HILLARY TO ADDRESS CHARLOTTE PROTESTERS (LAMONT SCOTT VIDEO)

HILLARY TO VISIT CHARLOTTE; CALLS FOR RELEASE OF LAMONT'S DEATH VIDEO:

PRAY FOR LAMONT SCOTT'S FAMILY.

PRAY FOR OUR LEADERS AND THE POLICE.

PRAY FOR HEALING AND PEACE.

Sources: Charlotte Observer, Fox News, YouTube

**** Hillary to visit Charlotte, urges release of police video

Hillary Clinton said Friday that the police video of the fatal shooting of a black man by Charlotte police should be released immediately as she prepared to make a pre-debate visit to the embattled North Carolina city.

Clinton wrote on Twitter that authorities in Charlotte should release the police video of the Keith Lamont Scott shooting "without delay. We must ensure justice & work to bridge divides."

The Democratic presidential nominee's campaign said she would travel to Charlotte on Sunday, one day before her first high-profile debate with Republican Donald Trump. Her campaign did not immediately release details of her visit to Charlotte, where protests have broken out in the aftermath of the shooting.

A video recorded by Scott's wife was released Friday by his family and does not indicate whether Scott had a gun. Police have said he was armed, but witnesses have said he held only a book.

leading up to the debate, both Clinton and Trump have been confronted with questions about police violence after the North Carolina shooting and a separate incident in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a white police officer was charged with manslaughter in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man whose vehicle had broken down in the middle of the street.

Clinton said Wednesday that the shootings had added two more names "to a long list of African-Americans killed by police officers. It's unbearable and it needs to become intolerable."

MUHAMMAD ALI'S LEGACY; PROUD POWERFUL BLACK MAN ("VIET CONG")

MUHAMMAD ALI'S LEGACY; PROUD POWERFUL BLACK MAN:

"NO VIET CONG EVER CALLED ME NIGGER".

ALI LEFT SOME BIG SHOES TO FILL.

WHERE ARE THE PROUD POWERFUL BLACK MEN OF TODAY?

Sources: ESPN, NY Times, Youtube

Muhammad Ali formerly known as Cassius Marcellus Clay, was born in January 1942, and died in June 2016 at the age of 74.

Ali converted to the ISLAMIC faith in 1964 and remained a devout Muslim until his death.

Ali was married four times and fathered nine children who loved and respected their Father very much.

Ali was an intelligent professional Boxer who lost and won back his title three times.

After developing a personal friendship with the late Sportscaster Howard Cosell, Ali became an international figure.

Throughout his life Muhammad Ali stood strong by his Convictions, including his refusal to fight in the Vietnam war after publicly declaring "No Viet Cong ever called me Nigger".

Although I don't agree with all of Muhammad Ali's personal life and religious decisions, I will forever respect Ali for being a Proud Powerful BLACK Man, who never sold out his people for Money nor Fame.

Muhammad Ali most certainly deserves to REST IN PEACE.

I send my prayers and condolences to the surviving family of Muhammad Ali.

***** Ali's legacy outlives him, but must be considered in 

THERE IS, EVEN in the sadness of his death, little reason to think about Muhammad Ali in the gauzy past tense, to remember him through the lens of pre-color-film footage, except to beam at those hands, marvel at the foot speed, linger on the unblemished supremacy of his youth with all its beauty and foreshadowing.

Otherwise, we need only rise each morning to see him, for Ali feels very much present today as he was during his time. Too many contemporary parallels exist to look backward.

Like Martin Luther King Jr., Ali was once one of the most hated men in America, and like MLK, he would decades later be co-opted by many of the very people who hated him (though a young Ali would be as despised today as he was in the 1960s).

It is the lonely walk of the original, of the dissenter, and it knows no era. He was hated by white America for his unsparing criticism of its obvious, enduring racism, a conversation no more welcome today than it was in 1963. He was hated by blacks and whites alike for challenging the military, for questioning the necessity, morality and inherent racism of war, and in response the American government used its full weight to try to destroy him. He was hated for challenging Christianity as a Muslim in America, yet in death he is mourned as if yesterday's struggle has been long resolved and defiance is no longer necessary.

When recast, Ali is so often dipped in the notion that he "transcended" race, which is pure and unadulterated nonsense. There was nothing for Ali to transcend racially. To him, blackness was no obstacle but central to his identity. His loyalty to being black made him both reviled by whites and luminescent to the black people desperate for his presence, for the African-American admission fee to acceptance and fame has always been the erasure of their color, to abandon it lest they be seen as threatening or difficult, angry or ungrateful. The white ticket buyers and image makers must be comfortable, and the black price for their comfort is reducing the core of oneself or risking the inevitable brand-threatening mainstream rage, or worse: being accused of playing the dreaded "race card," as if humiliation were a game easily turned into advantage with the right strategy. Creating distance from race is the key to mainstream black advancement; the pathway to future acceptance is unattainable without that surrender. Ali rejected this fantasy. He did not transcend race. He took his blackness with him.

Said Ali: "Money means nothing to me nor boxing when it comes to the freedom of your people. So everything I'm doing, if it means hitchhike tomorrow, if it means being raggedy, if it means look for a job, I'll be happy because I can go to bed, my conscience is clear and I didn't sell out or trade my people just because I could be rich in Hollywood."

So much of him lives today, including his darkest side. His worst moments were in his racial cruelty toward rival Joe Frazier. He was quicker mentally, better with words than Frazier, and whether for promotion or mental advantage, he used his better looks and lighter skin to exploit the racial stereotypes that saddle black men everywhere. He knew the implications of calling another black man a "gorilla," and he did it anyway.

What Ali did transcend was the conventions of modern celebrity by remaining a human. He could love the black and the brown around the world and, through the force of his humanity, bend the historical resistance to him over the final 40 years of his life. He could be rich and still be one of the poor. He knew the price for his beliefs, the price of not abandoning his people for fame or money, and was still willing to pay it in full.

Most of America will remember him safely, by separating Ali from its current self, allowing it to be magnanimous and him to be unthreatening. It will admire his religious conviction without recognizing our collective hostility toward Muslims. It will honor his courage, yet discourage us from questioning, as he did, the wars we fight, the government that spies on us or the fact that we forget our poor. It will celebrate his defiance while defiance is precisely what our increasingly intolerant culture is going out of its way to crush.

There is no reason to look backward, for Ali lives presently in the air we breathe. What is past is prologue.

BEN CARSON CONCEDES 2016 GOP RACE (OBAMACARE vs SLAVERY)

BEN CARSON CONCEDES 2016 GOP RACE: (OBAMACARE vs SLAVERY)

TRUMP HIGHLY RESPECTS DR CARSON'S INTELLECT.

POLITICS IS A BLOOD SPORT ONLY FOR THE RUTHLESS.

TRUMP IS HUMAN YET RUTHLESS ENOUGH TO WIN.

Sources: CNN, NY Times, Youtube

**** Ben Carson, Seeing No ‘Path Forward,’ Signals End to Bid

Ben Carson, the only Republican to have once threatened the lead of Donald J. Trump in national polls, said on Wednesday he saw no path forward and would skip a debate on Thursday in his hometown of Detroit, signaling an end to his candidacy after paltry performances in the nominating contests.

Stopping short of suspending his campaign, Mr. Carson said he would provide more details in a speech on Friday, but after his dismal showing in the Super Tuesday states, his campaign is effectively over.

A retired pediatric brain surgeon of world renown, Mr. Carson long held Republicans’ favor with an uplifting biography and a quiet manner that belied his strafing critiques of President Obama and liberalism, which delighted grass-roots conservatives.

In the end, Mr. Carson withered under mocking insults hurled at him by Mr. Trump, especially in Iowa, and he suffered from voters’ desire for a candidate projecting strength at a time of anxiety over terrorism.

“Dr. Carson’s favorability ratings have never changed,” Armstrong Williams, a close adviser, said just before the Iowa caucuses last month, when Mr. Carson finished a disappointing fourth. “But after Paris and San Bernardino, his supporters made a different decision.

They wanted a war president. Dr. Carson did not have the rhetoric or the competitiveness on the debate stage to say the explosive things, to say, ‘Let’s keep all the Muslims out.”’

Even in a year of fierce anti-establishment leanings, Mr. Carson’s months-long popularity, coupled with the prodigious support of small donors — his $20 million collected last summer led all other candidates – stunned political professionals.

Born into poverty and raised by a single mother with a third-grade education, Mr. Carson remade himself from a wayward teenager into a scholar, winning admission to Yale and medical school. 

By 33, he was the chief of a major department at Johns Hopkins Hospital. 

He burst on the political scene in 2013 when he criticized President Obama’s health care plan at the National Prayer Breakfast, a video watched over and over by delighted conservatives.

After his disappointing showing in the Iowa caucuses, Mr. Carson never seemed to regain his political footing. 

In the round of Super Tuesday contests Tuesday, his hopes for a strong performance in the South faltered, as he ran a distant fourth or fifth in every state.

“I do not see a political path forward in light of last evening’s Super Tuesday primary results,” Mr. Carson said in a statement. “However, this grassroots movement on behalf of ‘We the People’ will continue.”

“I appreciate the support, financial and otherwise, from all corners of America,” Mr. Carson said. “Gratefully, my campaign decisions are not constrained by finances; rather by what is in the best interests of the American people.”

BRANDON MCKEAN'S HANDS vs MICHIGAN POLICE (APARTHEID; STOP AND FRISK) )

Ladies and Gentlemen, it's the year 2014 but in the UNITED STATES Of America BLACK Men can't even walk down the street with their hands in pockets without being suspected of being a CRIMINAL.

Can you say "APARTHEID"??

Can you say "BLACK Men have become strangers in the UNITED STATES....Land of the FREE"??

Can you say "the U.S. Federal Gov't and CONGRESS are at Fault"??


Article Sources: AOL; Huffington Post; Youtube


ARTICLE: "Sheriff Defends Stopping Black Man For Walking With Hands In His Pockets"


A black Michigan man who was stopped by a sheriff's deputy after walking with his hands in his pockets said he believes he was the victim of racial discrimination.

The local sheriff says the deputy acted appropriately, and that the video of the incident doesn't show the full story.

Brandon McKean, 25, told The Huffington Post he was in the middle of walking a mile from a friend's house in Pontiac, Michigan to his own home to eat dinner around 4:30 p.m. on Thursday. The temperature had hovered around freezing that day, and he had his hands in his pockets.

McKean had been walking for just a few minutes, he said, when an Oakland County sheriff's deputy drove up, got out of the car and questioned him. McKean began filming with his phone.

"You were walking by … well you were making people nervous," the deputy says in the video McKean recorded, above. "They said you had your hands in your pockets."

"Wow, walking by having your hands in your pockets makes people nervous to call the police, when it's snowing outside?" McKean responds.

"They did," the deputy says. "I'm just checking on you."

McKean posted the video on Facebook, intending to show a few friends what he considered an absurd and unjustified stop by police. But it quickly went viral, with many outraged commenters sharing the post.

By Tuesday, the video had been seen more than 3 million times, according to Facebook's stats, and had circulated widely, from Gawker to "The Colbert Report."

Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard forcefully objected to the version of the incident that comes across when McKean's clip is viewed on its own, saying it doesn't clarify the reason for the stop and leaves out context.

McKean's video cuts off before the end of their conversation, when the deputy further explains why he stopped McKean and the importance of following up on any 911 call.

The video "was posted with an agenda," Bouchard told HuffPost.

The sheriff said that before McKean was questioned, a business owner called 911, audibly frightened, about a man who had walked by the shop six or seven times looking in the windows with his hands in his pockets. The caller believed the man was casing the business and that a robbery could be imminent. The business and its employees had reportedly already been robbed seven times.

Bouchard would not name the deputies who were dispatched nor the business, but said they had determined the person the 911 caller described was McKean, "without question." After the furor over the video, the sheriff's office posted their own video, which the deputy had also recorded with a phone.

"It boils down to this, if someone calls 911, do you want the police to come or not?" Bouchard said. "A police officer responded, made a quick ascertainment of the situation and determined that nothing else was needed, didn't pat down an individual, never detained an individual, called off secondary units and left. I think that was a very restrained, very professional approach."

McKean told The Huffington Post that the suspicious person spotted by the business owner definitely wasn't him and that he had not walked the stretch that many times.

The encounter occurred at a time when racial bias in policing has become a national conversation in part because of the death of Mike Brown, a black 18-year-old who was killed by then-police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri this summer. A grand jury's decision not to indict Wilson was announced just a few days before McKean's brush with police, and McKean said Brown's death was just one of the many situations, including several others he experienced in the past, that prompt him to record encounters with law enforcement for his own safety.

Bouchard said controversial instances of policing around the country, like Ferguson, become teachable moments for his staff, and deputies' continual training includes cultural sensitivity. When his people do wrong, the sheriff said, he wants to hear from the community and hold officers accountable. But he argued McKean's stop is not one of those cases.

"Given the sensitivity and the anxiety for a lot of people around this country, it's not helpful to the dialogue and certainly not helpful to keep the community the safe," Bouchard said.

McKean was less positive about how police handled the incident in Pontiac, despite telling the deputy he was glad officers were around to patrol. He told The Huffington Post he'd been stopped "for absolutely no reason" three or four times in the last five years.

"The crazy thing is, I know somebody who got their house broken into and they called the police, and the police took about two hours to come," he said. "And they came and pulled up on me in under five minutes for walking with my hands in [my] pockets, and that doesn't make sense."