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Four years after Don Imus slurred the Rutger’s women’s basketball team, he was at it again with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. Midway into their jocular back and forth about the wedding of Wallace’s daughter in Mexico City, he referred to Mexican conceptual artist Miguel Calderón as “Cheech and Chong.” While I haven’t confirmed it yet, it appears that this is the Miguel Calderón in question. He has shown his work at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Guggenheim, and is represented by Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York. This series of videos explains his playfully indulgent conceptualism, as well as his roots in Mexico City, one of the world’s great metropolitan cities.This is not to say that Cheech and Chong were not great conceptual artists themselves, but it seems obvious that Imus cannot conceive of someone who is not of European descent as a complex creative individual with a broad range of influences that cannot be reduced to a crude stereotype. It’s also kind of strange just how under the radar this incident has been considering the huge uproar over the admittedly more egregious “nappy headed ho” slur. Chris Wallace showed himself to be his wishy-washy smirking self by momentarily objecting to the slur, yet continuing on to pal around with this ignorant fossil.

Decadence in Full Swing

The day after the debt-ceiling ripoff, the stock market plunges and there are revelations that extremely expensive luxury items are flying off the shelves at the same time that Walmart is practically giving stuff away. We’re talking $2500 suede boots and $1650 facial cream. It’s amazing how the whole country seems to be hypnotized by the idea that the poor and the government is ripping them off.

Ironic Moment of the Week

While explaining the genesis of Mayor Bloomberg’s attempt to leave a lasting legacy as a humanist by starting a special program (co-funded by George Soros) to help black and Latino youth, this New York Times storybrings us to the light-bulb pop that did it for Mike:

Mr. Bloomberg urged his aides to study the experiences of black and Latino men in 2010. The aides said he was especially surprised and unsettled by statistics showing how frequently many of the men returned to the city’s prisons…

So you’re telling us that someone who has hired less minorities to serve in his administration than Giuliani did, who hired a spin-doctor DC lawyer to run the public schools into the ground to provide fertile ground for bogus charter schools to swoop in, who presided over a police department that engaged in a massive stop and frisk operation that unjustly criminalized thousands of black and Latino youth–this guy was “especially surprised and unsettled” by statistics that showed a high rate of crime recidivism among said youth?

Who wrote this press release?