A long analysis by Keith Hennesey. Let’s hope the hurdles are sufficiently high. The best scenario is that they go all-out to pass this legislative totalitarian abomination, further enraging the electorate, but fail to do so.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
A Response To Frank Rich’s Latest Vile Slander
“If Our Colleges And Universities Do Not Breed Men Who Riot…”
As noted, one of the left’s distinguishing features is to continually rewrite its own violent history, and attribute it and project it onto others. In addition to the slander, it also creates a continual amnesia, or ahistorical attitude on the part of new adherents to it who are so mistaught the history.
Walt, Walt, Walt…
I admire Walt Cunningham as a hero of Apollo, but it’s hard to do so as a policy analyst. The very title of his opinion piece is nonsense:
We must not discard greatest innovator in history
Presumably he’s talking about NASA, and specifically the human spaceflight program. But in fact, due to risk aversion, it is probably the least innovative technology program going, with “Apollo on Steroids” the most prominent and recent example. I’d wager that we get more innovation out of Silicon Valley in a month than we have from the entire history of the human spaceflight program. He expands in the first paragraph:
What A Surprise
The president doesn’t understand how insurance works. It seems he’s just as ignorant about it now as he was when he was a kid. I’d have laughed at him, too. I still do. Or would, if he weren’t running the country.
[Update monday morning]
More (amusing) thoughts from Tom Maguire:
Obama apparently blundered to the common (and thriftier) conclusion, since no one buys collision on a junker.
However, months later he realized that paying more for collision would have been a great idea, so history is re-written. It is now due to ACME’s rapaciousness that they are unwilling to right this wrong and write him a check. And they laughed! Surely Chait can hear the racial overtones there! After the laughter died they should have explained to the college grad that he could file a third-party claim against the other driver, assuming Obama was not at fault, but that also may have been too confusing.
Well. If even Obama can be duped by greedy insurers into saving his money and taking a sensible risk, what hope do the rest of us have? Surely we need these new health insurance mandates to make sure both that we buy policies and that the policies we buy have everything we need, not just everything we (stupidly think we) want.
I find the condescension and arrogance of these “brilliant” “liberals” insufferable.
Prospects For Constellation Resurrection
Clark Lindsey has some realistic perspective:
After the noise dies away from the hearings on the NASA budget, the harsh reality of NASA’s limited budget is going to sink in with Congress just as it did for the Augustine panel when they started to look at the numbers. Constellation just won’t fit. You can’t fly the ISS, keep all those Shuttle workers employed and proceed with Ares/Orion. Shelby et al will try to save Constellation but the vast majority of the appropriators have much, much higher priorities than NASA and they are not going to boost the agency’s budget just to preserve a $100B+ billion dollar program that the NASA administrator, a blue-ribbon panel, the President and common sense all say is not viable.
He also points to a useful recent precedent:
Despite all that noise and anger and legislative maneuvers, by the end of July the plan was accepted: The F-22: Senate Votes to End Production – TIME – July.22.09. Congress as a whole decided that the negatives were not nearly as bad as claimed and the positives were too good to reject.
If Bolden and the administration push in a similar vigorous and sustained manner for their NASA plan, they will also win. As I’ve noted before, President Obama would no doubt love to battle Congressional members who want to force him to spend tens of billions of dollars on a failed Moon program, especially when most of that opposition consists of supposedly small-government, pro-business, anti-deficit Republicans. (Could just see him in a public forum saying that continuing the Moon program would be “an inexcusable waste of money”.)
I hope that the days of NASA as pork, as opposed to progress, are at least coming to a middle, if not an end. And the ironies continue to abound.
Bang, Bang
…you’re safe.
The gun-grabber religion is amazing in its intensity and irrationality.
Mainstream Leftist Journalists
…the bell tolls for thee.
Suborbital Safety
I have some thoughts over at Popular Mechanics, that arose from last week’s suborbital researchers’ conference in Boulder.
[Update a few minutes later]
Wayne Hale (who I was privileged to finally meet in person last week in Boulder) has some thoughts on “human rating.” I like his last quote. It reminds me of another one: “Every time they performed an investigation of the accident, all of the paperwork was found to be in order.”
To The Moon, Alice!
Not. Some very useful thoughts from Miles O’Brien.
It is a shame how atrociously this has been reported, with all of the nonsensical talk about “ending human spaceflight.” Of course, it’s partly the administration’s fault, by springing it at the last minute. As Miles notes, anyone with their head in the sunlight could see that Constellation (or at least Ares — killing Orion as well was a legitimate surprise) couldn’t survive in the current (or really, any) environment, but it still came as a shock, with an inadequate description of what is to replace it. I hope that this will be rectified in the coming weeks and months.
This Won’t End Well
The brutal truth about Californians.
When I first moved out there thirty years ago, it was unusual to run into a native Californian — most people you met were immigrants from other states (or countries). I suspect that’s less true today, but modern native Californians are a different breed from those of an earlier era, and they’re running their own state into the ground. They don’t appreciate the natural bounty of the place, and seem to have an entitlement mentality.