Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary

How Much More Of This Should We Take?

15 Comments

I think that this is the most pathetic attorney general in the nation’s history:

If you thought Mr. Holder’s stubborn refusal to speak the words “radical Islam” was bad during yesterday’s House testimony, get this one: “I’ve just expressed concerns on the basis of what I’ve heard about the [Arizona immigration] law. But I’m not in a position to say at this point, not having read the law, not having had the chance to interact with people are doing the review, exactly what my position is.”

And yet, he was putting the Justice Department into motion to legally challenge it, and both he and the Secretary of State have been criticizing it. They’re both lawyers. It’s not a long bill. He should resign.

[Update a few minutes later]

Heather McDonald on one particularly idiotic claim about the bill:

It should not be necessary to rebut Councilman Reyes’s hysterical fabrications, but for his fellow members of the L.A. City Council, who compared Arizona’s law to Nazi Germany and to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and for all those other grandstanding politicians who are busily denouncing Arizonans’ racism, a primer is apparently needed.

If Mr. Reyes was planning to fly to Arizona from L.A. (pre-boycott, of course), he would need either his driver’s license or his passport to get on a plane. So we had better add the TSA to the list of Holocaust-in-waiting perpetrators. The only way he could be “deported” is if he is in fact an illegal alien, and before that happens, there will be plenty of “questions asked” and other legal wrangling, thanks to decades of work from the immigration-law industry. The only way the police would have a chance to discover that he is an illegal alien is if he has given them lawful grounds to stop him, such as running a red light, driving drunk, or acting suspiciously enough to suggest imminent law-breaking — and then has given them further ground to suspect that he is in the country illegally, such as possessing no valid identification.

If, on the other hand, Mr. Reyes presents any form of valid government ID during the course of a lawful police stop, he will be presumed to be in the country legally, and there will be no inquiry into his immigration status. So if, after getting through the brownshirts at LAX, Mr. Reyes continued to carry his California driver’s license, he would have nothing to worry about in Arizona.

Since Mr. Reyes and all the other boycotters are so convinced that the Arizona police are itching to abuse their rights under SB 1070, they would make a much better case against the law by actually traveling to Arizona and demonstrating to the world their mistreatment at the hands of the police. Until then, their unhinged denunciations of the law reveal only one thing: They are terrified that it will work.

Yup.

[Update a while later]

Holder profiles Arizona. Don’t hold your breath waiting for complaints from the New York Times, though.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

History

44 Comments

…that is of no interest:

Stroilov claims that his documents “tell a completely new story about the end of the Cold War. The commonly accepted version of history of that period consists of myths almost entirely. These documents are capable of ruining each of those myths.” Is this so? I couldn’t say. I don’t read Russian. Of Stroilov’s documents, I have seen only the few that have been translated into English. Certainly, they shouldn’t be taken at face value; they were, after all, written by Communists. But the possibility that Stroilov is right should surely compel keen curiosity.

For instance, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:

Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.

Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?

And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful protesters in Tbilisi.

Stroilov’s documents also contain transcripts of Gorbachev’s discussions with many Middle Eastern leaders. These suggest interesting connections between Soviet policy and contemporary trends in Russian foreign policy. Here is a fragment from a conversation reported to have taken place with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad on April 28, 1990:

H. ASSAD. To put pressure on Israel, Baghdad would need to get closer to Damascus, because Iraq has no common borders with Israel. . . .

M. S. GORBACHEV. I think so, too. . . .

H. ASSAD. Israel’s approach is different, because the Judaic religion itself states: the land of Israel spreads from Nile to Euphrates and its return is a divine predestination.

M. S. GORBACHEV. But this is racism, combined with Messianism!

H. ASSAD. This is the most dangerous form of racism.

One doesn’t need to be a fantasist to wonder whether these discussions might be relevant to our understanding of contemporary Russian policy in a region of some enduring strategic significance.

As she points out, there should be at least as much opprobrium for defending, or being associated with communists as there is with Nazis. They did, after all, murder many more people. Instead, their fellow travelers continue to travel freely in academia, and pollute the minds of our youth. And as the documents show, they continue to run Europe as well.

[Update a few minutes later]

I hadn’t read the whole thing when I first posted this. Here is another gem:

And what of Zagladin’s description of his dealings with our own current vice president in 1979?

Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for “human rights.” . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.

Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered the episode so uninteresting that even Biden’s political opponents didn’t try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.

You should really read the whole thing.

Education, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Reinforcing Racism

15 Comments

Some disturbing, but not surprising (at least to me) counterproductive results:

Chatman attributes the low climate scores in area and ethnic studies precisely to the instruction students receive in those classes. “Students in area and ethnic studies should have learned to recognize prejudicial communication and should be more sensitive to communication that might be prejudicial,” he writes. Whereas a math student might hear a remark and think nothing of it, an African American Studies student might discern prejudice and stereotyping. Does this mean that students in area and ethnic studies are more perceptive and accurate in their assessment of campus climate, or have they acquired in their classes a “warped lens” (Chatman’s term) that sees social life in overdone racial categories? Chatman even draws a logical possibility that might appall area and ethnic studies instruction, that is, that the climate in those fields is a lot worse than it is in engineering classes and labs. One wonders how area and ethnic studies professors would feel if they were ordered to undergo diversity sensitivity sessions themselves to try to straighten out their problems.

One suspects they wouldn’t take it well. I’ve got a better idea. Don’t guarantee student loans for anyone majoring in this crapola (along with degrees in “education”), and watch it dry up and blow away.

History, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Auto World

8 Comments

The anniversary of the folly.

Having moved away from Michigan a few years before, I never went, but it does seem ill conceived. As one commenter said, for a fraction of that amount of money, they could have put together the world’s best auto museum, with many classic cars, to rival or even exceed the Ford museum in Dearborn, and it might still be there. Government in action.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

The Oil Spill

17 Comments

…doesn’t make the case for Big Government:

…the idea that because a person or thing can do some things brilliantly doesn’t mean they do everything well. Some writers can’t count past 10 without taking their shoes off; some artists are tone-deaf; some math whizzes cannot learn languages.

Franklin Roosevelt and Albert Einstein were exceptional talents, but asking them to trade occupations would not have been clever. Like Einstein and Roosevelt, markets and government do different things well.

Government is a big and blunt instrument, while markets are smaller and flexible tools. Government acts for the whole, and gives things one direction; markets react to and serve individuals, respond to a great many small discrete interests, and facilitate the pursuit of happiness by creating demands for a great many diverse and various skills.

The frustrating thing is that doing all sorts of things in which it has no business, and isn’t very good at, it’s neglecting the things that it’s supposed to be doing, and being even more incompetent at them in general.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

What Is A “Bail Out”?

47 Comments

Can anyone explain to me what Bolden means when he says that he might have to “bail out” commercial space? Does it mean that he’ll have to keep pouring money into them until they deliver the needed product/service? What else could it mean? And if so, are the current cost-plus Ares/Orion contracts “bail outs”? At least with commercial, we have a chance of getting out of that mode. With the POR, “bail outs” (and very expensive ones — fifty billion for both Ares and Orion, though still not as big as GM/Chrysler) are the default.

Political Commentary, Space

The Astronaut Show

52 Comments

The Senate hearings have begun. The first and last man on the moon will be testifying. While they’re certainly admirable men, I’m not sure what they have to contribute to this discussion. They know nothing about affordable or sustainable programs. They are in fact experts on those with the opposite characteristics. Here’s the webcast, and Alan Boyle is tweeting it.

[Update mid afternoon]

Sigh…

Cernan says it “might take as much as a full decade and would take 2-3 times as much” money as budgeted to launch new commercial spaceships.

When did Gene Cernan become a cost estimating expert? And this, from Cowing’s feed:

Cernan: had telecon last week; Bolden said comm space may need bailout like GM/Chrysler – may be largest bailout in history.

Bigger than TARP? Bigger than GM/Chrysler? Bigger than the thirty-five billion dollars that Ares I was projected to cost, if all went well? When SpaceX has spent less than a billion to date, and they’re most of the way there?

Words fail.

And of course, who can gainsay them? They walked on the moon.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I don’t know whether to be angry, or sad about this. Gene Cernan is up there spouting utter nonsense to senators. Did someone else give him these bizarre talking points, or is he just making it up? Either way, it tarnishes him badly.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Is someone going to ask Bolden to confirm this, or is he no longer a witness?

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s another gem of innumeracy from Captain Cernan:

Cernan: Let’s put a box on the 1040 for taxpayers to give an extra penny to NASA. I bet we’d get enough $ to do all we wanted.

Let’s be generous and assume that there are a hundred and fifty million US taxpayers. By my accounting, that would give us a whopping $1.5M a year.

It’s like he’s just talking without thinking, and making this stuff up on the fly.

[Update a few minutes later]

I have more thoughts on “bail outs” here.

[Update late afternoon]

Clark has some brief thoughts, and links:

From Sen. Hutchison capturing cosmic rays for energy production to Sen. Rockefeller transporting Sir Isaac Newton to 1880s Baltimore, it was a typical Congressional hearing on a technical topic.

The country’s in the very best of hands.

[Update a few minutes later]

It was nice to see Senator Brownback saying sensible things. I just got an email from the Commercial Spaceflight Federation with a quote:

I am a strong supporter of NASA, as I mentioned, and of the commercial space industry … With the impending retirement of the Shuttle, NASA is now assuming a much different role than in our past space effort, and I think there is great opportunity to have a space program that leads the world but will be a space program that is firmly embedded in opportunity for all. By opening up commercial space, it ensures a strong future for the US and the competitive aerospace industry.

I think it helped that Pete Worden was on his staff for a while a few years ago.

[Evening update]

Alan Boyle has a story on the hearings today, and Clark Lindsey has expanded on his initial thoughts.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

That’s No Lady

14 Comments

…it’s my Supreme Court nominee. Of all the things for the left to get its panties in a new wad about.

Though this does remind me of a pet peeve of my own, and a much more egregious one (I just heard it again yesterday morning on the local news). The female anchor (not to pick on her, men do it, too) was describing some sort of brutal crime, after which she said that the police were still looking for the “gentleman” who perpetrated it.

Apparently, many people are no longer familiar with the meaning of the words “lady” and “gentleman” (it just occurs to me that people in show business compliment their audiences by addressing them as “ladies and gentlemen” — do they say that at WWE events? Wishing to see such an exhibition doesn’t seem very ladylike…). They are not synonyms for (respectively) “woman” and “man.” They are describing a particular sort of woman or man. As far as I know, and from all I’ve heard about her public conduct (and ignoring rumors about her private life, about which I’m indifferent), Elena Kagan is a lady. And the guy the news reporter was describing was no gentleman.

Humor, Political Commentary, Satire

The New British Coalition

3 Comments

Now this is what I call compromise:

There were some objections to the deal from the Sheriff’s assistant, Sir Guy of Gisbourne, who was reportedly unhappy with the idea of getting into bed with men in tights. However, he was quickly rebuffed by the Sheriff: ‘We have moved on from our old ‘nasty’ image of yore,’ he said, ‘people need to understand that the Sheriff’s Men are now a modern, progressive movement dedicated to promoting a caring, liberal and inclusive reign of terror.’

Many of Mr Hood’s supporters were hoping for a so-called ‘Rainbow Alliance’ of Friar Tuck, Maid Marian and Little John. However, negotiations quickly fell apart because everyone thought that Little John was a tedious, self-opinionated twat.

Yes. Well, he was.