CNN is reporting that two police officers were shot dead in Mississippi late Saturday. It was the first time in 30 years that an officer was killed in the line of duty in Hattiesburg, the mayor said.
Officers Benjamin J. Deen, 34, and Liquori Tate, 24, were making a traffic stop when they were shot, Mayor Johnny DuPree said.
They were taken to a hospital, but did not survive.
“The men and women who go out every day to protect us, the men and women who go out every day to make sure that we are safe, were turned on tonight,” DuPree said.
Police have apprehended two suspects, Marvin Banks and Curtis Banks, he said.
After the shooting, the suspects stole a police vehicle, which they used to flee. It was later found abandoned, according to CNN affiliate WDAM. The two men both have criminal records.
This, from a FBI statement. “Earlier in the day, the Claiborne County Sheriffs Department and the Mississippi Wildlife Fisheries and Parks conducted a ground search for a man who had been missing since early March. Officers located a man hanging in the woods near Roddy Road a half mile from his last known residence.
“The sheriff’s department contacted the MBI and FBI for forensic and investigative assistance. Investigators are currently processing the scene for evidence to determine the cause and manner of death.”
The man was reported missing on March 8 after disappearing on March 2nd.
Let me be the first one to issue an apology. I was wrong and I am big enough to admit that. Apparently, there is one smart Republican in Mississippi, I had no idea. And because he is so wise, he has dropped the party of hate and ignorance and has joined the party of Progressives.
Former Republican state Sen. Tim Johnson on Wednesday announced he’s switching parties and challenging incumbent Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves this year.
According to the local report, Johnson held a press conference at the state Capitol and reportedly told supporters, “Why join the Democratic Party and run for lieutenant governor? I’ll tell you: We are all Mississippians first. Elected officials should be in the business of helping all Mississippians, not picking out who to hurt.
“The Republican Party leaders’ actions against supporting Medicaid expansion and threatening our local hospitals was the final, deciding factor for me.”
Mississippi Republican governor Phil Bryant has some nerve! Just like other Republican governors nationwide, Governor Phil Bryant has denied the people of his state any access to healthcare through Obamacare, and has refused to expand Medicaid through the provisions provided under Obamacare.
That is expected. He is after all, a Republican and as such, has put his political ideology above the health needs of the people he governs. After a WalletHub study of the uninsured in Mississippi found a 3.3% increase in the uninsured rate, Bryant is putting the blame squarely on Obamacare… the same Obamacare he refused to implement in Mississippi.
“If statistics show that the ill-conceived and so-called Affordable Care Act is resulting in higher rates of uninsured people in Mississippi, I’d say that’s yet another example of a broken promise from Barack Obama,” Bryant said.
The nerve of this dude!
An estimated 137,800 people in Mississippi were left uncovered by health insurance because the state did not expand Medicaid.
The final results were turned over to the Secretary of State on Monday, and they showed Cochran winning the Republican primary by 7667 votes.
Meanwhile, his Teaparty challenger Chris McDaniel, is asking for a do over, claiming that some Mississippi residents voted illegally because they are registered Democrats. State rules do not prevent cross-party voting, but prohibits voting in both Democratic and Republican elections.
Cochran will face Democrat Travis Childers in the November midterm elections.
The Mississippi Republican was about to lose his seat to a Teapot favorite, so he did the unthinkable and pandered to the black community, normally a strong Democratic voting block, and got them to write his name down on the ballot. Now that he’s won, these Democrats are wondering what exactly will Thad Cochran do for the black community in Mississippi.
Various members of the Congressional Black Caucus that represents a large section of this voting block are already speaking up.
“Absolutely we have expectations,’’ Rep Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), said in an interview.
“My hat is off to Sen. Cochran for being as desperate as he was, to actually go out and up front got out and ask for those votes,” said Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.). ” Those votes were delivered and I’m hopeful he will be responsible and responsive to the voters that pushed him over the top.”
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) agreed that Cochran has an opportunity to support the black community.
“What I hope happens is that he comes to the realization that African Americans are the reason I have this final six years and therefore I’m going to try and be more responsible than I have been,” Cleaver said.
Their sentiment was echoed around the capitol and in Mississippi following Cochran’s win over tea party favorite Chris McDaniel, fueled by surge in black voters in the Mississippi Delta. Turnout increased overall in Mississippi for the runoff, but counties that are majority black like Jefferson County saw voters came to the polls in record numbers.
But how realistic is it, to expect a Republican to do the right thing? Should these Democrats think that in today’s partisan atmosphere, a Republican would even consider policies that benefit the voters who put him in office? Especially when those voters are Democrats… and black?
These Democrats may be in for a rude awakening. They should have found out what Cochran and his party stood for and the polices he’ll more likely support, before casting their vote.
Although her son eventually confessed to the crime, her execution is scheduled to happen on Thursday.
If Mississippi executes Michelle Byrom, 57, on Thursday, she would be the first woman executed in the state since 1944. A motion to approve that execution date is pending before the Mississippi Supreme Court.
Jackson attorney David Voisin, a consultant for the defense, said the state is moving “to kill a horribly battered and abused woman who did not do what the state said she did.”
In her capital murder trial, her son, Edward Jr., testified against her, saying she hired his friend, Joey Gillis, as a “hit man” to kill his father, Edward Sr., in 1999 for $15,000 — money she would pay from life insurance proceeds.
Jurors never saw the two letters that Junior wrote his mother in which he detailed how he killed his father and never heard from a psychologist who says Junior described killing his father.
Junior, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to commit capital murder, is now free on earned supervised release.
Although he won some delegates in Mississippi and Alabama in yesterday’s primaries, Romney’s clear focus on “math” as his only way to winning the Republican nomination is quite frankly, lame. What we are witnessing before our very eyes is a Republican candidate who is proving time and time again, that he simply cannot win a majority of the Republican votes in southern states – something that must be done if he expects to come close to competing against President Obama in the general elections.
Given yet another chance to seal the deal and wrap up this primary process, Romney placed third with 29% of the votes in Alabama with Gingrich slightly ahead. Santorum came in first with 35%. The story wasn’t much different in Mississippi – Santorum 33%, Gingrich 31% and Romney 30%. For entertainment value, 4% of the Republicans voted for Ron Paul. But even with this problem with winning the popular vote in southern States on their hands, Romney’s campaign went on CNN to highlight that they managed to win some delegates in those two states, inching them even more closer to the magic figure of 1144 – the total amount needed to win the Republican nomination. According to a CNN tally, Romney has 489 and leads second place Santorum by 255 delegates.
But can math alone bring Mitt Romney a victory? Newt Gingrich puts it this way: “The elite media’s effort to convince the nation that Mitt Romney is inevitable just collapsed. The fact is that in both states, the conservative candidates got nearly 70% of the vote, and if you’re the frontrunner and you keep coming in third, you’re not much of a frontrunner. And frankly, I do not believe that a Massachusetts moderate who created Romneycare as the forerunner of Obamneycare is going to be in a position to win any debates this fall, and that is part of the reason I’ve insisted in staying in this race.”
If you’re the Republican candidate and you cannot get Republicans in Republican states to vote for you, then you have some serious problems. The math may work to get you the nomination, but at some point, you have to prove you can get the votes.
“…while the campaign’s slow, methodical approach to collecting delegates in obscure, boring, or otherwise un-noteworthy contests has served them well logistically, it hasn’t helped them win the argument. The rhetoric of strength and leadership that could give them momentum heading into the general has been replaced with a list of math-centered talking points that deal with delegate counts, percentages, and margins of victory.
Campaign in poetry and govern in prose, the old political adage goes. The Romney campaign, it appears, has chosen to forego words altogether and make their case with numbers. But how long can the party’s would-be standard-bearer hinge his entire campaign message on math?”
Rick pulls off the daily double and the race pushes on. I can’t say as I’m terribly surprised but the results certainly were a sharp rebuke to Romney and his claims to be a conservative. Perhaps in the fall, when he’s the nominee, this will help him as moderate voters will determine this election.
The Mississippi Results:
Predict Survey says!
Gingrich 33% 31.3%
Romney 32% 30.3%
Santorum 29% 32.9%
Paul 6% 4.4%
And Alabama
Romney 32% 29.0%
Gingrich 31% 29.3%
Santorum 30% 34.5%
Paul 6% 5.0%
The GOP will win these two states in the fall, so no worries there. Newt Gingrich has promised to fight on, but he’s lost any claim to being the conservative alternative to Romney and can only be a spoiler. Santorum can say all he wants about being the nominee, but I don’t see him winning any of the big, less conservative states still to come. If he can manage to pick off a couple (IL, NY, CA), then we’ll talk. My take is that this positions Rick as a possible VP candidate if he has enough delegates and clout to force the issue in Tampa.
I’m sure that recent polls showing president Obama to be vulnerable (again and still) have emboldened conservatives not to settle on a candidate they don’t want. The remaining question is whether they want to go all in for Santorum.
We all know that there are some systems that are set up against the poor that benefit the rich. A good example of this is the following story. A mother of two is sent to jail for lying on her food-stamp application, while bankers largely responsible for our economic downfall and cheating the middle class out of trillions, got bailed out and huge bonuses.
Last week, a federal judge in Mississippi sentenced a mother of two named Anita McLemore to three years in federal prison for lying on a government application in order to obtain food stamps.
Apparently in this country you become ineligible to eat if you have a record of criminal drug offenses. States have the option of opting out of that federal ban, but Mississippi is not one of those states. Since McLemore had four drug convictions in her past, she was ineligible to receive food stamps, so she lied about her past in order to feed her two children.
The total “cost” of her fraud was $4,367. She has paid the money back. But paying the money back was not enough for federal Judge Henry Wingate.
Wingate had the option of sentencing McLemore according to federal guidelines, which would have left her with a term of two months to eight months, followed by probation. Not good enough! Wingate was so outraged by McLemore’s fraud that he decided to serve her up the deluxe vacation, using another federal statute that permitted him to give her up to five years.
He ultimately gave her three years, saying, “The defendant’s criminal record is simply abominable …. She has been the beneficiary of government generosity in state court.”
It’s almost an unbelievable figure – 916. That’s the amount of legislation that Republicans introduced from January to April, trying to regulate a woman’s reproductive system. It’s absolutely stunning!
This information comes from a report byThe Guttmacher Institute, and it finds that 49 states have contributed to this number with various bills geared towards regulating abortions and a woman’s right to choose. The report says that in 15 states, the following measures became law:
expand the pre-abortion waiting period requirement in South Dakota to make it more onerous than that in any other state, by extending the time from 24 hours to 72 hours and requiring women to obtain counseling from a crisis pregnancy center in the interim;
expand the abortion counseling requirement in South Dakota to mandate that counseling be provided in-person by the physician who will perform the abortion and that counseling include information published after 1972 on all the risk factors related to abortion complications, even if the data are scientifically flawed;
require the health departments in Utah and Virginia to develop new regulations governing abortion clinics;
revise the Utah abortion refusal clause to allow any hospital employee to refuse to “participate in any way” in an abortion;
limit abortion coverage in all private health plans in Utah, including plans that will be offered in the state’s health exchange; and
revise the Mississippi sex education law to require all school districts to provide abstinence-only sex education while permitting discussion of contraception only with prior approval from the state.
The report continues;
In addition to these laws, more than 120 other bills have been approved by at least one chamber of the legislature, and some interesting trends are emerging. As a whole, the proposals introduced this year are more hostile to abortion rights than in the past: 56% of the bills introduced so far this year seek to restrict abortion access, compared with 38% last year. Three topics—insurance coverage of abortion, restriction of abortion after a specific point in gestation and ultrasound requirements—are topping the agenda in several states. At the same time, legislators are proposing little in the way of proactive initiatives aimed at expanding access to reproductive health –related services; this stands in sharp contrast to recent years when a range of initiatives to promote comprehensive sex education, permit expedited STI treatment for patients’ partners and ensure insurance coverage of contraception were adopted.
Four months, 916 bills introduced. Sounds like a new record is about to be set. Whatever happened to Roe v. Wade? You know, the 1973 decision by the Supreme Court that gives women the right under the 14th amendment of the Constitution to have a choice? The law that has guided this issue for the last four decades.
We use cookies to improve your experience on our site. By agreeing to this, we can analyze browsing behavior and unique IDs on this site. Declining or revoking consent may affect certain features.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
