Category Archives: Political Commentary

The Dem’s Dilemma

A concise description of it, over at Ann Althouse’ site (see second comment):

Obama would not be getting the super delegates at this stage if he were not african american.

Hillary has the popular vote. Moreover, if primaries were held again today, Hillary would greatly expand her lead. She would beat Obama by 3/4 of a million votes in Florida and she would crush him in Michigan. In addition, Obama’s big lead from Illinois would shrink.

Today compared to January, what we know about Hillary has not changed. This is not true for Obama. Everything we have learned about Obama in March-May has been negative. The truth is that Obama was unknown on Super Tuesday and people voted for him because they thought he was something other than what he is. Today Obama is more known and the trend of support for him in the battleground states is downward. The super delegates were put in place to pick up on these trends. Unfortuantely, the race issue has tied their hands.

Oh, well. Sux to be them.

It’s a bed they made, though. Sleep tight.

The Dem’s Dilemma

A concise description of it, over at Ann Althouse’ site (see second comment):

Obama would not be getting the super delegates at this stage if he were not african american.

Hillary has the popular vote. Moreover, if primaries were held again today, Hillary would greatly expand her lead. She would beat Obama by 3/4 of a million votes in Florida and she would crush him in Michigan. In addition, Obama’s big lead from Illinois would shrink.

Today compared to January, what we know about Hillary has not changed. This is not true for Obama. Everything we have learned about Obama in March-May has been negative. The truth is that Obama was unknown on Super Tuesday and people voted for him because they thought he was something other than what he is. Today Obama is more known and the trend of support for him in the battleground states is downward. The super delegates were put in place to pick up on these trends. Unfortuantely, the race issue has tied their hands.

Oh, well. Sux to be them.

It’s a bed they made, though. Sleep tight.

Bizarro World

The comments (125 and counting) in this post over at Space Politics a few days ago have gotten progressively weirder and weirder.

Did you know that New Space is a baby boomer thing? And that it’s a failed paradigm, while the standard procedures of NASA giving out cost-plus government contracts has been a total success, and will get us to the stars any year now?

Me, neither. What is “Someone” smoking? No surprise that he or she posts anonymously.

The Zero-Sum Candidate

Both Barack and Michelle Obama have a collectivist mentality:

Jeff Dobbs, a little while back, saw Michelle Obama’s statement that “The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”

…Barack Obama today: “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.

Would an Obama Administration really mean an end to “eating as much as we want?”

There is an implicit assumption here that, in order for one person (or country) to have more, another must thereby have less. This is the view of a person who views wealth not as something that is created, but something that simply exists, and the only important issue is how to divvy it up. But no one in Zimbabwe is starving because I took food away from them and ate it myself. They are starving in former Rhodesia, and in North Korea, and other places, because the governments there, in thrall to greed and the poisonous ideology of collectivism, have destroyed the agricultural sector.

What are the Obamas going to take away from us to give to someone else? And how will they decide from whom to take it, and to whom to give it? And what means will they choose to do so?

And which countries’ approval are we seeking? Egypt, to whom we give billions a year in aid? France? Germany? The Europeans seemed to be well fed, last time I checked.

My mother, who used to tell me to clean my plate in the sixties because there were children starving in China, had her mother tell her to clean her plate during the depression because there were children starving in Europe. Who is it that Obama is asking (telling?) us to clean our plates (or better yet, put less on them) for? Will he set up rationing? Will Michelle be in charge of the rationing board and pie distribution?

Hungry stomachs want to know, before November.

The sad thing, of course, is that our agricultural policies, which actually increase the cost of our food (though we’re wealthy enough to afford it, at least until the Obamas take over), are also complicit in destroying the agricultural sector of many third-world countries, by providing foreign aid in the form of subsidized grain and depressing the price of food there, making farming a non-viable economic activity. What will Barack do about that?

[Update a few minutes later]

This doesn’t speak so much to their collectivism, but Charlotte Hays asks:

I loved Obama telling us how how “unacceptable” and “low class” it would be for us to to mention his wife’s anti-American remarks. How’s he gonna stop us? (I certainly hope he will have a tougher approach when negotiating with dictators!) And, come to think of it, this isn’t the first time Obama has said that anti-American “snippets” by a close associate were taken out of context. We get to decide if we think this is relevant, not the candidate.

Do we really want to be bossed around by these arrogant people and their double standards for four years?

[Update in the afternoon]

Rachel Lucas and her commenters aren’t very impressed by Obama’s Calvin-ball campaign rules.

So I just want to know what happens if Republican’s aren’t “careful.” Is he gonna give them karate? Write a strongly worded letter of disapproval?

Crossing Their Fingers

It looks like NASA’s not going to abandon the ISS. That seems sensible to me.

I’d like to know where they get the 1/124 number for probability of having to evacuate. But it makes sense, given that they’re already down at least one (and actually, more like two or three) level in the fault tree, that you can accept a lower reliability for the lifeboat. Lifeboats, after all, have traditionally been pretty iffy propositions. It’s not reasonable to demand high reliability of them. That was one of the complaints that I used to have when working on CERV–that the requirements were overspecified for something that was only for use in an emergency.

Irony At Epcot

A travelogue by Lileks:

The plot was hugely ironical: Timon and Roomba or whatever the warthog is named were building a resort in the jungle, and damning a stream to create a water feature. Simba showed up to demonstrate the error of their ways. The hilarity of any manifestation of the Disneyverse criticizing an artificial lake to build a resort goes without saying. And it did go without saying, of course. Simba said that Timon and Roomba or whatever were acting like another creature that did not behave in tune with nature, and that creature was . . . man.

BOO HISS, I guess. Jaysus, I tire of this. Big evil stupid man had done many stupid evil bad things, like pile abandoned cars in the river, dump chemicals into blue streams, and build factories that vomited great dark clouds into the sky. Like the People’s State Lead Paint and Licensed Mickey Merchandise Factory in Shanghai Province, perhaps? Simba gave us a lecture about materialism and how it hurt the earth – cue the shot of trees actually being chopped down, and I’m surprised the sap didn’t spurt like blood in a Peckinpah movie – and other horrors, like forests on fire because . . . well, because it was National Toss Glowing Coals Out the Car Window Month, I guess. I swear the footage all came from the mid-70s; it was grainy and cracked and the cars were all late-60s models. Because I’m pretty sure we’re not dumping cars into the rivers as a matter of course any more. You’re welcome to try to leave your car on the riverbank and see how that turns out for you.

At the end Timon and Phoomba decided to open a green resort, and everything’s hakuna Montana.

Follow the link for the rest of the story.

One Of The (Many) Reasons

…that Obama is unlikely to win. Michael Weiss writes extensively about his Iraq minefield:

…there is every expectation that Obama will have his bluff called sooner or later. Adolph Reed, a prominent black leftist intellectual who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania, published a fascinating and undervalued essay in current issue of The Progressive magazine. It is titled “Obama No.” Professor Reed has followed the resistible rise of this young Chicago politico for quite some time, and he never liked what he saw:

Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It’s like what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists: They get themselves onto a stage that’s so big that they can’t hide their contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories they’ve told different people.