This past month, Michelle Malkin has joined other conservatives in pointing out that Kevin Jennings (who happens to be gay), the Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools, had, as a young teacher, done nothing to protect of a 15-year old boy from who had told him he was having an affair with an adult (male).  That is, Jennings did not report this to authorities.  (Nor did he, as far as I can tell, confront the man.)

Today, for the first time (as far as I can figure out), he publicly expressed regret for his inaction:

Twenty-one years later I can see how I should have handled this situation differently. I should have asked for more information and consulted legal or medical authorities. Teachers back then had little training and guidance about this kind of thing. All teachers should have a basic level of preparedness. I would like to see the office of Safe & Drug Free Schools play a bigger role in helping to prepare teachers.

It is troubling, to say the least, that the Administration would tap such a man to serve in the Education Department who detailed the boy’s confession in a book One Teacher in 10, yet did not express regret until long after his appointment.*

The same people who got so worked up (and rightfully so) at the silence of the Catholic Church in the wake of similar conduct among its clergy are silent in the wake of Mr. Jennings’s own silence.  (I guess for such things to excite outrage, the “enabler” must come from a class of those sanctioned for condemnation.)

While Jennings’s wrong pales in comparison to that of the man having sex with the teenager, he still behaved badly, especially given that he was a teacher at the time.  And while it’s generally a good thing to have openly gay people serving in government, Jennings’s prominence does more to hurt the public image of gay people than it does to help it. (more…)

With nearly one in eight adults in the Golden State out of work, our junior Senator, instead of trying to reduce the burdens on California companies which create jobs seeks to increase them.  Yup, that’s right, ever loyal to her liberal basis and its “climate-change” doomsaying, Mrs. Boxer together with her Massachusetts colleague, John Kerry, “unveiled their cap-and-trade bill energy tax bill today“:

In spite of their claim that this bill will create jobs, portions of the bill suggest the Senators understand that their legislation will be costly for Americans. This is why the bill contains subsidies for people who lose their jobs as a result of the bill’s provisions. . . .

Unlike the Waxman-Markey bill, the Boxer-Kerry permits EPA to move forward with regulations.

Increased regulation will hardly lead to a more favorable business climate.  Yet, with the state she represents shedding jobs, Mrs. Boxer puts forward a bill which anticipates further job losses.

With a state in a crisis, Mrs. Boxer would rather accede to the cries of left-wing environmentalists than put forward policies to create jobs in her jurisdiction.

(H/t Michelle Malkin who has more.)

According to Gallup, the Democratic advantage in “leaned party identification” has been cut in half since Obama’s inauguation:

Since Barack Obama took office as president in January, the Democratic advantage in leaned party identification has shrunk each quarter, from 13 points in the first quarter (52% to 39%) to 9 points in the second quarter (49% to 40%) and 6 points in the most recent quarter (48% to 42%).

This “six-point spread in leaned party affiliation is the smallest Gallup has measured since 2005.”  During George W. Bush’s second term, “an increasing number of Americans began to align themselves with the Democratic Party.”

Once the Democrats came to power, they could no longer hide their ideology behind their primary mantra (which they’re still chanting in many quarters, particularly New Jersey) of “Bush is bad; we’re not Bush.  Bush is bad; we’re not Bush.  Bush is bad; we’re not Bush.  George W. Bush is bad, bad, bad.  He’s very bad.  So, vote for us ’cause we’re not Bush.”

Now, that people see the kinds of solutions Democrats are offering, they’re turning away from the party.  More of them might find a home in the GOP if the Republican Party were to do a more convincing job of articulating its small government principles, at a time when, Gallup has found, the American people are becoming increasingly skeptical of big government.

The winning essay from the 2009 Secretary of Defense National Security Essay Competition criticizing the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) ban against gays openly serving in the military appears in the upcoming issue of Joint Forces Quarterly. This journal is “published for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff” and with regards to this essay, The Boston Globe reports:

The views do not necessarily reflect those of Pentagon leaders, but their appearance in a publication billed as the Joint Chiefs’ “flagship’’ security studies journal signals that the top brass now welcomes a debate in the military over repealing the 1993 law that requires gays to hide their sexual orientation, according to several longtime observers of the charged debate over gays in the military.

While decisions on which articles to publish are made by the journal’s editorial board, located at the defense university, a senior military official said yesterday that the office of Admiral Mike Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman who is the nation’s top military officer, reviewed the article before it was published.

You can read the essay in its entirety for yourself here (pdf). I found it to be an interesting and fair examination of issues involved not only with the effectiveness of DADT but also with possible results of repealing this ban. The issues addressed for repeal include not only leadership required from command personnel and some heterosexual servicemembers resistant to such a change in policy, but also the need for behavioral changes from some homosexual servicemembers when it comes to “violations of the military regulations governing fraternization between ranks”. While the essay’s author acknowledges that the ban against open service may have to led some condoning this behavior, he rightly states the principle that all proponents of repeal I know of agree with: “Ultimately, homosexuals must be held to the same standards as any others”.

Perhaps most powerful in this essay is the author’s conclusion regarding DADT, which while it may echo much of what proponents of repeal have stated over the years since the policy’s adoption, it carries more weight in my view given the forum in which it is expressed:

The 1993 “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” law was a political compromise reached after much emotional debate based on religion, morality, ethics, psychological rationale, and military necessity. What resulted was a law that has been costly both in personnel and treasure. In an attempt to allow homosexual Servicemembers to serve quietly, a law was created that forces a compromise in integrity, conflicts with the American creed of “equality for all,” places commanders in difficult moral dilemmas, and is ultimately more damaging to the unit cohesion its stated purpose is to preserve. Furthermore, after a careful examination, there is no scientific evidence to support the claim that unit cohesion will be negatively affected if homosexuals serve openly. In fact, the necessarily speculative psychological predictions are that it will not impact combat effectiveness. Additionally, there is sufficient empirical evidence from foreign militaries to anticipate that incorporating homosexuals will introduce leadership challenges, but the challenges will not be insurmountable or affect unit cohesion and combat effectiveness.

It will be interesting to see if White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs will continue parsing his responses to questions regarding DADT as the Obama Administration still punts this down field.

– John (Average Gay Joe)

Tom Maguire calls it:

the silliest thing I read today, or maybe this year.  The military effecting a civilized, bloodless coup because they don’t like the current leadership?

Ed Morrissey echoes his thoughts and adds, “It’s a lunatic fantasy straight out of Greek theater.”  John Perry, a supposedly conservative columnist at Newsmax is talking about a military intervention here to “defend the constitution” in response to the President’s dithering on Afghanistan.  You don’t defend the constitution by making civilian authority subservient to the military.  That undermines one of its animating ideas, one which George Washington himself particularly appreciated.

In the spirit of the Father of our Country, Morrissey offers a better alternative to Obama’s dithering:

The alternative, non-violent solution is the one we’ve been using for 220 years: elections.  We have another coming in 2010.  If the American people get fed up with the direction of this government, then we will change it in the midterms.  We do not need our military to rescue us from ourselves, thank you very much.

One might excuse this kind of nihilism if it came from a college freshman who had no sense of his own nation’s history, but this comes from a man who served two White House administrations.  There is simply no excuse for this hankering for a banana republic in America from someone who should know much, much better.The alternative, non-violent solution is the one we’ve been using for 220 years: elections.  We have another coming in 2010.

Extremists on the right aren’t the only ones to harbor fantasies of military intervention.  Morrissey notes that Gore Vidal, a gifted writer, but conspiracy-minded leftist also imagines a military dictatorship.  Well, okay, then.

Obama has been blundering badly on any number of issues, but he was elected for four-year term. Military intervention is not the solution to our nation’s problems.  Not the proper response to a flailing Administration.  And that someone claiming to be a conservative would suggest as much indicates a man unfamiliar with the ideas of the ideology he ostensibly espouses.

UPDATE:  Despite left-wing attempts to call Perry a mainstream conservative (see the comments below), he is anything but:

The fact of the matter is that John L. Perry is not a conservative. In fact his bio page says that he’s worked for Jimmy Carter, a Democrat governor of Florida and other Democrat Party institutions.

This past weekend, I, like many conservative bloggers, weighed in on Clark Hoyt’s Sunday New York Times column about his paper’s sloth in reporting several stories which right-leaning websites had broken.  As Hoyt acknowledged the Old Gray Lady’s errors, you’d think the paper, in addition to appointing what James Taranto has termed, “Secret Agent Editors” to monitor the rightosphere, might show that it means business by working double time to crack open even further stories that first appeared on the web.

They might want to investigate the claim by the new chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Rocco Landesman that “former NEA Director of Communications [Yosi Sergant was acting] unilaterally* and without the approval or authorization of then-Acting Chairman Patrice Walker Powell” when he initiated a conference call urging artists (recipients of his agency’s grants) to help push Obamacare.

As far as the NEA was concerned, Yosi may well have been acting unilaterally.  But, others in the Administration knew of his actions; another Obama appointee was in on the call, Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.  If this White House official was in on a call with one federal agency and its supposedly non-partisan grant recipients, then it stands to reason she (or one of her colleagues) may have participated in other such investigations.

Why isn’t the Times delving further to see if this was an isolated occurrence or standard practice at the Obama White House?  Maybe there were other such calls–but this was the only one that happened to be recorded.

Are journalists from news outlets like the Times trying to make up for their failure to get these stories by digging deeper, perhaps trying to gain access to White House phone records–or even to probe Ms. Wicks herself to ask her why she participated on this call?  Who put her up to this?  Did other people in the White House know, say her boss, Valerie Jarrett or the President’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel? (more…)

It is amusing how many people in my circle who delighted in the Democrats’ triumph last fall (and thus would not seem to have any interest in a Republican revival) have been telling me just what the GOP needs do to remain viable.  And from what I’ve read on the web, they’re not alone.  Other lefties lately smug in Obama’s triumph dispense reams of advice to the GOP.

They tell me the GOP can’t win if it remains the party of “No,” yet are at pains to remember what exactly the Democrats stood for in 2006 when they won congressional majorities.  (And many of them can’t really identify what Obama stood for beyond Hope and Change.  Oh, and yeah, and that he wasn’t George W. Bush.)

Well, perhaps these Democrats (and assorted leftists) should dispense some advice to the Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia.  Although he’s been Governor of the Garden State for nearly four years, Democrat Jim Corzine prefers to run against George W. Bush who’s been out of office for nearly nine months:

A cruise through the Corzine campaign Web site shows press releases referring to [Republican challenger Chris] Christie as “Bush Republican Chris Christie.” One of many Bush-themed ads carries this tag-line: “Chris Christie—the same Bush policies that got us into this mess.” And at a Corzine rally this past weekend, the Press of Atlantic City reports former Vice President Al Gore revving up the crowd with attacks suggesting that Mr. Christie represents “the George Bush wing of the Republican Party.”

Attack, attack, attack seems to be the Demorats’ New Jersey mantra. And it’s pretty much the same in old Virginia.  Weighing in on both races, Jim Geraghty offers:

. . . the two Democrats running for governor this year, Jon Corzine in New Jersey and Creigh Deeds in Virginia, have run almost entirely negative campaigns since the primaries ended. Complaints from the usual mainstream-media suspects aren’t completely missing, but they seem pretty quiet this year.

In my view, Chinatown (even though the ending leaves me feeling off) ranks alongside Star Wars and Rocky as one of the best movies of the 1970s.  It earned Roman Polanski his second (of four) Oscar nominations for Best Director (and deservedly so).

He also raped a 13- year-old girl and has been much in the news lately since his arrest Saturday in Switzerland on an “arrest warrant stemming from a sex charge in California“.

I don’t have much to add to what a number of bloggers and pundits have said, highlighting the double standards of those Hollywood types who want bygones to be bygones and are outraged by the arrest.  My friend John Nolte sums it up:

Pleading guilty to unlawful sex with an underage girl — the drugging, raping and sodomizing of a 13 year-old — isn’t stopping Hollywood from ginning up an indignation campaign over the possibility of fugitive director Roman Polanski being held accountable for his crimes. Yes, these are the values of those who control the most powerful propaganda device ever created.  Which begs a question: If his unspeakable deed doesn’t meet the standard, what exactly would Roman Polanski have to do in order to become a pariah in this town … I mean, besides vote for Sarah Palin?

Read the whole thing.  Somehow if you’re a great artiste, some Hollywood types contend, you should be excused for such indiscretions.  Sorry, but no.

Yes, Polanski is a great artist, one of the most gifted filmmakers of our time.  He also raped a 13-year-old girl.  The one does not excuse the other.  He’s been accused of a serious crime, should be tried in a court of law and punished severely if found guilty. He pleaded guilty to the charge and fled the country before his sentencing. He should be punished severely for this anything but minor infraction. [Thanks to my readers for alerting me to the error in the original.] (more…)

Every now and again, I’ll say something in a comment which, on further reflection, I believe, deserves greater prominence on this blog.  Such was my remark to a critic’s point that during the 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination:

Hillary was very much seen as the real liberal by her followers, with Obama as the pragmatist rather than the ideologue

An interesting comment to offer about a woman who, despite her shrill rhetoric as First Lady, earned the respect and forged working relationships with Republicans in the course of her tenure in the United States Senate.  And I can’t think of any partnerships the Illinois Democrat formed with Republican that led to the enactment of significant reforms during his tenure in that legislative body.  Such is what pragmatists do (work with partisan rivals to craft major legislation).  Indeed, his voting record was to the left even of Mrs. Clinton.

A pragmatist would have a record of brokering deals between the parties and would have a voting record, if not to the center of the Senate as a whole, at least to that of his partisan caucus. Barack Obama didn’t even have much of a record of forging compromises during his eight years in the Illinois Senate.

Were he truly a pragmatist, right now, he would be sitting down today with partisans on both sides of the health care debate, trying to forge a compromise palatable to the various interests.  Instead, he has adopted a hands-off approach, outsourcing the deliberation to Democrats in Congress.  Which brings me to the comment I made which, I believe, deserves greater attention:

. . . to call Obama a pragmatist is to rely on his campaign rhetoric as a source of information [while ignoring] his voting record in the [Illinois and United States] Senate and his actions as President.

UPDATE: One more thing, would a pragmatist push legislation for a health care overhaul when the American people were increasingly turning against his proposals.

This sure doesn’t sound like global warming:  U.S. Northeast May Have Coldest Winter in a Decade.

(H/t:  Instapundit)

In his various comments to my post, The conservative violence in left-wingers’ heads, william (sic) makes much of the failure of conservatives to denounce the rabid rhetoric of a handful of right-wing extremists.  As he wrote in commenting to a previous post,

Take some moral responsibility for the violent rhetoric of your movement. Maybe if more people on the right actually had the conscience or guts to call out the hyperbole and extremism within their own movement, the rest of the world wouldn’t have to. And it’s not just the left-wing that wonders if you’re all a bunch of foaming crazies, it’s mainstream America that is getting scared of the rage you and your leaders are trafficking in. For most decent Americans, the rabid vitriol and arms-bearing at the August tea-tantrums was unsettling and repugnant . . . .

First, his assumption about mainstream America are far off the mark, with Republicans polling better at the beginning of September than they were at the end of July, and with public support for the President’s health care plans (the issue which go so many of the supposedly foaming crazies so agitated this summer) plummeting.

Second, why is it that conservatives need to denounce the “hyperbole and extremism” of a handful of fringe activists (and one occasionally loose-lipped talk show host), when Democrats and liberals seemed somehow relieved of that obligation during the 1990s?

william is not alone, indeed, he is representative of a certain strand in left-wing thought (see, e.g., left-wing blogs) thundering about conservatives’ silence in the face of angry rhetoric on the right.  And throughout the first eight years of this decade, some of this very same left-wingers remained silent or actively engaged in the same sort of rhetoric they now denounce.

But it takes some presumption for a left-winger to demand that we do so, particularly if he can provide no evidence that he denounced his name-calling fellow travelers who protested so loudly, so angrily, marching alongside those carrying posters advocating violence against the President when a Republican served in the White House.

Comparing the President to Hitler, something that currently gets william et al. so incensed?  A staple of anti-Bush protests (and blog posts) from 2002 onward.  Perhaps I might take his feigned outrage at conservative silence in the face of hateful rhetoric from a handful of extremist more seriously if he could provide evidence that he and liberal bloggers regularly denounced the regular expressions of anti-Bush vitriol and frequent advocacy of violence at left-wing protests in the George W. Bush era. (more…)

Politico reports this morning that “supporters [of the public option] are working hard this week to bring it back, against the odds, with a series of high-profile votes in the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday.”  While various Democrats are sending mixed signals about whether or not the final bill will include this option, the President clearly wants it in, having told Univision, “I absolutely do not believe that it’s dead.”

Now, oftentimes when I debate health care reform with friends and talk about my experiences getting health care, I tell them that what we need is more competition.  And many of my liberal friends, those most familiar with the Democrats’ talking points quickly reply that, well, that’s what we need a public option.

And that leads to my invariable reply, “When has a government program lead to increased competition, especially one that involves a government entity offering the same product as one already available in the private sector?”

My interlocutors are clearly unaware of the combination of provisions in the proposed health care bills which push people toward the public option (penalties making it cheaper for private companies to drop health care coverage, the requirement that people buy an “accceptable” plan, the government’s ability to offer cheaper plans, given that it is not subject to market forces.)

Not since Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting policies of  the first part of the last century perhaps has any government policy served to increase the number of businesses in a given industry offering goods and services.  With more private sector enterprises able to compete, they struggle to offer the best product at the best price so as to increase their market share (and profit margin). As a result, we see lower prices and increased innovation.

That’s what we need to see in health insurance, private companies freer to offer a diverse array of coverage and not just packages acceptable to the federal government.

Oh, not so good I see…

That’s a shame since your children and grandchildren are going to be paying off the $787B price tag for decades to come.

If they can even afford to pay taxes that is.

UPDATE: Here’s some more good news (*cough*) in the Era of Hopeandchange.

The number of young Americans without a job has exploded to 52.2 percent — a post-World War II high, according to the Labor Dept. — meaning millions of Americans are staring at the likelihood that their lifetime earning potential will be diminished and, combined with the predicted slow economic recovery, their transition into productive members of society could be put on hold for an extended period of time.

The number represents the flip-side to the Labor Dept.’s report that the employment rate of 16-to-24 year olds has eroded to 47.83 percent — the lowest ratio of working young Americans in that age group, including all but those in the military, since WWII.

And worse, without a clear economic recovery plan aimed at creating entry-level jobs, the odds of many of these young adults — aged 16 to 24, excluding students — getting a job and moving out of their parents’ houses are long. Young workers have been among the hardest hit during the current recession — in which a total of 9.5 million jobs have been lost.

Why do I find it increasingly funny sad that those most supportive of Obama in 2008 were young people and those making over $250,000.  Now they are the ones most likely to get shafted.  LOL. Boo hoo hoo.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

In no particular order:

• More than one-third of all US casualties in Afghanistan have happened since Obama  took the oath of office (Oct 2001 to Dec 2008 versus Jan-Sept 2009)
• Job losses in the USA have gone up significantly SINCE Obama signed his “stimulus package”
  UPDATE from USA TODAY:
  Fourteen of the top federal agencies responsible for spending under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act say they’ve hired about 3,000 workers with stimulus money. That’s helped fuel the continued growth of the federal government, which increased by more than 25,000 employees, or 1.3%, since December 2008, according to the latest quarterly report. During that time, the ranks of the nation’s unemployed increased by nearly 4 million, Labor Department statistics show.
• There has been no significant progress on gay rights since Obama took the oath of office.  And Obama shares the same view on gay marriage as President Bush.  And Dick Cheney is more progressive on gay marriage than Obama is.
• Obama is responsible for more government spending than all of his previous Presidents’ spending combined
• The only political violence in 2009 has come from left-wing radicals, not conservatives
• Gitmo will still be open in February 2010
• Transparency by the Obama Administration is a hollow talking point, not policy
• We have still not withdrawn from Iraq, despite the withdrawal agreement that President Bush reached with the Iraqi government
• Obama is getting the same intelligence from the same intelligence agency on Iran that Bush did on Iraq
• Based on a variety of public polling, Obama is the most divisive President since Richard Nixon
• No American President in this nation’s history has ever so frequently expressed his sorrow at being its leader

I’m sure I’ve missed something….

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

From the New York Times remembrance: (h/t – The Corner)

He was a college dropout and proud of it, a public relations go-getter who set up the famous Nixon-Khrushchev “kitchen debate” in Moscow, and a White House wordsmith in the tumultuous era of war in Vietnam, Nixon’s visit to China and the gathering storm of the Watergate scandal that drove the president from office.

Then, from 1973 to 2005, Mr. Safire wrote his twice weekly “Essay” for the Op-Ed Page of The Times, a forceful conservative voice in the liberal chorus. Unlike most Washington columnists who offer judgments with Olympian detachment, Mr. Safire was a pugnacious contrarian who did much of his own reporting, called people liars in print and laced his opinions with outrageous wordplay.

Critics initially dismissed him as an apologist for the disgraced Nixon coterie. But he won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, and for 32 years tenaciously attacked and defended foreign and domestic policies, and the foibles, of seven administrations. Along the way, he incurred enmity and admiration, and made a lot of powerful people squirm.

On a personal note, Mr. Safire was my college graduation speaker at Syracuse University in May of 1990.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Many in the rightosphere are making much of Clark Hoyt’s Sunday New York Times column about his paper’s lack of speed in reporting several stories that generated a lot of heat in conservative media and on FoxNews:

But for days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still. Its slow reflexes — closely following its slow response to a controversy that forced the resignation of Van Jones, a White House adviser — suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs. Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.

That’s the journalistic understatement of that year.  I do wonder if the Times picks up on those stories “lacking facts” from left-wing blogs and opinion sites.

Jill Abramson, the paper’s  managing editor for news, agreed with him “that the paper was ’slow off the mark,’ and blamed ‘insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.’”

To remedy all this, the Times has now “assigned an anonymous editor to ‘monitor opinion media.’” Questioning Hoyt’s claim that the paper lacks a liberal bias, Michelle Malkin asks him to “address directly and openly the paper’s own complicity in covering up the ACORN story before Election Day” when the paper had information about financial shenanigans at the controversial left-wing organization.

More often than not, reporters from MSM outlets like the Times don’t seem particularly interested in conservative opinion.  In the controversy over whether NBC producer Jane Stone called Alex Rosenwald, media director of Americans for Limited Government “Jew Boy” in an e-mail, she claimed she had merely told him “Take me off this list!”  So, her defense of unbecoming conduct is that she, a news producer, asked to be removed from a list which might be a source of information and opinion, you know, news of the events and ideas shaping public discourse.

Guess they’re just not interested in what those free-marketers are saying and doing. That she would want to be removed from a libertarian e-mail list helps confirm the reports Matthew Vadum receives from “fellow right-leaning journalists that getting rude and offensive emails from reporters in the mainstream media is a fairly common occurrence.” (more…)

With conservative parties winning elections across Europe, it seems now only a question of time until our friends in the UK replace Prime Minister Gordon Brown with a more conservative leader.  German voters just returned Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party to power, handing potential coalition partner, the “classical liberal” Free Democrats,” nearly 15 percent of the votes, the party’s best showing ever.”  She’ll thus be able to ditch her grand coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD), who, with “only 23.5 percent of the votes,” suffered their worst performance since World War II.”

As a result, “Mrs. Merkel will finally have the chance to enact the kind of liberalizing economic reforms she proposed when she first ran for chancellor four years ago.“

While the SPD saw its support plummet, the far-left Left party saw a surge in its support, capturing 12% of the vote and securing it as many as 80 seats in the Bundestag.  That party favors “return to East German socialism” and did particularly well in the east German state of Brandenburg and in the “western German state of Saarland,” home to the party’s charismatic leader Oskar Lafontaine.

With the possible exception of the UK and Spain, now every major European country has a government significantly to the right of our own.  What a change a year makes.

UPDATE: Just checked the election returns from Germany’s last national election in 2005. Seems Mrs Merkel’s CDU/CSU coalition actually captured a slightly smaller share of the vote today than it did four years ago. The real increase was the FDP, increasing its percentage by about 50%. Note especially that the gains by the Left and Green parties do not alone account for the percentage lost by SPD. It seems those voters “defected from the left to the German most “committed to open markets and free competition“.

A sign that the ideas of freedom and smaller government seem to be resonating in Germany.

Of the latest story to drive left-wing bloggers into a frenzy, Robert Stacy McCain writes

The murder of Bill Sparkman in Clay County, Ky., has caused bloggers to engage in widespread speculation about the motive for the killing. Sparkman was employed part-time conducting a Census Bureau survey. . . .

[A] law-enforcement source, not authorized to speak about the case, said state and local officials are working closely with the FBI on the investigation. Internet gossip is a source of concern, he said.

“You’d be surprised what some of these morons write on the Internet . . . that they wouldn’t say to somebody’s face,” the official said in a brief telephone interview.

While we know a few more details about the murder than we did when I first mentioned Sparkman death in a blog post, we still don’t know who killed Bill Sparkman nor as law professor William A. Jacobson observes, why he was killed.  That, Jacobson blogs, “has not stopped the left-wing internet ghouls from seeking to exploit Sparkman’s death for political purposes, turning his part-time Census status into the reason for his killing and creating a cause célèbre out of thin air.“

Paraphrasing what I wrote in a comment, whereas Kentucky law enforcement (and conservatives) are waiting for an investigation, many left-wing bloggers are leaping to conclusions, suggesting that comments by a Republican Congresswoman and radio and TV talk show hosts created the climate that led to Sparkman’s murder.  The problem is, since we don’t know who murdered Sparkman, we have no evidence to back up their accusations.  All they have is their narrative and their prejudice.

Interesting that these left-wingers are quick to accuse conservatives for fostering a climate of hate, but aren’t even considering that Sparkman may have been killed by people in the drug trade.  And there’s more evidence that Sparkman’s death was drug-related than that it was ideological.  Even the AP noted that his body was found “in a corner of Appalachiawith an abundance of meth labs and marijuana fields — and a reputation for mistrusting government that dates back to the days of moonshiners and ‘revenuers.’“

These bloggers’ hysteria tells us more about their prejudices than it does about the circumstances surrounding this man’s death.  We don’t know why Bill Sparkman is killed, but we do know how quick left-wingers are to accuse conservatives of fostering violence. Even when the only evidence tying conservatives to violence exists in left-wingers heads. (more…)

When I saw that Glenn Reynolds had posted, “BILL CLINTON WAFFLES ON SAME-SEX MARRIAGE“, I assumed that if I followed the link I might find fodder for an original post, but basically just found that Ann Althouse had said pretty much all there was to say about the Democrat’s comments on CNN reiterating his sudden support for gay marriage.

Clinton is a master blabber, but what did he say? He’s not even for a right to marry, only for leaving it up to the states: “if gay couples want to call their union marriage and a state agrees….” He’s only implicitly admitting that the Defense of Marriage Act — which he signed — was wrong. He doesn’t even apologize for what he did back when he had actual power to do something. He’s presenting it all as a personal journey of his. He’s older and wiser. Bleh!

Clinton signed DOMA when he thought it was in his political interest, and I suspect he thinks it’s in his political interest now to embrace same-sex marriage.

This is nothing more than a has-been politician trying to get some attention.  As I wrote back in July when first addressing Clinton’s about-face on gay marriage, “there’s no political cost” to changing his mind.  Since he can’t run for office any more, he can’t lose any votes.

Back in 1996, he signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), calculating there would have been a political cost to vetoing it, socially conservative Democrats might balk at supporting him a second time.  Assuming (correctly as it turned out) that gay voters wouldn’t desert him if he backed the meaure, he signed it.

If today, safely out of office, he had said he did the right thing in signing DOMA, he wouldn’t have made any news.  But, when he says he’s changed his mind, well, that’ll get him a few headlines–and earn him the accolades of gay activists and bloggers ever eager and always willing to praise a Democrat.

Sometimes when you’re reading a speech, you miss something which strikes you only when you see it in isolation.   And so it was when, in these posts, I caught this line from the President’s speech Wednesday to the United Nations:

For those who question the character and cause of my nation, I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months.

Instead of referencing this nation’s achievements in the 232 1/2 years prior to his inauguration, Mr. Obama tells us what he has done since he took office.

He may talk about “responsibly ending a war” in Iraq, but he doesn’t mention the word, victory, nor the tyrant we overthrew, a tyrant who, by the way, had repeatedly snubbed his nose at the United Nations, you know, the institution he was addressing.

He does not mention how we helped liberate a continent from fascist tyranny.  And the only time he mentions the President who led us to that great victory (a word absent from his discourse) was to reference his “vision for this institution” (i.e., the United Nations).

Nor did mention how Presidents of both parties stood strong against communism and for freedom, waging and subsequently winning the Cold War, bringing down the Iron Curtain and bringing freedom and economic growth to the long-suffering peoples of central and eastern Europe.  Well, he did reference the Cold War, just once, reminding us that it was “long-gone.”  Does he even appreciate how American policies made that so? (more…)