Patterico's Pontifications

4/6/2014

Mark Joseph Stern’s Weak Defense of Mozilla

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 4:25 pm



Mark Joseph Stern, the “gay politburo official at Slate,” has an extraordinarily silly piece titled The Astonishing Conservative Hypocrisy Over Mozilla and the First Amendment. Stern is the Slate writer who last month fell for a hoax story written by a satire publication that publishes such articles as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un Announce Openly Gay Relationship, Plan Global ‘Reign of Tyranny’ as New Power Couple. Now Stern turns his extraordinary powers of observation towards conservatives, whom he brands as hypocrites for denouncing the ouster of Brendan Eich as the CEO of Mozilla. Eich’s sin? Having donated $1000 to the pro-traditional marriage Prop. 8 campaign several years ago. Here’s Stern:

A repeated cry in conservative and libertarian circles over anti-gay Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich’s resignation is that the company is somehow trampling Eich’s free speech rights. Eich, as you’ve surely heard, donated $1,000 in 2008 to California’s Proposition 8 campaign, which successfully outlawed gay marriage in that state before getting shot down by the courts. It’s true that, because of this donation, Mozilla’s leaders and board members pressured Eich to resign. But it’s absurd and hypocritical to claim that this pressure constituted an infringement of Eich’s legal rights.

Stern begins the analysis by destroying a strawman argument: that Mozilla, a private company, is violating Eich’s First Amendment rights. Only government can violate someone’s First Amendment rights, but no serious commentator is arguing otherwise. So let’s move on:

But I can already hear the inevitable retort: Sure, Mozilla wasn’t literally trampling on Eich’s First Amendment rights, but it was violating the broader principles of free speech and free association. This argument is strikingly one-sided and opportunistic. Corporations like Mozilla, for better or worse, are also endowed with significant rights of free speech and free association—for instance, the freedom of Mozilla’s board and leadership to condemn Eich’s anti-gay actions. And make no mistake: Freedom of association includes the freedom of exclusion, particularly the freedom to exclude from your private organization an individual whose conduct is inconsistent with your values. Mozilla’s decision to seek Eich’s resignation implicates the same First Amendment principles that famously allow the Boy Scouts to exclude gay troop leaders.

Here Stern is conflating two distinct issues: 1) should Mozilla have the legal right to dismiss Eich? and 2) should Mozilla have dismissed Eich? Stern seems to argue that, because the answer to the first question is “yes,” that somehow refutes those of us who answer the second question “no.” Here, Andrew Sullivan (yes, Andrew Sullivan!) makes the correct argument:

As I said last night, of course Mozilla has the right to purge a CEO because of his incorrect political views. Of course Eich was not stripped of his First Amendment rights. I’d fight till my last breath for Mozilla to retain that right. What I’m concerned with is the substantive reason for purging him. When people’s lives and careers are subject to litmus tests, and fired if they do not publicly renounce what may well be their sincere conviction, we have crossed a line.

I agree — although it also matters, I think, what that sincere conviction is, and how it is expressed. People understandably want to propose a rule that will apply to any belief, however outrageous and inappropriate, and however it is expressed. But not all speech and beliefs are the same. If instead of donating to Prop. 8, Eich were donating to the KKK, I would have no problem with a company wanting to bounce him out. The example becomes even easier if Eich were expressing that sentiment publicly, in crass ways: imagine if Eich had a personal blog in which he continually used disparaging racial or religious epithets as he encouraged readers to donate to the KKK. The fact is, not only should a company be entitled to decide whom it employs, but sometimes a company is right to use a person’s personal beliefs — depending on what they are and how they are expressed — as a reason to fire an employee.

A similar point of view was expressed by Ken White in this post about Pax Dickinson, although I felt that Ken’s post was a bit too dismissive of the legitimacy of criticism of certain social consequences for speech.

Even though I think employment-related social consequences for speech can be appropriate, I maintain that such situations are, and should be, extremely rare — and that questionable cases should generally be resolved in favor of not disciplining an employee, because of the danger of letting political correctness ruin people’s lives.

Ultimately, I think you can’t draw lines that don’t take account of the fact that some speech simply is appropriate, and some is not. You can’t go around insulting everyone you meet, using profanities in inappropriate situations, and using racial and other epithets without risking some severe social consequences. On the other hand, when a company fires people for holding beliefs that were once expressed by the current President when he was running for office, I think that company ought to come in for some criticism.

Getting back to Stern, my assessment of him is that he considers opposition to gay marriage to be 100% equivalent to opposition to interracial marriage: it is indicative of a bigoted state of mind, and the holder of that sentiment deserves any negative consequence he has coming to him. Stern and I simply disagree here, and even though I voted against Proposition 8, I do not consider all (or even most) supporters of that proposition to be bigots or homophobes. I consider most of them to hold sincere beliefs based on a respect for an institution — traditional marriage — that has survived for millenia.

And Mr. Stern? If Vladmir Putin and Kim Jong Un want to get married, as the publication you trust claims, then I have no problem with that. But I don’t want to go on a witch hunt against people who do.

4/3/2014

Mozilla CEO Resigns for Thoughtcrime

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 6:17 pm



Mozilla CEO resigns for the offense of having donated to Prop. 8 years ago, thus showing his support for traditional marriage.

I support gay marriage. I also hate thuggery. I will be removing Firefox from every computer I own. I encourage every reader of this site to do the same.

UPDATE: A couple of readers are contending that Mozilla does not make money off of Firefox. False.

8/5/2018

Our Side Has an Impressive Young Candidate Too, and Naturally Facebook Hates Her

Filed under: General — JVW @ 4:01 pm



[guest post by JVW]

Lost in the brouhaha over our spunky but batty niece, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been the intriguing story of a very impressive young Republican Congressional candidate running in California’s 16th District, which encompasses parts of Fresno, Merced, and the San Joaquin Valley. Elizabeth Heng is the daughter of Cambodian immigrants who fled their home county during the terror of the communist dictator Pol Pot. Here is how Alexandra Descantis of National Review described her in a nicely-written profile last month:

About a decade ago, after [Heng] graduated from Stanford University, where she had served as student-body president, she returned to the Central Valley and opened a series of cell-phone stores with her brothers. Eventually, she found herself responsible for managing about 75 employees. “That was when I saw firsthand how government regulations impacted businesses negatively,” she says. “I constantly felt that from Washington, D.C., and Sacramento, they were saying that I was everything wrong with our country, when all I was doing was creating jobs.”

She subsequently decided to leave California to work in Washington, D.C., not expecting to stay long. “But it takes a long time to understand how to get legislation across the finish line,” she explains. Before she knew it, she had been in the nation’s capital for about six years, on and off. At one point, she worked on the House Foreign Affairs Committee with congressman Ed Royce (R., Calif.). At another, she aided Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in Nevada.

In 2016, Heng became a director for President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony — a role she held even as she traveled to Connecticut in her off hours to obtain an MBA at Yale. (“Never be one of the inauguration directors and get your MBA at the same time,” Heng says of that experience. “It was the worst of all worlds.”) When the inauguration finally took place, she remembers how powerful it was to watch her immigrant parents sitting on the stage with the incoming president.

Nothing against our delightfully daffy Bronx-born, Long Island-bred, Bronx-returning Democrat Socialist superstar, but Ms. Heng’s curriculum vitae is somewhat more impressive than graduated college, interned for Ted Kennedy, then tended bar and worked as a “community organizer.” Though not outright defeating an entrenched and influential incumbent in a one-party district like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez did, Ms. Heng did manage to take 47% of the vote in June’s open primary, holding the incumbent, seven-term Democrat Representative Jim Costa, to 53%. Moreover, she accomplished this feat running as a Republican in a district where Democrats at the top of the Presidential ticket usually get close to 60% of the vote. In the 2014 Republican wave election, Costa narrowly beat Republican challenger Jim Tacherra by a 51% to 49% margin, but in the rematch during the Presidential election year of 2016 when almost twice as many voters cast ballots, Costa cruised to a 58% to 42% victory.

So Ms. Heng, facing what we would assume to be an angry and motivated Democrat base, faces a stiff challenge in pushing aside Mr. Costa this November. To help introduce herself to the electorate, the Heng campaign has produced a wonderful four-minute introductory video. I encourage you to watch it; it is worth the investment of time.

Naturally, this video from an attractive and charismatic young female minority Republican candidate has the left resorting to their usual film-flam. Facebook, citing what we would guess to be the gristly images of Pol Pot’s victims at the beginning of the video, has suspended the Heng for Congress account prevented the video from being embedded on the Heng for Congress page. NRO published a screenshot which the campaign provided, with Facebook’s usual bland and canned language explaining their decision:

Heng screenshot

In the accompanying post, the publisher of National Review, Jack Fowler, gets to the heart of the matter:

Is the Cambodian Genocide now a non-event? Or just too icky for the Silicon Valley Boys? Or maybe this ad-rejection is yet another powerful Republican political message that fails some subjective standard contrived in a liberal hotbed?

That a Stanford graduate can be treated so capriciously by what Fowler rightly terms “the Silicon Valley Boys” ought to be shocking, but in the era of whispers of Twitter shadow bans and the firing of tech employees who hold contrarian social beliefs I guess it can’t be entirely surprising.

I confess that I know nothing about Elizabeth Heng other than what I read in the NRO profile and what I have seen on her website. She may be a little more bullish on the ability of the federal government to Accomplish Great Things than I would prefer, but overall I get the sense that she is a sober-minded and serious person who understands that federal programs must somehow be paid for, and finding the money to fund a program for one year doesn’t automatically mean that you have therefore found the money to fund it forever. If you would like to help her campaign with a donation (the California Democrat machine run by public employee unions, crybullies, and wealthy progressives is no doubt working hard to deflect this challenge) you can do so here.

EDIT: In the initial post I said that Facebook had “suspended” the account, but that doesn’t appear to be accurate. I have amended the post to say that they have prevented the video from being shown on the platform. My apologies for misconstruing the response.

– JVW

4/15/2014

To Stigmatize Or Not

Filed under: General — Dana @ 6:32 am



[guest by Dana]

Over at The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf posts an interesting and compelling defense of traditional marriage from a self-described 23-year-old African-American college student and a strong Christian who believes in the Biblical definition of marriage. The young woman is tired of critics equating her to an anti-black racist.

Keep in mind that one day this 23-year-old African-American female college graduate might become an executive at a successful company, or perhaps even become the face of the company. Should there be an expectation for her to step down? Are we at the point where a person of faith (resulting in a now seeming unacceptable moral view), should be disqualified from professional advancement? Should there be a political and moral vetting done *before* any advancement or promotion to the executive level …just to make sure? Would an African-American woman be accused of bigotry in this situation? Should society stigmatize her as a bigot and punish her professionally for her expressed views and beliefs?

I realize the general issue was discussed on Patterico’s Mozilla thread, however, because I found the young woman’s correspondence so compelling in its thought and clarity, I wanted to share it with readers.

Personal opinion: I am not in favor of gay marriage. There are a lot of people who do support it, and I have read and heard their opinions so many times. I am aware of the fact that many of them think that if someone does not approve of gay marriage, that means they are a bigoted person who hates anyone who is different from them. This is a gigantic misconception and it’s absolutely crucial that this misconception is erased, because it’s overwhelming. Sure, there are some traditional marriage supporters who do dislike gay people. They imagine the idea of themselves kissing a person of the same sex, and that’s gross to them because they don’t have those attractions, so they see gay people and automatically think “gross,” “strange,” etc. I wish they would calm down with the knee-jerk reaction and understand that gay people are not some kind of strange, alternate, not-quite-human species. Gay people are just people. I don’t see gay people as different; I see them as fellow human beings who happen to have different feelings and different opinions than I have.

“Opinions” is key there. It’s not just that gay people have different feelings of attraction. They also have different opinions than I have on what marriage is and where it came from. Gay people, and straight people who support gay marriage, believe that marriage is something created by humankind. Government does play a big role in marriage, after all. (And like I said earlier, I’m not sure that’s a good idea.) However, I have a different opinion. I believe that God, who created all people, has His own intention for what marriage is supposed to be. I believe He deliberately created two inherently different, non-interchangeable types of humans so that one of each could permanently join together and start a family. In both Testaments, the Bible mentions that homosexual behavior is a sin- and in more places than I have room to mention, the Bible shows pictures of marriage, romance, and sex as things that are all wrapped up in God’s amazing design … and His design was intended for couples made up of one of each sex. My point is that when I say I am not in favor of gay marriage, I’m not trying to create my own definition of marriage based on what I do and do not think is “gross,” and based on which groups of people I do or do not “hate.” All of that is a misconception. The reality is that I am trying to show others God’s picture.

When I say “homosexual behavior is a sin,” people who react with “that’s hateful” don’t understand what sin is and why it’s important to speak out against it. My belief is that sin is anything that goes against God’s design and His rules. People who don’t believe in sin obviously do not see anything wrong with homosexual behavior and they don’t know why people like me speak out against it, so their reasoning is that what I say must come from hatred.

But if I hated all sinners, I’d hate myself.

There are lots of sins that exist, and in fact, everyone in the whole world has sinned. When either side of the gay marriage debate focuses only on homosexuality, they miss the bigger picture. I hope that non-Christians understand that the reason we Christians openly voice our opposition to sin is that our desire to be forgiven of our own sins is the reason we became Christians in the first place. We see sin as something that separates us from God, and we see Jesus as the one who took the punishment for our sins and saved us.

We can’t be silent about that; we must tell other people. We can’t explain who Jesus is and why His death is so important without also explaining what sin is.

Everyone sins. Everyone has an innate desire to sin, unfortunately. Some people’s innate desire is for homosexuality. I understand when gay people say that they can’t help having those feelings. I understand that hearing “you can change if you pray and try hard over time” is extremely difficult. Maybe we Christians haven’t talked enough about how we believe that everyone is a work in progress, including ourselves. Whoever chooses to believe in the Biblical definition of sin is choosing a sometimes difficult life of putting God ahead of themselves and their own desires.

I don’t want to give the impression that it’s only gay people who must learn to control their desires, and straight people are okay. I’m sorry for all the times that Christians have given that impression. Like I said before, I see gay people as people. They are just people who sin in a different way than I do.

My beliefs don’t come from hatred and an arrogant desire to feel superior. And many traditional marriage supporters have beliefs similar to mine. Yes, there are hateful traditional marriage supporters, but there are also traditional supporters who sincerely do not hate at all. Yes, we try to convince others to believe what we believe, but that’s because our beliefs are so important to us that we feel it would be wrong and clique-like to keep them only to ourselves. I wish that more gay marriage supporters would not automatically think of us as “hateful bigots” who are trying to “brainwash” other people into believing what we believe simply for the sake of becoming one of us, to add to our numbers and to make us feel superior. It’s not about us.

It’s about God.

I’m not trying to be mean to gay people. I instead want to reach out to gay people, and all other people. Let’s agree to talk to each other politely, and respectfully disagree about our different beliefs.

–Dana

4/13/2014

Having An Honest Conversation Requires Being Honest

Filed under: General — Dana @ 10:14 am



[guest post by Dana]

Today, Ross Douthat addresses the lack of honesty that permeates the cloudy justifications from both Mozilla and Brandeis University.

What’s particularly interesting about this column are the comments generated. A great number of them exemplify, without the slightest hint of self-awareness, the point Douthat closes with: I can live with the progressivism. It’s the lying that gets toxic.

EARLIER this year, a column by a Harvard undergraduate named Sandra Y. L. Korn briefly achieved escape velocity from the Ivy League bubble, thanks to its daring view of how universities should approach academic freedom.

Korn proposed that such freedom was dated and destructive, and that a doctrine of “academic justice” should prevail instead. No more, she wrote, should Harvard permit its faculty to engage in “research promoting or justifying oppression” or produce work tainted by “racism, sexism, and heterosexism.” Instead, academic culture should conform to left-wing ideas of the good, beautiful and true, and decline as a matter of principle “to put up with research that counters our goals.”

No higher-up at Harvard endorsed her argument, of course. But its honesty of purpose made an instructive contrast to the institutional statements put out in the immediate aftermath of two recent controversies — the resignation of the Mozilla Foundation’s C.E.O., Brendan Eich, and the withdrawal, by Brandeis University, of the honorary degree it had promised to the human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

In both cases, Mozilla and Brandeis, there was a striking difference between the clarity of what had actually happened and the evasiveness of the official responses to the events. Eich stepped down rather than recant his past support for the view that one man and one woman makes a marriage; Hirsi Ali’s invitation was withdrawn because of her sweeping criticisms of Islamic culture. But neither the phrase “marriage” nor the word “Islam” appeared in the initial statements Mozilla and Brandeis released.

Instead, the Mozilla statement rambled in the language of inclusion: “Our organizational culture reflects diversity and inclusiveness. … Our culture of openness extends to encouraging staff and community to share their beliefs and opinions. …”

The statement on Hirsi Ali was slightly more direct, saying that “her past statements … are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.” But it never specified what those statements or those values might be — and then it fell back, too, on pieties about diversity: “In the spirit of free expression that has defined Brandeis University throughout its history, Ms. Hirsi Ali is welcome to join us on campus in the future to engage in a dialogue about these important issues.”

What both cases illustrate, with their fuzzy rhetoric masking ideological pressure, is a serious moral defect at the heart of elite culture in America.

The defect, crucially, is not this culture’s bias against social conservatives, or its discomfort with stinging attacks on non-Western religions. Rather, it’s the refusal to admit — to others, and to itself — that these biases fundamentally trump the commitment to “free expression” or “diversity” affirmed in mission statements and news releases.

This refusal, this self-deception, means that we have far too many powerful communities (corporate, academic, journalistic) that are simultaneously dogmatic and dishonest about it — that promise diversity but only as the left defines it, that fill their ranks with ideologues and then claim to stand athwart bias and misinformation, that speak the language of pluralism while presiding over communities that resemble the beau ideal of Sandra Y. L. Korn.

Harvard itself is a perfect example of this pattern: As Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame pointed out when the column was making waves, Korn could only come up with one contemporary example of a Harvardian voice that ought to be silenced — “a single conservative octogenarian,” the political philosophy professor Harvey Mansfield. Her call for censorship, Deneen concluded, “is at this point almost wholly unnecessary, since there are nearly no conservatives to be found at Harvard.”

I am (or try to be) a partisan of pluralism, which requires respecting Mozilla’s right to have a C.E.O. whose politics fit the climate of Silicon Valley, and Brandeis’s right to rescind degrees as it sees fit, and Harvard’s freedom to be essentially a two-worldview community, with a campus shared uneasily by progressives and corporate neoliberals, and a small corner reserved for token reactionary cranks.

But this respect is difficult to maintain when these institutions will not admit that this is what is going on. Instead, we have the pretense of universality — the insistence that the post-Eich Mozilla is open to all ideas, the invocations of the “spirit of free expression” from a school that’s kicking a controversial speaker off the stage.

And with the pretense, increasingly, comes a dismissive attitude toward those institutions — mostly religious — that do acknowledge their own dogmas and commitments, and ask for the freedom to embody them and live them out.

It would be a far, far better thing if Harvard and Brandeis and Mozilla would simply say, explicitly, that they are as ideologically progressive as Notre Dame is Catholic or B. Y.U. is Mormon or Chick-fil-A is evangelical, and that they intend to run their institution according to those lights.

I can live with the progressivism. It’s the lying that gets toxic.

–Dana

3/6/2012

Front Groups for the SEIU . . . and the Teamsters . . . and ACORN!

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 12:44 am



The Daily Caller reports on a number of front groups for the SEIU. This post expands on the Daily Caller report, and shows that the front groups are not merely tied to the SEIU, but also to the Teamsters — and to a descendant of our old friend ACORN.

The Daily Caller piece explains:

The politically aggressive Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has quietly created a national network of at least eight community-organizing groups, some of which function alongside the Occupy Wall Street movement, a Daily Caller investigation shows.

Incorporated by the SEIU as local non-profits, the groups are waging concerted local political campaigns to publicly attack conservative political figures, banks, energy companies and other corporations.

Each local group has portrayed itself as an independent community organization not tied to any special interest. But they were founded, incorporated, and led by SEIU personnel.

The front groups, which operate as 501(c)(4) non-profit organizations, pretend to engage in grassroots activity, such as going to a Republican senator’s office, and claiming to be unemployed D.C. residents demanding that the senator meet with them concerning an Obama jobs bill. The only problem is that the puppeteers are not far behind:

A source told the Daily Caller that while African-American and Hispanic protesters sat in McConnell’s office, two Caucasian women from Our DC directed the protesters from the hallway. The staffers called reporters, operated laptops and posted messages to Twitter.

As Rick Perry might say: “oops.”

Despite these groups’ utter lack of transparency, the Daily Caller provides extensive evidence tying these groups to the SEIU. For example:

An SEIU-tied Washington, D.C. law firm incorporated each of them. The founding board members are solely SEIU executives and organizers. In each city the founding addresses match those of SEIU locals.

In addition to that and other evidence, the Daily Caller tells us that the IP addresses of the front groups’ web sites tie back to an SEIU server.

Good stuff, and excellent research.

A tipster provides me with more, giving me further links and ties between one of the front groups and several unions and “community organizing” organizations. In addition to finding ties to Son of ACORN and the Teamsters — the main thrust of this post — my tipster also found more evidence tying one of the front groups named by the Daily Caller to the SEIU.

That organization is Houston-based “Good Jobs = Great Houston,” a non-profit, like most of these other groups . . . and a group tied to unions, ACORN descendants, and other parts of the institutional left.

For example, a visit to the Good Jobs = Great Houston web site reveals the following disclaimer, which shows a direct tie to the SEIU:

F. Warranty Disclaimer

THIS WEBSITE IS PROVIDED TO YOU “AS IS.” YOU AGREE THAT YOUR USE OF THE SEIU WEBSITE SHALL BE AT YOUR SOLE RISK. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, GOOD JOBS=GREAT HOUSTON, AS WELL AS ITS OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, AND AGENTS (COLLECTIVELY, GOOD JOBS=GREAT HOUSTON), DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN CONNECTION WITH THE WEBSITE AND YOUR USE THEREOF. GOOD JOBS=GREAT HOUSTON CANNOT AND DOES NOT WARRANT THE ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, CURRENTNESS, NONINFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OF THE SITE’S CONTENT OR THE CONTENT OF ANY SITES LINKED TO THIS SITE. NOR DOES GOOD JOBS=GREAT HOUSTON GUARANTEE THAT THE WEBSITE WILL BE ERROR FREE, OR CONTINUOUSLY AVAILABLE, OR THAT THE WEBSITE WILL BE FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL COMPONENTS. THE SEIU PARTIES DO NOT WARRANT, GUARANTEE, OR ASSUME RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY PRODUCT OR SERVICE PROVIDED, ADVERTISED OR OFFERED BY A THIRD PARTY THROUGH THE GOOD JOBS=GREAT HOUSTON WEBSITE OR ANY HYPERLINKED WEBSITE OR FEATURED IN ANY BANNER OR OTHER ADVERTISING.

Man, that’s funny. Let’s screenshot it in case they try to scrub it:

Yeah, that seems pretty direct all right. Did they mean to leave the legal language so revealing? As Rick Perry might say, again: oops!

There is other evidence tying this organization to SEIU. Take a look at the following magical address:

4299 San Felipe, Suite 200
Houston, TX 77027

That very special address — right down to the suite number! — is the address of three “coalition partners” of Good Jobs = Great Houston: Mi Familia Vota, Hope Local 123, and SEIU Local 1. All four list the same office address, and the 2 unions link to the same page. And SEIU Local 5 in Houston is at the same address and suite number. Fancy that.

Next we have . . .

The Teamsters Connection

Teamsters Online described a “community canvasser” job with Good Jobs=Great Houston! as being a “Teamster Job”:

And while the link appears to be dead, a Twitter site calling itself “Union Jobs” advertised the same job:

And then we have . . .

The ACORN connection

Here’s where it gets really interesting.

Here is the contact info for Good Jobs = Great Houston. Please take special note of the address:

Contact Us

Good Jobs=Great Houston
2955 Gulf Freeway
Houston, TX 77007

Phone: 713-236-8245
Fax: 713-236-8279

Google and real estate listings show that address to be a combination office space/warehouse. Check here and here and here.

Coincidentally, this is the same address as that of the Texas Organizing Project:

Houston Office:
2955 Gulf Freeway Suite B
Houston, TX 77003

832-387-5845
info@organizetexas.org

Oddly enough, the “Texas Organizing Project” is a “coalition partner” of Good Jobs = Great Houston.

And the really fun part is: the Texas Organizing Project? Yeah, that would be the new name for ACORN in Texas:

State chapters have incorporated themselves under new names. New York became New York Communities for Change. California became Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. Texas became Texas Organizing Project.

So Good Jobs = Great Houston and Texas Organizing Project (Son of ACORN) are not just “coalition partners,” but also make their address in the same warehousey location in Houston.

Hmmmm.

You could do the same exercise with virtually all these groups, and probably find all kinds of union ties. I think the ACORN tie surprised me the most least.

Keep in mind that the front groups pretend to be independent, grassroots organizations. Even as their puppeteers direct their actions, and organize under the auspices of well-funded unions, they claim non-profit status, and would have you believe they are genuine grassroots groups.

Hahahahahahahahhaha. Uh, not so much.

If Andrew Breitbart were alive today, this is the kind of shenanigans by the institutional left he would want us to expose. Nice work by the Daily Caller . . . and my tipster.

We are all Breitbart!

3/15/2011

Clear Evidence of Voter Fraud in New Mexico

Filed under: General,Immigration — Patterico @ 5:14 pm



What will the voter fraud denialists say about this?

The New Mexico secretary of state’s office is cross checking the state’s voter rolls with a list of thousands of foreign nationals who have been issued driver’s licenses.

The work is far from done, but Secretary of State Dianna Duran testified during a House committee Tuesday that the review has turned up evidence of foreign nationals obtaining a license, registering to vote and casting ballots.

In case you were wondering, that’s not supposed to happen.

A spokesman for Gov. Susana Martinez, Scott Darnell, says the initial report from Duran’s office should concern every New Mexican.

He says every illegally cast vote disenfranchises a New Mexican and this is another reason why the governor wants to stop issuing licenses to illegal immigrants.

Under a 2003 law, the state has issued more than 80,000 driver’s licenses to foreign nationals, including illegal immigrants.

There seems to be very little coverage of this.

I have been sounding the alarm on voter fraud by illegal immigrants for some time now. Immediately after the disastrous election of Obama, I wrote:

Several days ago, I asked you: “What do you think is the single greatest source of voter fraud in this country?” To me, the answer is obvious and intuitive: votes cast by illegal immigrants.

By all accounts there are far more than 10 million illegal immigrants in this country. Most estimates are around 12-13 million; some are 16-17 million; some are as high as 20 million. We have gotten about 500,000 new illegal immigrants per year every year since 2004; from 2000-2004 this number was even higher, ranging from 800,000 to 850,000 new illegals every year.

We all know that these illegals do much of what citizens do: drive, work, receive health care, etc.

Many do these things off the books, driving without licenses and working without documentation. But many others do these things with phony documentation, obtaining fraudulent licenses and filling out work papers with bogus information.

Why wouldn’t they vote, too?

It certainly seems logically possible that there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal votes cast in this past election. If this is true, it is possible that illegal immigrants decided this election.

I have also discussed the problem here (responding to ACORN apologist Peter Dreier) and here (discussing the increasing worthlessness of your vote).

The problem is not limited to illegal immigrants, by the way — they are just the most egregious example of non-citizens voting. Indeed, it doesn’t even have to be the case that the non-citizen intends to defraud the system: some think they are entitled to vote.

We don’t know what the numbers will be in New Mexico. We will keep a close eye on this and report the numbers when we hear them. (Keep in mind that this review will catch only fraud by foreign nationals who have gotten a driver’s license. The fraud could be much more widespread than this review will reveal.)

Every state should be doing what New Mexico is doing. It’s an easy and undeniable way to attack voter fraud on a wide scale. That is, if you think voter fraud matters. Me, I do. Because it carries the potential to cancel out my vote in favor of someone who has no right to cast a ballot.

If California ever tries to conduct such a review, prepare yourself for the cries of profiling! and racism! But really, absent such cynical and dishonest arguments, is there any reason not to do this?

1/24/2011

Charles Johnson Impotently Tries to Threaten My Job

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 6:51 pm



Looks like my last few posts really got to Charles Johnson:

The reference is to a post by Aaron Worthing, my guest blogger, who published the post while I was at work. Aaron’s post began as follows:

Okay so metaphorically, we just chopped off Charles Johnson’s head and mounted it on a pike on our collective front lawn, so why not go for Andrew Sullivan next?

Note the level of dishonesty at work here. Charles seeks to mislead his dopey crowd into thinking that I made a real threat against him, as opposed to a guest blogger making an explicitly labeled metaphorical statement. He has “deniability” because:

  • He didn’t actually say it was me, he just said it was my site, and of course that is technically true;
  • While Dowdifying the quote, he did say it was “metaphorical” — in a way that allows his dumber readers to conclude that is merely what my defense would be.

But of course the real purpose is to stir up his little army of sycophants and try to get them to contact my work. If you read through his comments, you’ll see that the small-brained lizards all fell for Charles’s little truth-bending exercise. They all think I wrote the post; they all think it’s a real threat; and several of them are making the usual predictable noises about how they are going to call my office, etc. etc. Stuff I have heard a million times before. Some examples:

Any public employee should be ashamed of posting anything like that anywhere.

. . . .

Who does this guy answer to? (And who is that guy’s boss?)

. . . .

Omigod! I’m sorry to hear about this. I’m also shocked that the guy who posted it is in law enforcement. He really should know how horrible such a web post is.

. . . .

Personally? I think they should fire him.

. . . .

They should give him the ultimatum of first shutting down “Patterico’s Pontifications” and then ceasing to engage in “late night” errant behavior. If not then they should fire him. At least that’s what I think Los Angeles County District Attorney, Steve Cooley, should do.

This is, of course, exactly what Charles sought when he wrote the post. This is all about shutting down the guy who criticized their hero Charles. He knows they will react like that. That’s why he posted what he did.

One commenter even quoted a left-winger here, who cited extreme comments on a pro-life blog to make a point about right-wing hate speech, and pretended that the extreme comments were being made by commenters here and supported by me:

This comment from that blog is terrifying. Be careful Charles. This does not even pretend to be metaphorical.

Jasper says:
January 21, 2011 at 11:07 am
’2 cent solution’

I would propose the 4 cent solution. A .45 between the eyes ….

Jasper says:
January 21, 2011 at 8:10 pm
“We do our ministry with love, not with hate speech, not with slander, not with anger or outburst. with a calmed, rational and loving approach”

I promise Joy, I will calmly pull trigger of my .45 into an abortionist that cuts the spinal cords of innocent babies. There will be no anger, slander or hate speech, only justice.

The level of idiocy and dishonesty is a compelling testament to the low level to which everyone there has sunk. That quote is from this comment by leftist Jim, who introduces the quote with the phrase: “You mean violent comments like this on a noted pro-life blog?” Leftist Jim is making a point about violent rhetoric on another blog. And the LGF commenter who quoted the comment had to know this.

Of course, by shading the truth to make it sound like I (not Aaron) made a real (not explicitly labeled metaphorical) threat, Charles hopes to frighten me and silence me.

Here is how much I am frightened and silenced:

Charles Johnson, you are a hypocritical, dishonest lowlife punk. This post of yours guarantees that I’ll be doing a new post about you every single time I find out about another lie of yours.

Every. Single. Time.

In doing so, Charles Johnson, I will metaphorically crush you. I will metaphorically disembowel you and eat your innards. But I will not do a single physical thing to you. Nor will I encourage others to.

I will simply laugh and laugh as your reputation continues to shrink into nothing.

I have, of course, had people do this exact sort of thing to me many, many times before — and it’s not purely a tactic of the left, either. (In fact, there is one certain “classical liberal” site that did almost precisely the same thing a little more than a year ago.) Tbogg, Sadly No, Brad Friedman, his partner the convicted bomber, the aforementioned “classical liberal” site, and several disgraced reporters and columnists for the Los Angeles Times have all learned that the best way to get me to stop pointing out their dishonesty is to stop engaging in dishonesty.

You stop lying, I stop pointing it out. Simple as that.

UPDATE: It just gets better and better. Here is a Twitter message Johnson just republished:

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha.

UPDATE x2: Jeff Goldstein denies gratuitously using my name and job title to harm me — in a post that gratuitously uses my name and job title.

His denial is false.

Commenter Dustin reminds us of the numerous posts in which Goldstein gratuitously linked my name, job title, and the word “anti-Semitic.” Dustin’s comments are here, here, and here. As Dustin explained:

You google bombed his name and job with ‘is he an antisemite’. Why didn’t you google bomb his blog handle, Patterico?

It’s really obvious that you were hoping that people searching for Patterico’s professional name would see questions about his antisemitism.

This isn’t funny, and you’d understand if you had a job.

Another point, your family was harassed by a deranged stalker. You chose to associate Patterico in your constant mentioning of this stalker, even though Patterico begged you not to, as this would lead the stalker to harass Patterico’s family. And indeed, he was right… that’s what happened. Thanks Jeff. You’re a real classy guy.

Your evidence that Patterico is an antisemite? None. You just thought it was a funny joke to have someone’s name on google linked to that question because you really, really hate the guy. He’s done nothing to you. He’s always asking you to chill out and stop this blog war. If I post something critical enough of you, Patterico just deletes it and asks me not to provoke you.

And I realize the reason is that he does actually want to have a life outside of this blog crap.

I think even Dustin doesn’t realize how far Jeff carried the Google bombing campaign.

You perhaps did not know that Goldstein, having created this Google bomb, then fortified the bomb by going to numerous of his old posts and linking the “anti-Semitic” post. Here are a few examples:

and here:

and here:

and here:

and here:

and here:

and here:

and here:

and here:

Note that Goldstein was not linking to comments of mine that he wanted to criticize, which would have been legitimate. Instead, he was repeatedly and gratuitously linking to a trumped-up smear on me, which specifically included my name, my job title, and the word “anti-Semitic.”

Goldstein appears to defend this smear as “satire.” Apparently, in his view, false words spoken online and linked to a person’s name and profession can’t be considered harmful as long as the intent is to joke or be clever. Deb Frisch must be thrilled to learn of Goldstein’s support for this excuse for Internet harassment.

I note also this Goldstein comment in which he uses my name and job title, and falsely claims that I was trying to hurt him professionally. The record shows that I was doing the precise opposite — but the smear worked. If you click on Goldstein’s comment and scroll down, you will see Jeff’s commentariat spinning into the exact same frenzy Charles Johnson spun his commenters into — with people posting contact information for the District Attorney, suggesting that the Los Angeles Times should be told bad things about me, and so forth. When Charles Johnson pulled his gratuitous naming of me and my job (alluding to Goldstein doing the same as precedent), I was reminded of this behavior by Goldstein.

P.S. Dustin also reveals that, like me and EricPWJohnson and many others, Dustin’s comments were altered at Protein Wisdom: “He instantly started changing all my comments on his blog.”) You can add this to the mountain of other evidence proving that Goldstein alters even reasonable people’s comments when they call him on his bad behavior.

Goldstein also admits that he outs commenters, and defends it by saying that if you included part of your name in your e-mail address, and then criticize him, you were asking to be outed.

These are all tactics of the sort Charles Johnson has used. My point is that, unfortunately, they are not limited to the left.

1/23/2011

Glenn Beck’s Warning More Prescient Than Previously Realized, But Let’s Shut Him Up Anyway

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 1:23 pm



With every passing day, the left attempts to recharacterize standard political rhetoric as violent — even as we learn more about real violence on the left . . . violence that Big Media has chosen to hide from our view.

Power Line notes how the New York Times is publicizing a letter from the Center for Constitution Rights which seeks to muzzle Glenn Beck for telling the truth about Frances Fox Piven. As Power Line notes, Piven has engaged in rhetoric supportive of violence; Beck has pointed that out; and this supposedly means that Beck is responsible for a handful of anonymous Internet threats on her life.

Meanwhile, people lie about Sarah Palin, creating an explosion of death threats against her, and that doesn’t rate concern from the Center for Constitutional Rights or the New York Times. (Thanks to Dana for that point.)

Now, what was Glenn Beck warning about besides Piven? Oh yes: violence by radical leftists against Democrat politicians. Which leads me to the next topic:

On his blog, reader Mike K. alerts us to a real assassination attempt that you probably never heard about. A fellow named Casey Brezik stabbed a college dean in Kansas last September, but thought he was stabbing Missouri Governor Jay Nixon.

Turns out the would-be assassin, while possibly mentally disturbed, was also one of these Marxist revolutionaries Beck was warning about. Lisa Graas wrote:

In fact, a quick overview of Brezik’s Facebook page, which I found easily by doing a simple Facebook search for his name, shows that he is not just some pot-head college student. The picture at the top of this article was posted in Brezik’s profile with the Guevara quote: “A true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of AMOR!” Brezik also appears to be sympathetic to Fidel Castro saying in regard to the former leader of Cuba’s statement on war, “Is this not to be takin [sic] seriously?” . . .

Brezik is best described as an active anarcho-communist who had a fascination with Che Guevara and was concerned about world poverty, capitalism and the environment. He was so concerned, in fact, that he opted to act exactly as Che Guevara did — as an executioner.

Brezik has been discussing the possibility of using radical activity to bring about the change he was looking for. Only one of his 26 Facebook friends engaged him on the issue while the rest either didn’t see his comments or ignored them.

And from the American Thinker:

In his “About Me” box on Facebook, Brezik listed as his favorite quotation one from progressive poster boy, Che Guevara. The quote begins “Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism” and gets more belligerent from there.

On his wall postings, Brezik ranted, “How are we the radical(s) (left) to confront the NEW RIGHT, if we avoid confrontation all together?”

As good as his word, Brezik’s marched on Toronto in June 2010 to protest the G20 Summit, where he was arrested, charged, and deported. “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED,” he boasted.

Like many on the left, Brezik seemed to have found religion.

In reference to an article about Terry Jones and his proposed Quran burning, Brezik posted on the day before his planned assault, “This is now a Holy war. Scriptures have been desecrated. War U can’t handle. Make a choice and quick.”

News to you, right? To me, too. For example, the L.A. Times never printed a word about this assassination attempt, in their print edition or anywhere else.

Oh — and did I mention? His intended target was a Democrat.

Why, it’s almost as if Glenn Beck had a point when he said that self-described leftist revolutionaries may turn on their own with violence!

But by all means, let’s pile on Glenn Beck for telling such truths, while ignoring the lies that endanger Sarah Palin’s life. It’s all part of the “New Civility.”

For the children!

10/20/2010

Widener Law Tries to Erase Its Embarrassment

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 9:37 pm



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing]

I am not going to document it as meticulously as with the WaPo/AP story because this is just not a significant issue–if the links go bad, you will just have to either believe me, or not.  But with the help of Dustin and JK, we were able to recover a cached version of Widener Law School’s coverage of the O’Donnell debate, before they scrubbed it of pretty much all analysis, with gems like this:

“Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” asked Christine O’Donnell, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Delaware, during a debate held at Widener Law’s Delaware campus on Tuesday, October 19th against Democratic candidate and current New Castle County Executive Chris Coons.

O’Donnell asked the question of Coons during an exchange on the Constitution and O’Donnell’s contention that Intelligent Design should be taught in public schools alongside Evolution. The law school audience reacted strongly to O’Donnell’s lack of familiarity with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Coons too seemed bemused at O’Donnell’s question, calling the separation of church and state “an indispensable principle” of the Constitution and noting, “Religious doctrine doesn’t belong in our public schools.”

The unnamed writer of the piece apparently thought it was self-evident that O’Donnell was showing us how stupid she was.  Except now we know she wasn’t.  She was making a wholly valid point—that the phrase “separation of church and state” doesn’t actually appear in the constitution, and its validity as a doctrine is highly debatable.  I mentioned the arrogance of the audience in a previous post, but I think honestly Althouse captured it better than I did, when she wrote:

A word needs to be said about the mocking laughter that instantly erupted from the law students in the audience. Presumably, that sound meant we are smart and you are dumb. Where did they learn to treat a guest at their law school — Widener Law School — with such disrespect? They hooted O’Donnell down, and she never got a chance to explain her point. What does that say about the climate for debate in law schools? Not only did they feel energized to squelch the guest they politically opposed, but they felt sure of their own understanding of the law….

What is the atmosphere at Widener? Is there no intellectual curiosity? No love of debate? No grasp of how complex constitutional law problems can be?

The irony of it all is that here is a line that is also rescued from the memory hole at Widener’s Law School site.

Following a welcome from Widener Law Public Relations Officer Mary Allen in which she affirmed the law school’s commitment to the “Open exchange of ideas,” WDEL Anchor Peter MacArthur… turned to a panel of four journalists for the first question.

(emphasis added.)  I doubt that the exchange is very open, if the minds are so closed.  This whole incident has rightfully become an embarrassment to the law school.  And that makes it less shocking that they tried to disappear this entire piece.

You can read the current version of this webpage, here.

Update: Minor corrections made.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

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