When you run for an office, lambasting its occupant for his fiscal failures, you know that should you succeed in replacing him, you’re going to have to clean up the messes he will have left behind. In the third presidential debate in October, then-candidate Barack Obama detailed the fiscal mess he would be inheriting should he win the presidential contest that fall:

It seems that whenever I fault the news media for going overboard about Sarah Palin, any Palin-hater within earshot will rebuke me for demanding that people refrain from criticizing the accomplished Alaska reformer.  They contend I wish to silence Palin critics. Heck, I don’t even seek to silence the rabid Palin-obsessives, just lament that those who criticize the charismatic conservative celebrity (more often than not) exaggerate her flaws, if not make up (or truncate) comments she has made or views she holds, all while refusing to acknowledge Sarah Palin’s strengths as an individual and her record as an office-holder.

Why can’t some people just express their disagreement with Mrs. Palin in a civil tone — and take the time to familiarize himself with her actual arguments?  Those who question her competence to hold office should at least consider her actual record in office.  But, some in the news media would rather ask gotcha questions than inquire into that record.

Despite the ignorance of many Palin critics of what that Republican woman actually did in Alaska, she was an accomplished reformer who had worked with Republicans and Democrats alike while governor of the Last Frontier.  Before questioning Palin’s qualifications to lead, Ann Althouse did just that when commenting on a movie based on the Alaskan’s accomplishments:

The material — which impresses some people, even to the point of getting confused into thinking that the movie is good — shows Sarah Palin’s rise to power in Alaska and her excellent achievements and immense popularity as governor. The problem is that all of this happened in the context of boldly and bravely challenging the corrupt Republican establishment. This made her very popular with Democrats in Alaska. (more…)

A great comedienne honored to receive good wishes from a great leader:

There are many tributes that one can offer the late great Lucille Ball, but the greatest is perhaps the simplest:  she made makes us laugh.

She may have geared her humor to audiences in the 1950s, but when we watch the reruns, even though our mores have changed, her antics still delight and amuse us.  We still laugh at Lucy.  As Marlo Thomas put it:

And we loved her for the most basic of reasons: We trusted her. We knew if we showed up on Monday nights, she’d pay us back in laughs.

Whether she was plucking chocolates off a conveyor belt and stuffing them in her mouth, or vigorously stomping in a vat of grapes, or lighting a putty nose on fire –while it was attached to her face — Lucy’s mission was always the same: to see the laugh all the way through. She was like an Olympic gymnast, who practices tirelessly, executes to perfection and always lands on her feet.

As Roger Rabbit put it, “A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it’s the only weapon we have.”  Indeed.  How many people found a dark day brightened by a half-hour of Lucy’s humor?  (Or have he antics make a good day even better?)  How many times have we turned to Lucy (or other funny folk) as a respite from the struggles of a human life?

And this woman pioneered a new means to bring laughter to millions of homes.  She helped define the modern sit-com.  In developing her unique brand of physical comedy, she may have drawn on vaudeville schtick, but she made it made it work for (what was then) a new medium.  As she was influenced by the silent start Harold Lloyd, countless comedians (and comediennes) have been influenced by her.

The woman whom we remember for making us laugh had not set out to be a comedienne, but to be a Broadway star.  Only in her late 30s, after suffering many setbacks did she realize that that was her purpose in life — to make people life — and she pursued it with passion, determination, imagination and effort.  May we all such realizations and pursue them as did Lucille Ball.

RELATED: 15 Things You Never Knew About TV’s Funniest Lady

It seems that whenever I hear a TV show is well-written, I learn that a number of its writers are gay.  I would dare say that a number of those who helped provide the set-ups and dialogue for Lucille Ball’s pioneering physical comedy were guys like us.

The funny lady all but confirmed this in a 1980 interview from People magazine quoted in an Advocate article paying tribute yesterday to a woman one man called “the true gay icon”:

Ball was asked her thoughts on a number of subjects, including gay rights. “It’s perfectly all right with me,” she replied. “Some of the most gifted people I’ve ever met or read about are homosexual. How can you knock it?”

Because of the craziness of this past week, a visiting nephew and a visiting father, I somehow got my dates messed up.  I had planned on celebrating this centennial of Lucille Ball’s birthday today, Sunday, August 6, only looking up at my calendar yesterday afternoon to realize that it was indeed, Saturday, August 6 so Sunday would be the 100th anniversary of Lucy’s birth plus one day.

In honor of that great lady, I tracked down a few videos honoring her.  Here, the Gipper offers a tribute to the woman who made millions laugh.

Note how at about 0:46 into the video when Mike Wallace asks Ronald Reagan what made Lucy so special, the great man replied, “I don’t know that I can answer that.  You just accepted it and reveled in it, but you didn’t try to get down and analyze what she could do.  But, it just was peculiarly hers and her way.  I don’t know of anyone you could compare her to.”

What a great way to appreciate a great artist.  You don’t analyze how they do it; you just delight in how well they do it, that they make us laugh or cry — or just plain feel more alive and better connected to the universe and those around us.

A Facebook friend posted this on his page:

If the US Government was a family, they would be making $58,000 a year, they spend $75,000 a year & have $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing BIG spending cuts to reduce their spending to $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget & debt, reduced to a level that we can understand.

- Dave Ramsey

From the Washington Post:

Standard & Poor’s announced Friday night that it has downgraded the U.S. credit rating for the first time, dealing a symbolic blow to the world’s economic superpower in what was a sharply worded critique of the American political system.

Lowering the nation’s rating to one notch below AAA, the credit rating company said “political brinkmanship” in the debate over the debt had made the U.S. government’s ability to manage its finances “less stable, less effective and less predictable.”

Wonder if we would have seen this downgrade if the president had offered a plan of his own at the outset of the debate.

Downgraded because we spend too much:

S&P said the downgrade “reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.” It also blamed the weakened “effectiveness, stability, and predictability” of U.S. policy making and political institutions at a time when challenges are mounting.

“Democrats,” Professor William A. Jacobson writes

own the downgrade. They fought Republicans and Tea Party supporters every step of they way, and forced a deal which was insufficient. They played class warfare and race politics against arguments that we needed to drastically change our spending habits.

Via Instapundit.

But there is no doubt that we’ve been living beyond our means and we’re going to have to make some adjustments.

Now, what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.

Candidate Barack Obama, October 15, 2008

THIS CAN’T BE GOOD: U.S. Borrowing Tops 100% Of GDP: Treasury. “The new borrowing took total public debt to $14.58 trillion, over end-2010 GDP of $14.53 trillion, and putting it in a league with highly indebted countries like Italy and Belgium.”

Glenn Reynolds, August 4, 2011

Via James Pethokoukis at Reuters.com:

From Goldman Sachs today: We have lowered our forecast for US real GDP growth further and now expect real GDP to grow just 2%-2½% through the end of 2012. Our forecast for annual average GDP growth has fallen to 1.7% in 2011 (from 1.8%) and to 2.1% in 2012 (from 3.0%). Since this pace is slightly below the US economy’s potential, we now expect the unemployment rate to be at 9¼% by the end of 2012, slightly above the current level.

2. Even our new forecast is subject to meaningful downside risk. We now see a one-in-three risk of renewed recession, mostly concentrated in the next 6-9 months. There are three specific issues that concern us. First, a worsening of the European financial crisis, and a failure of European policymakers to respond adequately, could lead to a further tightening of financial conditions and credit availability, which would worsen the economic outlook globally. Second, our forecast assumes that the payroll tax cut—currently scheduled to expire at the end of 2011—is extended for another year, but if that failed to happen the fiscal drag in early 2012 would increase significantly. Third, increases in the US unemployment rate have historically had a tendency to feed on themselves, and this could happen again.

Pethokoukis makes this comparison to the 1980 & 1984 elections:

The consensus used to be that President Obama might be OK if the jobless rate fell below 8 percent by Election Day.  That seems increasingly unlikely. The economy is, at best, in slow-growth mode, just churning and churning, creating few jobs.  Comparisons to President Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” campaign are looking ever-more ridiculous.  Under Reagan’s tax-cut driven recovery, unemployment fell from 10.8 percent in December 1982 to 7.2 percent by Election Day as the economy grew 4.5 percent in 1983 and 7.2 percent in 1984. In fact,  Jimmy Carter’s 1980 campaign might be the better comparison. The unemployment rate jumped from 6.0 percent in December 1979 to 7.5 percent on Election Day 1980 as the economy shrank 0.3 percent.

All I know is that outside of the 4% unemployment rate of the DC Beltway, it is more like Mourning In America under the Obama regime.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Among the “five steps officials in Washington should take immediately to spur faster hiring in America’s private sector”  the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Tom Donohue offered yesterday was unlocking our domestic energy resources.  When I blogged on Donohue’s points, Bruce chimed in claiming that one “would do the most good for the economy“.

Well, it seems that if something is good for the economy, the Obama administration intends to do the exact opposite.

And they’re not just limiting energy exploration, they’re also blocking its production.

New Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules threaten to shut down coal-fired power plants in Texas, costing jobs, increasing the cost and limiting the availability of energy in Texas.  (Via Insapundit.)  Over at RedState, Ben Howe details just how agency Administrator Lisa Jackson’s policies are helping destroy the coal industry.

As Joy McCann warns us, the same agency “is setting up a new standard for ozone in the air” which task “local authorities to figure out how they can remove a naturally occurring gas.”  (Read the whole thing.)

The agency wants to “take over North Dakota’s federally authorized regional haze program because it doesn’t think the state’s rules will be tough enough to regulate two power plants.”  North Dakota is one of the few states booming in the economic downturn.

Those are just a few examples of how overzealous regulation at the EPA threatens energy production.  And that doesn’t even get to administration efforts to limit energy exploration.

The National Review‘s Kevin D. Williamson sums it up:

In one of the most awkward and vapid performances I can remember his having given, Pres. Barack Obama yesterday made it clear that he has learned absolutely nothing from the debt-ceiling debate — that he may be incapable of learning. He continued to talk nonsense about government “investing” in this, that, and the other, and said that was how the nation creates jobs. It was a self-discrediting performance.

Emphasis added.  (Via Instapundit.)  Williamson also details how he would balance the budget.

Even after his $800 billion stimulus failed to generate the promised employment numbers, the president still thinks we should be spending more money to jumpstart the economy .  He sounds like a man who, after maxing out his credit cards, ask Visa to raise his credit limit so he can spend a little more to get his life in order.

Um, Mr. President, weren’t you paying attention during the recent debate?   We don’t have the money to fund your new schemes — or any new schemes for that matter.

Someone looking for new means of government “investment” at a time when federal borrowing exceeds the Gross Domestic Product is not fit to lead.

Perhaps, the Obama campaign is growing less confident about the Democrat’s ability to raise $1 billion to reelect the increasingly unpopular president.

Now, we’ve got what Michelle Malkin bills, “A taxpayer-subsidized Obama campaign road trip!”  ”As part of” the preident’s “new focus” on jobs, the Democrat, Ed Morrissey reports, “plans a bus tour — an unusual mode of travel for an American President, but SOP for a presidential candidate working the crowds to bolster support.”

Joy McCann finds an upside in this: “the President can’t be pretending to do his job from a bus any more than he can from the golf course.”  But, she laments that there is also a downside, “he’s expressing his support for public funding of campaigns by using operating expenses rather than his own campaign funds.”

Guess he’ll be using this tour to tell us how he plans to create more jobs.  If he’s doing any talking about job creation, he should be addressing his words not to citizens of battlegrounds states, but to his appointees in the federal bureaucracy, instructing them to rescind the burdensome regulations they authorized in the past thirty months — and to find new ways to streamline the “permitting process.”

But, I daresay instead of offering new ideas on job creation, he’ll pull a page from his campaign playbook and attack Republicans, likely blaming the last Republican president for the mess he inherited.

RELATED: YOU DON’T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO SEE WHICH WAY THE WIND IS BLOWING: Arianna Huffington: Nobody Believes Obama’s Top Priority Is Jobs – It’s Getting Reelected.

With a new executive at the helm of “Equality California” (EqCA) we at GayPatriot have hoped (indeed still hope) that the largest gay and lesbian organization in the Golden State will become less partisan than it has been in the past and less prejudiced against Republicans.

Despite the organization’s statist ideology, seeking a legislative solution to problems facing gay and lesbian citizens, and its alliances with a variety of interest groups allied close to the state Democratic Party, including public employee unions, the organization’s new executive director, Roland Palenica, told San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter that his group “represent[s] all LGBT Californians, whether they donate to us or not“.

No, Roland, no you don’t.  You don’t speak for the gay Republicans who bristle at EqCA’s alliance with state Democrats.  You don’t speak for gay libertarians who bristle at the statist “equality” ideology.  And you don’t even speak for all gay leftists who bristle as your alliance with corporate lobbyists.

Michael Petrelis, a man who bills himself as a socialist and who alerted me Palencia’s self-serving comment, has taken the new e.d. to task for assuming to speak for all of us:

My email invitation to the town hall meeting where the gay community was allowed to vote on permitting EQCA to speak for every one of us must have been sent to the wrong addy. When did we all get a say about EQCA being the entire community’s rep? Of course, we didn’t, just as we don’t see them holding regular public forums.

Recall EQCA’s board failed to organize any open sessions about the EDposition before Palencia was hired. . . .

EQCA does not represent me, and quite a few other LGBT people in California. We have major issues with the group and the elitists running it. . . .

And EqCA does not represent me either — and I would daresay the overwhelming majority of GayPatriot readers living in the Golden State.

With “the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 500 points, as investors appeared to lose faith in the ability of the world’s policy makers to revive the global economy” and a “growing realization among even the most optimistic investors that the United States is entering a new recession — a dreaded ‘double-dip’“, Republicans need to put forward a plan to jumpstart the economy.

We know that increased government spending won’t do the trick.  We have to find ways to stimulate the dynamic and job-creating sector of the economy.  Perhaps the biggest problem is what the blogress formerly known as Little Miss Attila dubs the “pervasive climate of regulatory uncertainty” which . . .

. . . has led to the phenomenon of businesses “not knowing which way to turn.” When businesses don’t know what to invest in, they keep their money to themselves. [The president] should have signalled that he’d try to be fair to entrepreneurs and corporations.

Via Instapundit.  Over at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s blog, Tom Donohue offers “five steps officials in Washington should take immediately to spur faster hiring in America’s private sector” which instead of ratcheting up federal spending will thin “the ranks of those who are dependent on government support”:

1. Ratify Pending Free Trade Agreements With Colombia, Korea, and Panama.
2. Unlock Our Domestic Energy Resources.
3. Green-Light Transportation and Energy Infrastructure Projects.
4. Speed Up Permitting and Provide Immediate Regulatory Certainty.
5. Put the Welcome Mat Back Out for Tourists and Travelers.

Of those five points, I think we need focus on 1, 2 and 4, but alas that the incumbent administration does not seem much interested in such free-market policies.

With the debt debate behind us, House Republicans must at minimum debate bills which would unshackle the engines of economic growth, removing burdens from entrepreneurs, those job creators and innovators who are the life-blood of any economy.

Conservatives have to do more than just criticize Obama’s big-government policies.  We have to offer free market alternatives.  With these five steps, the Chamber of Commerce has done just that.  It’s time for House Republicans to follow suit.

On Tuesday, I linked the closing question of Stephen Green’s insightful post on the Obama administration, but the beginning of that post also merits your attention (as does the middle).  He used Steve McCann’ thoughtful piece at American Thinker, linking the president’s behavior in the debt ceiling debate to his overall failure of leadership, as his jumping-off point.

McCann contends that

Barack Obama’s only interest in the debt ceiling debate was to raise the borrowing limit sufficiently to get by the next election, and as a cudgel to denigrate the Republicans. His concern was not for the American people and the impact of overwhelming national debt, nor an impending and inevitable credit downgrade. Rather, he was determined that raising the debt ceiling would not become an issue during the presidential campaign. . . .

The destruction wrought by the nearly $5.5 Trillion (more than a third of the total debt of a nation 222 years old) he will have added to the nation’s balance sheet by the end of his term was immaterial, thus no detailed plan was forthcoming from the White House, and no lie or accusation aimed at the opposition was too absurd to tell.

The Democrat has, McCann observes, “abdicated all responsibility to the Congress, in particular the House of Representatives, which has little choice but to assume a role they are not structured to do: lead the country as best they can until November 2012.”  Indeed, Obama been doing that since the dawn of his administration where he let congressional Democrats draft the “stimulus” as they would later write the health care overhaul.

Seems the election of a Republican House threw a wrench into his plans of governance.   (more…)

Kudos to Yahoo! for this headline on their homepage yesterday:

More than anything this exposes the emptiness of the Democratic and left-wing bellyaching about the deal and reminds those of us who wish to reduce the size and scope of the federal government that we still have our work cut out to us.

But, at least Yahoo!’s Chris Moody is acknowledging that in Washington-ese a spending cut is not a reduction in the current level of spending, but a reduction of projected future spending:

Much of the problem has to do with the language of Washington, which, you might have noticed, is different from the speech you hear almost every other place on Earth. When most politicians talk of “cutting” spending, they don’t always literally mean that they intend to reduce current spending levels. Instead, under this version of fiscal discipline, Congress merely agrees not to spend as much money as it initially had planned. Once that deal is struck lawmakers then turn around to sell their proposals as “cuts.”

Take the “debt ceiling deal” President Obama signed on Tuesday. Let’s say that the federal government, when all is said and done, actually slows the growth of spending by $2 trillion over a decade–the minimum amount promised. After 10 years’ time, if all $2 trillion is not spent, there will actually be an increase of about $1.8 trillion.

Read the whole thing, especially for the video on the minuscule nature of the cuts in the recent deal.

In the coverage of the Reagan budget “cuts” in the 1980s, we only saw such candor in the conservative media.

SOMEWHAT RELATED: Paul Ryan asks, Where’s Your Budget, Mr. President? Via Instapundit.

UPDATE:  So, the “public backlash” the president is enduring from his liberal base over the deal is anger that spending increases aren’t going to be as large as forecast?

Bowing “to pressure from gay activists who threatened a business boycott“, a gay South Florida business association has cancelled a meeting with U.S. Rep. Allen West.  Seems that that Republican’s views on gay issues don’t perfectly align with those of gay activists.  Or maybe it’s that (R) after his name which designates him (to some gay lefties) as a horrible, no good, very bad person.

With the Wilton Manors Business Association succumbing to the threat of a boycott, gay entrepreneurs won’t have the chance to meet West, a champion of deregulatory/small government policies which help small businesses, including gay enterprises.

After the group had invited West to a meeting slated for August 8, Michael Rajner, legislative director of the Florida Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Democratic Caucus warned that a failure to rescind the invitation “would prompt gay ‘community leaders and other social justice advocates’ to call for [Wilton Manors Business Association President Celeste] Ellich’s resignation and launch a ‘boycott [of] any and all businesses’ that are members of the business association.”

Wonderfully tolerant fellow that Mr. Rajner, wanting someone to resign for reaching out to an elected official.  Guess for folks like him, the mere prospect of meeting with a Republican is akin to blasphemy.  Unfortunately of standing up to his intolerance and animus, the business association caved.

Well, some are taking these intolerant leftists to task for their narrow views.  Via our reader ThatGayConservative comes this piece from Javier Manjarres who find it sad that leftist leaders of the gay community would marginalize their community “by standing against anyone or anything that isn’t painted over with a big fat ‘gay pride flag’. ”

The Congressman’s wife Angela chimed in as well:

Perhaps it has become so important to brand people, especially in politics to make sure that you have someone to vilify and hate. It makes it easier to say and behave in certain ways. However, if tolerance were to be achieved by an evening of discussion, it would have been discovered that Congressman West’s close relative is gay and married to his partner — we love and adore them both. (more…)

Mocking those in the MSM who malign the Tea Party, Ed Driscoll explains:

Incidentally, nice bit of Orwellian doublethink to call the grass-roots, libertarian-oriented Tea Party “Totalitarian.” This has to be the first “Totalitarian” movement in the history of mankind that, if it gets everything it wants…will leave you the hell alone.

Via Instapundit.

So, to those who can’t understand why a gay man could support the Tea Party, there it is in Ed Driscoll’s italics.  I want the state to leave us alone to live our lives as we please.

Remember, many in the Tea Party have adopted the “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden Flag as the movement’s symbol.  Shouldn’t gay people whose fellows have suffered severely throughout history from state meddling in people’s private lives welcome a movement designed to put limits on government?