As Johnson has reported: “At the time, the deputy commissioner for services and enforcement — her boss — was none other than Steven Miller, who held the post of IRS commissioner from November 2012 until his resignation in May after the IRS scandal broke.” Grooms herself left the IRS in 2011 to rejoin House Oversight as its chief Democratic counsel. There she advises ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings on how to handle the IRS scandal, which involves the people she used to work with at the IRS. That’s called a conflict of interest, with bells on it.
There have to be major reforms in the civil service.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Mens Rea: Lerner sent confidential information in private emails. She knew it was wrong, and being a lawyer, she almost certainly knew it was illegal. If we didn’t have such a corrupt Attorney General, she’d be doing a plea deal right now, in exchange for telling everything she knows, and where the orders came from.
OK, call me crazy, and I haven’t looked into this at all. But would anyone be at all surprised if they were selected on how much they filled Democrat campaign coffers rather than track record or competence?
Why is ObamaCare such a hot steaming mess? Because Obama cares more about campaigning than governing (though he does like the part of governing where he can push his political enemies around).
[Update a while later]
The Republicans didn’t sabotage the health exchanges. Obama did.
This train wreck was perfectly predictable, and many predicted it.
[Update a couple minutes later]
It’s ObamaCar.
[Update a while later] USA Today: “…an inexcusable mess.”
There’s still a long way to go. The fusion reaction will need to release many times more energy than it consumes to be viable on a commercial scale. But this is still worth getting excited about. Figuring out fusion would be a game-changer, and breakthroughs like this one remind us of the dangers of predicting the future based on current technology. The rate of technological change is accelerating, and the only ones who stand to lose are the prophets of doom.
..by keeping calm. Bjorn Lomborg says, once again, cool it:
When you look at these issues properly, the results are surprising. Climate change, for example, has had a net benefit for the world. From 1900 to 2025, it has increased global welfare by up to 1.5 per cent of GDP per year. Why? Because it has mixed effects – and when warming is moderate, the benefits prevail (even if they are unevenly distributed between nations).
Increased levels of atmospheric CO2 have improved agriculture, because the gas works as a fertiliser; we have avoided more deaths from cold than have been caused by extra heat; and we have saved more from lower heating bills than we have lost to an increased need for air conditioning.
But that doesn’t give the socialists the control over our lives that they continue to crave.
This should lead to the end of the National Park Service.
[Update a while later]
Let’s turn the parks over to the states. And why stop there?
All that this is doing is fomenting disgust with the federal government. That’s not a good attitude for people who love big government to be nurturing.
Mr. Griffin reminds us that space is a dangerous business. One of his biggest jobs at NASA was to manage the risk in a reasonable way. Risk can never be taken to zero; that would mean humans do nothing. Astronauts have died in space, but to put this in context, people in the aerospace community have also been killed on the highway on their way to work. Transportation, in any form, does not currently have zero risk. Safety is important. An early failure, such as the Apollo Launch pad fire, would be a problem for commercial viability. Design will require a reasonable middle ground with some redundancy, but not to the point of adding massive weight or prohibitive costs. Technology is so much better today and designers have fifty years of operating history to guide them. The physical demands of working in space are so intense that a momentary distraction could prove fatal. However, more is known about human error factors and training could better manage those.
Gee, someone should write a book about that. Yes, I know, Real Soon Now. Had a last-minute glitch, but it’s happening this month.
