Bill Clinton

I haven’t watched much of the Democratic Convention. But I rushed home to watch Bill Clinton. I am not a fan. Never have been. But you are blessed to see Michael Jordan take the last shot to win the NBA Championship You do not miss Tiger Woods sink a birdie on the 18th hole to win the U.S. Open. And you don’t miss the best politician of his generation redeem his reputation and hand off the baton of leadership to the first African-American President. His speech tonight was nothing less than brilliant. He is the best example why we force Presidents from office after eight years. He could be President for life.

Imagine

Imagine two young children in the ghetto of Chicago. Imagine them talking through a thin wall dividing a small bedroom into two. Imagine their father shouting from his bed, "didn’t I tell you to go to bed." Imagine two young minds born into working poverty but refusing to be limited by it. Now imagine the older brother introducing the younger sister as the next First Lady of America at the Democratic Convention.

Imagine

Only In America.

Tropic Thunder Is Racist, Insulting And Damn Funny

Now I certainly understand why the mentally disable are pissed off at Ben Stiller recently released movie Tropic Thunder and the "Simple Jack" character. It is offensive. Let me apologize to the mentally disabled and their advocates but I laughed my ass off. And I don't feel bad because the darts are really turned at egotistical actors who jump at the chance to play "Simple Jack" because the Academy has a history of rewarding those performances -Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, Sean Penn. This movie is aimed squarely at Hollywood and the fact that it will "peddle us any kind of shit and call it" entertainment -remember Howard Beal of Network.

I am a Robert Downey fan and if he was bold enough to play black-face in this politically correct culture, then I was bold enough plop down my eight dollars. Downey did not disappoint. At times I squirmed at watching him but he is so good, and the movie is so funny. Besides it is 2008 and a black guy is about to be President.Even black people should lighten up -no pun intended. Tom Cruise is in the movie and I don't want to ruin it for you, but he should be nominated for an Oscar.

I have said numerous times that Art by nature must be offensive. Ben Stiller certainly went in with that thought. But After eight years of Bush, Iraq War, high gas prices, and foreclosures, we deserve to go into a large room together, turn down the lights and laugh our asses off at each other and our own callousness at accepting any 'shit" that Hollywood gives as entertainment.

Trifling Ass Negroes Are Uptown Too

I cannot believe that Martin Luther King died on a balcony to liberate Kwame Kilpatrick from a sex scandal. Nor, can I believe Malcolm X left a widow and young children so Sharpe James could sell his mistress city property at a low ball figure and she in within months resell it for thousands of dollars in profit. Did Thurgood Marshall spend his life liberating us so two black judges in Shreveport could be indicted and found guilty of taking bribes for as little as one hundred fifty dollars to lower bonds? Did my mother and father carry me to civil rights rallies so Congressman Bill Jefferson of New Orleans could run for reelection under the cloud of an indictment?

It is not enough that our community is subjected to street hoodlums cruising our urban streets like characters in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clock Work Orange, imposing random violence on the poor. We are now being sold into economic bondage by a predatory political class that see black folks as no more than a commodity to be packaged to white politicians unable or unwilling deal with us as equals. . Paulo Friere in Pedagogy of The Oppressed wrote that the danger of the revolution is that the revolutionary soon comes to resemble the Oppressor.

Does Detroit, the most depressed city in America needs to see its mayor pleading to a judge that he had to violate his bond so he could save the city from impending financial doom, rising sea levels and aliens? Watching Kilpatrick performance in court as he explained his behavior was looking at a walking definition of a narcissistic sociopath. The Appellate court let him out of jail only to see the DA bring additional felony charges against him for committing a battery on a Sheriff Deputy attempting to serve him a legal document. The citizens of Detroit would be safer if the Appellate Court would have upheld the trial judge and let his ass sit in jail.

I know Bill Jefferson personally. He is an extremely intelligent man, who lifted himself from intense poverty and brought his brothers and sisters along with him. Jefferson sent t his daughters to Harvard Law School and built the largest black law firm in the south. Jefferson is a tall man, whose eyes are constantly darting over you, as if he were a predator sizing you up for his next meal. It is hard to feel at ease in his company. Dutch Morial the first black mayor of New Orleans in a viscous mayoral primary 30 years ago, put Jefferson picture on thousands of fake dollar bills and labeled him Dollar-Bill Jeff. Every day since, Jefferson has tried to live up to that moniker.

Jefferson was indicted for “running a criminal enterprise” out of his congressional office. His brother Mose has been indicted too, along with two of Jefferson sisters, one of which is cooperating with the Government. And other family members maybe facing the same fate.

With all of the chaos surrounding Jefferson, he has the audacity of hope that he will be re-elected in November. New Orleans is still teetering from the greatest natural disaster ever to hit an American city, needs Bill Jefferson as their representative in Congress? Truth is Louisiana and New Orleans politics are so bizarre that Jefferson just might make it. You see Dutch Morial son Mark Morial, who too was elected mayor sits in New York as President of the Urban League watching uneasily as a steady stream of his family members and close political associates too go off to jail.

What is despicable is that when these predatory, Armani wearing, Mercedes driving, second home in the Caribbean living, Hampton partying negroes get caught, they always wrap themselves in the blanket woven by Fannie Lou Hammers’ pain of being sterilized without her permission or Emmitt Till laying in a open casket in Chicago beaten beyond recognition, or Andrew young pointing on a Memphis Balcony to where the assassin bullet rang out -killing a dream, or a lone black farmer standing in front of a court house in searing heat -in some rural county down south, that might as well be on another planet in distance from any protection, disobeying the letter tacked to his tree the night before telling him “nigger don’t you show up tomorrow to vote”.

I could understand these trifling ass Negroes more, if they would just be the motherfucking thieves that they are and leave us out of it. The New York Times ran a story today, titled “Is Barack Obama The End Of Black Politics.” I certainly hope so.

Even Jeffrey Wright Is Not Immune

When will the citizens of this community stand up and say "enough" and demand that a mayor and city council finally hire a police chief with the guts to bring true reform to the Shreveport Police Department by removing a rogue element that operates outside any norms of a civilized society? Maybe an Obama Justice Department will have the intestinal fortitude to do what District Attorney and Congressional Candidate Paul Carmouche and a string of U.S. Attorneys could not or would not do: prosecute police officers who brutalize and, yes sometimes murder their fellow citizens.

Jeffrey Wright is one of America’s most accomplished actors. Praised by the New York Times as the best actor on Broadway and considered by some as the best actor of his generation, Wright was subjected to the black man’s nightmare in our fair city. Like so many other black men in Shreveport and this country, Mr. Wright found himself lying on a street corner being repeatedly tasered, cursed, and called nigger by high-tech vigilantes paid with taxpayers dollars. I know this because I have talked to sources who have seen the police video and cell phone videos.

Mr. Wright you are lucky your encounter happened in front of a crowded nightclub and not an isolated street corner. Marquise Hudsmith was not so lucky. He was shot dead for waiving a cell phone on a dark street. I have posted the video below but I warn you it is so barbaric it sickens the soul.



Just two months ago, a Shreveport Police Officer staked out a burglary, watched a young man go into a furniture store and never called for backup. When the young man came out the store carrying stolen items, the officer shot the young man in the back killing him and then reported he used his car as a weapon. By the way this same officer has been involved in two other shootings one of them fatal and all involved a victim allegedly using his vehicle as a weapon. This officer has been on the force less than nine years. Most police officers go their whole career without pulling their weapon from their holster.

There have been numerous other police shootings in recent years including an invalid wheel-chair bound man, who was wheeling himself down a street and ended up being shot and killed after a "routine traffic stop” by Shreveport Police.

Now I know your friends on the Upper Westside will stereotype the city and police force as a bunch of racist rednecks but I am sure you will tell them that the city is majority African-American with a black mayor and police chief. And there are African-American officers who brutalize citizens with the same vigor as Bull Connors a generation ago. I sued the city when a black officer raped my client in the back seat of his police cruiser. He was a serial rapist who kept a rape kit of KY Jelly, gloves and condoms in the trunk and had been stalking women for years. A bad police force cuts across race and gender. They just bad.

Some of us in the African-American community thought the election of Cedric Glover and the hiring of Henry Whitehorn would bring a greater sensitivity to this problem. But we should have known better when one of Glover’s first official acts was to declare April Confederate History Month. His and Whitethorn’s failure to take on the Police Union and root out a small but dangerous criminal element operating within the Department is a betrayal of the thousands of citizens, some of them who had never voted before , who went to the polls to vote for something different.

What they got instead is a police chief and mayor who no matter what criminal activity police officers indulge in, they within 24 hours declare the ‘OFFICERS WERE JUSTIFIED.” What does a officer have to do to violate policy and be fired? Get caught on video, wearing a Klu, Klux Klan outfit, and sticking a cattle prod up a citizens' ass?

Mr. Mayor, whoever is advising you to hold the police cruiser and cell phone videos from the public should be fired immediately. They are incompetent and by you following their advice, it makes you look just as incompetent. By taking the position that you will not release the videos, further undermines the citizens' confidence in you, your police chief and the other 95 percent of outstanding police officers that go to work every day and risk their lives for little pay, so we can believe that we are safe.

Eventually, the truth will come out and you would have surrendered the moral authority of your office. And, for what? Do you not know that eventually those videos will have to be released and the world - through YouTube and the Internet- will judge you and the city in ways you cannot imagine?

Mr. Wright, I have no idea whether you broke the law that night and deserved to be arrested. But I do know you did not deserve to be brutalized, repeatedly tasered as you lay on the ground and be called a nigger. It may not mean much to you but a lot of citizens are truly sorry and extend to you an apology. They offer the same apology to Mr. Brolin and the dozens of other citizens who have suffered from the police this year.

Perhaps Oliver Stone's next movie could be about rogue officers in a police department down South that routinely brutalize and even murders its citizens and is protected by a District Attorney, Mayor, Police Chief and the silence of its citizens. It will not make as much money as Dark Knight or “W”, but it is a story worth telling.