So you are feel­ing real­ly sick, hor­ri­ble stom­ach cramps, you final­ly decide to take the advice of those who care about you and go see a med­ical Doctor.
After a bat­tery of tests the Doctor and his team explain that you have can­cer, at this point it is not ter­mi­nal but it could be real soon if a treat­ment reg­i­men is not embarked on immediately.
You are in shock , can­cer how could you end up with can­cer , sure you have been sick but can­cer? How could you poten­tial­ly be ter­mi­nal­ly ill , this kind of thing only hap­pen to oth­er people.
So in a daze you sat there as the Doctor explained the steps which must be tak­en imme­di­ate­ly if you are to have a chance of sur­vival, but you hard­ly heard a thing he said . Still in a daze you leave the Doctor’s office with­out agree­ing to any­thing the Doctor said or mak­ing appoint­ments to return for pro­fes­sion­al treatment.
Still in ter­ri­ble pain you go to the neigh­bor­hood cor­ner store, you pur­chase some over the counter pain killers you take a cou­ple with a drink of white-rum, all the time telling the shop­keep­er what you were just told and ask­ing her advice as you scoff at your Doctor’s sci­en­tif­ic findings.

She tells you to go get some cerasee tea and even­tu­al­ly gets you to pur­chase some she just con­ve­nient­ly has on hand. Doped up on the con­tents of the over the counter drugs and the poten­tial­ly dead­ly alco­hol com­bi­na­tion you feel some relief so you leave the cor­ner store and go to your neigh­bor’s house where you relate what you heard from your Doctor.
He laughs and tells you the doc­tor is an idiot , they don’t know what they are talk­ing about and he pro­ceed­ed to tell you about some­thing much bet­ter than any­thing the doc­tor could ever do for you.
He brings out a green con­coc­tion he has hid­den some­where in his house. He brags that it con­tains Ganga , White Rum and a whole slew of oth­er weeds and herbs. He pours you a small glass and you drink it down swift­ly all the time winc­ing at the hor­rif­ic taste.
Pretty soon the calm­ing effect of the drug and the addi­tion­al alco­hol tell your brain that it is work­ing on what­ev­er ails you. Unfortunately for you what is hap­pen­ing is that between the alco­hol the cannabis and the over the counter drug your brain con­vinced your body that the pain has sub­sided. When in fact you are only being lulled into a false sense of relief as the dan­ger­ous com­bi­na­tion is mere­ly cre­at­ing a calm­ing effect, but it is actu­al­ly still there.

You feel so great on the Ganga white Rum and pills that you ask your neigh­bor for the ingre­di­ents which he will­ing­ly and proud­ly gave to you . You went ahead and cre­at­ed your own witch’s brew which you con­tin­ue to take to calm the stom­ach cramps.
You do this for months and you feel some­what bet­ter but the pain nev­er real­ly goes away.
More or less it tends to sub­side when you take the con­coc­tion, how­ev­er you find that you have to drink more and more each time to achieve the same result.

One morn­ing you are unable to get out of bed the pain has become excru­ci­at­ing­ly unbear­able, you are unable to stand.
Your fam­i­ly rush­es you to the hos­pi­tal where you are admit­ted in crit­i­cal con­di­tion. Quick tests reveal that you do have can­cer. You tell the Medical team you want them to oper­ate , just do any­thing to rid you of the pain.
The team looks at you with a strange look on their faces, you won­der why it is that no one is say­ing any­thing . You can almost hear your own heartbeat.
After what seemed like an eter­ni­ty the lead Doctor breaks his silence.
There is no point in operating .
The can­cer has tak­en over your body.
You have only weeks to live.
He tells you he will have his team make you as com­fort­able as pos­si­ble, they silent­ly streamed out of the room… Unable to put your thoughts into a cohe­sive pat­tern you despair as you try to con­tem­plate what you will fell like dead.
If only you had act­ed when your fam­i­ly Doctor told you you had cancer.….….….….….….….….

AS YOU MAY HAVE IMAGINED.….

As you may have imag­ined ‚none of this hap­pened I con­jured it all up .
Why? Because this hypo­thet­i­cal exact­ly describes Jamaica’s crime crisis.
Sure Professionals have diag­nosed the prob­lem in a time­ly fashion.
Sure Professionals have giv­en their views on what needs to be done in order to save the coun­try. But in typ­i­cal Jamaican fash­ion they chose to get Law ‑enforce­ment advice from, butch­ers, bar­bers, farm­ers, vil­lage lawyers and every­one in between , instead of lis­ten­ing to the peo­ple who actu­al­ly know what the hell they are talk­ing about.

The truth of the mat­ter is that the peo­ple nev­er tru­ly respect­ed or cared about law-enforce­ment or it’s offi­cers. This is true from Jamaica House to grass-yard. The epi­dem­ic of crime , crim­i­nal tol­er­ance and mur­der is a cul­tur­al one and not one which can be erad­i­cat­ed quick­ly. It may require gen­er­a­tional change to ful­ly remove the crime cul­ture from the Island.
They nev­er respect­ed the police so they do not lis­ten to the police on polic­ing they go to every talk­ing head they find and ask how do you fix this crime prob­lem, because God for­bid they con­sult seri­ous­ly with Police about policing. …

Well the can­cer has set­tled in ‚no amount of bush doc­tor , jonkanoo, witch dak­ta or belief that Divine hands placed them in posi­tions to fix crime will change a damn thing. The fact is that if you don’t know what the hell you are doing you sim­ply don’t know.
No amount of wannabe police is going to fix our crime sit­u­a­tion,. Just days ago Doctors in the United States sep­a­rat­ed twin boys joined at the head . After over twen­ty hours of surgery they man­aged to sep­a­rate the boys successfully .
It was­n’t easy , it was­n’t quick but the par­ents damn sure did not ask the guys who worked in main­te­nance, impor­tant though they are, to per­form the oper­a­tion on their sons.
They chose the real pros.
No amount of white rum and gan­ja, or pon­tif­i­cat­ing jok­ers with expan­sive and lengthy argu­ments  is going to fix this prob­lem. They are part of the prob­lem, they have jobs because of crime . They have no inter­est in see­ing the back of crime.

In 2010 heav­i­ly armed mer­ce­nar­ies who rule the streets demon­strat­ed in no uncer­tain terms that they were pre­pared and capa­ble of defend­ing their turf. The burned Police sta­tions and mur­dered mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces.
In the end the Government held hear­ings on the advice of the nation­al secu­ri­ty sew­er work­ers, butch­ers, and farm­ers, hig­glers, doc­tors, jour­nal­ists and all in all bull­shit­ters [sic] on what the actu­al secu­ri­ty experts did wrong as the fought valiant­ly to annex one com­mu­ni­ty to the rest of the country.
In the end they ruled that those who burned police sta­tions , killed mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces should be com­pen­sat­ed mon­e­tar­i­ly and the coun­try should apol­o­gize to them as well.

The idea that the polit­i­cal forces on the Island in both polit­i­cal par­ties want to see the end of crime is the biggest bull­shit . Everyone has a stake in crime one way or the other.

Last Sunday an entire family of five were slaughtered and their home along March Pen Road in Spanish Town, burned to the ground. According to the Police for the last three consecutive weekends there have been acts of arson along March Pen Road.

According to the US, State Department’s Overseas Security Advisory Council [Crime through­out Jamaica maybe as a result of sev­er­al fac­tors: pover­ty, ret­ri­bu­tion, drugs, gangs and politics. 
Additionally, Organized crime and oth­er crim­i­nal ele­ments are preva­lent and extreme­ly active. Most crim­i­nal activ­i­ty is gang-relat­ed. The police are only able to resolve (make arrests) in 45 per­cent of homi­cides annu­al­ly, and they only con­vict per­pe­tra­tors in sev­en per­cent of the homi­cide cas­es. This leads both the pub­lic and police to doubt the effec­tive­ness of the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem lead­ing to vig­i­lan­tism, which only exac­er­bates the cycle of vio­lence. Based on their past expe­ri­ences, most civil­ians fear that at best, the author­i­ties can­not pro­tect them from orga­nized crim­i­nal ele­ments, and at worst, are col­lud­ing with crim­i­nals, lead­ing cit­i­zens to avoid giv­ing evi­dence or wit­ness testimonies.]

Having seen it first hand and fought it for a decade, I would say to the US State Department , “you hit the nail on the head but there is no maybe about the fac­tors which have cre­at­ed this dan­ger­ous Serengeti of violence”.
This assess­ment is a damn­ing indict­ment, not on our coun­try but on the Administrations which have han­dled the Island’s affairs since it was let go by Britain.
When a team screws up you don’t fire the team. Sure you may make a change here and there ‚but the prob­lem is always with­in the remit of the coach­ing staff.

Jamaica’s polit­i­cal lead­ers after Independence have been indis­tin­guish­able from lit­tle banana repub­lic strong­men. The kind every­one points to in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia.
They have pret­ty much inter­pret­ed the pow­er giv­en to them to serve as author­i­ty to rule.
Both polit­i­cal par­ties have placed guns into the hands of crim­i­nals and insu­lat­ed them­selves from crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion by effec­tive­ly dis­man­tling the rule of law.

There are sev­er­al rea­sons why cas­es gets stalled in the system.
Incomplete pros­e­cu­tion case files ◊Missing wit­ness­es ◊ Overburdened Infrastructure ◊Defense coun­sels not being paid◊Accused crim­i­nals abscond­ing the juris­dic­tion, among others.
When we con­flate the afore­men­tioned and jux­ta­pose them with the lim­it­ed time that the high court sits in the abbre­vi­at­ed ses­sions, we have a bet­ter idea why there is such a huge back­log. One begins to get a bet­ter idea why such small num­bers of cas­es gets heard much less decided.
It gives us a bet­ter view of why even mur­der cas­es do not get heard as they should with the degree of dis­patch they deserve.
Did I also men­tion poor pri­or­i­ti­za­tion on the part of author­i­ties giv­en the exist­ing chal­lenges? Well that is also a part of the equation.

Nevertheless , none of the rea­sons which con­tribute to the back­log sin­gu­lar­ly or com­bined is enough to jus­ti­fy toss­ing a case as seri­ous as mur­der from the roster.
Look, I too believe that clear­ing the dock­et of all cas­es would give all con­cerned a fresh start . But as tempt­ing as that prospect is , it would only offer the polit­i­cal direc­torate and those who got the sys­tem bogged down in the morass in the first place a sec­ond chance at lethar­gy ‚lazi­ness, and corruption.

No amount of zeal and desire for a fresh start could ever jus­ti­fy toss­ing a mur­der case from the court dock­et sim­ply because we crave a fresh start , or worse that some bureau­crat desires to over­step his bounds .
There are sev­er­al ways that court dock­ets can be cleared with greater alacrity with­out deny­ing jus­tice to those whom have had their loved ones tak­en away from them.
First , get rid of the sil­ly Michaelmas , Hillary and Easter ses­sions and have Judges sit in courts on week­days in oth­er countries.
If nec­es­sary appoint more judges and sus­pend for a time the use of court­rooms used for res­i­dent mag­is­trate mat­ters . This can be done by effec­tive­ly using the plea-bar­gain tool, giv­ing low lev­el offend­ers the oppor­tu­ni­ty to accept a plea , pay a fine and move on with­out clog­ging the sys­tem. Doing so would effec­tive­ly free up court­room space and release the bot­tle­neck chock­ing off the dis­pen­sa­tion of justice.

The idea of throw­ing out cas­es in order to gain a fresh start is exact­ly the oppo­site of what the coun­try should be doing . It will encour­age cor­rup­tion. It will encour­age crim­i­nal offend­ers to stall their cas­es know­ing they will even­tu­al­ly be tossed.
Shockingly that is what the Island jus­tice Minister is advo­cat­ing. Which leads me to ask , ?whose inter­est does Delroy Chuck represent.
Delroy Chuck is not igno­rant to these facts, there­fore it must rea­son­ably be con­strued that his push is to absolve dan­ger­ous mur­der­ers using the office of the Minister of Justice to do it will not stand.
We can­not allow Delroy Chuck to use the peo­ple’s office to help Jamaica’s dan­ger­ous mur­der­ers to evade jus­tice . Chuck belongs in the hall of shame, in a coun­try of law this guy would be boot­ed from office for dar­ing to sug­gest what he has.,
This pub­li­ca­tion is call­ing on Prime Minister Andrew Holness to repu­di­ate the posi­tion of Delroy Chuck. And replace him with a pub­lic ser­vant who has the inter­est of Jamaica’s law abid­ing cit­i­zens at heart.

The coun­try does not need a jus­tice min­is­ter who advo­cates for crim­i­nals over decent law abid­ing citizens.

President Obama hit Republicans right between the eyes by explain­ing how birtherism and the GOP’s pol­i­tics of hate cre­at­ed Donald Trump.

I’ve actu­al­ly heard this argu­ment a num­ber of times. I have been blamed by Republicans for a lot of things, but being blamed for their pri­maries and who they’re select­ing for their par­ty is novel.

Look, I’ve said — I said it at the State of the Union that one of my regrets is the degree to which polar­iza­tion and the nasty tone of our pol­i­tics has accel­er­at­ed rather than waned over the course of the last sev­en and a half years. And I do all kinds of soul-search­ing in terms of are there things I can do bet­ter to make sure that we’re uni­fy­ing the coun­try. But I also have to say, Margaret, that, objec­tive­ly, it’s fair to say that the Republican polit­i­cal elites and many of the infor­ma­tion out­lets — social media, news out­lets, talk radio, tele­vi­sion sta­tions — have been feed­ing the Republican base for the last sev­en years a notion that every­thing I do is to be opposed; that coöper­a­tion or com­pro­mise some­how is a betray­al; that max­i­mal­ist, abso­lutist posi­tions on issues are polit­i­cal­ly advan­ta­geous; that there is a “them” out there and an “us,” and “them” are the folks who are caus­ing what­ev­er prob­lems you’re experiencing.

And the tone of that pol­i­tics — which I cer­tain­ly have not con­tributed to — I don’t think that I was the one to prompt ques­tions about my birth cer­tifi­cate, for exam­ple. I don’t remem­ber say­ing, hey, why don’t you ask me about that. Or why don’t you ques­tion whether I’m American, or whether I’m loy­al, or whether I have America’s best inter­ests at heart — those aren’t things that were prompt­ed by any actions of mine.

And so what you’re see­ing with­in the Republican Party is, to some degree, all those efforts over a course of time cre­at­ing an envi­ron­ment where some­body like a Donald Trump can thrive. He’s just doing more of what has been done for the last sev­en and a half years.

…..

So I am more than hap­py to own the respon­si­bil­i­ty as President, as the only office hold­er who was elect­ed by all the American peo­ple, to con­tin­ue to make efforts to bridge divides and help us find com­mon ground. As I’ve said before, I think that com­mon ground exists all across the coun­try. You see it every day in how peo­ple work togeth­er and live togeth­er and play togeth­er and raise their kids togeth­er. But what I’m not going to do is to val­i­date some notion that the Republican crack-up that’s been tak­ing place is a con­se­quence of actions that I’ve taken.

President Obama pinned the rise of Donald Trump square­ly on the Republican Party. Republicans decid­ed that they were going to embrace birtherism, obstruc­tion and hate as a polit­i­cal strat­e­gy. The soil that grew Donald Trump was fer­til­ized by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and every sin­gle elect­ed Republican who fol­lowed the lead of con­ser­v­a­tive media by embrac­ing Obama hate.

The bill has come due for sev­en years of Republican racial­ly divi­sive pol­i­tics. Donald Trump is doing noth­ing more than run­ning on all of the same posi­tions that Republican politi­cians used to win House and Senate elec­tions in 2010 and 2014. Donald Trump isn’t hijack­ing the Republican Party. He is a byprod­uct of the Republican Party.

Obama didn’t cre­ate Trump. The Republican reac­tion to the suc­cess of Obama’s pres­i­den­cy cre­at­ed Trump. Republicans blame Obama for every­thing, but they only have them­selves to blame for the rise of Donald Trump.

birtherism cre­at­ed Trump, Donald Trump, President Obama, Republicans cre­at­ed Trump

Obama Leaves Republicans Reeling By Explaining How GOP Birtherism And Hate Built Trump

DOES THIS MAN LOOK LIKE A PRESIDENT TO YOU?

That this man has been allowed to be a representative of a major political party for the Presidency of the United States is beyond shocking , not just to many Americans but to people across the Globe who look on in utter horror. That such a hateful narcissist, misogynistic, Racist could emerge as the standard bearer of the Republican Party should however come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention.

The Media Made This F**king Monster: How Phony Objectivity Helped Create Donald Trump

When the total­i­ty of Donald Trump’s char­ac­ter is summed up, by his own words and actions, it becomes clear­er each day that Hillary Clinton’s deplorable char­ac­ter­i­za­tion describes Trump quite appropriately,.
Who would argue that big­ot­ed Racists , and Misogynists are deplorable?

Who would argue against the fact that Donald Trump for President has been and always was a huge laugh­ing mat­ter for peo­ple all across the world.
Elements with­in the British Parliament wants Trump banned from enter­ing their country.
Imagine that with­in the con­text that England is America’s clos­est ally.

Republicans Cannot Now Deny The Monster They Created..

Benjamin Netanyahu Israel’s Prime Minister asked Trump not to vis­it that Country, albeit it was at a crit­i­cal time, when his pres­ence may have inflamed pas­sions and cre­at­ed violence.
Consider how­ev­er that a poten­tial American pres­i­den­t’s pres­ence could been seen to be that poten­tial­ly com­bustible has to account for something.
Israel may very well be America’s sec­ond clos­est ally.

https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​c​a​l​l​e​d​-​b​l​u​e​-​c​o​l​l​a​r​-​a​n​g​er/

Consider that the peo­ple of America’s clos­est neigh­bor on it’s south­ern bor­der total­ly hates Donald Trump . Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto invit­ed Trump to his coun­try and was imme­di­ate­ly shocked by the vis­cer­al and angry response he received from the Mexican people.
Enrique Peña Nieto did not have the char­ac­ter to resign,. Nevertheless finance Minister Luis Videgaray, who alleged­ly arranged the vis­it stepped down as a result of the uproar Trump’s vis­it elicited.

Blacks Have Everything To Lose Under A Trump Presidency As Does Most Everyone Else.….

let’s look at Donald Trump’s racist 1989 cam­paign against the so-called Central Park five . Trump spent over a hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars on full page Ads in the city’s news­pa­pers call­ing for the death penal­ty of the lit­tle boys who were wrong­ly arrest­ed, and coerced into an unlaw­ful and ille­gal con­fes­sion with­out the ben­e­fit of lawyers or their par­ents present.
The old­est boy at the time was a devel­op­men­tal­ly chal­lenged 16 year old. The oth­er four were 15 and 14 years respectively.
Even after the boys had been con­vict­ed and served out their full sen­tences and were found to have been wrong­ly con­vict­ed he showed absolute­ly no com­pas­sion for his racist cam­paign against them .
It should also be not­ed that Trump called for the death penalty/​lynching of the boys even though the cen­tral Park vic­tim had not died . To this day Donald Trump refus­es to admit he was wrong.

https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​n​a​t​i​v​e​-​i​s​m​-​d​i​s​g​u​i​s​e​d​-​p​a​t​r​i​o​t​i​sm/

With respect to con­tin­ued police killings of unarmed Black men across America, Donald Trump called for tougher polic­ing tac­tics, includ­ing the use of the uncon­sti­tu­tion­al stop and frisk policy.
He labels Black People hope­less. Labels Mexicans Rapists and mur­der­ers. He wants to ban all Muslims from enter­ing America, sole­ly on the basis of their Muslim faith.
He berates and ridicules a gold-star fam­i­ly who sac­ri­ficed their only son who lost his life serv­ing in the nation’s armed forces./
He sur­rounds him­self with peo­ple like Rudolph Giuliani, and Newt Gingrich., Between him­self Giuliani and Gingrich they have nine mar­riages. That says some­thing about their so-called Christian val­ues or more appro­pri­ate­ly their lack thereof.

Other major sup­port­ers of Trump includes New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie a major bul­ly who is alleged to have know and maybe con­spired to pun­ish a Fort Lee New Jersey Democratic Mayor who did not endorse him for re-elec­tion, by clos­ing lanes lead­ing into the George Washington Bridge.
The lane clo­sures cre­at­ed major con­ges­tion at the bridge and result­ed in much traf­fic prob­lems for Fort Lee.
One for­mer Christie loy­al­ist cur­rent­ly under indict­ment has tes­ti­fied that Christie absolute­ly knew about the lane closures .
Steve Bannon Alt Right func­tionary and for­mer­ly of the far right web­site Breitbart now co-con­trol Trump’s campaign.
Former FOX head hon­cho Roger Ailes who alleged­ly sex­u­al­ly harassed mul­ti­ple female employ­ees of the mis­in­for­ma­tion net­work , cost­ing the com­pa­ny tens of mil­lions, now also report­ed­ly advis­es Trump.
At what point does vot­ers start ask­ing them­selves whether this is the pres­i­dent they want.

Trump knows he has a sol­id block of core sup­port­ers who do not care about any­thing he ever says or does. He allud­ed to that say­ing “I could shoot some­one in the mid­dle of 5^th avenue and I would­n’t lose a sin­gle supporter” .
These are the deplorables who absolute­ly hates every­one who does not look like them or believe what they believe. These are they who blame every­one but them­selves for their lack of upward mobility.
Ultimately every ratio­nal vot­er has to deter­mine whether this vile crea­ture is a poten­tial America President.

There are a million ways one can be complimentary of something without saying outlandish things which may be construed as controversial. I have always believed that the best way to find out what people really think is to let them speak without interrupting them , by and large they will tell you who they are and what they really believe.

Former President Bill Clinton was once char­ac­ter­ized as the Explainer in chief by no oth­er than cur­rent President Barack Obama. Coming from President Barack Obama that is a glow­ing endorse­ment that Bill Clinton is incred­i­bly capa­ble of artic­u­lat­ing a point , prob­a­bly more so than many.
Nobody believe Bill Clinton has a prob­lem say­ing exact­ly what he wants to convey,hence that is the rea­son his com­ments regard­ing the Affordable Care Act legit­i­mate­ly rais­es eyebrows.

Here’s the Clinton Flint, Michigan, speech last Monday.

.….….….….….….….….….….….….….….

[The cur­rent sys­tem works fine if you’re eli­gi­ble for Medicaid, if you’re a low­er-income work­ing per­son, if you’re already on Medicare, or if you get enough sub­si­dies on a mod­est income that you can afford your health care. But the peo­ple that are get­ting killed in this deal are small busi­ness­peo­ple and indi­vid­u­als who make just a lit­tle too much to get any of these sub­si­dies. So you’ve got this crazy sys­tem where all of a sud­den, 25 mil­lion more peo­ple have health care and then the peo­ple that are out there bust­ing it ― some­times 60 hours a week ― wind up with their pre­mi­ums dou­bled and their cov­er­age cut in half. It’s the cra­zi­est thing in the world.

Now the next thing is, we got to fig­ure out now what to do on health care. Her oppo­nent said, ‘Oh, just repeal it all. The mar­ket will take care of it.’ That didn’t work out very well for us, did it? We wound up with the most expen­sive sys­tem in the world and we insured the small­est per­cent­age of peo­ple. On the oth­er hand, the cur­rent sys­tem works fine if you’re eli­gi­ble for Medicaid, if you’re a low­er income work­ing per­son, if you’re already on Medicare, or if you get enough sub­si­dies on a mod­est income that you can afford your health care.

But the peo­ple that are get­ting killed in this deal are small busi­ness­peo­ple and indi­vid­u­als who make just a lit­tle too much to get any of these sub­si­dies. Why? Because they’re not orga­nized, they don’t have any bar­gain­ing pow­er with insur­ance com­pa­nies, and they’re get­ting whacked. So you’ve got this crazy sys­tem where all of a sud­den, 25 mil­lion more peo­ple have health care and then the peo­ple that are out there bust­ing it ― some­times 60 hours a week ― wind up with their pre­mi­ums dou­bled and their cov­er­age cut in half. It’s the cra­zi­est thing in the world so here’s the sim­plest thing ― you raise your hands, you think about it ― here’s the sim­plest thing: fig­ure out an afford­able rate and let peo­ple use that ― some­thing that won’t under­mine your qual­i­ty of life, won’t inter­fere with your abil­i­ty to make expens­es, won’t inter­fere with your abil­i­ty to save mon­ey for your kid’s col­lege edu­ca­tion. And let peo­ple buy in to Medicare or Medicaid.

Here’s why: you can let peo­ple buy in for just a lit­tle bit because unlike where you are now, if you were on the oth­er side of this, if you were an insur­er, you’d say, ‘Gosh, I only got 2,000 peo­ple in this lit­tle pool. Eighty per­cent of insur­ance costs every year come from 20 per­cent of the peo­ple. If I get unlucky in the pool, I’ll lose mon­ey.’ So they over­charge you just to make sure, and on good years, they just make a whop­ping prof­it from the peo­ple who are least able to pay it.

It doesn’t make any sense. The insur­ance mod­el doesn’t work here; it’s not like life insur­ance, it’s not like casu­al­ties, it’s not like pre­dict­ing flood­ing. It doesn’t work. So Hillary believes we should sim­ply let peo­ple who are above the line for get­ting these sub­si­dies have access to afford­able entry into the Medicare and Medicaid pro­grams. They’ll all be cov­ered, it will not hurt the pro­gram, we will not lose a lot of mon­ey. And we ought to do it.

.….….….….….….….….….…..

I think his health care bill has been a remark­able suc­cess for 25 mil­lion peo­ple, and for get­ting rid of pre-exist­ing con­di­tions, and the prob­lems with it show why the pres­i­dent was right to rec­om­mend a pub­lic option in the first place because the only real prob­lems I can see with it are small busi­ness­peo­ple and indi­vid­ual work­ing peo­ple just above the sub­sidy line are hav­ing. Why is that? Because they’re small, they’re inde­pen­dent, they do have any mar­ket pow­er vis a vis the insur­ance com­pa­nies, and that’s why Hillary said, “The change we need is not to wreck this thing and repeal it. It’s done too much good. The change we need is to cre­ate an afford­able option for the small busi­ness peo­ple and the work­ing peo­ple who are not cov­ered ― that’s what the pub­lic opin­ion is about.

Keep in mind, when the oth­er side com­plains about that, if they just pay these peo­ple some­thing they can afford, it will cov­er well over 90 per­cent of the costs of the expan­sion of Medicare or Medicaid or both. Why? Because there’s a huge pool. This is one place where his adjec­tive works. This is real­ly impor­tant ― there’s a ‘huge’ pool, and the eco­nom­ics of health care are as fol­lows: in any giv­en year, more than 80 per­cent of the costs are claimed by 20 per­cent of the peo­ple. It’s just a shift­ing 20 per­cent. That means if you have a small pool, it’s impos­si­ble to price right. It doesn’t work, it’s not like life or casu­al­ty or prop­er­ty or oth­er insur­ance, which is why there should be a pub­lic opin­ion, and it will either be avail­able to peo­ple, or the pri­vate insur­ance com­pa­nies will fig­ure out how to reor­ga­nize them­selves and put peo­ple into huge pools to compete.]

Look Bill Clinton is nobody’s fool he bad­ly wants his wife to be President . Bill Clinton will do any­thing includ­ing run­ning as a block­er for his wife’s cam­paign . Fans of the Netflix series house of cards may find some sim­i­lar­i­ties between the Clinton’s Political life and that of the fic­tion­al cou­ple the Underwoods played by Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright.

Bill Clinton under­stands that the Affordable Care Act is less than per­fect. Now this is part­ly because of the Intransigence of some Republican Governors. Bill Clinton I believe under­stands his wife owns this law as much as President Obama, she also strug­gles might­i­ly with white male vot­ers , who bet­ter to speak to those white men than Bill Clinton?
I esti­mate that Bill Clinton wants to insu­late his wife from what­ev­er neg­a­tives that are out there against the ACA.
There was absolute­ly no rea­son for him to say So you’ve got this crazy sys­tem where all of a sud­den, 25 mil­lion more peo­ple have health care and then the peo­ple that are out there bust­ing it ― some­times 60 hours a week ― wind up with their pre­mi­ums dou­bled and their cov­er­age cut in half. It’s the cra­zi­est thing in the world so here’s the sim­plest thing ―

His speech was fine with­out it and he knows it, it was total­ly unnec­es­sary and most peo­ple under­stands that.
Bill Clinton’s lega­cy is some­times lost in the shuf­fle, Clinton see him­self as a great President, yet the con­ver­sa­tions on Presidents are gen­er­al­ly cen­tered between Ronald Reagan , George W Bush and Barack Obama. Somewhere in that shuf­fle Bill’s pres­i­den­cy gets lost.

It’s not the only time that Bill Clinton had to do clean up after deliv­er­ing a speech . Speaking in Spokane Washington last March clin­ton said the following .
[“Now, if you don’t believe we can all grow togeth­er again, if you don’t believe we’re ever going to grow again, if you believe it’s more impor­tant to re-lit­i­gate the past, there may be many rea­sons that you don’t want to sup­port her. But if you believe we can all rise togeth­er, if you believe we’ve final­ly come to the point where we can put the awful lega­cy of the last eight years behind us and the sev­en years before that — when we were prac­tic­ing trick­le-down eco­nom­ics and no reg­u­la­tion in Washington which is what caused the crash — then you should vote for her because she’s the only per­son who basi­cal­ly has good ideas, will tell you how she’s going to pay for them, can be com­man­der-in-chief and is a proven change-mak­er with Republicans and Democrats and inde­pen­dents alike.”]

Many saw those com­ments as an attack on the stew­ard­ship of President Barack Obama. Clinton and his peo­ple were forced to clar­i­fy that he was speak­ing to Republicans unprece­dent­ed obstruc­tion these last eight years is their lega­cy, and the American peo­ple should reject it by elect­ing Hillary Clinton to build on President Obama’s suc­cess so we can all grow and suc­ceed together.”
The fact of the mat­ter is Clinton did not say any­thing about Republican Obstruction but in fact said the awful lega­cy of the past eight years and the pre­vi­ous sev­en years. Even if by some stretch of log­ic one is able to accept that the last eight years com­ment could be assigned to Republican obstruc­tion­ism, what do you do with the sev­en years before that .
One would have to accept that Bill Clinton was say­ing that the Republican Congress was obstruct­ing the Bush Presidency , which is not sup­port­ed by nei­ther fact nor logic.
Like I said let peo­ple speak and they will tell you how they real­ly feel.

My dis­trust of Bill Clinton may not square with many Democrats, truth­ful­ly many peo­ple see Bill as the first Black President or a sort of hon­orary black of sorts.
I don’t.
Bill and Hillary Clinton are two incred­i­bly ambi­tious peo­ple who wants to win at all cost. I believe nei­ther of them are nec­es­sar­i­ly bad peo­ple, they are just two peo­ple who will do what they must to win.
If that include diss­ing the afford­able care act, diss­ing Obama’s pres­i­den­cy, or ditch­ing the TPP as Hillary now does then so be it.
Bill Clinton, the first Black President[sic] had no prob­lem diss­ing sis­ter soul­ja in 92.
He had no prob­lem telling Senator Ted Kennedy in 2008 that the only rea­son he was sup­port­ing Barack Obama for President was because he was black.
He had no prob­lem telling Senator Kennedy that “A few years ago, this guy would have been get­ting us cof­fee,” the for­mer pres­i­dent told the lib­er­al lion from Massachusetts, accord­ing to the cam­paign book, “Game Change.”

Yeah , I’m sor­ry but I view Bill Clinton’s com­ments with far more cyn­i­cism and skep­ti­cism than the aver­age cen­ter left per­son does and I believe with prop­er justification.
But then again I may be wrong.

When Criminals break the law they ought to know they will be pun­ished . They ought to know they will be caught, not may be caught . They ought to know it’s not a mat­ter of if , but a mat­ter of when.

That was the atti­tude I brought to law-enforce­ment back in my day , it ought to be the atti­tude of police today and going forward.
When the Commissioner of Police said that no stones will be left unturned until Duppy Film is brought to jus­tice for killing two police offi­cers he ought to have meant it.
He ought not only mean it but he should only say it if he has the means to deliv­er on his promise.
Almost a year lat­er the name Duppy Film is a dis­tant mem­o­ry . Neither the Commissioner of Police nor his band of over­weight kha­ki wear­ing paper tigers both­er to talk about this assas­sin who sum­mar­i­ly exe­cut­ed two law-enforce­ment offi­cers with­out consequence.

As for me I would not have promised what the Commissioner of Police promised. Not only because I under­stood from the get go that the Commissioner was speak­ing from the side of his mouth to appease the offi­cer’s fam­i­lies . I would most cer­tain­ly have pref­ered bring­ing jus­tice to him period.
Those who like to pon­tif­i­cate and pre­tend that Jamaica is a place in which Policing can be done as it is in Scandinavia are free to exist in that utopi­an bub­ble, I share no such belief.

I am going to haz­ard a guess that cop killers would cer­tain­ly not be on the loose dur­ing the days of Anthony Hewitt , Isiah Laing , Cornwall (big­ga) Ford, OC Hare, Altamoth (par­ra )Campbell  and the long list of valiant crime fight­ers who kept the streets safe and crim­i­nals in their place.
The self appoint­ed moral­ists can argue all they want. It does not change the fact that crime was kept to a min­i­mum and they ben­e­fit­ted from the low­er mur­der numbers.

Jamaica has got to be the only place on Earth which looks for polic­ing solu­tions and strate­gies from talk­ing heads rather than those who are actu­al­ly trained in the dis­ci­pline and have lived the experience.
It’s lit­tle won­der that they passed a law sup­pos­ed­ly to catch crim­i­nal cops , throw­ing out con­cerns from good cops and hav­ing the law increase crime expo­nen­tial­ly as a result..
If the polit­i­cal class want­ed a lid on crime as they con­tem­plat­ed a sec­ond polic­ing agency, they would cer­tain­ly have empow­ered that agency to go after all crim­i­nals , like the FBI is empowered.

As many aver­age Jamaicans have allud­ed, the laws are designed to oppress the poor­er class while ren­der­ing the upper class untouchable.
Today that upper class char­ac­ter­i­za­tion has been reduced to any two-bit lawyer or polit­i­cal thug.
If you know some­one who know some­one who know some­one in pow­er you are untouch­able. Our coun­try is no dif­fer­ent than a sub-Saharan tin-pan dictatorship.

Murder is the top­ic of dis­cus­sion once again as was in 2010 when it reached a crescen­do lead­ing up to the Tivoli Gardens annex­a­tion to Jamaica . Front and cen­ter in the con­ver­sa­tion are the same cheap hus­tlers who play both sides of the conversation.\
Hustlers like Horace Levy has long been seen as a rel­e­vant voice in the dis­cus­sion as it relates to the Island’s impov­er­ished neigh­bor­hoods , crime and gangs.
Levy once head­ed a NGO called the Peace Management Initiative.

https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​j​a​m​a​i​c​a​-​h​u​m​a​n​-​r​i​g​h​t​s​-​g​r​a​v​y​-​t​r​a​in/
As head of that NGO Levy found a seat at the table on the nation­al dis­course on crime, it also gave him a pow­er­ful mega­phone much like JFJ and oth­er hus­tlers have been allowed to dom­i­nate the con­ver­sa­tion to the detri­ment of the Island.
As a con­se­quence of hav­ing that mega­phone Horace Levy joined the long line of anti-police antag­o­nists who use their perch to demo­nize the police and ele­vate criminals.
Levy has led a vis­cer­al cam­paign against the Jamaica Constabulary Force, bur­nish­ing his image as a sav­ior of sorts for the down­trod­den while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly ensur­ing his rel­e­vance with­in the con­text of what exist on the Island.
https://mikebeckles.com/looking-to-continue-eating-a-food‑2/

Horace Levy vis­cer­al­ly exco­ri­at­ed the Police’ assess­ment of what con­sti­tut­ed Gangs in many of the Island’s depressed com­mu­ni­ties back in 2013. In a delib­er­a­tive push­back Levy said much of what the police count­ed as active gangs were what he char­ac­ter­ized as Corner Crews.
In a let­ter to then Commissioner of Police Owen Ellington, Levy said the following.

Some ques­tions for the police, the com­mis­sion­er of police, the min­is­ter of nation­al secu­ri­ty, and the peo­ple of Jamaica: Does every police encounter with crim­i­nals have to involve a shoot-out? Must every police encounter with crim­i­nals require the use of lethal force? Are our crim­i­nals real­ly so more vicious than crim­i­nals in oth­er coun­tries that they can only be dealt with by lethal force? How come our more vicious crim­i­nals man­age to shoot so few police? How much longer will Commissioner of Police Owen Ellington go on sup­port­ing, even encour­ag­ing, the killings car­ried out by his men? How much longer will Minister of National Security Peter Bunting go on endors­ing the behav­ior of Commissioner of Police Ellington? How much longer will our cit­i­zens go on tol­er­at­ing this kind of wan­ton killing of fel­low cit­i­zens? Is the blood of only a few of us boil­ing? If this can hap­pen in the first two weeks of the year, what will the oth­er 50 be like?

At the time Horace Levy berat­ed the Jamaican Police for bat­tling the Island’s urban killers in which he out­right said not enough cops are being killed in their encoun­ters with criminals.
These were some of the crime num­bers which exist­ed between the years 2001 to 2008, 2001 – 2008.
Reported Cases of Murder : 10, 836
Shootings : 11,229
Rape and Carnal Abuse: 9119

At the time Levy wrote that let­ter no one chal­lenged Levy on the insan­i­ty that more police offi­cers should be get­ting shot if the num­ber of armed men they were elim­i­nat­ing were actu­al­ly tru­ly engag­ing them in shoot-outs.
Without one scin­til­la of evi­dence this line of ghast­ly rea­son­ing was allowed to pre­vail with­out the prop­er lev­el of out­rage which should have been attached to it.
I can­not think of any oth­er coun­try in which this line of argu­ment would have been allowed to con­tin­ue , much less com­ing from agen­cies of Government which are tax­pay­er sup­port­ed as the Public defend­er’s office is.
No one except this hum­ble writer both­ered to chal­lenge that notion because it was the pre­vail­ing belief of lit­er­al­ly all who hat­ed police, includ­ing the head of the tax­pay­er fund­ed office of pub­lic defend­er at the time Earl Witter and the long list of peo­ple who gained rel­e­vance by say­ing they were for human rights.

Today crime is out of con­trol, the Island is awash in guns, the Police is effec­tive­ly hol­lowed out to a shell of its for­mer effec­tive­ness , and lord knows it was far from perfect.
The Island’s killers don’t both­er to hide their faces when they parade their weapons, or when they kill .Why should they ‚who is going to go get them?
There are effec­tive tax­pay­er fund­ed safe­guards against them being pur­sued , pros­e­cut­ed much less tak­en out.
The American Federal Bureau Of Investigations(FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Agency(DEA) will now be oper­at­ing sup­pos­ed­ly out of the American Embassy in Kingston.
There has been next to no dis­cus­sion on the Sovereignty issue inher­ent in this revelation .
The mut­ed whim­pers I have heard all seem to sug­gest well we’ll take any help we can get.

In Tuesday’s Edition of the Jamaica Gleaner Horace Levy’s nar­ra­tive has seem­ing­ly come full cir­cle . In a ram­bling dia­tribe titled: Containment Not Good Enough.
Levy said quote:

Minister Bobby Montague’s pre­sen­ta­tion in Parliament last week on the mea­sures tak­en to stem the vio­lence in west­ern Jamaica was detailed and com­pre­hen­sive. It seems to have sat­is­fied most peo­ple that the min­is­ter, the police, the Government are on top of the prob­lem. The real­ly sad thing is that sat­is­fac­tion. It is because the vio­lence, grim as it is, 100 mur­ders a month and climb­ing is treat­ed as intractable. It has been with us for so long that it has become a fix­ture in our envi­ron­ment, a grin-and-bear-it unease. So the counter-vio­lence pre­scrip­tions, which focus sole­ly on repres­sion and con­tain­ment, are tak­en as suf­fi­cient. It is not even noticed that con­tain­ing for a time is all they are doing.
http://​jamaica​-glean​er​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​c​o​m​m​e​n​t​a​r​y​/​2​0​1​6​1​0​0​4​/​h​o​r​a​c​e​-​l​e​v​y​-​c​o​n​t​a​i​n​m​e​n​t​-​n​o​t​-​g​o​o​d​-​e​n​o​ugh

In brief ‚Horace Levy demand­ed to know why was­n’t the slip­pery slide into anar­chy prevented.
Ha for the free­dom to chat shit and not be held accountable .…
Horace Levy sim­ply believe that as always no one notices that he is play­ing both sides for his per­son­al ben­e­fit. In the end Horace Levy’s com­ments not only showed his polit­i­cal stripes it reveals for the coun­try the hypocrisy of these leech­es who play the sys­tem for all it’s worth for their own use and benefit .
Sorry Horace Levy not every Jamaican is igno­rant or blind to what you are doing. You can­not have it both ways.
I see you.….….….….…..

August 31^st 2015 I wrote a lengthy Article titled TRUMP’S RISE A CONTINUATION OF WHAT PALIN BROUGHT TO THE PROCESS…
In that arti­cle I spoke at length of the fright­en­ing rhetoric which had all of a sud­den crept into the polit­i­cal dis­course with a degree of anger we had not heard before.

I went on to say it was dur­ing the elec­tion peri­od of 2008 and the intro­duc­tion of Sarah Palin onto the American polit­i­cal scene that the filthy racist under­bel­ly of America’s race prob­lem came to the fore. For the first time a cer­tain seg­ment of the American pop­u­la­tion believed that the citadel of white suprema­cy they built was about to be tak­en over by a black man with a fun­ny sound­ing name.

Whether McCain was pushed to select Palin a rabid divi­sive racist we may nev­er know. Whether McCain knew just how ran­cid and cor­ro­sive her rhetoric would be toward the African-American Democratic can­di­date we may nev­er know either. But note the time the Tea-Party rose to promi­nence and judge for yourself.
I believe those old enough to remem­ber the 2008 Elections doesn’t need a reminder of the Xenophobic, igno­rant, Racist cam­paign Sarah Palin waged on behalf of John McCain’s candidacy.
https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​t​r​u​m​p​s​-​r​i​s​e​-​a​-​c​o​n​t​i​n​u​a​t​i​o​n​-​o​f​-​w​h​a​t​-​p​a​l​i​n​-​b​r​o​u​g​h​t​-​t​o​-​t​h​e​-​p​r​o​c​e​ss/

John McCain’s deci­sion to chose Sarah Palin unleashed a brand of racial­ly polar­ized pol­i­tics no one in my gen­er­a­tion or younger had ever seen before .
In a doc­u­ment titled Partisan Polarization and the Rise of the Tea Party Movement Professor Alan I. Abramowitz Department of Political Science Emory University wrote .
The Tea Party move­ment has attract­ed enor­mous atten­tion from jour­nal­ists, can­di­dates, and elect­ed offi­cials since it first appeared on the U.S. polit­i­cal scene in ear­ly 2009. However, there has been con­sid­er­able dis­agree­ment among polit­i­cal observers about the num­bers and moti­va­tions of those par­tic­i­pat­ing in Tea Party protests, the preva­lence of racist sen­ti­ments among Tea Party activists, the role played by wealthy indi­vid­u­als, con­ser­v­a­tive groups and media fig­ures in foment­ing these protests, and the poten­tial long-term impact of the move­ment (Judis 2010; Crabtree 2010; Parker 2010; Scarborough 2010).

In a rather reveal­ing Article pub­lished in the New York Daily news Monday October 3^rd, President Barack Obama spoke to exact­ly this truth.
Said the President.

“I see a straight line from the announce­ment of Sarah Palin as the vice pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee to what we see today in Donald Trump, the emer­gence of the Freedom Caucus, the tea par­ty and the shift in the cen­ter of grav­i­ty for the Republican Party,”.
“Whether that changes, I think, will depend in part on the out­come of this elec­tion, but it’s also going to depend on the degree of self-reflec­tion inside the Republican Party,” “There have been at least a cou­ple of oth­er times that I’ve said con­fi­dent­ly that the fever is going to have to break, but it just seems to get worse.”
“It might not have been rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Republicans across the coun­try, but it meant that John Boehner or Mitch McConnell had to wor­ry about that mood inside their par­ty that felt that, ‘No, we should­n’t coöper­ate with Obama, we should­n’t coöper­ate with Democrats.’ That it rep­re­sents com­pro­mise, weak­ness and that the broad­er char­ac­ter of America is at stake, regard­less of what­ev­er pol­i­cy argu­ments might be made,” 

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/obama-current-angry-mood-gop-started-sarah-palin-article‑1.2815652

The President is cor­rect, we believed this to be true from the moment Senator McCain chose Palin. It’s as if some­one had opened up a pan­do­ra box releas­ing an evil Genie emerg­ing with it, a swarm of destruc­tive Locusts none of which could be put back into the bottle.
The President has con­sis­tent­ly said he expect the fever to break soon­er or lat­er. Thus far the fever seem to be get­ting worse,even though Palin has demon­strat­ed that she was by far a total­ly unfit per­son to be a heart­beat from the presidency.
Even though Palin has proven her irrel­e­vance the dam­age has been done. Whether or not Trump becomes President the tox­i­c­i­ty Palin released into the polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment is here to stay.
Just goes to show that one fool can make many. Or prob­a­bly more appro­pri­ate­ly awak­en a lot more.

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Unrest in Charlotte, NC, September 20, 2016. (Credit: Reuters/​Adam Rhew)

Donald Trump should skip the next two debates unless he gets spe­cial guar­an­tees from the mod­er­a­tors, for­mer New York may­or and top Trump advis­er Rudy Giuliani told reporters after the debate. Lester Holt, the NBC News anchor who mod­er­at­ed the debate, should be “ashamed of him­self,” Giuliani said after the debate. He said Holt was wrong to attempt to fact-check Trump on the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of stop-and-frisk and his claimed oppo­si­tion to the Iraq War​.Read more: http://​www​.politi​co​.com/​s​t​o​r​y​/​2​0​1​6​/​0​9​/​g​i​u​l​i​a​n​i​-​t​r​u​m​p​-​d​e​b​a​t​e​s​-​2​2​8​7​5​6​#​i​x​z​z​4​L​S​v​Q​p​fgj

After decades of building up Donald Trump as a legitimate businessman who took his father’s construction business and made it an empire, and framing Hillary Clinton as one half of a pair of pathological disgusting untrustworthy liars the media gets it’s moment in the sun.

PRIZE FIGHT

For months the media has been sell­ing the first pres­i­den­tial debate as a prize fight , they have gone as far as to tell view­ers it will be the most watched event in the his­to­ry of television.
At the end of it all Neilsen will tell just how many house­holds tuned in for the spec­ta­cle. Ironically the nar­ra­tive is baked in. Hillary Clinton is a patho­log­i­cal liar who can­not be trust­ed because she used a pri­vate serv­er . [sic] The nar­ra­tive is that Clinton is viewed as some­one who can­not be trusted.
The polit­i­cal­ly neu­tral Politico has point­ed out that Donald Trump tells a lie every three min­utes and fif­teen sec­onds , over a five hour period.

There have been so much about Donald Trump which has dis­qual­i­fied him from the pres­i­den­cy yet none of it seem to mat­ter to vot­ers accord­ing to the polls. Which caus­es us to won­der whether the require­ments for the pres­i­den­cy has­n’t already changed this elec­tion cycle.
MSNBC’s Craig Melvin this morn­ing asked Jack Kingston a for­mer Georgia Congressman and a Trump sup­port­er, whether the Moderator has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to fact check can­di­dates who lie dur­ing this debate?
Not sur­pris­ing Kingston said no, mod­er­a­tors should not be in the busi­ness of fact check­ing the can­di­dates on the lies they tell. A female Clinton sur­ro­gate on the same pro­gram said absolute­ly yes , they should be .
Why would any­one seek­ing the pres­i­den­cy want to lie about pol­i­cy posi­tions or about their oppo­nen­t’s record? That I believe is the defin­ing issue in this debate .

Now here is what I find trou­bling . It was the job of the Press to guard our democ­ra­cy unless that too has changed as well this cycle.
Debate mod­er­a­tors are jour­nal­ists, how is it that it is not the guardians of our democ­ra­cy’s job to fact check lying politi­cians seek­ing the world’s most pow­er­ful office?
Presidential debates are job inter­views. Candidates seek­ing the pres­i­den­cy should be prepar­ing and study­ing up on pol­i­cy posi­tions and that of their oppo­nents with a view to being able to appro­pri­ate­ly debate the issues.
They should not be seek­ing to lie and get away with lying their way to the nuclear codes.
Why would the media be ask­ing lying politi­cians and their sur­ro­gates whether can­di­dates caught lying should be called out as CNN’s Candy Crowley called Mitt Romney out in 2012? It is their job to do so why would the media cede that most crit­i­cal of func­tion to either polit­i­cal par­ty? Is there any won­der that the sys­tem is this corrupt?
In the last gen­er­al elec­tions Mitt Romney insist­ed that President Obama had not called the Benghazi attack an “act of ter­ror” for 14 days. Crowley cor­rect­ly fact checked Romney that Obama had indeed used the term “act of ter­ror” dur­ing remarks at The White House the day after the attack.
Candy Crowley was right , Mitt Romney was wrong end of story.
However it did not stop the usu­al bar­rage of attacks on Ms Crowley from the polit­i­cal right for doing what her pro­fes­sion trained her to do , get to the truth.

There is no point in lit­i­gat­ing the neg­a­tives of Donald Trump. They are far too many, they are far too dis­tinct, they are far too dis­qual­i­fy­ing. A vot­er who claim that he or she is still unde­cid­ed about who they are vot­ing for at the top of the tick­et is a lying Trump voter.
There is a bina­ry choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, bar­ring some unfore­seen event one of these two peo­ple will be the next pres­i­dent of the United States. Gary Johnson will not be nei­ther will Jill Stein.
There is a hid­den vote out there for Donald Trump I believe, despite the work President Barack Obama has done to return this coun­try to a sound foot­ing there is an ele­ment out there that is pre­pared to reg­is­ter a protest vote against him.
Hillary Clinton’s neg­a­tives also plays into that somehow.
Sure Donald Trump’s neg­a­tives are as stink as a Skunk but they are pre­pared to destroy every­thing by vot­ing for him because he is white and male. They will vote for him with­out admit­ting that they did. The equiv­a­lent of break­ing skin while wash­ing their hands of the blood . Being able to say I did not vote for him when s**t heads south.
That is the chal­lenge for Hillary Clinton.

In a nut­shell this pres­i­den­tial cam­paign may be summed up with­in the con­text of Ted Cruz’s recent endorse­ment of Donald Trump . Cruz said he does not get mad eas­i­ly but when some­one mess­es with his wife and his fam­i­ly he pulls the gloves off.
During the Republican pri­maries Donald Trump made neg­a­tive state­ments about Heidi Cruz’s appear­ance. He also said that Cruz’s father may have been involved with Lee-Harvey Oswald in the killing of President John F Kennedy. This infu­ri­at­ed Cruz to the point that at the Republican Convention Cruz took to the stage and asked vot­ers to vote their con­science rather than ask them to vote for Donald Trump.

Despite all of that, last week in a lengthy face­book post Ted Cruz said he would be vot­ing for Trump. Cruz’s capit­u­la­tion can only be seen for what it was, a craven ‚cal­cu­lat­ed attempt to posi­tion him­self for anoth­er run at the pres­i­den­cy in either 2020 or 2024.
Country be damned it’s all about per­son­al ambitions.

The Police work for you .
You pay their salaries. You provide the pension plans and health-care for them and their families.
You pay for the precinct houses from which they operate. You pay for the cars they drive. You pay for the dashcam videos in cases where they are provided them.
Yet even though you pay for all of it, you are not entitled to see what is on the video when the videos have information which will show police officers doing what they shouldn’t be doing to citizens like you if North Carolina Republican legislators and Governor Pat McCrory have their way.

The unlaw­ful killing and abuse of black cit­i­zens by some police offi­cers have been a sore issue for­ev­er . Despite the protes­ta­tions of black and brown peo­ple, white peo­ple who con­trol pow­er have large­ly ignored their cries for jus­tice or have sim­ply remained silent.
Some have argued that whites large­ly remain silent because of racist ten­den­cies, also that they are served by the sta­tus quo. Others have argued that whites see police in a dif­fer­ent light because they are policed dif­fer­ent­ly and most cops are white,.
The lat­ter view tends to sup­port the argu­ments of peo­ple of col­or, that there are two sep­a­rate jus­tice sys­tems , one for whites and anoth­er for every­one else.

Taxpayers invest­ment in body and dash­cams were sup­posed to either hold police account­able or exon­er­ate them when they act appro­pri­ate­ly. What the police are now doing through their unions and politi­cians behold­en to them, is to make a deter­mi­na­tion when or if the footage is released at all.
That means the very unjust sys­tem which is under scruti­ny gets to set the para­me­ters for that scrutiny.
For those of us who believed that equip­ping police cruis­ers with dash­cams and offi­cers with body cam­eras would go a long way in remov­ing most of the ambi­gu­i­ty from cas­es where police ver­sion of events dif­fer from that of the pub­lic, we may need to rethink those beliefs.
What both­ers me is why on earth would police depart­men­t’s push for mea­sures which invari­ably will lead to more con­flict with the pub­lic they serve.

Republican gov­er­nor Pat McCrory said the law will strike a bal­ance between improv­ing pub­lic trust in the police and respect­ing the rights of officers.
Respecting the rights of officers?
Officers oper­ate in pub­lic spaces sup­pos­ed­ly on behalf of the pub­lic. What con­ceiv­able right could police have abridged by the release of videos of their actions ?
The answer is none !
It is a red her­ring designed to give police one more lay­er of cov­er to con­tin­ue to bru­tal­ize and kill peo­ple of col­or with­out being held accountable.
If this is allowed to stand the next step will be to make it a crime to film ille­gal behav­ior of police.
More and more states will fol­low North Carolina’s lead in mak­ing it impos­si­ble for police crimes to be uncov­ered when police get to deter­mine whether the pub­lic have a right to see whether they broke the law.
This only makes sense in a par­al­lel uni­verse. The longer police agen­cies get to hold video footage , the more like­ly it is that the pub­lic trust what they even­tu­al­ly release. The more that hap­pens the less trust and con­fi­dence large sawths of the pub­lic have in the police. The longer the police hold video footage the more like­ly it is that those footage will be tam­pered with and altered to sup­port the police ver­sion of events. There is noth­ing demo­c­ra­t­ic or trans­par­ent about this. It is a slow steady march toward a police state in which the pub­lic has no say.

As a for­mer police offi­cer I am not naïve to the claims that releas­ing videos to the pub­lic may com­pro­mise aspects of an inves­ti­ga­tion. I am also mind­ful that evi­dence in cer­tain video record­ings may inflame pas­sions and lead to vio­lence or more vio­lence in cas­es where vio­lent protest has already occurred.
Nevertheless when the total­i­ty of the dis­trust of police is tak­en into con­sid­er­a­tion, the police make a crit­i­cal tac­ti­cal mis­take in not appear­ing to be transparent.
I have long main­tained that demon­strat­ing against police is counter pro­duc­tive. Cops do not make laws , going into the streets may have some emo­tion­al val­ue but beyond that it yields pre­cious lit­tle substantively.
The fact is that a large sec­tion of the pop­u­la­tion care expo­nen­tial­ly more about bro­ken glass than it does bul­let rid­dled bod­ies. On that basis march­ing and protest­ing has zero effect in chang­ing attitudes.
If march­ing and singing was going to change cir­cum­stances they would have changed in the over half a cen­tu­ry since the begin­ning of the civ­il rights movement.
The sem­i­nal issue affect­ing the African-American Community when Dr King lived was police abuse. Over the half a cen­tu­ry since Dr King was mur­dered the sem­i­nal issue affect­ing African-Americans is not pover­ty , or lack of jobs as some so called black lead­ers would have you believe, it is police abuse.

There is a rea­son black and brown peo­ple do not trust the police , there are decades and decades of rea­sons for them not to.
When police get to decide whether video footages are released to the pub­lic which pays them, and pay for the video it reveals an intrin­sic sick sys­tem of the tail wag­ging the Dog.
♦Laquan Mcdonald was killed walk­ing away from Chicago police, the police refused to release the footage until they were forced to. The even­tu­al release of the video showed that Mcdonald was sum­mar­i­ly exe­cut­ed as he walked away , nev­er­the­less cops on the scene lied that he posed a threat which neces­si­tat­ed them using dead­ly force.
It was basi­cal­ly an assassination.
♦Walter Scott was sum­mar­i­ly exe­cut­ed In North Charleston, South Carolina as he ran away from a police offi­cer, a civil­ian video revealed that the cop placed a taser beside the body of mis­ter Scott with the intend­ed val­ue of argu­ing Scott attempt­ed to use it on him.
♦ Samuel Dubose was mur­dered in Cincinnati Ohio . The police con­tend­ed that mis­ter Dubose attempt­ed to run him over with his car. Video evi­dence how­ev­er showed that the offi­cer lied that Dubose posed a threat . Importantly as well , oth­er offi­cers on scene cor­rob­o­rat­ed the lie of the cop who mur­dered mis­ter Dubose,
So much for only a few bad apples.
♦Donald Andrews who oper­at­ed a smoke shop in Schenectady New York became a tar­get of police in that city for no rea­son but that he was a black man oper­at­ing a smoke shop.
Police rou­tine­ly staked out his store and would rou­tine­ly enter the store as part of their sur­veil­lance. On one occa­sion one of the offi­cers was cap­tured on mis­ter Andrews sur­veil­lance video, plant­i­ng crack cocaine on the counter. Not only was that offi­cer crim­i­nal he was stu­pid, it defies log­ic that any­one would believe that a per­son sell­ing crack cocaine would have it on the counter like candy.
According to experts mis­ter Andrews could have received four years for that bit of crack cocaine.

Dr. Boyce Watkins, Syracuse University Professor and founder of the Your Black World Coalition at the time said that this case is reflec­tive of the slip­pery slope that exists for black men when it comes to the crim­i­nal jus­tice system.

“If this is the case where the offi­cer got caught plant­i­ng the drugs, what about all the thou­sands of oth­er cas­es where the offi­cer wasn’t stu­pid enough to do it in a room full of cam­eras,” says Dr. Watkins. “The truth is that these inci­dents are not anom­alies, and are reflec­tive of the cor­rup­tion that exists in a sys­tem that has found black men to be lucra­tive com­modi­ties for the prison indus­tri­al com­plex. It has destroyed our fam­i­lies and must be con­front­ed in its entire­ty.” If police tes­ti­mo­ny is always val­ued above and beyond the defen­dan­t’s, how often do you think this hap­pens? With black men being arrest­ed for drug dis­tri­b­u­tion more than any oth­er group of peo­ple, it prob­a­bly hap­pens more than you know.

For years peo­ple of col­or in city after city across America have com­plained about police fram­ing them and fal­si­fy­ing reports send­ing inno­cent peo­ple away for years on end some­times for life.
The inno­cence project found­ed in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, mis­sion state­ment says it is a nation­al lit­i­ga­tion and pub­lic pol­i­cy orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to exon­er­at­ing wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed indi­vid­u­als through DNA test­ing and reform­ing the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem to pre­vent future injustice.
Through Messers Scheck and Neufeld and their team’s effort to date 344 inno­cent indi­vid­u­als have been exon­er­at­ed after serv­ing lengthy peri­ods of time in prison for crimes they did not commit.
In some cas­es indi­vid­u­als have served over three decades in prison, as you may well imag­ine the bulk of those are peo­ple of color.
The work of the inno­cence project is mon­u­men­tal when con­sid­ered against the dif­fi­cult and next to impos­si­ble prospect to get the sys­tem to say it was wrong or even to open up to a sec­ond look after con­vict­ing some­one for a crime they did not commit.

The nation­al Fraternal order of police which endorsed Donald Trump for President of the United States pushed back at Trump on Thursaday for sug­gest­ing that offi­cer Betty Shelby who shot and killed an unarmed Terence Cutcher may have choked.

Speaking at the church of his sup­port­er African-American Pastor Darrell Scott ‚Trump said this.
“I must tell you I watched the shoot­ing in par­tic­u­lar in Tulsa and that man was hands up. That man went to the car, hands up, put his hands on the car, I mean to me it looked like he did every­thing he was sup­posed to do,” said Trump in remarks at a town hall style event address­ing African-American issues in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

However the police Union which rep­re­sents over 300,00 cops nation­wide pushed back at Trump say­ing quote:
“He must be mind­ful of the due process rights and pre­sump­tion of inno­cence accord­ed to all, includ­ing police offi­cers.”
Trump won the sup­port of the Police Union as he would because of his mas­cu­line pro-police stance . No sur­prise there, the Republican par­ty has long been sup­port­ed by the Military and police. Seen large­ly as a kind of Daddy par­ty, sup­pos­ed­ly cater­ing to safe­ty and secu­ri­ty of the nation.
Democrats on the oth­er hand con­verse­ly is seen as the Mommy par­ty, cater­ing to health and well-being , tak­ing care of those unable to take care of themselves.

The state­ment of the police Union though cor­rect struck me as a bit odd.
Many peo­ple of col­or who com­plain about police excess­es would be hap­py to see police apply those same prin­ci­ples when offi­cers inter­act with them and oth­ers like themselves.
They too , each and every­one of them , have a right to due process and the pre­sum­nption of innocence.
Imagine if these same prin­ci­ples were applied to every police vehic­u­lar stop. Every time offi­cers knock on the door to some­one’s home, their cas­tle. Imagine if every instance of inter­ac­tion of offi­cers with the com­mu­ni­ties they serve are char­ac­ter­ized by due process and the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence. Literally most of the prob­lems which exist between police and cit­i­zens would sim­ply cease to exist.
https://​mike​beck​les​.com/​a​m​e​r​i​c​a​s​-​p​o​l​i​c​i​n​g​-​p​r​o​b​l​em/

Imagine if the police start respect­ing the right of all human beings to life lib­er­ty and the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness, as guar­an­teed in the Constitution how dif­fer­ent things would be. Trump’s run­ning mate Mike Pence the sit­ting Governor of Indiana today said the talk about implic­it bias­es in police depart­ments should stop.
The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution pro­hibits the mak­ing of any law respect­ing an estab­lish­ment of reli­gion, imped­ing the free exer­cise of reli­gion, abridg­ing the free­dom of speech, infring­ing on thefree­dom of the press, inter­fer­ing with the right to peace­ably assem­ble, or pro­hibit­ing the peti­tion­ing for a gov­ern­men­tal redress of griev­ances. It was adopt­ed on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amend­ments that con­sti­tute the Bill of Rights.

In essence Mike Pence wants to cur­tail the first amend­ment con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly guar­an­teed right to free­dom of speech to be abridged and abrogated.
In a Trump-Pence America, peo­ple like this writer could face seri­ous con­se­quences for speak­ing out about implic­it bias­es in police depart­ments which inform behavior.
This is what makes a Trump-Pence Presidency such a dan­ger­ous propo­si­tion for peo­ple of col­or all across America and across the rest of the world.

Jason Miller a spokesper­son for Donald Trump released to the media late Thursday night a press release stat­ing that Donald Trump believes that President Barack Obama was indeed born in the United States .

This rev­e­la­tion is at best curi­ous, the Birther move­ment was a mod­ern day equiv­a­lent of the slav­ery days “show me your papers ” which was ini­ti­at­ed by Donald J Trump.
It was the birther move­ment, cre­at­ed by the now Republican nom­i­nee which launched Trump’s polit­i­cal career .

WHAT IS THE REASON FOR THIS AT THIS TIME?

Donald J Trump knows that this mat­ter is going to come up at the first debate com­ing up on September 26^th. Hillary Clinton will not allow Trump to get away with it and Trump knows it.
This is a cyn­i­cal attempt to take the issue off the table before the debates.

Donald J Trump told the coun­try that he sent inves­ti­ga­tors to Hawaii to dig up evi­dence inti­mat­ing that the nation will be sur­prised at what they found.
Interestingly , Donald J Trump had noth­ing , it was a lie like all of the oth­er lies he told about his wealth, his Russian con­nec­tions, his fake com­pa­nies and his fake Trump University.
Even after the pres­i­dent released both his short and long form birth cer­tifi­cates Trump and his min­ions , includ­ing Orly Taitz con­tin­ued with the racist attempt at de-legit­imiz­ing the nation’s first black president.

On the same day that Donald J trump dis­par­aged a Flint Michigan female African American pas­tor who wel­comed him into her church as a “ner­vous mess”, the dis­re­spect­ful con-man wants to convince the nation and Black peo­ple across the globe that the con­temp­tu­ous slan­der cam­paign he waged against the pres­i­dent should now be set aside on his say so.

This lat­est devel­op­ment comes as sur­ro­gates includ­ing Giuliani has con­sis­tent­ly said Trump now believes the pres­i­dent was born in the United States.
There is just one miss­ing com­po­nent . We have not heard it out of the mouth of Donald Trump . What we have heard is the Trump cam­paign say­ing that he did a ser­vice to the President for get­ting the pres­i­dent to release his birth certificate.

We we all knew Donald trump was­n’t real­ly try­ing to court Black vot­ers . As I said in a pre­vi­ous arti­cle “a Leopard does not change it’s spot”.
A scor­pi­on will still sting a Frog giv­ing it a ride across the riv­er sim­ply because that’s what scor­pi­ons do, they sting.

I hate to say “I told you so” to the seg­ment of Black Clergy which allowed itself to be used as human props for the immoral cam­paign of char­la­tan , con-man Donald Trump’s pres­i­den­tial ambi­tions, actu­al­ly I don’t hate to at all , I told you so .

Merely a day after Pastor, the Rev. Faith Green Timmons of  Bethel United Methodist Church opened her church to Donald Trump to speak to the church’s work in water dis­tri­b­u­tion in the Flint area Trump went off script and began to attack rival Hillary Clinton.
Pastor Timmons walked over to Trump and told him,“ ‘Mr. Trump, I invit­ed you here to thank us for what we’ve done in Flint,’ Timmons said. ‘Not to give a polit­i­cal speech.”.

He he, he , Trump backed down . “ ‘Ok, ok that’s good I’m going to go back onto Flint“which he did respectfully.
However in vin­tage style, Donald Trump the pet­ty, inse­cure, lit­tle man could not allow that bit of scold­ing go with­out hit­ting back.
In vin­tage inco­her­ent Trump fash­ion Thursday, he referred to pas­tor Timmons as quote “a ner­vous mess.”

During an inter­view with “Fox and Friends” Thursday, Trump said that he was treat­ed well while in Flint, but that Timmons seemed ner­vous — “like a ner­vous mess” — when intro­duc­ing him. He lat­er added that “every­one plays their games, it does­n’t both­er me.”
I absolute­ly agree, no one knows more about game-play­ing than the imposter, Donald J Trump >
The only peo­ple who seem obliv­i­ous to his con-game are non-col­lege edu­cate whites and cer­tain seg­ment of the black cler­gy.
Couldn’t agree more with Donnie boy.

Cesar Millan is a Dog trainer who does a terrific job demonstrating that generally when domesticated dogs act improperly , at least by domesticated standards , it is generally the human’s fault.
Cesar artfully demonstrate just how simple it is to use common techniques like rewards for good behavior and a simple tap to remind dogs we are not pleased when they do things we don’t want them to do.

As instruc­tive as Cesar Millan’s tele­vi­sion show is on dog train­ing , I some­times think to myself this show is actu­al­ly about human training.
Nevertheless as Jamaicans most of us, par­tic­u­lar­ly those among us who were blessed to have been born and raised in rur­al Jamaica, Cesar’s train­ing were mom’s train­ing . Only dif­fer­ence was that when we stepped out of line the taps were far more intense and voluminous.

In fair­ness to the few peo­ple who were born in the tiny strip of sea-side land which is actu­al­ly Kingston they too were not alien­at­ed from the con­cept of actions ver­sus con­se­quences, or risk ver­sus reward.
In the tiny Island we call home, no one can truth­ful­ly claim they were not privy to those very meth­ods which were used by Jamaican par­ents , grand­par­ents and extend­ed fam­i­ly mem­bers to instill val­ues and dis­ci­pline. n the British essen­tial­ly uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly ditched the Island in the lit­tle exer­cise we Jamaicans like to call our Independence there­after emerged, com­mu­ni­ties which start­ed to trend as homo­ge­neous communities.
They became com­mu­ni­ties which vot­ed as monoliths.
The con­fla­gra­tion of these com­mu­ni­ties have since spread through­out the coun­try and with them orga­nized and uncon­trolled crime. Jamaicans aligned to one or the oth­er of the two main polit­i­cal par­ties will­ing­ly attach them­selves to these com­mu­ni­ties despite the noise to the con­trary, because of the expec­ta­tion they hold of receiv­ing spoils for their vote.
Despite protes­ta­tions of pover­ty and need, no one has been forced to live in these communities.

So from the begin­ning peo­ple on either side of the polit­i­cal divide who opt­ed to live in these com­mu­ni­ties we now refer to as Garrisons, did so of their own voli­tion. They did so with the expec­ta­tion that there would be mate­r­i­al gain for themselves.
Whether the Garrison is Concrete Jungle , or Tivoli Gardens, Dunkirk, or Drews Land, Kintyre, or Common, Flankers, or Rivoli my view is the same. I view them all in the same dim light.

As a for­mer police offi­cer I risked life and limb with my col­leagues, got shot at and got shot. I have zero com­pas­sion for any of these com­mu­ni­ties. I do not give a rats ass about polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion. While I lived in Jamaica I vot­ed once for the Labor par­ty . The PNP was not a par­ty I could begin to con­sid­er cast­ing a vote for.
I am also cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly repulsed by Jamaican politi­cians on either side of the polit­i­cal divide, some more than others.
I held no alle­giance to any polit­i­cal par­ty then and I don’t now.
This is the rea­son I am pissed at the notion that Andrew Holness will be apol­o­giz­ing to the Garrison com­mu­ni­ty of Tivoli Gardens for events which occurred there in 2010.

I will not re-lit­i­gate events which occurred in that com­mu­ni­ty a google search will yield a trea­sure trove of infor­ma­tion on what tran­spired there.
What is impor­tant to con­sid­er is that that com­mu­ni­ty as does many oth­ers, thumbed it’s col­lec­tive nose at the rule of law. Opting instead for jun­gle rule and the ele­va­tion of com­mon thugs as their representatives.
Now in fair­ness to Tivoli Gardens and oth­ers like it , res­i­dents may sim­ply have cal­cu­lat­ed that the thugs who did not wear suits and banged on desks were more respon­sive to their every­day needs .
On that score they would hear no com­plaints from me.

According to Jamaican Media the apol­o­gy is being craft­ed for deliv­ery by the Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness.
It is impor­tant to note that the per­son spear­head­ing this push is none oth­er than Delroy Chuck the Island’s jus­tice min­is­ter. No sur­prise there that Chuck would be the lead­ing edge on this despi­ca­ble gung-ho attempt, not just to apol­o­gize to Tivoli but to actu­al­ly reward peo­ple for bad behav­ior. In Jamaica it is extreme­ly dif­fi­cult to dif­fer­en­ti­ate crim­i­nals from non-crim­i­nals based on the posi­tions they hold.

Chuck who chairs the com­mit­tee, says the work of the body would bear in mind the objec­tives of the rec­om­men­da­tions, name­ly, restor­ing and pro­mot­ing trust and con­fi­dence in the State; com­pen­sat­ing vic­tims for prop­er­ty dam­age, wrong­ful death, and injuries; con­trol­ling the use of force of the Jamaica Defence Force and the Jamaica Constabulary Force; and dis­man­tling gar­risons and mit­i­gat­ing the con­di­tions that give rise to them.(jamaicagleaner.com)

♦How fuck­ing con­ve­nient that There is no men­tion of the his­to­ry of crim­i­nal­i­ty per­pe­trat­ed on the Island by this errant com­mu­ni­ty which decid­ed­ly ignored the nation’s laws.
♦ How con­ve­nient that this com­mu­ni­ty which took on an entire fam­i­ly of crim­i­nal thugs as its sav­ior at the expense of the Jamaican state, is now expect­ing law abid­ing Jamaicans like my friends and fam­i­ly mem­bers to foot the bill for it’s restoration.
♦ How con­ve­nient that the Government would chose to apol­o­gize to the com­mu­ni­ty which told the nation they would die for Dudus and said “fuck you” to the bus­es which were pro­vid­ed to move them to safety.
♦How con­ve­nient that there is no mon­u­ment, no recog­ni­tion of the work of the Military and the Police who took the risks and braved the bul­lets so that dirt bags like Delroy Chuck can then spear­head the charge to com­pen­sate the very same peo­ple who defied the rest of the country.

No this is not jus­tice for any­one . Jamaica is a par­adise for crim­i­nals. It is a gang-land enclave run by two com­pet­ing gangs of immoral sub-humans mas­querad­ing as leaders.
This nation which has more Churches per square mile than any oth­er nation on earth, should hang it’s col­lec­tive head in shame. That it hon­ors crim­i­nals, mur­der­ers, rapists , extor­tion­ists, and those who active­ly har­bored, fed and gave aid and com­fort to them with­out a sin­gle word of hon­or to the mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces who bat­tled and died, is despi­ca­ble abhor­rent and down­right reprehensible .

This will be a stain on the his­to­ry of the nation, not an abso­lu­tion for wrong­do­ing as Chuck and his ilk would have us believe.
Even dogs under­stand the con­cept that actions have consequence.

The Government is to offer an apol­o­gy to res­i­dents of west Kingston over the oper­a­tion by the secu­ri­ty forces in the area in May 2010, which left dozens dead and injured and mil­lions in dam­age to hous­es and oth­er prop­er­ties. Justice Minister Delroy Chuck yes­ter­day told The Gleaner-Power 106 News that the apol­o­gy was being craft­ed, adding that “in a mat­ter of weeks, it is like­ly that it is to be pre­sent­ed to Parliament”. The apol­o­gy is expect­ed to be deliv­ered by Prime Minister Andrew Holness. Making an apol­o­gy is one of the 15 rec­om­men­da­tions made to the Government by the com­mis­sion of inquiry into the incur­sion. The 900-page report of the three-mem­ber pan­el, which was chaired by Barbadian jurist Sir David Simmons, was released to the pub­lic in June after being tabled in Parliament.

Promoting Restorative Justice

“With the deaths of 73 civil­ians and a sol­dier, the com­mis­sion not­ed that a pub­lic apol­o­gy is nec­es­sary in order to assuage the hurt feel­ings, bit­ter­ness, and resent­ment of the peo­ple of West Kingston, and, with a view to pro­mot­ing restora­tive jus­tice and bring­ing clo­sure to this sor­ry chap­ter in Jamaica’s his­to­ry,” the report stat­ed. “We rec­om­mend that the Government of Jamaica apol­o­gise in Parliament to the peo­ple of West Kingston, and Jamaica as a whole, for the excess­es of the secu­ri­ty forces dur­ing the oper­a­tion. The Government is, in the last resort, respon­si­ble for the con­duct of its secu­ri­ty forces,” the report fur­ther charged. Regarding redress, Chuck said a com­pen­sa­tion com­mit­tee is to be set up “soon” and that once that is done, he hopes that it will com­plete its work “in a mat­ter of months”. A state­ment issued on Tuesday by the jus­tice min­istry indi­cat­ed that the Cabinet com­mit­tee review­ing the report of the May 2010 Commission of Inquiry is tak­ing steps to come up with a sys­tem to imple­ment the com­mis­sion’s rec­om­men­da­tions. Read more here :http://​jamaica​-glean​er​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​l​e​a​d​-​s​t​o​r​i​e​s​/​2​0​1​6​0​9​1​5​/​t​i​v​o​l​i​-​a​p​o​l​o​g​y​-​h​o​l​n​e​s​s​-​a​p​o​l​o​g​i​s​e​-​p​a​r​l​i​a​m​e​n​t​-​d​e​a​d​l​y​-​m​a​y​-​2​0​1​0​-​o​p​e​r​a​t​ion

Am I the only person who believes Hillary Clinton is running a really horrible campaign? We can all agree Hillary Clinton is a weak candidate but did they not learn anything from 2008?

Maybe I am alone on this , but it seem that there is real­ly no coör­di­nat­ed mes­sage com­ing out of Clinton’s Brooklyn Campaign headquarters.

Donald Trump’s entire life is a smörgås­bord of dis-qual­i­fiers. For some rea­son which is lost at least on me, the Clinton cam­paign seem to believe that their can­di­date has the elec­tion in the bag.
What’s shock­ing about this whole débâ­cle is that Donald Trump is lit­er­al­ly the worst and most dan­ger­ous can­di­date to ever be nom­i­nat­ed for the American Presidency, at least in mod­ern times .

He has stead­fast­ly refused to play by estab­lished rules as it relates to releas­ing his tax returns . There is no law forc­ing him to, but for over forty years pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates of both par­ties have released their tax returns to the public.
Trump’s own vice pres­i­den­tial run­ning mate has released his returns , yet there is no pub­lic or media pres­sure for Donald Trump to show respect to the American vot­ers he so des­per­ate­ly want to lead. Obviously the rules do not apply to the Republican nom­i­nee on anything.
Donald Trump has respond­ed claim­ing that he is under audit and thus restrained.
The IRS has rub­bished Trump’s claim argu­ing he is absolute­ly not pre­clud­ed or pre­vent­ed from releas­ing his tax returns dur­ing an audit. Despite this, Donald Trump has refused stick­ing to the lie and the media allows him to get away with it.

On his health Donald Trump had his Doctor cob­ble togeth­er a let­ter claim­ing he is the health­i­est per­son ever to run for the pres­i­den­cy . Literally every med­ical pro­fes­sion­al asked to respond to the let­ter has heaped scorn on it, and that does not even include the miss-spellings and the lan­guage used in the letter.

Hillary Clinton clear­ly adopt­ed a strat­e­gy she would run out the clock. During the month of August bask­ing in the glow of her extend­ed cam­paign num­bers , Clinton was large­ly absent from the cam­paign trail.
Her sur­ro­gates argue she was engaged in fund rais­ing events .

Look , there is a legit­i­mate argu­ment to be made for her using the time , there months away from the elec­tions , good poll num­bers, to fund-raise.
There is also an argu­ment to be made that she want­ed to scoop up all the cash she could for the final stretch of the campaign.
However,when The oth­er can­di­date is vis­it­ing flood rav­aged areas, vis­it­ing a for­eign head of state and is just plain all over the media, there is just so much mon­ey is going to do to stop that surg­ing opponent.

Hillary Clinton is a weak can­di­date, her cam­paign is prov­ing to be equal­ly as lethar­gic. As I said in a pre­vi­ous blog her cam­paign lacks nim­ble­ness. Either it is not using the huge trove of neg­a­tives out there against Donald Trump or using them has had no effect on his candidacy.
It is unimag­in­able that the Clinton cam­paign would allow the Trump cam­paign to flip the nar­ra­tive from a ref­er­en­dum on Trump to one on her despite her out­spend­ing Trump as much as ten to one by some estimates.

The Trump cam­paign takes Clinton’s attack lines flip them and are using them against Clinton with marked effectiveness.
♦Clinton argues Trump is unfit . Trump says Hillary has no sta­mi­na. ♦Clinton argues Trump is dis­qual­i­fied from serv­ing as com­man­der-in-chief because of the dis­parag­ing com­ments he made about sev­er­al groups of peo­ple. Donald Trump flipped the same com­ments say­ing Hillary is dis­qual­i­fied because of her “bas­ket of deplorables” com­ments.

The fact is that it is impos­si­ble to turn on a tele­vi­sion set for two min­utes with­out hear­ing the name Donald Trump,the media is total­ly fix­at­ed on the guy. It’s kin­da like the way radios sta­tions play bad songs over and over on short rota­tions to the point you hear them even when you sleep. You get to the point you begin to start think­ing you like the song because that’s all you hear.

The aver­age vot­er may not like Trump or may even be unsure about him but they can’t help hear­ing his name and accord­ing to the polls they are begin­ning to feel maybe, just maybe this guy is not as bad as they say.
We keep wait­ing for the moment when the Clinton Campaign unleash­es some­thing which will suck the air out of the Trump lying racist and divi­sive cam­paign once and for all.
Instead Donald Trump is out on the cam­paign trail using words he does not know the mean­ing of to describe Hillary Clinton’s com­ments about half of Trumps sup­port­ers are in what she call “part of a bas­ket of deplorables”

The fact of the mat­ter is that whether it’s half or the whole of his sup­port­ers are ♦Racist♦Xenophobic♦Sexist♦Misogynist♦Islamaphobic♦ Nativist , it’s pret­ty damn deplorable.
A can­di­date who accord­ing to one poll is viewed by 60% of the nation as racist , a can­di­date who mocks a hand­i­capped reporter , thats pret­ty deplorable. A can­di­date and his run­ning mate who refuse to denounce David Duke and oth­er racists are pret­ty deplorable. A can­di­date who cas­ti­gates and labels an entire race of peo­ple as rapists and mur­der­ers is pret­ty deplorable.

A can­di­date who says that a Federal judge with an exem­plary record, is inca­pable of com­ing to a fair deci­sion in a case he is hear­ing because of his race, that’s pret­ty darn deplorable.
A can­di­date who mocks a fam­i­ly who lost their son in mil­i­tary ser­vice of the United States , that’s deplorable.
A man who mock John McCain a dec­o­rat­ed war hero who was cap­tured and tor­tured, that’s deplorable.
A man who spent over $85.000 in 1989 to dem­a­gogue 5 inno­cent black and brown teenagers in the New York Press. Demanding the death penal­ty for them, poi­son­ing the jury pool result­ing in an incor­rect find­ing of guilt and a sub­se­quent 13 year impris­on­ment before they were exonerated.
That’s pret­ty damn deplorable.

There should be no hes­i­ta­tion about say­ing those peo­ple are deplorable. Yet Donald Trump’s run­ning mate Mike Pence, the sit­ting Indiana Governor, was asked whether David Duke is deplorable, Pence replied “I’m not in the name-call­ing busi­ness.”
That exact­ly goes to the argu­ments Hillary Clinton has been making.
Trump/​Pence wants every­one to believe these are ordi­nary American work­ing peo­ple , you know farm­ers, cops, butch­ers, bar­bers, cops . Well if true what does it say about them?

The fact is nei­ther Trump nor Pence wants to denounce the most rad­i­cal racist zealots who find their voice as a result of their can­di­da­cy. They have been the life-blood of Trump’s can­di­da­cy from day one.
That’s the rea­son guys like Jeb Bush , and John Kasich are watch­ing these elec­tions from the sidelines.

Despite wads of cam­paign cash the Clinton cam­paign seem to be like the car­toon character

legs spin­ning but not moving .
Those who see her can­di­da­cy as the only remain­ing buffer between a Trump Presidency are ner­vous and fret­ful at what appears to be a cam­paign unsure of what to do.
The grunts you hear are com­ing from Republicans climb­ing back on board Donald Trump’s cam­paign ship . Good poll num­bers, and an insur­gent cam­paign final­ly show­ing some dis­ci­pline and Republicans are falling over them­selves to ingra­ti­ate them­selves with Donald Trump. It may be late but not too late for Clinton to call up David Plouffe and David Axlerod two of the archi­tects of Obama’s two wipe-outs of Republicans in 208 and 2012.

Of course in vin­tage Clinton style they will stick with the lack-lus­ter cam­paign , even as Trump is on his third set of cam­paign staff.
Hillary Clinton seem des­tined to snatch defeat from the jaws of vic­to­ry unleash­ing on the world a xeno­pho­bic, racist , misog­y­nis­tic, con-man and that’s just the beginning.
It’s nev­er too late to make a change.

In the end Hillary Clinton may be able to eke out a vic­to­ry in November . If that hap­pens it will be a func­tion of how deplorable a can­di­date Donald Trump is .
Given a stronger Democratic can­di­date with less bag­gage Democrats would have been guar­an­teed the White house, and maybe , just maybe the House of Representatives would have been up for grabs, not to men­tion Governorships and oth­er offices down ballot.
At this stage eking out a win will be a huge vic­to­ry for Democrats and President Obama’s legacy.