I’m back in Boca, having a busy afternoon, but Iowahawk has been busy too. He has some multicultural wisdom, and tax advice from the new Treasury secretary. Also, questioning whether the new president took the short bus to the White House.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
A Taxpayer March On Washington?
It seems like it’s getting to be time for this. The problem is that people who pay taxes are too busy working to earn the money on which to pay taxes to have time to go to Washington. Massive marches on Washington are reserved for those with no jobs, or nothing to do, or because they are on the dole of some kind, sometimes aided by federal subsidization of “community organizers” like ACORN.
That’s one of the reasons that big-government programs are a positive-feedback ratchet that are almost impossible to reverse. The programs have their own built-in constituencies, that are funded by the programs to allow them to agitate for more, while the ever-shrinking rest of us who are trying to actually earn a living get stuck with the bill. It can’t go on forever, of course, but it can go on long enough to ruin a nation.
“The Jews Of The Gathering Night”
Melanie Phillips on Jews who hate their Jewishness.
Just For The Record
I don’t want Barack Obama to succeed, and it’s not my job to make him succeed, or pledge to be his servant.
I want America to succeed. I only want him to succeed to the degree that he shares that goal. Based on his actions so far, in supporting this travesty being shoved through Congress, it doesn’t appear that he does.
Twenty-Three Years Ago
Challenger was destroyed live on television, in front of millions of schoolchildren watching the first teacher go into space. We learned many lessons from that event. Most of them are wrong.
As I noted yesterday, on the Apollo 1 anniversary, I had a piece about the tragic space anniversaries that cluster around the end of January a year ago.
Shake Those Pom Poms, Jeff
A dispatch from an alternate reality:
I know you all have seen the public discourse regarding Ares and Orion and shuttle, and understandably such discourse can temper our resolve to push forward — if we let it. But, let’s review the bidding. First, we should remind ourselves, as we saw in intimate detail at last summer’s Lunar Capability Concept Review (arguably the finest such review the team has yet executed), that the Ares I/Ares V/Orion/Altair transportation system is highly integrated and keenly designed to open the lunar frontier to us in the years to come. Our driving requirements of going anywhere on the Moon, staying twice as long as Apollo in a sortie mode, sending twice as many crew members, and enabling their return at any time, must remain at the forefront of any consideration to alter the nation’s exploration launch architecture. I assure each of you that we are doing all we can to communicate this key aspect of our baseline plan — it is about much more than launching Orion to LEO (Low Earth Orbit).
And where did those (trivial) requirements come from?
We don’t know, because the agency continues to refuse to show its work.
But it’s pretty pathetic that forty years after Apollo, it thinks it the height of ambition to spend tens of billions of dollars on a system that, even in the unlikely event that it works as currently designed, within budget and schedule, will only do twice the number of crew for twice the duration for billions of dollars per flight. Such a paltry goal simply isn’t worth the money, even if we ignore all the design and management issues. If NASA doesn’t want to get serious about space, then it should stop wasting the taxpayers’ money, and let someone else have it who is.
“Screw-The-Taxpayer Plan”
My first attempt to come up with an accurate name for the currently misnamed “Stimulus Plan.” The Republicans can’t allow this false euphemism to continue if they want to lead the charge against it. Another one: “Pay-Off-Democrat-Constituencies Plan.”
[Tuesday afternoon update]
Michelle Malkin has the best name yet. She calls it the Generational Theft Act.
[Bumped]
[Update a few minutes later]
Jim Manzi has another accurate moniker for it: The European Socialist Welfare State Bill.
Man Bites Dog
“Gaza is Hamas’ fault.” Not an unusual sentiment (though not usual enough), but scrape your jaw off the floor when you hear that it was said by an EU official. The usual suspects aren’t pleased, of course:
A Hamas official, Mushir al-Masri, was quoted by Reuters as saying his group was “shocked” at Michel’s comments. He lambasted the official for “giving cover to massacres and terrorism committed by the Zionist enemy against the Palestinian people… Palestinian resistance is as legitimate as the resistance of European countries that fought against foreign occupiers.”
Well, I have to admit that I share their shock. But not their dismay. I guess their mendacious game isn’t working as well as it used to.
[Evening update]
As long as they’re having a fit of sanity, the EU might want to consider the fungibility of money, and whether or not they’re fueling violence with foreign aid to the so-called Palestinians.
Survey The Upcoming Disaster
The proposed “Stimulus” Package is on line now.
As Glenn Reynolds says, it’s basically a massive transfer of wealth to the politically connected from the politically unconnected.
[Update a few minutes later]
Robert Samuelson has some gloomy thoughts:
in practice, the stimulus could disappoint. Parts of the House package look like a giant political slush fund, with money sprinkled to dozens of programs. There’s $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, $200 million for the Teacher Incentive Fund and $15.6 billion for increased Pell Grants to college students. Some of these proposals, whatever their other merits, won’t produce many new jobs.
Another problem: Construction spending — for schools, clinics, roads — may start so slowly that there will be little immediate economic boost. The Congressional Budget Office examined $356 billion in spending proposals and concluded that only 7 percent would be spent in 2009 and 31 percent in 2010.
Assume, however, that the stimulus is a smashing success. It cushions the recession. Unemployment (now: 7.2 percent) stops rising at, say, 8 percent instead of 10 percent. Still, a temporary stimulus can’t fuel a permanent recovery. That requires a strong financial system to supply an expanding economy’s credit needs. How we get that isn’t clear.
I hope it doesn’t take another war to get us out of this.
A Herd, Not A Pack
How long are we going to tolerate security theater, and behave like the sheep that the government wants us to be?