Tara Servatius, a blogger for the John Locke Foundation, a “free-market think tank” in Raleigh, N.C., resigned on Thursday after posting an offensive cartoon of President Obama on the foundation’s blog earlier in the week.
Servatius issued a statement saying she was “genuinely sorry my inclusion of the photo along with my blog post has caused controversy.”
But the conservative blogger also defended her inclusion of the photo as an attempt to articulate her position “At the time, I was searching for a picture of the president in drag to illustrate his Southern political strategy of courting young voters, a majority of whom support gay marriage,” Servatius wrote. “It was one of the first photos to come up on Google Images. Regrettably, I didn’t think about the racial implications of the picture when I posted it. I simply don’t think in those terms. Unfortunately some people do. To me, fried chicken is simply a Southern cuisine. So the picture seemed perfect to illustrate Obama’s Southern strategy.”
This week in 1945, Billboard magazine computed the nation’s number one selling record album for the first time. The album, consisting of four 78 RPM shellac records, was the King Cole Trio. Among the eight sides, three featured vocals by Cole. The album stayed in the number one position for 12 weeks. A similar chart noting the country’s most popular single recordings had been published since January of 1936. Today, there are many different charts, reflecting the large number of music formats popular among music fans. Those fans spend nearly $7 billion each year on their favorite recordings. Profile America is produced by the U.S. Census Bureau: Measuring America—People, Places, and Our Economy.
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