liberal N proud
liberal N proud's JournalWhy there is hope for the end of racism...
The only good news about the McKinney pool party is the white kids’ response to racism
In the story of the Texas pool party, where a police officer was caught on tape manhandling and pointing a gun at young black teenagers, there's a lot to be concerned and outraged about. But there's also one tiny thing to celebrate: the actions of two white kids.
Just 14 and 15 years old, they wasted no time speaking on the record about the racist comments made by adults that they said set off the incident, and recording the discriminatory treatment they said they witnessed.
Sadly, when it comes to public opinion about the event, it's likely that these accounts have more weight coming from the white kids than from the black kids who have offered similar stories, but whom many media consumers might see as potential criminals and untrustworthy reporters of what happened.
Their stories shaped the early media narrative of the event, and their sense of responsibility to memorialize what happened should be seen as an example. Many American adults could learn something from their brave decisions to acknowledge rather than avoid or explain away the injustice they saw, but also to make sure the rest of us understood.
http://www.vox.com/2015/6/9/8747567/mckinney-pool-party-white-teens
I have noticed this with my kids, our girls either don't see color or don't care because people are people and they are friends are friends. That is why I have hope for the future and if we all keep pushing for it in constructive ways, teaching each other, then maybe one day soon, racism will be dead.
Didn’t the McKinney, Texas, police officer know he was being recorded?
This is the question the media is asking? Did he know he was on camera? 
A police officer slams an unarmed 15-year-old girl in a bikini to the ground, pulls his gun and kneels on her as teens on either side of him shout and, of course, record the encounter. Within hours, millions watch the video: Some see a defenseless black teen being manhandled by an out-of-control white cop; others see a lone, scared officer in the crowded, chaotic aftermath of a fight he doesn’t yet understand.
Cellphone video has become as much a part of policing as tickets and handcuffs. Video images of police shootings have sparked national turmoil. But Friday’s ugly, cacophonous scene in McKinney, Tex., at first seemed like something more routine — a call about misbehaving teens at a pool party on a hot Texas afternoon.
Then it went awry, at least in the seven-minute version of reality that a local teen posted on YouTube. The clip is the classic kind of video that can crush public trust in police. Yet paradoxically, police chiefs are pushing for more video, in the form of body cameras, to repair relations with those they serve.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/didnt-the-mckinney-tex-police-officer-know-he-was-being-recorded/2015/06/08/504033e6-0df7-11e5-9726-49d6fa26a8c6_story.html
And this moron wants to be President?
Huckabee: Hack China back for attack on fed wokers' data
The U.S. should launch a cyberattack campaign against China, 2016 GOP hopeful Mike Huckabee said Monday, days after it was revealed suspected Chinese hackers had pilfered 4 million federal workers’ records.
"What will it take for President Obama to open his eyes?” Huckabee said, calling it “mind-boggling” that the administration wouldn’t hack China in response to the breach revealed last Thursday at the Office of Personnel Management.
“The way you deal with a bully on the playground is to punch them in the face and put them on the ground because the only thing they respect is power,” he said.
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/244351-huckabee-hack-china-back-for-attack-on-fed-wokers-data
2 girls missing from Avon, Ohio housing complex.
AVON, Ohio - The FBI is asking for the public’s assistance in a case where two children went missing Saturday in Avon.
The FBI and the Avon Police Department say 12-year-old Autumn R. Shreve and 2-year-old Sophia Rogers disappeared Saturday afternoon from the Timberlake Apartment Complex. Authorities say the girls were last seen on Mulberry Lane, at around 4 p.m. and were reported missing in the evening.
Police and family say Shreve was a babysitter for the 2-year-old.
Newsnet5.com obtained the 911 call from the incident in which the 2-year-old’s mother, Kaylyn Rogers, said her fiance’s 12-year-old sister, Shreve, was babysitting the infant when the mom got home at about 7 p.m Saturday. Shreve told Rogers she planning to take Sophia to the park, the mother said in the call.
http://www.newsnet5.com/news/local-news/oh-lorain/autumn-r-shreve-12-and-sophia-rogers-2-missing-from-avon-since-saturday
Switching to the Metric System Is Officially a Presidential Campaign Issue
Lincoln Chafee kicked off his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination on Wednesday in Virginia by promising to fight climate change, curb extra-judicial assassinations, and switch the United States to the metric system.
The Rhode Islander, who served in the Senate as a Republican before joining the Democratic party after being elected governor, unveiled his left-leaning, if idiosyncratic, agenda in a wide-ranging address at George Mason University. His continued opposition to the Iraq War, which he voted against authorizing as a senator, could put him in conflict with the party's front-runner, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As a senator, Clinton was an early supporter of the invasion, though she has since called it a mistake.
National defense was just one area in which Chafee advised heeding the wisdom of the international community. (He likewise proposed ending capital punishment entirely, and praised Nebraska for its recent ban.)
But then Chafee went a few feet—er, meters—further:
Earlier I said, let's be bold. Here's a bold embrace of internationalism: Let's join the rest of the world and go metric. I happened to live in Canada as they completed the process. Believe me, it is easy. It doesn't take long before 34 degrees is hot. Only Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States aren't metric, and it it'll help our economy!
.http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/06/lincoln-chafee-metric-system-campaign
Now those are issues I could get behind.
Should have added this when I posted...
Jon Stewart, Iraq War Critic, Runs a Program That Helps Veterans Enter TV
During the surge in Iraq in 2008, Nathan Witmer led an Army scout platoon in a thicket of villages rife with insurgents and roadside bombs. What he really wants to do is direct.
Or maybe write — or produce.
“Anything with movies was always the dream,” said Mr. Witmer, who left active duty in 2010.
Like many troops leaving the military, he was steered instead toward jobs in government agencies that offered preferential hiring or with big corporations that recruited veterans, and he assumed his hope of working in show business would remain only that.
But after selling medical equipment for two years, he had the chance to join a five-week industry boot camp designed to bring young veterans into the television business. To his surprise, it was run by one of the Iraq war’s fiercest critics, Jon Stewart, the longtime host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”
<snip>
“The Daily Show” developed the program over the last three years without publicizing it, but now, because Mr. Stewart is preparing to leave the show, he has taken it into the open, urging other shows to develop their own programs to bring more veterans into the industry.
“This is ready to franchise. Please steal our idea,” Mr. Stewart said in an interview at his Manhattan studio recently. “It isn’t charity. To be good in this business you have to bring in different voices from different places, and we have this wealth of experience that just wasn’t being tapped.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/26/arts/television/jon-stewart-iraq-war-critic-runs-a-program-that-helps-veterans-enter-tv.html?emc=edit_th_20150526&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=45299538&_r=0
Verdict in Cleveland cop Belo to be announced within the hour.
Not going downtown this weekend.
No way!
The Party Pooper was an airplane
Family Says Airplane Dumped Human Waste on Girl’s Sweet 16 Party
It was not a “Super Sweet 16? for Jacinda Cambray.
It started out well enough, your regular, run-of-the-mill birthday party in in Levittown, Pennsylvania on a Sunday afternoon – cake, swimming, horseshoes, good times with friends and family.
And then it started raining shit.
Literally. Not “shit, it’s started raining and we have to go in” or “there was a real shit-storm when Jimmy showed up with his new girlfriend” -human excrement was falling out of the sky.
Video at link...
http://www.epictimes.com/2015/05/airplane-dumps-human-waste-on-girls-sweet-16-party/
George W. Bush Did Something Much Worse Than Lie Us Into War
Something critical is being lost in the torrent of pixels being spilled by the media as Jeb Bush wriggles haplessly, like some prehistoric insect trapped in amber, struggling to explain away, recast or rationalize his brother's hideous legacy. Many of us with functional memories concluded long ago that Jeb's brother deliberately lied us into a pointless war, one that resulted in pointless maiming and pointless deaths of our own soldiers and perhaps a million Iraqi civilians, and the equally pointless rise of a nihilistic cult of deluded savages we know as ISIS.
And although many Americans, for various reasons, don't want to face up to it, that is the truth. There may be be a "competing narrative," there may be political "spin," but there really can only be one truth, and Jeb Bush and the secretive Billionaires who hope to install him as the country's next President know that truth happens to be very, very inconvenient for him when the country has not yet forgotten what happened the last time a Bush occupied that office. When Jeb said he'd rely on his trusted brother for foreign policy advice, well, that just made things worse.
There is, however, an even more heinous aspect to what Jeb's "trusted brother" did, and it shouldn't be allowed to escape down the memory hole. We've been lied into wars before, with similar disastrous results. But George W. Bush did something far worse than lie us into a war: he did it in a breathtakingly cynical and malevolent way--in effect, by holding a gun to every Americans' head and threatening to pull the trigger. He did it by holding us--all of us--hostage to a twisted ideology that demanded the war, waving the gun at calculated intervals in our face, the way any terrorist would. And he told us flat out, over and over again, that if we didn't do what he said, we'd all be killed.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/22/1386781/-George-W-Bush-Did-Something-Much-Worse-Than-Lie-Us-Into-War?detail=facebook_sf
The Tea Party's Most Hated Presidential Hopeful?
Hint: Not Hillary Clinton
The tea party hates South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, and the feeling is mutual. It attacked the Republican lawmaker mercilessly during his Senate reelection campaign in 2014, but Graham held his seat with 55 percent of the vote. "Kicking the crap out of the tea party is the most fun Senator Lindsey Graham has ever had," wrote Molly Ball for The Atlantic last June after interviewing the South Carolina Republican on the eve of his primary election victory, when he faced six no-name challengers, one of them a tea party pick, in his deep red state's Republican primary.
On June 1, Graham plans to join the crowded GOP 2016 field, according to his preannouncement on Monday. And his soon-to-be presidential campaign raises the question: How will the Graham/tea pary feud continue?
The animosity between this three-term senator and tea partiers began before his 2014 reelection campaign, triggered in part by Graham's intermittent attempts to work with Democrats in the Senate. Such moves have enraged staunch conservatives. The Executive Committee of the South Carolina Republican Party compiled a list of 29 offenses that they "strongly disapprove of and hold to be fundamentally inconsistent with the principles of the South Carolina Republican Party." Right-wing blogs have nicknamed him "Flimsy Lindsey" and "Grahmnesty" because he disagreed with his party on climate change, immigration reform, and a few other hot-button Republican issues.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/tea-party-lindsey-graham-conservative-2016
Graham is only a 3 term Senator?
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