Category Archives: Political Commentary

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

4 Comments

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.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

How Republics Die

23 Comments

My thoughts on the most recent judicial atrocities, over at PJMedia.

[Update later afternoon]

Some thoughts from Randy Barnett on “judicial restraint” and Republican judicial appointments.

I know it sounds crazy, but I want judges to follow the Constitution, not the tyrannical majority. I also want them to overturn crap decisions. Stare decisis my ass.

[Update a little while later]

Should we make Justices accountable to the voters?

It seems like a bad idea to me. I agree with Cruz’s diagnosis of the problem, but not his remedy. I think that one of the reasons that impeachment is so toothless is the original wording: “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The Founders had a very clear view of what that meant, but most people today do not, as we discovered during the Clinton impeachment trial. The only successful impeachments and removals I can think of occurred in the context of gross and blatant corruption (Alcee Hastings, who was later re-elected), or actual criminality. The other part of the problem is that, while they were adamantly opposed to political parties and made no Constitutional provision for them whatsoever, they perhaps didn’t anticipate how difficult they would make impeachment (even though court appointments are in theory non-partisan).

I think a better solution might be to amend the Constitution to simply modernize the grounds for impeachment. For instance, “…or, in violation of their oath of office, persistent indifference to the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Who could argue with that? It would be quite entertaining to watch Democrats attempt to argue that office holders shouldn’t have to uphold their oath of office. And if it passed, it would force impeachment trials to actual discuss those arcane concepts.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is sort of similar to proposals to rein in the government by adding the words “and this time we really mean it” to the 9th and 10th amendments against encroachments by the flawed interpretations of the Commerce Clause. It would be a “this time we really mean it” to simply following the Constitution and the rule of law.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Racism In America

81 Comments

90% of it comes from the Democrats and the Left.

Yes. And it’s always been the case, from the times of slavery, through Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, right up through today.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related: Why do we continue to honor the racist Woodrow Wilson? He was a Democrat, and the first arguably fascist president. And his views were probably influenced by the anti-Enlightenment pro-slavery screeds of Calhoun and Fitzhugh.

[Friday-morning update]

Whitewashing the Democrats’ racist history. With (as always) the aid of the media, either from ignorance or partisanship, or both.

[Bumped]

Business, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Why Apple Pulled Civil War Games From Its App Store

3 Comments

Because it was afraid of the Internet:

No rational person would complain that there were Civil War sims. No sensible person would believe that society would be improved by demanding their removal. No emotionally stable person could think that they were safer now because someone, somewhere, would not get updates to a game they purchased that allowed them to fight as the Union Army but contained the sight of the Confederate flag. Anyone who would believe these things is tethered to reality by a frayed strand of dental floss, and while they may live in a comfy bubble where everyone believes the same things and has at least two friends who are doing very important work in the field of instructional graffiti, most people are stable enough to resist the siren call of the Stars and Bars, even in the form of a picture on a phone.

But. The loud people may complain. The company would have to explain. An explanation would be seen as a justification.

Of course there are nuances to this; Apple is working with developers to use a different, earlier flag, according to some reports. Because that’s the issue, right? Finding an acceptable flag to represent a slave state? As I noted elsewhere, the app store still has a game that lets you simulate the USSR, including an in-app purchase that lets you fine-tune your oppression settings. One could say this is okay because the USSR was an equal-opportunity killer, just as the repression settings in “Tropico” are hunky and / or dory because you’re putting the screws to your own people. If that’s the case, then they have decided that American Slavery is not only a unique historical event, but something whose magnitude and uniqueness sets it apart from every other act of state oppression and governmental violation of human rights. The enslavement of an entire population is not offensive, per se, because it’s color-blind.

I mean, sure, go ahead, make that argument. And if that’s the case, then my Roman Slave Merchant Sim should get brisk approval, because the Romans didn’t care who they enslaved, and also had the option to buy your way out. They practically invented the in-app purchase, in a way.