David Vitter Loses in LA Gov. Contest

Sen. David Vitter lost by a good margin to Democrat John Bel Edwards in yesterday's election for Louisiana Governor, and has also announced that he will not be seeking re-election for the US Senate. I wouldn't necessarily say that this makes the LA Sen. match a nice possible pick-up for Dems, because Vitter's losing last night has an awful lot to do with David Vitter.

A lot of people might point back to the infamous D.C. Madam scandal, that left many with an uncomfortable mental image after rumors  (not exactly corroborated, and not exactly not corroborated, you know) suggested that Vitter was fond of adult baby/diaper fetish play. But that didn't sink him in the 2010 election for Senate. If personal scandal was what scuttled Vitter's chances, the somewhat dodgy claim that he had a mistress whom he impregnated and then advised to get an abortion (not a very sympathetic story in heavily pro-life Louisiana) could be a bigger factor as a sort of October Surprise. (Although a similar story regarding U.S. Rep. Scott Desjarlais never bit him in the ass in equally pro-life Tennessee.)

So what really hammered in the last nail in Vitter's political coffin? I'm going to go with a persistent attitude of shadiness. Campaign finance shadiness. Endorsement-seeking shadiness. Just plain all-around shadiness.  Even his last-minute Hail Mary leap onto the anti-Syrian refugee bandwagon was done in a particularly shady way, claiming a refugee settled in Louisiana had "gone missing" when he in fact just moved and made whatever notifications had to be made through normal channels.

So, he practically "swatted" a guy to try to finagle slightly better polling just ahead of an election. Yeah. Shady.

But then there's LA Gov. Bobby Jindal. You could say that Jindal's performance as Governor already wasn't doing a prospective Republican candidate any favors (only KS Gov. Brownback is more generally hated by folks in his own state). But WP's David Weigel suggests that Jindal timed his exit from the GOP presidential primary to "bigfoot" all over any last minute publicity Vitter meant to generate. (If so, I can honestly say something good came out of the Jindal presidential campaign.)

Governor-elect Edwards seems like a good guy, and I hope he turns things around in Louisiana. But were it not for Vitter's awfulness, I have no reason to think a generic Republican without Vitter's negatives would have lost.

Oh Look. Bobby Jindal Dropped Out.

Damn. I had Santorum next on the 2016 Death Watch, but I guess it really is time that Jindal, who was making no headway at all, hung up the old campaign. In a primary that has really outside figures like Trump and Carson who sort of burn up all the oxygen, getting attention is hard enough, but Jindal never seemed to really find the right red-meat tone. He once took on the "stupid party", but in the end, they took him in, and they took him down.

I don't think his run did him any favors in his state, or made him look any better for a possible 2020 go at things. I'm still for Santorum as a sooner rather than later exit, but Graham's support is probably more vaporous.

About that Anti-Gay Thing Some GOP Candidates Were Doing?

I sort of had wondered if any of them might have realized that the content at this particular Religious Right whang-dang-doodle would have been de trop for a general election, and maybe tried to frogman their way out of it--and if so, the closest to a possible remote mainstream chance, Ted Cruz, coulda, woulda, shoulda, got on that particular train. Well, he didn't try to take his Ivy League education and walk off that stage.

So, um, good for him and his committed values?

But frankly, as covered by Right Wing Watch, this thing was absurdly hateful. ("Sitting in cowshit hateful" might be my new metric of hateful as a very hateful thing.) Huckabee, Jindal, and Cruz, all laid out their theocratic bona fides without the least concern that anyone might find this problematic at all.

I don't think I'm alone in finding this coziness with the kinds of people who want to stone gays and adulterers literally because they find this punishment in an Iron Age collection of Bronze Age just-so stories really disturbing.

Their faith isn't my litmus test--it's their intentions. I think they have bad intent towards people who do not believe as they do. And I find it chilling.

Bobby Jindal is a Ridiculous Poser

For some reason, LA Gov. Bobby Jindal thinks everything is better with a helping of maximum Jeeeeeeeesus. Which is why he would go after Planned Parenthood with so many totally political and extra-legal prosecutions of Planned Parenthood it wouldn't even be funny. As in, sending government agencies to strong-arm non-profit organizations isn't funny.

What the hell is wrong with Bobby Jindal? Because in another context, he kind of implied that it would be worthy of prison for any officials to let their agencies be used in a political way,  But apparently, if the IRS was used as Bobby Jindal's shitstirrer, that would be different.

It would not be different. Stop pretending you can use the federal government to be sicced on your pet peeves, Bobby Jindal. We already don't like you. Let's not make it chronic.

Climate Sunday Bobby Jindal Edition

The Governor of Louisiana, a state which experienced a devastating hurricane ten years ago, rather prefers that climate change not be a feature of how President Barack Obama commemorates the recovery from this event.

I don't invest a lot in whether I'm doing anything Bobby Jindal finds appropriate, so I am going to not only talk about climate change, but name this post in his honor. I'm funny that way. Because, among other wild things, the state of Louisiana is kind of disappearing because of sea level rise.  The state loses as much as 50 square miles a year.

That's something former FEMA Director Michael Brown certainly doesn't think is necessarily real science.  Or rather he prefers not to believe that human activity is exacerbating the effect. But real science finds that sea levels are definitely rising. As for the folks who think global warming isn't happening or that human activity isn't causing it, it turns out they are sciencing badly, and real scientists can't reproduce their stupid data. (Reproducibility is totally a real science metric about whether results of a test are valid. This demonstrates that climate denialism isn't appropriately "skepticism" as much as it is "total fail". )

Just this Friday, Bill Maher hosted Rick Santorum on his HBO show, Real Time.  There was a "he said/he said" moment regarding whether 97% of scientists really did support climate change. Well, some would call it more than 97%.

Climate change is real. We need to ensure our infrastructure can support the worst case scenario (in 2005, for a minute, some observers thought New Orleans dodged a bullet, until the levees burst). We need to mitigate our carbon output. And we need to think about how climate change impacts especially the poor and less-mobile among us. We are foolish not to see this as a problem.

Here's What Happened at Gov. Bobby Jindal's House

So, we all know that Governor Bobby Jindal resides in the Governor's mansion there in Louisiana, right? Well, he used the lawn of his residence to counter a protest of about fifty Planned Parenthood supporters with a big screen showing the Planned Parenthood hoax videos--which I think sounds like one hell of a stunt.

Wait a minute, you might say, hoax videos? Why would he be showing those on the lawn of the Governor's mansion in Louisiana which is paid for by the taxpayers there?

Well, it's a funny old thing. It looks to me like people who knew very well what the fetal tissue donation situation was, set up false companies to try and tip-toe representatives from Planned Parenthood into saying things that sounded incriminating for the skullguggerous purpose of killing it. That's how it looks to anyone who really looked into it.

As it happens, so far, several states that lodged investigations into Planned Parenthood on the basis of these videos, have determined that there was no there, there. It turns out that use of fetal tissue has been very positive for medical science.

He's a Rhodes Scholar!

We need to end birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants.

— Gov. Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal) August 17, 2015

The illegal immigrants don't get birthright citizenship. Kids born here do. If they are born here, they aren't immigrants, because they did not come from somewhere else. Sure, you can say "But, we know what he meant."

Yeah. I know what he meant. My husband's parents were documented legal residents, but not citizens, but my spouse is a citizen. And Bobby Jindal, Donald Trump, and Scott Walker aren't probably talking about him, anyway, because his parents were coming from a European country (although there are some Birthers who actually have an issue with Sen. Santorum's immigrant father, so who even knows?)

I think we can understand what these candidates are saying very well. Every now and again, people say gays, liberals and atheists should be deported, too. If any of those ideas got a bandwagon going, I almost think you could count on Gov. Jindal to hop on so hard his ankles would hurt.

My Take On the GOP 2016 Cluster

There were in actual fact no winners here. Every one of these people in some way or another expressed a kind of disqualifying factor that removed themselves from being mainstream presidential competitors--especially Trump, but also Carson, Christie, Rubio. So many fails, so little time to explain why they represent so much fail. I think a lot of people believe that Marco Rubio did some kind of well-he didn't.

He isn't exactly articulate about immigration and he really isn't knowledgeable about foreign policy. My opinion wasn't changed. I still think Jeb Bush doesn't want the job and that Trump is a privileged a-hole. But it was great to know that Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, and Ted Cruz are all pretty much in favor of making women carry the children of their rapists, or carrying children even if they are liable to be physically harmed or even die doing so. Good to know--to avoid thinking they will be successful candidates.

I Would Rather Use a Microwave TBH

This does have the makings of a viral video because it has two of the things Americans really love--guns and bacon! But I just don't really know about the fit here. I mean, I think of bacon as mostly a breakfast food, and firing guns is really loud, so...that won't work in the morning. (You might get return-fire!) And how sanitary is that, really? Gun oil on my bacon, bacon grease on my rifle. Ick. Oh Ted Cruz! You rise above your Ivy League education and lawyerly reputation like a circus clown shot out of a cannon!

It's only 2015, and this 2016 race is already kind of cuckoo bananas. Some folks would blame Trump for it because he makes everyone have to get louder and weirder but I am not so sure. You can only bait people to get as crazy as they are willing to go--then it's on them.

I've seen that one of the candidates made a point about the decorum of the office. We'll have to see if he resists the urge to, I dunno. Wrassle gators or the like. This primary is still young.

(I'll note that Gov. Bobby Jindal manages to stunt and front in a more low-key, signifying way, that will neither help himself in the race and will probably just actually harm some low-income Louisianans for whom Planned Parenthood is the most available point of medical access. Neither of the LA PP clinics do abortions. Cruz and Paul for sure are also for defunding Planned Parenthood all over--but they can't do it by executive fiat.)

Arresting the WBC?

One of the most understandable impulses upon hearing that the always-inappropriate haters of Westboro Baptist Church are coming to disrupt funerals in your community with their brand of nastiness is exactly what LA Governor Bobby Jindal wants to do--he wants them arrested.

I sympathize, because really, they seem like awful people, and it bothers me that they use their religion to get in the faces of others at a burial--I consider that a kind of sacred space that they are violating.

But he does know how WBC will respond, I hope? Because this is what they do: they will sue. They will claim that their freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and civil rights were violated all to heck.

They've won in court with those claims before. Non-violent protests pinning them a distance away from the mourners staged by civilians seem to work, but arresting them, I'm afraid, just gives them exactly the kind of attention they crave.

They pretty much are awful people, though.

"The Left" is Actually Obsessed with Cake

Sen. Ted Cruz has addressed LGBT rights again, and once again the best way I can describe our differences is "cake or death."

What Cruz has to say about "the left" and our weird support of gay rights is:

"Is there something about the left — and I am going to put the media in this category — that is obsessed with sex?" Cruz asked reporters at an event in Beaumont, Texas, according to the Texas Tribune.

"ISIS is executing homosexuals — you want to talk about gay rights?" Cruz continued. "This week was a very bad week for gay rights because the expansion of ISIS, the expansion of radical, theocratic, Islamic zealots that crucify Christians, that behead children and that murder homosexuals — that ought to be concerning you far more than asking six questions all on the same topic."

Cruz railed against "mandatory same-sex marriage" and criticized a reporter for asking about his views on gay marriage, according to the Texas Tribune.

Nobody on the left gives two damns about what consenting adults (key words, "consenting" and "adults") do in their private time. What we are concerned about is a public issue--how LGBT people's rights are respected in employment, in commerce, in not being harassed in schools, workplaces, or the street, and in being able to form property contracts with the partner of their choosing. It's not the sex--after all, Lawrence v. Texas used equal treatment under the law to invalidate anti-sodomy laws that discriminated specifically against LGBT people, and the accomplished attorney Cruz should be well aware of that case. The movement for equality is about rights that extend beyond the bedroom, but do not extend beyond those that straight people already enjoy.

Governor Jindal is Stupid-Partying Again

For a guy who once sincerely seemed incensed about the GOP being "the stupid party", it seems sad to me that LA Gov. Bobby Jindal can't seem to keep away from the stupid. Continuing on the theme of otherizing Muslims in an attempt to seem serious about national security, Jindal makes two claims in a short period that are both pretty much bullshit: that President Obama is not "doing his job" and going after ISIL's leadership, and that Muslim clerics are not adequately condemning ISIL.

The timing of this assertion happens to coincide with a raid on ISIL in Syria (where ISIL seems to have been more active and less directly challenged) that killed a senior leader of ISIL, Abu Sayyaf and resulted in the capture of his wife, Umm Sayyaf and the freeing of their young Yazidi slave. It's like Jindal also suffers from the odd habit of mind that causes someone like, say, TX Rep. Lamar Smith, to believe that nothing is being done about ISIL, while of course, the US is doing actions against them, albeit ones that have not been authorized by an act of Congress.

I think Governor Jindal might be a little confused about whom is not doing what job, hmm? The US has been doing something about ISIL, along with a coalition of area (read: Islamic) forces.

The CPAC 2015 Poll is in

I've really not made a big point of following CPAC this year because I finally get that I am not the audience this whole shindig is for. Of course, part of the deal is that the prominent voices of today's conservatism are supposed to be showcased. Yes, some of these people are running for POTUS. But that doesn't mean I have to take it totally seriously, because the likelihood that, for example, the CPAC straw poll actually ever meant anything would probably mean that we were experiencing Ron Paul's second term. And we are not. So, if Sen. Rand Paul has enjoyed his third CPAC poll win, this has more to do with inheriting his father's libertarian apparatus, and less to do with anything like being able to win in 2016. (I think.)

WI Gov, Scott Walker has come in a respectable second, despite or probably because he compared union workers to ISIS, which would no doubt haunt him if he made it to a general election. His claims that facing protesting union folks prepares him for foreign policy is kind of strained, I think. And making the "Reagan" connection is so obvi. Try harder, you try-hard!

Rhodes Scholar Tells Europe A Lie About Themselves

I had to wait until LA Gov. Bobby Jindal actually gave a speech in front of people telling them about the "no-go" zones in their midst before casting shade at him, because that's the way I roll. Sure, he telegraphed his intention to make the speech about the unidentifiable "no-go" zones days beforehand, but I wanted to give every benefit of the doubt that he would pull out and point his nose in the direction of a target that wasn't...some shit FOX News made up.

I don't know if this is my bad, or his, really. I should have realized that once committed to blather, blathers gonna blather, blather, blather (h/t, Taylor Swift). What I did not actually entirely realize was that he had a defense ready--go on. Seated? Arm rests--clutch them. 

After the remarks, Jindal was grilled by CNN about the remark. “Look, I’ve heard from folks here that there are neighborhoods where women don’t feel comfortable going in without veils,” Jindal said. “That’s wrong. We all know that there are neighborhoods where police are less likely to go into.” 

When pushed about backing up his statements with facts, Jindal added a qualifier, calling them “so-called no-go zones.” A Fox commentator who talked about no-go zones in London and Birmingham provoked a response from British Prime Minister David Cameron who said he nearly choked on his porridge when he heard about the remarks.  

“I think that the radical Left absolutely wants to pretend like this problem is not here,” Jindal said. “Pretending it’s not here won’t make it go away.”

Ew. So, he saw that 60 Minutes episode where Muslim brothers were disrespecting women and generalized it to all neighborhoods that had a Muslim population? And then conflates it with neighborhoods that police won't go into (like, we talk about the "Philly Roll" as being something even cops did in certain neighborhoods in North Philadelphia, but even that is, actually, urban legend, and no--not a problem with Muslims). Then he implies that the "radical Left" isn't really up for a conversation about Islamic extremism unless they--what, ignore him talking about things that aren't true?

Musings on a "War on Religion"

When 2016 probable presidential hopeful LA Gov. Bobby Jindal latches on to an idea like decrying a "silent war on religious liberty", I find myself thinking of people like the Schaibles, who, owing to their belief in faith-healing, allowed two of their own children to die.

There is is difference between liberty and license. What one does for or to one's self is quite a different thing than how one treats others. In a world where some parents would walk over hot coals and broken glass for the sake of their injured or sick offspring, the indifference to the suffering of their children in the name of "faith" is appalling. So too, I think we as a society would reject the defense of child beaters who relied on the Bible as the basis for the abuse--which is why I don't see, for example, "reparation therapy" as anything but abuse since it is not backed by science and is harmful. Crying "religious freedom" simply doesn't give anyone the right to abuse others, not even one's own children.

And I find I have to reject also the idea the discrimination of others is a necessary freedom if simply based on their classification. And I don't think this is at all a rare thing to reject just on the face of it.

Also, what Lemieux says is true. It's an old argument about freedom that does not get any better with age. I it's purest form, it actually sounds asinine these days.