Who are you going to believe, Attackwatch, or your lying eyes?
[Update a while later]
Here’s the commercial for it. Hilarious.
[Update]
More from the Hawk:
“I actually sympathize with #AttackWatch. They remind me of the time I got my head wedged in a bowling ball return chute.”
[Update mid morning]
The Hill has a story on it.
[Afternoon update]
Well, that didn’t take long. Go get your Attack Watch tee shirt.
…on unemployment. Even Robert Reich thinks the president isn’t serious:
Reich is still confused, though:
If the president was never really serious about getting Republican votes in the first place–if his jobs bill and the tax increase on the wealthy were always going to be part of his 2012 election year pitch–why didn’t he make his jobs bill big enough to do the job?
Let’s accept for the sake of argument the creationist premise that an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent government can create all the jobs it wants simply by borrowing and spending enough money. Let’s also assume Reich’s premise that “enough,” in this case, is some figure considerably in excess of $447 billion.
Why didn’t Obama ask for enough? That seems obvious. If the answer is “no,” and the point of asking the question is to elicit a negative response, then the practical difference between what you get if you ask for $447 billion and, say, $5 trillion is not $4.553 trillion but zero. If Obama is asking for the money only for appearance’ sake, as Reich concedes he is, then it’s more important that $447 billion appears more reasonable than $5 trillion.
Either way, Megan McArdle wishes “that Obama hadn’t wasted my Thursday evening, and that of 31 million other Americans, listening to a jobs plan that was only designed to produce one job–a second term for Barack Obama.” Most of those viewers–those of us who write about this stuff for a living being obvious exceptions–didn’t actually have to watch the speech, so we’re not able to work up much sympathy for those who didn’t have the good sense to change the channel or go out and live a little.
But let’s take this by the numbers. Obama’s speech lasted about 42 minutes. Multiply that by 31 million viewers and, say, $20 an hour, and you end up with the man-hour equivalent of about $434 million. It’s a shameful waste, but much less of one than if Stimulus Jr. actually became law.
No danger of that, fortunately. The neo-Keynesians have finally completely destroyed whatever credibility they ever had.
I have some thoughts on cost overruns on federal transportation projects, including space transportation, over at Open Market.
…is it the end game? This will be a horrific human catastrophe, the result of decades of malgovernment. If the generals abandon their peace treaty and pick a fight with Israel, it should take the opportunity to expand its territory and buy more border security.
The Keynesian one:
Another CEI colleague, Luke Pelican, has a blog post at Open Market about the current House proposal to halve FAA-AST’s budget request:
Given the current quagmire facing NASA, the rapid development seen in the private space sector, and the uncertainty regarding the FAA-AST’s future regulatory plans, this budgetary restriction may help narrow the agency’s focus to ensuring a streamlined licensing process for commercial operators, rather than placing greater emphasis on regulatory efforts that could hamper future commercial space developments.
If they are going to cut the office’s budget, that’s at least a strong argument for pulling back their regulatory reach. They need to include the moratorium in whatever comes out of conference.
How do we transcend the post-911 mess? Some thoughts from my CEI colleague, Wayne Crews.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts from Tim Carney on the rise of the Homeland Security Industrial Complex.
…is all about God:
…over hard history, we have learned that there are some struggles in which the evil of the fight itself supersedes the good of any potential victory. Faith is not knowledge; we should approach the super-natural with humility in our beliefs and forbearance towards the beliefs of others. And anyway, many cherished doctrines, no matter how deep or meaningful, don’t have much immediate effect on our lives. I believe that God is three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit — but if it turns out He’s five guys named Moe, I’m not going to change my weekend plans.
So we hate the idea of fighting a holy war. But we have no choice. No matter what moral knots some self-loathing westerners tie the facts into, the truth remains, the other bastards started it and now it’s on. Doesn’t matter how tolerant you think you are. Doesn’t matter how many “Coexist” bumper stickers you own. If a man with a gun kicks your door down and starts telling you how to pray, there are only two possible outcomes: victory or surrender.
Yes. It’s been obvious to me that we’re in a holy war for ten years now (and I suspected it for over thirty, since the Iranian revolution). This is also how the war on Israel has to be viewed to make any sense. And I say that as an agnostic, with no God in the fight (so to speak). But unlike the left, which sees Baptists as the worst people on earth, and as a child of the Enlightenment, I know who my enemy is.
Say what?
Decades ago, when I was an AIAA Congressional Science Fellow, a group of AIAA industry representatives met with my then-boss, Sen. Adlai Stevenson, III, and asked what real influence I had exercised while doing staff work in Congress. Sen. Stevenson smiled and replied, “This is Washington. Not even the President has any influence.” It was meant as a joke, but the experiences of three presidents who proposed human space initiatives prove that it was no joke. George H. W. Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative was killed by NASA coming up with an unaffordable plan. George W. Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration was hijacked by ideologues who wanted to create US control of cislunar space with a permanent lunar base.
Emphasis mine. That’s sure not what happened on my planet. On my planet, the VSE always contained a lunar base, but Mike Griffin and Scott Horowitz came up with an awful plan to implement it that never had a chance of succeeding in any affordable way. Not sure what planet Lou posted that from.