Iowahawk has discovered the most exciting new car model to be premiered by Congressional Motors. Behold, the Pelosi:
Sporty mag-style hubcaps and an all-new aggressive wedge shape designed by CM’s Chief Stylist Ted Kennedy slices through the wind like an omnibus spending bill. It even features an airtight undercarriage to keep you and a passenger afloat up to 15 minutes — even in the choppy waters of a Cape Cod inlet. Available a rainbow of color choices to match any wardrobe, from Harvest Avocado to French Mustard.
Inside, a luxurious all-velour interior designed by Barney Frank features thoughtful appointments like in-dash condom dispenser and detachable vibrating shift knob. A special high capacity hatchback holds up to 300 aluminum cans, meaning fewer trips to the redemption center. And the standard 3 speaker Fairness ActoPhonic FM low-band sound system means you’ll never miss a segment of NPR again.
Mark Steyn has the best take yet on the supposed Palin “gaffe”:
…that’s Sarah Palin’s real stroke of genius in these difficult times for the global economy. For, in an age when the government picks which banks to nationalize and which banks to fail, and guarantees mortgages that should never have been issued, and prepares to demand that those taxpayers with responsible and affordable pension plans prop up the lavish and unsustainable pension programs of Detroit, Governor Palin has given us a great teaching moment and a perfect snapshot of what my Brit reader would recognize as pre-Thatcher “industrial policy”:
When the government decides it can “pick winners” and spare them from the realities of the market, everyone else gets bled to death.
Thank you, Sarah. It’s the first election ad of Campaign ’12.
It’s a shame we can’t do something about the turkeys at MSNBC and the Huffpo.
The decision to undertake the study reverses a major decision NASA took after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and subsequent accident investigation, that crew and cargo would be launched on separate vehicles. The Ares I, with its solid rocket booster first-stage and the new upper stage powered by the J-2X engine, was selected to orbit the Orion crew exploration vehicle.
That decision never made as much sense as everyone thought it did. It was one of the false lessons “learned” from Shuttle. And, as always, it raises the issue of what “human rating” really means. Generally, given the way the requirements often end up getting waived for NASA’s own vehicles, but not for other players, like the “Visiting Vehicle” rules for ISS, it’s simply an arbitrary barrier to entry for commercial providers.
[Monday morning update]
I should clarify that this discussion is about launch only. For in-space operations, it does make sense to separate passengers from cargo, and it probably makes sense to have robotic freighters as well, due to the long trip times and lack of need to handle emergencies with crew.
As Clark notes, this isn’t directly related to space transportation regulation, but you can see it coming:
The proposed regulation, titled the Large Aircraft Security Program, would require owners of those aircraft to obtain permission from TSA to operate their own personal aircraft every time they carry passengers. Additionally, all flight crews would be required to undergo fingerprinting and a background check, all passengers would have to be vetted against the government’s terrorist watch lists, and numerous security requirements would be imposed on airports serving these “large” aircraft. EAA adamantly opposes this regulation and urges all members to respond to TSA…
“…We thank the TSA for agreeing with the many industry group and EAA members’ requests for an extension, providing an additional two months to study and react to the proposal,” said Doug Macnair, EAA vice president of government relations. “This proposal would be an unprecedented restriction on the freedom of movement for private U.S. citizens. It would also, for the first time, require governmental review and authority before a person could operate his/her own personal transportation conveyance.
First they came after the private aircraft pilots, and I said nothing, because I wasn’t a private aircraft pilot.
Irene Klotz has an interview with the (hopefully) outgoing NASA administrator:
I would be willing to continue on as administrator under the right circumstances. The circumstances include a recognition of the fact that two successive Congresses — one Republician and one Democrat — have strongly endorsed, hugely endorsed, the path NASA is on: Finish the station, retire the shuttle, return to the moon, establish a base on the moon, look outward to the near-Earth asteroids and on to Mars. That’s the path we’re on. I think it’s the right path.
I think for 35 years since the Nixon administration we’ve been on the wrong path. It took the loss of Columbia and Admiral Gehman’s (Columbia Accident Investigation Board) report highlighting the strategic issues to get us on the right path. We’re there. I personally will not be party to taking us off that path. Someone else may wish to, but I do not.
What Dr. Griffin doesn’t understand is that, in his disastrous architecture choices, and decision to waste money developing a new unneeded launch system, it is he himself who has taken us off that path.
I also have to say that I think that this particular criticism by Keith Cowing is (as is often the case) over the top and ridiculous. It’s perfectly clear what he meant–that with all of the other problems facing the country right now, Shuttle retirement per se isn’t going to be a top priority. But it is an issue that will no doubt be dealt with by the transition team.
I really think that we should bring back literacy tests for voting. They shouldn’t have gotten rid of them because they were being used to racially discriminate–they should have just ended the racial discrimination.
[Friday evening update]
I have to say that readers of my blog, even the non-USians (or at least the ones commenting), are way ahead of the curve. Nice to know.
And here’s more on his antipathy to the Second Amendment:
After the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the D.C. handgun ban and self-defense ban were unconstitutional in 2007, Holder complained that the decision “opens the door to more people having more access to guns and putting guns on the streets.”
Holder played a key role in the gunpoint, night-time kidnapping of Elian Gonzalez. The pretext for the paramilitary invasion of the six-year-old’s home was that someone in his family might have been licensed to carry a handgun under Florida law. Although a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo showed a federal agent dressed like a soldier and pointing a machine gun at the man who was holding the terrified child, Holder claimed that Gonzalez “was not taken at the point of a gun” and that the federal agents whom Holder had sent to capture Gonzalez had acted “very sensitively.” If Mr. Holder believes that breaking down a door with a battering ram, pointing guns at children (not just Elian), and yelling “Get down, get down, we’ll shoot” is example of acting “very sensitively,” his judgment about the responsible use of firearms is not as acute as would be desirable for a cabinet officer who would be in charge of thousands and thousands of armed federal agents, many of them paramilitary agents with machine guns.
Fighting the confirmation of this man should be the Republicans’ first battle against the Obama administration. The last thing we need is the second coming of Janet “Burn Baby Burn” Reno.
An interesting piece on changes to police tactics. The traditional response was bring up the SWAT team, plan it out carefully, then go in. As the matter was better understood, this switched to whoever gets there first goes in immediately — seconds passing means people dying. To my mind, this is a powerful argument for allowing teachers to be armed. The article ends:
“The other statistic that emerged from a study of active killers is that they almost exclusively seek out “gun free” zones for their attacks.
Now why would that possibly be?
They may select schools and shopping malls because of the large number of defenseless victims and the virtual guarantee no on the scene one is armed.
As soon as they’re confronted by any armed resistance, the shooters typically turn the gun on themselves.”
Unfortunately, too many in the media and the gun-control community are too stupid to recognize it as obvious. You might think that this startling result could be the basis for a more sensible policy, but judging by the election results, I fear not. Particularly if someone like Eric Holder becomes Attorney General.
Geraghty is on the job (several posts–just keep scrolling). He’d be a disaster on guns, drugs (that one is Jacob Sullum), civil liberties, and basic integrity. And here’s Larry Tribe’s critique on his thuggish behavior and legal opportunism in the Elian Gonzales affair.
Wearing an effusively-colored tie that set off his gray suit, Mr. Dyson began his talk at the Nassau Club by encouraging the audience to interrupt him as he spoke, since, he declared, “it’s much more fun to have an argument than do a monologue.”
In the absence of audience interruptions, Mr. Dyson had an argument anyway with the scores of people (like Al Gore) who weren’t present to defend their belief in the dire consequences of global warming. (“There’s no accounting for human folly,” Mr. Dyson said when asked about Mr. Gore’s Nobel Prize.) Saying that on a recent trip he and his wife found Greenlanders to be delighted with their warmer climate and increased tourism, Mr. Dyson suggested that representing “local warming by a global average is misleading.” In his comments at both the Nassau Club and Labyrinth, he decried the use of computer modeling to make “tremendously dogmatic” predictions about worldwide trends, without acknowledging the “messy, muddy real world” and the non-climatic effects of increased carbon dioxide. “There is no substitute for widely-conducted field operations over a long time,” he told the Nassau Club audience, citing the “enormous gaps in knowledge and sparseness of observation” that characterize the work of global warming experts.
Why can’t some people get with the program? Thankfully, though, mz will be along any minute to call Professor Dyson “stupid.”