We should put an end to it. There’s nothing in it required by the Constitution. As noted, the current State of the Union format was invented by Woodrow Wilson, the closest thing this country ever had to a fascist dictator. Why would we want to continue it?
…as monarchical theatre it sucks. If you’re going to have an annual affront to republican virtue, you could at least have Barney Frank in knickerbockers and full-bottomed wig walking backwards shouting, “Hats off, strangers!”
Unless former John Edwards aide Andrew Young is making it all up — and at this point, Edwards has forfeited the benefit of the doubt — America came within Ohio’s electoral votes of electing a mad, narcissistic, and perhaps psychopathic monster to the vice presidency.
…It can’t be said enough. Almost every Democrat in the country did everything they could to put this man into the vice presidency in 2004, and quite a few of them worked hard to put him into the presidency in 2007 and 2008.
It’s what they do. And the truly disgusting thing is the way that the press, particularly the LA Times, covered for him.
As is usually the case, the comments at this Andy Pasztor article on the upcoming changes to the human spaceflight program, are ignorant and often nonsensical (the usual spinoff arguments are employed — one comments corrects another that NASA didn’t invent the microwave oven, only to then claim that it invented Teflon). As is often the case, it’s a stupidly partisan debate, with Obama haters (ironically) defending a bloated government agency. Jim Muncy and Bob Werb try (probably unsuccessfuly) to inject a little sanity.
And I have to say that I really don’t understand all these comments about “outsourcing” to US private industry. The irony of course is that the current plan is to “outsource” all of US human spaceflight after Shuttle to the Russians, indefinitely, and largely because the past five years and many billions were wasted on Ares/Orion instead of providing more incentive to private industry.
There’s a long piece over at Newsweek that, advertently or not, demonstrates the meaninglessness and flexibility of the word. As I’ve often noted, like “fascist,” most people who use it have no idea what it means.
I saw this on Friday, and it’s a good primer for young (and perhaps even old) leftists (or people who think they’re leftists) unfamiliar with their own intellectual history (not to mention why it’s odious to wear a Che teeshirt).