“In 2019, women around the globe took action, claiming leadership positions in government, business, philanthropy and media,” writes Forbes in the introduction to its 2019 list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women, published Thursday. “These trailblazers are not to be messed with,” they add.
Eric Holder, the former Attorney General under President Barack Obama, blasted the present attorney general, William Barr, for a series of recent comments that he made that shows he is “unfit to lead the Justice Department.”
Holder said he has been reluctant to speak up to “publicly criticize my successors,” however he said he opted against that stance because Barr is treading on dangerous waters with his rhetoric about absolute presidential powers and his veiled threat to communities that he deems don’t show law enforcement enough respect.
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In a Washington Post op/ed, Holder called Barr’s comments “deeply inappropriate for America’s chief law enforcement official” and said “since the moment he took office,” Barr’s comments and actions have been “fundamentally inconsistent with his duty to the Constitution. Which is why I now fear that his conduct – running political interference for an increasingly lawless president – will wreak lasting damage.”
Holder elaborated in the opinion piece.
“Barr has made a series of public statements and taken actions that are so plainly ideological, so nakedly partisan and so deeply inappropriate for America’s chief law enforcement official that they demand a response from someone who held the same office,” Holder wrote.
For example, on Nov. 15, Barr addressed a Federalist Society convention, telling the conservative crowd that the top elected position in the nation had “become smothered by the encroachments of the other branches,” of government, according to The USA Today.
In his Washington Post op/ed, Holder called this language “an ode to essentially unbridled executive power” and he cautioned that Barr’s “attempts to vilify the president’s critics sounded more like the tactics of an unscrupulous criminal defense lawyer than a U.S. attorney general.”
Recently, Barr also made controversial comments at a Justice Department event that honored law enforcement. At the ceremony, Barr scolded Americans for not giving police “the respect and support that law enforcement deserves,” and then seemed to hone in on certain communities, believed to be Black and other communities of color.
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“If communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need,” Barr said.
Holder took issue with that statement and said, “no one would understand– let alone truly respects – the impartial administration of justice or the role of law enforcement could ever say such a thing.”
“It is antithetical to the most basic tenets of equality and justice, and it undermines the need for understanding between law enforcement and certain communities and flies in the face of everything the Justice Department stands for,” Holder wrote in the Washington Post op/ed.
The post Former AG Eric Holder slams William Barr’s recent comments appeared first on theGrio.
College football doesn’t give black coaches many chances when it comes to getting and/or keeping a job, according to analysis from FiveThirtyEight.
From 2008 to 2018, there were 250 head coaching changes at the Football Bowl Subdivision level. Out of the changes over that time, only 2% of those opportunities saw a head coach who was black being replaced by another one. Fifteen percent of the coaching changes showed a non-black coach being replaced by a black one, while 12% involved a black coach being replaced by someone who isn’t black.
Black coaches had no part in the vast majority of the transitions—in more than 70% of the coaching changes, neither coach was black.
In other words, over the last decade, a college football program that made a head coaching change was 68 percentage points more likely to have a change that included no blacks than to have one that included two. And there was a less than 20% chance that if a black head coach was let go or left, the replacement coach was also black.
Over the course of NCAA history, Division I programs have replaced one black head coach with another one, on a non-interim basis, just seven times. In almost all of those cases, the coach left for another opportunity; only one came after a firing.
At the beginning of the 2019 college football season, there were just 14 black head coaches out of the 130 schools in the NCAA’s Division I Football Bowl Subdivision, according to The Shadow League. Three had been fired by the beginning of December: Frank Wilson at University of Texas at San Antonio, Charlie Strong at University of South Florida, and Willie Taggart at Florida State University. None of their replacements are black.
There has always been a lack of minority representation in positions of power in college athletics. “College sport continues to have some of the lowest grades for racial hiring practices and gender hiring practices among all of the college and professional sports covered,” wrote Richard Lapchick, director of The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES), in its 2018 College Sport Racial and Gender Report Card.
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Now you know we can’t start this blog without a proper intro—hit it!
