While Andrew Sullivan has earned praise for covering the Iranian uprising, that easily excitable blogger just can’t seem to resist getting in his digs at his favorite bête noires, the sinister Karl Rove and the dishonest Sarah Palin.  After all, he doesn’t want to risk losing his newly acquired liberal bona fides.

On Sunday, blogger R.S.McCain (via Glenn) pointed out that Sullivan compared the Iranian President to those two Republicans:

Really, Sully? I mean, really? WTF goes through someone’s mind when they dream up an idiotic comparison between (a) Karl Rove, a Republican political strategist, and (b) Mahmoud Ahmadinejed, a Jew-hating genocidal maniac?

You might as well compare Rove to Charles Manson or Pol Pot. Please note that Sullivan’s comparison involves no hypotheticals. It does not appear to be any sort of parodic humor, except unintentionally. He evidently means to suggest in all seriousness that Ahmadinejad and Rove are similar in some meaningful way.

Even as Sullivan was criticizing an enemy of America, of freedom, a man who harbors a particular animus against gay people, he had to get in a few hits on two of his favorite punching bags, two people who, despite their flaws, have never led regimes which execute gay people or who have even advocated our elimination.  The worst they did was to argue against state recognition of same-sex marriage.

Perhaps, Andrew “needed” to make those digs.  As he was joining conservative (& libertarian) bloggers in covering the rallies in Iran, he needed to reassure his new (well, not so new any more) left-wing audience that he hadn’t returned to his “roots” on the right.  Just because he’s agreeing with conservatives on this one, he’s telling us with his potshots at Palin and Rove, that he has hasn’t (re)joined the neo-con cabal.

It’s too bad Sullivan can’t denounce an anti-American regime without also badmouthing American conservatives.  And he still styles himself a conservative.  Pathetic.

One things which makes it so much fun to be an “out” Republican at Gay Pride events is to see the expressions on Democratic officials’ faces when you challenge them on their policies.  I mean, they basically expect gays to fawn all over them because they assume we’re all left-wingers and just googly-eyed to have them marching in the Pride Parade.

I caused my State Assemblyman, the tax-hike-favoring Mike Feuer, to do a double take on Sunday.  As others cheered, I cried out, “Cut My Taxes.”  He turned at me and asked, “Just your taxes?”

“No,” I replied, “Cut taxes across the board.  We have the highest taxes* in the nation and the highest unemployment rate**.  There’s a correlation.”

Instead of responding, with a tight smile, he looked away and waved at someone else, oblivious to what he and his fellow Democrats are doing to discourage economic growth in the Golden State.

No wonder he didn’t consider my observation, he and his fellow Sacramento Democrats are determined to raise our taxes.  (Just the thing we need in an economic downturn.)  I have a better idea:  cut the salaries of public employees.

While I should have said that the state taxes are among the highest (as is our unemployment rate), it seems Feuer et al. are determined to make sure the Golden State has the highest tax burden among the fifty states.  And should state Democrats get their way and hike taxes, well, then we will have the highest unemployment in the nation.

And with the Obama Administration refusing to bail out our profligate General Assembly, state Democrats have to make tough choices, either stand up to their political patrons or raise taxes on their fellow citizens.

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*According to the Tax Foundation, California has the fourth highest tax burden after Connecticut, New Jersey and New York.

**Well, the Golden State has one of the highest unemployment rates, the rates in Rhode Island and South Carolina are curently slightly higher and in Michigan significantly higher.

There is much to fault in the President’s speech yesterday to the American Medical Association (AMA).  But, to me, the most objectionable aspect was its tone. The President seemed to suggest that “if you’re not on board with the reforms I’m proposing, you’re against reform altogether.”

And yet, as clear as it is that our system badly needs reform, reform is not inevitable. There’s a sense out there among some that, as bad as our current system may be, the devil we know is better than the devil we don’t. There is a fear of change – a worry that we may lose what works about our health care system while trying to fix what doesn’t.

He all but ignored the free market reforms put forward by Republicans.

He, like his fellow partisan, the unhappy Barney Frank attempts to dismiss objections to Democratic plans by contending that the alternative would be doing nothing.  This is where the President and the Democrats really beginning to irritate me.  They act as if they’re the only one with ideas to reform various over-regulated sectors of the economy.

Couldn’t they at least be honest and have some intellectual courage to defend their policies by showing why their policies are better than the Republican altnernatives instead of suggesting, as they do, that their ideological adversaries have no alternatives whatsoever?

As Bruce pointed out earlier today, gay groups have been astonishgly silent as millions of citizens rise up against electoral fraud in quite possibly the most oppressively anti-gay regime in the world.  And this electoral fraud serves to keep in power Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man, whom gay leftie blogger Michael Petrelis reports, ” used “Homosexuals to Undercut Rivals.”

I guess that’s only bad when Karl Rove does it.

Human Rights Campaign (HRC) President Joe Solmonese last week condemned the shooting at the Holocaust Museum, yet has nothing to say about the protests in Iran.  And I could find no references to the events in Iran on the web-pages of the other gay groups.

Petrelis doesn’t mince his words in comparing HRC’s response to the Obama Administration’s support of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) to the reaction of the protestors in Iran:

At a time when thousands and thousands of brave Iranian democracy-fighters are justifiably upset with their president stealing an election from them and the opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, and they’re taking to the streets to visibily and loudly demand change, I am appalled at how the gay bloggers have praised a letter from HRC. Why accept just a crumb from the $41 million organization?

Well, at least Solomonese wrote a letter to the President.  He didn’t even issue a statement in solidarity with the Iranian people protesting their anti-gay regime.  It seems it’s only when Republicans do something which is (or could remotely be perceived as) adverse to the interests of gay people does it raise the hackles of the leadership of the various gay organizations, particularly HRC. (more…)

All but lost amidst David Letterman’s half-hearted apology to the Governor of Alaska for his crude references to he daughter was the late night talk show host’s failure to address his description of her look as that of a “slutty flight attendant“.

Back in 1992 when then-journalist David Brock called law professor Anita Hill (who herself rose to fame for her slander of then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas) “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” politically correct pundits worked themselves up into a lather.  They had a point.  So, if it’s inappropriate and deserving of censure to calla female law professor “slutty,” wouldn’t it then be inappropriate to so describe the appearance of a female Governor as such?

Has any conservative pundit (or other public figure) called a prominent left-of-center woman “slutty” since Brock so described Ms. Hill?  If so, was he (or she) called on it?

David Letterman still has some apologizing to do.

So, perhaps it is time for CBS to let the talk show host go.

*Since 1992

**(in deference to bob below:) Or Comedien.

In one of her many (all worth your attention) posts on David Letterman, Cynthia Yockey recalls an episode of the 1970s TV series Happy Days which made a “lasting impression” on her:

It encapsulates why all of us who are outraged at David Letterman’s vile rape jokes about 14-year-old Willow Palin and his unfunny, degrading remarks about her mother, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, must get this bully fired from his show on CBS.

In that episode, the Fonz (Henry Winkler) attempts to teach Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard) how to stand up to bullies. Yesterday, after reading David Letterman’s apology to Sarah Palin, another episode came to mind, this one where instead of teaching a lesson, the Fonz needed to be taught a lesson.  You see, the Fonz did something he had never previously done; he made a mistake.  He had to admit he was wrong.

It took him the whole episode to do so, but, finally while struggling over the saying the word, “wrong,” as if he had a stammer, he did indeed say it.  It just didn’t come naturally to him.  It doesn’t seem to occur to David Letterman to say as much.  Yes, he did take “full responsibility.”  That is, to be sure, certainly a step (a very big one) in the right direction.  He did apologize.

But, he should have shown a little more class and said something like,

I was wrong to make a joke about Governor Palin’s daughter.  It is not appropriate to make jokes, particularly prurient ones, about the children of politicians, even if they are of legal age.  I compounded my error by not checking to confirm that the Governor’s took her 18-year-old daugther to the Yankee game.

Had he uttered these or similar words, it may well be appropriate to let the matter drop.  He did do the right thing, but he didn’t go far enough.  He needed to say, “I was wrong.” And as one of our readers noted in commenting on his failure to speak  those three words, he should also have added that he would “not do it again“.  For his purposes, however, this should do the trick.  The MSM will drop the issue.  Cynthia Yockey explains why we should not. (more…)

Aside from Andrew Sullivan and Michael Petrelis, The Gays(tm) have been stunningly silent on the Iranian election.  Almost as silent and stand-offish as President Obama has been.

While I haven’t blogged about it (admittedly), I have been Twittering my ass off throughout the weekend on the subject!  After all, shouldn’t gays be MORE invested in the outcome of Iran’s future than almost anyone?  They hang gays there after all.

Frank Fleming made an excellent observation on Twitter over the weekend:

You’d think liberals could put at least half the anger they aim at Prop 8 supporters towards someone who has executed gay people.

Amen.  It is the big inconvenient truth for The Gays(tm).  Life in America for us is ashamedly better than nearly every other country on earth.  But there always has to be something for The Gays(tm) to attack America and Christians about so they can raise money to keep themselves going.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

“Improved” apology does no include three words he really needed to say, “I was wrong.”

More on this anon.