The Medicare mandates violate the General Welfare clause.
[Update a few minutes later]
ObamaCare criminalizes medicine. Yeah, HillaryCare tried to do that, too. But that time there were enough Dems smart enough to keep it from happening. No such luck last year.
[Update a while later]
Well, Queen Nancy warned us that we had to pass the bill to see what was in it. But it was important. Who had time to read it?
…and social engine. A (literally and figuratively) pretty cool story.
The zombie rocket continues:
At the root of the problem is a 70-word sentence inserted into the 2010 budget — by lawmakers seeking to protect Ares I jobs in their home states — that bars NASA from shutting down the program until Congress passed a new budget a year later.
That should have happened before the Oct. 1 start of the federal fiscal year.
But Congress never passed a 2011 budget and instead voted this month to extend the 2010 budget until March — so NASA still must abide by the 2010 language.
That means NASA and its contractors are required to keep building Ares I, even though Obama effectively killed it when he signed the new NASA plan that canceled the Constellation moon program begun under President George W. Bush.
“It would be nice if Congress did its work,” said John Logsdon, space expert at George Washington University. “I would not be surprised if there was a combination of frustration and anger [at NASA]. They want to get on carrying out a good space program.”
It doesn’t matter. Having a good space program hasn’t been politically important in over forty years.
[Update a while later]
More from Stephen Smith:
Perhaps the singular achievement by SpaceX with its December 8 launch and orbit of the Dragon spacecraft is to show what American engineering can still accomplish when freed of Congressional shenanigans.
Imagine what SpaceX, Orbital, Boeing or one of the other Commercial Crew Development applicants could do with that $500 million which will do nothing except keep on life-support a brain-dead government jobs program.
Imagine. It’s easy if you try.
America spends far more on education than countries like Germany, Japan, Australia, Ireland, and Italy, both as a percentage of its economy, and in absolute terms. Yet despite this lavish government support for education, college tuition in the U.S. is skyrocketing, reaching levels of $50,000 or more a year at some colleges, and colleges are effectively rewarded for increasing tuition by mushrooming federal financial-aid spending. Americans can’t read or do math as well as the Japanese, even though America spends way more (half again more) on education than Japan does, as a percentage of income, according to the CIA World Fact Book.
Definitely another bubble about to pop.
Sarah Palin was prescient about the death panels. And yes, ultimately, that’s exactly what they’ll be. The truth hurts, particularly for leftists.
A mystery. There’s still a lot we don’t understand about nutrition.
I think I’d go crazy on such a monotonous diet. It’s a shame if it really turns out that variety, while being the spice of life, may be an unhealthy way to eat. But it would work out well for space travel. Keeping food interesting is one of the major challenges for NASA and long-term astronaut health, both mental and physical.
To all my readers who celebrate it, whatever their beliefs. We’re having a quiet one, at home, with guests for dinner tomorrow.
[Update a few minutes later]
I got a Green Christmas. A lot of sequestered carbon emissions in my stocking. Again. Yay me.
[Update a while later]
Some worthwhile links for Christmas reading.
The Manhattan Project, ICBM development, Apollo, the Vision For Space Exploration.
Understanding which is the outlier, and why, provides insight into policy going forward.
In the piece in which Victor Davis Hanson defended himself against Jeffrey Sachs’ nasty ad hominem smears, he also discussed the DREAM act and immigration issues. Here are some excellent thoughts from a “Patriotic Hispanic” along those lines. And more from Mickey Kaus on the continued false consciousness (or mendacity) of the radical Hispanic community.
Robert Conquest, call your office:
Responses to Gingrich’s speech, when not ignoring the factual content of his presentation, or engaging in ridiculous casuistry (pretentiously, if clumsily put forth as [semi-]educated “nuance”), offered mendacious, bowdlerized portrayals of living Islamic doctrine and its historical consequences, past as prologue to the present. But a collective wealth of unambiguous evidence — readily available — reveals the breathtaking shallowness and intellectual dishonesty of these self-righteous attacks on Gingrich, and U.S. state anti-Sharia initiatives, including: objective, erudite analyses of the Sharia by leading Western scholars of Islam; the acknowledgment of Sharia’s global “resurgence,” even by post-modern, “anti-colonial” (i.e., against Western colonialism, not Islamic jihad colonialism!) academic apologists for Islam, combined with an abundance of recent polling data from Muslim nations, and Muslim immigrant communities in the West confirming the ongoing, widespread adherence to the Sharia’s tenets; the plaintive warnings and admonitions of contemporary Muslim intellectuals — freethinkers and believers, alike — about the incompatibility of Sharia with modern, Western-derived conceptions of universal human rights; and the overt promulgation of traditional, Sharia-based Muslim legal systems as an integrated whole (i.e., extending well beyond mere “family law aspects” of the Sharia), by authoritative, mainstream international and North American Islamic religio-political organizations.
Speaking of ad hominem attacks…
I wonder how long it will be until the time is ripe for a book from Gingrich titled, “I Told You So, You F***ing Fools“? I hope that future generations will view Sharia apologists as they currently view Nazi apologists. In fact, it would be nice if they’d view communist apologists that way, even today.