Breaking: Stan McGee “Abruptly” Resigns as Massachusetts Gaming Commission Head

Posted: May 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Breaking News, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , | 11 Comments

Carl Stanley (“Stan”) McGee

The Boston Globe reports:

The newly appointed interim head of the state gaming commission abruptly resigned Wednesday night, saying that the ‘‘growing distractions’’ created by allegations of sexual abuse against him had made it impossible to be effective in the job.

In a message to the board, Carl Stanley McGee said that ‘‘after much personal thought’’ he decided to step down to let the commission ‘‘get on with the important public business of job creation and economic development it was created to perform.’’

Board chairman Stephen Crosby, who had staunchly defended McGee’s appointment as interim executive director and had called the 2007 abuse allegations ‘‘meritless’’ and ‘‘warrantless,’’ said Wednesday night that he agreed with McGee’s decision.

On Sunday, I wrote a post about McGee: The Story of Stan McGee: More Evidence that Children Are Expendable in America.

In 2007, while he was on vacation in Florida, McGee was arrested and charged with sexual assault on a 15-year-old boy. The charges were later dropped, but the boy’s parents filed a civil suit against McGee, and the suit was settled in their favor.

Criticism of the appointment had been building after several articles about the alleged assault appeared in local newspapers. According to the Globe,

The resignation by McGee capped a day of mounting criticism over the decision by the board to offer him the job without thoroughly investigating the abuse allegations.

The article suggests that the Commission had decided to hold up the appointment while it did a thorough background check on McGee.

A spokeswoman for the commission hinted the agency might hold up the appointment while it conducts a background check on McGee — even though Crosby has previously said that he and other board members had looked into McGee’s record and found it ‘‘pristine.’’

The spokeswoman, Karen Schwartzman did not return messages from the Globe, but she told New England Cable News host Jim Braude that ‘‘after voting to extend an offer to Mr. McGee, the vote made clear that it was subject to passing a background check. … The background check for Mr. McGee is under way and is not complete yet. Mr. McGee won’t be on the commission payroll until such time as the background check is complete.’’

McGee will return to his post as assistant secretary for policy and planning in Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration. Maybe it’s time the Governor also did a background check on McGee.

ALEC Announces It Will No Longer Focus on Social Issues

Posted: April 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: American Gun Fetish, Breaking News, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, fundamentalist Christians, Human Rights, legislation, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , | 27 Comments

ALEC has sent out a press release announcing a very significant change in its organizational structure and goals. The headline: ALEC Sharpens Focus on Jobs, Free Markets and Growth — Announces the End of the Task Force that Dealt with Non-Economic Issues. Here’s the gist:

“We are refocusing our commitment to free-market, limited government and pro-growth principles, and have made changes internally to reflect this renewed focus.

“We are eliminating the ALEC Public Safety and Elections task force that dealt with non-economic issues, and reinvesting these resources in the task forces that focus on the economy. The remaining budgetary and economic issues will be reassigned….

“Our free-market, limited government, pro-growth policies are the reason ALEC enjoys the support of legislators on both sides of the aisle and in all 50 states. ALEC members are interested in solutions that put the American economy back on track. This is our mission, and it is what distinguishes us.”

Except those really aren’t the reasons ALEC was founded. The brains behind ALEC were Paul Weyrich, who also founded the Heritage Foundation and joined with Jerry Falwell to found Moral Majority, and other right wing legislators focused on social issues like Henry Hyde.

One of the first to envision fusing the conservative movement with evangelicals, he and the Rev. Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority as well. In fact, Weyrich coined the phrase the “moral majority”. No believer in majority rule, he said: “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” His statement was a harbinger to ALEC’s later very dogged voter suppression activities. “Recently Voter ID legislation based on ALEC’s template was introduced in states across the country and passed in at least fourteen states,” under the guise of preventing election fraud.

So voter suppression was part of the organization’s charter, apparently.

ALEC’s model legislation has been instrumental in the explosive growth of the prison population. It helped pioneer “three strikes” laws, mandatory minimum sentencing laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws, which serve to abolish or curb parole so converts are made to serve the entire length of their sentence. “Because of truth-in-sentencing and other tough sentencing measures, state prison populations grew by half a million inmates in the 1990s even while crime rates fell dramatically.” In fact, one of ALEC’s benefactors, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), made an offer to cash- strapped states to buy up their prison populations at a cost savings as long as the state kept their prisons 90 percent filled to capacity.

And of course ALEC was behind the Stand Your Ground laws that have become such a big issue since the Trayvon Martin shooting.

And now ALEC is dropping this part of their agenda. This is a huge victory for anyone who care about human rights.

Breaking: George Zimmerman to be Charged in Trayvon Martin Shooting

Posted: April 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Breaking News, Crime, racism | Tags: , , , , , , | 28 Comments

Florida Special Prosecutor Angela Corey

Florida Special Prosecutor Angela Corey will hold a press conference at 6PM today to announce state charges against George Zimmerman, who admitted to shooting Miami high school student Trayvon Martin on the evening of February 26 as he returned to the home of his father’s fiancee in a gated community in Sanford, Florida. Sanford Police released Zimmerman the same night, apparently believing his claim that he killed Martin in self-defenst

Multiple news sources are saying there will be charges filed against Zimmerman, but not what crime he will be charged with. Corey had told reporters on Tuesday night that she would give them three hours notice before she announced new details in the Trayvon Martin case.

ABC News:

The prosecutor’s ruling is certain to provoke controversy in Sanford, Fla., where shooting took place and across the country.

Zimmerman, 28, a white Hispanic neighborhood watch captain, shot and killed Martin, who was 17 and black, on Feb. 26 after following the teenager for several minutes.

The special prosecutor’s ruling came one day after Zimmerman’s legal team quit because they had lost contact with him, and suggested that the pressure of the case had “pushed him over the edge.”

His lawyers said that Zimmerman was no longer in Florida and ABC News has learned that prosecutors do not know his exact location.

I’m hoping that Corey knows where Zimmerman is. His former attorneys had said earlier that he would willingly turn himself in if a decision were made to charge him. Will he follow through on the promise now that he has reportedly gone rogue?

State tuned. I’ll update this post with any new information that I can find.

RIP Newsman Mike Wallace

Posted: April 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Breaking News | Tags: , | 3 Comments

Mike Wallace has died.

I will remember Mike Wallace this way: a pioneer in news and in breaking the silence about depression:

There’s no shame in having it.

Mike Wallace Interview Photo

Mike Wallace interviewed singer Tina Turner at her home in Nice during the summer of 1996. (Courtesy of Mike Wallace)

Mike Wallace: There’s about as much shame as getting Scarlet Fever. No, there is no shame whatsoever.

Tipper Gore also went public in the last couple of years. Her depression was also triggered by an event in her life, a very serious injury to one of her children. That is something a lot of people don’t realize, that there can be a triggering incident. That doesn’t mean it’s not clinical depression.

Mike Wallace: Or genetics can trigger it. A shocking event, the loss of a job, the loss of a marriage, there are all kinds of things. It may be latent in you. As I look back, I believe my mother probably had a tendency to that. But it can be treated, if people would pay attention to it, and when they are given some kind of medication, stick with it. Find the right recipe and stick with it. Sometimes it takes a little while to catch.

 

via the New York Times Media Decoder blog:

Mike Wallace, ’60 Minutes’ Pioneer, Dies
By BRIAN STELTER
Mike Wallace, a pioneer of American broadcasting who confronted leaders and liars for the newsmagazine “60 Minutes” for four decades, has died, CBS News said Sundaa morning. He was 93.

His death was announced on CBS by the anchor of its Sunday morning program, Charles Osgood. The network did not immediately specify when or where he died. Mr. Wallace had been ill for several years.

As one of the original correspondents and hosts of “60 Minutes,” which was started in 1968, Mr. Wallace helped to establish the television newsmagazine format. “60 Minutes” is now the most popular such program on American television.

Mr. Wallace was perhaps best known for ambush interviews of crooks and cheats. Mr. Wallace “invented a new paradigm for television news, creating a signature technique that would become a standard in the industry,” the biographer Peter Rader writes in a new book, “Mike Wallace: A Life.”

Mr. Wallace entered semi-retirement in 2006. He last appeared on “60 Minutes” in January 2008, when he had an exclusive interview with Roger Clemens, a baseball legend who had been accused of steroid use.

In interviews after he retired, Mr. Wallace said he would want his epigraph to read, “Tough But Fair.”

Eyes in the Sky

Posted: December 10, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Breaking News, Civil Liberties, Drone Warfare, Injustice system, Patriot Act, We are so F'd | Tags: , , | 8 Comments

For anyone who is not persuaded that this country has made a significant U-turn in terms of privacy, civil liberties and what we used to quaintly refer to as ‘freedom,’ this You Tube report is for you.  Hat tip to Democratic Underground on this particular find.

Personally, these drones scare the bejesus out of me.  But any public official saying that ‘nothing is ruled out’ when it comes to drone application in the domestic arena is even more frightening. It should also remind us that this is what perpetual war and disaster capitalism creates–a security industry for profit wrapped in secrecy and the American flag.

The Eyes in the Sky will be watching.  All of us.

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