SELECT COMFORT QUICKEN LOANS CITRIX CARBONITE PRO FLOWERS LEGAL ZOOM SLEEP TRAIN (California Mattress Store)
No offense but I don’t buy any products from his advertisers in the first place so they could pull them all and it wouldn’t matter to me.
Dear people,
This business first popped up in George Stephanopolis's question to Mitt Romney in a debate about whether states could ban contraceptives. Everyone then wondered out of which orifice George had pulled that one and why he wasted 5 minutes of the debate on it since no one had been talking about such a thing anywhere at any time. It later turned out that it was already in the works as a campaign issue by Democrats running for reelection who sent out a fundraising letter claiming that Republicans in Congress were already meeting to ban contraception.
Obama then ordered religious organizations to provide contraception. When those and other organizations said, correctly, that he did not have Constitutional authority to mandate that they do this, a House committee was organized to discuss Obama's Constitutional overreaching. It was at that meeting that Eleanor Holmes Norton tried to get Sandra Fluke in to testify about contraception. She was told that the meeting was about Constitutional overreach, not contraception. EHN and another Congresswoman made a big scene for the cameras falsely claiming that there were only men, no women, testifying, though there were two women scheduled to testify in a later session. This also was used in Democrat campaign literature to push their meme about Republicans trying to eliminate contraception.
Finally, this group of Democrat politicians organized a meeting in Congress for Fluke to testify. Fluke is a long time activist who deliberately enrolled at Georgetown to fight its insurance policy regarding contraceptives. This all was a set up. You and others have fallen for it. Rush did not. He rightly called her to task for claiming that a third party should pay for her contraceptives in order that she and others could continue a sexually libertine lifestyle.
It should have been expected that you and other advertisers would get complaints by an extremely vocal minority which represents the tiniest fraction of a percent of Rush's listening audience, complaining about something they heard someone else say that he said. I heard what he actually said that day and the next and, given Ms Fluke's (and Nancy Pelosi's) political grandstanding, it was innocuous and an example of reductio ad absurdum ("illustrating absurdity by being absurd" as he has done for years) to illustrate her and the Left's position regarding both sex and contraception/prophylactics and their demand that they be accommodated in the matter by third parties on both ends.
You guys do yourself no favor capitulating to the vocal, extreme left for two reasons: 1. they hate you on principle as a private business, 2. Rush's listeners far outnumber them and represent a greater income stream both actual and potential for your company.
I bought a Tempurpedic (best money I ever spent) and I”ve NEVER bought any of the others...but I’l make my voice know to them. Boycotts work both ways. eff ‘em.
Yet when CNN called us Tea Baggers.......**crickets**
I want to Carbonite.com, clicked on ‘contact us’ in the lower left corner of their web page, then “Support for
Home & Home Office” button, then ‘Email’ then rattled off a message in defense of Rush and my outrage at their stance in support of a 30 year old political activist lawyer that is lesbian who lies about her motives as a “student” and her need for contraception.
Okay, I know I am not the smartest person in the world, but I have never even seen the comments. What exactly did he say? I was out of town in meetings and I come back to this. I am so angry at these advertisers because they are pulling their ads and I can’t even seem to find what Rush actually said! This all seems very strange to me. You would think if he did something that outrageous you would be able to find it everywhere! Not just that he called a woman a name.
So Ms. Fluke happened to be PART of a PROTEST GROUP last year that CALLED itself SLUTS? (Following on to the ALL CAPS MOTIF here.)
Hey, Rush took her at face value. He could be magnanimous and invite Ms. Fluke on the program to explain how really, truly, she isn’t a slut.
(Ms. Fluke may be merely a SLUT SYMPATHIZER.)
These “movements” to boycott advertisers who drop shows rarely have the effect that boycotters think they have. I’m not saying that they never put a pinch on the companies are boycotted, but the unseen effect on companies who do not advertise with the show in question is tremendous.
It usually plays out something like this:
Marketing Meeting
Marketing guy, “JB, we’ve been offered a discount to advertise on the XYZ since several of their advertisers dropped them. It’s a huge market, and at this price I don’t think we can say no.”
JB, “I saw that on my desk yesterday, but let’s hold on a minute. These listeners/viewers/whatever are so militant that if we get on board, we can never leave. I think we need to stick with politically neutral venues we can get in and out of without creating ill will. Let’s stick with Clear Channels syndicated sports package. No one is ever boycotted for dropping a sports program.”
Marketing guy, “I didn’t think of it like that JB. Maybe you’re right.”
I tell them all if I was Limbaugh, “don’t let the door hit ya where the Good Lord split ya!”
Liberals do this all the time. More sponsors will sign up and that will be that. But, it will take letter to the editors and other material such as blogs to show that this dame was a Dem plant. If those sites which are writing that can prove it, these dopes who pulled their ads will be looked at as just stupidly naive and PC.
I am going to fire off e-mails to all these companies right now. This is just insanity!
Why are these companies surrendering to these people? They don’t even have enough money to buy a condom, let alone their products.
I just emailed Sleep-Comfort that we were planning on purchasing one of their beds this weekend after receiving our tax refund. But due to their ignorance and bowing to the left wing crazies in this country, we will take our money else where. I USED to be a big customer of PRO-FLOWERS, but I will never again use their services.
If you screw with Rush, you screw with millions of his dedicated listeners.
All of these companies should be boycotted, and we should let them know why.
They’re taking our money, religion, healthcare, etc.
Why not our speech?
Conservatives are sitting on their asses doing nothing - if I was a lib, I’d be pushing the envelope too.
Now go pay your taxes - the activists need your money. :)
Carbonite?
Buy two external hard drives. Back up your data often.
Pro Flowers?
They are horrible. I ordered flowers for my Mom’s birthday a MONTH in advance. They arrived late and frozen; turned brown the next day.
Sleep Number?
It’s Tempurpedic for me when it comes time for a new mattress.
Legal Zoom?
The founder was a defense attorney for O.J. What else needs to be said?
So, people who don’t listen to Rush, are telling advertisers they won’t listen to him? By the end of the week, he will still have 15+ million listeners, and the companies will lose, not gain customers.
I smell Media Matters at work.
As capitalists, we can recognize people's right to refuse to buy a product or service. I don't have a problem with boycotts in principle, though they usually don't work because most people don't link their purchase decisions to corporate behavior.
That's a little different with Rush Limbaugh, who is well known for being over-the-top with his remarks. There probably **ARE** advertisers buying time on his show who do not realize what he says on his show, and they could end up pulling their ads.
What needs to happen — and happen **RIGHT NOW** — is two things.
First, actual customers of these businesses pulling their advertising need to contact the businesses, explain that they are regular customers (providing purchase receipts or dates of purchase would be helpful) and suggest that antagonizing actual customers is a bad idea merely because liberals who may not be customers are organizing a pressure campaign.
Second, people who are regular listeners to Rush Limbaugh, especially if they are customers, should contact the business, explain the facts of what Rush Limbaugh actually said, and suggest that yanking an ad because Limbaugh called a sexually promiscuous woman a “slut” makes no sense unless the company is prepared to yank all of its ads from television and radio programs glorifying promiscuity.
Sending copies of the letters or emails to Rush Limbaugh would likely be helpful.
The logic behind both of those two points is pretty much irrefutable. If enough people protest, advertisers will see that while a brief suspension of ads on Rush Limbaugh's program may be needed to throw a bone to the liberals, they can then put the ads back on the air on the grounds that they've “punished” Limbaugh with the suspension but the ratio of complaints on both sides shows that Limbaugh has just as many supporters as opponents.
Now, some practical guidance from experience:
I've been on the staff of two different news organizations subjected to those boycott campaigns on separate occasions.
One of them was completely false and unwarranted, but resulted in my publisher asking my editor to re-evaluate our news coverage of a strip club owner who was involved in a public fight with a two-star general over placing his club off-limits. I responded by writing an extended op-ed piece making clear that contrary to the public attacks and boycott threats against our newspaper, I'm a conservative Christian who has absolutely no toleration for strip clubs, am not opposed to the Army, had previously worked as a civilian in Army Public Affairs, and was at the time attending a local church of a conservative Presbyterian denomination, the PCA, whose more prominent ministers included Dr. D. James Kennedy, then the pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. (Side point: I've since transferred to a much more conservative church of a different Presbyterian denomination, the ARPs, and I'm well aware of the problems that happened at Coral Ridge after Dr. Kennedy's death, though that had nothing to do with my decision to leave the PCA.)
Basically, once the newspaper allowed me to make clear publicly that I don't agree with the strip club owner and was merely reporting what he was saying, not agreeing with it, the boycott threat went away since the people threatening the boycott found out to their surprise that not everybody in the media is a God-hating anti-military liberal.
The second threat was at a different newspaper and I confronted it head on. Basically a local business owner got mad that I ran a photo of a wrecked car in which a rural high school student had died after a high-speed crash. (No photos of bodies, just the vehicle — I do not and will not run dead body photos.) When he started calling my advertisers to complain, I got in front of the ball, personally called all our significant advertisers in advance, explained the situation, said I would not stop running crash photos under any circumstances since people need to see the consequences of irresponsible driving, and offered details from the police report which showed the driver was even more irresponsible than had been publicly reported and easily could have killed more people than just himself. It probably didn't hurt that the high school cheerleaders were doing a fundraising campaign at the time, and I ended up making the first business contribution to that campaign.
The end result is not one advertiser pulled their ads, and several advertisers told me that when the complainer called, they responded to him in not very nice terms.
Bottom line: in a capitalist economy, people have every right in the world to organize boycotts. Boycott targets need to get in front of the ball and respond with facts. In the long run, facts usually win.