As a member of the GOProud Board, I’m publishing this statement:

On behalf of the GOProud Board and its members and supporters, we want to make it very clear that “outing” a gay or lesbian individual is wrong and should never be used as a political weapon.

Private lives should remain just that — private. The right to disclose one’s sexual orientation belongs solely to each individual. We will continue to oppose “outing” as it has never advanced a political cause but only hurts individuals and their families.

We strongly regret the events of this week.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

About eight weeks ago, I asked What could Obama accomplish in his second term?

Others wonder if the Democrat actually has a governing agenda for his second term.  Listening to the president’s speech on Tuesday, Sonicfrog agreed with the Democrat’s diagnosis of the problem, calling the address “nicely worded”, but found it lacking in specifics.  “OK,” the blogger asked, “So what is your solution to fix the problem of the diminishing middle class?”.

Seems Sonic’s concerns reflect those of a supermajority of Americans, given this tidbit Ed Morrissey pulled out of the recent CBSNews poll:

Even while Obama keeps fanning the flames of class warfare, no one is sure what Obama intends to do with a second term anyway.  Two-thirds don’t have a clear idea on his second-term goals (32/66) — and that includes a majority of Democrats (46/52) along with more than two-thirds of independents (29/69).

Via Instapundit.  A Republican who offers a clear an comprehensive reform plan could win a lion’s share of those voters — and then some.  Some who have a clear idea of the president’s second term goals believe the Democrat wants to further increase the size of the state.  And they want no part of that agenda.

Supporting the status quo on gays in the military, that is, after the repeal of the misguided Clinton-era Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell (DADT), may not help a candidate win Republican votes in states like Iowa with a large concentration of social conservatives.  That said, saying, as Rick Perry does in his new ad, that “there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military, but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school” is more the mark of desperation than of sound political strategy.

Now, I’m all for kids openly celebrating Christmas and praying in schools (if they so choose  – and provided they do so on their own, that is, not in prayer organized by a teacher or school official). As should all people. Heck, the “free exercise” clause of the First Amendment guarantees it. (And the “establishment” clause does not trump it.)

It’s a nice rhetorical trick to contrast the open service of gay people in the military and the open celebration of Christmas, but the juxtaposition just doesn’t work, save perhaps to remind voters of the candidate’s social conservative bona fides.  In doing so, Perry is really jumping the shark.  His campaign is sinking and he is making a desperate ploy to gain traction.

I doubt this tack will work.  Even among socially conservative Iowa Republicans (as among Republicans nationwide), jobs and the economy are the key issues: (more…)

According to Reuters, “‘Avatar’ director James Cameron has been hit with a lawsuit by a writer who claims that the plot for the hit sci-fi movie was lifted from his own project“:

In the suit, which was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court Thursday, Eric Ryder claims that he entered into an agreement with Cameron’s production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, to develop a movie based on his story “KRZ 2068.”

According to the suit, the project was envisioned as “an environmentally themed 3-D epic about a corporation’s colonization and plundering of a distant moon’s lush and wondrous natural setting.”

Mr. Ryder, it appears, is mistaken. Evidence sxists showing that Cameron merely rewrote Disney’s Pocahontas.

A week ago, Bruce posted a piece suggesting that the Fast and Furious scandal was worse than Watergate.  Perhaps, it’s not that bad, not a question of administration malfeasance, but just one of bureaucratic incompetence.

Yesterday, Republicans grilled Attorney General Eric Holder when the Democrat testified before the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.  He might have taken his cues in handling testimony from Johnny Friendly‘s (Lee J. Cobb) cronies in On the Waterfront. He was deaf and dumb about what was going on in his outfit.

Well, maybe he really didn’t know.  And if he didn’t, well, the best term to describe his leadership at Justice is incompetent.  So, he claims, he didn’t read the memos (addressed to him) detailing the “operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to allow straw buyers to smuggle guns into Mexico“, a program which “resulted in the deaths of more than 200 Mexican citizens and U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.”

Now, of course, the Attorney General is a busy man and can’t read every word of every 100-page memo addressed to him.  But, that’s why he has a big staff.  And you’d think one of his aides would alert the government’s top law enforcement official to a program allowing buyers to smuggle guns — without tracking devices — into Mexico.  Oh, yeah, and the ATF wasn’t informing the Mexican government about this program.

You’d think that when word of this program became public (or at least became known to the Attorney General), he’d fire  – or at least severely discipline — those on his staff who didn’t alert him to a program which resulted in the deaths of Mexican citizens — and a U.S. law enforcement official.  But, as Michelle Malkin reported yesterday Holder only offers a vague statement about making personnel changes and it’s not all he’s “possibly” going to do. (more…)

For the past few evenings while having my snack or seeking a moment’s escape, I have been working my way through The Bette Davis Collection, Vol. 3 which I bought on sale at a Barnes * Noble in Denver.  (I could have saved a few more bucks had I bought it online at Amazon.)

Although the films in this collection aren’t all of the caliber of those in the collection I blogged about three years ago, Miss Davis’s screen presence is no less compelling.  She seems capable of playing the full range of feminine emotion from demure, but cold old maid to a maternal nanny to an affectionate wife to self-centered hedonist (link each movie) and be utterly believable in each role, indeed, in numerous situations.

What struck me in the last movie, In This Our Life, that I started watching last night and finished watching while grabbing a snack after catching one of the greatest movies ever made on the big screen, On the Waterfront, was not just her performance, but the way the 1942 film, set in Richmond, Virginia, treated the black characters.

WARNING:  Plot details provided.

Here a young black man Ernest Anderson‘s Parry Clay works for the family of Davis’s family while studying law.  When drunk after returning from a bar Davis‘s Stanley Timberlake (yes, both she and her screen sister Olivia de Havilland have men’s first names) erratically driving her sports car, runs over a mother and daughter, killing the latter, she pins the blame on Parry whom, she claims, was cleaning her car that night.

And we’re made to sympathize with Parry, not her.  De Havilland’s Roy begins to doubt her sister’s story when his mother Minerva (Hattie McDaniel) provides an alibi.  The white woman trusts the young black man; she has seen him use his small income to buy law books and watched him work hard in a law office. (more…)

Caught this first on Powerline, then on Gateway Pundit. The man who defeated the man heralded by Joe Biden as an economic advisor to the Obama administration at the ballot box in a state Obama won by 15 points lays it out:

Note how all the #OWS folks just repeat their leader.  (Wonder what that says about them).  Christie just laughs at these folks, mocking their anger.

Kudos, Governor!

Considering a challenge Republicans face in replacing Barack Obama next year, Jim Geraghty wonders

. . . if we’re seeing a bit of the “sunken costs” phenomenon on Obama, in that folks invested so much of themselves emotionally in him throughout 2007 and 2008 that they feel that the only way to make that emotional investment “pay off” is to stick with him until fortunes turn around for Obama (and the country).

Of course, as the Wikipedia summary notes, “Sunk costs greatly affect actors’ decisions, because many humans are loss-averse and thus normally act irrationally when making economic decisions.” Like a gambler convinced that his next hand will be a big winner, Obama fans may look at three years or more of disappointment, scandal, and economic hard times and be convinced that a big turnaround and payoff is just around the corner . . .

Or, maybe they’ll take a taste of whiskey and heed the sage advice of Kenny Rogers’s gambler and know when to fold:

Given Mr. Obama’s record since the days of hope and change, it’s not time to walk away, it’s time to run.

My good friend Ben Howe has the chance of a lifetime. He’s a finalist in WBT-AM’s context to find the “Next Talker” contest.  Ben is contributor at RedState, plus a funny, energetic and influential activist in the new Conservative movement in America.  He’s also a big supporter of us here at GayPatriot.

All of the details are here at RedState.  When you go to the WBT webpage — make sure to “Register” and then “Like” in order to vote for Ben.

Thanks for all of your help in advance!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

As you know, we here at GayPatriot define a diva as a strong woman who commands the respect of men.  And once again, it’s time to pick that blogress who best defines that quality.  In past years, I’ve linked previous nominees and diva-esque blogresses.  This year, I’ll link those past posts when I get a moment, but for now will leave it up to you to nominate those most deserving of this coveted honor.

We’ll keep nominations open for one week, through December 15 at which point Bruce and I will pick those lucky ladies to appear on the ballot.

Take a gander of how AOL heads the story on former Democratic New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine’s congressional testimony:

In the article, there’s nary a word about the failed CEO”s Democratic affiliation nor his service as governor of the Garden State, nor any mention of his advisory role in the Obama administration.

Guess in their rush to get this story out, the folks at Arianna Huffington’s eponymous Post just let these minor details slip their minds.

Perhaps the main reason I tout every victory for “gun rights” as offering a victory gay Americans is that I believe those who seek to improve the lot of such citizens need to think outside the box of identity politics.  That is, we don’t need gay-speicfic legislation advancing our “equality,” but benefit by laws promoting the freedom of all Americans.

Now, to be sure, laws which make it easier for law-abiding Americans to own firearms benefit gay Americans for the same reasons such laws benefit all Americans.  The real issue–and the conversation we should be having–is whether we can improve the social situation for gay people through means other than identity politics.

What applies for gay people applies for others as well.  Lately (with yesterday’s speech as yet another example), the president has taken to class warfare in making the case for raising additional revenue to fund the federal government.  As Republicans have resisted such attempts, his rhetoric serves only to advance his political cause.  He has yet to offer a plan which could pass the current Congress, indeed which could even get through the Democratic Senate.

Despite his failures, he has yet to offer an alternative plan to raise revenue; his fellow partisans in the Senate recently nixed Republican plans to raise revenue through tax reform rather than rate increases.  He has failed, as Jonah Goldberg wrote about his failure in other policy matters, “for political and ideological reasons, as well as a more basic failure of imagination.”

If the president had a little imagination, he could “think outside the box” and learn from a fellow Democrat, former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley who, in 1986, seeing some similar inequities in the tax code that the president has demagogued in recent days, championed a tax reform plan that earned bipartisan support.  Instead of demagoguing tax rates, the president, like the New Jersey Democrat, could sign on to real revenue-enhacning reforms.

He could even turn to a Senate Democrat, Oregon’s Ron Wyden who just five years ago, “commemorating the 20th anniversary of TRA’86,” joined Bradley in “calling for a bi-partisan coalition to repeat the 1986 feat.”  Wyden could team up with Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey who, in the “supercommittee” debt negotiations, proposed the reforms that Democrats rejected.

All that is required is a little imagination.  And a willingness to think outside the box.

Yesterday, the president told us that conservative economic policies have never worked. Someone should ask him the same questions about the Keynesian theories that drive his big-spending policies. He — and many of his supporters — really do believe that we need economic stimuli in order to jump-start the economy.

Only problem is that such solutions rarely (if ever) lead to sustained economic growth. The New Deal delayed economic recovery in the 1930s. Japan suffered a “Lost Decade” in the 1990s when its government adopted policies similar to those Democrats would follow in 2009.

Instead of trusting to theories which sound good on paper, we need to turn to policies which have succeeded in practice.  In his book on the housing crisis, Thomas Sowell makes the case for a pragmatism that has eluded the incumbent president:

In housing markets, there have been an abundance of theories and of fervently believed doctrines, but not nearly such an abundance of willingness to subject these theories to the test of evidence.   Politicians would be gambling their entire careers on a roll of the dice, if they were to publicly subject the policies and programs that they have been advocating for years to empirical test of their consequences.

The economy grew after the economic policies similar to those Obama derided yesterday took effect in 1983.  And despite Obama’s success in enacting his policies in 2009, the recovery which followed the Bush-Pelosi-Reid downturn (the one that he “inherited”) has been the most anemic in generations.

Would be nice if the president acknowledged that empirical test of his policies rather than stick to the rhetorical appeal which served him so well in 2008.

It’s always good to study the record of a successful predecessor, particularly one whose economic policies worked pretty much as advertised.

In reading about this great Republican, the Democrat might realize that the policies he claimed never worked actually worked quite well.

For five days only, this handsome set is 50% off.  And the Reagan Library offers free ground shipping on orders over $100.

Commenting to my post about a lesbian mother dispatching her son to tell a presidential candidate that she (his mother) “doesn’t need fixing,” Naamloos offers:

With the economic situation as it is, I’m not sure why Michele Bachmann’s views on homosexuality are relevant.

I don’t agree with them, but I do generally agree with her fiscal/economic views (at least what I know of them).

Good point.  And that is perhaps the reason first Yahoo! and then AOL promoted the story:

Seems they want to keep the focus on the various Republican candidates’ quirks (or celebrities’ self-promoting critiques) to prevent Americans from realizing how much more closely conservative candidates are aligned with mainstream American opinion than is the incumbent administration.

Despite her positions on social positions, Mrs. Bachmann does have a far better idea of what ails the American economy than does Barack Obama.  He may say that conservative economy theories have “never worked“, but, well, that remark ignores the economic record of the last two decades of the Twentieth Century.

And Obama’s one to talk; his $800-billion “stimulus” failed to work as promised.  Meanwhile, the last president to try the “trickle down economics” that Obama excoriated did, despite inheriting a weak economy from his predecessor, leave office during an era of unprecedented prosperity.

Well, maybe Keynesian economic theory “proves” that conservative economic policies don’t work.  The real world has produced slightly different results.

So to keep us distracted from the real world record of Obama’s economic policies, our friends in the MSM need to cook up new stories each day about Republican presidential candidates, lest the American people start to realize how, on the key issues of the day, they have far more in common with those supposedly outlandish Republicans than they do with the incumbent.

Based upon my experience as an uncle, having seen (or currently witnessing) eight nephews pass through the late single-digit stage, if an 8-year-old boy were to, of his own accord, ask a question of a presidential candidate, he might ask him to name his favorite superhero or to discuss the various characters in Star Wars. He would not ask a question about homosexuality.

Which brings me to this video:

Now, despite the attempts of the folks at Yahoo! to spin this as Michele Bachmann vs. the 8-Year-Old, just by watching the video, it’s clear his mother is putting him to telling the candidate, “My mommy’s gay, but she doesn’t need fixing.”

Now, to Mrs. Bachmann’s credit, she’s not rude; she just refuses to answer.  The real question (which our friends at Yahoo! fail to ask) is why the boy’s mother didn’t have the guts to make a similar statement to the Congresswoman.  Unlike the hestitant child, the woman could follow up with the candidate, pressing her to respond.

Despite her social conservatism, Mrs. Bachmann (in the current presidential campaign) has shown considerable reluctance to talk about her views on homosexuality.  As we reported here, she didn’t even respond to GOProud’s request for a meeting.  And that is a serious strike against her.

It is legitimate to ask the candidate about her views on homosexuality.  It’s pathetic when a mother puts up her son to speak on her behalf.  And it’s telling that the media eager to make a martyr of the boy don’t call the mother out on her cowardice.

Today, the president traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas, in Michael Know Beran’s words “to unveil his latest persona: Teddy Roosevelt, who delivered his “New Nationalism” manifesto in the town’s John Brown Cemetery in August 1910.”

And yea, the Democrat did invoke the Republican who also favored a more muscular state than had that energetic early twentieth century leader’s predecessors. Only problem is, as Beran reminds us:

The difference is that in 1910 government spending amounted to about 8 percent percent of GDP. A century later it comes to around 40 percent. The country today has too much state, not too little.

At this point, I’d settle for government spending (at all levels) three times what it was a century ago.

UPDATE:  Writing about the speech, Tina Korbe observes:

Today in Osawatomie, Kan., Barack Obama laid bare his progressive agenda, calling for more federal involvement in education, increased spending on infrastructure, an extension of the payroll tax cut and increased taxes on the rich. . . .

. . . on the whole, the president was pretty transparent about his belief that big government makes everything better.

Seems that every time the incumbent gives one of his ballyhooed big speeches, he calls for more federal spending and greater government intervention.  Doesn’t this guy remember that he won the Oval Office by promising a “net spending cut”?

UP-UPDATE: About the incumbent’s attempt to compare himself to the Republican progressive, Victor Davis Hanson writes, “What we have here is an adolescent president in desperate search of an adult identity of his own, without which he borrows liberally from others, often oddly from Republicans or conservatives.” Read the whole thing.

In the past few days, my intellectual focus has been less on politics and more on other matters.  Now, to be sure, I have scribbled a few ideas for posts, but, in terms of actual blogging, I feel more like I did when researching a chapter for my dissertation.  I had a rough idea of what I wanted to say. but thought I needed to do a little more research and let the ideas “steep” a little longer before putting them proverbially to paper.

And so it is with a number of political issues, some related to the presidential contest, others to our nation’s predicament (and so indirectly related to the presidential contest) and others to the constantly improving state of gay America — and the constantly deteriorating condition of our mainstream media.

Jeff Carter writes:

When people ask me who I am backing, I say I don’t care. I am backing the Republican Party candidate because Obama is so terrifically bad. He is the worst President in a generation, and may be the worst President since 1900.

Via Instapundit.  Once our party settles on a nominee, we’re going to have to rally around him for that man is the individual who will have the best (indeed, the only) chance of preventing Barack Obama from serving a second term.  And if his first term is any guide; his reelection will keep the federal government on a holiday from the nation’s real problems.

As president, Obama has so far failed to put forward a budget which keeps spending in check — and to propose a plan to reform entitlements to prevent their accelerating costs from pushing the federal government even further into debt.  His jobs bill is a mere repacking of a program which has been tried and failed.

Not all the Republican candidates have signaled an understanding of the tasks facing our next president, but there are leaders, with powerful positions in both houses of Congress, who know what’s at stake.  And they will have far more influence in Washington with a Republican chief executive.

Unlike Bruce, I never backed Herman Cain‘s presidential bid.  I did appreciate his charisma and his ability to articulate the conservative economic message, particularly while offering his experience creating jobs in the private sector, a leader who helped businesses become financially sound.

And as an outsider in a year when people are becoming increasingly disenchanted with Washington, Herman Cain had, for a moment, a strong appeal.

But, he wasn’t prepared for the hostile media that all surging Republicans face.  Nor could he flesh out his ideas on a great variety of issues, foreign and domestic.  Beyond his 9-9-9 plan, he lacked a bold plan for comprehensive reform — which Washington desperately needs.

His appeal, in short, was his charisma — his ability to articulate the conservative message — and his outsider status.  But, he couldn’t build on that.

As he withdraws, Patricia Murphy of the Daily Beast asks, “Where are Jeb Bush and Chris Christie when their party needs them?”

My question exactly.