In The Notes: Ronald Reagan’s Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom, the editors include this comment by an Israeli scientist the Gipper preserved on one of his many note cards:

Those nat[ion]‘s which have put liberty ahead of equality have ended up doing better by equality thanthose with the reverse principles.

I’m sorry to interrupt WeinerGate… but I wanted to say hello from I-40 West near Knoxville, TN. I’m on our 3rd annual Nashville road trip for the CMA MusicFest this week.

To keep track of my escapades, please follow me on Twitter!

The awesome week of Country Music starts tonight with the Grand Ole Opry show. The lineup is amazing: Darius Rucker, Martina McBride, Oak Ridge Boys, Lady Antebellum and Carrie Underwood. I know! Awesome, right.

You can listen to the show at 10:30 Eastern on Opry.com.

I’ll try to tweet or post some pics tonight.

More from Nashville later!!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

“Other than Andrew Breitbart,” Roger Simon writes, “the big winner in all this so far is the Republican Party.”

Now, I don’t know if I agree with my fellow Angeleno about this story being a victory for the GOP, save that it neutralizes a man who Moe Lane billed as “one of the Democrats’ attack dogs“, but I do agree that Breitbart is a big winner of this whole enterprise.  Huge, indeed.  It was a victory he did not even seek, vindication he may not even have looked for.

For more than a full week, in blogs, on cable news and even in our comments section, Democrats and their allies were hinting that the new media mogul had ginned up this story, with one of his minions responsible for hacking into the Congressman’s twitter account.  They attempted to use this story to smear Andrew Breitbart.

And he just happened to be in New York at the very time Weiner had scheduled his press conference to admit his deception.  Left-wing pundits put Breitbart into the story. So, we have Democrats calling his credibility into question, then yesterday the Democrat at the center of the scandal apologizing to Breitbart, thus acknowledging that the slurs directed against the new media pioneer had no basis in reality.

Many, heretofore unaware of his good works, will now see Breitbart as the man falsely maligned by his critics on the left. It’s going to be a lot harder now for the Democrats to attack this man.   (more…)

Commenting on Democratic U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner’s statement today that his wife ““was not happy” when she learned this morning of his dishonesty, Jennifer Rubin asks, “Did she learn nothing from working for Hillary Clinton about enabling lying men?”

And didn’t Weiner, elected to Congress the year Mrs. Clinton’s husband lied about, then admitted to a sexual relationship with a White House intern, learn anything from his fellow Democrat’s experience?  Maybe, he thought that he too could get away with it, as the former president did.  Maybe he thought Democrats were immune from scandal.

Yet, with the new media, he should have learned that the game has changed.  He should have known the perils to a married public official of seeking out extramarital dalliances, even if such flirtations are never consummated.

To be sure, his statement today was laudatory.  He was forthright, didn’t pass the buck, appeared genuinely contrite, acknowledged the mistake he made and the pain he caused his family, particularly his wife.  Most importantly, he acknowledged that his own dishonesty last week made his mistake “worse.”

One wonders less at his judgment in engaging in on-line flirtation and more at his judgment not just in denying it, but in the manner of his denial.  Instead of merely saying that he had not tweeted the picture, he continued to deceive us in numerous public fora, including press conferences, public statements and media interviews.  It was as if he undertook a press tour entirely to deceive. (more…)

He should have made this statement last week.  It’s strong.  He doesn’t mince words.  He acknowledges his error and doesn’t try to pass the blame onto others.  And admits he hasn’t been telling the truth.

“I haven’t,” the Democrats says, “told the truth and have done things I deeply regret.”  He calls what he did a “terrible mistake”, calls it a “very dumb thing to do.”  Acknowledges it was “destructive” and repeatedly says he accepts responsibility, that he has harmed his wife and family.  Calls it his own “deep weakness.”

Had he offered this statement last week, people might be more disposed to forgive him.  Right now, however, we have the question not whether or not he truly regrets his actions or he regrets that he got caught.

RELATED:  R.S. McCain is also covering the Democrat’s presser.

UPDATE:  He even apologizes to Andrew Breitbart (who comes off today, as Charlie Sheen might put, as the day’s big winner).

UP-UPDATE:  Just a thought.  He might have served himself better had he made his statement and then not taken questions.  Some of these questions are just, well, inappropriate.

UP-UP-UPDATE:  Calls its a “deep personal failure”, but says he never met any of the women in question nor has he had sex outside his relationship.  And says he’s not making any excuses for his behavior, repeats that he did a dumb thing and “lied about it.”

UP-UP-UP-UPDATE: Yes, he’s right, his wife does deserve better than this. And he acknowledges that denying this made it “worse.”

SPECIAL UPDATE at 4:51 PM EST. Get off the stage, Anthony. You’ve said all you need to say. One minute later, he takes my advice.

UP-UP-UP-UP-UPDATE: Lis Wiehl on Cavuto saying that if he admits responsibility, he should resign. Because he lied to his constituents.

Perhaps the most telling means to determine media bias is to compare treatment of the two major parties’ nominees for vice president.  One had a reputation for embellishing his record while making some pretty silly statements, the other had her supposedly silly statements publicized as a signs of her stupidity.  His were brushed aside, as “Well, that’s just Joe.”

Now, another prominent Democrat tapped by Barack Obama for an important job has now joined her fellow partisan from the First State, with her eagerness for exaggeration and her penchant for misrepresentation.  And Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has not been subject to the same degree of media scrutiny (and mockery) as the more charismatic former Alaska governor received.  Now, Jennifer Rubin reports, she’s telling us that Republican “want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws“.

“No,” quips Rubin,

I don’t suppose the media will give her the same treatment that is handed out to Palin. They make allowances for Wasserman Schultz, you see, because her “heart is in the right place,” meaning she mouths liberal platitudes, albeit inartfully.

Well, they do make allowances for Joe Biden.

Questions, comments requests can be sent to sarjex (at) gmail dot com

The great wickedness of Liberalism, I saw, was that those who devise the ever new State Utopias, whether crooks or fools, set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others.

–David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture

About ten minutes ago (12:10 AM PST).

UPDATE:  Yup:

Screen capture of google search at 12:24 PST (3:24 GayPatriot blog time).

According to Michael Alan, blogging at Legal Insurrection, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the current chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), is attempting to brush aside the actions of her New York House colleague, claiming that Anthony Weiner “is dealing with ‘a personal matter.’”  That “personal matter” is the Congressman’s tweeting a certain semi-lewd picture to a college co-ed.

When, however, a male congressman sent somewhat lewd messages to young men, she not only castigated her colleague, but demanded the resignation of the House Speaker as well, suggesting he was complicit in those shenanigans.  While Alan attributes the difference in her reaction to the partisan affiliation of the congressmen in question, we should also note that she has called for a much harsher censure of the man sexually drawn to members of his own sex while seeking to excuse the behavior of an apparently heterosexual federal representative.

Could it be that she used the pretext of the 2006 scandal involving Congressman Foley to draw attention to these misdeeds of a gay man, so reminding people of the shibboleth that gay men regularly prey on teenage boys?  And yet she finds it excusable that a married straight man would use electronic media to flirt with a woman less than half his age.  This Democrat appears more ready to criticize a gay man than a straight one.

I’m sure HRC is already looking into the matter and asking why the Democrat who showed such outrage over Foley’s illicit electronic missives to young men would be so indifferent to Weiner’s tweets to young women.

(Via Instapundit.)

Yesterday, I blogged that Obama Democrats don’t seem to be willing to admit that their economic policies have failed.  Today, while scanning the blogs, I caught this over at Gateway Pundit.  It’s not just that the president’s party refuses to admit failure, they want to double down and continue with the very policies which failed to generate the growth they promised when they passed the “stimulus.”  Jim quote a post from The Hill:

House Democrats this week have amplified their calls for new spending on infrastructure and other federal projects in the face of May’s discouraging job-creation figures.

Even as Republicans are insisting on “trillions” of dollars in spending cuts, Democrats maintain that a targeted injection of additional federal dollars in the near-term would go a long way toward reversing the hiring slump. Friday’s disappointing job report, they say, only bolsters their case.

“The American people, while concerned about the deficit, place much more emphasis on job creation, and they see a role for the government,” Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) told The Hill. “A fast injection of job stimulus on the public side would help tremendously. … It [the job report] helps our argument about investment.”

Um, Congressman, why are you so convinced that the American people believe that job creation requires federal involvement?  Seems you’re projecting your ideology onto them.

Sometimes, ya gotta wonder if spending is like heroin to the Democrats; they only feel good when they’re spending the taxpayers’ money.

one of the things that I’m trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.

–Barack Obama, March 19, 2009

IT’S NOT MY FAULT! Reuters: Obama Blames Europe, Japan for US Economic Woes.

–Glenn Reynolds, June 4, 2011

I am underwhelmed with the GOP Presidential Candidates so far. Except for one… The Herminator.

Check out this interview with ABC News on their web program “Topline”.

And here is the Herman Cain Train video put out by his campaign.  How can you NOT like this guy?!?

I met Herman Cain at CPAC and I continue to be impressed every time I see or hear him.  I’m not endorsing anyone yet… but at least Herman Cain has a lot of Americans EXCITED about a potential leader for our great nation.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Last night, via this blog’s Facebook page, a reader alerted me to an article sure to cheer (momentarily) the hearts of all freedom-loving Americans:  a federal judge has ruled that a gay softball league can set its own standards for participation.

“It is not,” U.S. District Court Judge John Coughenour wrote in his ruling, ”the role of the courts to scrutinize the content of an organization’s chosen expression.”  Nor should it be.

Three bisexual men filed a lawsuit in Washington state against the North American Gay Amateur Athletic Association (NAGAA) after they had been kicked off the team for not being gay enough.  Now, when I initially blogged about this suit last April, I called NAGAA’s rule limiting the number of heterosexual players “stupid” and found it “disgusting that a gay organization would not just countenance, but also conduct a public interrogation into individuals’ private lives.”  (It did so to find out if they were gay enough.)

That said, it’s a private organization and private organizations should be allowed to set their own rules.  Allowing it to do so, the judge

. .  refused to enjoin enforcement of the two-player rule. “Plaintiffs have failed to argue that there is a compelling state interest in allowing heterosexuals to play gay softball,” Coughenour wrote.

“NAGAAA might very well believe that given the history of gay exclusion for sports, the only way to promote competition for all persons, and ensure that gay athletes have the same opportunities as straight athletes, is to create an exclusively gay community with exceptions for a small number of straight players,” the ruling states.

The ruling wasn’t entirely rosy though. “Coughenour also ruled that the athletic association failed to prove it should not be subjected to public-accommodation laws as ‘a distinctly private organization.”  So, now we’ve got a federal judge determining such matters.  That is a truly chilling thought.  Shouldn’t the simple question be whether or not the group takes state money.

Let NAGAA set its own rules.  Indeed, let all private athletic associations do the same.  If a group of gay guys want to play softball with a group consisting primarily of their fellow gays, then more power to them.  It’s their choice.  Isn’t this land of the free?  And isn’t that what freedom means?

UPDATE:   John Yoo gets it: (more…)

Below you’ll find a chart, using the administration’s own forecast of how unemployment would decline with and without the president’s recovery plan.  This helped them sell the $800 billion plan to a skeptical public, already upset with the previous administration for not doing enough to hold the line on spending.

I circled the points on the chart that correspond to the middle of this year. Had we done nothing, the president’s economists warned us, unemployment today would be a tad above 8% and declining.

With the latest figures of 9.1% unemployment, up one-tenth of a point over last month, unemployment is a full point ahead of where it was supposed to be without the near- one trillion dollar increase in federal debt.

Yesterday, we learned that we’re not creating as many jobs as are normally created right after a steep economic downturn:

Payrolls grew at the slowest pace in eight months and the U.S. jobless rate unexpectedly climbed to 9.1 percent in May, reinforcing signs that a slowdown in the world’s largest economy is persisting into the second quarter.

Employers added a less-than-projected 54,000 jobs last month, after a revised 232,000 gain in April that was smaller than initially estimated, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington.

Emphasis added.  Link via ILoveCapitalism.  It seems the president and his economic team are uncertain what to do fix the economy now that it’s clear that their original recovery plan failed to produce the results promised.  They just won’d admit the “stimulus” failed nor, as David Harsanyi suggests, do they have any new ideas to generate more growth and create jobs:

But what exactly has this administration done right? What creative ideas have they offered? How many alternative realities (you know, ‘things could have been worse’?) do we have to accept? Fact is, while these condescending technocrats accuse their opponents of being nihilists, ideologues and radicals, they are the ones that refuse to deviate from dogma no matter how much evidence of failure confronts them.

Via Instapundit. (more…)

If Bill Clinton did not have Newt Gingrich to play off and work with, he would not have been as successful a domestic policy president as he was. In many ways, the Democrat flailed around until Republicans won Congress in 1994.

Did Gingrich learn anything in their exchanges which would enable him to craft a consensus domestic policy as Clinton did? Does he have the political skills to work with Congress and appeal to the public?

Sarah Palin did more to bring down corrupt politicians in her own party before she became governor than Barack Obama has done in his party, indeed in both parties, in his entire political career.

As readers of this blog know, I frequently take issue with the various gay groups’ obsession with the notion of “equality.”  In the last century, we saw how many advocates of this ideal sought to enforce it through the heavy hand of the state through regulations which limit the freedom of private enterprises and even individuals.

Reading today in the the latest collection of the Gipper’s writings,The Notes: Ronald Reagan’s Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom, I caught this note which gets at my discomfort with all this “equality” rhetoric:

The real Am[erican] idea is not that every man shall be on a level with every other, but that every man shall have the liberty without hindrance to be what God made him. The office of gov[ernmen]t is not to confer happiness but to give men the opp[ortunity] to work out happiness for themselves.

The policy, it would seem, would then be to eliminate laws which constrain our freedom rather than to enact ones which (supposedly) ensure our equality.

UPDATE:  In the very next notecard quoted in the book, the Gipper takes on equality more directly, citing Edmund Burke:

A perfect equality will indeed be produced — that is to say equal wretchedness, equal beggary, and on the part of practitioners a woeful, helpless and desperate disappointment.  Such is the event of all compulsive equalizations.  They pull down what is above; they never raise what is below; they depress high & low together, beneath the level of what was originally the lowest.

“How long,” Michelle Malkin asks,”before Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner conducts his next meltdown press conference flanked by two adult-movie ‘goddesses’ a la Charlie Sheen? Like the delusional bad-boy actor, Weiner actually thinks his self-destructive act is ‘winning‘, too.”

And why boast (falsely as it turns out) that he has more Twitter followers than Paul Ryan?  It’s almost as if his whole game now is about getting media exposure (well, not quite).

I had dinner last night with a friend who routinely votes Democrat and even he had trouble believing his fellow partisan from the Empire State.

Mr. Weiner is not acting like he has nothing to hide.  Indeed, it’s almost as he believes making a spectacle of himself will keep people’s eyes riveted on the locked door to the closet where he keeps his secrets.  If they keep looking at that door, he wants to believe, they won’t want to know what inside because it’s locked, you see.  You know, like that scene in Star Wars where C-3PO and R2-D2 hide from the stormtroopers in Mos Eisley.

If he were indeed innocent of the charges leveled against him, he would:

1. Say in plain and simple terms that he didn’t send the tweet in question
2. Call for an investigation to see who had hacked his Twitter account
3. Remain silent until said investigation was complete.

It seems that all too often when Democrats criticize Republican policies, a good number of my fellow partisans run for cover. But, in the wake of attacks on the Ryan reform, Republicans are fighting back against a mendacious opposition whose leaders are misrepresenting their plans to reform Medicare in light of its looming bankruptcy.

Last week, we saw Republicans rising to defend the Ryan budget in the wake of the Republican loss in NY-26. Senator Marco Rubio cut a powerful video. “Ryan,” Glenn Thrush and Abby Phillip reported in Politico, “directly confronted President Barack Obama over Democratic ridicule of Ryan’s controversial Medicare overhaul plan – while other GOP leaders accused the president for “demagoguery” during a chilly bipartisan White House meeting.”

“The ability of the Republicans,” Jennifer Rubin writes, “to push back, and to begin to get the facts out is impressive“:

Michael Steel, spokesman for Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) told me this morning: “We’re making progress, and we know the truth is on our side — but everyone is going to have to keep working hard to make sure the American people know that we have a plan to preserve and protect Medicare, while Democrats’ insistence on the status quo will mean bankruptcy and steep benefit cuts.”

We’re not acting like Republicans of the past and sitting on our hands, hoping the merits of our ideas will sell themselves. We know we need to aggressively defend them in the fact of determined opposition.

This bright blogress suggests “Lincoln-Douglas style” debates with Ryan as “the standard-bearer for the Republicans.” At the same time, Rubin wonders “which Democrat would be willing to take him on”, hinting that there would be few takers “since their talking points have shriveled after only a few days of intense scrutiny.”

NB: Sometimes our critics do have a a point. And in response to PeeJ’s criticism below (comments 4 & 6), I changed the introduction to this post as the original was incidental to the post (and actually distracted from my meaning).