[Washington, October 29. Image via Getty]

WASHINGTON - OCTOBER 29: Christina King Ferris, sister of Martin Luther King Jr., stands next to a model of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial while attending a ceremony announcing the approval of the construction process for the memorial on the National Mall October 29, 2009 in Washington, DC. The memorial will be situated midway between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials and take approximately two years to complete. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

[New Orleans, October 15. Image via Official White House Photostream]

Students hold out their hands to greet President Barack Obama during his visit to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School in New Orleans, La., Oct. 15, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

•  Egyptian tycoon Hisham Talaat Mustafa has been sentenced to death for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Lebanese pop star Suzanne Tamim. • Breitbart has posted a preview for the documentary "The Iraqi Workout," which is a 45-minute study of the a women's gym in the north of Iraq. • A new (no shit) study has found that fathers respond to the risky sexual behavior of their teen offspring by increasing parental supervision. This contradicts an earlier study which indicated that parents tend to pull away when teens engage in sexually uninhibited behavior. • Two children of Martin Luther King Jr. have threatened to sue over a film that is currently in the works about their father's life. Dreamworks currently has the rights to King's story, but Bernice and Martin King claim they did not give their approval for the project. • In response to an uptight grandmother's complaints about a picture of a little girl breastfeeding her doll, Babble states what should be obvious: breastfeeding is not a sexual act, and it is not obscene. • Click here to read an interesting article from Time Mag about sex, consumer culture and how the two became so intricately linked. • As if us hypochondriacs didn't have enough to be worried about: in 2006 Swedish doctors discovered invisible chlamydia, which can escape detection on routine tests. The good news? They have developed a way to screen for the dangerous strain. • According to new data, women in Japan have the longest life expectancy out of any group, with the average lady surviving to see 86, while men in Sierra Leone have the shortest life expectancy (only 39). • A new drug usually used to chemically castrate sex offenders has been deemed by some a "miracle" cure for autism. However, many say that the use of the drug is "medically indefensible." •  Today Anne Mulcahy, CEO of Xerox, announced that Ursula Burns will be named CEO of the company on July 1st. Burns will become the only black female CEO among Fortune 500's top 150 companies. • Scientists have discovered the genetic mutations responsible for the unusual appearance of Julia Pastrana, the famous "bearded lady" from the 1800s. •

• Diane von Furstenberg attended the inauguration with her oldest African-American friend, André Leon Talley. She hobnobbed with Oprah and David Axelrod, then dressed up in, um, a ski suit to watch the swearing-in. [Financial Times]

• Poor Peter Som sounds like he's having a hell of a time. He left Bill Blass to focus on his eponymous line, only for his financial backers to, well, back swiftly away. The Cut asked how he was doing, and he told them, "Shit happens. Sometimes it's a lot, sometimes it's a little. So I think everyone's going through some tough times...Why don't you ask me some questions about Michelle Obama's dress?" Turns out he submitted sketches of a long, white gown — "I guess I was in the ballpark, right?" — but obviously wasn't Michelle Obama's final choice. The way I see it, while a Google bump and a Good Morning America interview might have given him some press, the fundamentals are still what counts. And his ability to design beautiful clothes women want to wear is, at least, recession-proof. [The Cut]
• Clearly Som is not the only one in fashion hurting. Abercrombie & Fitch, which had extremely poor fourth quarter sales, laid off 50 workers at their Ohio headquarters. The mall store sees itself as an aspirational brand, so it refuses to discount its wares to move units during any downturn — their sale-happy competitors have no such compunction, which is part of the reason for Abercrombie's double-digit slide in same-store sales since August of last year. Further layoffs have not been ruled out. [Reuters]
• For another view on the recession, check out this interview with Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce, conducted back in September, just as the financial news was going from bad to awful. It's a snapshot of two men who, like we all were back then, are still grappling with the daily news of a world economy in a slow-motion crash. Says Gabbana, "The money hasn’t changed, it’s the mentality." Dolce offers, "Maybe we go well with crisis?" before pointing out a trend piece in Corriere della Serra about the financial crisis bringing people together. Gabbana shoots back, "Yes, but I’m also tired of reading this stupid stuff. I’m sick of it. We said the same thing after September 11. We just continue to do our job in the same way, maybe putting more energy, more fantasia, more creativity into it." As worthwhile a strategy as any. [Interview]
• Other designers plowing resolutely ahead without saying 'boo': Brioni, which introduced a made-to-measure suit that can cost up to $43,000 in October, and Hermès, whose limited-edition silk Josef Albers scarves of last fall cost $2800 each. The "elite of the elite" have bought 30 of the suits, astonishingly. [WSJ]
• Supposedly, LVMH's Bernard Arnault and PPR's François Pinault have buried the hatchet. What kind of world is it where two French luxury-industry billionaires who share a last-name syllable can't get along? [Financial Times]
• Iman compared herself to a duck in an interview with E! Canada. Because ducks look calm and collected, but are paddling furiously beneath the surface. A writer for the National Post, apparently unable to grasp why a supermodel would find an animal metaphor useful in describing her personality as opposed to her looks, takes this to mean Iman has body-image issues. [National Post]
• A stage manager who worked on the set of "Lipstick Jungle" is being charged with the theft of almost $30,000 worth of costumes. Designers who had lent the production their clothing and accessories noticed unreturned items going up on eBay. [CNN]
• Jason Wu is feeling the love this week. The 26-year-old designer of that one-shouldered white gown got his very own profile in the Times' "Sunday Styles" section, right ahead of fashion week. Reporter Eric Wilson mentions Wu was taking interviews in between working on his fall collection, but offers no further details of the intriguing fur-fest. (Wu told Fashion Week Daily fall would be all about fur. And "luxury.") [NY Times]
• Inaugural fashion coverage would not be complete without a lengthy, considered piece by Robin Givhan all about the styles of dress of the attendees not named Obama. [Washington Post]
• For reasons unclear, Spanish feminists protested a Zara store in Madrid. [The F Word]
• J Peterman, the company best known for "Seinfeld" gags and a real-life 1999 bankruptcy, is back. [MSNBC]
• Awesome lady Jane Birkin watched the Hermès men's show in Paris wearing an Obama pin. [WWD]
• Chloe Sevigny talks to the Times about her style, but gives no information about that unisex collection she's presenting this week in Paris. She does, however, shop for hosiery from a guy who is "like the Soup Nazi, but he sells socks." [NY Times]
• Meanwhile, Padma Lakshmi has a line of fine jewelry she'd like very much to sell you. [WWD]
• The Fashion Design Council of India has a new program: model rehab. It's like industry exit counseling, to get you a new job when the clients stop booking you. [Hindustan Times]
• Jim Horne, male model of the 40s and 50s, and first cover subject of the newly renamed Gentleman's Quarterly, died at age 91 in New York. The business certainly was different then. [NY Times]
• Women shoppers are increasingly angered by the poor construction of budget fashion items. Complaints because of unwarned shrinkage, fading, breaking zippers, running dyes, and embellishments that fall off at the first wear are up 22%. Let's not take it anymore! Until there is another sale at H&M. [Independent]
• Marc Jacobs has palatial new digs in someAndre Balazs-developed condo building in SoHo. It's 2,500-square-feet, presumably expensive. [New York Post]
• Pam Anderson's Vivienne Westwood campaign is out. Shockingly, the pairing results in a less than demure aesthetic...let's just say Pamela Anderson's breasts are prominently displayed. Which is more subtle than the pics themselves! [Fashionista]
• At least they're going out with a bang: Hartmarx Corp., the Chicago company that owns Obama Inaugural tux-maker Hart Schaffner Marx, has filed for bankruptcy. [WSJ]
• Kanye West "promotes" his new Louis Vuitton-collab sneakers in a bizarre new video. Which is to say, he proclaims that he's changing his name from "the Louis Vuitton Don" (?) to "Martin Louis the King, Jr." (?) then declares, "and until then, I will be in the building, swagger, until one hundred thousand trillion." [Racked]
• Speaking of odd collaborations, we don't even want to imagine what kind of douchey teen will carry the new Ric Owens Eastpaks to school. At the very least, the inkstains had better be solid gold. [Fashionista]

"They were liberation songs,” she said in a videotaped interview with The New York Times in 2007 for its online feature "The Last Word." "You’re walking down life’s road, society’s foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die, or insist upon your life." […]

Odetta marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and performed for President John F. Kennedy. Bill Clinton awarded her the National Endowment for the Arts Medal of the Arts and Humanities. She sang and performed well into the 21st century, and her influence stayed strong, and one critic called her voice a "force of nature."

Time magazine's Richard Corliss writes: "During the folk boom, each Odetta gig, in coffee house or a concert hall, was a master class of work songs, folk songs, church songs, and an eloquent tutorial in raw American history. Identifiable from the first syllable, her voice fused the thrill of gospel, the techniques of art song, — the wisdom that subtlety sometimes trumps volume — and the desperate wail of blues." Bob Dylan credited her first solo record in 1956, Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues, as "the first thing that turned me on to folk singing… [It] was just something vital and personal."

Odetta, Voice Of Civil Rights Movement, Dies At 77 [NY Times]
Odetta: Soul-Stirrer, 1930-2008 [Time]
American Folk Music Legend Odetta Dies At 77 [USA Today, via AP]
Odetta, 77; Sang the Soundtrack For The Civil Rights Movement [Washington Post]

[Image via Free Republic.]

MEGAN: No, the Clinton thing is totally epic, I fully support a separate post for that.
MOE: ok cool... i suppose then that we should talk about... florida and michigan, jeremiah wright, rosencrantz & gildenstern…
MEGAN: Wait, aren't they dead?
MEGAN: (Sorry, it was a pun that had to be made)
MOE: we all die is sort of the point
MEGAN: That's sort of existential for this time of the morning, I thought I was supposed to be the depressed one!

MEGAN: By the way, I meant to say, all I dreamt about last night was Bill Clinton and economic insecurity.
MOE: Dude Dodai and I saw the Sex & The City movie. All I dreamt about was…shoes.
MOE: NO NOT REALLY.
MEGAN: Aw, those would've been some awesome dreams, though.
MOE: I would say the movie made me ill, but I was ill before…it's just such A Soul Murdering Work Of Staggering Consumerism
MEGAN: Yeah, that's sort of why I went to see Indiana Jones instead. That, and the fact that my companion was a straight guy.

MEGAN: Anyway, so that that Pfleger guy is the new Wright and Obama's church is the story that shall never die even though he quit it this weekend and no one can answer the riddle of why they would continue to tape the damn sermons.
MOE: This Pfleger guy is soooooo much more fascinating than Jeremiah Wright. WHERE DID HE COME FROM? And unrelated: Did you read how there are still seven or eight Jews in Baghdad? It totally is ruling the Most Emailed List, as if it were a story about pandas or spotted owls, only that's really now how it is…anyway their synagogue closed after the war "made it too dangerous for them to worship openly." Great going, us! And everyone used to be so nice, and Muslims were nice to Jews and Sunnis were nice to Shiites, but not anymore, except that there are so few Jews that the Muslims actually are still nice to them…anyway. Back to Pfleger.

MEGAN: Right, because the only violence the Iraqi state used to countenance under Saddam Hussein was the violence that it itself committed against the Kurds and political dissidents! But, yes, Pfleger.
MOE: Dude, has someone made a mashup of this vs. Harriet Christian? Because that sort of demands to be done.
MEGAN: By the way, in point of fact, "der Pfleger" is German for "male nurse." Not that that's important.
MEGAN: Oh, God, Harriet Christian. What a wack job. "Inadequate black male," Harriet? Gosh, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones must've loved that shit.

MOE: Seriously, okay, the thing here is 1. If it didn't sufficiently speak to Pfleger's own point that what he said was probably just as offensive to most folks as anything Jeremiah Wright said but it's harder to argue with him because he is himself white, then 2. Harriet Christian pretty much does the rest of his job for him.
MOE: And the Rosencrantz reference was MoDowd's. So unlike me, I know.
MEGAN: I don't know, was Pfleger more acceptable? Was he just the straw that broke the camel's back, or was it worse?
MOE: The thing is that this lede

They say that every president gets the psychoanalyst he deserves. And every Hamlet gets his Rosencrantz.

is typically retarded, but I remember that play being my favorite thing I'd ever read back in high school, and maybe that's why McClellan appeals! Except McClellan was probably aiming more for Guildenstern. Spokespretty Dana Perino can be Rosencrantz.
MEGAN: Is openly mocking Hillary Clinton worse than "God damn America" and "the government invented AIDS" and shit?
MOE: See, I guess I didn't see Pfleger until after I'd seen Harriet Christian. How come no one has made a mashup of this shit yet?
MEGAN: Nope. Could we set it to, like, Keystone Kops music?
MOE: Someone should do that, and then splash in some Michael Richards
MEGAN: Ooh, right.

MEGAN: Anyway, so Howard Dean (who is apparently the new devil to Hillary supporters) called Geraldine Ferraro's comments on race "outside the mainstream and unhelpful." That's a start, really.
MOE: Here's a little passage from a Chicago Tribune story about how Rev. Pfleger got into this line of work:

Clements has remained an activist ever since, leading anti-drug campaigns, encouraging black adoptions, convincing parishioners to open their hearts to ex-offenders. He often joins forces with a white activist priest, Rev. Michael Pfleger, the pastor of St. Sabina Catholic Church on the South Side. As it turns out, Pfleger was also in Marquette Park the day King was hit with the rock.

PFLEGER WAS 16, a kid from nearby Thomas Moore parish. Everywhere he went for several days leading up to the march, people in his Southwest Side neighborhood were talking about the pending march. Why couldn't they stay in their own place? They took away our old house. They took away our old neighborhood. They took away our old church. They drove us out. Now is the time to draw the line.

Pfleger and two friends hopped on their bikes and rode to the park to see if they could get a look at King, the man who was causing all the trouble. When they got to the park, it was scary. "I saw this hate," he says. "I had never seen them, my neighbors, like that. I'd never seen that side of white people."

His neighbors were cursing and throwing rocks. There were police in riot gear and there he was, King, looking calm, trying to say something to the mob. But Pfleger couldn't hear over the screams of "Niggers, go home!"

MOE:

"King was in control," Pfleger recalls. "And the more in control he was, the angrier the crowd became. I thought to myself, 'Either this man is crazy, or this man has some sort of power I want to know about.' It was the greatest, most powerful class in non-violence I'll ever get in my life."

The next day, Pfleger started reading whatever he could find about the march and about King. He cut out photos of King and taped them to the back of his bedroom closet door as a sort of shrine. Today, in his office at St. Sabina, he has half a dozen photographs of him: King addressing thousands of people at the rally at Soldier Field, King speaking at a temple on the North Shore, King and a young Jesse Jackson the night before King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

"People ask me all the time why I became a priest," Pfleger says. "I tell them it was really a black Baptist minister who called me into ministry. My activism today was unquestionably birthed that day in Marquette Park. I think of him as a mentor."

MOE: That's from 2006
MOE: In 2002 he was involved in some controversy when a black team joined his mostly white suburban Catholic school league and parents were like "we don't want to go play there it's unsafe."
MEGAN: "I'd never seen that side of white people," kind of helpfully sums up what I think every right-thinking person's view of racism is. Like, the horror that you could be associated with something that is so very, very obviously deeply wrong.

MEGAN: The first time you see it or experience it, it should make you sick to your stomach that there are people like that in the world.
MOE: So here's the question: Geraldine Ferraro: obviously unhelpful. Michael Pfleger: more helpful than unhelpful, over the long haul, I believe. And yeah, racism is completely stomach churning the first time you experience it from your community. I mean, my initial experiences were all in Asia, which was slightly different, because it was like, my little kid friends grumbling about how Chinese spit and/or smelled and/or always insisted on touching our hair. It was beyond my comprehension at the time how they could even think those things, to be honest. It used to bother me so much. I would stand there dutifully while someone touched my hair and yearn to apologize for the Opium Wars and having an air conditioner and such. Oh… phew! Geraldine Ferraro is now back on Fox. Someone needed to put the crap back in this Crappy Hour!

MEGAN: OMG, she looks so freaking happy to be on Fox. Goddammit, Geraldine, try to look a little less self-satisfied.
MEGAN: Dude, they just completely laughed at her when she quoted Jackie Mason. I'm beginning to be uncomfortable.
MEGAN: Oh, are you kidding? She's like, "If people said that crap about Obama, we would be horrified." Oh, really, Geraldine? You mean, like, when Andrew Cuomo said that Obama cannot "shuck and jive" at a press conference and his press people successfully convinced everyone to ignore it and not a single Democratic party leader in NY or beyond called him out on it?
MOE: I'm clarifying the Pfleger thing; it was his school in the "dangerous" neighborhood, and his school was rejected from the Southside Catholic Conference or something on account of that, and then he went public with racism charges, and then a lot of Catholics were like "why couldn't he have been a little quieter about this shit."

MEGAN: Ah, lovely. Well, Chicago is such a lovely, well-planned city. Ahem.
MOE: Jesus I didn't even know what "shuck n jive" meant.

"To shuck and jive" originally referred to the intentionally misleading words and actions that African-Americans would employ in order to deceive racist Euro-Americans in power, both during the period of slavery and afterwards. The expression was documented as being in wide usage in the 1920s, but may have originated much earlier. "Shucking and jiving" was a tactic of both survival and resistance. A slave, for instance, could say eagerly, "Oh, yes, Master," and have no real intention to obey. Or an African-American man could pretend to be working hard at a task he was ordered to do, but might put up this pretense only when under observation. Both would be instances of "doin' the old shuck 'n jive."

MEGAN: Yes. It's a racist term.
MOE: Um yeah.
MEGAN: But his press people called everyone in the universe (I ought to know) and were like "he meant bobbing and waving!!! you're taking it out of context" and I was like, there's no context for that
MOE: What I wonder is if there would have been way more of those types of slips had Barack Obama been more stereotypical. Had he not been reared with such colossal reserves of cultural capital, the "something for everyone" biography, the arugula plus the brotherhood plus the atheist mom plus the Indonesian stepdad etc. etc.…had he simply been more stereotypical, had he had an "I could have been baking cookies all those years" moment. Do you think there would be more overt racism involved in his campaign? Because I did, but quotes like Cuomos

MOE: Quotes like Cuomo's just make me think it doesn't even matter. They're digging through the history books, finding the anachronistic phrases that will send messages to the right constitutents…so I guess it is less overt.
MEGAN: I mean, he's had his cookie-baking moments, in my opinion, his "stereotypical white person" about his grandmother and stuff. But, yeah, I mean, it horrifies me that either these very bright politicians are using these fucking "code" words like "shucking and jiving" and "kid" and whatever else so that people under a certain age who don't know them won't know that they're being racist and people over a certain age will get the reference. It's like Bush and his fucking evangelical code word bullshit in all his States of the Union and shit.
MOE: But like, it's just racism. You get to the point where, as we've discussed before, he's inoculated himself to this shit, to the point David Duke himself can't get it up to really hate on Obama, and yet we've got Harriet Christian of Manhattan… it makes no sense.
MEGAN: Because, I'm sorry, you don't grow up in the South when they grew up, you don't get to talk about how inspiring the civil rights movement was to you as a politician and then claim not to know.
MOE: And…re racism, institutional: did you read the Post Magazine cover story on Tatum O'Neal's drug of choice? Because I didn't have time but I should have.
MEGAN: I didn't, either, I was still all obsessing about politics, but the sentence disparities for crack v. powder cocaine are completely fucked
MOE: Here's his spiel before Congress:

My name is Michael Short. I am here because in 1992 I was sentenced for selling crack cocaine. Before that, I had never spent a day in prison. I came from a good family. I had no criminal history. I was not a violent offender. But I was sentenced to serve nearly 20 years. I was 21 years old.

They'll be chatting about the story at noon for anyone who still thinks racism exists in this country!
'
MEGAN: But, no, see, it's not racism it's racial resentment, didn't you learn anything?
MOE: Newsbreak Terror Roundup: an attack on the Danish embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, a growing sphere of influence for the Taliban, has killed six, Syria has agreed to allow IAEA weapons inspectors to check out its North Korean JV, and something about the Iraqi jail system being less terrible than before. And should we talk about Puerto Rico?
MEGAN: Oh, sure, Puerto Rico. Hillary won! Ricky Martin danced!
MOE: Oh dude, I didn't see the National Review had run six separate stories on Friday trashing McClellan. Good grief.
MEGAN: Well, you know, it's like proving that someone's not a witch by piling stones on them. When they've crushed his chest, he'll be redeemed.
MOE: Ugh, I hate the "well-worn tell-all path" line. I just don't subscribe to the "All ousted tools of the idiocracy are unhappy in the same way" line of reasoning, but if anyone tracks down his partisan ghostwriter the Prince Of Darkness…is probably too lazy but he'll get a lot of hits with misleading headlines suggesting he has!

MEGAN: I really think PoD is giving Bobby too much credit. Let's return to caling him the Earl of Minor Despair. Or the Count of Emotionally-Instigated Intestinal Distress
MOE: Wait, he has emotions?
MOE: Ya think?

Obama's Latest Pastor Disaster [Newsweek/WaPo]
Hillary Clinton Attacked At Barack Obama Church [YouTube]
Clinton Supporter Thrown Out Of Rules Committee Meeting [YouTube]
Glamoracy [Glamour]

We don't even know what to say about this: