Delaware Liberal

Monday Open Thread

Welcome to your Monday open thread. Share what’s on your mind with the rest of us. Don’t be shy!

Once again Sarah Palin is responsible for another round of ugliness. Conservatives are still up in arms that the 1st amendment covers everyone, including people they don’t like. This weekend an anti-Park51 (Cordoba House) protest was held in NYC. One man found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, looking too foreign.

At an anti-Islam rally yesterday at Ground Zero, a person of color wearing a skull cap and wandering through the crowd was targeted with insults and nearly attacked by protesters for the offense of looking vaguely Muslim. The videographer summarized the episode this way:

A man walks through the crowd at the Ground Zero protest and is mistaken as a Muslim. The crowd turns on him and confronts him. The man in the blue hard hat calls him a coward and tries to fight him. The tall man who I think was one of the organizers tried to get between the two men. Later I caught up with the man who’s name is Kenny. He is a Union carpenter who works at Ground Zero. We discussed what a scary moment that was for him.

These are the same people who told us they were exercising their Constitutional rights by acting like asses at townhall meetings and waving guns around in crowds. I guess the 1st amendment only applies to them, huh?

Finally, a good news story for the day. Corporations can donate unlimited money to political campaigns, but should they?

Target still finds itself facing a backlash:

After weeks of public protest over its financial support of an organization that backed a GOP gubernatorial candidate opposed to gay rights, Target Corp. now faces a new form of pressure: demands from institutional shareholders that it revamp its donation process to avoid the chance of additional backfires.

Imprudent donations can potentially have a major negative impact on company reputations and business if they don’t carefully and fully assess a candidate’s positions,” said Tim Smith, a senior vice president at Walden Asset Management, one of three asset management firms that this week filed a resolution asking the retail giant to overhaul its campaign donation policies. He cautioned that funding ballot initiatives, as many corporations have done, “can similarly backfire.”

The three management firms sponsoring the resolution — Calvert Asset Management, Trillium Asset Management and Walden — together hold $57.5 million of Target stock. Other institutional investors, including the giant New York state pension fund and union investment managers, are considering co-signing the resolution, which calls on Target’s independent directors to review the criteria and risks in making donations to organizations active in political campaigns.

“Target should have carefully considered the implications that direct political contributions can have toward shareholder value,” said Ola Fadahunsi, spokesman for New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, the pension fund’s sole trustee. “It’s troubling to think that they can fund controversial candidates without properly assessing the risks and rewards involved.”

This country is divided enough without turning into “red” companies and “blue” companies

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