But I agree with Instapundit that it’s a good one:
Obama is humorless, and full of himself. That would make him a great target for satire, except that his followers take the position that any mockery or criticism is racist. The prospect of four years of that sort of thing is the best reason I can think of not to vote for him.
I don’t think that the Obama worshipers have any sense of what a turn-off he is to the rest of us.
But I agree with Instapundit that it’s a good one:
Obama is humorless, and full of himself. That would make him a great target for satire, except that his followers take the position that any mockery or criticism is racist. The prospect of four years of that sort of thing is the best reason I can think of not to vote for him.
I don’t think that the Obama worshipers have any sense of what a turn-off he is to the rest of us.
I know what you’re saying — “who invited the fat chick to the Twister party?” Certainly, all of us (with the possible exception of Randy) wish she wasn’t here. But it’s important to remember that fat chicks are often an important source of party supplies, and we must take the good with the bad. In the same way, Fannie Mae supplies the critical financial weed and beer to keep our national economic party going.
The numbers are complex, but let me boil it down for the economic layperson. Fannie Mae is a government company type thing that has a large pile of money, which I will call “A”. The first thing it does is create $20 million bonuses for high performance executives like Franklin Raines, James Johnson and Jamie Gorelick, which I will call “B.” Next, it allocates an amount “C” to lobbyists to make sure important Congressmen always get a thoughtful holiday card from Fannie Mae. After subtracting B and C from A, they are left with D, which is lent to homebuyers. These homebuyers then pay back the amount E, which, when subtracted from D, leaves F, the amount Congress has to come up with. In order to keep this important financial system humming along at peak efficiency, it is necessary that you, the taxpayer, are F’ed.
RTWT, and save the Dave!
I would love an Obama presidency with a Republican-controlled Congress.
Unfortunately, that’s not a choice realistically on offer. The best we’ll probably be able to do, absent some political earthquake, is a McCain in the White House, with Dems continuing to misrule the Hill. That’s not a good thing, but it’s better than the donkeys running the whole show (despite the fact that McCain isn’t much of a Republican, either).
On the other hand, a Democrat monopoly on power would have salutary effects on the elections in 2010. But I fear the SCOTUS replacements that would almost certainly ensue in the interim, which are much harder to undo. That’s really the bottom line to want to keep Obama out of the White House.
Life is rough in Michelle Obama’s America, in which all six hundred bucks buys is a pair of ear rings. As for the fresh fruit, she can’t afford a refrigerator for the mansion?
Mike Griffin again disquisites on the Yellow Peril.
Well, actually he doesn’t. Here’s all he says (unless there’s some elaboration to which the BBC is privy, but we are not):
Speaking to the BBC News website during a visit to London, Dr Griffin said: “Certainly it is possible that if China wants to put people on the Moon, and if it wishes to do so before the United States, it certainly can. As a matter of technical capability, it absolutely can.”
What does that mean? If he means that if China made it as much of a priority as we did during Apollo, and if we continue on our own disastrous plans, that they could reverse engineer what we did and put some Taikonauts on the moon before NASA lands astronauts, sure.
But how likely is that? And even if it happened, what’s the big deal? We were first on the moon, they were second. Big whoop. There’s no way on their current technological trajectory to do it in any sustainable way, and even if they did, there’s nothing they could realistically do there that would constitute a threat to us, either in terms of national security, or our own ability to do things there on our own pace.
My take?
It is extremely unlikely–the Chinese are not fools. They know how much it will cost to do a manned lunar mission, and it’s not a high priority, particularly when their economy is potentially a house of cards (something not made better by the current energy prices, which will result in either a curtailing of their fuel subsidies, or a decline in economic growth, or both). If and when they are serious about going to the moon, it will be quite obvious, and we’ll have plenty of time to do something about it if we think that it’s actually a problem.
But Mike apparently thinks that he’ll have a better chance of getting increased funding for Apollo on Steroids if he can frighten uninformed people about the Chinese taking over the moon.
Hey, he said he was about change!
As Glenn notes, this could be a hint of how an Obama administration would behave.
You know, we lowly, benighted citizens are always told that ignorance of the law is no excuse. Well, considering the size of the federal code, and that of all the states in which we live, and occasionally move to, often on short notice, how does one justify this?
It’s not just about the ability for citizens to take pictures of police officers in public places (though that’s important too; see: King, Rodney). It’s about the officer’s behavior — specifically his attempt to bully this man into compliance with an illegal demand, using his power as an officer of the law in the service of his personal pique, at the expense of the citizenry that he is supposed to “serve and protect.” It is absolutely, totally and completely unacceptable for police officers to use the authority conferred by their badges to violate people’s rights in this manner, and society needs to send that message loud and clear.
Should ignorance of the law be an excuse for this man? Call me crazy, but it seems to me that those enforcing the law should be much more responsible for knowing it than those who are being oppressed by ignorance of it.
Orion, already overweight, just got heavier:
“Preliminary estimates show that if this 30-40% [turbulence] heating augmentation heating is applied to the aerothermodynamic database the heat shield mass may increase up to 20%,” says an internal NASA report obtained by Flightglobal.
I wonder if, instead of using an ablator, a tile system would be lighter? It would be more maintenance intensive (particularly with water landings), but it wouldn’t be as bad as the Shuttle, because many of the tiles would be symmetrical and more mass producible. We were never really allowed to do this trade in Phase B at Northrop Grumman–NASA just told us they were going to supply the TPS.
I’m actually quite surprised at this–I would have thought that they’d have modeling an ablative shield down to a science by now. Apollo was way overdesigned, because they didn’t have any experience or good analytical tools to indicate how much shielding they needed. If you look at the heat shield on an Apollo capsule, you can see that it is just slightly charred, with most of it unburned; it could have done a couple more missions without refurbishment or replacement. But based on that experience, we should have been able to predict the optimal weight of an ablator designed to come back from the moon pretty well, and years ago. How did this come up just before PDR?
Anyway, now they have unexpected weight growth in the program at the same time that they have weight and performance problems with the Ares 1. And apparently there are budget problems at LM, as well, if this report is true:
The ORION contractor is overrunning. The minions are out of money. Where can 20-30% more funds be dredged up to cover this miscarriage? You guessed it…the little man.
The minions have let the contractor off the hook for meeting its small business obligations this year. The same obligations that were bid as part of the winning proposal, ostensibly offering a better package than the opposing team, are now null and void. As a result, some of those little companies will start disappearing, lacking jobs and income.
They seem to be achieving the trifecta–failing on performance, schedule and budget. It’s a program manager’s nightmare.
[Update a few minutes later]
Some further thoughts over at Gravity Loss:
What will the payload landed on the moon be? What propellants are used? What is the Altair’s or Orion’s mass? And work back from there to TLI mass and ultimately to launch from Earth, all with generous margins. And it has seemed that a certain cycle has formed. First a solution on Ares I is based on some logic linking it to Shuttle hardware, infrastructure or Ares V with common elements, which should save a lot of money and time and keep the workforce etc etc. Somewhat later, rumors about a severe performance shortfall on either launcher start circulating. Then after a while NASA announces a new configuration where the commonality is disrupted. And again forward we go.
Unfortunately, the concepts seemed to be driven more by politics than engineering. That was often the case in Apollo, too. The Manned Spaceflight Center could have remained at Langley, but there were political reasons to move it to Texas. Marshall didn’t have to be in Huntsville–they could have moved the rocket team at Redstone to somewhere else (e.g., the Cape, whose location really was driven by geography and not politics). But there were two differences in Apollo. It had essentially unlimited budget, and its success was politically important. Neither applies to the VSE, yet NASA, by Mike Griffin’s own admission when he announced the architecture, not only chose to do Apollo over again, but to do it “on steroids.”
Jennifer Rubin makes a pretty good point:
Obama claims that experience is not as important as “judgment” or “change.” By manufacturing or existing accomplishments, however, he suggests that he does not buy his own pitch.
Rather, his repeated attempts to bolster his resume indicate that he may be nervous about his non-existent record of achievement. Not trusting that voters will buy his disparagement of experience, Obama is now resorting to a common, but risking tactic of under-qualified job-seekers: fudge the resume.
Resume fraud carries grave risks. If the employer finds out you are lying, you are unlikely to get the job, even if the competition is weak. And for Obama, who is already belaboring under an avalanche of tough press about his many policy flip-flops, he hardly needs another storyline which sheds doubt on his credibility and character.
I think that it’s things like this that are the reason the polls now seem to be even, even with the media love affair continuing.
[Update a while later]
Victor Davis Hanson lists some of Senator Obama’s other problems:
Obama has a poor grasp of history, geography, American culture, and common sense — whether the number or location of states in the Union, basic facts about WWII or where Arabic is spoken, or his sociological take on Pennsylvania, etc. His advisors realize this, and are playing 4th-quarter defense by keeping him out of ex tempore, non tele-prompted hope and change venues, where his shallowness can manifest itself in astonishing ways.
I was just listening to NPR in the car, and Terry Gross was interviewing Ryan Lizza on Fresh Air. He just had a long piece in the New Yorker about Obama’s Chicago history. He was talking about the Rezko housing project problems, and he said that Obama didn’t seem to be involved in the corruption, that the worst you could say about him was that exercised bad judgment.
Well, that in itself is saying something pretty bad, given that his claim to the presidency is that, while he may not have as much experience as his opponents, he has good judgment. But was his Rezko involvement good judgment? Was his attending a bigoted church for twenty years good judgment? Was it good judgment to pre-declare the surge a failure before it even began? So now it’s hard to make a case for either his experience or his judgment.
I know that the Senator believes that to know him is to love him, but I think he may find out that as the campaign actually engages after the conventions, the more people learn about him, the less inclined they’ll be to make him the next commander-in-chief.