Could Arizona Elect A Deranged Closet Case To The Senate? You Bet-- Meet Trent Franks

Trent Franks-- Please don't say he doesn't "look gay"

Even after deranged Idaho ultraconservative (and dedicated homophobe) Larry Craig (R) was arrested for trying to perform fellatio on a police officer in a Minneapolis public toilet and subsequently drummed out of the Senate by his colleagues, the GOP has continued nominating and electing virulently anti-gay closet queens to that body. Although he refuses to address his status publicly, Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is so well known in DC and South Carolina gay circles as being gay that he can hardly be classified as even in the closet any longer. Miss McConnell is more circumspect and even went to the trouble of acquiring a beard to give himself a Craig-like patina of being "straight." More recently Republicans elected a closeted congressman from Illinois, Mark Kirk, to the Senate. That seems to have given Trent Franks, far to Kirk's right, some ideas-- and he thinks it's time for Arizona to have a demented closet queen railing against gay families in the Senate. And, of course, gays aren't the only focus of Franks' hatred and vitriol.

Franks is a frequent critic of President Obama, even going so far as to call him an “enemy of humanity” at a right-wing conference, and later claimed unconvincingly that he simply meant he was an “enemy of unborn humanity.” He even wanted to impeach Obama over his decision not to defend unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act and warned that Obama has an “ideological commitment” to “weaken America.” Most recently, Franks joined Rick Santorum to claim that Obama and his allies were deliberately trying to destroy America. Such rancid statements shouldn’t come as a surprise, since Franks has floated Birther conspiracy theories and said Obama consistently “acts un-American.”

Expect the Religious Right to rally behind Franks against the more libertarian Flake. Franks is a noted proponent of the charge that abortion providers are leading a genocide against African Americans, and said that African Americans were better off under slavery than in America with reproductive freedom. He even introduced legislation barring “race-based” abortion along with leading anti-choice figures, believing his bill will “blow a fatal hole in Roe v. Wade,” and also screened the discredited documentary Maafa 21, which argues that Planned Parenthood wants to exterminate African Americans, in Congress. Moreover, Franks participated in Lou Engle’s militantly anti-choice and anti-gay The Call rallies, and worked with Dominionist groups.

The possibility of a Franks candidacy has already forced Flake to abandon his previously pro-reform position on immigration to compete with Franks, who is an anti-immigrant hardliner.

Although the greed-oriented Club For Growth has endorsed Flake, Franks plans to run the kind of extremist teabagger campaign that goes down well in Arizona and he'll be announcing his candidacy at a fundraiser next week hosted by allies Joe Arpaio and Michele Bachmann. Not Sarah Palin though. The new Arizona resident is rumoring to be threatening a run for the Senate herself, having been being a senator-- unlike a governor-- requires no actual work or responsibilities.

Back to to self-loathing gay conservatives, something Franks should think closely about-- After Roy Ashburn, a by then chastened California Republican state Senator, was arrested, drunk, in a car with a young male prostitute he apologized, sincerely, for leading an anti-gay Republican jihad in the state Senate and tried to explain why he had done it. There is no member of the U.S. Congress who should pay more attention than vicious homophobe and closet case Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ):

Patt Morrison: "A lot of people, gay or straight, are probably wondering why you voted even against issues like insurance coverage for same-sex partners."

Senator Roy Ashburn: "The best I can do is to say that I was hiding. I was so in terror I could not allow any attention to come my way. So any measure that had to do with the subject of sexual orientation was an automatic 'no' vote. I was paralyzed by this fear, and so I voted without even looking at the content. The purpose of government is to protect the rights of people under the law, regardless of our skin color, national origin, our height, our weight, our sexual orientation. This is a nation predicated on the belief that there is no discrimination on those characteristics, and so my vote denied people equal treatment, and I'm truly sorry for that."

UPDATE: That Was Fast

God sometimes works against Satan in mysterious days:

“After diligently and prayerfully trying to consider every aspect a potential Senate bid would entail, I have sincerely concluded that mounting a Senate bid at this time would not be what is best for my family, nor what would best allow me to serve my country at this critical time in her history,” Franks said in a statement released from his Congressional office.

Or maybe someone showed him the compromising pictures that exist of him having sex with multiple male partners. Who knows?

Not All Earmarks Are A Bridge To Nowhere And Not All Earmarks Are Meant To Line Congressional Pockets

Fox News exposes Republican crook Ken Calvert

There are earmarks and... then there are earmarks. Not every earmark goes to line the pockets of corrupt congressional earmarkers and their cronies the way characters like Duke Cunningham, Don and Bill Young (R-AK & FL), Jerry Lewis (R-CA), and Ken Calvert (R-CA) have worked it. There are also the kinds of earmarks that are exactly what members of Congress are supposed to be doing for their constituents. This is what the L.A. Times had to say about one of southern California's most corrupt congressmen in history, Ken Calvert. (Take a look at what the Fox News report has to say about his shady dealings in the video below.)

Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona) is an experienced investor in Riverside County's booming real estate market, so he's used to seeing prices change quickly. Last year, he and a partner paid $550,000 for a dusty four-acre parcel just south of March Air Reserve Base. Less than a year later, without even cutting the weeds or carting off old septic tank parts that littered the ground, they sold the land for almost $1 million.

Even for a speculator like Calvert, it was an unusually good deal.

During the time he owned the land, Calvert used the legislative process known as earmarking to secure $8 million for a planned freeway interchange 16 miles from the property, and an additional $1.5 million to support commercial development of the area around the airfield.

A map of Calvert's recent real estate holdings and those of his partner shows many of them near the transportation projects he has supported with federal appropriations. And improvements to the transportation infrastructure have contributed to the area's explosive growth, according to development experts.

That's the bad kind of earmarks-- the kind Republicans know the most about and engage in as a matter of course. But there's another kind of earmark, the kind not meant to enrich oneself but to benefit the constituents of your district. Pinpointing federal tax dollars to assist their districts is actually a core Constitutional responsibility of elected Representatives. Sure, the vast majority of Republicans as well as some other bad apples have used the earmarking process to benefit themselves, their families and contributors and lobbyists and corporations that will kick back money to them, but that shouldn't lead to a wholesale negation of the benefits of the process. Since the GOP was voted out of power the whole earmarking process has been reformed so that it's now all out in the open and much less likely to be used the way Republicans use it. So, of course, now the GOP is opposing it. All but three of them, Anh Cao, Don Young and Ron Paul, have opted out of the Republican Party drama queen stunt of condemning all earmarks (until they can get back into power and change the rules back towards the corruption they thrive on). Meanwhile, they're threatening Cao, Young and Paul with being thrown off their committee seats. Cao and Paul do not make earmarks to benefit themselves, only for their constituents. Young, of course, is as corrupt as your garden variety Republican and sees the earmark process as a kind of piggy bank for himself and his campaign donors.

Keep in mind that in the Senate the two most prodigious earmarkers are Mississippi Republicans Thad Cochran ($470,857,775) and Roger Wicker ($390,993,300). And David "Diapers" Vitter ($249,182,063) is not far behind. Yesterday we talked with Orange County Democrat Beth Krom, an Irvine City Council member and former mayor running for Congress against one of the more cynical members of Congress, John Campbell, who always puts his extremist ideology before the needs of his constituents.

[H]e’s signed an “anti-earmark” pledge, and considers any appropriation an earmark. So when Newport Beach needed federal funds to dredge out the Back Bay-- one of the few wetlands remaining in Orange County-- Campbell said NO. And when UC Irvine competes for federal grants to advance biomedical research or new technologies, Campbell won’t lift a finger to help. It doesn’t matter how meritorious the request, Campbell will not go to bat for his constituents.

Bottom line: we send billions of dollars to Washington in taxes every year, and he works every day to make sure not one penny comes back. If that’s not “taxation without representation, “ I don’t know what is.

Just a few districts over from Campbell's another far right extremist, Trent Franks, is also angering municipal officials-- including Republicans-- by throwing their cities under the bus. The very right-wing Arizona Republic, the biggest newspaper in Franks' western Arizona congressional district, reports some very disappointing news for his constituents.

Congressman Trent Franks, R-Arizona, pulled a $10 million earmark that would have helped build an interchange at Bell Road and Grand Avenue, said Michael Celaya, intergovernmental relations director, at Thursday's City Council work session.

Celaya visited the nation's capital in early March with council members Sharon Wolcott and Richard Alton to meet with several members of the Arizona congressional delegation.

The earmark for the interchange, submitted during fiscal 2009-10, was nearly guaranteed to the city, Celaya said, but "they (lawmakers) pulled from everybody."

Another blow: Franks, who represents Surprise in Congress, declined to submit an appropriation request for the expansion of Litchfield Road. That was a priority in the city's fiscal 2011 legislative agenda.

The good news: Congressman Ed Pastor, D-Arizona, known as Surprise's "silent champion," is submitting a $713,000 appropriation request to fund technology upgrades at the Surprise Police Department. The Surprise team turned to Pastor after Franks declined to submit the proposal.

John Thrasher is the Democrat running against Franks and he was as angry as everyone else in the area. "As your congressman, you can rest assured your fair share of tax dollars sent to Washington will come home to fund projects the current Congressman has deemed unnecessary" John told residents of Surprise, just northwest of Phoenix. "Like public safety... In pulling the funding to fix this dangerous intersection, Franks said no to public safety, no to job creation, and once again takes Arizona further down the wrong track."

The rapidly growing city of around 110,000 is pretty affluent-- median income for a family was $47,899 in 2000-- and a part of the district which has supported Franks' career. One Republican City Councilmember, on the condition of anonymity, told us today that several of them "would work behind the scenes for Franks' defeat... He doesn't care about the people in this district; he's never cared about anything but Trent Franks. I've never voted for a Democrat in my entire life, not for anything, but I'll be voting for Thrasher in November and so will lots of other people as angry as I am over this... This kind of game-playing is what turns people off to Washington, except it isn't Barack Obama; it's Trent Franks and John McCain. Ed Pastor didn't have to do what he did for us but it was the Christian thing to do. We won't forget him either."

Last week we met Ed Potosnak, the refreshing and brainy Democrat running in central New Jersey against corrupt Wall Street puppet Leonard Lance. Lance, of course, signed on to the GOP moratorium stunt and I called Ed to ask him how that would go over in Somerset, Union and Hunterdon counties, all of which already pay a higher share of taxes to support red state laggards in less advanced parts of the country.

Out of 435 Congressional Districts we pay the 13th highest amount in Federal taxes, and we only see a fraction of those dollars come from home.

My opponent, Leonard Lance, is pulling another political stunt at the expense of the taxpayers in our District, passing up tens of millions of dollars that could have funded critical priorities in our neighborhoods. These so-called “savings” will not go to deficit reduction; he is just aiming to score political points instead of working to improve our communities.

The families in the 7th Congressional District deserve to see the benefits of their tax dollars at home. Maybe its time that, we the citizens, have more of say in how we spend our money. Leonard used to place the interests of his constituents ahead of the politics of partisanship, but all you hear from him these days is national Republican talking points. Leonard has changed; he is not the Leonard we knew.

When I am in Congress I will fight to ensure the Federal government invests in projects across the 7th District to create jobs and strengthen our economy, increase our safety and security, and improve business opportunities and education.

Obama's Political Opponents Are Calling For Coups And Encouraging Assassination

Over the weekend a friend sent me a link for a Facebook polling asking whether President Obama should be killed. I called a friend of mine who works at the Secret Service. They were already on the case. Yesterday People For the American Way broke a story that I found considerably more disturbing than Joe Wilson's "You lie" screech at the Joint Session of Congress. This outbreak was from another extreme right wing Republican congressional backbencher looking for some attention, Trent Franks, whose Arizona district stretches from the suburbs west of Phoenix through Glendale and Sun City and up to the northwest corner of the state. It includes the bandit polygamist communities around Colorado City, the Hopi Indian Reservation, Lake Havasu City (home of London Bridge). McCain ran up a hefty piece of his margin of victory last year in Franks' district which has a PVI of R +12.9. Franks was re-elected with 60% of the vote.

Arizona Republicans tend to be very conservative. And Franks is the worst of a bad batch, easily the most reactionary member of the state's congressional delegation. His overall, career-long ProgressivePunch score is 2.15 (out of 100) and since Obama was elected president his score sank down to a big fat zero. Franks is an angry and driven man who feels he was dealt a bad hand in life. He's filled with irrational paranoia, bigotry and hatred. And, of course, he's a birther. Normally the Republican leadership keeps him away from the cameras and microphones but this week he escaped from the reservation and found an opportunity to declare President Obama "an enemy of humanity." Watch:



"Obama's first act as president of any consequence, in the middle of a financial meltdown, was to send taxpayers' money overseas to pay for the killing of unborn children in other countries...there's almost nothing that you should be surprised at after that. We shouldn't be shocked that he does all these other insane things. A president that has lost his way that badly, that has no ability to see the image of God in these little fellow human beings, if he can't do that right, then he has no place in any station of government and we need to realize that he is an enemy of humanity."

-Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ)

Congressmen like Franks and Wilson enable the violent nuts the same way Republican hate-talkers Savage, Limbaugh, Hannity, Couler and Beck do. And sure, enough, yesterday evening John Perry from extreme rightist website Newsmax upped the ante:

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic... Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a “family intervention,” with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don’t shrug and say, “We can always worry about that later.”

In the 2008 election, that was the wistful, self-indulgent, indifferent reliance on abnegation of personal responsibility that has sunk the nation into this morass.

The people behind this revving up of violence and social unrest are the losers from last year's election-- the disgruntled, angry right-wing of the Republican Party.

UPDATE: Franks Is A Closet Case!

Franks is part of a circle of gay evangelical preachers and their pals. Sometimes you put up a post and you get the most interesting phone calls! It's funny-- it's so predictable that the most hysterical anti-gay maniacs are always the big closet queens.

Latest GOP Anti-Choice Nonsense Fails

Friday, Arizona extremist (and closet case) Trent Franks introduced H.R. 3541, a bill that purports to ban abortion based on gender discrimination. It needed a super-majority to pass, so it failed 246-168. Seven Republicans from Democratic-leaning districts voted against it but 20 anti-women Democrats voted with the GOP:

Jason Altmire (Blue Dog-PA)
John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA)
Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK)
Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN)
Jerry Costello (IL)
Mark Critz (PA)
Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
Joe Donnelly (Blue Dog-IN)
John Garamendi (CA)
Tim Holden (Blue Dog-PA)
Larry Kissell (Blue Dog-NC)
Lipinski, Jr (IL)
Stephen Lynch (MA)
Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)
Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC)
Colin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
Nick Rahall (WV)
Silvestre Reyes (TX)
Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR)
Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-NC)

Earlier Thursday I was on a conference call of progressive groups with Matt Cartwright the progressive Democrat who crushed reactionary Blue Dog Tim Holden a couple months back. At the outset of the campaign Matt told me he's pro-Choice legislatively but pro-Life personally. Today someone asked him and he said he's pro-Life. The room was stunned. I was stunned. I'm still stunned. He assured us he won't vote against Choice if it comes up in Congress. But it will come up... incrementally, the way Franks brought it up Thursday. How will he vote then? I don't know; it's something we'll always have to worry about.

One of the GOP clowns, NJ anti-Choice fanatic Chris Smith, claimed the bill is meant to be pro-woman because it will supposedly save female fetuses (basically from Asians who want sons). "It is violence against women. This is the real war on women." Asian-Americans were not pleased, as Dana Milbank pointed out in the Washington Post.

The problem with Franks’s proposal is that it’s not entirely clear there is a problem. Sex-selection abortion is a huge tragedy in parts of Asia, but to the extent it’s happening in this country, it’s mostly among Asian immigrants. 

For Franks, who previously tried to pass legislation limiting abortions among African Americans and residents of the District of Columbia, it was the latest attempt to protect racial minorities from themselves. 

“The practice of sex selection is demonstrably increasing here in the United States, especially but not exclusively in the Asian immigrant community,” he announced on the House floor Wednesday afternoon. He quoted a study finding that male births “for Chinese, Asian Indians and Koreans clearly exceeded biological variation.”

Democrats found Franks’s paternalism toward minority groups to be suspect. Rep. Barbara Lee (Calif.), identifying herself as a member of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said the bill would “lead to further stigmatization of women, especially Asian Pacific American women.” Various Asian American legal and women’s groups opposed the bill. 

In an interview Wednesday afternoon, Franks didn’t dispute that Asian Americans would be targeted. “The real target in the Asian community here is the Asian women who are being coerced into aborting little girls,” he told me, adding: “When the left doesn’t want to make abortion the issue, they say you’re being against minorities.” 

Franks is a principled and consistent opponent of abortion, but his strategy has raised eyebrows before because of its racial component. In 2010, he said in a video interview that, because of abortion, “far more of the African American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by the policies of slavery.” (Franks told me this does not mean African Americans were better off under slavery.) 

In 2011, he championed the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act.” That proposal, similar to the one before the House on Wednesday, relied on the novel argument that African American mothers were discriminating against their fetuses by aborting them on the basis of race. 

More recently, Franks held hearings on a bill to prevent doctors in the District of Columbia-- where minorities are the majority-- from performing late-term abortions. Protesters picketed outside the Arizonan’s office asking whether “Mayor Franks” might help them with other local issues, such as potholes. Franks had blocked the District’s delegate in the House, Eleanor Holmes Norton, from testifying. 

Franks admitted he had no expectation that his latest bill would pass, because House leaders brought it up in a way that required a two-thirds majority. The purpose, he said, was to force pro-abortion-rights Democrats to make an uncomfortable vote.

But in singling out minority groups to make his political points, Franks risks aggravating a long-term problem for the Republicans. According to primary exit polls, 90 percent of GOP voters this year have been white. It’s difficult in 2012 to win with such a statistic; over the coming decades, as minorities become the majority, it would relegate the party to irrelevance.

And, by the way, one of Florida's senior Republican congressmen, the always deranged Cliff Stearns, was on TV yesterday urging that women who have abortions be arrested and charged with murder. Hard to imagine that there are still some women who are planning to votes for Republicans anyway.

Sociopath Republican Closet Case Trent Franks Gets His Ass Kicked By Lawrence O'Donnell

I have a feeling Arizona lunatic fringe Congressman Trent Franks won't be coming back to The Last Word any time soon-- unless he's a masochist and actually enjoys being exposed as a yappy dimwit on national television. O'Donnell ostensibly invited Franks, probably best known for labeling President Obama "an enemy of humanity," on the show to discuss his widely reported comment after the Tucson massacre that he thought a shootout would have been an appropriate response. “I wish there had been one more gun there that day in the hands of a responsible person, that’s all I have to say,” Franks, a fanatic gun control opponent, has been running around telling the media and doing his best to make the tragedy all about himself and his deranged right-wing ideological agenda.

Arizona, with its Old West heritage, has been at the forefront of the gun-rights movement. Last year, it passed a law making it the third state-- after predominantly rural Vermont and Alaska — to allow citizens to carry concealed weapons without a permit. Another law allows Arizonans to carry guns in bars, as long as they're not drinking. The vast majority of the state's politicians-- including Loughner's primary target, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat and gun owner-- are strong Second Amendment supporters. Congressman Trent Franks, a Republican and gun owner, points out that Arizona has a much lower gun-violence rate than Washington, D.C., which has much more restrictive gun laws. "Criminals always prefer unarmed victims," Franks says. There have been no reports out of Arizona of any credible push for new gun restrictions; in fact, several reports show citizens are flocking to gun shops to increase their firepower.

Unfortunately, the gun-rights vision of well-armed citizens shooting down an outlaw like Loughner midrampage did not come true in this case. Nationally, less than 1% of all gun deaths involve self-defense; the rest are homicides, suicides and accidents. In a study of 23 high-income countries, the U.S. had 80% of the gun deaths, along with a gun homicide rate nearly 20 times higher than the rest of the sample. Still, the gun-control movement has gotten little political traction outside selected major cities, and all but three states have laws that invalidate local gun restrictions. According to the NRA, 25 states have adopted "your home is your castle" laws that give homeowners wide latitude to shoot people on their property without fear of prosecution, and only 10 states prohibit or severely restrict the carrying of firearms in public.

In recent years, despite periodic spasms of attention after mass killings like those at Columbine and Virginia Tech, gun control has made no headway at the federal level either. It's telling that a progressive Chicago Democrat like President Obama-- a longtime gun-control advocate whose election inspired fervent warnings about Big Government's confiscating firearms-- has carefully avoided the topic in the White House. He even signed two laws that included provisions expanding gun access, one in national parks and one on Amtrak trains. If he objected to the provisions, he kept his objections to himself. A Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence report gave Obama an F for leadership on gun control. "We haven't seen a lot of political courage on this issue," says Brady Campaign president Paul Helmke, a former Republican mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind. "Republicans march in lockstep with the NRA, and Democrats are scared to death."

Republicans like to point out that Gabby is a gun-owner herself and that she filed a friend-of-the-court brief opposing a handgun ban in DC. They don't point out that when she was a state legislator, she favored restrictions on guns in Arizona and that the NRA gave her a D. I got a letter yesterday from Alan Grayson, who always spoke with great enthusiasm about Gabby-- and with far less enthusiasm about Sarah Palin.

When I opened my web browser yesterday, at yahoo.com, there was Sarah Palin, smiling at me.

“Oh, God,” I said to myself, “what has she done now?”

The headline was “Palin Defends ‘Blood Libel’”. That’s interesting, I thought. What else might Palin be defending? Cannibalism, maybe?

Well, it turned out to be a report on Palin’s disjointed remarks on Sean Hannity’s show, regarding the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. I then watched the report. Let me summarize it for you:

Palin: I am so misunderstood.
Hannity: I am so misunderstood.
Palin: I am so misunderstood.

But there was one person who seemed to understand Sarah Palin quite well. Gabby Giffords, herself, during the health care debate. Discussing threats against Democratic Members of Congress. After the door to her office was shattered. This is what Gabby said:

“You know, for example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is the way that she has depicted it is the crosshairs of a gun-sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize that there are consequences to that action.”

And here is Palin’s blithe response, on Hannity’s show: “That map wasn’t an original graphic.”

What is that remark supposed to be, Sarah? An exculpanation?

Even before I heard earlier Palin’s whining about “misguided finger-pointing” and “irresponsible statements from people who are apportioning blame,” I thought about this:

Palin came to my district, and told her people to “take me out.”

Palin told people again and again, “don’t retreat, reload.”

The day before the health care vote, one of my five-year-old twins received a telephone death threat intended for me.

A right-wing commentator offered anyone $100 to punch me in the nose.

We received so many threats of violence from teabaggers that we started a file.

And the day before Gabby was shot, I received a postcard saying “you better get some personal protection. You could very well be getting your ass kicked soon.”

Cause and effect. As Gabby put it, “there are consequences.”

Of course, I wasn’t the only target of these threats.

Gabby’s tea party opponent held fundraisers in which he invited contributors to fire an automatic weapon.

Democrat Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s opponent conducted target practice on her initials.

Democrat Ron Klein’s opponent told his supporters to make sure that Klein was “afraid to leave his house.”

Democrat Frank Kratovil was hung in effigy.

Democrat Tom Perriello was burned in effigy. And the gas line to his brother’s house was cut.

Democrat Emanuel Cleaver-- a minister-- was spat on.

Democrat Russ Carnahan had a coffin left at his home.

I could go on, but you get the point. Cause and effect. “There are consequences.”

And the Republicans? The shot supposedly fired at Republican Eric Cantor’s office was quickly exposed as a hoax.

As I observed on MSNBC last week, there has been a stream of violence and threats of violence by the right wing against Democrats. Gabby warned against it, and then became a terrible victim of it. Palin has instigated it, and then tried to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

What do I think? I think that Gabby said it best: “We can’t stand for this.” We have to stand against it.

Do You Love It When Right-Wing Perverts Get Into Sex Trouble? Most Recent Victims: Trent Franks (R) And Harold Ford (Blue Dog)

Note from one of my neighbors-- a prominent movie director-- when the Trent Franks news started breaking yesterday: "Your old buddy must’ve got caught in the men's room with a pecker in his hair lip.

The world is going nuts…"

In Sacramento, when Democratic state legislators are too conservative-- like as bad as the worsts Republicans-- Democrats and their union allies conspire to send them to Washington as congressmen. Two really horrible state legislators-- corrupt beyond normal bounds and as right-wing as a bad Republican-- Juan Vargas and later Lou Correa-- ran for Congress the entire establishment rallied around them. They tried to do the same thing with Isadore Hall but got sideswiped when his constituents were too smart to fall for the ploy and shocked the string corrupt California political class by elected progressive champion Nanette Barragán instead.

But in Arizona, they had a different trick. The Republican-controled state legislature was happy with Trent Franks' extreme right voting record but after he got caught fooling around with a young man, the state Republicans were happy to see him go off to DC as a congressman. He even managed to find some kind of mail order bride and ordered up a couple of insta-kids. He's one of the most loudly and obnoxiously homophobic members of Congress... but a closet case.

So when rumors started circulating Thursday that he was resigning immediately from Congress because of "inappropriate behavior," those who know about his penchant for the male sex organs, started wondering if he was credibly accused of having sexually harassed someone with a penis again. Republicans don't resign because of abusing women-- see Texas pervert Blake Farenthold, happily still in the House-- but they do resign when they get caught with the meat in their mouths (Mark Foley, Aaron Schock stand out lately).

AZCentral.com, part of the Arizona Republic:

Rumors have swirled for years about Franks’ extracurricular activities.

“I heard rumors of these types of problems in the past,” longtime Republican strategist Chuck Coughlin told me. “And in today’s society it doesn’t come as a big surprise anymore.”

Franks was all set to run for the U.S. Senate in 2012 until suddenly, he wasn’t. Multiple people have told me that his after-hours activities caught up to him.

“The information was there to be had, and it was shared with him, so he walked away from the race,” one consultant told me.

Another told me that Franks wrote sexually charged text messages a decade ago to a Republican operative-- texts that never came to light.

  Whatever the reason, Franks' Senate campaign abruptly ended before it began.

...Expect two things:

1. He'll resign citing family health concerns.

Ah... late yesterday afternoon, his statement came out. No reason to believe it's true by here in is in full:

"I have always tried to create a very warm and supportive atmosphere for every last person who has ever worked in my congressional office. It is my deepest conviction that there are many staffers, former and present, who would readily volunteer to substantiate this fact.

"Given the nature of numerous allegations and reports across America in recent weeks, I want to first make one thing completely clear. I have absolutely never physically intimidated, coerced, or had, or attempted to have, any sexual contact with any member of my congressional staff.

"However, I do want to take full and personal responsibility for the ways I have broached a topic that, unbeknownst to me until very recently, made certain individuals uncomfortable. And so, I want to shed light on how those conversations came about.

"My wife and I have long struggled with infertility. We experienced three miscarriages.

"We pursued adoption on more than one occasion only to have the adoptive mothers in each case change their mind prior to giving birth.

"A wonderful and loving lady, to whom we will be forever grateful, acted as a gestational surrogate for our twins and was able to carry them successfully to live birth. The process by which they were conceived was a pro-life approach that did not discard or throw away any embryos.

"My son and daughter are unspeakable gifts of God that have brought us our greatest earthly happiness in the 37 years we have been married.

"When our twins were approximately 3 years old, we made a second attempt with a second surrogate who was also not genetically related to the child. Sadly, that pregnancy also resulted in miscarriage.

"We continued to have a desire to have at least one additional sibling, for which our children had made repeated requests.

"Due to my familiarity and experience with the process of surrogacy, I clearly became insensitive as to how the discussion of such an intensely personal topic might affect others.

"I have recently learned that the Ethics Committee is reviewing an inquiry regarding my discussion of surrogacy with two previous female subordinates, making each feel uncomfortable. I deeply regret that my discussion of this option and process in the workplace caused distress.

"We are in an unusual moment in history – there is collective focus on a very important problem of justice and sexual impropriety. It is so important that we get this right for everyone, especially for victims.

"But in the midst of this current cultural and media climate, I am deeply convinced I would be unable to complete a fair House Ethics investigation before distorted and sensationalized versions of this story would put me, my family, my staff, and my noble colleagues in the House of Representatives through hyperbolized public excoriation. Rather than allow a sensationalized trial by media damage those things I love most, this morning I notified House leadership that I will be leaving Congress as of January 31st, 2018. It is with the greatest sadness, that for the sake of the causes I deeply love, I must now step back from the battle I have spent over three decades fighting. I hope my resignation will remain distinct from the great gains we have made. My time in Congress serving my constituents, America and the Constitution is and will remain one of God’s greatest gift to me in life."

Now let's translate that into something a bit more anchored in reality: The House Ethics Committee is investigating-- or at least was threatening to investigate-- Franks for "conduct that constitutes sexual harassment and/or retaliation for opposing sexual harassment." Even Paul Ryan-- who is still protecting Blake Farenthold, admits that the people complaining about Franks have "credible claims of misconduct."

UPDATE: He sure didn't want that Ethics Committee investigation putting anything out about his sordid, hypocritical life! A few hours ago, Franks once again used the phony relationship with his "wife" to end an awkward situation. After pressure from Ryan and McCarthy,  he issued a new statement saying he won't try to hang around until January 31. He's out immediately; maybe they'll take a river cruise down De Nile:

"Last night, my wife was admitted to the hospital in Washington, D.C. due to an ongoing ailment. After discussing options with my family, we came to the conclusion that the best thing for our family now would be for me to tender my previous resignation effective today, December 8th, 2017."

And in the middle of all this, crooked lobbyist Harold Ford, a former congressman who was always known to be chasing women-- he lost his Senate race because of sexual charges-- got fired by Morgan Stanley for sexual misconduct. The company told HuffPo, which broke the story yesterday that Ford "has been terminated for conduct inconsistent with our values and in violation of our policies." He's also a paid regular on MSNBC's Morning Joe-- always ready to show Democrats can be as conservative as Republicans when it comes to anything fiscal-- and I can't imagine they'll keep him on either.

In two interviews with HuffPost, the woman alleged that Ford engaged in harassment, intimidation, and forcibly grabbed her one evening in Manhattan, leading her to seek aid from a building security guard. The incident took place several years ago when Ford and the woman were supposed to be meeting for professional reasons. Ford continued to contact her after the encounter until she wrote an email asking him to cease contact.

The email, which was reviewed by HuffPost, shows that the woman emailed Ford after he repeatedly asked her to drinks. She asked him not to contact her anymore, citing his inappropriate conduct the evening where he forcibly grabbed and harassed her.

Ford replied to the email by apologizing and agreeing not to contact her. “Hey very sorry. Meant no harm,” the email reads. “And I apologize for whatever I may have said or what was said. And my overtures are strictly professional. Again I apologize didn’t mean to be inappropriate at all. Sorry that impression was left.”

HuffPost is not identifying the woman at her request but has reviewed emails that confirm her interactions with Ford and spoke to two people whom the woman confided in about the incident. One woman heard from Ford’s accuser the night of the incident and described her as “distraught, shocked, and frightened,” and said that she was concerned about any career ramifications should she report the incident.

In a statement provided to HuffPost, Ford denied the allegations: “This simply did not happen. I have never forcibly grabbed any woman or man in my life. Having drinks and dinner for work is part of my job, and all of my outreach to the news reporter making these false allegations was professional and at the direction of my firm for business purposes. I support and have tremendous respect for the brave women now speaking out in this important national dialogue. False claims like this undermine the real silence breakers. I will now be bringing legal action against the reporter who has made these false claims about me as well as Morgan Stanley for improper termination.”

John Singer, Ford’s employment counsel with the firm Singer Deutsch LLP, said “Morgan Stanley has still not told Harold directly of his termination, and unlike every other circumstance I’ve been in the company has refused provide me with a reason.”

He added: “This all demonstrates how this was a matter of convenience during a hyper-sensitive time and not based on real facts.”

Ford comes from a prominent political family in Tennessee. His father, Harold Ford Sr., held a congressional seat for 12 terms before retiring, leaving his son to run for the seat, a race which he won handily. Ford served in the House for nearly 10 years before deciding to run for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Republican Bill Frist. Ford lost that hotly contested 2006 race by fewer than three points to current Republican Sen. Bob Corker.

Since leaving Congress in 2007, Ford has worked for two financial services companies, first for Merrill Lynch and then Morgan Stanley, which he joined in 2011 as a managing director.

At the time Morgan Stanley announced the hire, the New York Times described Ford’s role as a rainmaker of sorts: “Mr. Ford will be responsible for ‘building business opportunities’ for clients, Morgan Stanley said. He will manage relationships with corporate directors, senior executives and institutional investors, as well as private clients.”

Time For House Republicans To Lead The Country Into A War Against Iran?

The Good Lord, in His wisdom, has dealt Trent Franks a most unfortunate hand-- and he's been taking it out on the American people for a very long time

Over 60% of American voters understand it was the Republicans who are behind the manufactured crisis threatening a worldwide economic catastrophe-- and they blame them for it. Congressional approval is now an astounding 5% and independents have turned on the GOP in a BIG way.

Democrats lead the generic Congressional ballot 46/41, including a 42/33 lead with independents. Independents have shifted 21 points on the generic ballot from July when Republicans had a 39/27 advantage with them. The lean toward Democrats for next year reflects who they blame for the shutdown. By a 51/37 margin they say Republicans are more at fault than Democrats, and by a 57/41 margin they think Congress is more to blame than the President.

The Republican Party is viewed favorably by 28% of Americans-- the lowest since Gallup started polling that question. And even a right-wing ideologue like John Podhoretz is willing to write for general consumption that right-wing extremists have pushed the badly-led congressional Republicans into committing political suicide.

This is what my fellow conservatives who are acting as the enablers for irresponsible GOP politicians seem not to understand. They like this fight, because they think they’re helping to hold the line on ObamaCare and government spending. They think that they’re supported by a vast silent majority of Americans who dislike what they dislike and want what they want.

…One thing we know for sure is that it’s not an equal fight, this fight between a man who received 65 million votes nationwide and a man who received 246,000 votes in one congressional district in Ohio.

Meanwhile, Boehner is basically the face of the US Congress in the eyes of the public. John Boehner is also the effective head of the Republican Party. And the US Congress is viewed favorably by… 11 percent of Americans.

Eleven percent.

When I interact with these conservatives, they say they don’t care about the GOP; what they care about are conservative ideas.

They’re right not to assign special glory or power to a political organization and to hold ideas above party. But here’s the condundrum: There is only one electoral vehicle for conservative ideas in the United States-- the Republican Party.

It’s one thing to refuse to waste your time buffing and polishing the vehicle so that it looks nice and pretty; that’s what political hacks do, and ideologues have every right to disdain such frippery.

But if, in the guise of making the vehicle function better, you muck up the engine, smash the windshield, put the wrong tires on it and pour antifreeze in the gas tank, you are impeding its forward movement. You’re ruining it, not repairing it.

It may not have been a very good vehicle in the first place, and you may think it couldn’t drive worse, but oh man, could it ever. And it’s the only one you’ve got.

So could there possibly be a better time for Republicans to try to rally the nation around them with a full scale war? Remember when war criminals like Wolfowitz, Rumsfield, Bush, Bolton and Cheney were planting sentiments like everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran. One real man-- albeit a notorious closet case-- who never got over it is Arizona's most extreme right congressman, crazed little Trent Franks. Wednesday, Foreign Policy gave the bloodthirsty crackpot and his new bill the spotlight:

A new bill authorizing a U.S. military strike against Iran is set to drop in Congress on Thursday-- just days after leaders in Washington and Tehran began talking openly after three decades of silence.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), is currently being shopped around to various House offices this week in search of a co-sponsor, The Cable has learned. Besides providing President Obama with "all options" to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapons capability, the bill ticks off a list of grievances with the Islamic state dating back 30 years on everything from verbal threats to nuclear enrichment violations.

"Since at least the late 1980s, Iran has engaged in a sustained and well-documented pattern of illicit and deceptive activities to acquire a nuclear weapons capability and has provided weapons, training, funding, and direction to terrorist groups," reads the bill.

The hawkish legislation, which essentially hands the president the full-force of the U.S. military if negotiations fail, comes just one week before Tehran sits down with six major powers in Geneva to discuss its nuclear program. For some foreign policy observers on the Hill, it threatens to spoil the already-delicate negotiations.

"It's hard to imagine a more counterproductive effort to slow the development of Iran's nuclear program-- especially when sanctions have succeeded in bringing the Iranians back to the negotiating table," a Congressional aide tells The Cable. "This attempt to legislate the use of force in Iran is so far out of the mainstream that it makes Netanyahu look like a bleeding heart peacenik in comparison."

Rebuffing critics, Franks insists now is the perfect time to hand Obama the keys to the military. "There's never been a more important time to make sure that any negotiations are backed up by a credible military capability," he told The Cable. "Iran has watched the United States allow redline after redline pass and has played rope-a-dope with the United States to the extent that they're on the cusp of being able to become a nuclear armed nation in potentially months."

Ahead of next week's talks, Iran's newly-elected President Hassan Rouhani has made a series of friendly overtures with the West, including everything from pledging to never develop nuclear weapons to writing Obama letters to mentioning Israel by name -- all of which culminated in a historic phone call with President Obama last month. But no one thinks coming to an agreement on Iran's nuclear program is going to be easy.

Meanwhile, yet another GOP closet case obsessed with war and gore, Lindsey Graham (R-SC), is crafting a similar bill for the Senate to reject. What exactly are these Republican closet cases so scared about that makes them need to prove something-- something dark and ugly-- to the American people? Doesn't the congressional health care plan include psychiatric services?

What The Hell Is Wrong With Arizona? Let's Start With Trent Franks

After Roy Ashburn, a by then chastened California Republican state Senator, was arrested, drunk, in a car with a young male prostitute he apologized, sincerely, for leading an anti-gay Republican jihad in the state Senate and tried to explain why he had done it. There is no member of the U.S. Congress who should pay more attention than vicious homophobe and closet case Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ):

Patt Morrison: "A lot of people, gay or straight, are probably wondering why you voted even against issues like insurance coverage for same-sex partners."

Senator Roy Ashburn: "The best I can do is to say that I was hiding. I was so in terror I could not allow any attention to come my way. So any measure that had to do with the subject of sexual orientation was an automatic 'no' vote. I was paralyzed by this fear, and so I voted without even looking at the content. The purpose of government is to protect the rights of people under the law, regardless of our skin color, national origin, our height, our weight, our sexual orientation. This is a nation predicated on the belief that there is no discrimination on those characteristics, and so my vote denied people equal treatment, and I'm truly sorry for that."

Why bring it up today? Well, aside from having learned nothing from the torment of a dozen Republican colleagues-- like him frightened and hysterical closet cases who have gone out of their way to target gay families for abuse and have then been outed, disgraced for hypocrisy and shunned-- Franks is seriously considering a run for the open Arizona Senate seat being abandoned by Jon Kyl. If he does enter the race, he sets up a social versus fiscal conservative primary battle with Jeff Flake, a far more respected Goldwater-type Republican-- far right but not a drooling hate-monger. Franks is a drooling hate-monger and the primary campaign will be a bizarre circus. And in red, red Arizona, it's likely whoever emerges the winner will be going to the U.S. Senate. This morning I re-read a passage that struck with me about the political situation in Arizona in Will Bunch's extraordinary book, The Backlash.

It is here-- in a land of luscious painted deserts bisected by blue highways, in the forty-eighth state, in practically the farthest corner of the United States from the temperate, coastal habitat of the Founding Fathers-- where the rubber finally met the road for backlash against the presidency of Barack Obama. It is as if the rising mercury in these arid badlands was symbolic of the skyrocketing political temperatures, where the promise of an American melting pot gave way to the realities of immigration and fears over our national identity in the twenty-first century.

Arizona had it all. The loose strands of unrest that you witnessed in other corers of the United States-- the gun worship of Knob Creek, the strange notion that Barack Obama was "not American," all the paranoia about Washington and "socialists" and big government-- were all wrapped together there with a big xenophobic bow. Geographically, this might be the extreme lower-left corner of America, but it was increasingly clear that the Grand Canyon State was the center of a great divide cleaving the nation in two.

The rest of the nation probably should have seen in coming. Political rage had been simmering here for years-- even when economic good times and a real estate boom tamped down the natural tensions between a mostly white, older, transient citizenry and a blue-color work force heavily comprised of undocumented Hispanics. The angry background noise was also submerged in the 2008 elections when the moderate and-- at the time, anyway-- self-proclaimed maverick Republican John McCain became the political face that Arizona was proud to show the rest of the nation. In particular, the middle-of-the-raod albeit occasionally mixed signals that the longtime GOP senator sent out on immigration meant that most outsiders weren't aware of just how angry the talk had become on the radio down in McCain's hometown, and many didn't know about the armed Arizonans patrolling the barren border regions or harassing the day laborers.

...[T]he passion of the anti-Obama uprising swept like a flash flood into the very corridors of the statehouse there, in a flurry of some of the most powerful anti-Washington legislation enacted since the day 150 years ago that South Carolina had actually seceded from the union in a similar jumble of concerns over states' rights-- and skin color. In a remarkable two-week stretch, the Arizona legislature enacted a law that made it easier for rank-and-file citizens to carry guns in public, nearly added an arcane ballot rule for presidential candidates aimed to sow uncertainty about Obama's citizenship, and allowed law enforcement officers to use racial profiling to make arrests and create a climate of fear among Latinos. The three bills may have seemed quite different from each other, but they collectively demonstrated the head start Arizona had when it came to the backlash. Together these pieces of legislation contained all the seeds that had been planted by the far-right radicals ever since Obama's election, and they all addressed the same problem in the eyes of white conservatives wielding political power, "manning the barricades of civilization," in the historian Hofstadter's famous phrase, against the invasion of the dark-skinned Others.

Thus, it is Arizona where the world is seeing the dire consequences of this whole backlash movement-- the most alarming rips in the very fabric of national unity in a century and a half, a nation that appears to be coming apart at the seams for a second time in its young history.

...It should come as no surprise that it was Arizona where the Tea Parties blossomed early. The ideas of the Tea Party "like minds," which included Beck's 9-12ers, gun aficionados, and the militia-friendly, spread quickly among voters here, proceeding rapidly up the political totem poll, where careen-driven politicians were eager to translate the most extreme of these into law. Under the sun-soaked sheen of red-tiled roofs, this was a state of paranoia, a place where men now brandished their legal weapons at the edge of speeches by Obama and where a pastor openly prayed for the president's death.

Enter Trent Franks, a fifth rate opportunistic rug rat with no education beyond high school and nothing to offer but naked bigotry and an ability to appeal to the lowest common denominator of the most nihilistic among the extremists. It could only work in a place like Arizona. His overall lifetime ProgressivePunch score is a startling 1.78-- worse than Michele Bachmann, worse than Virginia Foxx, worse than Steve King, worse than Darrell Issa... worse than any member of Arizona's uber-right wing congressional delegation. (Flake's score, by way of comparison, is 7.23.)

Angry at the world because of his deformed appearance-- he's had 9 unsuccessful operations to fix a cleft palate and lip-- and his urge for sexual contact with other males, he was an activist for religious sociopath James Dobson and his hate group, Focus on the Family. He's led unsuccessful ballot initiatives in Arizona to ban abortions, use tax dollars to pay for private schools and replace the progressive income tax with one favoring the very rich, before going to work as a consultant on the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan. He's also fanatically opposed to online gambling and is probably best known for claiming "Far more of the African American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by the policies of slavery," for referring to President Obama as "an enemy of humanity," and for a series of bizarre anti-Muslim assertions

He served two years, 1985-1987 in the Arizona House of Representatives and came in third in a reelection bid after he was reportedly discovered having sex with a man inside the Capitol. Now, as part of the lifelong cover-up, he wants to file impeachment charges against Obama over DOMA

The Dirty Half Dozen-- The 6 Worst Homophobes In The House

The first time I ever heard of former wingnut Congressman Ernest Istook (R-OK) was when I read a blurb in the Advocate listing the most dangerous members of Congress to the gay community. As time went on I noticed he was very aggressive in pushing a hate-filled anti-gay agenda (which increased when he left the Baptist Church and became a Mormon). Years later he wound up on another list-- as one of the most corrupt of the Abramoff co-conspirators in ripping off American Indian tribes.

Istook left Congress to run for governor and was the victim of the biggest gubernatorial history in many decades as he was swamped-- in the reddest state in the Union-- by Democrat Brad Henry. Henry took 66.5% of the vote and 74 of Oklahoma's 77 counties. Istook won in the state's 3 most backward counties, the three that make up the Panhandle, Beaver, Cimarron and Texas. It turned out one of his campaign staffers, Jordan Edmund, was one of the underaged male pages Republican Mark Foley had molested.

Still very much an obsessed homophobic sociopath, who bragged he would never hire a gay person to work for him, he never lets up demonizing gay people. People wonder who the next Ernest Istooks are likely to be.

Unfortunately, just looking at the voting records of House Members does not tell the story. ProgressivePunch scores all House members on a dozen roll call votes since 2004 that directly impacted gay people. 146 currently serving Republicans (plus one Blue Dog, Travis Childers of Mississippi) can boast ZERO scores! Only 32 Republicans don't have zeroes, including Ahn Cao (who has a disgraceful 50%, Mary Bono Mack (with an event more horrible 33.33% and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (also at 33.33%), all of whom represent large gay populations, respectively, New Orleans, Palm Springs and Miami Beach/Key West. The only gay closet case who doesn't score a zero is Illinois Senate candidate Mark Kirk (who scored a 25%). Closeted gays who voted against people every single time they had an opportunity to include David Dreier (CA), Trent Franks (AZ), Patrick McHenry (NC), Dana Rohrabacher (CA), Aaron Schock (IL), and Adrian Smith (NE).

So how do we define the worst of the worst? I may bear a particular animus toward lock-step anti-gay fanatics who represent large gay constituencies, like homophobic fanatic-- and zero-- John Culberson (R-TX) whose constituents include an awful lot of gay men and women in Houston's Montrose area. And I also harbor some animus towards closet cases-- even "everyone knows" types like David Dreier-- who vote against equality for gays in less favorable positions than they are. Ironically, Dreier, a zero himself, was vetoed for the Republican House Leader position by Roy Blunt based soley on the fact that he's gay. You'd think they guy would grok the concept of being discriminated against! But I decided when researching this piece to leave all that stuff aside and just concentrate on members of Congress who are proactively anti-gay, over and above their dismal voting records.

Let's take, for example, Dan Lungren (R-CA). Forget that he's a zero; they almost all are. Instead, notice that on March 4 last year he authored and proposed a constitutional amendment targeting gays and lesbians. As it turns out, his pernicious amendment, H.J.Res. 37 was referred to Jerrold Nadler's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, where it died the death it deserved. Forty Republicans rushed to co-sponsor it, including loudly bigoted gay-haters like Paul Broun (R-GA), Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA, traumatized at an early age for his transgender first name), Mike Pence (R-IN), Steve King (R-IA), closet queen Trent Franks (R-AZ), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Eric Cantor (R-VA), Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), John Mica (R-FL), Dan Burton (R-IN), Ken Calvert (R-CA), a shameless congressman arrested fleeing in a parked car with his pants down around his ankles when caught with a junkie-hooker by the police, and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT). And speaking of Chaffetz...

Chaffetz has appointed himself spokesperson for the GOP's anti-gay squad. When the Washington DC City Council voted 12-1 to recognize same sex marriages legally performed in other jurisdictions, Chaffetz went to war. "Some things are worth fighting for, and this is one of them," said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah), the ranking Republican on a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee that oversees the District. "It's not something I can let go softly into the night... I recognize the Democrats are in the majority, but I represent the majority of Americans on this issue." Or at least the majority of Utah voters who don't live inside the city limits of Salt Lake City.

Soon after, virulent gay-haters Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Dan Boren (D-OK) introduced a bill to force DC to not recognize same-sex marriage. A Pat Robertson front group filed an anti-marriage equality brief on behalf of 37 House members suing to stop the city from recognizing same sex marriages. Some very familiar names on that list: Robert Aderholt, Todd Akin, Michele Bachmann, Gresham Barrett, Roscoe Bartlett, Marsha Blackburn, John Boehner, John Boozman, Eric Cantor, Jason Chaffetz, John Fleming, Randy Forbes, Virginia Foxx, Scott Garrett, Phil Gingrey, Louie Gohmert, Jeb Hensarling, Wally Herger, Walter Jones, Jim Jordan, Steve King, Jack Kingston, John Kline, Doug Lamborn, Robert Latta, Don Manzullo, Michael McCaul, Thaddeus McCotter, North Carolina closet case Patrick McHenry, Cathy McMorris Rogers, Jeff Miller, Jerry Moran, Randy Neugebauer, Mike Pence, Joe Pitts, Mark Souder, and Todd Tiahrt.

On October 21 the House voted-- overwhelmingly-- to pass Tom Harkin's bill to amend title XXVI of the Public Health Service Act to revise and extend the program for providing life-saving care for those with HIV/AIDS (the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act of 2009). For normal Americans, regardless of party, it was a non-controversial, bipartisan endeavor and it passed 408-9. All the Democrats (including homophobic Blue Dogs who routinely vote against gay equality) and 162 Republicans including every single GOP closet case in the House and most of the garden variety hatemongers, voted for it. So who voted "no?" A motley array of the most vitriolic, hate-filled Republican bigots who come crawling out from under their rocks to revel in this kind of thing, including two on our list of the worst of the worst, Virginia Foxx and Louie Gohmert. Time for the list of the six worst, the ones who are always at the front of the line when it comes to kicking around gay people, the ones who scream the loudest and make the ugliest faces:

The Haters Who Act On Their Hate

Steve King (R-IA)- Where do we start with this raving package of pure Satanic hatred? How about the sick, McCarthyite letter King wrote to President Obama demanding he fire Kevin Jennings, the Assistant Deputy Secretary at the Department of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools. (Co-signers, obviously, included the rest of the Dirty Half Dozen.) Or maybe we should stick to Iowa and his classy reaction to the ruling by his state's Supreme Court recognizing that all Iowans were entitled to marriage equality.

Virginia Foxx (R-NC)- Poor Foxx built her entire demented career around spewing hatred towards gay people, first in the North Carolina legislature and more recently on the floor of the U.S. Congress, where she is considered one of the two dozen least effective, least influential members. Ironically she's become a kind of "fag hag" for Republican closet queen Patrick McHenry and he's one of the only members of Congress willing to be seen in public with her, especially after her demented tirade directed at Matthew Shepard's grieving mother. (See video below.) I don't know if any gay people read DWT or not but if you know any, please let them know that Blue America has endorsed Billy Kennedy, the progressive Democrat running against Foxx, and that he could use some help in the fundraising department, even if just a $10 or $20 contribution.

Louie Gohmert (R-TX)- Half of the Republican Party tag team of bigotry with Utah wingnut Jason Chaffetz, Gohmert was famously dubbed, by Rachel Maddow, Oscar the Grouch, popping out of his trash can to take aim at active duty military personnel who happen to be gay. Watch the video of him annoying members of the House by talking about his perverted sexual fantasies.

Jason Chaffetz (R-UT)- This one has decided his path to political ascendancy among the Mormons is through anti-gay demagoguery. Mormons, whose victimization at the hands of the narrow-minded isn't so far in the past, should know better.

Trent Franks (R-AZ)- The only closet case in the Bottom Six, Franks was driven out of the Arizona state legislature for his aggressive sexual behavior towards younger males. Safely ensconced in the Republican congressional caucus he figures that as long as he can bray homophobic epithets loudly enough, no one will figure out what he does when the lights go out. Best known for calling President Obama an enemy of humanity and claiming that African-Americans may have been better off when they were slaves, Franks is the definition of a kind of self-loathing homosexual that mostly went extinct in the early 1960s.

Duncan Hunter, Jr (R-CA)- Hoping to live up to his father's reputation as the most hysterical homophobe in Congress, Junior is as dumb as a brick and Aaron Schock's secret heartthrob. Because he served in the Marine Corps the GOP has tasked him with speaking out against equality for gays serving in the military. He does it badly and it is widely rumored that his confused statements about hermaphrodites stems from having been molested as a child. He, like the other 5, should see a psychiatrist and stop trying to victimize other taxpaying, law-abiding American citizens.



UPDATE

I just opened an ActBlue page to address homophobia. Can you help?

Will TrumpCare Turn Arizona Purple in 2018?

On crucial votes, Arizona conservaDem Kyrsten Sinema votes with the GOP far more than with the Democrats. The worst political coward in the entire House her repulsive political career has been one of switching parties and positions the way a normal person changes socks. She started as an independent socialist, became a Green, then a Democrat, a New Dem and finally the bottom of the barrel: Blue Dog. She loves telling people she didn't vote for Nancy Pelosi as speaker. Although her crucial vote score for the 115th Congress is a ZERO-- the only Democrat in Congress with a ZERO at this point-- her lifetime crucial vote score, 35.75, is the lowest of any Democrat in the House except fellow Arizona Blue Dog, Tom O'Halleran, a former Republican state legislator who switched parties for the sake of his own career path-- and he's only been in Congress for 3 months. Taking her very blue district into account, she has the lowest "F" of any Democrat in the House. When Ryan or McCarthy wants to be able to tell the press some especially hideous piece of legislation pummeling working families is "bipartisan"... well, that's why they have Sinema on speed-dial.

So if there was going to be even one Democrat to get on board with TrumpCare, everyone assumed it would be Sinema. So far, though, she's not embracing it-- even worse news for Ryan than conservatives like Rob Wittman, Ted Yoho and Justin Amash announcing that they're NO votes. Sunday, the Arizona Republican did an exhaustive look at the state's whole congressional delegation and didn't find much Ryan could be optimistic about-- and that was before the devastating CBO report showing 24 million people losing health insurance over the course of the next decade, 14 million in just the first dreadful year (2018, the year of the midterm elections). Before we go any further though, let me offer a district by district look of how many people are projected to lose coverage if TrumpCare is ever enacted. Statewide that would be 6,828,065, 7.6% of Arizona's total population. Here's the district breakdown, which is far more devastating for rural districts than it is for metropolitan districts:

• AZ-01 (Tom O'Halleran-Blue Dog)- 110,494- 14.5%
• AZ-02 (Martha McSally-R)- 41,011- 5.7%
• AZ-03 (Raul Grijalva-D)- 80,271- 10.5%
• AZ-04 (Paul Gosar-R)- 71,468- 9.7%
• AZ-05 (Andy Biggs-R)- 42,614- 5.4%
• AZ-06 (David Schweikert- R)- 42,614- 5.7%
• AZ-07 (Ruben Gallego-D)- 42,614- 5.5%
• AZ-08 (Trent Franks-R)- 42,614- 5.5%
• AZ-09 (Sinema-Blue Dog)- 42,614- 5.5%

Ron Hansen and Dan Nowicki at the Republican noted that "After years of calling for the dismantling of 'Obamacare,' many Republicans have come to a stark realization. It might be all but impossible, politically, to do so while ignoring how it extended coverage to millions of uninsured Americans." Conservative are in a real quandary. Four of the state's five Republicans in the House and both Arizona senators publicly withheld support, while three of the four House Democrats-- the worthless Sinema is staying mum to make sure which way the wind is blowing before she says anything-- made clear they absolutely oppose Ryan’s TrumpCare plan.

"If Republicans have accepted that everybody with pre-existing conditions are covered, that kind of dictates a lot of what you can and can't do," Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said, citing one of the key tenets of President Barack Obama's signature 2010 health law.

"The debate has moved, certainly, from where it was seven years ago."

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who attacked Affordable Care Act problems during his 2016 re-election campaign, said demands to just repeal the law are not feasible without a responsible replacement.

"We cannot abandon any group of Americans who have become accustomed to receiving health care," McCain told the Arizona Republic. "The question is how do you maintain it as affordable."

Not all in their party agree, which became evident when House Republicans unveiled their Affordable Care Act repeal bill last week to mixed reviews. Conservative GOP lawmakers were among the harshest critics, noting the plan is similar in structure to the ACA and dismissing it as "Obamacare Lite" or “RINOcare,” using the acronym for "Republican In Name Only."

Arizona's congressional delegation highlights how the situation has lawmakers off balance as President Donald Trump's first high-stakes legislative battle takes shape. Not only must they consider that opposing the plan would put them at odds with the president-- and his Twitter account-- but also with significant interest groups and donors who fund their campaigns, as well as their leaders in Congress, who can yield significant influence over their career path on Capitol Hill.

...With four members, Arizona has an outsized presence in the Freedom Caucus, a group of 40 or more Republicans whose hard line on spending in the past has pushed the federal government to the brink of a shutdown. Only one of them, Rep. David Schweikert, offered support for the GOP plan.

He followed leadership and voted Thursday to move the bill out of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, of which he is a member.

But members of the Freedom Caucus made it clear the proposal falls well short of their desire to scrap the ACA and create a market-driven system.

In a written statement, Biggs said, "The health care package ... is an amendment-- and not a clean repeal-- to Obamacare. ... I campaigned on a clean repeal to Obamacare and a free-market, patient-centered alternative to truly lower the costs of insurance premiums, and I intend to work with my colleagues in the House to ensure that Americans have affordable and accessible health care options."

Gosar rode the anti-Obamacare wave of 2010 to Washington. He has frequently cited his experience with the health-care system as a dentist to savage the ACA.

After being pressed by Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., to side with Trump or Minority Leader Nancy, D-Calif., Gosar bristled.

“My folks out in rural Arizona, they don’t have much choices. It’s too expensive for them to afford,” Gosar told The Hill. “So all of a sudden you’re going to see a very captive audience being driven from that competitive marketplace. And that’s why to me everything is all about recreating that competitive market.”

A Gosar spokesman on Friday clarified that Gosar feels House Republican leaders and Trump are making an effort to listen to their concerns.

Rep. Trent Franks, also a Freedom Caucus member, was silent on the GOP plan last week. His spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment on the issue.

Whatever Franks doesn't like about the plan, he is likely pleased it would defund Planned Parenthood, the health-services organization reviled by many conservatives because it provides abortions. Franks has made his opposition to abortion a central pillar of his tenure in Congress.

These days, Flake is feeling the most political heat. He faces his first re-election test as a senator next year.

Flake memorably got crosswise with Trump during last year's campaign, earning the ire of the president's supporters. Other Republicans are sizing up their chances for a possible challenge.

As a member of the House, Flake, whom the Club for Growth also supported in past campaigns, voted against the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

Flake said he sees pros and cons with the House repeal bill.

"Finally dealing with Medicaid as one of the three entitlement programs that are simply unsustainable" is one of the good parts, Flake told the Republic. "This puts at least some parameters around it."

On the other side, Flake views the bill's refundable tax credits as more taxpayer subsidies.

"We'll see when CBO comes back how that scores, but it's still pretty expensive," Flake said, referring to the pending cost and coverage estimates by the Congressional Budget Office.

McSally, a Republican, and Sinema, a Democrat, both were guarded on the GOP plan last week. They are not fans of the ACA and both preside over districts that are considered competitive, though each was comfortably re-elected last year. Both are also routinely mentioned as contenders for statewide office someday.

A spokesman for McSally said she is "encouraged" the GOP plan includes the provisions of the ACA she likes and noted she is "carefully reading the 123-page bill, listening to local stakeholders and in the days ahead will work with House leadership for a viable solution" to the nation's health care challenges.

In an interview last month, she tried to frame the issue as one of structure, not ideology.

"Can we agree that we’re on the same page and trying to get to the same outcome and we disagree on how to get there? It’s not like we don’t have the same goals, which is people can get access to health care," she said.

McSally has called for a system where "people can have choice and options, and people with pre-existing conditions are not one diagnosis away from going bankrupt."

For her part, Sinema rejected the race to pass the GOP bill without knowing its cost and how many people would be covered.

"I've been very, very critical of the ACA, but I do believe that if you are going to repeal it, you have to have a thoughtful replacement that ensures affordability and accessibility," she said in an interview before the Republican plan was released. "I'm very practical and I have no ideology connected to the solution here. ... I don’t have any predetermined have-to's on a list."

While McSally and Sinema held back their views, Rep. Tom O’Halleran, D-Ariz., who won the state’s closest congressional race last November, did not.

"This plan is neither affordable nor does it provide quality care for the vast majority of Arizona families," O'Halleran said.

The ACA has outsized importance in his district because it permanently authorized Indian Health Services.

Reps. Ruben Gallego and Raul Grijalva, who represent safe Democratic districts, have acknowledged changes are needed to the ACA. But they have drawn the line against any changes that would cut coverage.

"I don't think it's enough to say no to Trump," Grijalva said. "You have to be able to tell your constituents there was a better alternative."

Having just won a new six-year term, McCain isn't feeling political pressure, either. But he does want to uphold his word to Arizona voters by fixing the problems created by the Affordable Care Act.

"The reality we're facing is that Obamacare is unraveling," McCain said. "In Arizona, we only have one provider and well over 100 percent inflation in premiums. Obamacare, as it is, is not sustainable, so we have to work to fix it."

McCain hasn't come to a conclusion about the House GOP repeal bill, but said it will face unlimited amendments when it comes to the Senate.

He said he won't go along with conservative efforts to force an outright repeal without a replacement program.

"That's not what I campaigned on. I said I would repeal and replace," McCain said. "If I went along with that, I would be contradicting what I told the people of Arizona when I was running for re-election. So when these individuals say just repeal it, that's not what we told the American people we would do."

The DCCC will likely follow their same failed strategy and target just one district: AZ-02 (Martha McSally), a swing district that Romney won narrowly in 2012 (49.9% to 48.4%) but that Trump lost more substantially last year-- 49.6% for Clinton and 44.7% for Señor Trumpanzee. The DCCC didn't lift a finger for moderate candidate Matt Heinz who went up against McSally's $7,826,194 warchest with just $1,576,119 and lost by 37,000 votes, 56.7% to 43.3%. Ryan's Congressional Leadership Fund PAC spent another $662,677 attacking Heinz and the DCCC and Pelosi's House Majority PAC just looked in the other direction, whistling Dixie. This year, the DCCC says they are targeting AZ-02 but there is, as yet. not announced candidate.

In fact, the only Arizona Republican with a Democratic opponent so far is Andy Biggs (AZ-05-- Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert and the suburbs east of Phoenix as far as Apache Junction and Queen Creek). The district is one of the reddest in the state (R+17) but Talia Fuentes, a progressive and a biologist, wants to take Biggs on again anyway. Although last November Trump didn't do nearly as well as Romney did in 2012, he still managed to beat Clinton 57.6% to 36.5%. Fuentes was crushed by Biggs (63.1% to 36.9%) who spent $946,069 to her $18,650. The Club for Growth spent an additional $572,149 bolstering Biggs while the DCCC, as usual, sat the race out. The Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters spent $29 to help Fuentes.