Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Will The Republicans Impeach Obama?

11 Comments

I would never say never — who knows what he’ll do that might merit it in the future, but the notion that it is a metaphysical certainty is nonsensical. Given who would become president in that event, it would have to be for a pretty extreme situation. I’ve always thought that the Joe Biden pick was combination impeachment/assassination insurance. And even if you think they’d impeach knowing that the Senate wouldn’t convict, that would be dumb, too. They know what happened to them the last time that happened.

Political Commentary

A Read-The-Bill Rule

15 Comments

…for the people who, you know, actually vote on these legislative atrocities. From Hanah Volokh (who I assume is related somehow to Eugene and Sasha — sister?). I wonder if the new Congress were to pass such a thing, if the president would veto it? Or perhaps it’s not legislation, just a change to House or Senate rules, in which case, he wouldn’t be involved. Hard to know from just the abstract.

Business, Political Commentary, Space

The End Of The Space Race

26 Comments

…happened forty-three years ago today. In an excerpt from the book I’m working on:

…sadly for the enthusiasts, as already noted, it wasn’t really about space. As even the supposedly visionary Kennedy told his NASA administrator, James Webb, a few months before his assassination in 1963, “I don’t care that much about space.” It was about national prestige, not space per se – space was just the venue in which the competition was to be fought. Had Kennedy not been assassinated, it’s not clear that the Apollo program would have continued, or at least no more than it was under Lyndon Johnson who, under pressure from the Congress with the rising costs in blood and treasure from Vietnam, and the Great Society (and riots in Newark, Watts and Detroit, and other inner cities), actually ordered the end of production of new hardware in 1967, two years before the first landing. In fact, it was likely only the perceived martyrdom of the president who started the program that allowed it to go on as long as it did.

Beyond that, the space race was viewed as so expensive that many in the government (particularly those of a socialistic bent in the State Department) wanted to end it permanently, and in a sense they did, by signing and ratifying the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, which banned claims of national sovereignty off planet. Absent claims of national sovereignty, private off-planet property claims became, if not impossible, problematic. This had the intended effect of significantly reducing the incentive for nations to race to other worlds, including the moon. It also dramatically reduced the incentive for private enterprise to invest its own resources in doing so, even if there were some way of getting a return on the investment, by creating uncertainty in the legality of extraterrestrial property and real estate.

Alan Wasser is trying to do something about that. This is the sort of thing a Congress truly interested in conservative space policy would do, instead of keeping the pork flowing.