How about let’s treat borrowers like adults. For that matter, how about treating all of us like adults (even if many of us don’t always act that way)? At least those of us who are legally adults?
Category Archives: Political Commentary
New NASA Administration
If you have NASA TV, the hearings for Bolden and Garver are scheduled for 2:10 PM today.
Does NASA Need More Money?
Paul Spudis doesn’t think so. Neither do I. In fact, given what they’re doing with it, they apparently have too much.
Out Of Touch
Does Steny Hoyer have any idea how comments like this come across to normal people?
“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.
Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.
In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.
So, therefore, it’s not reasonable to expect people to read it. Right.
I have an radical idea. How about shorter bills?
[Update a few minutes later]
I think that this would be an item for a new Republican Contract with America.
[Update mid afternoon]
Voxiversity Continues
It’s chapter three, on Woodrow Wilson. Go take the quiz, and discuss.
No More California Dreamin’
If California is really where national trends start, the nation is in trouble. The good news, though, is that an anti-big-government revolt may be brewing out there.
[Update]
Michael Barone: Are Americans getting cold feet over Obama economic proposals? Let’s hope so, finally.
Five Stimulus Plans
…better than Obama’s first one. It’s not hard.
If they want a “second stimulus,” step one would be rescinding the first one.
The Bogosity Of The BMI
Here.
We got a Wii fit a few months ago, and it tells me that my BMI is high, though within the normal range (23.5), and it’s always encouraging me to set a goal to lose weight, but I don’t think that 170 lbs on a 5’11” frame is overweight, particularly when my waist size is only a couple inches more than it was when I was a kid. We ought to start debunking this.
How Far Does ESAS Stray From Aldridge?
So far that you can’t even see it from there. A devastating analysis that I hope everyone on the Augustine panel reads. And note that this is something that the press, even the space press, rarely, if ever, talks about.
About Those Green Shoots In The Economy
It would help a lot of the government wouldn’t keep stomping them down.
But you can’t waste a crisis, and if you haven’t accomplished everything you want with it yet politically, you have to sustain it, just as the Roosevelt administration did, for years. Let’s hope that we’ll be on to them this time around.
[Update a few minutes later]
Will we be saved by California?
The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat…
…The federal picture is so bleak because the Obama administration is the most fiscally irresponsible in the history of the U.S. I would imagine that he would be the intergalactic champion as well, if we could gather the data on deficits on other worlds. Obama has taken George W. Bush’s inattention to deficits and elevated it to an art form.
The Obama administration has no shame, and is willing to abandon reason altogether to achieve its short-term political goals. Ronald Reagan ran up big deficits in part because he believed that his tax cuts would produce economic growth, and ultimately pay for themselves. He may well have been excessively optimistic about the merits of tax cuts, but at least he had a story.
Obama has no story. Nobody believes that his unprecedented expansion of the welfare state will lead to enough economic growth. Nobody believes that it will pay for itself. Everyone understands that higher spending today begets higher spending tomorrow. That means that his economic strategy simply doesn’t add up.
Well, it does to some of the economic illiterati in my comments section. As I said, let’s hope the rest of us figure it out by next November.