Thoughts from the Blogprof, about the “Chicago way.”
I hope that things like this will continue to take their toll on the administration.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
The Power And Danger
…of iconography. Live by the icon, die by the icon.
By the way, I know that some people don’t like to have to watch a video, and would rather read, and I generally am in their camp. But I think that this is a more powerful presentation than it would be if Bill had simply done it in an essay. It’s only eight minutes.
[Update late morning]
I’ve added a clickable graphic as sort of a teaser. I actually think that it would be better with ROFL…
[Bumped]
[Update mid afternoon]
A new Obama logo: line by line.
Obama, ACORN And The SEIU
His relationship with these goons and thugs goes way back:
In Connecticut, the SEIU asked its members to attend Congressman Jim Himes’ town hall meeting and drown out the voices opposing ObamaCare:
Healthcare Town Hall Forum with Congressman Jim Himes
August 06, 2009, 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM. …
Action: Opponents of reform are organizing counter-demonstrators to speak at this and several congressional town halls on the issue to defend the status quo. It is critical that our members with real, personal stories about the need for access to quality, affordable care come out in strong numbers to drown out their voices.At a St. Louis town hall, four SEIU members surrounded and attacked ObamaCare protester Kenneth Gladney:
Yes, they surrounded me. Actually, after the first two guys got me on the ground, they surrounded me and started kicking me in the head and in the back, and the knees and stuff like that. And after it was done, I got up, kind of dazed, looking for my glasses. And the one guy actually was coming at me again, and that’s when the police came in and, you know, cordoned off everything and started, you know, started arresting people.
Why would the president of the United States have any interest in linking up with the SEIU, encouraging them to be his enforcers?
In the mid 1990s, ACORN and the SEIU partnered with other leftist groups to help form the Marxist New Party, a political coalition. In 1995, Obama sought out their nomination. He was successful in obtaining that endorsement and used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers.
What color shirts should we call them?
Grading His First Semester
President Obama’s report card:
Subject: History Grade: F Comment: Among Barry’s weakest subjects. He experiences great difficulty identifying his centuries and has very little grasp of historical facts and events. As well, he shows a distinct aversion to diligent research. His instructor was particularly dismayed by his inability to tally the number of states in the union.
Subject: Political Science Grade: F Comment: A field of study which Barry would do well to avoid in the future. Fundamental ideas in statecraft appear alien to him. His romantic view of the world and his assumption of personal infallibility breed complacency rather than proficiency.
Subject: Economics Grade: F Comment: Barry shows no understanding of economic theory and seems incapable of mastering the complexities of the discipline. His class projects have advocated solutions to topic problems which would lead to disastrous results in the application.
Subject: Self-Esteem Grade: A++ Comment: A course only recently added to the syllabus. Barry led his cohort group by a wide margin and even exceeded the degree of instructor expertise.
Sounds like there’s room for improvement. But unfortunately, he’s the teacher’smedia’s pet.
Is It Constitutional?
Obamacare, that is. Not that Obama cares. Have to break eggs to make an omelette, doncha know?
Post-Racial Is Post-Democrats
Some thoughts on the slanderous R-word, from Frank J:
…here is an opportunity for Obama to really show he’s post-racial. He could say that people who toss around charges of racism at everyone who disagrees with them are nothing but poison to a political debate. They are as useful to the issue of race as having a Ku Klux Klan member on TV, ranting undisputed. But Obama can’t speak out against mindless charges of racism, because if the Democrats lose the issue of racism, they lose everything.
Yes, don’t look for him to avail himself of the opportunity any time soon.
[Update a couple minutes later]
George-Bush-by-proxie syndrome:
The origins of manufactured “politics of personal destruction” is Saul Alinsky, the mentor of a young Hillary Rodham, who wrote her 92-page Wellesley College senior thesis on the late Chicago-based “progressive” street agitator titled, “There Is Only the Fight.”
Mr. Obama and his Fighting Illini, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, have perfected Mr. Alinsky’s techniques as laid out in his guidebook to political warfare, “Rules for Radicals.” In plain language, we see how normal, decent and even private citizens become nationally vilified symbols overnight – all in the pursuit of progressive political victory.
Here’s hoping for a big backfire.
Except they’re not really “progressives,” any more than they are liberals. This isn’t progress — tyranny over individuals and individualists is the oldest idea in civilization.
[Update a few minutes later]
Fighting for his presidency, not reform:
…his end run damaged what was once his greatest asset — the belief among voters that he was something different.
Endless evasions and then a crackdown on opponents has made Obama look like just another president — and a cynical one at that.
Emotionally invoking his grandmother’s November death over the weekend to shame his critics was just the latest in a series of shoddy ploys.
Can President Obama escape the wreckage of his health care effort? Yes, but only if he stops being so slippery and starts leveling with voters.
Shorter answer: no.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Democrats misread their mandate:
Our system of government depends not only on how many votes you win, but how broadly distributed those votes are. This prevents one section or faction from railroading another. It is evident in the Electoral College and the House, but above all in the Senate, where 44 senators come from states that voted against Obama last year. That’s a consequence of the fact that Obama’s election – while historic in many respects, and the largest we have seen in 20 years – was still not as broad-based as many would like to believe. Bully for Obama and the Democrats that they have 60 Senators, but the fact remains that thirteen of them come from McCain states, indicating that the liberals don’t get the full run of the show.
For whatever reason, the Obama administration has acted as if those hagiographical comparisons to FDR were apt. It let its liberal allies from the coasts drive the agenda and write the key bills, and it’s played straw man semantic games to marginalize the opposition. For all the President’s moaning in The Audacity of Hope about how the Bush administration was railroading the minority into accepting far right proposals – he was prepared to let his Northeastern and Pacific Western liberal allies do exactly the same thing: write bills that excite the left, infuriate the right, and scare the center; insist on speedy passage through the Congress; and use budget reconciliation to ram it through in case the expected super majority did not emerge.
This might have flown during FDR’s 100 Days. But this is not 1933 and Barack Obama is no Franklin Roosevelt.
You can say that again.
[Update early afternoon]
The race card gets trumped.
Are We Having A Conversation Yet?
Some health-care thoughts on the disingenuity of the president and his administration from Ann Althouse.
[Late Sunday night update]
Mark Steyn also has some health-care thoughts:
there he was, reassuring the crowd that the provision for mandatory “end-of-life counseling” has “gotten spun into this idea of ‘death panels.’ I am not in favor of that.” Well, that’s good to know. So good that a grateful audience applauded the president’s pledge not to kill them. He has no plans, as he put it, to “pull the plug on Grandma.”
The problem with government health systems is not that they pull the plug on Grandma. It’s that Grandma has a hell of a time getting plugged in in the first place. The only way to “control costs” is to restrict access to treatment, and the easiest people to deny treatment to are the oldsters. Don’t worry, it’s all very scientific. In Britain, they use a “Quality-Adjusted Life Year” formula to decide that you don’t really need that new knee because you’re gonna die in a year or two, maybe a decade-and-a-half tops. So it’s in the national interest for you to go around hobbling in pain rather than divert “finite resources” away from productive members of society to a useless old geezer like you. And you’d be surprised how quickly geezerdom kicks in: A couple of years back, some Quebec facilities were attributing death from hospital-contracted infection of anyone over 55 to “old age.” Well, he had a good innings. He was 57.
He also points out the asininity of using life expectancy as a figure of merit for different systems, as so many proponents of a government takeover so disingenuously do:
“Life expectancy” is a very crude indicator. Afghanistan has a life expectancy of 43. Does this mean the geriatric wards of Kandahar are full of Pushtun Jennifer Lopezes and Julia Robertses? No. What it means is that, if you manage to survive the country’s appalling infant-mortality rates, you have a sporting chance of eking out your three-score-and-ten. To say that people in Afghanistan can expect to live till 43 is a bit like saying the couple at No. 6 Elm Street are straight, and the couple at No. 8 are gay so the entire street is bisexual.
Which brings us to the United States and its allegedly worst health system in the developed world. Here’s the reality: The longer you live in America, the longer you live. If you’re one of those impressionable “Meet The Press” viewers who heard New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg bemoaning U.S. life expectancy, and you’re thinking, “Hey, I’m 77. Just about at the end, America-wise. Maybe it’s time to move up north or over to Europe, and get a couple of bonus years,” don’t do it! If you’re old enough to be a “Meet The Press” viewer, your life expectancy is already way up there.
America is the Afghanistan of the Western world: That’s to say, it has a slightly higher infant-mortality rate than other developed nations (there are reasons for that which I’ll discuss in an upcoming column). That figure depresses our overall “life expectancy at birth.” But, if you can make it out of diapers, you’ll live longer than you would pretty much anywhere else. By age 40, Americans’ life expectancy has caught up with Britons’. By 60, it equals Germany’s. At the age of 80, Americans have greater life expectancy than Swedes.
How can this be?
He explains. Hint: it’s not because we have socialized medicine.
More Gun Control Stupidity
In Michigan:
What is it with liberals and gun rights? Liberals simply cannot find an individual right to carry in the U.S. Constitution, even though it is explicitly cited in amendments that specifically address only individual rights, but can find a right to abortion which is somehow invisibly inserted somewhere in the same document.
It’s partly because they’re not really liberals.
In Defense Of Phobos
This WaPo piece by Joel Achenbach has something missing:
The panel will give the administration a menu of options that includes some that require a boost in funding for human spaceflight, which currently costs a little less than $10 billion a year, including the shuttle, the station and the Constellation program. Those options will include variations of a lunar program — the committee appears to prefer to see astronauts making sorties to various locations on the moon rather than concentrating on a single outpost at the moon’s pole, which is the current plan.
The committee is clearly most animated by what it calls the “Deep Space” option, a strategy that emphasizes getting astronauts far beyond low Earth orbit but not necessarily plunking them down on alien worlds. Instead, the Deep Space strategy would send them to near-Earth asteroids and to gravitationally significant points in space, known as Lagrange points, that are beyond the Earth’s protective magnetosphere.
Astronauts might even go all the way to Phobos, a tiny moon of Mars, where the spaceship wouldn’t land so much as rendezvous, in the same way a spacecraft docks at the International Space Station. That might seem a long way to go without touching down on the planet below. But the Deep Space option steers clear of “gravity wells,” which is to say the surface of any planet or large moon. The energy requirements of going up and down those steep gravity hills are so great that it would take many heavy-lift rocket ships to carry supplies and fuel on a mission to the Martian surface. A human landing on Mars is presently beyond NASA’s reach under any reasonable budgetary scenario, the committee has determined.
Note that there is absolutely no discussion of refueling, though that was a key feature of several of the Augustine options. The piece seems to be entirely focused (as the press tends to do, in its simplistic reporting) on destinations, and their various attributes, desirable or otherwise. This notion of a “long way to go without touching down on the planet below” seems to be an artifact of limited imagination.
First of all, once you’re at Phobos, if you send the right equipment, you might in fact be able manufacture the propellant needed to descend to the surface, manufacture propellant there, and come back up. The additional mass needed to do this would be trivial, compared to the IMLEO (initial mass in low earth orbit) required to do a Mars landing staged from earth. All it would take is a refuelable lander, and the equipment necessary to process the asteroid (which is what Phobos or Deimos are, other than their location).
But beyond that, what’s wrong with Phobos? I think that John Logsdon’s attitude is blinkered as well (not that that would be anything new):
Any strategy going forward must cope with the obvious problem that the United States has already visited the moon, and the solar system offers earthlings few other appealing places to go that are anywhere close at hand. Logsdon said he wasn’t sure that the Deep Space option, with its emphasis on “flybys” rather than landings, would be easy to sell to the public.
“I wonder myself if just flying around and not landing anywhere would be very attractive,” he said.
This from a guy who has never expressed any interest or desire to go himself, but thinks he knows what people want from a space program. First of all, you aren’t “not landing anywhere.” You are landing on frickin’ Phobos. The fact that it’s a lot easier than having to descend into a gravity well doesn’t make it less interesting. Yes, obviously, most people would rather walk on Mars, but (at least in NASA’s plans) most people aren’t going to be able to do any of these things. And on such a huge planet, even if someone lands on Mars, will it be the most interesting part of Mars? Not initially. Armstrong and Aldrin landed in the Sea of Tranquility not for any particular points of interest, but because it was the biggest flattest mare they knew of on the near side. It’s not like the first Mars explorers are going to climb Olympus Mons.
Seeing the earth from ISS, through glass and with their own eyes, unfiltered by electronics, is the most fascinating thing that astronauts there do. Why would we think that looking at Mars from Phobos would be of any less interest?
While I’m not that big on the voyeurism inherent in the NASA human spaceflight program as currently executed, I would think that having humans orbiting the Red Planet, and reporting back their experiences in their own words, would be pretty damned exciting (though I’d hope that given how picky they can be about astronaut selection, one of the criteria they would use was communications ability and articulateness, and even poetic ability — a lot of astronauts are good at this, but many aren’t, and when they are, it seems to be accidental, e.g., Mike Collins). There is no reason that you should have to descend into a deep gravity well to make deep space exploration exciting, and I tire of the notion that there is.
Ares I-X
…isn’t getting much love in comments over at Space Transport News. At least not the kind that its supporters would like to see:
Perhaps NASA should keep the Ares I-X in storage until the 4th of July next year. I imagine the flaming propellant debris cloud would be pretty cool to watch.
Posted by Neil H. at 08/15/09 12:28:554th of July is too long to wait. I vote for New Years fireworks spectacular.
Posted by john hare at 08/15/09 13:02:52How about Labor Day, send Summer out with a bang.
Posted by anonymous at 08/15/09 13:16:56
This “test,” which isn’t testing actual flight hardware, has cost (so far) a third of a billion dollars. That’s about the same as the estimate for the launch escape system for the Dragon. Sometimes it seems that people who advocate more money for NASA seem to have no concept of cost and value.