…as it is honorable. No, that’s not a compliment. And it was Hillary Clinton’s State Department in both cases, though it’s possible that the Bush State Department would have behaved as despicably in the one case. Arrogant bureaucrats being what they are.
The EPA
…has four scandals going on its own right now. Another monster that has to be reined in.
Hacking The Constitution
How Obama and the other hacks did it.
Sadly, I’m starting to view last fall’s election as illegitimate, so great was the cheating.
[Tuesday morning update]
This isn’t going to end until these people are removed from the power that they do not deserve.
Hillary And The NASA Letter
Did she really get a letter saying “no girls allowed”?
There’s no evidence of it, other than her repetition of the story (which doesn’t hold much weight with me, considering the source). As Jim Oberg points out, she certainly could have been part of the first class in 1978 that admitted women, had she applied herself. But her degrees were in political science and law, which certainly weren’t indicative of someone who desired a career in spaceflight. I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that she couldn’t handle technical subjects, or math.
The Supreme Court
Why the Obama administration keeps losing:
These cases have nothing in common, other than the government’s view that federal power is virtually unlimited: Citizens must subsume their liberty to whatever the experts in a given field determine the best or most useful policy to be.
If the government can’t get even one of the liberal justices to agree with it on any of these unrelated cases, it should realize there’s something seriously wrong with its constitutional vision.
Do tell.
National Space Policy
A “Values-Based Approach“? The question is — what are the values? I think he’s got it wrong:
Discovery is why a nation should go to space. It is what inspires all of humanity. It has been NASA’s only use of human spaceflight in the post-Apollo era that has returned value that is highly regarded by nearly all people in developed countries with free access to information. The synergy that once existed between human-assisted and robotic space exploration in the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) program is a blueprint for sustained deep space human-assisted exploration that can stoke the nation’s competitiveness in science, technology, and math toward realization of long-term financial and physical security.
That’s an opinion, not a fact. I would expect a scientist to think that science is the reason for human spaceflight, but most people don’t agree with him (or have even given it much thought). If it’s not for the purpose of developing and settling space, the amount of money we’re spending on it is unjustifiable.
Commercial Space
Stuck to the ground, by red tape.
Not a lot new there to people who follow this topic, but it’s a good overview of the issues.
The IRS Scandal(s)
Five myths that the agency’s defenders are using.
They’re not “myths” — they’re lies.
Why Is Everyone Upset With Obama?
He’s just being Obama:
The saga of Obama is marked by the uncanny ability to soar through the academic and government cursus honorum without ever being held too accountable for what followed. Obama’s selection as editor of the Harvard Law Review broke new ground. But to this day, no one cares much that his record was mediocre with no scholarly work to show for his tenure.
For that matter, ditto also his law career at the University of Chicago: an impressive appointment, but no scholarly book as promised, not even an article, and no distinguished record of teaching. Not much of anything. The point of the Nobel Prize was winning it — not doing anything that might have earned it. Just as there was no foreign policy achievement that preceded the prize, so there was naturally none following it. Why expect anything different now?
Anyone who is disappointed by him is a fool, and just one of the rubes.
[Update a few minutes later]
It’s all about trust:
Every president faces the predicament of overpromising. Often the gap can be chalked up to the difference between campaigning and governing, between rhetoric and reality. As with past presidents, people desperate to turn the page on the previous administration voted for the Obama they wanted and now are grappling with the Obama they got.
I got exactly what I expected, but I never wanted it.
The Futility Of Gun Laws
They don’t seem to work in California:
So we are again left with the question: how did the killer get this gun? It would seem as though he broke a stack of laws, without much of a struggle. It almost makes you wonder if California is barking up the wrong tree. They pass all these laws, starting with attempts to deal with a mass murder involving a mentally ill person in 1989, and they do not work. Short of house-to-house searches for guns, how are they going to be successful at enforcing these laws? Perhaps most importantly, if someone is mentally ill and intends to murder people (a capital crime), what sort of penalty is going to actually deter such a person from breaking gun-control laws?
Gun-control advocates, at least the more rational ones, will usually admit that these laws only work at the margins, by making guns harder for criminals and the mentally ill to get. I can buy that argument; all laws work only at the margins, and that is all that they have to do to justify their existence. I can also agree that when there is a large stockpile of illegal goods in circulation, it can take a while before laws aimed at those goods will remove them from the illegal marketplace. Still, when I see that laws that are decades old failed to disarm a 24 year old who could not possibly have legally acquired this weapon, I find myself wondering in what century California’s gun-control laws are going to be effective.
Because, you know, criminals don’t obey the law. By definition. And as he says, it’s not really a gun problem.