Obama's Ice Cream Flavor: "Black Power?"

When President Obama stopped for an ice cream cone at Bar Harbor, Maine's Mount Desert Island Ice Cream last weekend, he might have thought it was a relatively uncontroversial move.

Yet his choice of venue, as the Bangor Daily News reports, was quickly seized on as evidence that, as one blogger put it, the president was trying to "send a subtle message to his core radical base."

That message? "Black Power."

The speculation was prompted by the company's logo, which you can see at left. A small number of right-leaning bloggers say the president's choice of the shop as evidence that he wanted to send a message by stopping at a shop whose logo is reminiscent of the black power symbol of the 1960s.

Unsurprisingly, the woman who owns the shop, Linda Parker, is not exactly Huey P. Newton. A white woman in a state with a one percent black population, she told the Bangor Daily News that she chose the stark logo to differentiate her shop from larger ice cream makers who tend to use softer images.

Noting that Howard Stern uses a similar image, she asked rhetorically of Stern's radio program: "Is that the new black power comedy show?"

"All I'm doing is getting up, making ice cream, and going to bed," she told the newspaper. "That's all I do all summer. No time for radical insurgency."