Meet Michele Presnell, a GOP legislator in North Carolina, who supports saying Christian prayers before legislative meetings.
When a constituent asked her if it was okay to say Islamic prayers before a legislative meeting, Presnell emailed back, “No, I do not condone terrorism.”
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has backed away from his budget plan to eliminate the state’s income and corporate taxes while raising the sales tax and heavily cutting health care and education. Jindal’s approval rating has dropped to 38%, while support for his plan was at 27%.
Jindal is also one of the GOP governors refusing to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, even though the federal government initially pays for the entire expansion and subsequently pays for almost all of it. Businesses support the expansion — why wouldn’t they want a healthier work force?
Jindal’s failed budget in some ways makes him a canary in the coal mine for GOP policies. He’s very much in line with his party and groups like the Club for Growth, but not so much with his red state’s voters, who saw his budget as giving to the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class.
If Jindal really hopes to run in 2016, he needs to thread the needle of re-gaining his popularity at home while hewing to GOP orthodoxy.
The GOP seems to think its hope come from its governors, but when you try to enact its principles in the states, people don’t like the results. It’s much easier for a congressman like Paul Ryan or senator like Rand Paul to spout this inequality-extending stuff in theory than to live with its unfair consequences in practice.
A group of ten Republican legislators in North Carolina has submitted a bill that would establish an official religion in that state.
I’m guessing that religion won’t be Islam…
The post-Mittens re-branding of the GOP is going really well, don’t you think?
A new study, “Freedom in the 50 States,” done by George Mason University supposedly measures economic and personal freedoms and found North Dakota to be our freest state.
Um, tell that to someone who wants the personal freedom to have an abortion.
The next freest were South Dakota, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma.
The least free were New York, California, New Jersey, Hawaii, and Rhode Island. I’ve been in California for the past thirty years and have always felt quite free here, thank you very much.
Anybody think lots of people are about to flee the oppression of Hawaii for balmy North Dakota? Me either.
For more, see “Americans Are Migrating to More Free Republican States,” John Merline, Investors Business Daily
North Dakota just passed the most draconian abortion ban in the country — six weeks.
And North Dakota is also the most booming state in the country because of the oil being extracted there.
So what’s the connection? North Dakota’s state government currently has a $2 billion surplus thanks to oil revenues, so they’re happy to throw away money to defend their clearly unconstitutional abortion ban.
Another reason to hate the oil companies!
Some Tennessee state legislators freaked out about a new floor-level sink in a men’s room at the Capitol. They thought it was — oh the horror — so that Muslims could wash their feet before prayer.
Actually, the sink is so that custodial staff can wash their mops and fill their buckets more easily.
Much has been made of all the safe GOP House Seats, of how their occupants don’t have to fear a general election, just a primary challenge. Much has been made of how the gerrymandered seats let the GOP keep control of the House even though Dems got 1 million more House votes in 2012.
But there is an enormous downside to the GOP’s failure/inability to develop a strong bench for higher office by electing nut jobs to the House.
You get people in Congress like Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin who don’t just make fools of themselves when they run for Senate, they hurt the party nationally. Akin didn’t just kill the GOP’s chances of picking up a Senate seat in Missouri, he hurt other Senate races and he hurt Mitt Romney because of his damage to the overall GOP brand.
In the 2014 races, we may see the same thing play out with Steve King in Iowa and with Paul Broun in Georgia. Their inflammatory and bizarre beliefs will make news all across the country.
All politics may be local, but the politics of crazy has national consequences.
The Alaska House just passed a bill, 31-5, that says Alaskans’ guns and ammunition are not subject to federal gun laws.
Wait, it gets better. The law also says that federal agents are subject to felony charges if they try to enforce any future federal laws banning semi-automatic weapons or large ammo clips or requiring gun registration.
Sarah Palin is not an anomaly, there are plenty more where she came from.
Hey, Mr. Putin, you wanna buy (back) a state?
The GOP plan to win presidential elections by allocating electoral college votes based on congressional districts rather than winner-take-all in states Obama won twice is finally getting attention. Rachel Maddow has been raising the alarm, and here’s Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:
“Rather than going by the overall vote in a state, they’d allocate by congressional district. And this is where it gets real good, or bad, depending on your point of view. Democrats are now increasingly concentrated in urban areas and Republicans did an extremely successful round of gerrymandering in 2010, enough to enable them to hold on to a substantial House majority even though they got fewer votes in House races than Democrats.
“In other words, the new plan is to make the electoral college as wired for Republicans as the House currently is. But only in Dem leaning states. In Republican states just keep it winner take all. So Dems get no electoral votes at all.
“Another way of looking at this is that the new system makes the votes of whites count for much more than non-whites — which is a helpful thing if you’re overwhelmingly dependent on white votes in a country that is increasingly non-white.
“This all sounds pretty crazy. But it gets even crazier when you see the actual numbers. Here’s a very illustrative example. They’re already pushing a bill to do this in the Virginia legislature. Remember, Barack Obama won Virginia and got 13 electoral votes. But… if the plan now being worked on would have been in place last November, Mitt Romney would have lost the state but still got 9 electoral votes to Obama’s 4. Think of that, two-thirds of the electoral votes for losing the state. If the Virginia plan had been in place across the country, as Republicans are now planning to do, Mitt Romney would have been elected president even though he lost by more than 5 million votes.
“Remember, plans to do this are already underway in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and other states in the Midwest.
“This is happening.”
Got that? Mittens would be president today with five million fewer votes than Obama. If the GOP can’t win with women and minorities, they’ll just win with gerrymandering. Be afraid, be very afraid. They know demographics are against them, but if they soften their crazier stands, they will lose their base. So desperate times call for desperate measures, and this is pretty damn desperate.
GOP Gov. Rick Snyder’s approval of Michigan’s new right-to-work law has cost him the approval of his citizens.
Just last month, a PPP poll found 47% approved of his performance, and 37% disapproved. In their new poll, 38% approve, and 56% disapprove.
