He’s not interested in budget restraint or economic growth. It’s all about crushing his political enemies. That’s a war he wants to win, unlike the real wars overseas, that he just wants to “end.”
[Update a while later]
Sorry, link is fixed now.
Category Archives: Economics
An Alternate Vision For Mars Trips
Alan Boyle has a story on the current state of play for realistic concepts, something that SLS-based scenarios are not.
High-Speed Low-Speed Rail
Californians are in revolt.
What a monumentally stupid idea.
Opening The Frontier
Is it a job only for government employees?
As a commenter over there says, can’t they find some astronomer other than Tyson for an opinion on this?
I’d go further, and ask why they imagine an astronomer knows anything about it.
More People Have Signed Up To Go To Mars
…than have signed up for ObamaCare. Well, admittedly, it’s apparently a lot easier to do the former than the latter. And they’re not as nosy.
[Update a while later]
The health-care web site needs a complete overhaul.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
ObamaCare’s Useful Idiots
A round up.
Sadly, some of them inhabit this comments section.
[Update a while later]
The abysmal, pathetic ObamaCare roll out:
After the search for bin Laden, the Obama administration’s biggest manhunt has turned out to be for someone—anyone—who managed to actually sign up for and enroll in an insurance plan offered by the federal exchange. As The Miami Herald declared in a recent headline, “Obamacare enrollees become urban legend.” So far, you’ve got a better chance of turning up a gerbil escapee scurrying down Richard Gere’s leg than finding a couple dozen satisfied customers of healthcare.gov. During a legendarily awful Daily Show appearance, Sebelius lowered expectations yet further by saying that HHS will release enrollment figures on a monthly basis. Right after all the parades for record-setting grain harvests and successful launches of canine cosmonauts.
The first high-profile case of an Obamacare enrollee was paraded around the mainstream media like a captured U2 pilot in the old Soviet Union. But he turned out to be…well, not so much. On October 4, my colleague Peter Suderman broke the story that Obamacare poster boy Chad Henderson had not actually purchased insurance for either himself or his father. Henderson—a paid activist for Organizing for America, an outgrowth of the president’s re-election committee—eventually admitted to The Washington Post, “I have not purchased a specific plan.”
The broken web site didn’t help.
ObamaCare Supporters
…go through the stages of grief.
Somehow, being leftists, I don’t think they’ll ever get to acceptance. Bargaining’s as far as they’ll go, and then only to buy time until they can come up with a new strategy.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The disastrous roll out could spell doom. It certainly deserves it. And the Democrats deserve the accruing political fallout.
How Congress Screwed Up Human Spaceflight
There’s a good piece over at the Washington Times:
Imagine what could be done if resources being thrown into the furnace for the Space Launch System was repurposed for technology incubation, commercial projects, or heaven forbid, actual missions. For the cost of SLS, you could afford close to 170 launches to the ISS, 55 missions to Mars with cargo or for probes, or more than 220 Falcon Heavy launches. There are opportunity costs to funding bad projects, and funding SLS costs mankind nearly 500 opportunities to actually go to space.
But it gets it wrong at the end:
When President Obama came to office, NASA was working on the Constellation Program, its most ambitious project in decades. The plan would have seen the United States return to the moon and establish a permanent base as a first step toward the manned exploration of the solar system. Fiercely lauded in the scientific and space community, it even earned the rare but ringing endorsement of Neil Armstrong. However, this highly ambitious project was clumsily canceled by the Obama administration in the name of cost-cutting in 2010 — only to be replaced with the government monstrosity known as SLS a year later.
No. A reader would imagine that Constellation was just peachy, but it was just as programmatically disastrous as SLS, slipping more than a year per year in schedule with continuously ballooning costs. It (like SLS) needed to be cancelled. The mistake of the administration was not in cancelling it, but in not working with Congress in doing so, or providing a coherent explanation of what the replacement was to be. Constellation may have been “fiercely lauded” by some in the scientific and space community, but it was just as fiercely, and justly, attacked as a barrier, rather than a mean of serious human spaceflight beyond earth orbit. It’s curious that Mr. Jacobs seems to understand the current problem without understanding the actual history that led up to it.
Government: Who Needs It?
Fool Me Once, Shame On You
“Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me for five years, and I’m an Obama voter.”
No, “health care” is not health insurance.
[Update a few minuts later]
Obama’s web site is crashing because they didn’t want you to know how unaffordable the “Affordable” Care Act is.
It’s almost like the whole thing has been based on lies, for years.