Well, we lost the lead this evening in the 2005 Best LGBT Weblog Awards… so I guess I’m going to have to pull out the heavy artillery. (LINK HERE TO VOTE)

Why you ask, is there a picture of Billy Currington in this post hawking for votes for Best LGBT Weblog?

Well it seems that “Billy Currington” is the number one Google word search that brings folks to GayPatriot. Honest! I don’t get it either. But hey, I’d figure I’d try anything to win!

And as a reminder, my offer stands that I will personally donate up to $2,000 to Soldiers’ Angels ($1.00 for every vote in the Weblog Awards). So please, vote for GayPatriot… and help out our troops this Christmas season.

(LINK HERE TO VOTE)

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

When I returned from living in Europe, I determined to buy an American car. As I looked around and test drove various makes and models, a co-worker warned me against buying a Ford, saying that when she owed that make, she was constantly taking her car into the shop for repairs. I eventually settled on a Chevy Corsica as it handled the best of the cars I could then afford. That car, Mary Anne I, lasted more than eight years.

That car-buying experience was not the first time I heard about problems with Fords. Other friends have leveled similar complaints against that American manufacturer. To be fair, I will note that friends and family driving the larger Ford models, e.g., pickup trucks and SUVs, have been quite satisfied with their cars.

That said, if my VW, Mary Anne II, ever fails me, I will be much less likely to consider a Ford given the news I read this morning. The Company announced “that its luxury Jaguar and Land Rover brands will no longer advertise in gay publications.” While Ford denies that it made the decision based on pressure for social conservative Christian groups, the American Family Association (AFA) is declaring victory and ending a boycott of the company it had begun in May when it determined that Ford was “too gay-friendly.”

Although Ford won’t advertise certain models in gay publications, it will “continue its policies recognizing the rights of its gay employees.” So, the news is not entirely bleak.

Perhaps because Ford is retaining its nondiscrimination policy, I’m not as upset by this decision as much as some gay activists are. I see the free market at work and realize that gay people can protest Ford’s decision with their pocketbooks, by choosing not to buy Ford automobiles.

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I woke up in a charitable mood this morning. I would like to announce that for every vote cast on behalf of GayPatriot in the 2005 Weblog Awards, I will donate $1.00 of my own money to Soldiers’ Angels, a charity benefiting our brave American volunteers in the US Armed Forces by sending them Christmas stockings, care packages and letters.

Last year, this blog received just over 1,100 votes. I will donate up to $2,000 to Soldiers’ Angels based on the votes cast this year.

PLEASE CLICK TO VOTE HERE.

The competition will be tough, so make sure to vote EVERY DAY!!!

Thanks for all of your support and may the best blog win!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

In past posts and comments, I have suggested that this blog better represents gay Republicans than does Log Cabin. To defend this claim, I pointed out that while both Bruce and I voted for President Bush last fall just as did a supermajority of gay Republicans. And like most gay Republicans, despite occasional disagreements with the president, we generally support him. In contrast not only did Log Cabin refuse to endorse the president, but its president Patrick Guerriero attacked him just three weeks before the election. After the election, Patrick even refused to indicate who he voted for. He has barely uttered a word of praise since.

I have claimed that perhaps more than 90% of gay Republicans voted for the President last fall based on exit polling which showed that 23% of gay people voted for the president last fall. Given that polls showed that 25% of gay people voted for Bush in 2000, I figured that 92% of gay Republicans picked the president again.

As some of my critics have noted in the comments, that since not all gay Republicans supported W in the 2000 election, I was wrong about that 90% figure (for 2004). So, I did a few google searches to see if I could find the exact figure, but have so far been unable to find a single poll showing how gay Republicans voted in past presidential elections.

Without such a poll, we’ll have to look at the numbers that we have so as best to extrapolate the gay Republican vote in 2004. Given there were no indications of any major defections from the GOP in 2000 (when Log Cabin endorsed Bush), we’ll assume that that year, the president got the same percentage of the gay Republican vote as he did of the Republican vote. The lowest percentage I could find for the Bush’s share of the Republican vote in 2000 was 91.

Now, some of our critics cite an exil poll showing that the president won just 17% of the gay vote in 2004. If we average the two exit polls numbers (17 & 23), we get 20. For now, we’ll go with this average (even as I believe the higher exit-poll number is more accurate). 20 is 80% of 25 (the president’s 2000 share of the gay vote). If we assume that the president lost the same number of votes from gay Republicans as he did from gay Independents and Democrats, he would have won 72.8% of the gay Republican vote (80% x 91%). (Given that more Republicans would have stayed with their party’s man than non-Republicans, this likely underepresents the number of Republcans who voted for W in 2004. Lacking any better numbers (for now), we’ll go with this.)

Thus, in last fall’s presidential election, roughly three out of four gay Republican joined your humble bloggers in voting for the president while slightly more than one in four went with Log Cabin. (And this using a method which is more likely to underrepresent the president’s share of the gay GOP vote.) Seems we better represent gay Republicans than does Log Cabin.

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Yesterday, while at the gym doing cardio, I occasionally glanced up and watched the news on the TVs suspended in front of me. I didn’t have headphones (to hear the audio via nifty transmitters on the machines) and not all the TVs had close-captioning, so I primarily just saw the news without hearing it.

When Ramsey Clark came on CNN, I thus don’t know if the anchors and reporters asked this former Attorney General tough questions about his defense of Saddam. Given that it’s CNN, I expect that they fawned all over this man who represents deposed despots and mass murderers. Having earned such nicknames as “the war criminal’s best friend,” Clark’s primary criterion for choosing a client seems to that individual’s attitude toward the United States. If someone opposes America, Clark is ready and willing to defend him. No matter how great his crime.

His past clients include “former Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic, a Rwandan clergyman charged with genocide and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was convicted of conspiracy in the 1993 truck-bomb explosion at New York’s World Trade Center.” Even his former colleagues and friends, including some on the left find him “far out on the fringe” and aligned “with every tyrant and every war criminal he can find.”

While many sensible liberals have criticized Clark, his support for the most despicable anti-American despots and terrorists has made him a kind of poster child for the angry left. (Please note I’m saying “angry left” here, not the entire left.) For these irrational oppositionists, the U.S. is responsible for every problem in the world. Since this nation can only do wrong, anyone who opposes it must be worth defending. And in taking up the defense of America’s enemies, Ramsey Clark speaks up for those who have nothing but contempt for our nation and its ideals.

UPDATE: In the comments, our pal North Dallas Thirty references his thoughtful post on the topic. It appears that the defender of despots believes the Butcher of Baghdad was innocent! So, check out ND30′s post for a slightly different perspective than that we offer here.