Earlier today, in the wake of yesterday’s vote in the New York Senate rejecting gay marriage, the folks at AOL asked me to write about about gay leadership.   Shortly after I sent the completed post it, they published it.  Let me whet your appetite with the first three paragraphs.

In the immediate aftermath of the passage of California’s Proposition 8 last fall — where voters amended the state’s constitution to recognize only marriages between one man and one woman — there was a lot of finger-pointing in the gay community, but no bloodletting.

Leaders of all the major gay organizations kept their jobs, including the leader of the one organization dedicated to promoting gay marriage and the head of the leading gay rights group in the Golden State. Well, Patrick Sammon, head of Log Cabin Republicans, did announce his retirement, but he was resigning for personal reasons and no one was blaming him for Proposition 8′s passage.

Last month, when Maine became the 31st state to reject state-recognition of gay marriage at the ballot box, gay leaders put on their best game face, pointing to voter approval in Washington state of domestic partnerships, but didn’t wonder, at least not publicly, if their own leadership was to blame.

Click here to read the rest.

I’m imagining a clever video where an actress portraying Nancy Pelosi goes in to see her psychiatrist, complaining about the trials and tribulations of being the legislative leader of the majority party in Washington.  She would say that while she felt elated after her party’s electoral victories, winning back in the majority in 2006 and increasing it two years later, she now finds herself becoming increasingly testy, lashing out at friends and enemies alike.  She just can’t contain her rage against Republicans.

She had assumed victory would have exorcized her animus, but instead it’s increased it.  So, the good shrink, stroking his beard, asks her in a thick German accent to do a word association test to help get at the issues tormenting her.  He’ll say a word or expression and ask her to blurt out the first thing that comes to mind.  And for each problem he identifies, Pelosi would reply “tax,” “government program” or “spend.”

Like the Queen in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland who had one way of “settling all difficulties, great or small,” Democrats have one way of addressing all problems:  increase government spending.  In panic over rising unemployment, with 64 percent naming jobs as one of the “one or two most important problems facing the country,” the president hastily arrange a jobs summit at the White House.  Meanwhile, his fellow Democrats in Congress “hope to move early next year” a news jobs bill which when all it costs are tallied up “runs to nearly $300 billion”  (H/t:  Gateway Pundit).

Why don’t they just considering cutting some government regulations and laying off the federal employees who enforce them?  The short term loss in government jobs will yield a long-term gain in private sector employment while decreasing the cost of the federal government (albeit slightly in the grand scheme of things).

But, that wouldn’t involve an expenditure of taxpayers’ money which Democrats seek to spend much like an addict looking for a fix.

A reader alerted me to a strange piece on David Frum’s site in which Jeb Golilnkin said that the GOP will thank conservative lawyer Ted Olson for, together with liberal attorney David Boies, appealing “the constitutionality of California’s ban on gay marriage“:

If they were to succeed in showing the California ban to be what it is, an unconstitutional law that is, in Olson’s words, “utterly without justification” and that brands gays and lesbians as “second-class and unworthy” in the eyes of the law, Republicans will owe the two a debt of gratitude for saving the party from twenty years of supporting a position that 20 years from now men and women will view as utterly abominable.

Um, not so fast, Jeb.  Before you instruct our fellow Republicans on being “on the wrong side of history” (while borrowing a liberal talking point to say as much), take heed to the results of a little 1973 Supreme Court decisions, Roe v. Wade.  There, the court removed the issue of abortion from elected legislatures and overturned their bans on the practice.  And as a result, for the past thirty-six years, abortion has become a divisive social issue.

And back then, some states were already moving to legalize the practice (just as some are moving today to recognize gay marriage).  If federal courts mandate state recognition of gay marriage, gay marriage will become a political football like abortion, forever dividing us.  Mr. Frum should recall that gay marriage first became a political football in the 1990s shortly after the Hawai’i Supreme Court ruled that its state “statute limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples is presumed to be unconstitutional“, remanding the case to lower courts to see if there were compelling “state interests” which justified the ban.  Three years later, a trial court found that there were none.

The same year, Congress enacted the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Two years after that, Hawai’i voters amended their state’s constitution to limit marriage to opposite sex couples.  A raft of state referenda with goals similar to the Aloha State initiative followed.   In this century, the Goodridge decision in Massachusetts mandating that the Bay State legislature recognize same-sex marriages led to a similar flood of state initiatives limiting state recognized marriage to its traditional definition. (more…)

I know that I’m not just whistling in the wind with this post, but whistling in a typhoon.

First of all, I believe Tiger Woods behaved badly in cheating on his wife.  He betrayed his marriage vows and hurt someone to whom he had pledged fidelity.  And while, by dint of his athletic success and graceful manner, he has become a public figure, he has not been entrusted with any public responsibility.

What he has done is a matter for him to work out with his wife.  She has every right to be angry and to excoriate him for his errors.  But, we should not add to her pain by prying into their private life.  Let’s just leave them alone to work this thing out on their own and with those counselors they choose to consult at this difficult time.

Watching CNN while doing my cardio earlier today, I thought I agreed wholeheartedly with something the President had said about economic growth. But that “news” network quoted* only the second half of the statement he made “during the opening session of the White House Jobs Summit” this morning:

While I believe that government has a critical role in creating the conditions for economic growth, ultimately true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector.

Well, the second half is right. And, as for the first half, well, that’s a matter of interpretation.  In this day and age, government does play a critical role in creating the conditions for economic growth.  It creates those conditions by reducing the burdens it places on those institutions in the private sector which create jobs.

I do hope he considered plans to reduce those burdens, making it easier for entrepreneurs to expand their enterprises and innovate their services.

——

*On a chyron while showing him speaking at said summit.

It’s one thing to arrive on the platform after the train has left the station.  It’s quote another to want to change its direction once it’s left.  But that’s what ol’ Ma’am Boxer is trying to do.

With two of the leading scientists behind the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) either under investigation or stepping down (while under investigation) and the Australian Senate rejecting “Labour party Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s carbon emissions bill by a vote of 41-33“, the debate on global warming has shifted, yet Mrs. Boxer, the chairman of the Senate committee which considers climate issues, its Environment and Public Works Committee, acts as if little has changed in the past two weeks.  She finds the real problem is the stolen e-mails, not the doctored data on which she has based her complex cap and trade bill:  ”“You call it ‘Climategate’,” the Democrat inveighed, “I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate’”.

And on she blustered, “”Whatever it is, the main issue is, Are we facing global warming or are we not?”  No, Ma’am, that’s not the main issue, the main issue is whether if there is global warming, it is caused by human activity.  And the temperatures these past ten years don’t show much of a warming trend.

She does want to investigate the hacking.  And is right to do so.  But, try as she may, by making that the focus on her inquiry, she blinds herself to the reality of the climate science.  With each passing day evidence drips out showing calling into question the AGW theory.  The original data have been destroyed.  Other raw data haven’t been released.  AGW proponents have attempted to suppress the work of skeptics while trying to intimidate and/or discredit them and the journals where they publish their findings.

The hacked e-mails are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg which doesn’t seem to be melting, but solidifying.  And the e-mails only help bring to light information that was already out there, but which folk like Mrs. Boxer have been ignoring.  And they help confirm theories that skeptics of global warming have been putting forward. (more…)

Remember, back in February, when our junior Senator, Ma’am Barbara Boxer promised us that the “stimulus” was all about jobs.  Well, in metro areas in the once-Golden State, it’s become all about job losses.

Of the fifteen metropolitan areas recording “jobless rates of 15 percent or worse in October,” nine are in California and three in Michigan.  Let’s do some math here.  Approximately 12% of Americans lives in the Golden State, yet 60% of urban areas with the highest employment are in our state.  One wonders what Mrs. Boxer has been doing for the past seventeen years in the Senate.

While the Democrat has been busy writing books, the people she represents have been losing work.  And she keeps proposing laws which would place additional burdens on those institutions which create jobs: businesses. Regulations of the type she has supported and currently proposes are particularly onerous on small businesses.  And from 1987-2005, small businesses created the most net new jobs.

I do hope Mrs. Boxer will be telling us how she plans on easing the federal burden on small businesses, so innovative individuals and enterprising entrepreneurs can create new companies and/or expand their operations in the Golden State.

I first saw this video on Instapundit, then on PlanetGore, now on Michelle Malkin, and felt that, well, it was too fun not to link here: