Lyles, who was sitting on a couch, and had their weapons drawn to the “low ready position” when he arrived. The suspect, allegedly a former partner of Lyles, according to her lawyer, had already fled. Lyles allegedly told the two officers that they would not be able to leave the room.
At one point, her 4-year-old daughter climbed into her lap. During this time, Lyles allegedly made statements about turning into a wolf and cloning her daughter. Lim says he eventually convinced Lyles to drop the shears and called her family, who later arrived. He arrested her and took her to the King County jail. 
“After talking with Lyles' family, we learned that Lyles has experienced a recent sudden and rapid decline in her mental health,” Lim wrote...
Lyles was talking about turning into a wolf and cloning her daughter. 

1) So how did Lyles still have custody of her children? (Was it just about the money? Not enough medicaid money to put her in a mental health facility where she belongs? Even so, what about her children?) 
This is a sign of total lack of concern for black bodies all by itself. And it's just luck one of the children wasn't shot.
2) And why would an ordinary person, much less a cop, let someone who is mentally ill get between him and the door without searching her -- especially if that mentally ill person had to be talked out of scissors the week before?
The police caution as to be on the look out for dangerous behavior should have stopped this from happening all by itself. 

I think they key to understanding police officers killing the mentally ill is to understand the mindset of the police officer once he reaches a black neighborhood. 

Believe people's actions not their words. 

These police officers are behaving as if protecting their own lives is first and only priority --whenever they encounter a black person. 

- Charleena Lyle
- Philando Castile
- Miriam Carey 

Cowardice born of anti-black stereotypes is the the other 2/3rds of picture when it comes to unintentional murder of black people. The other 1/3 discussed before, the lack of formal training to handle the mentally ill, is compromised further by callousness. 

HEADLINE

Seattle Police Flack Talks 

About the Charleena Lyles Shooting 

While Playing Video Games



Incompetence is always made worse by a callous lack of empathy.  And some of that callousness is based on racism and likely classism too. 
For example, do you really believe this "police officers aren't trained" bullsh** would fly if Paris Hilton wound up dead on a the floor because she got high and picked up a kitchen knife...much less is she has some sort of psychological break down?
If you do believe cops would treat Paris Hilton the same way as they treated Charleena Lyles, please do recall that Charlie Sheen was running his white ass around with a machete in public when he was out of control and stoned. The police were called and they did not shoot him.

Things may have gone down exactly the way the Seattle Officers said it did. But they didn't use the precautions they should have to avoid having to shoot a mentally ill pregnant woman who was with her children at the time. 

And if white folks really cared about somebody aside from themselves and their money, in the form of tax dollars, Lyles would have been committed to a mental hospital on June 5th -- two weeks before cops trapped themselves in a mentally ill woman's apartment and wound up having to shoot their way out. 
Despite repeated previous mental health referrals and the involvement of Child Protective Services, she was alone with her children on Sunday, in distress and with nowhere to turn but 911. 
Ms. Lyles’s situation is not unique. People with untreated mental illnesses are disproportionately likely to attract police attention. The combination of mental illness, racial segregation and poverty is particularly likely to result in police contact, often leading to arrest. In fact, a 2006 Bureau of Justice Statistics study revealed that 24 percent of state prisoners report a history of mental illness... 
What changed over the past half-century is that the United States has seen a stunning decline in resources devoted to public mental health — during the same time the nation adopted mass incarceration
~NY TIMES
Bullets first and sorrow later is reserved for the mentally ill when bodies are black, especially black female bodies.

We know what happened to Charleena Lyles, give or take a few specifics. Cop just think it was justified when it wasn't. The shooting being justifiable is what we're arguing about. 

These cold-hearted bast*rds, unable to see black people as human, are actually arguing about Lyles being at fault because she filed a false police report...when she thought she turned into a wolf two weeks back.

Charleena Lyles kept calling police because she needed help and attention. She didn't get it. 

So what we're truly arguing about, what we're protesting, is the same thing as always: Black Lives DO Matter.