How Congress Failed Kingston Frazier

6-year-old kindergartner Kingston Frazier 

As Republican lawmakers work feverishly on Capitol Hill to strip access to healthcare for millions of Americans and cut taxes for the wealthiest individuals and corporations (God knows they're struggling...), it's doubtful the name Kingston Frazier means much of anything to them.

Kingston was a 6-year-old boy from Jackson, Mississippi who was all set to graduate from kindergarten on Thursday May 18th.

But three teenagers decided they needed to steal his mother's car from a Kroger's grocery store on Interstate 55 around 1am that morning, and when they broke into it, according to members of his family, Kingston was asleep in the back seat.

These heartless teens later abandoned the car 12 miles away in rural Madison County, but not before shooting young Kingtson in the back of the head and leaving him to die alone on a lonely dirt stretch called Glukstadt Road behind a warehouse.

It's Saturday and I slept in late this morning, but I'm tired - for a number of reasons.

I'm tired of some African-Americans preying on one another in a demented cycle of criminal violence that plays out like some kind of nightmarish extermination campaign of self-inflicted racial genocide.

Like many Americans I'm tired of the almost unrestricted flow of firearms in this country.

I'm tired of right-wing nutjobs like Alex Jones propagating the loony conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in 2014, in which 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed his mother before driving to the school and shooting 20 six and seven-year-old children and six adults, was a hoax intended to strip gun owners of their right to bear arms.

And I'm tired of Republican politicians opposing any reasonable measure to keep deadly firearms out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them - let's not forget that on the day that Rep. Steve Scalise was shot in the hip in Virginia recently, Republicans were scheduled to debate a bill that would make it easier to transport silencers across state lines and ease restriction on ammunition that pierces the body armor worn by many police officers.

The three teens charged in Kingson Frazier's death
from left, Wakefield, Washington and McBride 

How did Dwan Wakefield 17, DeAllen Washington 17 and Byron McBride 19, the three teens accused of stealing Kington Frazier's mother's car, get a hold of a gun in the first place?

How did Dylan Roof get the handgun he used to mercilessly gun down nine innocent people at a Bible study at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina?

In my view Congress owes us answers to those questions.

The recent string of high-profile shootings in this nation is a constant reminder of the failure of House Republicans responsible for drafting laws that protect Americans to take action to pass and enforce sensible federal restrictions on the purchase and ownership of firearms.

Do I believe Americans have a constitutional right to own firearms? Absolutely.

But at the same time those three teens pictured above had no business with a loaded handgun at 1am in the morning when they decided to steal Kingston Frazier's mom's Toyota Camry.

Are those three knuckleheads old enough to face responsibility for their actions?

Of course they are, and should considering the heinous nature of their crime.

And as young black men in Mississippi you can rest assured the full weight of the law is going to come down on them hard.

Particularly in a deep-south state like Mississippi where blacks and Hispanics are consistently overrepresented in prison populations, while whites are consistently underrepresented.

Take a look at the chart to the left published by the Prison Policy Initiative compiled from data from the 2010 U.S. Census.

African-Americans made up about 37% of the population of Mississippi in 2010.

But they comprised about 57% of the state's prison population.

Whereas whites made up about 58% of Mississippi's population in 2010, but made up only about 30% of the prison populace.

As Colleen Curry reported in an article for Vice News in 2015, if Mississippi had been a country in 2013, it would have had the second highest incarceration rate in the world.

But, as Curry's article notes, in all fairness to Mississippi state legislators, lawmakers enacted a series of prison reforms in 2014 that reduced the state's prison population by a remarkable 14% in just a year.

Given the years of heavy-handed and racially-biased conservative sentencing polices that caused the state's prison population to triple between 1978 and 2013, those law makers had a lot of ground to make up to balance the proverbial scales of justice - but they do deserve credit for taking concrete steps towards sensible prison and sentencing reforms.

But to get back to the issue at hand, Congress is empowered by the Constitution to write federal laws.

So I also hold them collectively responsible for Kingston Frazier's death for having consistently and actively blocked the kinds of gun control legislation that might have prevented those teens from getting their hands on a firearm in the first place.

But it's also important to look at the socio-economic angles to the death of Kingston Frazier.

Perhaps those three teens being out at 1am on a Thursday night trying to steal a car has something to do with the fact that Mississippi consistently ranks near the bottom in categories like health, education and personal income; at least half the population lives below the poverty line.

Cotton is one of Mississippi's major crops and
agriculture is one of the state's biggest employers

Back in February, the state's Chief Economist Dr. Darrin Webb published a detailed report showing the state of Mississippi ranked 49th out of 50 states with an anemic workforce participation rate of 53% in 2016.

As the report states, a mere 56% of people in Mississippi were actively looking for work or working in 2016.

Again, it was about 1am on a Thursday when the three teens stole the car in which Kingston Frazier was killed.

So I'm guessing none of them were employed; I don't know that for sure.

According to an article in the Clarion-Ledger by Therese Apel and Sarah Fowler, 19-year-old Byron McBride, tentatively identified as the shooter, claimed to be a manager at Wal-Mart but a company a spokesperson told the paper they had no record of his being employed at any of their stores.

The article also quotes 17-year-old suspect Dwan Wakefield's mother as saying that her son, a senior in high school, quit playing football to work a summer job selling cars with his father.

But I'd say it's probably fair to "guestimate" that all three teens were part of the approximately 44% of people in the state of Mississippi not currently working or actively looking for work.

While manufacturing, gambling and tourism all employ significant numbers of people in Mississippi, agriculture or agriculture-related jobs employ almost 30% of the state's population of approximately
3 million people - large industrial farms dominate the industry.

Nothing can excuse what those three teens did, but they are the living byproducts of one of the worst educational systems in the country in a state with lackluster job growth that's still trying to recover from the Great Recession; while there has been modest economic growth it lags far behind the national average.

Kingston Frazier

With deep state cuts to social safety net programs and education since 2007, coupled with the steep drops in federal spending on public school education since the 1950's, the pathway to college, trade school or meaningful full-time employment was probably a steep one for those three teens.

After the midterm elections in 2010 when Republicans re-took the House of Representatives in a landslide, they pretty much spent the rest of President Obama's terms in office blocking his proposals for large infrastructure spending bills and jobs legislation to expand employment.

That adds up to an awful lot of poorly-educated, under-employed teenagers in Mississippi, and it's a heart-breaking tragedy that three of them happened upon poor Kingston Frazier the night before he was to join his classmates from North Jackson Elementary School for kindergarten graduation.


Anyway I'd like to wrap this rather somber Saturday entry up by noting that like most southern states, Mississippi has some of the most lax gun control laws in the nation.

According to Gun.Laws.com, there is no law requiring a permit to buy a handgun or a long gun in the state of Mississippi, and people aren't even required to register their firearms either.

Republican politicians, who've basically prostituted themselves out to the NRA and the gun lobby, are quick to extol the righteous virtues of the 2nd Amendment, and what they consider an almost sacred right to bear ams has morphed into millions of unregistered and illegal firearms in the hands of people all over the country.

While some see that as the extension of an abstract right enshrined in the Constitution, as the tragic killing of 6-year-old Kingston Frazier illustrates, the actual reality is far more violent, bloody and horrifying.

Given that the state of Mississippi's gun laws are totally inadequate, Congress failed Kingston Frazier, one of its youngest citizens.

When Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is done stripping millions of Americans of their access to healthcare and gutting Medicaid to provide billions of dollars in tax cuts for America's wealthiest families, maybe he can find the time to take a trip down to Jackson, Mississippi to explain the virtues of the 2nd Amendment to Kingston Frazier's family and the classmates who didn't see him at their kindergarten graduation.

But I doubt it, it's unlikely Speaker Ryan even knows his name.

Crosscheck: GOP's Voter Suppression Data Monster

U.S. states where Crosscheck is used

With growing numbers of the Washington-based Republican establishment writing off Donald Trump's chances to win, all bets are off for GOP efforts to retain their majority in the Senate and the House next month when Americans head to the polls.

Paul Ryan's recent conference call to Republican lawmakers likely covered the importance of the GOP's ongoing ten-year mission.

Not to explore the depths of outer space like the Federation, but their darker mission to systematically and illegally prevent large blocks of American voters, who statistically tend to vote Democratic, from voting by taking advantage of an assortment of questionable "Voter ID" laws passed by majority-Republican state legislatures.

Republicans also have a monster to help them with that.

Not Trump, they created that monster but he's long since fled the castle to roam the countryside and they're no longer able to control him - and according to a recent New York Times article chronicling disturbing claims of his creepy, unwanted sexual groping and kissing by multiple women, Trump has a really hard time controlling his hands too.

The Republicans have a digital monster called Crosscheck that uses skewed data with intentionally oversimplified search parameters to systematically disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of people across the nation from exercising their right to vote.

As Greg Palast reported in an article in the September 8th issue of Rolling Stone, one of the most important tools Republicans will be using to try and retain control of Congress is officially known as the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program.

Crosscheck mastermind Kris Kobach

According to Palast's research, thanks to Republican-majority state legislatures, some twenty-eight different states across the nation (see map above) use Crosscheck to compare names, the last four digits of Social Security numbers and birthdates.

All under the guise of trying to uncover individuals registered in more than one state who may vote twice; an almost non-existent offense Republicans falsely trumpet as being rampant.

Crosscheck was the twisted brainchild of one of the truly mad professors of Republican politics, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, creator of the same Arizona law that allowed Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to direct his deputies to illegally pull over thousands of Hispanic drivers to check their immigration status.

On Tuesday a federal court filed criminal contempt charges against Arpaio for refusing a court order to stop using sheriff's deputies to engage in immigration enforcement after slews of complaints from registered U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent being pulled over because of their ethnicity.

So how successful is Kobach's Crosscheck program?

According to Palast's article: "Crosscheck has tagged an astonishing 7.2 million suspects, yet we found no more than four perpetrators who have been charged with double-voting or deliberate double registration."

Greg Palast & some of the names flagged by Crosscheck

In an earlier article about the Crosscheck program that Palast wrote for Al Jazeera back in 2014, an analysis of lists containing over two million different names flagged by the Crosscheck system in the states of Georgia, Virginia and Washington revealed that the lists were "heavily weighted with names such as Jackson, Garicia, Patel and Kim - ones common among minorities, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic."

So what it boils down to is that Kobach is essentially an architect of reactionary laws of dubious merit that sanction the targeting and profiling of American people of color and ethnic minorities based on the unjustified conservative-fueled fears of minor civil infractions.

Kobach's brand of "shake the tree and a bad apple will fall out" legal chicanery is part of the larger overall Republican strategy to secure majorities in Congress; as Palast notes, the majority of the twenty-eight states where Crosscheck is used have majority-Republican state legislatures.

So when those tight Senate races in critical swing states like New Hampshire and Ohio come down to the wire, Republicans hope Crosscheck and it's database full of faulty data will make the difference.

Sound absurd? Par for the course for the party that nominated a serial sexual predator as it's nominee for president.

Primary Perspective: Kirk Dumps Trump & Christie Stands By His Man

Well I just got back from casting my primary vote not too long ago and it was fairly busy in the lobby and library of my local polling site for District 54 in the Gershon Senior Citizens Building.

It took a few minutes of me waiting in the "A - K" line while a man in front of me had to straighten out a small issue with a name or address change that required him to step out of the line and fill out some additional paperwork before he could step into the booth and cast his vote.

But aside from that it was a pretty smooth election day experience for me, I was in and out in about seven minutes and I was determined to cast my vote regardless of the decision by the Associated Press last night to announce that Hillary has won enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination.

You may recall my having mentioned the little old guy named Bernie who monitors the two voting booths at the Gershon on the blog last fall on November 15th.

He was seated in his wheelchair in his usual spot between the voting machines today too keeping an eye on things, although he seemed a little grouchier than usual.

I asked him about the day's attendance and Bernie said it was pretty solid for a primary voting day; he felt it was because voters are angry.

I certainly couldn't disagree with Bernie on that one and I nodded in agreement as he took my green receipt as he lamented about the state of the nation.

Fox News commentator Rudy Giuliani 

"It's a shame what's happened to this country." Bernie grumbled as he looked up at me from his chair.

"I wanted to vote for Rudy Giuliani but he screwed up." he confessed as he looked off.

With that I shook my head in silent sympathetic agreement and slipped between the curtains to cast my vote. 

I pegged Bernie as a Fox News watcher long ago, and while we always exchange pleasantries at the booth, I try to avoid topics like one's personal politics at the poll site, so when he mentioned liking Rudy Giuliani as a presidential candidate, it told me two things about Bernie.

One, he's pretty conservative, and that's cool with me - I couldn't tell Bernie that I lived in New York City during the Giuliani mayoral regime, and I happen to think he worsened racial and cultural divisions in the city during his tenure (particularly with the way he ran the NYPD) and he morphed into a total right-wing nut job after his short-lived presidential hopes fizzled.    

Remember Rudy's "Obama doesn't love America." comment? Which he made at an event to raise funds for the equally right-wing nut job Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's presidential campaign back in February, 2015.

Secondly, Bernie's grumbling about Giuliani also told me that he's one of many Republicans who are sickened by Donald Trump's stubborn refusal to back away from his criticism of federal judge Gonzalo Curiel because of his Mexican heritage.

My sense is that Bernie, like many conservative voters,is coming to grips with the unfortunate reality that the GOP is backing Trump as the 2016 candidate.

Bernie is a veteran in his 80's and he's smart enough to know that nothing good is going to come of that for the Republican party.

Watching Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan publicly lecture Trump today like a couple of school principals berating some dimwitted bully harassing kids in the halls in an effort to disassociate the party from Trump's views, I could only shake my head.

The two of them are as responsible for Trump being the nominee as anyone else in the GOP, as their stubborn agreement to use their Congressional leadership positions to oppose any of President Obama's initiatives not only led to the gridlock that angered so many voters, it also set the tone for the unprecedented contempt with which conservatives treated Obama throughout his tenure.

Contempt which served as a green light for the open expression of racism and xenophobia within conservative American circles.  

Republican Illinois Senator Mark Kirk

Now they're watching this disaster unfold, and neither of them has the courage to stand up and say enough is enough.

Republican Illinois Senator Mark Kirk did.

The former veteran, who'd previously broken with his party over their refusal to even consider Judge Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court, stood up and did what I think a lot of  moderate Republicans want to do.


He publicly revoked his support for Donald Trump. In a detailed statement he said in part:

"It is absolutely essential that we are guided by a commander-in-chief  with a responsible and proper temperament, discretion and judgement...After much consideration I have concluded that Donald Trump has not demonstrated the temperament necessary to assume the greatest office in the world."

It's refreshing to see a Republican with some principles (and some cojones) finally stand up and say it, but it's sad that a more prominent member of the party leadership didn't say it first.

Singer Tammy Wynette

We certainly didn't get that kind of politcal and moral courage from our own governor here in New Jersey.

Much like the famous American country singer Tammy Wynette, earlier today, Chris Christie announced that he's gonna "Stand By (His) Man".

Despite a laundry list of offensive public statements by Trump, and virtually the entire Republican leadership denouncing his statements about judge Gonzalo Curiel as racist, Christie told baffled reporters,

"I've said this before, that I know Donald Trump, I've known him for 14 years, and Donald Trump is not a racist."


See no evil, hear no evil I guess, whatever lets you sleep at night and wake up and look at your face in the mirror in the morning.

Christie's denial of Trump's true character is a sad reflection of just how far to the right he's moved politically and morally in order to make himself more palatable to conservatives and pander to the extremists who control the Republican party.

As the media has been quick to observe today, Christie was the one back in 2011 who hit back at conservatives who criticized his decision to appoint Muslim judge Sohail Mohammed, an immigrant from India who became a U.S. citizen, as a State Superior Court Judge in Passaic County.

Christie publicly denounced delusional Republican fear-mongers who expressed "concerns" that Mohammed was a terrorist who would advocate for Sharia Law on the bench.

Apparently the chance for a cabinet position in a 2016 Republican presidency 'Trumps' Christie's own distaste for irrational conservative bigotry.

The righteous indignation Christie once expressed over politician's questioning a qualified judge because of his ethnicity?

That's all in the past.