There are now more government jobs than jobs that produce real wealth.
And we wonder why the country’s going broke.
How Likely Is It…?
…that a Napolitano replacement would be an improvement? Not much, at least from this administration. Of course, I don’t think that the department should have been created in the first place. Whoever runs it has a pretty impossible job.
Dogs And Cats
Tim Robbins gave money to Michele Bachmann?
I wonder it there’s a relationship between this and his breakup with Susan Sarandon? Perhaps he had his own road to Damascus experience?
As Instapundit notes, we’ll know this is for real if he gives money to Scott Brown.
Real Hope, And Change
Freeman Hunt offers some:
Ten years ago I was a very far left liberal. Probably more of a communist. And an atheist. And wanted to work for the government.
Hey, there’s nothing wrong with atheism. As long as you don’t proselytize…
Anyway, maybe there’s even hope for some of my commenters.
In Case Anyone’s Wondering
I’m renovating a house for re-rental in Golden, CO, including a kitchen remake, and two baths, one of which is essentially gutted other than tub. So all work and little blogging makes Rand a dull boy…
Obnoxious Quotes Of 2009
Forty of them.
They are pretty bad.
Complexity And Danger
Bob Clarebrough has some useful thoughts on the risk of space flight, for NASA and private enterprise, over at The Space Review. This is a very important topic, and one that I want to write a long post on, when I get unburied from current activities.
Climaquiddick
“You should be steamed.” Some thoughts from the former head of the Hurricane Center:
What do the skeptics believe? First, they concur with the believers that the Earth has been warming since the end of a Little Ice Age around 1850. The cause of this warming is the question. Believers think the warming is man-made, while the skeptics believe the warming is natural and contributions from man are minimal and certainly not potentially catastrophic à la Al Gore.
Second, skeptics argue that CO2 is not a pollutant but vital for plant life. Numerous field experiments have confirmed that higher levels of CO2 are positive for agricultural productivity. Furthermore, carbon dioxide is a very minor greenhouse gas. More than 90 percent of the warming from greenhouse gases is caused by water vapor. If you are going to change the temperature of the globe, it must involve water vapor.
Third, and most important, skeptics believe that climate models are grossly overpredicting future warming from rising concentrations of carbon dioxide. We are being told that numerical models that cannot make accurate 5- to 10-day forecasts can be simplified and run forward for 100 years with results so reliable you can impose an economic disaster on the U.S. and the world.
I always find the religious language amusing. The “believers” seem to take it on faith, because the high priests of Science have ordained, it, while the “skeptics” act like actual scientists.
[Monday evening update]
A call for Climaquiddick whistleblowers. I hope they get a lot. I think that the bastions have been captured.
Aviation Week Person Of The Year
…the space entrepreneur. Looks like Dave Masten made the cover.
It’s certainly more inspiring than anything that NASA is doing, at least in terms of manned spaceflight.
Obama Is Vulnerable On The War
…and he knows it:
Republicans smell blood. There is a pattern in the Obama administration of dismissing Islamist terrorist attacks as regrettable random acts. In his radio address after Major Nidal Hassan’s slaughtered 13 at Fort Hood, Texas, Obama made no mention of terrorism or militant Islam, instead blandly promising that the “ongoing investigation into this terrible tragedy” would “look at the motives of the alleged gunman”.
Hassan was a committed Islamist who had corresponded with the fanatical Yemeni imam Anwar al-Awlaki. In June, Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad, a Muslim convert being watched by the FBI and who had previously travelled to Yemen, murdered a US Army recruit in Arkansas. That rated only a tepid statement by Obama about a “senseless act of violence”.
But the violence wasn’t senseless, it had a calculated objective – just as Abdulmutallab was not, as Obama described him, an “isolated extremist”. No wonder many Americans want to grab Obama by the lapels and scream: “It’s the Jihad, stupid.” Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, clearly struck a nerve when he charged last week that Obama was “trying to pretend we are not at war”.
The White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer eagerly descended into the political fray, responding to Cheney with the obligatory jibe about Iraq and also a litany of examples of Obama’s “public statements that explicitly state we are at war”.
It’s a sure sign that you’re losing the argument when you have to research quotes from your boss’s speeches to prove that he gets it that America is at war. The problem for Obama is that people are now judging him by his actions as well as his words.
There were plenty of actions to judge him by before the election, but the media downplayed them.