Last week, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council got my hopes up for nothing. I opened his daily email, and this bolded sentence jumped out at me:

My heart skipped a beat. Could it be true? What sort of weird sexual perversion was he caught at? Was he in the stall next to Larry Craig? Was he selling drugs to Ted Haggard? Was he snorting santorum?

Excitedly, I started reading from the top:

Dear Friend,

I want you to hear something a California pastor said to me recently:

“If we lose, we go to jail.”

It’s just that simple, says Pastor Jim Garlow—if marriage loses in California, religious liberties everywhere will be next.

Oh, piss! He’s not in any sort of trouble! He’s just in his typical whiny fundie-pout again about some imagined slight. OK, Tony, what is it today? Let’s look at that last sentence again:

…if marriage loses in California…

Oh, you’re right, Tony! I agree completely! If Proposition 8 passes, the right of every Californian to marry would be taken away. Only those people deemed worthy by religious zealots would be allowed to marry. The current law, which protects the rights of all citizens, must be preserved. If Proposition 8 passes, marriage would lose big time in California.

…religious liberties everywhere will be next.

Well that last part is a non-sequitur. Tony needs somebody to proofread his stuff, so errors like that don’t slip through.

Family Research Council has been pouring resources into a national campaign to defend marriage and religious freedom…

Damn, Tony! You surprise me! I thought you were a religious wackjob! I didn’t know you were a civil libertarian! I’ve been working hard defending marriage and religious liberties, too! And it’s tough work, let me tell you. Did you know there are literally millions of religious nutters out there working their asses off right this minute to destroy those two pivotal institutions? But with your help, we can defeat Proposition 8! Glad to have you on board!

I’m writing today to ask you again to stand with us. We still must raise $600,000 before the close of our fiscal year on September 30.

Wow. I admire your spunk, Tony! I’ve got a lot to learn. Here I’ve been toiling at this blog for almost three years now, and I’ve never made a dime. I don’t even carry advertising. I thought defending marriage and civil liberties was the price of living in a free society. I didn’t know I could also make major bucks at it! Now that we’re partners, you’ll need to slip a little of that my way, you know. I’m not asking for a lot. Just enough to quit my job so I can sit on my ass all day like you.

The stakes are enormous. We face a national menace to religious liberty:

• In Boston, a Christian adoption agency was shut down for refusing to place orphans with homosexual couples.

What is this world coming to? The rights of the homosexual couples were clearly violated. It’s a good thing we shut that bigoted agency down.

• In New Mexico, a Christian-owned studio was fined more than $6,000 for refusing to photograph a lesbian commitment ceremony.

Why do these religious boneheads think they can impose their narrow worldview upon the rest of us? I’m with you, Tony!

• In San Francisco, the city council officially condemned Christian opposition to homosexual adoption as hateful and discriminatory rhetoric.

Maybe that’s your problem, Tony. You’re wasting your effort in cities where we’ve already won. As you just pointed out, the city council is right on top of this issue. I think you need to put your effort into places that haven’t yet left the 12th century.

FRC has been protecting marriage during its 25-year history, and we’ve been voicing your values ever since activist judges in Massachusetts and California legalized counterfeit marriage and triggered a national debate.

Uhh… What?

Your prayers and generosity are enabling FRC to use our national platform to make the forceful case for traditional marriage in the media, in the churches, and at the grassroots.

God DAMN it, Tony! You ARE a religious wackjob!

How dare you claim that you’re on the side of protecting marriage! Marriage is just now getting out from under the yoke of centuries of Christian oppression.

In less than two months, voters in California, Florida, and Arizona will have the chance to place marriage out of the reach of activists and liberals.

You mean out of the reach of the civil rights of millions of Americans. Go back to the 12th century, Tony. There’s no room for your hate in this one.

In my daily email from TownHall.com (what The Watcher likes to call Clownhall—I think I’ll steal that from now on), was an ugly advertisement for Expelled. That movie is like nuclear waste. Nobody wants it, you can’t get rid of it, and the retarded are mesmerized by it.

So here it is again. They’re advertising the DVD, which will be released in October. I decided it was time once again to point out how foolish this film is. I looked through the promotional graphics that I had previously downloaded from their web site, and I found the “patriotic” (idiotic is more like it) poster displayed below. Actually, that’s not exactly how the poster originally looked. The text was inaccurate, so I fixed it.

Neither would be today.

(Image from The Daily Voice)

The 96th Skeptics’ Circle has been posted over at Endcycle. It’s a short list this week, so you’ll have time to read them all. Greta Christina has a two part article on why she doesn’t believe in God. Go check it all out.

Today I received an email from Tony Perkins of the American Fundie Association (It’s not on their website, so I can’t provide a link.). It’s titled “YouTube Censorship: Another Chinese Import?” Tony tells us that YouTube has removed an anti-Obama video that discusses Obama’s positions on abortion.

This is one of those gruesome abortion videos that shows buckets of blood and gore, in an effort to make people react emotionally and not logically. What they neglect to tell you in those videos is that removal of a tumor is just as sickeningly gory. Nobody is advocating that we stop cancer surgeries. (Just cancer cures. See their position on stem cell research.)

What I find amusing about this whole affair is that fundies are always running around screaming about how television, movies, magazines, billboards, etc. are too graphic; they violate community standards, and must be censored. But when somebody tells them that their video is too graphic and violates community standards, they scream bloody fetus.

I found a scary article over at Mark Crispin Miller’s blog. In “Why They Chose Sarah Palin”, Mark asserts that Palin is just a convenient cover to mask voter fraud. He alleges that there aren’t enough fundies to explain Bush’s 2004 reelection. Bush’s disapproval rating was too high, and the numbers don’t add up. Instead, the election was stolen through tampering with the electronic voting machines (among other techniques). As the media were trying to come up with an explanation for how the pre-election polling could have been so wrong, the Bushkavites advanced the story that his win was due to a last-minute surge by the so-called “values voters”. McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin is intended to cover the same vote tampering in this election.

I don’t know how true this is. The vast majority of mainstream news outlets are all owned by just a few giant corporations, so no investigative reporting ever comes out of them anymore. That just leaves the smaller independents, who usually don’t have the resources to do all of the digging required to break these stories. Even when they do, it doesn’t get covered by the mainstream media, so the vast unwashed masses never find out and vote accordingly.

This is just a friendly consumer warning. You might want to shop anywhere else but Amazon. Their customer service is poor, and they do not stand behind their promises.

I ordered volumes 1 & 2 of a DVD series. They were being offered at the pre-release price of $24 each. Right next to the price was the guarantee that if the price dropped before the release date, they would charge me the lower price.

Finally the release date arrived, and they shipped the DVDs. Then I got an email. It said that Volume 2 had dropped in price:

You saved $4.00 with Amazon.com’s Pre-order Price Guarantee! The price of the item(s) decreased after you ordered them, and we gave you the lowest price.
…
$4.00 is your total savings under our Pre-order Price Guarantee.

Because we reduced the price of your pre-release title between shipment (when we charged you) and the release date, you will automatically receive a refund for $4.00.

I thought it was odd that only Volume 2 had a price change. I checked their site and saw that Volume 1 had also dropped in price, by $5! Not only did they not give me the promised price guarantee, but they cheated me out of the better of the two.

OK, I thought. It’s just a computer glitch. Something didn’t get processed right. I’ll email customer service, and they’ll fix it, right? Wrong. Here’s what they wrote back:

I have reviewed our previous correspondence with you, and I offer my sincere apologies for any misunderstanding regarding the Post-Order Price Guarantee policy.

I’ve confirmed that we now offer a greater discount than at the time you placed your order.

However please understand that as of September 01, 2008 we are no longer offering discounts if prices change on our website after you make a purchase.
…
Hence as you have placed this order after on September 14, 2008, we will not be able to apply this Post-Order Price Guarantee for this order.

It’s really funny that a bookstore would hire illiterates. I said nothing about a post-order price guarantee. I merely wanted the pre-order price guarantee that they promised.

I wrote back and explained the situation. Here’s the email I received this morning:

Thanks for writing to us about the recent price change on the item you purchased recently. I recognize you have a choice of retailers and appreciate that you prefer to order from us.

Oh great. Now they’re copying the airlines. That’s who you want to look to for a model of great customer service! One of the most reviled industries in terms of customer satisfaction!

Unfortunately, we do not have a post-order price guarantee.

Translation: “Unfortunately, we do not hire intelligent, literate, or competent people in customer service.”

I’ve reviewed your order and see that the price change was significant and you just received this item from us. Under the circumstances, I’ll make a one-time exception for you and issue a refund for the price difference in the amount of $5.00.

Please understand that I’m issuing this refund because of the exceptional circumstances, and I’m doing this for you against our standard policy.

What “exceptional circumstances”? That I caught them lying?

So even though I finally did get the price they promised me, it is clear that they don’t stand behind their promises or know a whit about customer service.

Over the years, I have spent literally thousands of dollars at Amazon. It looks like they don’t want that kind of business in the future. I’m posting this merely as a warning. I don’t care whether you shop there or not. I’m not trying to run them out of business. I just want you to know what kind of business they are and what you can expect.

(BTW, I occasionally mention books or DVDs on this site. In the past, I have provided links to buy the item at Amazon. Not that it does any good. None of you cheap bastards has ever bought anything! Anyway, about six months ago, I switched to Powell’s. You may have noticed that in the links. The only reason I did it was the Amazon links are very hard to create if you don’t want to have gobs of Javascript and live links to Amazon and nefarious tracking cookies on the site. I don’t like that stuff, because it dramatically reduces page-loading speeds. I also don’t like the privacy issue of those cookies, which they place on your computer whether you follow the link or not. That’s why I always rolled my own Amazon links, but they took a long time to create and test. Since I never made any money off of the links, I dumped them. Powell’s links are very easy to create, they have no Javascript, and they don’t plant a cookie unless you actually click on them. That’s the main reason I switched. In light of what has just happened, I’m glad I converted. Powell’s and other retailers will be getting my business from now on.)