VA-Gov: McDonnell's "Lie To The Voters" Strategy

This Bob McDonnell fellow is in quite a bit of trouble. His worldview has been exposed and it's not pretty. It's way far out on the extreme fringes of society, anti-woman, anti-contraception (!), holding the Garden of Eden above the US Constitution, and more. What's more, he actually acknowledges that his own views are unpopular.

It is also becoming clear in modern culture that the voting American mainstream is not willing to accept a true pro-family ideologue...Leadership, however, does not require giving voters what they want, for whimsical and capricious government would result. Republican legislators must exercise independent professional judgment as statesmen, to make decisions that are objectively right, and proved effective. (pg. 61)

That's an amazing statement, as Markos notes. He's saying that the ideal state for a Republican is to lie to voters during the campaign and governing as an extremist afterwards.

McDonnell spent 80 minutes on a conference call with reporters doing damage control yesterday. That's how serious they are taking this. But none of it should mean a thing, thanks to that paragraph above. McDonnell is not to be trusted - he told you that himself. And once a candidate loses trust, he doesn't have much left.

Creigh Deeds, who won late in the Democratic primary, was inching back into the race even before this revelation. I'd imagine things have tightened even more now. McDonnell is flat-out scary to a large portion of the electorate.

P.S. I am surprised that the Christie-Corzine race hasn't tightened up in some of the bigger polls. That's the other big gubernatorial race in November. The polls appear to be all over the place, and the impact of Christie's bad month may have not hit voters yet. I still believe Corzine can turn things around.

The Problem With The Republican Revolution Redux: It's The Crazy, Stupid

I keep seeing these expert handicappers arguing that Democrats will take significant losses in 2010. And I think they could be right, especially if the President doesn't take control of the debate on a number of issues and deliver the policies Democratic partisans thought they voted for last November.

But in the back of my mind, I have this nagging feeling that Republicans are simply too completely crazy to compete seriously with any halfway decent political party for the votes of independents. People have short memories, but not that short, and they well remember the disaster of the Bush years. And the Republican bench is filled with avowedly insane or unspeakably corrupt people.

Take the Virginia Governor's race, for example. GOP candidate Bob McDonnell, who until now had been atop the polls, is a Regent University type (Monica Goodling's alma mater) whose worldview in his mid-30s was completely out of the mainstream of American life (but right at home in the Republican Party):

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.

The 93-page document, which is publicly available at the Regent University library, culminates with a 15-point action plan that McDonnell said the Republican Party should follow to protect American families -- a vision that he started to put into action soon after he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates.

During his 14 years in the General Assembly, McDonnell pursued at least 10 of the policy goals he laid out in that research paper, including abortion restrictions, covenant marriage, school vouchers and tax policies to favor his view of the traditional family. In 2001, he voted against a resolution in support of ending wage discrimination between men and women.

The campaign for Creigh Deeds, the Democrat in the race, is all over this document and for good reason. It wasn't a youthful indiscretion, but a blueprint for radical theocratic governance, upon which McDonnell acted in the House of Delegates.

Another example: New Jersey GOP candidate Chris Christie, a Rove protege who used his US Attorneys office in New Jersey for partisan ends and held himself to a different standard of ethics than those he prosecuted:



My point is this: Republicans can't hide their crazy. In fact, they have to let little bits of it out to win their primaries. And yet these ethical lapses and statements of radical views massively turn off independent voters. In the abstract, on the generic ballot, Republicans might look good to those swamped by the anti-Obama lies of the noise machine. Up close, Republicans still have major problems with the electorate. So I'm not convinced that the losses next year will even hit double digits in the House, especially if Democrats get their act together and do something tangible for the American people.

...That said, I do think the Democrats will lose seats next year, mainly because most Presidents lose seats.

Religious Right? I Don't See Any Religious Right.

Kathleen Parker wrote an op-ed today calling out the "oogedy-boogedy" theocratic wing of the GOP and "armband religion" as impeding conservative electoral prospects for a generation.

Here's the deal, 'pubbies: Howard Dean was right.

It isn't that culture doesn't matter. It does. But preaching to the choir produces no converts. And shifting demographics suggest that the Republican Party -- and conservatism with it -- eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one's heart where it belongs [...]

But, like it or not, we are a diverse nation, no longer predominantly white and Christian. The change Barack Obama promised has already occurred, which is why he won.

Among Jewish voters, 78 percent went for Obama. Sixty-six percent of under-30 voters did likewise. Forty-five percent of voters ages 18-29 are Democrats compared to just 26 percent Republican; in 2000, party affiliation was split almost evenly.

The young will get older, of course. Most eventually will marry, and some will become their parents. But nonwhites won't get whiter. And the nonreligious won't get religion through external conversion. It doesn't work that way.

This has sent conservatives into a tizzy, as they demand, DEMAND to know what Parker is referring to. The author of "Liberal Fascism," who has never ascribed bad motives to a political party in his life, has a representative comment.

What aspects of the Christian Right amount to oogedy-boogedyism? I take oogedy-boogedy to be a perjorative reference to absurd superstition and irrational nonsense. So where has the GOP embraced to its detriment oogedy-boogedyism? With the possible exception of some variants of creationism (which is hardly a major issue at the national level in the GOP, as much as some on the left and a few on the right try to make it one), I'm at a loss as to what Kathleen is referring to. Opposition to abortion? Opposition to gay marriage? Euthanasia? Support for prayer in school?

Hey, can I offer a piece of evidence?

The California Supreme Court will take up various legal challenges to the constitutionality of Proposition 8, with oral arguments to begin around March and a decision expected by next May. I'm sure we'll see a host of arguments between now and March, but the amicus brief on behalf of the Lord is a new one. It's a PDF, but here's the opening statement:

Acting on behalf of the Almighty Eternal Creator, who is holding sole ownership to His creations, all planets, including the earth and everything above, below and on it, myself as His heiress, and the Kingdom of Heaven World Divine Mission (also known as Rebuild My Church Divine Mission), a Non-Profit Corporation in the State of California, submit this Amicus Curiae brief to the address the legal standard for granting "yes" on Proposition 8, passed with 52% of California voters votes, as the State of California Constitution Amendment: "Marriage between one man and one woman only!"

Later on, there's this section:

After a night full of dreams, before dawn on November 11, 2008, before I woke up in the morning, the Almighty Eternal Creator ordered me, saying "You explain to them the consequences that follow each and all of their actions. Once they understand, they will listen!"

These two matters (gay-lesbian and abortion) are just a couple of many major cases where people are exercising their free-will rights for wrong purposes. This has gone on for a hundred-thousand years and has contributed heavily to extreme weather, global warming, financial crisis, recession, global hatred, lying, violence, war and murder, serious sickness and diseases - often for the purpose of gaining rights for wrong purposes, power and money.

I mean, if you want to deny that a non-trivial part of your coalition is out in la-la land, go ahead. But ultimately, conservatives are responsible for giving this kind of nonsense talk a presentable forum and a place in their party. They made a devil's bargain and now they're trying to act like the Dominionists in their midst are perfectly normal.

I don't know how right Parker is (the economic royalists and the neocons can shoulder some of the blame), but let's not pretend that the religious right is rational and benign. And let's not pretend that their desire to mandate their views of morality on the whole society, to use hate as a wedge to divide and sow fear, to define what you do in the privacy of your home and with your body, hasn't caused revulsion among a fairly large segment of the population who can't stand being constantly told how to think and act.

John Cole has an additional bill of particulars.

The Faith Of Sarah Palin

The next President and the next Vice President of the United States could be Buddhists, Episcopalians, animists, Zoroastrians, agnostics, or worship a certain shade of green as long as they use sound judgment and the law to define their policy prescriptions. My concern is that Sarah Palin does not do so.

When Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin promised to lead the nation with a "servant's heart," evangelical Christians immediately recognized her as one of their own.

Whether before an audience of ministry students or on a national stage at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, the 44-year-old Palin speaks fluently about her faith, striking chords with phrases that evoke Christian virtue. Palin has called on people to pray for the cooperation necessary to build a natural gas pipeline across Alaska, labeled the U.S. mission in Iraq a "task that is from God" and argued that students should be taught the creation account from Genesis in public schools.

In a race where both presidential candidates, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain, have tried to court religious voting blocs, Palin's introduction to the Republican ticket adds another dimension.

Just as McCain's politics are largely shaped by his experience as a prisoner of war and Obama's by his embrace of his racial identity, Palin's approach has been shaped by her relationship with God. Palin sees her government work as paling in comparison to a greater mission.

"I can do my job there in developing our natural resources and doing things like getting the roads paved and making sure our troopers have their cop cars and their uniforms and their guns, and making sure our public schools are funded," she said in June to ministry students at her former church. "But really, all of that stuff doesn't do any good if the people of Alaska's heart isn't right with God."

I'm just never going to be OK with that. If your faith shapes your morality it's one thing. If you try to legislate your personal morality it's quite another. Palin has said that his goal as a public official is to follow God's will. She believes in a literal teaching of the Bible, and her current church seeks to convert gays away from homosexuality. They believe in spiritual warfare against the sinful. Her pastor has said that God is going to strike out His hand against America because of the fallen nature of Americans. This church is extremely radical and its teaching are not in step with a judicious handling of democratic institutions.

Many of Palin's beliefs mirror those of evangelical Christians. But Pentecostals occupy a distinct subset of evangelical Christianity. They believe they can be "baptized in the Holy Spirit" just as Jesus Christ's apostles were in the New Testament's Book of Acts. Gifts of the spirit include speaking in tongues, prophesy and faith healing.

The churches she has attended also embrace dispensation, a theological system that emphasizes man's dominion over the earth and the end times—theology that could potentially shape a believer's environmental and foreign policies.

We have endured eight years of this kind of end-times, Dominionist belief inside the White House. There's a difference between the faithful, the spiritual and what we are seeing out of the Wasilla Assembly of God. In the end, this comes back to McCain, who so needed the religious right to ramp up their phone banks and volunteer efforts that he sold his VP pick to the Christianists.

...and if you don't think this plays a role in public policy, take a look at this:

Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt has proposed a new rule that will limit the rights of women to receive medically accurate information and treatment. The alleged goal of the rule is to protect the rights of health care workers, volunteers, and trainees. The result would be limited access to birth control and abortion for women all over the country - regardless of state law.

From CNN:

The rule, which applies to institutions receiving government money, would require as many as 584,000 employers ranging from major hospitals to doctors' offices and nursing homes to certify in writing that they are complying with several federal laws that protect the conscience rights of health care workers. Violations could lead to a loss of government funding and legal action to recoup federal money already paid.

The comment period ends on September 25th. We have 19 days until this rule takes effect.

Read the entire thing.

2012 Campaign Begins

The Man Called Petraeus puts out his first dogwhistle:

Gen. David Petraeus is used to controversy surrounding the war in Iraq, but his publicized thoughts on an Army chaplain's book for Soldiers put him squarely in the middle of the ongoing conflict over religious proselytizing in the U.S. military.

The book is "Under Orders: A Spiritual Handbook for Military Personnel," by Army Chaplain (Lt. Col.) William McCoy, and according to Petraeus' published endorsement of the work, "it should be in every rucksack for those times when soldiers need spiritual energy."

But the endorsement - which has spurred a demand by a watchdog group for Petraeus' dismissal and court martial on the grounds of establishing a religious requirement on troops - was a personal view never intended for publication, the book's author now says.

"In the process of securing … comments for recommending the book I believe there was a basic misunderstanding on my part that the comments were publishable," McCoy said in an Aug. 19 email to Military.com. "This was my mistake."

This endorsement has been on the book for close to a year. Petraeus must have been starting to worry that nobody would find out about it!

Can't you hear the theocon right, musing, "I knew that Gen. Petraeus was a good Christian man! If only he were our guy instead of this McCain fellow. I'll bet Petraeus wouldn't consider one a' them baby killers for his Vice President..."

McCain's doing his best to keep the fundies in the tent this time around, but in their heart, they want the guy who writes blurbs on the "Jesus in the foxhole" book.

Theocrats Mobilize for "Armageddon"

This report of a national conference call to fight Prop. 8 and marriage equality sounds more like a battle plan than a political strategy session. All the leading figures of the religious right were there, and the language is undeniably militaristic. I believe that the best way to counteract the theocratic right is to display them in all their radicalism, so the whole country understands the goals of their movement. So here ya go:

The primary focus of the call was Proposition 8 in California, described by (Chuck) Colson as “the Armageddon of the culture war.” Many speakers invoked the language of warfare, raising up an army of believers, putting soldiers in the streets, being on the front lines of a battle. Lou Engle actually described a massive rally planned in Qualcomm stadium on November 1 as a “blitzkrieg moment.”

While speaker after speaker spoke of the dire threats same-sex married couples pose to “traditional” marriage, religious freedom, and civilization itself, the overall tone of the call was confidence that victory would be won with God’s help, 40 days of prayer and fasting before the election, teams of intercessors and prayer warriors around the country, and a massive highly organized deployment of volunteers in a systematic voter identification and turnout campaign.

This is not exactly the stuff of democracy, nor is it in any way reflective of a country with a separation of church and state. What is at work here is a putsch, a desire to seize the instruments of power and subjugate everyone to one belief system. They mobilize through fear, claiming that the next steps in the fiendish plan are to ban the Bible, legalize polygamy, and "destroy marriage". They're also using supposedly apolitical churches as an illegal communications apparatus:

Ron Luce from Teen Mania ministries and other organizers talked about plans to organize 300,000 youth and their families for an October 1 simulcast, and using them to reach 2.4 million. A representative of the Church Communication Network, a satellite network that has downlink equipment in 500 churches in California, 95 in Arizona, and 321 in Florida, said it would simulcast the youth event free of charge, and would make a satellite dish available “at cost” to churches who don’t yet have one. Said one speaker of the youth organizing, “if we don’t use them, Satan will.”

That is manifestly against the spirit of tax-exempt laws regarding churches - laws which I imagine you'll see broken many times between now and November. The free simulcasting and satellite services amount to in-kind donations.

People for the American Way is on this and keeping tabs on the theocratic right. As I said, forewarned is forearmed - there's a growing segment of the state and the country who are repulsed by this fundamentalism, this anti-Democratic dominionism. We have an opportunity this fall to lay bare the innate bigotry of their movement for all to see.

UPDATE: Another aspect to this is the exhuming once again of far-right theocratic icon Alan Keyes, who's running for President again - but only in California, as part of the American Independent Party (formed in 1968 by segergationist George Wallace, which is somewhat ironic). His running mate is Rev. Wiley Drake, the minister who prayed for the death of members of Americans United for Separation of Church and State last year. The fundies are lining up, packed in two at a time, and all headed to California in lockstep. It's going to be crazy out here for the next 95 days.

Women in Iraq

I know that we're entering the postwar period in Iraq and all, but just for giggles, let's take a look at what's happening in the country, shall we? The government we birthed into being has engendered a powerful fundamentalist strain that has made the country extremely dangerous for women (and not just KBR employees). Policewomen are being disarmed, officially, by the Iraqi government.

The Iraqi government has ordered all policewomen to hand in their guns for redistribution to men or face having their pay withheld, thwarting a U.S. initiative to bring women into the nation's police force.

The Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, issued the order late last month, according to ministry documents, U.S. officials and several of the women. It affects all officers who have earned the title "policewoman" by graduating from the police academy. It does not apply to men in the same type of jobs [...]

Without policewomen, Phillips said, there will be no officers to give pat-down searches to female suspects, even though women have joined the ranks of suicide bombers in Iraq. Last week, a female bomber killed at least 16 people north of Baghdad, at least the fifth such attack in Iraq this year.

Another U.S. advisor noted that forcing out female officers will hamper investigation of crimes such as rape, which stigmatizes women in Iraq, because few victims feel comfortable reporting it to policemen.

This is a death sentence for policewomen in Iraq. Police forces are often targeted by insurgents, and are subject to kidnapping and assassination. This undermines a four-year effort by the US military to integrate the police force by gender. An Interior Ministry official told an Army Brigadier General the following:

"Females are taken care of by men in this country. They are not out there being police officers."

Meanwhile, in the heavily Shiite south, women are being gunned down because of how they dress. Over 40 of them have been found this year.

Maj. Gen. Jalil Khalaf blamed sectarian groups that he said were trying to impose a strict interpretation of Islam. They dispatch patrols of motorbikes or unlicensed cars with tinted windows to accost women not wearing traditional dress and head scarves, he added.

"The women of Basra are being horrifically murdered and then dumped in the garbage with notes saying they were killed for un-Islamic behavior," Khalaf told The Associated Press. He said men with Western clothes or haircuts are also attacked in Basra, an oil-rich city some 30 miles from the Iranian border and 340 miles southeast of Baghdad.

"Those who are behind these atrocities are organized gangs who work under cover of religion, pretending to spread the instructions of Islam, but they are far from this religion," Khalaf said.

Not to mention the fact that gays and lesbians are singled out for murder in the country as well.

This is the country that we have pieced together with paper clips and tape. While we are walling off the country with 17 foot-high barriers and balkanizing the country into competing power groups of warlords and militias, we are blinding ourselves to the subjugation of women. They cannot serve in positions of power and authority. They cannot personally express themselves. The increasingly have nowhere to turn in the event of rape or assault.

This is a problem that doesn't get nearly enough coverage. We hear more about sectarianism (which has forced the police forces off the street beat), or the struggle to provide services, or the political stalemate. But the plight of Iraq's women is actually part of the larger story about how we've irreparably broken this country. This is a society now ruled by fundamentalists and willing to subjugate half their population. It's a direct result of the invasion, and it's being tacitly approved by a military occupation that reasons it should turn a blind eye and let this suppression play out. That this is a war being defended on the grounds that we've "liberated" the Iraqi people is the cruelest of ironies.

Peggy Noonan Admits Republican Voters Are Idiots

My friends, we are witnessing, in slow motion, the crackup of the fragile Republican coalition. And it's delightful to watch.

The two main groups in conflict are the economic royalists, the conservatives motivated by greed and keeping their dominance over the poor, and the theocrats, motivated by making state-sponsored religion the law of the land, removing gays from the country and banning abortion. There's always been an uneasy truce between these two camps, but the 2008 election is putting them in conflict. And the best example of this is Peggy Noonan's column in today's Wall Street Journal.

Noonan's subject was Mitt Romney's highly offensive speech on (how there's not enough) faith in America. It was very clear that, far from being a speech about the separation of church and state, it was about how you better have a church, so long as Mitt Romney wants to be the state. Today the Romney campaign refused to acknowledge whether or not atheists have a place in America. And Peggy Noonan speculates why Romney, who represents more of the economic royalist wing, felt the need to insult people who don't share this feeling of faith. By the way, Noonan liked the speech because she essentially likes Romney, but she lets her slip show at the end:

There was one significant mistake in the speech. I do not know why Romney did not include nonbelievers in his moving portrait of the great American family. We were founded by believing Christians, but soon enough Jeremiah Johnson, and the old proud agnostic mountain men, and the village atheist, and the Brahmin doubter, were there, and they too are part of us, part of this wonderful thing we have. Why did Mr. Romney not do the obvious thing and include them? My guess: It would have been reported, and some idiots would have seen it and been offended that this Romney character likes to laud atheists. And he would have lost the idiot vote.

My feeling is we've bowed too far to the idiots. This is true in politics, journalism, and just about everything else. (emphasis mine)

La Noonan couldn't have made it more clear than that; theocrats and so-called "values voters" are idiots, whose intolerance doesn't fit with the model of America. Of course, if any Democrat said this, there would be pure outrage. But that Noonan said it reflects the strain between the theocons and the econocons.

We can also see this in the attacks on Mike Huckabee that we've seen this week. They were incredibly coordinated and transparent. All of a sudden, every traditional media outlet ran with the Wayne Dumond story. When's the last time you saw any giant news story triggered by something in the Huffington Post? It doesn't happen. This was clearly opposition research run amok, as suddenly the royalist wing saw Huckabee, a charismatic theocon, as a threat. We're now seeing the Club for Growth drop ads in Iowa and South Carolina. These ads pretty much are the manifestation of this breakdown in the Republican coalition.

We've heard talk about a third-party candidate from the theocon wing entering the race if Rudy Giuliani or someone insufficient to their beliefs were named the nominee. We're seeing how the other side of this battle fights back; through insults and negative ads. Economic royalists think they own the GOP. They aren't taking kindly to the theocon wing thinking they deserve anything more than lip service.

This is going to be a full-fledged crack-up, and it's about time. It's great news as we move forward toward a more progressive nation.

They'll Still Find A Way To Oppose It

With the news that researchers have figured out how to create stem cells without destroying embyros, the theocratic right will have to come up with a new rationale for stopping scientific breakthroughs. Maybe they'll decide that it's akin to cloning people.

The unencumbered ability to turn adult cells into embryonic ones capable of morphing into virtually every kind of cell or tissue, described in two scientific journal articles released today, has been the ultimate goal of researchers for years. In theory, it would allow people to grow personalized replacement parts for their bodies from a few of their own skin cells, while giving researchers a uniquely powerful means of understanding and treating diseases.

Until now, only human egg cells and embryos, both difficult to obtain and laden with legal and ethical issues, had the mysterious power to turn ordinary cells into stem cells. And until this summer, the challenge of mimicking that process in the lab seemed almost insurmountable, leading many to wonder if stem cell research would ever wrest free of its political baggage.

There weren't any mad scientists looking to build a race of über-humans. The goal was to create stem cells from adult skin cells all along, mainly because they are more efficient and more plentiful. The fundies were trying to hold back progress on technical grounds, and I have no doubt they'll continue to do so.

98 and 21/100% Wrong

I seem to be gravitating to the Huckster, all of a sudden, but that's just because he's, well, a huckster, peddling his cheap, petty lies to the unsuspecting. Huckabee has somehow convinced the political press that he's a barrel of laughs and a great campaigner, but then again, anybody can be a great campaigner if you have a rampant disregard for the truth.

During the Republican debate, Mike Huckabee said he believes one of the defining issues facing the country is the sanctity of human life. Arguing that the issue is of historical importance, he invoked the Declaration of Independence's rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and said that most of the signers of the declaration were clergymen.

Not even close.

Only one of the 56 was an active clergyman, and that was John Witherspoon. Witherspoon was a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).

This is part of that whole "America is a Christian nation" zombie lie, and any argument they can use to further that is fair game. In fact, a good portion of the Founders were deists, believing vaguely in a spiritual being on a philosophical level but not identifying with a specific sect, and CERTAINLY not as clergy.

But this is the kind of deliberate fabrication that rolls as trippingly off the tongue of Huckabee as anyone else in the Republican field. It's no different from when he asserted with nothing resembling proof that illegal immigration is somehow caused by "the holocaust of liberalized abortion." And by the way, he doesn't believe in any punitive action for those committing the holocaust:

First, if abortion is a "holocaust," one wonders why most anti-choicers believe that the alleged primary perpetrators of this genocide should face fewer legal sanctions than if they spat on the sidewalk. And Huckabee would have signed the North Dakota law that also exempted women from punishment for contributing to the "holocaust." Does Huckabee believe that Eichmann should have been exempt from punishment? Or maybe he should stop using this idiotic and spectacularly offensive analogy?

But he won't, just as he won't stop outright lying to provide substance to his unbearable lightness.

Allowing Women To Determine Their Own Medical Care Is The REAL Holocaust

One of the more pervasive justifications on the theocon right for the failure of their economic policies is that they would all be eliminated if there were a million more people in the workforce as a result of making abortions illegal. This is a completely ridiculous argument; abortion rates in countries where the practice is illegal are virtually unchanged from countries where it's legal; all that criminalizing abortion does is cause the deaths of women who attempt to end an unwanted pregnancy. Furthermore, it's one of those theories that sounds right but can be easily made applicable to account for pretty much anything, good or bad.

Crime: "If it weren't for abortions, there'd be 50 million more potential murderers and rapists on the loose!"
Iraq: "If it weren't for abortions, we'd have 50 million more potential National Guard recruits! We wouldn't have this shortage!"
Tort Reform: "If it weren't for abortions, we wouldn't have 50 million more potential lawyers filing frivolous lawsuits!"
Abortion: "If it weren't for abortions, we would have 50 million more people in the world arguing against abortions!"
Abortion (the other way): "If it weren't for abortion, we would have 50 million more potential high-risk teenagers about, some of whom might want to get an abortion!"

So I never expected to see such a reductionist argument used in anything but the outer fringes of political debate. Except when the venue is the Values Voter Summit and the speaker is Mike Huckabee:

"Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce," the former Arkansas governor said. "It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973."

Thus ending the Huck-mentum bandied about by media types trying to wring some excitement out of a depressing GOP race. First of all, the Anti-Defamation League and all sorts of other organizations should be up in arms about comparing a medical procedure to the death of 6 million Jews. Second, this idea that Huckabee would unify social and fiscal conservatives was always a phantom, considering that the Club for Growth calls him Tax Hike Mike, and that tax issues were two of the top four issues to voters at the Values Voters Summit. And by the way, Huckabee split the straw poll vote with Mitt Romney, whose speech there was much more well-received.

But really, I want to stress that this could be the most inane argument ever expressed by a serious Presidential candidate. Or at least for this week, anyway.

American Taliban

A state senator in Montana lets his slip show, along with the slip of his party:

As a Republican state senator in Montana and as a human being, I am offended by Senator Craig's existence. Why oh why are most of the perverts that get caught Republicans? Are there more of them or are they just stupid? The thought of a US Senator chasing love in all the wrong places makes me think longingly of the Ayotollahs in Iran. They would just kill the turkey.

Those happy days where men are murdered for their sexual orientation. Ah, those halcyon days...

Just looking at the left-right chart, it is clear that the conservatives are moving to the same kind of authoritarianism that we have in fundamentalist theocracies around the world. Far from being libertarian, they want to be in everyone's bedroom, legislating morality and physically harming those who aren't as morally pure as they are. This is the real face of the Republican Party in the 21st century. And if the GOP wants to survive, they need to purge their party of this strain of fundamentalism and theocratic impulses, or they will never be anything but a minority party as the long arm of history bends toward justice and liberalism. I thank this state senator for peeling back the curtain.

UPDATE: Well, the American Taliban has succeeded in pushing WideStance Craig out of their party. Not to defend Craig, whose inability to understand the law disqualifies him to be a lawmaker IMO. But clearly there is a major, major problem in the Republican Party with their demand for absolute fealty with a fundamentalist agenda.

The Party of Hate Crimes

The House passed federal hate crimes legislation expanding the definition of a hate crime to gender or disability or sexual orientation. The Senate plans to to the same. This bill was first proposed in 1998, in the aftermath of Matthew Shepard. But the White House plans to veto because the far-right religious base that hates the gay wants to protect criminals (I thought that's what liberals do) who act on their discriminatory rhetoric.

Under intense pressure from conservative religious organizations to derail the bill, the White House on Thursday called it "unnecessary and constitutionally questionable," issuing the latest in a string of veto threats aimed at the congressional Democratic majority [...]

Opponents argue that the bill would create special classes of federally protected crime victims. "If someone commits a crime, they should be punished for that crime. Period," said Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.). "Today the Democratic majority has chosen to end equality under the law."

Added Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas): "Justice should be blind to the personal traits of victims."

Some bill opponents also say the measure could stifle religious expression. They derided the measure as "thought crimes" legislation, contending that a pastor who preached against homosexuality could be charged with a hate crime if one of his church members committed a hate crime. The bill's supporters dispute that, saying the measure preserves 1st Amendment rights.

Far be it from me to expect anyone to read the bill, but clearly it cites action and deed and not thought. And if a group in society is targeted on the basis of a particular trait, they ought to be prosecuted on that trait as well. Law enforcement groups all support it, including the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

We look to this country as some beacon of freedom, and one of the hallmarks of that is respect for minority rights. We're in this "greatest struggle in the history of civilization" with fundamentalist nations that stone women and execute gays publicly. Shouldn't we offer a full-throated differentiation?

Religion and Politics

While the mullahs of the Republican Party got together tonight to chat about forcing religion into the public square, in Turkey they are actually working hard to keep it out.

Turkish lawmakers on Wednesday set national elections for July 22, four months earlier than planned, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party submitted a package of bills that would bring it advantages in the coming political battle.

Elections had been scheduled for Nov. 4, but on Tuesday, Turkey’s highest court annulled Parliament’s vote for president, effectively blocking Mr. Erdogan’s candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a close ally with a background in Islamic politics. The ruling created a standoff between Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party and the secular establishment.

The secular establishment in Parliament blocked the Islamic candidate from taking the Presidency, with the tacit support of the military behind them. Now, the establishment probably just fears the more popular AKP Party, led by Ergodan, from getting power, and are using the religion card as a means to that end. This is a good take:

Turkey's 2002 election was a shocker, with AKP winning by far the largest share of the vote, and the results produced Turkey's first single party government since 1987 and the country's first two-party parliament in 48 years. It's vital to note, however, that AKP won not because of its religious conservatism but because the secular coalition was viewed as corrupt, out of touch, and stale. AKP and it's leader, current Prime Minister Erdogan, ran on a platform of reform, economic development, and technocracy. More importantly, AKP has mostly delivered on those promises.

This has occurred repeatedly, and yet people still don't understand it: in developing areas, especially the Middle East, the establishment secular rulers are thrown out for domestic reasons -- usually economic and developmental -- and replaced by reformers who happen to be religious conservatives. These groups often build grassroot support, provide services that the government neglects, and quietly but effectively grow their networks from the bottom up. Hamas in the Palestinian territories. Ahmadinejad in Iran. Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. AKP in Turkey. Further, many of those crappy secular governments are/were being propped up by the U.S., to the detriment of the nations' people. Turkey, which is, admittedly, uniquely founded upon the principles of secularism, is now struggling with just how religious politicians can be, and the results will be very interesting.

No, these aren't the brightest days for democracy in Turkey. But it's interesting that the separation of church and state, or mosque and state, can be used to appeal to the citizens of a predominantly Muslim nation. Religious freedom is typically strongest in those countries without a state religion and without a theocratic government; take for example the fact that Iraq has been added to a religious freedom watchlist because of the hardships that come with worship there. A country that values one religion over another will always suffer from this ignominy. A country that offers both freedom of religion and freedom from religion will eventually be more religious and more free. There are forces in this country trying to dismantle that wall between church and state, and in so doing they plant the seeds of their own destruction.