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Doctors have told Rebecca Alexander she will likely go completely blind and deaf within the next 10 years. "As my sister describes it, "It's like I am slowly being taken from the world around me -- like the end of an old Warner Brothers cartoon on TV where the picture becomes an increasingly smaller hole until it finally fades to black."

Rebecca, 30, has a rare genetic disorder called Usher syndrome, type III. It is among the cruelest of disorders -- progressively stealing normal life away from roughly 16,000 people nationwide. And, currently, there is no treatment or cure. Rebecca lives courageously each day with the hope that a cure will be found before it's too late."

Can I Get A Pickle? Part 1

Reggie Gaskins

Eric Lewis: Striking chords to rock the jazz world

Homepage: http://www.ericlewisgroove.com/

Madea Imitates Patti Labelle (Madea Goes To Jail) - The Play

White House Watermelon Email From California Mayor Dean Grose Inspires Outrage

The mayor of Los Alamitos is coming under fire for an e-mail he sent out that depicts the White House lawn planted with watermelons, under the title "No Easter egg hunt this year."

Local businesswoman and city volunteer Keyanus Price, who is black, said Tuesday she received the e-mail from Mayor Dean Grose's personal account on Sunday and wants a public apology.

"I have had plenty of my share of chicken and watermelon and all those kinds of jokes," Price told The Associated Press. "I honestly don't even understand where he was coming from, sending this to me. As a black person receiving something like this from the city-freakin'-mayor - come on."

The Orange County Register first reported the e-mail on its Web site Tuesday night.

Grose confirmed to the AP that he sent the e-mail to Price and said he didn't mean to offend her. He said he was unaware of the racial stereotype that black people like watermelons.

He said he and Price are friends and serve together on a community youth board.

"Bottom line is, we laugh at things and I didn't see this in the same light that she did," Grose told the AP. "I'm sorry. It wasn't sent to offend her personally - or anyone - from the standpoint of the African-American race."

Grose, who became mayor in December, said he sent an apology e-mail to Price and her boss and also left her a voicemail apology.

Regardless, Price said it will be difficult for the two to work together.

"Now I am like - wow, is this really how he feels?" Price said.

Los Alamitos is a 2¼-square-mile Orange County city of around 12,000 people. The mayor is elected by fellow members of the five-seat City Council.
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When first exposed to this stereotype as a child, I was actually ashamed to eat watermelon in public places where Whites might see my eating. Stupid, stupid, stupid... and ignorant to the fact (which I soon learned) that people everywhere love watermelon and this is a stereotype that is racist in portraying Blacks and watermelon.

JANET JACKSON SUPERBOWL PERFORMANCE

Chris Rock's Commentary On Janet's Superbowl Tittie

Believe it!!!!!

Suspect Transforms

Nigeria police hold 'robber' goat

Police in Nigeria are holding a goat handed to them by a vigilante group, which said it was a car thief who had used witchcraft to change shape. A police spokesman in Kwara State has been quoted as saying that the "armed robbery suspect" would remain in custody until investigations were over.

But another police spokesman told the BBC the goat was being held in case its owner claimed it.

The belief in witchcraft and the power to change shapes is common in Nigeria.

Police reform activists have condemned the "arrest", saying it highlights the low education levels of many Nigerian police officers.

Nigeria's Vanguard newspaper has a picture of the goat and reports that police paraded it in front of journalists in the Kwara state capital Ilorin on Thursday.

But this was denied by national police spokesman Emmanuel Ojukwu.

"The vigilante group arrested the goat and took it to the police, then they told the media."

The next morning journalists turned up demanding to see the goat, he said.

"But of course goats can't commit crime."

Oakland, Ca Fruitvale Bart Station Shooting. Full Video and Interview with Karina Vargas

Video and eyewitness evidence that Oakland police murder unarmed restrained Black father, by shooting Oscar Grant in back of his head. Click HERE for K-TVU video report. Click HERE for Oscar Grant funeral video.

On New Year's Eve, Oscar Grant was shot execution-style by a transit police officer in Oakland, California. He was shot in the back while face-down on a subway platform, unarmed and posing no threat.^1,2

Twelve days later--despite several videos showing what happened--the officer who killed Grant hasn't been arrested, charged, or even questioned. He quit the force and has refused to speak. The District Attorney has done nothing.

It's time to demand that California Attorney General Jerry Brown take over the case and arrest Grant's killer, and to ask that the US Department of Justice launch an independent investigation into the conduct of the local authorities. Please join us and ask your friends and family to do the same:

http://www.colorofchange.org/oscar/?id=2487-195325

Oscar Grant is the third man murdered by BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) police in the past 17 years. All three victims were Black and none posed a serious threat. In each case, BART and county authorities have failed to hold the officers accountable.³

In the previous cases, BART's internal investigations concluded that the officers felt threatened by the victims and were justified in pulling the trigger. It's unbelievable given the circumstances of the killings:

• In 1992, 19-year-old Jerrold Hall was shot in the back by a BART officer as he tried to leave the parking lot of a station. The officer was responding to reports of an armed robbery and said he suspected that Hall and a friend were involved. The officer tried to detain the two, Hall ran and then the officer shot him in the back and killed him. Hall was unarmed, but the officer said he thought Hall was on his way to get a gun and return for a showdown.⁴
  
• In 2001, a mentally ill man named Bruce Seward was the next victim of the rogue force. Seward, 42, was naked and had been sleeping on a bench outside the BART station when an officer approached him. Seward did grab the officer's nightstick at one point, but there were several options for subduing him. Instead, the officer shot and killed him.⁵

In addition to BART's internal investigation, Alameda County's District Attorney is also investigating Oscar Grant's murder--but the office's record on investigating police killings is horrible too. In both cases just described, the District Attorney bought BART's argument that the officers felt threatened. As a result, the cops were cleared of any wrongdoing.

In the case of Grant's murder, the DA has already let 12 days pass while doing essentially nothing--the officer who killed Grant is able to travel and leave the state, and he's free to talk with other officers and attempt to construct a story to justify his killing of Oscar Grant.

The problem with Alameda County's DA goes beyond BART police murders. In the past two years alone, there have been 11 fatal police shootings in Oakland (not including that of Oscar Grant).⁶ When asked, the officials at the District Attorney's office could not remember a single case in the last 20 years where an on-duty cop had been charged in a fatal shooting in Alameda County.⁷ It gives the clear appearance that the District Attorney's office just doesn't have the will to prosecute police crimes.

California's Attorney General needs to step in now and arrest Oscar Grant's murderer. And the US Department of Justice should investigate the failure of the authorities in Alameda County to act. It's the first step towards justice. After that, we will push for systemic changes to create public accountability for BART and other police departments. Creating those structural changes will be a much longer fight, but Oscar Grant's tragic death is a wake-up call that should give us a real chance to help prevent this from happening again.

Please join us in demanding justice, and then ask your family and friends to do the same:

http://www.colorofchange.org/oscar/?id=2487-195325

Notorious- Trailer

Click HERE to see more photos of my "peeps" at the New York movie premier for Notorious.

How To Send Text Messages Via Computer

SMS isn't just for sending text messages from one phone to another -- it's also a great way to get email messages on your phone.

Yes, you can get email on your phone! All you need to know is your cell phone's email address.

Most carriers have "SMS gateways" which take email messages from the Internet and deliver them to their customers' cell phones as SMS text messages. The trick is that you need to know what carrier the recipient's phone is on -- it's not enough to know their phone number. That's because the carrier determines what the email address of the receiving phone is going to be. For example, Cingular phones' address are all "something@cingularme.com" while Verizon phones are "something@vtext.com."

Sound complicated? It's not. All you really need to do is find your carrier in the list below, and then use the pattern shown there to figure out your email address. If you want to send email to a friend's phone, just ask them which carrier they use, and off you go!

(Note: For each carrier, I'll include a link to a page with more detailed information on how SMS works with that carrier, how much it costs, and where you can find more information. In the list below, just click any carrier's highlighted name to find out more.

SMS EMAIL ADDRESSES:

ALL: phonenumber@teleflip.com
Alltel: phonenumber@message.alltel.com
AT&T Wireless: (now Cingular): phonenumber@mmode.com
Boost Mobile: phonenumber@myboostmobile.com
Cingular: phonenumber@cingularme.com
Metro PCS: phonenumber@mymetropcs.com
Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com
Ntelos: phonenumber@pcs.ntelos.net
Orange: phonenumber@orange.net
Sprint (now Sprint Nextel): phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com

For more information, click HERE

The Obama's Seasons Greetings

Obama and McCain - Dance Off!

We Really Do Need Change

Rudy Ray Moore, 81, Dies

Rudy Ray Moore, 81, a Precursor of Rap, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: October 22, 2008

Rudy Ray Moore, whose standup comedy, records and movies related earthy rhyming tales of a vivid gaggle of characters as they lurched from sexual escapade to sexual escapade in a boisterous tradition, born in Africa, that helped shape today’s hip-hop, died Sunday in Akron, Ohio. He was 81.

The cause was complications of diabetes, his Web site said.

Mr. Moore called himself the Godfather of Rap because of the number of hip-hop artists who used snippets of his recordings in theirs, performed with him or imitated him. These included Dr. Dre, Big Daddy Kane and 2 Live Crew.

Snoop Dogg thanked Mr. Moore in liner notes to the 2006 release of the soundtrack to Mr. Moore’s 1975 film, “Dolemite,” saying, “Without Rudy Ray Moore, there would be no Snoop Dogg, and that’s for real.”

Most critics refrained from overpraising “Dolemite,” with the possible exception of John Leland, who wrote in The New York Times in 2002 that it “remains the ‘Citizen Kane’ of kung fu pimping movies.” The film, made for $100,000, nonetheless became a cult classic among aficionados of so-called blaxploitation movies — films that so exaggerate black stereotypes that they might plausibly be said to transcend those stereotypes.

Very little of Mr. Moore’s work in any medium reached mainstream audiences, largely because his rapid-fire rhyming salaciousness exceeded the wildest excesses of even Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor. His comedy records in the 1960s and ’70s — most featuring nude photographs of him and more than one woman in suggestive poses — were kept behind record store counters in plain brown wrappers and had to be explicitly requested.

But Mr. Moore could be said to represent a profound strand of African-American folk art. One of his standard stories concerns a monkey who uses his wiles and an accommodating elephant to fool a lion. The tale, which originated in West Africa, became a basis for an influential study by the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism.”

In one of his few brushes with a national audience, Mr. Moore, in a startlingly cleaned-up version, told the story on “The Arsenio Hall Show” in the early 1990s. Other characters he described were new, almost always dirtier renderings in the tradition of trickster stories represented by Brer Rabbit and the cunning slave John, who outwitted his master to win freedom.

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Levi Stubbs, of the Four Tops, Dies In Detroit

Detroit (WWJ) -- The lead singer of the Four Tops, Levi Stubbs Jr., died Friday (Oct. 17) morning at his home in Detroit. He was 72.

Stubbs had cancer and had a series of strokes. He stopped performing in 2000. Funeral arrangements are pending. He is survived by his wife Clineice and five children.

Stubbs (pictured second from right) was honored in 2004 on the group's 50th anniversary in music with an all-star salute in Detroit.

The Four Tops won international fame on Motown Records with the group\'s first hit, Baby, I Need Your Loving in 1964. A string of hits followed, including I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honeybunch), Standing in the Shadows of Love, Reach Out I'll Be There, Bernadette, It's The Same Old Song and Ain't No Woman (Like The One I've Got).

Stubbs and three of his friends, Obie "Renaldo" Benson, Lawrence Payton and Abdul "Duke" Fakir, started singing together at Pershing High School in the 50's and signed with Motown in the '60s.

With Stubbs' death, Fakir is the lone remaining member of the original group.

Notorious 2009 -Trailer - January 16, 2009

Grab your 40 and roll a blunt: The trailer for Notorious has finally hit the interweb. With Brooklyn rapper Gravy (née Jamal Woolard) playing Biggie and Derek Luke as P. Diddy, we can’t wait for this one. But will the film be a fitting legacy to one of the greatest rappers of all time? It’s hard to say from this teaser, which offers only a few glimpses of actual footage. Still, those glimpses are pretty awesome: Biggie as a little kid counting money? That pinstripe suit? Gold, Jerry, gold. On the other hand, the film is being released on Jan. 16, 2009 — historically a studio dumping ground. If it was really “sicker than your average,” wouldn’t Fox Searchlight drop it over Christmas? Only time will tell, but for now, the trailer holds us over after the jump.

From HERE

Tell McCain to End the Politics of Hate

Racism has not changed one iota from when at the age of eight I witnessed racism directed at an uncle. I saw the racism directed from the mind and mouth of the racist, which made me pity the source rather than the target. It was as if the racist was poisoned by his thought processes just as a poisonous reptile's venom is a part of the reptile. My uncle was a God-fearing, hard-working, righteous man who would pray for his haters. Why? When did we become hated so undeservedly? Maybe it's a case of "always hating the one you love!!!

Boogie Man - Lee Atwater

Mud Pies for ‘That One’
By MAUREEN DOWD
The New York Times
October 7, 2008

Some of John McCain’s friends, from the good old days when he talked straight, feared that his Greek tragedy would be that he would be defeated by George Bush twice: once in 2000, because of W.’s no-conscience campaigning, and again in 2008, because of W.’s no-brains governing.

But if McCain loses, he will have contributed to his own downfall by failing to live up to his personal standard of honor.

John McCain has long been torn between wanting to succeed and serving a higher cause. Right now, the drive to succeed is trumping any loftier aspirations. He cynically picked a running mate with less care than theater directors give to picking a leading actor’s understudy. And he has been running a seamy campaign originally designed by the bad seed of conservative politics, Lee Atwater.

It was adapted in 2000 in Atwater’s home state of South Carolina by Atwater acolytes in W.’s camp to harpoon McCain with rumors that he had fathered out of wedlock a black baby (as opposed to adopting a Bangladeshi infant girl in wedlock). Sulfurous Atwater-style rumor-mongering by Bush supporters — that McCain had come home from a Hanoi tiger cage with snakes in his head — aimed to stop him during that primary after he had zoomed in New Hampshire.

Atwater relished teaching rich, white Republicans to feign a connection to the common man so they could get in office and economically undermine the common man. In the 1988 campaign, the Machiavellian ran to help George Bush Sr. defeat Michael Dukakis with this unholy quintet of charges:

The Democrat was a ’60s-style liberal who would raise taxes and take away guns. He was weak and would not protect the country militarily. He was a member of the elite “Harvard Yard’s boutique.” He had a foreign-sounding name and was not on “the American side.” He was on the side of the Scary Black Man.

Sound familiar?

Certainly, at some level, John McCain must be disgusted with himself for using the tactics perfected by the same crowd that used these tactics to derail him in 2000. He’s now curmudgeonly, even hostile, toward the press — the group he used to spend hours with every day and jokingly describe as his base.

He unleashed Sarah Palin to slime their opponent and suggested that the Democrat with the foreign-sounding name who came from the Harvard Yard boutique is not on the American side.

Campaigning last weekend, Palin cast their Democratic rival as “someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

The woman is sounding more Cheney than Cheney. Palin said that Obama’s relationship with the former Weatherman William Ayers proved that he did not have the “truthfulness and judgment” to be president. Asked by William Kristol if the Rev. Jeremiah Wright should be an issue, she said, “I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more.”

Atwater gleefully tried to paint Willie Horton as Dukakis’s running mate. With a black man running, it’s even easier for Atwater’s disciple running McCain’s campaign to warn that white Americans should not open the door to the dangerous Other, or “That One,” as McCain referred to Obama in Tuesday night’s debate. (A cross between “The One” and “That Woman.”)

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Richelle Shaw - How did you get into the telephone business?

Forty-year-old Richelle Shaw has a green thumb when it comes to turning a company into a mega-success. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a business she owns or someone else’s. For starters, finding out that more than 300,000 Americans lose their phone service each month because of missed payments was the premise for Shaw’s company.

As fate would have it, she built a multimillion-dollar company, and nowadays many fledgling entrepreneurs have her to thank for turning their businesses around. How-to advice can be found in her book, “How to Build A Million Dollar Business in Las Vegas Without the Casinos,” or you can check out Shaw’s coaching program. To read a free chapter of her book click here: FREE CHAPTER

No, this isn’t a sneaky sales pitch because Shaw isn’t your run-of-the-mill entrepreneur who turned to coaching to make a living. Quite the opposite, this single mom is incredibly successful in her own right and has a passion for helping others attain fame and fortune.

If you read the answer to the first question I asked her, you might be as curious as I was. And it takes a lot to get my attention. Bottom line, I just had to know. How can I be like Richelle?

Your six-employee firm reached $2.37 million in sales last year, what inspired you to start your company?

SHAW: I am the only female African-American public utility in the nation. I own FreshStart Telephone. I was dating three men in three different states and had a high telephone bill. I was selling advertising, and the vice president of a local telephone company asked me to come and work for them. I did–was promoted six times in five years and grew the company from $300,000 to $36 million. I ended up buying the company from my boss. Lost it all after the 9/11, World Trade Center tragedy and rebuilt it back to $1 million in about six months.

What is unique or special about your business that gives it an edge over your competitors?

SHAW: I understand how to market. The customers drive my business. Actually, the results from marketing campaigns drive my business. Not what I think, not what my friends or staff think.

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