Jar-Jar Tate

The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.

- Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Congratulations, Golden Tate. You managed to alienate the Detroit Lions fan base with your insipid comments after Sunday's horrendous display of football even more than Detroit's horrendous display of football managed to do ... and that's quite an accomplishment.

"Today I felt like at times our fan base kind of turned their back on us," Tate said in yesterday's post-game interviews following the Arizona Cardinals' 42-17 shellacking of the Pontiac Pussycats, dropping the Honolulu Blue and Silver to a depressing 0-5 and increasing the odds of yet another Owen 16 season in the Motor City. Personally, after the way this year has started, I'm pulling for a bookend to join the 2008 winless season.

Y'awl can do this, Lions!

Granted, Tate's comments were sandwiched between compliments of the fan base ("I think our fans are amazing, and they've been patient for a long time" was one side of the Oreo; "We have a lot of confidence in our fan base, and we can't do this without our fan base" was the other side). But it was the creamy white "blame the fans" filling which got the bulk of the attention, and rightfully so.

Look, Golden - we understand you don't have a real grasp of the painful and seemingly pathetic (and, to a degree, sadomasochistic) kind of love-hate relationship Detroit's fans have with their allegedly professional football franchise. You're from Tennessee, played college ball at Notre Dame, and then went off to the Seattle Seahawks, even being part of a Super Bowl-winning team before coming to Detroit.

We even understand your frustration, being part of the dysfunctional world that is Lions Football. Trust us, we've been there/done that, as fans, for damn near 60 years - longer than I've been on this planet.

But if you're going to lash out at the fan base - who collectively are incredibly and overly sensitive to being thrown under the proverbial bus by members of their grossly-overpaid weekend entertainment, especially given the tons of dead presidents Detroiters have spent to support this historic mess of a franchise - then we, collectively, are going to take your comments and tell you to shove them where the sun don't shine. And having gone from just one horribly-blown call in Dallas away from actually winning a second playoff game since the mid-1950s last season, to this unwatchable and boring - yes, boring - collection of turnovers, penalties, and stupidity, just adds salt to the wound.

"Our fan base kind of turned their backs on us."

You know what? That stings.

I'm looking at the box score, which is no easier to digest than what I witnessed while eating at Duffy's of Greenacres and watching the massacre on the big screen. We, the fans, didn't commit six turnovers. We, the fans, didn't get hit with nine stupid penalties. We, the fans, didn't blow an early 7-0 lead by allowing 35 unanswered points against Arizona.

ARIZONA! Owned by that sorry excuse of a human being Bill Bidwell!

How bad are things now? You guys are making the 2015 Detroit Tigers' last-place American League East finish look like a sports championship level team. And in case you didn't catch it, the Tigers' season was horrid in infinite ways.

You're making an upcoming lost cause disguised as a Detroit Pistons campaign look like a refreshingly wonderful change of pace.

{At least we have the Detroit Red Wings to be thankful for!}

Jar-Jar Tate, the fans you alienated have suffered through every possible type of professional football hell for the better part of six decades. You want "creative ways to lose"? The Lions defined this perfectly, and since then have redefined it on a yearly (sometimes multiple times yearly) basis. To wit:

The Lions are 1-11 in post-season play since 1958.

They've won roughly 40 percent of their games since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970.

They've lost on a game-ending 63-yard field goal by New Orleans' Tom Dempsey.

They've lost when quarterback Dan Orlovsky stepped out of the end zone for a safety against Minnesota, and when Packers QB Matt Flynn set Green Bay franchise records with 480 yards passing and six touchdowns ... as a backup.

They've lost when long snapper Don Muhlbach botched his job after a long, dramatic touchdown drive against the Vikings, and when coach Marty Mornhinweg chose which side of the field he wanted to defend (rather than take the ball) to start overtime in Chicago.

They've lost when the refs picked up a pass interference flag in Dallas, and when the refs screwed up by not calling an intentional bat out of the end zone last week in Seattle, and because of the Calvin Johnson rule to Chicago.

They've lost by perhaps the most irrational football score ever (5-0) to Dallas in 1970.

They've lost when they attempted a fake punt from their own 12-yard-line against New Orleans (and I wrote about this in 1988, while in my last semester of undergraduate coursework at Central Michigan University).

They've had perhaps the greatest running back in the history of the game, Barry Sanders, retire after 10 seasons, days before training camp opened, because he was sick of losing all the damn time.

They've had Matt Millen, Andre Ware, Charlie Rogers, Ikaika Alama-Francis, Stockar McDougle, Reggie Rogers, Jeff Komlo, the Pontiac Silverdome, and a zillion other shades of hopelessly bad associated with the Ford Football Franchise.

Now, we recognize this is an epic failure on multiple levels. Just as no one individual would receive credit if Detroit actually won (a) a division, or (b) a playoff game, or (c) a football championship, this year's steaming pile of fecal matter is a team effort. To turn Howard Jones on his back, "Everybody is to blame." We have a coddled, run-of-the-mill quarterback who hasn't a clue how to GPS his passes to one of the elite receivers in the game (that would be Megatron, not you). We have more turnovers than Pepperidge Farms. More yellow flags than the United Nations. More vanilla, predictable plays called from the sidelines. The most passive, clueless ownership of any sports franchise in North America.

And yes, it would be easy to point at the loss of Ndamukong Suh on the defensive side of the ball, except his year (so far) in Miami has been amazingly worse than what we are seeing in Detroit.

There are cries for Martha Ford to sell the team, just as there were cries for her late husband William Clay Ford to do so; that ain't gonna happen. We are saddled with "Found On Road Dead" as a football franchise, barring some weird alignment of planets that Neil deGrasse Tyson has yet to announce, for much of the foreseeable future. Matthew Stafford (salary) is not going anywhere. Kicking front office brains Martin Mayhew and Tom Lewand out the door would be nice, but the Ford family is known for loyalty to lousy football management, so we're probably stuck with them as well.

The one change I see on the immediate horizon is the letting go of offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi, but even that is too late to salvage the season.

Meanwhile, here's my suggestion to Tate and the men who suit up to represent the Motor City and southeast Michigan on football Sundays: Shut the hell up. Do your damn job. And maybe - just maybe - we'll have your back.

Revenge Porn And The Constitution

Last week, nearly 30 new state laws went into effect in Florida, including the outlawing of “sexual cyberharassment,” commonly known as “revenge porn,” which is when someone posts an explicit image of another online without permission.

The law, which passed both the state House and Senate virtually unanimously in the spring (only two legislators in each chamber voted against the measure), defines sexual cyberharassment as “publish(ing) a sexually explicit image of a person that contains or conveys personal identification information … without the person’s consent, for no legitimate purpose, with the intent of causing substantial emotional distress to the person.”

Violators could face a first-degree misdemeanor charge, or up to a year in jail; repeat offenders could be socked with a third-degree felony, which carries a maximum five years in prison.

Twenty-six states now have some form of law regarding “revenge porn.” And while I applaud the crackdown on this particular heinous act by both Republicans and Democrats, I am a bit concerned about how effective it will be, and whether it will hold up in our courts. The new law amended an existing state statute to permit law enforcement officers to arrest individuals without a warrant when there is probable cause to believe the suspect has committed sexual cyberharassment. Additionally, the law permits a search warrant to be issued for a private dwelling if evidence relevant to proving sexual cyberharassment is contained therein.

My concerns revolve around the United States Constitution, specifically that pesky First Amendment and that equally troublesome Fourth Amendment, and how these two measures could impact how this particular legislation stands up when court cases are being filed and prosecuted. Conviction is made difficult by the First Amendment, which states that "Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Today, this includes the Internet; to place restrictions on what individuals can post online to us would be a clear violation of the First Amendment; speech on the Internet has full First Amendment protection.

The Fourth Amendment is the part of the Bill of Rights that prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and requires any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. To me, the key word here is “warrant;” as I noted two paragraphs ago, under the new Florida law law enforcement officers do not need to secure a warrant in advance to arrest individuals suspected of sexual cyberharassment. Under the Fourth Amendment, search and seizure - including arrest - should be limited in scope according to specific information supplied to the issuing court; without a warrant, there is no check-and-balance taking place by the justice system.

The constitutionality of this type of legislation is why some states’ revenge porn laws have been halted by federal courts. For example, Arizona’s law had made it a felony to "disclose, display, distribute, publish, advertise, or offer" an image of a nude person without that individual’s consent. However, it was so overly broad, it could have punished a wide range of constitutionally protected communication, including "a library lending a photo book about breast feeding to a new mother, a newspaper publishing pictures of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, or a newsweekly running a story about a local art show," according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

I agree that sexual cyberharassment is a bad thing. I applaud our elected officials for trying to do something about it. And I hope my assessment is wrong. But I do have concerns Florida’s leaders will need to try, try again on this type of legislation.

Truthiness

"The problem with internet quotes is that you cant always depend on their accuracy" 

- Abraham Lincoln, 1864

This snarky comment has been floating around cyberspace for several years. And yet, with every passing day, it seems to be even more a reliable indicator of where we are as a technology-driven communications society.

Today, we see this happening in at least two high-profile situations: on social media like Facebook, where a variety of hoaxes are posted and accepted as the gospel by thousands of users; and the 2016 presidential campaign, where despite the media’s ability to respond to less-than-factual comments more quickly than in years past.

One variation of this year’s Facebook hoax - yes, it’s an annual tradition, like Halloween and Santa Claus and hurricane season in Florida - reads, in part: “Better safe then sorry! Now it's official! It has been published in the media. Facebook has just released the entry price: $5.99 to keep the subscription of your status to be set to ‘private.’ If you paste this message on your page, it will be offered free (paste not share) if not tomorrow, all your posts can become public. Even the messages that have been deleted or the photos not allowed.”

The hoax includes a fictitious news report from a “Channel 13 News,” as well as various purported federal laws and the Rome Statute, as further “proof” of the post’s “legitimacy.”

Savvy Facebook users end up posting status updates mocking the hoax, but it still happens like clockwork.

Then there’s the political arena. Despite fact-checking sites like PolitiFact (http://www.politifact.com/), which do their best to determine which political comments are “True” (Mike Huckabee’s claim that six of the 10 wealthiest U.S. counties surround Washington, D.C.) and which achieve “Pants on Fire” status (example: Donald Trump’s claim this week that unemployment hit 42%), too often once less-than-honest comments are made, it is impossible to fully reverse the damage. Too often, individuals on either side of the political aisle accept their chosen (or, at least, preferred) leader’s words as the Gospel, and are reluctant to admit anything inaccurate was stated. And while individuals with opposing viewpoints howl at the moon about the situation, rarely does it impact what has transpired.

We can also see such questionable use of facts surrounding the current Planned Parenthood saga, where individuals on each side of the politically-charged topic have the ability to pick and choose which pieces of information to rally around and which to ignore. In fact, take any “hot button” topic coming out of Washington, D.C. these days - Benghazi, gay rights, immigration reform, public education, the national debt, legalization of drugs, Syrian refugees - and this phenomenon will occur.

Fans of The Colbert Report can point to the October 17, 2005 pilot episode, where the host coined the word “truthiness,” described as a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Nearly 10 years later, the word - and definition - still stand as a modern conveyance of the phrase “don’t let your facts get in the way of my opinion.”

Honest Abe would be proud to know his Internet quote is more honest than many of the comments it describes.