Author Archives: Mike

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Dip In Some Crimes COVID Related, Has Nothing To Do With Tony Anderson…

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The pri­vate sec­tor says new cur­fews result­ing from COVID-19 could see some rever­sal of the recent eco­nom­ic gains and the recov­ery of jobs.
At the rate, Jamaica is going in mur­ders, road fatal­i­ties, and, covid death pret­ty soon there will be no short­age of jobs, there won’t be any­one to fill those jobs.
It is a del­i­cate bal­ance that the gov­ern­ment is forced to strike in try­ing to pre­vent spikes in COVID-19 cas­es while con­sid­er­ing the coun­try’s eco­nom­ic health. I am yet unsure whether forc­ing peo­ple to stay inside their homes from 8;00 is the right way to go?
The coun­try’s lead­er­ship will have to decide whether it is fea­si­ble to lock peo­ple in their homes under the penal­ty of jail to fight the virus, as against the per­cep­tion that these cur­fews are intend­ed to main­tain the drop in non-vio­lent crimes the coun­try has been witnessing.

A few days ago, the Minister of National Security Horace Chang and his deputy told local media that the prime strate­gies they have in place are work­ing, despite the spate of killings across the Island. Chang point­ed to police sta­tis­tics that show a dip in non-vio­lent offens­es like house­break­ing, in that data were few­er rapes and robberies.
Murders were con­ve­nient­ly left ut of Chang’s presentation.
I point­ed out that crime is not a polit­i­cal issue; I sup­port the admin­is­tra­tion in oth­er areas, not nation­al secu­ri­ty. To sug­gest that “we have to give Tony Anderson more time to set­tle in” is an insult to every cop from District Constable to Deputy Commissioner.
More than all, it is an insult to the Jamaican peo­ple as mur­ders con­tin­ue unabat­ed to tell us that you are renew­ing Anderson’s con­tract because he is mod­ern­iz­ing the force.
What does that mod­ern­iz­ing entail, that we are forced to accept the dai­ly mur­ders of our fam­i­ly mem­bers while some bureau­crat mod­ern­izes the force?
If “Tony Anderson” can­not walk and chew gum simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, he has no busi­ness being in the job he has. It is up to Horace Chang to mod­ern­ize the force; the police chief’s job is to ensure that crime is con­tained to a minimum.
In fact, Tony Anderson had no cre­den­tials in polic­ing, law, or any oth­er dis­ci­pline close­ly relat­ed to the task of being a chief con­sta­ble. He got the job out of bla­tant pol­i­tics, and we are being forced to accept him whether we like his work or not.

I hate to find myself mak­ing a case for the police high com­mand, and I do so in prin­ci­ple, not out of affec­tion, or respect for that club’s mem­bers. Nevertheless, it is a slap to their faces the way this admin­is­tra­tion treats them. No, no, the PNP is far worse, so in actu­al­i­ty, the police find them­selves between dumb and dumb­er, more arro­gant and most arrogant.
Many mem­bers of the police high com­mand are mere polit­i­cal lap­dogs to the cor­rupt lit­tle politi­cians; it is nauseating.
That is the rea­son Andrew Holness has no respect for them. For those rea­sons, we are ordered to “give Tony Anderson time”[sic].
No com­mis­sion­er of police to come up from the con­sta­ble rank would have received such grace and deference.
But this is hard­ly about mak­ing the case against Anderson; I have nev­er met him; as I have said in oth­er forums, the guy seems like a great guy. I may have had a Red Stripe with him, assum­ing Holness allows him to drink a beer.
I believe that he is over his head, although I do not believe any police com­mis­sion­er can suc­cess­ful­ly use the anti-crime strate­gies the gov­ern­ment is using.
You can­not work in cement with­out expe­ri­enc­ing cement dust. You can­not paint and not get some col­or on what­ev­er you are wear­ing as sur­face apparel.
The point is that police [can­not] work with the worst crim­i­nals with­out get­ting push­back about exces­sive force?
As a for­mer police offi­cer myself, I know the streets, I have worked them with some of the best cops, and I have seen some of the worst. All in all, police offi­cers need some lat­i­tude to do their jobs with­out the pha­lanx of know noth­ing opin­ion­at­ed Monday morn­ing quar­ter­backs pass­ing judg­ment with­out know­ing the facts of alle­ga­tions against them.

I am a crit­ic of abu­sive and overzeal­ous polic­ing; I have seen it in the United States, I have seen the destruc­tive con­se­quences of race-based polic­ing. And yet, in each case, that offi­cer sare under the micro­scope for unlaw­ful behav­ior; I wait for the facts to emerge before div­ing in against the officers.
As an offi­cer in Jamaica, I was shot doing my job, but I nev­er stopped believ­ing in the good­ness of the peo­ple I served, and I know the qual­i­ty of the infor­ma­tion they gave to me.
Our offi­cers must get back to build­ing rela­tion­ships with the com­mu­ni­ties they serve.
In every sit­u­a­tion in which a team fails, the focus [must]be on man­age­ment, not on the team. If the team is bad, it is the coach­es’ fault (com­mis­sion­er & lead­er­ship team) or the team owner,(Government).
Coaches and own­ers do not get to blame play­ers (police offi­cers) for fail­ing to win, ( con­tain & erad­i­cate crime).
Regardless of cir­cum­stances of bad out­comes, it is always the lead­er­ship that’s at fault.
This Administration can­not con­tin­ue to blame police offi­cers for crime surges and esca­la­tion. It is the job of the Government to find solu­tions and exe­cute those solutions.

Andrew Holness’s try­ing to appease for­eign nations like the United States and Canada, which have their own domes­tic ter­ror­ism prob­lems, is both fool­ish and counterproductive.
Bear in mind that it will be these same nations, includ­ing England, that will declare Jamaica a failed state when it serves their purposes.
Jamaican lead­ers are not quick to grasp the con­cept of inter­na­tion­al machi­na­tions and the way large, pow­er­ful nations manip­u­late small­er, less pow­er­ful coun­tries to do their will. Many Jamaicans have already had their US visas yanked; these events ought to be a warn­ing that pow­er­ful nations still believe it is their right to cur­tail the free trav­el of humans across the globe. They can place any­one on a ter­ror watch list, and that per­son will not be able to board a flight, guilty or innocent.
Nelson Mandela was on a ter­ror watch list.
Jamaica needs a raft of new laws to com­bat dan­ger­ous trans-nation­al crim­i­nal­i­ty. The coun­try needs an expand­ed judi­cia­ry. It requires an expand­ed pros­e­cu­tor’s office. The gov­ern­ment needs a bet­ter trained, bet­ter-paid police department.
It needs an inde­pen­dent police review board made up of intel­li­gent peo­ple, includ­ing for­mer police offi­cers who served in street units.
The coun­try needs the repeal of the INDECOM Act. We should all be clear that the INDECOM act was forced onto Bruce Golding by for­eign pow­ers, it must be repealed.
Only when we adopt these mea­sures will we begin to see a mea­sur­able reduc­tion in vio­lent crime, one that is sustainable.
lock­ing peo­ple in their homes all night is not the answer, sure if peo­ple are in their homes hard­ly any­one will break-in and if they are not on the streets they are less like­ly t be robbed or raped.
So there you have it dear min­is­ter Horace Chang the dip in those crimes is eas­i­ly explained it has noth­ing to do with any­thing your boy [Tony Anderson] is doing, it’s COVID.
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.Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

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America Will Not Find 17 Republican Senators To Protect The Constitution From Enemies Foreign And Domestic

Democrats are work­ing like hell to save the American Democracy. Still, it will be a tall order because one of the two major polit­i­cal par­ties does not believe in the demo­c­ra­t­ic process.
The last Democrat to occu­py the pres­i­den­cy, Barack Obama, spoke to the fun­da­men­tal ques­tion of truth a few years ago.
Speaking to Comedian and Talk show host David Letterman Obama said:
“One of the biggest chal­lenges we have to our democ­ra­cy is the degree to which we don’t share a com­mon base­line of facts,” Obama said. “What the Russians exploit­ed, but it was already here, is we are oper­at­ing in com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent infor­ma­tion uni­vers­es. If you watch Fox News, you are liv­ing on a dif­fer­ent plan­et than you are if you lis­ten to NPR.”
“At a cer­tain point,” he con­tin­ued, “You just live in a bub­ble, and I think that’s why our pol­i­tics are so polar­ized right now.”

The tri­al of Donald Trump will begin in the United States Senate on February 9th, 2021; it is prob­a­bly a safe bet to opine that Donald Trump will not be held account­able because out of a pos­si­ble 50 Republican Senators, the Country will not find 17 to stand by the oaths to pro­tect the Constitution from ene­mies for­eign and domes­tic. And so the vast major­i­ty of them will push a lie, .…. a lie that has no mer­it, a lie that has been debunked by legal schol­ars from both sides of the polit­i­cal spectrum.
That lie is that the sen­ate has no con­sti­tu­tion­al author­i­ty to try a pri­vate cit­i­zen. The pri­vate cit­i­zen being Donald Trump.
They will turn their eyes from the fact, the truth, the irrefutable real­i­ty that Donald Trump is no ordi­nary cit­i­zen, but a failed pres­i­dent retired by the American voters.
Donald Trump [was] impeached a sec­ond time for incit­ing a mob of insur­rec­tion­ists to storm the US Capitol on January 6th, hop­ing that he would be giv­en a sec­ond term after they over­turned the elec­tion of Joe Biden.
Impeachment arti­cles [were] filed while trump was in office. Then Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell delayed the tri­al by using a straw­man argu­ment that he would be unable to recon­vene the Senate, which was on recess.

So even though Trump was impeached as a sit­ting pres­i­dent, and even though his tri­al would have con­vened and prob­a­bly con­clud­ed while he was in office but for McConnell’s gam­bit, Republicans are still per­pet­u­at­ing the lie that a pres­i­dent who out of office can­not be impeached.
If that lie is allowed to stand, pres­i­dents will for­ev­er be allowed to com­mit all kinds of egre­gious crimes at the end of their terms, and there will be no mech­a­nism to hold them accountable.
If those trai­tors to their oaths are allowed to have their way through those lies, any future pres­i­dent who los­es an elec­tion can ginn up his/​her sup­port­ers to attack the Legislative branch of the Government and over­turn the elec­tions on his/​her behalf.
This is lit­er­al­ly the real­i­ty; it is exact­ly what’s at stake; it ought to gal­va­nize Republicans and Democrats alike in a band of pro­tec­tion against the American Democracy. Only that Republicans in the US House and Senate have signed over their feal­ty to [one man] who has demon­strat­ed that he has the abil­i­ty to ral­ly sup­port around the cause of white supremacy.

One out­raged writer con­tends, “no amount of evi­dence will con­vince these frauds to extri­cate their lips from Trump’s ass. ” In ref­er­ence to Senate Republicans.
It must be remem­bered that Republican US Senators who will vote against the Constitutionality of impeach­ing Donald Trump on a fraud­u­lent process argu­ment and who will vote not to con­vict on the mer­its of the case, will for­ev­er be attached to a failed pres­i­dent who sought to end 240 plus years of con­sti­tu­tion­al democracy.
They will for­ev­er be stuck with the stench of that treach­ery; they will for­ev­er wear the scar­let let­ter “T” for trai­tor, all in servile def­er­ence to a con-artist.
What aris­es from these real­i­ties is the sem­i­nal ques­tion of what is at stake for the white suprema­cist par­ty that the Republicans have final­ly mor­phed into.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

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Trump’s Second Impeachment Another Iteration Of Harm Republicans Will Inflict On The Nation…

In an arti­cle pub­lished today, I laid out how Republicans can purge them­selves of Donald Trump if they wish to.
I did so because I want­ed thinkers who are not polit­i­cal junkies like I am to under­stand bet­ter the ram­i­fi­ca­tions and nuances of how pol­i­tics work out­side of what the pun­dits tell you.
https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​t​r​u​m​p​-​d​o​e​s​-​n​o​t​-​h​o​l​d​-​r​e​p​u​b​l​i​c​a​n​s​-​t​o​-​r​a​n​s​o​m​-​t​h​e​y​-​n​e​e​d​-​h​i​m​-​t​o​-​g​a​l​v​a​n​i​z​e​-​h​a​t​e​-​i​n​-​a​m​e​r​i​ca/

The strat­e­gy I out­lined is designed to inform, not change the way Republican US Senators view their oblig­a­tions to the Constitution. They will not be swayed from nar­row par­ti­san­ship enough to be both­ered by pesky minu­tia like fideli­ty to the constitution.
Not when they can offer feal­ty, def­er­ence, rev­er­ence, and slav­ish devo­tion to Donald Trump.
If the smug look on Lindsay Graham’s stu­pid face, the nau­sea one feels at watch­ing the snivel­ing lit­tle Marco Rubio defend Trump, or the total loathing one feels at watch­ing the idi­ot­ic Rand Paul try to jus­ti­fy Trump’s trea­son are any­thing to go by, one should expect noth­ing after the tri­al, but anoth­er iter­a­tion of Trump hold­ing up a news­pa­per head­lined, “Trump acquit­ted.”

Andrew Johnson

Only three [pres­i­dents were ever impeached, of the 46 men who have held the office. One guy thought that his acquit­tal was a license to go on a crime spree. Democratic House pros­e­cu­tors said acquit­ting Trump would lead to a Trump crime spree, they were right. Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins retort­ed,” Trump had learned his les­son,” there goes Collins’s rep­u­ta­tion, to the extent she had any left.
Collins’s state­ment was an admis­sion that Trump was guilty, but Republicans do not believe that Republican Senators should con­vict a Republican president.
So yeah, “we know he is guilty, but we believe that in this case impeach­ment is the pun­ish­ment; there is no need for any oth­er remedy.”
Only that Trump learned no les­son; he saw his acquit­tal as a license to com­mit more crimes, and com­mit more crimes he did.

(1) Andrew Jackson, the 17th President of the United States (1865−1869), an old-fash­ioned south­ern Jacksonian Democrat of pro­nounced states’ rights views. Johnson replaced the assas­si­nat­ed Abraham Lincoln. His lenient Reconstruction poli­cies toward the South embit­tered the Radical Republicans in Congress and led to his polit­i­cal down­fall and his impeach­ment, though he was acquitted.

Richard Millhouse Nixon

(2) Richard Nixon would have been impeached, and poten­tial­ly con­vict­ed for his role in the Watergate scan­dal. Nixon resigned before he could be impeached.

Bill Clinton

(3) William (Bill) Jefferson Clinton, 42nd President of the United States. In 1998, as a result of per­son­al indis­cre­tions with a young woman White House intern, Clinton was the sec­ond U.S. pres­i­dent to be impeached by the House of Representatives. He was tried in the Senate and found not guilty of the charges brought against him.
This was a sham impeach­ment that nev­er should have happened.

Donald Trump

(4) Donald John Trump impeached for with­hold­ing aid to Ukraine to get polit­i­cal dirt on Joe Biden, whom he believed would be a for­mi­da­ble oppo­nent against him. The Republican Senate acquit­ted him despite the moun­tain of cred­i­ble evidence.
Nevertheless, Trump was sound­ly beat­en by Joe Biden in the pres­i­den­tial elec­tions held in 2020.
This impeach­ment should have result­ed in the con­vic­tion of Donald Trump and his expul­sion from the presidency.

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Evan Vucci/​AP/​Shutterstock (10358411u)

(5) Donald John Trump was impeached a sec­ond time for “incite­ment of insur­rec­tion” one week after the January 6 riots. Donald Trump should have been kicked out of the pres­i­den­cy the first time he was impeached, was spared by a Republican-con­trolled Senate that places feal­ty to the most cor­rupt man ever to occu­py the pres­i­den­cy, and per­haps the most cor­rupt to ever hold polit­i­cal office in the United States, over their oblig­a­tions to the constitution.
Senate Republicans will not con­vict this crim­i­nal; it will be just one more iter­a­tion of the dam­age this Republican par­ty is will­ing to inflict on the American nation.
Another Criminal Republican President, Richard Nixon, who orches­trat­ed a felony break-in of the Democratic Campaign Headquarters and stole doc­u­ments to fur­ther his ends, resigned before being kicked out of the presidency.
A few Republican Senators told Richard Nixon that it was time to leave because the votes were there to remove him.
Sounds famil­iar? It seems that the pat­tern of Republican pres­i­dents com­mit­ting felonies to win elec­tions is noth­ing new; nev­er­the­less, back then, a few of them had the char­ac­ter to remem­ber their oaths. The Russian col­lu­sion that has not been ful­ly inves­ti­gat­ed was one more attempt by Republicans to com­mit crimes to win the presidency.
Even to Nixon, (tricky Dick), who infa­mous­ly remarked, “I am no crook,” the stain of being impeached and con­vict­ed was not some­thing he craved.
It is almost a guar­an­tee that the shame­less, char­ac­ter­less, Donald Trump will find a way to spin the shame of impeach­ment, not once but twice, into a thing of honor.
And like the hap­less fol­low­ers of the naked Emperor, the Republicans in the Senate & House will trot behind him pre­tend­ing not to see the shame of the naked King.
What losers!!!

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

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“You Have To Give ‘Tony’ Anderson Time To Settle In. Wait, What?

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“You have to give ‘Tony’ Anderson time to set­tle in. If he does­n’t set­tle in, you are just going to appoint anoth­er com­mis­sion­er, and you do the same tra­di­tion­al things all over again.” [Horace Chang, Minister of National Security.
Ha, yes, so there you have it, the prob­lem with Jamaica’s crime prob­lem is, and has always been, the tra­di­tion­al ways of doing things, as far as this Administration is concerned.
Consequently, They threw out the bath­wa­ter, baby and all, then they real­ized, that the water was not the prob­lem, but not only did they throw out the water, they also dis­card­ed the baby in the process.
This shit is not fun­ny; it is as asi­nine as George Bush telling his FEMA direc­tor, “good job, Brownie,” even as peo­ple were on rooftops in Louisiana threat­ened by flood­wa­ters, beg­ging to be rescued.
Let me not relit­i­gate Andrew Honess’ BS; let me not give expo­sure to Delroy Chuck, and oth­ers who adopt­ed Carolyn Gomes’ lies, (you remem­ber her lies), about name brand cops!
Gomes built a name for her­self on dead police offi­cers’ blood and was award­ed nation­al hon­ors on that blood.
Andrew Holness came out of that anti-police world view, and so no one should be sur­prised that he placed Anthony Anderson over the JCF. He and his min­ions are now mov­ing the goal­post of account­abil­i­ty that was the barom­e­ter for pre­vi­ous Commissioners who came up through the ranks and told us that mur­der sta­tis­tics are not a true met­ric of suc­cess and fail­ure of crime management.
I can­not think of a more press­ing measurement. .

Horace Chang

How fuck­ing stu­pid do they real­ly think we are. Even if we ignore the obvi­ous friend­li­ness of,‘you have to give Tony Anderson time to set­tle in,’ bull­shit, we are still left with a Commissioner of Police on whose watch mur­ders have con­tin­ued to esca­late. In con­trast, his friends in the polit­i­cal are­na run pro­tec­tion for him by blow­ing smoke up our ass­es that esca­lat­ing homi­cide num­bers are not a true mea­sure­ment of fail­ure, because he is mod­ern­iz­ing the force.
Chang to the media.
“That’s why you sep­a­rate homi­cide from a lot of the real­i­ties. Homicides are a big prob­lem. For every com­mis­sion­er, we have put there and min­is­ter and Government, to deal effec­tive­ly with the gangs will take us a lit­tle while. All I can say to the pub­lic is that the things that we are doing, I am con­fi­dent that they can work, but it will not hap­pen in three years. We should see some reduc­tion in the num­bers in the next 18 months, but three years is a short time to deal with many of the third-gen­er­a­tion gangs.”
I won­der how this new nar­ra­tive plays with peo­ple like George Quallo, and oth­ers who were pil­lo­ried for the ris­ing crime even though they were not giv­en half the resources that have been made avail­able to Antony Anderson.
I find it inter­est­ing that this nar­ra­tive is being pushed after our arti­cle on January 28th. We asked salient ques­tions as to why Anderson still has a job even as vio­lent crimes con­tin­ue to increase?

https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​3​5​0​-​i​n​c​r​e​a​s​e​-​i​n​-​m​u​r​d​e​r​s​-​i​n​-​s​t​-​j​a​m​e​s​-​w​h​e​r​e​-​a​r​e​-​t​h​e​-​c​a​l​l​s​-​t​o​-​f​i​r​e​-​a​n​t​o​n​y​-​a​n​d​e​r​s​on/

In that arti­cle, linked above, we said the following.
It is no won­der then that since the start of 2021, the Parish of Saint James has seen an increase of 350 per­cent in mur­ders against the pre­vi­ous year.
Saint James may be expe­ri­enc­ing the largest increase in vio­lent crime, but it is not the only Parish expe­ri­enc­ing a surge in vio­lence. The shock­ing uptick of mur­ders in the Island’s tourism mec­ca has gone on unabat­ed; it is a pre­cise met­ric of the country’s fail­ure to get its arms around this crime monster.
Pride and arro­gance will cause us to lose this once pearl of the Caribbean; igno­rance, and pre­tense are citadels of defense against the strate­gies that would inex­orably begin to turn the hell­ish crime mon­ster around.
Like pour­ing water into a bas­ket, they con­tin­ue to nib­ble around the edges. They con­tin­ue to admin­is­ter band-aids to gun­shot wounds, while con­sol­ing the casu­al­ty with plat­i­tudes, even as he bleeds to death.
Braggadocio’s pre-writ­ten state­ments of resolve, a reac­tionary show of force, only to pull back because of its unsus­tain­abil­i­ty, are noth­ing if not comical.

Antony Anderson

A week lat­er, the Nation’s Deputy Prime Minister/​Minister of National Security and his Deputy trots out a nar­ra­tive sup­port­ing Anderson, one that dis­torts the killings’ real­i­ty while point­ing to low­er num­bers in non-vio­lent offences, as a shiny thing for the local media to chase. To the local medi­a’s dis­cred­it, they did not have the courage to hold the gov­ern­ment account­able based on the facts we laid out.
Horace Chang’s con­stituen­cy sits smack dab in the mid­dle of Saint James, which over the years has become Jamaica’s most vio­lent parish.
It is rep­re­hen­si­ble that Chang, who now holds the nation­al secu­ri­ty port­fo­lio and should not have been appoint­ed to head that min­istry, much less con­tin­ue with this lev­el of fail­ure, now finds him­self mak­ing excus­es and ratio­nal­iz­ing away the admin­is­tra­tion’s fail­ures on the issue of crime.
On the one hand, sup­pli­cants to the sta­tus quo argue that the Government and the Police com­mis­sion­er can­not be held account­able for mur­ders, and in par­tic­u­lar, mur­ders that emanate from domes­tic disputes.
If that is true, then Chang’s deputy Matthew Samuda’s state­ments are to be treat­ed the same way we treat the rest of our garbage. Samuda argued; that under Major General Anderson’s stew­ard­ship, lar­ce­ny cas­es have dropped by 70 per­cent, rob­bery 50 per­cent, break-ins 30 per­cent, rape over 40 per­cent, and aggra­vat­ed assault cas­es have dropped by over 50 percent.

Notice that there is no talk about the esca­lat­ing mur­der sta­tis­tics? There is a rea­son for that, and as I have said in pre­vi­ous arti­cles, and the video above, from time to time, events in Jamaica lead to sharp drops in cer­tain cat­e­gories of crimes, that the police can­not claim cred­it for.
In the Youtube video above done in 2019, I made the very same case against the deflec­tions and dis­trac­tions that the Government was engag­ing in, even as it pur­sued fail­ing and failed strate­gies that were bear­ing no fruits, but were result­ing in more and more Jamaicans being killed, some need­less­ly, oth­ers as a direct con­se­quence of the gov­ern­men­t’s incompetence,stubbornness and arrogance.
As far as I know, those drops have nev­er been stud­ied, but world cup soc­cer has always been one such event when even heart­less crim­i­nals take a break from their ghoul­ish practices.
This down­turn in non-vio­lent offens­es, and rapes may be attrib­uted to the COVID-19 out­break that has sig­nif­i­cant­ly changed the way peo­ple operate.
For exam­ple, as a detec­tive sta­tioned at Constant Spring, I real­ized that house­break­ings were rife in Havendale Saint Andrew for the sim­ple rea­son that Havendale was a beau­ti­ful bed­room com­mu­ni­ty of mid­dle-class peo­ple who left their homes to go out to work.
These folks did not have helpers, so their homes were prime targets.
On the con­trary, the more upscale com­mu­ni­ties of Norbrook and Cherry Gardens had rob­beries. Those homes had helpers, so the preda­tors would pounce on house­hold helpers when they ven­tured out­side to com­plete a task. 

I am not a crim­i­nol­o­gist; it is up to the experts to fer­ret the truth that lies deeply buried in the data. But let us not be fooled by bureau­crats and politi­cians who would try to use num­bers to deceive and mislead.
If Horace Chang has a strate­gic plan that deliv­ered those low­er num­bers in non-vio­lent crimes, let us see them.
In fact, we will be mak­ing a for­mal request come Monday, February 8th to the Ministry of National Security and the Office of the Commissioner of Police for evi­dence of those strate­gies that led to those reductions.
All law-abid­ing Jamaicans want a crime-free soci­ety, but if it comes down to hav­ing few­er break-ins and rob­beries against few­er mur­ders, I believe the major­i­ty of the peo­ple would pre­fer few­er killings.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

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Trump Does Not Hold Republicans To Ransom, They Need Him To Galvanize Hate In America…

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Donald Trump’s sup­posed hold on the repub­li­can par­ty is only as strong as long as he remains a viable can­di­date to run for office again as a pres­i­den­tial candidate.
It makes sense that as the Republican pres­i­dent who was able to turn out the most votes ever, Republican office­hold­ers would be ter­ri­fied of his abil­i­ty to run his own lack­eys to the right of them. Nevertheless, that the­o­ry bears some examining.
Sure an argu­ment can be made about his abil­i­ty to play king­mak­er still, even if he is con­vict­ed and is ren­dered unable to hold fed­er­al office ever again.
That idea pre­sup­pos­es that Trump ever did any­thing unless he can grift from it. It is a stretch to believe that Donald Trump would extend him­self in any effort that would not include the perks of liv­ing in the white house, fly­ing air force one, and enjoy­ing the trap­pings of pow­er the pres­i­den­cy affords.
It is almost a sure­ty that Donald Trump would have no inter­est in pol­i­tics out­side of the pos­si­bil­i­ty of enrich­ing him­self.
Here’s a nov­el idea; Senate Republicans can rid them­selves of him once and for all if every Republican Senator votes to con­vict Trump in the upcom­ing sen­ate trials.

UNITED STATES — JANUARY 6: Trump sup­port­ers take over the Capitol steps on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress works to cer­ti­fy the elec­toral col­lege votes. (Photo By Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

It is alleged that some of them were opposed to what he was doing to the coun­try while he was in the white house. I did not believe any of that argu­ment put forth by the main­stream media.
Donald Trump com­mit­ted crimes against the coun­try when he decid­ed to use aid to Ukraine to lever­age oppo­si­tion research data on Joe Biden.
Republican Senators saw the full extent of Trump’s crimes, not just in the Ukraine mat­ter but in the still undis­closed Russian col­lu­sion matter.
Republican Senators knew the extent of Trump’s crimes, and if they did not, they did not deserve to be in the posi­tions of pow­er they are.
They had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to uphold the oaths they took to uphold the Constitution. They did not, only Senator Mitt Romney of Utah vot­ed to con­vict the clear­ly crim­i­nal Donald Trump, they all chose polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy over their oblig­a­tions to the constitution.

What’s the harm to Republicans if Senators respect their oaths to the Constitution and vote to con­vict a pres­i­dent that tried to over­throw the gov­ern­ment and install him­self pres­i­dent for life?
Are Republican vot­ers going to pri­ma­ry all 50 sen­a­tors? Is that what the servile US Republican Senator from South Carolina means will destroy the par­ty if they push Donald Trump out?
Yes, that is the fear; they fear that Donald Trump would encour­age his MAGA army not to sup­port elect­ed offi­cials who do not bow down to him, there­by split­ting the Republican par­ty apart.
And so folks like Lindsay Graham would rather sup­port a despot­ic lying sedi­tion­ist that cede pow­er to the oth­er par­ty while his par­ty rebuilds free from the stench of Trump.
Even if Trump had enough clout to man­age a pri­ma­ry against the Republican sen­a­tors fac­ing the elec­torate in 22, there is zero evi­dence that the lack­eys he sup­ports could mount a cred­i­ble chal­lenge to those sen­a­tors anyway.

Donald Trump’s name would be in those elec­tions, hav­ing backed those right-wing alter­na­tives even though his name would not be on the bal­lots, and so, if and when they fail, it would be Trump who fails, again. It will be the final death blow to the lie being per­pet­u­at­ed about his sup­posed stran­gle­hold on the party.
Donald Trump lost the house, the sen­ate, the white house; let us not for­get that he could not save Loffler and Perdue in Georgia, a for­mer­ly ruby-red state, even though he cam­paigned for them.
All in all, Donald Trump is a los­er who could not make it, so he faked it, and now the world sees him for the big fat los­er he is.
Republican Senators can do two things right in the upcom­ing impeach­ment trials.
♦ Vote to con­vict a crim­i­nal who stirred up race hatred in the coun­try, incit­ed trai­tors to the coun­try to over­throw the Government on his behalf, result­ing in police offi­cers’ death.
♦ Vote to con­vict, there­by ensur­ing that he can no longer hold Federal office ever again, remov­ing what­ev­er hold he may have on the party.
♦ Or for­ev­er be iden­ti­fied as sup­port­ers of QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, lies, dis­in­for­ma­tion, and being the par­ty that sup­port­ed and val­i­dat­ed an attempt to over­throw the American democracy.
In this sec­ond impeach­ment tri­al, Republican Senators have a sec­ond oppor­tu­ni­ty to get it right, once and for all, they have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to send a clear and unequiv­o­cal mes­sage to Donald Trump and his insur­rec­tion­ist sup­port­ers, take back their par­ty, of for­ev­er bear the stain and the stench for pos­ter­i­ty, as the men and women who sup­port­ed Donald Trump’s attacks on America.
Republicans in the House have already demon­strat­ed that they are ful­ly a QAnon cau­cus. The Senate’s vote on Trump’s sec­ond impeach­ment will con­firm for the world that the Republican par­ty is ful­ly the QAnon polit­i­cal party.
It fol­lows that this par­ty should nev­er be trust­ed with polit­i­cal pow­er, ever again.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

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A Race War Evident Long Before The Capitol Siege

AARON MORRISON
Fri, February 5, 2021, 10:14 AMA war rages on in America, and it didn’t begin with Donald Trump or the assault on the Capitol.

It start­ed with slav­ery and nev­er end­ed, through lynch­ings and vot­er sup­pres­sion, the snarling attack dogs of Bull Connor and the insid­i­ous account­ing of redlining.

Today’s bat­tles in the race war are waged by legions of white peo­ple in the thrall of stereo­types, lies and con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries that don’t just exist for reclus­es on some dark cor­ner of the internet.

People like the mur­der­er who fatal­ly shot nine Black parish­ioners at a church in South Carolina, telling detec­tives that Black peo­ple were tak­ing over the coun­try and rap­ing white women. And the shoot­er who killed 23 and wound­ed 23 oth­ers at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas — tar­get­ing Mexicans, author­i­ties say, because he believed they were invad­ing the coun­try to vote for Democrats.

And the riotous mob, rife with white suprema­cists, that bought in when Trump and oth­ers insist­ed false­ly that the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion was stolen, most­ly in areas where peo­ple of col­or live and vote.

For a very long time, civ­il rights lead­ers, his­to­ri­ans and experts on extrem­ism say, many white Americans and elect­ed lead­ers have failed to acknowl­edge that this war of white aggres­sion was real, even as the bod­ies of inno­cent peo­ple piled up.

Racist notions about peo­ple of col­or, immi­grants and politi­cians have been giv­en main­stream media plat­forms, are rep­re­sent­ed in stat­ues and sym­bols to slave­hold­ers and seg­re­ga­tion­ists, and helped dem­a­gogues win elec­tions to high office.

The result? A crit­i­cal mass of white peo­ple fears that mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics and the equi­table dis­tri­b­u­tion of pow­er spell their obso­les­cence, era­sure and sub­ju­ga­tion. And that fear, often exploit­ed by those in pow­er, has proven again and again to be among the most lethal threats to non­white Americans, accord­ing to racial jus­tice advocates.

So how does the nation begin address­ing the war of white aggres­sion after count­less missed opportunities?

The Rev. William Barber II, a civ­il rights leader and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, a mul­tira­cial coali­tion that aims to lift mil­lions out of pover­ty and oppres­sion, said it starts with col­lec­tive­ly refus­ing to have polit­i­cal debates root­ed in lies and racist tropes.

“White suprema­cy, though it may be tar­get­ed at Black peo­ple, is ulti­mate­ly against democ­ra­cy itself,” Barber told The Associated Press. “The col­lat­er­al dam­age, when you keep unleash­ing the lies, sow the wind and pour this poi­son into the veins of peo­ple, is the sys­tem becomes so sep­tic that vio­lence spews out of it.”

After tak­ing the oath of office on the very plat­form that some in the mob scaled to breach the Capitol, President Joe Biden acknowl­edged the dan­ger of doing noth­ing about sys­temic racism and vio­lence born of hate.

“A cry for racial jus­tice some 400 years in the mak­ing moves us,” he said. “A cry that can’t be any more des­per­ate or any more clear. And now a rise of polit­i­cal extrem­ism, white suprema­cy, domes­tic ter­ror­ism that we must con­front and we will defeat.”

Historically, white suprema­cy has advanced in lock­step with fears of Black polit­i­cal pow­er. After the Civil War, when for­mer­ly enslaved peo­ple got the right to vote and hold office, the white response includ­ed Jim Crow seg­re­ga­tion, vot­er sup­pres­sion and oppres­sion through law enforcement.

The Jan. 6 Capitol riot occurred the same day that Georgia declared the win­ners of its runoff elec­tions — Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the first Black and Jewish can­di­dates the Southern state had ever sent to the U.S. Senate. And it hap­pened as Inauguration Day approached for Kamala Harris, the first Black and South Asian per­son sworn to serve as vice president.

It should not go unnot­ed that at least one large Confederate flag was waved by the Capitol trespassers.

To many in that most­ly white mob, non­white Americans wield­ed an incon­ceiv­able amount of polit­i­cal influ­ence in the last elec­tion, threat­en­ing the pri­ma­cy of white rule. When white suprema­cism is chal­lenged, its defend­ers delib­er­ate­ly sow divi­sion in ser­vice to the old order, Barber said.

“This kind of mob vio­lence, in reac­tion to Black, brown and white peo­ple com­ing togeth­er and vot­ing to move the nation for­ward in pro­gres­sive ways, has always been the back­lash,” he said.

Oren Segal, vice pres­i­dent of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said address­ing the war of white aggres­sion also requires that we stop using benign terms like “cul­ture war” to describe vio­lence that lit­er­al­ly kills Americans.

“All some­body had to do was actu­al­ly look at the dead bod­ies and the killers to real­ize that the threat of domes­tic white suprema­cist vio­lence has been with us for quite a while,” Segal said.

According to the ADL, which tracks hate vio­lence, rough­ly 74% of extrem­ists who com­mit­ted homi­cides in the U.S. between 2010 and 2019 were right-wing extrem­ists, and a major­i­ty of those were white supremacists.

On Monday, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has tracked racism, xeno­pho­bia and zealotry since 1990, said the num­ber of active hate groups decreased last year by 11%. The decrease is due, in part, to a splin­ter­ing of white suprema­cist and neo-Nazi groups and a migra­tion to social media plat­forms and their use of encrypt­ed apps. Still, the law cen­ter said, the lev­el of hatred and big­otry in America, as well as the threat of domes­tic ter­ror­ism by hate groups, has not diminished.

Christian Picciolini, a for­mer far-right extrem­ist who found­ed the derad­i­cal­iza­tion group Free Radicals Project, said it has become easy to oth­er­ize and ignore white peo­ple who sup­port far-right move­ments or join hate groups. But for too long, he said, that has been part of a col­lec­tive denial among white peo­ple that a real-world, vio­lent threat exists.

“We have to under­stand that, if we want to pre­vent this in the future, we have to exam­ine our his­to­ry — 400 years of what I would clas­si­fy as our nation’s pot­holes,” said Picciolini, who last year released the anti-extrem­ist book “Breaking Hate.”

Malcolm Graham, a for­mer state sen­a­tor in North Carolina, firm­ly believes that America’s fail­ure to con­front white suprema­cism cost the life of his old­er sis­ter, Cynthia Graham-Hurd. She was among the nine killed in 2015 dur­ing a Bible study meet­ing at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.

The mas­sacre “was a defin­ing moment,” Graham said. But that moment was wast­ed when offi­cials and media overem­pha­sized that the vic­tims’ fam­i­lies for­gave the killer, instead of inves­ti­gat­ing his path to extrem­ism, he said.

“We nev­er real­ly dealt with what occurred in Charleston, because every­body was so quick to want to clean it up,” said Graham, who now serves on the Charlotte City Council.

Cynthia Graham-Hurd, a beloved pub­lic librar­i­an who was just shy of her 55th birth­day, died hud­dled under a desk in the church’s fel­low­ship hall. She had been shot at least a half-dozen times.

The gun­man, Dylann Roof, com­mit­ted the nation’s dead­liest act of anti-Black domes­tic ter­ror­ism since the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bomb­ing that killed four girls at a Black church in Alabama. During clos­ing argu­ments at Roof’s tri­al, a fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor said the 22-year-old avowed white suprema­cist intend­ed to start a war between the races.

His actions instead sparked a nation­al reck­on­ing over white suprema­cist iconog­ra­phy, includ­ing the Confederate bat­tle flag, mon­u­ments and stat­ues that appeared in pho­tographs and draw­ings inves­ti­ga­tors found among Roof’s belongings.

In July 2015, for­mer Republican Gov. Nikki Haley, who is Indian American, signed leg­is­la­tion per­ma­nent­ly low­er­ing the Confederate bat­tle flag that flew over South Carolina’s Capitol. Many saw it as a sign that white Americans were awak­en­ing to their com­plic­i­ty and accept­ed their oblig­a­tion to address dis­pro­por­tion­ate white con­trol of gov­ern­ment, econ­o­my and media.

Two years after the Charleston mas­sacre, in 2017, white suprema­cists, the Proud Boys and neo-Nazis held a so-called “Unite the Right″ ral­ly in Charlottesville, Virginia. The event was staged in oppo­si­tion to the pro­posed removal of a Confederate mon­u­ment from a pub­lic park. Heather Heyer, a white coun­ter­pro­test­er, died in an attack car­ried out by a rallygoer.

Trump — who, just one day before Roof car­ried out his mur­ders, launched his White House bid by decry­ing Mexican migrants as rapists and drug deal­ers — infa­mous­ly said there were “fine peo­ple” among the racist Charlottesville ral­ly participants.

There have been moments when it seemed like a reck­on­ing with racism was at hand. After the May 25 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, white peo­ple joined protests across the nation.

The SPLC said 111 Confederate mon­u­ments and oth­er white suprema­cist sym­bols have been removed, relo­cat­ed or renamed since Floyd’s death. But near­ly 1,800 Confederate sym­bols, includ­ing 725 mon­u­ments, remained on pub­lic land as of December.

“Confederate sym­bols are not relics of the past – they are liv­ing sym­bols of white suprema­cy,” SPLC chief of staff Lecia Brooks said.

“As evi­denced by the events of Jan. 6, the Confederate flag is just one of many tools still used to reassert white suprema­cist ideals,” she told the AP. “These sym­bols did not go up overnight and the pow­er they hold — specif­i­cal­ly in the South — will not be over­come if we con­tin­ue to stay silent.”

The SPLC has called for fed­er­al law enforce­ment agen­cies to devote more resources to track­ing and pros­e­cut­ing hate vio­lence and bias inci­dents, as well as enact­ing leg­is­la­tion that shifts fund­ing away from pun­ish­ment mod­els and toward pre­vent­ing vio­lent extrem­ism. Picciolini, the for­mer extrem­ist, said pre­ven­tion is essen­tial to derad­i­cal­iz­ing peo­ple who pose domes­tic ter­ror threats.

“The way that I work with peo­ple to dis­en­gage them from extrem­ism is to not real­ly debate them ide­o­log­i­cal­ly,” he said. “I think that’s the same way America has to deal with this prob­lem. We have to look back at our his­tor­i­cal pot­holes and final­ly accept them and address them, (and) embrace the peo­ple who’ve been harmed along the way, to help shape our future together.”

For Graham, who lost his sis­ter in the Mother Emanuel shoot­ing, the onus isn’t on Black peo­ple to begin nego­ti­at­ing a truce in the race war. Accountability must come first, he said.

“I think white folks need to have a town hall meet­ing, and I think they need to start call­ing their peo­ple out,” Graham said. “They have to be able to point a fin­ger at folks that look like them, and point them out at their din­ner table, at their church­es, at their places of employment.”

Those town halls can be spaces for heal­ing between the races, said La June Montgomery Tabron, pres­i­dent and CEO of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, a phil­an­thropic organization.

“At the root of heal­ing is truth-telling,” said Tabron, whose orga­ni­za­tion has host­ed a nation­al day of racial heal­ing for sev­er­al years. “What we know in our work is that, for chil­dren to thrive in the future, they need a coun­try, a nation and a world where there is equity.”

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When The World’s Oldest Democracy Is No Longer The Standard Bearer Of Democracy…

Hyperpartisanship is not a thing, only in Jamaica. In the pow­er­ful United States, it is per­va­sive, the sound you hear is the suck­ing sounds of the last dol­lars being sucked from the pock­ets of the mid­dle-class, into the accounts of the oli­garchs at the very top.
It hap­pens so fast these days, that after only a mat­ter of a few years, Jeff Bezos is able to step down from the day to day run­ning of pow­er­house mar­ket­place Amazon, and yes, Jeff Bezos is worth a stag­ger­ing $191.8B.
In America, the vast major­i­ty of poor whites vote against their inter­est, against health care, against pro­grams that direct­ly ben­e­fit them…just so that the peo­ple at the very bot­tom, the peo­ple they despise, do not have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to climb out of the dan­ger­ous quick­sand of poverty.
It comes as no sur­prise that the poor­est states are states that vote Republican.
According to (Politifact)Census data also show that 9 of the 10 states with the low­est medi­an house­hold income were Red: Mississippi, Arkansas, West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oklahoma. Nine (9) of the 10 states with the low­est medi­an fam­i­ly income were Red: Mississippi, Arkansas, West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and South Carolina.
The only Blue state on each list: New Mexico.

By the way, 9 of the 10 states with the high­est per-per­son income vot­ed Blue in the 2012 pres­i­den­tial race: Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Virginia, and Washington. The only Red state on the list: Alaska. Whether you look at per-per­son, house­hold, or fam­i­ly income, nine out of the ten poor­est states vot­ed Republican in the last four pres­i­den­tial elections.
According to the data com­ing from Politifact, it is clear that many white vot­ers go into the vot­ing booths and cast bal­lots against their finan­cial interests.
In many of those states, vot­ers vote repub­li­can straight-tick­et for decades, regard­less of the regres­sive poli­cies put for­ward by Republicans, i.e., trick­le-down eco­nom­ics, what Herbert Walker Bush famous­ly labeled voodoo eco­nom­ics.
Voters in those states are not vot­ing for their eco­nom­ic inter­ests as the main­stream media has tried to fool us into believ­ing for decades. They are vot­ing for their whiteness.
That group was labeled ‘white work­ing-class,’ for a while vac­il­lat­ed between the two polit­i­cal par­ties, and they were tout­ed as a group of vot­ers who had eco­nom­ic anxieties.
Barack Obama’s Presidency peeled back the scab to the raw nature of their racism. Even as they ben­e­fit­ted from the Affordable care Act Obama cham­pi­oned, many of those genius­es were inter­viewed and record­ed telling the press they did not want Obama-care; they want­ed to keep their afford­able care act.
Yup, genius.

In my native Jamaica, hyper-par­ti­san­ship is not about race; but, about deeply entrenched polar­ized ideas about what Government should be, much like the Republicans and Democrats.
Blinkered par­ti­san­ship allows polit­i­cal par­ties of both sides to get away with incom­pe­tence and cor­rup­tion because their sup­port­ers engage in what-about-ism in defense of their par­ty to the detri­ment of the greater good.
Jamaicans have come a long way from the days of mur­der­ing each oth­er and burn­ing their prop­er­ty over polit­i­cal differences.
As a small fledg­ling democ­ra­cy, Jamaicans deserve much praise, not just for fol­low­ing a path toward Democracy since the Manley flir­ta­tion with auto­crat­ic rule in the 1970s, in which he all but locked up the polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion and declared a state of nation­al emergency.
To its cred­it, the PNP has not attempt­ed to go down that path since Jamaicans showed Manley that they would not stand for that kind of gov­er­nance, in an embar­rass­ing drub­bing at the polls in 1980.
Ever the for­giv­ing peo­ple, Jamaicans gave Manley a sec­ond chance in 88; he nev­er attempt­ed that exper­i­ment again. ill­ness forced Michael Manley from the polit­i­cal stage and his deputy Percival James Patterson took over.
After Manley left, the par­ty retained con­trol for an unprece­dent­ed 22-years. A peri­od of unprece­dent­ed dis­as­ter for Jamaica, both on the eco­nom­ic and nation­al secu­ri­ty fronts.
Nevertheless, the PNP nev­er again attempt­ed auto­crat­ic rule. The Achilles heels of the PNP have since been klep­toc­ra­cy, cor­rup­tion & incompetence.

As tiny Jamaica matures and begins to be a bea­con for elec­toral integri­ty, her pow­er­ful neigh­bor to the north has been hav­ing grave chal­lenges with the con­cept of Democratic gov­er­nance. The idea of a small gov­ern­ment-run by ‘we the peo­ple’ is no longer sacro­sanct to one of the two polit­i­cal parties.
It is not the two polit­i­cal par­ties behind the prob­lems in the United States. Despite its faults and short­com­ings, the Democratic par­ty has held true to the prin­ci­ples of demo­c­ra­t­ic governance.
The Republican par­ty jet­ti­soned what­ev­er ide­al­is­tic prin­ci­ples of Democracy it may have har­bored, out of fear that it will not be able to com­pete nation­al­ly in short order.
The prob­lem for the repub­li­can par­ty, dat­ing back to the Nixon era, and maybe even beyond, is that it allowed itself to become the par­ty of white nationalists.
A cred­i­ble argu­ment can be made that the Republican par­ty ceased being the so-called par­ty of Lincoln, (what­ev­er that means), from as far back as the sign­ing of the land­mark 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 vot­ing Rights Act that followed.
White Nationalists, not want­i­ng auton­o­my for Black peo­ple, ran away from the Democratic par­ty of then-pres­i­dent Lyndon Baines Johnson and sought refuge with the Republicans.
Some peo­ple argue that the Republican par­ty could stop being the racists’ par­ty, as if the par­ty is sep­a­rate from the peo­ple in it.
What would change the par­a­digm is the for­ma­tion of a third polit­i­cal par­ty. The thing that has now prompt­ed pan­ic among Republicans and has result­ed in scores of vot­er-sup­pres­sion bills emerg­ing in Republican-run Legislatures around the coun­try, is that even with the racist-in chief on the bal­lot in 2020, and even after unprece­dent­ed num­bers of votes for the Republican par­ty, they still lost the pop­u­lar and the elec­toral col­lege vote.
Without the elec­toral col­lege, the Republican par­ty would have been a dead par­ty for well over two decades.

The intrin­sic nature of white­ness and what it rep­re­sents in the American body politic has pre­vent­ed the Republican par­ty from chang­ing course. I find it laugh­able that left-wing tele­vi­sion talk­ing heads con­tin­ue to wring their hands in despair, and won­der when the Republican par­ty will turn and become a big-tent par­ty rep­re­sent­ing every­one in America.
The par­ty long purged mod­er­ates, (RINOS) Republicans in name only, leav­ing a hard-core cadre of white supremacists.
They now oper­ate as the Republican par­ty, but it is for all intents and pur­pos­es, the par­ty of Donald Trump and, by exten­sion, the Q Anon par­ty.
An Elephant can­not cease being an Elephant; it is what it is, so the coun­try is forced to deal with what is now the Q‑Anon par­ty, one that does not believe in Democracy or fair play.
The make­up of the insur­rec­tion­ist crowd that attacked the Capitol build­ing on January 6th, is a tes­ta­ment to that fact.
In that crowd of anti-democ­ra­cy racists, were busi­ness peo­ple, real estate agents, cops, sol­diers, lawyers, doc­tors, and a who is who of the American society.
What that com­bustible crowd that attacked the Capitol build­ing on January 6th had in com­mon, was the sin­gu­lar defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic called white­ness. A sense of enti­tle­ment that they own America, that they have the God-giv­en right to deter­mine the direc­tion the coun­try takes, regard­less of the wish­es of the majority.

It is a tox­ic arro­gance from the first white set­tlers who came and mur­dered every­one in sight, took what they wanted.
All these hun­dreds of years lat­er, these nean­derthal mis­cre­ants still believe that they and they alone have a right to where they stand. Never mind the mas­sacre of the native peo­ples. Never mind the enslave­ment of African peo­ple, some of whom they came and saw. Never mind the per­pet­u­al crimes against human­i­ty they per­pe­trat­ed on every­one that was­n’t pale and devoid of melanin. Still today, they fun­da­men­tal­ly believe that they have a right to the land they stole, and all that’s in it.
Even with the unfair advan­tages, Republicans enjoy (a) two United States Senators per state that dis­en­fran­chis­es tens of mil­lions of peo­ple, except rough­ly 18 mil­lion. (b) an elec­toral col­lege that ignores the direct will of the peo­ple, and gives them the pow­er to poten­tial­ly cor­rupt par­ty offi­cials, ©, grotesque­ly ger­ry­man­dered con­gres­sion­al dis­tricts that chose their vot­ers, rather than vot­ers choos­ing their elect­ed representatives,(d) bla­tant vot­er sup­pres­sion, laws, and prac­tices. Republicans can only win elec­tions when they cheat.
It fol­lows that the Trump strat­e­gy of pro­ject­ing onto the Democrats what he pulled out all the stops to achieve, cheat­ing.….. found favor with this group of dis­hon­est, insuf­fer­able people…
They are in the minor­i­ty; their sup­port­ers are some of the wealth­i­est peo­ple on the plan­et, and some are just dumb racists. Their cause is despi­ca­ble and unjust, but unless every stake­hold­er, every vot­er ful­ly real­izes what’s at stake and get up and vote, Democracy in America will be some­thing chil­dren read about on what­ev­er they will be read­ing from a hun­dred years from now.
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.Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.

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The Qanon Party, Formerly House Republicans

Liz Cheney sur­vived being boot­ed from her num­ber 3 lead­er­ship spot in the Qanon par­ty, for­mer­ly known as the Republicans.
I post­ed on my social media page this evening the fol­low­ing statement.
Quote: “I want you all to think on this, the Republican cau­cus in the house is tak­ing a secret vote on whether Liz Cheney should keep her post. Cheney stood up for Democracy.
Not on whether to expel Marjorie Taylor Greene”.
That was the point, I thought. Not that Liz Cheney even­tu­al­ly sur­vived and will keep her lead­er­ship post in a secret bal­lot, but Cheney was being forced to run the gaunt­let for stand­ing up for truth and her oath to the Republic.
While the Qanon right-wing cau­cus in con­gress gave Marjorie Green a stand­ing ovation.
I shed no tears that Liz Cheney was forced to run the gaunt­let; she is a neo-con whose pol­i­tics should scare any ratio­nal American.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

The impor­tant thing in this lat­est iter­a­tion of Marjorie Green’s shit-show, is that the speak­er of the house, the great Nancy Pelosi, will sched­ule a vote on Thursday, February 4th, that vote will decide whether Marjorie Green gets to sit on the House’s edu­ca­tion and bud­get committees.
The real laugh about this solemn vote is that the trai­tor­ous Qanon right-wing par­ty will have to vote pub­licly, with no secret bal­lot. Pelosi will place them on the record hav­ing to either con­demn her hate and luna­cy with a vote of yes to remove her. Risk being run out of the par­ty by the Trump insur­rec­tion­ist mob, or vote no and for­ev­er be iden­ti­fied as Qanon mem­bers of the house. A beau­ti­ful choice for me if you ask me.

Image result for kevin mCcARTHY
Kissing the ring of the loser.

The Democrats asked Kevin McCarty to attend to the press­ing issue of Marjorie Green. McCarthy held a four-hour meet­ing with his sedi­tious cau­cus- then appeared with his face red from the stress of prepar­ing to lie and his lips drip­ping with the putrid sali­va of mendacity.
Kevin McCarthy came out of the meet­ing, mis­pro­nounced Qanon, and said he does­n’t know what it is. What a stink­ing liar; he absolute­ly knows what it is; his entire cau­cus is Qanon.
Kevin McCarthy was dead set that they will be retak­ing the house in 2022, but I have news for him. I would humbly sug­gest here and now that. Democrats will hold the house with an improved majority.
David Perdue pre­tend­ed he could not pro­nounce Kamala Harri’s name in the run­ning to hold on to his Georgia Senate seat.
He lost.

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Kevin McCarthy will not become speak­er in 2022; he is a pathet­ic con­niv­ing lit­tle man with no char­ac­ter., he stands for noth­ing, and will even­tu­al­ly fall and be stepped over by the more caus­tic Jim Jordon.
All McCarthy can hear are the foot­steps of Jim Jordon in the back­ground. Jordon will take over the cau­cus as soon as he slips, and the trans­for­ma­tion will be complete.

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Proud Boys Dealt Another Blow As Feds Crack Down

Talking about being dealt a blow? Canada declared this ter­ror­ist group, well “A TERRORIST GROUP’ , some­thing the United States refus­es to do.

The far-right Proud Boys have been thrown into a tumult in the after­math of the Jan. 6 riot, with the group’s lead­ers fac­ing crim­i­nal charges, their chair­man exposed as an infor­mant, and law enforce­ment inves­ti­gat­ing what role Proud Boys had in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Now, amid a brew­ing trade­mark dis­pute with their for­mer lawyer, they might even lose the right to use their name.On Monday, for­mer Proud Boys lawyer Jason Lee Van Dyke, who holds the “Proud Boys” trade­mark, released a let­ter revok­ing Proud Boys chair­man Enrique Tarrio’s right to use the name. Van Dyke’s rea­sons for revok­ing the trade­mark rights includ­ed what he sees as the Proud Boys’ asso­ci­a­tion with Nazi groups, as well as Proud Boys burn­ing a church’s Black Lives Matter ban­ner in a December march in Washington, D.C.

Van Dyke doesn’t fit the pro­file of a typ­i­cal Proud Boys oppo­nent. Van Dyke has an elab­o­rate­ly check­ered legal his­to­ry him­self, includ­ing a tem­po­rary sus­pen­sion from prac­tic­ing law after threat­en­ing to kill one of his legal foes. Police claim Van Dyke once used Proud Boys to sur­veil his legal oppo­nent, and was alleged­ly record­ed by an infor­mant lay­ing out plans for a vio­lent ter­ror cam­paign against the man.

Van Dyke’s com­plaints that the Proud Boys are too close to white-suprema­cist groups is espe­cial­ly bizarre, giv­en his own his­to­ry. As recent­ly as 2019, Van Dyke was report­ed­ly caught on tape attempt­ing to join The Base, a neo-Nazi ter­ror­ist group, before being reject­ed by its mem­bers as a “huge lia­bil­i­ty.” In the mem­ber­ship inter­view, a per­son iden­ti­fied by Vice News as Van Dyke can be heard prais­ing neo-Nazi writ­ers and dis­cussing a crack­down on Jewish immigration.

“There’re plen­ty of peo­ple in the Proud Boys who don’t believe that Jews have a place in this coun­try and they want to put a stop to it,” Van Dyke report­ed­ly said in the recording.

Despite that, Van Dyke is now posi­tion­ing him­self as the defend­er of the Proud Boys name, accus­ing Tarrio of using the trade­mark to sell sub­stan­dard Proud Boys mer­chan­dise and let­ting Proud Boys cre­ate fas­cist-style graph­ics using the trademark.

“Your license to uti­lize the ‘Proud Boys’ trade­mark for any pur­pos­es is ter­mi­nat­ed, effec­tive imme­di­ate­ly,” Van Dyke wrote in the let­ter to Tarrio.
Read more here; https://​www​.thedai​ly​beast​.com/​p​r​o​u​d​-​b​o​y​s​-​d​e​a​l​t​-​a​n​o​t​h​e​r​-​b​l​o​w​-​a​s​-​f​e​d​s​-​c​r​a​c​k​-​d​o​w​n​?​r​e​f​=​h​ome

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Democrats Will Be Outside Playing Victim In Short Order, If They Do Not Use The Power They Are Given .…

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If estab­lish­ment Democrats in the Senate and House think that the Republican Party has a prob­lem with its right flank, they should fool around with this slim major­i­ty the American peo­ple gave them; their left flank will poten­tial­ly be worse.
Newly mint­ed Senate Majority leader Charles Schumer the New York Democrat, has been talk­ing tough, even though he has the slimmest of majori­ties imag­in­able and must bring his entire cau­cus along to get any­thing done, even with the bud­get maneu­ver known as reconciliation.
Democrats are not known for push­ing through the agen­da they are elect­ed to pass. They waste valu­able time nego­ti­at­ing with Republicans to pur­sue bipar­ti­san­ship, some­thing Republicans do not seek when they hold pow­er. Republicans do not nego­ti­ate in good faith, and on that basis, Democrats ought not to waste time chas­ing bi-par­ti­san­ship sole­ly for the sake of optics. They gen­er­al­ly pre­tend to nego­ti­ate, then walk away with­out sup­port­ing the very ideas they once advanced.
MSNC’s Rachael Maddow spent a great deal of her Programs on Monday evening, February 2nd, ded­i­cat­ed to mak­ing this very point.

I have no idea whether or not Schumer is spooked at the prospect of an AOC run to his left; there have been rum­blings to that effect. I doubt that Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is inter­est­ed in risk­ing her seat after just one full term to chal­lenge Schumer. Still, it does not hurt to have Schumer get­ting up off his back­side because of the heat on his left flank.
Across the State of New York, pro­gres­sives have won seats in the House, no estab­lish­ment, go along to get along Democrat should feel safe in just occu­py­ing space in the House or Senate.
Progressives have won in oth­er states, in Georgia. Republican Senator David Perdue, labeled Jon Ossoff, a com­mu­nist. In Missouri, Cori Bush,  a Black Lives Matter activist, won a seat in Missouri’s first dis­trict. Bush beat long­time Democrat Lacy Clay, in the pri­maries and was suc­cess­ful in the gen­er­al as well.

Establishment Democrats and the Congressional Black Caucus are not sup­port­ive of the younger upstarts who lurk on their left heels. The CBC has thrown its sup­port behind estab­lish­ment can­di­dates to ward of chal­lenges to them. Cori Bush’s sec­ond chal­lenge to Clay, who lit­er­al­ly hand­ed the Missouri first dis­trict seat by his father, has been par­tic­u­lar­ly poignant and anoth­er eye-open­er for the estab­lish­ment, some of who posit­ed that Congresswoman Alexandria Cortez’s win was a fluke.
The con­gress­woman who just won re-elec­tion, unseat­ed long­time estab­lish­ment, Congressman Joseph Crowley. Another New York pro­gres­sive, Jamaal Bowman, also won a seat in the Congress after defeat­ing long­time Democratic Representative Elliot Engel in the Democratic primaries.
But it’s not just in New York that young upstarts have been win­ning, Cori Bush was the first Black woman to rep­re­sent her state in the Congress.
In Colorado, Joe Neguse, anoth­er African-American, won Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District, encom­pass­ing Boulder, Fort Collins, Summit, and Eagle Counties.
Joe Neguse is the first African-American to rep­re­sent his state.
The issue for estab­lish­ment Democrats, is that while they con­tin­ue to chase con­sen­sus with a Republican Party that is not inter­est­ed in Democracy, much less gov­ern­ing for all of the American peo­ple, their base has no inter­est in doing so.
The frac­ture that con­tin­ues to sep­a­rate sane fis­cal con­ser­v­a­tives like Republican Adam Kinzinger of Illinois 16th Congressional District and the rest of the par­ty rep­re­sent­ed by the likes of Ohio’s Jim Jordon, will even­tu­al­ly come to the doors of estab­lish­ment Democrats.

At the moment, it seems to the estab­lish­ment in the Democratic par­ty that they are insu­lat­ed from an insur­gency by the young upstarts. They should think long and hard whether they rep­re­sent their con­stituents’ wish­es who want rapid solu­tions to America’s polic­ing prob­lem, Criminal Justice, min­i­mum wage, health care, and wealth disparities.
If they fail to do what they are sent to do, they will find them­selves back in the posi­tion they seem to rel­ish, on the out­side of pow­er, play­ing victims.
Republicans not only use the pow­er they steal through ger­ry­man­der­ing, vot­er sup­pres­sion, purg­ing vot­ers lists, and oth­er tac­tics, they abuse their powers.
Democrats must learn to use pow­er wise­ly and decisively.
Only when Democrats use the pow­ers they have to ram through their agen­da will Republicans come to the table to nego­ti­ate in good faith. Republicans have mas­tered the art of stalling when they are not in con­trol. They pre­tend to want con­sen­sus, and Democrats have fall­en for it time and again.
It is for the rea­sons that Bernie Sanders received such over­whelm­ing sup­port in two gen­er­al elec­tion cycles. It is what result­ed in the elec­tion of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the oth­er mem­bers of the squad.
It will con­tin­ue to esca­late, as younger more pro­gres­sives move to pri­ma­ry entrenched estab­lish­ment fig­ures dis­con­nect­ed from their sup­port­ers’ core.

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Mike writes for thinkers.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

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Here We Go Again, Rochester NY Police Abuse, This Time It’s A 9‑year-old-girl…

On what plan­et would this be allowed to hap­pen with­out the sever­est con­se­quences pos­si­ble to these mon­sters, one and all?
Here is a sit­u­a­tion in which a 9‑year-old child is dis­traught and asks for her dad, and a cop tells his col­league to quote, “at this point, just spray her.”
America, what you wit­nessed here are cops who want to esca­late to force lev­el, and would use any pre­tense to get to that escalation.
In the first instance, there is absolute­ly no need to place a 9‑year-old child in hand­cuffs. None whatsoever.
Secondly, the female cop speak­ing to the lit­tle girl is not deesca­lat­ing the sit­u­a­tion by demand­ing that she sit back; the child is already in the cruis­er; where was she going to go?
American Police con­tin­ue to use these pre­tens­es to trig­ger force, then revert to them to jus­ti­fy using force.
A car­ing trained police offi­cer would gen­tly ask the lit­tle girl her name, rather than con­tin­u­al­ly demand­ing that she sits back.
The next step is to ask her her father’s name and find out from the child how they may con­tact her daddy.
Contrary to these sim­ple steps, the mon­sters used pep­per spray on the child instead. If you do that to my child, it becomes per­son­al; it is no longer between me and the sys­tem; it becomes between you and me.

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In Rochester, police released two body-cam­era videos Sunday of offi­cers restrain­ing a dis­traught 9‑year-old girl who was hand­cuffed and sprayed with what police called a chem­i­cal “irri­tant.”
The Democrat and Chronicle report­ed that before the video release, Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren expressed her con­cern for the “child that was harmed dur­ing this inci­dent that hap­pened on Friday.”
“I have a 10-year-old child, so she’s a child, she’s a baby. This video, as a moth­er, is not any­thing you want to see,” Warren went on to say. A total of nine offi­cers and super­vi­sors respond­ed to the report of “fam­i­ly trou­ble” on Friday. The girl can be heard in the body-cam­era videos from offi­cers at the scene scream­ing fran­ti­cal­ly for her father as the offi­cers try to restrain her.
At a news con­fer­ence Sunday, Deputy Police Chief Andre Anderson described the girl as suicidal“She indi­cat­ed she want­ed to kill her­self and she want­ed to kill her mom,” he said.
Officers tried to force the girl into a patrol car, but she pulled away and kicked at them. In a state­ment Saturday, the police depart­ment said this action “required” an offi­cer to take the girl down to the ground. Then, the depart­ment said, “for the minor’s safe­ty and at the request of the cus­to­di­al par­ent on the scene,” the child was hand­cuffed and put in the back of a police car as they wait­ed for an ambu­lance to arrive.

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Police said the girl dis­obeyed com­mands to put her feet in the car. An offi­cer was then “required” to spray an “irri­tant” in the hand­cuffed girl’s face, the depart­ment said Saturday.
At Sunday’s news con­fer­ence, Police Chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan described the irri­tant as pep­per spray. She declined to defend the offi­cers’ actions.
“I’m not going to stand here and tell you that for a 9‑year-old to have to be pep­per-sprayed is OK. It’s not,” Herriott-Sullivan said. “I don’t see that as who we are as a depart­ment, and we’re going to do the work we have to do to ensure that these kinds of things don’t happen.”
Police said the girl was even­tu­al­ly tak­en to Rochester General Hospital, “where she received the ser­vices and care that she need­ed,” and was lat­er released to her family.
The Rochester Police Department has faced scruti­ny since Daniel Prude’s death last year after offi­cers from the depart­ment put a hood over his head and pressed his face into the pavement.

Again I ask,” Why do African-Americans con­tin­ue to call the police to their homes, know­ing that the mon­sters are trained to hate and kill them”?

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‘Harry Dog’, Dudus’ ‘ex-lieutenant’, Shot Dead In West Kingston

Harry McLeod, the reput­ed ‘ex-lieu­tenant’ of for­mer Tivoli Gardens don, Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, was killed along Darling Street in the vicin­i­ty of Coronation mar­ket in Western Kingston on Sunday morning.
McLeod was 51 years old.
Reports are that about 7:50 am, McLeod, wide­ly known as ‘Harry Dog,’ who was a labor­er of Tivoli Gardens, was stand­ing along the road­way when a sil­ver motor­car with sev­er­al men aboard was dri­ven up.
The men opened gun­fire on McLeod before mak­ing good their escape.
McLeod was assist­ed to the hos­pi­tal, where he was pro­nounced dead on arrival.
Some five years ago, McLeod was acquit­ted of sev­er­al crim­i­nal charges, includ­ing lar­ce­ny, receiv­ing a stolen motor vehi­cle, and forgery after the pros­e­cu­tion could not build a case against him in the Corporate Area Resident Magistrate’s Court.

The charges against McLeod arose after the vehi­cle in ques­tion was alleged­ly found in Tivoli Gardens with some 4,000 rounds of ammu­ni­tion in it dur­ing the May 2010 oper­a­tion to appre­hend Coke, who was then want­ed in the United States on drugs and gun­run­ning charges.
With McLeod’s doc­u­ments in it, the vehi­cle was alleged­ly found in front of Coke’s ‘Presidential Click’ office.
That acquit­tal came two years after McLeod was freed of ille­gal pos­ses­sion of ammu­ni­tion charge after 42 rounds of ammu­ni­tion were alleged­ly found in his Oxford Road, New Kingston apart­ment when he was held in 2011.
He has also been arrest­ed sev­er­al oth­er times after the police list­ed him as a “major per­son of inter­est” relat­ed to crimes com­mit­ted in the Kingston Western Police Division.

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A Year After Winning A Landslide The Prime Minister Blames Boogeymen For The Killings, A Sign Of Failure…

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Talk about paint­ing your­self into a cor­ner.….. Prime Minister Andrew Holness cam­paigned on the promise that peo­ple would sleep with their win­dows open under a Holness admin­is­tra­tion. I will not hold the prime min­is­ter to that promise; politi­cians make crazy state­ments, I am not here to nit-pick or make polit­i­cal points.
As I have said repeat­ed­ly, if you read my work and take from it that I am a syco­phant for one side or the oth­er, you are out of your mind.
But let us look at the oth­er things the Prime Minister said before win­ning the elec­tions, after he won, and the things he con­tin­ues to say today.
“Police will not be kick­ing down peo­ple’s doors while I am Prime Minister.”& ” We can­not just form anoth­er squad and send them to shoot up gun­men.” .…..Who the hell does this guy think he is any­way? But wait, you are lit­er­al­ly telling shoot­ers that they have a friend in you when you make state­ments like that.
What is the Prime Minister’s inter­est in keep­ing shoot­ers alive, at the per­il of law-abid­ing Jamaican citizens?
The Prime Minister con­tin­ues to embar­rass him­self by sup­pos­ing that police offi­cers go out to exe­cute shoot­ers. That is usu­al­ly a choice made by the gun­men themselves.
As I said pre­vi­ous­ly, I will not hold the prime min­is­ter to his sil­ly cam­paign promise. Still, I will con­tin­ue to hold him account­able based on the direc­tion he has been tak­ing the coun­try, which has been the oppo­site direc­tion required to begin to turn the coun­try around.

The Prime Minister’s arro­gance and his bull­ish­ness on the sub­ject cre­at­ed ani­mos­i­ty in many offi­cers past and present. Many of those offi­cers placed their lives on the line for a pal­try salary and con­tin­ue to do so.
The Prime Minister joined the anti-police antag­o­nist to Monday morn­ing quar­ter­back vio­lent con­fronta­tions, even those in which police are killed and injured.
By tak­ing that tack and bring­ing in his friend Antony Anderson from the mil­i­tary to exe­cute what I cau­tioned would be a failed strat­e­gy, he basi­cal­ly sig­naled that he want­ed a clean break from tra­di­tion­al polic­ing; police offi­cers guns must fire sweet-smelling ros­es, offi­cers must walk around kiss­ing every ass and every jack­ass and call­ing them sir and ma’am..”
Emboldened by the buf­foon­ery, every punk decid­ed to drape up offi­cers who approach them, regard­less of their transgression.
Several offi­cers lost their lives because they were scared to defend them­selves, out of fear that Holness’ boy Terrence Williams would take their gun away, then per­se­cute them to the fullest extent of [INDECOM], not by Jamaican law.
The res­ig­na­tions poured in up to fifty per month, so they insti­tut­ed mea­sures to make it a crime for offi­cers to leave the JCF, with­out first giv­ing a 6‑month pri­or notice before they do so.

Still, the offi­cers kept on leav­ing, not car­ing about their new rules.
The chick­ens have now come home to roost, mis­ter Holness paint­ed him­self into a cor­ner, he told us our old ways were out­dat­ed, he knew bet­ter than the offi­cers who are in the field doing the work, the peo­ple he so resent­ed that he does­n’t even con­sult them to talk about polic­ing, he con­sults sol­diers, on polic­ing. He placed sol­diers to super­vise career police offi­cers. He cre­at­ed the gen­er­al per­cep­tion among the rank and file that the best they could ever aspire to in the JCF after the best edu­ca­tion, and years of polic­ing expe­ri­ence, is Deputy Commissioner of Police.
They are not good enough to head the agency they spent their entire work­ing careers serv­ing. Holness did not need to say those words; the infer­ence was bla­tant­ly clear.
Holness’s arro­gance has been caus­ing count­less lives; it will con­tin­ue to cause the lives of much more inno­cent Jamaicans.
The Prime Minister’s arro­gance will be his undo­ing. The Zones of Special Operations he tout­ed has done noth­ing to stem the blood-let­ting. The States of Emergencies he derid­ed then was forced to ini­ti­ate did not do it either, and nei­ther has his charm offen­sive done a damn thing to stop the killings.
Now that peo­ple can­not sleep with their win­dows open, .… (ok, that was a low blow), okay, peo­ple can­not sleep, period.
What now?
The Prime Minister and his Police Commissioner have revert­ed to blam­ing the media and the Opposition par­ty. The Prime Minister insin­u­at­ed that some sin­is­ter force is dri­ving up the mur­der sta­tis­tics. His Commissioner of Police blames media head­lines for sen­sa­tion­al­iz­ing mur­der statistics.
How in God’s name can one sen­sa­tion­al­ize facts?

The Jamaica Labor Party won 49 seats in the 2020 gen­er­al elec­tions, oblit­er­at­ing the Opposition People’s National Party. The vic­to­ry was so resound­ing it sent Opposition Leader Peter Phillips into retire­ment. It was the first time since 1967 that the Jamaica Labor Party had won back to back con­test­ed elec­tions. The mag­ni­tude of the 16 seat pick­up by the JLP was a clear man­date for the JLP to reshape Jamaica and set a new course for the coun­try after years of stag­na­tion and regres­sive per­for­mance under PNP leadership.
The Prime Minister’s state­ments blam­ing shad­owy bogey­men for his watch’s esca­lat­ing mur­ders is a shock­ing admis­sion that his secu­ri­ty poli­cies are an abysmal fail­ure.
Come on, guys, are you seri­ous right now? It is okay to say you were wrong. It is okay to say that the bull­shit you have been ped­dling was .….……well, like I said, cow manure.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

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Gunslinging Karens Now Leaders In Republican Attack On Democracy…

Republicans rail against what they call the can­cel culture.…..of course, their oppo­si­tion to (what the rest of us call account­abil­i­ty), is all about not being able to abuse and use deroga­to­ry lan­guage against peo­ple they believe to be less than.
Interestingly, Republicans don’t have a lick of a prob­lem when Democrats get can­celed. Ooops, I meant to say when peo­ple are held accountable.
It was­n’t too long ago that they were glee­ful that the very effec­tive Comedian turned US Senator Al Franken was run out of Washington because there was a list of sex­u­al­ly inap­pro­pri­ate behav­ior with mul­ti­ple women.
I’m not here to defend Al Franken, and I don’t know whether or not he was guilty as accused; what we know is that he was nev­er arrest­ed, charged, or con­vict­ed of any­thing. And so that begs the idea of inno­cent until proven guilty.

Former Senator Al Franken.

Al Franken was thrown to the wolves by his own col­leagues, led by New York’s junior US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who want­ed to run for pres­i­dent on a plat­form of stand­ing up for women.
In all, there were com­plaints from eight dif­fer­ent women against mis­ter Franken; Democrats raised against him because they want­ed to have clean hands. I guess they expect­ed that there would be reci­procity from Republicans.
I’m not sure what form that would have tak­en; Republicans do as they please, just like their white sup­port­ers act with impuni­ty, large­ly with­out consequence.
Can you imag­ine the FBI con­tem­plat­ing not pro­ceed­ing with crim­i­nal charges against sedi­tion­ists who invad­ed the nation’s Legislative citadel using the pre­text that pro­ceed­ing against them will clog up the courts?
When has the FBI or any oth­er police agency in America decid­ed not to go after black peo­ple who may have run afoul of the laws? Okay, I’m off-top­ic; let me get back to my thoughts.

This is Republican Q anon con­gress­woman Lauren Boebert from Colorado; anoth­er abide by no rules gun­slinger, who wants to car­ry a gun on the house floor. Boebert’s rap sheet is a long as a cold win­ter night.

Pushing Al Franken out did not make any sense, at least not to me. Al Franken was forced out in December of 2017. Donald Trump, who was accused of grop­ing and oth­er­wise vio­lat­ing expo­nen­tial­ly more women, was elect­ed pres­i­dent despite those alle­ga­tions and was sworn in as America’s 45th pres­i­dent just under a year ear­li­er. But this is hard­ly about the despi­ca­ble pres­i­den­cy most ratio­nal and con­sci­en­tious peo­ple would soon­er forget.
It is about the stu­pid­i­ty of Democrats of purg­ing peo­ple from the par­ty who have not been con­vict­ed of any crimes. Simultaneously, the Republicans refuse to agree to impeach and bar Donald Trump from ever hold­ing Federal office ever again.
Trump com­mit­ted sedi­tion against the United States of America, yet only five Republican Senators would even hon­or their oaths to allow the case to be heard against that crim­i­nal. And just three weeks ear­li­er, they were all cow­er­ing in fear at the nean­derthal horde that tore the doors down look­ing to kill off Democratic lead­ers, and Mike Pence, in the US capi­tol building.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

Then, there is this [karen], Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia 14th dis­trict, a Qanon con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist who was recent­ly elect­ed to the US Congress. She advo­cates vio­lence against her Democratic coun­ter­parts. Suggested that putting a bul­let in the head of Speaker Nancy Pelosi would be a good idea. And a range of oth­er quotes that are not only dan­ger­ous but frightening.
The lying lit­tle twat, respond­ed that mul­ti­ple peo­ple man­aged her social media account. Essentially punt­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty to a face­less non-exis­tent person.
Look, I com­plete­ly get that run­ning a con­struc­tion busi­ness with her hus­band would require a social media team. Oh yeah, she is one impor­tant celebri­ty. But killing the US House speak­er, on your social media page, and you don’t know about it?
This twat want­ed to take a gun onto the US Congress floor, yes, and she walks around the met­al detect­ing devices erect­ed in the Capitol build­ing after the January 6th insur­rec­tion, instead of through them as any law-abid­ing cit­i­zen would.

GOP candidate posts image of herself with gun next to Tlaib, Dems

Here she is lit­er­al­ly threat­en­ing the Democratic cau­cus mem­bers while pre­tend­ing that she meant defeat­ing them at the bal­lot box. But she is not alone; the entire Republican cau­cus in the House is a fas­cist-white suprema­cist cau­cus, the Senate cau­cus is no better.
(Politico report­ed today that Rep. Jimmy Gomez wants Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene boot­ed from Congress. On Wednesday, the California Democrat announced that he planned to intro­duce a res­o­lu­tion to oust the con­spir­a­cy-the­o­ry-ped­dling Republican from Georgia after recent news reports revealed that Greene had pre­vi­ous­ly called for vio­lence against Democrats on social media. A two-thirds major­i­ty is required to expel a mem­ber from the House, mean­ing Gomez’s res­o­lu­tion is almost cer­tain to fail in a cham­ber where Democrats hold a razor-thin major­i­ty CNN on Tuesday unveiled exam­ples of Greene’s past social media activ­i­ty from as recent­ly as 2019 that appeared to endorse exe­cut­ing Democrats and fed­er­al law enforce­ment offi­cers. She was report­ed to have liked one com­ment that said “a bul­let to the head would be quick­er” to elim­i­nate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Taylor Greene has antag­o­nized her peers by flout­ing coro­n­avirus guide­lines and has gar­nered nation­al atten­tion for engag­ing in the QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry. She has also denied the Parkland school shoot­ing, and was filmed spread­ing racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic com­ments, prompt­ing con­dem­na­tion from her own party.)
The Republican minor­i­ty leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, reward­ed Marjorie Taylor Greene with a seat on the edu­ca­tion committee.

Republican Lauren Boebert, 33, Colorado, a Trump show­boat, wants to car­ry her Glock in the house chambers.

There is more than just Marjorie Taylor Greene; there are more [Karens], these are the best of what is now the Republican par­ty. Lauren Boebert, was just elect­ed to the US Congress from Colorado, with a rap sheet as long as a cold win­ter night. Yup, it’s real­ly easy to guess at the qual­i­ty of the con­stituents who sent her to rep­re­sent them.
According to the very Conservative Rupert Murdoch New York Post, in June 2015, Boebert was cuffed for dis­or­der­ly con­duct at a coun­try music fes­ti­val near Grand Junction, Colo., after police said she attempt­ed to inter­fere in the arrest of minors bust­ed for under­age drink­ing and encour­aged the accused to run off. Boebert said the rev­el­ers had not been read their Miranda rights and that the arrest was ille­gal. Bowebertcontinued yelling and caus­ing the under­age drinkers to become unruly,” an arrest­ing offi­cer said in a state­ment at the time. “Lauren said mul­ti­ple times that she had friends at Fox News and that the ille­gal arrest would be nation­al news.” At the time, Boebert was run­ning Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colo. Colorado Newsline first report­ed the story.

Boebert sub­se­quent­ly missed two court appear­ances and was arrest­ed again in December 2015. The charge was dismissed.
A year lat­er, in September 2016, Boebert was charged with care­less dri­ving and oper­at­ing an unsafe vehi­cle after rolling her truck into a ditch, police said. A war­rant was issued for her arrest when she failed to show up for court a month lat­er. She was booked on Feb. 13, 2017. She ulti­mate­ly plead­ed guilty to the unsafe vehi­cle charge and paid $123.50 in fines and court costs. The care­less dri­ving charge was dis­missed. The inci­dent was first report­ed by the Colorado Times Recorder. In September 2010, Boebert was arrest­ed after a neigh­bor, Michele Soet, accused Boebert’s two pit bulls of attack­ing Soet’s dog. Soet’s dog nar­row­ly escaped injury after jump­ing into a van. The future leg­is­la­tor plead­ed guilty to a sin­gle count of “dog at large,” pay­ing a $75 fine.

Remember when the racist right derid­ed Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, for hav­ing wait­ressed?
This is Lauren Boebert, serv­ing drinks, no prob­lem here.

Boebert’s future hus­band, Jayson, also had brush­es with law enforce­ment. In January 2004, he was arrest­ed after alleged­ly expos­ing his penis to two women at a bowl­ing alley, accord­ing to an arrest affi­davit. Lauren Boebert (then age 17 and known as Lauren Opal Roberts) was also there. Jayson Boebert plead­ed guilty to pub­lic inde­cen­cy and lewd expo­sure, earn­ing him­self four days in jail and two years’ pro­ba­tion. In February 2004, he was booked on a domes­tic vio­lence charge, against Lauren Boebert. He “did unlaw­ful­ly strike, shove or kick … and sub­ject­ed her to phys­i­cal con­tact,” a spokesman for the Garfield asso­ciate coun­ty court clerk told The Post. They had been dat­ing at the time. Jayson Boebert ulti­mate­ly served sev­en days in jail. Colorado blog­ger Anne Landman first unearthed the busts. According to a police report, Lauren Boebert took her revenge in May 2004 dur­ing an alter­ca­tion with Jayson at his home in which she scratched his face and chest and trashed his residence.
Well, there you have it, folks, a who’s who of white Christian virtue. A reg­u­lar rogue’s gallery of low-class trail­er trash is now dou­bling as Federal legislators.

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350% Increase In Murders In St James, Where Are The Calls To Fire Antony Anderson?

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Yesterday I wrote an arti­cle that was less than com­pli­men­ta­ry of the Jamaican Prime Minister and his han­dling of the Nation’s crime-fight­ing strategy.
I want to con­tin­ue address­ing the island’s crime surge today with the same clear-eyed focus I tried to use in the January 27th article.
https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​t​o​-​t​h​o​s​e​-​w​h​o​-​s​a​i​d​-​t​a​k​i​n​g​-​o​u​t​-​m​u​r​d​e​r​e​r​s​-​h​a​s​-​n​o​t​-​w​o​r​k​e​d​-​h​o​w​-​i​s​-​r​o​l​l​i​n​g​-​o​v​e​r​-​a​n​d​-​s​u​r​r​e​n​d​e​r​i​n​g​-​w​o​r​k​i​n​g​-​f​o​r​-​y​ou/.
For decades, the two polit­i­cal par­ties that rule Jamaica have done noth­ing to advance the coun­try’s rule of law. In fact, they have advanced mea­sures that have expo­nen­tial­ly cement­ed a cul­ture of crim­i­nal­i­ty that lit­er­al­ly tran­scends any police depart­men­t’s abil­i­ty to erad­i­cate, least of all, the poor­ly trained, poor­ly equipped, poor­ly paid, and super­vised JCF.
Members of the two polit­i­cal par­ties have been sur­ro­gates for dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals and still are today.
They send cop-killers away in the dead of night. They encour­age mem­bers of their con­stituen­cies to demon­strate against the police. They get involved in police inves­ti­ga­tions; they encour­age puni­tive mea­sures against decent police offi­cers who try to do their jobs; of course, this is only pos­si­ble because the lead­er­ship of the JCF has been slav­ish lap­dogs, always look­ing to serve their mas­ters for a pat on the back. Members of the two par­ties have been con­nect­ed to gang­land activ­i­ties, includ­ing the mur­der of Jamaican citizens.
It is impos­si­ble then to have a coun­try where the rule of law is respect­ed when the head of the stream is as filth and cor­rupt­ed as that which exists in our country.

It ought to come as no sur­prise that, accord­ing to [Transparency International, our beau­ti­ful lit­tle island con­tin­ue to be one of the most cor­rupt nations on earth.
In fact, a recent report indi­cates that Jamaica is the Caribbean’s fifth most cor­rupt coun­try. In Transparency’s lat­est report, for the year 2020, Jamaica inched up from a score of 43 to 44 out of 100, in a con­text where zero is deemed very cor­rupt, and 100 is very clean.
In sim­ple terms, Jamaica has­n’t even yet reached the halfway mark away from the worst cor­rup­tion indi­ca­tor, which is zero.
This ought to give us some per­spec­tive as we pon­der the entrenched crim­i­nal­i­ty wash­ing over the tiny island of 2.8 mil­lion people.
Members of par­lia­ment dou­ble as defense lawyers to vio­lent mur­der­ers. They leave the court­room then head over to Gordon house to leg­is­late on the nation’s vio­lent crime rate.
To say that this is uneth­i­cal is to state the obvi­ous. To accept the con­flict of inter­est inher­ent in this kind of prac­tice is to begin to under­stand the com­plex lev­el of cor­rup­tion which brought Jamaica to the point where the Island is tee­ter­ing on the brink of becom­ing a failed state.

As we plug into those real­i­ties, we see the con­se­quences of these entrenched yet unad­dressed issues. It is no won­der then that since the start of 2021, the Parish of Saint James has seen an increase of 350 per­cent in mur­ders against the pre­vi­ous year.
Saint James may be expe­ri­enc­ing the largest increase in vio­lent crime, but it is not the only Parish expe­ri­enc­ing a surge in vio­lence. The shock­ing uptick of mur­ders in the Island’s tourism mec­ca has gone on unabat­ed; it is a pre­cise met­ric of the coun­try’s fail­ure to get its arms around this crime monster.
Pride and arro­gance will cause us to lose this once pearl of the Caribbean; igno­rance, and pre­tense are citadels of defense against the strate­gies that would inex­orably begin to turn the hell­ish crime mon­ster around.
Like pour­ing water into a bas­ket, they con­tin­ue to nib­ble around the edges. They con­tin­ue to admin­is­ter band-aids to gun­shot wounds, while con­sol­ing the casu­al­ty with plat­i­tudes, even as he bleeds to death.
Braggadocio’s pre-writ­ten state­ments of resolve, a reac­tionary show of force, only to pull back because of its unsus­tain­abil­i­ty, are noth­ing if not comical.

In pre­vi­ous years the thing to do would be to fire the Commissioner of Police. Blaming the vic­tim worked up until they paint­ed them­selves into a cor­ner that belies every­thing they told the coun­try before.
Previous com­mis­sion­ers who came up through the ranks were inca­pable of doing the job they were trained to do, so they had to bring in peo­ple from outside.
Of course, those out­siders had to come from the fix-it sad sack army with its own moun­tain of prob­lems with crim­i­nal­i­ty, but I digress. I am real­ly not look­ing to burst any star­ry-eyed bub­ble that may still exist about the Army’s pro­fes­sion­al­ism. Not today.
So this is their gold­en boy, for­mer head of the Military, intel­li­gent, with the let­ters to match, not taint­ed by the squad­die men­tal­i­ty; what’s not to like?
Only that he has presided over the worst increas­es in homi­cides and oth­er vio­lent crimes in the nation’s history.
So what now? What is the sto­ry now, crickets?
Why are there no calls for the res­ig­na­tion of Anthony Anderson? I’ll tell you, they knew that chang­ing Commissioners of police would do noth­ing to alle­vi­ate ris­ing crime, but they need­ed a scapegoat.
Moving around deck chairs on the sink­ing Titanic will do noth­ing to stop the ship from sink­ing; who exact­ly were they fooling?

Having shone a lit­tle light on cau­sa­tion, let’s now pro­vide a few solutions.
(1)Watered down laws do noth­ing to deter crim­i­nals. Pass laws that send clear mes­sages to vio­lent offend­ers that if you com­mit mur­der, you will not see the light of day.
(2) Remove for­eign-fund­ed groups from the leg­isla­tive table. No oth­er nation allows so-called human rights lob­by a seat at the table, much less allow them to dic­tate legislation.
(3) Law ‑Enforcement is not always pret­ty; some­times it gets messy. Allow the police to do their jobs with­in the frame­work of the law. When they vio­late their oath, hold them accountable.
(4) Discontinue doing the things I laid out in para­graph one.
(5) Provide the police with the resources they need to get the job done.
(6) Get out of the way of the Police.

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Mike writes for thinkers.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

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Raphael Cruz, Marco Rubio, Enrique Tarrio, Et Al ‚Trump’s Cuban Waterboys…

I total­ly under­stand the sense of bewil­der­ment you feel when con­sid­er­ing the two Cuban-Americans in the United States Senate. How could any ratio­nal per­son feel any­thing but dis­dain and rev­o­lu­tion at them for being such slav­ish sup­pli­cants to the cause of white supremacy?
I have ten­ta­tive­ly broached the sub­ject a few times on these pages; how­ev­er, it bears a deep­er dive to bear out what actu­al­ly dri­ves the two Cubans.
Some pun­dits argue that most of Latin America’s peo­ple are prac­tic­ing Catholics, which explains why Hispanics grav­i­tate to the heretics in the Fascist Republican par­ty, which they claim is a polit­i­cal par­ty of Christian Conservatives.
There is some truth to that argu­ment, but how does one explain the oth­er half or so who come from the region that prac­tices their reli­gion but will have noth­ing to do with the Republican par­ty because of its racist and dis­crim­i­na­to­ry policies?
In try­ing to under­stand Raphael Cruz & Marco Rubio’s actions, it is impor­tant to under­stand how racism shaped behav­iors in the Americas, includ­ing on the Island of Cuba, before the Castro Revolution.
It is also impor­tant to under­stand the broad­er con­text of how enslaved African peo­ple were treat­ed in the region and the lengths some have gone to be dis­as­so­ci­at­ed from the specter of the reviled black skin.

Trump’s water­boy

The unimag­in­able bru­tal­i­ty and bar­barism that African-Americans suf­fered for hun­dreds of years did not come from the hands of [Christians] as they want you to believe. (a)They came from the hands of peo­ple who called them­selves Christian Crusaders.
So the idea of America’s birth from pil­grims who came to the new world try­ing to prac­tice their Religion is a fly­ing unicorn.
The truth is that the peo­ple who came here were pris­on­ers who faced exe­cu­tion in Europe. They had the choice of leav­ing for the Colonies or dying; the oth­er choice was life impris­on­ment in the dun­geons they called pris­ons. They chose the colonies. Australia, America, New Zealand was born.
The prac­tice of ship­ping mur­der­ers, rapists, and oth­er dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals to America only came to an end after the civ­il war end­ed. Have you ever asked your­selves how Religious peo­ple could be that bar­bar­ic and evil?

Raphael Cruz, the oth­er waterboy

Cubans of Spanish ances­try dis­crim­i­nat­ed against their African coun­ter­parts, even though they them­selves were large­ly out­casts who were brought there to work the sug­ar plan­ta­tions., The tox­ic can­cer of racism exist­ed in Cuba from the start and through­out the Spanish American war.
Fidel Castro’s rev­o­lu­tion became the great equal­iz­er, even though the Castro’s came from Spanish ancestry.
The hatred Cubans in America feel for Castro, and his rev­o­lu­tion, runs far deep­er than just the pover­ty brought on by the American blockade.
It is a deep hatred and a long­ing for the satel­lite apartheid state they oper­at­ed under cor­rupt White and Spanish men lead­ing to Batista’s fall. The Spanish trash in Cuba always treat­ed Blacks like sec­ond class citizens.
I won­der why Raphael Cruz went to lengths to change his name from Raphael to Ted, Hum? It is also not out of the ordi­nary that dark-skinned Cubans that have emerged from out of Cuba speak Spanish and des­per­ate­ly iden­ti­fy with the Latin side of their iden­ti­ty instead of their true African identity.
If you are not con­vinced about these facts, trav­el through Miami’s inter­na­tion­al air­port, or have some deal­ings with the Miami Police Department or any oth­er gov­ern­ment agency in that city that is over­run with them.
Cubans see them­selves as whites, trac­ing their blood­line to Spain, of course, the inter­min­gling and inter­mar­riage may have some­thing to say about that Eurocentricity they crave to iden­ti­fy with.
The lan­guage was forced on the African slaves, the skin they can­not shed, but the caste sys­tem that still exists on the Island, to a less­er extent today, they all pre­tend to be European, rather than African.

Enrique Tarrio Faces Three Years in Jail Over Weapon Charges Outlined in Court Files
The face of a domes­tic ter­ror­ist Enrique Tarrio.

About one-fourth of Cubans are mulat­toes (of mixed European and African lin­eage), and some two-thirds are descen­dants of white Europeans, main­ly from Spain. Whites have been the dom­i­nant eth­nic group for cen­turies, monop­o­liz­ing the direc­tion of the econ­o­my and access to edu­ca­tion and oth­er gov­ern­ment ser­vices. Although mulat­toes have become increas­ing­ly promi­nent since the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, some mulat­toes and blacks (of African her­itage) still face racial dis­crim­i­na­tion. (Brittanica).
During the admin­is­tra­tion of our first African-American President, the lit­tle mon­grel Cuban Senator from Cuba, Marco Rubio, told Fox that the pres­i­dent has no class. “We have a pres­i­dent now that does self­ie-stick videos, that invites YouTube stars there, peo­ple that eat cere­al out of a bath­tub.” President Obama once made a video for [Buzzfeed] where he tried to use a self­ie-stick that attach­es to a cell­phone to take pic­tures and invit­ed YouTube stars to inter­view him. One of those, GloZell Green, once made a video that went viral of her eat­ing cere­al in a bathtub.
Since that com­ment, the lit­tle Cuban grem­lin has become a slav­ish water­boy for the worst crim­i­nal ever to occu­py the white house.
Not only has he not crit­i­cized the low life, Donald Trump, for his count­less crimes and indis­cre­tions, but he has also become apol­o­gists for him, ren­der­ing the label mon­grel too good to describe Rubio.

Raphael Cruz and Marco Rubio are prod­ucts of their his­to­ry, their past & their present. They are con­tin­u­al­ly run­ning from who, they real­ly are, try­ing to be seen as some­thing else.
Anything but who they real­ly are!
So it is no sur­prise to me to learn that anoth­er Cuban, Enrique Tarrio, a Cuban black try­ing to be some­one else, was an FBI infor­mant, now await­ing tri­al for his crimes.
In December 2020, (black enterprise)reported that Black Lives Matter signs out­side of sev­er­al his­toric Black church­es in Washington D.C. were burned and destroyed dur­ing a pro-Trump ral­ly. When Tarrio appeared on a “Warboys” pod­cast inter­view that month, he took respon­si­bil­i­ty and stat­ed he was “the per­son that went ahead and put the lighter to it and engulfed it in flames. “I’m damn proud I did,” he said.
The lit­tle mutt went on to pon­tif­i­cate on the Parler web­site that “against the wish­es of his attor­ney, I am here today to admit that I am the per­son respon­si­ble for the burn­ing of this sign.”
He also dared police offi­cers to arrest him, writ­ing: “Come get me if you feel like what I did was wrong. We’ll let the pub­lic decide.”
Running from who they are, try­ing to be accept­ed, I get it but chang­ing your name and com­mit­ting crimes is hard­ly the way to go about gain­ing acceptance.
Just ask Raphael Cruz; his col­leagues in the Senate hates his guts; worse yet, even his chil­dren can­not stand him.
Guys, please get a grip of your­selves, gain some self-respect.

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.Mike writes for thinkers.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog mike​beck​les​.com. 

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Expel Josh Hawley

By John Nichols

The Missouri senator is just as guilty as Trump. As the Senate gears up for the impeachment trial, some senators are beginning to look at Hawley too.

Were the irre­deemable task of mount­ing a defense for Donald Trump at his Senate impeach­ment tri­al to fall to me, I would sim­ply point to the pres­ence of Josh Hawley among the jurors. Then I would rest my case.
If Trump’s chief accom­plice in the incite­ment to insur­rec­tion on January 6 is allowed to con­tin­ue to serve in the cham­ber, the cyn­i­cal argu­ment would go, how can sen­a­tors seri­ous­ly argue that the 45th pres­i­dent should be held to account?
Needless to say, I won’t be mak­ing that defense, or any oth­er, for Donald Trump. I couldn’t with a straight face rec­om­mend that the dis­graced for­mer pres­i­dent be let off the hook. They’ve got him on tape—and on Twitter — incit­ing the vio­lent mob that invad­ed the US Capitol in order to over­turn the results of the 2020 elec­tion. Trump’s guilty of the high crime with which he has been charged. He must be con­vict­ed by the Senate and barred from ever again occu­py­ing pub­lic office.
Yet the Hawley conun­drum remains. He is just as guilty as Trump, just as respon­si­ble for what hap­pened on January 6.“But for him it wouldn’t have hap­pened,” for­mer Missouri sen­a­tor John Danforth, a Republican who helped to launch his fel­low Missourian’s career, says of Hawley’s role in the Capitol inva­sion. “But for him the approval of the Electoral College votes would have been sim­ply a for­mal­i­ty. He made it into…a spe­cif­ic way to express the view that the elec­tion was stolen. He was responsible.”
Read the full sto­ry here; https://​www​.then​ation​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​p​o​l​i​t​i​c​s​/​e​x​p​e​l​-​j​o​s​h​-​h​a​w​l​e​y​-​i​n​s​u​r​r​e​c​t​i​on/

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To Those Who Said Taking Out Murderers Has Not Worked; How Is Rolling Over And Surrendering Working For You”?

It is clear at least to [me]that there will be no direc­tion­al change in the num­ber of killings in Jamaica any­time soon. For one, the present Prime Minister’s arro­gance pre­vents even the most cur­so­ry re-exam­i­na­tion of what has been hap­pen­ing so far, to find out where changes may be made.
The present sys­tem of one man mak­ing deci­sions on a sub­ject in which (a) he has zero edu­ca­tion and (b) where he has an obvi­ous bias against police, will result in far more mur­ders, not fewer.

See spec­ta­cle in link below

https://​www​.face​book​.com/​k​e​i​s​h​a​.​m​a​c​.​9​0​6​/​v​i​d​e​o​s​/​2​4​5​0​7​9​7​3​3​8​1​5​753

The insane arro­gance of the Jamaican Prime Minister on the issue of crime is breath­tak­ing­ly shock­ing. In his most naked igno­rance, the prime min­is­ter still arro­gant­ly insists today, as he did when he cam­paigned for office, we can­not just form a squad and send them to shoot up gunmen.
Any crim­i­nal pro­fil­er will tell you that a part of the arse­nal of deal­ing with vio­lent crim­i­nals is the fear that they must feel at the pow­er of the laws and those who enforce them. By remov­ing the ele­ment of resolve, that every­thing is on the table at the high­est lev­el, the Island’s crim­i­nals are com­fort­ed in the idea that they have a friend in Jamaica house.
This is far more seri­ous than JLP/​PNP; it is a threat that has exis­ten­tial ram­i­fi­ca­tions for the island’s stability.
If we set aside the absolute mock­ery of the exer­cise in the peo­ple’s house that pass­es for par­lia­men­tary dis­course, the utter non­sense of the Prime Minister’s super­cil­ious address should shock all law-abid­ing Jamaicans.

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If we ignore the woe­ful­ly pathet­ic fail­ings of Mark Golding and what remains of the PNP, even if we remove from our con­scious­ness the idea that the PNP could do a bet­ter job, we are left with the more fright­en­ing specter, that as a nation, Jamaica is in seri­ous trouble.
There is no under­stand­ing that [yes] there is only one lan­guage that means any­thing to Jamaica’s vio­lent mur­der­ers; that is the lan­guage of the law­man’s guns.
Modern-day sophistry pop­u­lar­ized by this Prime Minister has bled into the lumpen pro­lif­er­ate is noth­ing but fal­la­cious argu­ment, that has demon­stra­bly failed. Jamaicans have seen what that kind of uptown pre­tense is capa­ble of, and they are fed up with it. Law-abid­ing Jamaicans are fed up with this abdi­ca­tion of duty, but they have no one to stand up on their behalf.
A look at the mem­bers’ behav­ior in the peo­ple’s house informs with­out a shad­ow of a doubt that this sor­ry lot will not res­cue the coun­try. It also demon­strates why there are no stan­dards of deco­rum and civil­i­ty in our country.

The Prime Mister’s promise that there are greater efforts at shoring up bor­der secu­ri­ty is not an excuse to ignore the killings that are hap­pen­ing with alarm­ing fre­quen­cy dai­ly. Even if the secu­ri­ty forces could stop every gun com­ing into the coun­try, it would not stop the killings; it would cut off the sup­ply of weapons and ammu­ni­tion, and oth­er con­tra­band, but it would do noth­ing about the will­ing­ness of killers to kill indiscriminately.
I had long advo­cat­ed that the Island made a hor­ri­ble gam­ble under Percival Patterson when it decid­ed not to train a sin­gle detec­tive for a full decade. The records will show that-that peri­od rep­re­sents where the police lost the fight.
As some­one who came from the force’s inves­tiga­tive arm, I am a bit par­tial to it, even as I under­stand the need for the var­i­ous arms of the force, inves­tiga­tive pro­fi­cien­cy can­not be overstated.
One thing that must be made clear to this Prime Minister, even with the great­est intel­li­gence gath­er­ing, when it’s time to go after the blood­thirsty killers, it requires com­pe­tent, well-trained officers.

The death of Superintendent Leon Clunis and anoth­er offi­cer in June of last year in Horizon Park, St Catherine, was a stark reminder of that.
I don’t expect the Prime Minister to con­cern him­self with the minor con­se­quence of the on-duty death of two police offi­cers due to his poli­cies; the rest of us do.
Stopping guns com­ing in and pro­tect­ing the streets from the killers are not zero-sum issues. We have to do both simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. Ramping up intel­li­gence gath­er­ing and advanc­ing strong enforce­ment are not mutu­al­ly exclu­sive.
This Government has been one of the most crim­i­nal friend­ly admin­is­tra­tion since our inde­pen­dence. Shockingly, a Labor Party Administration could be this tone-deaf on such a sem­i­nal issue, as the crit­i­cal issue of pro­tect­ing the Jamaican people.
Andrew Holness’ seems to be caught up in read­ing his own press clip­pings. The idol­a­trous title [bro­gad] bestowed upon him by his sup­pli­cants, seems to have com­plete­ly eat­en away the part of his brain that would be recep­tive to com­mon sense.

The Jamaican Prime Minister, Andrew Holness, has zero train­ing or knowl­edge about law-enforce­ment. The Minister of Nation Security, Horace Chang, is a med­ical doc­tor. The Commissioner of Police, Antony Anderson, is a Soldier. Justice Minister Delroy Chuck, is a Lawyer, opposed to the rule of law, who should nev­er be allowed close to our coun­try’s nation­al secu­ri­ty apparatus.
The best argu­ment to be made for any­one that is part of the Security & Justice appa­ra­tus is Attorney General Marlene Mahaloo Forte, who real­ly has pre­cious lit­tle to do with crime-fight­ing strategies.
Again, I chan­nel my friend,” to the peo­ple who say tak­ing out mur­der­ers has not worked; how is rolling over and sur­ren­der­ing work­ing for you”?
In the 1980s, under Edward Seaga, shoot­ers knew that we were com­ing for them; there was no if’s and or buts. They sought refuge in oth­er coun­tries. At the time, the Island was reg­is­ter­ing 500 plus homi­cides. As law enforce­ment offi­cers, we worked night and day to reduce those num­bers because we thought that num­ber was far too many.
The fake elites com­plained that our strat­e­gy was not work­ing. How are the abject and shame­ful sur­ren­der work­ing for you know-noth­ing opin­ion­at­ed fools now?

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Mike writes for thinkers.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.