Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

I Would Have Trouble Being Collegial

65 Comments

I’m getting tired of hearing all these Senators from both parties talking about what a great guy, what a charmer Ted Kennedy was. I don’t think I’d be able to be that friendly with someone who, regardless of his politics, essentially murdered a young woman with whom he had probably been philandering, got away with it, and joked about it. You know, there was another Ted who everyone thought was charming, too. His last name was Bundy.

[Late Sunday afternoon update]

Mark Steyn has some related thoughts:

You can’t make an omelette without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed — he certainly changed Mary Jo’s — but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been okay to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history . . . Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.” What true-believing liberal lass wouldn’t be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second’s notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if you’ll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain’s comparatively very minor “Profumo scandal,” the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen’s Privy Council, and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children’s playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.

Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the “Kennedy curse,” a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim — and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn’t, he made all of us complicit in what he’d done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.

Read all.

[Bumped]

Political Commentary

I’m With Them

5 Comments

57% of the voters want to throw the rascals out:

While Democrats have become more supportive of the legislators, voters not affiliated with either major party have moved in the opposite direction. Today, 70% of those not affiliated with either major party would vote to replace all of the elected politicians in the House and Senate. That’s up from 62% last year.

Republicans, not surprisingly, overwhelmingly support replacing everyone in the Congress. Their views have not changed. But Republican voters are disenchanted with their team as much as the Congress itself: 69% of GOP Voters say Republicans in Congress are out of touch with the party base.

There’s really just one political party — the big-government party.

Political Commentary

A Random Thought

I wonder if the president chose his vacation location because he anticipated, or had been told that it was a strong possibility, that Senator Kennedy might die during this period. It certainly made his life much easier than if he had had to disrupt it to fly across the country to deliver his eulogy.

Not criticizing, just wondering. The thought struck me because I was just hearing Chris Wallace saying that he was returning to his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Only Forty Years Left For The Planet

14 Comments

Because they aren’t taking our advice to not shout:

Great. So if there is an advanced civilization on Gliese 581d, the very first communication it’ll get from us will be a two-hour long text spam attack. How, exactly, is several billion variations of “u r teh suxxors rofl” and “OMG ur my new BFF aliens!!11!!!” supposed to convince an alien planet that we’re actually intelligent. More importantly, how will this convince them that we’re actually good neighbors?

Seriously, why should they be allowed to put the entire planet at risk like this? Listening is one thing, but deliberately broadcasting (or even, as in this case, narrowcasting) our presence doesn’t seem very smart to me.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

America’s Chamberlain?

10 Comments

Has President Obama already sold out eastern Europe to the Russians?

Ellison thinks that “Obama’s people believe that many global problems will be more easily solved together with Moscow.” In particular, nuclear disarmament. Ellison says that Obama will “sacrifice a lot” to get it. You know, the way Czechoslovakia was “sacrificed” to a certain mustachioed German house painter several decades ago.

Is Barack Obama going to become America’s Chamberlain? Is he going to ignore the horrific spate of obviously political murders the Kremlin has been committing ever since Putin arrived? The invasion of Georgia? The relentless anti-American rhetoric? The nuclear bombers buzzing Alaska with metronomic regularity?

Is he going to eliminate nuclear deterrence in Europe and leave its eastern regions helplessly vulnerable to Russian tanks, just as Georgia was left vulnerable?

It seems so. As blindly as Chamberlain, Obama appears to believe that our foes can be appeased into becoming friends and that we can rightly sacrifice smaller nations to our noble vision.

I wonder if people thought they were voting for this last fall?

Business, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

A Brief History

6 Comments

…of NASA’s resistance to commercial competition, in a comment (number 31) over at Space Politics by Al Fansome:

For the last 25 years, NASA has had to be brought KICKING & SCREAMING every step of the way — into a partnership with commercial industry. It has been resisted by the NASA iron triangle (NASA + contractors + Center politicians).

* The DOT was given the legal authority by Congress in the 1980s to regulate commercial space transportation over the objections of the traditional status quo space powers.

* Commercial payloads were taken off of the Shuttle after Challenger by the Reagan Administration over the active opposition of the then NASA Administrator (Fletcher).

* The Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 — which was the first law mandating that NASA buy commercial space transportation services — was passed by Congress over the objections of NASA.

* Instead of partnering with the American Rocket Company in the late 1980s, NASA MSFC created a competing hybrid rocket R&D program in an attempt to put AMROC out of business. (They succeeded.)

* The Congress passed the Commercial Space Act of 1998 that mandated that NASA should purchase ISS cargo resupply services. NASA resisted that mandate for 6 years — until Columbia happened and the Bush Administration created the Commercial/Crew Cargo services budget as part of the VSE in 2004. In December 2008, over 10 years after CSA98 passed, NASA finally signed an ISS cargo services delivery contract.

* NASA is still resisting doing commercial crew — which was part of the original official VSE plan (it was the CREW/cargo services program in the VSE). It has taken a national commission of space experts — reporting to the White House — to unequivocably recommend (its in all the options) that NASA institute a commercial crew (instead of Ares 1).

* NASA could have instituted “propellant depots” as part of the national strategy years ago. Why were propellant depots so obvious to the Augustine Commission as a key enable for our national goals in space, but ignored by the traditional NASA bureaucracy?

It is not because the NASA bureaucracy is dumb. I assert the reason is that creating a depot based architecture is not in the “bureaucratic interest” of NASA, as it outsources a large portion of the supply chain for exploration to commercial providers.

Prediction — NASA will resist creating propellant depots to the extent it is given the means to do so.

I think it’s a safe prediction. Those means have to be restricted. Though at least, this time, I think that we have top NASA administration on the right side.

[Early afternoon update]

He left out the saga of the Industrial Space Facility.