Republican Senator Ted Cruz (Texas) is sort of the new Michele Bachmann, the new take-no-prisoners hero of the grassroots right wing of our country, who from every rooftop has bellowed his determination to stop the wheels of government turning if he can’t get the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as “Obamacare”) repealed. He’s tarred any Republican who can count votes and see legislative reality a “surrender caucus.” He’s a demagogue, pure and simple. To some, the Brylcreem-wearing Senator from Texas is even worse than a slightly more masculine Michele Bachman, he’s a Joseph McCarthy redux.

It’s been a fascinating week for Cruz, as his efforts to filibuster a budget bill lacking language that would defund Obamacare were finally revealed to be a pipe dream. That hasn’t prevented Cruz from alienating almost all of his Republican colleagues in Congress, among whom, according to the National Review, Cruz is currently so unpopular that “Nancy Pelosi is more well-liked around here.” Wow.

But we keep learning more. Cruz went to Princeton for his A.B. in public policy (he graduated summe cum laude) before moving on to Harvard Law School, where “during the first week, he announced that he was creating a study group and only people with high GPAs from the Big Three Ivies could apply for admission. In short, Ted managed to come off as a pompous asshole at Harvard Law.” Cruz is posing as a man of the people, but there are few people more nakedly elitist than he is. But then again, IOKIYAR (It’s OK if you’re a Republican), I guess. Jason Zengerle at GQ has reported much the same thing about the Ivy League elitism.

But it gets better once you delve into the details of his undergrad days, remembered by those who knew him firsthand, including his “creepy” habit of wandering over the women’s side of the dormitory wearing little more than a paisley bathrobe, as The Daily Beast reported:

[S]everal fellow classmates who asked that their names not be used described the young Cruz with words like “abrasive,” “intense,” “strident,” “crank,” and “arrogant.” Four independently offered the word “creepy,” with some pointing to Cruz’s habit of donning a paisley bathrobe and walking to the opposite end of their dorm’s hallway where the female students lived.

Virtually everyone described Cruz as very smart and as a flaming asshole—read the above links for more of that. The overall portrait emerges of a man who made up his mind—about everything—when he was still in high school. Cruz is a bit like a grown-up, oilier version of Andrew Breitbart’s boy wonder, Ben Shapiro.

The hard right is hoping for another Democratic debacle à la 2010, but I’m not seeing it. Obamacare is not legislation currently under consider consideration—it’s been passed, the conservative-leaning Supreme Court has okayed almost all of it. The economy is doing much better than it was doing in 2010, and we haven’t been signing a lot of trillion-dollar bailouts into law lately. Off years are always tough on the White House incumbent party, but Republicans relying on that pattern may be disappointed next year. Right now it looks a lot more like that “Republican Civil War” we keep hearing about.

On top of everything else, shutting down the government in the name of stopping Obamacare from going into effect is massively unpopular:

Opposition to defunding increases sharply when the issue of shutting down the government and defaulting is included. In that case, Americans oppose defunding 59 percent to 19 percent, with 18 percent of respondents unsure.

So yeah, keeping pushing that message, Senator Cruz.

It’s gotten so bad for Cruz lately that Republicans are feeding FOX News the kind of opposition research usually reserved for the vilest of pinko Democrats (see video below). Whatever happens, Cruz is a wildly entertaining figure and I hope he remains the greasy public face of the Republican Party for a while to come.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Republican Healthcare
Vile Republican policies set the stage for socialist revolution in America

 
Although they’re not quite yet on the endangered species list, the dwindling number of Americans who self-identify as “Republican” must have the GOP’s top political strategists laying awake at night. They’re the smart guys and gals who are really the ones in charge of “the stupid party.”

Talk about a fuckin’ thankless task! Can you imagine?

According to Think Progress, the rolling average of GOP party identification prepared by The Pollster.com shows Republicans at 22% of the American public, a percentage that has been declining steadily for several years as the party caters more and more to its fringiest members, who are increasingly looking like its only members! Their problem with broadening the party’s appeal goes far beyond a “Catch 22%” as an apparent civil war among the GOP’s constituent parts is coming to a nasty boil. Damned if they do, damned it they don’t, should the GOP decide to join this century, they’d lose the remainder of their old guard voters.

Pew Research Center has it looking even worse for the GOP, down to only 19% of Americans! If this is accurate, then what percentage of these folks would live north of the Mason-Dixon line? It can’t be that many anymore. And Republican voters aren’t merely primarily located in southern states, they’d also, in the main, be some pretty long in the tooth southerners.

Senior fellow at both the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress, Think Progress blogger Ruy Teixeira writes that the Republicans’ lockstep intransigence to the Affordable Healthcare Act, while offering nothing better—nothing at all—to replace it, is being seen as just a big “fuck you” to the folks that will be covered now.

Maybe they’re placing their bets on the wrong horse, especially when it comes to Obamacare. Start with the fact that roughly a third of the opposition to Obamacare stems from the view that the program isn’t liberal enough rather than too liberal. That doesn’t fit with the GOP’s blow-it-up paradigm. Nor do recent polls that show an average of only 35 percent saying they want to repeal Obamacare as opposed to keeping it as is or with changes.

That’s not an insignificant point: I have had pollsters call me on three separate occasions over the past four years to ask about my attitude towards the healthcare law and I was not once given the option of saying “I’m not much of a supporter of the ACA because it’s not liberal enough” or to in any way indicate that I thought the expansion of Medicare for all would be a better way to go. I was only offered a “yay or nay,” vote it up or down choice. From the tone of the questioning, I’m pretty darned sure that each of these polls were paid for by conservative groups. It seemed odd that they were conducting polls, not to find out scientifically what the public really thinks, but to instead get them to confirm or imply agreement—even if nothing of the sort was intended—by deliberately proscribing the parameters of the debate to twist statistical arms.

The point being that MY opinion—I’m a staunch socialist—was being tallied as an “I’m agin’ it!” vote and used to confirm some delusional Republican bias. That’s simply ridiculous.

Apparently equating better access to healthcare with Hitler has been a bit of a bust for the GOP. A recent Hart Research/SEIU poll on voter attitudes toward Obamacare vis a vis the 2014 races found that:

Voters feel intensely negative toward Republican candidates who have worked to repeal or undermine the law, especially those who are unwilling to help their constituents take advantage of the benefits and protections available to them under the ACA….Seventy-one percent of voters express unfavorable feelings toward “a Republican who, as an elected official, refuses to help individuals and small businesses understand how best to deal with Obamacare and take advantage of its benefits.”….Two-thirds of all voters (including 60% of undecided voters) have an unfavorable impression of “a Republican who repeatedly voted to cut the funding needed to effectively implement the law, and refuses to provide information to employers and individuals about it.”

“Intensely negative” doesn’t really beat around the bush, but you know, they’re assholes, pure and simple! It’s always been a puzzle to me why it practically takes an electric cattle prod to get most Democrats and non-Republican leaning independents to actually vote, despite the clear-cut shit sandwich alternative if they fail to make that tiny, tiny civic effort. I’m looking at YOU lazy-ass North Carolinians who didn’t even bother to vote last year. Look what it got you, especially those of you who just got your jobless benefits cut.

If you could do it all over again, would you do anything differently?

More from the Hart survey summation:

Our generic congressional trial heat shows a relatively narrow, three-point advantage for Democratic candidates (44%) over Republicans (41%) nationwide. However, when the choice in the 2014 election is presented as “a Democrat who favors fixing and improving Obamacare rather than repealing it altogether” versus “a Republican who wants to totally repeal Obamacare,” voters favor the Democratic candidate (51%) over the Republican candidate (36%) by 15 percentage points.

The biggest problem the Republicans have is… themselves. Almost everyone hates ‘em, so why not double down on everything they hate the most?

And if you happened to catch any of the news coverage of this weekend’s anniversary of the March on Washington, exactly what sort of snake the GOP has stepped on by trying to curb voter rights for African-Americans is becoming pretty apparent, isn’t it?

Don’t ever change GOP!

The skeleton with the wig on, above left, and her husband, don’t want poor people to have health insurance

You might think from the way that it’s getting reported that the 13 members of the Maine Republican Party who are leaving the GOP decided to ditch the party because it had gotten too extreme, too stupid, too racist, too xenophobic, was in bed with the oligarchs, etc.

“As Maine goes, so goes the nation,” you maybe hoped?

Well, if you actually read the entire resignation letter (which frankly isn’t really all that interesting) that’s not what they’re saying at all. These folks are hardcore Tea party types who loathe John Boehner and who are supportive of Maine’s governor Paul LePage, surely one of the very dumbest people in America to currently hold an important political office. There’s fierce competition as to who is actually the dumbest, but LePage is every bit as egregiously inane as Michele Bachmann, Steve King or Louie Gohmert are. Just yesterday LePage was revealed to have said that Obama “hates white people” at a private GOP fundraiser last week. Truly, when you assert support for Paul LePage, you are endorsing stupidity itself, in its most offensive, know-nothing, force your ignorance on others form.

So yeah, it seems pretty clear to me that this renegade baker’s dozen aren’t leaving the Republican Party because it’s too extreme, they’re heading out the door en masse because it’s not nearly extreme enough! The way Huffington Post lazily half-reported on the matter, you might well think they were “moderates.” Most of the tweets I’ve seen about it were from folks who seemed to be under this impression, too. Or maybe they just read the headline and… assumed.

What I did find interesting about the letter, though, is how it smacks so strongly of the Ron Paul-style free market/no foreign intervention school. When you have office-holders and elected officials (including a 2006 candidate for Congress) of a political party willing to denounce it in public and renounce their memberships, this is an interesting development indeed and one that should have the GOP establishment quaking, on both a state and national level. Will other Libertarian/Tea party types, emboldened by the defection of the Maine Republicans, do the same in their states and form break-away parties and political action groups? I sure hope so!

This whole “GOP Civil War” thing we’ve been hearing about sounds like it’s about to get very interesting, very quickly. This is a loud shoe dropping. With the deep, deep unbridled fanaticism within the party’s ranks, any sort of perceived ideological “betrayals” by former allies in the conservative movement makes the likelihood of that once ironclad coalition splintering into warring former Republican factions seem likely indeed.

The demographic tide that turned, hard, against the GOP in recent years as their voters got older (and deader) while the country as a whole has become younger and browner, is merely one of their seemingly insurmountable problems. Should they split up into two or more rival factions, to my mind, that would be just great. United they stand, but divided, well… the entire conservative movement will be about as impotent as their stalwart old white male voters. The oligarchs, the stupid, the religious, the stingy, they need each other BADLY. If that coalition frays—and then they go to war against each other like feuding hillbilly relatives with rabies, which they will—the GOP is doomed. Put-a-stake though-its-heart and piss-on-its-grave doomed.

Can a Republican ever win the White House again? Consider this, on a national level, the 2016 Democratic Presidential nominee will basically start out with 246 electoral votes. Imagine the finger-pointing rancor between say, the “Chris Christie Republicans” vs the Rand Paul fans and then turn the volume knob up to ten on that noise. The names may change, but the negative, hateful energy is turning inwards now. Without a black guy for them to unite against, what hope does the GOP have in 2016?

Update: Then there was this.

Keep in mind as you watch the video below that it was paid for by a Republican-affiliated PAC!
 

 
Does the GOP have any intention of becoming more than a party of older white people? They “say” they want to change and be “more inclusive” but do they really? Really? It doesn’t look that way based on pretty much all of the evidence. Off the top of my head I can’t think of even one minor area where any change has become evident in the Republican Party, but there are dozens upon dozens of examples every week of mentally-deficient, racist, authoritarian, blindly anti-science, voter suppressing Republican hi-jinks.

How many votes, really, can the so-called “Southern strategy” still squeeze like turds out of a bloated, hick white electorate, when younger and better-educated whites aren’t inclined to want to buy what the obviously IQ deficient Republicans want to sell them force on them in the first place? And the House seems ready to kill any sort of immigration reform, so they’ve written off Latinos. As in “fuck you, you’re never going to vote for us anyway” written off.

I don’t think Republicans realize how stupid they look to the rest of us. The “marketing message” they send. If they did, why would they continue to humiliatingly beclown themselves, often on a national stage? Did you watch the live webcast of the Texas Senate abortion filibuster? I was glued to it for hours and one thing that struck me was (literally, I’m not trying to be arch) how terribly DUMB the Republican pols looked. They appeared, as a group, to the naked eye, to be excessively thick.

When they’d switch the camera over to where the Democrats were, the ‘crats looked like normal people who were frankly astonished at the authoritarian idiocy of what the GOP pols were getting up to. It was some of the most riveting “reality TV” I’ve ever seen.

But talk about a reality check: Surely there must have been plenty of pro-life Americans who watched that webcast, too, and they saw the same thing everyone else saw, normal people on one side and the residents of Hooterville (with a supermajority in the Texas Senate!) on the other. At a certain point, issues like pro-choice and pro-life will become separated from matters like forcing corporations to pay “living wages” and more economic/survival matters. Will even pro-life Christians still side with a GOP that, for instance, doesn’t believe in the minimum wage?

What has traditionally worked for the GOP on a national level no longer works and they are wildly flailing, without a fucking clue about what to do about it. A coalition of idiocy can only really last so long…

Even if the GOP won every southern state and Indiana, that still relegates them to a regional party status and one that will become increasingly marginalized as red states like Texas flip blue in coming years and as more deeply red states turn more, shall we say, er, Confederate.

The writing is on the wall in Texas, with her Latino population (and newly energized Democratic women). Racist or anti-immigration politics were popular with California Republicans within recent memory, keep in mind. Look what it got them, a permanent Democratic super-majority in the state. The chances of the GOP having a resurgence in California are dead. The GOP is basically dead here. They can’t will elections and they don’t even try anymore.

In the clip below, Rachel Maddow brilliantly sets up the white Republican pins and then knocks them all down. First up the new revelations about Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s openly racist staffer.

Via Raw Story:

The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication, reported Tuesday that Rand Paul’s director of new media was an avid supporter of the Confederacy who celebrated John Wilkes Booth’s birthday. The aide, Jack Hunter, had served as a chairman for the League of the South and warned America would no longer be America if white people were not the racial majority.

The same aide was hired by former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) to write a book. Maddow noted that DeMint was now head of the Heritage Institution, which faced criticism earlier this year after publishing a report on immigration that was co-authored by a man who believed Hispanic people were inherently less intelligent that white people.

“Should the Republican Party be just the party of aggrieved white people, even to the extent that it may stray occasionally into Confederate territory in order to do that?” Maddow wondered. “Do you want that in order to maximize every possible white vote you can get out of an electorate that is less and less white all the time?”

Apparently they do. What other options do they realistically have?
 

“Goldman Sachs 2020 Slave Labor Camp International” by Lee Harvey

Considering the appalling number of Americans these days who are paid as little as their bosses can possibly get away with paying them, you would think that citing opposition to the notion that hard work should, you know, pay a living wage and provide for some level of human dignity in the world’s richest country, would be perceived as a toxic issue by the elders of the Republican Party. Something you wouldn’t want to touch with a ten foot pole…

But you would be wrong.

During a hearing on raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, Sen. Bernie Sanders got Lamar Alexander, the ranking Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee to admit that he wants to abolish the minimum wage.

It was remarkably easy—he wasn’t even trying—for Sanders to provoke a remarkable reaction to this statement:

“There are certain conservatives who do not believe in the concept of the minimum wage. The concept of the minimum wage. In other words, if the economy as such, and I offer you three dollars an hour.”

Alexander took the bait, interrupting Sanders (“Let me jump in. I do not believe in it” he says) and offering his two unsolicited cents:

Sanders: So you do not believe in the concept of the minimum wage?

Alexander: That’s correct.

Sanders: You would abolish the minimum wage?

Alexander: Correct.

Sanders: If someone had to work for two bucks an hour, they would work for two bucks an hour?

Senator Alexander is not a stupid man. He’s a graduate of Vanderbilt University and NYU’s law school. He’s been in government since the Nixon administration, he was the 45th Governor of Tennessee from 1979 to 1987 and he served as George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of Education. He’s run for president twice.

Alexander was not caught off guard and this was not exactly a trick question that Senator Sanders posed to him, either. He volunteered this information: Alexander really means this shit.

Oy vey. When will these Republicans ever learn?

The exchange between Sanders and Alexander starts (after Sanders lays the groundwork discussing the situation that fast food workers find themselves in making $7 bucks an hour) at the 5:48 mark. At the end of it, the asshole from the conservative Heritage Foundation asserts that the minimum wage hurts “the beneficiaries”!
 

 
Via Politics USA

 
Outgoing GOP crazypants Rep. Michele Bachmann of MN seems to have accidentally taken some sodium pentothal before sitting down for this recent interview with WorldNutDaily. In it, Rep. Bachmann states, with no equivocating (as is her wont), that if immigration reform passes, there will never again be a Republican President or a GOP ruled Senate and that they’ll eventually lose the House for good, too.

Oh, how I love these rare moments of Republican candor! But Bachmann, as true as what she is saying really is, misses the equally valid flip-side of her statement: If immigration fails to pass, there won’t be another Republican President ever again either! Win/win!!!

The Republicans, are, of course, fucked in every respect and they have only themselves—and their staggeringly stupid brand of politics—to blame. Instead they’re probably just going to point the finger at “Mexican anchor babies,” but to no avail.

You snooze you lose. For the politically tin-eared Rip Van Winkles of the Republican Party, it’s already too late.

But that’s no going to stop Reps. Bachmann, Steve King and Louie Gohmert who are reportedly planning a revolt in the House over immigration reform legislation forcing additional debate (likely to prove highly embarrassing with those three clownjobs leading the charge) on the immigration bill they say will have “dire consequences for the country.”

The minute immigration reform gets passed, you can put a fork in the Grand Old Party. Even the reddest of redneck states will start turning blue very, very quickly and there is nothing the Republicans can do about it, either. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place. These assholes are staring down a demographic tidal wave that is going to DROWN THEM.

Admittedly, although a one-party rule by the Democrats doesn’t sound like much of a prize—it has been pretty great for California, though, hasn’t it?—that party will be increasingly easier to reason with once the GOP—so pathologically impervious to reason, obviously—has suffered continuing electoral humiliation and diminishment at the vote of a rapidly changing American electorate.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Who’s (still) afraid of the big bad Republicans?

The nightmare (free market) scenario the GOP faces: THEY’RE A VERY BAD INVESTMENT

The Republicans are way, way, more screwed than they thought!

Republican explains to other Republicans why the GOP is so totally fucked
 

 
Via Right Wing Watch

Rising GOP star Dave Agema, neither a hater or bigot, just a good, clean-living, God-fearing conservative Republican

The humiliating self-immolation of Dr. Ben Carson apparently wasn’t enough, so the comedy gods must be demanding another GOP sacrifice. Dave Agema, the Republican National Committee member from Michigan—a small-minded dumbass whose anti-gay Facebook posting that suggested gays were responsible for “half the murders in large cities” (among other things, but Agema didn’t write it, he just posted it) made national news last week—isn’t going to go away quietly as he proved during a remarkably idiotic conservative talk radio interview.

Move over Louie Gohmert, you’ve got some brain-damaged competition in the “Male Michele Bachmann” sweepstakes!

Via Deadline Detroit:

“It’s not about hate, folks,” he says of warnings about purported physical and mental health risks of homosexuality. “What it is, is hey, if you’re in this lifestyle, if you really love somebody that’s in this lifestyle, you want to ask them and try to get them out because they’re not going to live as long. It’s going to hurt them emotionally and physically.

“That’s what it’s about. So it’s really more about caring than it is hate,” Agema adds during an outspoken, defiant conversation Monday with sympathetic hosts at WPIQ in Manistee in northern Michigan.

That talk-format station airs syndicated shows from Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Comfortable turf, in other words.

Comfortable turf for unhinged morons like Agema who don’t know when to quit and detestable Republican fuckwits, in other other words…

Agema, a Michigan state representative from 2007-12 first got himself noticed about a year ago, when the newly-minted RNC member made some very confused remarks about Muslims, terrorism and how Obama was a Muslim terrorist. Or something like that. Agema is so witless that he once agreed to appear with Koran-burning Yosemite Sam look-a-like Pastor Terry Jones before backing out.

A bigot? Where’s the proof? Ahahahahahahahah. This guy’s fucking funny!

The Republican National Committee-man had this to say during his time on air with WPIQ’s Morning Breakfast Show hosts, Davin Lawrence and Doug Sedenquist, a Republican activist:

School messages: “I don’t want my kids – my grandkids, I should say – taught in school that this is an alternate lifestyle, [that] you should accept it. I would rather have them taught, hey look, here’s what happens in this lifestyle. Here’s what’s going to happen to you physically. Here’s what’s going to happen to you emotionally. Instead we’re going to teach just the opposite..”

Personal experience: “I’ve been involved in this issue for years, way back when I worked for American Airlines this became an issue, because we had, you know obviously we had a lot of homosexuals in the flight attendant realm, and, uhh, we had issues.”

Social change: “Society in general has been tolerant of any behavior that doesn’t affect others in a general stance. But this does affect others. . . . When you look at this stuff, it’s just amazing what’s happening in our society, how fast it’s happened, I mean just 20 years ago, you wouldn’t think this would happen, or 25 years ago, and look where we are now—we’re just like they are in Europe. And some of those studies over there show the same thing: This is not a good thing for us, folks. And all I want to do is maintain our principles, and I want to stay on the conservative side, not on the liberal side.”

Critical response: “They’re trying to say you’re a bigot if you’re bringing it up and I think that’s what bothers me more than anything. I never heard such amount of name-calling, threats and bigotry on their part, calling me a bigot, for bringing up this information. I have never seen anything like it. . . . I’ve been threatened just by speaking out. And that’s the key, they are trying to shut anyone and everyone down from saying anything, that’s what they do. . . . What you get thrown back in your face is nothing but hate.”

Threat to churches: “The next thing I fear is they’ll come to your churches and say oh, you won’t marry same-sex couples? Well that’s interesting. This is a hate crime, you just lost your tax-exempt status. This is going to go from one step to the next, it’s part of the plan.”

Challenge to party: “I just wish our leadership would get behind this, and stand, have backbone, and stand for what our core principles are in the Republican Party.”

I have to agree with Agema on that last point. Don’t ever change GOP!

Don’t. You. Ever. Change.
 

 
H/T Wonkette

Can you find all four idiots in the above image?

Was it entirely predictable that Dr. Ben Carson, the head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University and rightwing media darling would implode this publicly and this fast?

You’d think—or at least I did—that a man intelligent enough to run a department at a prestigious medical university would be… you know… well… smarter than the average conservative. Less prone, perhaps, to making idiotic comments when there’s a live microphone around?

You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. Dr. Ben Carson is a fucking idiot, as he proved on Fox News’ Hannity program last week when he compared marriage equality with bestiality and sex with children, and as he continued to demonstrate Monday on conservative talk radio troll Mark Levin’s show. Via TPM:

Carson, who is the head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University, said he represents an existential threat to liberals. “They need to shut me up, they need to get rid of me,” Carson said. “They can’t find anything else to delegitimize me, so they take my words, misrepresent them and try to make it seem that I’m a bigot.”

“And you’re attacked also, in many respects, because of your race,” Levin said. “Because you’re not supposed to think like this and talk like this. A lot of white liberals just don’t like it, do they?”

“Well, you know, they’re the most racist people there are,” Carson said. “Because, you know, they put you in a little category, a little box, you have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation?”

Um… sorry Dr. Carson, you might see yourself that way, but it seems rather obvious, based solely on, hey, your own words, that clear-thinking people, be they white, liberal or whatever else they may be, think you’re a plank. You and ANYONE else, of any race, who would say such nasty, ignorant and petty things. In public.

Dr. Carson, this is not a black thing or a white thing, this is a stupidity thing. YOUR stupidity. To imply otherwise is preposterous!

No one needs to look any further than your own words to conclude that YOU are the bigot in this equation. It’s got everything to do with the actual words that came out of your mouth, on national television!

You say that your words were twisted? HOW? Where is the nuance in comparing civil rights for America’s LGBT population to sex with animals and children?

Quite a leap to compare the reaction to what you said to, well, you know… actual bigotry!

If you were white, Dr. Carson, not a whole lot would change—you might even still be invited to come on Fox News, for instance, if you weren’t black—but people would still still be perfectly justified to call you an idiot. Because you are one.

The students at Johns Hopkins who want you out as their commencement speaker aren’t racists, but you sir, are most certainly an asshole.

HOW DARE these liberal bigots speak the truth to you…

UPDATE: I just read the following on Huffington Post in a piece by Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert on Carson’s travails and found it quite amusing:

“You know, intelligent people tend to talk about the facts,” Carson recently said, condemning those who reduce political disagreements to the kind you find on a “third grade playground.” He urged partisans to “find some accommodation” and to “tone down the rhetoric a little bit.”

He said these things while appearing on Fox News, the cable bastion of name-calling and blind partisanship. (Emphasis added)

Superb!

Here’s a link to yesterday’s Hannity, where one of the whitest men in America discusses supposed “racism” directed at black conservatives and gets his dumb ass handed to him on a platter by LA-based civil rights attorney (and talk radio host), Leo Terrell.
 

 
In yet another stunning example of, well, fucking idiocy—why look for an alternate way to state it, this shit doesn’t deserve the dignity, only cruel mocking—one of the top GOP officials in Georgia, Sue Everhart, the chairwoman of the state Republican Party there, told the Marietta Daily Journal that gay marriage will just encourage straight people to exploit the system to scrounge benefits!

“Lord, I’m going to get in trouble over this, but it is not natural for two women or two men to be married,” Everhart said. “If it was natural, they would have the equipment to have a sexual relationship.”

Everhart said while she respects all people, if same sex marriage is legalized across the country, there will be fraud.

“You may be as straight as an arrow, and you may have a friend that is as straight as an arrow,” Everhart said. “Say you had a great job with the government where you had this wonderful health plan. I mean, what would prohibit you from saying that you’re gay, and y’all get married and still live as separate, but you get all the benefits? I just see so much abuse in this it’s unreal. I believe a husband and a wife should be a man and a woman, the benefits should be for a man and a woman. There is no way that this is about equality. To me, it’s all about a free ride.”

Everhart said if she had a young child, she wouldn’t want them to have gay parents who would influence that child’s sexual orientation.

“You’re creating with this child that it’s a lifestyle, don’t go out and marry someone else of a different sex because this is natural,” Everhart said. “But if I had a next door neighbor who was in a gay relationship, I could be just as friendly to them as I could be to you and your wife or anybody else. I’m not saying that we ostracize them or anything like that. I’m just saying I’m against marriage because once you get the gay marriage you get everything else.”

Sorry Sue, but just like Chuck and Larry, gay people do want it all.

Via TPM:

 
My wife recently asked me: “So why aren’t you writing any more of your political screeds for the blog lately?”

Some readers have written in and asked the same thing: When did I stop hating on Republicans, anyways?

I promise you I haven’t, but generally speaking, I get pretty burnt out on politics after an election year. This time, though, I think it goes deeper than that. The main reason I think I care less about politics today than I did only five months ago is that for years I’ve long expected to see a steep decline in the size of the GOP’s voter base and the party’s influence and I think that’s now pretty much a fait accompli. We’ve seen it happen. 2012 was the very last year that the Republicans still had a decent shot at getting in on a national level and cementing the rules of, ahem, “democracy” to favor themselves—but as we all know, that didn’t happen.

I certainly think there were very valid reasons for fearing the rise of the far right—the brief Tea party moment was admittedly not something that I saw coming—but I’m not feeling that so much anymore.

The Tea party foolishness, Glenn Beck, the birthers and the rapid rise and fall of Sarah Palin can already be seen in the rear-view mirror as the frenzied flailing of a dying elephant. By 2016, a pretty good chunk of the Grand Old Party’s aging baby boomer base will have at least one foot in the grave and by 2020 and 2024, well, forget about it.
 

 
In the very near future, America will be truly unrecognizable to itself, and this will be especially hard on the folks who don’t even live in the present to begin with. Progress cannot be stopped. Entropy is simply not possible in a country this big and with such a radically changing demographic makeup, no matter how certain personality types—low IQ authoritarians, xenophobes, racists, religious busybodies, I’m talking about the GOP base, here, of course—try to force it on everyone else.

I’m just so over it. Aren’t you?

The dam has burst on a lot of issues: immigration reform, LGBT civil rights, cannabis laws, healthcare, and the water is rushing past the reichwingers and they just got drenched.

This is not to say that I’m not still amused by soaking wet Republicans, it’s just that the 2012 election showed, I think definitively, the hard and fast limits to their influence and that the national brand is truly a spent force, one perhaps best left behind as a relic of another era (like plaid golf pants, Brylcreem, Lawrence Welk… or Jim Crow laws).

To my mind, it all looks pretty downhill from here on out for the Republican Party. Any argument that posits a resurgent national GOP moving forward is an argument made by someone who apparently still thinks that the most recent US Census was just a big ole fat gubmint LIE and who probably voted for Michele Bachmann in the Iowa Caucus.
 

 
There simply aren’t enough of them anymore. That’s a demographic fact, Jack. Don’t believe me? Go argue with reality, I don’t care what you think. Get real: The so-called “two party system” is not some immutable law of American political physics that needs to carry on without end, especially not when one of the parties has opted to radically remake itself, taking on the classic features of an extremist fringe group.

Some Republicans kinda got the “voter revulsion” message, but not really. When Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus presented the 97-page report of the RNC’s “Growth and Opportunity Project,” a post-mortem on the GOP’s 2012 losses at the National Press Club on Monday, he said:

“When Republicans lost in November, it was a wake-up call. And in response I initiated the most public and most comprehensive post-election review in the history of any national party. As it makes clear, there’s no one reason we lost. Our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital; our primary and debate process needed improvement.”

In short, a sizable majority of the American electorate thinks the Republicans suck eggs and their own internal polling backs that up to the extent that they don’t even try to spin it anymore! (Something remarkable in and of itself).

The report is actually pretty brutal, acknowledging that women, gays, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, college-educated Caucasians and the mainstream media basically hate Republicans. These, er, “special interest groups” are, for all intents and purposes, immune to the GOP’s charms. They’re not going to just suddenly jump on the Republican train for any reason, this much seems assured.

Not to mention:

“Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents…”

Yeah, the young people. They simply aren’t that into inheriting a country with insane wealth inequality, the 1% elite owning half of everything and keeping the productive capital within their own families, tainted meat, bad air and undrinkable water. Try rounding up an electoral majority when women, gays, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, college-educated Caucasians and young people of all races think you’re shit!.

‘Nuff said, eh GOP?
 

 

“We sound increasingly out of touch.”

That’s putting it mildly. The GOP talk about minority outreach, and then they introduce voter ID bills in their statehouses! It’s even a matter of Republicans appearing not to be able to differentiate fiction from reality anymore, let alone shit from shinola.

I mean, they’re exactly what Bobby Jindal said they—and by extension he, himself—are: “the stupid party.” Many Americans simply perceive the GOP as being closely synonymous with idiocy and they have no trouble articulating this to the GOP’s own pollsters. And like, this somehow appears to be NEWS to them! The stench of stupid is so thick on the modern Republican party brand that it’s going to be a really difficult odor to wash off.

Hands up, who wants to be a member of the stupid party? How about you?
 

 

“At our core, Republicans have comfortably remained the Party of Reagan without figuring out what comes next. Ronald Reagan is a Republican hero and role model who was first elected 33 years ago—meaning no one under the age of 51 today was old enough to vote for Reagan when he first ran for President.”

OUCH, OUCH AND DOUBLE OUCH! A knife thrust deep into the Republican heart! Why it’s conservative treason… even if it’s true!

They’ve had no new ideas since the Reagan era, either. Since before most people owned a personal computer. Since there were just three TV networks and PBS for most of America! Why would the smartest, most capable young conservatives of the up and coming generation want to make a career investment in the GOP instead of someplace… you know, not so dumb? How will the party attract talent?
 

 
And furthermore, how will the party raise money when they’ve proven to be such a shitty investment for their deep-pockets donors. Even the Koch brothers seem to be turning their back on the GOP. Who could blame them, they’re ruthless businessmen? They know the score. The ROI the GOP offer blows. Expect them to act accordingly. If Rand Paul would bolt the party for the Libertarians (as his father once did) the Kochs would be right there behind him.

“If Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.”

Hahahaha. No shit. Well, then someone had better essplain that to the loudmouthed lamebrain from Texas, Rep. Louie “anchor babies” Gohmert, who insists that the GOP must never give into immigration reform because “they” will never vote for Republicans if offered a pathway to citizenship. It’s a “trap” Democrats have laid for the GOP, in Gohmert’s eyes.

Look, Louie Gohmert’s a fucking idiot, that’s glaringly obvious to everyone but him and his fellow idiots, but if you think about it, he’s actually quite right in this instance. It’s a real damned if they do, damned if they don’t sort of situation these Republicans have put themselves in regarding immigration reform, isn’t it? But they’ve insisted upon it, the Democrats didn’t trap them with anything. This is a giving them an awful lot of credit for what amounts to a Catch 22 that’s been hatching under their noses and in their own districts, literally for DECADES, don’tcha think?
 

 
As New York’s Jonathan Chait wrote about the RNC’s seemingly intractable woes:

The report determinedly avoids confronting the party’s most fundamental problem: Its attachment to an economic agenda that most voters correctly identify as serving the needs of a wealthy minority. Rather than confront the problem, the report is a detailed and generally shrewd plan for working around.

Yup. Tuesday on MSNBC, RNC chair Reince Priebus told Luke Russert that the party’s platform on gay marriage has not changed despite efforts to make the party appear more inclusive:

“I know our party believes marriage is between one man and one woman.”

That’s some “effort,” Reince (if that is, in fact, your real name).
 

Paul Ryan, the GOP’s pathetic idea of an intellectual…

Obviously there’s a gigantic problem with this entire RNC re-branding enterprise: It’s dead on arrival and anyone with a brain capable of critical thought on the level of, say, a peanut, can see the fatal flaw that’s got a flashing neon sign and a bunch of old coots in Revolutionary War uniforms pointing their replica muskets right at it. Republican voters, especially the ones who never went to college, the cranky old farts who are to varying degrees racist, close-minded Christianists, anti-immigrant homophobes and just angry, disapproving people, en générale, will have none of this shit!

And these troglodytes make up about half the party’s registration rolls and everyone knows it. Good luck with the fucking rebranding, boys.
 

 
Writing about the RNC autopsy at the NY Times, Thomas B. Edsall had this to say:

The highly visible presence of the candidates these voters prefer – recall the party’s Senate nominees in Missouri and Indiana, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, and their bizarre views on rape and abortion — suggests that the Republican Party has a severe, if not toxic, problem: a septic electorate that, in the words of the Mayo Clinic, “can trigger a cascade of changes that can damage multiple organ systems, causing them to fail.”

But let’s leave these trifling inconveniences aside for now, shall we? Suffice to say, there’s a major split occurring in the GOP that’s going to seriously impact their ability to ever get back to a place of national influence. This was already obvious at the start of the primary season. As a national party, they’re no-hopers within a decade, splintering into factions (Tea party and social conservatives, RNC establishment and the wealthy elites, “Ron/Rand Paul Libertarians,” etc) and facing an increasingly insurmountable demographic irrelevancy that will grow by leaps and bounds every four years.
 

 
I don’t think the Republicans can do that much—or at least as much—damage to the country moving forward. It’s clear that there are (at least) two factions of the party who are locked in a civil war. The endgame of everyone taking their toys and going home seems like a forgone conclusion. They’re just not going to be able to work together anymore. You’ve got the wealthy elites who would like the game to stay rigged vs. the Rick Santorum “stupid” folks. They desperately need one another to add up to a nationally viable party. Divided they don’t really amount to much anymore.

They’ve been humbled, their electoral impotency was on full display for the entire country to see on election night.

Furthermore. there are boundaries now that they know they can’t cross. Those boundaries weren’t there before, but they are now. Public opinion can be employed much easier as a prophylactic against the worst Republican power grabs (like this talk of changing Electoral College rules, something that everyone is already wise to). Of course, I’m not suggesting completely ignoring what the GOP gets up to—I’m not usually someone to underestimate the power of stupid people in a group—but their best days are behind them, and I think that’s a pretty uncontroversial thing to say at this point, without any caveats coming readily to mind.
 

 
I’m noticing that this attitude is increasingly, and I think correctly, becoming the default position of the mainstream media, that the uh… I guess threat of low IQ authoritarian Republicanism has diminished considerably. Bill Maher touched on this topic on his Real Time program on HBO last week when he mocked Christian bluenose group One Million Moms (the churchladies who protest the Skittles and Geico commercials for promoting bestiality) who have not one million Twitter followers, but fewer than 3000.

When Bill Maher is brushing off silly reichwingers as a source of comedy, like a canary flying out of a coalmine, hey, he’s probably onto something: They’re a joke.

It’s a pretty steep fall from Andrew Breitbart to Ben Shapiro to put it a different way.

The 2012 election was a real “man behind the curtain” moment for the Grand OLD Party and its increasingly tenuous relationship to modern America and the up and coming generation. The slow, agonizing death of the Republican Party seems all but certain, done in by hubris, idiocy, greed, hypocrisy, terrible ideas, loathsome shit-for-brains politicians, moronic uninformed voters, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the list can go on and on and on. They suck, but fuck ‘em, they’re not really worth nearly as much energy being expended in their direction.

Maybe it’s simply time to push past them and leave these nitwits behind to play in their sandbox of stupidity. The zeitgeist is not with the Republican Party and I think the big story of American politics in 2013 is that most people are starting to realize this.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The nightmare (free market) scenario the GOP faces: THEY’RE A VERY BAD INVESTMENT

The Republicans are way, way, more screwed than they thought!

Republican explains to other Republicans why the GOP is so totally fucked

 
This ridiculous footage was shot over the weekend at the conservative Republican convention, CPAC, during a seminar titled “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?” led by a black conservative by the name of K. Carl Smith. (As Bill Maher pointed out Friday on his HBO show Real Time, if you’re “sick and tired” of being called a racist, chances are that you ARE a racist, but nevermind that rather obvious logic for a moment).

TPM’s Benjy Sarlin was present at the seminar and wrote that Smith “mostly urged attendees to deflect racism charges by calling themselves ‘Frederick Douglass Republicans.’” (Now THAT’S rebranding for ya, ain’t it?)

Watch what happens when CPAC attendee, Scott Terry of North Carolina, speaks. It’s mind-boggling. This asshole—who was with a buddy in a Confederate flag tee-shirt—shocked even his fellow CPAC attendees with his “food and shelter” remark about slavery. I don’t think that was easy to do in a place like CPAC—in particular to offend the kinds of clowns who’d sign up for something called “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?”—but somehow Scott Terry managed it.

Scott Terry is “proud” of “his people”! So proud that he felt the need to go to a meeting about perceived racism in the conservative movement and explain how as a white, Southern male, HE’S BEING DISENFRANCHISED by all this talk of minority outreach!

Genius!
 

Field marshal Rove?

The leader of the Tea Party Patriots organization issued an apology on Tuesday to Karl Rove after the group sent out a fundraising email with a doctored photo depicting the GOP adviser in a Nazi uniform.

Wait a minute? Republicans calling other Republicans Nazis??? Whoa! This means the Tea party blockheads are beginning to hate Rove with the same sort of bile these characters normally reserve for Obama? How very, very fascinating!

The solicitation was titled, “Wipe the Smirk Off Karl Rove’s Face” and read:

“Karl Rove believes he can raise hundreds of millions of dollars, crush the Tea Party movement and protect the big-government status quo in Washington from millions of freedom loving Americans.”

Hilarious, but all too predictable. There is nothing, I repeat nothing, that gives me more joy than to see the country’s DUMBEST voting block splintering into angry, impotent… hate cults. To watch the disciplined Republican Party devolve into fractious groups that utterly despise each other—in real time, yet—is such a deeply pleasurable thing.

From all appearances, the GOP still cannot fathom the demographic tidal wave that hit them in the ass on Election day. Forget about all this talk of “rebranding.” I mean, these guys are fucked—fuckity fuck fuck fucked—and the smartest ones in their ranks have figured this out. They’ve got an insurmountable problem on their hands called their own voters!

How can you cater to the lowest IQ buffoons, racists, gun nuts, women haters, Creationist lunatics and cranky old people for decades and then try to turn that barge of fools around on a dime, all the while losing elections and presenting your biggest donors with NOTHING for the return on their (huge) investments? It can’t be done and I think the younger Republicans realize the brand is now so badly tainted and beyond repair that they’re starting to think “Why bother with these dipshits?”

The savvy old hands like Newt Gingrich know this. When he waged his notoriously vicious scorched earth campaign against Mitt Romney in the GOP primaries last year, it quite obviously got to the point where Gingrich just didn’t give a fuck anymore. He wasn’t in it for the good of his party (if he was he never would have considered running in the first place), he was only in it for himself. Even longtime Gingrich watchers were shocked by the hardcore nature of his attacks. Republicans aren’t supposed to speak ill of their fellow Republicans. Haven’t they heard of Reagan’s 11th Commandment? Newt pissed on Romney with gleeful abandon.

Turns out that might’ve been Newt just clearing his throat for his latest scheme…

Gingrich was left badly in debt by his ill-fated Presidential candidacy. One of his think tanks was forced into bankruptcy last Spring and he was reportedly nearly $6 million in debt by June. Say what you want about Newt, he’s got a pretty astute sense of what the most numbnuts conservative punter really cares about. If “Newt Inc.” (as Gingrich calls his various enterprises) is faltering, what’s (newly) poor Newt gonna do? It’s reinvention time.

If the party’s fucked anyway, I predict that Gingrich is going to make a new career out of what he previewed last year, and that is vilifying “the Republican establishment” for fun and profit. I’m pretty sure he looks at the carcass of the GOP like a vulture would, as something to be picked clean. I can’t say I blame him.

Even if the Republican Party moving forward from 2013 is relegated to a mere shadow of its former self, a diminishing and rapidly dying-off fiefdom of free market/Fox News/Christianist idiocy, what’s left of the GOP will still be an awful lot of people. Newt can be the leader of that club. He’ll never, ever get near the White House, but there are tens of millions of dollars in it for him to wrest a good portion of the GOP and divert it into his own personal cash cow. Newt can do that demonizing Karl Rove as the personification of the establishment and setting himself up as the “anti-Rove.”

I think it could happen. If there is one thing the Tea partiers love, it’s a mean cuss. Who’s meaner than Newt Gingrich? I can’t see their allegiance going readily to other GOP figures. And look how visible he’s been lately. Newt has adroitly sniffed the fart of populist rage that the GOP’s rank and file feel towards the party’s establishment. There’s a cheap and cheerful way for him to capitalize on it and that is to pile on Karl Rove.

What’s hilarious to me, though, is how Gingrich manages to keep a straight face while saying shit like this, as he wrote in Human Affairs:

I am unalterably opposed to a bunch of billionaires financing a boss to pick candidates in 50 states. This is the opposite of the Republican tradition of freedom and grassroots small town conservatism.

So wrote the man whose entire run at the nomination was funded by ONE billionaire, Sheldon Adelson!

Obviously Gingrich believes Republicans have the memory of goldfish, but you can see how he’s positioning himself and it’s clever. If you have Rove leading the establishment Republican charge and the Newtster setting himself up to profit from the appearance of combating Rovers influence, well, grab some popcorn, this is going to get good.

 
Never underestimate the stupidity of… stupid people.

Take anti-union activist and Tea party tool, “interim” AZ FreedomWorks coordinator Stephen Viramontes, for instance. Yesterday on Twitter, Viramontes bragged about how he planned to give out Valentines to AZ ‘s Republican lawmakers with drawings of Hitler, Fidel Castro, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong as well as Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. Apparently, for it’s unclear, his bright idea was to somehow associate these figures with union-busting legislation SB1182—strongly favored by Viramontes’ fellow dimwits in the Tea party movement—and “humorously” put some pressure on several GOP lawmakers believed to be wavering in their support of the draconian anti-union bill.

Presumably someone close to him convinced Stevie Blunder that this was a total clownjob move that would just make him look like a dickhead and cause him professional embarrassment, as Viramontes deleted his lamebrained boasting.
 

 
Maybe it was all in fun, but since The Arizona Capitol Times got a nice screenshot before he deleted his tweet, the joke’s on Stephen Viramontes.

Proving yourself too stupid for a career in AZ Tea party politics is a real accomplishment:

Viramontes’ planned use of cards featuring Hitler, Stalin and other leaders who are estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of more than 65 million people comes on the same day that nonprofit liberal news magazine Mother Jones posted a story on its website about an internal investigation that was sparked after FreedomWorks’ executives made a video of a woman wearing a Hillary Clinton mask having sex with a woman in a panda suit.

The video was intended to be shown at FreePac, a July 2012 conference in Dallas, but was scrapped after FreedomWorks employees complained.

Although he sent out a series of tweets about the cards, some of which showed pictures of them, Viramontes said after an initial version of this story was published that he never planned to give the cards to lawmakers and said he doesn’t support the actions or beliefs of any of the dictators on the cards.

“It was never something I was really, seriously going to do,” he said. “It was probably bad judgment on my part to even joke about it.

“Those that know me get the humor.”

Like this guy?
 

 
The Valentine cards are actually the work of artist Ben Kling, who has created other, similar cards with philosophers, authors, celebrities and historical figures. Kling had nothing to do with Viramontes’ feeble attempt at a “joke” and no association with FreedomWorks. He told TPM that he thought the media flap caused by Viramontes’ lame attempt at some Hitler humor was hilarious.

 
There is a long (10 pages) story that The New York Times Magazine published on its website today (”Can the Republicans Be Saved From Obsolescence?” by Robert Draper) that performs a highly informative—and often highly amusing—autopsy on just how badly the GOP fucked up the 2012 election.

There are LOL gems throughout the piece, but there’s one section that stood out for me when the author attends some focus groups in Columbus, Ohio with media-saavy G.O.P. pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson:

About an hour into the session, Anderson walked up to a whiteboard and took out a magic marker. “I’m going to write down a word, and you guys free-associate with whatever comes to mind,” she said. The first word she wrote was “Democrat.”

“Young people,” one woman called out.

“Liberal,” another said. Followed by: “Diverse.” “Bill Clinton.”“Change.”“Open-minded.”“Spending.”“Handouts.”“Green.”“More science-based.”

When Anderson then wrote “Republican,” the outburst was immediate and vehement: “Corporate greed.”“Old.”“Middle-aged white men.” “Rich.” “Religious.” “Conservative.” “Hypocritical.” “Military retirees.” “Narrow-minded.” “Rigid.” “Not progressive.” “Polarizing.” “Stuck in their ways.” “Farmers.”

That was what an all-female focus group told her. The young males in Anderson’s focus groups used terms of endearment like “racist,” “out of touch” and “hateful” to describe the Grand Old (and getting older by the day) Party.

Later that evening at a hotel bar, Anderson pored over her notes. She seemed morbidly entranced, like a homicide detective gazing into a pool of freshly spilled blood. In the previous few days, the pollster interviewed Latino voters in San Diego and young entrepreneurs in Orlando. The findings were virtually unanimous. No one could understand the G.O.P.’s hot-blooded opposition to gay marriage or its perceived affinity for invading foreign countries. Every group believed that the first place to cut spending was the defense budget. During the whiteboard drill, every focus group described Democrats as “open-minded” and Republicans as “rigid.”

“There is a brand,” the 28-year-old pollster concluded of her party with clinical finality. “And it’s that we’re not in the 21st century.”

 

 
Now contrast Kristen Soltis Anderson’s angle on the GOP’s problems with that of conservative Republican chucklehead House Judiciary Chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas. Smith is the guy who was pushing the “Keep Our Communities Safe Act” in 2011, something that if signed into law would have authorized the government to lock up certain illegal aliens indefinitely.

Now Smith, a longtime DREAM act opponent who is about as dumb as a bag of wet hair, is warning Republicans that “immigration is exactly the wrong subject to use to attract Hispanic support” in an editorial he penned for Politico yesterday (”5 reasons GOP should avoid immigration trap”) urging the GOP to oppose immigration reform because it would give Democrats “millions of votes”:

Does anyone really think Republicans are going to outbid Democrats on giving benefits to illegal immigrants?

And fifth, you have to be a little suspicious when liberal Democrats tell Republicans they have to support amnesty to win elections. Do Republicans really think they have the best interests of the GOP at heart?

Immigration is the field Democrats want to lure Republicans to play on. Why? Because Democrats know they’ll win.

Democrats have done the math and realize that legalization inevitably would give them millions of votes, meaning more victories in congressional and presidential elections.

No shit, dumbass. Why didn’t the GOP figure this out a long time ago? Were the results of the US census too “liberal” for their liking?

The Stupid Party strikes again. But immigration isn’t the only pile of, uh, “trap” that the Republicans have stepped in: I can’t wait to see the Republicans tie themselves tightly up in knots trying to defeat a measly increase in the minimum wage! (That was one of the sneakiest things Obama pulled on the GOP during the State of the Union address—there were several—and they fell for it hook, line and sinker).
 

 

Isn’t that a face you’d just like to punch?

The newest version of SB 234, Tennessee’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill—which would prohibit any mention whatsoever of homosexuality to Tennessee students in kindergarten through the 8th grade—includes an updated provision requiring teachers and guidance counselors to tell parents if their child self-identifies as LGBT.

What could possibly go wrong in a state where idiots turn in their “gay” dogs to be euthanized?

Remarkable, isn’t it?

The same closet-case dickhead who authored the first bill (which was introduced in 2011 but died) State Sen. Stacey Campfield (NATURALLY A GODDAMNED REPUBLICAN), reintroduced SB 234 this time as well. Campfield is, yes, the very same fucknut who proposed cutting welfare payments when kids get bad report cards just last week!

“The act of homosexuality is very dangerous to someone’s health and safety,” says Campfield.

From the new bill:

The general assembly recognizes that certain subjects are particularly sensitive and are, therefore, best explained and discussed within the home. Because of its complex societal, scientific, psychological, and historical implications, human sexuality is one such subject. Human sexuality is best understood by children with sufficient maturity to grasp its complexity and implications [...]

A school counselor, nurse, principal or assistant principal from counseling a student who is engaging in, or who may be at risk of engaging in, behavior injurious to the physical or mental health and well-being of the student or another person; provided, that wherever possible such counseling shall be done in consultation with the student’s parents or legal guardians. Parents or legal guardians of students who receive such counseling shall be notified as soon as practicable that such counseling has occurred.

WTF???

As Think Progress points out:

Family rejection is a serious risk for LGBT youth. Kids who are LGBT often face alienation, if not outright abandonment, because they come out. Forty percent of homeless youth are LGBT, and many of them report that the reason they left home was to escape an environment hostile to their sexual orientation. LGBT youth who experience family rejection are at high risk for depression and suicide.

Annoyed that his opponents dubbed the first go-round the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, this year Campfield called it the “Classroom Protection Act.”

“Protection from who?” asked Chris Sanders, chairman and president of the Tennessee Equality Project.

“It’s kind of like ‘Don’t Say Gay’ on steroids,” Sanders told The Tennessean. “He’s listened to the objections and ended up making it worse.”

Campfield is known as a particularly bellicose, arrogant and ignorant conservative Republican, the kind of combative not as smart as he thinks he is loser who’s one rung lower than, say, former Tea party-backed congressman Joe Walsh, with about half of Walsh’s wit, charm and intelligence (Walsh possesses none of these attributes, of course). There was a debate last year about whether or not to remove Campfield’s photo from his former high schools Wall of Fame. This guy is a dick.

If you’d like to give Stacey Campfield a piece of your mind—he’s obviously got none of his own—you can do so here. A Facebook page was also set up to organize getting rid of this jackass who seems intent on giving Knoxville a bad name. Here’s his phone number—(615) 741-1766—and his email address: sen.stacey.campfield@capitol.tn.gov

Below, a (flaming) ignoramus speaks his tiny, tiny little mind: