SATIRE: Donald Trump threatens 2020 Tokyo Olympic boycott if torch relay runs through Hiroshima or Nagasaki

As if President Donald Trump hasn’t angered enough people, Trump is now angering the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and supporters of the Olympic movement. That’s because Trump, in an early-morning Twitter rant, threatened to force the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) to boycott the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan if Tokyo Olympic organizers ran the Olympic torch through Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki, two Japanese cities that the U.S. military dropped nuclear weapons on during World War II in order to force Japan to surrender to the United States.

In an extended Twitter rant, Trump called the IOC “a globalist mafia that hates America”, accused the Tokyo Olympic organizers of “attacking America’s military superiority”, called the Japanese people “total losers”, and called members of the U.S. Olympic team “unpatriotic”.

Trump was quickly criticized by Democratic Party elected officials and leaders, current and former Olympic athletes, virtually everyone associated with the NBC television network, virtually every significant public figure in Japan, and the entire IOC, although many Republicans, including U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (D-KY) are defending Trump’s Olympic boycott threat, and the USOC has not issued any statement regarding the boycott threat.

Every single Democratic Caucus member in each house of Congress signed a letter, written by U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), calling for Trump to “immediately renounce his asinine Olympic boycott threat” and “immediately apologize to the International Olympic Committee, the Tokyo Olympic organizers, and the people of Japan for impugning the Olympic movement”. The letter did not call for Trump to apologize for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings on behalf of the United States, although the letter did note that the Olympics are “a major component of America’s reputation worldwide”. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who himself led a multi-nation boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow over the then-Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, said that he saw “no justification whatsoever” for a Tokyo Olympic boycott.

Many current and former Olympic athletes are extremely angry at Trump over his boycott threat. U.S. Olympic swimmer Lilly King, who famously defeated Russian swimmer Yuliya Yefimova for individual gold in Rio in 2016, criticized the proposed boycott and suggested that Trump is afraid that she might defeat the Russians again. Even current and former Olympic athletes who are politically conservative, such as decorated former Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton and decorated Olympic shooter Kim Rhode, were livid at the thought of Trump boycotting the Tokyo Olympics over a war that ended over seven decades ago, with Retton saying that it will probably be the only time in her life that she’ll criticize a Republican elected official.

Beyond U.S. politicians and Olympic athletes, Trump is getting a ton of pushback from every corner of the globe, particularly those with a stake in Tokyo Olympics in some form. Longtime NBC Olympic anchor Bob Costas, who will not be the primetime NBC anchor for future Olympic telecasts for reasons unrelated to the Trump boycott threat, said that Trump “was acting like a strongman from a country like North Korea” instead of “acting like what would be expected of an American leader”. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that he hoped that a “bully” like Trump would not damper the Olympic spirit in Japan and worldwide, but he also said that he fears that Trump has become “too irrational”. One member of the IOC from a European country who refused to publicly disclose his or her name went as far as to compare Trump’s boycott threat to the 1972 Munich Massacre, and all other members of the IOC have also criticized the boycott threat.

Long story short, if destroying a country’s reputation was an Olympic sport, Trump would be an Olympic gold medalist.

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(APRIL FOOLS) Ted Cruz buys Wisconsin State Capitol for $1

With Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) leading in the Wisconsin Republican presidential primary polls, Cruz is planting his flag in Wisconsin in a big way, as both houses of the Wisconsin State Legislature voted along party lines yesterday to sell the Wisconsin State Capitol and the parcel of land that it sits on to Cruz for only $1, while Wisconsin taxpayers will have to shell out $5 million annually so that the state could rent its state capitol building in order to conduct official legislative business.

While Republicans in the Wisconsin State Legislature hailed the measure as “even better than the Milwaukee Bucks arena deal”, as State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) put it, Democrats slammed the deal as a blatant ripoff of Wisconsin taxpayers, not to mention slamming some of the “renovations” that Cruz has planned for the Wisconsin State Capitol. State Representative Melissa Sargent (D-Madison), speaking on behalf of the entire Democratic membership of both chambers of the Wisconsin State Legislature, said this about Cruz’s purchase of the Wisconsin State Capitol and his plans for the capitol:

If you thought giving taxpayer money to wealthy sports team owners was a terrible idea, well, Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, and their Republican cohorts just crowned Cruz as Wisconsin’s worst landlord.

I have lived my entire life in the shadows of our house, as we like to call our state’s capitol, and for Cruz to buy off Walker and his Republican cohorts with a lot more than money in order to sell our house for a buck, while Wisconsin taxpayers get ripped off to the tune of $5 million per year, makes me sick to my stomach.

What is even worse is that Cruz’s ideas for “renovating” our house are way out of line with the concept of separation of church and state. Cruz wants to replace the Fighting Bob LaFollette bust with a nativity scene, wants to replace the Lady Forward statue with a statue of far-right televangelist and failed presidential candidate Pat Robertson, and wants to place a creationist statue in the rotunda of our house. It’s clear to me that Cruz has zero respect for the U.S. Constitution, the Wisconsin Constitution, and the people of this great state.

This isn’t a deal or a giveaway, it’s a ripoff. Make no mistake about it, I, and every other Wisconsin Democrat who currently holds elected office in our great state, will fight my hardest to make our house our house again!

When asked by Molly Beck of the Wisconsin State Journal about whether or not Sargent would run for re-election to the Wisconsin State Assembly, Sargent said that she’d have more fun designing a proposed golf course complex for cyclists than anything else. When Beck asked Sargent to answer Beck’s question directly, Sargent said that she’d probably run for re-election to the Assembly, although Sargent also said that she was becoming more interested in various non-political interests.

SATIRE: Marco Rubio loses debate to a robot

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a satirical blog post that does not describe a real-life event. For all future blog posts, satirical blog posts will be marked with (SATIRE:) before the blog post title, and non-satirical blog posts will contain no such marking.

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Earlier today, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, delivered an absolutely awful debate performance…against a robot created as part of a joint project between students and professors of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The debate was held inside of a greenhouse on the UW-Madison campus, with no spectators admitted to the debate site, although video of the debate was recorded and streamed online.

While the robot, named “Samantha”, responded to debate moderator Mike Gousha’s questions truthfully and honestly (Samantha’s political ideology is similar to that of Democratic elected officials in the Madison, Wisconsin area) and didn’t give any repetitive responses, Rubio mostly stuck to a canned line claiming that “President Obama knows what he’s doing, and he wants to radically change America”. At one point in the debate, Samantha chided Rubio for being “robotic” with his responses, prompting members of a focus group watching the internet livestream of the debate to burst out in laughter.

Samantha also commanded a deep knowledge of Rubio’s political track record, bringing up, among other things, Rubio rarely showing up to vote in the U.S. Senate, his use of a Florida Republican Party credit card for personal expenses, and his opposition to LGBT rights. This put Rubio on the defensive throughout the debate; in fact, towards the end of the debate, Rubio was barely able to give audible responses to debate questions.

Samantha’s closing statement (per debate rules, Rubio and Samantha were limited to one-sentence closing statements) was absolutely legendary:

If, after watching the debate, you think that Senator Rubio is more robotic than an actual robot, you’re not alone.

Sara Goldrick-Rab, a UW-Madison professor who led the effort to build Samantha, was absolutely delighted after seeing a video of the debate, saying that her team had built “an absolutely awesome robot” that “delivered a memorable debate performance”.

(SATIRE) Wisconsin Republicans move to ban curling in Wisconsin

The Republicans who control Wisconsin state government have made unions, women, workers, the middle class, ethnic minorities, voters, decency, and common sense political targets since 2011. Now, they’re making the sport of curling, a Winter Olympic sport in which teams of two or, more commonly, four players slide stones down a long, narrow sheet of ice seeking to have the closest stone to the center of a circle twelve feet in diameter (in curling terminology, this is known as the house) and having as many stones as possible closer the center of the house than the other team’s closest stone, illegal in Wisconsin.

Republican State Representatives Michael Schraa of Oshosh and Bob Gannon of Slinger have introduced legislation that would make playing the sport of curling, owning and/or operating a curling club, facility, and/or equipment, and broadcasting and/or participating in a broadcast of curling matches over radio, television, and/or the internet a felony punishable by a maximum sentence of three years imprisonment under Wisconsin law. In a joint press release, Schraa and Gannon claimed that “only glue-sniffing radical liberals” would play or watch a sport like curling and that curling needed to be banned in Wisconsin because “the vast majority of curlers and curling fans are liberal Democrats”, a claim that has not been backed up by any scientific opinion polling.

The Schraa-Gannon bill to ban curling in Wisconsin has drawn significant backlash from Democrats, progressives, the business community in Wisconsin, the curling community in the United States and internationally, the Olympic community, many in the legal community, and even some Republicans.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC), the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), the World Curling Federation (WCF), the United States Curling Association (USA Curling), and the Wisconsin State Curling Association (WSCA) issued a joint statement strongly condemning the proposed legislation, calling the legislation “straight out of medieval times” and “an attempt to criminalize a great sport played by many Wisconsinites”.

In a show of solidarity amid a heated, highly-competitive race for Chairperson of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin (DPW), all five of the candidates for DPW Chair, Former DPW Chairperson Joe Wineke, Democratic National Committee (DNC) member Jason Rae, Former State Representative Jeff Smith, Former State Representative Stephen Smith, and former business executive and state senate candidate Martha Laning issued a joint statement promising to make opposition to the Schraa-Gannon bill a key part of the DPW’s messaging in the 2016 election and that all five of the DPW Chair candidates believe that backlash to the Schraa-Gannon bill would result in a large number of Democrats being swept into elected office in Wisconsin, similar to what happened when the Republicans enacted the Bennett Law, which required Wisconsin public and private schools to teach classes in the English language only, in 1889.

U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin, all three of Wisconsin’s Democratic U.S. Representatives, and every Democratic state legislator in Wisconsin have all gone on record denouncing the Schraa-Gannon bill. While most of the Democratic statements consist of strongly-worded press releases opposing the proposed legislation, Madison’s all-female state assembly delegation, consisting of State Representatives Chris Taylor, Melissa Sargent, Terese Berceau, and Lisa Subeck, called a joint press conference in which they wore curling uniforms and carried curling brooms into the assembly parlor in protest of the proposed legislation. Taylor gave perhaps the sharpest criticism of the proposed legislation, saying that the Republicans who are supporting the legislation “have no stones” and claimed that “the only reason why Representatives Schraa and Gannon are proposing this ridiculous piece of legislation is because no four people in the Assembly Republican caucus could beat us at a curling match”.

Many in the Wisconsin business community are also strongly opposed to the Schraa-Gannon bill. Lori Compas, the executive director of the Wisconsin Business Alliance, a progressive business organization in Wisconsin, authored a letter, which was signed by dozens of Wisconsin businesspeople and addressed to every Wisconsin state legislator, denouncing the legislation. Compas called the Schraa-Gannon bill “a ridiculous attempt to criminalize a sport played by many Wisconsinites” and wrote that “curling clubs are an integral part of many Wisconsin communities”.

Many in the legal community believe that the Schraa-Gannon bill likely violates the U.S. Constitution. Ed Fallone, a professor for the Marquette University Law School and former state supreme court candidate, publicly stated that he believes that the legislation would likely be struck down by federal and/or state courts if enacted. Fallone argued that the legislation appears to violate the freedom of association provision of First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, since curling is not a threat to public safety in any way, and the law would prohibit curlers and curling fans in Wisconsin from organizing to play and show their support for curling.

Even some Republicans believe that banning curling is a ridiculous idea. Four Republican state representatives (Lee Nerison, Travis Tranel, Keith Ripp, and Samantha Kerkman) and one Republican state senator (Robert Cowles) have all publicly stated that they oppose the Schraa-Gannon bill. Former Republican State Senator Dale Schultz also opposes the legislation, saying that anyone who supports the legislation is “probably hallucinating” and that “there’s no valid reason whatsoever to ban curling”.

Progressives have organized protests to the Schraa-Gannon bill in numerous Wisconsin communities, including one in Madison, where over 1,000 people protested against the proposed legislation. Many protesters wore curling uniforms and/or brought curling brooms with them to the protests, and one person was seen driving a Zamboni, a ice resurfacing vehicle that is used on ice hockey and skating rinks, but not on curling sheets, to a protest held near the Madison Curling Club in McFarland.

Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has refused to publicly say whether or not he would sign legislation banning curling in Wisconsin, and calls by numerous media outlets to the governor’s office have gone unanswered.