Michigan Democrats were accidentally given a number for a campaign hotline that was actually a phone s3x line.
Seems appropriate to me. Give the Dems a call to find out how they’re going to screw you.
Rockin’
Barack Obama may be a better dancer than John McCain, but neither of them can hold a candle to sister Sarah rockin’ out to Red Neck Woman in blue jeans. No more Niemann Marcus for her.
And Elaine Lafferty (yes, the Elaine Lafferty who used to edit Ms. Magazine) thinks that Sarah Palin is a “brainiac.” Really:
…these high toned and authoritative dismissals come from people who have never met or spoken with Sarah Palin. Those who know her, love her or hate her, offer no such criticism. They know what I know, and I learned it from spending just a little time traveling on the cramped campaign plane this week: Sarah Palin is very smart.
I’m a Democrat, but I’ve worked as a consultant with the McCain campaign since shortly after Palin’s nomination. Last week, there was the thought that as a former editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine as well as a feminist activist in my pre-journalism days, I might be helpful in contributing to a speech that Palin had long wanted to give on women’s rights.
Now by “smart,” I don’t refer to a person who is wily or calculating or nimble in the way of certain talented athletes who we admire but suspect don’t really have serious brains in their skulls. I mean, instead, a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight. Palin asks questions, and probes linkages and logic that bring to mind a quirky law professor I once had. Palin is more than a “quick study”; I’d heard rumors around the campaign of her photographic memory and, frankly, I watched it in action. She sees. She processes. She questions, and only then, she acts. What is often called her “confidence” is actually a rarity in national politics: I saw a woman who knows exactly who she is.
A Harbinger?
If these micropolling results are valid, Obama’s in trouble in Pennsylvania:
These were conducted Oct. 23,24,25
Bucks County: O: 49 M: 43 2004 Results: K: 51 B: 48
Allegheny: O: 52 M: 42 2004 Results: K: 57 B: 42
Erie: O: 50 M: 43 2004 Results: K: 54 B: 45
York: M: 57 O: 39 2004 Results: B: 63 K: 35
Montgomery: O: 51 M: 39 2004 Results: K: 55 B: 44
John Kerry took Pennsylvania in 2004, but only by a narrow margin–51 to Bush’s 49 percent. But these polls indicate that Obama isn’t doing as well as Kerry did, except in York County (which seems to be going from red to blue). And between Murtha and the NRA, he’s probably going to lose big in rural western Pennsylvania. Now maybe he can make it up in Philly, but Rendell might have to bring out the dead voters.
The Gadfly
A few days ago, I wrote that John McCain isn’t the right candidate to put John McCain into the White House (i.e., he’s an electable candidate, with his history and record, but he’s unable to run a winning campaign). If he loses, it will be easy to blame the financial meltdown, but it was his response to it, and his incoherent inability to discuss economics sensibly, and his unwillingness to go after his colleagues in Congress, that will be the ultimate cause. I still think that it’s winnable, though. And if he wins, I think that he’ll have been saved by Sarah Palin.
In any event, Rich Lowry says much the same thing.
What’s Wrong With The First One?
Does Barack Obama agree with Marcy Kaptur that we need a Second Bill of Rights?
U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D. Toledo) whipped the crowd up before Mr. Obama took the stage yesterday telling them that America needed a Second Bill of Rights guaranteeing all Americans a job, health care, homes, an education, and a fair playing field for business and farmers.
Sure he does. He already said in a debate that we all have a “right” to health care. No, I don’t think that I, or anyone, has a “right” to stuff that requires taking from others. This is Eurosocialism.
Forty Bucks A Barrel?
It’s certainly plausible to me. Given how much of an overshoot there was, it wouldn’t be surprising to see it dip that low before stabilizing. As I’ve long said, over a hundred bucks was unsustainable. I would hope it won’t stay that way for long, though. It’s harder to justify shale and new drilling (and conservation) at those prices.
A Threat To Straight Marriages
This sounds like a straw man (and one that I often hear in the gay marriage debate):
The anti-gay-marriage argument that simply makes no sense to me is the one that says allowing gay folks to marry will mess up my marriage – my heterosexual marriage. I don’t follow the reasoning that gay married couples will undermine the ability of straight married couples to form and sustain marital partnerships.
Perhaps someone has made that argument somewhere, sometime, but I’ve never seen or heard it myself. It would be helpful if she would provide a link to support the straw man. Of course it makes no sense to her. It makes no sense at all, which is why few people make such an argument.
I think that this may be a perversion of the real argument, which is that, for those uncertain of their sexual orientation, it will weaken societal pressures to have a heterosexual lifestyle and marriage. If society is no longer heteronormative, then a little boy might grow up thinking that it’s OK to marry his friend Joey, instead of Sally. Actual homosexuals are going to grow up to be gay regardless, but it’s not necessarily a good idea to encourage wavering where it exists. Now, one can argue whether it’s a good or bad thing to do so, but that’s the argument to be discussed..
The argument isn’t about existing marriages–that’s nutty. It’s about future ones.
Not New Ideas
Just bad ones:
Obama plans to resuscitate the welfare policies of the Great Society, but by stealth. It will be the same thing-the dole-but it will be called a “tax credit,” which has a more emollient sound than “relief,” “public charity,” “the dole.”
What I find depressing about this-as, indeed, about the whole Obama juggernaut-is the extent to which it represents a return of bad ideas that have already been tried time and again, have failed and made people poorer and less stalwart, and yet seem poised to make a sorry comeback once again. I’ve written about the “déjà-vu-all-over-again” phenomenon before in this space. Bill Ayers? Haven’t we done that? Jeremiah Wright? Haven’t we done that, too? Haven’t we tried Obama’s “soak the rich,” anti-business economic policies? Haven’t we tried his “can’t-we-all-just-get-along” foreign policy? Don’t we know that economics is about the creation rather than the redistribution of wealth, and that low taxes and strategies that encourage productivity and investment are best calculated to make the entire society, including the less fortunate, more prosperous? Don’t we know where appeasement and capitulation get us in foreign affairs? Don’t we remember Jimmy Carter? Haven’t we learned anything?
We’ll find out on Tuesday.
Death Of A Blogger
Dean Barnett has lost his battle with cystic fibrosis. It’s a shame that he couldn’t last long enough for a cure. He was by all accounts a good man, and he was a great blogger, who faced his enemy with courage and equanimity. Condolences to his family and friends.
Don’t Know Much About Launch Costs
The Space Review is up (a little late–it’s usually available first thing Monday morning, but Jeff is probably recovering from his trip to New Mexico), and it has a couple interesting articles. The first one describes the benefits of amateur efforts toward space settlement. The second one is a relook at the economics of O”Neill’s Island One space habitat. It’s nonsensical, because the author doesn’t understand much about the economics of space launch. Let’s start with this:
O’Neill’s expectations about launch costs (like those of other 1970s-era prophets of space development) proved to be highly optimistic, even given the disagreement about how these are to be calculated. A $10,000 a pound ($22,000 per kilogram) Earth-to-LEO price, almost twenty-five times the estimate O’Neill worked with, is considered the reasonable optimum now.
Considered so by whom? Not by ULA. Not by the Russians. Not by SpaceX. The only launch vehicle that has launch costs that high is the Shuttle, and that’s because it flies so seldom that its per-flight cost is on the order of a billion dollars. In a due-east launch, it can get close to sixty thousand pounds to LEO, and if it cost six hundred million per flight (as it did before Columbia, when the flight rate was higher), that would be about ten thousand bucks a pound. But to call this “optimum” is lunacy. Other existing launchers are going for a couple thousand a pound (the Russians are less based on price, but its not clear what their costs are, and if they’re making money). SpaceX is projecting its price for Falcon 9 to be about forty million, to deliver almost thirty thousand pounds to LEO, so that’s a little over a thousand per pound. And that’s without reusing any hardware.
But even these are hardly “optimum.” The true price drops will come from high flight rates of fully-reusable space transports, and there’s no physical reason that these couldn’t deliver payload for on the order of a hundred dollars per pound or less.
Of course we aren’t going to build HLVs for space colonies, as Gerry O’Neill proposed. If it happens, it will happen when the price does come down, as a result of other markets. But if the point is that Island One is unaffordable at current launch costs, it’s a trivial one–most intelligent observers realize that. But it’s ridiculous to think that lower launch costs can’t be achieved, or even that his stated number has any basis in reality.