Louisiana Dem. Governor John Bel Edwards Wins Reelection

In another blow to Donald Trump's fantasy that he can invincibly mobilize his toxic base to defeat Democrats merely by tweeting and holding rallies,Democrat John Bel Edwards won reelection yesterday in Louisiana.  Among popular measures Edwards had oversee during his first term were Medicaid expansion and criminal justice reforms, plus passage of a sales tax to address the budget disaster left by his Republican predecessor, Bobby Jindal who, like GOP extremist Sam Brownback in Kansas proved GOP tax cut policies are disastrous.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Edwards' win and the erosion of governorships held by Republicans during Trump's time in office.  Here are story excerpts:

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards was elected to a second term on Saturday, overcoming opposition from President Trump and an increasingly polarized state electorate to hand Democrats their second major victory in a governor’s race over the past two weeks.

Edwards, 53, was running against Republican businessman Eddie Rispone, 70, in a runoff election after neither candidate won an outright majority of votes last month.

Edwards’s victory is another setback for Trump, who traveled to Louisiana twice over the past month to campaign for Rispone and sent a series of tweets urging Republicans to vote. [Trump's] The president’s popularity in the South has failed to prop up GOP candidates in two of the three states that held gubernatorial elections this year, allowing Democrats to gain governorships for the third consecutive year.

In Kentucky, Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear unseated Republican Gov. Matt Bevin this month. In January, 24 of the nation’s governors will be Democrats, up from 15 at the end 2017.

The Louisiana election caps off a grueling campaign in which Edwards, a relatively conservative Democrat, worked to prove his party could still lead a state that has continued to drift to the right in the Trump era.

[Trump] The president made another pitch for Rispone on Saturday.  “Louisiana, 3 hours left, get out and Vote for @EddieRispone for Governor,” he tweeted. “Lower taxes and much more!”

But Edwards, who was minority leader in Louisiana’s House of Representatives before being elected governor in 2015, has remained relatively popular throughout his term and was optimistic his reelection bid could withstand the head winds of national politics, including the ongoing drama in Washington over the impeachment inquiry.

“We need to keep moving forward, and we can’t take a chance of going back,” Edwards said at a campaign event in New Orleans this past week.

After he succeeded Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), Edwards worked with a Republican legislature to balance the budget, imposing a sales tax increase. He also successfully fought to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which extended coverage to nearly a half-million residents. The governor also pushed to hike teacher pay while working to drive down the state’s unemployment rate to the lowest level in more than a decade.

One of Edwards’s most high-profile accomplishments has been legislation reworking the criminal justice system in a state that had one of the nation’s highest and most racially unbalanced incarceration rates. The bipartisan legislation, which reduced sentences for some drug crimes and made it easier for some inmates to seek parole, could cut the state’s prison population by 10 percent over a decade, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. Democrats have made a net gain in governorships for the third consecutive year. The party picked up seven governorships last year in the 2018 midterm elections, including winning several Midwestern states that Trump carried in 2016.

Democrats also gained a governorship in 2017, when Gov. Phil Murphy (D) replaced Republican Chris Christie in New Jersey in the same year that Virginia voters elected Gov. Ralph Northam (D) to replace former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe.

SOS: Republicans, It’s Time to Panic

As I have made clear numerous times, in my opinion, Donald Trump is seriously mentally ill.  At best, he is a dangerous malignant narcissist.  At worse, he is a sociopath megalomaniac likely to act out of anger and trigger events that may be hard to stop once the dominoes begin falling.   Of course, no one should be surprised by any of this.  Even some other Republicans called out the danger that Trump posed if he ever had access to the nuclear codes.  Republicans like Rand Paul and even Bobby Jindal.  More recently, Senator Bob Corker joined this chorus and speculated that Der Trumpenführer could trigger World War III.  Yet too many Republicans continue to put their political party above the nation - indeed the entire world - and refused to state the obvious: Trump needs to be removed from office by any means necessary. Worse yet, his base of supporters who thrill at his war against gays, his efforts to allow non-white, non-English speaking Puerto Ricans simply die, and his war against black NFL players continue to support him.  Many in this latter group, of course, claim to be "godly Christian" even as their actions and the policies that they support are the antithesis to the Gospel message.   A column in the Washington Post by a former aid to George W. Bush and another column in the New York Times look at the danger that Trump poses to America and the world.  It is time for true patriots to act.  Here are highlights:

In the midst of a governing crisis, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) has once again risen to his role as the voice of bland complacency. Concerning the open warfare between President Trump and Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Ryan advises “these two gentlemen to sit down and just talk through their issues.”

But what are Corker’s “issues”? He has asserted that Trump requires constant handling to control his volatility: “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him.” Corker has accused Trump of lacking strategic thinking: “A lot of people think that there is some kind of ‘good cop, bad cop’ act underway, but that’s just not true.” Corker has called out Trump’s routine deceptions: “I don’t know why the president tweets out things that are not true.” Corker has talked of Trump’s vacuity: He acts “like he’s doing ‘The Apprentice’ or something.”  [T]he real problem has always been Trump’s fundamental unfitness for high office. It is not Trump’s indiscipline and lack of leadership, which make carrying a legislative agenda forward nearly impossible. It is not his vulgarity and smallness, which have been the equivalent of spray-painting graffiti on the Washington Monument. It is not his nearly complete ignorance of policy and history, which condemns him to live in the eternal present of his own immediate desires.

Corker has given public permission to raise the most serious questions: Is Trump psychologically and morally equipped to be president? And could his unfitness cause permanent damage to the country?

It is no longer possible to safely ignore the leaked cries for help coming from within the administration. They reveal a president raging against enemies, obsessed by slights, deeply uninformed and incurious, unable to focus, and subject to destructive whims. A main task of the chief of staff seems to be to shield him from dinner guests and telephone calls that might set him off on a foolish or dangerous tangent. Much of the White House senior staff seems bound, not by loyalty to the president, but by a duty to protect the nation from the president. 

The security of our country — and potentially the lives of millions of people abroad — depends on Trump being someone else entirely. It depends on the president being some wise, strategic, restrained leader he has never been.

The time for whispered criticisms and quiet snickering is over. The time for panic and decision is upon us. The thin line of sane, responsible advisers at the White House — such as Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — could break at any moment. 

Any elected Republican who shares Corker’s concerns has a political and moral duty to state them in public. If Corker is correct, many of his colleagues do have such fears. Their silence is deafening and damning.

Wow!  And this was written by a Republican at the core of the George W. Bush White House. As noted, a column in the Times makes a similar argument from the other side of the aisle.  Here are highlights:

Don’t say that we weren’t warned.

In a September 2015 speech before the National Press Club in Washington, the Louisiana governor and Republican presidential candidate Bobby Jindal said:

“Donald Trump is dangerous. But not in the way you think. Many people think he’s dangerous. They say, ‘Well, you wouldn’t want somebody like that with such a hot head with his fingers on the nuclear codes.’ And yeah, that’s certainly true. That’s not the real danger. The real danger is that ironically Donald Trump could destroy America’s chance to be great again.”

During the second Republican presidential debate that same month, the CNN anchor Jake Tapper referred to Jindal’s concern about Trump and the nuclear codes, and asked Carly Fiorina, “Would you feel comfortable with Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear codes?”

Fiorina hemmed and hawed, deflected and redirected, doing anything not to say what everyone knew — that Trump with the nuclear codes was a horrible idea. Jeb Bush also cowered when the question was put to him. But Rand Paul was forthright and forceful, saying:

“I think really there’s a sophomoric quality that is entertaining about Mr. Trump, but I am worried. I’m very concerned about him, having him in charge of the nuclear weapons, because I think his response, his visceral response to attack people on their appearance — short, tall, fat, ugly — my goodness, that happened in junior high. Are we not way above that? Would we not all be worried to have someone like that in charge of the nuclear arsenal?”

Hillary Clinton warned during the campaign, in a foreign policy speech in June 2016, “This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes, because it’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin.”

In July 2016, Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter for his best-selling memoir “The Art of the Deal,” revealed to The New Yorker, “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.”

He continued, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes, there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

That same month, Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia warned at the Democratic National Convention about “giving the nuclear codes to a man who praises Vladimir Putin and Saddam Hussein.”

Trump continues his war of words and measuring of egos with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. While I still find the threat of a nuclear strike remote, it grows less and less remote with every passing day and every insult.

Kim Jong-un is irrational and unhinged, but so is Trump.

No matter whether I agreed with President Barack Obama’s policies or not, I never once worried that he might ignite a nuclear war. That assurance has now been removed. As my colleague Nicholas Kristof, who recently visited North Korea, said of the possibility of a war between our country and theirs, “War is preventable, but I’m not sure it will be prevented.”

This is what Senator Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, meant when he talked to The New York Times last week. The Times reported that Corker charged that Trump was “treating his office like ‘a reality show,’ with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation ‘on the path to World War III.’ ”

Plenty of people tried to warn us about this moment, but not enough Americans took heed. To them, this was sky-is-falling hyperbole. The use of nuclear weapons was a thing of history and Hollywood.

But it is ever so clear that the threat is urgent and real and that the only thing standing between a nuclear strike and us is a set of short fingers that constantly type out Twitter insults. . . . If all this makes you uneasy, good. It should.

GOP Policies Cause Louisiana to Falls into Budget Crisis

The blog has looked at the economic disaster that the implementation of "true conservative" policies under Gov. Brownback and Republicans brought to Kansas.  Less mentioned is what similar policies under Bobby Jindal brought to Louisiana.  What is particularly frightening is that the failed policies implemented in Kansas and Louisiana are almost virtually the same as those being espoused by every one of the Republican presidential candidates save Donald Trump who has yet to lay out in any detail what he would seek to do.  Stated another way, the GOP presidential candidates want to bring economic and budget disasters nationwide as they once again espouse voodoo economics and trickle down economics that have twice devastated the U.S. economy and budget deficit. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had to undo the budget wreckage wrought by Reagan and Chimperator George W. Bush.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the Louisiana disaster which ought to send off alarm bells for anyone contemplating voting Republican in November.  Here are highlights:

Already, the state of Louisiana had gutted university spending and depleted its rainy-day funds. It had cut 30,000 employees and furloughed others. It had slashed the number of child services staffers, including those devoted to foster family recruitment, and young abuse victims for the first time were spending nights at government offices.

And then, the state’s new governor, John Bel Edwards (D), came on TV and said the worst was yet to come..

Edwards, in a prime-time address on Feb. 11, said he’d learned of “devastating facts” about the extent of the state’s budget shortfall and said that Louisiana was plunging into a “historic fiscal crisis.” Despite all the cuts of the previous years, the nation’s second-poorest state still needed nearly $3 billion — almost $650 per person — just to maintain its regular services over the next 16 months. Edwards  gave the state’s lawmakers three weeks to figure out a solution,

Louisiana stands at the brink of economic disaster. Without sharp and painful tax increases in the coming weeks, the government will cease to offer many of its vital services, including education opportunities and certain programs for the needy. A few universities will shut down and declare bankruptcy. Graduations will be canceled. Students will lose scholarships. Select hospitals will close. Patients will lose funding for treatment of disabilities. Some reports of child abuse will go un-investigated.

But even if Louisiana’s Republican-dominated legislature approves certain tax increases, as most expect, the state still would grapple with problems. The taxes — which could include hikes on everything from groceries to salaries — would dig into the pockets of citizens in a state where 18 percent live in poverty and where the median income is 20 percent below the national average. 

Many of the state’s economic analysts say a structural budget deficit emerged and then grew under former governor Bobby Jindal, who, during his eight years in office, reduced the state’s revenue by offering tax breaks to the middle class and wealthy. He also created new subsidies aimed at luring and keeping businesses. Those policies, state data show, didn’t deliver the desired economic growth. This year, Louisiana has doled out $210 million more to corporations in the form of credits and subsidies than it has collected from them in taxes.

The math is daunting: For the fiscal year that ends June 30, Louisiana is facing a $940 million deficit, roughly one-eighth of what the state typically doles out from its general fund in a year. For 2016-2017, which begins July 1, the gap is $2 billion.

On Jindal’s watch, nearly every agency in Louisiana shed employees, and state lawmakers say some teetered because of the losses. The Department of Children and Family Services shrank to 3,400 employees, from 5,000 in 2008, and social workers began carrying caseloads larger than national standards. The state also cut funding for youth services and mental health treatment.

In recent days, lawmakers have zeroed in on a plan that would somewhat narrow the deficit for the rest of this fiscal year but barely make a dent in the $2 billion gap for next year. Lawmakers would raise sales and cigarette taxes while dipping further into a rainy-day fund. They would also use settlement funds from BP, the company responsible for a 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Still, massive cuts would still be required for hospitals and universities.

Since the 2007-08 school year, Louisiana has cut funding for higher education by 44 percent, the sharpest pullback in the nation; Southern has seen its funding cut 49 percent. During that time, the burden of supporting education has flipped: Whereas the state once provided 70 percent of the money its schools spent, now the students support the bulk of the costs — in the form of higher tuition.

A popular “TOPS” scholarship fund — available to anybody in the state with a 20 ACT score and a 2.5 GPA — is depleted. Some students will lose their scholarships, and for a future batch of high schoolers, the fund will be unavailable. Belton said that many students were taking out new loans to deal with the rising tuition or stressing about how they would remain enrolled.

“We’re trying to provide for a middle class in America,” he said. “And to compromise that mission compromises the promise for the state.”

Republicans, despite lip service to the contrary, do not give a damn about America's middle class or average workers.  Rather, corporate welfare and tax cuts for the wealthy are the only real agenda.  Take a good look at Kansas and Louisiana - this could be all of America if the GOP wins the White House and retains control of Congress.

Bobby Jindal Ends Presidential Run

Personally, I never understood why Bobby Jindal ever thought he was a viable presidential candidate.  He may have won the governorship of Louisiana, but I never saw much of the racist, Christofasist base of the Republican Party voting for someone who was of Hindu descent.  True, Jindal is Christian, but most in the GOP base cannot look beyond skin color - which why I find it so baffling that Ben Carson has done as well as he has in the polls of the GOP base.  Jindal may have recognized this reality and seemingly sought to counter it by shamelessly prostituting himself to the Christofascists and adopted every anti-gay, anti-equality, anti-modernity position popular with the worse knuckle draggers of the far right.  Apparently, shameless misogyny and self-prostitution simply was not enough.  Huffington Post looks at Jindal's decision to end his hopeless campaign.  Here are highlights:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) ended his presidential campaign on Tuesday.

"I've come to the realization that this is not my time, so I've come here to announce that I am suspending my campaign for president of the United States," he told Fox News' Bret Baier.

Jindal, who entered the presidential race in June, has remained near the back of the Republican pack since then. In recent months, his persistently low polling numbers relegated him to the smaller televised events that preceded each of the main GOP debates.

Jindal has served as Louisiana's governor since 2008, the year he oversaw the mass evacuation of his state's coastal areas during Hurricane Gustav. Since then, he's established himself as a hard-line conservative  . . . . 

Earlier this year, the governor launched an executive order to fulfill the spirit of HB 707, a defeated bill intended to allow Louisiana citizens and businesses to discriminate against same-sex couples without punishment.

During his campaign, like many other GOP candidates, Jindal threw his support behind Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, citing her religious convictions.

Before Jindal exited the race, Willie Robertson, a star of the A&E reality show "Duck Dynasty," appeared to withdraw his support of Jindal and endorse Trump instead. Jindal's campaign denied that Robertson had broken bad on the governor, saying that Robertson simply "admires" Trump's "business acumen."

My view is "good riddance."  Now, Jindal needs to focus on repairing the huge damage that he has done to Louisiana, especially public education and public higher education. 

"Death Penalty For Gays" Literature At Hate Group Conference Attended by GOP Candidates

As predicted, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz and Bobby Jindal attended the hate group sponsored National Religious Liberties Conference in Iowa where among other extremist propaganda a pamphlet entitled “Is The Death Penalty Just?,” was disseminated.  The pamphlet argues that the death penalty is just, and that homosexuality is among the offenses deserving the death penalty.  The American Taliban is alive and well and increasingly shows itself to be little different from ISIS except for the level of violence it is willing to use. Right Wing Watch looks at the gathering of extremist to whom Huckabee, Cruz and Jindal are only too happy to prostitute themselves.  Sadly, there is little media outcry.  Imagine if the same thing was said about blacks, Jews or Hispanics?  Here are highlights of the hate mongering:

Phillip Kayser is among the several speakers joining Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz and Bobby Jindal at the National Religious Liberties Conference in Iowa this weekend, and as we've reported, he, along with the conference's chief organizer, Kevin Swanson, has called on the government to execute gay people. Kayser's views are so extreme that back in the 2012 election, Ron Paul's campaign tried to cover up his endorsement.

However, it seems that in today's GOP, calling for the execution of gay people isn't beyond the pale.

At the conference, where he is giving two speeches on how local officials and others can defy the Supreme Court's marriage equality decision, Kayser distributed the very pamphlet calling for the death penalty for gay people that caused a stir back when he endorsed Paul.

In the pamphlet, “Is The Death Penalty Just?,” Kayser unsurprisingly concludes that the death penalty is in fact just, and lists homosexuality among the offenses deserving of capital punishment. Ironically for a "religious liberties" summit, he also claims that the government should treat "breaking the Sabbath," "blasphemy and cursing God publicly," "publicly sacrificing to other gods" and "apostasy" as death penalty crimes as well.

He writes that government officials are "subject to Biblical statutes and judgments," claiming that "Christians should advocate the full implementation of all God's civil penalties in every age.... Every Old Testament statue continues on the books, and without those statutes, we could not have a consistent ethnical standard." Even "pagan" nations are obliged to follow biblical law, he writes, as "God held gentile kings accountable to these civil laws."

These people are frightening!  What's equally frightening is that they are completely welcome in today's Republican Party - as is Ben Carson.  

Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal Pander to Group Call for Execution of Gays

While Bobby Jindal's and Mike Huckabee's appear moribund, that doesn't mean that they aren't still busy prostituting themselves to the most ugly and extreme elements of the Christofascist base of the Republican Party.  The same holds true for Ted Cruz who continues to strike me as a frightening reincarnation of the late Joe McCarthy.  All three of these political whores are set to appear at a conference hosted by a radio host who has repeatedly called for the execution of gays.  As Salon notes, GOP debate moderators need to call out all three of them and force them to acknowledge that they are in bed with those who want to murder law abiding Americans merely because they do not adhere to a hideous form of Christianity.  Here are story highlights:

Republican candidates may want softball questions for the rest of the debate season, but here’s something that the moderators should be confronting at least some of them about: Three candidates—Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal—are scheduled to speak this weekend at a conference hosted by a radio host named Kevin Swanson who has openly advocated for putting gay people to death.

The conference is called the National Religious Liberties Conference, and it’s based on the premise that Christians are somehow having their religious liberties stripped from them because they can’t impose their views on others.

“Over the past few years, we’ve seen a marked erosion of the religious liberties that were the bedrock of the founding of our country,” Swanson says in a press release promoting the conference.

[A] look over the list of supposedly oppressed Christians that are speaking at the conference shows that the real source of anger is that it’s becoming harder than ever for Christians to oppress others, particularly LGBT people.

For instance, one of the supposedly persecuted Christians is former Air Force Senior Master Sgt. Phillip Monk, who runs around claiming that he was fired from the Air Force for his devout religious beliefs. This is a lie. Monk was supervising a staff sergeant who was supposed to be training recruits and was using his captive audience to proselytize his version of Christianity, particularly pushing his religious beliefs against homosexuality on them. Using your position of authority to push your religion on your underlings is against military rules . . . . In other words, Monk lost his job for refusing to uphold the value of religious liberty. 

Most of the other people labeled “Persecuted Christians” who are speaking at this conference have similar stories: Two anti-gay brothers who believe they are owed a TV show and are somehow persecuted if they don’t get one. A couple who violated anti-discrimination laws by refusing to let a gay couple rent their building to hold a wedding, even though they use their building all the time for straight weddings.  A couple who own a bakery that pulled the “we don’t serve your kind around here” move with a lesbian couple who wanted a wedding cake. An evangelical preacher who feels entitled to have a public high school advertise his church for him. 

Unsurprisingly, Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, is speaking at the conference as well. Rafael Cruz is a completely unhinged radical, so much so that Ted Cruz has sought to distance himself on occasion from his father. But, as Ted Cruz’s participation in this event suggests, he has more in common with his father than not, including the rock solid belief that Christians are somehow being “oppressed” if they can’t impose their views on the unwilling.

Right Wing Watch has more details on the level of hate and mental derangement of the folks that Cruz, Huckabee and Jindal - and by some reports, Ben Carson - seek to prostitute themselves too.  This trio of hate mongers belong in a nut house, not the White House.  When it comes to mindset, these folks are really little different than the extremists of ISIS.

GOP Candidates Rush to Praise Kim Davis and Subvert the Constitution

Driving home I was listening to a constitutional law scholar on a POTUS satellite radio.  The topic?  The GOP 2016 presidential candidates flocking to support anti-gay County Clerk Kim Davis and breathlessly prostituting themselves to would be Christofascist voters in the GOP primaries. Not surprisingly, the scholar had little good to say about these candidates and he flat out slammed their ignorance about the U.S. Constitution.  Perhaps the most shocking - and desperately pandering - comments came from Mike Fuckabee Huckabee who proved he is unfit for the office of president or any other elected office.  But Huckabee is not alone in his desire to toss the U.S. Constitution into the toilet.  The Hill looks ate the GOP candidate reactions.  Here are excerpts:

The Kentucky clerk who has been jailed for refusing to issue licenses to same-sex couples is getting full-throated support from several Republican presidential candidates.

Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Ted Cruz (Texas) blasted a judge's decision Thursday to hold Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis in contempt of court. 

"I think it's absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberty," Paul said on CNN's "Wolf," citing his home state clerk's "heartfelt conviction.

Cruz, a vocal opponent of the Supreme Court's decision legalizing same-sex marriage this summer, also rebuked the judge.  "Today, judicial lawlessness crossed into judicial tyranny."

"Today, for the first time ever, the government arrested a Christian woman for living according to her faith. This is wrong. This is not America," Cruz said in a lengthy statement posted to his campaign website next to a bright red button for supporters to donate to his White House bid. 

Huckabee, the first to offer a strong defense of Davis this week, blasted putting her in custody in a series of tweets on Thursday afternoon, calling it an assault on religious liberty.

One Huckabee tweet stated:  

Kim Davis in federal custody removes all doubts about the criminalization of Christianity in this country. We must defend #ReligiousLiberty!  

Huckabee went on to say that he was headed to Kentucky to visit Davis.  And former Hindu, Bobby Jindal likewise jumped on the pro-Davis band wagon of political whores.

Call me a cynic, but those riding the GOP clown car who are the most vociferous in their support for Davis are all at the bottom end of the polls.  They will literally do anything to catch the eye of the unwashed masses of the Christofascists in the GOP base.  

Resisting Gay Marriage Is a Losing Battle for the GOP

Despite the fact that polls that show a majority of Americans support the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, many Republicans are pledging to oppose the ruling and GOP governors in Louisiana and Texas are giving cover to Clerk's who refuse to issue licenses to same sex couples, claiming that their "religious freedom" is being trampled upon.  Such arguments are a totally disingenuous twisting of what the First Amendment grants to citizens, but with the Christofascists and their political whores in the GOP that simply doesn't matter.  A column in the Washington Post looks at why this is a losing battle for the GOP and will ultimately marginalize the party.  Here are excerpts:

After the Supreme Court’s historic 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Southern politicians adopted a strategy that became known as “massive resistance.” It doomed the South to a losing battle against not just the court but also a majority of Americans. 

Some GOP conservatives may be on the verge of making a similar mistake in the aftermath of the court’s ruling last week supporting same-sex marriage. At the very time moderate Republicans want to escape positions that isolate them from an increasingly diverse and tolerant country, some hard-right leaders seem ready to double down on a limiting version of “traditional values.”

Poll numbers show why defiance is likely to be a losing strategy. According to the Pew Research Center, 57 percent of Americans support gay marriage. In the aftermath of the court’s decision, this number will probably grow, especially among the younger voters the GOP needs to attract. Among millennials, born after 1980, 73 percent support same-sex marriage.

Denunciations of the ruling came from some right-wing presidential candidates, such as former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. “I will not acquiesce to an imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch. We must resist and reject judicial tyranny, not retreat,” he thundered.

Some moderate Republicans, such as Jeb Bush, straddled the issue, dissenting from the court but promising to uphold the law. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said the ruling “tramples on states’ rights” and that “no earthly court” can alter God’s will, but added that he would comply with court orders.

Cruz’s language was so extreme that it seemed almost a call to ignore or disobey the court. “There is no obligation on others in government to accept the court as the final arbiter of every constitutional question,” Cruz said. Pressed by Inskeep, he affirmed that state officials “should feel no obligation to agree that the court ruling is right.” 

Such intemperate language may have been encouraged by the sneering tone of Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent.
These conservative ripostes recall the aggrieved language used by Southerners after the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was illegal. Conservatives asserted then the South’s deeply held values and way of life had been attacked. . . . . It took federal troops to eventually impose desegregation.

This is the dark American past toward which some far-right Republicans seem to want to steer their party. The problem is that court-bashing may be good politics for candidates seeking support from older, whiter, more religious voters in the crowded GOP field.

History tells us that intolerance is a losing bet in America, and that those who embrace defiance of the courts regret it later. The Richmond Times-Dispatch apologized to its readers in 2009 for its “editorial enthusiasm for a dreadful doctrine” a half-century before. “The record fills us with regret.” 

As I said, "conservative Christian" = modern day segregationist and racist.

ACLU Sues Bobby Jindal For Pro-Christofascist Executive Order

Seemingly desperate to court Christofascist voters n the coming Republican caucuses and primaries, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal - whose approval ratings in hid home state are in the toilet - signed an executive order to allegedly fight "discrimination against Christian individuals and businesses" and grant them a license to discriminate against LGBT individuals.  Never mind that the special rights demanded by the "godly folk" were so extreme that they could not win passage in the ultra-reactionary Louisiana legislature.   And never mind that it was Jindal who after the 2012 presidential election debacle said that the GOP needed to stop being "the party of stupid."  Obviously, Jindal is not taking his own advice, and now he is being sued by the ACLU for good measure.  The New Civil Rights Movement looks at Jindal's shameless self prostitution and the ACLU lawsuit.  Here are excerpts:

Back in May, Bobby Jindal's dream of adding to Louisiana law a religious freedom bill that would "protect" Christians from LGBT people and gay marriage failed so miserably it didn't even pass out of committee – despite him personally advocating for and demanding the legislature pass it.

So the Republican Louisiana Governor, having chastised President Barack Obama for lawful use of executive orders to determine which undocumented immigrants would not be deported, based on their family ties in the U.S., signed an executive order designed to, as he wrote an op-ed, fight "discrimination against Christian individuals and businesses." Not, say, "people of faith," or, "those with deeply held religious beliefs," but "Christian individuals and businesses."

On Monday, after the Supreme Court found same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, Gov. Jindal had his legal counsel draft a memo explaining to all branches of government that his executive order shields government employees from having to, say, issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple, or officiate a same-sex couple's wedding.

Today, the ACLU Foundation of Louisiana, Forum for Equality Foundation, and six individuals filed suit against Gov. Bobby Jindal's "Marriage and Conscience Order," stating "it goes beyond his constitutional authority as governor."

In a press release, the ACLU notes their lawsuit "asserts that the 'Marriage and Conscience Order' creates a class of persons who are protected over others due to their belief that same-sex couples should be denied marriage equality."

Under the Louisiana Constitution, the governor is not authorized to create a substantive right by executive order. The "Marriage and Conscience Order" creates substantive rights in favor of those who oppose marriage equality, and therefore is invalid.

“Governor Jindal has violated the Louisiana Constitution by setting up special protections for those who share his belief system," ACLU of Louisiana’s Executive Director Marjorie Esman said. "In our country no one is above the law, including the Governor. He swore to uphold the laws of Louisiana. This lawsuit seeks to hold him to that oath."

Jindal is an embarrassment and I suspect many Hindus are shaking their heads in disbelief over his lunacy and shameless self-prostitution to religious extremists, most of who are racists as well.