Seems that the secret to landing a plum job in the Obama Administration is quite similar to some of the strategies used in the city where the president cut his political teeth.

According to Politico:

More than two years after Obama took office vowing to banish “special interests” from his administration, nearly 200 of his biggest donors have landed plum government jobs and advisory posts, won federal contracts worth millions of dollars for their business interests or attended numerous elite White House meetings and social events, an investigation by iWatch News has found.

To wit:

Overall, 184 of 556, or about one-third of Obama bundlers or their spouses joined the administration in some role. But the percentages are much higher for the big-dollar bundlers. Nearly 80 percent of those who collected more than $500,000 for Obama took “key administration posts,” as defined by the White House. More than half the 24 ambassador nominees who were bundlers raised $500,000.

Via Instapundit.  Do wonder, to borrow an expression from David Axelrod, if this information will be scrutinized as much perhaps as Sarah Palin’s e-mails.

Yesterday, two of my favorite blogger/pundits, Glenn Reynolds and Michael Barone, linked a post where Walter Russell Mead compared the incumbent chief executive not just to the worst president of many of our lifetimes, but also to the man considered by many the worst president of the century just concluded, Herbert Hoover. That big-government Republican . . .

. . . had long been known as a leading progressive, and in the face of the Depression he was ready to countenance a significant expansion of the government’s role. His Reconstruction Finance Corporation would be taken over by FDR; it lent money to distressed companies in an effort to jump start the economy. He proposed the creation of a federal Department of Education; he was willing to countenance significant budget deficits and supported important public works projects (like Boulder Dam) as a way of stimulating employment and rebuilding confidence in the economy. . . .

With great intelligence and serious goodwill, both men set about to address the most important issues facing the country and the world — only to find that their chosen remedies failed one by one. . . . (more…)

One again, the outspoken governor of New Jersey doesn’t mince words.

Now, I’m sure some folks will call this good man a “hater” for holding to the traditional definition of marriage. What stands out here is that he publicly dares to differ with the doctrine of his church and has come out clearly in favor of same-sex civil unions.

All that notwithstanding, he’ll still remain a folk hero to many straight conservatives.

(Via Jimmy LaSalvia on Facebook.)

Perhaps the most heartening thing about the Weiner scandal is the extent to which it helps restore my faith in my fellow gays.  Well, some bloggers may try to excuse his behavior as the new normal or some such, every single gay person with whom I have spoken (or e-mailed) about the matter says the congressman behaved boorishly, that is, as I wrote here, they understand that marriage changes things.

Had Weiner not been married, most of them grant, they would have held him to a different, less lofty, standard.  Some of my interlocutors, to be sure, contend that if he was going to engage in online flirtations, he could have made it “okay” by being open with his wife about his internet interactions.  Despite their looser definition of martial fidelity, even these folks do acknowledge that a married man has responsibilities which a single man lacks.

Telling this story would certainly strengthen the case for state recognition of same-sex marriage.  In the matter of the married Anthony Weiner, there does seem to be a difference in the attitude of the official designated spokespeople for our community and the average, everyday homosexual.

Let me hope that I’m not the only gay man to point this out in a public forum.

In the comment thread to one of my recent posts on Palin Derangement Syndrome, a number of readers either took our defenders to task for appropriate language or faulted me for not calling them on it.

I answered those criticizing me briefly, “those who use this forum to take issue with my critics in terms I would rather they not use do not speak for me.” Indeed, I believe the ad hominem nature of some responses to our critics weakens their (otherwise sound) arguments, and have told our defenders as much in private e-mails, personal conversations and on this blog, writing here and here:

All too often alas, those who chime in to defend Bruce or me compromise some very strong comments when they resort to ad hominem, using the term “libtard’ or some such. In many cases, if they took the insult out of the comment, they’d have won the argument anyway. That need to get in that additional dig, while emotional satisfying, compromises their entire argument and gives our critics ammunition to attack them.

“Friends,” I once remarked, “you make a better case when you leave out the ad hominem.”   While many have used the forum we provide to conduct serious discussions of the issue of the day, most recently in my post on Anthony Weiner and marriage, all too often the tone of the comments drives away some of our critics — as well as some of our ideological confrères.

It pained me recently when a moderately left-of-center classmate from college e-mailed me about how the discussion quickly degenerated.  And this from a reader who took pains to register his criticism of my posts in a most civil manner, respecting as he did, both my intellect and intentions.  Would it that some of our defenders had showed a similar respect for him.

And for all our critics who chime in in a tone similar to that he adopted.  And that our critics show the same respect for us and those who defend us in a civil manner.

Almost two weeks ago, I derided film snobs for telling us what kind of movies we should and shouldn’t like.  Yesterday, the fetching Stephen Green (sorry, fellas, he’s straight; sorry, gals, he’s married) took one to task for doing the same sort of thing, lamenting the enduring appeal of one of the greatest films of the 1980s, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

And this flick is more than just an entertaining one.  It endures because it presents Ferris as a man whose attitude was worthy of emulation.  As Green puts it:

Ferris, in other words, had plenty of adversity. He just handled his with the aplomb the rest of us wish we had. Everybody at school loved him for that. And why shouldn’t they? After all — we love him for it, too.

Not only do we love him for it, but this attitude has a very real effect in the life of his uptight best  friend, with Bueller serving as “the catalyst for the deep changes which Cameron [that friend] undergoes.”

As Glenn, who alerts us to the post, might say, “Read the whole thing.”

Thanks to the Republican Senate in the Badger State, gay people may soon have a tool to protect themselves against assault.  Would-be gay bashers will now tread more carefully knowing that gay people could be packing:

The Wisconsin Senate passed a bill Tuesday that would allow concealed weapons in the state Capitol and other public places, but not in police stations, courthouse and other specifically exempted locations.

The final vote was 25-8, with all 19 Republicans and six Democrats supporting it, and the other eight Democrats opposed.

Wisconsin would become the 49th state to legalize carrying hidden guns. Those who want to carry the weapons would have to obtain a permit.

Before the bill goes to Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who backs the measure, it must also pass the Assembly. That could happen later in the week.

Thank you, Governor Walker, for supporting a means to give law-abiding gay people a means to protect themselves.  Via Instapundit.

No longer Bush’s Fault(tm), our man-boy President now blames…. wait for it….. technology instead of his economic policies for our stagnant economy.

President Obama explained to NBC News that the reason companies aren’t hiring is not because of his policies, it’s because the economy is so automated. … “There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”

Oh brother.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

UPDATE (from Dan):  Is it just me, or did Obama sound whiny when he blamed ATMs.  And wasn’t he supposed to be the hip politician who embraced new technology?  Don’t think this will play well with most Americans, may make him look as out of touch as some president who at least according to an inaccurate report in the New York Times was unfamiliar with a grocery store checkout scanner.

UP-UPDATE (from Bruce):  An ATM has responded to this scurrilous attack from Obama.

I didn’t do it.

President Obama says I’m to blame for high unemployment – part of the “structural” problems with the economy. Yes, he actually said my electronic brethren and I – who dispense cash and make lines move a little more quickly at the airport – are part of the reason 1.5 million fewer Americans have jobs than when the “stimulus” was enacted.

But before the president fingered us as responsible for job losses, he sought to take credit for the sluggish economy.

And even DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) said this morning that Democrats own the economy. I don’t. I’m just an ATM. I don’t own anything.

As I pointed out in a post earlier today, when on John King’s CNN show yesterday, Obama strategist David Axelrod offered up this whopper, “This president was scrutinized, more perhaps than any candidate ever had been.”  Perhaps clueless about the latest Sarah Palin-inspired media frenzy, King chose not to challenge the Democrat on his assertion.

Perhaps, Mr. King should join me in subscribing to the Wall Street Journal’s Political Diary.  Yesterday, in that e-newsletter, John Fund, commenting on said frenzy asked us to

Contrast this with the level of interest that reporters have shown in Barack Obama’s lack of a paper trail during the 2008 campaign and afterwards. No, I’m not talking about the issue of his birth certificate. I am thinking of his college records and papers; his application to the Illinois bar to become a lawyer; his complete list of clients while he was in private practice; and his records from his service in the Illinois State Senate. Almost none of this has been released in whole or in part by Mr. Obama, and requests have been airily dismissed.

And then there are Mr. Obama’s longtime associations with very left-wing political figures and foundations. With the exception of journalist Stanley Kurtz, author of a richly documented new book called “Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism,” almost no one has been interested in those ties.

Do hope Mr. King asks Mr. Axelrod about this missing paper trail and these associations the next time he has him on CNN (and he does seem to be a frequent quest on that network).  In the meanwhile, it would be nice if other reporters at CNN started subjecting the incumbent to the same sort of scrutiny it subjects Mrs. Palin.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  The Griper may not “like to use this type of argument but” remains “certain that in this case if Sarah Palin were a liberal and the right held her up to this scrutiny there’d be accusations of sexual prejudice flying all over the nation.”  Indeed.

UPDATE:  Ann Althouse offers some perspective on the nature of the scrutiny the media have made into Mrs. Palin’s affairs:

In the run up to the receipt of the boxes of xeroxes, air time was devoted to speculating about what might be in those emails. Most notable — it’s in the middle of the “Daily Show” montage — was the suspicion that the governor’s husband was secretly running the show, pulling the strings. (You know, the shameful sexism.) But there was absolutely nothing that looked at all like that. Maybe there’s another montage that could be made of these reporters spelling out clearly what was disproved by the emails. But I think what’s they did was dribble out statements like “no smoking gun yet” — seemingly expecting that we’d gradually lose interest and move on to something else.

Read the whole thing.   Via Instapundit.

GIven the political tilt of this town (Los Angeles), particularly its gay residents, I was pleasantly surprised at Pride this past weekend to see so few Obama 2012 stickers.   Joe Solmonese may be bowing and scraping to the Democratic incumbent, but many of our gay peers (on the left) don’t seem too enthusiastic for President Obama.

Maybe it’s beginning to dawn on them that Hillary Clinton would have been a far more aggressive champion of causes near and dear to the hearts of gay activists than Obama has been.  At least Mrs. Clinton participated in gay Pride parades in New York.  Obama never participated in such celebrations in Chicago.  (Ask me again why so many gay bloggers preferred the then-junior Senator from Illinois to his then-New York counterpart.)

It’s not just left-of-center gays who aren’t all that excited about reelecting the incumbent.  The president couldn’t fill a 2,200 hundred seat concert hall in Miami for a recent fundraiser (only 980 partisans bought tickets, with some seats going for just $44, leading Ed Morrissey to observes that in the county where Obama enjoyed his largest margin in the Sunshine State, this is “a clear signal that Obama won’t get anywhere near the kind of enthusiasm he inspired in 2008, and without that, he’s very vulnerable indeed.“

Yesterday, while doing my cardio at the gym, I looked up to see the Obama re-election campaign’s top political strategist David Axelrod on his John King’s program where the Democrat offered his “assessment of the GOP presidential contenders“.  I followed the conversation briefly, but Axelrod’s insights seemed so banal, more bromides than analysis, that I returned to my book which was (far) more more engaging.

I wondered if anyone on CNN had ever invited Karl Rove onto their program in 2003 to offer his assessment of the Democratic presidential contenders in that cycle’s contest.  (When I read the transcript today, Axelrod’s words confirmed my initial analysis, more bromidic than insightful.)

Commenting on the debate in this morning’s WSJ.com’s Political Diary (available by subscription), Paul A. Gigot wonders why the candidates agreed “WSJ.com’s Political Diary “to those terrible, demeaning ground rules”. They had only 30 seconds to respond to the questions, with the “formate” thus making them, in Gigot’s words, “all look smaller and less informed than most of them are.” Given CNN’s bias, perhaps that was the goal. (more…)

Obama: My family would be fine with just 1 term.

In a thoughtful piece on the media frenzy surrounding the release of the “13,000 emails detailing almost every aspect of Sarah Palin’s governorship of Alaska“, Toby Harden gets one thing wrong:

The email release could mark the end of a chapter of what conservatives have termed “Palin Derangement Syndrome” [PDS]. Her enemies in the media appear to have overplayed their hand.

He may well right that the accomplished former governor “seems likely to emerge from the scrutiny of the 24,000 pages, contained in six boxes and weighing 275 pounds, with her reputation considerably enhanced” at least to those concerned with her actual record.  But, Mrs. Palin had already developed a solid reputation in her home state — well before John McCain tapped her as his running mate fewer than three years ago.

Many of those afflicted with PDS never paid much attention to that record.  Recall, that in her celebrated interview with the then-Republican nominee for Vice President of the United States, Katie Couric never once asked the charismatic conservatives about her record in office.

Indeed, you talk to most of those afflicted with PDS and they repeat some talking points about earmarks Palin asked for when Mayor of Wasilla.  Or books she supposedly wanted banned from the local library.  They’ve always given short shrift to her actual record.  Or the record approval she once enjoyed.  Among Alaska Democrats.

Palin Derangement Syndrome is not a rational reaction to an imperfect understanding of Sarah Palin’s record in office, but an irrational antagonism to a charismatic conservative woman.  Facts didn’t matter to their initial opposition to this strong woman.  And they won’t cause some Palin-haters to reassess their animus.

Via Big Government.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Rick Patel quips:

It does seem like Sarah Palin is the Emanuel Goldstein of the American left. She provides them with their two minutes of hate every day. You can imagine them all together in a howling mob.

It does seem hatred of Sarah Palin is part of the doctrine of the church of liberalism.

A truly great movie about the greatness of basketball legend Michael Jordan would focus not on his success with the Chicago Bulls, but his failure with the Birmingham Barons and the Scottsdale Scorpions, two minor league baseball teams. The man whom no one could touch (metaphorically speaking) on the basketball court was bested by all too many on a baseball diamond.

The theme of the story would simple:   just because you excel in one field of endeavor doesn’t mean you will excel in other fields.  A great athlete in one sport is oftentimes, at best, mediocre in another.

And so it is, to a certain extent with Newt Gingrich in politics.  A man who had a vision of Republican congressional majority and the political know-how to realize that vision, stumbles badly when competing for the White House.  Reflecting on the implosion of Gingrich’s political team, Michael Barone recalls the Georgian’s successes:

He foresaw that Republicans could win congressional races in the small-town South and worked hard to prove it, losing first in the Watergate year and then in 1976 when Jimmy Carter swept Georgia before he beat a conservative Democrat in 1978.

I remember that starting in 1984 he was predicting that Republicans could win a majority in the House. He was wrong then, but he was right in 1994 and he was right about the reasons all along. He saw that Republicans would win most Southern seats and that talented young Democrats elected in the Vietnam/Watergate years would in time retire or be defeated.

He coached politically clueless Republican candidates with the high tech of the day — hours of Newt on audiotape — and bucked the Bush 41 White House and House Republican leader in opposing a tax increase in 1990.

Read the whole thing.  In the 1980s, Gingrich foresaw a GOP majority when most people took it for granted that Democrats would run the House as the had for the past thirty years.  He changed the face — and the attitude — of congressional Republicans.  It seems he was better in devising legislative strategy than he is in running a presidential campaign. (more…)

Playing on the “Legalize LA” T-shirts and signs once ubiquitous in the Southland, some gay activists, in the wake of the passage of Prop. 8, created a “Legalize Gay” T-shirt, like this one seen at one of HRC’s two booths yesterday at LA Pride:

What makes this T-shirt so absurd is its suggestion that it’s not legal to be gay in America today. To be sure, we still need laws in more states recognizing our unions.

Even, however, without that recognition, gay people who enter into such relationships, even those who call such relationships, “marriage,” aren’t been hauled before federal magistrates (or state courts for that matter) and asked to disavow their romantic inclinations; they’re not being forced to live apart from their partner nor to move to another jurisdiction nor are they being incarernated for living openly with individuals of the same sex. And they’re not being forced to undergo “conversion therapy.”

Simply put, it’s not illegal today in American to be gay. People aren’t being arrested and threatened with a loss of liberty for freely expressing our sexuality. I mean, heck yesterday at Pride, the county sheriff was not closing down our celebration, but was instead helping facilitate it, guaranteeing our right to assemble peaceably.

Let’s not make things seem they are worse than they are — and acknowledge (as most of us do) how much progress we have made.  It’s not illegal to be gay in America.  Indeed, gay people in the United States — and other Western societies — are more free to live our lives openly than they have been at almost any point in human history.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Az Mo in NYC offers:

As far as the original post goes, I never thought I was illegal, or a second class citizen, until people started drilling it into my head that I was….people on the gay left. One day I said, “wait a minute,” looked around, saw wealthy gay men and women, homosexuals in congress, and on TV and realized that just wasn’t the case. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter what someone else thinks of me just as it shouldn’t matter to them what I think of them.

To be fair, this year’s Pride Festival in Los Angeles seemed much less political than past Prides.  I did spot a few Obama 2012 “I’m in!” stickers, but what was striking was not their presence, but their paucity.  Not many gay Angelenos seemed “in” with the incumbent Democratic president.  HRC had been far more successful in getting people to display their equal sign.

But, the extreme left did make an appearance, including some folks, demanding the release of a man who committed treason against the United States of America:

From the Communist-front group ANSWER: (more…)

Every year at LA’s Gay Pride festival, a handful of unhappy extreme social conservatives religious fanatics protest the parade. This year, I counted six. Wrong as I believe them to be, I have always supported their right to assemble peacefully and express their grievances. We should be able to be strong enough to face their criticism.

This year, I was pleased to see some counter-protesters standing in front of them brandishing their own signs.

Ain’t free speech grand?

Why, Ann Althouse wonders, referencing Ann Coulter’s new book, do liberals “fanatically worship” their leaders?

Good question.

Via Instapundit.

. . . putting more effort into combing through Sarah Palin’s e-mails than they did combing through the details of the “stimulus” and Obamacare legislation — and those were actual bills considered and passed by Congress and signed into law by the president.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Palin is the former governor of one state and is not, at present, a candidate for any public office.

UPDATE:  A nice rejoinder to the flurry of MSM interest in Mrs. Palin’s e-mails:

Other former vice-presidential candidates or potential presidential candidates whose entire email archive from their time in office has been released so the press (or just people who read the WaPo online) can comb through looking for something interesting

. . . .

You know, I can’t think of any. Nope, not a single one.

Via Instapundit.

And I thought only about 8% of Americans live there, but given the statistics on the jobs created in the current economic recovery, it seems more Americans must live in the Lone Star State than census figures suggest. (Guess the ACORN census workers in Texas were sleeping on the job.)

How else do you explain this?

Some 37% of all net new American jobs since the recovery began were created in Texas. . . .

Using Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, Dallas Fed economists looked at state-by-state employment changes since June 2009, when the recession ended. Texas added 265,300 net jobs, out of the 722,200 nationwide, and by far outpaced every other state. New York was second with 98,200, Pennsylvania added 93,000, and it falls off from there. Nine states created fewer than 10,000 jobs, while Maine, Hawaii, Delaware and Wyoming created fewer than 1,000. Eighteen states have lost jobs since the recovery began.

This article must be using outdated census figures.  It says 24.7 million people live in Texas while 36.9 million reside in California.  With a population almost 50% greater than that of its Lone Start counterpart, well, then shouldn’t the Golden State have added about 400,000 new jobs?  I mean, well, um that’s what our junior Senator promised.  Right, m’am?