American Glob

Ken Mehlman, the campaign manager for George W. Bush in 2004 and former chair of the RNC has come out as gay. You know what? Good for him…

Ken Mehlman, President Bush’s campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, has told family and associates that he is gay.

Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he said in an interview. He agreed to answer a reporter’s questions, he said, because, now in private life, he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage and anticipated that questions would arise about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California’s ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition 8.

“It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” said Mehlman, now an executive vice-president with the New York City-based private equity firm, KKR. “Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey, and for me, over the past few months, I’ve told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they’ve been wonderful and supportive. The process has been something that’s made me a happier and better person. It’s something I wish I had done years ago.”

Maybe he was listening to what Paul Ryan said about the future of the Republican party in April of 2009…

Ryan is promoting, not bending, conservative principles to expand the party.

“If you believe in freedom, liberty, self-determination, free enterprise, I don’t care if you’re a Muslim, Jewish, Agnostic, Christian, gay, straight, Latino, black, white, Irish, whatever. Join us.”

I’ve been saying since July of 2009 that the Republican Party was going more Libertarian and that it was a good thing. I stand by my prediction.

UPDATE: According to Allahpundit of Hot Air, this is old news. Who knew? Not me, apparently.

Read a lot more on this at Memeorandum.

Why? Because the billionaires in question are Libertarians who give money to conservative causes. Feast your eyes on their big exposé called “Covert Operations.”

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.”

The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

How does the New Yorker feel about far left billionaire George Soros who gives millions of dollars to far left causes? Just look at the headlines I dug up with a quick search…

The World According to Soros

Most of the instincts that Soros brings to his current incarnation–one in which he sometimes refers to himself as “a stateless statesman”–were developed in the course of his nearly 40-year career in the financial markets. He started Quantum in 1969. Today the fund and its diversified offshoots have assets of roughly $11 billion. Tells about the “open society” foundations he has established in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

The Wisdom of Soros

As a rule, I do not put much store by the statements of billionaires and central-bank chairmen. The former are accorded undue respect because of their wealth, the latter because of the positions they hold. In my experience, neither great riches nor high office are strongly correlated with economic wisdom and common sense. For today, however, I am making an exception: first for George Soros, the veteran speculator and philanthropist, and, in my next post, for Mervyn King, the head of the Bank of England.

The Money Man

Can George Soros’s millions insure the defeat of President Bush? Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the future of progressive politics in America. The billionaires were not especially close socially, nor were they in complete agreement about politics or strategy. Yet they shared a common goal: to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush in the 2004 election.

Gee. That almost seems like a double standard, doesn’t it? Funny that.

Read more on this at Memeorandum.

Reason TV has produced a video that profiles a new school voucher program in post-Katrina New Orleans that is enjoying tremendous success.

School vouchers and charter schools are a very libertarian approach to education that puts power and choice in the hands of parents instead of government bureaucrats. What a novel idea…

For the record, President Obama doesn’t support school voucher programs.

This powerful new video from the Republican Study Committee comes via Ace and Ed Morrissey of Hot Air who writes…

We’ve seen the moments before in earlier clips, but the RSC puts these together with warnings from Ronald Reagan about the danger to liberty from runaway government and liberal policies.  If these seemed trenchant decades ago, they’re equally relevant now:

I was just a kid when Ronald Reagan was President but I remember him well. I’m reminded of that line from the opening theme song of All in The Family: Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover Ronald Reagan again…

Lots of other bloggers are weighing in on this at Memeorandum.

Starring….

John Stossel as Mister Fantastic
Virginia Postrel as Invisible Woman
Nick Gillespie as Human Torch
and Judge Andrew Napolitano as The Thing

I love them all.

Freedom, choices and liberty. What kind of US president talks of such things? Oh yeah, good ones!

Bask in Reagan’s Reagany goodness.

I’m currently taking bets on how soon this video will show up on the Glenn Beck Show.

I’m like Ben Stein. Anyone? Anyone?

UPDATE: Instapundit links! Welcome Insta-readers!

Left wing/media + Tea Party = Define. Demonize. Rinse. Repeat.

It’s like watching a 3 year old struggle with a jigsaw puzzle for AGES 14 AND UP.

The 3 year old thinks he’s grown up enough to do the puzzle, but after hours of frustration, throws the box of pieces at the wall in anger and screams “RACISTS!”

Charles Blow of The New York Times hit that breaking point last week.

Mark Lilla, writing in the New York Review of Books is the latest 3 year old to step up to the plate.

Many Americans, a vocal and varied segment of the public at large, have now convinced themselves that educated elites—politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, but also doctors, scientists, even schoolteachers—are controlling our lives. And they want them to stop. They say they are tired of being told what counts as news or what they should think about global warming; tired of being told what their children should be taught, how much of their paychecks they get to keep, whether to insure themselves, which medicines they can have, where they can build their homes, which guns they can buy, when they have to wear seatbelts and helmets, whether they can talk on the phone while driving, which foods they can eat, how much soda they can drink…the list is long.

Apparently, by Lilla’s estimation, Americans should not be allowed to decide these things for themselves. Don’t you cave men know that your social betters know what’s in your best interest? Lilla’s article is long but it doesn’t take him too long to reach the tantrum point…

A new strain of populism is metastasizing [Note the Cancer reference] before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. [SNIP] Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob.

Forgive me for asking, Professor Lilla but aren’t the words “libertarian” and “mob” mutually exclusive?

Robert Stacy McCain, commenting on the same article observes…

An exaggeration, of course, but you sense the source of liberal Lilla’s frustration. What was the point of the Left’s “long march through the institutions” if, having captured those institutions, they can’t use them to tell everybody else what to do?

Streiff at RedState smartly adds…

This is a very convenient position to take when you’re in Mr. Lilla’s position. The alternative is to admit that your entire world view is being repudiated by most of the country.

Here’s an explanation of the Tea Party for Misters Blow and Lilla that any three year old could understand. Federal spending and the expansion of government under eight years of George W. Bush was bad. Under Obama, it’s already worse.

Libertarianism is not the enemy and the Tea Party movement is not racist.

Now who wants a cookie?!

How did General Motors repay it’s bailout?

Nick Gillespie of Reason explains:

According to a new article on Politico, Libertarians are leading the way for 2010 and 2012…

Who are these centrist, independent-minded voters who swung the elections in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts to Republican candidates and are likely to be crucial in races this fall?

Political analysts are searching for a name. They have tried “tea partier,” “populist,” “conservative,” even “strange and unpredictable.”

None of these fits, however.

These voters are neither populist nor conservative. But many may be libertarian — fiscally conservative but socially liberal or tolerant.

A careful look at polling data shows these voters may be less mysterious than analysts think.

Libertarians seem to be a leading indicator of this trend in centrist, independent-minded voters, based on an analysis of many years of polling data. We estimate that libertarians compose from 14 percent to 23 percent of voters nationally. They are among the few real swing voters in U.S. politics.

Wow, Libertarians are leading the way? Who knew?

Oh yeah… I did:

As the Tea Party movement continues and many Americans grow more concerned by government expansion, the interest and support for Libertarian style Republicanism is knocking loudly at the front door of conservatism. The GOP would be wise to answer.

Read it all.

And that question is…

What is a Libertarian?

I used to be a Kennedy-style “liberal.” Then I wised up. Now I’m a libertarian.

But what does that mean?

When I asked people on the street, half had no clue.

We know that conservatives want government to conserve traditional values. They say they’re for limited government, but they’re pro-drug war, pro-immigration restriction and anti-abortion, and they often support “nation-building.”

And so-called liberals? They tend to be anti-gun and pro-choice on abortion. They favor big, powerful government — they say — to make life kinder for people.

By contrast, libertarians want government to leave people alone — in both the economic and personal spheres. Leave us free to pursue our hopes and dreams, as long as we don’t hurt anybody else.

Read the whole thing here.

While we’re on the subject of Libertarians, the folks over at Reason are wondering if it’s time to lower the drinking age. Where were you guys when I was 18???