Wyclef Jean to Run for President of Haiti

Singer-songwriter Wyclef Jean, who for many years has been an advocate for Haiti, now wants to be president of his native country.

Jean, 37, submitted the paperwork August 5 to run in the election set for Sunday, November 28. The winner will be elected to a five-year term. Political analysts don’t expect President Rene Preval to be reelected.

People had speculated for years about the political ambitions of Jean (pronounced Zhahn), who was born in Haiti but moved to New York City when he was 9.

Jean said he knows critics will say he’s not eligible to run because the Haitian constitution requires a candidate to have lived in Haiti for five straight years prior to an election.

“They’re going to attack me in the next two weeks,” Jean said. “They think they’re going to get me with the dual citizenship thing. But I have a Haitian passport with a green card.”

A three-time Grammy Award winner best known for being part of the group The Fugees, Jean became highly visible in Haiti after a January 12 earthquake devastated the Caribbean island. The earthquake killed 230,000 and left 2 million homeless in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

Yele Haiti, a charity founded by Jean, collected millions of dollars earmarked for earthquake relief and recovery efforts. Much of the money came from people texting their donations.

A 2006 tax return showed one-third of the donations to Yele Haiti had been used instead for miscellaneous expenses. At a news conference in January, Jean tearfully denied knowledge of the financial problems.

Actor Sean Penn, whose J/P Relief Organization has aided Haitians, said on August 4 that in the months after the earthquake Jean “has been virtually silent for those of us in Haiti. He has been a non-presence.”

Although Jean has no political experience, he says he believes he can inspire Haitians in a way similar to that of the first African-American president.

“The United States has Barack Obama and Haiti has Wyclef Jean,” he said.

DID YOU KNOW?

* Haiti has a long history of political instability. Dr. Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, are among the past presidents widely seen as brutal and corrupt by the people of Haiti.

* Half of Haiti’s 9 million residents are under the age of 25. That could bode well for Wyclef Jean’s campaign since he is very popular among Haitian youth.

* Pras Michel, Jean’s cousin, and Lauryn Hill were the other members of The Fugees. The group’s second album, The Score, won two Grammys.

* Jean’s uncle Raymond Joseph, a former Haitian Ambassador to the U.S., also plans to run for president? “We talked about this; we talk all the time,” Joseph said. “We are family. We won’t allow politics to divide.” There is talk that Joseph and Jean may campaign together. Relatives campaigning together while running against each other for the same job? That’s something you may never see in American politics.

A Supreme Achievement: Elena Kagan Joins America's High Court

With the lifetime appointment of Elena Kagan, three women will serve together on the United States Supreme Court for the first time.

Kagan, a New York City native, joins Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg on America’s highest court. Kagan, 50, will be the youngest of the nine members.

Both Sotomayor, who was nominated by President Obama last year, and Bader Ginsburg were born in New York City. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia grew up in New York City.

During an August 6 ceremony at The White House hosted by President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, Kagan thanked her parents. “I wouldn’t be standing here today without their love, support and devotion,” said Kagan, the 112th Supreme Court Justice.

Sandra Day O’Connor was the first woman to sit on the High Court and decide many of America’s important legal issues. She was nominated by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and retired in 2006.

Kagan graduated from Harvard University Law School, as did President Obama. She is the first Supreme Court justice in nearly 40 years with no experience as a judge. She is a former dean of Harvard Law School, and she had served as solicitor general under former President Bill Clinton.

After President Obama appointed Kagan for the Supreme Court, she had to be confirmed by a majority of the members of the U.S. Senate. Since there are 50 states and each state has two senators, a total of 100 senators voted.

Kagan was confirmed by a vote of 63-37 to replace the retired John Paul Stevens. Ben Nelson of Nebraska was the Democratic senator to vote against her. Five Republicans and the Senate’s two independent members voted for her.

President Obama said the senators “got a pretty good look at Elena Kagan…her formidable intelligence, her rich understanding of our Constitution…and occasionally her irreverent sense of humor.”

THE SUPREMES

The U.S. Supreme Court traditionally begins its session on the first Monday in October. Here are the nine members and the years they were nominated:

Chief Justice John Roberts (2003); Associate Justices: Antonin Scalia (1986); Anthony Kennedy (1988); Clarence Thomas (1991); Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1993); Stephen G. Breyer (1994); Samuel Alito (1994); Sonia Sotomayor (2009); and Elena Kagan (2010).

NEW WORDS
Ask students to come up with words and terms that mean the same as: irreverent – making fun of, mocking, saucy, flippant

majority – best part, more, most

What does a solicitor general do? The solicitor general is the chief lawyer representing the federal government, and decides what legal position the U.S. will take in the Supreme Court.

Today's College Football Playoff KOs Oregon, Iowa, LSU, Notre Dame

The easiest column for any sportswriter is one calling for a playoff system in major college football, especially since President Barack Obama says he’s for it.

Forget it. It won’t happen, nor should it happen.

Every major college football team plays at least 12 games now. To add a four-team or eight-team playoff to determine a national champion would prolong the season to almost-NFL length (without paying the athletes) and make a mockery of the idea that these players are really student-athletes.

There has to be some time left for class lectures, term papers, research projects, mid-term exams and finals, right?

Here’s what is good about the current system in college football: The regular season acts as a de facto playoff tournament—weeding out the unworthy teams every weekend while allowing a dark horse or two to play its way into one of the five Bowl Championship Series games (Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl, BCS Championship Game).

Here’s what is not so good: The Associated Press media poll, the USA Today Coaches’ poll and the computer-generated polls that all weigh too heavily toward teams from the six so-called “power conferences”: the Southeastern Conference; the Big 10 (which actually has 11 teams); the Big 12; the Pacific 10; the Atlantic Coast Conference; and the Big East.

Many people hate the current system.

But you know what? It works. Every week, the system separates contenders from pretenders.

Today’s games knocked out four pretenders:

· Oregon, coming off a devastating 47-20 romp over USC last week, showed it’s not quite ready for prime time, losing at Stanford 51-42;

· Iowa was 9-0 before losing at home to Northwestern, 17-10;

· LSU, which could have won the SEC crown and staked a claim for a national title berth, lost at Alabama, 24-15; and

· Notre Dame, the greedy football independent that plays every home game on NBC and every road game on another major network, was humiliated at home by Navy, 23-21.

So now we know, on the second weekend of November, that one of four teams will win the national championship: Texas (Big 12), Florida (SEC), Alabama (SEC) or long shot Cincinnati (Big East).

The rest of the season will determine which school’s 300-pounders get to hold up the fancy crystal football on the field in Pasadena, CA on January 7.

A school from one of the power conferences will win the national championship every year. That’s just the way it is in college football.

Media conglomerates such as Disney (owners of ESPN and ABC), Viacom (owners of CBS) and News Corporation (owners of Fox Sports) pay billions of dollars to televise major college football.

And the power conferences, major bowl committees and mid-major conferences—in that order—are sharing those billions for producing mostly exciting games that garner high TV ratings.

Hence, there is no incentive for the NCAA to use January to stage a football version of college basketball’s “March Madness.”

It is better to be a Gonzaga or George Mason in college basketball than to be a Boise State or TCU in college football.

In football, the best that Boise State of the Western Athletic Conference or TCU of the Mountain West Conference can hope for is to get into a BCS game in January.

It just won’t be the national championship game.

Last year, Utah of the Mountain West crashed the party—and then embarrassed Alabama in the Sugar Bowl.

The year before, it was Hawaii of the WAC—and then the Rainbows got eviscerated by Georgia in the Sugar Bowl.

And the year before that, Boise State played party-crasher and stunned Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl—one of the most exciting bowl games ever.

So, I’m sorry, Mr. President, but major college football will basically stay the way it is, with a little tweaking here and there to give the Boise States and TCUs more of a reason to hope audaciously.

(How does he find time to watch college football? I need health care.)

The NFL Should Give Limbaugh Bum's Rush

It is refreshing to see so many African-American pro football players stand up for something socially relevant.

Players such as Bart Scott of the Jets and Mathias Kiwanuka and Antonio Pierce of the Giants spoke out forcefully this week against the possibility of race-baiting broadcaster Rush Limbaugh owning a piece of the St. Louis Rams.

Scott, Kiwanuka and Pierce all described Limbaugh as the racial antagonist he is, as someone whose presence as a minority franchise owner would be deeply offensive in a league where 70 percent of the players—and more than 90 percent of the starting players—are African-Americans.

Pierce strongly suggested that a Rams team partly owned by Limbaugh could become the NFL equivalent of Three Mile Island to African-American players—free agents would not sign to play in St. Louis, and those currently on the team would be eager to leave.

In this instance, African-American NFL players did not wait for the head of their players’ association, attorney DeMaurice Smith (also an African-American), to speak out against the Limbaugh proposal.

The players made their objection emphatically and cogently clear.

A country that elected its first African-American president 11 months ago should not have as a part-owner of a franchise in the country’s most popular sports league a man who said he hopes that president fails.

Why would the NFL want to do business with a guttersnipe like Limbaugh, who once wrote on his own Web site that an NFL game reminded him of a fight between Crips and Bloods without weapons?

Limbaugh obviously sees nothing wrong with being a member of the Everglades Club in Palm Beach, Florida—a club that has never had an African-American member.

Even Sammy Davis Jr. and the white member who invited him were once escorted out of the Everglades Club, according to Florida’s New Times.

NFL teams make money. Truckloads of money.

That is the only reason Limbaugh would want to get a piece of the action. He certainly has never shown any regard for the kinds of people whose blood, sweat and talent on the field generates all that income for NFL franchise owners.

Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay says he would not vote in favor of Limbaugh’s ownership group. (Seventy-five percent of NFL franchise owners, or 24 of 32, would have to vote in favor of Limbaugh.)

Limbaugh routinely uses his three-hour weekday radio show to perpetuate despicable lies such as the one about a white boy beaten by black kids on a school bus while other black kids yelled, “Right on!”

“Well, it could have happened,” was the lame reply from those who enjoy visiting Limbaugh’s toxic island of a radio show five days a week.

Obviously, Limbaugh makes those people warm, fuzzy and nostalgic for the racially oppressive America they once knew—the one where a wise Latina named Sonia Sotomayor could never have dreamed of sitting on the United States Supreme Court, and an African-American named Barack Obama could never have dreamed of having the power to appoint her.

So the Limbaugh crowd believes the lies he tells about school bus beatings, and cheerily sings along to “Barack, the Magic Negro” (set to the tune of “Puff, the Magic Dragon”) for this is the America they remember.

Limbaugh does not like to see African-Americans ascend to high-profile positions, such as U.S. president or quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles.

This is why Limbaugh called Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb “overrated” several years ago and assailed other media members for engaging in “social engineering” by turning McNabb into a star.

Limbaugh served up this rubbish as an NFL commentator for ESPN, a position for which he was never qualified and from which he resigned.

Does the NFL really want to wallow in the gutter with Limbaugh again?

Even if it does, African-American players have made it known that they stand ready to give Limbaugh exactly what he deserves—the bum’s rush.