I always get a little skeptical when I see democrats and republicans agreeing on almost anything. Especially when it comes to their propensity to ignore the US Constitution.

Recently, both the democrats and the republicans were cheering President Obama’s violation of the US Constitution. Article 1, Sec. 8 pretty clearly authorizes Congress to define and punish matters of piracy and crimes on the high seas. There is probably a good reason the nation’s founders included this reference.

There is nothing in the US Constitution that authorizes the President to order US Navy snipers to kill persons on a Coast Guard vessel (of a country we don’t recognize) in order to keep a Danish owned ship from paying it’s toll to cross a section of water.

Why don’t we and others recognize this country? For starters, western nations then would be forced to stop over fishing (and depleting the food reserves of a very poor country) off this country’s coast. But that could mean paying a little more for sushi!

Although many Americans have been hit hard by the continuing – and alarming – growth of unemployment, none have come close to being hit as devastatingly hard as the country’s African-American workers.

The unemployment rate among African-Americans is above 15 percent, more than twice the rate for white workers and almost 7 percent higher than the rate for African-American rate a year ago. The jobless include more than one-third of the African-Americans aged 16 to 19 who want and need jobs.

The figures come from a new report by the Center for American Progress, a think tank headed by John Podesta, the Georgetown University law professor who served as President Clinton’s chief of staff.

As bad as the situation is, the report says it “will likely only increase as the economic crisis deepens.”

That’s partly because so many African-Americans work in manufacturing and construction, which have been hurting the most of any industries during the current economic turmoil. The continuing troubles in the auto industry alone could lead to hundreds of thousands or more black auto workers being

Tell the Obama Administration you demand Constitutional Justice Now for Mumia Abu-Jamal Initiated by the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC) SIGN THE ONLINE PETITION AT
Petition

On April 6, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal asking for a new trial for death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, based on evidence of racist prosecutorial misconduct during his original 1982 trial in Philadelphia. An important aspect of this misconduct is based on the 1986 Batson issue—a legal decision that says that prospective jurors cannot be selected or unselected based on their race.

In Mumia’s 1982 trial, the white prosecutor used 11 of his 15 strikes to remove Black jurors from the jury. In the end, Mumia’s case was tried before a jury of ten whites and two Blacks. On top of the strikes made by prosecutors, there was also a well-documented culture of racial discrimination by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office.