That was the essence of an inadvertently hilarious (anonymous, natch) comment about Obama in this post.
To me, that’s like Helen Thomas saying “don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Unsustainable
Crude has fallen below $90/barrel. That’s from a peak of almost a hundred fifty.
Of course, this will be no surprise to regular readers.
[Afternoon update]
Apropo some of the comments, here’s a promising new technology for getting oil from shale and tar sands. I don’t see a price per barrel, though.
No Free Marketeer
That’s what John McCain is. One of the reasons it’s hard to get enthused about him. I suspect that Palin might be a little better.
[Update a while later]
Both presidential candidates are completely economically incoherent.
No surprise, since they’re both economic ignorami. Though in Obama’s case it’s worse, because he thinks that he understands economics, and much of what he knows for damned sure is wrong.
Compare And Contrast
This is the Beltway/MSM definition of a “compromise”: giving the Dems everything they want.
I hope that John McCain (or even Sarah Palin) urge Bush to veto the sham energy bill, and explain why.
Can We All At Least Agree?
That Nancy Pelosi is an ignorant, arrogant moron?
She’s going to let the anchor that is Charlie Rangell drag her party to defeat this fall, and she’ll lose her job.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Why Obama Will Lose Pennsylvania
Ads like this.
There are actually a lot of reasons. The only thing that could save him will be ACORN vote fraud in Philly. And that will depend on who Ed Rendell really wants to win. He is a Hillary! supporter, after all…
A New McCain Demographic
Gays for Palin? Why not? As the article notes, Alaska is a pretty libertarian, live-and-let-live place. I wonder if a lot of lesbians think that she’s hot?
And of course, this goes against the hysterical stereotype of her in the minds of the left as an extreme “right-wing” social conservative.
We’re Unworthy
Donna Brazile says that if The One doesn’t win, it will be because we didn’t deserve him:
“He has had some moments where he seems unsure of his own voice,” Brazile said, “but I still think he can pull this off.”
And if he doesn’t?
“If he doesn’t, then Obama didn’t lose,” she said. “The country just wasn’t ready.”
Well, she’s right, in a way. And we should be thankful that we haven’t deteriorated as a nation to the point at which we were.
I’d put it a little differently, though. It won’t be Obama losing so much as the nation winning.
More On The Space Civil War
It’s not just between Mike Griffin and OMB (and the White House?). Now (not that it’s anything new) there is a lot of infighting between JSC and Marshall over Orion and Ares:
Design issues for any new vehicle are to be expected, and correctly represented by the often-used comment of ‘if there weren’t problems, we wouldn’t need engineers.’ However, Orion’s short life on the drawing board has been an unhappy childhood.
The vast majority of Orion’s design changes have been driven by Ares I’s shortcomings – via performance and mass issues – to ably inject the vehicle into orbit. The fact that the Ares I now has several thousand pounds of reserve mass properties negates the suffering it has brought on the vehicle it is designed to serve.
Those penalties Orion had to endure could be seen at the very start of its design process, when the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) reduced in size by 0.5 meters in diameter, soon followed by Orion having its Service Module stripped down in size and mass by around 50 percent.
‘Mass savings’ would become one of the most repeated terms surrounding the Orion project.
One of the problems that the program had (like many) were caused by the intrinsic concept of the Shaft itself. If you’re designing an all-new rocket, it is a “rubber” vehicle in that one can size stages to whatever is necessary to optimize it. But in their determination to use an SRB as a first stage, they put an artificial constraint on vehicle performance. When it was discovered that the four-segment motor wouldn’t work, they went to a different upper stage engine. When this didn’t work, they went to five segments (which meant that it was a whole new engine).
During Apollo, von Braun took requirements from the people designing the mission hardware, and then added a huge margin to it (fifty percent, IIRC), because he didn’t believe them. As it turned out, they ended up needing almost all of the vehicle performance to get to the moon.
This program never had anything like that kind of margin, and now, at PDR 0.5, it’s already almost gone. So now they’re rolling the requirements back on to the Orion, demanding that the payload make up for performance loss by cutting weight, while also (probably, next year) requiring that it add systems to mitigate the fact that the vehicle is going to shake them like a Sherwin Williams machine. This will result in further loss of margin, redundancy and safety.
This is not a typical development path of a successful program. It is emblematic of one about to augur in.
There Are Lies
…damned lies, and campaign hyperbole:
…we’ve all heard the self-serving myth that pits helpless, meek, high-minded, issue-oriented Democrats against mendacious and mean Republicans, who not only detest America — especially children and small vulnerable creatures — but will lie and cheat to keep all oppressed.
The facts betray a more equitable story. And it starts with Sarah Palin’s assertion that she said “thanks, but no thanks” to the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” and opposed earmarks. This is an elastic political truth.
Technically, she did stop the project after initially supporting it. She has taken earmarks — even lobbied for them while mayor of Wasilla. As governor, though, Palin also vetoed over 300 wasteful projects and made an attempt to reform the process. Her record on earmarks is mixed, but by any measure, it’s far superior to either Democratic candidate.
Moreover, if this Palin claim can be classified as an untruth, Obama can be called a “liar” just as easily.
Take, if you will, the foundational assertion of Obama’s entire campaign that he is the candidate of post-partisan change. Obama, meanwhile, voted with fellow Democrats 96 percent of the time in Washington. And the bipartisan achievement he most often cites, an ethics reform bill, was passed by unanimous consent in the Senate.
Unanimous: “. . . being in complete harmony or accord.”
So, then, “Unity” should be referred to as a poetic truth.
And when much of the media acts as if it is personally offended by a questionable McCain ad accusing Obama of voting for a bill that would have provided sex education to kindergartners, you feel the pain. It was, indeed, a massive stretch.
It reminds me of the Obama ad that accuses McCain of having “voted to cut education funding” and “proposed” the abolishment of the Department of Education despite neither being true. Not much anger at that one. Just a lot of talk about the media’s responsibility to keep candidates honest. And absolutely, journalists have a responsibility to put every single candidate through the wringer.
Every candidate.
Something for the latest desperate anonymous moron that continues to drive by in comments with its pathetic shrieks of “Liar, liar!” to keep in mind.