Can anyone figure out how this story about the Falcon 9 justifies its headline?
What is the “crucial step”? When did it occur? All the story says is that the vehicle has been sitting on the pad since January which, at the end of March, hardly seems like hard, breaking news.
I’m also amused that PopSci accepts the characterization of the vehicle as “reusable.” While I hope that they can ultimately achieve that goal, that’s all it is, as I understand it. It’s not a current design feature.
An invitation for Bill Ayers to speak at Boston college has been rescinded, under public pressure.
Remember, when a private company wants to cover up billions in losses and the responsibility for them, that’s a major scandal and proof of the evils of capitalism. But when a government regulator does the same thing, that’s just how people are, these things happen, whaddyagonnado? Plus, more evidence that the country’s in the very best of hands:
After the companies were taken over, investors around the world who buy the companies’ debt and mortgage investments weren’t willing to pay top dollar, reflecting doubts about whether the U.S. government would stand behind the firms if they faltered further. As a result, mortgage rates initially rose, further depressing house prices, contrary to what the government intended when it took over the firms.
Then, earlier this month Freddie Mac lost its chief executive, longtime banker David Moffett, who joined the company at the government’s behest in September. He clashed with government regulators who pushed him to take steps that would forgo revenue opportunities. Freddie Mac is now looking for a new chief executive, chief operating officer and chief financial officer — and having trouble finding them.
Gee, why would a business that the government has taken over and mismanaged have trouble recruiting
fall guyssenior executives in this political climate?
I think that Liddy missed a big opportunity to have a McCarthy-hearing style moment, after having to take all that Bravo Sierra from the anal orifices on the Hill who really caused the crisis because they were on the take, after taking a thankless job for one dollar a year. He could have castigated them for their own roles, and resigned, with an “At last, Senator, have you no decency?” He’d have been my hero if he had, and I suspect a lot of people would have agreed.
Oliphant – whose work I usually find humdrum in the extreme – has done us a favor. Deliberately or not, he has dropped the oldest of phony Leftist pretenses – that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not the same. The poor, diminutive woman and child of Gaza in his cartoon are being eaten alive by a rapacious Jewish star, not by the flag of Israel. It is the religion or ethnic group (you decide), not the state – Jews, not Israelis – performing this supposedly horrific act.
Well, thank you, Oliphant, you racial primitive you. You let the cat out of the bag we always knew was in there. And you did it in the pages of the Washington Post.
It was always a pretty thin excuse.
[Update a few minutes later]
More thoughts from Ron Radosh:
in his new cartoon, Oliphant echoes the kind of propaganda once favored by the Nazis in their racist paper Der Strumer, edited by one of Hitler’s top journalists, Julius Streicher. What Oliphant does is show a headless Nazi-like soldier- an Israeli- goose-stepping Nazi fashion with his sword ready for action. He is ready to inflict a weaponized Star of David on a mother and child in Gaza. The right side of the religious symbol of Judaism is depicted as a shark coming at the hapless victims.
If you think the comparison to the cartoons in Streicher’s rag is going too far, take a look at this cartoon. Or this one: the Jewish “monster” with his claw-like hands trying to take over the world. One might wonder if Oliphant consulted this Nazi archive for inspiration.
He probably didn’t have to. They have modern equivalents in Middle East media.
At the thread about the world’s most attractive female politicians, Alan K. Henderson notes that Alessandra Mussolini didn’t make the cut, though she’s got Hillary beat by a country mile. I’d never heard of her before, but she’s very interesting. She’s Il Duce’s granddaughter, and Sophia Loren’s niece, if Wikipedia is to be believed.
But what’s strange about the article (well, not so strange, actually, it’s typical) is the way the word “fascist” and the phrase “right wing” are thrown around freely, with very few references to actual policies that would justify such labels. It seems to contain many of the misconceptions described in Jonah Goldberg’s book. For instance:
Her relations with Gianfranco Fini, leader of the Alleanza Nazionale, never were very good, she announced; she then withdrew later, her resignation due to differences with him at least once.[9] This antagonism was exacerbated when Fini criticized some aspects of fascism, such as its antisemitism. She unsuccessfully challenged him for leadership of the party when he withdrew support for Benito Mussolini in a television interview in January 2002.
Note that there is an implicit assumption that there is something intrinsically anti-semitic about fascism. But one can understand why she might be upset about this slander against her grandfather because, for all of his other sins, there is zero evidence that he was anti-semitic. That was in fact one of the tensions between his regime and Hitler’s. It wasn’t just a coincidence that eighty percent of Italian Jews survived the Holocaust.
And of course, there was very little that was actually “right wing” about him, except that he appropriated the label late to differentiate himself, a man of the left all his life, and a national socialist, from the international ones in the Soviet Union.
And let’s puzzle out the next graf:
Mussolini suddenly left National Alliance on 28 November 2003, following the visit of party leader and the Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini to Israel, where he described fascism as “the absolute evil” as he apologised for Italy’s role as an Axis Power during the Second World War. Mussolini however defended the right of Israel to exist and declared that the world “should beg forgiveness of Israel.”
That hardly sounds like either a “right winger,” or anti-semite to me. Again, while it wouldn’t be inappropriate to apologize for being part of the Axis, Italy had nothing to apologize for when it came to its own treatment of the Jews, at least relative to the rest of Europe, or even with respect to the US, which refused to admit them in the thirties. So again it would be understandable that she would be upset about an apparent slander of her grandfather’s memory. The use of the word “however” in the last sentence implies that she would be expected to be opposed to Israel, when in fact there’s no reason to think that even her grandfather would have been.
This next one is hilarious, if you accept Jonah’s thesis:
Following her resignation, Mussolini formed her Social Action party, originally named “Freedom of Action”, and organized a far right coalition named Social Alternative. That was a surprising move, as Mussolini, during her political career, had always taken progressive stances on many issues, including abortion, artificial insemination, gay rights and civil unions. She has been an outspoken “feminist” and has been described by conservative commentators as a “socialist” and a “left-winger”.
So, what exactly is it that is “far right” about the coalition? They don’t say. We must simply take their word for it that it is. Is it possible that the move is not as “surprising” as it might be to people who don’t view the world through the conventional looking glass of fascism as “right wing”?
I loved this one:
In 2006 she responded to claims by effeminate Italian M.P. candidate Vladimir Luxuriathat she was a ‘fascist’ with the line “Meglio fascista che frocio” (“It is better to be a fascist than a fruit”).
Of course, she’s not necessarily admitting to be a fascist with that line, but she actually seems fine with the label, given that her grandfather invented it. Perhaps as a leftist, she understands fascism much better than most of her cohorts?
[Update late afternoon]
I missed this one. The very first sentence of the article:
Alessandra Mussolini (born 30 December 1962) is an Italian conservative politician…
So what is it that makes her a “conservative”? Her “progressive” views on abortion, artificial insemination, gays, civil unions? Her “feminism”? Or is it just that she’s an admitted fascist, and we all know that fascism is “conservative,” and “right wing”?
[Update a few minutes later]
Now that I think about it, she’s her grandfather’s granddaughter — a leftist who calls herself a fascist. Except unlike most European leftists, she’s not anti-Israel (and anti-semitic).
A new web site, apparently by Liberty Girl and others.
We’ll see where this goes.
You know, since they’re doing a movie of Atlas Shrugged, it might be a good time for The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress as well. I wonder if anyone’s optioned it?
Thoughts on the unsavory and oppressive relationship between big government and big business:
…one needs to remember that the New Deal was not the assault on big business that its fans claim. FDR may have talked a good game about going after “economic royalists,” and he did love confiscatory personal income taxes. But he and his Brain Trust also loved cartels, big businesses, and other “big units” of society. The notion that big business and big government are at war with one another is one of the great enduring myths of the 20th century. The truth is that ever since Teddy Roosevelt abandoned his love of trust-busting, progressives have liked big businesses big, really big. The bigger the business, the more reliable the partner for big government.
Contra popular myth/lies, It’s not libertarians who favor big business and corporations.
[Update late morning]
Not Japan — Argentina:
In visits to Asian capitals during the region’s financial crisis in the late 1990s, I often heard Asian reformers such as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew or Japan’s Eisuke Sakakibara complain about how the incestuous relationship between governments and large Asian corporate conglomerates stymied real economic change. How fortunate, I thought then, that the United States was not similarly plagued by crony capitalism! However, watching Goldman Sachs’s seeming lock on high-level U.S. Treasury jobs as well as the way that Republicans and Democrats alike tiptoed around reforming Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae — among the largest campaign contributors to Congress — made me wonder if the differences between the United States and the Asian economies were only a matter of degree.
On Wall Street there is an old joke that the longest river in the emerging-market economies is “de Nile.” Yet how often do U.S. leaders respond to growing signs of economic dysfunctionality by spouting nationalistic rhetoric that echoes the speeches of Latin American demagogues like Peru’s Alan Garcia in the 1980s and Argentina’s Carlos Menem in the 1990s? (Even Garcia, currently in his second go-around as Peru’s president, seems to have grown up somewhat.) But instead of facing our problems we extol the resilience of the U.S. economy, praise the most productive workers in the world, and go on and on about America’s inherent ability to extricate itself from any crisis. And we ignore our proclivity as a nation to spend, year in year out, more than we produce, to put off dealing with long-term problems, and to engage in grandiose long-term programs that as a nation we can ill afford.
Read the whole depressing thing.
Pardon me the schadenfreude, but I just can’t stop laughing at these links.
Don’t pull on Superman’s cape, and don’t…mess…with the Mickey. And I don’t mean mouse.
The Irish teleprompter “gaffe” by President Obama wasn’t.
Once again, the Repubicans have let us down. I had hoped that the Senate would block this authoritarian expansion of Americorps.