July 22, 2014

‘Power Grab’ in Campaign Against Three Tennessee Judges Could Have National Implications

By Hazel Trice Edney

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – An attempt to unseat three judges in an upcoming Nashville, Tenn. election is nothing less than a “raw power grab” by right wing special interests using big money to buy control of the courts, says the head of a non-partisan organization of lawyers this week.

“It is a raw power grab is what it is. Their campaign against these justices are based on a series of lies, half-truths, misstatements and material omissions,” says Charles Grant, president of the bi-partisan Nashville Bar Association (NBA), which has endorsed the retention of the judges. “It has huge implications nationally because if they can do it here, they can do it anywhere.”

The situation involves three Tennessee Supreme Court Justices Cornelia A. Clark, Sharon Gail Lee and Gary R. Wade, all up for retention on the court by the vote on Aug. 7. They were originally appointed by Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen.

Opposing the judges are namely Republican Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey and other Republicans backed by wealthy political operatives, some from outside the state, including the billionaire Koch brothers of Wichita, Kans., according to widespread media reports. Among Ramsey’s tools is a 30-page Power Point that attempts to scare voters by claiming – in part – that the three judges are soft on the death penalty and “anti-business”.

Grant says the claims in the Power Point are blatantly false and undermines the integrity of the process.

“It is chock full of misstatements, it’s misleading, it has substantial omissions, sometimes it attributes to these judges opinions that were written by the Court of Appeals for example. And when confronted with all of this misleading information that he is putting out to the public about the quality of these justices’ work, he will come right out and say, ‘It’s not my job to tell their side of the story,’” says Grant, the NBA’s first Black president. “What is it that they hope to accomplish? They hope to control the court. That’s what they hope to accomplish. They don’t want independence. They want control.”

In Tennessee media reports, Ramsey has defended his conduct by saying, “I’m telling my side of the story and they’ll get to tell their side of the story. Every campaign tells half of the story…They tell their side of the story and the people decide.”

Adding to the difficulty of clarifying their records is the fact that judges can’t speak out to defend themselves in the same manner as someone running for a political office. Because of codes of conduct, they must appear impartial at all times and avoid public confrontations that could warrant a conflict of interest later. They can’t speak publically on specific cases. Neither can they ask for financial contributions.

Voters would need to research deeply to unearth the real facts pertaining to the three judges, Grant says. For example, though Ramsey contends they are soft on the death penalty, they have actually affirmed 90 percent of the death penalty cases before them, Grant says. As for the “anti-business” charge, “It is not the justices’ jobs to be leaning one way or the other. That is not what we want them to do. We want them to decide the cases based on the facts and the law without favor, without prejudice to one side or the other.”

The historic principles that have allowed for major progress in America are also at stake, Grant says.

“If Supreme Court judges had been subject to special interests, we would never have had Brown verses Board of Education. We would never have had the landmark decision that dismantled segregation and state-enforced discrimination through laws like Jim Crow and racially restrictive covenants and red-lining by banks and all of those things that enforce racism and racial oppression. So we need to have some kind of check on this power to make sure the basic constitutional rights and the bill of rights are protected.”

In a nutshell, the 40-year-old “merit selection” process by which judges are chosen in Tennessee is quite common in states across the U. S.  Candidates are intensely vetted through a bi-partisan nine-member judicial evaluation commission, which then recommends three judges to the governor for any vacancy on the Court of Appeals or Supreme Court.

When the eight-year term is up, the judges are re-evaluated by a commission which then makes a public recommendation on whether the judge should be retained. If the commission decides against the retainer, the judge is subject to a popular election. If the commission decides for the retainer; then the judges go on the ballot for the public to review their record and to review the recommendations and to determine whether or not they should be replaced.

After this rigorous process, Clark, Lee and Wade were all recommended for retainer by the commission of non-partisan lawyers and citizens. Yet, the judges are now under a partisan attack.

With the rigorous campaign to unseat and replace them, Grant fears the judges’ retention bids could realistically fail because of the potency of the smear campaign and the money that is backing it.

“It is about buying influence. They are going after these justices because these justices do not cow tow to special interests. They do their jobs. They call the balls and strikes as they see them,” Grant says. “When a special interest or group wants to target a judge, it’s kind of easy to identify, to take one of their one hundred opinions or whatever, to misstate the facts or misstate the law or completely mislead.”

Grant and the NBA are not alone in their advocacy for fairness in the process. On July 15, a bi-partisan group of district attorneys came forward to support the three judges saying they have outstanding records and deserve to be retained. Also, Republican Mickey Barker a former chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court, has been quoted as calling the anti-retention campaign “frightening” because it would turn the Tennessee Supreme Court into a "partisan branch of government."

Trial lawyer Lew Conner, also a Republican, recently held a fund-raiser of his own to assist the judges in their retention bid. “This is about a system being wrongfully attacked, and Ramsey is the attacker,” Conner was quoted in the Tennessee Watchdog.

Grant says the bi-partisan outrage is simply due to the knowledge that a politicized judiciary could lead to a rogue court which could make decisions based on political whims and allegiances instead of the facts of the cases before them.

He concludes, “Lawyers don’t want judges beholding to special interests. None of us do. Lawyers don’t want to walk into court thinking that the scales of justice are already tilted toward one party before we’ve had an opportunity to present our case,” Grant concludes. “The only way to win is to educate the population. If you want an independent judiciary; you have to understand when it’s under attack by partisan special interests.”

July 21, 2014

Cheney's Memory Lapse on Iraq as He Blames Obama 
By Dr. Wilmer J. Leon, III

News Analysis

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1967

“Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many. Too many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is "ending" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as though wishing made it so...”  - Dick and Liz Cheney, WSJ 2014

Former VP Cheney and his daughter Liz have recently been trying to blame President Obama for the failures in Iraq.  According to the Cheneys, “…the establishment of terrorist safe havens across a large swath of the Arab world, present a strategic threat to the security of the United States. Mr. Obama's actions—before and after ISIS's recent advances in Iraq—have the effect of increasing that threat.”

What the Cheney’s conveniently forgot or intentionally omitted from their analysis is the role that VP Cheney played in creating the “Iraq myth” and the “War on Terror”.

As he misused the events of 9-11 to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq, he conveniently omitted from that argument that the think-tank he co-founded, The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), had petitioned President Clinton as far back as 1998 to overthrow Saddam: “We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy…That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.”

Initiating that senseless invasion with over $816B wasted, 4,489 Americans killed and 32,021 wounded presented a much greater strategic threat to the security of the United States than the Cheneys will ever admit.

In 2004, Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) released “Iraq on the Record: The Bush Administration’s Public Statements on Iraq.” In this report Waxman highlights “237 specific misleading statements made by Bush Administration officials about the threat posed by Iraq. It contains statements that were misleading based on what was known to the Administration at the time the statements were made.”  VP Cheney made fifty-one of those “misleading” statements.

In his book The Shadow World, James Bamford writes, “After Cheney left the DOD in 1992, his appointment as CEO of Haliburton in 1995 led to a remarkable improvement in the company’s fortunes…Under Cheney’s five year leadership, Haliburton received…$1.5bn” in government credit guarantees. “Cheney was paid well for his services: for fifty-eight months he received $45m…some of these payments were made to him while he was Vice President” As the late Gil Scott-Heron wrote, “ask them what their fighting for and they’ll never tell you the economics of war…”

The Cheney’s also forgot to mention the role that the American overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 played in laying the groundwork for the rise of the “Islamic fundamentalism” that America finds itself battling around the globe.

Cheney’s failed attempt at revisionist history is bad enough in-and-of itself but it also speaks to a much larger issue.  The larger issue is the failure of the concept of Pax Americana when considered over a larger historical timeframe or the arc of the moral universe.

Pax Americana is a concept used to describe America’s ability to impact and direct world events through its post-WWII military and economic strength.  Concepts such as this and others such as manifest destiny and American exceptionalism have resulted in or at least contributed to many of the problems America faces today. In Blowback Chalmers Johnson wrote, “Instead of demobilizing after the Cold War, the US imprudently committed itself to maintaining a global empire.”

America is experiencing this Blowback with the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, the decimation of Iraq, the struggles with Iran, the resistance in Libya, and even an estimated 70,000 unaccompanied minors predicted to arrive at the US southern border by the end of 2014.

Any historical understanding of US foreign policy in Central America demonstrates that it is not an accident that as much as 74 percent of this new wave of unaccompanied minors are coming from three countries; Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.  US interventionist foreign policy has decimated the economies of these countries and created a climate of lawlessness and fear, forcing families and now children to flee for their lives.

In 1954, at the behest of the United Fruit Company the CIA orchestrated a coup d'état and overthrew Jacobo Arbens Guzman, the second democratically elected president of Guatemala.

In 1963, at the behest of United Brands (the company that absorbed United Fruit) the CIA orchestrated a coup d'état and overthrew Ramon Villeda Morales as he vowed to pass land reform laws in Honduras.

In 1981 the Reagan administration weighed into the civil war in El Salvador supporting the military and further destabilizing the country.

In 1852 Frederick Douglas said, “Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.”

Douglas’ analysis is as correct today as it was then. The tragedy is that the only people who cannot see this reality are Americans who are blinded by this false vision of Pax Americana.

In 1967 the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?”

As democratically elected presidents in Guatemala and Honduras worked to bring land reform to their people, the U.S. sided with the landlords.  As King said, “They must see Americans as strange liberators.”

Today, the unaccompanied minors at our Southern border are Malcolm’s “chickens coming home to roost”.  The unraveling of Iraq is the result of greed, failed logic, and a weak American democracy.  No matter how hard the Cheney’s try to impose or inflict their revisionist history upon the American narrative, they will fail; just as he did in Iraq.

Here’s why, “When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1967

Dr. Wilmer Leon is the Producer/ Host of the Sirius/XM Satellite radio channel 126 program “Inside the Issues with Wilmer Leon” Go to www.wilmerleon.com or email:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. www.twitter.com/drwleon and Dr. Leon’s Prescription at Facebook.com  © 2014 InfoWave Communications, LLC

July 21, 2014

Malala, a Taliban Victim, Finds Sisterhood With Nigeria's Missing Girls

Malala Yousafzai, right, is now advocating for the freedom and education of Nigerian girls.

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from Global Information Network

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – A Pakistani teen who survived certain death from a terrorist’s gunshot to her face has met with the mothers of Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by elements of the group Boko Haram.

On the first leg of a three day visit, Malala Yousafzai, now 17, and her father, Ziauddin, spoke with some of the mothers, telling them she saw the more than 200 kidnapped girls as her sisters and would stand up for them. Malala’s recovery led to her advocacy for education for girls.

Speaking with the Nigerian News Agency, she said: “On my 17th birthday, my wish is to see every child go to school and I want to see my Nigerian sisters being released from their abduction and I want them to be free to go to school and continue their education.”

Though it recently became the leading economy in Africa, Nigeria has one of the world's worst records for education. More than 10 million children aged between 6 and 11 are not in school. There is a shortage of more than 200,000 primary school teachers.

At a meeting this week with Malala, President Goodluck Jonathan disputed criticism that his government was not doing enough to find the girls. He called it "wrong and misplaced," according to a presidential statement.

Jonathan has not met with any of the parents, though some regularly make the dangerous drive from Chibok to join activists who have held daily rallies in Abuja.

Parents of the missing girls were quoted this week by The New York Times pleading for international support. “American, France, China, they say they are helping, but on the ground we don’t see anything,” said Lawan Zanah, father of one missing girls. His frustration was echoed by the school principal, Asabe Kwambura who feared that the international campaign #BringBackOurGirls was slacking.

“Continue the campaign,” she urged. “Our students are still living in the woods. We want the international community to talk to the government of Nigeria to do something because they are doing nothing.”

The government, the Times reports, has just hired an American public relations firm for $1.2 million. “That money could be better used to pay for security at schools,” observed Nicholas Kristof, Times journalist.

Meanwhile, a San Francisco-based charity promoting education for girls in Africa received $900,000 after articles that appeared in the Times. Camfed – or Campaign for Female Education – says the money will help 3,000 girls continue in high school across the continent.

July 21, 2014

Nation's Capital Has Conversation With the 'Mayor for Life'
By Amylia Johnson

Barry spoke about his life and his book at “A conversation with Marion Barry,” the first in a series of events
marking Washington Informer’s 50th anniversary. Informer publisher Denise Rolark Barnes (Right)
conducted the interview. PHOTO: Amylia Johnson

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Howard University News Service

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Marion Barry walked down an aisle of the auditorium at the old Congress Heights School in Southeast D.C., stopping to shake hands with those in the audience.

Finally, he took the stage, proclaiming Washington the “grandest city in the world.” The former mayor and current Ward 8 representative on the DC City Council was ready for “A Conversation with Marion Barry,” the first in a series of events celebrating the Washington Informer newspaper’s 50th anniversary.

The event was also an opportunity for attendees to receive a signed copy of Barry’s book, “Mayor for Life: The Incredible Story of Marion Barry Jr.,” co-authored with Howard University graduate Omar Tyree. But many were just eager to hear from the infamous mayor his account of his life.

Barry spoke candidly to the crowd in the interview guided by Washington Informer’s publisher, Denise Rolark Barnes, using anecdotes and life lessons to give a small taste of his incredible journey from the cotton field of Mississippi to four-time mayor of the nation’s Capitol his provocative book narrates.

At one point, the “Mayor for Life” described himself as “Black to the bone.” The majority Black audience cheered and laughed in agreement. The audience was full of D.C. residents who have been beneficiaries, supporters and admirers of Barry’s tenure as a public servant.

Muriel Bowser, the Democratic nominee in the November 2014 mayoral election and DC City Council member for Ward 4, was one in the audience, standing when Barry called her name. Barry said that Bowser was someone who had come to him to talk and learn from his experiences.

Others in the audience benefited from Barry’s summer job and youth leadership initiatives. Some credited Barry with giving them the grants and contracts to start or grow their companies over the years he has been in public office.

When it comes to his younger years in Mississippi, Barry said early lessons on honesty, wisdom and courage largely shaped the way he views the world and the Black man’s role in it. These lessons came from his mother to whom he dedicates his book, which one reviewer describes as “a story of courage, empowerment, hope, tragedy, triumph and inspiration.”

“I was born on a farm,” he said. “I went to a one-room school house.” The young Barry developed a love for learning, especially science. “I don’t know when I started getting that zeal, but I got it.”

At Fisk University, he was only a year away from completing a chemistry degree, when he left academia to work in the Civil Rights Movement and fight against segregation.

“I was getting tired of chemistry anyway,” said Barry, the first chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

He attributes his success in civil rights and political campaigns to his desire to learn and the scientific logic he gained in college.

“It taught me to build,” he explained. “You have to be daring.”

The conversation also touched on dark times in his life, his infamous arrest at the Vista Hotel after the FBI videotaped him smoking crack cocaine. Barry was arrested in January 1990 and served a six-month jail term in a federal prison. He was serving his third term as mayor (1979 to 1991) when he was busted. The indomitable Barry survived the scandal to win a fourth term as D.C. mayor from 1995 to 1999.

As a council member, he says he is committed to improving the economic life of Ward 8 residents, the poorest region in DC.

“It’s hard to mobilize the city government,” he said. “It’s hard to get them to focus on what needs to be done.” Not only was the night a focus on Marion Barry, but it was also an opportunity for the Washington Informer to bring attention to its charity groups, scholarships and other partners. One partner, Mahogany Books, which co-sponsored the book signing, is a Black-owned online bookstore that is working to collect and provide books for area youths. The Washington Informer was first printed during the Civil Rights Movement in 1964, the same year that Barry came to D.C. The newspaper has become a symbol for the Black community, so it was fitting that Barry, an enigma in DC politics, be the first guest to celebrate the paper’s milestone. “You can have the best vision in the world,” said Barry. “If you don’t have courage, it won’t matter.”