GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA: FOR WHO THE BELL TOLLS NEXT.

Just five people shy of Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting incident that claimed 26 lives, the Uvalde Texas Robb elementary school mass shooting at 21 victims, now ranks among the highest grossing gun carnage in America. It is sad that such frequent blood spilling has tragically become part of our culture as a society. May the souls of the killed now rest.

25th AMENDMENT: ITS NOW ALL CRICKET.

Madam Speaker Nancy Pelosi once questioned former President Donald John Trump's fitness to remain in office due to what she claimed was his declining mental capacity. Does anyone know what Madam Speaker presently thinks about the incontrovertible case which America is now saddled with? Just curious!

WHO WILL REBUILD UKRAINE?

The West should convert frozen Russian assets, both state's and oligarchs' owned, into a full seizure and set them aside for the future rebuilding of Ukraine. Like the Marshal Plan, call it the Putin Plan.

A HERO IS BORN.

I am staying put. I will not run away and abandon my people. The fight is here in Ukraine. What I need are weapons and ammunitions, not a ride out of town like former Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani - President Volodymyr Zelensky.

IT IS WHAT IT IS.

"There is too much hate in America because there is too much anger in America." - Trevor Noah.

WORD!

A life without challenges is not a life lived at all. A life lived is a life that has problems, confronts problems, solves problems and then learns from problems. - Tunde Fashola.

NOW, YOU KNOW.

When fishing for love, bait with your heart and not your brain, because you cannot rationalize love. - Mark Twain.

JUST THE FACT.

In our country, you can shoot and kill a nigger, but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings - Dave Chappelle

DO YOU?.

“What you believe in can only be defined by what you’re willing to risk for it." - Stuart Scheller.

HEDGE YOUR CRISIS.

Never get in bed with a woman whose problems are worse than yours. - Chicago PD.

PROBLEM SOLVED.

'The best way to keep peace is to be ready to destroy evil. If you Pearl Harbor me, I Nagasaki you.' - Ted Nugent.

OUR SHARED HUMANITY.

Empathy is at the heart of who we are as human beings. - Cardinal Matthew Kukah.

WORDS ON MARBLE.

"Birth is agony. Life is hard. Death is cruel." - Japanese pithy.

REPENT OR PERISH - POPE.

Homosexuality is a sin. It is not ordained by God, therefore same sex marriage cannot be blessed by the church - Pope Francis.

CANCEL CULTURE IS CORROSIVE.


FOR SAKE OF COUNTRY.


MAGA LIVES ON: NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER!

TWITTER IS BORING WITHOUT HIS TWEETS. #RestorePresidentTrump'sTwitterHandle.


WORD.

"If you cannot speak the truth when it matters, then nothing else you says matters.” - Tucker Carlson.

#MeToo MOVEMENT: A BAD NEWS GONE CRAZY.

"To all the women who testified, we may have different truth, but I have a great remorse for all of you. I have great remorse for all of the men and women going through this crisis right now in our country. You know, the movement started basically with me, and I think what happened, you know, I was the first example, and now there are thousands of men who are being accused and a regeneration of things that I think none of us understood. I’m not going to say these aren’t great people. I had wonderful times with these people. I’m just genuinely confused. Men are confused about this issue. We are going through this #MeToo movement crisis right now in this country." - Harvey Weinstein.


RON DELLUMS: UNAPOLOGETICALLY RADICAL.

"If it’s radical to oppose the insanity and cruelty of the Vietnam War, if it’s radical to oppose racism and sexism and all other forms of oppression, if it’s radical to want to alleviate poverty, hunger, disease, homelessness, and other forms of human misery, then I’m proud to be called a radical.” - Ron Vernie Dellums.


WHAT REALLY MATTERS IN LIFE - STEVE JOBS

“I reached the pinnacle of success in the business world. In others’ eyes, my life is an epitome of success. However, aside from work, I have little joy. Non-stop pursuing of wealth will only turn a person into a twisted being, just like me. God gave us the senses to let us feel the love in everyone’s heart, not the illusions brought about by wealth. Memories precipitated by love is the only true riches which will follow you, accompany you, giving you strength and light to go on. The most expensive bed in the world is the sick bed. You can employ someone to drive the car for you, make money for you but you cannot have someone to bear sickness for you. Material things lost can be found. But there is one thing that can never be found when it is lost – Life. Treasure Love for your family, love for your spouse, love for your friends. Treat yourself well. Cherish others.” - SJ

EVIL CANNOT BE TRULY DESTROYED.

"The threat of evil is ever present. We can contain it as long as we stay vigilant, but it can never truly be destroyed. - Lorraine Warren (Annabelle, the movie)


ONLY THE POOR WISH THEY HAD STUFF?

“I’m not that interested in material things. As long as I find a good bed that I can sleep in, that’s enough.” - Nicolas Berggruem, the homeless billionaire.

Sunday, February 28, 2016

HILLARY CLINTON IS PART OF THE PROBLEM - DOUG J. TICE



itempropIn the winter of 1996 at Keene State College in New Hampshire, then First Lady Hillary Clinton spoke forcefully about policing and criminal justice on behalf of her husband's re-election campaign.

The “challenge,” Clinton declared, “is to take back our streets from crime, gangs and drugs.” Boasting of the administration’s putting more cops on America’s mean streets, she called for “an organized effort against gangs, just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on … They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators. No conscience. No empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”
The president, she promised, had ordered “a very concerted effort against gangs everywhere.” She urged Americans “to be a part of this anti-crime, anti-gang, anti-drug effort.”
Times have changed, and Clinton has changed with them, although she still likes the ring of “concerted effort.”
But in a debate last month, what the now-presidential candidate called for was “a concerted effort to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system.” Beyond finding it “incredibly outraging to see the constant stories of young men … who have been killed by police officers,” Clinton was appalled that “one out of three African-American men may well end up going to prison. … [A]nd very often, the black men are arrested, convicted and incarcerated … for offenses that do not lead to the same results for white men.”
Today’s bestselling crises are no longer “crime, gangs and drugs.” Today’s crowd-pleasing concerns are “systemic racism” and “mass incarceration.” And a lot of the same politicians who wooed voters a couple decades ago by vowing to “take on” the “superpredators” — brushing aside softheaded talk about “how they got that way” — now seem shocked (shocked!) that “these people” turned out to include many young black males, and that “bringing them to heel” often meant sending them to jail.
Fact is, Hillary and Bill Clinton both have admitted to some regrets, or anyhow reconsideration, regarding their tough-on-crime stances years ago, and particularly regarding the big 1994 federal crime bill that did much to swell U.S. prison populations. But it wasn’t just them. The Clinton crime bill passed with overwhelming Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.
(And yes, Bernie Sanders, who today deplores our “broken” criminal justice system, voted for it.)
All over the country in the 1990s and beyond, no-mercy politicians cracked down on crime with “three strikes” laws and mandatory minimums and broken-windows policing tactics and sex offender civil commitment laws and on and on — and sent prison populations soaring.
Today, politicians and great thinkers all across the spectrum find the results of yesteryear’s anti-crime, anti-gang, anti-drug efforts, well, “incredibly outraging.”
This massive shift in attitudes and policy prescriptions on crime has of course tracked a stunning decline in crime rates in America. The rate of violent crime has plunged by half over the past 20 years. On its face, that happy development might explain many changes of heart and make a course correction reasonable. Tough-on-crime politics peaked not long after (we now know) crime levels themselves peaked in the early 1990s. Now that we’ve largely taken back the streets, it may, in fact, be time for a cease-fire and an assessment of where our concerted efforts went too far.
But seldom do we hear that sort of cautious, measured reflection. The anti-crime rhetoric of 20 years ago was extravagant (“superpredators!”) and so is today’s anti-criminal justice rhetoric (“systemic racism!”) We seem to have gone from suffering a catastrophic crime epidemic two decades ago to suffering a catastrophic injustice epidemic today — with no social health in between.
If so, maybe this lurching from one imbalance to another has something to do with unbalanced leadership.
One difficulty in making sense of America’s wild ride on the crime issue is that we don’t know how much of a role sending more criminals to prison has played in reducing crime. Numerous researchers have concluded that more incarceration has made only a trivial contribution; others think it may account for a third of the crime decline. What’s clear is that crime is a bafflingly complex social phenomenon, and we just don’t know.
Two decades ago, politicians far and wide sounded pretty sure that throw-away-the-key policies would help. But today, with prisons full and streets more peaceful, they are not claiming credit but proclaiming a shiny new outrage — one somebody else must be responsible for — that is a fine a new reason to vote for them.
What makes all this so frustrating is that crime on the one hand and injustice on the other are two horrible evils that we have to rely largely on government to combat. But this record of serial demagoguery makes it hard to have confidence that those who lead us are up to these tasks.
The best advice for citizens is simply to listen skeptically and critically to everything politicians and ideologues of any variety say about crime and criminal justice — and to keep one’s eyes on facts. Here are a few of note, from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics “Prisoners in 2014” report:
• Slightly more than 1.5 million inmates were held in state and federal prisons in 2014, the large majority (87 percent) in state facilities.
• Black males were incarcerated at a rate nearly six times the rate of white males, and also at two-and-a-half times the rate of Hispanic males.
• Minnesota’s overall incarceration rate is the fourth lowest in the country (behind Maine, Rhode Island and Massachusetts) and well under half the national rate.
• Nationally, among all state prisoners, 53.2 percent are incarcerated for violent crimes. Drug offenses account for 15.7 percent. Drug possession accounts for 3.6 percent.
• Among federal inmates, just over half are incarcerated for drug offenses. Combining the state and federal populations, all drug offenders make up 20 percent of the grand total.
It is likely that county jail populations and offenders under other kinds of supervision (probation, etc.) increase the overall role of drug and other nonviolent offenders in the criminal justice system. 

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