News Roundup for 12/13/11

Hitting a new Lowe

-Headline of the Day-
"Protests growing against Lowe's."

All Lowe's wants to do is sell you a hammer. Maybe some bathroom tiles. If they're lucky, some big saw thing. So it was that the home improvement chain sought what it thought was the path of least resistance when it came to wingnut bigots concerned that a TV shows wasn't portraying American Muslims as terr'isty enough. Turns out TLC's All-American Muslim managed to find a family that wasn't building bombs in their basement and this was the worst thing ever! One guy even suggested they find a family that does engage in terrorism and film that, because committing crimes against America is apparently cool with him so long as it makes Muslims look bad on the teevee.

So all these people got together and decided they needed to complain to the advertisers of the show. And that's when things got stupid. Lowe's, apparently headed by people born without spines, decided that they wouldn't advertise on a show that was controversial. They said they were sad that they'd made "some people very unhappy," but this was the way things were going to be.

But here's the problem with avoiding controversy: you can't. It's pretty much impossible -- especially when the people ginning up the controversy are a bunch of bigoted assholes who hate a show because it doesn't lie about an entire American demographic. In running away from a tiny controversy, they ran headlong into a giant one. That's the sort of brilliant business sense that we've come to expect from corporate America.

Anyhoo, now Lowe's is in trouble with the not-bigot people, which is just about everyone (I know, we've been over this all before, but some people are just tuning in). They've got MoveOn and a Democratic senator on their case, as well as people like me. It's just really, really bad.

So, the lesson here is that if you run a business and a bunch of customers tell you to start hating another bunch of customers, chase them off with a broomstick. Pronto. (Politico)


-An apt analogy-


Click to embiggen

Works for me. (DailyKos)


-Bonus HotD-
"Axelrod Plays The Monkey Butt Card On Newt Gingrich."

David Axelrod: "I told my colleagues yesterday a bit of homespun wisdom I got from an alderman in Chicago some years ago when one of his colleagues wanted to run for higher office and he was really dubious. He said, 'just remember the higher a monkey climbs on a pole, the more you can see his butt.' So, you know, [Newt Gingrich] is very high on the pole right now and we’ll see how people like the view." (Talking Points Memo)