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It's about time we had a serious discussion about Martha Burk. Come on, you know who she is. She's the woman that, in 2002, inanely tried to compare Augusta National Golf Club and The Masters with racial segregation because it is a male-only sports club. If you really can't remember or just don't have all the details, here's a timeline of the Burk vs. Augusta dispute. For an in-depth review, read this issue of the Capital Research Center's Foundation Watch. For an entertaining read, try this article from Failure Magazine; Martha Burk and the controversy won 'Failure of the Year'...

Masters to go commercial-free again in 2004 by DOUG FERGUSON, Associated Press JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) -- Augusta National chairman Hootie Johnson thought the commercial-free broadcast of the Masters in the United States turned out so well he plans to do it again. Johnson, who dropped his television sponsors last year to keep them out of the controversy over the club's all-male membership, said Tuesday the 2004 Masters again would have no sponsors or commercial interruptions. ``There were many aspects of last year's broadcast that were favorable,'' Johnson said in a statement. ``The response from our TV viewers about the ability...

Maintaining his stance on behalf of Augusta National that the club will invite a female member at a time of the club's own choosing, Hootie Johnson today underscored that the club's position is the club's, and not just Hootie's: "If I drop dead this second, our position will not change." Good for Hootie! The mindless egalitarian leftists on Martha Burk's side present Augusta's all-male membership as discrimination – as though there is any such thing as a "right" to partake of private property that is not yours, on which you could associate with people who don't want you there –...

<p>When the leader of an American institution looks out his window and sees Martha Burk of the National Council of Women's Organizations, the New York Times and the Rev. Jesse Jackson all blowing their horns, like Jericho the walls soon come tumbling down. At least in most cases.</p>

Filed at 10:35 a.m. ET Nearly 30 companies whose chief executives are members at all-male Augusta National now belong to another exclusive club. They are listed in the ``Hall of Hypocrisy,'' the slogan on a Web site launched Tuesday night by Martha Burk and the National Council of Women's Organization in the latest attempt to pressure the golf club into inviting women to join. The site -- www.augustadiscriminates.org -- made its debut about the time Burk appeared on HBO's ``Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.'' ``We think it is important for women to know that some of America's largest corporations maintain...

A local diamond merchant here in Augusta, Doris Diamonds, is holding a "Martha Burk Sale" this coming Sunday for MEN ONLY! They are invited to come in and pick out a Christmas gift for their wives or girlfriends. Ad is all over the radio, and people here in Augusta are loving it. We can still laugh while the liberals in rest of the US gets carried away with pontificating...

<p>CLOTHES MAKE the man, and so it is that Tiger Woods can become the manliest man in America.</p> <p>How? By wearing a dress while playing in this year's Masters.</p> <p>The New York Times wants Tiger to boycott the Masters to protest the host club's no-women membership policy. Not gonna happen. Golfers don't boycott for reasons of social conscience. It's not in their genes or their endorsement contracts.</p>

For the past few months, while the top corners of The New York Times’ front page have been preoccupied with Iraqi invasion plans and Al Qaeda sleeper cells, below the paper’s fold—and in other prominent spots inside—The Times has launched its own tactical assault against the Augusta National Golf Club, host to the Masters Tournament. Usually forgotten for 51 weeks out of the year, the Georgia club’s refusal to admit women as members has made it a bull’s-eye for equal-opportunity proponents and a symbol of the kind of mint-julep, stick-in-the mud thinking that critics say belongs in Binx Bolling’s South,...

If the club that runs the Masters can brazenly discriminate against women, that means others can choose not to support Mr. Johnson's golfing fraternity. That includes more enlightened members of the club, CBS Sports, which televises the Masters, and the players, especially Tiger Woods... [snip] Tiger Woods, who has won the Masters three times, could simply choose to stay home in April...if Mr. Woods took that view, the club might suddenly find room for a few female members. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, for example, is said to be a very good golfer.

William (Hootie) Johnson, the chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club, has become the poster boy for a particularly regressive branch of the golfing set. As he announced somewhat testily last week, his famous all-male country club has no plans to add women members — not anytime soon and certainly not in time for the Masters tournament in April. Augusta National is a private club, Mr. Johnson explained, and thus his members have a "constitutional right to choose" who can be excluded from its expensive inner sanctum. The constitutional right to choose is real, but it is not limited to...

Monday, November 11, 2002 Defiant Johnson says Masters will go on no matter what Associated Press AUGUSTA, Ga. -- Defiant as ever, Augusta National chairman Hootie Johnson declared that The Masters will be played next year, no matter what, and there is no chance a woman will be a member of the golf club by then. Should Augusta National have to admit a female member? Yes No ''We will prevail because we're right,'' the 71-year-old Johnson said. His comments were the first on the subject since he fueled the debate over the all-male membership at Augusta National by criticizing...

The Augusta National Golf Club, one of the bastions of American golf, has been closed all summer, as it traditionally is after playing host to the Masters Tournament in April. But a bitter dispute over the club's all-male membership has brought unwelcome attention to the members. Embarrassed and embattled, some of Augusta National's 300 or so members now say they plan to seek an internal compromise that would end the club's conflict with a coalition of women's groups. About a dozen members who were interviewed over the past three weeks said they had been distressed by the confrontational approach taken...

Augusta National Golf Club's all-male membership is an eclectic who's who of the corporate, political and sports worlds. Its approximately 300 members range from former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to University of South Carolina football coach Lou Holtz; former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn and auto scion and Detroit Lions owner William Clay Ford; ex-General Electric CEO Jack Welch and Atlanta developer Tom Cousins. The club's roster includes race car builder Roger Penske; the director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Bruce Lilly, and beer baron Peter Coors. Also, investment genius Warren Buffett, former Secretary of State George Shultz,...

Students streaming back to the hallowed halls of Harvard this fall will find a few new faces: Last week, Harvard Law School lifted a 20-year-old policy banning military recruiters on its campus, enacted to protest the ban on homosexual soldiers. Why, pray tell? Did the boys in red reverse course because Harvard recognized that in a time of war, hampering military recruitment was foolish and unpatriotic? Nah. Of course not. Instead, Harvard finally bowed to a 1996 law stripping federal financing from schools that did not permit military recruiters. Faced with losing either its nondiscrimination principles or $328 million in...

Earning the "privilege" to smoke fine cigars, exchange dirty jokes and lie about your golf game, sexual exploits and how hard you worked to inherit your wealth with a group of mostly old white men isn't part of the cure for gender discrimination. Augusta National Golf Club, the home of the Masters, the chosen playground for Hootie (Johnson) & His Blowhards, isn't the proper battleground for the war on gender discrimination. It's the equivalent of President Bush sending ground troops to Dallas looking for Osama bin Laden. A hunt for bin Laden in Texas would draw a lot of attention...

"One of the early policy decisions was to take in as members only those who were acquainted with one or more members of our Organization Committee. In practice, this meant that Bob (Jones) and I were the ones who were active in the membership effort, nearly everyone who came being a friend of Bob's or mine, a circumstance which remained substantially true for the next twenty-five years. Fortunately, both Bob and I ahd rather large acquaintanceships for young men. Bob then being twenty-eight and I thirty-six years of age. Our contacts were located in a number of states. Bob's friendships...

Augusta National Golf Club is putting its money where its mouth is in its fight with a women's group pressuring the club to admit a female member. Club chairman Hootie Johnson announced Friday that because corporate sponsors of the Masters' telecast are being pressured by the National Council of Women's Organizations, the 2003 tournament will be shown without sponsors or commercials. At least golf fans will benefit from the fight. The 2003 telecast would have contained its normal four commerical minutes per hour. With 12 1/2 hours of live programming, that's 50 minutes of commericials that will not take golf...