Author: Linn Washington

It’s bad enough that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney lies repeatedly on the campaign trail and top Romney surrogates like John Sununu crassly engage in race-baiting that elicits no rebuke from Romney.

But the Republican Party’s penchant for prevarication and prejudice in pursuit of the U.S. presidency is reaching a new low – yet again – with actions by a GOP aligned group called Raging Elephants.

This group is funding billboards in Texas and Tennessee trumpeting the factually flawed assertion that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Was a Republican,” and is urging black voters to “VOTE REPUBLICAN.”

A Raging Elephants’ billboard campaign in Memphis links that MLK-was-a-Republican line with requests to vote for a black female Republican congressional candidate running there.

This King-was-a-Republican claim resurrects a similar fraudulent claim mounted in 2008 by a group called the National Black Republican Association. That Association placed billboards in South Carolina, Florida and Denver pushing the same flawed contention about Dr. King.

There is no historical evidence that the decidedly non-partisan Dr. King worked for either Republicans or Democrats. There is evidence that King’s father publicly identified himself as a Republican, however many blacks during the early-to-mid-20th Century did, understandably identifying politically back then with the party of slave-emancipator Abraham Lincoln.

A Romney campaign that encourages racism is also trying to lure black voters through lies

Two police lieutenants face a similar criminal charge but one gets a slap on the wrist while the other is fired.

One of these two police supervisors is an officer with a distinguished record of exposing corruption and misconduct.

Guess which of those two veteran police officers received the harsher punishment?

The whistle-blower!

Upon firing Lt. Aisha Perry weeks ago, Police Department officials subjected her to the humiliation of a public arrest, complete with ‘perk walk’ before television news cameras. But they kept a lid on a secret that casts suspicion on the real reason behind Perry’s termination: While publicly firing Perry for theft of utility services, PPD brass were at the same time quietly disciplining seven other Department employees behind the scenes for similar theft of utility service offenses.

Philadelphia Police Lt. Aisha Perry, targeted by vindictive police because she's a whistle-blower

Much is rightly made of the ‘maverick’ character of former Pennsylvania U.S. Senator Arlen Specter in obituaries and other media coverage since his recent death.

That maverick streak certainly animated Specter’s December 2010 Farewell Speech from the Senate where he criticized the lack of civility currently rampant in that body plus assailed both political parties for perpetuating legislative gridlock and abuses of Senate rules.

Missing from this coverage, however, is any mention of a proper but unpopular position former prosecutor Specter took on the most contentious murder case in the history of the city where he lived – Philadelphia.

In July 1995, Specter bucked Philadelphia’s legal and political establishment by criticizing the judge then handling a pivotal appeal hearing for Mumia Abu-Jamal charging that jurist with crippling proper court procedure by unfairly rushing that critical Post Conviction Relief Act hearing.

Specter offered this unusual criticism in an equally unusual forum: a speech before the Republican National Committee.

Arlen Specter (l), and on right, French Mayor Catherine Payge with filmmaker/professor Johanna Fernandez and Mumia's son Jamal Hart a

After spending much of her 94-years as a civil rights activist this Washington, DC resident is understandably supportive of the Barack Obama presidency because she like many African-Americans never thought she’d ever see a black man sitting in that Oval Office seat designated for the most powerful person on earth.

This 94-year-old bristles at the extraordinary amount of criticisms unleashed against Obama telling a niece that she’d like to take a sharp sword and stick Obama critics “in the butt!”

Many blacks are touchy about criticisms directed toward Obama, feeling – with factual basis – that Obama receives unfair criticisms, particularly from right-wing conservatives.

For example Michelle Bachmann, the extremist Republican congresswoman with presidential aspirations, blasted Obama blaming him for historic high levels of black unemployment, a rate consistently double that of whites during this so-called Great Recession which actually is a full-blown depression for minorities and many whites.

Of course Bachmann’s partisan slam was silent on small yet salient facts like Obama inheriting the jobs killing recession from his Republican Oval Office predecessor who Bachmann blindly supported.

And, Bachmann’s blast blithely dismissed the fact that she and her Republican confederates on Capitol Hill have persistently opposed efforts by congressional progressives to pass jobs creating initiatives that would significantly increase employment among all jobless Americans, including blacks.

Blacks have been disproportionately punished in the US depression, and stimulus programs have helped mostly whites

The recent outrage in Pennsylvania over the scheduled October 3 execution of a man who killed two men who had sexually abused him during his childhood has tarnished the reformer image of Philadelphia DA Seth Williams, exposing him as just another prosecutor willing to trample justice to preserve a death penalty.

When Seth Williams successfully campaigned to become Philadelphia’s top prosecutor a few years ago he used a catchy phrase: “A New Day/A New DA.”

But based on Williams’ recent posturing and positions taken by him, evidence indicates this new DA continues operating in the same old way as his predecessors.

Instead of running his office in accordance with that ‘New Day’ many expected, DA Williams is defending death penalty cases that are stained by prosecutorial misconduct and is pursuing factually bogus charges against victims of police brutality, including one involving a blind man charged with attacking the police who beat him.

The most pronounced example of Williams’ old wine/new bottle stance is his vigorous –and intellectually dishonest — public relations campaign backing the execution of child-sex abuse victim-turned-murderer Terrance Williams.

A week before the scheduled execution (which was halted by a Philadelphia judge just days before it took place), DA Williams wrote an op-ed article in the Philadelphia Inquirer in which the DA denounced death row inmate Williams for never mentioning his sexual abuse during trial. But putting aside the obvious point that a sex abuse victim might not dare to report such a violation, in his op-ed the DA himself declined to report that prosecutors during that trial had withheld evidence of that very sexual abuse, in the form of police reports about it, from the defense, the court and the jury, in order to enhance the the chances of winning a sentence of death.

The DA’s failure to mention that the prosecution had withheld important mitigating evidence is journalistic misconduct of the same nature as the prosecutorial misconduct he was hiding from readers.
The Philadelphia DA’s Office took a spanking later when, during the same week, a Philadelphia city court judge set aside the death penalty on Terrance Williams and Pennsylvania’s Board of Pardons, which had earlier met and denied Williams’ request for clemency, reconvened a clemency hearing in his case.

Terrance Williams was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on October 3 for killing one of his abusers. His death warrant had been signed in September by Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, a Republican former state attorney general who ignored an avalanche of clemency pleas including pleas from former prosecutors, judges, clergy, jurors who convicted Williams and even the wife of one of Williams’ victims, who had informed prosecutors at the time of the trial that her husband had indeed earlier sexually abused his killer.

Standing behind cops and prosecutors, right or wrong, is Philly's new DA, Seth Williams (r)

The news media have failed once again to report a significant story about an example of the racism always so obvious at Republican National Conventions.

That story this time is not about the usual paucity of black delegates participating in the GOP’s quadrennial presidential candidate nominating confab (evident to anyone viewing video of the convention floor) or about Republican leaders lamely decrying Democrats for “falsely” claiming the GOP exploits racial prejudice.

Rather, the story persistently missed by mainstream news media this time concerns the failure of the GOP to include black-owned businesses in the economic opportunities arising from its nominating convention.

This exclusion belies the GOP proclamations that it is a champion of both business opportunity and of even-handedness.

The recently concluded Republican National Convention in Tampa Bay pumped an estimated $153-million into that region’s economy.

However, very few black businesses around Tampa received any revenue from RNC-related expenditures.

The presidents of the Tampa Bay Black Chamber of Commerce and the Sun Coast African American Chamber of Commerce both said economic exclusion ruled at Tampa’s RNC event.

Black faces were hard to spot at the GOP Convention in Tampa, even among concession businesses

The perplexing predicament confronting Daryl Brooks could confound writers Albert Camus and Franz Kafka, two authors acclaimed for their works about individuals subjected to surreal forms of injustice.

Brooks, a community activist in Trenton, New Jersey, is facing a Kafkaesque return to prison because some NJ state parole personnel charged him with committing a parole violation that top NJ Parole Board officials contend is not actually a violation.

Top New Jersey State Parole Board officials acknowledge that ‘admission of guilt’ by a person is not a condition for either a person’s release from prison on parole or for a person remaining on parole once released from prison.

Yet, some parole personnel are pushing hard to put Brooks back in prison for his failure to admit guilt, despite top Parole Broad officials having said such an admission is not required for released parolees.

A top Parole Board executive, when responding to a news media inquiry in late June, responded “No” to a question about guilt admission being a condition for parole release or parole continuance. The Board’s executive director recently affirmed that response.

Brooks is not alone in enduring such Kafkaesque predicaments from parole authorities.

Daryl Brooks, railroaded into jail, and then barred from parole for refusing to admit guilt

Mumia Abu-Jamal, the internationally recognized American political prisoner, thwarted a Philadelphia judge’s secretive court order that could have eliminated his future appeal rights when he filed a last- minute motion on August 23rd challenging that order sentencing him to life-without-parole.

Most supporters and detractors of Abu-Jamal had been expecting the formal conversion of his controversial death sentence to life-without-parole in the wake of a federal appeals court’s second and final rejection of requests from Philadelphia prosecutors to keep Abu-Jamal on death row back in April 2011.

What was unexpected by Abu-Jamal supporters were the procedures surrounding the secretive court order, which appears to have violated a number of Pennsylvania Rules of Criminal Procedure.

Abu-Jamal’s Pro Se Motion for Post Sentence Relief and Reconsideration of Sentence referenced Rule 720 of Pennsylvania’s Criminal Procedure which states in part that defendants shall “have the right” to make post-sentence motion but that motion must be filed “no later than 10 days after imposition of sentence.”

That secretly issued resentencing order occurred on August 13, 2012, exactly ten days before Abu-Jamal filed his motion.

If that ten-day filing period had expired, undiscovered due to secrecy-shrouded issuance of the resentencing order about which no public notice or notice was provided to Abu-Jamal and his legal team, his legal ability to challenge his continued confinement would have been damaged, including his probable loss of future appeal rights.

Mumia, off death row but fighting to escape life in prison, with attorney Rachel Wolkenstein and his wife Wadiya Jamal

One week before a Pennsylvania court judge upheld that state’s controversial Voter ID law by concluding the measure’s impact was “neutral and nondiscriminatory,” critics of that law released a disturbing study documenting the law’s discriminatory impact on voters in Philadelphia.

Today’s ruling by PA Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson rejecting a request for an injunction blocking implementation of the Voter ID law in November’s presidential election casually dismissed evidence that the measure would adversely impact the elderly, infirmed, college students and racial minorities.

Yet, a geographic analysis of voter data in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s largest city, concluded that the state’s “new strict photo ID requirement may be in effect a racially discriminatory voting procedure…African-American and Latino communities are disproportionately affected by the Voter ID law…”

That analysis, prepared for Stephanie Singer, chair of Philadelphia’s three elections supervising City Commissioners, detailed how areas around Philadelphia’s major universities, like the University of Pennsylvania and in heavily low-income/minority neighborhoods, contained the largest percentages of persons now rendered ineligible to vote under the Voter ID law.

“This law has a racial impact,” Singer said about the ID law formally known as Act 18.

Judge Robert Simpson: The smiley white face of Jim Crow and legalized voter suppression in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, the same conservative Republican who recently cut 70,000 from receiving their meager welfare payments in order to cut government costs, is ready to spend millions of bucks to implement a voter suppression scheme that evidence indicates is a blatant partisan measure designed to help Mitt Romney gain a presidential election victory.

Earlier this year Corbett and his confederates in Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled legislature approved one of the nation’s most restrictive photo Voter ID measures to squash what they claimed was frequent voter fraud particularly in Democratic strongholds like Philadelphia – the state’s largest city.

However, Corbett Administration officials now admit that the fraud their Voter ID measure seeks to corral – persons falsely impersonating someone else on Election Day – is virtually non-existent in the state.

Corbett Administration officials, during a state court hearing on a lawsuit to block implementation of this Voter ID law, acknowledged they had uncovered no evidence of past impersonation fraud and found no evidence that it will occur in the 2012 presidential election.

In fact during the eight years Corbett served as Pennsylvania’s attorney general before his election to governor in 2010 he never prosecuted a single voter fraud case.

Republican-led states are setting up new Jim Crow voting obstacles in a desperate effort to win in November