Shit that Pissed me Off – 4/14

United Airlines Fails Spectacularly at Customer Service

United Airlines had a fully booked flight but also had several employees who needed transport to where they would be working the next day.  They asked passengers to give up their seats for an $800 travel voucher.  Nobody volunteered.

Maybe because it was a Sunday night and they all had work the next day.  And their boss wasn’t going to pay them for the day off.  What a bunch of selfish pricks.

Anyway, rather than upping the offer (which they totally could have done), the airline opted to pick people at random.  And one guy didn’t want to go.  So they had security drag him off the airline in front of a bunch of cell phone cameras.

As you might imagine, it has been a bad week for United.

I’m not the only person who remembers when this was United’s ad slogan, right?

But it has also been a bad week for the passenger who was dragged off the plane.  As soon as his name became public, news organizations began to dig into his past and it turns out he’s not a perfect person.

I’m shocked to discover that as everyone else I’ve ever met is completely perfect.

His past transgressions have nothing to do with not wanted to be forced to take a different flight after he paid for his ticket and the airline made some poor planning decisions.

The response from a few corners of the internet have been, basically, he deserved it.

Um…no.  The guy was violently removed from the plane.  Not removed from the plane. Violently removed from the plane.

You can argue all you like how three other people voluntarily left after being randomly selected.  Doesn’t matter. Beating people up just isn’t something you should be doing unless they are a Nazi.

And in spite of all the muckraking our media has done over this fellow, they have not been able to turn up any evidence that the guy is a Nazi.  So I’m going to say the beating was entirely unjustified.

He didn’t deserve it.  That’s the problem with this whole “let’s wait for all the facts to come out” mentality.  It doesn’t matter what type of guy he was.  It doesn’t matter if he was a little bit belligerent when told he’d have to leave the plane after buying a ticket.

He was violently removed from the plane.  He didn’t deserve it.  That is the only fact that matters.

Trump Corner – While you Were Distracted by all the Bombs he’s Dropping He Defunded Planned Parenthood

As soon as the Republicans controlled both houses and the White House, we knew this was going to happen.  What is especially sinister is the quiet manner in which it took place.

The bill, which is not specially about Planned Parenthood but it is about Planned Parenthood, defunds any medical facility that provides abortions.  Even if those services are a tiny fraction of the services those facilities provide.

It was passed in the Senate on a tie breaker vote by Vice President Mike Pence.

Trump, who loves the spotlight, quietly signed it into law.

Now what they did isn’t going to shut down Planned Parenthood as a lot of their funding comes from private sources.

But what it does is takes health care away from women who aren’t getting abortions.

Because Planned Parenthood didn’t use federal money for abortion services.  They used it for the other 97% of the work they do.

The far right has this idea that Planned Parenthood is an abortion factory when, in fact, they help a whole lot of low income women have healthy fucking babies.  Which is something we should all think is a good thing.  No matter what we think about abortion.

So what we learn from all of this is that Trump is quietly but methodically moving forward a far right agenda while also dropping bombs all over the place.

We knew he’d do the first part.  He claimed he wasn’t going to do the second.  But let’s be honest – we all kind of expected he would anyway, right?

Sean Spicer Manages to Invoke Hitler

Spicer, who has the most difficult job in the world because he needs to make sense of whatever the fuck President Trump (fuuuuuuuuck) is tweeting, managed to ensure nobody had any sympathy for him earlier this week when he compared Syrian leader Bashir al-Assad to Hitler.

Actually, he didn’t just compare Assad to Hitler.  He implied Assad was worse than Hitler because he used chemical weapons on his own people.

Never you mind that Hitler used the same chemical weapon on millions of Jews.

If Joe Friday were interviewing Sean Spicer, I think he might have a stroke as a self defense mechanism.

Spicer had to spend much of the next two days apologizing for being an idiot.

And he still has a job.  Probably because he has never performed abortions.

Or, more likely, because no matter how much of a jackass he sounds like from the podium, he does a spectacular job from distracting us from the jackass in the oval office.

Everyone is so busy talking about Spicer’s latest gaffe, we don’t have time to pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

Nintendo is Discontinuing the NES Classic

I realize most of you don’t care about this news item but it pisses me off because I don’t have one yet.

Now I’m going to have to go get one off of eBay and it is going to be three times as expensive.  Ooo!  Wait!  Maybe I can still grab one from Amazon!

No.  All they have is used ones for hundreds of dollars.  Fuck.

Oh Tim, you say as you blame the victim, why didn’t you buy it before now?

Because I didn’t, OK?

Catholic School Rejects Handicapped Girl Because God

Here’s where we can see one of the reasons the concept of school vouchers is going to be a huge problem.  The Notre Dame Preparatory High School rejected a student with dyslexia and ADHD because they claim her disability would make it difficult to teach her their religion.

I’m going to leave aside the fact that I don’t think the primary purpose of any high school should be to teach religion.  Because they are a private school and that’s one of the reasons private schools exist and, more importantly, my rant on the subject would be far too long and would involve a lot more uses of the word “fuck” than even I feel are appropriate.

The fact a private school is fighting for and, given the current make-up of the Supreme Court (thanks Obama), likely to win the right to basically refuse any student on religious grounds no matter how dubious those religious grounds may be.

We don’t think we’ll be able to teach this kid anything about our religion.

Don’t think the kid will take well to your religion?  Fuck her.  She can burn in hell.

I mean, god gave her that disability, right?  And god doesn’t give anyone anything they can’t handle, right?

So she can handle it but the teachers at Notre Dame Preparatory High School can’t.

Vouchers are all about making it easier to send kids to schools like this.  Provided the schools will take them.

And evidence would suggest that, unless these kids fit a very narrow definition of what is acceptable, the schools won’t.

Hey – if you are tired of being pissed off, I wrote a new story this week!  It’s a comedy story so, hopefully, it won’t make you mad!