80 thoughts on “Obama’s First Term”

  1. It’s funny. Back in 2008 when Obama won, there were a bunch of folks making dire predictions about the next four years. Now these same folks are moving it out another four years when it didn’t happen. Kind of reminds me of chicken little. I think the Tea Party will actually hurt Republicans chances come next election since they (the Tea Party) will keep on insisting on far right candidates that turn off a lot of folks.

    1. What sort of dire predictions? My expectation was that Obama would run a remarkably dishonest administration, that the US would experience a period of stunted growth, that Obama would come up with some sort of socialist legislation (due to his baggage from college days and as a “community organizer”). And I haven’t been disappointed.

    2. “…there were a bunch of folks making dire predictions about the next four years.”

      You need to get out more. They were right.

    3. Did anyone predict that employment as a percentage of population would flatline from 2010 to 2012, at a rate 5 percentage points lower than the 2002-2008 average?

      http://mercatus.org/publication/single-most-accurate-indicator-labor-market-health

      Did anyone predict that Obama would increase the debt by $6 trillion?

      Did anyone predict that an FBI operation woudl cost the lives of over 100 Mexican nationals, a US border agent, and an ICE agent?

      Did anyone predict that the US would insert itself into a civil war and fail to protect its post-civil-war presence against the inevitable counterinsurgencies?

  2. Yes, because tea party candidates did REALLY well in this election.

    I just hope to hell this brings a real conservative party to US politics. One I could vote for when I get a passport.

  3. The Tea Party is defunct. It has been successfully vilified in the public eye, enormously successfully. The only people who don’t think that the Tea Party movement is an extreme social conservative / regressive movement that is heavily racist, anti-immigrant, anti-female, pro big business, etc. are Republicans and maybe a tiny percentage of independents. Most centrists and casual Democrats see the Tea Party as the most right wing of the right wing. Yeah, it sucks, but them’s the facts. It’s time to drop the brand and start over.

    1. What would be the point, Robin? Any rebranding would get tagged as the same “extreme social conservative / regressive movement that is heavily racist, anti-immigrant, anti-female, pro big business, etc”. It’s not the label that is damaged by this vilification. It is us.

      At this point, I think it wise to take some time off before thinking about how things went wrong. Maybe a rebranding is in order or other such tactics? Maybe “Going Galt”? But I think we’ll see more clearly in a few days or weeks than we will at the moment of defeat.

    2. Ya, read a lot of articles about the aftermath and they all include a section on how the changing demographics were bad for Republicans and that Obama’s victory was a victory over racism.

      Romney wasn’t running to ‘put minorities in their place’ and his voters were not motivated by bigotry. They were concerned with the economy, debt, and foreign policy. But it looks like the media and those on the left thought of this race as a battle against bigotry.

      Obama did a great job wedging the demographic groups and stereotyping the GOP as being bigoted against them and this will just continue.

      For the GOP the challenge isn’t so much how they need to appeal to minorities but how do they shatter the racial stereotype applied to them by Democrats.

      1. 15 million fewer people voted in 2012 than 2008.

        The T-party showed up.
        Obama energized his base with free stuff.
        The great middle, who “just wanted it to be over” stayed home.

        Obama won with 11 million fewer votes than in 2008. Let’s ponder on that.

        1. I think that it is far too early to make a definitive determination on who stayed home.

          Lets see what the numbers say….

    3. …and this successfully shows why the country is doomed – 2 entire generations, wasted intellectually and philosophically, that now have the power to determine Presidential elections. The pillars of modern society – education, media, politics – are so skewed, there is little hope for a fix.

    4. The villainifying of the Tea Party was easy to do once the Republican Religious Right took over and stuck their candidates with their social agenda. The Tea Party candidates that lost didn’t lose on their economic philosophy, they lost because of their views that big government should be in the bedroom and mandating social morals and their views that government should be in control of women’s bodies.

      Given the choice between candidates that wanted the government in their wallet versus those who wanted it in their bedroom they choose the former over the real evils of the latter.

      The passage of laws legalizing marijuana and the defeat of laws banning sugary drinks is further proof that the American voters want the freedom to make their own decisions and not have government make decisions for them, especially on marriage and reproduction.

      The lesson for the Republicans is if they want to succeed they have to focus on advocating for freedom of choice not only in the economy, but in the bedroom as well and not use to power of the law to impose moral values on individuals. In short, they need to become the party of Lincoln again, not Ralph Reed.

      Or even more, a party that Ayn Rand could have supported. Remember, she was a illegal immigrant until her marriage to an American citizen, supported abortion when it was illegal and practiced an open marriage with other members of the “Collective”.

        1. Rand,

          Word trouble again?

          The conservative media saw him as one and so did the Tea Party. And he was part of the Tea Party Caucus which is about as much a card carrying member of the Tea Party you are able to get, since the Tea Party doesn’t give out membership cards 🙂

          None of course care if Rand Simberg defined him as a Tea Party candidate.

          http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/08/07/congressman-akins-wins-missouri-gop-senate-primary-to-take-on-sen-mccaskill/

          Tea Party-backed Rep. Akin wins Missouri GOP Senate primary to take on McCaskill

          Published August 08, 2012

          FoxNews.com

          [[[Akin had played up his Tea Party credentials, in an unusual primary race in which all three candidates claimed conservative, outsider appeal.

          The results send yet another Tea Party-backed candidate into the general election, with the McCaskill face-off considered one of the most closely watched Senate races of the year. ]]]

          His House or Representative page where he lists his membership in the Tea Party Caucus.

          http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CC0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fakin.house.gov%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26view%3Darticle%26id%3D1359%26Itemid%3D29&ei=TiabUOiND8eeiQKR_YHIAg&usg=AFQjCNF6b1lsVYdCY9tGqx-8En-BlSP6UA

          1. It takes a genuine moron to think that Fox News is the “conservative media.”

            Akin was not a Tea Party candidate. They only adopted him after the actual Tea Party candidates split the vote in the primary, because he was better than McCaskill.

          2. Rand,

            Doubling down on your errors again? He was part of the Tea Party Caucus long before the election. Or are you now the membership Secretary for the Tea Party?

            As for Fox News, well I guess only someone to right of conservatives would consider them liberal, but google Conservative Media and they are right there as the poster network 🙂

          1. Rand,

            It does to the vast majority of Americans. Only a handful of those on the fringe, folks who actually think liberals are fascist, have a problem with it.

            http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/right+wing

            right wing
             
            noun
            1. members of a conservative or reactionary political party, or those opposing extensive political reform.

            2. such a political party or a group of such parties.

            3. that part of a political or social organization advocating a conservative or reactionary position: The union’s right wing favored a moderate course of action.

          2. Ah, the “life long Republican” is a member of the “reactionary political party”? I guess this explains Matula equating the Mohammed mocking video to yelling fire in a theater. That’s a good definition for reactionary.

            Well, Matula got his wish, the video maker got a year in jail! Who would ever call those who called for the video maker’s imprisonment, “liberal”?

          3. Leland,

            He got a year for breaking parole. But I guess you think its OK for criminals to break parole…

            And the normal Republican Party is not reactionary, only the Tea Party element.

          4. Rand,

            Ahh, but does liberal mean the same thing to you as it does to the rest of America. That is the question…

          5. Breaking parole is one thing. You claimed he yelled fire in a theater. That’s reactionary.

            So which is it moby:
            Do you have so little respect for Muslims that you don’t think they can be mocked?
            or
            Are you just afraid of Muslims that you rather not take your chances?

            I’m betting the latter, based on your fear of the Koch brothers, the tea party, whatever R3 is in your mind, and the apple not falling far from the tree. 🙂

  4. Oh thanks Randy, I really needed that.

    Obama has 4 years 2 and 1/2 months.

    I expect we’ve got half that before another 9/11 type attack. Maybe next year, om 9/11 again.

  5. Don’t count on it. Nobody died in Watergate, and the details on Benghazi are going to come out now. The calls for impeachment will become too loud to ignore.

    Watch for the economy to “unexpectedly” nosedive. Business owners have ridden out the last four years, and a great many will start going Galt, selling their companies and liquidating assets before new tax rules kick in January first.

    Israel cannot wait forever, and will have to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. The reelection of Obama just sped that up.

    Stock up on precious metals – gold, silver, and lead. The examples of Sandy and Katrina should have already convinced you to get a bug-out bag. The next couple of months will be interesting.

    1. I agree with most, but Israel has no hope of knocking out Iran’s nuclear program. It’s just buried too deep. Within the next few years, Iran will get the bomb, and eventually there will be a nuclear exchange which will decimate Israel and annihilate Iran. The die has been cast.

    2. “The calls for impeachment will become too loud to ignore.”

      But they will be ignored. I fully expect Benghazi and F&F to be whitewashed away at this point. At most, a couple of people as low-ranked as possible will be made scapegoats.

    3. There will be no impeachment. Impeachment only occurs of there is public backing for such a thing. The MSM will downplay the report, spin the report as sour grapes and a bad attitude. The GOP will look bad.

    4. Ah, another Impeachment trial.

      Actually you could have several as the House of Representatives basically decides what is an impeachable offense and you only need a simple majority to start a trial.

      Of course there is little chance of getting the two-thirds vote in the Senate to convict the President regardless of the “facts”, but the House could just keep throwing charges over and over…

      Really, the news networks would love it 🙂

  6. Has anyone heard from Mike Griffin yet? Mike who you say? Never mind, he’s not coming back.

  7. Hey All,

    Yea, I can’t wait for the next four years. Retired military – I’ll check my PO Box for my recall letters for when things get worse.

    This will not end well.

    Sigh

    1. There will be no recall.
      Everything ends. Everything. All that we fought for…

      We will quietly cash our monthly retirement checks while watching the country go bankrupt. And while the courts get packed with Obama’s cronies.

  8. Nobody is going to impeach Obama, ever. There is just too much for too many at stake in having the first african-american president complete his term.

    The economic nosedive will be replied to by the Administration and MSM with a barrage of “we didn’t spend enough stimulus.” They will only double down, and force the House to go along lest they lose their seats at midterm thanks to the propaganda. This is going to be the Depression, at least.

    Iran will get the bomb because Israel doesn’t have the resources to destroy enough of their nuc infrastructure at once, and it’s so deeply buried and extensive now thanks to years of buying time while leading around this Administration by the nose that it’s doubtful even the US could destroy it.

    Unless (only maybe) we are willing to use nukes on them – but oh, I forgot, we are also going to unilaterally disarm. “Now, Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich, you are such a reasonable fellow…”

    Need I add that sooner or later, using one delivery system or other, the Iranians, perhaps with aid from all the great Sharia lands that will soon surround Israel (thanks to the arab ‘spring’), will set off one or more nukes there.

    I could go on, but why bother?

  9. What happened to the Tea Party this fall?

    The tea party did fine. The problem is the lack of turnout we expected for Obama didn’t happen. His turnout was higher than 2008. We have to face the fact that these people weren’t fooled. They really want Obama and his policies.

    The American education system under Tides (a family of organizations) and other organizations has worked because Americans haven’t cared enough to do anything about it.

    America has been infiltrated and remade. Now it’s the Saudi’s turn.

    Plato explained this a long time ago.

  10. I give the press a lot of credit for Obama’s re-election. Fast and Furious, Superstorm Sandy, Bengazhi…all of these would have been covered in a significantly more aggressive manner with a GOP administration

    1. Fast and Furious was a ATF program that was deeply flawed. Obama had little to do with it and similar programs were done under the previous administration. Not much of a story actually. Benghazi is the same – not much of a story. Unfortunately bad things happen especially in war. But conservative talk radio is doing their best to turn a molehill into a mountain.

      I think what really hurt the republicans the most was the scorched earth policy they took and disrespect given to Obama. The press, mostly the conservative press including talk radio, did a great job of showcasing this policy so I do give the conservative press a lot of credit too. It just turned off too many people.

      1. “Obama had little to do with it and similar programs were done under the previous administration. ”

        TC, you’re incorrect on the second half of that statement. Let me give you a quick rundown, if you’re willing to listen.
        1. Gunwalker, the Bush program, was organized and run with the help of the Mexican Federal government; F&F was not. In fact, the Mexicans didn’t even know about it.
        2. Gunwalker RFID-tagged guns to attempt to trace them, but eventually the cartels found out about this, so there was no attempt made to track the F&F guns.
        3. As far as I know, the ATF did not pressure gun dealers in Gunwalker to make illegal sales.
        4. As far as I know, no Gunwalker guns resulted in the death of US Border Patrol agents.

      2. Holder lied about his involvement in F&F and it was nothing like what Bush did.

        Heads should roll over Benghazi but they’ve been, how did she put it, shucking and jiving they’re way around the issue. Watergate was nothing in comparison.

        The office of the presidency deserves respect. What Obama has done with it deserves none. Perhaps the worst thing the media has done is allow him to claim credit for things he’s fought against. The media is suppose to expose such hypocrisy but seems incapable of doing even that little thing.

        The conservative press turned off stupid people. The worst thing the so called conservative press has done is give Obama the benefit of the doubt when there was no doubt.

        This country has been corrupted to the point where even the most blatant thing gets a ho hum response instead of the true outrage they aught to receive. The rule of law doesn’t apply to these mobsters. But you can now be jailed for offensive speech making a joke of our bill of rights.

        We went past the tipping point so fast and so far back that we hadn’t realized it. By not dealing with it when we should have (before most of us were born) the problem may not have a solution anymore.

        Yesterday wasn’t a fooled electorate. It was one without American values.

        Americans will struggle to succeed and Obama will continue to take credit for it while working against it. We really aught to go Galt.

      3. Fast and Furious was a ATF program that was deeply flawed. Obama had little to do with it and similar programs were done under the previous administration.

        I take it you’ve never looked into Fast and Furious. Yes, there was a Bush program, but it was halted when smugglers figured out there were RFID tags on their weapons. Here’s what I’ve posted on F&F.

        But let’s consider the results. I doubt even one gun in ten guns made in the US are used in a crime. But let’s consider what happened with guns from Fast and Furious.

        The gun selling started in November 2009, according to Wikipedia. By June 2010, less than a year later, the ATF had sold 1600 such guns and was aware that roughly 300 had been found at crime scenes in Mexico and the US. They still ran Fast and Furious till mid December 2010 (almost half a year later!) when US Border Agent Brian Terry was killed in a fire fight which included two guns from Fast and Furious. Further, it appears that every one of these guns went to cartels. There’s no illusion that the guns could have been meant for peaceful use.

        So basically, the ATF deliberately armed criminals who they knew were killing people. And we find the guns showing up at crime scenes involving hundreds of murders, both in Mexico and the US. That’s accessory to murder. It’s pretty damn cut and dry.

        It’s also worth noting that the purchasers which bought Fast and Furious guns probably also bought other things as well. So when agents were prevented from stopping F&F guns from crossing the border, what else went with those guns? That may have been the true point of F&F, to allow a cartel a window of about a year to smuggle out of the US into Mexico.

        The Obama administration should be finding the truth of this in court, not protecting the guilty.

      4. Yes why should Obama be held accountable for anything that happens in the one branch of government he is actually in charge of.

      5. “I think what really hurt the republicans the most was the scorched earth policy they took and disrespect given to Obama”

        Obama ran the most negative divisive campaign in the last 100 years. His campaign said Romney and the Republicans wanted to put black people back in slavery, kill old people, ban birth control, take away women’s right to vote and many other horrible things.

        1. I would say its the opposite – Republicans ran a divisive campaign based on mis-information, lies, scare tactics and trickery. I’m not sure how you got all those ideas from Obama’s campaign but at least one of them came from the Republicans platform – there could indeed be certain birth control that get banned. I’m surprised to see you took Joe Biden so seriously but most folks took it as a bad metaphor. I’d suggest getting news from multiple news sources instead of just FOX.

          1. It wasn’t just Biden saying those things. Obama kept saying Romney wanted to go back to the 50’s and undo all the civil rights progress. It was a campaign based on race, gender, and class or as it is being called today demographics.

            Obama lied about Romney’s position on the auto bailout and lets not forget Benghazi where the transcripts of his Rose Garden speech and 60 minutes interview show he went out of his way not to call it a terrorist attack and to blame it on a youtube video, the creator of which was just sentenced to a year in jail.

  11. I think Kurtz is right that some of the biggest effects of Obama’s 2008 election will only be felt thanks to his reelection, especially Obamacare, but also things like education reform and new car mileage standards. The question is what the public will think of them.

    In general voters don’t like change of any sort (as much as they like to vote for politicians promising change), and they especially don’t like change if the thing they care most about — the economy — is getting worse. In a worsening economy, everything bad can be blamed on the changes being made (e.g. blame the financial collapse on the Bush tax cuts, or 2012 unemployment on Obamacare). But, conversely, if the economy is improving, everything else looks better too. Clinton and Reagan’s policies got more popular as the economy improved, even when the policies didn’t change.

    So I think the big question is whether the economy will improve over the next two and four years. If it does, and the signs are encouraging, the entire Obama agenda will look better as a result. If it doesn’t, everything Obama’s done will be tainted.

    1. So I think the big question is whether the economy will improve over the next two and four years. If it does, and the signs are encouraging, the entire Obama agenda will look better as a result. If it doesn’t, everything Obama’s done will be tainted.

      Will it Jim? Or will it look like those mean Republicans holding poor Obama back. One of the remarkable things about this has been Obama’s ability to divert blame from his policies.

      1. Nah knowing Republicans if the economy gets better it was because the Republicans held the House. If the economy gets worse it was because Obama was President.

        1. Nah knowing Democrats if the economy gets better it was because Obama held the White House. If the economy gets worse it was because Republicans held the House.

        2. There’s your problem ‘Zilla, always looking through that statist filter. The economy grows because the private sector takes the risks. The economy fails when government rides the private sector to exhaustion.

          1. You seem to be a believer in the markets. However the state has a role to play in ensuring that the market has the conditions for it to be able to function properly namely the rule of law, defense, common infrastructure like roads, etc.

            There is plenty wrong that the Obama government and the Bush government before it did. Would the deficit be this large without spending so much money on longwinded wars, or bailing out banks which should have gone bankrupt? Instead of taking lessons from the S&L crisis where after the bankruptcies and increasing the deposit rates the economy quickly recovered we got into this mess. Romney did not say he would change the way this is being handled. Quite the opposite he said his number one priority in the economy was saving the banks. This is one of the reasons why he invariably lost. His program wasn’t all that different from Obama’s where it mattered.

      2. I think voters gave Obama a pass on the state of the economy, not because they blamed Republicans, but because the general trend over his time in office has been positive (i.e. he had the good timing to take office when things were hitting bottom). If the economy had been a bit worse this year, we’d have President-elect Romney.

        If things start getting worse I expect Obama to get the blame, no matter what the GOP does. That’s the structural feature that encourages minority party obstruction: the president will get blamed for whatever bad happens, and credited for whatever good happens, so the minority party has no incentive to help make things better.

        I’d love to see a big grand bargain with the House GOP over the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, payroll tax, sequestration cuts, etc (the poorly named “fiscal cliff”). Say, the GOP gets to keep the Bush tax rates for the rich, and repeal of the defense cuts, while Obama gets a carbon tax, more infrastructure stimulus, and a continued payroll tax cut tied to the unemployment rate. Or a big deal on immigration (tighter enforcement for a path to citizenship, and, ideally, greatly expanded legal immigration). But I don’t think Cantor and Boehner will see the advantage of such a deal, and Obama doesn’t need a big deal to guarantee his re-election, so I’ll be very surprised if we get one.

        Instead we’ll get a showdown over the tax rates, and I don’t know who will blink first. Will Obama agree to keep the top rate at 35% for a while longer? Will the House agree to drop the other rates, while the top rate goes up to 39.6%? Eventually one side is going to give in, because the alternative is a recession.

        1. the minority party has no incentive to help make things better.

          It couldn’t possibly be because they have a different idea of what “makes things better.” It’s not like they have posterity, either. They’re just some alien race of creatures with NO incentive to make things better. Jeesus, you are just a walking cartoon character parroting shit he read off the Leftosphere.

          1. They have no political incentive to make things better, and politics is what they do. Two-party politics is a zero-sum game; neither party can gain power without the other one losing it.

            At one point the GOP’s “different idea” for health care reform was an individual mandate. Its different idea for environmental regulation was cap and trade. Its different idea for economic stimulus was tax cuts and infrastructure spending. Its different idea for immigration was a comprehensive plan with a path to citizenship.

            Then a Democratic president got behind those different ideas, and threatened to use them to make things better, and himself more popular; at that point opposing their former ideas became a GOP political imperative.

            The same incentives apply in reverse when the GOP has the White House. In the 2000s the Dems in Congress were reluctant to support an immigration deal that they’d jump at today. The GOP caucuses are more disciplined, but the basic dynamic works both ways.

            My favored solution is to undercut this perverse incentive by removing the opportunities for minority party obstruction (e.g. get rid of the Senate, or at least the filibuster). The party in the White House will get what it wants, and if the voters don’t like the results they’ll be thrown out. Nobody will have both the power and the political incentive to make things worse.

          2. Your error is reification. Just because an idea is offered by a minority of a minority party doesn’t mean it’s embraced by a majority of a majority party some time in the future with completely different people involved.

          3. No, the very same people turned against the exact ideas that they had championed in some cases just months earlier (I believe Gingrich’s climate change pirouette happened in a matter of months; his position on Libya intervention switched within hours). In 2008 Jim DeMint, one of the most conservative Republican Senators, endorsed Romney, citing RomneyCare. In 2012 Jim DeMint held off on endorsing Romney because of RomneyCare. It wasn’t Romney or RomneyCare that had changed, it was the fact that Obama had passed a law very much like RomneyCare.

          4. Republican behavior of the last four years was party before country so yes, based on this, they had no incentive to help make things better. Many of the ideas coming from Obama were ideas conservatives supported in years past – so no, Republicans didn’t have different ideas, they just didn’t like who was driving them.

            What is the total bummer is that if Republicans had made an effort to work with the Democrats and compromise on things, we would have had better outcomes of what came out of Congress versus the one sided deals we are seeing now. Of course when the Senate Minority has as his party’s #1 priority to get rid of Obama, it certainly didn’t help things. I can expect behavior like this with kids but from adults, come on.

          5. Republicans didn’t have different ideas

            Completely false. You simply had no interest in looking at those ideas since it doesn’t fit your narrative.

  12. I can’t say I was surprised since I was expecting Obama to win this election. US Presidents usually get reelected especially when there is an ongoing war in progress. The Republicans still hold the House and the Democrats hold the Senate again. It remains to be seen how this will play out. Already I hear here calls for impeachment but of course when Bush lied about WMD in Iraq, causing the deaths of many Iraqi civilians and US military personnel, plus some $1 Trillion in debt did anyone try to impeach him? No because the country was at war at the time.

    If the two main parties in the US can’t come to some sort of compromise and we keep seeing these sorts of non-budgets then the situation might get pretty dire indeed in particular for those of us interested in space development. The Senate unfortunately still contains the usual suspects like Nelson and Hatch so we will probably be seeing a lot of the same antics from these people.

    1. “US Presidents usually get reelected especially when there is an ongoing war in progress.”

      You wouldn’t know there was a war going on based on the coverage it receives in our media.

      “Already I hear here calls for impeachment but of course when Bush lied about WMD in Iraq”

      It is possible to be wrong and not be lying. But we did find WMD in Iraq.

      http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/ns/world_news-mideast/n_africa/

      http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2012/Jul-30/182706-uk-experts-to-help-iraq-destroy-chemical-residues.ashx

      “did anyone try to impeach him? No because the country was at war at the time.”

      No, because Bush didn’t do anything illegal. That will be the same reason why Obama is not impeached over Benghazi. Lying in a debate and on national TV shows is not illegal and neither is refusing to send aid to Americans under attack.

      While F&F might cost Holder his job eventually, it is unlikely that it will get to Obama.

    2. No, deficits don’t matter, remember? Just stamp out the dollar bills, there will be zero consequences. Please stay on-script.

    3. So Godzilla, ya know if Bush lied about WMD in Iraq, so did Hillary. Add in Benghazi now too. You calling for her impeachment?

  13. Obama now has four years and a Democratic Senate. He can stack the SCUTUS and other judicial benches with progressives and socialists.

    That is what scares me. His influence will live long after he is gone.

    1. I’m not sure it will be easy for Obama to appoint judges. The GOP has enough votes to filibuster, and while Reid has been moving towards filibuster reform, I don’t think he has the votes to make dramatic changes on day 1. I expect we’ll hear more about Bill Frist’s “nuclear option”.

  14. Silver lining: COTS should continue. And inevitable budget cuts to NASA should strangle SLS with some finality.

  15. For those who want a preview of Obama’s second term (“BOII”), the second part of the ATLAS SHRUGGRF movie coming out next week.

    It will be of special interest to readers of this blog because two of most prolific commenters, Chris Gerrib and Jim, appear in cameo roles. Baghdad Jim will appear as spokesperson for economic czar Wesley Mouch, telling the sheeple, “Do not believe your lying eyes! There are no shortages! The economy is fine! The law of Supply and Demand has been repealed!Business is booming! All appearances to the contrary are mere illusions –lies put forth by the great Satan Galt!” Gerrib will appear as local cop Officer “Chip” Diller shouting at the panic-stricken masses, “Please, maintain order! You will all receive your rations in due order! Please, trust our rulers! Our rulers know what they’re doing!”

    1. people whose names begin with letters later in the alphabet are victims of terrible discrimination

      I once discriminated terribly. I was born in NY and have a 099 social security number. So when registering at LACC in the late 70s, they had two lines. One for everyone with a SS# from 500 to 999 and the other line just for me.

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