Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Tea Party’s Cost To A Republican Senate

3 Comments

…has been grossly exaggerated:

Had “the Tea Party” won in Missouri, the GOP likely would have gained a Senate seat. Had it lost in Indiana and Delaware, the GOP likely would have gained them. It’s a jump ball in Colorado and Nevada—let’s split the difference and say maybe Jane Norton would have eked it out. I’d say you can only blame “the Tea Party” for a net loss of two Senate seats since 2010. That’s a period during which it helped send Mike Lee, Ron Johnson, Pat Toomey, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul to the upper House—during which “establishment” candidates like Denny Rehberg, Heather Wilson, Rick Berg, Josh Mandel, George Allen, Tommy Thompson, Carly Fiorina, and Dino Rossi totally failed to win seats.

The notion that Tod Akin was a Tea Party candidate remains hilariously ignorant. Actually, the Tea Party seems to have effectively taken over the Republican Party, in the sense that its candidates have been forced to run on limited-government themes, which is a good thing.

Business, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Next ObamaCare Lie

5 Comments

The Dems don’t really want to “fix it.” Every attempt to make a legislative change has been blocked in the Senate. Don’t let them get away with it.

[Update a few minutes later]

Hey, remember when Dems thought that the VA was a great model for government health care?

But they continue to pine for single payer, and surreptitiously or otherwise hope that the ObamaCare debacle will push us in that direction.

[Update a couple minutes later]

More problems and arguments lie ahead:

…the vast middle ground of “modify the law without repealing it” is terra incognita. It is as accurate as Burns’s formulation, and no less precise, to say that those who want to leave the law as it is are outnumbered more than 5 to 1 by those who want to repeal or change it.

There’s an additional ambiguity: What does it mean to leave the law “unchanged” when the Supreme Court has already struck down parts of it and the administration has declined to follow or enforce others? That’s not a salient question for immediate electoral purposes; in terms of voting intention, “left unchanged” can be taken as a statement of support for the Democrats. But even if the statutory language proves resistant to any effort at modification, there will be a new administration after 2016. That could mean more discretionary (or extralegal) changes and perhaps the end of ObamaCare as we know it.

“ObamaCare as we know it” is also an ambiguous turn of phrase, to say the least, for what do we know of ObamaCare? A few provisions are relatively straightforward, such as the expansion of Medicaid eligibility (in those states that have gone along with it) and the mandate that family insurance plans cover 23-, 24- and 25-year-old children of policyholders.

But the whole of ObamaCare is an insanely complicated scheme that even experts are still struggling to understand. “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it–away from the fog of the controversy,” then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said in March 2010. We’ll be finding out for many years to come, and there’s no reason to think that “fog” will ever lift.

The only way to lift the fog is to blow it all away.

[Update a few minutes later]

And then there’s this:

“The IRS isn’t likely to bring such proceedings to earn a pittance,” Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan, tells McIntyre. Then again, it wasn’t money the Obama IRS was after when it embarked on a campaign of harassment against conservative nonprofit organizations. These ObamaCare penalties may be too draconian to be applied generally, but applied selectively, they could be a powerful weapon of an abusive administration.

This administration is nothing if not abusive of the weapons at its disposal.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Terminating The ISS

53 Comments

General Bolden says that no single partner can do it.

Eric Berger says that Charlie doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

[Update a while later]

Second link was wrong, but fixed now. Sorry.

I should add that Zvezda is a much bigger problem than Soyuz (we could solve the latter simply by ending the irrational “safety is the highest priority” mantra). But that’s probably solvable too. If it were important.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Climate-Change Fundamentalists

1 Comment

More thoughts on the extreme-green religion.

[Update a while later]

Saving the planet, lawsuit by lawsuit:

Aside from the idea that a cease-&-desist letter can be copyrighted anymore than a parking ticket or a receipt from the gas station can, there are several other curious points the University makes. I’ve written to Ms Malloch seeking clarification, and will let you know as soon as I receive her response. Re the defamation threats, Brandon Shollenberger might like to know that my cracker-barrel legal team was the driving force behind “Rachel’s Law”, which ensures that no libel judgment from a jurisdiction that does not provide free-speech protections as strong as America’s will be recognized by courts here. But note yet again that, for all the complaints that “climate change denialists are suing scientists”, it is, in fact, the other way round. In Queensland as in the District of Columbia as in British Columbia, it’s the scientists who are suing.

Yes. Their “legal defense” funds are actually legal offense funds.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Origination Clause

36 Comments

Sorry, NYT, but I just went and looked, and no one has passed an amendment repealing it.

As with Halbig, the Chief Justice may see this as a chance to rectify his previous screw up. When you strip out all the language of a House bill, leaving nothing but the bill number, it’s pretty clearly a violation of the spirit of the clause, no matter what kind of procedural games the Congress wants to play.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

Forget Safety, We Need Our Own Spaceships

34 Comments

I have a follow-up to my Friday USA Today column, over at The Corner.

[Update a few minutes later]

At the suggestion of a colleague, lest I appear to be advocating kamikaze missions, the suggested language for the legislation might be: “The exploration and development of space is a national priority. Therefore, NASA’s first priority must be mission success in the critical steps toward reaching this goal. Consistent with this priority NASA shall strive at all times to achieve a level of safety comparable to that enjoyed by other critical national programs in extreme environments, such as deep-ocean and polar activities.”

The challenge and onus would then be on NASA and Congress to say why that is not a reasonable standard (which is currently met without all of NASA’s ridiculous safety/cost-plus/certification rigmarole).

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Space Movement

9 Comments

Is it moribund, and losing ground?

I’m not sure it matters, except to the degree that it influences government policy. Ultimately, it’s going to happen privately, if the government doesn’t prevent it. The flaw of past thinking of the movement was the notion that NASA was going to lead the way, and that it would need more money to do so. It’s pretty clear that that was never a realistic possibility.

Business, Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Why People Are Getting Fatter

5 Comments

New thinking:

One reason we consume so many refined carbohydrates today is because they have been added to processed foods in place of fats — which have been the main target of calorie reduction efforts since the 1970s. Fat has about twice the calories of carbohydrates, but low-fat diets are the least effective of comparable interventions, according to several analyses, including one presented at a meeting of the American Heart Association this year. A recent study by one of us, Dr. Ludwig, and his colleagues published in JAMA examined 21 overweight and obese young adults after they had lost 10 to 15 percent of their body weight, on diets ranging from low fat to low carbohydrate. Despite consuming the same number of calories on each diet, subjects burned about 325 more calories per day on the low carbohydrate than on the low fat diet — amounting to the energy expended in an hour of moderately intense physical activity. . . . If this hypothesis turns out to be correct, it will have immediate implications for public health.

Actually, it’s only “new” thinking for people who’ve been paying no attention.