TV star Mo’Nique calls it racism; United Airlines calls it a disgruntled passenger. Either way, Mo’Nique was escorted off her flight from Chicago to New York after a verbal confrontation with flight attendants over…a hair dryer.
Mo’Nique and her stylist were traveling to New York when the stylist placed t
he hair dryer in an overhead in first class, where Mo’Nique was sitting according to a report in the New York Daily News. The stylist returned to her seat in coach.
The flight attendants refused to believe that the hair dryer belonged to Mo’Nique.
Mo’Nique alleged in the NYDN article that one flight attendant said, “Tell your people that the next time they have an attitude, they are being thrown off. … Since 9/11, we don’t play around.”
“Are you equating my hair dryer with 9/11?” Mo’Nique said she retorted.
Mo’Nique was escorted off the plane and back to O’Hare Airport where a United supervisor called local police to complain of a “disgruntled and belligerent passenger.”
Mo’Nique was not arrested or detained and another United agent booked her and her crew on the next flight to New York where the actress taped two episodes of “The View” as a guest host.
Mo’Nique is trying to rally support for a boycott of United.
WASHINGTON - The White House on Friday criticized former Education Secretary William Bennett for remarks linking the crime rate and the abortion of black babies.
“The president believes the comments were not appropriate,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.
Bennett, on his radio show, “Morning in America,” was answering a caller’s question when he took issue with the hypothesis put forth in a recent book that one reason crime is down is that abortion is up.
“But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down,” said Bennett, author of “The Book of Virtues.”
He went on to call that “an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.”
Responding later to criticism, Bennett said his comments had been mischaracterized and that his point was that the idea of supporting abortion to reduce crime was “morally reprehensible.”
Bennett was education secretary under President Reagan and director of drug control policy when Bush’s father was president.
Quick hits:
Would this have happened if it was 17 white kids from Cherry Creek?
Year-long expulsion unfair, students argue
Commerce City - Seventeen high schoolers who have been expelled for an entire calendar year are hoping for a reprieve.
The students, all boys, were expelled from Adams City High School after a fight off campus in which most of them were spectators. Only two students actually fought, but all received the same punishment.
Say what? Expelled for WATCHING a fight? Off school grounds? For some reason me thinks something is amiss in Commerce City?
…
Hmm…maybe he gets it at home?
Boy charged with harassing black classmate at Jeffco middle school
In addition to calling her the N-word, students referred to her as a “monkey” and “blackie-chan” and told her to go back to Colfax Avenue in Denver.
In one incident, she and her cousin returned to the school cafeteria to find that someone had spit in their sandwiches
…
The boy who was charged may have been trying to impress his friends, his parents said. His father warned him against making racial comments and showed him a television program on race.
“When he was in elementary school, there was one colored family, and there was no problem then,” he said.
It’s 2005, who in the hell still calls African-Americans, ya know black folks, “colored”?!?!?!
Some weeks it’s just way too easy…
***UPDATE***
I posted this over at Blogcritics.org and the discussion has taken off…already 50 comments and some damn good discussion…check it out
***UPDATE***
What in the world is going on with our kids??? The following all occured in the past week, heck few days really:
School shooter kills 9
Bemidji, Minn. - A high school student went on a shooting rampage on an Indian reservation Monday, killing his grandparents at their home and then seven people at his school, grinning and waving as he fired, authorities and witnesses said. The suspect apparently killed himself after exchanging gunfire with police.
It was the nation’s worst school shooting since the Columbine High School massacre in Jefferson County in 1999, when 15 died, including the two gunmen.
Teen’s kill list: Start with mom
White Lake Township, Mich. - His mother’s name was at the top of his kill list.
After that, he named students, teachers, administrators and two police officers. A 10th name was scratched out. It didn’t stop there: He had another list he labeled “maybe,” and it had four classmates on it — three boys and one girl.
School “kill list” was a hoax (this one was at my little brothers school and the school we had discussed switching HardCore to)
Aurora, Colo. - A 13-year-old African-American boy who was trying to “fit in” confessed to a hoax that prompted parents to pull their kids out of Laredo Middle School on Wednesday, officials said.
The boy, a Laredo seventh-grader, created two “kill lists,” discovered Tuesday, that included a racial slur and threatened harm to roughly a dozen black students, police said. The suspect included his own name, said Kathleen Walsh, spokeswoman for Aurora police.
WTF???? What are we doing wrong as parents? As a community? As a society?
What happened to the cry, “It takes a village to raise a child?” Are these kids missing some sort of love or nurturing? Are the parental figures missing tell-tale signs? Or will we just never be able to see this type of thing coming?
I don’t have the answers, I have far more questions than I can type right now. But I want to know, need to know, what are the schools doing to protect my kids from this? What is my community doing to protect my kids?
More importantly, what am I going to do protect my kids? I can’t shield them from the harsh realities of life forever, but I can do something to try to at least alleviate some of the fears that I have and my kids have.
Does anyone else have any thoughts on this? Help me out here…I will take all the help I can get on this one.
So Kobe Bryant and his accuser settled the civil lawsuit against him for an undisclosed amount.
Well DUH!!!! Who didn’t see that coming?
As soon as the criminal charges were dropped against Kobe anyone with two brain cells knew that the details of that fateful night in Eagle, Co. would be forever kept a secret.
Great, I’m cool with that. I am just hoping that this means that Kobe can go back to playing hoops. Ok, go back to playing hoops without the thoughts of a trial in the back of his mind. Maybe instead of 30-40 points night he can drop in 50.
I am hoping that the young lady in this can go on and raise her unborn child and enjoy her new marriage.
And I am hoping I don’t have to hear about, report about or deal with this story anymore!
Hoodies give coats the cold shoulder
“For teens, the hoodie has replaced regular coats because it is so functional,” said Barbara Coulon, vice president of trends for Youth Intelligence, a forecasting company in New York. “They’ll throw on a vest over it, or layers underneath. And today, there’s a hoodie for every group - urban skaters, hip-hop kids, preppy kids, athletes, boys and girls. They’re just everywhere.”
Teens and I guess my never gonna grown up self. I haven’t worn a coat in a few years…hate ‘em, too bulky when I’m in the car driving. I do have an entire closet full of assorted hoodies though. You name it, I have it…usually end up having to replace them every few months (let’s say every 6) due to the boys “borrowing” them, getting washed and faded or simply just getting worn out since I wear them daily.
On those really cold days, I wear a long sleeve t-shirt under my hoodie and call it good. People thought I was crazy, but apparently I am just stuck a generation or two behind 
OK, so who was it? Who did that most heinous act that pushed good ‘ol Mother Nature over the edge and has made her unleash her wrath on the world?
Earthquake and Tsunami wipe out over 150,000 people in South Asia. Rain and snow pour down on California causing deadly flooding and mudslides. Flooding in Utah causes houses to just fall off their foundations and float away. Flooding in Ohio causes good old President Bush to declare a state of emergency.
And that is just in the past month. Let us not forget the anger unleashed on Florida this summer under the guise of hurricanes.
I am afraid to think of what could possibly be next. I fear if I say it or write it, it could happen.
It’s been a while, so I guess I forgot the one thing paramount to being a journalist: If you deal with news, you deal with constant death.
To hear them talk about hearing screams for help from under the mud in La Conchita, Ca., only to hear them stop, threw me. To see pictures of a distraught father and husband, shown here, being led away in cuffs, not because he was under arrest, but because that was the only way the police could stop him from digging to find his family, crushed me.
To run to the store for ice cream and come back to not only having lost your house, but your family as well…unfathomable!
They pulled the bodies of Jimmie Wallet’s wife and 3 daughters from the mudslide on Wednesday.
What a week…it was so nice to only have to worry about working one job. The transition from days to nights is coming along nicely, I think I am finally getting about 6-8 hours of sleep a day…more than I have in a long while that’s for sure.
Anyway, the renewed alertness has made it possible for me to peruse a few other news sites besides the one that pays me. Wait, let me rephrase that, it has made it possible for me to dig much deeper into the news sites I visit daily…yeah, that’s it.
There wasn’t a lot that jumped out at me this week, but this hit some chord deep inside me:
From my former employer, The Detroit Free Press:
She didn’t want the baby. But prosecutors said that didn’t mean her boyfriend could bash her in the stomach to induce a miscarriage.
Now the 16-year-old Richmond Township boy faces a rarely used felony charge that could land him under the jurisdiction of the Macomb County Juvenile Court until he’s 21.
The teen allegedly hit his girlfriend, also 16, repeatedly in the stomach with a souvenir baseball bat. The two are students at Armada High School.
In October, the girl miscarried in her Armada Township home. The teens — allegedly with the help of their parents, who hadn’t known about the pregnancy — buried the fetus in an open field in the father’s northern Macomb County yard.
A few weeks later, the girl spoke about the forced miscarriage at a high school leadership conference in the Upper Peninsula, Smith said. The conference’s adult facilitator alerted the State Police, who found the decomposed fetus.
Macomb County Medical Examiner Daniel Spitz said the fetus was about 13 inches long and 6 months old. He couldn’t determine whether the fetus was stillborn or had a heartbeat when it was delivered.
Ok, so we have so-called smart kids getting pregnant…not surprising. But then we have so-called smart kids beating/being beaten with a bat to cease said pregnancy. Then to top it off we have the so-called smart kids parents helping them dispose of the dead fetus…apparently the so-called smart kids did not get their so-called smarts from their parental units.
How sad is it that in the year 2005, (well 2004 since this happened last October) that kids don’t understand that they have options and that there is a right and a wrong way to do things. This was by far one of the most wrong way to end a pregnancy I have ever come across.
I have to agree that maybe those wonderful folks in Michigan need to stop the abstinence is the only birth control and start teaching kids that if they are going to have sex, and we know they are, that they need to protect themselves. Not just from pregnancy, but from sexually transmitted diseases as well.
Truly sad when this is what happens due to fear and lack of education.
This is the week I embarked on my refound career in journalism. What a week to walk through that door…
Earthquake/Tsunami devastates the Asian coast - The death toll just keeps rising, with some saying that an estimate of 100,000 dead may be low.
To have been away from the heart of a newsroom for 5 years and to come back to this has been very humbling. I had forgotten how amazing some of the worlds news photographers are at capturing the moment. I have spent countless hours looking at 100’s, if not 1000’s, of full color photos of the death, devastation and despair from this.
I guess I can easily attribute my not so peaceful sleep the past few night to the images burned in my head of all the children lost in this tragedy. I look at the photos, at the eyes of the living, at the bodies of the dead and I am left wondering does it get much worse than this?
This region of the world, which survived on tourist money, may never recover from this even with the mass amounts of foreign aid coming in. The long reaching impacts of this on the entire world is still to be seen.
But one report on CNN, the worlds leader in news (**YAWN**), was quick to point out that the cost of Nike and Rebook tennis shoes would undoubtedly go up since Nike used “a Thailand production facility” (third-world pennies-a-day labor is more like it) to manufacturer their shoes. Rebook had outsorced some of their production to Thailand as well. Wow, now that was the only thing I could think about when I saw the initial news reports.
I had better run out and grab those new Jordans tomorrow 
Bodies are being buried in mass graves dug by bulldozers and for some reason I am supposed to be concerned about the price of Nikes?
Sometimes what they call news would be funny if it wasn’t so sad…
My first week back was a short one, so I guess I can say I made it.