For Religious Conservatives, the War Against Gay Rights is Already Lost

One of the more enjoyable aspects of the recent and rapid advance of gay rights over the past few years -- and the past few months in particular -- has been watching the Baghdad Bob-like insistence on the far-right that the battle against the Homosexual Menace can still be won. For those of you who might not remember, "Baghdad Bob" was a nickname given to Saddam Hussein's Information Minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf. He earned notoriety for being the worst propagandist anyone had ever seen, insisting that the defense of Iraq from the Dubya invasion was going great for Hussein -- at one point telling reporters there were no Americans in Baghdad while our tanks rolled around in the background.

The right's approach to the advance of gay rights and gay acceptance has been complete denial to a ludicrous degree. For people who talk about liberty and freedom a lot, they sure don't seem to have a lot of use for them.

At the head of all this stupid, you're generally going to find Michele Bachmann. Yesterday was no exception.

Raw Story: Appearing on CNN’s The Situation Room, and speaking before Arizona governor Jan Brewer vetoed SB 1062 which would have effectively legalized discrimination based on religious grounds, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) explained to Wolf Blitzer that a veto would “eviscerate” freedom of speech.

Asked by host Blitzer what she thinks Governor Jan Brewer should do with the bill sitting on her desk, Bachmann replied that we need to have “tolerance” for people on both sides of the issue.

“I think what we need to do is respect both sides. We need to respect both opinions,” Bachmann replied. “And just like we need to observe tolerance for the gay and lesbian community, we need to have tolerance for the community of people who hold sincerely held religious belief.”

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Bachmann's Career Dies as it Lived -- Running Scared from Any Hint of Accountability

During her presidential run, soon-to-be former Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann developed a reputation for having a rocky relationship with the press. It wasn't so much the media's fault, as it was Shelly's.

Dylan Stableford, Yahoo! News (Aug., 2011): CNN weekend anchor Don Lemon says that Marcus Bachmann, the husband of Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, and two members of her campaign staff pushed him into a golf cart during a campaign stop at the Iowa state fair in Des Moines before Bachmann's victory in Saturday's straw poll.

"She came out, after speaking for just a couple minutes," Lemon said on CNN. "There were other reporters and cameras there. And I asked her very respectful questions: 'How do you think you did in the debate last night?' and 'How do you think you're going to end up in the Ames Straw Poll?' And her two campaign aides started elbowing me."

Lemon continued: "I told them, asked them not to elbow me. And then her husband Marcus started doing the same thing. And then he elbowed me into the cart. And I said, 'You just pushed me into the cart.' And he goes, 'No, you did it yourself.'"

The entire incident struck Lemon as odd, since he was just doing general reporting. "We weren't asking any 'gotcha' questions," he said. The same story covers a similar incident with ABC's Brian Ross, who was "manhandled" by Bachmann security after asking a question about Bachmann's tendency toward migraine headaches.

"I was never closer than 10 or 12 feet to her," Ross said later. "The people around her recognized me and came up and identified themselves as with the staff said they knew who I was. And the blocking was all about me. Other cameraman, other reporters were allowed to get close." See, Ross is scary because he's ABC's investigative reporter

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Not the "Greatest Country in the World," But Getting There

Is the United States the greatest country in the world? Not if you look at the facts. Our infant mortality rate is worse than forty other nations, we rank in the middle of all nations in terms of income inequality, and we compare poorly with the rest of the world when it comes to people living in poverty. "America is the greatest nation in the world" is something you're supposed to say if asked, maybe even believe, but by most measures it simply isn't true.

Which is why progressives exist. People on the right like to point to progressives' skepticism about this whole "greatest country in the world" stuff to paint us as America-haters. This is poor logic. The person who loves something is the person who's willing to do the work to fix it when it starts falling behind. Leaving everything be and hoping for the best is laziness, not love. Progress means there's always room for improvement, while conservatism believes that everything is fine the way it is -- in fact, it's the belief that things are worse than they used to be. Which explains why they're all busy trying to undo the 20th century.

And it explains why real progress toward real liberty sticks in their craw. As Don't Ask, Don't Tell ends today, it's important to mark a milestone of American progress toward being the greatest country in the world.

Associated Press:

Just as the formal repeal of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy took effect, Navy Lt. Gary Ross and his partner were married before a small group of family and friends.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

GOP Debate a Trip Through Conservative Fantasyland

At last night's Republican presidential debate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry summed up very nicely nearly everything that's wrong with today's Republican Party:

ABC News:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry clung to his skepticism of climate change science in Wednesday's Republican presidential debate when he was asked if he believes man-made climate change is happening.

"The science is not settled on this. The idea that we would put Americans' economy at jeopardy based on scientific theory that's not settled yet to me is just nonsense," Perry said. "Just because you have a group of scientists who stood up and said here is the fact. Galileo got outvoted for a spell," he said.

It's perfect. It's got everything. It's got poor Rick Perry being victimized -- just like Galileo -- for scientific dissent. It lacks a single fact to back up the argument. And it displays economic flateartherism (developing new markets and new technologies would be bad for the economy? Really?). It's got a bass-ackward take on history worthy of Michele Bachmann (Galileo's case wasn't that of a hyper-religious know-nothing against scientists, it was a scientist against hyper-religious know-nothings like Perry). And it's a fine example of believing whatever in the hell you want to believe, inconvenient facts or logic be damned.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Calling the GOP "Anti-Science" is Being Generous

As a noted climatologist and expert on all things geological, Rep. Michele Bachmann can say with some degree of certainty that she knows what caused both Hurricane Irene and the earthquake that shook the east coast last week.

"I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians," she told a crowd in Florida yesterday. "We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending." Let me just point out that the right is accusing President Obama of politicizing Irene, then move on.

Shelly's not politicizing Irene, though. She's just spelling out cold, hard facts. All this happened because God has an opinion on government spending in the US. Seems to me that a being capable of miracles would be able to be a lot more clear -- maybe writing "STOP SPENDING SO MUCH MONEY!" across the sky in fire. But never mind that; the guy who supposedly runs the entire cosmos has a problem with the ratio of revenues to expenditures in one of the world's two-hundred-fifty-some nations. Call him detail-oriented.

Of course, it pays to point out that Bachmann rejects climate science. "I don't think it has been established as a fact that global warming is the issue of the day," she said in 2010. "One thing we need to do is look at the science." Think about that for a second. The evidence isn't good enough for her to conclude that global warming in a man-made phenomenon, but the science is solid that an angry god causes earthquakes and hurricanes. Worse, it takes someone of great faith to decipher what these earthquakes and hurricanes actually mean. This is the sort of reasoning that gets virgins thrown into volcanoes.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Conservative Thinkers' Self-Inflicted Dilemma

Reading a Politico piece on Republican elites worrying about 2012, you can almost stop reading after the fourth paragraph:

It's a tough time to be a conservative intellectual.

From the Weekly Standard to the Wall Street Journal, on the pages of policy periodicals and opinion sections, the egghead right's longing for a presidential candidate of ideas -- first Mitch Daniels, then Paul Ryan -- has been endless, intense, and unrequited.

Profoundly dissatisfied with the current field, that dull ache may only grow more acute after Ryan's decision Monday to take himself out of the running.

The problem, in shorthand: To many conservative elites, Rick Perry is a dope, Michele Bachmann is a joke, and Mitt Romney is a fraud.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

The "Unbiased" Media Strikes Again

When I woke up this morning, I cracked open my paper and came across this simpleminded and asinine opinion piece, courtesy of the Wisconsin State Journal editorial board. Yay for the debt limit deal, they argue, because it proves that Washington still works, despite the best efforts of some imaginary, bipartisan obstruction patrol.

The ideologically-driven progressives on the far left and the rigid tea party crowd on the far right seem equally entrenched against building consensus around workable solutions.

But at some point, the relentless finger-pointing and blaming of "the other side" needs to stop so America's very real and complicated problems can be addressed in meaningful ways.

The first thing that popped into my mind was a quote from Paul Krugman. "The 'both sides are at fault' people have to know better; if they refuse to say it, it's out of some combination of fear and ego, of being unwilling to sacrifice their treasured pose of being above the fray," he wrote recently. "It's a terrible thing to watch, and our nation will pay the price."

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Obama Swamping GOP Fundraising

It's a point I make often -- in fact, regular readers may think I try to pound it into the ground -- that people generally don't vote for things, but against things. I suppose the same goes for fundraising. It's a lot easier to get people to open their wallets to stop something than to start something. This is why negative campaigning works; it's all about being against something. Candidate X voted for a bill I don't like and candidate X must be stopped.

There isn't anything wrong with this in and of itself. Progress is impossible without preventing backsliding. And, although it might appear to the contrary, it seems to make progress possible. Progress is always opposed and whether something moves forward or not seems to depend on the weakness of the opposition (in most cases), rather than the strength of the support.

Anyway, this whole theory of mine goes a long way toward explaining this:

Talking Points Memo:

The latest fundraising numbers from President Obama's reelection effort are jaw-dropping and represent the kind of haul Republicans have been warning their supporters about for months.

In a video sent to reporters and supporters Wednesday morning, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina announced $86 million in total fundraising between April and June of this year. Messina said $47 million went to the Obama campaign itself, while $38 million went to the DNC.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Republicans Have an Odd Definition of "Exceptional"

Wikipedia defines the concept of American exceptionalism this way:

American exceptionalism refers to the theory that the United States is qualitatively different from other nations. In this view, America's exceptionalism stems from its emergence from a revolution, becoming "the first new nation", and developing a uniquely American ideology, based on liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez-faire. This observation can be traced to Alexis de Tocqueville, the first writer to describe the United States as "exceptional". The term "American exceptionalism" itself was first used by members of the American Communist Party in the 1920s, in reference to their belief that "thanks to its natural resources, industrial capacity, and absence of rigid class distinctions, America might for a long while avoid the crisis that must eventually befall every capitalist society."

Of course, the entry goes on in some detail, but the broad concept is pretty much all there; America is a unique nation for many reasons. Personally, I believe the most important distinction is that we are a nation founded in law -- we exist for a reason. Where other nations may exist because of ethnic or religious identity, America does not. And we aren't defined by our existence within the borders of an ancient monarchy or tribe. "I am American" means something very different from "I am French," for example.

The problem with American exceptionalism isn't that the concept exists -- in fact, it's not difficult to see the validity of the argument. The problem is that it sounds vaguely like an argument that it is not; that the US is better than other nations and entitled to take liberties in the world. It was the Bush administration and their defenders who argued that America the Exceptional had the right to invade Iraq, in defiance of international law.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Truth? There is No Truth

What the hell is wrong with Republican voters? That's a question I've asked myself again and again and have yet to come up with a satisfying answer. It's as if reality has no meaning for them and they believe the universe is a big chunk of clay, waiting to be molded into whatever they want it to be. Even history means nothing -- just words on a page that can be edited to fit new narratives. We in the reality-based community are stuck in our slavish devotion to perceiving things as they actually are, while conservatives seem to see themselves of free from everything. Everything, that is, but a rigid ideology that runs contrary to most of those pesky facts. Science is the enemy. Math is the enemy. History textbooks are the enemy. The media is the enemy. If it disagrees with the ideology, it is the enemy.

Consider, for example, Minnesota Representative and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. Despite being a noticeably low-wattage bulb, she's become a bona fide possibility for the GOP nomination. Public Policy Polling finds that if Sarah Palin doesn't run, Bachmann "will pretty instantaneously vault to co-front runner status with Mitt Romney, provided she can continue her current momentum" and Gallup reports that she "finds herself in a relatively positive position among Republicans as she begins her formal campaign."

Granted, most of this polling was done before Bachmann had a rough few days of seemingly constant gaffes, but gaffes are what she does. A combination of serial liar and ignoramus, none of what's been making headlines for her lately can come as a real surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the woman.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

What it Takes to Do Well in a GOP Debate

The first Republican debate is over and it seems the clear winner was Mitt Romney. In fact, National Journal polled political insiders (names at the link) and found 51% of Republican insiders believed Mittens walked away with it. Only 35% of Democrats agreed, but he was the winner among them as well. Among both groups, Michele Bachmann came in second, but I think she benefits from the soft bigotry of low expectations -- she didn't swallow her tongue, claim that the United States was founded to fight communism, or praise President Lincoln's initiative in starting the space program.

So it was Mittens who took the night. The best take on that I've read so far comes from Steve M. at No More Mr. Nice Blog:

...Romney pitches his voice midway between avuncular and angry; his words are pitched the same way. I think he may have a sweet spot: this stuff plays to every Limbaughnista and Fox fan's bitter resentments, but the rest of America has heard this stuff for so many decades -- ever since Reagan, really -- that by now it sounds like harmless common-sense folk wisdom. After all the craziness in the last election cycle, Romney might sound like a return to sanity while promising to do pretty much what the crazy people promised to do. That could work -- and if so, he's really dangerous.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Polling Suggests Tea Party is Loud, But Not Numerous

The 2012 presidential campaign begins today, about as officially as it ever will. A presidential debate in New Hampshire tonight features Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Ron Paul, and Tim Pawlenty. This is by no means the full field. Missing will be John Huntsman -- absent by choice -- and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a Ron Paul clone that event organizers decided "was not viable as a candidate." At this point, neither are Gingrich or Paul, but I guess name recognition earns you some slack.

Going into this, Romney is definitely the candidate to beat. A new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll puts Romney at the head of the pack by a fairly respectable margin, beating his closest competitor -- the as yet unannounced Sarah Palin -- 24% to 20%. After that, it's Giuliani with 12% and it just gets sad after that.

Gallup likewise has a poll out and the news for the non-Romneys there is worse. While Mitt's percentage is identical to CNN's findings -- 24% -- everyone else is worse off. Palin only scores 16%.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Winning the GOP Primary in Wingnutopia

Gallup reports a new poll using a somewhat misleading headline; "With Huckabee Out, No Clear GOP Front-Runner." The reason I say this is somewhat misleading is because there wasn't a clear frontrunner with Huckabee in. The GOP field this year is a mix of no-names, frootloops, and finger-in-the-wind flip-floppers. The Gingrich campaign is (perhaps prematurely) already being declared dead in the water, a victim of the candidate's mouth. Anyone who remembers Newt's days as speakers won't be surprised -- he was always one to speak before thinking, assuming that every random thought was brilliant and worthy of great attention. His current situation must seem very familiar to him.

What we do see in the Gallup poll is a sort of split between the more pragmatic primary voters who recognize their candidate has to win a general election and the true-believers, the 'baggers, and the talk radio-informed who demand nothing short of wingnut purity. In that poll, leading the pack -- albeit barely leading -- are Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin. That would be the same Sarah Palin who recent polling shows would lose even to Dennis Kucinich (a "rout," in the pollster's words) in the general election. In short, be prepared for a lot of "who's the soul of the Republican Party?" articles, because the answer to that question isn't extremely clear.

And Newt's reportedly washed-up campaign? Scoring third right now.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

GOP Candidates Must Walk the Line Between Too Crazy and Not Crazy Enough

At this point, it would be unrealistic to expect polling on the 2012 presidential race to be predictive. The elections are nineteen months away, give or take a few weeks, and anything could happen between now and then. If you looked at a poll now and said, "This is definitely who's going to win," being right would be as much a matter of luck as anything. It would barely be a better informed choice than using the numbers in your mother's birthday to play the lottery.

But one cliche about polling that's inarguably true is that they're snapshots of a moment in time. It shows you where people's heads are at; what they think is important, what they seem to want, what misconceptions they hold, etc. If not predictive, polls can still be informative.

So looking at a New York Times/CBS News poll out today can tell us a lot about Republican primary voters, even if it doesn't tell us much about who will win that primary. This poll, like a recent CNN poll, finds Republican voters unimpressed with their choices. The NYT poll finds that "nearly 60 percent of Republicans cannot point to a single candidate about whom they are enthusiastic," while CNN's showed "No opinion/No one" in the lead, with 45% of respondents.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

American Fad: The Tea Party's 'Big' DC Rally

Yesterday, as I was writing about the decline of the Tea Party, that very Tea Party was in Washington, proving me right. AMERICAblog's Joe Sudbay posted this press release earlier this week, announcing a big rally in DC:

Tea Party Patriots, the nation's largest grassroots organization, today announced that it will hold its first "Continuing Revolution Rally" outside of the U.S. Capitol challenging Congress and the members it helped sweep into power to take swift action on the budget. Tea Party stars in Congress such as Reps. Mike Pence and Michele Bachmann will join thousands of Tea Party activists to send a message to the rest of Washington. Thursday's rally is co-sponsored by Let Freedom Ring, the Institute for Liberty, and Smart Girl Politics.

“Members of Congress have abandoned their service to the people by passing continuing resolutions instead of cutting the $100 billion they pledged," said Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin, National Coordinators of the Tea Party Patriots. "Is it lack or leadership? Is it a lack of courage? A real budget will spark a national debate on the role of government, and that's what the American people want."

While the press release promised "thousands of Tea Party activists," all angry that the GOP isn't eager to shut down government, the rally didn't deliver.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

On Milbank's Palin Embargo

I'm not completely sold on Dana Milbanks's embargo on Sarah Palin news for the month of February. Personally, I'd like the unpopular Palin and the equally brainless demagogue Michele Bachmann to become the two vacant faces of the Republican Party. The only downside to this that I can see is that people will start equating a midwestern accent with idiocy.

In any case, it's not February yet, so deciding to join in or to violate the ban is a moot point. Which is good, because it turns out someone told Sarah to say something clever and she's extremely proud of herself.

Politico:

Former Alaska GOP Gov. Sarah Palin said Wednesday night that President Barack Obama's call for "winning the future" during his State of the Union address is best framed by the acronym it shares with a much different phrase -- "wtf."

"That was a tough speech to sit through and try to stomach," Palin said during an interview with Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren.

CONTINUE TO POST>>