Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Long Live Space Station!

4 Comments

So says Jeff Manber:

By all media accounts, including that of Augustine himself on the news shows, the officials were told that going back to the Moon or on to Mars is impossible at current budget levels. I’m happy about that—because it just seems to me that the Augustine panel’s report should focus not on another hardware project, but how the federal government procures space goods and hardware.

I’ve thought from the start that a government commission deciding which rocket should be built, or where the orbiting gas stations should be located, smacks of government planning at its worst. If all of Washington, including President Obama, can agree that despite investing $50 billion in General Motors, the auto czar has no place selecting the new models of automobiles, why should it be different for rockets or lunar modules?

For me, it was kind of a Cold War throwback to have watched as members of the Augustine panel have traveled around the country listening to engineers and industry executives talk up one launch system and bad mouth another, push for one new NASA program and throw cold water on another. Think “sunshine laws” meets a Politburo meeting.

Norm Augustine should report to the president that the problem afflicting our space program is not this hardware or that program, but the way we are spending our tens of billions for space.

Exactly.

[Afternoon update]

The Space Frontier Foundation says that Ares needs a death panel:

“Derivatives of proven commercial launch systems, and new ones under development, could meet any reasonable need for heavy lift,” said Foundation co-Founder, James Muncy. “The barrier is psychological: NASA will have to stop pretending it can design cost-effective launch vehicles and instead focus on exploration systems that fit on the launch vehicles taxpayers can really afford.”

Werb concluded: “The choice is clear. We can continue funding an overpriced, government space limousine, or we can kick-start a whole new industry that will reduce government’s costs and create new jobs. The tools of private sector innovation and competition offer our best and only chance to have affordable and sustainable human space exploration.”

Unfortunately, it’s not so clear to those who want to keep Huntsville green.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

A Rare Thing

67 Comments

Anthony Weiner is an honest Democrat:

S: So, Anthony, I figured it out over the break. You actually do want the federal government to take over all of health care.

W: Only in the sense that the federal government took over health care for senior citizens 44 years ago.

S: You want to expand that for all Americans.

W: Correct. I want Medicare for all Americans.

Weiner wants to destroy the private sector insurance market, which accounts for 15% of the American economy, in order to have government control health-care decisions. At least, as Jazz says, he’s honest … for what that’s worth.

It’s actually worth a lot. I wish we’d see that kind of honesty from the president and congressional leadership.

[Update mid morning]

From the Trojan Horse’s mouth: they plan on a slippery slope. Gee, what a shock.

[Early afternoon update]

More honesty from the left: the history of the “public option“:

Following Edwards’ lead, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton picked up on the public option compromise. So what we have is Jacob Hacker’s policy idea, but largely Hickey and Health Care for America Now’s political strategy. It was a real high-wire act — to convince the single-payer advocates, who were the only engaged health care constituency on the left, that they could live with the public option as a kind of stealth single-payer, thus transferring their energy and enthusiasm to this alternative. It had a very positive political effect: It got all the candidates except Kucinich onto basically the same health reform structure, unlike in 1992, when every Democrat had his or her own gimmick. And the public option/insurance exchange structure was ambitious.

But the downside is that the political process turns out to be as resistant to stealth single-payer as it is to plain-old single-payer. If there is a public plan, it certainly won’t be the kind of deal that could “become the dominant player.” So now this energetic, well-funded group of progressives is fired up to defend something fairly complex and not necessarily essential to health reform. (Or, put another way, there are plenty of bad versions of a public plan.) The symbolic intensity is hard for others to understand. But the intensity is understandable if you recognize that this is what they gave up single-payer for, so they want to win at least that much.

And winning is all that matters to them.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

A Farewell To Reader’s Digest

7 Comments

Lileks has some thoughts:

Reader’s Digest was a staple in our house, because Grandma gave it to us every year as a Christmas gift. Until I learned that it was required to make fun of it, I enjoyed every issue. Quizzed myself on the vocabulary test (It pays to increase your word power! Peter Funk was the author, I believe; the name was amusing then, and sounds like a BEFORE part of a Viagra ad now), learned to appreciate the difference at an early age between “Life in These United States” and “Laughter is the Best Medicine.” (Non fiction vs. jokes.) As a hypochondriac from an early age, I avoided “I Am Joe’s Duodenum” or “I Am Joe’s Throbbing Mass of Inevitably Non-Functioning Gristle,” and I never read the Condensed Books. By the time I came along they were mostly expanded articles, running under the “Drama in Real Life(TM)” banner, I think. We had some Condensed Books, which seemed wrong on every possible level, like compressed ice-cream or Star Trek shortened for extra commercials. What would you take out of a book to condense it? Did they just pick characters and subplots and tease them out of the story like a colored thread in a loosely-knit yarn scarf?

We used to have both the magazine and a lot of compressed books at our summer cottage in northern Michigan, and I read them voraciously as a kid. The magazine seemed to go downhill in the past years, though, and I haven’t read one since I turned an adult. I’ll always remember, though Susan Sontag’s speech to her leftist cohorts in 1982, in which she outraged them by rhetorically asking who would have been better informed about the nature of the Soviet Union, and communism in general — readers of The Nation, or of Reader’s Digest? What replaces it today as a purveyor of the truth against ideological lies (not that it itself had done that for many years)? The mainstream media doesn’t seem to think there’s much market for it.

Here are more thoughts on RD, and MBA consultants, from the other McCain.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Cindy Sheehan

3 Comments

…finally wises up:

I asked Sheehan about the fact that the press seems to have lost interest in her and her cause. “It’s strange to me that you mention it,” she said. “I haven’t stopped working. I’ve been protesting every time I can, and it’s not covered. But the one time I did get a lot of coverage was when I protested in front of George Bush’s house in Dallas in June. I don’t know what to make of it. Is the press having a honeymoon with Obama? I know the Left is.”

I think that the glow has worn off for the rest of us, if it was ever there to begin with. And they were never really anti-war — they were just on the other side (in this case, the Democrat side).

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Power And Danger

20 Comments

…of iconography. Live by the icon, die by the icon.

By the way, I know that some people don’t like to have to watch a video, and would rather read, and I generally am in their camp. But I think that this is a more powerful presentation than it would be if Bill had simply done it in an essay. It’s only eight minutes.

[Update late morning]

I’ve added a clickable graphic as sort of a teaser. I actually think that it would be better with ROFL…

[Bumped]

[Update mid afternoon]

A new Obama logo: line by line.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Obama, ACORN And The SEIU

8 Comments

His relationship with these goons and thugs goes way back:

In Connecticut, the SEIU asked its members to attend Congressman Jim Himes’ town hall meeting and drown out the voices opposing ObamaCare:

Healthcare Town Hall Forum with Congressman Jim Himes

August 06, 2009, 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM. …
Action: Opponents of reform are organizing counter-demonstrators to speak at this and several congressional town halls on the issue to defend the status quo. It is critical that our members with real, personal stories about the need for access to quality, affordable care come out in strong numbers to drown out their voices.

At a St. Louis town hall, four SEIU members surrounded and attacked ObamaCare protester Kenneth Gladney:

Yes, they surrounded me. Actually, after the first two guys got me on the ground, they surrounded me and started kicking me in the head and in the back, and the knees and stuff like that. And after it was done, I got up, kind of dazed, looking for my glasses. And the one guy actually was coming at me again, and that’s when the police came in and, you know, cordoned off everything and started, you know, started arresting people.

Why would the president of the United States have any interest in linking up with the SEIU, encouraging them to be his enforcers?

In the mid 1990s, ACORN and the SEIU partnered with other leftist groups to help form the Marxist New Party, a political coalition. In 1995, Obama sought out their nomination. He was successful in obtaining that endorsement and used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers.

What color shirts should we call them?

Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary

The End Of Tinkering?

18 Comments

Well, it’s not gone, but it certainly has gone out of fashion compared to when I was a kid. How many kids work on their own cars these days? Though I would note that just changing a head gasket is not equivalent to rebuilding the whole engine.

I think that this is part and parcel of the whole academic bubble, which continues to inflate beyond economic reason. Particularly in today’s economy, people should realize that plumbing can’t be outsourced.

[Update about noon]

Speaking of the upcoming pop of the education bubble, some schools are now not allowing parents to see their children’s grades in college. How many parents are going to put up with that and continue to pay tuition to such an institution? The notion of “treating students as adults” works fine for students who are actually adults. But adults pay their own way. There’s a lot more to being an adult than simply surviving long enough to reach the age of majority.