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Welcome Ceremony of the Pope in Brazil
Posted in Soul Brother Presents
Tagged Brazil, Pope Francis, Rio de Janiero, video, World Youth Day, WYD
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Police Questioning of Minors
Everyone knows the iconic phrase “you have the right to remain silent.” It is usually the first thing that police tell someone when taking them into custody, and it makes up one of the several rights – commonly known as “Miranda rights” – that people have when in police custody.
Police must notify a person of their Miranda rights before taking them into custody or interrogating them. If they do not, they risk having a judge throw out any statements or admissions that the person in custody might make.
Determining the exact point when police officers have taken someone into custody presents difficulties, however. Obviously, an arrest constitutes police custody, but other situations can amount to police custody even without a formal arrest.
To decide whether or not police have placed a person in custody, courts will examine the facts of a particular case in order to determine whether or not a reasonable person would have felt like they could leave the situation or interrogation. If a reasonable person would have felt free to leave in that situation, then the police have not taken the subject into custody. If a reasonable person would not have felt at liberty to leave, then the police have placed the subject in custody and must notify them of their Miranda rights.
The same rules apply when the situation involves the questioning of minors. The Supreme Court recently expanded on those rules, however, when it decided that the police must take a person’s age into account when determining whether the circumstances of a case merit a Miranda notification.
Read More Police Questioning of Minors – FindLaw.
411 On Stand Your Ground: Which 26 States Have It & What Does It Mean?
Stand Your Ground (Photo credit: Seattle.roamer)
As we continue to reflect on not-guilty Trayvon Martin trial verdict, the controversial stand your ground law that aided in George Zimmerman’s defense has come to the forefront of the discussion.
But what exactly is stand your ground? In which states is it the law? What are its implications? Below, find your stand your ground cheat sheet.
Historically, the U.S has mandated a duty to retreat, which requires a person facing immediate danger to retreat before resorting to violent self-defense. Essentially, stand your ground revokes the duty to retreat, and instead allows the use of force without the initial attempt to retreat. The logic behind these laws is that it will clarify and validate the use of force in self-defense, even if no attempt to retreat was made. In many states, stand your ground law offers immunity from prosecution; a person could avoid trial all together under stand your ground.
People who feel stand your ground is just argue that individuals in a compromising situation should not have to worry about retreating before defending themselves for fear of how it will appear in trial later. Opponents, who often refer to stand your ground as “shoot first,” believe the law endorses unnecessary violence and results in erroneous injuries and deaths, like Trayvon Martin’s.
There are states whose legislatures have enacted specific stand your ground laws that absolve individuals of the duty to retreat. Other states have adopted stand your ground doctrines through interpretation of their self-defense laws.
Read More 411 On Stand Your Ground: Which 26 States Have It & What Does It Mean? | Global Grind.
Conservative Hypocrisy on Racial Profiling and Affirmative Action
Video of a group marching to the rally for Trayvon Martin at the University of MN (Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue)
By Conor Friedersdorf
An instantly controversial Victor Davis Hanson column recounts a piece of advice handed down through three generations in his family: Watch out if you see young black men on the street or approaching your house or vehicle — they commit “an inordinate amount of violent crime.” A fair number of commenters at National Review agree with that counsel. My colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates retorts that it is “stupid advice” that betrays “a rote, incurious and addled intellect.”
What do I think?
The significance of Hanson’s column and its embrace by some conservatives can’t be fully appreciated without looking back at his larger body of work on race in America. His attitudes are common, though far from universal, in movement conservatism.
At their core is a glaring contradiction.
VDH wrote last year that “until the election of Barack Obama, ‘white’ was an increasingly rare designation.” Intermarriage, integration, and assimilation “were making race itself an irrelevant consideration.” But then Obama engaged in “race-baiting” and “staged anger” at alleged white racism.
Hanson sees liberals as race-obsessed, which he regards as anti-American. The “new emphasis on tribe”* ignores human individuality “and assumes that friendships, marriages, and alliances will not dare trump racial and ethnic solidarity,” he argues. “Ours is now instead a Galadriel’s mirror of the Balkans, of India’s castes, of Rwanda, but no longer of a multiracial melting-pot America, where our allegiances were to be political, economic, and cultural and not necessarily synonymous with how we looked.” Hanson dismisses prevailing racial categories. “Only in the hyper-racialist America can we take quite distinct Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and Chinese third-generation citizens and create from them the artificial rubric ‘Asian’ in their shared antithesis to ‘white,'” he writes, “or take disparate Cubans and Mexicans and likewise reinvent them as identical Latinos, or take Jamaicans, Ethiopians, and American blacks and call them all ‘African-Americans’ on the similar logic of not being something equally artificial like white — which I guess covers Americans who used to be Greeks, Irish, Armenians, Jews, Poles, and Danes.”
National Review Tells Young Whites To Avoid Blacks, Again
Victor Davis Hanson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Zack Beauchamp
A top conservative publication published a column on Wednesday advising young white children to stay away from black people, despite firing a columnist roughly a year ago for writing a very similar piece in a different publication.
Victor Davis Hanson, a scholar of military history and longtime National Review foreign affairs columnist, has a habit of dipping his toes into racially uncomfortable water. In a past column, for example, Hanson accused President Obama of attempting to victimize white people for political gain.
His column today, however, directly echoes the now-infamous piece by self-described “race-realist” John Derbyshire that National Review deemed a firing offense. Derbyshire’s TakiMag piece, the conceit of which was that the author was giving a white equivalent of “The Talk” that black parents give their children about racism, included gems like “avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally,” “stay out of heavily black neighborhoods,” and “if accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.”
Read More National Review Tells Young Whites To Avoid Blacks, Again | ThinkProgress.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Barack Obama, Black people, John Derbyshire, National Review, race, racism, Victor Davis Hanson, White people
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Justice for Trayvon Martin rallies: ‘Racist and proud’ group stages counter-demonstration
Dueling groups of protesters converged on a wealthy Houston neighborhood on Sunday in reaction to last weekend’s not-guilty verdict for George Zimmerman in the death of teen Trayvon Martin.Around 80 people gathered on a street in Houston’s River Oaks area, some carrying American flags and shouting support for stand-your-ground self-defense laws.Members of this group held signs that read: ‘We’re racist and proud,’ ‘Remove the Black Panthers from the U.S.A.’ and ‘If Zimmerman is a “White Hispanic” then President Obama is a “White Black.”‘
Their presence was in response to several hundred people organized by Houston activist Quanell X, who led a march for more than an hour through the same neighborhood’s streets in support of Martin.
Police officers, many on horseback, kept the crowds moving and separated. Except for some insults shouted, the marches and rallies appeared peaceful.
Read More Justice for Trayvon Martin rallies: ‘Racist and proud’ group stages counter-demonstration | Mail Online.
Police Lieutenant Accused of Racial Profiling: “Let’s Have a Black Day” — Is the Department Attempting a Cover Up?
The Gateway Arch, part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, Missouri, framing the courthouse where the Dred Scott decision was read. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Alex Cane
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Eastern Missouri is suing the St. Louis county police department over the refusal to turn over documents related to a cop’s instructions to racially profile. The ACLU says the lawsuit is a last resort after requests for public records on the case were denied, the St. Louis Riverfront Times reports.
The civil liberties group says that the police are violating Missouri’s public records law.
“If we don’t fight this, then the average citizen who is entitled to get documents just as much as the ACLU is will give up,” the ACLU’s Grant Doty told the Riverfront Times. “Then the accountability that this law was intended to promote is going to be harmed.”
The case centers around a cop named Patrick Hayes. A county police lieutenant, Hayes has been accused of ordering police to racially profile minorities. He allegedly said things like “let’s have a black day” and the the police should “let’s make the jail cells more colorful.” A whistleblower, who the public now knows is Sgt. Daniel O’Neil, made the allegations that eventually led to the firing of Hayes. O’Neil has also filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that cops retaliated against him for his whistleblowing.
Being In The Minority Can Cost You And Your Company
Wall Street (Photo credit: benontherun.com)
By Shankar Vedantam
The racial wage gap in the United States — the gap in salary between whites and blacks with similar levels of education and experience — is shaped by geography, according to new social science research.
The larger the city, the larger the racial wage gap, according to researchers Elizabeth Ananat, Shihe Fu and Stephen L. Ross, whose findings were recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“The average racial gap in metropolitan areas of around 1 million people — and you can think of a place like Tulsa, Okla. — is about 20 percent smaller than the gap in the nation’s largest metro areas of Chicago, L.A. and New York,” Ananat says.
Ananat’s research suggests that the racial gap is not directly the result of prejudice or, at least, prejudice conventionally defined. Rather, it has to do with patterns of social interactions that are shaped by race — and a phenomenon that economists call spillovers.
Economists have long noted that multiple companies in an industry often congregate in an area — think of movie companies in Hollywood or investment bankers on Wall Street — and observed that these firms become more profitable. Indeed, this may be one reason why an up-and-coming tech company would want to locate in Silicon Valley, rather than in Tennessee, where costs are far cheaper.
But why do companies that congregate become more profitable? It has to do, Ananat says, with the fact that when a number of companies involved in similar work are concentrated in one area, they effectively create an ecosystem where ideas and refinements can spread easily from one company to the next, and increase productivity overall.
Read More Being In The Minority Can Cost You And Your Company : Code Switch : NPR.
14-Year-Old Girl With Pro-Choice Sign Under Attack: “Please Stop Calling Me a “Whore”
Texas State Capitol, Austin TX (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Tuesday Cain
I’m a 14-year-old girl who has lived in Austin, Texas, my whole life. I like art, music and talking on the phone with my friends. When I grow up, I’d like to become a science teacher.
I also believe in the right to choose and the separation of church and state. Or to put it another way — to put it the way I wrote it when I was protesting at the Capitol last week:
“Jesus isn’t a dick so keep him out of my vagina.”
Yes, that’s my sign.
I came up with it last week when my friend and I were trying to think of ideas for what would get people’s attention to protest the scary restrictions that are happening in my state trying to take away a woman’s right to safe and accessible abortions.
It worked.
When my friend and I took turns holding the sign, one of the pictures of her went viral.
Then my dad went online to defend the sign on Twitter and other online forums.
That’s when people started calling me a “whore.”
I’m going to be honest about what it feels like to be called that as a 14-year-old girl who has never had sex and who doesn’t plan to have sex anytime soon.
I feel disappointed.
It’s hard for me to understand why adults would be calling me this. It’s hard for me to understand why anyone would use this term for a 14-year-old girl.
It’s not anyone’s business, but as I said, I am a virgin, and I don’t plan to have sex until I am an adult.
But none of those facts make me feel any less passionate about fighting for a woman’s right to choose and the separation of church and state in my home state of Texas.
Read More 14-Year-Old Girl With Pro-Choice Sign Under Attack: “Please Stop Calling Me a “Whore” | Alternet.
Debt ceiling drama returns
White House (Photo credit: Tom Lohdan)
By Jake Sherman and Burgess Everett
Warnings from the White House, Wall Street and the world economic community be damned: Debt ceiling drama is back.The rapidly approaching fight over lifting the nation’s borrowing limit won’t only pit Republicans against President Barack Obama but also pit Republicans against Republicans.
One example of the GOP tension: Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and several other Senate Republicans are hoping to strike a large-scale fiscal deal with Democrats and the White House to reform entitlements, the Tax Code, fund the government and infrastructure projects, and most important, blunt sequester cuts. They met with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough again Tuesday.
But Rep. Paul Ryan, who is taking a lead in crafting the House Republican debt plan, wants nothing to do with it.
“It doesn’t matter — we’re not going to do what they want to do,” the Wisconsin Republican told POLITICO when asked about Senate Republicans’ plan for the debt ceiling. “It really doesn’t matter what they do. It doesn’t matter what John McCain and others do on the taxes and the rest. If they want to give up taxes for the sequester, we’re not going to do that. So it doesn’t really affect us.”
Once again, Washington is waltzing toward calamity with no clear strategy. In the next six months, however, Congress and the White House will need to raise the nation’s borrowing limit to avoid a debt default and downgrade. Congressional sources say the nation will hit its borrowing limit anytime from October to the end of 2013.
via Debt ceiling drama returns – Jake Sherman and Burgess Everett – POLITICO.com.
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