Oh, and by the way, while the Supreme Court was pondering whether DOMA had a legitimate basis or whether it was simply an expression of reactionary hatred, the founder of right wing website Redstate.com, Erick Erickson, contributed this to the debate:

You’re not really loving your neighbor when you’re cool with him staying on the road to hell.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) March 27, 2013

At the National Review today, we find a brainless fluff piece about one of the most deranged Republicans in Congress: Can Paul Broun Win?

Author Betsy Woodruff admires Paul Broun’s “quirkiness and candor,” and his penchant for saying “colorful” things like this:

• “The Constitution I uphold and defend is the one I carry in my pocket all the time, the U.S. Constitution. I don’t know what Constitution that other members of Congress uphold, but it’s not this one. I think the only Constitution that Barack Obama upholds is the Soviet constitution, not this one.”
• “All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, the Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”
• “I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.”
• “I was the first member of Congress to call [President Obama] a socialist who embraces Marxist-Leninist policies like government control of health care and redistribution of wealth.”

That wacky, irrepressible caveman has a direct line to the Almighty, of course, and he knows that the Man Upstairs has called on him to be a Congressman.

He speaks for the religious Right. In the South, religion and politics have always been separated by only the thinnest of walls, and in Broun’s case, the line between religious and political fervor is particularly slim. “He really believes that the Lord wanted him to be a congressman,” says a source close to Broun.

But these aren’t his only lovable qualities! Broun also likes to kill animals, lots of them.

Broun remains an avid hunter. When I stopped by his Hill office, the first thing I noticed was that hunting trophies covered almost every wall. When he had to move offices a few months ago, the movers made quite a scene parading the heads of wild animals through the halls of the Rayburn House Office Building.

Broun doesn’t hunt just for the trophies. “If I shoot it, I’m gonna eat it,” he says. His warthog was particularly toothsome. “It’s actually pork,” he explains. “I had roast warthog, it was cooked in a French style. I’m a French cook myself, and I like to cook things with some fancy sauces and stuff that I’ll make at home. That was excellent.”

The only thing he didn’t especially care for was the lion. “The lion wasn’t particularly tasty,” he says. “It was kind of chewy, but I ate it too.”

The very model of a modern day Republican!

Related:
Science Committee Member Broun: Evolution, Embryology, Big Bang Are ‘Lies From the Pit of Hell’

Here’s Tannenhaus’s full article at the New Republic: Original Sin - Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people.

“Who needs Manhattan when we can get the electoral votes of eleven Southern states?” Kevin Phillips, the prophet of “the emerging Republican majority,” asked in 1968, when he was piecing together Richard Nixon’s electoral map. The eleven states, he meant, of the Old Confederacy. “Put those together with the Farm Belt and the Rocky Mountains, and we don’t need the big cities. We don’t even want them. Sure, Hubert [Humphrey] will carry Riverside Drive in November. La-de-dah. What will he do in Oklahoma?”

Forty-five years later, the GOP safely has Oklahoma, and Dixie, too. But Phillips’s Sunbelt strategy was built for a different time, and a different America. Many have noted Mitt Romney’s failure to collect a single vote in 91 precincts in New York City and 59 precincts in Philadelphia. More telling is his defeat in eleven more of the nation’s 15 largest cities. Not just Chicago and Columbus, but also Indianapolis, San Diego, Houston, even Dallas—this last a reason the GOP fears that, within a generation Texas will become a swing state. Remove Texas from the vast, lightly populated Republican expanse west of the Mississippi, and the remaining 13 states yield fewer electoral votes than the West Coast triad of California, Oregon, and Washington. If those trends continue, the GOP could find itself unable to count on a single state that has as many as 20 electoral votes.

The right wing tactic of “teaching the controversy” is popping up again in Nebraska; this time Republicans are using it to confuse children about climate change, but I’d be willing to bet they also have their sights set on Charles Darwin. Kate Sheppard has details: Nebraska Kids to Learn America Is Awesome, Climate Change Is Just a Theory.

Students in Nebraska are getting new standards for social studies curriculum, after weeks of intense debate. The state Board of Education reached agreement on two items of controversy this week: whether to include “American exceptionalism” and how to teach about climate change, the Lincoln Journal Star reports.

The fight had been over whether to explicitly teach the idea of American exceptionalism, as one board member proposed, and whether to include information about climate change, which the current standards do not mention. The board approved the standards after making some changes:

The words “American exceptionalism” do not appear in the final draft, but the concept does. In the sixth- through eighth-grade U.S. history standards, one of the “indicators” — examples of what to teach — is the “unique nature of the creation and organization of the American Government, the United States as an exceptional nation based upon personal freedom, the inherent nature of citizens’ rights and democratic ideals.”

Likewise, climate change appears in the sixth- through eighth-grade geography standards, but is presented as a theory, not as fact, asking students to evaluate “recent global climate change theories, and evidence that supports and refutes such theories.”

“American exceptionalism,” gotta love it. An amorphous concept, but wingnuts never get tired of it. It’s very important to believe in the special nature of their own specialness.

The religious right is beginning to feel like they were used and discarded: Social Conservatives Say They Deserve Seat at Table in Retooled GOP.

“If you have a party that says not to talk about social issues, it’s going to be awfully hard to convince an electorate of why we should celebrate life,” said Bob Vander Plaats, the evangelical leader in Iowa who played an influential role in that state’s caucuses earlier this year.

Yes, because without blue-nosed theocratic fanatics like Bob Vander Plaats telling them how to think, no American would ever celebrate life.

I don’t know what’s keeping it awake in the rest of the country, but here in California the Republican Party is just about ready for a long, long nap: GOP Might Never Again Hold Power in California.

Let’s count the election day wounds:

Mitt Romney lost to President Obama by a landslide 21 percentage points in a state that used to consistently side with the Republican nominee.

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein drew only token Republican opposition and won by 23 points.

Democrats, at last count, were gaining four congressional seats in California.

The stunner was the state Assembly, where Democrats apparently achieved a historic supermajority to match the party’s similar feat in the Senate. This means there’s virtually nothing that Democrats can’t pass on their own in Sacramento, relegating Republicans to mathematical irrelevancy.

But it doesn’t stop there.

The Republican slice of registered voters in California slipped below 30%. Only eight years ago it was nearly 35%. Democrats are 44%.

And about that loud anti-tax mantra, the Republicans’ favorite rallying cry: Most voters aren’t listening.

Speaking at the Awakening 2012 conference of religious right basket cases, Rick Scarborough is mad as hell at Bart Simpson, Rachel Maddow, the theory of evolution, and Brokeback Mountain. And a lot of other stuff. Especially fornication. Because it all leads to fornication, you know.

The Vatican is cracking down on American nuns who aren’t opposed to women’s rights and gay rights, which should surprise no one who’s been following the Catholic Church’s swing to the right.

WASHINGTON — The Vatican has launched a crackdown on the umbrella group that represents most of America’s 55,000 Catholic nuns, saying that the group was not speaking out strongly enough against gay marriage, abortion and women’s ordination.

Rome also chided the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) for sponsoring conferences that featured “a prevalence of certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”

Tonight, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has signed into law one of the nation’s most radical right wing anti-choice bills: Brewer Signs Bill Banning Most Abortions After 20 Weeks.

Gov. Jan Brewer has signed a bill into law banning most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and making numerous other changes to abortion regulations.

The new law will likely go into effect sometime in July, depending on when the Legislature ends its session.

Supporters of House Bill 2036 say it protects women and unborn children, who at this gestational age may feel pain. Opponents say it strips women and their doctors of the ability to decide how to handle situations of fetal abnormalities often discovered later in pregnancy.

“This bill is about protecting maternal health and safety,” said Rep. Kimberly Yee, R-Phoenix, who sponsored the bill. “When a woman has a later-term abortion after 20 weeks … this exponentially increases the risk of death.”

The conservative Center for Arizona Policy was behind the bill. Center president Cathi Herrod thanked Brewer for signing the bill into law.

“HB 2036 provides for the health needs of women considering an abortion, ensuring that women have all the information they need when making this life-changing decision,” Herrod said in a news release. “Abortion not only ends the life of a pre-born child, but it also seriously endangers the health and safety of women.”

But remember: according to the Republican Party’s spinmeisters, that whole “war on women” meme is completely imaginary.

Birth control via Shutterstock

The Republican Party has been trying like crazy to disguise their attacks on women’s contraception as an issue of “religious freedom,” but the newest Bloomberg national poll shows that Americans are not buying their snake oil: Republicans Losing on Birth Control as 77% in Poll Spurn Debate.

Americans overwhelmingly regard the debate over President Barack Obama’s policy on employer-provided contraceptive coverage as a matter of women’s health, not religious freedom, rejecting Republicans’ rationale for opposing the rule. More than three-quarters say the topic shouldn’t even be a part of the U.S. political debate.

More than six in 10 respondents to a Bloomberg National Poll — including almost 70 percent of women — say the issue involves health care and access to birth control, according to the survey taken March 8-11.

That conflicts with Republican presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, who say Obama is violating religious freedom by requiring employers — including those with religious objections to birth control — to provide a way for women to obtain contraceptive coverage as part of their insurance plans.

The results suggest the Republican candidates’ focus on contraception is out of sync with the U.S. public. Seventy-seven percent of poll respondents say birth control shouldn’t be a topic of the political debate, while 20 percent say it should.

One factor in these results: the disgusting misogynistic attacks launched by Rush Limbaugh against Sandra Fluke. When Limbaugh started spewing hatred at this young woman, he effectively destroyed the Republican Party’s “religious freedom” disguise, and made it appallingly clear that this initiative is about something much more primal — the compulsive need for reactionary sexist right wing men to control women.