KATHLEEN RICE vs NANCY PELOSI - CONYERS & DEMS' FUTURE (CIVIL WAR)

KATHLEEN RICE vs NANCY PELOSI - CONYERS & DEMS' FUTURE (CIVIL WAR):

RICE REPRESENTS DEMOCRATS' FUTURE (2018, 2020).

PELOSI REPRESENTS DEMOCRATS' PAST (2008, 2012, 1990s).

JOHN CONYERS SHOULD RESIGN BUT PELOSI & OTHER OLDER LEADERS APPEAR TO BE PROTECTING HIM.

IS PELOSI AFRAID OF TERM LIMITS ON THE HORIZON??


Sources: CNN, Daily Beast, Politico, Business Insider, The Hill, Youtube


****** Dem lawmaker: Pelosi harassment response set women back 'decades'


Her defense of John Conyers as 'an icon' squandered the party's moral authority, Rep. Kathleen Rice says.

A Democratic congresswoman laced into Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday, suggesting the top House Democrat “set women back and — quite frankly, our party back — decades” by failing to more forcefully confront allegations of sexual harassment by veteran Democratic Rep. John Conyers.

Speaking to reporters at the Capitol, Rep. Kathleen Rice of New York said Pelosi’s appearance on “Meet the Press” on Sunday — when she raised questions about the accounts of Conyers’ accusers and described the Michigan Democrat as an “icon” — ceded the party’s moral high ground on sexual harassment issues, especially because one of Conyers’ accusers is bound by a nondisclosure agreement.

“I think that her comments on Sunday set women back and — quite frankly, our party back — decades,” said Rice, who is advocating for legislation that would expose a slew of hidden, taxpayer-funded settlements for sexual harassment by lawmakers and aides.

Rice said Pelosi’s comments were particularly egregious in light of President Donald Trump’s tacit embrace of Roy Moore, the Alabama GOP Senate candidate accused of molesting a minor.

“I think that we ceded the moral high ground on Sunday when our leader said on ‘Meet the Press’ that John Conyers was an icon and we don’t even know who these women are, when she was fully aware that the woman in question was bound by a nondisclosure agreement,” Rice said. “I think we had an opportunity to stake that moral high ground when you have a president who is supporting a man for Senate who — all credible allegations that have not been refuted — showed him to be a predator of teenage girls.”

A Pelosi spokesman said Rice’s comments were not an accurate portrayal of the minority leader’s sentiment.

“The leader was very clear on Sunday that no matter how great an individual’s legacy, it’s not a license for harassment,” said the spokesman, Drew Hammill.

Hammill also noted that Pelosi, in her “Meet the Press” interview, said she favored eliminating nondisclosure agreements that silenced victims from speaking out.

“[A]ll of these nondisclosure agreements have to go,” she told NBC’s Chuck Todd in the interview. Since that interview, Hammill added, Pelosi has said she believes Conyers’ accusers and subsequently spoke to one of them about her story. She also has signaled support for legislation from Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) that would reform the system of harassment reporting in Congress to protect victims.

Rice was among of a group of Democrats who vocally opposed Pelosi’s reelection as Democratic leader when the caucus voted after the November election to give Pelosi another term.

Rice’s comments escalate her already pointed criticism of Pelosi’s leadership — and of her Democratic colleagues, who she said earlier Wednesday were not confronting sexual harassment issues within their own ranks seriously enough. She’s one of three Democratic lawmakers, along with Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who have called for Conyers to resign immediately.

Rice left early Wednesday from a closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting and told reporters she bailed because she didn't think her colleagues were approaching the harassment issue seriously. A Democratic aide said Rice exited after Pelosi spoke about the issue and also missed at least a portion of the comments from eight Democratic lawmakers who addressed harassment issues.

"There was a lengthy discussion of sexual harassment policies and reforms needed," the aide said.

TRUMP'S EXECUTIVE CABINET TEAM OF RIVALS SHOWS STRONG LEADERSHIP

TRUMP'S EXECUTIVE CABINET TEAM OF RIVALS SHOWS STRONG LEADERSHIP:

TRUMP DOESN'T WANT A TEAM OF "YES MEN" AND BUTT KISSERS.

MSM NETWORKS (CNN) APPLAUDED OBAMA'S "TEAM OF RIVALS", SILENT WHEN TRUMP DID LIKEWISE.

CAN YOU SAY MEDIA BIAS??


Sources: The Economist, Fox News, YouTube


The late Pres Abraham Lincoln received notoriety for creating a "Team of Rivals" when selecting members of his executive cabinet.

Barack Obama was hailed and lauded by the Mainstream Media for following in Lincoln's footsteps, especially when Obama nominated his former 2008 opponent Hillary Clinton for the role of Secretary of State.

Now in the year 2016, President-Elect Donald J. Trump is building his own executive cabinet "Team of Rivals" leadership fleet.

But wait!

Where is the Mainstream Media?

Obama was praised for his "Team of Rivals".

So why is the MSM silent when Trump practices the same brilliant leadership strategy?
----------------------------------------------


***** The next administration

Donald Trump has a team of rivals too
THE president-elect’s first administration hires had all been middle-aged white men who had backed him to the hilt when others wrinkled their noses.

But with a pair of nominations announced on November 23rd he rang the changes. He named Nikki Haley, the Indian-American governor of South Carolina, to be his ambassador to the United Nations, and Betsy DeVos, a billionaire Republican benefactress, as his education secretary.

As The Economist went to press, he was also reported to have invited Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon whom he defeated in the Republican primaries, and who is black, to be his secretary of housing and urban development.
All three possible appointments are intriguing, perhaps Mrs Haley’s especially. She is a first-generation American—her parents migrated from the Indian state of Punjab in the 1960s—who converted from Sikhism to Christianity before her marriage, yet still occasionally attends gurdwara.
Sparky, personable and, at the age of 44, an acknowledged Republican star, she could be the first Indian-American to hold a cabinet office. She is also a former opponent of Mr Trump’s.
She criticised him implicitly last January, when giving the official Republican rebuttal to Barack Obama’s last state-of-the-union speech. “It can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices,” she warned:

Americans “must resist.” She then criticised Mr Trump explicitly after he failed to disavow the support of a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Having distinguished herself by the alacrity with which she had lobbied to remove the Confederate flag from government buildings the previous year, after a racist massacre of black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, Mrs Haley’s condemnation carried moral weight.

It is smart of Mr Trump, who once derided her for her criticisms, to try to harness that. Her nomination is evidence that he can in fact bury a grudge. There is speculation he might also be trying to head off a potential challenger in 2020; that would be smart, too.

Mrs DeVos, an heir by marriage to the Amway direct marketing fortune, is another former critic of Mr Trump. She gave money to three of his rivals in the primaries—including Jeb Bush, an establishment figure Mr Trump humiliated—and said the reality television star did “not represent the Republican Party”.

In some ways the epitome of the well-heeled Republican elite he railed against on the trail, Mrs DeVos is also a crusader for the pro-choice school reforms, including an expansion of charter schools and vouchers to make private education more widely accessible, he has called for.

Amid uncertainty about what Mr Trump means to do with power, given the sketchiness of his platform and his apparent abandonment of a couple of big campaign promises, Mrs DeVos’s appointment is a rare clue to a Trump policy agenda. Teachers’ unions decried it; Mr Bush, one of Mr Trump’s most indefatigable Republican opponents, warmly applauded.

Mr Carson’s nomination, if he agrees to it, would be rather odd, but that is now expected of the retired medical whizz.

Backed by a devoted following of evangelical Christians, he briefly led the Republican primary field, yet seemed unaware of what the job of president entailed; his brilliant brain seemed resistant to remembering almost any detail of foreign policy. When reported to be in the reckoning for a cabinet role, his business manager said that was the “last thing he would want”, because he “feels he has no government experience.”

This was not a great recommendation for a job that includes responsibility for the federal government’s efforts to alleviate urban poverty.

JOHN KELLY COMPLETES TRUMP'S FLEET OF EXECUTIVE CABINET GENERALS

JOHN KELLY COMPLETES TRUMP'S FLEET OF EXECUTIVE CABINET GENERALS:

EXCELLENT, COMPETENT CHOICES FOR AMERICAN LEADERSHIP.


Sources: Fox News, MSNBC, Youtube


***** Trump poised to tap John Kelly for DHS, adding another general to team


Adding yet another general to his administration, President-elect Donald Trump is expected to tap retired Marine Gen. John Kelly as his choice to lead the Department of Homeland Security.

Kelly told Fox News Trump already has asked him to serve in the DHS position.

“I have been asked and would consider it an honor,” he said.

Kelly would be the third general Trump has picked for his administration, after announcing James Mattis – who along with Kelly is a four-star general -- as his pick for Defense secretary. Trump also announced in November that retired Gen. Michael Flynn would be his national security adviser.

Kelly retired from the Marine Corps earlier this year after leading U.S. Southern Command for three years, during which he was involved in the oversight of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and the southern border.

Kelly was picked by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to serve as his senior military adviser and then served in the same position under Leon Panetta before moving to Southern Command.

Kelly complained at his last Pentagon press conference in January that after 40 years as a Marine he had the authority to watch drug dealers heading to the border by sea, but he could not disrupt them. He is believed to have a good relationship with current DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, with whom he served as Pentagon general counsel.

He served three tours in Iraq, and holds the somber distinction of being the most senior military officer to lose a child in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. His son, Marine 2nd Lt. Robert Kelly was killed in November, 2010, in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

Known as an outspoken but loyal commander, Kelly will be first to lead the department who is not a lawyer and the fifth overall. The department was formed after the 9/11 terror attacks in order to help foil future attacks on the American homeland.

Sources say Trump has settled on Kelly for the role, and is expected to name him in the next few days. Kelly’s selection will require confirmation by the Senate.

Immigration enforcement is a familiar issue for Kelly, and a big part of the DHS portfolio. Southern Command, which is based in South Florida, regularly works with DHS on missions to identify and dismantle immigrant smuggling networks. And it has partnered with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in an operation targeting human smuggling into the U.S. and helped with the rescue of children arriving alone at U.S. borders.

While Trump has tapped military officials for key appointments, doing so can also bring complications. Gen. Mattis will need to secure a waiver from Congress in order to be considered due to a requirement that military officials be out of service for seven years before being secretary of Defense.

Trump, meanwhile, said Wednesday that he has taken, and acted on, advice from President Obama on who he should appoint to various positions in his administration.

“I have asked him what he would think of this one and that one,” Trump said on NBC's "Today" show. “I would say that, yes, I take his recommendations very seriously and there are some people that I will be appointing, and in one case have appointed, where he thought very highly of that person, yes.”

While he did not go into specifics, he said that he likes Obama "as a person" despite the brutal criticism he leveled at the president on the campaign trail.

"I will say this, I've now gotten to know President Obama. I really like him. ... I can't speak for him, but we have a really good chemistry together. We talk,” Trump said.

A coziness between current and former presidents is not unusual. President George H.W. Bush wrote President Bill Clinton a warm note when Clinton took office, while President Obama has repeatedly spoken of how accommodating President George W. Bush's team was to Obama in the lead-up to him taking office in 2009.

DEMOCRATS TAKE PHILADELPHIA FOR HILLARY IN 2016

DEMOCRATS TAKE PHILADELPHIA FOR HILLARY CLINTON IN 2016:

I CAN'T IGNORE HILLARY'S LEADERSHIP ABILITIES.

Sources: Wall Street Journal, YouTube

DESPITE Political & Ideological differences, I still admire Hillary Clinton as a very Powerful woman.

Thus my reason for choosing to cover the 2016 DNC Convention in Philadelphia.

Congratulations!

***** Hillary Clinton to be Anointed Democratic Presidential Nominee in Philadelphia

Tuesday’s action in Philadelphia:

Main Event: Bill Clinton, former two-term president and husband of Hillary Clinton, addresses the convention.

Big Idea: Showing a softer side of Hillary Clinton

Convention Business: A roll-call vote of the states will formally anoint Mrs. Clinton as the party nominee.

The second day of the Democratic convention will test whether Bernie Sanders’s delegates have gotten the message that it’s not a good idea to disrupt the proceedings and boo every mention of Hillary Clinton’s name.

But it’s the candidate’s husband who will provide most of the day-two theater. Former President Bill Clinton is an accomplished speaker whom President Barack Obama once affectionately dubbed the “Secretary of Explaining Stuff.” His speech is a chance to prove anew he’s a legitimate campaign asset.

That point has seemed in doubt. While heading to his plane at the Phoenix airport last month, Mr. Clinton stopped and paid an impromptu visit to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, whose plane had just landed. Though ostensibly a social call, critics said it was wrong for the pair to meet when the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server.

Voters haven’t seen or heard much from Mr. Clinton since that fateful tarmac encounter. Today they’ll get a close-up of the former president – and he needs to deliver. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll earlier this month showed that only 37% viewed him favorably, while 42% had a negative view of him. The Clinton campaign would like to see those numbers improve as the race barrels toward election day.

With the state-by-state roll-call vote, Mrs. Clinton will officially become her party’s nominee. That’s a milestone, but she still has plenty of work to do. Polls consistently show voters like her experience but haven’t particularly warmed to her as a person.

Various speakers today will try to address that vulnerability. They will talk about her work on behalf of children. Families of black shooting victims will likely mention the outreach they’ve gotten from Mrs. Clinton as they’ve coped with personal loss.

Can a four-day convention help persuade voters that Mrs. Clinton is a more empathetic figure than they might have guessed?

It’s no small feat. Aides to Mrs. Clinton have spent decades trying to make her a more likeable figure. They’ve put her on comedy shows and sat her down with late-night TV talk-show hosts. And yet, she is the most disliked Democratic nominee in recent history, polls show.

The convention is perhaps Mrs. Clinton’s last, best chance to make the case she’s worthy not just of respect, but of affection.

HILLARY CLINTON BEGGING FOR THE BLACK VOTE TURNS ME OFF

#HillaryClinton

HILLARY CLINTON BEGGING FOR THE BLACK VOTE TURNS ME OFF:

HILLARY NEEDS TO MAINTAIN HER REPUTATION AS A STRONG LEADER.

2016 BLACK VOTERS NEED OPPORTUNITY & SOLUTIONS NOT FOOD STAMPS, PITY OR DANCING POLITICIANS.

Due to the OBAMA administration doing absolutely NOTHING to help Uplift the BLACK Community for seven years as he has helped to Uplift the GAY Community and WALL STREET, Democrats are now really in trouble with 2016 BLACK Voters.

Presumptive 2016 Democrat Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton appears to be listening to Foolish Advisers.

Hillary's campaign Advisers are telling her to Dance for BLACK Voters and Beg for BLACK Voter support versus inviting BLACK Grassroots Activists (not AL SHARPTON) to personally meet with her to offer up SOLUTIONS and OPPORTUNITY to help Collectively Uplift the 21st century BLACK American community.


~ Hillary Clinton’s support among BLACKS plunges in a new poll.

Over the course of the still-awfully young Democratic primary season, one demographic split has been repeated over and over again: Non-whites have consistently been more supportive of Hillary Clinton than whites.
That's one reason that Bernie Sanders's strength in Iowa and New Hampshire isn't as worrisome as it might otherwise be for Clinton backers; in states with less-heavily white populations -- a.k.a. most of the rest of the country -- Clinton should conceivably do better.

A new poll from Suffolk University and USA Today, though, suggests a big shift among African Americans that could undermine that confidence. We have to note up front that this is one poll, with large margins of error on black responses. That said, the shift is surprising.

Since the last Suffolk poll in July, the overall race has tightened. Clinton still leads, but by less than she used to.

Part of the shift in support for Clinton might be due to the decline in her net favorability among blacks. Opinions of Clinton have dropped among all Democrats as we've seen before. Among blacks, the decline has been greater -- and the increase in favorable views of Sanders has been stark. Clinton is down 16 points in net favorability, and Sanders is up 31.

Clinton still leads, of course, and Joe Biden isn't in the race.

The vice president does better with blacks than Sanders, and past polls have shown that many Biden backers would go to Clinton if he were to decide not to run. A quarter of those who had a preferred candidate said Clinton would be their No. 2, and 31 percent said theirs would be Biden.

But 20 percent said they would go to Sanders before either Biden or Clinton.

It's also important to note that this new poll doesn't show much change in support for the top three Democrats over other recent polls. Clinton's been at or a bit above 40 percent for a while, while Sanders has been in the mid-20s.


Sources: Newsone, Washington Post, YouTube

DARREN WILSON CALLS FOR "PEACE" AFTER MURDERING AN UNARMED BLACK BOY FOR BASICALLY NO REASON (GRAND JURY DECISION)

#DarrenWilson

OFFICER DARREN WILSON CALLS FOR "PEACE" IN FERGUSON:

SAY WHAT?? DIDN'T HE CREATE THIS CHAOS??

The same Adult Man who pumped 8 Bullets into an Unarmed 18-yr old Big BLACK Kid and left this BLACK kid's body lying in the Street for hours, just because WILSON felt this BLACK Kid did not move out of the Street quickly enough.........

Now wants "PEACE"!

That's right!

Officer DARREN WILSON wants PEACE in FERGUSON.

Ain't that a Blip??

He is the reason behind all of this Chaos, now he wants "PEACE".

LET THE NATIONWIDE PEACEFUL PROTESTS & ECONOMIC BOYCOTTS CONTINUE UNTIL REAL CHANGE OCCURS.

Article Sources: ABC News; CNN; Youtube

JAY NIXON vs BLACK FERGUSON CITIZENS: HE ONLY CARES ABOUT WHITE ST. LOUIS CITIZENS

#JayNixon

JAY NIXON vs BLACK FERGUSON CITIZENS:

Tuesday afternoon when MISSOURI Governor JAY NIXON (D) began speaking during a Press Conference, I turned to the FOOD NETWORK Channel.

He's nothing but a Political Bloodsucker, only concerned with being Re-elected by WHITE St Louis Voters.

If Officer DARREN WILSON were BLACK and MICHAEL BROWN were WHITE this entire situation would have different Results!

By the way.......JAY NIXON is also a DEMOCRAT!


Article Sources: Washington Post; Rebel Pundit; Youtube

ARTICLE: "Gov. Nixon: More National Guard Soldiers To Ferguson"

Gov. Jay Nixon (D) said at a news conference Tuesday that he would deploy hundreds more National Guard soldiers to Ferguson in response to overnight violence throughout the area. The additional troops will be stationed throughout the community to protect homes and businesses, he added.

“Last night criminals intent on lawlessness and destruction terrorized this community, burning buildings, firing guns, vandalizing store fronts and looting family businesses, many for the second time,” he said.

Nixon said there were already more than 700 troops in the area, but that number would increase to “more than 2,200 in the region.”

AL SHARPTON SHOULD NOT LEAD NEW MOVEMENT; BILL DE BLASIO AND FLORIDA DREAM DEFENDERS SHOULD

#AlSharpton

AL SHARPTON SHOULD NOT BE LEADING THIS NEW RACIAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT IN AMERICA.

BILL DE BLASIO AND THE FLORIDA DREAM DEFENDERS SHOULD TAKE UP THE MANTLE AND LEAD.

I RESPECT SHARPTON BUT HE NEEDS TO ALLOW NEW YOUNG BLOOD TO STEP UP AND LEAD.

SHARPTON CAN REMAIN IN THE MOVEMENT BUT HE SHOULD NOT LEAD IT.

WE NEED LONG TERM ECONOMIC BOYCOTTS AND PEACEFUL PROTESTS ALL OVER THE USA UNTIL CHANGE OCCURS.

TALK IS CHEAP WE NEED ACTION……..JOBS………SMALL BUSINESSES……..EQUAL JUSTICE.

Long time Self-Appointed Civil Rights Leader AL SHARPTON should NOT be allowed to LEAD this New Racial Justice MOVEMENT in the United States of America.

Although I may NOT have always agreed with AL SHARPTON'S Motives, I do appreciate his Voice but now he needs to fall back and make way for some New, YOUNGER LEADERS to take charge of this MOVEMENT.

If SHARPTON wants to remain in the MOVEMENT than be a MENTOR but don't try to LEAD because his LEADERSHIP days are over.

Older Civil Rights LEADERS are often Stubborn and Stuck in their ways.

Older Civil Rights LEADERS are often NOT as Open-Minded and Open to Effective CHANGE as Younger people are.

Older Civil Rights LEADERS are often too entrenched and Sold-out to CORPORATE MONEY to remain Effective.

What worked 20 years ago will NOT work today because the World has Changed and INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM has grown Worse!

The 21st Century BLACK Community needs NEW, YOUNG LEADERSHIP like the FLORIDA DREAM DEFENDERS and Mayor BILL DE BLASIO of NEW YORK CITY.

Yes I said NYC Mayor BILL DE BLASIO!

BILL DE BLASIO is a WHITE Man married to a BLACK Woman but prior to being elected Mayor of NYC, he was a very Effective Community Advocate.

As a NYC Community Advocate DE BLASIO helped thousands of OPPRESSED BLACK and LATINO people.

That's why so many BLACK & LATINO Voters Elected DE BLASIO when BLOOMBERG'S 3rd term ended.

After being Elected Mayor, DE BLASIO did NOT change his Spots or jump into bed with Corporate "FAT CATS".

Instead DE BLASIO has United NEW YORK CITY and he is still to this day helping the OPPRESSED BLACK and LATINO People of New York City!

BLOOMBERG Divided New York City.

DE BLASIO has United New York City.

I believe BILL DE BLASIO and the FLORIDA DREAM DEFENDERS should team up together and LEAD the New Racial Justice MOVEMENT in America.

DE BLAISO is from the NORTH.

The DREAM DEFENDERS are from the SOUTH.

They need to team up TOGETHER.

That’s rights I said it!

The New LEADERSHIP Racial JUSTICE Baton in America should be passed to BILL DE BLASIO and the FLORIDA DREAM DEFENDERS.

So to wrap this post up and keep it short, I respect AL SHARPTON but he needs to allow NEW YOUNG LEADERSHIP to Step Up.

I’ve noticed that whenever AL SHARPTON LEADS, the MOVEMENT only last for a few Months then it goes Silent.

This time the MOVEMENT needs to last until well past 2016 or until EFFECTIVE CHANGE takes place in America, including JOBS for BLACK People.

Not simply low paying Temp JOBS even for BLACK People with College Degrees.

But Real JOBS like We had before the RECESSION!

We need Real JOBS and help to Re-Start SMALL BUSINESSES in BLACK Communities so We can HIRE Our BLACK Youth, just as We did before the RECESSION.

I repeat.

If SHARPTON wants to remain in the MOVEMENT than be a MENTOR but don't try to LEAD because his LEADERSHIP days are over.

I'm just saying.

WE NEED LONG TERM ECONOMIC BOYCOTTS AND PEACEFUL PROTESTS ALL OVER THE USA UNTIL CHANGE OCCURS.

TALK IS CHEAP WE NEED ACTION……..JOBS………SMALL BUSINESSES……..EQUAL JUSTICE.

Article Sources: FSU News; NY Times; Politico

ARTICLE: "Darren Wilson Not Indicted, Dream Defenders Plan Peaceful Rally"

Dream Defenders plan rally against shooting of unarmed Michael Brown


UPDATE: Monday, Nov 24, 2014; 9:26 p.m.

The grand jury reached the decision not to indict Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August. Dream Defenders are set to march at 10 p.m. at the Civic Center.
UPDATE: 6 p.m.

Tallahassee's Dream Defender's changed the time and location of their rally to 9 p.m. at the Civic Center.

Lead Organizer Brian Marshall said they will hold the rally regardless of the verdict.

---

The grand jury reached the decision not to indict Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August. Dream Defenders are set to march at 10 p.m. at the Civic Center.

Tallahassee’s Dream Defenders say they will hold a peaceful rally, marching from the Civic Center at 10 p.m.

In addition to the situation in Ferguson, Dream Defenders are rallying against other police brutality and race issues in Tallahassee, including the tasing of 61-year-old, unarmed Viola Young last month. They are also rallying for justice for Duane Strong, an 18-year-old shot and killed by police from inside his car at Cheek's nightclub in Tallahassee.

MARION BARRY IS DEAD AT 78 R.I.P.; GREAT BLACK LEADER WITH A TERRIBLE VICE ( SMOKING CRACK)

R.I.P. former Washington, DC Mayor MARION BARRY, a BLACK Man with Great LEADERHSIP abilities yet he Could NOT or Would NOT control his desire for Illegal Drugs (CRACK).

However despite MARION BARRY'S Substance Abuse problem and various Scandals, his GOD-given Ability to LEAD never left him.

And despite MARION BARRY'S Failures he always BOUNCED Back!

The man was Elected FOUR Terms!

I know FOX NEWS will most likely call the Voters who kept re-electing Mayor MARION BARRY "Stupid" but who cares??

FOX NEWS could be an Awesome News Organization but for the RACISM it projects in its
daily News Reporting practices.

By the way......RACISM really does make Human Beings STUPID!

Enough about FOX NEWS, now back to my post on MARION BARRY.

MARION BARRY had the uncanny ability to always BOUNCE Back in life.

He was persistent and never gave up.

It was as if GOD could see MARION BARRY'S Heart and True Intentions of his Soul, gently Guiding him and telling him "I FORGIVE YOU MARION", now keep going even if you mess up while trying".

Bouncing Backing is definitely a sign of True LEADERSHIP ability.

Real LEADERS can be knocked down Six times but they will rise again the Seventh time!

Real LEADERS are Creative, Intelligent, Independent Thinkers, Bold (most of the time), Resilient, Gifted, Wordsmiths, often Misunderstood, Charismatic, Visionaries, Persistent, in Charge of their OWN Destiny, can be easily Frustrated, can be Inpatient and are sometimes Anti-Social in personality.

Real LEADERS are Imperfect HUMAN BEINGS.

Regardless of what anyone says or researches on the subject of LEADERSHIP,
Real LEADERS are Born NOT made.

True LEADERSHIP is an Inherited Trait, but that Trait can either be Diminished or Developed based upon one's Childhood and Adolescent environment.

If people who possess Natural born LEADERSHIP Skills are never taught how to properly develop those LEADERSHIP Skills, or are not taught how to protect those LEADERSHIP Skills, when faced with Hardships and Temptations those same Natural born LEADERS will crumble & FALL.

Just as MARION BARRY did.

Just as ROB FORD did.

Just as BILL CLINTON did.

Just as TOM DELAY did.

Just as BARACK OBAMA JR did.

In fact the only GREAT LEADER in the history of Mankind to Never FAIL while on Planet Earth, is our Lord and Savior JESUS CHRIST!

MARION BARRY will be remembered in my book as a Great LEADER because he kept Bouncing Back!

I won't judge him and I hope he is now in HEAVEN.

R.I.P. Mayor Barry!


Article Sources: CNN; NY Daily News; Washington Post

***ARTICLE: "Marion Barry Dies; 4-term D.C. Mayor The Most Powerful Local Politician Of His Generation"


Marion Barry Jr., the Mississippi sharecropper’s son and civil rights activist who served three terms as mayor of the District of Columbia, survived a drug arrest and jail sentence, and then came back to win a fourth term as the city’s chief executive, died early Sunday at United Medical Center in Washington. He was 78.

Mr. Barry, who also served on the D.C. Council for 15 years and had been president of the city’s old Board of Education, was the most influential and savvy local politician of his generation. He dominated the city’s political landscape in the final quarter of the 20th century. There was a time when his critics, in sarcasm but not entirely in jest, called him “Mayor for Life.” Into the first dozen years of the new millennium, he remained a highly visible player on the city’s political stage, but by then on the periphery, no longer at the center.

His personal and public life was fraught with high drama and irony. He struggled with alcohol and drug addiction, relapse and recovery. He was married four times, divorced three times and separated from his fourth wife. His extramarital liaisons and legal trouble over unpaid taxes made news.

He came to Washington as a champion of the downtrodden and the dispossessed and rose to the pinnacle of power and prestige. As mayor of the District, Mr. Barry became a national symbol of self-governance and home rule for urban blacks.

His programs helped provide summer jobs for youths, home-buying assistance for the working-class and food for senior citizens. And he placed African Americans in thousands of middle- and upper-level management positions in the city government that in previous generations had been reserved for whites.

“He was really the architect of creating a local government infrastructure in the early days of home rule,” Frederick D. Cooke Jr., a longtime friend who served as Barry’s attorney, said in a 2014 interview. “He helped it to diversify to be more inclusive. It had been a stilted, segregated entity, and he made it possible for people to believe they could have a seat at the table.”

Gladys Mack, assistant city administrator for budget in the first and subsequent Barry administrations, was among the mayor’s early managerial appointments appointees. Decades later, she would remember Mr. Barry as “a forward thinker.”

One example, Mack said, was his decision to build the new District Government building at 14th and U streets in Northwest Washington — a spawning ground for the 1968 riots that followed the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

His advisers counseled against it, Mack recalled, but the mayor said, “We need to do this . . . and it became a catalyst for development of the entire area.”

Mack was named chief of the D.C. budget in 1979, a time when few women in the nation were in top municipal leadership jobs. Mr. Barry, she said, “appointed close to a dozen women to positions that were not traditional for women.”

When Mr. Barry took office, so chaotic had the District’s finances been that the city didn’t even know how much money it had in the bank. He instituted budgetary and fiscal accounting procedures to figure that out. But by the end of his last term as mayor, Congress and the courts had stripped him of much of his authority, complaining of graft, corruption and gross mismanagement in his administration.

“Some governments are corrupt but are known for their competency in running the city,” Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.) told Mr. Barry at a 1989 hearing on the D.C. budget. “Others are incompetent but considered clean. [Washington’s] government is scandalously corrupt and hopelessly incompetent.”

In 1990, Mr. Barry was arrested on drug charges in a sting by the FBI and D.C. police after having been lured to a Washington hotel room by a woman with whom he’d previously had an amorous relationship. “Bitch set me up!” he muttered aloud as he was being placed under arrest. The comment was captured on FBI videotapes of the sting and broadcast on television, and it would endure as a signature phrase in Mr. Barry’s vocal legacy. His conviction months later would become front-page news around the world.

He completed a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program and served six months in a federal prison, then used the experience to his political advantage as a platform in his improbable comeback bid for elected office.

“Who can better help our city recover than someone who himself has gone through recovery?” he asked rhetorically.

Charismatic, irrepressible and engaging, Mr. Barry always seemed to get up again. In 1977, while on the council, he was shot during the siege of the District Building (now the John A. Wilson Building) by Hanafi Muslims, who also had taken over the Islamic Center and B’nai B’rith offices.

Mr. Barry’s wound was superficial, but it nevertheless enhanced his personal mystique. After a brief hospitalization, he returned to the political arena and in less than two years was mayor of the District.

For 16 of the next 20 years, he would hold that office. Over time, he would come to reflect a personal style that was almost regal.

In a chauffeur-driven Lincoln Town Car, he traveled across the city, accompanied by a select security detail of police officers and an entourage of aides and hangers-on. Attractive women were omnipresent. He delighted in such extravaganzas as his annual “State of the District address” at the Washington Convention Center, where city workers, senior citizens and schoolchildren were rounded up for a Marion Barry spectacle.

When the Washington Redskins went to the Super Bowl, Mr. Barry went, too, as the First Fan of the hometown team. After Washington beat Miami in the 1983 Super Bowl, he flew back to Washington on the team’s charter aircraft, which was met at Washington Dulles International Airport by President Ronald Reagan. First off the plane to be greeted by the president: Marion Barry.

He was a regular at title prizefights in Las Vegas and elsewhere, he vacationed in the Caribbean and he met with heads of state in Africa.

His constituents, he said, liked and expected this lifestyle. “We’re an example of pride to D.C., to the nation and especially to the international community,” Herbert O. Reid Sr., Mr. Barry’s longtime counsel, mentor and friend, said in 1979. Reid died in 1991.

In large measure, Reid told The Post in 1987, Mr. Barry’s political ambition and success stemmed from the wounds of a dirt-poor childhood and his need to overcome the feelings of rejection he experienced early in life.

“He really wants to be loved and liked by everybody,” Reid had said. “He is proud of his achievements. . . . But I think the background and struggle have left some scars. I think there is some concern about being accepted.”
Champion of the poor

As he ascended the stairway of power and prestige, the mayor promised never to forget the folks who put him in office. He could “walk with kings” and not “lose the common touch,” Mr. Barry often said, quoting from the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling.

He cherished his reputation as a champion of the young, the aged and the poor, having plowed hundreds of millions of tax dollars into job training and employment programs, senior centers and social-welfare endeavors. Rank-and-file workers were hired by the thousands to serve under Mr. Barry’s newly-appointed supervisory corps of African American middle and top level managers.

“He was so in tune with the common person that he could make you feel as if you’d had a long term relationship, even if you’d only just met him for five minutes,” said his attorney, Cooke.

And Mr. Barry’s constituency, Cooke said, was not limited to the dispossessed. He promoted local African American businesses, “using government as an economic level to increase participation.”

Mr. Barry’s enemies saw it differently.

“Patronage, in the guise of local ‘empowerment,’ has always been hallmark of Barry’s governing philosophy,” wrote former FBI agent and Washington lawyer Carl T. Rowan Jr. in a 1998 New Republic article. To the mayor, Rowan said, the D.C. bureaucracy was “a source of jobs for people whose main qualification was their eligibility to vote for Barry.”

Before leaving office in 1999, Mr. Barry would lose his power over the city’s finances to a financial control board that Congress created in 1995. Courts would take over entire city departments.

The city agencies that served public-housing residents, foster children, inmates and the mentally ill would all be placed in receivership. A judge would later call conditions at the city’s receiving home for juvenile delinquents “unacceptable for a civilized country.”

Residents of a city-operated nursing home had limbs amputated because of infected bedsores. Infant mortality and murder rates remained among the highest in the nation, and the Fire Department would plead that its ability to fight fires was seriously impaired. In the public schools, dropout rates remained high, test scores low.

Mr. Barry left the mayor’s office insisting that the city was better off than it was when he was first elected. “I’ve had . . . more homers, more doubles, more triples than I’ve had strikeouts.”

In the turbulence of the 1960s, Mr. Barry had made his mark in the national capital: a young civil rights activist, streetwise and confrontational, with an “in-your-face” style that won the hearts and minds of thousands in the most depressed and impoverished of Washington’s black neighborhoods.

Over the years, their support would remain unshakable, even in the face of such crises as the conviction of high Barry administration staffers on charges involving political corruption, a soaring D.C. murder rate, deteriorating municipal services and Mr. Barry’s own incarceration.

Voters in the city’s white and more-affluent neighborhoods were less forgiving. By 1994, when Mr. Barry made his last run for mayor, he was soundly repudiated in these areas, but this was more than offset by his strength in such poverty-stricken neighborhoods as Shaw, in the inner city, and Far Southeast Washington, east of the Anacostia River.

For those who harbored resentment that he could still be elected mayor of Washington after a drug conviction and jail sentence, Mr. Barry had this advice: “Get over it!”

In January 1979, Mr. Barry took the oath of office for the first time as mayor of the District of Columbia, having defeated the city’s first elected mayor, incumbent Walter E. Washington, and D.C. Council Chairman Sterling Tucker in the Democratic primary the previous September.

Mr. Barry ran strongly among white voters west of Rock Creek Park and on Capitol Hill, less so in poor, black areas — just the reverse of what would happen in the years ahead.

In a ceremony rife with symbolism, he was sworn in by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the high court, and Mr. Barry led an inaugural parade down the 14th Street corridor hit by rioting after the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

His election coincided with a wave of African American political activism that swept black politicians into the mayor’s office in such cities as Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, Newark, New Orleans and Atlanta, as well as Birmingham, Ala., Gary, Ind., and more than 200 smaller cities in the years between 1965 and 1985.

Family of sharecroppers

Marion Barry Jr. was born March 6, 1936, into a family of sharecroppers in the rural hamlet of Itta Bena, Miss. His mother, Mattie Carr, was just shy of her 17th birthday when she married Marion Barry Sr., a strapping sharecropper about 25 years her senior. The marriage disintegrated in conflicts over money and her ambition to flee a life of chopping cotton.
After leaving her husband, she settled in Memphis, where she worked in a slaughterhouse and as a housemaid.

Growing up, the future mayor worked hard at a variety of jobs. He had two newspaper routes and sold a third newspaper on street corners. He waited tables, bagged groceries and inspected soda bottles. He also went to choir practice.

In school, he was a good student. He was also an Eagle Scout.

The work ethic would remain throughout his career. In the early 1970s, when Mr. Barry was on the school board, it was said of him, “While you are sleeping at night, Marion Barry is up planning his next move.” Later, there was another axiom: “The mayor will spend more time cultivating his enemies than his friends.”

In 1958, Mr. Barry graduated with a degree in chemistry from LeMoyne College in Memphis, where he had been president of the student chapter of the NAACP. It was during those years that college fraternity brothers gave him the middle name Shepilov, after Dimitri Shepilov, a purged member of the Soviet Communist Party. Occasionally, he was called “Shep,” but he never officially made it part of his name.

In 1960, he received a master’s degree in chemistry at Fisk University in Nashville. He helped organize an NAACP chapter at Fisk and was a leader of Nashville’s first lunch counter sit-ins. He also participated in a 1960 meeting of black college student leaders that led to the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights organization known for demonstrations, sit-ins and boycotts. Mr. Barry was its first national chairman.

At the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he was working on a doctorate, he met Blantie Evans, who would become his first wife. They were married in 1962 and later divorced.
D.C. debut

In 1965, Mr. Barry arrived in Washington to direct activities for the SNCC. This came at a critical juncture in D.C. race relations.

Nationally, the civil rights movement was heating up. There had been riots in the black enclaves of several urban centers, and more were to come. In Washington, the post-World War II flight of whites to the suburbs had given the city a population that was majority African American. But the local government was dominated by whites and subject to the oversight of white-dominated congressional committees. There was no home rule.

The stage was set for Mr. Barry’s D.C. political debut. Clad in a dashiki shirt and speaking in inflammatory rhetoric, he established himself as a visible presence with a forceful voice that could not easily be ignored.

In January 1966, he led a one-day bus “mancott” to protest a fare increase requested by D.C. Transit. He organized a “Free D.C. Movement” to press for home rule. He called the D.C. Police “an occupation army.” In 1969, he tore up a parking ticket, struck the officer who had placed it on his windshield and was charged with assault. The case ended with a hung jury.

Rep. John L. McMillan (D-S.C.), the chairman of the House Committee on the District of Columbia and one of the most influential men in Washington, was among the targets of his rhetoric. “The citizens of the District of Columbia,” Mr. Barry declared, “are tired of living on the McMillan plantation.”

In the winter of 1967, Mr. Barry resigned as director of SNCC’s Washington office, declaring, “Now we must concentrate on control — economic and political power.”

With financial support from the Department of Labor, he organized and directed an organization known as Pride, which put more than 1,000 inner-city youths to work clearing alleys of trash and debris, killing rats — and later running gas stations and a landscaping business and managing an apartment building.

In 1971, Mr. Barry won his first election for citywide office, defeating School Board chair Anita F. Allen for an at-large seat on the board.

From 1972 until 1974, Mr. Barry was the school board’s chairman. In 1974, he was elected to an at-large seat on the D.C. Council, receiving more votes than any of the four other at-large council members. At that point, he resigned as director of Pride Inc. to become a full-time politician.

He turned over the management of Pride to his second wife, Mary Treadwell, a Pride colleague whom he met at Fisk. They would later divorce. Treadwell was convicted of conspiracy to defraud in connection with the theft of federal money from an apartment building managed by Pride, and she received a three-year jail sentence. Mr. Barry was not implicated in that case.
A change in the man

On the D.C. Council in 1975, he was instrumental in defeating a 1 percent gross-receipts tax on all city businesses, winning the gratitude of the business community. He helped get a pay raise for the police department. He was among the early supporters of equal rights for gays and lesbians. Voters in these constituancies supported Barry at the polls. When he ran for a second term in 1976, he was overwhelmingly reelected with 78 percent of the vote.

Two years later, he ran for mayor.

But this was a different Marion Barry from the militant, confrontational street activist of the 1960s. Gone were the dashiki and the threatening scowl. The Barry of 1978 wore business suits and smiled pleasantly, bending his powerful frame forward ever so slightly to hear the complaints and observations of the little old ladies whose votes he sought.

“I’m a situationist,” he said at the time. “I do what is necessary for the situation. If I walked around in a dashiki now, people would say I’m crazy.” This was a tactic he’d learned years earlier as a civil rights worker with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: It had been an SNCC principle that in the country, you dressed like country folks, and in the city, you dressed like city folks. That way, you could fit in.

In his first mayoral candidacy, Mr. Barry won the backing of Washington’s police, firefighters’ and teachers’ unions, and his cultivation of various interest groups across the city paid dividends at the polls. He also won an endorsement from the editorial board of The Washington Post.

In this first campaign, he ran as an outsider, inveighing against a city bureaucracy that he repeatedly described as “bumbling and bungling.” He outlined a “hit list” of department heads — many of them black — whom he said he would fire, and he lambasted real estate speculation, which he said was displacing elderly blacks from their homes.

“What Mr. Barry seems to value, and to be offering . . . is precisely what we think the people of this city need and ought to be looking for . . . energy, nerve, initiative, toughness of mind, and active concern for people in distress,” The Post said in an editorial.

With about 35 percent of the vote and a margin of less than 2,000, Mr. Barry won the Democratic primary that September. Not because of his appeal in the low-income black community, but because he carried the white wards of the city while his two chief opponents — former mayor Walter E. Washington and Tucker, the former council chairman — split the black vote. It was only after taking office that Mr. Barry consolidated a black base of support, not just among the poor and downtrodden but within the middle-class black and business community.

In November’s general election, he had no trouble defeating Arthur A. Fletcher, a Republican who had been an assistant secretary of labor in the Nixon administration and a deputy assistant for urban affairs in the Ford administration.

As the new mayor of the nation’s capital, Mr. Barry made it one of his first acts to buy new clothes. Now he had a new image to fit.

Friends took him on shopping trips for the power suits and the red ties he usually wore. During his first term in office, he once stopped at a neighborhood Popeyes for a box of fried chicken, and he carried the box back with him into his office at the District building. “Mr. Mayor,” an aide protested, “you can’t be walking around with a chicken box in your hand.” The mayor assigned a security officer the task of toting the mayoral chicken.
City problems fester

Early in Mr. Barry’s first term, stringent controls were imposed on city spending and a bloated payroll was trimmed by 10 percent, largely through attrition. The city’s financial records were sufficiently organized to permit the first successful audit in history. There was a downtown office-construction boom, and the mayor took pride in helping developers cut through red tape to obtain building permits. Hand-in-hand with the cutting of red tape was an emphasis on the inclusion of minority contractors in works and projects sanctioned or supported by the city government.

But beneath this veneer, serious problems continued to fester. Crime and unemployment increased. There was only minimal improvement in the efficiency of city agencies.The infant mortality rate remained high, and abandoned homes remained boarded up in blighted neighborhoods throughout the city. Mini-scandals seemed to occur with disturbing frequency, and there was increasing talk of the mayor’s personal indiscretions.

Facing another election in 1982, Mr. Barry abandoned the fiscal restraint of his first years in office for $180 million in new spending for jobs, housing and programs for the elderly. He faced a seemingly tough opponent in the Democratic primary, Patricia Roberts Harris, who had served in the cabinet of President Jimmy Carter as secretary of housing and urban development and secretary of health, education and welfare.

But Marion Barry the progressive reformer of 1978 had become Marion Barry the power broker by 1982. He had tightened his political hold on the city, raised more than $1 million and put together a solid campaign organization. He was engaging on the stump, and he had a winning way with voters. He beat Harris with 59 percent of the vote.

At a party in 1985, Mr. Barry met an unemployed model named Hazel Diane “Rasheeda” Moore in what would become one of the more fateful encounters of his career. Moore would later testify that she had a two-year love affair with the mayor, who by then was married to the former Effi Slaughter Cowell, his third wife.

Moore subsequently received $180,000 in city funds over the next three years to run an “image consciousness” program for city youths — at the same time she was meeting Mr. Barry for exotic trysts that she said often included drugs.

Whatever difficulties attended Mr. Barry’s second term, their effect at the polls was negligible when he ran for a third term in the fall of 1986. In the Democratic primary, he crushed former school board member Mattie Taylor, winning 71 percent of the vote. Carol Schwartz, a Republican on the D.C. Council, ran against him in the November general election. Mr. Barry captured 61 percent of the vote to her 31 percent.
The sting

Mr. Barry had said in August 1989 that he’d made an “irrevocable decision” to run for a fourth term as mayor. On Jan. 18, 1990, the mayor received a telephone call from Moore. She was staying at the Vista International Hotel on Thomas Circle in Northwest Washington, and she invited Mr. Barry to her room. He accepted.

Captured on FBI videotape, the scene at the Vista would later be played on television newscasts around the world: the mayor reaching out to fondle Moore’s breast and leg, asking about drugs and taking two long drags on a crack pipe, the storming of the room by FBI agents, the mayor placed against the wall with his arms outstretched, handcuffed, being read his rights.

“Bitch set me up. . . . I shouldn’t have come up here,” the mayor repeated.

Three days later, instead of a planned declaration of his candidacy for a fourth term, Mr. Barry, tearful and contrite, announced that he had “weaknesses” for which he would seek help. “I’m going to find a way to begin to heal my body, mind and soul. . . . I realize I’m going to have to walk this journey by myself. . . . I have come face to face with my deepest human frailties. I’ve had to look my human weaknesses straight in the eye . . .”

A few days later, Mr. Barry left town for a seven-week rehabilitation program in Florida and later in South Carolina.

Early in June, he went on trial in federal court on perjury and drug-possession charges. While the jury was still being selected, he announced that he would not seek reelection. (In January of 1991, Sharon Pratt Dixon would succeed him as mayor. )

After a two-month trial and eight days of jury deliberations, Mr. Barry was convicted on Aug. 10 of one count of cocaine possession — at the Mayflower Hotel in early November 1989. This was based on the testimony of an Alabama businesswoman who testified that she had used cocaine with Barry there.

But the jury was unable to agree on the charge stemming from the FBI sting at the Vista, where Mr. Barry had been videotaped smoking crack and arrested on Jan. 18, 1990. He was acquitted on a second count of cocaine possession. On the remaining charges, including three felony counts of perjury before a federal grand jury, the jury was also unable to reach a verdict.

This was a major victory for the mayor. Acquittal on the felony count appeared to remove a potential legal barrier to the possibility of his holding public office in the future.

Within 30 minutes of the verdicts’ announcement, his supporters were driving past the federal courthouse on Constitution Avenue in Northwest, honking their horns and shouting in celebration.

On Oct. 26, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who had presided over his trial, declared that Mr. Barry had “given aid, comfort and encouragement to the drug culture.” The judge sentenced him to six months in prison and a year on probation, and he fined him $5,000.

Coming in third

At the time, Mr. Barry was running as an independent for an at-large seat on the council, having announced his candidacy five days after his trial ended. But less than two weeks after his sentencing, he suffered the first defeat of his 20-year political career, finishing third with just 20 percent of the vote.

It would be another year before he began his prison sentence. In October 1991, his appeals exhausted, Mr. Barry reported to a minimum-security federal prison in Petersburg, Va., to begin serving his six-month sentence.

Even while incarcerated, he made news. Late in December, an inmate reported having seen a female visitor perform oral sex on the former mayor in the prison’s family reception room. Mr. Barry denied it, but prison authorities ruled that he had engaged in sexual misconduct with a visitor and moved him to a medium-security prison in Loretto, Pa.

When he was released in April 1992, he returned to Washington like a hero, riding home in a limousine followed by six buses packed with praying, celebrating supporters.

Back home, he hit the ground running, seeking the Ward 8 council seat — in far Southeast Washington, the poorest, most isolated ward in the city and the only one he had carried in his failed 1990 bid for an at-large council seat.

By a margin of 3 to 1, he crushed the incumbent, former political ally Wilhelmina Rolark, in the Democratic primary, then won handily in the November general election.
Rebounding

In May 1994, he announced his candidacy for a fourth term as mayor. “I’m in recovery,” he said, “and so is my city.”

For the critical Democratic primary, he faced veteran council member John Ray and the incumbent mayor, who by then had married and was known as Sharon Pratt Kelly. Neither was a match for the charismatic Mr. Barry, who was campaigning night and day, preaching a message that the “God-force” within had taken control of his life and helped him clean up his act.

His 12-year marriage to Effi Barry having ended in divorce, Mr. Barry had married Cora Masters, a political science professor at the University of the District of Columbia, early in 1994. She was communications director for his campaign.

On the day of the primary, Mr. Barry won easily, taking 47 percent of the vote to John Ray’s 37 percent and Kelly’s 13 percent.

Two months later, he beat Republican council member Carol Schwartz in a rematch of the 1986 general election, with 56 percent of the vote to 42 percent for Schwartz.

In January 1995, 16 years after he first took the oath of office as mayor of the District, Mr. Barry was sworn in for his fourth term. This was a smaller, poorer city than the one he led in 1979. The District was beset with such problems as an AIDS epidemic and crack cocaine that were unknown when he began his first term. Courts had already taken over the city’s prisons and foster-care programs, and a takeover of public housing was underway. City finances were in disarray, and judges had threatened contempt citations to force payment of its bills.

Beaming as he took the oath of office, Mr. Barry proclaimed the “dawn of a new day” for the District of Columbia, and he said he was beginning a “second chance” as the city’s mayor. Maya Angelou read a poem affirming that “strong men . . . get stronger.”

Control of D.C. shifts

Three months after his return to power, Mr. Barry unveiled his “miracle budget,” which essentially relied on Congress to provide hundreds of millions of dollars to bail the city out. On Capitol Hill, it sank like cement. A month later, Congress created the D.C. financial control board and gave it total control over the city’s spending.

For the rest of Mr. Barry’s term, he would feud with the control board and its chief financial officer, Anthony A. Williams, who in 1999 would succeed him as mayor. In July of 1997, Congress enacted a reform package for the city that stripped Mr. Barry of almost all of his remaining power, handing over day-to-day control of nine major operating departments to the control board.

The mayor called it “a rape of democracy” and a “bloodless coup,” proclaiming that it wasn’t just about Marion Barry. Republicans, having seized control of Congress in 1994, had been looking for an excuse to curtail home rule in the nation’s capital, he said.

But it was common knowledge on Capitol Hill that Mr. Barry was, in fact, the primary player in the contretemps and that a restoration of home rule for the District was unlikely as long as he was mayor. Mr. Barry admitted as much in May of 1998, when he announced that he would not seek a fifth term. As his successor in the mayor’s office, Anthony Williams would regain almost all the powers that had been taken from Mr. Barry.

Reviewing his years as mayor, Mr. Barry said he was especially proud of the construction of 23 million square feet of office and retail space in the new downtown, a smattering of new housing and what then was known as the MCI Center. His years as mayor also had seen a dispersal of D.C. government offices across the city — to locations along the 1968 riot corridors of 14th Street NW, H Street NE and Martin Luther King Avenue SE. On 14th and on H streets, this helped spark revitalization of once-blighted neighborhoods.

Spotlight never faded

On Jan. 2, 1999, Mr. Barry left the mayor’s office for the final time. On the dais at his successor’s inauguration at the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center, he embraced Williams and formally relinquished leadership of the city to him. Then he left the ceremony as a private citizen.

Never again would he hold the power and influence he once commanded, when he was at the top of his game. But he remained a celebrity. He would still be greeted with standing ovations at certain clubs and nightspots in the city. Well-wishers, seeing him on the streets, would rush to shake his hand.

He remained prominent and frequently in the media. He was elected twice more to the council, each time as the representative from Ward 8.

His fourth wife, Cora Masters Barry, left him, and his third wife, Effi Barry, died in 2007. Marion Christopher Barry, his son with Effi Barry and his only immediate survivor, pleaded guilty to drug possession in 2011 and received a suspended jail sentence. Effi Barry’s mother, Polly Harris, was quoted in The Washington Post as saying that the former mayor was responsible for Christopher Barry’s drug use.

“All of my grandson’s problems are laid right at the feet of his so-called father, Marion Barry,” she said. “He was never a father. He was never at home.” Mr. Barry called his mother-in-law’s comment “totally unfounded.”

At times, he spoke openly about his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction. In a court-ordered screening in 2005, the former mayor tested positive for cocaine and marijuana use. These were not his only personal issues: He was placed on probation for failing to file D.C. and federal income taxes.

He had myriad health problems — high blood pressure, diabetes, prostate cancer, and he underwent a kidney transplant. There was a $35,000 judgment against him stemming from a lawsuit filed by a custodian at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, who said that Mr. Barry shoved her and exposed himself to her in an airport restroom in 2000.

In 2010, Mr. Barry was censured by the council, stripped of his chairmanship of the council’s Committee on Housing and Workforce Development and removed from the Finance and Revenue Committee. That vote stemmed from a $15,000 “personal service” contract that Mr. Barry, in his capacity as a council member, had awarded to Donna Watts-Brighthaupt, an on-again, off-again girlfriend to whom he had lent money. She repaid him with money from that contract.

In an interview with Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy shortly after his colleagues voted to censure him, Mr. Barry declared he was “feeling great. . . . I’ve been through worse. . . . The reason I survive is because I have an abiding faith in God.

“Having faith doesn’t mean you don’t have to use good sense. God doesn’t expect you to act like a fool. But God did give us a secular side and a human side. There is a constant fight between the Devil, which is the flesh, and the spirit, which is God. It’s a total, all-out war.”

MYLES MONROE & His Wife RUTH Are Dead But Their Work For God Won't Stop

MYLES MUNROE & HIS WIFE RUTH ARE DEAD

R.I.P. Dr Myles Munroe and his Wife Ruth, who died Sunday afternoon in a Plane Crash.

The plane went down while trying to land at an Airport in the Bahamas.

The Devil is Defeated and he is a LIAR!

Dr MYLES MUNROE and RUTH are now in Heaven with JESUS CHRIST.

However the Work they started on Planet Earth for the Kingdom of GOD will Continue no matter what!

The Lord knows what really happened and He will handle it!

NO FEAR

ONLY GOD IS IN CONTROL, NOT MAN

NORTH CAROLINA'S DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS FAILING BUT WHY?? DON'T BLAME THE GOP

WHY IS NORTH CAROLINA'S DEMOCRATIC PARTY FAILING?

RACISM, KKK...... SO MANY REASONS BUT THE GOP ISN'T ONE.

After KAY HAGAN was Defeated last Tuesday by her GOP Opponent THOM TILLIS, it's no surprise to hear NORTH CAROLINA'S Democratic Party Leaders blaming GOP Leaders for her loss.

Both HAGAN and TILLIS Spent more than $100 Million in a hotly debated U.S. Senate race, yet NC Democratic Party Leaders only seem to be focused on money that flowed from GOP Donors.

However the TRUTH is that NORTH CAROLINA'S Democratic Party has been in Trouble for quite some time.

Long before Nov 2010 when the GOP regained Control.

In fact were it Not for BARACK OBAMA'S Voter Tsunami in 2008, neither KAY HAGAN, nor former NC Gov BEV PERDUE would have Won, because both HAGAN and PERDUE rode OBAMA'S coattails in 2008.

So let's just briefly address some Major issues within NORTH CAROLINA'S Democratic Party:

1) All WHITE Leadership at the top but mostly BLACK Voters statewide.

2) KLU KLUX KLAN Power remains at the helms of both the NORTH CAROLINA Democratic and Republican Party.

3) Regardless of which Political Party is in Power,
BLACK Voters in NORTH CAROLINA are still Disenfranchised as it relates to Education, Unfair Taxation, lack of Small Business Opportunities, Mass Transportation, Unemployment, Criminal Justice.

Why??

4) In NORTH CAROLINA the Democratic Party wants BLACK Voters to Support Democrats, while being SILENT about everything that is keeping BLACK Voters in this State from reaching Upward Mobility.

It seems the only time Democratic Party Leaders allow BLACK Voters to "Speak Out" is when it's time for another ELECTION.

5) Each time a BLACK Citizen in NORTH CAROLINA dares to step up for Statewide Leadership positions, they are knocked back down to earth by WHITE Democratic Party Leadership or Hammered by the NORTH CAROLINA Media Until those BLACK Citizens give up any Hope of ever achieving Statewide Democratic Party Leadership in NORTH CAROLINA.

I could go on and on with more reasons as to why the NORTH CAROLINA Democratic Party is FAILING and is rapidly on its way to becoming Politically Extinct.

But...........

The GOP isn't one of those reasons.

I'm just saying.

Mayor Bloomberg Launches Program To Help Minority Males Succeed; Donates $30M

Bloomberg to Use Own Funds in Plan to Aid Minority Youth

The administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in a blunt acknowledgment that thousands of young black and Latino men are cut off from New York’s civic, educational and economic life, plans to spend nearly $130 million on far-reaching measures to improve their circumstances.

The program, the most ambitious policy push of Mr. Bloomberg’s third term, would overhaul how the government interacts with a population of about 315,000 New Yorkers who are disproportionately undereducated, incarcerated and unemployed.

To pay for the endeavor in a time of fiscal austerity, the city is relying on an unusual source: Mr. Bloomberg himself, who intends to use his personal fortune to cover about a quarter of the cost, city officials said. A $30 million contribution from Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation would be matched by that of a fellow billionaire, George Soros, a hedge fund manager, with the remainder being paid for by the city.

Starting this fall, the administration said it would place job-recruitment centers in public-housing complexes where many young black and Latino men live, retrain probation officers in an effort to reduce recidivism, establish new fatherhood classes and assess schools on the academic progress of male black and Latino students.

Mr. Bloomberg plans to announce the three-year program in a speech on Thursday morning in Manhattan, in which he will declare that “blacks and Latinos are not fully sharing in the promise of American freedom.”

Even as crime has fallen and graduation rates have risen in New York over the past decade, city officials said that black and Latino men, especially those between ages 16 and 24, remained in crisis by nearly every measure, including rates of arrest, school suspension and poverty.

Although the populations of young white, black and Latino men in New York are roughly the same size, 84 percent of those in the city’s detention facilities and nearly all of those admitted to children’s and family services facilities are black and Latino youth, according to data from the Bloomberg administration. “The magnitude of the disparities is stunning,” said Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services. “It’s tragic.”

Mr. Bloomberg has put the weight of city government behind large-scale social change before, with public-health campaigns against smoking, sugary beverages and fatty foods.

But now, he is confronting a problem whose intractability and deep-seated causes have bedeviled policy makers for decades. And by focusing so heavily on a subset of city residents, he risks angering those unlikely to be helped by the new resources.

“The success rate, in general, is not that promising,” said Elijah Anderson, a professor of sociology at Yale, who has written extensively about urban issues.

The challenge, Professor Anderson said, will be persuading New York’s businesses to embrace these young men and offer them permanent employment after the city’s work is completed. “Companies have to be much more receptive to these young people and meet people like Bloomberg halfway,” he said.

The administration’s plan, developed after a year of study and debate, spans much of the city’s bureaucracy and multiple stages in the lives of the men it is trying to reach, beginning in middle school and ending with career counseling.

In interviews, aides to the mayor said the new measures emphasized the practical needs of the city’s most impoverished black and Latino men, many of whom are unable or unwilling to enroll in time-consuming education and training programs unless they are compensated, according to the officials.

So to promote remedial math and literacy classes in the morning, for example, the city would link them with paid internships in the afternoon. The internships would pay $7.25 an hour, but students would be paid only if they participated in the class.

“Working is a big motivator for these kids,” said Kristin Morse, the director of programs and evaluation at the city’s Center for Economic Opportunity.

For the first time, the Education Department would specifically tie the success of black and Latino boys — measured in part by test scores and graduation rates — to the grades the city gives schools each year. Those grades can determine whether a school remains open.

Much of the program is intended to prevent young men from entering or returning to the criminal justice system, which has long been a revolving door for many black and Latino youth.

Under the plan, the city’s Probation Department would open five satellite probation offices in neighborhoods with the highest crime rates — like East New York, Brooklyn; Jamaica, Queens; and the South Bronx — and inside community organizations that offer services from which the young men might benefit, like computer classes to help them prepare for a job or yoga classes to help them control anger. Currently, the city’s 524 probation officers work out of central offices in the five boroughs, often disconnected from the communities where the men whom they monitor spend most of their time.

To provide role models for the men on probation, the city said it would recruit from those neighborhoods 900 paid mentors, many of whom used to be troubled themselves, and promote a range of community service programs, like cleaning parks, removing graffiti and painting community centers, said Vincent N. Schiraldi, the city’s probation commissioner. He said the goal was to help New Yorkers see these young men “not as the scary guy in a North Face jacket hanging at the corner, but as men who can have a positive impact in their neighborhoods.”

Aides to the mayor described several of the measures as common-sense solutions that would cost little, if anything, to put in place. The city will try to reduce the barriers to employment for men with criminal convictions by instructing managers not to ask job applicants about those records in the first stage of the interview process.

The city would also encourage men to obtain driver’s licenses or state identification cards, after focus groups suggested that a large number of young black and Latino men did not have them, making it difficult for them to apply for jobs. “They didn’t know why they should have it or how to get it,” said Andrea Batista Schlesinger, a special adviser to the mayor, who organized the program.

Now the city plans to promote such identification in the paperwork given to high-school graduates and during interviews for summer jobs with city agencies.

Mr. Bloomberg urged his aides to study the experiences of black and Latino men in 2010. The aides said he was especially surprised and unsettled by statistics showing how frequently many of the men returned to the city’s prisons — an issue that became personal for the mayor after a stranger pulled him aside on the subway and told him his story: he was 45, black, a convict and unemployed. Mr. Bloomberg asked Dennis M. Walcott, now the schools chancellor, to check in periodically with the man, who was later arrested again.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Bloomberg called Mr. Soros, who has spent millions of dollars on programs to help black men in Baltimore and other cities, and invited him to lunch. The mayor asked the financier to match his donation for a program in New York, and Mr. Soros quickly agreed.

“When the mayor approached us,” Mr. Soros said, “he was knocking on an open door.”


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