As a practical matter, it’s Obama’s refusal to negotiate that matters. A member of Congress can’t get time with the president or his top aides on demand. A president can always get through to a member of Congress — as Obama did, finally, Monday night for a conversation described as “less than ten minutes.”
Astonishingly, Obama said in a prepared statement that no president had negotiated ancillary issues with Congress when a shutdown was threatened. Four Pinocchios, said Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler.
Unfortunately, only one side understands that. Of course, they hate James Madison, and all of his limited-government works.
… until the FBI bugs the West Wing of the White House, or the Treasury building next door, or the Internal Revenue Service’s headquarters a few blocks to the southeast, we might never know the exact origin of America’s tax collectors harassing President Obama’s political adversaries.
Maybe there was never an explicit order. Considering the threat of being overheard, it’s part of the job of the capos to know what the boss wants and make him happy by giving it to him without him even having to ask.
The IRS and the Obama administration are on the same page when it comes to big government: Tea Partiers and other conservatives threaten the massive state they love, and the IRS’ powerful army of bureaucrats is a pretty handy weapon for use against them.
…This is not a coincidence, any more than awakening with a severed horse’s head in your bed after being made “an offer you can’t refuse” is.
Someone — either within the IRS bureaucracy or above it — saw what Carson did, didn’t like it, and decided to make him pay. The American people must know who it was.
You might depart the theater after Gravity with mixed emotions about going to space yourself. Cuaron’s tracking shots and sweeping vistas of the blue marble below evoke a sort of spiritual response, especially in the spaces between suspense when the movie gets quiet. Of course, the Bullock and Clooney spend much of the film spinning and flailing in mortal danger, dodging hunks of metal that become ballistic missiles at orbital speed. Jones sees Gravity as appearing amid a rising wave of interest in space brought on by the emerging private space industry, and that’s a hopeful trend. But humanity has to be realistic about risk assessment, and ready for the high drama of trying to rescue space travelers after a disaster in orbit. Perhaps when space travel becomes common, and not simply the domain of professional astronauts, we’ll treat space disasters like plane crashes—tragedies that can be made extremely uncommon, but never eliminated. And that will be a good thing.
The biggest problem, he says, is the anonymity granted to reviewers, who are often competing fiercely for priority with authors they are reviewing. “What would be their reason to do it quickly?” Tracz asks. “Why would they not steal” ideas or data?
Anonymous review, Tracz notes, is the primary reason why months pass between submission and publication of findings. “Delayed publishing is criminal; it’s nonsensical,” he says. “It’s an artifact from an irrational, almost religious belief” in the peer-review system.
Climaquiddick was a particularly egregious case of it, but the whole system is broken. And this is what leads to so much crap science, not just in climate, but in nutrition and other areas. It doesn’t get properly reviewed or argued.
I find quite bizarre the repeated claims that the Supreme Court’s decision in NFIB v. Sebelius should somehow end debate on the PPACA and the individual mandate. Did the Supreme Court’s decisions upholding the Hyde Amendment or other limits on federal funding for abortion end debate over the wisdom or fairness of these policies? Of course not — nor should they have. These decisions did not dampen the debate over the underlying constitutional questions either. There is nothing inappropriate about abortion rights groups continuing to challenge these policies, politically and in the courts. By the same token, so long as a substantial portion of the American electorate opposes key elements of the PPACA, we should expect efforts to limit or overturn it. That’s how the system works.
Indeed. There are more cases pending, and if they reach SCOTUS, they may still overturn the law (particularly given the ruling that it is non-severable). It will simply happen on some grounds other than those previously argued. Also, unless Roberts’ decision arose from his being blackmailed (I wish I could be sure that it wasn’t), he probably learned a lesson from it, and won’t pass up another opportunity to strike it.
When it comes to the International Space Station resupply business, these firms are competing with governmental operations from Russia and Japan. Congressional defenders of the old-school government-operated space service are curiously disdainful of American entrepreneurship and eagerly point out how these foreign solutions can fill our needs while we compel NASA to build a Space Shuttle replacement. What these critics miss, however, is that every dollar going to one of our domestic firms stays in the U.S., creates serious jobs, and makes the most of America’s entrepreneurial advantages. Funding this investment in America’s future follows in the steps of successful Federal investment in jumpstarting industries that have included the transcontinental railroad, the Internet, and GPS. Such visionary investments have produced big economic returns that increased government revenues for decades.
Director Alfonso Cuaron’s ultra-realistic tale of disaster and survival in near-Earth orbit is easily the best movie about space exploration since “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It’s also the most spectacular and awe-inspiring cinematic experience in recent memory.