Just wanted to pop in and say:

Interesting that, given the flight of Wisconsin Democrats, we’ve now come to the point where, by comparison, a Community Organizer voting ‘present’ is actually a sign of boldness and leadership. A sliding scale, to be sure. But heck, at least he showed up!

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HHQ)

UPDATE (from Dan):  wonder if those Washington Democrats so eager to criticize Republicans as obstructionists for trying to block the big-government agenda of the president’s party will use the same label to describe Wisconsin Democrats.

UP-UPDATE (also from Dan):  Here’s some background on Wisconsin’s obstructionist Democrats. They’ve left the state, but it appears Tea Party activists are badgering them back to the Badger State to do their jobs.

So, they were standing for the people of Wisconsin by fleeing to Illinois?

UP-UP-UPDATE (also from Dan):  I’m liking the Badger State’s chief executive, “Walker to Dems: ‘You Can’t Have Conversations If You’re Not at Work’.”

UP-UP-UP-UPDATE (also from Dan): With this walkout, who, the editors of the Wall Street Journal ask, is “really trying to short-circuit democracy?“

Over at Politico, Ben Smith reports that national Democrats are helping organize the angry, untidy protests in Wisconsin:

The Democratic National Committee’s Organizing for America arm — the remnant of the 2008 Obama campaign — is playing an active role in organizing protests against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to strip most public employees of collective bargaining rights.

OfA, as the campaign group is known, has been criticized at times for staying out of local issues like same-sex marraige, but it’s riding to the aide of the public sector unions who hoping to persuade some Republican legislators to oppose Walker’s plan.

Wonder what HRC has to say about this, with their preferred political party, indeed, the very remnant of the Obama campaign, taking part on behalf of this Democratic constituency when it sat on the sidelines on issues of concern to another of its voting blocks, gay Americans.

Now, that the Democrats are involved in these protests, protests where we’ve seen some very uncivil rhetoric, with the elected Republican governor compared to Hitler, does they then countenance this kind of discourse?

Will Barney Frank call on Democrats to “differentiate themselves” from their national party?

NB:  Tweaked title to make it more pithy.

UPDATE:  Please note that these are not spontaneous protests, ginned up by interest groups favorably to the Democratic Party and that party’s own auxiliaries.

In the aftermath of the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), even after we learned of the shooter’s mental illness and lack of conservative pedigree, the editors of the New York Times, in the highest of dudgeon, still refused to let go of their narrative, telling us that

. . . it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge. Many on the right have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants, or welfare recipients, or bureaucrats.

The shooter’s “paranoid Internet ravings about government mind control” may “place him well beyond usual ideological categories”, but heck according to the old gray lady, he’s still “very much a part of a widespread squall of fear, anger and intolerance that has produced violent threats against scores of politicians and infected the political mainstream with violent imagery.”

Well, in the past few days, there have been numerous violent threats issued against politicians setting a state on edge, and, well, this gale of anger, producing violent threats against leading politicians while infecting political discourse with violent imagery, ain’t coming from the right.  Our reader V the K links a video interspersing Democratic calls for civility (and attacks on the supposed angry rhetoric of the right) with some of the language they decry on signs of those protesting Wisconsin Governor Walker’s reforms.

Let’s hope those folks so concerned about the violent rhetoric on the right will rise to condemn the actions of Badger State public employee unions and their allies.

Over the National Review, Jay Nordlinger has been all over this story, with Glenn Reynolds linking one of his many posts and quipping, “VIOLENCE: THE TEA PARTY GETS BLAMED, BUT IT’S USUALLY THE UNIONS WHO ACTUALLY DO IT:” (more…)

Just last night when dining with some right-of-center bloggers and allied conservatives, I met a conservative woman who upon learning I was gay asked if I knew a certain gay Republican (I did).  She reported his observation that he found it easier to be gay in Republican circles than to be conservative in gay circles — something your humble bloggers have long experienced as well.

Well, when I returned home, I found in my in-box an e-mail from Bruce alerting me to post on the American Thinker from another gay man who has just learned the same thing.

Discovering posters attacking Sarah Palin on a San Francisco fence, Ray Gross tells that he is gay and living in hiding in San Francisco, “hiding from the Liberal Left”, hiding that he’s a conservative:

Gay people are used to feeling the fear of backlash and intolerance.  It’s been a common theme for me, and I hid being gay for a good part of my life because of that fear.

But here I am, hiding again, hiding from those who have been telling me my whole life that they are the tolerant, loving and accepting ones.  And I believed them, joining them in pinning the labels of hate and intolerance on the political right.

Now I fear them.  They are not tolerant or accepting.  They accuse others of hate and intolerance and yet, by their behavior they show themselves again and again to be the hypocrites they are.  They are incapable of seeing the irony of the situation; that those who preach “tolerance” are intolerant, and those who champion “love” exude hate.

Like Pavlov’s dog they are trained by the left and the liberal media to salivate at the mere mention of the words “conservative” “Republican,” “right,”  “Christian,” and “Bush”.  Now, they have a new favorite victim for their hate and intolerance, Sarah Palin.

Yet again, these folks manifest the very hatred they claim to find in their ideological adversaries.  Why do these people hate so much?