Did you hear the one about the multi-millionaire who played the poor union guy on the Super Bowl ad?

From Republican Report:

This morning, Republic Report published a post revealing the backers of an anti-union ad that ran during the Super Bowl. We realized after publication that one of the actors playing a disgruntled union mechanic was actually Rick Berman, the consultant advising the anti-union lobbying campaign. A call to Berman and Company confirmed that Berman, who owns a $3.3 million dollar house and is known for his elaborate astroturf campaigns on behalf of big corporations, played the part of a mechanic in the ad.

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Komen CEO to speak at Yale commencement

Oh the opportunities for mayhem are endless. Read the rest of this post...

Retail shoppers slowing down in China, more signs of a bubble, may effect us

There's a reason we call rapid growth a "bubble." Nothing lasts forever including the impressive economic growth in China.  And if their bubble bursts, it's going to have ripple effects across Europe and the US.  Bloomberg:

Chinese shoppers on their Lunar New Year holiday were less lavish than expected by Hong Kong jewelers, curbed spending on beauty brands and slowed spending at South Korean stores. They may keep that pace in the coming year of the dragon. Holiday sales on the mainland grew 16 percent to 470 billion yuan ($75 billion), according to data from the Ministry of Commerce, the slowest pace since the 2009 financial crisis and three percentage points below last year’s increase. China is finding it is not immune to global economic forces and the slowdown is hitting Chinese consumers, who may increase this year’s spending at a slower pace than in 2011. This may mean trouble for the growing number of foreign companies rushing into China, especially luxury brands, said Jason Yuan, an analyst at UOB Kay Hian in Shanghai.

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Video: Man makes lamp shade out of log

I want one.

Making of a Shade from Soren Berger on Vimeo.

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ThinkProgress: Ari Fleisher was secretly involved in Komen’s anti-Planned Parenthood strategy

We now have more evidence that Republican and loyal Bushie Nancy Brinker, who also runs Komen for the Cure, is using her "charity" for Movement Conservative purposes.

Judd Legum is reporting exclusively at ThinkProgress that Ari Fleisher was secretly involved in Komen's anti-Planned Parenthood strategy — as early as December of last year if not earlier.

(Why does a "charity" need an "anti-Planned Parenthood" strategy? Maybe because being a "charity" is not its primary function? Nancy Brinker is walking twin paths; decide for yourself which one is primary.)

Legum writes (my emphasis):

According to a source, during at least one interview, Planned Parenthood was a major topic of conversation. Fleischer indicated that he had discussed the Planned Parenthood issue with Komen’s CEO, Nancy Brinker, and that she was at her wits end about how to proceed. Fleischer described himself as a longtime friend of Brinker.

Pause for a second. Why would a charity CEO be "at her wit's end" about suddenly revoking money that another non-profit had regularly been receiving — money clearly being spent for the charity's stated purpose?

No reason at all, unless that CEO were coordinating with a recently-hatched, coordinated Movement Conservative attack on that organization. Clearly this is political behavior.

Back to Legum:

Fleischer confirmed to ThinkProgress that he would receive a fee from Komen when the search is complete. Fleischer did not specify the amount of his fee but said it would be “substantially below the normal placement fee charged by executive search companies” because “they’re a charity I believe in.”

Fleischer’s high-level involvement with Komen further complicates its image as an apolitical cancer charity. Fleischer is a prominent partisan commentator and a longtime critic of Planned Parenthood.

Let's say that again. The Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure is not an apolitical organization. They are a highly political operation nested inside an apolitical-appearing charity.

High marks for original reporting, Mr. Legum.

The next problem — Komen's been pushed out of the apolitical closet and they are trying to get back in. They want us to unlearn what we know.

Even Nancy Pelosi is trying to help them re-hide themselves.

"It was an unfortunate situation but it was dealt with in a short period of time, [and] I commend the Susan G. Komen foundation for seeing the light on this," Pelosi added. "[It] just goes to show you, when women speak out, women win.

Translation: Time to go home. My question — Do "women win" if Komen for the Cure is allowed to remain intact as currently structured and led?

What will progressives do about this? That's the question, isn't it.

I know what Uncle Straight Talk would do. And knowing him, he wouldn't spend a ton of time discussing it. How about you?

GP Read the rest of this post...

GLAAD calls on CNN to fire Roland Martin over violent comments

Martin, who is a CNN contributor, has a history of stepping in it when it comes to gay civil rights issue.  There was the time he defended his wife's effort to cure gay people, and the time he compared being gay with being a drunk or a thief.   Martin also, for example, defended comedian Tracy Morgan who "joked" about stabbing his own son to death if he found out the boy were gay.  Considering the Tracy Morgan brouhaha happened less than a year ago, it's all the more strange that Martin published two tweets yesterday that seemed to advocate violence against gays.

One tweet was about a rather homoerotic David Beckham ad that ran at the beginning of the Super Bowl. I was at a friend's house and stopped dead in my tracks when I caught the ad out of the corner of my eye.  It did seem an odd ad for the Super Bowl, not that some gay men and women don't watch the Super Bowl too (and after all, Madonna was the half-time show, and you don't get any gayer than that).  Still, when Martin tweeted about smacking the sh*t out of any guy who liked the ad, you had to wonder about his later explanation that he meant it as a criticism of any guy who liked soccer, rather than any guy who enjoyed the homoerotic underwear ad.

Then you get to a second Tweet that Martin wrote about the Super Bowl yesterday:

Harder to write that one off as being about anything other than a subtle (or not) anti-gay slur.  The guy is wearing pink (this is a photo of the pink suit days earlier), girls wear pink, so the guy needs to be beaten.  If you're straight, you might think that this isn't necessarily about being gay.  If you're gay, you recognize immediately the origin of comments bashing guys for dressing girly.  In Chicago where I grew up, we used the expression "that's so gay."  The expression wasn't intended to be about gays either.  But it was. 

Martin has "clarified" his comments. GLAAD has called on CNN to fire him.

It may seem subtle, but if you think about it, it's really not.  Considering Martin keeps having these anti-gay bimbo eruptions - and now he is for the third time seemingly defending jokes about anti-gay violence - we're well past the time that clarifications are enough.  I get that people mis-speak.  I get that sometimes people are too sensitive and misinterpret things.  But how many times does Roland Martin have to mis-speak in support of bigotry before it indicates something about the man in addition to his mouth?

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Gingrich aide edits Wikipedia to hide mention of 3 wives, ethics charges

Typical. Read the rest of this post...

Wow. Breast cancer survivor destroys Komen in YouTube response. Just wow.

Oh my God. About 2 minutes 40 seconds in, the woman just destroys Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the organization that runs the Race for the Cure and recently stopped funding breast exams at Planned Parenthood clinics, reportedly because Komen's senior vice president is an anti-abortion activist who had it out for Planned Parenthood (Komen has since backtracked, only slightly, on their position).

The video is just okay until you hit the 2 minute 40 second mark.  Then just wow.  I'm not sure, in her place, that I'd have the courage to make a video like this.



Now compare that video with this one. Read the rest of this post...

Romney criticizes Obama for having same position on contraception as Governor Romney in 2005

Boston Globe:

Mitt Romney accused President Obama this week of ordering “religious organizations to violate their conscience,’’ referring to a White House decision that requires all health plans - even those covering employees at Catholic hospitals, charities, and colleges - to provide free birth control. But a review of Romney’s tenure as Massachusetts governor shows that he once took a similar step.

In December 2005, Romney required all Massachusetts hospitals, including Catholic ones, to provide emergency contraception to rape victims, even though some Catholics view the morning-after pill as a form of abortion.

He said he was acting on his legal counsel’s interpretation of a new state law - one passed by lawmakers despite his veto - but he also said that “in his heart of hearts,’’ he believed that rape victims should have access to emergency contraception.

Some Catholic leaders now point to inconsistency in Romney’s criticism of the president and characterize his new stance as politically expedient, even as they welcome it.

“The initial injury to Catholic religious freedom came not from the Obama administration but from the Romney administration,’’ said C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts. “President Obama’s plan certainly constitutes an assault on the constitutional rights of Catholics, but I’m not sure Governor Romney is in a position to assert that, given his own very mixed record on this.’’

The man is such a liar. And you gotta love the Globe's headline:

Romney’s contraception stance has changed since 2005: ’05 contraception stance similar to Obama’s now

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In Mitt Romney’s America, we're all from Kenya

In Mitt Romney's America,
we're all from Kenya

New poll numbers look good for the President, and bad for Romney. Wash Post/ABC Poll:

In a general-election test, Obama leads Romney 52 to 43 percent among all Americans; more narrowly, 51 to 45 percent, among registered voters. Among all adults, it’s Obama’s first time topping 50 percent in a head-to-head matchup with Romney since July; it’s his first time ever above that point among registered voters.

Two reasons this is happening. 1) The President has been fighting back of late. 2) Romney is getting beaten up by Gingrich in the primaries, and quite effectively by the President and the Democrats as well. As evidenced by these numbers - the tax fairness message is working:

Two-thirds of all Americans say they do not think [Romney] is paying his fair share [of taxes].

Fully 68 percent view the federal tax system as stacked in favor of the wealthy, not the middle class. More than seven in 10 support increasing the taxes of those earning more than $1 million a year — an idea the president has long pushed.

Romney has fought back, arguing that attacks on his or anyone’s financial success represent class warfare and criticism of the capitalist system that he said has made the United States the strongest and most innovative economy in the world.

Mitt Romney would have called the storming of the Bastille "class warfare."  Hell, he'd probably have been on the side of King George too during the American revolution - after all, the Monarchy made England the strongest and most innovative economy in the world, so why is everyone beating up on the rich guy?

I hear George Washington was Kenyan too. Read the rest of this post...

Komen CEO Nancy Brinker’s life among the 0.1 percent

Updated: See below.

Not to be outdone, the Newsweek-owned Daily Beast has an interesting background article on Nancy Brinker and Komen for the Cure. In it, there are a number of details that support what we wrote earlier.

[Update: The Daily Beast appears to have incorrectly reported Brinker's salary in an earlier version of their story, and we reported that figure, with some skepticism. The Daily Beast has quietly rewritten their story, correcting the salary figure, so I've deleted the grafs relating to the higher (now incorrect) salary. The correct figure is close to the $500,000 we earlier reported here.]

The article's details reinforce the picture we painted earlier. Brinker is not just a charity maven, she's a hard-core Republican and friend of the mighty:

[T]he commanding, 66-year-old businesswoman, diplomat, and Medal of Freedom recipient, ... established the world's largest breast cancer nonprofit, with its signature pink ribbon, in memory of her older sister, Susan in 1982. (Laura Bush, a close friend, was one of her original supporters and volunteers. After their mastectomies, Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan joined the group.)

When she married Norman Brinker in the early 1980s she was able to launch her twin careers — building Komen into a money-earning powerhouse and helping to finance the Movement Conservative project:

in the early ’80s, she met and married multimillionaire restaurateur Norman Brinker, a major Republican donor. ... When they tied the knot, the union provided Nancy with a network of A-list political connections and friends, plus the funds to lead a luxurious lifestyle and create the Komen Foundation, now the Susan G. Komen for the Cure with affiliates in 170 communities in 50 nations. ...

Several years later the couple divorced and with a hefty settlement, formidable drive, and her chum George W. Bush in the White House, Nancy was ready to step onto the world stage. First the [p]resident appointed her ambassador to Hungary and then U.S. chief of protocol.

That ambassadorship was likely a thank-you gift for her fundraising (nearly $700,000 in political donations between herself and her husband). Most ambassadorships are; it's been an open secret for decades.

How seriously did she take her ambassadorship?

She was lonely, says a friend, and spent most of her time away from her post.

Ah, the life of the 0.1% Can I have a job like that? Small people get lonely too, you know.

So I'll ask again — how much have those twin paths merged? How much of her political fundraising benefits from her Komen work, and vice versa?

Calling Jimmy Olsen; an opportunity awaits. Is Komen a right-wing "fog shop" — an actual charity with a hidden "confuse-the-progressives" Movement Conservative agenda? Said "charity" gives only 24% to Research and a whopping 50% (almost) to "Education."

Education — is that what the kids are calling it these days? Maybe it's time to find out.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Huff Post: Anti-abortion activist Komen SVP was behind attack on Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood, and far too many commentators, were conned by Komen's milquetoast mea kinda culpa they issued last Friday in a successful effort to quell the furor over their dropping funding for breast exams at Planned Parenthood clinics.  A number of us wondered last week whether the inside leaks were true, and Komen dropped Planned Parenthood because their CEO is a huge GOP donor and former Bush appointee, and their senior vice president is an anti-abortion activists who promised two years ago to defund Planned Parenthood.

Komen denied the allegations.  Then again, Komen said a lot of things last week.  Most of them contradictory.  First they killed Planned Parenthood's funding because of the GOP congressional investigation, then they blamed it on their new-found opposition to "pass-through" grants, then in their apology they suggested that the real problem was the investigation, but maybe they'd still kill the grants in the future because of the pass-through.

It was masterful obfuscation considering how amateurish was their handling of the disaster for most of the week.

And now we find out via HuffPost, who has not only talked to an inside source, but seen emails that confirm what that source has told them, that that GOP anti-abortion activist working at Komen was the one behind the secret plan to defund Planned Parenthood.  As if we didn't already suspect.  Here's Huff Post:

Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the nation's leading anti-breast-cancer charity, has insisted that its since-reversed decision to pull funding from Planned Parenthood arose from a routine change in criteria for grant eligibility that had nothing to do with abortion politics.

But a Komen insider told HuffPost on Sunday that Karen Handel, Komen's staunchly anti-abortion vice president for public policy, was the main force behind the decision to defund Planned Parenthood and the attempt to make that decision look nonpolitical.

"Karen Handel was the prime instigator of this effort, and she herself personally came up with investigation criteria," the source, who requested anonymity for professional reasons, told HuffPost. "She said, 'If we just say it's about investigations, we can defund Planned Parenthood and no one can blame us for being political.'"


Emails between Komen leadership on the day the Planned Parenthood decision was announced, which were reviewed by HuffPost under the condition they not be published, confirm the source's description of Handel's sole "authority" in crafting and implementing the Planned Parenthood policy.

Handel's strategy to cut off Planned Parenthood involved drafting new guidelines that would prevent Komen from funding any organization that was under investigation by local, state or federal authorities. Since Planned Parenthood is currently the target of a congressional inquiry prompted by House Republicans into the way it uses government funds, the family planning provider would have been immediately disqualified from receiving new Komen grants.

Komen, famous for its use of pink in everything from blenders to pistols, needs to hand Karen Handel a pink slip.  And CEO Nancy Brinker either lied to America in a now-infamous YouTube video posted on the front page of Komen's Web site - a video in which she claimed, remarkably, that the congressional investigation had nothing to do with Komen killing the PPFA funding (contradicting her own staff, and contradicting the apology Komen issued only twelve hours) - or is so incompetent that she had no idea what her own staff was saying all week, or what their apology would say the next morning. Either way, Brinker, at the very least, needs to explain herself as well.

Don't forget that Komen runs the Race for the Cure. At the rate Komen is losing the race for the truth only drastic action will save what has now become a fatally damaged brand. Read the rest of this post...