The FBI announcement that there will be no criminal charges against Clinton July 5 was pure anti-climax. There weren’t going to be.

Yet, Republican presidential contender Donald Trump was so happy he couldn’t jump high enough when Bill Clinton met briefly with Attorney General Loretta Lynch. This supposedly was irrefutable proof that Lynch, and by extension President Obama and Hillary Clinton, were in cahoots to cook the books on the FBI and Justice Department probe into Hillary’s alleged misuse of State Department related emails.

Trump got what he wanted; namely much GOP lambasting of Bill for alleged deal-making to scuttle the probe, the quick recusal of Lynch from any direct hand in the probe, much chatter that Clinton was shady and a liar, and much media attention to the meeting that Hillary had with the FBI.

The three-hour meeting at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. was the icing on the attack Hillary cake. It supposedly was even more proof that Clinton was in real hot water, and maybe, just maybe, there could actually be charges brought against her.

As I said, that was never going to happen. For the simple fact that’s been a fact from the moment the whiff of scandal arose about Clinton’s use of a private server to read and send State Department related emails, there was no wrongdoing involved.

There was never a shred of evidence that Clinton jeopardized national security by the use of her private server. The protocols about the use of a private email server to conduct official government business were tightened after Clinton’s State Department tenure.

However, there is indeed some momentary political fall-out from Bill’s meeting with Lynch.

The fact that Clinton did meet with Lynch at all, no matter what the circumstances and no matter that there wasn’t a word spoken about the probe, gave Trump and the Republican Party more ammunition to plant the seed even deeper in the general public that the Clintons are the personification of sleaze, and that President Obama is anything but a neutral arbiter in the Justice Department probe.

That in turn reinforced the very widespread notion that Clinton is prone to shade the truth about embarrassing or compromising issues. That all comes on top of incessant polls that practically join Hillary at the hip with Trump as the two presidential candidates who have the highest negatives in living presidential memory.

The presidential campaign is fast getting the moniker of the race to the bottom and the impression that if Clinton wins, it won’t be about her sterling political competence, qualities, leadership, experience and acumen, just that fewer people held their noses about her than Trump.

The Bill-Lynch meeting was also a case of horrible timing. It came days after the report on the Benghazi debacle that found that Clinton had no culpability in and for the attack. That seemed to presage the expectation that the same finding would be made with the email flap. The probe would find nothing on Clinton.

Bill’s meeting with Lynch hitting the news cycle hard drowned that notion out at least for the moment.

Then there’s the recent polls. Trump’s stock has been going south in most polls. And virtually every time he lets fly a fresh zinger about firing TSA employees with hijabs, slandering a Mexican judge, or tweeting with an anti-Semitic construed emblem about Hillary, this knocks another point or two off his popularity.

That makes the anti-Trump panic among many GOP party regulars and potential donors and handlers soar higher. So, for the moment, Bill’s meeting and the FBI interview seemed to offer welcome pause in the downhill run for Trump.

The single slender thread that Trump clings to about the email probe is that Clinton is indicted in the days before the election. That won’t happen. But it won’t stop Trump from dropping strong hints every chance he gets that it should happen and if it doesn’t, he’ll circle back and plop the blame for this on the alleged collusion to kill charges by variously, Bill, Hillary, Obama and Lynch.

The great pity is that the continued GOP, media and public obsession with Clinton’s emails at times blur, ignore and flat out dodge any real talk about tax reform, job growth and the economy, health care, wealth and income inequality, civil rights, environmental concerns and criminal justice reforms. These are the issues that any election should be about, and what the media and the public should care about.

Bernie Sanders famously said at one of the early debates with Clinton that he was sick and tired of hearing about the damn emails and said the only thing that should be on the table for debate and discussion were the real issues. He got loud cheers from the mostly Democratic audience for telling the truth.

There was never much chance though that the email scandal would fade to the non-issue that it is and should be. But Bill notwithstanding, whenever it’s dredged up it’s still much ado about nothing.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of “Let’s Stop Denying Made in America Terrorism” (Amazon Kindle). He also is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One and the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.

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That’s the state amendment passed by voters in 1996 that banned the use of race as a factor in college admissions. The ammunition was supplied convincingly by the U.S. Supreme Court last week when it strongly upheld the University of Texas’s affirmative action program.

Justice Anthony Kennedy rammed the point home that race can be considered in admission to ensure broad, and meaningful racially diverse colleges. California Attorney General Kamala Harris further underscored the critical importance of affirmative action at California colleges in her friend of the court brief.

Affirmative action also assures the fair and equitable use of tax dollars for public education. That is a point missed or deliberately distorted in the affirmative action wars.

African Americans and Hispanics pay taxes, lots of taxes, and are vital public stakeholders. Yet, when colleges and universities shut the door or severely limit the number of African American and Hispanic students at public institutions this means their tax dollars amount to de facto support of modern-day quasi Jim Crow education.

They are forced to pay for educational services and advantages in higher education that white students get and their children are denied.

Studies on college admissions to California colleges and universities have repeatedly found that there was a big plunge in the number and percentage of black and Hispanic student enrollment after the passage of Proposition 209. The downward trend has remained agonizingly steady over the years.

The studies also found that colleges and university administrators have done everything they could to devise policies and strategies employed to deftly skirt around Proposition 209 to ramp up the low numbers of black and Latinos on the campuses. The efforts have failed to boost the numbers.

The problem of stagnant or declining black and Hispanic student enrollment is made even worse by the widening gap between the percentage of underrepresented minority students graduating from California high schools and the percentage enrolling in the University of California system.

In 2014, the state Senate took a big stab at trying to roll back Proposition 209 when it passed Constitutional Amendment 5. That would have given voters another chance to consider the use of race in college admissions.

The bill was pulled after some Asian-American constituent groups claimed that reinstituting affirmative action would do major harm to Asian-American students’ chances of getting admitted to state colleges and universities.

The charge that Asian Americans would and are getting the short end of the admissions stick from affirmative action doesn’t hold up. Asian-American students already make up a disproportionate number of students at many public universities. According to university figures, at the University of Texas they make up 16 percent of the university enrollees though they are only 4 percent of the state’s population.

The figures there are typical of their enrollment at many public universities where Asian-American students make up double-digit numbers of the student population.

The other old argument is that affirmative action is just another way of imposing quotas that would admit a lot of unqualified, poorly educated black and Hispanic students to the colleges. That is nothing more than a rehash of the old quota or reverse bias argument that’s been used for years by conservatives to thwart affirmative action.

Quotas have long since been ruled illegal. Despite popular myth, even before the imposition of Proposition 209 in California there was never a quota system that mandated a set number of black and Hispanic students be admitted at any California university or state college. Race, then, was simply used as one of several factors that could be considered in a student’s admission.

The brutal reality is that Proposition 209 is a relic of a time past when the relentless attack on affirmative action was a sneaky and malicious way to maintain a racially discriminatory, two-tiered education system that blatantly excluded black and Latino students. It was bad public policy then, and in the two decades that Proposition 209 has been on the books, it still is.

Now that the Supreme Court has spoken, there is absolutely no reason why California lawmakers shouldn’t speak as well and dump Proposition 209. Their swift action can and will serve as a model for other states that followed California’s lead and imposed bans on affirmative action in higher education to make affirmative action a reality again. We’ll all benefit from that.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is “Let’s Stop Denying Made in America Terrorism” (Amazon Kindle). He also is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One and the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.

The post THE HUTCHINSON REPORT: Time to dump affirmative action ban appeared first on Wave Newspapers.

Those confrontations told much about the good and the bad times for Baca and the Sheriff’s Department that he ran with a tight fist for nearly two decades. Baca is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court on July 11 for making false statements in a federal probe into the department.

That is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the by now well-known, and well-documented, deplorable, disgraceful years of abuse, brutality and neglect of and against prisoners that went on in the L.A. County jails.

The man that gets much of the blame for that sorry condition is Baca. He was the sheriff, the man at the top, and the abuses happened on his watch. But Baca, though often kicking and screaming, did finally face up to the brutal reality that the jails were in deplorable shape and that there had to be a top-to-bottom serious and radical overhaul.

That meant immediate and vigorous implementation of the dozens of reform recommendations such as fully empowered independent oversight, getting rid of deputies who brutalized prisoners and administrators who looked the other way, massive improvements in inmate mental and medical care, and total transparency and accountability on the reform process.

While Baca was hammered hard for the terrible things that went on in the jails, there was the just as deeply troubling problem of dubious officer-involved shootings and allegations of racial profiling by deputies. Other civil rights leaders and I could not ignore them. I challenged Baca in three appalling cases where deputies either gunned down or killed in a vehicle incident two young African-American males and a Hispanic male.

We held press conferences at the spots in South L.A. and Inglewood where the killings occurred and demanded a meeting with Baca at sheriff’s headquarters and at my organization, the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable’s office.

Baca did not hesitate. He agreed to the meetings at sheriff’s headquarters and my office. He agreed to review and revise policy on how and when officers should use deadly force in civilian encounters.

He was as good as his word and announced within days a policy change that would emphasize containment and de-escalation, not confrontation and gun play when confronting civilians in situations where there was no direct threat to the officers.

Baca went further and promised that the Office of Independent Review tasked with investigating all officer-involved shootings and use of excessive force would provide detailed and timely reports to my organization and other civil rights groups on its findings and what action it would take in the cases.

We demanded full public transparency in the findings and the action. Baca agreed.

I also repeatedly probed Baca on the innovative inmate education programs that he had implemented in the county jails, and pushed him to ramp up the programs. They were the type of programs that could make a huge difference in giving inmates needed skills and training to enable them to get jobs once released.

In our conversations on this issue, Baca agreed that it made no sense to continue to lock up people who could, with the right programs and push, turn their lives around.

I continued to challenge Baca to ensure that there be real discipline of deputies who used deadly force under highly dubious circumstances. That came to a head in the shooting in central L.A. of an African-American homeless man in 2013.

I immediately went to the scene and talked to some of the witnesses who disputed the deputy’s contention that the man had physically threatened deputies. I immediately called Baca to inform him of what I was told.

He quickly agreed to review the shooting personally and take appropriate action. The action in that case was another policy directive which reiterated that deadly force must be the absolute last option in dealing with civilians, especially in dealing with homeless individuals on the streets.

That was particularly volatile and had the potential for a deadly confrontation. Baca again agreed and followed up with action.

Whether it was a meeting, a personal or private conversation we had at my office, or with other civil rights leaders, and there was sharp disagreement about the department’s handling of a shooting or an abuse case in the jails, I was always struck by Baca’s willingness to listen, and often take immediate action. Baca knew that we would not let up in pushing for real reform in the Sheriff’s Department on the crucial life-and-death issue of the overuse of deadly force.

Baca’s legacy is deeply tainted by public disgrace and rancor over the hideous legacy of abuse, brutality and neglect in the L.A. County jails. He will pay a price for that when sentenced.

However, that’s only one side of what his legacy should be. The other side is the side I saw, and that’s of a sheriff who listened to me and other civil rights leaders who pointedly told him the department must clean up its act, and do it now.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of “Let’s Stop Denying Made-in-America Terrorism” (Amazon Kindle). He also is the weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One and the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.

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The key word is domestic and using that word to describe the killing of 49 people in the worst killing spree in American history as a home-grown terror act is a huge departure from past practice.

In almost all cases of mass shootings in the last few years, officials have searched long and hard to ferret out any possible foreign ties of the shooter to “radical Islamic” groups. In the Orlando incident, Orlando officials and the FBI, even after branding the massacre “domestic terrorism,” didn’t depart from the script and quickly speculated that the alleged shooter, Omar Mateen, whose family is from Afghanistan, may have had “radical Islamic leanings.”

This may well prove to be the case as more details unfold about his life here. But no matter what influences drove him to his maddening act, Mateen is not Afghani. He was born, raised and educated in America, and even worked in some capacity at a security job.

That makes his bloody act yet another grim case of not simply an act of domestic terrorism, but made-in-America terrorism.

Despite the years of carnage from these type of shootings, it’s still hard for many to come to grips with this bitter truth. That was painfully evident following the mass killing of 14 persons in San Bernardino last December.

FBI officials were initially loath to call the killings domestic terrorism. When they did finally brand the killings terrorism, they made it clear that the killings would be investigated as a terrorist act “inspired by foreign terrorist organizations.”

However, that still begged the question of calling the massacre exactly what it was — domestic terrorism. The main alleged shooter in San Bernardino, as Mateen, was born, raised and studied in America. He was also a public employee.

The still nagging reluctance to label these massacres “domestic terrorism” fits in with the well-established pattern of officials and virtually all Republican leaders to avoid at all costs using the term. The only exception is when those who commit mayhem and murder are Muslim.

And according to numerous studies they are the rare exception since the overwhelming majority of those who commit targeted mayhem in this country are non-Muslim, invariably, white males with a checkered history of crime, mental instability and deeply influenced by right-wing rants.

In Mateen’s case, there were reports that a possible motivation for his rampage was his being offended by gays.

The refusal to consistently brand acts such as Mateen’s, “domestic terrorism,” strikes to the heart of how many Americans have been reflexively conditioned to regard terrorism. It’s almost always related to the Middle East and the perpetrators are presumed to be Muslim.

The FBI’s working definition of what constitutes terrorism is: “Terrorism is an act done or threatened to in order to try to influence a public body or the citizenry, so it’s more of a political act.”

Even when South Carolina church shooter Dylann Roof plainly wrote that he had an animus toward blacks and acted out that insane animus by gunning down multiple black churchgoers, he still did not reach the elevated bar to rate being branded a “domestic terrorist.”

The same held true for alleged Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic shooter Robert Lewis Dear, who, despite plainly targeting the clinic and giving the reason why, he also didn’t rate the label of domestic terrorist.

Instead, the ritual was to officially whitewash and airbrush the mass carnage they wreak with ritual condolences and prayers for the victims and their families.

The consequence of refusing to stray from the textbook definition of who is a terrorist and what is terrorism on U.S. soil has consequences beyond disarming, confusing and in effect putting even more Americans in harm’s way from home-grown terrorists. It also is overloaded with a heavy mix of political calculation and cynical manipulation.

A big part of which has been to take pot shots at President Obama for allegedly turning a blind eye toward the threat on America’s shores of radical Jihadist influenced groups. Obama is routinely denounced by GOP ultra-conservatives, and the Fox News scare machine, for supposedly refusing to use the term, “Jihadist terrorists,” for fear of offending Muslims.

Whether it’s shooting up a Planned Parenthood clinic, a center for the developmentally disabled, or any other domestic target, there’s simply no political incentive to call the shooters “domestic terrorists.” This crashes hard against the official narrative that made-in-America terrorists and terrorism constitute minimal or no real threat to life and property here.

The danger supposedly only comes from a foreign group, Muslim of course.

Orlando officials departed from that script by calling the nightclub massacre exactly what it was, “domestic terrorism.” That departure is a much-needed step toward coming to grips with the lethal threat of made-in-America terrorism.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of “Let’s Stop Denying Made-in-America Terrorism” (Amazon Kindle). He also is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One and the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.

The post THE HUTCHINSON REPORT: A case of made-in-America terrorism appeared first on Wave Newspapers.

Clinton has been lambasted by many blacks for his push of the omnibus crime bill, the wild expansion of the death penalty at the federal level, his gutting of welfare and the demolishing of banking regulations and other initiatives that allegedly resulted in the locking up of and impoverishing of millions of blacks.

However, just suppose it wasn’t Clinton, but Donald Trump who had been asked to give one of the eulogies?

The firestorm would have been cataclysmic. The very idea is not sacrilegious.

Ali and Trump had a long, cordial relationship, though they seemed as far apart as the sun and the moon. In the 1960s, Ali was the outcast black separatist, anti-government activist, nearly imprisoned draft dodger. He was unceremoniously dumped from boxing, dogged every step of the way by a small phalanx of FBI agents and had a government intelligence dossier that was as thick as a telephone book.

He was America’s number one pariah.

At the same time, Trump lived a silver spoon life. He was a young well-to-do white guy, with no declared political interests or activism, who busily worked for his father in his real estate development company and attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

When he graduated, it was a given that he was a young privileged white guy whose sights were clearly set on making gobs of money in the real estate and casino and hotel development business. He was the epitome of the American dream.

Though there’s no record of Trump saying anything about Ali’s draft refusal, defiance of the government, and radical black separatist anti-white pronouncements then, it doesn’t take much imagination to think that Trump saw Ali just as many others did. That was as an unpatriotic, white hating, black militant.

The same year the Supreme Court tossed Ali’s conviction on draft evasion in 1971, Trump officially took over the Trump organization and would spend the next three decades wheeling and dealing in the real estate and business world buying and plopping down casinos, hotels and golf courses throughout the country.

Meantime, Ali, often cash strapped and with plenty of debt from the nearly four years he was banned from the ring, had to scramble to make money with big marquee fights against Joe Frazier, Ken Norton and George Foreman.

Though legions hailed Ali for his pugilistic skills and he had many admirers, legions also were not ready to forgive him. To them, he was still a back racist, loud mouth, draft dodger.

But Trump wasn’t among those legions. Trump’s cheerleading of Ali started when he was enthralled with him after watching the first Ali-Frazier fight in 1971. To Trump, Ali was not just a classy and courageous boxer, but a cash cow.

And for someone like Trump who saw boxing as a way to fill up lots of seats at his casinos, Ali was a natural attraction. For a businessman, this was too much to resist. Trump was now firmly on the Ali bandwagon.

In the next decade, Trump threw a birthday party for Ali, gave testimonials at events for him, and shelled out tens of thousands of dollars in donations to Ali’s Arizona-based Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center. Ali reciprocated by giving Trump a couple of humanitarian awards. This was not just the standard run-of-the-mill stuff that businessmen do to burnish their image as charitable good guys and to get a bushel of tax write-offs in the process.

Trump admired Ali as a courageous fighter and solid role model of someone who was reviled but bounced back. Ali in turn seemed to admire Trump for his willingness to reach out and support causes that were near and dear to him, and to actually show that he really cared about him.

Ali was careful to give Trump a big pass when he lashed out at his silly, crude and offensive call to consider banning Muslims from the country. Ali did not mention Trump by name in his criticism. He simply convinced himself that Trump was really referring to “jihadists and extremists,” not all Muslims.

The mutual admiration society that Trump and Ali had for each other was real and heartfelt. Trump was quick in the door in his praise of Ali when news broke of his passing. That was not simply playing to the public and media gate. It was genuine.

The takeaway is not that Trump, the noxious, race- and Muslim-baiting demagogue, and Ali, the socially conscious, much beloved Muslim, could find common ground. It is simply another indication that Ali could bridge the unseemingly unbridgeable gulf between someone who would shamefully use race and religion as a wedge to polarize and divide.

That is a tribute to Ali’s greatness and it’s also testament to Trump’s acknowledgement of that. Yes, he, not Clinton, could have been one of those to eulogize Ali.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is “How ‘President’ Trump will Govern” (Amazon Kindle). He also is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One and the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.

The post THE HUTCHINSON REPORT: Trump and Ali had an unusual friendship appeared first on Wave Newspapers.

The parents, are African American. The 4-year-old toddler is African American.

The issue no longer was simply the heart-breaking tragedy of the killing of a prized and endangered animal. Nor was it simply heaving a big sigh of collective relief and much joy that a child was saved.

The issue now was the enraged finger point at the parents for being bad parents. And the equally enraged charge that the only reason there was a finger point was because they were black, and that if they were white there wouldn’t be a peep of condemnation, just joy.

Cincinnati police officials raised the stake in the debate when they announced with great fanfare that the parents could face charges presumably for child negligence or endangerment. That is yet another near textbook case of where race again, sometimes sneakily, sometimes nakedly, crops into a flashpoint issue.

Trying to make a guess on the motives of those who line up on both sides is a close run up. Topping the checklist of the attributes of a good parent of toddlers and young children is fierce vigilance, awareness and protection at all times of a child’s well-being and safety.

The paramount concern of every child welfare agency on the planet is to ensure that children stay out of harm’s way at all times. The penalty for violating that responsibility is severe; the removal of a child from an unsafe home, whatever the parent or child’s color.

In part what fanned the gorilla killing to a fever pitch and prompted the merciless finger point at Michelle Gregg, the boy’s mother, for negligence, was the almost surreal circumstance of a once-in-a-lifetime, horrific scene. That is a toddler falling into the enclosure of a prized and potentially dangerous zoo attraction in full and socking view of dozens, including the mother.

A video captured the horror in graphic and terrifying detail of the child being bandied about by the gorilla, and of course, the gunning down of the gorilla. That was a drama that even Hollywood on its best or worse days would have trouble concocting.

The other part is, of course, race. The fact that the parents are black fed into the ancient stereotype that black parents are chronic shirkers, lax, uncaring and plain lousy parents. Case after case has been cited of some incident where a white kid was in danger, including one involving a kid in a gorilla enclosure at an Illinois zoo in 1996.

Yet there were no mass calls for the parents to be drawn and quartered or the kid snatched away from them. There was certainly no petition circulated that thousands eagerly rushed to sign demanding that the parents be brought up on charges by family services.

There was no rush by Fox News and other news outlets to dig up and blare every piece of dirt some about the father’s past run-ins with the law. The fact that the father wasn’t even at the zoo was by inference more damning proof supposedly of parental indifference.

White parents in those rare times of similar tragedy were not hounded on their job, and called every vile name under the sun in countless rants on Facebook and tweets. These are ridiculous and outlandish stretches to bash the parents, but with a hyper-charged emotional issue involving a child’s safety, anything, no matter how irrational, goes.

Yet, it’s the emotionalism over the issue that makes it impossible to just wave off the contention that something went badly awry in that fateful moment when a child could easily have been injured or even killed in the grip of a massive animal.

One can rail at Cincinnati zoo officials all day for not constructing a breach-proof barrier around the gorilla enclosure to ensure the safety for the animal and the patrons, and they wouldn’t be off base with that. But even without the seeming lapse in security, the brutal reality remains that millions of people visit zoos every year. Yet it’s the rarest of rare occasions when anyone tumbles into an animal enclosure.

There are lessons to be learned by all in this tragedy about how best to ensure the safety of animals, the safety of patrons, the responsibility of parents to be just that, responsible at all times for their child’s safety, what a child protective agency should or shouldn’t do in this situation, and the never ending cautionary note about the danger of dragging race into a tragedy.

There were no winners here. A prized endangered animal is dead, a child was in and then escaped harm’s way, two parents are on the public hot seat for supposed negligence, and zoo officials must do a soul search about what, if anything, they could or should have done better to prevent the tragedy.

Racism or bad parenting, it’s both and neither.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is “How ‘President’ Trump Will Govern (Amazon Kindle).” He also is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One and the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.

The post THE HUTCHINSON REPORT: Is it racism, bad parenting or neither? appeared first on Wave Newspapers.

The two words were more than simply a case of Cosby being polite. The words were vindication for dozens of women. These are the women who came forth to say that Cosby drugged, fondled, molested, abused, intimidated, and of course, raped them over the course of many years.

They suffered mightily for coming forth. They were lambasted from pillar to post as liars, cheats, sluts, publicity seekers, and every critic’s favorite, gold diggers.

Thousands of others never bought Cosby’s long, loud and bitter denials that he was the innocent victim of a giant con game, or the serial denier’s favorite, the victim of a sinister plot by take your pick: the “white man,” “white media,” “white establishment” or simply some unnamed, nebulous white conspirators to bring down a fabulously popular, rich, supremely successful black man. They also said thank you.

There were also more than a few legal experts who did not buy the virtual article of faith that there were no legal grounds to prosecute him because the statute of limitations had long since run out on most of the claims. There were just too many alleged victims. That meant that there had to be a case somewhere that fit the bill for a legal prosecution.

Meanwhile, Cosby fed into the conspiracy paranoia and the public trashing of the women by filing motion after motion to duck prosecution and defamation of character countersuit after countersuit against his various women accusers. His holding action sufficiently muddied the stream to cast doubt while delaying what was almost certain to be the inevitable. That was his painfully long-delayed plop into a court docket.

In the much cited unsealed affidavit Cosby swore to in 2005, he confessed to giving drugs to one woman and getting drugs for other women he wanted to have sex with. This was tantamount to a smoking gun confirmation of what many of his alleged victims claimed, and that was that he plied them with drink and drugs before he sexually waylaid them.

Even without the affidavit, it was not true that a sexual abuser could get away with the crime simply by waiting out the calendar. More than two dozen states have no statute of limitation depending on circumstances in the nature and type of sexual assault. If the evidence was compelling, a Cosby could indeed be prosecuted even decades after the assault in those states.

This gross misconception about prosecuting sexual crimes implanted the dangerous public notion that rape or sexual abuse could be minimalized, marginalized or even mocked because the clock had wound down on when the crime could or even should be prosecuted.

A Cosby prosecution rightly tosses the ugly glare back on the wrong public perceptions about rape and sexual abuse and how easily the crime can still be blown off. And it is.

The Iowa Law Review, in March 2014, found that rape is routinely underreported in dozens of cities. The rape claims were dismissed out of hand with little or no investigation. The result was there were no report, no statistical count and no record of an attack.

The study zeroed in on the prime reason for this, namely disbelief. It’s that disbelief that assures men such as Cosby are reflexively believed when they scream foul at their accuser.

They lambaste their character and motives. If things get too hot, they toss out a few dollars in hush money settlements and the screams are even louder that it was all a shakedown operation in the first place and the victim is further demonized.

That wasn’t the only reason it took so long to prosecute Cosby. He wasn’t just another rich, mediagenic celebrity whose wealth, fame and celebrity status routinely shielded him from criminal charges. Cosby and men like him have deep enough pockets to hire a small army of the best public relations flacks around to spin, point fingers, and hector the media that their guy’s pristine reputation is being drug through the mud precisely because of their fame, wealth, talent and, of course, goodwill.

Cosby was a special case even by the standards of the rich and famed celebrity world. For a decade, he reigned as America’s father figure, not black father figure, but father figure. He embodied the myths, fantasies, and encrusted beliefs about the role that a caring, loving, engaged dad is supposed to have with his family.

That rendered him almost untouchable when it came to casting any dirt on his character. That’s all past now, Cosby is now just Cosby, the accused rapist, and that’s reason enough to say “thank you.”

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is “How ‘President’ Trump will Govern” (Amazon Kindle). He also is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One and the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.

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He’s got fresh media shelf life in order to answer one question and beat up on one candidate. The question is can or will Bernie Sanders do a Nader presidential campaign 2000 act and run as an independent when he doesn’t get the Democratic nomination?

That won’t happen, and Nader knows it, for the simple fact that Sanders, unlike Nader, is a committed Democrat, and really believes that the key to reforming the political system lies in keeping the heat on the Democratic Party from within to move to the left, and stay there.

But it’s really the Hillary Clinton question that Nader has taken wild flight on. He incessantly bashes and harangues her for being as he gleefully puts it, “Hillary the hawk” and a bought-and-paid for shill for Wall Street. This is the etched-in-stone stock Nader attack on Clinton. Legions of Sanders’ more rabid backers just as gleefully parrot this line.

This can only go one place if it is left to mutate among more than a hard core few. That place is a beeline to the mortal danger of a Donald Trump White House.

Nader would be right at home on this stretch of the political highway. Despite endless efforts to rewrite the 2000 presidential campaign and absolve Nader of putting George W. Bush in the White House, history is having none of it. Nader elected Bush.

Every polling study done for the 2000 presidential election found that Nader snatched anywhere from 2 to 5 times more votes from the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, than he did from the Republican Bush. In both Florida and New Hampshire, the two states that Bush “won,” studies found that Nader voters would have been far more likely to have voted for Gore if Nader weren’t on the ballot than vote for Bush.

The much disputed and still hotly debated Florida vote that dumped the election onto the Supreme Court and virtually guaranteed a Bush White House, involved the microscopic 537 vote edge Bush held over Gore. Nader got nearly 100,000 votes in the state. If he weren’t on the ballot, Florida would have been a comfortable win for Gore.

But forget for a moment the volumes of studies that completely blow away the attempt to whitewash Nader putting Bush in the White House. How about just using common sense.

Now, what would be the likelihood of someone who votes for Nader, the consummate, prototypical, liberal-progressive-corporate-conservative gadfly, doing a complete about face and voting for a Bush? You’d have to go way beyond fantasyland to conjure up that happening.

The oft-heard counter from the Nader apologists is that well, if Nader weren’t on the ballot, his voters would have stayed at home. Yet, using the voter participation percentage index for presidential elections as a guide, there was a 50 percent voter turnout in 2000.

That would have meant that even if 50 percent of voters that voted for Nader didn’t vote at all, this still would have given Gore upwards of 10,000 more votes than Bush would have gotten in Florida.

OK, now we fast forward to presidential campaign 2016, and Nader’s drumbeat attacks on Clinton as just another deal-making, corporate beltway politician. It’s a short step from that to say that there’s not much difference, and little to choose from, between her and Trump other than that she wears the tag of “Democrat” on her resume.

The call is again for a Democratic palace rebellion. In making this claim, some stand the retort that this will further fracture, alienate and demoralize an already nervous, shaky and uneasy Democratic base, and could only work to the advantage of the GOP, on its head.

They claim that Sanders’ political revolution would force the Democratic Party to back the progressive line on everything from labor rights, poverty, battling Wall Street and the corporations, and ending the American war making under threat of losing thousands of votes.

That’s a thin reed to hang an election on. There’s much historical evidence to back up the grave peril that warfare within a political party fuels alienation and resentment. That actively aids and abets the other party. The many calls, petitions and pleas to write in Sanders, vote Green Party, or simply stay home are ominous signs that it could happen.

The eternal argument of not voting for the lesser of two evils, in this case Trump or Clinton, will almost certainly rage all the way up to Election Day. Nader almost certainly will be hauled out repeatedly to make the argument that progressive voters should reject all the exhortations from Clinton backers to jump on her bandwagon out of fear of the bogeyman Trump.

Hopefully, Nader doesn’t hold himself up as example of what happens when angry Democratic voters say no to a Democratic presidential candidate. That “no” elected Bush, and that same “no” could elect Trump.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is “How ‘President’ Trump will Govern” (Amazon Kindle). He also is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One and the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on Saturdays at 9 a.m. on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.

The post THE HUTCHINSON REPORT: Ralph Nader returns to campaign wars appeared first on Wave Newspapers.

Lonnie David Franklin Jr., convicted May 5 of murdering nearly a dozen women, may have murdered at least 25 women in a killing spree that stretched at least from 1985 to 2007.

There are lots of theories from police, prosecutors and media observers as to why he got away with murder for so long. But the one fact about his long-term killing spree that repeatedly jumps out is that his targets were mostly poor women. Some were prostitutes, others drug addicted or with petty criminal records. But all, or nearly all, were black.

During the early years of his murder rampage, there was the standard charge that police dragged their feet in catching the killer precisely because the victims were poor black women. Critics said then that if the Grim Sleeper’s victims had been middle class white women, police and city officials would have pulled out all stops to catch the killer.

That is not the first time serial killings of poor black women have brought loud shouts of a racial double standard in how police deal with them. The double standard charge has been made against police in serial killings in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and in the Washington, D.C. area.

More than a decade ago community groups in East St. Louis were outraged when they learned that city officials turned down offers from the FBI to help in nabbing a serial killer suspected of killing 13 women during a two-year span. Red-faced city officials back pedaled fast and accepted FBI help.

It’s not just the race of the victims that have stirred rage. It’s also the race of the killers. In Los Angeles and other big cities, the serial killers have been black.

That blows the myth that serial killers are mostly young white males. About one out of five of serial killers are black males. But black-on-black homicides always fuel suspicions that police take these crimes less seriously.

Police and prosecutors bristle at the charge that they are less diligent when it comes to nailing serial killers who kill blacks than whites. In Los Angeles, police officials pleaded that they were understaffed, lacked the resources and technology to make a swift arrest when the killings began their years ago. There’s truth to that.

In the past decade, there has been a tremendous advance in the use of computer matches, and forensic and DNA testing. This has helped police quickly zero in on likely suspects. During the tenures of LAPD Chief Bernard Parks and William Bratton, police went further and set up special task forces to track down the killer.

Yet, it’s also true that the serial killer’s victims in inner-city neighborhoods are not the type of women who reflexively ignite police and public outrage. There are reasons, troubling reasons, for this.

The long-running Grim Sleeper killing saga underscores the great threat of murder and criminal violence to many black women. Homicide ranks as a major cause of death for young black females.

A black woman is more likely to be raped and assaulted than a white woman. While the media at times magnifies and sensationalizes crimes by black men against white women, it ignores or downplays crimes against black women.

Then there’s the drug menace. Nearly half of the women behind bars in America are there for drug-related offenses. The majority are black. Some of the suspected serial murder victims in Los Angeles had a rap sheet for drug use. They easily fit the popular public and media profile of the drugged-out, derelict black woman.

There’s also the notion that these women are dangerous women. The police slayings of black women in some cities, the upswing in violent crimes by women, and Hollywood films that show black women as swaggering, trash-talking, gun-toting, and vengeful stoke public jitters about these women. One in four women is now imprisoned for violent crimes, and half of them are black.

According to annual reports from the Sentencing Project on crime and imprisonment in America, for the first time in American history black women in some states are imprisoned at nearly the same rate as white men. They are being jailed at even younger ages than ever.

American Bar Association studies have found that teen girls account for more than one-quarter of the juvenile arrests, are committing more violent crimes, and are slapped back into detention centers after release faster than boys. Black girls were arrested and jailed in far greater numbers than white girls.

The crusade to catch and put the Grim Sleeper behind bars for good certainly made the public much more aware of the peril that many black women face on the streets; and part of that peril is the possibility of being the victim of a serial killer. That made police even more determined to nail their killer.

Unfortunately, it took an ugly and embarrassing media spotlight on the gruesome serial killings in Los Angeles to heighten police and public awareness that serial killers come in all colors, and more often than not their victims are poor, black women.

Let’s hope the conviction and harsh penalty that the Grim Sleeper almost certainly will get and deserves will permanently drive home that peril.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is “From Sanders to Trump: A Guide to the 2016 Presidential Primary Battles” (Amazon Kindle). He also is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One and the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on Saturday at 9 a.m. on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.

The post THE HUTCHINSON REPORT: Serial killer escaped detection for years appeared first on Wave Newspapers.

Here’s what it found. By a whopping high percentage, adult whites were the greatest users and abusers of alcohol. Nearly 60 percent of white adults were drinkers.

The figure for Hispanics was slightly more than 45 percent. African Americans came in at less than 45 percent of those who used and abused alcohol. The study fine-tuned the amount of drinking Americas do even more.

It found that whites again led the pack in the number of drinks that they had. That number was five or more drinks at the same time in one month. Hispanics were much less likely than whites to be binge drinkers. African Americans were even less likely to binge drink. The study concluded that Asian Americans and blacks were by far the least likely to be binge drinkers.

That was no aberration. Other studies on drug and alcohol use among Americans, young and old, have repeatedly confirmed that whites, especially young whites, are far more likely to do drugs and get sloppy drunk than Hispanics or African Americans.

That being said, and time and again borne out in surveys and studies on drug and alcohol use, how does one rationally explain the fact that one can search and look until their eyes glaze over and almost never see or find a DUI checkpoint in say Westwood, Bel Air, Cheviot Hills, Pacific Palisades or Woodland Hills? But at the same time one doesn’t have to look very far or hard to find DUI checkpoints in in South or East L.A.?

A recent local survey found the LAPD is most likely to prop up a DUI checkpoint or more delicately put, a saturation patrol, in these areas. The point of the checkpoints on paper anyway is simple. The more motorists that our stopped in random checks the more likely the police are to nab drunk drivers, and thereby save lives, since they present a clear and present danger to motorists, pedestrians and themselves.

So far so good; that’s the rational part of the reason for checkpoints. But don’t drunk drivers in Westwood or Woodland Hills pose just as grave a hazard to life, limb and property as a drunk driver in South L.A. or East L.A.?

It’s a rhetorical question since the real answer is that these areas are saturated with checkpoints because catching drunk drivers is not solely a safety issue. If that were the case, then there would be the same number or more checkpoints on the Westside.

It’s a case of playing race, income, and just plain, well just plain numbers. The brutal reality in policing is that it’s simply easier and more legal and cost-effective to stop and bust a black or Hispanic driver in South or East L.A. than Westwood. The driver stopped there could likely be a corporate official, a legislator, a top educator or even someone in law enforcement.

They are far more likely to have the connections and clout to loudly challenge within and without courts, and embarrassingly in the press, their stop and arrest than someone in South L.A.

The over-saturation of South and East L.A has proven a financial cash cow to the city’s coffers in hefty fines, the raking in of piles of cash in towing costs from people having their vehicles impounded, for the motorist nabbed, a stain on their driving record, or the loss of their license, and arrest, which entails even greater costs.

One report found that blacks and Hispanics were five times higher than the state average to have their license suspended.

That is a huge burden to bear for low-income drivers. Yes, let’s be clear, if the driver is drunk, he or she does present a major hazard and should be taken off the streets, and deserves to be hauled into court, pay a fine and have their driving privileges curtailed. But so does the drunk driver in Westwood.

The problem is that the chances of that driver getting the same day in court, a hefty fine and their license revoked is virtually nil.

Police officials say that there are more likely to be crashes on the Westside than in South L.A. But the point is not just the number of auto accidents, but to remove drunk drivers from the road, no matter where they are.

The intoxicated driver in Westwood is a potential fatal crash waiting to happen to just as in South L.A. However, if it depends on a DUI checkpoint there to catch he or she, they don’t have much to worry about.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is “From Sanders to Trump: A Guide to the 2016 Presidential Primary Battles” (Amazon Kindle) He also is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One and the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Saturdays at 9 a.m. on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.

The post THE HUTCHINSON REPORT: DUI checkpoints avoid the Westside appeared first on Wave Newspapers.