Recall Madonna Constantine, the Columbia University professor who made headlines last October after claiming to be a victim of a hate crime when she found a noose hanging from her door. At the time, it wasn’t public that Constantine was also under investigation for widespread plagiarism, charged with lifting others’ work without credit in numerous academic journal articles she bylined. So then it was thought that perhaps somebody sympathetic to Constantine, or Constantine herself, had placed the noose on her door to drum up sympathy for her, boning up her defense that she was the victim — of “structural racism that pervades this institution,” according to her own words.

An investigation was launched to encompass both matters and now, it seems, a conclusion:

CONTINUED »

• Hot off his album's huge debut week, Lil Wayne's forming a super group with T-Pain. Super? [NB]

• Is this what they mean by tears of a clown? [AHH]

• R. Kelly's lawyer felt compelled to tell Hannah Montana he's sorry for bring up her name during a sordid child porn trial. What, the makers of Little Man don't get an apology. [C&D]

• Noose shmoose. Racists have no creativity these days. [CST]

• Can the magic touch of Swizz Beatz resurrect Michael Jackson's career? In a word, no. [SP]

Wherein you, the readers, talk amongst yourselves.

What would you do/say if your white coworker came into the break room, showed you a homemade noose and said, "Are you ready?"

• Barack Obama is "grounding his lofty rhetoric in the more prosaic language of white-working-class discontent," and although I'm not sure what that means. I'm not sure I'm supposed to. [NYT]

• That Columbia professor who was a victim of a noose hanging (back when nooses were sweeping the nation), was also accused of plagiarizing from a bunch of other scholars, which makes some people suspicious about the origins of that noose. [NYM]

• Dammit, Google gets me every time. [MG]

• Alphonso Jackson, the recently resigned HUD secretary, blamed the the subprime mortgage crisis on Yuppies, Buppies, and Guppies. [QT]

• So this thing between Tracey Edmonds and Rocco DiSpirito is really happening, I guess. [CL]

As a rash of racist incidents and noose-hangings plagued the country late last year, I imagine G.W. Bush and his advisers sat around the Oval Office, twiddling their thumbs, saying, "Eh. Let's wait to address this until around the middle of Black History Month." And that's what they did.

Yesterday, Bush took his anti-noose stance public at a BHM event honoring Civil Rights hero John Lewis.

"The era of rampant lynching is a shameful chapter in American history," Bush said in an event marking African-American history month at the White house.

"The noose is not a symbol of prairie justice, but of gross injustice," the president said. "Displaying one is not a harmless prank, and lynching is not a word to be mentioned in jest. [Take that, Kelly Tilghman! -- Ed]"

Just so he never has to make this sort of speech again, Bush later took a firm stand against swastikas and those who insist on calling all Asian people Chinese. [MSNBC]

• Some (white) Southern Democrats "wish there was someone worth voting for." Hmmm. [NYT]

• I love it when Fox Newsies get all sappy about the Democratic race. [FOX]

• Racism is alive in El Paso, TX. Just so you know. [EPT]

• Nooses on a baseball field! America's pastime… [WP]

• Happy Black-History-Month-Although-Every-Month-Should-Be-Black-History-Month!

• Oprah and Dr. Christiane Northrup make their vaginas smile on national television. [Jezebel]

• Gary Coleman's pants sold for $400,000 on eBay. I don't know who is more pathetic, Gary Coleman for selling his pants or the guy who paid for them. [E!]

• The editor of a golf magazine got fired for ill-advisedly using a noose to illustrate the "lynch Tiger Woods" remarks made by a Golf Channel anchor, who, incidentally, was not fired. [Jossip]

• At this point, are that many people looking to listen to Prodigy's new album in one language, let alone 1,500? [Wired]

• Slim Shady's looking a little worse for the wear. [CB]

• Label me a skeptic, but I find it very hard to believe that Solange Knowles' new album is truly "bananas." [BB]

• Michael Vick's sentence might have been harsh, but it was for something he has admitted to doing. It's time for the NAACP to chill with its "the Feds care more about dogs than black people" bit. I'm not sure if they realize it, but their Vick protests are succeeding in making an organization look bad, but it's not federal law enforcement. [NBC12]

• Let's lay it on the table now — a noose is not always a symbol of racial intimidation. Sometimes it's a rope with knots in it. [BG]

• A group of fatherly black men just want to give Dog Chapman a big hug. No, really! [BT]

• Naomi Campbell gets what's coming to her. [SB]

• It's time for the kids to start leaving Santa carrot sticks instead of cookies on Christmas Eve. [BH]

• Colleges love their forums. If only they really worked. [CBS3]

• The Feds pledge to help Connecticut law enforcement track down the people responsible for noose-hangings. [TD]

• I'm sure Xzibit will think of some special, X-related way to let everyone know he was cast in the new X-Files movie. [Reuters]

• Vivica Fox sucked it up and turned herself in to the authorities. [People]

• Karith Foster, Don Imus' new black female sidekick, tries to put sellout accusations to rest. [SB]

• U.S. News & World Report says, "Sometimes Halloween Costumes Aren't Funny; They're Racially Insensitive." There's a more succinct way to put that. [USN]

• On top of everything else Barry Bonds has done, he's now pitting black and white fans against each other. There should be a federal investigation! Oh… [ESPN]

• Banning nooses doesn't ban racism. [LADN]

]• A man is riding a horse across country, visiting HBCUs to raise awareness about the "black experience." Poor horse — in a variety of ways, that's a lot of ground to cover. [WBKO]

• This study is about black people and social networking, but I couldn't really get past the term "African American-fluentials." [BW]

• Connecticut plans to "crack down" on nooses. How? By requiring background checks before people can purchase rope? [AP]

• If at first you don't succeed, then try, try a forum. [CP

• The Jena Six is on Essence's list of the 25 most influential people, along with Beyonce, Rev. Al, and Barack Obama. [PR]

• A white man's being persecuted for a crime a black man committed? Well, that's a twist on an age-old theme. [WFTV]

• South African airline Comair is being accused of racism by critics who say they failed to hire black cabin crew members because they couldn't swim. [SABC]

• Plastic surgery really shouldn't kill you. [HP]

• Seriously, with the nooses? There are so many other racist symbols out there. Go to a library or something. [NOTP]

The man charged with vandalizing Tupac Shakur's Center for the Arts in Dekalb, Ga. and throwing a noose around his statue is 43 years old and African American, meaning he is both old enough and black enough to have known better than to do something stupid and hateful like that. That's not to imply that a white teenager shouldn't have also known better. I'm just saying. [SOHH]