American Politics

Do I Have to Boycott Target?


I mean it will be fairly easy seeing that we don’t have Targets here in Alberta, but it’s my go-to store whenever I am in the States.

I love Target. The super-sized ones especially. One stop and a Starbucks to boot. What’s not to adore?

Apparently though the corporate arm of shopping nirvana decided to test out that whole “peoplehood” thing the Supreme Court granted companies a while back by donating $150,000 to the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota. Target is headquartered in Minneapolis and I am merely guessing, but I imagine that in spite of his stance against same-sex marriage, the candidate is pro business in a way that only Republicans can be.

So, the gay community – offended and rightly so – are calling for a boycott unless Target makes an equal contribution to some organization they support or that supports them.

I think there was probably a good reason why businesses have been forced to surreptitiously contribute to political campaigns in the past, don’t you? Betting Target would agree right about now.

Anyway, I was all set to back to school shop my little heart out in Great Falls next week because our trip to Yellowstone would have taken us that way, but Rob’s still reacting to one of his meds, and since we don’t know which one, we are scrubbing the whole summer vacation thing now.

I would have shopped Target anyway though. I understand the outrage, but think the “compromise” is a weeny cop-out.

You’ll boycott Target until you force them to make a second contribution to save face and void the first one?

How does an equal contribution to an entity or candidate who supports same-sex marriage cancel out the first one? The first $150,000 is out there already. Check cashed. Damage done. A second donation would be merely done to appease and lure you back.

Will you go back? Knowing that Target – despite its pro-gay worker and family practices in its company and at its stores – gave money to a Republican who hates gays only because they liked his stance on business?

Nothing will be any different after Target has been forced to capitulate. And they will cave. What’s $150,000 when billions are at stake? Money that will come out of your pocket and you’ll do it willingly then take home your goodies, spread them on the floor and roll around on them like an overheated pig in mud.

The same-sex marriage battle is nearly over now that it’s in the courts. The Supreme Court will either affirm the right (because they don’t really have any other legal choice) or they will kick it back to the states and we will have civil unions across the board. This has nothing to do with Target or idiot Republicans pandering for mid-term votes anymore.

Still, a person should do whatever helps them sleep best at night.

Sarah Palin or Shakespeare? Sometimes it’s Hard to Tell.


Sarah Palin committed a bush in a recent Twitter battle cry to New Yorkers calling them to “refudiate” plans to build a mosque close to the 9/11 site.

“Refudiate” is, of course, not a real word in the same that “normalcy” was not a real word until President Warren G. Harding coined it a hundred years ago – give or take.

The offense against the American version of the English language was quickly seized upon by those who (quite rightly) fear Palin and held it up as proof of her already rather obvious lack of dexterity with a language we can only assume she’s been speaking since toddlerhood.

Although malapropisms out of the mouths of political leaders actual and wanna be are disheartening, out of the mouth of Palin, it’s not worth a footnote much less a bloggy storm.

What’s really eye-opening came on the heels of Mama Sarah’s predictable inability to be chagrined.

“Shakespeare liked to coin words too.” she twittered back at the elitist blogosphere.

And indeed he did.

All that glitters is not gold. As (good) luck would have it. Household words. Cold comfort. In a pickle. Devil incarnate. Eaten me out of house and home. For goodness sake. Give the devil his due. Heart of gold. Laughing stock. It was Greek to me. Naked truth. Wild goose chase.

What amazes me and seems to have sailed past everyone’s offended ears is that Sarah Palin knows that Shakespeare coined words and phrases that previously didn’t exist in the English language.

And I will concede that it’s very possible that her little Twuip was as ghostwritten as her book, but it was clever, and it’s past time her critics realized that she cannot be mocked and jeered away.

First, because Palin doesn’t blush unless it will serve a greater purpose.

Second, she has a gift for turning faux pas into the “aw shucks, I’m just folk like you ordinary people”. She spins her legend from the ridicule and frustrated rants of the left and the few on the right who see the damage she is doing to their politics – such as they are.

Refudiate? I think ole Will could have done better. The things that man could have done with a Twitter stream should leaving us weeping over the drivel that reigns as literary there now.

It’s not the worst thing she’s uttered in any medium, but it’s important to remember that she can’t be taken down by trivial nit-picking. She feeds on that like Nosferatu on village virgins.

Substance, people. She doesn’t have any. Criticism of her should.

What Do Hitler, Obama and Lenin Have in Common?


If you are a Tea Party member in Mason City, Iowa, the commonalities lunge at one like bad 3-D, but to a person who reads, thinks for herself and happens to have paid attention during her early 20th century history class – the question should really be “aside from being political leaders during economically crushing times what do they have in common?”

And even that is stretching it.

The “change” bogeyman is nothing more than a political tool that they all use – Tea Partiers and Mama Grizzlies included -because it works.

Human beings are notorious for their dislike of change. Creatures who seek comfort and who mainly live within the confines of their homes unless some consumer need drives them out to the nearest shopping blight on the landscape, Americans in particular are living change at speeds that the vast majority of them never anticipated and weren’t raised with the coping skills to deal with.

The Tea Party then is little more than an adult temper tantrum about the loss of the American Dream rug beneath their feet. Turns out, that whole myth about us descending from hardy pioneer stock is really just a myth.

The people of Germany and Russia during WWI, which is the breeding ground for both Hitler’s rise and Lenin’s takeover, were dealing with the kinds of economic devastation the likes of which would send most Americans in search of corners to curl up in. To compare our current recession to children literally starving to death, as they were in Russia at the end of the first world war, is the height of self-absorption.

To their credit, the main body of the Iowa Tea Party disapproves of the Mason City billboard.

Yes, it’s a billboard, and it’s up for the coming month in Mason City, so feel free to mock and jeer across the blogosphere, but don’t expect it to have any effect on their views.

I know the kinds of people who fall for this type of logic. I grew up next door to them in the northeast part of the state. I taught their kids for twenty years in the public school system in the center of the state. Decent enough folk, they lead with their bellies and their sense of entitlement and a recession like the one we are experiencing unnerves them. Why? Because it flies in the face of everything we Americans are taught to trust. Behave, work hard and the middle class dream is yours.

A dream that Obama favors by the way and that Lenin would have curled a lip at.

I won’t argue with the smaller print that “radical leaders prey on the fearful and naive” but I will note the irony. And the fact that the irony would be so lost on the people who designed this billboard.

UPDATE: After being up for just one week, the Mason City Tea party billboard has been covered up at the request of the group who received hundreds of threatening messages from irate Mason City folk – who apparently all know there history better than the Tea Party people. No apology was issued and the group’s spokesperson insists that people misunderstood the billboards main idea. Um … sure, dude.

Photo by Deb Nicklay/Mason City Globe Gazette