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Georgia Representative Driving While Drunk

Talk about Karma… good, or bad … here’s one for the legislation books.

A Georgia House of Representatives Republican, Andrew John “Kip” Smith, who sponsored Georgia House Bill 464, ran a red light on Friday morning. In a nutshell, the Bill requires random drug testing on citizens who receive public assistance.

For informational purposes, Rep. Scott Holcomb countered by introducing a bill to test all state lawmakers “randomly” for drugs.

According to the arresting officer, “I asked him again, and he stated he had consumed a single beer at Hal’s. I noticed also that Mr. Smith’s eyes were watery, and I asked him to exit the vehicle, which he did.” In short, Smith first lied to the officer about whether or not he’d been drinking, then refused to take the test.

When Smith finally agreed to it, blowing into the officer’s hand-held “intoximeter,” he failed the test. It registered at .091, above the legal limit of .08.

 ***S Renee Greene is an author, writer, and journalist. A former Atlanta real estate paralegal and former news clerk with the Columbus (GA) Ledger-Enquirer, she is the manager of GreeneInk DigiMedia News Association and the communications officer for the Empowerment Leadership Academy (ELA) of Contra Costa County, CA. She also owns Delayed Reaction.**

Black women have been called many names throughout United States history, says mystery writer Frankie Bailey, but no one has denied them their strength.

Black culture delivers black women daily challenges with home, church, family and community, as well as on the job and in the social arena. Whether we are at the dinner table or the church social, the black woman’s strengh unleashed is a changer of all it impacts.

Now that young adults have signed a brief in support of health care reform, it may well be past time for black women across the nation to take the stand they have always taken to protect this nation’s children, and their own. Eventually, all babies come home to genetic mitochondrial Eve. It is our duty and our responsibility to see to it that all Americans get the healthcare they need, whether they can afford it or not. 

Black women have a tradition of survival that makes their stand in support of healthcare reform the final stand to make sure the Affordable Care Act sticks long after President Obama is out of office. We’ve never been the kind to run from a good thick challenge, and now is the time for black women to band together and make the final push to ensure that everyone is taken care of, now and in the future.

“ObamaCare” is a 24/7 doctor on-call and a private direct line to the Surgeon General of the United States if the President even so much as sneezes. The Affordable Care Act is for ALL Americans, not for Obama. He doesn’t need it and never will. Neither will his wife or children.

WE need it.

We know how this is done. Just do it.

None of us can afford to allow them to kill the Affordable Care Act. The taxpayers can’t afford it, America can’t afford it. We have all paid, and bled, enough. Health care is not an option for human beings; it is a right, not a privilege. Advocates of the animal Humane societies of the nation would do no less for a dog.

What about people?

 ***S Renee Greene is an author, writer, and journalist. A former Atlanta real estate paralegal and former news clerk with the Columbus (GA) Ledger-Enquirer, she is the manager of GreeneInk DigiMedia News Association and the communications officer for the Empowerment Leadership Academy (ELA) of Contra Costa County, CA. She also owns Delayed Reaction.**

That’s what the website ‘purpose statement’ says. Sounds innocent enough. But it doesn’t hurt to take a look at the activities of these types of organizations in order to find out what they are really scratching at.

Citizens United was created in November 1988 by conservative activist Floyd G. Brown. A ”nonprofit corporation organized under the laws of Virginia and tax-exempt under section 501 (c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code,” Citizens United is affiliated with The Presidential Coalition, the 2007 Conservative Victory Committee, and Americans for Bush. The organization is now headed by David Bossie, who has been the president since 2000.

Floyd G. Brown, who participated in the 1988 “Willie Horton” attack ad on Michael Dukakis and remains proud of it, carries on a blog that consistently launches the same types of “scare attacks” against the Obama administration bending the facts to fit his histrionic point of view. But he, along with David Bossie, was also known for launching the same types of attack ads against Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

What makes Bossie and Citizens United scary today is that their zeal to “take America back” and to lean into the “founding fathers” for guidance is about as politically wrong-headed as it gets.

Their glossy-eyed look at the founding fathers of America tend to overlook the fact that President George Washington himself did not accept all Christian dogma as fact, and even that President John Adams signed the famous Treaty of Tripoli, which boldly stated, “[T]he government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion….”

Errors of fact and judgment in deciphering scriptural context and American politics have been at the heart of decision-making when it comes to who gets to run this nation. I witnessed, in the 1980s, some evangelical black Americans who actually thought that because Ronald Reagan was not afraid to quote a scripture from the Bible, it automatically made him presidential material, without any sense of all of the other things he said (and did) that were detrimental to black America.

Black America soon found out, the hard way, just how horrific a choice for President that Ronald Reagan was.

It was later said that Reagan set race relations and black progress in America “back 20 years.” Back to the Civil Rights Movement prior to the time any progress had been made at all. Rumor had it that Reagan, while watching The Bill Cosby Show, stated that black Americans had been “helped enough.” He also was known for beginning his presidential campaign on the gravesites of three murdered Civil Rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, saying that it was time for the nation to “get back to basics.”

In 1981, right after Reagan was elected someone took his initiative to get back to basics too seriously. It was the year of the lynching of Michael McDonald of Mobile, AL, the first lynching in the United States since Emmitt Till’s murder took place in Mississippi in 1955.

In 1988, President Reagan vetoed the Civil Rights Restoration Act, passed by Congress to overturn the 1984 Supreme Court ruling, Grove City College v. Bell. Congress enacted the measure by overriding Reagan’s veto. Reagan also vehemently resisted signing the national King Holiday into federal law until Coretta Scott King herself marched the Bill right up to him in person and put it in his face.

For Citizens United, the Reagan-essiah rule of law of the 1980s is the uniform model code for legislative force across the United States. Just as the Klan put out deadly synergy with the White Citizens Council of the 1950s, Citizens United carries on that legacy to this day.

They continue to use fraud and assault-inducing encounters with black Americans, as well as other minorities, to make it appear that American-rights-friendly civil organizations, such as ACORN, labor unions, census takers, and more, are committing acts of fraud. Problem is, O’Keefe and his compadres are the ones causing the problems and committing the fraud.

They use their inside operatives to ”plant” the so-called fraudulent evidence, and then video-tape actors and unwitting accomplices who are not aware of what they are up to, to make it appear that these incidents are legitimate.  Most recently, in New Hampshire, O’Keefe and his accomplices violated the law.

According to media reports, O’Keefe and his undercover operatives committed fraud in Tuesday’s N.H. primary by going to polling stations, falsely representing who they were, and requesting ballots under the names of recently deceased voters — a violation of state and federal law. O’Keefe says he ”wants to convince Americans that voter fraud [which rarely happens in real time] is a ‘pressing threat’ to democracy.”

Closer to the truth may be the thought that O’Keefe sympathizes with the right-wing’s desperate moves to help state lawmakers pass onerous rules on ‘how and when’ people can vote in order to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of mostly poor, minority and young American voters.

O’Keefe, now on probation for tampering with a Democratic Senator’s phone system, is currently being investigated for the voter fraud and tampering by New Hampshire Attorney General Michael Delaney and U.S. Attorney John Kacavas.

 ***S Renee Greene is an author, writer, and journalist. A former Atlanta real estate paralegal and former news clerk with the Columbus (GA) Ledger-Enquirer, she is the manager of GreeneInk DigiMedia News Association and the communications officer for the Empowerment Leadership Academy (ELA) of Contra Costa County, CA. She also owns Delayed Reaction.**

In 2008, a tornado ripped through the property and the church was forced to take out a loan to cover the repairs. It has managed to pick itself up, rebuild, and continue servicing the community; but BB&T’s CEO, Kelly King, wants to foreclose on it by ignoring the church’s attempts to work with the bank to modify the loan and bring it better terms against the fair market value of the property itself.

As a matter of record, BB&T took $3.1 billion in federal bailout money from the American people during the Bush administration’s economic fallout in 2008 and used it to eat up hundreds of smaller banks, acquiring another $26 billion in assets the following year. Rumor has it that the bank wants to sell the valuable land from under the church by refusing to modify the loan and profiting off inflated property values.

Occupy Atlanta supports the Higher Ground Empowerment Center and the Vine City community.

 ***S Renee Greene is an author, writer, and journalist. A former Atlanta real estate paralegal and former news clerk with the Columbus (GA) Ledger-Enquirer, she is the manager of GreeneInk DigiMedia News Association and the communications officer for the Empowerment Leadership Academy (ELA) of Contra Costa County, CA. She also owns Delayed Reaction.**

Is there media overkill going on this election year, or is it because the crowded Republican field is keeping up so much overbloated noise that it is hard for the media to keep up with them?

Have you had enough, or do you want more?

Photo of King Memorial from AP

Maya Angelou’s words concerning the quote inscribed on the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. memorial on the National Mall, that they made him appear to be an “arrogant twit,” seems to have gotten through to the powers that be at the office of the Secretary of the Interior.

The inscription currently reads “I was a drum major for justice, peace, and righteousness.” Kings actual words were “Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.”

The phrase is modified from Dr. King’s February 1968 sermon known as the “Drum Major Instinct.” At the time, the world famous civil rights icon was explaining to his Atlanta congregation how he would like to be remembered at his funeral. Two short months later, in April of 1968, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn.

Ken Salazar, spokesman for the U.S. Department of the Interior says he is not sure how the changed inscription will be paid for, but the job would be done. Previously, architect Ed Jackson Jr. had said the quote was paraphrased because there was not enough space on the memorial to put the entire quote. They have now decided to come up with a more appropriate way of phrasing Dr. King’s words.

As a matter of information, the members of the King Memorial Foundation stated that Ms Angelou, though a named member of the Council of Historians, did not show up at the meetings when the words for the inscription were decided.

***S Renee Greene is an author, writer, and journalist. A former Atlanta real estate paralegal and former news clerk with the Columbus (GA) Ledger-Enquirer, she is the manager of GreeneInk DigiMedia News Association and the communications officer for the Empowerment Leadership Academy (ELA) of Contra Costa County, CA. She also owns Delayed Reaction.**

A school district outside of Philadelphia PA is going straight up broke.

So what do the teachers do? Walk out?

Hayell “No.” They won’t go.

The Chester Upland school district, which has laid off more than 40 percent of its teachers and professional staff and nearly half of its support staff, and has not given raises to the teachers who were due for them, let alone their regular paychecks, has teachers who are determined to keep teaching in spite of having no paychecks coming in the foreseeable future.

Their reason? The kids need stability and need their routines to go on, despite the severe financial setbacks in the school district. “We need the students to know that we’re here and we’re not abandoning them,” says elementary school math teacher Sara Ferguson said. “We need them to know they’ll have some place to go.”

Gossip of massive exodus and school closings took over the community.

At an early January 2012 meeting, members of the Chester Upland Education Association and the Chester Upland Education Support Personnel Association, affiliates of the Pennsylvania State Education Association and the National Education Association, passed a resolution to keep working, without pay, as long as they could.

Though there doesn’t seem to be much they can do to mitigate the losses, Ferguson says “I was never so proud in my life to be a PSEA member, to be a CUEA member…everyone has different financial situations, but … we decided to remain on the job as professionals.”

 ***S Renee Greene is an author, writer, and journalist. A former Atlanta real estate paralegal and former news clerk with the Columbus (GA) Ledger-Enquirer, she is the manager of GreeneInk DigiMedia News Association and the communications officer for the Empowerment Leadership Academy (ELA) of Contra Costa County, CA. She also owns Delayed Reaction.**