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.

Is Trump Trying to Take a Dive?

 Opinion | thepilot.com

OK, is Donald Trump actually trying to lose this nomination?

I’ve floated this idea a couple of times as a joke, as the GOP’s Gift That Keeps on Giving goes from outrage to outrage, doing and saying things that would be career-ending gaffes for any other person running for the presidency.

Using profanity in stump speeches, attacking a highly decorated former POW for being a POW, admitting that George Dubbya Bush lied us into the Iraq War, etc. etc. … you’ve got to admit, it makes you wonder.

And yet, nothing seems to dent Trump’s armor. The Trump Chumps just love him more. So he keeps ramping up the madness. But it would be crazy to suggest that he was deliberately trying to throw the election. Wouldn’t it?

And then …

This past Monday, Stephanie Cegieleski, former communications director of Trump’s Make America Great Again SuperPAC, wrote an “open letter” to Trump supporters.

She tells of being told when interviewing for the job that Trump’s run was a “protest candidacy.” He had no actual plan or even desire to win, the interviewers told Cegieleski.

“The Trump camp,” she says, “would have been satisfied to see him polling at 12 percent and taking second place to a candidate who might hold 50 percent.” She says she was initially “excited for the change to the debate he could bring.”

But then she began to notice that the man not only has no knowledge of policy, but also lacks “the humility to admit what he does not know — the most frightening position of all.”

The turning point, when she finally broke with him once and for all and decided to write the “open letter,” came when Trump responded to the brutal terrorist attack on Easter Sunday in Pakistan by taking to Twitter, detailing the casualties (and getting the numbers wrong), and proclaiming “only I can solve.”

That was the moment, Cegieleski says, when she realized that the monster she helped create (her words) had broken loose.

He may have started with the “desire to rank second place to send a message to America and to increase his power as a businessman,” but “his pride is too out of control to stop him now.”

So can Trump actually do anything now to derail his crazy train? He certainly seems to be still trying, what with stunts like posting an unflattering picture of Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi, after a pro-Cruz SuperPAC tried to turn Utah’s Mormons against Trump by spreading a picture of Trump’s supermodel wife kinda nude (meaning that she was nekkid, but tastefully arranged so that the naughty bits were hidden).

Wives, everyone agreed, are off-limits — unless wingnuts are circulating pictures of Michelle Obama Photoshopped to look like a baboon.

Then Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was arrested and charged with battery after surveillance tapes showed him manhandling a female reporter after a Florida rally. Trump, with his usual charm, demanded to know, “If she was being assaulted, why didn’t she scream?”

In a normal campaign, this would have been a serious blow. As you may have noticed, however, this is not a normal campaign. Assaulting an uppity reporter, a female one to boot? That’s not going to hurt Trump a bit. Because, as we’re told over and over, people are angry.

People are so enraged that promises have been broken by the Republican “establishment” that they’ll back someone who promises to be straight with them.

Maybe that’s true. But the problem for Trump is that the promises that people are so upset about are ones that that very “establishment” knew were never going to happen in the first place.

They knew from the get-go they weren’t going to repeal “every word of Obamacare.” They knew they weren’t going to shut the government down until Planned Parenthood was defunded.

They knew they weren’t going to defund Homeland Security over the president’s executive orders on immigration. They didn’t have the votes, and most of them weren’t crazy enough to shut down the government.

So what happens if, God forbid, Trump gets the White House and the angry Trump Chumps discover that, no, Mexico isn’t going to pay for a border wall and we can’t make them? What will those angry people do when we truly can’t deport 11 million people?

What are they going to do when torturing people results not in an end to terrorism, but more of it? What are they going to do when the man who boasts about being the world’s greatest deal-maker starts cutting deals on things they hold sacred?

I don’t know, but I know I don’t want to find out. Trump may or may not be trying to derail his own campaign, but somebody better do it, and soon.

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.

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?

The Return Of Lord Mitt

 Opinion | thepilot.com

It seems that Lord Mitt the Earl of Romney, that clumsily programmed candidate-droid who led his party to crushing defeat and cruelly denied Mitch McConnell his dream of making Barack Obama a one-term president, is now volunteering to save the Republicans from their rapidly escalating civil war.

First, Lord Mitt called upon front-runner Donald Trump to release his tax returns, suggesting there would be some sort of “bombshell” in there that would doom the Trump candidacy.

Ponder that for a moment. Mitt Romney, who fought tooth-and-nail to avoid releasing his own tax returns, is now demanding, apparently with a straight face, that Donald Trump release his. Irony isn’t just dead, it threw itself off a seaside cliff in despair.

The Earl then gave a scathing anti-Trump speech in Salt Lake City.

“Donald Trump,” Lord Mitt said, “is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing members of the American public for suckers.”

All completely true, of course, but again, Mitt Romney is charging someone else with being a phony? Upon hearing this, Irony raised its broken body from the rocks upon which it had thrown itself and dragged itself sobbing into the sea to drown.

Trump, for his part, immediately found the video of Romney thanking Trump for his endorsement and began declaring that Romney would have “gone down on his knees” if The Donald had demanded it as the price of his backing. 

That Donald. So classy. My Republican friends (and I do have some) are just so very proud that this man is the face of their party right now.

Actually, it should surprise no one that Romney has changed his position, both on Trump and on the issue of tax returns.

This is, after all, a man who, in 2012, demonstrated his ability to change his position on an issue literally within minutes, a man whose communication director said that a campaign was “almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again,” a man whose chief pollster said, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”

Then came the news that “Romney for President Inc.” had filed paperwork with the FEC in February of this year. The Internet exploded with speculation, as the Internet is prone to do. Was Romney keeping his hand in with an eye toward stepping in to save the party from Trump at a so-called “brokered” or “open” convention?

After all, that kind of convention is looking more and more likely as Young Marco Robotto, Sen. Green Eggs and Ham and — oh, yeah, that Kasich guy — scrape together a few delegates here, a few there, and maybe enough to deny Trump a first-ballot victory, after which delegates will be free to vote for whomever they wish.

As always, if something on the Internet looks too perfect to be true, it most likely is.

Bradley Crate, the deputy CEO of the Romney for President campaign, went on Twitter to inform the curious that it was just a required change-of-address form filed by his company, Red Curve Solutions.

Romney himself says he has no plans to don the red nose, strap on the big shoes, and join the denizens of the Republican Clown Car in their Carnival of Buffoonery. Or so he says now. See “Etch A Sketch,” above.

Mitt has, however, recorded robo-calls for both Kasich and Rubio, which is sure to make him even more adored among the Republican electorate. Because, after all, who doesn’t love being robo-called at dinnertime by the guy who got his butt kicked last time?

To tell the truth, I don’t think a Romney Rescue will happen. For one thing, I don’t think the Lord loves the Democrats enough to give them Mitt Romney to run against again. If Mitt Romney is going to be the savior of the GOP, then they just ain’t making saviors like they used to.

Still, at the chaos that would be certain to ensue at a brokered convention, all bets will be off. Will we see elderly Republican delegates in funny state-themed hats brawling in the aisles of the Quicken Loans Center in Cleveland? Will there be a mass walkout of Angry Trumpistas as the desperate Republican Establishment tells the voters what’s good for them?

 Well, we live in hope.

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.