6)See http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n23_v110/ai_13235609 and especially http://www.theocracywatch.org/taking_over.htm#Religious. It is no surprise that Republican Party platforms routinely endorse Religious Right agenda items, including overturning Roe v. Wade, sweeping abortion bans, anti-gay discrimination by government in marriage and other spheres, teaching creationism in the public schools and endorsing coercive organized prayers in the public schools. In 2004, the Texas Republican Party, one of the most far-right of any state parties, endorsed a “Christian Nation” platform plank (see http://www.explodedlibrary.info/2004/06/why_the_texas_g.html), declaring “The Republican Party of Texas affirms that the United States of America is a Christian nation, and the public acknowledgement of God is undeniable in our history. Our nation was founded on fundamental Judeo-Christian principles based on the Holy Bible. The Party affirms freedom of religion, and rejects efforts of courts and secular activists who seek to remove and deny such a rich heritage from our public lives” – an unmistakable reference to court rulings against Roy Moore’s brazenly sectarian Ten Commandments crusades in Alabama and frequent right-wing efforts to get around Supreme Court decisions banning organized, coercive prayer and Bible readings in public schools.

7)http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/sns-ap-cvn-palin-environment,0,6369060.story; also see http://www.americablog.com/2008/08/sarah-palin-wants-to-let-polar-bears.html. Palin obviously considers oil drilling in Alaska as far more important than protecting polar bears, whose habitat of ice floes is being seriously threatened by unprecedented melting brought on by global warming. Climate scientists know that global warming is especially strongly felt in the polar areas, where rapid temperature rises are causing melting glaciers, ice shelves to break off of Greenland and Antarctica’s ice sheets, and where polar bears are being forced to swim long distances because ice floes are becoming more scarce. Sarah Palin herself acknowledged the strong impact of global warming on Alaska because it lies so far north.

8)http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1837868,00.html; also see http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2008/08/30/sarah-palin-making-john-mccain-look-like-al-gore/.

9)http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/101906/sta_20061019031.shtml.

10) http://dwb.adn.com/news/politics/elections/story/8347904p-8243554c.html, and http://www.thelangreport.com/religion-or-lack-of/sarah-palin-wants-creationism-taught-in-school/.

11)http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/03/us/politics/03wasilla.html?em.

12)http://news.yahoo.com/story//ap/20080904/ap_on_el_pr/cvn_palin_iraq_war; also see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/02/palins-church-may-have-sh_n_123205.html.

13)http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/02/palins-church-may-have-sh_n_123205.html; see a video clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS_VduCWhzM&feature=related.

14)Slocum, Fred, “GOP is Too Far Right.” My View column, Mankato Free Press, May 30, 2008; http://www.mankato-freepress.com/letters/local_story_151113330.html.

15)Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005); see http://www.hackerpierson.com/. Hacker and Pierson, both professional political scientists, writing when Republicans held both the White House and Congress, show that Republicans “have strayed dramatically from the moderate middle of public opinion, yet faced little public backlash. Again and again, they have sided with the affluent and the ultraconservative, while paying little heed to the broad majority of Americans . . . If politicians veer off center, the normal checks and balances of American government are supposed to pull them back. Yet Republicans have short-circuited many of these checks and balances . . . [via] a systematic weakening of the bonds between ordinary voters and elected politicians [and] a deliberative process systematically restricted and distorted by party chieftains, unresponsive power brokers subverting the popular will, and legislation written by and for powerful interests and deliberately designed to mute popular discontent.” The major facilitators of these phenomena include President George W. Bush, his former top advisor (and current Wall Street Journal columnist) Karl Rove, now-indicted former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and Republican power-broker Grover Norquist, head of the virulently anti-government (in economic policy only) lobbying group Americans for Tax Reform.

16)The incredible shrinking moderate presence in today’s Republican Party is evident in the Bush Administration, as moderates like former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman have left the administration, feeling marginalized by more conservative White House appointees like Donald Rumsfeld (in Colin Powell’s case) and the administration’s relentlessly anti-environmental policymaking, evident in its resistance to any concerted action against global warming, walking away from Clinton-era lawsuits to force utilities to comply with the Clean Air Act, muzzling of government scientists and experts from speaking out on global warming, lifting of restrictions against mountaintop-removal mining (a huge gift to Republican-allied mining companies) and attempt to relax arsenic standards in drinking water, among many other examples. In elections, the pattern has been that Republican members of Congress deemed insufficiently conservative have faced primary challenges from far-right “true believers,” often well-funded by right-wing power brokers like Americans for Tax Reform and the so-called Club for Growth. In this vein, moderate Republican Rep. Marge Roukema of New Jersey fended off strong 1998 and 2000 primary challenges from archconservative Scott Garrett, but retired from Congress in 2002, and Garrett won the seat in a Republican district in November 2002; moderate Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania barely won his 2004 primary against archconservative Patrick Toomey; and in Michigan, moderate Republican Joe Schwarz lost his 2006 primary to the far more conservative Tim Walberg, who then was elected to Congress from another Republican district. Finally, political scientists Hacker and Pierson show that both House and Senate Republicans have moved rightward far more than their Democratic counterparts have moved leftward, and that Republican activists are both further off-center and galloping further rightward, while Democratic activists as a group are more centrist and moving slightly toward the center.