I’m very psyched. Clayton, a loyal GP reader from the Mountain States, has made this sign he will carry tomorrow in DC!!

Here is a handy guide to Tea Party Protests around the nation tomorrow.

Oh, if you are a homophobic, socialist, racist liberal — please do not attend.  Your hatred of your fellow Americans who believe in the Constitution is not welcome.

UPDATE: A special plug for the Tea Party protest in San Francisco on Thursday!

Thursday April 15th

UNION SQUARE

4:00 PM to 7:00 PM

(between Macy’s and Tiffany’s)

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

I’m delighting in the serendipity of preparing for my college reunion while reading about left-wing attacks on the Tea Parties.  One (of the many, many) reason(s) I so grew to love my alma mater, America’s finest liberal arts college, was the presence of so many broad-minded liberals.  Yeah, there were a few narrow-minded leftists there, including a number of the faculty, but, by and large, people with differing political views politely agreed to disagree.

I recall so many heated discussions which ended not with recrimination, but respect.  We understood that our ideological adversaries had reached their conclusions in a thoughtful manner and held to said convictions with sincerity.  We didn’t end friendships because of political differences.

So, why, I wonder, can’t White House officials, Democratic Congressman and Senators and left-of-center opinion-makers show the same respect for the Tea Party movement? To be sure, many do, but they appear drowned out by a narrow-minded multitude.

We’ve got reports of Democratic officials in one state bending over backwards to deploy Tea Party Crashers.*   And we’ve got one guy boasting of his efforts to do the same.  Should they succeed, I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that some in the MSM will report the left-wingers’ masquerade as genuine tea party hatred.

Unfortunately, too many of the Tea Party haters lack the respect for different viewpoints that was a hallmark of my undergraduate education.  Instead, it appears they were reeducated at graduated from the school of Saul Alinsky where intellectual discourse takes a back seat to political agitprop:

If you can’t make your enemies go away by ignoring them, call them racists. And if you can’t provide any evidence for your accusations of racism, just manufacture some. And you can always justify it to yourself, because if they’re not bad people, why don’t you like them?

*UPDATE: Michelle reports, “A denial from NH Democrat Kathy Sullivan at TPM. Waiting for response from Now Hampshire…” NH was the state in question.

One of the things I most enjoy about reading Michael Petrelis’ blog is that that leftist blogger minces no words when talking about the various gay organizations.  I believe he has called them Gay, Inc.

Now, while Michael and I agree that it would be a good thing (very good indeed) for gay Americans if Joe Solmonese stepped down as head of HRC and Geoff Kors left “Equality California,” we would certainly lock horns when the time came to pick their replacements.  He’d likely favor someone from the activist mold; I’d pick someone who didn’t have ties to left-wing organizations and Democratic politics.  And who knew how to speak Republican.

That said, Petrelis has a post today where he makes a great point about the gulf between gay bloggers (mostly on the left) and gay organizations (also on the left):

Yes, I know this blog post by SF Weekly’s gay writer Patrick O’Connor, who describes himself as “an uppity fag who is sick of everyone making a buck off his marriage,” is one more snark entry against the leading professional gay orgs at the state and federal level and doesn’t break new ground, but it’s still worthy of attention. Why?

Because it’s a shining example of how there are so few gay bloggers, okay, gays in general, who have either EQCA or HRC’s back. It’s damn near impossible to find pro-EQCA or pro-HRC blog posts, or independent thinkers who proudly back the orgs and their way of operating.

Emphasis added.  Petrelis then quotes Patrick Connors’ piece in the SF Weekly

Like the Human Rights Campaign’s Joe Solmonese, Geoff Kors from EQCA runs a gay ponzi scheme. Trust them! Invest in the organizations that provide their leaders with fat paychecks and watch the social justice trickle down back to the community. Unfortunately they are gay versions of Bernie Madoff. No on 8 was a multi-million dollar disaster. Why would any sane person support a repeal effort in the hands of EQCA? (more…)

Ever since I have begun intense work on my dissertation, I have not had the time to check all the blogs I normally do, so I try to first scan those sites, e.g., Memeorandum, Instapundit, the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential, Yahoo! and AOL’s main page, which are a ready source of information and opinion. To that mix, I usually add Michelle Malkin, not merely for her Buzzworthy Sidebar, but also because I know I can rely on that blogress to check her facts.

When a number of conservative bloggers (including some at this site) were quick to jump on an alleged hate crime committed against a Pennsylvania woman volunteering for the McCain campaign in 2008, Michelle threw cold water on our rush to judgment, contending that the “story smells awfully weird“. She was right to be skeptical as the story proved, just as that blogress had suspected, to be a hoax.

When some blogs reported that when “Louisiana GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal’s campaign fundraising chief, Allee Bautsch, and her boyfriend in the French Quarter of New Orleans” were assaulted in New Orleans because they were wearing Palin pins, Malkin offered a “cautionary note“.  She was right to express caution, as we learned soon after the story surfaced that “Bautsch and her boyfriend were NOT wearing Palin pins.”

While the two people were assaulted, the “the detail about the Palin buttons,” was as Allahpundit points out, “simply wrong“.

I don’t always agree with Michelle Malkin and can find her rhetoric a bit overheated at times, but her blog remains an excellent source of information and her commitment to fact-checking a textbook example in how to blog.  And in this busy time for me, combined with the other sources listed above, she helps us learn what’s going on in the world while offering a unique conservative perspective, with clever visuals and witty asides.

Seeing how well it worked out for them to run against then-President George W. Bush in ’06 and ’08, Democrats are hoping to repeat that strategy this fall.

Well, now Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling firm, has found that in a matchup with his successor, W. is within in the margin of error:

Americans are now pretty evenly divided about whether they would rather have Barack Obama or George W. Bush in the White House. 48% prefer Obama while 46% say they would rather have the old President back.

Pretty astounding numbers given W’s unfavorables when he left office.  Pollster Tom Jensen concludes, “Figuring out a way to make voters change their minds about the current President would be a much more effective strategy for Democrats than continuing to try to score points off the former one.”

I’d been wondering when W. would catch up with Obama in polling.  It’s happening sooner than a lot of people expected.

(H/t:  Jim Geraghty.)

(In a matchup with Ron Paul, Obama leads by a similarly slim margin.)

Last June, as the Senate was about to consider the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Mark Tapscott reminded us of something the thenjunior Senator from Illinois, a Mr. B. Obama, said:

And here is what he said in 2006 on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” regarding Senate Democrats who were then considering filibustering President George W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Samuel Alito:

“Well, I will be supporting the filibuster because I think Judge Alito, in fact, is somebody who is contrary to core American values, not just liberal values, you know.”

Can you imagine how commentators in the news media and left-wing bloggers will tie themselves in knots if a Republican Senator said a Democratic nominee to the Supreme Court was “contrary to core American values.”

Normally, I wouldn’t think it appropriate to filibuster the president’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, but, well, in judicial procedures, we often rely upon precedent.  And a certain Democratic Senator joined his colleagues in setting one.

Republican Senators who filibustered an Obama nominee would just be following in that Democrat’s footsteps.

Of late, I’ve been impressed that the opinion pieces AOL has linked on furnished on its main page come from sensible folk on both sides of the political aisle, but yesterday, they linked a piece by a writer from the left-wing publication, The Nation, which offered the standard, dishonest narrative about the Tea Party movement.  This wasn’t an opinion piece based on the movement, but yet another opinion piece based on the movement as defined by its extremes.

Telling us just exactly Why Tea Partiers Can’t Shake the Racism Label, Paul Wachter dredges up a few examples of obscure tea party activists who said some rather hateful things.  Now, by the Wachter standard, the Democratic Party is sure having a tough time proving that its rank-and-file don’t believe Barack Obama is the Messiah or that the president’s supporters don’t believe opponents of Obamacare are domestic terrorists.

Not just that, this left-winger, while bashing Tea Parties, presumes to tell us just exactly what our problem is, “What might help the tea party avoid accusations of racism would be if it were more forthcoming about what exactly it stands for.”

Um, Paul, we’re against Obama’s big expansion of the federal government and for freedom.  Other reporters who took the time to talk to Tea Party activists figured it out.  He might have also figured it out had he done the some instead of writing about the angry right-wingers who live inside his head.

Wow, this guy is just plain filled with bile.  Expect to see more such screeds on so-called mainstream news outlets in the coming days.

To the credit of AOL, while they did publish this silly screed, they posted it together with a report of the attempts to crash the Tea Party:  ”Opponents of the Tea Party movement are planning to crash the group’s rallies this week as a way to portray the conservative activists as out of touch with ordinary Americans.”

Christopher Weber who wrote the piece did some reporting; Wachter did a lot of projecting.

Just got a note from the Carly Fiorina campaign that the candidate Tom Coburn is backing to replace the big-spending Barbara Boxer in the United States Senate will be attending a Tea Party this Thursday, April 15 in San Diego from 10 to 11 AM at Tuna Harbor Park.

Wonder if her leading opponent will be protesting excessive government spending that day?

For those on the Left who have no problem with our president’s past own personal affiliations with the likes of Wm. Ayres, Jeremiah Wright, and Saul Alinsky who are constantly haranguing anybody to the right of Charles Schumer who doesn’t repudiate their own made-up contrivances of what the Tea Party movement is, comes a thoughtful objection from conservative John Podhoretz to David Goldman’s castigation of Obama.

Podhoretz takes issue with this conclusion to Goldman’s scathing piece (which, BTW, was about Obama’s destruction of our special relationship with Israel…a topic for another day):

Obama is the loyal son of a left-wing anthropologist mother who sought to expiate her white guilt by going to bed with Muslim Third World men. He is a Third World anthropologist studying us, learning our culture and our customs the better to neutralize what he considers to be a malignant American influence in world affairs.

In fairness, Podhoretz rightly excoriates Goldman for his attack on the president’s mother, and even makes this poignant observation:

Spewing repellent nonsense about Obama’s mother and spinning bizarre notions about his innate foreignness — when he is in fact the possessor of one of the great and enduring American stories, and is in his own person a demonstration of precisely the kind of American exceptionalism that Obama so pointedly pooh-poohs — can be used to discredit his opposition.

My slight quibble with John’s objection is simply that, while I agree with him that Ms. Dunham’s predelictions or other vices are a non-sequitur and frankly unbecoming and inappropriate, one can take Goldman’s characterization of Obama being “a Third World anthropologist studying us, learning our culture and our customs the better to neutralize what he considers to be a malignant American influence in world affairs” can be taken metaphorically. I’d definitely see it that way. That description, I think, fits to a T Obama’s view of America (and espeicially Her exceptionalism), which can be seen as such, even for those among us who aren’t birthers.

Punch-line to this is, to the trolls who haunt our comments section, we are having the discussion about those among us who use false accusations and inflammatory rhetoric that cloud our shared disdain for the current president’s socialist proclivities. But perhaps it’s simply happening above the plane of imagined “N-word” accusations and spitting incidents, so they’re not noticing it.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)