“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”
The president will be very disappointed. He was so looking forward to discussing nuclear weapons with Ahmadinejad and demonstrating the power of his silver tongue. What will he do if he doesn’t have a comfortable, familiar dictator to prostrate himself before? These damned people, wanting their freedom. They’re so inconvenient.
We went downtown this morning to the tea party by the federal building on Broward. It wasn’t a huge turnout (my guess is that there were not more than three or four hundred people at any given time) but the crowd was enthusiastic, and creative with their signs, with a lot of cars driving up and down the street with their own signs, bullhorns and car horns. It was mostly a fiscal protest. I saw only one “Choose Life” sign, and a couple related to foreign policy. There was no obvious news coverage.
I shot video of this band playing some Dixieland. I may Youtube it later.
A little street theater.
The other Barry.
This guy say’s he’s running for Senator as an Independent. He doesn’t have a web site yet, but he’s got a few months to get started. He’s Jewish, born in Brooklyn during the war, and claims to have known Jack Kennedy, who he said wouldn’t recognize the Democrats today. “The Chicago machine has taken over the country. Obama is a Stalinist, and knows exactly where he wants to go. I’ve known a lot like him in my day.”
More than 17 percent of those who answered said they would have to shut down their business because there is no way they could handle the kinds of increases being predicted.
The unscientific poll taken of Manufacturing & Technology eJournal readers from June 28th through July 1st drew 943 responses.
OTHER CHOICES INCLUDED:
Would raise the price of my product or service to customers (22 percent);
A combination of price increases, personnel cuts and reductions in pay and benefits (20 percent);
Set aside some time for someone (or multiple someones) to read aloud the Declaration of Independence to the assembled. It will be a powerful moment, I can guarantee you.
Assuming you haven’t already thought of this, of course.
[Saturday morning update]
Happy Independence Day! For a lot of us, who still care about liberty, it takes on more meaning than usual this year.
Maybe this is one of those rare times that a politician really is resigning to spend more time with their family. If any politician would do that, it seems like this one would. In any event, I’m sure that the press and the Democrats are proud of themselves for chasing her out of politics.
…millions of full-time workers are being downgraded to part-time, as businesses slash labor costs to remain above water. Because people are working less, wages have fallen by 0.3% this year. Factories are operating at only 65% capacity, while the overall jobless rate hit 9.5%. Throw in discouraged workers who want full-time work, and the labor underutilization rate climbed to 16.5%.
The news is even worse for young people, with nearly one in four teenagers unemployed. Congress has scheduled an increase in the minimum wage later this month, which will price even more of these unskilled youths out of a vital start on the career ladder. One useful policy response would be for Congress to rescind the wage hike to $7.25 an hour (from $6.55) that is scheduled for July 24. But the union economic model that now dominates Washington holds that wages only matter for those who already have jobs. The jobs that are never created don’t count.
This is right out of the New Deal play book. Price labor out of the market by government fiat. And keep kids (many of whom live with their parents) from climbing on to the first rung of the employment ladder. Teenage unemployment is 24%, and they raise the minimum wage. Brilliant.
And then there’s this (part of a huge grand indictment of Waxman-Markey):
Naturally, Big Labor gets its piece of the pie, too. Projects receiving grants and financing under Waxman-Markey provisions will be required to implement Davis-Bacon union-wage rules, making it hard for non-union firms to compete — and ensuring that these “investments” pay out inflated union wages. And it’s not just the big research-and-development contracts, since Waxman-Markey forces union-wage rules all the way down to the plumbing-repair and light-bulb-changing level.
Via Kaus, who also notes that if this insanity is extended to health care, you can kiss any hopes of cost savings goodbye. We’ve got to put the brakes on all this economic vandalism, somehow. I hope that we can finally stop it in the Senate.
[Update a few minutes later]
The dog will hunt, but it can’t find anything.
[Late morning update]
The worst job market for teens since 1965. But let’s be sure to raise that minimum wage.
Good tips for tea partiers tomorrow. And if you don’t have a sign, don’t let it keep you home:
The most important thing you can do as a tea party demonstrator is show up. You will be absolutely astonished to find that the biggest benefit you will experience is how encouraging and inspiring it is to be among like-minded people demonstrating for a noble cause. The feelings of affirmation and connection will keep you going through all kinds of adversity in the fight to preserve the United States as a democratic republic powered by capitalism and individual liberty.
…try to walk away with something of a plan. As Glenn and I have noted, chanting and waving signs are great, but if you really want to influence the way government works, you have to put yourself in front of the folks who make the decisions. And those at the lowest levels — city and town councils, mayors, county boards, members of Congress — are rarely used to crowds of people passionately making the case for spending less money.
Shelby’s argument has been that the exploration funding in the bill was intended solely for reducing the Shuttle-Constellation gap, a spokesman for the Alabama Republican told the paper (although there is no specific language dictating that in the bill). And certainly Constellation can use every bit of additional funding it can get. However, would that $100 million have a greater effect towards reducing the gap in US human space access if it’s spent on Constellation (where it might accelerate schedules by on the order of a month), or on commercial efforts that might (but are certainly not guaranteed to) be operational years before Ares 1 and Orion?
It can’t use it in any way that’s beneficial to either the taxpayer, or a space enthusiast. I almost weep when I think of the useful things we could do with a mere hundred million dollars. Shelby is quickly making himself public enemy number one of anyone who wants a sane and cost-effective space program. More over at the Sentinel.
The next three weeks or so leading up to the anniversary are going to be full of pieces like this, from a British journalist who covered the event. It’s a good piece, and I don’t want to diss it–it’s obviously a key part of his own personal history and inspired him, but I disagree with this notion, which will also be a common one among the upcoming commemorations:
A new era was to begin: there would one day be huge satellite cities in space, colonies on the moon, an outpost on Mars, and all before 2001.
This is just not true, much as we’d like it to be. Apollo, for all of the wonder of the achievement, was in fact a detour from the road to those goals. I’ll be explaining that more in my essay a little later this summer in The New Atlantis. I would also note that Eagle didn’t separate from “Apollo.” It did so from the spacecraft Columbia. But that’s just a nit compared to the other point, and I encourage people to enjoy the piece anyway–it’s generally a good historical description of the event.
