In my opinion, it’s never a good day to be CNN Crossfire co-host and conservative commentator, S.E. Cupp. While she stops short of the unironic anti-feminist parody that is Ann Coulter, she does her own fair share of leveraging perceived sex appeal to promote a dangerous agenda. But in a certain way, Cupp outdoes Coulter in disingenuousness. I’m referring to the moderator’s tendency to offer opinion polls as “evidence” of a liberal guest’s misinformation on a given issue.

This week was a particularly challenging one for the hapless Cupp. And frankly she got what she deserved – from a mild-mannered, brilliant scientist wearing a bow tie. It was sort of majestic, and definitely inspiring.

Cupp was quick and repetitive in demonstrating the annoying trait described above on Tuesday night’s broadcast devoted to the climate change debate. She opened the show by turning to beloved scientist, engineer and TV personality Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”) to ask:

“Even if what Van and the White House are saying [about theNational Climate Assessment update] is all true, the scare tactics have not worked.”

And how do we know that the liberal tendency to engage scientific fact in order to promote revisions in environmental policy is a loser? Well, as Cupp said, “Only about 36 percent of Americans think global warming is a serious threat to our way of life.”

That is a neat trick of rhetorical acrobatics that has been appallingly effective for the GOP: promoting voter ignorance as an argument for party stupidity. It disrespects both the public and the political establishment simultaneously, yet the diehards eat it right up. One of the more confounding phenomena of our time.

Sadly, this is nothing new and many of us who enjoy critical thinking and the prospect of planetary continuity have become inured to the constant anxiety, depression and helplessness. We are used to the dread that accompanies awareness. We understand that the human race is careening toward a ditch in a car driven by global Big Business and its government lackeys, but we can’t get half of our fellow citizens to acknowledge we’re even moving. Simple science.

Thankfully Bill Nye is in possession of the type of feistiness that liberals (and yes, I acknowledge grief that environmental common sense has become partisan) are going to need in order to have a prayer of saving humanity. The discursive blows were delivered fast and furious to an outmatched Cupp and her cohort, Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation (who might as well have stayed home). In only his second full sentence of the broadcast, Nye demolished Cupp’s smug misuse of statistics by asking, “So, how do you want to get public consensus, by saying that it’s not happening, that it’s not serious, that shorelines aren’t flooding?”

This was only the beginning of one of the most entertaining installments of the rebooted opinion show to date. Check out this beautiful exchange roughly halfway through the show:

“Cupp: You can look at entitlement reform, which will bankrupt this country long before climate change destroys us.

Heart disease kills seven million a year worldwide. 870 million suffer from hunger. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me in good conscience that climate change is our most urgent, No. 1 priority right now.

Nye: Climate change is our most urgent No. 1 priority right now.

Cupp: That’s what I thought you would say.”

I was ready to invoke the slaughter rule but Nye wasn’t finished by a long shot. He even gave those of us who fervently seek to address climate change, post-talking stage, a polite but tough slogan: “I think the scientific community has been very patient.”

We can’t afford to play nice anymore. Nothing less than the planet and human existence are at stake. And the more people we have like Bill Nye committed to the cause – armed with facts, backbone and most importantly, ideas – the better our shot at survival.

The best thing about the Internet is that it’s a completely unmitigated free-for-all. People can literally say or do anything. That’s also the worst feature of the World Wide Web (trolls, hate speech, misogyny, child pornography) but the relatively nascent life cycle of the Internet has trained us all to take the good with the bad. Almost to a person, we’ve agreed to abide by only one law: if you don’t want to see it, read it or hear it, then don’t. Click the next link. There’s quite literally something out there for everyone and almost anyone can leverage the tools of the Web to find success within their own particular niche, no matter how singular it might appear to one’s offline community. The Internet – the greatest of equalizers.

Enjoy it while you can.

According to multiple published reports, the Federal Communications Commission has offered a proposed set of rules that would effectively end net neutrality as we know it.

Edward Wyatt of The New York Times reports “The proposal comes three months after a federal appeals court struck down, for the second time, agency rules intended to guarantee a free and open Internet.”

The writer goes on to point out the patently obvious: in the decision to allow large media companies with deep pockets to purchase rides in the “fast lanes” of Internet service providers, the last egalitarian, populist institution we share as a human species is endangered. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Equal opportunity denied to the 99 percent (or even in more charitable Romney-like estimations, 47 percent) by the superrich.

Wyatt writes, “The rules could radically reshape how Internet content is delivered to consumers. For example, if a gaming company cannot afford the fast track to players, customers could lose interest and its product could fail.” Yes. And there’s also this:

“Consumer groups immediately attacked the proposal, saying that not only would costs rise, but that big, rich companies with the money to pay large fees to Internet service providers would be favored over small start-ups with innovative business models — stifling the birth of the next Facebook or Twitter.”

But those arguments are pretty much still looking at the issue through the corporate lens. I’m more inclined to side with the proletariat view of Todd O’Boyle, Program Director of Common Cause’s Media and Democracy Reform Initiative, who warned “If it goes forward, this capitulation will represent Washington at its worst…Americans were promised, and deserve, an Internet that is free of toll roads, fast lanes and censorship — corporate or governmental.”

There is still time for the F.C.C. to turn away from the proposed changes. A final vote is scheduled for the end of the year. Let there be a huge public backlash that renders defeat unavoidable. Moreover, it’s got to come from the ground. Because this isn’t like Arizona’s recently vetoed bill that would have allowed businesses to refuse to serve gay Americans based upon “religious beliefs.” We can’t rightly expect corporate interests to intervene on this one. No threat of lost customers here. Just another opportunity to squeeze out competition.

We’re going to have to do this on our own, the way the tools and power of the Internet have famously inspired rebellion the world over: Occupy Wall Street, Tahrir Square, Julian Assange. Right or wrong, individuals and groups have made their arguments heard and shared using the Internet. It seems fitting we do the same here, while we still can.

Visit the F.C.C. website when the proposed rules are released for public comment on May 15, and for goodness sake, comment. I may be preaching to the converted when it comes to PoliticusUSA readers, but if there is any occasion (and obviously I believe there are many more) worth making our voices heard, this it. This kind of garbage flies because we are a listless and complacent electorate, but we can put a stop to that anytime.

We owe it to the Internet. The glorious, messy, crude, amateur, uniting, creative and wonderful universe – for all to share equally.

I am not an economist. Although I appreciate data of all kinds, especially the economic variety, as a useful tool for driving policy, I’m not into hard number crunching as a form of amusement. I leave that in the capable hands of experts such as Nate Silver, Nobel Prize-winning guru Paul Krugman and others who may interpret the statistics through a liberal lens, but abstain from playing games with the raw facts.

The aforementioned Krugman has referred to the 2014 “it” text of economic circles across several of his Winter and Spring New York Times columns. I’m speaking of course of Thomas Piketty’sCapital in the Twenty-First Century. In Krugman’s March 23 piece, “Wealth Over Work,” he describes Piketty’s book as doing “more than document the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small economic elite. He also makes a powerful case that we’re on the way back to ‘patrimonial capitalism,’ in which the commanding heights of the economy are dominated not just by wealth, but also by inherited wealth, in which birth matters more than effort and talent.” Just prior to this description, Krugman labels Piketty’s work the most “important economics book of the year — and maybe of the decade.”

They don’t go around handing out Nobel Prizes for nothing, so when Krugman speaks in these terms, sensible people (real ones, not the Paul Ryan pretenders) tend to listen. And predictably, the right wing cottage industry that is dedicated to undermining Krugman and others who argue that their much vaunted “job creators” aren’t generating much besides personal wealth, have to articulate and repeat some sort of disingenuous response.

Enter Ross Douthat, Krugman’s ideological adversary at The Times. On Easter Sunday, the pundit offered “Marx Rises Again,” in which he is careful to label Piketty a “social democrat” (you can almost see and hear the ensuing spit take of disgust). Douthat goes on to offer his own description of Piketty’s work, one infused with a derisive, elitist, Modernist tone which suggests that any text widely read must be garbage. The columnist characterizes the book as “that sweeping interpretation of modern economic trends recently translated from the French, and the one book this year that everyone in my profession will be required to pretend to have diligently read.”

I’m not sure why, but reading this passage immediately brought to mind a frustrated and sneering John McCain pointing to his opponent, Barack Obama, during the 2008 Presidential campaign debates, then referring to him as “that one.” Maybe it’s because the circumstances are somewhat similar.

An idea that has popular support and which contradicts the exclusive, anti-populist platform of today’s GOP must be rejected and ridiculed to the point of anger. After all, how could the unwashed proletariat fail to see that what’s good for the one percent is good for the ECONOMY?! Nevermind recent painful memories of pesky incidents like the burst of the housing bubble, the 2008 stock market crash, the collapse of the auto industry and the virtually jobless economic recovery from the Great Recession. Like some sort of fantastical Jedi Mind Trick, Douthat and his cohorts (he is far from the worst) would still have us believe that the only problem with free markets is regulation. Even after all we have seen with our own eyes and felt through our own broken American Dreams.

Douthat and his fellow partisans can keep insisting that the playing field remains level, but it’s insulting and absurd. He offers “Piketty’s dark vision relies, in part, on economic models I am unqualified to assess.” But assess he does anyway, as though a lack of fact mastery has ever stopped anyone on the right from offering an”expert” opinion.

Climate change. Female reproductive rights. The social safety net. Inequality. These forces, and the need to recognize them, are real. And I would caution conservatives to recall history. When great empires are brought down by the ignorance and greed of the few, everyone fails together. There are no survivors. The little white lies you tell yourselves and feel the need to repeat to the rest of us won’t offer you any protection when it all comes tumbling down.

While CNN busies itself covering every non-development in the search for missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 (I never thought I’d say this, but I miss Newt Gingrich. He makes for amazing treadmill grist.), the world continues to turn. And as much of the nation’s news apparatus is rightfully preoccupied with a triumphant conclusion to Obamacare’s first enrollment test, it’s been another busy week for foreign policy.

Such is one of the many perversities plaguing the Obama era. Every time the beleaguered POTUS wants to shine the spotlight on domestic issues, international unrest just won’t have it. Thankfully, he has arguably the modern era’s most unflappable State Department leader by his side. There seems to be no number of hairy, potentially history changing crises that Kerry cannot attack at once.

Secretary of State John Kerry is a busy fellow. Last week the former Presidential candidate was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for what I am sure were tense discussions regarding the years-long Syrian conflict, ongoing negotiations with Iran and a host of other topics. Apparently a glutton for punishment, Kerry was halfway home this past weekend before turning his plane around and heading for Paris.

According to a report from Matthew Lee of the Associated Press, “Kerry [was] to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov Sunday evening at the Russian ambassador’s residence. Kerry spoke to Lavrov on the flight to Shannon after President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed in a call on Friday to have their foreign ministers meet to discuss a possible diplomatic resolution to the Ukraine situation.”

Seriously, if the only channel one watches is CNN, it’s easy to become transfixed by the Flight 370 black box countdown and Richard Quest’s virtuoso ability to make floating jellyfish sound like a break in the search. But change the station. There’s plenty of other stuff not happening.

John Kerry is definitely the ‘don’t put off until tomorrow that which can be done today’ sort. I like this Kerry, the urgent, sincere, and dare I say bold Secretary who can juggle multiple serious imbroglios without misplacing a strand of that lovely silver hair. Would that he had been half so interesting in 2004.

Apparently opposed to a good night’s rest, Kerry was up and at it early Monday morning. According to a report from Shira Schoenberg of The Republican, “As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry jetted to Israel on Monday in an attempt to revive faltering peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, Israeli members of parliament visiting Boston reacted with mixed emotions, ranging from cautious optimism to strong pessimism.” That’s right. Kerry can mix it up with naysaying Israeli lawmakers talking to the press on two different continents. Boom.

And because North Korea needs to make sure the world still knows it exists every few months, the communist nation exchanged fire with its neighbor to the South in the early part of the week. While North Korea’s aggression in the event, according to Kashmira Gander of The Independent, is attributable to “an expression of Pyongyang’s frustration at making little progress in its recent push to secure international aid,” The White House and the State Department are expected to formulate some type of official response. Kerry’s got this.

Obviously some of my remarks have been semi-serious, but my respect for John Kerry’s energy and leadership is completely genuine. Others might have deemed following the celebrity and competence of Hilary Clinton’s turn in the Cabinet a daunting task not worth the undertaking. But Kerry accepted the challenge and even afterward, could easily have chosen to play it safe. Instead, with everything else on his international plate (and by extension ours), the man continues fighting the good two-nation, Israeli/Palestine fight. He seems completely unburdened by previous decades of failure to achieve a solution, and if he doubts his own eventual success, it doesn’t show.

I don’t mean to suggest that the combustible situations unfolding across the globe aren’t deadly serious. They are and it’s precisely because so much is at stake in so many regions that I am grateful for Kerry’s cool-headed, thoughtful, yet unwavering direction. He may not know it all, but he’s a thinker, a statesman, not a trigger happy cowboy. I think he’s found his calling.