Category Archives: Political Commentary

Humor, Political Commentary

Having Fun With The Speech

23 Comments

Just a few minutes before your opportunity to play O-Bingo.

Well, it’s easier on the liver than a drinking game.

[Update as the speech begins]

I liked this particular subtitle:

“Let me be clear” – Warning to “have your shovel ready.”

I would say that listening to an Obama speech is definitely a shovel-ready project. Hip waders are handy, too.

[Update after half an hour or so]

Well, not that I’m surprised, but he’s laying out a program of every statist/fascist wet dream from TeddyR to present. The State will be responsible for us, from cradle, to early education, to all education, to college for all Americans (is that even a rational goal?) to grave. We no longer have any individual responsibility. The State will provide.

[Update after the speech]

Jim Garaghty notes the irony:

“We are not quitters,” says the guy who left the Senate before serving a full term.

So, what is he running for now?

[Update a couple minutes later]

Matt Welch is already manning his shovel:

The president has not even begun his non-State of the Union tonight, and already (at least according to leaked excerpts) he’s full of s**t…

Wonder what he’ll say now that he’s actually heard it?

[8 PM Pacific update]

I agree:

Oratorywise, so good. Ideawise, so weak. Combination, so dangerous.

Well, the campaign continues. And of course, that’s how propaganda works.

[Update at 8 PM Pacific]

Man bites dog. MSNBC is actually fact-checking the president.

[Updaten at 8:20 PM Pacific]

Apparently, “freedom” isn’t high on the president’s agenda. Not that I’m surprised.

[Update a couple minutes later]

A commenter asks what I thought of Jindal’s speech. I didn’t pay that much attention, but here’s a pan of it.

Economics, Political Commentary

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Health Czar

1 Comment

So sayeth Paul Hsieh:

The Obama administration would control costs by creating a new Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research to determine which treatments are deemed most effective and thus eligible to be paid for by government. These decisions would be based on statistical averages that cannot take into account specific facts of individual patients.

Yet good physicians must consider precisely these specifics when treating their patients. If you are suffering from abdominal pain due to gallstones, who should decide whether medication or surgery would be more effective for you?

The doctor who has felt your abdomen, listened to your heartbeat, and knows your drug allergies? Or the bureaucrat who got his job by telling the right joke to the right person at the right Washington cocktail party?

We don’t need czars, “health,” cars,” “drugs” or otherwise, period. Last time I checked, this was America, not Russia.

This recent (in the past couple decades) appetite in the American body politic for czars is just another sign of incipient fascism. As Paul notes, we aren’t (yet) serfs in need of a czar, even if the left is intent on making us that way.

Here are some related thoughts from James Capretta:

Opponents of market-based reform plans like to cite USA Today-type stories to discredit the whole concept of ownership, consumer choice, and competition in health care. But, in reality, the article again points to the need for a systematic reform which would give individually-purchased insurance the same tax advantage as now provided to employer-paid premiums. That change by itself would give the individual market the size and scale it needs for more stability. And then the competition which consumer choice provides would entice lower cost, higher quality products into the market as well. Over time, the financial advantages enjoyed by today’s dominant employer-based plans would give way to the security of owning stable insurance that can be kept even as job circumstances change.

Health insurance is another area in which politicians screw up the market, and then demand more (and more damaging) intervention to fix the problems caused by the screwing up, while blaming an unfettered market that didn’t exist.

Political Commentary, Space

Do We Need A Department Of Space?

Jeff Krukin says no.

I agree. We have too many departments already. But we do need a lot better interagency coordination of space policy, something that having a space council might or might not help with. I in fact agree with his recommendations in general (though in addition to elevating the Office of Space Commerce, I would re-elevate AST back out of the FAA and have it report directly to the SECDOT, as it did when originally formed in the eighties).

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Democrat War On Science

1 Comment

John Tierney has some useful thoughts on the politicization of science in the new administration:

Most researchers, Dr. Pielke writes, like to think of themselves in one of two roles: as a pure researcher who remains aloof from messy politics, or an impartial arbiter offering expert answers to politicians’ questions. Either way, they believe their research can point the way to correct public policies, and sometimes it does — when the science is clear and people’s values aren’t in conflict.

But climate change, like most political issues, isn’t so simple. While most scientists agree that anthropogenic global warming is a threat, they’re not certain about its scale or its timing or its precise consequences (like the condition of California’s water supply in 2090). And while most members of the public want to avoid future harm from climate change, they have conflicting values about which sacrifices are worthwhile today.

A scientist can enter the fray by becoming an advocate for certain policies, like limits on carbon emissions or subsidies for wind power. That’s a perfectly legitimate role for scientists, as long as they acknowledge that they’re promoting their own agendas.

But too often, Dr. Pielke says, they pose as impartial experts pointing politicians to the only option that makes scientific sense. To bolster their case, they’re prone to exaggerate their expertise (like enumerating the catastrophes that would occur if their policies aren’t adopted), while denigrating their political opponents as “unqualified” or “unscientific.”

“Some scientists want to influence policy in a certain direction and still be able to claim to be above politics,” Dr. Pielke says. “So they engage in what I call ‘stealth issue advocacy’ by smuggling political arguments into putative scientific ones.”

My concern with Chu and Holdren is that they are Club of Rome types who seem to be anti-technology. I’m sure that they would say that they are in favor of “appropriate” technology (yet another leftist theft of an intellectual base, like “progressive”), but it amounts to having no faith in our descendants to come up with technological solutions to today’s burgeoning problems. That inability to account for technological improvement is at the heart of apocalyptic predictions like world-wide famine and California agriculture drying up from lack of water. It’s that same blindness (and ignorance of basic economics) that resulted in Holdren and Ehrlich losing their bet with Julian Simon

Not to say, of course, that famines and droughts can’t occur, but if they do, it will be a result of foolish (or evil) government policies, not an overabundance of carbon in the atmosphere.

Political Commentary, Space

Our Continuing Throwaway Space Program

11 Comments

Well, another satellite gets tossed into the drink instead of into orbit:

Brunschwyler said the first sign of trouble during today’s failed launch occurred about three minutes after liftoff, when the Taurus XL rocket’s telemetry showed no sign it had shed its clamshell-like payload fairing.

The fairing is a nose-mounted shroud that protects the spacecraft inside from the Earth’s atmosphere until the booster reaches space. Once it separates, launch controllers expected to see OCO and its upper stage accelerate faster since it would have shed the excess weight. But that speed boost never occurred.

“As a direct result of carrying that extra weight, we could not make orbit,” Brunschwyler said, adding that the failure ultimately sent OCO crashing into the ocean near Antarctica. “We’re fairly certain that it did not fly over any land and it landed short of Antarctica.”

Failure to separate cleanly, or at all, is one of the most common causes of a launch failure of an expendable vehicle. And because it’s expendable, like every other aspect of a launch, each fairing separation is a first one. There’s no way to test it to ensure that it will separate properly when it is supposed to.

Had this been a reusable space transport, it would have had a payload bay door that had been operated successfully many times in the past (and the vehicle would have had the performance capability to take it all the way to orbit). And if for some reason it couldn’t be opened on orbit, the mission would have been aborted, and the payload returned safely to earth to await another attempt, and a three-hundred-million-dollar satellite would have been preserved.

But instead, we continue to put up satellites on unreliable throwaway rockets that generally have much less value than the cargo, but often destroy it. And we plan to continue to do so on steroids, with the abominable plans for Constellation.

The proverbial Martian, looking at how we do spaceflight, would scratch his head at the antics of these crazy earthlings, but wouldn’t be at all surprised that we’d made so little progress in conquering his homeworld. And all because we were in such a hurry half a century ago that we decided to put up satellites with munitions.

[Update a few minutes later]

That satellite cost almost three hundred thousand dollars a pound.

There’s got to be a better way.

Political Commentary, Space

NASA’s Budget

5 Comments

Congress has finally gotten around to passing an FY09 budget for agencies operating on a continuing resolution, including NASA. Jeff Foust has the numbers. I’m not sure the last time this happened, if ever, but it actually is getting more than it requested. There is no change in manned spaceflight (Shuttle plus ISS plus Exploration) but aeronautics and science are getting a bump. As Jeff notes, this doesn’t include the extra billion that the agency gets in “stimulus.”

So, for the first time in a long time, the agency is flush, and not getting its budget cut. I guess that when the old saying has gone from “a billion here and a billion there,” to “a trillion here and a trillion there,” it gets hard to argue for fiscal discipline in any area, even one that has traditionally been contentious. It’s just a shame that so much of the money is wasted, given NASA’s current plans.

Political Commentary

Government Conspiracy Theories

7 Comments

Yuval Levin explains why they’re implausible:

…no one around here, in either party and on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, has nearly the information, ability, or competence to pull off any kind of complex four-steps-ahead type maneuver, and the system works in a way that makes it pretty much impossible to seriously try. Most of the time, people are barely managing to keep their heads above water amidst the rush of events and to respond to the latest unexpected and ridiculous screwup.

I’ll always remember riding into work on the train day after day when I was a (very) junior staffer in Newt Gingrich’s Speaker’s Office in 1998 and reading in the paper about how the Republican leadership in Congress was setting traps for Bill Clinton and playing some ingenious chess game with the impeachment process, and then arriving at work and finding that no one had any idea how things had gotten where they had or what would happen next. It was much the same working in the White House: All the various conspiracy theories (good and bad) were utterly laughable. Governing is terribly complicated and the people doing it, while often very intelligent, could never hope to master anything close to the command of contingency necessary to carry off any kind of conspiracy. They often can’t even manage to meet their actual responsibilities adequately in the face of the indescribably intense entropy of government. (That’s, by the way, one more reason why they should not be given trillions of dollars to throw around).

This applies to space policy as well. And it’s particularly hard to get good policy in such an environment when it isn’t even perceived to be politically important. It also reminds me of a story that the late and deeply lamented Tom Rogers told me, from when he was working for the Johnson administration, and came to the realization that in Washington, no one is in charge, really. Some people have lofty titles, and big offices, and issue orders, and occasionally they’re followed, but mostly, as Yuval notes, it’s a highly entropic process, a sticky mess of friction and confusion. It’s the nature of a democracy, and please spare us from a strong man who will cut through it, because he’s likely to end up slicing vital things.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Next Stage Of Wrecking The Economy

8 Comments

Get ready for the cram down:

Now, maybe higher interest rates on home loans would be a good thing. Home ownership is heavily subsidized in this country, and the reason bankruptcy law currently protects banks from losses on principal is so that they can keep mortgage-interest rates low. But is Congress really going to let mortgage-interest rates rise as a result of this new law? Liberal interest groups already think credit-card interest rates are a crime against humanity. Can you imagine the hue and cry whenever mortgage-interest rates start to tick up?

The more likely scenario is that Congress passes some new law that keeps mortgage-interest rates suppressed, even though the new bankruptcy law has exposed banks to greater risk. If your goal is to re-inflate the housing bubble and create another credit catastrophe, well, there you go.

It’s truly infuriating the way politicians muck with the market, then implement more mucking to deal with the unintended consequences of the first muck, and then blame laissez-faire capitalism for the problems. And the media let them get away with it, repeatedly.