Politics

Hmmmm…suck-o: Target’s CEO is a massive republican.

Now we know why the target is red.

And, we seem to be getting a clearer picture as to why Target has sided with the far-right Christian wackos, in permitting their pharmacists to turn you away because they think you’re a sinner.

Over the years, Target CEO Robert Ulrich has donated:

• $71,353 to Republicans
• $3,660 to Democrats

Hmmm… that’s interesting.

Perhaps my favorite donation is the $5,000 he gave just two months ago to a PAC named “Every Republican is Crucial.”

And here’s some info from the first link in the quoted text above, because I hadn’t heard about this before:

Planned Parenthood has had other communications with Target. Target’s policy is that the customer can go to hell if their pharmacist thinks you’re a sinner. Target will let their pharmacist turn you away so that YOU have to go find another pharmacy, rather than their pharmacist getting another frigging job.

You have to love Target. They’re willing to hire people who don’t wan to do the very job they’re applying for. And their own employee’s bigotry and bias matters more to them than the emergency health needs of their own customers.

Dammit — is it even possible to shop guilt-free anymore? As far as I can tell, the only way to make sure as little of my money as possible goes to causes and organizations that I don’t support is to keep it in a jar in my mattress and never spend any of it.

Need another reason to stay far, far away from Wal-Mart? Or maybe another reason to be disgusted with the culture of fear and repression of political dissent in the country? Be glad you’re not this high school student.

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.
But that’s what happened on September 20.

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s-down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”

According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent. But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.

Is this really the country we want it to be? Sadly, it’s the country the voters asked for.

(via seagoth)

Found this via Chris Randall. Yes, I know it’s over-simplified hyperbole, and I’m guessing that it dates from roundabout election time. So what. It gave me a grin.

(Sidenote: I did a Google Search to see how widespread this was, and only got four hits, three of which were variations of the URL to Chris’s blog. But if I do a Google Blog Search, I get 165 hits. Has Google removed weblogs [or, at the very least, drasticaly de-emphasized them] from their default search now that their blog search is active?)

Dear Red States…

We’ve decided we’re leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we’re taking just the Blue States with us.

In case you aren’t aware, that includes Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get Elliot Spitzer. You get Ken Lay.

We get the Statue of Liberty. We get Hollywood and Yosemite. You get Dollywood. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom and Enron. We get Harvard. You get Ole’ Miss. We get 85 percent of America’s venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama. We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay their fair share.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition’s, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.

Please be aware that the new country will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we’re going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your politicians and evangelicals. They have kids they’re apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don’t care if you don’t show pictures of their children’s caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we’re not willing to spend our resources in Bush’s Quagmire.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country’s fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation’s fresh fruit, 95 percent of America’s quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners) 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools, plus Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.

Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we’re discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11, and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with high morals.

So…when did CNN start hiring The Onion‘s writers?

Oh, wait. They’re serious?

Amazing.

At least he’s actually acting like a President for once. Pity that it took this long, this big of a catastrophe, this many dead people, and I’d bet that it’s motivated more by his tanking approval rate than any real sense of responsibility…but at least it’s something.

“Nothing Really Matters (Kruder and Dorfmeister)” by Madonna from the album Nothing Really Matters (1999, 11:10).