Category Archives: Political Commentary

Let’s Start A List

Which thirty-four states would be the most likely to call for a constitutional convention, if we can’t get critical mass on the Hill for amendments? This would be next year, after the coming elections, not now.

The best place to start is with the states that are already challenging ObamaCare, but I’d say, not in any particular order, the following are possibilities (and some probabilities):

Alaska
Idaho
Montana
Wyoming
Nevada
Utah
Arizona
Texas
Colorado
Virginia
Alabama
Georgia
Mississippi
South Carolina
North Carolina
North Dakota
South Dakota
Nebraska
Missouri
Arkansas
Tennessee
Kentucky
Michigan
Wisconsin
New Mexico
Pennsylvania
Ohio
Indiana
Oklahoma
New Hampshire
Florida
Iowa
Minnesota
Kansas
New Jersey
Delaware

I think that’s enough. And some of them are iffy, but as I said, I’m imagining a new political landscape after the elections (in which the Dems have really screwed themselves long term, with all of the statehouses and governorships coming up in a redistricting year). My thinking is that it will be impossible to get the west coast, Hawaii, or the northeast for the most part, but everything else may be fair game.

[Afternoon update]

Hmmmm…there are currently fourteen states with Republican-controlled legislatures, and eight that are split. That would make twenty-two in total, so they’d have to convert the splits and pick up at least a dozen of the current twenty-seven Social Democrat legislatures. Assuming that you can’t get any Social Democrat houses to go along, of course…

[Update a while later]

Here’s a list of states where Obama is underwater in the polls. There are a few surprises.

Another Expired Obama Position

In this case, it’s a good thing. Back during the campaign, when John McCain proposed an automotive prize, then-Senator Obama derided it:

Explaining that “when John F. Kennedy decided that we were going to put a man on the moon, he didn’t put a bounty out for some rocket scientist to win,” Obama believes that to speed alternative fuel development and increase fuel-efficiency, the full power of the government must be combined with the “ingenuity and innovation of the American people.”

But now, Jonathan Adler says that Obama has his eye on prizes:

Earlier this month, with little fanfare, the Obama Administration took a small but significant step toward encouraging greater technological innovation. On March 8, the Office of Management and Budget issued a guidance to federal agencies on the use of challenges and prizes to spur technological innovation. This memorandum seeks to “strongly encourage” federal agencies to “utilize prizes and challenges as tools for advancing open government, innovation, and the agency’s mission.” It further explains that many federal agencies have sufficient statutory authority to create technology inducement prizes with existing funds and spending authority.

This is particularly good news for NASA, because Centennial Challenges needs an infusion of funds. Fortunately, the current NASA administration is very supportive of this sort of thing, and can be expected to support new prize activities if they get the budget for it.

Lunar Property Rights

OwenRichard Garriott ponders his:

I have noted the interesting point that I am now the only private individual with a flag or stake on the soil of the moon, and thus at the least I might be able to make some claim to the land beneath it, if not even more territory.

Surely my claim would be far better than the people who are currently selling lunar plots that they have identified only via telescope photographs. Those people have no physical basis of their claim. I at least have a marker on the soil which really belongs to me.

People have countered with the fact that there are international treaties that state “No country will make territorial claims off of the earth. This was agreed to after the USA and USSR had a brief race of sending impacting probes to the moon which scattered flags,and almost began a territorial race on the moon.

But I counter with the fact, that I am not a country! Also there is international convention, that if I were to go to an unclaimed pacific island (of which there are still many) and plant a flag on the beach, international convention is that any part of that new land which I use, is mine. Not the whole island but any part I use.

I could argue that my lunar rover has a lander at one end of its 40 kilometer track and has surveyed the land with probes and cameras along the track, and the lander is at the other end, thus I have used, surveyed and modified the moon in this area. Also my lander is still in active use, it has special mirrors which are actively used to measure earth moon distance to this day.

Some have countered that when I bought the rover, the seller could not make claim to the land as they were bound by the treaty and thus could not sell the land to me.

I can counter that even if that is so, my lander is still mine. It is still in use. and thus I can still make active claim on my own without any need of the transfer of such rights!

This could be an interesting test case. Is sovereignty required to have individual property rights? It certainly seems like it would be to enforce them.

One thing that doesn’t seem likely to occur under this administration is to renegotiate the Outer Space Treaty. But that might be an interesting outcome of the political pendulum swinging back in the future.

State Socialists In Space

I use the “s” word because the “f” word seems to really upset people, even though it’s more accurate. It’s a shame that Hitler gave it such a bad name.

Anyway, Jeff Foust has an article today on the irrational antipathy of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, to private enterprise. Well, OK, it’s not all irrational. Some of it just typical rent seeking. Congressman Culberson comes off as particularly foolish, and not just for his Marine analogy:

“If the private sector exclusively owns access to space, who owns the technology? They’d have the right to sell it to any nation on the face of the Earth?” (Not easily, thanks to the export control regime that covers space technology in the US today.)

“Imagine if America had to hitch a ride on a commercial vehicle,” he continued. “If the private sector and the Chinese and Russians control access to space, they could charge us whatever they want.”

Yes. Whatever they want. As long as the price wasn’t higher than their competitors.

Why does this so-called fiscal conservative either not understand, or not believe in, how markets work?

You know who really charges “whatever they want”? A monopoly cost-plus contractor for NASA. Which is why Ares I has already cost about twenty times as much as Falcon 9, for similar capability (if it’s ever completed), with first flight for the former still years away, versus weeks away for the latter.

Today’s Travesty

I haven’t much to say except to that what happened in Washington tonight has very probably set off a tinderbox, and we will now be in rebellion. May it be a non-violent one, but if violence is what it ultimately takes, we are a people whose nation is founded on such in the defense of human liberty.

[Monday morning update]

Professor Jacobson has a pep talk.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Paul Hsieh on the coming battles. And Victor Davis Hanson says that Obama has crossed the Rubicon. Fortunately, Julius Caesar he’s not.

[Update a while later]

Had enough?

As I have argued now for months – first, in August, here; then, in November, here and here; and, more recently, here, here, and here – a genuine political realignment may be in the offing. This has happened at irregular intervals in our nation’s past – most notably, in 1800, 1828, 1860, and 1932 – and on each occasion the political party benefiting from the upheaval was able to paint a plausible picture depicting their opponents as being parties to a conspiracy to overthrow the liberties possessed by their fellow Americans. This is what Thomas Jefferson did to the Federalists in and after 1800; it was what Andrew Jackson did to John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Nicholas Biddle, and the Whigs in and after 1828; it was what Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans did to the slave power conspiracy and its fellow travelers in the North in and after 1860, and it was what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did to Herbert Hoover and the business-minded progressives in and after 1932. When FDR claimed, at the 1936 Democratic convention, that “a small group” of his fellow Americans was intent on concentrating “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives,” he was merely rephrasing the charges lodged in an earlier time by Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and their political allies.

Of course, one cannot plausibly advance such a claim except in circumstances where one has a great deal of help from one’s opponents. In 1800, Jefferson profited from the quarrel pitting Alexander Hamilton against John Adams, and by exhibiting secessionist propensities at the Hartford Convention, the New England Federalists destroyed their own party. Something similar can be said regarding Nicholas Biddle and the supporters of the Second National Bank. The same is true for the supporters of the slave power in and after 1860, and Herbert Hoover was in similar fashion a godsend for FDR.

If the Republicans have a comparable opportunity in 2010 and 2012, it is because of what I described in my very first blogpost as “Obama’s Tyrannical Ambition.” Barack Obama has a gift. He has told us so himself, and he is right, but he errs in supposing that his oratorical skill will enable him to fool all of the people all of the time, and over time he has, in effect, unmasked his own party as a conspiracy on the part of a would-be aristocracy of do-gooders hostile to very idea of self-government in the United States. There is no need for me to review the record of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress in the last fifteen months. It is enough to say that, in an administration that promised transparency, everything has been negotiated behind closed doors in a manner suggestive of tyranny and that, in an administration that promised to distance itself from the lobbyists, every major bill has been written by them and is loaded with special deals that give new meaning to the old phrase “corrupt bargain.” The stimulus bill, cap-and-trade, healthcare reform: with these Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid have brought home to the American people, as never before, the tyrannical propensities inherent in the progressive impulse. Thanks to them, everyone now knows that there is no such thing as a moderate Democrat.

I’m not sure that everyone knows it, but enough to now to make the whirlwind that they’ll reap pretty big in the fall. And perhaps years to come.

[Update a few minutes later]

Another pep talk, from Bill Whittle:

…in terms of limiting the practical and immediate damage, holding it here — just holding it — is important and essential. Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have an IQ of 130 — that would be combined between the three of them and you can get to 150 if you throw in Biden — and so they actually believe that a few months from now, they will be able to add single-payer to this goat rodeo, this bloodbath, this circus of incompetence conducted by this museum-grade confederacy of dunces. It got them a bill that requires people to pay for private insurance — which I am, of course, utterly opposed to on every level — but that is way short of single payer and we MUST hold the line here and not an inch further until reinforcements arrive in January. And they will. In numbers that will astonish and amaze the most optimistic among us.

We need to understand the great lesson we have learned about these people in this debate. Barack Obama is, to the liberal cause, a politician that comes not once in a decade, or once in a generation, or even once per century. Barack Obama is, to them, a once in history opportunity for progressives to control this country, and they will fall on a forest of swords to achieve those ends because this is the best chance they have ever had or ever will have to permanently shackle the people to the state. They know that this Health Care fiasco will cost them the House and now perhaps the Senate in November, but that new Congress will not seat until January and in the ten months between now and then they will, I predict, start an orgy of legislation that will make this Health Care circus look like a tea party.

But it seems to me that they have spent every dime of political capital in the bank and have done nothing less than awoken from it’s long and deep slumbers the American Giant, who in attempting to sit upright discovers the Lilliputian threads that have been staked into the ground with finishing nails and who looks around, blinking and disoriented, fatter and softer and much, much poorer than he was when he last opened his eyes back in 1941, but possessed now as then with a terrible anger and capable still of mighty exertions.

So, to the short term: everybody knows that Reid and Pelosi and The Lightworker himself, obviously, are all hoping to use this bill as the foot in the door for the stuff they really want: A single-payer National Health System, or at least the “public option,” which is simply single-payer on the installment plan. We can’t let them get that. Going forward, we can’t let them get single-payer, or cap and trade, or amnesty, or any of it.

We’ll see if their political tone deafness continues.

[Update mid morning]

Another pep talk, from Moe Lane: things we were told we couldn’t do.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jim Treacher says it’s not fair to call this a political Jonestown for the Democrats, because Jim Jones only killed 900 people.

You Know What’s Worse Than Being A Racist?

Falsely accusing others of racism. Even if Clyburn did hear the N-word, (I think he’s probably lying), it doesn’t justify tarring (and I choose that word deliberately) everyone at the protest. This, and similar comments by Janeane Garafolo, is contemptible. And I and a lot of other people are getting pretty damned tired of it.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I agree with Dana Loesch:

I mean, if you’re going to smear a group of people by claiming that they were shouting slurs, perhaps make sure you don’t post video that completely refutes your claim and makes you look like a race hustler. Just saying.

That’s exactly what it is: race hustling. Identity prostitution and the Democrat party is the biggest pimp of all. To say nothing of Al Gore’s fleecing of the Cheyenne and Arapaho (I take interest in indigenous affairs because of my family’s proud heritage); the evisceration of under-privileged kids in DC to go to better schools via vouchers; Obama bringing in Sharpton to quiet the black community’s concerns that the administration’s economic policies are hurting them; or the cover up of the Gladney hate crime (and the socialists who called him an array of slurs); Democrats use minorities as nothing more than tools to claim power. It’s disgusting and as many, including Jay Stewart, Andre Harper, Charles Lollar, Stephanie Rubach, and others have said, inherently racist. These activists have spent so much of their lives asking the Democrats where is the progress? and pointing out how certain policies destroy their communities.

Socialists go about their concern for civil rights in the same manner that fake Christians go about their faith: they only take it out for the times they think people are watching or when they think that they could gain something from it. They hang it up in the closet when not in use.

And they keep them on the “liberal” plantation. Where they want to put all of us, and this bill, if it survives the vote and the courts, will be a big step in that direction.