With this week came April Fools’ Day and a long list of hoaxes — Nutella discontinuing, “The Walking Dead” being canceled, UF President Kent Fuchs and football coach Jim McElwain switching jobs. But some of the events of this week were unfortunately and painfully real, which brings us to this week’s edition of ...
Darts & Laurels
Lately, the biggest international stories are about the nuclear deal with Iran, finalized yesterday, and last week’s Germanwings tragedy.
The crash is believed to have been deliberately caused by the plane’s co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz. He locked everyone out of the cockpit and slowed the plane down on its descent to prevent alarms from going off. All 150 people on the plane died in the crash.
Most people would be hard-pressed to find any relationship between the two; then again, most people aren’t former Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann. Bachmann, whose crazy eyes reflect a generally uncouth and unstable disposition, left office in 2014.
She remains vocally involved in politics. In a rather bizarre Facebook post, the one-time presidential candidate, who just scored a cameo in the upcoming Sharknado 3 movie, compared President Obama to Lubitz in reference to the Iran deal. In forging a diplomatic solution to a serious problem, Obama is acting like “a deranged pilot flying his entire nation into the rocks.”
Now, Michele Bachmann — or anyone, for that matter — is welcome to disagree with the Iran deal. They’re welcome to articulate their disapproval and anger, too — this is America, after all. But, for the love of God, there are plenty of ways to do so without resorting to such blunt and tasteless comparisons as this. Here’s a big ol’ DART to Michele Bachmann — not for disagreeing with the deal, but for doing so in the least tactful way imaginable.
For once, the nation’s attention turned to Indiana after the governor signed a religious freedom act that could be used by businesses to discriminate against gay couples that want to get married.
It got pretty nasty pretty quickly, and things got even worse when a local ABC affiliate interviewed the owners of a small-town pizza parlor, Memories Pizza. The Walkerton, Indiana, restaurant is family-owned, proudly displays crosses and, as its owner said on television, “if a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide pizzas for their wedding, we would have to say no.”
It was pretty much the worst-case scenario under the new law, and people freaked accordingly. Some freaked too hard, sabotaging the restaurant’s Yelp and threatening to burn the place down.
The fierceness of the response basically confirmed fears of gay, leftist, anti-Christian hate mobs. Supporters raised more than $200,000 in less than 24 hours to help Memories Pizza fend off Big Gay. For that, we’re gonna have to hand a DART to pretty much everyone involved in the fiasco — Memories Pizza, the donors, but mostly the vulgar trolls who are giving them a cause to fight for.
In local news, Student Government just finalized a deal with Uber that would reduce fares to UF students by 50 percent.
While the reduced rate applies only at certain times and in certain areas, it covers both Midtown and downtown during peak no-one-should-be-driving hours. Safety is a great thing to incentivize; For that, we’d like to present SG and Uber a LAUREL for working together to improve student welfare.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 4/3/2015 under the headline “”]
