|
Banned
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by maleficent
|
Recently, I lived in an aprtment building in Manhattan for several years. The doorman on duty challenged all unfamiliar faces at the door, denying entry to the building, past the lobby, to anyone who was not recognized. The building contained over 400 residential apartments, and a 24 hour shift, for the doormen, including relief staff, during breaks, was covered by at least 7 or 8 staff members.
After the first week, I was never challenged by the doormen again. Capitol police number 1225, and they make an annual salary of about $55,000.00. On their website, "tact" is the emphasized, principal qualification for that job.
McKinney has encountered past problems with the Capitol Police, which seem unnecessary, to me, since these officers need only to recognize, on sight, 535 senators and house members. The doormen in my NYC building recognized me and more than one thousand other residents in my building, by their faces.
The record shows that Mckinney has had a long history of difficulty, and that she is not an adversary of the Capitol Police:
Quote:
CAPITOL GAINS WITH 10 BLACK WOMEN SERVING IN CONGRESS, WASHINGTON IS EXPRIENCING A DEPARTURE FROM POLITICS AS USUAL
Boston Globe
March 20, 1994
Author: Ana Puga, Globe Staff
...."I got up here in Congress by being myself," McKinney says. "What's frustrating is that people are so accustomed to seeing white men in suits on the Hill that I still have to defend my presence here."
While McKinney began her political life by demonstrating for an end to segregation in Georgia in the 1960s, Rep. Carrie Meek started out by surviving segregation in Florida in the 1930s.......
......Almost every black woman lawmaker has a story that illustrates that point. Waters recalls telling a white committee chairman that if he was going to keep calling her "Maxine," then he'd better start calling the colleague beside her "Joe," instead of "Congressman." <b>McKinney clashed with a white male Capitol Police officer who overlooked her members' identification pin, grabbed her by the arm, and demanded to search her bag.</b> The police officer has since been banished from his post at a Hous e office building entrance.
In her congressional office, McKinney has traded her dashiki for a white sweater, but the rest of her outfit remains the same, down to the gold lame sneakers. Her hair is pinned back in two thick braids. Unlike the sweet-toned Meek, McKinney's voice carries to every corner of the room. Yet her message and Meek's are similar. "Some people can't fathom the idea that a black woman with braids is a member of Congress," McKinney says, leaning back in her chair, as if to show how relaxed she is in t he role. "But at least I have a few colleagues who think like me and talk like me and vote like me."..........
|
Quote:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...49/ai_15837272
....To get a feel for how much and how deeply their mere presence has rocked the nations most powerful old boys' club, just consider the welcome-to-Washington greetings extended to Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun and Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney.
Though Braun's historic election had been headlines for weeks, when she came to pick up her ID at freshman orientation, she was handed a card granting her all the rights and priveleges the U.S. Congress bestows - on a Senate spouse.
Cynthia McKinney had to file an official complaint to stop Capitol Hill police from regularly stopping her when she tried to enter the Capitol........
|
Quote:
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.ph...0-120057-3228r
Rep. McKinney has 5th run-in with security
WASHINGTON, March 30 (UPI) -- For the fifth time since 1993, U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., had a run-in with Washington security personnel when an officer failed to recognize her.
An unidentified Capitol Police officer said he stopped McKinney and asked her for identification Wednesday morning as she tried to enter a government building while talking on her cell phone. He claims she whirled around and hit him on the chest, The Hill reported Thursday.
Capitol Police had no comment and said they were investigating.
Members of Congress are allowed to enter into the buildings without passing through security screening.
In 1993, Capitol Police posted a photo of McKinney on an office wall so officers could remember who she was after she complained. Then in 1995, she complained again about being stopped.
In 1996 and 1998, she complained that White House security officials did not give her the same treatment as other members of Congress, at one time mistaking her 23-year-old white aide for her. McKinney is black.
"I am absolutely sick and tired of having to have my appearance at the White House validated by white people," she said at the time.
|
Quote:
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_ho.../17209140.html
Monday, October 15, 2001
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
NEVADA DELEGATION: Security increased at Capitol
Lawmakers and aides working under heightened sense of awareness since attacks
Lawmakers say they've been advised not to wear the lapel pins that signal their membership in Congress and to consider taking off their congressional license tags.
Berkley said she's thinking of ditching the license tag. Ensign said he's never used one, even when he served in the House in the mid-1990s.
|
Quote:
Capitol Police Suspend Officer
Powdery Substance Left at Security Post
Washington Post
November 13, 2001
Author: Spencer S. Hsu; Washington Post Staff Writer
Two days before the discovery, Rep. Cynthia A. McKinney (D-Ga.) warned in a letter that morale among the 1,295-member force that protects Congress had plummeted. McKinney blamed the tension on the strain of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and subsequent anthrax incidents.
Also yesterday, officials said that trace amounts of anthrax bacteria were found in the offices of three additional senators, bringing to 11 the number of senators' suites found in recent days to be contaminated.
If convicted of a hoax, the officer faces up to five years in prison and $3 million in fines, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office said. Law enforcement officials, led by U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, have warned for weeks that the perpetrators of hoaxes will be vigorously prosecuted.
McKinney wrote House Sergeant-at-Arms Bill Livingood that low morale "appears to be widespread throughout the department" because of an "unfavorable work environment" created by managers.
McKinney said officers complain that colleagues are quitting, recruits are dropping out and officers lack training and adequate winter clothing, while the Capitol remains vulnerable to attack.
"It is bad enough that officers are working 70-plus hours a week, barely seeing their families," McKinney said in the letter, which included an account of a confrontation between an officer and supervisor. "But to have officers come to work and be verbally abused by their superiors and treated like children . . . is unacceptable." The confrontation was relayed to her by the officer who was involved.
The House was closed for Veterans Day yesterday, and neither McKinney nor Livingood could not be reached immediately for comment.
|
Quote:
A house of un-American activities -
Congress redefines bunker mentality
The Washington Times
November 16, 2001
Author: Deborah Simmons; THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Remember the initial anthrax scare? When both the House and Senate, led by Senate Minority Wimp Trent Lott, tried to hightail it back to their hometowns at the first whiff?
Well, now they're preparing to retreat under cover at Ft. McNair at the first sign of danger. They also are considering 24-7 patrols by the D.C. National Guard Military Police and agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). Seems U.S. Capitol Police are complaining about being overworked and their Democratic friends in the House and Senate are concerned about morale. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, for one, recently fired-off a letter to the sergeant at-arms of the House, complaining about officers "working 70-plus hour a week [and] barely seeing their families."
|
Quote:
http://www.11alive.com/news/news_art...?storyid=78032
Reported By: Jon Shirek
Web Editor: Michael King
Last Modified: 3/31/2006 11:17:39 AM
................U.S. Capitol Police said there is surveillance video of the confrontation between the officer and McKinney, but they say the video will not be released. McKinney released a statement saying she deeply regrets the incident, but was rushing to a meeting when the officer failed to recognize her. "Unfortunately, the Police Officer did not recognize me as a Member of Congress and a confrontation ensued," the statement read............
...........McKinney says that government security officers often fail to recognize her, and treat her like a criminal suspect.
Her critics in her DeKalb County district say she thrives on controversies she manufactures.
McKinney’s staff members are defending her by distributing a clip of her from the new film “American Blackout.” McKinney is showing the filmmaker around the capitol grounds, and a security officer fails to recognize her at first, and stops her.
“That’s just typical of the type of treatment I receive. It’s typical. So, I’m not surprised and I’m not offended,” McKinney said. “Okay. Thank you. Some things never change. That’s what Tupac said.”
McKinney and her aides say that even now, in the midst of her sixth term in the House, Capitol Police constantly stop her and treat her like an intruder or terrorist until she can prove to them she is a Member of Congress.
Still, she says she is expressing deep regret about her most recent confrontation with an officer, who says that this time, she struck him after recognizing her.........
|
To clarify the point that I am trying to make...there are two sides to this "story". Mckinney is sensitive, and she probably overreacted when the Capitol officer challenged her and then attempted to physically stop her. But....put yourselves, if you truly want to be fair...in her circumstances, with her hisory. She is a 51 year old black woman, the first of her combination of race and gender, from her state, to be elected to the house. She's been going through these security "challenges" for more than a decade. Until half way through high school, (Georgia did not integrate it's public schools until 1969..) she personally experienced racial segregation in her state. How many of you have any idea what that did to influence her world view and temperament? The "Capitol" that she serves in was built by <a href="http://washingtontimes.com/national/20050531-110046-7574r.htm">negro slave labor</a>.
How many of you, if you exhibited bad judgment and lost your temper, would have to endure a reaction like this?:
Quote:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200604030010
......On the April 3 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, Neal Boortz issued an apology for his remarks about Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA), stating, "I've known Cynthia McKinney for a long time, and there is no way in the world that that word should be used to describe her or her hairdo or any woman." As Media Matters for America noted, Boortz said that McKinney, "looks like a ghetto slut" during the March 31 broadcast of his radio program, and later added that he didn't "blame them [Capitol police] for stopping" McKinney during a March 29 incident at the Capitol because she had a "ghetto trash" haircut and "looked like a welfare drag queen [that] was trying to sneak into the Longworth House Office Building." In issuing the apology, Boortz added that it "won't mean anything to people who consider any negative comment or criticism of any type at any time about anybody who is not white to be racism."........
|
Yeah....Cynthia "effed up"...and she "pulled the race card". She has also showed courage in her lifelong fight for equal rights, and for challenging the Bush admin.'s official account of the 9/11 attacks. It took her two congressional committee hearing sessions, after she was re-elected to congress, (after losing her seat because of a republican backlash primary election "Op" that unseated her because she was bold enough to publicly accuse the Bush administration of 9/11 complicity), to extract an <a href="http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/031505_mckinney_transcript.shtml">admission</a> from Rumsfeld and JCS Chairman Gen. Myers that there were four wargames in progress on the morning of the 9/11 attacks.
How much of this incident's "backlash" has to do with the way McKinney puts her career on the line. As we find out more about Cheney and his Libby "Op", is he really any less brash than McKinney, or any more benevolent in his overall intentions?
Gimme a break...enough with all the indignation that I've seen expressed on this thread....
Last edited by host; 04-06-2006 at 09:07 PM..
|