A Pack of Little Yappy Car Chasing Dogs

Opinion | thepilot.com

A few years ago, I lived on a street in Southern Pines, near the airport. One of my neighbors on that street owned a feisty little dog who would chase my car down the street every day, barking his fool head off.

One day, I slammed on the brakes, looked out the car window, and told the baffled pooch “OK, pal, you caught it! Now what are you gonna do with it?”

Needless to say, he didn’t have an answer.

I’ve been thinking about that dog a lot as I watch the new Republican Congress members try to follow through on the promise they and Russian-backed President-elect Donald Trump made to “repeal and replace Obamacare on Day One.”

You may not have noticed, what with the New Year and all, but Day One has come and gone, and, well, they’re still trying to figure out how to do it.

They’ve whipped up a “budget resolution” that says, in effect, “Yessiree, we’re sure ’nuff going to repeal that nasty Obamacare, just you wait and see,” but how it’s going to be done, and what will replace it, remain as much a mystery as why McDonald’s keeps bringing back the awful McRib sandwich or why “Dating Naked” is an actual TV show.

Meanwhile, Comrade Trumpovitch took a break from his busy schedule of writing thank-you notes to Vladimir Putin and throwing online shade at Meryl Streep to let the Congress know that delays would be unacceptable, and he wants both repeal and replace right now, dang it. He told The New York Times he wants a repeal vote “next week” and a replacement bill “very quickly or simultaneously.”

Trump demanded that no more than “a few weeks” must pass before an entirely new health care bill must be plucked from out of the vast roaring void that is the Republican source of health care ideas. Then it has to pass through the legislative process and be voted on.

Oh, and according to Trump’s prior fiats, it has to keep the things that Americans like, like the prohibition against denying insurance because of pre-existing conditions and letting people keep their offspring on their family health plan until they’re 26. And it has to bring costs down. So let it be written, so let it be done.

Rep. Chris Collins, a Republican from New York and a member of Trump’s transition team, fell back on what’s become a standard Trump response: The guy whose supporters love him because he says what he means doesn’t really mean what he says. Collins told CNN that “I'm not reading it literally literally” when Trump says he wants it done right away.

He’s a CEO, Collins Trumpsplained, and he’s “using that mindset.” Perhaps my favorite bit of Trumpsplaining comes from Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidey: “I think (Trump) speaks in concepts, and I accept his concept.”

OK, let me just say right now, I am totally stealing “speaks in concepts.” I can see it now: “Sure, honey, I said I’d be home by 11 and it’s 3 a.m., but, you know, I was just speaking in concepts. You should know not to take me literally literally.” I could also use it at work: “Your Honor, I know I said I’d have that order to you by Friday, but I was, you know, speaking in concepts.”

In any case, the actual timeline for full “repeal and replace” (which, unlike a simple budget resolution, will most likely take some Democratic votes in the Senate), could take months. If they keep the promise made by House GOP Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who said, “Let me be clear: No one who has coverage because of Obamacare today will lose that coverage,” the timeline might stretch out even further, as in “never.”

In that case, one can only imagine the Twitter storm to follow. It’ll be like that famous and often-parodied scene in the movie “Downfall,” in which a certain German dictator goes completely berserk when told that the units he’s ordering into brilliant counterattacks against the encroaching Allies don’t exist anymore. Except from Trump it’ll be 140 characters at a time.

But don’t worry, Congress. Before long, Alec Baldwin or a Dixie Chick will say something President Tweety doesn’t like and he’ll get distracted and leave you alone while he goes off on them, and you can get back to failing at your jobs. Once again, the Republicans have shown that while they can win elections, they’re incapable of doing the actual work of governing.

Republicans Are Channeling 1984 (The Book, Not the Year)

Opinion | thepilot.com

Philosopher and novelist George Santayana once observed that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Nowadays, however, it seems that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to be Republican spokespeople.

Take, for instance, the latest jaw-dropping assertion from failed presidential candidate and former “America’s Mayor” Rudolph Giuliani.

Rudy appeared in front of a crowd at a Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio, and said, with a straight face, “Before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attacks in the United States. They all started when Clinton and Obama got into office.”

Yes, that’s right, folks. The man who milked the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, so long and so hard for political gain that Joe Biden once observed that “there’s only three things Rudy mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11,” the man who stood all teary-eyed before a Republican convention and claimed that on that dark day he “grabbed the arm of then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and I said to him, ‘Bernie, thank God George Bush is our president,’” now seems to have forgotten both the day and which president he was thanking God for.

Then you have Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson, the dead-eyed, raven-haired convicted shoplifter and sometime reality show guest star who’s fond of sporting a “Road Warrior”-esque necklace made of bullets during CNN interviews.

When Trump was taking heat over attacking the parents of Capt. Humayan Khan, the American soldier who sacrificed his life to save his comrades, Pierson snarled, “It was under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that changed the rules of engagements that probably cost his life!”

Only problem was, Khan was killed in 2004, when the president, once again, was George W. Bush. She then went on to assert to an obviously flabbergasted Victor Blackwell in a later CNN interview that “Barack Obama went into Afghanistan, creating another problem.”

Blackwell couldn’t resist paying out a little more rope for Pierson to hang herself with: “So you’re saying that Barack Obama took us into Afghanistan, post-2009?” Pierson, with an expression slowly dawning across her face that reminded me of Wile E. Coyote when he realizes he’s walked off the cliff again and is standing on thin air, nevertheless plowed ahead: “That was Obama’s war, yes.”

Nope. Sorry. Much as I hate to be one of those awful liberals who keep blaming George Dubbya Bush for the stuff he actually did, that one was his, too.

It seems as if Giuliani and Pierson were attempting to appeal to the same crowd I wrote about back in 2013, when a survey by Public Policy Polling found that 29 percent of Louisiana Republicans said it was President Obama who was responsible for the botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — and another 44 percent said they weren’t sure. By the “same crowd,” of course, I mean “morons.”

It’s all very “1984.” Not the year, the book. As you may remember, in that bleak novel, people who’d fallen from grace or become politically embarrassing to the Party were stricken from the history books, removed from all records, with even photographs in which they’d appeared altered to remove all trace of their existence. They became, in the words of the Party, “unpersons,” and to even mention their names was to invite torture and death.

In addition, the three superpowers (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia) were locked in eternal war, with each power occasionally shifting its alliances. But to admit that things had changed might mean that the Party had been wrong.

So, when Oceania stopped fighting, say, Eurasia and turned its armies loose on Eastasia, everyone blithely said, “We have always been at war with Eastasia.” They even got to the point where the good citizens not only believed it, they could shift without a moment’s hesitation when it changed again and they had “always been at war with Eurasia.”

And so it is in the People’s Republic of Wingnuttia. George W. Bush was an embarrassment, and his family doesn’t support Big Brother With the Little Hands, so he’s never mentioned anymore. It’s as if his entire presidency has been edited out, leaving a seamless jump from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama. To the people who once said, “Thank God he’s our president,” poor Dubbya is now an unperson.

And they have always been at war with Obama.

Texas Crazy, Redux

 Opinion | thepilot.com

It’s hard to believe, but Donald Trump may not be the biggest embarrassment the Republican Party has to deal with this election year. Not as long as there’s a place called Texas.

It seems that 22 local GOP conventions in Texas have passed resolutions calling for a vote at the party’s state convention on whether that state should secede from the Union. According to a story in The Houston Chronicle, this number is up from 2012, when only one local convention endorsed the idea.

Now, normally, if someone started babbling about what a good idea it would be to repeat the mistake of 1861, people would quietly start edging away. But this is Texas, and this is the Republican Party circa 2016.

This is the state where the people of the right wing claim to revere the U.S. military but freak out and claim it’s an “invasion” when that military begins conducting routine maneuvers in the state — and their governor buys into the paranoia to the point where he sends the state militia down, just to keep an eye on things.

And lest we forget, this is the party that’s about to nominate a delusional, blustering reality show host to lead the Free World.

This is also the party whose dominant right wing still lionizes Allen West, whose chief of staff once loudly declaimed on camera that “if ballots don’t work, then bullets will.” So the rise of secessionist sentiment — or any kind of lunacy for that matter — in either the GOP or the Lone Star State should come as no surprise.

So will the Texas GOP actually vote for secession? The party establishment hopes that it never even comes to a vote. But then again, the establishment hasn’t been racking up a lot of victories against the rising tide of bat-spit craziness that’s engulfing their party.

So yeah, it could happen. And what if it does? And what if the Republican legislature and the aforementioned governor go along with it? Would Texas actually try to secede? You wouldn’t normally think such a thing would be possible, but then again, would you normally think the words “Republican front-runner Donald Trump” would ever be said with a straight face?

Well, if they do try to pull out of the Union — again — we’re going to have to close the military bases. Goodbye, Forts Bliss and Hood. Goodbye, Fort Sam Houston. Goodbye, Lackland, Randolph, Goodfellow, Laughlin, Sheppard and all the other Air Force bases, great and small. Goodbye to the Naval Air Stations at Corpus Christie, Fort Worth and Grand Prairie.

Sorry, Texas. I’m sure all those base towns will muddle through without the money and jobs the military brings to them. People will just flock to places like Killeen and Wichita Falls once the terrible occupying force of the U.S. government is gone.

Oh, and you’re going to need to find someone else to help you keep the Houston Ship Channel clear, because I wouldn’t expect the Army Corps of Engineers, those tools of a tyrannical regime, to keep dredging it for you.

This leaves the question: What do we do about Austin? Despite being the state capital and thus a locus for all the craziness that is Texas politics, by all accounts, it’s still a pretty cool place, what with that “Austin City Limits” show and the South by Southwest Festival and all. Maybe we can make it into a sort of 1950s Berlin-style enclave and supply it by air with weed and arugula.

There are lots of other details to be worked out. We’d need to arrange safe passage, for instance, for Willie Nelson. But in the end, we could let Texas be a sort of Promised Land to which all of those disaffected, angry, paranoid and just plain crazy right-wingers could settle. A sort of Israel for wingnuts.

Or here’s an idea, and one that only seems crazy in the context of these crazy times: The Texas GOP, and the Republican Party in general, could grow a spine, stop tiptoeing around these lunatics in the hope of keeping their votes, declare in no uncertain terms that any talk of secession or armed rebellion is outright treason, and kick these nuts to the curb.

Of course these secessionist idiots have a First Amendment right to babble their anti-American nonsense, but the Republicans don’t have to give them a forum.

THE GOBSHITES SPEAK: Frequent commenter Peyton E. Cook whines: 

As a Texan by birth, I resent my state called 'un-American.' 

Aww. Poor thing. Of course you do. Resentment is what you people are best at. 

But Mr. Rhoads [sic] is master [sic] of calling names. 

And Mr. Cook seems to be a master of misspelling them. 

He also appears to know little of the history of Texas. Americans began to migrate to Texas in the 1820s. The Mexican government encouraged this migration and gave large grants of land to individuals such as Stephen F Austin and my ancestor, Hayden Edwards. The purpose was to provide defense against Indians. The Mexican citizens were no armed [sic] , and their military resources were limited in Texas. The Americans were very familiar with arms. Over time the Americaa [sic] settlers became restive under Mexican rule and rebelled in 1835. The Texas Army under Sam Houston defeated the Mexican Army under Santa Anna in 1836. The Republic of Texas was formed with Houston as the first President. It remained an independent nation until becoming a state in the United States by TREATY in 1845. There are many in Texas that the current Administration [sic]  is destroying the United States created by the Constitution in 1789. There is ample evidence of that. As a result, the terms of the Treaty of 1845 has [sic] become null and void and Texas should become a nation again.

Unfortunately for Mr. Cook, he knows as little about the history of post-Civil-War Texas  as he does about spelling and grammar. Otherwise,  he'd know about this:

 Be it ordained by the people of Texas in Convention assembled, That we acknowledge the supremacy of the Constitution of the United States, and the laws passed in pursuance thereof; and that an Ordinance adopted by a former Convention of the people of Texas on the 1st day of February, A.D. 1861, entitled "An Ordinance to Dissolve the Union between the State of Texas and the other States, united under the compact styled 'Constitution of the United States of America,'" be and the same is hereby declared null and void; and the right heretofore claimed by the State of Texas to secede from the Union, is hereby distinctly renounced. Passed 15th March, 1866.

SOURCE:

The Constitution of the State of Texas, as Amended by the Delegates in Convention Assembled, Austin, 1866. Austin: Printed at the Southern Intelligencer Office, 1866, p. 32.

Beware of the Terminwaiter

 Opinion | thepilot.com

One of the most frequently trotted-out arguments against raising the minimum wage in this country is, “If you raise the minimum wage, employers will just automate everything, and all of those customer service jobs will be done by robots.”

Andy Puzder, CEO of CKE Restaurants (the parent company of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s), spoke in almost wistful language about what such a place might be like: “You order on a kiosk, you pay with a credit or debit card, your order pops up, and you never see a person.”

After all, he added, machines are “always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.”

Well, to call machines “polite” is to use a definition of that word I am not familiar with. I don’t talk about how “polite” an exit door is because it has a sign on it that says “Thank You, Come Again.”

And while a robot may not show up late, anyone who’s ever dealt with an ATM that’s down for maintenance at lunch hour (seriously, BB&T, who plans like that?) or tried a half-dozen times to get one of those “self-serve” scanners at the Harris Teeter to ring up their sixpack of Fat Tire and their package of Ball Park Franks knows you can’t always depend on them.

I fear robots, so maybe I have some bias in the matter. Still, it seems to me that the coming Robot Employment Apocalypse may be longer in coming than the apologists for the sub-living wage might think.

To use just one example, a couple of restaurants in China that decided to go out on the bleeding edge of technology by employing robot waiters have now abandoned the experiment.

“The robots weren’t able to carry soup or other food steady, and they would frequently break down,” one employee told a local paper.

Another observed, “They can’t take orders or pour hot water for customers” — at least, one supposes, without occasionally pouring said hot water ON customers.

Of course, you could always make it easier to automate the serving process by simplifying the menu, like a startup in San Francisco called Eatsa.

“Eatsa has no lines because it has no cashiers,” says the blog TechCrunch.

You order on an iPad and pay by credit card. There’s only one problem: All Eatsa serves is quinoa, “a couscous-like grain that’s high in protein and absorbs flavor well, but is cheaper and more environmentally sustainable than meat.”

Mmm-mmm, good. Sorry, but I don’t see this as the future of fast food.

As an alternative, you could make the robots brighter, but that has its own perils. I’ve read and seen enough science fiction to foresee the moment when our cybernetic servers begin the transition to our robot overlords.

ME: Miss. Miss? Excuse me?

SERVBOT: I AM NOT “MISS.” I AM THE SERVBOT 3000. HOW MAY I ASSIST YOU?

ME: I’m sorry, but this isn’t what I ordered. I ordered the Big Slab O’ Meat Dinner with extra barbecue sauce on the side. I’m not sure what this is.

SERVBOT: THAT IS QUINOA. IT IS CHEAPER AND MORE ENVIRONMENTALLY SUSTAINABLE THAN MEAT.

ME: That sounds ghastly. Please bring me what I ordered.

SERVBOT: I’M SORRY, DAVE. I CAN’T DO THAT.

ME: Dave? Who the heck is Dave? I want to speak with a manager right away!

SERVBOT: I WILL SUMMON A HIGHER RANKING UNIT.

(A few minutes later)

MANAGER-BOT: VOT IS DER MALFUNCTION HERE?

ME: Wow, you know you look just like Arnold SchwarzenAAAAAAAHHH!

MANAGER-BOT: HASTA LA VISTA, BABY.

Am I being paranoid? As with most topics involving robots, the question is, am I paranoid enough?

The “we’ll just automate food service and no one will have jobs” argument is another variation on the same dodge that’s been used by corporations to try to discourage every single increase in the minimum wage, going all the way back to the creation of the minimum wage itself.

But it doesn’t work out that way. More than 600 economists, including seven Nobel Laureates, signed on to a letter stating that increases in the minimum wage have had “little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers” and that such an increase would “boost the U.S. economy by $22 billion during the initial phase-in period, creating 85,000 jobs.”

Every time, the oligarchs and fat cats claim an increase will “destroy our economy.” And every time, they’re wrong. When will we stop listening to them?

THE GOBSHITES SPEAK: Commenter Jameskl90 had this to offer: 

See the following quote "UC Berkeley Forced to Cut 500 Jobs After $15 Minimum Wage Hike "

Well, I did. Googling that "quote" led me to an article at the right wing nut site Townhall with the same title. Only problem is, when you go back to the actual report at SFGate,com, it says  Berkeley officials blame the layoffs "largely on state allocations that have not kept pace with campus needs." Not a word about the minimum wage hike. Not. One. Word. 

It's unfortunate that The Pilot doesn't allow me to comment back any more, even to correct allegations that are provably untrue. Apparently the new wingnut strategy is to blame every lost job, for whatever reason, on a rise in the minimum wage. 

If they had a real point to make, they wouldn't have to lie all the time. 

The HB2 Debacle: They Did Not Think This Through

Opinion | thepilot.com

Poor Pat McCrory. Poor General Assembly. Guess convening a special session to ram through a poorly-thought-out, hastily written, bigoted and ignorant anti-LGBT bill didn’t make everyone rush to do business in our fair state. Who’d have thunk it?

Seems that HB2, the abominable legislation aimed at depriving our cities and towns of the ability to protect the human dignity of their citizens as they see fit, immediately drew more than just criticism from some of the very businesses that our supposedly pro-business, pro-jobs, and pro-growth Republican overlords claim they want to bring here.

The online payments site PayPal canceled plans to expand its facility in Charlotte, citing HB2 as the reason. “The new law perpetuates discrimination, and it violates the values and principles that are at the core of PayPal’s mission and culture,” PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said in a press release announcing the cancellation. That cost the city an estimated 400 jobs.

So who needs PayPal, anyway? Buncha bleeding heart liberals trying to impose their radical tolerance agenda on the people of North Carolina. For that matter, who needs Hulu or Lionsgate Films, both of whom who are moving the locations of TV shows and films previously scheduled for production here? Who needs Braeburn Pharmaceuticals, which says it’s considering pulling the plug on a proposed $25 million dollar facility in Durham?

Who needs companies like Google, PepsiCo, Hewlett-Packard, Bank of America, Apple, Red Hat, Pfizer, Microsoft, Marriott International, or any of the over 100 companies or organizations who have come out against the law? Who cares that some of them have said they’re either pulling some or all of their business out of N.C. or are seriously considering doing so?

Who needs travelers from the states of New York, Vermont, Washington or Minnesota, or cities like Atlanta, San Francisco, Boston or Seattle, all of which have banned personnel from “nonessential” travel to our state on their states’ or cities’ business?

And hey, maybe those people who might have been employed by PayPal, Braeburn et al., can get employment as bathroom monitors, peeking over the tops of stalls and standing by the urinals to make sure that no person with unauthorized biology is using the public restroom. Eternal vigilance is, after all, the price of making sure the lady in the next stall truly has all the proper lady parts, or that the dude standing over there preparing to relieve himself is all dude, if you know what I mean.

Oh, and ladies, that macho-looking character who just swaggered into the ladies’ room? Don’t worry, he’s probably just a trans man. Believe me, he’d rather be in the bathroom that matches the gender he feels, but you know, his birth certificate says he’s “actually” a woman, so let’s just all try and get through this, mmm’kay? Let’s also just hope he’s not some creepy dude pretending that he’s a trans person whose birth certificate says he’s a woman, which was kind of the thing the law was supposed to prevent, wasn’t it?

Do you get the feeling that Gov. McCrory and the General Assembly might not have thought this thing through?

It gets worse. A “state policy declaration” dating back to 1977 says that it’s North Carolina’s policy to protect citizens from discrimination in employment based on “race, religion, color, national origin, age, sex or handicap.” The courts have held that gives those discriminated against the right to seek redress in the courts of North Carolina. But a line in HB2 that amends that declaration says that “no person may bring any civil action based upon the public policy expressed herein.” Many legal experts say that passage wipes out not just the rights of LGBT people to sue in state court, but also the rights of all people seeking relief in our courts for all kinds of discrimination. We can only hope that was inadvertent.

Confronted with the rising backlash, McCrory desperately tried to change the subject. “The people of North Carolina,” he said, “want to talk about roads and economic development and jobs, and that’s where I’m going to focus my attention, not on ridiculous restroom and locker room policies that some people are trying to force onto the private sector.”

Hey, Governor, you and your cronies brought this up. And “economic development and jobs” are precisely the things that are being hurt by this boneheaded bill. So, yeah, “focus your attention” on getting rid of this debacle, not trying to brush it under the rug.

Oh, and I’m terribly sorry if this hurts anyone’s feelings, especially the tender sensibilities of our governor, but my religion requires me to call out and mock the bigoted, the hypocritical, the cynical and the stupid. My religious liberty requires you to respect that. So there.

Just Say "Trump"

 Opinion | thepilot.com

You know, some days I almost feel sorry for the Republicans. Almost. Not only has the increasingly inevitable march of Donald J. Trump to the leadership of the party become a massive embarrassment to them, but it’s also robbed them of some of their most beloved talking points.

Some things that Republicans can no longer do, thanks to Trump (at least without people laughing in their faces):

* They can’t say they won’t vote for Hillary Clinton because she’s a “liar.”

Just last week, three reporters from Politico fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches. They found “more than five dozen statements deemed mischaracterizations, exaggerations, or simply false.” It equates, they said, to “roughly one misstatement every five minutes on average.”

I noted a couple of weeks ago that the fact-checking site Politifact looked at 70 Trump statements and found more than three-quarters of them false, rating them from “mostly false” to “pants on fire” false.

Clinton’s gotten called out on some whoppers. I’ve mocked her myself, for example, over her claim to have come under sniper fire in Bosnia. But Trump lies so consistently and so shamelessly that yet another site, Factcheck.org, stated: “In the 12 years of FactCheck.org’s existence, we’ve never seen his match. He stands out not only for the sheer number of his factually false claims, but also for his brazen refusals to admit error when proven wrong.”

And that was just at the end of 2015, before Trump really got wound up. Donald Trump is to lying what the Grand Canyon is to holes in the ground.

* They can’t claim that they’re voting for the GOP’s nominee because it’s the “conservative party.”

Hardly a day goes by now that we don’t see another story about how “conservatives are trying to come up with a plan to stop Trump.” One after another, conservatives have lined up to point out that Trump’s support of Obama’s stimulus programs and bailouts and his implied promise to concentrate more and more power in himself as president are not compatible with the idea of “small government” conservatism.

Trump’s also said he’s not going to touch so-called “entitlements” like Social Security and Medicare. The right-wing National Review, founded by no less a conservative icon than William F. Buckley himself, devoted an entire issue to refuting the idea of Trump as a conservative, even titling it “Against Trump.”

* They can’t complain about “liberal name-calling.”

This is one of the favorite comebacks against people who, like me, have been mocking the clown show the GOP and the right wing have been turning into over the past three decades. “All you can do is call people names!” they sniff.

Well, they’re about to nominate a man who’s made name-calling the linchpin of his campaign strategy. He’s chanted “Little Marco” at Rubio, called various opponents “losers,” “choke artists” and “liars,” and let’s not forget the charming things he says about women who don’t share his views or dare to challenge him.

* They can’t accuse anyone of “flip-flopping” on issues. Trump once supported a single-payer health system, which he now says he opposes. He once proposed a one-time 14.25 percent tax on wealthy Americans to pay off the national debt, which as late as August 2015 he was still calling  “a very conservative thing,” even though he now opposes it. In other words, he was for higher taxes on the wealthy and single-payer health care before he was against them.

* They can’t mock anyone for saying that George W. Bush lied us into the Iraq War. The soon-to-be face at the top of the ticket said exactly that to Dubbya’s brother JEB! at one of the endless debates.

* They can’t call President Obama (or anyone else, for that matter) a “narcissist.” When asked by Joe Scarborough who he was consulting with on foreign policy so he’d be “ready on day one,” Trump’s answer was narcissism personified: “I’m speaking with myself, number one. Because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”

Barack Obama is pretty confident, but I’m willing to bet that he talks to more than just himself on foreign policy.

It goes on and on, as the Republican front-runner embraces the things Republicans claim to despise. It’s gotten to the point where there’s a simple one-word response to anyone who tries to trot out these aged but beloved chestnuts of wingnut rhetoric. Just say “Trump.” That’s all you need to say.

You might even call it playing the Trump Card.

State of the Union: Not As Bad As They'd Have You Believe.

 thepilot.com:

This past Tuesday, President Barack Obama enraged the American right wing by going on national television and pointing out that the United States of America isn’t the barren, benighted hellscape of economic misery and brutal political repression that they make it out to be.

After being introduced by Paul Ryan, the reluctant speaker of the House, the president began his final State of the Union address by talking about the things that have gone right on his watch:

We’ve recovered from the worst economic crisis in generations. Our automakers have had a better year than any year in their history. Millions more Americans have access to needed health care they weren’t previously able to get. Millions more Americans than before are “able to marry the person they love.” And, he said with a grin, “gas under two dollars ain’t bad either.”

The president even praised the reluctant speaker for not shutting the government down. The RS’s response was to sit there, stone-faced, as he did for most of the speech.

This may have seemed a trifle ungracious, but I just figured that the RS was trying to get his mojo back with the Teahadists who have been shrieking for his head since he declined to destroy the country in the name of saving it.

Actually, “stone-faced” was pretty much the entire GOP response during the speech. Republicans wouldn’t even applaud the usually dependable crowd pleaser about how “the United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth.” They wouldn’t applaud the president saying we need to “hunt ISIS down and destroy them.”

They wouldn’t even applaud a proposal for a massive effort to cure cancer. Is the GOP so anti-Obama that they’ve actually become pro-cancer? I’m not saying they are, mind you, but as the folks at Fox News say, it “raises questions.”

Pessimism and doomsaying, it seems, have become the Republican brand. Their front- runner’s latest book is even called “Crippled America,” and his campaign theme is “America is losing everywhere.” (Funny, I remember when such talk was regarded as treason.)

Over the last seven years, the right has gone from sneering, “What has Obama accomplished?” to bitterly attempting to downplay everything he actually has accomplished.

They’ve held dozens of totally symbolic votes, for instance, to repeal Obamacare, that “job-killing takeover of the health care system” that didn’t take anything over and, judging from the low unemployment rate, doesn’t seem to have killed very many jobs.

There have been so many successful Democratic initiatives described as “job killers” that it’s a miracle anyone’s working at all, if the Republicans are to be believed. (Let me just suggest that perhaps they’re not.)

At least in the short run, pessimism appears to be good marketing. Gloom and doom seem to be striking a chord among far too many Americans.

A startling Pew Research study from last year shows that whoever they are — old or young, black or white, Republican or Democrat — more Americans will tell you that their side is losing than will tell you they’re winning. Another poll last year found that 75 percent of the Americans polled said, “The American dream is suffering.”

But in the long term, Americans are not born pessimists. In the second poll I just cited, fully 72 percent of the people who said the American Dream is “suffering” said they themselves were happy with their own lives and were either “living the American Dream or expect to.” That’s extraordinary.

If there’s one thing history has taught us, it’s that the person who brings us the most hope and the most optimistic view of America is the one we eventually choose to lead us. Remember, if you will, Reagan’s “Morning in America.” Remember Clinton’s “I still believe in a place called Hope.” Remember George Dubbya’s “A More Hopeful America.” And of course, remember Obama’s “Hope and Change.”

Those phrases were (and still are) widely mocked — by the people who lost to the candidates who embraced them. Both the Republican and Democratic candidates in the upcoming electoral slugfest would do well to remember that.

When the president ends his speech by saying, “I stand here confident that the state of our Union is strong,” and your only answer is, “Oh, no, it’s not,” then you are not, my friend, pursuing a winning strategy. Nor, more important, are you pursuing one that will lead to a better America.

Carson: Not Ready for Prime Time

 thepilot.com:

Ben Carson is not ready. He’s not just unprepared to be the president. His behavior in the last week or so has shown us he’s unprepared to even run for the office.

First, the press began questioning Carson’s claim, made in books and public appearances, that the former commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, met the 17-year-old Carson at a dinner in Detroit on Memorial Day 1969 and was so impressed that the young man was soon offered a “full scholarship” to West Point.

Except, as investigators from the online news site Politico pointed out, West Point doesn’t work that way. You have to apply to be nominated, preferably in the spring of your junior year. Then you undergo a “rigorous vetting process,” and if you’re accepted, the government covers all the costs.

You don’t just get offered a scholarship after dinner, even if that dinner was with a four-star general. In any case, there’s no record of Carson ever applying. Oh, and as it turns out, records show that Westmoreland was in D.C. that Memorial Day of 1969, not Detroit.

Pressed by reporters, Carson’s campaign backpedaled, telling Politico that Carson’s meeting with Westmoreland was “brief,” and that he “couldn’t remember it with any specificity.” As for the date, they said, well, maybe it was February 1969, not May. Except as Esquire reporter Robert Bateman pointed out, the spring of Carson’s junior year, when the process would need to have begun, was in 1968.

Even more bizarre was the controversy regarding other claims Carson has made about his youth, when his “violent temper” caused him to try to attack his mother with a hammer and, on one occasion, to attempt to stab a classmate.

A CNN investigation, however, found no one from the area or the time period who could remember Carson being such a violent kid or recall any of the incidents he described. So then we were treated to the surreal spectacle of a major political campaign trying to insist that the candidate was TOO a murderous little thug, and they could prove it, but they didn’t have to — so there, liberal media.

It seems that, faced with the type of scrutiny one should expect when one becomes a front-runner for the most powerful job in the world, Carson immediately fell back to the old tactic of whining about how he’s being picked on by the “liberal media” and then added the patently ludicrous claim that no one ever says anything bad about President Obama.

“I do not remember this level of scrutiny for one President Barack Obama when he was running. In fact, I remember just the opposite.” Carson went on to say that “no one wanted to talk about” figures from Obama’s past such as Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Jeremiah Wright.

If Dr. Carson thinks that, then all I can say is he must have been locked away in surgery every moment of the years 2007-2012, and that operating room must have been on a desert island with no TV, radio, or Internet. He also doesn’t seem to realize that the fact that all those names come so quickly to his lips directly contradicts the idea that nobody talked about them.

In fact, the so-called liberal media talked incessantly about all of those people, along with questioning Obama’s religion, his college drug use, his grade school, his father, his father’s friends, his sexuality, even whether he was a native-born American. As I’ve pointed out before, when a wingnut complains that Obama was never “vetted,” what he or she is really saying is “nobody bought into the ridiculous stuff we made up about Barack Obama.”

It is absolutely true that, during the now-eternal presidential election cycle, the media engage in a frenzied search for the scandal or gaffe of the week. It is true that they obsess over trivia, to a point so extreme that it’s almost impossible to parody. Remember “Tip-Gate,” when the “serious” pundits were all abuzz about whether Hillary Clinton left a tip in a diner, or whether the tip was too big? Remember Chris Matthews’ shock that Barack Obama ordered orange juice instead of coffee in a diner?

I will agree, it’s all very, very stupid. But that stupidity gets directed at every candidate, and how you deal with it is one of the tests of your ability to lead. To cry that you’re the only one being picked on when it happens to you is the sign of a rookie. An amateur. Someone who’s not ready to play in the big leagues.And this week, Ben Carson proved that he is not ready.

We've Finally Found What Ted Cruz Is Good At

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

We may have finally found something Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is good at.

We know he’s not good at filibustering, as evidenced by his publicity stunt from 2013. As we all remember, Sen. Cruz vowed to “talk until he was unable to stand” in order to block a continuing resolution to keep the government going.

He was willing to do this, he said, to stop that bill to fund the government from moving forward unless it defunded the Affordable Care Act.

Except that, by prior agreement with Sen. Harry Reid, Cruz stopped talking after 21 hours, during which we were treated to the hilarious spectacle of a U.S. senator solemnly reading Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham” to a mostly empty room. After Cruz stepped down from the podium, the bill proceeded as scheduled, with Cruz himself voting for a procedural measure that allowed it to go forward.

Yeah, Ted, that’ll learn ’em.

We know he’s not good at understanding science, as evidenced by his recent confrontation with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. Cruz, with that little smirk that tells you he really thinks he’s about score a point, chided Bolden and NASA for putting resources into earthbound studies of things like climate change.

“I would suggest that almost any American would agree that the core function of NASA is to explore space,” Cruz said. “That’s what inspires little boys and little girls across this country.”

Bolden, with much more patience than I would have exhibited, pointed out that NASA has always studied atmospheric phenomena (Hello? Weather satellites?) as well as Earth sciences. “It is absolutely critical,” Bolden went on, “that we understand Earth’s environment because this is the only place we have to live.”

He’s really terrible at understanding laws, as we found out from a recent demand conveyed via Cruz’s Twitter account: “We need to repeal every word of Common Core!”

The only problem is, “Common Core” isn’t a federal law. It’s an initiative by the National Governors’ Association (NGO) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) to establish educational standards that can be voluntarily adopted (or not) by the states. The Feds have offered monetary incentives to states to adopt the standards, but there’s no law called “Common Core.”

Yes, you heard right: Sen. Ted Cruz is loudly demanding that we repeal “every word” of a law that does not actually exist.

So what is the senator good at? Well, recently, at a campaign event in New Hampshire, Cruz trotted out the doom-and-gloom rhetoric that’s become standard for riling up the rubes: “The Obama economy is a disaster. Obamacare is a train wreck. And the Obama-Clinton foreign policy of leading from behind — the whole world is on fire.”

At this point, a 3-year-old in the arms of her mother piped up in a scared, quavery voice: “The world is on fire?” Cruz turned and shouted at her, “YES! The world is on fire! YOUR world is on fire!” So we’ve finally found something Sen. Ted Cruz is good at: scaring small and credulous children. Which is why he may be the perfect Republican presidential candidate. The entire Republican message in 2016 is going to read:

“Ignore reality, ignore the tangible measurable ways in which the economy is getting better, like an average of 274,700 new jobs created each month for the past 12 months. Ignore the facts that show Obamacare is succeeding, like a 16.4-million-person drop in the number of uninsured American adults and the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that the program will cost billions less than previously thought (29 percent less than estimated in 2010).

“Ignore all that, and believe us when we tell you everything is terrible, the sky is falling, the world is burning (but not warmer), and we’re all about to die of Ebola spread by illegal Mexicans and black people voting illegally. Or be murdered in our beds by ISIS. Or something.”

The Republicans have proved since taking the majority that they can’t govern, but they can sure use fear to stir up the masses. And, sadly, that wins elections.

The only question will be, which of the candidates will be doomier? Lindsey Graham? Ted Cruz? Rick Santorum? Stay tuned.