…has died.
I met him a couple times, but didn’t really know him well. But the man is a propulsion legend.
Yoko Ono Versus Ayatollah Khomeini
Yup:
A lot of sound and fury, but it doesn’t signify nothing. It tells the Iranians that the thing the president values most is the talks themselves – not stopping their nuclear program, not cutting their regional ambitions down to size, not defending American allies. The Iranians understand that Obama’s greatest desire is to be able to say that his central foreign policy promise – that he can settle conflicts through diplomacy – is finally, five years on, being fulfilled.
For their part, the Iranians know that with the talks set to begin, they have what amounts to a blank check from the White House to make mischief. They know that Obama will now say and do little lest Iran play its trump card – leaving the talks. Obama is thus playing cuckold, willing to absorb repeated public humiliation so long as his partner doesn’t leave him.
That’s been clear since he first ran for president and said he’d go to talk with Tehran “unconditionally.”
WW II In Europe
Obama And Clinton And Rice
…lied. People died.
Ham testified in the classified session that there was some peripheral chat about a demonstration, but that he and other commanders were always clear, from the beginning, that Benghazi was a terrorist attack. That’s the word they delivered to President Obama and his top advisers including then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Ham has been consistent both in sworn testimony and in his public comments.
So that was always the military’s take. It was as we all know not President Obama’s take. He was selling the attack as a demonstration in response to a movie for weeks after the fact. Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sold the same line, and then hand-picked the Accountability Review Board to conduct a phony investigation into the attack.
Sort of like the IRS “investigation.”
[Update]
Even Dianne Feinstein is disputing the latest attempt to misshape the narrative.
NASA’s Budget
Jeff Foust has the details.
As usual, SLS/Orion is funded above the request, and Commercial Crew below it. And technology takes it in the shorts yet again. But at least they didn’t underfund Commercial Crew as much as they have in the past. It’s only about a hundred-twenty-five million less than the $800M+ request. It apparently also contains a three-year extension on launch indemnification.
Note that Congress is demanding a cost-benefit analysis for Commercial Crew, but (as Clark Lindsey notes) not one for the wasteful $3B that’s going to SLS/Orion.
Sneering Anti-Technologists
Lileks is unimpressed:
Honestly: would you rather they hadn’t invented clothes-washing machines? Radio? Would you rather that one member of a household spend their entire day over a washtub with nothing but the sound from the street through the screen window for company?
It’s comforting for some, apparently, to think that people in the past just stared slack-jawed at flickering images and rose like zombies when the Consumption Instructions were finished, and spent their life in agitated dissatisfaction until the useless, needless object was acquired and installed. I’d like to know if these people have microwave ovens.
I’m thinking they write their ignorant snark on computers that they don’t really need.
Jobs
How Democrats kill them. While lying (perhaps even to themselves) about how they’re creating them.
The IRS Abuse
The fix is in:
Unlike Chris Christie’s Bridgegate, which hardly anyone cares about, a majority of the American people have consistently believed that the IRS targeting was deliberate and political. Obama himself said it “outraged” him, before he fake-fired the interim IRS chief and put the fix in place by appointing one of his own political contributors, Barbara Bosserman, to “investigate” it. Now his political contributor says “Nothing to see here, move along.” His Treasury secretary, Jack Lew, calls the abuse a “fake scandal.” So much for the president’s alleged outrage.
Across all these revelations, just 10 of the 41 groups that the American Center for Law and Justice is representing in the IRS abuse case have even been contacted by the FBI. Just 10. Ever.
That’s not an investigation, but it was never intended to be an investigation. The fix was always in on this thing.
I don’t think that Issa is going to let this go.
Millennials
Is this the year they finally get fed up with big government?
These ads depict millennials as emotional, instinctive animals acting on appetites, impulses, and desires rather than moral and intellectual beings capable of acting according to reason and prudence. The liberal poster child is a product of the state, dependent on cradle-to-grave government support, to which free birth control is a higher end than a well-paying job or — heaven forbid — starting a family.
For many millennials, the scales have fallen. They realize that the future of Obamacare depends on their signing up to pay higher insurance premiums and deductibles. In the era of iPhones and PS4s, they realize that a government that can’t design a website can’t be expected to manage the intricacies of the entire health-care industry. In the wake of the news that the NSA collects mountains of metadata, they also fret that the government that wants you to talk about health care could (with a warrant) listen in on that very conversation.
Given the bleak reality for many millennials today, it’s obvious that the Democratic party can’t talk straight to them. Instead, it manufactures witty, tongue-in-cheek social-media campaigns and faux controversies like the “war on women.” (As with most faux liberal controversies, the data seem to suggest the opposite — in 2009 women became a majority of the work force for the first time ever, while 2013 saw women under 30 earn a higher median income than their male counterparts did.)
These tricks worked in 2008; they worked again, albeit to a far lesser degree, in 2012; but in 2014, it appears the magic has finally worn off. Many millennials see through the catchy rhetoric to the empty promises.
Let’s hope. As I’ve said in the past, I’d like to see a poll that asks if people would be more, or less likely to vote Republican if they promised to repeal and replace Barack Obama next year.
[Update a while later]
ObamaCare flops with the young.
Well, big surprise. What’s in it for them?
Income Inequality
Republicans should own the issue, with competition and markets, and fighting cronyism:
Well, no. Inequality has increased across advanced economies. Macro factors such as globalization and technology deserve most — but maybe not all — of the “blame.” Big Government loves to pick winners and losers in the private sector. Some lucky ducks owe their place in the 1 percent or 0.1 percent or 0.01 percent to federal favoritism. Conservatives shouldn’t mind at all when value-creating innovators and entrepreneurs strike it rich while crony capitalists do not. The precious tax breaks and subsidies that go to rent seekers, such as those in the agriculture and alternative-energy sectors, should get the ax. Sorry, Big Sugar and Big Solar.
Unfortunately, they don’t mind cronyism that much, as long at it’s their cronyism.