Tag: Conservative Values

Clueless Florida Republicans ‘Celebrate’ Juneteenth

Buck Banks

The Republican Party of Florida is at it again, showing its stupidity and insensitivity toward African Americans. How? By trying to morph into a celebration what was actually a crime against slaves. At the same time, they are trying to align themselves with the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, a radical band of reformers and abolitionists whose Congress overrode the veto of white supremacist President Andrew Johnson to pass civil rights laws only to see them overturned by an “activist” Supreme Court.

Is Juneteenth something to celebrate? Certainly not. However, it is absolutely something to acknowledge

Here’s another example of the Republicans trotting out a black party member to show America that Mr. Lincoln’s party is still a great place to be black. Hey, Michael Steele, how are you celebrating Juneteenth?

Here’s the latest product from nimrod Jim Greer and his merry band of dolts:

Representative Jennifer Carroll, Chairperson of the Republican Party of Florida’s African American Republican Leadership Council, and RPOF Chairman Jim Greer today released the following statement regarding “Juneteenth,” a celebration recognizing June 19, 1865, the day the last American slaves learned that they were free:

“‘Juneteenth’ is a celebration of the day when the last remaining slaves received word that President Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, resulting in their freedom. As the Party of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party of Florida is built on the foundation of freedom, and this principle is as important to us today it was so many years ago, when President Lincoln helped to found the Republican Party as the anti-slavery party,” said Representative Carroll. “Over 140 years, we have championed these convictions. From the Civil Rights laws of the 1860s to the landmark 1954 decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education, which called for the end of segregation in public schools, the Republican Party has always been an advocate for civil rights.”

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And Those Sins Are…?

Trish

“Most Americans look at this as a personal situation.” Graham let out a laugh and said: “I’ve got plenty of sins that I’m not going to share with anyone else.”

— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is widely rumored to be gay and in the closet, as quoted by Politico. Graham said Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) should not have relinquished a leadership position in the Senate after being exposed as an adulterer despite his previous high-profile support for a fundamentalist agenda.

Saletan: Why are Pro-Lifers Sorry?

Trish

William Saletan at Slate gets to the knife-edge of the line pro-lifers are attempting to straddle in the death of Dr. George Tiller. In a piece called, Is it Wrong to Murder an Abortionist?, Saletan says these folks don’t seem to believe their own rhetoric. If they did, they would be like Tiller’s assassin, killing every abortion doctor they could find. After all, if someone were shooting students on a college campus or old folks at a nursing home, no one would say they regret that things went too far when the gunman was killed.

Saletan: ‘If you don’t accept what Roeder did, then maybe it’s time to ask yourself what you really believe.’

Tiller’s murder is different from all previous murders of abortion providers. If you kill an ordinary abortionist, somebody else will step in. But if you kill the guy at the end of the line, some of his patients won’t be able to find an alternative. You will have directly prevented abortions.

That seems to be what Tiller’s alleged assassin, Scott Roeder, had in mind…

So is Roeder getting support from the nation’s leading pro-life groups? Not a bit. They have roundly denounced the murder. The National Right to Life Committee says it opposes “any form of violence to fight the violence of abortion,” preferring instead “to work through educational and legislative activities to ensure the right to life for unborn children, people with disabilities and older people.”

…I applaud these statements. They affirm the value of life and nonviolence, two principles that should unite us. But they don’t square with what these organizations purport to espouse…

You think you’re pro-life. You tell yourself that abortion is murder. Maybe you even say that when a pollster calls. But like most of the other people who say such things in polls, you don’t mean it literally.

…If you don’t accept what [Roeder] did, then maybe it’s time to ask yourself what you really believe. Is abortion murder? Or is it something less, a tragedy that would be better avoided? Most of us think it’s the latter.

Amen. Enough with the Hitler comparisons, the overwrought bombast, the entire “abortion is murder” meme. Murder is murder. Abortion is only a very regrettable solution when all the other options seem worse.

Why Republicans Resist Sotomayor

Buck Banks

A new Gallup poll sheds light on why the Republican Party is so resistant to President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court:

The survey said only 11 percent of Republicans are Hispanics or blacks or members of other races. More than six in 10 are white conservatives and the rest whites with other ideological leanings. That compares with 36 percent of Democrats who are Hispanics or non-white and 27 percent of independents.

The Republicans would do well to ignore their innate racism (party chair Michael Steele excepted) and listen instead to the will of the American voters as uncovered by a recent Quinnipiac poll:

American voters approve of President Obama’s pick of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court by a 54 percent to 24 percent margin, with 22 percent still undecided. Democrats support the nomination by 81 percent to 3 percent and independent voters by 50 percent to 26 percent, while Republicans oppose it 46 percent to 26 percent. Men approve of the nomination 48 percent to 31 percent while women approve 59 percent to 18 percent.

O’Reilly in Uproar Over Gay Dumbledore

Buck Banks

It was, I suppose, predictable that professional bloviator Bill O’Reilly would get his panties in a twist over author J.K. Rowling’s (yawn) revelation that a character in the Harry Potter novels was gay. Rowling told an audience at Carnegie Hall last week that the headmaster of Hogwarts Academy, Albus Dumbledore, was gay.

Despite the fact that Rowling offended my English major’s sensibilities by telling something outside the novel (“So, Mr. Twain, what career track did Huck follow when he grew up?”), O’Reilly is trying — very hard, apparently — to cast Rowling as a “provocateur” who is pushing “gay indoctrination” by saying a character in her novels is gay, even though he apparently never did anything gay-like in the novels. Here’s Bill at his usual, courtesy of Media Matters:

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Bush Won’t Pay for Kids’ Health Care But Flew Billions in Shrink-Wrapped Bundles of Cash into the Iraq War Zone – a Fortune That Can’t Be Accounted for Now

Jon Ponder

Mid-2003: A reporter in Iraq stands on a pallet filled with shrink-wrapped bricks of C-Notes

“Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone?” — Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

Pres. Bush said he vetoed the Democrats’ expansion of the SCHIP children’s health insurance program because it was too costly. This confirms what we know about the president’s priorities. But the cost to cover 10 million additional children would be $35 billion, Democrats have pointed out, which is roughly what it takes to run Bush’s war in Iraq for 41 days.

An even more apt example of the misplaced values of Bush and his party is the story of the $12 billion or so that was flown into Iraq in 2003 and then went missing and will never be recovered. It sounds like a financial scandal of historical proportions, and yet it is one of the most under-reported story of the war:

The United States flew nearly $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent.

The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a U.S. congressional committee.

In the year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nearly 281 million notes, weighing 363 tons, were sent from New York to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of $2,401,600,000 on June 22, 2004, six days before the handover.

After this was revealed in an investigation into Bush’s handling of his invasion of Iraq, Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Government Oversight Committee was prompted to ask:

“Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone?”

Security in the war zone was so lax as to be non-existent:

“One [Bush Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)] official described an environment awash in $100 bills,” the memorandum [on the investigation for Waxman’s committee] says. “One contractor received a $2 million payment in a duffel bag stuffed with shrink-wrapped bundles of currency. Auditors discovered that the key to a vault was kept in an unsecured backpack.

And:

“They also found that $774,300 in cash had been stolen from one division’s vault. Cash payments were made from the back of a pickup truck, and cash was stored in unguarded sacks in Iraqi ministry offices. One official was given $6.75 million in cash, and was ordered to spend it in one week before the interim Iraqi government took control of Iraqi funds.”

The Bush team — many of whom were inexperienced Republican Party operatives, cronies of the president and their twenty-something kids — lost or ripped off millions of dollars from the UN that was intended to feed Iraq’s poor people:

On April 12, 2004, the [CPA] in Erbil in northern Iraq handed over $1.5 billion in cash to a local courier. The money, fresh $100 bills shrink-wrapped on pallets, which filled three Blackhawk helicopters, came from oil sales under the UN’s Oil for Food Programme, and had been entrusted by the UN Security Council to the Americans to be spent on behalf of the Iraqi people.

The CPA didn’t properly check out the courier before handing over the cash, and, as a result, according to an audit report by the CPA’s inspector general, “there was an increased risk of the loss or theft of the cash.”

Paul Bremer, the American pro-consul in Baghdad … kept a slush fund of nearly $600 million cash for which there is no paperwork: $200 million of this was kept in a room in one of Saddam’s former palaces, and the US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.

To get a sense of the Bushies’ attitude about the loss of the money, here is retired Admiral David Oliver, who was Bremer’s financial advisor, on the loss of billions of Oil for Food dollars:

“I have no idea. I can’t tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn’t – nor do I actually think it’s important.”

Q: “But the fact is billions of dollars have disappeared without trace.”

Oliver: “Of their money. Billions of dollars of their money, yeah I understand. I’m saying what difference does it make?”

The reason Adm. Oliver should have cared — aside from the fact that finance was his purview — is that some of this cash very likely fueled the insurgency that ensued a few months later. It is also likely the money ended up in the hands of terrorists who used it to buy weapons to kill our troops.

AFA Cranking Up Its Christmas Witch Hunt

Buck Banks

‘Tis the season. Since Halloween is almost upon us, the American Family Association has cranked up its annual witch hunt for companies that don’t include Christian messages or symbols in their marketing and advertising materials. In other words, companies that don’t commercialize Christmas by slapping baby Jesuses all over their packaging and ads are somehow bad, according to the AFA (which, by the way has $32 million in dough it has collected from dumb Christians).

The first victim of this season is that godless dough ho’ Mrs. Fields Cookies.

How did this come to the AFA’s attention? An anonymous call:

When Diane H. of Michigan called Mrs. Fields and asked to speak with a supervisor in customer service about why they banned Christmas, the supervisor told Diane that they do not offer anything with Merry Christmas because they don’t want to offend anyone.

Then Don “Wildman” Wildmon, chair of AFA, called for a boycott of Mrs. Fields products.

But if you go to Mrs. Fields’ Web site, it’s Xmas stuff out the wazoo. Did Mrs. Fields cave in just a day to the AFA’s bullying? Lord no:

So all Mrs. Fields is really guilty of is having the good taste to not start hawking its Xmas goods until after Halloween. Shucks, the AFA bully boys must be disappointed — “Curses! Foiled again!”

Use the AFA’s own mail-out system to send a letter of support to Mrs. Fields by going here.

Ann Coulter Has a Christian Message — Really

Buck Banks

Who knew Ann Coulter was a Christian? We all knew she is a freaking nut case and so far to the right of moderate she makes Newt Gingrich look like a peacenik Yippie type, but a Christian?

Oh, but of course, she’s a Christian in that predictable but inimitable Ann Coulter way. On the CNBC show “The Big Idea” Monday night Coulter suggested to host Donny Deutsch that the U.S. would be a better place if there weren’t any Jewish people. She also said that Jews need to “perfect” themselves into Christians:

It led Deutsch to suggest that surely he couldn’t mean that, and when she insisted she did, he said this sounded “anti-Semitic.”

Asked by Deutsch regarding whether she wanted to be like “the head of Iran” and “wipe Israel off the Earth,” Coulter stated: “No, we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say. … That’s what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament.”

You can read a transcript here.

With Christians like Coulter around, who needs fanatical Islamists?

AFA: We Didn’t Lie And Morningstar Still Hates Christians

Buck Banks

Man, Joe Mansueto must have really rattled the Wildmons, American Family Association’s head henchmen, when he responded by e-mail to all the AFA drones who sent him an e-mail through the AFA site criticizing his company for not taking an ad from Faith Financial, as we reported earlier. See, most organizations who are slimed by the Wildmons choose to meet with them privately. Mansueto, chair and CEO of Morningside, chose to take the fight to the public.

Several hours later, the Wildmons are in full spin mode, quoting Faith Financial’s version of what happened as a way to deflect criticism:

‘Based on the fact that Morningstar takes advertisements for liberal social interest groups, it still appears to AFA that the Faith Financial ad was rejected due to it’s Christian content.’
— Tim ‘Wildman Jr.’ Wildmon

Faith Financial attempted to amplify its message of values-based investing on a national platform. To that end, it worked with a global ad agency named Come And Stay which suggested using Morningstar.com, one of the largest and most popular investor information resources in the industry. The ad agent worked with Faith Financial to craft an ad that met both the criteria of Faith Financial and Morningstar then submitted an offer/invoice (what is generally considered a contract) to CEO Stephen Bolt of Faith Financial who signed it and sent it back to be presented along with the 80 word text of the ad to Morningstar. Much to the surprise of both the ad agent and Faith Financial, the ad was rejected by Morningstar. Faith Financial Planners was told by the ad agent after he had consulted with Morningstar that ‘Unless you change the message completely and eliminate the Christian undertones…’ the ad will not be accepted.

The ad agent submitted an offer/invoice to CEO Stephen Bolt of Faith Financial who signed it and sent it back to be presented along with the 80 word text of the ad to Morningstar. From Faith Financial’s perspective, the offer/invoice was a binding agreement as is stated in the contract, but Faith Financial recognizes that Morningstar.com never accepted Faith Financial’s ad and thus, Morningstar never signed an agreement with Faith Financial.

Anybody who has ever dealt with advertising knows that signing an insertion order is a contract between the advertiser and the advertising agency, not the publisher. That’s why there’s an agency percentage — for the work and the financial risk. So, there was never a contract between FF and Morningstar — but that’s what Tim Wildmon said. So who’s lying? I’d bet on both Faith Financial and Wildmon. The above was offered by Wildmon by way of explanation.

He then accuses Morningstar of anti-Christian bias while not offering one iota of justification other than to say that because Morningstar rejected the ad, then it is de facto biased. Oh, except for this:

Based on the fact that Morningstar takes advertisements for liberal social interest groups, it still appears to AFA that the Faith Financial ad was rejected due to it’s [sic] Christian content.

I went to the Morningstar site and I had a devil of a time finding an advertisement. And here’s where you can find the advert for Faith Financial.

I went to the Faith Financial Web site and to tell you the truth it looks to me like some kind of Christian multilevel marketing pyramid scheme. Judge for yourself by going here.

I could see how Morningstar, which is one of the largest financial sites in the country that does real analysis and provides real content regarding financial matters might be put off by Faith Financial, which looks kind of questionable.

And last time I checked it is within the rights of a private business to choose to do or refuse to do business with whomever it desires. And if there are consequences to that decision, then so be it. People are free to boycott and demonstrate any business that clearly demonstrates bias, but refusing to play ball with a bunch of flaky Christian scam artists is not against the law.

Unfortunately, neither is lying — with one hand on the Bible — to people to get them to follow your misguided agenda.

AFA Caught in Another Lying Smear Campaign

Buck Banks

A couple of days ago I received an e-mail from Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association. In typical seething indignation, the missive exhorted me to leap to the condemnation of Morningstar, a provider of financial information, for its refusal to run an ad on its Web site from Faith Financial Planners:

Like any bullies, the Wildmons — pater and son — exaggerate their organization’s power and significance, and wield the threat of economic boycott like a baseball bat when they attack on behalf of Jesus.

We have learned that our friends at Faith Financial Planners were denied a paid advertisement on the website of Morningstar unless they removed the “Christian” content from their advertisement. Morningstar — one of the largest providers of financial information on mutual funds, stocks, and portfolios for individual investors and institutions in the world — told Faith Financial that the company had to “change the message completely and eliminate the Christian undertones.” This is a clear example of bigotry just because Faith Financial represents a Christian message about values and investing. Faith Financial is a company that, through one of its subsidiaries, provides information for Christians to use in reflecting their values in their investments. The information alerts values-based investors to those companies that are involved in pornography, abortion, the homosexual agenda, etc.

But Wildmon wasn’t finished yet:

In an unprecedented move, after a contract had been signed by both parties, an ad sales agent for Morningstar informed Faith Financial that Morningstar had reversed its decision to accept the ad and decided that Faith Financial must censor the “Christian undertones” in order for the ad to be acceptable. American Family Association is asking you to let the leadership at Morningstar know that this kind of Christian bigotry is unacceptable.

I, of course, took action. I like to take the AFA’s stock letter copy and rewrite it to take the polar opposite position. In a perverse way, it relaxes me and is mightily entertaining. Today I received a response to my e-mail from Morningstar Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Joe Mansueto:

The AFA’s email alert claimed that Morningstar asked a company called Faith Financial Planners to “eliminate the Christian undertones from their ad,” reneged on a contract, and rejected an advertisement on the basis of anti-Christian bias.

These allegations are false. First and foremost, at no time did Morningstar sign a contract with Faith Financial or any group representing Faith Financial, and no one at Morningstar asked Faith Financial to “eliminate the Christian undertones from their ad.” The AFA is also incorrect in accusing us of bias in our decision not to run the ad in question.

Seems Morningstar had pretty good grounds for not running the ad:

This ad, which was submitted to us by a third-party agency, was a special promotional offer for a free copy of the book “Money on Loan from God.” A variety of companies run these types of promotional offers, which are made available to people who sign up for Premium Membership service on our Web site, Morningstar.com.

To give you a better sense of our internal process, our ad sales team evaluates each ad submission on a case-by-case basis, within our stated advertising guidelines. We have limited sponsorship opportunities available for the special offer area of our Web site and often turn down promotional requests based on a number of factors.

We also frequently turn down ads that we believe make unreasonable or risky promises to investors. The text in this particular ad — “Achieving a double bottom line on your investment, financial and moral!” — raised a red flag with our ad rep. Also, our ad rep was not familiar with the author of the book or the book’s contents.

Taking all of these issues into consideration, as well as our advertising guidelines, our ad rep made the judgment call to turn down the promotional offer for this special area of our site.

So, let’s review the facts, since AFA apparently didn’t: There was no signed contract, Morningstar didn’t ask Faith Financial to change its ad copy, the ad probably violated Morningstar’s ad policy and it wasn’t Faith Financial but a third-party agency that submitted the ad.

This is a familiar approach by American Family Association — trump up some nonexistent instance of alleged bias against Christian values, distort the facts, rouse its base to action and smugly await some hoped-for free media coverage.

The AFA simply practices thuggery in the name of Jesus. Like any bullies, the Wildmons — pater and son — exaggerate their organization’s power and significance, and wield the threat of economic boycott like a baseball bat when they attack, supposedly in defense of Jesus.

Morningstar’s Mansueto did the right thing by showing the AFA for what it is — a gang of lying, bullying Christian fundamentalist extremists.

Update: AFA has compounded its earlier lies with new ones. Read more…