The GOP continued its quest to alienate everyone (except the 1% and the most fundamentalist social conservatives) by highlighting both the War on the Environment and the Culture Wars over the last week. I'm starting to think that they really are headed for a monumental collapse in November, as they accelerate the pace of buffonish attacks on things that the vast majority of Americans actually approve of (like cleaner air and contraception).
Something in the water? All of a sudden, there's a lot of crazy coming out of Louisiana. While Rep. Boustany of Louisiana was fretting in last week's installment that poor folks may be spending their welfare benefits on women, wine, and general debauchery, Rep. Fleming of that same state was obsessing over abortion - obsessing so much, in fact, that he mistook an Onion satire that described a multibillion-dollar Planned Parenthood "abortionplex" as reality. The mistake was quickly scrubbed from his website, but with the internet that's always too late. Which basically shows that there really are GOP culture warriors who believe their own propaganda - believe it so thoroughly, in fact, that this abortion opponent took seriously a satire that described an imaginary facility where women could get spa treatments and then sip lattes from the coffee bar in between casually destroying their unborn child. And where he gets the idea that Planned Parenthood gets so much money that they can build a "multi-billion" dollar facility is beyond me.
This is your brain on mercury: too bad for you. Meanwhile, the House subcommittee on energy and power proclaimed that we can't afford the economic cost of controlling emissions of the neurotoxin mercury (we can presumably afford the economic costs of brain damage, disease and death caused by mercury). As incredible as it may seem, the modern GOP aparently hates clean air and water just as much as it hates abortion.
The Republican War on Science, Part 2,312: Colorado GOP Rep. Gardner made the proverbial mistake of politicians, and accidentally spoke the truth. In this case, the truth was that the GOP really, really wants to make sure we don't waste any more tax dollars on research that supports that global warming thing - you know, that thing that every major scientific body in the world agrees is happening and is a serious threat to human society.
Dim bulbs: Rep. Steve King became the latest GOP rep to make it clear that he really, really, doesn't like energy-efficient light bulbs. And he wsa apparently outraged that when nancy Pelosi was Speaker, she had energy-efficient bulbs installed in House office. His finely honed sense of liberty was so outraged by this outrageous behavior, in fact, that he likened House janitors who replaced old bulbs with energy-efficient ones to the East German Stasi.
Because nothing says "totalitarian dictatorship" like more efficient lighting, that reduces pollution and saves people money on their energy bills.
Religious Freedom: My right to dictate your behavior. Perhaps nothing better symbolized Rep. Daryl Issa's clownish hearing on "religious freedom" last week than the now-famous picture of a bunch of men, waiting to speak about how terribly important it was to their religious freedom that women no thave any ability to access birth control in their health insurance policies. There is a little that can be said about this stunningly medieval mindset, other than that if the GOP wins the Senate and/or the Presidency in this upcoming election, they're going to party like it's 1499.