What’s up with California Republicans and all the Obama-watermelon references?
Dean Grose, the white, Republican mayor of Los Alamitos, California, has apologized to a local black businesswoman, Keyanus Price, to whom he sent an email depicting the White House lawn planted with watermelons. The picture included the caption, “No Easter egg hunt this year.” (via The Huffington Post)
And let’s not forget the “Obama Bucks” pictured in a newsletter mailed by a California Republican women’s organization on the eve of the November election.
Maybe it was more than just policy differences that had California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger considering a switch in parties.
Update
- (2/26) [Today, as it turns out, is the birthday of the late black actor Godfrey Cambridge who died in 1976 at the age of 43. Cambridge famously starred in a 1970 film as a bigoted white insurance salesman (played in “white face”) who awoke one morning to find he had turned black. The movie, directed by Melvin Van Peebles, was the Watermelon Man.]
- (2/27) Mayor Who Sent Obama Watermelon Email Quits
“Every few years, someone counts up the titles covered in the New York Times Book Review and the short fiction published in the New Yorker, as well as the bylines and literary works reviewed in such highbrow journals as Harper’s and the New York Review of Books, and observes that the male names outnumber the female by about 2 to 1. This situation is lamentable, as everyone but a handful of embittered cranks seems to agree, but it’s not clear that anyone ever does anything about it. The bestseller lists, though less intellectually exalted, tend to break down more evenly along gender lines; between J.K. Rowling and 
The 'Not-So-Rough' Guide 