Posted 1:07 AM by Scoobie Davis

Amway and the Unification Movement: Hierarchies of Misery
On both the Moon blog and the Amway blog.

Posted 10:39 AM by Scoobie Davis

Sun Myung Moon Operative Providing Support to Mitt Romney's Campaign
Check it out on the Moon blog.

Posted 6:02 AM by Scoobie Davis

Ironic Must Read
Christopher Hayes article " The New Right-Wing Smear Machine" in The Nation on the under-the-radar spam e-mail smear campaigns by some right-wing operatives and how sites like Snopes.com and BreakTheChain.org have been countering the disinformation. Hayes mentions the now-infamous Hillary/Gold Star Mothers smear started by an operative writing for the right-wing website NewsMax (I wrote about the Gold Star Mothers smear and about NewsMax). It is a thorough article about how unscrupulous meme-creators are using e-mail for the purposes of modern day whisper campaigns. What I found ironic about reading the article online was that it had a Google ad for, of all things, NewsMax.

Posted 1:31 AM by Scoobie Davis

The Truth About Robert Kiyosaki
I have a new post on the anti-Amway blog.

Posted 8:55 PM by Scoobie Davis

Fox Business Anchor or Porn Star?
Radar magazine reports, you decide.

BTW, in case you missed it, Radar featured me in their story on crashing the Oscars.

Posted 7:44 PM by Scoobie Davis

New Post on HorowitzWatch
Check it out

Posted 10:55 AM by Scoobie Davis

The Washington Times Knows about my New Sun Myung Moon Blog
Today I checked out my Statcounter stats and discovered that someone from the Washington Times came to my new Sun Myung Moon blog based on a Google blogsearch of "Sun Myung Moon."

Also, as has been the case with my new anti-Amway blog, someone from the US Department of Justice was reading the Moon blog today.

Posted 1:11 AM by Scoobie Davis

New Sun Myung Moon Blog
When I decided to put my Amway posts from this blog into a separate blog, it was a success that exceeded all of my expectations. Accordingly, I have created a separate blog in which I have put my posts on Sun Myung Moon and the Unificationist movement. The new blog is called The Real Sun Myung Moon. Enjoy.

Posted 10:49 AM by Scoobie Davis

New Posts on the Amway blog
click here

Posted 1:42 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
"Soros or Murdoch" by Marty Kaplan

Posted 12:38 PM by Scoobie Davis

The Mainstreaming of Extremism
Last night on The O'Reilly Factor, Billo discussed controversies revolving around Rosie O'Donnell's latest book, Celebrity Detox. His guest was Marji Ross, the president of Regnery Publishing. This was clearly an attempt by O'Reilly to make a fringe publishing house appear mainstream.

I have meant to write a post about how Regnery Publishing has attempted to rehabilitate the image of Sun Myung Moon. Regnery has published two pro-Moon books and two other Unificationist-related books (there may be more). I will post this soon.

UPDATE: Arianna Huffington: "Midnight in America: the Mainstreaming of the GOP's Lunatic Fringe"

Posted 3:48 AM by Scoobie Davis

New posts on the Amway blog
Click here

Posted 3:54 PM by Scoobie Davis

Targeted by Amway?
I checked my Statcounter stats and found out that my anti-Amway blog is being monitored by Warner Norcross & Judd, the law firm representing Amway in its frivolous lawsuit against online critics. Warner, Norcross, & Judd is one of Michigan's most prestigious law firms. I will write more about this later.

Quick note: My Amway blog is less than two weeks old and it is already getting a lot of search engine traffic. For instance, it turns up in the top ten of a Google search of "reasons not to do Amway." I'm proud.

Posted 11:36 AM by Scoobie Davis

Cults and Power: Two Moonies Seeking US House Seats
Nobody ever accused Sun Myung Moon and his Family Federation for World Peace (FFWP) of modesty. Both Moon and FFWP president Michael Jenkins made this claim about their movement: "We are the chosen people" (this slight of the Jewish people is hardly surprising considering Moon's view of Jews--see addendum).

At least two of Moon's "chosen people" are considering runs for US House seats. Last month, I wrote a post about FFWP member and Arizona State Representative Mark Anderson who is considering a challenge to freshman Democratic representative Harry Mitchell.

In recent days, FFWP member David Caprara is considering a run for the seat left vacant by the recent death of Representative Jo Ann Davis (R-VA).

What makes the runs by Anderson and Caprara especially interesting is that in a 2002 book paying tribute to Sun Myung Moon (modestly titled The Hope of All Ages, A Unified World Peace: A Tribute to the Reverend and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon), Anderson and Caprara co-authored a revealing chapter. In it, they acknowledged that the Congress's establishment of Parent's Day was inspired by Moon, a sexual predator and con artist who exploited people's concern for family members to bilk them out of their life savings. Members of Moon's cult view Moon and his wife as the "True Parents" of humanity. Caprara and Anderson acknowledged that this was the covert rationale for the establishment of Parents' Day by the US Congress: "The establishment of Parents' Day was the result of a bipartisan, multiracial and interfaith coalition of religious, civic, and elected leaders inspired by your commitment, Reverend Moon, to the ideal of establishing true parent role models"(p. 17).

Addendum: Sun Myung Moon on the Jewish people:

To recreate Israel, the church and the state must become one as Cain and Abel. Instead they became one with Rome and captured and killed Jesus. They united with Rome. Who are the Jewish members here, raise your hands! Jewish people, you have to repent. Jesus was the King of Israel. Through the principle of indemnity Hitler killed 6 million Jews. That is why. God could not prevent Satan from doing that because Israel killed the True Parents. Even now, you have to determine that you will repent and follow and become one with Christianity through Rev. Moon.

Thanks again to Moonboots for help with this post.

Posted 1:24 AM by Scoobie Davis

Get Back to Work!
A few months ago, I found out that someone in the US State Department was Googling for pictures of Michelle Malkin (and getting paid by the taxpayer for doing it). More recently, someone in the Justice Department was surfing the web and came to my site apparently looking for dirt on Al Gore (and possibly violating the Hatch Act).

I checked my Statcounter stats and found that for the past three days, someone from the US Justice Department has been checking out my anti-Amway blog. Don't they have some criminals to catch?

A quick note: since I've started this blog, I have noticed from my Statcounter stats that Amway's parent company Alticor has been monitoring my Amway blog on a daily basis.

Posted 1:53 PM by Scoobie Davis

Amway is Imploding!
Read about it on the Amway blog.

Posted 8:54 AM by Scoobie Davis

Amway's War on Bloggers
As cult expert Steven Hassan has pointed out, information control is essential to a cult like Amway. Many new Amway recruits have been told by their sponsors not to watch TV, listen to the radio, or surf the Internet (this last component became more difficult when Amway became web-oriented with Quixtar in 1999). With the advent of the Internet, lower level Amway distributors as well as prospective recruits have plenty of critical information about the corporation (my Google bomb helped to make this information more accessible to these people). This is great because accurate, critical information is a bane to mind control groups like Amway.

More recently, there has been a lot of infighting between the company and disgruntled distributors. This has led to these distributors creating blogs such as Quixtar Lost My Cents, Free the Quixtar IBO log, The IBO Rebellion, Free the IBO, Crazy World, Save Yourself Dick DeVos, and many others.

In response to these new waves of criticism, Alticor, the parent company of Amway and Quixtar, has filed a series of lawsuits against many of these critical bloggers. Such lawsuits are known as Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP). They are filed in order to chill public expression by bankrupting the defendants. Bloggers and others concerned about freedom of expression should stand up for these targeted blogs against corporate bullies like Alticor.

Note: This post is cross-posted on my Amway blog.

UPDATE: Crazy Horse has a list of the sued bloggers.
If you want to watch the YouTube videos that Amway/Quixtar finds so threatening, click here. The videos with the Hooded Angry Man are hilarious.

Posted 1:07 AM by Scoobie Davis

Amway's War on Bloggers
Click here to read about Amway/Quixtar's SLAPP lawsuits against Internet critics. For a humorous but informative response from a blogger, click here. I will have much more later.

Check out my Amway blog for more later.

Posted 10:50 PM by Scoobie Davis

Krugman on Gore Derangement Syndrome
Read the column here. As luck would have it, Monday morning's Moonie Times' editorial page dissed the former VP for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. The Times' editorials are just sore because the Nobel committee doesn't award a prize for eugenics.

UPDATE: Robert Parry and The Daily Howler have more.

Posted 10:08 PM by Scoobie Davis

Film Work this Weekend
I was doing work on a full-length indie film project (I have a speaking part). I need to rest but the Amway lawsuits are something I will write about tomorrow.

Posted 11:35 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
David Neiwert on Rush Limbaugh.

Posted 1:55 PM by Scoobie Davis

Congrats to Ed Schultz
For having the same audience size as Billo. This is all the more impressive considering that O'Reilly has a top-rated cable TV show and Schultz started his national radio program over a year-and-a-half after O'Reilly started the Radio Factor.

Posted 11:19 AM by Scoobie Davis

New Posts on the Amway blog
Click here

UPDATE: Alticor, the parent corporation of Amway/Quixtar, knows about my new Amway blog.

Posted 12:32 PM by Scoobie Davis

Announcing a New Amway Blog
I have been receiving a lot of traffic from people doing Amway-related keyword searches. I thought the best way to deal with this traffic would be to create a new blog devoted to Amway and reprint the Amway posts from this blog as well as to create other resources for those concerned about the corporation. The title of this new blog represents my feelings about the corporation. The blog is only a few hours old so it does not have many of the features I envision for it. Check it out.

Posted 11:03 AM by Scoobie Davis

Busy
Working on a big project. Details later. In the meantime, I've updated my post on John Hagee.

Posted 1:08 AM by Scoobie Davis

Amway: The Cult of Greed
I'm writing a somewhat long post on Amway. I don't when it will be finished but it will include some of the company's links to the Bush administration. In the meantime, I have revised my long post on the company I wrote earlier in the year. At the end of the post, I have included excerpts from Eric Scheibeler's must-read book Merchants of Deception that underscore what a truly bizarre organization it is.

Posted 10:47 AM by Scoobie Davis

This is Fox News, indeed!
I was channel surfing last night and checked out Fox News' Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld. I can only watch the show for a few minutes at a time because Gutfeld is the most annoying person in the world (perhaps he learned his annoying mannerisms as an assistant to the American Spectator's R. Emmett Tyrrell). Last night's program had some accidental candor in it. One of the panelists was Rebecca Gomez, on-air eye candy for the forthcoming Fox Business Channel. Gomez told the panel that she believed that Hillary Clinton would be elected president in 2008. Gutfeld chided her for being a downer, explaining to her: "This is Fox News!"

UPDATE: This is Fox News.

Posted 10:36 AM by Scoobie Davis

Web Articles on Sun Myung Moon
Ed Brayton, who writes on issues of science and religion, has a series of articles on Sun Myung Moon with an emphasis on the Messiah's ties to Michigan.

Posted 3:13 AM by Scoobie Davis

Radio Interview about Unification Church Heir Apparent Justin Moon
On the Leonard Lopate Show, Christopher S. Stewart--author of the recent article of Justin Moon's gun company, Kahr Arms--is interviewed (click here then click "Listen to the whole show," then click "Kahr Arms and the Unification Church"). One of the more revealing parts of the interview is how the Moonies are lobbying the Bush administration hard for a pardon for the cult leader for his 1982 tax fraud conviction. This makes sense: Moon is 87 and Bush is probably his last hope for a pardon.

Posted 1:27 AM by Scoobie Davis

Film Stuff
I went to an advance screening of The Heartbreak Kid. I laughed but the traditional Mexican dancing scene was not funny.

Posted 11:41 PM by Scoobie Davis

What Do You Expect?
I wasn't surprised Ann Coulter has fantasies about denying women the franchise. This is the same person who said that women shouldn't be allowed in the military and who blamed Abu Ghraib on "a girl general."

Posted 12:51 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Robert Parry: "The Clintons and the Bushes"

Posted 11:38 AM by Scoobie Davis

Is the Unification Church Behind a "Sexual Reorientation" Group?
It's no secret that the Reverend Sun Myung Moon doesn't care for homosexuals, whom he once referred to as "dung-eating dogs." Here is an excerpt from a Moon speech:

Is the world around us a peaceful world centered upon God, or is it all confused? That is what is called free sex. What is the meaning of lesbians and homosexuals? That is the place where all different dungs collect. We have to end that behavior. When this kind of dirty relationship is taking place between human beings, God cannot be happy. That is what the secular world is like. As the lord of all creation, are we seeking that kind of world?

Moon might be behind the International Healing Foundation (whose domain name is www.gaytostraight.org), a group that claims to engage in reparative therapy to make gays heterosexual. Warren Throckmorton has preliminary evidence that IHR is a UC front group.

Posted 10:44 AM by Scoobie Davis

John Hagee is Really, Really Scary
I've written about Hagee before (click here and here). Sarah Posner has an update on Hagee. The man is a maniac. Hagee reminds me of something Blaise Pascal said over 300 years ago, "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

UPDATE: Recently Bill Moyers examined the Christian Zionist movement. Hagee and his group Christians United for Israel (CUFI) was the focus of Moyer's examination. The program is available on YouTube:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

Posted 3:13 PM by Scoobie Davis

I just Listened to Ann Coulter on Sean Hannity's Radio Show
I hope Media Matters was recording it.

Posted 12:42 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Wesley Clark on Rush Limbaugh's dishonoring of the troops. Clark knows all about this pattern by Limbaugh: back in 2003, Limbaugh falsely accused of conduct unbecoming an officer. Digby has much more.

Posted 1:15 AM by Scoobie Davis

A Family Tradition: The Amway/Blackwater Markups
Dick DeVos, former CEO of Amway, and Erik Prince, the CEO and chairman of Blackwater USA, are brothers-in-law (also click here). Both Prince and DeVos are reactionaries with ties to the sectarian right and dominionist causes. Both are businessmen who provide goods and services with very high markups. Here is some information about Blackwater charges. Here is what Amway charges for some of its products (also here and here). The main difference is that Blackwater charges its outrageous prices to the US taxpayer while Amway charges its out-of-sight prices to its mostly Republican distributors (who are taught to blame themselves when they almost inevitably fail in this elaborate Ponzi scheme). However, what is most important is that DeVos and Prince profit from other people's misery.

Addendum: I have some other posts on Amway/Quixtar/Alticor: 1) On the blogger success against Amway's scams (check out the new addendum I added recently); 2) An update on the success against Amway/Quixtar; 3) Why Democrats are chumps for not taking on Amway; 4) I mention the Proctor & Gamble suit against some prominent Amway distributors here; 5) A short post on Amway's troubles; and 6) 2006 was not a good political year for Amway.

UPDATE I: Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army has an article about Blackwater in The Nation appropriately titled Blackwatergate."

UPDATE II: The Death of Irony. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA): "[Erik] Prince is on his way to being an American hero just like Ollie North was."

UPDATE III: Check out my new Amway blog.

Posted 8:44 PM by Scoobie Davis

Anita Hill Strikes Back
Click here

Posted 1:10 PM by Scoobie Davis

New Post on HorowitzWatch
Click here