Barbara Buono's Lesbian Daughter Is In A Very Different Situation Than Louie Gohmert's Lesbian Daughter

Digby, Jacquie and Amato met with Barbara Buono at Netroots Nation last week-- so now we can all vouch for what an incredible governor she would make. All she has to do is get around a gigantic roadblock, media darling (they're masochists) Chris Christie. But, as far as Blue America is concerned, it's now official: we endorse Barbara Buono for governor of the Garden State!

Early Monday morning I found an e-mail from someone named Tessa Bitterman. I never heard of her and almost deleted it. But something made me open it and read it. I'm glad I did. Tessa is Barbara Buono's youngest daughter, a law student. Perhaps you read the tragedy of Republican Congressman and sociopathic homophobe Louie Gohmert (R-TX), whose daughter, an artist and a lesbian, moved to Shanghai to get as far away from her hate-filled father as she could. Very sad, especially as Gohmert runs around spreading lies and divisiveness about the LGBT community. Buono's daughter is also a lesbian and, of course, her relationship with her mother is nothing like the acrimonious and combative one in the Gohmert household. This is the e-mail from Tessa-- not about Gohmert, but about another Republican hatemonger and homophobe, Chris Christie:

Growing up, my mom was always there for me no matter what. I’m gay and from an early age I felt free to express myself with my mother, knowing she would always support me for who I am.

As a gay American I have a stake in what our governor says about marriage equality. And I have been deeply shocked by Chris Christie. As governor, he has been a giant roadblock to New Jersey achieving equality for all. By failing to support marriage equality, Christie is blatantly delegitimizing an entire group of people.

I have also seen Chris Christie misrepresent himself as a moderate to New Jersey-- that’s why it’s even more important to stop him before he takes his radical show on the road when he goes national after this election.

...Now that Christie is running for re-election, he is more than happy to try and portray himself as a moderate. But the truth is-- his record scares me. It scares me because if he takes his brand of deception national, all Americans are in for a rude awakening.

Tessa urges her readers to contribute to her mom's campaign-- which you can do here-- and reminds New Jersey voters that "if we want to keep politics of polarizing and dividing people from spreading beyond New Jersey" we need to help Buono overcome the media's narrative that Christie "has the election in the bag." This photo shows the inside of Christie headquarters the other day, when interns were fed donuts. Read the label carefully:

UPDATE from Tessa

"Did you see what the Supreme Court just did? They just ruled that I and millions of other Americans have the right to have the federal government recognize our marriages.

"But here in New Jersey, Chris Christie is still blocking marriage equality-- he is trying to be more conservative than Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and the rest of the Tea Party."

And speaking of New Jersey's homophobic and bigoted governor, Christie disagrees with the Supreme Court rulings:

“I don’t think the ruling was appropriate,” said Christie, who is running for re-election in a blue state, one in which Democrats have hailed the SCOTUS decision on DOMA.

“I think it was wrong,” Christie continued, calling it “typical of the problem we see” in New Jersey’s own Supreme Court…

He blasted the U.S. Supremes for substituting “their own judgment for the judgment of a Republican Congress and a Democratic President. In the Republican Congress in the ‘90s and Bill Clinton. I thought that Justice Kennedy’s opinion was, in many respects, incredibly insulting to those people, 340-some members of Congress who voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, and Bill Clinton.”

“He basically said that the only reason to pass that bill was to demean people. That’s heck of a thing to say about Bill Clinton and about the Republican Congress back in the ‘90s. And it’s just another example of judicial supremacy, rather than having the government run by the people we actually vote for,” said Christie, who recently appeared with Clinton at a Clinton Global Initiative conference.

Bill Clinton, of course, has completely disowned DOMA and has campaigned against it. The Republicans may too... in a couple decades. More reason than ever to support Barbara Buono for governor of New Jersey.

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So Even a Pathetic Pipsqueak Like Dana Rohrbacher Scares Boehner?

Dana!

Rohrbacher used to be... a surfer, a folk singer, a pot head, a homo, Congress' #1 supporter of the Taliban and a terrorist in Afghanistan (or at least someone who dressed up as a terrorist for a photo shoot). Rohrabacher recognized the affinity between the Taliban and the Republican Party, backed them for bringing "stability" to Afghanistan and told his dumb-as-abrick-constituents in Orange County that the Taliban "intend to establish a disciplined, moral society" and, like Republicans, are just misunderstood "devout traditionalists, not terrorists or revolutionaries." And people in Orange County keep voting for him anyway. Or at least the idiots in Orange County do, not normal people there.

And, yes, Dana Rohrbacher is no longer a surfer, a folk singer, a pot head, a homo (he's married with kids now but...) or a Taliban backer, but he's still one of the biggest crackpots in Congress-- and a die-hard racist who's built a career on his hatred of Mexicans and by his unabashed expression of vitriol towards them. He is suspected by many of having fed Mitt Romney that memorable line about self-deportation that sealed the fate of not just Romney, but of so many Republicans in 2012.

And this week he publicly announced that he would try to depose John Boehner if he allows a vote on the Senate's immigration reform bill. He knows it would pass in the House and he's apoplectic that Boehner might even consider allowing a vote. “If Boehner moves forward ... and permits this to come to a vote even though the majority of Republicans in the House-- and that’s if they do-- oppose what’s coming to a vote, he should be removed as Speaker," hissed Rohrabacher menacingly. So Boehner caved-- at least temporarily.

Even though most mainstream conservative Republicans in the House support the bill-- including Boehner lieutenants Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan-- Boehner, gin to his head, agreed to abide by the so-called Hastert Rule and not allow a vote unless a majority of House Republicans decide its OK.

“I also suggested to our members today that any immigration reform bill that is going to go into law ought to have a majority of both parties’ support if we’re really serious about making that happen, and so I don’t see any way of bringing an immigration bill to the floor that doesn’t have a majority support of Republicans,” Mr. Boehner said at a news conference after meeting with House Republicans.

Mr. Boehner’s comments, both privately in the closed-door meeting at the Capitol Hill Club and publicly, came as some House Republicans have begun to draw a firm and vocal line in the sand, warning Mr. Boehner that his speakership could be at risk if he tries to force through an immigration bill without the support of his conference.

...Though Mr. Boehner has violated the Hastert rule several times this year — to help avert a fiscal showdown, provide relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy and pass the Violence Against Women Act — he explicitly said on Tuesday that he would not take up an immigration bill without the support of a majority of his party.

Mr. Boehner’s comments will make it harder for him to buck conservatives on an immigration overhaul, something that many consider crucial for Republicans hoping to regain their national standing with Hispanic voters. His position will also make it harder to strike a deal between the House and the Senate on a final immigration measure if the legislative process gets that far.

...Mr. Boehner is well aware of the difficult political situation he finds himself in. When asked if he believed he could lose his job if he violated the Hastert rule on immigration, he said, to laugher, “Maybe.”

In the meeting before his news conference, Mr. Boehner offered further reassurances to his members.

“This town thrives on non-stories, and the biggest non-story of the week is this speculation that I’m somehow planning secretly to pass an immigration bill without a majority of Republicans,” Mr. Boehner said, according to a source who was present at the meeting. “I have no intention of putting a bill on the floor that will violate the principles of our majority and divide our conference.”

Still, Mr. Boehner’s comments come as conservative Republicans are increasingly worried about how the immigration bill will be handled in the House. Representative Steve King, an Iowa Republican and leading opponent of the immigration overhaul making its way through the Senate, plans to hold a six-hour news conference outside the Capitol on Wednesday to voice his concerns about the current bill.

GOP reactionaries and bigots fear that what Boehner will do is allow a vote on the bill the emerges eventually from the Senate-House reconciliation. There may not be many Republican congressmen as racist as Rohrabacher, but Texas lunatic Louie Gohmert certainly is one. And he's ready to rumble. He's running around telling fellow extremists that Boehner "has been consistent on that as far as a bill coming to the floor of the House that the House generates. That is not the concern that Steve King, Michele Bachmann and others and I have had. Our concern has been that even if we pass a very good bill, like Trey Gowdy’s bill, if the Speaker sends that to a conference committee and the report comes back and that’s the one we’re concerned may not have a majority of Republicans... If we get a bill back that has amnesty and 99 percent of the Democrats vote for it and the Speaker can put the pressure on 30, 40, 50 of our guys, people that are committee chairs or in leadership positions, then they can still pass it even without a majority." No one pulls the wool over Louie Gohmert's eyes! NO ONE. (Boehner now appears to have been beaten into submission on the conference report as well.)

Compounding the problems of the radical right and Know Nothing xenophobes, Alabama wingnut Jeff Sessions (KKK) demanded the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to estimate how much money immigration reform would cost the taxpayers. Sessions was unprepared for the answer. Not only does the deficit shrink in the first 10 years by $197 billion if the Senate bill goes into law, the second tens years will see an astronomical $700 billion windfall for American taxpayers. I imagine Sessions, Rohrabacher, Bachmann, King, Gohmert and the other freaks were ready to jump into the DC sinkhole that's swallowing up calls this week.

The CBO score could give the bill a significant boost as the Senate tries to clear it before the July 4 recess. Supporters are hoping for a strong vote in order to put pressure on House Republicans to pass a bill this year.

The bill requires increased spending on border security and ultimately would provide a path to legal residency and possible citizenship for the nation’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants. That status would allow immigrant to tap into federal entitlement benefits but they would start paying taxes for the first time as well.

The CBO normally uses a conventional 10-year budget window and this has been a sore point for opponents of the Gang of Eight bill, who had called for a longer-range estimate.

The chief Senate critic of the immigration reform bill, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) last month said the bill will be costly once illegal immigrations qualify for entitlements.

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What To Do About A GOP That Has Devolved Into Intransigent Extremism?

Joe Conason takes on the moronic Beltway adage that "everyone is equally at fault" for the nation's problems by pointing out that the most salient fact in American political life is (and for some time has been) the intransigent extremism of the Republican Party.

Whatever the punditocracy may imagine, there is no way for Obama to force his agenda on the Republicans in the House and the Senate, who range from scheming partisans like Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor to Tea Party zealots like Ted Cruz and Michele Bachmann. Unlike Abraham Lincoln or Lyndon Johnson, the two brilliant manipulators with whom he is sometimes compared and found wanting, the president is not equipped to bribe, blackmail, or herd in the style of those Machiavellian chief executives. If he were so equipped-- and indeed used his power as ruthlessly as Lincoln or Johnson-- the same pundits who now complain that he isn’t controlling the agenda would shriek about his misuse of power.

...What Obama evidently doesn’t understand, despite years of bitter experience, is the significance of that right-wing extremism for someone like him, whose nature is to accept differences and seek compromise. Unable to negotiate with a reasonable counterpart on either side of the Hill, he too frequently negotiates with himself-- whether over Obamacare, the debt ceiling, the budget, deficit reduction, taxes, or “reforming” Social Security.

Yet whenever he discards a progressive position, such as the public option in health care, or adopts a conservative position, such as reducing Social Security cost-of-living increases, he only succeeds in demoralizing his base. Meanwhile, rejection by the Republicans is preordained.

So what is left for President Obama to do if he wishes to see any of his second-term agenda enacted? By now he ought to have noticed that when he speaks out firmly on behalf of progressive principles, in support of working families, his polling numbers improve and his power increases. (And whenever he vacillates, his numbers diminish and his authority weakens.)

Yesterday we saw a resurgent fascist party in England, UKIP, make huge headway against the political Establishment, primarily by capitalizing on crude nationalism and rabid anti-immigrant sentiment. When David Cameron, whose Conservative Party lost big, was asked by a journalist if he regrets referring to the fruitcakes and clowns who ran on the UKIP ticket as fruitcakes and clowns, he responded, “It’s no good insulting a political party that people have chosen to vote for. Of course they should be subject, and they will be subject, to proper scrutiny of their policies and their plans. But we need to show respect for people who've taken the choice to support this party. And we're going to work really hard to win them back." Cameron finds himself in a situation not unlike the hapless John Boehner. When you start feeding the beast of hatred and bigotry some red meat, the beast is never satiated. The beast will inevitably eat you as well. And that brings us to Timothy Eagan's OpEd in yesterday's NY Times, about how the crazies-- the U.S. version of the UKIP-- have taken over the House of Representatives. Appropriately enough, he starts with Gohmert, certainly one of the craziest of the lot, right up there with Broun, King, Bachmann and Stockman.

Not long ago, the congressman from northeast Texas, Louie Gohmert, was talking about how the trans-Alaska oil pipeline improved the sex lives of certain wild animals-- in his mind, the big tube was an industrial-strength aphrodisiac. “When the caribou want to go on a date,” he told a House hearing, “they invite each other to head over to the pipeline.”

Gohmert, consistently on the short list for the most off-plumb member of Congress, has said so many crazy things that this assertion passed with little comment. Last year, he blamed a breakdown of Judeo-Christian values for the gun slaughter at a cinema in Colorado. Last week, he claimed the Muslim Brotherhood had deep influence in the Obama administration, and that the attorney general-- the nation’s highest law enforcer-- sympathized with terrorists.

You may wonder how he gets away with this. You may also wonder how Gohmert can run virtually unopposed in recent elections. The answer explains why we have an insular, aggressively ignorant House of Representatives that is not at all representative of the public will, let alone the makeup of the country.

Much has been said about how the great gerrymander of the people’s House-- part of a brilliant, $30 million Republican action plan at the state level-- has now produced a clot of retrograde politicians who are comically out of step with a majority of Americans. It’s not just that they oppose things like immigration reform and simple gun background checks for violent felons, while huge majorities support them.

Or that, in the aggregate, Democrats got 1.4 million more votes for all House positions in 2012 but Republicans still won control with a cushion of 33 seats.

Or that they won despite having the lowest approval rating in modern polling, around 10 percent in some surveys. Richard Nixon during Watergate and B.P.’s initial handling of a catastrophic oil spill had higher approval ratings.

But just look at how different this Republican House is from the country they are supposed to represent. It’s almost like a parallel government, sitting in for some fantasy nation created in talk-radio land.

As a whole, Congress has never been more diverse, except the House majority. There are 41 black members of the House, but all of them are Democrats. There are 10 Asian-Americans, but all of them are Democrats. There are 34 Latinos, a record-- and all but 7 are Democrats. There are 7 openly gay or lesbian members, all of them Democrats.

Only 63 percent of the United States population is white. But in the House Republican majority, it’s 96 percent white. Women are 51 percent of the nation, but among the ruling members of the House, they make up just 8 percent. (It’s 30 percent on the Democratic side.)

It’s a stretch, by any means, to call the current House an example of representative democracy. Now let’s look at how the members govern:

To date, seven bills have been enacted. Let’s see, there was the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship act-- “ensuring the stability of the helium market.” The Violence Against Women Act was renewed, but only after a majority of Republicans voted against it, a rare instance of letting the full House decide on something that the public favors. Just recently, they rushed through a change to help frequent air travelers-- i.e., themselves-- by fixing a small part of the blunt budget cuts that are the result of their inability to compromise. Meal assistance to the elderly, Head Start for kids and other programs will continue to fall under the knife of sequestration.

On the economy, the Republican majority has been consciously trying to derail a fragile recovery. Their first big salvo was the debt ceiling debacle, which resulted in the lowering of the credit rating for the United States. With sequestration-- which President Obama foolishly agreed to, thinking Congress would never go this far-- the government has put a wheel-lock on a car that keeps trying to get some traction.

Meanwhile, not a day passes without some member of this ruling majority saying something outrageous. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, for example, has endorsed the far-side-of-the-moon conspiracy theory that the government is buying up all the bullets to keep gun owners from stocking their home arms depots. As for Gohmert, earlier this year he nominated Allen West, a man who isn’t even a member of Congress (he lost in November) to be Speaker of the House. Harvey, the invisible rabbit, was not available.

Gohmert, like others in the House crazy caucus, has benefited from a gerrymandered district. He can do anything short of denouncing Jesus and get re-elected.

The Beltway chorus of the moment blames President Obama for his inability to move his proposals through a dunderheaded Congress. They wonder how Republicans would be treating a silken-tongued charmer like Bill Clinton if he were still in the White House. We already know: not a single Republican voted for Clinton’s tax-raising budget, the one that led to our last federal surplus. Plus, they impeached him; his presidency was saved only in the Senate.

Listen to how conservative Republican Senator Pat Toomey explained it:

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Seriously, Is The Republican Party Cracking Up?

Yesterday everyone was talking about the Republican plan in the North Carolina legislature to establish a state religion, something clearly prohibited by the Constitution, not to mention centuries of common practice in the U.S. People were scratching their heads and wondering if the proposal was just something from Tea Party crackpots with no influence. Well one of the sponsors, Edgar Starnes, is certainly a Tea Party crackpot but he's serving his 10th term and he's the GOP Majority Leader of the House. He represents tiny, somewhat backward Caldwell County which voted 23,069- 10,795 for Romney over Obama in November. Starnes claims North Carolina can enshrine a state religion if it wants to.

Guess what; Oklahoma has even more cracked Republicans than North Carolina, loons concerned with UN black helicopters. And then there was Louie Gohmert, an actual U.S. Congressman from the saddest part of Texas, who claimed-- and with a straight face-- that gun control is a slippery slope that leads right to gay sex and bestiality

It must be pretty stressful being a Republican. The voting public doesn't agree with any of their core positions and voters don't trust their hands on the levers of power. A new poll from Quinnipiac had nothing but bad news for them.

Among all American voters, the Democratic Party is less disliked than the GOP: the Democrats get a negative 38 - 44 percent favorability, compared to a negative 28 - 52 percent for the Republicans. The Tea Party gets a negative 24 - 43 percent.

Voters also give Republicans in Congress a negative 19 - 71 percent job approval, compared to a negative 34 - 59 percent for the Democrats in Congress.

"The Republican brand is essentially in the toilet these days, but it's worth remembering the Democrats faced a similar situation in the late 1980s and got their house in order and returned to power in short order," said [Assistant Director Peter] Brown.

But the trend is far from favorable for them. Last July when the survey asked who they would vote for for Congress, a generic Republican or a generic Democrat, 43% picked a Democrat and 40% picked a Republican. This month the Democrat still has 43% support. But the Republic support has sunk to 35%, enough to make up for the gerrymander advantage. Among voters with a college degree it's even worse for the GOP. 31% favor a Republican and 44% favor a Democrat. and asked whether the congressional Republicans are doing a good job, only 19% said yes. Even among Republican voters only 34% felt they were doing a good job while 57% said they disapprove of the job Congressional Republicans are doing. No demographic approved-- not even white born-again evangelical voters, 63% disapproving. When asked if the Republicans Party "cares about the needs and problems of people like you or not," 59% said NOT. Among these same respondents 59% said that the Democratic Party does care.

Meanwhile another new poll just out, this one from Marist, shows the GOP severely out of sync with American voters on gun control. Voters don't only want background checks, they want assault weapons banned entirely. Six in 10 respondents-- including 83% of Democrats, 43% of gun owners and 37% of Republicans-- believe that the laws covering gun sales should be stricter. 87% of Americans support background checks for private gun sales and sales at gun shows, and 59% favor legislation that would ban the sale of assault weapons. The same poll also shows the public rejecting the Republican Austerity Agenda.

[T]he Morning Joe/Marist survey shows that Americans-- by nearly a 2-to-1 margin-- want President Barack Obama and Congress to make job creation their top priority (64 percent) instead of deficit reduction (33 percent).

Those who prefer Washington’s political leaders to emphasize job creation include 76 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Republicans; a narrow majority of Republican respondents (51 percent) want the focus to be on deficit reduction.

Also, Obama edges congressional Republicans by four percentage points, 44 percent to 40 percent, on the question of who has a better approach to deal with the federal budget deficit.

But the president’s approach to deficit reduction-- calling for a combination of spending cuts and increased tax revenues-- is more popular than the Republicans’ cuts-only approach.

Forty-two percent of respondents prefer a mixture of spending cuts (including to entitlement programs) and revenue increases; 35 percent pick increasing mostly revenue; and just 17 percent choose mostly cutting government spending (including to programs like Medicare and Medicaid).

Still, an analysis from Think Progress, it appears that a landslide victory in the House would--  thanks to gerrymandering-- only yield a 5 seat majority. Which means Democrats would, once again, be at the mercy of useless Blue Dogs and New Dems who are exactly as corrupted by corporate money as the Republicans are.

According to a Quinnipiac poll released today, if the election were held today 43 percent of the electorate would support a Democratic U.S. House candidate, as opposed to just 35 percent who would back a Republican. That 8 point lead for Democrats is significantly more than the GOP’s margin of victory during the 2010 Republican wave election (6.6 percent) and even more that the Democratic margin of victory during the 2006 wave (7.9 percent)-- when Democrats were bolstered by both an unpopular Republican president and a failing war in Iraq. And yet, if Democrats succeed in maintaining this substantial lead through next year’s congressional election, they will likely emerge with a tiny majority of just 5 seats... Republican gerrymandering was so successful during the last redistricting cycle that Democrats would likely need to win the national popular vote by more than 7 points in order to win the barest of majorities in the House.

As Greg Sargent put it in his Washington Post column, "public opinion among Republicans is increasingly isolated and drifting away from the rest of the electorate. You see this on pretty much every major issue facing the country." He offers lot of examples-- 57% of Americans support a pathway to citizenship for immigrants already here, something 60% of Republicans oppose. 58% of voters (and 62% of Independents) believe the time has come for marriage equality. Only 34% of Republican voters agree, which makes it difficult even for evolved Members to support something that everyone in the country but the crazy GOP base is favoring.

So while you have the RNC vacillating between rebranding and claiming President Obama is plotting infanticide, Democrats need only point to the results of Tuesday's runoff in South Carolina to show the American people that there really is something seriously wrong with Republicans.

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