Ho ho! They must go, and the rest look like Pinocchio!

The time has come for the big field of Republicans to go away, according to this recent info from the Huff Po:

A majority of likely Republican voters think that every candidate save Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), businessman Donald Trump, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson should drop out. (The survey was conducted in part before Paul and Santorum's announcements, but finds ample support for the idea of them ending their respective campaigns.)
The other GOP candidates whom voters say they wouldn't miss much include former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore.
Even Carson is teetering on the bubble -- 43 percent say he should quit the race, compared to the 12 percent or fewer who say the same about Trump, Rubio or Cruz.

According to a poll by YouGov.com, this is what failure looks like:

But when asked who is most likely to win the primary overall, only 27% of Republicans cite Trump, down 30 points from a poll conducted just days before caucus night. 29% now expect Marco Rubio to be the nominee, following the Florida senator’s surprisingly strong finish in Iowa. Last week, only 9% thought Rubio was most likely to win. Expectations for Ted Cruz, at 24%, are slightly behind Cruz and Trump. No other candidate is higher than 2%.

I applaud Ben Carson for his polite skepticism regarding the apology from Ted Cruz, the one where he indicated he would wait to see what the actions of Cruz show about his sincerity.  The reality though is that Carson would likely come in third out of three among the candidates from Florida, Rubio, Bush and Carson.   It is not clear that any one of those three could win Florida in a national election, with Florida being an important swing state essential to achieving the presidency.  Carson is an idiot savant, brilliant in his profession, but clearly prone to weird and wandering statements that indicate he lacks the broad, well-rounded education and background necessary for the presidency.  He is unpopular outside of the other crazy evangelical extremists like himself, and losing ground fast.

Imho, the buck stops with Cruz for the actions of his campaign; his failure to fire anyone from his campaign, along with his defense of promoting a false narrative (Carson never indicated he would have a "big announcement" suggestive of quitting),  argues he had very little relative problem with the actions of his staff who represented him in Iowa.

At the same time we see the Trump classic conservative false claim of being victim, with the accompanying failure to own his part in his own loss in the state of Iowa.  Clearly his bad second place is more likely the result of his refusing to attend the candidates debate.  No individual responsibility there!  Indeed it appears that Trump might finally be offending the gullible with his bad loser antics.  Whining as he has been about losing, on top of his bitching about Megan Kelly, is showing him to be quite different than the tough guy image he was attempting to project.  Now he just looks like a loser with foolish excuses.

WHEN he fails to be the right wing nominee, it remains to be seen if Trump will pursue even greater hubris and folly by running as an independent, further fracturing the conservative vote, out of either spite or the mistaken notion that he could win.  Trump CANNOT win, except possibly in the alternate reality in his own egotistical mind.  Among other problems, no candidate for president has ever previously won after a single divorce, other than Reagan, never mind multiple divorces.  And there appears to be some inherent opposition to a foreigner in the White House as first lady, which would apply to Trump's latest wife, as well as to the wife of Jeb Bush, from Mexico.

A little history trivia, the only foreign born first lady was the wife of John Quincy Adams, Louisa Johnson, who was born in London, daughter of an Englishwoman and an American merchant (Joshua Johnson).  Her uncle Thomas Johnson later served as governor of Maryland and a Justice of the Supreme Court.  Some of the Johnson family had always remained in the colonial US, and were - unlike other potential first ladies who are immigrants or 1st generation Americans - always well accepted socially and politically.

We see Rand Paul, Rick Santorum and Mike Hucksterbee all dropping out of the race.

 It is unlikely Santorum could carry his home state of Pennsylvania if he were the candidate for the GOP; likewise it is unlikely Mike Huckabee could win his home state of Akransas. More aptly Huckster-bee, since he sold the remains of his tattered integrity pushing quack diabetes cures. The same could be said for remaining candidate Chris Christie, who is despised in his home state where he has been a very unsuccessful governor, and for the other departed governor candidates Jindal and Walker. This is similar to failed candidates in the prior election, like Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann, who did not have the support in their home state of Minnesota for higher office, and for Paul Ryan who failed to carry his home state of Wisconsin in the 2012 election cycle, and did not even carry the vote in his own hometown of Jaynesville. Likewise, the other candidates who have left the race really never had a prayer of becoming the GOP candidate; rather, they either ran on delusionally inflated ego, or in the hopes of the exercise in futility having some other form of payout.  I would argue that most of the candidates from the right in the 2016 election cycle never seriously believed they were viable candidates.

Oregon Shooter DID NOT target Christians

The conservative guns-and-Bibles pushers are LIARS. That explicitly and emphatically includes the GOP candidates who are exploiting the Oregon shooting for political gain.

They make money and gain influence by peddling false claims about tragedies.  They make claims from un-verified reports; in the case of Oregon, the unverified reports about targeting Christians which law enforcement conspicuously would not validate or confirm.  The guns-and-Bibles pushers then CONTINUE to push their inaccurate but scary narrative, even after the facts are clear their statements and positions are false.  Follow the money; they do this because there is bloody $$$ in it for them, from the religious right and from the gun promoters.

To update that old line "there's money in them thar hills!", there is money in those 'shills'.  From dictionary.com:

Shill, noun:a person who poses as a customer in order to decoy others into participating, as at a gambling house, auction, confidence game, etc.

The Oregon shooter, like the Columbine shooters he emulated, did not target people for their religion, much less for being Christian.

From the Inquisitr:

Even initial reports that Mercer was targeting Christians now appear to be incorrect. Initial reports indicated that he asked victims if they were Christian, and shot them in the head if they answered yes.
But new reports from witnesses say that Mercer did ask questions about religion, but it did not appear to be a motivating factor in who he shot and who he did not.
“‘Do you have a God? Are you Christian? Do you have a religion?’ It was more so saying, ‘You’re going to be meeting your maker. This won’t hurt very long.’ Then he would shoot them,” said Stephanie Salas, whose son, Rand McGowan, was wounded in the attack, in an interview with the Associated Press.

We saw something similar in the Columbine mass shooting back in 1999.  There were false claims made then about religious persecution in the targeting of victims.  And it is likely from the information known to date that the Oregon shooter, who had a sick interest in becoming famous (or more precisely notorious and infamous) like those other shooters, was to some degree emulating the Columbine shooters.

This shooter - and I won't use his name, precisely to deny him that notoriety, was into Goth.  The Columbine shooters were erroneously widely reported to be into Goth.  The Columbine shooters were, again erroneously, widely reputed to be outcasts, without friends, part of the 'trench coat mafia'.  And the Columbine shooters (who were really trying more to be bombers) were widely reported to have targeted certain groups, notably jocks, minorities, and Christians. 

Watch the news coverage of the Oregon shooter unfold.  Then take a look at his proto-type mass shooting, Columbine.  The parallels are chillingly clear that the Oregon shooter was emulating the myths and the actual behavior of the Columbine mass shooting in a number of ways.

From the most definitive research on Columbine, Dave Cullen's book Columbine, via the article 7 Myths about Columbine:

Myth #3: The Columbine killers targeted certain kinds of students.
Truth: Although initial news reports claimed the Columbine killers had targeted minorities, jocks, and Christians, the killing was indiscriminate. Their initial plan was to blow up hundreds of students in the cafeteria. When the bombs failed to go off, they killed students randomly. Interestingly enough, Eric’s friends described him as a sports enthusiast, and two of his best friends were Asian and African American.

Myth #6: Cassie Bernall was martyred for her faith in God.
Truth: According to the eyewitness under the table with her, Cassie was shot when Eric poked his shotgun under the table and said, “Peekaboo.” The 911 tape verifies this testimony.
The martyr story arose from the testimony from another student in the library, Craig Scott (brother to victim, Rachel Scott), who recounted a conversation that took place across the room. Valeen Schnurr was the one who actually professed her faith in God, and this took place after she was shot. As she lay bleeding, she prayed, “Oh my God, don’t let me die.” Dylan turned around and asked her, “God? Do you believe in God?” Valeen said, “Yes, I believe in God.” When the killer asked why, she replied, “Because it’s how my parents raised me.”

We also heard, about Columbine, that those two mass shooters would have been stopped if someone had a gun.  There were two armed cops who were unsuccessful in stopping those two shooters.  Likewise, there was a security guard, and numerous armed students, mostly trained veterans, on the Oregon campus - it was NOT a gun free zone - and they did NOTHING to prevent the tragedy from taking place.  In fact, no civilian with a gun has EVER prevented or stopped a mass shooting in the United States, even when on the scene.

Conservatives like to play the victim card, claiming to be victims when they are not. It is one of the more annoying aspects of conservatives. The religious right is particularly prone to making these false claims. Pro-gun advocates likewise push the notion they could be attacked at any moment, by fill-in-the-blank adversaries, and they likewise push the factually faulty notion that if they have their gun(s) with them they will shoot the bad guy dead, the good-guy-with-a-gun fallacy.  All of which sells more guns to stupid people who are not fact or reason based, the goal of the NRA.  Because gun sales need two things, a ginned-up threat and the myth that another gun in circulation in the hands of a civilian carrier is the solution.

Pro-gun candidate Ben Carson is trying to gin up his support from the religious right based on the false initial claims that Christians were targeted in the Oregon shooting.  God-and-Guns scam artist Mike Huckster-bee, promoter of fake diabetes treatments to desperate sick people for cash, and Bible-thumping pro-gunner, is also trying to gain political advantage from the tragedy.  We also see Donald Trump doing the same, with a less explicitly religious persecution angle.  And we have the Lt. Gov. of Tennessee claiming that Christians should be arming themselves because they are a persecuted minority - both factually false claims.

Whether it is claiming they're some kind of martyr if you don't wish them Merry Christmas, to the false claims they were targeted in the latest mass shooting -- by a self-proclaimed fellow conservative -- they try to spin gain, including political capital from these false victim claims.  Pushing the "we are victims" at every opportunity, no matter how factually false is also part of the right wing propaganda that keeps the right wing, especially the radical and extremist right, feeling angry and agitated. That gets unqualified crooked con artists elected, and it sells a lot of guns.

It does not get us good governance or greater safety.  It is based on lies and corrupt money, corrupt power.  Only the foolish and the willfully ignorant should support this effort to propagandize, manipulate, and gain advantage from these efforts to push an us vs. them national mentality of fear and divisiveness.  They lie, they profit, they gain advantage and power.  DON'T LET THEM. They will make you their victims, not the victims of some shooter who should never have had access to legal guns in the first place, much less 14 of them (yes, they found another one).

Conservative Hypocrisy and Double Standards of Justice -- Easy on themselves, MAX Harsh on everyone else

Conservatives are hypocrites.

Conservatives want a lenient justice for them and their children, and the harshest possible justice for other people.


We see this in Jim-Bob Duggar, when it comes to his son being guilty of a sex crime, against his four sisters and another girl.


We see it with Jeb Bush when his kids were guilty of crimes while he was governor, especially when his daughter was a drug addict. Daughter Bush went to rehab, but at least went through the justice system -- but only apparently because Jebbie couldn't avoid it. Jim-Bob Duggar acted as a vigilante, keeping HIS son out of the system of justice entirely, and certainly did not hold him accountable under our system of laws, much less subject him to the death penalty for rape and incest.

We see it when Mike Huckabee used his position as governor to keep his son from being held accountable in the courts for animal cruelty in hanging a stray dog. Then-governor Huckabee is alleged to have used his power and influence to prevent an investigation and prosecution, according to the authorities who attempted to investigate and prosecute the case. Of course, this NEVER stops ol' Mike Hucksterbee, purveyor of quack cures, from being critical of OTHER people's parenting, like his criticism of the Obama's for the choice of music they allow their daughters -- while Huckabee pals around with pedophile Ted Nugent, performing sexually offensive lyrics with him -- and then lying about it.
From Right Wing Watch:

After Mike Huckabee criticized Beyoncé’s music as “obnoxious and toxic mental poison” unfit for children and compared the singer to a prostitute, it didn’t take long for people to point out that he himself had once joined with Ted Nugent to perform a sexually explicit song on his national television program.

Huckabee is, predictably, reacting by pretending that what happened didn’t actually happen, telling the Christian Post today that Nugent “changed the lyrics pretty dramatically” when he sang the song “Cat Scratch Fever” on Huckabee’s Fox News show.

In fact, anyone who watches a video of the performance can see that Nugent didn’t change any of the song’s explicit lyrics as Huckabee accompanied him,

Video available here.  You have to wonder at how much forgiving of the pedophiles Mike "Family Values" I-Wannabe-President REVEREND Huckabee can offer. It appears to be quite a lot, given that among the many examples truly evil sexual conduct in super close friend Ted Nugent, covered by the HuffPo a year ago February:

In fact, in the case of Nugent, we have even come to see alleged child sexual abuse as some sort of eccentricity or harmless vice. Can you imagine anyone else who had been accused of having sex with a 12-year-old, written a song about raping a 13-year-old and adopted a 17-year-old so that he could have sex with her going on to campaign alongside all the most conservative "family values" candidates?

When Ted Nugent was 32 years old, he released the song "Jailbait." Here's a taste of the lyrics (written by him):

Well, I don't care if you're just 13

You look too good to be true

I just know that you're probably clean...

Jailbait you look fine, fine, fine...

It's quite alright, I asked your mama

Wait a minute, officer

Don't put those handcuffs on me

Put them on her, and I'll share her with you

The albums' next track is titled "I Am a Predator."...

Two years before recording "Jailbait," Ted Nugent had the novel idea of becoming legal guardian to a 17-year-old girl, so that they could have sex without, you know, her parents having legal recourse. They acquiesced. "I guess they figured better Ted Nugent than some drug-infested punk in high school," he told VH1, years later. In the same documentary, he claimed to have had several relationships with young girls, and seems to brag about gaining their parents' approval, too. (Though he didn't go so far as to adopt any of them.)

Oh those hypocritical claims of the moral high ground! Another perfect example of the conservative do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do, and- if-it-becomes-inconvenient- lie ideology. Another example of the problem with conservatives, sex, and religion -- because of course, Hucksterbee shares a love of god and guns and maybe grits with gravy with the Nuge, and that makes everything else all okey-dokey and forgiveable.


Justice under conservatives is for OTHER PEOPLE, not 'them" and not "theirs' - and that is dangerous, that is unfair, that is uncivilized, that is not the rule of law under the U. S. Constitution. Justice is for evangelical conservative men, and screw justice and legal protection for women and girls.

Via Patheos:

Before he was the star of 19 Kids and Counting, Jim Bob Duggar was a prominent political figure in Arkansas, serving as a member of the state’s House of Representatives before running for the U.S. Senate in 2002.

Duggar lost his 2002 bid to be the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate, however, he did take positions as a candidate. While trying to justify his anti-choice, anti-abortion stance, U.S. Senate candidate Jim Bob Duggar stated forcefully and clearly that those guilty of rape and incest should be put to death.

The following appeared on Duggar’s campaign website:

Q. What is your abortion position, and specifically, where do you stand on rape, incest, and threat to the mother’s health?

A. If a woman is raped, the rapist should be executed instead of the innocent unborn baby. Adoption is an option. Many couples would love to adopt and are waiting for a baby. Abortion has been and always will be the destruction of an innocent child. Rape and incest represent heinous crimes and as such should be treated as capital crimes. The developing infant committed no crime and should be allowed to live. In the unlikely event that the life of both mother and baby would both be lost (for example, a tubal pregnancy) all should be done to save the life of the mother.

Here is just a part of what is wrong with what passes for Duggar thinking, above and beyond the draconian punishment that characterizes conservatism. It is that we should not be executing anyone, even rapists. I'll give Duggar this much agreement, rape IS a heinous and terrible crime, for which there should be appropriate and severe consequences AND FOR WHICH THERE SHOULD BE DUE PROCESS IN CRIMINAL COURTS.  Josh Duggar should receive real legal consequences, but he should also receive real treatment, not fake pray-away-the-gay/pedophile and incest pseudo-treatment under restorative sentencing.

But in seeking restorative justice rather than retributive justice (eye for an eye), we should be seeking treatment for offenders, not simply the most extreme punitive action we can devise. Nothing is made whole or better after excessively punitive justice, in contrast to restorative justice where the goal of the process focuses on an outcome that is not based on vengeance, on trying to feel better by hurting a person who did something wrong or bad.

From Wikipedia:

Restorative justice is an approach to justice that focuses on the needs of the victims and the offenders, as well as the involved community, instead of satisfying abstract legal principles or punishing the offender. Victims take an active role in the process, while offenders are encouraged to take responsibility for their actions... In addition, it provides help for the offender in order to avoid future offences. It is based on a theory of justice that considers crime and wrongdoing to be an offence against an individual or community, rather than the state. Restorative justice that fosters dialogue between victim and offender shows the highest rates of victim satisfaction and offender accountability.

We do not have exemptions for abortion as a constitutional right; this is something that conservatives, in their fundamentally flawed concepts of right and wrong, innocence and guilt, are attempting to impose on the women in this nation. Women have a right to abortion (a limited right as established by Roe v. Wade) because women have autonomy over their bodies, because women have a right to determine if they consent to being pregnant rather than having it imposed on them against their will.


Embryos and fetuses are clumps of cells in the process of differentiation into a variety of kinds of tissues and potentially into the component body parts and systems. But embryos and fetuses are NOT PEOPLE, they lack the essential neurological development to have the essential awareness and capability that we define as living human beings. We use the same criteria to determine if someone is alive or brain dead -- and no longer able to think or feel as a living human being, even if there is some residual bodily processes that continue.


The simple reality is that most fertilized ova do NOT go on to become human beings, due to a failure to implant in the uterus and therefore they fail to complete that developmental process, possibly as high a rate of failure as 80% without intervention, and as high as 100% with contraception. The fertilized ova has no rights and deserves no rights, contrary to the efforts of extremist conservatives to force personhood on the nation as law. A conceptus is NOT A PERSON, and is unlikely to become one.


The simple reality is that many embryos and fetuses in nature do not continue to develop either. We can engage in a superstitious idea about reproduction, or we can accept the reality that pregnancy is a choice, and that most attempts at reproduction are not successful, much less entitled to continue at the expense of an unwilling woman's body. 

It is very difficult to rationalize that some omnipotent deity, or the biological system of nature  created by such a deity, produces all these little zygotes, these fertilized ova, and then fails to follow through with them -- but we are supposed to believe that we humans cannot make this conscious decision for ourselves about reproduction?  That is ridiculous on the face of it, and there is nothing anywhere in the Judeo-Christian religious texts which preclude doing so.  In fact quite the opposite is true -- there are a lot of accounts in the Bible of ripping open pregnant women so as to destroy pregnancies among conquered peoples.  The Bible actually requires it in the old testament, unless you posit that God only creates SOME pregnancies but not others.

2 Kings 15:16King James Version¹⁶ Then Menahem smote Tiphsah, and all that were therein, and the coasts thereof from Tirzah: because they opened not to him, therefore he smote it; and all the women therein that were with child he ripped up.

Hosea 13:16King James Version ¹⁶ Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.

Abortion has NOTHING whatsoever to do with guilt or innocence of that potentially developing cellular process. The reasoning that posits this is a human being with rights or guilt or innocence is BADLY FLAWED.


Even if you accept the premise of religion over rational thought, even Jim-Bob Duggar's own faith posits that a conception is not 'innocent', because of the doctrine of original sin -- that EVERYONE is born with sin and guilt. The Duggars, like former ordained pastor Mike Huckabee, are Southern Baptists; but the concept of original sin is a foundational concept and part of most forms of Christianity.

Southern Baptists and the Doctrine of Imputed Sin

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Joshua Breland

James Petigru Boyce (1827-1888), the founding president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, affirmed the federal headship of Adam and the doctrine of original sin. On whether man inherits guilt and is under condemnation prior to actual personal transgression, Boyce writes:Consequently, at the very moment of birth, the presence and possession of such a nature shows that even the infant sons of Adam are born under all the penalties which befell their ancestor in the day of his sin.

In other words, there is no state of innocence unique to the zygote, conceptus, embryo or fetus that places them in a position superior to assert a right over an existing fully formed human being.

It is not for conservatives in their flawed concept of good and evil, innocence and guilt, to decide that women are bad for having sex, so they deserve pregnancy, or that people are to be divided into good and evil -- which is apparently synonymous (or should that be SIN-nonymous) with being part of "them" in a black and white extremism of right and wrong that gives passes to conservatives but imposes the harshest possible outcomes on those they identify as 'other' or different than them.

EVERY human being on this planet, now and in the past and in the future, is a combination of good and bad, regardless of their religious or political beliefs -- or lack of them.

As to the notion that women should simply hand over 9 months of their lives, and their bodies, to continue as victims of rape or incest, because there are lots and lots of waiting adoptive parents......if that were true we would not have so many children in need of adoption already.

When we look at the generous forgiveness of those conservatives supporting the Duggars, including Mike Huckabee who was governor while Jim-Bob was in the Arkansas legislature, and while the Josh Duggar incest crimes were taking place, we see this about the outcomes of the conservative hypocritical justice system, from the fact check of Huckabee's past political ads:
Via On the Issues:

When it comes to violent crimes, a category that includes murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults, Huckabee’s record is mixed: Murders and robberies declined, while rapes and aggravated assaults increased. Overall, the violent crime rate was actually 5.2% higher than in 1996, when he took office.

Thanks to the double standards and conservative hypocrisy of Jim-Bob Duggar and Mike Huckabee, add Josh Duggar's multiple incidents of rape and incest against his four sisters and another young girl to those statistics -- because they were excluded under the term in office of Jim-Bob Duggar and Mike Huckabee in Arkansas.


Conservatives FAIL at governance, because their fundamental - and fundamentalist - concepts of how the world generally, and how government, and especially justice specifically operate are flawed and faulty, and inherently unfair and unjust. Conservatives mean well, but do badly... and they hate being held accountable for those failures and failings. Accountability is reserved for anyone who does not think or believe as they do.


THAT is why not one of the conservatives currently running for office should be elected, and why those who are the most extreme pose the greatest danger to our society and citizens.