Fox News is reporting that Bill Richardson is withdrawing from the Obama cabinet as Secretary of Commerce, probably over his pay-to-play problem. He was perceived by the space community as someone who would provide full support for the department for commercial space, based on his record of supporting space tourism and related ventures as governor of New Mexico. I wonder if the transition team had some backups to go to, or if it will be a while before we know who will replace him?
De Rugy and the others also mention my other frustrations. First, that the Republican Party betrayed libertarians so badly on this issue. Second, that the media portrayed opponents of the bailout as unserious and ideological. Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson were hailed as saviors, even though they could just have easily been portrayed as bumblers. The whole thing was portrayed as government having no choice but to come in and clean up the private sector’s mess, rather than an ill-conceived attempt to stop markets from adjusting to a mess that was created by a combination of market failure and government failure. Third, that even though much of the public instinctively and correctly opposed the bailout, it sailed through without costing Congressmen their seats.
The one upbeat commentator is Len Gilroy. He thinks that the high level of indebtedness of government will force politicians to scale back spending and to privatize. I’m sorry, but he comes off sounding like Mary Poppins on laughing gas.
As a commenter notes, the only hope is that a lot of non-libertarians are outraged, too. I hope it doesn’t end in riots, but I hope it ends.
Some enterprising 527 (or the RNC) needs to buy some ad time for this. Perhaps during the next Congressional hearings on bailing out the auto industry.
I’m listening to the NASA announcement on COTS, but I missed the first few minutes. I’m inferring that both SpaceX and OSC won follow-on contracts. First mission is two years from now for SpaceX and a little later for Orbital.
Battered by falling demand from consumers around the world and a surging yen, Toyota and other Japanese automakers have been reducing earnings outlooks and cutting workers.
“The change that has hit the world economy is of a critical scale that comes once in a hundred years,” President Katsuaki Watanabe said at the company’s Nagoya office. The drop in vehicle sales over the last month was “far faster, wider and deeper than expected.”
Toyota forecast an operating loss of 150 billion yen ($1.66 billion) for the fiscal year ending March 2009. Toyota has never reported an operating loss since it began disclosing such figures in 1941. But it did have an operating loss in unofficial, internal calculations for the year ending March 1938 a year after the company was founded.
And they think that pouring billions down the Detroit rathole can save them in such an environment? Particularly when the union refused to give on work rules? Mickey Kaus has more, here and here.
What a disaster this administration has turned out to be at the end.