Adding fuel to the notion that former Republican President Richard Nixon might have been the closest thing to Archie Bunker to ever occupy the White House, a new round of tapes has been released showing that embattled commander in chief was a racist, sexist and anti-Semite. Read more.

 Ex-convict-Ku Klux Klansman David Duke, the former Republican member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, says the new African-American chief of the GOP is a “racist” and an “Obama Jr.,” who will run “rank-and-file” Republicans out of the party. Michael Steele, who formerly served as the lieutenant governor of Maryland, is the first Black person chosen to head the Republican Party, of which Duke was a longtime member. Read about what Duke said about Steele here.

Lafayette Franch Pastry, a New York bakery in Greenwich Village known for its tasty cookies and treats, is coming under fire for a tasteless and racist batch of chocolate treats called “Drunken Negro Head Cookies.” The cookies are dark brown with exaggerated facial features and cherry toppings. Ted Kefalinos, who first introduced the cookies on Martin Luther king Day last week, says he made the cookies to honor Obama. He also admits that he is not an Obama fan but thinks the cookies are a winner for him since every one in his first batch was sold. When customers asked Kefalinos why he made the cookies, he reportedly mentioned Obama and said the new President will “get his” just like Abraham Lincoln who inspires him. “I’m sorry that people were offended by the cookie,” says Kefalinos, who insists his product is not racist. No one got offended when he introduced “Dead Geese Bread” after a U.S. Airways plane crashed in the nearby Hudson River two weeks ago, he argues. Many New Yorkers plan to boycott the shop whose pastries were used in “Sex in the City” and Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever.”

Cheney Wheelchair Bound for Inauguration
Vice President Dick Cheney, who reportedly pulled a muscle in his back while moving, will watch President-elect Barack Obama being sworn in from a wheelchair. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Monday, “Under his physician’s recommendation, the vice president will be in a wheelchair for the next couple of days, including for tomorrow’s inauguration.”

Man Arrested for Online Obama Threats
Federal agents arrested a Mississippi man for writing on the Internet that he wanted to kill President-elect Barack Obama. Secret Servicemen arrested Steven J. Christopher Friday for blowing up an Internet chat room with his racist and anti-Semitic remarks, a U.S. attorney said. He entered his comments on Jan. 11, 15 and 16. His remarks were posted on a Web site that features information and articles about extraterrestrials, government conspiracies and unexplained physical phenomenon.

One of the highest ranked Web sites on Dr. Martin Luther King is one run by a White-supremacist group whose goal is to convince youths that the slain civil rights leader was much less than a hero, scholar and peacemaker. On “martinlutherking.org” there are downloadable fliers “to pass out at your school.” One of those “educational” fliers asks: “Which holiday honors a philanderer, a drunk, a liar, a plagiarist, and a cheater?” The answer: “Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.” The operators of the site are members of a group called Stormfront, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as the largest “hate group” online. Stormfront has been co-opting King’s name for its Web address for the past decade, and it is the third most popular site that pops up when Martin Luther King is Googled, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. Mark Potok, of the hate-crime-fighting law center, told the Journal-Constitution that Stormfront has about 154,000 members, an 82,000-member increase from two years ago. Don Black, the leader of Stormfront, has said that wants his Web site to reach high school students “who are forced to parrot the liberal party line about King being a great leader.” He said, too, that “The United States was traditionally a White nation, and we have the right to preserve it. If that makes me a racist, I am.” But Black’s steady stream of hate-talk, no matter how distasteful, isn’t necessarily illegal. The civil rights leader’s nephew, Isaac Newton Farris Jr., who heads the nonprofit King Center in Atlanta, said he has decided against challenging Stormfront in court. “You can’t stop people from having opinions,” he said. “If people think my uncle was adulterous and didn’t have a Ph.D., we can’t do anything about that. The only thing we can do is stop them from using his name.” Pete Wellborn, an Atlanta lawyer who specializes in Internet law, told the Journal-Constitution, “As vile, reprehensible, ignorant and horrible as that Web site is, one could argue that it’s political comment.” The Kings could succeed in a suit, he said, if they could prove that Stormfront is making money off King’s name.

Palin is silent about racist Obama messages. Black leaders in Alaska want Gov. Sarah Palin to speak out against the rash of racist Barack Obama jokes circulating on the state email system. A spokesman for Gov. Palin, who as the vice-presidential candidate butted heads with Obama during the recent election, dismissed the emails as a bad deed by just a sliver of the thousands of state employees. “My understanding is that the Department of Administration is following up on this with the individuals who took action to forward the offensive e-mails,” he said. “This is, of course, a confidential personnel and disciplinary matter that has nothing to do with the governor’s office.” The disclosure of the emails was the result of a report by The Associated Press. One of the five e-mails obtained by AP asks about the outcome of the Democrat’s victory after all the time and money that was invested and concludes: “Another Black family living in government housing!” Administration Commissioner Annette Kreitzer described the episode as “embarrassing to the state.” She said that she alerted the governor’s office about the emails. Said the Rev. Alonzo Patterson, state chairman of the Alaska Black Leadership Conference, who wants Palin to repudiate the emails: “They’re doing that in a state setting. She should condemn it.”

Lender must pay for preying on Blacks. Gateway Funding Diversified Mortgage Services has agreed to pay up after acknowledging that it charged Blacks and Hispanics unjustifiably higher rates than White consumers for mortgage loans. The higher prices cannot be explained by the applicants’ credit characteristics or underwriting risk, according to the complaint filed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Gateway Funding Diversified Mortgage Services, L.P ., and its general partner, Gateway Funding Inc ., based in Horsham, Pa., violated the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) in pricing both prime and sub-prime mortgage loans. Gateway allowed the loan officers to charge the consumers as they pleased, in addition to the risk-based price “overages” that included higher interest rates and higher up-front charges. Gateway paid loan officers a percentage of these overages and failed to monitor whether African-American and Hispanic consumers were paying higher overages than non-Hispanic White borrowers, the commission charged. It claimed that African Americans and Hispanics were being charged higher prices because of their race or ethnicity – price disparities that are “substantial, statistically significant, and cannot be explained by factors related to underwriting risk or credit characteristics of the applicants.” Said FTC Chairman William E. Kovacic: “Unlawful discrimination in the pricing of mortgages is intolerable. Discretionary pricing policies must be crafted and monitored carefully so that all applicants are treated fairly.”

GOP Group Mocks Obama on Bill With Watermelon, Fried Chicken.

The head of a Republican group in California is denying that a newsletter it put out had any racist intent, despite the fact that it depicted Democratic candidate Barack Obama on a food stamp with a watermelon, a bucket of fried chicken and a rack of spare ribs. While GOP officials have denounced the link of Obama to racist stereotypes, the president of Chaffey Community Republican Women tells a newspaper in Riverside, Calif., “it was just food to me.” She says she had received the illustration in e-mails and decided to reprint it to poke fun at a remark by Obama that he doesn’t look like other presidents. The Obama campaign has declined to comment, saying it does not address such attacks.  However, a Black member of the GOP club did address the issue. Sheila Raines says she cried for 45 minutes after hearing about the illustration. She added, “this is what keeps African-Americans from joining the Republican Party.” 

The Washington Post Endorses Obama

The Washington Post believes Barack Obama’s the man to be president and has officially endorsed the Democratic presidential nominee.  However, while the paper expressed high hopes about an Obama presidency, it noted some  reservations about his limited experience.   The Post said McCain made the choice easy after his disappointing campaign and selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate – who the paper says is not ready to be president.

A Double Dose of Difficulty for Toni BraxtonToni Braxton’s health problems are a lot more serious than she first let on to. The 41-year-old singer tells People magazine that she’s been diagnosed with microvascular angina, a condition in which the heart is not receiving the amount of oxygen it needs to function properly. She tells the magazine that the condition caused nearly a-quarter of the blood flow to her heart to be blocked. Several years ago, Braxton was diagnosed with pericarditis, an inflammation of the heart tissue that kept her sidelined for a while. Braxton says she sometimes wonders why all of this is happening to her. Meanwhile, the songstress is also dealing with health issues with her 5-year-old son, Diezel, who has been diagnosed with autism. The recording star says she has come to terms with that challenge and has become a spokeswoman for the group Autism Speaks. Braxton is currently competing on “Dancing With The Stars.”

Hurricane Katrina: three years later. As New Orleans braces for another potentially destructive storm, we look back to the impact and the progress made in the last three years after Hurricane Katrina here.

BET News Quiz: An HBCU gets millions; McCain gets a surprise endorsement; and Yung Berg was allegedly jumped. Test your knowledge here! 

Police are thankful for saggy pants … this time. Instead of enforcing laws against saggy pants, police departments around the country might want to start issuing pairs of the below-the-butt slacks to hoodlums. In Atlanta Wednesday, police shot and wounded a fleeing 21-year-old suspect as he allegedly turned toward officers and aimed his gun but stumbled while struggling to keep his pants up. Police said that Emmanuel Uzowihe was sprinting down one of Atlanta’s busiest streets when he was felled by officers, stopping traffic. His injuries were not life-threatening, and he was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital for treatment, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Officers with the department’s Auto Theft Task Force pulled over Uzowihe for an undisclosed traffic violation, Sgt. Lisa Keyes told the Constitution-Journal. Uzowihe jumped from the car and ran down the sidewalk, she said. Police pursued, ordering the suspect several times to stop, she said. A witness, Trevious Grier, said she saw Uzowihe’s weapon as he ran past. “He had a long black handgun he was holding in front of him,” Grier said. “I’ve never seen a gun that big before.” But as soon as he pointed the weapon, an officer shot him twice, police said. But according to witness Darrell Jackson, Uzowihe’s baggy pants is what landed him in the hospital. “He was running pretty fast,” Jackson said. “The only thing that messed him up is he was trying to pull his pants up.” Kelly agreed, saying, “I bet he won’t wear baggy paints again.”

Obama bills are “racist,” some say. A Republican Party leader in Washington state apologized Thursday for phony $3 bill with a picture of Sen. Barack Obama wearing Muslim headgear and sporting a camel that was sold at a booth at a county fair. “I want to apologize to anyone upset or offended by seeing it,” Snohomish County Republican Party Chairwoman Geri Modrell told The Herald newspaper. Underneath the likeness of a smiling Obama is the tag “Da Man,” and there are signatures from purportedly from “Teddy Kennedy, Chief Socialism Advisor” and “Al Sharpton, New Spiritual Advisor.” Modrell said that she asked volunteers to remove them when she discovered them on Tuesday. Some visitors to the fair called the bills “racist” and “offensive.”

Pat Buchanan, a political pundit and highly visible commentator, is angry about media diversity.
Conservative columnist and political pundit Pat Buchanan’s “primal racial fears” have blinded him from recognizing the inequities that persist in America, the organization that represents African-American journalists said in a response to one of his recent commentaries. Find out more at BET.com/news.

He allegedly was mad that an African American had slept with his wife

A Florida man targeting African Americans slammed his car into a 25-year-old Black woman who was riding her bike, according to police. Police said that Thomas Cosby, 56, drove his automobile into Nekedia Cato, and in the process destroyed a nearby porch and hit a tree before causing her to roll over three times, according to NBC affiliate WESH Channel 2. “He just hit me because I was Black,” Cato, who was riding her bike home from the store, told the television station. “I actually saw him coming toward me. I tried to move my bike as fast as I [could], but it wasn’t quick enough. He came straight for me.” After Cosby crashed, police said, he got out of his car and yelled the “N”-word and a slew of racist remarks, including how he wanted to kill Black people, WESH reports. “He was screaming out he had to kill all Black people because one slept with his wife,” said Cato, who suffered several injuries, broken bones and a broken leg so severe doctors inserted a metal rod into her leg. “If he could target me just because of the color of my skin, he could target anybody else. “I’m kind of scared walking down the street because I don’t know if people hate me.” Authorities say she could spend several weeks in the hospital. Cosby is facing hate-crime charges for alleged aggravated battery and simple battery.