Thomas James has some space-related thoughts.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
More Ayers Thoughts
The point is not that President-designate Obama is a “close friend” of the unrepentant Ayers, or that he was only eight when his patron was building bombs to kill the women of New Jersey. As Joe Biden would no doubt point out on his entertaining “This Day In History” segment, McCain was only six when Czogolsz killed President McKinley. But I doubt he’d let the guy host a fundraiser for him.
But, in the world in which Obama moves, it would seem absurd and provincial to object to partying with an “unrepentant terrorist.” The senator advanced and prospered in a milieu in which men like Ayers are not just accepted but admired for their “passionate participation”, and function as power-brokers and path-smoothers. This is a great country, and most of us (as Peter Kirsanow notes below) make it without having to kiss up to America-haters like Ayers and Wright. But not Obama.
Who is this man on course to be 44th president? Apparently, it’s not just impolite but racist to ask.
Speaking of which, Sarah Palin apparently handled the racism nonsense from CNN pretty well yesterday.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Jonah Goldberg has some more thoughts on the terrorists“passionate anti-war and civil rights movement” and the contradictions of the fascist left.
Clueless Space Commentary
Jeff Foust has a roundup.
And as I note over there in comments, the Kennedy myth persists:
“Not since John F. Kennedy, has a president truly understood the incalculable value of space…”
Not even then…
Pre-Humans
Alan Boyle has a story on the latest thinking about Lucy, with a cool artist’s rendering. And of course, no post like this is complete without the usual clueless comments by the creationists.
Hilarious
Mickey Kaus points out the foolishness of the press, in imagining that there was ever any possibliity that the media would be supporting McCain.
It’s one thing to have pro-Democratic, pro-Obama media favoritism: That’s just the way it is. Political reporters have opinions. Better blatant than latent.
It’s another to have that very favoritism used as evidence that McCain is blowing it, losing his reputation for “integrity” and his “gold plated brand.”
Yes, they only like McCain when he’s running against Republicans. The NYT endorsed him in the primary. Does anyone imagine they’ll endorse him in the general?
He also has a warning:
It might seem as if the MSM reaction against McCain’s shift to negativism has “driven the final nail into his coffin,” as Heilemann suggests. The Feiler Faster Thesis says no–given the speed with which the country now processes information, there’s plenty of time for several dramatic twists and turns, including lead changes. Obamaphiles (in the press and elsewhere) are deluding themselves, I think, if they think they can ride the economic crisis and the reaction against negativity to victory in a month. Plus Obama’s not that far ahead.
Nope.
About Time
UCLA economists have calculated how long FDR extended the Great Depression. Seven years.
Roosevelt’s role in lifting the nation out of the Great Depression has been so revered that Time magazine readers cited it in 1999 when naming him the 20th century’s second-most influential figure.
“This is exciting and valuable research,” said Robert E. Lucas Jr., the 1995 Nobel Laureate in economics, and the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. “The prevention and cure of depressions is a central mission of macroeconomics, and if we can’t understand what happened in the 1930s, how can we be sure it won’t happen again?”
…”The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. “Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”
Remember this the next time someone talks about a new “New Deal.” The myth of Roosevelt is akin with the current idiotic nonsense being promulgated by Democrats that the financial crisis was a result of “deregulation.”
[Update about 9 AM EDT]
Sebastian Mallaby has a nice corrective to the “deregulation” nonsense:
The key financiers in this game were not the mortgage lenders, the ratings agencies or the investment banks that created those now infamous mortgage securities. In different ways, these players were all peddling financial snake oil, but as Columbia University’s Charles Calomiris observes, there will always be snake-oil salesmen. Rather, the key financiers were the ones who bought the toxic mortgage products. If they hadn’t been willing to buy snake oil, nobody would have been peddling it.
Who were the purchasers? They were by no means unregulated. U.S. investment banks, regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, bought piles of toxic waste. U.S. commercial banks, regulated by several agencies, including the Fed, also devoured large quantities. European banks, which faced a different and supposedly more up-to-date supervisory scheme, turn out to have been just as rash. By contrast, lightly regulated hedge funds resisted buying toxic waste for the most part — though they are now vulnerable to the broader credit crunch because they operate with borrowed money.
If that doesn’t convince you that deregulation is the wrong scapegoat, consider this: The appetite for toxic mortgages was fueled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the super-regulated housing finance companies. Calomiris calculates that Fannie and Freddie bought more than a third of the $3 trillion in junk mortgages created during the bubble and that they did so because heavy government oversight obliged them to push money toward marginal home purchasers. There’s a vigorous argument about whether Calomiris’s number is too high. But everyone concedes that Fannie and Freddie poured fuel on the fire to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
As he points out, it’s important to understand the actual cause, because if we misdiagnose the disease, we’re likely to come up with nostrums that make it worse, just as FDR’s “brain trust” did. And that’s exactly the path we’re on with Obama. McCain may make similar mistakes, but with him, at least it’s not a sure thing.
[Mid-morning update]
Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts on the upcoming speculative bubble in regulation. I agree that we need to design the system to be much more fault tolerant.
Playing The Rubes
…more than hypocrisy is at work here. It is not just far Left, American-hating radicals he now disowns. You get the sense that he believes everyone can be played. Rashid Khalidi can believe that Obama finds no one suffers more than the Palestinians. Jews can buy that he was moved by the Holocaust from a summer camp experience. Voters in his Congressional race in 1990 can be told that there is no difference ideologically between him and 100% ADA-rated Bobby Rush, but the rest of the state in 2004 (and eventually the country) can buy that he’s a post-partisan reformer. Terrorists come to believe he shares their scorn for America, but Iowa voters hear him talk about his appreciation that only in America could his story have happened. Primary voters in Ohio are coddled with protectionist promises – and then privately scorned while he is talking to San Fransciso liberal donors.
There is no end to it — everyone gets the version of Obama that perfectly fits his own world view. It is not hypocrisy. It’s fraud. Whatever he told or shared with Ayers, Dohrn, Wright, or Pfleger counts for no more that what he told or shared with other now inconvenient groups and individuals. He’s sold the same piece of political real estate to multiple buyers for multiple, conflicting uses.
Unfortunately, so far, he’s been right, taking a page from P. T. Barnum, and the sucker production rate has increased quite a bit with the population increase over the past century. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but unfortunately, you can fool enough of them to get elected.
As If We Needed One
Radley Balko has another reason to fear an Obama/Biden presidency–increasing federalization of crime:
Since the vice-presidential pick, Obama and Biden have embraced criminal justice policies geared toward a larger federal presence in law enforcement, a trend that started in the Nixon administration and that has skewed local police priorities toward the slogan-based crime policies of Congress, like “more arrests” and “stop coddling criminals.”
Wonderful.
Space Weather
We’re going to be hit by an asteroid tonight. The angle is such that it will just be a spectacular fireball. But it’s nice that we’re finally getting to a position from which we can predict these things. The next step is to be able to prevent them, if necessary. Too bad that almost nothing that NASA is doing is contributing to that, at least with the manned spaceflight program.
Democrats Against Obama
I suspect that there are a lot more of these folks than there are Republicans against McCain. And they’ve connected the ACORN dots between Obama, the Dems in Congress and the housing meltdown.