Well, here’s something we saw coming:

Seems people are confused as to when they get their free ObamaCare. McClatchy report that there’s a lot of complication in the Stalinization of Health Care act of 2010. What a surprise.

While companies are lamenting that the legislation is going to cost them billions of dollars, and their employees hundreds of thousands of jobs, health care customers are likewise vexed by the new regime.

Now, in all fairness, the enactment of any hostile takeover large new program by the federal government would have many moving parts and lead to lots of questions. But this little part stands out:

…much of the guidance will depend on Department of Health and Human Services regulations that are still being developed.

Yes, that’s leviathon regulation. And we don’t even yet know how it’s going to flesh out.

Brings to mind two very memorable quotes from two very memorable ladies:

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)

Okay, this is kind of inside-ball (but now that the season’s begun and the Rockies are undefeated!*, I’ll go there), but it’s incredibly important:

Net neutrality, as it’s called, is the death-knell for a free and uncensored Internet. In short, it’s an end-run to regulate the entire medium, and it took a good blow today when a 3-judge panel bitch-slapped the FCC, determining it did not have the authority to boss ISPs around.

As we see governments around the US (such as my formerly-feedom-loving Centennial State) enacting tax laws and other onerous regulations at the expense of our right to free and open access to information and communication, the Orwellian-named concept of Net neutrality is not going to die an easy death.

In fact, the panel’s reasoning was that, since Congress hadn’t passed a law yet giving the FCC the authority to issue such regulations, expect a new push in that oh-so-representative body to take up the issue. You know, they’ve been so loath historically to over-regulate us, right?

Vigilance is necessary, my friends. A good place to start educating yourself (if you haven’t already) is—as usual—Cato, and, naturally, the reliable Reason has a lot of good information as well.

Given the lengths to which the Obama Administration and Pelosi/Reid Congress will go to in order to push for their utopian Soviet-style vision for America, don’t be surprised if they make an attempt to sneak through this liberty-crushing measure under the radar. The innocuous-sounding label of “Net neutrality” is likely to assist in that usurpation. It’s a highly-technical issue, and one in which most Americans won’t be very deeply engaged. But this is the way the Net ends, not with a bang.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)

*UPDATE: Giambi was unable to save the day, so Rox lose to the Brewers, dropping their record to .500, which is, by the way, still pretty good for this early in the season.

Ah, so what if he once lived in freedom and was stripped away from his American family by President Clinton and shipped to the heart of a Communist dicatorship.  At least Elian and I will soon have the  same socialist-inspired healthcare that Michael Moore so loves.  Meet Comrade Gonzalez.  I’m betting President Obama would love to add him as an advisor some day.   After all, there are enough Marxists in the West Wing now to fill Castro’s palace in Havana.

Elian Gonzalez holds a Cuban flag during the UJC, Union of Young Communists, congress in Havana Sunday April 4, 2010. Gonzalez, the Cuban boy at the center of an international custody battle 10 years ago in April 2000, attended Cuba’s Young Communist Union wearing an olive green military school uniform.(AP Photo/Ismael Francisco, Prensa Latina)

In the late ’90s, a 5-year-old boy named Elian Gonzalez found himself at the center of an international tug-of-war. On Thanksgiving Day in 1999, Elian was found floating off the coast of Florida after the boat that was taking him from Cuba to the United States sank. His mother and 10 others drowned.

Relatives in Miami opened their arms to Elian. Marisleysis Gonzalez, his 21-year-old cousin, became Elian’s primary caregiver. “I guess he saw that mother figure in me,” she says. “He was always attached to me.”

For five months, Elian lived in Florida. Then, one day, his father came to claim him.

With the U.S. government’s help, Marisleysis says she and her family arranged for a psychologist to help determine where Elian should live…but that meeting never happened. One day, Marisleysis says federal agents stormed her house with their guns drawn and took Elian away. “It was terrifying. It was something I never expected,” she says. “[Elian] was begging for nobody to take him.”

The world is a better place with you in it.  Our house is definitely different now!  *grin*

Happy Birthday to the One Year Old!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

I post these poll data merely as fodder to ruin our liberal trolls’ evening.

On major issues, 48% of voters say that the average Tea Party member is closer to their views than President Barack Obama. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 44% hold the opposite view and believe the president’s views are closer to their own.

Not surprisingly, Republicans overwhelmingly feel closer to the Tea Party and most Democrats say that their views are more like Obama’s. Among voters not affiliated with either major political party, 50% say they’re closer to the Tea Party while 38% side with the President.

Poll after poll shows that Independent voters have fled Obama and are not coming back.  This is a fact.  Not a conspiracy theory about BushHalliburtonCheneyRove.

Facts are stubborn things.  Liberals should study facts more, not create their own realities.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Since Tom Campbell trailing badly in the race for the California GOP gubernatorial nomination jumped to the Senate race, I have been largely silent on this blog about the move.  To be sure, at least two of his new media people, both individuals I respect, have reached out to me.

While I have never shifted my personal allegiance from Carly Fiorina, I was initially less concerned about Campbell’s candidacy than that of Chuck DeVore.  I had heard Campbell speak last June at a Cato event here in LA and was impressed with his understanding of and commitment to the ideas and ideals of free markets.  But, given his record in Sacramento where he served a stint as director of the California Department of Finance, it seems that commitment is entirely rhetorical.

And then, we learned about his association with some unsavory characters who had terrorist associations.  Today, Jimmy LaSalvia, Executive Director of GOProud is calling the FCINO (Fiscal Conservative in Name Only) out on those ties:

[LaSalvia said,] “The greatest threat facing gay people worldwide is the spread of radical anti-gay Islam. Unfortunately, Tom Campbell’s record makes it clear he either doesn’t understand that or is unwilling to confront it.”

Campbell wrote a letter of support for convicted terrorist Sami Al-Arian, who actually raised money for Campbell’s failed run for Senate in 2000. Al-Arian was indicted in February 2003 as the North American head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In the indictment, it was revealed that in Al-Arian’s communications with his colleagues were discussions of terrorist operations. Among the victims of these operations in Israel were several Americans.

“Tom Campbell raised money from and publicly voiced support for a convicted terrorist,” continued LaSalvia. “A man who once publicly declared, ‘Jihad is our path. Victory to Islam. Death to Israel. Revolution. Revolution until victory. Rolling to Jerusalem.”

This is not a man gay people can, in good conscience, support.

If Campbell’s lead in the polls for the GOP Senate nomination does not continue to erode as it appears to be doing, Democrats would be wise to tap Micky Kaus as their party’s nominee for the U.S. Senate.  Many Republicans, straight and gay alike, wary of supporting a candidate with associations like Campbell’s might opt for a new face instead of the failed Senator now ending her third term in Washington.

The crash is hard when it comes.  Our poor yoot were deceived and ignorant about what/who they were voting for.  Perhaps their eyes are slowly opening....

[U]pper-middle-class professionals—are suddenly downwardly mobile. For years, they used rising family wealth to help foot the bill for college, down payments for houses and start-up cash for children’s careers. But pay cuts, layoffs and the decade-long flat-lining of the stock market mean many families can no longer help their children.

This comes as young adults could use a financial helping hand more than ever. The unemployment rate for workers ages 16 to 29 was 15.2% in March, the highest rate since 1948, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In general, highly trained and educated workers are faring better than those without degrees in this labor market. The unemployment rate for college graduates is 5%, compared with 9.7% overall. In general, the employment picture is improving, with employers adding 162,000 jobs in March, the biggest monthly gain in three years.

Even so, the average length of unemployment, 31 weeks, is at its highest level since 1948. There were a total of 2.3 million unemployed college graduates in March 2010, 1.45 million more than in March 2007, with heavy layoffs in white-collar sectors such as finance.

So the young are being penalized by Obama’s economic policies and healthcare mandate.  And those making over $250,000 (who voted for Obama by a majority) are now having to pay for the rest of the President’s welfare policies.

I think I’ve figured out Obama’s principles:  Use them, throw them under the bus, move on to next target.  No wonder he hearts Castro & Chavez.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Unlike Bruce, I have only recently become a fan of Ann Coulter.

I knew her when we were both in law school, she at Michigan, I at U-VA and while impressed with her intellect, I was irritated by her schtick, playing the leggy blond right-winger who said outrageous things. She used her looks as did Helen, daughter of Tyndarus (later of Troy), Cleopatra and Evita, to advance her career, especially as they (those looks) contrasted with the pock-marked, pot-bellied stereotypical outspoken conservative who also said outlandish things.

In an ideal world, her commentary would be beyond the pale.  She says some things which are deliberately provocative, but her commentary is no less provocative than that which passes for serious liberal thought on the editorial pages of our nation’s major dailies and on cable TV.

We are, however, not living in an ideal world.  We live in a world, at evidenced by the attacks on the Tea Party when some in the media report as news inaccurate stories about racist conservative activists, activists who exist only in the heads of Democratic Congressmen and their various and sundry echo chambers.

I had an insight about Ann about the time last year I heard her speak at David Horowitz’s birthday celebration.  (I went not so much to hear her speak, but to honor David, a man I have long respected.)  I realized that in the world as it is — and not as we’d like it to be — she is an ideal conservative spokesman (no spokesperchild she).

What Ann does is just throw the left’s broadsides on conservatives back at them, returning with a playful smile what lefties send out with a self-righteous scowl.  She mocks in good fun and to make a point.

I thought of Ann today when Byron York was looking into the left hyperventilating over Rush Limbaugh responding to the president’s attack on him, calling his Administration a regime:  ”By using the word ‘regime,’ Limbaugh was doing something he does all the time: throwing the language of the opposition back in their faces.”

In short, Coulter’s “schtick” is a lot like Limbaugh’s.

Ann, I apologize for not getting you before.  I was holding our side to a higher standard.  Sometimes in the current media atmosphere, you have to respond in kind to get heard.  And to make a point.

Uh oh… they let her talk.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Open thread here.  But I thought I should post in case Dan is unable to.  Hopefully all of our West Coast readers are doing fine.  I haven’t heard of any injuries in California.

More to follow, I’m sure….

In their remarkable spirit of tolerance, the folks at the taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR)

. . . has asked Fox News not to identify its news analyst, Juan Williams, with NPR branding when he appears on Fox News because of outrage among its largely liberal listener-base.

That was just too rich.  A radio network which leans left on the taxpayer dime upset that one of its commentators appears on a private TV network that supposedly leans right.

And Williams is himself no conservative.  But, before these lefties begin their belly-aching, they should actually watch their NPR colleague on FoxNews.  Personally, I find his presence there one of the best things about the network.  Simply put, he’s a very smart liberal who engages his conservative counterparts.

Not just that, while he wants Obama to succeed, he’s honest about the president’s missteps and failings.  He is, in short, a liberal with integrity.  I like to listen to Williams because he offers the liberal point of view without bile.  He doesn’t bash conservatives; he counters their arguments.

He makes a better cause for liberalism than do those who routinely attack FoxNews and does so on FoxNews.  How many other liberals get the chance to make their case in a supposedly conservative forum and do so in a manner which doesn’t antagonize their ideological adversaries?

Well, yesterday, this good man showed that he respects political movements at odds with his own ideas–and the president he supports — when he warned Democrats that there is a danger in their attempts

. . . to dismiss the tea party movement as violent racists deserving of contempt. Demonizing these folks may energize the Democrats’ left-wing base. But it is a big turnoff to voters who have problems with the Democratic agenda that have nothing to do with racism. . . .

But Democrats cannot win elections without capturing the votes of independent-minded swing voters. And that is where writing off the tea party as a bunch of racist kooks becomes self-destructive. The tea party outrage over health-care reform, deficit spending and entitlements run amok is no fringe concern. And it is insulting to all voters to suggest that criticism of President Obama, even by people who want to throw him out of office, is motivated by racism.

Like Patrik Jonsson at the Christian Science Monitor, Williams understands that Tea Party protesters (more…)

Just chanced upon this post, The Coming Conservative Renaissance, while linking another.  I had penned it in October 2008.

In today’s Washington Examiner, Mark Tapscott writes:

The reality is that Bush was anything but a conservative, judged by the major decisions of his presidency, according to two stalwarts of the conservative movement establishment. That’s the argument made by Craig Shirley, author of two of the best books on Ronald Reagan’s rise to the White House, and Donald Devine, one of Reagan’s chief political strategiests during that rise, have a superb oped in today’s edition of The Washington Post.

“But the results speak otherwise. In total, Bush increased federal spending on domestic programs more than any president since Richard Nixon, easily surpassing Bill Clinton, Carter and his own father, so much so that by 2008, America had two big-government parties.

To be sure, W was solid on national security matters and judicial appointments, but on spending he was Obama-lite.  Nearly four years ago, when Bush was still president, I wrote this about him:

On domestic spending, he has rivaled Lyndon Johnson’s profligacy. Not only that. He has failed to follow Ronald Reagan’s legacy of federalism; instead of returning government functions to the states, has nationalized them.

Funny that many Americans rejected the GOP in 2008 because their previous standard bearer had been so bad on spending so they voted for someone who promised a “net spending cut” and to “pay for his new spending plans with even bigger spending cuts.”

Only on spending, Obama makes W seem parsimonious by contrast.

Scan the editorial pages of some of this country’s major dailies and you’ll come away with the impression that the most energetic political movement in the United States to have emerged since Obama took office is a bunch of angry racist red necks, lead by white men berating Barney Frank not for his big-government policies, but for his attraction to members of his own sex.

As Matt Carden, one of our readers put it, the media coverage of the Tea Parties is like social conservatives’ coverage of Gay Pride marches.  They show us the freaks and call it the mainstream.

Well, today, via Glenn Reynolds, comes a piece of even-handed reporting on this movement which has galvanized hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of freedom-loving Americans.  Those reporters who look at the Tea Party movement without prejudice find that instead of representing an amalgamation of angry right-wing freaks instead represents the mainstream of Americans.

In his piece for the Christian Science Monitor, Patrik Jonsson reminds us that, “polls show that the anger at big government exhibited by tea party protesters is shared by many, if not most, Americans“:

A Pew poll in early March found 71 percent of Americans “dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country today,” while a CNN poll showed that 56 percent of Americans are more than just discontented with Washington. Instead, that majority of respondents agreed that the government is “so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.”

Moreover, Paul Krugman’s fulminations notwithstanding, the Tea Party agenda does not include rolling back the Civil or Voting Rights Acts, but focuses on holding the line on the growth of government and its regulatory sweep:

What’s more, the release this week of the top three planks of the “crowd-sourced” Contract From America project, to some activists, shows a maturation from sign-wielding protesters to a political reform movement grounded in ideas.

The top three vote-getters among 360,000 respondents on the Contract From America website: Calling for an enumerated powers act to force lawmakers to check the constitionality of new laws; requiring a two-thirds majority in Congress for any tax hike; and a legislative backstop to prevent the EPA from “backdoor regulating.”

Looks like they left out gay-bashing too.

One day we may have to psychoanalyze the Krugmans and other Tea Party bashers to understand their refusal to understand the ideas of their adversaries–or even recognize that their adversaries have ideas which do not play into their own stereotypes of right-wingers hating the other. (more…)

As I’m about to finish up the chapter in my dissertation on Athene and the Iliad, I will soon move on to the Odyssey. At the same time, should I continue to write as I have done these past two months, I am preparing an odyssey of my own, though much different from that of the wily Ithacan.

His epic has more to do with his return home than about the current connotation of the word based on the book about said return. According to dictionary.com, an odyssey is also “a long series of wanderings or adventures, esp. when filled with notable experiences, hardships, etc.” I don’t expect mine to be filled with hardships, I expect it instead to be filled with friendships and family.

Because my niece’s Bat Mitzvah (in New York) in May is just a few weeks before my college reunion (in western Massachusetts) in June, I intend to make an adventure of it, driving east and then visiting friends, family and “sacred” spots along the way.

Right now, the route has me passing through Vegas, Denver, Omaha, Des Moines, Chicago, Pittsburgh.

From New York, I expect to head down to D.C., Charlottesville, Charlotte, Atlanta, then back up through Nashville, Cincinnati, Cleveland and on into New England.  The return route is yet to be determined.

Drop me an note if you’d like to help arrange a gathering for GayPatriot readers along the way.

I’m sure Tano could offer a good explanation of this poll.

(H/t Classical Values.)

Yeeehaw.

Ann Althouse does get some pretty impressive commenters. Her reader Lem offers a great insight into the racial accusations of the Tea Party bashers:

Accusing the tea partiers of a hidden racist agenda, essentially means that the election of Obama has set the country back.

Their hatred (from the likes of Krugman, King, Blow, and Rich for the right is so blinding they don’t realise the import of their accusations.

If its about race (and any idiot could see that its not) then it means Obama has a miserable fail winning people over.

(H/t: Instapundit.)

So eager to brand critics of Obama as racist (their default reaction to any energetic movement on the right), the left-wing critics show that they are unable to transcend race.  They just can’t imagine that someone might oppose the policies of someone who happens to be black for something unrelated to his race.

Supplying the video, Kathy Shaidle reports:

Today Arnie and I attended that protest outside (tax payer funded) Palestine House, where a genocidal Muslim VIP will be speaking tomorrow night.

Speaking of genocide: we have video of one Muslim guy in the Palestine House parking lot, yelling, “We need another Holocaust” at the JDL/Yidden on Wheels protesters

Via Instapundit.

Yesterday, I had trouble getting things done, yet given that the Census is a constitutional mandate, I did make sure to send in my form.

To be sure, I balked at the questions on ethnicity.  Today, the words of perhaps the greatest dissent in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court came to me.  And I wished I had quoted Justice John Marshall Harlan’s objection to the majority decision in Plessy v. Ferguson: “Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”

Nor should the Bureau of the Census ask us such questions.  The constitution mandate the census for the purpose of apportioning representation and direct taxation.  And yet, we get these postcards telling us to fill it out so out jurisdiction can get its share of federal largesse.

Well, you can guess if there are questions about race and ethnicity, the gay groups want their share of the spoils too.  The juveniles at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) want to “queer” the census, having us affix pink stickers to our census forms (you know, like Seventh Grade girls put on their notebooks) asking that we be counted as “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or straight ally.”

Gee and I thought the goal was for the state not to judge us by our sexuality, but to treat as as equal before the law.  Our sexuality should not be a factor in the federal enumeration.  Our sexual orientation is, not, well, it shouldn’t be the government’s business.

So beholden has NGLTF become to the balkanization of our society that they insist the government, for enumeration purposes, count us a gay.  What next?  Gerrymandered congressional districts to ensure our voted is not diluted?