A long but interesting piece from Matt Continetti.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
How Ricci Was Almost Swept Under The Carpet
Stuart Taylor, on Judge Sotomayor’s judicial malpractice.
The Obama Shop
Yes, it is creepy. Sometimes I feel like a hostage in Jonestown.
Contempt For The Rule Of Law
By the Obama administration. Hey, why let a pesky constitution get in the way of a friendly leftist dictator? That could be a bad precedent for their own future.
[Late morning update]
Ten days that shook Honduras: a brief history.
A House Of Repeal
I like this idea:
Perhaps what America needs is an authority whose sole job is to get rid of outdated, ill-conceived, or just plain bad laws.
This administration would certainly keep it busy.
I don’t know if this is the solution, but the system clearly is broken. The Founders would be appalled.
I still like my idea of a Sunset Amendment:
“All laws passed by the Congress shall remain in effect for no more than ten calendar years from the date of passage, at or prior to which time they must be repassed, or expire. All federal laws in existence at the time of passage of this amendment shall have staggered expiration dates, as a function of their age on the books, according to the formula, time-to-expire = 35 x (year-of-amendment-passage – 1787)/(year-of-amendment-passage – year-of-law-passage) + 5. Repassage of all existing laws will also have a lifetime of ten years.”
I’ve put some (but not a tremendous amount of) thought into this. The idea is to make the whole mess go away eventually, but you wouldn’t want to have a single date of expiration for all existing law–it would simply overwhelm the system. What I’m hoping for here is something that whelms the system only slightly, but enough to keep them so busy renewing important laws that they won’t have time to renew antiquated or bad ones, or to cause new mischief.
The formula has the earliest phaseouts (of the most recent laws) occur in five years, while the oldest laws (some of which, given their age, might have actually been good ones), can hang on as long as forty. The last sentence may be redundant, because it’s implied by the first sentence, but I want to make it clear that once law existing prior to amendment passage has been reauthorized, it has no special status among laws passed later–it is simply treated as any other newly-passed law.
There is a useful discussion of loopholes over comments at the old post.
Armed Revolution
What’s so funny about it? The Iranian people are demonstrating the need for a Second Amendment. The right to self defense should be a universal human right.
Backlash
Maybe The Ming Dynasty Had The Right Idea
Legend has it (whether true or not) that, after Zheng He’s voyages were shut down, it was made a capital offense to build a ship with more than four masts.*
If I were Norm Augustine, I would suggest that NASA be encouraged to innovate by being forbidden to develop a vehicle with more capability than the biggest existing Atlas V. This would finally force them to stop wasting money on the heavy-lift fetish, and get on with the business of developing a cost-effective (and scalable) in-space transportation infrastructure. If they really want to continue to indulge in this economically irrational behavior, let them do it with their own money, or find some crazy investor, instead of continuing to screw the taxpayers.
*It was not the size restriction of the ships that prevented the Chinese from being a naval power. The Portuguese and Spanish conquered the New World with much smaller ones.
The “Chavez News Network”
A report from Roger Simon, on what’s happening in Honduras. And US reportage.
You Know The Program Is In Trouble
…when the major contractors are running down the lines of the ship:
According to industry officials present, former astronaut and Boeing Vice President Brewster Shaw, Lockheed Vice President John Karas and other executives met with the staff of powerful U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby to discuss creating a media campaign to counter Ares I critics and alternative ideas. Shelby, R-Ala., is a fierce protector of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, which is designing the Ares rockets.
But the campaign never materialized. Instead, Lockheed and Boeing have softened their positions and even indicated some support for looking at alternatives.
Lockheed, which has a $4.5 billion contract to design and build the Orion crew capsule to ride on top of Ares I, now says it is “neutral” on which rocket takes its capsule into orbit.
In addition, it allowed United Launch Alliance, the company that Lockheed jointly owns with Boeing, to make a presentation to the Augustine Committee advocating its Delta IV rocket — now used to launch military and commercial payloads — as a cheaper, better alternative to Ares I.
When asked this week which rocket his company supports, spokesman Stephen Tatum replied: “Lockheed Martin is focused on building the best Orion crew exploration vehicle possible for our NASA customer.”
Diplomatically put.
Dead rocket walking.