Cowboys' Brent charged in death of teammate in car crash

Cowboys' Brent charged in death of teammate in car crash - Dallas Cowboys defensive tackle Josh Brent was charged with manslaughter on Saturday after the car he was accused of driving while drunk crashed and killed teammate Jerry Brown Jr, in the second tragedy involving NFL players in a week.

Police in the Dallas suburb of Irving said that Brent, 24, was driving at high speed on a state highway at 2:21 a.m. when his car flipped and then caught fire. The car slammed into an "outside curb, causing the vehicle to flip at least one time before coming to rest in the middle of the service road," police said.

Brown, who had been in the passenger seat, was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital a short time later. Brent suffered "minor scrapes" and was booked into the Irving jail, where he remained on Saturday awaiting arraignment, police said.

 

Dallas Cowboys football player Joshua Price-Brent, 24, is shown in this booking photo supplied by the Irving Police Department December 8, 2012. Price-Brent flipped his vehicle after striking a curb. 

"Officers at the scene believed alcohol was a contributing factor in the crash," police said, adding that Brent was given a sobriety test. "Based on the results and the officer's observations and conversations with Price-Brent, he was arrested for driving while intoxicated," Irving police spokesman John Argumaniz said at a news conference.

Brown, 25, was a linebacker on the professional team's practice squad but had not played any games with the Cowboys. He had played in one NFL game for the Indianapolis Colts this season before joining the Cowboys.

Brown also played for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League in 2011 and for two Arena Football League team, the Jacksonville Sharks in 2011 and the San Antonio Talons in 2012. Arena football is played indoors on a smaller field than NFL or Canadian outdoor football.

Brent, 24, has started in five games for the Cowboys and played 12 this season since regular starting defensive lineman Jay Ratliff was sidelined with injuries.

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones issued a statement expressing his condolences to the family of Brown, who was originally from Missouri.

"We are deeply saddened by the news of this accident and the passing of Jerry Brown. Our hearts and prayers and deepest sympathies are with the members of Jerry's family and all of those who knew him and loved him."

Brent remained in jail on Saturday and his bond will be set at his Sunday morning arraignment, police said. The drunk driving charge was upgraded to intoxication manslaughter, a second degree felony which is punishable in Texas by two to 20 years in prison and a fine up to $10,000.

When police arrived on the scene of the accident after several 911 calls, part of the car was on fire. The 2007 Mercedes sedan was resting on its roof in the middle of the road, and Brent was dragging Brown out of the burning car, said Irving police spokesman John Argumaniz at a news conference.

Police believe, based on gouge marks and other physical evidence at the scene, that Brown was driving faster than the posted 45 miles per hour speed limit.

Argumaniz said the Texas police are still looking for witnesses to the crash, which did not appear to involve any other vehicles.

"There were people on scene," he said. "However, it's our understanding that no one saw what took place. They drove up after the accident."

Brent has been arrested for drunk driving before. While he was on the University of Illinois football team, he was arrested February 23, 2009, on a drunk driving charge, according to Champaign, Illinois, county records. He spent time in the county jail and was suspended from the team, according to local media reports. He eventually left school and was drafted by the Cowboys.

The Cowboys team, which has struggled to live up to high expectations this season with 6 wins and 6 losses, is playing the Cincinnati Bengals in Cincinnati on Sunday.

The tragedy comes as the NFL is still reeling from the death of Kansas City Chiefs starting linebacker Jovan Belcher, who shot his girlfriend to death one week ago before driving to the team's training facility and killing himself in front of the coach and general manager. ( Reuters )

Blog : Popular Entertainment

Post : Cowboys' Brent charged in death of teammate in car crash

READ MORE - Cowboys' Brent charged in death of teammate in car crash

Do black people support Obama because he's black?

Do black people support Obama because he's black? - Surviving slavery, segregation and discrimination has forged a special pride in African-Americans. Now some are saying this hard-earned pride has become prejudice in the form of blind loyalty to President Barack Obama.

Are black people supporting Obama mainly because he's black? If race is just one factor in blacks' support of Obama, does that make them racist? Can blacks' support for Obama be compared with white voters who may favor his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, because he's white?

 

Associated Press/Peter Kramer - FILE - In this Sunday, March 7, 2010 file photo, Stacey Dash arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in West Hollywood, Calif. Dash, who tweeted an endorsement of Romney, was subjected to a stream of abuse from other African-Americans. (AP Photo/Peter Kramer)

These questions have long animated conservatives who are frustrated by claims that white people who oppose Obama's policies are racist. This week, when a black actress who tweeted an endorsement of Romney was subjected to a stream of abuse from other African-Americans, the politics of racial accusation came full circle once again.

Stacey Dash, who also has Mexican heritage, is best known for the 1995 film "Clueless" and the recent cable-TV drama "Single Ladies." On Twitter, she was called "jigaboo," ''traitor," ''house nigger" and worse after posting, "Vote for Romney. The only choice for your future."

The theme of the insults: A black woman would have to be stupid, subservient or both to choose a white Republican over the first black president.

Russell Simmons, the hip-hop mogul and Obama backer, called Dash's experience "racism." Said Barbara Walters on "The View": "If she were white, this wouldn't have happened."

Twitter users are by no means representative of America, and many black Obama supporters quickly denounced the attacks. But for people like Art Gary, an information technology professional, the reason Dash was attacked is simple: She is a black woman supporting a white candidate over a black one.

"It goes both ways," said Gary, who is white. "There is racial bias amongst whites, and there is racial bias amongst blacks. But as far as the press is concerned, it only goes one way."

Antonio Luckett, a sales representative in Milwaukee who is black, called the attacks on Dash unfair. But when people speak out against a symbol of black progress like Obama, he said, "African-Americans tend to be internally hurt by that."

"We still have a civil rights (era) mentality, but we're not living in a civil rights-based world anymore," he said. "We want to say, 'You're black, you need to stand behind black people.'"

Luckett said one reason he voted for Obama in the 2008 primary against Hillary Clinton was because Obama is black: "Yes, I will admit that."

Is that racism? Not in Luckett's mind. "It's voting for someone who would understand your side of the coin a lot better."

Such logic runs into trouble when applied to a white person voting for Romney because he understands whiteness better. Ron Christie, a black conservative who worked for former President George W. Bush, finds both sides of that coin unacceptable.

"It's not the vision that our leaders in the civil rights movement would have envisioned and be proud of in the era of the first African-American president," Christie said.

Martin Luther King Jr. fought Jim Crow laws, which deprived blacks of political rights after Reconstruction, upheld by Southern Democrats. But black voters switched after Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through the 1960s civil rights legislation and Republicans successfully pursued the votes of white people who disliked the civil rights agenda.

Since then, Democrats have persistently wooed black voters with programs and platforms that African-Americans favor, and the party has been rewarded every four years.

Clinton got 83 percent of the black vote in 1992 and 84 percent in 1996; the third-party candidate Ross Perot probably sliced away some of Clinton's black support. Al Gore got 90 percent in 2000; John Kerry got 88 percent in 2004. Obama captured 95 percent in 2008, and 2 million more black people voted than in the previous election.

Christie says he, too, shares the sense of pride in Obama smashing what for blacks is the ultimate glass ceiling. He understands that black pride springs from a shared history of being treated as less than human, while the history of pride in whiteness has a racist context.

But he still sees black people voting for Obama out of a "straitjacket solidarity."

Christie sees it in his barbershop, where black men shifted from calling candidate Obama "half-white" and "not one of us" to demanding that Christie stop opposing the first black president.

He sees it in the comments of radio host Tom Joyner, who told his millions of listeners a year ago, "Let's not even deal with facts right now. Let's deal with our blackness and pride — and loyalty. . I'm not afraid or ashamed to say that as black people, we should do it because he's a black man."

The actor Samuel L. Jackson said much the same thing: "I voted for Barack because he was black," he told Ebony magazine. "Cuz that's why other folks vote for other people — because they look like them."

In 2011, as black unemployment continued to rise, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus said that if Clinton was still president, "we probably would be still marching on the White House . (but) nobody wants to do anything that would empower the people who hate the president."

And just last week, the rapper Snoop Dogg posted a list of voting reasons, written by someone else, on a social media account. No. 1 on his pro-Obama list: He's black. Snoop's top reason to not vote for Romney: He's white.

All of this may help explain why Veronica Scott-Miller, a junior at historically black Hampton University, directed the following tweet at Dash: "You get a lil money and you forget that you're black and a woman. Two things Romney hates."

In an interview, Scott-Miller said the GOP fought Obama's effort to provide funding for historically black colleges like hers. She dislikes Romney's opposition to abortion and thinks Republicans have a "negative stigma about us . they make generalizations in their speeches about our race in general, and they make up terms like welfare queens and stuff."

Told that some saw her tweet as racist, she said that's not what she meant. "I was saying that as a black woman, Romney doesn't have that much that would make us want to vote for him," said Scott-Miller, who is black. "Because Barack Obama lives with three black women in his house, he knows about what they need, he knows about the issues we may be facing, he talks to black women on the regular."

Sherrilyn Ifill, a law professor at the University of Maryland, wrote a column last week exploring why so many black voters are rejecting Romney. She said it has less to do with the candidate than with his party's treatment of Obama, such as John Sununu calling the president "lazy" after the debate, a congressman shouting "You lie!" during the State of the Union address, claims that Obama is not a citizen and more.

In an interview, Ifill said that for black voters, such accusations feel like white people are attacking their own dignity. "In essence," she says, "they are closing ranks around Obama."

She noted that women were justifiably moved by Hillary Rodham Clinton's candidacy and Catholics flocked to the polls to elect President John F. Kennedy. Comparing black pride in Obama to white pride in Romney is a "false symmetry" because of the history of black oppression, she says, and she asked for patience from America at large.

"There should not be this resistance to pride over the first black president," Ifill says. "If we get to the fifth one, I'll be with you." ( Associated Press )

Blog : Popular Entertainment

Post : Do black people support Obama because he's black?

READ MORE - Do black people support Obama because he's black?

Dick Clark, entertainment icon nicknamed 'America's Oldest Teenager,' dies at 82

Dick Clark, entertainment icon nicknamed 'America's Oldest Teenager,' dies at 82 - Dick Clark, the music industry maverick, longtime TV host and powerhouse producer who changed the way we listened to pop music with American Bandstand, and whose trademark Rockin' Eve became a fixture of New Year's celebrations, died today at the age of 82, ABC News has learned.

Clark, who suffered a serious stroke in 2004 but returned to the airwaves, reportedly died from a heart attack.

Born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., on Nov. 30, 1929, Richard Wagstaff Clark began his lifelong career in show business began before he was even out of high school. He started working in the mailroom of WRUN, a radio station in upstate New York run by his father and uncle. It wasn't long before the teenager was on the air, filling in for the weatherman and the announcer.

Dick Clark attends Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest 2011 in Times Square in this Dec. 31, 2010 file photo in New York City. (Andrew Walker/DCNYRE2011/Getty Images)

Clark pursued his passion at Syracuse University, working as a disc jockey at the student-run radio station while studying for his degree in business. After graduating in 1951, Clark went back to his family's radio station, but within a year, a bigger city and bigger shows were calling.

Clark landed a gig as a DJ at WFIL in Philadelphia in 1952, spinning records for a show he called Dick Clark's Caravan of Music. There he broke into the big time, hosting Bandstand, an afternoon dance show for teenagers.

Within five years, the whole country was watching. ABC took the show national, and American Bandstand was born.

Blazing a New Trail in Pop Music

American Bandstand's formula was simple. Clean-cut boys and girls danced to the hottest hits and the newest singles. In between, Clark chatted with the teens, who helped "rate-a-record," turning songs into sensations. Everyone showed up on American Bandstand: from Elvis Presley to Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry to Chubby Checker.

When Dick Clark moved to Hollywood in 1963, American Bandstand moved with him. He started Dick Clark Productions, and began cranking out one hit show after another; his name became synonymous with everything from the $25,000 Pyramid to TV's Bloopers & Practical Jokes to the American Music Awards. In 1972, Dick Clark became synonymous with one of the biggest nights of the year.

New Year's Rockin' Eve

Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve on ABC became a Dec. 31 tradition, with Clark hosting the festivities for more than three decades, introducing the entertainment acts and, of course, counting down to midnight as the ball dropped in New York's Times Square.

But the traditional celebration saw a temporary stop in 2004, when Clark suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and struggling to speak. Regis Philbin stepped in. But by the next New Year's Eve, Dick Clark was back, his speech still impaired. In halting words, he told the audience, "I had to teach myself how to walk and talk again. It's been a long, hard fight. My speech is not perfect but I'm getting there."

But that didn't stop him: he returned each year, and recently he was joined by Ryan Seacrest.
The Museum of Broadcast Communications has done the math, and figures that Dick Clark Productions has turned out more than 7,500 hours of television programming, including more than 30 series and 250 specials, as well as more than 20 movies for theatre and TV.

All this earned Clark a long list of awards and accolades: Emmys, Grammys, induction in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It also made him one of the richest men in Hollywood; he also had stakes in a wide range of businesses, including restaurants, theatres and real estate.

In March of (2012/this year), he put one of his homes on the market, asking $3.5 million for a one-of-a-kind house on 22 acres in Malibu, modeled after Fred and Wilma's house on "The Flintstones."

"America's Oldest Teenager"

Clark, whose eternally youthful look earned him the nickname "America's Oldest Teenager", is survived by his three children and his third wife, Keri Wigton, married to him since 1977. He credited his appearance to good genes, once saying "if you want to stay young looking, pick your parents very carefully."

Now, America's Oldest Teenager is gone, leaving his indelible mark on generations of fans, and helping change rock 'n' roll and TV forever. His signature sign-off was always "For now, Dick Clark… so long," said with a salute. Today, generations of Americans are saluting back. ( ABC News )

READ MORE - Dick Clark, entertainment icon nicknamed 'America's Oldest Teenager,' dies at 82