The Five Factor Values Test

H/T to JustMeWriting

Your Values Profile

Loyalty: You don't really value loyalty. In your opinion, friendship should be earned. If you don't agree with someone, it doesn't matter how close you are. You'll let them (and everyone else know) exactly what you think. Honesty: You don't really value honesty. You do value getting your way, no matter what. And if a little lying is required to do that, no problem. A few white lies never hurt anyone (at least, that's what you tell yourself!) Generosity: You value generosity a fair amount. You are all about giving, as long as there's some give and take. Supportive and kind, you don't mind helping out a friend in need. But you know when you've given too much. You have no problem saying "no"! Humility: You value humility a fair amount. You tend to be an easy going, humble person. But occasionally your ego takes over. You have a slight competitive streak - and the need to be the best. Tolerance: You value tolerance a fair amount. You are open to new cultures, beliefs, and ideas. You have very few prejudices that you're aware of. And while you are tolerant, you do stand true to what you believe.

The Five Factor Values Test

Does "Roid Rage" Excuse a Double Murder?

Evidently it does if you are a white wrestler. I haven't heard a single piece of news coverage that even begins to speak ill of the crazy ass wrestler who killed his child, his wife, and himself. I'll concede that he was crazy as hell. I do think it should be pointed out that the coverage of this white man's crimes in no way shape form or fashion come close to the type of coverage you generally see when a Black man commits a crime; see Bobby Cutts for a contemporary example. Both of these dudes committed insane acts of violence against their families, but less than a week after the white guys crime, the police are raiding a doctor's office to find evidence that would offer mitigation for Benoit's crimes. Cutts meanwhile, should look forward to the death penalty, because there will be no discussion of mitigating factors.

clipped from www.ajc.com DEA, sheriff's officials raid office of Benoit doctor The Associated Press Published on: 06/28/07 Federal drug agents and sheriff's officials raided the office of pro wrestler Chris Benoit's personal physician in search of records and other items, authorities said Thursday. The raid at Dr. Phil Astin's office in Carrollton began Wednesday night and concluded early Thursday, said agent Chuvalo Truesdell, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Atlanta. The search warrant had been obtained in connection with the Benoit investigation, he said.

A Gross Failure of Prosecutorial Discretion

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If nothing else happens in this case, District Attorney David McDade should be hounded out of office and never allowed to practice law again. In fact, it would not offend my sensibilities if McDade suffers for the rest of his life, unable to get any good job, and a pariah in any community he inhabits. After all, that is the fate to which he (all by himself with his exercise of prosecutorial discretion) consigned Genarlow Wilson.

clipped from writ.news.findlaw.com A Gross Failure of Prosecutorial Discretion During the trial, in response to Wilson's pointed questions about the propriety of prosecuting people for such conduct, Douglas County District Attorney David McDade said that he did not write the law, implying that he had no choice but to prosecute Wilson for aggravated child molestation. McDade said separately that Wilson should have taken a plea deal but that he failed to do so because he "has decided to become a martyr." These statements are remarkable in three respects. First, we should be quite disturbed to learn that a prosecutor, who has more discretion in carrying out his job than almost anyone else in the criminal justice system, is prepared to rely on the Nuremberg defense. Yes, a criminal statute literally applied to Wilson's conduct, but the District Attorney has no obligation to enforce the law slavishly, when even he himself concedes that "[w]e don't believe that a 10-year sentence is an appropriate punishment [in this case]."

Inside the Genarlow Wilson Case

When this many people agree that justice is not being served, including the man who wrote the law, and in fact justice is being intentionally denied, there must be a reckoning.

clipped from www.creators.com Inside The Genarlow Wilson Case Most Americans are now aware of the plight of Genarlow Wilson. Three years ago, the now 21-year-old African-American was sentenced to 10 years in prison under a Georgia law that turned his act of consensual oral sex into "aggravated child molestation" and subjected him to a harsh mandatory jail sentence. Incredibly, it was "my" law under which Wilson was convicted and sentenced. It was never, ever the law's intention to lock up young people for 10 years for consensual sex.

No Justice...Period

Stay Tuned

clipped from www.ajc.com Judge: No bond for Genarlow Wilson Hearing canceled; ruling could keep him in jail for months By JEREMY REDMON The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 06/27/07 A Douglas County judge ruled Wednesday Genarlow Wilson is not eligible for bond in his child molestation case, a development that could keep Wilson behind bars for at least several more months pending an appeal.

Reprinted In It's Entirety From Dallas South Blog

The War in Iraq*

Posted by Shawn Williams on June 24th, 2007

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As the rhetoric spews forth regarding the War in Iraq, the men and women in uniform seem to be little more than asterisks in someone else's story. The 3,555 asterisks in this post represent the lives of U.S. military personnel that have been lost since the so-called Iraq War started in March 2003 (according to an Associated Press count). Each asterisk is a son, a daughter, a mother or a father, a brother a sister, an aunt or an uncle.

As soldiers continue to fall, the White House looks to preserve its legacy, the Pentagon seeks to shift blame, and Congress talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk. Roadside bombers killed seven U.S. troops Saturday, raising to 25 the number for U.S. soldiers who have died this week.

How many more asterisks before there is a real shift in policy? How many more human footnotes to the story of this administration? How much more will the American people take?

.: A Man's View... So Listen!

.: A Man's View... So Listen!

Because I was asked to share good advice....

Hat Tip to BlackLooks for the meme.

Christ, another meme!

1. Tell a child who’s not older than twelve that you’re going to show them two pictures, and that their job is to tell you which one of them is Jesus Christ.
2. First show this image: IMAGE 1, then this one: IMAGE 2, and each time ask, “Is this Jesus Christ?”
3. What did they say? Report your findings on your blog or here.
4. Write a short note about whether it’s the result you wanted, and if not, what should we do as parents to make sure we get the result we want?
5. This is a sensitive issue, don’t tag anyone. Hope for volunteers, instead.

I tried this on my 9 year old daughter, but I presented it a bit differently. My kids know that we are extremely pro-Black and I didn't know how that might affect the response, so I put both pictures on the same page and asked her which one was a picture of Jesus. Her response prompted an hour long conversation between me and my wife and several more hours of research for me as I must now have a long conversation with the child, but here's how she responded.

She hovered over the Black Jesus for a little while, then she picked the white Jesus. Then before I could say anything, she said wait a minute, and decided to read the writing on both pictures. After reading the writing, she chose the picture of the Black Jesus. I asked her why and she said the writing on the Black man’s picture seemed more like something out of the Bible, while the writing on the white man's picture didn't seem particularly spiritual. I then asked her why she picked the white man's picture at first, and her reply was that was the picture that she had seen most often referred to as Jesus.

I was a bit concerned for a while. But then I posed the same question to my 18 year old son. He was politically correct at first, claiming that different people might say that either picture was Jesus, but after we pressed him to make his own choice he picked the Black photo, because as he put it, “light skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair don’t come out of that area.”

The surprise for me is that we are very Afro-centric in our household, and we also do not attend a Christian church. I do, however, allow my daughter to go to her grandparent's church or her aunt's church, because that’s often the only time she gets to interact with her extended family and cousins. Those few trips to church shouldn’t have more of an effect on her psyche than I do. But now I realize that the cumulative effect of the all the various societal portrayals is something else altogether to deal with. We did a good job with my oldest, but we will have to work harder to keep up in the information age.

This exercise did get me thinking again about what we tell our kids and how we allow them to be brainwashed with any number of mentally debilitating ideas. I think it’s problematic to have a child believing in the mythology of the Bible as real and completely true just as much as it is to have them believing in Santa.

The following are some of the things that I am going to go over with the 9 year old; just to make sure she is getting the real deal from me the way she needs to get it. I’m sure that she doesn’t hold an image of the white man as God in her mind, because she had no problem with the Black man's picture as the son of God. Besides, around my house all positive images are black images.

The traditional Image of Jesus
If we look at Christmas cards & stationery with Christian themes, the face of Jesus looking back at us has a pale skin, blue eyes, and often fair hair. This image of Jesus comes from the painter & sculptor Michelangelo (1475-1564) who used his lily-white cousin as the sitting model. Ever since, western Christians have reproduced this image or variants in their churches, picture cards and so on. White representations of Jesus continue to dominate Euro-American Christian culture. The suggestion that Jesus might have been dark-skinned (black in today’s racial taxonomy of the US or UK), makes most westerners uneasy. In addition, Adam & Eve, Moses, the Apostles and even God "himself" are depicted as fair-skinned folk, all of which can contribute to a white supremacist view of the world.

The evidence for a dark Jesus
a) Biblical lore: Soon after Jesus was born, Herod is believed to have sent his soldiers to seek and kill him as an infant. To hide the Christ child, we are told his family fled with him to Egypt but pre-Arab Egypt was a society of dark-skinned Africans (as evidenced in their own hieroglyphs) and it would be folly to try hiding an Aryan baby there of all places. The land was referred to as Kemet (the Black land), for thousands of years, and themselves as "Kemetcu" (the black humans). The "father" of modern history, Herodotus, himself acknowledged as much when he said "the Egyptians, Colchians and Ethiopians have thick lips, broad nose, wooly hair and are of burnt skin." Elsewhere, he actually referred to them as "black”.
b) History: Tim Wise, progressive writer from Nashville, Tennessee points out that the earliest representations of Jesus, Mary, and Christ's disciples appear in the catacombs of Rome, where the first Christians, known as Essenes buried their dead. All of these portrayals show a dark-skinned Messiah. In addition, the Roman Empire under Emperor Justinian II minted a gold coin that pictured Jesus. This coin, which today can be viewed in the British Museum, shows a man with clearly non-white facial features and tightly curled hair, consistent with the description of Christ in the Book of Revelations, wherein it is stated that Jesus had hair like wool, feet the colour of burnt brass, and resembled jasper and sardine stones: both of which were brown in colour.

A traditional Jesus, left, and the BBC's image of what he might have looked like

Jesus has been named the top black icon by the New Nation newspaper. Their assertion that Jesus was black has raised eyebrows in some quarters - so what color was he?

Just as no one will ever produce proof for the existence of God, the question of Jesus's color may always be a matter for personal belief.

Was he white, white-ish, olive-skinned, swarthy, dark-skinned or black? There are people who believe he was any one of those shades, but there seem to be only two things about the debate that can be said with any degree of certainty.

First - if the past 2,000 years of Western art were the judge, Jesus would be white, handsome, probably with long hair and an ethereal glow.

Second - it can almost certainly be said that Jesus would not have been white. His hair was also probably cut short.
(BBC News Online Magazine(

Holding Prosecutors Accountable May Be Only Solution

"The district attorney has offered to give those arrested community service assignments in return for guilty pleas. So far, none have accepted."

That's the last paragraph in the New York Times article about the police arresting over 30 Black and Latino teenagers last month. You'll call me a sensationalist when I say their only crime was "Being Brown", but I honestly fail to see any other rationale behind these mass arrest of our children.

Hat Tip to Prometheus 6 for the update on this story that actually broke a few days after the arrests last month. Somehow this slid under my radar for several weeks. Right now I have only the limited information available in the Times article, but it seems to me that in this day and age of ubiquitous cameras, if there was a large group of kids acting unruly and the police had been monitoring them for all this time, somebody would have thought to get the bad behavior on a phone cam or something to show that they were causing a disturbance. There is too much that feels wrong with even the few details that are being reported in this case.

But back to that last paragraph, because that really made my stomach turn. In spite of the fact that there is obviously more to this situation than meets the eye, the solution from the criminal justice system is always predictable. Throw a criminal charge at it, and then make the stats look good with a plea bargain.

The district attorney should be throwing all these cases out. The simple fact that there are numerous witnesses that refute the officers' statements about disorderly conduct establishes reasonable doubt. But instead he offers them all a chance to get a criminal record.

I hope not a single one of these kids takes that crappy offer. There were parents present when this episode went down, and somebody needs to be responsible and step up and say whether oor not there was any behavior that warranted police intervention. If so, the actors need to be identified and dealt with, but if not, then the simple fact that this prosecutor is trying to get them to plead guilty when there was no crime is a crime in and of itself.

Everyone cheered when the Duke team made the big bad prosecutor back down. Black folks need to take some lessons from that and realize that we cannot continue to take this crap lying down.

Maybe there are too many cops for us to ever hope to get them to all act properly, but there are only a few prosecutors, and they are all elected officials. We can do something about them. Holding the prosecutors accountable may be the only solution to breaking the gestapo hold on our communities and saving our children from the prison industrial complex.

clipped from www.prometheus6.org The New York Times has decided to report what they should have for quite a while. Bob Herbert has been talking about it for a while now. The police, already fearing retaliatory violence, say the teenagers were exchanging gang signs, wearing T-shirts with a gang name and bounding atop cars when they were arrested. Parents and teachers of the group and witnesses said that they were no more boisterous than any group of teenagers would be in similar circumstances, and that they did not see any youths atop cars.

The Free Market and African American Commerce

Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder,,, hopefully

I've been incog-negro for a while now. Had to take the kids out of the country for a minute. Valuable lessons were learned by all, some of which I will mention here soon.

THE LINE STARTS RIGHT HERE TO PUT A FOOT IN THURBERT'S BEHIND

Let's get the rationale straight from the horse's mouth.

From AJC.com

In the Wilson case, law governs

By THURBERT BAKER
Attorney General of Georgia
Published on: 06/12/07

As Attorney General, it is my responsibility to follow the laws of Georgia as they are written, not how some may wish they were written.

Monroe County Superior Court Judge Thomas Wilson's order struck Genarlow Wilson's original sentence, and then purportedly went on to sentence Wilson to a misdemeanor. The law in Georgia is clear that while a habeas court may grant habeas relief, there is absolutely no authority for a habeas court to reduce or modify the judgment of the trial court, in this case, the Superior Court of Douglas County.

• A different opinion: Justice mocked again

I have attempted to bring the defense lawyers and Douglas County prosecuting attorneys together in hopes of reaching a resolution. As recently as this past weekend, the Douglas County District Attorney's office offered Wilson's attorneys a plea deal that would have allowed Wilson to plead to first-offender treatment, which would mean he would not have a criminal record nor would be subject to registering on the sex offender registry once his sentence has been completed. The plea deal could also result in him receiving a sentence substantially shorter than the 10-year mandatory minimum sentence for which he was originally sentenced, possibly leading to his release based upon time already served. Wilson, through his attorneys, rejected all of those offers.

Let us all breathe a sigh of relief that Attorney General Baker is working hard to preserve the rule of law. All that's lleft now is for him to issue a statement defending the Jim Crow laws on the books in the 60's and denounce all the activist judges who took it on themselves to place JUSTICE before the unreasonable edicts of the status quo law.

This is the kind of chicanery that I would expect out of Bush Supreme Court appointee. However, as I read his statement, it leaps out at me that Thurbert is not saying that Genarlow should remain in jail. At this point that is the only thing keeping my boot off his butt. In legalese, he is basically saying that the Monroe County judge who finally made the right call on this case can feel free to let Genarlow out of prison, he just can't change the original courts ruling. In all fairness, this is probably a legally sound argument. So what I'm hoping will happen today is that the Monroe County Judge will amend his ruling to simply have Genarlow released forthwith. The Attorney General's office would then have no further legal standing on which to block the release. That's far more important than cleaning up the record, which should be easier to accomplish if Genarlow is not behind bars.

Thurbert should have left it right there. (Envision my boot resuming it's journey towards his hindquarters.) That nonsense about a reasonable plea offer is a crock of crap that threatens to disgorge every meal I've eaten this month. Where does he get off requiring that Genarlow plead guilty to a felony that isn't a felony anymore? Why is he incapable of seeing that this law was misapplied in a grossly unjust fashion? Why is he pandering to the law and order lunatic fringe who obviously believe the only good Black man is a Black man under State supervision?

This thing has too much momentum to fall off the tracks at this point. So I am fairly sure of a positive outcome for Genarlow. Mr. Baker on the other hand, may have some 'splaining to do come election time.

A Pretty Good Article - A Damn Good Statement

Courtesy of Crooks and Liars

See if you can guess the topic of the full article before you go check it out. I bet you can't because this statement applies almost universally to any issue you can think of that anyone might be moved to write about. This is called a central issue, focal point, cornerstone, foundational logic, starting point, etc.

clipped from powerofnarrative.blogspot.com They still believe, like not very bright children who believe in Santa Claus past the age of six or seven, that calling something "government" or appealing to "a society of laws" purifies it of self-interest and corrupted and corruptible motives and concerns. They seem to be incapable of understanding that, from the first historic forms of the State, the State has always formed and will always form alliances with certain individuals and segments of society -- to which the government bureaucrats will provide favors and special dispensations, and to the severe disadvantage of those individuals and groups that are not so favored.

Because She Got To It Before I Did

GENARLOW WILSON'S 10 YEAR PRISON SENTENCE THROWN OUT!.

Fort Wayne African American Independent Woman has the scoop.

UPDATE: SCORE ONE MORE FOR THE GLORIOUS IDEA OF BLACK ELECTED OFFICIALS.

The Attorney General's office is supposed to be the highest legal arm in the body politic.

From AJC.com,

Attorney General Thurbert Baker's office filed a notice to appeal the judge's order this afternoon, saying Wilson has "absolutely no authority to change the judgment of the trial court, in this case the Superior Court of Douglas County."

The attorney general's office disclosed that as recently as this past weekend Douglas County offered Wilson's attorneys a plea deal that would have allowed Wilson to avoid a criminal record and inclusion on the sex offender registry once his sentence had been completed. The plea deal would have also allowed Wilson to serve a "substantially shorter" prison sentence, possibly leading to his "release based upon time already served."

Wilson, through his attorneys, refused those offers."

Isn't it nice of them to offer Genarlow the opportunity to plead guilty to a felony that the state now says doesn't exist? They sure are great guys down there. This is the same line of crap they gave us in the Shaquanda Cotton case. "It's not our fault that the dumb Black defendant wouldn't take the butt whipping we offered him. We threatened, I mean warned, I mean advised that dumb Black defendant that if it went to trial we were going to punish him to the fullest extent possible for wasting our time with this trial nonsense." The entire plea bargaining system seems like it was designed to make sure as few people as possible actually have their day in court. Obviously they make it clear that if you don't take the offer they will bury you. If the prosecutor thinks that a minimal sentence is is fair in a plea agreement, he or she should have no problem instituting that same sentence even if the defendant wishes to exercise his constitutional right to a trial by a jury. The only reason not to is to punish said defendant for having the temerity to challenge the authority and spurn the good nature of the (in)justice system.

Thurbert Baker must have lost his damn mind. Either that or he thinks that he really doesn't need the Black vote to retain a state office. What possible purpose could he have to resist letting this young man out of jail. Even White people want this Black man let out of jail!! That crap about which judge has the right to do what thing is a crock of crap, since they all pretty much do as the damn well please anyway. There is absolutely nothing wrong with forum shopping; it's done all the time by people with the resources to use that as a legal strategy.

Thurbert is evidently tired of that boring old Attorney General position and wants to get out. I think the good people of Georgia should arrange that for him as expeditiously as possible.

clipped from dowdellresearch.blogspot.com Will Georgia release Genarlow Wilson? Read the background on Genarlow Wilson entrance into a Georgia Prison. Update: 11:54 a.m. A judge rules that a Georgia man should be released from a 10-year prison sentence for having oral sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17.

Goodbye Chocolate City

Here in Atlanta, the so-called Black mecca of the south, we are undergoing a gentrification phase that will almost certainly change the color characteristics of the city. Basically the Black people are disappearing. Nobody is quite sure where they.went, but they are indeed going. Places I used to live, where 15 years ago you could only find a white person looking for street pharmacueticals, are now sprinkled with more and more non-Black faces.

And guess who's worried? Black politicians, who of course need Black people to vote them into those cushy positions. And guess what else, the white people seem pretty happy about it. Mike King says stuff like "Under Jackson, Atlanta was among the first cities to enact rules requiring set-asides in major contracts for minority subcontractors. But those rules were weakened as a result of a lawsuit in the 1990s. Bill Campbell, then mayor, famously likened the plaintiffs in the lawsuit to the Ku Klux Klan.
It didn't seem to matter that the set-asides were constitutionally questionable and cost the city millions. They also played an important role in Campbell running the most corrupt administration in the city's history. Under his watch contracts were awarded not based on whether they might help a struggling business, but how they might help Bill Campbell and his cronies."

I;m not sure about the cronies, but I guess it doesn't really matter that Bill Campbell was NOT convicted of any malfeasance in office, rather they got him on tax evasion, which he had a perfectly good explanation for, and which would ordinarily only result in monetary penalties and interest. The judge who sentenced Campbell even made ridiculous statements, after the jury had returned NOT GUILTY verdicts on the corruption charges, to the effect that he was sentencing Bill harshly based soley on his belief that something improper happened that the Feds couldn't prove to a jury after a 6 year investigation.

This white guy's opinion also states that "Since Jackson's rise to power, political decisions in Atlanta, and to some degree in Fulton County and DeKalb County as well, have been measured by whether they benefit whites or blacks most.." He also equates efforts to include Blacks in the bounty that government provides to businesses to white peoples violent repression of Blacks legal right to vote. This is what passes for an unbiased opinion in the only major newspaper in the Black Mecca of the South.

For some strange reason, Black folks actually thought we had some power in this city.

I am a native Atlantan, and although it is true that you see a lot of Black people here who appear to be doing well for themselves, this is far from some Chocolate oasis where people of color come to be refreshed and replenished. Outside of a select clique, the prosperity never really trickled down to the general Negro population. Inner city schools were still a pure mess, the city infrastructure debilitated, cops still cracked Black heads just as hard and often.

But what's really important about this whole phenomena is that we are still stuck on stupid when it comes to power. Anytime power is used only to benefit the privileged few, the power is invariably diluted and ultimated lost because the masses will only put up with that for so long and because there is always another clique trying to usurp that power to reap the benefit for their privileged few. It's pathetic that Black folks still follow the flawed and terminally corrupt blueprint of the status quo. It seems to me that if we only want to replace whites in power so we can have Blacks abuse and misuse the same power.

clipped from www.ajc.com Black leaders concerned about losing power Published on: 06/07/07 It's rare when Atlanta politicians talk frankly, especially in public, about race and power. So, Mayor Shirley Franklin's candid assessment last week that African-Americans are in danger of losing their Atlanta political base marks an important threshold in the evolution of one of the first American cities to be governed almost exclusively by black leaders. MIKE KING MY OPINION

AN INFORMAL POLL

If you were given the choice between

(a) having all the money you needed to do everything you and your family could ever dream of doing for yourselves, or

(b) every person in the world having adequate food, clothing, shelter, health care, and educational opportunities

WHICH WOULD YOU CHOOSE?


Please don't say you would choose (A) and then do (B). That's not an option here. I know some of you may be tempted to adjust the scenario, or theorize that this hypothetical is flawed in some way, and that's cool too, but answer the question first before you fix it to better suit your purposes. I'll explain the rationale behind all this once I get some feedback.

UPDATE 06/07/2007: Thanks so much for the responses so far. At first I would have been happy to get 10 responses, but I did not realize how much these responses would help me with the project I am working on. I usually don't ask for things, but PLEASE, TAKE A QUICK MINUTE AND RESPOND TO THE POLL. I promise that everyone who wants to will be given a chance to expound at great length on any thoughts that you may have about this question.

C.R.E.A.M. is your reward for participating in this little experiment.

Criminal Justice System Is Just As Broken As The Healthcare System

I usually find nothing stimulating and very little even newsworthy in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. But somebody slipped a gem in today. THIS ARTICLE IS A MUST READ IF YOU EVER WANT TO UNDERSTAND WHY WE HAVE TO REFORM THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM BEFORE IT DESTROYS US.

If I thought I could get away with reprinting the entire article I would, but the synopsis is simple. Late 2006, Atlanta police officers illegally obtained a search warrant for the home of 90 year old Katheryn Johnston. Mrs. Johnston was killed in the subsequent drug raid, and the officers attempted to cover up their crimes by planting drugs and trying to get an informant to lie to back up their story. These officers have since pled guilty to their crimes and given information that their actions that day were basically standard operating procedure for them. This article chronicles the allegations of one such standard day in the life of the Atlanta narcotics unit. The same group of officers terrorized an Atlanta man and his family, and when he complained, the police responsible for investigating the police basically ignored the complaint. In fact they basically ignored 57 complaints against these officers. FIFTY-SEVEN COMPLAINTS

clipped from www.ajc.com "Never in my wildest dreams did I think anyone had done anything illegal," said W.X. Moss, the investigator who handled Howard's complaint. "No one had any idea they were doing what they were doing." From his experience, Moss said most complaints against officers were from people upset at having been arrested or inconvenienced by police officers doing their jobs. After Howard complained about the search, Moss took the officers' statements, prepared a summary of the differing accounts and kicked it up to superiors, who decided wrongdoing could not be proven and took no disciplinary action. In dozens of other cases, the Office of Professional Standards almost never upheld complaints against the same officers, APD records show. Over their careers, the six officers involved in both the Howard and Johnston searches have been investigated by internal affairs 57 times for complaints of excessive force, use of firearms, abuse of authority and acting unlawfully

This is a sweeping indictment of the entire law enforcement process, a process which is the foundation of the criminal justice system. Even the lame protestations that this type of activity is not the norm are refuted by the obvious lack of internal accountability.

It is absolutely essential that we recognize that this is not just some little problem with a few bad cops. This is a clear and glaring symptom of a of a diseased rotten to the core system. This article lays out a big piece of the problem at the law enforcement level, for reasons that I can only speculate, there is a significant segment of the law enforcement community engaged in unconstitutional, illegal, and immoral behavior and being protected by the remainder of the police force.

But not just protected by their fellow officers, but enabled by the prosecutors and judges that make up the remaining elements of the criminal justice system. (I intentionally do not include the corrections system, which while related to the criminal justice system is actually a for profit concentration camp system for black and brown men.) The judges sign off on these bogus warrants, and they have to realize at some point that they are just reading the same old rehashed statement. Either that or they just don't care, which is even worse.

When I worked as an undercover drug officer, I was trained to basically copy my warrants from the old warrants, use the same language just change the particulars, and the judge wouldn't ask any questions. And while I never even thought about getting a warrant illegally, it would have been simplicity itself to do so. It wasn't necessary for me; I was a young black male, from the streets, so I could fit in and get my own evidence. I wen tin with the informant. But the white cops couldn't do that, so they made fewer cases than I did. Their jealousy over this situation caused them to plant beer in my undercover car in attempt to get me put off the vice team. I have no problem believing they were capable of doing much worse to poor Black folks they didn't even know.

The prosecutors further enable police lawlessness by routinely accepting trumped up cases and evidence from these officers and then zealously prosecuting the usually poor, usually brown defendants, many of whom protest their innocence and the police malfeasance to anyone in authority who will listen, usually to no avail. These highly trained, intelligent legal minds perform their roles as cogs in a machine designed to chew up and spit out the young Black men of this society. And here again, their complicity is evident, and can only be attributed to blissful ignorance or intentional indifference.

At least I can see a profit motivation behind the health care issue. That's simply a case of follow the rich white man.

Prometheus6 located this glimpse into the back room of a white-folks only brainstorming session. The part we both found most interesting was the discussion of how the law is applied unequally to Blacks and poor people. they freely admit that it's common knowledge and openly practiced at the highest levels of government. Why is it so hard to believe that the entire system is rotten to the core?