Last week, our reader Chris H offered a comment which goes to the heart of the Republican dilemma among gays — and social liberals, particularly those who live in what current Breitbart blogger John Nolte dubbed the “blue islands” which dot our nation’s increasingly “red” landscape:

I had an interesting experience this weekend. I was at a BBQ this and one of my friends was complaining about how he is having to pay rent on a place where he’s trying to start a new business. However, he’s stuck in red tape hell because the city of West Hollywood, the Health Department and Alcoholic Beverage Control can’t agree on what to classify his business as. So.. he waits and waits. He said he could be out 45k before he even opens his doors.

This is the same friend that outwardly expresses disgust at Republicans and Conservatives.

I reminded him it’s not Republicans and Conservatives that support these kinds of crazy regulations.

He sheepishly had to concede.

“My gay friends sure hate those Republicans“, Chris offered in the thread following another post, “but when I discuss Liberterian/Republican concepts with out identifying them as ‘Republican’ I generally get agreement.”

Last year, I endorsed Mito Aviles for West Hollywood City Council even though that Democrat (who had hanged Sarah Palin in effigy) because he was aghast at the burdens local regulation placed on small business.

If these folks could get over their animus against Republicans, voting based on the parties’ relative stands on economic liberty rather than on the politically correct notions of partisan ideology, we’d see a surge in support that could make the 2012 election for the GOP what 1932 was for the Democrats.

More on this anon.

In his Daily Caller piece on Dan Rather’s Wednesday appearance on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”, Jeff Poor reports that “one-time CBS “Evening News” anchor Dan Rather said that allegations that the mainstream media reports news from a liberal perspective have been greatly overstated.”

Poor includes this excerpt from Rather’s remarks on the Comedy Central program:

“It hasn’t been my experience,” [Rather] replied. “Most journalists I grew up with, most journalists I worked with and practiced with were trying to be honest brokers of information. Now, what sometimes got you a reputation of liberal, journalists generally form an apprenticeship covering the police beat at midnight, after midnight, on Saturday night, the charity hospital. Journalists, the best of then, do see a Dickensian side of society that most people don’t see. So when they try to call attention to that, people who don’t like it say, ‘Oh, you’re a liberal.’”

Via Hot Air Headlines.

Dan Rather seems to be assuming that a concern for the less fortunate makes one appear to be liberal?  What then does he make of repeated reports showing conservatives more generous in supporting charities with their own money than are liberals with theirs?

And please note that I title this post with a question and include it in the Random Thoughts category.

NB:  Tweaked the post a tad.

While the conservative blogosphere is abuzz about how Mitt Romney’s team outorganized the Obama campaign’s attempt to trash the presumptive Republican nominee’s Massachusetts record and the candidate’s press conference outside Solyndra, Yahoo! chooses to lead their news with the speculations of a former Carter administration official.

Walter Shapiro, according to his USA Today biography, “served in the Carter administration as a presidential speechwriter (1979) and as press secretary (1977-78) to Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall . . . [and also] sought the Democratic nomination for a U.S. House seat . . . .” Key Wiki reports that he “was an identified member of JournoList – an email group of approximately 400 “progressive” and socialist journalists, academics and “new media” activists.”

Has Yahoo! ever led with the speculations of a former Reagan Administration official who has blogged at RedState about Obama’s musings in his Blackberry? (more…)

Their image promoting the unveiling of the White House portrait of the immediate past President of the United States:

At first blush, the First Circuit ruling overturning portions of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), those denying “federal benefits to married gay couples”, appears to be on shaky legal ground:  ”In its unanimous decision, the three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston said the 1996 law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman deprives gay couples of the rights and privileges granted to heterosexual couples.”

There is no constitutional right to those privileges.

That said, there is the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”  Later in the AP article cited above, we read:

The court, the first federal appeals panel to deem the benefits section of the law unconstitutional, agreed with a lower level judge who ruled in 2010 that the law interferes with the right of a state to define marriage and denies married gay couples federal benefits given to heterosexual married couples, including the ability to file joint tax returns.

. . . .

“One virtue of federalism is that it permits this diversity of governance based on local choice, but this applies as well to the states that have chosen to legalize same-sex marriage,” Judge Michael Boudin wrote for the court. “Under current Supreme Court authority, Congress’ denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples lawfully married in Massachusetts has not been adequately supported by any permissible federal interest.

Emphasis added.  Now, while I might quibble with Judge Boudin’s language, he said, “legalize” when he clearly meant “recognize”, he does seem to be on solid Tenth Amendment grounds here.

“The court points out that,” observes Ed Morrissey helping get a the point about the judge’s language, “contra some hysteria among activists, DOMA does not invalidate marriages, but it gives states leeway to disregard marriages performed in other states, and puts the federal government in the position of denying the validity of such marriages”.   Indeed.  If a state “disregards” a marriage, they just don’t grant it privileges, but it still remains valid — or should — in the eyes of those who define themselves as married.

Now to check Volokh for some sound legal analysis.  UPDATE:  Dale Carpenter has a short post on the decision, observing,  (more…)

My most recent post on the Grenell matter should have been an occasion for our readers to consider yet again the most unreported story in the gay media  – and indeed a social phenomenon that only receives passing notice even in the conservative press, that of the of strong intolerance among certain liberals toward people like us, gay conservatives.

Indeed, there are liberal hate sites whose bitter, negative bloggers devote the better part of their time to leveling personal attacks on conservatives, reserving a particular venom for right-of-center gays who do not toe the “equality” party line.

Given how regularly these sites misrepresented my arguments, I haven’t checked them since George W. Bush was president.

Unfortunately, it seems that some of our readers, on both side of the political aisle, have stooped to the level of the hate bloggers in leveling personal attacks on others who have chimed in, offering opposing points of view.  In recent days, I have been checking the comments section less and less frequently.  And when I do, it often feels foreign to me as if it’s part of the blog entirely independent of its bloggers.

So, once again, I ask, readers, please keep the comments civil.  You diminish the quality of your own arguments, making your case far less compelling, when you make assumptions about or level ad hominem attacks against your ideological adversaries.

And all this in a post about the hateful, mean-spirited attacks a prominent gay conservative received.  Those on the left help make my point while those on the right diminish theirs.

. . . and his endorsement of Mitt Romney than the “news” network has to the failure of the Senate Democrats to pass a budget in over three years?

UPDATE:  Seems I’m not the only one noting the network’s obsession with Mr. Trump.   From Jennifer Rubin:

Peter Wehner blasts CNN. “There are dozens of significant and complicated topics that CNN could explore with care. But it has decided to hyper-focus on Donald Trump and the birther issue. That’s bad enough. But what makes it worse is when some in the media then saddle up on their high horses and lament that lack of seriousness in American politics. They pretend what they most want is a sophisticated and elevated conversation about the weightiest issues facing our nation and the world. They deride politicians for focusing on trivialities, even as they are the ones putting the spotlight on the trivialities and demanding politicians address them.”

. . . he’d stand no chance of being reelected.

Ace reports perhaps the most significant comment Scott Walker’s opponent has made in the course of the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall:

[Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett] cannot name any school districts harmed by the Act 10 reforms, and appears to agree with the proposition that it’s helped many (in as much as he does not dispute this part of the question).

He then says he’ll “run an analysis” to find some schools he think were hurt, and get back to the reporter at some point before the election (which is six days off).

This is the central issue in this election — Tom Barrett’s failure to identify any schools harmed by Act 10 is therefore a concession that none have.

In an election caused by unions upset by said law (Act 10), the Democrat can’t name a single school harmed by this supposedly nefarious law.

‘Nuff said?

Council Submissions

• The Noisy Room – Stalking the Blogosphere – BlogBurst Friday for Free Speech
• The Colossus of Rhodey – This Is Even Funnier Because Of Her Obstinance
• Simply Jews – Viktor Dvorakovsky: an undermartyred Russian Islamist
• The Independent Sentinel – Obama’s Truth Team Engaging In Deceptive Propaganda
• The Political Commentator – The IPO: Did Facebook “Jump the Shark”?
• Joshuapundit-Memorial Day: An Honest Man Versus A Liar
• Rhymes With Right – Religious Freedom Alert – South Carolina Jailer Declares No Mass For Catholic Prisoners
• The Razor – Media Bias and the Sin of Omission
• GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – Syria Phobia
• The Right Planet – BlogBurst Friday: Blog About #BrettKimberlin Day
• Bookworm Room – Book review: Marcus Luttrell’s “Service: A Navy SEAL at War”
• The Glittering Eye -I’d Really Like to Know How They Think Things Should Work
• Gay Patriot – Richard Grenell, gay conservatives & the GOP
• VA Right!- McConnell Blasts Obama Admin for Spending $20 Mil to Promote Obamacare at a Time of Record Debt & Deficit
• The Mellow Jihadi – Mandatory Arabic In Harlem

Honorable Mentions (more…)

Shortly after we learned that Richard Grenell decided to step down at Mitt Romney’s foreign policy/national security spokesman, I tried to reach the former aide to John Bolton to ask him a simple question:  whether or not, he, like most gay conservatives, received more grief from the gay left than from social conservatives.

Well, my blogger friends may or may not have passed my messages on to Mr. Grenell.  But, I may finally be getting an answer — or a close approximation of one.  Our reader Leah alerted me to blogger William A. Jacobson’s post where that law professor excerpted an article from Palm Springs’s Desert Sun reporting the gay Republican “took heat from both the political left and the right“:

In an interview with The Desert Sun, Grenell said: “The far left doesn’t want a gay person to be conservative and the far right doesn’t want a conservative to be gay. Some of the most hateful, mean-spirited intolerant comments about me being the foreign policy and national security spokesman for Governor Romney … were coming from the left.”

But it was the far right that gloated louder than the far left after Grenell’s resignation. Leading the charge was the conservative American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, who called Grenell’s resignation a “huge win for us.”

Grenell denies he was forced out by social conservatives, noting that he’s been an openly-gay Republican spokesman for decades.

Emphasis added.  He insisted that he resigned because he didn’t believe that he should be the story:  ”When the messenger becomes part of the message — if you really care about these issues — you should step aside.”

So, folks on the left offered some of the most hateful, mean-spirited intolerant comments about him being the foreign policy and national security spokesman for Governor Romney . . . . Hmmm. . . . Does parallel the experience of us here at GayPatriot — and the reports we have received from our readers.

Wonder when the legacy media will get around to cover that particular aspect of the Grenell matter — or the general story about left-wing intolerance toward “uppity” conservative minorities — and if they’re going to ask the “first gay president”, to borrow and paraphrase an expression, to differentiate himself from such hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric.

I had been planning a post on Obama’s claims to be a skinflint, but other bloggers have easily disposed of the disingenuous claim that the Democrat has “has presided over slower growth in federal spending than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.”

Funny how he makes that claim when my Obama-supporting friends defend their guy, claiming we needed a macroeconomic stimulus to jumpstart the economy.  ”I thought,” writes Victor Davis Hanson,

. . . one Obama swore to us that borrowing $5 trillion was vital — Keynesian pump priming, stimulus, averting 8 percent–plus unemployment, and all that. But now another Obama claims that his serial $1 trillion deficits are proof not of “growth” of the sort that improved GDP and reduced unemployment, but rather of fiscal discipline that stopped reckless Republican spending. So Obama over the last four years brought both austerity that checked wild Bush spending, and also Keynesian growth that snapped us out of the Bush lethargy? Spending is saving? Record deficits are record fiscal restraint?

“These people are Keynesians“, quips one blogger, “Why can’t they say so?”

Maybe because part of Obama’s appeal in 2008 was that even as he reassured his liberal base by offering new spending plans, he reassured independent voters and libertarian Republicans dissatisfied with the spending record of the then-incumbent administration.  They’re finding it difficult to admit that Obama can’t be all things to all people. (more…)

“It’s a matter of record,” blogger Chris Reed observed reminded us yesterday, “that Bill Clinton thought the fawning media coverage (go to the 4:10 mark) of Obama gave him the Democratic nomination and the presidency in 2007-08″  (via Instapundit).

Perhaps Mr. Obama wouldn’t have had as easy a time of it had Clinton’s wife been better prepared for a media that didn’t treat her with kid gloves.  Up until her bid for the White House in 2008, Hillary Clinton faced a generally supportive media.  It seems that until she started campaigning in the Buckeye State’s Democratic presidential primary that year, she had taken for granted that the media would treat her as the previously had.

Only that year, they found a candidate they liked even more than her — whose narrative was even more compelling than hers.

Given how close was the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination that year, one wonders if Mrs. Clinton would have secured her party’s nod had she been prepared — at the outset of the campaign — for a media more favorable to her opponent.

It seems she and John McCain had the same problem.  Both assumed that the media’s affection for them would be constant.  Oh, but our legacy media are fickle — and easily swayed by the supplications of the latest charmer.

Doesn’t seem that there’s any risk Mitt Romney will be counting on the media as did the immediate past Republican presidential nominee.

NB:  Tweaked the title.

Check out the leading headline on AOL’s home page:

In the article linked, we learn that “former MF Global CEO Jon Corzine has been hit by the housing crash“:

The ex-Governor of New Jersey recently sold his Hoboken penthouse apartment for $2.8 million, 14 percent less than what he paid for it in 2008, Bloomberg reports (h/t Business Insider).

. . . .

The housing crash isn’t the only crisis Corzine is dealing with, though. Corzine is coming off the bankruptcy of MF Global last fall when the brokerage firm made a failed $6.3 billion bet on European debt, losing more than $1 billion worth of customer funds. Even with that money now largely accounted for, the collapse is a major blemish on Corzine’s resume. The Obama campaign returned $70,000 worth of donations to Corzine in December as result, according to Bloomberg.

How nice to report that the Obama campaign returned that tainted money, while failing to note how energetically both Mr. Obama and his Vice President campaigned for their fellow Democrat when he unsuccessfully ran for reelection as Governor of New Jersey in 2009.

The Huffington Post’s Harry Bradford neglects to report something Jonah Goldberg covered last month, namely the Obama campaign’s then-recent announcement “that Corzine is still on the list of top-tier bundlers for the Obama reelection campaign. Corzine has raised more than half a million dollars for Obama“:

Obama is constantly denouncing “millionaires and billionaires” for playing by their own rules. It’s true that the campaign told one reporter in February that it wouldn’t take more money from Corzine himself, but it’s been happy to let the man solicit donations for Obama even as Corzine is under investigation by Obama’s own Justice Department.

This isn’t the first time Mrs. Huffington’s outfit failed to identify Mr. Corzine’s partisan affiliation.  Wonder why it keeps slipping her mind.

Willie Brown, the former Democratic Speaker of the California State Assembly wrote yesterday:

The president’s trip to the Bay Area last week made it painfully clear that the Barack Obama re-election campaign has lost its mojo.

There was no life, no personality, no memorable line or moment and no real enthusiasm in the entire fundraising foray. In short, there was no buzz.

It was like a summer rerun of a show that wasn’t very interesting to begin with.

. . . .

Obama was more than a candidate last time out. He was a popular and cultural phenomenon. A rock star. But the trouble with rock stars is that they drop like a rock once fans conclude they are “over.”

Via Weasel Zippers via Instapundit.  To borrow the California Democrat’s image, seems Obama is like the singer who happens to stumble upon the right song at the right moment.  With that that song, he zooms to the top of the charts and the critics awed by the power of that one song define him as the next big thing.  Problem is, he just doesn’t have the artistic imagination which allows him to write music for times that are a’changin’.

No wonder the Obama campaign is struggling to come up with a theme for his reelection campaign.

It looks like Democrats have found their shiny object for this week.  Over at HotAir headlines, they link the New Obama ad: Why won’t Romney stand up to Trump? Pam Spaulding, my favorite leftie blogress is on top of the story.

The presumptive Republican nominee has stated the obvious that, well, he doesn’t agree with all his supporters.  Now, I’ll grant that it would be better if Mitt Romney wasn’t participating in a fundraiser with the other Donald.  (Sorry, friends, the Donald is always clad a in a sailor shirt and hat and no pants.)

Does the Obama campaign really believe that the American people will judge a candidate not by his own experience and platform and define him by some of his more eccentric supporters?  Wonder how they would react should conservatives demand that Obama, to borrow and paraphrase an expression, differentiate himself from his more extreme supporters.

UPDATE:  Looks like Mitt Romney is not going to play the Obama Democrats game.  Byron York reports:

Mitt Romney’s refusal to repudiate Donald Trump sends a signal, both to Democrats and the voting public: With the nation’s future at stake in this November’s election, Romney will not accommodate calls that he disown supporters who make ill-considered, unpopular, or sometimes outrageous statements on matters not fundamental to the campaign.

Read the whole thing. Kudos, Mitt.  Does seem that only Democrats ask Republicans to repudiate their supporters who make silly statements.  If the Democrats started repudiating Bill Maher, they might have a point.

UP-UPDATE: Romney repudiating repudiations

UP-UP-UPDATE: Jim Geraghty wonders why it’s more “that Romney repudiate Trump than for Obama to repudiate Corzine?”

The Obama campaign kept the money Jon Corzine raised while returning his personal donation. Why is Trump a bigger controversy than that?

Corzine’s recklessness cost 3,200 people their jobs – bigger than most of the mid-90s layoffs under Bain that the Obama campaign insists upon spotlighting in its ads.

This post is related to the up-up-update.

Ann Althouse explains why she didn’t read a Jeffrey Rosen, er, Jeffrey Toobin piece in the New Yorker:

I have an interestingness standard, not an it-was-in-The-New-Yorker standard.

Diva.

The Watchers Council has announced its winners for the penultimate May 2012 competition and they are as follows. Among the council nominees, the rankings:

• *First place with 3 2/3 votes! Joshuapundit – What Does Peace Mean Anyway?
• Second place with 2 2/3 votes – The Razor- Geert Wilders: A 21st Century Canary in a Coal Mine (more…)

Ann Althouse linked this earlier today:

Thinking outside the box may solve problems in the real world. But in the political realm, creative noodling will get you cast into the outer darkness. No matter which way you lean, The Machinery requires cogs, not cognizance.

She was talking about Democrats taking Cory Booker, but it relates well to a post on gay marriage/civil unions that I intend to write in the near future.

“Liberalism“, writes Roger Simon today, “as an ideology is in its death throes. Only the power trip remains.”  Maybe that explains why the president is having trouble coming up with an agenda for his second term.

Roger reached his conclusion, in part, by observing the reluctance to all too many liberals to engage in serious debate:

Given that their ideology is dying, no wonder liberals no longer want to debate the issues.  They avoid serious discussion at every possible juncture, changing the conversation to putative racism, sexism, classism — anything but the proverbial elephant in the room, economic demise.

Read the whole thing.  Something to ponder.

Is Roger right to ask if liberalism is dead?