I never thought I’d be grateful for anything my state’s hyper-partisan junior Senator has said or done, but it seems Mrs. Boxer is bound and determined to prevent Obamacare from passing.  According to law professor William A. Jacobson, Ma’am “is proclaiming she has enough votes in the Senate to block the equivalent of the Stupak Amendment from being attached to any Senate health care bill.”

Without the Stupak Amendment, the bill would have lost a number of pro-life Democrats in the House and would not have passed.  I dare say they won’t vote for the final bill without such language. Indeed, one of Ma’am’s own Democratic colleagues, Nebraska’s Ben Nelson told Politico (via his spokesman) that he “could not support anything less than Stupak amendment.”

Without the abortion language, a Senate bill to overhaul the nation’s health care system will lose that Democratic vote and all but guarantee a successful Senate filibuster.

So, thank you, Ma’am, your pro-abortion extremism will likely sink Obamacare!

At some point, I will have to blog about the consideration I have given to runnig against my big-spending Congressman Henry Waxman, a man who has spent 35 years representing Hollywood while doing nothing to stop the steady drain of entertainment jobs from his district.  Ol’ Henry, like all too many on his side of the aisle, is more concerned with liberal ideology than the issues of his constituency.

Here, however, as in only a handful of districts across the country, including Virginia’s 8th Congressional District, representing the Old Dominion’s close-in suburbs of Washington, D.C., he can get away with it.  For all too many here in Hollywood, like their ideological confrères in our nation’s capital region, liberal politics trumps all else, even box office success.

The ideological makeup of Virginia’s 8th is not deterring my friend Matthew Berry from throwing his hat in the ring against his mean-spirited Representative, Jim Moran.  Matthew announced today the formation of a congressional exploratory committee as he pursues the Republican nomination in that inside-the-Beltway district. He vowed to run a clean office, pointing out that Moran “is currently under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for his involvement in a scandal involving the PMA Group.”

Importantly, Matthew vows to stand up to a spendthrift Congress:

The federal budget deficit this year is more than $1.4 trillion, over three times the previous record, and under current projections the national debt will grow by over $9 trillion in the next ten years. . . . This Congress is taking the United States down the road to insolvency. During this Congress, the United States has lost over 3.5 million jobs and unemployment is now over 10 percent. . . he performance of the current Congress can be summed up in just ten words: too much debt, too few jobs, and too much spending.

Matthew may know what issues resonate with voters across the country, but inside the Beltway, bigger government means more jobs. For, while the jobs picture remains bleak across the nation, it’s not nearly so bad in the nation’s capital.

All that said, I know Matthew. He’s a smart guy and a principled man who would stand up for fiscal discipline. Congress could use a few more men like him, so I wish him well his quest, quixotic though it may be.

More than eighteen years ago, a Congresswomen from the San Francisco Bay area led a group of her Democratic female House colleagues in marching across Capitol Hill to demand a delay in the confirmation hearings of then-Judge Clarence Thomas.  That woman, a Ma’am Barbara Boxer, was upset because that good man had, in a conversation with a female co-worker, supposedly made references to pubic hairs on a can of Coke and talked about a pornographic movie.

The person, a Miss Anita Hill, leveling those lurid accusations could find no one to corroborate the crime.

Well, seven years later, Ma’am would find herself in the Senate, with a man from her party in the White House.  That man, a Mr. Bill Clinton, would stand accused of sexual indiscretions, all corroborated and all of which, unlike those leveled against Mr. Thomas involved physical contact.  It wasn’t just Monica Lewinsky.  That Democrat groped one woman in the White House while another woman accused him of raping her when he was Attorney General of Arkansas.  Unlike Miss Hill, Juanita Broaddrick had corroborating evidence.

And as this information came out, you’d have expected a woman like Mrs. Boxer, so concerned about a Republican’s supposed boorish conversation would, upon learning of the aggressive actions of the then-President of the United States, have stormed the White House gates.  But, not our Ma’am.  She was silent, never chastised the Democrat, even thanked him after winning reelection in 1998.

Given Ma’am’s obvious double standards, you’d think the media might ask her why she was so upset about a Republican’s conversation, but indifferent to a Democrat’s behavior.

Seems for this woman, partisan politics trumps all else, even the welfare of her fellow females.  And she styles herself a feminist.  Let’s hope that in this era of new media, Ma’am’s constituents learn of her double standards and her partisan zealotry.  The MSM certainly hasn’t done its job about telling the truth of this hypocrite.

Jonah Goldberg could find inspiration in Anne Moir and David Jessel’s Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women for a sequel to his book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change.

The problem is that it is the apostles of sexual sameness who set the agenda; they would enact the laws and ban the books in a vain attempt to divert children from their natural sexual identities.  But the idea that we are all born with a clean slate of mine, a tabula rasa, ready for society to print its message upon, is a totalitarian’s dream.  And if, after all, we are what we are because of our biology, is it not as monstrous and hopeless a task to eliminate our differences as it was to create a master race?  There is a disturbing whiff of sexual fascism in the premises and prescriptions of those who advocate sexual neutrality.

How about calling this tome Sexual Fascism:  The Secret History of Feminism, from the Social Construction of Gender to Gloria Steinem’s Defense of Bill Clinton’s Philandering?

For all Obama’s noble-sounding campaign rhetoric about how he’s a post-partisan kind of leader offering a new kind of politics, he has emerged as perhaps the most partisan of presidents, offering the same old kind of politics, practiced for decades in the City of Chicago based on an art first perfected in Tammany Hall.

He didn’t bring people into the White House versed in the art of political compromise and civil discourse, but instead individuals who cut their teeth in the rough and tumble of partisan politics.  In July, Michael Barone observed that most “of Obama’s top White House staffers are politics operatives, not policy wonks.”  Just this week, linking a column which build on Barone’s point, Michelle Malkin called Obama’s policy “the Perpetual Campaign.”

In that column, Dan Gerstein offered

This was meant to be an innocuous bit of inside baseball touting Gaspard’s labor roots and progressive bona fides. But it wound up revealing the Obama White House’s biggest weakness: The president’s top advisers are not just overly political, they are almost totally political. Indeed, this West Wing is stacked with “hacks”–campaign professionals who are acculturated to think, act and win in the hothouse environments of elections, not to govern a bitterly divided country in extremely difficult times.

. . . . .

Now, new presidents always bring trusted campaign advisers into their administrations. But they usually mix them with a range of serious governing professionals, who come with a very different ethos, to balance out the politicos and bring diverse perspectives into the presidential inner circle. This White House is disproportionately different. But Obama’s West Wing is devoid of governing wise men (think Leon Panetta forBill Clinton, James Baker for the first George Bush and Clark Clifford for multiple Democrats). It is stocked almost exclusively with political pros and a handful of Friends of Barack whose main and often dominant frame of reference is partisan or personal.

After spelling out the partisan pedigree of various Obama staffers, Gerstein points out what’s missing.

What’s missing from this group, besides diversity of experience and interests, is a senior adviser or two with an independent point of view who could carry Obama’s post-partisan portfolio. Someone who would wake up every day thinking about how to form broad-based coalitions, (more…)

For all the talk from the MSM about a “civil war” in the GOP, it would appear that there are quite a number of “angry” liberals in the Democrat Party too. The liberal America Blog is calling for a boycott, or “pause” as they prefer to call it, of the DNC, Organizing for America and the Obama campaign due to broken promises on gay rights:

We are asking voters to pledge to withhold contributions to the Democratic National Committee, Organizing for America, and the Obama campaign until the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is passed, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) is repealed, and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is repealed -– all of which President Obama repeatedly promised to do if elected.

America Blog’s “pause” is being echoed by other prominent liberal blogs and bloggers, including: Daily Kos, Dan Savage, David Mixner, FireDogLake, Michelangelo Signorile, Pam’s House Blend & Towleroad.

It’s not just a failure on gay rights by Obama/Pelosi/Reid that has liberal Democrats upset, the Stupak amendment to the recently-passed House version of ObamaCare has angered the prominent Open Left blog enough to likewise call for a boycott of the DCCC:

It is time for progressives to pass a Stupak amendment of our own. We need to stop giving money to organizations that spend money on John Boccieri, Bobby Bright, Travis Childers, Parker Griffith, and Harry Teague. We are better off without spending a single dime on most, if not all, of these 23 Democrats.

Their call to boycott the DCCC is being echoed by DailyKos.

With all the angst out there on both sides of the political spectrum it appears that we do indeed live in “interesting times“. How’s that hopeychangeyness coming along, Mr. President?

– John (Average Gay Joe)

The title of his latest is Paranoia Strikes Deep.

As we celebrate today the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Empire, let us take a moment to remember the bitter legacy of Communism, based on an ideology drawn up not by men who studied human nature, but by an intellectual who studied law and philosophy and surrounded himself by other radicals.

Marx had little (if any) contact with the working classes for whom he claimed to speak and little (if any) experience with the actual creation of wealth.  He largely lived off his wife’s various inheritances and the generosity of his colleague, er, comrade, Friedrich Engels.

Unlike capitalism which arose organically with the collapse of feudalism during and just after the Renaisance, communism arose first in the minds of men.  It was, to borrow a term from gender theorists (whose ideas also arose not from the study of human nature, but from their own ideology) a type of “social construction.”

Communism, like a certain piece of legislation which narrowly passed the House in the dead of the night this past Saturday, was an idea based not on policies which work, but one which intellectuals and policy wonks imagined would work if just given the chance.

But, when given that chance, Communism killed more people than any other ideology in human history and impoverished hundreds of millions of others, stifling their spirits and limiting their opportunities.

When the Berlin Wall fell twenty years ago, so too did the illusion of the promised land promised by Marxist ideology.

As we celebrate today one of the greatest accomplishments of the most accomplished president of the second half of the twentieth century, it becomes incumbent on ourselves to contrast his rhetoric with that of the current incumbent.  Whereas Ronald Reagan reserved his greatest venom for the enemies of the United States, Barack Obama reserves his for the adversaries of the Democratic Party and the opponents of his ideology.

We have seen him repeatedly blame his predecessor for the difficulties of the job for which he spent two years campaigning to get.  Nixon never blamed, at least not in public, Johnson for leaving him a mismanaged war in Vietnam.  Once in office, FDR didn’t remind Americans of the failings of his predecessor, instead he appealed to the best in their nature — and this nation.

And now, if this quote from Democratic Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon is accurate, we’ve got the current President of the United States using a derogatory and juvenile term to dismiss the concerns of increased government control over health care:

Mr. Obama, during his private pep talk to Democrats, recognized Mr. Owens election and then posed a question to the other lawmakers. According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked, “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”

Emphasis in original, hat tip to Ed Driscoll.  This Democrat uses more divisive rhetoric, far more divisive, than his polarizing predecessor.  Some new kind of politician that.

Ronald Reagan may have been the Great Communicator.  The man who currently occupies his old office has become the Great Divider.

UPDATE: (more…)

I’ve been trying to figure out why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (likely following orders handed down from the White House) was so determined to hold a vote on a bill to increase government control over one-sixth of our economy the week after her party suffered its worst shellacking at the polls since President George W. Bush’s in election in 2004.  And that year, that good, but flawed Republican, didn’t win New Jersey, Pennsylvania or New York’s Westchester County as did his fellow partisans last week.

Not just that, his margin in the Old Dominion was ten points lower than that of the victorious Republican gubernatorial candidate last week.  Voters didn’t just turn against the Democrats; if polls are any indication, people are turning, in increasing numbers against the Obama/Pelosi health care plan:

The Ipsos-McClatchy poll taken at the end of October showed a 15-point drop in support for the plan among independents over the course of last month. That helped drive down overall support for the health bill to 42 percent versus 52 percent against.

So, why did she do it?  Perhaps the bill’s narrow passage is, as Ed Morrissey speculates “the high-water mark for ObamaCare.”  If Democrats didn’t push it now, the bill would stand even less chance of passage.

Or maybe it’s more than that.  Maybe Democrats really do see last week’s election as purely local affairs and think that polling trends show increasing opposition to big government are blips on the radar screen, a temporary reaction to a down economy.

But, I think it’s the Democratic mindset, that of both Mrs. Pelosi and the supposedly post-partisan president.  As his far White House staff reveals, this guy is the most partisan figure to occupy the Oval Office at least since Nixon.  They really do want to fundamentally transform America, regardless what the polls say and the people feel.

It is a fitting tribute on the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall to rightly note the man who challenged the evils of Communism, rallied his nation behind him and defeated the oppressive regimes.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has history right as she told our US Congress last week. America won the Cold War through leadership, not waffling:

I think of John F. Kennedy, who won the hearts of the Berliners, when, during his visit in 1961, after the wall had been built, he reached out to the desperate citizens of Berlin by saying, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” I think of Ronald Reagan, who, far earlier than most, clearly saw the sign of the times and, standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate, already in 1987, called out, “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” This appeal shall remain forever in my heart.

I thank George Herbert Walker Bush for the trust he placed in Germany and then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl, offering something of immeasurable value to us Germans already in May 1989: partnership in leadership. What a generous offer 40 years after the end of the Second World War.

God Bless Ronald Reagan. No doubt, the greatest President I will see in my lifetime. Today is one of those days when I remember what it is to be an American and the awesome responsibility we have as being freedom’s last beacon of hope.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Maybe some of our readers can help me out on this.  You see, I’m a little confused about the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Islamist radical who murdered thirteen Americans at Ft. Hood earlier this week.

We read that he feared deployment to Afghanistan because he didn’t want to fight Muslims, yet we also read that he celebrated Islamist suicide bombings.  

So, here’s where lies my confusion.  Most of those murdered by said suicide bombings are Muslims.  So, he’s concerned about an army which fights with some Muslims on behalf of other Muslims, yet celebrates Muslims who murder Muslims in cold blood?

UPDATE (from Bruce): ABC NEWS — US Officials Aware of Hasan Efforts to Contact al Qaeda.  But, no.  This wasn’t an Islamist terror attack on US soil.  Noooooooooooooooooooo.

The good news about the House vote yesterday to approve PelosiCare is that the city where I was born, Cincinnati, Ohio will, come January 2001, once again have a Republican Congressman.  Now that Steve Driehaus, who currently represents the Queen City, voted in favor of HR 3962, he has all but guaranteed that Steve Chabot, the man he  ousted in 2008 by clinging to Obama’s coattails, will win his old seat back.  And Chabot won’t be the only Republican ousting a Democratic incumbent next fall.

Just scanning the list of Democrats who voted for increased government control over our health care, I see Republican pickups elsewhere in Ohio as well as in New Hampshire, New York, Virginia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Florida and Tennessee.  And even though yesterday’s vote does not guarantee enactment of this multi-hundred billion dollar bureaucratic boondoggle, it does guarantee Republican pickups in next fall’s elections.  And some of those Democrats who voted “Nay” may be swept up in the rising tide against their party.

I wonder how many of the 220 representatives who voted for the bill actually read the whole (or even significant parts of the) bill.  The backlash against those who voted in favor is surely already beginning, but will increase as citizens find particularly offensive or onerous provisions in the legislation which many Congressman did not know they had voted for.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may not have posted the bill online in time for all those voting on it to read it, but it is online now.

While our representatives did not have had time to read the bill before they voted on it, citizens will have a chance to read it before we vote on them.  A “Yea” vote for many will mean a “Nay” vote from their constituents. (more…)

The unhappy Barney Frank has a strange habit of associating himself with people who violate silly laws.  Back in 1989, his occasional lover operated a brothel out of the Massachusetts Democrat’s Capitol Hill home.  Eighteen years later Barney “was present during a marijuana arrest at James Ready’s home in Ogunquit, Maine.  Ready is well-known for his relationship with Congressman Frank.”

Now, I’m all for laws decriminalizing prostitution and pot and, in the abstract, Mr. Frank’s association with such figures should not be that big of a deal.

We are, however, not dealing with abstractions.  This mean-spirited Democrat is a Representative in the United State Congress and even Chairman of a powerful committee.  It’s his job to write the laws of the land.  So, does his association with such figures suggest a lackadaisical attitude toward enforcement of tate laws?  (Or, maybe he’s making a point about federalism since he serves in the federal, not state, government?)

Now, Barney’s saying that he had no clue that the plants in Mr. Ready’s home were marijuana. Yeah, right.  And he didn’t know Steve Gobie was using his residence to turn tricks.

It seems that acknowledging mistakes is something this Democrat just can’t do.

Glenn Reynolds thinks ol’ Barney’s “being as honest as he has been on the stimulus and healthcare. . . .”  Not to mention his assurances about the solvency of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Unless we get linked by a very high-traffic blog, Saturdays and Sundays tend be our slowest days where we see a huge drop-off in the number of visits we get. It seems most people would rather spend times with their families and friends than follow politics.

Perhaps that’s why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi decided to schedule the health care vote for Saturday, a day when most Americans are paying little attention to events in our nation’s capital.

Oh, and, I wonder how many Congressmen actually read the bill they’re voting on and whether it had been posted for 72 hours online before today’s debate (as Mrs. Pelosi promised).

The conventional wisdom is that the 49 Democrats from congressional districts that backed John McCain last fall are those likely to tip the balance in the current debate on health care.  

Given the results of last Tuesday’s elections, however, those Democrats for districts which delivered 45% of their votes (or more) to the Republican should also be concerned.  And maybe even those from districts which delivered fewer than 57% of their votes to Barack Obama last fall.

In his analysis of those elections, Karl Rove observed, “The overall shift away from Democrats was 13 points in Virginia, 12 points in New Jersey, and eight points in Pennsylvania.”

Given the growing opposition to PelosiCare, a shift of eight points no longer seems out of the question (should the bill pass), indeed, it now seems increasingly likely in next fall’s elections.  Many Democrats may find themselves in a bind though, knowing that if they vote, “No,” in the interests of appeasing their constituents, they may well incur the ire of the party’s left-wing base, drying up sources of financial support and campaign volunteers.

Even passage of the bill today does not mean Obama/Pelosicare becomes the law of the land.  Remember that while the House may have passed the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill by the narrowest of margins back in June, neither House seems any closer to passing a companion version in the Senate and reconciling the differences so they can send it to President Obama for his signature.

Should Mrs. Pelosi’s bill pass today, many of those Democrats who vote in favor–and not just the 49 from “McCain districts” are going to hear from their constituents.  And I daresay what they hear may cause a few of them to change their votes the next time they have to vote on such legislation.

As I research the idea of male aggression for the chapter in my dissertation on why men need the goddess Athena, I encounter reams of evidence, from the social as well as the natural sciences, which provide substance to my “gut” suspicion of the term, “marriage equality.”

In their 1989 book, Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women, Anne Moir and David Jessel write:

A hundred years ago, the observation that men were different from women, in a whole range of aptitudes, skills, and abilities, would have been a leaden truism, a statement of the yawningly obvious.

Such a remark, uttered today would evoke very different reactions.

But, these differences are real and they go to the very heart of the debate about marriage:

The appreciation, for instance, that sex has different origins, motives and significance in the context of the male and female brains, that marriage is profoundly unnatural to the biology of the male, might make us better and more considerate husbands and wives.

Sex differences are not then a social construct and men and women see marriage in profoundly different terms, at least until their mutual sexual attraction brings them together in a committed relationship.  

We know how real those differences are from even such a zealous advocate of gay marriage as Andrew Sullivan.  He understands how hard monogamy is for men and offers excuses today for men’s failure to realize that ideal, a failure he refused to countenance when he was writing/debating gay marriage in the 1990s.

Does acknowledgement of these differences mean that gay people should abandon the struggle for state recognition of same-sex marriage?  For now, I’ll say, “not necessarily.”  It does mean, particularly given the results in Maine this past week, that we need change the way we approach the debate.

Ten months ago, just days before a new dawn in America, then President-elect Barack H. Obama told us that

Economists from across the political spectrum agree that if we don’t act swiftly and boldly, we could see a much deeper economic downturn that could lead to double-digit unemployment and the American Dream slipping further and further out of reach.

(Via Instapundit.)  With the swift action he proposed, his team promised us we’d see unemployment top out at about 8% in the summer and start to decline in the fall.  We wouldn’t see double-digit unemployment.  Well, with the numbers announced today, we’re seeing just that.

(Chart via Gateway Pundit.)  Maybe we’d be seeing a different graph if Obama had authored a different stimulus, removing federal regulation and cutting the corporate income tax.

So, given that unemployment continues to climb, don’t you think the President would do well to adjust his priorities and follow the advice of a leading Democrat and “Forget healthcare, focus on employment.”

In trying to spin the results of this week’s elections to fit the Democratic/media narrative that Republicans are a dying species, Administration officials dwell on the results in NY-23 as if the White House were indifferent to the races in New Jersey and Virginia. And anyway, the Democratic candidate in New Jersey was an incumbent Governor weighed down by broken promises and corruption.

Let me remind you what a leading Democratic Governor said just over a month ago about the contest in the Garden State:

Asked in an interview with POLITICO about the New Jersey race, Democratic Governors Association chairman and Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer said flatly: “Corzine wins.”

Then the always-colorful Schweitzer stood up, reached into his pocket and shook a few coins, and doubled-down: “I bet whatever money is in my pocket he’s going to win.”

Was he just betting his change?

Let’s also recall where President Obama was last weekend.  Yup, you got it.  He was in Jersey, holding rallies in Camden and Newark.  And it wasn’t just the President.  The Democratic National Committee was urging Maine Democrats to make calls to New Jersey on behalf of Jon Corzine while doing nothing to help Defeat Question 1 (the citizens’ veto of a state law recognizing same-sex marriages).

According to liberal blogger John Aravosis:

the DNC was in fact doing more than sending generic “get out the vote” messages to advocate. In states they deemed worthy, they were actually organizing for specific things on the ballot. Marriage in Maine simply didn’t pass muster.

It’s not just that, a DNC official told Aravosis that it “did not send an email to our Maine list asking them to make calls in New Jersey.”  Democrats, while begging for gay money, were more concerned about reelecting an embattled Democrat than opposing Question 1.  

It must really hurt for those gay Democrats who have such high expectations for their party.

Let’s see, 69 (of 258) House Democrats “have expressed opposition to the Speaker’s health care bill.”  The party’s leadership may delay the vote slated for tomorrow on the bill as they struggle to find enough votes to pass it.  No wonder they’re doing what they always do when they’re in a jam:  blame Republicans.

Yeah, but if Republicans are so divided, um, how come they’re unified in opposing this big-government boondoggle?

As a further sign of discontent on the right, er, left, let’s not forget that

left-wing activist group MoveOn.org began sending out emails seeking contributions to fund primary challenges against any Democratic senator who does not fully support “health care reform with a public option.” Now there’s an update: MoveOn executive director Justin Ruben says the group has raised $3,578,117 for the project and is thinking of new ways to punish errant Democratic lawmakers.

They need to find a way to get those moderates to toe the Pelosi party line.  Wonder if CNN plans to run any articles on the divided Democrats.  ’Cause when it comes to partisan unrest, that’s the real story this week.