“I never considered myself a maverick” — John McCain

McCain faces a tough reelection in AZ, up against JD Hayworth, and isn’t helping his case by getting the date of the election wrong.

The McCain Mutiny — Newsweek

Maybe Michele Bachmann might want to fill out her census form…

Minnesota has eight members in the House, but the State Demographer estimates Minnesota is within 1,000 people of losing a Congressional seat.

Bachmann’s sprawling district, looping from Stillwater to St. Cloud is the oddest geographically, and many experts agree if one district goes, it will be hers.

Source: WCCO

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.

“Unfortunately, America loves Guns. We love guns to a point where that uh we see devastation on a daily basis. You don’t blame a group.” – Mayor Daley, link heads to Founding Bloggers

What an interesting statement. I must agree that (and to me this is obvious) crazy individual people should be treated as crazy individuals. When there are groups of crazy individuals, the rules have to change.

It’s possible that Mayor Daley is politically posturing and spinning the tragedy into a rally call for stiffer gun control. Even if he is, such a statement would gain no ground and would make him look foolish if there weren’t already people who believe that it’s absolutely true.

There are people that argue with me about gun control, and 99% of the time, they start with a bad assumption.

• Less guns = less suicides
• Theives use owner’s guns against them all the time
• Innocent bystanders get shot by legally carried guns
• Fatal shooting accidents are just as common as murders
• More guns turns normal anger like road rage into killings

These assumptions are not backed up by factual information. It doesn’t seem to matter how many papers or statistics I cite, these arguments inevitably end with me being accused of believing false information. That’s rather convenient. Rather than have to find fact or theory that’s a credible defense of their point, they simply dismiss my sources altogether. So I stopped arguing about numbers and reality, I’ll meet them on the philosophical and anecdotal levels.

To their credit, I’ve never encountered one of these arguments in which I’m accused of lying or somehow craving death and murder, so that’s a good thing.

It’s amazing though how closed-minded the anti-gun movement really is. Actual shooting injury and death data are waved away outright or openly skewed to fit their imagination.

The original imagined scenarios aren’t completely without logic. The most recent discussion, which took place about a month ago, was with a coworker. She, with no prompt from me, jumped from road-rage to handguns. She said she just couldn’t understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to allow people to carry guns, (paraphrase): “What if all these people that yell and get out of their cars and carry baseball bats, what if they had a gun? Then instead of someone getting punched, well now they’re dead!”

Okay, sounds logical, but it doesn’t happen that way. My favorite example is a good friend of mine who has a permit, and also has the quickest, most fiery temper I’ve ever seen. He’s a good man though, and hasn’t gotten in trouble with the law, which is why they gave him the permit. When he carries, he’s a different man. Totally calm. There’s a mental barrier there and I know why my coworker doesn’t trust it and it’s a good thing. She doesn’t understand the barrier because her’s has never been tested. There’s a similar mental barrier that keeps people from being attracted to family members or to persons of inappropriate age. So yes, there’s people who cross that line, but rarely is it sudden and unpredictable, and when it is, I’d like to be armed so they don’t kill too many people before they’re stopped.

And that’s the second point: if there’s no guns, it means whomever has a bomb or other efficient weapon has enormous power.

I like to use metaphors to put things in a different light. Rape is worse than murder in some ways, at least in my opinion, and should be treated with a similar level of horror. So if the police were the only ones that could stop rape, would you trust them to show up? Would you trust them so much that you’d feel safe? Or is it easier to imagine that the vast majority of people, given the means and opportunity, would go to great lengths to stop or prevent a rape and not participate in one.

Stiff gun control forces the public to trust the government. Think about it. Do you really trust congress, judges, senators, state troopers to fight tooth and nail on your behalf? To make sound, just decisions more than you’d trust your friends (um, the ones who haven’t been convicted of crimes and have passed safety and legality courses)?

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently sent this official letter to a member of the state assembly.  As a coincidence, the letter was sent to the member of the state assembly that told the Governor to “kiss [his] gay ass” at a fundraiser the other day.

Don’t see the significance?  Try reading the first letter of each line, down the page.

Still need it s-p-e-l-l-e-d o-u-t?  Click here (probably NSFW).

You have presented me with a highly undesirable option. I am troubled.

A RADICAL Muslim group sparked outrage last night as it launched a massive campaign to impose sharia law on Britain.

I haven’t been able to fake surprise yet, but I’m still trying, so bare with me.

The group declared: “We hereby request all Muslims in the United Kingdom, in Manchester, Leeds, Cardiff, Glasgow and all other places to join us and collectively declare that as submitters to Almighty Allah, we have had enough of democracy and man-made law and the depravity of the British culture.

“On this day we will call for a complete upheaval of the British ruling system its members and legislature, and demand the full implementation of Shari’ah in Britain.”

Last quote, my personal fav…

Mr Choudary has said that under sharia law in Britain people who commit adultery would be stoned to death, adding that “anyone who becomes intoxicated by alcohol would be given 40 lashes in public”.

He has also mocked the deaths of British soldiers, and branded an Army homecoming parade a “vile parade of brutal murderers”.

The Islam4UK website is currently down. I’ll try to get in for an update later on.

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.

via Ace, The Washington Post casually mentions this in paragraph four of a story about the White House getting ready to get tough on critics…

When critics lashed out at President Obama for scheduling a speech to public school students this month, accusing him of wanting to indoctrinate children to his politics, his advisers quickly scrubbed his planned comments for potentially problematic wording. They then reached out to progressive Web sites such as the Huffington Post, liberal bloggers and Democratic pundits to make their case to a friendly audience.

Emphasis mine.

So there you go. He had a different message planned, but scrapped it after the critics called him on it in advance.

Only 12% of my fellow citizens believe me to be a racist, according to polling:

Twelve percent (12%) of voters nationwide believe that most opponents of President Obama’s health care reform plan are racist. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 67% of voters disagree, and 21% are not sure.

I’d like to see the numbers lower, of course. And you 21% that “are not sure” disgust me. Get off the fence, losers.

Eighty-eight percent (88%) of Republicans reject the notion that most of the opponents are racist. So do 78% of voters not affiliated with either major party. However, just 39% of Democrats share that view. Twenty-two percent (22%) of those in the president’s party say that most of the opposition to his plan comes from racists, and another 39% are not sure.

I’d also like to find the 12% of Republicans that didn’t flat out reject the question, and figure out what their problem is.

Maybe tomorrow they can poll members of congress, people who work in the White House, and members of the media, and ask them the same question.

Apparently, contrary to what I’ve been reading, this is not the first time a President has put together a speech for the kiddies.

George H.W. Bush did it in 1991 (as one of our contributors alluded to earlier in the comments).

Democrats, predictably, were outrageously outraged.

“The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students,” House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said. “And the president should be doing more about education than saying, ‘Lights, camera, action.’ “

Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), chairwoman of the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families, said it was outrageous for the White House to “start using precious dollars for campaigns” when “we are struggling for every silly dime we can get” for education programs.

Presumably, Gephardt and Crying Pat Schroeder are just as outraged today.

I knew that I read somewhere that this was “the first speech of its kind” or something along those lines, but I couldn’t remember where.

After searching, I came across the text of the letter that Arne Duncan, Education Secretary, sent to school principals a few weeks ago, which used to be on the ED website, but isn’t anymore. (Full text here and here.)

This is the first time an American president has spoken directly to the nation’s school children about persisting and succeeding in school. We encourage you to use this historic moment to help your students get focused and begin the school year strong. I encourage you, your teachers, and students to join me in watching the President deliver this address on Tuesday, September 8, 2009. It will be broadcast live on the White House website www.whitehouse.gov 12:00 noon eastern standard time.

Emphasis mine.

Bush’s speech didn’t count. #1, because he’s a Republican, and they are evil. And #2, because it had a different theme.

The speech at Alice Deal Junior High School, broadcast live on radio and television, urged students to study hard, avoid drugs and turn in troublemakers.

As for the claim that the Obama speech will be innocuous and non-political, I think even a casual read of Duncan’s letter pretty much blows that theory away.

Since taking office, the President has repeatedly focused on education, even as the country faces two wars, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and major challenges on issues like energy and health care. The President believes that education is a critical part of building a new foundation for the American economy.

Yeah, nothing political about that at all.