Hasta La Gadget!

America finds one airline less fly than the rest.

Spirit Airlines ranks dead last in customer satisfaction, according to a 2017 travel report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

The airline scored a 61 on a 100-point scale.

Spirit is known for its cheap fares. But their no-frills, a la carte policy means the airline has no free amenities like inflight beverages, and it charges for a carry-on larger than a small purse.

Rounding out the bottom was Frontier with a score of 63, and United with a score of 70.

The report, which was based on roughly 180,000 customer interviews conducted over a 12-month period, ended in March. Therefore, responses didn’t reflect customer dissatisfaction after Delta cancelled thousands of flights earlier this month, or the PR nightmare United experienced after David Dao was violently dragged off an overbooked flight.

David VanAmburg, managing director at ACSI, told CNN Money that he believes one of these airlines will be hit harder than the other next year.

“We expect Delta to be hurt more than United (UAL),” he told the outlet. “If for no other reason than the Delta cancellations impacted thousands of passengers, while United, while obviously a very horrific incident, was with one passenger.”

JetBlue and Southwest got the highest scores on the ACSI report, receiving an 82 and 80 respectively.

Spirit did not immediately respond to a request for comment from HuffPost.

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WASHINGTON ― Members of Congress have paid no mind to a Trump administration request calling for an array of cuts in a stopgap spending bill that must be passed this week to avoid a government shutdown. 

Lawmakers had already basically hashed out an agreement on spending earlier this year, before the Trump administration started looking for ways to offset the cost of a new border wall with cuts that were like a mini version of the broader Trump 2018 budget proposal from March. 

“Despite promising that Mexico was going to pay for it, he made a last-minute push to jam funding into this bill to force families and taxpayers to pay for his ill-conceived and expensive border wall,” Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), a member of the Senate Democrats’ leadership team, said Tuesday.

But despite the administration’s suggestion to cut $18 billion in domestic spending from programs that provide things like heating assistance and rural development in late March, those proposals haven’t been part of the conversation on Capitol Hill.

“He hasn’t said a word about the $18 billion in extreme cuts his fellow Republicans have simply ignored,” Murray said of the president.

Back in December, President-elect Trump’s transition team asked congressional leaders to hold off on setting spending levels for the next fiscal year, asking them instead to pass a “continuing resolution” that would keep government funding essentially on autopilot until spring. That way the Trump administration could weigh in on the process and advocate for its priorities. 

Asked about the cuts proposed by Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said he wants Congress to finish sorting out spending for the current fiscal year before dealing with what Trump wants for fiscal 2018. 

“What we want to do is deal with our bill that was due Oct. 1 and the other I believe we ought to put off and have time to debate it,” Shelby told HuffPost on Wednesday. 

Other Republicans said they felt the same way. 

“The incoming administration really underestimated the amount of work that would be involved in trying to craft a budget for the next fiscal year,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told reporters on Wednesday. “And it would have been much better if we finished this fiscal year, which after all we’re halfway through, back in December.”

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said “there was pretty much bipartisan agreement about the bill and then there were just these kind of ancillary issues that came up here late in the game which they’re trying to sort out.”

Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said Tuesday that Trump would sign a spending bill without any money for his border wall, a significant retreat from the administration’s earlier position. 

But the funding fight isn’t settled, as Mulvaney and Democrats are still wrangling over whether the legislation should include money for the continuation of payments owed to insurers covering Obamacare enrollees. Separately, Republicans in the House of Representatives are also working this week on another long-shot bill to repeal the health care law. 

A spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget declined to comment for this article.

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Can people with drastically opposing political views still find common ground? 

That’s the question behind Heineken’s new advertisement, “Worlds Apart,” in which strangers participate in a social experiment, meeting to build some furniture and get to know each other. The hitch is: They don’t know that they have fundamentally opposing political views.

“I would describe my political views as the new right,” says one man, before he meets his partner in the experiment. “Feminism today is man-hating.”

“I say that I’m left,” says the woman who will later be paired with the man. “I would describe myself as a feminist, 100 percent.” 

The six participants ― a right-winger paired with a left-winger, a climate change denier with an environmentalist, and a transgender woman with a man who opposes transgender rights ― all start by working together to build chairs, a table and a bar (it is a beer ad after all).

They get to know intimate details about each other’s lives, with one participant sharing that he has experienced homelessness, for example. Partway through, the participants are asked to stand and watch a film ― and that’s when they hear each other’s initial political statements for the first time.

The trans woman watches as the person she’s just gotten to know says on screen: “Transgender ― it is very odd.” Her smile drops.

The participants are then given a choice: leave, or stay and chat over a Heineken (again, this is a beer ad). They all choose to stay and talk it out.

“I’ve been brought up in a way where everything is black and white ― but life isn’t black and white,” concedes the man who initially said transgender people were “not right.”

The ad, part of a new Heineken campaign in the U.K., ends with a call to action: “Open your world.”

The experiment was real and not staged, Heineken PR reps told HuffPost.

Watch the ad below:

The ad’s message of finding common ground through conversation is more than just a nice idea ― it’s backed up by a well-researched concept called contact theory, which posits that contact with groups from different backgrounds can increase tolerance.

With this ad, Heineken joins a growing list of companies using hot-button political topics to sell their products ― some with mixed results. During the Super Bowl, for instance, Budweiser ran an ad on immigration that led some anti-immigrant viewers to call for a boycott. More recently, a Pepsi ad sparked outrage for co-opting images from recent protests to sell its soda.

So far, most reactions to Heineken’s ad on Twitter have been positive.

Some people, however, expressed doubts that they could stay and chat with someone with such opposing views.

H/T Upworthy

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A mom and Army veteran refused to acquiesce to public breastfeeding shaming.

Avery Reukauf was nursing her 2-month-old son Wilder at the H&R Block on Fort Gordon Military Base when the manager asked her to cover up. The mom posted about the experience and the way she responded on Facebook.

Avery wrote that the manager asked her, “Can you cover up with a towel or something?”

“I was completely shocked, so I raised my voice slightly and said, ‘No but I have a muslin if you would like to cover your face. You must not know Georgia’s breastfeeding laws,’” she explained. 

Avery told HuffPost she accompanied her friend, Shondra Mottos, to the H&R Block that day. In her Facebook post, she noted the manager asked her to leave following their exchange. 

“So I then called the Military Police so they could come and inform him of them,” she wrote, referring to the laws about breastfeeding in public. “I’m glad they came and informed him that he could not tell me to leave. Also one of the MPs told me that there is nothing wrong with a mother breastfeeding her child.”

“I’m only posting this because I hope more moms will stand up to normalize breastfeeding,” she concluded. “I refuse to cover my child or nurse in my car.”

Avery’s post had received over 40,000 likes as of Wednesday afternoon. She told HuffPost she originally posted it in the breastfeeding group Milky Mamas, but then several moms asked her to repost it on her personal profile so that they could share it.

“The women in my breastfeeding support groups inspired me to share my story,” Avery said. “Some of them voiced their concerns about public breastfeeding in our local support group through Army Family Support Center. Listening to some of them state the fear behind public breastfeeding, I knew that I needed to share this for those women. So they could see that sometimes you will have people who won’t support you publicly breastfeeding, but it’s OK to stand up for yourself and your baby.”

Avery is an Army combat veteran, who served as a supply specialist from 2006 to 2010. “I deployed to Iraq for 15 months with 101st Airborne Division,” she told HuffPost. “I joined at 17 years old and definitely can say I grew up fast in the Army.” She also met her husband, Robert, in the Army, and he remains on active duty. 

Within a few hours of sharing her H&R Block story on Facebook, Avery’s post was flooded with responses, and she was pleasantly surprised to see that most were positive. Though she received some negative messages telling her to use a cover or not breastfeed in public, the mom said her response to such comments is, “I’m sorry you are so offended by me feeding my son.”

Avery shared her husband’s response to the negativity as well. Robert shared this message online:

“I am highly offended and quite disturbed by a lot of the people’s comments. Yeah freedom of speech and all that but does that make it right? Everything my wife does is completely within her rights. So what’s the problem?!?!? For everyone who has already stated their problems, they’re not valid enough to belittle and argue. I completely support my wife in breastfeeding without a cover. Her breast aren’t for anyone but our son. If you can’t understand that I’m sorry. But she has my full support. Don’t worry about if her breast is hidden or not because she has a husband behind her that doesn’t care either way.”

Though H&R Block did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment, Avery said the head of corporate communications, Tom Collins, reached out to her on Tuesday. 

“He was very concerned about my experience at H&R Block and very apologetic,” she said. “It was a good conversation and I’m glad that no other breastfeeding mother will experience what I went through at that H&R Block.”

Ultimately, the mom hopes people who read her story realize that nursing moms are just trying to feed their babies. “Breastfeeding mothers have rights whether you agree with them or not,” she said. “When you see a mom breastfeeding her child in public, whether you support her or not, let her breastfeed in peace.”

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Facebook’s struggle with livestreams of terrible crimes is still very real, and appears to be worsening. Local media report that a young Thai man used Facebook Live to broadcast a murder-suicide where he hanged his baby daughter before taking his own…