Congress doesn’t understand the health-care legislation. But it’s important to pass it as quickly as possible.
This is beyond Lewis Carroll.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
First African-American Elected President
Minorities and particularly African-Americans hit hardest:
The economic crisis has predominantly hit non-white working class men; the collapse of the auto industry is threatening to destroy the basis of the Midwestern black middle class. Key matters for African-Americans languish — the overincarceration of young black men that makes a mockery of American justice being the number one example. Government aid? That goes to bankers in Connecticut. If the President were white, there would be riots.
The conflict between the narrative and the reality is nothing new to anyone who has been watching these people for long.
News From The Augustine Panel
I have it on fairly good authority that one of the subpanels will have an interesting announcement this morning, that some readers may find encouraging. Don’t know much more than that, and I’ll be incommunicado until this afternoon, when we get back to Boca.
[Mid-afternoon update]
I see from comments that there was a strong endorsement of propellant depots for exploration beyond LEO (which, as Jeff noted, should have been so obvious that historians will look back dumbfounded in retrospect that we remained hung up on megalaunchers for so long). I haven’t seen the presentation yet, but Clark Lindsey has a summary.
[Update a few minutes later]
Jon Goff: “The most amazing twenty-five minutes in NASA history.”
Well, that’s probably a slight exaggeration — I think an event that happened a little over forty years ago probably tops it, but I know what he means. The question is whether or not the policy establishment will pay attention. I have an email from someone in the know who notes that everyone on that subpanel gets the Frontier Enabling Test.
I’m sorry I missed the presentation live, but I assume that it will be replayable, or Youtubed. It certainly should be — I think that it probably will prove to be quite historic.
[Update about 4 PM EDT]
What is Norm Augustine thinking about ISS?
If he was not playing devil’s advocate, then Augustine’s first question indicates a belief that the American public might not be so excited about funding a lengthy and costly mission to Mars that isn’t clearly an American mission. His second question suggests he believes that when you get right down to it, there isn’t much to the space station beyond the great international coalition it has wrought.
There are many strong arguments to keep the space station — most notably that it seems ridiculous to abandon it just five years after it’s completed — but if Augustine believes deep down that it serves no real scientific or exploration purpose, that will carry a lot of weight with Obama.
I think that for current planned uses, and in its current location, it’s not worth the money of keeping it going. If “international cooperation” is so important to Sally Ride and the other politically correct astronauts, let them scrounge up the couple billion a year to do so from ESA, Japan, and others. But I’d like to see some serious proposals to move it to a more affordable location at 28 degrees (it wouldn’t take long to save the money that it would take to move it in reduced launch costs) and use it as a base facility for depot operations and research, as well as a primary base for extended-duration crew research for deep-space missions, perhaps using coorbiting Bigelow modules. With a short-distance cargo-crew tug, this would eliminate the need for a back-to-earth lifeboat, for everything short of a coronal mass ejection or alien attack.
[Evening update]
Jon Goff has posted his white paper on propellant depots, which I would assume played at least some role in today’s results.
Why The Smart People Say That Obama Is A Great President
Frank J. explains.
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I was commenting over at NASA Watch, and in response to this comment: “I don’t understand why designing one big rocket to launch everything at once isn’t the better idea. Saturn V took the crew and the cargo to the moon…, I wrote something like “Because an approach taken in a race to the moon isn’t the best approach for building a program that is affordable and sustainable,” with a link to my piece at The New Atlantis. All comments are moderated over there. The post appeared, but like this:
Because an approach taken in a race to the moon isn’t the best approach for building a program that is
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Apparently, Keith not only isn’t going to link to it himself, he’s not even going to allow links to it in comments. I wonder why he doesn’t think that his readers would find it of interest?
Obamacare
It’s even worse than you think:
The Democrats want to spend $1.5 trillion over a decade, impose an $800 billion tax increase in the midst of the worst recession in a generation, increase federal borrowing by $239 billion (on top of the $11 trillion the Obama budget already requires us to borrow through 2019), impose costly mandates on employers that will discourage hiring as unemployment nears 10 percent, force individuals to buy one-size-fits-all government defined insurance, and insert the government in countless new ways between doctors and patients. All of that would occur whether or not the plan includes a “public option,” which at this point it does include and which will exacerbate all of these problems.
As these facts have become clear, Obama’s standing has fallen and public opinion has grown decidedly less enthusiastic for the administration’s approach. The trend is likely to continue, because the details of the plan reveal that its two most serious drawbacks–its cost and the prospect of government rationing–are worse than even most of their critics have grasped.
Of course, that won’t stop them, in and of itself. We have to make our views known to our representatives next month when they’re back in their districts.
Though perhaps it’s not fair to call it Obamacare, since the president admits that he doesn’t even know what’s in the bill. And yet he continues to flail around attempting (and apparently failing) to defend it.
[Update late afternoon]
Why “health care” is not a right:
…imagine if the government had a body of experts charged with figuring out what your free-speech rights are, or your right to assemble, or worship. Mr. Jones, you can say X and Y, but not Z. Ms. Smith, you can freely assemble with Aleutians, Freemasons, and carpenters, but you may not meet in public with anyone from Cleveland or of Albanian descent. Mrs. Wilson, you may pray to Vishnu and Crom, but never to Allah or Buddha, and when you do pray, you cannot do so for longer than 20 minutes at a time, unless it is one of several designated holidays. Please see Extended Prayer Form 10–22B.
Of course, all of this would be ludicrous beyond words.
Actually, I can imagine this gang coming up with something exactly like that.
The Know-Nothing In Chief
Fred Barnes says that it’s clear that the president is an utter economic illiterate:
Obama professes to believe in free market economics. But no one expects his policies to reflect the unfettered capitalism of a Milton Friedman. That’s too much to ask. Demonstrating a passing acquaintance with free market ideas and how they might be used to fight the recession–that’s not too much to ask.
But the president talks as if free market solutions are nonexistent, and in his mind they may be. Three weeks after taking office, he said only government “has the resources to jolt our economy back into life.” He hasn’t retreated, in words or policies, from that view.
…A good example of Obama’s economic shallowness is his unrelenting defense of the $787 billion “stimulus.” Enacted in February, it has had minimal impact on the economy. Yet Obama has no second thoughts. He says he wouldn’t change a thing about the stimulus. It has “already saved jobs and created new ones,” he said at the press conference, neglecting to note that 2 million jobs–a net 2 million–have been lost since it was passed.
That was clear even during the campaign, to those of us who are not. Unfortunately, most people (including most journalists) are in the same boat as the president.
“Sorry” Seems To Be The Hardest Word
The president seems to be incapable of admitting error. Just another of his endearing narcissistic traits. Fortunately, as Tom points out, he has the New York Times to cover for him.
[Update a few minutes later]
Like the commenter over at Patterico’s place, this incident has reinforced my prejudices about race-baiting Harvard law professors.
[Afternoon update]
Obama seems to be one of those “liberals” who is capable of apologizing for anything and everything except his own actions. So since he’s always quick to apologize for me, I’ll do it for him. I’m sorry, Sergeant Crowley, that our president is a racialist, classless ass. I bear no responsibility, not having voted for him, but I’ll apologize anyway, just as he is happy to apologize for things that others have done for which he bears no responsibility, even when the apologees’ crimes are far more egregious.
Obama’s Path Not Taken
Victor Davis Hanson muses on how things might be if President Obama had lived up to the false campaign promises of candidate Obama.
A Space Program For The Rest Of Us
I know, you’ve all given up, and just assumed that the piece in The New Atlantis was just another drug-addled Simberg fantasy of grandeur. That when I kept saying it would be Real Soon Now, that it was just vaporware. Well, Now has finally arrived.
As I wrote in an early draft, if extraterrestrial aliens had contacted the White House after the last lunar landing in 1972, and told the president that humans wouldn’t be allowed to move into space beyond earth orbit, and to pass the message on to his successors, but that the public was not to know this, it’s hard to imagine how policy actions would have been much different. Let’s Hope that this can finally Change with the new administration. That (unlike most of the rest of the agenda) would be Hope and Change that I could believe in.
[Late Friday update]
I want to thank everyone for the kudos, but I can’t accept it (did you know that kudos is not plural?) without acknowledging that this was a collaboration. Adam Keiper, the first and only (to date) editor of The New Atlantis, encouraged me to write this piece and, more importantly, played a key role in making it what it was. While we lost some things in editing (that I’ll rectify in a later Director’s Cut, and perhaps expand into a book), he focused it and almost certainly helped make it more influential in getting more to read it now, when we are at such a critical cusp of policy decisions.
But beyond that, he really helped write it. I was tired when I finished, and had a weak ending. The final paragraph, one of the best in it, if not the best (and it may be), is his.
And I’m grateful for the opportunity that he provided to get this message out, not just with The Path Not Taken five years ago (was it really that long?) but this and other pieces. The links in it are his, which indicates to me that he’s been following this topic closely. The most amazing thing is that this collaboration is a result of a snarky criticism by me of his own space-policy punditry, over half a decade ago. Rather than taking umbrage, he opened his mind to new possibilities, and the result is this (so far at least) collaborative magnum opus.
[Bumped]