Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Jack Cafferty Reads My (Zennie Abraham's) Response To His Question On CNN's The Situation Room



On today's CNN Situation Room, Jack Cafferty asked why Black's economic mobility was declining over past years. I wrote in this answer:

Hi Jack,

Even though I'm Black, I'm going to resist the temptation to fall right into the question. First, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found that economic mobility for ALL Americans has declined sharply since 1980. Thus, it's logical that Blacks would be part of that statistical whole. We have a HUGE problem which stems from America's lack of desire to support manufacturing industry and allowing it, and now service industry firms, to move offshore and not subsidizing American firms to pay a living wage and compete internationally.

Zennie Abraham, Oakland, CA


Well, to my surprise, Jack read the entire email -- just as you see it -- on the air! It was nice to hear my message get out in the open!

Houston Texans Offensive Lineman Fred Weary Sues Houston - Racial Profiling - ESPN & AP

Weary sues city of Houston, two officers over Taser arrest

ESPN.com news services

HOUSTON -- Houston Texans offensive lineman Fred Weary is suing the city and two police officers for a November 2006 arrest in which he was shot with a Taser gun during a traffic stop.

In his lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court, Weary is accusing the city and the officers of excessive force, assault, racial profiling, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution.

"I have to put closure on this situation and this is my first step to closure," Weary told KRIV-TV in Houston. "It's really taken a toll on my life and my family. I didn't know last year that it would affect me the way it has. It's my right that I need to do something about it.

"I feel my rights have been violated that day last year," Weary told KRIV-TV. "I have had to deal with that for this whole entire year. I've thought about it a lot. It's been on my mind constantly."

The two officers said they stopped Weary because he didn't have a front license plate and was driving "suspiciously."

According to the police report, the 6-foot-4, 308-pound Weary became angry and uncooperative after being stopped in an area near Reliant Stadium, where authorities were on alert because of criminal activity. Weary was coming from a team practice when he was stopped.

Police said Weary was shot with a Taser after he pushed one of the officers away and then tried to come toward them after being told to put his hands on his vehicle.

A misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest was later dismissed because of insufficient evidence.

Weary's attorney, Joe Walker, told KRIV that his client's lawsuit doesn't specify a dollar amount.

"I will leave that to the sound discretion of the jury," Walker told KRIV.

The officers "clearly used race as a factor for reasonable suspicion and making a traffic stop of Mr. Weary," Walker said.

Walker said Tuesday that Weary would not have filed the lawsuit if he had received letters of apology from Mayor Bill White and Police Chief Harold Hurtt.

He had also asked for monetary compensation, which would have been donated to a police charity, and that the city review its policies regarding racial profiling and the use of Tasers.

"He never got his letter of apology or a concrete review of tasering," Walker said. "He asked for a copy of [taser] policies and they sent him a policy that was completely blacked out, censored."

Walker said the city's policy on Taser use needs to be re-examined because some reviews done by local media and advocacy groups show that in more than 350 of the first 900 police Taser incidents, no person was charged.

Weary's taser incident renewed controversy over the stun guns' use, prompting White to call for a study of how officers have used the devices. The study, being conducted by the University of Houston Center for Public Policy, is set to be done by January.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.

Racism's Alarming Spread On YouTube

This video below shows on YouTubers concern over the rampant spread of racism on YouTube. It comes out in comments on certain videos and is so prevanlent one has to ask if YouTube is safe. I personally think so, but I do think this issue should be adressed before a crisis sets in.



And this is another video expressing concern.



We need a reminder that racism is mental illness and should not be tolerated or spread on any medium like YouTube.

Hillary Clinton Campaign Staffers Warn CNN's Wolf Blitzer To "Take It Easy" On Her

That's according to the Drudge Report and Sayanthingblog. Wolf made fun of it on The Situation Room, still it came from somewhere. Blitzer says he doesn't know where it came from. Stay tuned.

Hillary Clinton Iowa Student Question "Plant" Scandal Hits CNN

Hillary Clinton Iowa Student Question "Plant" Scandal Hits CNN




Wow. This is a story that's picking up legs and growing -- not going away. CNN has this exclusive interview with the student who's upset that she was picked as a plant by the Clinton campaign. Read it below and watch the video!

CNN Interview of Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff



GRINNELL, Iowa (CNN) -- The college student who was told what question to ask at one of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign events says "voters have the right to know what happened" and she wasn't the only one who was planted.


Student Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff said a staffer told her what to ask at a campaign event for Sen. Hillary Clinton.

In an exclusive on-camera interview with CNN, Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff, a 19-year-old sophomore at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, said that giving anyone specific questions to ask is "dishonest," and the whole incident has given her a negative outlook on politics.

Gallo-Chasanoff, whose story was first reported in the campus newspaper, said what happened was really pretty simple: She says a senior Clinton staffer asked if she'd like to ask the senator a question after an energy speech the Democratic presidential hopeful gave in Newton, Iowa, on November 6.

"I sort of thought about it, and I said 'Yeah, can I ask how her energy plan compares to the other candidates' energy plans?'" Gallo-Chasanoff said Monday night.

"'I don't think that's a good idea," the staffer said, according to Gallo-Chasanoff, "because I don't know how familiar she is with their plans." Watch the student describe how she was approached »

He then opened a binder to a page that, according to Gallo-Chasanoff, had about eight questions on it.

"The top one was planned specifically for a college student," she added. " It said 'college student' in brackets and then the question."

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Topping that sheet of paper was the following: "As a young person, I'm worried about the long-term effects of global warming. How does your plan combat climate change?" Watch the student ask the planted question »

And while she said she would have rather used her own question, Gallo-Chasanoff said she generally didn't have a problem asking the campaign's because she "likes to be agreeable," adding that since she told the staffer she'd ask their pre-typed question she "didn't want to go back on [her] word."

Clinton campaign spokesman Mo Elleithee said Clinton had "no idea who she was calling on."

"This is not acceptable campaign process moving forward. We've taken steps to ensure that it never happens again," she said in a written response to CNN.

Gallo-Chasanoff wasn't so sure.

"I don't know whether Hillary knew what my question was going to be, but it seemed like she knew to call on me because there were so many people, and ... I was the only college student in that area," she said. Watch the full interview »

In a separate statement in response to the campus article, the campaign also added, "On this occasion a member of our staff did discuss a possible question about Senator Clinton's energy plan at a forum. ... This is not standard policy and will not be repeated again."

Gallo-Chasanoff may have some doubts about that one as well.

"After the event," she said, "I heard another man ... talking about the question he asked, and he said that the campaign had asked him to ask that question."

The man she references prefaced his question by saying that it probably didn't have anything to do with energy, and then posed the following: "I wonder what you propose to do to create jobs for the middle-class person, such as here in Newton where we lost Maytag."

A Maytag factory in Newton recently closed, forcing hundreds of people out of their jobs.

During the course of the late-night interview on Grinnell's campus, Gallo-Chasanoff also told CNN that the day before the school's newspaper, Scarlet and Black, printed the story, she wanted the reporter to inform the campaign out of courtesy to let them know it would be published.

She said the "head of publicity for the campaign," a man whose name she could not recall, had no factual disputes with the story. But, she added, a Clinton intern spoke to her to say the campaign requests she "not talk about" the story to any more media outlets and that if she did she should inform a staffer.

"I'm not under any real obligation to do that, and I haven't talked to [the campaign] anymore," Gallo-Chasanoff said, adding that she also doesn't plan to.

"If what I do is come and just be totally truthful, then that's all anyone can ask of me, and that's all I can ask of myself. So I'll feel good with what I've done. I'll feel like I've done the right thing."

The Clinton campaign's acknowledgment that it planted a question re-enforces a widely held criticism of the senator -- that she is not entirely honest, said Bill Schneider, CNN's senior political analyst.

"It's the same criticism often made of her husband," Schneider said. "Most Americans never felt Bill Clinton was honest and trustworthy, even when he got elected in 1992 -- with only 43 percent of the vote. His critics called him 'Slick Willy.' ... Will her critics start referring to the New York senator as `Slick Hillary?'"

Asked if this experience makes her less likely to support Clinton's presidential bid, Gallo-Chasanoff, an undecided voter, said, "I think she has a lot to offer, but I -- this experience makes me look at her campaign a little bit differently."

"The question and answer sessions -- especially in Iowa -- are really important. That's where the voters get to ... have like a real genuine conversation with this politician who could be representing them."

While she acknowledged "it's possible that all campaigns do these kind of tactics," she said it still doesn't make it right.

"Personally I want to know that I have someone who's honest representing me."

Gallo-Chasanoff's story comes at a time when a second person has also come forward with a similar one. Geoffrey Mitchell of Hamilton, Illinois, a town located on the Iowa border, told CNN the Clinton campaign also wanted him to ask a certain question at an Iowa event in April.

"He asked me if I would ask Sen. Clinton about ways she was going to confront the president on the war in Iraq, specifically war funding," said Geoffrey Mitchell, a supporter of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois. "I told him it was not a question I felt comfortable with."

No questions were taken at the event. Elleithee said this incident was different than what happened with Gallo-Chasanoff in Newton. Elleithee said the staffer "bumped into someone he marginally knew" and during a conversation with Mitchell, "Iraq came up." Elleithee denied the campaign tried to plant him as a friendly questioner in the audience.

Mitchell said he had never met the staffer before the event.

Rackspace? Never Heard Of It Until Now; It's Got Bad Publicity On Technorati!

I had never heard of Rackspace until now, and I know I'll never use them! Look at this sample of posts over at Technorati! Wow. Apparently the system was taken out by a truck!


  • Photo of jlm382

    Rackspace.com had downtime? That’s impossible!




    It’s a pity that Rackspace, a company with a stellar reputation for uptime and “Fanatical Support” ... to be happy Rackspace customer. I studied the way they did business and implemented it in my own ...





    46 minutes ago
    by jlm382
    in Jessica Mah Meets World ·
    Authority: 41



  • No one has claimed this blog

    Web Host Rackspace Knocked Offline




    Web Host Rackspace Knocked Offline First, Web hosting company Rackspace had a “maintenance failure” at its Dallas data center Sunday, then a truck on Monday hit a transformer providing its power.





    28 minutes ago
    in Headline Watch ·
    Authority: 65



  • View all »

    Videos about rackspace





    1. Rackspace Fox 29 News at 9





    2. The Reasons I Chose Rackspace for Hosting





    3. Rackspace X-Mas Party 2006





    4. Rackspace






  • No one has claimed this blog




    Web Host Industry Review | Find Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting, ... Rackspace Servers See Downtime Web Host SoftLayer to Host Internap RatePoint Partners with IPOWER







  • Photo of TomRaftery

    US Data Center chillers not backed up by diesel generators?




    US Data Center chillers not backed up by diesel generators? Published by Tom Raftery on 13/11/2007 in cix and data centre. 0 Comments Rackspace are a high-profile data centre ... .







  • Photo of allspaw

    Datacenters can suck. Communication can be great.




    Datacenters can suck. Communication can be great. If you consider that you and your users are in some sort of a ‘relationship’, then good communication is pretty important. The Rackspace datacenter outage reminds me yet again that we’re lucky to have a handful of





    2 hours ago
    by allspaw
    in Kitchen Soap ·
    Authority: 23



  • No one has claimed this blog

    RackSpace Data Center Goes Dark After Accident




    [ Batteries_2] The internet may seem omnipresent and infallible, ... at 365 Main that brought down our site, one of RackSpace's data centers in San Antonio went dark ... for the count for almost three hours.







  • No one has claimed this blog

    Rackspace Hit By Outage Caused By Wayward Truck




    Rackspace reported that it had two separate incidents at its Dallas/Forth Worth data center Monday, which resulted in visible downtime at a number of Internet customers. The firm reported







  • Photo of tkeating

    MyBlogLog outage - civrf.yahoo.com lookup failed




    [ MyBlogLog outage]It must be outage week, since I not only discovered Skype had a brief outage but ... to a major outage at Rackspace, which is Om's hosting company, along with several other large websites. I wonder if Yahoo uses Rackspace - which would explain the MyBlogLog outage.







  • No one has claimed this blog

    Cooling Challenges an Issue In Rackspace Outage




    miller60 writes “If your data center’s cooling system fails, how long do you have before your servers overheat? The shrinking window for recovery from a grid power outage appears to have been an issue in Monday night’s downtime for some customers of Rackspace, which



  • Facebookers Launch Official Petition Against Hillary Clinton's Insult

    In The Politico.com , it was reported that On Saturday, November 10th, Clinton advisers told reporters this about Barack Obama's voters:

    “Our people look like caucus-goers,” Grunwald said, “and his people look like they are 18. Penn said they look like Facebook.”

    Penn added, “Only a few of their people look like they could vote in any state.”

    This was reported by Roger Simon in his column today and the well-reported quip angered more than a few Facebook users. It was one of the dumbest errors commited by the Clinton campaign, and could serve as another nail in the coffin of her Presidential campaign.

    The Clinton camp's way too arrogant, and comments like those of Gruwald and Penn prove it.

    The anger of Facebook users has materialized into a petition against Hillary Clinton, which you can see and respond to with a click here.