Un-break his heart! Marc Anthony Skeletor and Jennifer Lopez put their difference aside to spend some time with family and friends at the Miami home they previously shared for his 43rd birthday. There are some reports that Marc Anthony fell to his knees in tears while fans sang “Happy Birthday” to him at Miami performance the night before. But if you lost them cakes, wouldn’t you cry too??? Just sayin’. FamePictures
Looks like President Barack Obama has some backers and cosigners for his plan to get the economy back on track : Former President Bill Clinton urged lawmakers on Capitol Hill to focus on stimulating growth in the U.S. economy before efforts to reduce the deficit. “I think that we need to focus right now on putting the country back to work,” Mr. Clinton said Sunday in an interview on CBS’ Face the Nation. “I’d like to see the economic plan that (President Obama) talked about in his address to Congress enacted first, then when the economy starts growing again in a year or two, then I’d like to put the hammer down on this deficit problem,” Mr. Clinton told host Bob Schieffer. The former president praised Mr. Obama’s forthcoming proposal to raise taxes on the highest earning Americans, though he said he did not know the precise timing of when such a move would be implemented. “I think the president is doing the right thing,” Mr. Clinton said. Mr. Obama on Monday is expected to unveil a plan calling for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year, administration officials told CBS News. The notion is based on an argument made popular by billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who has said that the current tax system gives an unfair advantage to his billionaire investor friends who do not pay as high a rate on their income as middle-class Americans. “If you look at the group that has had the biggest income increases and the benefit of most of the tax cuts of the previous eight years before the Obama administration took office, those of us in that income group, we’re in the best position to make a contribution to changing the debt structure of the country,” Mr. Clinton said, “I don’t think that’s such a draconian thing.” Mr. Clinton added that the economy will not start growing until the banks clear mountains of debt racked up in the mortgage crisis. “In the meanwhile I think a combination of the payroll tax changes that Obama recommended, setting up an investment bank and doing more in infrastructure and then looking at areas of specific opportunities to put people to work can really create million of jobs and get us out of hte worst of this doldrum,” Mr. Clinton said. Source
I find it intriguing that the fact that nurses have stages protests against Wall Street has gotten pretty much no coverage in the mainstream media. I checked nurses + protest on Google News, and the only note take of their September 1 protest was a story in the Boston Herald and MarketWatch (but the latter merely published their press releases). Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : naked capitalism Discovery Date : 17/09/2011 09:47 Number of articles : 2
First Lady Michelle Obama graces the cover of Upscale magazine’s October 2011 issue. Readers will get a more intimate and relatable view of the first lady as she revisits her life before the White House, shares candid fashion views and discusses the issues that she is working on to positively impact our country and the world. In the October Upscale cover story, entitled “National Treasure,” Michelle Obama opens up to Spelman College graduates about her life as a young black girl in the Southside of Chicago. “Some of you may have grown up like me, in neighborhoods where few had the chance to go to college,” explained Mrs. Obama, who prefers to be called Michelle. The cover story will also detail the impact Mrs. Obama has had on fashion, reasons for her style choices, reflect her comparison to previous first ladies, including Jacqueline Kennedy. The feature also covers Mrs. Obama as a wife and mother, coining the term mom-in-chief, highlighting the Obama’s ability to bring a positive image back to the black family. Michelle Obama Graces The Cover Of Essence Magazine Michelle Obama: First Female Public Figure To Appear On Better Homes & Garden
A year ago, people across the country were keeping a close eye on California to see if golden state voters would be the first in the nation to legalize marijuana. Prop 19 didn’t pass, though it got close with 46% of the vote. Why didn’t Prop 19 pass? What’s next for the marijuana movement in California? We caught up with Dale Gieringer, director of CA NORML , at the 2011 Seattle Hempfest and asked… Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : Reason Magazine – Hit & Run Discovery Date : 14/09/2011 17:22 Number of articles : 2
SMH… Republican Bob Turner, with voters dealing a rebuke to President Barack Obama in a traditionally Democratic district, won the New York City House seat that scandal forced Anthony Weiner to give up. The Associated Press reported that with 88 percent of the vote counted in yesterday’s special election, Turner had 54 percent and Democrat David Weprin had 46 percent. “I think it’s a big red flag,” Stu Rothenberg, editor of the Washington-based Rothenberg Political Report, said of the New York election results. “The ramifications go well beyond Queens and Brooklyn.” He called it “a warning sign that voters who are dissatisfied with the direction of the country may well be more likely to take it out on the president and his party than on congressional Republicans.” Rothenberg said Democrat Weprin “didn’t run a great race,” but “even a weak Democratic candidate should be able to hold it against a mediocre Republican.” Hope this isn’t a sign of what’s to come in 2012… Source
In his new memoir, One Day It’ll All Make Sense , Chicago-born actor/rapper Common, gives readers a revealing, gripping, and raw look into his life and journey from boy to man. In this deeply personal, introspective memoir, Common unveils himself, layer by layer, from his childhood on the streets of the South Side of Chicago; to grappling with the decision to leave college, disappointing his mother, and pursuing a career in hip hop; to emerging as a talented recording artist faced with all the trappings of fame and success but working hard to remain true to himself and the people who’d supported him along the way. “People who know me as Common might find it hard to believe some of the things that made me Rashid,” says Common. “That’s partly why I’ve written this book, so that I can show myself as a man in full. That means telling some tough truths, revealing my faults and vulnerabilities. But it also means showing the true strength of my character.” Yesterday, Common kicked-off the launch of his book tour at Barnes & Noble in New York where he was interviewed by MTV’s resident VJ, Sway, before a crowd of over 300 fans. And, we’ve been privy to get a copy of Common’s limited book tour schedule. Yes, you can meet him and get your book signed. Catch him at the following locations: September 16 th : LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY MARK TAPER AUDITORIUM Conversation with Kevin Frazier 630 West Fifth Street LOS ANGELES, LA 7:00 pm September 20 th : Barnes & Noble—DePaul Signing Only 1 E. Jackson Boulevard Chicago, IL 6:00 pm September 24 th : BALTIMORE BOOK FESTIVAL Conversation with Dr. Eric Dyson 600 North Charles Street Baltimore, MD 6:00 pm Check out this chapter excerpt from Common’s memoir, One Day It’ll All Make Sense. PROLOGUE Dear Reader: When I was eighteen months old, my mother and I were kidnapped at gunpoint. My father held the gun. At least that’s one side of the story. I first heard about it all from my aunt long after it happened, when I was already a grown man. I asked my mother, and she told it to me one way. I asked my father, and he told it to me another. The story I’ll tell you begins where my mother’s and my father’s tales come together and continues past them into the separate corners of my parents’ truths. Somehow in telling it, the story becomes my own. Somehow in telling it, it all starts to make sense. My father, Lonnie Lynn, was a Chicago playground legend. They called him the Genie because he’d make the basketball disappear right before your eyes then make it reappear at the bottom of the net. At six foot eight, he had NBA size and the skills to match. He was nice around the rim and had a sweet stroke from inside eighteen feet. But he talked back to coaches. He missed practice. He developed a habit. He was out of the league before his career really began. For all his gifts, he played just one year of professional basketball, for the Denver Rockets and the Pittsburgh Pipers of the ABA. Around the same time, his relationship with my mother was falling apart. He was getting high, keeping drugs right out in the open on the nightstand. He’d react to the slightest provocation. One time my mother locked him out of our apartment, and he shot out all the windows. When he was sober, he was a loving man, but when he was high, he was somebody else. “I was out of basketball,” my father later told me. “I was struggling. My lowest point came in December of 1972, when you were nine months old. I weighed one hundred ninety-five pounds, less than I had coming out of high school. That’s what the drugs had done—or, rather, what I had done with the drugs. By the time I got back to Chicago, I was back near my playing weight at two hundred thirty-five pounds. I was ready for my last chance.” His last chance came with a tryout for the Seattle SuperSonics. They knew about my dad’s past troubles, and they were concerned. They wanted to know he was a family man. Problem was, my folks were separated, heading toward divorce. So, early one morning, my father packed everything he owned into the backseat of a rented Dodge Charger and drove to Eighty-eighth and Dorchester in Chicago’s South Side, where my mother and I lived. Here is where my parents’ stories diverge. “He took us out of the house at gunpoint, handcuffed me to the front seat, put you in the back, and started driving across the country to Seattle,” my mother says. “You and your mother got in the front seat with me,” my father recalls, “and we started out on Interstate 90 heading west.” I can imagine my mother seething inside—not panicked, not defeated—waiting for her moment. My father must have known this too. Part of him might even have feared her, a strange thing since he was the one at the wheel. She had this indomitable spirit; it only grew stronger when she felt her child was in danger. What could she do? When we stopped for gas, she says he handcuffed her to the steering wheel. When she needed to use the restroom, she says he stood outside the door. The situation must have looked hopeless to her. My mother escaped with me early one Sunday morning. She recalls my father pulling off the highway to get gas; there were no plans to stop for food, no plans to sleep. She complained of a headache and asked my father to bring her something for the pain. He came back to the car with a bottle of pills. My mother took two like the container directed then somehow managed to put the rest in his can of Coke as he gassed up the car. When he got back in, he took a big swig of soda then threw the can out the window. It wasn’t long before he started feeling the effects. “Did she drug me? I don’t know,” my father told me later. “All I know is that I made the decision that it was better to sleep during the day and drive at night while you were sleeping.” We stopped at a roadside motel on the outskirts of Madison, Wisconsin. I wonder what people saw when they looked at us. A beautiful family on a cross-country trip? A doting mother holding her child? A loving husband clutching his wife close by his side? Did they see the family we were or the family we might have been? My mother told me that my father had just enough time to handcuff her to the bed, sit me on the couch, strip off some of his clothes, and fall onto the mattress, his feet dangling off the edge. Soon he was snoring away. Once he was fast asleep, my mother says she started working her small hand against the cuff, folding her fingers in on themselves and pulling until metal scraped skin. “Rashid,” she said in a stage whisper. “Rashid, baby, go outside and play. Mommy will be there soon.” Something in her eyes must have told me, young as I was, that this was no time for games. I followed her instructions and slipped out the door. Her hand finally free, my mother followed after me. She made it to the lobby and told the man working there to call the police. “Next thing I know,” my father now says, “I wake up and there are two policemen standing over my bed. One of them’s got a shotgun on me. The other’s pointing a pistol. I raised my hands up above my head and turned my eyes to the sky. I can remember seeing a teardrop of water falling down from that low, low ceiling. That’s when I cried out: ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’ “It was all over the radio, the television, the newspaper. ‘Kidnapping,’ in capital letters. But I was in jail only overnight. They released me the next morning without charges.” Madison, Wisconsin, is one hundred sixty-three miles from the South Side of Chicago and nearly two thousand miles from Seattle. The road trip, the kidnapping, my father’s dream—whatever you call it—it was over almost as soon as it had started. Can a story you’ve only overheard somehow still give shape to your life? Can other people’s stories also be your own? Hearing this was like discovering a lost piece of my past, like having my life told as legend. Could it have really happened? Part of me figured that when I asked my parents about it, they’d deny it. But when I asked each of them, they confirmed it—even if they told their stories in a different key. They say trauma always accompanies birth, the beginning of new life. When I think about my parents and me driving toward my father’s dream, I think about what it means to bear the legacy of these two people who were estranged from each other before I was born but remain tied together because I was born. It speaks to me about connections, willing and not. It speaks to the fact that when you try to tell your own story, you can’t help but tell someone else’s along the way. This is my life, my story, but it’s their story too. I think of my mother, a young woman with a child at the time threatened by a man she still loves. Maybe that’s why she’s always loved me so hard, like she could lose me at any moment. Today she is a mother, a grandmother, my best friend. I think about my father and how his inner pains and self-doubt sometimes expressed themselves in ways he couldn’t control. What possesses a man to aim a gun at the woman he loves and the child he helped conceive? If not the gun, then what possesses him to pursue a dream past all consequence? Today he is a thinker, a dreamer, a complex soul. Who knows the truth of the story? My truth is this: I inherited love and trouble, joy and fear. I experienced all of these things before I could even put them into words. The story I have to tell you is one of inheritance and identity, of the values my mother passed on to me that I hope to pass on to my daughter, Omoye. The story is of making myself into the man that I want to be: an artist, a father, a child of God. When I was given the opportunity to write this book, I had some misgivings. Had I lived enough? Would anyone want to hear my story? When I think of memorable life stories, I think of great men and women looking back over the decades. I think of Malcolm X and Assata Shakur. I think of Maya Angelou and Nelson Mandela. What story does a kid from the South Side of Chicago have to tell? So I talked with friends. I talked with my mother, my father, my grandmother, my daughter. We laughed, we reminisced, we even shed a few tears. At a certain moment, I took in a breath, I breathed it out, and I knew that I had lived a life I wished to share. I knew that if I dedicated myself to writing about my life, it might all start to make sense. I’ve always loved to write. It must have started with my mother. She still has a note I wrote to her when I was six or seven years old about leaving the key so she could get in the house and how I didn’t want to get a whippin’. She tells me that’s my first letter. In school, I’d write love letters to cute girls in class. When I first started rapping, I’d write my lyrics in a composition book. As I grew older, I’d write my hopes, fears, and dreams in a journal. I still write to this day, even to people who are part of my everyday life—my mother, my daughter, my friends. I may be a talker just like my dad, but I love to express myself through letters. Maybe I write because I’ve learned to show certain parts of my heart on the page that I still struggle to capture in speech. That’s why I’ve decided to begin each chapter of this book with a letter. In these pages, I’ve written to my mother and to my daughter and to many others—to you, to lost friends, to distant lovers, to future generations. Each letter offers a way into the stories of my life that follow. Together they tell a story of their own, of a life still very much in the making. I have loved and lost and given and failed and fallen and prayed and believed and worked and sexed and proved and listened and traveled and healed and grown and watched and journeyed and loved again and grown some more. I’ve done all of these things and all of these things have created the man that I am today. I also realize that my life is an expression of all those I have known and all who have known me. They are people in and out of the public eye. They are friends and fans and lovers and mentors. They are people like my mother and my grandmother and the guy I only ever knew as Duck, who was on the street but used to say that one day I’d be a star. People like Yusef and Ajile and the bellman at the House of Blues Hotel in Chicago who always had a kind word when I arrived. My life is people like Omoye, Murray, Kanye, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Minister Louis Farrakhan, Maya Angelou, my father, Mike Jolicoeur, Dion, Dart, Ron, Rasaan, Monard, and the memory of another South Side son named Emmett Till. All of these people are a part of me as I am a part of them. Their souls have joined with mine. In fact, sometimes when I’m writing songs I find myself looking through their eyes, expressing what I believe they might see and feel. You’ll hear some of these other voices threading in and out of the pages that follow. Other than my own, the voice you’ll most often hear is that of my mother. It’s only right given that my mother has been—and remains—the most influential person in my life. Throughout the chapters, you’ll find her speaking in her own words directly to you through italicized text, offering perspectives on my past that complement and occasionally even contradict the view of my life as I see it. I’m writing you now because I know I have something to say to you. I believe we can forge a connection that will help us to recognize the other in the self. I know I can enlighten. I know I can inspire. And I know that this journey is not just about what I think about myself. It’s not about how many records I’ve made or how many films I’ve done. It’s about what has happened in my life that can spark you to be better in yours. What have I said and done, what have I failed to say and failed to do, that will give you insight as you strive to reach your full potential and serve your purpose on this earth? So I hope this letter finds you in the place where you are willing and ready to progress in your life. I hope this book not only entertains you but also helps you grow in a spirit of openness. I write to you wishing, praying, and sending the best love to you. This is my story, the story of an uncommon life. Love, Common
The new baby, born in Demopolis, Ala. and measuring 7 lbs., 7 oz. and 19 inches long, joins big brother James, 5. Like a true country artist, Ashton Shepherd, 25, said of the new addition: “She’s perty!” Country singer Ashton Shepherd has something new to sing about: She and husband Roland Cunningham welcomed a daughter, Raden Delilah Cunningham, on Friday, Sept. 9, a rep for the singer tells us. The star is likely well-prepared to add another child to her brood, considering she hinted in a 2
‘I think our generation has grown,’ the 25-year-old Arab-American tells MTV News of the decade since terrorist attacks. By Gil Kaufman, with reporting by Tami Katzoff Rima Fakih Photo: WireImage On Sept. 11, 2001, Rima Fakih was a student at St. John’s Prep High School in Astoria, Queens. She was in a social studies class when a student behind her said that the World Trade Center had been hit, and from the window of the school, she could see that he was right. “All you could see was just some big black smoke,” she said, noting that her teacher’s husband worked in the buildings at the time and that the students had to bring their instructor water to try and calm her down. It was a defining moment in the life of Fakih, a Lebanese immigrant who last year became the first Muslim and first Arab-American to win the Miss USA crown. “It was kind of a nightmare, to be honest with you, because the principal came on the speakers and was saying, ‘Attention, students: Please everyone report down to the basement. We need you all in shelters.’ I just couldn’t move because my older brother Rabih worked across the street from the World Trade Center, he worked with Goldman Sachs.” In addition, her older sister worked in tower seven of the WTC and her father was on his way to work at the time. When Fakih got home, her mother was on the ground in tears, barely able to breathe because the vivid memories of the attacks evoked the 15-year Lebanese civil war that had forced the family to flee their homeland. “I was born in South Lebanon during the war and I remember vivid memories [of] hiding in shelters during the shelling,” Fakih told MTV News. “At that moment, it felt just like that.” With her father stuck on the Queensboro Bridge and her mother unable to reach Fakih’s siblings, the tension mounted during the day. Her father eventually made it to safety at an uncle’s house, while, luckily, her newlywed brother, just back from his honeymoon, had taken a few extra days off at his new wife’s request. Unfortunately, nobody could reach her sister. “It was very terrifying. I remember my little brother was a baby and he was asking my mom to change the channel because he couldn’t watch the scary movie anymore,” she recalled. The images of the planes hitting the buildings kept playing all day, with the building Fakih’s sister worked in clearly visible in the footage. Finally, though, they got word that her sister had spent 12 hours in a shelter, wearing a gas mask, a scenario so haunting that she ended up in therapy for more than a year. “She saw people jumping out of the buildings … on fire, from the top,” Fakih said of her sister Rana. “She was in a meeting when the first plane hit and the windows shattered.” A veteran observer of the war in Lebanon, Rana counseled her co-workers to take shelter and stay away from the windows. Some, however, didn’t take her advice and ended up dying that day. “I remember how hard it was for my family and I at the time to not only live around the atmosphere of New York City, but to receive a lot of stereotypes,” Fakih said of her family, which owned a Middle Eastern restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side for 20 years. Bricks were thrown through the restaurant window and business tanked in the wake of the attacks as a result of the some of the post-9/11 anti-Muslim sentiment, with Fakih remembering how she was bullied at a her Catholic high school by some students who made rude comments. “Every time something would happen, I would be scared. I’d watch TV and … [think], ‘Please God don’t let this be a terrorist act; don’t let this be Arabs or Muslims.” The family moved to Dearborn, Michigan, in 2003, a city that boasts the highest concentration of Middle Eastern immigrants in the U.S., and they felt much more at ease. Rima began attending the University of Michigan, but unlike some of her Arab-American peers, she did not change her name in order to fit in and escape greater scrutiny. She held fast to her identity, even when some fellow Muslims warned her not to enter the Miss USA pageant because they believed she could never win. Ten years later, though, she thinks things have gotten better. “I think I’m a great example to that,” she said. “Winning the crown of Miss USA, being the first Arab American, the first Muslim-American and possibly the first immigrant to win the title of Miss USA just testifies to the fact that there is freedom in this country and there is justice and there is freedom of religion and freedom of choice and this is what America is based on.” Fakih said the 9/11 attacks planted fear in a lot of people in her generation, including her. “I might be an Arab and a Muslim, and I might get on a train sometimes and see a man leave a bag and I just don’t want to touch it, I want to get off at the next stop,” she admitted. “Now, I think our generation has grown. My generation especially has seen so much fear and then so much change and growth in the [last] 10 years that it planted this fearlessness inside us and this ability to feel like we live in a country where you can do anything and we can overcome.” And when people asked whether she could win the Miss USA title, she’d say, “If Barack Hussein Obama is in office, then Rima Hussein Fakih can win Miss USA.” As part of the “I Will” campaign to commemorate the 9/11 attacks as a national day of service and remembrance, we asked Fakih how she’ll mark the anniversary on Sunday. “On September 11, I will call to check on my sister and my older brother, who worked at the World Trade Center, to make sure that they still love and trust this county as much as everyone else.” What will you do to remember 9/11? Share your thoughts below, and visit 911day.org to upload your video response. Related Photos First Arab-American Miss USA Rima Fakih: A Year In Photos
The true spirit that lives on from September 11, 2001 is love. I was at work the day the buildings fell victim to hatred. I walked home with people covered in dust and dirt. I helped a man shake the debris from his clothes. I lost friends in those sterling silver towers of light. There are many who feel that it is an unfortunate event that should be forgotten. My beautiful city was rendered smokey, muddy and sad. The emotional toll of watching doctors, nurses, and common every day citizen rush to help. . I walked home more than 5 miles to turn back around and go see what I could do. I sat on a floor waiting to donate blood for hours. There were many African Americans who reacted like me. It didn’t matter what color, religion, sexual orientation, or creed you were. We were all one. We were bound by the love of humanity to help. September 11, 2001 is filled with people who dropped everything they were doing to help.These are the amazing true stories of the construction workers who left their work sites and marched down to ground zero, unbidden and en masse, to join the search and rescue effort; of the restaurateurs who emptied their refrigerators, brought tons of food down to the site and fed everyone working there; of the sanitation workers, teachers, phone technicians and thousands of others who stepped forward to help the city revive itself; and of Americans from across the country who joined them. There was the guy in a wheelchair who rolled himself miles from his home in Harlem to bring down a bag of sandwiches. There was the urban search and rescue team that came up from San Juan, Puerto Rico, with their dogs to spend hour upon hour hunting through the piles of debris. And there were those who had lost loved ones in earlier disasters coming to help the bereaved of 9/11 cope with tragedy. So many thousands showed up from everywhere to help that the authorities had to turn the city’s main convention venue, the Javits Center, into a special site dedicated to organizing the volunteers according to skills and capabilities. Recalling that enormous outpouring of support from “people of all persuasions, backgrounds and beliefs,” former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani says, “I saw it, I lived it, and am humbled by the heartwarming, remarkable response that demonstrated the resilience of America.” Now we honor the dead, recall the pain and hope for the future. We can continue their legacy by serving. I challenge you to serve on this day. The true spirit of September 11, 2001 is love. God Bless America and may the lost souls rest in peace. How To Get Involved and Serve: Red Cross and Peace Corp . Obama: 9/11 Is Tribute To ‘Enduring Values’ And ‘Resilient Spirit’ Top 5 Musical Tributes To 9/11
