Is COTS being killed? If so, by whom? It’s coming out of the House, so it doesn’t have Shelby’s fingerprints on it.
I was told on good authority years ago that COTS was surviving Griffin’s NASA because of strong White House support. Well, that was a different president. We’ll see what this one does.
It’s not just Republicans and “the right.”
My piece at PJM is up now. It got delayed because the story is moving so fast I had to do a bunch of updates this morning after writing it last night.
…is on the web now.
You’d almost think that Jeremiah Wright was the guy who shot up the Holocaust Museum. I’ll have some more thoughts on leftist/media stereotyping at PJM later this morning.
[Update late morning]
“Socialism represents the future of the west.”
So sayeth the “right wing” Jew hater.
[Bumped]
[Update after lunch]
It just keeps getting better. The guy may have been targetting that well-known bastion of leftist politics, The Weekly Standard. And of course, none of us should be shocked to learn that he was a journalism major…
Palau is going to take the Gitmo Uighurs off our hands for not much more than ten million dollars each.
This is idiotic.
[Thursday morning update]
…the plan is, apparently, to take Islamists who are driven into violent rages by the sight of a woman with bare arms and let them go in a country full of beaches where “natives often go topless.”
The country’s in the very best of hands.
[Bumped]
Thoughts from Don Surber:
From left, the women are Katharine Harris, Carrie Prejean, Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, and Michele Bachmann.
These five women are are not the only ones that American liberals ridicule without fear. They are like little boys who cannot handle a strong woman. These women dare challenge them intellectually, and so we get crude counterattacks.
So-called feminists stand on the sidelines like so many Silda Spitzers or Elizabeth Edwardses or Hillary Clintons, standing by their menfolk while the boys treat women like dirt. Heck, Mrs. Edwards even served as her husband’s attack dog against any critic — even as she knew he was sleeping with his mistress of many years.
It’s kind of ironic, because I recall back in the nineties that these same people stupidly told us that we didn’t like Hillary Clinton because we were “threatened” by a “strong woman” (hilariously ignoring our admiration of Jeanne Kirkpatrick and “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher).
He gets this wrong, though:
Letterman will get away with it because liberal misogyny is OK in America. It has the Seal of Approval of the National Organization For Women.
It’s not “liberal” misogyny. These people aren’t liberals, and it’s time we stopped allowing them to get away with slandering true liberals by calling themselves that.
FAQ advice from Jay Nordlinger, on Che, what classical music to listen to, and how to be a journalist. A sample:
I wrote to a Latin America scholar — a superb one — and he said the following: “At one time, I was collecting stuff about Guevara to write a piece of my own, but the subject is so nauseating . . . as if I had to write an article explaining why the Nazis were bad.” Yet such articles are necessary: because the myth-making about Che is strong and mesmerizing. My scholar friend continued, “Are you aware of the fact that there are busts and statues of Che Guevara not just in Central Park but in Vienna and other European capitals?”
Yes, but those busts and statues can be taken down, mentally — with truthful accounts and assessments. With fantasy-puncturing. There is plenty available, for those who wish to see (to see beyond the T-shirt, that is).
My own advice: visit Che-Mart.
He also has an awesome set of classical recommendations, if you’ve never been into it that much.
I don’t think Obama realizes — or, more frighteningly, perhaps he doesn’t care — what this spending is going to do to the economy. After all, the free market is just a rival power center. As Tim Noah says: ‘On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.”
I’ll have more thoughts on this Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy tomorrow at PJM.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Glenn’s post was motivated by Megan McArdle’s thoughts on deficits, and who to blame for them:
The problem with the budget deficit is not any particular program, or even any particular tax cuts. It is not that George Bush or Obama is a bad person who does bad things. The problem with the budget deficit is that, unlike the deficits George Bush ran, the deficits projected under Obama (and beyond) are actually large enough to potentially precipitate a fiscal crisis. If our interest rates suddenly spiked up, perhaps because lenders were worried about the size of our budget deficits, we’d find ourselves in the kind of nasty fiscal jam that regularly plagues third-world countries. The difference is, no one has enough money to bail us out.
Obama is the one who will have to prevent this. Yet instead of plans, we’re getting fairy numbers from the OMB. That’s worrying, and it’s sure not George W. Bush’s fault. His OMB liked to inflate the deficit projections, so that they could take credit for a mostly imaginary reduction.
It’s almost like he wants to wreck the economy.
One of Jonah Goldberg’s readers nails it, I think:
Political thought can be described as a straight line with communism occupying the far left position, fascism the far right.
While I’m in agreement with a lot of its positions I’m not a socialist. For instance, I think some income inequality is probably necessary. And while there are parts of communism that I agree with, there are also parts that I have significant misgivings about, like the relative lack of press freedom and free speech.
There is almost nothing I find appealing or I’m in agreement with when it comes to conservatism.
My own views are pretty centrist. I may lean a little to the left but there isn’t anything extreme about my politics, and besides most of the people I know have similar opinions so I must be pretty solidly in the center.Conclusion:
If I’m in the center, and can find more common ground with communism than conservatism then conservatism must be pretty far to the right; if not exactly fascist very much in the same neighborhood.
Note the false premises that lead to the conclusion, starting with the very first one (which has at least two — the notion that politics is expressible on a single-dimensional axis, and that fascism is the opposite of communisim on such an axis). Another is that such views are “centrist” (a term that again implies that there is a single line to be in the “center” of).
But as Jonah says, their problem is that they don’t understand their own intellectual history, and most of them think that “progressivism” and “liberalism” (neither of which term really applies to their belief system) started in the sixties, when they think about it at all.