A Big Glass Of Nader Aid For The GOP, Con't.

Apparently there really is an effort to get a third party candidate into the race on the conservative side, and I can't wait for this to happen.

A band of exasperated Republicans — including 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, a handful of veteran consultants and members of the conservative intelligentsia — is actively plotting to draft an independent presidential candidate who could keep Donald Trump from the White House.

These GOP figures are commissioning private polling, lining up major funding sources and courting potential contenders, according to interviews with more than a dozen Republicans involved in the discussions. The effort has been sporadic all spring but has intensified significantly in the 10 days since Trump effectively locked up the Republican nomination.

Those involved concede that an independent campaign at this late stage is probably futile, and they think they have only a couple of weeks to launch a credible bid. But these Republicans — including commentators William Kristol and Erick Erickson and strategists Mike Murphy, Stuart Stevens and Rick Wilson — are so repulsed by the prospect of Trump as commander in chief that they are desperate to take action.

Their top recruiting prospects are freshman Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), a conservative who has become one of Trump’s sharpest critics, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), who withdrew from the 2016 race May 4. Romney is among those who have made personal overtures to both men in recent days, according to several people with knowledge of the former Massachusetts governor’s activities.

I really is a toss-up to see which would be the bigger disaster, this or Trump losing the Senate and maybe even the House.  Ben Sasse?  Really? And John Kasich? I can't wait for this to blow up in the GOP's face.  You thought that Cleveland was going to be ugly before? Wait until they try to steal the nomination from Trump.

Popcorn and a chair, folks.  The Conserva-schism is going down.

That GOP War On Women Again, Con't

Red State Republicans sure do love the notion that women need to be protected from, above all else, themselves. Alabama is no different with what may be the goofiest TRAP law of them all regulating abortion clinics.

The Alabama legislature passed a bill Wednesday that prohibited abortion clinics from being within 2,000 feet from any K-8 public school — the same rule a sex offender must follow in the state.

If signed by anti-abortion Gov. Robert Bentley (R), the rule will force at least one abortion clinic to move — or close. This won’t be the first time the Huntsville clinic, Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives, will be forced to relocate because of an anti-abortion law. The clinic moved to its current location across the street from a new elementary school to comply with a 2013 anti-abortion bill that placed unnecessary restrictions on abortion clinic facilities.

“It disturbs me that a person has tried to abide by the law, and still gets penalized,” Democratic Rep. Laura Hall said, according to the Associated Press. “It is unfair for an individual to meet the demands of a law that we passed and when they moved, we create another law to put them basically out of business.”

Supporters argue that the regulation is meant to keep aggressive anti-abortion protesters away from children, something a clinic has no control over. But other state lawmakers have been more direct about the fact that their general dislike of abortion clinics fueled the vote.

“I don’t feel like these types of facilities need to be anywhere near our children,” said Republican Rep. Ed Henry, who carried the bill in the House.

The anti-abortion advocacy organization that fought for the bill echoed Henry’s opposition.

“Our message is to point out that killing a baby is still killing a baby whether its politically correct or not,” says local activist Rev. James Henderson, the executive director of the Christian Coalition of Alabama, the group responsible for getting the bill into the statehouse. He said it made sense that abortion clinics should have the same buffer zone from schools as sex offenders because, he said, the majority of underage girls brought to abortion clinics, “according to studies that have been done, are pregnant as a result of statutory rape anyways.”

See, abortion clinics promote rape of children, so we can't have them near schools.  Pretty soon it's going to be "can't have them near churches" and "can't have them near government buildings" and "can't have them within city limits" and so on, until they're virtually impossible to provide for 95% of women.

If there's anything that people need to understand, is that these fanatics will block Clinton or Sanders from ever appointing a Supreme Court justice to end these laws.  They are here to keep women poor, pregnant, and under control as second-class citizens whom for sex is a cardinal sin, and reserve abortions for only "the right kind of women" to be able to get.

This has always been about punishing the sluts and the whores, and it has been for thousands of years.

Any Deport In A Storm

There are times when the Obama administration has royally screwed up, and when they do, they need to be called out on it. This latest "deportation surge" is one of those times.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency will conduct a 30-day “surge” of immigration raids beginning in May, as Reuters first reported. The raids will target “single adults” and Central American mothers and children who arrived in the country after January 1, 2014 and have since “evaded their deportation orders or not shown up for court hearings,” according to theWall Street Journal. 

Many of those Central Americans are likely fleeing gang violence in their home countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. A Salvadoran dies every 60 minutes because of the growing violence there. Immigration lawyers point out that these people are simply seeking asylum within the United States’ borders, even if U.S. officials don’t recognize that fact. 

The impending raids are similar to the large-scale immigration raids that the administration conducted at the beginning of this year, which terrorized immigrant communities across the country. Advocates are condemning the move, calling for the administration to provide legal services to mothers and children instead. 

“In January, when 121 individuals were detained in different parts of the country, our communities lived in terror,” Steven Choi, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said in a statement. “This tactic of keeping immigrant communities in constant fear of deportation is immoral and unjust. It does nothing to resolve the broader issues of our broken immigration system.” 

A government source indicated that ICE agents were advised to stay away from “sensitive locations” like churches, schools, and hospitals, ABC News reported.
But so far, those guidelines have not been closely followed this year. As ThinkProgress previously reported, ICE agents have lured an undocumented immigrant out of a church, and have taken Central American teenagers into custody while they’re on their way to and from school. 

In light of this, advocates are concerned that immigrants may soon be too afraid to leave their homes. During January’s large-scale immigration raids, even immigrants outside North Carolina, Texas, and Georgia — the three states that ICE targeted for its operations — found themselves taking different routes to work or avoiding dropping their kids off at school.

Having said that this solution is pretty horrific, the real issue is our terrible immigration system and the fact that Republicans have been blocking efforts for immigration reform for decades now.  We wouldn't be in this situation if we were allowed to fix immigration.  Republicans refuse to let that happen.

But that leaves the fact Obama is rounding up and deporting kids back to a violent hell, and it's something that needs to stop, outright.

Dispatches From Bevinstan,Con't

Morning Consult's regular survey of the popularity of the nation's governors finds that being in office for just six months, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin's approval rating is a dismal 33%.

Republicans take eight of the spots on the list of 10 most popular governors. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker is America's most popular governor, and he is followed very closely by fellow Republican Larry Hogan of Maryland. Delaware's Jack Markell is the country's most popular Democratic governor. 

Despite national outrage being directed to Snyder and his administration, he does not have the worst approval rating. America's least popular governor is Republican Gov. Sam Brownback in Kansas, who is embroiled in ongoing budget woes that followed large tax cuts. Only 26 percent of Kansas voters approved of his job performance, compared to 65 percent who said they did not. 

Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, whose state has experienced job losses to neighboring Massachusetts, is the second-least popular governor in the country and the least popular Democrat. His approval is 29 percent, while 64 percent of voters in the Nutmeg State disapprove of his performance. 

America's newest governors, Kentucky Republican Matt Bevin and Louisiana Democrat John Bel Edwards, have experienced opposite fates as voters have gotten to know them better since they were elected last fall. In the Bluegrass State, Bevin's approval rating sits at 33 percent, well below the 57 percent support which his Democratic predecessor Steve Beshear enjoyed before he left office. Edwards, meanwhile, has a 10 percent higher approval rating than the 35 percent Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal had at the end of his term.

So Bevin is in the basement with Sam Brownback and Dan Malloy, both of whom have seen major job losses in their respective states due to austerity budgets.  What a surprise, dismantling kynect (which worked great and was a model for the country) and then replacing it with a far worse system in the trainwreck that is Benefind has made Bevin a laughing stock, not to mention his austerity budget cuts set to start costing the state tens of thousands of jobs and wrecking the economy.

But once again, this is exactly what I warned Kentucky voters about for months, and people voted for the guy anyway.

Welcome to Bevinstan, Matt.  Your honeymoon is officially over.