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Host Stephen Colbert invited the veteran rapper on the program to settle a recent linguistic beef that freelance writer Julieanne Smolinski had kicked up when she disputed the accuracy of an answer in a New York Times crossword puzzle.

In an email sent to the Times, she wrote:

“The clue for 28 down reads ‘Wack, in hip-hop,’ and the answer provided is ‘ILLIN’. “These are not the same things, at all!”

In defense, Times puzzle expert Will Shortz wrote back:

“According to the Dictionary of American Slang, edited by Robert L. Chapman,’illin” means ‘stupid, insane.’ ‘Wack’ is defined as ‘worthless, stupid.’ The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, by Tony Thorne, defines “illin’” as ‘bad, uncool,’ and says it is a buzzword in the rap and hip-hop cultures. It seems to me that’s roughly the same as ‘wack’ in the sense of worthless or stupid.”

So Colbert figured who better to enlist than Mike D—the “only authority with a license to ill” and who’s also versed in matters of ill communication—in order to settle the score.

Watch a particularly professorial Mike D break down who actually won the beef.

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Peart initially explains that even though his mother gave him an ominous warning about the police at the precocious age of 9 — “She cautioned me to carry ID and never run away from the police or I could be shot” — he still thought police officers were “cool.” Nearly 10 years later, Peart’s perception of New York’s finest was irrevocably changed after his 18th birthday celebration, when he was brutally harassed:

… Out of nowhere, squad cars surrounded us. A policeman yelled from the window, ‘Get on the ground!’ I was stunned. And I was scared. Then I was on the ground — with a gun pointed at me. I couldn’t see what was happening, but I could feel a policeman’s hand reach in to my pocket and remove my wallet. Apparently he looked through and found the ID I kept there. ‘Happy Birthday,’ he said sarcastically.

Unfortunately for Peart — and many other blacks and Latinos — this would be the beginning of an increasingly abusive affair with the police. Peart, for his part, would be harassed at least three more times between his birthday-turned-target practice in 2006 and his most recent run-in in 2010. An officer took Peart’s keys and attempted to enter his apartment without his permission, while yet another officer forced him into a squad car, handcuffed. Naturally, Peart has become increasingly paranoid about the police:

These experiences changed the way I felt about the police. After the third incident I worried when police cars drove by; I was afraid I would be stopped and searched or that something worse would happen. I dress better if I go downtown. I don’t hang out with friends outside my neighborhood in Harlem as much as I used to. Essentially, I incorporated into my daily life the sense that I might find myself up against a wall or on the ground with an officer’s gun at my head. For a black man in his 20s like me, it’s just a fact of life in New York.

Thankfully, Peart isn’t taking this blatant discrimination and abuse lying down. He is a member of Harlem’s Brotherhood/Sister Sol, which works to empower youths about their rights while teaching them mechanisms to stay alive, and is a witness in the Center for Constitutional Rights lawsuit, which seeks to bring racist cops to task for racial profiling.

While it is criminal that a young black college student is STILL having to ask this question in 2011, it is yet another testament that the black and brown people of this nation are still regarded as second-class citizens.

Read the rest of Peart’s article here.

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Maureen Dowd a columnist for the New York Times has an article called “You’ll Never Believe What This White House Is Missing” in which she speculates that the reason for the Shirley Sherrod mishap was due to a lack of Black advisers in the White House.

The Obama White House is too white.

It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent her early years in Iran.

But unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand “the slave thing,” as a top black Democrat dryly puts it.

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On a blog called NYT Pick, the author criticized the New York Times for their recent annual Holiday Gift Guide, called “Of Color/Stylish Gifts.” Here’s what they said.

We don’t like to throw around words like “racist” in the same sentence as the NYT’s name, but there’s no other word we can think of to describe this page in the NYT’s annual Holiday Gift Guide — called “Of Color/Stylish Gifts” and aimed exclusively at the paper’s non-white readers.

They go on to outline the details of the “Of Color” gift guide.

Can you imagine the NYT designating a section of its Holiday Gift Guide to presents made “for and by white people”? Or Jews? Or Chinese? Of course you can’t.

We welcome NYTPicker readers of any color to click here and see the page for themselves.

The gift suggestions include:

– “The Mocha Guide To Military Life,” a book for black women whose husbands or boyfriends serve in the armed forces.

–”Hair Rules,” a hair-care product for a hair-stylist “hero to Michelle Obama and Alicia Keys” that includes a travel kit for kinky hair.

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From NYTimes.com:

The banks were bailed out last fall, the automobile companies last winter. For Edward McClelland, a writer in Chicago, deliverance finally arrived a few days ago.

Mr. McClelland’s credit card company was calling yet again, wondering when it could expect the next installment on his delinquent account. He proposed paying half of his $5,486 balance and calling the matter even.

It’s a deal, the account representative immediately said, not even bothering to check with a supervisor.

Click here for more.

From NYTimes.com:

As she describes it, Beth Jacobson and her fellow loan officers at Wells Fargo Bank “rode the stagecoach from hell” for a decade, systematically singling out blacks in Baltimore and suburban Maryland for high-interest subprime mortgages.

These loans, Baltimore officials have claimed in a federal lawsuit against Wells Fargo, tipped hundreds of homeowners into foreclosure and cost the city tens of millions of dollars in taxes and city services.

Wells Fargo, Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as “mud people” and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.”

Click here for the full story.

David Brooks for The New York Times:

When I was a freshman in college, I was assigned “Reflections on the Revolution in France” by Edmund Burke. I loathed the book. Burke argued that each individual’s private stock of reason is small and that political decisions should be guided by the accumulated wisdom of the ages. Change is necessary, Burke continued, but it should be gradual, not disruptive. For a young democratic socialist, hoping to help begin the world anew, this seemed like a reactionary retreat into passivity.

Over the years, I have come to see that Burke had a point. The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly. There were big errors like communism, but also lesser ones, like a Vietnam War designed by the best and the brightest, urban renewal efforts that decimated neighborhoods, welfare policies that had the unintended effect of weakening families and development programs that left a string of white elephant projects across the world.

Click here for the rest.

From Celia W. Dugger at The New York Times:

After months of resisting intense pressure from leaders across southern Africa, Zimbabwe’s opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, announced Friday that he would do as they have insisted and join a power-sharing government as prime minister with his longtime nemesis, President Robert Mugabe.

The opposition party’s decision to join the government was made unanimously at a meeting of its leadership in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. It will usher in a new phase in the opposition’s decade-long struggle against 84-year-old Mr. Mugabe and his almost 30-year grip on power — a grip he tightened after claiming victory in a bloody, discredited presidential run-off election against Mr. Tsvangirai in June.

“There was jubilation and ululation, singing and dancing,” said party spokeswoman Thabitha Khumalo, describing the reaction of party leaders to the decision to join the government.

Click here for the full post.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, President-elect Barack Obama’s nominee for secretary of state, appears today before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Op-Ed page asked 10 experts to pose the questions they would like to hear Senator Clinton answer.

1. United States policy has failed with respect to Israeli-Palestinian peace. The reluctance of any American president to act as an honest broker in the process, rather than as a strong, unquestioning friend of Israel, has contributed to this failure. How do you propose to bring success to the peace process?

2. There is clearly an imbalance of influence and power between the State Department and the Defense Department. An enormous shift of foreign policy influence has also occurred, since the era of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, from the State Department to the National Security Council staff and its head, the national security adviser. How do you propose to bring some of that influence back to the State Department?

— LAWRENCE B. WILKERSON, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005

1. Does it benefit American security to have more liberal democracies in the world? If so, what steps would you take to advance this trend?

2. Do you believe that NATO enlargement has contributed to American security and moved former Soviet states toward greater democracy and regional cooperation?

— MIKHEIL SAAKASHVILI, the president of Georgia

1. Some say “war on terror” is a misnomer that has led our policy astray. They argue that terrorism is a tactic, not an ideology or a cause, and that a war against it is bound to be ill focused and inconclusive. Do you think we should drop the term “war on terror,” and describe our policy more precisely as a war to defeat Al Qaeda and violent Islamic extremism?

2. In the Middle East, we see a paradox: Countries with pro-American governments like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have populations with high levels of anti-American sentiment. Meanwhile in Iran, whose government is hostile to the United States, public opinion of America is more favorable. How do you explain this, and what can we learn from it? Should the United States disentangle itself from autocratic regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt?

3. One of the most damaging legacies of the Iraq war is that it has given idealism and internationalism a bad name. How will you persuade the American people, and the world, that the United States can be a force for democracy and freedom?

— MICHAEL SANDEL, a professor of government at Harvard

Click here for the full post.

From Bill Kristol at The New York Times:

Barack Obama made news Sunday on ABC’s “This Week”: The White House dog will likely be a Labradoodle or a Portuguese water dog.

I’ve got to say I’m a little disappointed. These are nice, friendly, generally obedient breeds (or in the case of the Labradoodle, a crossbreed). But what a missed opportunity! Obama could have made a bolder, edgier choice, like a mini-Australian shepherd. I happen to know one well. He’s very smart, a bit neurotic, devoted to his master (if sometimes confused about whether he or the master is the master), and always looking for people to herd. A mini-Aussie would have fit right into a White House populated by Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, Joe Biden et al. Instead, Obama’s going with a no-drama canine alternative.

And he seems to be going for the no-dramatic-change-in-policy-in-the-White-House alternative as well. Consider Obama’s reaction when George Stephanopoulos played a clip of Dick Cheney counseling Obama not to implement his campaign rhetoric until he’s fully briefed on the details of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policy.

“I think that was pretty good advice, which is I should know what’s going on before we make judgments and that we shouldn’t be making judgments on the basis of incomplete information or campaign rhetoric. So I’ve got no quibble with that particular quote,” said Obama. Usually, presidents pretend their campaign positions are more than “campaign rhetoric.” Not Obama.

Click here for full post.

Tens of thousands of eligible voters have been removed from rolls or blocked from registering in at least six swing states, and the voters’ exclusion appears to violate federal law, according to a published report.

The New York Times based its findings on reviews of state records and Social Security data.

The Times said voters appear to have been purged by mistake and not because of any intentional violations by election officials or coordinated efforts by any party.

States have been trying to follow the Help America Vote Act of 2002 by removing the names of voters who should no longer be listed. But for every voter added to the rolls in the past two months in some states, election officials have removed two, a review of the records shows.

The newspaper said it identified apparent problems in Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina. It says some states are improperly using Social Security data to verify new voters’ registration applications, and others may have broken rules that govern removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election.

Democrats have been more aggressive at registering new voters this year, according to state election officials, so any closer screening of new applications may affect their party’s supporters disproportionately, the Times said.

The result is that on Election Day, voters who have been removed from the rolls could show up and be challenged by political party officials or election workers.

The six states seem to have violated federal law in two ways. Some are removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which is not allowed except when voters die, notify the authorities that they have moved out of state, or have been declared unfit to vote.

And some of the states are improperly using Social Security data to verify registration applications for new voters, the newspaper reported.

“Just as voting machines were the major issue that came out of the 2000 presidential election and provisional ballots were the big issue from 2004, voter registration and these statewide lists will be the top concern this year,” said Daniel P. Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University.