Well, if you didn’t, Michelle Obama went out of her way to tell you this week. Parents can be real fun sometimes, can’t they?

Any interesting puberty related stories she is ready to share?

Update: Pelosi says 20,000 jobs lost & million giving up on work = Stimulus SUCCESS! ALSO FOX explains the numbers further

20,000 job were lost in January while the overall unemployment rate fell to 9.7%.EVERYBODY CELEBRATE!! Wait, the prediction for January had the economy gaining 5,000 jobs and overall unemployment jumping to 10.1%. Huh? So the estimate was that we would gain more jobs and that would result in higher unemployment. We lost 20,000 jobs, but the unemployment rate went down. Yes, something does smell fishy… and it is not fish.

For the answer, you have to read a little deeper into the numbers:

<blockquote>A sharp increase in the number of people giving up looking for work helped to depress the jobless rate. The number of ‘discouraged job seekers’ rose to 1.1 million in January from 734,000 a year ago.</blockquote>

Yes, you read that right, 1.1 MILLION people stopped looking for work in January. It is that bad, they just said “you know what, not working and looking for work are almost exactly the same thing.”

OK, so maybe hold off on the celebrating.

I chose not to watch a bunch of talentless hacks waste time by engaging in bizarre behavior while utilizing deception to score temporary points before reality set back into the American people because action could never life up to promise. I watched American Idol instead.

If true this is downright criminal and would go to show the Obama administrations disregard for our military, security, and the decency of the office. Found via AtlasShrugs

No, really, the White House served ACORN cookies during their holiday party. Found via Snark & Boobs and Big Government.

Like most man-made disasters, the Obama Presidency started with astonishingly high expectations that had nowhere to go but crashing toward the Earth. Think Hindenburg, think Titanic, think Snakes on a Plane. Obama painted himself a savior, what the nation got was George Bush in even more socialist and befuddled clothing.

Think about Obama’s list of accomplishments. The president ran on cutting waste and changing Washington. He then promoted and signed a massive stimulus bill written by the most corrupt institution on Earth, the US Congress. The bill was sold as a job creator but unemployment actually went up. Worse for the Obama administration, waste and the inability to do basic accounting have only added to its failures, leaving the president in the final weeks of 2009 taking credit for a dip in unemployment from 10.2% to 10%. Break out the champagne!

Next up, Obama won a Nobel prize for doing nothing. Well, great. The problem? His prize for peace was accepted a week or so after announcing the escalation of War in Afghanistan, ouch! He at least scored points with the left for trying to end the war in Iraq. Bad news is that a fresh wave of terrorist attacks are starting to make us wonder about the future of that nation. Oh, plus Mr. Peace has also been bombing Pakistan since early on in his presidency, but who pays attention to stuff like that? I am all for bombing Pakistan, but no one is willing to give me a prize for it.

Since no other legislative accomplishments were had, Cap & Trade is dead, Health Care seems shaky at best but most likely dead for now, let’s go back to that peace prize. Obama also won for nuclear non proliferation. Woops, there is that whole Iran thing.

The President promised to close Gitmo in a year, but that doesn’t seem likely. He lifted the ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. That pleased the left but since we have no real money to fund stem cell research or much else, who cares?

He did pay an enormous amount of money for old cars. These cars were then destroyed. A temporary rise in car sales was met with a giant bottoming out. So… yeah. We own clunkers and we didn’t even scrap them to the bone for parts. Way to go!

In year one of the Obama presidency, it took the President longer to pick out a dog than decide on wasting trillions of taxpayer dollars. He continued most of the policies of the Bush administration that liberals hate like the Patriot Act, domestic spying, and the War in Afghanistan. He took the massive spending that contributed to our financial mess and turbo charged it. He appointed an assortment of Czars who are basically insane and have only further destroyed his credibility.

The nation in financial ruin, corporations both benefiting wildly while at the same time being consumed by the government, and lobbyists in the White House after promising throughout the campaign there wouldn’t be, all round out a pretty terrible presidency so far. There are still a few weeks left but with the Congress ready for vacation and Obama no doubt ready to play even more golf, I don’t see much hope or change coming out of the White House as we close off his first year.

The United States and Russia do not intend to, and cannot, create the future government of Afghanistan. It is up to the Afghans themselves to determine their future. – Joint US/Russia release on Afghanistan – November 13th 2001

The comedian Sam Kinison had a routinue that described succinctly and almost eloquently, in its own way, our past and current travails. Noting the futility of programs to ease hunger, sold through celebrity television charity pitches, he would speak into the microphone as if speaking to a suffering family in Africa or the Middle East. “You live in the (expletive) desert,” he would yell, “move to where the food is!” Pretending to pickup clumps of silicone he would add, “You see this? This is sand, nothing grows here, you live in the desert!”

Our war in Afghanistan has hit its obvious conclusion. It is the same conclusion that was met by every outside nation that ever entered the land, though our battle is far less bloody and costly in comparison to what other nations have endured. In the end, no matter what we do, we will be incapable of forcing order in Afghanistan and will leave knowing that it will only be a matter of time before some other lunatic steps in to brutalize and then organize the people to attack us and our allies.

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Let me be blunt, troop surges or no, I don’t believe we have any strategy for Afghanistan and we may have no chance of actually “winning” anything. Let me be even more blunt, I don’t think we ever did have a strategy and I don’t know if we ever could have any real strategy for the long term security or stability of that nation. Republican or Democrat, Bush or Obama, the endeavor over there has been running on an empty tank of gas toward the edge of a cliff in the middle of nowhere for a long while. We are faced with either running out of gas in a desert or plummeting toward our doom.

Call me what you like, from what I can tell Afghanistan is a wasteland. Courted for centuries because of its strategic location, in a world where we can fly wherever we want, the country has about zero value other than being a great place to grow drugs and hide murderers. Oh sure, who doesn’t want a place to grow drugs and hide murderers, but that is what we have large swathes of South America for.

The problem with our war in Afghanistan is pretty simple. We went there to find the people who perpetrated 9/11 and to kill terrorists. We did a good job at first. Then we realized there is a silly little catch. We can kill terrorists as long as they are hanging out in the barren wasteland of Afghanistan. The moment they cross an invisible line into the barren wasteland border region of Pakistan, game over. So, yeah, pretty much screwed there. McCrystal or not, I have yet to hear an actual viable plan for dealing with that border over the long haul. We cannot protect our border, what the hell are we going to do in Afghanistan?

Our other objective has always been bringing order to the chaos of Afghanistan’s backward tribal system. I am sure there are some nice people in Afghanistan and I wouldn’t want to disparage them when I make this next statement but, sorry, it is true. These tribal leaders are like the sand people in Star Wars only with brutal gang rapes and honor stoning of women.

Afghanistan is a nation historically in constant conflict with no order or central authority. The people have placed their lives into the hands of drug dealers who brutally abuse them. Somehow our leaders, both Republican and Democrat, look at that situation and keep asking, “I wonder why they haven’t taken to democracy and reform?” This makes me wonder if our leaders are less than or equal to the worthlessness of the Afghanistan leaders.

The president has taken almost a year to decide what to do in Afghanistan. In that time the situation has gotten worse. He has had time to do a lot of golfing. He has had time to ram through thousand page plus legislation that appeared out of nowhere and further bankrupted our country. He has had time to run fundraisers and hang with celebrities. He has had time to play a lot of basketball. He has had time to call police racists and wade into all kinds of other domestic drama.

Now Democrats and the easily lead media are hailing him as a great deliberator for taking a year to decide what Generals probably could have walked an engaged person through in a day. Now that he has reportedly made up his mind, he won’t actually tell us his decision for another week. From the media reports I have heard it will take two more years for all the troops he will add to the theater to actually get there whenever he gets around to start sending them.

Is there a plan for Pakistan? Who knows. Is there a measurable or two for success? No idea. Will this plan make any headway into the overarching reality that the War is being influenced by much larger players *cough CHINA, RUSSIA cough* who are delightfully watching our demise? No idea.

So a year of deliberation and…? Maybe Obama will get around to answering a couple of those questions next week? Hopefully it won’t just be a series of speeches with a lot of platitudes and the only real questions coming from Code Pink while the news media giggle and fawn over their leader.

I want to “win” in Afghanistan, I just don’t know what winning actually means. I distrust Obama’s ability to run a War or make a decision that doesn’t result in having the opposite effect of what he intended, like the decisions he has made on the economy. The problem is, I have no faith in elected Republicans either and no faith that there actually is a solution in Afghanistan that doesn’t take every resource we have. So here I sit, thinking about Afghanistan, thinking no one has a REAL plan and neither do I.

Is it time to bring home the troops?

Luckily all that red was “deficit neutral”… JUST KIDDING, there is no such thing! Seriously though, if the Post Office cannot be run right, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, you name it, what makes people believe a 1,000+ page bill creating a new health care system will be “deficit neutral”?

It is easy to show stimulus success, if you just make the data up and create your own parts of the United States. Maybe this is part of Obama’s 57 states?