Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Education, Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Chelsea Clinton Too Expensive?

6 Comments

Hire Ashe Schow instead!

For those who like to get the most for their money, here’s an itemized menu of what you can get if you hire me instead:

• Bargain basement price of $200 per minute (limit of three-hour event)

• $10 per person for a handshake (light grip but not limp)

• $15 per person for a photo with me*

• $20 per person for a handshake and a photo

• $25 per person for a photo in which I appear enthusiastic

• $30 per person for a hug**

• $5 per person for a minute of light conversation

• $10 per person for a minute of light, enthusiastic conversation

• $15 and speaker will call your mom on your cell phone

• $25 per person for a lengthy, deep conversation with your mom in which I tell her we’re best friends***

Seems like a much better deal to me. I like the a la carte plan, particularly the hug.

But as Ed Driscoll notes, that doesn’t allow them to contribute to the Clintons’ personal slush fund.

Business, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Legal Polygamy

10 Comments

Not that I care that much, but it’s probably inevitable now. But as noted there, Richard Epstein makes a great point:

In particular, Kennedy never explains why his notions of dignity and autonomy do not require the Supreme Court to revisit its 1878 decision in Reynolds upholding criminal punishment for polygamy, which is still on the books. Nor does he ask whether the dignity of workers could, and should, be used as a reason to strike down the full range of labor regulations on both wages and hours that make it flatly illegal for two individuals to enter into a simple employment contract on mutually agreeable terms.

That would require them to rule consistently, rather than just making it up as they go along based on stuff they like.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Grace And Dignity After Charleston

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Thoughts from Jonah Goldberg:

There are few subjects that ignite more casual, uninformed bigotry and condescension from elites in this nation than Dixie. “Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment,” the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky wrote last year.

How then to explain the tens of thousands of South Carolinians, white and black, marching in unity across the Ravenel Bridge on Sunday night? Did the city bus in decent Northerners?

The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins glibly asserts that “the Confederate battle flag is an American swastika, the relic of traitors and totalitarians, symbol of a brutal regime, not a republic.”

If it were left to me, I would take the flag down (for the reasons South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley laid out Monday). But this kind of cheap moral preening is galling. Is it really too much for people to muster the moral imagination that the issue isn’t nearly as simple as that?

A November poll of South Carolinians found that 61 percent of blacks wanted it down. That means nearly 4 in 10 blacks felt differently. Are they deluded? Are they the moral equivalent of self-loathing Jews, happy to live under a swastika?

Bigotry against white Christian southerners isn’t just the only acceptable one; it’s almost mandatory. And it largely comes from people who embrace and vote for the historical and traditional (and current) party of racism.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

My Initial Project Status

25 Comments

For those not backers, but interested in what’s happening, I did a project update this morning:

I’m starting to spool up on the project (I expect to actually be funded this week — there’s a two-week delay after the close). Leonard David has a report today that the “Affordable Mars Strategy” report has been published and is available for free download [note: I haven’t actually been able to find the download — all I could find at Leonard’s link was Scott Hubbard’s op-ed — but I think I have the report]. I’ve also been in communication with the authors (specifically, John Baker and Nathan Strange at JPL), and received a lot of material from them last week (some of which may be redundant with the report). I’m planning a trip to Denver next week to (among other things) talk to folks at ULA about integrated vehicle fluids and propellant depots.

The JPL work will provide a foundation for my own analysis, and I’ll probably be discussing it with them. While I think they have a good solution for what they perceive to be their problem, I have fundamentally different top-level requirements.

I would characterize their approach as “Apollo to Mars”: A destination, a date, civil-servant boots on the ground, with a giant government-owned-and-operated rocket, except (unlike Apollo) it is budget constrained. I don’t think that will be any more economically and politically sustainable than Apollo was. I also think, bluntly, as a taxpayer and space enthusiast, that it would not be worth the money.

My approach is to get NASA completely out of the earth-to-orbit business, and to take the savings to develop the technology needed to build a scalable in-space reusable, resilient, affordable transportation architecture, that will enable not simply NASA, but anyone else who wants to, to go to the Red Planet.

And not just to Mars.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Fake IRS Scandal

6 Comments

The agency has until the end of the month (i.e., this week) to come clean:

All thinking Americans are fed up with the arrogance. Entitlement and disdain [sic] for the law demonstrated repeatedly by the IRS officials, especially Commissioner Koskinen, who is now proved by his own Inspector General to have lied to Congress when he claimed the IRS had made every effort to find the missing emails and backup tapes. …

Judge Sullivan has also set a hearing for July 1 at 1:30 in his courtroom. If the IRS has not sufficiently answered his questions in writing, there’s no doubt they will be called upon to do so in person. This hearing may be worthy of concession sales. It’s past time for “orange to be the new black” for some people in the IRS.

I’m not sure any change in outfit will really improve her looks.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Language Of Leftists

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Yes, they do talk differently, and duplicitously:

…here’s another way to look at the results. Liberals talk about politics in language that appeals to our primal socialist instincts, developed on the savanna when we belonged to small clans of hunter-gatherers who really did look out for their kin. Conservatives discuss politics in language that reflects modern reality: socialism doesn’t work in groups larger than a clan, because people do not behave selflessly when they belong to a large group of unrelated strangers. Liberals believe in what the economist Daniel Klein calls “The People’s Romance,” but that fallacy has been exposed by Adam Smith, de Toqueville and Darth Vader, among others.

When liberals say that “government is the word we give to the things we choose to do together,” they score high on affiliation, and some of them may even believe government is one big happy collaboration among equals. But conservatives know that philosophy just means giving one small group of people in the capital more power to boss and coerce the rest of us.

Yes. I think this also related to Jonathan Haidt’s thesis.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Hillary’s Emails

49 Comments

It keeps getting worse:

This would present a huge legal issue for anyone whose name didn’t rhyme with Millary Minton. The Federal Records Act requires work-related communications to go to the National Archive, where the government determines what can and cannot be published for public review. That is why the Obama administration instructed its agencies not to use personal e-mails unless those communications were copied to official accounts, in order to comply with the FRA. Hillary and her team flat-out disregarded those directives and flouted the law in running their own private email system. Now, with records under subpoena by an official committee of Congress, it seems clear that Hillary and her team not only destroyed email subject to the subpoena but tampered with the evidence they did provide.

Any other government official would be looking at jail time for that kind of action. Sandy Berger got caught doing essentially the same thing with official government documents not under subpoena (presumably for the same purpose, to clean up after the Clintons), and traded his law license in exchange for not getting prosecuted. The chances of Hillary Clinton getting investigated for this by the Department of Justice are roughly nil while Barack Obama is President, but it’s certainly a good argument for keeping that authority away from Hillary by ensuring she doesn’t succeed Obama to the White House.

As he notes, if the White House is really unhappy about this, they have a Justice Department to look into that.

OK, stop laughing.

[Late-afternoon update]

The other story the media won’t discuss. Yes, with Bush and Cheney, it was all about Halliburton and oil. But not Hillary and Sid.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Falcon Failure

66 Comments

I overslept. Just got up and saw my Twitter feed.

My immediate thought: This makes is a lot harder to sell my thesis that we need to start flying crew ASAP. I haven’t changed my mind, but I’ve never claimed that it would be safe to do so, just that it was important to do so. My second thought: Would the launch abort system have worked for this event? I really am surprised at this.

[Update a few minutes later]

Unfortunately, it happened before stage separation, so they didn’t get to even attempt a landing.

[Update a couple minutes later]

[Update a few minutes later]

Second question (per Henry Vanderbilt’s comment): Could capsule have separated absent an LAS? Was the Dragon destroyed by range safety itself?

[Update a while later]

Some video, sent by my book editor.

[Evening update]

Thoughts and history from Stephen Smith:

Humanity reached the Moon in 1969, yet failures and fatalities still happen. They always will.

Today I met a 12-year old from a Colorado middle school who had an experiment aboard SpaceX CRS-7. I told her I was sorry she lost her experiment, but she was undeterred. Grinning from ear to ear, she said, “We’ll build another one and do it again!”

As he notes, so will SpaceX.

[Update a few minutes later]

A good balanced take from the WaPo.