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AfD nomination of Quantec

An article that you have been involved in editing, Quantec, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Quantec. Thank you. Reyk _YO! 21:38, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Will Rogers

I don't know if you know much about Will Rogers, and it's hard to explain him if you don't. Are you old enough to recall when people would talk over the water cooler about Johnny Carson's quips on The Tonight Show? Let's just say that Rogers, in his era, was like Johnny Carson in his era, only much more so. He was seen, heard and read in every possible medium of the time: newspapers, books, films, radio, and "live" in vaudeville and as a lecturer, as he styled himself (he used to say the difference between a humorist and a lecturer is that a humorist entertains, and a lecturer annoys). When he died in that plane crash in 1935, it was like a national tragedy. Rogers had endless comments on everything you can think of about life in America, endless sage advice. If I spend all evening here, I could come up with many quotes, which I bring up on appropriate occasions. A good one I recall is one that I think he used at the beginning of his autobiography, which I read many decades ago, and so don't remember much except this, which is kind of paraphrasing: "An autobiography is where you talk about all the things you wish you'd done, and leave out all the things you wish you hadn't done." He was constantly ragging Congress. He was credited with the comment, "We have the best Congress money can buy!" One quote that struck me in the wake of 9/11/01 is this one, which no longer quite works, but it did in Rogers day, regarding America having "friends" in other nations. George Will once said that nations don't have "friends", they have interests. Rogers put it this way: "The two best friends America ever had are the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean." Baseball Bugs 02:06, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

His comments about Coolidge, that you had not heard before, were a parody of course. I recall another one, regarding Coolidge's alleged advice in the stock market: "Buy only good stock. Wait till the price goes up, and then sell it. If it don't go up... don't buy it!" I gather Coolidge was not amused by Rogers. But then, not much amused Coolidge in general. I recall seeing Rogers talking to an audience featuring FDR (who had a pretty good sense of humor anyway), and seeing FDR just roaring with laughter. Whether or not he really thought something was funny, he knew which side his bread was buttered on. And Woody Allen once said that Groucho Marx was the best comedian this country ever produced, and he might be right, but as an overall admired humorist, Rogers was the king. Baseball Bugs 02:49, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks!

Thank you for the kind welcome and for your input. Believe me, we're all sick here where I live, so we can always use happy moments when we can get them. :) Hero of Time 87 (talk) 07:13, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Kathy Griffin

Why do you revert my update on Kathy Griffin claiming that YouTube is not a reliable source when other references cite YouTube in this very same article? Chartsfo (talk) 17:59, 2 January 2009 (UTC)chartsfo

Sorry - I didn't see those. Feel free to remove them if they're the only references for a controversial assertion. Kelly 18:00, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Kathy Griffin redux

here's another citation to another source:

http://www.nypost.com/seven/01022009/news/regionalnews/happy______new_146872.htm

But of course someone has now locked her article for "excessive vandalism".

If attempting to put legitimate, verifiable information is considered "excessive vandalism" (any one of the editors could have viewed the cited video on the same source—YouTube—that was allowed in prior reference citations) then there seems to be something wrong with Misplaced Pages. Chartsfo (talk) 18:09, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Feel free to propose your edit at Talk:Kathy Griffin. Kelly 18:15, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Sarah Palin

I wonder if John McCain had any clue as to what a "media monster" he was creating when he nominated Palin. Every move connected with her is being covered, like it used to be with Jackie Onassis or Elizabeth Taylor. Wholly out of proportion, at this point. However, with her grandson now born, maybe the frenzy will fade in a month or two. Baseball Bugs 21:42, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

I've been amazed myself. I was aware of Palin before McCain selected her, just as an example of a libertarian politician who bootstrapped herself from housewife to Governor - something I enjoyed seeing (You know, I guess Caroline Kennedy, you know, would be an example of an opposite approach to politics, you know). I never really liked McCain, but I have to say Ann Coulter was correct in characterizing McCain as something like an insect that gives birth to the new generation before dying. McCain's centrist RINO idiocy is likely the past of the GOP, while Palin's exciting new feminism is likely the future. The attacks on her remind me sharply of the attacks on Reagan. Kelly 21:49, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Reagan was a seasoned veteran by the time he ran for President. Her next 4 years as Governor might make her a better candidate for higher office than she is now. However, I might take her more seriously if she didn't adhere to the belief that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Baseball Bugs 21:52, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Heh - . She doesn't believe that. (Thought I did until recently - I watched too many Land of the Lost re-runs.) Kelly 21:55, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Maybe that's one of the bogus rumors about her, like the interview in the towel. Baseball Bugs 21:59, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, it is~a bogus rumor. If you want to see full-frontal Palin Derangement Syndrome, check out this site. The people there believe that not only did Sarah Palin fake her pregnancy with Trig Palin, but that Bristol Palin faked her pregnancy with her son Tripp. (Apparently there's a free-range uterus somewhere in the Palin family.) The conspiracy theories have grown ever more complex as evidence emerges to disprove their initial assertions. By this point, at least dozens of people must be involved in the conspiracy, and they are all keeping silent. If true, Sarah Palin is a Moriarty-style evil genius and should be placed in charge of our intelligence services, :) It's kind of like the assertions by the 9/11 truthers that George W. Bush is simultaneously a retarded babbling chimp and a genius capable of orchestrating and covering up the 9/11 attacks. Kelly 22:07, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

A free-range uterus. Now there's an icky concept. I was always skeptical of the towel story, yet hopeful - but if it hasn't appeared on Youtube by now, there can't be anything to it. Baseball Bugs 22:14, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Palin has a child named Trig. In order to improve her standing with the math-and-science community, she needs some kids or grandkids with names like Algebra and Calculus. Baseball Bugs 22:24, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

If the towel thing made YouTube, I'd totally be there. Even Maxim says Palin is the USA's sexiest politician. But personally, I attribute the name of her grandson Tripp to unfortunate Star Trek: Enterprise fandom. Kelly 22:28, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Sexier than John McCain? Well, that's not a fair comparison. I'm sexier than John McCain. However, I wouldn't kick Condi Rice out, either; she's pretty cute, if she'd get that dental problem fixed. Laura Bush is way up there on the cute list, but she's technically not a politician. Baseball Bugs 23:35, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Heh - yeah, I'll miss Laura Bush - she's much better than our first Klingon First Lady. Yeah, I'm a Condi fan, too - I think she's our country's most accomplished female government figure. Too bad she got Bush cooties on her. Kelly 01:02, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

The days of the demure first lady are just about done. Laura was exceptional. But Hillary, and especially Nancy Reagan, have laid the groundwork for Michelle Obama. I wonder what Rice will do now. If I were Obama, I would keep her around in some capacity. But we'll see. And if she had a few "Bush cooties", McCain was downright infested. Baseball Bugs 01:21, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Rice was a failure on pretty much every level. I've never seen the State Department reduced to the level of impotence and irrelevance that she presided over. Even where her dated expertise in Sovietology might have theoretically been applicable - say, in dealing with Russia and Putin - we screwed the pooch in a way that would have been unimaginable 8 short years ago. The single biggest single condemnation of Condi Rice is that she is generally considered George W. Bush's foreign-policy mentor. Nuff said. MastCell  05:16, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Meh - personally I think Bush's foreign policy was the only bright spot of his administration. It was his bullcrap big-spending domestic policy that I couldn't stand. But at least he saved the honor of the military by insisting on victory in Iraq, in the face of Congressional Democrats who were actively seeking defeat. I remember Hillary Clinton telling General Petraeus that it required a "willing suspension of disbelief" to think that things were turning around there - yeah, real prescient. But the next few years should be fun - with a Clinton as Secretary of State, and a bunch of Clinton retreads/Chicago machine politicians in the administration, the leaks and scandals will flow like fine wine. Kelly 05:33, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

I'm looking forward to some good old Democratic scandals - the occasional adulterous relationship or influence peddling will be a welcome change from bet-you-can't-top-this violations of the Constitution and the law. I hear what you're saying about the surge and the military's honor - but what about the global effect of Bush's foreign policy? Compare our standing in the world and our power (by any measure - military, economic, diplomatic, moral) on January 20, 2000 to the present. There probably hasn't been a decline that precipitous at any other point in American history - and it wasn't a lack of military prowess, but abysmally poor political leadership and foreign policy that got us there. I realize I'm speaking from ignorance here to some degree - I'm not a member of the armed services. But to me, respect for the military would also entail a commitment to veterans' health. The Administration's VA budgets and the situation at Walter Reed make a lot of Bush's rhetoric about his respect for the military sound hollow and hypocritical to me. And ultimately, respect for the military would mandate not risking the lives of soldiers without a clear exit strategy that takes into account at least one contingency (other than being greeted as liberators by a country that happily signs over its oil wealth to us). Hey, how did I get on this soapbox? :) MastCell  05:58, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

<undent>I was stationed overseas throughout the whole Clinton administration...trust me, other countries didn't like us any better back then than they do now. They still won't like us under Obama...and the milquetoast Europeans still won't fight no matter who is in charge. I look at the Germans in particular and shake my head - only 2-3 generations ago they were, man-for-man, the most feared fighting force in the world, and now they're too wimpy to even take the fight to some raggedy-assed muj in Afghanistan. I will grant you a point on military healthcare, but the major problem is with PTSD - and much of the time that's because troops deny that they need help - it's a cultural thing. Support on stuff like prosthetics and rehab has jumped light-years ahead of where it used to be. I've never seen a president so popular with the troops as Bush - he's a rock star when he makes an appearance at a base. Did you know he personally wrote to each and every family who lost a serviceman in the war? With Clinton, troops had to be ordered to show up, and they would stand around bitching until the whole ordeal was over and he left. And yeah - the initial occupation of Iraq was crap. The First Gulf War was run by Vietnam vets that were mostly gone by the time of Iraq, and we were stuck with the crappy perfumed political generals that rose to the top through the 1990s, and they mostly suck - they seemed more interested in protecting their little fiefdoms from Rumsfeld's attempted reforms than actually winning the war.

Oh, you can soapbox all you like - I enjoy talking about this stuff. :) Kelly 22:01, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, the handful of Europeans I interact with on a daily basis are all very nostalgic for Clinton - a Dutch fellow told me that Hillary was more popular than Obama in the Netherlands during primary season, because people there had such positive feelings about Bill Clinton. Of course, it may be sampling bias, or retrospective lowering of the bar - when Clinton was President, I thought he was deeply flawed and badly underperformed his potential, but measured against the following 8 years, I'd put him on Mount Rushmore.

I don't think you can blame the Europeans for not lining up behind us enthusiastically. Look at our diplomatic approach - we started from a moment after 9/11 where everyone was sympathetic to us. And by sheer ineptness and arrogance, we not only squandered that opportunity, but turned everyone against us. All so that a small group of witless neocons with a schoolgirl crush on Winston Churchill could have a laboratory to test their dissertations and whitepapers. You can't treat Europe as an effeminate irrelevancy 99% of the time and then turn around and expect them to jump when you need a hand with something. Well, maybe Tony Blair, but that's about it.

I can't say I'm an expert on why things in Iraq have gone so badly. But my sense is that the occupation failed not because of the generals, but because of the total lack of civilian political leadership and planning. The generals asked for more troops upfront, and some warned Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney that their expectations were unreasonable - those generals were promptly retired. In any case, the military did what it was asked to do with what it was given - the problem was that there was no plan beyond "we will be greeted as liberators", and no budget beyond "the reconstruction will pay for itself". The catastrophic decisions were all made shortly after the initial victory, and they were made totally on the spur of the moment and often later contradicted or reversed just as arbitrarily. It was completely clear that there was no meaningful leadership - all of the effort was expended on dreaming up bogus rationales to "sell" the war, making domestic political capital out of the war, sticking it to the Democrats as defeatists and troop-haters, and questioning the patriotism of anyone who criticized anything Cheney/Bush wanted to do at any given moment.

As for Bush's popularity with the troops, I'm not inclined to be sanctimonious toward people in uniform. They bear the brunt of Bush's decisions in a way that I don't. From my perspective, if I were president, I'd feel like an unforgivably hypocritical ass if I made a public show of appreciation for the troops but didn't bother to lift a finger to plan for their safe exit from an engagement or even plan for a single less-than-optimal contingency. Or if I made speeches about the troops' sacrifices, and then went home and slashed the VA's budget in order to protect tax cuts for people already making a very comfortable living. But that's politics. MastCell  07:09, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

I lived in Europe for 9 years...get back once in a while, I still have a couple of godchildren there, kids of locals that I was friends with. The supposed goodwill only lasted a few days/weeks before it was back to the same old B.S. from the European press - they were all asking "What did the U.S. do to deserve the attacks?" with the assumption that we did deserve them. Trust me, I lived it up close and personal - protesters and everything. But they've been basically worthless allies for a long time - couldn't even do anything about the Balkans, right in their own backyard. Soldiers from the Anglosphere are pretty good. The average French soldier (especially the Legion) is good but their senior leadership is horrific.

The only general I can think of that said we needed more troops for Iraq was Shinseki...but apparently he didn't feel that strongly about it. He continued right on as Chief of Staff until his term was up, then he retired like all the Chiefs do when they're done. Nobody forced him to retire, and he if he felt more troops were critical to the mission, he should have resigned rather than accept the mission without them - but he didn't. That said, the whole relationship between Rumsfeld and the generals was strange. Before 9/11, Rumsfeld was beginning an effort to transform the DoD away from the Cold War structure we still have into something smaller and more flexible (something that really needs to be done) - and he was kicking over a lot of fiefdoms in the process. Generals can't defy the SecDef and the CINC openly so you end up with a lot of foot-dragging and passive-aggressive bullcrap. On the other hand, the SecDef or CINC don't override the generals' recommendations on military strategy. So you get a Mexican standoff and crappy strategies like troops holing up in mega-bases in Iraq while the muj kill civilians and put IEDs on the patrol routes. Ugh.

Was VA funding really cut? I haven't noticed from my worms-eye view, things seem to be improving. There are a lot less people using the VA than before though - I hate to say this (it feels morbid), but the WWII and Korea guys that used to fill the places up are dying off now. Haven't heard many complaints from the GWOT vets that use the places, and I know quite a few.

I guess, despite Bush's numerous mistakes, I have to ultimately give him credit for keeping the country safe since 9/11, and liberating 60 million people from tyranny is nothing to sneeze at. Hopefully Obama can hold those gains. Kelly 07:49, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

"Well, the handful of Europeans I interact with on a daily basis are all very nostalgic for Clinton." ( MastCell ) LOL. That reminds me of the infamous Barbara Streisand comment that Bush MUST have stolen the election in 2000 because 'everyone I know voted for Gore.' Liberals are famous for living in an insular world. They associate almost exclusively with like-minded liberals and begin to think that their POV is monolithic and everyone else is a 'fringe right wing nutjob.' 24.21.105.252 (talk) 20:22, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Wow, more Obama corruption problems even before the inauguration. Even Bill Clinton didn't have issues like this - I remember don't ask, don't tell and his Attorney General nominees hiring illegal aliens, or not paying Social Security taxes, as being the main issues. Obama's wearing all the persistent corruption of the Democratic Party around his neck. Maybe the American people will be looking for a grassroots corruption-fighter the next time round, instead of hopeychanginess. And we've got you know, you know, Caroline Kennedy, you know, maybe coming to the Senate, along with Roland Burris, who the Democrats want to count as 3/5 of a Senator, and Al Franken, the new face of the Democratic Party. There's not enough popcorn for the spectators watching the politics going on right now. Kelly 21:38, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

OK there. Thanks. Remember your party was royally whipped by the US voters. And they enjoyed every single fucking second of it. Clinton was 10000X the president of W the liar. (WMD's my fat fucking ass).OrangeMarlin 22:27, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

AfD which might be of interest to you

You contributed to the article so I'm letting you know: Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/John McCain lobbyist controversy, February 2008 Borock (talk) 09:53, 3 January 2009 (UTC)