Two years ago, Tea Party madness swept Republicans into state and municipal offices throughout the country. In Arkansas, Republicans took control of both the state house and senate. The last time they accomplished that feat was 1874.
Jason Rapert won a seat in the Arkansas state senate in 2010 and, with the backing of the Koch brothers’ Americans For Prosperity, won again in 2012. The result has been the type of loony tunes legislation we’ve all come to expect from teabagging politicians.
On Wednesday, the Arkansas legislature lurched forward with a radical measure to ban most abortions if a fetal heartbeat is detected within six weeks of a pregnancy, a requirement experts say will force the state to insert a probe into a woman’s vagina to detect.
The bill also penalizes doctors who perform abortions after the arbitrary cut-off date with a Class D felony, carrying up to six years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. The chief sponsor of the measure is Republican State Senator Jason Rapert, a fiddle-playing financial planner with his own evangelical outreach center that hosts mission trips to Uganda, Ghana, and the Philippines. He has been among the loudest anti-abortion politicians in the state, and has sponsored a number of other radical bills, including a very strange effort to organize a constitutional convention to give state legislatures power over the national debt limit.
Did the 2012 election not teach them anything about messing with women and their reproductive rights?
Some Republicans (i.e. those with national ambitions) have softened their harsh rhetoric toward minorities. The Marco Rubio, Christ Christie and Jeff Bush types in the party understand that the GOP will never win another general election without the votes of Hispanics, Asians and other minorities. And therein lies the problem the Republican party is forced to deal with. Namely, Tea Party-sponsored bigots and assholes like Jason Rapert.
Here’s a clip of Rapert at a Tea Party rally in 2011 where he says:
“I hear you loud and clear, Barack Obama. You don’t represent the country that I grew up with. And your values is not going to save us. We’re going to take this country back for the Lord. We’re going to try to take this country back for conservatism. And we’re not going to allow minorities to run roughshod over what you people believe in!“
And this:
“I wonder sometimes, when they invited all the Moslims to come into the White House, and have ‘em a lil’ Ramadan supper, when our president could not take the time to go attend a National Prayer Breakfast. I wonder what he stands for.”
As NYmag points out, President Obama attended the National Prayer Breakfast in 2009…and 2010…and 2011…and 2012. And for the record, George W. Bush attended the Ramadan dinner in the White House every year of his presidency. You can add ‘liar’ when describing Rapert.
So what is the GOP going to do with the racists and bigots who populate their party? How do they outreach to minorities while they still attract hate-mongering race-baiting politicians like Rapert? The problem for conservatives is that Rapert is not an anomaly in the Republican Party. The GOP is a haven for racists, bigots, Christian fundamentalists, climate change deniers, gay bashers and Fox-loving, government hating, low-information idiots. And contrary to Republicans’ claim that their problem is finding the right people to articulate their message, the real problem has less to do with the messenger than it has to do with the message. It has been soundly rejected by the majority of Americans.
It’s 2013 and the times are indeed changing. Republicans just don’t know it.
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The requirements for becoming a U.S. senator are as follows…
How about adding another requirement along the lines of:
Rep. Todd Akin, Missouri’s Republican Senate nominee, caused a public outcry Sunday when he told a local television station that “legitimate rape” rarely leads to pregnancy.
“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin, the Republican Senate nominee in Missouri, said. ”If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Of course, Akin is both wrong and ignorant which seem to be the prerequisites for any Republican politician. It is worth nothing that Paul Ryan and Todd Akin co-sponsored the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act which stipulated that only women subjected to “forcible rape” would be entitled to government paid abortion.
forcible rape?
How does one describe a man who favors imposing more restrictions on rape victims? And how does one describe a person who would cast a vote for a politician who holds such beliefs?
There are no limits to the right’s madness.
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This is what right-wing insanity sounds like…on a good day.
[Planned Parenthood] deals out nothing but deception, death, personal devastation, and moral degradation. Never will I agree to give that bloody, indecent, immoral organization one penny. I will not be satisfied until it is outlawed.
The above words were part of an email that North Carolina Republican State Rep Larry Pittman sent to Planned Parenthood in response to the following letter sent out by PP urging NC lawmakers to not defund the organization.
Planned Parenthood is an essential community provider in North Carolina. Each year, at nine health centers across the state, they provide over 18,000 tests for sexually transmitted infections, over 11,000 life-saving breast and cervical cancer screenings, and contraceptive services to more than 61,000 women.
Planned Parenthood makes the case that the organization’s work actually helps in cutting down on the number of abortions performed each year by providing contraceptive services. Wingnuts like Pittman aren’t listening. Despite the fact that abortion services only account for 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s revenue (all non-profit, btw), Pittman is still able to say:
My sources tell me that 75 percent of [Planned Parenthood’s] income comes through abortions.
Typical right-wing crap. When the facts are not to their liking, they have no qualms in making up a new batch to match their thinking on whatever it is they’re trying to smear, destroy or revert back to Victorian norms. Logic doesn’t work on these people (contraception results in fewer abortions – could anything be more obvious?) and facts have no meaning for them (they create their own), so what is one to do?
Do your best to vote these dishonest, intellectually challenged vermin the hell out of public office. Not always possible, but certainly well worth the effort.
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They’re crawling out of the woodwork like roaches on a mission.
Mississippi state Rep. Bubba Carpenter (R) said that it’s OK for women to have coat hanger abortions because it’s for a greater good.
A video obtained by Rachel Maddow’s blog captures Carpenter saying he is proud of Mississippi’s attempts to outlaw abortion outright, despite the fact that the Supreme Court has ruled abortions legal in the United States.
His exact words.
It’s going to be challenged, of course, in the Supreme Court and all — but literally, we stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi, legally, without having to– Roe vs. Wade. So we’ve done that. I was proud of it. The governor signed it into law. And of course, there you have the other side. They’re like, ‘Well, the poor pitiful women that can’t afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger. That’s what we’ve learned over and over and over.’
But hey, you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that’s what we’ve decided to do. This became law and the governor signed it, and I think for one time, we were first in the nation in the state of Mississippi.
The thinly veiled scam that Mississippi is pulling off here is passing a law they claim puts an end to coat hanger abortions by placing restrictions on which doctors can perform abortions in Mississippi. What the law does in fact is jeopardize the existence of Mississippi’s only abortion clinic thereby leaving women without the means to travel out of state to take matters into their own hands.
The only explanation I can think of on how legislators like Bubba in Mississippi can sleep at night after passing draconian laws that endanger the lives of women is that they’re sociopaths.
And the only explanation I can think of on how people can vote sociopaths like Bubba into office is that they’re a terribly ignorant and backward bunch.
Also, it should be illegal for anyone with the name ‘Bubba’ to enter politics.
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