Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

A Letter

21 Comments

…going around Wall Street:

We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?

I wish it was easier to undo legislation.

[Update a late afternoon]

Nicole Gelinas has some useful thoughts.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Real Reason

23 Comments

Why “liberals” accuse the Tea Partiers of racism:

Entitlements are in essence a Ponzi scheme. Now we have to face that and do something serious about it or our economy (the world economy) will fall apart.

Liberals, leftists or progressives — whatever they choose to call themselves — have a great deal of trouble accepting this. To do so they would have to question a host of positions they have not examined for years, if ever, not to mention have to engage in discussions that could threaten their livelihood and jeopardize their personal and family associations.

Thus the traditional wish to kill the messenger who brings the bad news: the Tea Partiers. And the easiest way to kill them — the most obvious and hoariest of methods – is to accuse them of racism. Never mind that there is no evidence — or what little evidence proffered has been shown to be manufactured prevarication — liberals must continue the racism meme at all costs. There is no other. To engage the Tea Party Movement in a battle of ideas would be suicidal for them, because the basic economic tenet of American liberalism — an increase in government spending and consequent increased national debt is good for society — seems nonsensical to the vast majority of our citizens at this point in history. And for good reason.

This situation could be looked at as an awakening or reawakening for our country, but it is far from completely good news. You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see that relations, in the immediate future at least, between ideological adversaries are going to be increasingly hostile. In the battle to maintain power — and equally as importantly to maintain self-image — many strains of the left will redouble their efforts to define the Tea Party movement as racist, further splitting our society and racializing it. They will seize on any isolated incident of the slightest prejudice as a pretext. And it is not unlikely that they will find what they need somewhere, because any movement of millions contains someone who exhibits some form of racism some time. Again, it’s simple math.

Unfortunately, not much can be done about this other than what already has. We have to be constantly vigilant, especially with the mainstream media so deeply in the liberal camp, often to an extent those media themselves don’t realize. It’s imbued in their DNA and their unconscious.

This is why we must fight back, and call them on it every time, and never let them get away with it.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

What Is Obama’s Motive In Space?

20 Comments

Brian Micklethwait tries to figure it out. I think he’s overthinking it, myself. I agree with this commenter:

Obama doesn’t believe in space exploration and doesn’t care about it. He is uninterested. Therefore he doesn’t attempt to manage it or fix it the only way he knows – by state management. He is willing to leave it alone, to ignore it, to stay away from it. He cares about social policy (“spreading the wealth”) – space has nothing to do with this. It’s not his cup of tea.

It doesn’t really matter. The policy is what it is. Now we have to fight to get it implemented, and unfortunately, that means (ironically) a fight with people who should be supporting it if they were true to their own principles.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

The Danger Of A Little Knowledge

Someone reading this Kiplinger newsletter article might think that the author knows what he’s talking about, but he gets a number of things wrong, including making the same mistake as many in ignoring the existence of the Atlas and Delta. Fortunately, he’s corrected on many counts in comments by Clark Lindsey, Robert Horning, “Red” and others.

[Update a while later]

Even the subhed is wrong. There is no such thing as the “Constellation rocket.”

Business, General Science, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, War Commentary

Where Is The Outrage?

15 Comments

Suppose that, a week before the Congress voted on whether or not to authorize military force, a document had been generated that showed there were no WMD in Iraq. Suppose further that it was reported that the Pentagon had sat on it, and not released it until weeks after the vote. And when asked why, the explanation was “we didn’t want to influence the vote.” Then, a Pentagon official comes out and denies that it was deliberately withheld, though the record clearly shows that the information was known by the defense secretary prior to the vote.

Imagine the howls from the Democrats and the press, and calls for firings and impeachment, and demands for a new vote.

Substitute health care reform for Iraq, HHS for Pentagon, and “will cost much more than advertised” for “no WMD,” and that’s exactly what has happened.

[crickets chirping…]

Business, Political Commentary, Space

Bye Bye, LAS

5 Comments

Funding for it is ending this week:

Orbital Sciences Corp. is warning subcontractors supporting development of a launch abort system for NASA’s Orion crew capsule that funding for the effort will cease April 30, according to industry sources and documents.

No more money down that rat hole. This is good, not just because it doesn’t waste any more money on it, but because it makes it harder for Orion to compete with Dragon or Orion Lite for crew delivery if Lockheed Martin tried to use their subsidized system to get into that market. Boeing couldn’t have been happy to have heard that Orion had been resurrected, when they were making a decision about whether not to put their own money into a crew capsule (with the help of their CCDev contract). I don’t know if this will be enough to assuage their fears, though.