Supporting Virginia versus Sebelius:
If nothing else, I hope the brief will help dispel the myth that there is an expert consensus to the effect that the mandate is constitutional (see also here). It should by now be obvious that many well-known and highly respected scholars believe otherwise.
I think the notion that the mandate is constitutional is nonsense.
This is the blind leading the blind — political advice for Barack Obama from Fritz Mondale, the man who lost forty-nine states, and then lost his own in a Senate race.
That’s right, his problem is that he hasn’t connected with us enough. It has nothing to do with his economically inept policies, continuous apologetics for everyone but him, and Marxism.
It must be pretty big, if Jim Oberstar is in trouble.
This is great news for advocates of commercial spaceflight. When the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act was passed a few years ago, Oberstar (then in the minority) fought to have the FAA regulate passenger safety for space vehicles with nonsensical talk of a “tombstone mentality,” despite the consensus among experts that it didn’t know how to do it, and that it would do nothing except strangle the infant industry in the cradle. The compromise was that it would be hands off until 2012, unless there was an accident to cause a revisit of the policy.
Well, the industry hasn’t moved along as fast as was hoped at the time, and we’re still in a situation in which the FAA doesn’t really have a handle about affordable safety requirements, though it will have to start regulating it in two years, absent further congressional action. Industry proponents have feared to raise the issue, because with the Democrat takeover in 2006, Oberstar had taken over the chair of the relevant committee.
There has been hope (looking almost certain now to all other than Dems whistling past the graveyard) that the Republicans would take back at least the House this fall, which would mean that his power to block an extension would be reduced significantly. If he ends up not even being in the Congress at all, let alone on the committee, that would be great news for progress and sensible commercial space policy.
Today is the Sputnik anniversary. Here are my thoughts from the fiftieth, written three years ago, in Orlando, not far from Disneyworld’s Tomorrowland (the California version was built a couple years before Sputnik) with some tomorrows that remain tomorrows over half a century later.
Over at The Space Review, Jeff Foust has his own anniversary thoughts, in the context of last week’s historic House vote. Also, He alsoFrank Stratford discusses the role of Mars in future human exploration.
[Update a while later]
I didn’t read that Mars piece before I linked to it — I just assumed that because the home page said it was by Jeff Foust, that it was worth reading. Actually, it’s by someone down under named Frank Stratford, and it’s got some nonsense in it, with no very clear point.
It’s probably pointless to point it out, but Mark Whittington once again demonstrates his profound inability to comprehend English:
…last April, President Barack Obama was quite specific that the Moon would be excluded from any program of space exploration.
“Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before. Buzz has been there. There’s a lot more of space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do”
Lori Garver herself pointedly excluded the Moon in a speech before a meeting of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics about her vision for the next fifty years in space.
In Whittingtonworld, not going someplace first is an “exclusion” of it. No one familiar with logic would draw such a conclusion. No one in the administration has said that we are not going back to the moon. All that the new policy does is remove it as the first target (as the Augustine panel suggested last year, for good reason). In fact, that is the only significant difference between the new policy and the original VSE, which was distorted beyond recognition by Mike Griffin’s determination to redo Apollo. As for Lori neglecting to specifically mention the moon in her speech in Anaheim (for which I was present), that was also not a “pointed exclusion.” A “pointed exclusion” would have been something like, “We are going beyond earth orbit, to asteroids and Mars, but not the moon.”
And of course, Mark continues to delude himself that what any president (particularly a likely one termer) states as a goal in space is going to matter a decade later, and doesn’t realize that Americans are no better at ten-year plans than Lenin was.
But as I said, it’s fruitless to expect Mark to get simple things like this right.
And a warning in Berlin, that the Europeans have been ignoring for far too long. The biggest problem that liberal societies face in this war is how to properly confront a totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion.
[Update a few minutes later]
Geert Wilders on trial. This is a travesty, and a display of the true Islamaphobes are — those who betray western liberal values by shutting down any criticism of the most intolerant religion of all.
I’d also like to see a compare and contrast between the mess left behind by both crowds. It’s a striking metaphor: the vast majority that wants peace and freedom to live their lives, and the small tyranny whose main goal seems to be to deliberately increase societal entropy. There are never as many of them as they want us to think there are — it’s why they come up with duplicitous names like “Bolsheviks.” Or “progressives.”
[Update a few minutes later]
I asked, and via Charlie Martin, we have received:
The bottom line is this–while it’s amusing to look at the pictures of all the trash left behind by the labor unions and left wing socialists, they aren’t going to give up their efforts to win on November 2 just because we’ve proven we are much neater than they are at rallies. Depending on which count you pay attention to, they did manage to persuade somewhere in the vicinity of 30,000 or so to come out on a Saturday. If you look closely, you’ll note that many of the attendees arrived on buses paid for by SEIU and other labor unions. You can bet that these groups will be throwing money around “like drunken sailors” over the next 30 days to get the crowd that littered the Mall Saturday to show up at the polls on November 2. We would be unwise to take our eye off the ball now.
Yes, clearly, neatness is not a value with them. Power is.
[Update late Sunday evening]
Who are you going to believe, us or your lying eyes?
Appropriate, considering it’s from a site called Crooks and Liars…
[Monday morning update]
High-school students received class credit for attending the rally.
Did anyone attend this mini rent-a-mob who wasn’t bribed or coerced? And why do I suspect that they wouldn’t have gotten similar treatment for Glenn Beck’s rally?
…and women. Thoughts from Iowahawk about the ecofascists.
[Afternoon update]
We’ve reached the point in this cycle of humanity to where if you aren’t part of Groupthink, you are to be eliminated.
Fortunately, their fantasy red button doesn’t exist, and the folks with the guns will keep them from getting it, at least here.
[Sunday morning update]
The inevitable remix.
[Bumped]
…and you’re not as smart as you think you are.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is worth repeating:
If I had said a day ago that your typical New York Times reporter doesn’t have the vaguest sense of what the rule of law means, I would have heard from all sorts of earnest liberal readers — and probably some conservative ones too — about how I was setting up a straw man. But now we know it’s true. It’s not just that she doesn’t know what it is, it’s that even after (presumably) looking it up, she still couldn’t describe it and none of her editors raised an eyebrow when she buttered it.
I wouldn’t mind this rule by the “elites” quite as much if they really were elite, and not just graduates of grade-inflated Ivy-League schools who apparently never learned much of use in the real world, (assuming that they even had the cerebral propensity to do so).
Thoughts on time, and slavery.
