Wednesday Reads: Lucky Charms Anyone?

Good Morning

You have to give it to General Mills, they are keeping with the times…and pissing of the right-wing along the way.

Remember a few months ago when General Mills came out with an interracial family advertisement for their Cheerios brand cereal? Cheerios stands by TV ad showing mixed-race family

A mom sits at her kitchen table when her grade schooler saunters up with a big box of Cheerios.

“Mom,” says the girl. “Dad told me Cheerios is good for your heart. Is that true?”

Cut to dad waking from a nap on the living room couch with a pile of Cheerios on his chest (where his heart is) crunchily cascading to the floor.

The message is in line with the company’s Heart Healthy campaign, except this 30-second ad features a black dad, white mom and biracial child and produced enough vitriol on YouTube last week that Cheerios requested the comments section be turned off.

This week, the company is standing by the fictitious family, which reflects a black-white racial mix uncommon in commercials today, especially in ads on TV, at a time when interracial and interethnic couples are on the rise in real life, according to 2010 U.S. Census data, brand strategists and marketing consultants.

These comments were what you would expect from the trolls…according to Tim Nudd at Ad Week: It’s 2013, and People Are Still Getting Worked Up About Interracial Couples in Ads

It’s another one of those things that shouldn’t be a story but is—an ad from a major U.S. brand featuring an interracial couple and their daughter. You’d think this new Cheerios ad from Saatchi & Saatchi in New York might go largely unnoticed, given the plethora of interracial couples on TV shows these days. (NBC’s Parenthood is a notable example, though far from the only one.) But it’s not going unnoticed—it hit Reddit’s front page, a place largely reserved for life’s great oddities, and the YouTube view count is rising fast. The problem is that TV ads have always lagged TV programming in this regard, as so many brands are clearly scared of being perceived as making a political statement with the casting of their commercials. Thus, the Cheerios ad, despite its characters being representative of tens of thousands of actual couples in America, sticks out like a sore thumb. And then you have the YouTube comments section, which predictably has devolved into an endless flame war, with references to Nazis, “troglodytes” and “racial genocide.” At what point will an ad like this just seem normal?

Yeah? When will ads like that seem normal?

Well…General Mills has stepped once more into the new normal…this time with its Lucky Charms brand cereal. (Oh, and I can you taste the rainbow!)  Leprechaun-troversy: Conservatives Blast Lucky Charms For ‘Going Gay’

With all of the conservative whining about being called “bigots” just because they “believe in traditional marriage”*, it’s refreshing to receive helpful reminders about what the anti-gay right really stands for. On the heels of last week’s landmark Supreme Court rulings on marriage equality, General Mills announced that Lucky Charms Cereal would be “celebrating Pride month with whimsical delight, magical charms, and two new rainbow marshmallows,” a bid for inclusion that was met with derision by conservatives.

*and want the government to force that belief on others, but only gay others, not straight others who want to get divorced. Traditional Marriage™ refers only to traditions from the Bible, but not the parts of the Bible that contain weirdnesses like 700 wives and incest. Do not take Traditional Marriage™ if you are on blood thinners.

General Mills announced their campaign via a press release to GLAAD, and a Charm-ing video ad pegged to a social media campaign:

From GLAAD:

“We value diversity. We value inclusion. We always have … and we always will,” said Ken Charles, vice president of global diversity and inclusion for General Mills. “We’re proud of our workplace, and we’re proud to be a leader for diversity and inclusion in our community. For decades, General Mills has worked to create an inclusive culture that welcomes and values the contributions of all.”

By inclusion, Charles even means the millions of straight marrieds, and unmarrieds, who support marriage equality, and a safe world for adults and children of all kinds. That kind of inclusiveness can only mean one thing: Lucky Charms is trying to buttsex your children.

I will embed a link to the ad in a moment, but here is the right’s response to this new ad…

From gay-porn-star-name-generator victim Rod Dreher of The American Conservative:

Your children’s breakfast cereal is now gay. Just so you know.

Your children’s breakfast cereal is now gay. I don’t think that’s a sentence anybody not a comedy writer ever imagined penning.

What’s next? Snap, Crackle, and Poppers?

Poppers? WTF is that? Anyone would know that the “gay” term in the phrase “Snap, Crackle, Pop” is “Snap.” As in “Two snaps UP!”

But to continue with Tommy Christopher’s post…

Other conservative blogs declared Lucky Charms to be the “Official Gay Cereal,” and the scolds over at Newsbusters took the opportunity to name and shame other gay-friendly companies, and to suggest a new slogan for Lucky Charms:

General Mills’ pandering to the ever-more-popular gay crowd makes economic sense, given Rudolph’s reaction. After all, they don’t want to suffer the fate of Chick-Fil-A and get splattered with liberal media vitriol for supporting traditional marriage.

Then again, General Mills is joining a long line of big companies who have come out of the closet to play to the gays by supporting same-sex marriage, including Starbucks, Nabisco (Oreo), Macy’s, the Girl Scouts, and Target. After all, they’ve got the mass news media on their side, and that’s a pretty hefty marketing advantage.

So maybe, to continue to “celebrate” this push in favor of all-things-gay. Lucky Charms should add L, G, B, and T shapes to the cereal mix and change it’s catchphrase from “magically delicious” to “openly gay.”

Newsbusters, for its part, celebrated Pride Month by describing everyone and everything as “openly gay,” which is also how it celebrates every other month.

Conservatives seem to be laboring under a grave misunderstanding, which is shocking, I know. Celebrating the inclusion and equality of LGBT people in the human family doesn’t actually make you gay, any more than supporting supporting the civil rights movement makes you black, or supporting the New England Patriots makes you a cheater. I support marriage equality, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and LGBT-inclusive hate crimes legislation, but I am not gay. If I eat Lucky Charms, I might have a dangerous spike in my blood sugar, but it won’t make me gay.

Attempting to slur supporters of equality by association is not a new thing. Ask any white civil rights demonstrator what they were called, and they’ll bear that out. I support the right of people to believe as they wish, and agree with Lucky Charms that even they are #LuckyToBe Americans.

You can see both commercials below.

The big story this morning deals with the ACA…otherwise known as Obamacare: Health-Law Employer Mandate Delayed by U.S. Until 2015 – Bloomberg

The Obama administration will delay a crucial provision of its signature health-care law, giving businesses an extra year to comply with a requirement that they provide their workers with insurance.

The government will postpone enforcement of the so-called employer mandate until 2015, after the congressional elections, the administration said yesterday. Under the provision, companies with 50 or more workers face a fine of as much as $3,000 per employee if they don’t offer affordable insurance.

It’s the latest setback for a health-care law that has met resistance from Republicans, who have sought to make the plan a symbol of government overreach. Republican-controlled legislatures and governors in several states have refused funding to expand Medicaid coverage for the poor and declined to set up exchanges where individuals can buy insurance, leaving the job to the federal government.

The delay in the employer mandate addresses complaints from business groups to President Barack Obama’s administration about the burden of the law’s reporting requirements.

“The administration has finally recognized the obvious — employers need more time and clarification of the rules of the road before implementing the employer mandate,” Randy Johnson, a senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest business lobby, said in an e-mail.

You know…the Obamacare thing confuses me almost as much as the Snowden thing does. So much crap to wade through just to get some simple explanation of how the process works.

Valerie Jarrett, a senior Obama adviser, said in a blog post announcing the move that the administration decided on the delay so officials could simplify reporting requirements and give employers a chance to adjust their health-care coverage.

The individual mandate, a linchpin of the law that requires most Americans to carry health insurance, remains in effect.

Geez, I wish they would just go to a single payer plan…I know it is a hopeless dream but hey…if Lucky Charms is gay today then maybe someday soon we will find ourselves living in a land where healthcare and single payer go hand in hand.

Meanwhile, over in Egypt: Mursi, Egypt army pledge lives in ‘final hours’ showdown | Reuters

Egypt’s army commander and Islamist President Mohamed Mursi each pledged his life to defy the other as a deadline approached on Wednesday that will trigger a military takeover backed by protesters.

The military chiefs, wanting to restore order in a country racked by protests over Mursi’s Islamist policies, issued a call to battle in a statement headlined “The Final Hours”. They said they were willing to shed blood against “terrorists and fools” after Mursi refused to give up his elected office.

Mursi said, “The price … is my life.”

I am sure that they will be happy to make him pay that price.

Did you see this story yesterday? It is something out of an Edgar Allen Poe tale: Answer to 1985 Disappearance Is Found in Home’s Wall

Stuffed in a container and tucked inside a false wall in the basement of the home JoAnn Nichols shared with her husband in upstate New York, her body was inevitably whittled away by time.

A skeleton was all that was left when a contractor stumbled upon her remains last week, after nearly three decades hidden from the world.

Ms. Nichols’s identity was confirmed on Monday through dental records, partly answering the riddle of what became of a well-liked first-grade teacher who disappeared a few days before Christmas in 1985.

She never left her home in Poughkeepsie. She was most likely killed there, buried there and forgotten there.

From the day her husband, James L. Nichols Jr., first reported her missing, talk swirled about what might have happened to Ms. Nichols, who was 55.

It was suggested that perhaps she was depressed. Her only son, James Nichols III, 25, had died three years earlier. He drowned in a boating accident, the police said at the time.

As you can possibly surmise, the husband killed her.

He gave an interview to The Poughkeepsie Journal and calmly described the 30-second call.

“There’s no reason to assume she’s dead or alive, joined a group or run off with some other man,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “There are a thousand possibilities. The pain is not knowing.”

The police never found any evidence of the call.

An extensive search, including with the assistance of a psychic, turned up nothing, and gradually, the case faded from the public’s attention. The police said that it remained open and was reviewed annually, but that the trail had been cold for years.

It is not clear if Mr. Nichols was ever the focus of investigators. The police declined to go into detail about the case.

Mr. Nichols went about his life — a man of strange and obsessive habits, according to neighbors. He was known as a hoarder, a collector of things that held no value to anyone beyond himself.

In the basement there was a steady accumulation of junk, piled high to the ceiling, the authorities said. The secret hidden within the wall was buried deeper and deeper by the flotsam.

On Dec. 21, 2012, Mr. Nichols died of what the police said were natural causes. He was 82. It was 27 years to the day that he had reported his wife missing.

The cause of death was blunt-force trauma to the head…how horrifying, and so sad that she was in the house the whole time.

I will end this post with a link to the latest news regarding Adam Lanza. Boston Boomer sent this to me last night:

Here is the Newser link: Adam Lanza’s Online Posts Discovered: Sources – Investigators tell the ‘Hartford Courant’ they’ve linked username to him

And here is the link to the actual Hartford Courant article: Adam Lanza Edited Wikipedia Mass Killer Pages, Wrote Of Bullet ‘Fetish’, According To Authorities – Courant.com

In posts on gun message boards and gaming chat rooms, a user who authorities believe was Newtown gunman Adam Lanza showed a technical prowess about weapons and computers, a “fetish” for a certain bullet and a near-fixation with correcting Wikipedia articles about mass killers.

He would have been 17 years old at the time of the posts, which are being examined by investigative agencies. The posts linked to Lanza reflect his interests and thoughts, publicly revealed for the first time in the killer’s own words.

[…]

The poster who authorities suspect is Lanza questions Connecticut’s assault-gun ban, offers a blueprint for his laptop computer and provides YouTube links to a commercial for a laughing doll from the 1970s and for The Rock-afire Explosion, an animatronics band that played in ShowBiz Pizza locations in the 1980s.

In one thread on the website thehighroad.org in October 2009 at 1 a.m., the poster believed to be Lanza asks whether a ban on a certain semiautomatic pistol might extend to other weapons.

Another poster suggests that he ask the Connecticut State Police.

“I always prefer asking through proxy when I can avoid speaking to someone directly. I was just wondering if anyone knew because I have a fetish for .32 ACP,” the poster suspected to be Lanza responds, referring to ammunition.

The posts reveal an intense and well-developed interest in high-capacity weaponry and an almost obsessive attention to details both in the user’s own writing and his editing of articles about mass murder.

You should go and read that article in full. It gives me the creeps to think he was very familiar with folks on the community gun and game websites.

Well, this is ending on a down note, and I am just too tired to find a funny read to lift it up. Maybe a cartoon will do?

Painfully Wrong by Political Cartoonist Jen Sorensen

Uh, nope…although it is funny in a satirical way…it is pathetic in a very real way.

Sorry folks!

Maybe you can lighten the mood in the comments below?