I just ran to the post office, which gave me a chance to catch a few minutes of the Michael Medved Show.

One of the callers had a theory as to why Obama’s poll numbers are tanking, and it was just too good not to share.

Ready?  Obama’s numbers are in the toilet because the racist Republicans intentionally ran a team that they knew would lose (McCain/Palin), so they would later have the opportunity to make Obama look bad.

Plausible, I say.

I mean, more plausible than the explanation that the public is rejecting a man who has shown little to no leadership on anything, uses a teleprompter at an elementary school, thinks the correct response to the Mass. election is to attack banks, and thinks that the issue with the health care bill is that he hasn’t spent enough time explaining it to the public.  Obviously.

This story is over a week old, but needs to be discussed, especially as this is the #2,356 most Comcast hating website in the World.

Comcast, The Worst Company on Earth, bought NBC Universal from GE the other day.  Actually, they bought 51% of it in a complicated deal, but the bottom line is that Comcast now owns NBC, USA, Bravo, and some other stuff.

Where this all gets interesting is that Comcast is obviously in the content delivery business.  They currently pay NBC a ton of cash to make their networks available to their cable subscribers.  But now, they’ll own those networks.

So, as the owner of, say, USA, Comcast is now in the position to set the price of providing USA to customers.  That’s a bad thing if you’re one of Comcast’s competitors, like DirecTV.

I won’t claim to be an expert in the whole cable TV business, because I’m not, but it’s not hard to imagine how this could go badly, especially in the hands of the Worst Company on Earth.

Normally, a myriad of federal agencies would get involved and scrutinize this deal.  There’s the anti-trust angle, the broadcast angle, etc.  Those federal agencies are part of the executive branch of government, headed by the President.

So, what’s an evil company to do when they need a favor from the President?  Why, scratch his back, of course.

The day after Comcast announced it was buying NBC, their CEO announced his support for the President’s disastrous and unpopular health care program.  The letter can be found here.

Read more here and here.

So there you have it, Comcast, The Worst Company on Earth, is teaming up with the Worst Administration in Recent History, trading support on the health care bill for regulatory approval.

They always said this was the Most Transparent Administration Ever, but I guess I didn’t expect it to be this transparent.

This will be long.  Bear with me, please…

I used to have the worst boss.  For real.  I would put this guy up against anyone else’s “worst boss” and I think I might still win.  No, your crappy 19-year-old boss at the 7-11 or Wendy’s doesn’t count.  This guy was a VP at a Fortune 100 company.  Someone you’d think might be qualified in some way to lead people.  He wasn’t.

Some Background

The boss was the VP of IT at a major retailer.  I won’t name him or the retailer, but if you know me you already know who I’m talking about.  (We’ll call him Paul for ease of reference.)  I was the Director of Application and Database development (a mouthful).  Basically, I was the #2 guy in IT at the company.

I was put in place because Paul was failing.  The CFO forced Paul to hire me over his objections.  Paul wanted to hire a crony of his.  I didn’t apply for this job or seek it out.  I got a phone call one day that said the CFO wanted to speak to me.  He handed me a piece of paper, which was a job offer, and, in a moment of temporary insanity, I took it.

I knew going in that Paul sucked.  I had worked with him in the past.  I thought I knew what I was getting into.  I looked forward to the challenge.

I was wrong.  The guy was somehow worse than I expected.

The Signs

I could easily fill a book about my experience working for Paul, so I’m trying to keep to just the relevant points.  There is an ultimate point here, I promise.

The first sign I had that Paul was worse than I expected was when he publicly threw one of his subordinates under the proverbial bus.  In a meeting with all of the highest leaders in the corporation, Paul was asked about a project that was not going well.  He took no responsibility.  Instead, he blamed one of his subordinates, and said that this guy was lying to him about his progress and not cutting it in his job.

That wasn’t true.  In reality, Paul hadn’t ever handed the project off to his subordinate.  But Paul was very comfortable slandering this guy and basically neutering his reputation to save his own ass.

The next big sign came during a crisis.  One day email just stopped working.  No one had email anymore.  Obviously a complete lack of email is a major issue.

In a situation like this a leader would gather people together, get all the key players in the room, and make a game plan to figure out a solution.  Paul gathered up all of his personal effects, put them in his backpack, and declared to someone who was passing by his office that he was quitting.

That left a very confused group of people, and no leader.  We found Paul a few hours later wandering around the 7th floor.  He was going from PC to PC seeing if he could get the email to work.  He hadn’t quit.  He just had a breakdown of some sort.  When he came back he never addressed the packing up of the personal effects, or the disappearance.  He acted like nothing had happened.

The Confrontation

The email incident prompted a quite heated (and somewhat surreal) confrontation between Paul and me.  Words were exchanged.

I told him he needed to decide if he was going to work here or not.  If he was going to quit, fine.  If not, then he needed to get his head in the game and start acting like a leader.  His team needed leadership, something which he was not providing.

He responded in a bizarre way.  First he told me that “he had always been a high achiever,” and went on about how he had always had good review scores, and how he always succeeded at whatever he tried.  He used the phrase “high achiever” many times during this speech.

Then he said something that surprised me.  He told me that he “could do the jobs of anyone on his team better than they could do their jobs themselves.”  He then went on to name several positions, including mine, and note how he could do that job better than the person who held it.

Really?

This claim was shocking to me because it was so much the opposite of my philosophy of leadership.  I always sought out the best and brightest people for my teams.  I was proud of the fact that I couldn’t do their jobs better than they could.  If I could, why did I need them?

I built teams of people who didn’t agree with me.  We’d argue, debate, and in the end I’d make a decision, knowing that my decision was informed by a diverse group of opinion.  It was their job to bring their best, and my job to take all of the varying opinions into account and make a decision based on my view of the situation.

Paul’s view was different.  He thought he was the best and the brightest, all in one.  He also thought of himself as a “high achiever.”  He wasn’t.  Maybe he was in the past, but he was obviously now in a position that was over his head.  He didn’t have the skills or ability to succeed in a high level job like a VP.  He was a failure.

He was “downsized” a few months after the email incident.

The Point

So I was reading an article the other day, and this jumped out at me:

Obama, who is not without an ego, regarded himself as just as gifted as his top strategists in the art and practice of politics. Patrick Gaspard, the campaign’s political director, said that when, in early 2007, he interviewed for a job with Obama and Plouffe, Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Reading that did not surprise me.  In fact, it made things quite a bit clearer.

Barack Obama, like Paul, thinks of himself as a “high achiever.”  He thinks he is a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, more knowledgeable about policy than his policy directors, and on and on.

Perhaps Obama was once a “high achiever,” I mean, he did get elected President after being in the Senate for like 10 minutes.  But, like Paul, he’s now in way over his head.  And like Paul he got there by throwing the little people under the bus.

The Epilogue

The fact that Obama considers himself the smartest person in the room gives you perspective on his decisions.

No wonder he rejected all of his general’s plans in Afghanistan.  After all, Obama is a better general than his generals.

Barack Obama is a “high achiever” in the mold of Paul, the worst boss I’ve ever had.  I just wish we had the ability to downsize him before the damage he does becomes irreversible.

Two stories caught my attention today, and since the majority of this blog’s readers are in MN and AZ, I thought I’d put them together:

From MN:

You’d never know it without going online to the new and improved federal government stimulus tracking website, but the economy and jobs picture is really picking up in Minnesota’s 57th congressional district. There in plain sight, it states that 35 jobs have been saved or created as a result of $404,340 in stimulus spending, according to the figures found by the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota on the federal government’s stimulus tracking website on the summary page for MInnesota at Recovery.gov.

Over in Minnesota ’s 27th congressional district, however, it appears to be a bleaker picture for those hoping for a turnaround. The federal government’s statistics indicate only 2.5 jobs have been created or saved despite the listed expenditure of $3,159,657 of taxpayer dollars.

Then there’s the 13th congressional district which outperformed them all. Hard to believe, but the hard working folks in the 13th congressional district generated five jobs from just $42,109 in stimulus spending.

And AZ:

This afternoon comes the most encouraging economic news, courtesy of our keen-eyed buddy Rick Klein over at ABC, that the Obama administration’s $787-billion economic stimulus has, for example, thankfully created 30 new jobs in a little-known rural corner of Arizona at a cost to American taxpayers of only $761,420.

That works out to only $25,380.67 spent to create each individual job.

So the people of that 15th Congressional District in staunchly Republican Arizona should be pretty happy about this.

So congratulations to the administration on … wait … hold on … this just in…

None of those congressional districts exist.  Sorry.  Each state has eight districts, so the MN 13, 27, and 57 aren’t real.  Nor is the AZ 15th.

Most. Transparent. Administration. Ever.  So transparent, you can almost see right through them.

Remember, these are the people who want to take over your health care.

BTW, the fake jobs/fake districts aren’t limited to AZ and MN.  For instance, there’s CA, KS, NM, NH, and on and on…

When Barack Obama made the shameful decision to skip the Berlin Wall commemoration, he claimed it was because he was really busy.

His spokesman said “Obviously, we have a lot to work on here and we have commitments for an upcoming Asia trip.”

So what was Obama busy doing? Jim Geraghty examines the President’s schedule for the day:

He had a 10 a.m. daily briefing from the intelligence community, a 10:30 a.m. economic daily briefing, an 11 a.m. meeting with senior advisers . . . and then, right after that, at 6:45 in the evening, he had to sign an executive order about hiring veterans, and at 7 p.m. he had a meeting with Israeli prime minister Netanyahu (with preconditions).

In the interim, it’s not like he was just sitting around the Rose Garden and enjoying the weather. Take a look at the White House web site, where you’ll see he was . . . oh. He was sitting in the Rose Garden enjoying the weather.

Click the link to see the White House Photo of the Day.  It’s priceless.

In a related story, we now know what Obama was doing while the evil George Bush was visiting the troops at Fort Hood:  He was at Camp David having a relaxing weekend.

Actions speak louder than words, Mr. President.  And yours are very, very, clear.

Former President George Bush visited the wounded at Fort Hood today.

Former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, visited wounded soldiers and their families near the site of the worst mass shooting on an Army post in the United States.

The Bushes made their private visit to Fort Hood’s Darnall Army Medical Center on Friday night. Bush spokesman David Sherzer said in an e-mail that the couple thanked Fort Hood’s military leaders and hospital staff for the “amazing care they are providing.”

Bush’s visit was private, (as in, not open to the press) as it should have been.  Contrast that to a recent photo op by the current CIC.

What was President Obama so busy doing that he couldn’t find time to make it to Texas?  Trying to cram a health care bill down our throats in a Saturday session of congress.

A bill that will have significant bipartisan opposition.  A bill that poll, after poll, after poll, shows that we don’t want.  On a Saturday, because the vast majority of the country won’t be paying attention.

It is no surprise that Obama chose to push health care instead of visiting wounded soldiers.  His priorities have always been clear.  But that doesn’t mean that they are right.

Dear Barack Obama,

You won the election last year.  You’re in charge now.  Please start acting like it.

We’re tired of hearing about George Bush.  That guy is ancient history.  We didn’t like him, so we elected you.

It’s time to stop blaming your predecessor and start leading.  We know, Bush was a disaster.  But you’re in charge now.  So stop whining and start doing.

Campaigning and governing are two different things.  You don’t seem to know the difference.  So, I humbly offer some advice to get you started:

1. Stop giving speeches blaming George Bush for everything.  Like this one.
2. Stop issuing press releases blaming George Bush.  Like this one. (about halfway down the page)
3. Stop picking fights with individuals or news organizations.  It’s beneath the office.  Your predecessor understood that, and according to you, he was an idiot.
4. Golf less.
5. Make a decision on Afghanistan.  Your general asked you for more troops.  You dithered.  Leaders make decisions, they don’t dither.
6. While you’re at it, stop blaming George Bush for Afghanistan.  Again, you’re in charge now.
7. Maybe lay off the fundraisers.  Just for a while.

This is just a start.  Your snitches at flag@whitehouse.gov know where to find me if you want more advice.

Signed Sincerely, Me.

It’s been a while since we last checked in on Iran, so here are four stories that caught my attention in the past few days:

1.  Iranian Opposition Apologizes for That Whole Hostage Thing – The opposition groups that were at the heart of the flap over the elections a few months ago have issued an apology to the US government for the Iranian hostage situation 30 years ago.

“Thirty years ago in the turmoil of the revolutionary zeal an indefensible act of hostage taking was committed that the new generation of Iran are not proud of at all,” he said. “We know very well how that deplorable action hurt the noble American people and how it led to three decades of unnecessary and painful bad relations between our two nations.

“Only a small and repressive minority who rule Iran today still insist on keeping Iran on a confrontation course with the US, Britain and the West and indeed they have now taken the Iranian people as hostage to their destructive policies.”

2.  In a related story, during protests on the 3oth anniversary of the hostage taking, an Iranian crowd is heard chanting “Obama, Obama, Are you with the regime or with us?” I think we all know the answer to that:

The answer to that question is of course obvious to Americans. Interesting, because they’re explicitly mentioning Obama, not “America” or “USA”. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this distinction is probably significant, and they understand that most Americans are pretty supportive of their desire to ditch the Mullocracy and the bad crazy leadership…Obama? well, not so much. He’s stiff armed them once already, and seems perfectly willing to allow the regime to strengthen its hand even more with nuclear weapons.

3.  As the opposition reaches out to the US, the group in charge smuggles weapons to Syria and Hezbollah.  Fortunately they were intercepted by Israel.  This time.

The weapons seized on the ship included some 3,000 rockets of various types, as well as 60-millimeter mortars, 7.62-rifle Kalashnikov-ammunition, F-1 grenades and 122-millimeter Katyusha rockets. The ship’s cache was reportedly ten times the size that of the Karine A’s that Israel seized in 2002.

4.  And finally, Iran’s leader says negotiating with the US would be “perverted.”

Iran’s supreme leader, spurning what he described as several personal overtures from President Obama, warned Tuesday that negotiating with the United States would be “naive and perverted” and that Iranian politicians should not be “deceived” into starting such talks.

None of this should be surprising to anyone who has been paying attention, but that doesn’t make it any less destructive.

Since taking office, President Obama has repeatedly tried to reach out to the corrupt power in Iran.  When he had a chance to get behind an opposition group that could effect real change in the region, he voted ‘present’.

Now the Iranian leaders are openly mocking him.

Even the most casual reader of history could have predicted how this would all play out.  Which makes me wonder why our President, who I’m repeatedly told is a genius, wasn’t smart enough to see this coming.

Smart Power!

Russia is weighing changes to its military doctrine that would allow for a “preventive” nuclear strike against its enemies — even those armed only with conventional weapons. The news comes just as American diplomats are trying to get Russia to cut down its nuclear stockpile, and put the squeeze on Iran’s suspect nuclear program.

Or, in other words, Russia sees our pathetic and feckless foreign policy and knows that we’re to pussy to do anything about stopping them.

Pity the former Soviet territories that step out of line…

What’s more, Patrushev said, Russia is revising the rules for the employment of nukes to repel conventionally armed attackers, “not only in large-scale, but also in a regional and even a local war.”

Hey Georgia!  Got that?  If you don’t shut up we’ll nuke you.  And all that will happen to us is we’ll be the subject of a few meaningless UN resolutions.

Good thing we canceled that missile defense shield.

Maine senator Olympia Snowe added her support to the current version of the health bill.

At the White House, Obama called the events “a critical milestone” toward remaking the nation’s health care system. He praised Snowe as well as Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the committee, and declared, “We are going to get this done.”

It’s disappointing for opponents of the bill, but not altogether unexpected since she’s spent some time discussing this with the pres already, and she’s only a part-time republican anyway.




UPDATE:
Charlie Gibson interviews, Snowe answers questions with blathering blatherskite, and this, which stood out to me:

Understandably people do have honest philosophical differences…

Yes, I’m glad you recognize that fact, Madam Senator. Both sides want citizens of the US to be healthier, and have different ideas of effective, long term strategy, but that observation does nothing to rationalize unifying toward a bad solution.