Advocates to Obama: Every 36 Hours Law Enforcement Kill a Black Person (rate higher when Latinos are added)

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VoiceofDetroit

Now that Barack Obama has been reelected President of the United States of America, it is imperative that the racial justice movement hold him and his administration accountable for the extrajudicial killing of Black and oppressed people throughout the country.

The Obama administration must assert its authority over the various law enforcement entities throughout the country and stop the discriminatory policies and programs that demean and endanger Black life like racial profiling, stop and frisk, the war on drugs, and mandatory minimum sentencing that facilitates mass incarceration.

In the first six months of 2012, one Black person every 36 hours was executed in the United States. Since January 1, 2012, police and a much smaller number of security guards and self-appointed vigilantes have murdered at least 140 Black women, men and children.

This epidemic constitutes an egregious human rights crisis that the Federal Government has a fundamental obligation to address. As party to the Convention to Eliminate all forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) the United States government has an obligation to protect the lives of racial minorities. The government is also obligated under various civil rights laws and executive orders to protect the lives of African Americans.

Our movements must step up our organizing and action over the course of the next several days, weeks, months and years to ensure that the Obama administration complies with our demands. We call on you to once again join us in raising the basic demands listed below by continuing to call, fax, and email the White House and the Department of Justice and tell them to act now!

Deuce McAllister Wants Angry White Students to Settle Down so Ole Miss Can Recruit More Blacks to football program

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Former Ole Miss running back Deuce McAllister, who went on to be a first-round pick of the New Orleans Saints, understands well how the university's past – and now, its present – impacts the football program's recruiting efforts.

"I feel strongly for the university," he said. "I mean, I'm embarrassed. I'm embarrassed as an alumni, I'm embarrassed as a former athlete. Because I know how hard it is to get minority players to come to the university. That's the stigma that they have to fight. That's the stigma that the staff has to fight.

"It makes it tough on Coach Freeze. It makes it tougher," McAllister said. "That does not put the school in the best light. And the biggest thing that they fight a lot of the time is how much they've got to deal with the past, how much they need to prove and show how much they have changed.

"So when you have a situation where you're telling kids, 'It's not like that anymore,' that Ole Miss has changed, then you have an incident like this occur, then that hurts. That hurts you with recruiting minority students. It hurts you with recruiting minority athletes."

Ole Miss must also deal with the potential that opposing coaches will use the rally as ammunition to recruit negatively against Freeze and the Rebels. "No about it, they'll use it in negative recruiting," McAllister said. "Whether it's them getting the paper and showing it, whether it's them using that negative film, negative image, they'll use it.

 

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After 2nd Failed Ballot Initiative Alabama governor wants to remove racist language

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Sfgate

After two failed efforts to remove racist language concerning education from Alabama's 1901 Constitution, Gov. Robert Bentley says he's more determined than ever to try again to delete vestiges of segregation from the document.

Amendment 4 would have removed language mandating poll taxes and separate black and white schools, but black legislators and the Alabama Education Association opposed the measure. They argued it should be defeated because it preserved a 1956 amendment that declared that Alabama children did not have a right to a public education

Bentley said he would prefer an amendment that only addresses the racist language. He said he is concerned that deleting the1956 amendment concerning the right to an education would cause Alabama residents to worry that lawmakers would approve a tax increase to pay for it. But he said he believes removing the racist language would help the state's image around the country.

Legislators have said the amendment would have to be worded carefully to avoid the difficulties that have doomed the first two efforts, the first one in 2004.

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Mapping study: Alabama leads in racist tweets post-election

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Al.com and FloatingSheep

Floatingsheep.org, a website run by geographers who track and analyze user-generated online content, recently mapped racist tweets in response to President Obama's re-election. And guess which state was the biggest offender?  Sweet home Alabama. You can review the full results here. 

During the day after the 2012 presidential election we took note of a spike in hate speech on Twitter referring to President Obama's re-election, as chronicled by Jezebel (thanks to Chris Van Dyke for bringing this our attention). It is a useful reminder that technology reflects the society in which it is based, both the good and the bad.  Information space is not divorced from everyday life and racism extends into the geoweb and helps shapes its contours; and in turn, data from the geoweb can be used to reflect the geographies of racist practice back onto the places from which they emerged.

Using DOLLY we collected all the geocoded tweets from the last week (beginning November 1) with racist terms that also reference the election in order to understand how these everyday acts of explicit racism are spatially distributed. Given the nature of these search terms, we've buried the details at the bottom of this post in a footnote [1]. 

Given our interest in the geography of information we wanted to see how this type of hate speech overlaid on physical space.  To do this we aggregated the 395 hate tweets to the state level and then normalized them by comparing them to the total number of geocoded tweets coming out of that state in the same time period [2]. We used a location quotient inspired measure (LQ) that indicates each state's share of election hate speech tweet relative to its total number of tweets.[3]   A score of 1.0 indicates that a state has relatively the same number of hate speech tweets as its total number of tweets. Scores above 1.0 indicate that hate speech is more prevalent than all tweets, suggesting that the state's "twitterspace" contains more racists post-election tweets than the norm.

So, are these tweets relatively evenly distributed?  Or do some states have higher specializations in racist tweets?  The answer is shown in the map below (also available here in an interactive version) in which the location of individual tweets (indicated by red dots)[4] are overlaid on color coded states. Yellow shading indicates states that have a relatively lower amount of  post-election hate tweets (compared to their overall tweeting patterns) and all states shaded in green have a higher amount.  The darker the green color the higher the location quotient measure for hate tweets. 

Map of the Location Quotients for Post Election Racist Tweets
Click here to access an interactive version of the map at GeoCommons

A couple of findings from this analysis

  • Mississippi and Alabama have the highest LQ measures with scores of 7.4 and 8.1, respectively.
  • Other southern states (Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee) surrounding these two core states also have very high LQ scores and form a fairly distinctive cluster in the southeast.
  • The prevalence of post-election racist tweets is not strictly a southern phenomenon as North Dakota (3.5), Utah (3.5) and Missouri (3) have very high LQs.  Other states such as West Virginia, Oregon and Minnesota don't score as high but have a relatively higher number of hate tweets than their overall twitter usage would suggest.
  • The Northeast and West coast (with the exception of Oregon) have a relatively lower number of hate tweets.
  • States shaded in grey had no geocoded hate tweets within our database.  Many of these states (Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and South Dakota) have relatively low levels of Twitter use as well.  Rhode Island has much higher numbers of geocoded tweets but had no hate tweets that we could identify.
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Secret Service investigates white woman’s Facebook post about Obama

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Latimes

A Turlock woman who used a racial slur to describe President Barack Obama on Facebook and wrote "maybe he will get assassinated" is being investigated by the United States Secret Service.

The post by Denise Helms, which has since been removed, went up right after the president won his second term Tuesday night. But she doesn't plan to apologize.

"I didn't think it would be that big of a deal," Helms told FOX 40 Sacramento.

"The assassination part is kind of harsh. I'm not saying I'd go do that or anything like that, by any means, but if it was to happen I don't think I'd care one bit. … It's not something I would be upset about."

The Secret Service said all threats or perceived threats are taken seriously and investigated, but declined further comment.

"I don't understand what I did wrong," Helms said. "I didn't say, 'Hey, someone go do this.' "

Helms also said that, despite using a racial slur, she doesn't consider herself racist.

White Students Have Racial Temper Tantrum at Virginia college after Obama’s Supreme Ass Whipping of Mittens

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WashPost

Hampden-Sydney College, an all-male school in central Virginia, is investigating an election-night incident in which a group of students upset about President Obama’s reelection set off fireworks, threw bottles and then shouted racial epithets at members of a minority student organization, officials said Thursday.

Some in the group also threatened violence against the Minority Student Union members, college officials said, but there was no physical contact. Officials said about 40 students were involved, but it was unclear how many were active and how many were bystanders.

“I am terribly disappointed with the students who participated in this harmful, senseless episode including those men who stood idly by and watched it happen,” college President Christopher B. Howard wrote in a statement addressed to the Hampden-Sydney community. “There is no place for bigotry or racism of any kind on this campus.”

The incident at Hampden-Sydney, a private liberal arts college in Prince Edward County, occurred as another racially charged episode was unfolding at the University of Mississippi. There, the Daily Mississippian student newspaper reported, hundreds of students “exchanged racial epithets and violent, politicized chants” about midnight as the nation learned that its first black president had been reelected.

At Hampden-Sydney, about 300 people attended a forum Wednesday to address the incident. “We were all impressed with the number of students who stood up and condemned this,” said college spokesman Thomas Shomo.

Howard, who took office in July 2009, is the first African American president of Hampden-Sydney. Federal data show that 8 percent of its students are black and 83 percent are white.

The 1,080-student school, founded in 1775, is one of a handful of all-male colleges left in the United States. Among its former students were the ninth U.S. president, William Henry Harrison, and television comedian Stephen Colbert, who attended the school before later graduating from Northwestern University.

Shomo said the 40 students involved in the incident coalesced on the school grounds after television networks announced that Obama had defeated Republican Mitt Romney. The group of students walked over to a lawn outside the Minority Student Union house, he said, where some threw bottles and set off fireworks. Shomo said, however, that the bottles apparently were not directed at any person or building. When some students started shouting racial slurs and threats, Shomo said, members of the minority student group called campus security.

No physical blows were exchanged, he said. The incident lasted less than 45 minutes. Howard himself went to the scene soon afterward to talk with students about what had happened.

The college, which posted a statement on the matter on its Facebook page, is investigating the incident. Shomo said students could face punishment for violation of the school’s code of conduct. According to the college’s Web site: “The Hampden-Sydney student will behave as a gentleman at all times and in all places.”

 

Kentucky has Nearly all White Elected Officials

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Kentucky.com

Although 8 percent of the state population is black, that group claims no U.S. senators or representatives or state constitutional officers, one state senator and five representatives.

A 2009 study by then-Secretary of State Trey Grayson, found no minorities in any county elected positions other than magistrates (three).

Remarkably, this is something of an improvement. This year, Kentucky ranked only 38th in the percentage of women in the state legislature, up from 47th in 2008.

 

Softer 3-strikes law has defense lawyers preparing case reviews

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LATimes

A day after California voted to soften its three-strikes sentencing law, defense lawyers around the state Wednesday prepared to seek reduced punishments for thousands of offenders serving up to life in prison for relatively minor crimes.

 

The process of asking courts to revisit old sentences could take as long as two years and benefit roughly 3,000 prisoners. They represent about a third of incarcerated third-strikers.

 

Proposition 36 garnered about 69% of the vote. The initiative won in all 58 counties, amending one of the nation's toughest three-strikes laws, one that had overwhelming voter support when it was approved in 1994 amid heightened anxiety over violent crime.

 

"People want a fair and just criminal justice system," said Michael Romano, who helped write the proposition and runs a Stanford Law School project that represents inmates convicted of minor third strikes. "The passage of Proposition 36, especially by its margin, has given some hope … to people behind bars who have been forsaken by their families and society."

 

Courts can reject a request to reduce a sentence if they determine the prisoner is a danger to public safety. Inmates with prior convictions for rape, murder and child molestation cannot be released under the measure.

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Puerto Rico Referendum Approves U.S. Statehood for 1st Time, But Results Show Divided Views

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Democracy Now! 

For the first time in Puerto Rico’s history, a majority of the island’s voters have supported a non-binding referendum to become a full U.S. state. The measure will require approval from the U.S. Congress, but President Obama has said he will respect the vote. Obama made the same promise last year when he visited the island, becoming the first sitting U.S. president in half a century to do so. If Puerto Rico becomes the 51st state, its residents will have the right to vote in all U.S. elections, but will also have to start to pay federal taxes. We speak to Juan González, Democracy Now! co-host and New York Daily News columnist.

Advocates Say Arpaio Hasn't Won Yet, Urge County to Count All Votes

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Colorlines

Now, advocates and alternative media in Arizona are questioning these results. They say hundreds of thousands of provisional and early votes have yet to be counted.

The Latino advocacy group Presente.org sent out a petition today calling for all the votes to be counted. The petition reads, "Arpaio is leading by 90,000 votes but there are over 300,000 ballots that haven't been counted yet--likely most are from Latino neighborhoods!"

Arizona Latinos voted early more than twice the rate they did in 2008, the NY Times reports.

New America Media's Valeria Fernandez reports:

Arpaio's critics, among them Unite Here, Promise Arizona and Citizens for a Better Arizona (CBA) - groups that were behind a get-out-the-vote effort -- expressed concerns over a large number of provisional ballots that were cast.

"We're focused on the people that were not allowed to vote. We're concerned about how the county recorders run the election," said Randy Parraz, co-founder of CBA. "There were people that were not allowed to vote at all."

Brendan Walsh, political director with Unite Here echoed those concerns.

"We were finding that people went to the polls and were being asked to cast provisional ballots," said Walsh, when they should have received the ballot in the mail.

The Phoenix New Times reports that a reversal is unlikely in the sheriff's race.

The gap between Penzone and Arpaio may narow, but is likely too deep of a hole to dig out of. 

The county counted more than 44,000 ballots yesterday, but the numbers in the Penzone-Arpaio race have not budged by much. Currently the spread there is 9.48 percentage points.

But, the New Times reports:

It's a different story when it comes to the Rich Carmona v. Jeff Flake U.S. Senate contest, where Flake is up by a mere 79,867 votes, or 4.8 percent. 

Republican golden-boy Flake must be sweating big ol' bullets right now. Yesterday, the Arizona Secretary of State's Office announced that there are more than 600,000 provisional and early ballots remaining statewide to be counted. According to one of the savviest political experts I know, Democrat and former legislator John Loredo, Carmona could make up that gap with that's left to count, especially considering that many of the "late" ballots turned in at the polls will tend to be Democratic.

Dinosaur Rush Limbaugh: The Amnesty Trap and "Old, White Men"

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RushLimbaugh

RUSH: See, there you go, and the Republican Party believes this. This Al Cardenas, the head of the American Conservative Union, said the party is too old, too white, too male. Three million Republicans didn't vote. And if they had, these numbers on single women and Hispanics would not have mattered because Romney would have won. But the theme is that the Republicans are too exclusive.

Look, I don't want to bore you. We mentioned this in the first hour and a half of this program. I'm just telling you this is where they are. This is what the Republican Party is listening to. They listen to people like Stephanopoulos and this conservative guy, Al Cardenas. Too old, too white, too male. Lost single women, Hispanics. Again, I'm just gonna ask the question: The Hispanic voters, why do they vote Democrat? And it isn't immigration policy.

It is not immigration policy. That's not why Hispanics vote for Democrats. Republicans, to get the 75% of Hispanics that vote for Democrats, are gonna have to become members of the welfare state. And then they're gonna have to compete for the welfare state vote better at it than the Democrats do. Or they're gonna have to embark on an outreach program to explain to 'em why the welfare state's not in anybody's best interest, and try to talk 'em out of it.

But that's why 75% of Hispanics vote Democrat. And this is academic, scholarly research produced yesterday by Heather Mac Donald. I'm not making it up. She's the scholar on this stuff. Seventy-five percent vote Democrat because they believe in the big expansion of government, social safety net, and progressive taxation. It had nothing to do with immigration policy. Single women vote for the Democrat Party because the Democrat Party is their husband.

 

Peter Brant II, son of billionaire, jokes about ‘contingency plan’ to ‘kill Obama’

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TheGrio

The steady stream of ugly reactions to President Barack Obama’s re-election continues.

The latest incident involves Peter Brant II, the 18-year-old son of billionaire publisher Peter Brant Sr. and former Victoria’s Secret supermodel Stephanie Seymour.

In a series of text messages to his friend Andrew Warren, which were reprinted by Jezebel,  Warren whined about how a second Obama term would make him “poor.” Brant II then claimed, “I have a contingency plan. Kill Obama hahaha.”

Brant II thought their exchange was so hilarious he reportedly posted their conversation on Instagram, along with an off-color remark about women’s rights.

“HAHAHAAHAHA … won’t it be uproarious when the Secret Service stops by Chez Brant later today?” wrote Hillary Moss of New York magazine.

Washington Redskins Celebrate Veterans Day with Racist Logo and Name in Camouflage Backdrop (another reason to fire the Shannies)

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ThinkProgress

Fresh off its pink campaign to bring awareness to breast cancer, the National Football League is now embarking on another uniform-related campaign to highlight and pay tribute to America’s military members ahead of Veterans Day. Last week, NFL players wore camouflage-pattered ribbon stickers on their helmets and coaches wore ribbons attached to their shirts.

Washington Redskins coach Mike Shanahan, as Uni-Watch’s Paul Lukas noticed, didn’t wear the ribbon on his sweatshirt last week, but the team is paying tribute to the military by draping its official web site in camouflage, as this screen shot shows:

Paying tribute to the U.S. military is an easy decision for most of the NFL’s franchises, but for Washington, the decision would seem to be much more complicated. Native Americans have served in every major American war, and according to the U.S. Navy there are at least 190,000 Native American military veterans. But native tribes also spent decades fighting against the United States and were very nearly eradicated by the same military to which the NFL and subsequently the Washington Redskins are now paying tribute.

The Redskins, of course, haven’t acknowledged the long, complicated history the team’s namesake has with that military, much as they have refused to acknowledge much of the controversy (which now includes a lawsuit brought by Native Americans) surrounding the use of an offensive name and offensive imagery. Washington’s football franchise paying tribute to the U.S. military wouldn’t be controversial whatsoever if the team realized or acknowledged such facts. That the team doesn’t understand that moves like this will invite further controversy, though, seems yet another indication that neither the franchise nor the league understand that use of the name “Redskins” and the accompanying imagery don’t just represent a team name and a logo, but a people who have a deep-rooted and complicated history with our country.

Donald Trump and Karl Rove lead calls for revolution

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Guardian 

"The losing candidate has an important duty tonight," said Republican strategist Steve Schmidt as polling closed. "That's to concede the election in a graceful manner."

Around 1am, Mitt Romney duly obliged – but some of his allies did not get the memo. To put it mildly. "[Obama] lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!" noted Donald Trump, in a tweet that he slyly deleted once it became clear that, in fact, Obama had actually won the popular vote. "The world is laughing at us," Trump added, apparently without irony. "Lets [sic] fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice!"

Not to be outdone, Karl Rove – the former Bush strategist, Fox News pundit and Romney donor – refused to admit that Obama had won Ohio, causing civil war among Fox's other analysts, who had already declared the state for the Democrats. "I'd be very cautious about interfering in this process," said Rove, conveniently forgetting that a similar intervention by Fox in 2000 had swung the election the way of his former boss. "That's awkward," said Fox's Megyn Kelly.

Earlier, Republican pundit Bill O'Reilly blamed the whole thing on race. "Obama wins because it's not a traditional America any more. The white establishment is the minority." Classy.

AG Eric Holder May Step Down In Second Obama Term

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ThinkProgress 

During remarks at the University of Baltimore School of Law Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder said he is unsure whether he will keep his post for a second term, CBS DC reports. “That’s something that I’m in the process now of trying to determine,” Holder said. “I have to think about, can I contribute in a second term?” Holder, the first African-American attorney general, has led the Department’s vigorous efforts to enforce the Voting Rights Act, and first announced in 2009 that the Department would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act. He has withstood vicious attacks by Senate Republicans and was held in contempt of Congress for his alleged participation in a botched gun sting operation known as “Fast and Furious.” A DOJ inspector general’s report later cleared him of any wrongdoing. According to a Wall Street Journal story on Obama’s second term, Holder has said he wants to stay long enough to mark the 50th anniversary of several civil rights milestones.

White People Stockpile Weapons: Louisiana voters strengthen protection of right to bear arms

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Jurist

Louisiana voters overwhelmingly approved an amendment to the state constitution which creates the strongest protection of the right to keep and bear arms in the nation. With all 4,267 precincts reporting, unofficial results from the Louisiana Secretary of State show that 73.46 percent (1,283,850 votes) [unofficial results] of the state's electorate supported the amendment. Before the amendment, Article 1, Section 11 [text] of the Louisiana State Constitution read: "The right of each citizen to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged, but this provision shall not prevent the passage of laws to prohibit the carrying of weapons concealed on the person." Earlier this year, the Louisiana State Legislature [official website] approved a joint resolution [text, PDF] proposing the amendment to the state's voters. With the amendment, Section 11 will now read: "The right of each citizen to keep and bear arms is fundamental and shall not be infringed. Any restriction on this right shall be subject to strict scrutiny." The legislature initiated the amendment process in response to the 2001 Louisiana Supreme Court decision in State v. Blanchard [opinion, PDF]. In that case the court upheld a lower court's ruling on the powers of the legislature with respect to a citizen's right to bear arms say that the "right to bear arms is established by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article I, § 11 of the Louisiana Constitution. The State of Louisiana is entitled to restrict that right for legitimate state purposes, such as public health and safety."

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Mitt Romney 'would be willing to work for Barack Obama'

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Telegraph Uk

The possibility of Mr Romney being offered a government job or task-force during a second Obama term was raised by the president in his victory speech on Tuesday night.

"I also look forward to sitting down with Governor Romney to talk about where we can work together to move this country forward," Mr Obama said.

Grant Bennett, who served alongside Mr Romney as a Mormon bishop in Massachusetts, said that his friend would never run for office again but could well be persuaded back into public service.

"If Mitt were invited by the president, he would say 'I'm an American. Can I contribute?," Mr Bennett told The Daily Telegraph. "Mitt's fundamental motivation is to make a difference for good".

Such a move would be likely to enrage Republican colleagues determined to block Mr Obama from implementing his plans. Alex Castellanos, a prominent Republican strategist, described Mr Obama's gesture to Mr Romney as "incredibly generous, but also incredibly smart politics".