Team Obama can’t seem to get it

Welcome to America, Mr. President. You needed to leave Chicago behind. Your campaign team was just that. You need to have a team to help you run the country. Please don’t rush to change things untill after the 2010 elections. Remain stupid.

How could such smart people do so many stupid things? That question, or variations on it, is being asked in Washington and around the country about the Obama administration.

Team Obama failed to realize they were no longer running in Chicago or in the Democratic primaries or facing an electorate fed up with Republicans. And, more important, they failed to realize that vastly expanding government goes deeply against the American grain — and against the basic appeal of their successful campaign.

The same people who directed the campaign that defeated Hillary Clinton and routed John McCain, a campaign that raised far more money and attracted far more volunteers than any before it, have within a year come up with a legislative program that is crashing in ruins and that, to judge from recent polls, has left the Democratic party weaker than I have seen it in almost 50 years of closely following politics.

The fact that Democrats, from last July until last week, had a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate to go along with Nancy Pelosi’s strong majority in the House seems to have tempted Team Obama to go the all-Democratic route on health care, cap and trade and fiscal policy. But even strong temptations should sometimes be resisted.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/With-absolute-power_-Team-Obama-grows-stupid-83945567.html#ixzz0f9RuV91f

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/02/10/wapoabc-poll-shows-obama-losing-command-of-the-issues/

No Women Ski Jumpers in upcoming Olympics

Our loss–Well, maybe when the Olympics move to Russia?

Curling is much more fun. Thats the one where they have that thingy where some guys use a couple of brooms and sweep away to some assine goal which no one understands. The women were rejected in 2006 when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) added only one event, ski cross—head-to-head downhill racing that prides itself on being chaotic. Too few ski jumpers was the reason, said the IOC. The women argued numbers: 83 competitors at the elite level from 14 countries, more women than for ski cross, bobsled, snowboard cross, luge or skeleton, according to Women’s Ski Jumping USA, nonprofit volunteers supporting the athletes.

But why would the IOC bar women ski jumpers? Women’s Ski Jumping Vice President Vic Method has a theory: “This is a big macho event in Europe. If suddenly you’ve got these little size-four girls jumping comparable distances, the men don’t look so macho anymore.” When the Vancouver ski jump opened in 2008, Lindsey Van of the U.S. out-jumped the men, setting the record of 105.5 meters on the new 95-meter jump and promising Olympic drama now denied, or at least delayed.

Men have been ski jumping since the early 1800s and were part of the first winter Olympics in 1924. The event is spectacular and scary, especially on the biggest hills. A lone skier sits on a bar atop a 215-meter hill (that’s about 705 feet high). He pushes off and speeds down the 382-foot, snow-covered surface at 64 miles an hour. Then suddenly he’s airborne, flying as far as 784 feet, 40 feet high, hitting the ground with such force that, when things go wrong, we’re reminded of that old “Wide World of Sports” footage about “the agony of defeat.”

Women—ski jumping since the 1880s and in FIS-sanctioned events since 1998—take the same risks as the men. The technical difficulty of their events is the same and their performances are comparable, but they don’t get to compete on the sport’s biggest stage, the Olympics.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704533204575047482012978218.html?mod=wsj_share_facebook