Wisconsin Tourism Federation (WTF)

WTF? Bloggers cause Wisconsin Tourism Federation to change name | Technically Incorrect - CNET News

Well, OK ... sometimes some lettering combinations pick up new meanings over time.

When Is The Stimulus a Failure?

So the Democrats and the MSM declared the Surge a "failure" before a single extra soldier had been sent to Iraq. That was considered "fine".

BO predicted that we needed to spend $800 Billion to keep unemployment from going over 8%. Can you imagine the outcry if the Surge HADN'T actually worked??

Is it clear yet that this clown as absolutiely no idea what he is doing? HEEEELLLLOOOO !!!! is there anyone paying any attention, or are people such complete media sheep that they will just go with whatever they are told to think??

What CAN BO Do?

Obama’s Olympic failure will only add to doubts about his presidency - Times Online

I think we all know that, he can talk / campaign. When the electorate is stupid enough to vote for "Hope and Change" I guess that works, but we have seen a lot of the limits to rhetoric this year.

There has been a growing narrative taking hold about Barack Obama’s presidency in recent weeks: that he is loved by many, but feared by none; that he is full of lofty vision, but is actually achieving nothing with his grandiloquence.

Sorta sums it up -- pretty, but empty suit!

Mr Obama was greeted — as usual — like a rock star by the IOC delegates in Copenhagen — then humiliated by them. Perception is reality. A narrow defeat for Chicago would have been acceptable — but the sheer scale of the defeat was a bombshell, and is a major blow for Mr Obama at a time when questions are being asked about his style of governance.

Yup, the folks really like -- a loser, especially when the loser is the former greatest nation on earth. The PEOPLE overseas "really like him" -- the leadership realizes that he is an empty suit, and while the enemies no doubt love him, the allies are starting to get extremely worried. With good reason.

See Bush was NOT an empty suit. The media and the Democrats certainly tried to make him that, but any leader that could drive the Surge with 60% disapproval ratings of the action to success is a LEADER! Note that BO thought it was really bad that Bush hadn't gotten Bin Ladin -- now BO has taken over and is fast on his way to losing the whole deal in Afghanistan, and **HE** said it was a WAR OF NECESSITY!! Does that mean he should step down for a president that can get the job done?

So unemployment is up (a lot), the economy has not turned around, even with the biggest media cheering section we have ever had in the US, Afghanistan is falling apart and BO came in DEAD LAST in the Olympic sweepstakes. It was even a self-inflicted wound! He didn't need to associate himself with the effort.

If Bush's first year had been anything like this, the MSM would have been hard on the impeachment mantra by now -- of course the "Impeach Bush" bumper stickers were already out from the left. Naturally, those are the "civil folks".

Ends And Means

RealClearPolitics - Obama's French Lesson

Confusing ends and means, the Obama administration strives mightily for shows of allied unity, good feeling and pious concern about Iran's nuclear program -- whereas the real objective is stopping that program. This feel-good posturing is worse than useless, because all the time spent achieving gestures is precious time granted Iran to finish its race to acquire the bomb.

I work as a software systems architect, confusing ends with means is a constant danger often fallen into. Software is "infinitely pliable", it gives you the illusion that nearly anything can be accomplished, it is but "a small matter of programming". Sadly it is far from so.

Normal world leaders have long left behind such illusions about nations, politics, human nature, economies and the history of mankind. They have typically drunk deeply from the vast storehouse of human thought and experience that tells us that since when each of us looks in the mirror, at least beyond some hopefully young age, we see a flawed and mortal human. Those of us that will gain some small measure of "success" in this world choose to use that not as an excuse, but as just one more fact of life to be dealt with and improved upon in the best ways that we know possible.

By the time men get to the point of leading nations, they have usually led businesses, states, movements, political parties, cities, or some other form of real world training. To lead in the real world on even a relatively small scale is to learn the universality of human imperfection and the limitations of the real world very directly. That knowledge comes with the realization that too often, those that have never taken the mantle of leadership are still living with those same illusions thought to be left behind as the price of maturity.

We daily see that BO is not a leader. He doesn't understand the most basic aspects of leadership, and would nearly certainly have failed at any number of smaller leadership tasks had he ever have had those tasks. We would be in FAR better shape had he even served as a mayor in a small town in Alaska. There he would have discovered that there are always rivals, some folks that seem to be your friends are not once you take on leadership, getting agreement among even those who generally think like you is extremely difficult.

Most of all, there are often simply no means at all to reach what ever ends it is that we thought desirable. One wonders if BO ever put any toys or lawn furniture together? It seems almost impossible to imagine the stupidity of someone taking on tasks like running GM with the level of condescension and disdain he has displayed for people that clearly know far more than he has even imagined could be known!

It is hard to underestimate the ego of a man who would write two auto biographies before the age of 50. One because he thought being president of Harvard Law Revue was so cool, and the other after he had won a Senate seat after running essentially unopposed. (The Chicago political machine managed to take down a very strong Republican candidate named Jack Ryan by managing to open private documents from a divorce that asserted that he had tried to take his former wife to a sex club. His former wife was Gerry Ryan, "7 of 9" on Star Trek, that would have been better referred to as "11 of 10". That Ryan was able to utter any intelligible sentences other than "can we go to bed now" is a testament to his sexual restraint)

Charles whole column is eminently worthy of reading. The end is unfortunately way too true:

Bismarck is said to have said: "There is a providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America." Bismarck never saw Obama at the U.N. Sarkozy did.

Infant Mortality

Ann Coulter : A Statistical Analysis of Maritime Unemployment Rates, 1946-1948. Just Kidding, More Liberal Lies About National Healthcare! - Townhall.com

Ann does a great job of destroying the liberal shibboleth that "America has a poor infant mortality rate". Essentially it boils down to these basic facts:

• Most countries don't count premature births below a certain weight, or in many cases even babies that live less than a day as "births" -- they call them "miscarriages".
  
• Most infant problems are lifestyle problems, not medical problems -- smoking, drinking and drugging mothers. Teen mothers. The US leads in all these categories, THANKS LIBERALS!
• Blacks have bad infant mortality rates and nobody really knows why.
  

The fact that it is the US that keeps pushing the envelope on saving premature babies earlier and earlier in fact ADDS to what the liberals refer to as our "infant mortality problem". By working harder to keep these tiny babies alive and counting them as "infant deaths", we end up looking worse in global statistics.

Imagine how quickly our infant morality rates would "improve" if ONLY we got "universal healthcare". Any baby that dies less than a day after birth is a "miscarriage". Why bother to try to save premature "babies"? It seems kind of weird that a nation that allows them to be partially birthed and have their brains sucked out to kill them in partial birth abortion would spend all that money trying to save them -- let them die and count them as miscarriages! Brilliant -- saves money, gives us better statistics, AND makes us more "morally consistent".

Switching Oxen

Op-Ed Columnist - Where Did ‘We’ Go? - NYTimes.com

I read through Freidman's piece and despair that Americans can return to some semblance of reality based discourse. He seems to realize that Bush was also de-legitimatized, but seems to think it was only because his first election was close. True, the Republican's tried to impeach Billy C, but that was only after he clearly lied often and egregiously in a suit that would have cost any other male at least his job, if not jail time. He also certainly perjured himself, and the Democrat side was recently very pleased to see Scooter Libby be prosecuted on that charge.

It is clear that someone as smart as Friedman CAN utterly forget the CONSTANT calls of "Bush Lied", "Bush is Hitler", "Bush is tapping your phone" ... and indeed, whole movies, some of them shown in theatres to millions of people like "Fahrenheit 911", dedicated to any sort of shoestring insinuation and smear that could be trotted out, not only of Bush, but of American troops, and "Death of A President", a FILM about the assassination of Bush. The number of people that "Bush ought to be shot" got to be so high that it wasn't shocking to hear anymore.

It is very hard to believe that Friedman (and others of his ilk) is not just trying to "set the stage" so that **IF** anything should happen to BO, there can be maximum use of force against all who  Tom is "holding responsible in advance". When Reagan was elected, I remember A LOT of folks saying "he is going to get us all blown up with his cowboy attitude". I personally knew a number of people that were actually building and stocking bomb shelters for the apocolypse -- and while I thought they were idiots, they were college educated folks working in good jobs at a major US corporation. If someone honestly believes that the president is going to "kill us all", isn't that MORE of a reason that someone might try to harm him than "he might be a socialist"?

Reagan of course WAS shot shortly after taking office and AFAIK, NOBODY tried to make it out that the rhetoric of the time "caused his death". People of course DID try to claim that "the hate filled climate in Dallas" got JFK shot, but the guy that shot him had gone to the USSR and Cuba and was a Communist -- not exactly the sort of "Southern angst" that the MSM was hoping for. How about today? It is certainly possible that any sort of a crackpot MIGHT take a shot at BO -- the Reagan would be assassin was trying to impress Jody Foster. You don't get a whole lot loonier than that -- unless of course you take Squeaky Fromme who was a drugged out Manson follower that tried to shoot Gerald Ford with a .45 ACP, but she had failed to chamber a round.

So ANY president COULD have an attempt made on his life at any time -- Saddam Hussein for example tried to have Bush 41 assassinated, but the MSM wasn't very worried about that other than they were concerned that W may have been trying to "get even". Were we missing ANYTHING of the "climate for violence against the president" when Reagan or Bush 43 were in office? I can't imagine what it would have been. Would it have been helpful for the media to assert that during Reagan, "people concerned that he was going to blow us all up" would be tempted to do him harm? or that during Bush 43, that "people who thought he was not legitimately elected, a liar, having soldiers killed for the corporate interests, or trying to harm lower income people for his rich friends" might have cause to do him harm?

Either Friedman is so far gone on bias that he utterly missed the 80's and the '00s, or he has his own rather nasty agenda. There is no way to know, we just have to guess.

But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far left has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.

What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Bush be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.

Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.

The previous isn't really a quote -- replace "far left" with "far right" in the first paragraph and "Bush" with "Obama" in the second, THEN it is what Friedman said. BUT, unless the guy is especially evil (see above), we have to assume that he is so biased that he didn't have at all the same feeling in the years from '03 to '08 that Bush was demonized beyond ANY comparison with relatively mild criticism of BO today. Apparently, whose Ox is getting gored really DOES make all the difference.

French Contempt for BO?

RealClearPolitics - Sarkozy's Contempt for Obama

Hey, these are the folks that take showers once a week! BO is a subject they know a good deal about.

Nicolas Sarkozy was furious with Barack Obama for his adolescent warbling about a world without nuclear weapons at a meeting Mr. Obama chaired of the United Nations Security Council last Thursday (9/24).

"We must never stop until we see the day when nuclear arms have been banished from the face of the earth," President Obama said.

What infuriated President Sarkozy was that at the time Mr. Obama said those words, Mr. Obama knew the mullahs in Iran had a secret nuclear weapons development site, and he didn't call them on it.

‘President Obama dreams of a world without weapons...but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite," Mr. Sarkozy said.

"Iran since 2005 has flouted five Security Council resolutions," Mr. Sarkozy said. "North Korea has been defying Council resolutions since 1993."

"What good has proposals for dialogue brought the international community?" he asked rhetorically. "More uranium enrichment and declarations by the leaders of Iran to wipe out a UN member state off the map."

Golly, the cheese eating surrender monkeys are finding BO to be worthy of disdain. Our media used to CELBRATE any slight or perceived slight of Bush from any foreign power -- it was "evidence of how little respect the world had for Bush". But what is up here? Oh, wait -- the MSM LIKES BO, so when foreign leaders show that they think he is an idiot, they do their very best to ignore it, rather than to trumpet it from the mountaintops for days as they did with Bush. If they throw a shoe at him, I bet the MSM will demand that the US go to war over it -- just like we ought to do SOMETHING about those damned "tea bag protestors"!! (after there are so many they can't ignore them anymore).

NOT "The Decider"?

RealClearPolitics - The Campaign is Over, Mr. President

One thing BO seems to want to very much be is "not Bush". Although implementation of that has been hard -- he announced last week that there isn't any way they are going to make the deadline he had set up in January for closing Gitmo -- my expectation is he may just have to rename it rather than close it. Imagine, the great and powerful BO has been unable to convince folks that they REALLY ought to take a couple hundred terrorists that the US deems as too dangerous to be housed on US soil. Might it have been just a BIT more intelligent to figure out a plan for closing it BEFORE you announced that you were closing it by a specific date? That is the way some of us mortals in business have to operate.

The press was certain it was BAD for Bush to be "The Decider", but how good is it now that BO clearly isn't? He is dithering around on Afghanistan while soldiers die -- for what? Things are certainly much worse since BO's last brilliant strategy. The Generals have asked for more troops, but now he isn't sure. While running, he was CERTAIN that Afghanistan was the "war of necessity" and Iraq was "the wrong war". So is it OK for BO to screw up and lose the war that he had declared the right one? Maybe he can cover that on Letterman the next time.

The trouble with Obama is that he gets into the moment and means what he says for that moment only. He meant what he said when he called Afghanistan a "war of necessity" -- and now is not necessarily so sure. He meant what he said about the public option in his health care plan -- and then again maybe not. He would not prosecute CIA agents for getting rough with detainees -- and then again maybe he would.

Most tellingly, he gave Congress an August deadline for passage of health care legislation -- "Now, if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town ..." -- and then let it pass. It seemed not to occur to Obama that a deadline comes with a consequence -- meet it or else.

Well, actually there is a lot more trouble with BO than that, but it is a start.

How surprising. Super candidate without any leadership experience finds that being a leader is HARD -- especially when it is leader of a nation of 300 Million people. Candidate returns to what he knows, being a candidate!! That was much more fun, and he was successful at it! But wait, did those 300 million people hire him to prance around on TV everywhere and be "entertaining"? Not really.

In the Presidents Secret Service

The subject book by Ron Kessler is generally an easy and fun read. It gets way too preachy on the alleged shortcomings of SS management and funding shortages at times, but that stuff can be skimmed.

Generally a fun look behind the scenes at some of the Presidents and first families. Sounds like Jimmy Carter was an even bigger fake than it seemed -- he would carry an empty bag for the camera to make it seem like he carried his own bags, made a big deal out of having a "dry White House" and then liked Bloody Marys before church and treated the help and the SS like absolute crap.

LBJ was as nuts as he seemed -- very close to being a drunk, but kept it under control. Would whip it out and pee with press or staff around anytime he wanted outdoors and didn't mind calling a secretary to take notes while he was taking a big dump.

Reagan was what you would expect -- respectful of the guys, apologetic that they had to work holidays, always saying thanks and giving them food and inviting them and their families to parties. Nancy was as cold as you might expect.

They disliked most of the protectees that were womanizers -- JFK, LBJ, Spiro Agnew, but they sympathized with Slick Willie. They had to deal with Hillary too, and it seems that Billy was very easy to like in private. Apparently the infamous "Hillary throwing stuff at Billy" never happened, but he did get to spend the Martha's Vinyard vacation after the Monica "confession" in the doghouse.

In most ways the book makes the SS seem less invincible than one would like -- I'm not sure that it is doing their ability to protect the president any favors.

Oh, they like BO and family -- he is still smoking away, but that is OK -- he's a Democrat!!

The "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy"

Bill Clinton: 'Vast right-wing conspiracy' as 'virulent' as ever - CNN.com

Does this really make any more sense than "Birthers", "Truthers", or whatever zany idiots are braying at any moment? I think not, except this is the man who walked the halls of power with his pants around his knees, believe it or not, this particular zany idiot was once president.

What would the press have to say if Bush was on a show and talked about a "vast left wing conspiracy"?? From the lefty view, anyone who doesn't accept that the MSM in generally is completely unbiased, Fox is virtually a Nazi hotbed, and there is NO SUCH THING AS LEFT WING MEDIA is as bad a nutcase as someone that believes in hard work, individual responsibility and paying your bills. That kind of howl at the moon naked kind of stuff that really ought to get one locked up as a racist or worse these days ...

KIds SInging Praises to "The One"

The Associated Press: Scrutiny rises over NJ kids singing Obama song

Naturally, the MSM finds this to be just fine. What could be wrong with singing praises to "the one"? Unless someone is a racist, don't they simply HAVE to support the great and powerful BO?

How would kids singing praises to Bush be? Suppose there would have been a Hitler comparison or two on that? Nah, Our press is UNBIASED!!

Preemptive Hillary Use

Have we no mercy?


U.S. Condemned For Pre-Emptive Use Of Hillary Clinton Against Pakistan

Carter Racism

Jimmy Carter says that tea baggers hate President Obama because he's black.

America abhors history. No wonder, given how many national crimes are lurking back there. But we’ve arrived at a time when a politician’s refusal to consider the past is a perverse testament to prudent leadership. And as a result, a statement as obvious as Carter’s—that the tea-baggers hate President Barack Obama because he’s black—can be passed off as controversy in 2009.

Yes indeed, America abhors history. Like how about the last 6 years? Did America hate Bush because he was white? How many times was he called liar, Hitler, idot, burned in effigy and generally maligned in every way possible? The left loved to carry a sign that said "A village in Texas is missing it's idiot" -- it was a pure scream. Now though, "A village in Kenya is missing it's idiot" is completely inappropriate. Strange.

For the leftys, the answer is simple -- Bush did everything wrong and BO does everything right. There is no possible reason to dislike BO other than he is black, end of story. The war in Afghanistan was worthy of protest with  Bush in office, now it is fine -- even though it is going far worse under BO's policies. Being left means that ideology is the only answer -- hatred of folks with opposing views is reflexive. True, blacks are hated worse if they are conservative like Clarence Thomas, but leftys can never  be racist. It is righteous to hate conservative views and the idea that blacks would have such views is so abhorrent, they are hated especially badly. Forcing blacks into a standard thought prison isn't racist at all if you are of the left.

So to the left, Carter is right -- criticism of the right is just inherently good. Racism is especially noxious, so hanging that placard on anyone that disagrees with BO is just fine. Everyone is free to agree with the left!!

Liberal = Forced

Op-Ed Columnist - Have a Nice Day - NYTimes.com

Friedman is a smart guy. At one time he seemed to have a pretty good handle on what global competition means, but lately he seems to have decided that we are too much at peril from global warming to keep being competitive. He makes this rather straight forward statement relative to solar energy:

The reason that all these other countries are building solar-panel industries today is because most of their governments have put in place the three prerequisites for growing a renewable energy industry: 1) any business or homeowner can generate solar energy; 2) if they decide to do so, the power utility has to connect them to the grid; and 3) the utility has to buy the power for a predictable period at a price that is a no-brainer good deal for the family or business putting the solar panels on their rooftop.

I'm always impressed at how quickly the leftward leaning fall into the force mode -- "has to"! They are all about "choice" as long as it is offing the unborn, same sex marriage, or paying taxes (as long as you are a Democrat), but for the stuff they get interested in, "has to" arrives very quickly. A few laws for public safety and preventing crime isn't enough for them -- they need to have a law for every aspect of your life, your companies life, and if possible, the lives of everyone in the "universe" (as in "universal" health care).

 Businesses, markets and such are just not as smart as "the experts" ... although we find out over and over that they are.  

Charles on BO and the Truth

RealClearPolitics - Does He Lie?

Great column, just read it.