And good on him, too:

“As I’ve said previously, my highest priority is to have the policy that best enables our armed services to do their job,” Senator-Elect Toomey said.  “Our civilian and professional military leadership have now spoken and said we should repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.  I would support a free-standing measure to do so.”

As NRO's Daniel Foster correctly notes, assuming a freestanding DADT repeal bill passes the Senate this session (and it should-- it now has 61 pledged votes, including from the Maine Republican duo of Collins and Snowe, as well as Scott Brown and Lisa Murkowski), Toomey won't actually get a vote on this.  But that's hardly the point.  Toomey is widely-regarded as a rock-ribbed conservative (and though he's more known as an economic conservative, he is quite socially conservative, too).  So this sends a pretty powerful message, in my opinion.

Thank you, Pat Toomey.  [intro]

I'm generally not a huge Jim DeMint booster (first of all, I've always been more a fan of Tom Coburn; second of all, DeMint has enough of those out there already; and third, my genuine sense is that DeMint has been a bit more concerned with fire-breathing rhetoric than action at certain junctures, and some of his rhetoric-- e.g., with regard to gay/single female schoolteachers I just don't like).

But, all that being said, this is a very good thing:

If you thought Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., went on interminably last week, just wait until you see what Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., has planned.

Democrats, having passed none of this fiscal year's appropriations, want to ram through the lame duck Senate a 2,000-page spending bill that no one had a chance to read. DeMint released the following statement yesterday. I've put the most important part in bold at the end:

“President Obama and Democrats have apparently learned nothing from this November’s election. This nearly 2,000-page omnibus filled with thousands of earmarks shows they are still determined to ram through as much big-government spending as they can in this lame duck session. Americans loudly demanded an end to the runaway spending, but Democrats are intent on raiding every taxpayer dollar that they can grab from the Treasury on their way out of power. This bill also funds the unconstitutional Obamacare law that Americans oppose and have asked Congress to fully repeal. Democrats haven’t given Republicans or the American people time to read the bill, but I’ll join with other Republican colleagues to force them to read it on the Senate floor.”...

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This afternoon, I got a tip from a self-described Maria Cino fan, one "Maggie O'Hooligan" (yes, I see what they did there). Michael Steele's images directory related to his re-election site was available for review by visiting this page!!! Ooh, the temptation of finding secret pictures of Michael Steele himself partying in a lesbian-bondage-themed Hollywood night club!

Not so fast... the thousands (I'm guessing-- review the screenshots way, way below and judge for yourself) of images are actually interesting in a rather different way, namely insofar as they seem to rebut an assertion being made by Steele and his folks prior to the election. That whole Fire Pelosi! bus tour was supposed to be solely about helping Republican candidates across the country, right? It wasn't at all supposed to a stealth Steele re-election tour, right?

Wrong... or at least its purpose as between then and now has morphed. Pretty much every picture I opened (and I didn't open them all because I have work to do and things) is of Steele on the tour. And, of course, they're sitting in the images directory of his re-election website.

Shocka! Or, not really...

What's more shocking to me, actually, is that among the pictures, one finds images of Steele with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ron Paul, and Don King, among others. Steele gets kudos from me for the first two because both are so reviled by so many Republicans (and I bet money a bunch of prospective Chairmen wouldn't be too keen to be seen grinning with Ah-nuld, in particular, these days). With regard to the Don King photo, though, well, that is just kind of shockingly awesome....