January 9, 2019

Judge gets national attention for KKK statement

Source: Nashville's NBC affiliate

He's made Newsweek and USA today. One of the headlines read, "Tennessee judge goes on tirade about crime among black men being 'more effective' than KKK."

Montgomery County Judge Wayne Shelton was on the bench talking to murder suspect Vincent Merriweather when he said, "I grew up in a time where people wore white robes and they shot at black people, and now we see young, black men wearing black hoodies shooting at black men and doing a much more effective job than the klan ever thought about doing."

"My initial reaction was, he was on point," said Jimmie Garland, the President of the Clarksville branch of the NAACP. While many people are sounding off, outraged, on social media, calling Shelton "racist," Garland is standing by his side.

"He's telling the young people, 'Stop killing yourself. Stop doing the job that, back in the early 30's and 20's and 10's, they did wearing robes and wearing pointed caps. You don't have to do that,'" said Garland.



Read more: https://www.wsmv.com/news/judge-gets-national-attention-for-kkk-statement/article_2dd1a108-12d2-11e9-b73f-eff5d9672984.html

---

Apparently in 2015 he made similar comments regarding the death of another young African-American male: “What a horrible tragedy this is. Black lives matter. That life mattered. That black life mattered to (his family) and it matters to me,” he reportedly told a pair of teenage brothers accused of gunning down a 20-year-old man after a high school graduation party...The Klan doesn’t exist anymore. Who doesn’t care about black lives now? I’ll let you answer that. I’m tired of black men killing black men. If I offended anyone . . . I can’t help it.”

January 6, 2019

Police In Houston Charge Suspect With Murder In Death Of 7-Year-Old Jazmine Barnes

Source: NPR

Police made an arrest on Saturday in the shooting death of a seven-year-old girl in Houston. The Harris County Sheriff's Office says 20-year-old Eric Black Jr. has been charged with capital murder. Black "admitted to taking part in the shooting," the office wrote in a statement.

Police initially said that a white man in a red pickup truck pulled up beside the car and opened fire. A tip from the public helped police identify Black, who is African American. He is now in custody in East Harris County.

Jazmine's family, a local chapter of Black Lives Matter and others had said they believed the shooting was racially motivated.

"I have no tint on my windows or anything so you can see there is a mother — a black mother — with daughters, beautiful children," Washington told CNN while police were searching for a suspect. "You took my baby from me and you have no care in the world."

Read more: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/06/682631402/police-in-houston-charge-suspect-with-murder-in-death-of-7-year-old-jazmine-barn

---

I hope this continues to get traction and we see justice for precious Jazmine. Unfortunately, without the salacious headline of a racially charged murder, this story now probably drops like a rock.

January 3, 2019

Has anyone looked at the newly released "list of charges" on their local website? What a joke.

It was an ACA requirement that just went into effect 1/1/19.

My local hospital has one excel file that is 281 rows, and another that is almost 6,300 rows. Each line has a "description" which will be absolutely meaningless to 99% of people, and then a charge, which because no one actually pays it, will also be absolutely meaningless. The information also lacks any instructions or context whatsoever; consumers will have no idea that their knee replacement is probably a combination of dozens of codes, instead of just 1 of the 100+ codes that have the word "knee" in it. Nor does this information account for the myriad other charges that will never show up on a hospital chargemaster, such as ambulance charges, physician charges, OP therapy charges, pharmacy charges, lab charges, etc.

Incredibly, this took NINE YEARS to implement. In 9 years, we should have been able to standardize wording, show code bundles, etc. Shit, if we passed Single Payer I would expect it to be implemented in less than 9 years.

I keep telling myself "it's a start," but if it's not even remotely useful information, what exactly is it a start to? How in 10,000 pages of regulations could we not have addressed this issue better? What a ridiculous waste of time and resources.