I tried to read Orrin Hatch’s defense of Republican obstructionism

I really did. I got as far as the first sentence: Justice Antonin Scalia was among the greatest jurists in our nation’s history, and decided that the flavor of that bullshit was going to be just a little too rank. So I skipped to the last paragraph, read Considering a nominee in the midst of a toxic presidential election would be irresponsible, and realized that I have become wise in my years in skipping all the crap in between. What’s making this election toxic, I wondered? Has Hatch looked at his fellow party members?

Fortunately, a historian examined Hatch’s rationalizations for me. Reeking ordure confirmed, and that mysterious scent stinking up the joint? That’s cowardice.

If Hatch and his fellow Republicans want to vote against Judge Garland, they have every right to do so. But they should stop being cowards. They should make a substantive argument against him. vote against him, and accept the political consequences of that vote. They should stop pretending that this reckless path they have chosen is anything but a desperate attempt to hold onto a Supreme Court majority.

Dishonest, cowardly, and contemptible. That’s our Republican party!

Could I ever vote for a Blue Dog? Maybe.

collinpeterson

I have never voted for my representative, Collin Peterson.

Peterson is a co-founder of the Blue Dog Coalition, the caucus of moderate House Democrats, and is known for his conservatism. He’s anti-abortion, opposed to embryonic stem cell research, against same-sex marriage and supports the death penalty. He is also avidly anti-gun control.

I can’t stand the guy. Look at that list: he opposes everything I favor. So every time I’ve had to go into the voting booth, I look at his name, and his opponent (who is always something worse), and I just leave it blank. I’m not voting for him or a Republican.

But I might have to change my habits, hold my nose, and punch that ballot in the future. Not only is Peterson endorsing Bernie Sanders, but the Republicans are getting increasingly vile.

Chad Hartman: I would say this sir, I think you are genuine in what you want [but] I don’t think a lot of these people want the help you are offering. I would say this you have talked about the issue of sexuality and have caused plenty of criticism. I just want to ask you if you still stand by what you said a few years ago that homosexuality is unhealthy sexual addiction. Do you still stand by that?
Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen: Yes I do, and I know — I have friends who are homosexual, and I have friends who are former homosexuals, okay? So it is uh — you know the CDC — the Centers for Disease Control — which is not a right-wing organization, I think we can all agree on that — recently came out with the report that we have between 65 and 100 million Americans that have an STD. 65 to 100 million. We’re approaching one third of our population has an STD.
Hartman: Many heterosexuals obviously…
Gruenhagen: This whole concept of promiscuity outside the bond of marriage is not working out real well, and people say, “Well, that’s a social issue.” Do you understand the billions and billions of dollars in health care costs those diseases brings?
Hartman: You are telling the millions of people in this country who are homosexual — and the rest of their lives are no different than me or yours — but that the reason they have described themselves as homosexual is because they have an unhealthy sexual addiction?
Gruenhagen: Yeah you can go on the internet and there’s treatment for sexual addictions right here in Minnesota, whether it’s pornography or unhealthy sexual behavior. You can receive treatment for that and be free from those compulsions.

OMG. The Republicans are making Collin Peterson look liberal! And compelling me to <choke> compromise!

Who is to blame for the current chaos in the Republican party?

I love it when Charles Pierce cuts loose.

For four decades now, ever since Ronald Reagan fed it the monkeybrains in the 1980, hitching his party to the snake-oil of supply-side economics and to the sad remnants of white supremacy, often as expressed through an extremist splinter of American Protestantism, the Republican Party has been afflicted with the prion disease that now has blossomed into utter public madness. That’s the story everyone was too blind, stupid, or afraid to tell. You know who in the media really created He, Trump? Anyone who laughed at Ronald Reagan’s casual relationship with the truth and with empirical reality. Anyone who blew off Iran-Contra. Anyone who draped C-Plus Augustus in a toga after 9/11. Anyone who cast Newt Gingrich as a serious man of ideas. Anyone who cast Paul Ryan as an economic savant, that’s who. Anyone who wrote admiring profiles of how shrewd Lee Atwater and Karl Rove were. Anyone who put Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck on the cover of national magazines based simply on their ratings. Anyone who put Matt Drudge on a public-affairs program. Anyone who watched the conservative movement, the only animating force the Republican party has, drive the party further and deeper into madness, they are the ones who share the blame. He, Trump merely has taken the bark off ideas that were treated as legitimate for far too long by far too many people, most of whom don’t really give a damn about the plight of the vanishing middle class except for its use as fuel for rage-based, self-destructive politics.

I could not believe it when that dopey clown Reagan got elected — that bozo should have been slapped down before he became governor of California. I was even more appalled when the dopier, clownier W got elected, and once again, I was wondering why the media just peddled it as a great way to sell advertising minutes on the news. And now…

Limbaugh and Beck and Drudge and Breitbart continue to be treated as oracles into the guts of the American psyche, and have become the American psyche.

I can’t even bear to watch the network pundits any more. When David Brooks is treated as if he’s the serious, sane one, we’re done.

Even our Republicans are better than yours

I’ve been bragging about the progressive Democrats we have here in Minnesota: Dayton, Klobuchar, Franken, for instance. But sometimes even our Republicans surprise me.

Minnesota GOP Chairman Keith Downey is breaking from leading Republican presidential candidates after controversial remarks about Muslims by Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Downey spoke at “Muslim Day at the Capitol” last week after deadly attacks in Brussels by Islamic terrorist group ISIL. The attacks prompted Trump and Cruz to call for closer scrutiny of Muslims to protect the country from dangerous extremists.

The GOP chairman, who spoke at the annual event for the first time, quoted extensively from letters he exchanged with Asad Zaman, executive director of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota and an organizer of the discussion. Downey told the audience that “the political debate occurring in this context unfortunately is severely hampered by a lack of knowledge about Islam and the Muslim community in America.”

I’m still not ever voting for them. But they’re taking steps in the right direction.

(Before 300 million people pack up and move to Minnesota, I’ll remind you all of the downsides. Cold. And mosquitoes. Also, occasional outbursts of accordion music.)

I knew the Trump2016 trauma was exaggerated

It’s become the standard trope: college students are whiny, delicate, over-sensitive wimps who can’t take the real world and demand safe spaces and trigger warnings. These complaints about students are usually made by ignorant jerks who don’t know any, and who will also be complaining about too PC and of course, the regressive Left, and before you know it, they’ve put all college folk into the cultural Marxist category. Those phrases are good tells to let you know you’re dealing with an idiot.

The latest cause célèbre for the regressive trolls is an incident at Emory University, in which someone scrawled “Trump 2016” on the sidewalk. As the right-wing twits tell it, the students were shocked and horrified and demanding protection from the administration, and the administration rushed to coddle them.

It was all a lie.

[Read more…]

The Bundy clan are filthy vandals

pooptrench

The people who occupied the Malheur refuge were more than just sanctimonious criminals — they were also disgusting. Here’s a gallery of photos illustrating the wreckage they left behind. They trashed the place. They wrecked the land. They disrespected the property of the people who worked at the refuge while demanding that their property rights were paramount.

That photo is of their legacy: a shit-filled trench.

That’s how I’ll always remember the Bundys.

North Carolina: You suck.

The Republicans are flailing about to promote their regressive social agenda, and they’re succeeding, at least temporarily. While we’re all distracted by the spectacle of presidential elections, they’ve managed to control legislatures and governorships in many states, and that means they get to push through all kinds of ugly laws.

So North Carolina has passed a ‘bathroom law’, which seems to be the new strategy for getting public approval of odious legislation. They’re making sure men don’t get to sneak into women’s restrooms, how can you disagree with that? Well, I can, but appealing to modesty and privacy works as a great stalking horse when what you’re really about is oppressing minorities. The NC bill isn’t just about regulating bathrooms.

McCrory’s statement and tweets tonight only mention the so-called “bathroom issue” – but in fact the bill excludes LGBT citizens from protections in housing, employment, and public accommodations. The bill also overturns not only the LGBT rights bill in Charlotte, it repeals similar laws in eight other North Carolina municipalities.

McCrory also keeps emphasizing that it is a “bipartisan” bill. There were a few Democrats who voted for it initially, but how can you call it bipartisan when every Democrat in the senate walked out on the vote in protest? It seems to me that that is kind of the opposite of bipartisan support.

So not only are they passing oppressive legislation, they are constantly lying about it. Business as usual for the Republicans, I guess.

Remember this next fall. The election isn’t just about the highest office in the land, it’s also about the entire poisonous nest of scumbags at every level of government. Vote the Republicans out. Don’t even let a professed Republican be elected to dogcatcher.

jpsheffield

A nice twist on the North Carolina law: see this manly bearded fellow? He’s a transgender man. He’s now required by law to use women’s restrooms in North Carolina.

It’s going to be spectacular, what with all the conservative crania exploding, when someone tries to prevent him from entering the room the law says he must use.

I’m sure there are also transgender women who are going to blow everyone’s mind when they use the men’s room. The proponents are all thinking about enforcing strict gender norms, and they’ve just taken an action that is going to make all the people who don’t fit in their narrow little boxes more prominent.

The War on Bathrooms

It’s getting ridiculous. Now Minnesota Republicans have teamed up to propose a bill outlawing gender-neutral bathrooms. Why are Republicans so obsessed with bathrooms? I don’t know. Personally, I can’t get worked up about where someone carries out excretion, as long as they’re discreet and don’t make a mess.

A striking fourty-four Republicans have cosponsored a bill in the Minnesota House that would block businesses and other employers from providing gender-neutral restrooms or from enacting policies that allow transgender employees to use appropriate restrooms. The bill, like one introduced in the Minnesota Senate on Friday, amends the Minnesota Human Rights Act, the nation’s first nondiscrimination law barring discrimination based on gender identity.

HF 3374 and its identical counterpart HF 3395 defines “sex” as “A person’s sex is either male or female as biologically defined.” The bill does not mention people who fall outside the male-female binary such as those who are intersex, nor those whose sex designations have been legally changed under Minnesota law.

I’m a biologist, and I don’t know how to unambiguously define every person’s sex. Chromosomes? Genitals? Those can give conflicting messages. Culturally, sex is a behavior and an attitude, and that doesn’t align well with the signs labeling bathroom doors. Should I only pee in the presence of people who don’t want to have sex with me? That’s easy — 99.9999% of the human race can share a bathroom with me. And that rare 0.0001% who do would include both men and women. Shall we also prohibit gay men from using men’s rooms? (I shouldn’t say that — Republicans might think that’s a dandy idea for more oppressive legislation.)

Fortunately, this is Minnesota, where the Republicans are a minority, and I suspect that not only will it fail to get out of the legislature, but if it does, our Democratic governor will veto it.