Well, like pieces of a puzzles, some things may be falling in place in regards to the scandal related to missing RNC emails. Now, in addition to Rove’s involvement in the scandal involving the U.S. attorney firings, these missing emails may also contain another bit of damaging information — a batch of emails from election night 2004 are missing and there is some speculation that they may contain clues as to what happened in Ohio that night. Ohio was plagued with some very suspect occurences that day (fewer voting machines in Democratic districts, suspect voter rolls and even an unexplained shutting out of the press during a vote count based on a supposed terrorist threat — in a rural community and without the FBI knowing anything about it).

So, some are clearing interested in why the emails from this night are missing. Here’s why the suspicion:

But the time frame from which these e-mails are missing also includes a critical late night period after the presidential election of 2004. In these crucial hours, computerized vote tallies may have been shifted to move the Ohio vote count from John Kerry to George W. Bush, giving Bush the presidency.

Earlier that day, Rove and Bush flew into Columbus. Local election officials say they met with Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell in Columbus. Also apparently in attendance was Matt Damschroder, executive director of the Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Elections.

These four men, along with Ohio GOP chair Bob Bennett, were at the core of a multi-pronged strategy that gave Bush Ohio’s twenty Electoral College votes, and thus the presidency. Bennett and Damschroder held key positions on election boards in the state’s two most populous counties, with the biggest inner city concentrations of Democratic voters.

So, you have to wonder if all this is related. I believe so and, as more rocks are picked up, more scandals are going to be exposed. I think we are just beginning one of the wildest political rides in U.S. history.

Popularity: 41% [?]

I live in the Cincinnati, Ohio area and, sometimes, I believe that some of the stupidest ideas and concepts I have ever heard were born here. Today, I bring you such an example.

We have a group of people here who are looking to publish a list of 1500+ people who they call “likely killers”. I have seen this described as the “Minority Report”, referring to the movie where people were arrested, before a crime was commited, based on the predictions of psychics.

So, if you have people ready to publish a list of “likely killers”, you would think they would be crime experts, right?

Bad assumption. The backers of this list include two city council candidates, Charlie Windburn (a former councilman) and Melanie Bates (a woman whose husband was killed in a robbery last year). Another backer is Todd Portune, a county commissioner. None of these people have law enforcement backgrounds.

The program used to compile this list was created by crime activist Chris Kearney, who has a background in information technology but, again, not in law enforcement. The criteria he used to come up with a list were “all people in Hamilton County who’ve committed a violent crime in the past 12 months and who also have a prior conviction for a gun or drug crime.”

Now, let’s get to my problems with this. First is the fact that you are about to publish a list of names of people who you identify as potential killers. So, if any of them are trying to turn their lives around you have just made them the targets of law enforcement and just generated a “do not hire” list for all potential employers. Can anyone smell the lawsuits coming?

Secondly, you are using pseudo-science to predict a criminal act. You are not including psychological profiles and not accounting for how much violence occurred in previous crimes. These are just two considerations I can think of but, when you talk criminal profiling, you have many to consider.

Finally, just because you can create a computer program does not mean that it’s any good at its job. I could pick a random sampling of any 1500 people and, no doubt, a few could be killers, regardless of criminal background. So, in this case, if a few turn out to be killers, it would likely be more coincidental than predictory. However, what makes this more dangerous is that you create a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. You cut off avenues for people seeking to turn their lives around, which pushes them back out into the streets and they commit crimes that result in them killing someone.

Sadly, you have a group of people who got together and thought this was a good idea. Even more sad is the fact that they have supporters for this nonsense. If they focused as hard on bettering employment opportunities in Cincinnati as they did on backing this mess, we would have real strategies for reducing crime.

Popularity: 38% [?]

Some New York Police Department sergeants are feeling the heat after they decided to pull a Don Imus move. During roll calls in the days following the Imus firing, four black female cops were reffered to as “nappy headed hoes”.

For some reason, these cops must have found it funny and acceptable to speak to their black female counterparts in this manner. However, I am certain that police officials in a department of questionable relations with black citizens, did not want to deal with another scandal.

The following excerpt contains examples of what these women dealt with:

Detective Aretha Williams was looking for the sign-out book at the end of her shift.

“Don’t give me no lip before I call you a nappy-headed ho,” Sgt. Michael Cantatore, who is white, told Williams, according to the detective.

That comment “cut me to the core,” said Williams yesterday. “I find it disrespectful, racist, sexist.

“It can’t be tolerated,” said the 15-year veteran, who broke down into tears during a press conference with 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care.

Cantatore is scheduled to retire today. An NYPD source said he would be interviewed tomorrow by Equal Opportunity Office investigators who are probing the women’s complaints.

In another incident, on April 15, three black female officers - Tronnette Jackson, Maria Gomez and Karen Nelson - allegedly were singled out during a morning roll call in Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct by Sgt. Carlos Mateo, who is Hispanic.

“Stand-up, ho’s,” Mateo said, according to lawyer Bonita Zelman, who works with the Guardians Association, an advocacy group for minority officers.

Police Officer Ralph Montenez then chimed in, “They’re not just ho’s, they’re nappy-headed ho’s,” according to Zelman.

Sadly, this is what you get when people get too comfortable disrespecting us. This goes to show that, in the NYPD, even the black officers catch hell.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Rudy Giuliani has been exploiting his role in the aftermath of 9/11 too long. Never mind that, despite being warned against it, he put the command center in the World Trade Center complex after the ‘93 attacks there so, when the towers fell, the emergency communications system went with them. Also, the firefighters union in New York and some families of 9/11 victims have publicly come out against Giuliani, painting a sharp contrast to the “9/11 hero” image he keeps trotting out.

Now, you can tell Giuliani is smelling himself too much. Borrowing a move from the Dick Cheney playbook, Giuliani is saying that a Democratic victory in 2008 would put America at risk for another 9/11 attack but, if a Republican is elected, especially him, we’ll all be safe.

Perhaps Giuliani has not been paying attention but, due to Bush foreign policy, terrorist attacks have actually risen worldwide. But, that matters not to those who use the most terrible tragedies to score political points.

Guiliani sounds like he wants to pick up where Bush will leave off. Thanks but, no thanks.

Popularity: 42% [?]

“Livin’ Proof” from the album Livin’ Proof

Popularity: 35% [?]

I might as well go there. A couple of weeks or so back, the Duke Lacrosse players saw charges dropped when evidence showed that they could not have committed the rape of which they were accused. I remember a lot of pundits trying to play a racial game of “gotcha” by trying to attack prominent black folks for not speaking out on this when they were so vocal about Don Imus. Well, I’m going to turn the tables on those critics and ask, where are you today now that Jerry Miller became the 200th person exonerated by the Innocence Project?

You see, as bad as it was for the Duke players to have their reputations damaged, a lot of people (too many of them black), without the benefit of being able to afford good legal representation, have been left to languish is prisons for decades for crimes they did not commit. In this instance, Jerry Miller spent 25 years in prison for rape, was paroled as a sex offender and was forced to wear an ankle monitor. In a supreme twist of irony, the person who actually did the crime can’t face charges because the statute of limitations for the crime ran out.

So, while I feel for anyone accused of a crime they did not commit, where are these folks who were accusing black people of hypocrisy a couple weeks ago now that this story has come out? Two hundred is a huge number and this is just based on what the Innocence Project has been able to do so, I have to believe that there are many more.

So, from the Scottsboro Boys to Jerry Miller, America has seen a lot of innocent black folks go to jail for long stretches of time, only to have their innocence established either when they’re dead or when some of their most productive years were behind them. Therefore, “gotcha” crowd, what do you say about this?

Popularity: 18% [?]

Billy Ray Johnson was known around town as kindly and “slow”. So, it is unconscionable to take advantage of such a person but, that is precisely what happened in Linden, Texas , on a September night nearly four years ago.

Billy stumble upon an all-white party. He was given alcohol and became intoxicated. Later, a group of men from this party beat him and left him on a fire ant hill. Mr. Johnson suffered a concussion and bleeding on the brain. As a result of his injuries, he now lives in a nursing home.

The men where tried by an all-white jury which sentenced them to either probation or jail. The longest of term was 60 days.

The family of Mr. Johnson gain some measure of relief when a jury award a $9 million civil judgment to them against two defendants –James Cory Hicks and Christopher Colt Amox. The other two defendents, Chadwick Stone and John Wesley Owens, had already reached private settlements with the family.

When I first heard of this case a couple of years back, I felt that I was reading about a story from the 40’s or 50’s and was sickened by the slap on the wrist these people (and I use the term loosely) received for such a heinous crime. Today, I am at least mildly heartened to see these so-called men be held to some level of accountability for their criminal act.

Popularity: 49% [?]

I have been posting about the Justice Department’s fired attorney scandal quite a bit lately. The reason I keep hammering on this is that there is an assault on minority voting rights taking place in the highest levels of our government.

In Ohio, leading up to the election, I saw dirty tricks being played by our then-Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate, Kenneth Blackwell (thankfully, he now has neither job). One of the dirty tricks was threatening voter registration workers with fines and jail time for voter registration forms that were not hand-delivered to the secretary of states office (instead of using mail). So, each individual voter registration staffer would need to hand-deliver the forms of the people they registered. So, that sweet little old lady who took the time to sit at a table in a library in Cincinnati, Ohio to help people get registered to vote could have been facing jail time/fines for not driving the 100+ miles to Columbus, Ohio to deliver the forms filled out while she was on duty. What this also meant was that supervisors for these registration drives could not check out forms for quality and accuracy, meaning more registrations could be tossed out due to errors.

Why is this important? A majority of voter drives result in more Democratic registrants than Republican registrants. This is because the drives often aim at registering poorer and minority voters, who typically vote Democrat. Thankfully, a suit was brought against Blackwell that forced him to end this discriminatory practice.

What I didn’t realize, at the time, was that Ken Blackwell was part of a strategy the Republican Party had enacted in so-called “battleground” states that was done in conjunction with the U.S. Justice Department. They claimed to be cracking down on voter fraud but, in reality, it seems that they were just cracking down on voters.

It has come out that this was a process that has been in place for over six years with the goal in mind of keeping Democratic voters away. This is why the voter ID law in Georgia were enacted (which left many older folks out in the cold because, due to segregation-era policies, they were never issued birth certificates, a requirement for obtaining ID). This is also why Blackwell violated his own state law in Ohio by not making voter registration available at public assistance and Bureau of Motor Vehichles offices. Finally, we also know about how many voters were purged off the rolls in Florida and Ohio because their names didn’t match those in databases or they had the same names as someone on a felon’s list.

So, what we are seeing with the Alberto Gonzales situation is a case of what was done in the dark coming to light. The Republicans can’t win poor and minority votes so, instead, they chose to work to take them away. Again, this is why this scandal should be of concern to us.

Popularity: 16% [?]

“Put In On” from the album Lifestylez Ov Da Poor and Dangerous

Warning: Language

Popularity: 44% [?]

Paris has long been on of my favorite Hip-Hop artists. He has never shied away from the controversial and has always been willing to tell the truth as he sees it.

While he has addressed issues of racism, police brutality, social justice, politics and world affairs, he has, also, been highly critical of black-on-black genocide, the disrespect of black women and black rap artists turning rap into a minstrel show.

So, in the aftermath of the Imus flap, the question about rappers disrespecting black women came up, as well. While making no excuses for the music of these rapper, Paris cuts through the b.s. and breaks down how Corporate America is indeed driving this negativity. I’ll let his words speak for him:

The argument is often made by Russell Simmons and others that rappers are poets who simply report on what they feel and their surroundings, and that they shouldn’t be censored. As an emcee, on that point we partially agree — we shouldn’t be censored. But balance between the negative and positive needs to be provided, and it currently isn’t. Most artistic integrity is questionable at best. My understanding is that artists are supposed to express what they believe in at all costs (if not, there’s work at the post office). But most don’t, and they mold their approaches to making music based on what they perceive major labels wanting. If Def Jam or Interscope or any of these other large culture-defining companies issued a blanket decree that they would only support material and artists with positive messages then 99% of those making music now would switch up to accommodate. That’s real talk. I’m not saying these labels should (or would), but if they did, gangstas would stop being gangstas and misogynists would stop being misogynists at the drop of a DIME. Many artists are like children, and most will say and do what is expected of them in order to benefit financially. And although there is definite self-examination that needs to take place within the artist community, the lion’s share of the blame falls on the enablers who only empower voices of negativity. Record labels and commercial radio often use the excuse that they are “responding to the streets” and that they are “giving the people what they want.” BULLSHIT. They dictate the taste of the streets, and people can’t miss what they never knew. The fact is that there are conscious decisions made by the big business and entertainment elite daily about what to present to the masses — and it is from those choices that we are allowed to decide what we do and do not like. Who presents the music that callers are invited to “make or break” on the radio? That callers are invited to “vote on” on T.V.? Who decides on what makes it to the store shelves or the airwaves at all? Like I said, life imitates art, and pseudo-black culture is determined by those other than us every day. Walk into any rap label or urban radio station and you can count the number of black employees on one hand.

…

What I want to know is, when did the worst in us become normal and accepted? When did it become par for the corporate course that “black man as thug” and “black woman as slut” be business as usual? Major companies now line up to profit from the buffoonery of a few…at the expense of us all. MTV, Viacom, Clear Channel, Boost Mobile, Amp mobile, Chevy, all major record labels and most video games come readily to mind, but there are many others.

I’m not a hater…although I do hate the imbalance in the industry right now and the negativity it fosters. I’m not calling for censorship. You can’t lump me in with the Jesse Lee Petersons and the Armstrong Williamses of the world…bourgeois self-hating black men who demean other black people and profit at our expense. And nobody can say that I’m unqualified to speak on it, since I’ve contributed to the sale of just under 4 million albums independently, still run my own successful counter-establishment label (www.guerrillafunk.com) and have been embracing messages of self-esteem and self-sufficiency for years.

So, once again, when I hear that black people aren’t addressing the madness that passes for Hip-Hop these days, I tell them to quit being so lazy and find out if blanket statements like these are true. I would argue that, most definitely, there are those, both inside and outside of the industry, who’ll tell you otherwise.

Popularity: 34% [?]