Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, Space

Half A Century Of NASA

3 Comments

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.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

No Fascism Here

51 Comments

Nothing to see at all. Move along, move along.

As Jonah says:

All I need to know about your politics is whether you find this creepy or not.

Get out the crayolas and color me creeped out.

[Update mid afternoon]

Die Obamajugend Singt.

Roger Simon (who knows his fascists) has more thoughts.

[Update a few minutes later]

Some great comments at the Hit’n’Run link.:

[Olympics flashback]

The worst part is that the original singers were all replaced by much cuter kids.

[/Olympics flashback]

[Update about 3:15 PM EDT]

Exurban League has more, as does Confederate Yankee. It turns out to be astroturf:

Here’s a partial list of those who helped produce this “grassroots” effort:

  • Jeff Zucker — American television executive, and President & CEO of NBC Universal.
  • Post-producer (former choreographer?) Holly Shiffer.
  • Motion picture camera operator/steadicam specialist Peter Rosenfeld (appropriately enough, worked in “Yes Man,” a movie about ” a guy challenges himself to say ‘yes’ to everything for an entire year.”
  • Darin Moran, another motion picture industry professional, who just finished filming — how appropriate — Land of the Lost.
  • Andy Blumenthal, Hollywood film editor.

Jeff Zucker. This generation’s Leni Riefenstahl. Except without the talent.

Political Commentary

It Must Have Been A Real Emergency

13 Comments

As I noted yesterday, Speaker Pelosi’s partisan lies were a clear sign to members on both sides of the aisle that she didn’t take this crisis seriously. Or, to be fair, the alternative explanation: that she is an abject moron (a proposition for which abundant evidence is available from over the years). Now here is more evidence of at least the former notion:

…considering that only a dozen votes needed to switch in order to provide a different outcome, and 95 Democrats in the House voted against it, critics are now wondering why couldn’t House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., have assured a different outcome considering how important she said its passage was?

Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., told me yesterday that he felt no pressure at all to vote for the bill.

Some leader.

In other words, it had nothing to do with saving the financial markets. It was for raw partisan advantage. The tragic and infuriating thing is that, even though Congress has an even lower rating than George Bush (and if it’s possible for an approval rating to go negative, it probably did so after yesterday’s clown show), many of these creatures will probably be reelected, due both to gerrymandered districts, and the unfortunate psychological notion that people hate Congress, but unaccountably think that their own Congressperson is great.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

What Went Wrong

8 Comments

Tom Sowell explains, as only he can:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac do not deserve to be bailed out, but neither do workers, families and businesses deserve to be put through the economic wringer by a collapse of credit markets, such as occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Neither do the voters deserve to be deceived on the eve of an election by the idea this is a failure of free markets that should be replaced by political micro-managing.

Nothing about this makes me more angry than the continued lies by the collectivists that this was a failure of the free market.

Humor, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Please, Get Well

22 Comments

And live a thousand years.

Only P.J. O’Rourke could write an hilarious column about his cancer diagnosis:

Why can’t death — if we must have it — be always glorious, as in “The Iliad”? Of course death continues to be so, sometimes, with heroes in Fallouja and Kandahar. But nowadays, death more often comes drooling on the toilet seat in the nursing home, or bleeding under the crushed roof of a teen-driven SUV, or breathless in a deluxe hotel suite filled with empty drug bottles and a minor public figure whose celebrity expiration date has passed.

I have, of all the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid. What color bracelet does one wear for that? And where does one wear it? And what slogan is apropos? Perhaps that slogan can be sewn in needlepoint around the ruffle on a cover for my embarrassing little doughnut buttocks pillow.

Furthermore, I am a logical, sensible, pragmatic Republican, and my diagnosis came just weeks after Teddy Kennedy’s. That he should have cancer of the brain, and I should have cancer of the ass … well, I’ll say a rosary for him and hope he has a laugh at me. After all, what would I do, ask God for a more dignified cancer? Pancreatic? Liver? Lung?

I don’t believe in God, but it he’s there, please bless him.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The “Obama Effect”

7 Comments

I think that this isn’t going to be an isolated case:

My husband’s business is a canary in the coalmine. When tax policies are favorable to business, he hires more guys, buys more goods, etc. When he is taxed more heavily, he fires people, doesn’t buy anything new, etc. Well, duh. So, at the mere thought of a President Obama, he has paid off his debt, canceled new spending, and jotted a list of whom to “let go.”

The first of the guys will get the news tomorrow. And these are not minimum-wage earners. These are “rich” guys, making between $200,000 and $250,000 a year.

My husband will make sure that we’re okay, money-wise, but he won’t give himself a paycheck that will just be sent to Washington. He’ll make sure that he’s not in “rich guy” tax territory. So, he will not spend his money, not show a profit, and scale his workforce down to the bare minimum.

Multiply this scenario across the country and you’ll see the Obama effect: unemployment, recession, etc. No business owner will vote for this man, but many a “middle-class worker” will vote himself out of a job. Sad the Republican can’t articulate this.

Unfortunately, the Republicans nominated the wrong candidate for that. Maybe the vice-presidential nominee can.