This CEO Made a Political Donation, Then Lost His Job Because Liberals Didn't Like It

By Rob Bluey
The chief executive of Mozilla resigned yesterday amid protests over his $1,000 donation in support of California’s Proposition 8, which defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
Brendan Eich’s 2008 donation was first revealed two years ago while he was serving in a senior role at Mozilla. But it was after his appointment as CEO last month that half of Mozilla’s board quit and company employees publicly voiced their disapproval. Others launched a public campaign seeking his ouster.
In the wake of yesterday’s news, Andrew Sullivan, a leading advocate for redefining marriage, said the episode “should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society.”
Heritage Foundation scholars weighed in with their reaction.
Ryan T. Anderson, the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society, warned that “bullies” were poisoning democratic discourse by attacking anyone who doesn’t share their view:

The outrageous treatment of Eich is the result of one private, personal campaign contribution to support marriage as a male-female union, a view affirmed at the time by President Barack Obama, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, and countless other prominent officials. After all, Prop 8 passed with the support of 7 million California voters.
So was President Obama a bigot back when he supported marriage as the union of a man and woman? And is characterizing political disagreement on this issue—no matter how thoughtfully expressed—as hate speech really the way to find common ground and peaceful co-existence?
Sure, the employees of Mozilla—which makes Firefox, the popular Internet browser—have the right to protest a CEO they dislike, for whatever reason. But are they treating their fellow citizens with whom they disagree civilly? Must every political disagreement be a capital case regarding the right to stand in civil society?
When Obama “evolved” on the issue just over a year ago, he insisted that the debate about marriage was legitimate. He said there are people of goodwill on both sides.

>>> Read more, “Eich Is Out. So Is Tolerance.”
Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative and senior legal fellow, said the episode was an example of how the disclosure of political contributions served as a means to intimidate and harass an individual for his personal views:

Before Eich resigned, he pointed out that he had kept his personal beliefs out of Mozilla and that they were not relevant to his job as CEO. He was exactly right, although that did not prevent him from resigning.
In a startling display of irony that was obviously lost on her, Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker, who approved of Eich’s resignation, said it was necessary because “preserving Mozilla’s integrity was paramount.” She seems not to recognize that forcing a founder of the company to resign because of his personal beliefs that have nothing to do with his qualifications as a corporate officer is the exact opposite of “integrity.”
Eich is certainly not alone in his predicament. As the Heritage Foundation previously pointed out, other supporters of Proposition 8 in California have been subjected to harassment, intimidation, vandalism, racial scapegoating, blacklisting, loss of employment, economic hardships, angry protests, violence, death threats, and anti-religious bigotry. All committed by individuals claiming they are simply trying to gain “acceptance” and who complain about the supposed intolerance of society over their lifestyle.

Brendan Eich and the New American Totalitarian State

By Sally Zelikovsky

....But, in the end, his personal liberties, reasonableness, and competence couldn’t survive the pitch forks and threats. Eich clearly has more sense in his little pinky than the “aggrieved” have collectively. But still, this is one of the saddest days in America -- a nation founded on religious liberty, a nation that has fought to protect the civil liberties of its citizens from encroachment by the state or abuse by employers, landlords and other institutions. It now seems that anyone can be punished for his or her religious, moral or political beliefs by well-funded mobs that can exert economic pressure on one’s employer. These are the tactics of closed societies behind the Iron Curtain; not the shining city on the hill.

This isn’t new: we have seen it take place on a national level with Chick-fil-A. Many of us have seen people outed at work for their support of Prop 8. Busloads of angry mobsters have descended on the private property of CEOs. We have seen Tea Parties shaken down by the IRS. We know there is a Hollywood blacklist for conservatives. It has been a slow trickle that is fast turning into a full stream.

This is NOT about Prop 8, gay marriage and religion. That is just the context in which this latest abuse has come to be. It is about the freedom -- in your personal life -- to believe as you do, support the candidates and issues you want, and to be left in peace to do so without fear of recrimination at the place where you make your livelihood.

If competent individuals can be fired at work for their personal stances on issues that they do not bring into the workplace, then we are no longer in a free and open society, but a very tightly closed one where fear reigns and keeps us all under control--where our beliefs must yield to pre-set political and religious dogma we are force fed.

Not only is it hard to swallow that something like this could happen in our country, it is hard to fathom how anyone can be so self-righteous, so emboldened, to think it a perfectly good idea to socially engineer society with the same iron fists as history's liberty-crushing despots. All of that talk about equality, justice, liberty, tolerance and diversity, is just talk. It’s a one way street leading to oppression. And so frenzied are they with their viewpoints -- so intent on crushing any opposing ideas-- that they are blinded to their own bigotry.

So now, no longer is it just the government that can single you out, punish and persecute you for being a patriot or a tea partier. Now, your employer can as well. And then, maybe your landlord. And, why not the local hospital? And what about your kids in school? For those of you from the old USSR, you know, this was how it was done. Stick to the party line, keep quiet, support the state…and you keep your job and get assigned a small apartment. If you don’t, your kids suffer in school, your boss makes life difficult at work and don’t be surprised if your electricity doesn’t work. Take on the entire system, become a dissident or refusnik, and it’s off to Siberia. You’ll be lucky if you live.

Knowledge is indeed power, and when those in power can use their knowledge of what you do outside of work to determine your professional fate, we have indeed stepped behind the Iron Curtain.

This is simply chilling.

How did people find out that Mozilla’s CEO donated to support Prop 8?

....The Prop 8 donor list now functions essentially as a blacklist, and Eich isn’t its first or only victim. Remember, people who gave to Prop 8 have been harassed and had their property vandalized; the Heritage Foundation issued a report chronicling cases of intimidation back in 2009. Either Eich didn’t know the law when he chipped in 10 times the disclosure amount or he assumed that giving to a political cause as a private citizen wouldn’t cause people he worked with for years to force him out of the company upon conviction of a thoughtcrime. Which, by the way, is what this was. Jonathan Last seizes on the significance of Mozilla chair Mitchell Baker admitting that “I never saw any kind of behavior or attitude from him that was not in line with Mozilla’s values of inclusiveness.” If that’s the case, says Last, why exactly was Eich ousted?

So the problem isn’t with how he comported himself. It’s with what he thought…
Now that we’re in the realm of thought-crime where Eich loses his job not because of how he behaved, but because he gave money to a cause which is deemed untouchable, let me ask you this: What if Eich hadn’t given $1,000 to support Proposition 8. What if, instead, the tech community simply found out he had voted for it?
By any reasonable chain of logic, voting for Prop. 8 is at least as bad–probably even worse–than merely giving money to support it. A vote for Prop. 8 is an affirmative action taken to directly advance the cause, rather than the indirect advancement of financial support. If Eich was a known Prop. 8 voter, would there have been a similar campaign against him? I can’t think of a reason why not.

The ultimate campaign finance reform is smaller government

By James Pethokoukis
.....If you are genuinely worried about the influence of Big Money on Big Government, the free-enterprise solution is to shrink the influence of Big Government. A government able to pick winners and losers through regulation, spending, or the tax code is a government worth influencing, whether through campaign donations or lobbying activities. Numerous studies and analyses have calculated a massive “return on investment” from lobbying. For instance: a 2013 Boston Globe series found that by forking over a mere $2 million over two years to Washington lobbyists, Whirlpool secured the renewal of an energy tax credit worth a combined $120 million over two years.
What’s more, the reason for lobbying may be changing. Companies used to try to, as Ronald Reagan once put it, get government off their backs. But now, according to economist Luigi Zingales, lobbying has shifted from reactive to proactive, and toward getting government in their pockets to obtain unique privileges.”
Getting back to campaign finance, Bradley Smith sums up:

The practical results of this decision will be to make fundraising easier for party committees and candidates. That is almost certainly a good thing and should help ease concerns that “super PACS” are too influential with parties. Don’t expect a landslide in new giving, however, as the old aggregates did not affect most donors, who contribute to only a few candidates.
Ultimately, this decision is a significant victory for the First Amendment. Perhaps more important than the immediate result is the insistence that the government must have an actual, rather than conjectural, theory of corruption to be prevented. The “monsters under the bed” theory of constitutional jurisprudence seems headed for the dustbin.
As Justice Roberts wrote, “If the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests, and Nazi parades — despite the profound offense such spectacles cause — it surely protects political campaign speech despite popular opposition.”

House Oversight Committee to vote on contempt citation for Lois Lerner

By Thomas Lifson

Lois Lerner could face as much as a year in jail, though there are several steps between the vote next Thursday scheduled by Chairman Issa and the Ms Lerner checking in to the Graybar Hotel. Eliana Johnson reports for NRO:

The House Oversight Committee will vote next Thursday on whether to hold former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress, sources say. (snip)

The committee’s vote would clear the way for John Boehner to bring the issue before the full House, and he has indicated he will do so. Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said, “Speaker Boehner has been clear, both publicly and privately, that if Lois Lerner does not testify fully and truthfully, she will be found in contempt of Congress.”

Contempt findings are rare. If the House ultimately holds Lerner in contempt, a statute directs the district attorney to refer the matter to a grand jury. Criminal charges could result in a jail sentence between one month and one year or a fine between $100 and $1,000. (snip)

[Rep. Elijah] Cummings has already sent a letter to Boehner arguing that Issa violated key procedural rules that preclude the committee from holding Lerner in contempt. Issa shot back a letter to Cummings and on March 25 produced a memo from the House counsel indicating that the committee has met all the legal requirements to schedule a vote to issue a contempt citation.

It’s a start.

Ready to Smirk

How Comcast bought the Democratic Party

By Matthew Continetti

The communications giant Comcast announced in February that it would buy Time Warner Cable for $45 billion, creating the largest cable provider in America, with more than 33 million customers. That is about one third of the U.S. cable and satellite television market. FCC approval is required for the merger to go into effect. Critics of the deal say it would lessen competition and lead to even shoddier customer service. They are probably right, as all of us will soon find out, because there is little chance the merger will be stopped. Comcast, Time Warner, and their political fixers have spent years preparing for this moment—by buying off the Democratic Party.
Comcast, which employs more than 100 lobbyists, spent almost $19 million last year on lobbying activities. Its president and CEO, Brian L. Roberts, is a golf buddy of President Obama’s, and a Democratic donor who has contributed thousands of dollars not only to the president’s campaigns, but also to the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the DNC Services Corporation, and to Steny Hoyer, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Bob Casey. Roberts’ executive vice president, David Cohen, is a former aide to Democratic bigwig Ed Rendell. Cohen skirts lobbying regulations through loopholes, has raised more than $2 million for Obama since 2007, and in 2011 hosted a DNC fundraiser at which the president called him “friend.” Cohen has visited the White House 14 times since 2010, including two visits to the Oval Office. He attended the recent dinner for President Hollande of France.
Cohen plays a major role in the Comcast Foundation, which has disbursed more than $3 billion since 2001, primarily to “groups that serve African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians” and other segments of the Democratic coalition. You will be surprised to learn that many of the groups to whom the Comcast Foundation has donated now support the proposed merger. Of the $33 million Comcast has spent on political campaigns since 1989, more than half, or some $18 million, has gone to Democrats. Barack Obama is number one on the list of the top ten recipients of Comcast’s largesse. There are four Republicans on the list.
...It is something of a political irony that Republicans, who for ideological reasons are pro-business, have not raised questions about, or objections to, the conjoining of two Democratic institutions into a media trust. If Republicans had any sense, they would wage war against Comcast and its Democratic enablers and turn the merger into a live issue. Needless to say they have not done so, perhaps in the wrongheaded and futile hope of scraps from the table of the Comcast cable beast, perhaps in the foolish and selfish notion that David Cohen may one day add another man to his company of lobbyists.

New York Students Opting Out of Common Core Testing Told To “Sit And Stare”…

By Tiffiny Reugner
....I’m wondering if when Common Core experts use the word ‘rigor’ they are meaning ‘rigor mortis’ or death as education has been stripped of mind stretching challenging learning. New York schools even have a sit and be bored or play dead policy for students who have opted out of the standardized testing.

MARION, N.Y. – The controversy surrounding the new Common Core-aligned standardized tests is causing some New York school leaders to act as childish and immature as the students they are supposed to be leading.

13WHAM.com reports at least 16 school districts in the Empire State have implemented a “sit and stare” policy for students who’ve been opted-out of the state assessments by their parents.

Such students “will have to sit at their desks without any other reading or testing materials, while all the students around them take the 60- to 90-minute exams,” the news site reports.

It’s not difficult to read between the lines here. The “sit and stare” policy is a way petty and vindictive school principals and superintendents can get back at parents who are pushing back against the Common Core experiment.

The parents are making the school leaders’ lives more difficult, so they’re going to return the favor – by making the children pay.

That’s not just our interpretation of what’s happening; the leader of the state’s largest teachers union sees it the same way.

“This (‘sit and stare’) policy aimed at students whose parents elect to ‘opt out’ their children from state standardized testing is unconscionable,” said Richard Iannuzzi, president of the New York State United Teachers, in a February press release.
I’ve found when talking to administrative persons in the educational field that they talk about the beautiful words of a ‘fairer education’. These pretty fairytale words are absolutely unrealistic and unnatural and impossible to make every student coming out of the educational machine the same. The reason; NO group of children could EVER have an equal footing in education because of genetics. The problem with making fairness and sameness your goal is that to be successful you must kill off the intellect of those who have a greater capability to comprehend by erasing challenging and rigorous learning.

Trigger warnings: New wave of political correctness hits campuses

By Robby Soave
Hypersensitive students and professors all over the country are about to score another victory for political correctness if they succeed in their mission to normalize the use of “trigger warnings,” which are intended to protect people from taking part in class discussions and media that might offend them.
Trigger warnings are most commonly attached to online news articles and blog posts. They warn readers that the post contains specific, offensive content. An article about sexual violence, for instance, might come with a trigger warning for rape victims. The idea is to prevent post traumatic stress.
But censorship-inclined activists are now eager to force professors to attach trigger warnings to their syllabi.
“Some students and professors argue that nearly everything should come with a trigger warning,” wrote Laurie Essig, a professor of psychology at Middlebury College and a contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Mrs. Dalloway? Trigger warning: suicidal tendencies. The Great Gatsby? Trigger warning: suicide, domestic abuse, graphic violence. Think I’m making this up? I’m not.”
Essig provided the example of a Rutgers University student who praised trigger warnings as an ideal compromise between free expression and censorship, noting that “by creating trigger warnings for their students, professors can help to create a safe space for their students — one that fosters positive and compassionate intellectual discussion within the collegiate classroom.”
Students at the University of California-Santa Barbara are doing their best to make their PC dreams a reality. The student government passed a resolution that urged administrators to adopt mandatory trigger warnings as official university policy last month.
“This is not meant to censor … but it really just asks that professors and other people on campus acknowledge the effects of triggering content on students with PTSD,” said Bailey Loverin, the student who sponsored the resolution, in a statement.

The Mendacity of the Fed and the Ruination of Capitalism

By James Longstreet

....“The Fed runs everything; it has pegged, manipulated, medicated and manhandled the entire financial system. There is not an honest interest rate left…..A Regime of crony capitalism, for both sides… using the tools of the State the budget and the central bank…to accomplish ends that would not be remotely feasible, reasonable or likely in a free market.” So says Mr. Stockman. “The Federal Reserve has taken over and runs the GDP.”

...In free markets, as Hayek described, multitudes and myriads of independent consumers, producers and planners act using their own thoughts and motivations directed by their own cogitations and information. The aggregate of all this knowledge goes beyond the ability of any central planner to “know.” Central Planers do not, cannot know what the multitude, the myriad of independent spenders, consumers and creators know.

When Central Planners “decide,” they consequently and deliberately assist some and hurt others. No era has proven this more clearly that the past 5 years of Federal Reserve “planning.” Retirees, savers and holders of dollars have been hurt. Speculators, stock investors, CEOs with stock options, and borrowers have been helped. It was decided that that should occur. It did. Some hurt, others helped.

Stockman describes the current condition. There is “…no intellectual integrity left …understanding of sound money and fiscal rectitude and free markets is lost. (It’s) All is about what it takes, by the day, by week and quarter to keep the bubble going….”

...But we have it different today. Mr. Stockman explains:

“In short, the Fed has interposed itself throughout the very warp and woof of the nation’s business economy. It does this in a manner that makes a mockery of our purported mechanism of economic governance -- that is to say, the spontaneous actions and decisions by millions of producers, consumers, investors and savers on the free market in response to honest price signals arising from the vineyards of commerce and industry. Instead, in a manner like the ‘caribou’ soccer of 6-years olds, today’s economic actors have no choice except to ceaselessly chase the Fed around the economic fields.”

Janet Yellen, and Ben Bernanke before her, are nothing more than lemming herders looking for a cliff. They have promoted debt creation which is tantamount to future consumption denied. We borrow from the future to pay for today’s “punch bowl.”

Conclusion: The Federal Reserve has monopolized economic planning and in so doing, controls not just interest rates and other macro economic levers, but its influence spreads to and culminates within the individual’s life decision making process. In short, Janet Yellen and the misdirected unauthorized whims of the Federal Reserve are running your life. Are you in the group they decided to help or hurt?

PK'S NOTE: Funny, this is what our government tells its citizens to do, too. Control is so much easier that way.

Russian minister’s advice to US on Crimea: Watch sitcoms and do yoga instead

By Scott Greer
Current relations between Russia and the U.S. have recently been tense over the crisis in Ukraine, but one intrepid Russian minister has offered some advice

for how America can accept his country’s takeover of Crimea.
“They should get more fresh air, do yoga, eat healthily, maybe watch some sitcoms on television,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in an interview with Interfax Thursday.
In Ryabkov’s opinion, America’s actions resemble “childish tantrums” and the country as a whole needs to just chill out and accept that Crimea is now no longer apart of Ukraine. He sees that the alternative of sitcom watching is better than voicing opposition to Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
“This would be better than winding oneself up and winding up others, knowing that the ship has already sailed … Tantrums, weeping and hysteria won’t help,” Ryabkov said, according to a Reuters report.

No Country For Young Men

By Richard Fernandez
The author of the Twilight of Abundance, David Archibald, sent an email a few days ago, saying “there is a whole new world coming.” Archibald, who’s an Australian, warns in his book that the world is running out of food, energy and security. Where he differs from Malthus, however, is in arguing that the shortages are the consequence of policy, rather than the inherent limitations of the universe. The world is doing everything it can to run in the opposite direction of abundance because we think we have too much. The West dreads warmer weather, even though warmer weather might allow more crops to grow; it discourages energy production. And its leaders are working feverishly to throw away the residual security of the post Cold War world.
...The Western Left’s biggest lie is that it represents a movement of the young, but it really represents the very old. Their very concerns are geriatric: Marxism, trash recycling, health and safety, public transportation and gossip.
...The reason the Democrats will stay in power is we’re too tired to fight them. Too worn out from driving 50 miles each day to work as a greeter at Wal-Mart.
...The world may be falling to pieces but someone else will take care of it.
...The West does Facebook because you don’t have to get up from the chair to work it. Maybe what we call “youth culture” is just the culture of people who need a remote. The West lives in the memory of abundance, because that is the reality its old people remember. They can’t see things from the real viewpoint of those who have to pay the National Debt and the ‘Young Invincibles’ who must fund the subsidies for Obamacare. If we there were really a youth culture it would look like the Wild Hunt rather than one in which people in kaftans recycled garbage in eco-communities. You’re no longer young when you’ve forgotten how to dream and how to be angry.
It would be almost impossible to convince the West that only a few years ago their ancestors conceived and built the Suez, the Panama or the Moonship though it’s the truth. The West was truly young once.

Of Stinkburgers, Meanwiches and America’s Greatest General

By Michael Walsh
...Hard to know where to begin with one. The uncritical use by the reporter of the term “federal investments”? A “crowd” of 1,400? A “series of zingers” from the Commander in Chief? “Mockery” from the bully pulpit? Can it be that Obama really doesn’t listen to himself, weigh his words, or respect what, pre-Clinton, we used to laughingly call the “dignity of the office”? Surely somebody wrote those lines for him; this is, after all, a man whose forays off-prompter often end in disaster:

More likely, he simply doesn’t care. His glide path to the presidency has been marked by one thing in particular: no one has ever said “no” to him about anything. He went to one of the most exclusive (and, if you’re into racial bean-counting, whitest) private prep school in Hawaii, then skated through Occidental, Columbia and Harvard while leaving nary a mark or a memory. More than five long years into the Obama presidency, it’s clear that his sense of the job is entirely confined to its ceremonial aspects — parties, vacations, junkets — and to campaigning, which is the only thing he’s any good at.
...So why we should be surprised at “stinkburger”? As Lucianne.com drily noted on its post this morning, What next? Republicans are “poopyheads”?