…before it’s remaindered
The book portrays Speaker Pelosi as vapid, prideful, arrogant, and as an elitist.
There’s probably a good reason for that. They’d have to waterboard me to get me to read it.
Oh, For A Justice Mary Poppins
Frank J. has his wish list for the SCOTUS replacement.
Another Topless Photo Appears
What is it with these gay marriage opponents?
And yes, let’s destroy Carrie Prejean for agreeing with the president.
I wonder if she agrees with the president that this officer should have been fired for being gay?
[Saturday-morning update]
why aren’t leftists upset at Obama for holding the same beliefs on gay marriage as Carrie Prejean? [h/t Instapundit]
Easy, they assume that he is lying. They think his Christianity based justification for opposing actual marriage for gays is simply a lie to fool the rubes on a hot-button issue. They know he might have lost critical support from left-of-center religious conservatives if he had really stated his true beliefs on the matter, so he just lied about his real beliefs to bamboozle the rubes.
Their comfort with this assumption that Obama is lying reveals a lot about contemporary leftists’ mores and their systematic contempt for their fellow citizens. They’re so full of themselves that they believe that the important thing is for them to have power, and that it really doesn’t matter how they get it. If Obama has to lie about his real beliefs about gay marriage then that’s acceptable in the cause of the greater good.
Have to break eggs to make the omelette.
The Mission Continues To Shrink
Doug Messier has a scoop on the latest cost cutting efforts at NASA. One small step for a dummy, one giant leap for dummykind.
Reading The Tea Leaves
There’s a lot of interesting and disputatious discussion of the NASA budget and its implications for Ares I over at Space Politics this morning.
Ethanol Versus Electricity
An interesting discussion of the transportation tradeoffs of biofuels.
St. Elizabeth
I’ve never been as impressed by Elizabeth Edwards as the media has wanted me to be (of course, the gulf between my perception of John Edwards and the media’s desires has been even wider). Kaus says that the media continues to be too soft on her:
You’re understandably focused on your own family. You won’t say Hunter’s name. She’s “irrelevant to your life.” You don’t know if Hunter’s child–which you call “it”–is John’s. You just know “It doesn’t look like my children.” You say Hunter had no right to disrupt your marriage. “Women need to have respect for other women.” But during the campaign an aide and friend of John Edwards, Andrew Young, stepped up and claimed paternity of Hunter’s child. Andrew Young has a wife. How do you think she feels about this? How do her children feel about it, and what other kids say about it, when they go to school? Do you really not care if she’s going through whatever she’s going through because she’s playing her part in a lie constructed in service to your husband’s, and your, unstoppable ambition?. How are you respecting her and her marriage?
Both of these people are complete hypocrites, and made for each other. Fortunately, though, they weren’t made for the White House.
A Good Question
From Iain Murray:
The news has just broken that the Federal Reserve is requiring GMAC to raise $13 billion in new funding. Given the way its previous creditors were treated, just who do they think will lend to them?
Gosh, it’s almost as though they want to take over the economy.
Virgin Vision
Will Whitehorn talks a good game:
He foresees uses of the spaceship for science experiments, for example as an alternative to visiting the International Space Station or using unmanned flights for pharmaceuticals companies seeking to use microgravity to change particles.
Later, the aircraft could be used to launch small satellites or take other payloads into space, Whitehorn says. “We could put all of our server farms in space quite easily…”
…Eventually, he sees the possibility of transporting passengers to terrestrial destinations in spacecraft outside the atmosphere instead of by plane. He says a journey from Britain to Australia could be done in about 2-1/2 hours.
“That’s a 20-year horizon,” he said.
I’d take that a lot more seriously if he had liquid engines…
And of course, he never misses an opportunity to bad-mouth the competition:
Virgin is not the only non-governmental party trying to develop space travel in the private sphere, but Whitehorn is confident it will be the first to take passengers into space.
SpaceX, led by veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur Elon Musk, is developing space-launch vehicles but they are not designed to carry passengers.
Well, yes, if you ignore the Dragon…
And of course, XCOR might beat them, though if they don’t get to a hundred klicks, the claim will be that they’re not in space, despite the stars, curvature of the earth, and minutes of weightlessness.
A Tale Of Two Axes
George Bush’s Axis of Evil versus Barack Obama’s.