Today, the Vermont Senate approved “a bill that would allow same-sex couples to marry in the state.”  While it’s unfortunate that there was “no debate” on this important legislation, allowing Senators to flesh out why gay marriage is a good thing, I commend the legislature for taking up the issue.

Unlike the Green Mountain State’s decision to recognize same-sex civil unions in 2000, this time the legislature acted on its own without the State Supreme Court requiring it to take up the issue (as it did for the civil-unions legislation).

This is how states should address the issue, through the elected legislature, on the initiative of its members.

As those following the gay marriage debates turn their attention again to the Green Mountain State, let us recall how we have progressed since last we focused on that New England state.  In 2000, civil union were seen as a revolutionary step, one which required court intervention.  Now, they’re seen as the conservative solution to the controversy over how to recognize same-sex couples.

Earlier today, when I linked Scott Ott’s satirical post, that Supreme Court Justice “Scalia Urges Patience with Barney Frank’s Heterophobia,” I did not realize that the unhappy Massachusetts Congressman called the Justice a “homophobe.” What is it with Barney that he has to label all those with whom he disagrees as bigots?

Brainy Barney may be, but narrow-minded he is as well.

Last fall, he accused conservatives of racism for linking the financial meltdown to the Community Reinvestment Act and the mismanagement of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

When, on the campaign trail, then-Republican presidential nominee John McCain made an issue of the Massachusetts Democrat’s proposals to raise taxes, increase domestic spending and gut the defense budget,* Barney called the attack on his statements, “an appeal to prejudice.”

Smart as Barney is, he has shown little capacity to understand conservative ideas, smearing his ideological adversaries rather than countering their arguments.  Is this the kind of man we want as the “most prominent openly gay politician in America”?

Now, do you have a better idea why I think he’s bad for gay people?

—————-

*Frighteningly, it seems what Barney hoped would come to pass in the Obama Administration is coming to pass.

UPDATE:  Ed Whelan and Mark Hemingway have been having a field day with this issue at the Corner.  Whelan called the attack “inane,” with Frank using the word, “homophobe. . . . to cut off serious discussion, not to promote it.“  Not sure I agree with him there, but I do share his distaste for the word.  (He, like me, would prefer a term like “anti-gay animus.”

Mark Hemingway agrees with Whelan that “the context of Frank’s remarks seems to betray his casual slander of” Justice Scalia.

One of the most hopeful signs about the “tea party” movement is that it represents an opportunity to rebuild the Reagan coalition.  When I joined my fellow Angelenos last month protesting higher taxes and bigger government on the Santa Monica pier, I noticed the diversity of the crowd, social conservatives, military veterans, veterans of the Ron Paul campaign, businessmen, conservative activists and various and sundry citizens from all walks of life.

If you attended tea parties in other towns, please let me know whether or not you had a similar experience.

Considering the diversity of these rallies, the tax and spending issue should be the one to help lift the Republican Party out of its late doldrums and into productive activity, offering voters that “better vision for the future” that Michael Barone believes we need to build on the growing disfavor Americans are feeling for the Democrats.

Barone has blogged much on the need for Republicans to Target Upscale Voters Unhappy With the Obama Economy. His analysis of polling data help confirm a conclusion I have reached based primarily on anecdote, conversations with friends, fellow alumni of my “élite” New England alma mater and family members.  A good number of these people share my fiscal conservatism, yet buy into the media image of the GOP as a party in thrall to social conservatives.

“If the Republican Party were more tolerant,” they say, they’d move back or toward, as the case may be, to the GOP.  It’s why, I believe, the GOP needs downplay the social issues to focus on the fiscal ones.  To that end, I believe Barone’s point about choices is so important. Young Americans, he contends, “are used to making their own choices, setting up their own networks, taking their own initiatives.”

This issue of choice could appeal to more than just young voters.  It could only serve to keep senior citizens in the Republican fold, reminding them that Obama’s health care plan would limit the choices they currently have.  As it helps the GOP retain social conservatives as we remind them that less government means more freedom, leaving them with the choice how to raise and where to educate their children, in public schools, parochial schools or at home.

(more…)

As I read yet again of Obama’s minions going door-to-door at the behest of Obama aides now working for the Democratic National Committee to press for passage of a spendthrift budget with trillion-dollar deficits, I note how this budget does not meet up with the fiscal responsibility the candidate preached in his campaign. As he himself said in the third presidential debate “what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.”

That’s right he said that throughout this campaign, he proposed a net spending cut. Now, some of his supporters might say, well, he didn’t realize how bad the economic situation was. Um, he repeated that message of fiscal responsibility after the election, promising to “scour the federal budget, line by line, and make meaningful cuts.”

And just after pushing through the spendthrift “stimulus,” he hosted a Fiscal Responsibility Summit at the White House.

He has been praised for his gift of rhetoric, that he, with a good speech in front of him, is a master of the spoken word.  Alas, that he uses those words to deceive.

UPDATE:  An illustration of Obama’s deception.  Here’s what one of his prominent supporters had to say recently:

In the midst of this bonfire of inanities, President Obama is pressing ahead with a $3.6 trillion budget, predicated on utterly unrealistic economic growth, even as the Congressional Budget Office is now projecting that this year’s deficit will soar past $1.8 trillion, 13 percent of the US economy. . . President Obama came to office proclaiming that he aims to solve problems, not hand them on to our children. Most presidents say that sort of thing. But now we are in very dire straits, and that being the case, he will be held to account. It’s your legacy, sir, and let’s not hear any more about ‘inheriting the crisis.

(H/t:  Jennifer Rubin)

Read the whole thing!  Via Instapundit.

Turns out hyperpartisan White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was in the meeting when the language allowing for the AIG bonuses about which Democrats have been grandstanding overmuch in recent days was inserted into the “stimulus” bill”

“Right now, you get the feeling this is all about protecting [White House Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel,” says a former Treasury Department lawyer, who worked in that department’s counsel’s office on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) before joining a D.C.-based law firm in February. “At the time, we were led to believe there were basically three or four people from the Administration at the table when the final deals were cut and one of them was Emanuel.”

“Emanuel isn’t talking” as White House officials try to pass the buck.  Doesn’t sound like the Administration is doing much to follow through on the president’s recent pledge to break “a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.”

If the president wants to live up to his campaign pledge of post-partisanship, his commitment “new kind of politics,” he needs to fire Rahm Emanuel, a man who embodies the worst excesses of that old kind of politics against which Mr. Obama ran such an effective campaign.

Not just that, as I’ve said before, given the president’s particular strengths*, he need a Chief of Staff with a different skill set, a man who can serve a kind of prime minister, effectively running the government while the president sets the broad agenda.  A master of scripted eloquence, Obama needs a detail man as his right-hand man.  Not a partisan gunslinger with an axe to grind.

*UPDATE:  Jennifer Rubin suggests Obama might see his new job as preferring to “campaign and hold summits, leaving the governing to others.”  It would then follow that he should entrust that govering to competent and dispassionate indiviuals.

Shouldn’t Liberals and Global Warmingists be thrilled at all of America’s newspapers failing?

Saves trees, right? More trees to hug!!!

Bruce (GayPatriot)

Glenn linked some left-wing blogger depicting certain conservative bloggers as crybabies because they faulted the MSM for not covering the various “tea parties” across the land protesting higher taxes and bigger government.

But, the tone I find in conservative blogs is not so much anger and whining.  It’s not not such much outrage any more, but just plain amusement. This is what we’ve come to expect from the mainstream media. It proves what we’ve been saying all along, that their mantra is not, as per the New York Times‘ masthead motto “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” but rather Only the News that Fits our Narrative We Print.

Nothing illustrates this better than the front page from the Connecticut Post which Don Surber reproduced on Sunday.  The paper gave the story of the protest/bus tour again AIG executives “two big pictures, a main story, and a side story.“  Even the paper’s page-one photo shows more photographers than protesters.

“Buried inside [the paper] was a story of 300 people in Ridgefield staging a Tea Party against the entire $700 billion bailout and the subsequent $787 billion stimulus.”  That is, the paper devoted front-page cover to a rally less than one-seventh the tea party’s size.

As we right-of-center bloggers detail such hypocrisy, we experience a weird kind of “schadenfreude,” a pleasure in misfortune.  The misfortune is the media’s failure to cover (or, in the case when they do cover, attempts to downplay) rallies in support of ideas we conservatives and libertarians have long championed.  And the pleasure is being proven right about the mainstream media, finding in their silence (or downplaying) further evidence that they are biased against covering stories which don’t fit their narrative of what they believe the news should be.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  “You’re off just a bit on the NYT slogan — it’s ‘All the News that Fits, We Print’.”