Back on 7/17/2006 here is what we posted on our blog about Mr. Lonegan when he tried to get a Spanish advertising billboard removed from his town...
Don't confuse this town with the capital city of the same name in Colombia, South America, where the official language is Spanish and the national motto is Libertad y Orden.
The Bogota NJ city council made it perfectly clear last week that is wants no Spanish billboards in that borough.
Apparently NOBODY told these folks how dumb they look protesting a billboard. So they escalated the matter by protesting to the offending advertiser, McDonalds, and by calling for a boycott. Thankfully. McD's won't budge.
They are removing all doubt down there south of Teaneck. Even NPR is mocking them. Anti-hate web sites feature Bogota's Mayor as a poster boy for racism.
The Fox fighters at News Hounds reported with the video clip of Mayor Lonegan from the Fox and Friends show on 7/11 that,
Yesterday morning on FOX and Friends First, Steve Lonegan, Mayor of Bogota (pronounced Bug-OH-dah), New Jersey, proved that bigotry, pettiness, mean-spiritedness and prejudice are alive and well on FOX News Channel and, sadly, it seems, also in New Jersey. Mayor Lonegan is very, very, very upset that McDonalds has posted a Spanish-language billboard in his fair city of 8,000 (1,680 of whom are Hispanic) and is agitating to get them taken down.I don't know why Mr. Lonegan did not try to rename his borough. After all Bogota looks a lot like, Bogotá, the capital city of the Spanish speaking South American country Columbia. Wikipedia reports that, "Bogotá is the largest city in Colombia, and one of the biggest in Latin America."
Bogota, New Jersey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: (from 2006...)
Bogota is a Borough in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States. As of the United States 2000 Census, the borough population was 8,249. Bogota was formed on November 14, 1894 from portions of Ridgefield Township at the height of the "Boroughitis" phenomenon. Portions of Bogota were taken in 1895 to form part of the new Township of Teaneck. Bogota was named in honor of the Bogert family, which had been the first to occupy the area.
The Mayor of the Borough of Bogota is Steve Lonegan. Members of the Bogota Borough Council are Pat Kearns, Joe Noto, George T. Shalhoub, Melissa Schnipp, George Silos and Patrick McHale. In July 2006, the conservative Mayor Lonegan, who in previous years had unsuccessfully sought several higher offices, including a race for governor in 2005, created a firestorm when he engineered a Borough Council resolution requesting that McDonald's remove a Spanish-language billboard for iced coffee in town. Lonegan said the billboard was 'divisive.' The story received national publicity, occurring concurrently with a national debate on illegal immigration.
1 comment:
It does seem to violate corporate standards for English. I was in Paris once, in the late 1980s. Stopped into a McD's for a drink. I would have expected the fish sandwich to be "filet de poisson", but no, it was "filet-o-fish", just like in the States.
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