…so let it be done. I don’t think that I’ve seen a president so intrinsically contemptuous of the Constitution in my lifetime. And that’s a lifetime that included George Bush (who should have been impeached for signing McCain-Feingold) and Bill Clinton.
Much of the administration’s approach has to do with a change in the nature of liberal politics. Today’s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class. Their goal is governmental control over everything from what sort of climate science is permissible to how we choose to live our lives. Many of today’s progressives can be as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah. Like Al Gore declaring the debate over climate change closed, despite the Climategate e-mails and widespread skepticism, the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth. Critics lie beyond the pale.
The problem for the clerisy lies in political reality. The country’s largely suburban and increasingly Southern electorate does not see big government as its friend or wise liberal mandarins as the source of its salvation. This sets up a potential political crisis between those who know what’s good and a presumptively ignorant majority. Obama is burdened, says Joe Klein of Time, by governing a “nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive,” as the title of his story puts it, without the guidance of our president. But if the people are too deluded to cooperate, elements in the progressive tradition have a solution: European-style governance by a largely unelected bureaucratic class.
There’s nothing new about this, really. Today’s “progressives” are very similar to the original ones, from Teddy Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson, on whose legacies European fascism was forged.
Voters who once supported Gingrich but have now turned away from him say that his hot-tempered response to the ads, rather than the ads themselves, simply turned them off. “He’s got a temper,” said one Tea Party member at a Nashua coffeehouse Saturday morning. “I don’t want a guy with a temper with his finger on the button.” Other voters said Gingrich’s ill-tempered complaints about the ads distracted them from the former speaker’s message about jobs, the economy, and American renewal.
In South Carolina, Gingrich’s decision to call Romney a liar did not sit well with many Republicans, including those who don’t support Romney. “I think people saw him calling Romney a liar as just un-presidential,” says one well-connected South Carolina political figure. “It just looked unpresidential.”
Life is ten percent about what happens to you, and ninety percent about how you respond to it.
The hard part, he says, isn’t subsisting in a hostile environment millions of miles from home but changing the Space Shuttle-era culture of timidity.
It would be easier to just ignore NASA than to change it. I’m working on an issue paper on risk aversion and reward, and how we have to stop fretting so much over killing people if we want to open up space.
Does anyone from Boeing know the sequence of events of the formation of USA? At the time it was created, was it known that the company was going to purchase Rockwell’s space divisions, and were the legacy Rockwell people part of the new contract? USA was formed in September of 1996, I think, but the purchase didn’t occur until late in the year. I’m assuming that, since Rockwell wasn’t one of the initial parents, this must have been part of the purchase negotiations, but am curious to know how it all worked.
Most importantly, private parties outside government can refuse to obey any regulation issued by the new agency. They will be able to defend themselves in court by claiming that the head of the agency is an unconstitutional officer, and they will have the grounds for a good test case. They can call Richard first, me second, for advice!
I hope we don’t have to wait until the regulations are issued to resolve it, though.