Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, Space

I Can’t Wait For November

4 Comments

Jeff Foust tweets the latest idiotic comment from Alan Grayson:

Rep. Grayson: if Apollo 13 had been comm’l, all those 100s of engineers would have been replaced by a 20yr-old in Grateful Dead tshirt. (?!)

Was this supposed to be clever?

Can this guy possible win reelection? I wonder what the current polls say?

[Update]

Oh, barf:

Rep. Griffith calls Ares 5 “the soul of America” to the rest of the world.

I hope he loses his primary.

[Update a few minutes later]

Geez, it gets stupider by the minute:

Griffith: if we put space out to competitive bid, might as well walk off the court and hand it over to Russia and China.

That’s right, because allowing American free enterprise to deliver NASA astronauts to orbit is exactly like “handing it over to Russia and China.” You know, just like having Fedex and airliners deliver logistics and troops to the theater is just like handing it off to the commies.

You’d think that these people would pull their heads out at least once in a while, just so they could breathe.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Taking The “New” Out Of News

8 Comments

But I’ll bet that Pinch Sulzberger still doesn’t know why his paper is going out of business.

And more thoughts from Matt Welch on the media narrative and its double standards:

Constituents Using a Forum to Register Displeasure With Representative: Spooky!* 700 Angry Protesters on a Bankster’s Front Lawn: “About damn time”

Can you imagine if DC police had escorted a mob to the house of a news exec during the Bush administration? See, that would be fascism. But Obama’s purple-shirted thugs? Not so much.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“Progressives”

59 Comments

Lileks finds an interesting quote from prohibition days:

There may be no clearer demonstration of the drys’ pragmatic acceptance of every variety of ally than a comment made by Mabel Willebrandt – a federal official, a feminist, a progressive – when she was asked about the faithfully dry Ku Klux Klan: “I have no objection to people dressing up in sheets, if they enjoy that sort of thing.”

I’m always amazed at how many “progressive” ideas (gun control, minimum wage, unionization) have their roots in racism (the fascist dictator Woodrow Wilson being a canonical example). People who want to call themselves “progressive” today (like Hillary Clinton) might be amazed too, if they knew their own intellectual history. Speaking of which, I loved this:

True story. A few years ago, when Katie first came to CBS News, I worked as the editor of her blog “Couric & Co.” One afternoon, I had a meeting with her in her office overlooking the CBS newsroom. Her suite of offices is gorgeous: white-on-white, with a marble desk and gorgeous black-and-white prints on the walls.

(Think “The Devil Wears Prada,” and you’ll get the picture. Staffers used to refer to it as “The White Palace” or, more derisively, “White Castle.”) On the back wall is a lovely, dramatic picture of Jackie Kennedy and her children. Other iconic women on the walls included Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, Audrey Hepburn. When Katie arrived for our meeting, I was admiring the pictures, but noticed one woman who was unfamiliar to me. “Who’s that?,” I asked.

“Margaret Sanger,” she replied.

So is Katie into eugenics, too? Is she a fascist, or an historically ignorant dolt?

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Cooked Books

7 Comments

…of ObamaCare.

The country is being run by blatant liars and charlatans.

[Update a few minutes later]

So, now the Donkeys and “liberals” think that “ObamaCare” is a pejorative? When did that happen? I thought that once they passed it, we were all going to love it. Now they don’t want to take creditblame for it?

I like the suggestion of one commenter that we call it National Socialist Healthcare.

Political Commentary, Space

It’s Not About The Excitement

76 Comments

It’s about the space economy, stupid.

I agree that developing lunar resources should be part of the mix, though we have a lot of work to do to prove out the techniques to do so in a way that makes economic sense. But as I’ve said before, I’m not that concerned about abandoning that goal for now — it was many years off in any event, and if it’s the momentary price we have to pay to kill off the misbegotten Ares program, it’s one well worth it. We can decide to go to the moon any time, and it will be a lot easier with a low-cost infrastructure than with a high-cost one.

Philosophy, Political Commentary

The Subjects Of The Constitution

4 Comments

Randy Barnett points to a revolutionary groundbreaking article on constitutional review:

[T]he important point is that any legislative violation of the Constitution is complete at the moment of enactment, and any subsequent facts must be irrelevant to the merits; whereas an executive violation of the Constitution happens later, and the facts of execution may be essential to the inquiry. So if the who is Congress, then the challenge is more likely to be ripe earlier—indeed, most strikingly, it might be ripe immediately after enactment, and before any enforcement whatsoever.

I haven’t read the whole thing, so it may be covered, but from the excerpt, it seems to me that it isn’t just Congress that is the “who.” Once the president signs an unconstitutional law, he becomes a violator as well (as Bush knowingly, even admittedly did when he signed McCain-Feingold, willfully violating not only the Constitution, but his oath of office — if you wanted an impeachable offense, that one seemed prima facie to me).