Karen Handel is out at Komen, but not before she posts a whiny, self-justifying letter of resignation that has to be read and savored:
We can all agree that this is a challenging and deeply unsettling situation for all involved in the fight against breast cancer. However, Komen’s decision to change its granting strategy and exit the controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood and its grants was fully vetted by every appropriate level within the organization. At the November Board meeting, the Board received a detailed review of the new model and related criteria. As you will recall, the Board specifically discussed various issues, including the need to protect our mission by ensuring we were not distracted or negatively affected by any other organization’s real or perceived challenges. No objections were made to moving forward.
I am deeply disappointed by the gross mischaracterizations of the strategy, its rationale, and my involvement in it. I openly acknowledge my role in the matter and continue to believe our decision was the best one for Komen’s future and the women we serve. However, the decision to update our granting model was made before I joined Komen, and the controversy related to Planned Parenthood has long been a concern to the organization. Neither the decision nor the changes themselves were based on anyone’s political beliefs or ideology. Rather, both were based on Komen’s mission and how to better serve women, as well as a realization of the need to distance Komen from controversy. I believe that Komen, like any other nonprofit organization, has the right and the responsibility to set criteria and highest standards for how and to whom it grants.
What was a thoughtful and thoroughly reviewed decision – one that would have indeed enabled Komen to deliver even greater community impact – has unfortunately been turned into something about politics. This is entirely untrue. This development should sadden us all greatly.
The answer to the question “What took you so long?” is that she was writing this pile of horseshit.
dmsilev
Given that she basically nailed herself to a cross with that letter, perhaps “Handel’s Messiah” would have been a better title?
Quibbles aside, the damage has been done. One person who either fell on her sword or was pushed out won’t change that.
geg6
Fuck that beyotch. Just fuck her and SGK, too.
Never again a penny. Not one.
mistermix ... World Peace
@dmsilev: “Handel’s Messiah Complex”?
BGinCHI
Bottom line with these GOP hacks: they are gutless and cannot make arguments. They play politics and when called on it, accuse everyone else of “playing politics.”
Straight out of the Karl Rove Handbook.
Oh, and how do you know that Chrysler/Clint Eastwood ad was so powerful and harmful to the GOP brand?
Rove was the first to denounce it the next morning. He only goes after the strongest stuff.
Shawn in ShowMe
Shorter Handel: You won’t have Karen to kick around anymore. I gave this organization the best nine months out of my life and you pick a bunch of baby-killers over me? Ungrateful savages.
scav
‘S probably good for all sides to be reminded that nothing has changed under the hood at Komen, all in all. I don’t think she nailed herself to the cross or fell on any sharp object in that letter. Water Music for me, until I find something better, maybe in an opera.
Violet
Every time a wingnut resigns, Fox News Victims Collective gets a new member.
r€nato
I’m shocked that dirty fucking abortifascist hippies would suggest that the VP of Public Policy was involved in making decisions that might have a political aspect to them.
slag
What dmsilev said.
I am “deeply disappointed” that more of the Krazy Komeni didn’t get handed the Mitten along with her. More work to be done on that front, I guess.
r€nato
@BGinCHI: shorter Rove: wingnuts are shitting their pants because Clint Eastwood won’t join them in rooting for America to fail.
slag
@mistermix … World Peace: Even better.
Privatize the Profits! Socialize the Costs!
Amd my shitting in my hat and then clapping it onto my head has also been unfairly turned into some sort of attempt at comedy.
Entirely untrue!
I was SERIOUS when I did that!
Violet
I think now would be a good time to write SGK’s corporate
shillspartners and let them know you aren’t going to support them if they support Komen, DESPITE Handel resigning, because Komen doesn’t give enough of its money to actual research and treatment support. Let them know this isn’t over.Culture of Truth
1) Defunding PP was the right decision
2) Ok, maybe it was wrong, but the whole
Board agreed with me
3) Perhaps not the whole Board, but this was planned before I ever got there!
4) We can all agree basically this is a national tragedy
5) Fuck all you mean liberals
Steve
My favorite part was where she says she “openly acknowledges her role,” only she doesn’t.
It’s also kind of weird how she mentions that the donations to Planned Parenthood were controversial before she joined the organization (which is true, I guess) when we all know the decision to defund Planned Parenthood had nothing to do with any controversy ginned up by pro-life groups and was 100% about the awesome new grant standards. Right?
BGinCHI
@r€nato: First they came for the Gran Torinos….
philpm
I’m surprised she didn’t deliver her resignation on F&F this morning to be able to wring the full drama out of how she’s been wronged. Her wingnut welfare should kick in over the next day or two.
Jewish Steel
That is a grotesque piece of equivocation. On par with the non -apology apology that’s so fashionable, “I’m sorry if you were offended.”
jibeaux
So….”other people approved of this decision….I stand by the decision…also too it was made before I ever got there.” You can take a girl out of the Bush admin, but you can’t….
vernon
“This development should sadden us all greatly.” … Wait, did she just concern-troll herself?
opie jeanne
“…a realization of the need to distance Komen from controversy (the funding of PP)…”
“….and the controversy related to Planned Parenthood has long been a concern to the organization..”
and
“… and exit the controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood and its grants was fully vetted by every appropriate level within the organization…”
There it is, she admits that it had nothing to do with rules, everything to do with dumping PP, and everyone was in on it.
BGinCHI
@vernon: It’s like masturbation for people who are too repressed to touch themselves.
philpm
@Steve:
Yep, the whole “the decision was made before I got there, but I still had a hand in it” routine. Jeez, she’s an idiot.
Martin
@jibeaux: No shit. “You go to war with the charitable organization you have, not the charitable organization you wish you had”.
Cambridge Chuck
I actually believe her when she claims the whole process was thoroughly and “carefully” considered by the board. That’s why her resignation is not sufficient to repair the damage: the whole leadership team was involved. More importantly, the episode has de-sanctified the pink ribbon scam, and allows us to focus on organizations that support health for all women, not just women of a certain kind.
gypsy howell
The drama over the last few days has made me realize that SGK IS wingnut welfare.
scav
Handel coda, perhaps (for this particular opus) but Komen, da capo.
MattF
Set the Wayback Machine to repeat Mary McCarthy’s famous line about Lillian Hellman:
“Every word she wrote was a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”
philpm
@gypsy howell:
Yeah, I realized that after I posted and re-read it. I wonder what the second tier of wingnut welfare is?
Linda Featheringill
@BGinCHI:
Chrysler, halftime in America.
Isn’t the whole thing just beautiful? The Republicans are making damned sure that Obama is responsible for the comeback in Detroit.
[I know that Obama didn’t do it by himself. Lots of people worked hard to pull off that feat. But in the current environment, he gets the credit/blame.]
And the arguments and accusations serve to make sure that just about everyone notices the ad.
And Google now says there are 1780 articles available about the ad.
:-)
Edited. I can’t spell.
Benjamin Franklin
@Violet:
S’ok. As long as the Typhoid carrier is quarantined.
dave l
@opei jeanne: Yes, it was clearly all about avoiding controversy. And you have to wonder how mendacious/stupid everyone involved was to imagine that they could shake off all that pesky controversy by taking sides.
butler
You were going to deliver more community impact… by cutting off access to members of the community. Makes a whole lot of sense.
She’ll be signing copies of her new Regnery press volume about her terrible struggle against the mean hippies in about a week.
eric
cant imagine this will help getting a job anywhere but FOX and maybe a book deal, because crapping on the Board is a bridge burning of fail proportions. I suspect that these are people not without influence in the non-welfare world of the wingnut. Stupid is as stupid does. Her letter is proof of her poor judgment.
Jay C
Well, what would one expect from a former Republican State official?
“I was completely involved in the decision, but it really wasn’t my fault it all went wrong, but I’m going to resign anyway”
Oy.
IM
a) No need ti drag Händel in this.
b) Hasn’t she a point? She is the sacrificial goat now, but:
as she says, the board made the decision and the board did know, had to know that this meant to cut off PP. So the others are responsible too.
And should go, from Brinker on down.
CaptainFwiffo
Achievement Unlocked: Winger Scalp Collected
beltane
@Jay C: Sounds like Sarah Palin translated into standard English.
dmsilev
@mistermix … World Peace: Yes, that works quite well.
IM
At least we now know who was the cut-out in this operation.
I like my mysteries well-explained.
kindness
Doesn’t matter. Komen is a scam operation which spends most of it’s money on itself and not enough on actual research.
The American Cancer Society & Planned Parenthood will get my gifts from now on. So in that sense, I’m actually glad this happened as now I know my limited dollars will actually be better spent.
Garbo
If she was so hot shit at her job, as VP of Public Policy, she should have alerted Komen to the possible ramifications of dropping funding for PP. but she was blinded by her bias and now has to live with it. TFB, baby.
dmbeaster
This letter confirms my suspicions about several things. First, that the change in policy was sold internally based on the alleged “controversy” about Planned Parenthood, and predated Handel. I am sure Komen was measuring the cost-benefit of PP grants well before Handel ever showed up. In other words, wingnut craziness about PP justifies more craziness in order to avoid the craziness. There is a reason wingnuts constantly double down – it is a working strategy to get what they want. And that strategy works best against the spineless who are willing to compromise principle in order to avoid the heat of defending principle from attack.
Second, this letter is mostly about how Handel feels that she was stabbed in the back. In other words, she was doing what they wanted, and doing it how they wanted (allegedly). Even though the basic course of action was phony baloney (“we aren’t dumping PP – just changing grant criteria”), “how dare anyone criticize me when you went along with it”. And she is basically right – the corporate Komen is stabbing her to deflect its own accountability for its own decisions. Of course, she is engaging in the same dodge of pretending that her policy was more about protecting Komen from “controversy” rather than a political anti-abortion agenda, and that she was allegedly serving women by putting anti-abortion issues ahead of breast cancer.
Liars to the core – all of them.
And in the greater context of these issues, this is why tote-bag liberals are so infuriating and useless (whether it is abortion of other issues). Equally infuriating are the reflexive contrarians or split-the-difference types. If you are not willing to take the heat to defend principle, then you actually don’t have any you believe in.
Culture of Truth
I suspect she does have a point. Mitt Romney would tell her wingnut welfare ain’t beanbag. Time to take one for the team.
Trentrunner
An Andrew-less Dish (byline Chris B.) has given Doug one of their tastelessness awards for daring to call for scalps in this mess, for “politicizing what shouldn’t be political.”
Funny how Andrew’s concern tone trolling rolls downhill to all his staff as well.
If you’re reading this, Chris B., fuck you. Who politicizes women’s health? Remember HPV vaccine? Now contraception? And always abortion? We didn’t start this fire. But we responded. And we got a scalp. FUCK YOU.
Elizabelle
Handel seems to be furious that she’s been singled out, and (it seemed to me) points out that the whole Board is complicit.
She’s making the case for lots more housecleaning.
by everyone is now getting blamed solely on me. No way, Jose.
amk
brinker is the next on the chopping block for blatant lying on public teevee about handel’s role in this whole fiasco ? Not that it would do much good for a fucked up brand name.
rikryah
Bitch, bye
Culture of Truth
If someone could score an interview with Handel, some veeerrry intersting things might come out of it. She sounds a tad peeved.
Shawn in ShowMe
@amk:
I’ll believe that Brinker’s going down about the same time Dick Cheney is tried at the Hague. Komen is her baby. She’ll take everyone else down before she lets them take it away.
trex
There’s all sorts of stuff to unpack in this jeremiad:
So by ending contributions to Planned Parentood, which is the screener of last resort for poor women, we therefore can conclude that poor women are not “the women [Komen] serve[s]. Presumably Komen is directing their efforts toward the jet-set, wives of corporate execs, and upper middle-class soccer moms driving loaded mini-vans – you know, the right kind of women you’d want to rub shoulders with whole buying a guilt-free yogurt with a pink ribbon on it.
That’s funny, the decision to update the granting model by denying funds to organizations under investigation was made prior to April of 2011 when she was hired? Because the investigation by Stearns wasn’t announced until September of 2011, months later. Either Karen is lying or now she’s tipping her hand that there was actually some collusion he between Komen and Stearns to gin up an investigation to provide cover for defunding PP. This story keeps getting better and better! Was the Board involved? Ari Fleischer? Just how deep does this thing go? I’d love to see Brinker hauled before Andrea Mitchell again and have to answer the specifics on these questions and see just how much further she throws Handel under the bus in order to salvage her organization.
Roger Moore
@IM:
This. She’s absolutely right that she’s taking the fall for a group decision. I just hope she convinces people who weren’t paying that careful attention that is the case, so they’ll know that SGK is still a bunch of anti-choice wingnuts.
Maude
@rikryah:
Notice she didn’t say she was wrong. Of course not.
Villago Delenda Est
@CaptainFwiffo:
Worth 15 nerd points! Woohoo!
Elizabelle
@Culture of Truth:
Per the Jim Galloway link, she’s meeting reporters this afternoon. Wonder if she’ll show. Galloway’s with the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
http://blogs.ajc.com/political-insider-jim-galloway/2012/02/07/karen-handel-resigns-from-komen-for-the-cure/
amk
@Shawn in ShowMe: Does she ‘own’ the trust that takes public money ? Don’t think so. The ‘board’ might dump her if they feel if she is pissing away their gravy train.
The Moar You Know
Way too late to matter. She should have hung in there because liberals now know that SGK is nothing but a right-wing, forced-birth organization. They might as well operate as such.
Culture of Truth
“We’re gonna need a bigger bus.”
Elizabelle
@The Moar You Know:
I was wondering if this was how it might play out. Agree that SGK is never going to see a lot of donors back.
Raenelle
Now she’ll become a wingnut darling and either run for office or get a Fox gig. They’re never shamed; they never get punished; they never change.
Roger Moore
@trex:
Absolutely right. The women Komen serves are Nancy Brinker and her cronies at the top of the organization. They get fat salaries and social stature for their “charitable” work. The have to do something about cancer to keep the money flowing, but that’s really a means to an end.
Roger Moore
@Culture of Truth:
And Komen needed a bigger
bribeseverance package.Howlin Wolfe
Right. Handel couldn’t imagine that the decision to cut off PP would be seen as political because, because, it was “thoughtful”, it was “vetted”, it was, I dunno, “fuck-all”! How stupid she must think people are to buy that. And quel surprise when a political firestorm is unleashed that singes her nose hairs. WAHHHH!
Patricia Kayden
Was she the one who retweeted the “cry me a river” comment? If yes, it’s good that she resigned.
Betty Cracker
Wait, what? You mean the DFHs won a round? GTFO! Their brand is still screwed, I say.
gelfling545
@Steve: I
It would have been helpful to her if Word had a “wildly inconsistent checker”.
The Lilac Hand of Menthol Dan
That’ll be the freaking river cried, then.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
Cynical, but sums up the actual situation quite nicely. What this controversy has done is focus a very bright light on what SGK is actually doing about breast cancer, which apparently is not really all that much. Most of the money is in “overhead” of various types…not going to actually preventing breast cancer, or finding a cure.
In their eagerness to appease the vile wingtards, they’ve sabotaged their own gravy train. Boo fucking hoo.
Howlin Wolfe
@Trentrunner: THIS AND A HALF!
scav
@Roger Moore: Besides, wasn’t one of the excuses that went screaming past that PP didn’t serve anyone so they were going to concentrate on the groups that did actual mammograms? So, PP doesn’t serve women but SGK does?
Satanicpanic
This makes me very happy. Next we need Brinker to step down. Then the rest of the board. Then we tear down their HQ and salt the ground it was built on.
philpm
@Raenelle:
Gotta be the Fox gig. She already tried the running for office track and failed miserably.
Shawn in ShowMe
@amk:
I imagine the board will retain Brinker to keep her mouth shut. She knows where the bodies are buried and she’s the face of the organization. Handel was a recent addition who the board can dismiss as a pushy disgruntled employee if she decides to sing to the press.
Culture of Truth
Indeed. Time to take that midnight train to Georgia.
FreeAtLast
She must be referring to that highly regarded scientific study that proved definitively that abortion increases the risk for breast cancer. I’m just having a hard time finding a link to it in the peer-reviewed literature.
LAC
And here’s my letter back to her: “Fuck off, bitch. Get off the cross and spare the wood. Someone else will be needing it for Easter. buh bye!!”
artem1s
by vilifying some organizations and their services and then pitting our constituents against one another… Rove playbook operation.
Woodrowfan
@BGinCHI: It’s OK to concern-troll yourself, everybody does, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards…
amk
@Shawn in ShowMe: That I can buy but not the argument that she founded the frigging thing. The moment she went for public donations, her claims of ownership are null & void.
Culture of Truth
“I believe that Komen, like any other nonprofit organization, has the right and the responsibility to set criteria and highest standards for who
how and to whom it grants.it hires.”true enough
pat
I mentioned this on another thread, but there are a lot of Komen supporters who were outraged to find out they were sending money to PP. They are probably gone now too.
Tee hee.
amk
@Culture of Truth: LOL. Niiice.
Mike E
@Culture of Truth: I’m sorry that you were offended by my actions.
ETA Jewish Steel beat me to it!
amk
@Mike E:
fix’d.
Mike E
@amk: I suck at non-apologies, and I am sorry!
Ben Cisco
A couple of old ladies on scooters have something to say.
Lex
At the November Board meeting, the Board received a detailed review of the new model and related criteria. As you will recall, the Board specifically discussed various issues, including the need to protect our mission by ensuring we were not distracted or negatively affected by any other organization’s real or perceived challenges. No objections were made to moving forward.
I actually believe this. And if it’s true, then Brinker and the board need to resign, as well. And amid all the celebrating over Handel’s well-earned departure, let us not forget this.
This ain’t over.
I forget now whether it was John or Doug who said that liberals need to stay on the offensive, but this is a perfect example. This deal is not yet closed, and it needs to be.
Soonergrunt
@geg6: Don’t hold it in. You should express yourself more…
:)
Jeff Boatright
@trex:
Ding! Ding! Ding! You win the intertoobes for a day!
Runner-up: Everyone here who is pointing out that Handel is basically telling the truth, that Komen Inc. was totally on board with all the wingtard politics, and that she simply facilitated the execution of the Board’s desired outcome.
Garbo
@scav: Last time I checked, you can’t just waltz into a radiology office and order up your own mammogram. You need to have a referral. Which is what PP does.
Everything these people say makes no sense to me. I think that is a relief, actually.
Southern Beale
She threw Komen under the bus as she left. Hilarious.
“It wasn’t me! I was just doing WHAT THE BOARD SAID TO DO!” Hilarious.
Now there’s a hilarious Twitter hashtag, #Karenhandelsnextjob.
dave
@amk: She is also president of the board and has placed her son on the board so she may not be easy to oust.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
She’s a natural on the wignut welfare circuit:
Handel’s aggressive changes to Georgia’s election systems provoked a quick backlash. She became a leading figure in the push for a restrictive voter ID bill, which was enmeshed in litigation for more than three years over charges that it disenfranchised African-Americans, Latinos, students and the elderly.
Even more controversially, in 2007 Handel engineered a system to “purge” thousands of Georgia voters who didn’t match Social Security Administration and other government data. The purge system, which a federal panel later ruled had been wrongfully implemented without approval from the Justice Department, identifed more than 200,000 “no match” voters.
But the data was riddled with errors. Misspellings, multiple people with the same name and other flaws generated thousands of “false positives,” with many legitimate voters wrongfully identified — and in some cases removed from the voter rolls.
In the weeks leading into the 2008 elections, Handel stepped up her crusade. Georgia sent letters to 4,770 voters saying their registration was being “challenged.” Handel even went so far as to encourage Georgia residents to challenge the votes of anyone if they doubted their citizenship, a move savaged by voting rights advocates as opening the door to racial profiling and intimidation.
The following year, the Department of Justice ruled that Handel’s no-match law was inaccurate and discriminatory. The DOJ found that by relying of bad data, Georgia may have disenfranchised thousands of perfectly legal voters; according to their analysis:
[Georgia] flagged a large number of persons who have subsequently demonstrated that they are in fact citizens, Indeed, of the 7,007 individuals who have been flagged…as potential non-citizens, more than half were in fact citizens.
The flawed purging was also discriminatory in its impact:
The DOJ also calculated that although blacks and whites made up equal numbers of the newly registered, blacks were flagged 60 percent more than whites. The DOJ similarly found that “Hispanic and Asian individuals are more than twice as likely to appear on the (flagged) list as are white applicants.” In essence the program puts an undue burden on blacks, Hispanics and Asians to prove their citizenship when trying to vote.
Handel’s moves were widely seen as a bungling and heavy-handed in their partisanship; an Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial wrote days before the election, “No matter the outcome of Tuesday’s election, a loser has emerged — Secretary of State Karen Handel.”
FYWP. Everything above this, starting with italics is quoted from the link. Did I say FYWP?
They will love her for her history!
FormerSwingVoter
My response:
Want to put in your own two cents? Contact the Komen Foundation here.
JGabriel
mistermix @ Top:
Handel:
Handel can’t have spent that much time writing or editing it — she let it get published with a missing word (“more than 30 years”) in the very first sentence.
.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike E:
Fixd.
slag
@Ben Cisco: I like those old ladies on scooters. They bring the good kind of Get Off My Lawn etiquette.
Cathie from Canada
Someone probably already mentioned this upthread, but “cry me a freaking river, Karen!”
signsanssignified
I love this bit:
“Neither the decision nor the changes themselves were based on anyone’s political beliefs or ideology.”
Of course not. Quick class–name any decision by anyone that is not based on one’s ideology–whatever it may be.
amk
@dave: Ah, typical wingnut welfare. Still not enough save her sorry a$$ when push comes to shove. Fuck, they kicked steve jobs out, remember ?
FlipYrWhig
Handel didn’t create the mess. Handel’s being brought in in the first place was a sign of imminent mess.
My guess is that the existing low-level noise about Komen and PP made Komen nervous when they saw how much more PP was being vilified by wingnuts in Congress and statehouses. So they brought some right-to-lifers on board to help them avoid the “Komen funds abortionists” controversy they knew would flare up soon enough. And then Handel came up with the “investigation” idea.
I still think everyone involved had no notion that _Komen_ would end up looking like the ones politicizing the issue. They should have had someone on staff who understood politics a little better. Perhaps a VP for public policy.
FlipYrWhig
BTW, Karen Handel = Ayatollah Komeni.
Maus
@FlipYrWhig:
Right, she’s symptomatic of the rot and illness.
nanute
If her statement was true, (it’s not), she would have stayed on and fought to remain. Instead she acted like… I just can’t think of the right word.
Maus
@JGabriel: Give her some slack, yo. She barely has a high school diploma, she was hired on for her hateful anti-woman, anti-gay political posturing and not her editing skills.
Soonergrunt
@Patricia Kayden: Everybody with a twitter account should be tweeting that back to her.
Sad_Dem
So, would singing a chorus of sha-na-na, hey-hey, goodbye be political, or just immature?
Bubblegum Tate
Auf wiedersehen, jackass.
Actually, before you go, I should thank you for one thing: Were it not for your wingnutty bullshit, I wouldn’t have known that SGK was such a shady operation all-around. So kudos to you for bringing that fact to wider attention.
Jennifer
Eh…kind of hard to paint Handel as the sacrificial goat when we’ve all seen that tweet that she gleefully re-tweeted. Gee Karen, if it wasn’t “political”, then why the victory dance on twitter?
In ANY organization where you do something like that that undercuts the corporate message (that tweet was contemporaneous with Brinker’s statements that the whole thing had nothing, NOTHING I TELL YOU, to do with PP’s status as an abortion provider – it was ALL about new grant guidelines), you’re going to get shown the door.
Handel isn’t a fall guy here; she set herself up for the fall by making it clear that the decision was rooted in politics at the same time the rest of the organization was trying to spin the story that it wasn’t.
Just typical wingnut FAIL, in other words.
Tone In DC
@r€nato:
Oh AYUH.
Ben Cisco
@mistermix … World Peace: Stolen, but with attribution?
Ben Cisco
@BGinCHI:
BWAHAAHAA!!
pseudonymous in nc
I think I called it, albeit later than I expected. I definitely called the self-serving “it’s not me, it’s you!” tone. What I didn’t expect was “You fucked up – you trusted me!”
Now that she’s a made wingnut, Handel has lifetime eligibility to wingnut welfare benefits.
Dave
Handel pushed it, that’s why she’s the sacrificial lamb.
From the Atlantic:
“GUYS! WE CANT TOTALLY TAKE THEM! COME ON, FOLLOW MEEEEeeeeee!”
ReflectedSky
I waited YEARS to get up the nerve to comment, finally did last night, predicted Handel wasn’t going anywhere for months, and woke up to find out I was already wrong.
Oh, well. This is something that’s nice to be wrong about. If she’s out, then she’s free to talk, it sounds like, and she’ll keep the Komen = wingnut message out there nice and loud.
It would have actually been smarter for the board to keep her close for while, if they didn’t have a gag in place before releasing her. Let’s see if I’m wrong about that, as well.
The furor over this is the first time I can think of where women on Facebook really made a difference. It was nice to be part of that.
Kyle
And, apparently, they have the right, with no responsibility, to deny grants based on transparently political just-made-up rules that don’t apply to anyone else.
Cutting off PP was as transparently a hatchet job as Bush v. Gore.
“Nobody could have expected” that hiring a Republican politician would bring Republican politics into the organization.
Hopefully this will server as some kind of warning to other charities that hire political wingnuts into management – they will burn down your organization with their arrogance and self-righteous pursuit of what the voices in their head are telling them to do.
WaterGirl
@ReflectedSky:
Welcome! Cole’s first tag line was “consistently wrong since 2002”, so you fit right in. And you can admit when you’re wrong, which makes the world a better place.
jimmiraybob
I assume by “she” you’re referring to Ari Fleischer’s firm.
John M. Burt
Um, sorry, no. :{ D
Ruckus
A number of people have pointed out that she outed the board and everyone else at SGK. They are all in on it. Even if she is/was the mastermind behind the clusterfuck, the others in charge are in on it. And while I’m sure there are people who work there who were against the whole PP deal, they lost and the wingers won.
So SGK outed themselves and now all of us know, not just those who did due diligence.
So not a penny to SGK. Not one cent. It was mostly a scam before now that’s all it is.
Dr.BDH
Whenever i read this sort of “I’m leaving but I didn’t do anything wrong” missive, I think of Roger Mudd’s interview with some Republican spokesperson when Nixon resigned. The mouthpiece went on and on about what a great president Nixon had been and how Watergate wasn’t such a big deal and all the usual crap. Mudd let him finish and then asked, quietly, “So, then, why is he leaving?”
Interrobang
As I said before about the infamous retweet with which Handel so enthusiastically agreed: At least the pro-choice side only throws political bombs. Your side has got a hell of a lot of answering to do for all of those literal bombs, asshole.
I suppose it’s too much to ask of a wingnut that they have the self-awareness to realise that even if they were someone’s hired hatchet-(wo)man, the hatchet is still in their hands, right, and the responsibility is at least partially with them? I mean, if that’s their general attitude — I didn’t do it, I only did it! — feel sorry for anybody out there who mistakenly hires a wingnut as a consultant; your project’ll be fucked, and your consultant not only will not admit that s/he fucked up, s/he’ll probably deny that there is a problem. And then want to be paid extra.
Criminy. Do these people need to be reminded from time to time on how to breathe?
Xenos
@Maus:
That made me check here wikipedia entry. She had enough connections to get a job as Marilyn Quayle’s Deputy Chief of Staff, but not enough connections to get into a college that would graduate her with a minimal amount of work?
Wow – she must be quite embedded in the wingnut welfare/upwards failure system. Probably Jonah Goldberg’s long lost fraternal twin. Hoocouldanode she would be completely incompetent at this job?
Gretchen
@BenCisco: thanks for reminding me of Margaret and Helen. I haven’t been there in awhile, and they’re hilarious.
patroclus
Cry me a freakin river, Karen!
Maus
@Xenos:
Right! She didn’t even need a diploma mill PhD!
ReflectedSky
@WaterGirl: Thanks for the welcome. I appreciate it.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Shorter Karen Handel:
I hope she enjoys the view from up there.
Gust Avrakotos
What right wing hate media outlet hired her? Or maybe she gave the GOPers enough of a boner to consider her for Romneys VP running mate?
TG Chicago
@Privatize the Profits! Socialize the Costs!: I loved that line, too.
Or, the way I read it:
That’s a load of crap! It was always about politics! And it never would have had greater impact. Oh wait…
Err… exactly!
If she spent the last week writing something this poorly, then all the more reason they were wise to be rid of her.