The Republican Party Platform made its
debut Tuesday. Quite the document. Not that there is a single surprise after the twisted stuff we've seen from that quarter in the past few years. But if you've old enough, you can remember when we used to wag our bloggy fingers at the ever-more extremist Texas GOP Platform. That has now been trumped.
Peter Montgomery writes 6 Right-Wing Zealots and the Crazy Ideas Behind the Most Outrageous Republican Platform Ever:
The official 2012 Republican Party platform is a far-right fever dream, a compilation of pouting, posturing and policies to meet just about every demand from the overlapping Religious Right, Tea Party, corporate, and neo-conservative wings of the GOP. If moderates have any influence in today’s Republican Party, you wouldn’t know it by reading the platform. Efforts by a few delegates to insert language favoring civil unions, comprehensive sex education and voting rights for the District of Columbia, for example, were all shot down. Making the rounds of right-wing pre-convention events on Sunday, Rep. Michele Bachmann gushed about the platform’s right-wing tilt, telling fired-up Tea Partiers that “the Tea Party has been all over that platform.”
Given the Republican Party’s hard lurch to the right, which intensified after the election of Barack Obama, the “most conservative ever” platform is not terribly surprising. But it didn’t just happen on its own. Here are some of the people we can thank on the domestic policy front.
Montgomery goes on to examine Talibangeiical ideologues
Bob McDonnell, Tony Perkins, David Barton, Kris Kobach, James Bopp and
Dick Armey.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008:
DSCC chair Chuck Schumer came by the Big Tent today, and among other things, he gave an update on competitive Senate races and overall strategy for November.
He painted a highly optimistic picture of Democratic Senate prospects. On the defense side, Louisiana's Mary Landrieu, long considered the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent, is now holding a double-digit lead. Of 23 Republican seats, he pointed to Colorado, New Hampshire, Alaska, Virginia, and New Mexico as races in which Democrats are and have been significantly ahead. He said that Kay Hagen in North Carolina, Al Franken in Minnesota, and Ronnie Musgrove in Mississippi are about even with their opponents, while Jeff Merkley in Oregon, Bruce Lunsford in Kentucky, and Tom Allen in Maine are close enough that the races could be winnable. "Those are the 11—5 ahead, 3 even, 3 close."
Tweet of the Day:
Tune in Monday to Friday from 9-11 AM ET for Daily Kos Radio, hosted by David Waldman a/k/a KagroX. You can listen
here. Today's
Kagro in the Morning show: Today's weirdest news: the alleged plot to assassinate President Obama, and also apparently put millions of American princesses under a spell by poisoning the apple crop. Then a look urban gangs vs. right-wing militias, and whether Vito Corleone "went Galt" better than John himself. In news from
this planet: the Republicans rediscover the "debt clock," and Reince Preibus notes each family's share of the debt increase is less than two off-the-cuff Mitt Romeny bets.
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