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Top news stories personally selected by the publishers for their relevance to the Black American community.
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"Pinstripes not prison stripes" is the message attached to the "100 Black Men's" new anti-violence campaign.
You might see billboards with the message popping up around Baton Rouge.
It's part of a federal program called Project Exile.
"100 Black Men" has partnered with the group to reach kids during an influential time in their lives and educate them about the long term effects of a life of crime.
If you want to get your child involved in Project Exile, call 225-356-9444.
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WAFB.COM
http://www.wafb.com/Global/story.asp?S=12876889
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Egan Chin/News Studio of Sean Bell, 23, with his fiance Nicole. Bell was shot dead by police in 2006. Police fired some 50 rounds and struck Bell's car 21 times. The city agreed Tuesday to pay more than $7 million to settle a wrongful death civil suit lodged by the fiancée and pals of Sean Bell, the unarmed black groom gunned down by cops on his wedding day, sources said.
The settlement, approved by a Brooklyn federal magistrate, ends a four-year legal battle by tragic would-be bride Nicole Paultre Bell and two men wounded in a 50-shot barrage that claimed her lover's life.
Under the agreement, the city will pay $3.25 million to Sean Bell's family estate, which is controlled by Paultre Bell. Bell's pals Joseph Guzman, 35, who was shot 11 times in the incident, will receive $3 million and Trent Benefield, 27, who was shot three times, will be granted $900,000.
"I believe the settlement is fair," said Paultre Bell, the mother of Bell's two daughters, Jada, 7, and Jordyn, 4. "No amount of money can provide closure for losing Sean. I don't think there will ever be closure."
"What's important is my fight doesn't end now," she said, vowing to continue to push state legislatures to pass a package of laws to reform the Civilian Complaint Review Board, require drug testing when cops fire their guns and ban arrest quotas.
Guzman said he is still suffering from the shooting that fueled minority concerns that cops are too quick on the draw in their neighborhoods.
"I got a metal rod in my leg. I have four bullets still in me," he said, standing in front of Brooklyn Federal Court with Paultre Bell and their lawyer Sanford Rubenstein. "I don't think a black or Hispanic man's life means much in this city. It will happen again."
Guzman and Benefield, who is black, were in a car with Bell when undercover cops opened fire on them outside the Club Kalua strip club in Queens on Nov. 25, 2006, hours before Bell was to get married.
Detectives Michael Oliver, Marc Cooper and Gescard Isnora were all acquitted in a 2008 trial of manslaughter and reckless endangerment charges stemming from the Bell shooting. The cops fired on Bell's lurching car after mistakenly believing someone inside had a gun and fearing that Bell was trying to run them down.
The U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn declined to prosecute the cops for civil rights violations.
The NYPD still has yet to decide whether to discipline a total of five officers involved in the shooting.
City Corporation Counsel Michael Cardozo said he hoped the agreement will bring a "measure of closure" to all parties involved.
"The Sean Bell shooting highlighted the complexities our dedicated officers must face each day," he said. "The city regrets the loss of life in this tragic case, and we share our deepest condolences with the Bell family."
Federal Magistrate Roanne Mann signed off on the settlement during a marathon closed-door meeting with lawyers for the city, Paultre Bell and the two shooting survivors.
Detectives union President Michael Palladino called the settlement "an absolute joke."
"The police were there doing their lawful duty. Bell was intoxicated and tried to run them over," Palladino said. "The taxpayers are now on the hook for $7 million. There's something seriously wrong with that picture."
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NYDailyNews.com
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/07/27/2010-07-27_new_york_city_settles_for_715m_in_sean_bell_police_shooting.html#ixzz0uzznFnTs
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Dr. Peggy Fuller, a Charlotte dermatologist, spent time as a prison doctor as a way to pay off medical school loans. That experience tapped into her ability to connect with all kinds of people.
Dr. Peggy Fuller never thought she'd find herself in federal prison.
But that's where she landed - as a doctor treating imprisoned women whose crimes ran the gamut from drug smuggling to fraud to murder.
But Fuller, now 51 and a Charlotte dermatologist who just celebrated the fourth anniversary of her practice, didn't have a choice. More than 20 years ago, a broken engagement set off a series of events that led her to default on her medical-school loans - more than $500,000 - and she had to pay them off by doing medical service in an underserved population.
"The most salient thing with prison is seeing the wire, the tall wire, and the bars," Fuller said, remembering her time at the Federal Medical Center prison in Lexington, Ky. "It's restricted - confined, mentally. I'd imagine some people might never go home. It's their permanent destination."
One of Fuller's lifelong friends, Brenda Smith, told her at the time that the prison "was an important place to be, and that she could do good work while she was there." Smith said one of the doctor's defining traits was her ability to connect with any sort of person, whether colleague or peer or inmate.
In fact, Fuller rose to become the coordinator of inmates with HIV/AIDS, which eventually inspired a trip to Africa to teach on the subject.
But the more time Fuller spent in the prison, the more she realized her background was not so different from the women there. After all, she grew up poor, and there were few opportunities simply handed to her.
Her family lived on a sharecropper's farm in Cedar Grove, near Chapel Hill. When she came across an inmate she had grown up with, she was struck by the consequences of the choices they'd both made in life.
"I was sad to see her in that situation," Fuller said.
The difference between them was that Fuller hadn't fallen into a bad crowd - instead, she turned hardships into motivation.
Integrating a school
Fuller and her five siblings grew up running through the woods, tending to goats and cows and rolling in the grass by her family's farm, which she now owns. She was one of the first African-American children to be integrated into an all-white elementary school.
She grew up without things like indoor plumbing, but her parents never taught her to feel sorry for herself.
"I never knew about poverty until someone told me I was poor," Fuller said.
She didn't let poverty get in the way. She earned a scholarship to study biology at Spelman College in Atlanta, and then was accepted to seven different medical schools. She decided on Tufts University in Boston in 1980, and then did her residency in internal medicine at a VA hospital in Boston and Boston City Hospital, now known as Boston Medical Center.
By that time, Fuller had a young son. When the toddler was 11 months old, he was burned in a kitchen accident that left scars on his arms. Fuller had always liked dermatology during her medical school rotations, and was affected by the care for her son's burns. So after her four years at the prison, she enrolled at Brown University in 1994 to study dermatology. In 1998, Fuller came to Charlotte and joined the staff of Charlotte Dermatology to be closer to her mom and dad.
Today, Fuller owns her own small practice, Esthetics, in the Elizabeth neighborhood. Her services are about 60 percent medical and 40 percent cosmetic, including spa treatments and laser hair removal.
And because Esthetics doesn't take health insurance - first-time visits are $180 - Fuller can spend as much time as she needs with her patients, said office manager Elizabeth Jackson.
Time with patients is one of Fuller's favorite things about the job.
And her past is a big part of who she is now - from a farm near Chapel Hill, to medical schools in the northeast, to a prison in Kentucky, and finally back home to North Carolina.
"Grace is why we ended up how we (my family) did," Fuller said, referring to the success she and her siblings found in life.
"People marvel at the formula, but it was just grace."
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CHARLOTTEOBSERVER.COM
Read more: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/07/27/1584240/physicians-path-went-from-farm.html#ixzz0uyi0bLcY
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New Black Panther Party members outside a North Philadelphia polling place in November 2008.
The fourth precinct of the city's 14th ward encompasses about eight square blocks north of Chinatown, made up of small, suburban-style houses, a few abandoned lots, and the Guild House West, a retirement home. The home is where people of the fourth precinct vote and, on Nov. 4, 2008, where two members of the New Black Panther Party briefly stood, one armed with a nightstick.
The group is as obscure as it is bigoted. But as Americans elected our first black president, the right-wing media began a relentless campaign to portray Barack Obama's victory as auguring the rise of black racism. The story eventually found its way into the mainstream press.
The idea is that whites are being oppressed, much as Southern blacks were warned away from polling places by Klansmen and violent cops in the pre-civil rights era. But this Philadelphia neighborhood is almost entirely black, and no white voters - or, for that matter, any voters - complained of intimidation. On the grounds that voter intimidation requires at least one intimidated voter, I walked the fourth precinct in search of a victim.
Angel Rivera, 49, and a friend were enjoying a cold beer on a shaded bench around the corner from the Guild House. Rivera had just finished 10 years behind bars and was exploring his old stomping grounds.
"The neighborhood's more relaxed - no more gangbanging," he said, recalling the bleak public housing that once stood nearby. Over the past 15 years, it was remade into a federally subsidized community dubbed West Poplar Nehemiah: single-family, owner-occupied homes for working-class Philadelphians. The nearby Cambridge Plaza and Richard Allen Homes - where Bill Cosby grew up and set Fat Albert - underwent similar transformations.
Neither Rivera nor the guys from the homeless shelter at Broad and Ridge had heard of any black-power thugs striking fear in the neighborhood. Rather, they kept bringing up teen pregnancy and bad schools. So I moved on, still searching for black racism and an intimidated voter.
A block away, I found Carmen Candelaria, 42, getting out of her car. She reported no trouble exercising her franchise in the last election. And Candelaria - unlike millions of Fox News viewers nationwide - has somehow never heard of the New Black Panthers terrorizing her neighborhood.
On another street, I cornered a 32-year-old architectural designer who would discuss her neighbors only on the condition of anonymity. I asked if she had heard of the intimidation; she had not. The militants? She had.
"One of the guys lives in the development," she said, pointing a block west.
As I rounded the corner of Parrish and Park, I found the militant headquarters, its Black Liberation flag standing out a bit from its surroundings. I walked past the neighbors' lawn furniture, grills, and driveway basketball hoops. A plaque on the man's door read: "Coloreds only. No whites allowed."
Here was the neighborhood crank who had launched a thousand cable-news jeremiads, nestled among his hardworking, indifferent neighbors. But I was having trouble finding victims or sympathizers. It almost seemed as if he were - a cartoonish anomaly?
"Oh, I don't even deal with it," said Boo, a neighbor, shaking his head when I asked about the militant down the block. "We can't control what people think. He's holding onto the past. Lots went on years ago that wasn't right, but we can't hold onto that."
Sitting on his porch and petting a very small, fluffy white dog, Boo, 47, was in prison two years ago and unable to vote in the last election. Like other neighbors, he had never heard of the Black Panther controversy ricocheting around the right-wing echo chamber, ostensibly concerning the voting rights of the people of this very precinct. But he seemed truly dismayed to hear conservatives were charging that President Obama fostered black racism.
"No. No. It was time for a change, and people need to welcome that change," he said. "Just because an African American man was elected president doesn't mean the Black Panther Party is going to run crazy, or the Muslims are going to run crazy."
At a park down the block, a few homeless guys enjoying cold tall boys pointed out a young white man mowing his lawn. I had found my victim.
"I'm a Democrat, so they wouldn't need to intimidate me," joked Tim Greaves. The 20-year-old Temple student had recently moved into the neighborhood, and he insisted that his mostly black neighbors were not oppressing him.
The Black Panther episode is, of course, just one of many complicated stories about race in America that have been opportunistically disfigured by the right. Shirley Sherrod's is another.
We occupy an ever more alternate universe, in which tea partyers pretend to be victims of Obama's "deep-seated hatred for white people," as Glenn Beck put it. Yet at ground zero of one such supposed victimization, I couldn't find the hate - save for one solitary, if expertly drawn, caricature. If Fox News wants to talk about race, a conversation with real people might be a good place to start.
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PHILLY.COM
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Middle-class blacks are more likely than whites to have reduced their saving and investing to make it through the recession, according to the 2010 Ariel Black Investor Survey released today.
It found that nearly half of all blacks, compared with 31 percent of whites with household incomes of at least $50,000, dipped into savings to make ends meet in the last two years.
Among blacks who participate in 401(k) plans, 27 percent reduced the amount they contribute per month, compared with 16 percent of whites. Twenty-two percent of non-retired blacks borrowed or withdrew money from a retirement account, compared with 14 percent of whites. The median amount blacks contributed to their retirement plans is $230 per month, compared with $337 a month contributed by whites, the survey found. The findings mark the first time in a decade that black households have reported saving less than $200 per month.
“In times of economic hardship, people have to make difficult decisions,” Ariel Investments President Mellody Hobson said.
But she noted the resulting trade-offs mean many blacks are slipping even further behind.
Since 1998, the survey has consistently found blacks save and invest less than whites of similar incomes. This year, the median amount black households reported saving monthly is $189, compared to $367 among whites.
Sixty percent of blacks said they invest in the stock market, compared with 79 percent for whites.
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SUNTIMES.COM
http://www.suntimes.com/business/currency/2523348,CST-NWS-Save22.article
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Members of the National Black Farmers Association march outside the USDA in 2002.
Five months after President Obama announced a $1.25 billion settlement for black farmers who faced overt discrimination by the USDA in the eighties and nineties -- and several days after the Sherrod case brought the issue up again -- Congress again refused to authorize the money.
On Thursday, the Senate quietly stripped the funding for the Pigford II settlement and several other programs from a supplemental war funding bill. Senators then unanimously passed their version of the bill, which will go back to the House.
Conservative opposition to the settlement came to light last week in the aftermath of the Shirley Sherrod scandal. A farm collective founded by Sherrod and her husband that was forced out of business by the discriminatory practices received a $13 million settlement as part of Pigford last year, just before she was hired by the USDA. Some, including Rep. Steve King (R-IA), have called the settlement a fraud.
Majority Leader Harry Reid blamed Republicans for the failure to pass Pigford.
"I hoped that tonight the Senate could finally right a wrong that has been left unresolved for far too long. But Republicans stood in the way," he said in a statement. "As recent events have reminded us, the fact that justice and fairness were denied to black farmers for so many years continues to have ramifications today. ... Republicans should be held accountable for standing in the way of justice for those affected."
But several Democrats -- including Sens. Evan Bayh (IN) and Tom Carper (DE) -- also voted to block the bill.
Five months after President Obama announced a $1.25 billion settlement for black farmers who faced overt discrimination by the USDA in the eighties and nineties -- and several days after the Sherrod case brought the issue up again -- Congress again refused to authorize the money.
On Thursday, the Senate quietly stripped the funding for the Pigford II settlement and several other programs from a supplemental war funding bill. Senators then unanimously passed their version of the bill, which will go back to the House.
Conservative opposition to the settlement came to light last week in the aftermath of the Shirley Sherrod scandal. A farm collective founded by Sherrod and her husband that was forced out of business by the discriminatory practices received a $13 million settlement as part of Pigford last year, just before she was hired by the USDA. Some, including Rep. Steve King (R-IA), have called the settlement a fraud.
Majority Leader Harry Reid blamed Republicans for the failure to pass Pigford.
"I hoped that tonight the Senate could finally right a wrong that has been left unresolved for far too long. But Republicans stood in the way," he said in a statement. "As recent events have reminded us, the fact that justice and fairness were denied to black farmers for so many years continues to have ramifications today. ... Republicans should be held accountable for standing in the way of justice for those affected."
But several Democrats -- including Sens. Evan Bayh (IN) and Tom Carper (DE) -- also voted to block the bill.
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TALKINGPOINTS MEMO.COM
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The right wing, starting with blogger Andrew Breitbart, thought it had a find when it discovered video of a black woman, little-known USDA employee Shirley Sherrod, talking about race to the NAACP. But the attack backfired when it emerged that Breitbart had taken Sherrod's comments out of a context in which she was laying out her own progress toward racial tolerance -- progress that Breitbart and his ilk actively resist.
This is the same right wing that attacked ACORN, using a goofball who claimed he went into their offices dressed as a pimp and won a game of "gotcha." Except, as it turned out, he didn't wear the pimp outfit into ACORN offices, and the right lost the game of "gotcha" when both the Brooklyn district attorney and the nonpartisan Congressional Research Office found ACORN was not guilty of anything.
The right wing homed in on a small group of crazies called the New Black Panther Party, which represents almost no one, and tried to make the case that because the Justice Department didn't prosecute them for voter intimidation, the Obama administration doesn't want to prosecute black people. Forget that Bush didn't prosecute the same case, either, and not one voter said he or she was intimidated. The goal was to get Attorney General Eric Holder -- but they failed at that one, too.
Did Breitbart, who promoted the ACORN story and the Sherrod story, ever step up to the plate and say he was wrong? No, he blamed Sherrod, the farmers she helped, and the media, claiming that Sherrod still had race problems, the farmers might not have been the farmers, and the media exhibits the sin of being liberal.
Of course admitting a mistake requires humility. And a conscience.
OK, so they failed to successfully smear Shirley Sherrod, ACORN was exonerated, and the New Black Panther Party was let off the hook by, it turned out, the Bush administration.
Maybe it's time those on the right learned a lesson: If they want to succeed, they'll have to aim lower. See if the cleaning lady who polishes the brass outside the Oval Office ever attended a meeting of 9/11 Truthers. Explore whether the driver in Obama's presidential limo ever read a book by Noam Chomsky. Find out if the valet who uses the whisk broom on the first lady to ensure that she is lint-free has a relative who is now or has ever been an advocate of wealth redistribution.
Do that, and pretty soon you have a narrative. And then you can tie it all to President Obama. After all, look who he surrounds himself with!
Of course, it won't do any good, because your side will have to do the one thing that will keep those opposing the president unable to harm him: Your side will, eventually, have to face the voters.
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AOLNEWS.COM
http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/opinion-nothing-quite-compares-to-empty-nest-syndrome/19556033
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A chariot belonging to King Tutankhamun that may provide clues to the boy king's final moments, will leave Egypt for the first time to go on display in New York, the culture minister said on Monday.
The chariot, which will arrive in New York on Wednesday, will be part of the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibit in New York, Faruk Hosni said in a statement.
"This is the first time that the chariot will travel outside Egypt," antiquities chief Zahi Hawass was quoted as saying.
"It is a once in a lifetime opportunity for the people of New York to see something of such great significance from the boy king's life," he said.
The chariot, one of five discovered by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, is undecorated and its wheels are worn out, suggesting it had been used frequently by King Tut.
Hawass said that during recent CT scans and DNA tests, medical teams had found that Tutankhamun had an accident a few hours before he died causing a fracture in the king's left leg.
"This makes the inclusion of Tutankhamun's chariot to the New York exhibit even more interesting as the young king may have fallen from this very chariot," Hawass said.
"As we discover more about Tutankhamun's death, we may find that this very chariot is an important piece of the puzzle that we've been working for decades to solve," he said.
Last month German scientists said Tutankhamun was probably killed by the genetic blood disorder sickle cell disease, rejecting the conclusions of a major Egyptian study released in February which suggested he had died of malaria.
In Sunday's statement, the culture ministry said Hawass and his team "stand behind their findings and reaffirm that Tutankhamun died of complications from malaria and Kohler's disease, an ailment that effects blood supply to the bones."
Tutankhamun achieved worldwide fame because of the stunning funerary treasure found in his tomb, including an 11-kilo (24.2-pound) solid gold death mask encrusted with lapis lazuli and semi-precious stones.
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YAHOO.COM
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100726/wl_africa_afp/egyptarchaeologytut
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Clear your schedules for Thursday morning, and heat up some chicken soup for the soul. President Obama will cozy up to the ladies of the ABC show "The View" in the first appearance by a sitting president on a daytime talk show.
Obama was interviewed on the show in March 2008, shortly after announcing his bid for presidency. Then three months later, soon-to-be-First Lady Michelle Obama showed "her warmer side," as the New York Times called it.
Members of Obama's Cabinet have frequented "The View" in the past, perhaps to enjoy the regular softball questions that the show's hosts are often criticized for. Fox News griped about as much in response to a 2006 interview between "The View's" Joy Behar and Hillary Clinton.
Washington and the journalism world will surely be watching with a critical eye. But what's important to ABC is that they'll be watching -- along with the show's primarily female audience. The program recently saw its highest total of young women viewers in three months.
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg could barely contain her excitement, calling it "one of the biggest announcements we've probably ever made." It's so significant, apparently, that Barbara Walters, who is set to return as a regular host in September, will make a "special appearance."
The four ladies went on to reminisce about Vice President Joe Biden's appearance in April, when he chatted about his wife, Jill, and his oopsie-daisy drop of the F-bomb. (We should expect plenty of that sentimental junk from Thursday's show -- a likely tactic to redeem Obama's slipping approval ratings.) The women then commented about those nice "security guards" -- no, wait, Secret Service.
"They were all over me," Behar said of the federal agents. "I felt like I was at a gay bar."
"I'm going to leave that alone," Goldberg replied.
Good thinking, Whoopi.
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LATIMES.COM
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/07/obama-the-view.html
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Michelle and Sasha Obama are heading to Spain for a little mother-daughter time.
Good summer for Spain: First, the World Cup. Next, a private visit from Michelle Obama.
The White House announced Monday that the first lady will travel next week to Spain for a "mother-daughter trip with longtime family friends." Only Sasha, 9, will make the trip; Malia will be away at camp.
No further details were released, although Spanish press reports say the trip is scheduled for Aug. 4-8 at the Villa Padierna in Marbella. Although the visit is considered a private holiday, the first lady will meet with King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia. (This isn't the first mother-daughter trip: last summer, Michelle, Malia and Sasha vacationed in France and England.)
The president won't be on this trip. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Obama will celebrate his 49th birthday Aug. 4 with a fundraiser at the home of Chicago billionaire Neil Bluhm -- guests will donate $30,000 each to the Democratic National Committee.
The family will vacation together later in August -- a weekend on the Florida Gulf Coast and ten days Martha's Vineyard.
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WASHINGTONPOST.COM
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/reliable-source/2010/07/rs-_obama_spain.html
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The Harris Interactive poll for favorite American sports star was released this week along with si.com’s annual list of highest earning athletes. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, Tiger Woods tops both.
Although Woods’ has lost an estimated $22 million in endorsements, he still made more money than any other athlete clearing $90,508,163. This figure obviously doesn’t reflect divorce settlements. Maybe not too surprising as he still has Nike among others as endorsements.
What did surprise me was the fact that he was still America’s favorite sports star. Almost as surprising was that Kobe Bryant tied him in the poll. Both have had their share of problems. Tiger’s much talked about infidelities and Bryant’s sexual assault accusation.
LeBron James fell from second to sixth with Derek Jeter going from fourth to third.
This poll goes to show that the best thing you can for your career and for your “Q” rating is win.
Woods has struggled of late with his golf game but he is still seen by many as the best. Bryant just won his fifth NBA Championship. You would think that off the playing field/court antics would play into this poll but it apparently doesn’t.
What did James do to fall four spots? Besides ripping the heart out of Cleveland? He just wants to play basketball with his buddies.
Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Charles Barkley have all come out and said they wouldn’t have made the same decision James made and I think that is true.
In the grand scheme of things I think most people would agree that cheating on your wife with 17 people (that we know of) and being accused of rape is worse than screwing an entire city and taking the easy road to a championship. Of course we don’t know the motivation for people voting the way they did, maybe none of that had anything to do with it.
Maybe these voters don’t like Gatorade. Maybe they don’t like headbands. Maybe they just don’t like LeBron.
It will be interesting to see what this poll looks like in five years if Kobe retires, Tiger’s game is gone and LeBron wins some rings.
Just like Al Davis* said, “Just win baby!”
*Davis was voted #493.
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WASHINGTONTIMES.COM
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A Bush appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights denounced allegations by some pundits that the Justice Department is refusing to pursue a voting rights case against members of the New Black Panther Party because of race, and suggested that the charges being made by right-wing figures are politically motivated.
Conservative broadcasters and websites have claimed that the Obama administration is dropping prosecution of New Black Panther activists who were videotaped outside a Philadelphia polling station on Election Day 2008, making intimidating remarks; one man was carrying a nightstick.
Earlier this month former Justice Department lawyer and Republican activist J. Christian Adams testified to the commission that senior officials in the department are not applying voting rights laws in a race-neutral way, by refusing to press charges against African Americans on these issues.
A recent Media Matters investigation has debunked charges that the Obama administration withdrew criminal charges against the Panthers (in fact, the Bush administration decided not to pursue criminal charges, with Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez testifying that the Bush Justice Department "determined that the facts did not constitute a prosecutable violation of the criminal statutes"; a civil lawsuit was filed in the last days of the Bush administration, and a judgment won by the Obama Justice Department in May 2009).
Media Matters also found no evidence that any voters in the predominantly-black voting district had been prevented from voting.
Appearing on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday, the commission's vice chair, Abigail Thernstrom, said, "We have no direct evidence that [the NBP activists] actually intimidated anybody, stopped them from voting."
Thernstrom even characterized the case, in a recent column published by the National Review, as "small potatoes."
Of Adams' charges that DOJ is discriminatory in prosecution, Thernstrom said, "We certainly have no direct evidence that anybody in the Justice Department said 'We're not going to prosecute this case because we have racial double standards: We protect blacks, we don't protect whites.'
"I think the evidence is extremely weak," Thernstrom told anchor Bob Schieffer. "If the Justice Department chooses - and I would be delighted if it did so - to send to us, for instance, somebody who is at that alleged brown bag meeting in which [Deputy Assistant Attorney General] Julie Fernandez said, 'We don't prosecute cases [against] blacks …' fine. I'm an evidence girl, really. I want evidence."
Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, also appearing on "Face the Nation," argued that not all the facts are known, "because the Justice Department is stonewalling subpoenas issued by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
"Two African-American poll watchers testified they were intimidated," said Fund. "We saw testimony that the voters said they turned around and said they would came back; we don't know if they ever came back."
Fund said there was a pattern of "consistent politicization" in the Justice Department, listing examples of Voting Rights Act decisions in the South.
"North Carolina is predominantly African-American," Fund said, "and voted to have non-partisan elections. The Justice Department said you can't do that. You have to continue to give black voters the cue of Democrat versus Republican so they'll know who to vote for.
"Georgia wanted to take Social Security data and verify the U.S. citizenship of people who were registering to vote; the Justice Department said you couldn't do that.
"I think the Justice Department is clearly stonewalling these subpoenas because they have something to hide. Do I know exactly what they're hiding? I don't."
Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson said this and another racially tinged case, the media flap about Shirley Sherrod and Andrew Breitbart, are indicative of a deeper societal problem:
"I think we're in a moment where you have people on the left and on the right that want to take political polarization and turn it into racial polarization for their own purposes, to get Internet hits or to get supporters or other things," Gerson said. "That's a very, very disturbing trend. So you have it with the New Black Panther case, in my view, where you take an incident and try to turn it into a narrative when it really doesn't justify that."
He called the misuse of racial issues in the media is damaging in a lot of ways: "These wounds are very close to the surface in America. When people take these issues and attempt to use them for political reasons, when they feed rage, they're doing something very, very dangerous. I think, you know, historically it's a real problem."
Thernstrom went further: In a recent interview with Politico, she said that conservative members of the commission had a political aim - to use the New Black Panthers issue to "topple" the Obama administration.
"My fellow conservatives on the commission had this wild notion they could bring [Attorney General] Eric Holder down and really damage the president," Thernstrom told Politico.
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CBSNEWS.COM
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/07/25/ftn/main6711575.shtml
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Why the indefatigable Al Sharpton still has work to do. And what his evolution tells us about race and politics in Obama’s America.
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The National Enquirer cites sources who say Whitney Houston spends over $300,000 a year on drugs - and friends believe she's back in a downward spiral that will soon take her life.
Her entourage recruited a drug dealer who sold her $6,000 worth of cocaine during a tour stop in Europe in June - this, according to "an eyewitness to the deal," the tabloid reports.
The same source adds that Whitney, 46, was high as a kite during her interview with Oprah Winfrey, despite telling the talk show host that she was drug-free.
The Enquirer says their own "in-depth investigation" has discovered that Whitney has spent an average of $6,300 a week on drugs - or a staggering $327,600 a year.
"Whitney is a dead woman walking! With the amount of drugs she's buying, she won't be able to live long. She'll be dead in months," her friend Marlon David, a party promoter, told The Enquirer.
"A friend of mine... is a drug dealer who deals in cocaine. One of Whitney's people called him and said, 'Whitney wants to party,'" David told The Enquirer exclusively.
The Grammy-winning singer's sobriety came into question almost as soon as she kicked off her "Nothing But Love" comeback tour in February in South Korea. Throughout the trek, Whitney was seen in multiple YouTube clips struggling hard to hit notes.
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Wesley Snipes
Lawyers for Orlando-born movie star Wesley Snipes say they received an email from a juror who claims three fellow jurors presumed the actor to be guilty of tax crimes before the trial began two years ago.
Atlanta-based lawyer Daniel Meachum asked a federal judge today to permit Snipes' defense team to interview the trial jurors, arguing that the actor's constitutional rights may have been violated by the jury's bias.
The unusual request, filed in wake of a federal appeals court ruling that upheld the guilty verdicts and three-year prison sentence as fair, withheld the juror's name, though the lawyers promised to reveal the identity to the judge.
Federal prosecutors want Snipes, 47, to begin serving his prison sentence for tax-related crimes. They filed a demand this week asking U.S. District Court Judge William Terrell Hodges to revoke the actor's bond.
Snipes, best known as the vampire-killing hero in the science-fiction trilogy "Blade," has been free on bond during the appeal. He was accused of dodging taxes on an estimated $38 million that he earned from films and investments from 1999 to 2004. Though acquitted of the most serious charges, jurors found him guilty of three misdemeanor counts of willfully failing to file federal tax returns..
The text of the juror's email was included in the request, filed in federal court in Ocala.
It read: "I served on the jury in Ocala that found him guilty on 3 counts of failing to file taxes. It was a deal that had to be made because of certain jurors that had already presumed he was guilty before the trial started and we only found this out in the last few days of deliberation. We thought we were making the right deal because we did not think he would go to jail for not filing taxes. There were 3 on the jury that felt this way and told us he was guilty before they even heard the first piece of evidence going against what the judge had said."
If any juror had presumed Snipes guilty, the verdict is invalid, the defense motion argued.
Prosecutors could not be reached Friday night for comment.
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