Wednesday Open Thread [3.19.14]

In their heart of hearts, the religious right yearns for a fascist dictator to impose their theology by force on Americans. Don’t believe me, well then ask Franklin Graham:

Evangelist Franklin Graham is praising Russian President Vladimir Putin for his aggressive crackdown on homosexuality, saying his record on protecting children from gay “propaganda” is better than President Obama’s “shameful” embrace of gay rights.

The countdown to Franklin Graham’s coming out party is now clicking away…

Minnesota state Rep. Andrea Kieffer (R) said that a package of bills that would provide paid family and sick leave and address the gender pay gap makes women “look like whiners.”

“We heard several bills last week about women’s issues and I kept thinking to myself, these bills are putting us backwards in time. We are losing the respect that we so dearly want in the workplace by bringing up all these special bills for women and almost making us look like whiners.”

Sigh. When men ask for salary and benefit raises at work, are they called whiners? I swear, conservative women are self loathing.

COLORADO–U.S. SENATE–Public Policy Polling: Sen. Mark Udall (D) 42, Rep. Cory Gardner (R) 40

FLORIDA–GOVERNOR–University of North Florida: Former Governor Charlie Crist (D) 34, Gov. Rick Scott (R) 33. And yet, Scott’s approval rate is 45%. So this poll makes no sense. First, that is an extremely low number for both Crist and Scott, so they must not have pushed leaners at all. Second, if you approve of the Governor’s job performance, you tend to support him for reelection. Here, we have to assume 12% of Florida voters like the job Rick Scott is doing but are voting against him anyway or at the very least are not sure.

Ponnuruwarns Republicans against thinking they are going to win in 2014 no matter what they do.

Take a look at the Huffington Post’s poll averages. Obama’s net job-approval rating is slightly up since the start of February. His rating on the economy has been improving since early December. He has been rising on foreign policy since late September. While the president is still “upside down,” as the operatives say, on all those measures, Republicans would be foolish to assume that the trend is their friend.

And even if Republicans succeed by taking the path of least resistance, they will be storing up future trouble. What if they win the Senate? In that case, Congress will have to move legislation. Republicans will have to come up with attractive conservative bills then, so that Obama will either feel it necessary to sign them or pay a political price for vetoing them. They will be in much better shape if they have campaigned on some of these ideas.

But having a structured campaign where the Republicans declare themselves to be FOR something other then FREEDOM is something that Ross Douthat thinks is a long way off.

I don’t think you’re likely to see real movement until after the 2016 campaign. The House Republican caucus is just too dysfunctional to unite around anything except modest budget deals and insufficient alternatives, and if they did unite around something more substantial they’re too distant from the White House ideologically to cut a deal. That’s probably still going to be the case after the midterms, and the lame duck phase of presidencies rarely produce much policy movement anyway. So for the ideas currently circulating to actually come up for votes that mean something, I think you’d need a change in the correlation of forces in Washington D.C. – and in particular, you’d need a clear leader capable of pushing them, which basically can only happen if there’s a Republican in the White House.

That doesn’t speak much for Republican policy ideas. Republicans in Congress followed George W. Bush around like lemmings for most of his Presidency, voting for things that would get them tar and feathered by the tea party now. Perhaps it is best that the GOP not win back the Senate this year. Because Scott Galupo fears a GOP in complete control of Congress will sabotage both the GOP presidential primary and the nominee it produces:

[T]he seeming tranquility in Washington is simply the sound of two parties behaving well until a midterm election. If and when Republicans retake the Senate, the intraparty feud, now simmering, will begin to boil anew. The rightmost flank, flush with victory, will need to be appeased. And the ideological toxicity; the demographics of death; the lack of a viable national standard-bearer — these factors and others will conspire to elect the next President Clinton.