For some reason I found this funny. My primary reason is the fact that I can’t believe people still fall for these scams.

Over the past several years, there have been Nigerian scams (also known as 419 scams). Basically, there are folks in Nigeria sending emails promising recipients riches for their assistance in helping them get money out of secretive bank accounts. There are several variations on this scheme from a person posing as the child of a big government official or businessman who needs help getting millions out of offshore accounts or even people acting as agents on behalf of some person who has willed the email recipient millions if they only pay the needed funds for legal fees.

In the end, people can be taken for several thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Well, one of “victims” is now on his way to jail for stealing taxpayer money.

The public treasurer for Alcona County, Michigan is facing 13 years’ prison time for embezzling $1.2 million in public funds that went to Nigerian scammers. Thomas Katona, who was treasurer for 13 years, was discovered when bank employees informed the county about 6 checks, each for $186,500 were paid to overseas accounts. Katona also ended up losing $72,000 of own personal funds to this same scam. It’s a shame because he probably needed it for his legal defense.

You know what they say about something sounding too good to be true? They were probably right.

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At Tarleton State University in Texas, a group of students decided that the best thing to do on Martin Luther King Day was to throw a party in which attendees were encouraged to dress in stereotypical garb attributed to black people. One student, as you see on the right, decided to come as Aunt Jemima.

This was discovered by a Tarleton student, who happens to head the school’s NAACP chapter, while browsing Facebook.com. The student, Donald Ray Elder, found this on a page in a folder marked ‘MLK’.

This is an excerpt of the piece at Thesmokinggun.com:

When he discovered the images, Donald Ray Elder told TSG, he sent an e-mail to Tarleton student Jeremy Pelz, on whose Facebook page the photos were placed in a folder titled “MLK.” In a reply e-mail, Pelz (seen in the picture at right) told Elder that he would rename the folder in which the photos were placed “so it does not bring any disrespect to Mr. King.” Pelz noted that the party was started a few years earlier “because one of best friends is black or African American, whichever you deem politically correct, to be his day not to dishonor him.” He added, “So I do apologize if you felt any disrespect because none was intended.” School officials have launched an investigation into the party and the university’s president, Dennis P. McCabe, has denounced the photos as despicable. In a subsequent post, Pelz–who has yanked the party photos from his Facebook page–stated that the party was not meant to be “racist or discriminating.”

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“Slow Down” from their debut release, One for All

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We have heard this story too many times before. A white woman says she was raped. She identifies the perpetrator as a black man. Because the description is vague, many black men in the area are held under suspicion. It later turns out that either the woman was not attacked at all or, at least, not by a black man.

I am not trying to diminish the crime of rape. Personally, I rate it slightly below murder. However, because it is so severe to me, I think that we must be very concerned when black men are falsely identified as attackers. Such is the case with Rosemarie Clark, a white Connecticut woman who is now facing charges for falsely claiming she was raped by a black man.

We must ask some serious questions here. First, was she really raped? If so, why identify a black man as the attacker? For black folks, the answer is simple. There’s a presumed criminality and even a presumed bestial nature when it comes to black men. This makes it much easier to garner sympathy and mobilize action on the part of law enforcement. If she was indeed attacked, does this mean that her story is less credible by identifying her attacker as white? This seems to be the moral of the story here.

I saw a similar story unfold when I was a student on Ohio State University’s campus in the around 1989-1990. A young white woman claimed she was raped by a black man. The description was just vague enough to cast a cloud of suspicion over a good portion of black men on campus. It was such that black men were concerned about their movements at night, lest they suffer some violence by presumed defenders of white womanhood. A few months later, the woman recanted. She only received a $1000 fine and had to write what I considered a very weak apology in the local newspaper.

Needless to say, having witnessed this firsthand, I was left somewhat bitter by the whole experience.

So, naturally, I become defensive when I hear stories like this one. My concern will only grow greater as my son gets older. People sometimes mock the fear that some black parents have with their sons dating white women but, the jilted lover of today could be the accuser of tomorrow and, possibly, lead to a life in the criminal justice system.

Therefore, cases like this one will always stir emotions on both sides of the issue. Who do you consider - the person who may have really been raped, but by someone of another group entirely, or those placed under suspicion for no good reason?

All I know is that, as a black man and the father of a black boy, I don’t want either of us to have to live under this scrutiny. So, when things like this happen, I am going speak out, if for nothing more than the sake of my own child.

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In a follow up to a previous post, two elections workers in Cleveland, Ohio were convicted yesterday for vote-rigging in regards to the 2004 presidential election there. Jacqueline Maiden, the elections coordinator for Cuyahoga County, and Kathy Dreamer, the ballot manager, were each convicted on one count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee, a felony. Both were also convicted of the misdemeanor offense of failing to perform their duties as elections employees. Each faces a possible prison sentence of 6 to 18 months.

Maiden and Dreamer conspired to rig the recount by selecting ballots that would not cause a challenge. The prosecutor did not allege they were seeking to sway they vote to Bush’s favor. Instead, the prosecutor said their motive was to avoid potential weeks or months of counting ballots. In other words, they were lazy.

So, now that we know about this part of the puzzle, how about investigating our former Secretary of State and failed gubernatorial candidate J. Kenneth Blackwell? I sure would like to know why did his worst to make it hard as hell for the black and the poor to get the same access to voting as their more well-off counterparts.

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“Hip Hop Hooray” from the album 19 Naughty III

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Though this is a very small study, it may shed some light on why the state of black health care is in such dire condition.

A recent study of 25 African-American doctors, conducted by Yale University, concludes that the discrimination experienced by black doctors has left them soured on the profession and causes many to leave the field.

Although race allowed them to connect better with some colleagues, patients and staff, the doctors said they were left out of crucial information and social networks that could lead to promotion.

“I do not see us in those leadership pipelines,” one doctor told the researchers. “We’re not in the corridors of power and it has nothing to do with intellectual capacity or ambition.”

“Increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the physician workforce is a national priority and has been offered as one solution to addressing health inequities,” says researcher Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, who authored the study. “But any efforts to increase numbers also needs to address the role of race within health-care institutions to successfully recruit and retain ethnic and racial minority physicians.”

If black doctors are indeed feeling this way, this does not bode well for black patients, who already experience great inequities in medical treatment. I don’t know if health-care institutions are listening but, if they aren’t, we need to be more assertive in making them do so.

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Well, it was no surprise. As I posted recently, a recent court decision against State Farm has led the company to see the writing on the wall and begin settling its Hurricane Katrina lawsuits and insurance claims.

State Farm has indicated that this has the potential of going into the hundreds of millions of dollars to settle claims by some 35,000 customers.

This settlement also helps State Farm avoid a criminal probe by Mississippi’s attorney general.

So, like I said previously, I hope other insurers follow suit and do the same in other affected states, as well. Lord knows that New Orleans could benefit from such a settlement.

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“Talkin’ All That Jazz” from the album In Full Gear

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Nathan Poffenbarger will be spending the next 1 1/3 - 4 years in state prison. The Cornell University student received the maximum sentence for the Feb. 2006 stabbing of Charles Holiday, a black Union College student visiting the campus.

Poffenbarger’s actions were a culminations of racist hostilities he had been expressing for a while. According to Poffenbarger, on the night in question, he attacked Holiday in a blind rage. However, he was apparently lucid enough to attempt to hid the weapon and destroy other physical evidence.

The incident in question involved a chance encounter between Poffenbarger and Holiday. Poffenbarger had been thrown out of a party for spewing racial epithets. While walking home with his girlfriend, Poffenbarger encountered Holiday, who was walking with a couple of friends. Poffenbarger then began to yell racial insults at these men. Poffenbarger’s girlfriend intervened and one of Holiday’s friends remarked that Poffenbarger was lucky that she intervened. Poffenbarger then hurled himself at Holiday and stabbed him. Back at his dorm, Poffenbarger cleaned his knife, dismantled it and hid it. He then burned the cloth that he used to wipe the knife in order to destroy the evidence. Poffenbarger was arrested for the crime on Feb 19, 2006.

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