GOP Thinks Embracing Their Racism Counts as a Strategy

If you read my headline posts (and I've missed a few this week, sorry. I'll most likely miss tonight's too), you'll know that "David Brooks wrote something stupid again" is a running gag with me. He often goes to great lengths to promote the idea both parties are to blame for Washington being broken, taking Evel Knievel-like leaps of logic to arrive at his predetermined conclusions. But like pretty much all pundits, it proves impossible to always be wrong and the frustrating thing about Brooks is that he can be insightful when he drop his trademark false equivalency -- which he very seldom does. So I wasn't extremely surprised when I saw Taegan Goddard pick up two paragraphs from Brooks about immigration reform that were dead on the money. It's not that Brooks tends to be wrong so much as he's committed to not being right -- I guess because it gets him on TV so much (TV news show producers also love the innoffensive "both sides are just as bad" lie).

Here's his take on the GOP and immigration reform:

It's beginning to look as though we're not going to get an immigration reform law this year. House Republicans are moving in a direction that will probably be unacceptable to the Senate majority and the White House. Conservative commentators like my friends Bill Kristol and Rich Lowry are arguing that the status quo is better than the comprehensive approach passed by the Senate. The whole effort is in peril.

This could be a tragedy for the country and political suicide for Republicans, especially because the conservative arguments against the comprehensive approach are not compelling.

The thing about Brooks is, as the current Pope of the Church of High Broderism, that people take him seriously when he singles out one party as being the problem. Republicans won't of course -- mostly because they've become some weird hybrid fantasists/nihilists who don't take anything that happens to be real seriously -- but other pundits in the pundit echo chamber will. Not so much the political suicide part, which is pretty much what most of them are already saying, but the part about GOP arguments against reform being made out of suck. Republican excuses for killing immigration reform are mostly unpopular and all stupid.

And the stupidest of all is the mythical "missing white voter."

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In Wisconsin, Champions of 'Fiscal Restraint' Begin Shoveling Money Into a Furnace

It's all so painfully predictable. Republicans pass a restrictive abortion law that clearly violates Roe -- and therefore, the Constitution -- in a blatant pander to the Christian conservative base. Planned Parenthood and the ACLU sue to stop the bill and a federal court does its job.

NBC News: A federal judge Monday temporarily blocked part of Wisconsin's new abortion law and scheduled a hearing for next week.

The law, which went into effect Monday, includes provisions similar to those in several other states that require women to undergo an ultrasound procedure before having an abortion and require doctors who provide abortion services to have admitting privileges at a hospital.

Opponents, including Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, which is representing two doctors and an abortion clinic in challenging the law, said the measure was rushed into effect and that the provision affecting doctors would force two of the state's four clinics to close.

The blocked provision is the one that requires clinics to have admitting privileges at hospitals. This is an obvious attempt to regulate these clinics out of business and the judge found that the evidence "strongly supports a finding that no medical purpose is served" and that claims that the provision safeguards women's health "does not bear even superficial scrutiny on the current record."

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