Activist Erica Garner, daughter of Police Brutality victim Eric Garner, dead at 27 years old
Erica Garner describes the agony of finding out her father was killed while in a chokehold by NYPD officers — and the aftermath of the trial and protests. Erica Garner | The Marshall Project | The New Yorker
Story by The Root
Written by Breanna Edwards
Erica Garner, the daughter of police brutality victim Eric Garner, who died in 2014 after a New York City police officer restrained him using an illegal chokehold, passed away on Saturday morning at the age of 27. Her official email account confirmed the news.
__________________
officialERICA GARNER
✔
@es_snipes
She passed away this morning. The reports are real. We didn't deserve her.
9:37 AM - Dec 30, 2017
___________________
Erica, a mother of two, had been fighting for her life ever since suffering a severe heart attack that was brought on by an asthma attack on Christmas Eve, which left her in critical condition. She sustained major brain damage due to lack of oxygen and had been in a coma ever since.
It was her second heart attack.
Erica Garner on why she's endorsing Bernie Sanders (The Grio)
Back in August of this year, Erica gave birth to her second child, a son, whom she named Eric after her father. It was after baby Eric’s birth that the activist suffered her first heart attack. It was then that doctors discovered that she had an enlarged heart.
“She was a warrior, she was a fighter and we didn’t pull the plug on her,” Esaw Snipes, Garner’s mother said, according to the New York Daily News. “She left on her own terms.”
Erica Garner was indeed a force to be reckoned with, occupying space and speaking out loudly against police brutality ever since her father’s July 2014 death. She was unafraid, unabashed and unapologetic about what it was she was fighting for.
Erica Garner Interview at The Breakfast Club Power 105.1. Erica says "Police have followed her numerous times"(02/03/2016)
Mere months after her father’s death, Erica staged a “die-in” at the very same location in Staten Island where he had a confrontation with police, leading to his death, even as he pleaded with NYPD officers, “I can’t breathe.”
Eric Garner’s last words became the rallying cry for a movement, as protests swept the entire nation. His death was followed weeks later by Michael Brown’s killing by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., the catalyst for the Black Lives Matter Movement.
In July 2016, two years after her father’s death, Erica took on President Obama and ABC News during a presidential town hall that the network was hosting.
Erica Garner, Activist Daughter of Eric Garner, Dies at 27 After Heart Attack | NBC Nightly News
The activist got up and left the taping of the event, after she said she had been “railroaded” by the network and denied the opportunity to ask the president a question, an opportunity that she said she had been promised.
Erica said that she had an agreement that she would have been able to ask President Obama about the Justice Department’s investigation into her father’s death, only to be blindsided.
The mother of two was particularly frustrated as she cleared time to go to Washington, D.C., even as she was planning an event for the then-two-year anniversary of her father’s death.
Two months later after taking that stand, she called out New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, after the mayor claimed he was barred from releasing the records of her father’s killer, Daniel Pantaleo, citing an archaic law that has been ignored for the past 30 years as the reason why he could not do so.
“Just cause you love Black pussy don’t mean you love Black lives… cc @BilldeBlasio,” Garner wrote on Twitter, pointing to the fact that de Blasio, a white man, is married to a black woman and raising a black son but still couldn’t give a damn about state-sanctioned killings.
“The thing that kills me is that De Blasio is raising a Black man . . . This is the example . . . My dad lays down and rolls over for white supremacy,” she tweeted.
During the 2016 presidential election, she was an outspoken supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders, with Sanders’ presidential campaign releasing a stirring video, featuring Erica somberly speaking about being a mother and activist.
Her light, her will to fight, her outspokenness and her truth shone brightly in the face of oppression and sometimes outright dismissal. In her passing this world has lost more than could possibly be recognized.
_____________
officialERICA GARNER
✔
@es_snipes
When you report this you remember she was human: mother, daughter, sister, aunt. Her heart was bigger than the world. It really really was. She cared when most people wouldn't have. She was good. She only pursued right, no matter what. No one gave her justice.
9:41 AM - Dec 30, 2017
______________
Our thoughts go out to her entire family at this incredibly difficult time.
"Watch Night Meeting" New Years Day Midnight January 1, 1863 - Painting by William Tolman Carlton
This painting by William Tolman Carlton captures the moments before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect at midnight on Thursday, January 1, 1863.
A group of slaves surround a crate with an older man at the center holding a large pocket watch as the group counts down the remaining time till New Year's Day.
The crowd of figures is illuminated only by a torch at the right edge of the canvas, beside which is a print of the Emancipation Proclamation posted to the wall. At left is a doorway, beyond which is an illuminated cross and, in the doorway, stands the silhouette of a figure holding the Union flag. There is one white woman present, sitting left of the center, looking toward the black woman beside her. Across the bottom, Carlton has inscribed the title of the painting on connecting links of a chain.
The original painting was a gift to President Abraham Lincoln in July 1864 and left the White House with First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln after his assassination. Its whereabouts are now unknown. The current version in the White House collection is likely Carlton's first study and is not signed or dated. It was acquired during the Nixon Administration.
Carlton was born in Boston and spent much of his life in Dorchester, Massachusetts.
The NFL has cancelled the final Sunday night football game of the season
Story by CNN
Written by David Goldman
Next Sunday's game had two disadvantages: The games all had a likelihood of being dull by the time Sunday night rolled around. And this coming Sunday is New Year's Eve, a day when historically few Americans watch television.
The last time the NFL held a Sunday night football game on New Year's Eve was in 2006, when the Chicago Bears hosted the Green Bay Packers. It was quarterback Brett Favre's last game with the Packers (and widely expected to be his last game ever). Still, only 13.4 million people watched that game, about a quarter fewer than the average Sunday Night Football game that season.
Since the last Sunday night football game also happens to be the final game of the season, the NFL tries to schedule a game that will definitely have playoff implications for one or both of the teams playing. (A team that already made the playoffs might sit their starters, leading to an exceptionally boring game.)
This season, there were no such games that met the NFL's criteria on the final week's schedule. The NFL, which hadn't yet announced which teams would play Sunday night, would have either scheduled a game that had a chance of being a snooze or a game that already had no playoff implications at all.
Instead, there will be seven games scheduled for 1 p.m. and an unusually high nine games scheduled for 4:25 p.m. kickoffs. There won't be an 8:30 p.m. game this year.
"We felt that both from a competitive standpoint and from a fan perspective, the most fair thing to do is to schedule all Week 17 games in either the 1 p.m. or 4:25 p.m. windows," said Howard Katz, the NFL's broadcasting chief, in a prepared statement.
All of Sunday's games will be broadcast on CBS or Fox. NBC won't have a game this coming week, and NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy declined to comment about whether the network would be compensated for the lost broadcast. Unlike other weeks of the season, the NFL has the sole discretion about the scheduling of the final Sunday night game of the year.
2017 has been a tough year for the NFL. The ratings for this NFL's season are down 9% from last year.
Erica Garner, Daughter of NY choking victim Eric Garner, In Critical Condition After Suffering Heart Attack
Erica Garner 27 years old suffered a heart attack (Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
Story by The Root
Written by Kirsten West Savali
Erica Garner, 27, daughter of Eric Garner—the 43-year-old Staten Island N.Y. man who was killed in 2014 when NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo restrained him with an illegal chokehold—is in a coma after suffering a heart attack on Christmas Eve.
Emerald Snipes shared her sister’s condition on Facebook:
Erica, a mother of two, is reportedly unable to breath on her own, the NY Daily News reports.
Esaw Snipes-Garner, Erica’s mother and Eric Garner’s widow, said her daughter’s heart attack was brought on by a severe asthma attack. This is the second heart attack that the 27-year-old activist has suffered; the first one occurred after she gave birth in August to her son Eric, named after her father.
It was then that doctors discovered that Erica had an enlarged heart.
“[She] is still with us,” Snipes-Garner told the News. “She’s fighting. The doctor says she has a strong heart.”
Someone who identified themselves as one of Erica’s workers tweeted from her official Twitter account and asked followers for prayers.
Erica became a fierce oppositional force against state-sanctioned violence after NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo killed her 43-year-old father on July 17, 2014 by placing him in an illegal chokehold.
A few months after her father’s lynching at the hands of the NYPD, Erica staged a “die-in” on the same Staten Island N.Y. corner where Eric Garner took his last breath.
“I can’t breathe,” Eric Garner’s last words, became a rallying cry for a movement that would intensify even more just three weeks later in the wake of Michael Brown’s extrajudicial killing in Ferguson.
When NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, citing an archaic law, refused to release Panteleo’s disciplinary record, Erica blasted him on social media, making it clear that having a black wife and black children does not mean that de Blasio has genuine love for the black citizens he claims to serve.
In December, 2014, a grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo, who had a history of violently targeting black men.
Kenneth Smith and Rylawn Walker both filed lawsuits against Pantaleo in federal court claiming that not only did Pantaleo lie about the men being in possession on marijuana—charges that were later dropped—he also subjected them “to a degrading search of his private parts and genitals,” according to the lawsuits.
Since Erica Garner first stepped on the frontline seeking justice for her father, she has also been vocal on the war on drugs and has heavily criticized the Democratic Party for their apathetic so-called pragmatism in the face of rampant police brutality and systemic oppression in occupied communities.
She is a warrior making her father, her family, and her community proud.
Our thoughts are with Erica and the entire Snipes-Garner family as we await news on her condition.
See more: http://www.sportingnews.com/nba/news/magic-johnson-isiah-thomas-reconcile-video-lakers-pistons-dream-team-hiv-jordan-bird/1j29bn1w7z37q1p8mz5r3nbaji
A counterdemonstrator uses a lighted spray can against a white nationalist at the entrance to Lee Park in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12. Charlottesville became a target for white nationalists after the city council voted to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a downtown park. After several smaller rallies, hundreds of white nationalists and counterprotesters converged downtown.
Aerial view of devastation following Hurricane Irma at Bitter End in Virgin Gorda, British Virgin
Link to more 2017 Photos: https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/year-pictures-2017
This Tax Bill Is a Trillion-Dollar Blunder - Op-Ed by Michael Bloomberg
The hour is late, but the fight is not over. (Photo credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
CONGRESS AND PRESIDENT TRUMP PUT POLITICS AHEAD OF SMART REFORM.
Commentary by Michael R. Bloomberg
Last month a Wall Street Journal editor asked a room full of CEOs to raise their hands if the corporate tax cut being considered in Congress would lead them to invest more. Very few hands went up. Attending was Gary Cohn, President Donald Trump's economic adviser and a friend of mine. He asked: "Why aren't the other hands up?"
Allow me to answer that: We don't need the money.
Corporations are sitting on a record amount of cash reserves: nearly $2.3 trillion. That figure has been climbing steadily since the recession ended in 2009, and it's now double what it was in 2001. The reason CEOs aren't investing more of their liquid assets has little to do with the tax rate.
CEOs aren't waiting on a tax cut to "jump-start the economy" -- a favorite phrase of politicians who have never run a company -- or to hand out raises. It's pure fantasy to think that the tax bill will lead to significantly higher wages and growth, as Republicans have promised. Had Congress actually listened to executives, or economists who study these issues carefully, it might have realized that.
Instead, Congress did what it always does: It put politics first. After spending the first nine months of the year trying to jam through a repeal of Obamacare without holding hearings, heeding independent analysis or seeking Democratic input, Republicans took the same approach to tax "reform" -- and it shows.
The Treasury Department claimed to have more than 100 professional staffers "working around the clock" to analyze the tax cut. If true, their hard work must have been suppressed. The flimsy one-page analysis Treasury released -- which accepts the White House's reality-defying economic projections in order to claim that the tax cuts will pay for themselves and then some -- is a politically driven document that amounts to economic malpractice. So does the bill itself.
The largest economic challenges we face include a skills crisis that our public schools are not addressing, crumbling infrastructure that imperils our global competitiveness, wage stagnation coupled with growing wealth inequality, and rising deficits that will worsen as more baby boomers retire.
The tax bill does nothing to address these challenges. In fact, it makes each of them worse.
EDUCATION: The bill, by limiting the deduction for state and local taxes, will make it harder for the localities to raise money for education. The burden will fall heaviest on cities with poor students, making it harder for millions of children to escape from poverty -- and leaving more and more businesses with fewer qualified job applicants.
INFRASTRUCTURE: Restricting state and local tax deductions will also mean less local investment for infrastructure, and by raising deficits, the bill will constrain federal infrastructure spending. Our airports, railways and roads are in desperate need of modernization, and our energy grids are vulnerable and inefficient. Yet spending on those and other needs, which acts as a catalyst for private investment, will become more difficult.
INEQUALITY: If Congress wanted to raise real wages and reward work, there is a simple and proven way to do it: expand the earned income tax credit. Instead, it seems to believe that lower corporate tax rates will magically lead to higher wages, which fundamentally misunderstands how labor markets work.
In addition, by eliminating the requirement that individuals buy health insurance, many young and healthy people will drop out of the marketplace, causing health insurance premiums to rise for everyone else. This is nothing more than a backdoor tax increase on health care for millions of middle-class families that will leave them with less disposable income for savings, investment and spending.
DEFICITS: The bill's cost -- $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion -- makes it more difficult for taxpayers to afford Medicare and Social Security for the baby boom generation, which is now hitting retirement. Republicans didn't grapple with those costs. Instead, they kicked the can down the road. Ignoring the bill's price tag, or pretending we needn't worry about deficits, is like ignoring climate change or pretending we needn't worry about its effects. I'll say one thing for Republicans in Congress: They're consistent.
In effect, the tax bill achieves four main things:
* It takes money away from schools and students.
* It restricts our ability to invest in infrastructure.
* It does nothing to boost real wages while making health insurance more expensive.
* It makes it harder to control the costs of Medicare and Social Security without cutting defense and other spending -- or further exploding the deficit.
To what end? To hand corporations big tax cuts they don't need, while lowering the tax rate paid by those of us in the top bracket, and allowing the wealthy to shelter more of their estates.
To be clear: I'm in favor of reducing the 35 percent corporate tax rate as part of a revenue-neutral tax reform effort. Right now, the corporate code is so convoluted, and rates so high relative to other nations (thereby creating an incentive to keep profits offshore), that the real rates companies pay can be wildly divergent. This is neither fair nor efficient. Eliminating loopholes and reining in the offshoring of profits can and should be done in a revenue-neutral overhaul of the tax code.
Raising Dion focuses on single mother Nicole Reese, who is raising her 7-year-old son, Dion, after the death of her husband.
However, things get complicated as Dion begins to develop powers like invisibility and telekinesis. Nicole must steer Dion as his powers evolve while simultaneously shielding him from detection. The first and last issue of the comic Raising Dion was published in 2015.
Recently, however, Netflix ordered a 10-episode series based on the comic. The writer, Dennis Liu, is a Taiwanese American, but the Netflix series will be produced by Michael B. Jordan.
Tavis Smiley responds to PBS's decision to suspend his nightly talk show
Story by Tavis Smiley
On the eve of the 15th season and 3,000th episode of my nightly talk show, I was as shocked as anyone else by PBS’ announcement today. Variety knew before I did.
I have the utmost respect for women and celebrate the courage of those who have come forth to tell their truth. To be clear, I have never groped, coerced, or exposed myself inappropriately to any workplace colleague in my entire broadcast career, covering 6 networks over 30 years.
Never. Ever. Never.
PBS launched a so-called investigation of me without ever informing me. I learned of the investigation when former staffers started contacting me to share the uncomfortable experience of receiving a phone call from a stranger asking whether, I had ever done anything to make them uncomfortable, and if they could provide other names of persons to call. After 14 seasons, that’s how I learned of this inquiry, from the streets.
Only after being threatened with a lawsuit, did PBS investigators reluctantly agree to interview me for three hours.
If having a consensual relationship with a colleague years ago is the stuff that leads to this kind of public humiliation and personal destruction, heaven help us. The PBS investigators refused to review any of my personal documentation, refused to provide me the names of any accusers, refused to speak to my current staff, and refused to provide me any semblance of due process to defend myself against allegations from unknown sources. Their mind was made up. Almost immediately following the meeting, this story broke in Variety as an “exclusive.” Indeed, I learned more about these allegations reading the Variety story than the PBS investigator shared with me, the accused, in our 3 hour face to face meeting.
My attorneys were sent a formal letter invoking a contractual provision to not distribute my programming, and that was it.
Put simply, PBS overreacted and conducted a biased and sloppy investigation, which led to a rush to judgment, and trampling on a reputation that I have spent an entire lifetime trying to establish.
This has gone too far. And, I, for one, intend to fight back.
It’s time for a real conversation in America, so men and women know how to engage in the workplace. I look forward to actively participating in that conversation.
Four Englewood High Schools in Chicago Set To Close
Story by CBS-TV Chicago
Written by Jeremy Ross
This comes more than a year before a new school is set to open for student in the South Side neighborhood. CBS 2’s Lauren Victory has a look at the plans from Paul Robeson High School.
Chicago Public School leaders promise the grounds at Robeson will be home to a $75 million new high school, but construction is not slated to finish until fall 2019. That leaves students at other Englewood schools in jeopardy for the 2018 school year, according to the Chicago Teachers Union.
Representative for CTU said they are hearing about June 2018 closures at Robeson, John Hope College Prep, Harper High School and Team Englewood Community Academy.
“This is unprecedented, closing all the public schools in a neighborhood,” said CTU Vice President Jesse Sharkey. “You’re talking about really waging a war on and targeting an entire working class black neighborhood.”
Sharkey said John Hope College Prep and Harper High School will let out class for good this June. Adding parents should expect closure announcements for Robeson High School and TEAM Englewood Community Academy as soon as Friday.
But, the plan was not totally a secret.
In June, CPS announced they would shutdown these schools and open up a state-of-the-art facility in their place; but CTU representatives said they were promised the closures would not happen until the new building was ready.
“That promise has been broken. All those decisions that get made about school closings and school openings at that level run though the mayor’s office.
“These students will be shipped off to places like Gage Park or Hyde Park and they will not be able to attend high school in their neighborhood,” Sharkey said.
At Chicago’s John Hope College Prep students and parents like Jackie Claybon suddenly find themselves preparing for life in another school.
“This whole thing about them closing, it’s kind of a shocker,” she said. “It would actually disrupt them even worse. The kids right now are actually attending school, so you close it down, where are they supposed to go then?”
CPS President Forrest Claypool told the Chicago Tribune he is confident decisions are being made with the students best interest in mind.
CBS 2 were told a meeting with top district officials is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Friday at Paul Robeson High School.
Rubio to vote 'no' on tax bill unless child tax credit is expanded
Story by The Hill
Written by Alexander Bolton and Avery Anapol
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has threatened to vote against the tax bill, putting the legislation in danger of being delayed past Christmas.
Rubio has told Senate leaders that he will vote against the bill unless the child tax credit is made more generous to help lower-income workers who pay payroll taxes and not regular income taxes.
“Sen. Rubio has consistently communicated to the Senate tax negotiators that his vote on final passage would depend on whether the refundability of the Child Tax Credit was increased in a meaningful way,” said a spokesperson for Rubio.
Rubio told reporters at the Capitol that the current tax credit is insufficient.
"Right now it's only $1,100. It needs to be higher than that," Rubio said.
"I understand that this is a process of give and take, especially when there's only a couple of us fighting for it," he told reporters. "Given all the other changes they've made in the tax code leading into it, I can't in good conscience support it unless we are able to increase the refundable portion of it."
If Rubio votes against the bill, Republicans can only lose one other lawmaker if they hope to pass the final bill that emerges from a House-Senate conference.
Rubio, speaking to reporters at the Capitol, did not give a number for how much the credit must be increased to win his vote, saying it "certainly has to be higher than it is now."
Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), a member of the Senate-House conference, said negotiators are confident they’ll be able to bring Rubio back onboard.
“We’re still working with him and expect to satisfy his concerns,” Cornyn told reporters.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) previously voted against the Senate tax bill because it would add $1.5 billion to the deficit, and no Democrats support it.
Corker has not ruled out voting for the final conference report, though he suggested his concerns have not changed.
“The issues I had before are still there,” he said.
A spokesman for Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who worked with Rubio on a previously proposed child tax credit expansion, told The Hill the senator is undecided on voting for the bill in its current form.
Republicans are also worried about the health of two of their 52 members — Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and Sen. Thad Cochran (R-(Miss.).
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders dodged on whether Trump would support further expanding the child tax credit.
“We’re going to continue working with the senator, but we’ve made great strides,” she said.
The Senate and House passed versions of the bill last month, and are now conferencing to iron out differences and send a final bill to President Trump. Lawmakers have promised a final version of the the tax bill soon, and Trump has said he hopes to sign a bill before Christmas.
Rubio and Lee proposed an amendment that would have expanded the child tax credit further, but the Senate voted the amendment down earlier this month.
Democrats and Republicans both criticized the amendment because it would have raised the corporate tax rate further.
-Jessie Hellmann, Peter Sullivan and Naomi Jagoda contributed to this report which was updated at 2:43 p.m.
Federal Communications Commission REPEALS NET NEUTRALITY rules
Story by Reuters
Written by David Shepardson
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted along party lines today to repeal landmark 2015 rules aimed at ensuring a free and open internet, setting up a court fight over a move that could recast the digital landscape.
The approval of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's proposal marks a victory for internet service providers like AT&T Inc, Comcast Corp and Verizon Communications Inc and hands them power over what content consumers can access.
Democrats, Hollywood and companies like Google parent Alphabet Inc and Facebook Inc had urged Pai, a Republican appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump, to keep the Obama-era rules barring service providers from blocking, slowing access to or charging more for certain content.
Consumer advocates and trade groups representing content providers have planned a legal challenge aimed at preserving those rules.
The meeting was evacuated before the vote for about 10 minutes due to an unspecified security threat, and resumed after sniffer dogs checked the room.
FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, a Democrat, said in the run-up to the vote that Republicans were “handing the keys to the Internet” to a “handful of multi-billion dollar corporations.”
Pai has argued that the 2015 rules were heavy handed and stifled competition and innovation among service providers.
"The internet wasn’t broken in 2015. We weren’t living in a digital dystopia. To the contrary, the internet is perhaps the one thing in American society we can all agree has been a stunning success," he said on Thursday.
The FCC voted 3-2 to repeal the rules.
Consumers are unlikely to see immediate changes resulting from the rule change, but smaller startups worry the lack of restrictions could drive up costs or lead to their content being blocked.
Internet service providers say they will not block or throttle legal content but that they may engage in paid prioritization. They say consumers will see no change and argue that the largely unregulated internet functioned well in the two decades before the 2015 order.
How the new US Senator Doug Jones Beat Roy Moore and Shocked the World
Story by Real Clear Politics
Written by Molly Ball
The way things have been going in Alabama, some Democrats thought they might never taste victory again. So when Doug Jones, Alabama’s newly elected Democratic senator, took the stage here Tuesday night after his special election win, it was hard to blame him for being briefly overcome.
“Oh, my,” Jones said, as a moist-eyed, joyous crowd hung on his words. “Folks, I got to tell you, I think that I have been waiting all my life, and now I just don’t know what the hell to say.”
With Jones’s surprising win, the American political landscape seemed to rattle and tilt on its axis. If a Democrat could be elected in Alabama — a state President Donald Trump won by 28 points just last year — a lot of things suddenly look possible for the party out of power. And panicked Republicans confronted a stark reality: If they could lose Alabama, no Republican may be safe in next year’s midterm elections.
Jones faced an unusually weak opponent in Roy Moore, the twice-defrocked former state Supreme Court justice who was accused, after winning the Republican nomination, of preying on teenage girls. But 13 months ago, Alabama also faced a referendum on an accused sexual predator who struck divisive themes while seeking to discredit the media, and the result was very different. Since Trump was elected, something has changed in the American electorate — something big enough to flip one of America’s reddest states.
Gleeful Democrats hugged, cried, waved signs in the air at Jones’s Senate election-night celebration. Cannons released a shower of red-white-and-blue confetti. Jones’ win was powered by a surge of Democratic turnout and a steep dropoff in Republican turnout. Almost as many Alabamans voted for him in an irregularly scheduled midwinter special election as voted for Hillary Clinton last year — but Moore got less than half as many votes as Trump had. If that kind of turnout imbalance holds, Republicans “aren’t facing a 2018 wave, they’re facing a tsunami,” said Michael McDonald, a voter-turnout expert at the University of Florida.
The state’s senior senator and many national GOP leaders refused to support Moore. Trump stuck with him. But for the third election in as many months, Trump’s support did not help his chosen candidate; it may even have hurt, by galvanizing anti-Trump voters. Just 48 percent of special-election voters said they supported the president. The win for Jones, who will serve through 2020, cuts Republicans’ majority in the Senate to 51-49, complicating the president’s agenda and increasing the chances of Democrats taking the Senate next year.
“Doug Jones tapped into something bigger than Democrats and bigger than Alabama,” Randall Woodfin, the young, left-wing, newly elected mayor of Birmingham, told me. “It’s a miracle. And man, oh man, do we need it.”
A special election is by definition a fluke, an unusual vote under an unusual set of circumstances (in this case, the appointment of Jeff Sessions to Trump’s Cabinet). But it is also a symptom. The currents that helped Moore win the GOP primary, over Trump’s objection — anti-establishment fervor, culture-war red meat — will continue to afflict the Republican Party nationally. And the voters who won it for Doug Jones exist all over America: women, young people, African Americans, suburbanites.
The defeat of an alleged sexual predator was particularly symbolic for women, who have led a wave of activism since Trump was elected. The women who came forward to accuse Moore said they broke decades of silence because they thought they might finally be heard. Even as Moore was trying to discredit his accusers, high-profile men across the spectrum — in Hollywood, in media, in business and in politics — faced long-overdue judgment for their past actions. On the same day Moore was defeated, Trump feuded in suggestive terms with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand after she called on him to resign.
The wounds of the past run deep in Alabama, and they aren’t all fully healed. After Jones left the stage, I spoke to Patricia Gaines, a petite, elegant 78-year-old in dark lipstick. She grew up in Selma, she told me; her father was a local minister who offered communion to blacks. That angered the local Ku Klux Klan, who came on horseback to threaten them. The family fled in the middle of the night. With her father out of work, Gaines entered beauty pageants to put herself through college and was crowned Miss Alabama.
That was in 1961. Traumatized, Gaines never again set foot in Selma — until Election Day, when she traveled to her hometown to give black voters rides to the polls. “Today the tide started to turn away from the insanity we have been living through,” she told me, her eyes moist. “It is time for a return to decency, love and compassion.”
The jubilant crowd lofted cocktails and danced to booming beats. Earlier, the DJ had queued up “Sweet Home Alabama,” the anthem of Southern defiance. Young and old, black and white, men and women, the Democrats all sang along, heads thrown back in joy — “ooh, ooh, ooh” — as if to say: This is our state now.
Roy Moore. Photo: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images
A failed Republican blueprint
Moore rode his horse, Sassy, to the polls on Election Day, a cowboy-hatted embodiment of the nostalgia animating many of his devotees. The press, which he considered one of his opponents, scattered in front of him as he rode. His other opponents included both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Moore wasn’t wrong to claim that Washington was afraid of him. In the primary he’d campaigned against the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, a tactic that proved brutally effective. (Just 16 percent of the voters on Tuesday approved of McConnell.) Many D.C. Republicans feared prior to the vote that a Moore win would be worse for the party than a loss, tainting them with swing voters while empowering the far right.
There was a larger fear at play for both political parties: What if the Trump-like playbook of Moore’s campaign worked? The political theory of Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, is that tribal grievance is more powerful than the parties’ tired old platforms of kitchen-table issues — that you can move more voters with “Lock her up!” and “Build the wall!” and “Fake news!” than with old-fashioned issues and tactics. And so Moore and his allies distributed appeals about preserving Confederate monuments and making players kneel at football games and warning about dangerous criminals registering to vote. The Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, Ed Gillespie, took a similar tack last month. If either candidate had won, this set of issues might have become the new political blueprint.
That was a frightening prospect, both to the traditional Republicans Bannon has vowed to drum out of office and to the Democrats who worried they would find themselves on the wrong side of this culture war. But Moore’s loss suggested the opposite might be true: Bannon may have led Republicans into an ideological cul de sac, with a platform that’s irresistible to their hard-core base but poisonous to everyone else. The worst-case scenario for Republicans is a future in which only Moore-like candidates can win primaries, embracing positions that prompt Democrats to mobilize to defeat them.
On the eve of the Senate election, Bannon had come to Alabama to deliver the message himself. On Monday night, in a newly built barn-cum-wedding-venue on a farm in remote southeast Alabama, Bannon warmed up a couple of hundred supporters for Moore. The night was dark and chilly — Alabama had received an unusual winter snowstorm in the last week. Outside the barn, a green tarp festooned with branches, dried moss, and toy alligators was meant to evoke the “swamp” Moore vowed to “drain.”
The election, Bannon proclaimed, was a good-and-evil showdown between “the Trump miracle and the nullification project.” Of the GOP establishment, he said, “They’re trying to get you to shut up.” But, he added, “They couldn’t beat Trump because they couldn’t beat you … it’s the deplorables, it’s the hobbits, it’s the silent majority.”
Accompanying Bannon was his supporting cast, the army with which he intends to invade the GOP. There was Corey Stewart, the once and future Virginia candidate, who nearly won a gubernatorial nomination on a platform of Confederate nostalgia; there was Paul Nehlen, who is trying (for the second time) to take down House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin, and who recently told a columnist to “eat a bullet”; there were candidates for office in Texas and Missouri and Indiana, and the controversial former Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke. Together, they are Bannon’s agents of chaos — but now that Moore has lost, they may struggle for traction.
Moore himself was not a Bannon creation but an ally of convenience. Like Trump, he was, for Bannon, a useful battering ram against the hated establishment. Before he became known as an alleged pedophile, Moore was already plenty controversial: in addition to defying the Supreme Court, he had argued that Muslims should not hold office, that gay sex should be illegal, and that life was better in the time of slavery.
Moore’s wife, Kayla, testified to her husband’s character, pointing out that he has had black employees and a Jewish lawyer. Of the press, she said, “In my opinion, they should be held accountable.”
Moore, for his part, said, “If you don’t believe in my character, don’t vote for me.” Then he ducked into a back room to appear on Bannon’s satellite radio show, which airs six hours a day.
The Moore supporters in attendance were certain he hadn’t done the things of which he’d been accused. Had he won, it would have deepened the sense that partisans are cocooned in their own separate realities, impervious to disagreeable facts. According to exit polls, nearly all of those who voted for Moore believed the allegations against him were false. “It is so wrong for those women to tell these vicious lies,” Bernadette Pittman, who traveled to Alabama in her capacity as the head of Northwest Florida Bikers for Trump, told me. “I am a victim of sexual assault, and I know you can’t keep a secret like that for 38 years. It would kill you.”
At the entrance to the farm, a knot of protesters wore red dresses and white bonnets, evoking “The Handmaid’s Tale.” A peanut farmer from a nearby town, Nathan Mathis, stood with a sign imploring his fellow citizens not to vote for Moore, and a photograph of his late daughter, Patti Sue, a lesbian who shot herself to death at age 23. Nathan Mathis found her on the floor of her trailer.
“My daughter believed Jesus to be God’s son,” he said. “She was baptized. She was gay—she wasn’t a pre-vert.” The knot of reporters around him asked what he hoped to accomplish by coming here. “If we sit back and don’t say anything,” he said, “we deserve what we get.”
CNN's Jake Tapper fact checks Roy Moore spokesman
New hope for Democrats
What Doug Jones hoped his Senate election meant, he told me, was that things were going to change. It was the day before the election, a day he had spent bounding tirelessly from place to place. Jones can seem dour and bland in ads and news clips, but in person he has a bouncy energy and a quick laugh. He’s not flashy, but he seems to know who he is.
I asked Jones why he had embarked on a seemingly doomed campaign. “I just felt like the timing was right in this state for some people to have a voice that I knew had not felt they had had a voice in the past,” he told me. It wasn’t just the presidential election: he pointed to the recent removals of a governor, a chief justice, a speaker of the house convicted. “People were tired, and they wanted people to talk straight to them,” he said. “The only way to guarantee that you can’t win is to not run at all.”
Appointed U.S. Attorney by President Bill Clinton in 1997, Jones in 2001 brought to trial two men who had never been prosecuted for their involvement in the 1965 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four young black girls. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a eulogy for the girls, but J. Edgar Hoover declined to prosecute the case. To prosecute the bombers, Jones unearthed a never-before-heard recording of Thomas Blanton telling his wife, “You have to have a meeting to make a bomb.” A granddaughter of the other bomber, Bobby Cherry, testified that he had boasted about having “helped blow up a bunch of niggers back in Birmingham.” Jones put them both in jail.
Jones hoped his Senate election would strike a blow for sanity, for coming together, for rising above partisanship. “A lot of people are just concerned that we have reached fever pitch in the partisan divide,” he said. “It’s real easy to get people whipped up into a frenzy by preying on their fears.” His first priority in Washington, he said, would be fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which the current Congress has let expire. In Alabama, 150,000 children depend on the program.
Jones’s victory was also the story of a skilled, well-financed campaign powered by a dogged candidate who became a national cause célèbre for the left. The campaign and its allies focused on voter mobilization and turnout. While Moore virtually disappeared — perhaps fearing confrontation with the press, or believing that God’s will does not depend on get-out-the-vote programs — Jones’s campaign boasted it had logged millions of contacts with voters. The upscale, Republican-leaning suburbs where he drew crucial crossover votes were blanketed in Jones signs. His approach could be a road map for other Democrats to make gains in hostile territory.
A few doors down from Jones’s Birmingham headquarters, I sat in the back of the Magnolia barbecue restaurant with an effusive 57-year-old white woman named Carole Griffin. The smell of smoked meat filled the air, and an urban radio station played on the speakers. Between songs, a deep-voiced man backed by jazz piano warned, “Roy Moore wanted to keep the Jim Crow language in the Alabama constitution. … Make sure everybody in your family votes.” It was funded by Highway 31, a super PAC funded by national Democrats that spent $4 million on Jones’s behalf.
An Alabama native, Griffin owns a French bakery in town. She had always been quietly progressive, not wanting to alienate her customers. But Trump’s election motivated her to take a stronger stand. She was helping mobilize voters for the campaign in conjunction with MoveOn. Griffin also heads the local Indivisible chapter, which has grown to more than 2,000 members.
“I was in despair about being a progressive in Alabama,” she told me. “Now I realize nobody knew where to find me!”
Jones cemented local liberals’ loyalty when he showed up at their five-day round-the-clock sit-in at their senators’ local offices, protesting the proposed health-care bill — in the rain. The group’s most active members include a suburban housewife, young Black Lives Matter activists, a doctor, and a plumber and his wife from a rural area outside the city. “They’re my favorite protest buddies, because they’re not afraid to yell,” Griffin said. About two-thirds of the members are women.
Griffin was sure Jones’s Senate election was no fluke. It was the product of a movement that had been building for some time. It was the product of a Republican Party gone crazy and a Democratic Party that was getting off the sidelines. It was a product of a changing Alabama: in Cullman, a historic Klan outpost an hour north of Birmingham, she had attended a Young Democrats gathering hosted by a gay-rights activist and a drag queen.
“It’s just a matter of moving that needle a little bit further,” she said. “We’re not like that stereotype of us. There is something happening.” After years of political disappointment, Griffin said, “It’s given me hope.”
Fed Raises Rates While Keeping Three-Hike Outlook for 2018
Story by Bloomberg
Written by Christopher Condon
Federal Reserve officials followed through on an expected interest-rate increase and raised their forecast for economic growth in 2018, even as they stuck with a projection for three hikes in the coming year.
“Averaging through hurricane-related fluctuations, job gains have been solid, and the unemployment rate declined further,” the Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement Wednesday following a two-day meeting in Washington. Inflation will remain below the Fed’s 2 percent goal in the near term but “stabilize” around the target in the medium term, the central bank said.
In a key change to the statement, the Fed omitted prior language saying it expected the labor market would strengthen further. Instead, Wednesday’s missive said monetary policy would help the labor market “remain strong.” That suggests Fed officials expect improvement in the job market to slow.
The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes was little changed after the Fed announcement, as was the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index.
The 7-2 vote for the rate move, the Fed’s third this year, raises the benchmark lending rate by a quarter percentage point to a target range of 1.25 percent to 1.5 percent. In another move that could tighten monetary conditions, the Fed confirmed that it would step up the monthly pace of shrinking its balance sheet, as scheduled, to $20 billion beginning in January from $10 billion.
Through the policy adjustments and the statement, the Fed continued to seek a delicate balance between responding to positive news on growth and unemployment that encouraged gradual tightening, while signaling caution due to persistently weak inflation readings that have befuddled policy makers.
That puzzle continued earlier Wednesday when Labor Department data showed consumer inflation, excluding food and energy, was lower than expected at 1.7 percent in the 12 months through November.
YOU’RE FIRED? Omarosa Manigault is out of Trump’s White House
Omarosa (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The reality star's is the first of a round of departures heading into the new year
Story by AP
The White House says Omarosa Manigault Newman — one of President Donald Trump’s most prominent African-American supporters — plans to leave the administration next month.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders says Manigault Newman’s resignation is effective Jan. 20, one year since Trump’s inauguration.
Manigault Newman’s decision comes at the start of what’s expected to be a round of departures heading into the new year.
The White House said last week that deputy national security adviser Dina Powell will leave the administration early next year.
Manigault Newman is a former contestant on Trump’s reality TV show “The Apprentice.” She joined the administration as director of communications for the White House Office of Public Liaison, working on outreach to various constituency groups.
Colin Kaepernick visits Rikers Island inmates, and the correction officers union isn't happy
Colin Kaepernick visited Rikers Island prison on Tuesday, and the correction officers union is upset about it. (AP Photo)
Story by Yahoo News
Written by Liz Roscher,Shutdown Corner
Colin Kaepernick can’t seem to do anything without making someone upset — even if it’s something selfless.
On Tuesday, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback went to the infamous Rikers Island prison in New York to pay a surprise visit to inmates. A Department of Corrections spokesman said that Kaepernick was there “to share a message of hope and inspiration.” But according to the New York Daily News, Kaepernick’s very presence at the prison angered Elias Husamudeen, president of the Correction Officers Benevolent Association. Here’s what Husamudeen told the Daily News:
“This will only encourage inmates to continue to attack Correction Officers at a time when we need more protection.”
It’s not clear how Husamudeen decided that Kaepernick sharing an inspirational message with inmates meant that he was telling them to attack correction officers, but here we are. Kaepernick is an advocate for criminal justice reform, which in no way means he was calling for inmates to attack prison officers.
That wasn’t all Husamudeen was offended by. New York’s PIX 11 had more about Kaepernick’s visit, and more about what Husamudeen was angry about.
Husamudeen was also upset inmates were provided with suits to wear for the meeting. Kaepernick’s meeting was in conjunction with the organization “100 Suits for 100 men,” a program for young adult inmates who are mentored in financial literacy, become members of a book club and listen to guest speakers. “We’re living in a world of make believe,” Husamudeen said. “Inmates don’t wear suits in jail. Give suits to the men in the streets looking for work. Help them before they come to jail.”
Rikers Island is one of the most brutal prisons in the country. Giving the inmates suits to wear while while they hear Colin Kaepernick speak is a chance for them to feel human. Denying inmates their humanity is how prisons break people down, and Kaepernick was trying to give that humanity back to the inmates for just a few hours. Nothing about that is “make believe.”
In the end, it doesn’t necessarily matter what the president of the Correction Officers Benevolent Association says about Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick did something positive for several Rikers Island inmates on Tuesday, and that’s what matters.
Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) praises bipartisan bill to protect Religiously Affiliated Institutions
PRESS RELEASE
December 11, 2017
Contacts:
Wilsar Johnson 202- 225-6906
Daniel Schwarz 202-225-5635
NADLER PRAISES BIPARTISAN BILL TO PROTECT
RELIGIOUSLY AFFILIATED INSTITUTIONS
Washington, D.C.—This evening, the House passed H.R. 1730, the “Protecting Religiously Affiliated Institutions Act,” by a vote of 402-2. This bill would extend protections under current federal law for “religious real property.” Currently, Section 247 of the Federal Criminal Code prohibits both the damaging of religious property because of the property’s religious character and the intentional obstruction — by force or threats of force — of anyone’s exercise of religious beliefs.
H.R. 1730 would clarify that threats of force against religious property are included in this prohibition. Additionally, the measure would provide that the damaging or obstructing of such property that results in damages exceeding $5,000 constitutes a felony punishable by up to 3 years imprisonment. Finally, the bill would clarify that real property covered by the statute includes property leased by a non-profit, religiously-affiliated organization.
The importance of this legislation is underscored by the recent upsurge in bomb threats, hate crimes, and vandalism committed against communities of faith. For instance, more than 150 bomb threats were made against Jewish Community Centers in the first quarter of this year alone. And, there has been an alarming surge in the number of threats, vandalism, and arson committed against mosques over the past year.
In response to House passage of this bill, Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) stated,
“Recently, our country has been experiencing a surge in hate crimes – including those committed against communities of faith. In 2016, the hate crimes statistics released by the FBI indicate that anti-Semitic hate crimes increased 20% from the prior year.
“Our country was founded on the principles of religious liberty, and while we may disagree with the religious practices of others, it is never acceptable to use physical obstruction, force, or threats of force to deny others the right to worship.
“I believe it is not only appropriate but necessary for Congress to strengthen our laws against these types of acts so that no American has to choose between their faith and their safety. And I am pleased that this important bill, which was adopted by the Judiciary Committee, has now been passed by the House of Representatives.”
Journalist Simeon Booker, intrepid chronicler of civil rights struggle for Jet and Ebony, dies at 99
Simeon Booker, shown in 1982, spent decades leading the Washington bureau for Jet and Ebony magazines. (Fred Sweets/The Washington Post)
Story by the Washington Post
Written by Emily Langer
The photographs stunned the country: a 14-year-old boy dead in a coffin, his head crushed, an eye gouged, his body disfigured beyond recognition from an agony in which he was beaten, shot, tied with barbed wire to a weight and submerged in the Tallahatchie River of Mississippi.
The young man was Emmett Till. His murder in 1955 — punishment for the transgression of whistling at or otherwise offending a white woman — became the most infamous of the thousands of lynchings visited upon African Americans in the Jim Crow South. Till’s death galvanized the civil rights movement, but only after Simeon Booker helped deliver the story to a national audience.
Mr. Booker, the Washington bureau chief of Jet and Ebony magazines for five decades, died Dec. 10 at an assisted-living community in Solomons, Md. He was 99 and had recently been hospitalized for pneumonia, said his wife, Carol Booker.
Few reporters risked more to chronicle the civil rights movement than Mr. Booker. He was the first full-time black reporter for The Washington Post, serving on the newspaper’s staff for two years before joining Johnson Publishing Co. to write for Jet, a weekly, and Ebony, a monthly modeled on Life magazine, in 1954.
From home bases in Chicago and later in Washington, Mr. Booker ventured into the South and sent back dispatches that reached black readers across the United States. He was in Chicago, Till’s home town, when he heard that the young man had disappeared while visiting relatives in Money, Miss.
Mr. Booker instinctively went to the home of the young man’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, and earned her trust as she moved through her terror and then grief. He was with her at the funeral home where, over the objections of everyone present, she insisted that the casket bearing her son’s mutilated corpse be opened.
Mr. Booker described the scene in Jet: “Her face wet with tears, she leaned over the body, just removed from a rubber bag in a Chicago funeral home, and cried out, ‘Darling, you have not died in vain. Your life has been sacrificed for something.’ ”
A Jet photographer, David Jackson, photographed Till’s body, which thousands of mourners observed at his funeral. No mainstream news outlets published the images of Till’s body, according to an account decades later in the New York Times. But their appearance in Jet and several other African American publications helped make the Till murder “the first great media event of the civil rights movement,” historian David Halberstam wrote in his book “The Fifties.”
Like Till, Mr. Booker grew up in the North and said he had never entered the Deep South before traveling to Mississippi to cover the trial of Till’s accused killers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam. An all-white jury acquitted the defendants after deliberations lasting roughly an hour. Later, Bryant and Milam confessed to the killing in a paid interview with Look magazine.
Mr. Booker was in constant peril as a black journalist reporting in the South. But the Till case presented particular dangers.
“The first day we got there we went over to Till’s granduncle’s house and men in a car with guns forced us to stop,” Mr. Booker told the Times. After the verdict, he recalled, “the first thing we had to think about was getting to Memphis and getting out of there, because we were marked men. And they put us all on one plane, the reporters and witnesses and everybody.”
Mr. Booker later became bureau chief in Washington and established the Johnson company’s office in the capital. After a lengthy search for accommodations in the then-segregated city, Mr. Booker and his colleagues found two rooms in the Standard Oil building on Constitution Avenue NW.
As one of the few black reporters in Washington, he wrote a column for Jet called Ticker Tape U.S.A. and led editorial coverage of the executive and legislative branches at a time when black reporters were largely excluded from news events, as from everyday life. He covered 10 presidents and traveled to Southeast Asia to report on the Vietnam War.
And he returned to the South, documenting the civil rights struggle. For his safety, he sometimes posed as a minister, carrying a Bible under his arm. Other times, he discarded his usual suit and bow tie for overalls to look the part of a sharecropper.
Once, in an incident retold when Mr. Booker was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame in 2013, he escaped a mob by riding in the back of a hearse.
He wrote that he was “never prouder of Jet’s role in any story” than in 1961, when he helped cover a Freedom Ride from Washington to New Orleans, an interracial effort to test compliance with a ban on segregated interstate transit.
A mob firebombed one of the buses in Anniston, Ala. Thugs forced their way aboard Mr. Booker’s coach and beat the protesters. In Birmingham, Ala., Ku Klux Klansmen waited to beat them again.
With help from the office of U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Mr. Booker and the Freedom Riders were eventually flown to safety. But such demonstrations continued, and integration was enforced in interstate travel.
Simeon Saunders Booker Jr. was born Aug. 27, 1918, in Baltimore, where his father, a Baptist minister, was the director of a YMCA for blacks. The family later moved to Youngstown, Ohio, where his father opened a similar YMCA.
“From an early age, I knew I wanted to be a writer,” Mr. Booker told the Vindicator, a Youngstown newspaper. “Teaching and preaching were the best advances for blacks at the time. But I wanted to write.”
He received an English degree in 1942 from Virginia Union University, a historically black institution in Richmond, then began his career at the Baltimore Afro-American. He later joined the Cleveland Call and Post, also an African American publication, where he received a Newspaper Guild Award for a series covering slum housing — and where he was fired for trying to unionize the staff.
In 1950, after several previous applications, he received a prestigious Nieman Foundation fellowship for journalism at Harvard University.
After the Nieman, Mr. Booker wrote to numerous newspapers seeking employment. “The only one to answer me,” he told The Post years later, “was Phil Graham of The Washington Post.”
Graham, the publisher at the time, told Mr. Booker, “If you can take it, I’m willing to gamble.” Graham’s admonition referred to the unrelenting difficulty Mr. Booker would encounter in the segregated capital. When he introduced himself as “Simeon Booker from The Washington Post,” people laughed.
“If I went out to a holdup, they thought I was one of the damn holdup men,” Mr. Booker told The Post. “I couldn’t get any cooperation.”
Mr. Booker said he eventually determined that The Post wasn’t “prepared” to have a black reporter on its staff.
“It was all new to them, having a black guy in the newsroom,” he recalled. “It was recommended to me that I only use the bathroom on the fourth floor — editorial — so I did. I could eat in the cafeteria, and I was thankful for that. But I was always alone.”
After a two-year tenure that he described as a “social experiment,” he joined the Johnson company. At the time, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff wrote in their Pulitzer Prize-winning volume “The Race Beat,” African American newspapers were suffering crippling circulation losses. The Johnson magazines offered the alluring opportunity to reach vast national audiences, and Mr. Booker remained with the company until his retirement, around his 90th birthday.
In his reporting, Mr. Booker developed a working relationship with Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, a top aide to J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, and credited the bureau with helping keep him safe when he traveled to the South. He described the FBI as “a kind of co-engineer with us,” adding that “Jet and Ebony never would have been what we were without the FBI.”
His account appeared in conflict with later discoveries by historians that the FBI had sought to undercut the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement he led. David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer-winning historian, told The Post that Mr. Booker’s flattering accounts of the FBI were “one of the most hilarious snow jobs in American history.”
Mr. Booker described the relationship as simply a matter of staying alive.
“Maybe [they] looked at me as some kind of informer. I was giving them information — far as where I was going, who I was going to cover — and they were giving me information about staying safe,” he told The Post. “I’d have never gotten into the South were it not for J. Edgar Hoover and Deke DeLoach. DeLoach saved my neck more times than I can remember.”
Mr. Booker’s marriage to Thelma Cunningham ended in divorce. He was later married for 44 years to the former Carol McCabe of Washington and Solomons. Survivors include two children from his first marriage, Simeon Booker III and Theresa Booker; a son from his second marriage, Theodore Booker; and many grandchildren. A son from his first marriage, Abdul Wali Muhammad (also known as James Booker), was editor in chief of the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, the Final Call, when he died in 1991.
Mr. Booker’s books included “Black Man’s America” (1964), the children’s volume “Susie King Taylor: Civil War Nurse” (1969) and “Shocking the Conscience” (2013), a memoir co-written with his second wife. In 2016, he received a career George Polk Award in journalism.
More than three decades earlier, he had received the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award. At the awards ceremony, he recalled that he had “one compelling ambition.”
“I wanted to fight segregation on the front lines,” he said. “I wanted to dedicate my writing skills to the cause. Segregation was beating down my people. I volunteered for every assignment and suggested more. I stayed on the road, covering civil rights day and night. The names, the places and the events became history.”
'Morning Joe': Harold Ford Jr. Suspended by MSNBC Amid Sexual Assault Claim - FORD DENIES ALLEGATIONS
Story by Yahoo News
Written by Ryan Schwartz
Morning Joe is down yet another contributor: former U.S. congressman Harold Ford Jr. has been suspended by MSNBC as he fights back against claims of sexual assault.
Mika Brzezinski confirmed the news on Friday’s edition of the Joe Scarborough-fronted morning show, just one day after The Huffington Post reported that Ford was terminated by Morgan Stanley following a human resources investigation into allegations of misconduct. The accuser, a reporter who came forward anonymously and was not employed by Morgan Stanley, said she had met with Ford several years ago in a professional capacity. He is alleged to have forcibly grabbed her during the encounter, prompting a building security guard to intervene. Ford reportedly continued contacting the woman via email after the incident, until she asked that he cease contact altogether.
Following his termination by Morgan Stanley, Ford gave a statement to HuffPost denying the allegations, saying, “I have never forcibly grabbed any woman or man in my life.” What’s more, he is suing both the reporter who came forward as well as Morgan Stanley (for wrongful termination).
Former Congressman Harold Ford Jr. Fired For Misconduct By Morgan Stanley: Harold Ford strongly DENIES allegations
A woman who was interviewed as part of the company’s HR probe separately told HuffPost that Ford harassed her one evening in Manhattan several years ago.
Story by Huffington Post
Written by Yashar Ali
Former Democratic Congressman Harold Ford Jr. has been fired for misconduct by Morgan Stanley after facing a human resources investigation into allegations of misconduct, a company spokeswoman confirmed.
“He has been terminated for conduct inconsistent with our values and in violation of our policies,” a spokeswoman for Morgan Stanley told HuffPost in an email.
At least one woman, who is not a Morgan Stanley employee but interacted with Ford in a professional capacity, was interviewed by Morgan Stanley’s HR department as part of the investigation.
In two interviews with HuffPost, the woman alleged that Ford engaged in harassment, intimidation, and forcibly grabbed her one evening in Manhattan, leading her to seek aid from a building security guard. The incident took place several years ago when Ford and the woman were supposed to be meeting for professional reasons. Ford continued to contact her after the encounter until she wrote an email asking him to cease contact.
The email, which was reviewed by HuffPost, shows that the woman emailed Ford after he repeatedly asked her to drinks. She asked him not to contact her anymore, citing his inappropriate conduct the evening where he forcibly grabbed and harassed her.
Ford replied to the email by apologizing and agreeing not to contact her. “Hey very sorry. Meant no harm,” the email reads. “And I apologize for whatever I may have said or what was said. And my overtures are strictly professional. Again I apologize didn’t mean to be inappropriate at all. Sorry that impression was left.”
HuffPost is not identifying the woman at her request but has reviewed emails that confirm her interactions with Ford and spoke to two people whom the woman confided in about the incident. One woman heard from Ford’s accuser the night of the incident and described her as “distraught, shocked, and frightened,” and said that she was concerned about any career ramifications should she report the incident.
In a statement provided to HuffPost, Ford denied the allegations: “This simply did not happen. I have never forcibly grabbed any woman or man in my life. Having drinks and dinner for work is part of my job, and all of my outreach to the news reporter making these false allegations was professional and at the direction of my firm for business purposes. I support and have tremendous respect for the brave women now speaking out in this important national dialogue. False claims like this undermine the real silence breakers. I will now be bringing legal action against the reporter who has made these false claims about me as well as Morgan Stanley for improper termination.”
John Singer, Ford’s employment counsel with the firm Singer Deutsch LLP, said “Morgan Stanley has still not told Harold directly of his termination, and unlike every other circumstance I’ve been in the company has refused provide me with a reason.”
He added: “This all demonstrates how this was a matter of convenience during a hyper-sensitive time and not based on real facts.”
Ford comes from a prominent political family in Tennessee. His father, Harold Ford Sr., held a congressional seat for 12 terms before retiring, leaving his son to run for the seat, a race which he won handily. Ford served in the House for nearly 10 years before deciding to run for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Republican Bill Frist. Ford lost that hotly contested 2006 race by fewer than three points to current Republican Sen. Bob Corker.
Since leaving Congress in 2007, Ford has worked for two financial services companies, first for Merrill Lynch and then Morgan Stanley, which he joined in 2011 as a managing director.
At the time Morgan Stanley announced the hire, The New York Times described Ford’s role as a rainmaker of sorts: “Mr. Ford will be responsible for ‘building business opportunities’ for clients, Morgan Stanley said. He will manage relationships with corporate directors, senior executives and institutional investors, as well as private clients.”
Ford also serves as a paid on-air political analyst for NBC/MSNBC and regularly appears on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe.”
Ex-cop Michael Slager gets 20 years in prison for fatal shooting 50-year-old Walter Scott in Charleston, South Carolina
Story by AP
Written by Meg Kinnard
A white former South Carolina officer was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Thursday for fatally shooting an unarmed black motorist in the back in 2015, wrapping up a case that became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement.
Attorneys for ex-North Charleston Officer Michael Slager said he shot 50-year-old Walter Scott in self-defense after the two fought and Scott grabbed Slager's stun gun. They said race didn't play a role in the shooting and Slager never had any "racial animus" toward minorities.
Still, Slager pleaded guilty in federal court to violating Scott's civil rights. As part of the plea agreement reached in May, prosecutors dropped state murder charges. A year ago, a state judge declared a mistrial when jurors deadlocked in that case.
"This is a tragedy that shouldn't have happened," U.S. District Judge David Norton said.
A bystander recorded the shooting on a cellphone, and it was shared around the world, setting off protests across the U.S. as demonstrators said it was another egregious example of police officers mistreating African-Americans.
Slager fired at Scott's back from 17 feet (5 meters) away. Five of eight bullets hit him.
The video was seized on by many as vivid proof of what they had been arguing for years: that white officers too often use deadly force unnecessarily against black people.
When the jury failed to reach a verdict in the state murder case, many black people and others were shocked and distressed, because the video seemed to some to be an open-and-shut case. Some despaired of ever seeing justice.
Scott's family testified before the sentence was handed down and said they had forgiven Slager.
"I'm not angry at you, Michael. Michael, I forgive you, and Michael, I do pray for you now and for your family, because we've gone through a traumatic time," said Scott's brother Anthony.
The shooting angered local African-Americans who complained for years that North Charleston police harassed blacks, pulling them over or questioning them unnecessarily as they cracked down on crime. But after the shooting, the Scott family successfully pleaded for calm, asking everyone to let the justice system run its course.
Two months after the shooting, a young white man killed nine black church members in a racially motivated attacked during a Bible study in Charleston. The family members of those victims struck a similar forgiveness tone after that attack.
Before the sentence was handed down, the judge had to decide whether the shooting amounted to second-degree murder or manslaughter. Norton found that it was murder.
"No matter what sentence I give, neither the Scott family nor the Slager family is going to think that it's right," the judge said.
After the shooting, Slager picked up his stun gun and placed it next to Scott. Slager contends he was securing the weapon. Prosecutors think he put it there to bolster his self-defense story.
An emotional Slager told the Scott family that he was grateful for their forgiveness.
"This tragic event that occurred in seconds has changed the lives of everyone involved," he said. "With my actions that day, Walter Scott is no longer with his family, and I am responsible for that."
The judge also found that Slager, 36, obstructed justice when he made statements to state police after the shooting.
A pre-sentencing report for Slager found that he committed manslaughter and recommended 10 to nearly 13 years in prison. But the judge was not bound by that review.
If Slager had faced another state trial and been convicted of murder, he could have been sentenced to anywhere from 30 years to life in prison.
Convictions in police officer shootings are uncommon in the U.S. and prison time is even rarer.
South Carolina has been aggressive in charging white officers who shoot unarmed black people. Four have pleaded guilty in state or federal court in the past six years. But only Slager and former state trooper Sean Groubert, who shot a man as he tried to get his wallet during a seat belt violation check, will have been sent to prison. Groubert was sentenced to five years behind bars.
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Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/emotional-testimony-expected-ex-officers-sentencing-ends-092953960.html
Fox's Rupert Murdoch's 50-million dollar compound on fire.
405 Freeway closed in Sepulveda Pass due to Skirball Fire east of the freeway (NBC News)
A new brush fire has broken out near the Getty Center in Brentwood. 6.12.17 (KTLA-TV)
This was the drive on the 405 Freeway Wednesday morning in Los Angeles as the Skirball Fire erupted near the Getty Center. The freeway has since been shut down and mandatory evacuations have been ordered. Credit: Matt Paolasso
Congressman John Conyers announces retirement from Congress effective today
Story by Radio One Detroit via Inspiration Station Praise 102.7
Written by Alicia West
This morning (Dec. 5) live on The Mildred Gaddis Show, Congressman John Conyers announced his retirement and endorsed his son, John Conyers III to run for Michigan Congressional seat.
Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, during a House Judiciary Committee meeting in July. The House’s longest-serving lawmaker, he will not seek re-election, a family member said. Credit Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
After 53 years in Congress, John Conyers Jr. has decided to step down amongst claims of sexual harassment. In his live interview with Mildred Gaddis, he stated that the claims are false but will still retire as his health is one of his main concerns. He believes his legacy will live on, untainted, stating “this too shall pass.”
Retired Congressman John Conyers (Michigan)
He also has endorsed his son John Conyers III to replace him in his Michigan Congressional seat. “We are all working together to make this country a better one. To make equality and justice more available for any.”
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Read more:
CBS: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rep-john-conyers-son-john-conyers-iii-to-run-for-congress-seat/
NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/us/politics/john-conyers-election.html
The Hill: http://thehill.com/homenews/house/363282-conyers-announces-retirement-amid-sexual-misconduct-allegations
CBS: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rep-john-conyers-son-john-conyers-iii-to-run-for-congress-seat/
Huffington Post: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-conyers-retires_us_5a1dca15e4b04abdc6147ba1
NPR: https://www.npr.org/2017/12/05/568547396/rep-john-conyers-i-am-retiring-today
CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/05/politics/john-conyers-out-retires/index.html
The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/john-conyers-sexual-harassment-allegations/547520/
Supreme Court allows full Trump travel ban to take effect
Story by The Hill
Written by Lydia Wheeler
The Supreme Court today gave President Trump another major win by granting his administration’s request to fully reinstate the third version of his travel ban.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and a Federal District Court in Maryland had said the President could only block nationals from the designated eight countries if they lacked a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.
The high court’s decision now puts those rulings on hold.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Sonia Sotomayor said they would have denied the government’s request.
Flynn to testify Trump 'directed him to make contact with the Russians': report
Story by The Hill
Written by Josh Delk
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn is expected to testify that President Trump instructed him to contact Russian officials during the 2016 campaign, according to a report by ABC News.
Flynn is saying that Trump "directed him to make contact with the Russians," ABC's Brian Ross said Friday, just moments after Flynn entered a guilty plea for lying about his contact with Russians during the presidential transition period.
Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI on Friday, after being charged with one felony count in special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
According to ABC News, Flynn is also prepared to testify against Trump, members of Trump's family and White House officials.
The former adviser has reportedly also "promised full cooperation to the Mueller team" within the last 24 hours.
Flynn is the first official to hold a formal office in the Trump administration to be implicated by the Mueller probe, which is examining potential ties between the campaign and Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Flynn's misrepresentation of his conversations with Sergey Kislyak — which took place in December 2016, before Trump took office — were the justification for his ouster from the White House after just 24 days.
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Read more:
The Hill: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/362773-flynn-to-testify-trump-directed-him-to-make-contact-with-the
CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/01/politics/comey-tweet-michael-flynn-plea/index.html
NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/us/politics/michael-flynn-guilty-russia-investigation.html?_r=0
NPR: https://www.npr.org/2017/12/01/561238303/michael-flynn-sr-expected-to-plead-guilty-to-lying-to-fbi
Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/12/01/flynn-could-deliver-a-knockout-blow-to-trump/?utm_term=.dcb46f73e4e9
ABC News: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/michael-flynn-charged-making-false-statements-fbi-documents/story?id=50849354
