Hugo Chavez seems to have given up on him. He probably figured that he had enough problems of his own. And of course, that means that their good bud Barack Obama has probably given up on him as well, since he never had a good case to make to support him in the first place, and he also has enough problems of his own. Good for the Honduran people, if not for him.
And note how the issue has fallen out of the news…
Viewing Barack Obama as an orchid:
As Natalie Angier writes in The Beauty of the Beastly, orchids are “among the most artfully deceptive” of flowers, having acquired “an extravagant repertory of disguises in color, odor, shape, and overall engineering” in order to lure their unsuspecting pollinators to do their covert bidding. Many orchids are actually “named after what their flowers resemble: spiders, butterflies, baskets, shoes, peas, and donkeys,” anything that might appeal to an emissary. “Little about orchids,” she continues, “is what it seems”; most of them “are shameless charlatans.” One in particular, the Lady’s Slipper, seems engorged with nectar, yet “not only is it utterly dry inside; it’s also a nasty trap.” Food for thought, if not for anything else.
Food for thought indeed.
The president continues to drop in popularity:
How bad has Barack Obama’s decline at the polls become? Even CBS has finally realized it. Both approval and disapproval numbers have moved sharply over the last month, and in the wrong direction, as voters have discovered that Obama hasn’t a clue about the economy and creating jobs.
There was never a single reason, to anyone with a lick of economic sense, to think that Barack Obama knew the first thing about job creation. He had no experience with it in his life up to that point, and most of his chosen mentors and associates have been Marxists and other economic ignorami. Now that he’s validating those of us who were always skeptical, the rest of the rubes are catching on as well. And even CBS, with its skewed poll, can’t deny it any more.
The deform being planned in Washington isn’t looking so inevitable.
I’m starting to wonder if, and hope that, the stimulus atrocity was the high-water mark of this administration in terms of ramming its agenda through Congress.
[Afternoon update]
Health-care plan? What health-care plan?
Even NASA seems to realize that the end is near for Ares I.
For more than a week now, engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., including some working on Ares I, have been pulled from their current duties to study creation of a smaller version of the Ares V that could carry both crew and heavy equipment.
NASA confirms that it is looking at different versions of the Ares V, though a spokeswoman played down the significance of the review.
“This is nothing new, and as a part of these ongoing … studies the program continues to look at a wide variety of options on Ares V as is standard practice in formulation,” said NASA spokeswoman Ashley Edwards in a statement.
But NASA insiders and contractors familiar with the work say that the work is far from “standard practice” and could herald the demise of the Ares I.
“They are looking at a whole new launch architecture,” said one NASA contractor familiar with the study. “Although it’s still too early to pronounce Ares I dead, it is safe to assume that members of the committees have doubts about it.”
Gee, you think?
Iowahawk for car czar.
A surtax on small business to pay for nationalizing health care:
Here’s the ugly income-tax math. First, Mr. Obama has promised to let the lower Bush tax rates expire after 2010. This would raise the top personal income tax rate to 39.6% from 35%, and the next rate to 36% from 33%. The Bush expiration would also phase out various tax deductions and exemptions, bringing the top marginal rate to as high as 41%.
Then add the Rangel Surtax of one percentage point, starting at $280,000 ($350,000 for couples), plus another percentage point at $400,000 ($500,000 for couples), rising to three points on more than $800,000 ($1 million) in 2011. But wait, there’s more. The surcharge could rise by two more percentage points in 2013 if health-care costs are larger than advertised — which is a near-certainty. Add all of this up and the top marginal tax rate would climb to 46%, which hasn’t been seen in the U.S. since the Reagan tax reform of 1986 cut the top rate to 28% from 50%.
Combined with the upcoming rise in the minimum wage, remember things like this when Democrats lie about how they’re interested in creating jobs.
In everything but thought:
A professor who confronted me declared that he was “personally offended” by my column. He railed that his political viewpoints never affected his teaching and suggested that if I wanted a faculty with Republicans I should have attended a university in the South. “If you like conservatism you can certainly attend the University of Texas and you can walk past the statue of Jefferson Davis everyday on your way to class,” he wrote in an e-mail.
I was shocked by such a comment, which seemed an attempt to link Republicans with racist orthodoxy. When I wrote back expressing my offense, he neither apologized nor clarified his remarks.
Instead, he reiterated them on the record. Was such a brazen expression of partisanship representative of the faculty as a whole? I decided to speak with him in person in the hope of finding common ground.
He was eager to chat, and after five minutes our dialogue bloomed into a lively discussion. As we hammered away at the issue, one of his colleagues with whom he shared an office grew visibly agitated. Then, while I was in mid-sentence, she exploded.
“You think you’re so [expletive] cute with your little column,” she told me. “I read your piece and all you want is attention. You’re just like Bill O’Reilly. You just want to get up on your [expletive] soapbox and have people look at you.”
From the disgust with which she attacked me, you would have thought I had advocated Nazism. She quickly grew so emotional that she had to leave the room. But before she departed, she stood over me and screamed.
This is one of the reasons that the education bubble will eventually pop. Parents aren’t going to remain willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to send their kids to Indoctrinate U.
Some thoughts from Jerry Pournelle, in response to the Derbyshire piece a few weeks ago:
Years after Apollo I had a conversation with John R. Pierce, Chief Technologist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. John said that we’d made a mistake. In Heinlein’s future history, we go to the moon in stages first developing sub-orbital capabilities, then satellites, and finally went to the Moon; and we should have done it that way this time.
At the time I get somewhat angry in my disagreement with him, but it’s pretty clear John was right. He really meant that we should have learned to build space ships, real reusable ships that could fly suborbital, then orbital, then be refueled in orbit — rather than developing a bit disintegrating totem pole that could only be used once. I think he was right, and we may have to do it all over again before we can become a space-faring nation.
This will be one of the themes of my upcoming piece at The New Atlantis.
[Monday afternoon update]
Paul Dietz notes in comments that the Pournelle response was actually to a different Derbyshire post, that I hadn’t seen. He says that Apollo wasn’t a mere folly, but a magnificent one.
[Bumped]