'Picaninny' sign appeared in previous Hope Mills July 4th parade

Images from the Hope Mills Area Chamber of Commerce show a controversial float carrying watermelons and a derogatory advertisement has been featured in previous Fourth of July parades.

The float initially came under fire when parade watchers took offense to two tractors that flew Confederate battle flags behind them. One of the tractors also pulled a trailer full of watermelons with a sign that read, "WHITE HISTORY MONTH HUG WTE PPL."

A historical advertisement was also affixed to the front of the trailer, depicting a caricature of a black child eating a watermelon along with the words "Picaninny Freeze" and "A pal for your palate."

In southern states, the term "picaninny" was used to refer to the children of black slaves and later black citizens.

According to photos from the Hope Mills Area Chamber of Commerce, this was not the first year the advertisement was used in the July 4th parade.

In 2011, a trailer carrying watermelons also featured the same "Picaninny" sign along with a flag that is an amalgamation of the Confederate battle flag and North Carolina state flag.

Kenny Bullock, who is the director of Parks and Recreation for Hope Mills and is responsible for organizing the parade, said he received complaints about the signs in this year's parade. He said some parade watchers felt the parade unit contained racist overtones.

Parade watcher Alicia Jones said the float was blatantly offensive, saying she was watching the parade with her son and she was surprised by the implied message.

"At that time his innocence was broken, and I had to sit there in the parade and explain to my son what that meant -- what all those signs meant -- at 7 years old," Jones said. "I mean it really caught me off-guard."

Town Commissioner Pat Edwards, however, said she did not know the "Picaninny" sign was in the parade this year. She said no one complained about it in the past.

She said she's familiar with the image used on vintage-style signs, and doesn't find it personally offensive.

"It's not more offensive than Aunt Jemima in the grocery store," Edwards said. "So where do you draw the line?"

Edwards said she wishes the "white history" signs had not been displayed because she understands how some people would be offended.

Bullock said farmer Donnie Spell applied for the entry in the parade. He listed eight to 10 antique tractors and a trailer of watermelons for sale would be included in the parade. There was no mention of the signs, Bullock said.

Bullock said he heard about the signs just before the parade. But he could not find Spell at the time, so he asked Spell's daughter-in-law to ask Spell to take down the signs.

Bullock said he believes the signs were removed and put back up later.

Spell regularly showed his tractors and confederate flags in the town's parades, town commissioner Pat Edwards said.

Bullock said the previous entries were allowed as free speech. However, he said the "White History Month" sign combined with the other elements of the parade entry went too far.

Mayor Jackie Warner said she did not think the parade was the appropriate venue to display the signs and watermelon trailer. She said the parade is intended to be family friendly, and is not meant to be a forum.

People running for political office are discouraged from being in the parade.

Following up on the controversy stirred by the float, town leaders are expected to discuss potential new guidelines for parades at the next Hope Mills commissioners meeting.

"If there's something that needs to be changed, we're going to have to be bold enough to say, 'Hey, that can't fly. That can't go,'" Warner said. "That's something that [is] giving the people that are in charge the authority to make those decisions, but we don't have that in writing. We don't have that as a policy.

"We have to come up with the guidelines."

Without any current policies, Warner said Spell cannot be penalized in any way. She said it may have been a good idea for Bullock to follow-up before the parade, but because there is no policy about parade entries, Bullock did not violate any duty of his job.

"The accountability now lies on making sure this doesn't happen again," Warner said.

Edwards and Warner said they do not think Spell intended to be malicious, just to express his views. They said he has done many good things for the town of Hope Mills.

When reached at his farm Monday, Spell did not have any comment on his parade entry.

Amazon.com sells the "Picaninny" advertisement for $10.74.

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Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/52442460/ns/local_news-raleigh_nc/

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GOP-led House seeks to punish IRS with budget cuts

By ANDREW TAYLOR Associated Press on Jul 10, 2013, at 2:28 AM??Updated on 7/10/13 at 3:18 AM

WASHINGTON - The GOP-controlled House unveiled slashing cuts to the budget of the Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday, punishing the beleaguered agency after it targeted tea party groups and other nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status.

The agency's 2014 budget would be cut by $3 billion, or 24 percent below levels approved in March. Also, 10 percent of its budget for tax enforcement would be fenced off until the IRS implements recommendations by an agency watchdog designed to prevent further abuses.

The IRS cuts come after a wave of bad publicity for the agency, including questionable spending on conferences like a lavish $4.1 million event in 2010 that included a "Star Trek" video parody and a $17,000 payment to a motivational speaker who was a painter. President Barack Obama had requested a $1 billion increase for the IRS.

"Right now I can't think of a federal agency in a worse position to ask for more money," said Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas.

The Appropriations Committee also revealed cuts to NASA, White House salaries, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The full House took up a $30.4 billion measure funding the Energy Department and water projects that is about $3 billion below levels enacted earlier this year. Democrats protested cuts to clean and renewable energy programs.

Democrats controlling a Senate panel, meanwhile, went in a wholly opposite direction in giving a $1.3 billion increase to a Health and Human Services Department account responsible for implementing Obama's signature health care law.

At issue are the annual spending bills funding the day-to-day operations of federal agencies. The GOP-controlled House and Democratic-led Senate are acting as if on different planets, with the Senate ignoring deep automatic spending cuts and the House promising even more punishing cuts to domestic programs while restoring cuts to the Pentagon.

The House is drafting spending bills in line with a $967 billion "cap" required by automatic cuts that took effect in March after Washington failed to agree on an alternative mix of tax increases and cuts elsewhere in the $3.5 trillion federal budget. The Senate is writing bills to a $1.058 trillion cap, almost a full 10 percent higher. But the House GOP cuts to domestic programs are greatly magnified by a $41 billion shift from nondefense programs like NASA, education and research on renewable energy to the Pentagon.

The results are night-and-day differences between the House and Senate spending bills illustrated most dramatically by a $164 billion Senate measure unveiled Tuesday by liberal Democrat Tom Harkin of Iowa. The measure, which funds education, health and labor programs, is a full 26 percent more generous to such programs than an as-yet-unreleased House version and provides an almost 5 percent increase over levels enacted in March.

So even as advocates for the poor worry about budget cuts forcing poor preschoolers from Head Start, the Senate measure promises to increase the program by $1.6 billion, or about 20 percent. Health research would win a small increase, as would Title I grants to help educate disadvantaged school children.

Republicans say the Senate bills are filled with empty promises. Even if they were enacted over GOP opposition, they would be subject to across-the-board cuts known as sequestration that would bring them down to the $967 billion level embraced by Republicans. Sequestration is required because Congress and Obama have failed to follow up a 2011 budget pact with deficit cuts other than a bitterly fought tax increase on upper-bracket earners.

Democrats counter that Republicans are offering empty promises - to defense hawks upset by sequestration. The House GOP increases to the Pentagon would be automatically rolled back through sequestration, as would Senate Democrats' efforts to increase domestic programs.

By contrast, the House measures revealed Tuesday are laced with painful cuts. While the FBI is exempted, NASA would absorb an almost $1 billion cut below 2013 levels. Spending on federal buildings would be cut $2.4 billion below Obama's request.

US & World

Bombing suspect heads to 1st public court hearing

Survivors of the Boston Marathon bombing will watch as the young man who could face the death penalty for the attack appears in court for the first time since he was found bleeding and hiding in a boat in a suburb days after the April 15 explosion.

GOP redistricting success may hurt immigration push

Republicans' knack for congressional redistricting helps them control the U.S. House, but it may be working against them on immigration changes that national GOP leaders see as critical to the next presidential election.

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Source: http://www.tulsaworld.com/article.aspx/GOP_led_House_seeks_to_punish_IRS_with_budget_cuts/20130710_13_A3_WASHIN453964?rss_lnk=16

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Members of Basehor VFW Post No. 11499 wave to parade-goers near the end of the parade route.

Members of Basehor VFW Post No. 11499 wave to parade-goers near the end of the parade route.

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Source: http://www.bonnersprings.com/photos/2013/jul/05/52510/

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Office Advancement vs. Home Duties - NYTimes.com

In an article on Monday, I wrote about the choices faced by middle-class working mothers, who typically don?t have the resources to hire nannies and other support to help them ?lean in? at the office. But one of the striking things I came across in my reporting was that a majority of working parents, men as well as women, don?t actually want more responsibilities at the office.

About every five years the Families and Work Institute conducts its National Study of the Changing Workforce, which surveys employed men and women about work and family roles. One of the questions is, ?Thinking about your plans for the future, do you want to move to a job with less responsibility, stay at your current level of responsibility, or move to a job with more responsibility??

Here are numbers that they pulled from their data set at my request:

As you can see, in 2008, 39 percent of mothers of children under 18 said they wanted jobs with greater responsibility. The share was 44 percent for fathers. For whatever reason, the share has been falling steadily for fathers, down from 64 percent in 1992. For women the share dipped between 1992 and 2003 and then barely edged back up in 2008, but it is still well below its level in 1992. Maybe this reflects a generational value shift. Maybe advances in telecommunications (e-mail, smartphones) mean people are already working during non-traditional work hours more than they would like to.

But perhaps one of the reasons why men in particular are not itching for more responsibility at work is that gender roles have been changing, and men have been taking on more duties at home.

The National Study of the Changing Workforce, in fact, found that a higher share of fathers in 2008 said they took on at least equal responsibilities for child care than did so in 1992. (Taking responsibility for child care was defined as providing one-on-one care as well as managing child care arrangements.)

Women affirm that men are taking on more child care today than in the past, but there seems to be some quibbling between the genders about what exactly constitutes ?equally? shared responsibilities. The survey found that there were many more fathers who said they were handling most of the child care or sharing the duties equally than there were mothers who said their spouses or partners were handling most or equal shares of child care.

There was a similar discrepancy between men?s and women?s responses about cooking. About 67 percent of women say they do ?most? of the cooking, while 55 percent of men say they take at least an equal share.

The difference in opinion was even bigger when it comes to cleaning. A significantly larger share of men say take on at least an equal share of housecleaning duties in 2008 than in 1992, but women do not report any change over that period.

The Families and Work Institute report containing these survey findings concludes: ?Whatever the precise objective degree of responsibility men are assuming for various aspects of family work, it has clearly become more socially acceptable for men to be and to say they are involved in child care, cooking and cleaning over the past three decades than it was in the past!?

Source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/office-advancement-vs-home-duties/

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Google Doodle celebrates 66th anniversary of Roswell UFO incident

Reuters

London: Search engine giant Google commemorates the 66th anniversary of the Roswell UFO incident which took place back in 1947.

Generations of UFO enthusiasts along with conspiracy theorists have claimed that US military had captured a crashed alien aircraft outside Roswell in July 1947, but authorities insisted that the incident merely involved the recovery of debris from a top secret surveillance balloon, reports the Guardian.

The US Air Force had closed the case and denied the reports about aliens and said that what witnesses saw as aliens were actually life-sized anthropomorphic test dummies.

The doodle errs on the side of humour and allows users to control a small animated alien figure as it goes about a series of tasks on a Roswell-like landscape, the report added.

Source: http://news.in.msn.com/international/article.aspx?cp-documentid=253353440

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Is victory near on veteran-jobs slog??

veteans

Bill Briggs NBC News contributor

17 hours ago

The veteran-unemployment crisis may be ebbing toward an end as the jobless pace for younger ex-troops declined in June for the fifth consecutive month, marking its lowest rate since November 2008, the Labor Department reported Friday.

Among former service members who served during the Iraq and Afghanistan eras, 7.2 percent were out of work last month, undercutting the 7.5 percent unemployment rate posted in June by non-veterans ? a monthly milepost reached only three times during the past five years, federal figures show.

Veterans and company leaders were not prepared Friday to declare victory over the chronic quandary. But one job recruiter and former Navy pilot said the brighter stats reflect the immense sweat spent by veterans advocates on job fairs and resume-writing help plus the spreading buzz among business honchos who are starting to trust and tap a pool of ex-military talent once largely ignored.

?You have a very viable workforce ? mature, skilled, seasoned, reliable and disciplined ? and employers are making a concerted effort to look at that pool of candidates almost separately from the non-veteran pool,? said Sean Carroll, managing partner at Polachi Access Executive Search, based near Boston.

?It's almost like when you apply to college: there?s a pile of applications from legacy candidates (that get the first look) and then a pile from everybody else," added Carroll, who flew missions during the first Gulf War. "You?re seeing that now with employers: there's a pile of veteran candidates then there?s everybody else.?

A massive public-private drive to hire younger veterans was ignited in early 2011. That year, first lady Michelle Obama launched the "Joining Forces" campaign, which has helped escort nearly 300,000 ex-military members from careers in uniform to civilian jobs, the White House reported April 30. In March 2011, JPMorgan Chase kicked off its "100,000 Jobs Mission," partnering with dozens of other companies ? including Wells Fargo, United Airlines and Coca-Cola ? to put veterans into civilian roles.

The ongoing drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, which ultimately will bring 34,000 troops home during the next year, is continually restocking the lines of job hunters.

Not all slices of the American veteran community are seeing better financial times, however.

Among veterans between the ages of 20 and 24, the June unemployment rate reached 21.0 percent ? compared to a 14.3-percent jobless pace among U.S. non-veterans in the same age bracket, reports the Institute for Veterans and Military Families, a veteran-boosting initiative at Syracuse University, backed by JPMorgan Chase. Experts say far more work must be done to help the youngest ex-troops transition from combat to civilian vocations.

"Folks want to give back to the veterans," Carroll said. "If employers can do that, can leverage the skills these men and woman have developed (in war) ? I don't want to call it a sympathy vote ? but I think they do want to give them a shot."

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Tickets on sale for The EDGE Improv at BPA - Bainbridge Island ...

Join The EDGE Improv for an ingeniously improvised evening of on-the-spot comedy, all from audience suggestions, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, July 6 at Bainbridge Performing Arts.

The troupe?s riotous antics have earned a devoted community of followers and inspired rave reviews from audience members. The EDGE troupe members include Ken Ballenger, Frank Buxton, John Ellis, Cynthia Lair, Susan MacPherson, Bhama Roget, Andrew Shields, Chris Soldevilla and Matty Whitman.

Tickets are $16 for adults and $12 for seniors, students, youth, military and teachers and may be purchased at www.bainbridgeperformingarts.org.

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Source: http://www.bainbridgereview.com/entertainment/214388941.html

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