Illegal fundraising by the Obama campaign? Who would have thought?
I wonder how much of that foreign money comes from oil wealth.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Mrs. Grievance
I guess that being overambitious, and impatient with your current position isn’t confined to Barack Obama. He and Michelle were made for each other:
At big firms, much of the work that falls to young associates involves detail and tedium. There were all sorts of arcane but important rules about what could and could not be said or done in product advertisements, and in the marketing group, all the associates, not just the new ones, reviewed scripts for TV commercials to make sure they conformed. As far as associate work goes, it could have been worse — “Advertising is a little sexier than spending a full year reading depositions in an antitrust law suit or reviewing documents for a big merger,” says White — but it was monotonous and relatively low-level.
Too monotonous for Michelle, who, White says, complained that the work he gave her was unsatisfactory. He says he gave her the Coors beer ads, which he considered one of the more glamorous assignments they had. Even then, he says, “she at one point went over my head and complained [to human resources] that I wasn’t giving her enough interesting stuff, and the person came down to my office and said, ‘Basically she’s complaining that she’s being treated like she’s a second-year associate,’ and we agreed that she was a second-year associate. I had eight or nine other associates, and I couldn’t start treating one of them a lot better.”
White says he talked to Michelle about her expectations, but the problem could not be resolved because the work was what it was. He is not sure any work he had would have satisfied her. “I couldn’t give her something that would meet her sense of ambition to change the world.”
She and Barack are going to make us work. Arbeit macht frei.
Even Deeper In The Tank
The New York Times continues to act as the propaganda arm of the Obama campaign:
Steve Diamond has made a powerful case that, whoever first suggested Obama’s name, Ayers must surely have had a major role in his final selection. Diamond has now revealed that the Times consulted him extensively for this article and has seen his important documentary evidence. Yet we get no inkling in the piece of Diamond’s key points, or the documents that back it up. (I’ve made a similar argument myself, based largely on my viewing of many of the same documents presented by Diamond.) How can an article that gives only one side of the story be fair? Instead of offering both sides of the argument and letting readers decide, the Times simply spoon-feeds its readers the Obama camp line.
The Times also ignores the fact that I’ve published a detailed statement from the Obama camp on the relationship between Ayers and Obama at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. (See “Obama’s Challenge.”) Maybe that’s because attention to that statement would force them to acknowledge and report on my detailed reply.
Yup. Wouldn’t fit the narrative.
[Mid afternoon update]
Instapundit has a roundup of links discussing this.
The Chinese Space Program Has Come A Long Way
Heh.
[From Bruce Webster, via email]
Presidential Stock Market Response to VP Debate
Obama is still trading as a 2-1 favorite on Intrade after the debate and has even moved up a point since yesterday’s close to 66 cents (for a security that pays one dollar if he wins) as of press time. But Palin has earned her stripes. The “Palin to be withdrawn from the ticket” security has dropped from ten cents yesterday to 4 which is a penny less than “Biden to be withdrawn from the ticket”. My opinion? Palin’s the best of the four and should have been thrown to the media wolves so they could patronize her and have it backfire, so she could continue framing the debate, and so she could dominate the late-night talk shows and comedy shows. It’s not too late for her to make a circuit of the late night TV shows. Parody is a high form of praise. CNN reported that she did less than five interviews to Biden’s 100+. I don’t see McCain changing that now. I hope she runs in 2012 and if necessary 2016.
Missed Opportunity
I’m watching the debate, but not attempting to live blog it. But I have to say that while Palin is doing fine in general, she missed a huge opportunity. When Biden kept going on about how he and The One were going to “end” the war, she should have said, “Senator, you, Senator Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid…you all keep talking about ending the war. But Americans don’t want to just end a war. They want to win the war. Why can you not let the word “victory” pass your lips when it comes America and the Iraq war?”
[Update a few minutes later]
Well, she keeps saying “win the war” and he keeps saying “end the war,” so maybe the point will come across subtly, but it would have been a big blow had she pointed it out.
I have to say that Biden has been surprisingly gaffe free. He’s told lots of whoppers, but no big gaffes.
Sarah Biden’s Gaffes
McCain should have dropped this idiot from the ticket weeks ago.
By the way, sorry for the light live blogging of the workshop, but I had some side meetings this afternoon. More in the morning.
It Can’t Be A Real Crisis
The latest version of the bailout bill has new earmarks in it. As Mark Steyn explains:
I suppose sophisticated insiders would assure me that regrettably there’s no possibility of earmark reform; this is just the price of doing business in Washington. But that’s why non-sophisticated non-insiders hold the political class in contempt. The same blowhards who run for office on a platform of lowering ocean levels and healing the planet then turn around and insist they’re unable to do anything about the one small area of human endeavor for which they bear sole responsibility.
If this is an emergency, hold the wool research. If it’s an emergency that’s got time for wool research, let’s chew it over for another few months.
And they wonder why their approval rating is even lower than Bush’s?
Half A Century Of NASA
I have some fiftieth birthday thoughts over at Pajamas Media.
[Early afternoon update]
Well, this is annoying. A screwed-up history from Time magazine:
NASA was actually founded in 1915 and at the time was known as the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics — or NACA. Its job was to keep the nation abreast of the latest developments in the then-nascent technology of powered flight. NACA was established with good intentions but operated mostly as a bureaucratic backwater, a government body that couldn’t hope to keep up with a rapidly evolving private industry. In 1957, however, all that changed. That was the year the U.S.S.R. launched Sputnik, the first Earth satellite — and in the process, scared the daylights out of the U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower acted quickly, dusting off NACA and renaming it NASA — for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. On October 1, 1958, the new agency officially went into business.
No, NASA was not NACA, or “founded in 1915.” NACA was a completely different kind of animal. It had nothing to do with space, and it was not an operational organization. It was a basic research outfit, and viewed the aviation industry as its customer, providing data and resources that allowed them to build better airplanes.
Sadly, once it was absorbed into the borg of the new space and aeronautics agency fifty years ago, it lost that focus, and the new entity largely saw itself as the customer, and the space industry as its contractors. Many argue that we need to return to a NACA philosophy for space, but it’s extremely misleading and confusing to state that NASA is NACA, and that its history goes back over ninety years. In fact, it is false.
He also doesn’t really explain why JSC is in Houston. Yes, Johnson was happy to have the mission control center in Texas, but Texas is a big state, and there are no particular geographical requirements for mission control (unlike, e.g., a launch site). It could as easily have been in Dallas or elsewhere. It was established in Houston because Rice University donated a lot of land for it.
Getting The UN Involved
Plans to set up international efforts to deal with the asteroid threat continue.