Jon Stewart, the host of Comedy Central’s Daily Show, turned up the heat on the Fox News meat heads after Bernard Goldberg decided to take issue with one of Goldberg’s comments. To give you a little history, Stewart’s recent call out resulted on an airing of Fox & Friends, which two weeks ago asked (more than once) whether the crescent-moon shaped logo that the White House used during a nuclear security summit was some sort of Islamic image.
According to the New York Times, Stewart had his staff call the White House to ask just that, and discovered that there were no Islamic ties. The White House told the Daily Show staffers that the image was based on the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom. Of course, Stewart proudly reported this news on his show on April 14.
On the next evening’s broadcast, Stewart showed a montage of Fox news hosts and commentators, including Bernard Goldberg, making wide-reaching generalizations about liberals. In particular, Stewart zeroed in on Goldberg, a Fox News contributor, calling him a hypocrite for complaining that Tea Party members are being stereotyped. Then, Stewart told Fox News to go f*** itself.
Goldberg then proceeded to go toe to toe with Stewart on a visit to Bill O’Reilly Factor. However, Goldberg got caught up in the no spin zone and got his wrinkled ass waxed when Stewart responded to his weak come back.
Take a look at the clip above and see for yourself why Comedy Central is no place for old Bernie.
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Funeral services for Dr. Dorothy I. Height, chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW),will take place in Washington, D.C. beginning Tuesday, April 27 and end with funeral services at Washington National Cathedral on Thursday, April 29, according to former U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman, who is overseeing the arrangements. President Barack Obama will deliver the eulogy.
The 98 year old founding matriarch of the American civil rights movement died last Tuesday at Howard University Hospital. The cause of death was not disclosed.
Dr. Heights crusade for racial justice and gender equality spanned for more than six decades, and as president of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, she was the most influential woman at the top levels of civil rights leadership.
Although she never drew the media attention that conferred celebrity and instant recognition on some of the other civil rights leaders of her time, Ms. Height was often described as the “glue” that held the family of black civil rights leaders together. She did much of her work out of the public spotlight, in quiet meetings and conversations, and she was widely connected at the top levels of power and influence in government and business.
As a civil rights activist, Ms. Height participated in protests in Harlem during the 1930s. In the 1940s, she lobbied first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on behalf of civil rights causes. And in the 1950s, she prodded President Dwight D. Eisenhower to move more aggressively on school desegregation issues. In 1994, Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
In a statement issued by the White House, President Obama called Ms. Height “the godmother of the Civil Rights Movement and a hero to so many Americans.”
She “devoted her life to those struggling for equality . . . witnessing every march and milestone along the way,” Obama said.
In the turmoil of the civil rights struggles in the 1960s, Ms. Height helped orchestrate strategy with movement leaders including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph and John Lewis, who would later serve as a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia.
In August 1963, Ms. Height was on the platform with King when he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. But she would say later that she was disappointed that no one advocating women’s rights spoke that day at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Less than a month later, at King’s request, she went to Birmingham, Ala., to minister to the families of four black girls who had died in a church bombing linked to the racial strife that had engulfed the city.
“At every major effort for social progressive change, Dorothy Height has been there,” Lewis said in 1997 when Ms. Height announced her retirement as president of the National Council of Negro Women.
As a champion of social justice, Ms. Height was best known during the early years of her career for her struggles to overcome racial prejudice.
She was also energetic in her efforts to overcome gender bias, and much of that work predated the women’s rights movement. When President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, Ms. Height was among those invited to the White House to witness the ceremony. She returned to the White House in 1998 for a ceremony marking the 35th anniversary of that legislation to hear Clinton urge passage of additional laws aimed at equalizing pay for men and women.
“Dorothy Height deserves credit for helping black women understand that you had to be feminist at the same time you were African . . . that you had to play more than one role in the empowerment of black people,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) once said.
As president of the National Council of Negro Women, Ms. Height was instrumental in organizing and sponsoring programs that emphasized self-help and self-reliance.
Those included nutrition, child care, housing and career counseling. In response to a public TV program, “The Vanishing Black Family,” Ms. Height helped create and organize the Black Family Reunion Celebration, which has been held on the Mall and in cities across the country annually since 1985. The gatherings are intended to honor the traditions, strength and history of African American families while seeking solutions to such social problems as teen pregnancy and drug abuse.
“The reunion is as important today as some of our marches were in the past,” Ms. Height said in 1992.
In 1995, Ms. Height was among the few women to speak at the Million Man March on the Mall, which was led by Louis Farrakhan, the chief minister of the Nation of Islam. “I am here because you are here,” she declared. Two years later, at 85, she sat at the podium all day, in the whipping wind and rain, at the Million Woman March in Philadelphia.
Dorothy Irene Height was born in Richmond on March 24, 1912, and she grew up in Rankin, Pa., near Pittsburgh, where she attended racially integrated schools. But she felt the lash of racial bigotry early in her life. A music teacher in her mostly white elementary school appointed her student director of the school chorus, but a new principal forbade her to take that position. At the next school assembly, the chorus refused to stand and sing until Ms. Height was reinstated as leader, and the principal relented.
The principal subsequently became one of her staunchest supporters, Ms. Height recalled in her 2003 memoir, “Open Wide the Freedom Gates.”
As a high school senior and the valedictorian, she won a national oratorical contest, and with it a $1,000 college scholarship. But the college of her choice, Barnard in New York, had already admitted its quota of black students — two. When Ms. Height applied, she was informed that she would have to wait at least a semester before she could enroll.
Instead, she went to New York University, where she graduated in three years and received a master’s degree in educational psychology in her fourth year.
As a young woman, Ms. Height made money through jobs such as ironing entertainer Eddie Cantor’s shirts and proofreading Marcus Garvey’s newspaper, the Negro World. She went nightclubbing in Harlem with composer W.C. Handy.
Ms. Height began her professional career as a caseworker for the New York City welfare department. She got her start as a civil rights activist through the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and from the pastor’s son, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who later represented Harlem in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Ms. Height later said that as an officer of the Harlem Christian Youth Council, “I was one of the multitude whose first experience as a civil rights activist was in walking and talking with merchants on 125th Street.”
After attending an international church youth conference in London in the summer of 1937, Ms. Height returned to New York with the conviction that she needed to operate from a broader base than that of a welfare caseworker. She found her opportunity that November at the Harlem branch of the YWCA during a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Mary McLeod Bethune, president of the Harlem YWCA, was impressed by Ms. Height’s poise and style in greeting the president’s wife, and she promptly offered her a job.
Quitting her job as a welfare caseworker, Ms. Height joined the staff of the Harlem YWCA. She remained a full-time YWCA staffer until 1975, serving the last 18 years simultaneously as president of the National Council of Negro Women.
As a child, she had once been turned away from the Pittsburgh YWCA swimming pool. As a YWCA staff member, she was instrumental in bringing about an interracial charter for Ys in 1946.
In the 1940s, Ms. Height came to Washington as chief of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA branch. She joined the staff of the national YWCA board in 1944, and, until 1975, she remained on that staff with a variety of responsibilities, including leadership training and interracial and ecumenical education.
In 1965, she organized and became the director of the YWCA’s Center for Racial Justice, and she held that position until retiring from the YWCA board in 1975. She was a visiting professor at the Delhi School of Social Work in India, and she directed studies around the world on issues involving human rights.
Ms. Height became national president of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority in 1947, and she held that position until 1957, when she became the fourth president of the National Council of Negro Women.
Over the next four decades, she established a national reputation as a graceful and insistent voice for civil rights and women’s rights. She was tall and stately and spoke in a tone that always commanded attention. She rarely had to raise her voice.
“If the times aren’t ripe, you have to ripen the times,” she liked to say. It was important, she said, to dress well. “I came up at a time when young women wore hats, and they wore gloves. Too many people in my generation fought for the right for us to be dressed up and not put down.”
Ms. Height never married. She is survived by one sister, Anthanette Height Aldridge of New York.
As the women’s rights movement gained momentum in the early 1970s, Ms. Height forged alliances with white feminist leaders, while disagreeing periodically on matters of tactics and racial emphasis. “African American women have advanced in every field that women have advanced, but the sad point is that those are the few and not the many,” she said.
Under her leadership, the National Council of Negro Women sponsored voter registration drives and organized an education foundation for student activists who interrupted their education to do civil rights work.
Another 1960s program, Wednesdays in Mississippi, was a favorite of Ms. Height’s. It consisted of weekly trips to Mississippi by interracial groups of women to assist at Freedom Schools and voter registration campaigns. This was often perilous work, especially during the summers of 1964 and 1965, when the hundreds of young civil rights volunteers who streamed into Mississippi were routinely harassed, sometimes beaten and, in a few cases, killed.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the council helped organize and operate development projects in African countries. It ran a “pig bank” project in rural Mississippi in which pigs were given to poor, hungry families so they could raise them, with the understanding that two pigs from subsequent litters would be put back into the bank for another family.
Over the years, there were fundraising drives for a statue of Bethune and acquisition of a large and imposing headquarters building in downtown Washington to house the National Council and the Dorothy I. Height Leadership Institute. The building, with white oak woodwork, a marble staircase and fluted cast-iron columns, stands at 633 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, the site of what was once a slave market. For years after stepping down as president of the National Council, Ms. Height made daily visits to her office there, using a walker or a wheelchair as she became infirm.
On her 92nd birthday, she received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest decoration Congress can bestow. But Ms. Height often urged her co-workers to “stop worrying about whose name gets in the paper and start doing something about rats, and day care and low wages. . . . We must try to take our task more seriously and ourselves more lightly.”
For a summary view on Dr. Heights, please click to view video below.
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I have three dogs who are rescues. Their names are Dinah, Carmen and Ruby.
One day when I was walking them, my neighbor’s sister was visiting from out of town. The sister’s name is Carmen. My Carmen who at five is still full of energy was being her usual self, and had to be called down. Carmen the woman was sitting with her sister of the front porch. Carmen the woman asked her sister how did I know her name and why was I calling out to her without looking her way. The sister explained to her that my dog’s name was also Carmen. Of course Carmen the woman was incensed.
After Carmen the woman returned home, my neighbor shared the story with me. Carmen the woman asked her to ask me how would I feel if she named a dog after me. After laughing about it, I told the neighbor to tell her sister I would be honored, and not to take it personally since I did not have her mind when I named Carmen.
Like my friend Patrice Rushen, I name my dogs after jazz singers, musicians or a song. Patrice who adopts greyhounds have named her dogs Ella, Carmen and Quincy, after Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, and her mentor Quincy Jones.
My mix chow Carmen of course is named after Carmen McRae, Dinah also a mix chow is named after Dinah Washington, and Ruby my gentle pit bull was named as I was listening to Thelonius Monk’s “Ruby My Dear”.
In the above video other dog owners share how they arrived at naming their dogs.
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As a butler at the White House, Eugene Allen saw eight presidential administrations come and go. Click photo to view gallery
In the end, Eugene Allen, a White House butler who lived a life behind the scenes of history, was the subject of wide acclaim.
Several hundred people packed a funeral service Thursday at Greater First Baptist Church on 13th Street NW to celebrate Allen’s life and the national narrative he embodied.
“His life represents an important part of the American story,” President Obama said in remarks read from a lectern by Rear Adm. Stephen W. Rochon, chief usher of the White House. The president’s letter cited Allen for his service to the country and his “abiding patriotism.”
“He was such a charming man,” said Delores Moaney, who worked at the White House as a maid during the Eisenhower administration. (The jobs were coveted and considered prestigious positions among blacks during that pre-civil rights era.) “I had worked as a maid with the Eisenhower family in New York,” she said, her hand resting on her cane. “When I got to the White House, I met Gene. You’d notice his smile right away.”
Allen, who died March 31, was born in 1919 and raised in a log cabin in Virginia during a time of harsh segregation. He served eight presidents, from Harry S. Truman to Ronald Reagan. Such was Allen’s reputation inside the White House that first lady Nancy Reagan invited him to attend a state dinner for German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Allen, who believed he was the first butler to be invited to a state dinner, danced underneath chandeliered light with his wife, Helene, that night and sipped champagne that he had, for so long, served to others.
Allen was behind the doors of the White House during the Little Rock school crisis, the 1963 March on Washington, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the Vietnam War, Watergate and many other epochal events.
Years after he retired, Allen and his wife of 65 years were looking forward to voting for Barack Obama, the first African American president. Helene, however, died the day before the election, and Allen went to the polls by himself. He and his wife were profiled in a 2008 Washington Post article. He later would receive a VIP invitation to Obama’s swearing-in.
Nancy Mitchell, who became the first female usher at the White House, was at Thursday’s funeral service. “I was scared when I first joined the White House” in 1980, she recalled. “Gene — he told me to call him Gene, but I never could — calmed me down. He’d come and get me and say, ‘Nancy, let’s go get some lunch.’ And he had already set up a lovely place setting for me and him. He may have been the best man I ever met.”
The choir sang “Jesus on the Main Line,” and it sang, “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep.”
There was weeping anyway.
Allen’s son, Charles, stood at a lectern and shared a memory: “My father came home late on the day that President Kennedy had been shot. But then he got up and put his coat back on. He said, ‘I’ve got to go back to work.’ But in the hallway, he fell against the wall and started crying. That was the first time in my life I had ever seen my father cry.”
The Rev. Winston C. Ridley Jr., who officiated, said Allen “was there during the declaration of wars, the desegregation of schools. All the while walking among the presidents and carrying food and drinks with a quiet dignity. He was there during the events that would change the course of history.”
Moaney, the Eisenhower maid, shook her head in silence back and forth, the way people do when they believe they’ve just heard something sweet and spiritual.
The minister continued: “Now, it’s true that some tried to stigmatize his job, that of a butler. But Eugene Allen raised it to a level of excellence. It was as if Eugene knew the way to be exalted was through humility.”
They laid the butler to rest at Rock Creek Cemetery in Petworth. He wore a gray evening suit, a White House pin on his lapel and a pair of snow-white gloves. Helene lay just inches away.
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The woman told the dispatcher that she shot her niece, apparently referring to a 19-year-old woman killed during a fight that police say started over a skimpy Easter outfit _ jean shorts and a green T-shirt tied up around her midriff.
“I just shot my niece,” the woman says calmly at the beginning of the 33-second call released to The Associated Press on Tuesday.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” the woman said. “We was arguing, I tried to get my gun to prove a point, they got the rifle with me and it went off.”
Asked about the location of her niece, the woman says bluntly, “In the car. I think she’s dead.”
The woman does not give her name but calls herself the victim’s aunt. Family members say Evelyn Burgess, the woman arrested in the shooting, was referred to as the victim’s aunt, though she was her older second cousin.
Police say Burgess got into a fight with Danielle Pickens over her attire, then shot her outside Burgess’ house Sunday night. Pickens died at a hospital early the next day.
Family members of both women said Tuesday that Danielle Pickens’ style of dressing was well-known among relatives.
Danielle Pickens often wore short skirts to the holiday gatherings hosted by Evelyn Burgess, said Pickens’ sister, Ralinda Pickens, and uncle, Tico Pickens.
“The way she was dressed that day is the way she always dressed, and everybody knew that,” said Tico Pickens, 33. “It wasn’t like she meant any harm toward nobody by doing it. It was just comfortable to her.”
Burgess, 42, is charged with one count of murder. Franklin County Municipal Court Judge William Pollitt set Burgess’ bond at $500,000 during a court appearance Tuesday.
Burgess didn’t say anything at the hearing and doesn’t have a lawyer assigned to her yet.
At her house on Tuesday, her husband, Kevin Burgess, said his wife was doing all right, but he declined to comment further.
Danielle, who went by Danny, once dressed like a tomboy, then one day tried on a short skirt she liked and started dressing differently.
“The first time she put on a cute little skirt, I guessed she liked it and she dressed like that ever since,” said Ralinda Pickens, 20.
She says events escalated quickly at the Easter party at Burgess’ house on the north side of Columbus.
Evelyn Burgess was angry at Danielle over her outfit and accused her of flaunting her looks around other men at the party, including Burgess’ husband, Ralinda Pickens said.
A fight broke out with Evelyn Burgess and Danielle struggling with a baseball bat, then ended as Ralinda Pickens broke things up, got her sister outside and prepared to drive her home.
The sisters were in the car when Burgess came running up with a gun, reached inside the car, pulled Danielle by the hair and shot her as she tried to seek shelter under her older sister, Ralinda Pickens said.
Burgess then walked back inside her house, sat down on a couch, told people what had happened and waited for the police, Ralinda Pickens said.
“I never thought she would do something like that,” Ralinda Pickens said Tuesday of Burgess, crying softly as she sat on the porch of her house about a five-minute drive from where the shooting happened. “Whatever anger she had built up in her nobody actually knew.”
Evelyn Burgess had bought the gun from a local gun store about a year ago, Ralinda Pickens and Tico Pickens said.
Below is a video narrated by New York State Senator Eric Adams which is circulating on the Internet. This video on dressing may have proven Burgesses’ point without the fatal result.
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