Cascadia: Not so batshit crazy ?

The insane NZ right wing are talking up the Daily Caller report

White House website deluged with 

secession petitions from 20 states

How would Old Glory look with 30 stars instead of 50? As far-fetched as it may sound, the White House might soon be forced by its own rules to examine the question.

On Nov.7, the day after President Barack Obama was re-elected, the White House’s website received a petition asking the administration to allow Louisiana to secede.

Hilarious to think that the nut jobs are so concerned about the re-election of President
Obama they have now swallowed the next play in the batshit crazy American  sulk book. It actually started out as a Democratic response to the election of Bush but the Republicans have taken it to a whole new level.


From Slate 2004

Even before Sen. John Kerry conceded defeat in the presidential election, some bitter blue-staters had begun joking about the possibility of seceding from red-state America. Which makes you wonder: Are there any provisions in U.S. law for a state to opt out of the Union?

No. But the legal situation wasn't always so clear cut. Before the Civil War, the legality of secession was an open question, and Southerners would frequently threaten that their states might ditch the fledgling nation. The legal argument, framed eloquently in the 1830 Senate debate between Daniel Webster and Robert Hayne, centered on the Constitution: Was it merely a treaty among the many states? Or was it the founding document of a singular country, a compact of the "people" cited in its opening clause? This legal argument, among other things, eventually begat the Civil War, and since it ended, scholars have agreed that the Constitution grants no right of secession.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia, there are groups that seek independence from the United States and Canada and hope to form the Republic of Cascadia.

You can find it here.

It even has a flag.

For the record.

Statistics of the Republic of Cascadia:

• Name: The Republic of Cascadia (long form), Cascadia (short form)
• Capital: Cascadia
• Area: 855,762 sq km
• Population: 14,220,981 (2005 est)
• GDP: US$323 billion (1996 est)
• Language: Cascadese (a dialect of English)
• Time System: Metric Time

The Republic of Cascadia stretches from 42° to 60° north latitude. Its western border consists of the Pacific coast and a portion of the American state of Alaska. On the east, it borders the American states of Idaho and Montana and the Canadian province of Alberta. Cascadia is divided into three prefectures: British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington.

Government:

Cascadia is a constitutional republic that guarantees its citizens their basic rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to a fair trial with a jury of peers. It has a strong democratic tradition and universal suffrage. The seat of the national government is in the capital city of Cascadia, which is tucked safely away from centers of urban decadence.

Resources:

Cascadia has abundant natural resources. Vast forests provide it with ample timber for both export and domestic use. Rich fish and shellfish stocks also supply valuable exports as well as powerful brain-food for its citizens. Raging rivers and vulcanism offer cheap and renewable forms of hydrodynamic and geothermal power generation. Its many harbors and protected waterways give Cascadia an edge when it comes to trans-Pacific shipping.

Its natural resources are exceeded only by its industrial resources. The Cascadian software and biotechnology industries lead the world in innovation and market-share dominance. Cascadian-produced software is on 97% of the world's computers, and that figure will continue to rise. (Although it has not yet achieved sheep-cloning technology, it is close -- watch out Scotland!) The Republic of Cascadia is a nuclear power with the ability to process weapons-grade plutonium and also advanced missile technology. Cascadia has the facilities and technical expertise to produce a wide range of fighter, support, and commercial aircraft, as well as space vehicles. Besides being a global leader in vehicle technology, Cascadian industry is also developing sea-based launch capabilities for orbital payload delivery and possible lunar conquests.

But why conquer the moon when you can win the stars? The Republic of Cascadia has long been sought by movie and TV producers for use in location shooting -- and even production work -- because of its scenic beauty; commercially popular image; and cheap, non-union labor. This is just a part of Cascadia's plan to become a global media powerhouse, the likes of which Hollywood couldn't imagine. Cascadia has a proven track-record in producing trends in music, fashion, food, and other forms of product consumption, which it can profit from by building on its brand recognition and loyalty. Furthermore, with its space program providing satellite technology and its software industry providing cutting-edge Internet technology, Cascadia is poised to control the means of infotainment distribution -- and thereby consumer demand -- on a global scale.

The Republic of Cascadia is not yet officially recognized by Canada, the United States of America, or the United Nations. Not that it is any of their business.

If you are going to take the piss do it well.

Republican stupidity continued

The New York Times editorial opines.

A Big Storm Requires Big Government

Most Americans have never heard of the National Response Coordination Center, but they’re lucky it exists on days of lethal winds and flood tides. The center is the war room of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where officials gather to decide where rescuers should go, where drinking water should be shipped, and how to assist hospitals that have to evacuate.

Actually I think that that is a bit hard on most Americans I am sure that they remember Katrina and the FEMA stuff ups very well. 

Disaster coordination is one of the most vital functions of “big government,” which is why Mitt Romney wants to eliminate it. At a Republican primary debate last year, Mr. Romney was asked whether emergency management was a function that should be returned to the states. He not only agreed, he went further.

“Absolutely,” he said. “Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.” Mr. Romney not only believes that states acting independently can handle the response to a vast East Coast storm better than Washington, but that profit-making companies can do an even better job. He said it was “immoral” for the federal government to do all these things if it means increasing the debt.

If Americans ever need to elect a court jester Romney is the man for the job. The guy is a fucking joke.

It’s an absurd notion, but it’s fully in line with decades of Republican resistance to federal emergency planning. FEMA, created by President Jimmy Carter, was elevated to cabinet rank in the Bill Clinton administration, but was then demoted by President George W. Bush, who neglected it, subsumed it into the Department of Homeland Security, and placed it in the control of political hacks. The disaster of Hurricane Katrina was just waiting to happen.

Republicans on the whole just don't get it at all. Most Republican politicians would be unelectable outside of the United States. 

The agency was put back in working order by President Obama, but ideology still blinds Republicans to its value. Many don’t like the idea of free aid for poor people, or they think people should pay for their bad decisions, which this week includes living on the East Coast.

I suspect that many people in the US haven't got a clue what the Republican  extreme right wing religious zelots actually stand for. The Tea Party has a bewildered look at the grass level. 

Over the last two years, Congressional Republicans have forced a 43 percent reduction in the primary FEMA grants that pay for disaster preparedness. Representatives Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and other House Republicans have repeatedly tried to refuse FEMA’s budget requests when disasters are more expensive than predicted, or have demanded that other valuable programs be cut to pay for them. The Ryan budget, which Mr. Romney praised as “an excellent piece of work,” would result in severe cutbacks to the agency, as would the Republican-instigated sequester, which would cut disaster relief by 8.2 percent on top of earlier reductions.

Why would you want to do something as stupid as that ?

Does Mr. Romney really believe that financially strapped states would do a better job than a properly functioning federal agency? Who would make decisions about where to send federal aid? Or perhaps there would be no federal aid, and every state would bear the burden of billions of dollars in damages. After Mr. Romney’s 2011 remarks recirculated on Monday, his nervous campaign announced that he does not want to abolish FEMA, though he still believes states should be in charge of emergency management. Those in Hurricane Sandy’s path are fortunate that, for now, that ideology has not replaced sound policy.

Obama is not only the sensible choice he is the only choice. America can't with stand another idiot republican administration  at this point in time.

Racist, Sexist, Stupid - Republican

From Stuff

Donald Trump wants to make a deal with President Barack Obama.

If Obama releases his college and passport records by the end of October, the New York real estate mogul and reality show host says he will contribute US$5 million (NZ$6.09m) to a charity of the president's choice.

Trump made the offer early today (NZ time) in a video posted to his Twitter account. He called Obama "the least transparent president in the history of this country," and said that by taking the deal Obama would satisfy voters' questions about his past.

Trump drew broad publicity last year for questioning whether Obama was born in the US and eligible to be president. Obama later released his long-form birth certificate showing that he was born in Hawaii in 1961.

More from Stuff 

Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock is standing by his statement that when a woman becomes pregnant during a rape "that's something God intended..... - a day after a television ad featuring the former Massachusetts governor supporting the GOP Senate candidate began airing in Indiana" 

"I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realise that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen," 

From Balloon 

" The Funniest Thing I Heard Post Debate

By John Cole October 23rd, 2012

Was sitting here with my friend and said “Let’s check out the hive mind.” So we switched to Fox, and caught Sean Hannity talking to Ed Gillespie, and Hannity was apparently doing push back on the devastating Obama zinger about horses and bayonets, and said, and I am not fucking making this up:

“Some of our troops rode horses in Afghanistan and the Marines still carry bayonets. Maybe someone should tell the President how the military actually works.”

Yes, Petunia. A couple hundred special forces guys rode horses in Afghanistan, basically because you can’t take an M1A2 or Hummer up the Khyber pass. Likewise, the Marines do still do carry bayonets (as does the Army!), but I don’t recall the last bayonet charge. The number of combat troops carrying bayonets is a small fraction than the 3.5 million grunts we had in WW1 wearing pith helmets and dying in bayonet charges and mustard gas. Likewise, there were tens of thousands of horses in WW1 in combat, there were a few in Afhanistan.

These people are just insane."

From Pine View

Pretty much every intolerant asshole in the country has moved to the Republican Party, if they weren’t already there. The only exceptions are a few holier-than-thou progressives who can’t enjoy one moment of life if even one person is going hungry.

With that lone exception, all the prudes and bigots and tsk-tskers and money-grubbers and polluters and religious freaks and misogynists and fraudsters and warmongers have aligned with the conservative movement.

Yankee Republicanism is dead. All we have is the reactionary right aligned with a bunch a greedheads. You won’t find an inch of daylight between Pat Robertson and Mitt Romney or Mitt Romney and Paul Wolfowitz or Grover Norquist and Mitt Romney. We have the worst of all worlds.

From Peking Duck

" Robbing from the poor to give to the rich. That about sums them up.

I’ve refrained from posting on US politics because it is simply too depressing. Watching nutty conservatives transform the once sane if misguided Republican Party into an Ayn Rand-worshipping club of ueber-rich white men — and seeing so many Americans get on board donning their Tea Part costumes — has been a jaw-dropping spectacle."

From No Minister A New Zealand blog proving that racist and stupid are not exclusively American and right wing insanity is universal.

I wonder how many black Americans with no jobs, no incomes, no homes, no food and no hope might reflect that their forbears were immensely better off.  They had jobs, for a start.  They had homes, they had food.  While they didn't have 'freedom' as we know it, it's fair to say most American slave owners treated their people reasonably.

Bein' back on de plantation in good old Virginny might be a damned sight better than some drug ridden hell hole in back street Chicago.

I rest my case.

Child Marriage

Reuters reports 

Following on from a post a couple of days ago on Child brides facts, we have this.

NEW YORK (TrustLaw) - Child marriage, which steals the innocence of millions of girls worldwide and often condemns them to lives of poverty, ignorance and poor health, is one of the biggest obstacles to development, rights groups say.

A girl under the age of 18 is married every three seconds -- that's 10 million each year -- often without her consent and sometimes to a much older man, according to the children's charity Plan UK. Most of those marriages take place in Africa, the Middle East or South Asia.

"This is one of the biggest development issues of our time and we're committed to raising the voices of millions of girls married against their will," Plan UK head Marie Staunton said in her introduction to "Breaking Vows," a recent global report on child marriage.

I agree justice must be given to these children. Stealing a child's childhood is an awful crime be it forced marriage or recruitment into militias, too often the fate of young boys in Africa.

From horrific childbirth injuries to the secret sale of "drought brides," the consequences of child marriage are explored in a multimedia documentary by TrustLaw, a legal news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation (childmarriage.trust.org).

"Young children have babies -- your life is ruined, your education is ruined," said Kanta Devi, who was 16 when she married in Badakakahera village in India's Rajasthan state.

"You become upset with everything in your life," she told TrustLaw.

There is no way any child should marry before 18 and even that is to early in my opinion.

The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child considers marriage before the age of 18 a human rights violation.

But according to the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), there are more than 50 million child brides worldwide, a number that is expected to grow to 100 million over the next decade.

NZ law allows marriage at 16 with parental consent and I think it should be raised to 18 and the parental  consent part dumped. The age of consent ( sexual ) is 16 and should stay.

RIPPLE EFFECT

Rights activists say six of the eight U.N. Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015 are directly affected by the prevalence of child marriage -- the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger; achievement of universal primary education; promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women; reduction in child mortality; improvement in maternal health; and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.

The ripple effect is devastating, experts say.

That this practice has the potential derail important UN goals shows just how despicable it is. 

Girls forced into early marriage rarely continue their education, denying them any hope of independence, the ability to earn a livelihood or of making an economic contribution to their households.

The practice also reinforces the concept of girls as worthless burdens on their families to be jettisoned as soon as possible.

Girls who complete secondary school are six times less likely to become child brides than contemporaries with less or no education, according to the ICRW, a Washington-based think tank.

The value of an education is clear. It's ironic that many families recognise this post schooling. 

But distance from schools and a lack of school fees often preclude education for the poorest girls, who are twice as likely to marry young as those from wealthier homes.

In Niger, Chad and Mali, more than 70 percent of girls are married before the age of 18, according to ICRW analysis of demographic and health data last year.

Bangladesh, Guinea, Central African Republic, Mozambique, Burkina Faso and Nepal have child marriage rates over 50 percent, the data showed.

Ethiopia, Malawi, Madagascar, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Eritrea, Uganda, India, Nicaragua, Zambia and Tanzania are all above 40 percent.

These figures are appalling. 

The reasons child marriages occur vary with the country and are rarely simple.

"Very often people are sort of quick to demonise, in some ways, the family members and the people who make the decisions about the marriage of girls," Jeffrey Edmeades, a social demographer with ICRW, told TrustLaw.

"But we're finding, for the most part, that people are making these decisions because they feel it's best for their daughters. Parents love their children and they do want the best for them. They're just not sure what the best is."

That is a cause for hope.

Edmeades, who has been working with aid agency CARE on a project to tackle child marriage in Ethiopia, gave the example of children in that country being betrothed before birth to cement strategic alliances between families.

In other cases, girls are married off early to ensure that their virginity, and thus their economic value as brides, is intact and the honor of the family is protected.

Meanwhile, debts and natural disasters, such as tsunamis and drought, can lead to girls being sold off as brides as families scramble for survival.

'SILENT HEALTH EMERGENCY'

Girls under 15, their bodies still developing and their pelvises narrow, are five times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth than women over 20, the U.S. Agency for International Development estimates.

The vast majority of those deaths are in the developing world, where a lack of pre- and post-natal care and advanced procedures such as Cesarean sections makes pregnancy and childbirth far more risky than in rich countries. In Africa, for example, 60 percent of women and girls give birth without a skilled medical professional present, according to the U.N. World Population Fund.

Worldwide, 70,000 girls aged 15-19 die each year during pregnancy or childbirth, UNICEF says. The U.N. World Population Fund considers pregnancy the leading cause of death in that age group, citing complications of childbirth and unsafe abortions as major factors.

Children of child brides are also at risk. Babies born to mothers younger than 18 are more likely to be underweight or stillborn, Plan UK says.

Girls forced into early marriage are also at an increased risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS because they are unlikely to be able to negotiate safe sex with their husbands.

"Child marriage is a silent health emergency in the sense that it's often overlooked as a root cause of maternal mortality and morbidity (illness)," the ICRW's Edmeades said.

DRAWING MORE ATTENTION

While it is a subject still little known and rarely discussed in much of the Western world, the issue of child marriage is drawing greater attention from international aid and humanitarian organizations, as well as governments.

In the United States, where child marriage is rare, the U.S. Senate has reintroduced legislation aimed at curbing global child marriage that was unanimously passed in the Senate in 2010 but blocked in the House of Representatives.

Bloody republicans.

The International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act would establish a strategy over several years to prevent child marriage in developing countries.

It would also require the State Department to report on child marriage in its annual human rights report and integrate efforts to prevent the practice into current development programs.

The bill will be reintroduced in the House this autumn, according to Betty McCollum, a Democrat representative from Minnesota, who is its lead sponsor there.

It was blocked in the House last December primarily due to Republican concerns that it would help organizations supplying abortions, which "couldn't have been farther from the truth," McCollum told TrustLaw.

"It has nothing to do with abortion," she said. "It has everything to do with saving 12-year-old girls from being sold into slavery or sold to settle a family debt."

Right wing Republicans really piss me off.

Not only will it make aid dollars more effective, she added, but "it's a win for the child, it's a win for the community the child lives in and it's a win for the international community."

The Elders, an influential group of global leaders founded in 2007 by former South African President Nelson Mandela, gathered dozens of organizations for a two-day meeting in Ethiopia in June and have launched a campaign called "Girls Not Brides: the Global Partnership to End Child Marriage."

I worry about post Mandela South Africa and in fact Africa. The man is an incredible moral and political force for good.

Republican Insanity Explained

I was actually looking for a different republican insanity story, trust me there is no shortage, when I stumbled over this headline

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

It was "Cult" that attracted my attention.

"But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP."
Lets face it you don't get much more insane than the modern GOP.

"...it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy."

As you can see the article is a bit dated but I can fully understand the authors reaction.

"It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages."

The article lists many examples of this type of behaviour.

"Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself."

And that is a real risk, the American right seems to have lost the plot.

" John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

Remember Rick Perry threatening to take Texas out of the Union in May last year ? That he legally couldn't do that seemed of little consequence to him.

" Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30 years of unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always fall short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students."


We thought Muldoon was bad and trust me he was but he was an infant compared to the modern Republican Party and National in NZ cleaned up the mess something the Republicans are incapable of it would appear in America.

" This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.

You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black.[2] Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear."

He He  ".. Obama's policy of being black."
What is interesting though is his analysis of the Democrats.

" While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?"

While I am a fan of Obama I do think he could have been more forceful and less compromising with the lunatics that are the current GOP, I accept politics is at the end of the day the art of the possible and no more so than in the USA.

" It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest."


This is the part that mystifies me about the American people when the housing crisis hit we were bombarded with images of people in trailer parks flying the Stars and Stripes, hell in most countries they would be burning the flag and a hell of a lot more, just look at Greece.

Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that defines "low-information voter" - or, perhaps, "misinformation voter."

Separation of church and state is something most western democracy's take fairly seriously.


"If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power."


It is a sad but I think apt conclusion should the Republicans in this guise ever regain office and inevitably they will.