tagged w/ Middle-Class
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Another dentist appointment today. Seems like I just had one. I go every 6 months for a cleaning and exam. Due to (pick one) genetics, medications or lousy luck- I have bone loss in my jaw.I have good dental hygiene- my dental assistant loves my hygiene and sympathizes about my bone loss. I used to have dental insurance.Another dentist appointment today. Seems like I just had one. I go every 6 months for... more
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For those who don’t know, I am a Mason. I believe their philosophy of brotherly love to people, charity, and inclusiveness is in alignment with my own beliefs. I think more of that attitude needs to spread across the country. So earlier this week, I travelled with a group of brothers to a meeting at the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts. It was a hot meeting as the Grand Lodge is not air conditioned, yet. Other than dripping through the whole thing, it was quite fascinating.For those who don’t know, I am a Mason. I believe their philosophy of brotherly... more
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David Frum sees the writing on the wall:
“I used to worry that Sarah Palin would be the Barry Goldwater of 2012. My bad. Paul Ryan is the Barry Goldwater of 2012.
~snip~David Frum sees the writing on the wall:
“I used to worry that Sarah Palin... more
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I wrote an article in July titled, 'Does Glen Rahan Doneghy's life matter?'. In that article I discussed local prosecutorial racism, propaganda in favor of police, prosecutorial misconduct and police corruption as some of the reasons Doneghy may not get a fair trial. Recent events in the case have made that article just shy of prophetic. The case involves a driver that struck a police officer who was tragically killed.
Lexington detective David Richards testified to the grand jury and at an earlier preliminary hearing providing false information. He falsely claimed that a witness at the scene claimed that Doneghy's vehicle was the only one on the street at the time. He also claimed that this witness saw Doneghy's vehicle deviate from it's course of travel and then struck officer Durman.
Doneghy's attorneys, Kate Dunn, Sally Wasielewski, and Gayle Slaughter attempted to talk to any witnesses to prepare their case. Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney, Lori Boling, falsely claimed that there were no witnesses, thus, denying them their right to interview the witness. I've personally seen this type of mis-direction and prosecutorial misconduct time and time again in my own cases.
The witness, Ronnie Hood, however claims that while sitting on his porch his bushes obstructed his view. Mr. Hood claims that he did not know about the accident until after he heard a loud noise. Additionally, Mr. Hood's home is several doors down the street from where the accident took place.
Our founding fathers understood a number of things about criminal accusations. It’s difficult if not impossible to prove a negative. It’s better to free a guilty man than to punish an innocent one. Government cannot be trusted or supported if it doesn’t respect the rights of the accused. Finally, they gave us a Constitution to protect our rights and provide confidence to the court system.
Because it is nearly impossible to prove a negative the accused is never required to prove his innocence. To do so would require the accused to prove he did not do something. The burden of proof rests with the prosecution who must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Commonwealth Attorney, Ray Larson, states on his website and on WLAP radio and internet sites that he believes 99% of accused are guilty. This guilty until proven innocent mindset has permeated our criminal justice system all the way down to the beat cops. It is because of this that prosecutors hide witnesses and evidence and overzealous police officers lie to grand juries. They believe that the accused is guilty anyway so what does it hurt to lie or hide evidence if it speeds up the process of conviction. What we wind up with are thousands of falsely accused being imprisoned by a system gone awry.
Ray Larson also makes no secret of his personal feelings about minority criminals on his website or in his lengthy rants on the radio. While portraying white collar criminals as tragic situations of wrong decisions he resorts to name calling and slander when referring to cases involving working class crime and especially minorities. White collar criminals are wished a better future after learning a minor lesson, usually without jail time. However, Larson tends to claim that minorities fit into the once a 'thug' always a 'thug' category and they will always re-offend, he states.
Doneghy is a poor black man and officer Durman was a middle-class father and husband and member of local mega-church, Southland Christian Church. He was also caucasian. Believe it or not, in 2010 going on 2011, that still matters in Kentucky. Very rarely, 10 times in the last 25 years, has someone been prosecuted for vehicular homicide in Fayette County. However, this case involved a police officer and a black man with a criminal record lacking the money for Johnny Cochran.
Read the rest of the article at the link: http://www.examiner.com/courts-in-lexington/lexington-detective-lies-to-grand-jury-case-regarding-police-officer-s-deathI wrote an article in July titled, 'Does Glen Rahan Doneghy's life... more
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“The conditions now, in my view, are unquestionably worse in the inner cities,” attorney and civil rights stalwart David Ginsburg told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Education is worse. Housing is worse. Unemployment is worse. We now have a drug problem that we didn’t have in 1967 and 1968. There are millions of handguns. The cities have been essentially disregarded by the federal government.”
Ginsburg knew what he was talking about. He served as executive director of President Lyndon Johnson’s National Commission on Civil Disorders, formed after explosive race riots swept the nation in 1967. He believed white America was responsible for that unrest by penning African-Americans into ghettos. “White institutions created it (the ghetto), white institutions maintain it and white society condones it,” he said, according to his obituary in The New York Times.
Ginsburg, who died May 23rd at his home in Alexandria, Va., at age 98, made the statement quoted above in 1992 comparing the situation then with the Sixties, but he might just as well have spoken today comparing our grim realities with the bleak Nineties. That’s because a poverty-struck black underclass continues to be a source of profits for the unscrupulous.
Slumlords charge exorbitant rents. “Convenience” stores charge higher prices. Military recruiters have their pick of jobless youth desperate for work. And the for-profit, private prisons increase their head count (and income) as the judicial system hands off the young drug peddlers caught in the legal web. As the Kaiser Family Foundation reported, African-Americans fill 40 percent of the nation’s prison cells. Yet they make up just 13 percent of the nation’s population.
It’s a fact, the Associated Press reported, that “More than three times as many black people live in prison cells as in college dorms,” according to a Census Bureau finding in 2006. “It’s one of the great social and economic tragedies of our time,” Marc Morial, president and CEO of the Urban League, commented. “It points to the signature failure in our education system and how we’ve been raising our children.”
Indeed, a report released this May by the U.S. Department of Education finds the U.S. has 16,122 “high poverty” schools, and that students in them “are more likely to be minorities,” an AP story said. What’s more, the number of such schools is up from 12 percent of the total in the 1999-2000 school year to 17 percent of the total in 2007-2008 school year. In President Bush’s “no child left behind” era, it seems entire schools got left behind.
As for housing, Habitat For Humanity reports that “95 million (Americans) experience housing problems, including cost burden, overcrowding, poor housing quality and homelessness.” That’s nearly one-third of a nation. Here, blacks again, are getting the worst of it. Writing about Philadelphia in the Huffington Post on Feb. 11th of this year, journalist James Sanders says wretched conditions persist: “Predominantly black parts of town — North Philly, and the so-called ‘Badlands,’ for instance — are all too synonymous with crime and poverty. Too many black students drop out of high school, and give in to lives on the streets or in gangs.” The situation is similar in San Francisco where substandard public housing, high crime rates, and “dissatisfaction with underperforming urban schools” have combined to ignite a black exodus from the city, according to the August 28, 2007 USA Today. In Springfield, Mo., writes Cheryl Fischer of the Kuumba Human Rights Focus Group, the city’s own records show that 35 percent of African-Americans live in substandard housing and 5 percent live in dilapidated housing. As well, 70 percent of African-Americans in that city earn $20,000 or less annually, and only 12% of African-Americans earn from $30,000 to $60,000 annually.
The Urban League’s report put unemployment among blacks nationally at nearly 15 percent in 2009, compared with 8.5 percent for whites and 12.1 percent for Hispanics. It also showed a median income for whites of $55,530 compared to $34,218 for blacks. The UL called for a job-creation and job training investment of $168 billion over the next two years. FYI, back in 1962, Whitney Young, then UL’s executive director, called for a “Marshall Plan” to help black Americans that was largely ignored by President Johnson. LBJ was intent on “winning” the war in Viet Nam. The U.S. preferred making wars overseas to helping African-Americans at home in those days and Presidents Bush and Obama have followed in his footsteps.
As the National Low Income Housing Coalition reported this April, a family needs to earn $38,360 a year to afford to rent a decent two-bedroom home but that “rents continue to rise while wages continue to fall” in the current recession. Its “Out of Reach 2010 report shows once again that “prevailing incomes and wages are simply not enough to allow a family to afford a decent home in their community,” said Sheila Crowley, NLIHC president. The national two-bedroom Fair Market Rent is a staggering $959 a month. In addition, 74% of metro renters live in an area where having two full-time jobs at the minimum wage would still not allow them to afford that price. “The persistence of high rates of unemployment and under-employment is making it ever more difficult for families to secure decent housing. Unfortunately, the situation is not likely to improve any time soon,” Center for Economic Policy and Research Co-Director Dean Baker commented. Of course, the U.S. could have built 7,779,092 affordable housing units with the $1 trillion it has now flushed down the sewers of Iraq and Afghanistan, says the National Priorities Project of Northampton, Mass. But the brilliant brains running Washington instead have got 5,000 coffins shipped home for the same money, not to mention 1-million funerals in Iraq alone. Of course, the profits of oil companies and defense contractors have been stupendous.
Nothing in the above is meant to detract from the remarkable gains by African-Americans who have pushed themselves into the middle-class, despite the formidable odds against them. An examination of U.S. Census data will indicate this has been going on at least since the 1940s. But overall, for Black America, it is as David Ginsburg remarked: “Education is worse. Housing is worse. Unemployment is worse.” It’s the same today as in the Nineties or Sixties. So where’s the civil rights movement?“The conditions now, in my view, are unquestionably worse in the inner... more
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Two best friends, Chris and Mike, take their annual 6-day camping trip. Things are different this time when Chris invites his friend, Kathy, to join them.
Days into the expedition, a series of bizarre events forces the trio into survival mode. Fighting with the consequence of making choices proves to be an unbearable task and delaying those choices pushes them to their limits. Every moment now threatens the group's chances of survival.
Irreversible sacrifices are made and living with those concequences proves to be harder than making them.Two best friends, Chris and Mike, take their annual 6-day camping trip. Things are... more
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Barrack Obama is having an identity crisis with the middle-class voters of America. It is this disconnection with middle-class voters that casts a grand illusion on Obama's campaign.Barrack Obama is having an identity crisis with the middle-class voters of America. It... more
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