[Update a few minutes later]
Did the Cordray power play backfire? Gee, maybe people care about the Constitution and the law more than the Dems want them to.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Good Night, Moonshot
Matt Welch has some thoughts on the mission creep of the “If we can put a man on the moon” analogy. It’s also an introduction to this month’s issue of Reason magazine, which is focused on space. It’s on the stands and in the mail now, and other pieces in it, including my own, and contributions from Greg Benford and Bob Zubrin, will be going on line over the next couple weeks.
[Update a while later]
I have some related thoughts over at Open Market.
The Lunar Yellow Peril
I have some thoughts on China’s recently announced space plans, and some conservatives’ overreaction to them, over at PJMedia.
[Update mid morning]
Tea Party in Space has responded to Cal Thomas as well.
Save The Blacksmiths!
Why creative destruction is the core of capitalism.
Newt’s (and Rick Perry’s) attacks on Romney and Bain Capital are undermining the argument for limited government. They’re also giving ammunition to Obama in the fall if Romney is the nominee.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Romney doesn’t have to apologize for his Bain career.
Don’t Know Much About Science
Some thoughts about the “moderate” Jon Huntsman:
Nearly everything “liberal” about Huntsman is symbolic. His campaign’s iconic moment was an unprovoked Twitter comment in which he wrote: “To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”
While politically loaded, this statement is nearly substanceless. A president’s “Belie[f] in evolution” has not had any bearing on public policy in a good while. And scientifically, the statement doesn’t mean much — “believing in” something is more the business of faith than science.
And “trust[ing] scientists on global warming,” taken literally isn’t actually agreement with Al Gore’s fevered warnings of 20-foot sea-level rises or endorsement of Democrats’ big-government energy proposals.
Science involves detail, nuance, and acknowledgment of uncertainty. Bluster about “believing in science” is just a self-congratulatory liberal trope meant to denigrate conservative rubes from the red states clinging bitterly to their guns and religion.
It’s identity politics, and Huntsman is identifying as a liberal or a moderate. That MSNBC hosts and liberal writers fall for this trick is telling, but just as telling is how much conservatives also buy into it.
It comes back to the mistaken concept of many that “science” is knowledge, rather than a process by which we achieve it. It is my own belief in science that creates my skepticism about AGW, because the process is intrinsically flawed, and the leading practitioners of “climate science” have betrayed it.
[Update a few minutes later]
I often joke about firing up the SUVs to stave off the next glacial advance, but now there’s a paper that says greenhouse gases will do exactly that. Of course, they still think that global warming is worse than a mile-thick sheet of ice. Have to stick with the narrative.
The Minimum Sudoku Problem
Of course, this is for a nine-by-nine. There is nothing intrinsic to the sudoku concept that requires a nine-by-nine matrix, as far as I know. That’s just the size that utilizes the non-zero digits. Smaller ones would just leave out the upper numbers, and larger ones could continue by using letters, as in hexadecimal (though they would get increasingly tough to solve as size increased). People think that sudoku is about math because it has numbers in it, but it’s really just a logic puzzle. It doesn’t have to use numbers at all, but everyone knows them, so they make handy symbols. You could just as well use mah-jong tiles, or animals for a kid’s version.
Obama Versus The Constitution
Thoughts from Mickey Kaus.
Obama’s New Defense Plan
Commercial Crew And Solyndra
Clark Lindsey takes on the ongoing idiocy of thinking them equivalent, or comparable.
So Let It Be Written
…so let it be done. I don’t think that I’ve seen a president so intrinsically contemptuous of the Constitution in my lifetime. And that’s a lifetime that included George Bush (who should have been impeached for signing McCain-Feingold) and Bill Clinton.
[Update a few minutes later]
The new authoritarianism:
Much of the administration’s approach has to do with a change in the nature of liberal politics. Today’s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class. Their goal is governmental control over everything from what sort of climate science is permissible to how we choose to live our lives. Many of today’s progressives can be as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah. Like Al Gore declaring the debate over climate change closed, despite the Climategate e-mails and widespread skepticism, the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth. Critics lie beyond the pale.
The problem for the clerisy lies in political reality. The country’s largely suburban and increasingly Southern electorate does not see big government as its friend or wise liberal mandarins as the source of its salvation. This sets up a potential political crisis between those who know what’s good and a presumptively ignorant majority. Obama is burdened, says Joe Klein of Time, by governing a “nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive,” as the title of his story puts it, without the guidance of our president. But if the people are too deluded to cooperate, elements in the progressive tradition have a solution: European-style governance by a largely unelected bureaucratic class.
There’s nothing new about this, really. Today’s “progressives” are very similar to the original ones, from Teddy Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson, on whose legacies European fascism was forged.