Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Name Names, Governator

96 Comments

I’m getting more than a little tired of Arnold the RINO decrying hypocrites in his ostensible party, who supposedly rail about the Porkustimulus bill, while going out to cut ribbons at events funded by it and taking credit for them. And yet somehow, he never provides an actual example.

I’m willing to believe that such people exist (Republicans do have some repugnant people in the party, Scharzenegger being quite prominent among them), but if you’re going to damn the party to which you claim to belong in such a way, it would seem that, at a minimum, one should offer some evidence for it. Or admit that one is just blowing it out his…abs. And of course, the press (in this case Greta) never calls him on it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

There Seems To Be A Step Missing

36 Comments

In all the media discussion over Iran’s incipient nuclear capabilities, two phrases seem to be intermingled. The headline on Fox News uses the word “warhead,” while Jamie Colby is talking to John Bolton, who continues to use the phrase “nuclear weapons.” While Iran having nuclear weapons is obviously nothing to sneeze at (though the White House seems to have a different view), nuclear weapons are not warheads. A warhead is a specific kind of nuclear weapon — one that not only works, but is light enough to be delivered on a missile, and has reentry and guidance systems to deliver it to its target. One does not go from enriching uranium to building warheads in a single step, but I hear no discussion of this. I wish I did.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Going Post-Doctoral

79 Comments

One line stuck out to me in this piece about Professor Amy Bishop:

“You have to talk about Amy Bishop’s mental health in this situation as one of the variables, but being denied tenure when you’re in your mid-40s at an out-of-the-way obscure rural campus in the deep South is a catastrophic loss, and people don’t understand that,” says Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.

This looks like northeastern Ivy bigotry to me, and it seems to be driven by ignorance. I think that most people at UAH would be surprised to learn that their university is “out-of-the-way,” “obscure,” or “rural.” Huntsville is a non-trivial city (it has a major NASA center, and Army R&D facility, and a vast aerospace contractor industrial base), and UAH has an excellent engineering school, particularly for aerospace (despite their having picked up Mike Griffin as a professor, though it’s probably a job to which he’s much better suited than running NASA). I suspect that, to Mr. Levin, its real crime is being in the “deep” south (just below the Tennessee border). And he probably thinks that for someone with a post-graduate degree from Harvard, her willingness to subject herself to such a benighted place is just one more sign of a mental disorder.

Political Commentary

Bending The Curve

4 Comments

That’s what the Dems will have to do to hold on to the House:

Highlighting the GOP’s continued momentum, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report made ratings changes in 25 House races Thursday, all of which favor Republican candidates. The downgrading of Democratic prospects in the races paints an increasingly promising picture for GOP chances of taking over the House next year.

The respected political publication now rates 54 Democratic-held seats in the most highly competitive category — with 26 of them either pure tossups or favoring the Republican candidate. The publication rates 95 Democratic seats in total as potentially vulnerable — over one-third of the entire caucus.

Republicans need to pick up a net of 40 seats to win back control of the House. According to the Cook ratings, the GOP has only six seats that are at risk of flipping.

The list of potentially vulnerable Democrats, according to the Cook Report, includes members who have been virtually untouchable in the past, including Rep. Dave Obey (D-Wis.), the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and Rep. Nick Rahall, the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, who hasn’t faced a competitive race since 1990.

“At this rate, Democrats are likely to lose at least 25-35 seats in the House and would have to bend the current trajectory of the cycle to hold onto their House majority,” wrote Cook Political Report House analyst David Wasserman.

Actually, when you look at their current behavior (e.g., continuing to attempt to ram health care deform through), it doesn’t even look like they’re trying to keep it. It looks more like they’ve accepted the loss of power, and are just trying to get as much done to advance their totalitarian agenda as possible and hope that it’s irreversible, even if it worsens their losses this year. They play the long game.

Along those notes, a popular argument they make is that once people get it, no matter how undemocratically, they’ll like it so much that it will be impossible to repeal (and unfortunately, the history of other entitlements supports that). They’re drug dealers who want to get us hooked, after which we’re their slaves.