Dave's Verse

Adam Serwer and Tim Murphy have the reporting. First, just in case you didn't think Herman Cain was really as crazy as he appeared, there's this: One private intervention came during the summer of 2011, when then-GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain attended one of Norquist's weekly, off-the-record breakfasts, a gathering for DC's conservative elite. The assembled big-shots were disturbed by some of Cain's comments on the campaign trail about Muslims. A Think Progress reporter had captured him boasting that he would never appoint a Muslim as a member of his cabinet. Weeks later Cain had argued that cities like Murfreesboro, Tennessee—where activists were attempting to block a new Islamic center—should be allowed to outlaw the construction of mosques. "It really bothers me when you say this, because that's scary," Norquist recalls one of the participants, who was Jewish, saying. Cain sought to reassure his hosts that only Muslims would be subject...

Ta-Nehisi Coates provides us with a fascinating analogy between the NRA and the pro-slavery proponents of the 19th century written by Tony Horwitz: Emboldened by success, and imbued with a fanatical and paranoid world-view, they see enemies everywhere and regard any hint of compromise as betrayal. As New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley wrote in 1854, slavery "loves aggression, for when it ceases to be aggressive it stagnates and decays. It is the leper of modern civilization, but a leper whom no cry of 'unclean' will keep from intrusion into uninfected company." Much the same applies to the NRA and its insatiable appetite for new territory to allow arms in, and new ways to allow those guns to be used--such as putting armed guards in our elementary schools, as the NRA today suggested. The policy goals are different now, obviously. But the way in which the GOP and NRA think about the world is similar. Someone is always ready to take all their guns away. The same...

Rep. Steve King, he of legalize dogfighting and kidnapping/raping is legal fame, says he has never heard of a woman becoming pregnant by rape . Well of course he hasn't. That's because King, like his Republican colleagues, don't live in the same world as the rest of us. They have no conception of how people other than themselves live their lives. Given my last several posts, you can see where I'm going with this. Republicans like King and Todd Akin only see what they grew up seeing and what they were told. Unless they have traveled and sought out information about other people and places but simply chose to ignore it, they haven't ventured outside of their own minds and their own experience. Nothing or no one has challenged their worldview. That's how Paul Ryan can get 60% of his cuts in his budget from programs from the poor. That's how they would pass a law that makes it murder to use some forms of contraception. They have no idea what it's like to...

In my last post I talked about the lack of women in the GOP. Yesterday, some guy named Todd Akin made some elephant shit insane remarks about rape and abortion. I won't quote him here. It's obvious he has no answer for the issue of abortion because of rape and just made shit up to try and justify his horrible position. I'll just send you to this piece by Jamelle Bouie explaining that the policies Akin supports are that of the entire GOP. What I didn't get to in my last post was some of the specific the consequences of the lack of women in the GOP. I think those remarks and the GOP's stance on abortion might be the biggest consequence. If you read what Akin said and his responses you see that he just has no clue about what it means to be a woman. He barely addresses the woman in his remarks. It's all about the act of rape, which he seems to not fully understand, and the child (as he puts it) that "may" result from the rape. I pretty firmly believe...