Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary

John Murtha

9 Comments

RIP.

As I was taught, if you don’t have anything good to say…

[Update a few minutes later]

I assume that there will be a special election. I’ll bet that a Republican will have a good shot at taking the seat.

[Update a couple minutes l later]

Yup, a special election on primary day, May 18th, and it’s the only district in the country that voted for both John Kerry and John McCain. The only thing, really, that kept getting him reelected was the pork. Looks like a likely Republican pickup to me.

[Late afternoon update]

An obit from Rick Moran. With the good, the bad and the ugly.

Political Commentary

The Human Rights Facade

1 Comment

…is beginning to crumble.

There is a vital role for groups like HRW and Amnesty to play in the world. Properly understood, their mission is to use their moral authority to shame and condemn tyranny and those who wish to make the world a hospitable place for tyrants and terrorists. But moral authority requires moral clarity. HRW and Amnesty have been overtaken by activists who use their position to wage easy campaigns against open societies instead of taking on the more difficult, thankless, and sometimes dangerous struggle against closed ones.

Kind of like the global warming scam. Amnesty International should be ashamed, but it’s apparently incapable of it.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Best Ad

22 Comments

I missed the first half (after giving up on our Costco trip yesterday, being unable to find a parking space and having forgotten that everyone would be stocking up for the game today, we went about game time. Lightest traffic ever…), but my favorite ad in the second half was Audi’s. Selling us green cars by showing us our ecofascist future…

[Update a few minutes later]

I agree:

I can’t wait for the video showing Hitler’s reaction to Peyton Manning’s fourth-quarter interception.

I think that it says something about the culture that, sixty-five years later, Adolf Hitler has become a pop-culture joke. Unfortunately, I think that the ideology of radical Islam and Allah will be much more resistant. Partly because when we make fun of Hitler, there aren’t riots in the streets, with threats of decapitation.

[Update a few minutes later]

Did the Colts get the kiss of death?

He also thought the Olympics were a shoe-in for Chicago because of his involvement (epic fail), that Corzyn would win in New Jersey, Deeds in Virginia, Coakley in Massachusetts, and that he would by himself succeed in Copenhagen. That’s 0-5 there tough guy! From NFL.com: President Obama predicts Colts victory in Super Bowl XLIV.

I’m guessing that there are a lot of donkeys who will be begging The One to stay the hell away from their campaigns this fall.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Obama Isn’t A Keynesian

7 Comments

He just thinks he is:

If Keynes were alive today, what would he think of President Obama’s fiscal policies?

He would roll over in his grave if he could see the things being done in his name. Keynes was opposed to large structural deficits. He thought that they chilled rather than stimulated the economy. It’s true that we’re stuck with large deficits now. The goal should be to reduce them, not to take on new spending that makes them worse.

Today, deficits are getting bigger and bigger with no plan to significantly lower them. Keynes understood what the current administration doesn’t understand that the proper policy in a democracy recognizes that today’s increase in debt must be paid in the future.

We paid down wartime deficits. Now we have continuous deficits. We used to have a rule people believed in, balanced budgets. And now that’s gone.

But misinterpreting Keynes allows them to pursue their political agenda of growth in government.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Great IPCC Meltdown

6 Comments

…continues:

When the glacier story broke, IPCC apologists returned over and over again to a saving grace. The bogus glacier report appeared in the body of the IPCC document, but not in the much more carefully vetted Synthesis Report, in which the IPCC’s senior leadership made its specific recommendations to world leaders. So it didn’t matter that much, the apologists told us, and we can still trust the rigorously checked and reviewed Synthesis Report.

But that’s where the African rain crisis prediction is found — in the supposedly sacrosanct Synthesis Report.

So: the Synthesis Report contains a major scare prediction — 50% shortfall in North African food production just ten years from now — and there is no serious, peer-reviewed evidence that the prediction is true.

But there’s more. Much, much more.

You wonder at what point, if any, the warm-monger worshippers will realize that they’ve been scammed?

And as Mark Steyn notes (again), it’s not just a science scandal, it’s a scandal of gross journalism malpractice.

[Update a few minutes later]

Time to follow the money.

Political Commentary, Space

China To The Moon?

31 Comments

This is sort of interesting, if true:

NASA sees China’s strategy for a manned lunar landing as launch vehicle intensive. While America’s notional Constellation moon project centers on a single – and still unbuilt – Ares-V “superheavy” lift booster for a direct ascent to the moon and two “lunar orbit rendezvous” operations, China will likely opt for two complex “Earth orbit rendezvous” maneuvers.

This will require four “Long March V” rockets – in the same class as the Pentagon’s Delta IV heavy lift launch vehicles – to put their cosmonauts on the moon. Launched in pairs over a two-week period from China’s new Wenchang Space Center on the South China Sea island of Hainan, the four Long March Vs will each loft 26-ton payloads into low Earth orbits. The first mission will orbit the rocket for the translunar journey which will then join a second payload of an empty lunar module (LM) and its lunar-orbit rocket motor. Those first two unmanned payloads will rendezvous in Earth orbit and then fire off for the quarter-million-mile journey to the moon.

Once the unmanned LM is in a stable lunar orbit, the second pair of missions will be launched into Earth’s orbit; the first with another translunar rocket motor and the second with a combined payload comprising the lunar orbiting module, a modified service module, an Earth re-entry module and the manned Shenzhou capsule with three Chinese cosmonauts.

Unlike many at NASA, they’re smart enough to avoid the huge development costs of a heavy-lifter. Of course, it will still be a very expensive mission, but based on existing vehicles. We looked at these kinds of architectures at Boeing during CE&R, before Mike Griffin took over and they became anathema. Of course, we were trying to actually satisfy the requirements of the VSE and the Aldridge recommendations, something that Mike apparently never considered important.

I should add that the article is clearly wrong on this point:

October’s launch of the experimental Ares 1-X heavy lift rocket, while flawless, may well mark the end rather than the beginning of America’s next-generation Constellation manned-space program.

It was hardly “flawless,” unless you don’t consider a failure to deploy all the chutes a flaw.