GOP to Retain It's Anti-Gay, Anti-Woman, and Anti-Immigrant Party Platform

In yet another clear sign that the Republican Party remains the party of exclusion dominated by "Christian" extremists and white supremacists, the RNC has voted to retain the 2016 party platform in its entirety with no changes that might expand the the GOP's mythical and non-existent "big tent."  The "social issues" portion of the platform was largely written by Tony Perkins of Family Research Counsel, a certified hate group that is vitriolically anti-gay and seeks a total end to abortion in all cases.  On racial issues, Perkins has documented ties to white supremacy groups and retention of the 2016 platform - combined with Trump's objections to NASCAR ban of the confederate flag and changing the names of military bases bearing the names of Confederate generals - signals that the GOP will play the race card again in 2020.  Much of the opposition to any streamlining and toning down of the party platform has come from Christofascists to whom Trump continues to pander.  A piece Politico looks at the situation and a platform that hopefully harms down ballot candidates who may try to pretend they are moderates.  Here are highlights:

A vote by the Republican National Committee to leave the party’s 2016 party platform unchanged ahead of the November election has infuriated grassroots activists — including moderates who wanted to streamline its message and social conservatives who sought added language on emerging hot-button topics.

The decision by the party’s executive panel Wednesday means the GOP will maintain positions in the 4-year-old policy blueprint — including opposition to same-sex marriage and a nod to gay conversion therapy — and decline to stake out new positions on topics such as police reform, gender identity and third-trimester abortions. Party officials and senior Trump campaign aides had previously discussed ways to pare down the 58-page document to a single note card or abbreviated list of principles, but the effort broke down after several conservative groups registered complaints with the White House.

“America has changed incredibly since 2016 and not updating our platform to reflect that is an unforced error. The RNC should reconsider this terrible decision,” said Terry Schilling, executive director of the American Principles Project and a proponent of updating the platform to oppose efforts to defund law enforcement or permit transgender minors to undergo gender reassignment treatments.

“We can’t go into 2020 with the same platform we had in 2016, and by limiting the ability to make changes you run the risk of having a stale platform. It will be tone deaf,” Schilling added.

At the other end of the GOP spectrum, Jerri Ann Henry, former executive director of Log Cabin Republicans, said the decision effectively upholds “one of the worst platforms in terms of LGBT issues.” Henry, who has spent years fighting for marriage equality within the Republican Party, was supportive of a condensed platform that “harkens back to the party’s big principles and not the minute detail of every microscopic policy.”

But when plans to shrink the bloated platform fell through, the only suitable alternative in her view was to proceed with platform deliberations, which typically occur in the week or two prior to the party’s nominating convention.

The widespread disappointment in the decision to leave the platform unchanged illuminates one of President Donald Trump’s major hurdles as he campaigns for reelection. The same traditional conservative groups that objected to condensing the platform in a way that would have eliminated controversial planks on abortion, parental rights and LGBT issues are now annoyed they can’t change the platform to strengthen its language on some of those same issues and others.

At the same time, positions contained in the 2016 platform on abortion, education, marriage, LGBT rights and family structure could further alienate suburban voters and women. Those demographics abandoned the GOP in droves during the 2018 midterms and the Trump campaign has invested significant resources to try to win them back.

Grassroots conservatives [think Christofascists] view the platform as a mechanism for accountability and worried that eliminating its explicit language on social issues would open the door for Republican candidates to be deliberately vague on key issues. Among their concerns was that mentions of abortion — which comes up 35 times in the 2016 version — would be reduced.

“The full platform is still essential for guiding policy, holding legislators accountable, and for distinguishing policy differences between Republicans and Democrats,” the Eagle Forum had written in its Monday letter to Trump and McDaniels. “We respectfully request that all efforts to streamline the overall platform, which has been forged over more than a century of committed grassroots activism, be resisted.”

With the Platform Committee scrapped, the only official business that is likely to take place next month in Charlotte, N.C. — the original location of the 2020 GOP convention — is the selection of Trump as the party’s nominee. [Trump's] The president’s acceptance speech is expected to take place at a separate facility in Jacksonville, Fla., though the Trump campaign and RNC were still finalizing those details this week.

Trump is Driving Voters Away from GOP

In the wake of Donald Trump's outrageous attacks on Megan Kelly, some in the GOP are belatedly voicing attacks on Trump.  The main point to remember is that while the Donald says outrageous and hatefully things, what he is saying is generally in line with GOP policies and continues to excite the GOP base because Trump isn't afraid to openly voice the hate and bigotry that are typical of today's GOP voter.  Thus, when Jeb "Jebbie" Bush accuses Trump of driving voters away from the GOP, Trumps big sin is openly saying what Jebbie and others prefer to state in dog whistler messages.  The Hill looks at Jebbie's disingenuous criticism of Trump.  Here are excerpts:

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on Saturday said Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is repelling voters by attacking Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.

 

Bush said Trump will not attract female voters in 2016 by speaking crudely about Kelly and other women.

 

"What Donald Trump said is wrong,” he told listeners at the RedState Gathering in Atlanta. “Mr. Trump should apologize.”

 

“What he said does not win elections,” said Bush, who is also a White House hopeful next year. “Worse yet, it is not something that brings people together.”

 

Bush’s rebuke of Trump comes as the two men wrestle for the GOP’s presidential nomination next election cycle.

 

The former Florida governor is running in second behind the anti-establishment Trump in multiple national polls among potential voters.

 

Bush charged Saturday that Republicans will only reach the Oval Office next year by building a path that includes as many Americans as possible.

 

Bush on Saturday fiercely rejected the idea that Kelly unfairly targeted anyone from the GOP’s 2016 field during last week’s contest.

 

“We have candidates complaining that the questions were too tough,” he said. “That’s nothing.”

 

“Dealing with Putin is tough,” Bush quipped. “The big personalities on that stage matter nothing for people in poverty.”

 

“We need leaders to fix these big things,” he added. “We have had great presidents in the past who lifted our spirits with concrete solutions who did just that.”

 

The Donald shoots off his mouth.  Bush's past policies and the ones he supports now continue to attack women and harm the poor.  At least Trump says what his outrageous views are in fact.  Jebbie lies about his real agenda. Actions speak louder than words, and Jebbies past actions speak volumes.

 

 

 

 

Cuckservative - Right Wingers Who Claim Their Country is Being Stolen

Haven't heard the term "Cuckservative" until now?  Candidly, neither did I since I don't frequent white nationalist circles.  But as a piece in Salon discusses, the term is becoming increasingly popular among the GOP base and it use to describe conservative who are allowing "their country" to be stolen from them by the usual targets of Christofascists and the white supremacy crowd but are too cowardly to do anything about it.  Sadly, it is part and parcel with the Republican Party's slide to insanity and open racism.  Here are excerpts from the piece:

In a recent article at Salon, Joan Walsh did an excellent job in navigating the political effluence that is the American right’s newborn obsession with “cuckservatives.”  There, she noted how:

“Cuckservative” started showing up in my Twitter mentions last week, after I suggested Donald Trump supporters might not be the brightest bulbs. As I clicked around, I came to a shocking conclusion: I’ve been uncharacteristically downplaying the amount of racism and misogyny powering the right today. The spread of the epithet “cuckservative” is a sign that the crudest psycho-sexual insecurity animates the far right.

“Cuckservative,” you see, is short for a cuckolded conservative. It’s not about a Republican whose wife is cheating on him, but one whose country is being taken away from him, and who’s too cowardly to do anything about it.

OK, that’s gross and sexist enough already, but there’s more. It apparently comes from a kind of pornography known as “cuck,” in which a white husband, either in shame or lust, watches his wife be taken by a black man. Lewis explains it this way: “A cuckservative is, therefore, a race traitor.”

White supremacists have reinforced the racial intent of the “cuckservative” narrative.   . . .  But, as Walsh explains, usage the word hasn’t been limited to white nationalist circles:

Rush Limbaugh helped spread the term to the mainstream when he praised Trump like this: “If Trump were your average, ordinary, cuckolded Republican, he would have apologized by now, and he would have begged for forgiveness, and he would have gone away.”

At present, “cuckservative” is just one more signal of how the contemporary Republican Party and movement conservatism have become a carnival-like human zoo fueled by the talk-radio echo chamber, one where extremism is now mainstream, and the politically adolescent and immature obsessions of “men’s rights” victimologists — with their “alpha males” and “cuckolding” anxieties — are considered reasonable and respectable points of view.

The convergence of white supremacy and conservatism in the modern Republican Party — spurred in part by a renaissance of toxic white masculinity — has produced what, in the moment, appears to be a series of never-ending climaxes and crescendos wherein new levels of absurdity and paranoia replace previous peaks once thought unattainable. The extreme has become the new normal for mainstream American conservatism.

 

[T]his camp of aggrieved and imperiled white men, drunk on toxic white masculinity, are terrified of their supposed status as “victims” in a more inclusive and cosmopolitan 21st century America. Whereas cuckolding has its foundations in eroticism, the term “cuckservative” has evolved from a related, but ultimately very different, psychosexual fixation: racialized castration anxieties.

 

White men saw themselves as the naturally dominant group in the United States from its founding to the present. The idea of white male privilege as “normal” and a given remains inexorably compelling — especially to the “angry” and aggrieved white men who are the base of the Republican Party in the post-civil rights era.

 

The Republican Party’s fetish for guns, its knee-jerk defense of white-on-black-and-brown police violence and abuse, and its theocratic Christian politics also have many wellsprings in the American South. The right’s desperate efforts to control women’s bodies and reproductive freedoms are likewise a legacy and reminder of how white men’s power has historically extended to their (supposed) ownership over women’s sexuality and health.

Thus, white male anxieties spoken to by those who authored and circulated the “cuckservative” meme are really just evoking a misdirected feeling by some white men that they have lost political power and potency — that they have been, so to speak, castrated.

Jeb Bush and Christie Spout Anti-Woman Rhetoric at Wing Nut Gathering

The willingness of would be Republican presidential nominees to prostitute themselves to the Christofascists continues unabated.   And these political whores have shown that they are prepared to trash smart, independent women in the quest to win the votes of misogynists in the GOP base.   Joining such ranks are Jeb "Jebbie" Bush and Chris Christie who made statements that would make the always delusional Phyllis Schlafly proud.   Think Progress looks at the unseemly self-prostitution at the wing nut gathering this week sponsored by Faith & Freedom Coalition and Concerned Bitches Women for America.   The GOP war on women is nowhere close to being over.  Here are highlights:

“It was right here in this room that we celebrated the burial of the Equal Rights Amendment,” conservative Phyllis Schlafly, who led the fight against the constitutional amendment in the 1970s, told a cheering crowd in Washington, D.C. on Friday.

Schlafly has continued her anti-feminism, anti-women’s choice messaging. She has remained in the spotlight by making incendiary remarks, like that women should be paid less than men so they can find husbands. And at the conservative conference co-hosted by the Faith & Freedom Coalition and Concerned Women for America this week, her anti-choice rhetoric was echoed by many of the Republican candidates vying for the presidency in 2016. 

Many of the candidates who spoke discussed their faith and their traditional family values to justify their anti-choice, anti-equality platforms. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who declared his candidacy earlier this week, listed off his anti-choice credentials, including the fact that he signed into law a partial-birth abortion ban and pushed through a constitutional amendment requiring that parents be given notice when their minor daughters seek an abortion. 

Bush also lent his support as governor to “crisis pregnancy centers,” right-wing organizations often posing as women’s health clinics with an explicit anti-choice agenda that use misleading information and deceptive tactics to try to dissuade women from choosing an abortion.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is likely to announce his campaign within the month, also drew loud applause from the conservative audience when he discussed his cuts to Planned Parenthood funding. 

“When [the Democratic legislature] sends me Planned Parenthood funding year after year after year and I am the first governor to veto Planned Parenthood funding out of the budget, there is no room for compromise there,” he said. 

In 2010, Christie eliminated all family planning funding in New Jersey, cutting off $7.5 million that used to support 58 clinics. The action has had drastic effects on the state and its ability to meet the need for family planning services ever since — nine health centers have been forced to close and impoverished residents have suffered.

The biggest irony is that if these Republicans and the Christofascists really wanted to cut the number of abortions, as Europe has shown, the way to do it is through comprehensive, science based sex education in schools and a ready availability of contraception.  The "godly folk," of course strenuously oppose sex ed and contraception, and in the process make the number of abortions higher than they need be. 

What To Look For In Media Coverage Of Hillary Clinton

Sadly, the main stream media likes to merely parrot the talking points of the GOP and other far right organizations (e.g., FRC's Tony Perkins is constantly given a platform and never seriously challenged on his batshitery or asked about his white supremacist ties), so during the coming slug fest of the presidential campaign, it will be telling to see how willingly the media allows itself to be used to further anti-Hillary, sexist propaganda coming form the usual suspects.  Likewise, it will be telling to see how much of a pass nutcases like Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum are given when they utter insane statements or send dog whistle messages to racists, religious extremists and male chauvinists.   Think Progress looks at things to watch for.  Here are excerpts:

Now that Hillary Clinton appears to be officially tossing her hat in the ring in an announcement expected this weekend, activists are bracing for what could be a second round of sexist coverage.

From one person at a rally yelling “iron my shirt” to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews calling her a “she-devil” on air, the coverage of Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign sparked a national conversation on how female candidates should be talked about in media coverage. As Clinton steps into the spotlight again nearly a decade later, the real question becomes whether anything has really changed.

“The big difference between 2008 and 2016 is that there’s now research that demonstrates the harm that sexist media coverage does to women who run for office,” said Rachel Larris, communications manager for the Women’s Media Center, which co-released a project with She Should Run to guide media coverage on key language that can can harm female candidates.

“The conversation that is evolving between 2008 and 2016 is seen as not just the sexist insults but the soft sexism,” Larris continued. “There’s a wider conversation being talked about and what actually is sexist coverage of women.”

Though many are joking that a Clinton candidacy is a blast from the past, a lot of things have changed since the last time she ran for office, including the composition of the media itself. The New York Times has two full-time reporters covering Hillary Clinton, both women. Even Fox News, which often comes under fire for its sexist coverage, has more women in the anchor chair than they did in 2008. But even though more women might be writing and presenting the news, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the coverage will be worlds better.

“We all live in this culture, and unfortunately this culture can be sexist,” Larris said, cautioning that female reporters can fall prey to sexist narratives.

[O]ver time, as more and more and more women enter journalism, we’ve seen more attention to women in politics. We’ve seen more attention to treating them in a fair way and treating them like their male counterparts,” she said. She also pointed out that the Clinton campaign itself has changed since the last time she ran, and they’ll likely emphasize a different message and her newer experience.

Lawless said that she felt the straight news coverage of Clinton last time around was reasonably fair, but that it was the punditry class that was more of a problem. But when asked if she thought it might be better this time around, she said it would be mixed. 

“The thing that’s tricky about Hillary Clinton is that she’s an incredibly unique candidate. It’s difficult to disentangle whether things said about her are necessarily examples of sexism or whether they’re Clintonisms,” she said. “Somebody goes to a rally and says ‘iron my shirt’ – that’s sexism. If somebody pushes her 87 times after a question and kind of never lets her off the hook – I don’t know, that’s a more ambiguous situation.”

Ultimately, the important thing is to point it out, argues WMC’s Larris. “When voters are made aware of the differences in coverage they respond positively that these messages shouldn’t be part of our election coverage. … People can call out media coverage, you don’t have to have a high position to do it.” 

I suspect that there will be many coming opportunities to call out the media!

The Virginia GOP's Continued Circular Firing Squad

Over 20 years ago, I was elected to the Republican City Committee for Virginia Beach.  The party then was a very different organization and sane moderates were still in the majority despite efforts by Christofascists to infiltrate and hijack the party.  Now, the moderates are gone and to be in the GOP one needs to be either (i) a far right Christian extremist, (ii) an open racist, or (iii) driven by greed and a desire to deny benefits to the poor and destitute and allow the nation's infrastructure to collapse.  Not surprisingly, fewer and fewer voters in high turnout elections find the GOP agenda appealing.  Yet do those in the leadership of the Virginia GOP believe they need to change the party agenda?  Of course not.  They are such fanatical ideologues (and so beholden to the extremists at The Family Foundation) that they simply need to "be more unified."  The fact that their agenda is viewed as poisonous and that the state's demographics are changing don't register in their warped minds.  A piece in the Richmond Times Dispatch looks at the Virginia GOP's ongoing circular firing squad.  Here are excerpts:

Without a victory in a statewide race since 2009, the Virginia GOP would have to overcome increasingly challenging demographics to deliver the state to Republicans in the 2016 presidential election.

Republican Party of Virginia Chairman John C. Whitbeck, elected in January to serve out the term of retiring Pat Mullins, has made it his mission to modernize the party without diluting its conservative principles.   “We don’t need to change who we are, we don’t need to reform our belief system and our platform. That’s not going to happen,” Whitbeck said in an interview.

 

The big challenge for the Virginia GOP, should it opt for a convention, is to represent the range of opinions within the party, said Stephen J. Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington.   “From the point of view of creating a broad-based party with a lot of public support, conventions really don’t get you there,” Farnsworth said. “A few thousand people who participate in a convention are going to be far more ideologically extreme than the much larger population that would participate in a primary.”

UMW’s Farnsworth said the convention-versus-primary debate is just one indicator that the conflict within the Virginia GOP is not just a difference of opinion between candidates, but a more permanent cleavage.  "The idea that Eric Cantor was not conservative enough to win a Republican nomination is a significant departure from were the RPV stood 10 years ago,” Farnsworth said.

Whitbeck rejects the notion that a conservative candidate cannot appeal to mainstream voters.

Beyond fundraising, Virginia Republicans face another daunting numbers game. State voter turnout spikes above 70 percent in presidential elections, which maximizes Democrats’ advantage in Virginia’s increasingly diverse population centers of Northern Virginia, greater Richmond and Hampton Roads.

In 2008 Barack Obama carried Northern Virginia by 234,079 votes. He ran basically even in the rest of Virginia, winning the state by 234,527 votes.  In 2012 Obama again swept the four counties and five cities in Northern Virginia, this time by a total of 231,244 votes. Republicans improved their vote totals in rural sections of the state, but Obama still carried Virginia by more than 149,000 votes.

In 2016, if the Democratic presidential nominee — presumably former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — again comes out of Northern Virginia with a cushion of more than 200,000 votes, the Republican nominee will be hard-pressed to offset the margin.

The population centers that hold the largest segment of the state’s voters continue to grow more diverse. For instance, the state’s most populous locality — Fairfax County, with more than 1.1 million residents — was 69.9 percent white in 2000 and 63.6 percent white by 2013.  In that span the county’s Asian population rose from 13.1 percent to 18.4 percent. Its percentage of Hispanic residents rose from 11 percent to 16.2 percent.

While aware of the state’s voting patterns in recent presidential elections, Whitbeck says Virginia Republicans do not need to reconsider their message.  “It’s all about our presentation, that is the issue.

When your agenda is anti-black, anti-Hispanic, anti-gay and anti-women, its hard to see how you change your "presentation" so that the voters you attack and malign - and seek to disenfranchise - are going to vote in support of your policies.   The Kool-Aid continues to be consumed by the gallons at RVP headquarters and city and county committees across Virginia.   A form of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting somehow to achieve a different result.  Until the GOP, and especially the Virginia GOP, decides to move into the 21st century and face demographic change, I hope their losing streak continues and come the next census, many of their gerrymandered districts will dissolve.

GOP Lawmaker: Women Need Man’s Permission for Abortion Absent "Legitimate Rape"

GOP State Representative Rick Brattin

Despite constant Republican Party claims that there is no GOP war on women, actions speak much louder than words and demonstrate that there is indeed a GOP war on women.  How else to explain Missouri Republican Rick Brattin's new bill which states that “[n]o abortion shall be performed or induced unless and until the father of the unborn child provides written, notarized consent to the abortion.” It's legislation right out of the wet dreams of Victoria Cobb and her fellow Christofascists at The Family Foundation (will Del. Bob Marshall introduce a similar bill here in Virginia?).  The GOP has seemly learned nothing from the Todd Akin debacle.  The Raw Story looks at this mindset that views women as chattel property of men.  Here are highlights:

Republican lawmaker in Missouri is introducing a bill that will require women to receive consent from the man who impregnated them before getting an abortion, Mother Jones‘s Molly Redden reports.

State Representative Rick Brattin filed the bill, which states that “[n]o abortion shall be performed or induced unless and until the father of the unborn child provides written, notarized consent to the abortion.”

The two exceptions to the requirement are “in cases where the woman upon whom the abortion is to be performed or induced was the victim of rape or incest,” or if the woman has “a notarized affidavit attesting to the fact” that the man who impregnated her is deceased.

Brattin told Mother Jones that while the bill allows for an exception in the case of rape, the woman seeking an abortion will have to prove that she has been raped.

“Just like any rape, you have to report it, and you have to prove it,” he said. “So you couldn’t just go and say, ‘Oh yeah, I was raped,’ and get an abortion. It has to be a legitimate rape.”

He insisted that he was using the phrase “legitimate rape” differently from former Missouri representative Todd Akin, who claimed that women cannot become pregnant from a “legitimate rape” because her body will “shut the whole thing down.”

“I’m just saying if there was a legitimate rape, you’re going to make a police report, just as if you were robbed,” he said by way of clarification. “That’s just common sense.”

 Common sense anywhere except in the sane, non-Christofascist world.

The GOP War on Women Continues - Senate Republicans Block Equal Pay Bill

Even after a GOP internal study concluded that the Republican Party confirmed that women find the GOP to be largely radioactive and favor Democrats by a large margin, Senate Republicans blocked the Equal Pay Bill which would have banned salary secrecy and tighten rules to try to narrow the gender wage gap.  Sadly, this move is part and parcel with the GOP's view that women are inferior and not worthy of equal pay for equal work.  It's basically an extension of the GOP view that when not participating in a Republican women group, women should basically be at home barefoot and pregnant.  One can only hope that women will pay attention and cast their vote against the GOP come November.  A piece in Think Progress looks at this latest "flipping the bird" to women.  Here are excerpts:

After allowing the Paycheck Fairness Act to move forward last week, Senate Republicans turned around on Monday evening and unanimously voted to block the bill, which would ban salary secrecy and tighten rules to try to narrow the gender wage gap.

The vote came weeks after the Republican National Committee claimed that “All Republicans support equal pay.” Senate Republicans have unanimously shot the bill down multiple times over the past four years.

The bill includes a number of provisions aimed at preventing the gender wage gap in the first place, which currently means a woman who works full time, year round makes 77 percent of what a similar man makes and hasn’t budged in a decade.

It would ban salary secrecy, in which employers prohibit or strongly discourage employees from discussing pay with each other, thus making it difficult for women to discover unequal practices. 

While it’s illegal to tell workers they can’t talk about wages with each other without a business justification, since it infringes on the right to engage in concerted activities for mutual aid, it’s still widespread: about half of private sector workers say they can’t talk about pay at work.

The Paycheck Fairness Act would also narrow the definitions of what is considered a legitimate business-related justification for pay disparities between a man and a woman with the same skills, responsibilities, and working conditions, while increasing penalties for those who are found to have no reason for gaps. It’s meant to discourage unequal pay scales so that women don’t have to remedy situations by bringing lawsuits, which are time consuming, costly, and increasingly difficult to win.

Republicans say they are in favor of equal pay for women’s work, but they haven’t articulated their alternatives to the Democrats’ bill. Instead they say women are already protected and argue that the gap isn’t as big as the statistics say.

The GOP's Ridiculous War "for" Women

Unless one is a Kool-Aid drinking Christofascist or utterly motivated by greed and a quest for lower taxes, it is becoming harder and harder for saner and rational women to vote Republican.  The GOP at both the state and federal level is obsessed with controlling women's' bodies and seemingly wants women bare foot and subservient to either their husbands or other white males.   Despite this reality, the GOP is trying to "win back women voters" through approaches that would require one to have had a lobotomy or have the IQ of a trainable mentally retarded individual - Karen, are you listening?  Not surprisingly, most women are not buying the disingenuous propaganda.  Here are highlights from Salon n this GOP idiocy:

In an exciting new development for American politics, the Republican Party ran some spreadsheets and crunched some numbers and — lo and behold — have discovered that women vote. However belated this revelation might be, the GOP is running at this knowledge with everything they have.

Yesterday, high-ranking Republican woman Cathy McMorris Rogers unveiled a bold new campaign to reach out to the half of the population the GOP has been trying to keep broke, barefoot and pregnant. And to prove that they are the party of business and branding, Republicans even came up with a scorching new slogan that’s destined to set the meme-world on fire:  “The War for Women.”

That’s right, they’ve cleverly declared that they are not, as is widely assumed, waging a war on the fairer sex — it’s actually all for them. So now the GOP is fighting against those who are saying it’s a war on women.
[W]omen are working and they are making money and they are buying things. Which means that something has changed since 1953 when Cathy McMorris Rogers was put into the cryogenic chamber from which she apparently emerged just this week. 

Because reliable contraception combined with changing social attitudes and laws making labor markets more hospitable, large numbers of women left traditional forms of female employment and sought careers. They are the reason that today’s commentators can have meaningful discussions about “women at the top.”

That’s certainly not something Cathy McMorris Rogers wants anyone to think about too deeply. After all, she’s adamantly opposed to the birth control mandate in the Affordable Care Act . . . .

Instead of helping women maintain control of their reproduction, the “War for Women” is a hodgepodge of stale policy proposals for weak tax credits, a bill to prevent employers from firing women who ask about equal rights in the workplace (shocking that this is even necessary) and the pièce de résistance: a bill to allow “flex time” in lieu of overtime, an employer’s dream legislation that will lower their bottom line while giving the ladies the illusion that they are “free” to work less. (Flex time should be an addition, not a tradeoff for overtime.)

Meanwhile, as the Huffington Post’s Laura Basset points out, the record shows that in this Congress the GOP blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act — a common-sense initiative that would halt the practice of firing employees who talk about their salaries with their co-workers — and refused to bring bills to the floor that would have provided real childcare tax credits, mandatory paid sick leave and family leave and would have required that employers allow pregnant women certain accommodations in the workplace.

The patented GOP reverence for “life” is remarkably absent everywhere in society except on the sidewalks outside of abortion clinics. If these people are fighting “for” working women, they’ve got a funny way of showing it.

[T]these ongoing assaults on women’s freedom from the courts, as well as the insulting rhetoric coming from conservative pundits and politicians, are only helping women’s groups and the Democratic Party raise more money than ever. It appears that women don’t actually like being exhorted to just “close their legs” and seem to understand quite clearly that the Republican Party agenda is hostile to working families and they and their male allies are putting their money where their mouths are.  

Virginia GOP Senator Pushing Denial of Evolution

As I have lamented before, there was once a time when the Republican Party once respected and upheld knowledge, learning and logic.  Those days are long gone and now one cannot help but wonder where the GOP finds the lunatics it puts in office or whether it sends would be candidates off somewhere to either give them a lobotomy or perform some sort of "Stepford Wife" transformation of them into the ignorance embracing morons that the seem to become in most instances.  A case in point is Virginia Republican Senator, Stephen Martin (Chesterfield), pictured at left, who not being content with making himself and Virginia look ridiculous by his comment referring to pregnant women as "hosts" is now peddling denial of evolution.  Blue Virginia looks at Martin's latest batshitery:

Yes, the same Virginia Republican Senator, Stephen Martin, who became a national laughing stock for his comments calling women "the child's host (some refer to them as mothers)," and generally raging against pro-choice advocates (as "very sick people"), is back at it again on his Facebook page (note to Senator Martin: stay off of social media!!!).

This time, he's denying evolution, citing an article on an "intelligent design" site. According to this website's about section, "intelligent design (ID) offers a promising scientific alternative to materialistic theories of biological and cosmological evolution - an alternative that is finding increasing theoretical and empirical support." Of course, that is complete and utter bull****, but there are actually people who believe it (#education system FAIL).

Anyway, it seems somehow appropriate that the guy who views women as no more than a baby's "host" would also deny one of the most important, crucial, and well-evidenced scientific theories in human history. Even more amazing is that this guy is a State Senator, although it's certainly not surprising that he's a member of the Republican Party (Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and many others thrashing around in their graves just thinking about what's become of their once-fine party...). 

I continue to be amazed at the apparent form of mental illness that afflicts the Christofascists and sadly too many in the GOP that  causes them to be terrified of modernity, actually thinking for themselves, and cling to the Old Testament which was written by unknown, ignorant herders more than 2500 years ago.  It is truly a form of sickness and mental illness. 

Pennsylvania Voter ID Law Struck Down

With the nation's demographics changing against them Republicans have sought to limit the ability of those who are not angry white far right Christians and/or those primarily motivated by greed to vote.  Anything rather than change the party's homophobic, racist, anti-women vulture capitalism platform pillars.  One state where this was done was Pennsylvania whether some in the GOP boasted that the new voter ID law would insure a Romney victory in 2012.  Romney lost Pennsylvania and now that law has been struck down by a state court judge.  The judge's reason could equally apply to Virginia's new voter ID law that claimed to fix voter fraud problems that never existed. The New York Times has details.  Here are excerpts:

In a strongly worded decision, a state judge on Friday struck down Pennsylvania’s 2012 law requiring voters to produce a state-approved photo ID at the polls, setting up a potential Supreme Court confrontation that could have implications for other such laws across the country.

The judge, Bernard L. McGinley of Commonwealth Court, ruled that the law hampered the ability of hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians to cast their ballots, with the burden falling most heavily on elderly, disabled and low-income residents, and that the state’s reason for the law — that it was needed to combat voter fraud — was not supported by the facts.

“Voting laws are designed to assure a free and fair election,” the judge wrote in his 103-page decision. “The voter ID law does not further this goal.”

In addition, Judge McGinley ruled, the state’s $5 million campaign to explain the law had been full of misinformation that has never been corrected. He also said that the free IDs that were supposed to be made available to those without driver’s licenses or other approved photo identification were difficult and sometimes impossible to obtain.

Opponents of voter IDs called the ruling a “devastating indictment” of the Pennsylvania law.

James Schultz, the governor’s general counsel, said the state was studying the ruling. “We continue to evaluate the opinion and will shortly determine whether post-trial motions are appropriate,” he said. It was also unclear whether, if there is an appeal, the high court would be able to rule in time to allow the law to take effect for May’s primary.

As in other states that have passed similar voter ID laws in recent years, Pennsylvania’s law was spearheaded by Republican legislators and signed by a Republican governor, in Pennsylvania’s case without any Democratic legislative support.

Opponents contend that such fraud is rare — in Pennsylvania’s case, the state could not point to a single incident — and that the laws were intended to suppress Democratic turnout, since those who do not possess a state-approved photo ID are more likely to be in groups that tend to vote Democratic.

“The type of problem that is addressed by voter ID laws is virtually nonexistent, which does raise the question of why they are passing these laws,” Witold Walczak, legal director of the A.C.L.U. of Pennsylvania, said after Friday’s ruling. “And the answer is that it is a voter suppression tool.”

 

“The court really looked at the actual impact of the law,” Ms. Weiser said. “Some of the past decisions have come without doing a real, close look at the impact. The issue is how they affect people in practice, not in theory. And in practice, it turns out that a significant number of people can’t get the photo ID they need.”

The plaintiffs in the Pennsylvania case included several voters who believed they had been disenfranchised, as well as the N.A.A.C.P., the Pennsylvania League of Women Voters and Philadelphia’s Homeless Advocacy Project.

“We feel we are in a very good position to be able to defend this law when it goes before the Supreme Court,” Mr. Walczak said, “though it would be foolish to try to predict what the Supreme Court will do.”

 If a majority of voters will not support a political party's platform and/or candidates it ought to be a wake up call that the platform or candidates need to change.  When, if ever, will the GOP get that message?

Virginia GOP Congressional Candidate: It’s Not Rape If Your Wife Is "Wearing A Nightie"

Will the GOP war on women ever end?  The anti-woman batshitery seems endless, and not surprisingly some of it is coming out of Virginia.  Take for instance GOP Congressional candidate and Virginia state Senator Richard H. “Dick” Black (pictured above) who must have been separated from Todd Aiken at birth.  It is worth noting that Black is the darling of The Family Foundation which has accused Democrats of "being divisive" because they support equal rights under the civil laws for gay Virginians.  Meanwhile, Black obviously sees women as chattel property of their husbands who must yield to their husbands' desires no matter what.  Virginians need to take a good long look at Black because he symbolizes the mindset of the vast majority of today's Virginia GOP.  The New Civil Right Movement has details.  Here are excerpts:

A Republican candidate for the U.S. Congress is under fire today after a video surfaced showing him opposing a bill that to make it illegal for a person to rape their spouse. It’s not just that Virginia state Senator Richard H. “Dick” Black was against the bill, but — just like Todd Akin — it’s his comments that have many up in arms.

“I do not know,” Black said in an ad made from a 2002 Virginia House debate, “how on earth you could validly get a conviction of a husband-wife rape when they’re living together, sleeping in the same bed, she’s in a nightie, and so forth…”

Citing state police statistics, the ad at the end notes that between 2002 and 2010, “there have been more than 800 reported victims of spousal rape in Virginia.”

Sen. Black wants to become a U.S. Congressman. And given Virginia’s recent history of electing anti-gay, anti-women Republican politicians like Governor Bob McDonnell (Gov. Ultrasound, as Rachel Maddow called him) and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, Black may have a good chance of going to Washington.

Noting that Black “commands substantial support among the conservative grassroots,” Mother Jones reports today that he “has referred to emergency contraception, which does not cause abortions, as ‘baby pesticide.‘ Black also fought to block a statue of Abraham Lincoln at a former Confederate site in Richmond. He wasn’t sure, he explained at the time, that statues of Lincoln belonged in Virginia. He has argued that abortion is a worse evil than slavery. And once, to demonstrate why libraries should block pornography on their computers, Black invited a TV reporter to film him using a library terminal to watch violent rape porn.”

Sen. Black, according to Mother Jones, “was at his most virulent when targeting Virginia’s same-sex couples. He championed legislation to ban same-sex couples from adopting children, claiming that gay men and women are more prone to violence, alcoholism, and suicide.”

In 2003, Black tried to pass legislation preventing same-sex couples to apply for low-interest home loans from the Virginia Housing and Development Authority. The current policy, he explained, “subsidize[s] sodomy and adultery.

There's more, but you can quickly see why Black is a favorite with the racist homophobes at The Family Foundation.

The GOP's Abortion Strategy is Backfiring

For the record, I am no fan of abortion.  However, there are circumstances where abortion is warranted.  In addition, proper gynecological care for women, both pregnant and non-pregnant is an imperative.  The same goes for access to safe and effect contraception.  Yet, because of the Christofascists' obsession with policing everyone's sex lives, and those of women in particular, the GOP (which is a de facto arm of the Christian Right extremists) has been waging a war  against not only abortion, but also contraception and even access to appropriate gynecological care.  As a piece in The Daily Beast reports, the strategy seems to be actually backfiring and causing more late term abortions.  As with so many things, the GOP and ultimately the Christofascist party base are making things worse.  It's a situation where the GOP/Christofascist opposition to science based sex education - they prefer abstinence only sex education - results in more teen pregnancies, not less.    Here are article highlights:

Right wing politicians who are push laws to restrict a woman’s access to later-term abortions presumably do so because they don’t want women having abortion after 20 weeks. But new research from medical school-based scholars finds that other policies that conservative Republicans are pushing, including restrictions on access to clinics as well as constrained access to health insurance, actually result in more women seeking later-term abortions. In other words, not only are Republicans hypocrites—but their hypocrisy is backfiring.

Diana Greene Foster and Katrina Kimport are professors in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences in the School of Medicine at the University of California in San Francisco. Between 2008 and 2010, Foster and Kimport studied the cases of 272 women who had received an abortion at or after 20 weeks of gestation, as well as of 169 women who received first-trimester abortions.

The study found that young, low-income women are disproportionately more likely to seek abortions at or after 20 weeks. That’s partly because of the compounding circumstances young low-income women are more likely to face. Many in the study were either raising children alone, were depressed or using drugs or were experiencing domestic violence or tension. Half of the women having later-term abortions were unemployed, compared with just one-third of women having first-trimester procedures.

But the barriers to accessing abortion services weren’t limited to the conditions of these women’s lives but the context of medical access in their communities. Foster and Kimport found that first-trimester and later-term abortion seekers ranked roughly the same in terms of delays due to “not knowing about the pregnancy” or “trouble deciding about the abortion." But there were four barriers to abortion services that affected late-term abortion seekers twice as much as those who had first-term procedures:

1. Not knowing where to go for an abortion

2. Difficulty getting to the abortion facility

3. Raising money for procedure and related costs

4. Difficulty securing insurance coverage.

Right wing legislative attacks on abortion facilities across the country have only made the first two factors worse. Thanks to archaic and absurd restrictions Republicans in Texas have imposed on abortion providers in the state, a woman in El Paso, Texas, will now have to drive 560 miles—over a 16 hour trek—to San Antonio to access her right to have an abortion. The Texas law has also restricted what doctor’s can tell their patients about abortion options.

At the same time, in the last two years, many states have enacted restrictions on insurance coverage for abortion services. For instance, eight states prohibit insurance policies underwritten in the state to cover abortion services. Eighteen states restrict abortion coverage in public employee insurance plans. Thirty-five states prohibit Medicaid from covering abortions. And 23 states have restricted coverage for abortions within the new health plans to be offered in Obamacare exchanges. Beyond the insurance issue, Republicans cutting food stamps while refusing to raise the minimum wage keeps poor women poor—and further constrains their options.

So, to be clear, right wing conservatives who supposedly don't want women to have later-term abortions are passing legislation in states across our country that have the effect of driving more women, especially poor young women, to have later-term abortions.

Ken Cuccinelli Wanted to Make Divorce Harder for Women

Too many voters I fear still do not fully understand the extent of Ken Cuccinelli's extremism.  Yes, he wants to reinstate Virginia's sodomy statute which has been historically used to persecute gays.  He wants to end all abortions (even in cases of rape) and wants a "personhood" provision added to Virginia's Constitution that would outlaw many forms of contraception.  But many do no realize that he wants a 18th century approach to women's rights and would make it far more difficult for women in abusive marriages to divorce.  Women are in short to be near chattel property of their husbands.  A piece in Slate looks at this aspects of Cuccinelli's anti-modernity, anti-woman agenda.  Here are excerpts:

As reported in the Huffington Post, when Cuccinelli was a state senator, he filed not one but two laws that were aimed at eliminating Virginia's no-fault divorce law—which would make Virginia the only state in the country not to have a law protecting its citizens’ ability to unilaterally end a marriage without giving a specific reason—though the legislation died in committee.

McAuliffe's campaign is right to be suspicious of Cuccinelli's gendered intentions. It is true that Cuccinelli has been pointedly gender-neutral in his public statements about the bills, defending his attacks on no-fault divorce by saying, "This law has everything to do with the breakdown of the family. The state says marriage is so unimportant that if you just separate for a few months, you can basically nullify the marriage." No doubt that's how he'd like it to appear to female voters.

However, a deeper look suggests that his desire to eliminate no-fault divorce is about more than a gender-neutral concern for the "breakdown of the family." The bills Cuccinelli drafted were specifically about empowering spouses who resist the divorce. As the Washington Post reported, Cuccinelli has ties to the "fathers rights" movement, a group of men who agitate to give men more power over divorce proceedings. These groups supported Cuccinelli's bid to end no-fault divorce presumably because they saw it as a way to make it harder for women to end their marriages.

[W]hen relationships are abusive, it's very often the case that the victim wants out but the abuser wants to hold it together. Even though there was technically an exception for abuse in Cuccinelli's bill, those victims—who are largely female—would have had to cobble together evidence that would be necessary to meet Cuccinelli's standards for the exception, a process that would require many to stay in the marriage and endure abuse while gathering proof. Cuccinelli may not see this as a problem, but McAuliffe is right to bring it to voters' attention.

Cuccinelli's world view - and that of his religious extremist backers at The Family Foundation - is both antiquated and frightening.  Gays, women, blacks and others who are deemed "other" by the white Christofascists who make up most of Cuccinelli's support need to turn out in force on November 5th and not only make sure that Cuccinelli loses but that he loses big time.  The GOP forces of hate and bigotry need to be sent a resounding message.

Republicans Praise Obama for Offering Bold Vision to Thwart

As noted in a prior blog this evening, Barack Obama's inaugural speech called upon all Americans to strive to fulfill America's promise of equality to all citizens and to undertake measures to protect the poor the sick and the homeless in a manner that would implement the Gospel message if one takes a true Christian perspective.  I also posited that it will be the Republicans and their Christofascist/Tea Party base that will work diligently to sabotage Obama's efforts.  Now, Andy Borowitz has a piece in The New Yorker which, while in some ways tongue in cheek, actually hits the nail on the head.  Here are column highlights:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Congressional Republicans heaped fulsome praise on President Obama’s second Inaugural Address today, saying that it had given them a detailed list of things to thwart over the next four years.

“My big fear was that the speech would be full of vague platitudes that wouldn’t be helpful to us in plotting against him,” said House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). “Once he started offering details of what he actually hoped to accomplish, though, I realized we had hit the mother lode.”

Speaker Boehner praised the President for citing such specifics as hiring math and science teachers, building roads, and reducing health-care costs: “Now that we know that’s what he’s got in mind for his second term, we can hit the ground running to stop him.”

“My takeaway from the speech was, if we work hard enough, there’s nothing we can’t keep him from doing,” he said.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) praised Mr. Obama for injecting humor into a usually somber address: “I loved that joke about ending political name-calling.”

Sadly, Borowitz is right.  We will see the GOP descend further into the depths of insanity, racism, bigotry and extremism over the next four years.  They can talk all they want about improving the GOP's "messaging" and "communications" but it's all a crock of bullshit.  Nothing will change until the Christofascists and white supremacists are thrown bodily out of the GOP.

Eric Cantor Kills the Violence Against Women Act

Other than perhaps Ken Cuccinelli and Del. Bob Marshall, few politicians in Virginia are more despicable than Congressman Eric Cantor who not only seems only too happy to allow the federal government to go over the fiscal cliff, but also holds animosity against women.  How else to explain his role in killing the Violence Against Women Act.  Indeed, Chloe Angyal, an editor of Feministing.com, went so far as to call Cantor “the patron saint of rapists.”  Sadly, Cantor's conduct is very much in keeping with the GOP's agenda of trample over anyone other than angry white men and, of course, theocratic Christofascists.   Jonathan Capehart has a piece in the Washington Post that looks at Cantor's disgusting actions.  Here are excerpts:

If you were watching “Melissa Harris Perry” last Sunday, you saw my head explode over the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). Not over the bill itself but over the opposition of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to the tribal provision. This provision would give tribes limited authority to prosecute non-Native Americans accused of domestic violence, sexual assault and other crimes against Native American women on Indian reservations. But because of Cantor’s intransigence on this issue, VAWA reauthorization is almost dead in the 112th Congress.

I was so incredulous that I said the House Republicans were trying to protect white men from prosecution.

I think we need to ask why Eric Cantor is going to such efforts, to such extensive efforts to protect men who go onto reservations to rape women. We need to talk about it and frame it as violence against women, but we also need to flip it around and talk about it, this is about protecting rapists. That’s exactly what Eric Cantor and the House Republicans are doing when they are holding this up.

Basically, right now, if you are a non-Native American man who beats up, sexually assaults or even kills a Native American woman on tribal land, you’ll get away with it. That’s because tribal courts do not have jurisdiction to prosecute non-Indian defendants. In addition, federal and state law enforcement have limited resources and might be hours away from a reservation. And then there’s this: According to a General Accounting Office report on “Department of Justice Declinations of Indian Country Criminal Matters,” federal prosecutors declined to take action on 52 percent of violent crimes committed on tribal lands. Of those declined cases, 67 percent were sexual abuse and related cases.

Add the statistics above to those in the chilling congressional findings in the “Tribal Law & Order Act of 2010” and you’ll see why the tribal provision is needed in VAWA.

34 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native women will be raped in their lifetimes
39 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native women will be subject to domestic violence

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) co-authored the VAWA reauthorization, which includes a tribal provision that gave limited jurisdiction to tribal authorities to prosecute non-Indian defendants. The bill passed the Senate with 68 votes in April. Despite ongoing talks that intensified this week and included Vice President Biden, the bill is on life support.

“The only way to reauthorize VAWA this year is for the House to take up and pass the Senate-passed bill,” Leahy said in a statement. “If the House Republican leadership refuses to do that in the final days of this Congress, it is a shame.” And an outrage.

Cantor is indeed a vile individual and along with Ken Cuccinelli and Bob Marshall are representative of a political party that seems to be suffering from rabies or some mental disorder.  Women and every minority group need to work as a coalition to see that these men are removed from office.

RNC Launches Autopsy on 2012 Election

While it ought to be obvious to anyone sentient why the GOP lost the presidency, lost rather than gained seats in the U. S. Senate, and saw its majority in the House of Representatives shrink, the Republican National Committee is launching an official autopsy on the 2012 election.  God forbid that they have a clue that hate, bigotry, racism, pandering to religious extremists, and engaging in a reverse Robin Hood social policy are not the easiest things to sell nowadays  in light of the nation's rapidly changing demographics.  On the other hand, perhaps an official investigation may cause a few in the GOP outside of the lunatic Christianist/Tea Party base to grasp that the party needs a major overhaul on its positions and that Christofascists and anti-immigrant extremists should not be allowed to draft the party platform.  An article in Politico looks at this effort to discover what ought to be obvious.  Here are excerpts:

The Republican National Committee is rolling out a plan to review what worked and what didn't for the party in the 2012 cycle, appointing five people at the top of a committee that will make recommendations on things like demographics, messaging and fundraising.

The Growth and Opportunity Project is going to be chaired by RNC committee member Henry Barbour, longtime Jeb Bush adviser and political operative Sally Bradshaw, former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, Puerto Rico RNC committee member Zori Fonalledas, and South Carolina RNC member Glenn McCall. Priebus, who is running for a second term, is holding a call with committee members to roll out the plan this afternoon.

The plan is to focus on: campaign mechanics, fundraising, demographics, messaging, outside groups, campaign finance, the national primary process and, last but not least, what the successful Democratic efforts revealed about the way forward, and recommend plans for the way forward, sources familiar with the plan said.

Priebus had told a large group of donors in New York last week that the review would be conducted outside the building and would not be led by RNC staff. But sources familiar with the project said that there are 2 RNC senior staffers, Ben Kay and Sara Armstrong, assigned to the project as support staff, saying the goal between them and the RNC members involved was to have, as one source said, "both inside and outside influence" to bring in a several different points of view.  Still, the source insisted that "the GOP has problems but they are solvable. 

Still, given the complaints about the party, the composition of the committee includes at least one Priebus ally - Barbour - and others with ties to Bush-world. It includes demographic diversity, but less so ideologically. Officials said the review will include a broad swath of people within the party, including donors and grassroots members, but it remains to be seen how conservative activists react. The main focus of the review is inclusion of new voters for future victories, the sources said.

The RNC isn’t the only group assessing how 2012 went so terribly wrong. The high command of American Crossroads, the most powerful of the GOP SuperPACs, met last week in Washington, Republican sources tell POLITICO. Heavyweight advisers Haley Barbour, Ed Gillespie and Karl Rove were all in town for the meeting, which featured a discussion of the campaign and the first extensive conversation about how the group should approach the 2014 mid-terms.

Yet even as they attempt to learn from what happened, Crossroads also is preparing to make clear to their donors that they weren’t blind to the difficulties of Romney’s winning the presidency. One of the internal memos prepared for the meeting detailed on a state-by-state basis the group’s final polling in each state and the actual results. Their surveys were closer to the outcome than Romney’s internal data.

Messaging isn't the GOP's problem.  The problem is horrific policies and pandering to religious zealots and white supremacists and robbing the poor and middle class to give tax breaks to the wealthy.
 

The GOP's Lost Civilization

I continue to be amazed at the lunacy and bigotry that now passes as policy and intelligent thought within today's Republican Party.  At holiday parties over the weekend I again found numerous individuals recounting how, like myself, they had been Republicans in the past before the party began to lurch down the road towards a collective lobotomy and mandatory KKK membership.  One need only look at the candidacy of Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli here in Virginia to realize that, absent huge change, the best thing that can happen for the country is the GOP's extinction.   That and the extinction of conservative Christianity as personified by the Christofascists within the Republican Party base.  Maureen Dowd has a wonderful column in the New York Times that looks at the GOP's efforts at self-destruction, particularly the racism, sexism and homophobia that will be the death of the party if allowed to continue.  Here are some column excerpts:

Too bad the Republican Party didn’t have my mom to keep it on its toes. Then it might not have gone all Apocalypto on us — becoming the first civilization in modern history to spiral the way of the Incas, Aztecs and Mayans. 

The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys.

 

Just another vanishing tribe that fought the cultural and demographic tides of history.

Someday, it will be the subject of a National Geographic special, or a Mel Gibson movie, where archaeologists piece together who the lost tribe was, where it came from, and what happened to it. The experts will sift through the ruins of the Reagan Presidential Library, Dick Cheney’s shotgun casings, Orca poll monitoring hieroglyphics, remnants of triumphal rants by Dick Morris on Fox News, faded photos of Clint Eastwood and an empty chair, and scraps of ancient tape in which a tall, stiff man, his name long forgotten, gnashes his teeth about the 47 percent of moochers and the “gifts” they got. 

Instead of smallpox, plagues, drought and Conquistadors, the Republican decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where poor people and sick people and black people and brown people and female people and gay people count.

Outside the Republican walled kingdom of denial and delusion, everyone else could see that the once clever and ruthless party was behaving in an obtuse and outmoded way that spelled doom. 

The G.O.P. put up a candidate that no one liked or understood and ran a campaign that no one liked or understood — a campaign animated by the idea that indolent, grasping serfs must be kept down, even if it meant creating barriers to letting them vote.

Who would ever have thought blacks would get out and support the first black president? Who would ever have thought women would shy away from the party of transvaginal probes? Who would ever have thought gays would work against a party that treated them as immoral and subhuman? Who would have ever thought young people would desert a party that ignored science and hectored on social issues? Who would ever have thought Latinos would scorn a party that expected them to finish up their chores and self-deport? 

Republicans know they’re in trouble when W. emerges as the moral voice of the party. The former president lectured the G.O.P. on Tuesday about being more “benevolent” toward immigrants.

Republicans act as shellshocked as the Southern gentry overrun by Yankee carpetbaggers in “Gone with the Wind.” As the movie eulogized: “Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.”

As noted above, Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli embodies everything that is wrong with today's Republican Party.  In 2013 it is of paramount importance that he go down to electoral defeat like Romney/Ryan.