Good. It will help reduce the warfare they’ve been making on the rest of us and the economy.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Drinking Game Suggestions
Jonah has some in preparation for the latest Obama borefest.
I’m not sure there’s room to be too original here. His usual phrases are familiar enough: “Let me be clear,” “make no mistake,” “this will not be easy” etc. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of thing. One different way to go is conceptual or thematic. Every time Obama suggests there’s a consensus among experts about a proposal when there isn’t, drink. Every time he claims to be aligned with the populist backlash he created, drink. Every time he suggests that History with a capital H demands that we do whatever it is he’s talking about, drink. Every time he says that he’s being “pragmatic” or “bipartisan” when he’s actually being wildly ideological or partisan, drink. And so on.
My own preference is to drink every time he says something that will obviously cost me money. If that seems like an invitation to alcohol poisoning, you could narrow it down slightly by drinking only when something will cost you money and make the economy worse at the same time.
I don’t think it would narrow it down much.
Anyway, I’ll miss it, or rather, I won’t watch it (I won’t miss it at all). I’m going to a book party for Amy Alkon in Santa Monica.
[Update a while later]
Sarah Elizabeth has some predictions:
If the past two weeks are any indication, the President’s State of the Union address tonight will be hilarious.
I don’t say that to be flippant or snarky, as I am admittedly wont to do. I say that genuinely and from a place of what I consider to be astute analysis.
Case in point: After Scott Brown’s stunning Senate victory in Massachusetts and what was the political equivalent of the Boston Massacre, the story line that immediately emerged out of the White House’s Play-Doh spin factory was that Barack Obama – the Harvard-educated, memoir-penning intellectual and oratorical genius – is now a populist!
If that didn’t generate a chuckle, you’d better get your funny bone examined. To put a finer point on it, the Obama administration now wants you to believe that the same guy who criticized the heartland for clinging to guns and religion, who told Cambridge, Mass., police that they behaved “stupidly,” who made fun of Scott Brown for driving a pickup truck, is now a bona fide man of the people.
I told you: hilarious.
The guy we knew from the past year and from the campaign trail – lofty rhetoric, elitist pontificating from on high – was “Obama: Live at the Acropolis.” The State of the Union will mark a new beginning. Call it the debut of “Obama: Live at Folsom Prison.”
So as we gear up for the speech, may I suggest that you include in your survival kit a six-pack of your favorite adult beverage so we can play a little drinking game called “Barack the Plumber.”
I’m still not going to listen.
[Update early afternoon]
Here are the talking points for the speech. As noted, they’re full of whoppers.
More Edwards Revelations
Thoughts from Jim Garaghty:
Unless former John Edwards aide Andrew Young is making it all up — and at this point, Edwards has forfeited the benefit of the doubt — America came within Ohio’s electoral votes of electing a mad, narcissistic, and perhaps psychopathic monster to the vice presidency.
…It can’t be said enough. Almost every Democrat in the country did everything they could to put this man into the vice presidency in 2004, and quite a few of them worked hard to put him into the presidency in 2007 and 2008.
It’s what they do. And the truly disgusting thing is the way that the press, particularly the LA Times, covered for him.
The Ellie Light Letter
Iowahawk has gotten one from her.
No More Moon
At least by NASA, if the Orlando Sentinel has it right:
When the White House releases his budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was supposed to return humans to the moon by 2020. The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon.
There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, no Constellation program at all.
In their place, according to White House insiders, agency officials, industry executives and congressional sources familiar with Obama’s long-awaited plans for the space agency, NASA will look at developing a new “heavy-lift” rocket that one day will take humans and robots to explore beyond low Earth orbit. But that day will be years — possibly even a decade or more — away.
In the meantime, the White House will direct NASA to concentrate on Earth-science projects — principally, researching and monitoring climate change — and on a new technology research and development program that will one day make human exploration of asteroids and the inner solar system possible.
There will also be funding for private companies to develop capsules and rockets that can be used as space taxis to take astronauts on fixed-price contracts to and from the International Space Station — a major change in the way the agency has done business for the past 50 years.
As the article notes, there will be a battle royale with people on the Hill like Shelby, but it’s hard for me to see how the program will survive if the White House sticks to its guns. On the other hand, this is not a White House known for sticking to its guns.
Anyway, if that’s the new plan, it actually has a lot better prospects for getting us back to the moon than Constellation ever did, and much more affordably.
[Update a while later]
Clark Lindsey makes a good point on the politics:
Regarding the resistance in Congress to cancellation of Ares I, I’d bet the administration would love that fight. With deficits a huge concern in the general public, the killing of a giant boondoggle government rocket project is exactly the sort of symbolic act that the administration would be happy to see receive a lot of attention. The fact that most of that resistance comes from a handful of Republicans in Alabama and Texas would only highlight the irony of a situation where the President will be fighting conservatives to kill a government program and use private sector services instead.
When it comes to pork, there don’t seem to be any “conservatives.”
[Update a couple minutes later]
Keith Cowing feels cheated (again):
NASA has just spent more than half a decade telling Americans that we are all going back to the Moon – and why. In the process, billions of dollars have been spent. Children have grown up being told this again and again – just like my generation heard in the 1960s. Now this is being taken away from them. I can only imagine how my generation would have reacted. It is one thing to alter a plan, change rockets, etc. But it is quite another to abandon the plan altogether.
The ISS has great potential – much of it yet to be realized. But much of that untapped potential was preparing humans to go out into the solar system. Now those destinations have evaporated and have been replaced with the elusive and ill-defined “Flexible Path”.
How is NASA going to explain this about face? Answer – they won’t – because they can’t. They are incapable of admitting mistakes or even stating the obvious. What I really want to see is how NASA attempts to explain this bait and switch to all of the students it has sought to inspire since the VSE was announced. A “Summer of Innovation” centered around a stale and contracting space program seems somewhat contradictory to me.
How will NASA – and the White House – explain the use of vast sums of taxpayer money to bail out the decisions of incompetent financial institutions on Wall Street and yet not be able to find a paltry fraction of that amount to bail out the future of space exploration that future Americans will benefit from – and participate in.
Shrug.
He apparently had far too much faith that anything was going to come of this. I was somewhat hopeful right after the announcement, but once ESAS came out, I knew that the program was doomed to failure. We’ve wasted billions and years more, but at least we’re going to stop the bleeding now. I’m much more encouraged about our prospects to get to the moon now than I have been in five years.
[Early afternoon update]
Bill Posey has fired off a foolish response:
“This Administration has thrown hundreds of billions of dollars into a failed stimulus bill, but when it comes to keeping America first in space his ‘plan’ is to cancel the development of America’s next human space vehicle, outsource our good-paying Shuttle jobs to the Russians, place all of our hopes on a yet unproven commercial adventure, rush/force the transition to yet unproven commercial alternatives, and shifts money from human space flight to global warming research.
“Until we have a clearer plan for the future, the only realistic and reasonable way to preserve America’s leadership in space is too [sic] provide for a temporary extension of the Shuttle. To terminate the Shuttle later this year with no plan, but rather a vain hope, is ill advised.
He has never proposed a realistic plan as to how to extend Shuttle. They’re running out of pieces to fly it, and the lines were shut down long ago. And I get very tired of arguments for “jobs,” good paying or not, with no apparent concern about cost or value to the taxpayer (or space enthusiast, for that matter). I grow even more tired of hearing about how an Atlas that has an almost perfect flight record is “unproven,” while Powerpoint rockets are some kind of sure thing, merely because they are being designed by NASA.
No, this isn’t exactly what I’d be doing if I were president, but it’s a hell of a lot better policy than anything we’ve had since Mike Griffin took over. I don’t even object to spending more money on climate monitoring, particularly given what a mess the science currently is — I just wish that Jim Hansen wouldn’t have any control, or even influence, over it.
James O’Keefe
Has apparently never learned the aphorism about Caesar’s wife. I don’t know what was going on here, but if the reporting is correct, this was really stupid. But I can’t exclude the possibility of an FBI sting, with this administration…
Manufactured Consensus
The more we learn about the working of the IPCC, the more clear it is that it was not doubt that was being “manufactured,” but the consensus itself:
Alabama State Climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, served as a UN IPCC lead author in 2001 for the 3rd assessment report and detailed how he personally witnessed UN scientists attempting to distort the science for political purposes.
“I was at the table with three Europeans, and we were having lunch. And they were talking about their role as lead authors. And they were talking about how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol,” Christy told CNN on May 2, 2007. – (For more on UN scientists turning on the UN years ago, see Climate Depot’s full report here. )
Christy has since proposed major reforms and changes to the way the UN IPCC report is produced. Christy has rejected the UN approach that produces “a document designed for uniformity and consensus.” Christy presented his views at a UN meeting in 2009. The IPCC needs “an alternative view section written by well-credentialed climate scientists is needed,” Christy said. “If not, why not? What is there to fear? In a scientific area as uncertain as climate, the opinions of all are required,” he added.
‘The reception to my comments was especially cold.’
No doubt. Time for some climate change at the UN.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Cui bono, when the IPCC lies?
Risk Averse
Wayne Hale wonders if NASA’s culture will allow it to enter a new era of private space transportation.
It all continues to come back to the fact that actual accomplishments in space are not politically important, as they were during Apollo. When something’s not important, it’s hard to justify risk for it.
What Is Exploration?
Paul Spudis has some useful thoughts. I think that confusion on this issue is one of the causes of our current space policy mess, particularly with regard to human spaceflight.
Why Mirandize The Panty Bomber?
More questions. Like the foolish decision to try KSM in New York, it’s not too late to undo this mistake. But it would require a rethink of our approach to Islamic terrorism overall, which is unlikely coming from the current crew.
[Update late morning]
The Abdulmutallab travesty.
This is brazen self-sabotage. We are in a war of intelligence. People risk their lives every day to get the information to understand the terror networks arrayed against us and identify specific threats. Why would we pre-emptively silence a priceless source of timely intelligence?
It literally didn’t even occur to the administration to do otherwise. Top terrorism officials weren’t consulted. The director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the director of National Intelligence, the FBI director, and the secretary of Homeland Security were all out of the loop. Some as-yet-unidentified top Justice Department official, who probably is known around the office as “general,” made the call.
According to an Associated Press account, after Abdulmutallab chatted with customs officials about his plot, FBI agents showed up and talked to him for about 50 minutes. He told them he’d worked with al-Qaeda. The agents didn’t Mirandize him, relying on an exception in cases involving an imminent threat to public safety. Then, a new FBI team arrived with instructions from Washington to read Abdulmutallab his rights. It’s the last we’ve heard from him.
It’s almost like they want us to lose.