Poor Brontosaurus
The most popular and well-known dinosaur never existed.
Colombian Prostitutes
Gee, I would have expected them to be much more attractive. They wouldn’t be worth the money or risk to me. Now I think even less of those secret service agents.
[Update a while later]
Mark Steyn has some caustic and appropriately snarky thoughts:
Cartagena’s most famous “escort” costs $800. For purposes of comparison, you can book Eliot Spitzer’s “escort” for $300. Yet, on the cold grey fiscally conservative morning after the wild socially liberal night before, Dania’s Secret Service agent offered her a mere $28.
Twenty-eight bucks! What a remarkably precise sum. Thirty dollars less a federal handling fee? Why isn’t this guy Obama’s treasury secretary or budget director? Or, at the very least, the head honcho of the General Services Administration, whose previous director has sadly had to step down after the agency’s taxpayer-funded public-servants-gone-wild Bacchanal in Vegas.
All over this dying republic, you couldn’t find a single solitary $28 item that doesn’t wind up costing at least 800 bucks by the time it’s been sluiced through the federal budgeting process. Yet, in one plucky little corner of the Secret Service, supervisor David Chaney, dog-handler Greg Stokes, or one of the other nine agents managed to turn the principles of government procurement on their head. If the same fiscal prudence were applied to the 2011 Obama budget, the $3.598 trillion splurge would have cost just shy of $126 billion. The feds’ half a billion to Solyndra would have been a mere $18 million. The 823-grand GSA conference on government efficiency at the M Resort Spa & Casino would have come in at $28,805.
Chaney-Stokes 2012! Grope . . . and Change! Red lights, not red ink.
Go read the whole thing.
Look Who’s Missing
Here’s the list of Obama campaign bundlers for the first quarter of the year. You know whose name isn’t on it? Elon Musk. I’d like to see the list for previous quarters, so we’d know if Christian Adams is far too trusting of his Congressional source.
A Rebuttal To Jim Dunstan On Space Property Rights
[Note: this is a guest post by Alan Wasser, Chairman of the Space Settlement Institute]
As the Space Settlement Initiative says, the settlement of space would benefit all of humanity by opening a new frontier, energizing our society, providing room and resources for the growth of the human race without despoiling the Earth, and creating a lifeboat for humanity that could survive even a planet-wide catastrophe.
Unfortunately, it seems clear that, as things stand now, space settlement will not happen soon enough for any of us to see it, if it ever happens at all. The US government has now officially decided not to go back to the moon, philanthropists cannot afford it, and there is nothing else on the moon or Mars that could be profitable enough to justify the cost of private enterprise developing safe, reliable and affordable human transport. Continue reading A Rebuttal To Jim Dunstan On Space Property Rights
That “European Civil War”
Some thoughts from Mark Steyn:
It was, in a certain sense (and putting Russia and Japan to one side), a “western civil war” between the Anglophone democracies and Continental Fascists – but for some reason that’s far less congenial an interpretation to EU myth-makers.
Indeed.
The Rights Of The People
The President’s Glass House
The Dems had better be careful where they cast that next stone.
If I Had A Dog
“…it would look just like the dog that Obama ate.”
This is the gift that keeps on giving.
Will America Go To Space Again?
Bryan Preston is unduly pessimistic. The answer is yes, and hopefully in a couple weeks.