Yeah, Gateway Pundit and Drudge and the Freepers and Pammy Atlas and Examiner.com, why don't you want the capitalists who own the Concord Mills mall to have the right to operate their business in the manner they deem best?
'Impeach Obama' bumper stickers spark a shopping mall protest
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- While protesters rallied in his support, the owner of a Concord Mills kiosk that sells conservative merchandise said he met with the mall's manager Sunday to see what arrangements can be made for him to remain after his lease expires Friday.
Nothing was agreed to, except that the two would meet again Monday, said Loren Spivack, owner of Free Market Warrior.
Spivack has contended that he's being kicked out of the mall for political reasons. He's traced his exile to a letter to the editor in the Charlotte Observer criticizing his business, saying it promotes "ideas such as racism, sexism and even slavery."
He said he was at work again Sunday when he got a call from mall manager Ray Soporowski inviting to talk in his office.
"It was a pleasant, amicable conversation, but we didn't come to any resolution about whether our business would be able to stay in the mall," Spivack said. "He wanted to include some of his company's senior management and we agreed to talk again Monday."
Mall officials have repeatedly declined to comment. Reached Sunday, Soporowski continued that policy. "With all due respect, that conversation is between Loren and myself," he said....
"[T]hat conversation is between Loren and myself" -- why don't right-wingers, of all people, believe that? Why don't they believe that the owners of a business are free to choose how they run that business? "Free speech"? If Loren can't sell his merch anywhere, because of government suppression, that's a free speech issue. But this is a business decision -- right, righties? Isn't that what Ayn Rand and your other pro-capitalist heroes would say?
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I don't know what's being sold at the kiosk, but what I see on the Web site seems milder than many online sites run by wingnuts -- there's nothing eliminationist or blantantly racist. The article quoted above mentions a couple of items that have been controversial:
[Spivack] opened his Free Market Warrior kiosk last spring, selling such items as "Impeach Obama" bumper stickers and baby bibs that say, "My parents chose life. Thanks Mom and Dad!"
Left unmentioned is this little item:
That one pisses me off. But it seems milder (by modern gutter standards) than bone-in-the-nose crap like this.
But ultimately it's the mall owners' call. Don't like it? Shop somewhere else.
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UPDATE: I've seen reports that Spivack sells pro-Confederate merchandise -- a letter to the editor stating as much started this controversy -- but I didn't know if that was accurate. Now I see that Mary C. Curtis of Politics Daily is citing one such item: a bumper sticker that reads, "About that Civil War thing ... N.C. never actually surrendered."
Is it just impossible for wingers in the South to refrain from that sort of thing (even those who, like Spivack, were grew up in enemy territory)? And on the other hand, why doesn't Spivack have the cojones to post that one on his site?
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