The mayor of San Francisco wants to help pregnant women with the financial burden of having and caring for an infant — but only certain pregnant women.
White, Asian, and Hispanic expectant mothers need not concern themselves with applying for help from the city’s new program: It’s only for black and Pacific Islander women.
An 89-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s nearly lost her Ocean Twp house over six cents. SIX F&$#ING CENTS! She had mistakenly underpaid her 2019 property taxes by six cents. September 9th, she received noticed that the township put her house up for sheriff’s sale, according to a report on NBC New York. Of course the interest grew at a far faster rate than any of us could hope to gain in savings and the bill quickly grew to $300.
The woman is Glen Kristi Goldenthal and her daughter, Lisa Suhay, who lives in Virginia, spent a whole day on the phone with township officials trying to save her mother’s house from being sold out from under her. Thankfully she was successful and Ocean Twp Mayor Chris Siciliano was quick to apologize and admitted something must be done to change the system.
Even when the tax collector called Mrs. Goldenthal to tell her of the delinquent tax, he knew something wasn’t right. But that didn’t stop the machinery of New Jersey government from rolling full steam ahead to try and take the poor old woman’s home.
Shameful doesn’t even begin to describe, not only this incident, but the entire property tax situation in our state. It’s disgusting! It’s also not the first time it’s happened here. Luckily Lisa Suhay was able to stop the confiscation. Some other elderly residents were not as lucky. At the time, 90-year-old Gloria Turano of Lawrence Twp lost her home in 2017, after the loan she took out to pay the property taxes ran out. Her husband had built the home with his own hands in 1953. It almost happened to 107-year-old Rose Eastwick of Cranford until generous strangers stepped in to save her from losing her home last year.
“They Have Money For War But Can’t Feed The Poor.”
Tupac Shakur
After a jury convicted Jamal Trulove, then 25, of first degree murder in February 2010, then-San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris praised the “brave witness who stepped forward from the crowd.” Harris was then running for attorney general of California and in her campaign bragged about her high conviction rates as the San Francisco DA. Harris echoed what her deputy prosecutor Linda Allen said repeatedly to the jury: Priscilla Lualemaga, the only eyewitness to testify at trial about the July 2007 homicide of Seu Kuka, did so at great risk of retaliation. “She’ll never get her life back,” Allen said, adding that Lualemaga testified knowing that “maybe [she’ll] get killed over being a witness because she saw someone else kill someone.”
Lualemaga’s identification of Trulove as the shooter who killed Kuka on a sidewalk in San Francisco’s Sunnydale housing project was the critical evidence against him. For prosecutors to win, the jury had to believe Lualemaga’s claim that just before 11 p.m. on July 23, 2007 she saw the shooting from a second-floor window when the street below was shrouded in darkness.
The jury also had to believe Lualemaga saw the shooter despite a poor vantage point of the crime scene; her failure to pick Trulove from a photo wall she had viewed with police for hours; her evolving memory of the shooting over time; and the benefits the prosecution provided to Lualemaga and her family that would eventually total over $60,000 in living expenses. Yet the prosecution argued that Lualemaga’s testimony was credible because it came at profound personal risk.
But there was no evidence corroborating the prosecutor’s suggestion that, as a court of appeal later described it, there were “assassins lurking on defendant’s behalf.”
There was also no physical or forensic evidence that inculpated Trulove, and no other witnesses said he was the shooter. Trulove insisted from the beginning that he was innocent.
The case’s glaring flaws didn’t matter: in October 2010, Trulove, then a young father, aspiring actor, and hip-hop performer who had appeared on the VH1 reality television show “I Love New York 2,” was sentenced to 50 years to life.
Four years later, in 2014, a California Court of Appeal overturned his conviction based on the prosecutor’s repeated attempts to exaggerate Lualemaga’s credibility. The state’s claim that Lualemaga risked retaliation for testifying in the Trulove case was, the court said, a “yarn … made out of whole cloth.” The prosecution “did not present a scintilla of evidence at trial that defendant’s friends and family would try to kill Lualemaga if she testified against him,” the court said, and that misconduct, combined with Trulove’s trial counsel’s failure to object, gave him the right to a new trial.
In 2015, the same prosecutor at the San Francisco DA’s office retried Trulove, but he was acquitted and walked free for the first time since his 2008 arrest. In April 2018, a federal civil jury awarded Trulove $10 million, finding that San Francisco police officers fabricated evidence against him and withheld exculpatory evidence. In March, the city’s Board of Supervisors approved a $13.1 million payment to settle the suit.
Michigan Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer’s state-owned residence is getting $1.1 million in security upgrades, including an eight-foot-tall perimeter fence.
Whitmer has long questioned the effectiveness of physical barriers, but is asking Michigan taxpayers to foot the bill for a seven-figure project to keep out uninvited guests. The governor’s office confirmed the renovation on Friday, telling the Detroit News that the wall would help “ensure the safety, security, and protection of any sitting governor and the first family.” The renovation will include an electrified fence that Whitmer claims is necessary because of threats she has received.
Whitmer, a Biden surrogate, has attacked the idea of using barriers to prevent illegal immigration. She called President Donald Trump’s border wall “costly and ineffective” in February 2017, nearly a week after suggesting that money for the wall would be better spent elsewhere.
“$40 BILLION for the wall,” Whitmer tweeted. “Think how many kids that would educate, how many roads, bridges and pipes it would fix.”
Whitmer also campaigned against Trump’s wall in 2018, saying, “it is time we get back to building bridges, not walls.”
Hellbound and Down 
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