What is it with ecofascists and kids? Is there something Freudian going on there, or is it because they recognize that children are the future of humanity? And we can’t have that.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Space Policy Foolishness
This is a sample of the kind of thing we’ll be working against next year: a Weekly Reader version of space policy, presumably from Representative Olson:
President George W. Bush inaugurated an ambitious and important plan to establish a base on the Moon by building much larger and safer rockets to take our astronauts beyond low Earth orbit. These rockets, called Ares I & Ares V, were part of a system called Constellation and they would be the backbone of a new system of vehicles capable of landing and supporting astronauts on the Moon or elsewhere in the solar system.
Mr. Obama, the candidate, announced he would cut the program and put the production of a heavy lift rocket for five years. But as the election approached, Obama changed his story to get elected and said not only had he always supported NASA & space flight but that he could and should do it better than the Republicans. Once elected Obama quickly returned to his original position and KILLED the program saying it would wait FIVE years.
Pete Olson has been working in Congress to save the space program and the jobs that go with it. Those jobs, filled by engineers, technicians, scientists and managers, are essential to the space program and if lost could never be recovered. This loss of personnel would be only a small part of the tremendous loss the entire nation would suffer as America would lose its lead in space flight. Pete Olson understands all this and working with the entire Houston delegation struggled to preserve what could be, but that was not enough.
I was, myself, dismayed to learn the program was greatly reduced in scope, but Olson explained as in a month when he expects Republicans to take the lead in the House again, that he and the others will be able to put more funding back into NASA to restore the mission. This is not the end. This is just the beginning Olson reported. I believe him.
What Pete Olson doesn’t understand about space space policy and technology would fill a middling-big library. No mention of the budget problems and schedule delays. No mention of the new technologies that will finally be funded. Nope, it’s the standard kindergarten treatment — George Bush had a wonderful plan for exploring the galaxy, bold and ambitious, and going along just swimmingly, and then that mean commie Barack Obama came along and Ended Our Space Program. It just makes you want to cry.
America Will Survive The Obama Debacle
But will Democrats?
I love the Wile E. Coyote cartoons. It’s nice to see the country finally coming to its senses.
[Update a while later]
Related thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson:
Obama — egged on by obsequious advisers, an out-of-touch, hard-left base, and a toady media — decided that he had done what other Northern liberals had not, either because (a) the country was at last ready for European-style socialism, or (b) his singular charisma and talents could convince it that it was even when it was clearly not.
The result was that our Oedipus/Pentheus rushed headlong into socialized medicine, mega-deficits, needlessly polarizing appointments of the Van Jones type, and various federal takeovers, coupled with quite unnecessary editorializing about largely local matters — from the Skip Gates mess to the Arizona immigration law and Ground Zero mosque.
In each case, the supposed uniter deliberately weighed in on these controversies to quite unfairly demonize his opponents — “stupidly” acting police, Arizona xenophobes picking up children on the way to buy ice cream, Islamophobes wanting to deny religious liberty, etc. A thousand other nicks, from Eric Holder’s “nation of cowards” to Obama’s musings that at some point one needs no more income, ensured continual bleeding as his poll numbers fell by nearly 30 points in just 20 months.
The result was that the president soon lost the moral capital to push through an unpopular agenda — to such a degree that his out-of-the-mainstream views and his polarizing style of governance might well destroy Democratic congressional majorities for a decade.
A decade, if they’re lucky.
I never bought the conventional wisdom that the Obama campaign was brilliantly run. He was just the right guy in the right place at the right time. With the right skin color.
The Reviews Are In
…for Client Number Nine, at Eight. And this is a new low for Kathleen Parker, too.
What would possess CNN to think that people would want to watch as loathesome and hypocritical an individual as Elliot Spitzer?
This Is News?
ABC thinks that it’s a big deal that Rush Limbaugh is simply telling the truth:
The nation’s preeminent conservative talk radio host referred to Mr. Obama as a “jackass,” an “economic illiterate” and an “idiot, where capitalism is concerned.”
So, what’s the problem?
This reminds me of the old Soviet joke, about the guy who is arrested after walking down the street shouting “Brezhnev is an idiot.” He was sentenced to thirty-five years — five years for insulting the premier, and thirty for revealing a state secret.
In related news, the president stamped his hooves in petulant anger.
[Update a few minutes later]
It just occurs to me that it’s not a word with which the president is unfamiliar, or loathe to use himself. It’s what he called Kanye West.
Who Cares What He Thinks?
You know, if you have questions about vehicle development costs, or propulsion issues, I guess it would be useful to have a discussion with Dave King, but I see nothing in his experience that would render him in any way knowledgable about markets for commercial spaceflight. But a lot of clueless people will read this and think that he knows what he’s talking about, and make policy and investment decisions on the basis of it. This is even worse than having Congress call Tom Young as a witness, just because he was head of Lockheed and worked at JPL, when he has no experience with human spaceflight.
Via Clark Lindsey, who has more thoughts:
I would hope that in the future, NASA’s top administrators hire human spaceflight program managers who actually believe that human spaceflight is worth buying and are devoted to lowering its cost so that more and more people can afford to buy it.
Dream on. Not part of the job description. Which is why space remains unaffordable fifty-three years after its dawn.
An Amicus Brief
Supporting Virginia versus Sebelius:
If nothing else, I hope the brief will help dispel the myth that there is an expert consensus to the effect that the mandate is constitutional (see also here). It should by now be obvious that many well-known and highly respected scholars believe otherwise.
I think the notion that the mandate is constitutional is nonsense.
IBOTUS
This is the blind leading the blind — political advice for Barack Obama from Fritz Mondale, the man who lost forty-nine states, and then lost his own in a Senate race.
That’s right, his problem is that he hasn’t connected with us enough. It has nothing to do with his economically inept policies, continuous apologetics for everyone but him, and Marxism.
No Lost Moon
It’s probably pointless to point it out, but Mark Whittington once again demonstrates his profound inability to comprehend English:
…last April, President Barack Obama was quite specific that the Moon would be excluded from any program of space exploration.
“Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before. Buzz has been there. There’s a lot more of space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do”
Lori Garver herself pointedly excluded the Moon in a speech before a meeting of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics about her vision for the next fifty years in space.
In Whittingtonworld, not going someplace first is an “exclusion” of it. No one familiar with logic would draw such a conclusion. No one in the administration has said that we are not going back to the moon. All that the new policy does is remove it as the first target (as the Augustine panel suggested last year, for good reason). In fact, that is the only significant difference between the new policy and the original VSE, which was distorted beyond recognition by Mike Griffin’s determination to redo Apollo. As for Lori neglecting to specifically mention the moon in her speech in Anaheim (for which I was present), that was also not a “pointed exclusion.” A “pointed exclusion” would have been something like, “We are going beyond earth orbit, to asteroids and Mars, but not the moon.”
And of course, Mark continues to delude himself that what any president (particularly a likely one termer) states as a goal in space is going to matter a decade later, and doesn’t realize that Americans are no better at ten-year plans than Lenin was.
But as I said, it’s fruitless to expect Mark to get simple things like this right.
European Terror Threats
And a warning in Berlin, that the Europeans have been ignoring for far too long. The biggest problem that liberal societies face in this war is how to properly confront a totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion.
[Update a few minutes later]
Geert Wilders on trial. This is a travesty, and a display of the true Islamaphobes are — those who betray western liberal values by shutting down any criticism of the most intolerant religion of all.