Morgan Freeman on the tea party, racism and Obama

Morgan Freeman on the tea party, racism and Obama

Here's Freeman on the right wing and the tea party in this country:

"The tea partiers who are controlling the Republican party...their stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term," he tells Piers Morgan. "What underlines that? Screw the country, we're going to do whatever we can to get this black man out of here."

He continues: "It is a racist thing." Is he disappointed in Pres. Obama?

"Kind of, but I so understood that he was trying to hold onto his own promise," says Freeman. "He would be President of all the people.""

Proofs of Racism in the South/United-States:


This is a clip from a movie about a classic book I read in school, called "To Kill A Mockingbird". Which, after all these decades, still holds true in the Deep South.

Famous Speeches: To Kill a Mockingbird

1. “Anatomy of Injustice”: Death in a small town

A real-life murder mystery and courtroom drama makes for a page-turning indictment of the death penalty

The story begins with the discovery of a body in 1982: Handsome, well-off Dorothy Edwards, a 76-year-old widow and resident of rural Greenwood, S.C., who “could have passed for 56.” Her battered corpse was found in her closet by a neighbor. He helpfully pointed out to the police a beeping alarm clock, a full pot of automatically brewed coffee and an open copy of TV guide — all conspicuously pointing to a time of death — before suggesting that the 23-year-old man who’d recently washed Edwards’ windows seemed a likely culprit. Within days, the police had arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a soft-spoken, docile laborer of very limited intelligence, with the feeblest excuse for probable cause: Edwards had written Elmore a check and one of his fingerprints was found on the windows she’d paid him to clean. Do I even need to tell you that Edwards was white and Elmore black? After that came a mockery of criminal investigation followed by a mockery of justice. The police failed to photograph the bed where they claimed Edwards had been brutally raped or to retain the bedsheets as evidence. Other evidence passed through an unusually large number of hands (some of them unaffiliated with the investigation), or disappeared and then eventually reappeared (or not). No one bothered to check out that so-helpful neighbor who discovered the body and recommended a suspect. The medical examiner delivered a convenient but highly improbable time of death in a report that an expert would later liken to the work of a “first-year intern.” As for the public defenders initially assigned to Elmore’s case, one was a racist who referred to his client as “a red-headed nigger.” The other was, in the words of a detective convinced of Elmore’s guilt, “drunk through the whole trial.” The judge made no secret of wishing to wrap things up quickly. He allowed the father of a prosecutor’s best friend to sit on the jury and incorrectly informed the jurors that those who didn’t support the death penalty were obligated to recuse themselves. He also plainly indicated that he considered Elmore to be guilty. The locally powerful lead prosecutor engaged in a colorful array of misconduct. In a week, Elmore was sentenced to death. Elmore’s advocates succeeded in overturning his conviction twice. He was awarded two additional trials. In the first he was assigned the same incompetent defense attorneys (Bonner describes it as a “video replay” of the original trial) and in the second (which was allowed to contest the sentencing only) a committed but inexperience defender was unable to outwit a wily, unscrupulous prosecutor to mitigate the penalty. Elmore’s case changed that young lawyer’s views on capital punishment by showing him a legal system plagued by outright finagling: “not human error,” he told Bonner, “but human manipulation … We don’t have the right as a civilized society to pass this judgment.” Eventually, Elmore’s case came to the South Carolina Death Penalty Resource Center and Diana Holt, a freshly minted attorney at age 36. Holt had overcome a childhood and youth marred by sexual abuse, drugs and divorce. She was convinced of Elmore’s innocence and the further she and her colleagues pursued inquiries that should have been made by his original defense team, the more convinced they became. Bonner is clear that most convicts on death row are guilty; at issue is not whether they committed the crime, but whether mitigating circumstances — in particular, mental deficiency — argue for life without parole. That death sentences will be appealed is taken for granted, but what Bonner underlines is the institutional defensiveness and inertia that makes those sentences so difficult to overturn. South Carolina judges were extremely reluctant to admit that South Carolina state attorneys and law enforcement could be negligent or deceitful, or their fellow judges remiss. A state attorney (like the one assigned to Elmore’s appeal) might one day expound on a prosecutor’s solemn duty to pursue justice not just victories, then battle fiercely to uphold a conviction even he can see is unjust. Perhaps most appalling to the average citizen, the emergence of persuasive evidence of innocence after a conviction is often irrelevant to the appeals process. A condemned man’s defenders must instead rely on persuading judges that his constitutional rights were violated during his arrest or trial. “Innocence alone does not entitle a defendant to a new trial,” Bonner explains. While there are good reasons for this principle, it has led to such grotesqueries as a state lawyer arguing before the Missouri Supreme Court that an innocent man ought to be executed even if the court found “absolute” evidence exonerating him of the crime. (To their credit, the justices on that court ruled that “It is difficult to imagine a more manifestly unjust and unconstitutional result than permitting the execution of an innocent person.” Conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court apparently disagree.)

Innocent killed for crimes, especially if they are of a hated minority, is normal - though you will rarely find anyone involved in prosecuting the case who thinks they are innocent - pinning a crime on a group that is outside the real group of criminals is a time honored Southern tradition (and believing that, despite all evidence, is another tradition)...

1. "Graves' brother, Arthur Curry Jr., has always insisted that Graves was home with him the night of the murders. "There is no justice, especially here in Texas. Had he done that and I knew it, I could not have hid the truth knowing that someone's family was in torture," says Curry. Graves has not been given an execution date. His lawyer is seeking a new trial."

2. "The Death Penalty Information Center keeps an "Innocence List" which names incarcerated people who have been exonerated since 1973. There are 119 to date. The criteria for inclusion on the list are: "In order to be included on the list, defendants must have been convicted and sentenced to death, and subsequently either: a) their conviction was overturned and they were acquitted at a re-trial, or all charges were dismissed; or b) they were given an absolute pardon by the governor based on new evidence of innocence." 

3. Although I support "the death penalty" in theory, I can't support it in the States because of the corrupt government (Federal and State). More Info on the death penalty here.

2.White guys vs. Obama

He’s getting blown away among blue-collar white men, but it doesn’t have to cost him the election.

 

 

 

 

 

It could also be that the blue-collar men have been more receptive (especially in the face of tough economic times) to the right’s unrelenting efforts to create culturally based resentment of Obama. Conservative leaders, news outlets and commentators have taken countless opportunities to add to their preferred caricature of Obama as a radical leftist eager to settle old racial scores on behalf of black America. Themore subtle voices have simply pushed the idea that there’s something distinctly un-American about Obama’s policies. It may be that all of this has had an effect beyond the hardcore Republican base.

Whatever the reason, Obama’s white guy problem is particularly ominousfor his chances in a swing state like Ohio, with its large blue-collar population. The flip side, though, is that he may not be as damaged in swing states with more diverse populations — Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, for instance, where Hispanics account for a growing share of the electorate. This could create a path to victory for Obama even if he’s unable to win back any of the blue-collar white men he’s lost.

At this point, if Obama wins a second term, it will be despite losing to Romney among men and among whites. This doesn’t mean he can afford to write off blue-collar white men completely. But if he gets his clock cleaned with them and still prevails, it will speak to the advantage Democrats figure to enjoy as America continues to diversify in the years ahead.

3.Study: All-White Jury Pools More Likely To Convict Black Defendants (UPDATED)

Duke University released a study on Tuesday that examined the impact of race in jury pools in Florida, and there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that, according to the study, which looked at 700 cases between 2000 and 2010, all-white jury pools are significantly more likely to lead to convictions of black defendants than white ones. The good news is that a single black juror in the pool can alter that dynamic.

Two particularly salient points from Duke'ssummary of the study:

-- In cases with no blacks in the jury pool, blacks were convicted 81 percent of the time, and whites were convicted 66 percent of the time. The estimated difference in conviction rates rises to 16 percent when the authors controlled for the age and gender of the jury and the year and county in which the trial took place.

-- When the jury pool included at least one black person, the conviction rates were nearly identical: 71 percent for black defendants, 73 percent for whites.