DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Liberal groups try to exploit backlash against Target for helping anti-gay

Quote:

---

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Liberal-groups-push-to-apf-2321043209.html?x=0

Liberal groups push to exploit Target backlash
Liberal groups try to exploit backlash against Target for helping anti-gay marriage candidate


ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) -- Protesters have been rallying outside Target Corp. or its stores almost daily since the retailer angered gay rights supporters and progressives by giving money to help a conservative Republican gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota. Liberal groups are pushing to make an example of the company, hoping its woes will deter other businesses from putting their corporate funds into elections.

A national gay rights group is negotiating with Target officials, demanding that the firm balance the scale by making comparable donations to benefit candidates it favors. Meanwhile, the controversy is threatening to complicate Target's business plans in other urban markets. Several city officials in San Francisco, one of the cities where Target hopes to expand, have begun criticizing the company.

"Target is receiving criticism and frustration from their customers because they are doing something wrong, and that should serve absolutely as an example for other companies," said Ilyse Hogue, director of political advocacy for the liberal group MoveOn.org, which is pressing Target to formally renounce involvement in election campaigns.

But conservative organizations are likely to react harshly if Target makes significant concessions to the left-leaning groups.

The flap has revealed new implications of a recent Supreme Court ruling that appeared to benefit corporations by clearing the way for them to spend company funds directly in elections. Companies taking sides in political campaigns risk alienating customers who back other candidates.

Target's $150,000 donation to a business-oriented group supporting Republican Tom Emmer, an outspoken opponent of gay marriage, was one of the first big corporate contributions to become known after the U.S. Supreme Court threw out prohibitions on corporate spending in elections earlier this year.

The Minneapolis-based chain has gone from defending the donation as a business decision to apologizing and saying it would carefully review its future giving. But the protests have continued.

Demonstrators gathered near Target's Minneapolis headquarters on Thursday, and two Facebook groups focused on gay rights are organizing protests at Target stores nationwide this weekend. Immigrant rights supporters have joined the protests, citing Emmer's tough stance on illegal immigration.

The company is in talks with the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights organization that wants Target and electronics retailer Best Buy Co., which gave $100,000 to the same group backing Emmer, to match their donations with equal amounts to help gay-friendly candidates.

Fred Sainz, the group's vice president for communications, said he is optimistic both companies will respond to the demand. Target has long cultivated a good relationship with the gay community in Minneapolis, and its gay employees have protested the donation.

"The repair has to be consistent with the harm that was done," Sainz said.

MoveOn, which had feared a heavy flow of corporate donations to groups that help conservative candidates after the Supreme Court decision, protested outside Target headquarters last week.

On the other side, conservatives have begun to rally to support Target, but in smaller numbers. A Facebook page urging "Boycott Target Until They Cease Funding Anti-Gay Politics" has more than 54,000 fans. A page declaring "I will NOT Boycott Target for supporting a Conservative candidate" has a little more than 400 fans.

A Target spokeswoman said the company had nothing to add to chief executive Gregg Steinhafel's statement of apology last week. At Richfield Minn.-based Best Buy, a spokeswoman said the company is reviewing its process for political donations and intended the Minnesota contribution to focus "solely on jobs and an improved economy."

Emmer has said he views the Target giving as an exercise in free speech and wants to keep his campaign focused on economic issues.

Target and rival Wal-Mart Stores Inc. have been trying to expand into urban markets after years of saturating the suburbs. Just last month, Target opened its first store in Manhattan, in East Harlem.

The company has 1,700 stores in the U.S. but only 150 stores in cities, and 50 more in cities with more than 100,000 people nearby.

In San Francisco, Target got a warm reception when it originally outlined plans to open two stores. That's shifted since the Minnesota controversy erupted.

"It just illustrates their disconnect, I think, from a city that they would want to establish a successful business in," said Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi. Target stores would be serving "the epicenter of the LGBT rights movement."

Target and BestBuy's donations went to MN Forward, a business-focused group that has run ads supporting Emmer and his lower-taxes message. The group is staffed by former insiders from Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty's administration and has also backed a few Democratic legislators.

MN Forward has continued to collect corporate money after the backlash against Target, bringing in $110,000 through Tuesday from businesses including Holiday Cos. gas stations and Graco Inc., a maker of pumps and fluid handling equipment.

AP Retail Writer Emily Fredrix in New York and Associated Press Writer Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis contributed to this report.

---

Quote:

---

Liberal groups are pushing to make an example of the company, hoping its woes will deter other businesses from putting their corporate funds into elections.

---

Then it says...

Quote:

---

A national gay rights group is negotiating with Target officials, demanding that the firm balance the scale by making comparable donations to benefit candidates it favors.

---

It has nothing to do with them putting their corporate funds into elections.. it has 100% to do with who receives those funds.

Quote:

---

Things like this make me think of the movie P.C.U. with all of the students just waiting to protest anything and everything at the drop of a hat.


We just need George Clinton to make it all better.

---

Quote:

---

I don't think corporation should be allowed to donate to candidates at all, period. They aren't citzens, the dont' have a right to vote, and the candidates are supposed to represent people, not entities. Their owner wants to donate? have at it. But businesses should stick to business and leave democracy to the people.

---

Quote:

---

Just because en employee or shareholder of a company, who makes his money though ownership of a company, is not allowed to donate the money he makes to who he wants?

---

Quote:

---

We just need George Clinton to make it all better.

---

Quote:

---

I would actually be fully in support of banning all donations from any andóall non-citizens, to be fully inclusive of all organizations, collectives and businesses.

---

and unions.

Quote:

---

Justices, 5-4, Reject Corporate Spending Limit
Facebookcomments
(2082)Sign In to E-Mail Print
Reprints
Share
CloseLinkedinDiggMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalink By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: January 21, 2010
WASHINGTON — Overruling two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

Skip to next paragraph

Reuters, left; Bloomberg
Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and John Paul Stevens, right.

Related
Lobbyists Get Potent Weapon in Campaign Ruling (January 22, 2010)
Does Corporate Money Lead to Political Corruption? (January 24, 2010)

Corporate Money and American Politics
Will the Supreme Court's campaign finance decision damage democracy?

Join the Discussion »

Blog

The Caucus
The latest on President Obama, his administration and other news from Washington and around the nation. Join the discussion.

More Politics News
Enlarge This Image

Luke Sharrett/The New York Times
Dave Bossie, President of Citizens United, spoke to the press following Thursday’s Supreme Court decision.

Enlarge This Image

Lauren Victoria Burke/Associated Press
Senator Charles E. Schumer, left, accompanied by Rep. Chris Van Hollen, spoke about campaign finance reform after the Supreme Court ruling on Thursday.
Readers' Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Read All Comments (2082) »The 5-to-4 decision was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said that allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace would corrupt democracy.

The ruling represented a sharp doctrinal shift, and it will have major political and practical consequences. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision to reshape the way elections were conducted. Though the decision does not directly address them, its logic also applies to the labor unions that are often at political odds with big business.

The decision will be felt most immediately in the coming midterm elections, given that it comes just two days after Democrats lost a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and as popular discontent over government bailouts and corporate bonuses continues to boil.

President Obama called it “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”

The justices in the majority brushed aside warnings about what might follow from their ruling in favor of a formal but fervent embrace of a broad interpretation of free speech rights.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of the court’s conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

The ruling, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205, overruled two precedents: Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, a 1990 decision that upheld restrictions on corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates, and McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, a 2003 decision that upheld the part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that restricted campaign spending by corporations and unions.

The 2002 law, usually called McCain-Feingold, banned the broadcast, cable or satellite transmission of “electioneering communications” paid for by corporations or labor unions from their general funds in the 30 days before a presidential primary and in the 60 days before the general elections.

The law, as narrowed by a 2007 Supreme Court decision, applied to communications “susceptible to no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate.”

The five opinions in Thursday’s decision ran to more than 180 pages, with Justice John Paul Stevens contributing a passionate 90-page dissent. In sometimes halting fashion, he summarized it for some 20 minutes from the bench on Thursday morning.

Joined by the other three members of the court’s liberal wing, Justice Stevens said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings.

Eight of the justices did agree that Congress can require corporations to disclose their spending and to run disclaimers with their advertisements, at least in the absence of proof of threats or reprisals. “Disclosure permits citizens and shareholders to react to the speech of corporate entities in a proper way,” Justice Kennedy wrote. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented on this point.

The majority opinion did not disturb bans on direct contributions to candidates, but the two sides disagreed about whether independent expenditures came close to amounting to the same thing.

“The difference between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree, not kind,” Justice Stevens wrote. “And selling access is not qualitatively different from giving special preference to those who spent money on one’s behalf.”

Justice Kennedy responded that “by definition, an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate.”

The case had unlikely origins. It involved a documentary called “Hillary: The Movie,” a 90-minute stew of caustic political commentary and advocacy journalism. It was produced by Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit corporation, and was released during the Democratic presidential primaries in 2008.

Citizens United lost a suit that year against the Federal Election Commission, and scuttled plans to show the film on a cable video-on-demand service and to broadcast television advertisements for it. But the film was shown in theaters in six cities, and it remains available on DVD and the Internet.

The majority cited a score of decisions recognizing the First Amendment rights of corporations, and Justice Stevens acknowledged that “we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment.”

But Justice Stevens defended the restrictions struck down on Thursday as modest and sensible. Even before the decision, he said, corporations could act through their political action committees or outside the specified time windows.

The McCain-Feingold law contains an exception for broadcast news reports, commentaries and editorials. But that is, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in a concurrence joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., “simply a matter of legislative grace.”

Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion said that there was no principled way to distinguish between media corporations and other corporations and that the dissent’s theory would allow Congress to suppress political speech in newspapers, on television news programs, in books and on blogs.

Justice Stevens responded that people who invest in media corporations know “that media outlets may seek to influence elections.” He added in a footnote that lawmakers might now want to consider requiring corporations to disclose how they intended to spend shareholders’ money or to put such spending to a shareholder vote.

On its central point, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Justice Stevens’s dissent was joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.

When the case was first argued last March, it seemed a curiosity likely to be decided on narrow grounds. The court could have ruled that Citizens United was not the sort of group to which the McCain-Feingold law was meant to apply, or that the law did not mean to address 90-minute documentaries, or that video-on-demand technologies were not regulated by the law. Thursday’s decision rejected those alternatives.

Instead, it addressed the questions it proposed to the parties in June when it set down the case for an unusual second argument in September, those of whether Austin and McConnell should be overruled. The answer, the court ruled Thursday, was yes.

“When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”

---

Quote:

---

I am aware of that. I just happen to think they are wrong.. or maybe I shouldn't say they are wrong. I think their interpretation is correct, I just don't think it should be that way.

---

Quote:

---

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of the court’s conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

---

Quote:

---

I don't care... I'd say that I disagree completely with the Supremes on this. I'd say that they got this one completely and totally WRONG.

The Constitution guarantees rights to Citizens, and a business is NOT a citizen; nor is a Church; nor is a Union.

Quite simply, to me, that means that they should NOT receive the same protections and Rights under the constitution as an individual... and the First Amendment does NOT apply.

Quote:

---

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of the court’s conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

---

And Justice Kennedy failed to recognize that ruling the other way would NOT have removed or infringed upon those individuals' First Amendment rights in any way. Every last one of them would still be able to engage in whatever political speech they chose to - as individuals.... it is just that the company would not have, and nowhere in the First Amendment does the Constitution extend rights to his quoted "association of citizens".

---

Quote:

---

Yes, those people are citizens. The company, however, is NOT a citizen. It is merely a business entity, but more so, it is not a citizen, nor is it a person... thus, technically, it has no rights whatsoever. A company also does not carry a vote.


So, yes, those people can donate their own money freely. I would actually be fully in support of banning all donations from any and all non-citizens, to be fully inclusive of all organizations, collectives and businesses.

---

Quote:

---

Just look at a first term Senator. He writes two books, "Audacity of Hope" and "Dreams From My Father". Instant millionaire. There a million ways for politicians to make millions. Do you know how many millionaires there are in the Senate, and it's both parties.

Unfortunately, you almost need to be a millionaire to run for higher office.

---

Quote:

---

Quote:

---

Just look at a first term Senator. He writes two books, "Audacity of Hope" and "Dreams From My Father". Instant millionaire. There a million ways for politicians to make millions. Do you know how many millionaires there are in the Senate, and it's both parties.

Unfortunately, you almost need to be a millionaire to run for higher office.

---

I'm not speaking of those guys.. Like them or hate them individually, if they made thier money legitimatly outside of the political arena, I have no quarrel with them,,,

---

Quote:

---

I don't recall every prior president being referred to a Hilter and Mao.

---

Quote:

---

I probably have dropped a few in my time...

Hilter or Mao never crossed my mind.

It sorta goes along with any Hilter referance discredits the person who states it.

---