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.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
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.
That Many?
Rasmussen says that a quarter of the public thinks that lawmakers know what they’re doing in an economic crisis. He says it is “only” that much, but it seems way too high for my comfort. What are they, idiots?
No Fascism Here
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]
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.
Connecting The Dots
A long, detailed piece on Barack Obama, his associations, and the long-term plans to radicalize the nation through manufactured crises. And it’s a story that we continue not to hear from the press, as they have reporters up in Alaska going through the Palin family trash cans.
Hot Kinky IMacs
Barack’s teleprompter is very demanding
It Must Have Been A Real Emergency
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.
What Went Wrong
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.