Reader MV passed along a McClatchy article on a “quiet transformation is taking place in the Republican Party, which has begun to embrace openly gay candidates – and among gay Republicans, who now feel more comfortable speaking out in a party that may have accepted them but didn’t always show it.”

The article reports how the party is rallying behind one openly gay candidate,

Richard Tisei, a former Massachusetts state senator, who’s campaigning on what he describes as the number one issue for gay voters and everyone else in the state’s 6th Congressional District, north of Boston.

“In general, the campaign I’m running on is based on the economy,” he said.

Tisei does support same-sex marriage, and he said party leaders knew that from the beginning of his campaign for Congress.

“I don’t agree with the party platform, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a good Republican,” Tisei said.

Hmmm. . .  where did I hear that recently?

Tisei’s sexuality notwithstanding,

The National Republican Congressional Committee has designated Tisei as a “Young Gun,” meaning he’s on the national party’s radar and can expect to get more resources for his campaign. Committee Chairman Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas said Tisei “has met organizational and fundraising benchmarks and has established himself as a strong contender.”

Does seem like some folks might need to change their narratives.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Chris H offers:

I’ve been saying this for years.. but once the “gay” thing goes away, the Democrats are going to have a really hard time maintaining their grasp on to the LGBT alphabet community.

My gay friends sure hate those Republicans … but when I discuss Liberterian/Republican concepts with out identifying them as “Republican” I generally get agreement.

Read the whole thing.

“The Left, labor, Democrats, which planned to embarrass” Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Mike Allen of Politico on MSNBC this morning (as quoted by Jim Geraghty), ”instead have made him a national figure with a very bright future,”  adding “It was money poured down the drain by Democrats and the Left in a presidential election year.”

Indeed.

Wonder if we’ll ever see a tally of the total amount of money the various and sundry public employee unions poured into the Badger State, first to lobby the legislature and organize rallies against Walker’s reforms, then to launch petition drives to recall the state Senators targeted for replacement in 2011, to do the same this year to recall Walker, his Lieutenant Governor and another batch of state Senators, then to campaign for their chosen candidate in this month’s primary and now to campaign against the governor himself in the actual recall election upcoming.

Money spent in those endeavors is money they won’t be able to spend to help hold the Wisconsin Senate seat for the Democrats or to help in other political contests this year.

Meanwhile, in attempting to demonize and destroy Mr. Walker, the unions have made that reformer a Republican hero.  As Ann Althouse writes:

The recall has put Walker in the position where he must advertise and promote himself, which might have been awkward before — and it was never his thing. TV viewers are getting barraged with Walker ads — and almost nothing for his cash-strapped opponent, and we’re tolerating it because he was forced into having to defend himself. What a nice opportunity for him!

Via Instapundit.

UPDATE:   “The bigger problem for unions”, writes 2010 CPAC Blogger of the Year, Ed Morrissey, ”is the display of impotence“:

They have poured millions of dollars into Wisconsin, pushed people into rallies and protests, and wasted valuable man-hours organizing for recall elections and a special election for the state Supreme Court, only to come up empty thus far.  Until now, people feared the impact of unions in elections, and in special elections such as these even more, as they are more easily mastered by superior organization.  However, Walker supporters cast more ballots in the recall primaries than the combined votes of the top two Democrats, just as they did in the race that pitted Supreme Court Justice David Prosser against Joanne Kloppenburg, and in almost every recall race thus far.

Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock yesterday defeated 36-year Senate veteran Richard Lugar in the Hoosier State’s Republican primary.  This Tea Party favorite who has defeated an establishment Republican has, unlike other such victors, a better than even shot of winning the seat for the GOP.  Mourdock is very much in the mainstream of his state’s politics, an accomplished public official who has served on Vanderburgh County’s Board of Commissioners and in his current position.

His opponent, “the longest-serving Senator in Indiana’s history”, recently celebrated his 80th birthday and was first elected to public office when the 60-year-old Mourdock was 13. Lugar doesn’t seem to have maintained a residence in Indiana, the state he has represented in Washington since Barack Obama was in high school.

It does seem time for him to retire to spend time with his grandchildren.

Not only did Mourdock defeat an octogenarian legislator, but he did so by running on on the principles which secured Ronald Reagan’s rise, favoring a smaller federal government with fewer regulations.

Although “a lot of pundits have been prematurely writing the obituary to the Tea Party,” writes Philip Klein in the Washington Examiner, “Mourdock’s victory demonstrates that the movement still has a lot of power.” Indeed.

UPDATE:  Jennifer Rubin echoes — and builds upon — my point:

At first blush this might seem to be a repeat of 2010: Diligent, moderate incumbent taken out by wide-eyed Tea Party loony. But Mourdock is no Sharron Angle or Christine O’Donnell. And Lugar had gotten out of touch with his constituents and had long ago ceased to be an effective reformer or constructive player in the Senate.

Read the whole thing.

The more I think about how Congressman Adam Schiff responded to my question earlier today, the more aware I become not just of this Democrat’s incompetence (a competent Congressman would offer a government’s pressing fiscal problem), but also his demagoguery. In the course of his talk, he attacked Republicans for holding the nation “hostage” on the debt negotiations (without acknowledging his party’s responsibility for accumulating so much debt*
).  And, as I reported previously, he criticized the Republicans’ proposed Medicare reforms without offering any alternative of his own.

His comments reminded me of something Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in response to a question Paul Ryan asked him about the president’s budget:

Here’s a link to a video putting that comment in context. This may prove to be the defining exchange of the Democrats’ 2012 strategy — governing as well as political. Fault the Republican plan without offering a solution of their own.

*Under his party’s leadership, we saw a vast increase in federal spending which, to borrow an expression, “we didn’t pay for“.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  V the K asks: “why aren’t the Republicans demanding of Democrats, in every interview and every press conference ‘What’s your plan?’” Good question. Why aren’t they?

Welcome Instapundit Readers!  I see Glenn compared Mr. Schiff to the Treasury Secretary.  I address Mr. Geithner’s acknowledgement in my this post.

Just returned from a townhall with my soon-to-be new Congressman (provided he isn’t defeated in November) Adam Schiff.  When the 113th Congress convenes next January, thanks to redistricting, Henry Waxman will no longer represent me in the U.S. House.*

Despite his more civil demeanor, Mr. Schiff acknowledged that he had no plan to address the coming insolvency of federal entitlements.

Citing the warning of Medicare’s trustees about the program’s coming insolvency and this report about Social Security failing even faster than anticipated, I asked the Democrat what specific reforms had he proposed or supported to address the problem.  After he stumbled around for a while acknowledging the complexity of the problem and offering some broad goals for reform, I interrupted him, repeating my question, this time emphasizing the adjective, “specific”.

He then said, “I don’t have a specific plan for Social Security.”  (When, after the townhall, I showed him that sentence on my notepad, he started to blather on about his goals, but acknowledged that I had quoted him correctly, that he had no specific plan.)

Later, when I asked point blank, “So you don’t have a plan?”, he replied that he did not.  And yet, when I inquired about the bipartisan plan the Democratic senior Senator for Oregon Ron Wyden backed, he faulted that proposal while taking potshots at the types of reforms Republicans had proposed and were considering.  Perhaps, I should have reminded him what Jon Huntsman said in expressing admiration for “Congressman Paul Ryan’s honest attempt to save Medicare“:

Those who disagree with his approach incur a moral responsibility to propose reforms that would ensure Medicare’s ability to meet its responsibilities to retirees without imposing an unaffordable tax burden on future generations of Americans.

Mr. Schiff attacked Mr. Ryan’s plan, yet has not met the “moral responsibility” of proposing those such reforms.

My new congressional district will be ill-served who, although acknowledging our the crisis of federal entitlements, has failed to offer a solution.  By failing to put forward (or sign on to) legislation offering real reform, Adam Schiff, simply put, is not doing his job.  And should be replaced come November.

If all goes well, then, he will, technically at least, never become my Congressman.

* (more…)

Take a gander at Yahoo!’s headlines in this screenshot I took at 10:24 PST (1:24 GayPatriot blog time):

Note the last one. By clicking on that headline, we don’t get a news story, but an opinion piece by a former official in the Carter administration. Just took one google search to determine Mr. Shapiro’s politics. Yeah, his USA Today bio claims that “Since 1979, his only partisan activity has been voting”, but the tone of his column suggests otherwise.

Perhaps, Yahoo!’s editors includes that column in their headlines because they wanted to balance out yet another poll (and this one which tends to lean left) showing that American prefer budget cuts to spending hikes as a means to reduce the deficit: “Cutting government programs is favored as the way to reduce the budget deficit by more than twice as many Americans as those who favor raising taxes, said a Reuters/Ipsos poll.”

As per the last headline, expect more such coverage of Romney, with various media outlets styling opinion pieces critical of the presumptive Republican nominee and praising the Democrat as news.  But, the Reuters/Ipsos poll shows us just how out of touch is the incumbent, a Democrat who, since his election, has favored increasing government programs — even after voters repudiated this approach in the 2010 elections.

It does seem you can count on the New York Times editorial page to repeat the talking points of the Obama administration.  And now apparently, their star columnist has joined the fray.  According to Jeff Poor in the Daily Caller, Tom Friedman is now calling the Republican Party “a radical party”:

I think it is the fact that in my view the Republican Party is no longer a conservative party. It’s become a radical party on a lot of these key issues.

(Via Hot Air headlines.) Well, Tom, it is a fact that that is your view.  Problem is though that most Americans don’t agree with you.  Republicans now have a modest lead over Democrats in the RealClearPolitics average of the generic congressional ballot.

And it’s not just that poll.  As John Hinderaker reports, Rasmussen’s “latest ‘voters trust’ survey” shows Americans preferring Republicans to Democrats on 6 of 10 key issues, including the economy (“far and away the most important thing on voters’ minds this election“) where the supposedly radical party leads the president’s party by 11 points (49-38).  On national security the GOP has a 9-point edge (48-39).  On taxes, it’s a 6-point edge.

That’s one point higher than the Democrats’ largest margin — on education where voters trust them by a 44-39 margin.  Wonder if the margin would favor the Republicans if the producers of Waiting for Superman had addressed the ties between the teachers’ unions and the Democratic Party.

Seems Mr. Friedman is the voice of the liberal mindset (much heralded among those who share his opinions) rather than a man attuned to the realities of American politics.

SORT OF RELATED:  And this prominent New Yorker, the voice of a community entirely different from Mr. Friedman’s, has been calling the president’s policies “radical.”  (Via Gateway Pundit.)

There are two stories coming out of yesterday’s primaries and caucuses, the first which has gained the greatest currency that Rick Santorum lost the two biggest contests, the second, mentioned mostly on pro-Romney (or anti-Santorum) blogs that Mitt Romney won a plurality of the delegates.

The former Massachusetts governor cleaned up in American Samoa, winning all nine of the territory’s delegates and won a big victory in Hawai’i, running twenty points ahead of Santorum, capturing an absolute majority on the island of Oahu and narrowly losing to Ron Paul on the big island.  As a result, as John Hinderaker pointed out, Romeny “added six delegates to his lead“.  Hugh Hewitt says he netted only 5, winning 40 delegates to Santorum’s 35.

That said, Mitt Romney’s failure yessterday to build on his showing in previous Southern contests (as per Jay Cost’s analysis) indicates that he still need do some serious “coalition maintenance” (to borrow an expression Paul Gigot coined in a January edition of WSJ.com’s Political Diary (available by subscription) back in January).

Not quite sure what he needs to do, but it might help him to reach out to some conservatives who have been critical of his candidacy.  Should Romney win the Republican nomination, he’s going to need a fully activated, energized and operational conservative base not just to win the presidency but to help his fellow partisans in down ballot races in order to have a governing majority come next January.

Don Surber was on a roll this past weekend. Glenn linked his must-read post on the videos linking Barack Obama to radical law professor Derrick Bell:

This video will not bring down President Obama. His sorry record of no accomplishments will. We cannot afford to live in 2008 and mope about Obama not being vetted. The job before us is to show that the last 3+ years have sucked and 4 more years of Obama — a red-blooded, true Christian American who was born in Hawaii — will suck even harder.

While over at Surber’s site, I caught up on some of his recent posts, including this critique of Rick Santorum’s organization, a piece on the record level of polar ice, an alert to an Obama campaign attack on Sarah Palin, and the video included at the end of this post.

And he post the chart “Obama used to sell the $787 billion stimulus” contrasting the unemployment rate projected when he put forward the nearly $800 billion program with the latest figures.  Not only is the unemployment rate 2.3% higher than the administration forecast, but it’s even higher than the level expected “without” the “recovery plan.”

He contends the Palin ad shows that the president runs “on diversion” that the Democrat “is running for re-election as a troll.”  Do hope my fellow Republicans follow the lead of another conservative blogger, Jim Hoft and focus on another Democratic attempt at diversion, illegal robocalls targeting Republican Congressmen who just happen to be on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (DCCC) hit list.

If the Democrats are so confident of victory this November, how come they keep trying to distract voters? (more…)

White House Using Taxpayer Cash to Pay for Spin: (more…)

Yesterday, in a piece manifesting a misunderstanding of conservatives prevalent on the gay left, Peter Casseis discussed the dilemma facing conservatives in the Sheriff Babeu hullabaloo, given that the story falls at the intersection of “the twin hatreds of gay men and immigrants.”  He then calls the tough-talking conservative “ne of a long line of anti-gay conservative government figures forced out of the closet”.

Seems that for some on the left, a strong advocate for conservative principles must necessarily be (to borrow an inaccurate depiction of another outspoken conservative) “a racist, sexist, homophobe.”

Turns out, however, as Casseis, to his credit, begins to acknowledge (in the second page of his article), that anti-gay sentiment really isn’t a defining issue for many, if not most, conservatives and Tea Party supporters.  Over at Big Journalism, Brandon Darby reports something which comes as little surprise to gay conservatives:  most grassroots activists couldn’t care less about his sexual orientation:

The state’s tea party grassroots continued to see Sheriff Paul Babeu for what he is; namely, a man who has done a good job in the many positions of service he’s held throughout his life and career.

An Associated Press article from February 26^th says it best: Tea Partiers Stick with Outed Gay Sheriff. In the article, members of rural Arizona’s Yavapai Tea Party spoke out on their support for the Sheriff the Left needed to stop. The AP writer quotes 64-year-old Air Force pilot and Tea Party leader Bill Halpin as saying: “I care less. I just care less. Don’t preach it on me. Don’t push it on me and, by golly, I respect your rights.”

Read the whole thing.

Just before the polls in New Hampshire closed on Tuesday, I caught my guy on FoxNews.  It was one of the few times I had seen the former Utah Governor on TV.  It struck me that I had come to my decision to back Jon Huntsman almost exclusively based on what I had read in the Wall Street Journal and on the candidate’s web-site.

I was backing the candidate with the boldest and most pragmatic conservative approach to the fiscal mess created by increased spending and an excessive reliance on the federal government to address our nation’s woes, social as well as economic.

And I’ve wondered, as I asked yesterday morning, if the liberals who voted for Huntsman on Tuesday knew his “economic package [had] earned the Wall Street Journal‘s praise” for its bold conservative approach to our nation’s fiscal crisis?  Perhaps they’ve rallied ’round him not for the ideas he has espoused but for the criticism he has leveled.  They like Republicans critical of the GOP.

All that said, we need a bold approach to our nation’s fiscal situation and regulatory leviathan.  Jon Huntsman has offered such an approach.  (As has House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan.)  If he makes that the focus of his campaign, he may gain some ground in the polls.  And even he doesn’t win, he may have some impact on the eventual nominee — pushing him to offer an equally bold platform.

Oh, and one more thing.  It would be nice to hear a candidate putting forward a conservative fiscal platform while supporting same-sex civil unions.  These policies aren’t mutually exclusive.  And Rudy Giuliani has, alas, faded from the political scene.

UPDATE:  Learned that my friend David Boaz of the Cato Institute (mentioned in this post) will be on Judge Napolitano’s Freedom Watch on the Fox Business Network tonight at 8 PM EST to talk about Rick Santorum.  Make sure to tune in.

Rick Santorum, David Harsanyi writes,

. . . grumbles about too many conservatives believing in unbridled “personal autonomy” and subscribing to the “idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do … that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom (and) we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues.”

Perhaps Santorum confuses libertinism with libertarianism, but for him “cultural issues” go way beyond defending the life of the unborn or opposing gay marriage. Santorum believes that conservatives should recognize “that individuals can’t go it alone,” which sounds a lot like the straw-man justification for nearly every state expansion in memory. Why does Santorum, a conservative, believe that getting government out of our lives means a person must “go it alone,” anyway? Maybe it means that person can go to his local church or his family or his community or his local bar to seek help — or maybe he can figure things out himself.

Emphasis added.  Via Instapundit.  Well, thanks, Rick for reminding me why I’m a conservative.  (I’m part of the “too many”.)  And for echoing the Obama administration rap on the right.  Last month in Osawatomie, Kansas, President Obama contended that the “Republican philosophy is simple[:]  We are better off when everyone is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

Harsanyi’s question (that I emphasized above) is perhaps one of the most important ones to ask of any critic of free market capitalism.  It is one that my friend David Boaz addresses in the seventh chapter, “Civil Society,” of his first-rate book, Libertarianism.  Harsanyi’s suggestive sentence (beginning with “Maybe”) is, in some ways, a succinct summary of that chapter.

I have many concerns about Rick Santorum, not just regarding his statements about homosexuality.  In his piece, Harsanyi gets at the heart of my philosophical concerns about the former Senator.  Like George W. Bush, he really doesn’t get Reagan conservatism.

“The junior senator from Texas,” James Taranto wrote in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “is decidedly unenthusiastic about the current state of the institution he joined nine years ago”:

“It’s not what I would call the world’s greatest deliberative body now,” John Cornyn, a Republican, says on a recent visit to the Journal. “The Senate has been pretty much dysfunctional. I mean, we haven’t had a budget for well over 900 days. We don’t have legislation that’s introduced and then referred to committee, and actually have it marked up in committee, where people can offer amendments and debate them. . . . It’s all been sort of prepackaged. [It] shows up on the floor, [Majority Leader] Harry Reid denies the opportunity to . . . offer amendments, and then he complains about Republicans filibustering the legislation.”

Given the efforts of the president and his fellow partisans to blame the nation’s problems on the intransigence of a do-nothing Republican Congress, you’d think the Senate Majority’s management of the one chamber with a Democratic majority might get more coverage, particularly its failure to fulfill its basic fiscal responsibility, passing a budget.

As House Republicans have done the hard work of putting together a budget that controls spending — and shown the American people where they stand by voting on it, the president, instead of offering counter-proposals, has offered only speeches.  He and his fellow Democrats may attack the Republican budget, but the only budget the president has authored in the past year couldn’t muster even a single Democratic vote in the Senate.  He still hasn’t put forward a specific proposal in line with his much-ballyhooed April 13 budget speech.

No wonder the Texas Republican . . .

. . .  imagines the president with an angel sitting on one shoulder and a devil on the other: “He’s listening to the devil, who’s telling him, ‘Don’t make a deal.’ Paul Ryan in the House proposed a constructive solution to . . . our fiscal problems. And rather than engage and propose something constructive himself . . . [the president] decided to go into the class-warfare mode, where, as you know, you can’t raise taxes enough to solve the problem.” (more…)

Yesterday, in a roundup on Tuesday’s elections, Jennifer Rubin concluded that

Conservative partisans err in concluding, just as President Obama did in his first two years, that bad economic times have softened the ground for extreme steps. Republicans would be wise to stick to bread-and-butter issues, and make sure they can sell to the center-right coalition. That reality may disappoint the loudest voices in the blogosphere, but it’s solid advice for actual candidates and office-holders.

Is she right? Given the mess that the incumbent administration augmented, the next president needs to take bold steps so the nation can regain its fiscal footing.  We need real, bold reform.  And some Democrats, along with their allies in the mainstream media, might call such reforms, “extreme.”

Or, maybe we need a leader who can make the case for bold reforms without sounding extreme?

While I appreciate Herman Cain’s charisma and his Reaganesque ability to articulate the small government/personal freedom message that has animated our party at least for the last thirty years, I have several concerns about the personable businessman and do not back him for the White House nor do I share my co-blogger’s enthusiasm for the candidate.

In many ways, I see his appeal on the right in the 2012 cycle as similar to Barack Obama’s appeal to the left in 2008 cycle.  Both are charismatic men, running as outsiders to the political establishment.

Only Cain has made clear his commitment to conservative principles in his campaign while Obama obscured his advocacy of big-government notions in his.  And Cain has a record of accomplishment in the private sector — with the concomitant executive experience.  Oh, and the media has scrutinized the Republican’s record with a fine-toothed comb while paying little, if any, attention to Obama’s.

Hugh Hewitt sums it up:

Herman Cain is fun, and he’s generally right.  He has enormous energy and a sense of humor.  He may not be ready to be president, but he was certainly ready to run for president, just like then Senator Obama in 2007. The big difference is that in 2007 MSM supported Obama’s ambitions and that in 2011 MSM pushes back against Cain’s, reflecting the media elite’s valuing of Obama’s Harvard Law/University of Chicago credentials, time in the Illinois State Senate and cup-of-coffee years in the U.S. Senate much more than Cain’s decades in the private sector. (more…)

In recent weeks, with increasing evidence of a sputtering economic recovery, it’s become abundantly clear that the Democrats see their path to victory in the 2012 elections in attacking and marginalizing the GOP.  Because the Democrats have made their intentions abundantly clear, Republicans should have an easier time running against the president’s party.

That said, failing an effective counteroffensive, the Democrats’ attacks could work.  Yet, it remains a high-risk strategy for the party currently in power.  Instead of offering hope for a less-divisive, shall we say, post-partisan politics, the president and his party will attempt to label the GOP as the party

1. reluctant to tax “millionaires and billionaires,” refusing to ask the superrich to pay their “fair share” of federal income taxes.
2. of extremists out of step with middle American, particularly the “middle class”, and
3. the party of “No,” unwilling to compromise and failing to offer a jobs plan of its own.

Republicans should be able to counter the 3rd line of attack, if the House passes a jobs bill and Republican leaders remind voters of the details of the plan–and if the Republican nominee offers a plan of his own.

Over at the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein reminds us that Democrats have tried a similar attack strategy in the past, smearing the Republican nominee in order to distract voters from an incumbent Democrat’s record.  ”With his ratings in the tank, President Carter [in 1980] attempted to raise fears about Ronald Reagan.”  Remember, the left did not always see the Gipper as a genial conservative pragmatist, indeed, Carter’s team that year hoped the California Republican would win the GOP nomination as many thought him too much a right-winger to win a general election.

The attacks on Reagan were actually effective in keeping the race competitive until the very end – and that’s when the two candidates debated, and Reagan came off as reasonable, informed and likeable, which was a contrast with the way he was being portrayed. Everybody who follows politics knows about Reagan’s famous “there you go again” retort to Carter during the debate, but few remember what Reagan was responding to. As it turns out, it was a similar line of attack that we’re now seeing against Perry. (more…)

Rudy Giuliani, my guy for 2008, reminds Republicans where our focus should be:

“I think the Republican Party would be well advised to get the heck out of people’s bedrooms and let these things [e.g., gay marriage] get decided by states,” Giuliani said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We’d be a much more successful political party if we stuck to our economic, conservative roots.”

It does seem that the one upside of Obama’s big-government ways is that it has kept the GOP, by and large, centered on the small-government ideas that have defined the American conservative movement at least since the ascendancy of Barry Goldwater in 1964.

The Tea Party has certainly helped out*.

My only quibble with the former NYC Mayor’s comment is his use of the conditional, “We’d be,” he said, “a much more successful political party if we stuck to our economic, conservative roots.” (Emphasis added.)  I’d use either the present or past tense her, to note how the GOP has been more successful when it sticks to those roots, as many Republicans were in the 2010 elections.

*RELATED: Gay marriage not priority to NH Tea Party Protesters

Blogress diva Ann Althouse has a smart post on U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin’s “likely” run for Joe McCarthy’s seat in the United States Senate.  The Madison-based law professor wonders at her Congressman’s fund-raising appeal where said Democrat chided those “cynical voices” who doubted her “from the very beginning”, dismissing her as an outspoken lesbian:

I think the problem is that she’s too liberal. But I understand the strategy of disparaging those terrible voters by calling them homophobic and sexist instead of facing the reality that they aren’t as far left as she is. Speaking of “cynical voices.”

Does seem Ms. Baldwin is aping the strategy of all too many gay Democrats.  It’s all about her sexuality, not her policies.  Note, she’s the one bringing up her sexuality.

We don’t need another big-spender in the U.S. Senate, another politician enamored with Obama’s big-government policies.  We need someone committed to cutting the size and limiting the scope of the federal government.  And that individual is not the Obama loyalist from Madison.

To be sure, it would be great to have a lesbian in the Senate.  So, let’s draft Cynthia Yockey to take on Ben Cardin and Tammy Bruce to take on Dianne Feinstein.  Both women would be vast improvements on the incumbents.

From the AP:

A sharp dive in private job growth and a continued slowdown in the manufacturing sector combined to send the Dow Jones industrial average down more than 200 points Wednesday, its biggest drop since early March. Treasury bond prices rose to their highest level of the year as traders placed a larger value on safer investments.

Doubts about the economy’s strength that built throughout May were compounded by a pair of reports that were weaker than investors expected. . . .

And private employers added just 38,000 jobs in May, down from 177,000 in April, according to payroll processor ADP. Analysts had expected 180,000 new jobs.

Wait, wasn’t the “so-called stimulus” supposed to juice job growth? Looking forward to the 2012 campaign, Jennifer Rubin writes:

The president can’t merely attack his opponent or George W. Bush as he did last time; he’s going to need a record of accomplishment on the issues voters care most about. And unless the economy turns around very quickly, that’s going to be a very large problem.