The Spencer Hamilton Blog

I keep hearing about two murders that the right wing are using to say: The media is biased against black perpetrators and white victims because the media didn’t bring a lot of light to the murder of Christopher Lane (2013) and Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian both murdered in 2007.   Results: Of the four charged at the state level, three (Letalvis D. Cobbins, Lemaricus Davidson, and George Thomas) had multiple prior felony convictions. After a jury trial, Lemaricus Davidson was sentenced to death by lethal injection and Letalvis Cobbins and George Thomas were sentenced to life in prison, Cobbins without the possibility of parole and Thomas with the possibility. Vanessa Coleman has been convicted of facilitating the crimes and sentenced to 53 years in prison, and Eric Dewayne Boyd has been convicted of federal charges as accessory after the fact to carjacking and sentenced to 18 years in prison. [4] The state convictions were set aside because of misconduct by the...

       In New Mexico there’s a flurry going on about marriage equality and whether or not the issuing of marriage licenses is legal or not. New Mexico has a gender neutral marriage law so it’s anyone’s guess. Prior to this, I did a video that talked about the NM Supreme Court being asked to intervene to interpret the law and grant marriage equality In that state. Meanwhile, a woman dying of a terminal illness wants to marry her partner. The Governor of that state has also called for a vote to send a ban on marriage equality to the people saying it is better decided by the people of the state…to me that sounds like the slavery dodge when voters said: we’ll be slave state or we’ll be free…if anyone doesn’t know what Bleeding Kansas is, it’s simply when Missouri said we’ll kill all the abolitionists and hopefully that’ll be a slave state too. It backfired as voters called it a free state and all those lives were lost. So, while it’s a different situation an...

I remember when a facebook friend of mine had a status that said: Drug testing for welfare recipient, GENIUS! I looked at that post and thought: He never needed food stamps ever did he? He grew up in a middle class suburb at a time when the middle class was roaring like a freight train all over this country. He is a white gay man who doesn’t know the realities of those on food stamps. Most people who support this may come from a few vantage points: Food stamp recipients are lazy (I qualified for them while I wasn’t working but collecting unemployment and looking for work) that food stamp recipients are all drug users (states that have implemented that policy doesn’t bear out that view) and that somehow if you are on assistance you must be using drugs. Simply put, this is a conservative view that a man who lobbied for marriage equality parroted this on his page. I don’t see how someone getting 1K/yearly through foodstamps can crash the economy but Wal Mart and GE getting millions of ...

Some news of the Week The GOP budget plan that was voted on by the House a few months ago has come to an abrupt, screeching halt as lawmakers are forced to recognize that it simply will not work. The Ryan budget was passed in the House along party lines last March — and almost didn’t pass at all, as 10 Republican representatives voted with the 197 Democrats against it, making the final vote tally 221-207. Hal Rogers, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, even went so far as to state, “I believe that the House has made its choice: sequestration – and its' unrealistic and ill-conceived discretionary cuts – must be brought to an end.” But the  problem with Ryan’s budget  is that it works in abstractions, and is never binding. And Republicans learned that, for the sake of saving face while going back to their districts, the heavy cuts projected in the Ryan budget just weren’t workable.” He goes on to report, “Republicans passed the unspecific outlines of the...