If you missed Her Highness’ press conference yesterday, Dana Milbank has a very entertaining description of it:
As more skeptical questions were shouted, Pelosi opened her eyes wide. She licked her lips. She chopped the air with her hand and moved her arm like a windshield wiper. She swallowed hard. She used both hands to clear her hair from her face as she fired off pleas that “I wasn’t briefed,” “I wasn’t informed” and “They misled us.”
Enjoy.
I’ve often noted that, had the Bush administration been truly serious about the VSE, they would have at least attempted to create a new agency to carry it out, because NASA simply carries too much bureaucratic and pork-laden baggage from its Cold-War origins. This would be similar to what happened in the eighties, when the Reagan/Bush administration realized that they couldn’t count on the Air Force to do missile defense properly, and set up SDIO to report directly to the SecDEF.
Anyway, Frank Sietzen asks the question today, if you were building a new space agency from scratch, what would it look like?
Michael Totten says to brace for a Hezbollah electoral victory:
Geopolitically though, everything will change. Lebanon’s current “March 14″ government is an ally of the West and of Arab governments other than Syria’s. Prime Minister Fouad Seniora has repeatedly – and I think honestly – stated he wants a renewed armistice agreement with Israel. A “March 8″ government would reverse all those diplomatic efforts and push Lebanon back into, or at the very least toward, the Syria-Iran axis. War prospects with Israel would increase, and any eventual war would almost certainly turn out more destructive than the last one if the people of Lebanon willingly elect a coalition led by a jihadist party vowing war and destruction.
If it happens, this will be a major policy challenge for the new administration.
A hundred billion there…being wasted on “education.”
But it’s OK, because he’s going to ask the cabinet to find a hundred million dollars in cuts.
It reminds me of this point in Geraghty’s piece yesterday:
When Obama announced a paltry $100 million in budget cuts, and insisted this was part of a budget-trimming process that would add up to “real money,” he clearly understood that the public processes these numbers very differently from the way budget wonks do. Alinsky wrote: “The moment one gets into the area of $25 million and above, let alone a billion, the listener is completely out of touch, no longer really interested, because the figures have gone above his experience and almost are meaningless. Millions of Americans do not know how many million dollars make up a billion.”
It’s right out of the playbook.
The latest word is that the new administrator is going to be Charles Bolden. I remain disturbed by the Abbey connection. It will be interesting to see what Augustine comes up with, and how it’s received.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the NBC story.
Al Sonja Schmidt has some thoughts on how the media treats women on the two sides of the aisle.
The biggest borrower in the history of the known universe lectures college students not to live on credit. Of course, to be fair, they can’t print their own money.
I think that chutzpah is a pretty good word for Nancy Pelosi accusing anyone else of lying about the torture briefings.
I wonder if Hoyer is really going to mount a coup? I hope not — I think that a continuation of Speaker Pelosi is worth a lot of Republican votes a year and a half from know.
[Update early evening]
Who’s lying, Nancy or the CIA? Go take the poll.
To paraphrase the first commenter, is this a trick question?
[Update a few minutes later]
Apparently, the speaker has never learned the first rule of holes:
I won’t rehash the now familiar provisions that explain what torture is. But I do want to focus our attention on a prong of the torture statute, Section 2340A(c), that hasn’t gotten much notice to this point:
Conspiracy.— A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.
So I ask myself, “Self, what difference does it make whether Speaker Pelosi knew the CIA was waterboarding suspects or merely knew the CIA was planning to use waterboarding?” Answer: None.
Unless a victim is killed by torture such that the death penalty comes into play (which is not alleged here), American law regards conspiracy to commit torture as something exactly as serious, punished exactly as severely, as actual torture. As it happens, I don’t think waterboarding as administered by the CIA was torture. But Pelosi says she does. If that’s where you’re coming from, how do you get off the hook by saying you only knew about a plan to torture but not actual torture?
To establish torture conspiracy, a prosecutor wouldn’t even have to prove an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy. You just need to show that two or more people agreed to commit the prohibited act. Here, though, by her own account (or at least one of her own accounts), Pelosi knew the CIA was planning to use waterboarding and later learned it was actually being done. So, if Pelosi was told — as the CIA says she was — that waterboarding was being used, that’s another nail in the coffin. But for a prosecutor, it’s just gravy — not at all necessary to the case. As Pelosi herself tells it, she was aware of a conspiracy to torture — which is just as significant under the law as torture itself — and she did nothing about it.
Someone should take away this idiot’s shovel.
Let’s cure aging.
Works for me.
Some idiot left a comment on a month-old post overnight about government health care:
> Because I get my health insurance through my employer and unless they change the carrier, I don’t have a vote on that.
Sure you do. You get to choose your employer, at least for now.
I note that you don’t get to choose your govt.
It’s called an election.
I guess that was supposed to be some kind of clever riposte, but it’s stupid. Or disingenuous.
One of these things is not like the other. If I want to change my employer, no one can stop me (or at least no one can stop me from leaving my current one). So far, at least. It is a matter between me and my employer, and my future employer. It is not a matter dependent on what millions of maleducated ignorant voters think.
I do not get to choose my government. If I did, I can assure you that I would have had a much different government for my entire life. In a democracy, you only get to choose your government if you make the same choice as the majority of other voters. Otherwise, you get their choice, not yours. In my entire life, I’ve never gotten my choice, or anything close to it. Which is why it’s best that, given it’s one-size-fits-all, government have as little power as possible, and that it be devolved down to the lowest level possible, as the Founders intended.
But the only choice that the Dems seem to want me to have is whether or not to have an abortion.