Like Mickey Kaus, I didn’t watch the president’s campaign speech State of the Union last night and am finding the text actual quite “boring” with standard Obama tropes repeated so often, you’d think his speechwriters merely cut and paste passages from previous addresses into this one, adding a few references to events of the past year.

Instead of reading the entire speech, I searched instead for a few words, like “obstruction.”  Sure enough, it’s there, “But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.”  There you go again, Mr. President, Republicans aren’t proposing to return to those policies which created the crisis.  That’s just another one of your false choices.

When I searched for other words like “cut”, “Medicare”, “Social Security” and “entitlement”, it became clear that the Democrat has no plan to address some of the nation’s pressing fiscal issues.  As Jennifer Rubin asked, “Where is his entitlement reform? Where is his tax-reform plan? He can’t be bothered with actual governance.”

Sure, he says “we’ve agreed to cut the deficit by more than $2 trillion.”  But, he didn’t specify how he plans to “cut through the maze of confusing training programs” nor identify particular domestic programs he wishes to scale back.

He even proposed new government programs, offering only to fund them through higher taxes on millionaires.  If you’re trying to cut the deficit, you should use any revenue you bring in to pay that off rather than any new liabilities.  As William W. Beach put it in National Review’s symposium on the speech:

. . . among the litany of programs he announced, he promised little action on the driver of economic decay: the blooming debt of governments at all levels, but particularly the government that President Obama runs. (more…)

I did not watch the State of the Union last night.  Instead of hearing a speech by a man of little accomplishment and great acclaim, I went to see a movie about men of great accomplishment and little acclaim, Red Tails, about the Tuskegee Airmen and their valor in World War II.

All I can saw is get yourself to the cinema and see this movie (and make sure to bring a handkerchief).

It’s cheesy and has, particularly at the outset, some really clunky dialogue, but later on, there are also some great lines.  And some amazing scenes.  In the end, you forget cheesiness and focus on the story, the hotshot pilot who just wants to shoot down Nazis, his commanding officer who has trouble with the booze.

Some of the film’s flaws, like those in our friends, make the film more endearing, like the imprisoned American officer who can’t disguise his Australian accent — or Cuba Gooding Jr.‘s attempt to imitate Douglas MacArthur by dramatically clenching his teeth on a curved pipe.  (Perhaps because Gooding is such a likable guy, he can get away with this — and, in my eyes, he does.)  In the end, it’s just a feel-good story about a group Americans who want to serve the country even as some in their country’s leadership question their ability to serve.

The pacing of the film is such that you’re drawn into the story and easily forget its shortcomings.  Director Anthony Hemingway focused on making it an action film, starting in the air rather than tell us about the Tuskegee program.  It is not as great a film as Glory to which I’m sure it’s been compared, but it doesn’t need to be.  It entertains us, it moves us — and reminds us of some forgotten men of the greatest generation, men who helped defeat one of the greatest evils of all time.

This is why they make movies.

Four years ago, Barack Obama ran for the presidency promising a new era of hope and change.   He would bring us together with a new kind of politics that transcended partisan differences.

Since starting working in the Oval Office, however, he has adopted a much different tone.  When a Republican Senator challenged the Democratic president “over the contents” of the stimulus, the Democratic President, instead of acknowledging the point, snapped, “I won” as if his electoral victory obviated the need for argument.

Last year, after failing to find much support for the budget he had released, he claimed he was going to offer a different approach and instead of gave a speech excoriating the Republican plan without offering an alternative of his own.  The headline of the Washington Post report on the address read that it had a “partisan tone.”  The Annenberg Center reported that the Democrat “misrepresented the House Republicans’ budget plan at times and exaggerated its impact on U.S. residents“.  Hardly the way to begin a serious dialogue on federal fiscal priorities.

Will his State of the Union address tonight be less partisan?  Will he honestly address his opponents’ proposals?  Will he offer plan to cut deficit?  ”The current fiscal year,”  as John Hinderaker reminds us, “will be the fourth in a row in which the Obama administration racks up a $1 trillion-plus deficit.”

Will he propose sweeping tax reform as some Republican presidential candidates have done — and his own deficit reduction committee recommended?  Will he put forward tonight a plan to reform entitlements and rein in federal spending or will he return to the same old song and dance and repeat the tired refrain about increasing taxes on millionaires and billionaires?

Most signs, however, indicate that instead of attempting to bridge partisan differences, the speech will accent them.  Over at Politico, Carrie Budoff Brown and Glenn Thrush report that Obama “gave the first detailed look at Tuesday’s address in a video message Saturday dispatched through his campaign, not the White House, which is usually the origin for previews.”

No wonder, Ed Morrissey asks a more cynical question than the ones I posed, “What empty promises will Obama offer tonight?”  He reports that Obama failed to deliver on over 70% of the promises he made in last year’s SOTU.

(more…)

President Obama, reports Dwvin Dwyer this morning on ABCNews, “has spent the past three months railing against a ‘do-nothing Congress,” and tonight he has the opportunity to deliver his message face to face.”   As the Democrat demagogues a legislature that won’t rubberstamp his priorities, he will certainly obscure one fact:  Congress is not a completely Republican, but a divided, institution.  The House, to be sure, is Republican, but the Senate remains Democratic.

And it’s that Senate that hasn’t been doing much of anything.  Speaker John Boehner reports, for example, that “Thirty jobs bills passed over the last year in a Republican House of Representatives that are sitting in the United States Senate“.   And “today marks the 1,000th day since the Senate Democratic majority . . .  approved a federal budget.”  One thousand days.  That’s about as long as Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, reigned as Queen of England.

“The federal government“, observe the editors of the Washington Examiner

. . . still managed to pile nearly $4 trillion onto the national debt as the Senate dithered during those 1,000 days. The Senate forced the federal government to function piecemeal for three years through a series of haphazardly stitched-together omnibus bills and continuing resolutions. These bring together in one massive document trillions in spending and borrowing that can then be jammed through Congress with one convenient up-or-down vote, with only token debate and few if any amendments allowed. It’s Washington’s nice and tidy way of handing voters a take-it-or-leave-it approach to federal spending.

Wonder if Obama will fault his fellow partisan Harry Reid for leading a do-nothing legislative chamber?  Wonder if our friends in the legacy media will even note the thousand days.*

As usual, Democrats will try to blame Republicans for their mistakes as John Hinderaker reports:

Democrats like Dick Durbin and Nancy Pelosi have tried to blame their dereliction of duty on the Republicans, claiming that it would be futile to propose a budget since the Republicans would filibuster it. As usual, the Democrats rely on ignorance: under the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, budgets pass the Senate by a simple majority and cannot be filibustered.

In contrast to the Democratic Senate, the current Republican House passed a budget just over 100 days after being sworn in.  This year, the president will again miss the statutory deadline for submitting a budget.  Last year, his budget couldn’t even garner a single Democratic vote in the Senate. (more…)

Sunlight, I’ve always believed, is the best disinfectant.

We should not hinder people from voicing their opinions, no matter how hateful because only when they voice them can we counter them.  Today, in her inimitable style, Amy Alkon, an Angelena diva who quips that if she “were any more gay-friendly,” she’d “have a girlfriend instead of a boyfriend”*, takes a school superintendent to task for labeling “a column in a school newspaper that criticized homosexuality as ‘bullying.”

Why should people be scared of someone voicing such an opinion?  Shouldn’t their silly commentary provide an easy target, a jumping off point for an argument in defense of homosexuality?   Why do some folks wish to suppress opposing opinions?

Basically, Amy tells this superintendant to grow a pair:

Look, I was bullied. Girls followed me through the halls in junior high and taunted me with anti-Semitic epithets. When it started to get serious (when they started throwing chairs in my path), I told my dad, and he went to the principal and it stopped.

The point is, there are measures that can be taken before we start crumpling up the Constitution. And sorry, but you don’t have a right to not be offended, not even if you’re in high school. What you should learn to do is think and write and debate well so you can see that your point of view wins the day. And if somebody throws a chair at you, and there’s nobody to go to the principal’s office for you…maybe that’s the real problem we should be dealing with, but…

Emphasis added.  Seems Amy’s got more balls than the school superintendant who has a man’s name (Todd Carlson).

A gay couple had called the school and complained after they had read the “offensive” column.  Carlson responded to their complaint.  They would have done better to have written a strongly worded letter intended for publication in the journal.

Via Instapundit.

* (more…)

“Of the 10 metropolitan areas with the toughest job situations, seven are in California“, reports Danielle Kurtzleben in U.S.News & World Report

Wonder if this is related to the flight of business from the Golden State.

Hey, Ma’am, what are you doing to keep those businesses from fleeing the state? And, Jerry, you may want to talk to the Governor of Texas; he has a little more free time than he did last week. Seems a lot of California jobs are headed his way.

Kudos, Governor:

Gov. Chris Christie today nominated an openly gay African-American Republican mayor and an assistant state attorney general to the state’s highest court.

Christie nominated Phil Kwon, who worked under Christie when he was U.S. attorney, and Bruce Harris, who was elected mayor of Chatham Borough in November. Kwon, of Bergen County, would be the first Asian-American to sit on the state Supreme Court.

. . . .

Harris graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College, and with honors from Boston University Graduate School of Management. He earned a law degree from Yale. In addition to serving as mayor of Chatham, he most recently worked at the law firm of Greenberg Traurig and previously at Riker, Danzi, Scherer, Hyland and Perretti.

Impressive that Harris overcame the obstacles of an inferior undergraduate education to achieve what he has.

Democrats often talk about hiking taxes on the rich so they pay their “fair share“. So what about the 47% who currently don’t pay any federal taxes? Is their fair share zero?

UPDATE:  Does this mean Obama plans to ask the 47% to do their part.  From his fund-raiser last week in Harlem:

And if we are going to do all that without leaving a mountain of debt for our kids, while still maintaining the strongest military on Earth, while still making sure that Social Security and Medicare are there for future generations, that our seniors are protected –then all of us have to do our part.  (Applause.)

And that should not be a Democratic idea or a Republican idea.  It’s about responsibility.  It’s about taking responsibility for the country.

Emphasis added. He did say, “all of us”, but it sure seems he meant what the Occupiers call “the 1%.”

Repeat after me:  “Hope and Change.”

<audience chant>

Now this: “Mmm, mmm, mmm… Barack Hussein Obama.”

<audience chant>

Now read this:

Exactly three years after Aretha Franklin’s hat launched the Obama administration, the Democrat’s annual job approval rating has sunk to his lowest level.

That’s not normally a good sign after 1,095 days in office. But who’s counting? Heading into reelection years, pols want to be at least at the 50% level. A new Gallup Poll just out reveals that the ex-state senator’s job approval for his third full year is 44%.

That’s down from 47% in his second year.

That’s down from 57% in his first year.

It’s also down from the 69% approval he enjoyed on Inauguration Day.

So, the better Americans have come to know the guy and to watch his record, the less they seem to think of him. Of course, what really matters is what they think of him starting with early voting this October and ending the night of Nov. 6.

Gallup’s 2012 results are based on about 175,000 adult interviews during the year, showing a brief high for Obama of 53% in May (can you say Navy SEALs’ success?) and a low two times of 38% in both August and October.

In terms of historical patterns, Obama’s third-year average is the lowest of any modern president except the doomed Democrat Jimmy Carter, who had 37.4%. The highest approval at this stage of a first term was Dwight Eisenhower with 72.1% and George H.W. Bush with just under 70%.

According to Gallup’s analysis:

“Comparing Obama’s third-year numbers with all presidential years in Gallup records, Obama’s 44% average job approval rating is well below average, ranking 53rd of the 68 presidential years measured.”

But this conflicts with what They all tell me: Barack Obama is The Smartest President EVAH!” 

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Been reading a book on the Big Easy, Tom Piazza’s Why New Orleans Matters.  Reflecting on his surprise at learning that a musician read philosophy, the author philosophizes himself:

It is an old American situation, of course—anyone interested in an extended essay on the subject should read Ralph Ellison’s “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” in his collection Going to the Territory, or Constance Rourke’s American Humor, both extended meditations on the masks not just that we put on for others but that we put on others, that surprises that lurk so often around the corner of someone’s seemingly straightforward identity.  It is a lesson that one has to learn continually in New Orleans.  Things are always more complex than they seem.

Bold added.  Italics in original.

The masks that we put on others.  To our commenters, think about that before you reply to someone who offers an opinion different from your own.  Don’t make assumptions about who they are.  You may be surprised how much you have in common.  (Reminder to self:  do need write that post on how Paula Deen brings together GayPatriot readers with contrasting political views.)

The masks that we put on others.  The masks some of our ideological adversaries place on gay conservatives when they make assumptions about our motives.

Read the passage above, then re-read it.  There’s much wisdom there.  And not just about New Orleans.

Every now and again, you’ll run into an Obama supporter who professes to be a fiscal conservative. When you challenge them on the incumbent’s big-spending ways, they’ll reply that he had to do it because they mess that George W. Bush left him was so bad.  (Well, during the campaign, Obama did say that, there was “no doubt” that during the Bush era, we’d “been living beyond our means and [were] going to have to make some adjustments“?  Oh, yeah, but he made those adjustments would require reductions in spending:  ”Now, what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.”)

Even though these individuals dub themselves fiscal conservatives, they still contend that we needed the “stimulus” to jumpstart the economy; a couple have asked me, “What else can you do to get the economy going again?”

In such cases, I remind them of the economic booms of the 1980s and 1990s.  We didn’t need fiscal stimuli then.  It’s as if the 1980s never happened and we’re still taught about Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression — as if the New Deal succeeded in pulling us out of that era’s economic malaise.  They seem oblivious to the reasons for the Reagan rebound.

Oh, yeah, one more thing.  When your interlocutors start talking about the 1990s, ask them to thank Bob Dole for the success of Bill Clinton’s “stimulus.”

RELATED:  Glenn links “K.C. JOHNSON ON the ruinous reign of race-and-gender historians.“

Click here for the answer.

. . . or counterproductive, bear two things in mind:

1. The Senate still has a Democratic majority.
2. Americans elected Republicans to redress the excesses of the president’s policies not to rubber stamp them, or, to paraphrase that Democrat, “They won.”

The “South Carolina vote,” writes Tim Stanley in the Telegraph, “was really a referendum on [Mitt] Romney”.  Indeed.  The man who rescued the 2002 Olympics tumbled from a commanding lead in the polls last week to a resounding defeat last night.

The on-and-off again Republican frontrunner spent the last week playing defense.  He could have learned, like Newt, to turn attacks to his advantage.

For example, in the debate, when John King asked Romney about his tax returns, he should have responded that he will release them just as soon as Barack Obama releases his college transcripts, then ask Mr. King how extensively his network had covered the incumbent’s failure to release a great variety of documents.

He would have concluded by adding that he would release them in short order.  The takeaway wouldn’t be so much the release as it was his ability to take on the media.  And he would remind voters that Obama hasn’t been as transparent in office as his 2008 rhetoric suggested he would be.*

Romney also could have turned an attack into an opportunity if he had responded to attacks on his work at Bain by offering a robust defense of venture capitalism.

Those mistakes notwithstanding, Romney’s real problem appears to be something else, what one erstwhile Huntsman supporter called the former Massachusetts governor’s “connection problem”, as Byron York reports:

[South Carolina] Attorney General Henry McMaster, was also aligned with Huntsman until Monday, and he too chose Gingrich instead of Romney.  McMaster cited Gingrich’s performance in the two South Carolina debates as a prime factor in his decision, but he also expressed concern over Romney’s problem engaging voters. “I don’t know why,” McMaster said Saturday night.  “I can’t explain it, but there’s a little bit of a connection problem.”

With that problem in mind, let me conclude with a personal reflection.  Of the remaining candidates, I remain most likely to vote for Romney, but have yet to announce my support of endorse the former Massachusetts governor.  Four years ago, even after being impressed with his performance in the few snippets of debates I watched, I ended up pulling the proverbial lever for John McCain.

ADDENDUM:  Glenn has a good roundup of reaction to the results (this one too).

* (more…)

In congratulating Newt Gingrich on his victory last night, our friend Chris Barron, Co-Founder and Chief Strategist of GOProud, noted something significant about the former Speaker’s South Carolina success:

Tonight, we congratulate Speaker Gingrich on his victory in South Carolina. We are hopeful that in the contests ahead that Speaker Gingrich will run the type of positive campaign he promised earlier in the primary process.

It is clear that Speaker Gingrich’s poll numbers improved dramatically once he ended his unnecessary and unproductive attacks on Governor Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital. As conservatives we should make it clear that we are the champions of free enterprise.

Emphasis added.  He’s right.  Newt surged not because of his attacks on Mitt Romney’s work in the private sector but instead because of his attacks on the media’s flacking for those who favor a larger public sector.

Polls show considerable popular dissatisfaction with the president’s policies, particularly his big-government initiatives like Obamacare.  They also show support for the broad conservative policies which have defined the GOP at least since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.  The best attempts of the media notwithstanding, conservative ideas are ascendant.

At the same time, the incumbent struggles to regain the footing he had four years ago, with his attacks on Republicans more redolent of class warfare demagoguery than reflective of the reality of his partisan adversaries’ policies, his own dismal poll numbers inflated by a compliant media, the administration’s spin reported as if it were news, its scandals treated as if they were the inventions of a right-wing cabal eager to destroy anyone trying to free the country from the control of a corporate elite.

If a conservative candidate, with a record of executive accomplishment, could take the fight to Obama, he could not rally the right, but appeal to independents as well.  The electoral map would not resemble that of the past few national elections, but would look more like the one in 1988.  Every state where Republicans did well in 2010, including such purplish “blue” states as Maine, Michigan Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, would turn “red.”

In the current contest, however, no candidate has emerged to take on Reagan’s mantle.  At the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein lamented, that “one of the miracles of America’s founding was that so many great men emerged at once and complemented each other with unique skills. But now, in a time of great crisis, we’re stuck with painfully bad choices.”

Over at Red State, Erick Erickson (with whom I don’t often agree) didn’t mince words when weighing in on last night’s results:

Newt Gingrich’s rise has a lot to do with Newt Gingrich’s debate performance. But it has just as much to do with a party base in revolt against its thought and party leaders in Washington, DC. . . . (more…)

As you can probably guess, I’m not as sanguine about Newt’s victory in South Carolina as is Bruce.  I think the most important issue in this election is defeating Barack Obama and replacing him with a president committed to making the kinds of reforms the Democrat has assiduously avoided for the past three years.   And don’t believe Newt is capable of the executive leadership necessary to accomplish the kind of bold reforms we need to get our economy moving and restore our national image.

We need a man who is not just decisive in his words, but also in his actions; we need someone who can exercise authority.

I thought Newt’s speech tonight showed both his strengths as a visionary and his weakness as a personality.  He offered a great defense of our system, generous tributes to his rivals and a strong critique of the incumbent.  But, he went on too long.   He didn’t need to attack the elite media.  Now, to be sure, if it weren’t for his attacks on the media in each of the two most recent debates, he wouldn’t have done as well as he did last night.

He won, in large part, because he dared take on an institution which has treated Republicans unfairly and all but maligned the conservative movement.   If they had afforded Barack Obama the same scrutiny they have given to each of the Republican candidates, he would be a backbencher in the U.S. Senate and America’s first female president would be campaigning for her second term.

Even as I have my doubts about my former boss, I had a conversation tonight which gave me some hope.  I saw a Democratic friend at a party tonight.  He told me Newt’s victory tonight meant “Game Over” for the GOP; Obama is going to be reelected.

Just shy of four years ago, at another party, as Obama was wrapping up the Democratic nomination, this same man told me that his fellow partisans had just handed the election to the Republicans.

Politics is a strange business.  Our forecasts often run awry — as President Tom Dewey will tell you. Jimmy Carter cheered as Ronald Reagan was wrapping up the Republican nomination in 1980.  That Democrat won six states in the general election that fall.

It’s too bad we don’t have a governor running this year who can rally the party’s conservative base.

UPDATE:  In his analysis of the results, Michael Barone contends that Newt’s. . . .

. . . victory in South Carolina was a victory not only over Romney and Santorum and Paul, but also over the news media, (more…)

We are about to head to Columbia, SC to the Victory Party for Newt tonight.

I’ll be posting more later. Also, up to the moment reports on Twitter: @GayPatriot.

Update: NEWT WINS SOUTH CAROLINA HANDILY.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Can you imagine a periodical billed as a news magazine with a cover interview with a Republican leader conducted by a man who advised said leader?

Now of the Obama apologists, Fareed Zakaria perhaps has the broadest world view — and does occasionally show respect for conservative interlocutors and understanding of conservative ideas.  But, aware that in the same segment of one television show, the pundit has gone from acknowledging he advised Obama on foreign policy to praising Obama on foreign policy (for taking his advice?), I am less likely to take his as an even-handed account.

Explaining why she didn’t read a cover story on another one-time news magazine, Ann Althouse articulates my reasons for not reading this one:

Another way of putting that is: I have a life. I can’t read everything. Generally, I scan the web in the morning and find some things that feel bloggable to me. Today, it was the Newsweek cover photo and headline, and that’s what I wrote about. Writing about the headline, I had the reaction that it doesn’t work on me. It doesn’t make me want to read. It’s insulting! That is a journalistic failure by Newsweek.

Read the whole thing.  And if you, like me, like the way that diva writes, read this too. (more…)

One of our readers observed a Facebook phenomenon among his (liberal) friends that applies to mine as well:

Getting a lot of posts about how sexy the President was singing an Al Greene song. It’s all I can do not to comment how much more sexy he will be when he is the ex-President.

The song, as I noted in a previous post, is all about staying together.   Our friends on the left have crafted this image of Obama as a unifier with their primary evidence being his speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2004.  (They conveniently ignore his voting record in the U.S. Senate and his rhetorical outbursts and public statements at odds with his rhetorical flourishes and campaign-created public image.)

Today, Charlie Spiering at the Washington Examiner provided further evidence that the incumbent president seeks to win reelection not by pushing us to stay together, but by creating false choices to tear us apart.  At a campaign fundraiser in New York, he told supporters (including disgraced Congressman Charles Rangel) “that Republicans are more radical than ever“:

The Republicans in Congress, the candidates running for President, they’ve got a very specific idea about where they want to take this country. . . .   They want to reduce the deficit by gutting our investments in education, by gutting our investments in research and technology, by letting our roads and our bridges and our airports deteriorate.

If a Republican president leveled those kind of allegations against his partisan adversaries, our friends in the legacy media would submit his charges to a fact check.

RELATED: More demagoguery from the divider