I know that it’s old news, but this is the first time I actually sat down and listened to this hearing excerpt. Alan Grayson is an ass and a jerk, but I can understand his frustration with Bolden, who doesn’t realize that the Augustine panel made no recommendations, who doesn’t know what the word “commercial” means, didn’t know whether or not Flexible Path included Constellation (it didn’t necessarily), isn’t able to articulate what the plans are, and doesn’t generally seem to know what’s going on at all.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
A Failed Attempt
…at channelling FDR? John Pitney has a theory about the president’s latest bizarre off-prompter moment:
One can only guess what the president was thinking. I’m the new Roosevelt, right? So what did he do when he was under attack? He told union guys something about a dog. But instead of tossing off some humorous line about Bo the First Canine, he blurted out a bit of witless self-pity.
It was as senseless as it was unfunny. Not even the world’s looniest dog-hater has ever accused a pooch of ignoring the Constitution and a running up a $13 trillion debt.
I like Treacher’s take, myself:
Who’s a good president? Obama’s a good president, isn’t he? Yes he is!
I certainly wouldn’t compare Obama to a dog. Dogs are capable of learning.
Well, the question is, how old is this dog, and can he learn any new tricks in time for either this election, or the next one?
Commercial Crew
Jeff Foust describes the current state of play, based on last week’s AIAA conference in Anaheim.
I Didn’t Know He Ever Had Any
Barack Obama has lost his sex appeal. Of course, I’ve always been immune to politicians’ supposed charisma, from Reagan to Clinton.
We Are Ruled By Professors
Thoughts from VDH:
So what did I learn in the university? I’ll try to be a bit less specific than I was in Who Killed Homer? written over a decade ago.
First was the false knowledge — odd for an institution devoted to free inquiry. The university runs like a 13th-century church in which the heliocentric maverick is a mortal sinner. So too on campus the Rosenbergs never spied. Alger Hiss was a martyr. Mao killed only a few who needed killing (see Anita Dunn on that one).
Che was not a murderous thug, but a hair-in-the-wind carefree motorcyclist. Minorities supposedly died proportionally higher in Vietnam — as they supposedly do now in Iraq and Afghanistan. Women are underrepresented as both undergraduates and as humanities graduate students. Anyone with an accented name obviously had picked grapes or was denied voting rights. Adlai Stevenson was an American saint, even more so than George McGovern. Only the unhinged even discussed doubts about global warming. Don’t question any of the above; it was all gospel — as we see now in D.C., from Keynes to Gorism to Cordoba as the beacon of Islamic tolerance during the Inquisition. (Doubt any of that, and that laid-back elbow-patched joking prof who told the class “Call me Bill,” in a flash, Gollum like, turned into a snarling jackal, screaming, “I am Doctor Jones, with important publications on climate change and a doctorate from Berkeley! How dare you question me!”)
The last time we had a college professor for president, almost a hundred years ago, we had our first fascist dictator. Maybe we need an inoculation every century or so. Of course, Wilson didn’t fend us off from Roosevelt.
Read the whole thing, especially about the chainsaw-wielding decapitating criminology professor.
Time Is Running Out
…for NASA reform. Contact your representative while they’re in the district. Next week, when they come back, there will be another attempt to pass the ruinous NASA authorization bill in the House.
And speaking of reform, should NASA be abolished?
I don’t think that just renaming the agency will work. And can we please stop repeating the myth about Fisher pens and pencils? There are good reasons not to use a pencil in a space vehicle.
Not-Enough-Labor Day
How the government is destroying jobs.
You’d almost think it was deliberate.
I Hope They Remain This Delusional
The president continues to fantasize that he’s a campaign asset this fall:
Obama himself has largely shucked his “postpartisan” ideal, and you can expect some sharp rhetorical elbows thrown at Republicans when he addresses a Labor Day rally in Milwaukee on Monday. That’s likely to escalate in coming weeks as Obama – and first lady Michelle Obama – go stumping for Democrats.
“They’ve forgotten I politick pretty good,” he told a crowd in Austin, Texas, last month.
Oh, yeah? Tell it to Creigh Deeds, John Corzine and Martha Coakley.
I continue to challenge the conventional wisdom that Barack Obama is either a good campaigner or a smart politician. He won the nomination because the Dems wanted an alternative to the arrogant and “inevitable” Hillary and he was black. He won the election because McCain was a horrible candidate and ran a horrible campaign, people were fed up with the mushy Bush-era Republicans, and because he was black.
People have gotten to know him now, and they don’t like it.
The Tsunami Approaches
California once again leads the nation with a $26 billion budget deficit plus an unfunded pension obligation of $500 billion. Its current financial structure is clearly unsustainable. It has an operational structure that in ungovernable with often duplicative agencies, some collecting less in tax revenue than the agencies spend on collection. Wikipedia lists 500 existing public agencies for the State of California. California can no longer afford such a luxury. It must deconstruct these bloated inefficient government agencies, and rid itself of their chairman, staff, offices, cars, pensions and the overhead that such excess represents. A $26 billion dollar deficit is not something that can be corrected with a wage freeze or job furloughs. Bold leadership can lead California to deconstruct its 500 agencies down to 100 functional organizations. California is a classic example of what must change in the coming Great Deconstruction.
One Orange County city has already taken bold steps to correct its $10 million deficit. It may be a model for other cities and states across the country. Internally, it has decided it will not replace any city worker that dies, retires, moves or quits. The city will simply out source the employment to an outside service company and eliminate healthcare requirements and unsustainable pensions. Building inspectors will be out sourced as will city plan checkers, librarians and meter maids. Only essential services like top executives and cops will remain on the city payroll. The city staff will eventually decrease from 220 to approximately 35 personnel. This is the essence of deconstruction.
It’s going to get very ugly for the parasites. Let’s just hope they don’t end up killing the host.
[Update a few minutes later]
Business and unions meet to discuss upcoming pension disaster.
That Bursting Higher-Education Bubble
More thoughts on this topic, from Michael Barone.
[Update a while later]
Roger Kimball notes another similarity with housing:
As I wrote in a piece for The New Criterion a few years ago,
“Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social, and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe. Why should parents fund the moral de-civilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians? Why should alumni generously support an alma mater whose political and educational principles nourish a world view that is not simply different from but diametrically opposed to the one they endorse? Why should trustees preside over an institution whose faculty systematically repudiates the pedagogical mission they, as trustees, have committed themselves to uphold?”
Just imagine the sorts of sub-literate, ideologically charged nonsense that Women’s Studies debtor was battened on in her classes! The Australian philosopher David Stove, commenting on the Faculty of Arts at Sydney University, formulated a diagnosis that applies to the teaching of the humanities of most Western universities: It is, Stove wrote, a “disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly-leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle.”
There are incipient signs that a Great Recoiling from this intellectual disaster is beginning to form. It will be greatly aided by the economic disaster in which the institutional life of universities is embedded. “Why,” hard-working parents will ask themselves, “does it cost more than $50,000 a year to send Johnny to college.” Leave aside the question of what it is that Johnny is and isn’t learning in those ivy-covered walls. Why does his four-year furlough from the real world cost so much? One reason, of course, is that Johnny, assuming his parents are paying full freight, is paying not only for his own tuition: he is also helping to foot the bill for Ahmed, Juan, and Harriet down the hall. Colleges routinely boast about their generous financial aid packages, how they provide assistance for some large percentage of students, etc. What they don’t mention is the fact that parents who scrimp and save to come up with the tuition are in effect subsidizing the others. How do you suppose Johnny’s parents feel about that?
Honk if I’m paying your kid’s tuition.