Twice while helping out with Outfest, I have experienced the class of Chaz Bono.  When honored by the festival one year on Opening Night, instead of delivering a long speech, he, humbled by the honor, briefly thanked the festival, then returned to his seat, understanding that people were eager to see film.  Another time, when I was managing the theater where he was appearing, he showed incredible courtesy to the Outfest staff (including yours truly), thanking us for our assistance, respect to his audience, staying to talk to anyone who wished to have a word with him.

He is showing his class once again — and a bit of courage — by joining Cindy McCain and former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan in hosting a fundraiser, organized by our friend Ric Grenell, for his step-mother, Republican Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack on Sunday, October 14, 2012 from 5:00 until 6:30 PM. For more information and to RSVP, contact Reagan Cotter.

Mrs. Mack is the only Republican woman in California’s House delegation.  She voted to repeal Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, has signed Americans’ for Tax Reform Taxpayer Protection Pledge and  has been honored by that organization as well as the National Federation of Independent Businesses and the National Association of Manufacturers.

Join me in supporting this good Republican, voting the right way on DADT repeal and supporting a smaller, less intrusive federal government.

For more insight into why economic growth in anemic and job creation is stagnant, take a gander at a poll released last “week by the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB)“:

The national survey, conducted between Aug. 13 and Sept. 4, interviewed 800 small business owners and manufacturers and found that 69 percent of them think President Barack Obama’s policies have hurt American businesses and manufacturers, and 55 percent would not start a business today given the current environment.

. . . .

The survey showed that small business owners and manufacturers think federal regulations, taxes, government spending and the costs of health insurance and energy are the main causes of slow economic growth.

Small businesses generate the most new jobs.  If we want to see job growth, federal, state and local governments need reduce their spending and scale back on their regulations.

Earlier today, a liberal friend posted this on Facebook, sharing it from some left-of-center site:

Just whose policies are failing? Barack Obama has been president for 3 years and 8 months.

Hat tip to our reader Leah for her quip which helped me craft the title.

FROM THE COMMENTS: Diane offers, “Corporations are hoding onto their profits because the future is uncertain.”

RELATED:  Yeah, it sure does seem that the legacy media are treating Romney like an incumbent.

In the month of September, the conservative (and Spanish-language) media (and from a few rogue reporters at ABCNews) reported a number of stories about President Barack Obama all showing his disinterest in or ambivalence toward governing. And yet, outside those pockets at ABC and occasionally on CNN), our legacy media all but ignored (or otherwise downplayed) these stories which called Obama’s competence into question.

By the end of the month, a number of pundits and bloggers, including a Democratic pollster, commenting on the media’s negligence, had scored them for promoting the president’s reelection and undermining the national interest, with Charles Krauthammer suggesting the media should just “relocate to Chicago” given that they’ve all but become “‘an auxiliary of the Obama campaign”.

In both interviews with and news reports about Obama, authors, journalists in Spanish-language media, a late night talk show host and those occasional “rogue” reporter, revealed a man more focused on his reelection than on the job to which he was elected four years ago.  And our friends in the legacy spent more time following up on Mitt Romney’s supposed “gaffes” than they did on these very real examples of Obama’s incompetence:

• The release of the Bob Woodward book showed Obama disinterested in the give-and-take that is part and parcel of negotiating with Congress.
• The president jetted off to a campaign event in Las Vegas the day after the attacks on our embassy in Cairo and the murder of our ambassador in Libya.
• In an interview with David Letterman, Obama failed to identify the amount of the national debt.
• He dissembled on immigration reform in the Univision townhall, blaming Republicans for his failure when his party controlled Congress for the time period in question (his first year in office); Obama neither introduced such reform legislation nor did he provide a framework within which Congress should work, nor did he press Congress to act.
• In that same townhall, the Democrat “falsely claimed that the [Fast and Furious] program began under President George W. Bush.”  There has been almost no legacy media followup on the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on the gunrunning scandal, a report which calls into question the managerial competence of Attorney General Holder and reminds us that some in the administration did not cooperate with investigators. (more…)

It’s as if they make to make 2012 2008 all over again.  President Obama has been in office for over 3 years and 8 months and  yet his Vice President blames Bush:

Can’t these guys ever take responsibility for their actions?

Do we want to be led by a team constantly lamenting the situation they inherited (rather than trying to fix them) and blaming their predecessors for their problems? Shouldn’t they instead be coming up with solutions to the debt crisis?

UPDATE:  Too bad Joe didn’t listen to his boss who, on March 19, 2009, told Jay Leno that ‘one of the things’ he was ‘trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.‘”

“In a different political environment,” laments Allahpundit

if Congress wasn’t back home campaigning for reelection and demands for answers from the top weren’t fated to be met with screeching about how the GOP is “politicizing terror” before the big vote, I think the House would already be moving towards holding hearings about what the White House knew.

Richard Grenell, however, believes Congress should hold hearings immediately:

We should do it immediately, because we’ve already seen the State Department scrubbing some of its information from its website. . . .  The State Department gave a warning that said, ‘We don’t have any intelligence that anything is going to be wrong on 9/11.’ And then they removed that from the website. . . . So we already see a scrubbing from the State Department and it’s really important for congressional committees to quickly get in and figure out what’s going on.

He calls media “completely complicit in trying to make this all about a film, a YouTube video that had been out since June, and the narrative was falling apart.”  He also scores the administration from being oblivious to increasing turmoil in the Middle East: (more…)

If our legacy media covered the Obama administration with any degree of scrutiny, we might see more reports like this:

Ed Morrissey catches a detail in the lastest Bloomberg poll which suggests that information is getting through the legacy media’s filter.  ”One month after Democrats bragged at their convention that they would pound Mitt Romney on foreign policy and national security,” he observes, “Barack Obama suddenly finds himself at a disadvantage on the issue of terrorism.”*   He cites Uri Friedman’s post on Foreign Policy reporting that 

The foreign-policy results of the new Bloomberg National Poll haven’t gotten much attention yet, but the survey contains some bad news for the Obama campaign. According to the poll, Mitt Romney has a 48-42 advantage over Barack Obama on the question of which candidate would be tougher on terrorism. Romney, in other words, has encroached on one of Obama’s signature strengths.

Polls taken earlier in September and in August, showed Obama leading Romney on the issue, usually by double-digit margins.  If the legacy media had been doing their job this past month, the Republican might have opened up a double-digit lead on terrorism and national security, instead of just edging ahead.

Instead of covering Obama’s foreign policy/national security blunders, the legacy media have been covering for them.  Democratic pollster Pat Caddell wonders why the media have not devoted much attention to the president’s decision to jet off to a fundraiser in Las Vegas the day after the terrorist attack on our diplomatic personnel in Libya:

First of all, we’ve had 9 days of lies…If a president of either party…had had a terrorist incident and gotten on an airplane [after remarks] and flown off to a fundraiser in Las Vegas, they would have been crucified…it should have been, should have been, the equivalent, for Barack Obama, of George Bush’s “flying over Katrina” moment. But nothing was said at all. Nothing will be said. [...] It is [unacceptable] to specifically decide that you will not tell the American people information they have a right to know. (more…)

For the past two weeks or so, many on the right have been wringing their hands about a series of polls showing Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney, sometimes outside the margin of error.  And although Gallup showed the race narrowing into a tie last week, this week we’ve seen the president build and expand his lead on the Republican nominee.

In two posts today, Jim Geraghty addresses this, suggesting in the first post that the Republican is behind, but not by much. In the second, he cites one of his “regulars, he accounting-minded poll watcher nicknamed ‘Number-Cruncher’” who offering a wealth of data* comparing polls in recent years to the final result, notes that pollster errors seem generally overwhelmingly to favor the Democrats.

Now, if this was just random chance of mistakes, you would see pollsters being wrong in both directions and by about the same margin in each direction at the same rate – sometimes overestimating how well the Democrats do some years, sometimes overestimating how well the Republicans do. But the problem seems pretty systemic – sometimes underestimating the GOP by a little, sometimes by a lot.

Read the whole thing.

* (more…)

“On his first full day in office,” report Bloomberg’s Jim Snyder and Danielle Ivory, “President Barack Obama ordered federal officials to “usher in a new era of open government” and “act promptly” to make information public.”

Yet, their article headlines that his cabinet has flunked this test with 19 of 20 ignoring the law:

Nineteen of 20 cabinet-level agencies disobeyed the law requiring the disclosure of public information: The cost of travel by top officials. In all, just eight of the 57 federal agencies met Bloomberg’s request for those documents within the 20-day window required by the Act.

“When it comes to implementation of Obama’s wonderful transparency policy goals, especially FOIA policy in particular, there has been far more ‘talk the talk’ rather than ‘walk the walk,’” said Daniel Metcalfe, director of the Department of Justice’s office monitoring the government’s compliance with FOIA requests from 1981 to 2007. (more…)

Over at Instapundit, Ed Driscoll finds some schizophrenia at NBC, linking Jay Leno’s lament that ‘We Wasted Four Years Waiting For Obama To Do Something About The Economy.’”  He also cites Newsbusters’ report that “NBC skipped the bad [economic] news for Barack Obama entirely. ABC allowed it a mere 21 seconds. CBS was the only network to allow the story a full report.”

Guess bad economic news doesn’t matter when a Democratic president is running for reelection.

In July, Josh Gerstein of Politico reported that “President Barack Obama’s Jobs Council hasn’t met publicly for six months, even as the issue of job creation dominates the 2012 election.”  Their failure to meet seems representative of the administration’s attitude toward the economy.  The president  – and his team — would rather focus on other things.

They seemed quite confident that passage of the “stimulus” would lead to a robust recovery and yet when the economy rebounded, it did so with a whimper, with growth anemic and not enough jobs created to make up for (what would be) an expanding labor market (if so many people weren’t dropping out of the workforce).  In not one single quarter, in not one single month since the $800 billion dollar bill passed has unemployment fallen below the level Obama’s own economic team forecast had Congress failed to pass his “recovery plan”.

And yet, as Ed Morrissey reported in June, the Democrat kept talking about pivoting back to jobs and the economy, but never seeming to do so.  The Democrat’s focus has never been on matters on economic.  New economic numbers came out yesterday, suggesting that the economy might be sliding back into recession.  The government needs take action, yet it seems clear that the incumbent is reluctant to face up to the bleak economic situation.

He just doesn’t seem all that interested.

Yesterday, we learned of  steep drop in durable goods orders and a downward revision of GDP in the second quarter. Suggesting that “2012 may be the worst non-recession, non-depression year in the history of the United States”, James Pethokoukis reports that “Commerce Department data goes back to 1930. Since then, there has been no single year with GDP growth as weak as 2012 that wasn’t in recession.”

In an another post, Pethokoukis also cites “research from the Fed which finds that since 1947, when two-quarter annualized real GDP growth falls below 2%, recession follows within a year 48% of the time. And when year-over-year real GDP growth falls below 2%, recession follows within a year 70% of the time.” (more…)

As I’ll be returning to the Bay Area next weekend, am organizing a brunch for our readers on Sunday the 7th.

And to honor a reader who is moving back to Denver, we will have a dinner in Los Angeles on Monday the 15th.

Please RSVP if you can attend either (or both) event(s).

Because of my familial and religious obligations this week, I was unable to participate in the Watcher oF Weasels competition. The Watcher did nominate one of my posts and these are the results of the last ballotting of September 2012:

Council Winners

• *First place with 3 1/3 votes! Joshuapundit – Shoot The Messenger – US State Dept Blasts CNN For Revealing Its Misrepresentations On Libya Attack
• Second place with 2 votes –Simply Jews- Lying again, Ms Clinton?
• Third place with 1 1/3 vote – Rhymes With Right-Where Obama Got It Wrong At The UN (more…)

I want to apologize for not blogging for the past two days. I have just returned from a trip to the Bay Area to meet my new nephew. And shortly after his bris, it was time to attend Yom Kippur services.

Yesterday, while still in the Bay Area, I checked the blog only briefly, had thought to write, but decided to spent more time with my Mom, my sister and her boys.

Back in LA now, and hope to get back to regular blogging soon.

It’s Bruce checking in from Orlando, FL, where PatriotPartner (John) and I are celebrating a good friends birthday at Disney World.

Then on Saturday night, we head out for a more ambitious trip: Sydney, Australia next week!

On Oct 3., John and I are lucky enough to see Lady Antebellum perform at the Sydney Opera House!

All this to say that my blogging will be slow. And I’m actually trying to ignore the day-to-day political stuff until Oct 8! Wish me luck. LOL.

I will probably have some pics during the Sydney trip on my Twitter account. So follow me there for sure!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

I spent the better part of Monday driving across the Golden State, from my apartment in West Hollywood to my sister’s place in the San Francisco suburbs.  I saw a total of two Obama bumper stickers, both in the LA area and one Romney/Ryan sticker on a (very) small car with New Mexico plates in the Central Valley.  And in the East Bay, did see a Tea Party banner, offering Mr. Obama a pink slip.

Striking that in the midst of a presidential campaign, I’d see so little evidence of that campaign.

I missed the big story of the day — or what would be the big story (as in super-duper big) had it happened in a Republican administration — where “the Secretary of State’s spokesman–the diplomat’s diplomat” (to borrow John Hinderaker’s expression) used some very undiplomatic language in response to a BuzzFeed reporter Michael Hasting’s request for information about (among other things) the State Department’s failure to secure/search the American consulate in Benghazi after the terrorist attacks on the facility earlier this month.

Spokesman Phillippe Reines, “couldn’t or wouldn’t answer“, as Ann Althouse put it, Hastings’s “excellent set of questions”.  And although many have focused on Reines’s, well, intemperate response, Althouse believes

Those nasty comebacks shouldn’t be the story. They should direct us to the set of questions. Those are great questions, and the State Department will not answer them. Without answers, they feel like questions that answer themselves.

Can you imagine the coverage this story would garner had the spokesman to a Republican official responded in such a manner?  (Text of his responses in first link above.)  Within hours of the story breaking, he would have submitted his resignation.

There is a huge story in this failure to answer these questions, a story of a department in disarray.  We need to learn more about this story.  Heads should roll.  And more reporters should be asking questions.

RELATED:  John Nolte reminds us of the media overreaction when a Romney spokesman told reporters to kiss his “ass, after they started heckling Romney at the sacred site where Poland buries its war dead“.

(John also believes the administration is focusing on the film used as a pretext for the protests “to draw attention and blame away from U.S. security failures“.)

From the Huffington Post via numerous friends on Facebook:

GOP vice-presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said that the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy should not be reinstated in an interview with West Palm Beach NBC affiliate WPTV that aired on Sunday.
. . . .

“I talked to a lot of good friends of mine who are combat leaders in the theater, and they just didn’t think the timing of this was right to do this when our troops were in the middle of harm’s way in combat,” said Ryan. “Now that it’s done, we should not reverse it. I think that would be a step in the wrong direction because people have already disclosed themselves.”

“I think this issue is past us. It’s done. And I think we need to move on,” he said.

More on this as time allows.  Good news indeed.  To note, this corresponds with what I’ve been hearing from sources closer to the campaign than I.

Just read a great piece by Ross Douthat that really gets at (what should be) the primary issue in this presidential campaign.  He compares the growing concentration of power in our nation’s capital to “the ruthless Capital in ‘The Hunger Games,’ [with] the wealth of Washington is ultimately extracted from taxpayers more than it is earned.  And over the last five years especially, D.C.’s gains have coincided with the country’s losses.”

He cites “new census data” which reveal “that 7 of the 10 richest American counties in 2011 were in the Washington, D.C., region”;

For Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, what’s happened in Washington these last 10 years should be a natural part of the case against Obamanomics. Our gilded District is a case study in how federal spending often finds its way to the well connected rather than the people it’s supposed to help, how every new program spawns an array of influence peddlers, and how easily corporations and government become corrupt allies rather than opponents.

(Via HotAir headlines.)  Read the whole thing.

(More on this anon as time allows.)

Last week, while doing cardio, whenever I caught Piers Morgan on CNN, it seemed he was inquiring into a statement by or a release from (i.e., tax returns) Mitt Romney.  He seemed almost oblivious to the fact that Barack Obama is President of the United States, uninterested in scrutinizing the incumbent’s policies.

Do wonder if any of the cable “news” networks (save FoxNews) have run panel discussions on

• Bob Woodward’s new book, The Price of Politics and Barack Obama’s practice of governing
• Obama’s decision to jet off to a campaign in Las Vegas on the day after attacks on our embassy in Cairo, Egypt and our consulate in Benghazi, Libya the latter leaving four Americans, including the Ambassador, murdered
• The report by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General revealing malfeasance by Obama appointees and shoddy management by the Attorney General (also an Obama appointee)
• Obama’s false statement about the origin of the gunrunning program.

Do let me know if you’ve seen any such segments and provide the links (if available).

UDPATE:  Had my first response within ten minutes of posting this, with a reader reporting, “C-SPAN ran Woodward’s presentation and Q & A of his new book at the Washington, D.C., book fair yesterday.  I watched the whole thing.  It doesn’t fit your specifics, so feel free to write it off. ”  It might not precisely fix my specifics, but it’s something.  Maybe CNN will follow C-SPAN’s lead.