PROVO, UTAH (BNO NEWS) — Known for his role as Arnold Jackson in the 1980s sitcom “Diff’rent Strokes” where he uttered the phrase “What you talkin’ ’bout Willis?”, former child TV star Gary Coleman died today May 28, 2010. Coleman, who suffered intra-cranial brain bleeding and was on life support in the intensive care unit of a Utah hospital was 42.
Utah Valley Regional Medical Center spokeswoman Janet Frank confirmed that Coleman died of a brain hemorrhage, and said his life support was terminated on Friday morning. Coleman died at 12.05 p.m. MDT.
The actor was taken to a local hospital for treatment after a fall at his Santaquin, Utah home on Wednesday. On Thursday, Coleman became conscious for brief moments and then slipped out of consciousness throughout the day.
As of Thursday afternoon his condition was labeled as unstable. He was then put on life support which was unplugged on Friday morning.
Born in Zion, Illinois Coleman was adopted by Edmonia Sue, a nurse practitioner, and W.G. Coleman, a fork-lift operator. Mr. Coleman suffered from a congenital kidney disease that was caused by focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (an autoimmune destruction and alteration of the kidney). The illness halted his growth at an early age, which lead to a small stature (4 ft 8 in; 1.42 m) and a childlike appearance. Gary underwent two kidney transplants, one in 1973 and one in 1984, and required daily dialysis.
At the height of his fame on Diff’rent Strokes, he earned as much as $100,000 per episode. It is estimated he was left with a quarter of the original amount after paying his parents, advisers, lawyers, and taxes. He later successfully sued his parents and his ex-advisers for misappropriation of his finances and was awarded $1.3 million.
Coleman became a popular figure, starring in a number of feature films and made-for-TV movies including On the Right Track and The Kid with the Broken Halo. The latter eventually served as the basis for the Hanna-Barbera-produced animated series The Gary Coleman Show in 1982
Coleman secretly wed his girlfriend of five months, Shannon Price, 22, on August 28, 2007.[6] They met on the set of the 2006 comedy film Church Ball. On May 1 and 2, 2008, Coleman and his wife appeared on the show Divorce Court to air their differences in front of Judge Lynn Toler.[7] Unlike regular Divorce Court participants, they appeared on the show with the intent to save their marriage rather than adjudicate a separation.
Coleman suffered a seizure on the set of The Insider on February 26, 2010. Dr. Drew Pinsky, who was with Coleman at the time, assisted him until paramedics arrived.
On May 26, 2010, Coleman was admitted to Utah Valley Regional Medical Center in Provo, Utah, in critical condition as a result of falling and hitting his head at his home outside of Salt Lake City, UT.
Suffering an intra-cranial hemorrhage, Coleman was unconscious and on life support by mid-afternoon on May 27, 2010, and mid day today mountain time, Coleman gently slipped away after his life support was terminated, leaving us the memories of talent as a child star.
Coleman is survived by his wife, Shannon.
What’s Your Take On The Matter? Register and/or sign in and sound off!
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
Less than a month after Arizona’s so-called “Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” made racial profiling the law of the land, Governor Jan Brewer signed a new law that targets Latinos and other minorities, not on the streets but in the classroom. HB 2281 bans ethnic studies in the state’s public and charter schools, an attempt to dissolve the Mexican American Studies Department in the Tuscon Unified School District (TUSD), and a move that puts African American studies, Pan-Asian studies, and Native American studies in the crosshairs. Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a former lawyer who is running for state attorney general, has been waging war against the ethnic studies department for years, describing it as “promoting ethnic chauvinism.”
“It’s just like the old South, and it’s long past time that we prohibited it,” Horne said this week, even as media outlets reported that Arizona schools are being directed by his office to purge English teachers who speak with an accent.
Sean Arce, Director of the Mexican American Studies Department in Tuscon told AlterNet that the new law is all part of a political agenda that is creating a “toxic environment in Arizona, specifically geared at Latinos.”
“I think [supporters of the law] have really been emboldened by the other anti-Latino, anti-immigrant legislation,” he says, “and, also, I believe Tom Horne is using this as an anti-Latino platform to get elected to the attorney general’s office.”
Arizona’s law, which was partly written by Superintendent Horne, makes it illegal for a school district to provide any classes that “promote the overthrow of the United States government,” “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals,” and which “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.” Arce and his ethnic studies colleagues argue that this is a complete distortion of their program — a program Arce vows will not going away anytime soon.
“We’re going to continue to do what we have been doing, because we know that those four major provisions in the bill are absurd,” he says. “For example, promoting the overthrow of the American government — that’s ridiculous, we don’t do any of those things.” (Indeed, as noted by Politico this week, “neither the governor nor the bill’s supporters have identified examples where a Chicano studies class has advocated the ‘overthrow’ of the federal government.”)
Instead, Arce says, the 12-year-old program has bolstered academic achievement by Latino students, lowered the dropout rate, and enhanced the college matriculation rate.
“Unfortunately, some fear an educated Latino population,” Arce says, because it “translates to a more participatory demographic; a more involved, informed demographic. That translates to possible votes — and a possible shift if power relations that exist here in the state of Arizona.”
Rather than shut down all ethnic studies courses immediately, HB 2281 directs either the Arizona Board of Education or the office of the superintendent to first conduct an investigation to determine whether the curriculum is in violation of the law. “It is a process that the state has to go through,” says Arce. Given the political climate, however, he and his allies are wasting no time. A lawsuit against the measure is in the works “on behalf of parents, students, teaching staff and the community,” he says. In the meantime, students have taken to the streets to raise their voices in opposition to the new law. On Wednesday, 15 people, including four minors, were arrested protesting in front of state offices. “That doesn’t happen very much,” says Arce. “You don’t see kids fighting for their education.”
Some 1,500 students are currently enrolled in the TUSD’s ethnic studies program, which also extends to elementary and middle school students, as partly integrated into their curriculum.
“Don’t Propagandize Kids”
Upon taking office in 2003, Superintendent Tom Horne lamented that “the progressive movement has de-emphasized the teaching of substance,” stressing the need to bolster the teaching of American history. “Our high school students must learn about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Revolutionary War, the ideas on which this country was founded, and the Greco-Roman basis of western civilization,” he said in his inauguration speech, an idea he repeated in a 2007 speech before the conservative Heritage Foundation.
In his speeches and articles, Horne likes to boast that he participated in Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963, citing his favorite line from MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech: that children should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
“That has been a fundamental principal for me my entire life, and ethnic studies teach the opposite,” Horne wrote in 2008, repeating the same anecdote to CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
Horne believes that ethnic studies is emblematic of a “race obsessed,” “downer philosophy” that teaches students that they are oppressed.
On CNN Horne had the misfortune of appearing alongside the fast-talking scholar Micheal Eric Dyson, who countered that “Martin Luther King Jr. cannot not be used to justify xenophobic and racist passions that are dressed up as desires to reform the curriculum.”
“I would say that the xenophobia and racism is on your side,” Horne responded. See the video above.
When asked by Cooper whether he meant to say that there is “no racism in this country,” Horne replied, “That’s not the predominant atmosphere in America.”
And yet, in many quarters of the country, Arizona is becoming something of a pariah state for its newly reactionary treatment of Latinos. Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon estimated this week that a collective boycott of the state could cost Arizona $90 million.
Even amid such continuing national outrage over the anti-immigrant SB 1070, however, Horne insists that Arizona students are being fed a false narrative of racial victimization. “Don’t propagandize kids that they’re oppressed and that they have no future and that they should be angry at their country,” he said. “Teach them that this is the land of opportunity, where if they work hard they can achieve their dreams.”
Horne seems blissfully unaware — or else indifferent — to the contradiction between his insistence that all children should be treated as individuals, regardless of race, and the new laws that are being passed specifically targeting Latinos.
If this can happen to Latinos it can happen to Mexican American Studies Department in the Tuscon Unified School District (TUSD), it can happen to African American studies, Pan-Asian studies, Native American studies, etc any where in the USA. Will you speak out before there is no one else to speak?
What’s Your Take On The Matter? Register and/or sign in and sound off!
My maternal grandmother loved Art Linkletter and as a kid growing up in the 60s, I would sit with her after school and watch Art Linkletter’s House Party Show.
Art Linkletter, who hosted the popular TV shows ‘People Are Funny’ and ‘House Party’ in the 1950s and 1960s, has died. He was 97.
His son-in-law, Art Hershey, says Linkletter died Wednesday at his home in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles.
‘Art Linkletter’s House Party,’ one of television’s longest-running variety shows, debuted on radio in 1944 and was seen on CBS-TV from 1952 to 1969.
Though it had many features, the best known was the daily interviews with schoolchildren.
“On ‘House Party,’ I would talk to you and bring out the fact that you had been letting your boss beat you at golf over a period of months as part of your campaign to get a raise,” Linkletter wrote.
“All the while, without your knowledge, your boss would be sitting a few feet away listening, and at the appropriate moment, I would bring you together,” he said. “Now, that’s funny, because the laugh arises out of a real situation.”
Linkletter collected sayings from the children into ‘Kids Say The Darndest Things,’ and it sold in the millions. The book ’70 Years of Best Sellers 1895-1965′ ranked ‘Kids Say the Darndest Things’ as the 15th top seller among nonfiction books in that period.
The primetime ‘People Are Funny,’ which began on radio in 1942 and ran on TV from 1954 to 1961, emphasized slapstick humor and audience participation — things like throwing a pie in the face of a contestant who couldn’t tell his Social Security number in five seconds, or asking him to go out and cash a check written on the side of a watermelon.
The down-to-earth charm of Linkletter’s broadcast persona seemed to be mirrored by his private life with his wife of more than seventy years, Lois. They had five children, whom he wrote about in his books and called the “Links.”
But in 1969, his 20-year-old daughter, Diane, jumped to her death from her sixth-floor Hollywood apartment. He blamed her death on LSD use, but toxicology tests found no LSD in her body after she died.
Still, the tragedy prompted him to become a crusader against drugs. A son, Robert, died in a car accident in 1980. Another son, Jack Linkletter, was 70 when he died of lymphoma in 2007.
Art Linkletter got his first taste of broadcasting with a part-time job while attending San Diego State College in the early 1930s. He graduated in 1934.
“I was studying to be an English professor,” Linkletter once said. “But as they say, life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans.”
He held a series of radio and promotion jobs in California and Texas, experimenting with audience participation and remote broadcasts, before forming his own production company in the 1940s and striking it big with ‘People Are Funny’ and ‘House Party.’
Linkletter was born Arthur Gordon Kelly on July 17, 1912, in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. His unwed mother put him up for adoption when he was a baby; when he was about 7, he and his adoptive parents moved to the United States, eventually settling in San Diego.
He recalled his preacher-father forced him to take odd jobs to help the family. So Linkletter left and became a hobo, hopping trains across the West, working where he could. He recalled later that he felt the religious faith instilled by his father had been a great gift.
After leaving daily broadcasting in 1969, Linkletter continued to write, lecture and appear in television commercials.
Among his other books, were ‘Old Age is Not for Sissies,’ ‘How To Be a Supersalesman,’ ‘Confessions of a Happy Man,’ ‘Hobo on the Way to Heaven’ and his autobiography, ‘I Didn’t Do It Alone.’
A recording Linkletter made with his daughter Diane not long before she died, ‘We Love You, Call Collect,’ was issued after her death and won a Grammy award for best spoken word recording.
“Life is not fair … not easy,” Linkletter said in a 1990 interview by The Associated Press. “Outside, peer pressure can wreak havoc with the nicest families. So that’s the part that’s a gamble.
“But I’m an optimist. Even though I’ve had tragedies in my life, and I’ve seen a lot of difficult things, I still am an optimist.”
Bill Cosby tried to bring “Kids Say the Darndest Things” back to television, and as delightful as it was, it just couldn’t compare to those afternoons sitting with my maternal grandmother watching Art Linkletter after school. Take a look at the video below to the Art Linkletter tribute done by Cosby.
Linkletter is survived by his wife, Lois, whom he married in 1935, and daughters Dawn and Sharon.
What’s Your Take On The Matter? Register and/or sign in and sound off!
Former major league baseball pitcher Jose Lima died Sunday at the age of 37 of a heart attack.
Lima, whose high-energy brand of pitching he called “Lima time” helped send the Dodgers to the playoffs in his only season in Los Angeles.
According to Pasadena Police Lt. Tracey Ibarra, paramedics were called to Lima’s home just after 6 a.m. Suffering cardiac arrest he was taken to Huntington Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The cause of death will be determined by an autopsy, said Los Angeles County coroner’s investigator Kelli Blanchard.
Dan Evans, his agent said Lima had been had gone dancing with his family Saturday night and exhibited no signs of ill health.
Lima won 13 games for the Dodgers in 2004, helping the team win the National League Western Division title. He pitched a five-hit shutout in the playoffs against the St. Louis Cardinals, the Dodgers’ first postseason win since 1988.
Lima, who also pitched for Houston, Detroit, Kansas City and the New York Mets in his 13 major league seasons, sometimes alienated opponents with his antics, which included gesturing grandly on the field, pounding his chest and yelling into his glove. He even sang the National Anthem before a game with the Dodgers. But many former opponents said they enjoyed him once they played on his team and got to know him.
“You come to realize that the energy you see on the mound isn’t a false persona, that’s Jose Lima,” Dodgers catcher Brad Ausmus told The Times on Sunday. Ausmus played with Lima in Houston and Detroit.
“He was a showman, a hot dog. But he’d win games; and I think a lot of times, it wasn’t his ability but his ability to will himself to do it,” Dodgers Manager Joe Torre said. “In talking himself into it, I think he sort of intimidated some of the opposition too.”
Lima had been to Dodger Stadium about five times this month and on Friday sat in the front row of the field level behind home plate and received a loud ovation when he was introduced between innings. Sunday, the Dodgers observed a moment of silence in Lima’s memory before the game.
He was born Jose Desiderio Rodriguez Lima on Sept. 30, 1972, in the Dominican Republic. Lima was signed by the Detroit Tigers in 1989, and the right-hander debuted with them in 1994. He made the All-Star team in 1999 with the Houston Astros when he won 21 games.
Lima was traded back to the Tigers in 2001 but released by the team in 2002. Kansas City picked him up from an independent league team in 2003, but he turned down their offer in 2004 to sign with the Dodgers.
After spending 2004 with the Dodgers, Lima returned to Kansas City. But he struggled to a 5-16 record, and his last major league season was 2006 with the Mets.
Lima’s many stops included pitching for Long Beach and Edmonton in the independent Golden Baseball League in 2009. “We’re all here for the same thing,” he told The Times while pitching for Long Beach. “If you work hard and stay focused, no reason you can’t get picked up by some major league team.”
When no teams expressed interest in him this year, Evans said, Lima moved past his playing career with a smile.
“For most guys, that’s a difficult transition. Jose not only embraced it but was excited about it,” said Evans, who was the Dodgers’ general manager when Lima signed with the team.
The Dodgers said Lima was preparing to open a youth baseball academy in Los Angeles and committed to making community appearances for the team.
Lima’s survivors include five children and a brother, Joel, a Dodgers minor league player, the Dodgers said. He was divorced.
What’s Your Take On The Matter? Register and/or sign in and sound off!
DETROIT (May 22) — Rev. Al Sharpton the Civil rights activist gave a rousing eulogy on Saturday May 22, 2010 for a 7-year-old girl killed in a police raid, challenging the hundreds of mourners to take responsibility and help stop a spiral of violence that has swept the city.
Sharpton lobbed some criticism at Detroit police, whose explanation of how Aiyana Stanley-Jones died from a gunshot has been contradicted by the girl’s family. But he mostly offered a broad cultural message to a city where at least three children and an officer have been killed in recent weeks.
“I’d rather tell you to start looking at the man in the mirror. We’ve all done something that contributed to this,” he said referring to Aiyana’s death.
“This is it,” Sharpton said at Second Ebenezer Church. “This child is the breaking point.”
Is this child’s senseless murder truly the breaking point or is this just more talk with no action to follow? By no means am I questioning the sincerity of Reverend Sharpton. I’m certainly not jumping on the band wagon with Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, who criticized Sharpton’s visit, by saying he was disgusted and accusing the Action Network New Yorker of a “drive-by at the scene of a tragedy.” It should be noted that Mr. Cox is a Republican running for governor and any criticism by him might be considered as a self serving political statement.
In response to gubernatorial candidate Mike Cox, Sharpton made the following statement: “I’m disgusted when I look at a 7-year-old baby in a casket,” and rather turn to each other, we name-call and ego-tripping and trying to jump in front of a camera rather than stand up and say, ‘Enough is enough.”
The congregation stood and applauded Sharpton, who was the final speaker at a nearly two-hour service that included stirring gospel music and remarks from clergy.
Aiyana was shot in the neck while sleeping on a couch May 16. Police hunting for a murder suspect say an officer’s gun accidentally fired inside the house after he was jostled by, or collided with, her grandmother. A stun grenade was also thrown through a window.
The question still remains will African Americans step up to the plate? Is this merely talk where on Monday morning middle class blacks who fled Aiyana’s community in their BMW and Mercedes Benz will continue to act as if the problem in our black community is not their problem because they no longer reside inside the hood?
Our ancestors survived the middle passage shackled to other Africans belonging to different tribes. They were shackled to Africans whose stench of death they had to inhale along with their own stench in every breath they took in that darken sweat hole packed like sardines. Our ancestors regardless of tribe affiliation were shackled together in slavery in this country that prides itself on being a democracy. Our ancestors regardless of skin tone and hair texture was shackled together during reconstruction. Our ancestors no matter what educational background, were shackled together in segregation. Our ancestors were shackled together in the civil rights movement, and it’s a fact of life here in America that the civil rights movement has not ended, but continues.
Another fact of life is that as a people no matter where we live, we will always continue to be shackled together.
When some of our brothers and sister drove up in their BMW with college educations to buy that dream home in the suburbs, they were handed a sub-prime loan with a smile. Never mind that many qualified for a low fixed interest rate. A matter of fact companies like Wells Fargo hired people like Tavis Smiley, the influential creator of the State Of Black America Union to target us. Now some of us are hustling to make those payments on homes that have lost a good deal of their value. For what it’s worth these folks may as well be renting. For others, they have simply lost their homes to foreclosure.
A good deal of these are homes had been in the family for generations. Because African Americans accumulate wealth through home ownership, (and not with BMWs and Mercedes Benz which loses a great deal of value whe driven off the car lot), 50% of the wealth of the people of color have been taken away.
Further, when it came time for the recovery that was supposed to take place, communities of color got shut out again because banks refused to cooperate to modify loans or restructure mortgages to help families stay in their homes resulting in foreclosures and the mortgage payment hustle.
It’s no getting around it, economic and political power is the order of the day. That is so apparent in the Tea Party movement, a movement copied from our civil rights movement. Interestingly, the goal is said to be the removal of politicians who represent special interest groups at the expense of their constituents running this country into the ground financially. However, members of this movement blame President Obama who acquired the plethra of problems create by other administration for not remedying the problems in his first year. Further they unapologetically advocate the destruction of the civil rights our ancestors fought and died for in civil right marches and sit-ins. Collectively they threaten the court cases like Brown v. Board of Education along with all the civil rights lawsderived thereof. You might think that their aim is the hood, but if they are successful in electing people who support their thinking, it will have a negative impact on all regardless of where you live or what kind of car you drive.
People of color cannot have political power unless we elect people who will support our rights and existence in both state and local governments as well as the federal government. We know that our voter base was eroded by felony convictions and murders over turf in the 80s’ drug epidemic, that still exist. That erosion also includes our drugged out brothers and sisters who commit petty crimes, mostly misdemeanors, to finance their drug dependency. Voting is neither a priority nor a reality to them. Although drugs is a problem in the suburbs, it destructive impact is all too visible in the hood. Some had their rights restored during the last Presidential campaign, and certainly helped in the election of the first African American President.
Whether we like it or not, we are shackled to each other. For there can be no true economic and political base without the support of all. Every vote counts, and with a vote comes a voice. Some of us have tried in vain to ignore that voice as not being one that sounds like we have sought to hear in the confines of our suburban homes. In reality, it is the voice of the hood that we hear as foreclosure looms or we tire from the endless hustle to make a mortgage payment on a property that isn’t worth its’ purchase price of two years ago. The truth of the matter, we can no longer afford to ignore that voice. Remember a violation of civil rights is an injustice and an injustice to one is an injustice to all including yourself.
Yes yourself. Looking in the mirror we not only see our image but we see that our lives are really no different than our brothers and sisters we left in the hood. We may have moved out of the hood but the hood and all the racial problems follow us no matter where we live.
The bottom line: we can’t ignore the stench that stinks to high heaven when a promising life such as Aiyana Stanley-Jones is taken senselessly. It happened in the hood and like the sub-prime loan scam, if we don’t step up to the plate especially during the mid-term elections local, state and federal, it will happen to us in the suburbs. As we sleep they think of ways to redistribute our minimal wealth to themselves and at the same time take away the civil rights and voting rights our ancestors fought and died to regain after reconstruction. There is no denying that we have provided a helping hand by leaving and ignoring a viable community which had served as both a political and economic base in the days of segregation, and not turning out for local and state elections as well as federal midterm elections. We’re discovering that the grass is not greener in the white suburbs.
As Reverend Al Sharpton has said, we are all responsible in some way, for little Aiyana’s demise. Therefore, we must look at ourselves in the mirror and determine how we will come together to stop the madness, for we all make a difference.
What’s Your Take On The Matter? Register and/or sign in and sound off!
