What They Need in Louisiana

Opinion | thepilot.com
Certainly everyone’s heart has to go out to the people suffering from last week’s floods in Louisiana.

The devastation is truly stunning, and I hope you’ll join my family and other people of good will in sending donations to any one of the many worthy charities providing relief to the unfortunate folks in the area. After all, this is the sort of occasion which should bring all Americans together, right?

Well, as the eminent Professor Byrd used to solemnly intone to us at UNC Law School: “One might think that. But one would be wrong.”

As usual, there’s a noisy cadre of right-wingers who see a terrible tragedy and think, not “How can we help?” but “How can we blame this on President Obama?”

We saw it in the wake of the Benghazi murders, where Mitt Romney literally did not wait till the bodies were cold before he took to Twitter to politicize their deaths, and the right-wingers haven’t let up since.

And so it begins again, with the inevitable kvetching about, “Why did Obummer wait so long to go down there for his photo op? He was playing golf! … It’s Obama’s Katrina!”

Well, as for why the president waited till this past Tuesday to visit, it is very likely because the governor of the state, John Bel Edwards, asked him to.

“It is a major ordeal,” Edwards said. “They free up the Interstate for him. We have to take hundreds of local first responders, police officers, sheriffs, deputies and state troopers to provide security for that type of visit. I would just as soon have those people engaged in the response rather than trying to secure the president. So I’d ask him to wait, if he would, another couple weeks.”

Donald Trump, of course, ignored this simple logic  and made his visit last week, where he passed out a few packs of Play-Doh and vamoosed as soon as the cameras were off.

Because if there’s one thing wet, thirsty, homeless people need, it’s some Play-Doh. You can squeeze it to take your mind off your troubles. You can use it to plug leaks. In a pinch, you can even eat it. Ask any kindergartner.

So what was the president doing? Merely signing the orders and making the declarations needed to mobilize the people who can actually do something besides look concerned for the cameras and pass out toys — which those people proceeded to do.

Let’s get one thing straight. The criticism of President Bush over the botched response to Hurricane Katrina had very little if anything to do with how long it took Dubbya to get to New Orleans. The criticism was due to failures that caused hundreds of needless deaths due to cronyism and incompetence.

The response to the Baton Rouge tragedy appears to be at least competent. Resources are getting where they need to go. We don’t have, for instance, a Navy hospital ship complete with rescue helicopters wandering around the Gulf, futilely waiting for orders, which happened after Katrina.

We don’t have FEMA turning back donated supplies of water, preventing the Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel, and telling doctors and nurses who volunteered to help the sick and injured at the New Orleans Airport to mop floors instead “while people died around them” (as later revealed by a CNN investigation).

Instead, as Layton Ricks, the president of Livingston Parish, told the “PBS Newshour,” “What I needed (the president) to do was declare the state of emergency. He did that. FEMA ramped up really fast. Under Gov. Edwards, along with (FEMA Administrator) Craig Fugate, they were helping us get the assets that we needed at that time.”

That’s what happens when a president appoints someone with nearly 30 years of emergency management experience to head FEMA, rather than a guy who’d previously ran a horse breeder’s club but who was a big fundraiser for Bush. Results are what the Baton Rouge area needed from this administration, and that’s what they’re getting.

Some people are so dedicated to the idea of excusing the failures of the President Who Must Not Be Named that every crisis has to become “Obama’s Katrina,” and the response to every terrible thing that happens anywhere in the world is not to sympathize with or to try to send aid to the victims, but to immediately go online to complain that the president played golf somewhere in the general time frame.

Don’t be like those people. If you’re able, grab your credit card or your checkbook.

Donate food or clothing. Volunteer, if you can. Check out the opportunities for all of that at http://volunteerlouisiana.gov. Do something to build up, not tear down, your fellow Americans.

THE GOBSHITES SPEAK: Inveterate liar Frank Staples (aka "skylinefirepest") , who posts every week to tell everyone how much he hates the column he reads every week, is particularly incoherent this week:

Dusty road...is there any Republican that you could like? It's attitudes like yours that keep us from compromising on anything. It's carp [sic] like the liar in chief putting forth a man for the Supreme Court that is an avowed 2nd Amendment hater and should therefore have never been submitted as a Supreme!! It's stuff like this, where trump went and the liar in chief went golfing, that keeps the liberals in something to write about...you know, on those days when hillary is still not being charged and there's only the hatred of trump that excites you. You're a pitiful man, dustie road, [sic] even for a rabid liberal.

Poor old Frank's never gotten over the day several years ago when he showed up at my office, introduced himself as "skylinefirepest" and asked to see me, but my wife thought he was a nutcase (which he clearly is) and sent him on his way. He's been foaming at the mouth over every column since, and he's not above simply making shit up to fuel his screeching diatribes. 

In Which I Toss Aside Political Correctness In My Quest For Universal Love

 Opinion | thepilot.com

Here are a few random observations on the bizarre happenings of the last couple of weeks:

— On March 11, Sen. Orrin Hatch told a reporter from the right-wing “news” site Newsmax that he doubted that President Obama would nominate a nice moderate judge to fill the seat of the late Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.

For example, Hatch noted, “he could easily name Merrick Garland (Chief Judge of the D.C. Court of Appeals), who is a fine man.”

Hatch quickly went on to say, “But he probably won’t do that, because this appointment is about the election. So I’m pretty sure he’ll name someone the (liberal Democratic base) wants.”

So whom did the president nominate on March 16? None other than that “fine man” himself, Judge Merrick Garland. It’ll be fun to watch all of the people like Hatch who have praised Garland and voted for him to be chief suddenly acting like the guy’s some raging liberal who’s unfit to wear a judge’s robe.

Let’s face it, Republicans: The president of the United States is messing with you. And he’s doing it brilliantly.

— Meanwhile, Sen. Pat Toomey revealed more than he probably thought he had when he took to Twitter to say, “Should Merrick Garland be nominated again by the next president, I would be happy to carefully consider his nomination.”

Another senator, the aptly named Jeff Flake of Arizona, said he’d vote for Garland in the lame duck session after the election if Hillary Clinton won to keep her from nominating someone farther left. So much for the principle that they’re just “waiting for the people to speak.”

News flash, ladies and gentlemen: They did speak. Twice, when they elected Obama by large margins, knowing that part of his job for the entirety of both four-year terms would be to appoint Supreme Court Justices whenever vacancies come due.

He’s done his job, senators. Now do yours.

— On this past week’s sort-of-Super Tuesday, Donald Trump gathered a large number of the delegates he’ll need to win the Republican nomination outright.

His rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich, however, also won enough delegates to get closer to their dream of denying Trump that knockout victory and possibly throwing the nomination wide-open at a so-called “open” or “brokered” convention in Cleveland.

I wouldn’t do that if I were you, warned Trump. If he doesn’t get the nomination “automatically,” he told CNN, “I think you’d have riots. I think you’d have riots. I’m representing a tremendous, many, many millions of people. … I wouldn’t lead it, but I think bad things would happen.”

Got that? The man who aspires to be the leader of the Free World is threatening his own party like a bit player on “The Sopranos.” It’s a heck of a thing when the ‎GOP’s best hope is a brokered convention that’s only a figurative bloodbath and not a literal one. I don't envy them.‬‬‬‬

— Speaking of Trump and violent thuggery, it seems that he’s backpedaling on his statement that he’d “pay the legal fees” of people who beat up protesters at his rallies, such as the old geezer who walked up and cold-cocked a black protester being led out of the arena in Fayetteville.

By “backpedaling,” I mean “lying and claiming that he ever said it, even though he’s on video as saying exactly that.”

There have been some classic liars in the American political scene, but the Republican frontrunner is in a class by himself. This is a man who can deny something happened, even as he’s looking at a video of it happening.

That’s either a rare gift of sheer nerve or a complete disconnection from reality. But somehow, his supporters say they love Donald for “telling it like it is.”

— Trump’s supporters also say they love him for the fact that “he doesn’t care about political correctness.”

When you actually look at what they call “political correctness,” however, it becomes clear that all “PC” really means is having some degree of sensitivity about how your words might affect, offend, even wound people.

Well, if that kind of sensitivity is what you despise and resent, then allow me to be politically incorrect: If you’re voting for this con artist, you’re a bloody moron. A rube. A sucker for this cheap carnival barker who preys on your anger, fear and ignorance to make you feel like you’re an oppressed minority when you’re anything but that. Grow the heck up.

There. I told it like it is with no concern for political correctness. Love me now?

Just Not That Smart

Opinion | thepilot.com

We’re going to have to face a painful fact: Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans are just not that bright.

The body of the late Justice Antonin Scalia was barely cold before McConnell and his lackeys rushed to warn everybody not to politicize this solemn moment, about three seconds before they began politicizing it for all they were worth.

McConnell, Toddler-Terrifying Ted Cruz and Young Marco Robotto — sorry, I mean Rubio — declared that there’s an 80-year-old “rule” against a president nominating a Supreme Court Justice in the last year of his term.

They had discovered this rule by the research method known as “making stuff up.”

Turns out, this situation where one of the Supremes shuffles off this mortal coil in the last year of a presidency just doesn’t happen all that often, certainly not often enough that one could glean so much as a guideline, let alone a rule, from history.

The Constitution — which the wingnuts claim to revere but apparently know jack-squat about — is very clear that the president “shall” nominate, among various other officers, “Justices of the Supreme Court” and appoint them “with the advice and consent of the Senate.”

So we have the spectacle of the president doing his constitutional duty, and the Senate saying, “We won’t advise, we won’t consent. Heck, we won’t even meet the nominee.” Having demonstrated their own uselessness as a Senate, they now appear to be dead-set on rendering another of the three branches of government as paralyzed as they are.

Where the “three no’s” (no meetings, no hearings, no vote) that McConnell et al. have promised to stick to are found in the Constitution has never been explained. Like the supposed “80-year rule” against nominating in an election year, this appears to be pure applesauce, as the late Justice Scalia was fond of saying.

Not only is this behavior by the Republicans against both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution, but it’s also foolish. If the Republicans hold the line on their promise to delay even a hearing till after the election, they’ll keep this issue open until Election Day.

They’ll give whoever the Democratic nominee is a perfect example of the kind of mulish obstructionism that people are so heartily and vocally sick of.

They are handing even a half-smart candidate a club the size of a California Redwood to thrash them with on a daily basis, and both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are not half-smart — they are both very, very smart.

The current course of action by the Senate Republicans seems perfectly calculated to lose not only the presidency but the Senate. When that happens, folks, stuff’s gonna get real, as the kids say.

Or consider this alternative scenario: A few Senate Republicans actually do their jobs, defy the leadership, and give the candidate nominated by the president a hearing.

Centrists and independents say, “Hey, maybe these guys are reasonable after all,” but the wingnuts scream, “OMG! We are betrayed again by the evil party establishment!” and tear the party to shreds before handing the raggedy, bloodstained banner of the presidential nomination to “outsider” Donald Trump.

Democrats win the presidency and the Senate, and get to replace not only Scalia, but Ginsburg, Kennedy and probably Breyer as well.

Majority Leader McConnell is leading his party into the political equivalent of the Valley of the Little Big Horn. He and his supporters in the Senate should turn their horses around and get the heck back to the high ground.

They should face the reality that President Barack Obama was indeed elected to that job, by large margins, and he’s going to do the job till the last day in office.

But they should also demand the sort of bland centrist that Obama will almost certainly give them to avoid a fight, then run for the rest of the year on who gets the next three appointments.

They've really not thought this through, which I suppose is no surprise to anyone. I hate to say it, but they’re just not that smart.

OK, that’s a lie. I love to say it.

Ready To Do What It Takes? Not Hardly

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Folks, I am going to tell y’all a secret, something that will shock and amaze you. It’ll rock your world and possibly cause you to question everything you thought you knew. In fact, if you’re not sitting down while reading this, maybe you should.

Sometimes I actually agree with Robert M. Levy.

I know, I know, it surprises me too when I look across the page at my staunchly Republican fellow Pilot columnist, read the piece next to mine, and go, “Hmmm, he may have something there.”

Oh, it doesn’t happen all the time — in fact, probably not most of the time. But I agree, for example, that we shouldn’t be undercutting the president’s nuclear deal with Iran, even as we disagree on how bad it is. Bob seems to think it’s terrible; I find it merely mediocre. But we both agree that the alternative of no deal at all is worse.

I also agree, to a point, with his assertion in last week’s column that there’s a power vacuum in the Middle East that’s making it easier for ISIS to commit atrocity after atrocity, and creating a refugee crisis of a size and urgency not seen since World War II.

The question I’d like to address in response however, is why. Bob seems to blame President Obama. I don’t think that tells the whole story. And no, I’m not blaming George Dubbya Bush, either — at least not entirely. I think the problem is bigger and wider than any one president or party.

Bob’s column recalls the spectacle of “American and Allied forces liberating Paris” and of the days when “America became the liberator of the free world as kisses were exchanged in Times Square.”

So far, so good. But remember what it took for us to do all that. The attack on Pearl Harbor shocked America almost overnight onto a war footing. As civilians lined up to sign up, our homeland standard of living changed drastically. Auto plants switched from making cars to making tanks and other war machines. New tires became nearly impossible to get. Kids collected scrap metal. Gas and foodstuffs were rationed. Buying war bonds became a patriotic duty.

And then, when the last German and Japanese soldiers had laid down their arms, we poured hundreds of billions of dollars into rebuilding their countries, because we knew that impoverished and broken countries were ripe pickings for the Soviets.

Can you imagine something like that happening now, in response to ISIS? Dear Lord, when the president endorsed a voluntary national public service program, he was accused of trying to create a new SS. His wife endorsed healthy eating and exercise, and suddenly right-wing pundits were screaming about “tyranny” and declaring it a sacred American right to raise a generation of roly-poly little couch potatoes.

We can’t even conduct a military training exercise in the Southwest without a pack of loonies — some of them in the U.S. Congress — taking to the airwaves and Internet to declare that it’s an invasion of the U.S. by its own Army. Oh, and support for “foreign aid”? Fuhgeddaboutit.

You want a World War II level response to ISIS butchery? You’re going to need a World War II level of citizen participation, sacrifice, and yes, money. And We the People haven’t been ready to do that for a long, long time.

It didn’t begin with the Obama administration. It didn’t even really begin with the George Dubbya Bush reign of error, although we did see quite a bit of the same unwillingness to even ask the people for sacrifice. Even after 9/11, Dubbya suggested we should just go about our lives, go shopping even. In the run-up to Dubbya’s Wacky Iraqi Adventure, we were assured, falsely, that “Iraq will pay for its own reconstruction” (Paul Wolfowitz), and that it was doubtful that the war would last six months (Donald Rumsfeld).

But, no, it didn’t start with them. It took years of short, easy-to-win conflicts against laughably weak opponents like Panama and Grenada to lull us into the feeling that the projection of American power and leadership is something that can be done on the cheap, something we could watch from our La-Z-Boy recliners before flipping over to watch “Jeopardy.”So the next time someone compares ISIS to the Nazis and demands that “American leadership” be used to defeat it, take a moment to think about what it took last time and ask them: Will you, personally, make the kind of sacrifices Americans had to make to defeat that enemy? Are you willing to pull together, even under a president you didn’t vote for, to make that happen? If not, then maybe in the words of the old saying, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

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.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Health Itself

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

This past week, in addition to once again trying to repeal health care reform, the Republicans who have recently come to power took aim against a new, even more pervasive foe: health itself.

It started when President Obama, speaking to Savannah Guthrie on “The Today Show,” threw down the gauntlet when asked about vaccination in light of the recent measles outbreak in the U.S.

“The science is pretty indisputable,” the president said. “We’ve looked at this again and again. There is every reason to get vaccinated, but there aren’t reasons to not. …You should get your kids vaccinated.”

Well, the right wing wasn’t going to take that lying down, you betcha. Following the one ironclad principle of the right (“If’n one o’ them Obammy’s is fer it, we’s agin it”), Republican presidential hopefuls took to the airwaves to let us know that liberty includes the freedom to let your kids become tiny little germ weapons.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who, as you remember, tried to lock up a nurse for being in the same country as ebola, suddenly decided that inoculation against measles, a far more contagious disease, should be “optional.”

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul made his bid for the coveted Michele Bachmann Professorship of Unsourced Pseudoscientific Claptrap by telling talk show host Laura Ingraham, “I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.”

Heard from who? Jenny McCarthy? Well, hey, who are a bunch of dumb old scientists to argue with a Playboy Playmate and the former host of MTV’s “Singled Out”?

Not to be outdone, our own Junior Sen. Tom Tillis decried the undue regulatory burden of requiring restaurant employees to wash their hands after using the toilet.

“I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy,” Tillis said, “ as long as they post a sign that says, ‘We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restrooms.’ The market will take care of that.”

Of course, in the unregulated dream world where Sen. Tillis would have us all live, there’d be no one to ensure that the sign is visible, legible, or even in English. But, as the song goes, “Freedom’s just another word for wondering why the waiter’s hands smell funny.”

Later, as usual, both Christie and Paul had to, as they say, “walk back” their statements. The “walkback” is what wingnuts and the people who try to pander to them often find themselves doing when they realize that the codswallop they’ve been spoon-feeding to the rubes, goobers and haters on right-wing talk radio, and Faux News has actually been overheard by the non-insane, and they have to do some damage control before the editorial cartoonists start drawing them with tinfoil hats.

Christie’s office released a statement: “The governor believes vaccines are an important public health protection, and with a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated.” Rand Paul went even further and had himself photographed getting a booster vaccine for hepatitis A. Guess he figured that for him, the “profound mental disorders” train had already left the station, with him on it.

As for Senator Tillis, as of this writing, he’s still holding the line against the tyranny of mandatory hand-washing. This caused a Republican friend of mine to comment, “I would not shake hands with that man.”

Here’s the thing: Vaccines don’t cause “profound mental disorders.” The one study that showed a link between measles vaccine and autism was conclusively debunked a few years ago when it was revealed that not only did Andrew Wakefield, the British doctor conducting it, misrepresent and change the results of his research, he did so after taking thousands of pounds from lawyers hoping to capitalize on his dodgy “research” in lawsuits.

Wakefield was later stripped of his medical license, and the journal in which the study was published retracted the article.

Yet to this day, you will find people telling you with complete and misplaced confidence that children suffering from autism are “vaccine-injured.” To keep spreading this lie when measles is trying make a comeback is dangerous. For politicians to spread it for political gain is inexcusable.

As for the value of washing your hands after using the restroom: Ask your mom. If you’d rather believe Thom Tillis than your own mama, I don’t know what to tell you.

'Net Neutrality' is The Right Thing, Even if Obama's For It

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

There’s been a lot of talk since the election on where the first big showdown is going to occur between President Obama and Congress over the use of “executive actions.” Surprisingly, it may turn out that the first battleground won’t be immigration or the environment, but the issue of net neutrality.

So, what is net neutrality? Put simply, it’s the principle that all data going across the Internet should be treated equally. Imagine the Internet in the term once commonly used to describe it: as an “information superhighway.”

You’d want everyone on a highway to have equal access to it, right? But imagine if some people got special access to higher speed lanes and on ramps if they paid more. Imagine if, say, J.B. Hunt Transportation could pay to use faster lanes and quicker access ramps than Bob’s Friendly Trucking.

Pretty soon, poor Bob’s going to be out of business, and J.B. Hunt has one less competitor. That’s not good for capitalism. Further, J.B. Hunt’s going to pass that premium down to its users, who’ll have fewer and fewer options to go elsewhere. That’s not good for consumers.

To apply this to the Internet, say you and a few of your entrepreneurial friends have an idea for a new search engine, one that runs faster and provides better sorting of search results than Google or Yahoo. But when you try to get it up and running, you find out that you can’t complete because Google has flexed its financial muscle and paid Comcast and Time Warner off so that they’ll always have better access and run faster than you.

After the customary months of internal debate and re-debate on the subject, President Obama stepped forth and stated: “I believe the FCC should reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act — while at the same time forbearing from rate regulation and other provisions less relevant to broadband services.”

What that means in plain English is that he wants the FCC to treat Internet service providers (ISPs) as utilities or “common carriers,” meaning that they’d have more power to make them treat all their customers equally.

Some right-wing Washington types immediately leaped forward to defend the only real principle the wingnuts have left, to wit: “If’n Obama’s fer it, we’s agin it.” Orange John Boehner, alleged speaker of the House, claimed the president’s proposal would “destroy innovation and entrepreneurship” (as we’ve seen, precisely the opposite is true).

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz put down his copy of “Green Eggs and Ham” long enough to take to Twitter and Facebook to call the proposed rule change “Obamacare for the Internet.”

Cruz indicated his utter failure to understand the Affordable Care Act, net neutrality, and the English language by going on to claim that the proposed redefinition “puts the government in charge of determining Internet pricing, terms of service, and what types of products and services can be delivered, leading to fewer choices, fewer opportunities, and higher prices for consumers.”

This, despite the clear language about “forbearing from rate regulation.” On second thought, perhaps this is like Obamacare, if by that you mean “something right-wingers justify opposition to by lying through their teeth about it.”

It should surprise no one that Sen. Cruz is the recipient of over $47,000 in campaign contributions from the biggest Internet service providers, such as Comcast, TWC, et. al. What may have surprised the senator, however, is the number of self-described conservatives who joined their more liberal brothers in geekdom to tell him he’s totally full of it on this subject.

“As a Republican who also works in IT,” one wrote, “you have no clue what you are talking about.” Another wrote, “As a tech and fiscal conservative in Texas who generally votes Republican, I am incredibly disappointed by your completely inaccurate statement.”

That shouldn’t be a shock to anyone, however, because this is by no means a strictly liberal issue. According to a recent story on Time.com, a survey by the Internet Freedom Business Alliance (IFBA), a group led by former GOP Rep. Chip Pickering of Mississippi, found that “83 percent of self-identified conservatives thought that Congress should take action to ensure that cable companies do not ‘monopolize the Internet’ or ‘reduce the inherent equality of the Internet’ by charging some content companies for speedier access.”

Net neutrality is good for the Internet, and since so much of our business these days gets done there, it’s good for the country. This is an issue with support all along the political spectrum, even if it’s opposed by Comcast, TWC, and other corporate behemoths, and by their bought and paid-for shills in Congress.

Let’s not let knee-jerk opposition to all things Obama, as well as congressional harlotry, be the end of an open and level playing field for all online.

Latte Is The New Teleprompter

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Once again, the shrieking outrage over a photograph of President Barack Obama saluting with a cup of coffee in his hand as he steps off Marine One reveals that there is nothing too small or trivial but that the American right won’t throw a giant hissy fit over it.

It’s all very amusing — until you realize what it says about the state of right-wing thinking.

By now, I’m sure you’ve seen the photo: President Obama, on his way to the U.N., stepping off the helicopter, flanked by saluting Marines on either side. He has his coat slung over one arm and is returning the salute with, horror of horrors, a cup in his hand.

Of course, the right-wing hysteria machine, apparently made up of people who have nothing better to do than comb through every photograph of the president looking for something to be apoplectic about, leapt immediately into action.

“How disrespectful was that?” Republican strategist Karl Rove asked. Half-Term Governor Sarah Palin mocked Obama’s lack of military service in a speech to a “Christian values” convention, a speech in which she also identified the president’s home address as “1400 Pennsylvania Avenue” — actually the address of a park next to the historic Willard Hotel. (It should be noted that neither Rove nor Palin served in the military.)

The National Republican Senatorial Committee even created a website — yes, an entire website — to protest.

Thing is, the president isn’t required to salute at all, and in this situation probably shouldn’t have. According to the regulations published by the Department of the Army (and available online), a salute isn’t required when “carrying articles with both hands” and “when either the senior or the subordinate is wearing civilian clothes.”

In addition, for 192 years of our nation’s history, presidents (including war heroes like Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower) didn’t return the salute at all. The practice originally started with Ronald Reagan, who apparently ran around saluting everything in a uniform.

When a Marine aide let him know that that wasn’t standard protocol, Reagan went to the commandant of the Marine Corps, who told him, “You’re the [bad word] president. You can salute whoever you want.”

Of course, you can just imagine the howling that would have ensued if Obama hadn’t saluted at all. Or if, like the President Who Must Not Be Named, he was photographed, several times, saluting while holding his Scottish terrier in one hand. That’s different, we’re told by the Raging Right. Because — just because it is, OK?

So what next? Will Darell Issa convene hearings on “Latte-gate?” Will there be subpoenas demanding to know if the president took cream or sugar, and if so, was it an American brand? Will there be a breathless (and quickly debunked) expose on “60 Minutes”?

“Tonight on ‘60 Minutes,’ some guy you’ve never heard of who claims to have been a barista on Marine One has written a book in which he details his harrowing experiences on Sept. 23, 2014. He tells us how he would have heroically taken the cup from the president’s hand himself, but received a ‘stand down order’ for some reason we don’t know, but which we know is somehow Obama’s fault. I’m Lara Logan, and am as baffled as you are as to why I still have a job.”

More likely, “latte” will became the new “teleprompter”: a word wingnuts randomly drop into any conversation about the president in an attempt to craft a clever insult that only serves to point out how mindless and ill-informed the person delivering it actually is.

Example: “Wow, did you hear some guy jumped the fence and broke into the White House?” “Yeah, Obama was so surprised he nearly dropped his latte. Get it? Latte! HAW HAW HAW!”

It’s important, the wingnuts say, because it shows a pattern. They’re right, but not in the way they think. The real pattern is this: The right has certain narratives, certain themes they cling to. In this case, the theme is “Obama hates the military.” This is patently absurd, as anyone outside the right-wing anti-information bubble knows. But the truth doesn’t matter to these people. Any information that contradicts the narrative is rejected. Anything they come across, no matter how minor, is warped to fit the theme.

Fix the facts around the theory, instead of the other way around. Sound familiar? That’s the right-wing mindset that got us into the Iraq War. And that’s where it stops being amusing.