It’s Come to this: Cupcakes are being called Racist

This is not a joke. Politically Correct Idiots are ruining America. Now chocolate cupcakes, aka baked goods, are called racists.

The Source.com:

Bakery goods maker Duncan Hines has decided to open up its marketing doors to just about anyone these days. In their new website and YouTube promotion they’re giving various artists and directors the chance to create Duncan Hines commercials which will be promoted and sent out online. If their first ad is any indicator I won’t be buying Duncan Hines products for a long time.

The first ad, by director Josh Binder, is called “Hip-Hop Cupcakes” and features a bunch of plain cupcakes that suddenly start to sing and beat-box once the chocolate glaze is poured on top of them….That’s right. Chocolate glaze makes the cupcakes rap-stars. The problems with this ad are almost too numerous to point out but there are at least a few things that any self-respecting member of the Hip-Hop community should be annoyed by.

First, they aren’t even rapping! If you’re going to have inanimate food objects make music then they should at least have a real song or beat. Who doesn’t have fond memories of the California Raisins? The first cupcake starts to beat box, sort of, and then the rest of the them just start humming in some weird autotune music mix.

Second, the whole concept just falls flat if the intent is to appeal to Hip-Hop fans or even young people. The cupcakes aren’t cool, they don’t talk, no one spits a rhyme and worse they just look like smashed pale toads. Actually even toads would make more appealing pitchmen than weird Claymation cupcakes. This ad would have been a great opportunity to get someone from the Hip-Hop community as a spokesperson. As each cupcake gets a glaze couldn’t you just see Drake doing a voiceover:  “You Fancy Huh?”

Finally the racial component can’t be overlooked. It doesn’t matter that they’re cupcakes; the fact that they start rapping isn’t too far a stretch from making them in blackface. If the icing was in different flavors, or the lips weren’t so big and pink maybe we could give the ad a pass, but as it stands it’s a pretty poorly constructed and potentially racist ad I’m the last person to be overly sensitive to media images, but the frothy mix of chocolate skinned cupcakes, bad Hip-Hop and a long media history of depicting stereotypical black people to sell food give me reason to question the intent if not the effect of this ad.

Wonder how the author feels about driving on black tar roads? Or what pops into his head when he sees the image of a white sock being placed into a black sneaker? That has to be symbolic of some sort of racism no doubt. I bet this guy hyperventilates when he see a white person eating a peppermint patty or snicker bar.

He would probably commit suicide if he saw someone eating Smores. The brown graham cracker followed by a chocolate bar that is smothered with a white marshmallow. That is total racism.

H/T to Weasel Zippers

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Obama cut-and runs. Leaves Clinton to Sell Tax-Rate Deal

Whose the President in this video? Obama has the nerve to cut-and-run so he could attend a Christmas Party with his wife. Instead of concentrating on the economy and allowing everyone to keep their tax rates, Obama headed out to party it up. Again, Obama is over his head and continues to look weak.

The Associated Press reports:

Obama introduced Clinton lightly as “the other guy” and recalled how Clinton has overseen heady economic times. Obama warned that he wouldn’t be staying long – another White House Christmas party was waiting, as was his wife, Michelle.

And so it became clear pretty quickly that this was Clinton’s show.

“I feel awkward being here, and now you’re going to leave me all by myself,” Clinton said from the stage of the White House briefing room.

Usually its golf, but Obama will drop everything to attend a party.

Not that awkward.

Clinton comfortably outlined how the pending package of tax cuts, business incentives and unemployment benefits would boost the economy – even though it included tax help for the wealthy that Obama had to swallow.

It’s really sad that the current President has to turn to a previous President to sell his deal. Imagine if Bush 43 had brought in Bush 41 to sell a deal. The media would have slaughtered him.

“There’s never a perfect bipartisan bill in the eyes of a partisan,” Clinton said. “But I really believe this will be a significant net-plus for the country.

“When he finished his pitch, Clinton played the role of humble guy, saying, “So, for whatever it’s worth, that’s what I think.”

“It’s worth a lot,” Obama insisted.

Clinton was asked what advice he had for Obama, given the context of the times: the current president has to deal with a Republican Party that just won a convincing victory in the midterm election and will soon grab control of the House. Clinton faced the same halfway through his embattled first term in 1994, worked some major deals with the opposing party and rebounded to re-election.

“I have a general rule,” Clinton said, “which is that whatever he asked me about my advice, and whatever I say should become public only if he decides to make it public.” Obama didn’t provide that permission, saying: “I’ve been keeping the First Lady waiting for about half an hour, so I’m going to take off.”

The ‘great orator’ was outshined by Bubba. How’s that for the hope and change sheeple?

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The “Pigford” Fraud on the American Taxpayer

I have written several articles about the Pigford scandal. I found this article and it goes into more detail than others I’ve read, so I thought I would share it with those who are sick and tired of the taxpayers being screwed by the government who uses our tax dollars to pay for these scams.

Abraxas reports, via Undercoverage.com:

On December 12, 1996, a handful of black farmers, led by John Boyd (founder of the “National Black Farmers Association”) gathered on the frozen grass of Lafayette Park across from the White House to protest what they claimed was widespread racial discrimination by the USDA against black farmers.  This protest prompted President Clinton to pressure then Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman to investigate if these claims were true.

Glickman promptly suspended all government farm foreclosures pending the outcome of a ‘listening tour’ the following month (January 1997) in which Civil Rights Actions Teams (“CRAT”) traveled across the country gathering information on whether the black farmers’ claims were true.  While the investigation discovered that only 205 claims (two-tenths of one percent) out of a total of 116,261 loans and crop payments issued by the USDA’s Farm Service Agency had triggered complaints by black farmers, the 120-page report (“Civil Rights at the United States Department of Agriculture”) stated there was widespread discrimination against black farmers.    

In August 1997, black farmer Timothy Pigford of North Carolina filed “Pigford v. Glickman” in the U.S. District Court.[1]  (A second lawsuit was filed by another black farmer from North Carolina named Cecil Brewington.  Both cases were subsequently joined together as simply “Pigford”.)  The suit initially listed 400 black farmers but the number quickly grew to more than 2,000.

Now it’s up to 94,000 claims. 400 to 94,000 and our government knows about this fraud.        

In response to the lawsuit, the Department of Justice requested a stay (halt of the proceedings) in order to investigate each claim individually.  But U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman (a Clinton appointee) put a stop to the DOJ’s investigation by certifying “Pigford” as a class action lawsuit on October 9, 1998.  The judge then set a trial date of February 1, 1999.

The certification of “Pigford” as a class action case made the USDA vulnerable to huge monetary payouts; however, the USDA had two means of preventing this: sovereign immunity and the statute of limitations. 

The USDA was granted sovereign immunity by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as the Fair Housing Act and the Rehabilitation Act.  But, unfortunately for the USDA, nearly two years earlier[2] Clinton’s Assistant Attorney General Walter Dellinger had removed that immunity when he reinterpreted a different act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, to allow civil rights litigants to receive “monetary relief, including compensatory damages, attorneys’ fees, and costs, but not subject to any specific cap…”[3]   

This finding left the USDA with just one protection: the statute of limitations.  The limit in the case of the USDA was two years, meaning a claimant had to file a lawsuit within two years of the alleged act of discrimination.  However, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus – Rep. Eva Clayton (D-NC) – authored a request for a waiver (tailoring the request to apply specifically to the “Pigford” case) and in 1998 Congress approved the waiving of the two year limit in regards to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.    

This waiver, however, has subsequently been found to be unconstitutional, as shown by the United States Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in “Stogner v. California”.  However, because “Pigford” is supported by powerful interests in Congress, to date, no effort has been made to use that Supreme Court ruling to overturn the time waiver in “Pigford”.

Shortly after losing its waiver protection, the USDA announced it would settle and Judge Friedman issued a consent decree on April 14, 1999. 

At this point, it is worthwhile to study the language Judge Friedman used in his consent decree.  “Forty acres and a mule. As the Civil War drew to a close, the United States government created the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide assistance to former slaves. The government promised to sell or lease to farmers parcels of unoccupied land and land that had been confiscated by the Union during the war, and it promised the loan of a federal government mule to plow that land.”  Judge Friedman then relates how the government subsequently broke that promise, thus instilling amongst African Americans “a well-founded and deep-seated mistrust of the USDA. A mistrust borne of a long history of racial discrimination. A mistrust that is well-deserved.”

The term “forty acres and a mule” is the universally accepted language denoting slave reparations.  By using such language, Friedman made it clear he viewed “Pigford” as no longer a case involving discrimination against black farmers but instead as one now involving discrimination against every African American citizen.  As a result, the true cost of this lawsuit would potentially be not in the billions but trillions of dollars, the amount necessary to reimburse African Americans for a “long history of racial discrimination”.    

Judge Friedman divided the consent decree into two parts: “Track A” and “Track B”.  Track A claimants were limited to $50,000 apiece, plus relief from outstanding loans and tax liability; but the proof of discrimination was exceptionally low.  Track B claimants had no cap on claims; however, they were required to produce extensive documentation of discrimination.  (Not surprisingly, 99% of claimants opted for Track A.)

Once the consent degree was finalized, Judge Friedman released $450,000 for advertisement of the “Pigford” settlement.  “Quarter-page ads were ordered in 26 general circulation newspapers and 100 black-oriented papers over a two-week period in January 1999.  A full-page ad was placed in all editions of TV Guide for an 18-state region, a half-page in Jet magazine, 44 commercials on Black Entertainment Television, and 18 on the Cable News Network.”[4]

Within a month, 15,000 telephone inquiries were received by the USDA in response to these ads. By 2002, the number would peak at 138,911 inquiries for requests forms to file a claim – nearly seven times the amount of black farmers in America. 

It was at this time that rumors of malfeasance began to arise.  The Oregon contractor, Poorman-Douglas, hired by the USDA, reported that some African Americans “tried to certify young children as aggrieved parties. Husband-wife couples applied separately in hopes of double compensation for the same act. And a number of deceased persons “claimed” their reward, with surviving family and relatives filing on their behalf.”[5]

In another instance, an individual called Daniel Anew (an administrator at Elizabeth City State University) attended a meeting in Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 1999 where he heard about Track A of the “Pigford” lawsuit.  Mr. Anew thereupon hooked up with a fellow university official named Emma Brooks (who also was not a farmer) and the both of them began filing false claims which ultimately totaled $400,000.  The scam was subsequently discovered and both were sentenced to prison time and restitution in 2005.[6]

In one tragic case, the mutilated corpse of a man named Clovis Reed was discovered in Simpson County, Mississippi in 2003.  Reed had been murdered by Kathleen Nelson and her boyfriend, Roosevelt Walker, after they discovered that Reed was a government informant who was about to expose Nelson and Walker’s embezzlement of Track A money which both had received in “Pigford”.[7] 

Continue reading about this scam being paid for by YOU, THE TAXPAYER

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DHS confirms cheaper to deport every illegal alien than allowing them to stay

Why didn’t Obama’s Deficit Commission put this in their report?

David Gibson reports, via The Examiner:

On December 3, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs, Nelson Peacock, responding to request from several U.S. Senators, including Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), wrote: “Our conservative estimate suggests that ICE would require a budget of more than $135 billion to apprehend, detain and remove the nation’s entire illegal immigrant population.”

In July 2010, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) released the results of a study which examined the costs of illegal immigration at the federal, state and local levels. The study found that U.S. state and local governments shell out $84.2 billion annually in various services (law enforcement, schools, social services, etc.), with California taxpayers alone, spending $21 billion on illegal aliens every year.

The same study found that $29 billion is spent every year in federal funds on illegal aliens.

So, while it would cost a one-time fee of about $135 billion to deport every single illegal alien in the country, it is actually a bargain considering the fact that it already costs us $113 billion annually to keep them here.

In other words, the mass deportation would pay for itself in a little over a year.

But Democrats want to grant these illegal immigrants amnesty so they can fill their voter registers with more criminals.

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November federal budget deficit highest on record

Another record budget deficit for Democrats. Now you know why they’re fighting to raise taxes on all of us (if they defeat the Obama-Republican deal…all our taxes go up). Someone has to pay for their record spending sprees.

From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal budget deficit rose to $150.4 billion last month, the largest November gap on record. And the government’s deficits are set to climb higher if Congress passes a tax-cut plan that’s estimated to cost $855 billion over two years.

Keeping the tax rates the same does not add to the deficit. Spending more money they you take in adds to the deficit.

The Treasury Department says November’s budget gap was 25 percent more than the deficit in November 2009.

For the first two months of the current budget year, which began Oct. 1, the deficit totals $290.8 billion. That’s 2 percent less than for the same period a year ago. And economists had been estimating that the full-year deficit would decline after two years of record highs.

But analysts say the tax deal President Barack Obama reached with Republicans this week will give the 2011 budget year the largest deficit in history – $1.5 trillion, according to economists at JPMorgan Chase. It would mark the third straight year of trillion-dollar-plus deficits.

Under the tax-cut plan, JPMorgan economist Michael Feroli said he expects a $1.5 trillion deficit this year to be followed by a $1.2 trillion gap in 2012.

Many economists had expected Congress to extend the tax cuts that were enacted in 2001 and 2003. And they had included those extensions in their deficit forecasts for coming years. But they hadn’t factored in other parts of the tax-cut plan, notably a 2 percentage-point cut in workers’ Social Security tax for next year. That will cost the government an additional $112 billion over the next year.

Again, taking less out of our checks does not add to the deficit. The government counts this money as lost revenue but continue to spend more money than it takes in.

Before the tax-cut agreement, many economists forecast that the deficits would decline gradually in coming years. The Wall Street firms that serve as primary dealers for the government’s debt auctions estimated last month that the 2011 deficit would dip to $1.21 trillion and to $1.02 trillion in 2012.

The deficit for the 2009 budget year is the all-time high: $1.42 trillion. The second-highest is the $1.29 trillion deficit for the 2010 budget year, which ended Sept. 30.

The AP can’t tell us what the 2011 budget would be because the Democrats never passed one. They didn’t want to pass another trillion-dollar plus budget before the November elections.

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Figures…Liberals are easily distracted

What would you expect from a group who fell for a smooth talker with catchy campaign slogans?

ScienceDaily.com reports:

It goes without saying that conservatives and liberals don’t see the world in the same way. Now, research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln suggests that is exactly, and quite literally, the case.

In a new study, UNL researchers measured both liberals’ and conservatives’ reaction to “gaze cues” — a person’s tendency to shift attention in a direction consistent with another person’s eye movements, even if it’s irrelevant to their current task – and found big differences between the two groups.

Liberals responded strongly to the prompts, consistently moving their attention in the direction suggested to them by a face on a computer screen. Conservatives, on the other hand, did not.

In other words, Liberals have short attention spans and are easily distracted (tricked) from their tasks. Typical.

Why? Researchers suggested that conservatives’ value on personal autonomy might make them less likely to be influenced by others, and therefore less responsive to the visual prompts.

This is why conservatives are usually leaders and liberals tend to be followers.

“We thought that political temperament may moderate the magnitude of gaze-cuing effects, but we did not expect conservatives to be completely immune to these cues,” said Michael Dodd, a UNL assistant professor of psychology and the lead author of the study.

Liberals may have followed the “gaze cues,” meanwhile, because they tend to be more responsive to others, the study suggests.

“This study basically provides one more piece of evidence that liberals and conservatives perceive the world, and process information taken in from that world, in different ways,” said Kevin Smith, UNL professor of political science and one of the study’s authors.

“Understanding exactly why people have such different political perspectives and where those differences come from may help us better understand the roots of a lot of political conflict.”

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Obama honors Nobel winner with statement about himself

We are lucky he walks among us.

Byron York writes, via The Washington Examiner:

There was an extraordinary scene at the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo Friday morning.  The prize went to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was barred by the Chinese government from attending the ceremony.  It was the first time since 1935 — when the prize went to a winner imprisoned in one of Adolf Hitler’s concentration camps — that the Peace Prize winner or his repesentative did not appear personally to accept the award.* Liu’s absence was symbolized by an empty chair on stage.

So on this notable occasion, the White House released a statement from President Obama on the awarding of the prize to Liu in absentia. And this is how Obama’s statement began:

One year ago, I was humbled to receive the Nobel Peace Prize — an award that speaks to our highest aspirations, and that has been claimed by giants of history and courageous advocates who have sacrificed for freedom and justice.

Received a prize for doing absolutely nothing. Now if it were for teleprompter reading, Obama’s a winner hands-down.

Critics have often said of Obama that “it’s all about him,” that he has a tendency to reference himself no matter what subject he is discussing.  Could he do any more to prove them right?  But just to show that he is, in fact, humble, the president followed his opening sentence with this:

Mr. Liu Xiaobo is far more deserving of this award than I was.

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FAA Missing Records For 119,000 Aircraft

Our government regulators at work!

From the The Associated Press:

NEW YORK – The Federal Aviation Administration is missing key information on who owns one-third of the 357,000 private and commercial aircraft in the U.S. — a gap the agency fears could be exploited by terrorists and drug traffickers.

The records are in such disarray that the FAA says it is worried that criminals could buy planes without the government’s knowledge, or use the registration numbers of other aircraft to evade new computer systems designed to track suspicious flights. It has ordered all aircraft owners to re-register their planes in an effort to clean up its files.

About 119,000 of the aircraft on the U.S. registry have “questionable registration” because of missing forms, invalid addresses, unreported sales or other paperwork problems, according to the FAA. In many cases, the FAA cannot say who owns a plane or even whether it is still flying or has been junked.

Already there have been cases of drug traffickers using phony U.S. registration numbers, as well as instances of mistaken identity in which police raided the wrong plane because of faulty record-keeping.

Wait until your health care records are in the care of the federal regulators. Don’t worry…the government is great at keeping our information safe. Just ask WikiLeaks.

Next year, the FAA will begin canceling the registration certificates of all 357,000 aircraft and require owners to register anew, a move that is causing grumbling among airlines, banks and leasing companies. Notices went out to the first batch of aircraft owners last month.

Nobody ever said the government was efficient or effective. But you can trust them with your vital information. Wink!

“We have identified some potential risk areas, but I think we’re trying to eliminate as much risk as possible through the re-registration process,” said FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown.

The FAA says security isn’t the only reason it needs an up-to-date registry. Regulators use it to contact owners about safety problems, states rely on it to charge sales tax and some airports employ it to bill for landing fees. Also, rescuers use the database to track down planes that are missing.

It’s all about collecting those taxes. Who cares about security?

But the FAA has emphasized the security and law enforcement angle as the new measure has moved through the rule-making process over the past two years. The agency says the paperwork gap is becoming a bigger problem as authorities increasingly rely on computers to tighten aviation security in the wake of 9/11 and other terrorist plots.

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The Obama Stimulus Impact? Zero

By the Obama administration’s own standards, their stimulus failed. Need more proof? The Bush tax cut extension.

Do people think Obama would’ve agreed to continue the Bush tax rates if his stimulus were successful? The answer is no. If his $814 billion dollar stimulus kept unemployment below 8% and created jobs, we would not be having this discussion of extending the Bush tax rates in 2011.

Keynesian economics has once again been proven a failed economic philosophy.

Hoover.org reports:

For the past two years, economists writing on these pages and elsewhere have debated the merits of federal stimulus programs. President Obama’s compromise on the Bush tax cuts this week might be seen as at least partial recognition that keeping marginal tax rates from rising across the board is the best stimulus now, especially if the deal leads eventually to making the cuts permanent. The economic data rolling in confirm that recent temporary, targeted stimulus programs have not worked, and that their enactment was a triumph of Keynesian wishful-thinking over practical experience.

In September 2009, we reported on this page empirical research showing that the temporary tax rebates and transfer payments in the Bush and Obama administration’s stimulus programs were ineffective. Here we consider new data on the impact of increases in government purchases, which were heralded as a major stimulating factor in the Obama package.

The key tenet of Keynesian economics is that government purchases of goods and services stimulate additional economic activity beyond the amount of the purchase itself. The impact on GDP of the stimulus depends both on the dollar volume of additional government purchases and on the size of the government purchases multiplier, i.e., the effect of a change in government purchases on real GDP.

Although the policy debate has mainly focused on the multiplier’s size, data covering the first year and three quarters of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) show that, despite the large size of the program, the dollar volume of additional government purchases that it has generated has been negligible.

The ARRA attempted to stimulate government purchases in two ways. First, it provided funds to finance federal government purchases of goods and services; mainly for infrastructure, law enforcement and education. Second, it provided grants to states and local governments to enable them to increase purchases of similar goods and services.

Recently released Commerce Department data show that of the $862 billion stimulus package, the change in government purchases at the federal level has, thus far, been extremely small. From the first quarter of 2009 through the third quarter of 2010, government purchases have increased by only 3% of the $862 billion ($24 billion). Infrastructure spending increased by an even smaller amount: $4 billion. In a $14 trillion economy, these amounts are immaterial.

The Commerce Department also provides data on ARRA grants to state and local governments and the amount of purchases by these governments. According to these data, state and local government purchases of goods and services did not increase at all in response to the large federal stimulus grants. These purchases have remained slightly below their pre-ARRA level since the fourth quarter of 2008.

Meanwhile, state and local revenues fueled by the receipt of ARRA grants have grown by 10% over the same period. The low level of state and local purchases is consistent with the initial fall-off and subsequent slow growth in revenues excluding ARRA grants. Our statistical analysis shows that, once revenues are controlled for, ARRA grants have no statistically significant impact on state and local government purchases.

The absence of any discernible impact of federal grants on state and local government purchases should come as no surprise to students of U.S. fiscal policy history. In 1979, the late Ned Gramlich, former governor of the Federal Reserve Board and University of Michigan professor, studied the impact of similar grants in stimulus packages of the late 1970s. He found that the federal grants to state and local governments had little effect on their purchases of goods and services.

Therefore, Gramlich concluded, “The general idea of stimulating the economy through state and local governments is probably not a very good one. Plain old permanent federal income tax cuts retain their superiority as a fiscal stabilization device.”

So where did ARRA’s state and local grant money go? While some of it increased transfer payments to individuals in the form of welfare and Medicaid, the major part was simply used to reduce borrowing. As ARRA grants increased, net borrowing by state and local governments decreased. In the third quarter of 2010, for example, state and local governments received $132 billion in stimulus grants at an annual rate. In that quarter they borrowed $136 billion less at an annualized rate than they had in the fourth quarter of 2008, even though their revenues from all other sources were only $76 billion higher.

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Sherrod: White House Ordered Me Fired; Obama Can’t ‘Fully Grasp’ Civil Rights Struggle (Video)

The reason Shirley Sherrod was fired was because Obama didn’t want the Pigford/black farmer scandal to be exposed to the taxpayers.

In an interview with radio host Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, Shirley Sherrod said she believed that the order to fire her came from the White House, not from Sec. of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, as Vilsack has claimed.

She also revealed that in her private discussion with President Obama following her firing, the President advised Ms. Sherrod to read his book to prove that he understood the civil rights struggle in America. Ms. Sherrod has still not read the President’s book.

H/T to Breitbart.tv

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