Coming to a Republican-controlled town near you: Outlawed for being gay

— Quote of the Day, “One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did,” Texas Republican Congressman Chip Roy said. “One!” Is he watching my show? For almost all of the 20 years I’ve been doing my radio/TV show I’ve run a contest. I’ll give an autographed book to anybody who can come up with even one single piece of major legislation since Reagan that was written by Republicans, passed the House and Senate with a majority of Republicans, and was signed into law by a Republican president that helped average Americans more than billionaires or monopolistic giant corporations. While a few folks have identified small efforts around the edges (the no-call list, for example), nobody has found a single “big” thing the GOP has done for all Americans in the past 40 years. Now that reality seems to be sinking in for Texas Republican Congressman Chip Roy as he went to the floor of the House and begged his colleagues to give him the name of even one single piece of legislation they’ve passed this year while they’ve had control of the House. Of course, there isn’t one and probably never will be: the GOP serves the morbidly rich and giant corporations to the exclusion of all else, as anybody who’s been paying attention can see. If Chip Roy is really interested in passing laws and funding projects that help average Americans, he needs to leave the GOP and join the Democrats.

— How Mike Johnson got played. House Republicans can be a slippery bunch, but Speaker MAGA Mike wasn’t ready for this one. He’d come up with what he thought was a foolproof scheme to screw the Democrats in January with very little blowback, and it just blew up in his face. The problem House Republicans have figured out is that when they shut down the entire government — as they’ve been doing since the 1990s whenever there’s a Democrat in the White House and they want to throw a tantrum about social spending — people get pissed off. Nobody wants to see the national parks and monuments closed, the military not get paid, and air traffic controllers and TSA agents having to hold their breath because their checks are being deferred. So Johnson split his continuing resolution to fund the government through early next year into two parts: one that would expire on January 19th and the other in early February. The plan was to load all the “must function” stuff in the first bill, and all the social spending in the second one so they can pass the first in January and then shut down the government all they want for as long as they want when it comes to the second one because only people who are poor, on welfare, or work for agencies like the EPA and IRS would be affected. BUT, at the last minute somebody pulled a switcheroo and put the Defense and Homeland Security funding into the second bill and Johnson didn’t catch it: that was the legislation that got passed and President Biden signed on Thursday. Now the House Republicans are foaming at the mouth, looking for the “traitor” and “rat” who switched the bill versions just before they were voted on. Was it a turncoat Republican member of Congress? Or a mischievous staffer? Keep an eye on this one…

— Is a national abortion ban coming? The 19th century Comstock Act — which outlaws sending birth control or abortion products through the mail, including shipping things to doctors offices, pharmacies, and hospitals — is still on the books, although it’s not enforced. Texas Republican Judge Matthew Kaczmarek, when he ordered the abortion drug Mifipristone banned nationwide (it’s on hold as it’s appealed), grounded his decision in the Comstock Act, bringing it back into force. Republicans refuse to even consider overturning the archaic legislation as long as they control the House, and now we’re hearing that the GOP is planning to use the Act to ban both abortion pills, IUDs, and birth control pills nationwide if they can take control of the White House. Meanwhile, in Ohio where voters put abortion rights into their constitution last month, Republicans are trying to figure out ways to get around the law the same way DeSantis did with felon voter enfranchisement by “regulating” legal abortions in a way that will make them largely unavailable. No matter how unpopular outlawing birth control and abortion remain, the GOP is now stuck between a rock and a hard place. When Roe was in force, they could talk all day long about outlawing women’s right to regulate their own fertility without consequence and without having to follow through; now that Roe is gone, the religious fanatics they’ve cut deals with over the years are demanding their pound of flesh from the hides of America’s girls and women. If Republicans lose their support, they’ll lose the small edge they have in many elections.

— Coming to a Republican-controlled town near you? Murfreesboro Tennessee outlaws being gay. We’re seeing the early indicators of what America might look like if the GOP were to seize all the federal levers of power. First, of course, they’ll outlaw abortion and the birth control pill. Second, they want to kill off or privatize as many social welfare programs as possible, including Social Security and Medicare. And, finally, they want queer people back in the closet or dead. As a bizarre sort of “proof of concept,” Murfreesboro, Tennessee just criminalized being gay in public. We’re not talking about having gay sex in public: just being gay in public is now illegal. While Pastor Niemöller’s famous poem starts out with the Nazis coming after the trade unionists, the first group they really went after was the trans community, followed by gays and lesbians. That was all years before they criminalized being Jewish and even before Hitler dismantled the unions. If you have any concern at all for our queer brothers and sisters, now is the time to stop supporting or voting for any Republican in any capacity.

— Why the Washington Post published graphic images of mass shootings. For years I’ve argued that America needs an “Emmet Till moment” with regard to mass shootings. Till’s mother Mamie bravely demanded that her son have an open casket for his funeral so everybody could see how badly beaten he was by the white men who murdered him (and got away with it). Similarly, we need to show the graphic damage AR15s and the military-style ammunition they use cause to the human body. The Washington Post published graphic images from mass shootings yesterday and, while not as graphic as I’d like, it’s a start. The Parkland kids were right with the #ShowMyPicture stickers they made for their driver’s licenses, asking that if they were killed in a mass shooting the photos of their mangled bodies be made public. We need to face the horrors the GOP has inflicted on our children with their unyielding support of weapons of war on American streets.

— Crazy Alert! The “QAnon Queen” threatens locals with public execution as she abandons tiny town....say what?! Vice News is reporting that the self-proclaimed “Queen of Canada,” also known as the “QAnon Queen,” has been successfully driven out of the small town of Richmound, Canada by local residents. Romana Didulo and her followers loaded themselves into a caravan of RVs and cars this week and took off, much to the relief of the villagers whose lives they’d repeatedly threatened. Where will they end up? Mar-a-Lago? They could probably do worse…