Category Archives: Political Commentary

Education, Political Commentary

No Hicks Need Apply

36 Comments

Apparently in the interest of “diversity,” being a member of the 4H Club (and don’t even think about it if you’re a leader of such an organization, reduces your chances of getting into many private colleges:

what Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call “career-oriented activities” was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”

Espenshade and Radford don’t have much of an explanation for this find, which seems to place the private colleges even more at variance with their stated commitment to broadly based campus diversity. In his Bakke ruling Lewis Powell was impressed by the argument Harvard College offered defending the educational value of a demographically diverse student body: “A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.” The Espenshade/Radford study suggests that those farm boys from Idaho would do well to stay out of their local 4-H clubs or FFA organizations — or if they do join, they had better not list their membership on their college application forms. This is especially true if they were officers in any of these organizations. Future farmers of America don’t seem to count in the diversity-enhancement game played out at some of our more competitive private colleges, and are not only not recruited, but seem to be actually shunned. It is hard to explain this development other than as a case of ideological and cultural bias.

I’d love to hear their explanation for this.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Land Of Obama

23 Comments

Leads the way to fiscal meltdown:

The state of Illinois — broke, overleveraged, and still refusing to get its accounts in order — is up to something interesting: selling bonds to meet its pension obligations. As one of the many states that refuse to set aside adequate money to fund its public-employee pensions, Illinois is headed to the debt markets to raise $3.7 billion for pension liabilities to get it through the year. This is a double dip: In January, Illinois sold $2.4 billion in bonds for pension obligations. Actually, make that a triple dip: It sold $10 billion in bonds to fund its pension liabilities in 2003. “States don’t traditionally fund their pensions with debt,” says CNN in a nice bit of understatement, “but the practice frees up other money that can be used for operations.” The double whammy here is that Illinois’s pensions are in trouble because it already spent the money it needed for its pension contributions in past years on other spending: Which is to say, Illinois is borrowing money it will have to repay eventually to repay the pension money it already spent to pay for other spending it couldn’t afford then and can’t afford now. If you’re wondering where Barack Obama developed his fiscal finesse, you don’t have far to look.

And wasn’t it nice of them to send him to Washington where he can do the same thing to the rest of us?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

An Urgent Call To Action

17 Comments

Thoughts on tomorrow’s Senate vote on NASA authorization, from Henry Vanderbilt of the Space Access Society:

…let them both know that you support full funding for NASA Commercial Crew, and full funding for NASA space exploration technology, and that you are very much against any new NASA heavy lift booster development as very likely being a massive waste of taxpayer dollars.

Read the whole thing.

[Post Instalanche update]

More background and related links here.

[Thursday morning update]

Clark Lindsey has some links to the latest on the bill, here, here and here.

He also has some thoughts on how it could have been a lot worse:

while I don’t want to sugar-coat this awful bill, I’m just saying that it is no cause for despair. My philosophy from the start of this website and blog has been based on a belief that progress usually comes in step-by-step increments. It will be disappointing if the 2011 NASA budget doesn’t make the huge step initially promised. Nevertheless, even this bill is a step forward.

I never have high hopes for space policy. The bill could be a lot better, but just getting rid of Constellation, and particularly Ares, is a huge improvement. I’m willing to take if for now, and start to educate the Republicans so we can get better policy when they take over next year, and hope that they don’t try to undo everything that Obama did, and restore the disastrous Bush policy, simply on partisan grounds. It’s important to have a serious discussion on what we’re trying to accomplish, and how best to do it, regardless of the genesis of various policies. It hasn’t happened yet, but hope springs eternal.

[Update a while later]

No word about the press conference yet, but here is Hutchison’s official statement.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Magnificent Achievement

14 Comments

Thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson, on just how big Barack Obama has blown it:

What is strange about all this is how the clueless behavior only intensifies. We expect each day another crazy outburst from another fringe appointee, another “battle” to push through something the public does not want — all overseen by the “healer” of “no more red state/blue state” fame.

In short, in just 18 months, Obama has ended talk of permanent Democratic majorities and may well do to the Democratic party what Carter did in 1980 and Clinton in 1994, all while taking a once-obsequious press down with him. With idols like Obama, Mort Zuckerman, Chris Matthews, and Evan Thomas hardly need enemies.

I never had much hope for him, but I do have to admit that it’s quite impressive, and he’s done the Republic a great favor by putting a blast furnace under the kettle so that the frog noticed in time.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire

Two Randy Vicars

1 Comment

Iowahawk has the sordid tale:

It happened that in Washingtown-on-Beltway there once ministered to the shire folk two vicars of remarkable and resolute piety. Polite history shall record their names and peerages as the Reverend John St. Edwards, Lord Plaintiff of Durham, and the Reverend Albert des Gores II, Earl Carbonet of Greenhouse. It shall likewise note well that each man, in his fashion, was a virtuoso upon his respective pulpit. What it shan’t record, however, is each man’s slavish indenture to the base desires of the flesh. As every schoolboy knows, as well he does his Latin infinitives, few are those men whose breeches are immune to the Devil’s disturbances. In the case of our two ill-fortuned subjects, Lucifer himself seemed to take particular delight in presenting ribald temptations and the debasing consequences that follow. Herein lies their tale.

Well, it actually lies at the other end of the link.

Political Commentary, Space

Saving Private CRuSR

10 Comments

Apparently, among the many other idiotic things that the Senate authorization draft does is to kill the CRuSR program, the NASA initiative to encourage more suborbital science, which will be helpful in growing the industry. There is an effort afoot to fix this.

[Update a while later]

Jeff Foust has more.

[Update a few minutes later]

John Gedmark of the Commercial Space Federation is sending out an alert:

URGENT: Commercial Space in Jeopardy — Call Your Senator TODAY

A new authorization bill for NASA includes major cuts to commercial spaceflight, but Senator Warner has offered an amendment to restore those cuts and move commercial space forward.

The NASA Authorization Bill being proposed cuts the proposed Commercial Crew Program by $2.1 billion (up to 66%), seriously affecting commercial space efforts by such companies as SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Boeing, and Orbital Sciences. Senator Warner’s amendment will restore full funding to the program, but he needs YOUR help to get support from other Senators!

The Warner Amendment will be voted on Thursday morning. Now is the time to call your Senator to say, “Please support the Warner Amendment for commercial spaceflight that will create over 10,000 jobs, and reduce our dependence on Russia!” This is your chance to make a difference in the course of space history! (The phone numbers for each Senator on the committee are below, so please check to see if you or your parents are a residents of one of those states!)

Majority
Rockefeller (D-West Virginia)-Chair – 202-224-6472
Inouye (D-Hawaii) – 202-224-3934
Kerry (D-Massachusetts) – 202-224-2742
Dorgan (D-North Dakota) – 202-224-2551
Boxer (D-California) – 202-224-3553
Nelson (D-Florida) – 202-224-5274
Cantwell (D-Washington State) – 202-224-3441
Lautenberg (D-New Jersey) – 202-224-3224
Pryor (D-Arkansas) – 202-224-2353
McCaskill (D-Missouri) – 202-224-6154
Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) – 202-224-3244
Udall (D-New Mexico) – 202-224-6621
Warner (D-Virginia) – 202-224-2023
Begich (D-Alaska) – 202-224-3004

Minority
Hutchison (R-Texas)-Ranking Member – 202-224-5922
Snowe (R-Maine) – 202-224-5344
Ensign (R-Nevada) – 202-224-6244
DeMint (R-South Carolina) – 202-224-6121
Thune (R-South Dakota) – 202-224-2321
Wicker (R-Mississippi) – 202-224-6253
LeMieux (R-Florida) – 202-224-3041
Isakson (R-Georgia) – 202-224-3643
Vitter (R-Louisiana) – 202-224-4623
Brownback (R-Kansas) – 202-224-6521
Johanns (R-Nebraska) – 202-224-4224

If one of these is your Senator, let them know.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Big Green Lie

26 Comments

Exposed:

Greens who feared and climate skeptics who hoped that the rash of investigations following Climategate and Glaciergate and all the other problems would reveal some gaping obvious flaws in the science of climate change were watching the wrong thing. The Big Green Lie (or Delusion, to be charitable) isn’t so much that climate change is happening and that it is very likely caused or at least exacerbated by human activity. The Big Lie is that the green movement is a source of coherent or responsible counsel about what to do.

The greens claim to be diagnosticians and therapists: that they can both name the disease and heal it. They are wrong. The attitudes and political vision of a group of NGO pressure groups may work when it comes to harassing Japanese whale ships in the Antarctic; this vision and these people come up short when set against the challenge of moderating the impact of human industrial activity on the earth’s climate system.

They come up short in many areas.