Sometimes there is good reason to run against the Republican establishment.  When it taps candidates who favor big government initiatives and pro-union legislation, GOP leaders put their own interests ahead of the rank and file of their party.  Yet, sometimes, some conservatives have come so much to scorn the GOP establishment that they have forgotten why they’re opposing the establishment.  It’s as if opposing that establishment has become a thing into itself, opposing it for the sake of opposing it.

So resentful is Chuck DeVore that Washington Republicans tapped Carly Fiorina, his rival for the GOP Senate nomination in the Golden State, that his campaign, in a bid to raise a few bucks, is tarring that Reagan Republican as the choice of the “D.C.-based Republican establishment.”

In a fund-raising e-mail to supporters, DeVore mentions Carly’s appearance, but doesn’t criticize anything she said.  That is, it’s not her message that bothered him, but the GOP’s choice to have her offer the message.  This isn’t about ideas, it’s about self-interest.

DeVore all but gives away the game in the concluding line of his e-mail, “Any amount you can donate will go to support our conservative cause and defeat the establishment in Washington, D.C.” And I thought the goal was to defeat Barbara Boxer. She’s the one who’s liberal partisanship and big government ways have not helped the Golden State these past seventeen years.

In delivering the Weekly Republican Address on Saturday, Carly Fiorina made her conservative bona fides increasingly clear. And Chuck DeVore used that appearance to continue his war on the GOP establishment. But, unlike Marco Rubio in Florida, DeVore’s battle is not against an establishment candidate who backs big-government policies, but against a conservative Republican who shares Ronald Reagan’s vision.

And don’t we want to push the GOP establishment in the direction of that good man’s great ideas?

Nearly a full year into the Obama Administration, we’re getting a real sense that the new kind of politics is promised in that campaign was just that a promise.  Transparency is going out the window, with a closed door meeting on government openness and relaxation of rules for disclosure for unions.

And on health care, we’ve got the President and congressional Democrats thumbing their nose at the American people.  While polls show opposition to the various Democratic health care reforms increasing with each passing day, indeed, increasing despite mostly favorably coverage in the mainstream media and an aggressive promotional campaign by the President and his team, they press on.

One wonders why the Democrats persist on such an unpopular initiative when voters would rather they focus on fixing the economy, bringing down unemployment and lowering the burgeoning deficit.  Over at the Wall Street Journal, John Fund may have found the answer; it’s all about appeasing the Democratic base:

. . . many in the trenches are uneasy about the sprawling, complex bill they privately acknowledge has no bipartisan support, doesn’t seriously tackle soaring costs and will increase insurance premiums. That may explain Majority Leader Harry Reid’s haste—he has ordered a rare Sunday session this weekend to hurry up the debate. Public support for the bill averages only 39.2% backing in all polls compiled by Pollster.com.

But buried in the surveys is an explanation for the Democratic obsession to pass the bill: An overwhelming 76% of Democrats back it. “They believe the liberal base expects them to deliver and will punish them if they don’t,” says Democratic pollster Doug Schoen, who worked for Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

So, now finally we have an idea of the new kind of politician we have in Barack Obama. New, this type may be on the national stage, but typical he is in the Windy City.  An executive who sees it his job to push the policies of his machine, his cronies, no matter what the cost.

. . . why does his team appear to be so eager to “repaid TARP funds for a new job-creation program“:

The Obama administration will lose $200 billion less than expected from the federal bailout program and is looking at using part of the savings to fund new job creation efforts.

A Treasury official said that the administration now believes the cost of the financial rescue program will be at least $200 billion below the $341 billion estimate it made in August.

Um, fellas at the AP, it’s now the Obama Administration that will lose $200 million less, it’s the federal treasury which will be spared the loss.  But, then again maybe our friends at the AP have become so enamored with Mr. Obama that they can’t separate the two.

When it comes to Adam Lambert, gay organizations should either ignore the guy or criticize him for helping foster the image that gay people are obsessed with sex and flaunting that in the public square.

While many gay and lesbian singers, actors and talk show hostesses live their lives openly, they leave the sexual aspect of their lives where it belongs: behind closed doors.  Now, after Lambert’s recent stunt at the American Music Awards, he has certainly extended his fifteen minutes, maybe to twenty, maybe to a full half hour, but he has done little to make himself anything more than a pop culture phenomenon.  He even made the list of Barbara Walters Most Fascinating People of 2009.  He certainly be on the 10 faded stars of 2010.

And he doesn’t do much to improve the image of gay people.  Neil Patrick Harris and Ellen De Generes he surely ain’t.

You’d think an organization “dedicated to promoting and ensuring fair, accurate and inclusive representation of people and events in the media as a means of eliminating homophobia and discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation,” would not want to encourage antics such as Lambert’s.  Well, despite that mission statement, GLAAD (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) remains, in their words, “steadfast in our assertion that Adam Lambert is being subjected to a double standard by ABC as an openly gay performer. We do not support ABC cancelling Adam Lambert’s past and future performances.“  Guess that wanted to be inclusive of those who engage in such public stunts as his.

Um, fellas, it’s not because he’s an openly gay performer.  It’s because he behaved in a juvenile manner on a nationally televised awards show.

Do the folks at GLAAD feel they need to defend this guy just because he’s gay?  (more…)

Having reviewed the list of books recommended on the reading list designed by Kevin Jennings (and the subject of a recent post), a reader said she found a curious shortage (absence?) of books published before the 1980s.  Indeed, she was struck that he did not include E.M.Forster’s early twentieth century novel of homosexual love, Maurice.

Beyond Maurice and the novels of Jim Grimsley, there is a paucity of gay fiction that deals eloquently and deftly with the emotional aspects of coming out and coming to terms with homosexuality.  Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar does have its moments.  In the comments to that aforementioned post, some of our readers mention Mary Renault‘s fiction, particularly The Charioteer (which I have not read).  (And Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner has some choice passages.)

Given the paucity of good gay fiction, especially of such fiction without scenes of explicit sex, if Jennings had decided to compile a list of books without sex scenes, that list would be small indeed.  It is sad that so many gay men who take it upon themselves to write about their (our?) lives must needs describe the sex act itself whereas gifted writers for millennia have written about sexuality without describing the act itself.

We need need serious fiction, stories which help us explore the complexity of our sexuality and can describe the emotional rewards of monogamous love.  Perhaps, such books are out there, perhaps, they are even on Mr. Jennings lists, but given what I’ve read, given the conversations (and publications) in the debate on gay marriage, I’m doubtful.  Too many see marriage as a right and gratuitous literary descriptions of the sex act an entitlement.

All that said, there are a few books out there which do explore the emotional aspect and complexity of our sexuality.  It just doesn’t seem that (m)any of them are on Mr. Jennings’ list.

In the wake of the publication of the East Anglia e-mails, information strengthening the case of global warming skeptics has been coming to light at such a rapid pace than even the most dedicated followers of this debate can barely keep track of the data coming to light.  Al Gore has cancelled his $1,200 a head reception in Copenhagen.  One of the chief advocates of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis (thanks for the correction, Dave!) got quite testy in confronting a critic.

And the UK’s Met Office (its National Weather Service)

. . . plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.

In other words, as Sonicfrog (who alerted me to this article) notes, “those now examining the state of everything that went on have absolutely no confidence that things were done properly.”  Well, it seems they got cold feet about their reexamination and won’t be doing a do-over, but will be making “an effort to release more data to to public.”  Let’s hope they do more than just make an effort and actually release the data.

Just another sign how much global warming alarmists have been keeping us in the dark. (more…)

When I heard my gal* Carly explain how government regulation makes it difficult for entrepreneurs and employers to create new enterprises and expand existing businesses, I became increasingly enthusiastic about her run for the Senator.  Like the Gipper (and yours truly), she understands that government is not the solution to the problem, it is (more often than not) the problem.

Now,with this morning the Weekly Republican Address on health care, she’s done it again, relating his personal battle with breast cancer to the current national debate on health care:

She doesn’t have the Gipper’s fluency of delivery, but does get his basic view of government, particularly when she asks, “Will a bureaucrat determine that my life isn’t worth saving?”

All this takes on even greater urgency in the midst of the ongoing health care debate in Washington. We wonder if we are heading down a path where the federal government will at first suggest and then mandate new standards for prevention and treatment. Do we really want government bureaucrats rather than doctors dictating how we prevent and treat something like breast cancer?

Sounds a lot like Reagan’s address in 1964 when he warned against the belief that “a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”

Carly goes on to point out how the Senate bill would empower government panels to do just that, plan our lives for us by dictating health care solutions from that “far-distant capital.”   (more…)

Wonder if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will ever take responsibility for her own mistakes.  The “so-called stimulus” isn’t creating the jobs she and her fellow Democrats promised so she vows to spend even more of our money on similar government schemes.

It’s like hiring a guy to do magic incantations to cure your recurrent headaches, then when his supposedly healing words don’t work and the headaches return with even greater force, tossing the Tylenol and renewing his contract.

Now, with the Democrats having been in charge for ten full months (and then some), after having promised us that should Congress pass that aforementioned “stimulus,” unemployment would peak at 8%, Mrs. Pelosi, wait for it, blames her party’s all-purpose bad a guy, a Mr. George W. Bush:

Though jobs numbers released this morning were better than expected, Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want anyone to forget that the economic crisis started under the Bush administration.

The Department of Labor estimated today that just 11,000 jobs were lost in November. . . . Pelosi took the opportunity to take a few shots at the last administration.

(H/t Gateway Pundit.)  Hey, Nancy, you know when that recession began, you’d been Speaker for nearly a full year.

Democrats had majorities in both houses of Congress.  Wonder then how your party’s victories impacted the economy.  And what you and your fellow partisans were doing to forestall an economic decline.

A number of our readers have e-mailed Bruce and me, asking for our commentary on the latest revelation about Kevin Jennings, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Safe and Drug-Free Schools.  As Michelle Malkin put it in introducing her post on the story,

Doing the investigative work the dinosaur, Obama-enabling media won’t do, Scott Baker and a collaborative research team have waded through the sexually explicit reading list endorsed by safe schools czar Kevin Jennings and the group he founded — GLSEN.

For the record, I had been in a communication with a representative of that team and have been aware of the story well before it hit the blogs.  They have done their homework, identifying numerous sexually explicit passages in a reading list Jennings helped design for children in Grades 7-12.

As I read those passages, I recalled the numerous gay novels I had read after I completed my own novel.  What struck me about most gay fiction was not only its self-pitying nature, but the poor writing, the lack of introspection and the absence of character development.  They all seemed to define their sexuality by its sexual expression.  Only a handful (notably the eloquent Jim Grimsley) wrote convincingly about non-sexual longing and emotional intimacy.  Most included gratuitous and graphic descriptions of sexual activity.

And the books on Jennings’ list were no different:

Book after book after book contained stories and anecdotes that weren’t merely X-rated and pornographic, but which featured explicit descriptions of sex acts between pre-schoolers; stories that seemed to promote and recommend child-adult sexual relationships; stories of public masturbation, anal sex in restrooms, affairs between students and teachers, five-year-olds playing sex games, semen flying through the air.

But, would I go as far as the authors of the report to say the books has less to do with “promoting tolerance” than they did with indoctrinating “students into a hyper-sexualized worldview”?  It may be, but I don’t know.  I haven’t read the passages in context of the books in which they appear.

Now, there is nothing wrong with sexual activity nor is there anything wrong to writing about it.  (I do, however, contend that it rarely enhances a work of literature.  If you don’t believe me, just go read some of the classics of Western literature (prior to James Joyce) and see how they writing about human sexuality, its complexity and its expression without describing the sex act.  But, this is a matter for another conversation and another post.)

Indeed, one could include a sexually explicit passage in a novel about developing a mature attitude toward sexuality.  One could show how a young gay man moves from expressing his sexuality in pure sexual terms, but evolves to understand the emotions behind the sexual attraction, that, in being drawn to a particular man’s body, he slowly begins to appreciate him for what lies beneath the skin.

Now, presenting that emotional journey may well make for a good novel, but is it appropriate to encourage for schoolchildren to read such descriptions?  Maybe for kids older than sixteen (tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades), but clearly not for students in Middle School (or their first year of high school in some states).

As we ask that question, let me pose another that the other conservative bloggers who have picked up the story have not considered:  is this the image of homosexuality we want to promote to adolescents struggling with sexual feelings of which they are just becoming aware? (more…)

Imagine, if you will, that in the wake of the passage last fall of Proposition 8 in California, a group of social conservatives thought it was time to reintroduce the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) in Congress.  As they did, they announced a national media campaign to promote the measure, encouraging supportive Senators and Representatives to return to their state and districts and hold townhalls to promote the proposed constitutional amendment.

As one particularly strong supporter of the amendment scheduled just such a meeting in his Missouri district, gay activists got wind of the meeting and starting rallying their supporters from the area to participate and ask tough questions.  Well, the Congressman’s supporters found out about these plans.  And to prevent them from “disrupting” the event, they called a local Christian mega-church, asking its powerful pastor to help out.  Specifically, they wanted him to dispatch his vaunted security team to the event and to alert his congregation to pack the auditorium.

Well, he did as he was asked.  On the day of the meeting, the security force stood at the main entrance, making sure no one got in that way until just before the program started.  The larger-than expected crowd milled about restlessly outside.  Meanwhile, churchgoers were quietly entering the hall through a side door.

Film crews arrive and start filming the largely gay crowd.  They have come prepared and are brandishing a great variety of signage promoting gay marriage and denouncing the proposed amendment.  Concerned now that while they have won the battle of the auditorium, they may lose the battle of the “narrative,” the evangelical security force tries to wrest some of the signs from the protesters.  An enterprising gay man walks down the line, selling rainbow flags.  He’s doing a brisk business.  Fearful that these flags will dominate the camera shot, a few of the burly evangelicals try to prevent him from distributing his wares to the growing multitude.

Defiantly, he continues to sell.  This upsets the evangelical thugs;  they rip the flags out of his hand and wrestle him to the ground, kicking him repeatedly.  Another activist captures this on his cell phone.  Soon, police arrive, pushing the Christian crusaders off the slight young man and helping him into an ambulance which whisks him away to a nearby hospital.

In such a scenario, don’t you think the media would have a field day, making a martyr of the slight young man and demanding swift justice for the burly evangelicals?  (They’d probably also demand an investigation and call on the Congressman to resign.) (more…)

So, here’s a story about an extramarital liaison which should have legs.  It has more relevance to our public discourse than any tale of a golf player’s indiscretions.  And reveals more about corruption in our nation’s capital than the irresponsible actions of a junior Senator who carried on with a staffer.

Here we’ve got a committee chairman, playing a key role in drafting health care legislation, not merely carrying on with a staffer, but doing so while nominating her for a position of power and authority:

Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus’ office confirmed late Friday night that the Montana Democrat was carrying on an extramarital affair with his state office director, Melodee Hanes, when he nominated her to be U.S. attorney in Montana. According to a source familiar with their relationship, Hanes and Baucus began their relationship in the summer of 2008 – nearly a year before Baucus and his wife, Wanda, formally separated in April. The Senator has since divorced his wife.

Glenn Reynolds, whose post alerted me to the story quips, “At least the former Mrs. Baucus didn’t attack him with a golf club.”

For some reason, I don’t think the MSM will give this story the same coverage they gave to that featuring another Western Senator, but from the other side of the aisle.

Perhaps, as one of his first acts as President of the United States, instead of returning a bust of Winston Churchill to our friends in the United Kingdom, Barack Obama had studied the life and leadership of that great man, he could better lead this great nation.   That Englishman “inherited” far worse problems from his two immediate predecessors than the American did from his.

And wheareas instead of demonstrating “bottomless reservoirs of gracelessness” in faulting those predecessors for “the terrible mess he inherited” as Obama has done toward his immediate predecessor, Churchill, according to Paul Johnson, showed magnanimity toward those flawed leaders:

Churchill wasted an extraordinarily small amount of his time and emotional energy on the meanness of life:  recrimination, shifting the blame onto others, malice, revenge seeking, dirty tricks, spreading rumors, harboring grudges, waging vendettas.  Having fought hard, he washed his hands and went on to the next contest.  It is one reason for his success.  There is nothing more draining and exhausting than hatred.  And malice is bad for the judgment.  Churchill loved to forgive and make up.  His treatment of Baldwin and Chamberlain* after he became prime minister is an object lesson in sublime magnanimity.  Nothing gave him more pleasure than to replace enmity with friendship, not least with the Germans.

An object lesson Obama is in sore need of learning.  In his speech on Afghanistan, by one pundit’s count, he “adverted at least half a dozen times to the supposed blunders of his predecessor.”  And he’s not the only official in his Administration who eschews such Churchillian magnanimity in order to lambaste George W. Bush.  In an email to supporters touting Obama’s Afghanistan speech, Vice President Biden “said of the new policy towards Afghanistan: ‘It’s a clean break from the failed Afghanistan policy of the Bush administration, and a new, focused strategy that can succeed.’”

Why must they always define their policies by contrasting them to the “failed” ones of W instead defending them on their own merits?

Wonder how we could make a teaching moment for these two?

* (more…)

Just one last reminder about the GayPatriot holiday party this coming Sunday, December 6 in Los Angeles, starting at 4 PM. E-mail me for details.

More often than not, a reader pens a comment which deserves a post of its own.  And so it is with the questions DRH posed in response to my piece opposing the judicial resolution of gay marriage:

1) Do you really think homosexuality will *ever* become a non-divisive issue?

2) How do you think the divisiveness surrounding abortion would have played out had the outcome of Roe been different?

These are great questions. I think the first is more easily answered than the second.  That latter being one of the great “What Ifs” of contemporary American history.

Right now, to the first, I’ll say I don’t know, but the signs clearly point in the direction of it becoming a non-issue.  It certainly is less of an issue than it once was, with the divisions clearly surrounding state recognition of gay marriage.

To the second, I think that in the absence of Roe, there would still be divisions over abortion, but they likely wouldn’t be a harshly drawn as they are today.

in the forty-eight hours and some since President Obama spoke to the nation to outline his new strategy on Afghanistan, I’ve moved from concern about the absence of conviction in his rhetoric to cautious optimism about his relative indifference to the war effort.  Now, don’t get me wrong; I don’t think he wants us to lose the war there, far from it.  It’s just that I think he’d rather focus on other things.

And as far as Afghanistan is concerned, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  In fact, it may be a good thing, indeed, a very good hence my slight change of heart since I heard him speak.

When he addressed the nation, he didn’t seem to have his heart in his speech as he has in past addresses. Yet, the nut and bolts of his strategy are pretty sound.  Not just that, he has in charge of the effort two men involved in the successful “surge” in Iraq, Defense Secretary Robert Gates who supervised that shift his strategy from his then-new perch at the Pentagon and General Stanley McChrystal who, as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command in 2007, helped General David Petraeus implement the surge in Iraq.

If the President’s heart is not as much in this effort as it is in overhauling our health care system, he likely won’t micromanage the war as LBJ micromanaged Vietnam, devoting his time to his domestic agenda.  He’ll let the generals win the war based on the broad guidelines he set and the conditions on the ground.  With General McChrystal in charge, the President has picked a good man.  Should he let his fight the war according to the plans that outstanding soldier has outlined, we’re likely to succeed in Iraq, achieving the victory Obama refused to call by its name.

Even so, should we win Iraq, Obama will deserve a substantial share of the credit.  He’s the guy who tapped McChrystal.  And he’s the one who signed off on his strategy.

RELATED:  Charles Krauthammer disagrees.

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.