…if I were offering advice to the Romney campaign (I’m on active duty so I can’t do that) I would tell them to respond to this presidential move by listing the laws that he intends to ignore as soon as he becomes president. Commenter Smart Dude says: “Call this ‘The Obama Rule’ and shove this right in the[ir] face. . . There have to be a thousand insane regulations that need not to be enforced. Start with the War on Coal and the shutting down of irrigation water to Western agriculture.” I’m sure that Romney could score many political points with this approach, particularly in the realms of spending and environmental restrictions. Additionally, there is much entertainment value in this approach, as American voters would have the fun of watching David Axelrod contort himself explaining why ignoring one set of laws is good while ignoring another set of laws is wrong.
I like it. I can certainly think of a project or two at NASA that I’d ignore congressional directives on.
Brian Binnie (who flew the first X-Prize flight) emails:
…this e-book:
The Right Stuff: Interviews with Icons of the 1960s, is available just in time for Father’s day. It’s the first in a series dealing with “adventurers” over the decades, many of whom are leaders in the space arena. I wrote the forward to it and the SpaceShipOne story will appear when the chronology finally gets to the 2000’s.
I met Jim via the eclectic Explorers Club and he is regular contributor to Forbes Magazine.
Conservatives don’t see liberals as vampires — they’re zombies. The closest thing I’ve seen (or smelled) to a zombie apocalypse happened at Zuccotti Park, the shambolic squatters therein denied the ability to act upon their culinary impulses only by the manifest lack of brains available for eating. We may call liberals “bloodsuckers” and whatnot, and, as Mr. Davis notes, Rush Limbaugh did once go on an Obama-vampire riff, but he has his hematophages all wrong. Rush quotes our own venerable VDH:
Watching the tastes, the behavior, the rhetoric, the appointments, and the policy of this administration suggests to me that it is not really serious in radically altering the existing order, which it counts on despite itself. Its real goal is a sort of parasitism that assumes the survivability of the enfeebled host.
Not vampires, but leeches, ticks, bedbugs, etc. “Vampire” is the word we use for liberals when we’re trying to be nice.
I have to say that while I’m not thrilled at the prospect of a Romney presidency per se, I’m very impressed with the campaign so far. They seem to have been living inside Axelrod’s OODA loop for weeks now. The latest (and it’s hilarious) is that the campaign bus has its own Twitter account.
Rumsfeld called “an idea of enormous consequence” the fact that “anyone who finds a way to make use of such riches by applying their labor or their technology or their risk-taking are required to pay writ royalties of unknown amounts, potentially billions, possibly even tens of billions over an extended period, an ill-defined period of time, to the new International Seabed Authority for distribution to less developed countries.”
Saying that this principle has “no clear limits,” he mused that it could set a precedent for space exploration, too.
He shouldn’t just “muse.” It could be a disastrous precedent, completely undercutting the arguments we make against the Moon Treaty.
This kind of ignorance is why so much reporting is nonsensical — reporters are always surprised when an economic report “unexpectedly” has bad numbers, because they really believe the Keynesian crap.
, is available just in time for Father’s day. It’s the first in a series dealing with “adventurers” over the decades, many of whom are leaders in the space arena. I wrote the forward to it and the SpaceShipOne story will appear when the chronology finally gets to the 2000’s.