Dog Pile on the Rabbit!

Sorry, but I can’t resist piling on Gov. Bobby Jindal (R, Louisiana) for his Republican response speech to President Obama’s congressional address. Jindal has taken heat from just about every corner of the media; this includes Republicans as well as Democrats. The heat is justified as Jindal’s speech was full of the same old rhetoric that conservatives have been spouting for years; tax cuts good, government bad.

Jindal attempted to release the conservative hounds (Smithers, release the hounds) by tossing out a piece of red meat or as I like to call it, the other white meat; pork. Jindal’s now infamous example of unnecessary spending in the stimulus package is for volcano monitoring. It is pretty obvious that Jindal chose volcano monitoring because most of the American public is not even remotely familiar with volcanoes, so it seems like a good strategy to play on that ignorance. Well, do you know who is familiar with volcanoes, the United States Geological Survey is and they state some pretty darn good reasons to monitor volcanoes over at fivethirtyeight.com?

Now I realize that Jindal is a Rhodes Scholar and that implies that he is very intelligent, but how could he have missed the obvious correlation between hurricanes, i.e. Katrina and volcanoes when he first read the speech, assuming he did not write it. Both are natural disasters that have the potential to kill many people if they are not monitored. Here is the governor of Louisiana mocking a program to monitor natural disasters. Now, I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t smack of high intellect to me.

This is one of the great things about the Internet; in years past much of what Jindal said in his speech would have only been discussed in newspaper editorials and on talk radio, but today it is all over the internet. Millions of people are now exposed to the reality of what was really said, assuming you read the right sites such as factcheck.org.

Now that is what I call taking to the streets, digital streets that is…