Another member of the Alaska Republican establishment falls victim to the reforming zeal of Sarah Palin:  Incumbent Lisa Murkowski has conceded to challenger Joe Miller in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate.

Speaking to reporters at her campaign headquarters in Anchorage, Murkowski said “based on where we are right now, I don’t see a scenario where the primary will turn out in my favor.”

The concession come after a day of counting absentee ballots in which Murkowski gained little ground on Miller, the Fairbanks attorney backed by former Gov. Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Express.

There will be another Republican committed to cutting the federal budget and repealing Obamacare in the 112th Senate.

John Cusack Calls for ‘Satanic Death’ of Fox News, GOP Leaders

*(about MSNBC, CNN & Democratic Leaders)

**& it would generate far more attention in the MSM.

Buy a shirt and help send me to CPAC! Questions, comments requests can be sent to sarjex (at) gmail dot com

The California Senate failed to pass a bill which would have made it more difficult for gay citizens of the Golden State to protect themselves against hate crimes:

The California Senate rejected a bill Monday that would have made it illegal to carry unloaded guns in public, but lawmakers will give the vote one more try.

Monday’s 20-16 vote fell one short of the majority needed, but the Senate will reconsider the measure Tuesday.

Let’s hope Equality California (EqCA) and other groups concerned will the welfare of gay people are working hard to keep state Senators from voting in favor of this bill.

Now, if all law-abiding citizens could obtain Concealed Carry permits in the Golden State, gay people would feel a lot safer. Aware that gay people might be armed, thugs would be far less likely to attack us.  (Alas, that that is not even under consideration.)

The current bill would take one more right away form us and I trust those so concerned about our rights will be working overtime to defeat it again when the Senate reconsiders it.

(H/t:  Instapundit.)

HHS Secretary: Americans need ‘re-education’ on Obamacare

What is it with Obama Democrats, like followers of a long discredited creed, since relegated, as one wise and prescient man put it, to “the ash heap of history“, want to reeducate those who don’t share their views?

…”where are my subjects when I really need them?”

Whoops….

King Obama to Michelle: “Damn… that stupid President Bush put this gate here so we can’t stay dry!”

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Wow…. two weeks in a row, baby!  Tonight I’ll be talking with Ben Howe — a conservative activist and host of BTR’s “Renewing America”.  Ben attended the “Restoring Honor” rally in DC on Saturday and has some on-the-scene commentary to share. 

(Photo courtesy of Jon Ward from The Daily Caller)

Oh yeah… and I’m broadcasting tonight live from our nation’s capital — Washington, DC.  I couldn’t make it for the 8/28 rally, but I’m here this week for my “real” job.

And I’m just a few blocks from The White House.  Maybe I’ll hop on over to 1600 Penn Ave and ask Michelle for a crumpet.

Tune in tonight at 8:30PM for GayPatriot’s America.  We have a great chat room too!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Well, first reason for this post is that tickets for HOMOCON 2010 are nearly sold-out! 

But the REAL reason is to provide some extra impetus for you to consider a trip to Manhattan:  TAMMY BRUCE is coming.  Yep, if Ann Coulter wasn’t enough, our own Queen Conservative Diva Ms. Bruce will be there now, too!

So what are ya waiting for?  Join a buncha Gay Patriots in NYC on Sept. 25 for HOMOCON 2010!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

If the true goal of feminism were securing the success of women in all sectors of our society, feminist leaders would be regularly singing the praises of the immediate past Governor of the Last Frontier.  I mean, conservatives, particularly social conservatives, supposedly the political group least open to the advancement of women, have been the most ready to embrace Mrs. Palin.

They line up to buy her books, travel from all corners of the country to hear her speak at the Lincoln Memorial, find inspiration in her Facebook posts, look up to her as a role model and hero.  In short, this woman has become an inspiration to and potential leader for, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans.  Doesn’t their acclaim for this accomplished woman in itself validate the notion that women can inspire and lead?

And while right-wingers rally ’round this Republican, their left-wing counterparts are drawn to her like moths to a flame.   She, Sarah Palin, a woman, commands attention merely by speaking her mind. 

Instead of welcoming her rise, Palin, as Jennifer Rubin (in a most excellent post) puts it,

. . . clearly has the left in a tizzy. They have finally gotten it: she is redefining feminism. In the New York Times, two liberal feminists exhibit more than a little anxiety over the Palin juggernaut. To put it bluntly, they have Palin envy.

(Read the whole thing.  Rubin and I have similar feelings about Glenn Beck.)  

Maybe, feminists don’t like the former GOP Vice Presidential nominee because, as Rubin adds, Palin “has proved by example that a woman politician need not spout the pro-big government, pro-abortion, pro-welfare-state line.”  The charismatic woman has become “the most effective female politician in the country.”

But, maybe effective female conservatives just can’t qualify as feminist successes.

(H/t:  Instapundit.)

Recall how just a few days ago when some nut stabbed a Muslim cabbie in New York, the media were quick to highlight this hate crime while left-of-center pundits claimed conservatives and Republicans were responsible for the dastardly deed.  If a right-wing Republican didn’t do it, they at least created an environment which made such a heinous action possible.  The long-anticipated wave of anti-Muslim hate crimes was about to emerge.  

Well, it turns out that the “reportedly drunk perpetrator worked/volunteered for a liberal interfaith film company and there is zero evidence that he is a Fox News fan, Glenn Beck listener, Republican voter, or conservative blog reader.”  

And fortunately, the cabbie survived.

Now, another man who has not been so lucky will surely not get the attention the media (and at least one politician) showered on Ahmed Sharif (said cabbie).  Some nut walked into the office of Clay Sanner, a Bishop (lay church official) at a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Visalia California, chatted with, then murdered the Mormon.

If the MSM treated this crime as they did the one in New York, it would lead the news while pundits would be pointing fingers at gay activists, perhaps blaming the Human Rights Campaign or “Equality California”.  Recall, the anti-Mormon rhetoric following the passage of Prop. 8 in 2008, even resulting in a film exploring a vast and sinister LDS conspiracy against gays.

And some gay activists have been just as hateful (if not more so) in their nasty invective against Mormons as a handful of opponents of the “Ground Zero Mosque” have been against radical Islamists. (more…)

Ben Howe confronts a Progressive protesting the “Restoring Honor” rally yesterday.  Funny how the event was at the Lincoln Memorial…. but the misguided protestor was lamely hanging out by himself at the Washington Monument.  Heh.

This  is three minutes of pure fun as Ben rips this guy apart and demonstrates the sheer lack of principles of the Progressive movement.  At the end, the poor fool stammers and shouts “Well, you’re a RACIST and an IDIOT.”  Yup, when their intellectual argument breaks down after three minutes — Progressives pull the race card out as their last gasp of hope. 

This is why I don’t associate with the Gay Left — straight, gay or whatever — this protestor exemplifies the Progressive movement; and the Gay Rights crowd are a keystone of the American Progressive movement.

It IS all about redistribution of wealth.  But that isn’t “social justice” folks; it’s Marxist-Communism.

UPDATE: Ben Howe will be my guest tomorrow night on my BlogTalkRadio show, “GayPatriot’s America” at 8:30PM Eastern Time.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Well, duh.

Reviewing poll numbers which show that even as Republicans leads in generic matchups against Democrats, the GOP has still failed to regain the positive image it enjoyed frequently in the mid-1990s and occasionally in the early 2000s, I realize that our party still has not recovered to the damage the “brand” suffered in the concluding years of the Bush Administration.

At the same time, polls have shown that the ideas which undergirded the Reagan Revolution have gained greater favor among the American people.

In other words, people like the basic Republican ideas, but don’t yet trust the GOP to promote them and enact legislation consistent with them once in office.  It’s why I believe my party needs a new Contract with America, not the same as that successful document from 1994 — one that helped the GOP regain (after a 40-year hiatus) a congressional majority and whose planks the Democratic President of the United States cited as his accomplishments when he accepted his party’s nomination in 1996.

In a renewed contract, Republicans could acknowledge its failures in recent years and say something like “We understand that you [the American people] held us to the ideas behind that Contract and when we abandoned them, you voted us out.  We know that should we again stray from the small-government policies, you can — and likely will — do the same.”

Just such a Contract would go a long way to showing that Republicans recognize that they made errors in the past and could help improve their standing with the American people.

Remember how, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, a number of voices in the chattering classes, in the highest of dudgeon, inveighed against a coming backlash against Muslim Americans, with a skyrocketing number of anti-Muslim hate crimes?

Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case:

Hate crimes directed against Muslims remain relatively rare, notwithstanding the notoriety gained by incidents such as recent vandalism at the Madera Islamic Center.

Jews, lesbians, gay men and Caucasians, among others, are all more frequently the target of hate crimes, FBI records show. Reported anti-Muslim crimes have declined over recent years, though they still exceed what occurred prior to the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

Such crimes did jump right after 9/11 but, as Jonah Goldberg reminds us, have since begun to decline considerably.  

Regardless, 2001 was the zenith or, looked at through the prism of our national shame, the nadir of the much-discussed anti-Muslim backlash in the United States. The following year, the number of anti-Islamic hate-crime incidents (overwhelmingly, nonviolent vandalism and nasty words) dropped to 155. In 2003, there were 149 such incidents. And the number has hovered around the mid-100s or lower ever since.

(Read the whole thing.  Jonah asks a great question about the rush of some on the left to find intolerance in America.)  Guess Americans just aren’t the vindictive, bitter people who cling to their antipathy to people who aren’t like them as a means, you know, to express their frustration.  

Now, catch this anecdote (from the first article I quoted); it gets at the real problem with defining certain crimes hate crimes: (more…)

Via Glenn, I chance upon Charlie Spiering’s great round-up of conservative reaction to Ken Mehlman’s coming out:

Ken Mehlman is gay? Most right-leaning political junkies probably responded by asking, ‘Who is Ken Mehlman?’ or ‘Yeah, but who cares?’

Conservative bloggers either ignored the topic or pointed out that conservatives aren’t necessarily surprised or outraged by the news.

“I had absolutely no idea Ken Mehlman was gay, or existed,” wrote the Daily Caller’s Jim Treacher in response to the New York Times piece that marveled at the “muted reaction” of Republicans to the announcement.

The story has all but disappeared from Memeorandum.  I think I e-mailed someone telling her that I didn’t think this story would stay in the headlines past the Sunday (i.e., today’s) TV talk shows.  Seems I may have been onto something.

Guess this just confirms the notion that many of the leading opinion makers on the right are indifferent to an individual’s sexuality.

Were I not so busy visiting a good Mormon friend in Utah — where I get to play uncle to his kids — I might have more to say about Mortimer B. Zuckerman’s piece, The Most Fiscally Irresponsible Government in U.S. History, that Glenn Reynolds linked yesterday.

Suffice it to say that I read the piece shortly after my friend and I discussed this very issue, how the growing federal debt threatens not just our economy, but even the very greatness of this nation.  The passage that Glenn included on Instapundit very much reflected the tone of my recent conversation:

People see the stimulus, fashioned and passed by Congress in such a hurry, as a metaphor for wasted money. They are highly critical about the lack of discipline among our political leaders. The question that naturally arises is how to forestall a long-term economic decline.

But, something else struck me:

In a usnews.com post on July 26, Jodie Allen of the Pew Research Center reported that in recent weeks more academic and market economists have been urging the government to defer budget cuts and tax increases and instead provide additional stimulus to a still-fragile economy, some by continuing the Bush tax cuts. But among the public there has been a suggestive shift of opinion the other way, reflecting worries about debt. “Deficit and government spending” has jumped from 10th or 11th place as a priority for the federal government to one that is second only to job creation and economic growth.

While I of course so favor deferring tax increases into perpetuity, I do favor making budget cuts immediately.  Does this make me more or less representative of Americans?

That said, there does seem to be a disconnect between what the “élite” economists favor and what the people want.  People just don’t believe government stimuli work.  But, as per my conversation with my friend, would they support the drastic spending cuts we need to put our fiscal house in order?

Consider this:  ”Why plan a second stimulus,” Zuckerman asks, “if the first stimulus couldn’t prevent high unemployment?”

Yesterday, I was engaging in an e-mail exchange with a reader that seems to juxtapose nicely with two recent posts.

We were discussing how so many people determine that for every social problem (as well as to meet the challenges of social change) there must be a government solution.  He offered (and I quote with his permission),

Well the problem/mentality looks back to the civil rights movement, where government was really the motor that made things happen.  The idea is to take that model and use it for women, the disabled, gays, etc.  Our challenge is to say why that’s invalid.

Exactly.  In the civil rights era, we needed government intervention because government created the problem (at the outset of the Jim Crow era in the 1890s) by creating (at the state level) and countenancing (at the federal level) laws which defined color as a class and sanctioned discriminatory treatment against blacks while mandating private discrimination.

Over the past quarter-century or so, as people like us have become more open about our sexuality, we’ve seen the private sector react swiftly to accommodate this change (something that Jim Crow laws prevented private organizations from doing in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction).  There were no laws requiring that private institutions treat people differently because of their sexual orientation.

At the same time, gay activists (and their allies in politics) have been pushing for legislation which will treat us as a protected class in state and federal law.  It’s as if that supposed lack of civil rights about which John Aravosis is so concerned is really an absence of state-sanctioned group “rights”.  That needed bureaucratic validation that Alex Knepper so deliciously mocks.

More on this anon.

Normally, “when an economy emerges from a recession,” Jim Geraghty reminds us, “it takes off, making up for lost time. For example, the growth rate exceeded 7 percent for five consecutive quarters in the early 1980s.”  Well, we learn that at least according to the AP, ““The economy barely has a pulse“:

The Commerce Department on Friday will revise its estimate for economic growth in the April-to-June period and Wall Street economists forecast it will be cut almost in half, to a 1.4 percent annual rate from 2.4 percent.

(H/t Mark Hemingway @ The Washington Examiner.)

UPDATE:  By contrast, Germany’s economy is “sizzling.”

Over at the Daily Caller, noting how some gay left bloggers have been savaging Ken Mehlman since he came out, Alex Knepper writes:

The explicit message is basically that Mehlman, upon a singular urge for male flesh, is supposed to discard his feelings about every non-gay issue in the political arena and march into battle hoisting the rainbow flag.

It may come as a shock to the maladjusted children who enjoy throwing temper tantrums in front of the White House, but the experience of homosexuality is not monolithic, nor is there any cosmic decree mandating that it be a monumental, revolutionary identity shift. Mehlman, whose sexuality is probably far more ambiguous than his caterwauling critics can relate to, is one of millions of gay men whose values and life experience simply do not align with Gay Party dogma.

This young man doesn’t mince his words!  Love his line about the supposed cosmic degree mandating that our coming out involve a monumental, revolutionary identity shift.  It does seem that way for some people.  (Do need to address this issue in more detail and in greater depth.)

It seems he and I are on the same page about some of the rhetoric in the gay marriage debate when he asks, “Am I supposed to feel like less of a human being until some bureaucrat validates my existence? Is this the message I’m supposed to internalize?” Indeed.

Read the whole thing.

(H/t:  Reader Hyperion AKA  Jeremayakovka)

. . .  correcting all errors made by the (evil and) incompetent George W. Bush (and his bungling team).

Nagin and Brown Agree: US Not Prepared for Another Katrina

Over at Powerline, my friend John Hinderaker takes the New York Times to task for assuming that if Ken Mehlman had come out in 2004, it would have been a headache for the GOP as opposed to the mostly blasé response it’s been getting today:

That is, I think, untrue. We didn’t care about Mehlman’s personal life then, and we don’t care now. I believe our attitude is characteristic of the vast majority of conservatives. We wish Mehlman well. But whether Ken Mehlman is or is not gay has no bearing on the public policy question of whether gay marriage is a good idea or a bad idea.

He’s right.  It’s been my experience, as a gay conservative blogger, that most conservatives could care less about my sexuality.  But, Times reporter Kate Zernike is right about one thing:

The muted reaction reflects not only changing values in the country generally, but also, more notably, among many Republicans and conservatives.

The center of gravity of the conservative movement in this election season is with fiscal conservatives. The Tea Party is infusing the Republican Party with new energy, and Tea Party leaders and supporters say they do not want to talk about social issues: even if they do not personally support same-sex marriage or abortion, they think the Republican Party spent too much time talking about them and not enough time trying to rein in spending.

Ms. Zernike may not be entirely up-to-speed about the conservative movement.  Fiscal issues were always important to movement conservatives.  Th is is not something new.  If you don’t believe me, then just take a listen to this 1964 speech.  But, she’s right in that the Obama Democrats big-spending initiatives which led to the rise of the Tea Party movement put those for whom fiscal issue are paramount back in the drivers’ seat.

During the Bush era, we were relegated to a side car.  We found it hard to gain traction when the then-Republican president was not himself a fiscal conservative, but was taking heat from the left on any number of issues, particularly the War on Terror.  We devoted our energies to defending him, believing that winning that war was paramount to our national security (another defining issue for movement conservatives).

So, Mr. Zernike is right, the center of gravity has shifted on the right, but back to where it has long been, but this is more a return, a restoration even, to the bedrock principles of American conservatism than anything else.