Of all the idiotic fawning about Joe Biden when he was selected as Veep, what a “great” choice he was.
I don’t understand why anyone would take advice from him, about anything.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Happy Birthday
Only slightly repentant commie. I like folk music, but some folk musicians are a real piece of work.
One Of The Questions I Would Have Asked Tonight
Why did you support a policy that kicked poor kids out of good schools, including kids who were attending the same school your own daughters are attending?
Liberty And Tyranny
A video interview with Mark Levin. By a libertarian.
The book has hit its millionth sale. Good.
More Candidates For Tea Parties
This is what happens when the government picks winners and losers: big unions walk away with GM and small investors get thrown by the wayside. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to return to some kind of normal economic activity, and when that happens we will need investors, large and small, to feel it’s worthwhile getting back into the market. Deals like this one are going to make that awfully difficult.
People are reeling from having their 401ks wiped out in the current market slide. And now those who had for years bought what they thought were “safe” blue-chip corporate bonds are discovering they were only safe until they were told by the government to go fly a kite because government wants to pay off the unions instead. That is deeply unfair to small bondholders, and it’s dreadful economic policy. As a friend of mine put it to me, “Who in their right mind will buy corporate bonds now? And if nobody’s buying bonds, how exactly are our debt markets going to get humming again? What a mess.”
It’s almost like they want to wreck the economy.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Apparently, Ken Lewis, head of B of A, has been fired.
The question is, who did it? The shareholders and board (you know, the old-fashioned way), or was it our new head of the economy continuing to grab more power?
[Update]
Apparently it was the board. And he’s still CEO, just not chairman.
What He Says
…and what he does:
1. “As President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.”
2. “I will make sure that we renegotiate [NAFTA].”
3. Opposed a Colombian Free Trade Agreement because advocates ignore that “labor leaders have been targeted for assassination on a fairly consistent basis.”
4. “Now, what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.”
There are a lot more broken campaign promises (I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, and not call them lies) where those came from, and probably a lot more to come.
I just don’t understand why anyone believes anything he says. Must be something in the water.
[Update early evening]
Note, unlike many of His flock, I’m not complaining about him breaking campaign promises per se — many of them were awful, and I’m glad he didn’t follow through. I’m just sayin.’
Assembling The Station
Here’s a nice animation of ISS assembly. One of the most tragic things about the current approach to the Vision for Space Exploration is that it completely ignores all of the experience gained in orbital assembly over the past decade, instead reverting to Apollo on Geritol.
[Update a couple minutes later]
What a coincidence. I just got an email titled “Gee, Scolese Sounds Like A Critic Of ESAS” (I don’t know if the sender wants to be attributed):
I’m watching the Appropriations hearing, and in response to a question from Chairman Mollohan re plans for moon exploration, etc… Scolese talks about ISS as an example of success at assembling complex systems in LEO and that he would like to see NASA come up with an architecture to build things and then go explore.
Gee. What a concept.
You’ll have to get the transcript, but it sounds pretty treasonous…
At this point, just making Scolese the formal administrator is sounding pretty good to me.
[Update early afternoon]
Rob Coppinger is live twittering the hearing (not a permalink). And he has some thoughts on Scolese’ testimony as well:
In an extraordinary exchange between NASA acting adminisrator Christoper Scolese and the US House of Representatives’ committee on appropriations’ subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies chair, Scolese said that the agency was still working on what “return to the Moon” meant and whether that was a outpost, which he went on to describe as expensive, or an extended sortie like Apollo
So much for Apollo on steroids…
Let’s hope.
[Late afternoon update]
Here’s more extensive coverage of the testimony:
“We were looking at an outpost on the moon, as the basis for that [2020] estimate and that one is being revisited,” he said. “It will probably be less than an outpost on the moon, but where it fits between sorties, single trips, to the moon to various parts and an outpost is really going to be dependent on the studies that we’re going to be doing.”
“Recall [that] the Vision [for Space Exploration] was not just to go to the moon as it was in Apollo, it was to utilise space to go on to Mars and to go to other places,” he added. “We’ve demonstrated over the last several years that with multiple flights we can build a very complex system reliably – the space station – involving multiple nations…and we’ll need something like that if we’re going to go to Mars.”
Scolese’s further comments hinted that the agency’s plans might shift to include a greater emphasis on destinations beyond the moon. “So what I would like to see from NASA over time is an architecture that…will give us flexibility for taking humans beyond low-Earth orbit and allowing us to have options for what we can do at the moon as well as other destinations…[like] Mars or an asteroid…so that there are options on what we do in 2020,” he said.
Good news, bad news. The good news is that (as noted up above) he’s more interested in building an in-space infrastructure than Mike Griffin ever was. The bad news is that he’s backing off from the commitment to a lunar outpost. On the other hand, the in-space infrastructure may allow a revisiting of that issue if it can be shown to reduce the costs of lunar operations. And ESAS would never have allowed an affordable lunar outpost in any event. The activity rate would have been far too low.
[Bumped]
The Vision Deficit
The two Reason editors (multi-media and print) critique the first hundred days:
So here we are, 100 days into the great eight-year triumph of Hope over Change, a new Era of Really Good Feelings in which only one thing has become increasingly, even irrefutably, clear: President Barack Obama is about as visionary as the guy who invented Dippin’ Dots, Ice Cream of the Future. Far from sketching out a truly forward-looking set of policies for the 21st century, as his supporters had hoped, Obama is instead serving up cryogenically tasteless and headache-inducing morsels from years gone by.
On issue after issue, Obama has made it clear that instead of blasting past “the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long,” (as he promised in his inaugural address), he’s moving full speed ahead toward policy prescriptions that already had less fizz than a case of Billy Beer back when Jimmy Carter was urging us all to wear sweaters and turn down our thermostats. Instead of thinking outside the box, Obama is nailing it shut from the inside.
Read all.
Under My Bus
Celebrating the first hundred days. I think that most of us will be under that bus before this is over.
[Update a few minutes later]
The audacity of audacity:
“Those of you who are watching certain news channels on which I’m not very popular, and you see folks waving tea bags around, Obama said, “let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we are going to stabilize Social Security.”
“But,” Obama continued, “let’s not play games and pretend that the reason [for the deficit] is because of the Recovery Act.”
Talk about “playing games.” Yes, how could 800 billion dollars of unnecessary spending possibly have anything to do with the deficit? Why, that’s just crazy talk.
Is The Pentagon Lying?
Flopping Aces has been digging into the SEAL team delay.