Via Dave Weigel, Hooter’s restaurants in San Diego have announced they won’t serve Handsy Bob Filner, because of their vast respect for women. Click link for photo (and a twist!)
Less cheerful, Sheila Weller at the Washington Post:
… National gun rights people named Friday, Aug. 9, “Starbucks Appreciation Day.” They did so not because they are latte-with-soy-milk aficionados or avid collectors of the vintage confessional soft rock music and the questing-internationalist and healing-oriented books the coffee chain used to feature at its point of purchase. Rather, they did so because Starbucks – unlike, for example, Peet’s Coffee, Ikea, and California Pizza Kitchen — refuses to ban guns in its venues, preferring to hew to local policy. If a state or jurisdiction allows weapons, concealed or otherwise, to be carried into retail stores, the Starbucks franchises in that state will allow that, too.
Even those of you who didn’t get wind of this fleetingly covered news story can guess the “Grandma, what sharp teeth you have …” hidden agenda – or, at the very least, sneaky opportunity — that “Starbucks Appreciation Day” was about. It was a chance for gun activists to come not just to any Starbucks but to the Newtown Starbucks, a mile and a half from Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 26 people – the large majority very young children – were gunned to death eight months earlier….
To its credit, the Newtown Starbucks closed four hours early on Friday, so the gun activists couldn’t enter and make a scene. (The gun activists pronounced themselves angry at Starbucks for doing so.)…
Yatsuno
No Second Amendment remedies? I thought these were God fearin’ patriot types!
Mnemosyne
Funny how these assholes never bother to show up at a Starbucks on, say, the South Side of Chicago with their deep, deep concern about gun rights being taken away.
NotMax
Didn’t lose much – they probably would have ordered a few of the cheapest things on the menu and split them.
Shalimar
Gun owners at the Newtown Starbucks? My fetish is bigger than your fetish.
Yatsuno
@Mnemosyne: And get brown, blah, and maybe kweer cooties?
Luthe
As I told my parents when I saw the local paper Saturday morning (I live two miles from Newtown): “Some people need to have the word ASSHOLE tattooed on their foreheads.”
BillinGlendaleCA
Per the local news here in LA, those Hooters signs came from Glen Beck.
ETA: Noticed it’s in the update in the original. Wonder if Beck would do this for a rethug mayor.
Villago Delenda Est
These cowards need to be put to death with their own toys.
The Other Bob
At what point can their actions be defined as terrorism?
BillinGlendaleCA
@Villago Delenda Est: Personally I like the ‘ASSHOLE’ forehead tat.
The Other Bob
I guess they have to pull the trigger, not just intimidate, if this is right:
“The FBI defines terrorism as:
The unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
Emerald
Oh goody. We have a Hooters nearby, thanks to DARRYL ISSA who owns the freakin’ building and rented it to them.
So glad to see they have some standards, anyway.
Hunter Gathers
What is the world coming to when your local pervert mayor can’t patronise the neighborhood Boobs ‘N Chicken establishment? Next thing you know he’ll get booted out of Scores.
Spaghetti Lee
It was a chance for gun activists to come not just to any Starbucks but to the Newtown Starbucks, a mile and a half from Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 26 people – the large majority very young children – were gunned to death eight months earlier….
Scum. All of them. Fuck the NRA, and fuck the wannabe stormtroopers.
Origuy
@NotMax:
FIFY
fuckwit
@Hunter Gathers: The irony is intense. And it’s GLENN FUCKING BECK driving that bus… oh the sincerity! So Hooters has outed themselves as a kooky right-wing Glenn Beck following fringe establishment.
Hooters, Wal-Mart, and GoDaddy, added to the list of businesses I wouldn’t go near anyway, but now I have another reason not to.
bago
A local actor troupe should have flash mobbed the Starbucks with second hand clothing and blood packs.
My friends and I used to do Bloodfeast parties on Jeremy’s birthday, where squirt guns filled with fake blood were used to excess. Then this happened.
If those twerps announced something like that in Seattle they’d get clowned good.
Keith P
Once again, with feeling: Party of Assholes
I’ve just never seen any other group of people that performs so many actions based on what is the most dickish one possible that will upset the most people.
e.a.f.
Starbucks is so sick.
Thank God I live in Canada, where we have gun control. Yes, that includes Starbucks.
raven
How come I don’t get no h/t???
NotMax
@raven
We geezers just don’t get no respect, dagnabbit.
raven
@NotMax: Ah well, whatcha gonna do? You check out some of the hippie dudes that hit the lottery in Jersey?
http://storage.canoe.ca/v1/dynamic_resize/sws_path/suns-prod-images/1297454076131_ORIGINAL.jpg?quality=80&size=650x&stmp=1376424221075
NotMax
@raven
Hadn’t heard anything of it.
NotMax
@raven
Ah, thanks for the link. Definitely not a hair stylist.
Last thing I won was a contest to name a baseball team. And I have absolutely no liking for nor interest in sports of any type.
Won a lifetime pass to all games.
The kicker? The entire league promptly folded at the end of that season.
raven
@NotMax: Ha, my last year in Champaign-Urbana I was hired as the sportswriter for a local weekly rag that was mostly an entertainment paper. I had press box tickets and got to go to all the pre-season stuff. I wrote up the first game and the paper promptly folded. The kicker was that sitting in the press box sucked and I was going to go back and sit with my plas anyway. It was the Rose Bowl year for the Illini so it’s cool to have 6 unused press passes in my scrapbook.
BillinGlendaleCA
Only thing I’ve ever won was an emergency kit.
My wife won a radio contest: $100, tix to see Frank and Sammy, tix to see Dionne Warwick and Burt Backarach.
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: Anyone Who Ever Had a Heart and, of course, Walk on By.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: Though not my taste, good to see Frank and Sammy before they kicked the bucket. Even Don Rickles heckled a bit. Only times I’ve been to the Greek.
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: I didn’t care much for either but Frank could sing.
NotMax
@raven
@BillinGlendaleCA
Sammy Davis, Jr’s self-deprecating joke remains cute (if not quite PC today). Paraphrasing:
“My father’s black, my mother Puerto Rican, and I’m Jewish. When I move in, I clear out the whole neighborhood.”
BillinGlendaleCA
@NotMax: It was pretty tough on Sammy in the early days when they played Vegas. He couldn’t stay in the hotel he was performing at.
raven
@NotMax: This was enough for me.
NotMax
@raven
Ah, but also this.
raven
@NotMax: Least he visited the brothers in the bush.
raven
@NotMax: It’s funny, I actually know this Sammy Davis. Part of Forrest Gump’s story was based on him.
dmsilev
@Mnemosyne: There’s a distinct shortage of Starbucks shops on the South Side. Someone actually mapped it and showed that even when you took average neighborhood income into account, the average density of Starbucks was much lower on the South Side than the North. It’s a minor political issue that people bring up now and then.
Seriously.
raven
@dmsilev: What a shock.
raven
@dmsilev: Hey, dere’s on in Cicero!
NotMax
@raven
Stumbled across this and thought you might possibly find it interesting as a sort of real-time chunk of then.
fka AWS
Simple declarative sentences, how do they work?
cvstoner
ha. ha ha. ha ha ha. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Whew! Good one!
raven
@NotMax: Cool, I’ve got a bunch of them along with the hour long film of my unit in Korea. I was up at Cu Chi hangin with a buddy when they did and exchange of MPC (funny money). It was a highly secret op and they closed down every compound in the country. I wandered down to the chopper pad and a sympathetic crew chief let me get a ride back to my company or I would have been in deep shit.
gnomedad
@Luthe:
Actually, they don’t.
Paul in KY
@NotMax: Alot of orders for ‘water only’.
Manyakitty
Ugh. Shouldn’t have looked at this right after a big breakfast.
ThresherK
Local Fox News Affiliate made the Newtown Sbux the lead story that night. (Anyone else watch local Fox News because it’s the only weather on at 10pm?)
To its credit, the Newtown Starbucks closed four hours early on Friday, so the gun activists couldn’t enter and make a scene.
I am so going to the Newtown Sbux on my next trip down I-84 to give few words of thanks and something for the tip jar.
hitchhiker
Seattle here. I’m kinda wondering how this worked . . . Sbux doesn’t do franchises. All the stores are corporate-owned, and the managers have almost no autonomy when it comes to things like hours (or anything else, for that matter).
It’s the kind of company where they send corporate marketing gurus into every single location to help the managers arrange the displays every season to very exacting standards.
This had to be a corporate decision, is what I’m saying. I’d be surprised if they don’t change that policy.
ThresherK
@NotMax: I have to ask, what was the team? The late, unlamented Rhode Island Tiger Sharks?
I Heart Breitbartbees
I’m sorry. I wanted my venti half-soy, half-skim white mochachino unleaded.
The Moar You Know
@hitchhiker: I used to wear the The Heavy Green Apron. You are absolutely correct.
Here’s the deal. Starbucks will do anything, and I mean seriously anything, to placate pissed off customers. A jerk at my store who couldn’t get change for his hundred-dollar bill at 5:30 in the morning threw such a shitfit that they flew a vice-president down from Seattle to San Diego to take this asshole and his entire family out to dinner at one of the nicest places in town. That’s a serious fear at work there.
They didn’t adapt their current stance on gun-toting jerks out of any moral conviction. They adopted it out of pants-shitting cowardice. But now they’re finding, as Neville Chamberlain did so long ago, that there are some people who you just cannot appease (as a good friend of mine says, you give them a hand and get back a bloody stump). Starbucks can’t get away for long with the passive-aggressive tactic of closing a store early – the gun nut crowd, being as unemployable and psychotic as the anti-abortion crowd (mostly the same folks) will just start showing up every day at opening time. They’re going to have to do the one thing that they never, ever, ever have done in their entire company history – take a public stand on a controversial issue that will piss some people off.
Jeanne Dalbret
You have the right not to patronize an establishment which does not welcome your weapon.
I have the same right to refuse to patronize an establisment which passively condones public brandishing of said weapons.
I also have the right to ask those who insist on carrying such weapons that they occasionally show some discretion and consideration for others. I may not get my way, but I can ask.
Fort Geek
Guntards, hoooo!
r€nato
the act of openly carrying a gun is an act of intimidation. Period.
When a cop openly carries a gun, you are supposed to be intimidated… and rightly so, he’s the legally-designated representative of law and order.
When a gun nut openly carries a gun, you are supposed to be intimidated into shutting up. Because they are bullies, pure and simple.
I wouldn’t patronize any business that cultivates a clientele which feels it necessary to go everywhere armed. I can be confident (sort of) that a cop has been well-trained in how and when to use his or her firearm. How do I know that the packing gun nut isn’t liable to shove his iron in my face or make a veiled threat to shoot me over some perceived slight?
Glocksman
As the holder of an Indiana LTCH, here’s my $0.02:
While open carry may be legal, under most circumstances you’re either an idiot or compensating for certain ‘issues’ that AndroGel and ED meds can assist with.
Open carry in a rural area while out hunting or at the check station or local diner before heading afield is OK and accepted by the locals.
Open carry in an urban environment? Not so OK.
At best, you’re making yourself look like a wannabe cop.
At worst you’re flashing a ‘kill or disable me first’ sign at the criminals you are ostensibly worried about.
Not to mention the ones who now know you have a $500 pistol and would attack you from behind in order to steal your weapon.
As far as the ‘no weapons allowed’ signs go, they have no force of law here in IN unless I’d refuse to leave and then it becomes trespassing.
I simply ignore the signs* on the rare occasions I do carry because concealed means concealed and unless someone’s life is in danger, no one will ever know I’m packing heat.
*I also ignored my former employer’s (a 24 hr convenience store chain) no weapons policy when I worked 3rd shift.
If someone simply wanted to rob the place, not only would I have handed them all of the cash in the store, I would have assisted them with a fill up and loading the car with cases of Marlboros.
If they tried the ‘get in the freezer’ bit, that’s when the G19 would have come out, as my life at that point would be at severe risk.