As owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban has done a masterful job of building exceedingly talented teams that almost always fail to live up to expectations.
What’s that go to do with Charlie Sheen? Oh, nothing.
And speaking of enablers, Sheen has more than a few. Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times explains why he’s going cold turkey so as not to become one of them.
So … avert your eyes, hope for the best and let us move forward:
1. Reports that Qaddafi has enlisted the help of African mercenaries has made hundreds of migrant workers from sub-sahara Africa in Libya targets of mob violence. Both experts and migrants say the animosity stems from anti-African racism found throughout the Arab world, Qaddafi’s moves to buy the loyalty of black Libyans from the south of the country, and his push for a “Pan-Africanism” agenda at the cost of the Arab-majority. (Naima)
2. The 112th Congress is substantially blacker, browner and more female since the 102nd, in the early 1990s. (There are also fewer folks with law backgrounds, and many more with a past in business.) Is that where the partisan deadlock is coming from? One lobbyist thinks so. “More minorities and women on the Democratic side typically, more older white men with small-business backgrounds in the G.O.P. They can’t see eye to eye because they don’t see the same things.” (Avon)
3. States around the country have passed new voter rules meant to disenfranchise the folks who tend to vote Democratic, i.e., the poor, blacks, and Latinos, and now the New Hampshire legislature has taken it to a new level. A new state law would prevent most college students from voting in the town where they go to college, and the bill’s supporters are pretty up-front about why: those students tend to vote as liberals. (Monica)
4. On Tuesday, voters in Tennessee will decide whether to merge the mostly white suburban Shelby County school district with the mostly black urban Memphis school district. As you can imagine, this has stirred a lot of old resentments about class, power, and race. (Nicole)
5. Glenn Beck has been hemorrhaging viewers — and advertisers — and some folks at Fox News are wonder if they network would be better off without him. (Not that he’d be hurting. The NYT article points out that Beck gets his tinfoil hat on across a variety of media.) (Avon)
6. Scott Lemieux at says that we should be happy about the Supreme Court’s latest ruling on convicts’ access to DNA. (Monica)
7. Christian Longo killed his wife and three children, and is confined to a small cell where he awaits his execution. He also wants to donate his organs. “There is no law barring inmates condemned to death in the United States from donating their organs, but I haven’t found any prisons that allow it.” Jill Filipovic, who says the death penalty is “immoral, barbaric, cruel and unusual, and has no place in any civilized society” also rides for his right to do it. “Given that, prisoners on death row should have the option — the totally freely-made opinion, without any incentives on either end — to donate their organs after death. That, of course, requires counseling, and it requires that they not receive any benefit for organ donation. But there’s no reason not to allow people on death row the choice to donate.” (Avon)
8. Not surprisingly, black residents of Yazoo City remember segregation in their hometown a lot differently than native son Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour. (Blackink)
9. This Daniel Craig women’s equality video is pretty interesting for Women’s History Month. (Shani)
10. Really cool photos of subway cars being tossed into the ocean. (It’s for the environmental good; they’ll become reefs.) (Monica)
11. Does the Sunshine State need to do some rebranding? “Sullying the sunny brand are nagging unemployment and foreclosures. Some wonder if the Sunshine State isn’t becoming the Sunset State.” (Blackink)
12. Wally Yonamine, the first American to play professional baseball in Japan after World War II and possibly the first Asian-American to play in the NFL, earned a number of comparisons to Jackie Robinson and deservedly so. He died last Monday at the age of 85. (Blackink)
Stay cool, people.
And have a great rest of the week.
