It's Viva Las Vegas For GOP Contenders & Ken Detzner Rides Again

Voter purge-obsessed Florida Sec of State Ken Detzner

March may be coming to a rain-soaked close here by the banks of the Delaware River but if you harbored any doubts about Republican focus on the upcoming fall mid-term elections, kiss 'em goodbye.

Between the Supreme Court challenge by Hobby Lobby to undermine the contraceptive portions of the Affordable Health Care Act, ongoing Republican efforts to prevent eligible US citizens from voting in the November Congressional elections and a massive fund-raising campaign, the GOP is in game mode and all bets are off.

They're trying to hold onto their majority in the House and six is the magic number for them to re-gain the Senate. According to the slew of e-mails from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee clogging my overburdened in-box, a single GOP fundraiser last week raised a staggering $15.1 million.

Not a bad take for one nights work. Evidently the fiery but frequently senseless right-wing rhetoric of the recent CPAC conference motivated Republicans to whip out their checkbooks.

Remember when presidential candidates used to actually court the approval of American voters?

Last week a steady stream of potential GOP presidential candidates made the pilgrimage out to Las Vegas to seek the blessing (and campaign contributions) of global casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

You remember Sheldon right? After pouring $19 million of his almost $37 billion fortune to prop up Newt Gingrich's hopeless snoozer of a 2012 presidential campaign, Adelson then backed Mitt Romney once Newt crapped out. (And Sheldon made his fortune in gambling?)

Even walking-political liability Chris Christie is out there trying to make his case. He's happy to get the hell out of New Jersey for a few days and is apparently undeterred by the fact that pricey attorney/fixer Randy Mastro's NJ tax payer-funded whitewash "investigation" (which exonerated hizzoner despite not interviewing Bridget Kelly or David Samson) is almost universally viewed as a total sham by both the public and press.

Governor Christie seems to be laboring under the delusion that convincing David Samson to "retire" from his post at the head of the monumentally corrupt Port Authority will quench the thirst of the restless hordes calling for the truth about Bridge-Gate.

But wooing the backing of big GOP donors in Vegas may be the least of Christie's host of problems.

He's also got some 'splainin' to do to the members of the Republican Jewish Coalition meeting out there in Vegas regarding those anti-Semitic comments made by the Gov's own staffers about the GW Bridge traffic snarl in front of Rabbi Mendy Carlebach's house. Adelson is RJC's largest financial backer as well as a board member. Oops.

Julie Bykowicz wrote an excellent summary of the GOP players out in the desert seeking Sheldon's blessing on Bloomberg.com; check it out.

Finally, based on the ongoing Republican obsession to prevent US citizens from voting in essential swing states, one might almost be led to believe the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has a Sith lord on their payroll who can use the dark side of The Force to manipulate the minds of Republican secretaries of state like Ohio's notorious vote suppressor Jon Husted and Florida's vote suppressing zealot Ken Detzner (pictured above), to believe in a mythical plot of wide-spread voter fraud.

Data from organizations like the Department of Justice demonstrates that actual cases of voter fraud in the United States are so numerically infrequent (.00000013 out of 197 million votes cast in 2006) as to make it make it almost nonexistent.

But that hasn't deterred groups like True the Vote from using fabricated statistics and rhetoric-filled fear-mongering to support arcane voter ID laws, limit polling stations in districts that skew Democratic, and curtailing voting hours that make it easier for people who work to vote.

Republicans simply haven't been able to sell a simple majority of Americans to back GOP their legislative initiatives or presidential candidates in years, so men like Husted and Detzner have taken on the dirty work; doing everything in their power to try and systematically purge Democratic voters from the election rolls.

The state of Florida recently put the halt on yet another voter purge list filled with thousands of names the Republican party wants to remove the voter rolls led by the voter suppression ideologue, Detzner; the same guy who in 2011 ordered local Florida election districts to send out letters to thousands of voters informing them they were "non-citizens" and did not have the right to vote.

It turned out the purge list was filled with errors and most of the people were actually citizens who were eligible to vote. According to ThinkProgress.org a letter was even sent to a 91 year-old WWII veteran. The article by Josh Israel reports Detzner recently tried yet again to purge more voters but was once again shut down by the state because of inaccuracies and mistakes in the list.

It's a sad state of affairs when a political party simply stops trying to sway voters with new ideas and instead pours millions of dollars into widespread efforts to illegally strip people who won't vote for them of their most basic Constitutional right.

Or perhaps, Republicans are just terrified of what conservative author and pundit Ann Coulter recently termed the "browning of America"? Annie get your gun!!

And Republicans like John McCain are up in arms and outraged about Putin annexing Crimea?

Seems to me the GOP has it's own kind of Anschluss going on right here in America, only instead of guns and bogus diplomacy, they're using false voter fraud accusations to manipulate the electorate in a devious effort to assume further control over state legislatures, the House of Representatives and United States Senate.

Heather Mac Donald's "Common Sense" - Sheriff Joe Arpaio Just Can't Stop Profiling Latinos

Conservative urban affairs expert Heather Mac Donald

Clearly not everyone is going to draw the same conclusions from statistics and data presented in a report and that's fair; after all this is America and the 1st Amendment applies to all.

In my previous blog comments on the disparities in how discipline is meted out to students in American schools, I referenced some alarming statistics from the Department of Education showing some gaping differences in which students were more likely to receive harsher punishments from teachers and administrators.

It seemed to me reflective of the same kinds of disparities seen in sentencing and incarceration in this country and might offer insight into perception issues that impact the "school-to-prison" pipeline problem where some US states spend more on prisoners than they do on students.  

Evidently conservative author, essayist and political commentator Heather Mac Donald (pictured above) looked at the same data from the DOE and came to a much different conclusion.

As reported by Media Matters on Monday, in a piece in the National Review Online, Mac Donald dismissed the DOE study, instead positing that a combination of single parent homes, broken family structure and non-specific genetic behavioral differences specifically inherent in black children were the more likely cause for the disparities in discipline.

Mac Donald's conclusion? "Given the black-white crime disparities it is equally common sense that black students are more likely to be disruptive in class as well."

Exactly who's "common sense" she is referring to probably isn't hard to figure out, and as Media Matters reported, her totally unsupported conclusions go against the findings of more balanced experts and research on the subject of discrimination impacting discipline standards in schools.

Such flagrantly opinionated conclusions are hallmarks of Mac Donald's numerous columns which have appeared in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, National Review, USA Today and of course the always-balanced NY Post. 

Mac Donald has carved out quite a career as a Buchanan-esque sociologist railing against victim-hood, entitlements, welfare, crime...you get the picture.

The kind of thinker today's right-wing conservatives salivate over, she wields her academia-cred as a product of Andover, Yale, Cambridge and Stanford to offer views on race, urban affairs and crime cut straight from the Dinesh D'Souza school of thought. She wrote a book in 2003 with the intriguing title, "Are Cops Racist?" She was born in 1956 so one assumes she did grow up in the same America of Bull Connor and former LAPD chief Gates; perhaps she was just permanently scarred by the race riots of the 60's.

Given her contempt for non-whites she chooses to reside in New York (she recently defended the NYPD's Stop & Frisk policy) which makes her even more of an enigma to me.
 
Perhaps she harbors political ambitions? This concerns me. She's obviously more intelligent than Sarah Palin, and more nuanced than Michelle Bachmann but is only slightly less-detached from mainstream American reality than Michelle Malkin so it's hard to know what she would be like as a candidate; or God forbid, Chancellor of New York City's schools.

Speaking of "Are Cops Racist?" did you hear about Maricopa County (Arizona) sheriff Joe Arpaio?

He was hauled back into Federal court on Monday with a top deputy for ignoring a court order to stop intentionally using the resources and man-power of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office to target, profile, harass and arrest Latinos and function as an anti-immigration vendetta force.

He just can't stop! Sheriff Joe is the 81-year-old six-term sheriff famous for housing prisoners in open-air tents under the baking Arizona sun and forcing them to wear pink prison garb.

According to Fernanda Santos of the NY Times, Arpaio and his chief deputy Jerry Sheridan not only refused judge G. Murray Snow's order to stop targeting Latinos at their places of work and pulling them over; the two men were caught on video openly mocking the Federal court order issued last year and were laid out (and sternly warned) in court today by the judge.

I've got nothing against Heather Mac Donald or Sheriff Joe, they just confuse me. Despite their respective experience they seem hopelessly locked into a narrow, one-dimensional view of America where I view diversity as a strong point of society and a linchpin that defines America.

I suppose some people just can't get past their own common sense.
  

How Early Do Disparities in Punishment & Sentencing in America Begin? Try Pre-School

Guess who's most likely to be disciplined in US schools?

The reality of the huge gaps in disparities in America based solely on race in terms of indicators like unemployment, access to mortgages, insurance rates, car loan rates and total savings are glaring enough in these troubled economic times.

Perception is a huge part of that, and when we look at how perception impacts how disciplinary measures are handed out to students in US schools, some disturbing trends are evident.  

According to Department of Education statistics, disparities in punishment based on race in the US begin as early as preschool.

Of 8,000 preschool students who were suspended from school in 2011 (yes, that's toddlers suspended from school) an alarming 45% were black or Latino children compared to 26% of white children- even though the actual enrollment rates are actually the reverse.

It's a disturbing trend that continues right on through kindergarten, elementary, middle and high school. Between 2011 - 2012, a staggering 42% of K-12 students who were suspended were black, even though blacks make up only 16% of the overall population.

The math doesn't paint a pretty picture. But it does offer some insight into how the judicial system and law enforcement agencies serve as catalysts for channeling so many minority offenders into the vicious cycle of the American prison system - many of whom are incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses.

There's no question that ground-breaking books like author Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" or historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad's    "The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and, the Making of Modern Urban America" originally published in 2010 have helped to bring a new energy to, and analysis of, the approach to prison reform in the United States.

Groups like The Campaign to End the New Jim Crow (CENJCPNJ) are part of a growing nation-wide network of grass roots movements dedicated to prison reform in a modern industrialized nation where the statistics are both alarming and unambiguous.

Despite ranking third behind China and India in terms of population, the United States is the world's leader in terms of the total number of human beings incarcerated in prisons. While our politicians are quick to point to China, Iran, Russia and other nations for their human rights violations, there's no nation on Earth that imprisons a higher proportion of it's own populace than America.

According to The Sentencing Project, there are currently more than 2.2 million men and women imprisoned in America; that represents an increase of 500% over the past thirty years.

Despite such daunting statistics, real gains have been made by organizations, scholars, legal experts, politicians and activists finding innovative ways to address the myriad injustices resulting from disparities in incarceration rates to enact meaningful change.

For example, according to an article in the Des Moines Register by Rekha Basu, recently a delegation made up of representatives from the NAACP and voting rights groups traveled to Geneva to petition the United Nations to address the issue of American ex-prisoners having their voting rights stripped away by state legislatures even after their sentences have been served and they've been released.

How does that translate in terms of numbers? According a report entitled "Democracy Imprisoned", a staggering 8% of the adult African-American population is disenfranchised from voting as a result of state laws that bar former inmates from the ballot box compared to 1.8% of non-whites.

Look at the statistics in some Red States: 23% of African-Americans can't vote in Florida, in Kentucky (Senator Rand Paul and Senator Mitch McConnell's state) 22% of the adult black population can't vote - in Virginia 20% can't vote. Or look at Iowa, African-Americans make up 3.2% of the total population there - yet they make up 26% of the prison population.

Criminalizing non-violent behavior isn't just limited to harsh drug sentencing laws these days either. Even though debtor's prisons were largely outlawed in the United States around the 1830's and the US Supreme Court ruled that jailing people for being unable to pay debts violated the Constitution in 1970, even today some cities and towns still lock people up for failure to pay debts.

ThinkProgress.org reports that four residents of Montgomery, Alabama recently filed a lawsuit in Federal court after they claimed they were locked up for unpaid parking tickets and forced to do cleaning work inside the jail to work off their debt.

Some cities and towns in Georgia not only lock people up for failing to pay debts, they make the debtors pay a monthly fee to Judicial Corrections Services; JCS is a private company based in Georgia that handles debt collection for a number of municipalities across the US.

Back in 2012 a judge in Harpserville, Alabama severed the town's contract with JCS because he deemed the company functioned as a "debtors prison" that piled excessive fees on people convicted of minor offenses then jailed them when they couldn't pay.

Of course companies like JCS aren't new in the United States. The south has a long and particularly disturbing history with debtors prisons and "work farms" that once functioned as a state-sanctioned method of keeping huge numbers of mostly poor rural African-Americans incarcerated doing arduous enforced physical labor sometimes for years over relatively low, or completely fabricated fees that courts knew the defendants couldn't pay because they were so poor.

For a nation that loves to present itself as a beacon of human rights to other countries, the US certainly has a broad range of issues going on within its own borders that require more public attention, as well as meaningful legal remedies to address them.

Perhaps if we can start by looking closer at why much higher percentages of black and Latino preschoolers are being suspended, we can find ways to stem the tide of young lives being steered into the American prison system; lives forever branded into a state of permanent 2nd class citizenship from being simultaneously shut out of the voting booth and the chance to find a job to become productive members of society. 

Sadly for many kids, it begins early and lasts a lifetime.

Rohingya Blues & Sundown Town USA

Rohingya refugees from Myanmar detained in Malaysia 2013

During director Steve McQueen's recent acceptance speech for the Oscar for Best Picture for "12 Years a Slave" he cited a startling United Nation's International Labor Organization (ILO) statistic that there are currently 21 million people around the world living in a state of slavery, enforced labor or indentured servitude.

Last Tuesday the BBC's Ian-Muir Cochrane wrote an interesting article examining that figure and exploring the question of how many slaves there really are. It's a valid question.


But perhaps the bigger issue is not the exact number but the fact that there are human beings living in states of enforced labor at all fourteen years into the 21st century. People who can be found on just about every continent doing every kind of work imaginable.

Like the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims trapped in the Rakhine province of Myanmar.

Because the government of Myanmar has refused to grant them citizenship since 1948 (when this nation formerly known as Burma gained it's independence) this oppressed Muslim minority are not only unable to work, they also fall victim to violent attacks at the hands of Buddhist extremists and even the police and military.

Torture, beatings, arrests, torched homes and forced expulsion from villages have driven thousands of Rohingya to risk their lives to flee to Malaysia; which has a much larger Muslim population.

The harrowing journey takes the Rohingya through Thailand and over open seas through a treacherous route detailed by a New York Times article on Friday where they often fall victim to smugglers and human traffickers who frequently sell them into indentured labor working on fishing trawlers that ply the waters of the Gulf of Thailand, or as laborers on the mainland in Thailand or other Pacific nations.

Thousands of Rohingya have perished or been enslaved over the past few years. While it's critical to  attach some kind of number to that nightmarish trade in enforced human labor and misery, is it more important to quantify it, or back global efforts to put a stop to it?

Perhaps the point Steve McQueen was making in his Oscar speech is that if people were moved by his film that portrayed the story of one man's effort to escape human bondage - then people also need to be moved enough to demand an effort to end the global human trafficking that goes on here and now as well. What's the difference if it's 21,000 or 21 million really?

On another note, this past Saturday night I was scrolling through some Twitter links looking for interesting stories and saw this link to The Grio.com about a recent Injustice Files television special on the Discovery Channel about the history of "Sundown Towns" in America by filmmaker Keith Beauchamp.

I like to imagine I'm a reasonably informed person, but I was pretty shocked to learn that Sundown Towns still exist in America today, where (depending on the town) black Americans, Asians of different nationalities, Hispanics or Jews are not welcome to live and are actually prevented from living.

Most of these places aren't in the south either; there are some though, like Vidor, Texas. Most are in northern, mid-western and Western cities and towns.

Some are close to major US cities. For example it's only very recently that some communities outside Detroit, Michigan like Dearborn Heights, or Grosse Points had people of color moving in as residents; they were once notorious Sundown Towns. (As in you better not be here when the sun goes down.)

That legacy still hovers today. Dearborn Heights is where 19 year-old African-American high-school graduate Renisha McBride was shot in the face and killed with a shotgun back in November, 2013 by 54-year-old resident Theordore Wafer after she knocked on his front door to ask for help in the early morning hours after she crashed her car nearby.

These segregated communities were the subject of a 2006 book by James Loewen titled "Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism". 

Rather than just be shocked about it I'm going to personally take a more positive approach and pick up a used copy of Loewen's book and read it to better understand this troubling aspect of American society which is none the less an important part of this nation's history.

One we should all know more about. Funny, I graduated from high school and college and the term Sundown Town was never mentioned in any class I ever attended or test I took.

But I guess knowledge isn't always pretty. As Albert Einstein said, "Any fool can know. The point is to understand." The latter is what I'm after.

Citizens Call for Independent Investigation Into Robert Taylor's Death & The Economics of Potholes

Got potholes? Try Harare, Zimbabwe - (Photo Gadling.com)

For now most mainstream media outlets don't seem very interested in the circumstances surrounding the death of 75-year-old homeless man Robert Taylor in the Burlington County Detention Center back on December 30th.

But kudos to The Trentonian reporter Penny Ray for staying after this story and continuing to make sure it sees the light of day - giving hope that those responsible for this unspeakable example of criminal neglect of a human being are held accountable.

In yesterday's Trentonian Ray reports that concerned citizens are now calling for an independent investigation into Taylor's death. According to Ray's article, Burlington County resident Paul Bracy called for an independent investigaton during a meeting of the Burlington County Freeholders last Wednesday after county prosecutors had the audacity to issue a statement claiming Taylor's death was due to "natural causes."

The Burlington county prosecutor must have missed the part about Taylor being bound in a straight jacket naked and left on a cold concrete floor for five straight days with no food, water or medical treatment of any kind.

Barring a massive public outcry or more intense media scrutiny chances are slim that the Chris Christie-appointed state attorney general John Hoffman will initiate an investigation. But anything is possible given the spotlight on Christie for Bridge-gate and a judge's pending ruling on whether former aide Bridget Kelly will have to give up e-mails sent during the GW Bridge fiasco.

On a (somewhat) lighter note I was recently griping about the potholes just past the Route 1 overpass near the Parkside Elementary school on the southeast boundary of Trenton in a recent blog. It's still like driving over the Lunar surface over there but there was an interesting discussion about potholes
this morning on NPR's Car Talk.

A listener called in to ask where all the asphalt goes that seemingly disappears leaving the gaping holes in the surface of the road we're all too familiar with.

Apparently once the cold temperatures, snow and ice cause cracks and moisture begins to seep in, the wheels of every vehicle that subsequently role over the area take away small amounts of asphalt - eventually leaving a pothole.

The Car Talk guys, brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi, claim that while there should reasonably be asphalt and road construction design that would prevent potholes, preventing them entirely would cost the economy jobs and revenue because of the huge number of people potholes keep working.

Not just the state, county or city municipal workers who have to fill them each and every winter and spring, but the mechanics who repair transmissions, axles and tiress that fall victim to potholes.

Is that really true? Consider this article on the economic impact of potholes from CNBC economic reporter John Schoen. Among other facts he notes that this year Americans will spend a staggering $80 billion on vehicle repair costs from potholes. Guess which American city is fourth in the nation (behind Bridgeport, New York City and Milwaukee) for the most expensive vehicle repair bills from potholes? Trenton, NJ. 

Lord knows I've driven over them enough times (and cursed aloud) but never really considered the larger impact on the economy of something so annoying. The pothole as an important component of the US economy? Go figuh.

It could be worse I suppose, check out the world's worst potholes.

The Lonely Death of Robert Taylor In Cell # 203

Burlington County (NJ) Detention Center

It's said the measure of a nation can arguably be gauged by how the least fortunate within it's borders and institutions are treated.

If reporter Penny Ray's disturbing cover story in Monday's issue of The Trentonian about the death of 75 year-old homeless man Robert Taylor is any indicator, the Department of Corrections in the state of New Jersey and in particular the Burlington County Detention Center are setting new lows for the standard by which America treats incarcerated people with health and addiction issues.

Ray's article is based on eyewitness accounts taken from an unnamed veteran prison employee who works in the Burlington County jail and an inmate named Sean Turzanski, a college graduate with no prior record who was locked up in the segregation unit two cells away from where Taylor was brought back on Christmas Day 2013. 

According to both witnesses the 75 year-old Taylor, a chronic local alcoholic nicknamed "Drunk Santa Claus" was apparently detoxing when he was originally taken to the jail on December 20th.

He was in poor physical condition and in desperate need of hospital care when two guards later carried him into the single-person cell number 203 in the segregation unit of the Burlington County Detention Center on December 25th, naked and tightly bound in a "suicide smock" which prevented him from moving.

According to Turzanski (who'd been locked in the segregation unit on December 24th for allegedly defending himself in a fight with two other inmates), a prison guard named Sgt. Nunn told him that Taylor had been locked up because of an unpaid $96 ticket and that it was cheaper to just put him in the segregation cell because taking him to the hospital or clinic would've meant having two guards escort him.

Upon seeing Taylor's condition when he was brought in, Turzanski claims "I knew there was no way he committed an act that deemed him being in segregation." 

Taylor was left on the concrete floor of the cold cell with no mattress or blanket, for five days; during which time he was unable to move, never touched food trays left outside the cell door, never drank any water, never showered and continually defecated and urinated on himself.

The smell got so bad guards began spraying air freshener outside the cell, and even occasionally opened the cell door to spray Lysol directly on Taylor; who remained in the same position the entire time he was there.

But no jail personnel went in to check on the man's physical condition. Eventually one guard actually rolled up a towel and wedged it under the door to Taylor's cell because of the stench coming from inside - even nurses who regularly walked by the cell to administer medication to inmates never bothered to go in and check on him.

Turzanski was so appalled by the smell coming from the other cell he repeatedly asked guards and officers about Taylor's condition and requested they help him, but they ignored the homeless man; even when he managed a few weak cries for help.

Taylor was eventually found dead in the cell on December 30th five days after being locked up.

Turzanski managed to get another inmate who was released to smuggle a letter detailing the death of Robert Taylor out of the prison. If you click this link and scroll down to the bottom there's a link to the letter and you can read the entire hand-written account, which is one of those hard-to-fathom tales taken from real life that reveal things about ourselves as a nation that we really don't want to know about.

Members of the New Jersey Libertarian Party took up Turzanski's cause in February. An article posted on their Website claims a representative from the Open Government Advocacy Project requested incident reports from the prison regarding Taylor's death but was told no records existed.

In her March 10th article in The Trentonian, reporter Penny Ray says the chair of the New Jersey Libertarian Party, Jay Edgar, received an e-mail from Burlington County Prosecutor Robert D. Bernardi stating that his office "determined that no criminal wrongdoing occurred in the care of Mr. Taylor while he was incarcerated. The medical examiner determined that the death was due to natural causes. Additionally, Mr. Turzanski was interviewed by detectives from our office as part of our investigation. This office considers this matter closed as it pertains to any potential criminal violations."

And so goes this horrific case of neglect of a homeless man effectively left in a cell to die for not paying a $96 ticket. It's a really sad measure of the Burlington County Detention Center's treatment of a human being and appalling indifference to suffering by prison personnel that they couldn't just take him to the clinic or a hospital.

Just consider for a moment what $96 gets you these days, or what it means to the Burlington County Court; it cost a homeless man his life. If Sean Turzanski hadn't fought to get the story told would anyone even have heard of the lonely death of Robert Taylor? 

Dr. Ben Carson Emerges As The Official Republican Black Guy At CPAC 2014

Dr. Ben Carson

There's little question renowned pediatric neurosurgeon and author Dr. Ben Carson is an exceptionally intelligent and accomplished physician, which makes his willingness to be used as a pawn by the right wing conservative movement all the more puzzling.

You may recall Carson made headlines last fall at the Voter Values Summit when he took the stage and compared the Affordable Care Act to slavery.

Republicans absolutely love a black guy who will say crazy $#%! like that; I'll bet you Dinesh D'Souza jumps up, claps his hands and runs around the room dancing a little jig every time Carson unleashes one of those nuggets of extremist nonsense.

On Saturday the good doctor placed 3rd in the CPAC straw poll of GOP presidential front runners with 9% of the vote; Texas Senator Ted Cruz came in 2nd with 11% and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul came in first with 31% of the vote - poor Chris Christie finished 4th with 8% and is realizing Bridge-Gate is a liability to the GOP's chances in 2016.   

Carson used his speech to lambaste the "PC police" and "liberal media" for trying to silence him in the wake of his comparing homosexuality to bestiality while defending the "traditional definition" of marriage as being between a man and a woman in a recent Fox New Interview.

I can't speak for all liberals, but the idea that there's some kind of liberal plot to silence Carson is simply delusional. Nothing improves the chances of another sweeping Democratic presidential victory in 2016 than another right-wing nut-bag like Carson trying to use Christianity as a shield for narrow-minded bigotry - it's his own mouth that's bringing media attention down on his arcane views.

But there's no need to get into his attempt to compare the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, one of the worst crimes against humanity in history, with an act of Congress designed to ensure that all Americans have access to decent health care; and remember that's coming from a former brain surgeon who is a professor emeritus at the John Hopkins School of Medicine.

And how is it you operate on the human brain using techniques at the forefront of medical knowledge and technology and claim you don't believe in evolution?

Political views like his are so crazy they're far outside the boundaries of the mainstream political spectrum where the 2016 presidential election will be won or lost. And the sad truth is Carson has nothing original to say.

Instead of standing up and offering a different vision for the country, he just rants on about liberal plots to silence him, misquotes Vladimir Lenin and makes bizarre observations about Nazi Germany.

That fact that this guy placed third in the CPAC straw poll pretty much tells you all you need to know about today's Republican party.

No, liberals don't have to do anything about Dr. Carson, his own extremist views will be the cause of his political implosion in 12 to 14 months when the Republican race gets serious and he confronts the reality that this Republican party will never nominate a black man to be president; just ask Colin Powell.

After a brilliant medical career Carson is content to play the buffoonish and intellectually demeaning role of the "Republican Black guy" the GOP likes to hold up to demonstrate that they're really not the party that actively tries to strip away the voting rights of minorities, fights against a minimum wage hike and openly embraces the bigotry of an idiot like Ted Nugent.

Just give it time, Carson's political flame will extinguish itself and he'll quietly go the way of Allan Keyes, Herman Cain or Armstrong Williams.

Or maybe he'll just wake up one day and have a Michael Steele moment and realize the Grand Old Party was bamboozling him all along.

But for now, hang a sign on the door because the Dr. is definitely in the house.

 



 

High School Ignorance In Westchester - Scary Republicanism at CPAC

Tweet by Mahopac student Ryan Sarfaty

What is it with students from cushy suburban high schools lately and this fascination with using social media to spread offensive messages and imagery based on the most ignorant kinds of racial stereotyping?
   
It was only eleven days ago that I blogged about the staged lynching of a wrestling practice dummy by eight wrestlers from Phillipsburg High School in New Jersey after they beat a rival high school with a wrestling team and student body comprised of a considerably higher ratio of African-American kids.

A few minutes ago my buddy James called me from up in the Bronx. He's all kinds of pissed off about the news reports about messages posted by some students from Mahopac High School that were released on Twitter after their boys varsity basketball team lost a close AA semifinal playoff game to perennial New York state powerhouse Mount Vernon High School; which is predominantly black.     

Mahopac has suspended the students who posted the offensive Tweets and all of them will participate in sensitivity training. But it doesn't make sense. I mean, look at the home page of this high school; on the surface it seems like a basically normal high school right?

But look on the menu on the left side of the page where Mahopac Central School District superintendent Thomas Manko posted a March 5th press release about the post-game incident; and it's clear something is happening in this community that prompted the students in question to post those offensive Tweets.

I'll grant there were some reports (but no evidence so far) of some Mount Vernon fans making some derogatory comments about the Mahopac cheerleaders during the game; but what's prompting a Mahopac student to bring a Confederate flag to the semifinal game and wave it around? Or another student to Tweet an image of the Confederate flag?  

There's a lot of people incensed about this incident, including students from Mahopac and the Mahopac boy's varsity basketball coach; who's black by the way. But what really irked my friend Jimmy is that he just can't make sense if it.

Jimmy's 2nd generation Irish and he grew up in Bronxville and now lives in the heavily Irish section of the Bronx known as Woodlawn; which some jokingly refer to as the "27th County".

He's in his early 50's and in high school he was was an exceptional wrestler. He used to head over to Mount Vernon High School to wrestle with members of their team because he liked to match skills with them and their coach at the time was a big influence on him personally.

Jimmy told me he was always treated with respect by students, athletes and coaches at Mount Vernon High School and so were his older brothers when they went over to cheer for him or watch him wrestle there. I share that because it's an example that the behavior by the Mahopac students and players was deeply offensive to a number of people; of all races and backgrounds.

But it's not just taking place in Mahopac. USA Today had an article on the same incident that also highlighted an incident during a girl's basketball game in Illinois when some members of the predominantly white Bedford North Lawrence High School student section dressed up in safari gear to slight the far more diverse student body and team from Lawrence North HS.

Maybe these students are only repeating stereotypes they've learned? The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is well underway and Republicans are jockeying for the right to call themselves the most "severely conservative."

Now I'm not talking about governors like Chris Christie or Bobby Jindal standing up on the podium and teeing off on President Obama like mocking him is some kind of solution to pull America out of this protracted economic slump aggravated by stagnant wages and sluggish hiring.

I'm talking about straight out white nationalism espoused by a number of CPAC participants and speakers as reported by Devin Burghart in a really excellent piece on NationalMemo.com that exposes people like Robert Vandervoort and Peter Brimelow.

These guys are 1000 times more dangerous than "Mr. Hayes", the crazy dude in Florida flying a KKK flag and a Confederate flag over his trailer (and for the perfect tri-fecta of intolerance, a noose in the front yard too!) in Boca Raton, Florida.

Clowns like Vandervoort and Brimelow are dangerous because the Republican party is perfectly willing to legitimize their extremist beliefs in an effort to fan the flames of hatred against President Obama; and more so because tolerance of that kind of mindless hostility towards someone because of the color of their skin is clearly filtering down to some of the teenagers in places like Mahopac and Phillipsburg - and there's nothing remotely American about that. 

Billionaire Philanthropist Tom Steyer Becomes GOP Target for His Determination to Battle Climate Change

Tom Steyer & wife "Kat" Taylor - (Photo SFgate.com)

Remember back in October of 2013 during the height of the government shutdown (that was intentionally caused by Republicans who blocked a continuing funding resolution) when Congresswoman Michele Bachmann appeared in front of the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC with other GOP Congressmen and defiantly announced their determination to keep the memorial open for visiting WWII vets?

This of course was in spite of the fact that Bachmann was one of the people who caused the memorial to be shut in the first place.

As the founder of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus and part of the fringe extremist wing of the GOP that engineered the partial government shutdown (forcing national parks across the nation to close because there was no money to pay members of the national park staff) Bachmann was simultaneously the cause of the closed memorial - and was also against it being closed.

To me it both epitomized the audacious stupidity of the Tea Party and also served as a vivid reminder of the depths of their hypocrisy. 

Yesterday Senate minority leader Republican Mitch McConnell may well have outdone Bachmann with his tirade on the Senate floor against San Francisco philanthropist Tom Steyer because of the liberal-leaning former hedge fund manager's pledge to spend $100 million of his own money to target mostly Republican candidates who deny climate change during the upcoming 2014 elections.

As reported by Evan Halper on NationalMemo.com yesterday afternoon, the stone-faced McConnell had the audacity to compare Steyer of being no different than the Koch brothers.

McConnell's comments came in the wake of Senate majority leader Harry Reid's recent denunciations of the right wing billionaire brothers spending millions on false and misleading attack ads against the Affordable Care Act to target Democratic senators in an effort to return the senate to GOP control.

The accusations by McConnell are laughable considering the Koch brothers have literally spent HUNDREDS of millions of dollars of their money to bankroll the Tea Party, sponsor inaccurate media campaigns attacking the president and other Democrats on everything from health care to Benghazi as well as legislative efforts to suppress the votes of the elderly, minorities, students and immigrants.

The Koch brothers are also major donors to the climate change denial movement, but not because they don't believe in science; Koch Industries and their myriad of subsidiary companies are well known as some of the most notorious polluters in the nation. According to Greenpeace, since 1997 Charles and David Koch have contributed over $67 million to the climate change denial movement in the name of corportate profits over sound environmental laws.

While Steyer, who amassed a $1.5 billion fortune as a headge fund manager before retiring recently to focus exclusively on addressing global climate change, was a major donor to President Obama's presidential campaign and also committed at least $11 million of his own money to help Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe become the 72nd governor of that critical battleground state - by all accounts he's a principled man with a grounded perspective who is guided by a sense of ethics.

If your don't know anything about Tom Steyer and his wife "Kat" Taylor, just take a couple minutes to read through this insightful profile of this liberal-leaning philanthropist power couple written by Julian Guthrie on SFgate.com. Really interesting people.

Steyer, an Ivy-League grad who's father was a socially conscious and successful New York city lawyer and who's mother was a teacher who taught in Harlem schools), drives an old Honda hybrid. He's made it his mission in life to address climate change and has pledged to spend the bulk of his fortune on issues related to social justice and inequality in America.

In California he spent $30 million of his own money to help a state-wide campaign to eliminate a coroporate tax loophole that brings in a billion dollars a year into the state's coffers and helped reduce it's massive deficit.

His Ivy-League educated wife (the couple met a Stanford University) is the head of One Pacific Coast Bank, a Federally certified Community Development Financial Institution the couple founded in Oakland, CA to address the lack of banking and lending services in poor neighborhoods. She's also an active advocate for a fair justice system as well. 

This couple is for real, Americans fortunate enough to have benefitted from privileged upbringings and top-tier educations who used their knowledge and connections to prosper financially, and yet still recognize the importance of giving back to those less fortunate than themselves for the long-term well being of the nation.

They're philanthropists interested creating a better society who recognize that the nation prospers when everyone propspers. Mitch McConnell can take the floor of the Senante and gripe about them all he wants to; but the Koch brothers will never understand Tom Steyer's kind of philanthrophy; the Koch brother's narrow vision  of America is a "corporate-ocracy" which they pay for and profit from.

I for one, am glad there are advocates like TomSteyer and Kat Taylor willing to channel their time, energy and resources into a broder vision for America. It will be needed in the 2014 elections.
 

The Science of Sleep - Putin's Crimean Gamble & Other Political Tidbits

Russian President Vladimir Putin gets his gun on-(Photo-Reuters)

Did you know dolphins, walruses, whales and other aquatic creatures have the ability to sleep with one half of their brains awake while the other side snoozes?

That and many other fascinating insights are the subject of this weekend's edition of NPR's Radiolab, which explores the science behind sleep. Check out the link and give it a listen.

The cute photo of a young lamb sleeping or the strange story of the man who "Ho-Ho-Ho's" in his sleep like Santa alone are worth the click.

Speaking of sleep, looking at the troubling events unfolding in the Ukraine sometimes I wonder if half the world is sleeping as the dogs of war begin to stir in a region of the world that has known so much devastation and conflict over the past century. Russian President Valdimir Putin didn't waste much time deploying troops to "defend" the Crimean peninsula, the long-time home and warm-water port of the Russian navy's Black Sea Fleet; one of the largest flotillas of surface warships in the world.

I found Putin's purely symbolic gesture of appearing before the Russian parliament to "ask" their permission to deploy troops to Crimea to be somewhat theatrical. As if he needed their permission, or any of them would dare to say no to him. Given his rather authoritarian track record as a politician and the fact that he's outlawed opposition political groups in Russia, the appearance before parliament was likely more intended as media propaganda for the Russian people, the Ukrainians and the West.

Not everyone is asleep though.

Did you catch Bill Maher giving it to conservative talking head Bill Kristol on HBO last Friday night? Link over to Mediaite.com and watch the clip. As Maher began discussing the Tea Party on its 5th anniversary (I won't be sending a card) Kristol condescendingly asked Maher about the origins of the Tea Party and Maher shot back that it was because the country overwhelmingly elected a "black president". Priceless. Maher is almost unmatched when it comes to speaking truth to conservatives and calling them out on their insanity.

The city of Trenton, New Jersey seems poised to awaken at long last after the scandal-ridden tenure of ex-mayor Tony Mack was finally ended by a superior court judge's ruling last Wednesday.

 After being convicted back on February 7th for extortion, bribery and wire fraud for taking cash in exchange for selling a city-owned parking garage to a developer for a fraction of it's actual worth, Mack desperately clung on to power by using an obscure state law and in a monumental display of childish denial, refusing to resign his office.

Mack's response? His lawyer files an appeal for a new trial to seek the disgraced mayor's acquittal and Mack goes on Facebook to thank "the residents of Trenton and Mercer County for allowing me to serve you for over 16 years," before asking people to pray for him. Oh Lawd...Mack is scheduled to be sentenced on May 14th.

Unbelievable. This (former) emperor is butt-ass naked and he doesn't know it. So long Tony.  

And what's going on with the mass stabbing attack that took place in a railway station in Kunming in the Yunnan province of China? According to state media, the ten attackers randomly began stabbing people with knives, killing 29 and wounding 143 others. The horrific attack took place ahead of this Wednesday's influential National People's Congress and the Chinese government blames "Muslim separatists" - but who really knows?

This is the same government that sanitizes the nation's Websites from ANY mention of the pro-Democracy Tiananmen Square protests back in 1989 and makes it illegal to even talk about them; for all we know, the stabbing attacks could well have been a move by violent pro-Democracy forces.

But there's no need to go all the way to China to find examples of the government suppressing Democracy; Republicans do that right here in America too. The Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted was back in the news last week after eliminating Sunday and early evening voting hours; times that have statistically been shown to be favored times for African-Americans to cast their votes in elections.

Pay attention here folks, the GOP and their right-wing policy wonks over at the American Legislative Exchange Council know they have zero chance of winning back the White House in 2016 without winning Ohio's 18 electoral votes.

As we all (should) know you need 270 electoral votes to win, and since California's 55 electoral votes are all but certain to go Democratic, any 2016 Republican strategy to win the White House that's going to be based on the party's current extremist platform that openly embraces racial intolerance, denial of science, hostility to immigrant populations and misogyny means Republicans have to win Florida and Ohio.

Just take a quick look at the electoral map from the 2012 presidential race when Romney got his clock cleaned. The "Red" states with lower populations that skew Republican simply don't have enough electoral votes to overtake the more densely-populated northeast where Democrats typically claim the advantage in states like New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Massachusetts. 

That's why men like Jon Husted in Ohio, or the North Carolina governor Pat McCrory are hard at work enacting bizarre "voter integrity" laws to make it as difficult as possible for folks who tend to pull the Democratic lever in the election booth to cast a vote.

The sad truth is the American politicians who will be talking tough in the news this week really have no right to point their indignant fingers at Putin in Russia, or the Chinese government (or any other nation for that matter) for suppressing Democracy in their own nations, it going on right here, right now in the "Land of the Free".

At least it is for those American voters that Republicans consider to be just a little bit less deserving of the Constitutional right to exercise the right to vote than others.

The situational ethics of today's Republican party expose a transparent deep-seated hypocrisy that puts it at odds with the basic fundamentals of the Constitution they're so fond of fawning over; and cast the party as increasingly irrelevant in a nation who's demographics are rapidly shifting towards a place that people like the Bill Kristols, Michelle Bachmanns and their Koch Brothers patrons simply cannot fathom.      

Maybe Tony Mack should ask people to pray for people in the Ukraine, or voters who's right to participate in the electoral process are being stripped away by the GOP; they're arguably more deserving of divine intervention than Mack's sorry career as a mayor.

Anyway gotta run. Going to get a quick workout in before I get ready for the Oscars. I'm pulling for Steve McQueen and "Twelve Years a Slave" for best director and picture and Lupita Nyong'o for best supporting actress. While I think Chiwetel Ejiofor did amazing work in the lead role, I'm actually pulling for Matthew McConaughey for best actor for "Dallas Buyer's Club".

McConaughey's work in the HBO series "True Detective" is simply stunning and I thought his work in the film "Reign of Fire" was exceptional too. Ejiofor is an amazing actor (he was really strong in "Salt" alongside excellent performances by Angelina Jolie and Liev Schreiber) and he's going to get some choice film or television roles after his work in "Twelve Years a Slave" and his Oscar nomination; but his time will come.

Right now I think McConaughey deserves Oscar recognition for the body of his work; but we'll see, the Oscars have a way of offering up unexpected surprises - like Robert Redford not getting a best actor nomination for "All is Lost" for a role with almost no dialog. The Oscar committee was definitely sleeping on that one.