Month: October 2009

IOC to Chicago: Pound Sand!

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Very surprised that Chicago is out. Amazed that Obama would go to Copenhagen and get punked like this. It makes him look like a chump. I wrongly assumed he had it fixed or he would not have gone. Wow.

I know a lot of people will be sad about it, and for them I am sorry. But I have always been against having the Olympics here. I think we dodged a bullet. The taxpayers of Illinois, Cook County and Chicago were going to get clobbered, with a huge amount of inconvenience on top of it.

The whole thing makes Obama look like a dope. What was he thinking? I could not believe he would go and put himself at the mercy of these guys. That was too stupid to believe. I speculate that the IOC wanted to show the USA it could not be pushed around. In other words, going in person backfired.

I am repeatedly amazed at the way Obama mishandles things. I keep thinking, “oh, ah ha, I see, he must have something up his sleeve!” And then he never does! He’s always just winging it! A smile and a shoe shine will just get you so far, pal.

As Bugs Bunny used to say, “what a maroon!”

We are truly screwed with this guy as Chief Executive and Commander in Chief.

UPDATE: Michael Barone weighs in.

UPDATE II: Baseball Crank weighs in:

… you don’t publicly stake your prestige on something that’s not (1) hugely important (2) a done deal or (3) ideally, both. All presidents suffer defeats and embarrassments, but you generally don’t walk right into one on an issue of purely local importance to your home city. Obama’s and the nation’s standing in the world can’t help but be chipped away by this; the next time he goes jetting off to a summit or some other international event, people won’t be so quick to assume that he has all figured out in advance how he’s going to get what he wants. That aura, that mystique is a thing of value that the President is supposed to husband carefully for when the nation really needs it. Bush was impotent by the end of his presidency because he’d burned that up, but he had it for the better part of five years. Obama’s losing it already.
 
What a waste.

Via Vodkapundit.

UPDATE III: Does this remind anyone else of the Crowley/Gates matter? Another case where Obama really did not need to get himself involved. Yet he waded into it, made ti about himself, when it did not have to be about him, and did no one any good by doing it, and squandered credibility in doing so?

How come he does not instinctively avoid high risk / low return plays? Why does he have such a poor gut on this stuff?

It’s weird.

Suppressing Summer Vacation

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Obama thinks the school day should be extended and the summer vacation shortened.

It won’t take me much work to write a post about this, because I pretty much already did it, three years ago…

(August 01, 2006) Stopped at a store while driving through Georgia today, and the man mentioned that this is the first day of school for the local children. Googling around, it appears that lots of Georgia school systems are starting classes sometime this week. And the longer-school-year trend is by no means limited to Georgia.

This is really very sad. Children need time to be with their families. They need time to develop their dreams. They need time to learn things that are not part of any formal program.

Educational “experts” will try to justify a longer school year with the argument that “there’s just so much more to know these days.” Such claims are highly exaggerated. The truth is, most public K-12 schools make very poor use of the time of their students. They waste huge proportions of the millions of hours which have been entrusted to them–waste them through the mindless implementation of fads and theories, waste them through inappropriate teacher-credentialing processes, waste them through refusal to maintain high standards of performance and behavior.

When an organization or institution proves itself to be a poor steward of the resources that have been entrusted to it, the right answer is not to give it more resources to waste.

Just a few points to add to the above:

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That Irish referendum

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It occurred to me that what with one thing and another the significance of today’s referendum in Ireland may be lost on many readers of Chicagoboyz. Somehow Ireland, both North and South, have become less important on the other side of the Pond, now that Sinn Fein has been safely installed in the Ulster Assembly. There are, however, other issues at stake.

Let me recap. The Lisbon Treaty is a regurgitated version of the Constitution for Europe, the previous treaty agreed on by the previous Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) of the European Union. The Constitution, a whacking document of several hundred pages that laid down rules for just about everything though, to be fair, many of them had already existed in other treaties, was rejected in two referendums in 2005. The two were in core members of the European Union: France and Netherlands.

There followed a period of flurried activity, led by the Commission, specifically by the ditzy Margot Wallstrom, who is in charge of communications, that is, propaganda. She even set up a blog, which was so dull that even the eurosceptics who kept posting responses to her fluffy pieces, gave up after a while.

The idea was that the EUrocracy would have a dialogue with the people of Europe and find out their opinion. The fact that the opinion had already been given in two countries seemed to be irrelevant. In the fullness of time there was another IGC and another treaty, the Lisbon one, which was, apart from a few unimportant details, exactly the same as the Constitution. Because it was laid out differently, all EU member states were told that this was different and, therefore, there will be no referendums, even though serious constitutional changes were being proposed.

The Irish Supreme Court decided that, according to the Irish constitution, there will have to be a referendum and one duly took place. Well, blow me down. The people voted the wrong way and were told to vote again. The second referendum is taking place today and, naturally, we are all hoping that the Irish will prove to be as recalcitrant as they have been throughout their history.

In the meantime, all but two other member states have ratified. In Germany the parliament had to pass a number of laws to bring the German Constitution in line with the Lisbon Treaty as instructed by the country’s Constitutional Court. In the Czech Republic the treaty has been returned to the Constitutional Court by a number of Senators and the President is waiting for the decision. He is reluctant to sign but will probably have to if the legal decision goes the wrong way. Following that Poland will sign. This, of course, depends on an yes vote today in Ireland. If, on the other hand, the Irish vote no again, we shall have an interesting situation. Will the EU demand a third referendum or will they, as is much more likely, take this treaty off the table, push through as much of it as possible on the quiet and call another IGC to produce another document in a couple of years’ time.

Either way, the whole process has been incredibly painful for the European Union, its bureaucracy and supporters. The gloss has gone completely, the process is no longer inevitable and the nasty bits – lies, bullying and cheating to get their way – are showing.

For any glutton for punishment, I have more on Your Freedom and Ours.