Matthew Connor

The Food and Drug Administration announced on Tuesday that it will modify a rule that currently bars any man who has ever had sex with another man from donating blood. But while the agency’s new guidelines may be good news for bisexuals and celibate gay men who want to donate, it’s a far cry from a significant change in policy.

Under the revised guidelines, men who have not had sexual contact with another man within a year will be allowed to donate. “[T]aking into account the recommendations of advisory committees to the U.S.Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the FDA, the agency will take the necessary steps to recommend a change to the blood donor deferral period for men who have sex with men from indefinite deferral to one year since the last sexual contact,” the FDA said in a press release. Men who are currently sexually active with other men, however, will still not be permitted to donate.

The current regulations on donating blood, put in place in 1983, stem from the era of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and subsequent panic. But virtually no one has gotten HIV due to a transfusion; just one in 2 million people has contracted the disease that way. Because of these low statistics — combined with the fact that all donated blood is tested for HIV/AIDS — the American Medical Association came out in favor of ending the ban on gay men’s donations in June of 2013.

“The lifetime ban on blood donation for men who have sex with men is discriminatory and not based on sound science,” Dr. William Kobler, a board member for the AMA, said at the time of the organization’s change in policy stance. “This new policy urges a federal policy change to ensure blood donation bans or deferrals are applied to donors according to their individual level of risk and are not based on sexual orientation alone.”

Democratic members of Congress have similarly spoken out against the ban.

The FDA’s newly-announced regulations put all men who have sex with men into the same category as a very particular slice of straight donors; currently, straight men who have had sex with a woman with HIV can donate, as long as it was not in the last year. A request for comment from an FDA spokesperson on why there is still a distinction had been not returned at press time.

The change in policy could increase blood supply in the U.S. each year by as much as 4 percent, according to the New York Times.

The post FDA Takes Half-Step Toward Allowing Gay Men To Donate Blood appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Picture the typical American family: what do you see? You probably imagine a married mom and dad with a couple of kids -- think the Draper family, circa Season 1 of Mad Men. You probably know that that ideal has held true for fewer and fewer families over the decades. But new data from the Pew Research Center shows that fewer than half of American kids now grow up in one of these "traditional" families.

As of 2013, only 46 percent of U.S. kids live in a traditional family structure of two parents in their first marriage. An additional 15 percent live with a parent who has been remarried at least once, 34 percent live with a single parent, and 5 percent have no parent at home -- this latter group is most likely living with a grandparent, according to Pew. By contrast, 73 percent of American kids lived with a traditional family back in 1960.

Looking at the chart, it's clear that the change is less a function of remarriages, and more due to the sharp rise in single parenting. As Emily Badger wrote last week, 41 percent of births these days are to unmarried mothers. Among black mothers, that figure rises to an astonishing 72 percent.

Researchers are in general agreement that children of unmarried parents tend to have a tougher time in life: more poverty, more instability, and more problems at school, among other things. But it's less clear what type of policy measures we might take to address these issues. As Emily noted, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to encourage mothers to stay in relationships that may be abusive or otherwise more harmful to their children's health than going it alone.

But it's clear that the American family has changed dramatically over the past 50 years, and will likely continue to evolve. If policymakers of any political stripe want to help American families succeed, the first step is coming to grips with what that dramatic change looks like. For the majority of U.S. children, the traditional nuclear family is an ideal that doesn't reflect reality.

Ferguson prosecutor Bob McCulloch admitted that he presented evidence he knew to be false to the grand jury considering charges against Darren Wilson. In an interview with radio station KTRS on Friday, McCulloch said that he decided to present witnesses that were “clearly not telling the truth” to the grand jury. Specifically, McCulloch acknowledged he permitted a woman who “clearly wasn’t present when this occurred” to testify as an eyewitness to the grand jury for several hours. The woman, Sandra McElroy, testified that Michael Brown charged at Wilson “like a football player, head down,” supporting Wilson’s claim that he killed Brown in self-defense.

McElroy, according to a detailed investigation by The Smoking Gun, suffers from bipolar disorder but is not receiving treatment and has a history of making racist remarks. In a journal entry, McElroy wrote that she was visiting Ferguson on the day of Michael Brown’s death because she wanted to “stop calling Blacks N****** and Start calling them people.” McElroy also has had trouble with her memory since being thrown through a windshield in a 2001 auto accident.

McCulloch’s prosecutorial team had McElroy testify to the grand jury over two days.

In intentionally presenting false testimony to the grand jury, McCulloch may have committed a serious ethical breach. Under the Missouri Rules of Professional Conduct, lawyers are prohibited from offering “evidence that the lawyer knows to be false.”

McCulloch justified his actions by asserting that the grand jury gave no credence at all to McElroy’s testimony. But this is speculation. Under Missouri law, the grand jury deliberations are secret and McCulloch is not allowed to be present.

A Missouri lawmaker, Karla May, called Friday for a legislative investigation of McCulloch’s conduct. May said that there is evidence to suggest that McCulloch “manipulated the grand jury process from the beginning to ensure that Officer Wilson would not be indicted.”

Even before Friday’s interview, many legal experts were highly critical McCulloch’s use of the grand jury. Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, said she believed McCulloch “did not want an indictment” of Darren Wilson and turned the grand jury process on its head, acting as an advocate for the defense.

Mae Quinn, a law professor at Washington University School Of Law, told ThinkProgress that the unusual decision to present testimony he believed to be false to the grand jury — along with other atypical aspects of the prosecutor’s conduct in the Wilson case — could be an issue. “In terms of personal or professional interest playing a role in the grand jury process, I am struck by the double-bind we keep hearing about. That is, the county prosecutor feeling unable to simply present Darren Wilson’s case like any other without concern for perceived relationships with local law enforcement and others – and then making strategic decisions not singularly focused on representing the county,” Quinn said.

If Maura McShane, the Presiding Judge of the 21st Circuit, agrees with this assessment, she could appoint a new prosecutor and effectively restart the case against Darren Wilson.

Under Missouri law (MO Rev Stat § 56.110) the presiding judge of the court with criminal jurisdiction — in this case Judge McShane — can appoint another prosecutor if the prosecuting attorney demonstrates a conflict of interest or bias. Courts have interpreted this provision broadly to include “conflicts that reveal themselves through the prosecutor’s conduct in the case.” In State v. Copeland, a 1996 case, a Missouri court replaced the prosecutor because the judge “sensed that [the prosecutor’s] sympathies for [the defendant] may have prevented him from being an effective advocate for the state.” The judge “found the adversarial process to have broken down in that [the prosecutor] appeared to be advocating the defendant’s position.”

The recent admission that the prosecution knowingly presented false testimony to the grand jury builds on a pattern of conduct benefiting Wilson’s defense that could justify the appointment of a new prosecutor. This included: vouching for police conduct to the grand jurors, gentle questioning of Wilson himself and aggressive questioning of any witness adverse to Wilson’s defense.

A prosecutor handling any case where a law enforcement officer is accused of misconduct, nevermind one that attracts national attention, finds themselves in “a really hard position,” Quinn said. Quinn added that “[i]f such outside considerations weigh on the mind of a prosecutor, ultimately impacting the way a case is handled, that seems unfair not only to the victim and community – but the prosecutor, too. A special prosecutor in police cases, one who is insulated from these ongoing relationships and concerns, likely would engage in far less second-guessing and ancillary analyses.”

It’s now up to Judge McShane to decided if a new, independent prosecutor is warranted in the Darren Wilson case.

The post A Startling Admission By The Ferguson Prosecutor Could Restart The Case Against Darren Wilson appeared first on ThinkProgress.

In his annual end-of the-year press conference on Friday, Obama took questions from eight women and no men— a move that did not go unnoticed by journalists and others listening to his remarks.

The president started the conference by joking that White House Press Secretary “Josh [Earnest] gave me the list of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice,” and then proceeded to call on eight women from various news organizations. CBS News’ White House correspondent Mark Knoller said on Twitter that TV reporters were advised in advance that Earnest wanted “other reporters not regularly called on to get to question the [president].” The strategy resulted in the likely unprecedented female question sweep in addition to leaving out the major news networks.

On Fox News, White House correspondent Ed Henry joked that he was “outraged for men everywhere” but then admitted seriously that he was not pleased with the questions the women asked.

“Frankly some of the questions just didn’t press him,” he said. “There’s so much going on right now and the questions were trailing off. The president was almost like, let me remember what you asked because it was so unmemorable.”

Watch it:

The eight female journalists asked Obama about Sony’s decision to pull The Interview following threats by North Korea, the deal to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba, the state of race relations in the country and the Keystone XL pipeline, which incoming majority leader Mitch McConnell said will be the first matter up for a vote when the new Congress returns from the recess. Notably missing were any questions about the CIA torture report released last week.

While Obama only formally called on women, two men were able to yell out their own questions during the conference. “Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?” one asked, while a reporter called after Obama as he left the room. “Will you smoke a cigar Mr. President?”

The post Obama Only Takes Female Reporters’ Questions In Last Press Conference Of The Year appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Across the United States, white Americans show subtle or "implicit" biases against blacks -- biases they mostly don't even realize they have. This has been established through lots of research, but it's not perfectly uniform across the land. Whites in some states show more bias, overall, than in others.

That's the takeaway from the map above, courtesy of Project Implicit, which is based on the scores of 1.5 million voluntary takers of the Implicit Association Test or IAT (which detects subtle or unconscious racial preferences), and which we examined earlier this month. But we didn't know why the map looked this way -- with levels of uncontrolled bias higher in the U.S. Southeast and East Coast (but not so much New England).

Dominic Packer, a psychologist at Lehigh University, has a surprising (and troubling) answer: Unconscious racial bias, he shows in a new analysis, is higher in U.S. states in which there is a higher ratio of black citizens to white citizens -- or in other words, in which there are relatively more black people for every white person.

“These findings are inconsistent with any simple hypothesis that contact between members of different racial groups will lead to reduced bias," wrote Packer in his analysis. However, he added, they are quite consistent with the idea that in states with more black citizens, whites may perceive "greater competition for political, cultural, and economic resources" or "greater risk for cross-race crime."

Packer provided this visualization, first recoloring the IAT scores map above to a new color scheme, and then showing a map using the same colors for the ratio of black to white residents in the state:

In a 2014 presentation, Project Implicit researchers had already suggested that this relationship might exist. Packer simply went further, seeking to uncover correlations between state level differences in IAT scores (for whites) and a number of sociological and demographic factors, which are known to vary by U.S. state. Factors that he considered included levels of income and income inequality, history as a slave-holding state, political ideology, and the ratio of white to black residents in the state.

Interestingly, the research found that how a state voted in 2008 -- for Obama versus McCain -- did not explain anything about the state's average IAT score. There was simply no relationship to politics. However, other factors, like levels of income inequality and whether the state was once a slave-holding state, did correlate with implicit bias scores.

Since many of the factors listed above actually correlate with each other, raising questions as to which factor might be truly primary, Packer then took another step. That was to perform a statistical analysis -- called a regression -- that would seek to even more precisely define which variable is linked to the pattern of implicit racial bias.

The result was striking: The ratio of white to black residents in a given state explained over 50 percent of the variability in various states' white participants’ Implicit Association Test scores. "That’s pretty big, for anything social scienc-y," said Packer of the result.

Or to state the result in a different way: “States where Whites outnumber Blacks substantially in the population have lower average IAT scores,” wrote Packer. “In contrast, states where Blacks make up proportionally more of the population have higher average IAT scores.”

So do these relatively small differences in average implicit bias scores, across U.S. states, actually matter? Packer thinks that they do, suggesting that they may predict actual behaviors. To show as much, he turned to a much-discussed 2012 state-by-state map of racist tweets, and analyzed that map in light of the distribution of implicit bias by whites.

Here, fascinatingly, Packer found that states with higher implicit bias scores had more racist tweets. Furthermore, he found an interaction between whether or not a state voted for Romney (versus Obama) and whether it produced a lot of racist tweets -- meaning that in pro-Romney states, a high state IAT score predicted lots of racist tweets, whereas in states that went for Obama, it didn't really predict anything:

Because Packer’s analysis was not peer reviewed or submitted to and published in a journal, we sought comments from other researchers on it. Generally they offered praise, but also noted a number of caveats.

David Amodio, a neuroscientist at New York University who studies prejudice, said that Packer's analyses "appear to be done well." But he also cautioned that correlation is still not causation -- so we still don’t necessarily know the fundamental reason for the quite strong correlation that Packer’s analysis revealed.

“There could be a million reasons for the observed correlation between IAT scores and the ratio of Blacks and Whites in a state,” said Amodio.

The University of Washington's Anthony Greenwald, who created the Implicit Association test in 1995, had another point of note. While observing that Packer’s analysis "went interestingly beyond what we already knew," he warned that the result might look different if the analysis was at the level of U.S. counties, rather than U.S. states. An analysis at the level of counties, he suggested, might reveal a rural-urban divide in whites’ implicit racial bias levels that a coarser state level analysis can’t tease out.

In particular, Greenwald singled out Washington, D.C., from Packer’s analysis -- an entirely urban “state” where blacks make up just under 50 percent of the population, but where white people's IAT scores were relatively low, in comparison with those in other states. "The finding that Washington, D.C., is a huge outlier is by itself an indicator that population ratio provides no simple explanation,” said Greenwald. “And it seems plausible that cities with relatively high Black:White ratios may have lower mean IAT scores for Whites than do surrounding rural areas with lower Black:White ratios.”

Packer agrees that doing the analysis at the level of counties, rather than states, would lead to interesting new insights -- but he doesn't think it would invalidate his overall conclusion. But such a county-level analysis, he said, is "really important" as well.

So there is still more research to do in order to further home in and refine explanations for the striking pattern shown in the map at the start of this article. Let’s hope that happens forthwith: Knowing our biases, and why they exist, is the first step toward correcting them.

Over the past several years, the Salvation Army has tried to change its image, trumpeting that it doesn’t discriminate against LGBT people through its charity work (though it still does) and claiming that its history of supporting discrimination is a myth (despite being well documented). A new document obtained by Queerty demonstrates that the church’s teachings are still anti-gay.

The document is a memo circulated earlier this year by midwest Commissioner Paul Seiler that details the church’s teaching on homosexuality both internally and externally. The document does jibe with some of the Salvation Army’s public statements, such as that having a “homosexual orientation in and of itself is not a sin” and that sexual orientation is not a factor in hiring or serving.

However, the document proceeds to contradict that very point by outlining ways the church will discriminate in both its hiring and its service. The Salvation Army’s belief on marriage is that it’s still limited to a man and a woman, and anybody who isn’t in a marriage should be celibate. Anyone wishing to serve in a leadership role within the organization must abide by this tenet:

For anyone in a Salvation Army ministry position, the theological belief regarding sexuality is that God has ordained marriage to be between one man and one woman and sexual activity is restricted to one’s spouse. Non-married individuals would therefore be celibate in the expression of their sexuality. This is the long-standing expectation of all individuals in ministry roles in The Salvation Army, including lay people.

Salvation Army officials are also prohibited from officiating the marriage of a same-sex couple and can only attend a same-sex wedding if the ceremony is held at a non-Army facility and they go out of uniform. It’s unlikely such a wedding would take place at an Army facility anyway, because that is prohibited as well.

The Salvation Army told Queerty that the requirement of celibacy for non-married officers “has always been a policy in The Salvation Army.” Director of Communications Jennifer Byrd seemed to contest the incriminating details of the document, explaining, “We realize our message of service to the LGBT community and our non-discriminatory employment practices have been overlooked, misconstrued or misunderstood in recent years, and our focus the past 12-18 months has to be address these failings.”

Bil Browning, an LGBT blogger and activist who has led the campaign to challenge the Salvation Army’s anti-LGBT policies and beliefs, told ThinkProgress that Queerty’s discovery was “incredibly disappointing.” He chastized the church for employing a “‘policy of containment” instead of “taking a proactive approach of working with the LGBT community to heal old wounds.”

“Instead of ‘doing the most good,'” Browning explained, “the SA-USA opted to spin the truth and gloss over their extremely anti-LGBT past. I continue to hope that they’ll actually ‘do the most good’ some day, but that obviously isn’t their priority right now.”

Read the full memo over at Queerty.

The post Leaked Salvation Army Document Shows Pro-LGBT PR Campaign Is Just Spin appeared first on ThinkProgress.

The Guest's Maika Monroe stars in one of the year's most praised festival films, It Follows (Our Review). The film's first trailer has dropped and it does an amazing job at setting a chilling tone for the film and setting up a sense of mystery.

The film directed by David Robert Mitchell (The Myth Of The American Sleepover), has drawn comparisons to 80s horro films as well as Brian De Palma's early work.


Synopsis:
After a strange sexual encounter, a teenager finds herself haunted by nightmarish visions and the inescapable sense that something is after her.


It Follows opens in the UK on February 27. Radius TWC will relea [Continued ...]

With Congress set to pass a government spending bill that weakens a provision of Dodd-Frank, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) took the floor of the Senate on Friday evening to lash out at her colleagues. In her remarks, she took specific aim at mega-bank Citigroup, saying it wields unusual power in government and must be reigned in. "Many Wall Street institutions have exerted extraordinary influence in Washington’s corridors of power, but Citigroup has risen above the others," she said. "Its grip over economic policymaking in the executive branch is unprecedented."

Warren, pushing her party to take a less friendly attitude toward Wall Street, called on Congress to do as much for families living paycheck to paycheck as it does for big banks. Her prepared remarks follow:

Mr. President, I’m back on the floor to talk about a dangerous provision that was slipped into a must-pass spending bill at the last minute to benefit Wall Street. This provision would repeal a rule called, and I’m quoting the title of the rule, “PROHIBITION AGAINST FEDERAL GOVERNMENT BAILOUTS OF SWAPS ENTITIES.”

On Wednesday, I came to the floor to talk to Democrats, asking them to strip this provision out of the omnibus bill and protect taxpayers.

On Thursday, I came to the floor to talk to Republicans. Republicans say they don’t like bailouts either. So I asked them to vote the way they talk. If they don’t like bailouts, then they could take out this provision that puts taxpayers right back on the hook for bailing out big banks.

Today, I’m coming to the floor not to talk about Democrats or Republicans, but about a third group that also wields tremendous power in Washington: Citigroup.
Mr. President, in recent years, many Wall Street institutions have exerted extraordinary influence in Washington’s corridors of power, but Citigroup has risen above the others. Its grip over economic policymaking in the executive branch is unprecedented. Consider a few examples:

• Three of the last four Treasury Secretaries under Democratic presidents have had close Citigroup ties. The fourth was offered the CEO position at Citigroup, but turned it down.
•  The Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve system is a Citigroup alum.
• The Undersecretary for International Affairs at Treasury is a Citigroup alum.
• The U.S. Trade Representative and the person nominated to be his deputy – who is currently an assistant secretary at Treasury – are Citigroup alums.
• A recent chairman of the National Economic Council at the White House was a Citigroup alum.
• Another recent Chairman of the Office of Management and Budget went to Citigroup immediately after leaving the White House.
•  Another recent Chairman of the Office of Management of Budget and Management is also a Citi alum -- but I’m double counting here because now he’s the Secretary of the Treasury.

That’s a lot of powerful people, all from one bank. But they aren’t Citigroup’s only source of power. Over the years, the company has spent millions of dollars on lobbying Congress and funding the political campaigns of its friends in the House and the Senate.

Citigroup has also spent millions trying to influence the political process in ways that are far more subtle—and hidden from public view. Last year, I wrote Citigroup and other big banks a letter asking them to disclose the amount of shareholder money they have been diverting to think tanks to influence public policy. Citigroup’s response to my letter? Stonewalling. A year has gone by, and Citigroup didn’t even acknowledge receiving the letter.

Citigroup has a lot of money, it spends a lot of money, and it uses that money to grow and consolidate a lot of power. And it pays off. Consider a couple facts.
Fact one: During the financial crisis, when all the support through TARP and from the FDIC and the Fed is added up, Citi received nearly half a trillion dollars in bailouts. That’s half a trillion with a “t.” That’s almost $140 billion more than the next biggest bank got.

Fact two: During Dodd-Frank, there was an amendment introduced by my colleague Senator Brown and Senator Kaufman that would have broken up Citigroup and the nation’s other largest banks. That amendment had bipartisan support, and it might have passed, but it ran into powerful opposition from an alliance between Wall Streeters on Wall Street and Wall Streeters who held powerful government jobs. They teamed up and blocked the move to break up the banks—and now Citi is bigger than ever.

The role that senior officials working in the Treasury department played in killing the amendment was not subtle: A senior Treasury official acknowledged it at the time in a background interview with New York Magazine. The official from Treasury said, and I’m quoting here, “If we’d been for it, it probably would have happened. But we weren’t, so it didn’t.” That’s power.

Mr. President, Democrats don’t like Wall Street bailouts. Republicans don’t like Wall Street bailouts. The American people are disgusted by Wall Street bailouts. And yet here we are -- five years after Dodd-Frank – with Congress on the verge of ramming through a provision that would do nothing for middle class, do nothing for community banks – do nothing but raise the risk that taxpayers will have to bail out the biggest banks once again.
There’s a lot of talk lately about how the Dodd-Frank Act isn’t perfect. There’s a lot of talk coming from Citigroup about how the Dodd-Frank Act isn’t perfect.

So let me say this to anyone who is listening at Citi: I agree with you. Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect.

It should have broken you into pieces.

If this Congress is going to open up Dodd-Frank in the months ahead, let’s open it up to get tougher—not to create more bailout opportunities .

If we are going to open up Dodd-Frank, let’s open it up so that, once and for all, we end Too Big to Fail. And I mean let’s really end it – not just say we did.
Instead of passing laws that create new bailout opportunities for Too-Big-To-Fail banks, let’s pass Brown-Kaufman. Let’s pass the bipartisan 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act – a bill I’ve sponsored with John McCain, Angus King, and Maria Cantwell. Let’s pass something – anything – that would help break up these giant banks.

A century ago, Teddy Roosevelt was America’s trustbuster. He went after the giant trusts and monopolies in this country, and a lot of people talk about how those trusts deserved to be broken up because they had too much economic power. But Teddy Roosevelt said we should break them up because they had too much political power. Teddy Roosevelt said break them up because all that concentrated power threatened the very foundations of our democratic system.

And now we’re watching as Congress passes yet another provision that was written by lobbyists for the biggest recipient of bailout money in the history of the country. And it’s attached to a bill that needs to pass or else the entire federal government will grind to a halt.

Think about this kind of power. A financial institution has become so big and so powerful that it can hold the entire country hostage. That alone is a reason enough for us break them up. Enough is enough.

Enough is enough with Wall Street insiders getting key position after key position and the kind of cronyism we have seen in the executive branch. Enough is enough with Citigroup passing 11th hour deregulatory provisions that nobody takes ownership over but that everybody comes to regret. Enough is enough.

Washington already works really well for the billionaires and big corporations and the lawyers and lobbyists. But what about the families who lost their homes or their jobs or their retirement savings the last time Citi bet big on derivatives and lost? What about the families who are living paycheck to paycheck and saw their tax dollars go to bail Citi out just six years ago? We were sent here to fight for those families, and it’s time – it’s past time – for Washington to start working for them.

Britney Spears’ new single will be out early next year and will feature the dulcet tones of collaboration-shy rapper Iggy Azalea.

In fact it was the ‘No Mediocre’ hitmaker herself who confirmed the song’s existence during an interview at Kiss 108’s Jingle Ball thing.

Chatting about how she was going to Vegas to watch Britney’s show and that she was excited about finally meeting her, she then added: “We have a song that’s going to be her first single coming out next year”.

Asked to say a bit more about that she confirmed it was “awesome” and then said the following about how it all came to be:

“She said she would like to work with me in an interview and they kind of reached out and we recorded a few different things and one of those just ended up just being I think undeniably great. Hopefully everybody will get to hear it the beginning of next year.”

Exciting times.

According to a new poll released Tuesday by The Washington Post and ABC News, a majority of Americans believe that torture of suspected terrorists can be justified — even in the wake of graphic revelations by a Senate Intelligence Committee report of exactly what such tactics look like. That public approval conceals partisan differences, as colleagues Adam Goldman and Peyton Craighill write:

Views on the CIA’s tactics break down sharply along ideological lines. Liberal Democrats are most disgusted with the agency’s actions, while conservative Republicans are most likely to defend it.

Democrats who identify as moderate or conservative are more supportive of the program, joining majorities of independents and Republicans who say it was justified.

Those ideological poles at opposite ends of public opinion aren't that surprising. But the distribution of demographic groups between them is. A majority of nearly every group — non-whites, women, young adults, the elderly, Midwesterners, suburbanites, Catholics, moderates, the wealthy — said that torture of suspected terrorists can be often or sometimes justified.

A majority of only one other group beyond liberals and Democrats disagreed: people with no religion.

Below is the full breakdown of responses to this question in the Post-ABC News poll. If you oppose torture under any circumstance, this fine-grained look may be even more discouraging to you than the top-line finding:

“Witness 40″ was a key witness to Darren Wilson’s defenders because her story seemed to wholly confirm Darren Wilson’s narrative of the events that led to Michael Brown’s death. It is Witness 40 who described Brown as a drug-crazed lunatic who pummeled Wilson to near unconsciousness, ran away, then rushed Wilson like a football player, forcing Wilson to bring him down in a fusillade of gunfire.

As Chris Hayes expertly details in the video below, Fox News’ Sean Hannity did everything but write “Witness 40″ in loving cursive script and draw hearts around it in his Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper. You don’t have to watch it; who wants to watch Hannity voluntarily? Then again, Wonketteers tend to be sick freaks, so here you are, ya pervs:

But new investigative reports, first from activist Shaun King at Daily Kos, and now from The Smoking Gun, all but confirm two things: 1) Witness 40′s testimony was a complete fabrication; and 2) She should have never been taken as credible in the first place.

The Smoking Gun discovered the identity of Witness 40, identifying her as 45-year-old Sandra McElroy, a St. Louis resident, a discovery that has now been confirmed by McElroy herself. So we’ll drop the “Witness 40″ code name and refer to her by her given name, which has such a lovely lilt.

Look, a lot of the stuff that TSG has dug up about McElroy’s past is basically irrelevant. Having multiple bankruptcies, check fraud, being bipolar, and even, to our minds, her pro-Wilson social media messages — none of that really discredits her as a witness. In a country in which so many people have criminal records and so many suffer under the weight of mental illnesses both diagnosed and undiagnosed, it would be unfair to use these details as a way of discrediting her testimony. What matters is whether McElroy was there and her testimony was credible. And the bigger question is whether it was sensible for the state to put this woman in front of a grand jury, given what they knew at the time.

The answers to these questions are no, no, and “are you freaking kidding me.”

Before we dig into the details, it’s important to note that McElroy did not approach police to offer her account of the events until Sept. 11 — four weeks after the events in question. While it’s understandable that someone might be reluctant to testify in the racially and politically fraught atmosphere surrounding Michael Brown’s death, this also means that by the time she approached the police, the skeleton of Darren Wilson’s version of events had already appeared in the media.

By the time she was interviewed by the FBI on Oct. 22, two full months had passed since Brown’s death, and the day before that interview, The St. Louis Dispatch published an extensive story that laid out in precise detail Darren Wilson’s account of Michael Brown’s death.

This of course is only suggestive and circumstantial. Just because it’s POSSIBLE that McElroy cribbed the details of her testimony from accounts of Darren Wilson’s version of events taken from conservative blogs and mainstream press doesn’t mean she DID do so. Maybe she didn’t even follow the story all that closely, wracked from the trauma of witnessing such violent events. Yeah, about that…

In the weeks after Brown’s shooting — but before she contacted police — McElroy used her Facebook account to comment on the case. On August 15, she “liked” a Facebook comment reporting that Johnson had admitted that he and Brown stole cigars before the confrontation with Wilson. On August 17, a Facebook commenter wrote that Johnson and others should be arrested for inciting riots and giving false statements to police in connection with their claims that Brown had his hands up when shot by Wilson. “The report and autopsy are in so YES they were false,” McElroy wrote of the “hands-up” claims. This appears to be an odd comment from someone who claims to have been present during the shooting. In response to the posting of a news report about a rally in support of Wilson, McElroy wrote on August 17, “Prayers, support God Bless Officer Wilson.”

After meeting with St. Louis police, McElroy continued monitoring the case and posting online. Commenting on a September 12 Riverfront Times story reporting that Ferguson city officials had yet to meet with Brown’s family, McElroy wrote, “But haven’t you heard the news, There great great great grandpa may or may not have been owned by one of our great great great grandpas 200 yrs ago. (Sarcasm).” On September 13, McElroy went on a pro-Wilson Facebook page and posted a graphic that included a photo of Brown lying dead in the street. A type overlay read, “Michael Brown already received justice. So please, stop asking for it.” The following week McElroy responded to a Facebook post about the criminal record of Wilson’s late mother. “As a teenager Mike Brown strong armed a store used drugs hit a police officer and received Justis,” she stated.

Well, sometimes people share social media accounts and she has two daughters, so maybe they posted this stuff? Or maybe she was even hacked! People get hacked sometimes. Plus, let’s say this DID happen, it’s true that would demolish her testimony, but that doesn’t mean that the process itself is complicit. How could anyone have known? It’s not like she raised her right hand and solemnly swore to federal agents that she followed the case closely and got her testimony from social media accounts. Right?

PAGE 158 : Witness admits to regularly searching the internet for facts about the case.

PAGE 170: Witness admits to commenting on articles about the cases for weeks before she ever claimed to be a witness.

PAGE 170: Witness admits to “using the N-Word half a dozen times” in her comments about the case.

PAGE 177: FBI agent asks her to explain some of her comments about the case. Witness #40 admits to saying, “they need to kill the fucking niggers” and the protests are “an ape-fest.”

PAGE 177: Witness states that she and other Darren Wilson supporters have been making him homemade Christmas cards.

So when McElroy gave the FBI a statement that exactly matched Darren Wilson’s version of events…? Well, we’ll leave this jigsaw puzzle for toddlers out for you and see what you make of it.

But for some reason, it’s not the timing of the story and the way it marches in lockstep with the accounts of Darren Wilson’s narrative that fascinates us. It’s not even the way that she admits that she might have gotten some of the details in her account of Michael Brown’s death from media accounts of Wilson’s testimony. It’s the way that she describes the way she supposedly arrived at and left Canfield Drive, where she says she witnessed the events of Michael Brown’s murder.

When asked what she was doing in Ferguson — which is about 30 miles north of her home — McElroy explained that she was planning to “pop in” on a former high school classmate she had not seen in 26 years. 

Alright, fair enough. “Popping in” on a high school classmate from a quarter century ago isn’t our thing exactly, but hey, people are different. Upon arriving in the apparently unfamiliar town of Ferguson, McElroy claims to have immediately gotten lost. She pulled over and asked for directions at the QT. This is what she said happened after she got directions, in her own words.

And I didn’t follow them very well, instead of making a right out of QT, I made a left. And I realized I went the wrong way, so I made another immediate left.

But then I seen the apartments, my friend lived in an apartment. I thought, well, maybe I was in the right spot after all.

After proceeding in the opposite direction from the directions she was given, she saw some apartments and decided that since her friend lived in an apartment building, and these were apartment buildings, her friend must live in the buildings. She said this, under oath, to the agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigations. The mind reels. The FBI asked her a bit later how she knew that these apartment buildings were those apartment buildings, and I’ll leave Shaun King to summarize this incredible answer:

When she gets to them, she says they look like the apartments she actually intended to visit of a friend of hers from high school in the ’80s.

The FBI asks how she knew what they looked like and she said her friend sent her pictures of the apartments, but not the actual address of them for her to visit. Who does this?

We’ve got no smart-alecky remarks for this one, we’re as lost as you are. But at this point, perhaps it would have been a good time to check that address again, maybe call her old pal from high school and ask her for some personalized directions? TSG:

Saddled with an incorrect address and no cell phone, McElroy claimed that she pulled over to smoke a cigarette and seek directions from a black man standing under a tree.

Or … that. You could do that. It’s when she gets out of the car to seek directions from a random black man (remember, she regularly describes black people as apes and niggers, so I’m not sure what gave her the courage and faith to approach a random member of this species and act for directions) that she says she saw the events that left Michael Brown dead. You can read the sordid details on your own, but let’s skip forward to immediately after that. What did she do? King:

PAGE 132: The witness says she got in her car and left as soon as the shooting happened and then locked herself in her house for two weeks.

PAGE 134: She says the only person she told about what happened was her ex-husband but he swears he doesn’t remember anything about the conversation because he’s a heavily medicated person.

PAGE 146: The witness says she emailed the so-called friend she thought maybe lived in the Canfield Apartments in Ferguson the same day to tell her she got lost. When asked if they could see the email, she says she “deleted it.”

PAGES 148-152: Now the witness is in a terrible place in her interrogation. She just can’t explain how she drove off of Canfield Drive from the parking lot she said she was parked in. Mike Brown is dead in the middle of the street on one side. Darren Wilson’s SUV and growing volume of police cars are at the other. The FBI agent basically destroys her entire story here because she says she somehow “zig-zagged” out of Canfield Drive in a way that was physically impossible on that day.

PAGE 154: FBI agent flat out tells Witness #40 that her story of exiting Canfield in her car is impossible.

PAGE 175: FBI agents show her pictures of every car that came in and out of Canfield on August 9 and ask her to identify which one is hers. She cannot find it. They then inform her that her car was never seen by anyone or any photos that day.

For the love of spacious skies and amber waves of grain and the purple mountain majesties and the fruited plains that lie beneath them someone please tell us that based upon THESE FACTS ALONE, the state prosecutors declined to put McElroy in front of the Ferguson grand jury …

Despite an abundance of red flags, state prosecutors put McElroy in front of the Ferguson grand jury the day after her meeting with the federal officials. After the 12-member panel listened to a tape of her interview conducted at the FBI office, McElroy appeared and, under oath, regaled the jurors with her eyewitness claims.

McElroy’s grand jury testimony came to an abrupt end at 2:30 that afternoon due to obligations of some grand jurors. But before the panel broke for the day, McElroy revealed that, “On August 9th after this happened when I got home, I wrote everything  down on a piece of paper, would that be easier if I brought that in?”

“Sure,” answered prosecutor Kathi Alizadeh.

“Because that’s how I make sure I don’t get things confused because then it will be word for word,” said McElroy, who did not bother to mention her journaling while speaking a day earlier with federal investigators.

McElroy would return to the Ferguson grand jury 11 days later, journal pages in hand and with a revamped story for the panel.

Oh.

Before testifying about the content of her notebook scribblings, McElroy admitted that she had not driven to Ferguson in search of an African-American pal she had last seen in 1988. Instead, McElroy offered a substitute explanation that was, remarkably, an even bigger lie.

McElroy, again under oath, explained to grand jurors that she was something of an amateur urban anthropologist. Every couple of weeks, McElroy testified, she likes to “go into all the African-American neighborhoods.” During these weekend sojourns — apparently conducted when her ex has the kids — McElroy said she will “go in and have coffee and I will strike up a conversation with an African-American and I will try to talk to them because I’m trying to understand more.”

Oh.

Instead of quoting from this “journal,” let’s post a screenshot to capture it in all its curlicued glory:

Okay. For the record, that reads “Well I’m gonna take my random drive to Florisant. Need to understand the Black race better so I stop calling Blacks Niggers and Start calling them People.” We just want everyone to be crystal clear: we did not make this up. This is not a joke, this is an actual picture of the journal entry which she says she wrote before heading out to Ferguson.

There’s more to dig into, and you can go to TSG or Shaun King and read that. You can even, as we did, go directly to the source and read all the grand jury testimony yourself.

But here’s the bottom-line: Witness 40, who we now know is Sandra McElroy, was not on Canfield Drive and did not witness the shooting. Moreover, you did not need to know that she was Sandra McElroy, or know anything else than what she swore to under oath, to know that her testimony was a complete fabrication. All you needed to do was to listen to the words coming out of her own mouth to know that she was lying. Everyone who came in contact with her knew this. The local police knew this, The FBI knew this, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch knew this. So why place this rolling clowncar of a testimony in front of a jury? Why contaminate the minds of the jurors with lies, even if they probably could identify them as lies? How could this be justice? We don’t have any comforting answers, and we’re out of jokes.

[Daily Kos/The Smoking Gun]

Cleveland Browns wide receiver Andrew Hawkins became the latest player to join on-field protests against recent police shootings of black men on Sunday, when he walked onto the field with a t-shirt that read “Justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford” over his jersey.

Rice was the 12-year-old who Cleveland police shot in November after they received calls that he was playing with a toy gun in a park near his home; Crawford was killed by police in August in an Ohio while holding an air gun in a Walmart. Both were black.

Now, the Cleveland police union is demanding an apology from Hawkins and the Browns, saying that players like Hawkins don’t understand the law enough to take a stand.

“It’s pretty pathetic when athletes think they know the law,” Jeff Follman, the president of the Police Patrolman Union in Cleveland, said in a statement to Cleveland news station newsnet5. “They should stick to what they know best on the field. The Cleveland Police protect and serve the Browns stadium and the Browns organization owes us an apology.”

“He’s an athlete. He’s someone with no facts of the case whatsoever,” Follmer said later, according to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. “He’s disrespecting the police on a job that we had to do and make a split-second decision.”

The union statement is similar to one issued by the St. Louis police union after five Rams players walked onto the field before a game displaying the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” gesture to protest a grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson, the Ferguson, Mo. police officer who shot and killed black teenager Michael Brown in August. In that instance, the union called on the team and the NFL to discipline the five players. Though neither the Rams nor the NFL did so, the Rams last week made a donation to a local police charity.

The Browns responded to Follmer and the union in a statement, saying: “We have great respect for the Cleveland Police Department and the work that they do to protect and serve our city. We also respect our players’ rights to project their support and bring awareness to issues that are important to them if done so in a responsible manner.”

After the Rams players protested, similar gestures spread across sports, especially after a grand jury in New York declined to bring charges against a police officer in the death of Eric Garner, a black man who was choked to death by police in Staten Island. Chicago Bulls guard Derrick Rose took the court the next weekend wearing a shirt that read, “I Can’t Breathe,” which were among Garner’s last words and has become a rallying cry in protests across the country. Multiple NFL players, including Hawkins’ teammate Johnson Bademosi, wore similar shirts last weekend as the protests spread across the sports world. LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and other players have worn the shirts too.

The protests continued through the week and into this weekend, spreading to the ranks of college basketball. Notre Dame’s women’s basketball team and Georgetown’s men’s team were among those that wore “I Can’t Breathe” shirts before a game this weekend. The University of California women’s basketball team took the court Saturday wearing handmade shirts that bore the names of black men and teens killed recently by police.

The post Cleveland Police Demand Apology After Browns Player Protests Tamir Rice Shooting appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Millennials tend to gravitate to certain cities. They're more likely to live in San Diego than Newark, in Austin than Cleveland, in Washington than Tampa. But these geographic patterns bode poorly for their homeownership prospects: Millennials make up a larger share of the population in many metropolitan areas where they're least likely to afford the housing.

Jed Kolko, the chief economist at Trulia, illustrates this mismatch in the below graph:

Millennials are defined here as 20-34 year-olds to match available Census categories. The Y-axis captures the share of homes for sale on the market in each metro that are affordable on the local median income for households headed by Millennials. Homes are considered affordable when the total monthly payments (including taxes and insurance) add up to less than 31 percent of that median income.

In the above graph, Baton Rouge and Oklahoma City are outliers, metros with many Millennials and plentiful affordable housing. Cleveland, on the other hand, captures one extreme: Millennials there make up 18.4 percent of the population but can afford 71 percent of the homes for sale.

In metro San Diego, they make up nearly a quarter of the population. But just 18 percent of the housing is within their reach. The above calculations also assume a 20 percent down payment, so the affordable housing stock is probably a generous estimation.

As Kolko summarizes their quandary: "Millennials can afford markets where they don’t live, but they can’t afford many of the markets where they do live."

That means that if they do want to buy a home eventually — as survey results suggest that most of them do — many Millennials will probably have to sacrifice the cities that attracted them when they were young.

Turning thermostats in Boston buildings up one degree in the summer and down one degree in the winter would save millions of dollars per year and result in significant energy savings, according to a new report.

The report, published by Retroficiency, a company aimed at helping buildings across the U.S. increase their energy efficiency, looked at more than 16,800 commercial buildings in Boston, a city with a goal to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050. The report looked at a couple different ways Boston could save energy in its buildings, and charted the energy and monetary savings of each one.

If buildings turned up their thermostat one degree in the summer and down one degree in the winter, they would create a collective $20 million in energy savings each year, and would cut CO2 emissions by 81,017 metric tons — a reduction equivalent to removing 17,212 cars from the road. If all large hotels, retail buildings, and office buildings in the city installed advanced lighting controls — ie. controls that automatically turn lights off at certain times — the buildings would save $27 million and 81,368 metric tons of CO2. And if every office in the city adopted a schedule that included a half day every Friday in the summer, the buildings would save $2 million and 7,054 metric tons of CO2 — about the same as taking 1,499 cars off the road.

If all of these measures were put in place, they would get Boston about 24 percent closer to reaching its 2020 emissions reductions goal.

“These scenarios demonstrate that, while a city like Boston has made great strides in its efficiency efforts, significant savings opportunities can still be achieved,” the report states.

Mike Kaplan, VP of Marketing for Retroficiency, said in an email that savings from these actions would vary from city to city based on factors such as what types of buildings (offices, hospitals, etc.) are most common in the city and what sort of weather the city experiences. Still, he said, these energy-saving measures are a good step for a building in any city to take.

“Overall, reducing the set point one degree will always have a positive impact across a portfolio of buildings – the scale is determined by these outside factors,” Kaplan said. “This is one reason we’re conducting the Building Genome project, to show these cities, utilities and energy companies what’s possible on the commercial building energy efficiency front. There is huge potential in this market for both environmental and economic savings.”

Boston is the second city in Retroficiency’s Building Genome Project, which seeks to determine ways cities around the U.S. can save energy through tweaking the way their buildings use it. Retroficiency did an analysis of more than 30,000 buildings in New York City in April, and found that if the buildings turned their thermostat up one degree in the summer and down one degree in the winter, they would save $145 million annually.

Measures to improve energy efficiency have been found to be an important part of combating climate change. An October study found that gains in energy efficiency in major countries over the past 10 years saved more energy than China consumed in 2011. Energy efficiency investments also save money and can result in major health benefits.

The post Tweaking Thermostats In Boston Would Save Energy Equivalent To 17,000 Fewer Cars On The Road appeared first on ThinkProgress.

The Senate Intelligence Committee's five-year investigation into the CIA's torture of suspected terrorists just came out. There's plenty in there to shock -- for starters, just go to the document and search for "rectal feeding." The Post has compiled a list of 20 key takeaways from the report, which detail a regime of brutality, incompetence and deceit that have been damaging to the U.S.'s standing abroad.

Good luck trying to convince many Americans of that, though. Polls have shown a public generally supportive of the use of torture to gain information from terrorist suspects, at least in some circumstances, and even when you flat out call it "torture."

In 2009, the Pew Research Center found that 49 percent of the public said that "the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information" can "often" or "sometimes" be justified. This belief was held by 64 percent of Republicans, 54 percent of Independents and 36 percent of Democrats.

Including the number who say that torture can rarely be justified, 71 percent of Americans accept torture under some circumstances.

 

Overall 25 percent of respondents said torture could "never" be justified. Fourteen percent of Republicans said the same, compared to 38 percent of Democrats.

While these figures are from 2009, a more recent YouGov poll from 2012 showed similar levels of support for torture among the public overall. A 2014 report by the advocacy group Amnesty International found that U.S. respondents were more supportive of torture than people in other wealthy Western countries.

UPDATE: Pew data from 2011 paints largely the same picture.

Essential and clearly recommended for adepts of moody, poignant, luminous and cinematic ambient sculptures.

Deru (aka Benjamin Wynn) is an abstract-minimal ambient music project based in Los Angeles. A notorious figure in the world of experimental-electronic music as well as skilled researcher in technologies, sound engineering and explorations in formalized / computerized concept music, Benjamin Wynn delivers a ravishing and deeply introspective suite of “microsonic ambient poems” around the thematic of memories and personal dream-times on 1979.

The beautifully animated timbres, flexible sound textures, tonal colors serve a significant, constructive and highly emotional musical discourse engraved upon the fundamental notions of affective memory, trace, absence and secrecy. Under the philosophical angle the intuitive then logical representations of memory have been conceptually described in the works of Jean Piaget, Frances Yates, Henri Bergson. This new Deru work can be appreciated as a sonorous and sensorial translation of those intellectual approaches, capable to invite the listener in a serene and intense meditation on himself, on the flowing aspect of time and on retrospective exercises.

This album is conceived as a collaborative inter-media project for a fertile artistic dialogue between Benjamin Wynn for sound sculptures and Anthony Ciannamea for the video art production. Each composition is harmoniously accompanied by expressive and illustrative cinematic sketches. About the music itself and its compositional elaboration we assist to a tremendous and fascinating multidimensional drone ambient painting where moving acoustic elements meet electronic schemas. The opening theme is a sweetly melancholic and mysterious track, extraordinary immersive and intimate with a minimalist contemporary classical touch. “Let the Silence Float” is a powerful organic ambient soundscape followed by the sensational and more electronic inflected “Addictive yearning,” melodious and blissed-out. The following track follows the same trajectory with a wonderfully absorbing interaction between micro-sound manipulations, sustained drones and soundtracky melodious motifs.

Essential and clearly recommended for adepts of moody, poignant, luminous and cinematic ambient sculptures.

1979 is available on Friends Of Friends. [Bandcamp]

therumpus:

Here’s today’s Daily GIF!

A grand jury voted not to file any charges against David Pantaleo, the New York Police Department cop who took the life of Eric Garner after putting him in a chokehold — a maneuver banned by the police department.

The decision, announced through a source Wednesday afternoon to the New York Times and other news outlets, means Pantaleo may never face a public trial unless he is charged by federal or other authorities later.

The incident started with allegations that Garner had committed the very minor offense of selling untaxed cigarettes and ended with a violent chokehold that is banned by the New York Police Department. In the video, Garner is heard screaming, “I can’t breathe!” The incident was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner.

Police crackdowns of “loose” cigarettes are part of a larger focus in New York City on what are known as “quality of life” offenses — minor infractions that police consider part of a “broken windows” policing that reasons targeting minor crimes prevents more major ones. But as the incident with Garner shows, additional arrests present new opportunities for violence. These arrests have overwhelmingly impacted African Americans and Hispanics.

“It should be a cautionary tale to the police department about how it’s going about enforcing low-level offenses,” said ACLU Associate Legal Director Christopher Dunn.

As in the grand jury presentation in Ferguson, the prosecutor in this case took the unusual step of presenting months of testimony to the grand jury, including two hours from the defendant.

This is a drastic, monumental contrast from how most grand jury indictments are handled for ordinary criminal defendants, rather than police defendants. Prosecutors in many jurisdictions go through as many as 40 indictments in a single day. The duration of the proceeding also suggests that District Attorney Daniel Donovan is presenting much more to the grand jury than is typical — or even appropriate — in a grand jury proceeding, when the prosecutor’s sole job is to show probable cause.

Holding police accountable is exceedingly difficult and rare, according to limited available data on police firings, charges, and prosecutions. By contrast, grand juries overwhelming vote to indict most criminal defendants.

Unlike in Michael Brown’s case, Garner’s death was videotaped by a bystander, Ramsey Orta. Orta’s video eliminated much of the conflicting eyewitness accounts that dominated hours of testimony in Darren Wilson’s grand jury. But the head of the largest New York City police union, Patrick Lynch, accused Orta of “demonizing good police work.”

Pantaleo has thus far not returned to work, and could still face other discipline from the police department.

The post BREAKING: Grand Jury Won’t Charge Cop Who Killed Eric Garner With Illegal Chokehold appeared first on ThinkProgress.

On a Fox and Friends news segment, the former mayor of New York City said that the encounter between Officer David Pantaleo and Garner, in which Pantaleo put Garner in a fatal chokehold, was not an act of racism. On the flip side, he argued that current mayor Bill de Blasio’s failure to mention black on black crime in the city during his press conference Wednesday night did constitute racism.

De Blasio held a press conference after a grand jury decided not to indict Pantaleo, despite the fact that he was filmed choking Garner to death on a sidewalk. The incumbent mayor expressed concerns that many families have about the safety of their children, given the number of deaths at the hands of police officers. He also talked about the conversation he would need to have with his son. “We are dealing with centuries of racism that have brought us to this day,” he said.

In response to the press conference, Giuliani implied that de Blasio’s comments were racist in and of themselves. If de Blasio were going to talk to his biracial son about being killed while black, he should mention black on black crime, Giuliani argued.

First of all, there’s no racism in this case. If this man were a white man resisting arrest at that same size, the same thing would happen. There was an African American sargeant on the scene observing, in charge of the situation, never did anything to stop it…As far as I know…she did nothing to interrupt it. To suggest that racism is involved, just because it’s a white man and a black man, and then also to talk about families worried about their children, there are a handful of police shootings of blacks. Ninety-six of the time, it’s a black child being killed by a black. If he wants to train young black men in how to avoid being killed in the city, you can talk about police. Police should never kill anybody unjustifiably. I’ve put them in jail when that happens. But you should spend 90 percent of your time talking about the way they’re actually probably going to get killed, which is by another black. To avoid that fact, I think, is racist.

He also said that the mayor and civil rights lawyers are undermining law enforcement. “One of the things the mayor, Sharpton, and the others are doing,” Giuliani claimed, is “tearing down respect for a criminal justice system that goes back to England in the 11th Century.”

Watch the full interview here:

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

The post Giuliani Suggests Bill De Blasio Is The Real Racist appeared first on ThinkProgress.

There's a profound truth to one of the mottoes of protesters in New York who are upset about a grand jury's decision not to indict an officer in the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island this summer. "We can't breathe," they have been chanting. And in New York, as in most American cities, the air itself has been tainted by decades of disparity in public policy.

The motto paraphrases Garner's words as Officer Daniel Pantaleo held him in an apparent chokehold on the sidewalk. Pantaleo told the grand jury he did not intend to choke Garner and tried to let go of him when Garner said, "I can't breathe," but the asthmatic Garner suffered a heart attack and died several minutes later in the back of ambulance. A medical examiner ruled the death a homicide.

We'll never know if Garner would have survived the altercation if he hadn't had asthma. We also don't know what caused the asthma, which he developed as a child. What we do know is that asthma is much more common among blacks than whites, and that air pollution is much worse in communities of color nationwide.

Asthma was one among many factors correlated with race in Garner's life that led to the fatal situation, said Eddie Bautista, director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. "There are number of ways that racism plays out," he said. "The asthma is just one more example."

A recent study found that members of racial and ethnic minorities are exposed to levels of nitrogen dioxide, a common pollutant associated with asthma and heart disease, that are 38 percent higher than in the air whites breathe.

Advocates say that authorities often decide to dump waste in minority neighborhoods, and to locate highways and industrial facilities away from the higher-income areas where whites live.

Garner lived in Tompkinsville, a neighborhood on Staten Island's north shore where zoning regulations have concentrated shipping and industry, Bautista said.

The north shore of the island is one of six areas that New York City has designated for marine freight. Bautista's group analyzed the demographics of these zones and found that about two-thirds of the people living in them were not white.

Historically, he said, immigrants and people of color moved to these waterfront neighborhoods because they could live and find work there despite a lack of money and qualifications.

More recently, as the city has converted industrial land elsewhere into gentrifying residential and commercial neighborhoods, industry has further concentrated in the waterfront districts, likely leading to more asthma-causing pollutants.

"The more industrial land you take off the table, the less land you have, the greater the potential for clustering. It's a vicious cycle," Bautista said.

In one neighborhood, Hunts Point and Mott Haven in the Bronx, the rate at which children are hospitalized for asthma is about twice the city's average.

Pollution is not the only cause of asthma. Psychological factors play a role as well, including anxiety, stress and exposure to violence.

Children who live in neighborhoods where crime is high have been shown to have higher rates of asthma. For people living in old, poorly maintained houses, exposure to cockroaches is another risk: the insects produce allergens that might cause asthma in children.

 

On Twitter, white Americans are tweeting confessions of crimes they claim to have committed but got away with. It's a virtual version of the protests unfolding nationwide after a grand jury decided not to indict a police officer in the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island.

Now, African Americans are responding on Twitter with a new powerful message: discussing the indignities they experience in everyday life, in a country where racial profiling and disparities persist despite promises by the nation's highest-ranking officials to crack down on them.

Like the #CrimingWhileWhite stories, the #AliveWhileBlack hashtag tweets are not verifiable. But they have been a stirring reminder about the ways blacks face discrimination in American life even in far less dramatic situations than those that have been in the news lately. A sampling:

Pulled over by cop for playing Jay Z while driving with open windows in Lincoln Pk, Chi. Detained 45 mins. #alivewhileblack @JamilahLemieux

— Amy DuBois Barnett (@amydbarnett) December 4, 2014

A car wrecked into mine-- face bleeding, concussed, the police and medial workers told me to stop crying and faking. #AliveWhileBlack — Akilah Hughes (@AkilahObviously) December 4, 2014

22. White cops pull me over/out of car at 1am while at red light. Accuse me of prostitution. Detained for 30min. #AliveWhileBlack…& a woman.

— Christina Coleman (@ChrissyCole) December 4, 2014

officer asked me after seeing my name in my ID, "Do you support Farrakhan?" My response.. "Yes & my mother's jewish.." #alivewhileblack — Blame Ebro el Viejo (@oldmanebro) December 4, 2014

Crossing the grocery store parking lot. Cops stopped to ask me what I was doing there. I was holding grocery bags. #Alivewhileblack

— Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) December 4, 2014

Walking to school at 12. Harassed by 2 cops every day for weeks. Complete with racial slurs #Alivewhileblack — Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) December 4, 2014

Robbed at gunpoint, didnt want 2 go 2 police 'til my mom urged me. Told police my story,treated me as if I robbed someone. #alivewhileblack

— CrackmusicDescendant (@hautcommodity) December 4, 2014

@JamilahLemieux cracked my taillight, told me never to come back to "their city" after dropping off white female friend #alivewhileblack — JORDAN ❌ LEBEAU (@JordanInBoston) December 4, 2014

The tweets were picking up Thursday morning. Here's a live feed:

#AliveWhileBlack Tweets

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill to protect LGBT people from workplace discrimination that has been repeatedly proposed in Congress for over 20 years, was considered for probably the last time ever this week. Wednesday evening, House Democrats attempted to attach a version of ENDA to the 2015 defense spending bill in the Rules Committee, but it was defeated by a 7-3 party-line vote with no debate.

The version, devised by Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), stripped some religious exemptions from the version passed by the Senate last year. Polis was not present to vote on it, nor was Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), one of eight Republican House sponsors of ENDA, but it doesn’t seem likely their presence would have shifted the outcome at all.

This is likely the bill’s last hurrah. In June, after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of companies like Hobby Lobby exercising religious privileges as corporations, many LGBT groups abandoned support for ENDA because of its religious exemptions. Since then, they have been emphasizing the need for a more comprehensive approach to LGBT protections — in not only employment, but in housing, credit, and public accommodations as well.

Next week, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin will speak at the Center for American Progress about the need for an LGBT civil rights act that includes all of these protections. This new goal will likely leave ENDA, with its employment-only focus and exemptions allowing for religious discrimination to continue, in the dustbin of history.

It’s unlikely that any LGBT protections will advance in the next two years while Congress is under the control of Republicans, but a new focus on ideal legislation for truly protecting LGBT people from discrimination will allow for new opportunities to educate both lawmakers and the general public about the need for such laws.

The post Republicans Defeat Bill Securing Employment Protections For LGBTs Without Debate appeared first on ThinkProgress.

As protesters hit the streets in New York City and around the country Wednesday night, Congressman Peter King (R-NY) appeared on CNN and delivered an extended defense of the police killing of Eric Garner. King said that the officer, who employed an illegal chokehold to bring Garner down, was just doing his job. Ultimately, King pins says Garner was actually responsible for his own death: “If he had not had asthma, and a heart condition, and was so obese, he would not have died from this.”

On Twitter, King personally thanked the grand jury for not indicting the officer and “doing justice.”

The post Congressman Says Eric Garner Is Responsible For His Own Death: He ‘Was So Obese’ appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Five St. Louis Rams players held their own Ferguson protest before their game Sunday afternoon, walking onto the field during pre-game introductions with their hands raised above their heads in the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” pose that has become a fixture of the protests that followed the police killing of teenager Michael Brown in August.

Rams wide receivers Tavon Austin, Stedman Bailey, Chris Givens, and Kenny Britt and tight end Jared Cook, all black, entered the field ahead of the rest of their teammates with their hands raised in the air.

Britt also wrote Brown’s name and “My Kids Matter” on the wrist tape he wore during the game, as he posted on Instagram afterward:

A photo posted by Kenny Britt (@kennybritt18) on Nov 11, 2014 at 2:45pm PST

Now, the St. Louis Police Officers Association wants the NFL to take action against the players, saying in a statement that it was “profoundly disappointed with the members of the St. Louis Rams football team who chose to ignore the mountains of evidence released from the St. Louis County Grand Jury this week and engage in a display that police officers around the nation found tasteless, offensive and inflammatory.”

“The SLPOA is calling for the players involved to be disciplined and for the Rams and the NFL to deliver a very public apology,” the statement said, adding that officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Brown, had been “exonerated” when a grand jury declined to bring charges against him last week.

The statement ends with a note from the union’s business manager, Jeff Roorda, warning the NFL against “violent thugs” protesting in Ferguson.

“I’d remind the NFL and their players that it is not the violent thugs burning down buildings that buy their advertiser’s products,” Roorda said. “It’s cops and the good people of St. Louis and other NFL towns that do. Somebody needs to throw a flag on this play. If it’s not the NFL and the Rams, then it’ll be cops and their supporters.”

Roorda is a former police officer who has pushed back against reform ideas that have become popular in the wake of Brown’s death, including the idea that police should wear body cameras. Roorda, a Missouri state representative who lost a state senate race in November, also helped run a fundraising campaign for Wilson. According to the Los Angeles Times, he has previously advocated for legislation that would have kept the names of police officers involved in shootings secret unless charges were brought against them.

Sacramento Kings guard Ben McLemore, a native of St. Louis, also paid tribute to Brown by writing “RIP Mike Brown” on his shoes during Sunday’s game against the Memphis Grizzlies.

The post St. Louis Police Want Rams Players Punished For Pre-Game Ferguson Protest appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Chris Rock wants you to stop talking about "black progress," and consider "white progress" instead.

In an interview with Frank Rich of Vulture, he says "to say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before." He goes on:

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years... The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

Those last two sentences are at once sad, hilarious and quantifiably true. If Barack Obama had been born fifty years earlier, for instance, he would literally have had zero chance of becoming president - in 1958, only 38 percent of Americans said they would vote for a black presidential candidate, according to Gallup. By 2012, that number was 96 percent.

That 58 percentage point change didn't happen because blacks somehow became smarter and more qualified relative to whites during that period, but rather because many -- although by no means all -- white Americans abandoned the overt prejudices that kept talented blacks from getting ahead.

The General Social Survey, a massive public opinion poll conducted since 1972, documents some of these changes in white attitudes. In 1972, for instance, nearly two-thirds of whites said homeowners should be able to discriminate against blacks when selling their homes. That number fell to 28 percent by 2008.

The share of white Americans who would disapprove a family member's marriage to a black person has fallen rapidly since the 1990s, yet remains rather astonishingly high. Fully one quarter of whites said they would oppose such a marriage in 2008, the same year America elected the son of a white mother and a black father to the highest office in the land.

More than four-in-ten white Americans still say whites are more hardworking than blacks, and one-in-five say whites are more intelligent. Similarly, a majority of whites say that lack of willpower among blacks is driving racial inequality, and one-in-ten say that blacks are poor simply because of a lesser ability to learn.

As I alluded above, you can read these charts two ways: as a story of changing white attitudes -- "becoming nicer" -- over time, or as a marker of just how much progress remains to be made.

It's hard to look at these numbers and conclude that we somehow live in a "post-racial" society, or to believe, as a majority of whites do, that racism against whites is as big a problem as racism against blacks. We often speak of racism now as an "implicit" rather than an explicit problem -- that the subconscious biases we all hold have created a society of "racism without racists." (Don't believe this? Go take an implicit bias test and let me know how you do).

But numbers like the 25 percent of white Americans who would be upset by an interracial marriage in the family show that racism is still a very explicit phenomenon. Since we know that people have a tendency to tell pollsters what they think they want to hear, these numbers are likely undercounts, and potentially large ones.

"Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people," Chris Rock says. It's not going to be easy.

Nina Simone’s work, eclectic and nuanced, continually surprises. Her rendition of Jacques Brel’s “The Desperate Ones” is one of countless such displays. A delicate and poetic gem (which appeared on our November mix), the tune closes out Simone’s 1969 LP Nina Simone and Piano! The title is literal: it features only her voice and piano. Released between […]

When the news broke that the grand jury in Ferguson would not indict Officer Darren Wilson for shooting and killing teenager Michael Brown, Brown’s stepfather Louis Head had an emotional, angry reaction that was caught on video by the New York Times. “Burn this motherf***** down. Burn this b**** down,” Head repeatedly yelled. All around him, hundreds of people had similar reactions, and as news of the decision spread, some demonstrators set fire to cars and local business.

The footage of Head’s outcry went viral, and conservative media outlets picked it up and began referencing it in interview with officials, pressing them on whether they would take action. Then, in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson announced that his team was investigating whether or not to charge Head with inciting a riot.

In a statement released today, Head apologized, and explained: “I was so angry and full of raw emotions, as so many others were, and granted, I screamed out words that I shouldn’t have screamed in the heat of the moment.” He added, “I’ve lived in this community for a long time. The last thing I truly wanted was to see it go up in flames.”

Many legal experts, including Emeritus Professor of Law Vernellia Randall at the University of Dayton, are pointing out several problems with the case.

“I’m not sure the intent element can be met, mainly because his reaction was more of a spontaneous, emotional reaction that doesn’t come from him thinking out and planning to start a riot,” she told ThinkProgress. “Maybe if he went home and cooled down and came back and said the same thing, it would be different. Then there’s the causation problem. You would have to prove his words directly caused the riot.”

Under Missouri law, rioting itself is only a misdemeanor, not a felony. It would require police prove Head “knowingly assembled” with six or more other persons “and agreed with such persons to violate any of the criminal laws of this state or of the United States with force or violence.” As Michael Brown’s parents and others have pointed out, riots began long before the grand jury decision was announced.

Randall added that it’s inappropriate for law enforcement to publicly name anyone they’re investigating, especially in an environment of heightened tension between the community and the police.

“Like any criminal case, once you say you’re investigating someone, there’s an implication they did something wrong. That stigma is hard to get rid of, even if you’re never found guilty,” she said. “They haven’t released the names of other people, so they sort of are singling him out. The police could have said, ‘We don’t want to comment on any particular person, because we haven’t decided what to do.’ But they kind of added fuel to the whole idea that he should be indicted.”

Organizations on the ground, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri, say besides the legal problems with such an investigation, it sends a bad message at a sensitive time.

“Putting scarce resources and efforts into an investigation of Michael Brown’s stepfather is a poor policy choice, and it takes time and attention away from fixing real issues the shooting brought forth, like the fact that if you’re African American you’re more likely to be stopped by police, searched and arrested,” said Jeffrey Mittman, the Executive Director of ACLU of Missouri. “Police have a responsibility to serve their community, and that includes focusing on the healing of the community.”

Mittman compared the announcement of this investigation to the police’s decision earlier this fall to release the video of Michael Brown allegedly shoplifting from a convenience store. Mittman said like that video, this investigation into incitement of a riot is a distraction from the deeper issues at hand. “To see that pattern repeated is incredibly disappointing,” he said.

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