Over at Politico, Josh Gerstein reports:

Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) has announced his support for legislation that would permit the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy banning openly gay service members, making him the second Republican to go on record in favor of conditional repeal language attached to a pending defense budget bill.

“I have been in the military for 31 years and counting, and have served as a subordinate and as an officer. … When a soldier answers the call to serve and risks life or limb, it has never mattered to me whether they are gay or straight. My only concern has been whether their service and sacrifice is with pride and honor,” Brown said after two days of Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on “don’t ask” and a Defense Department study of how repeal could be implemented.

Looks like Senate Majority Leader now has the votes to overcome a filibuster on DADT repeal.  Now, he just needs to stop his foot-dragging on tax cuts so he can move forward on repeal.  Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said “she would vote with Democrats to end the military’s ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, “, but not “until a debate over tax cuts has been resolved“:

“Once the tax issue is resolved, I have made it clear that if the Majority Leader brings the Defense Authorization bill to the floor with sufficient time allowed for debate and amendments, I would vote to proceed to the bill,” she said in a statement.

Harry, the ball’s in your court.

I put together this information back in July of this year:

November 2008 (President George W. Bush)
Total Unemployed: 10.3 MILLION
Unemployment Rate: 6.7%

Obama Inaugurated – Jan 20, 2009
Total Unemployed: 11.1 MILLION

$787 Billion “Stimulus Package” – Passed Feb 2009
Total Unemployed: 12.5 MILLION

JULY 1, 2009
Total Unemployed: 14.5 MILLION
Unemployment Rate: 9.4%

November 2009 – “I will not rest until all Americans who want work can find work,” President Obama
Total Unemployed: 15.4 MILLION

January, 2010
Total Unemployed: 14.8 MILLION
Unemployment Rate:  9.7%

Healthcare Reform Signed Into Law – March 2010
Unemployment Rate:  9.7%
Total Unemployed: 15 MILLION

JULY 1, 2010
Total Unemployed: 14.6 MILLION
Unemployment Rate:  9.5%

Let’s add today’s update, shall we….

DECEMBER 3, 2010 – 22 MONTHS SINCE OBAMA BECAME PRESIDENT
Total Unemployed: 15.1 MILLION
Unemployment Rate:  9.8%

This is your country on Obamanomics.  Any questions?

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Just received the news in an e-mail form the organization:  ”Equality California Executive Director Geoff Kors today announced that he will step down from his position on March 31, 2011, at the conclusion of his ninth year with the organization.”

This is good news indeed.  Kors has been a relentless partisan while helming the advocacy organization, turning it into little more than a gay and lesbian auxiliary of the California Democratic Party.  That said, given that the (once-)Golden State has effectively become a one-party state, his partisanship did serve a purpose.

While Kors has done a good job of building coalitions among the left-leaning interest groups who hold sway in Sacramento and in lobbying legislators on the left, he did a terrible job helping the opposition to Prop. 8.  Should federal courts uphold that provision, those seeking to overturn it at the polls will need develop a different strategy for repeal than Kors et al implemented in opposition.  With Kors departing, that becomes increasingly likely.  His leadership team was reluctant to work with gay Republicans and consider their ideas.  Even in the wake of the proposition’s passage, gay Republicans (as this blog has reported) were excluded from the various post-mortems, many of which EqCA spearheaded.

Let us hope Kors’ successor does a better job of reaching out to Republicans and showing respect for the diversity of views among gay and lesbian residents of this wonderful, but economically challenged, state.  That way, we stand a better change of repealing Prop 8.

Joe Solmonese, your move.

Over at Powerline, Paul Mirengoff offers nuanced take on the Pentagon report on DADT and offers this nugget which gets at the nub of the issue:

If repeal can be accomplished at no appreciable cost to the military’s ability to fight, then DADT should be repealed instantly. Otherwise it should not be repealed.

And that’s really what it’s all about.  Read the whole thing.

(Please note, I am writing this as I prepare for bed Thursday evening, with a brain fried from a day spent doing last-minute edits of my dissertation.  I expect to offer some commentary on his post in the morning, as I believe, he addresses the important objections to DADT repeal — and in a civil manner.  Those who favor repeal should address his concerns in a similar manner.)

FRIDAY MORNING UPDATE:  I had hoped to offer commentary on Paul’s post this morning, but a number of things came up, mostly related to my dissertation, but also thought it important to post on the Kors’ resignation.

The gist of my reply would be that the current legislation puts the ball in the military’s court, so once it passes, the brass can address the concerns raised by the study, perhaps putting forward a tiered approach to repeal, starting e.g., with translators and implementing repeal on a unit by unit basis, addressing the concerns with each unit.   Again, I’m not a military guy, so don’t know exactly how to do this, so, let’s have more knowledgeable guys implement the particularities of repeal.

Just over two years ago, when the mortgage meltdown helped send the economy south, Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media told us the deregulatory policies of the Bush Administration were to blame. Only problem was that W, good man that he was (and remains), wasn’t a deregulator.

He called himself a compassionate conservative and in his eyes, followers of that ideology embraced a more activist federal government.  He didn’t see government as the problem.  He didn’t seek to deregulate the private sector. 

Indeed, whenever I ask our readers to identify specific deregulatory policies of the Bush Administration (that led to the meltdown), we get no references to Bush-era policies, but instead references to Clinton-era policies.  And as I noted in the post linked above, even “Obama-supporting columnist Sebastian Mallaby wrote, during [the 2008] campaign, that the “claim that the financial crisis reflects Bush-McCain deregulation is not only nonsense. It is the sort of nonsense that could matter.“  Deregulation didn’t cause the meltdown.

Now via Glenn Reynolds comes a report that indicates that instead of deregulating the economy, George W. Bush re-regulated it:

Citing Government Accountability Office figures, Heritage said “federal agencies promulgated 43 rules during the fiscal year ending September 30, 2010, that impose significant burdens on the private sector. The total costs for these rules were estimated by the regulators themselves at some $28 billion, the highest level since at least 1981, the earliest date for which figures are available.”

And contrary to the conventional wisdom, Obama’s red tape explosion was preceded by a Bush administration regulatory carpet-bombing of the private sector that increased the cost of doing business by at least $70 billion.

Read the whole thing.