No, Trayvon Martin was no Emmett Till.
But some people just can’t let go of their race-baiting. I for one (well, OK, for at least two) hereby officially refuse to engage in any more one-sided “conversations” about race.
[Link to the second page of the Barone piece at IBD seems to be broken — I’ve emailed him about it.]
[Update a while later]
The cheapening of civil-rights history. They should be ashamed, but they’re shameless.
The witnesses are being forced into a witness-protection program.
I don’t think they’re the ones being protected, though.
[Update a while later]
Will David Ubben blow the roof off the “phony” scandal?
Ubben was stuck on that rooftop for 20 hours before help finally arrived. He can tell us and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “what difference does it make”that help was not sent — at least two American lives. Ubben sustained injuries at Benghazi so severe he’s still being treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Rep. Darrel Issa’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has tried to interview Ubben as part of its Benghazi scandal investigation, but the State Department has not allowed the meeting, according to Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah.
“While initially they said they would be helpful, pretty quickly they turned that off,” Chaffetz reported. “And I had a meeting scheduled to go visit this … young man and then I was denied.” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki denies Chaffetz’s claim, saying State has been fully cooperative.
Yeah, right.
[Update a while later]
“The CIA has been subjecting operatives to monthly polygraph tests in an attempt to suppress details of a US arms smuggling operation in Benghazi that was ongoing when its ambassador was killed by a mob in the city last year.”
Of course they have. Can’t let the truth get out. Might turn a “phony” scandal into a real one.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Gee, maybe this is worth investigating after all.
To be clear, it isn’t at all certain that the CIA was secretly funneling Libyan weapons to Syria, long before Congress “lifted its hurdles” on arming Syrian rebels. But if CNN’s report is correct, the CIA is at minimum trying to hide something huge from Congress, something that CIA agents might otherwise want to reveal — itself a reason for Congress to press hard for information. And if speculation about moving weapons is grounded in anything substantive, that would be an additional reason to investigate what the CIA is doing in Libya. Dozens of CIA agents were apparently on the ground in Benghazi, Libya last September.
And yes, it would be nice to know why, and what they were doing.
Thoughts from Dan Henninger:
The political left, historically inclined by ideological belief to public policy that is imposed rather than legislated, will support Mr. Obama’s expansion of authority. The rest of us should not.
The U.S. has a system of checks and balances. Mr. Obama is rebalancing the system toward a national-leader model that is alien to the American tradition.
Gee, someone should write a book
Some extensive thoughts, from Charlie Martin.
Sorry, but disagreeing with the media is not a “war on science.”
Here, where cattle could graze in vast swaths of this depopulated city, democracy ratified a double delusion: Magic would rescue the city (consult the Bible, the bit about the multiplication of the loaves and fishes), or Washington would deem Detroit, as it recently did some banks and two of the three Detroit-based automobile companies, “too big to fail.” But Detroit failed long ago. And not even Washington, whose recklessness is almost limitless, is oblivious to the minefield of moral hazard it would stride into if it rescued this city and, then inevitably, others that are buckling beneath the weight of their cumulative follies. It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. This bedraggled city’s decay poses no theological conundrum of the sort that troubled Darwin, but it does pose worrisome questions about the viability of democracy in jurisdictions where big government and its unionized employees collaborate in pillaging taxpayers. Self-government has failed in what once was America’s fourth-largest city and now is smaller than Charlotte, N.C.
This is why the Founders gave us a republic, not a democracy.
Frank J. has (literally) a killer app for it:
Will it work? I dunno. But, I’d like to see it throw something off the planet. Or someone.
Let’s start with Barack Obama. Next, Joe Biden. Then, Obama’s cabinet. Follow that up with the Democrats in Congress, and then the people that voted for them.
I’m thinking once we do that, we’ll have worked out all the bugs, and the Republicans will get the idea that we don’t mind tossing folks off the planet. Maybe they’ll straighten up and act right.
I wouldn’t bet on it. We’d probably have to demonstrate it on a few of them, too.
It’s hard to believe that this was said with a straight face:
“The review had to be incredibly detailed, so our plans for vehicle integration, flight software, test, verification and operations will result in a safe, affordable and sustainable vehicle design,” said Todd May, manager of the SLS Program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
Emphasis mine.
Really? Affordable? And if it’s not affordable it’s not sustainable.
As for safety, here’s what I wrote in the book:
It should be noted that NASA currently plans only two flights for the SLS—one in 2017 to demonstrate the 70-ton capability, and one with a crew in 2021, to…somewhere. They have said that, when operational, it may only fly every couple of years. What are the implications of that, in terms of both cost and safety?
Cost wise, it means that each flight will cost several billion dollars, at least for those first two flights. If, once in operation, it has a two- or three-billion-dollar annual budget (a reasonable guess based on Shuttle history), and it only flies every couple of years, that means that each subsequent flight will cost anywhere from four to six billion dollars.
From a safety standpoint, it means that its operating tempo will be far too slow, and its flights far too infrequent, to safely and reliably operate the system. The launch crews will be sitting around for months with little to do, and by the time the next launch occurs they’ll have forgotten how to do it, if they haven’t left from sheer boredom to seek another job.
As a last-ditch effort to try to preserve the Shuttle in 2010, some suggested that it be maintained until we had a replacement, but to fly it only once per year to save money. The worst part of such a proposal would have been the degree to which the system would have been even less safe, given that it was designed for a launch rate of at least four flights per year. It was unsafe to fly it too often (as NASA learned in the 80s as it ramped up the flight rate before Challenger), and it would be equally so to fly it too rarely.
NASA’s nominal plans for SLS compound this folly, which is magnified by the fact that both internal NASA studies and independent industry ones have demonstrated that there is no need for such a vehicle to explore beyond earth orbit (existing launchers could do that job just fine, with orbital mating and operations), and it is eating up all the funding for systems, such as landers and orbital propellant storage facilities, that are necessary. All of this is just more indication that actually accomplishing things in space is the lowest priority for Congress (and unfortunately, the space agency itself, otherwise, the administrator would be more honest with the appropriators on the Hill).
But this PDR will be hailed by supporters nonetheless.
Here’s an article at the WaPo about it. This isn’t correct, though:
It is always desirable to launch to the east to capitalize on the direction of the Earth’s spin. The Earth travels about 1,000 mph west to east at the equator; you need to reach a speed of 17,000 mph to get to low-Earth orbit, so there’s no point in penalizing yourself 1,000 mph by heading in the wrong direction.
No, not “always.” Only for low-inclination orbits. For very high inclination, or retrograde, it’s actually preferable to launch from a high latitude (ideally, for a retrograde orbit, you’d like to launch from a pole, to eliminate any earth rotation, because it’s rotating in the wrong direction).
Eric Berger talks about the elephant in the room:
…this battle [over destinations] is a distraction from NASA’s real problem, which neither Democrats nor Republicans are willing to acknowledge. Namely, the space agency is being tasked with building a huge and powerful rocket it will not be able to afford to fly.
It doesn’t matter, as long as the jobs continue.
The media will continue to pretend that there’s nothing there, but it’s going to get harder and harder:
Lew, Carney and Obama himself act like people worried about a threat lying a little farther under investigators’ shovels. And they should be considering the suspicious timeline of Obama-appointed IRS chief counsel William Wilkins visiting the president on April 23 last year; IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visiting the White House the next day; and Wilkins’ office sending the IRS “guidance” on the Tea Party the day after that.
Just a coinkidinky, I’m sure.
[Noon update]
Did the IRS coordinate with other agencies to target conservative groups?
Sure looks like it. Still waiting for Baghdad Jim’s explanation of why Lerner took the Fifth.