(Akiit.com) Watching tv today got me thinking about what I want for the future… I’m no longer a young man, but still have alot to accomplish in life… Yes it sometimes takes something tragic to happen before one truly see the light… Need to literally overcome my shyness and start exploring this beautiful world… Would love to travel more, so I shall head over to a ShermansTravel.com and see what type of flight deals I could get, which in return shall help me save money…

Written By CTA

(Akiit.com) Ten years ago, Bill Cosby’s son Ennis and Michael Jordan’s father both died. Entertainer M.C. Hammer filed bankruptcy, and Malcolm X’s grandson ignited a fatal fire. Les Brown divorced Gladys Knight, and the NBA’s Juwon Howard went into a treatment center. Actor Howard Rollins (age 46) died, and Yaphet Kotto chose to marry for the third time.

Ten years ago in Current Biography, actor Samuel L. Jackson claimed that his wife “always says to me that I have now grown into the man that she always knew I could be.” Jackson, born 1949 in Washington, D.C., married actor La Tanya Richardson in 1980.

“The makeover on environmentally induced self-hatred must be done from inside.” filmmaker Spike Lee said. “Nobody made Richard Pryor do what he did to himself, but him.” Richard Pryor told Charles Whitaker in a 1986 interview for Ebony, “It’s nobody’s fault.”

In his book Vernon Can Read, attorney Vernon Jordan (born 1935 in Atlanta) says organization and structure is his credo, while late attorney Johnnie Cochran’s advice was, “Handle the good days and the bad days with equal aplomb.” (Source: Emerge)

As a Washington Post columnist, former Minneapolis Tribune columnist (and former Minneapolis Spokesman/St. Paul Recorder staffer), Carl T. Rowan criticized Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1967 for voicing his opposition to the Vietnam conflict. King dreamed of a day when “the lion shall lie down with the lamb and none shall be afraid.” Woody Allen countered that “The lion shall lie down with the lamb, but the lamb won’t get much sleep.”

Bayard Rustin wrote about King’s death and the death of Malcolm X as well. Rustin not only met Malcolm X, but also debated him.

Rustin was a pacifist. His maternal grandmother raised him as both Quaker — pacifism is one of their tenets — and a civil rights activist. Rustin bought a ticket to ride the interstate to test the Supreme Court’s Morgan Decision banning Jim Crow seating. He was not only jailed for this, but also served hard labor on a chain gang.

Asa Phillip Randolph appointed Rustin deputy of the August 28, 1963, March on Washington; he was in charge of organizing the march, but was kept out of the spotlight: As a gay man, Rustin was perceived as a threat to the solidarity of the Civil Rights Movement.

“In the late 1990s,” Ishmael Reed wrote, “some psychotic New Jersey police held a famous African American dancer to the ground until they saw that he was on the cover of that week’s Time magazine.” While being eyeballed for what seemed an inordinate amount of time by a White policeman on the street, Reed admits, “I was trying to reconstruct my whereabouts for the previous week. Just in case.”
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(Akiit.com) Whoever on Team Obama keeps feeding into Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s seeming compulsive need to speak out on the Reverend Jeremiah Wright should get the swift boot. When Wright went on his latest public and media tear, Obama should have simply issued a statement saying this: Wright is no longer my pastor. And as I have said repeatedly, his views do not reflect mine, and then move on.

But no, Obama’s Wright compulsion drove him to deliver a defensive and apologetic so-called race speech in which Wright was the centerpiece. Next, he denounced Wright’s views in an interview. Now he holds a halting, stumbling, anguished voice press conference to denounce Wright again. Here’s the effect of all this. He’s given a slew of gossipy, media talking heads more salacious grist for the gossip and rumor mill about Wright, the church and Obama’s long term relationship with both.

He’s elevated Wright from a relatively obscure, local preacher to a nationally known polarizing figure. He’s deepened the suspicions of those who all along felt that he was a closet radical and race panderer. This hurt him with white voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and almost certainly it will hurt him in Indiana. It has pecked away at the razor thin lead he had over Clinton among Democrats, and dropped him behind McCain in the general election. (Hillary beats McCain by ten points).

He created clouds of doubt among some of his non-rabid, and non-true believer supporters that maybe it’s time to take a second look at him and his candidacy. He’s given political analysts and pundits boundless ammunition to fire the jibe that maybe he is unelectable. After all, if he bombs with blue collar, rural, and less educated white voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania who are Democrats, what chance does he have of getting a big swatch of the must win independents who fit that same vote demographic in the South, the Midwest and the West to back him in a head to head showdown with McCain? He’s gotten so bogged down with the obsessive need to slam Wright that he’s managed to self-derail his campaign from the issues that should matter to debating Wright on of all things as to whether Wright and the black church as Wright claims are one and the same.
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(Akiit.com) A few years ago, Robert Downey Jr. was known for abusing drugs, doing jail time and skipping out on rehab sessions.

Next week he’s starring in one of the summer’s biggest movies, “Iron Man.”

Downey is not the only celebrity to bounce back from hard times with the law.

Willie Nelson was fined $32 million by the Internal Revenue Service during the early ’90s. The country singer sold most of his possessions and paid back about $16 million. Today, Nelson is as popular as ever, a beloved music icon.

Four years ago, Martha Stewart also did jail time for lying about a stock sale. Now the domestic diva is back on her throne as America’s homemaking queen.

Which brings us to Wesley Snipes.

This week Snipes was sentenced by a federal judge in Ocala to serve three years in prison for willfully failing to file tax returns. Snipes also faces paying millions of dollars in back taxes, interest and penalties. His lawyers have said they will appeal the sentence.
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(Akiit.com) Even before the first witness was called in the Sean Bell trial, a defense attorney for one of the three officers charged with gunning down Bell flatly said that he thought his client and the other two officers would be acquitted in the killing of Bell. This was not typical attorney bluster. The defense attorney was right.

At first glance, there was good reason to think that he was off base in his prediction and that the cops that fired the volley of shots that killed Bell would be convicted. An anguished New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg publicly questioned the shooting. Two of Bell’s companions gave eyewitness testimony that the officers acted like Wild West cowboys and opened up without warning. And most importantly Bell was unarmed and seemingly posed no threat to the officers.

But expectations, witness testimony, seemingly unimpeachable evidence, and the official condemnation of the deadly shooting by city officials obviously weren’t enough. There’s equally good reason why it almost never is.

When cops go on trial for overuse of deadly force, their victims are generally young blacks and Latinos. The attorneys that defend them are top gun defense attorneys and have had much experience defending police officers accused of misconduct. Police unions pay them and they spare no expense in their defense. The cops rarely serve any pre-trial jail time, and are released on ridiculously low bail.

If the cops are tried by a jury, police defense attorneys seek to get as many middle class whites on the panel as possible. The presumption is that they are much more likely to believe the testimony of police and prosecution witnesses than black witnesses, defendants, or even the victims.

Prosecutors have a big task in trying to overcome pro-police attitudes and the negative racial stereotypes. Two Penn State University studies on racial perceptions and stereotypes, one in 2003 and a follow-up study in 2008, found that many whites are likely to associate pictures of blacks with violent crimes, and in some cases where crimes were not committed by blacks they misidentified the perpetrator as an African-American. Defense attorneys played hard on that perception and depicted Bell and his companions as thugs and drunkards who posed a threat to the officers.
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