…now favor repealing the health-care debacle. Sounds like a good Republican campaign issue this fall.
The supporters of ObamaCare are not helped, of course, by stories like this:
Healthcare law tax credits encourage small businesses to stay small, not hire…
You don’t say.
The only question is whether this was an intended, or unintended consequence. It was perfectly predictable to anyone who understands human nature, incentives, and economics. Which excludes most Democrats.
Moe Lane makes a good point about Sestak’s claim that there was bribe attempt, but refuses to say by whom:
Either Sestak is lying about this, in which case he’s, well, a liar who did so for crass political gain; or Sestak’s telling the truth about this, in which case he’s pretty much explicitly participating in a cover-up of a felony. Either way, talking in general terms is not really acceptable. Unless there was an active conspiracy permeating the entire Executive Branch to bribe Joe Sestak, somebody in the White House is innocent of this crime – but until we get the full details of what happens, we won’t know who. And while I may have been heavily critical of the unprofessional behavior of the White House’s staffers, I think it’s hardly fair of Sestak to talk about this scandal in a fashion that implicates all of them.
Of course, the White House could clear things up, and clear the innocent, if it wanted to. After all, Gibbs won’t deny it — he just won’t talk about it.
Jeff Foust has a good roundup of the current state of play in industry/congressional skepticism about the ability of the new players to do the job.
And Tom Frieling describes an appallingly bad book on space history. This kind of thing is really inexcusable, and may feed ignorance for years. When I do my pieces for The New Atlantis, I circulate drafts among a lot of knowledgeable people, to make sure that I get it right. If I write a book, I’ll do the same thing. But I guess that kind of thing isn’t very important to some authors and publishers.
Some thoughts on self-abasing Jews. I like the Star Trek reference in comments.
And sadly, this seems related. They’re not brown shirts — they’re purple shirts, supported and encouraged by the State.
Folks, for those who have been brainwashed by academia all these years, this is what real fascism looks like.
[Update later morning]
A thug too far? Unfortunately, probably not, unless the media gets interested in the story.
[crickets chirping]
It’s not about God, gays and abortion any more:
Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country’s future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise — limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution. These visions are not reconcilable. We must choose.
It is not at all clear which side will prevail. The forces of big government are entrenched and enjoy the full arsenal of the administration’s money and influence. Our leaders in Washington, aided by the unprecedented economic crisis of recent years and the panic it induced, have seized the moment to introduce breathtaking expansions of state power in huge swaths of the economy, from the health-care takeover to the financial regulatory bill that the Senate approved Thursday. If these forces continue to prevail, America will cease to be a free enterprise nation.
I know which side I’m on. Read the whole thing.
[Sunday afternoon update]
Yes, Virginia, there is a culture war. As noted, it’s the one that has been raging for two centuries between Rousseau and Locke. And the Rousseauians have a lot of blood on their hands.
[Bumped]
I feel so much better knowing that people like this are in charge of enforcing the law and protecting me and mine.
And now they refuse to read the textbook. Why am I not surprised? All of this prevarication and outright lies from the “liberal” press wouldn’t be quite as annoying if they didn’t do it from an ostensible perch of moral preening and self righteousness.
If you want to know why more people don’t invest their own money in manned space hardware, look no further than this article:
After announcing in February that Orion and the rest of the Constellation program would be canceled in favor of outsourcing routine crew transportation to commercial operators, the White House decided in April to have NASA fund completion of a stripped-down Orion capsule that would launch to the international space station unmanned to serve as an escape craft.
Lockheed Martin, which beat Boeing and its teammate Northrop Grumman in 2006 for an Orion prime contract worth an initial $3.9 billion, welcomed the news as a partial reprieve for the project. But to Boeing, continued NASA funding of an Orion capsule that would need only a launch abort system to start launching crews would add substantial risk to a business case Schnaars said will be a struggle to close.
And why was Orion kept alive? Not because NASA really needed a lifeboat. It was to try to maintain political support for the administration in the purple state of Colorado. But this political decision could have bad consequences for the stated desire to have competition in commercial crew. And the general problem is that one of the many ways that NASA is such a bad customer is in its unpredictability. And it will always be thus with a government space program.
Let us count the ways.
Meanwhile, so feckless is its erstwhile ally, Israel is forced to make an alliance with the Arabs against Iran.
…is fundamental:
If they ever read the bill — or admit they do — they’ll find this sort of Yasser Arafat-like equivocation more difficult. Because it will quickly be revealed that their supposedly procedure-only quibbles are in fact objections to the substance — they oppose any methods of controlling immigration that are actually likely to work.
They support only the methods that won’t work — UAVs, “virtual fences,” other technobabble non-solutions — precisely because they won’t work, which is why they have a pass from the Open Borders lobby to support such measures.
Essentially they’re asking the bank robbers what they should do to improve vault security. The bank robbers tell them to leave the vault door open and turn off the alarms and fire the guards, and instead use “smart solutions” to guard the money, like big signs saying “Please don’t take our money.”
Fortunately, polls would indicate that the American people are on to them.