Rocco’s Little Chicago Pizzeria in Tucson had a message for the politicians who supported a bill that allows business owners to refuse to serve gays and lesbians.
“We reserve the right to refuse service to Arizona legislators,” the sign read.
“Funny how just being decent is starting to seem radical these days,” the restaurant commented on Facebook.
On the Fox News’ Hannity program last night, a panel was assembled to talk about food stamps. Using a story about a 29-year-old California surfer who is abusing the food stamp program while dining of lobsters, Sean Hannity asked his panel to respond to the lifestyle of the surfer.
‘Vice’ co-founder Gavin McInnes took issue with the premise of Hannity’s question and immediately suggested that white people are not the ones abusing the food stamp program. His conclusion? The abuse is happening because of “black Dominicans” in New York who are using food stamps as a “fat pill.”
During a panel discussion, Hannity asked his guests to respond to a 29-year-old California surfer who had allegedly been using the food stamp program instead of getting a job.
“This guy doesn’t personify the problem,” McInnes opined. “You see a middle-class white surfer kid. Here in New York, Dominicans go to the grocery store with their food stamps and the barrels that they ship back to the Dominican Republic are available at the grocery store.”
“But it’s more palatable to use this surfer than it is to use people who represent the problem here,” he said.
After another guest stated that “obesity is a big problem” when it comes to the food stamps, and the ease of “access to in these stores that accept food stamps,” McInnes shot back, “yeah, the sheer volume of it. It’s just a fat pill.”
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Fox News Megyn Kelly summed it up well when talking to Brit Hume about the Arizona Discrimination Bill.
“I look at this bill and I wonder whether this is … an overreaction [by religious] people who feel under attack on this score, and in the end, they may have struck back in a way that’s deeply offensive to many and potentially dangerous to folks who are gay and lesbians and need medical services and other services being denied potentially.”
Four years ago, he pulled his gun and shot his cousin. Then in March 2012, legally blind John Rogers pulled his gun again and killed his 34-year-old friend, James DeWitt. He stayed a short while in jail while the court went through the motions, but after it was all said and done, Stand Your Ground allowed John to walk free.
Last week, Stand Your Ground required a Seminole County Judge, John Galluzzo to return the murder weapon along with all his other guns to Mr. Rogers. This, according to WESH.
Even though the he said he didn’t want to do it, a judge in Seminole County, Florida, was forced to return a Glock pistol and a rifle to a blind man who won immunity for killing another man under the state’s “stand your ground” law. The surreal hearing took place in the Seminole County Courthouse in Sanford—the city where Trayvon Martin was killed and his shooter set free under the same self-defense statute.
John Wayne Rogers had stood accused of premeditated first degree murder for shooting a “drinking buddy” in March 2012 “after a long drinking session,” according to the Orlando Sentinel. The killing was done “once in the chest with a .308 Remington assault rifle from a distance of 18 inches or less.”
But amid differing eyewitness accounts at his trial last month, a judge dismissed the jury and awarded Rogers immunity under Florida’s “stand your ground” law.
That led to Thursday’s hearing, in which Judge John Galluzo reluctantly admitted he’d have to give Rogers his rifle and a Glock 10 mm handgun. “I have to return property that was taken under the circumstance,” the judge said. “I have researched and haven’t found case law to say otherwise.”
Rogers—who has done probation for firing 15 rounds at a cousin and was jailed for pushing and punching a woman in a domestic disturbance three years ago—will have to buy new ammunition, however, since the state considered his cache “too old and dangerous.”
I used to be a serious Republican, moderate and business-oriented, who planned for a public-service career in Republican politics. But I am a Republican no longer.
There’s an old joke we Republicans used to tell that goes something like this: “If you’re young and not a Democrat, you’re heartless. If you grow up and you’re not a Republican, you’re stupid.” These days, my old friends and associates no doubt consider me the butt of that joke. But I look on my “stupidity” somewhat differently. After all, my real education only began when I was 30 years old.
This is the story of how in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and later in Iraq, I discovered that what I believed to be the full spectrum of reality was just a small slice of it and how that discovery knocked down my Republican worldview.
I always imagined that I was full of heart, but it turned out that I was oblivious. Like so many Republicans, I had assumed that society’s “losers” had somehow earned their deserts. As I came to recognize that poverty is not earned or chosen or deserved, and that our use of force is far less precise than I had believed, I realized with a shock that I had effectively viewed whole swaths of the country and the world as second-class people.
No longer oblivious, I couldn’t remain in today’s Republican Party, not unless I embraced an individualism that was even more heartless than the one I had previously accepted. The more I learned about reality, the more I started to care about people as people, and my values shifted. Had I always known what I know today, it would have been clear that there hasn’t been a place for me in the Republican Party since the Free Soil days of Abe Lincoln.
Quickly now – There’s a discrimination bill in Arizona that would allow businesses to deny service to anyone on the ground of Religion. If a business feels that their religious beliefs is not being upheld by a potential customer or if the employee of that business feels that the customer’s lifestyle differs from theirs, the business will be able to legally kick that person off their premises. The governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, cannot decide if she should make this bill law. She’s actually trying to decide if discrimination in her state, should be legal.
Now to the letter.
Dear Arizona,
Congratulations. You are now the first state actually to pass a bill permitting businesses–even those open to the public–to refuse to provide service to LGBT people based on an individual’s “sincerely held religious belief.” This “turn away the gay” bill enshrines discrimination into the law. Your taxi drivers can refuse to carry us. Your hotels can refuse to house us. And your restaurants can refuse to serve us.
Kansas tried to pass a similar law, but had the good sense to not let it come up for a vote. The quashing came only after the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and other traditional conservative groups came out strongly against the bill.
But not you, Arizona. You’re willing to ostracize and marginalize LGBT people to score political points with the extreme right of the Republican Party. You say this bill protects “religious freedom,” but no one is fooled. When I was younger, people used “God’s Will” as a reason to keep the races separate, too. Make no mistake, this is the new segregation, yours is a Jim Crow law, and you are about to make yourself ground zero.
This bill also saddens me deeply. Brad and I have strong ties to Arizona. Brad was born in Phoenix, and we vacation in Show Low. We have close friends and relatives in the state and spend weeks there annually. We even attended the Fourth of July Parade in Show Low in 2012, looking like a pair of Arizona ranchers.
The law is breathtaking in its scope. It gives bigotry against us gays and lesbians a powerful and unprecedented weapon. But your mean-spirited representatives and senators know this. They also know that it is going to be struck down eventually by the courts. But they passed it anyway, just to make their hateful opinion of us crystal clear.
So let me make mine just as clear. If your Governor Jan Brewer signs this repugnant bill into law, make no mistake. We will not come. We will not spend. And we will urge everyone we know–from large corporations to small families on vacation–to boycott. Because you don’t deserve our dollars. Not one red cent.
And maybe you just never learn. In 1989, you voted down recognition of the Martin Luther King holiday, and as a result, conventions and tourists boycotted the state, and the NFL moved the Superbowl to Pasadena. That was a $500 million mistake.
So if our appeals to equality, fairness, and our basic right to live in a civil society without doors being slammed in our face for being who we are don’t move you, I’ll bet a big hit to your pocketbook and state coffers will.
George Takei
He didn’t say it in all those words, but Mitt Romney took to twitter to let Gov. Brewer know that discrimination is wrong.
In honor of Black History Month, Jon Stewart said it was time that some people got their facts straight on how history really went down.
Stewart called out Fox Business Network’s “tribute” to Black History Month Monday night by playing a clip of Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano claiming that President Lincoln hurt the nation by leading “the most murderous war in America” rather than letting slavery die a “natural” death. Napolitano argued that Lincoln should have tried “purchasing the slaves and then freeing them.”
Here’s how Stewart responded:
“Compensated emancipation, why didn’t Lincoln think of that!? What’s that? Oh, he did think of that? Oh! He spent most of 1862 trying to convince the border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia to free their slaves in exchange for money and everybody said f*ck off…because it wasn’t economically feasible and the slave states had a deeply vested socio-political interest in maintaining a two-tiered culture based on cheap forced labor.”
Watch
Arizona governor Jan Brewer is still deciding whether to allow Arizona business to legally discriminate. The bill passed both state houses, and Brewer must decide if her signature will make it law.
Until that decision is made however, much of the country is embroiled in the debate – should businesses be legally allowed to deny service to anyone because their religious beliefs are contradictory to that person’s way of life?
That was one of the questions asked by Anderson Cooper as he interviewed one of the Arizona senators who passed the bill.
Watch what happened next below.
The law would allow businesses in Arizona to legally discriminate against gays and anyone for that matter, on the basis of Religious beliefs. The legislation passed both the House and Senate in Arizona, and is waiting on Brewer’s desk for final signature to become law.
However, NBC is reporting that this signature will not happen. Here is the latest tweet from NBC on this topic.
More: Brewer “doesn’t want to take any actions that could jeopardize the economic momentum” in Arizona, source says
— NBC News (@NBCNews) February 25, 2014
Brewer has been under intense pressure from business groups and political leaders to diffuse the situation and veto the legislation which they fear will draw unnecessary attention to Arizona a year before it hosts the next Super Bowl and following economic losses on controversial immigration stances.
At the same time, three GOP state senators who initially ratified the measure have written to Brewer, a Republican, asking her to reject Senate Bill 1062, according to The Los Angeles Times.
Brewer, in an interview with CNN, said she is weighing her options. “I will do the right thing for the state of Arizona,” she said.
Imagine if you went to Burger King or any other business for the matter, made a purchase and saw those words plastered across your receipt where the “Customer name” should be. Well for a Virginian woman and her daughter-in-law, this was not an imagination, it was their reality.
In an interview with WTVR, the woman identified as only Miss Lorel, said she saw the profanity on the receipt Saturday night after she picked up her order at the drive-thru of the restaurant.
She immediately asked to see the manager.
“He did apologize. He also called the young lady over and asked her, ‘did you see this?’ She just shook her head. He said it had never happened before,” Miss Lorel said.
After apologizing, the manager returned the receipt to Miss Lorel but did not offer to refund her money
“This is more than an insult. I mean calling you names on a piece of a paper, that will hurt somebody,” Miss Lorel said through tears. “I liked going there. But after this they won’t get my business anymore. I can make my own burgers”
When contacted,franchise owner John Naparlo said, “We are obviously upset by the harm this has caused one of our customers.”
‘Dick’… Cheney was true to name and self last night when he did a telephone interview on Fox’s Hannity Show. Asked about the news that the Obama administration is considering cutting the military, Cheney responded with the usual racist stereotypes, typical of… well… racists.
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is proposing cuts to the military to meet the Pentagon’s budgeted needs. The plan would reduce the military from its all time high of 570,000 to a more feasible number, between 450,000 to 490,000.
Cheney called the plan “absolutely dangerous” and went on to say that it “does enormous long-term damage to our military.”
He then dropped this piece of racist stereotypical nugget.
“He’d much rather spend the money on food stamps than he would on a strong military or support for our troops.”
You know, the first black president and all. Despite the fact that southern whites make up a larger population of food stamp recipients than blacks, the racists would still use this argument when they have nothing else to say and when they know that their base is looking for their daily dose of hate.
