…is dead in the water. But it continues to do a lot of economic damage.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
A Mother
An Academic Lynching
This is atrocious, but all too typical of modern academia, ever since the leftists began their takeover in the sixties.
Can A Christian Be A Libertarian?
A discussion. As a skeptic, it’s not a problem for me, of course.
A Way To Show Opposition To Earmarks
The presidential candidates should support legislation to forbid politicians from naming earmarks after themselves.
Postenvironmentalism
…and technological abundance.
Space is going to play an increasing role here, I hope.
The Shale Revolution
Is going to have long-term geopolitical effects:
“So far this century, this is the biggest innovation in energy, in terms of scale and impact,” according to U.S. analyst Daniel Yergin, author of a classic history of the oil industry, “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power”, who emphasised that one-third of all the gas produced in the United States is already extracted from shale gas reserves.
…In Ramírez’s view, “the abundance and new distribution of reserves of shale gas and other non-conventional fossil fuels will affect predictions about the relationship between energy and the economy, and will have major geopolitical effects.
“An initial effect is that the largest and best discoveries are outside the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC),” which will see its influence on the global energy market diminish in the long run, the expert said.
At the same time, Ramírez said, Russia will embark on the race to consolidate its position as a major global actor on the basis of its energy resources; Canada will emerge as a world oil power; and the United States, its supply secure, could feel freer from the vagaries of Middle East conflicts.
Can’t happen soon enough.
Hey, Warm Mongers!
The war is over, and you lost. As he notes, though, they’ve done untold damage to places like California.
“A Travesty For Government Accountability”
The Obama administration continues to use the Constitution for toilet paper. If they get away with this, they’ll regret it when someone else comes to power. And the media, of course, lies for them and calls it a “recess appointment.”
[Thursday morning update]
Barack Obama’s tyrannical abuse of power.
[Bumped]
[Late-morning update]
The Constitution is clear on recess appointments. This isn’t one.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The appointment is Constitutionally dubious, and so is the job itself.
[Update early afternoon]
More thoughts from John Yoo:
President Obama is making a far more sweeping claim. Here, as I understand it, the Senate is not officially in adjournment (they have held “pro forma” meetings, where little to no business occurs, to prevent Obama from making exactly such appointments). So there is no question whether the adjournment has become a constitutional “recess.” Rather, Obama is claiming the right to decide whether a session of Congress is in fact a “real” one based, I suppose, on whether he sees any business going on.
This, in my view, is not up to the president, but the Senate. It is up to the Senate to decide when it is in session or not, and whether it feels like conducting any real business or just having senators sitting around on the floor reading the papers. The president cannot decide the legitimacy of the activities of the Senate any more than he could for the other branches, and vice versa.
Is the president going to have the authority to decide if the Supreme Court has deliberated too little on a case? Does Congress have the right to decide whether the president has really thought hard enough about granting a pardon? Under Obama’s approach, he could make a recess appointment anytime he is watching C-SPAN and feels that the senators are not working as hard as he did in the Senate (a fairly low bar).
I think this will come back to bite him. And it’s all about his reelection.
The Space Shuttle Decision
Forty years ago today, President Richard Nixon announced that the nation would build a reusable vehicle, that would be used to fly all of the nation’s payloads into space. It first flew a little less than a decade later, and flew its last flight last summer, after a little over thirty years of operations. We are only starting to recover from the policy disaster.
[Update late morning]
The Space Shuttle, in happier days (flyback booster, no SRBs, no ET).