Thoughts on “No Labels,” “independents,” “moderates,” “centrists,” and DMZs.
[Update late morning]
More thoughts from Yuval Levin. Edmund Burke is involved.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Just In Case You Still Took The Leftist Womens’ Movement Seriously
I give you this.
Honesty From Gene Simmons
He wants his Obama vote back, and admits that he voted for him because he was black. I suspect that there are a lot of people in the same boat, and they won’t make the same mistake twice. They expiated their racial guilt in 2008.
[Update a while later]
This seems right to me:
…ask yourself this question: How many people do you know who voted for Obama in 2008 but now express regret about the vote or reservations about his leadership?
Probably plenty.
Now ask yourself this: How many people do you know who voted against Obama in 2008 but have since been won over?
Probably not a single one.
The buyers’ remorse is strong in this One.
Dwindling
Sixty-nine years later, there aren’t many survivors of Pearl Harbor left. The war itself is passing out of living memory. And sadly, many of the lessons learned from it will probably have to be relearned, at the cost of how knows how many more innocent lives.
[Update a few minutes later]
Bing remembers. But it’s just another day to Google. You’d think it a significant date even to a “citizen of the world.”
[Update a while later]
When Japan attacked.
Pearl Harbor, Apollo 17, and Dragon
What do they all have in common? Well, as it turns out, not as much as I thought, or at least hoped, when I wrote this post at The Corner, because we now know that SpaceX won’t be flying tomorrow, due to a nozzle issue on the second stage. But the main points of it stand.
By the way, if they can change out a nozzle with only an additional two-day delay, that’s pretty remarkable. That kind of problem on the Shuttle could mean weeks. As I noted in comments over at Clark Lindsey’s, though, I wonder how many spares they have for upper-stage nozzles? If it were a first-stage nozzle, it would probably be no problem, because with nine engines, they have to really be cranking them out. But the single engine on the firstsecond stage, while using the same powerhead, has a different nozzle, because it has a higher expansion ratio for vacuum operations. But presumably, they have at least one in Florida, or if not, it’s a one-day trip from Hawthorne.
The Shackles Of Apollo
Another voice calling to break them, over at The Space Review.
Speech Policeman
Like Stanley Kurtz, I am getting really, really tired of David Frum:
All Galston and Frum have done is to make explicit — and reinforce — the mainstream press’s existing determination to ignore and silence critics of Obama’s radicalism. Once No Labels gets going, public resentment at these silencing techniques is bound to increase. Contrary to Galston and Frum, the way to reduce polarization is not to suppress disagreement but to invite reasoned debate on the issues that actually divide us. Since a substantial portion of the public views the president as a covert radical, let the topic be debated in the widest and most respectable forums. If the president’s accusers offer mere bluster, or his defenders are living in denial, we shall see it all then. A true public debate on this issue in the pages of the mainstream press would rivet the public’s attention and immediately raise the level of discussion. By further suppressing this debate, on the other hand, Galston and Frum promote distrust and enmity between Left and Right.
Suppressing debate is what the left is all about, because they never come off very well in a real one.
Calling Out Hollywood On Their Lying Crocumentary
I expected to see this kind of fact-checking on the latest leftist propaganda piece, but not from the Washington Post editorial board:
“It’s accurate,” Ms. Plame told The Post. Said Mr. Wilson: “For people who have short memories or don’t read, this is the only way they will remember that period.”
We certainly hope that is not the case. In fact, “Fair Game,” based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions – not to mention outright inventions.
Both the books and the movie should be filed in the “fiction” section, but people will continue to repeat the lies.
High-Speed Rail
Should China rethink it? Only if they’re smart. Tom Friedman will be very disappointed.
Of course, the more important question is whether or not Congress will cancel the boondoggle before we waste much more money on it.