A status update on the nation, and on Declaration Entertainment, now a year old.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Public Support For Space
With the approach of the final Shuttle launch next week, Pew has done a survey of public opinion, that shows continuing support for maintaining our “leadership” in space, whatever that means.
As is often the case with such polls, put together by people who don’t understand space policy themselves, those questioned are presented with a false choice:
Q.17 Thinking about the space program more generally, how much does the U.S. space program contribute to:
a. Scientific advances that all Americans can use
b. This country’s national pride and patriotism
c. Encouraging people’s interest in science and technology
You’d think that if they lacked imagination to come up with anything else on their own, they’d at least provide a d) Other, so they would know to think harder next time. I can think of at least two:
d. Increasing the nation’s wealth and standard of living
e. Increasing the potential for human freedom and opportunity.
I’d like to raise the money to do my own poll, that would actually be useful in guiding policy.
Force Him To Drop The Mask
Some thoughts on Republican electoral strategy:
Karl Rove’s right: The 2012 GOP nominee should “fiercely challenge Mr. Obama’s policies, actions and leadership using the president’s own words, but should stay away from questioning his motives, patriotism or character.” Still: If the GOP nominee uses good-natured humor to needle Obama’s record, then the president likely will show his bad side. And the country won’t like it.
It occurs to me that these polls showing that the public still “likes” the president, even though they disapprove of his performance, are probably overstating the former. I think that there is still some residual resistance to being accused of being racists (unsurprising, given the media climate over the past two years, in which that was the instant response from the president’s defenders, both in and out of the media, to any criticism of his policies). I’d imagine that we’re seeing some “Bradley Effect” for the presidential popularity, though they feel a little more free to speak their minds on the policies themselves.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I’d say that, after the rank hypocrisy of the AWOL president lecturing the Republican House (which has actually passed a budget) to buckle down and do their homework, this video is well deserved.
[Update late morning]
Change it back:
[Courtesy of Jeff Dobbs]
The War Against “Liberalism”
What’s next? A symposium.
One of the major battles should be to take the word back from the leftists.
Is The Space Age Over?
The Economist seems to think so. More thoughts later.
[Friday morning update]
Clark Lindsey has a good comment over at their web site:
The author uses the cheap-shot pejorative “Space Cadet” to demean those in favor of space travel. So I will use “Earth Child” to characterize the author’s parochial one planet view.
Go read all, as he takes Earth Child to task. A lot of the other comments there are also pretty critical and disdainful.
[Bumped]
[Update a few minutes later]
More comments over at NASA Watch.
It All Makes Sense Now
Larry J. has figured out what happened to the country:
I think I’ve finally figured out what happened in 2008. We’re all living the ultimate reality TV show. Obama is the hapless boob – think The Truman Show or An Idiot Abroad – with no job experience and nothing to show for his life except for two autobiographies written by age 45 (and it isn’t even certain he wrote them). The pitch for the show must’ve gone something like this:
Pitchman: Hey, I’ve got a great idea! Let’s push to elect someone totally unqualified to be the next president of the United States! We’ll be guaranteed at least a four-year run as we watch him blunder from one stupid thing to another.
Media Exec: Won’t that be hard?
Pitchman: No, I’ve got it figured out. First, we’ll push a black guy as our dupe and call anyone who doesn’t support him a racist. Second, we’ll get the news department to push every negative story we can find or invent to get the country in a bad mood like we did in 1992. Third, we’ll tell everyone how brilliant the guy is and expect everyone to believe it without a shred of evidence. Finally, we’ll point out how “cool” he is to get the young and stupid vote.
Media Exec: Sounds like a plan. What’s in it for us?
Pitchman: We’ll be more influential than ever before!
Media Exec: Who will be the boob?
Pitchman: We’ve found the idea candidate. His name is Obama and he’s the junior senator from Illinois. He reads well from a teleprompter and has a nice looking family but the guy is a total idiot when it comes to economics, history, or actually accomplishing anything. He spent years hanging around radicals and Marxists. He’ll run the country into the ground in no time.
Media Exec: Go for it!
I wish the show would end sooner.
The Wisconsin Disaster
…is only disastrous for unions:
…for one beleaguered Wisconsin school district, it’s a godsend, not a disaster.
The Kaukauna School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect, at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it’s all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous.
In the past, teachers and other staff at Kaukauna were required to pay 10 percent of the cost of their health insurance coverage and none of their pension costs. Now, they’ll pay 12.6 percent of the cost of their coverage (still well below rates in much of the private sector) and also contribute 5.8 percent of salary to their pensions. The changes will save the school board an estimated $1.2 million this year, according to board President Todd Arnoldussen.
Of course, Wisconsin unions had offered to make benefit concessions during the budget fight. Wouldn’t Kaukauna’s money problems have been solved if Walker had just accepted those concessions and not demanded cutbacks in collective bargaining powers?
“The monetary part of it is not the entire issue,” says Arnoldussen, a political independent who won a spot on the board in a nonpartisan election. Indeed, some of the most important improvements in Kaukauna’s outlook are because of the new limits on collective bargaining.
It will be interesting to see if stories like this appear in Wisconsin media, particularly in Madison.
Paving The Way For An Islamist Egypt
..by recognizing the Brotherhood and having contacts with it, the Obama administration also makes a unilateral concession encouraging the Brotherhood. People who know the Middle East understand how this works: Soon many Egyptians will say (as they said in Iran and as they now say in Turkey) that the United States wants the Islamists to win.
What a comprehensive disaster this administration is, on almost all policy fronts. And as usual, Al Reuters doesn’t cover itself in glory, either.
[Update a few minutes later]
This comment is interesting:
The comparisons of Egypt to Nazi Germany are increasingly appropriate. First comes the overthrow of the government (mission accomplished). Next comes the “cleansing” of the state of “undesirables” (in this case Coptic Christians and any other identifiable non-Muslim minorities in the country) and then comes the war of aggression (against Israel). Egypt is in Phase II right now. It’s unclear how long it will take for Phase II to be completed. But when it is completed and there’s nobody left in Egypt to oppose it, then will come the war. Of course the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t have to wait for Phase II to be completed to attack Israel. They’re already doing it by supporting anti-Israeli Islamist terrorism as well as the anti-Israeli agenda of the Left.
The good news is that, unlike German, they have no industry to speak of. But that by itself won’t stop them from acquiring the weapons they need.
Yesterday’s Appellate Ruling On ObamaCare
Was it a good sign for opponents of Congressional overreach? Let’s hope.
[Update a few minutes later]
Eight things to know about yesterday’s Sixth Circuit decision.
Obamanomics
…the clumsy attempt at class warfare probably wasn’t even Obama’s most disheartening moment during the presser. Several others were at least equally as bad…
But about what one would expect from someone so completely lacking experience or competence for the job: our Class Warrior in Chief.
[Update a few minutes later]
The president’s peculiar press conference:
It all had the feel of a childish tantrum by a person who desperately wishes he were living in a different reality—one in which he is the heroic man of action and his opponents are irresponsible and weak. But the fact is, the president and congressional Democrats have so far utterly failed to offer any path out of our fiscal problems—problems that they have greatly exacerbated. The president proposed a budget in February that would have increased the deficit, and then he retracted it in April and proposed nothing in particular in its place. Senate Democrats have not proposed a budget in two years; they now suggest they finally have one, though apparently it won’t really be brought to a vote. Republicans, meanwhile, have proposed a specific path out of our fiscal mess—averting a debt crisis and setting the budget on a course toward balance through discretionary cuts, budget-process reforms, and gradual but significant entitlement reforms. Rather than negotiate over that budget, the president has chosen to play the demagogue, simultaneously insisting that the budget offers nothing and that it goes too far in cutting government services (medical research, food inspectors, and the weather service are apparently in particular danger, he said yesterday, providing a kind of Salvador Dali map of post-modern lifestyle liberalism).
Now, having added about $5 trillion to the national debt since taking office (nearly doubling the debt), the president wants permission to add another $2 trillion, and he’s upset that rather than being given that permission together with a set of class-warfare tax hikes he is being asked to agree to some spending, budget, and entitlement reforms in return for that permission. Entitlements—the chief drivers of the even greater explosion of debt now coming at us—appear to be off the table altogether as far as he’s concerned. And while the president insists that failing to meet the August 2 debt-limit deadline would unleash a train of calamities not seen since the book of Job, he seems to be willing to risk them all in order to enact a set of tax increases that would yield largely trivial sums of revenue and whose only plausible justification could be the political appeal of envy.
It’s what class warriors do.