So, MSNBC has suspended its senior political analyst Mark Halperin for using a derogatory synonym for wiener to describe the president.  Calling “Halperin’s crack . . . crude and dumb,” Greg Sargent says, “it doesn’t deserve indefinite suspension.”

Two years ago, over on CBS, David Letterman said that then-governor of Alaska had the style of a “slutty flight attendant” and joked about a baseball player having sex with hee teenage daughter.  The former funnyman was not suspended and still appears on the air.

Guess MSNBC must just have stricter standards for political discourse than CBS.

Sonicfrog and I seem to have reached similar conclusions about our governor, he from the Central Valley, I from the LA Basin.  We have both been impressed with this Democrat’s willingness to cut the state budget, even standing up to the spendthrifts in his own party, yet remain concerned about his reluctance to take on public employee unions.  Not to mention his support of what Joel Kotkin has called, California’s Green Jihad.

Considering the “The Enigma That Is Jerry Brown,” Sonic writes,

Every time [the governor] does something that goes against the partisan grain, I want to stand up and applaud. See the veto of the union / Democrat sponsored card check bill, a corrupt gimme to the union lackeys, and the veto of the sham budget… OK, the first one anyway. I begin to think that, yeah, I think he kind of gets it now. I start getting comfortable with the idea that, yeah, maybe he’s no longer the “Governor Moonbeam” we all were so comfortable criticizing. Maybe he has changed and is going to be more respectable, more like his Dad.

But then he goes and passes / does something completely stupid –  like this – or this– or now, the so-called Amazon tax.

Jeez! I’m starting to get whip-lash!

Indeed.  Read the whole thing.

Even the AP called the president’s press conference yesterday “confrontational.”  I didn’t watch the press conference as I was spending the morning (Pacific Time) with my sister in the Bay Area before driving back home.  And well, I’d rather spend time with my sister — or play trains with her son — than watch a political talkfest.

What struck me about the conference was the consensus of the coverage, with many pundits and reporters echoing the AP’s evaluation; others labeled it “combative.”  I wondered, as I read the coverage, whether we were getting a foretaste of his reelection campaign, with attacks on partisan adversaries replacing promises of a new kind of politics.

A man who holds such a presser can’t run for reelection as the kind of politician he billed himself to be in the 2008 campaign.  And offering such confrontational public statements, Jim Geraghty reminds us, is hardly new for this president:

What I think this reveals is that Barack Obama is not used to being challenged. Most of us have scoffed at his predictable straw men, his off-the-cuff references to tonsil-stealing doctors, his exhausted, “some on the right say we should take this extreme path, some on the left take this extreme path, but I choose this sensible path in the middle” framing of every issue.

As we recall from his attacks upon Paul Ryan at GWU, the Supreme Court justices at the State of the Union, and his jabs at Pete Hoekstra, Obama loves to go after his opponents in national addresses, with his targets in the audience, unable to respond. In the setting of the grandiose national address is that there is rarely a rebuttal.

He bristles when challenged and lashes out at his ideological adversaries.  Is this the way to lead the country facing great economic challenges and a budget severely out of balance?

While I still have some quibbles with the rhetoric Log Cabin Executive Director R. Clarke Cooper uses on gay issues and his support of policies at odds with the conservative freedom agenda, I am pleased that unlike the first two executive directors of the group, he has shown a clear commitment to electing Republicans, challenging the big-government policies of the Democrats and helping build the GOP.

Just today, we learn that the Republican National Committee (RNC) tapped Clarke for “its Finance Committee, where he will be playing a critical role in raising funds for the party’s efforts to elect Republicans to the White House and across the country.”

We may not agree with Clarke on all issues, but it’s nice to see a Log Cabin (national) leader committed to building the GOP.

Honoring this great man ” for his role in helping to end communism”, the former Communist nation of Hungary “unveiled a statue of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan on Wednesday“:

Hundreds took part in the unveiling in Budapest’s Szabadsag, or Freedom, square, including Prime Minister Viktor Orban and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Mr. Reagan was remembered for his role in “bringing the Cold War to a conclusion, and for the fact that Hungary regained its sovereignty in the process,” the Hungarian government said in a statement.

How fitting that the statue will stand in Freedom Square. The Gipper would have loved that.

“US Air Force and Army officers, serving in Hungary, pose with the new statue of late US President Ronald Reagan after a centennial commemoration in Budapest, Hungary, Wednesday, June 29, 2011. The 180 kilograms (400 pounds) and 2.18 meter (7 feet, 2 inches) tall bronze statue honors Reagan at the Freedom Square in central Budapest, to mark his efforts to free the people of Hungary from the yoke of communism.”

AP Image via Gateway Pundit.

I believe that statue is life-size, given that the Gipper was larger than life.

UPDATE:   A reader from across the pond alerts us to how folks on the island that gave us Sir Winston Churchill and Lady Margaret Thatcher are honoring that great lady’s great friend:

Margaret Thatcher is “determined” to attend the grand unveiling of a statue of Ronald Reagan in Londonon July 4 despite having been too unwell to make the royal wedding . . . .

The 10-foot bronze will stand opposite a statue of Second World War commander Dwight D Eisenhower, which was unveiled by Lady Thatcher in 1989. A quotation from the ex-premier has been chosen for thePortland stone plinth of the Reagan statue. It reads: “Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.”

There’s more here including a picture of the life-size statue.

With a vote of 21 to 16, the Rhode Island Senate approved a measure to grant

. . . legal rights to same-sex partners “without the historical and religious meaning associated with the word marriage,” a statement from the Rhode Island General Assembly said.

“We have made great progress in our goal of providing increased rights, benefits and protections for gay and lesbian couples,” [Democratic state Rep. Peter Petrarca, the bill's sponsor said]

The bill, writes my friend Dale Carpenter

manages to do what nobody else has done: unite supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage.  Marriage Equality Rhode Island says it establishes “second-class citizenry.”  The National Organization for Marriage says it is “disappointing and dangerous.”  Caught in the middle were legislators, including the openly gay head of the state house, and Governor Lincoln Chafee (expected to sign the bill), who predicted this was the most they could do for at least a couple of years.

The New York Times reports that the legislation “was offered as a compromise this spring after Gordon D. Fox, the openly gay speaker of the Democratic-controlled House, said he could not muster enough votes to pass a same-sex marriage bill.”  Despite this compromise, we learn in a press release from “Freedom to Marry” that gay marriage advocates are asking the Ocean State’s governor to veto the bill:

. . . Freedom to Marry and the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) sent a letter late yesterday evening to Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee calling on him to veto the civil union bill currently under consideration if it comes to his desk in its present form.  The bill contains a provision that would allow  religious organizations and their employees to disregard couples’ civil union status, creating unprecedented, onerous and discriminatory hurdles for same-sex couples seeking to take care of one another.

(more…)

No, this is not Dan resuming his old moniker, but our first guest post in a while.  We’re giving a potential new GayPatriot a test run on our blog.  To be fair to this Midwestern man, I am cutting and pasting the post exactly as he sent it to me, without any edits.  These are his words, not mine.

For the first time since March, Obama and his faithful sidekick, TOTUS, gave a press conference today where he opened with remarks on the economy. After he blamed Bush for the 697th time this month, he launched another round of class warfare. This time, it’s the kids versus corporate jets Obama must have gotten word that Americans are getting tired of his demagogy of the millionaires and billionaires – so corporate jet owners are apparently the next victims. Just at the moment when both Republicans and Democrats are attempting to negotiate a debt deal, our first post-partisan president thought it was just the right time to reiterate his “us vs. them” agenda.

Obama claimed that Democrats had compromised in the debt talks by agreeing to billions of dollars in spending cuts. He blamed Republicans for refusing to agree to eliminate tax breaks for corporate jet owners and oil companies, while completely pretending that he didn’t know it was his own 2009 stimulus package that granted those breaks in the first place. Of course, I can hardly fault him for that; after all, nobody read the bill. Obama also said he would not engage in scare tactics, but went right ahead and forgot he said that when he set what I believe will be the tone for his re-election campaign:

“If we do not have revenues, that means there are a bunch of kids out there who do not have college scholarships,” Obama said. “[It] might compromise the National Weather Services. It means we might not be funding critical medical research. It means food inspection might be compromised. I’ve said to Republican leaders, ‘You go talk to your constituents and ask them, “Are you willing to compromise your kids’ safety so some corporate-jet owner can get a tax break?”

In other words, owners of major companies getting a tax break will cause kids to be punished, tornadoes to occur without any warning, and toxic food to be served at your neighborhood grocery store. Americans know better. (more…)

Like the Democratic governor of California, the President of the United States seems beholden to raising our taxes.

“You can’t,” the president said today during his press conference, “reduce the deficit without having some revenue increases in the mix“.

Well, maybe we’d be able to had he not so run up the federal credit card during his first two years in the White House. In the campaign, he promised a “net spending cut,” but delivered instead a dramatic spending increase, raising the rate of growth of the federal government far beyond the accelerated pace of the Bush years.

Seems he’s so insistent on a tax hike because he doesn’t want to scale back those increases.  That “net spending cut” thing was just a campaign gimmick.  Wonder what gimmicks his team has in store for his reelection campaign.

On March 19, 2009, after spending fewer than two full months in the White House, President Obama told Jay Leno that “one of the things” he was “trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.“  Well after more than two years as the nation’s chief executive, Barack Obama has showed us that he delights in blaming others for the difficulties his job entails.

Just today at his press conference, he blamed the failure to increase the federal debt limit on Congress.  Observing that the one-time self-professed post-partisan politician “set a combative tone that carried through the rest of the hour and seven minute session“, the Washington Examiner’s Conn Carroll concluded that

This was not the press conference of a president looking to provide leadership for a debt limit deal before Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s supposed August 2nd deadline. This was a president laying the groundwork to blame congressional Republicans for any negative fallout after Geithner decides to stop sending Social Security checks to seniors.

Carroll reminds us that the president “began his remarks by listing listed a number of bills that could help lower the nation’s 9.1 percent unemployment rate but were still “pending before Congress right now.” If those bills were so important to creating jobs, why then didn’t the president push them through when his party held comfortable majorities in both houses of Congress?

And why didn’t he take congressional Democrats to task last year for failing to pass them? And since his party still controls one federal legislative chamber, why then hasn’t that body, the Senate, led by example and voted on those bills?

It seems this president has a political strategy, but not a governing one:  make the Republicans appear obstructionist so he can win a second term, but to what end?  So, he can keep power and keep on demagoguing?

I had not expected my last blog post to be as long as it was.  I had merely planned to conclude with the anecdote of the lesbian mother I saw at Traintown, but then, well, as I wrote about her, other thoughts came to mind.

I had intended that post to focus on the debate on gay marriage, how, as I wrote the day after the New York legislature voted to recognize same-sex marriages, “the rhetoric [was] regularly exaggerated,” with the debate lacking “the type of civil discussion of the importance and meaning of marriage that would have helped strengthen the institution“.

Echoing my point “about the lack of meaningful/useful/informative discourse in the public square over the past two weeks” our reader Richard Bell confessed, in the comments section that he’s “still reeling from the hyperbole and hate of both sides.”  I found the debate so annoying with hyperbole on each side that I simply stopped following it.

What Richard saw as “hate,” I saw as hyperventilating;  advocates of the bill assured us that opponents hated gay people and wanted to deprive them of their “rights” while opponents warned of the imminent demise of traditional marriage (if the bill passed).

Give me a break.  Marriage has survived as an institution for as long as human beings have recorded the details of our lives.  It has survived challenges throughout history, most recently the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Despite those challenges and active efforts to undermine it, marriage remains a defining cultural institution.  Individuals who once rejected it in their youth, embrace it in early middle age and celebrate it in their golden years.

Traditional marriage will survive state recognition of same-sex marriage — and may even emerge stronger than it was when the debate over gay relationships began. (more…)

Sometimes, we bloggers find that our schedules do not allow us the time to write about breaking news of interest to our readers in a timely manner.  When the news breaks, we may have other plans and lack a paid staff or readily available understudies to fill in when we are away.

In the wake of the New York legislature’s vote to recognize same-sex marriages, I would have liked to have blogged more on the topic and have scribbled countless notes for a number of blog posts.  But, I had planned a trip, first to Santa Barbara for a friend’s going away party and thence to the Bay Area to spend time with some family members.  In the coming days, I will try to bring some order to my notes and write those posts, but for now, I write from the kitchen in my sister’s new house in the San Francisco ‘burbs, having just concluded a lengthy conversation with that spirited mother of a most energetic two-and-one-half year old.

For the past three days, I would have rather spent my time, dining with my mother (whose visit to SF was the occasion for my trip), hiking with my sister or playing with my nephew than organizing my notes and writing (hopefully) thoughtful posts on gay marriage.

Those three paragraphs were supposed to have served as the introduction to the first post I had wanted to write on gay marriage.  Perhaps, I should leave them as a reflection on blogging, but I do want to add one more thing.

Part of the “play” with my nephew involved a trip to Traintown, a railway-themed mini-amusement park featuring “a quarter scale railroad on 4 miles of track.”  On our twenty-minute ride, although I focused on my nephew, I did notice a (presumably) lesbian couple and their child.  One mother who had the short hair and very matter-of-fact manner of many lesbians I know and showed the same solicitude toward her daughter that my sister regularly shows her son, gently, at one time, offering her a sippy cup when the child seemed thirsty and not letting it fall when she rejected it soon thereafter, thrusting it at her Mommy (without regard to her willingness or ability to hold onto it). (more…)

“One of the easiest things in the world to do“, blogger R.S. McCain wrote earlier today, “is to tell other people how to raise their children.” Indeed, some liberal pundits find it easier to attack the children of prominent conservatives than to address the arguments of said pundits and politicians.

Remember, back in 1992 when the media went apoplectic after Rush Limbaugh made fun of the then-president-elect’s daughter on his TV show? It was perhaps the last time the conservative talker’s media critics were right about him (though many would provide inaccurate accounts of the incident). And Rush apologized and never again mocked Chelsea Clinton.

Now, we’ve got angry left-wingers harassing Glenn Beck when he took his family to an outdoor screening of a Hitchcock movie.  Even the Huffington Post picked it up, but note how they report it, “Glenn Beck Says Family Harassed In Bryant Park: ‘It Was A Hostile Situation’” Emphasis added.

By headlining it as “Glenn Beck Says,” the HuffPo editors suggest that Beck may have been throwing out empty accusations. You know, how they are, those deranged conspiracy mongers.

Given the different treatment the media accord to the children of conservative politicians, it is no wonder former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos (now working at ABC) asked Michelle Bachmann if her children are “prepared and are you prepared for the loss of privacy that comes with the president campaign“.  Wonder if he asked Barack Obama a similar question in the run-up to the 2008 presidential campaign.

Probably didn’t because he knew the media protect the privacy of Democrats’ children while using the adolescent foibles of Republicans’ kids as indications of the various conservatives’ unfitness for federal office.

ADDENDUM:  Do wonder if any of the civility police in the MSM, you know those folks eager to fault conservatives for the attack on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, will condemn those who harassed Glenn Beck.  And call for greater civility among liberal critics of conservatives.

NB: Changed the title because the original did not reference one of the subjects of the post.  Glenn Beck is not a politician.

UPDATE:  Yahoo! did pick up on this, even including the story among its news headlines, but get a load of the title, Glenn Beck and family encounter hostility in NYC.  (more…)

Michael Barone finds it “interesting that mainstream media journalists who are so eager to zing Michele Bachmann for getting John Wayne’s birthplace wrong, have not been interested in asking whether” President Obama made a mistake last Thursday

. . . when speaking at Fort Drum, he said that SFC Jared Monti was “the first person who I was able to award the Medal of Honor to who actually came back and wasn’t receiving it posthumously.” Alas, he was mistaken. He awarded the Medal of Honor to Jared Monti posthumously in 2009 and awarded the Medal of Honor in person to SSG Sal Giunta in person in 2011.

“You might think,” Barone quips, “that their chief motive is to make Obama look good and to suppress facts that make him look bad.”

Fascinating how many people, based on the immediate past president’s verbal gaffes, assumed he was a dunce. Wonder if they’d have a similar opinion of the incumbent if the mainstream media paid as much attention to his gaffes as they did to those of his predecessor.

UPDATE:  Unbeknownst to me, earlier today Jim Geraghty embedded the clip of former President Nixon speaking the words which inspired the title of this post.

In a post this morning, echoing Senator Jeff Sessions’s call for conducting “negotiations over raising the federal debt” in the open, John Hinderaker says that should let “their proposals see the light of day.” He contends that the president’s party has “nothing to offer but demagoguery.”

Indeed.

Yesterday, ABC reported just what kind of reelection campaign the president is running:

Signaling its messaging operation has kicked into gear, the Obama campaign today directly responded to Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann’s bid for the presidency, saying her economic policies would devastate the middle class.

“Congresswoman Bachmann talks about reclaiming the American Dream, but her policies would erode the path to prosperity for middle class families,” Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said in a statement.

“She voted for a budget plan that would extend tax cuts for the richest Americans on the backs of seniors and the middle class while ending Medicare as we know it,” he said.

(Via Jim Hoft.) So, Obama’s people are attacking the budget plan that Mrs. Bachmann supported without offering a plan of their own. Say what you will of the charismatic Republican from Minnesota, she at least had the courage to make “tough choices” on the budget.

We still don’t have the details of the president’s plan to cut the deficit. Nor to deal with Medicare’s coming insolvency. So, his team will attack a Republican for having the courage to stand up and show where she stands on issues where he refuses himself to take a stand.

With the president now in full campaign mode, he appears a little more energetic than he has in his past few months in office. Perhaps, it’s that he prefers campaign mode to governing, more comfortable attending fundraisers with adoring fans than laboring at compromises with principled, political adversaries. But, that craft of compromising happens to be part of his job description, particularly since Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives last fall.

Indeed, except for the speech-giving part of that job, Obama doesn’t seem much to care for his job, but he sure likes the title. At the fundraisers in which he delights, he can more readily speak in broad generalities, offering his amorphous vision of change (while often attacking his ideological adversaries, misrepresenting the nature of their criticism and distorting their policies) and exult in the adoration of his wealthy supporters.

The bromides he offers in his speeches call to mind Peter Sellers’s last (iconic) role, Chauncey Gardiner, in 1979 movie Being There. “As you may remember,” Michael Barone writes,

Gardiner is a clueless gardener who is mistaken for a Washington eminence and becomes a presidential adviser. Asked if you can stimulate growth through temporary incentives, Gardiner says, “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well in the garden.” “First comes the spring and summer,” he explains, “but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.” The president is awed as Gardiner sums up, “There will be growth in the spring.”

As that fictional president was awed by Gardiner’s bromides, so are Obama’s supporters awed by his. But, unlike Gardiner who did not seek to offer his empty rhetoric to powerful people, Obama does seek audiences for his well-delivered, but vague vision of change.

The president doe delight in the opportunities his job affords to give speeches, but otherwise seems put upon when forced to take on the real responsibilities of his job, like put forward a plan to reform Medicare when its trustees warn of the popular program’s coming insolvency or provide an alternative budget, given that not a single Senator voted for his (even though the Senate contains 51 members of his political party and two independents who caucus with said party). (more…)

Was busy outlining a post on this matter when DrewM at Ace pretty much summed it up in a sentence: “It’s funny how the answer to every problem is always more and strong government.”

For every problem it seems, particularly social ones, liberals believe the government should step in and impose a solution. But, as with many (but definitely not all) crises, government is not the solution, but very often is the problem.

In those cases where government is not the cause of the problem, the government solution often exaggerates it.

More on this anon, as necessary, with a possibly related post on why conservative policies are better for gay people (a notion I begin to explore here with Cynthia Yockey doing the same here.)

Hillary: State Dept. ‘Instrumental in Sealing Deal’ For Lady Gaga’s Gay Pride Gig in Rome

I mean, with all the problems in the Middle East and all, not to mention a couple of wars and various kinetic actions, you do have to have your priorities.

Via reader Peter from Houston.

Five years ago, when the highest court in New York State refused to mandate state recognition of same-sex marriage, I disagreed with gay activists who criticized the decision, writing, “It is the job of courts to interpret the law, not set social policy“, adding

Despite the unfortunate rhetoric of the releases of HRC and NGLTF, I am delighted to see that their leaders are now looking to these legislators to make that case. Let’s hope this defeat convinces them to spend more time promoting gay marriage in legislatures and other popular fora rather than in courts of law.

Now that they have done so; they have finally achieved the result they wanted.  Elected state legislatures, I have always contended, are the appropriate fora to decide such issues.

The process was often messy, the rhetoric regularly exaggerated, the understanding of marriage generally at odds with the history of the institution, but at least those who made the final decision were elected by the people of the various jurisdictions of the Empire State and thus answerable to them at the ballot box.

We may not have had (and indeed did not have) the type of civil discussion of the importance and meaning of marriage that would have helped strengthen the institution (and not just in New York), but the branch of government responsible for deciding whether the state should privilege same-sex unions as it has long privileged different-sex monogamous unions resolved the issue.

It’s amazing the speed with which our elected legislatures have moved to consider state recognition of our (gay) relationships.  Just six years ago, the Connecticut legislature voted to recognize civil unions, without a court mandating it to do so.  (more…)

While, as you can guess, I quibble with the title of Cynthia Yockey’s post that Glenn linked earlier today, she offers something which bears consideration and conversation:

. . . in the name of family values, we are forced out of our own families. However, gays have responded to discrimination by becoming entrepreneurs and professionals, which makes gays a natural constituency of fiscal conservativism and explains why 31 percent of gay voters voted for Republicans in 2010 (including me). Gays are the most getable demographic in 2012 for Republicans because there’s no voting bloc Obama and the Democrats have screwed over more than gays and they are furious and looking for a new home.

(Read the whole thing.  While I don’t agree with everything she has to say, she does raise some important issues and make some thoughtful observations.)

Now, while I do believe gay people are a natural constituency for a fiscally conservative GOP, I wonder how many have become so politicized by our overly political (gay) culture that they can’t see how free market policies benefit creative types, particularly the creative entrepreneurial types.  And gay people do seem to succeed in such professions, in numbers disproportionate to our representation in society at large.

As I learned in my conversation with Palin-effigy hanger Mito Aviles, state and local regulations on small business place unusual burdens on creative small business folk.  Their desire to scale back intrusive regulations correspond with the very principles of the Tea Party movement.

The question is:  how do we break them from their prejudiced view of the GOP, particularly given how the media dwell on social conservatives’ (alleged) dominance of the movement — and the ignorance of many gay leaders of the underlying philosophy of the Republican Party as it has evolved since the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the election of Ronald Reagan sixteen years later.

Commenting to my New York gay marriage post which I only hacked out in a few minutes, having learned the news while noshing on some yogurt after returning from a date, Jim Treacher offers another wonderful window in the liberal worldview:

It’s always funny when a lefty assumes he knows your opinion and condemns you for it. Because YOU’RE the prejudiced bigot.

It’s always fun noting the prejudices of the left, rushing to conclusions about our posts, based upon assumptions about our opinions, assumptions often at odds with the very content of the posts to which they attach them.  Some just must assume that so political am I that on a Friday evening, instead of socializing with friends or going to the movies, I will assiduously follow the news, able to write up a thoughtful and incisive blog post the moment big news breaks.

Sorry, fellows, politics isn’t all there is to my life.  I don’t sit at the computer waiting for news to break or constantly checking for updates on my Smartphone.

Do find it amusing that our first commenter must needed to comment critically, just minutes after I posted while I was getting ready for bed.

ADDENDUM:  Sometimes our critics refuse to appreciate that we have passions not related to political blogging and, unlike some web-sites or news outlets, don’t have staff who monitoring the news 24/7 and able to blog on a matter at a moment’s notice.  I was bone-tired last night when I learned the news and realized I needed to blog on the topic (even though I was beginning to fade).  I had planned to spend today reading (as is my wont on Saturdays when I don’t go to shul) before heading out to an afternoon barbecue, but because of the events in New York, will be devoting a (far) greater part of the day to blogging than I had initially planned. (more…)