Just for the record, I think he’s an idiot, but Megan McArdle poses an interesting question — how do Barack Obama’s reelection chances stack up against Herbert Hoover’s?
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Charles Kettering
The Most Unfairly Vilified Person In America
Whenever someone claims that Sarah Palin takes the crown for this, I think of Dick Cheney.
Mike Griffin
…has another temper tantrum. Clark Lindsey explains the facts of life to him. He’s obviously trying to position himself to get his old job back in a Republican administration. If that were to happen, it would be a disaster for our prospects in space.
Is It Really That Simple?
I await a credible alternate explanation. It is, after all, all part of the Chicago way.
Does It Really Matter That Much?
…what kind of airplanes Rick Perry flew? I haven’t seen Barack Obama pilot anything except a bicycle.
Just How Important Is Space Policy?
Traditionally, though it’s not a written rule, vice presidents have been in charge of space policy, though some are more so than others. Johnson was very much so, Agnew was somewhat, Ford and Rockefeller not much, Mondale tried to kill the Shuttle and succeeded in reducing the fleet size, GHW Bush wasn’t particularly involved as far as I recall, but Quayle was considerably, as was Gore. Sean O’Keefe was supposedly a friend of Dick Cheney’s, being groomed for bigger things when he was tapped as NASA administrator.
So I was over at Barnes & Noble, and picked up a copy of Cheney’s new book, and turned to the index. Mentions of O’Keefe? None. Mentions of the moon? None. Mentions of the Vision for Space Exploration? None. Mentions of NASA? None.
Come to think of it, I didn’t do a search for “Shuttle” or “Columbia,” but it’s hard to see how they would have been mentioned without mentioning NASA or O’Keefe. Basically, it wasn’t important enough to him to discuss it in a several-hundred-page book.
I would also note that, thankfully, Joe Biden doesn’t seem to be involved with space policy.
You Know What I Really Don’t Need?
Advice from Barack Obama on how to commemorate 911.
The Perils Of Price Controls
Let the market work in pharmaceuticals.
An Early Obama Letter
…confirms his inability to write:
Although a paragraph from this letter was excerpted in David Remnick’s biography of Obama, The Bridge, I had not seen the letter in its entirety before this week. Not surprisingly, it confirms everything I know about Barack Obama, the writer and thinker.
Obama was prompted to write by an earlier letter from a Mr. Jim Chen that criticized Harvard Law Review’s affirmative action policies. Specifically, Chen had argued that affirmative action stigmatized its presumed beneficiaries.
The response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his inability to make subject and predicate agree.
I am completely unsurprised by this. I think it at least partially explains why we aren’t allowed to see his transcripts.