Michael Steele to gays: drop dead

Today in Gay:

Weirdness erupts on the right. Senator Jeff Sessions, whose racist past got him denied a federal judgeship in 1986 by a Republican senate- and who's now the ranking minority member of the Judiciary Committee- says he wouldn't rule out a gay Supreme Court nominee.

Sessions- or Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, as Wikipedia has it, is the man who told colleagues he thought the KKK was OK till he learned some of them smoked pot. Calling Justice Ginsburg....

Boy Fogle- whose Palmetto Scoop blog has been "transforming SC politics" for nearly two years to no discernable effect- took a characteristically hands-on approach to the story:

Left-wing blogs across the country began targeting Sessions as “racially insensitive” when his promotion was public earlier this week. The attacks cite a pair of comments that Sessions is alleged to have made more than 20 years ago which were less-than-polite.

Whether or not Sessions said those things, as Graham points out, the nomination of a Supreme Court justice needs to be about the nominee and not a liberal red herring.

You could look them up, Scoopy. It's not hard. TPM has the entire Sessions confirmation hearing transcript.

Another New England state legalizes marriage equality by a majority vote of both houses. The Old Confederacy & Buffalo Commons' financially- emasculated Toby finally pulled back the curtain and revealed the truth:

“Our party platform articulates our opposition to gay marriage and civil unions, positions shared by many Americans. I believe that marriage should be between one man and one woman and strongly disagree with Maine’s decision to legalize gay marriage.”

Secular Right, which is emerging as the weirdest right-wing blog in ages, has a piece by one Heather MacDonald arguing this:

If the black illegitimacy rate were not nearly three times the rate of whites’, I would have few qualms about gay marriage. Or if someone can guarantee that widespread gay marriage would not further erode the expectation among blacks that marriage is the proper context for raising children, I would also not worry. But no one can make that guarantee.

Why might it further depress the black marriage rate? There is a logical reason and a visceral reason. First, it sends the signal that marriage is simply about numbers: it is an institution that binds two (for the moment) people who are in love. It erases completely the significance that marriage is THE context in which the children of biological parents should be raised. And there are undoubtedly many other subtle meanings and effects of gay marriage that we cannot even imagine at the moment—which institutional shift is something that conservatives should be most attuned to.

As for the visceral reason: It is no secret that resistance to homosexuality is highest among the black population (though probably other ethnic minorities are close contenders). I fear that it will be harder than usual to persuade black men of the obligation to marry the mother of their children if the inevitable media saturation coverage associates marriage with homosexuals. Is the availability of homosexual marriage a valid reason to shun the institution? No, but that doesn’t make the reaction any less likely.

What are the chances that gay marriage would further doom marriage among blacks? I don’t know. Again, if someone can persuade me that the chances are zero, then I would be much more sanguine. But anything more than zero, I am reluctant to risk.

Is it fair to those gays who want to marry that their desires should be thwarted for the sake of black boys? Maybe not. And as has been pointed out many times before, it is exclusively heterosexuals who have eroded the institution of marriage through easy divorce, increasing rates of single-parenting, “blended” families, and co-habitation. But just because marriage is already in bad shape, for reasons wholly unrelated to gay marriage, doesn’t mean that gay marriage won’t weaken it further.

Black failure is at present a greater social problem in my view than whether gays who already have the right of civil unions have the right to marry as well. For similar reasons, I have always been appalled at the campaign by gay rights groups to shut down inner city Boy Scout organizations if they don’t toe the line on gay rights. A Scout troop may be the only hope that a black 11-year-old in Brooklyn has to learn self-discipline and deferred gratification. That black kid’s life chances are a lot bleaker than any gay white Eagle scout leader.

I agree with Andrew and David Hume that gay marriage is inevitable, given the clout of the gay lobby and the power of the modern non-discrimination principle. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t have consequences beyond what we can possibly foretell and which conservatives should be attuned to.

Interesting, MacDonald's comment about the Boy Scouts. Waldo's an Eagle Scout, too. A former troop leader and Explorer Post advisor. He understood the difference between civic duties and personal life. Nary a complaint against him. But the BSA defined him as a bad moral example and, rather than waste time and money in court, Waldo simply retired from a 25 year career in Scouting.

The BSA has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the LDS Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, and litigation against the BSA has simply sought court validation of the act that if a state or municipality has a bar to discrimination based on sexual orientation, it can't give preferred treatment, at taxpayer expense, to a group that goes to court at the drop of a hat to bar gay Scouts and leaders from membership. The data BSA fights so hard to keep secret shows the vast majority of Scout leaders who abuse Scouts in their charge are straight and married. But we digress...

NYT has a piece arguing the President is behaving like a typical Democrat on gay issues: kicking the can down the road as far as he can.

Meanwhile, Anaconda's imginary friend Mande Wilkes sees the week's legislative activity as a big lesbian liplock, and tries to argue if the GOP will just put the sort of homophobia FITS News regularly espouses aside and takes up the ways of fiscal righteousness, order will be restored to the universe. As usual, you don't see Anaconda actually commenting on how such developments resonate in South Carolina. It's just a curiosity. Move along people, nothing to see in this state.

Suckers.

Boy Fogle, Vicarious Libertine

Oh, these times, these times...

Scoop Doggy- behind the news curve as usual- has a link to Rep. Alcee Hastings reading a long list of various sexual fetishes opponents of the hate crimes bill tried to append in committee. But he's been busy reviewing cultural performances he didn't attend and running a Taxpayers' Alliance in his mind.

Mr South Carolina Tourism says, "That’s right, sex acts. And not just the “usual” ones, but a few things even I have never heard of… and I’ve heard it all, baby."

Which begs the question: if you're such a sexual cosmopolitan, what gets you so riled up about gay tourists in this state; drag shows; and lesbians running for Congress?

Oh, wait, we forgot. Money to be made from it.

'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished

Earl Capps flirts with running for SCGOP chair. Given that Anaconda, who can't decide whether he is or isn't a Republican most days, has been similarly fan-dancing, the prospect of a Battle of the Bloggers is sublime.

All the contest wants is Scoop Doggy whining that he wasn't included as, well, anything (but protesting he's "earning media" on his own blog about himself); Savonarola denouncing all the candidates as stooges of the homosexualists; and Wesley Donehue explaining how it will all redound to the genius of Senator Jim DeMint, who writes WD's firm big checks.

It could be the funnest thing since William F. Buckley Jr ran for mayor of New York.

Just another Tuesday-

The Republican Party in Congress is so utterly devoid of ideas that they are starting to pay attention to Ron Paul, for God's sake.

Given the disdain in which Republican Mormons hold the President, why did one baptize his mother into the LDS Church after her death? At least if you're gay the odds of that indignity drop way down.

Inside Higher Ed has a rather more nuanced view of the Obama Speaking At Notre Dame Flap than Savonarola has offered you. Being lectured on church teaching by men who have made their way up the Vatican's greasy pole looking the other way on sex abuse is like calling a pig ugly. Or having the pig call you ugly back. The striking thing is how the noisy minority driving this sideshow want to force non-Catholics to adhere to Church teaching. That's no democracy, folks. A Pew poll says everybody but Savonarola and the Mel Gibson wing of the Church are saying , BFD.

30 year-old Republican congressman Aaron "Abs" Schock says Ronald Reagan is not a relevant figure to young voters who-like Schock, were born after The Gipper left office.



Would that Eric Cantor's Pizza House Road Show would take notice.Or, for that matter, Byron York, who has a really creepy piece about Reagan's ranch from which he divines that "Reagan's real legacy is the man himself." But he's fucking dead already.


The New Republican meme is that Supreme Court nominees who exhibit empathy are to be voted off the island. Klaatu, barada nictu.


Dom DeLuise has died, aged 75. Some of his best work was as part of the Mel Brooks stable of the 1970s. Remember him for his cameo as the "French Mistake" director in Blazing Saddles:

Another bewildering Monday in the news-

How to offset the emissions of the all the cars in the world for twenty years? Paint your roof white if you live in a hot climate.

Nate Silver says The Obama Market Crash is no leading indicator. Take note, Scoop Doggy.

Time was, back in the 196s, when a woman called Helen Gurley Brown played a major role in uncorking the sexual revolution. At 87, she's lived to see a major biography of herself and her "pippy-poo" career.

Michael Steele says GOP moderates are welcome in a separate but equal sort of way.

The Day in Gay:

Joe the Plumber thinks all gay people are pedophiles. SFAppeal says antigay rhetoric and campaigns are actually doing a service:

..In fact, having conversations about gay friends and family has a profound effect: in the last month, national support for gay couples has jumped nine percentage points. You read that right -- in just one single month, the percentage of Americans willing to support their gay friends and family to get married jumped from 33% to 42%. Good grief.And the advances just keep coming.

What's hastening along this shift in public opinion? Conversations. The more people talk about gay couples, the more comfortable they are with them. And it doesn't even seem to matter what people say -- lord knows, there've been plenty of anti-gay conversations lately -- every conversation keeps nudging public opinion towards equality. So the anti-gay-couple groups like the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) are standing in quicksand: the more they keep struggling, the faster they sink. Next month, the California Supreme Court will rule on Prop 8 -- and no matter the outcome, it'll nudge public opinion yet again.

So gay couples should celebrate every time NOM releases a new ad; anything that keeps gay couples in the spotlight is a good thing. NOM's brand new ad, featuring Miss California, is a great example. Within hours, it was thoroughly debunked; but more importantly, it's offensive to even the most casual observer. "No Offense" is the galling, passive-aggressive title. No offense? Really? "No offense, we just want to throw you out of your dying partner's hospital room," which happened just a few days ago in Oregon. These people aren't opposed to gay marriage -- they're opposed to gay people. Who's going to get behind a cruel, desperate message like that? Keep struggling,NOM.

Senator Jim DeMint likes federalism unless it's about gay rights. The editor of Red State says Justice Souter's retirement deprives the court of its only "goat fucking child molester" (emphasis in the original). How long till Savonarola runs with the story? Speaking of whom, he's in the running for Best Catholic Political Blog. It's hard to think of anyone who could wear the tiara better. Vote early, and vote often.

Department of Unanticipated Consequences: Same sex couples can legally marry in Iowa but if one's in the National Guard he/she'll get the bum's rush. DOMA strikes again.

Bad day for Boy Fogle. Anaconda slammed Scoopy's appearance on a TV show by calling it gay. Earl Capps, who's pretty much the only grownup among conservative SC bloggers, calls out Mr. South Carolina Tourism's super secret taxpayer group as hypocritical and ethically challenged. At long last Little Joe McCarthy is getting the scrutiny he deserves-from his own side.

Once again, gays prove more tolerant than their straight betters

The couple who gave Rudy Giuliani refuge between marriages and whom he has has recently chucked aside in his search for new political office, has married. Good wishes to them; they seem to have overcome their brush with cynical politicos.

SC GOP bloggers do their party no favors these days

Frank Rich warns us that there is peril in having no real opposition. Yet the Republicans, who are the party in utter disarray, remain in denial. Read the main GOP bloggers in South Carolina and you'd think Ronald Reagan was still alive (for a deft review of some new books about this maddeningly complex man, read here).

Waldo, typing furiously in his bath, takes some grim amusement from the fact that, as a conservative classified as a liberal by a blog rating service- and an influential liberal at at that, thank you very much- is the only one consistently working the issue of how the GOP stops its precipitous slide into Whigdom.

From Rich's column today, the warning:

But if those are the obvious hotspots for this presidency, there is also the domestic political culture to worry about. The Republican Party has collapsed, and that is not a good thing for the country or for Obama. We need more than one functioning party, not just to ensure checks and balances and pitch in ideas at a time of crisis, but to temper this president’s sporadic bursts of overconfidence and triumphalist stagecraft. No one is perfect. We must remember that there is also an Obama who gave us “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” a faux presidential seal and a convention speech delivered before what Sarah Palin rightly mocked as “Styrofoam Greek columns” hauled out of a “studio lot.”

That Obama needs a serious counterweight in the political arena. But the former party of Lincoln and liberty has now melted down to a fundamentalist core of aging, rural Dixiecrats and intrusive scolds — as small as 20 percent of the populace in the latest polls. Its position on the American spectrum of ideas is somewhere between a doomsday cult and Scientology.

Arlen Specter’s defection is the least of the Republicans’ problems, a lagging indicator. Though many characterize his departure as a “wake-up call” for the party, it’s only the most recent of countless wake-up calls the party has slept through since 2006. That was the year that Specter’s Pennsylvania Republican colleague in the Senate, Rick Santorum, lost his seat by a margin of more than 17 percentage points. Despite that rout and many more like it of similar right-wing candidates throughout America, the party’s ideological litmus test is more rigid than ever. The G.O.P. chairman, Michael Steele, and enforcers of Republican political correctness like William Kristol and the blogger Michele Malkin jeered Specter and cheered his departure. A laughing Limbaugh seconded e-mail from listenerscommanding Specter to “take McCain with you — and his daughter.”

You can’t blame the president if he is laughing, too. As The Economist recently certified, the G.O.P. is now officially in the throes of “Obama Derangement Syndrome.” The same conservative gang that remained mum when George W. Bush praised Putin’s “soul” andheld hands with the Saudi ruler Abdullah are now condemning Obama for shaking handswith Hugo Chávez, “bowing” to Abdullah, relaxing Cuban policy and talking to hostile governments. Polls show overwhelming majorities favoring Obama’s positions. But his critics have locked themselves in the padded cell of an alternative reality. Not long before The Wall Street Journal informed its readers that 81 percent of Americans liked Obama, Karl Rove wrote in its pages that “no president in the past 40 years has done more to polarize America so much, so quickly.”

From derangement it’s a small step to madness. Last week, the president of a prime G.O.P. auxiliary, the Concerned Women for America, speculated that the president’s declaration of “a state of emergency about the flu was a political thing” to push through Kathleen Sebelius’s nomination as secretary of health and human services. At those tax-protesting “tea parties” on April 15, signs and speakers portrayed Obama as a “fascist,” a “socialist,” a terrorist and Hitler. Republican governors have proposed rejecting stimulus money for their states (only to fold after constituents rebelled) or, in the notorious instance of Rick Perry of Texas, toyed with secession from the union.

But this is funny only up to a point. It was in 1937 — the year after the Democratic landslide left the Republican national ticket with a total of eight electoral votes — that a hugely empowered F.D.R. made two of the biggest mistakes of his presidency. He tried topack the Supreme Court with partisan allies and, overconfidently judging the economy recovered, retreated from the New Deal by instituting spending cuts that prompted a fresh economic tailspin.

Hate works in pics as well as it does in words

Monkey see, monkey do, it seems: hard on Scoop Doggy's addition of editorial cartoons, Savonarola embraces pictorial bigotry:



Note the nice conflation of Muslim and African-American imagery.

Jack Kemp had great hair.

The career of former congressman and cabinet member Jack Kemp, who has died this weekend at 73, illustrates why Newt Gingrich will never become president.





In American politics, you can either be a prophet or you can be a counselor.


Prophets are idea people. Counselors' identities- and status- are tied to their patrons'. Prophets just toss out ideas and make noise for them. Counselors have to help their masters govern and implement. Kemp tried to be both. It didn't work. So has Gingrich, and that won't work, either.


Kemp spent 18 years in Congress, where he had one idea, and it wasn't his. The journalist Jude Wanniski converted Kemp to advocacy of Arthur Laffer's revenue curve, and Kemp pretty much spent the rest of this life dining out on that, and variations of it. Nevertheless, Kemp was a major force in moving the GOP to its present position that with an economic depression looming, the only solution is to cut taxes. In his last years he remained silent about how the Laffer Curve works in a fucked economy.


Waldo met Kemp in 1976 at a seminar for congressional interns, where Kemp trotted out his new-found Laffer Curve enthusiasm, complete with Wanniski there to prompt him. Waldo came away with the sense that Kemp was an attractive, articulate former NFL star who fit well into the jock-turned-pol mold but was otherwise dumb as a box of rocks ("In his memoirs, former Vice President Dan Quaylewrote that at Cabinet meetings, Bush would be irked by Kemp's habit of going off on tangents and not making ''any discernible point.'')


Nothing in the next thirty years changed Waldo's mind, except a certain admiration for how Kemp managed to dodge the gay rights issue after Patrick Buchanan made it the centerpiece of the 1992 GOP convention (His son Jeff has made a post-NFL career as one of the leading gay-bashers in Washington State). After retiring from Congress to run an inept campaign for president in 1988, Kemp served four years in exile as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, where he mostly spouted thousand points of light-ish bromides in aid of the first President Bush's test run of compassionate conservatism. In 1996 he second-chaired the hulling of Bob Dole's campaign for president.

Republicans loved Kemp because he managed just enough maverickyness to let them claim things like his friend Ed Feulner did this weekend:

Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, a Kemp family friend and his former campaign deputy chief of staff, said Kemp's legacy will be his compassion.

''The idea that all conservatives really should regroup around and identify with is that this is not an exclusive club,'' Feulner said. ''Freedom is for everybody. That's what Jack Kemp really stood for.''

In the parallel universe that is Gay Patriot they are lighting candles for the old jock. Go figure.

John Derbyshire says we can't have marriage equality because it will rile the lower classes

Over at Secular Right they're ginning up some new, "secular" reasons for denying marriage equality now that a succession of legislatures have taken activist judges and imposition on religious practice off the table. The blogger "Bradlaugh," a nom de plume for prominent National Review homophobe John Derbyshire, defaults to the ultimate conservative position: it can't be done because it has never been done, and anyway, it's not a problem to me:

The comment thread here has me wondering how many conservatives we actually have reading Secular Right.

• The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868. The idea of gay marriage emerged from the lunatic fringe around 10 years ago, I think. So for 130 years it occurred to practically nobody that the 14th implied gay marriage — surely not, I’ll wager, to anyone whose opinion carried jurisprudential weight. Now suddenly it’s clear as daylight to all but a minority of mentally-diseased reactionaries.

That’s a point of view, but I’ll be damned if it’s a conservative point of view.

• I can’t see the parallel with inter-racial marriage, which has been proscribed by law only spottily through history. (It obviously didn’t seem outrageous to Shakespeare and his audience.) Same-sex marriage has never, so far as I know, been proscribed by law anywhere, because it never occurred to lawmakers that it was a thing anyone would want to do! The human prejudice against same-sex marriage is far, far deeper-rooted than that against inter-racial marriage, a picayune thing by comparison, as witness the fact that legislatures had to draw up statutes about it. There are no laws against eating rocks.

(And I must say, I don’t actually see why communities shouldn’t prohibit inter-racial marriage if they want to. I’d prefer not to live in such a community — given my domestic circumstances, in fact, I wouldn’t be able to! — but this doesn’t strike me as an unreasonable or immoral restriction for a state or country to impose on its citizens. But perhaps that’s just me. I simply don’t “get” the hysterical race panic that’s consumed so much rational thought in the modern West.)

• Hospital visiting. Still not getting it. If your hospital’s rules won’t allow gay lovers to visit, agitate to get the rules changed. What does this have to do with gay marriage? Sledgehammer, nut.

Here's one of his previous brainwaves on the subject:

If you have a cognitively-challenged underclass, as every large nation has, you need some anchoring institutions for them to aspire to; and those institutions should have some continuity and stability. Heterosexual marriage is a key such institution. In a society in which nobody had an IQ below 120, homosexual marriage might be plausible. In the actual societies we have, other considerations kick in.

Which makes about as much sense as your average Anaconda post on the topic.

Any ideas?

Andrew Sullivan on the nuke revival debate:

People who want to promote renewables over nuclear, for example, say “offshore wind power could power all U.K. homes”; then they say “new nuclear power stations will do little to tackle climate change” because 10 new nuclear stations would “reduce emissions only by about 4 percent.” This argument is misleading because the playing field is switched half-way through, from the “number of homes powered” to “reduction of emissions.” The truth is that the amount of electrical power generated by the wonderful windmills that “could power all U.K. homes” is exactly the same as the amount that would be generated by the 10 nuclear power stations! “Powering all U.K. homes” accounts for just 4 percent of U.K. emissions.

But here's the rub: while there may be an emerging consensus that nuclear power is cool in terms of greenhouse gases, now that we've closed the book on Yucca Mountain, what do we do with the waste?

Savonarola ("I Hate. I Decide.") finds a useful idiot in his Notre Dame/Obama Commencement Jihad: the woman who was Roe v. Wade:

Norma is a brave lady: in the 1980s she revealed herself to be the "Jane Roe" of the famous case, and in the 1990s she converted to Christianity. In 1998 she became a Catholic and now campaigns for civil rights "for everybody, including the unborn". (Incidentally, she never had an abortion: the case took so long that she had the child, which was adopted.)

Wikipedia tells a different story (with citations):

The Roe vs. Wade case took three years of trials to reach the United States Supreme Court. In the meantime, McCorvey had not aborted, but had given birth to the baby in question. In the case, she claimed that her pregnancy was the result of rape. She now claims that to have been untrue.^[2]

For a long time she was a quiet, if self-loathing, partnered lesbian of 22 years. She is also divorced from a man. Her children include "Melissa, plus two others." Then she got religion around the time she published her autobiography, and was baptized a Christian in a Dallas swimming pool in 1994. By 1998 she'd become a recovered lesbian and a Catholic, and a useful idiot to a new batch of masters- around the time she published her second memoir. In 2008 she endorsed Ron Paul for president. Now 61, she 's clearly reinventing herself yet again to dine out on her checkered fame for a few more years. What's next?

Bless Their Hearts

So the National Council for a New America has launched its website and a video.

This venture is supposed to be a "nonpartisan" listening tour in which conservative big dogs cast about for some new conservative ideas. Curiously, its web address is that of the House Minority Whip, Eric Cantor. One wouldn't have thought a partisan website would be government bidness but we've been wrong before.

But here's where you get the payoff: Click "National Leaders" and you see the tragically retro face of the party: dozens of white men, one woman, Bobby Jindal, and one closeted gay Republican legislative leader, who truly is the elephant in the middle of the living room. Or check out the intro to their video:

So for their first essay out into the Real America- the one Uncle Grumpy and Our Lady of Wasilla so sucked up to last year- Cantor, Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney had a meeting in a pizza joint- in Arlington, Virginia. Last time we looked that is so not outside the Beltway.

And, as in all Republican events, the leaders had their On Golden Pond moment with the loons ("The loons, Norman! The loons!"):

The leaders received positive feedback from the crowd, which included reporters, Republican aides and their friends, but not many new ideas.

On the subject of education, one attendee declared that “people learn more from listening to Rush Limbaugh than they do in high school or college.”

And while the leaders said they're willing to embrace the thoughts of the concerned voters, a group of conservative activists who were protesting in the parking lot complained that they were not allowed through the doors.

“We’re demonstrating against the fact that this organization set up by RINOs [Republicans in Name Only] have taken immigration off the agenda,” said Michael McLaughlin, a member of the American Council for Immigration Reform, a group seeking to stem the flow of immigrants into the country.

The activists grumbled that Republican organizers did not widely advertise the event. Several wearing shirts declaring themselves “Republicans Against Maverick McCain” craned their necks for a glimpse of the senior lawmaker, who did not show up.

Peggy Noonan, her voice all breathy like a conservative Kathleen Turner, says of the Republicans' Bad Week:

It is fine to dismiss Mr. Specter as an opportunist, but opportunists tell you something: which side is winning. That's the side they want to be on...

A great party needs give. It must be expansive and summoning. It needs to say, "Join me."

A party that is huge, vital and national, that is truly the expression of the views of a huge and varied nation, will, by definition, contain within it those who are more to the right, and more to the left, and more to the middle. This creates a constant tension, a constant fight, but no matter. As Ronald Reagan said in China, in front of students at Fudan University, we are "a great disputatious nation."

Great parties are coalitions, and coalitions contain disparate and sometimes warring pieces. FDR's coalition contained Southern Democrats from Birmingham and socialists from the Bronx. They didn't agree on much, but they agreed on some essentials, such as "the New Deal is good" and "government should be harnessed to help the little guy." It was imperfect and in time evolved but its success demonstrated that a great party needs give.

The argument over the Republican party now always devolves into the question: Should it be less conservative? I say devolves because it is Democrats and the left who frame the question that way, and they do so because whatever the answer, yes or no, it will damage Republicans.

Another way to put the question is: Can the party, having accurately ascertained its position, and recognizing shifting terrain, institute a renewed and highly practical tolerance for the many flavors of Republican? Can it live happily and productively with all its natural if sometimes warring constituent groups?

It must.

All the metaphors here are tired, so let's stick with the big tent. A big tent is held up by tent poles. No poles, no tent. No poles, all you have is a big collapsed canvas.

The poles that keep up the tent are the party's essential beliefs. Republicans over the next few years should define what each of their tent poles stands for—a strong defense being an obvious pole, a less demanding and intrusive government being another, a natural affection and respect for tradition and for life being a third—and how many poles there are.

But also, the people inside can't always be kicking people out of the tent. A great party cannot live by constantly subtracting, by removing or shunning those who are not faithful to every aspect of its beliefs, or who don't accept every pole, or who are just barely fitting under the tent. Room should be made for them. Especially in those cases when Republican incumbents and candidates are attempting to succeed in increasingly liberal states, a certain practical sympathy is in order.

In the party now there is too much ferocity, and bloody-mindedness. The other day Sen. Jim DeMint said he'd rather have 30 good and reliable conservative senators than 60 unreliable Republicans. Really? Good luck stopping an agenda you call socialist with 30 hardy votes. "Shrink to win": I've never heard of that as a political slogan.

Is it fully mature, and truly protective toward America, to be so politically exclusionary?

At National Journal Magazine Ronald Brownstein wonders the same thing:

By contrast, the GOP is becoming an increasingly monochromatic party, dominated by the most conservative voters and regions. This process enormously accelerated under Bush and Karl Rove, who built their governing strategy on energizing the Republican base rather than on expanding it by courting swing voters. Today, Democrats hold their largest advantage in party identification over Republicans since President Reagan's first term, and 70 percent of the shrunken GOP core identifies as conservative. After Specter's leap, Republicans hold just two of the 36 Senate seats in the 18 mostly affluent and secular "blue-wall" states that twice voted against Bush -- and that have now voted Democratic in each of the past five presidential elections.

Specter's defection shows how this contraction feeds on itself. The Pennsylvanian changed parties largely because he calculated that he could not survive a 2010 Republican primary challenge from conservative former Rep. Pat Toomey. This was a reasonable conclusion: Specter's base of moderates abandoned the GOP in huge numbers during Bush's second term. Their departure has left behind mostly conservatives receptive to Toomey's hard-core small-government message. In other words, the backlash against a rigidly conservative president produced a shrunken Pennsylvania GOP so doctrinaire that the eclectic Specter had little chance of winning its support. Now he's a good bet to win re-election next year as a Democrat.

Specter's switch shows that Republicans haven't yet paid the final bills for Bush and Rove's insular strategy. That price has been especially steep in the Northeast. In 1988, George H.W. Bush won eight of the 11 states from Maryland to Maine. Even as recently as 2000, Republicans won 40 percent of the House seats and held eight of the 22 Senate seats from those states. But amid the younger Bush's polarizing, Southern-inflected conservatism, Northeastern Republicans fell through the floorboards: They now hold only 18 percent of the region's House seats and, since Specter's switch, just three of its 22 Senate seats. In 2008, Barack Obama won all 11 Northeastern states and a combined 60 percent of their votes. Some weakened individual Democrats may provide isolated electoral opportunities for the GOP in 2009 and 2010, but across much of the Northeast, Republicans are now about as relevant as Whigs.

Shrewd former Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, calls Specter's defection a "devastating blow" that will send a "bad signal" of ideological intolerance to the moderate white-collar suburbanites the party must recapture if it is to threaten the Democrats' congressional and Electoral College majorities. "The dilemma for Republicans is, are we going to become a coalition, or are we going to be a private club?" Davis says.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele made his choice clear when he immediately issued a statement condemning Specter's "left-wing voting record." Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives quickly echoed Steele's good-riddance message. Any GOP coalition too narrow to welcome voters who share Specter's moderate views is almost certainly too narrow to dislodge the Democrats. But for many on the right, it seems, contraction and powerlessness are a reasonable price to pay for purity in the crumbling Republican clubhouse.

AP Writer Liz Sidoti makes a remarkable prediction: there's a rising tide in support of marriage equality and the Republicans are so screwed:

A Quinnipiac University poll released last week found that a majority of people questioned, by a 55-38 percent margin, oppose gay marriage. But it also found that people, by a 57-38 percent margin, support civil unions that would provide marriage-like rights for same-sex couples, indicating a shift toward more acceptance.

With congressional elections next year, Republicans, Democrats and nonpartisan analysts say the changes benefit Democrats, whose bedrock liberals favor gay unions, and disadvantage Republicans, whose conservative base insists that marriage be solely between a man and a woman.

"This is not a sea change. This is a tide that is slowly rising in favor of gay marriage," creating a favorable political situation for Democrats and ever-more difficulty for Republicans, said David McCuan, a political scientist at Sonoma State University in California.

Democrats have a broader base filled with more accepting younger voters, as well as flexibility on the issue. Hard-core liberals support gay marriage, while others, including President Barack Obama, take a more moderate position of civil unions and defer to states on gay marriage.

Conversely, the GOP base is older, smaller and more conservative. Republicans have no place to shift on the issue but to the left, because the party has been identified largely with its rock-solid opposition to gay marriage and civil unions. Also, the GOP has no titular head setting the tone on this or other issues.

But in the meantime, the GOP plans to make a big fuss about the next Supreme Court nominee because it's all they know how to do.

But Will and his national party leaders share an obsession with penises

Compared to Bob Herbert's summary of the GOP Anaconda is so bush league it hardly warrants mentioning him.

In our home the talk is of little else

Senator DeMint unleashes his inner tech geek, and in the process reveals-as if we needed reminding- the utter tone-deafness of SC Republicans when it comes to imagined solutions to their message problems. As usual, they play to tech tools that are pretty much the preserve of middle-class to well-off white folks. How much are the 11% unemployed Tweeting?

Maybe the poor can find another Easter Egg in the Senator's website like this one.

Somwhere, Aristophanes is laughing

Lysistrata, meet the government of Kenya.

He just loves the people who make his skin crawl. You figure it out. We can't.

Anaconda's breathessly reporting an "educrat = liberal  = homosexual" story tonight with these lurid teasers:

Gary L. Burgess, Sr. - a longtime political ally of House Ways & Means Chairman Dan Cooper - has confirmed his arrest to local media, but neither he nor the cops are discussing the nature of the “immoral act.” Prior to accepting the position in Hampton, Burgess was forced out of his job as superintendent of Anderson County School District 4 for allegedly intimidating a school nurse.

And while Anderson County’s definition of morality is certainly up for discussion, local sources tell us that the sheer depravity of the dirty deeds (both homo and hetero) that go down at Darwin Wright Park would literally make your skin crawl...

Hmmm … we’re going to go out on a limb here and guess that the “immoral act” had something to do with someone’s penis.

Just reading the tea leaves, you know.

Must be some more of the love Anaconda said he feels for gays the other day:

Look, we have nothing but love for gay people and their quest for equality - which is why we make fun of them with the same vim and vigor that we make fun of Presbyterians.

So why do some people seem to think they’re being targeted? Do they sit around all day and cherry pick a handful of articles (out of several thousand that we’ve published) just so they can draw the same conclusion they were going to draw anyway?

A conclusion that’s as illogical as it is unintelligible?

Isn’t that a disease? Or some kind of self-loathing?

Or could it be that some people really are that desperate to be offended?

Whatever the case may be, that’s a sad way for anybody to go through life … gay, straight or any other way.

In the meantime, just as our libertarian philosophy upholds equality - so will our sense of humor.

So why not give Burgess the benefit of the doubt? Maybe he was just out on a warm spring night looking to discuss Senator Jim DeMint's big freedom tent and how Anaconda's party will give gays, if nothing else, lower taxes in return for fewer rights. Everybody wants to be a Republican, right?

And let's hope Anaconda's got more to play with than he did with his last turgid scandal story about Massa Dawson being blackmailed over a high GOP officeholder's misdeeds that would make your skin crawl.  What happened with that one, Sic?