Free Republic

The Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease eight years ago, is stepping down from the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the influential Chicago-based civil rights organization he founded through its predecessor, Operation PUSH, more than 50 years ago. After ceding day-to-day operations last year, Jackson, 81, is formally handing the reins to his successor, the Rev. Frederick Douglass Haynes III, a senior pastor of friendship at West Baptist Church in Dallas. Haynes’ appointment is expected to be announced this weekend at the annual Rainbow/PUSH convention, sources said Friday. Haynes said it’s an honor to be chosen for this role....

A national mass surveillance system boosted by artificial intelligence (AI) took root in another state. The town council of Jackson, Wyoming, agreed in a close vote last month to install the 30 solar-powered license plate recognition (LPR) cameras along their streets and traffic lights, which feeds into a centralized surveillance system managed by the private company Flock Safety. The town is the first in the state of Wyoming to install the cameras. Council members who agreed to the measure expressed reluctance with their decision. Councilman Jonathan Schechter indicated his belief that the cameras marked a negative trend down an undesirable...

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was “profoundly disrespectful” when disagreeing with fellow Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Anchor Dana Bash said, “Thomas wrote, ‘Justice Jackson uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth, and well-being to label all blacks as victims. Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me. It is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push though barriers. Their race is not to blame for everything good or bad that happens in...

It has been an incredibly wild (and based!) week with the decisions the Supreme Court has handed down, including the Friday rulings upholding religious freedom and effectively grounding Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. But though the leftist meltdowns have been plentiful, what has been far more fulfilling to read have been the dissections of what the dissenting liberal Justices wrote on the Thursday affirmative action case ruling and the Friday one pertaining to religious freedom. Some of those dissections, as we previously reported, came from the court’s conservative members like Neil Gorsuch, who savaged Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in...

In 2020 the California legislature passed AB 3121 which created a 9-person task force to study California’s "complicity in slavery." The task force would also be authorized to make recommendations to the state legislature about payments – also known as reparations. Even if one could prove the dubious theory that the economic state of Blacks today is a result of America’s legacy of slavery, the state of California wouldn’t be the first place or even the second place to focus on this slavery. Since 1850 when California became a state its Constitution expressly forbid slavery, and it never supported the...

WASHINGTON, Friday May 15. Mr. L.L. CROUNSE, of the New-York TIMES Staff on the Rappahannock, sends to this Bureau the following exceedingly interesting extracts from the Richmond Enquirer of the 13th, and Sentinel of the 14th. From the Richmond Inquirer, May 13. HOW JACKSON WAS WOUNDED -- HIS SUFFERINGS AND DEATH -- ALL THE PARTICULARS Gen. JACKSON, having gone some distance in front of the line of skirmishers on Saturday evening, was returning about 8 o'clock, attended by his Staff and part of his couriers. The cavalcade was in the darkness of the night mistaken for a body of the...

A jury found four former Commonwealth Edison executives and lobbyists guilty of bribery-related charges Tuesday as part of an eight-year conspiracy scheme centered around former Democratic Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. In the highest-profile corruption case in Illinois in more than a decade, the jury convicted the defendants on all counts. "We're tired of political corruption," juror Amanda Schnitker Sayers said after the verdict. "We're hoping this is a first step." The Chicago veterinarian put the blame on Madigan. "He really did cause this all to happen," she said. Although Madigan wasn't on trial, the longest-serving state legislative leader in...

Hall of Fame basketball coach Phil Jackson has admitted to no longer following the NBA because it's become 'woke' and too 'political' since the 2020 bubble. The 77-year-old, who won 11 NBA championships as a head coach, claimed that he hasn't stayed up to date with recent developments in the league since 2020, while speaking to the Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin podcast.

Mississippi's Capitol Police Department, created to protect state buildings, has become Jackson's de facto second police department. During the past year, Capitol Police has doubled in size to almost 120 officers and expanded its reach into an 8.7-square-mile zone of Jackson called the "Capitol Complex Improvement Zone." This is where the former capitol security force now sets up traffic checkpoints, combats street crime and even investigates homicides. Jackson, however, still has its city-run police force, the Jackson Police Department. The expansion of Capitol Police is the response of the Republican, majority-white state legislature to Jackson's stubborn crime problem. The homicide...

Normally first-year Senators, and Supreme Court justices, keep a reserved bearing in the first few months in office. But not Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson. In her first two weeks on the Supreme Court bench, she’s nearly spoken more than the other three women on the Court put together: Probably not a good way to ingratiate herself with her colleagues.

The city of Jackson issued the following statement. After six months under an emergency contract and without compensation, Richard’s Disposal will cease all city-wide garbage collection. Their final day of garbage pick up will be Saturday, October 8. The announcement affects approximately 150,000 residential customers as well as municipal court and other municipal buildings around the city that are being serviced with roll off containers. The stoppage includes the twice-per-week pick-up of all residential garbage (including the collection of bulk items and bagged leaves). Household Hazardous Waste can still be dropped off at 1570 University Boulevard (at the corner of...

Whether Republican or Democrat, white or black, Jackson residents deserve better. Mississippi needs a strong capital city,” Latino writes. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall, ravaging the Mississippi Gulf Coast with record storm surge. On the 17th anniversary of one of the worst natural disasters in state history, Governor Tate Reeves stepped to a podium this week to announce another water-related disaster. The governor’s message: The City of Jackson’s Public Water System (“PWS”) had failed, and residents would have inconsistent and unsafe water supply for the foreseeable future. Though this crisis is only now gaining national attention, it...

According to multiple sources on-site and close to the State of Mississippi’s intervention in Jackson’s O. B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant that were not authorized to speak publicly, state Health and Emergency Management officials were met with a mix of “grateful faces” from a severely overworked and critically understaffed facility workforce operating in “fundamentally unsafe conditions” that needed to be immediately addressed. Critically unsafe municipal staffing levels were discovered when state officials arrived on-site. Particularly in the overnight hours, staff had dwindled to one operator on-site tasked with handling both the membrane and conventional filtering systems leaving a single point...

Liberal media outlets and figures blamed a long-running water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi, on racism in the wake of Republican Gov. Tate Reeves declaring a state of emergency. --- Reeves warned residents of Jackson, the state’s capital, not to drink the tap water due to the failure of water pumps at the city’s main water treatment plant Monday after the Pearl River flooded. National Guard troops began assisting efforts to deliver bottled water to the city’s 180,000 residents. Many liberal media figures, including reporters from NBC and MSNBC hosts, claimed racism was the cause of the crisis.

There is a another side to this catastrophe that has not been reported in the national news. * Half of the plant was built in 1992. The other half in early 2007. It is NOT an old plant. It was not maintained and allowed to fall apart. Buy a Lexus but don’t replace the oil, transmission fluid, and timing belt and see what happens after 200,000 miles or so. The plant is no different. * The city entered into a bad deal with Siemens in 2013 to replace all water meters for some new-fangled ones that would allegedly bring in...

NBC tech and culture reporter Kat Tenbarge tweeted how the ongoing water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi, is the result of "environmental racism" but became upset when users pointed out Democrats have been in control for decades and it appears local politicians ignored warning signs. "I’s the largest city in Mississippi. It’s 80% Black. Their water system is failing because of years of neglect. This is environmental racism," Tenbarge tweeted. When conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller said Republicans haven't controlled the city for a long time, Tenbarge said, "Oh, that's where all the racists in my mentions came from."

Chokwe Antar Lumumba, Democratic mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, promised to make the capital “the most radical city on the planet” during his 2017 campaign, but so far he’s been unable to even solve even the city’s basic infrastructure problems and the city’s running water is now unsafe to drink. He campaigned on plans to introduce universal basic income and alternatives to policing, to replace vacant lots with urban farms and to resolve chronic issues with the city’s water and roads in order to break the “cycles of humiliation” he said black residents experience in Jackson, the most heavily black large...

The 34-year-old attorney who had “never run for junior class president, let alone mayor” now holds the keys to the state’s most populous city. He brings with him a progressive agenda and much of the leftover to-do list of his father’s administration. He sees his victory – collecting 93% of the vote in Jackson’s 6 June election – as proof that even in a deep red Republican state, and even in the age of Trump, the city’s residents are ready to move in a new progressive direction. “The citizens of Jackson have demonstrated overwhelmingly a readiness to be a progressive...

No running water in Jackson. The heat index is 102 degrees. Schools and universities are closed. No way to cook, clean, bathe. This is capital city, and the biggest city in Mississippi. #jxnwatercrisis — Brittany Brown (@isthatbritt) August 30, 2022 Keep voting for republicans and eventually MS can be last in everything. Or at least be proudly neck and neck with KY for the bottom spot. — Michael Cush (@MichaelCush8) August 30, 2022 The city of Jackson is Democrat controlled and has been for many years. They own/operate/maintain the water system. I’m not saying that matters, but the facts matter....

The drinking water system in Jackson — Mississippi’s largest city and home to more than 160,000 residents — is failing, state officials announced on Monday. Thousands of Jackson residents already have no or little water pressure, and officials cannot say when adequate, reliable service will be restored. The city water system has been plagued with problems for years, including tens of thousands of residents losing water between one and three weeks during a 2021 winter storm. At a press conference Monday night, Gov. Tate Reeves said the city’s largest water treatment plants may be completely down. “The O.B. Curtis plant...