White Extinction Anxiety is Killing the GOP

The exodus of sane, rational - and I would argue, decent and moral - people from the Republican Party is accelerating as the party base becomes more racist and religiously extreme.  While Donald Trump (with Mike Pence quietly cheering in the background) intensifies his calls to racial hatred and ramps up his pandering to Christofascists, moderates are fleeing the party in droves. The fear - or perhaps psychosis that is fueling the GOP's lurch further and further toward something akin to a mix of fascism and fear mongering straight out of the KKK playbook is described in one column in the New York Times as "white extinction anxiety."  Sadly, the term aptly describes I suspect the bulk of Trump's supporters - including some of our "friends" who, in my view, threw aside morality and voted for the man - who simply cannot see the common humanity in others if they do not have the same skin color (or same sexual orientation).  Personally, as someone living in a white minority city, I simply do not comprehend the fear.  The only thing that springs to mind is what my former New Orleans belle grand mother: some whites simply must have others to look down on and discriminate against to feel good about themselves.  Superior if you will.  My grandmother held such whites in the lowest regard imaginable - white trash was the term she used.  Some may be offended, but the term increasingly describes the GOP base that now revolves around evangelical extremists and white supremacist.  Here are column highlights: 

Strip all the other rationales away from this  draconian immigration policy [Trump's family separation policy]. This is at the core: White extinction anxiety, white displacement anxiety, white minority anxiety. This is the fear and anxiety Trump is playing to. Politico Magazine dubbed Trump “Pat Buchanan With Better Timing.”

[T]he new numbers show that for the first time there are more children who are minorities than who are white, at every age from zero to nine. This means we are on the cusp of seeing the first minority white generation, born in 2007 and later, which perhaps we can dub Generation ‘Z-Plus.’”

America will soon be a majority-minority country. White America is growing older, there are fewer white women of childbearing age, and the white fertility rate is lower than that of Hispanics and blacks. 

All manner of current policy grows out of this panic over loss of privilege and power: immigration policy, voter suppression, Trump economic isolationist impulses, his contempt for people from Haiti and Africa, the Muslim ban, his rage over Black Lives Matter and social justice protests. Everything.

Trump is president and is beloved by his base in part because he is unapologetically defending whiteness from anything that threatens it, or at least that’s the image he wants to project. It is no more complicated than that. These immigrant children crying out for their mothers and fathers are collateral damage, pawns in a political battle to wring strict legislation out of Congress — medieval torture displays meant to serve as deterrents. These immigration policies are for people who conflated America with whiteness, and therefore a loss of white primacy becomes a loss of American identity.

But as noted above, for every new deplorable that Trump recruits to the GOP, more are leaving.  If the racism doesn't drive them away, the conflating of GOP policy with right wing Christian extremism does so.  Of course, it's no coincidence that many - likely a majority - the leaders of the "Christian" "family values" groups rallying to Trump are also all about white extinction anxiety also embrace white supremacy.  A second column in the New York Times looks at the exodus this entwining of the Christofascists' agenda is engendering.  Here are highlights: 

When the obituary for the Republican Party is written, the year 1980 will be cited as the beginning of the end. Reaganism was in full flower, but the big tent was already folding. Republican leaders endorsed a constitutional ban on abortion at the convention that summer, ending the party’s historic commitment to women’s rights and personal freedom.

As pro-choice Republicans, we refuse to support a party that has rightly earned the labels anti-woman and anti-common sense. . . .  As Republicans, we spent four decades working inside the party to produce effective policies helping women and families. Despite growing malice from an anti-choice faction, we kept our disagreements within the family. We redoubled our efforts to find common ground, rather than simply walk away.

But these successes were dismissed by party leaders who became increasingly beholden to the social extremists who were winning primaries in our broken, gerrymandered electoral system.

Our argument was simple: True fiscal conservatives should embrace family planning because it reduces poverty, increases educational attainment and work force competitiveness, improves health and provides people the opportunity to make educated moral choices. We incorrectly assumed that our fellow fiscal conservatives would join us in applauding the reduction in the number of unintended pregnancies, which saved taxpayers billions of dollars spent on the welfare state.

Instead, the policies and programs that led to these outcomes came under constant fire. The far right was more interested in conflating abortion and birth control for political purposes. It is fiscally disingenuous to deny birth control coverage and then bemoan unintended pregnancies and abortion.

The nastiness escalated to personal attacks on men and women who had dedicated countless hours and dollars to the party.

We don’t have the space to outline President Trump’s transgressions, but it is important to understand that his rise is an inevitable result of the hostility to women within the Republican culture. Women’s reproductive freedom has shifted with the wind: Remember that Ronald Reagan once supported abortion rights, as did George H. W. Bush, Mitt Romney and Mr. Trump himself.

We can no longer support a Republican Party that is shutting down low-cost health care clinics offering cancer screenings, basic health services and much-needed family planning services. It has become a party that wants to punish pregnant women by limiting their economic choices, that wants to reduce access to sex education programs that prevent unintended pregnancy and disease.

It is no wonder that women are voting with their feet. According to a recent analysis by the Pew Research Center, 56 percent of women identify as or lean toward Democrats. The gap is even wider among college graduates and minority voters.

It has become taboo within the party to even say “pro-choice.” Most of our supporters gave up on the party as it moved to the extremes not just on abortion but also on other social and fiscal issues.

This Republican Party is no family of ours. And so we say goodbye.

Republicans to Use Virginia AG Race to Attack LGBT Rights

John Adams with Jill Vogel and Ed Gillespie - be very afraid

This fall's Virginia elections are likely to draw much more national attention than in other years and, frighteningly, rolling back LGBT rights and reversing the legalization of same sex marriage appears to be one of the preferred talking points of the GOP attorney general candidate, John Adams.  Adams may come across as a more polished version of Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli, but he is every bit as much of an extremist as Cuccinelli.  Especially on the issue of LGBT rights. Among the knuckle draggers of Virginia rural areas and so-called Tea Party activists - actually Christian extremists hiding under a different label - the message resonates and it will be critical that progressives and the LGBT community not discount the danger Adams and the rest of the Republican ticket pose to basic civil rights.  Not only is Adams and anti-gay extremist, but he is also a huge fan of voter ID laws aimed at disenfranchising as many minority voters and Democrat leaning voters as possible.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the extreme agenda Adams and his fellow ticket mates will be pushing. Here are excerpts:

John Adams, the prominent Richmond lawyer who wants to be Virginia’s next attorney general, is no fan of the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage across the country.

“Totally made up, totally made up,” he told a Tea Party gathering in Virginia Beach last year. “Not in the constitution anywhere.”

But the Republican also told the crowd they had to live with the high court’s ruling unless one of two things happens. Either Virginia secedes from the union, something that did not work out so well 150 years ago. Or the court gets a big makeover.

“I’m an optimist,” he said. “I clerked for Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. You give me four more Clarence Thomases, we’re good. OK? I’m not kidding. We’re good. Because they will fix that court in a minute.”

Adams is running as both blunt conservative and strict adherent to the rule of law. The premise of his campaign is that Herring is neither – that the sitting attorney general has bent the law to advance a liberal agenda . . . Herring, of course, flatly disagrees with that notion. He won election four years ago promising to “take the politics out of the office,” a swipe at the activist tenure of his conservative Republican predecessor, Ken Cuccinelli II.

As attorney general, Herring went on to advance gay rights and abortion access, offer in-state tuition to certain illegal immigrants and to tighten gun control. Herring contends all of his moves were grounded in the law.

Virginia’s race plays out as national forces have politicized the office of state attorney general around the country. Herring and other Democratic attorneys general are branding themselves as the “resistance” to President Donald Trump, much as Republicans cast themselves as a firewall against President Barack Obama’s “overreach.”

Ahead of Virginia’s November election — the nation’s only attorney general’s contest in 2017 —the Republican Attorneys General Association voted early this year to scrap a long-standing “gentlemen’s agreement” with its Democratic counterpart to stay out of contests with an incumbent.

Long regarded as head of the state’s law firm and sometimes as Virginia’s top cop, the attorney general has evolved in recent years into a high-profile, highly politicized figure, said Bob Holsworth, a longtime Richmond political analyst.  “Cuccinelli began the change,” Holsworth said, referring to the attorney general who filed the first suit against “Obamacare,” investigated a university climate scientist and played hardball with the state Board of Health over abortion.

The Herring-Adams contest could grab more of the spotlight than usual. Republicans plan to play up the down-ticket race since Herring is more of a lightening rod than the low-key Northam.  “Mark Herring fires up our base,” House Speaker-designee Kirk Cox (R-Colonial Heights) said with a mock shudder.

And Democrats are zeroing in on Adams’s conservative views as they try to paint the Republican ticket as too far right for a changing Virginia. Gillespie treads lightly on social issues, as does the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, Jill Holtzman Vogel (Fauquier). Adams speaks far more frankly.  . . . Adams volunteers his personal opposition to gay marriage on his web site.

Democrats say Adams takes after someone else: Cuccinelli. They have seized on pro bono, friend-of-the-court briefs Adams wrote supporting the rights of two organizations – the Hobby Lobby retail chain and the Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of Catholic nuns – to be exempted from an Obamacare birth-control mandate due to religious objections.

“He did it on his own, in his spare time,” Herring said in a June 17 debate with Adams in Virginia Beach. “That’s where his passion is, in taking people’s rights away from them.” . . . Adams said his only interest was in protecting religious freedom [the right's code name for license to discriminate laws].

Do not be fooled by Gillespie's and Vogel's relative silence on far right issues.  While not voicing Adams' views, they will nonetheless pursue them if elected to office.  Virginia's women, minorities, non-Christians and gays should be terrified by all three of these candidates. 

Pope Francis, Breeding Bunnies and Ideological Colonization

In numerous posts I have slammed Pope Francis for his anti-gay batshitery while praising his pronouncements on wealth disparity and climate change.  The man, in short, confounds me, and it seems many others.  A piece in Religion Dispatches voices the same frustrations that I have and continue to experience.  Here are highlights:

Pope Francis confounds me. How can a man who is so eloquent and obviously heartfelt when he talks about global poverty and injustice and income inequality start spouting such a collection of reheated papal clichés and utter nonsense when he starts talking about women and sex?

His just-concluded trip to the Philippines was a virtual festival of such comments, some planned and some obviously off-the-cuff–and some even directly contradictory–but most just downright confounding.

In one of the impromptu inflight press conferences for which he has become famous, Francis told reporters in one breath that “[s]ome think that … in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits” but that Catholics should practice “responsible parenthood.”

Some saw this as a breath of fresh air or a major breakthrough for the Vatican. But who in the twenty-first century thinks Catholics “breed like rabbits”? That’s an offensive stereotype of Catholics that went out of date in the 1950s, when most Catholic women got on board with contraception—which the Catholic Church bans.

And he made his comments after saying Catholics shouldn’t use birth control and while criticizing a woman who was pregnant for the eighth time and facing a cesarean section: “Does she want to leave the seven orphans?,” he said, adding, “That is an irresponsibility."

So she’s irresponsible for getting pregnant eight times because she not using the contraception that you say she can’t use? . . . . Francis doesn’t seem to have the foggiest notion that the reason most people don’t use natural family planning is that it’s not reliable. It’s how you end up pregnant eight times.

In case this sounds familiar, it was a favorite theme of Pope John Paul II, who blasted efforts to expand access to family planning for women in the developing world as “contraceptive imperialism.” During the run-up to the historic 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development, which John Paul bitterly objected to for its emphasis on reproductive health care, all the Catholic cardinals met at the Vatican to denounce the conference as “cultural imperialism.”

The irony here is that the Philippines recently liberalized access to contraception that had been blocked by the Catholic bishops of the country in concert with the Aquino administration for more than a decade. The Reproductive Health law that restored government-financed family planning services was popularly supported by Filipinos but stymied for years by the politically powerful Catholic bishops. Who exactly was doing the colonizing here?

Women do have a lot of things to say in today’s society–like they want to use birth control to plan their families responsibly. To bad Pope Francis can’t hear them.

Are "Culture Warriors" Becoming a GOP Liability?

Here in Virginia and in other states - especially "red states" - across the country, the Republican Party continues to shamelessly prostitute itself to the ugliest and most extreme elements of the "Christian Right."   Perhaps this is the expected result of a political party that has allowed itself to become a sectarian party dominated by "Christian" extremists who, if the truth be told, want a far theocracy which would throw the U.S. Constitution on the trash heap.  But, in Virginia and elsewhere, this self-prostitution is becoming more and more of a long term liability as urban areas and younger voters reject the toxic message of those not so far distant from ISIS in terms of their desire to force their religion on all.  As the New York Times notes, Democrats are finally waking up to the fact that calling out GOP extremists can be a winning approach.  Here are column highlights:

Not long ago, it would have been unusual for a Democratic senatorial candidate in Iowa to run a powerful abortion-rights television ad like the one recently broadcast by Representative Bruce Braley.

[P]ersonhood ideas, shared by at least five other Republican candidates for United States Senate this year, have been radical for years. What’s new is that Democrats are increasingly willing to say so. For years they were cowed by the religious right into changing the subject when abortion or birth control or same-sex marriage came up. But now, increasingly assured that public opinion supports their positions, Democrats have become more aggressive in challenging Republicans about their beliefs.

The decision to go on the offensive is in part designed to incite the anger of women and draw support in the November elections, particularly that of single women, who tend to vote in small numbers in midterms. But it is also a reflection of the growing obsolescence of traditional Republican wedge issues in state after state. For a younger generation of voters, the old right-wing nostrums about the “sanctity of life” and the “sanctity of marriage” have lost their power, revealed as intrusions on human freedom. Democrats “did win the culture war,” Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist, admitted to The New York Times recently.

One of the most telling signs of the cultural change is the number of Republicans who are bucking conservative activists and trying to soft-pedal or even retreat from their ideology. . . . . Several other Republican candidates are trumpeting their support for over-the-counter birth control pills, though they remain opposed to the insurance coverage of contraception required by the Affordable Care Act.

In Oregon, the Republican candidate for the Senate, Monica Wehby, is running an ad promoting her support of same-sex marriage.

The shift in public opinion might not be enough for Democrats to keep the Senate this year. But over time, it may help spell an end to the politics of cultural division.

I look forward to the day when Christofascists are not welcome within the GOP - or in decent society.  They need to become cultural piranhas.

9 Sinister Things Christofascists Do in the Name of God

Through the centuries religion has caused untold evil and, as continues to be the case today, the evil is done in the name of God.  And with the Christofascists the basis of their evil efforts is always supposed biblical authority.  Never mind that they disregard huge portions of the Bible and act in a manner usually diametrically the opposite of the Gospel message.  A piece in Salon looks at some of the evil done by today's Christofascists - who make the Pharisees of the Bible look like wonderful people in comparison.  Here are some article excerpts:

Christians may be a super majority in the U.S. They may control the U.S. Congress and, as we all were reminded recently, the Supreme Court. But that hasn’t stopped Bible believers from preparing their children for martyrdom. Web resources abound for church youth leaders who want to make sure their young charges are ready when the lions come for them. Titles include, “Expect to be Persecuted” “Persecution Equals Reward” and “Adventure Game—Persecution of Christians and Paul of Tarsus.”

The Christian persecution complex is absurd. Modern American Christians are not persecuted or under attack.  But for Christians who are truly concerned about hostility toward their faith, I have a bit of advice: Don’t be evil. And don’t let your co-religionists get away with being evil either.

A huge part of the antagonism that even moderate Christians face from outsiders is due to the fact that too many devout believers claim a righteous mandate to say and do things that are truly horrible.  Let me spell it out.

1. Opposing protections and rights for children is evil.Thanks to the influence of biblical Christianity, the U.S. stands alone with Somalia in failing to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Why? Because the Bible instructs parents to hit their children, among other things. Laws that give rights to children go head to head with biblical texts which say in no uncertain terms that children are the property of their fathers, to be punished or even killed in accordance with the father’s religious beliefs and other priorities.

2. Denying young people accurate information about their bodies is evil.The U.S. government just spent a decade and a billion dollars on failed abstinence-only education programs concocted by Bible believers who live in some delusional world where prohibition works and virginity is next to godliness. . . . Instead of medically accurate information and thoughtful conversation about intimacy and childbearing, teens get promise rings and slut shame.

3. Demeaning and subjugating women is evil.When it comes to dignity and equality for women, instead of acting as moral torchbearers, Bible believers have been at the back of the pack for generations, along with conservative factions from other Abrahamic traditions ranging from Islam to Mormonism.

4. Obstructing humanity’s transition to more thoughtful, intentional childbearing is evil.“If a woman dies in [child]bearing, let her die; she is there to do it.” So spoke Martin Luther. But beyond the horrors of women dying after days of labor or bleeding out after unwanted childbirth, lies the incontrovertible evidence that children, families and whole communities do better when parents can plan their families. As one medical student put it, “The failure of any sect to support the benefits to humanity that could be obtained through the use of contraceptive technology is blasphemy.”  

5. Undermining science is evil.Science has been called what we know about how not to fool ourselves.The discovery of empiricism and falsification—a method of inquiry that forces scholars to ask the questions that could show them wrong—is what has differentiated modernity from the Middle Ages. . . . .But the scientific method has also become an existential threat to Bible belief. We know now that the Genesis creation story is myth, neurotransmitters rather than demons cause mental illness, mandrake roots and dove blood don’t improve female fertility or cure skin diseases, and the cognitive structures of the human mind predispose us to certain kinds of religious belief.

6. Promoting holy war is evil.What first flipped my bit, what transformed me from an agnostic into an outspoken full-time antagonist of Bible worship was a conversation with my Evangelical relatives about the Iraq war. From the vantage of my relatives and my childhood church “family,” George Bush needed no diplomatic or cultural expertise; he was Born Again. He didn’t need to seek input from his earthly father about the invasion, because he asked his Heavenly Father. Besides, Jesus is coming soon and war in the Middle East is predicted in the Bible. That makes it not only inevitable, but—in a manner of speaking—desirable.

7. Abusing and killing queers is evil.The Bible’s clobber verses may be open to interpretation, but the fact that those verses have caused centuries of suffering is not. For much of American history, the common term for queer was the biblical “sodomite,” implying that gays are so offensive to God that they pose a threat to society as a whole. Thanks to Christian missionaries, African and Latin American queers also have now lived for centuries now under the threat of violent death.

8. Destroying Earth’s web of life and impoverishing future generations is evil.The book of Genesis may say that only man is made in the image of God and that God gave man dominion over everything that grows or walks the earth. The book of Matthew may say that the return of Jesus is imminent and that his disciples shouldn’t worry about tomorrow, which will take care of itself. The book of Revelation may teach that this world is just a prelude to streets of gold.   But some of us think the lives and loves of other species have moral weight of their own. And some of us think that the intricate web that gave us birth is both precious and precarious, and that the wellbeing of future generations matters.

9. Trying to suck vulnerable people into your poorly researched worldview is evil. It’s one thing to latch onto the supernatural worldview you were raised in or the one that first triggered for you some radically cool temporal lobe micro-seizure or similar altered state. But then failing to do your homework before using your position of adult American privilege to foist your religion on kindergarteners, or families who live in desperate poverty, or people who just got hit by a natural disaster—in other words people who trust you because you are older or richer or more powerful or have more access to the very information that you have failed to use—now we’re talking about a violation of ethics. Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right.

It is quite an indictment, but all too true.

The GOP's Problem With Unmarried Women

Given the GOP's war on women in general, it is little surprise that Ken Cuccinelli lost the women vote by at least 9 points.  The big surprise was, however, that he lost the vote of unmarried women by 42 points.  Yes, 42 points.  This loss makes Mitt Romney's deficit with these women voters look good in comparison.  Apparently, Cuccinelli's obsession with regulating women's private parts - when he wasn't obsessing about gay sex - came back to bite him in the ass big time.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the GOP's growing problem with unmarried woman voters.  Here are excerpts:

The real problem for Republicans going forward is not women broadly but single women in particular. Governor-elect Terry McAuliffe spent most of his campaign time — and money — casting Ken Cuccinelli as a zealot on social issues like abortion and contraception in the just-concluded Virginia race.

[A]ccording to exit polls, Cuccinelli only lost female voters by nine points — identical to the losing margin for Mitt Romney among women in Virginia in the 2012 presidential election. (Romney lost women nationally by 11 points to President Obama in 2012.)

Where Cuccinelli did get swamped, however, was among non-married women where he lost by a massive 42-point(!) margin, according to preliminary exit polling. While Romney didn’t fare that poorly in 2012, his 29-point loss among non-married women in Virginia was more than double his losing margin among women more broadly in the Commonwealth.

Here’s the two-pronged problem for Republicans: 1) They aren’t winning married women by nearly enough to make up for their huge deficits among unmarried women and 2) There aren’t that many more married women than single women in the electorate to make up the margins.

(Worth noting: The married/unmarried divide isn’t just among women.  Cuccinelli won married men by six points but lost single men by 25.)

But, it’s clear from the Virginia data — as well as the 2012 presidential results — that Republicans must find a way to lose single women by a far less wide margin if they want to close a gender gap that it making it increasingly difficult for them to be a majority party nationally in presidential elections.

More reseach will need to be done, but perhaps the unmarried men and women are younger and, therefore, less accepting of Cuccinelli's - and the GOP's - religious extremism and regressive approach to social issues. 

What to Watch in Virginia Today

The polls are now open in Virginia and hopefully the day will prove to be a catastrophe for the Republican Party of Virginia.  And, if such turns out to be the case, it will be critical that the religious extremists and Neanderthals of the Tea Party not escape responsibility for the lunatics that were nominated by the GOP due to these elements.  Meanwhile, it will be a fretful day for political junkies as efforts are made to try to get a sense for what is happening throughout the day.  One big indicator will be turnout.  If turn out is higher than predicted, it will likely bode ill for the GOP ticket of crazies.  Likewise, how the vote in Southwest Virginia splits will also be telling.  A piece in Politico looks at some of the things to watch for.  Here are excerpts:

Turnout.  If turnout drops substantially below the 40 percent mark – if all the nasty attack ads about legitimately flawed candidates leave a chunk of voters so depressed they decide to stay home or vote for the libertarian – we could be in for a more suspenseful election night than most are expecting.

With that in mind, here are the key things to watch as exit polling and returns come in.

Does McAuliffe have coattails?   Cuccinelli’s weakness at the top of the ticket has heightened GOP fears of a Democratic sweep.

Republican attorney general candidate Mark Obenshain is outperforming his running mates by a few points—trailing slightly but still in the hunt. But strategists agree he will almost certainly get wiped out if Cuccinelli loses by six points or more. Democrats say it’s even possible that they could oust Del. Bob Marshall, the social conservative responsible for many of the legislative controversies that have dogged Cuccinelli in Northern Virginia.

The outer exurbs of Northern Virginia are a good place to see if a tidal wave is in the making. Cuccinelli will get crushed in the inner D.C. suburbs of Fairfax, Arlington and Alexandria, but he thinks he can hold his own in the outer suburbs of Loudoun and Prince William County.

Loudoun was long Republican, but it’s become much more competitive. McDonnell won the county, which includes Leesburg, by 22 points in 2009, but Obama carried it by 4.5 percent last year. The Democratic nominee for attorney general, Mark Herring, happens to represent the county in the state legislature.

Also watch Republican-leaning Chesapeake, a suburb of Norfolk on the coast. Obama got exactly 50 percent of the vote there last year after McDonnell won by 20 points. If Cuccinelli loses there, it’s going to be a blow out.

Will black voters show up without Obama on the ballot?  Some African-American leaders have expressed concern that black voters will stay home. If they do, the race will be much closer than the polls suggest.

The McAuliffe campaign has built a huge portion of its field program around mobilizing black voters. Former President Bill Clinton went into an overwhelmingly black section of Richmond to make an explicit pitch for the community to turn out, and Obama was only a little more subtle Sunday.

Is Sarvis a spoiler?  Libertarian Robert Sarvis, who ran for state Senate as a Republican in 2011, has pulled double digits in some polls largely by attacking Cuccinelli over his views on social issues like gay marriage.

A lot of people who tell pollsters they back Sarvis will probably stay home rather than vote for a candidate who has no shot of winning. But Cuccinelli hopes a bulk of them break his way out of a desire to beat McAuliffe.

Internal McAuliffe forecasts show the first 5 percent for Sarvis probably comes evenly from McAuliffe and Cuccinelli, but anything above that threshold comes two-to-one from the Republicans.

How big is the gender gap? McAuliffe is outspending Cuccinelli 10-to-1 on TV in the final days. His ads have suggested the Republican would outlaw common forms of birth control, toughen the requirements to get divorced and make it nearly impossible to get an abortion. Cuccinelli says these claims are ridiculous, but he chose not to spend what precious resources he had on defense.

An unmarried woman shopping recently at Trader Joe’s in Centreville, part of Cuccinelli’s old state Senate district, revealed the extent of his problems. Stevie McCauley, a high school guidance counselor, voted for John McCain and Mitt Romney, but she supports McAuliffe. “It’s choice, it’s gay rights, it’s birth control,” she said. “In general, I try to stay away from people who tell me what to do.” Other women interviewed outside the store said they don’t normally vote in off-year elections, but they will this year to vote against Cuccinelli.

Will McAuliffe make inroads in Southwest Virginia?  Cuccinelli will win this conservative swath of the state, but will he get anywhere close to the 69 percent of the vote that McDonnell received four years ago?  Democrats have invested heavily on television to try to sap Cuccinelli’s strength.

It will be a long day of wondering and waiting for result.

Election Eve Poll: GOP Ticket is Losing

Public Policy Polling is out with its final poll and the results are encouraging.  However, it is important that voters who oppose theocracy, the subordination of women, the disenfranchisement of minorities and institutionalized homophobia get out tomorrow and make sure that the extreme GOP ticket goes down in flames.  I for one want to see Ken Cuccinelli lose by double digits.  This is Virginia's opportunity to make a loud statement that the poltics of greed, racism, and religious extremism simply are not welcome.  Blue Virginia summarizes the PPP results:

*For Governor, Terry McAuliffe leads 50%-43% over Ken Cuccinelli, with Robert Sarvis fading (as most third-party candidates do in the end) to just 4%.

*For Lt. Governor, Ralph Northam is beating EW Jackson by 13 points (52%-39%). I find it disturbing that there are 39% of Virginia likely voters who would be willing to vote for this extremist huckster. Should be more like 3.9%.

*In the AG's race, Mark Herring's up over Cuccinelli clone Mark Obenshain, but not by much, at 47%-45%. The problem here, in my view, is that a lot of voters STILL don't realize how extreme Obenshain is, in large part because Obenshain's run a campaign that has obfuscated his views/votes (e.g., supporting a bill that would have made miscarriage a crime reportable to the police within 24 hours; supporting "personhood" legislation that would outlaw abortion and many forms of contraception; being anti-environment and  anti-background-checks; etc.) and even outright lied about them. All voters need to do to confirm these facts is about 15 minutes of using Google. But will they? If they do, then Obenshain should by all rights lose tomorrow by as large a margin as E.W. Jackson.

Turn out is critical and those who are complacent and lazy may rue the day that sat at home if somehow they allow this extremist GOP ticket to pull of an upset.  Go out and vote tomorrow!!

Is Cuccinelli’s Extreme "Conservatism" Headed for A Decisive Rejection

Remember how in the wake of Mitt Romney's 2012 loss to Barack Obama the far right of the Republican Party repeated the usual lie canard that the loss was the result of the GOP's failure to nominate sufficiently "conservative" - think insane - candidates?  Well, the 2013 Virginia GOP statewide slate could not be any more conservative.  In fact, the ticket is the dream ticket of the far right, religious extremists at The Family Foundation.  So far every poll suggests that Virginians are not falling over themselves to support the GOP extremist ticket.  As a column in the Washington Post suggests, ultimately the vote next Tuesday will be a referendum on Ken Cuccinelli and his extreme form of so-called conservatism. Here are column excerpts:

Here’s a statement by Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli II that I predict he will eventually disavow or at least regret: “We need people to know that Nov. 5 is a referendum in Virginia on Obamacare.”

Cuccinelli (R), who abhors the president’s health-care law, made the remark Monday at a Fairfax event in hopes of energizing party activists in the campaign’s final week.

But opinion polls are pointing to a comfortable victory, perhaps a landslide, for Democrat Terry McAuliffe. If that happens, do you think Cuccinelli will describe the outcome as an endorsement of the health plan he’s denounced as a reckless, unconstitutional violation of American liberty?
Neither do I.

But the Republican candidate is entirely correct in portraying the election as an important referendum. He just has the topic wrong.

The vote will be a plebiscite on Cuccinelli’s own, well-established brand of hard-line conservatism: a blend of tea party hostility to government and religious right opposition to abortion rights and gay equality. 

Perhaps Cuccinelli will stage a miracle comeback before Tuesday’s election. But if the polls are correct, then the result ought to smash the cherished myth of the Republican right that it can win elections in Virginia if it just stops offering milquetoast moderates such as Mitt Romney.

Republicans nominated Cuccinelli as part of the most conservative statewide ticket in memory.
Virginia voters have noticed. They don’t like what they see. 

Consider a striking bit of data from The Washington Post’s latest poll. Nearly 9 percent of likely Virginia voters share the following three characteristics: They voted for Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell four years ago. They plan to vote for McAuliffe this time. They view Cuccinelli as “too conservative.”

Cuccinelli has alienated past GOP voters partly through various actions in his job as attorney general, such as harassing a University of Virginia scientist with whom he disagreed about global warming.  “I voted for him for AG, but some of the things that he’s done are absolutely appalling to me,” said Pat Sheldon, a retired Navy lieutenant commander who lives in Prince William County. “His going after the Virginia professor. . . . That to me is a personal vendetta, just because he doesn’t know about climate change.”

The recent federal government shutdown also has hurt Cuccinelli, by arousing ire against his tea party allies.  “I don’t like the fact that he associated with people who are willing to shut the government down, which especially hurts the economy in this area,” said Jeff Hever, 36, of Leesburg, who works in the retail automobile business.

If Cuccinelli loses, then count on the Republican right to make three main excuses about why the outcome wasn’t “really” a rejection of its agenda. They’ll say they were massively outspent. That the government shutdown was unlucky timing. That they suffered collateral damage from the scandal over a businessman’s gifts to McDonnell.

Only one of the three rationalizations is valid. It’s true that McDonnell turned out to be a drag on the GOP ticket, instead of an advantage as expected.

By contrast, Cuccinelli has mainly himself to blame for his disadvantage in fundraising. Many Virginia businessmen who typically write big checks to the GOP supported McAuliffe, or sat on the sidelines, because they didn’t like Cuccinelli’s positions.

What is disturbing is the fact that even if Cuccinelli does goes down to defeat by a landside, the far right elements of the GOP who made him the nominee still will not get the message that people do not like what they and their candidates are peddling.   These people will remain untethered from reality and will likely continue to destroy the GOP.

McAuliffe Calls Cuccinelli Out As Threat to Birth Control

I recently noted how GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli - a//k/a Kookinelli - lied through his teeth to a crowd in Loudoun County when he claimed that he had no plans to limit birth control and contraception.  Of course, in the process of making that statement Kookinelli conveniently ignored his extensive anti-contraception voting record while in the Virginia Senate and his actions as Attorney General.  Thankfully, Democrat candidate has called Cuccinelli out and did everything short of calling Cuccinelli a lair - which is, of course what Cuccielli is without a doubt.  The Virginian Pilot looks at McAuliffe's justified statements about Kookinelli.  Here are highlights:

Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for governor, today accused his opponent of trying to “whitewash” his record on women’s health issues.

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate, told a questioner in Northern Virginia on Tuesday that he would not support legislation that seeks to restrict access to contraception. “I don’t think government should be doing anything about birth control,” he was quoted as saying.
McAuliffe, speaking to a group of students today at Tidewater Community College, said Cuccinelli is not being honest with voters.

“He totally whitewashed his record,” McAuliffe said, noting that Cuccinelli has supported so-called “personhood” legislation declaring that life begins at conception. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has warned that such measures could deny access to some forms of birth control.

McAuliffe was accompanied by Dr. Karen Remley, who resigned as state health commissioner last year over controversial new regulations imposing stricter architectural standards on abortion clinics. When the state Board of Health voted to exempt existing clinics from the new standards, Cuccinelli told board members they had exceeded their authority and could be denied state legal counsel if they disregarded his advice.

“I resigned because the attorney general overreached his authority and stepped on the authority of not just me but all of us,” Remley told the students. “Equal rights to access for health care, especially women’s health care, is very, very important to me.”

Remley said McAuliffe understands it’s important that women “have the opportunity to make choices that they want to make with their health care provider, not with politicians involved in the middle of those decisions.”

Having followed Christofascist organizations who support Cuccinelli for over a decade, one of their number one goals is to see a reversal of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut which struck down bans on contraception for MARRIED HETEROSEXUAL COUPLES and established a right to privacy that reappeared in Roe v. Wade.    Cuccinelli can lie all he wants, but his support for "personhood", his attacks on Planned Parenthood, and his support for bans on abortion under all circumstances tell the true story.  For more information on McAuliffe's plan for women's health, check out the information here.

Ken Cuccinelli Lies About His Agenda on Birth Control

Like Mark Obenshain, the far right extremist GOP nominee for Virginia Attorney General, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli  - a/k/a Kookinelli - is striving to dupe voters into believing that he is a moderate as opposed to the far right religious zealot he is in fact.  Today we saw this effort on display when Kookinelli lied through his teeth and told an audience in Loudoun County, Virginia, that he had no agenda to restrict access to birth control.   The problem is that Kookinelli's record in the Virginia Senate and as Attorney General tells a very different story.  Thus, the truth is that Cuccinelli seeks to close all abortion service providers and would similarly shut down Planned Parenthood even though 97% of that organization's services have nothing to do with abortion.  Think Progress looks at Cuccinelli's disingenuous lies.  Here are highlights:

Speaking at an event in Loudoun County, VA, on Tuesday afternoon, Virginia’s Republican candidate for governor indicated that he does not support any new restrictions on birth control. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said that “government legislation shouldn’t address contraception” — despite the fact that his record says otherwise.

The woman pressed him on the issue, pointing out that supporting far-right personhood measures would “automatically” threaten access to birth control by defining life as beginning at conception. She wanted to know whether to believe the “rumors” in TV ads that claim Cuccinelli favors placing those restrictions on women’s reproductive rights. Cuccinelli responded sharply: “I wouldn’t call them rumors. I might call them lies.”

At a press conference following the event, the Republican candidate was even firmer. “I’ve never supported legislation that invades people’s choices about contraception,” Cuccinelli asserted.

In fact, those comments are a sharp departure from Cuccinelli’s actual record on the personhood issue. In 2007, Cuccinelli co-sponsored a unsuccessful measure to define life as beginning at the moment of conception, which would have outlawed all abortions and some forms of birth control. In 2012, in his role as Attorney General, he endorsed legislation that would have updated the state constitution to grant personhood rights to fertilized eggs. Speaking in support of that proposal, Cuccinelli noted that the fight for personhood “is going to last for all of our lives.”

And even outside of personhood, the attorney general hasn’t exactly proven himself to be a strong supporter of sexual health resources. An outspoken opponent of the health reform law, Cuccinelli filed a lawsuit against it in 2011 — even though repealing Obamacare would obviously eliminate its birth control provision that ensures thousands of women can access contraception through their employer-sponsored health plans without an extra co-pay. And in 2005, Cuccinelli attempted to censor a safe sex event at a university because he considered booths with information about preventing unplanned pregnancies and STDs to be a “soft core porn show.” He has also waged wars against abortion clinics and oral sex.

Back in 2003, Cuccinelli even opposed a bill to make it clear that contraception isn’t a form of abortion, which could have helped protect women’s birth control access from falling victim to anti-abortion attacks.

“Ken Cuccinelli is trying to muddy the waters on issues important to women and we’re not buying it,” Cianti Stewart-Reid, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Virginia PAC, said in a statement. “The truth is, he is one of the most extreme candidates Virginia has ever seen, and that’s why we’ll be working double time to educate Virginia voters about the high stakes for women’s health this November.”

How Romney Would Treat Women

As the father of two smart, capable and wonderful daughters I have real concerns about today's misogynistic Republican Party views women.  Even more, so I worry about the course women's rights and equal pay for equal work would take under a Romney/Ryan administration.   With no daughters of his own, the already empathy free Romney truly has no clue or motivation that we fathers- at least those of not subscribing to the keep them barefoot and pregnant mentality of some evangelical denominations -  have for our daughters.  Nicholas Kristof makes the point in the New York Times that it is not just women who need to be worried about what a Medieval like Romney/Ryan administration would likely usher in for the female half of the nation's population.  He also correctly points out that if the GOP really wanted to reduce abortions rather than inflict far right Christianists views on all, it would support family planning and contraception initiatives, both of which are anathema to the Christofascists.  Here are some column highlights:

IN this year’s campaign furor over a supposed “war on women,” involving birth control and abortion, the assumption is that the audience worrying about these issues is just women.   Give us a little credit. We men aren’t mercenaries caring only for Y chromosomes. We have wives and daughters, mothers and sisters, and we have a pretty intimate stake in contraception as well.  

When it comes to women’s health, men as well as women need to pay attention. Just as civil rights wasn’t just a “black issue,” women’s rights and reproductive health shouldn’t be reduced to a “women’s issue.”  .  .  .  .  [W]hatever we call it, something real is going on here at home that would mark a major setback for American women — and the men who love them. 

On these issues, Mitt Romney is no moderate. On the contrary, he is considerably more extreme than President George W. Bush was. He insists, for example, on cutting off money for cancer screenings conducted by Planned Parenthood. 

The most toxic issue is abortion, and what matters most for that is Supreme Court appointments. The oldest justice is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a 79-year-old liberal, and if she were replaced by a younger Antonin Scalia, the balance might shift on many issues, including abortion.  One result might be the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which for nearly four decades has guaranteed abortion rights. If it is overturned, abortion will be left to the states — and in Mississippi or Kansas, women might end up being arrested for obtaining abortions. 

Romney’s campaign Web site takes a hard line. It says that life begins at conception, and it gives no hint of exceptions in which he would permit abortion. The Republican Party platform likewise offers no exceptions. Romney says now that his policy is to oppose abortion with three exceptions: rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at stake. 

Romney has also endorsed a “personhood” initiative treating a fertilized egg as a legal person. That could lead to murder charges for an abortion, even to save the life of a mother.   In effect, Romney seems to have jumped on board a Republican bandwagon to tighten access to abortion across the board. 

If politicians want to reduce the number of abortions, they should promote family planning and comprehensive sex education. After all, about half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which conducts research on reproductive health.

Romney has boasted that he would cut off all money for Planned Parenthood — even though federal assistance for the organization has nothing to do with abortions. It pays for such things as screenings to reduce breast cancer and cervical cancer. 

Romney’s suspicion of contraception goes way back. As governor of Massachusetts, he vetoed a bill that would have given women who were raped access to emergency contraception. 

Yet Romney seems determined to curb access to contraceptives. His campaign Web site says he would “eliminate Title X family planning funding,” a program created in large part by two Republicans, George H. W. Bush and Richard Nixon. 

So when you hear people scoff that there’s no real difference between Obama and Romney, don’t believe them.  And it’s not just women who should be offended at the prospect of a major step backward. It’s all of us. 

The worse part of the GOP/Christianist hypocrisy, however, is that once a fetus is born, they basically cease giving a damn about it.  They seek to reduce health care availability for children and seek to slash programs that aid children born to poor families.  Once again, I wind the words "HYPOCRITES and LIARS" on my lips.

Paul Ryan Again Attacks Contraception

With the Romney/Ryan ticket seemingly head towards a Titanic like disaster what does Paul Ryan focus on?  Contraception, of course, and attacks on the federal the mandate requiring insurance companies to offer contraception.  To me the phenomenon is symptomatic of the extremism and batshitery that has overtaken the Republican Party.  The good news is that as the Romney/Ryan ticket appears to be increasingly sinking in the polls, perhaps a disastrous loss will put constraints of Ryan's political future.  In many ways Ryan strikes me as a less insane version of Virginia's Ken "Kookineli" Cuccinelli.  A piece in the New York Daily News looks at Ryan's idiotic focus on contraception in an apparent effort to continue to lick the boots of the Christofascists.  Here are excerpts:

Rep. Paul Ryan must feel like the forgotten prince. The rising star in the Republican party is going down on a sinking ship, pulled by the anchor Mitt Romney, and he can’t seem to break free. Ryan has tried and failed to explain Romney’s gaffes, forced instead to stick to his own robotic messaging with tweets like, “We face a very clear choice in this election. Four more years of debt, doubt, decline or a real recovery to save the American Idea.”

When you’re forced to resort to alliteration your campaign is looking a little sad. But worse than Ryan's corny platitudes are his own public statements of late that are being overshadowed by Romney’s missteps shouldn’t be ignored.

While Romney was dismissing half the country as lazy freeloaders, Ryan was promising to end the contraception mandate included in Obamacare.

The controversy over the mandate stems from a tenuous argument that claims religious organizations, which may be morally opposed to contraception, are forced to provide insurance plans for employees that include contraception under the new rule.

Ryan’s flippant, “it will be gone,” may sound great to a rally of die-hard supporters in Florida, but birth control pills, unlike abortion, are not generally controversial.   Ryan’s comments are sure to come up in the vice presidential debates, where Vice President Joe Biden should be prepared to pounce on this remark that shows Ryan, just like his running mate, is completely out of step with mainstream America.

Affordable access to contraception is definitely not something men or women want to get rid of on day one. The rising star of the GOP should have known better.

 Ryan has happily embraced the 11th century mindset that now predominates in the GOP and I hope he meets defeat accordingly.  We need leaders who want to move the nation forward, not take us back to a time when blacks, women, Hispanics and gays were all consistently treated as less than citizens and religious based hate and bigotry ran unfettered.

GOP Dominated Missouri Legislature Passes Anti-Contraception Bill

Despite denials that it is not an anti-woman party, the Missouri GOP just over rode a veto of a bill that would grant special rights to Christianists and allow employers and perhaps insurers to deny contraception coverage under health plans.  Not surprisingly, the child rapist protecting Catholic Conference and other religious extremists backed the bill.   If women voters have any doubts as to what the Republican Party thinks of them, they need look no farther to see the 11th century mindset that the GOP holds towards women.  The alleged "religious freedom" smoke screen invoked by Republicans amounts to nothing more that granting special rights to Christianists to inflict their views on all citizens.  Here are excerpts from a Huffington Post story on yesterday's vote: 

Missouri lawmakers enacted new religious exemptions from insurance coverage of birth control Wednesday, overriding a gubernatorial veto and delivering a political rebuke to an Obama administration policy requiring insurers to cover contraception.

Although Missouri and 20 other states already had some sort of exemption from contraceptive coverage, Missouri's newly expanded law appears to be the first in the nation directly rebutting the federal contraception mandate, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures and supporters of the law.

Republican legislative leaders barely met the two-thirds majority needed to override the veto by Gov. Jay Nixon. 

Shortly after the vote, an attorney for the Greater Kansas City Coalition of Labor Union Women said it was seeking an injunction against the measure. Among other things, the suit being filed in Cole County Circuit Court claims the new Missouri law conflicts with President Barack Obama's health care law and thus should be struck down.

The Missouri measure was championed by the Missouri Catholic Conference, Missouri Right to Life and other religious and anti-abortion groups.

While vetoing the bill in July, Nixon said it was unnecessary because Missouri already has strong religious exemptions in its insurance laws. He also said the new Missouri law could allow insurers to claim a religious or moral exemption and thus deny birth control coverage to women who want it. 

The new Missouri law allows individuals, employers and insurers to cite religious or moral exemptions from mandatory insurance coverage for abortion, contraception and sterilization. It changes a "may" to a "shall" when describing an insurer's duty to provide policies without contraception coverage for those who request it. And the new law gives the state attorney general – or other individuals and entities – grounds to file lawsuits claiming an infringement of rights if they are compelled to cover contraception.

GOP War on Women: Anti-Contraception Flyers Handed Out at Santorum/Paul Ryan Event

The Roman Catholic bishops and those in the Republican Party who pander shamelessly to the Christianist GOP base have continued to whine and rant that religious liberty is under attack - even as they seek to trample rough shod over the religious liberty of others. Among this group, anything that impedes their ability to force their religious beliefs on all Americans is labeled a threat to religious freedom. It's all about them and the special rights that they demand to force others into submission to their beliefs. The debate over contraception is a case in point and, as Think Progress reports, is a lynch pin to much of the GOP agenda. Indeed, anti-contraception fliers at The American Dream Summit in Milwaukee show the real agenda. Here are highlights from Think Progress:

Republicans have gone to great lengths to cast the war on contraception and women’s health as a matter of religious liberty, but literature handed out at a key conservative conference this weekend had an unambiguous message for women: don’t use birth control.

Americans For Prosperity (AFP), a conservative Koch-funded organization, held its Defending The American Dream Summit in Milwaukee on Saturday with a few major headline speakers: Rick Santorum, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). All three insisted that the Obama administration’s rule requiring insurance companies to cover contraception actually had nothing to do with contraception, but rather was an attack on religious liberty.

The next room from where they spoke, however, featured a bevy of literature warning women about the supposed dangers of birth control and telling them that “Chastity is the best choice for single people.” One handout explained that contraception is unnecessary because “Saving yourself for your future spouse is guaranteed to prevent pregnancy before marriage.” Another answered the question “Is it safe?” with a simple “No.” The literature on emergency contraception warned that it could cause cancer before telling women simply, “Be good to yourself. Don’t use the morning-after pill.”

A week ago, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) pleaded with those in his party to “get off” the war on women. If a major conservative group disseminating literature attacking women’s reproductive health at its star-studded convention is any indication, the former GOP presidential nominee’s call is being completely ignored. With 70 percent of women agreeing that President Obama’s contraception requirement is a matter of women’s health, continuing to attack birth control could spell disaster for Republicans in the fall.

Virginia Voters Strongly Disapprove of the Virginia GOP's Christianist Agenda

I have noted many times that in Virginia, the Republican Party of Virginia ("RPV") is a de facto arm of the Christianist hate merchant organization known as The Family Foundation, an affiliate of Focus on the Family and the registered hate group, Family Research Council. Rather than seeking to implement policies and legislation that will respect and improve the lives of all Virginians, RPV's - and often Bob "Governor Ultrasound" McDonnell's - sole concern is not offending or disappointing the demands of the dominatrix like President of The Family Foundation, Victoria Cobb. In fact, the image at left, in my opinion, well illustrates the sick relationship of the Virginia GOP to Cobb and haters at The Family Foundation. If Cobb and her fellow religious extremists are happy, RPV's attitude is that the rest of Virginia's citizenry can literally go to Hell. Happily, this brazen disregard for the majority of Virginians and slavish obedience to The Family Foundation appears poised to bite RVP and Bob McDonnell in the ass. As Blue Virginia is reporting, the results from Quinnipiac Polls indicates that a majority of Virginians are none too pleased with the Virginia GOP. Here are some poll highlights:

Virginia voters disapprove of two hotly debated measures, to make it harder to get an abortion and easier to buy a handgun, as job approval ratings for Gov. Bob McDonnell and the State Legislature both drop, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

Voters approve 53 - 32 percent of the job Gov. McDonnell is doing, down from a 58 - 24 percent score February 9 and McDonnell's lowest rating [since the polls began]

Virginia voters disagree 52 - 41 percent with a new law that requires women seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound examination at least 24 hours before the procedure.

Voters say 72 - 21 percent that government should not make laws which try to convince women seeking an abortion to change their minds.

Voters also prefer 53 - 40 percent Virginia's old law which limited an individual's handgun purchases to one per month, over the new law which has no limits.

McDonnell gets a 77 - 13 percent approval among Republicans compared to 83 - 7 percent last month. His 53 - 33 percent approval rating among independent voters compares to 59 - 19 percent then. Democrats disapprove 49 - 35 percent, little changed from 47 - 34 percent last month.

The state's other statewide elected officials all retain their net positive ratings:

• U.S. Sen. Mark Warner 62 - 23 percent;
• U.S. Sen. Jim Webb 49 - 28 percent;
• Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling 36 - 21 percent;
• Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli 45 - 32 percent.

Women disapprove of the new ultrasound/abortion law 49 - 44 percent, while men disapprove 56 - 38 percent. Republicans approve 61 - 31 percent, while disapproval is 67 - 27 percent among Democrats and 56 - 39 percent among independent voters.

Women want the one-per-month limit of Virginia's old gun law 58 - 33 percent while men are split 47 - 48 percent.

Hopefully, kissing the bigoted asses of The Family Foundation while ignoring the desires of other Virginians will continue to cost McDonnell support and dash his dreams - or perhaps delusions - of a vice presidential nominee nod.

The GOP’s Bizarre Quarrel with Reality

The hornet's nest that the GOP has stirred up through its anti-woman agenda continues to swarm and swirl around delusional Republicans who refuse to accept the reality that it is no longer the 1950's and that women - and gays for that matter - are not going to go willingly back to that era dominated by white males with all others playing subservient or even invisible roles. This inability to cope with objective reality likely arises in part from the fact that Christianists, who by definition, reject objective reality, and ignorance embracing elements of society now form the base of the GOP. One has to wonder when these self-centered white males will wake up. Take for instance Virginia's Governor Ultrasound, Bob "Taliban Bob" McDonnell whose Facebook page makes for hysterical reading as he is incessantly lambasted by outraged women:

Governor, I'm having really bad cramps, been in bed 3 days puking bile, and my period is so heavy, that I've bled through onto my sheets. I would go to my doctor, but was told you're the "go to" guy for medical help on vaginal issues.

You are very famous all over Europe as well and they believe we are dealing with a man from the 14th Century...which was the time they use to burn Women ....for NOTHING. GET OUT OF OUR LIVES YOU are not going to Lord over us. Get another JOB.

You have ignored Virginia women. You represent the Taliban of Virginia. women do not forget. So sorry you feel you must control the lives of others. You will forever be known as the Vaginal Probe guy . . . probably not the V.P. you were hoping for.

Obviously, Taliban Bob should have remained focused on protecting closeted Republicans like his buddy former Congressman Ed Schrock.

But McDonnell is only one of many in the GOP who have declared a war on reality and modernity. A column in the Kansas City Star provides another example of the GOP's self-inflicted wounds. Here are highlights:

Women get a lot of lip service about being equal and fully valued members of society, although sometimes we have to wonder.

As we have advanced in the workplace, so have the fortunes of the men in our lives. “Mad Men” may be a popular TV drama, with its alluring evocation of the days when men were men and women were sexually available office underlings (or were at home wearing an apron). However, I doubt many married men would trade their wife’s income for a chance to relive that era. They couldn’t afford it.

Yet the Republican Party seems to live in a different reality. Here we are, smack in the middle of a presidential race, and the right is busy trying to undo everything the women’s movement has accomplished in the last 50 years — most notably reproductive rights, which were crucial in letting us pursue careers in the first place.

Mitt Romney, desperate to prove his conservative bona fides, has declared war on Planned Parenthood, vowing to strip the nation’s largest family planning service of federal funding. Opposition to abortion is the subtext of Romney’s attack, but the organization plays an even greater role in American society by helping to prevent unwanted pregnancies — and that bugs many conservatives, too.

In this climate, even the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act is stirring GOP pots. The bill passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee without a single Republican vote. It seems Republicans have a problem with new provisions having to do with Native American jurisdiction, and with the fact that the bill extends protection to immigrant women and same sex couples. Heaven forbid that the law protect too many victims of domestic violence!

All of this is quite a shock for women of my generation, who were playing hopscotch during the struggles of the 1960s and ’70s. The feminists of those heady years didn’t quite succeed in quashing male chauvinism. . . . . Now it’s up to new generations of women to defend our ground.

The rebuke of Rush Limbaugh is a start. His vile sexual taunting of a Georgetown law school student who dared to speak up to Congress was so excessive that advertisers abandoned his show in droves. It was remarkable, considering that vileness is his brand.

What truly enraged women about the episode were the craven excuses for Limbaugh’s comments offered by leading Republicans, including three of the four remaining presidential candidates. They couldn’t muster the moral courage to stand up to Limbaugh — because they desperately need his approval.

It would be convenient to write off these affronts to women as the last gasps of male privilege. The forces of patriarchy have lost, and all they have left is their resentment. But we should remember that resentment is powerful fuel for political movements, and the fires of backlash are still burning on the American right. The challenge for women (and their male allies) is to hold up a mirror to the real America — where the vast majority of women want and, at key points in their lives, use birth control — and to expose the phoney arguments and bogus values of the party that would deny them that right.

The Christianists have pushed the GOP into this anti-woman territory and I hope it drags the GOP down. I just hope that those who may be thrown from office or see their ambitions dashed remember who set them on this backward facing journey.

d more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/03/16/3495765/woman-troubles-the-gops-bizarre.html#storylink=cpy

d more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/03/16/3495765/woman-troubles-the-gops-bizarre.html#storylink=cpy