AP on the gay enthusiasm gap this election

From AP:

"It's all talk and nothing's happening, and I'm just over it," said Coatar, 62, a church business manager who said she's as concerned about health care and homelessness as about gay issues. "I don't know who to vote for and the election is a week away."

Wyatt, 35, a maintenance worker at the Center on Halsted, a community center serving Chicago's GLBT community, said politicians only court gay voters at election time.

"Once they're elected, they're not fighting for things like civil unions or same-sex marriage or ending 'don't ask, don't tell' because they're hot-button issues," said Wyatt, who usually supports Democrats. "We're just used as a piggyback for them to get into office. It's absurd."

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Sean Bugg: DADT Goes Fubar

Sean Bugg, the editor of Metro Weekly:

Where I disagree with the president is the inept, foot-dragging, mollycoddling process he put into place that seemed designed to placate bigots rather than repeal a discriminatory law. There were no shortage of people who warned that putting DADT repeal on a track that wouldn't end until after the certain-to-be-difficult midterm elections could be disastrous.

Plenty will argue that the 2009 calendar was too busy to deal with DADT, but if the plan was always to create a months-long timeline for the Pentagon to ask straight soldiers and their spouses, ''How do you feel?'' then the previous year would actually have been the time to do so.

Instead, we now face a situation where an overly cautious political pragmatism has turned into a case of political malpractice.

Since January's State of the Union address, when he included DADT repeal in his list of legislative priorities, all he has asked for is patience in a process that his administration crafted. At The Atlantic website, political reporter Marc Ambinder wrote of the president's reaction to the continued DADT protests: ''I do know that President Obama gets angry every time he's heckled by 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' protesters. He thinks he's doing everything he can given the constraints imposed on him by reality.''

Frankly, tough shit. His administration crafted the approach that brought us to this impasse and most of the hits the White House is taking for it are deserved.

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Discharged vet Joseph Rocha talks DADT

Our friend, Joseph Rocha, who was a witness in the LCR DADT case, spoke about the issue on a San Diego t.v. station. He's a great spokesperson -- and he still wants to serve his country.
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