January 10, 2018

Steve Earle "Over Yonder"

January 10, 2018

Ohio youth team kicked out of rec league over offensive jerseys

Dan Devine
Yahoo SportsJan 9, 2018, 10:55 AM


https://sports.yahoo.com/ohio-youth-team-kicked-rec-league-offensive-jerseys-185930020.html

<snip>

Four weeks into the Cincinnati Premier Youth Basketball League’s season, parents of players on a team from West Clermont, Ohio, saw that the team from Kings Mills, Ohio, against whom their children were playing was named “The Wet Dream Team.” They also noticed that the names on the backs of the high-school-aged boys’ jerseys included phrases like “Knee Grow” and “Coon.”

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“By no means are we perfect parents or assume our teenage boys are innocent and don’t speak of things like this, but I could never imagine allowing my teenage son to represent his school and league in this manner, let alone representing our family with such filth,” Rue wrote. “[…] There is enough hate, bullying, and aggressive behavior in the world that these kids, parents, and schools shouldn’t have to deal with bigotry and lewd innuendos on jerseys and in team names in a school district represented recreational basketball league. This isn’t a typo, this isn’t a mistake, these are ideas that were thought of, discussed, agreed upon by adults and kids alike, printed on uniforms, social media accounts registered and manned and no one thought this was a bad idea or inappropriate?”


<snip>

“CPYBL was developed to provide the best possible basketball experience for the youth of our communities and their families and has always been committed to bringing a positive experience to all of our members,” wrote Cincinnati Premier Youth Basketball League spokesman Ben Goodyear in a statement to the Enquirer. “Based on the information that we received, the actions and conduct of the team in question did not comply with our stated mission and expected standards and that team has, therefore, been dismissed from our league.”

They’ve also been “restricted from any further use of district facilities,” according to a spokesperson for the Kings Local School District, who emphasized that this team of students and the league in which they were playing isn’t affiliated with the district itself.

<snip>

The team’s coach, Walt Gill, apologized “to anyone that was offended by the jerseys” in a statement to WLWT. He noted that the team “offered to cover them up or change,” but that the league still chose to eject the team, “and we have accepted that decision.”

<sip>

“This is a teachable moment for [the teen players] to understand how these words are hurtful,” Cincinnati NAACP first vice president Joe Mallory told Cincinnati Fox affiliate WXIX-TV. “They’re inflammatory, and they’re divisive to the entire community. […] It’s everybody’s problem. It’s everybody’s business that when these things happen we all stand up and speak out on it.”

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Dan Devine is a writer and editor for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@oath.com or follow him on Twitter!
Follow @YourManDevine


Parents did this. Kids learn racism and sexism. The parents did this and the kids get the punishment. Why did the league take two quarters to shut it down? Why wasn't the offer to cover up or change the jerseys an acceptable alternantive?

January 9, 2018

Oprah - PLEASE run for Congress, there are a number of Illinois Republicans you could beat handily!!

A working Congress for a President Maxine Waters is what we really need!

January 6, 2018

Is Steve Bannon Cooperating with Robert Mueller?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/04/trump-russia-steve-bannon-book-robert-mueller

Is Steve Bannon Cooperating with Robert Mueller?
The former Trump adviser's incendiary remarks raise the question.
By Ed Pilkington / The Guardian
January 5, 2018, 6:48 AM GMT



One of the many telling vignettes in Michael Wolff’s book is the sight of Steve Bannon, then White House chief strategist, pacing the West Wing, openly dispensing odds on Donald Trump’s chances of surviving in office.

Bannon gave Trump a probability of a third that he might limp to the finish line because of Democratic incompetence; a third that he would be pushed from office under the 25th amendment on grounds of mental incapability; and a third that he would be impeached.

That a man who was for many months Trump’s right-hand man would brazenly give out such doom-laden predictions is remarkable enough. But letting the world know of it via Wolff could make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The most explosive aspect of Bannon’s take, revealed by Fire and Fury, is Trump’s handling – or rather mishandling – of the Russia investigation that rages around him. Assuming Wolff’s account to be accurate (and Bannon has said nothing so far to suggest otherwise) the former chief strategist considered Trump entirely out of his depth with regard to special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into possible links between Russia and the Trump team.

<snip>

We now know from the Guardian’s account of excerpts of the book that Bannon believes the June 2016 meeting between Trump’s son and Russians bearing promises of dirt on Hillary Clinton to have been “treasonous”. We also know that Bannon puts the chances of Donald Jr failing to have informed his father of the encounter at “zero”.

That is not evidence that would satisfy as meticulous a prosecutor as Mueller, but it does shift the frame of the Russia inquiry. Trump may try to belittle Bannon’s involvement with his campaign and subsequent time in the White House, scoffing that he had “little to do with our historic victory”, but few will buy that.

<snip>

“Bannon may already be cooperating with Mueller for all we know,” Painter said. “He has no incentive to cover up for Trump, or his family members."

<snip>

Bannon is specific about what he regards as the most dangerous aspect of the Mueller inquiry: “It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They’re going to go right through that.”

Last month it was revealed that federal prosecutors are looking into Kushner’s ties to Deutsche Bank. Those ties include the $285m borrowed from a bank which has been implicated in Russian money-laundering scandals to refinance his holding of part of the old New York Times building in Manhattan. Last July, the Guardian disclosed that Kushner bought the property from a Soviet-born oligarch whose company was named in a high-profile New York money-laundering case.

“Watch Kushner” and “watch Deutsche Bank” seem to be two of the takeaways from this extraordinary chapter in an exceptional presidency.

The book also gives an account of events on board Air Force One, in which a misleading public statement was prepared to explain the Don Jr meeting in Trump Tower with the Russians.

As was previously known, Trump took control of the statement, insisting the meeting was exclusively about the adoption of Russian children. In fact, the Russian contingent offered incriminating intelligence on Clinton, a crucial detail that was not mentioned but which became quickly public after the email chain involving Don Jr was released.

<snip>

Ed Pilkington is the chief reporter for Guardian US. He is a former national and foreign editor of the paper, and author of Beyond the Mother Country.

January 1, 2018

Capital Punishment Deserves a Quick Death

By THE EDITORIAL BOARDDEC. 31, 2017

<snip>.

Inside the death chamber that morning, prison officials spent more than an hour searching Mr. Campbell’s arms and legs for a vein into which they could inject the lethal drug cocktail. They comforted him as they prepared to kill him, providing the 69-year-old with a wedge pillow to help with breathing problems related to his years of heavy smoking.

After about 80 minutes, they gave up and returned Mr. Campbell to his cell, where he sits awaiting his next date with death, now set for June 5, 2019.

<snip>

The number should be zero. As the nation enters 2018, the Supreme Court is considering whether to hear at least one case asking it to strike down the death penalty, once and for all, for violating the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments.

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It would be tempting to conclude from this litany, which is drawn from an annual report by the Death Penalty Information Center, that capital punishment is being reserved for the most horrific crimes committed by the most incorrigible offenders. But it would be wrong.

The death penalty is not and has never been about the severity of any given crime. Mental illness, intellectual disability, brain damage, childhood abuse or neglect, abysmal lawyers, minimal judicial review, a white victim — these factors are far more closely associated with who ends up getting executed. Of the 23 people put to death in 2017, all but three had at least one of these factors, according to the report. Eight were younger than 21 at the time of their crime.

More troubling still are the wrongful convictions. In 2017, four more people who had been sentenced to death were exonerated, for a total of 160 since 1973 — a time during which 1,465 people were executed. In many of the exonerations, prosecutors won convictions and sentences despite questionable or nonexistent evidence, pervasive misconduct or a pattern of racial bias. A 2014 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences extrapolated from known cases of wrongful convictions to estimate that at least 4 percent of all death-row inmates are wrongfully convicted. Against this backdrop, it would take an enormous leap of faith to believe that no innocent person has ever been executed.

<snip>

Leaving it up to individual states is not the solution. It’s true that 19 states and the District of Columbia have already banned capital punishment, four have suspended it and eight others haven’t executed anyone in more than a decade. Some particularly awful state policies have also been eliminated in the past couple of years, like a Florida law that permitted non-unanimous juries to impose death sentences, and an Alabama rule empowering judges to override a jury’s vote for life, even a unanimous one, and impose death.

And yet at the same time, states have passed laws intended to speed up the capital appeals process, despite the growing evidence of legal errors and prosecutorial misconduct that can be hidden for years or longer. Other states have gone to great lengths to hide their lethal-injection protocols from public scrutiny, even as executions with untested drugs have gone awry and pharmaceutical companies have objected to the use of their products to kill people.

<snip>

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/31/opinion/capital-punishment-death-penalty.html

January 1, 2018

Why Franken Had to Go (please read before lighting hair on fire)

Why Franken Had to Go
By Christina Cauterucci

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2017/12/07/al_franken_s_resignation_saved_the_democratic_party_s_reputation_among_the.html

Minnesota Sen. Al Franken announced on Thursday his plan to resign “in the coming weeks” after a series of allegations that he groped women and kissed them without consent. “There is a big part of me that will always regret having to walk away from this job with so much work left to be done,” Franken said in somber remarks on the Senate floor. “But I have faith that the work will continue because I have faith in the people who’ve helped me do it.”
<snip>

The dilemma boiled down to this: Democrats could either put themselves at a potential political disadvantage by observing rules of decency Republicans have entirely abandoned, or they could lower themselves into the GOP latrine, keep Franken on the roster, and spend the next several election cycles smelling a little like shit. Democrats seemed content to hold their nose and bear with Franken through the first half-dozen accusations. But when a seventh accuser came forward this week, at least 17 Democratic senators—mostly women—publicly urged Franken to step down, leaving him little choice.

However unfair it may be that Franken is leaving Washington while admitted assailant Donald Trump is still in the White House (Franken called it an “irony” in his remarks on Thursday) and Moore might be on his way to the Senate, it is clear that Democrats, and Franken, made the right call.

Republicans have never held themselves to the same standards of behavior as Democrats, and it will never be a good idea to sink to the GOP’s depths of hypocrisy. Theirs is the party that panders to a set of rabid anti-abortion voters who couldn’t care less about the transgressions of its leaders as long as they vote to curtail women’s bodily autonomy. Its tolerance even extends to men who privately tell their own extramarital girlfriends to get the abortions its voters despise. It’s the party that lifted Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, positions the Violence Against Women Act as an assault on family values, believes equal pay legislation is anti-male, bemoans the days when women stayed home to keep house, and works to make it harder for colleges to combat campus rape. Dems are hardly blameless—no less than Joe Biden did Thomas a big favor by casting doubt on Anita Hill’s claims of sexual harassment—but in the Republican Party, contempt for women is a feature, not a bug. It would do Democrats no good to start hedging their own commitment—new as it is, for some—to gender equity.

<snip>

There’s another still longer game to think about, too. In the best-case scenario, the hurt caused by Franken’s resignation will be a memorable lesson to Democrats: Don’t mistreat women, or promote the candidacies of people who do—otherwise, your party might take a debilitating loss when it can least afford it, and the whole country will suffer. The moral high ground can be painful to walk, but at least there are fewer gropers there.

January 1, 2018

U.S. Police Killed Over 1,000 Civilians in 2017 While the News Was Watching Trump

U.S. Police Killed Over 1,000 Civilians in 2017 While the News Was Watching Trump
Sixty-eight of those killed by police this year were unarmed.
By Celisa Calacal / AlterNet
December 31, 2017, 8:16 AM GMT

https://www.alternet.org/human-rights/police-violence-2017

<snip>

According to the database Mapping Police Violence, police have killed 1,129 people this year in the U.S., which was similar to the number of killings in previous years. According to the Washington Post’s police shooting tracker, officers fatally shot 976 people this year. In 2016, police shot and killed 963 people, and in 2015, officers fatally shot 995 people. Black people were disproportionately affected, as they made up 25 percent of those killed, despite making up only 13 percent of the population. Sixty-eight of those killed by police this year were unarmed.

Out of the 1,000 people who died at the hands of police, several received high-profile coverage in the media. In June, Tommy Le was shot and killed by deputies in Washington state hours before his high school graduation. The deputies initially claimed Le was holding a knife or other sharp object, but investigators found that the object was a pen. An autopsy report revealed that the deputies fired two shots into Le’s back.

That same month in Washington, a police officer fatally shot Giovonn Joseph-McDade, a 20-year-old college student at Green River College, following a car chase. And in Seattle, police shot and killed 30-year-old Charleena Lyles, who was pregnant at the time. Relatives said she had been dealing with mental health issues in the past year. An autopsy in August revealed officers shot Lyles seven times.

In September, Scott Schultz, a student at Georgia Tech University and president of the college’s Pride Alliance, was shot and killed by a campus police officer. Schultz, who had a history of mental illness, left three suicide notes in his room before being killed by police.

In a particularly tragic case, 6-year-old Kameron Prescott was killed by a stray bullet this month when deputies opened fire on Amanda Jones in a suburb of San Antonio, Texas. Jones, 30, was killed after being pursued by officers for car theft and other offenses. The confrontation ended on the porch of a trailer where officers opened fire. One of the bullets pierced the trailer wall and struck six-year-old Kameron inside.

The 2016 death of 26-year-old Daniel Shaver gained further attention this year after released footage showed Shaver on the floor of a hotel hallway begging for his life in front of an Arizona police officer, who had his gun pulled. The officer, Philip Brailsford, fatally shot Shaver. Earlier this month, Brailsford was acquitted by a jury of second-degree manslaughter and reckless manslaughter.

<snip>

Celisa Calacal is a freelance writer for AlterNet. She is a senior journalism major and legal studies minor at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. Previously she worked at ThinkProgress and served as an editor for Ithaca College's student newspaper. Follow her at @celisa_mia.