Category Archives: Political Commentary

A Comedian In My Comments Section

Is this you, Frank J.?

If Obama does win re-election, he’ll likely preside over four more years of slow recovery, protect the Affordable Care Act until people get used to its benefits, protect Roe-v-Wade with another court pick or two, and go down in history as the best Democratic president since FDR. Come 2016 we’ll regret the 22nd Amendment.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah…[take a breath]…hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah…

Oh, man, my sides hurt.

The Latest Space Quarterly

Two articles from the current issue have been put on line for non-subscribers. One is a piece by Jeff Foust, discussing the stakes for commercial spaceflight in the upcoming COTS demonstration flights, and the other is a longer essay by Marcia Smith (who I first met at a AAS conference in Boston about thirty years ago) on the past and future of space policy, including human spaceflight. It’s a good overview, but I don’t think she’s sufficiently critical of the damaging role that Congress has played, and the role that pork, rather than actual accomplishments in space, plays in the SLS mess. She is justly harsh on the administration, whose policy making with space has been just as inept as in all else, though at least it had a more sensible policy even if it is unable to coherently articulate it. I’ve spent the last two years trying to make up for it, defending the new direction with numerous essays in various venues, but it’s hard to break through the FUD, noise and parochialism, particularly given how unimportant space policy is, as she notes herself.

We Lazy And Soft Americans

just don’t deserve a demi-god like Barack Obama:

Maybe it’s time for us to really take a look at ourselves and ask: Is Obama actually a great president, and we’re just a lousy country?

It’s not really that radical a question. I mean, look at him: He’s a bright, Harvard-educated man who’s not only been to other countries but has actually lived in them — he knows cultures and viewpoints beyond the narrow ones we have here. And he surrounds himself with the greatest minds on earth. And who are we, compared to him? We’re a bunch of slobs, really. Kind of ignorant. Maybe a little racist. And we surround ourselves with bowls of flavored corn chips. But the country’s problems are supposed to be his fault? Does that make sense?

Look at what Obama did to try and get our economy going. He had this big, hundreds of billions of dollars stimulus that was designed by all the great economists who work in his administration — the top minds. It should have worked. The economy should be roaring right now and unemployment a thing of the past. America should be a utopia. So what was missing from the equation? That the people the stimulus was used on are a bunch of lazy dimwits. Obama did everything he possibly could, but apparently Americans just aren’t very good at running businesses and creating jobs. Obama has given us so many advantages that even chimpanzees should have been able to create jobs, but we just sit there like useless blobs while our companies crumble around us. We’re failing the country. We’re failing him.

I’ve been saying for years that we’re just not worthy of him.

The Tebow Phenomenon

Dan Foster and Rich Lowry have some thoughts on why there is so much hostility to the openly Christian quarterback.

As a non-believer (but not a fundamentalist atheist), I think that he raises hackles in two different groups of people — those who are bigoted against Christians in general (and they are legion — it is the last acceptable bigotry in our society) and those Christians who feel guilty because he sets the bar too high (and there is actually a non-zero intersection of those two sets). I would think of him as the Ned Flanders of the NFL, the completely unironic guy who is made fun of because in living up to his beliefs rather than down to his impulses, he makes everyone else look bad. And because he’ll continue to do so, he won’t care. Which will just make them all the angrier.