Meet The 17-Year-Old Who Blew The Lid Off 

Racial Profiling

This video was made to show what the New York Police Department (NYPD) and their controversial Stop and Frisk program are doing to the residents there. The majority of the stops made by the NYPD are made on people of color (POC) although, as you'll see in the video, they do include some who are not of color. (In my opinion, the few they treat this way are known to be with POC , actually seen with POC, or behave in some way that personally irritates a member of the NYPD.) Because it was made there does not mean that what happens to New York City residents does not happen anywhere else, so don't breathe a sigh of relief because you don't live there! We may hear more about New York for whatever reason, but it happens in other cities all across the country, and as long as nothing is done to knock the upper echelon officers giving the orders down a peg or two, it will continue. And I don't mean literally knock them down; I mean do what this young man did. Sooner or later the police will come to realize that they can never know if they are being recorded or not, and that not all POC are going to just accept anything. Just maybe they'll stop thinking they are above the law and can stomp on all of us anytime they see fit.

Being a woman of color who is a recovering addict and has lived in the 'inner city' I'm quite familiar with racial profiling and how helpless it can make a person feel. It's degrading and humiliating, and it strips a person of their dignity as a human being, sort of like the way slavery did so many years ago. Back then, they wanted  people of color to feel that way so that they would be subservient, do as they were told without making any fuss, and if it meant beating them to make them submit, then so be it. That's what this audiotape makes me think of. There are times that the tape is extremely hard to listen to; for those like myself who are very sensitive, it may almost make you cry. It's sad that this is what is going on, and even sadder that so many are still trying to deny its existence even though the world knows better! We need more people like this young man to do whatever they have to do to shine a light on what is happening, to strip all the euphemisms and lies away and expose it for what it really is.

* If you live in New York City and want to keep the NYPD honest, download the Stop & Frisk app to record your encounter like Alvin did.

Credits:Original By The Nation. 

Found on the inimitable Dominic Powell's Facebook page 

by Alvin Meathe of Upworthy.

So This Is Their Next Weapon Against Obama??

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash.

     GOP Taps Its Top Woman, Mom of Three, for Obama Rebuttal  

 By Carrie Dann, Political Reporter, NBC News

After hearing from the leader of the free world at Tuesday’s State of the Union address, Americans will hear a rebuttal from a woman unfamiliar to many of them.
Most of the national television audience hasn’t heard of Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the highest-ranking Republican woman in Washington, D.C. and the standard-bearer tasked with delivering the GOP response to President Barack Obama’s address. But Republicans hope that she’ll make an impression with her unapologetically conservative message, her journey from humble origins to the U.S. Capitol, and her family-friendly biography as a busy mother of three young children.
   (To read the article in its entirety, click here. )

     One of the things I truly never liked about the Republican party, other than their total lack of human compassion for anyone other than themselves, is the way they have of believing that money, power, and position make them smarter than everyone else. They think that they can run roughshod over anyone in the country they choose, and they will not only make them accept it but eventually come to think it's a good move!! They think they can take away all the things that to many people are their lifeline, but to them are 'crutches' (Social Security, Medicaid, food stamps, etc.) and we are supposed to think it's a great idea. They think they can force women to bear children conceived in rape because 'if it really was rape her body would take care of it' (sound familiar?). Don't forget one of the most recent, they wanted to hold the country hostage until all the poor people who cannot afford health insurance had their one hope of getting it snatched away! There are so many things they have done that I am not even going to try listing them, it would take me two days to get this blog out and then no one would read it because A. It would be too long; and B. It would be too repetitious. I think we're all familiar with their antics. 
     Now, they seem to be under the impression that in order to make women swing to their side of the fence, all they have to do is bring in a woman that most of us have never heard of to respond to President Obama's speech. Oh yes, that's all it will take to make me jump right over into their camp, bring a woman who is "the highest ranking Republican woman in Washington, D.C.", a woman whose income is enough to raise a special needs child and two others comfortably and still work everyday, a woman who obviously doesn't have to worry about affording daycare, a woman who had the choice to do what she wanted with her own body but doesn't want anyone else to have it; listening to this woman is going to make me have an epiphany and suddenly become Republican?? How can the male-dominated society that is the GOP be so stupid? How can they really think that women are going to wholeheartedly jump en masse on the bandwagon behind this woman? How can I relate to her? The answer is, Mr. Republican know-it-all, I can't. You deciding to have this woman do the rebuttal means absolutely nothing to me, other than confirm to me once again, just how out of touch your whole party is with what is really going on in this country. Go back to the drawing room with your cigars boys, and take your "highest ranking Republican woman" with you.

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This post is completely the opinion of the author, who has no connection whatsoever with President Obama, his staff, the White House, or any political entity, other than as a voter.

Why Are We Always So Quick To Believe the "Children"?

The title of the video read:

Woman Forced Daughter Out In The Cold So She Could Smoke Crack

You can watch it here.

My interest was piqued by this for several reasons, not the least of them being that as a recovered 'rock star' (slang for crack addict), woman, and mother I could not see how anyone could be that addicted to crack that they would force their child outdoors in the frigid temperatures we just had! And I'm not saying that they wouldn't do it because of these great  motherly instincts; although the majority keep them, a lot of women out there lost any type of motherly instincts they had the first time they hit the pipe! No, they wouldn't do it because they would know that they could get arrested, and who would want to have their high ended with that booming knock on the door, and the accusation of child abuse? (For those saying "maybe she just wanted the rock that bad" I say bullshit! If she wanted the rock that bad, not her daughter, her mother, or St. Peter from the Pearly Gates would have mattered, she would have smoked right in front of them if she had to! That's too much time away from smoking, having to make someone go outside! lol) So anyway, I digress...

I can say honestly not only did none of my children ever see me actually using (but yes, perhaps they saw me after I'd used) I would have never dreamed of making them go outside! I might have gone in the bathroom and 'taken a long hot bubble bath' (ha ha ha) but no way would they have left, and I would have left and found somewhere else before I would have had one of my children do it! This is what made it so hard for me to take that headline seriously; I thought it would be something like in The Enquirer, where the headlines are based in truth, but it's been twisted around so much you don't even recognize it anymore. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. This woman is accused of sending her 16 year old child to her aunt's house a mile away, in the temperatures we had from that polar snap last week.  The daughter claims that her mother FORCED her to leave so that she could smoke crack. 

Okay, now I have to get a little bit racist here for a moment; please don't jump up and down people, it's just for the sake of the story. If we were talking about little blonde and blue-eyed, 110 lb Pollyanna from Mayberry, I could possibly believe it, but then we didn't have crack in Mayberry, did we? No, we're talking about a 16 year old, (probably) about 140 lbs, taller than her mother,  and if she had enough gumption to go to the police and cry "Crack!" then she also had enough to tell her mother "It is 16" below out there, I ain't going nowhere less you get me a ride!" They don't give all the details, but it does say that the mother's claim is that she told the daughter she could go if she wanted to. Now I'm not defending the mother at all, if crack was involved, then mom is guilty of something, if only not having good damn sense. But in my opinion, the scenario probably went something like this: Mom, (with or without company, with or without crack) in the bedroom, door shut. Daughter in her room or in the living room, bored to death, wants to go out somewhere. She asks Mom, who naturally says "Girl, get the hell away from my door asking them stupid questions! You know they said shouldn't nobody be outdoors!" and goes back to whatever she was doing. Daughter getting upset, she tired of sitting in the house, wants to go to So-and-so's, but nobody has a ride and Mom won't take her cause she busy in the bedroom. After a couple more tries, which get more and more heated cause Mom getting fed up, she hollers at daughter "Look you not gonna keep bothering me with this dumb stuff! You go wherever you want, I don't care. Bet you won't make it far as your aunt's house before you be running back in here crying cause it's too cold!" Well, daughter upset now, cause she wanted Mom to take her, not to call her bluff! So, she decides she can do it, she'll call her mother's bluff! She bundles up, goes outside, and immediately regrets it, but she can't go back in cause then her mother will have been right to tell her to stay in the house. What does she do? Decides she can't tell anyone it was her idea to come outside cause they'd say she was stupid, so she'll tell them it was her mother's fault! Yeah, great idea, and they'll believe her because she's a child, and they always believe the children in these cases!

So bam. We've got a mother under $1000 bond, in jail, and a daughter who might lose some skin and maybe meat from her hands for staying out there that long.  I AM NOT SAYING THIS IS THE STORY, please don't think that, it's merely one hypothesis that COULD have happened. My point is, the child knows that we always believe the child and uses that to her advantage!  IF it happened that way she's not the first, and I'm sure won't be the last! How many cases have we heard about with children coming forward and saying they were beaten, or raped, or locked in a closet, when nothing actually happened, all because they were mad at one or both of their parents and wanted to get back at them? It used to be "I'll run away, that will fix them", now it's "I'll call the police, that will fix them" and it's that way because we always believe the child! Now, in the case of a younger child, sure I can see it; most of them are not grown enough to lie about things like that. A 16 year old though? Come on! And we are the ones who gave them the power to do it! There are kids who are being abused, but there are also kids who, for lack of attention, or to get even with someone will lie about being abused, and we need to work on finding a way to tell the difference between the two. In my opinion, we can't listen to the so-called 'child experts' that are out here now, they're the ones who told us that spanking our children is wrong and it makes them dysfunctional, and kids should be able to call the police and send us to jail for disciplining them. To those 'experts' I say Hooey! Try getting on a public transit system, bus or train, in any major city, and see how many of these children have manners, don't swear at you, and will offer their seat in senior seating to an elderly or disabled person. If you're lucky, you might see one, and that's usually the one that is alone because the other kids make fun of them. Now if that's not enough to make a child dysfunctional I don't know what is!

I know I've really rambled here, this is one of those subjects that just drives me nutz. We accept whatever these kids say and punish the parents who really, may have done nothing wrong except in the child's mind when they were denied something that they wanted. (Again I state, I am not talking about this case specifically, I DO NOT KNOW what happened here!) The only thing I'm saying about this case is that me personally, I would not immediately jump to take the girl's word for what happened, there would  be a lot of investigation into the entire case and the history of their relationship before I  decided on what to do. If the mother did do what the daughter said, then throw the book at her, but if they find she didn't, I'd say daughter needs some intense, inpatient mental treatment, rid her of whatever it is that would make her do something like that to her parent.